DONALD J. TRUMP MADE THE FIRST OFFICIAL STOP OF HIS PRESIDENCY on January 21, 2017, at Langley, the Central Intelligence Agency’s Virginia headquarters. The agency is headed into its seventieth year of existence. One can only imagine what was going through Trump’s mind as his minions took him there. This bold visit showed chutzpah, for President Trump had taken office having already picked several fights with America’s spooks.
Rather than articulating any well-considered perspective on the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), other U.S. spy outfits, or even the general subject of espionage, Mr. Trump had accused its director of being a leaker, the officers of behaving like Nazis, and the agency of being as hopelessly wrong as it was when George W. Bush wanted to know if Saddam Hussein had nuclear weapons. Its cherry-picked appreciations had helped Bush lead the nation to war. Now the agency—in combination with the director of national intelligence (DNI), the National Security Agency (NSA), the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), and others—was saying that Russia had intervened in U.S. electoral politics. Russian spies and cyberwizards had infiltrated the computers of American politicians and staffs, collecting embarrassing information, some of which had been used to smear Trump’s Democratic opponent Senator Hillary Clinton. What the Russians might have held on to for the purpose of directly manipulating Trump remained unknown, but the intelligence agencies had some illustrative examples that they showed the president-elect before his inauguration.
Donald Trump had already displayed an extraordinarily thin skin for an aspirant to the presidency. His standard tactic had been to deny every charge, even when documented on paper or film or tape, while attacking those stating or reporting the information. Trump’s routine tactics were to attack right back and do so without regard for the truth. Thus he had ruthlessly exploited allegations that Hillary Clinton, who had used a private e-mail server while secretary of state, had been guilty of revealing secret information.
When the FBI could find no evidence of that but reported some of Clinton’s messages missing, Mr. Trump had outrageously invited the Russians to hack her. Trump’s differences with U.S. intelligence began when the DNI and others started to warn of Russian intervention. After his election victory, Mr. Trump strongly criticized the CIA when officials went to brief him, and he refused to receive the President’s Daily Brief, one of the nation’s foremost intelligence products. Soon Trump was insulting U.S. “intelligence,” saying they needed extra time to concoct phony stories before meeting him, then demanding the resignations of the leaders of the principal U.S. agencies.
On January 21 there was already bad blood between the new president and his spy agencies. On one level, Trump’s gambit in going to speak at the CIA was like walking into a den of vipers. Indeed, the president wore an overcoat and never took it off, and he left after just fifteen minutes. Trump could have been wearing a bulletproof vest under the greatcoat. More likely he never intended to make more than a whistle-stop, a political stunt to distract attention from the massive Women’s March going on outside at that very moment, in hundreds of cities and towns in the United States and across the world, not least the U.S. capital, Washington, D.C., where the crowd matched those of the greatest protests in the 1960s and 1970s against the Vietnam War.
President Trump’s appearance at CIA headquarters took place while the protesters gathered. The bad blood meant the president had an opportunity to mend fences. But the event took on an odd character. One of the main features of the Old Headquarters Building at Langley is what is called the Memorial Wall. The Wall has a star chiseled on it for each CIA officer who has given his or her life for the nation. Some of the stars have no names, for the persons they represent are considered undercover even in death. At the moment, there are 117 stars chiseled there. The Wall has special meaning for America’s spies. President Trump entered the building and stood in front of the Wall to make his speech.
Trumpian bombast soon sent the president off on tangents, boasting of his “intelligence,” his inaugural crowds, and denouncing the media. Some CIA folk were angered by Trump’s use of the Memorial Wall to stage what was essentially a political event. His only reference to the Wall was to his standing in front of that “very, very special” monument. As if nothing had happened between the spooks and their leader, Trump called his spies “very, very special people.” He implied a peace offer. The president made the point that he’d selected the CIA for his very first public event, accused the media of making up the feud between him and the spooks, and declaimed, “I just want you to know, I am so behind you.” Or again, “I love you, I respect you, there’s nobody I respect more.” Trump intoned that he would give the spies so much backing, they would want less, and he presumed that most of them—at one of America’s less political agencies—had voted for him. The jocularity seemed awkward, but it was pure Trump.
