AFTER MONTHS UPON months of listening to Roger Tamraz’s many schemes to get rich quick, I finally learned why the CIA had kept up contact with him all these years: He could get to anyone, anywhere. He must have had a Rolodex the size of the New York City telephone book.
I had just walked into my office one morning when the telephone rang. It was Roger, even more ebullient than usual. The night before, he’d had dinner with Vice President Al Gore at Senator Ted Kennedy’s house in McLean, Virginia.
“I sold the vice president on my pipeline,” he said. “Your tip on Cutler really paid off.”
What Tamraz didn’t tell me, and I would find out only much later, was that he had put Senator Kennedy’s wife, Victoria, on the payroll along with Lloyd Cutler. Victoria was supposedly helping to recover the money Tamraz had lost in Lebanon. His first check probably paid for dinner with Al Gore.
The former, and perhaps still active, international fugitive was not only pleased with his new dinner partners, he seemed to have suddenly become a Friend of Bill. President Clinton, Tamraz informed me, had called Azerbaijani president Aliyev to press for “multi-pipelines.” It didn’t matter to Tamraz that Clinton no doubt had in mind the Turkish route, Baku-Ceyhan, not the Armenian route. Amoco and British Petroleum, Amoco’s ally in the Caspian, had been openly dumping buckets of money on Washington lobbyists to persuade the White House to back the Turkish route. Any Washington insider—including, one would think, Lloyd Cutler—could have told Tamraz it was only a matter of time before their money prevailed and the White House specifically named Baku-Ceyhan. But Tamraz wasn’t a man to accept defeat without a good brawl, and he certainly wasn’t going to be intimidated by a pair of eight-hundred-pound gorillas like Amoco and BP. After all, who did Amoco come crying to when it wanted out of its problems in Italy?
“This lobbying thing is really paying off,” he said before he hung up.
I learned later that President Clinton had indeed called Aliyev, but that his call had been scripted largely by Sheila Heslin. Although I didn’t know what the exact circumstances were that led to Clinton’s call, I already knew for sure that Heslin didn’t have Roger Tamraz’s best interests in mind.
The way things worked on both ends of Pennsylvania Avenue would soon become a lot clearer, but to see what I was looking for, I would have to fly halfway around the world to the former Soviet republic of Azerbaijan.
IT WAS DUSK, and the snow-covered Caucuses were bathed in a radiant pink as the Gulfstream made a sharp right turn and dropped into Baku. A few minutes later, we were on the ground, taxiing up to an eerie, half-built, half-abandoned terminal that reminded me of a junked stage set from Star Wars.
We had a white-knuckle drive from the airport and dinner at a government guest house, then began the inevitable waiting. Around midnight, just when we were about ready to head back to the hotel, President Heydar Aliyev’s gofer arrived to pick us up for our meeting.
Aliyev was one of the few Soviet leaders left standing after the collapse of the Soviet Union. Once a member of the Communist Party politburo and chairman of the KGB, he would have been a serious contender to rule the Soviet Union had it survived. Instead he had to settle for Azerbaijan, a backward Soviet republic that sat on vast oil reserves and occupied a strategic position on the western side of the Caspian. Aliyev knew exactly what he had, and he intended to make the most of it. Although he wasn’t about to liberalize Azerbaijan politically, he threw open its oil industry to foreign investors, in particular the American majors.
Aliyev signed his first major oil contract on September 20, 1994, granting Amoco, Pennzoil, UNOCAL, Ramco, Statoil, Delta, and BP drilling rights for three offshore Caspian fields. The companies would work as part of the Azerbaijan International Operating Consortium (AIOC). With estimated recoverable reserves of about 4.4 billion barrels and a peak production of 700,000 barrels a day by 2010, AIOC’s concession rivaled some of Saudi Arabia’s mega fields. The oil companies’ PR departments started calling it “the deal of the century.” For Aliyev, AIOC not only provided badly needed cash, it also helped persuade the U.S. and Britain to lend him some necessary political support. With Russia on his north and Iran on his south, Aliyev lived in a bad neighborhood.
