Good Hunting: An American Spymaster's Story (27 page)

Back at headquarters, at the height of tensions prior to the troops’ landing in Haiti, Woolsey announced that he had reprimanded eleven current and former Agency officials for failing to discipline Aldrich Ames during his lackluster, alcoholic career or not moving more aggressively once it was discerned that a mole was loose inside the Agency. He noted “a systemic failure of the C.I.A.—and most significantly, of the Directorate of Operations—a failure in management accountability, in judgment, in vigilance.”
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I went to the auditorium at headquarters to hear Woolsey announce the reprimands of my colleagues and explain his reasoning for them. The place was packed, and the atmosphere was thick with tension. I stood at the back. Most of those in the audience were expecting Woolsey to come down much harder and announce a spate of firings. But they’d clearly misjudged the man. He had approached the task like the lawyer he is. He reviewed the evidence carefully and realized that there indeed had been a series of small misdeeds by a number of people, rather than major mistakes by a few. I sensed that most of those on hand were not satisfied. They surprisingly seemed to want harsher penalties for their own colleagues, largely because of the pain and humiliation the Agency had suffered. This view was shared by Congress and the White House. Washington needed a scalp, someone to take the fall, even though there was not one villain whose failures had led directly to the fiasco. I’m not sure Woolsey understood this at the time, and he received no credit for his measured approach.

The CIA’s inspector general identified twenty-three senior managers who in his view were accountable for Ames’s betrayals. Not long after Woolsey announced the reprimands, Frank Anderson, my successor as head of the Afghan Task Force, with associate deputy director of operations John McGaffin’s concurrence, headed off to Europe to give Milt Bearden, my close partner during the covert war in Afghanistan, a career achievement award. Bearden was among the eleven who had received reprimands. I did not know anything about this unauthorized award ceremony. But when Woolsey found out what Anderson and McGaffin had done, he immediately removed them from their positions, thinking it was an act of defiance on their part. They resigned instead of accepting their demotions.

McGaffin’s departure created a vacancy in the second-most-powerful position in the Directorate of Operations, that of the associate deputy director of operations. Certainly I was interested in the position, but I would rather have ascended to the directorate’s upper ranks under happier circumstances. The Ames case had shattered confidence in the Agency and crushed morale. The Clinton administration was downsizing and remained, at best, ambivalent about the value of the Agency, despite all the good counternarcotics work we had done in Latin America and our success in Haiti, where Aristide was back in power. Still, I had had my eye on the seventh floor since the day I joined the Agency, and I felt ready to take on a new challenge.

ELEVEN

Raising the Bar

Washington, 1994–95

A few days after Anderson and McGaffin resigned, I was surprised to receive in my office mail a formal letter from Woolsey saying I was a candidate for McGaffin’s job and would be interviewed soon. In the past, the director of central intelligence would simply have conferred with his deputy director of operations and selected someone. This time, Woolsey and his deputy DCI, Admiral William O. Studeman, wanted a clear say in the decision. There reportedly were three of us in the running: one senior officer from the Far East and another from the Africa Division, where Somalia was a hot issue. I knew the competition would be intense. The interview took place around the conference table in Woolsey’s office, with just me, Woolsey, and Studeman in the room, and lasted for half an hour, maybe forty-five minutes. It went by quickly. They began with a single, basic question: How would I propose handling the job? I took it and ran with it, setting forth an agenda for change inside the directorate that I had carefully thought through ahead of time. I told them I wanted to increase the emphasis on centers, bringing operators and analysts closer together, as we had done so effectively in the Counter Narcotics Center and the Afghan Task Force. We need to change our “tooth-to-tail” ratio, trimming staff in favor of more operators in the stations. We needed stricter accountability for our operational responsibilities. We needed more emphasis on counterterrorism, and we needed to push hard to upgrade the directorate’s technological capabilities. I thought my enthusiasm came across and helped me win points. It was hard to judge how I had done, but I felt I had handled myself reasonably well, and when I left the room I remained confident that I was still in the running.

