Good Hunting: An American Spymaster's Story (23 page)

On the trip to India, Twetten, an old India hand, took me to “Old Delhi” to see how the other half lived in the poorer sections of the city. He convinced two rickshaw drivers to ride us through the rougher part of town. At six five, I felt rather silly being pulled along by a bony, one-hundred-pound young man, but it was the only way to do it. On foot would have been impossible. Twetten particularly wanted to show me a “factory” that bound books with homemade paper liners and gold gilt. He was an avid collector of antique books, and after retiring he would study bookbinding and set up an antiquarian book company in Vermont. When we got to the site, I was amazed to see what passed for a “factory”: it consisted of a dozen Indians sitting on the floor, hammering out the artwork. I felt I was somehow intruding, even though they seemed immensely proud of their work. It reminded me in no uncertain terms what a privileged life most of us in America live. I later sent half a dozen personal books to them for rebinding, which I cherish to this day.

When we settled back in New Delhi, we relaxed over a few beers and very spicy food. Inevitably, we returned to talking about the business, and Twetten said that he wanted to run by me a couple of positions that would be coming open soon, to see if I was interested in either of them. The two jobs he was looking to fill were chief of the Latin America Division and chief of the Counterintelligence Center staff. Which one would appeal more to me? He said he couldn’t tell me the whole story but made it clear that there was something really significant happening inside the Counterintelligence Center, something he described as “critically important.” He knew what I didn’t—that the mole hunters were closing in on their prey. It was like the moment, fourteen years earlier, when I was offered the choice by Ray Warren between being a base chief or a station chief in Latin America. This time, it took me about as long to decide.

TEN

The Rooster and the Train

Washington/Haiti, 1992–94

Latin America was home to me, the part of the world where I’d served five overseas tours—three as chief of station—and overseen the drug war as head of the Counter Narcotics Center. When Tom Twetten gave me the choice of running either the Counterintelligence Center or the Latin America Division, I chose Latin America in an instant, with a sense of pride. Ever since I was a young operations officer in Chile, I had wanted to be division chief. And Latin America was the obvious choice; after all, I’d spent the first half of my career there. After Chile, I had traveled frequently on assignment to Mexico and other countries and then served as station chief in Argentina before returning to headquarters’ Near East Division.

The job that Twetten was offering me was the rough equivalent of a three-star general in the military. It was a position that required a new set of skills and offered challenges that tested my mettle and political agility. There are only two jobs above division chief in the Directorate of Operations: the deputy director for operations and the associate deputy director for operations. The chief of the Latin America Division could influence Agency policy and operations in the region and have a say at the DO board level. And two of the men whose leadership I most admired in the Agency, Ray Warren and Nestor Sanchez, had both held the position with distinction. Warren was station chief during my first tour in Chile and remained a mentor throughout my career, counseling me, encouraging me, promoting me. Some of us referred to him as the “Gray Fox,” for his wavy gray hair. He was six four and could have easily passed for an ambassador or Fortune 500 executive. He was measured in his demeanor and thoughtful and balanced in his deliberations. When, as chief of the Latin America Division, he sent me off on my first assignment as station chief, he gave me only a few words of caution: “Remember, most people in your position break their pick on the ambassador. Watch that.” In other words, don’t tangle with the ambassador on trivial issues and, even more important, develop a close collaborative relationship with him or her. Ultimately, you are expected to work out problems locally and not bring them back to headquarters for adjudication, which rarely works to a chief of station’s long-term advantage. It was invaluable wisdom that applied well beyond the embassy, to relations with liaison partners in foreign intelligence services, Congress, and other U.S. agencies. Warren was a man of impeccable judgment.

Nestor Sanchez succeeded him as chief of the division. He was yet another Agency legend. Born in New Mexico and fluent in Spanish, Sanchez, as a young case officer, ran a Cuban agent named Rolando Cubela, point man in the CIA’s plan to assassinate Fidel Castro. Sanchez and Desmond FitzGerald, one of the founders of the Agency’s Clandestine Service, met with Cubela in Paris in early November 1963 to talk about the latest Castro assassination plan. At the meeting, Sanchez gave Cubela a ballpoint pen made by the Technical Services Division that was actually a hypodermic needle filled with Black Leaf 40, a poison. As the meeting broke up, Sanchez and FitzGerald were informed that President Kennedy had been assassinated in Dallas. As a consequence, the operation was aborted.

