AN UNCOMFORTABLE INTERREGNUM followed Bill Casey’s collapse. With Casey in and out of the hospital, Robert M. Gates served as acting DCI. On February 2, 1987, Casey resigned. The White House faced the sudden need to find a new director of central intelligence. Years before, at the outset of Ronald Reagan’s presidency, Gates had told colleagues he wanted the top job. Now he came close to getting it. So close. The day Casey resigned, President Reagan nominated Gates as DCI in his own right. Perhaps the Reagan White House, beset by Iran-Contra, had not the energy or vision to seek out a new candidate for DCI. Or possibly Reagan saw Gates as a loyalist. Perhaps the call was for a professional but not someone with roots in the clandestine service. Gates fit that bill too. In any event, for a time it looked like Bob Gates would be moving into the director’s office.
The Senate would have to approve the Gates nomination, but the White House had clearly felt out the ground there. In the 1986 off-year elections the Democrats regained control of Congress, making Oklahoma Senator David L. Boren chairman of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence. Boren and a number of others reacted positively to the Gates nomination. Even Vermont’s Pat Leahy saw the Gates appointment as a wise move. Opinion held that Gates would be asked tough questions on Iran-Contra but then confirmed.
Bob Gates put his best foot forward. There could be no denying his background as a superbly qualified intelligence officer. He had done that work for the air force and the CIA, beginning with Soviet nuclear weapons. He had seen diplomacy on the U.S. delegation to arms control talks. Gates had crafted the NIEs as an assistant national intelligence officer, as national intelligence officer, and later as ex officio chairman of the National Intelligence Council. He had done management as an assistant to a CIA director, an executive staff director, and as deputy director. Gates had headed one of the agency’s tribes as deputy director for intelligence. He knew the White House, serving there under Jimmy Carter. As DDCI he had gotten a taste of covert operations and the clandestine service. In twenty-one years, in other words, Robert Gates had acquired wide agency experience. He had made some enemies, in particular as he handled intelligence reporting during the Reagan years, but in 1987 those people did not contest his nomination, which seemed unstoppable.
Except for Iran-Contra. Gates gave that his best shot too. Not coincidentally it became known that when he took over as acting director, Gates had recorded a classified video affirming that the CIA would act only under legal authorities and would never again do anything like the Iran arms shipments without a proper presidential finding. When hearings opened on February 17, Gates quickly made it known that he felt Iran-Contra had broken all the rules. He would resign if ordered to do something like that. Gates regretted not following up on the scattered indications of illegality he had perceived. But the nominee’s assurances foundered on the rocks of the Iran-Contra investigations. A number of questions had yet to be answered then, including whether Gates had helped mislead Congress, the extent of his participation in concocting false chronologies, his role in efforts to have the CIA take over the Secord “Enterprise,” when Gates learned of the diversion of funds to the contras, and what he had done once he knew it.
The more questions, the more Bob Gates’s chances disappeared into the maw of assorted illegalities. Had Gates known of violations of the Arms Export Control Act? Had he known of the “retrospective” finding? What had he done? Again and again. At this point Congress created a joint committee to investigate Iran-Contra, and it did not expect answers for months. Then, on February 22, the public learned that in 1985 Gates had sent the White House a memorandum from one of his national intelligence officers advocating the improvement of relations with Iran through arms sales, a view at variance with existing estimates. Two days later the joint committee asked that Gates’s nomination be put on hold. Senator Boren posed the alternatives of a vote or a withdrawal of the nomination while senior congressional leaders warned the White House that a fight over Gates would concentrate yet more attention on Iran-Contra. Reagan, who had just released a presidential commission report in an effort to put the scandal behind him, did not care to hear that.
Robert Gates decided to withdraw. The next day the administration took back the nomination. Gates issued a statement defending his actions during the Iran-Contra affair, denying he had covered up evidence or suppressed improprieties. Eventually the joint committee cleared Gates of illegal actions, and the Iran-Contra special prosecutor affirmed that conclusion, but there had been failings. Gates cites mitigating circumstances in his memoirs, where he writes:
I would go over those points in my mind a thousand times in the months and years to come, but the criticisms still hit home. A thousand times I would go over the “might-have-beens” if I had raised more hell than I did with Casey about nonnotification of Congress, if I had demanded the NSC get out of covert action, if I had insisted that CIA not play by NSC rules, if I had been more aggressive with the DO in my first months as DDCI, if I had gone to the Attorney General.
It became Robert Gates’s misfortune to be swept up in a web of illegality so immense it brought dangers of the impeachment of a president, which made Gates small fry indeed and virtually overnight neutered Ronald Reagan.
In withdrawing the Gates nomination, President Reagan simultaneously announced his appointment of William B. Webster to lead the agency. Webster liked to be called “Judge”—he had been a jurist on the federal bench, eventually on the Eighth Circuit Court of Appeals. Where CIA denizens begrudged Stansfield Turner his preferred title of admiral, no one held back with Judge Webster. Dedication to the law and to his native St. Louis, at least as deep as Turner’s to the navy, had seen Webster through law school at Washington University, then a decade as a St. Louis attorney, another as a U.S. district attorney, and then the bench. In 1978 President Carter named Webster to head the FBI, the post he held when Reagan asked him to move to Langley. Three days shy of his fifty-third birthday, Judge Webster came with stellar reviews—squeaky clean, exactly what Reagan then needed. The Senate intelligence committee approved his nomination in early May, and the full Senate consented to it shortly thereafter. Judge Webster was sworn in immediately.
Bob Gates felt the weight of Iran-Contra lifted from his shoulders, only to hear from his brother that their father had just died. As Gates dealt with personal tragedy, Webster established himself at Langley. Again like Admiral Turner, Judge Webster brought in a coterie as his inner circle—this time of former FBI aides. That move scarcely endeared Webster to CIA staff, though he took some of the sting away by announcing Gates would remain DDCI.
The new CIA director had a background in government and even in the security field, where his time at the FBI had included notable investigations of corruption among congressmen, the Korean CIA, and, of course, Iran-Contra. In Webster’s last months at the FBI the Bureau had looked into Southern Air Transport, the agency’s quasi-proprietary. But Webster’s knowledge of intelligence, mostly peripheral, resulted from participation in the National Foreign Intelligence Board, the DCI’s committee of the directors of all the U.S. intelligence agencies. His background in foreign affairs, even thinner, did not help in the corridors at Langley.
Webster’s tenure has received mixed reviews. Melissa Boyle Mahle, an officer with the DO’s Near East Division, saw the Judge as isolating himself, managing rather than leading CIA, passing Olympian judgments, treating the agency as something dirty or infectious. “He did not lead the troops, or ever really try to get to know them,” she writes. The chief of station in Brussels, Richard Holm, felt Webster never really fit in but nevertheless had been a good choice, and Holm was sorry when he left. Floyd Paseman, by 1987 a branch chief in the East Asia Division soon elevated to the management staff, believes Webster “did a terrific job of restoring the CIA’s image.” Dewey Clarridge asserts that Webster “didn’t have the stomach for bold moves of any sort.” Robert Gates acknowledges the criticisms but calls Webster a “godsend” to the CIA, observing that none of the complaints “amounted to a hill of beans compared to what he brought to CIA that May: leadership, the respect of Congress, and a sterling character.”
An early test for Webster would be how he dealt with Iran-Contra. The Judge tried to fend off congressional efforts to substitute an “independent” inspector general for the CIA’s in-house operation. Congress saw an IG report on the arms sales rendered in early 1987, and it paled next to the facts established in Capitol Hill’s own investigations. Suggestions for an independent IG, appointed by the president and confirmed by the Senate, had been around since the Church Committee, along with the argument that typical IGs, feeling sidelined in that position and hoping for promotion out of it, had little incentive for deep inquiry. Republican Senator William S. Cohen of Maine, then vice chairman of the Senate intelligence committee, introduced a bill to create the independent IG shortly before Webster arrived. When Republican Senator Arlen Specter of Pennsylvania tabled a broader measure including the same provision, both Cohen and committee chairman David Boren supported it. Judge Webster argued that he had made extensive changes to the IG office and that the CIA did not need a statutory post, even asserting that he could groom officials for senior assignments while an independent IG might inhibit his duty to protect sources and methods. That worked for a time, but more proposals appeared until one passed Congress in 1989, signed into law by President Bush that November.
Meanwhile Judge Webster took his time on Iran-Contra particulars. Partly his reluctance was due to ambivalent feelings. George, Alan Fiers, and a couple of others received performance bonuses even now, though the DDO’s was cut by half. Webster believed Clair George, a friend, innocent of any wrongdoing. Webster also knew that George H. W. Bush liked Dewey Clarridge. He did too, though concluding later that Clarridge had been a loose cannon, not always candid. Webster decided to reprimand Clarridge and drop him a grade, and transfer George. Both retired. But he fired Alan Fiers and secured resignations from Jim Adkins and Joe Fernandez. Later the DCI presented George with the National Intelligence Medal. Webster also prohibited CIA lawyers from defending agency personnel. Langley soon advised officers to take liability insurance in case they be called to account for their operations. Melissa Mahle, for one, felt fortunate to be nowhere near headquarters and, like others, tried to keep her head down.
While the Central Intelligence Agency struggled to regain its footing, dramatic changes were under way in the Cold War. Beset by economic problems, Russia moved rapidly toward accommodation with the United States. The change first became evident in nuclear arms control. Then Moscow publicized its change to a “defensive” military doctrine. In Afghanistan it invited the negotiations that led to its military withdrawal; in Angola it supported a similar negotiation that ended Cuban intervention. As developments occurred, the CIA’s challenge to interpret what was happening in Russia became even greater due to the sudden disappearance of its agents, a result of the as yet unknown treason of agency officer Aldrich Ames and FBI special agent Robert Hanssen. Webster faced an urgent need to realign his Directorate for Operations.
Much had changed since Bill Casey. Despite the apparent success of paramilitary action in Afghanistan, covert operations were under assault from Iran-Contra. Russia had again become an enigma to the DO. Meanwhile the Middle East and terrorism loomed much larger as security problems while secret wars continued in Africa. Judge Webster needed someone he trusted at the DO’s helm. Webster had graduated from Amherst College in 1947. Two years behind him followed a friend going to college on the GI Bill. Richard F. Stolz had fought in Europe with the 100th Infantry Division in World War II. Now an Old Hand at CIA, Stolz became Bill Webster’s solution to the DO problem.
Actually recruited into the CIA by an Amherst classmate in 1950, Stolz had done his first tour in Trieste. A spy in the classic mold, not a covert operator, he had served not only in Yugoslavia but under diplomatic cover in Germany and Bulgaria. Considered a star, he made chief of station in Moscow in 1964. Stolz had closed out the Italian political action as chief of station in Rome from 1966 to 1969. In the 1970s he headed the CIA in Belgrade and DO’s Western European Division and almost became deputy director then. But Stansfield Turner selected John McMahon over Stolz, whom he made baron of the Soviet Division. By the time Casey arrived, Dick Stolz held the premier supergrade post of station chief in London. Casey passed over Stolz a second time to choose Max Hugel, asking the fifty-six-year-old spy to come home as a handholder. Stolz would have none of it. He retired instead. Stolz consulted for the Casey CIA, which left him untarnished by Iran-Contra. Dewey Clarridge viewed Stolz as “somewhat timid operationally,” others saw him as prudent. Either way his excellent relations with Judge Webster made Richard Stolz an effective DDO.