I received a call a few days later from Ted Price, the deputy director of operations, who told me the job was mine. He called a senior staff meeting that afternoon in his office to make the announcement. I called Pat to give her the good news and then advised my deputy in the Latin America Division, Marty Roeber. But I did not mention it to anyone else. I did not want it out on the street before the official announcement from Price’s office. When Ted made the announcement to the division and station chiefs that he and Woolsey had selected me for the job, it came as a mild surprise to some, especially the other contenders. I enjoyed the moment, but like many moments in my life, I did not linger long on the good news and the shot of adrenaline that came with it. I moved on quickly, concentrating on how I would handle the job.

The news flew through the directorate instantly. Everyone in the Latin America Division was already aware of the development before I got back to my office. Price sent out a brief cable to all our field stations alerting them of my assignment as ADDO. Without fanfare, I took over my new office the next day and attended the directorate’s weekly staff meeting. I sat down in the ADDO’s chair at the table. I felt at home. The high-rolling clandestine chess match had begun.

As a psychological side benefit, I had a prestigious key to the director’s exclusive elevator, an office on the vaunted seventh floor, and a parking space in an elite executive lot in the basement, small symbols of success. It was a long walk from West Parking Lot, where I parked the first day I arrived at Langley so many years earlier. The executive parking area had a limited number of spots: for the DCI and the DDCI, the DDO and the ADDO, the DDI and the ADDI, the inspector general, the general counsel, and the executive director. DDO Ted Price drove a Porsche; IG Fred Hitz, a Lexus; executive director Nora Slatkin, a Cadillac convertible. I drove a bright canary-yellow Ford Festiva with stick shift and no air-conditioning. Hardly James Bond! Fortunately, my spot was adjacent to that of ADDI Dave Cohen, who drove a world-class junker that leaked oil profusely.

The atmosphere on the seventh floor was unlike anything I have experienced, before or since. The pace was relentless. The days were filled with back-to-back meetings and an onslaught of operational and personnel decisions that needed to be made nearly instantly. It was simultaneously exhilarating and frustrating, an addictive challenge to see how far I could push myself. But there was never as much time to be as thorough as we wanted. It was tough to maintain control over the day. All too often I was scheduled to do a project or meet people, and a fire would ignite over a flap that was in the press, or something would come in from the field, or someone would need immediate consultation. We wanted to be sure we saw to all our priorities, but there were always loose ends, because we never had enough time. The results were never perfect, and we often had to hope that what we put together did not unravel due to one errant thread.
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But I believed in my ability to handle any contingency. By that point in my career, I had recruited agents, run stations, orchestrated a covert war, directed an interdisciplinary center, and led a division. I’d even run a black bag job in the Mediterranean Basin, a singular moment in command when I reinforced, under intense pressure, that I could indeed pull the trigger.

We were breaking into a government building to steal a set of highly sensitive documents, a foreign nation’s crown jewels. We couldn’t leave fingerprints, and things had to run like clockwork, because this was the only night of the year we could go. If we didn’t do it that night, we would be out of business for a year. We had inside information telling us where the security cameras were and how the alarms worked, but the trickiest part of all was keeping tabs on more than a dozen foreign officials with access to the target area who could, theoretically, show up in the middle of the operation. We needed to know where all of them were when we went in at precisely 11:30 p.m. It was now 11:00, and we had them all under surveillance. So far, everything had gone according to plan. The insertion team from headquarters and all the extra surveillance teams, including some of our wives, had assembled with their fake documents and elaborate cover stories. They’d all been training together for weeks. It got down to every team member knowing exactly what he needed to do, including carrying a bag of coins so he could use a pay phone if his secure phone didn’t work. This was one of the most sensitive things we did in the Agency. And the people who executed the break-ins in many ways engaged in the most professional part of tradecraft. If it went well, we would get a pat on the back, and no one would know about it other than a small group of people. But if it went badly, it would be a long road back for me. Inevitably, someone would come in and show how I hadn’t taken proper precautions. The political and personal risks associated with this kind of operation were huge. If we were caught in the act, it could lead to the arrest of our entry team and create a political firestorm that could embarrass the highest levels of the U.S. government.