Nestor, a consummate operator but also good at Agency politics, rose steadily through the Agency. He became the top-ranking Hispanic officer in the DO at the time and had a great feel for Latin American political and operational life, which he combined with passion and humor. He was an especially effective recruiter, exuded leadership skills, and was broadly liked in the division. With almost no introduction in 1980, he asked me to go abroad. The assignment was a plum, and there were many people in line in front of me. Not only that, I was only a GS-14 in the civil service system, and the work I would be doing was at a GS-16 level, roughly the equivalent of a one-star general in the military. At the time, there was a rule that you couldn’t jump two grades for a new assignment, so Nestor said he was going to downgrade the post temporarily so I could do the work—not a common occurrence and no doubt the cause of some hard feelings among those waiting in line for a senior posting.

I assiduously observed Warren’s counsel on maintaining harmonious relations with the ambassador, and this cordiality was broken only once, when Sanchez visited. I brought him down to pay a courtesy call on the ambassador, and in a flash, both of them were agitated and practically yelling at each other. I wasn’t sure what exactly had set it off, but I quickly hustled Nestor out and back to my office. But for the next hour, I received calls from the ambassador telling me in no uncertain terms what he thought Nestor needed to know, and Nestor in turn instructed me on what to tell the ambassador. I was amazed that two exceptionally bright and talented professionals could push each other’s buttons so easily and dramatically. The ambassador, to his credit, did not hold this against me. It did, though, earn me some points with Nestor, for dealing with what he perceived to be a very difficult ambassador. The truth, of course, is that it took no especially adroit effort.

I saw Nestor again when I was back at Langley for a visit. I had lunch with him and a colleague who was running another station in Latin America, and he told us both that we should be putting in for the station chief’s job in Tegucigalpa, Honduras. We both laughed. Tegucigalpa was a three- or four-man station; to say you were going to Tegucigalpa was like saying you were being sent to Siberia. Sanchez was visibly agitated by our reaction. “You know how many times I’ve been upstairs to talk about your stations in the past week? None,” he said. “You know how many times I’ve been up there to talk about Tegucigalpa? Ten times. It’s going to become the biggest station in Latin America.”

That was my first introduction to the brewing operation to arm and train the Contras. Nestor’s skepticism about certain aspects of that operation seemingly cost him his job at the CIA. Casey is said to have told others that Nestor wasn’t “bold” enough for him. The operator who, as a young officer, ran the Cuban agents the CIA was counting on to assassinate Castro wasn’t a big enough risk taker? No, the real problem was that Nestor apparently did not fully share Casey’s enthusiasm for the Contra program. Here, again, we see the line between good covert action and bad covert action. Nestor reportedly thought using exiled members of the deposed Nicaraguan dictator’s National Guard was not the way to go. He questioned having other Latins training the Contras in Honduras. It likely was because of his resistance to parts of the operation that Nestor was eased out of the CIA, to become assistant secretary of defense for Latin America, a position he filled admirably.

Like Warren and Sanchez, I was not intimidated by the challenge of running the Latin America Division, perhaps because I didn’t fully appreciate what lay ahead. The country was banking on a peace dividend, having won the Cold War, and looking to a new leader after the U.S. presidential election in November 1992. Most officers at the Agency do not wear their politics on their sleeves; for a civil servant, it is unprofessional. I suspect most were silently rooting for President George H. W. Bush to beat Democrat Bill Clinton that fall, not so much for Bush’s politics, but because he had been a popular DCI, from 1976 to 1977, and was respected as a serious public servant himself, with extensive international experience. But the CIA workforce took Clinton’s election in stride. There was no gnashing of teeth about what it would portend. We were more concerned about the general depreciation of CIA stock because of the end of the Cold War, and what the peace dividend would mean, with both parties in Congress deemphasizing intelligence.

