4

CRISES

RIP ROBERTSON ARRIVED IN WASHINGTON WITHOUT SO MUCH AS A change of clothes. He and Gray Lynch holed up at the Shoreham Hotel to await their moment before the inquisitors. Robertson had little more than Navy-issue khakis and coral-cracked paratrooper boots. He had a few hundred dollars, so he enlisted his sidekick to distract their security detail while Rip slipped away to buy a suit. On the street Robertson ran into a businessman he knew from Central America, who looked at Rip’s shabby clothes and immediately volunteered to set him up with some work contacts. He handed Rip his card with a $20 bill wrapped around it. When Robertson returned to the Shoreham wearing a new suit, he panicked the CIA minder by pretending to be a reporter. Panic there would be aplenty, for the CIA had orchestrated a disaster. And the more the public learned of it, the worse it would become.

President Kennedy, as Eisenhower had done for the U-2 affair barely a year earlier, stood up to take the blame. “I am the responsible officer of this government,” JFK said to reporters two days after the exile collapse. But Kennedy very much believed that he—and other officials—had been victims of a CIA con job. Only Senator J. William Fulbright and, to a lesser degree, White House historian Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. were in the clear—though JFK thought Fulbright, at least, might have succumbed too if he’d been exposed to as much honeyed talk as the president’s circle.

To Rip Robertson and Gray Lynch, the shoe was on the other foot. They, especially Lynch, were completely convinced that Ate failed only because air strikes that might have disabled Castro’s planes had been canceled. To Lynch it remained a certainty that the preplanned bombing would have destroyed all the Cuban warplanes.* In all these CIA scandals, it is striking how often participants seize on one claim—usually unconfirmable—among a welter of issues, to insist Langley had really been right. With Cuba the canard concerned the air strikes. However, so little went smoothly with the CIA scheme—and the plan itself became so Byzantine—that it is difficult to see how JM/Ate could have led to anything but defeat.

Rip Robertson and Grayston Lynch were the only CIA people actually on the scene. A DO debriefing before the operatives met Taylor’s committee was the first time headquarters learned the realities at the front. “Tears came to their eyes,” Lynch writes, “when we told them of the last hours of the brigade, and of the suffering of the pitiful group of survivors that we had brought out of the Zapata swamp.”

Rip and Gray first went before the Taylor committee on April 28. Before his statement, the meeting record shows, Lynch tried to lay down a series of stipulations: the CIA plan had been sound, Brigade 2506 was winning, and it would have inflicted tremendous damage on Castro had it had the requisite ammunition and air support. “The men in this force fought as well as any he had ever seen.” Robertson then described the incident in which he and his team fired on Cuban militia. Here the CIA had been in direct combat with a nation with which the United States remained at peace. Robertson and Lynch returned the following week. Lynch’s testimony paralleled Robertson’s so closely that watchers noted only when he said something different. The lack of microphones or recording devices—even stenographers—in the meeting room disturbed Lynch. Later he learned that the transcripts for each day were constructed by General Taylor and Bobby Kennedy afterward.

Agency on-scene commanders may have been biased as to their prospects, and they were wrong to suppose the Kennedys were insincere on wanting to “get” Fidel, but they were right to perceive this inquiry as designed to shield perpetrators. Still, their vision stopped with Bobby Kennedy. Jack Kennedy’s scope ranged more widely. Allen Dulles sat on that board to protect the CIA, the main culprit. Note taker for the first session had been none other than Jesus Christ King. The early meetings took place at CIA headquarters. Admiral Arleigh Burke attended for the Navy. The fleet’s vulnerability centered on the possibility that its intervention could have saved the exiles. Max Taylor may have appeared efficient, but he, too, worked directly for JFK. Taylor had put those cards on the table at the group’s second gathering, when he told them all that President Kennedy did not consider this either an “investigation” or an “inquiry.” Just what it might be, he left to the imagination. In the hot seat that day was the high command, C. Tracy Barnes and Richard Bissell. For the CIA, in a crisis that threatened its being and purpose, the presence of gladiators to take its side would be crucial. More often than not, those individuals added their spirits to the Ghosts of Langley.

THE NERD WHO SPIED

“I’m your man-eating shark!” Dick Bissell proclaimed to Jack Kennedy. The two were at an evening affair at the Alibi Club, on I Street a couple of blocks west of the White House, where Allen Dulles had gathered his minions to regale the Kennedyites with tales of their derring-do, building rapport with the new president. The Alibi Club is a storied Washington institution. Its members pledge to answer the telephone ready to offer explanations—especially to spouses—for why husbands, their fellows, cannot come to the phone. The club had long been Dulles territory. This occurred before the Bay of Pigs, while the CIA labored to sell its plan. Mr. Bissell, out of character, perhaps remembered a Chicago childhood when his older brother kept a pet alligator in the sunroom.

Bissell didn’t look like a shark or an alligator. He looked exactly like who he was, an economist. Severely cross-eyed at birth, he had worn thick glasses from the age of six months. Summers in Maine, life in Chicago, then Hartford, where his father moved to pursue a career as an insurance executive, Groton, Yale—you’ve heard it here already. At Yale Richard went on to graduate school, became an instructor, and initiated a course on model building that became part of the economics core curriculum. His PhD thesis explored capital as a variable under static versus dynamic conditions.

With the approach of World War II, Bissell went to work with the Department of Commerce, moving to the War Shipping Administration. There he proved so successful that by the last year of the conflict the White House was calling for advice. The thirty-five-year-old economist went to Yalta as part of the U.S. delegation to one of the last wartime summits.

None of this had anything to do with international affairs, much less the world of spooks. In fact Bissell’s first “foreign” involvement was the opposite. Before the war, he helped organize a chapter of the isolationist America First Committee at Yale. Bissell warmed up the crowd for an October 1940 appearance by Charles Lindbergh. The road from that to CIA’s top covert operator had to be long. Years later, on an agency “cruise,” Bissell impressed the political action chief at one of his Far East stations as a college professor, not a man of action. Different from a shark, Richard Mervin Bissell Jr. became the accidental spy.

He begins as the fellow who keeps trying to return to his calling only to be summoned for another service. After the war, Bissell returned to academia as associate professor of economics at MIT. But in 1947 Averell Harriman called on him to create a staff for the President’s Committee on Foreign Aid. At congressional insistence, Harry Truman created this entity to review European requests for international help under the Marshall Plan. As a former governor and ambassador, Harriman had both the political skills and foreign service credentials to function as quasi-diplomat. He’d solved problems with Bissell when the governor headed the London embassy during the war, and he’d seen the economist again at Yalta, which Harriman attended as U.S. ambassador to Moscow. Harriman asked Bissell to be his executive secretary. In due course, Congress passed the Economic Cooperation Act in the spring of 1948, providing Marshall Plan aid. To implement this, Truman set up an Economic Cooperation Administration. Its deputy chief, Paul Hoffman, a member of the Harriman committee, prevailed on Bissell to assist. He had not completed an academic year before returning to government.

Exposure to the world of spooks began then. One friend, Frank Lindsay, rejected an employment offer, telling Bissell he was joining the Office of Policy Coordination. A good friend from Groton, the columnist Joseph Alsop, happened to be Frank Wisner’s cousin. Bissell and his wife, Ann, were soon part of a social circle that included Wisner, former OSSers Paul and Julia Child, good friend (and soon agency economist) Max Milliken, and top CIA wise man Sherman Kent. Groton friends Tracy Barnes and John Bross also materialized in their CIA incarnations. One day Wisner turned up in Bissell’s office in his official capacity. To fuel its activities, the agency needed to access funds in foreign currencies. Could the OPC piggyback on the Marshall Plan, receiving a portion of its “counterpart funds”? Told that Harriman agreed, Bissell approved. Soon, 5 percent of what the European nations furnished in their currencies went to pay for CIA activities in those countries. Bissell never learned how the agency used Marshall Plan money.

When the Truman administration promulgated its famous Cold War policy paper NSC-68, Bissell joined a group translating its prescriptions into budget proposals. One consequence of sharpening conflict, replacement of the relatively benign foreign aid program with one aimed specifically at defense assistance, led Bissell to leave government toward the end of 1951. He followed Paul Hoffman to the Ford Foundation and headed its Washington office. At this time Ford approached the PSB about helping fund Eastern European “defectors.” The swan songs were never far away. Max Milliken, an intimate since before the war, had been instrumental in inducing the CIA to fund an MIT institute, the Center for International Studies (CENIS), and create the Princeton Group, a circle of outside consultants with whom it tested perceptions. Gordon Gray attended some of their sessions. Dick Bissell joined this group. Ford Foundation money then found its way to CENIS. Bissell consulted for them. The Cold War was tightly wound indeed. Years later, the foundation would be exposed as having served as an agency conduit.

Meanwhile, Mr. Bissell developed an expanding portfolio of agency work. One project he liked brought in Frank Lindsay. Together they brainstormed ways the CIA could encourage anti-Soviet resistance in Eastern Europe. Bissell never recorded his feelings regarding the East German upheavals in 1953 or those in Hungary and Poland three years later. In any case, he attracted Allen Dulles’s increasing attention. Dulles offered a job that Bissell rejected, but the CIA chieftain kept at it. Again Bissell wanted to return to academe. Dulles brought him on as a consultant for five months. Bissell accepted because it meant he could delay moving his family, now with four children, until after the school year. He started at the CIA on February 1, 1954.

Immediately Richard Bissell became swept up in the swirl of agency operations. The Guatemala coup, hampered by differences between headquarters and the Lincoln field station, needed special attention. Director Dulles made Bissell his watchman. In a quandary over how to make effective the supposed rebel air force, which never seemed to have more than four planes able to fly, Bissell suggested increasing their psywar role, but the agency had practically no way to measure Guatemalan public opinion. When one of the aircraft ran off a runway, Dulles put Bissell in charge of getting a couple of replacements down to Nicaragua. He had a hell of a time. Headquarters understood the weakness and poor quality of the CIA armed band. Agency radio jamming contributed to its own communication problems. All hands breathed sighs of relief when President Jacobo Arbenz threw in the towel and left for exile.

It remains unclear when exactly Dick Bissell became Dulles’s fair-haired boy, but before the year was out he would be the director’s special assistant, working permanently for the CIA. His gifts were great—and widely perceived. The historian Arthur Schlesinger, when he arrived at the White House in 1961, had known Bissell for a decade and a half. He described Dick as “a man of high character and remarkable intellectual gifts. His mind was swift and penetrating, and he had an unsurpassed talent for lucid analysis and fluent exposition.”

Mr. Dulles put Bissell in charge of the agency’s most secret venture, Project Aquatone, the U-2 spy plane. The economist performed brilliantly. This program had been so tightly held that no one had thought about the mechanics of development. Bissell understood line items and realized that if the CIA had something called a reserve or contingency fund, things financed out of it might enjoy extra secrecy. He went to Allen for permission. The CIA contingency fund, with all its mischief, is Dick Bissell’s invention.

The special assistant set up a small staff in Washington—originally two rooms on Navy Hill, plus an even smaller technical management team at the Lockheed “Skunk Works” plant. He implemented very tight security. With the Pentagon, Bissell negotiated an arrangement to share costs—CIA would pay for airframe and cameras; Air Force would finance engines. When it became time for test flights, Bissell arranged for CIA use of Groom Lake, a dry salt flat in the region of Edwards Air Force Base and the now notorious Area 51 in New Mexico (Groom Lake itself is actually Area 53). An agency pilot perished during the flight test program. Bissell handled that quite discreetly. Tight security continued (though this is disputed—Lyman Kirkpatrick visited Watertown, the name of the airstrip, and returned to tell Allen Dulles that security had been virtually nonexistent). The U-2 flew over the United States to test its stealth characteristics—very successful. As proof of concept, Bissell staged a mission directly over Washington. Photos of the White House and Congress that Dick showed President Eisenhower convinced everyone they had a winner.

Ike thanked the briefers. The next day aide Colonel Andrew Goodpaster phoned with Ike’s OK of a ten-day window to fly over the Soviet Union.

Pilots were recruited from the Strategic Air Command. “Sheep-dipped,” they went through pretend retirement, resignation, and hiring by cover organizations. The first detachment trained at Groom Lake and deployed to Europe, initially to the United Kingdom. When the British got cold feet, Richard Bissell and Colonel Goodpaster made a trip across the pond. The British eventually returned to the fold, but for the moment they wanted no overflights from UK soil. The Americans moved to Germany, where Chancellor Konrad Adenauer allowed the U-2s to use an airfield at Wiesbaden. Early Russia missions flew from there.

This happened in the summer of 1956. The routine called for a morning flight briefing in Washington for a mission to take off in Europe the next morning. A final afternoon confab corresponded to when the European base began readying the aircraft. In Washington there would be a go/nogo decision about eleven p.m., when the U-2 pilot would be completing his prep. Flights typically launched at five thirty or six a.m., Central European Time, while Washington slept. The first day, the weather proved awful. Bissell scrubbed the flight. The second was worse. That evening, the European forecast looked much better. Bissell authorized the mission.

At about eight forty-five or nine a.m., Dick returned to headquarters and encountered Dulles, who asked about the U-2 flight.