But more important are the bits and pieces of what President Trump said that truly concerned the CIA and U.S. intelligence. Great things, of course. In terms of concrete aims, there was one, “radical Islamic terrorism.” In a clearer hint, he spoke of Iraq and Syria and the group called ISIS, oil, and how the United States should have kept it when we fought there before, but “maybe we’ll have another chance.” The wars had gone on for longer than any America has fought before. More generally the president said, “We have not used the real abilities that we have.” Equally ominously, “We have to start winning again.”
For what does President Trump want to use those capabilities? His modus operandi, on subject after subject since announcing his plans to run for president, had been to assert that he had a strategy but refuse to reveal what it might be. Off-the-cuff remarks promising one thing or another substitute. His cry of “America First” implied a withdrawal from the world scene. Conversely, at various times the new U.S. leader has promised to put more of the CIA’s operations officers into the field, to smite enemies harder than ever—in particular in Syria and Iraq as indicated above. Not long into his presidency he answered Syrian government chemical attacks against citizens with American cruise missiles. Trump promised tortures even more severe than those of the CIA under George W. Bush, to the degree that former spy chieftains warned Trump he’d have to bring his own pail to interrogation sessions. Since his CIA speech, President Trump has told an interviewer that he will defer to the views of his agency director and his secretary of defense but that he, personally, thinks torture works well. The president repeated that formula at the press appearance marking his first meeting with a foreign leader, Prime Minister Theresa May of the United Kingdom, even as the British leader rejected torture.
Meanwhile, President Trump reached outside the intelligence establishment for his CIA director, appointing Michael Pompeo, a West Point graduate and Tea Party supporter who, as a congressional representative from Kansas, had sat on the House Intelligence Committee and called for the execution of Edward Snowden. His first director of national intelligence, Dan Coats, was another politician cut from similar cloth. In an expression of incoherence, Trump prohibited the top U.S. spy (Coats) from the National Security Council, while putting the CIA boss (Pompeo) on the guest list. That lasted only a few weeks, but it is anyone’s guess where this is headed.
Though Trump stumbled through his visit to the CIA and told the crowd he loved them, the “reconciliation” seemed hollow—deserving of those demeaning quotation marks. Thus the Trump presidency began with a contradiction: a cleavage between the spies who populate Langley and the man who inhabits the White House. How deep that chasm remains will be revealed by events.
The agencies in this troubled relationship are going to be called upon for even greater efforts on covert operations. Mr. Trump saying the CIA had been “restrained” could only have reminded many of those gathered by the wall of heroes that the agency had baggage of its own. There are ghosts stalking the halls at Langley. At the moment of Trump’s visit, the CIA was still in the throes of waves of recrimination resulting from the tactics—including secret overseas prisons and torture—that it had resorted to in the war on terror. Its leaders had attempted to evade responsibility for those acts. Senior officers had had to give up ambitions for top jobs because of their links to these projects. Contract psychologists who had helped administer the torture were being sued at that very moment. Yet President Trump wanted more.
The things Trump wants from the Central Intelligence Agency are very much like what the agency has done in the past. Before exploring what the future may hold, we need to delve into those times. The Ghosts of Langley excavates that past. It is a history of the CIA viewed through the eyes of key figures, focusing particularly on covert operations. It tells how the agency, over seven decades, has resisted—and finally decoupled itself from—government accountability. Slowly at first, but with increasing momentum, officials have broken fetters of all types. The pace reached a breakneck speed with torture and black prisons in the war on terror. A climax came when the Senate intelligence committee tried to investigate those things. Efforts to defeat outside attempts to enforce accountability, in the recent past, have escalated to highly troubling and even criminal acts.
This is the first book to relate the agency’s current behavior toward authority to its founding and earlier history. The Ghosts of Langley puts fresh light on classic agency covert operations from Poland to Hungary, Indonesia to Iran-Contra, the Bay of Pigs too. It also lifts the veil covering the CIA’s role in the war on terror, going beyond the actions to the coverup. The account here follows the covert operations and shows how CIA lawyers have enabled them.
