I WASN’T THRILLED when Fred Turco shipped me upstairs to the general counsel’s office that first morning back at CIA headquarters. The two FBI guys who were waiting for me didn’t do much to add to my mood, especially when they informed me I was the subject of a criminal investigation. I had been yanked back from what I still consider a historic opportunity to unseat Saddam Hussein and dropped into a vipers’ nest, but in all honesty, I wasn’t really worried.
Whatever Tony Lake might have believed—or conveniently allowed himself to believe—there never was a rogue “NSC team” headed by one “Robert Pope”(aka Bob Baer) in northern Iraq. That was all Chalabi’s work, a wonderful invention that Lake had swallowed whole. I don’t claim to be a Boy Scout, but I hadn’t violated Executive Order 12333, either, or federal murder-for-hire statutes. I still had enough confidence in the system to believe that the truth would prevail, and in fact it did.
On March 22, 1995, I passed an FBI polygraph test and drove a stake into Lake’s investigation. FBI agents were rooting around in CIA files, but they weren’t going to find anything for one simple reason: There was nothing to find. Eventually, on April 4, 1996, the Justice Department would send a “declination” letter to the CIA, an official notice that there wasn’t enough evidence to prosecute. The CIA was about as apologetic as it knew how to be. It awarded my team a citation.
But neither a declination nor a citation was a get-out-of-jail-free card. I’d upset the national security adviser and sent the political seismic needles quivering at Langley. That meant two to three years in the penalty box: no overseas assignment until new management came along and memories faded. If I could keep my nose clean and mouth shut, I’d probably be able to get back in the field eventually. One more overseas tour, I figured, and I’d be able to retire. (Overseas years count extra in the Directorate of Operations; with enough of them, you can retire at fifty.)
To be sure, I’d never be promoted because someone would always vaguely remember that I’d infuriated the president’s national security adviser and taken a joyride in a Russian tank. A couple of sniggers around the promotions board table and my file would end up on the “not management” stack. But the point was, the CIA was going to leave me alone if I didn’t get into any more trouble.
My new job as deputy chief in the Central Eurasian Division’s South Group was just the place for lying low. Although South Group oversaw eight posts in central Asia and the Caucuses, my job had nothing to do with running agents or coups. All I really had to do was keep the paper flowing and the in box empty, and I had a lot of help with that. Some twenty-five people worked under me. If a thorny problem came up, like whether we should buy a new car for the chief in Bishkek, I could always buck it up to the group chief, Len, who could then buck it up to the deputy division chief, and so on. Headquarters was like slipping into a warm bath. Relax, and nothing much bad could happen. Or so it seemed at first.
It wasn’t long, though, before I began to realize just how lost I was in the current culture of Washington and the CIA. Some of the signs were obvious. When I had last spent time in the nation’s capital, it was still possible for a case officer to enjoy some of life’s little luxuries. In the interim, housing costs had spun out of control, and restaurant prices had swollen so much that only the expense-account class could afford to eat out with any regularity. After putting my life on the line for two decades in places few people would choose to live, I was earning the same salary as a midlevel career civil servant who never leaves his desk. Worse, I seemed to be carrying around a set of job skills that were constantly diminishing in value.
That was the bigger shock: not that I was relatively poor but that my professional worth had dropped so sharply and that I was so ill equipped to deal with this new world. I knew more about the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine/General Command than I did about my own country, more about the Saudi Wahabis than I did about the House and the Senate. For decades I had unpacked my bags in places like Tajikistan and the Sudan and begun learning the ins and outs of the local culture, and that’s what I did now. I needed an education, and no one was going to hand it to me, so I created my own graduate curriculum in American politics and set out to fulfill it. I did what professional intelligence officers are trained to do: I started talking with all sorts of people, anyone who could teach me how Washington works, intentionally or otherwise. And the lessons came pouring in. I would eventually learn far more than I had bargained for.
To my wonder, I would see how committee hearings and press leaks can be almost as effective as suicide bombers in promoting narrow, parochial causes. To my dismay, I would find that the tentacles of big oil stretch from the Caspian Sea to the White House. And to my anger, indeed to my rage, I would also see how money, not lives or national security, skews so much of what takes place in the very places most charged with protecting us all.
It was like The Odyssey, I finally figured out. While we were off fighting Troy, the people back home were drinking and whoring. They didn’t give a damn what those of us on the front had gone through, and they sure as hell didn’t want to hear what we had to say now.
But I’m getting ahead of my story.
MY FIRST and in some ways most enduring lesson in the politics of Washington arrived a little before noon on May 17, 1995, in the form of the smart, bespectacled, but not unattractive South Group reports officer. She was holding a single piece of paper between her thumb and index finger. With her other hand, she held her nose.
“This one stinks like shit,” she said. The South Group reports officer had a sharp tongue to go with her sharp mind.