Probably Webster’s most important initiative at CIA was to accept the concept of “fusion” and endow the method with concrete expression. The latest panacea in intelligence, fusion presumed that a real marriage of disciplines could generate payoffs greater than the contributions. At one level this meant bringing together all sources of data for step-shift gains in perspective. Another aspect of fusion was that it represented a new effort to break down walls between the clandestine service, the scientific wizards, and the intelligence analysts, who would be brigaded together in fusion “centers.” Focused on specific functional areas instead of the largely geographic divisions that prevailed in the DO, the centers promised to enable operators to use a more comprehensive database for planning.
Judge Webster built on the efforts of Casey, who been the first to establish such a fusion unit. That entity, the Counterterrorism Center (CTC), had partly been foisted upon him by a presidential commission on terrorism headed by George H. W. Bush, which pushed for the unit in its report. The CIA had previously responded to this threat with a staff within the DO, then with a counterterrorism operations group, neither possessing the scope or resources of CTC. Dewey Clarridge claims some credit as well, having written a paper fleshing out the idea at the close of 1985, following terrorist attacks on the Rome and Vienna airports. The irrepressible Clarridge moved from DO’s European Division to head CTC, backed by a finding enabling the CIA to take direct action to preempt terrorists.
Webster’s contribution lay in broadening this effort, making the CTC a priority at the Directorate for Operations. In 1988–1989 the CIA director created new fusion centers to deal with international narcotics and counterintelligence. Dick Stolz played along, attempting to hold down the barons, who objected to being deprived of the officers and budget money siphoned off to the fusion centers. The division chiefs had plenty at stake in this battle and good means to fight it, for they essentially controlled the assignments and promotions of officers in their units. Word down the line in the clandestine service was that employees concerned about their prospects should be loath to work at the centers. The CTC started out with people and money for major operations, but Clarridge’s successors could not maintain that momentum.
Although this moves a bit ahead of our story, Judge Webster took advantage of the collapse of Russia’s Eastern European empire in 1989 to try to defuse the opposition to his changes. These events had great significance for DO missions. Webster and Stolz established a group of senior officers to brainstorm a strategic plan for the future directorate. Dick Holm, back from Brussels to run the Career Management Staff, played a key role. After weeks of heartache, Holm’s group came up with a plan to sell within the DO, to the CIA as a whole, and on Capitol Hill. To Director Webster’s relief, the plan acknowledged the role of fusion centers.
The proliferation of fusion centers continued through the 1990s, and tensions between the centers and line operators remain today, more than two decades since creation of the first of them. In fact the Intelligence Reform Act of 2004, by giving a new director of national intelligence the authority to create his own fusion centers (with a national CTC assigned to him by law), promises to reinvigorate this struggle.
Other immese changes lay in store for the United States and the Central Intelligence Agency. In November 1988 Americans elected George Herbert Walker Bush to become president. Barely a month later, fatefully on Pearl Harbor Day, December 7, Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev gave a speech at the UN General Assembly in which he publicly retreated from Cold War confrontation. Gorbachev announced major unilateral cuts in Soviet troops in East Germany, Eastern Europe more broadly, and even Mongolia, coupled with reductions in Russian military manpower. The speech included language suggesting that Eastern European nations were entitled to self-determination. Given the Soviet withdrawal from Afghanistan, Gorbachev’s UN speech carried huge implications. Bush, the only President of the United States ever to have headed the CIA, moved cautiously, but the whole of his presidency would be dominated by the retraction of Soviet power and the eventual collapse of the Soviet Union.
The CIA too was wary of developments in Russia. Agency analysts had long foreseen growing problems, understood Gorbachev to be responding to a contracting economy while trying to preserve a version of Communist power, and pointed out specific fault lines in the Soviet situation. Analysts knew the Russians were spending large amounts sustaining foreign clients—the CIA projected Soviet expenditures from 1981 to 1986 to back Nicaragua, Afghanistan, and Angola alone at $13 billion, plus another $5 billion to $7 billion a year just for Cuba. But appreciating the motive forces in Gorbachev’s evolving policy seems to have been too much for Langley. Briefing senators on the meaning of Gorbachev’s speech, the national intelligence officer for the Soviet Union and key analysts, for example, portrayed the moves as tactical.
At the Directorate for Operations a similar attitude prevailed. Richard Stolz feared being taken in. Burton L. Gerber, a legendary case officer and street man in Eastern Europe and station chief in Moscow, now heading the Soviet and East European Division, had doubts too. Gerber questioned what CIA saw on the surface. One hint of change was that, miracle mirabilis, beginning in December 1987 the CIA began having its own sit-downs with Soviet intelligence, but the Russians certainly weren’t giving away the store. Worry about a mole within the agency simultaneously focused the spooks even more than usual on spy-versus-spy espionage rather than the positive intelligence mission. As then Deputy Director Gates puts it, “the American government, including CIA, had no idea in January 1989 that a tidal wave of history was about to break upon us.”
Gates soon left Langley—President Bush’s national security adviser, Brent Scowcroft, asked him to the White House as deputy. President Bush also wanted his choice for director of central intelligence to signal confidence to the community and—no doubt recalling his own experience at Jimmy Carter’s hands—wished to break the cycle of every president bringing in a fresh CIA director. He decided to keep Judge Webster. Gates’s successor as DDCI would be Richard J. Kerr, again a professional drawn from the ranks of analysts. It would thus be Judge Webster and Richard Kerr who gazed in amazement as the tidal wave of history hit the beach. Meanwhile Bush engaged in a series of lengthy and sterile policy reviews. When the rubber hit the road at the end of the Cold War, American officials would be bystanders.
It took President Bush several months to move off dead center in his approach to Gorbachev and Eastern Europe. In mid-April 1989 the president ended certain trade restrictions on Poland and gave the first of several speeches on Poland, Eastern Europe, and Russia. By then the Polish military-Communist government had acknowledged its labor and democratic opposition by opening “round-table” talks with them, agreeing to free elections under a formula designed to preserve Communist control. Bush scheduled a visit to Poland. Perhaps the Eastern European upheaval beginning in Poland betokened in some way the CIA’s propaganda there, though nothing it had done had the scope necessary to trigger a tidal wave. In any case, events in Poland were soon eclipsed by those in East Germany. By the time Bush reached Poland that July, East Germany had begun moving toward transformation, and Hungary had arrived, its Communist Party suddenly disavowing Leninism.
Restive East Germans began escaping to the West through Hungary or Czechoslovakia. Efforts to seal East Germany’s borders brought mass public demonstrations that dwarfed the 1953 East Berlin riots. This time the Russians rejected intervention. Gorbachev gave no comfort to German Communists who wished to crush the mobs. Instead the East German government fell, and the cabinet that took over from them resigned in its turn. Their successors told East Germans they could leave the country without special permission. On the night of November 9–10 deliriously excited crowds in both East and West Berlin began tearing down the Wall piece by piece.
These events electrified Washington and the CIA. President Bush sat in his Oval Office when Brent Scowcroft entered to tell him that reports indicated the East German government had opened its border. It was mid-afternoon. They went into the study to watch live on television.
At Langley America’s secret warriors took to the hallways. Excited gossip filled the air, champagne materialized, the spooks told war stories. Even the barons. Burton Gerber had moved that summer to squire the European Division, his place at the Russia House taken by Milton Bearden, a promotion for work in the Afghan War. Bearden heard from Richard Rolph, his station chief in East Berlin, that the border guards were really standing down, and people were crossing with alacrity. Rolph went out to mix in the crowds at Checkpoint Charlie. Bearden, like Bush, turned on the television, surfing between Cable News Network and the CIA’s satellite access to German TV. Uncle Milty had made a point of going out onto the bridge over which the Russians had pulled out of Afghanistan; it would not be long until he made his own pilgrimage to Checkpoint Charlie.
Over the next months the Communist governments of Eastern Europe were swept away. Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Poland, Romania, all went down. The Iron Curtain disappeared. These nations put in democratic governments, or at least as close to democratic as possible for societies raised on a diet of Marxism. Behind the questions of what the CIA knew and when, of whether Langley had “missed” the end of the Cold War and the collapse of the Soviet Union, lay an anomaly: America’s premier Cold War agency had had only a bit part in the largest expansion of democracy to occur since the fall of the monarchies after World War I. Of course there had been agency operations in the East, but to claim great credit for the CIA in these events would be a significant distortion of reality. Instead, in 1989 as in 1953–1954, the agency created to fight the Russians continued to expend the vast majority of its money, talent, and effort in the Third World. As the Cold War ended, several of those Third World operations persisted, if not unabated, at least as a form of broken-backed secret war.
As with every president during the time of the CIA, George Bush inherited secret wars begun by predecessors. But he had an advantage only Lyndon Johnson had previously enjoyed—as a member of the preceding administration he had had the opportunity to know the origins and status of the actions. In Bush’s case the primary theaters were Angola, Afghanistan, Libya, and Nicaragua. These secret wars entailed an assortment of headaches which left Ronald Reagan’s successor to cope as best he could.
By 1989 Angola had begun implementation of a multilateral agreement that provided for South African and Cuban withdrawal and reconciliation among warring parties. Bush continued CIA funding for UNITA through at least two budget cycles. In 1990 the president vetoed the intelligence appropriation (retaining the preceding year’s funding level) over a dispute on findings, as will be seen later. The second time around he kicked up a ruckus with the oversight committees to obtain a new peak appropriation, $80 million. Beyond that, evidence is sparse. Elections for a government were held, and the MPLA agreed to a coalition. But Jonas Savimbi, not satisfied with the outcome, had himself smuggled out of Luanda in a coffin and took up arms anew. Savimbi had key subordinates, including relatives, murdered. Whatever the purpose of the CIA’s secret war in Angola, no one any longer could speak of democracy. The conflict had lost any claim to noble cause.
The Angolan war sputtered on for another decade. The United Nations brokered a new cease-fire and sent a peacekeeping force to the war-torn land. UNITA shot down a United Nations aircraft, South Africans resumed their covert intervention, Angolans starved, and amnesty offers to UNITA were spurned. Only Savimbi’s death in battle in 2002 seems finally to have brought the conflict to a close. Had the Ford administration not begun this secret war, Angola might have been spared a quarter-century of misery. Had the Reagan administration not resumed the CIA covert operation, it is likely that Chester Crocker’s diplomatic solution would have crystallized sooner, though there is no telling whether it would have stuck.
As for Afghanistan, Soviet withdrawal left the situation virtually unchanged. The mujahedeen remained pitted against Najibullah’s Democratic Republic. The Russians sent Najibullah arms and cash, the CIA continued to support the muj. New weapons appeared on the battlefields, to the point that frustrated government forces, unable to strike down the resistance, began bombarding them with long-range missiles. President Bush made Afghanistan a subject of bilateral conversations between Washington and Moscow, as well as several personal meetings with Mikhail Gorbachev. Over time the superpowers agreed to stop their aid to the erstwhile proxies. The CIA handed over a final payment, a golden parachute, to the resistance.