“It’s in the air now,” Bissell said.

“Where is it going?” Allen asked.

“Going over, first Moscow . . . then Leningrad,” Dick answered.

“My God,” Dulles erupted. “Do you think that was wise, for the first time?”

Bissell had considered that. “It’ll be easier the first time than any later time.”

By midmorning he was able to phone to say the flight had landed, and pilot and film were safe. The flight series proved so successful that Bissell called it off after five days and half a dozen missions. The CIA had obtained photos of all the Russian heavy bomber bases. The numbers in their force were way less than some, in particular the U.S. Air Force, had expected. The so-called Bomber Gap stood revealed as a fabrication.

That marked the beginning of a long run—and a feather in Dick Bissell’s cap. He got the Soviets’ attention for sure; within a month, they had filed a diplomatic protest. Soon they stationed a KGB team outside Wiesbaden base. Under Bissell the CIA expanded its U-2 program, purchasing several dozen aircraft, forming a second detachment, stationed in Japan (Lee Harvey Oswald would be assigned there later, as a Marine radar operator). The agency began launching flights from additional locations, including England, Norway, Cyprus, and Pakistan. The British and Nationalist Chinese contributed pilots, and the latter formed their own U-2 unit.

After the U-2, Dick Bissell became pretty much unassailable. When Frank Wisner got in trouble, Allen Dulles had a close choice for a new operations chief. Richard Helms, who had served faithfully since the beginning; Lyman Kirkpatrick, still soldiering on as inspector general; or Bissell. Not only did Dulles choose Dick; he heaped even more work on him, while continuing the deputy’s role as aerospace technology wizard. An entity called the Development Projects Division (DPD) coalesced around Bissell. The agency wanted an even more sophisticated follow-on to the U-2, and it sought cameras and satellites to accomplish the same overhead photography from space. Bissell and DPD rode herd on both programs.

Eisenhower’s intelligence watchdogs, the President’s Board of Consultants, were up in arms over the operations directorate even as Bissell took it over. They had been highly critical of the CIA fiasco in Indonesia. Allen Dulles begged for time. Bissell got a few months after taking over in January 1959. Then he reported to the President’s Board that he had reviewed DO projects, useless ones were being phased out, new procedures adopted for approval, and so on. With experience on Guatemala and in Indonesia, Dick found his way forward. While this delicate dance went on, Bissell’s other portfolios boiled over. At almost precisely this time, DPD made the design selection for the advanced spy plane, code named Oxcart, and gave Lockheed four months to build a full-scale mockup. In January 1960, the CIA went ahead to contract for a dozen of the aircraft, by then called the A-12 (and still later the SR-71).

Meanwhile the reconnaissance satellite brought huge headaches. The project, code named Corona, would be disguised as a scientific satellite program dubbed Discoverer. It suffered one failure after another, beginning in January 1959, when the upper stage of the Thor-Agena rocket began firing with the booster still on the pad preparing for launch. After a month of repairs, the rocket took off successfully but simply disappeared from the radar screen. Eight successive launches of the Thor-Agena booster each failed in some fashion. Only one rocket, Discoverer 3, actually carried a science payload. In that case, the mice who were to ride the rocketship poisoned themselves, eating paint on the interior of the capsule. Supplied with new crewmice, Discoverer 3 launched on June 3 but suffered an inertial guidance failure and pitched into the Pacific Ocean. Failures continued almost monthly until August 1960, when Discoverer 13 succeeded in carrying out all portions of a mission profile from launch to de-orbiting a film capsule. On August 18, Discoverer 14 returned the first actual overhead photography.

Each mission involved Bissell in elaborate secrecy, with the spy satellites secretly assembled in Palo Alto, California, at a plant of the Hiller Helicopter Corporation and then moved to Vandenberg Air Force Base for launch. It seemed somehow fitting to be orbiting spy satellites from a base named for a general who had once headed the CIA.

The Corona satellite entered service in the nick of time, for on May 1, 1960, a CIA U-2 piloted by Francis Gary Powers had been shot down over Russia. Agency plans for this eventuality assumed that the aircraft had been destroyed, so the CIA could claim the U-2 had been on a weather data–gathering flight. But the Russians captured not only the pilot, but also the cameras and other espionage paraphernalia, making it completely clear that this had been a spy mission. With the collapse of DPD’s cover story, the CIA stood exposed.

Worse, the U-2 affair obliged President Eisenhower to take responsibility for the spy missions (giving John Kennedy his precedent). The Russians canceled participation in a long-anticipated summit conference that could have reduced global tensions. Equally distressing from Ike’s point of view, the shootdown led to a congressional investigation of national security affairs, including the spy plane fiasco. Operationally, uncertainty over the capabilities and distribution of Russian air defenses led the president to halt all overflights of communist territory.

That brought disaster for another of Bissell’s ongoing covert operations, ST/Circus, the secret war raging in Tibet, where the CIA had helped the Dalai Lama flee Lhasa early in 1959, then continued furnishing arms to anti-Chinese Tibetans. The agency had had the foresight to send along a camera crew to make a movie out of the Dalai Lama’s rescue, which Bissell showed to a much-impressed President Eisenhower. But without overflights, the CIA arms deliveries inside Tibet diminished to practically nothing, ensuring the rebels’ defeat. Overflights of Cuba also had to end, hampering preparations for the JM/Ate project too.

It’s a wonder the U-2 affair did not derail Dick Bissell at the CIA. Its consequences were that dramatic. Yet despite it, people spoke of Bissell as heir apparent. With the Cuban operation in high gear, Dulles may have been reluctant to relieve him. The agency’s operations chief also benefited from credits piled up in exploits from the U-2’s development to the Guatemala coup and the Dalai Lama rescue. Most striking is that President Eisenhower’s showdown meeting on the Cuba project took place on August 18, 1960—the same day the Corona satellite made its first successful launch, inaugurating a new era in spying. So Bissell kept his job. But with so much on his plate, it is not surprising he delegated to Tracy Barnes.

Except for one thing: the assassination plotting. Within days of that White House meeting, Dick Bissell began moving on several fronts. He quietly took security chief Sheffield Edwards aside to ask him to open a channel to the Mafia. Bissell had already had a conversation with J.C. King on going after Fidel. Now he became serious, and the Mafia had interests in Havana.

By late September, Bissell saw enough movement on the Mafia channel that he took Colonel Edwards around to Director Dulles and General Cabell. About this time, the idea of getting rid of Congolese premier Patrice Lumumba was added to the mix. When the Church Committee in the mid-1970s probed these matters, Bissell testified that he received the green light in October or early November 1960, just prior to the election. In a different place, Bissell insisted he had no knowledge that the president had, in fact, ordered anything.

“The planning for this operation,” Bissell related, “was conducted in a manner completely different from that of any other operation that I ever knew of.” CIA Security kept the approach out of standard channels. Edwards hired Robert Maheu, a former intermediary between CIA and FBI, now a Las Vegas private investigator, as go-between. Shef’s deputy accompanied Maheu to meet the Mafia don. According to Bissell, the CIA understood that the syndicate would move unless the agency called it off. The decision to enlist the Mafia in this assassination, in terms of operational security, represented probably the worst choice of all. Sure to come back and bite when some mafioso wanted to manipulate the U.S. government, the collaboration would be explosive no matter how it came out.

In any case, the JM/Ate planners for the Bay of Pigs were completely out of the loop on any assassination plots. After President Kennedy entered office, a White House official did tell Bissell that the agency should create an “executive action” capability. Within the DO, Bissell eventually sanctioned the creation of ZR/Rifle, supposed to provide an in-house capacity for murder.

All this went on while the Cuba invasion scheme ground ahead. And Bissell manned his ramparts. After the election, a Kennedy talent scout, a former agency person, visited Joe Smith, recently transferred to the Western Hemisphere Division. “After the President,” the fellow ruminated, “the DDP is the most important man in the U.S. government.” The operations deputy could actually initiate CIA activity and spend unvouchered funds. Dick Bissell had done both. Smith’s visitor, an old college friend, finished his thought: “He could easily get the country so deeply involved in a situation that started out as a simple covert action activity we couldn’t get ourselves out of it.” Despite pious words to Ike’s consultant board, Bissell had made no substantive changes to the way the DO did business. And he was deeply invested. “There will be no Communist government in Latin America while I am DDP,” he had said.

In Palm Beach, Florida, a few weeks after the election, Bissell and Dulles gave John F. Kennedy his first detailed glimpse of the Ate plan. Almost instinctively, Kennedy began chipping away at its margins. Bissell followed the president’s cancellation of some preinvasion air strikes by scaling back some others. The final mission, itself cut in half, would be the only one left. A program of more than forty bomber flights had been pared back to just eight.

Allen Dulles told a March 11 meeting with JFK that there would be a “disposal problem” if the exiles simply disbanded. He had also impressed JFK during a sit-down in the Oval Office, telling the president he had more confidence in the Cuba plan than he’d had in 1954 during the Guatemala coup.

Meanwhile, several of the top CIA operators, including task force chief Jake Esterline and the agency supervisor for the exile brigade, Marine Colonel Jack Hawkins, were threatening to resign over the cutbacks. In the middle of preparations for the Cuban venture, a coup against the Guatemalan leader occurred. The CIA’s Cuban exile troops actually took part in suppressing the coup. CIA-sponsored forces intervened in the domestic affairs of another nation for the purpose of preserving U.S. bases for a covert operation to destroy the government of a third nation. Bissell repeated what Dulles had said about disposal—it would be worse than an invasion—and he assured his operatives that Kennedy, having OKed the landing, would not leave the exiles in the lurch.

Robert F. Kennedy, attorney general, learned of the invasion only four or five days ahead of time. Bissell went to the Justice Department to brief him. According to Bobby, the CIA wizard put the chances of success as two in three.

The estimates were obviously flawed. When the weakened air attack proved less than a total success, Bissell, with Deputy Director Cabell, appealed for reinstatement of the original plan. President Kennedy happened to be at his weekend home in Hyannis Port, Massachusetts. The two CIA men went to see Secretary of State Dean Rusk, who listened to their arguments, then turned them down. He offered to phone the president and let them brief him directly. The CIA officials, feeling it wouldn’t do any good, desisted. Brigade 2506 went down in defeat. No one actually attempted to assassinate Fidel Castro.

HIGH STAKES FOR THE CIA

General Taylor’s committee initially met at the main CIA building on Navy Hill, barely a week after the exiles waded ashore at Playa Girón. Taylor ran a tight inquest in the way one might say a Navy skipper ran a tight ship. After lunch on April 22, five top agency people sat for the first hearing. Led by Old Rice and Beans Cabell, they included both Dick Bissell and Tracy Barnes. Allen Dulles led off, speaking from the bench to describe Eisenhower’s 5412 directive, the special group it sanctioned, and its authority for covert ops. The CIA brass then revealed a couple of abortive, last-minute attempts made to head off Fidel before he took power. Havana station chief William Caldwell had tried to induce Fulgencio Batista to resign in favor of a picked successor. Bobby Kennedy wanted to know when Washington had ruled Castro politically unacceptable, a question for which the witnesses had no ready answer.

Mr. Bissell described the CIA’s March 17, 1960, project proposal, Ike’s approval, and the concept of a “catalyst” force infiltrating in small teams. Max Taylor scratched at the central abscess—the question of how the plans related to officials’ understanding of the capabilities needed to unseat Mr. Castro. Dulles admitted that they had little to offer on that score. From there Bissell took the conversation back to infiltration teams, asserting that the idea had been to build large groups to facilitate airdrops. Not until several hours later did a CIA witness—Tracy Barnes—mention the transformation of the CIA infiltration concept into an invasion. Bobby Kennedy spoke up then, asking what purpose a strike force served. Bissell argued that the invasion would strike a blow leading to a general uprising.

A couple of days later, the same group gathered at midmorning in Allen Dulles’s conference room. This time they went all day. Richard Bissell confirmed that there had been no formal policy paper on the shift to an assault force. He went on to survey the plan’s evolution through the three months of Kennedy’s administration. Bissell and Dulles made up a tag team, each handing off to the other to read excerpts of records noting JM/Ate’s progression. In one session, on February 18, JFK had been presented with a paper described as “Bissell’s View.” That had argued for the invasion option, even advocating a single beach landing as an optimal way to “infiltrate” guerrilla fighters and asserting that Castro’s military had little (but daily improving) effectiveness. In six months, Bissell insisted, the Fidelistas would be unassailable, implying the need for rapid action. Taylor’s group mulled over the lack of a paper trail for the move from Trinidad to the Bay of Pigs, and focused on cutbacks in the air strikes intended to neutralize Castro’s air force.

Toward the end of a long day, Mr. Bissell reflected on the CIA’s most serious miscalculations. First, the agency had underestimated Castro’s organizational ability, reaction speed, and will to fight. Those were rookie intelligence errors, and some of them had been discussed in CIA analyses that the DO had ignored. Second worst had been the inadequate air capability—especially in crews—which would have avoided the exhaustion that quickly led to committing American pilots. A related error, Bissell admitted, had been “unnecessary concessions” to favor plausible deniability over military effect, namely the reduced attacks on Fidel’s warplanes.