The paper was a “tasker” from an NSC staffer named Sheila Heslin, who wanted to hear what the CIA knew about three American citizens: Georgetown University professor and prominent Maryland Republican Rob Soubhani; a doctor living in California, Sahag Baghdasarian; and oilman Roger Tamraz.
I didn’t know Soubhani or Baghdasarian, but I’d heard a lot about Tamraz from my days in Lebanon. He was a business partner of Amin Jumayyil, the Lebanese president who had released the suspects in the 1983 bombing of the U.S. embassy in Beirut. The two had done well together, but in 1989, after Jumayyil’s term ended, Tamraz’s bank in Beirut failed, and a Lebanese prosecutor indicted him for defrauding his depositors. Tamraz blamed Syria for the bank’s failure, claiming it was engineered to punish him for serving as Jumayyil’s emissary to Israel. Whatever the truth, Lebanon registered Tamraz’s indictment with Interpol, turning Tamraz into an international fugitive, a big enough black mark to prevent him from doing business in a lot of Middle Eastern countries. Always resilient, Tamraz moved on to the Caspian Sea. He was one of the first oilmen to show up in Turkmenistan after independence. Soon he had parlayed a suitcase of dollars of unknown origin into two prime Caspian oil-reserve blocks. By 1994 he was back in the news, promoting a pipeline that would carry oil from the Caspian to the Mediterranean via Armenia.
Sheila Heslin had included a note in the margin of the tasker, asking for derogatory information on all three men. In Tamraz’s case, that would be a snap. But there was a small problem. (Or as my reports officer so gently put it: “Is she nuts?”)Whatever his faults, Roger was an American citizen, and ever since Richard Nixon and Operation Chaos, the CIA had stopped spying on Americans. In 1981 an executive order had outlawed it. In the CIA’s rule book, spying on Americans was tantamount to assassinating a foreign leader, but maybe, I generously thought, the new crew at the White House was too young to remember Nixon.
“Why does Heslin want dirt on these guys so badly?” I asked innocently.
“How should I know? Maybe she’s a jilted lover.”
“So what do we have to do with it?” I asked. Heslin’s tasker, I had noticed, was addressed to the Directorate of Intelligence, not to our Directorate of Operations.
“Heslin thinks Tamraz is one of ours—a recruited agent.”
That put Heslin’s request in a new light. According to a 1977 agreement between the secretary of state and the director of the CIA, the DO is obligated to inform policymakers when they are in contact with an agent. Since NSC staffers were considered policymakers and Heslin was due to meet Tamraz on June 2, we were obligated to tell her about his connections to the CIA. The 1977 agreement, in short, trumped the 1981 executive order.
It turned out Heslin was right about Tamraz’s having a connection to the CIA. According to a file sent over from the Near East Division, he had been in contact with our case officers since the 1970s. At one point, he had even provided cover for two of our officers in one of his U.S. banks. When it later surfaced that the bank was affiliated with Bank of Credit and Commerce International, BCCI—the bank of choice for international narcotics dealers, money launderers, and other crooks—the CIA pulled out of the arrangement. Heslin was wrong, though, in assuming Tamraz was an agent. We had never paid him, and in our books, that meant he never worked for us. Nor was he the kind of person we ever felt entirely comfortable dealing with. Tamraz was always his own man. He helped the CIA only when it served his interests.
When the desk officer brought me the Tamraz memo that was to be sent in response to Heslin’s request, I didn’t even look at it. “Give it to Len to sign,” I told him. Len was the chief of South Group.
I was still evading responsibility, but I admit I was curious. How did Tamraz find his way to Heslin? How did she know about his connections to the CIA? More important, why would an NSC staffer even bother meeting him?
At precisely 1:02 P. M. on May 19, South Group faxed two memos to Heslin, both classified secret. One memo outlined the CIA’s relationship with Tamraz. The other explained that Soubhani, who was an oil consultant to Amoco as well as a professor, was an occasional contact of our chief in Baku. Although Soubhani probably had no idea he was even in touch with the CIA, we played it safe and let Heslin know about the connection. The DI sent its own separate memo on Tamraz to Heslin.
A week later the reports officer was back at my office. “Heslin’s on the warpath.”
I looked at her blankly.
“She’s decided we’re protecting Tamraz.”
This time I read the Tamraz memo. It spelled out clearly that he was wanted in Lebanon for embezzling from his own banks and for other crimes.
“So what’s wrong with that?” I asked. Embezzlement sounded derogatory to me.
“Heslin wants hard evidence to hang Tamraz, and we didn’t give it to her.”
Apparently, Heslin had gotten her dander up after comparing the memos from the DI and the DO. The DI sent along all the lurid Lebanese press reporting, which accused Tamraz of everything short of child molestation. Heslin had expected us to send over the same stuff—and more. Doesn’t the DO keep track of American businessmen working overseas, Heslin had asked her DI contact.
