See No Evil: The True Story of a Ground Soldier in the CIA's War on Terrorism (28 page)

The executioner the FBI picked for the task was Ed Curran, a serving FBI agent. From the day he took over the counterespionage group, Curran made it clear that he intended to run the place like a behind-enemy-lines commando unit. His first act was to fire anyone who knew any thing, especially the little old ladies in tennis shoes - the CIA’s institutional memory on Soviet espionage. He had to let them go: Smart people made Curran very nervous. Then, to let everyone know there was a new sheriff in town, he reopened every unresolved counterintelligence case on the books. Every single one. It didn’t matter if the employee was retired or had moved on to a new, non-sensitive job. The idea was to spread fear and paranoia throughout the CIA, and in that, he couldn’t have been more successful.

When the CIA appointed Rod Smith as its own head of counter-intelligence and thus Curran’s nominal boss, Curran was in effect given free rein. A lawyer turned case officer, Smith never spent enough time in the field to learn the job, much less anything about counterintelligence. After an abbreviated six-month tour in Europe, he came back to headquarters, where he would stay, moving up the bureaucratic ladder one dogged step at a time. In no time Curran had Smith feeding out of his hand. Blood soon flowed in rivers.

A casual friendship struck up, say, on an Italian vacation became a suspect foreign contact. Polygraphers were called in, and having been badly burned by Ames, who beat the lie detectors even while working for the KGB, they weren’t happy. Anxiety turned to stress; stress, to a failed test. Soon Curran had a ‘new case,’ and as the witch-hunts went on, new cases began to mount to the ceiling. Files were ransacked, police checks run. Then the FBI was called in because that was the deal Woolsey had made with Congress: The FBI investigates all suspected espionage cases. All over the FBI, well-meaning grunts were having CIA cases dumped on them, which they would then throw immediately on the floor, because, for all of Curran’s exhortations, they knew they had a hundred stronger cases to work on. Back at Langley, though, the dirt was already down. Being under an active FBI investigation, no matter how flimsy the evidence, meant no promotions, no overseas assignments, no sensitive clearances. The cafeteria was filling up with people who might as well have been marked with scarlet ‘A’ s, all of them eating alone.

The numbers tell the story. By late 1995 more than three hundred people were under suspicion, and that’s not to mention the number of CIA employees terrified they would be caught up in the bloodbath through no fault of their own. One day you’re at your desk, and the next you’re a virtual prisoner in one of the security facilities out by Tyson’s Corner. Everyone had a friend or colleague tied up in security purgatory.

Over at the FBI, director Louis Freeh couldn’t wipe the smile off his face. He was dismantling the CIA piece by piece, while in the press, he was portrayed as Mr. Straight cleaning up the decadent, Jaguar-driving, rummy CIA. Congress showered money on him. He hired more agents but still had more money than he could spend, so he used it to open FBI offices abroad - offices that one day will displace the CIA. And the best part was that Freeh, who doesn’t lack for a sense of irony hired an ex-CIA officer - fired by Woolsey for his failures in the Ames debacle - to advise him on opening the new branches.

In the meantime, while the FBI was tied up eviscerating the CIA, Robert Hanssen was giving away the FBI’s own secrets in trash bags.

As you might have guessed, I wasn’t a dispassionate observer of Curran’s purge. One day I was sitting in my office reading through the morning’s traffic when the division’s security officer and a young jack-booted sleuth from the counterespionage group fairly tumbled into my office. They were both breathless and made a point of slamming my door to underscore the seriousness of their visit.

‘Why are you still in touch with a Russian from Dushanbe?’ the security officer asked.

I’d been around too long not to know what he was doing. Start an interrogation with an accusation; throw the victim off balance, and you just might scare a confession out of him. In the business it’s called an accusatory process.

I looked at him dumbly.

Seeing that this tactic wasn’t getting them anywhere, he mentioned the name of a Russian woman I had known in Dushanbe. She had introduced me to the Russian skiers, but I was no longer in contact with her.

‘We’ll have to box you [polygraph] about it,’ the fascist from counterespionage said, summoning all the menace he could. He was wearing snakeskin cowboy boots, a sure sign of trouble inside the Beltway ‘We’ll find out the truth the hard way.’