Exactly like Grayston Lynch, Bissell implied that a fully executed bombing campaign would have meant victory on the ground. Years later, the journal Diplomatic History sought Bissell’s commentary on the paper a scholar had written based on Allen Dulles’s draft manuscripts containing his detailed defense of the Bay of Pigs—material that never went into The Craft of Intelligence. In that commentary, Richard Bissell accepted the Taylor committee’s criticism of him: “The Taylor Committee was probably correct in concluding that Cabell and Bissell [note his use of the third person] were negligent in failing to make a last attempt to persuade the president by telephone to reverse his decision.”

However, the myopic reductionism by which the CIA equated beating up Castro’s air force with “victory” is just the first error. To Mr. Bissell’s list we can add others.

Assault Brigade 2506 simply lacked the firepower to beat Castro’s ground troops. Moreover, Allen Dulles had told the White House that there would be a “disposal problem” and that the best solution would be to send the exile unit into Cuba. That decision, too, could be laid at the CIA’s feet.

The idea that Cubans, after a decade of impoverishment under a corrupt American-sponsored dictator, would rise up to join an exile brigade that represented the Cuban oligarchy was absurd. It seemed inherent in the CIA plan, yet Dulles later wrote in The Craft of Intelligence, “I know of no estimate that a spontaneous uprising of the unarmed population of Cuba would be touched off by the landing.” If that is so and the CIA’s real working premise had been that the exile brigade would win on its own, defeating Fidel’s entire army, the plans were utterly foolish. They were incoherent too: the ships contained thousands of weapons to arm expected volunteers.

The exile political leadership also lacked unity despite lengthy agency hand-holding, a sure disadvantage. In fact, the CIA contributed to the problem when top political operative E. Howard Hunt walked away from the frente because it had enlisted moderates and leftists, not just right-wingers. Without presenting themselves as a unified movement, the exiles had no chance.

That shortcoming, too, traces directly back to the Central Intelligence Agency. Jake Esterline, CIA’s task force chief, told the Taylor committee that around mid-March the 5412 Group had given him clearance “to attempt to set up an acceptable alternative to Castro.” Esterline took immediate action “to establish a covert mechanism, through which we could . . . get rid of Castro.” At first hearing, this sounds as though the Special Group was ordering a plot to assassinate, even while the CIA had a different plot to murder Fidel already under way. A close reading suggests that Esterline spoke colloquially, that he was simply referring to the provisional leaders of the Frente Revolucionario Democrático. Still, the statements raise a question: with the NSC’s covert-operations decision unit and the CIA task force leader both recalling plans to “neutralize” Fidel, wasn’t it time for Mr. Bissell to say something? As a matter of fact, he did not even tell the Taylor inquiry about the Castro murder plot. He left that to Allen Dulles. A decade later, Bissell told the Church Committee he thought that Allen was responsible for the murder contract and that Dulles would at least have hinted about it to Taylor. But by his own account, Bissell did nothing to verify his suppositions. All those errors went beyond stupid invasion planning and all led to Richard Bissell.

When Taylor’s group consulted Robert A. Lovett, Eisenhower’s former consultant told them that the Bay of Pigs reminded him exactly of the Indonesia affair, Project Haik, which the CIA had bungled. President Kennedy had abolished Ike’s board of consultants, but following the Cuban fiasco JFK turned around. He set up the President’s Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board (PFIAB). In just a few months, the CIA would be telling PFIAB that efforts to oust Fidel were dragging because its people were spending so much time on Bay of Pigs inquiries. In Eisenhower’s day, the agency had actually tracked staff hours consumed responding to the Doolittle inquiry and a later review led by Herbert Hoover, complaining that these efforts impeded its work.

Max Taylor would be kind. No criticism of individuals appeared in his final report, rendered in June, but the DDP already knew where he stood. Within weeks—while the Taylor committee still met, Bissell recalled later—President Kennedy told him he would not be moving into the top floor office suite at the new Langley headquarters. Kennedy is said to have spoken of “splintering” the agency “into a thousand pieces” to “scatter it to the winds.”

Instead, as he had made Allen Dulles do studies poring over his failure, so he put Dick Bissell in charge of an interagency paramilitary review. Bissell resisted the work—senior staffer Jim Cross, who helped assemble the paper that became the starting point for the review, repeatedly failed in efforts to get an appointment to see his chairman. The study concluded that paramilitary operations should be the domain of the U.S. military. Mr. Bissell also avoided the CIA inspector general’s examination of his actions. Lyman Kirkpatrick got his interview with Bissell only after three tries.

National security adviser McGeorge Bundy told associates that he could no longer trust Bissell’s judgment in an operational situation. Bundy thought Allen had had more misgivings than he had let on but had kept his counsel out of loyalty to Bissell.

General Taylor and his colleagues sat with Kennedy to discuss their report on June 13. Next day at the agency, the Deputies Committee mulled over how to proceed. Dulles explained JFK had decreed that there should be just one copy of Taylor’s report and that he would keep it. Dick Bissell implored the DCI to try to obtain a copy anyway, or at least to ask Kennedy to put the report in a file that the agency could see after a few months. Halfway through, the DO chief talked himself out of his idea; it would be better if the CIA had no access. That way, when the inevitable leaks came, they couldn’t be blamed on the agency.

Bobby Kennedy said that President Kennedy and he were both very fond of Allen, but that JFK was determined to see Dulles go. The president accepted his resignation on September 27, 1961. At one point, perhaps facetiously, Kennedy suggested Arthur Schlesinger as successor. The president also spoke to Bobby about succeeding the Great White Case Officer. His brother refused. Robert Kennedy recommended having a member of the opposing political party (the Republicans) as CIA chief. President Kennedy settled on John A. McCone, a millionaire industrialist who had been head of the Atomic Energy Commission in Eisenhower’s time.

Richard Bissell’s greatest challenge came from within the agency. Allen Dulles, as he pretty much had to do, assigned his inspector general to review the Bay of Pigs operation. That put Kirk on the hot seat. Kirkpatrick said nothing at the Deputies Committee meeting just mentioned, for he already had the assignment. He put his best people to work on it, led by his deputy David McClellan. Three more investigators read every file. In addition to Bissell, the IG inquisitors interviewed Tracy Barnes, Jake Esterline, J.C. King, and 124 others. Considering that there were roughly 450 people in all assigned to JM/Ate and that a goodly number were radiomen or aircraft mechanics—not much help—investigators heard from a healthy slice of the entire project staff, certainly its top people. The investigation, Kirkpatrick later wrote, amounted to “one of the most painful episodes of my entire career in intelligence, both personally and officially.”

The content of his report is familiar to anyone who has read histories of the Bay of Pigs. Themes like “perfect failure” or “brilliant disaster” are ubiquitous in the histories, and the IG found flaws everywhere. From the way agency components assigned underperforming staff to the task force to exile training, communications, operations, air efforts, and decision making, it was all a mess. It’s more interesting that Kirkpatrick’s report kicked over a hornet’s nest. “Rather than receiving [my report] in the light in which it was produced, which was to ensure that the same mistakes would not be repeated in the future, those that participated in the operation resented it and attacked it bitterly.”

His actions make clear Inspector General Kirkpatrick anticipated something like that reaction. The finished report bears an October 1961 date, but Kirkpatrick did not hand it over to Allen Dulles, who had commissioned it. Instead he waited until November 20, just a few days before the dedication of the Langley headquarters, when Dulles went into retirement. The IG handed his report to John McCone, and he did so just as the newly anointed DCI left for California to attend to last-minute personal business.

Kirkpatrick’s tactic ensured that Dulles could not bury the IG report. The way the Taylor committee’s inquiry had trailed off might have suggested that move. The CIA’s Cuba historian links Kirk’s motives to his long competition with Richard Bissell. In half a dozen conversations with Allen Dulles over the months in which the IG report was crafted, Kirkpatrick practically volunteered to take Bissell’s place at the head of the operations directorate. The agency’s official biographer of John McCone concludes that Kirkpatrick breached protocol and angered the new director.

Evidence cuts both ways. On the one hand, McCone employed Kirkpatrick again, on some rather serious business. On the other, the DCI’s correspondence with Dick Bissell indicates sympathy for him. McCone, who eschewed his given name and preferred to be familiarly known as “Alex,” signed his private correspondence “Jack.” That is the form he used with Bissell. Moreover McCone sided with the reductionists who insisted that only curtailment of the CIA bombing had prevented victory at the Bay of Pigs.

In the event the report would be battered and bashed. On November 28, John McCone’s first day, General Charles Pearre Cabell—familiarly referred to by his middle name—instructed Kirkpatrick to restrict circulation to those who had already received it. Explicitly kept at arm’s length would be the PFIAB. McCone himself told Kirkpatrick that his report conveyed a false impression of CIA responsibility.

Pearre weighed in again on December 15, claiming that detailed comment would result in a paper almost as long as Kirkpatrick’s. Bissell went ahead to do that, in a fifty-plus page exegesis that disputed nearly every point. However, even the persuasive Bissell had a hard time—as he had had before the Taylor committee—explaining the shift from infiltration to invasion, here attributed primarily and improbably to the difficulty of successful air drops. The DO analysis reached past the IG to aim at the president and NSC. Allen Dulles, as well as Cabell, complained they had not been consulted for the investigation.

Tracy Barnes did much of the writing on the DO response. By his lights, the IG report had been incompetent, biased, malicious, and released without informing affected individuals of its conclusions. That persuaded later agency historian Jack Pfeiffer. Barnes held that in the future no IG ought to be permitted to investigate the operations directorate without specific instructions approved by the CIA’s director, and that, in such a case, the concerned chief should actually be monitoring the inquisitors. This precisely parallels the CIA–Senate committee argument over the torture report.

Lyman Kirkpatrick protested in vain that the IG’s job was contained within the agency’s walls and that he had confined himself to examining the efficiency of the CIA project. Kirk never lived down the experience of being shunned by his colleagues. Shortly before retiring, Kirkpatrick had a revealing encounter with a Cuban exile writer, Mario Lazo, who had compiled an article he hoped to sell to Reader’s Digest. The piece, which Lazo sent to Kirkpatrick for his reaction, had commented favorably on the CIA at the Bay of Pigs. Kirk had said nothing until Lazo followed up in May 1964, when the CIA man asked that the author give up on the article. Lazo protested that he was a friend of the agency. “This was indeed part of the problem,” Kirkpatrick replied, adding that “I had been actually accused of writing the article myself.” Lyman Kirkpatrick couldn’t gain favor at the CIA even if he reversed his entire position.

If there had been a disposal problem with the Cuban brigade, an even bigger one existed with the CIA officers who had worked with them. Rip Robertson and Gray Lynch became lieutenants in the secret war against Castro, specialists in “maritime operations,” sometimes using those same ex-Navy LCIs they had at Playa Girón. Robertson had been singled out by the IG as a specific example of a poor officer. He and Lynch registered as agents for “Ace Cartography” and were responsible for the LCIs. Robertson, one exile relates, would feel sick or angry when missions were scrubbed. He once offered $50 for a miliciano’s ear. When the exile fighter brought him a pair, Robertson shelled out a hundred bucks and took the Cuban home for turkey dinner. How one might establish that the ears had belonged to a Fidelista as opposed to anybody else went unrecorded. Robertson later served in Southeast Asia, where he participated in more CIA operations and eventually died from malaria in Laos.

Grayston Lynch was given a medal, the Intelligence Star, the CIA’s second-highest decoration. Lynch, whose dislike for Robert Kennedy ran so deep that some JFK assassination theorists include him among their candidate conspirators, may not have known that Bobby was a cheerleader for Project Mongoose, the long-running series of plans to assassinate Castro. He left in 1971 after a hundred maritime operations; he passed away in 2008. Jake Esterline hated Bobby too; he refused to tell a CIA historian, even off the record, what he thought of RFK. Co-author of the CIA’s original March 1960 project proposal, Esterline got medals too and ended up running the Miami station from 1967 to 1972, shutting down Cuban operations once and for all. Lyman Kirkpatrick retired in 1965 and became a professor at Brown University. Richard Bissell went into the aviation industry, working for the corporation that became United Technology as a sort of government liaison.

Tracy Barnes gets a special place. Director McCone found him a sinecure as chief of the DO’s Domestic Operations Division, a unit that handled some procurement programs, “mounted” operations, contract agents such as Robertson or Lynch, and the rehired Cuban exiles. His division also took care of survivors’ benefits, including those for families of the Cubans killed at Playa Girón. Howard Hunt went to work for him. A couple of times Barnes tried to get Dick Bissell back with him, once on an initiative to manufacture underwater sleds like those the SEALs use, another time on an international investment gambit.

As deputy, Barnes got the naturalized Dane, Hans Tofte, whom he had known since Guatemala. Tofte fancied himself larger than life. He talked as if he had single-handedly won the Korean War for the CIA, and turned out to have exaggerated his exploits in the “blockade” of China, faking movies of Chinese Nationalists supposedly making combat landings. He also had tales of bouncing back and forth between British intelligence and the OSS during the war, stories that ranged from Singapore to Burma, Yugoslavia, and Germany. Tofte overreached when, asked to recommend a security policy for Colombia, he delivered one to President Kennedy that extolled the value of covert ops too soon after the Bay of Pigs.