Although it was a little after one in the morning before we were ushered into Aliyev’s Soviet-style office, he was wide awake. Comfortable in the corridors of power and with foreigners, he graciously went around the room and shook our hands. Although he was in his seventies, he still had a spring in his step.
Aliyev started the conversation with a rambling account of the failed March 1995 coup, the one the CIA suspected Prime Minister Ciller had a role in. According to Aliyev, just about everyone was involved, from Russia to Turkey. He even named some Azeri dissidents living in the U.S. I took notes for a while but lost interest as Aliyev waded deeper and deeper into the details; anyhow, I was half asleep. My interest perked up, though, when Aliyev brought up Exxon and Iran. I noticed Aliyev himself became more animated. There was even a trace of anger.
“You know, gentlemen, I am ready to help the United States and its oil companies, but I expect you to live by your bargains.”
Aliyev looked around the room. It was clear no one knew what he was talking about.
Aliyev filled us in. In March 1995 he had received a call from the State Department’s undersecretary for economic affairs, Joan Spiro. She said she was speaking in the name of Secretary of State Warren Christopher. In unmistakable terms, Spiro threatened that if Azerbaijan wanted to maintain good relations with the U.S., Aliyev would have to give Exxon its 5 percent. When Aliyev countered that he would face a lot of heat from Iran, Spiro brushed it off: “Don’t worry, you’ll get help.” The next call was from Deputy Energy Secretary Bob White. White also insisted on Exxon’s 5 percent. When Aliyev again mentioned Iran, White said, “We’ll take care of it, just make sure Exxon gets its deal.”
“So now that Exxon has its five percent, what are you going to do about Iran?” Aliyev asked. “I share a long, porous border with that country.”
Listening to Aliyev, I found it hard to avoid the conclusion that the Clinton administration was pimping for Exxon. Naïf that I was in the ways of the White House, I had assumed that the job of the government was to back U.S. business in general but never a specific company, especially when other American oil companies, including Mobil, gladly would have taken the 5 percent and probably paid even more for it.
After it broke in the press that Tony Lake and his wife had skirted the law by holding on to $304,000 in energy stocks when he was appointed national security adviser, I wondered if Lake had anything to do with Spiro’s and White’s calls. If so, the tension at home must have been thick enough to cut: Lake owned Exxon stock, while his wife held Mobil.
But the issue ran to more than money. It was about this time that the Sudanese decided they had had enough of hosting Osama bin Laden and offered him to us on a platter. Maybe if the White House and National Security Council had been spending less time thinking about Exxon and Mobil and Amoco and more time thinking about the implications of letting a known venomous snake slither away to Afghanistan, we might have all been spared a lot of future misery.
OIL SEEMED TO BE making bad bedfellows all over Washington. Jim Giffen was Mr. Kazakstan. If you wanted an oil concession in Kazakstan, you went to Giffen because his consulting company, Mercator Corporation, held all the keys to the kingdom. If you wanted to get out of your concession in Kazakstan because you’d been ripped off, you went to Giffen. He collected the commissions and distributed them, no questions asked, as long as the numbers on the check were right.
But Giffen did a lot more than business. He was Washington’s de facto ambassador to Kazakstan. When Kazak President Nazarbayev wanted to come to Washington, he didn’t phone Beth Jones, our ambassador in Alma Ata. He called Giffen, whose office in New York took care of all the arrangements, from travel to meetings to security. Giffen also arranged to do all the legal work and lobbying through his white-shoe law firm, Shearman and Sterling. Nazarbayev poured millions of dollars into the firm, even though no one seemed to know where the money ultimately ended up.
