THE CIA HAD LONG HAD A PROBLEM WITH WOMEN. FROM THE BEGINNING, agency folk considered spying man’s work. Women were not viewed quite the same as homosexuals, but they needed to fight for acceptance. The agency encouraged spooks to wed within its family because those unions joined people already vetted. Beyond that, women at the CIA labored at a disadvantage. What jobs should be open to them and how rapidly they might rise were questions seldom asked. The agency frequently hired wives of officers as clerical workers, especially when the husband was headed overseas. That practice simplified tasking and security in the stations. Throughout the CIA, any women often worked as clericals, or later sometimes as reports officers (in the DO) or analysts (in the DI).
Naturally women noticed, and of course they were restive. Men noticed too. Years later, a senior officer reflecting on the clandestine service culture of the 1950s remembered, “There were plenty of women in the dank, sloping halls of the temporary buildings below the Lincoln Memorial and later in Langley, but almost all were in the clerical category . . . the DO had some of the best-educated women in the country doing its filing and typing.” That impression, published by a thirty-five-year DO veteran in the early 1990s, had its roots in the very first days of the Central Intelligence Agency.
In basic courses, women junior officer trainees (JOTs) were excluded from the explosives, weapons, sabotage, and parachute segments, leaving them unqualified for command functions. This continued to be the situation in May 1953, when the Great White Case Officer himself appeared at the JOT course for his soon-to-be-standard keynote speech. After reciting his great failure to enlist Vladimir Lenin before the Russian Revolution, Allen Dulles opened the floor to questions. Many could have been expected—on the CIA’s role in the U.S. government, whether the agency would still be needed if the Soviet Union had a change of heart, on the need for a paramilitary capability, or on the danger of politicization in intelligence analysis. But several female JOTs put Dulles to the test. Did he think women were given sufficient recognition? Why were members of the fairer sex hired at lower grade levels than men? Was he going to do something about it? “I think women have a very high place in this work,” the recently promoted CIA chieftain replied, “and if there is discrimination, we’re going to see that it’s stopped.” Director Dulles promised he would put the agency’s inspector general on the matter.
GLASS-CEILING DILEMMAS
Here the action illustrated another kind of role for CIA lawyers. The inspector general (IG), like a camp counselor, had a responsibility to keep the action within bounds. This applied to all aspects of spy work. One result of Dulles’s encounter with the women trainees was formation of a task force of agency women. That group itself illustrated the depth of the problem. Agency officers were ranked from GS (General Service)-1 to GS-18; the top ranks—equivalent to Army colonels and above—started at GS-15. The Petticoat Panel, as the women’s study group became known, met in the I Building. It had thirteen full members plus nine alternates, deliberately restricted to experienced officers, women who had served at least three years. One board member in World War II had commanded all Women’s Army Corps personnel in the entire Mediterranean theater. Another had been a representative in the Vermont State Assembly. Several had doctorates, including an archaeologist, with one woman the daughter of a general. Many had been with the OSS or its precursor, the Office of the Coordinator of Information—by 1953 giving them a dozen years in service. At the agency, none of these women had risen above GS-14. There were no CIA women of higher rank. Few served in the DO.
When the Petticoat Panel asked to see data on CIA officers by rank and sex, the personnel boffins rebuffed them on grounds it was classified. An agency official review conducted by security-cleared, trusted officers would be denied information necessary for its work. The most they got was percentages—and that only after the IG’s intervention. They did discover that the agency actually had done better than the rest of the federal bureaucracy, but that seemed small comfort. A year later, General Doolittle’s study of covert operations found no females among the thirty-four top officers.
Director Dulles had said that his inspector general would take care of the problem. That job went to lawyer Lyman Kirkpatrick. Chairing the agency’s Career Service Board, Kirk held the right position to effect change. But the board wrestled with a host of issues, from retirement policy to insurance and medical coverage, and women were just one item. Kirk proved to be of some help. It was he who squeezed the percentages out of the personnel goons, but the IG had his own limitations. “No supervisor in this Agency in his right mind is going to take a good stenographer or a darned good competent file clerk and say, well . . . we are going to make a Case Officer or Researcher out of you,” Kirkpatrick said at the career board’s November 1953 meeting discussing the Petticoat Panel recommendations. Needless to say, no women were present.
Thinking in the DO, very much the same, is typified by Richard Helms, at the time its chief of operations. “There is a constant inconvenience factor with a lot of them,” Helms said at that same meeting. “You just get them to a point where they are about to blossom out to a GS-12, and they get married, go somewhere else, or something over which nobody has any control.” Helms believed that able women had had “damn good opportunity and very fair treatment in this Agency.” At the time, there were five women in the Directorate of Operations (and seven in the entire CIA) who ranked GS-14—the equivalent of Army lieutenant colonel. Women represented just 7 percent of DO’s field force and a quarter of its headquarters staff.
A decade later, in December 1963, the directorate had exactly five women at the GS-15 level (colonel) and none higher. Of the three women in the JOT class who had confronted Dulles that fateful day in 1953, only one remained on duty. A new officer, Carla, who joined the agency in 1965 as a secretary (and eventually became a case officer), recalled later, “When I came in . . . the first assumption was that any female you met in the hallway was a secretary or a clerk. And the other big difference was when I came on board, we wore hats and white gloves every day. The gloves were inspected as you entered the office to be sure that your palms were white.”
Women at the CIA were patient. Langley officials took that as license to put the problem out of mind. A July 1971 memorandum noted, “Recruitment Division has had few if any specific directives either encouraging or discouraging the recruitment of professional women.” There had been notable advances, if not in the DO. By 1972 a few women had reached or passed GS-15. Nearly 2 percent of officers in the highest rank were women, but progress comes slowly in the clandestine service. A 1976 study of the field station of the future noted that younger women seemed optimistic about challenging jobs and advancement opportunities, while older ones expressed pessimism regarding double standards and having to work harder than men to reach the same place. In the 1977 DO, there were 6 percent more men ranked GS-14 than GS-12, but on the female side the number dropped 77 percent. Worse, the drop-off between GS-14 and GS-15 amounted to another 92 percent for women as compared to just under half for males.