In July 1966, a young CIA recruit looking to rent a basement apartment in Tofte’s home opened a closet and found three cartons of secret documents. The new officer dutifully reported the stash to the deputy division chief, after which the Office of Security sent a team and found more. Tofte insisted—as CIA chief John Deutch did in 1996—that he had the materials at home for work. Unlike Deutch, Tofte claimed that the security men stole his wife’s jewelry. He sued. Courts dismissed Tofte’s case. He resigned.

That embarrassment finished Tracy too. Barnes retired in 1967 to work for Yale University president Kingman Brewster as a community relations specialist. The job was perfect for the unctuous Barnes. He died in early 1972, too soon to see how a bunch of his exile Cubans had signed on for a White House dirty tricks campaign, becoming notorious as the Watergate “Plumbers.” Barnes’s ghost shows the danger of a spy elevated beyond his competence level; there have been a depressing number of them. Robertson and Lynch are even more sinister, illustrating the damage done when operators unthinkingly forge ahead.

The CIA headquarters at Opa-locka continued in service as JM/Wave. Before its eclipse by agency activities in Vietnam, JM/Wave would be the largest CIA station in the world. It had never been true that the Kennedys weren’t serious about getting Fidel. Under JFK a whole new CIA project, Mongoose, would target Castro with more assassination plots, more sabotage, more team infiltrations, more deception operations—more of everything. One JM/Wave infiltration mission right in the middle of the Cuban Missile Crisis might have started World War III; the Russians could have misinterpreted it as scouting for a U.S. invasion. The Kennedys repeatedly revamped their arrangements and changed the names of the CIA’s field unit, but they were serious about Castro.

President Kennedy also felt a debt to the exiles of Brigade 2506. Bobby Kennedy recruited law school classmate E. Barrett Prettyman Jr., plus New York lawyer James B. Donovan (no relation to the general, but he had been general counsel to OSS), the man who negotiated with Russia and East Germany for the return of U-2 pilot Francis Gary Powers, to bargain with Castro to free the exile prisoners. The Powers exchange, made familiar by the movie Bridge of Spies, had involved an actual spy trade. This time Washington had no such trading material, but it could offer Cuba $53.5 million worth of medical equipment and medicines ($422 million in 2016), which had been denied by the U.S.-imposed trade embargo. Shortly after the missile crisis, Cuba released most of the prisoners. Donovan bargained for a few remaining exile frogmen and twenty-two Americans still rotting in Castro jails. They were released in the spring of 1963.

In Miami, at the Orange Bowl, the president came to inspect Brigade 2506 on December 29, 1962. Handed a replica of the exile battle flag, Kennedy promised to return it in a liberated Cuba. That never happened, but he opened up U.S. military ranks to the Cubans, paid compensation, and continued Mongoose and its successors. Lyndon Johnson did too, through 1965. The Cuban exiles became a CIA recruiting pool. The agency brought some back for service in the Congo, Vietnam, Bolivia, and Central America, among other places. Exile factions conducted their own plots against Castro, participated in assorted mayhem in Latin America, and according to Kennedy assassination scholars conspired against the president of the United States. Some of them were recruited by minions of another president, Richard Nixon, for the Plumbers. Their excesses in Watergate helped bring down his presidency. The agency had opened Pandora’s box. The Reagan-era CIA operation in Afghanistan, where agency mobilization of Islamist tribal resistance to the Soviets led to formation of the Al Qaeda terrorist network, is just another example of the evils let loose by these kinds of operations.

THE CRUSADERS

“Sticks and stones may break my bones, but the pitiful, feeble evidence of my alleged crimes presented in the Walsh report will never hurt me.” Thus wrote CIA baron Duane “Dewey” Clarridge, upon reading the final report of independent counsel Lawrence R. Walsh, who filed a criminal indictment against Clarridge in November 1990, based on his alleged perjury in multiple venues during investigations of the 1980s Iran-Contra Affair, when the CIA man participated in the sudden epidemic of amnesia that afflicted agency officials implicated in those events. One can sympathize with Clarridge’s frustration at the perjury accusations, never adjudicated because President George H.W. Bush, the first President Bush, preemptively pardoned him among a group of Iran-Contra figures. More interesting is Clarridge’s colorful rejection. He went on to say that he hoped the prosecutor would not seal the documents and to issue the veiled threat that “I will deal with Walsh’s allegations in the fullness of time and on my own terms.” The truth is, Dewey Clarridge had been a central figure in CIA projects which led to a crisis that nearly consumed Ronald W. Reagan’s presidency. Clarridge and the other amnesiacs faced the greatest crisis yet in the new era of intelligence oversight.

As delicate as Tracy Barnes but a lot more effective, Duane Ramsdell Clarridge had come up through the Near East and South Asian (NESA) Division. Clarridge, who went by the nickname Dewey, made his reputation as Barnes’s went into eclipse. In 1964 he was the base chief in Madras, India. His first encounter with the new house at Langley would be a year later, as headquarters desk officer for India and Pakistan. He’d been prescient when colleagues could not foresee Pakistan’s foolish 1965 war with India over Kashmir. Clarridge followed with a very successful tour as chief of station in Turkey. Later it became embarrassing that Aldrich Ames, the agency’s greatest traitor, served under Dewey there, but this occurred before the betrayal. Ames, on his first overseas assignment, underperformed, and Clarridge finally decided he lacked the skills to be a case officer. Not so Clarridge himself, who notably recruited a Polish couple by helping his prospective spies determine whether the wife was pregnant.

From solid New England farm stock, Dewey had been just old enough, when World War II started, to follow what his family and neighbors were saying. His grandmother’s election to the New Hampshire state legislature opened his eyes some, and Dewey aspired to more, while his family wanted him to go to private school and an Ivy. He did, in fact, attend a New Jersey private school, graduate from Brown, and do advanced study at Columbia, where an agency talent spotter collared him. Clarridge offered an interesting mixture of predatory talents. He sharpened his observational skills by watching the people go by at Grand Central Station before taking the train to Boston, and at Brown he developed a sense of the importance of memory.

As a spy, Dewey showed adaptability but naiveté, too. He was several years into a CIA assignment in Nepal before he realized that the agency had health and pension plans. Fulfilling a male citizen’s military service obligation, required in the 1950s, Clarridge joined the Army Reserve and passed through officer candidate school together with another agency fellow, John Stein, who rose to head the DO. Whereas Stein hated the Army interlude, Clarridge mastered tactics so well that he taught them in basic training and extolled them to CIA case officers. He was a quick study. In Nepal Dewey learned polo and used the sport as an entrée to the nation’s elite, as he did also in India. That led to an assignment as escort officer for a Nepalese general visiting Washington in 1960—and a first encounter with Allen Dulles.

When Beirut erupted in 1975, Dewey had been NESA’s chief of operations. No longer the powerful number-three position in a CIA unit, as it had been when Richard Helms held that job for the entire directorate, the chief of operations slot had morphed into a staff position with no command responsibilities, merely tasks sloughed off by the deputy division chiefs now controlling regions. Clarridge blames Jim Critchfield. The agency’s German enthusiast had switched to the Middle East beat before being drafted as top oil expert for the National Intelligence Council. Critchfield left behind a newfangled organizational structure that frustrated Dewey. He didn’t like the job, yet held it for a year and a half. Then Clarridge became one of the regional deputies, responsible for Arab countries. The Lebanese civil war took center stage on his watch. Clarridge managed Bob Ames and his agent the Red Prince, and he traded places with Clair George, who had been the deputy chief of NESA and relinquished that for the prestigious slot of Beirut station chief, only to have the post become a nightmare.

Dewey played musical chairs with George for a decade. Like others before and after, Clarridge went on “cruises.” He saw George again in Beirut, but CIA staff were soon evacuated to Athens, awaiting a moment for safe return. There were other headaches. NESA’s boss detested the men in the DO front office. He had Dewey take care of any business with them. The “Year of Intelligence”—1975, with its multiple investigations of the CIA—came and went. Dewey thought the revelations were the fault of agency director William E. Colby. He would later reflect that the twin traumas of Vietnam and the Church and Pike committees had led to skittishness at the agency.

The rules of the game had changed. On Capitol Hill, Congress created oversight committees in both houses, a formal structure for covert operations approval, and a new source of worry for agency officers. President Gerald R. Ford fired Colby, and for a year George Herbert Walker Bush headed the CIA. Bush saw Clarridge often because the NESA officer frequently accompanied DO brass to explain Arabs to the CIA chieftain. Dewey had little good to say about Stansfield Turner, whom President Carter brought in to lead the agency. He considered Turner a moralist—he was a devout Christian Scientist—and paranoid. But Clarridge could get away. After a stint of broadening as a southern European deputy, he headed to Italy as station chief in Rome, a primo CIA ticket.

Palestinians, Libyans, and homegrown extremists of both the left and the right were active in Italy then. Langley deliberated whether Dewey should get an armored vehicle. The leftist Red Brigades had kidnapped and murdered former Italian prime minister Aldo Moro in the spring of 1978. Moro had been a moderate who favored compromise with Italy’s giant Communist Party. Forty deaths a year were being attributed to terrorism. Not long after Clarridge completed his tour, new discoveries linked rightwing Italians, including Masonic lodges and some of the old “Gladio” networks, to some of the murders and bombings of this age.

Both Dewey and his wife, Helga, did a two-week course on firearms and defensive driving at Camp Peary before leaving for Rome. Clarridge seemed a target. An Italian magazine published a piece about him soon after his arrival. His flamboyance—he was notorious at Langley for pastel jackets, white shoes, kerchief, and cigar—made him very identifiable. Plus, Dewey did a lot of entertaining. He developed a reputation as a risk taker but, curiously, never ran into trouble.

Until Bill Casey, that is. Ronald Reagan rewarded his 1980 campaign manager, William J. Casey, with appointment as director of central intelligence. The assignment wasn’t farfetched, since Casey had been with the OSS and on Gerald Ford’s PFIAB. He wanted to fight communists, and the CIA had the ideal tools. On a get-acquainted cruise to Europe early in 1981, squired by Alan Wolfe, Casey had a pleasant dinner with Clarridge. According to Dewey, that was the end of it. But a few months later, his wife done with Rome, Dewey returned to headquarters. A succession of assignments were proposed, until the Latin America Division suddenly opened up, the post emptied by its chief, who left for the Pentagon. At this point, the head of the DO was old comrade John H. Stein. He recommended Clarridge. Casey approved. That marked the start of a disturbing passage.

Never accuse the CIA of being a rogue elephant. Bill Casey with his “private, off-the-shelf covert operation” and even the Castro assassination plots were products of someone’s idea of what presidents wanted. In the spy business, plausible deniability is rooted in the notion that covert operations are by definition secret. The hand of the United States, like that of God, must remain invisible. By extension, a president should not be seen approving the plots. This classic way has since been turned on its head, starting with the Bay of Pigs, where the Taylor group understandably concluded that it had been fantasy to suppose that America’s hand could be hidden. There were more of those ventures. There was a new Cuban exile air force, this time in the Congo. For a time, the CIA spent $1 million a day ($7.6 million in 2016) there. There was the “secret army” in Laos, where the price went higher. There was the Phoenix death-squad program in Vietnam, not to mention the whole Vietnam secret war. There were Air America’s proprietary CIA operations throughout the world. There was Track II, to depose Salvador Allende in Chile.

The sea change occurred in the mid-1970s when Congress passed laws defining procedures for covert operations approval and created oversight committees in both the Senate and House of Representatives to monitor spy work. Under the new system, Congress was to be informed of covert operations, and the oversight committees could supervise and monitor them. The legal instrument for telling Congress became known as a presidential finding or, more formally, a memorandum of notification. As is typical of complex mechanisms, this one lacked precision when installed. Throughout the CIA’s subsequent history, even into the present, the struggle over putting meat onto those bones has continued. The size of operations to be approved by a finding (too small is not worth it), the scope of a finding (which delimits the operation), the timing of filing with the oversight committees, the extent of notifications (how widely is Congress to be informed?), and the content of findings have all been matters of dispute.

Gerald Ford became the first president to be bound in this way. His officials complained vociferously of the number of congressional committees required to be informed and blamed the system for the failure of the CIA’s Project IA/Feature, its 1975 paramilitary adventure in Angola, in which agency-funded indigenous fighters chalked up an ignominious failure against Marxist government forces and were saved for the short term only by South African intervention. Jimmy Carter ran afoul the system with his 1980 Operation Eagle Claw, attempting to rescue the American hostages in Iran. Carter worried that informing Congress too soon might compromise the op. But it would be his successor, Ronald Reagan, who pushed back hard. His instrument was Bill Casey, who frequently acted through minions like Dewey Clarridge.