Najibullah’s control gradually weakened. His power was decisively compromised when a general and Uzbek warlord, Rashid Dostum, defected, shifting the balance of forces. By the time Kabul fell in 1992, Bush had disengaged the United States. Coup attempts began a new round of civil war between the Dostum-Masoud forces and the Peshawar-based resistance groups. Popular frustration with corruption and infighting among the warlords and fundamentalists led to the rise of new mullahs and an even more fundamentalist movement called the Taliban. Pakistani intelligence shifted their support to the Taliban, which introduced its own rocket attacks and went on to victory, conquering Kabul themselves in September 1996. They executed Najibullah, who had been sheltered by the United Nations. The Taliban admitted Osama bin Laden and his Al Qaeda. These events led directly to the terror war that continues today.
On Nicaragua President Bush steered a careful course. He believed in the necessity of a truce with Congress on the contras. The CIA’s project had ended in 1988. Langley’s division chief, Jerry Gruner, watched as diplomatic contacts led to partial agreements. Congress approved humanitarian aid to tide the rebels over into 1989, by which time Managua had scheduled elections for February 1990. Infighting among contra factions revealed fissures in the rebellion itself. Enrique Bermudez lost his commanding position, though he continued to function in that titular role. James Baker, secretary of state for Bush, refused to meet contra leaders, but he backed humanitarian aid through the Nicaraguan elections. Some leaders finally saw the president. Bush remained cool to their pleas.
The president took up the matter of Soviet arms with Gorbachev in their initial meetings as well as at the December 1989 Malta summit, to be told that Russia had halted shipments to Nicaragua. Cuba filled the void. American officials disputed the Soviet aid halt. Gruner and the CIA played a political action role in the elections themselves, fueled by $9 million in Bush administration electoral assistance. The Sandinistas lost, an outcome most U.S. officials had believed Managua would not permit. That says something about the Sandinistas too. International observers, headed by McGeorge Bundy and Sol Linowitz, pronounced the voting fair. In March 1990 there were slightly more than 6,000 contra troops in Nicaragua, among a total claimed force of about 15,000. These soldiers began regrouping and disarming, ending the long secret war. Between 8,500 and 11,500 contra rebels died in the CIA’s secret war. Casualty figures for Nicaraguan civilians and the Sandinista military are not available.
The last of the crossover covert operations concerned Libya. Reagan had never abandoned his enmity for Muammar Gadhafi, though after previous misadventures he needed a new formula. Gadhafi furnished the means with a fiasco of his own, a strike into Chad in 1988 that ended with the capture of hundreds of Libyan soldiers. The CIA recruited six hundred of these men for a new strike force. They volunteered in order to stay out of prisoner camps. A fresh anti-Gadhafi political front formed under Abdel Moneim al-Huni, who rejected CIA overtures. The project had to be tied to royalist interests. Gradually a new CIA initiative evolved, stimulated by the bombing of Pan American flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland, in December 1988, attributed to Libya. But the moment never seemed right to commit this formation, even in 1990 when controversy surged over whether Gadhafi had produced chemical weapons. Late that year renewed fighting for control of the Chadian government exposed the unit, revealed to possess large stocks of U.S. weapons including Stinger missiles and dune buggies. This secret initiative turned into more of an embarrassment than anything else.
When Gadhafi demanded repatriation, the leaders of Chad ejected the Libyans. The soldiers went to Nigeria, then Zaire, aboard U.S. military aircraft. Colonel Mobutu expelled them when Congress halted U.S. aid for Zaire. In March 1991 about four hundred of the refugees went on to Kenya while the rest agreed to go home. Through the Libyan government-in-exile in Rome, Prince Idris agreed to care for the soldiers. Kenya suddenly received $5 million from the Bush administration, though aid to that country had been denied on human rights grounds. In April 1992 the pretender to the Libyan throne died in London, mooting the entire exercise.
Like the operations themselves, the effort to regularize control of covert activity remained a work in progress. Bush pledged cooperation with the oversight committees, which refrained from enacting a law requiring notification within forty-eight hours. Bush substituted written assurances of “timely” notification. In October 1989 Bush told the committees that he would usually give notice within a few days but in some cases would rely upon his authority as commander-in-chief.
This did not sit well with congressmen, resulting in a 1990 effort to make the notification rules explicit. In an official account of its oversight efforts, the Senate reports that Bush officials assured them this measure would be acceptable. The 1991 intelligence budget bill contained the provision, which President Bush then trumped by pocket veto. The offending element was a part of the bill that defined covert operations so as to include “third party” activities. Bush asserted in a November 30, 1990, letter that “it is unclear exactly what sort of discussions with foreign governments would constitute reportable ‘requests’ under this provision,” arguing that it could have a “chilling effect” on the U.S. government. Side assurances to the White House from the chairmen of both oversight committees were not satisfactory to Bush. Revised legislation passed Congress on July 31, 1991, but without settling the “third party” issue. Bush’s successor, Bill Clinton, would be hoist on this petard a few years later.
Judge Webster may have been the most prominent casualty of the Gulf War. During the long interregnum between Saddam Hussein’s invasion of Kuwait and the beginning of the coalition military campaign came a period of diplomacy and economic sanctions. In Capitol Hill debates and the struggle for public opinion, Webster was called upon to render opinions on the effectiveness of sanctions, Iraqi intent, and the balance of forces. Others seized on Webster’s words as ammunition. This did not please Bush. Never that comfortable at Langley, Judge Webster decided he had had enough. He let a few weeks go by after the Gulf triumph, then stepped down. The DO shed few tears.
The White House announced the resignation on May 8, 1991. Appearing briefly with Webster, President Bush said he had yet to think of a successor but praised Robert Gates. That same day Bush summoned Gates to his cabin aboard Air Force One and asked if the former spook would accept the CIA nomination. Gates immediately agreed. He expected a painful confirmation process, and he got one. Iran-Contra investigations continued, and Bob Gates would not be definitively cleared until the special prosecutor’s final report, still two years in the future. When Alan Fiers pleaded guilty in July 1991, Gates feared that Fiers would implicate him in some way. “The lowest point in my life came the day before the plea bargain was announced,” Gates recalls. Acutely conscious of the fact that civil servants rarely rise to head their departments, Gates realized it had been a generation since Bill Colby had been confirmed. Gates had been close to some quite controversial people, from Kissinger to Casey. Then the summer of 1991 brought the final collapse of the Soviet Union, kicking off the debate as to whether the CIA had failed to predict it. Of course Gates had had a dominant role in CIA analysis of Russia for years. But this time, unlike 1987, Gates resolved to proceed with the confirmation process no matter what.
Charges that Robert Gates had politicized intelligence took center stage when confirmation hearings opened in September. At first an extended examination of the nominee was not planned. Marvin C. Ott, deputy director of the SSCI staff at the time, recalls that the predisposition to let Gates sail through created a staff presumption that there was nothing to look into. Committee staff and members were flummoxed by the appearance of a succession of analysts who gave chapter and verse on many Gates interventions in intelligence analysis. Reports on Afghanistan and Nicaragua were among those cited. Evidence emerged that current employees, reluctant to criticize openly, also saw Gates as an interventionist. Far from pro forma nomination hearings, those on Gates morphed into a major CIA inquiry.
The nominee presented a preemptive defense, attempting to disarm critics with examples of how he had simply tried to push analysts to back up their assertions, picturing some alleged interventions as his effort to tease out better reporting. Then a number of former analysts went before the committee to dispute that rendering, most notably Mel Goodman, who had been a colleague for years; Jennifer L. Glaudemans, a former Soviet analyst; and Harold P. Ford, one of the CIA’s grand old men. Alan Fiers appeared as part of the committee’s fairly extensive coverage of Iran-Contra, but his testimony did Gates no harm. Others supported the nomination. Gates himself returned for “something fairly dramatic,” a round of follow-up testimony refuting critics. The hearings became the most extensive examination of U.S. intelligence since the Church and Pike investigations. Work at Langley ground to a halt as CIA officers watched every minute on television, much like Americans riveted by the O. J. Simpson murder trial.
The intelligence committee wrestled with its quandary. President Bush intervened, invoking party discipline to ensure that members backed the nominee. Ott believes Gates appealed to the White House for this measure. Committee chairman David Boren staged his own covert operation, acting impartially in the camera’s eye while laboring in secret to build support for the nominee. Boren agreed to one of the most extensive committee reports on a nomination ever, in which his committee attempted to reconcile Gates’s testimony with the charges against him. In Ott’s view, this episode became the first time in a decade where partisanship reigned on the SSCI. Finally the committee approved Bush’s appointee. Gates was confirmed early in November.
For all the drama of the hearings, the sequel did not live up to the fears of opponents. Director Gates strove to preserve flexibility as Langley marched into the post–Cold War era. He showed a healthy appreciation for the need to change, forming a whole range of task forces, fourteen in all, each to recommend changes in some aspect of CIA activity. A group on openness figured among them, advising that a swath of records be made public. In 1992 Gates spoke before a conference of diplomatic historians and promised that the agency would open up, even in regard to covert operations. As an earnest of its intentions, the CIA declassified large portions of the body of NIEs on the Soviet Union and that December sponsored a conference reflecting on the period. Stansfield Turner gave the keynote address.
One of the Gates study groups considered politicization. Although its instructions were drawn so narrowly it could conclude there had been none, Gates gathered a large contingent of officers in The Bubble in March 1992 to ventilate the issue. Directly confronting the matter that had clouded his confirmation, Gates squared the circle by acknowledging that whether or not there had been politicization in the past, it was a danger to be guarded against. The director declared his determination to find better ways to prevent policy-driven analysis.
Another task force focused on covert action. Among the novelties there, a delegation of senior clandestine services officers met with scholars at the Institute of Policy Studies, a leftist think tank, to solicit their views on directions the agency might take. They did not flinch when told the DCI ought to abolish the Directorate for Operations. Of course no such advice made its way into the final report, but DDO Thomas Twetten was placed on notice that the old days were gone. Twetten, one of the anointed, who thought nothing of rejecting a Freedom of Information Act request for Mongoose documents whose substance was already in the Church Committee report, was forced to retrench. The directorate consolidated operations in several African countries, closing a number of stations—a move that soon came back to haunt the agency.
A national center to target human intelligence assets flowed from Gates’s concern for more spies. But DO officers in the field met with silence when they proposed new operations or recruitments. Iran-Contra showed that Langley would not back its officers in trouble, and now morale became difficult to sustain. One Latin American division field man told his mates, “Pay attention: this is the end of an era.” Clandestine officer Melissa Mahle pictures the atmosphere well: “We were not listening. Operations officers felt they had been made the scapegoat of a failed White House policy. . . . We did not hear the call to do . . . business in a new way, in a way that would be more attuned to the attitudes of the post–Cold War 1990s.” In a climate in which the agency’s goal seemed to have been achieved, Robert Gates could not stem the retirements and resignations that began about then. The clandestine service denigrated him as a mere analyst who did not understand operations.
As far as covert action is concerned, Mahle makes the apt point that part of the CIA’s problem was rooted in Reagan-era practice, in which covert operations were conducted openly and made the subject of political debate and partisan accusation, all to avoid explanations when projects did not go as advertised. She writes: “The CIA entered into a new phase of ‘overt covert action,’ a marvelous oxymoron that should join the ranks of ‘jumbo shrimp’ and ‘military intelligence.’ ” The consequences of acting overtly included constant demands for specifics—from Congress, the press, the public, foreign governments—that meant secrecy headaches. Operational details could be exposed. Political tumult could terminate actions in midstream, magnifying the fear of abandonment of CIA’s proxies. And overt action amplified tensions between CIA and the Pentagon too, as the special warfare community pressed for greater control. Worse, the CIA’s role became that of bag man, hiring the proxies, whether foreign security services or local factions, as spearpoints for U.S. action. Paramilitary capabilities atrophied with cutbacks in the Special Activities Division. Operations also became less controllable as CIA steadily reduced its direct role.