I rewound the spool to those long nights waiting for my agents on the Green Line, hoping Hizballah wouldn’t kidnap or kill me. Apparently, I’d gotten it wrong. What the White House wanted all along was business intelligence, dirt on Roger Tamraz, rather than intelligence on the terrorists.
Still, I figured that Sheila Heslin might just need a little education. Probably she didn’t know that a DO file was for contact reports and cables related to the running of an agent. It wasn’t a place where we stuffed articles from the press or stored evidence against an agent, hoping one day to be able to indict him. To be sure, if we found that information on an agent broke American law, we made a record of it and turned the evidence over to Justice, but looking to indict our agents and contacts wasn’t something we did as a matter of course.
I took the bull by the horns and called Heslin to explain all this. I also wanted to remind her, as we had on the cover sheet for the Tamraz memo we sent on May 19, that the rest of his files were in archives and it would take time to retrieve them for a complete summary.
Heslin was unimpressed. She grunted and hung up the telephone.
IN WASHINGTON, when it rains, it pours.
Bill 
, the deputy chief in New York, stuck his head in my door. I think it was May 30. “You guys interested in running an American oilman doing business in the Caspian?”
Whenever another case officer offers you an agent, it’s time to hold on to your wallet.
“No one in New York has the time to run this guy,” he said. “Anyhow, the Caspian’s too complicated for us.”
Too complicated? Next thing I knew, Bill would be telling me that the oilman was owned by a little old lady who drove him only on Sundays.
“Well, who is it?”
“Roger Tamraz.”
That surprised me. Nothing in his file had indicated that New York was still meeting Tamraz.
Let me be absolutely frank here: Any sane Directorate of Operations case officer in my position would have run the other way. Red flags were flying all over the field. A wanted Lebanese middleman, a shady Caspian Sea oil deal, and an NSC aide on the warpath—it doesn’t get much worse. Not to mention my track record with Tony Lake. But I’m always one to double my bet when I’m down.
“Sure,” I said. I had no idea what I’d do with Tamraz, but the fact that a staffer at the NSC hated him was enough for me to meet him. Anyhow, the DO didn’t have a single source in the Caspian. Tamraz was better than nothing.
“Tell him to call me at this number,” I added as I scribbled my CIA unclassified line on a piece of paper.
Unclassified lines are publicly attributed to the CIA. If you were to call the operator and ask about the three-digit prefix, she could tell you the number belonged to the CIA. The other lines, the sterile ones, were registered at the phone company in someone else’s name, like the Bureau of Engraving and Printing, Parkway Mortuary, or something. I used the unclassified line because I didn’t want Roger Tamraz to think from the get-go that we were going to play footsie.
AS SOON AS TAMRAZ pushed his way through the Four Season’s double doors, I recognized him from the photograph in his file. Slight and sandy-haired, wearing horn-rimmed glasses and a Brooks Brothers suit, he didn’t look the least Lebanese. Ed Pechous was a couple of paces behind him. Lately the chief in New York and Tamraz’s last case officer—the one who hadn’t been sending in reports—Pechous had gone to work for Tamraz the day he retired from the agency.
Once we made eye contact, Tamraz sailed across the lobby as if he owned the place, just like the New York banker he had become. We were still introducing ourselves when he whispered something in Pechous’s ear, handed him his briefcase, and turned his back on him as Pechous scooted away.
Nice touch, Roger, I thought. This had established him as just another Middle Eastern high roller who hired retired spooks, Secret Service agents, colonels, and ambassadors for the status: a bargain, too, less expensive than a private jet or a yacht anchored at Antibes, and easier to unload when budgets get tight.
After the waiter brought us coffee, I got down to business.
“How’d your meeting with Sheila Heslin go?” I asked.
“Wonderfully. She loves the idea of the Armenian route.”(According to Heslin’s version of the meeting, which I heard later, she all but threw Roger out of her office. It lasted a frigid twenty minutes.)
Tamraz pulled out a map of the Caucuses and Turkey, which he slid across the table for me to look at.
“I’m going to connect the Caspian to the Mediterranean with an oil pipeline,” he said, running his finger along a line that traversed Azerbaijan, Nagorno-Karabakh, Armenia, and Turkey. “It’s the deal of the century.”
For the next thirty minutes Tamraz droned on about his “peace pipeline.” I think he sincerely wanted me to believe that a pipeline would bring Armenia and Azerbaijan to the bargaining table. It didn’t matter to Tamraz that history had fairly well established that when political tensions rise, the first thing blown up is an oil pipeline.
“Seems like all this is going to cost a lot of money,” I said, hoping to sidetrack him and bring the meeting to a quick end. “Who’s going to pay for it, Roger?”
“The Chinese.” He pulled out a press photo of Matt Steckel, the president of Tamraz’s Oil Capital Limited, presumably at a signing ceremony commemorating the Chinese agreement to finance the pipeline. Since the caption was in Chinese, I had to take Tamraz’s word that it wasn’t a picture of his bankruptcy proceeding.