On the verge of his sixty-eighth birthday when he started at Langley, Director Casey left booby traps everywhere. When he sat for confirmation hearings before the United States Senate, it emerged that Casey had acted as a representative for foreign nations and interests without registering with the State Department, a crime under U.S. law. He’d failed to list two foreign governments and seventy other clients. His past business dealings were smelly. Casey had not mentioned nearly $500,000 in debts and $250,000 in investments. In the Nixon era, when the International Telephone and Telegraph Corporation (ITT) collaborated with the CIA to prevent the advent of Allende as Chilean president, Casey had been head of the Securities and Exchange Commission, and Alex McCone on the board of ITT. Suspecting corporate shenanigans, the SEC had had ITT under investigation. Someone quashed that investigation on Casey’s watch. Dozens of cartons of ITT documents were returned to the company. A Senate intelligence committee inquiry led to the odd verdict that “no basis has been found” to conclude that Mr. Casey was “unfit to hold office.”

There were also allegations that Casey, as head of Reagan’s campaign, had convinced the Iranians to delay releasing American hostages until after the election. This “October surprise” rivaled the political dirty tricks Richard Nixon had resorted to in his 1968 election victory. The Senate Foreign Relations Committee looked into this scandal but reached no conclusion.

Hardly even vexed, Casey promptly appointed another businessman, Max Hugel, to lead the CIA’s Directorate of Operations. Hugel’s appointment dissolved amid a welter of controversies as bad as Casey’s. To reassure the now doubtful troops, Bill asked old pro John Stein to lead the DO instead. That did not end controversy. Two years later, a Jimmy Carter briefing book from the 1980 presidential debates, which had been purloined, turned up in the DCI’s safe. By then Mr. Casey had become well established and “Debategate” proved only a passing frenzy.

An Irish Catholic swashbuckler, Bill Casey had been in charge of prepping OSS teams to infiltrate Nazi Germany. The war ended before more than a handful were in play. You wouldn’t hear that from Casey, though. He’d written a history of the OSS in Europe—a good one—full of Wild Bill Donovan, David Bruce, and the French Resistance, but there had not been much to say about the OSS in Germany, except to relate Allen Dulles’s exploits. In Casey’s words at his Senate confirmation hearing, “Intelligence and counterintelligence capabilities that were brought to bear against the enemy were worth many German divisions.” No one caught him, but if pressed Mr. Casey would no doubt have shifted his ground to explain that he had really been referring to the Ultra codebreakers or the aerial photographers. Assert, then change the subject—that remained Casey’s modus operandi in the 1980s.

After the war, Casey had gone back to his business, the law, capital ventures, and the Research Institute of America. That organization advised on tax shelters. Casey invested himself. Within a few years, he had scored big, selling a start-up microfilm records company to the 3-M Corporation. By 1948 he could buy an estate in Roslyn Harbor, Long Island. Before the 1980 campaign, he tipped the scales as a millionaire. Reagan tapped Casey early enough for the confirmation fracas to blow over. Bill took up the reins a week after the inauguration.

Another part of Bill Casey’s m.o. was encouraging opponents to underestimate him. Director Casey frequently mumbled and spoke unintelligibly. President Reagan turned to aides after one early NSC meeting to ask if anyone had understood anything Bill had said. Casey combined that with seeming to eat his tie. The overseers on Capitol Hill didn’t know what to make of him. Newsweek magazine wrote of Casey’s “chronic inarticulateness.” Wags called him the Mumbler. Senator Barry Goldwater, alternately chairman or senior member of the intelligence committee through the first half of the decade, called him Flappy. Journalist James Conaway in a 1983 profile found a former lawyer colleague who said quite openly, “It’s a tremendous advantage to Casey to have people underestimate him. They hear him mumble and ask, ‘How bright can this man be?’ The next thing they know, Casey’s eating their lunch.”

Mumbling and unintelligibility were indeed unexpected from this gentleman lawyer and author. Besides his OSS history, Casey had written one on the Revolutionary War. His reading of history remained deep, even while ensconced at Langley. Aides and CIA line officers have recounted how the director would run off to Washington or New York bookstores, or ones in London or Paris, even in Cairo while cruising, and purchase armloads of history books. He would then consume them like lightning.

Mr. Casey absorbed what he read, too. In 1984, the CIA op in Nicaragua had gone off course and the sharks were circling. The Nicaraguan government had brought suit against the United States at the International Court of Justice, while the Senate intelligence committee spat fury over the CIA’s failure to notify on its activities in Central America. With all this going on, Diplomatic History published its critique of Allen Dulles’s Bay of Pigs confessions. No one had to tell Bill. It was he who sent full-length photocopies of the journal article to interested friends. Both in general, about the controversies surrounding business interests, and in particular, about those arising from spy work, Bill Casey had been forewarned.

MARCHING AS TO WAR

The Sandinistas were to Ronald Reagan what Fidel had been to the Kennedys. The Nicaraguan revolution brought to power a political movement named for Augusto Sandino, a nationalist and socialist leader from the 1930s. During the Carter years, the Sandinistas had overthrown the Somoza family, the same one that the CIA had worked with in its Guatemala coup and at the Bay of Pigs. President Carter initially had been friendly toward the new government, but propelled by advisers who emphasized the dangers of Russian and Cuban ties in Central America he became more guarded. Sandinista leaders spoke of revolution as an international movement, and indeed a civil war between socialist and right-wing forces raged in neighboring El Salvador. With U.S. aid in the balance, the Nicaraguan government talked of opening to all political tendencies but accepted whatever aid it could get, which amounted to the Cubans and Russians. President Reagan halted all U.S. aid. Bill Casey’s CIA assembled intelligence alleging Nicaraguan arms aid for the socialist rebels in El Salvador.

Reagan relied on Casey. This president made more use of covert operations than anyone since Eisenhower. There were efforts in Angola, Madagascar, Mozambique, Cambodia, Poland, the Soviet Union, and more. Only some stayed secret in the classic way. The Reagan administration innovated the “overt covert operation” for the bigger ones. Far from studied secrecy, Reagan openly lobbied for ostensibly “secret” actions. The CIA’s war in Afghanistan, contrived to put a thorn in Moscow’s side, turned out like Iran and Guatemala in the far gone past. Apparent success evaporated afterward, when the op became the fountainhead for the Islamic extremism that fuels today’s war on terror. But the open-secret war against Nicaragua, controversial at the time, almost destroyed Reagan’s presidency.

The first presidential finding governing a Nicaragua operation came from the White House in March 1981. Wasting no time, Mr. Reagan justified war against Nicaragua as an effort to block shipments of weapons to El Salvador. Funding of $19 million ($54.6 million in 2016) went to create an antigovernment Nicaraguan force. Built around members of Somoza’s former National Guard, the partisans called themselves counterrevolutionaries, or contras. Later other political factions joined, but the name Contra stuck.

Casey brought in Dewey Clarridge when Nestor D. Sanchez, chief of the DO’s Latin America Division, moved over to the Pentagon. Clarridge worked alongside spy chief John Stein until the director made Stein the inspector general. Following service in Southeast Asia, Stein had been in Middle Eastern operations. Later Casey introduced Clair George as DO chief. The Central America task force, initially led by an East Europeanist, went to an officer who had divided his time between European and Middle Eastern assignments. His replacement, Alan K. Fiers, also hailed from the Middle Eastern tribe. Thus top leadership in the Central American secret war had largely been drawn from CIA’s Middle Easterners. This may or may not have had an impact on what happened, but it is suggestive.

Dewey Clarridge threw himself into the work. Using the pseudonym Dewey Maroni, he cruised the front lines and set up strong CIA stations in all the countries surrounding Nicaragua. At home Dewey drove a Ford Bronco with the vanity license plate I’M A CONTRA TOO. In El Salvador, the CIA’s effort focused in-country on the civil war, but elsewhere attention centered on Nicaragua. Dewey had a simple plan: get people into the country and have them kill Cubans.

Casey loved it. Clarridge presented his plan to interagency councils and ultimately the NSC. In November 1981, President Reagan approved it in a decision document.

Clarridge immediately visited Argentina. At first the CIA acted through them, but the Argentines dropped out in 1982 when Washington perched uncomfortably between the sides in the Falklands war. The embattled Latin America baron made his last visit to Buenos Aires that November. Taking the Argentines out of the equation quieted some critics of their “dirty war.” Clarridge felt he was in a two-front war, not just in Nicaragua but in Washington too, and he believed that CIA unilateralism might just improve the Contras. Unlike Jose Rodriguez with his cant about covenants, Clarridge had no illusions: “If the operation blew up or if Congress came down hard on the Agency and the division once again, somebody had to be the scapegoat . . . I could afford to take the fall.”

Despite money and technology, the secret warriors found themselves stymied. The Contras ate money but didn’t accomplish anything. A few partisan bands hiked into Nicaragua and blew up some bridges. Mostly they killed peasants, thousands of them. There were no Cubans to speak of, except for Cuban teachers in Nicaraguan primary schools, so Clarridge’s plan wasn’t going far. This became the pattern. Contra leaders claimed bigger forces, but these didn’t translate into action. By then the CIA had 180 officers on the project, mostly in Honduras and Panama, that many more in El Salvador, plus over a hundred Green Berets and various U.S. military personnel on temporary assignment for “exercises.” Honduras became the central station in the secret war, and the American ambassador there, John Negroponte, its proconsul.

An intelligence committee member, Senator Patrick Leahy, scheduled his own trip to Central America in January 1983. He cleared it with CIA deputy director John N. McMahon, emphasizing that he wanted real info from frontline agency stations. In Honduras Leahy heard a briefing that sounded like conspiring to overthrow the Managua government—going further than permitted by the presidential finding, now embodied in a congressional amendment restricting CIA expenditures. In Panama City, the station chief stonewalled altogether. Leahy sent word back to Washington that he would not budge until he got information.

Dewey, who had been in Panama and left the day before Leahy’s arrival, dashed down from Washington to bail out station chief Jerry Svat, an episode that goes entirely unmentioned in Clarridge’s memoir. Also obscured is the real status of the Contra “army.” The largest faction, the FDN, claimed seven thousand troops in 1983, when their true number was less than a third of that, and fifteen thousand in the spring of 1984, when strength had risen—to about six thousand. The CIA baron is also silent about the Contra numbers game.

Frustration led the CIA to new initiatives. Clarridge enlisted disaffected former Sandinistas to operate from Costa Rica, a southern front. The Miskito Indian minority living along the Atlantic coast joined in too. The baron worked to endow the Contras with rudimentary air assets. An airplane attacked the airport at Managua, Nicaragua’s capital, in September 1983. With the lame luck that characterized this covert op, two U.S. senators arrived at the airport just as Contras bombed it.

The Nicaragua project faced strong headwinds on Capitol Hill. The first $19 million came from agency contingency funds. Congress appropriated $21 million, and then $24 million, but it had slashed that madly, down from an $80 million request. It also passed the Boland Amendment, named for Massachusetts Representative Edward P. Boland, which prohibited the use of funds for the overthrow of the Nicaraguan government. Director Casey agreed to a new presidential finding to bring operations within the stipulated boundaries.

The September 1983 finding, according to top CIA officer Robert Gates, enabled the agency to support Contra efforts but not to conduct paramilitary operations of its own. Casey admitted as much to the National Security Planning Group. With a wink and a nod, the DCI and Clarridge pretended not to be doing any such thing while conspiring to hurt the Sandinistas. Scandals complicated the CIA’s project even more. The promulgation of a fresh presidential finding led to strategy reviews that included two fateful decisions: to close Nicaraguan harbors by mining and attacking them, and to commission a training course and a subsequent instruction manual titled Psychological Operations in Guerrilla Warfare.

Mining harbors amounted to a step-level escalation. To accomplish that required a maritime capability CIA completely lacked. Clarridge thought of Q-boats, heavily armed patrol vessels disguised to look like fishing boats or merchant ships. Instead, U.S. Customs donated a couple of speedy vessels called cigarette boats. These were then armed with Bushmaster machine guns. The CIA acquired a larger vessel as mother ship and to serve as platform for an armed helicopter. The crews for the attack boats, called Piranhas (after the carnivorous fish), and for the mother ship were contract agents called unilaterally controlled Latino assets. Clarridge speaks of sea patrols to stop boats traveling from Nicaragua to El Salvador, but the truth is the basic choices were made above his pay grade—at Reagan’s National Security Planning Group (NSPG) meetings in the spring of 1983.

The Clarridge memoir is again misleading here. The idea of mining had actually been mentioned at the NSC, in the very dawn of the Nicaragua program, as early as 1981, in the same meetings that led to Reagan’s first directive. It had been brought back to the White House in May and December 1983 for the decisions to create the naval force and then to use it.

Clarridge’s version in his memoir is that he thought up the mining over gin and a cigar at home, one evening late in January 1984. That should not be believed. Langley had already begun marching deeper into the Big Muddy.

Director Casey explicitly told the National Security Planning Group at the time of the September finding that it prohibited unilateral U.S. activity, yet the maritime attacks relied on this. The first harbor attacks took place in October. The first mine exploded under a ship on January 3, 1984. Two days later, Contra official Edgar Chamorro would be awakened in the night and handed a “press release.” In it, the Contras were to claim credit for the CIA attacks against ports and coastal targets. More strikes followed. Mines damaged a dozen merchant ships belonging to six nations. There were Q-boat raids on ports on both the Pacific and Atlantic sides of Nicaragua; the CIA mother ship transited the Panama Canal to switch coasts. One port, struck half a dozen times, left the Nicaraguan government in no doubt as to its adversary. In at least one raid, the CIA operational commander Rudy Enders personally flew in the helicopter gunship supporting the Piranhas.