Even the CIA’s own lawyers believed its original charter did not permit covert operations. Top agency officials found themselves defending against former supporters, even as early as 1952, when Russian adversaries tore off their cloaks and revealed themselves behind the fictive anti-Soviet partisan movement the CIA had been duped into supporting. Spies and stratagems have failed repeatedly, at times spectacularly. The CIA’s secret funding of the National Student Association became a big scandal during Lyndon Johnson’s presidency. In the mid-1970s, the inquiries by the Church and Pike committees in the U.S. Congress deeply embarrassed the spooks, an embarrassment exceeded only by the controversies swirling around alleged obstruction of justice flowing from the CIA’s secret prisons in the past decade. In their memoirs, agency insiders largely focus on their own careers or on one or a few episodes in this story. Outside observers and analysts most often narrate one striking project or campaign among the secret wars. Historians covering the agency’s entire history have so much ground to cover, they tend to tread lightly on deeper examinations.
But America’s spies have a heritage, one that is missing from these accounts. Intelligence agents work for an organization that looks back as well as forward. The CIA honors its heroes, laments its fallen, regrets its dupes and disasters. The examples of past spooks are always there to encourage—and to warn—the current generation of CIA officers. For this reason, Ghosts of Langley follows the exploits (or misadventures) of the great, the good, and the misguided. Instead of adopting a straight chronological approach, this account groups the spies by character types and presents their stories as lenses showing the larger picture of the agency’s evolution.
I have employed the metaphor ghosts quite deliberately. The ghosts that inhabit Langley headquarters may not be corporeal, but these individuals and others like them are exemplars. The legends of the forebears furnish illustrations for today—and tomorrow. They are both good, like Jennifer Matthews or Eloise Page, and bad, say Dewey Clarridge or Jim Mitchell. Some—like Robert Ames, perhaps—are sad, heavy with potential unfulfilled. Langley has seen them all. Its halls echo with the footsteps of past spymasters and their henchmen—and henchwomen. The CIA used to picture itself as America’s primo Cold War agency. Had it not reached so far and endeavored so much, it would have fewer ghosts. Spymasters have tried to lighten the atmosphere, speaking of headquarters as a “campus,” as if this were some university and not an agency practicing dark arts. The image of a haunted house fits much better. Indeed, every day that the militarization of the CIA increases, the agency is haunted even more by its drift away from the classic arts of espionage and intelligence analysis. Those who advocated a peacetime intelligence agency for America would themselves be haunted—by what their offspring has become.
Chronicles of the Central Intelligence Agency have conventionally focused entirely on the derring-do of operatives. A major theme here is how the operations, especially the failed ones, have driven the spies to contrive arguments and explanations they have relied upon—repeatedly—to escape from criticism and accountability. The narrative will show that in the most recent period the CIA reached new heights in this art of rationalization. You will encounter spy chieftains and operators but also visit little-known nooks of agency history. The growing power of lawyers at the agency is manifest. The oversight and control of covert operations have been critically dependent on a regulatory framework interpreted, in the first instance, by lawyers. In The Ghosts of Langley, you will see the operatives in their relation to the Delphic interpreters of regulation. The agency’s treatment of women officers is an exemplary case. It is critical to identify the framework under which the CIA labors, and the ghosts give us new eyes to glimpse the stages of its history.
When Dick Cheney, George W. Bush’s vice president, talked about walking on the dark side, he was referring to the Central Intelligence Agency, as well as the U.S. military’s Special Operations Command. Mr. Cheney hinted obliquely at what the Central Intelligence Agency had been put up to—reaching past long-understood norms of behavior. As The Ghosts of Langley documents the Bush era, it reveals how the arguments developed in the past have been employed in new contexts, sometimes even in reverse, to deflect charges of torture (criminal assault, assault with deadly weapons, assault with or without intent to kill), conspiracy, obstruction of justice, evasion of legal oversight, and more. Those charges threatened the CIA’s existence. The arguments and actions deployed to excuse failure, misadventure, and worse have been used to get past the monitors, disarm their objections, and avoid penalties. Each time the CIA skirted its overseers, the fabric of discipline, both within the agency and among the politicians who try to control it, has been weakened. The most recent and dramatic of the agency’s disasters is clearly the CIA’s torture program and the fallout from it. The torture program lay at the heart of U.S. actions in the war on terror, and with it this book begins.