The first woman station chief came in 1978, when Eloise R. Page went to Athens. After that, female COSes remained few and far between. Only one, Carol A. Roehl, headed multiple, major stations. No woman headed a DO division until 1994. Gina Haspel rose to deputy and briefly acted as chief, but excesses in the war on terror tainted her and she did not succeed to the position. A woman has been deputy chief financial officer. Women have headed CIA science, analytic, and support units and served as agency number twos and threes, but no woman has headed the Directorate of Operations to this day. Haspel and Avril Haines have served as deputy directors of the CIA. “I’m so sick of the deputization of women,” says Gina Bennett, a CTC officer who was among the first to warn of Osama bin Laden. “Deputy is the worst thing you can be. You’re carrying out the vision of someone else. It’s not a glass ceiling; it’s a wall.”
Whenever the Directorate of Operations needed to point to its successful women, it trotted out Page, and a colleague, Virginia Hall Goillot. Both had started with the OSS—Hall, in fact, earlier, with British special operations. Page had been Wild Bill Donovan’s secretary, went to London with OSS counterintelligence, and helped set up one of America’s first stations, in Brussels for the Strategic Services Unit. She turned to the CIA immediately when it was created, always with the DO.
“Miss Page,” as she remained and liked to be known, led the DO’s scientific and technical operations staff, and took on field assignments. She also accumulated experience on committees and interagency groups. For a decade starting from the mid-1960s, she helped staff the critical collections problems group of the intelligence community’s board of directors, the U.S. Intelligence Board. Pentagon colleagues began to call her the Iron Butterfly. She chaired the unit for several years before promotion to GS-18. Page became an early CIA expert on terrorism. With his penchant for history, Bill Casey enjoyed Page, an OSS colleague as well as a descendant of the founders of Jamestown, Virginia. In Casey’s day, Page dealt with CIA budgets and held the distinction of being among those who spent time with him one-on-one. In fact, in 1986 Eloise would be among the last to see Mr. Casey still coherent, late on the afternoon of November 25, 1986. A few months after Casey’s seizure, she went into retirement.
Virginia Hall Goillot’s experience takes us back. Hall, like Page, started out as a secretary (in the State Department). She lost a leg in a hunting accident in Turkey. When World War II began, Hall volunteered as an ambulance driver for the French, then for British special operations, for whom she worked as an agent helping set up networks in Vichy France. When the United States entered the conflict and created OSS, Hall wrangled a transfer. She entered France for the OSS by boat because of her prosthetic leg (a more romantic version has Hall parachuting with the device—she nicknamed it Cuthbert—strapped to her body). She was on her way to assignment in Vienna when the war ended. Her bravery and resourcefulness earned the Distinguished Service Cross as well as high British decorations. Hall married Paul Goillot, another OSS man with the Resistance, a decade later while with the CIA.
Like Eloise Page, Hall stayed on in U.S. intelligence. She made the transition to the CIA seamlessly. She reported on both Yugoslavia and Italy and took a cover role in the National Committee for a Free Europe when it was formed as parent entity for Radio Free Europe. She returned to the OPC at the end of 1951 and headed its paramilitary desk for France, monitoring the Gladio secret army project as a GS-13. Then she did the same work for the Southern European Division and later the DO’s Paramilitary Staff.
Virginia went on temporary assignment to Europe during the first half of 1956. Her mission was to find third-country agents to use in a political action contemplated by the Near East and Africa Division. She thought she’d done well, but her supervisor rated her average and had her cooling her heels for half a year—typical stuff then for a female operative.
Hall transferred to the Western Hemisphere Division to clear her path, and she did logistics for Jesus Christ King. Soon she was back at political action and psychological warfare. Hall needed eleven years to top the hurdle from GS-13 to GS-14. By then she had become an important player in the CIA’s covert operation against Cheddi Jagan in British Guiana. Hall retired in 1966, unheralded at the time. Despite this stellar career, she never attained the GS-15 grade.
For every woman the agency touted, there were uncounted legions who went unmentioned. Their trajectories show the pattern. Martha D. Peterson met her husband in college. He became a Green Beret, fought in Vietnam. She studied for a master’s degree. He joined the CIA, which sent John Peterson to Laos as a paramilitary officer with the Hmong secret army. Martha went with him and enlisted as a CIA clerical. John was killed in 1972. Martha returned to the United States. Some months later, she rejoined CIA as a trainee operations officer. Her first assignment: Moscow in 1975. The operations directorate sent very promising officers there on initial tours because the Russians would not yet have identified them. Peterson worked in support of a spy the CIA had recruited in Soviet military intelligence. Russian security caught her in July 1977, making a delivery for the agent, code named Trigon. Roughed up, Peterson kept her composure; she was declared persona non grata and returned to the United States. She became a CIA training officer, later a DO operative in the Middle East, and put in thirty-two years in all.
Then there was Linda C. Flohr, of the same generation, who joined in 1967. Flohr needed more than a decade to reach middle level, and in the early years of the Contra project she served as executive assistant to the task force chief. She produced the biopic the CIA filmed to laud “Comandante Zero,” a Sandinista defector who joined the insurgents. On her own sewing machine, Flohr created a flag for the group, along with backdrops for the film. The CIA wanted to take over the network that Nicaraguan government broadcasters used and show its Contra film instead. In 1983, when Reagan invaded Grenada, Langley dispatched Flohr on a last-minute scouting mission, meeting officials as well as the imprisoned British colonial governor. Flohr’s last assignment came with the Iraq Operations Group, whose op against Saddam Hussein after the First Gulf War fell apart. A year later, in the ferment to refashion U.S. intelligence for the post–Cold War era, she joined the staff of the Aspin-Brown Commission, an official effort to foretell the future. Later Flohr worked for the Rendon Group, which did public relations for Iraqi exiles, and for the NSC staff in the second Bush administration.