On January 12, 1984, Bill Casey informed Congress that he intended to empty the CIA’s Contra program accounts, suggesting large-scale procurement. Langley’s obfuscations started when the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, intrigued by Bill Casey’s intent of draining the Contra aid fund, asked for a briefing. Clair George, still the CIA’s congressional liaison a few months before his elevation to deputy director for operations, tried for a postponement. The committee insisted. Director Casey then phoned chairman Senator Barry Goldwater (R-AZ) and got the date pushed back to March.

Meanwhile, CIA witnesses and briefers kept to their Contra-attacks cover story. By March the harbor attacks and mining were front-page news. But when Casey appeared at the SSCI on March 8, he focused on a new agency budget request for another $21 million. Clair George and Dewey Clarridge spent half an hour that morning prepping Casey for his appearance, and both ducked in later with last-minute details. Clarridge would be the last person to see the director before Casey left for Capitol Hill. Langley later claimed that the committee was fully briefed at this session. In fact, Casey referred to the mining in one sentence—twenty-seven words in an eighty-four-page text. That sentence presented the cover story: mines placed by Contras.

Next, the DCI attempted to bypass the Goldwater panel completely, appealing to the Senate Appropriations Committee for a direct grant. The chairman had been a friend to the agency and might have agreed, but his vice chair insisted on enforcing the Senate rule that whatever committee had substantive jurisdiction had to approve money requests. Senator Goldwater became enraged when he learned that Director Casey had tried an end run.

More holes opened in Langley’s wall of silence. The CIA chieftain went to the House intelligence committee on March 27 to request the new money. Members there pressed him on who was controlling the maritime attacks. Casey admitted, “We are.”

A few days later, an SSCI staffer, veteran of a decade as a DO officer, saw a letter in which Casey used the term “unilaterally controlled Latino assets” and instantly realized that the CIA had sunk up to its ears in this operation. Mention of “firecrackers” clearly referred to mines, and Rob Simmons, the staffer, knew a mine packed with plastic explosive had far more power than a holiday noisemaker. “The CIA was directly involved in the mining,” he angrily told Goldwater. “Casey withheld the information from us. The President personally gave the go- ahead . . . in the fall of 1983.” Chairman Goldwater’s anger came through in the letter he sent the director on April 9, saying, “I am pissed off!” and “This is no way to run a railroad!” At Casey’s Capitol Hill appearance the next day, congressional overseers were frustrated and the CIA director truculent. Goldwater had to be dissuaded from dumping CIA secrets in a Senate floor speech. After a closed-door debate, the Senate passed a resolution rejecting the mining by 84 to 12, and the chairman issued a statement insisting that the committee had been deliberately misled.

Instead of contrition, Langley offered defiance. Casey denounced the complaint in a newsletter to employees, asserting that the CIA had met both the letter and spirit of the law. Spooks went to the New York Times to claim that Goldwater must have forgotten the briefings or that he was too old (a fateful accusation in Ronald Reagan’s time). Casey went so far as to ask the committee’s vice chairman, New York Democrat Daniel Patrick Moynihan, what the problem was with Goldwater.

Langley officers also averred that the delay of the January briefing to the SSCI had been at the committee’s behest. White House officials told cadets at Annapolis that every detail of the mining had been shared. Rob Simmons observed that the spooks’ behavior “can only be described as a domestic disinformation campaign against the U.S. Congress.” Senator Moynihan announced on April 15 that he would resign: “This appears to me the most emphatic way I can express my view the Senate committee was not properly briefed.” Notification, Moynihan insisted, had not been full, current, or prior, all of which were required by the Intelligence Oversight Act of 1980.

Moynihan made his promise on a weekend, in fact on a Sunday morning talk show. Bill Casey, as he often did, had gone home to New York. Moynihan’s action brought the developing crisis to a head. Staffer Simmons insisted that the CIA, not the intelligence committee, had sought to delay its briefing—twice, in fact. The Monday at Langley proved frantic as a succession of officials marched through Casey’s office in an effort to quiet the flap. The spy boss met agency lawyer Stanley Sporkin first thing. There was no way to wiggle off the notification hook. Section 413 of the act required the committee be “fully and currently informed of all intelligence activities which are the responsibility of, are engaged in by, or are carried out for or on behalf of the United States.” That included “significant anticipated” actions by the CIA plus all other branches of government. The congressional committees should have been told of the CIA mother ship, Piranha boats, and attack helicopter months earlier. When CIA personnel planned and participated in the attacks, the committee ought to have been informed of that, too.

No chance the Hill-ites were going to get that, at least not from the Casey-era CIA. Dewey Clarridge expressed contempt—for Moynihan specifically and the oversight committees in general. At one briefing, Clarridge draped his leg over an adjacent chair when Moynihan arrived late. The CIA man’s casual air offended the senator, who said something. Other CIAers sat aghast. On their way back to Langley, the baron quipped, “Moynihan was probably drunk.”

Another time, using a pointer to emphasize items on posters, Clarridge set up the easel in the senators’ faces and slapped the pointer hard each time he waved it, making the overseers cringe. The spook tickled his colleagues by saying, “It felt good.” If Langley wanted war with Capitol Hill, it could have begun over Nicaragua, long before the CIA torture.

Casey huddled with John McMahon, his deputy, and with Clarridge and George. Spokesman George Lauder tried to thread the waves. He was in Mr. Casey’s office five times that day. Lauder cobbled together an official statement declaring that the CIA had been fully responsive. Citing promises made at Casey’s confirmation hearing, Lauder asserted that the director or his deputy had met Congress on Nicaragua thirty times since 1981, with other staff responding to nearly two dozen requests in just the past six months. About briefings on mining, the statement asserted that Congress had been told eleven times. There was nothing about delays. When pressed and given the particulars of Rob Simmons’s account, Lauder checked. He called back to admit that the Senate’s version was exactly correct.

Widespread leaks sprung, and they revealed yet more CIA shortcuts. These disclosed creation of the maritime force, the nature of the mines, and the fact that agency officers had helped plan the project and had participated in attacks. Langley’s extravagant denials disintegrated. Casey spent hours on April 24 and 26 traipsing between offices, making private apologies to SSCI members. On the twenty-seventh, at an open hearing, Casey added his act of public contrition. Senator Goldwater convinced Moynihan to stay and withdraw his pledge to resign. An official CIA history of the agency and the Hill concedes that Director Casey’s apology had been “grudging.”

A few years later, under oath at the Iran-Contra hearings, former national security adviser Robert McFarlane admitted that Congress had not, in fact, been informed of the mining, as required by law.

Dewey Clarridge insists that the distinction between Contra mining and CIA mining is specious. The mining was consistent with a finding, Clarridge argues, so additional notice of it was absurd. He does not explain how this would be, if the September 1983 presidential finding prohibited CIA participation in paramilitary action, as its declassified scope paper specifies. Moreover, Clarridge insists, Congress was informed. He picks up the same number George Lauder had used (eleven times). Breaking that down, two mentions had been given to individuals who’d asked the right questions, four were part of the original deception, two concerned the budget end run, and several more were Casey’s after-the-fact explanations.

Laying mines is an act of war under the 1856 Treaty of Paris and the Hague Conventions of 1899 and 1907. The CIA went beyond flagrant violation. Its mines obstructed freedom of the seas and specifically targeted merchant (civilian) ships—two more breaches of international law. Worse, the CIA issued no danger notices to mariners, also required under law, even when the mines began exploding (the Contras were supposedly laying them). Most absurd is the position that a direct CIA action that had both domestic and international legal implications required no special mention to overseers (and in Dewey’s version, in which he dreams up the campaign of mines and Piranha attack boats, no approval from higher authority). For the Contras’ creators, legality amounted to no more than an annoying side issue.

Clarridge maintains that another month of mining would have driven Managua to the negotiating table. The assertion is disturbingly reminiscent of U.S. officials’ claims about the bombing of North Vietnam during the Southeast Asian war.

Of course, in his memoir, the CIA baron was responding to prosecutor Walsh in a place and by means of his own choosing. But his account also betrays his attitude at the time—and no one had Mr. Casey’s ear on the Contras more than he. Director Casey’s schedules show that Dewey cast a giant shadow. He saw the director, in the latter’s office, almost every day. Charles Cogan and Bert Dunn, fellow barons who ran the Near East Division and the Afghan war, hardly ever sat with Casey one-on-one. Afghanistan remained in the hands of DDO John Stein and his deputy Ed Juchniewicz. Stein mostly kept his hands off Nicaragua. Perhaps he knew something Dewey did not. The baron’s private time with Director Casey—just in the first quarter of 1984—came to over nine hours. Clarridge also accompanied Casey to a couple of dozen larger meetings and brought key figures to see “the boss,” including John D. Negroponte, proconsul of the secret war, and General Paul Gorman, commander in chief of the U.S. Southern Command. Clarridge reinforced Casey’s aversion to congressional oversight.

Apparently more sensitive than Casey or Clarridge to Capitol Hill tides, the White House demanded a fix. That meant specifying more detailed reporting requirements to Congress. After the mining of Nicaragua, the CIA agreed to furnish prior notice for actions beyond a finding’s limits, for anything requiring presidential or NSC approval, and for any plans about which oversight committees expressed interest. The so-called Casey Accords were committed to paper in January 1985. President Reagan then issued a directive recognizing the arrangement, affirming that all covert operations were to be authorized by finding and periodically reviewed. Langley would be in control unless Mr. Reagan decreed otherwise. But actions already under way completely trampled these new rules.

BILL CASEY’S ENTERPRISE

The travesty of the mining, especially in an overt covert operation, ought to have led to disintegration of the Contra project. For a moment, it seemed that it would. Only Dewey Clarridge paid a price. Clearly he could not remain the baron for Latin America. Casey suspended him between the DO’s European Division and the agency’s newly forming Counterterrorist Center. Then, just as the Nicaragua project budget came up for a vote, the press revealed a CIA manual covering assassinations and psychological operations.

More controversy. The field manual had been crafted by a CIA contract officer under the pseudonym John Kirkpatrick. Ostensibly produced to inculcate standards of human rights and prevent new Contra atrocities, the manual actually advocated deliberate terrorism, the creation of “martyrs” (even arranging deaths of Contra fighters if necessary), and such selective violence as the assassination of Sandinista leaders. In it, “neutralization” and murder were equated. About a dozen CIA officers had reviewed the draft; none objected. When a couple thousand bound copies reached the office of Contra politico Edgar Chamorro, he had them locked away and assigned young recruits to razor out the offensive pages and substitute more innocuous material.

Psychological Operations in Guerrilla Warfare represented a time bomb primed to explode. Its exposure brought renewed investigations. These showed that Casey and top minions had never approved the text, suggesting that, at best, they had been asleep at the switch. The Congress not only refused the extra money; it defunded the Nicaragua account. So as to send a crystal-clear message, Congress that October passed an even more restrictive version of the Boland Amendment. The staff lawyer at the DO, John Rizzo, watched Casey react and thought the director “had taken the action as a personal repudiation.” Under the new Boland prohibition, both the CIA and the Pentagon were prohibited from spending money for direct or indirect support of military action in Nicaragua by any government, agency, movement, group, or individual.

The spy chieftain had anticipated this. In March, at the height of the mining fracas, Casey sent a paper to the White House warning of an imminent funding crisis and recommending exploration of foreign alternatives. At the time, Casey thought of the Israelis. Robert McFarlane of the NSC soon met with Saudi ambassador Prince Bandar. Riyadh responded with a flourish. Promising $1 million a month, the Saudis made eight deposits before the Reaganites took the game further. This covert aid came on top of matching funds the Saudis were already putting into the CIA’s operation in Afghanistan, so Reagan owed them quite a debt.

President Reagan crossed the Rubicon when he gathered his National Security Planning Group at the White House on June 25, 1984. Officials were brainstorming ways to keep the Contras in the field in the face of the Boland prohibition. Director Casey suddenly construed the September 1983 presidential finding as encouraging third-country support. Presidential aide James Baker warned that obtaining third-country money would be an impeachable offense, but Vice President George H.W. Bush speculated that doing this was reasonable and no one should object. Others, too, talked around Baker. Ronald Reagan had the last word on soliciting Contra funding: “If such a story gets out, we’ll all be hanging by our thumbs in front of the White House.”

Mr. Reagan really worried about leaks, but his meditation described exactly what did happen. Casey had already sent Clarridge to solicit South Africa. The Pentagon, on the CIA’s behalf, asked Israel to donate captured Soviet-type weapons. McFarlane had solicited the Saudis. The line had been crossed. More followed. When the Saudi king came to Washington in the spring of 1985, President Reagan entertained him, and McFarlane subsequently made a money pitch. The Saudis increased donations substantially. The Reaganites got money from Taiwan, South Korea, Brunei, and private citizens. Israel and South Korea gave weapons. South Africa leased aircraft. The Contras made their first arms deal in late 1984.