Clair George, the former operations director who had sent me to Rome, was convicted in the Iran-Contra scandal in December for reportedly misleading Congress six years earlier about what he knew about a cargo plane shot down in Nicaragua. Notwithstanding a Christmas Eve gift of a pardon of George from the lame-duck president, this was not, by any stretch of the imagination, a good time to be taking over the division, or any division. With the Cold War over, the focus had turned to transnational threats, such as counternarcotics and, to an extent, counterterrorism—with good reason. On January 25, 1993, a Pakistani national named Mir Aimal Kansi opened fire with an AK-47 on CIA employees stopped at a traffic light on Route 123 in Langley, just outside headquarters. While not initially considered in the context of the al-Qaeda–inspired terrorists attacks of today, the Kansi attack was particularly stunning to those of us working at Langley. Agency officers Lansing Bennett and Frank Darling were killed in their cars, and three others were wounded in the attack. That year the general assumption at headquarters was that Kansi was a lone deranged Pakistani. No one linked his singleton action in late January to the bigger plot behind the truck bomb detonated below the North Tower of the World Trade Center a month later, or to any fundamentalist Islamic terrorist organization. But like Ramzi Yousef, the mastermind of that 1993 bombing in lower Manhattan, Kansi said in 1997, when captured by the FBI in Pakistan, that the Langley shootings were in retaliation for U.S. policies in the Middle East and for how Muslims were treated by the CIA in that region. Though Kansi could not be connected to any group in Pakistan or elsewhere, in hindsight, it’s clear that he, too, was a forerunner to Islamist terrorism à la al-Qaeda. After his capture, Kansi was rendered back to the United States, where he stood trial for the murders. He was found guilty and executed by lethal injection in 2002.

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The Latin America Division was on the third floor of headquarters. I had the largest office of all the division chiefs, because it once had been the deputy director of operations’ office, before the DDO was moved up to the seventh floor. It even had its own bathroom, a novelty for an office in that building. There were numerous stations in the division reporting to me. I had a division staff of about twenty, including reports officers, counterintelligence officers, a lawyer, and a human resources officer, but all field operations were run out of the individual stations. I brought with me my deputy from the Counter Narcotics Center, Marty Roeber, and made him deputy of the division, because I needed someone I could rely on and trust to pay very close attention to the day-to-day operational and intelligence details. It had been natural for me to choose Roeber, a career Latin America analyst from the Directorate of Intelligence, as counternarcotics deputy, since the CNC resided in the DI. But my decision to bring him over was fraught with peril and risk—for both of us. It is hard for an outsider to appreciate how rare a move this was, given the closed nature of the DO. To many in the directorate who had waited years for this job to open up, it appeared that I was bringing in an outsider unfamiliar with operations. But Roeber was a great partner, the most knowledgeable person I knew on Latin America in the Agency. He knew Latin America in a way that was different and more substantial than I did, even though I had lived there, and since counternarcotics remained a huge account in the division, it was a natural transition for us. Indeed, the overlap between the CNC and the Latin America Division was great, given that much of the money being channeled to the region in the early 1990s was for the purpose of counternarcotics. Marty helped immeasurably with the continuity and with coordination. He was also a bulldog in the Latin America office, and we worked extremely well together. I normally came in at 7:00 a.m. and would leave at 7:00 p.m. Roeber was there when I arrived and when I left at the end of the day. It must have been the Dr Pepper, which he drank incessantly, that kept him awake.

DO officers did not like the way Roeber dispensed with diplomatic polish when critiquing performance. He was a stickler for accuracy and detail. He wasn’t reluctant to tell people, “You got it wrong.” The DO, for all its wonders, did not like being challenged on its facts. But the DO performs best when it is challenged. Roeber would hold the line on facts—and most DO officers, schooled in cultivating relationships, did not like this. Roeber demonstrated to me just how valuable the analytic role could be in managing the intelligence gathered by the DO. As a consequence, I began to bring more analysts into the directorate in the reporting area. Coming off my experience running the CNC—and being in the midst of the hunt for Pablo Escobar in Colombia—I was acutely aware of the value of having analysts and operators work together. Having said that, these analysts were influenced by being so close to operations and so were not involved in producing the finished intelligence read by the top-level consumers in Washington. For our purposes, the analysts needed insight into what was going on in the operations and the quality of the sourcing, but their objectivity was inevitably influenced when they were on the team and were expected to be “true believers” in the cause at hand. That’s why we tried to maintain a “cellophane wall” between the analysts and the people running operations, especially covert action programs, because it’s so important that the analysts stay independent and objective. Analysts cannot be “part of the program.” Even though Roeber took off his DI badge for this assignment, he still brought intellectual and analytical rigor to the DO, and unfairly took a number of hits for it. DO officers blamed him for being hard on their reporting and operations, but they did not have the perspective to understand that he was doing exactly what I wanted him to do. They simply had a hard time accepting that “one of them” might actually think this was a good thing.