The growing importance of proxies had implications for the use of covert action to implant democracy. To the old dilemma of shady means in service of lofty goals was added the spoiler of agents who acted in America’s name with their own agendas, or those who took the CIA cash and wouldn’t stay “bought.” These problems were, and are, intractable.
As director, Robert Gates’s vision involved gradual, planned change. He put teeth into the idea of support for military operations. One of the task forces worked on that alone. He tried to turn the agency toward the challenges of proliferation and transnational threats. Director Gates wanted more and better training for analysts, use of open source information, and techniques like competitive analysis. He ordered the revamping of CIA file systems. He opposed restructuring, including talk of a national agency for mapping and photographic interpretation, but agreed with the Pentagon on reforms at the National Reconnaissance Office. When Gates came to Langley, 60 percent of the CIA budget aimed at Russia; when he left that figure had dropped to 13 percent. But Gates never completed his mission. George H. W. Bush lost the 1992 election to William J. Clinton. A few days later, on November 7, Gates announced his retirement. He stayed only long enough for Clinton to choose his own director. During that interval, however, the lame duck President Bush took an action that brought Langley its first tragedy in the business of support for military operations (SMO).
December 9, 1992. If Americans remember anything about the United States in Somalia—other than the tragic battle popularized in the book and movie Black Hawk Down—it is the midnight invasion of this East African country where Marines landed in the glare of the lights of TV crews. The Somali operation was typical of U.S. military actions during the 1990s—“humanitarian interventions,” in the lexicon. President Bush made the decision around Thanksgiving. Somalia had become a failed state, its government giving way to a coterie of warlords who overthrew Mohammed Siad Barré, Somali strongman for two decades. The warlords divided up the country, and Somalia plunged into chaos. The Bush administration had actually evacuated its embassy at Mogadishu, until then the Somali capital. Several thousand American citizens left at the same time the Gulf War military campaign began. By Bush’s final days Somalia had declined further, with swaggering gunmen walking the streets and feared “technicals”—pickup trucks or four-wheel drive vehicles equipped with machine guns—doing whatever they wanted. International aid groups were unable to distribute food. The UN created a mission in the spring of 1992, but by fall the warlords were overawed no more. Somalis starved. Bush had lost his election but decided that a quick intervention could clear away the obstacles to relief aid. He could get the American troops out by Inauguration Day and leave the White House on the crest of a humanitarian triumph. Operation Restore Hope began there.
One reason the TV crews could set up on the beach was that the CIA cleared the way. Michael L. Shanklin, former deputy chief of station at Mogadishu, returned to help make this intervention possible. Langley had included Mogadishu among those African missions it closed, but now that would not wash. Shanklin arrived at an airfield north of the city with a CIA team to reactivate his old networks. Among his assets had been a top aide to Mohammed Farah Aideed, one of the most powerful warlords, who controlled much of Mogadishu. The man had been Shanklin’s agent. Most likely using this channel, the CIA apprised Aideed of the impending U.S. intervention. The warlord agreed not to interfere. On December 3 the UN Security Council unanimously approved this expansion of its operation. Some 28,000 troops were slated for the operation, most of them American. The night of the landing, Shanklin’s people watched the beaches confident there would be no shooting.
American troops quickly dispersed through Mogadishu, creating a main base at the international airport, by the sea. Heavy transports began arriving with army soldiers to bolster the Marines, and then foreign contingents. Troop convoys spread out into the interior, and detachments moved by sea to points on the Somali coast. The CIA facilitated these moves in the same way it had connected with Aideed. For example, a few days after the initial disembarkation, agency operatives teamed with U.S. diplomats and international peacekeepers to convince the Somalis guarding a large inland base not to contest its takeover, soon the center for helicopter missions to other towns. Similarly the chopper raid to Marka in January was carried off in exactly the same way. The first American death of the Somali operation was in fact a CIA assignee, Sgt. Larry Freedman of Delta Force, detached to work with the agency.
Conditions were never easy for the spooks. Unlike the military, who traveled in armed convoys or large helicopter lifts with lots of backup, CIA officers moved one or a few at a time, and never had the same priority for reinforcement. Shanklin confronted the chaos soon after the invasion, as he drove CIA’s new station chief to meet an agent. Gunmen stopped them. One grabbed the fancy assault weapon Shanklin had in their vehicle. They did get away with their lives, and Shanklin’s asset was so well connected he could actually recover the rifle. Still, as security deteriorated the CIA people were forced to surround themselves with protective details, which made clandestine movement virtually impossible. Mike Shanklin had one major advantage—as an African American he could at least blend in with the Somalis, preserving his freedom of action much longer than the others.
There would be no American withdrawal before Bill Clinton’s inauguration. Instead the commitment endured for several more months. In March 1993 the UN set up a multinational force to replace the Americans, who continued to supply a large contingent, though most U.S. troops had left by May. Clinton exercised no personal supervision. His NSC Deputies Committee considered Somalia nine times before the climax of the action, but the president never pulled together his principals. By July, of about 21,000 troops the United States had nearly 4,000. Pakistan sent the largest contingent, almost 5,000 soldiers, followed by Italy (the former colonial power in Somalia) with 2,500, plus detachments from nineteen other nations. A Turkish general held the top command. Maj. Gen. Thomas M. Montgomery was the senior U.S. troop commander.
The UN also changed the mission. Where the peacekeepers had simply been directed to ensure that aid reached the people, now the UN wanted to help Somalia regain its footing as a nation. To accomplish this, the UN appointed a new special representative, an American, retired Adm. Jonathan T. Howe. Previously in the White House as deputy security adviser—Bob Gates’s replacement—Admiral Howe had long had a predilection for force, an attitude that did not serve him well in Mogadishu—“The Dish,” as the Somali city quickly became known to Americans.
Spooks and soldiers labored amid intense heat and blasting sun. The services did what they could to ease the passage. One American recalls the sexy voice of the woman disc jockey who entertained them in the mornings, serving up Top Forty hits on Armed Forces Radio: “99.9 FM Mogadishu, rockin’ the Dish. Keep your head down and the volume up. And you thought the desert was hot!” Mike Shanklin, like others, performed brilliantly in an assignment he had hardly wanted. Code name Condor, Shanklin had had his share of heat and sun as a Marine major in Vietnam, only to put in more with the agency. As one of the DO’s tiny cadre of black case officers, he had been certain of years in the sun and he had gotten them: Sudan, Algeria, Jordan, Chad, then Somalia the first time. Shanklin had had less than a week at Langley before being pressed into service for the Gulf War, then an abbreviated tour as station chief in Liberia. Shanklin’s request was for a place where the water runs and the lights work. He thought he had gotten that—a plush slot in London with CIA’s mission to the Brits. Then Shanklin had been pulled for this emergency mission to The Dish.
As the UN built up, Shanklin’s relationships became complicated. The UN had an intelligence unit camouflaged as an information center. The U.S. Central Command built up its own Intelligence Support Element with eighty people. Then came the CIA station. At first it had been a couple of rooms in a ramshackle building in The Dish. Then it moved out near the base at the airport. Soon the station became ramified, with dozens of communications and technical specialists but never more than six case officers like Shanklin, all of whom were worked to the edge.
Langley’s cadre for The Dish is interesting. The DO clearly chose security specialists over covert operators. Africa Division chief William R. Piekney, veteran of the mid-years of the Afghan War and now sitting among the barons, reached out to Garrett Jones, then completing a year’s sabbatical at the Army War College. Jones had served in Africa, Europe, and the Middle East, but more to the point his thesis concerned intelligence support for UN peacekeeping, and he had been a Miami police officer. Jones was chief of station. His deputy, John Spinelli, code name Leopard, had also been a police officer, a New York City detective, before CIA. Plucked out of the Rome station, Spinelli knew nothing whatever about Africa but spoke native Italian, having been born and raised in Rome until he was twelve years old. That language was useful in The Dish, a former Italian colony. Jones went out in August 1993 aboard an agency shuttle, a nondescript C-47 the CIA had reconditioned with brand-new engines and state-of-the-art avionics. Spinelli met the plane. Condor would be their star operative.
By the time Garrett Jones arrived, the fat was already in the fire. Warlord Aideed, uncomfortable with the U.S. presence, became more and more hostile. UN officials tried to preserve a fair relationship. Their advice to Admiral Howe: do the same. One source told reporters of the outgoing U.S. military commander’s comment to Howe: “Look, do not take on Aideed. You have to understand who the guy is in this country. You do not need to make him the enemy.” But The Dish became tenser by the day. Aideed worried that other warlords were gaining on him by being less compliant. A CIA report on June 21 pictured Aideed as a canny opportunist and a disruptive force in Somali politics. In early June two dozen Pakistani soldiers had been killed from ambush by Aideed gunmen. The UN swiftly demanded the arrest and trial of the perpetrators.
The Pakistani soldiers had been attacked just after inspecting Aideed’s headquarters and radio station. In Washington the NSC Deputies Committee adopted a four-phase operation aimed at Aideed. A week later the U.S. Tenth Mountain Division raided the radio station and command post. No Aideed. UN troops manned security cordons or raided weapons caches. The UN captured thirty “technicals” but no warlords, and a Moroccan battalion fell into an ambush. Howe then issued a warrant for Aideed’s arrest, with a $25,000 cash reward. The raids and the warrant made the UN and the warlord adversaries, ensuring enmity. When Howe ordered another special operations mission, an air attack by heavily armed AC-130 gunships, the gloves came off.
Admiral Howe demanded U.S. reinforcements and a parallel effort to take down the warlord. American commanders also asked for heavy tanks. A July 19 CIA report placed responsibility for Somalia’s predicament on Aideed’s shoulders. Defense Secretary Les Aspin rejected the tanks but not a special mission force. Bill Clinton writes that Pentagon estimates were that the effort had only a fifty-fifty chance of success, and half that probability of taking Aideed alive, but he agreed anyway. In late August Task Force Ranger, a contingent of four hundred special ops troops with sixteen helicopters—a Delta Force element plus a company of Rangers—deployed to The Dish. Mortars shelled the airport as they landed.
Maj. Gen. William F. Garrison, Delta’s commander, led the unit. Garrett Jones came to see him, telling Garrison that the CIA worked for him. Case officer “Buffalo” came with Task Force Ranger, as the intelligence support team under the SMO concept, and worked at their headquarters. Garrison sent one of his own people to the CIA station as liaison.
Years later Garrett Jones wrote an article he describes as the briefing he wishes he had given Task Force Ranger. Jones would have begun by noting the types of CIA people a soldier might meet, then the functions of a National Intelligence Support Team versus a station. The Dish, of course, had an improvised and very basic station. Protecting sources restricts the data CIA can give, while the likelihood of unforeseen necessities (like a rescue mission) requires that possibilities be reviewed at the outset, not in the heat of the moment. Everyone should expect spies to become compromised, ending key intelligence when needed most. And spooks and soldiers should at least use the same maps and be able to understand each other. All these things played out in the operation at Mogadishu called “Gothic Serpent.” Jones might have added that CIA officers should avoid extravagant promises of cooperation, since ultimately they answered to Langley, not military commanders.