In a burst of misguided creativity, William J. Casey created a private, off-the-shelf covert operation. To evade prohibitions, which he woodenly supposed applied only to the CIA, Casey ran the op out of the White House, using the NSC staff. Marine Lieutenant Colonel Oliver North, assigned by McFarlane, became Casey’s primary operative. Reagan’s administration had been bedeviled by events in the Middle East. In Lebanon, the barracks of the Marines in the multinational force were truck-bombed after the embassy. Then CIA station chief William Buckley and a succession of other Americans were kidnapped by fundamentalists controlled by Iran. To this day, it is unclear where the idea of intertwining Iran with Nicaragua came from, but by 1985 Director Casey had begun tapping CIA analysts for reports suggesting the desirability of an opening to Tehran. This effort turned into a project to sell weapons to Iran, primarily antitank and antiaircraft missiles, with the understanding that Tehran would instruct Hezbollah to free the Western hostages. Using the weapons-sale money to fund the Contras completed the circle.

This arrangement became the Iran-Contra Affair. Several points are important. First, this represented official United States business, not Mr. Casey’s private scheme. The arms sold were American weapons, taken from U.S. stocks or forwarded by Israel from American-furnished inventories and then replenished by the Pentagon. In November 1985, Israel sent a plane to deliver the weapons but couldn’t obtain landing permits. At that point, the CIA substituted a proprietary aircraft. Dewey Clarridge, now the agency’s counterterrorism chief, stepped in to arrange transit and landing rights in Portugal. (Clarridge disputes the nature of his activity here, along with the charge that he perjured himself in accounting for it.) Deputy director John N. McMahon demanded that a presidential finding be created to authorize this action, which had already occurred. Because the finding was retroactive, it was especially sensitive. Never returned to the CIA or briefed to Congress, White House officials destroyed the finding when Iran-Contra exploded.

In broad outline, U.S. allies donated or were induced to give money to Nicaraguan rebels, while U.S. weapons were diverted to sell to Iran for the ostensible purpose of obtaining freedom for American hostages in Lebanon. Monies from these transactions were also given to the Contras, who used these and other funds to buy guns. Several Contra factions dealt in drugs for some of that cash, as later agency investigations confirmed. Casey’s vest-pocket covert operations unit set up a proprietary arms network with CIA assistance, and those “private benefactors” not only carried the arms to Iran, but also sold some to the Contras, shuttled Contra supplies around Central America, and parachuted them into Nicaragua. Meanwhile, pro-Iranian militants in Lebanon seized more hostages for ransom.

The CIA provided proprietary aircraft for these functions, excepting the actual airdrops (although in March 1986 Southern Air Transport flew at least one in-country mission). Langley also furnished bank accounts in which Contra funds were deposited, good offices in Honduras, Costa Rica, and El Salvador, packets of intelligence for Contra operations, encryption devices and sophisticated communications equipment for the private benefactors, and full intel backing for the Iran side of the project. The Pentagon declared surplus some of its antitank and antiaircraft missiles, so as to give to Israel or sell to Iran, and also gave the CIA powerful machine guns for its Piranha boats.

Wink-and-nod tactics were very much in evidence. On October 1, 1984, Langley sent a cable to area CIA stations. All were to cease any actions that could be construed as providing any kind of support to the Contras. Seventy-three operatives were recalled. Analysts predicted declining Contra capabilities anyway, and certainly the rebel field forces had little to show. Efforts to energize the rebels, in particular by creating a southern front, were very much a Langley concern. Top floor, as field officers knew the high command of the secret war, wanted victory.

Alan Fiers, the new Central America task force chief, had been set to take on the Afghan project until Casey pulled him off. Fiers knew nothing about Latin America—“I didn’t even know that British Honduras had become Belize.” Clair George, who had been handling congressional relations when Casey switched him over to lead the DO, like Fiers, came from the Near East Division. Al Wedemeyer, Clarridge’s successor, at least had a background on Latin America. Jerry Gruner, another Latin Americanist, soon replaced him.

Bits and pieces of the private benefactor activity started to reach the public, including the fact that Oliver North had been cooperating with the CIA to help the Contras. The Boland Amendment restrictions applied to “all agencies” of the federal government, including the NSC. One Saturday, George called in Fiers and Wedemeyer and took them to Casey’s office, where they found Ollie North sitting next to the director. Through Wedemeyer, Fiers had reported discovering North active in Central America. Now, in front of both of them, Casey asked North if it were true. North denied it. In high dudgeon, the CIA director then told the NSC staffer, “I don’t want you operating in Central America. You understand that?”

When the meeting broke up and they were safely away, Clair George, who had a reputation for wisecracking, turned to Fiers. In the hallway, he explained that they had just seen a show staged for their benefit: “Sometime in the dark of night, Bill Casey has said, I will take care of Central America, just leave it to me.” They had witnessed a charade.

“Jesus Christ, Clair!” Fiers exclaimed. “If that’s true, then this will be worse than Watergate!”

While the CIA mining did not survive its revelation, the Iran-Contra project went on for more than two years, unraveling in spectacular fashion in October–November 1986. First, on October 5 a private benefactor transport crashed inside Nicaragua, downed by a government antiaircraft missile. Everything about the incident smelled of CIA. The plane, a Lockheed C123K, was of a type favored by the agency proprietary Air America. The pilot and copilot, dead in the crash, had flown for Air America in Laos. The pilot’s personal logbook, captured by the Sandinistas, confirmed his CIA links. The plane’s loadmaster, Eugene Hasenfus, survived, and he told the Nicaraguan government the plane belonged to the CIA. The aircraft, tail number N4410F, had actually been used by the United States in a drug-entrapment scheme against the Sandinistas. Once journalists traced the aircraft to the private benefactors, its co-owner turned out to be Richard Secord, a U.S. Air Force general who had worked with the CIA in Laos. Felix Rodriguez, in El Salvador as a facilitator for the benefactors, happened to be a former CIA contract officer who launched at the Bay of Pigs, worked in Bolivia against Che Guevara, and deployed in Vietnam, too.

Congress sought explanations. Nothing had been briefed to the intelligence oversight committees as having gone beyond the September 1983 finding. Clair George and Alan Fiers told SSCI that they knew nothing. Robert Gates, who had succeeded John McMahon as deputy director for central intelligence, seconded their denials. George went so far as to say that he knew only what he had read in the newspapers. Wrong answer. Both George and Fiers were eventually prosecuted for perjury. Bob Gates lost a promotion to CIA top dog.

Congressional overseers started probing the extent of CIA activity with the Contras, to Langley’s intense discomfort. A few weeks later, the Lebanese newspaper Al-Shiraa (The Sail) reported that the United States had been supplying weapons to Iran, trading them for hostages, and that Reagan’s former national security adviser Robert McFarlane had been in Tehran to make that deal. The speaker of the Iranian parliament confirmed the account, evidently leaked by the Syrian foreign ministry after Iranian operatives roughed up one of its diplomats. The New York Times picked up the report, which contained the irresistible detail that McFarlane had brought a cake baked in the shape of a key, plus a Bible inscribed by President Reagan.

As Al-Shiraa printed the weapons-for-hostages story, American David Jacobsen was released in Beirut. The Reagan NSC had thought all three Americans being held by militants were to be liberated, not just Jacobsen. Oliver North held center stage. On the surface, White House officials insisted that an arms embargo against Iran remained in effect. Reagan denied the Al-Shiraa report, claiming that discussion of these machinations made it harder to free hostages. But the cover-story bucket sprang leaks everywhere. Israeli media reported that Tel Aviv had helped the U.S. by sending military spare parts to Iran in exchange for hostages. American sources added that Washington sent spare parts too. Next, officials admitted the truth of McFarlane’s oddball cake-to-Iran overture.

By November 8, 1986, silence had become untenable, and Director Casey privately briefed top senators of the intelligence committee on the Iran project while still holding out on the Contra side. Similarly, when SSCI staff went to Langley to hear a presentation regarding the Iran arms deliveries, the facts of the abortive Israeli shipment a year earlier and the consequent retroactive finding were hidden from them. When they asked to see NSA intercepts, these were denied. The project, supposedly, was too secret. That month’s issue of Reader’s Digest had an article, “Congress Is Crippling the CIA,” by Rowland Evans and Robert Novak, who attributed agency failures to congressional oversight. The senators were certain that Bill Casey had been a source.

Capitol Hill committees decided to investigate the breaches of covert operations restrictions while officials conceded that the United States had actually engineered the arms transfers. President Reagan personally admitted U.S. participation when he met congressional leaders on November 12. In a nationally televised address the next day, Mr. Reagan insisted the weapons were defensive, supplied only in small quantities, and would have fit in a single airplane.

In a meeting at the White House on November 10, Secretary of State George Shultz first learned that a January 1986 finding had approved arms transfers to Iran. Reagan held a press conference to insist that no laws had been or would be broken. His pledge was deceptive on its face, because any deliveries to embargoed Iran required notification to Congress under the Arms Control Export Act. That had not been given. Congress had been denied the opportunity to reject proposed deliveries. Lawmakers had also been kept ignorant of multiple presidential findings, breaking the very promises Reagan had made after the Nicaragua mining controversy.

Beginning with the Al-Shiraa disclosures, NSC staff, anticipating having to mount a goal-line defense of White House actions, started compiling chronologies of this exploit. The “chrons” were designed to mislead and conceal. CIA people were dragged in to the drafting. But James McCullough, who directed Casey’s executive staff, remembers the Iran operation as barely intruding into the director’s suite. Because the op had been so tightly held, Casey, Robert Gates, Clair George, and a few others had dealt directly with the White House.

The unraveling began with Iran. A businessman friend of Casey’s, Roy Furmark, came to warn him that individuals who had provided short-term money to cover cash transfers in the arms deals, and had not been repaid, were about to blow the whistle. In a series of eyebrow-raising encounters, Casey’s suite suddenly rang with exclamations. Something would have to be said. Even to someone as close to Casey as McCullough, however, the moment the director ordered key people to contribute to the false chrons is obscure. Instead Mr. Casey left for a weeklong cruise to Central America. He remained there when the Senate and House oversight committees scheduled a hearing on the Iran initiative for Friday, November 21.

While Casey was traveling, Bob Gates had a couple of DO officers draft testimony the DCI would use to tell the story for Congress. Gates advised Casey that he should return to prepare for his appearance. On the morning of November 18, Clair George held a session for oversight committee staff in which he ran down a list of actions taken under the January 1986 presidential finding, of which Congress had just been informed. Jim McCullough attended. He found the Hill people irritated they had been excluded. Then DDO George swung into his litany.

“We were transfixed,” McCullough wrote. “No one in the room except Clair and his staff officers had ever heard any of this before.”

David Gries, Clair’s successor as Hill liaison, proved as ignorant as the rest. More than one of the committee people warned McCullough that Casey could expect a tough grilling on the CIA’s violation of agreed notification procedures.

In the hallway, George’s assistants stunned McCullough. They told him the DDO had failed to mention the November 1985 arms shipment. No doubt Clair had kept silent because that shipment had been carried out without any finding at all. Equally bad, the reincarnated Dewey Clarridge had arranged for that shipment to transit Portugal. Barely out of the starting gate, and against Gates’s instructions, DDO George had put the CIA in the position of holding back on events at the heart of the very matter that angered the overseers.

To make things worse, Ollie North’s doctoring of the NSC chronology represented the November 1985 shipment as a full-on CIA op. Langley staff fought North on that. But in chrons compiled over at the White House, North repeatedly made changes, both excisions and inserts, designed to show that the NSC had had nothing to do with arms trading. North’s efforts notwithstanding, the heat on the president had grown so fierce that on November 19 Mr. Reagan admitted that the United States had broken its own embargo to ship arms to Iran, and—after denials at that press conference of things already established—the NSC and State admitted that a third country had been involved. The next day, taking advice from Attorney General Ed Meese, President Reagan approved a Department of Justice (DOJ) investigation of the particulars.

Director Casey returned on the day of Reagan’s news conference. An early draft of testimony had been hand-carried to him in Central America and he had failed, both on paper and by tape recorder, to articulate thoughts for a rewrite. Now Casey came to work at 8:45 a.m. of November 20. Deputy Robert Gates spent most of the day with him, either alone or with others. The director’s first meeting included both Clair George and Dewey Clarridge. After lunching with Gates, Casey spent several hours at the White House, ending with Ollie North. Returning to Langley, Casey amended his proposed testimony to drop a direct acknowledgment that the NSC staff had asked the CIA for an airplane back in 1985. Now, he simply noted receipt of an “outside request.”

Mr. Casey met with officers who had worked the Iran deals. Their conversation went in circles. Many in the room had no idea what they were talking about. The agency’s comptroller first learned of money sent to the Contras while working on this testimony. Gates tried to lead a line-byline shakedown of the text, but there were too many interruptions. People spoke out of turn. Staff chief McCullough and agency lawyer Rizzo agreed the director seemed exhausted, uninterested in what would clearly be a crucial event. The “murder board,” convened to prepare Casey for his testimony in Congress, basically disintegrated. Both Casey and Gates went home, leaving Jim McCullough to finalize the statement, now being sought all around town. Casey deleted a sentence that referred to antiaircraft missiles. This version became the testimony he delivered.