Robert M. Gates, as CIA director, created the Iraq Operations Group with which Flohr served. He looked past the demise of the Soviet Union and set up initiatives with the aim of recasting Langley in a new mold. One of those was the Glass Ceiling Study, in March 1991, which Gates ordered to review conditions for women and minorities. There had been some movement since Dulles’s day. In contrast to the Petticoat Panel’s struggles, the CIA not only did not assert that its demographic data were a secret; the Office of Personnel actually handed quantitative analyses to outside contractors hired to crunch numbers for the study. The contractors also administered surveys and had focus groups to explore the data in greater depth. The Glass Ceiling Study found that women were a constant in personnel terms—about 40 percent in 1992—but concentrated in lower grades than men, peaking at GS-12, dropping at the next rank, and diminishing rapidly afterward. Among the Senior Intelligence Service (SIS—an entity created to broaden the government’s ability to offer perks at the highest levels, doubling for the old ranks of GS-16 to GS-18) women made up 10 percent of the force. Measured by bureaucratic clout, women represented just 6 percent of office directors or deputies. In the Directorate of Operations, there were fewer than ten women in those command positions.
A CIA management committee met to push reforms and devise ways to overcome barriers. Bonnie Hershberg, a major mover in this group, was recognized by a Trailblazer Award in 2007, but progress remained uneven. A year after the Glass Ceiling Study, aides could still poke fun at women in the Undercover Quilters, Langley’s in-house quilt-making club. Data for Fiscal Year 2009 show that the number of women who had reached SIS rank had diminished, tumbling by half, though those of GS-15 rank climbed to 22 percent of staff. That includes minorities, a smaller fraction in every category. By 2012 the SIS women, according to recent CIA disclosures, had risen to 19 percent, and in 2016 female “senior leadership”—probably something other than SIS—stood at 34 percent, both figures difficult to reconcile with the 2009 data, especially because the overall proportion of women at the CIA has remained constant at 45 percent.
Operations officer Melissa Mahle found it difficult to pursue Middle East operations, with Langley simultaneously micromanaging and yet so skittish about vulnerabilities that she was told to get liability insurance. Getting the agency to extend maternity leave and honor personnel policies was another problem. Women interviewed for a Newsweek feature repeatedly described the social costs of intelligence service—children costing them promotions, barren relationships limiting them to adoption, inability to make time for dating. A woman analyst who labored on nuclear proliferation issues and eventually left for one of the weapons labs put it this way: working hard for her own promotions, each year she found fewer women colleagues, while less-skilled men were rising as fast or faster. One day she realized that the only two women still with her had been in the office for a decade. It was time to go.
For others it was time to sue. Hershberg’s steering committee led to agency negotiations on equal opportunity, but stubborn bureaucrats yielded little. By 1994 the fever had run high enough that some two hundred women joined a class-action lawsuit. That brings us back to the Office of General Counsel. Ironically, at this moment, Langley’s gunslinger would be a woman, Elizabeth R. Rindskopf, who had arrived by way of the National Security Agency and the State Department. Naturally, she happened to be the agency’s first female general counsel. Rindskopf ran out of gas due to a related nightmare, a measure of the obstacles women face at the CIA.
THE SPOOK AND THE SHERIFF
Janine M. Brookner had been another of Langley’s meteors. Born in upstate New York on the eve of World War II, she married young, her high school sweetheart, divorced at twenty-two, and raised a son while earning a master’s at New York University. An NYU professor warned that if she followed her dream of joining the Peace Corps, she would starve. Janine followed Mom’s advice. Brookner’s academic focus had been Russia—perfect for the CIA, where her mom advised her to apply. In 1968 the agency hired Brookner, trained her, and promptly sent her to the Philippines. The twenty-eight-year-old case officer infiltrated the Philippine Communist Party. Sent to Thailand, she helped whittle down the insurgency in the northeast of that country. On a tour in Venezuela, Brookner became so critical to progress, she acted as station chief. In New York in the mid-1980s, Brookner managed CIA watchers of Soviet and other Eastern Bloc delegations at the United Nations. She noticed misbehavior among colleagues and reported one, Aldrich Ames, who might have been stopped before he became a Russian spy.
In July 1989, Ms. Brookner went to Kingston as station chief. Considered a backwater, Jamaica also had a reputation as a poorly managed station, but it had staff and conducted operations. She became the first female COS in the Latin America Division. Jerry Gruner, who had been Linda Flohr’s boss on the Central America Task Force, led the division and proved supportive. Janine’s efficiency ratings were superb, and graders credited her with energizing the station. Two years passed in a flash. The personnel gurus slated her for Prague in the Czech Republic.
Many elements of the assignment remained beyond the COS’s control, but Brookner was given her choice for deputy. She picked an African American officer she’d met at Langley. A black, even an American, could pass more easily on Kingston’s streets. The station chief’s trouble began halfway through her tour when the deputy’s wife telephoned, came to see Brookner, and accused her husband of assault. Under questioning the officer did not deny the incident but claimed the wife had started it. Feeling her way, anxious to avoid a repetition, Brookner told Langley. That was a judgment call. “I doubt I would have reported it,” Eloise Page told a reporter working this story. “I maybe would have felt that I could have gotten it worked out, just to avoid ruining his career.”
Ms. Brookner encouraged the deputy to report his version too. Not long afterward, headquarters recalled the officer. But Inspector General Fred Hitz investigated the station chief, not her subordinate. A month before her tour ended, a couple of IG inquisitors arrived in Kingston and dug out every bit of dirt imaginable. Someone alleged Brookner had improperly charged overtime. Others said she was an alcoholic, wore short shorts, thin T-shirts, and microscopic underwear, had sexually harassed a male subordinate at a Christmas party, and so on. Brookner suddenly found herself at Langley in a room with no phone, no window, and no work to do. Prague was out. She did not even discover the range of allegations until May 1992. She appealed to bosses. Dorwin Wilson, the Latin baron at the time, proved unresponsive.