In Washington, Giffen’s preferred point of contact was Assistant Secretary of State Toby Trister Gati, the head of State’s Bureau of Intelligence and Research. With a contact like Giffen, Gati quickly stopped calling up her own bureau or the CIA for anything on Kazak-stan. She could get everything she wanted from Giffen. For instance, when the CIA found out that Nazarbayev was selling sophisticated arms to North Korea and Iran, including the S-300, one of Russia’s most advanced surface-to-air defense weapons, Gati made the problem quietly disappear with a couple of phone calls to Giffen. (In the spirit of international cooperation, the North Koreans and Iranians simply found a new arms dealer.) It was all very chummy. Everybody walked away from the table a winner. The only unpleasantness was when Ambassador Jones found out that Gati had shown Giffen a top-secret CIA report on corruption in Kazakstan. He might have been the de facto ambassador, but he didn’t have a security clearance. A nasty exchange of cables followed between Jones and Gati, but the State Department dropped the matter. Gati was a protected citizen, and the potential embarrassment in Foggy Bottom wasn’t worth it.
I myself found how deep Gati was into the oil business when I was called down to the NSC in December 1995 for an unscheduled emergency meeting on Georgia. When I walked into the NSC’s stately conference room, I found the usual downtown nomenklatura: Dr. Coit Blacker, Sheila Heslin’s boss; Rand Beers, head of intelligence programs for the NSC; and Jennifer Sims, who worked for Toby Gati at the State Department and was married to the dean of Georgetown University’s School of Foreign Service. A few other people from Defense and State were there for decoration.
Sims didn’t waste any time making her pitch: We absolutely had to give Georgia president Eduard Shevardnadze a Matador air-defense system to protect his planes and helicopters. (The Matador detects things like radar lock-ons and approaching missiles.) Shevardnadze was the only Caucuses leader who had committed to the main oil-export pipeline; America could not afford to lose him.
I vaguely wondered why, if he was so important, the oil companies didn’t pay to protect his life. But I wasn’t about to get into that one, and continued to doodle until Sims dropped her bomb: The money for the Matador would come from the CIA. At first I thought I’d fallen asleep and was dreaming. The State Department couldn’t have forgotten already that after Fred Woodruff was murdered just outside of the Georgian capital, Eduard Shevardnadze had stonewalled the investigation at every turn. Now the CIA was being asked to reward Shevardnadze for his complicity by ponying up $2 million plus to protect his life—all so Amoco, Exxon, and Mobil could have some extra reserves for their yearly financial statement. Had the inmates finally taken complete control of the asylum?
At least I knew exactly how to drive a stake in this deal.
“Can’t be done,” I said, interrupting.
Everyone in the room stopped talking, surprised I’d said anything.
“Bob, what seems to be the problem?” Beers said, bracing himself for the worst.
“The man Ms. Sims proposes turning the Matador system over to is a murderer.”
Dr. Blacker shoved back his chair. There was a big, gaping hole where his mouth had been. For a minute I thought he was going to come around the conference table and strangle me.
“Sorry, Bob, I’m not sure we all understand what you’re getting at,” Beers said.
“The head of the Georgian KGB—the head of Shevardnadze’s security, the same man who is supposed to operate the Matador system—is a murderer. We have a video of him shooting six handcuffed prisoners in the back of the head. It’s rather gruesome, but I’d be happy to go back to Langley and bring you back a copy. In any case, he’s violated human rights. As much as we’d like to, there’s nothing the CIA can do for you.”
I wasn’t making up the story, either—we really did have the video. No one asked to see it, and that was the last I heard about the Matador.
ALL OF THESE SIDE STORIES continued to stoke my curiosity about Sheila Heslin and the oil lobby, so I began calling around Washington to see what the deal was. Heslin’s sole job, it seemed, was to carry water for an exclusive club known as the Foreign Oil Companies Group, a cover for a cartel of major petroleum companies doing business in the Caspian. It was the same cartel that had wanted dirt on Tamraz and the others. The group particularly hated Tamraz because he was a lot more agile than they were. He had an absolute genius for getting to the best properties first and flipping them for huge profit, which drove up the majors’ operating costs. As evidence, they cited Roger’s purchase of Block I in Turkmenistan. He hadn’t invested a nickel to develop it. His only interest was in reselling the field to one of them for a huge premium. There’s nothing the majors hate more than buying off a middleman they don’t have to.