Director Casey appeared before the oversight committees, starting with the House, on the morning of Friday, November 21. His description of the Iran initiative attributed the idea to Israel, saying that Tel Aviv offered channels for Americans to reach alleged Iranian moderates, who wanted weapons as a token of earnestness. CIA participation, according to Casey, began when someone asked Langley to recommend a reliable airline for bulk cargo. Clarridge’s extended maneuvers to obtain right of passage through Portugal and the aircrews’ talking their way past transit and flight clearances in several countries were passed off with obscure anodyne references. Casey said nothing about the NSC covert operation, his role in it, the CIA activities unauthorized by finding, the retroactive finding, or the one withdrawn in early January 1986. In connection with the (later) finding of January 17, 1986, which ordered that Congress be kept in the dark, the spy chief asserted that the president “does have the authority to withhold prior notice of operations.”

Casey went on to fuss about CIA lawyers, “extraordinary circumstances,” and the legislative history of the Intelligence Oversight Act of 1980—which had confirmed the statutory requirement for covert operations to be authorized by presidential finding—as permitting Langley to refuse prior notice. House intelligence committee chairman Lee Hamilton instantly engaged on the notification issue.

“The Congress so far as I know, and certainly this committee, has not recognized a constitutional basis for the President to withhold information,” Hamilton declared. “Such an interpretation of the statute very severely undermines the oversight role of the intelligence committees.”

The Iran operation as Casey explained it—at that moment yet to be connected to Contra activities—had been a long-term policy initiative in no way meeting the secrecy and urgency criteria claimed to justify blackout. In any case, Hamilton said, Congress understood that even under secret and urgent conditions, the CIA and government were obliged at a minimum to inform the Gang of Eight—the senior leaders of the intelligence committees of the House and Senate. Both the post-mining compromise and the national security directive President Reagan issued in January 1985 affirmed this requirement. “If the President were free to make some arbitrary determination of his own in each case,” Hamilton went on, “then the statute is meaningless.”

Director Casey yielded no ground, invoking the legal opinion of the CIA general counsel (“a consistent view between the successor general counsels and the successor directors”) and the precedent of President Carter’s Iran hostage rescue operation, of which Congress had also not been informed. Member after member came back to focus Mr. Casey on notification. The only possible conclusion is that the CIA’s interpretation of the notification requirements was rejected by the overseers, Republicans as well as Democrats.

Later that day, a colleague confided in McCullough. He worried about what would happen when it became known that Ollie North had given Iranian weapons-sales money to the Contras. Meanwhile a State Department counselor who had seen Casey’s draft presentation and smelled a CIA cover-up expressed his concern to DOJ officials. Justice investigators were already searching NSC records. They found discrepancies in the White House chronologies, which led to digging deeper, revealing a memo about diverting cash to the Contras. That disclosure occurred during the weekend, after Casey’s testimony. Like Clair George, the CIA director had already gone on record with a false narrative, repeated in both House and Senate.

Over the weekend, and while Justice sleuths were plowing through NSC papers, top intelligence community officials convened for a periodic management conference at an off-campus center in Airlie, Virginia. Casey’s talking points included claiming that the different agencies had worked together well during Reagan’s administration. His point that there had been no scandals must have stunned officials. Nicaragua had been one scandal after another, and there had been controversies over Angola, Mauritania, Afghanistan, estimates of Soviet military spending, alleged Soviet directed-energy weapons, and more. Just before this event, the DCI had met with a Justice Department investigator. What truly boggled the mind was Casey’s declaration that the Iran affair was over, thanks to his November 21 testimony.

Storm clouds gathered quickly. The first notorious “diversion memo” had now been discovered. Attorney General Edwin Meese heard at lunch that Saturday. Charles Cooper, the DOJ official who saw Casey Sunday morning, had been there. Director Casey, rather than preparing defenses, defiantly shook his fists.

He phoned Ed Meese and tried to deflect suspicion onto middlemen in the arms sales. First thing Monday, Casey wrote a letter to President Reagan demanding that he fire George Shultz, the secretary of state, with whom the CIA boss feuded. When Jim McCullough saw the letter, he tried to stop it, only to discover the missive had already been sent. That afternoon White House chief of staff Don Regan came to Langley and closeted himself with Casey for fifteen minutes. The DCI left shortly afterward for a reception at the Heritage Foundation. McCullough thought the director looked pale and seemed distracted. The next day the staff chief realized why—Regan must have come to Langley to tell Casey the jig was up on Iran-Contra.

Bill Casey enjoyed one last night of fun. That evening he went to Washington’s Metropolitan Club for dinner with Edward Hymoff, a fellow OSS veteran and the author of a highly regarded history of the cloak-anddagger agency.

Beginning on Tuesday, November 25, strong blows fell, hard at first but with increasing weight and quickening pace. On Tuesday President Reagan announced that a diversion of proceeds from Iran sales had benefited the Contras. Reagan insisted he had not been fully informed and had not approved any diversion. He introduced Ed Meese, who delivered the rest: a diversion of $10 million to $30 million ($21 to $63 million in 2016). National security adviser John Poindexter resigned; Oliver North was fired. Next day the president empaneled a commission under former senator John Tower to investigate the scandal. Intense media scrutiny produced a continuing stream of revelations, adding to the political firestorm.

In mid-December the Senate, followed by the House of Representatives, created special committees to investigate the Iran-Contra Affair. A few days later, a former federal judge, Lawrence E. Walsh, was appointed special prosecutor to establish whether criminal activity was involved. The investigations and legal prosecutions that flowed from these covert operations continued through the remainder of Ronald Reagan’s presidency and all of George H.W. Bush’s. Pundits cracked that the officials called to testify suffered from the widest epidemic of mass amnesia in U.S. history. That proved especially true of CIA people. Investigations would have gone on longer except that, in his very last days, Bush pardoned the officials in prison or in criminal jeopardy, including Dewey Clarridge and Clair George.

By then William J. Casey was no more. The day of Meese’s soon infamous Iran-Contra news conference, Director Casey called in some senior people. One of them, Jack Devine, ran the DO task force conducting the Afghan secret war. Casey wanted opinions. “Boys,” Devine recalls Casey asking, “this will blow over in a few days, right?” Devine thought that proposition ridiculous, but the querulous tone represented a step back from the erratic exuberance of Airlie. James McCullough saw Casey as exhausted and uncharacteristically passive. John Rizzo, now with the congressional liaison office, felt Casey looked older and seemed unfocused. Bob Gates had seen him falling over or bumping into things.

Meanwhile, the CIA’s problem had escalated. Eugene Hasenfus, Air America, and Laos were birds of a feather. The private benefactors of the Contras were the same people as the arms dealers to Tehran. Rather than explain a blackout of Congress on a controversial arms-for- hostages initiative that involved relatively small CIA involvement, now the agency had to show it was not behind an operation that supported rebels dear to Reagan’s and Casey’s hearts, utilizing classic CIA methods (plus former and even current agency personnel), situated in a region the agency had wired, and in a country where it had started a secret war. Adding another layer, the senior officers directly responsible (Clair George and Alan Fiers, plus Casey) had given Congress false testimony in their strenuous denials of knowing anything about the Contra resupply apparatus.

Bob Gates, in retrospect, thinks the evidence supports the view that the spy chief had not sponsored the diversion, even though he concedes that Casey stoood behind the push to solicit third-country funds, and also (separately) undertook to support an Iran mission, due to his guilt that Langley could not directly accomplish release of the hostages.

By the first week of December, Casey’s executive staff focused on new testimony. Naturally, the overseers had now scheduled multiple hearings and were loaded for bear. Casey fell out of his usual routine of days packed with his spooks consulting on one venture or another. At the first of the new hearings, with the House Appropriations Committee on December 8, the DCI repeatedly deferred to aides for answers, rather than pushing ahead himself. With the House Foreign Affairs Committee, Casey had his aides right with him at the witness table. Then the director punted for the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, arranging a conflicting engagement that left only staffers to answer questions after his brief opening statement. By the Friday, Mr. Casey had declined so far that he was barely coherent when interviewed by Time magazine.

The ax of doom hung over headquarters that weekend. The Senate Select Committee on Intelligence (SSCI) had scheduled its hearing for Tuesday, December 16. Jim McCullough got an upbeat telephone call from the director Saturday night, but Monday morning he saw a pale, gaunt Casey, late for work and unusually dressed. Deputy director Gates found Casey had a cut on his forehead and walked unsteadily, putting hand over hand to move along furniture. Security told Gates the director had done that over the weekend. The agency’s medical director, Arvil Tharp, came to monitor the DCI’s blood pressure because Casey’s personal doctor had changed his medication over the weekend. McCullough handed Director Casey the Time magazine he had interviewed for, plus a copy of his Senate committee opening statement, which included a politic mea culpa with which the DCI could appease the senators.

“Jim, I’ll look at it,” Casey rasped. “But I’ll tell you right now I’m not apologizing to Congress.”

Minutes later Director Casey had a seizure. McCullough ran into Gates’s office and they summoned emergency services, which took Bill Casey to Georgetown University Hospital. Tests showed a brain tumor. Surgery took place on December 18. Within a month it had become clear that William J. Casey could not resume his post. Mrs. Casey summoned Bob Gates on January 28. The director resigned the next day. The following morning, President Reagan appointed Robert Gates the next director of central intelligence. Bill Casey passed away on May 6.

In the meantime, in its examination of Mr. Casey’s November testimony, issued the day he resigned, the Senate intelligence committee determined that he had given false testimony. A draft report predictably accused the CIA of violating the Intelligence Oversight Act. In their legal defenses, Oliver North, John Poindexter, and the private benefactors all fingered Bill Casey as their leader and inspiration, undoubtedly an exaggeration, though we cannot establish by how much. What is demonstrable is Langley’s aversion to congressional oversight, as well as the clear damage that that arrogance inflicted on U.S. national security and the agency itself.

One of the last public functions Director Casey attended, little more than a week before his seizure, had been a memorial dinner in Philadelphia for Robert C. Ames, a Casey favorite and a brilliant intelligence officer. The new headquarters wing at Langley, named for Ames, would be completed in 1987. Bill would not be there to see it.

Casey’s may be the real ghost of Langley. For the most part, the others are men and women who see their careers explode in one excess or another. Dewey Clarridge left a ghost of that sort.

Casey had blown into Langley as the fresh wind going to invigorate CIA operations. He left the agency condemned to five years spent trying to prove that it had not become a criminal enterprise. Obstruction of justice, perjured testimony, illegal operations—that’s the same menu as the subsequent war on terror.

Alan Fiers, senior operations officer, copped a plea. Joseph Fernandez, chief of station in Costa Rica, reprimanded for the Contra psychological warfare manual, then fired, would be indicted on four counts in the Commonwealth of Virginia, but the case was thrown out because it couldn’t be prosecuted without revealing classified information. Declared guilty on four felony counts of filing false income taxes, Thomas G. Clines, former DO officer and active among the arms traders, went to prison. Clair E. George, CIA deputy director for operations, indicted on ten counts of perjury and obstruction, had a mistrial. A second trial on lesser charges led to conviction in December 1992, but he received a pardon before sentencing. Donald H. Winters and John Mallett were reprimanded for the Contra psychological warfare manual. Dewey R. Clarridge, CIA baron, relieved, demoted a pay grade, received a reprimand. Mr. Clarridge would later be indicted on seven counts of perjury and making false statements. He had a trial date when the CIA officers (except Clines) were pardoned by President George H.W. Bush on Christmas Eve 1992.

Dewey Clarridge went off to do risk analysis and security work, as do many former agency folk. He worked for aerospace corporations at first, but later missed the fieldwork. In the era of “private military contractors,” Dewey worked for a private intelligence agency and then formed his own. The New York Times hired his agency at one point to help search for a kidnapped reporter. The private firm obtained a Pentagon contract to run agents in Afghanistan and Pakistan. The flamboyant Clarridge made a renewed appearance in the primary season of the 2016 presidential election as a foreign policy adviser to Republican hopeful Ben Carson. By then Dewey stood on his last legs. He passed away that April.

This sorry record shows exactly and very concretely why Jose Rodriguez fantasizes when he talks about a compact with the American people. Agency operations are acceptable so long as they proceed under proper legal statute, authority, management, accountability, and within moral boundaries. Juicy-looking operational proposals float past all the time. Zealotry makes them all the more attractive. Smart fish don’t bite. They stop to think how projects will appear in the white glare of public knowledge. Smart fish don’t become ghosts.

* Lynch reports of his testimony that General Taylor, fair and efficient, kept alluding to the curtailed exile air strikes, saying, “It all goes back to the planes.” He thought that good and deplored Bobby Kennedy’s direction—questions to support the idea that “the invasion would have failed even without Castro’s air strikes,” adding that Kennedy’s proposition “was something that was impossible to prove.” Lynch passes by the point that it was equally impossible to prove the proposition that 1,400 exiles of Assault Brigade 2506 could have beaten the Cuban army of 200,000 no matter how successful the exiles’ air strikes.