About the time Task Force Ranger reached The Dish, the CIA lost its prize agent. Playing Russian roulette with aides, the wrong chamber of his revolver came up when the man pointed the gun at his own head. Mike Shanklin tried to reconstitute the network under one of the aides, but deteriorating security now forced Condor to use a protective detail, fifteen men including four navy SEALs, restricting his mobility. The safe house Shanklin used in northern Mogadishu sprouted so many antennae that locals dubbed it the “CNN House.” After a few weeks Condor heard that Aideed knew about him. Shanklin had to get out. Choppers picked up his team one night at a nearby soccer field.
General Garrison began new raids, blindingly demonstrating the poor intelligence while making his unit a laughingstock. The first went against a house Aideed supposedly frequented. Troopers roped down from the helicopters and captured the occupants—a bunch of UN relief workers and their Somali assistants. Then came an operation targeting the compound used by the Russians during the days of Siad Barré. The Rangers got into a firefight, but there were no warlords. The same happened on the next mission.
The CIA tried for better intelligence by radio monitoring. That didn’t work either. Some recount that The Dish had regressed to the pre-electronic age, so no emissions were left to track. Others record that Aideed had switched to low-power handheld radios difficult to track. The warlord certainly minimized his use of radios anyway. Garrison went ahead with a raid on Aideed’s radio broadcast facility. No kingpins there. On at least one occasion CIA informants were trapped in an artillery bombardment of Somali positions retaliating for attacks on the UN. Another time the CIA and military got into a fight over a “cross-border” mission, which the soldiers interpreted as an attack across a border while the spook was simply talking about putting a spy on a bus into the warlord-dominated zone.
John Spinelli came up with a fresh angle—news that a couple of Aideed bodyguards were ready to betray him for the reward money. They only had to be picked up and spirited out of the warlord zone. Jones had a bad feeling about the operation but left it up to his deputy. Spinelli scouted the area by chopper and returned with four CIA bodyguards early the next morning. In the interval Italian peacekeepers responsible for that sector began handing over to Nigerians, and the Somalis attacked. Spinelli’s jeeps were caught in the fighting. Spinelli was shot in the neck, a CIA casualty. General Garrison had him flown to Ramstein for treatment.
Mike Shanklin maintained contact with a couple of teams of gunmen who had worked for his network. When one spotted an Aideed lieutenant, the Rangers made a new raid. Troops arrived within half an hour, but the quarry had flown. Another Condor brainstorm resulted in the sole result of this campaign: Shanklin remembered a plan to have his top agent give Aideed a walking stick with a concealed tracking device. Condor asked Jones what had happened to the thing, and the station chief found it in a storeroom. Shanklin passed the stick to an agent, who gave it to an important aide, Osman Ato, an Aideed financier. The CIA used a helicopter to monitor movements of whoever had the walking stick. The chopper followed the device as a car stopped at a gas station below, and Delta made an instant drop-in, capturing Ato.
Admiral Howe radiated optimism, the only higher-up to do so. Others had a sense of foreboding. A fresh four-point plan approved by the NSC Deputies Committee on August 16 seemed less sanguine than the old one. Garrett Jones saw a report from headquarters titled “Looming Foreign Policy Disaster.” Langley pressured the station to advise on U.S. operations and intentions, which left Jones angry at being asked to spy on his own side instead of the enemy. In October, a few days after the Ato capture, he cabled Bill Piekney an “eyes only” message complaining that the Delta Force had been misused, that the myopic focus on Aideed would not solve Somali problems, and that Jonathan Howe had no idea what he was doing. “THINGS ARE BAD AND GETTING WORSE,” the cable began. Piekney told the station chief to shut up and get on with it. The next day came the battle of Mogadishu.
“Cheetah,” one of Jones’s scarce case officers, was in charge of the newest network, based on a splinter group from Aideed’s forces. Early on October 3 Cheetah reported a gathering of Aideed’s top aides. “Wart Hog,” the CIA officer now heading the Delta support team, radioed that the agent should indicate the building by stopping his car next to it and putting up the hood. The agent complied. Garrison ordered a raid. Jones, standing next to him, cabled this to Langley, but the initial reports were all good. In the space of minutes success turned to disaster as a chopper, damaged, went down, and for hours the focus became saving its crew and security team, then the men who went to rescue them. More helicopters were lost or damaged, as were vehicles from the quick-reaction forces sent in on the ground. Today it is believed that an early action of the Al Qaeda terrorists had been to train Aideed’s gunmen on tactics against copters.
The next morning General Garrison presided over a gloomy review at his command post. Military action to rescue the missing was ruled out. Sending out choppers to call the men’s names on loudspeakers, trivial as it seemed, became the choice. The military and spooks turned to the UN representative present, Kenneth L. Cain, who felt like the first time he had been called upon in law school. Cain said his job was to listen to the options and report to the UN command.
“Why don’t you go talk to some imam and ask him for help?” Garrett Jones sneered.
Cain thought the station chief’s expression was one of disgust.
Eighteen American troopers were killed and another eighty-four wounded in the disastrous gun battle. Another American, one of the chopper pilots, was captured and his body dragged through the streets. It was recovered afterward only by making a deal with Aideed. The United States would refrain from further retaliation.
Task Force Ranger now packed up and went home. Admiral Howe left too, replaced by his predecessor Robert Oakley, who had gotten along with Aideed, and the UN command made a truce with the warlords. When the UN pulled out of The Dish in 1995 their information unit left behind several boxes of U.S. intelligence documents, causing more heartache at Langley. In a way it had been Saigon all over again, albeit on a small scale.
A senior officer from the Latin America division replaced Garrett Jones, who retired in 1997. John Spinelli resigned in March 1998 after failing to get the CIA to change its disability rules to match those of other federal agencies. He later went to court to force that change. At last report that litigation continued. Mike Shanklin received an Intelligence Star for his bravery, left the agency, then had his security clearance stripped because he could not pass a lie detector test. The test broke down beginning with questions about his wife, an Italian doctor he had met in The Dish and consoled over the loss of her companion, his former star agent. Two Medals of Honor were awarded to U.S. fighters in the battle.
The Senate Armed Services Committee and the President’s Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board both decided after study that the intelligence support in Somalia had been as good as could be expected. It was the policy that had failed. Bill Clinton recalls that “the battle of Mogadishu haunted me.” Only afterward did Clinton convene his full National Security Council on the subject for the first time. The Dish became his Bay of Pigs. “The Somalia tragedy shocked Clinton into taking control of his foreign policy and his bureaucracy,” NSC executive secretary Nancy Soderberg writes. “Mogadishu was a strategic setback,” notes Clinton’s national security adviser, Anthony Lake, “not only in perceptions of the United States abroad, but in our confidence at home.” Lake recalls the battle as the worst moment of the first term of Clinton’s presidency. All three use the image of the Bay of Pigs.
The President’s Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board had been in decline since Ronald Reagan’s day. The first President Bush had left the board alone for a year, then cut it back by more than half in a replay of Reagan’s 1985 purge. The revamped six-member board he placed under former Senator John G. Tower. Bush selected strong members with good grounding in intelligence work. They included a former deputy director of central intelligence, a director of the National Security Agency, a CIA estimator and NSC staff official, plus a couple of technologists, one of whom, John M. Deutch, would presently head the CIA himself. But the board left as few tracks as the Bush-era Intelligence Oversight Board, headed by a political figure, former Governor James Thompson of Illinois.
President Clinton retained both institutions, appointing Adm. William J. Crowe, a former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, to lead the PFIAB. Like Reagan, Clinton had a tendency to use board membership as a political reward. Among his appointments was Zoe E. Baird, soon after she failed to attain the post of attorney general. On the other hand the Clinton PFIAB did real work. Its postmortem on the Mogadishu disaster has been noted. Somalia brought more changes than the board anticipated—the failure forced Les Aspin to resign as secretary of defense, and Bill Clinton then gave him the board chairmanship. Admiral Crowe went to London as U.S. ambassador to the Court of St. James. The Aspin appointment led to one of the most important developments of the decade for U.S. intelligence.
Energetic and hyperactive, Aspin had no intention of slowing down. Instead he wanted to make PFIAB the center for thinking about post–Cold War intelligence restructuring. In this he had competition, for projecting the future shape of the community concerned many. The House intelligence committee, several Washington think tanks, and the Council on Foreign Relations each had their own vision. Former officials like the NSA’s William Odom advocated reorganization too, then or later. But Les Aspin used the Somalia disaster to press Clinton for either a PFIAB study or a presidential commission made up entirely or primarily of board members.
Even on this idea Aspin had competitors. Four months after Mogadishu the FBI arrested CIA officer Aldrich Ames, whom agency counterspies had finally identified as the man responsible for many agent losses.* The Ames arrest focused enormous attention on the DO and led to demands for a review for quite different reasons. Virginia Republican Senator John W. Warner stood out among those who called for an examination. Warner, one of the few to have looked deeply at the Mogadishu debacle from an oversight standpoint, had actually stood in front of Garrett Jones and complimented him on the job CIA had done in The Dish. Now, in the wake of Ames, he wanted a shakedown.
Clinton had no stomach for a policy review of U.S. intelligence. He rejected the PFIAB study and did nothing until Warner provided for a presidential commission in the bill authorizing the CIA budget. The administration opposed this too until Aspin offered a compromise that became law. Les Aspin himself became chairman of the commission and John Warner a member. Including Aspin, seven of seventeen members were on PFIAB.
Although Clinton gave Les Aspin a broad role in the review, the president’s delays—he waited months before making his selections—showed reluctance to engage these issues. Aspin moved on his own, finally starting the review process in February 1995. Three months later the chairman suffered a stroke, a coma set in, and then Les Aspin lay dead. President Clinton brought in Harold Brown, a noted technologist and former secretary of defense in the Carter administration. The review became known as the Aspin-Brown Commission.
The group wrote its report by the due date and put out 150 pages of closely reasoned text plus appendices. Readers gleaned that intelligence would be crucial in the new world and that there needed to be international cooperation along with coordinated response to global issues. Aspin-Brown advocated a new “national” agency, one to bring the photo interpreters and map experts together. There would be plenty of text on policy guidance, space reconnaissance, technical collection, even oversight. But the twin concerns of the initiators were virtually invisible in the final report: both covert operations and counterintelligence were submerged in snippets of text within general treatises on broad issues.
In its final report Aspin-Brown acknowledged that covert action remained the most controversial activity but recommended that the capability be maintained to give presidents an option short of military force. The commissioners cited most witnesses, as well as the 1975 Rockefeller Commission, to support covert action for specific U.S. policy goals and subject to careful processes of approval.
The commission offered the caveats that covert methods should be no more aggressive than needed to accomplish the objective, and that actions should be undertaken only where compelling reasons precluded disclosure of U.S. involvement. The commissioners elsewhere conceded criticism that the Directorate for Operations had become parochial and insular, calling that a cliché and recommending the CIA rotate DO officers through outside assignments. They defended covert action by crediting it with success in thwarting terrorist incidents, smashing drug cartels, and attaining goals without resort to the military. The two or three pages on this were dwarfed by the many devoted to organizational issues (where only minor reforms made the final report) and the dozens on intelligence collection means, technical and otherwise. Accounts by commission staff make clear that talk about covert action by the commissioners, witnesses, and staff had been lively, extensive, and disputatious, much more so than reflected in the actual report.