“Roger, this is all very interesting. We need to talk about it more. Is there anything I can do for you now?”
Roger paused and then said, “Yes, as a matter of fact, there is. I need the president to hear my proposal.”
Clearly, Tamraz had a romantic view of my employer. He thought “CIA” was a kind of abracadabra that would magically open all the important doors in Washington, including the one at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. Somehow he had missed the press reports about Bill Clinton’s turning away his CIA briefers when they showed up in Little Rock the day after he won the election.
“You know, Roger, we don’t have the same juice we used to at the White House,” I said, trying to clue him in to reality. “Frankly, it’s difficult for even me to get a meeting at the NSC.”
“Well, I think most people in your position hire a lobbyist.”
Roger looked at me, all but begging for a name. I had just read something about Clinton’s former counsel Lloyd Cutler in The Washington Post, and said that I’d heard he was good.
Roger gazed at me in awe, as if I’d just invented peanut butter.
“We’ll keep in touch,” he said as he shook my hand and rushed off to another meeting.
I LEARNED LATER that Tamraz knew more about lobbying the Clinton administration than many people. In 1994 he had hired the firm of Arnell and Hastie to buy access in Washington. The firm claimed to be especially close to Secretary of Commerce Ron Brown and did manage to broker a few meetings for Tamraz. Pleased, Roger sent a fat retainer to Arnell and Hastie for a ticket on Ron Brown’s plane carrying a trade mission to Moscow. At the last minute, Brown got wind of Roger’s Interpol warrant and disinvited him. What if Russia honored the warrant and picked up Roger on arrival? What if Russia seized Brown’s U.S. government-issue airplane for transporting a wanted felon? International business was tricky that way.
Arnell and Hastie didn’t care whether Roger missed the flight or not. The ticket was prepaid, nonrefundable, and nontransferable, and the firm wanted its money. It filed suit and won a judgment against Oil Capital Limited, Panama, for $130,000—a pyrrhic victory, since OCL, Panama, had about 23 cents in its account.
Roger had also been lobbying the State Department hard. He’d won some converts and lost others. During his last visit to Turkey and Armenia, he started a fight between the U.S. ambassadors in Armenia and Azerbaijan that grew so nasty the two embassies stopped talking to each other.
WHEN I STARTED ASKING my contacts in the petroleum industry about Roger, the first reaction was invariably, Why would the CIA be asking about one of its own? Now I understood how Heslin had found out about Roger’s connection with us—apparently he’d told everyone he ever knew.
I went to see an oilman who knew more about crooked oil deals than Tamraz, mainly because he’d been involved in even more.
“If you need to talk to the Mafia, why don’t you go straight to it?” he asked.
I confessed I had no idea what he was talking about.
“Did you ever hear how Tamraz started in oil?”
No.
He smiled, pleased to be the one to tell me. Before he began, he poured himself a double chilled white Armagnac and clipped a cigar.
“Roger Tamraz was in Beirut working for KidderPeabody on the IntraBank liquidation. He was going through one of Intra’s safes and found a document concerning the former head of Saudi intelligence, Kamal Adham. Tamraz recognized its value right away. It was crucial to resolving a dispute in Adham’s favor, so he called Adham for a meeting. When Tamraz handed Adham the document, he said only, ‘You may need this.’ Adham was stunned: ‘How much do I owe you?’ Tamraz replied, ‘Nothing, but let’s keep in touch.’
“Sometime later, Adham called Tamraz and asked him if he wanted to help with a deal in Egypt. It was a pipeline from the Red Sea to the Mediterranean, involving huge commissions that Adham didn’t want his fingerprints found on. Tamraz agreed, the pipeline was built, and he got his cut as well as a reputation for being a savvy entrepreneur. It didn’t matter that all he was doing was operating a shell game on Adham’s behalf.
“Tamraz did so well with the Egyptian pipeline that he started nosing around for a new deal. It wasn’t long before he found one in Italy.”
The oilman stopped to relight his cigar and pour himself another Armagnac. “Do you remember Amoco’s problems in Italy?”
“Come on,” I answered, “let’s get on with it.”
“You’ll love this. Amoco was at its wit’s end, trying to solve its labor problems in Italy. It was about ready to shut down its Italian refineries and distribution networks—simply abandon them. No dummy, Tamraz saw an opportunity where others saw nothing at all. He persuaded Mu’ammar Qaddafi to buy all of Amoco’s downstream facilities. With a buyer in hand, he is reported to have used some of his private contacts in Sicily to facilitate the deal. It worked like a charm. The labor problems went away, the deal was signed, and Tamraz got a five percent commission with an interesting bonus: When the Libyans decided it wasn’t a good marketing strategy to have their name on Amoco’s old gasoline stations, Tamraz loaned them his. That’s why you see Tamoil stations all over Europe.”
Next I called an oil trader who I thought might know something about Tamraz.
“Did you know that Ozer Ciller—the husband of the Turkish prime minister, Tansu Ciller—and Tamraz are business partners?” he asked me.