A former boss, George Kalaris, who had been chief of station in Manila when Brookner served there, recalled, “She had a drive, persistence, and sensibility not normally found in male officers.” Brookner displayed that now. Soon a stream of affadavits began flowing to Hitz. The U.S. ambassador from her time in Jamaica reported his admiration for Brookner. Colleagues like Kalaris provided testimonials. The COS could show that the factual charges made against her were wrong. The IG asserted that everything was secret.
The IG’s office apparently would not say when alleged conduct had occurred or identify witnesses. Its January 1993 report recommended that Brookner take counseling and repay overtime claims. A new CIA director, R. James Woolsey, professed that he did not interfere in personnel matters. So in July 1994 Janine Brookner filed suit against the CIA. Now the winds blew against Langley. The Senate intelligence committee expressed its intense interest in the case of “Jane Doe Thompson,” as it was filed, in SSCI’s biennial report. The Christmas party sexual harassment, once that documentation surfaced, traced to a Drug Enforcement Administration officer who insisted he had made no such charge. The allegations about clothing related to someone else, a case officer Brookner had also reported. A claim that she had improperly used an agency helicopter proved to be without foundation. Indeed, a document that came to light during discovery proceedings demonstrated that Hitz’s office, between November 1991 and September 1992, had investigated at least forty allegations of illegal or improper activity by male officers ranking GS-15 or above, only three ending in reprimands, while here the CIA persecuted a female station chief in the face of contrary evidence.
Watching all this, Elizabeth Rindskopf, the general counsel, collared Jim Woolsey. With the CIA already in talks to avert a glass-ceiling class action, the Brookner lawsuit represented the very vehicle that would show that suit to be precisely correct. In December 1994, the CIA settled out of court, paying Janine Brookner $410,000 ($659,000 in 2016) in arrears and damages.
Rindskopf chose this moment to take a leave of absence to recharge her batteries, teaching at Cleveland State University Law School. She returned for only a few months in 1995 to supervise a settlement of the glass-ceiling litigation. Brookner’s case illustrated the workplace culture.
The DO had more than 2,000 officers. More than 250 of them saw themselves as did Brookner. Langley settled their December 1993 class-action suit in the summer of 1995, just as George Tenet came on board. The agency offered back pay, two dozen retroactive promotions, opportunities for women who had left in disgust to return as case officers, and more. It kept the monetary cost to $1 million. Rindskopf left for good. There has yet to be another female general counsel.
SHERIFFS IN SNEAKERS
The 1949 law granting extraordinary powers also governs both the general counsel and the inspector general, but those amendments were inserted much later. Where the language pertaining to the counsel consists of exactly one paragraph, simply providing that the top lawyer “shall perform such functions as the Director of Central Intelligence may prescribe,” the text pertinent to the inspector general goes on page after page. The difference testifies to the transformation of the IG’s role. There has yet to be a female IG, though it appears that the recent standard is to have one as deputy.
It is a long time since Lyman Kirkpatrick held the job. He focused on efficiency reviews. Kirk began to buck the trend with his Bay of Pigs study. “There are few who would argue that it wasn’t a flawed operation,” an inspector noted. “To have reported it differently would have been dishonest.” But look what happened. The IG, condemned from all sides, found wide dismissal of his recommendations. No wonder Kirkpatrick considered this painful. It would be Tracy Barnes who continued, only to get in more trouble.
So the IG went on measuring efficiency. Just make sure the survey doesn’t break any rice bowls. Ten years earlier, the IG’s audit function had been split off and given to CIA administrative organs. Inspectors general were left with the surveys. The IG had a staff in mid- to senior grades (GS-14 to GS-17) and, for much of the period, very limited in number (fifteen inspectors and four secretaries). Teams formed for each review. They began at headquarters, requesting documents and interviewing officers. Then they went cruising. A team captain decided the method. Her/his crew varied with the importance of the assignment. Even in the 1960s, there were nearly four dozen components to inspect, so clearly coverage could not be constant or comprehensive, and many times surveys threw up sensitive issues requiring separate and private handling.
In 1962 the IG looked into the CIA’s illegal mail opening, the equivalent of today’s dragnet NSA eavesdropping. The inspector general found the operators’ cover story useless, because U.S. law criminalizes tampering with the mails, so the surveillance was illegal on its face. Angleton’s staff traded memos deploring the IG’s conclusion.
One success came in evaluations of the CIA mind-control program, which had caused the death of unwitting test subject Frank Olson. The IG advised that the project should be terminated, but the scientists insisted that it continue. It was terminated.
Another survey covered the Western Hemisphere Division, which had conducted the Bay of Pigs, subsequent Cuban projects, the op against British Guiana, electoral interventions in Peru, Bolivia, and Chile, and more. Aside from compiling statistics, the IG accomplished little.
The agency had many proprietaries, ostensibly private businesses that existed to supply particular services for Langley’s operations or cover for CIA agents. Its air proprietaries are the best known. Among them the IG review led to confusion, to Larry Houston’s special task force, and to new umbrella management. Obtaining data from operators remained a problem. When inspector Scott Breckinridge complained to the IG, Gordon Stewart, the boss told him to drop the fight.
After leaks triggered charges on assassinations from columnist Drew Pearson, President Johnson demanded that the CIA review allegations that it had plotted to murder Fidel Castro. That 1967 review became most significant for the fact that it was on CIA letterhead and confirmed that the agency really had at least considered assassination plots. Details were limited—and the lawyers then sent all the agency records they’d consulted to the burn bin.
The war in Southeast Asia occasioned numerous IG reviews. One concerned the agency’s own analysis of the size of enemy forces; in it an analyst named Sam Adams contested the numbers furnished by military authorities. The IG decided not to credit the CIA man’s methodology or his argument that the United States might have avoided its surprise in the Tet offensive. But Adams had been right, and the military had manipulated the data.