Originally I aimed at a more conventional account. However, the writing took place amid a fierce struggle between CIA figures and congressional monitors on the oversight committees over the progress of, and even the principle of, an investigation of the agency’s actions in its detention and interrogation projects. Egregious enough to trigger the investigation in the first place, the agency’s actions that emerged steadily became darker, while its success at evading scrutiny grew ever more stark.
I have written a number of previous books on the Central Intelligence Agency, and one of my concerns has been to track the CIA’s relationship with its overseers. As events of the war on terror unfolded, I began to see how central the fight over investigation of this agency project was becoming to the entire oversight enterprise. That understanding reshaped this book. A central point in Presidents’ Secret Wars, my earliest work on this subject, was to argue that White House controls over the intelligence agencies offered an alternative to congressional oversight. More recently, in Safe for Democracy, the emphasis, at least so far as this element is concerned, showed an ebb and flow of White House versus congressional controls. In The Family Jewels, one goal was to demonstrate that the Central Intelligence Agency had erected a fortress of secrecy. Here I think the ghosts will tell us that the CIA has effectively broken free of congressional oversight, under conditions where White House control mechanisms have become increasingly ineffective and in which the agency, assuming a defensive posture, has used its fortress of secrecy in a way that will set up its next failure. If a new president with an itchy trigger finger embroils CIA in waters over its head, the impending disaster becomes ever more likely.
This record is not made up or based on journalistic speculations. To the greatest extent possible, I use sources that are entirely from the agency—official documents and releases, CIA histories, memoirs of former spies, and congressional hearings and reports bearing on agency activities. Press stories document some individual points, appearing where they figure as leaks the spooks seek to plug or where they denote media revelations that became part of this chronicle. The declassified annals, you will see, are quite sufficient to make this a stunning story, and I have made the narrative as tight as I can.
This book could not have been written by a CIA insider. If it had, either the text would be stuck in the limbo that nearly sank the Senate torture report, or you would see a sentence here and there surrounded by pages of blacked-out text. It is a sad commentary on how far our system has fallen that outsiders must say the things that intelligence persons cannot.
I have been studying the CIA for four decades. Along this lengthy road, I have been helped by people in many places. I want to specially acknowledge the Truman Library Institute, which assisted with a research grant. I owe a debt, too, to the staffs of the CIA and other government agencies, who have, however grudgingly, declassified material at my, and others’, request. The records declassified by Freedom of Information Act and other requests, the CIA’s own historical review initiatives, expiration of secrecy authority, and legal proceedings are all indispensable to making this authoritative record. Former agency people who have spoken to me at various times have been very helpful too. Librarians and archivists at the presidential libraries and the National Archives, the air force and army war colleges, the Naval Operational Archives, the libraries of Columbia University, New York University, the City of New York, George Washington University, and Montgomery County have all been vital to the completion of this project. At the Lyndon B. Johnson Presidential Library I’ve not until now had the opportunity to specially acknowledge the late Ted Gittinger, or the recently retired Regina Greenwell. Lara Hall continues to handle my declassification requests there very ably. At the Harry S. Truman Library I am recently indebted to David Clark, Sam Rushay, Randy Sowell, Tammy Williams, Jim Armistead, Jan Davis, and Lisa Sullivan. At the Dwight D. Eisenhower Library my thanks go to Mary Burtzloff, Nicole Beck, Deanna Kolling, and Michelle Kopfer. To all of these people, my great thanks. I owe a special debt of gratitude to Ellen Pinzur, my first reader, who has saved me from many pitfalls. At the New Press editor Carl Bromley, managing editor Maury Botton, and copyeditor Gary Stimeling saved the manuscript from many faults.These persons have all contributed things of value to this narrative. I alone am responsible for its errors.
—John Prados
Washington, D.C.
January 2017