I didn’t, although I did know that Roger had spent a lot of time in Turkey promoting his Armenian pipeline, and that he had met Prime Minister Ciller on at least one occasion. Our embassy in Ankara had reported that the Turkish ultranationalist group, the Gray Wolves, made the introduction.
As for Madam Ciller’s husband, Ozer, he was said to keep bad company. Among others, he was connected to the Turkish narcotics baron Omar Lutfu Topal, who would be gunned down in a 1996 mob war in Istanbul. At the time, Omar had an outstanding arrest warrant in the U.S. for selling narcotics.
“So what business were Roger and Ozer in?” I asked.
“Oil. Tamraz is paying Ozer to front for him.”
I checked the story in the files and found a reference to OCL’s sharing an office in Turkmenistan with a Topal company named Emperyal that ran a half-dozen casinos in Turkmenistan involved in laundering drug money. The Turkish state pipeline company, Botas, was the third tenant in the building in Turkmenistan—a nice, cozy setup.
A week later the same oil guy called me back. “I can’t confirm this, so take it with a grain of salt, but my friends in Turkmenistan tell me that Roger and Ozer were silent partners in Block I.”
Block I was Roger’s concession in Turkmenistan—an expensive piece of property with estimated reserves of 358 million barrels of oil and 3.7 trillion cubic feet of gas. CIA energy analysts had always wondered where Tamraz had found the money to buy it.
“Why would Ozer Ciller invest in Turkmen oil? It doesn’t make sense,” I said.
“Not if you don’t understand the oil business. It wasn’t Ozer’s money. Lapis Holding fronted for him. It put up all the money for Block I, including a thirty-million signing bonus that undoubtedly went right into the pocket of Turkmen president Saparmurat Niyazov.”
“Why would Lapis do that?” I asked.
“It wasn’t Lapis’s money, either. The TYT [Turkish Tourism and Investment Bank] loaned the money to Lapis. After Ozer and Lapis bled TYT dry, it collapsed. Both the liabilities and assets were written off. So, to answer your question, it was TYT’s depositors who paid for Block I.”
“Are you absolutely certain of this?”
“No, but that is what I hear.”
“So who is bribing whom?”
“For the use of thirty million, I suppose Tamraz could pay a little out of his pocket, don’t you think?”
This was too good. I had to share it with someone, so I called Sheila Heslin. Again, she grunted and hung up the telephone without comment, but I found out she made a note to herself shortly afterward. It read: “Mon … Roger Tamraz … bribing Ciller’s husband … Sep 28 … Instructions: Bob Baer.”
You’d think that the “instructions” Heslin had in mind were to issue me a merit badge. If Roger Tamraz was bribing government officials, he was in violation of U.S. law, which meant she had him by the short hairs. Without U.S. support, Roger would never worm his way into the Caspian oil deal. Heslin did have a hangman’s noose in mind, as things unfolded, but it was my neck, not Roger’s, she wanted to fit it around.
I ALSO PICKED UP another tantalizing lead: Roger Tamraz may have been involved with Ozer Ciller and Omar Topal in a coup in Azerbaijan, even though the facts were murky.
In March 1995, about the time Roger was traveling around Turkey and Armenia, Azeri president Heidar Aliyev had nearly been driven from office by an uprising led by the interior minister, Rawshan Javadov. After it failed, Javadov was killed, probably in an attempt to surrender. Those were the only facts we were certain of, at least at the beginning, but within weeks two Turkish intelligence officers working in Azerbaijan were arrested and tortured for their part in the coup. That made no sense at all—Turkey officially supported Aliyev—until it emerged that the two intelligence officers might have been working directly for Prime Minister Tansu Ciller, who paid them out of a secret slush fund. Soon the rumor mill was reporting that the Gray Wolves had been involved as well, along with Omar Topal. Since the Gray Wolves apparently had introduced Tamraz to Ciller, and since Tamraz and Topal were known business associates, it seemed prudent to be at least suspicious.
I MADE ONE LAST STAB at trying to pin down Roger. At one point he had waved in my face a fax from a Manhattan-based company he was associated with called Avis Capital. Roger said Avis Capital was going to help pay for his pipeline, so I had a friend in New York run down the company. The address on the fax Tamraz had shown me was real—a tenement in the Bowery—but there was no sign of Avis Capital. The building superintendent said he’d never heard of the company; nor had any mail ever arrived addressed to an Avis Capital.
I’d seen enough of how foreign hustlers had worked their way in Washington during Iran-contra to realize that Tamraz and the Clinton White House were an accident waiting to happen. The question was: How could I get out of its way?
IN THE MEANTIME, the CIA was circling the drain.