Among the hearings before the commission was a day, July 14, 1995, that could reasonably have been called “Seventh Floor Day.” Four of the five witnesses had been either the DCI or deputy (the fifth had been deputy director for intelligence). They included Dick Helms, Judge Webster, John McMahon, and R. James Woolsey. Woolsey? The commission would hear from the sitting director of central intelligence several weeks later, but the truth is that the sun of Clinton’s first DCI had risen and set in the relatively brief interval between his inauguration and this commission review.
Jim Woolsey, a Democrat at the time, and a lawyer, was an outside import to Langley. He knew a certain amount about spy satellites as a defense intellectual active on nuclear issues, but his closest brush with the CIA had come in 1989, when Woolsey in his legal role represented Charlie Allen trying to buck a reprimand for Iran-Contra. The term “neoconservative” was coming into use then, but in 1992 Woolsey would have been better recognized as a Jackson Democrat, one of the acolytes of Washington State’s Henry Jackson, a conservative on defense. He had sat on presidential commissions during the Reagan era, when Brent Scowcroft brought Woolsey onto a group studying nuclear forces. He and Scowcroft collaborated on articles advocating strategic force solutions, and early in the first Bush administration Scowcroft had tried to tap Woolsey to shepherd a policy review on that subject. Woolsey had been a negotiator on force reductions in Europe. He had also served as undersecretary of the navy in the Carter administration, counsel to the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency, briefly a member of the Kissinger NSC staff, and an army officer during Vietnam days.
Woolsey contributed policy advice to Michael Dukakis’s presidential campaign in 1988 and did the same for Clinton in 1992. That summer Sandy Berger, who coordinated national security for the campaign, brought together a group with—as Clinton himself puts it in his memoir—“more robust views on national security and defense than our party typically projected.” The group, which endorsed Clinton, included Woolsey. The candidate listened and satisfied himself that his conservative flank had been covered. Clinton recounts that he wanted to appoint House intelligence committee chairman Dave McCurdy as DCI, but McCurdy refused. The congressman probably recommended Woolsey in his stead—McCurdy headed an advocacy group in which Woolsey participated as his second. Woolsey had also known Les Aspin since 1971 and several times contributed to Aspin political campaigns. In any event, just before Christmas Sandy Berger summoned Jim Woolsey to Little Rock for what the Washington lawyer expected to be a consultation on whom to appoint to head the CIA. Instead Clinton offered the job to him.
R. James Woolsey got off on the wrong foot, and his situation only worsened. He proved both unlucky and unskilled as DCI. The Mogadishu debacle had already begun building. Barely a week before Woolsey’s confirmation hearing a Pakistani extremist went on a shooting spree at the road intersection outside CIA headquarters, throwing Langley into a rage as two agency officers died and three were wounded merely for stopping at a red light.
The new director knew enough to warn Congress that a garden of snakes had replaced the single dragon as the threat in the post–Cold War world. But Woolsey used that analogy to argue that Americans, instead of enjoying a Cold War dividend—a reduction in U.S. intelligence budgets—ought to spend as much or more. Director Woolsey gave token support to Clinton plans to cut intelligence spending by a billion dollars the first year, toward an overall reduction of $7 billion over five years, but he really wanted something very different. The DCI got into a table-pounding exchange with Congress in May at a secret hearing where he sputtered that reductions would gut the agency.
Soon Jim Woolsey would hardly be on speaking terms with Dave McCurdy or his successor, Representative Dan Glickman. Woolsey’s relations with Senate committee chairman Dennis DeConcini deteriorated even more. The DCI proved wooden with the spooks, endearing no one when he had an encrypted lock installed on his office door at Langley. He raised hackles among the secrecy cult when he announced that the CIA would declassify Cold War records, including those from covert action. That he merely repeated Bob Gates’s promise made little difference. Plain hysteria followed his initiating personnel cuts—a government-wide review by Vice President Al Gore ordered them, but Woolsey wanted them deeper and quicker. Actually Woolsey directed the cuts away from the DO, but few secret warriors paid any attention to that.
The DCI did no better with the White House. Several times Woolsey tried to take the President’s Daily Brief to Clinton, only to be ignored. National security adviser Anthony Lake and Sandy Berger, now deputy, also gave the CIA short shrift. Journalists attributed their attitude to experience (for Lake, at least) in the Nixon White House. When a small plane crashed on White House grounds in 1993, wags joked it was Woolsey trying to get in to see the president. Woolsey showed how bad it was when he began telling the joke on himself.
Barely had Woolsey become comfortable on the Seventh Floor when controversy broke out over the CIA and Haiti. Troubles on that Caribbean island had been brewing for months. In fact Americans trapped in The Dish consoled themselves by listening to the news from Haiti. A military coup against the government of Jean Bertrand Aristide brought matters to a head. Questions arose about links between the CIA and the groups of thugs and militia spearheading the violence, plus Haitian officers involved with drug runners. The chief thug had been a CIA asset. Then Brian Latell, a senior CIA analyst, briefed Congress on an agency psychological profile of Aristide, noting that he was mentally unstable and had been in a Canadian psychiatric hospital. That could not be confirmed. Woolsey gamely pretended there was no egg on Langley’s face, telling a TV audience the CIA had been pretty good on Haiti. At the White House, Nancy Soderberg of the NSC staff scored the Aristide profile “a textbook case of the politicization of intelligence.” Meanwhile the Mogadishu chickens came home to roost. Director Woolsey packed DO boss Tom Twetten off to London, replacing him with Hugh E. “Ted” Price, then the chief of the fusion center for counterespionage. Within months the arrest of Aldrich Ames called Price’s leadership of the spy hunt into question.
Director Woolsey defended Price, and he spent a good deal of energy on the Directorate for Operations. The DO still consumed more than half the CIA budget, reported at $3 billion at this time, but was widely seen as afflicted with low morale. Covert action fell to 5 percent of DO spending. The four-to-five-month paramilitary course at Camp Peary was cut back. The directorate closed fifteen stations in Africa. Of course, that still left something on the order of a hundred CIA stations. Over a few years’ time more than half a dozen station chiefs were replaced for cause, though some of the causes were trumped up. In Cyprus a chief had stolen a religious icon; in Bonn the German government asked for the recall; in Paris the French did the same; in Peru a station chief drew a pistol on his own staff. The subjects—or victims, depending on one’s point of view—included Richard Holm and Milt Bearden.
In Jamaica a woman chief of station, Janine Brookner, was replaced after reporting one of her officers for abusing his wife. Denied promotion, her reputation sullied by dark gossip, Brookner filed suit. The agency had already begun a “glass ceiling” study that eventually confirmed anecdotes like Brookner’s: women at the CIA were routinely denied promotions and desirable assignments compared with their male colleagues. For every CIA female masterspy there were a dozen Brookners. It took until 1994—in the Latin America Division—for a woman to become a DO baron. A class-action suit resulted. Both suits were settled against the agency because Woolsey wanted them off his desk—but they went on his blotter. Field officers like Melissa Mahle tread exceedingly softly, even distancing themselves from complaints if they wished to stay active. And African Americans? About this time there are reported to have been barely two dozen active black case officers among a DO cadre of eighteen hundred to two thousand. No wonder the directorate had to close stations in Africa.
Meanwhile the newly empowered CIA inspector general investigated CIA’s handling of the Ames case and rendered his report in September 1994. He found no fewer than twenty-three officers at fault, starting at the top. The IG’s cast of culprits skewered the ranks of the agency: directors Casey, Webster, and Gates; DDOs Clair George and Jack Devine; division chief Burton Gerber. The directors had handled the investigation on their watches; the barons had mostly dealt with Ames when he had been assigned to them. Ted Price held inevitable responsibility as chief counterspy. For months Woolsey had been larding speeches with claims of his aggressive response to the Ames case. But when the IG report appeared the director disciplined only half those cited, just seven on the active roster. Acknowledging that Price had dropped the ball on the notorious mole, Woolsey reprimanded the clandestine service chief but kept him on. Spooks began calling the day Woolsey acted on the IG report “Whitewash Wednesday.”
Finally came intelligence reform. Jim Woolsey opposed what became the Aspin-Brown review, yet while talking of the post–Cold War world, in almost two years there is little evidence he moved to realign either the operations or the intelligence directorate. Similarly, Ted Price got credit in press releases for reforms that are not evident. When creation of a review commission began to look certain, Director Woolsey tried to head it off with an internal review of the DO and DI. Congress would not be put off.
At home just before Christmas 1994, Woolsey’s family confronted him about how the CIA job took away from time together, and prevailed upon him to change. Woolsey called up President Clinton and said he would have to leave the CIA. Bill Clinton had a regular circus with the DCI post—filling it remained a headache. Vice Adm. William O. Studeman, the DDCI, acted in the post during the interregnum. Clinton first nominated air force Gen. Michael P. Carns, who withdrew in March 1995 with the same problem Zoe Baird had had—employing household help without meeting U.S. labor and/or immigration law. Then the president asked John M. Deutch, previously a PFIAB member. Deutch, the deputy secretary of defense, wanted to be secretary and turned Clinton down, but after the Carns mess he relented. He was confirmed and sworn in that May. Ted Price saw the writing on the wall and retired. Just as these changes were grinding forward, in Iraq came the final collapse of Langley’s latest secret war.
In one form or another the CIA’s shadow war against Saddam Hussein went on for years, without quite the ferocity of its struggle with Fidel Castro but with a similar doggedness punctuated by failure. The fight began in the Gulf War, continued as a paramilitary effort, then faded into political action. It began with the first President Bush, who at the outset of the Gulf War compared Saddam to Adolf Hitler, and as hostilities unfolded virtually invited the Iraqi people to overthrow their dictator. As coalition armies smashed the Iraqi forces, the extra effort required to take Baghdad and dispose of Hussein would have been a mere incremental addition, but Bush rejected that course. In retirement he told TV interviewer David Frost in December 1995 that he had miscalculated by anticipating Hussein’s demise. In fact in his diary the president had written of Hussein at the time of the war, “Hope to see the madman is gone.”
Many Iraqis took Bush at his word. Expecting the United States would help in an endeavor it had invited, they took up arms. The Marsh Arabs in southern Iraq, the Kurds in the north, and elements of the Iraqi military all fought. The Iranian People’s Mujahedeen helped Shiite rebels. For weeks beginning in March 1991 the battle ebbed and flowed, with the issue never really in doubt. Saddam had begun pulling his vaunted Republican Guard out of the Kuwaiti front soon enough to keep it substantially intact, and those troops became his trump cards against the rebellions. A CIA report on March 16 laid out several possible scenarios, including the fall of the dictator and emergence of a pro-Iranian Shiite state, but it noted that Saddam had the upper hand. That never changed. Iraq lacked prominent leaders who might supplant the dictator. Several hundred thousand Iraqis are believed to have perished in the fighting.
President Bush may have intended more than is apparent on the face of this history. There are at least two accounts that assert a White House decision in the very first days of the Gulf War to take down Saddam by means of a covert operation. But the only actions known to have happened were those contributing to the war itself—the economic and psychological warfare and the arming of a Kuwaiti resistance. During the uprising, what President Bush did would be more overt: in conjunction with London the United States imposed “No Fly Zones” over northern and southern Iraq, preventing Saddam from using his air force against the rebels, and Bush began Operation Provide Comfort to send relief to the Kurds. Washington also continued economic sanctions in hopes of further weakening Saddam, and later in conjunction with UN disarmament measures. From Capitol Hill and the media came calls to break the ban on assassinations in order to kill Saddam—a “silver bullet” solution as it were.