For a major review of the Far East Division in 1971, the IG allocated a permanent staff of just five, though there were augmentations for different parts of the inquiry. One piece concerned Laos, where allegations persisted that Air America crews were trafficking drugs aboard CIA aircraft. The inspector general decided that aside from “bad apples” there was nothing to the charges. Other parts of the survey focused on the notorious Phoenix program, in which Washington and Saigon sought to eliminate the National Liberation Front (NLF) administrative network. The district, provincial, and national centers where prisoners were interrogated became a most controversial aspect. These were direct antecedents of the black prisons of the war on terror. IG inspectors actually visited some of them. The public heard torture charges. There is no indication that the IG filed complaints on either centers or interrogation methods.
The CIA paid and supported a paramilitary army in South Vietnam that formed the strike force of the Phoenix campaign. Individual platoons were called provincial reconnaissance units (PRUs). Charges were rife that the PRUs killed indiscriminately, were used as enforcers in corrupt shakedowns, and more. The inspector general’s survey concluded that the PRUs were highly effective and that their professionalism was improving. When the PRUs transferred to South Vietnamese government control, IG officers expressed confidence.
Then the inspector general’s field people discovered, during an inspection of the DO European Division, that a good deal of effort was being devoted to spying on Americans, dissenters against the war in Vietnam. Angleton’s Project Chaos staff were the beneficiaries, the CIA’s contribution to the war against dissent in America. The diversion from spy missions was obvious, even given the excuse that the spooks watched antiwar activists simply to see what enemy agents they might contact (none, other than official North Vietnamese or Liberation Front diplomats).
Part of the inspector general’s difficulty no doubt flowed from the nature of those selected for the job. Lyman Kirkpatrick set the mold. He had been DO, tried and true. He had wanted to be the chief operator. Others were hewn from that stone. John Earman had been special assistant to Allen Dulles and executive aide to Dick Bissell. Earman had helped in the postwar race to utilize former Nazis for intel purposes. Like him, successor Gordon M. Stewart had a German connection, in fact an important role advocating for CIA support of a nascent German intelligence agency. He had been chief of station in Germany. William V. Broe had been in the Far East and Latin America. All of them were creatures of the DO. Donald F. Chamberlain, the IG under Colby from 1973 to 1975, hailed from the agency’s technology side and was a plank holder in creation of the Directorate of Science and Technology. Changes under Chamberlain highlighted another reason for the IG’s ineffectiveness. As if the small staff of the 1960s hadn’t been problem enough, at this point the office was cut to just five investigators.
That was the situation in the Year of Intelligence, when the Church Committee looked into the inspector general’s work. The congressional investigators recommended that the IG office be strengthened. Church Committee members found that the inspector general lacked objectivity, authority, and independence. The Church, Pike, and Rockefeller investigations led to creation of the congressional oversight committees. The Senate committee’s projected CIA charter in law provided for a stronger inspector general, but the bill won little support from stalwarts. Langley went to its DO for Inspector General John H. Waller.
Needless to say, Bill Casey had little use for an inspector general, especially one whose job was to ensure legality. Of course, the paradigm cases were the scandals over the Contra assassination manual and the Nicaraguan harbor mining. As related earlier, John Stein (another DO officer posted as inspector general) excused agency activities in its secret war. The joint congressional investigation found that the inspector general “appears not to have had the manpower, resources or tenacity to acquire key facts uncovered by the other investigations of the Iran-Contra affair,” failing to uncover those facts despite residing inside the CIA’s secrecy envelope.
Inspectors general were watchdogs in sneakers, monitors who begged to be taken seriously. Congress decided to create an independent CIA inspector general like the IGs established throughout government by a 1978 law, which had exempted Langley. In 1987 Pennsylvania senator Arlen Spector introduced the bill. William Webster, Casey’s successor, testified against it at hearings in 1987 and again the following year. Director Webster insisted that his post–Iran Contra reforms eliminated the problem. Webster had previously been FBI director and had a lot of support on Capitol Hill, so Congress deferred action.
Next the oversight committees asked the IG to undertake several particular investigations. The Senate committee saw results that varied widely in scope and competence and felt the office was floundering. By the summer of 1989, the overseers had decided a law had become necessary. By then George H.W. Bush was president. Politician Bush had shepherded the CIA through Ford’s last year and had his own views on the balance between confidentiality and oversight. He spoke to Senate leaders several times while the legislation took shape. It passed Congress with an overwhelming Senate majority.
The new office of inspector general, appointed by the president, confirmed by Congress, with a duty to report outrageous activity to both, became a reality in 1990. For the first time, the office had a budget funded separately from the rest of the agency, authority to hire and fire its own staff, a renewed capacity to conduct audits, and a legal right to access Langley’s contractors and employees. The inspector general could initiate inquiries, and previously existing channels for disgruntled officers to warn the IG of excesses remained in place.
The new IG had the advantage of no longer serving at the pleasure of the CIA director but still had important limitations. The inspector general had no subpoena power and so couldn’t compel subjects to yield evidence, and he needed the DCI’s approval to seek cooperation from other agencies. Under the legislation, which amended the Central Intelligence Agency Act of 1949, the IG also had a duty to inform the agency director of problems and deficiencies in CIA administration, preserving the old role of efficiency expert. The director could forbid inquiries. Obviously, good relations with the director remained important. Most reports went to the seventh floor for consideration, and the IG soon found it difficult to recruit CIA specialist staff if their return to agency posts was not secure. The inspector general, in spite of the statutory right to access, would need the CIA director on his side to break logjams over files and end foot-dragging by recalcitrant agency offices. This system went into effect in the fall of 1990 when President Bush nominated the first independent inspector general.