When the FBI arrested Rick Ames on February 21, 1994, I was in Dushanbe. Watching on CNN as Ames stood handcuffed by the side of his new Jaguar XJ-6, my first reaction was that no one at the CIA owns a Jaguar. The officers who once could have afforded one—the investment bankers and lawyers who fought with the OSS in World War II, and the few who’d stayed on to establish the CIA in 1947—were all gone. Ames’s Jaguar must have been the only one in the CIA parking lot. How could security have missed it?
But the lapse in internal security was just the beginning of the misery. Rick Ames wasn’t your average spy: When he gave away a dozen Soviet agents at one liquor-soaked lunch, he established himself as one of history’s greatest traitors, in the company of Benedict Arnold, the Rosenbergs, and Kim Philby. Just as Britain’s MI-6 would never live down Philby, so the CIA would never live down Ames. He had ratted out our crown jewels, the reason we existed. The only difference between the two was that Philby sold out for ideology, while Ames did it for money, pure and simple.
When I got back to headquarters in August 1994, I could see how Ames’s betrayal was playing out. Then director Jim Woolsey was turning over the CIA’s counterespionage to the FBI, an act that would be almost as destructive to the agency as Ames. In fairness, Woolsey didn’t have much choice. The CIA had screwed up so badly with Ames that it could no longer be trusted to clean its own house. Congress was breathing down Woolsey’s neck, and the press wanted its own pound of flesh. To appease everyone and atone for our sins, Woolsey turned the CIA over to its worst enemy in Washington—the FBI. Way back at the beginning of the cold war, J. Edgar Hoover had wanted to keep all national security operations, domestic and foreign, under his heavy thumb. Now it looked like his ghost was about to get its way.
The executioner the FBI picked for the task was Ed Curran, a serving FBI agent. From the day he took over the counterespionage group, Curran made it clear that he intended to run the place like a behind-enemy-lines commando unit. His first act was to fire anyone who knew anything, especially the little old ladies in tennis shoes—the CIA’s institutional memory on Soviet espionage. He had to let them go: Smart people made Curran very nervous. Then, to let everyone know there was a new sheriff in town, he reopened every unresolved counterintelligence case on the books. Every single one. It didn’t matter if the employee was retired or had moved on to a new, nonsensitive job. The idea was to spread fear and paranoia throughout the CIA, and in that, he couldn’t have been more successful.
When the CIA appointed Rod Smith as its own head of counter-intelligence and thus Curran’s nominal boss, Curran was in effect given free rein. A lawyer turned case officer, Smith never spent enough time in the field to learn the job, much less anything about counterintelligence. After an abbreviated six-month tour in Europe, he came back to headquarters, where he would stay, moving up the bureaucratic ladder one dogged step at a time. In no time Curran had Smith feeding out of his hand. Blood soon flowed in rivers.
A casual friendship struck up, say, on an Italian vacation became a suspect foreign contact. Polygraphers were called in, and having been badly burned by Ames, who beat the lie detectors even while working for the KGB, they weren’t happy. Anxiety turned to stress; stress, to a failed test. Soon Curran had a “new case,” and as the witch-hunts went on, new cases began to mount to the ceiling. Files were ransacked, police checks run. Then the FBI was called in because that was the deal Woolsey had made with Congress: The FBI investigates all suspected espionage cases. All over the FBI, well-meaning grunts were having CIA cases dumped on them, which they would then throw immediately on the floor, because, for all of Curran’s exhortations, they knew they had a hundred stronger cases to work on. Back at Langley, though, the dirt was already down. Being under an active FBI investigation, no matter how flimsy the evidence, meant no promotions, no overseas assignments, no sensitive clearances. The cafeteria was filling up with people who might as well have been marked with scarlet “A” s, all of them eating alone.
The numbers tell the story. By late 1995 more than three hundred people were under suspicion, and that’s not to mention the number of CIA employees terrified they would be caught up in the bloodbath through no fault of their own. One day you’re at your desk, and the next you’re a virtual prisoner in one of the security facilities out by Tyson’s Corner. Everyone had a friend or colleague tied up in security purgatory.
Over at the FBI, director Louis Freeh couldn’t wipe the smile off his face. He was dismantling the CIA piece by piece, while in the press, he was portrayed as Mr. Straight cleaning up the decadent, Jaguar-driving, rummy CIA. Congress showered money on him. He hired more agents but still had more money than he could spend, so he used it to open FBI offices abroad—offices that one day will displace the CIA. And the best part was that Freeh, who doesn’t lack for a sense of irony, hired an ex-CIA officer—fired by Woolsey for his failures in the Ames debacle—to advise him on opening the new branches.
In the meantime, while the FBI was tied up eviscerating the CIA, Robert Hanssen was giving away the FBI’s own secrets in trash bags.
AS YOU MIGHT HAVE GUESSED, I wasn’t a dispassionate observer of Curran’s purge. One day I was sitting in my office reading through the morning’s traffic when the division’s security officer and a young jack-booted sleuth from the counterespionage group fairly tumbled into my office. They were both breathless and made a point of slamming my door to underscore the seriousness of their visit.