Another thing I learned was that Heslin wasn’t soloing. Her boss, Deputy National Security Adviser Sandy Berger, headed the interagency committee on Caspian oil policy, which made him in effect the government’s ambassador to the cartel, and Berger wasn’t a disinterested player. He held $90,000 worth of stock in Amoco, probably the most influential member in the cartel and the one with the greatest reason to be wary of Tamraz. Another big oil alliance led by Chevron had lost serious time and money getting rid of a spoiler named John Deuss in a similar Caspian oil deal. Nobody intended to let Roger play the same role this time.
The deeper I got, the more Caspian oil money I found sloshing all around Washington. The Caspian Sea embassy fax lines were burning up with proposals from lobbying and law firms to sell access to the White House. Probably the most aggressive was Berger’s old firm, Hogan & Hartson, which put out the word that it could guarantee entrée into the White House. Anytime. Turkmenistan opted for the Israeli connection, hiring a firm called Merhav, which had good relations with the American-Israeli Public Affairs committee.
One thing was clear: Whether you were an oil company or an oil country, if you wanted to put something in play in the nation’s capital, you had better be ready to pay.
NEVER INTIMIDATED by big oil, Roger Tamraz was putting his lobbying campaign on wartime footing, as I found out when my phone rang two days after I got back from Azerbaijan.
“I gave your name and telephone number to Don Fowler,” Roger said without preamble. “He’s going to call you. I told him about us, about our project.”
I drew a blank. “Don Fowler?”
“The Democratic National Chairman. He’s on our side.”
“You gave this phone number to the Democratic National Chairman?”
Tamraz didn’t see any problem, but then he rarely did. As for me, I saw a boatload. The number Roger had given Don Fowler was the unclassified one that marked me as CIA, and Washington had a long history that proved intelligence gathering and partisan politics were a lethal mix. As soon as I hung up with Roger, I called Fowler. He wasn’t in, but I left my cover number and hoped he would tear up the other one.
A little after two, he called back on the CIA line.
“Don Fowler here.” I could hear a PA system in the background. Fowler was calling from an airport telephone booth. “I’m a friend of Roger’s. He tells me you’re writing a paper about him for the White House.”
In fact, I had told Roger about the memos we had sent the NSC in response to Sheila Heslin’s little tasker. If the CIA was sending papers around Washington acknowledging a relationship with Tamraz that it had committed to keeping secret, the least I could do was tell him. It was his ass on the line.
“Son, I need a copy of that paper to show the president. He needs to know about everything Roger has done for this country. Let me know where I can pick it up.”
Now, this called for some truly fast thinking. I could deny knowing Roger, but was it wise to lie to someone close to the president? Or I could admit knowing Roger but deny there was a paper, another lie but maybe just a tad more attractive. Then I realized there was a third way.
“Sir,” I said, “I cannot talk about what Roger may or may not have done for this country. And if a paper exists, as Roger says, then it’s at the White House. You’ll be able to find it there.”
I was proud of myself. I’d given Fowler a line of pure bureaucratic bullshit. As for the memo, let Heslin tell Fowler he couldn’t have it.
Fowler, obviously annoyed that I wasn’t going to play, snorted and hung up.
Suddenly the game was getting very rich. Right number or not, Fowler knew he was calling the CIA, and I knew what he wanted: my help in overcoming Heslin’s opposition to letting Roger in. That’s what Roger had asked me for in the beginning, and I was certain that was what he wanted now from Fowler.
I also sensed that a cold call from the chairman of the DNC to a midlevel DO case officer under a very dark cloud had the makings of a Titanic-size disaster, so I called an FBI agent friend and asked his advice. He whistled appreciatively and then got down to business.
“What you do now is spread it all around Langley like manure,” he advised. “Tell as many people as you can. Document it wherever you can. Because when this thing goes down, whatever it is you’ve managed to stick your nose into, no one is going to remember talking to you.”
I started with my manager in the Central Eurasian Division. There was a look of pure horror on his face when I told the story. I couldn’t find the lawyer for my division, so I went to see the one assigned to the Near East Division. To my eternal gratitude, as soon as I walked out of his office, he sent an e-mail summarizing our conversation to Bob Caudel, the CE Division lawyer; John Rizzo, the DO’s lawyer; and Rob Davis, the same genius who told me the Iraq investigation would be a good thing for me. Later, when the whole thing exploded, that e-mail would save my skin.