NEW SHERIFF IN TOWN
Frederick P. Hitz appeared before the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence on September 25, 1990. George J. Tenet, then the SSCI’s staff director, sat among the listeners, as did as L. Britt Snider, then on the staff. (Hitz would ultimately sit opposite Tenet as CIA director, and Snider would follow Hitz as IG.) The senators were in a celebratory mood. They were rolling out an institutional change years in the making, one that promised to extend their reach and assist their oversight role. The refashioned IG could serve as a warning bell against repetition of anything like Iran-Contra. Ideally, such excesses could not occur because the IG would catch them first, investigate them to death, and bring them to both Capitol Hill and the White House.
Hitz represented a known quantity, or at least no surprise. He arrived with recommendations from former CIA director James R. Schlesinger and top agency lawyer Daniel B. Silver. Virginia senator John W. Warner, an old acquaintance, presented Mr. Hitz. The committee had private insights into the nominee. Fred Hitz had been something akin to a professional legislative aide, having worked on legislative affairs between bouts at the law. He was also the uncle of long-serving SSCI aide Natalie Bocock. He’d been on the Hill liaising for the State Department, the Pentagon, and the Department of Energy, as well as the CIA (from June 1978 to July 1982). Admiral Stansfield Turner had honored Hitz with a merit award and elevation to the Senior Intelligence Service at the midpoint of that tour.
Nearing his fifty-first birthday and acceptable throughout the agency, Hitz had not been just a lobbyist. He’d joined the CIA as an operations officer trainee in 1967, the same year as Linda Flohr. He’d served a tour in the Ivory Coast with State Department cover. President Bush, when he led the agency, knew Fred as the Pentagon’s water carrier on the Hill. At that time, the Lebanese civil war embroiled both the CIA and the Department of Defense, and lots of congressional committees clamored for the executive agencies to answer their questions.
More than those of most successors, Fred Hitz’s nomination hearing consumed itself with conversations on how he intended to act within the confines of the new law. It would be fair to say that Hitz originated the role of the “modern” inspector general. He recognized “the heavy seas upon which the legislation sailed.” He had a clear perception that the IG and his staff must understand intel operations and procedures and build the trust of agency officers. For example, whereas the law provided that the IG should report to the committees (with comment) each time a spy chief shut down an investigation, Hitz stated his intention to stand down unless he and the CIA director differed on the validity of DCI’s action. The lawyer also anticipated that he would not be called upon to report criminality to the Department of Justice, as required in the law, because the CIA was supposed to do that. Fred apparently thought there would be no more Bill Caseys. He was comfortable with the IG’s lack of subpoena power.
Only Senator Howard Metzenbaum (D-OH), who believed a stronger candidate should have been sought, opposed the nomination. Hitz received confirmation from the full Senate. Feeling ran strong that the inspector general’s office, which had gone unfilled for nearly a year, needed to be put back on track.
So there was Fred Hitz, facing the Senate inquisitors, at precisely the moment when Janine Brookner’s troubles began in Jamaica. The misbehavior of the deputy that started the mess took place in September 1990. Just as Hitz geared up his new office, the complaint about Brookner floated up through channels. The inspector general opened an investigation. Hitz at least assigned a woman officer as team chief. Hitz continues to believe that the Brookner case had been handled properly but that comments elsewhere around Langley inflamed both sides, while press coverage made the thing appear botched.
But there was a learning curve. When allegations surfaced against Jose Rodriguez in 1996, Inspector General Hitz did his investigation and concluded that Division Chief Rodriguez should be disciplined. That result would then be reviewed again, by an “accountability board” responsible only to the CIA director. In the baron’s case, the board agreed with the IG. Measures taken against Rodriguez did not, ultimately, prevent his rise to head the clandestine service. The process became standard procedure.
Inspector general investigations also evolved. Disciplinary inquiries like the ones regarding Brookner and Rodriguez remained the bread and butter of the Office of the Inspector General, along with audits of the operating units. Indeed, the audit staff became the largest part of the IG office. Hitz professionalized the practice by developing a mixed cadre of people hired directly plus officers seconded from agencies. He attempted to rely on insiders as much as possible, worrying that outside gunslingers would spook the workforce. Reflecting the IG’s new independence, the staff grew beyond its previous peak. He had at least a dozen women in senior positions and recollects that all performed admirably.
A lot had changed since Fred Hitz served with Stan Turner. Fred felt the swish of turnover at the top during the Clinton era—five CIA directors in seven years. Agency officers were driven in different directions, then their bosses were gone. Hitz agrees with George Tenet’s judgment that the collapse of the Soviet Union essentially triggered a state of bankruptcy at Langley. Rebuilding became everyone’s job. The IG’s part, Hitz decided, would be to articulate standards for oversight, be candid with and available to the CIA director, and to be straight with the rank and file. Hitz believed the CIA Act revisions creating his post gave him the jets for the job. If he needed more, he was ready to go to the president, Congress, or the CIA director.
Mr. Hitz tried to endow his unit with specific legal expertise, establishing a deputy inspector general for investigations. This was A.R. Cinquegrana, a fellow who had worked for the Department of Justice and also OGC. When Admiral Turner revealed the agency’s MK/Ultra drug experiments back in 1978, it had been Cinquegrana who gave the University of Wisconsin the CIA documents revealing its role in that program. Liz Rindskopf, the IG’s opposite number as general counsel, got along well with Hitz except for a few minor territorial skirmishes. Langley’s barons, office and branch chiefs, and others took more time to realize that IG reports had consequences. When audits or recommendations came, the barons ignored them, only to have Tenet order implementation. Then even the cynics wised up.
The inspector general’s major inquiries grabbed attention. On Hitz’s watch, there were many. By far the best known centered on activities in Guatemala. The inquiry delved into the agency’s relationships with Guatemalan intelligence and security units, but it started with the bulldog determination of Jennifer Harbury, whose husband had been tortured and killed by Guatemalan security forces in 1992. A Guatemalan officer who doubled as a CIA agent would be connected to these events in a January 1995 report.