All this flashed through my mind when we lost one of the people we were supposed to have under surveillance, on the outskirts of town minutes before our insertion team went in. Up until then, the team had largely been directing the operation, because of its expertise and preparation, and seemed to want to call the shots. This now changed on a dime. No one wanted to sit in the middle of the room and take responsibility for what needed to be done next.

“Over to you, Chief. Now what do we do?”

They recognized that the risk had escalated substantially. They understood that I needed to make the call and take full responsibility for the operation. All the air was sucked out of the room, and all the risk was on me. Within seconds, I had to assess the options and outcome—where did we lose him? what was the likelihood of his returning to the building? could we pick him up in enough time to still vacate?—and then decide. And it all needed to be done in a matter of seconds. I couldn’t say, “I want to go think about it, and we’ll reconvene in an hour.” Truth be told, I didn’t need an hour. I had the facts. I knew that nothing new was going to develop over the next hour. I calculated that, given where we had last seen the target, we should be able to get in and out before he returned. I also doubted that on that particular day, at that hour, he would be headed back to the office. But it wasn’t a certainty. I took a calculated risk.

“Okay, we’re going,” I said.

You could say it was foolhardy, or you could say it was a prudent risk-management decision. It all came down to whether we pulled it off. And this time it did indeed go off like clockwork. The team got around the alarms and the security cameras, broke the locks, found the documents we wanted, and got them out in minutes. We had to quickly copy them and put them back exactly where we’d found them. But then we hit a major snag no one had anticipated: the documents were sealed with an acrylic paint that, if they were opened, would show telltale indications of tampering. Since they had to be returned in pristine condition, we couldn’t break the seal until we solved the paint problem. Fortunately, my wife, Pat, was out on one of the surveillance teams, method acting. She is an artist, and she was on the street posing as one, with all her paints. She came in, looked at the envelope, and worked up an identical paint. We broke the seal, and Pat restored it to normal without a trace. The team redeposited the documents. Mission accomplished.

*   *   *

If anything, the pressure, the risk, and the intensity only escalated all these years later as I was put through my paces on the seventh floor. Days often began before dawn and ended well after dark, with me lugging a large Samsonite suitcase loaded with an evening’s reading, which was retained in an Office of Security safe within my residence. When I first got there, I wondered if I was the only one doing this, until one night I saw DDCI Studeman leaving with two suitcases! After dinner at home, I would spend hours plowing through documents, only to start again the next morning. Dottie Hanson, who was my wise and multitalented administrative assistant, recalls that I would arrive in the morning with a pile of little notes I had written overnight, which she would quickly review so we could plan our day from there.

Despite the intensity of the work environment, Hanson maintained her sense of humor. Most memorably, one day I accidentally shut a car door on her foot rushing to go downtown. Although she wasn’t hurt, she decided to play a prank and immediately headed to the nurses’ office and had them wrap her foot in a huge bandage. I was mortified when I returned to the office and saw her foot, but she could not keep a straight face and quickly broke out laughing, to my relief. The ability to laugh was an important quality for everyone working in such a fast-paced and high-stakes environment.

Another important trait in this type of environment is the ability to think strategically. I learned a lesson about effective leadership from an unlikely source when I was young. The lesson was to carve out time in my day, every day, just to think. I learned it when I was listening as a teenager to an unusually frank conversation between my father and his longtime friend Jim O’Neil, the head of Plumbers Union Local 690 in Philadelphia and the leader of all the building trades in the city. In terms of power, he was second only to the mayor, who many thought had been elected by the powerful union bosses in the early 1960s. I was fascinated to see these very strong men talking about life and leadership. They exuded strength and decisiveness. O’Neil noticed me, turned, and apropos of nothing said, “Always have a firm handshake and never have your photo taken with a drink in your hand. But most important, take the first half hour of each day to reflect and game the day.” These were simple thoughts, but they stuck with me. I have a reliable alarm in my head and almost never use an alarm clock. When I was on the seventh floor at the CIA, that internal alarm always woke me up—as it does today—half an hour early so that I could reflect on the day ahead.