The evidence suggests that President Bush, agonizing over the plight of the Iraqis and the relationship between the rebellion and his own exhortations, decided to resort to covert action after March 1991. Langley’s reports clearly suggested an opening—a March 16 intelligence memorandum, prepared by Winston P. Wiley’s Iraq cell of NESA, observed that
The wars with Iran and over Kuwait have almost certainly cost Saddam military support. We believe many officers and men must harbor considerable resentment against him for giving away the gains acquired in the costly war with Iran and for nearly destroying Iraq’s military capability in the Kuwait war.
Thus a key to undermining Saddam might lie in the Iraqi military. The problem would be to neutralize Hussein’s Republican Guard, his best troops, and his airpower.
The broad concept seems to have been that if an Iraqi rebellion broke out, one of Saddam’s generals would take the opportunity to shoot him, and that would be that. A presidential finding resulted. When the draft memorandum of notification crossed the desk of Middle East baron Frank Anderson in May 1991, he wrote in the margin of his copy, “I don’t like this.” That summer the agency weighed in again with an SNIE that pointed to the intense internal—especially military—and other pressures on Saddam. Deputy Director for Intelligence Richard Kerr took the unusual measure of adding a personal note that drew attention to the estimate’s discussion of Saddam’s vulnerabilities. While many in the community warned that an Iraqi successor regime might not be very different from Saddam’s, and some—primarily INR—observed that his regime might crumble suddenly due to its own weaknesses, and though there may have been reluctance at NE Division, these things did not halt the move toward covert action. President Bush signed a lethal finding in October 1991. The project had initial funding of $15 million. Langley formed an Iraq Operations Group within Anderson’s division.
To a considerable degree the No Fly Zones could neutralize Saddam’s airpower, one key to the success of this project. In September U.S. officials informed Saudi Arabia of the deployment of eighty additional aircraft for possible punitive strikes, plus missile batteries to protect against Iraqi counterattacks. The Saudis seem to have been reluctant to go along, but the evidence is not clear—there are reports that Riyadh encouraged this initiative, though preferring to spread the risk by having some forces based in Kuwait or Jordan. In November 1991 Bush assured King Fahd that the United States would maintain sufficient power in the region to defeat Iraq.
Just as Bob Gates went back to the CIA, his NSC Deputies Committee asked the JCS to consider how to cope with the Iraqi military. The Joint Chiefs were to plan for the contingency of Iraqi commanders making a desperate plea for help, no doubt predicated on their rising against Saddam. Gen. Colin Powell, the JCS chairman, warned against excessive optimism when the Deputies Committee debated the issue on December 12. Powell believed success impossible unless the United States stood ready to use ground troops. Brent Scowcroft apparently argued that airpower could negate Saddam’s core capabilities. Thereafter planning was pulled into the White House.
Director Gates traveled to Cairo and Riyadh in February 1992. Immediately before that trip, Iraqi dissident factions first met in Damascus. Under cover of a CIA familiarization tour, Gates saw Egyptian and Saudi officials about Iraq. National security adviser Scowcroft is reported to have approved Gates’s talking points. Another version has it that the CIA director solicited views on dealing with Saddam without offering a U.S. plan. Soon afterward Egypt and Syria publicly declared they would not participate in any covert operation. But intelligence chiefs of Syria, Saudi Arabia, and Iran then convened in Damascus to hammer out a common front. They were unable to do so. These three lands all had reasons to hate Saddam. Although they could not agree on an active operation, they began supporting the Muslim fundamentalists of the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq.
Meanwhile the CIA began to rev up Iraqi dissident groups. Langley hired the Rendon Group, a Washington public relations firm that had helped the U.S. government with propaganda on Panama and on Kuwait during the Gulf War, to make the dissident movement real, funneling $326,000 a month to Rendon for this purpose. The propagandists and the CIA encouraged a range of exile groups to attend a congress in Vienna in mid-June 1992, where the Iraqi National Congress (INC) was created and Ahmad Chalabi elected its head. DDO Thomas Twetten said of the INC exiles, “They needed a lot of help and didn’t know where to start.” Rendon spread the exiles’ words around the globe in a massive anti-Saddam campaign.
In the spring Director Gates secretly visited Jordan, where King Hussein, the former CIA asset (not related to Saddam), wanted no part of an Iraq covert operation but agreed to give the agency a free hand in his country. After that the former Baghdad station worked out of Amman. Obstacles remained formidable. An NIE issued shortly before the Vienna congress found Saddam stronger than ever and likely to remain in control for at least another year. About then the House intelligence committee, in its markup of the CIA budget, pumped up funding for Iraq to $40 million. Serious covert action impended.
The exile groups were happy to pocket CIA money. Beyond that they were apparently told the United States would support ousting Saddam but were not promised direct CIA help. The lukewarm Middle East response to Washington’s invitation seems to have cooled Bush. The agency was not involved when in early July 1992 word began filtering out, initially through the exiles, of some kind of military rebellion followed by Saddam’s massive crackdown. Each day the gloom deepened. An assassination had miscarried. A military putsch either had been attempted or had been discovered by Saddam’s security; forces involved included Republican Guards, among them the original commander of this organization. The supersecret Special Security Organization, which Saddam created after the 1991 uprisings, had defeated the action. Saddam locked down the army—no units permitted to move for any reason. Those arrested and imprisoned—or worse—included a former chief of staff, heroes of the Iran-Iraq War, a number of generals, a prime minister’s son, senior diplomats, and many others.
After the abortive putsch, the CIA focused on the dissidents. There were uneasy relations between Chalabi’s INC and another umbrella group, the London-based Iraqi National Accord of Ayad Allawi, backed by the British Secret Intelligence Service. In October 1992 at Irbil in the Kurdish zone, the CIA brought the INC together with the Kurds and the fundamentalist Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq. For the moment Allawi was excluded. Soon the rumor came out of London, from an Iraqi exile, that the CIA itself had given away the Iraqi military coup plot, right down to handing Saddam’s henchmen a list of participants.
By then Bush’s time had ended. Iraq became a crossover project handed on to the Clinton administration. In an end-of-term interview with the Washington Post, Brent Scowcroft reflected that ousting Saddam had never been “a major objective” of Bush policy in Iraq but that the effort had come “pretty close.” Scowcroft observed the Iraqi generals that summer had failed because Saddam Hussein had “one of the most efficient security systems in the world.”
The Clinton people were not much impressed. One later said: “The program was too fat, and all this front-end capitalization had been completed, and there was no coup plotting. There did not seem to be much prospect.” They wanted to cut the Iraq project by half. Suddenly a fax campaign erupted, with appeal letters appearing all over Washington, particularly on Capitol Hill. Congress restored much of the money. An incident in 1993, when George H. W. Bush visited Kuwait to celebrate the Gulf War victory and became the target for an Iraqi assassination attempt, virtually assured the project’s continuation. President Clinton struck the headquarters of Saddam’s intelligence service with cruise missiles, but that merely framed his interim response.
Still, the unnamed Clinton official was right. Most of the CIA’s cash went for the care and feeding of exiles. That might have been all right if the CIA had some prospect of depositing them in Baghdad, but they carried little weight as an alternative to Saddam. This open-ended program smacked of the long, futile bankrolling of Russian exiles in the West, which in the final analysis simply kept those people in business. The Iraqis were sincere enough, and made a start by their anti-Saddam messages to the Iraqi people. Langley tried to multiply the impact through its Rendon Group marketing. Thus the Iraq project attained the level of psychological warfare. But a fresh NIE in December 1993 explicitly noted that the Chalabi group “does not have the political or military clout needed to bring Saddam down or play an important role in a post-Saddam government.” The estimate again concluded that Saddam was likely to stay in power, having defeated several attempts against him, though his vulnerabilities remained.
Ahmad Chalabi talked the talk amiably. He wrote a paper on the failings of the 1991 uprising and how that event, properly utilized, might have brought down Saddam. His paper became the INC’s rallying point. After the Irbil meeting Chalabi began dividing his time between Kurdistan and the West, organizing in one place, lobbying in the others. Saddam’s view of Chalabi’s efforts may be gauged from the 1994 attempted bombing of the latter’s house in Kurdistan.
Washington seemed divided and Langley far behind. According to CIA accounts, the State Department’s regional director for Iraq had no interest even in being briefed on what the agency had on its plate. The NSC held no meetings on the subject. The CIA’s Iraq Operations Group (IOG) adopted a wait-and-see attitude. In 1994 Stephen Richter replaced Frank Anderson at the head of the NE Division, agitating for action. Fred Turco, the IOG chief, agreed that Langley should at least test possibilities. His deputy, Robert Baer, plus a couple of SSCI staffers, visited Kurdistan that September. In late October Warren Marik led a CIA field team to follow up.
Among the generation of case officers who joined the agency after Vietnam, Marik spoke Turkish and could find his way around northern Iraq. Although it often seemed like slicing salami, Marik thought the Iraq project, code name DB/Achilles, might eventually shrink Saddam’s span of control to Baghdad’s city limits. Pressures for quick results, for a coup on a schedule, were what led the CIA astray. “We lost our way,” Marik reflected later. Chalabi’s plan looked to fit the demands for a schedule. Marik did not go up or down on the plan, but, an Afghan project veteran, he started providing weapons and training to INC activists. Langley did not order the training, but Fred Turco made no move to halt it either.
Marik’s became the first of a succession of CIA teams in northern Iraq. Usually the Americans entered by truck from Turkey. Task force deputy Baer argued that CIA needed a permanent presence. He volunteered to set up a CIA base. Baer arrived in January 1995 under the pseudonym “Bob.” A seventeen-year CIA veteran, Baer had served in India, Beirut, and elsewhere; a confirmed Middle East clansman, he had been deputy station chief in Morocco, most recently station chief in Tadjikistan; and had been with Dewey Clarridge in the early CTC. Teams rotating through Kurdistan on his watch varied from four to ten officers. In all about fifty CIA people made the trek.
Among his first tasks after arrival, Baer met with an Iraqi defector, Gen. Abdullah al-Shawani, a former commander of Saddam’s special forces and of Turkmen ethnicity from Mosul. Shawani had defected earlier but had several brothers in Saddam’s army, including one who led a Republican Guard unit. Here lay the potential answer to CIA’s dilemma of how to neutralize Saddam’s best troops—have the revolt come from their ranks. Shawani popped the Great Question: Would the United States support a coup if he launched one? Willing to take all the risks, the Iraqi nevertheless needed secure communications equipment plus assurances of immediate diplomatic recognition to prevent civil war. Baer, certain Langley would not respond to coup talk lacking details, was right. Stephen Richter pressed for more information.
Next came Chalabi and the Kurds. Baer had met the exile leader soon after joining the IOG. Chalabi had pressed for a permanent CIA presence. Now that “Bob” had arrived, Chalabi invited him to meet with a group that included the two main Kurdish factions. When the CIA man entered Chalabi’s home, he found the State Department’s regional director already there. The diplomat, dropping by during an area tour, immediately left, with the Kurdish leaders following. Here lay another sore point: the Kurds, one faction headed by Masud Barzani, the other by Jalal Talabani, were at each other’s throats, every so often with gunfire.