Two polygraphs in six months seemed like a lot, but I didn’t have a choice if I wanted the CIA to continue to pay me.

About two hours later, I ran into the security officer in the hallway and gave him a what-the-fuck look. I knew the guy from before; we got along, so he told me the story. My colleague in Tashkent, XXXXXX-had decided he wanted to ride the counterespionage wave for a promotion. He picked up a rumor about the Russian and me and sent it in, properly dressed up in the supersensitive XXXXXX channel cable. It was just the kind of lead the Curranites loved.

The only humor in the whole incident - and it was gallows humor at best - came when I filled out the prepolygraph security questionnaire. Had I had any problems with US law enforcement since my last investigation? In the appropriate box, I neatly wrote in pencil: Yes, investigated by the FBI for attempted murder.

It worked like a charm. I was assigned the meanest, oldest, grizzliest polygrapher security had. He’d been around and knew how the game worked. He could tell the difference between a mole and someone who was in the business of meeting foreigners. I was in and out in an hour.

My colleagues weren’t so fortunate. Too many of them ended up with twenty-three-year-old polygraphers plucked out of the hills of West Virginia - people who thought all foreigners were communists.

Predictably, Ed Curran’s purge made the CIA even more risk-adverse than it had already become. People weren’t just scared to meet foreigners on their vacations; they were scared to do it in their jobs as well.

You could see the results in everything we tried to do. There wasn’t a single reporting agent in any one of the eight posts I supervised in central Asia and the Caucuses. No one was meeting anyone. There were no requests for even provisional approval of new agents, no contact reports. It was considered a lucky day if South Group received an administrative cable from one of our posts on the frontier. As far as I could see, the other groups in the Central Eurasia Division were in the same sorry shape. Daily group-chief meetings were about budgets, projections, personnel changes, task forces, paper deadlines - anything but recruiting sources.

All over the Islamic world, cells were forming, ancient grudges were boiling to new surfaces, the infidel West was being targeted for destruction, and we didn’t have a real ear to the ground anywhere.

Dave Cohen’s appointment as the new director of operations did nothing to ease the situation. Cohen was a career analyst. Even though he had put in a cameo appearance as domestic head of the DO, he knew next to nothing about operations. Not only had he never met or recruited an agent, he apparently had no idea what an access agent even was. Among his first orders was to fire all of them. Remember the access agent in Madras who introduced me to Sami, the Arab officer on assignment to the Indian military? Remember all those agents in Beirut who ran down Mughniyah’s networks? Under Cohen’s new standards, I never would have been authorized to run them.

In the same spirit of anti-effectiveness - and in accord with a new DO policy that desk jockeys were to be promoted at the same rate as field operatives - Cohen began handing XXXXXX-chief posts to people with virtually no qualifications for the job. Riyadh, Tel Aviv, Nairobi: I started to lose track. The only apparent qualification of the new chief in Riyadh was that he had been George Tenet’s briefer when Tenet was at the NSC. Over my protests, the same thing happened in South Group. I was replaced in Dushanbe by someone who wasn’t a case officer, and my reports officer with the sharp tongue was given an important chief’s job in the Caspian. She was smart, but she’d never served as a case officer in the field, or run or recruited an agent.

Her last day at headquarters, she stuck her head in my office to say good-bye. ‘By the way, just to let you know, I don’t recruit agents. That’s not my job.’ She’d obviously picked up the new mantra going around that chiefs don’t run operations - they ‘represented the director.’ It was crazy, like the local beat cop refusing to make an arrest because his job was to represent the chief of police.

Cohen, in turn, was replaced as the director of operations by a retiree. And the retiree’s successor hadn’t had an overseas assignment in more than a decade, and that to a backwater post in Europe. Did the agency even care about operations anymore? If so, it was hard to see.

The effect on intelligence collection, not surprisingly was devastating. I did my own investigation to see just how bad it was. In 1986 the Directorate of Intelligence had computerized all intelligence reports, putting them on a single server that I arranged to get access to. I started by searching for all reporting on the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, the Pasdaran, from human sources - that is, agents, people on the ground. In the late 1980s, reporting on the Iranian Pasdaran started to taper off. By 1995 there was nothing - not a single report. It wasn’t like the US had lost interest in the Pasdaran, or should have. The Pasdaran blew up the Al-Khobar barracks in Saudi Arabia in 1996. It was more like we had voluntarily deafened ourselves and gouged our eyes out in the midst of an ongoing crisis.