True enough, Harbury’s husband, Efraín Bámaca Velásquez, had been a rebel leader married to an American, but he was a heroic figure in a struggle in which the Guatemalan military were killing peasants and burning villages in what amounted to war on Mayan Indians. The CIA station reported the rebel comandante’s disappearance within days, as well as its expectation that his fate would be hidden. Harbury, a lawyer, went to Guatemala to discover what had happened and asked for U.S. embassy help.
Another death of an American, in 1990, had been reported to Langley at the time—and connected to the same CIA asset. In November 1991, the CIA, tentatively or not, had had general counsel Rindskopf prepare a referral to the Justice Department, and the Latin America Division had briefed a senior Justice official in connection with it. Thus the CIA station had known the situation from day one. But station officers stonewalled Harbury and reportedly lobbied embassy colleagues in the defense attaché’s office, which had its own links to the Guatemalan military, to withhold their cooperation too.
Jennifer Harbury began a much-reported hunger strike. Media attention uncovered new angles. It turned out that at least a dozen Americans had disappeared into the maw of Guatemalan security forces since 1984. Primarily important by then to Washington’s war on drugs, Guatemala was using its $3.5 million a year in CIA money for ethnic cleansing. In the Clinton years, the annual dole declined to about a million, but the place still crawled with CIA spooks, and most of them fought the government’s war.
The human rights implications were clear, and Langley had had human rights directives on the books since the time of the Contra assassination manuals. These were strengthened in 1989, and a year later the Latin America Division had affirmed them. Then discovery of the murders put it all in question. Not only did the local station clam up, but also at Langley the DO failed to flag Guatemala for the congressional overseers.
Jennifer Harbury met with staff of the intelligence committees in 1995. By then she was convinced the CIA had been mixed up in Bamaca’s death and said so. The Senate committee followed up and soon discovered rumors of the Guatemalan agent’s involvement. Besides its own probe, the SSCI asked the inspector general to inquire. The IG probe ramified as it proceeded, eventually encompassing multiple elements, including one on the Bamaca murder, one on that of the American Michael DeVine, one on other allegations, another specifically on the agency asset implicated in these events, and one into whether documents had been hidden or destroyed.
The president’s own Intelligence Oversight Board opened another investigation, but all of the inquiries failed to establish any deliberate intent to withhold information. And the veracity of reports linking the agent to the killings came into doubt. Some were hearsay, others were from unreliable sources, and so on. But the Guatemala City station had delayed a report connecting its asset to the Bamaca killing, a sin of omission that was real. Otherwise the slate seemed clean.
Nevertheless, Admiral William O. Studeman, acting CIA director, had been mousetrapped by his channels into inaccurate testimony. Director John Deutch, who took charge in the middle of this, was determined to sweep clean. A dozen officers were disciplined, including former division chief Terry Ward and former station chief Fred Brugger, who was forced into retirement. Deutch promulgated new regulations to make clear that he himself would take the lead in deciding what congressional notifications would be made. Deutch reaffirmed human rights directives and issued new orders requiring background checks into persons proposed to be put on payroll, with prohibitions against those with human rights transgressions.
It’s worth pausing a moment for the Deutch “bad boy” prohibition. This brought a hail of complaints, to a degree sloughed off onto the inspector general. Some said the kind of people who know stuff you want to find out are bad boys by definition, and to prohibit them is to cut off your nose. Think about that. Of the top spies in CIA history—Popov, Penkovskiy, Tolkachev, Gordievsky, Kuklinski—none were bad boys. Even the knuckle draggers, say, Cuban exiles, among them the good ones were principled men and women in the fight, their aim to get Castro. Bad boys talking the talk but out for the buck are neither effective agents nor good investments. This kind of simplemindedness leads to trouble. After 9/11, when the terrorist attacks were examined by a commission and Langley was obliged to furnish evidence, the CIA disclosed that no agent recruitment had ever been prevented by the bad-boy rule.
Another argument takes the form that the prohibition and the IG have led to a risk averse CIA, an operations directorate reluctant to get its feet wet. That amounts to fear mongering. The risk aversion charge has actually been around nearly as long as the congressional oversight system. Each time there is a push to increase accountability on spy activity, the charge comes back from those seeking to avoid regulation. Spooks dreaded risk aversion when covert operations reporting mechanisms were under review, when Congress wanted the independent IG, and again when operatives refused to give lawmakers or the public access to the “legal memoranda” that “justified” torture or extrajudicial killing.
The truth is that, at the very moment the inspector general probed highhanded CIA refusals to apply rights norms in Central America, the DO had embarked on a high-risk, poorly conceived covert attempt to oust Saddam Hussein in Iraq, something called DB/Achilles. Squabbling Iraqi opposition and ethnic factions compromised the op. Jittery Washington officials let the project come apart.
Risk aversion comes from repetition of stupidity, not from accountability.
Agency officers involved in the Iraq fiasco were investigated by the FBI. The Senate committee and inspector general largely stayed out of it. In April 1996, after he’d spent a year on the hot seat, Justice dropped its probe of DO operator Robert Baer. Advice that operations officers should maintain million-dollar liability insurance policies flowed from proceedings like this—and not just to the women. Baer’s troubles came not from risk aversion but from CIA ghosts—from the agency’s contradictory tendencies to forge ahead, then run for cover when the institution seemed threatened. Agency lawyers protected the institution, not the man.
Another of Hitz’s inquiries was more personal. That would be the IG’s examination of the Aldrich Ames espionage case. Here the question became why it took Langley nearly a decade to expose the traitor, even though suspicions of a mole instantly deepened when the Soviets swept up virtually all the CIA agents in Russia over a short period in 1985. Aldrich H. Ames had been in Hitz’s training class. It was also poignant, after the glass-ceiling suit and Hitz’s misstep in the Brookner case, that CIA women led the counterspy team that caught Ames. Results of the IG inquiry leaked to the New York Times. Furious, Jim Woolsey, CIA director, ordered Hitz to undergo a polygraph test. Fred passed without difficulty.