I couldn’t resist calling Heslin, hoping to get a rise out of her. By now I was learning to keep a journal to compare events and times and to help fill out the matrices. I placed the call on October 23. Here’s what my notes say about our conversation.
Me: “You know Roger’s going to make it into the White House. He’s going to get his meeting with Clinton.”
Her: “That’s the stupidest thing I’ve heard in a long time. Roger’s on the Secret Service blacklist. I know because I put him there. He can’t get into the White House. Period.”
Me: “He’s going to do it through Don Fowler.”
Her: “No, he’s not. What do you people use for brains out there?”
I could almost see the phone slam down.
On October 25 my group finally finished the follow-up on Roger Tamraz. What with summer vacations and transfers, and ordering up the remaining volumes of Roger’s file from archives, the memo had been lingering in the office since June. I would have preferred that the memo had been sent before Fowler’s call, to avoid even the hint of any influence. But the memo spoke for itself. It included not only all the derogatory information we had sent to Heslin back on May 19 but newly inserted details about BCCI as well. It wasn’t going to get Roger indicted, but it was an honest, accurate account of everything the DO knew about him.
The problems with the October memo came after it left South Group. Tamraz was starting to make a lot of people nervous. When the October memo landed on Dave Cohen’s desk, duly logged in as DDO 95-3136, he didn’t like the smell of things. The memo stated right on the cover sheet that Tamraz was rubbing elbows with the DNC and the White House crowd. So Cohen, who hadn’t gotten to be director of operations because he lacked the political instinct for self-survival, bucked it up to the general counsel’s office, accompanied by a handwritten marginal note from his assistant: “We’ve already forwarded NSC info on Tamraz. FYI: he is a U.S. citizen, so I’ve asked DO/LGL to O. K. passage of file info to NSC.”
Cohen wasn’t the only one running for cover. On November 13, 1995, Paul Redmond, the deputy director for counterintelligence, sent the October memo to George Tenet, then deputy director and soon to be number one. Although it said right on the cover sheet in black and white that Tamraz was in touch with Fowler and Heslin, as well as a bunch of other politicians, Tenet wrote in the margin, “Have not fully read. Please pay careful attention here.” Tenet doesn’t have the time to read a two-page memo concerning financial ties between the president of the United States and an indicted middleman? Frankly, if I’d been in Tenet’s position, I would have checked out for the day and pretended I hadn’t seen the memo at all. There was no way to win on that one.
The general counsel’s office apparently was oblivious to the executive jitters on the seventh floor. In that narrow legal view of the world, it didn’t matter whether Tamraz was in contact with Osama bin Laden or Jesus Christ. The rule was simple, and never mind any competing findings: The CIA did not send derogatory information on American citizens to other government agencies, including the White House. Accordingly, the Office of General Counsel duly removed every negative comment about Tamraz and sent it back to Cohen. Now absolved of any responsibility, Cohen then faxed it to Heslin on December 26, 1995. Requested in June, the follow-up memo arrived nearly seven months late and didn’t say a bad thing about Roger. Little wonder that Heslin, in her complete ignorance about the CIA, believed she’d stumbled onto an evil and venal CIA conspiracy.
IF ONLY that had been the end of it. On December 6 I met Roger Tamraz for lunch, at his request. We sat at one of those semicircular booths at the Four Seasons, overlooking the C&O Canal. Businessmen preferred these tables because they could lean head to head and whisper without being overheard.
“Well, I did it,” Roger said, very proud of himself. “I met the president.”
“How’d you manage to do that, Roger?” I asked, although I knew the moment the words left my mouth that they shouldn’t have.
“It was easy. Fowler gave me price list of what I could get for campaign donations, from a night in the Lincoln Bedroom to a one-on-one with the president in the Oval Office.”
I must have looked like I’d just swallowed my napkin ring.