I also looked into reporting on the Saudi royal family.

I’d seen the same thing with Iraq. Iraqi Operations was a Potemkin village. Of the thirty-five officers assigned to the headquarters component, at least 10 percent were documented alcoholics. Another 10 percent had been designated as low performers. Two in five were retirees who had come back to work on contract, and the rest didn’t really care whether the CIA had a human source in Iraq or not. Congress dumped millions and millions of dollars on the CIA for Iraq, yet virtually none of it made it into Iraqi hands.

One American consultant in London was paid more than the director of the CIA and the president of the United States put together. She had an open first-class ticket to fly back and forth to the US anytime she wanted. In London, she rented some of the priciest office space available. When the CIA went out to inspect, we found she had subleased the office, defrauding the government of even more money. In this one instance alone, I could account for $1 million just flushed down the toilet. It was out-and-out theft, and there were at least twenty other instances with other people that involved similar amounts of money.

Incidentally, the woman who had set up the payment to the London consultant resigned from the CIA on a Friday and went to work for the same company the London woman worked for the following Monday. The CIA inspector general’s office found, to its horror, that the same woman, while at the CIA, had funneled two other equally large contracts into that consulting firm, the same one she now worked for. In the end it was too painful for the agency to bring the case to the Department of Justice’s attention, and the London consultant continues today to successfully shake down Congress for money.

It wasn’t only money the CIA lost control of. In 1997 British authorities were furious when they found out my old Iraqi friend Ahmad Chalabi had rented his studio on Barlby Road in London to a Saudi dissident, Dr. Sa’d Al-Faqih, one of Osama bin Laden’s soul mates. Faqih’s platform called for overthrowing the Al Sa’ud family in Saudi Arabia and expelling Britain and the US from the Middle East. Chalabi had reason enough to fall out of love with us - we had, after all, abandoned him in his hour of need - but it was wrenching to see the people who wanted to be our allies making common cause with our enemies.

Nor was it just in the Middle East that the CIA seemed to have thrown in the towel. In 1996 a post in central Asia came in with a proposal to set up a secret site to monitor Lop Nor, the Chinese nuclear-weapons testing facility. The location was topographically unique because it was at the end of a valley and served as a sort of funnel for emissions and electronic data from Chinese explosions. About the same time, the Department of Energy picked up indications that the Chinese were testing miniaturized nuclear warheads, but it couldn’t be sure since the tests were below the threshold of our current collection capabilities. The collection site would have remedied that.

‘Sorry, the NSC turned the operation down,’ Peggy XXXXXXX, the head of Chinese operations, told us. ‘It does not want to risk irritating the Chinese by collecting information from platforms in Central Asia.’

Eventually, we compromised and put a nuclear ‘sniffer’ on top of one of our embassies, but it was hundreds of miles from Lop Nor and picked up nothing. Keep in mind the context of this decision: A Chinese official kindly sent us by overnight mail what appeared to be a Chinese government description of the W-88, our highly sophisticated, miniaturized nuclear warhead. Were the Chinese testing a weapon based on the W-88 design at Lop Nor? We’ll never find out unless some other Chinese official sends us a postcard to let us know.

Worst of all, the CIA seemed to have stopped caring about its own people, especially the ones who took the greatest risks. By the spring of 1996, I’d had enough of Washington and volunteered to go to Sarajevo on a counterterrorism operation meant to probe the depth and extent of the Iranian intelligence presence in Bosnia. I had a half-dozen people working for me, including a couple who paired up on a surveillance team. Since foreigners stood out in Sarajevo, I suggested they live outside of town and commute to their watching stations. The ride in was fairly safe because they drove an SUV with military markings, but one week, when I was out of town, their SUV was pulled for other duty and they were forced to make do with a small, locally plated VW A few nights later, they were on their way home when a car cut in front of them, trying to force them off the road. They reacted according to the book. As soon as the woman saw the other car was armed, she yelled,’ Gun!’ Her husband, who was driving, sped up and swerved around the car, just in time to get sprayed with a machine gun. He survived, as did his wife, who was wounded in the back, but they almost didn’t survive the bureaucracy back at headquarters.