On September 28, 1994, Hitz appeared before the Senate intelligence committee to discuss the Ames case. The IG had put a team of a dozen on it, acting on an unusual request from the SSCI, made directly to him rather than through the CIA director. For the first couple of months, for fear of tainting a criminal prosecution, the inquisitors had restricted themselves to background interviews with persons not likely to be witnesses. Once Ames pled guilty, the IG went to full speed but then had less time. Hitz also chose not to involve his deputy, Cinquegrana, except to compare the list of officials whose management of Ames was scrutinized, with a list of CIA awardees whose honors were held back due to the investigation. The major conclusion, that the sudden loss of virtually all agents in Russia did not receive enough attention quickly enough, appeared quite reasonable. Clair George, Richard F. Stolz, and Thomas A. Twetten led the DO during that time. George, of course, had been preoccupied by Iran-Contra, and Twetten by the Guatemala affair.
Bill Casey left Fred Hitz uncomfortable amounts of business. Cinquegrana knew where many of the bodies were buried. He had, for example, been involved in Casey’s effort to exempt the CIA from reporting drug trafficking to the Justice Department. The Senate formed a special committee to look into the drug trade in the early 1990s, and its hearings made many charges that linked the CIA’s Contra rebels to the flow of drugs into the United States The issue had already grown heated by August 1996, when San Jose Mercury News investigative reporter Gary Webb published a series of articles linking Los Angeles drug rings to the Contras, directly charging agency complicity. Director Deutch actually flew to Los Angeles to give a public press conference in November 1996—one of very few ever held by a spy chief—denying the charges.
Under pressure from California’s congressional delegation, Director Deutch agreed to an investigation. That, too, became an IG assignment, and Cinquegrana conducted the detailed inquiry, which produced two volumes of reporting, one on the California side and another focused on the Contras, especially in Costa Rica, but also Nicaragua and Honduras. Where trouble gathering information from CIA operating divisions might have been expected, there turned out to be remarkably little. Perhaps that had to do with their story. The inquiry found no CIA misbehavior with California drug rings, conceded that (uncertain numbers of) Contras had moved drugs, and argued that the CIA had been generally aware but lacked direct evidence.
Since Casey’s Central American wars already preoccupied the IG, Hitz went on to produce an investigation of agency activities in Honduras. In the Salvadoran civil war there had also been a single attack in which a number of U.S. Marines were killed, and the IG looked into what the CIA had known about that. By then Fred Hitz had decided his time was up. The controversy surrounding his investigations had been distracting, and he felt the IG office was now sufficiently established. Hitz left the CIA in the spring of 1998.
His successor was a natural. L. Britt Snider, long a lawyer and counsel to the Senate intelligence committee, had been an author of the legislation creating the independent inspector general, the annual intelligence authorization bills, and even the original Senate resolution creating the Select Committee on Intelligence. Britt had been a lawyer to the Church Committee back in 1975. The fifty-three-year-old graduated University of Virginia Law School, then joined the Army Signal Corps, serving as an officer in Vietnam. He returned as the war wound down, to work on constitutional rights for the Senate Judiciary Committee, and went from there to the Church investigation. Snider returned to his North Carolina home and set up a law practice, but Capitol Hill lured him back, and then he spent nearly a decade at the Pentagon as a civilian official in the intelligence field.
Snider joined the SSCI in January 1987 and stayed through February 1995, then directed the staff of the Aspin-Brown Commission. At the SSCI, Britt had been friends with George Tenet, and a few months after the latter ascended to director of central intelligence he enlisted Britt Snider as special counsel. President William J. Clinton found Snider an attractive candidate for IG for the same reason he appointed Tenet to lead the agency—the Senate would certainly confirm, and Clinton had trouble getting approval for CIA appointees.
At his confirmation hearing, Britt Snider spoke of his closeness to George Tenet—with whom the senators were also intimately acquainted—and said he and George agreed the IG must be completely independent. That proved fortuitous, because almost the first item on Snider’s IG agenda was an inquiry into Director Deutch’s handling of classified information—and Deutch had been the man who brought Tenet to Langley, originally as his second. Snider’s relationship with George Tenet endured, but the inspector general’s health suffered, and he felt obliged to take several leaves of absence.
The office settled down again in 2002. Then for the first time in the era of the modern IG, a CIA professional was nominated. John L. Helgerson had learned the trade as deputy to Snider. Helgerson had come up through Langley’s analytical side, a career analyst. His specialty had been North Africa and the Middle East, and he proved useful in the inquiries after 9/11. In the mid-1980s under Casey, Helgerson’s Africa portfolio expanded to include Latin American analysis. During that period, the DI produced some notorious reporting, such as a paper claiming that the Sandinistas were about to field Soviet jet fighters, which they never did. Later, as a top DI official, he had refused to remove heavy-handed managers who terrorized their people. Shielding one senior Soviet Analysis (SOVA) Division officer, most of whose staff put in for transfer, he browbeat the disaffected analysts rather than disciplining their wayward boss. He had a reputation for tacking with the wind, perhaps starting from his time as assistant for policy support under Stan Turner. Ultimately Helgerson rose to deputy director for intelligence, leading the entire analytical apparatus.
Jim Woolsey, as CIA director in 1994, rewarded Helgerson with a plum posting to London to liaise with MI-6. After returning, John did that stint for Britt Snider, and after a tour with the newly created mapping and geospatial agency he took charge of the National Intelligence Council (NIC), the community’s top analytical unit, responsible for the National Intelligence Estimates. In the months preceding the 9/11 attacks, the NIC did not read the omens. This was also the time the Bush administration began churning out phony charges that Iraq possessed nuclear and other weapons of mass destruction. Helgerson spent a good deal of his NIC period giving speeches. For all that, John L. Helgerson became a surprise as IG, rising to his calling.
On Helgerson’s watch, Langley’s directors came to dread the touch of the inspector general. No doubt some of them began to think nostalgically of the days when the IG, constricted, restricted, and carefully selected from friendly cadres, had been kept in a box. The last of Langley’s bosses to enjoy those benefits had been Richard Helms.