Chalabi decided the only way to bridge the differences was to have everyone fight Saddam. He activated his scheme for an uprising. For Project Achilles, Baer put Chalabi’s initiative together with General Shawani’s coup in the so-called Bob Plan. In Chalabi’s scheme the Kurds would attack Iraqi army units opposite them, while in the south the Shiites would rise up anew. Saddam’s army, according to Chalabi ready to revolt, could collapse within twenty-four hours. The other arrow in Baer’s quiver, the coup, seemed complementary. Chalabi had one plan, while over the weeks Shawani divulged more details of his own: it hinged on Saddam retreating to his Tikrit stronghold where he would be toppled. A tank force would run interference while several army units combined to counter loyalists. Relatives commanded the coup forces and no one else knew anything, so security should be perfect.
So much for the concept. Director Deutch, Woolsey’s successor, not only approved Project Achilles, he asked the task force to set markers to measure progress. Chalabi timed his uprising for March 4. As the appointed hour approached, the Kurdish differences, instead of disappearing, sharpened. The leak might have come there. Suddenly, in a move nearly unprecedented in the annals of CIA covert operations, an agency base chief in the field received a cable direct from the White House, from security adviser Tony Lake. It came the day before the planned uprising. The cable read: “THE ACTION YOU HAVE PLANNED FOR THIS WEEKEND HAS BEEN TOTALLY COMPROMISED. WE BELIEVE THERE IS A HIGH RISK OF FAILURE. ANY DECISION TO PROCEED WILL BE ON YOUR OWN.” The message instructed Bob Baer to tell the plotters and confirm once he had done so.
Former NSC staffer Kenneth Pollack, who handled the Iraq account in 1995–1996, maintains that the covert operation had never been sanctioned by the White House, which might explain Lake’s eleventh-hour intervention. But Baer specifically notes approval by Pollack’s boss, senior director Martin Indyk, in January 1995. The truth here remains obscure.
Meanwhile the Kurds’ Masud Barzani had little reason to trust the CIA—his father had been sold down the river on orders from Nixon and Kissinger. Now Barzani made common cause with Iran. Bob Baer saw Iranian gear with Barzani’s fighters, even Iranian militia guarding Kurdish supply points. His faction seemed already to know of the Lake cable. At the last moment Barzani pulled out of the rising. Talabani, furious, made only perfunctory efforts. Chalabi went ahead—and the INC revealed its real weakness as very little happened.
Chalabi’s effort fizzled. That left the coup. Saddam busted it. General Shawani saw failure all around and aborted his own effort. He took his family and fled to Syria. Robert Baer, ordered back to Washington, endured an FBI investigation for a potential violation of the ban on assassinations, since the Iraqi military would surely have killed Saddam. Langley hung its man out to dry. The NE baron and IOG staff distanced themselves from Baer as far as possible. But the CIA had never been direct participants, and Baer would be cleared after a year of misery.
Langley had an alternative to Chalabi—the Iraqi National Accord (INA), which British intelligence had been pushing on the CIA for months. The SIS believed Ayad Allawi had much deeper roots in Iraq and thus potential for action. The INA predated Chalabi’s group and had never cottoned to them. Allawi stayed away from the “Bob Plan” and stepped up to the plate once it failed. If it wanted to accomplish anything, Langley had no choice except to go along. Not everyone at the agency agreed with the play-both-ends strategy. Warren Marik thought resorting to the INA amounted to using Saddam-like figures, since Allawi was a former official of Saddam’s political party. But the task force and NE Division forged ahead. Stephen Richter one day went to the White House to brief the Allawi option to Clinton officials. Lake approved, contingent on the action being carried out by the summer of 1996 to avoid interference with the presidential election campaign that year.
The INA showed its mettle when adherents and disaffected officers stole radios from stockpiles of the Iraqi Fourth Army Corps in the south. Smuggled to Kurdistan, the gear could be used in military operations. The Accord also put broadcast transmitters onto the backs of trucks and beamed its messages into Saddam-land. There were car bombs in Baghdad, Tikrit, and other towns. Chief bomb maker Amneh al-Khadami, based at Suleimaniyeh in the Kurdish zone, assembled the bombs, and activists were paid to place them.
In March 1996 a former chief of staff of Saddam’s army, Gen. Nizar Khazraji, defected and threw his support to the INA. There were other silent backers too, people like tribal leader Sheik Khamis Hassnawi or politician Abdul Jabar Kubaisi. Stephen Richter also convinced General Shawani to try his coup again, and had him coordinate plans with Allawi. Langley told Congress in May that Saddam’s chances for holding power even one more year had diminished. Whether Director Deutch or NE baron Richter were the sources of this optimism, it was misplaced.
According to United Nations weapons inspector Scott Ritter, whose disarmament teams were primed to investigate concealment activities by Saddam’s Special Security Organization, the CIA planned to use his inspections as trigger for the covert operation. Ritter believes that Richter actually cut back CIA support to the UN inspectors at one point in order to prevent them from getting ahead of the coup preparations.
But Saddam’s intelligence service had penetrated the operation at an early stage. In January it reportedly captured the secure communications equipment used by Shawani. On June 26 the CIA Baghdad station in Jordan learned, in a call from Iraqi security on the agency’s own satellite phones, that Saddam’s henchmen knew all about the Shawani-Allawi project. Kubaisi fled the country. Others were apprehended by security services, more than two hundred, with eighty Accord members and dozens of Iraqi officers executed. In a TV extravaganza six months later, the Iraqi government televised the confessions of a number of the Allawi captives, portraying the Iraqi National Accord as an agency spy ring.
Now the Kurds began fighting each other again, breaking a 1995 truce. This time Jalal Talabani’s faction switched sides to align with the Iranians while the Barzani forces sided with Saddam himself. The Iraqi army began attacking on August 17, 1996, the golden anniversary of the date when Barzani’s father formed a Kurdish political movement for independence. The offensive gathered steam steadily. Bob Baer’s successors, CIA officers at Irbil, fled across the Turkish border. Iraqi troops seized Chalabi’s offices with their computers and files. Baghdad flung 30,000 to 40,000 troops and 350 tanks into Kurdish country.
Congressmen who had talked up the possibilities against Saddam suddenly wished to be quoted more skeptically. One told the New York Times, “Twenty million dollars to overthrow Saddam Hussein? Please.”
Several hundred Chalabi troops who had worked with the CIA retreated to the Turkish border hoping to be rescued. In fact American diplomats met with Masud Barzani and Turkish officials, arranging refugee status for former U.S. relief employees, everyone except the CIA fighters. Ultimately six thousand Kurds evacuated to Guam aboard U.S. military aircraft. Then, in May 1997, U.S. authorities arrested half a dozen of the erstwhile CIA fighters on immigration charges, suspecting that Saddam had used the refugee flow to send spies to the United States. The thoughts of officers like Fred Turco must have been dark indeed. Bob Baer had already decided to go public. And former CIA director Woolsey volunteered pro bono legal aid to the Iraqis. The case turned into a spectacle of secret evidence and murky charges.
Even this debacle did not end the sorry story of the Iraqi project, a sort of tar baby that proceeded in tandem with the overt U.S. and UN dealings with Baghdad on disarmament. As with the Vietnamese generals and Ngo Dinh Diem, Washington had talked of a coup, drew back, invited action against those it perceived as undesirable, then got involved in marginal plots. This evoked Vietnam. Unlike Saigon, which the CIA had had wired for sound, its sources in Iraq were minimal and news came secondhand. The repeated failures then compromised CIA’s ability to recruit agents to provide real intelligence on Saddam’s weapons of mass destruction.
Conservative groups in the United States continued to argue for aggressive moves against Saddam. Neoconservative Richard Perle actually gave a speech at the American Enterprise Institute denouncing CIA baron Stephen Richter—though not by name—demanding he be cashiered for incompetence. After 1998 elections returned Republican majorities in Congress, conservatives pushed for a law to enshrine the anti-Saddam operation. Congress voted $100 million for this purpose. President Clinton signed the legislation.
Neither the Chalabi nor the Allawi groups had the ability to topple Saddam, but they became the recipients of the U.S. cash. Payments to INC ceased after a couple of years when auditors found irregularities in its handling of funds, but that is when Ahmad Chalabi began feeding alarming claims of Saddam’s alleged nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons to the Pentagon. Even when the CIA swore off the INC, the Defense Intelligence Agency picked it up, under the new presidency of George W. Bush, son of the Gulf War victor. Money for Chalabi continued in spite of a DIA review showing the reports were worthless, and until the Bush administration invaded Iraq in 2003 to overthrow Saddam by force.
The U.S. military flew Chalabi back to Baghdad and trained seventy INC activists as auxiliary troops. That number, compared to plans to recruit five thousand “Free Iraqi Forces,” demonstrates the INC’s actual weakness. Chalabi, who failed in an attempt to impose himself as mayor of Baghdad, sided with Shiite militants to reinvent his career. Linked to the ayatollahs of Iran, Chalabi would later be revealed as their spy, handing over secret U.S. code data. He became a figure in the U.S.-installed Iraqi provisional government. At this writing, after the Iraqi election of December 2005, Chalabi failed to gain any seats at all for his political party but may yet appear in Baghdad’s government. As for Ayad Allawi, the Bush administration made him head of the transitional administration, and his small secular party won seats in a new parliament. Jalal Talabani became president of the provisional Iraqi regime and continues in that post. Masud Barzani is a powerful Kurdish party leader. The biggest winners of all were the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq, the Shiites supported by Iran.
Stephen Richter’s promise, tarnished by the Iraq operation, faded. Once spoken of as a leading candidate for DDO, the baron was passed over for that job. Still, he became head of the DO’s Technology Management Group and received the Distinguished Intelligence Medal. Less exalted CIA officers did not do nearly as well. During George W. Bush’s presidency, another baron was threatened with mayhem for warning against “Curveball,” an INC operative purveying bogus data on Saddam’s alleged weapons of mass destruction.
The Iraq operation of the Clinton years marked an important passage in another way. Here Congress arrived at partnership with the executive on mandates for covert action. Probably an inevitable consequence of “overt covert operations,” the 1990s became an era when Congress could issue secret war orders with teeth in them. In a dim past, the age of Eisenhower and Truman, Congress had enacted law affecting covert action in Europe, and those presidents pretty much ignored the orders with impunity. During the 1980s, when Bill Casey and the Reagan folks came up with the “overt covert” formula, the powers of the Hill had been mostly negative ones. Congress could reject, as it did in Nicaragua. Charlie Wilson’s Afghanistan had been the exception, and even he possessed few more means for enforcement than Charles Kersten had had three decades earlier. For all its imperfections, the system of congressional oversight had now progressed far enough that a president—and the Central Intelligence Agency—could no longer dismiss Congress out of hand. The congressionally ordered Iraq program, following upon years of CIA failure, made that quite clear. Haggling over the exact nature of the legislative-executive relationship lies behind all the major disputes of the 1990s, and the elaboration of rules of the road would be the key development of the turn of the century. This became as evident in covert operations as in other aspects of intelligence work.
* The initial impression that Ames had been the only source of these losses would itself fall to subsequent evaluations. Suspicion later centered on FBI special agent Robert Hanssen, who would not be arrested until February 2001. Most recently CIA experts like Milton Bearden have expressed a belief that even Ames and Hanssen, taken together with Ed Howard, do not account for all the agent losses.