“Why are you still in touch with a Russian from Dushanbe?” the security officer asked.
I’d been around too long not to know what he was doing. Start an interrogation with an accusation, throw the victim off balance, and you just might scare a confession out of him. In the business it’s called an accusatory process.
I looked at him dumbly.
Seeing that this tactic wasn’t getting them anywhere, he mentioned the name of a Russian woman I had known in Dushanbe. She had introduced me to the Russian skiers, but I was no longer in contact with her.
“We’ll have to box you [polygraph] about it,” the fascist from counterespionage said, summoning all the menace he could. He was wearing snakeskin cowboy boots, a sure sign of trouble inside the Beltway “We’ll find out the truth the hard way.”
Two polygraphs in six months seemed like a lot, but I didn’t have a choice if I wanted the CIA to continue to pay me.
About two hours later, I ran into the security officer in the hallway and gave him a what-the-fuck look. I knew the guy from before; we got along, so he told me the story. My colleague in Tashkent, 
, had decided he wanted to ride the counterespionage wave for a promotion. He picked up a rumor about the Russian and me and sent it in, properly dressed up in the supersensitive 
channel cable. It was just the kind of lead the Curranites loved.
The only humor in the whole incident—and it was gallows humor at best—came when I filled out the prepolygraph security questionnaire. Had I had any problems with U.S. law enforcement since my last investigation? In the appropriate box, I neatly wrote in pencil: Yes, investigated by the FBI for attempted murder.
It worked like a charm. I was assigned the meanest, oldest, grizzliest polygrapher security had. He’d been around and knew how the game worked. He could tell the difference between a mole and someone who was in the business of meeting foreigners. I was in and out in an hour.
My colleagues weren’t so fortunate. Too many of them ended up with twenty-three-year-old polygraphers plucked out of the hills of West Virginia—people who thought all foreigners were communists.
PREDICTABLY, Ed Curran’s purge made the CIA even more risk-adverse than it had already become. People weren’t just scared to meet foreigners on their vacations; they were scared to do it in their jobs as well.
You could see the results in everything we tried to do. There wasn’t a single reporting agent in any one of the eight posts I supervised in central Asia and the Caucuses. No one was meeting anyone. There were no requests for even provisional approval of new agents, no contact reports. It was considered a lucky day if South Group received an administrative cable from one of our posts on the frontier. As far as I could see, the other groups in the Central Eurasia Division were in the same sorry shape. Daily group-chief meetings were about budgets, projections, personnel changes, task forces, paper deadlines—anything but recruiting sources.
All over the Islamic world, cells were forming, ancient grudges were boiling to new surfaces, the infidel West was being targeted for destruction, and we didn’t have a real ear to the ground anywhere.
Dave Cohen’s appointment as the new director of operations did nothing to ease the situation. Cohen was a career analyst. Even though he had put in a cameo appearance as domestic head of the DO, he knew next to nothing about operations. Not only had he never met or recruited an agent, he apparently had no idea what an access agent even was. Among his first orders was to fire all of them. Remember the access agent in Madras who introduced me to Sami, the Arab officer on assignment to the Indian military? Remember all those agents in Beirut who ran down Mughniyah’s networks? Under Cohen’s new standards, I never would have been authorized to run them.
In the same spirit of antieffectiveness—and in accord with a new DO policy that desk jockeys were to be promoted at the same rate as field operatives—Cohen began handing 
-chief posts to people with virtually no qualifications for the job. Riyadh, Tel Aviv, Nairobi: I started to lose track. The only apparent qualification of the new chief in Riyadh was that he had been George Tenet’s briefer when Tenet was at the NSC. Over my protests, the same thing happened in South Group. I was replaced in Dushanbe by someone who wasn’t a case officer, and my reports officer with the sharp tongue was given an important chief’s job in the Caspian. She was smart, but she’d never served as a case officer in the field, or run or recruited an agent.
Her last day at headquarters, she stuck her head in my office to say good-bye. “By the way, just to let you know, I don’t recruit agents. That’s not my job.” She’d obviously picked up the new mantra going around that chiefs don’t run operations—they “represented the director.” It was crazy, like the local beat cop refusing to make an arrest because his job was to represent the chief of police.
Cohen, in turn, was replaced as the director of operations by a retiree. And the retiree’s successor hadn’t had an overseas assignment in more than a decade, and that to a backwater post in Europe. Did the agency even care about operations anymore? If so, it was hard to see.
The effect on intelligence collection, not surprisingly, was devastating. I did my own investigation to see just how bad it was. In 1986 the Directorate of Intelligence had computerized all intelligence reports, putting them on a single server that I arranged to get access to. I started by searching for all reporting on the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, the Pasdaran, from human sources—that is, agents, people on the ground. In the late 1980s, reporting on the Iranian Pasdaran started to taper off. By 1995 there was nothing—not a single report. It wasn’t like the U.S. had lost interest in the Pasdaran, or should have. The Pasdaran blew up the Al-Khobar barracks in Saudi Arabia in 1996. It was more like we had voluntarily deafened ourselves and gouged our eyes out in the midst of an ongoing crisis.
I also looked into reporting on the Saudi royal family. 
I’d seen the same thing with Iraq. Iraqi Operations was a Potemkin village. Of the thirty-five officers assigned to the headquarters component, at least 10 percent were documented alcoholics. Another 10 percent had been designated as low performers. Two in five were retirees who had come back to work on contract, and the rest didn’t really care whether the CIA had a human source in Iraq or not. Congress dumped millions and millions of dollars on the CIA for Iraq, yet virtually none of it made it into Iraqi hands.
One American consultant in London was paid more than the director of the CIA and the president of the United States put together. She had an open first-class ticket to fly back and forth to the U.S. anytime she wanted. In London, she rented some of the priciest office space available. When the CIA went out to inspect, we found she had subleased the office, defrauding the government of even more money. In this one instance alone, I could account for $1 million just flushed down the toilet. It was out-and-out theft, and there were at least twenty other instances with other people that involved similar amounts of money.
Incidentally, the woman who had set up the payment to the London consultant resigned from the CIA on a Friday and went to work for the same company the London woman worked for the following Monday. The CIA inspector general’s office found, to its horror, that the same woman, while at the CIA, had funneled two other equally large contracts into that consulting firm, the same one she now worked for. In the end it was too painful for the agency to bring the case to the Department of Justice’s attention, and the London consultant continues today to successfully shake down Congress for money.
It wasn’t only money the CIA lost control of. In 1997 British authorities were furious when they found out my old Iraqi friend Ahmad Chalabi had rented his studio on Barlby Road in London to a Saudi dissident, Dr. Sa’d Al-Faqih, one of Osama bin Laden’s soul mates. Faqih’s platform called for overthrowing the Al Sa’ud family in Saudi Arabia and expelling Britain and the U.S. from the Middle East. Chalabi had reason enough to fall out of love with us—we had, after all, abandoned him in his hour of need—but it was wrenching to see the people who wanted to be our allies making common cause with our enemies.
Nor was it just in the Middle East that the CIA seemed to have thrown in the towel. In 1996 a post in central Asia came in with a proposal to set up a secret site to monitor Lop Nor, the Chinese nuclear-weapons testing facility. The location was topographically unique because it was at the end of a valley and served as a sort of funnel for emissions and electronic data from Chinese explosions. About the same time, the Department of Energy picked up indications that the Chinese were testing miniaturized nuclear warheads, but it couldn’t be sure since the tests were below the threshold of our current collection capabilities. The collection site would have remedied that.
“Sorry, the NSC turned the operation down,” Peggy 
, the head of Chinese operations, told us. “It does not want to risk irritating the Chinese by collecting information from platforms in Central Asia.”
Eventually, we compromised and put a nuclear “sniffer” on top of one of our embassies, but it was hundreds of miles from Lop Nor and picked up nothing. Keep in mind the context of this decision: A Chinese official kindly sent us by overnight mail what appeared to be a Chinese government description of the W-88, our highly sophisticated, miniaturized nuclear warhead. Were the Chinese testing a weapon based on the W-88 design at Lop Nor? We’ll never find out unless some other Chinese official sends us a postcard to let us know.
Worst of all, the CIA seemed to have stopped caring about its own people, especially the ones who took the greatest risks. By the spring of 1996, I’d had enough of Washington and volunteered to go to Sarajevo on a counterterrorism operation meant to probe the depth and extent of the Iranian intelligence presence in Bosnia. I had a half-dozen people working for me, including a couple who paired up on a surveillance team. Since foreigners stood out in Sarajevo, I suggested they live outside of town and commute to their watching stations. The ride in was fairly safe because they drove an SUV with military markings, but one week, when I was out of town, their SUV was pulled for other duty and they were forced to make do with a small, locally plated VW A few nights later, they were on their way home when a car cut in front of them, trying to force them off the road. They reacted according to the book. As soon as the woman saw the other car was armed, she yelled, “Gun!” Her husband, who was driving, sped up and swerved around the car, just in time to get sprayed with a machine gun. He survived, as did his wife, who was wounded in the back, but they almost didn’t survive the bureaucracy back at headquarters.
“They should have just given up their car,” the branch chief responsible for Bosnia said. “That’s how we would have handled it in South America.”
I was stunned. I knew the desk officer had spent only two years in some quiet post in South America doing administrative work. Worse, she knew nothing about Bosnia. She had refused to make a familiarization trip to Sarajevo. She spoke no Serbo-Croatian. I could have overlooked it all if later, she hadn’t suggested the couple be put up in front of a Personnel Evaluation Board and reprimanded them for not giving up their car. No wonder that a headquarters staffed with officers so badly misidentified the Chinese embassy in Belgrade that we sent a missile into it.