“I started out small—a coffee,” Tamraz said, proud of his frugality. “I got to mention my Armenian route to Bill. He was intrigued and wanted to talk more about it.”
“Heslin’s going to love this,” I thought out loud. In truth, I, too, was a little alarmed that the president of the United States had become plain old “Bill” to Roger. Tamraz wasn’t a man you wanted to let too far into your good graces.
“No, no,” he went on. “It’s gone much further than that. Tomorrow I have my one-on-one in the Oval Office. Bill and I are going to work out a strategy for the whole area. I’ve opened a channel to Russia.”
“A channel to Russia?” The last time Tamraz was involved in a diplomatic channel, he ended up losing a bank.
“In fact, I just got back from a meeting with the Russians in Milan. I saw Alexander Korzhakov and Pavel Borodin.”
On the upside, Korzhakov and Borodin ran Russia during those many days and nights when BorisYeltsin was too drunk to find the hotline. On the downside, Korzhakov and Borodin also doubled as Yeltsin’s bagmen. Borodin would be arrested on a Swiss money-laundering charge in January 2001 in NewYork, on his way to George W. Bush’s inauguration.
“They told me Yeltsin would like to help Clinton’s reelection campaign. You know … with money.”
By now I was almost out of my seat. Roger obviously had lost his mind. I wished desperately that we had taken a larger table, one with more space between the two of us.
“And here’s the best part for our project.”
I really wished he’d stop calling it “our” project.
“Yeltsin will sign off on the Armenian route, but in return he’ll want some money for his campaign. It will be no problem. We talked about a ballpark figure of a hundred million. The Chinese promised all the money I need. Yeltsin even agreed to let a little money leak into Bill’s campaign. Everyone walks away from this a winner. I can’t wait to see the president and tell him.”
I raced back to Langley after we had finished and told Roger’s story to Bill Lofgren, the tough and irascible Central Eurasian Division chief.
“That’s utter and complete bullshit,” Bill responded. “I don’t believe him.”
Just to be certain, he picked up the telephone and asked his secretary to get Rome on the line. He wanted to find out if Borodin and Korzhakov really had been in Milan on December 1 and 2, as Tamraz claimed. Always start with the facts you can establish.
The following day, after we learned that the two Russians really had been where Roger said they were, I brought Lofgren to see Tamraz so he could get the story straight from the horse’s mouth. Roger repeated it almost verbatim. He was still planning to see Clinton that afternoon. The only new twist was that Roger now had on display an official White House photograph of himself talking to Clinton over coffee.
When we got back to headquarters, Lofgren called then director John Deutch and told him the story. Deutch’s assistant called back the same afternoon. He said the president was going to Paris shortly and had no plans to meet Tamraz. “I think you have a problem with your source. Apparently, he’s a liar,” the assistant told Lofgren.
FOUR DAYS LATER, Fowler called. “Son, have you changed your mind about that memo?”
Unaware that the October memo was still being scrubbed and polished by the deputy director of operations and the general counsel’s office, I told Fowler again that if any CIA paper on Tamraz existed, it was with Sheila Heslin. He could get it from her.
“That damn broad won’t give me anything,” Fowler grumbled.
With that, I decided to throw caution to the winds. If anyone was going to know just how deeply the major oil companies were into the NSC, it was going to be Don Fowler.
“Mr. Fowler, I believe your problem is with the big boys, and the biggest bully seems to be Amoco. It doesn’t appreciate an interloper like Roger poaching in its preserve. That’s why he’s been frozen out of the White House.”
“You’re goddamned right. I know exactly what Amoco is doing, and Amoco’s ambassador at the NSC, Heslin.”
“Well, it seems she’s got you pretty well trumped.”
“We’ll see about that,” Fowler said as he hung up the phone.
IF IT HAD BEEN JUST a matter of money or even political corruption, I might have been able to walk away from all I had learned about big oil, the White House, and the NSC. Elective politics always breed a certain amount of nastiness. What I couldn’t get around, though, was this: Every time I turned over a new rock, there was something even nastier underneath. Finally I got to the ugliest rock of all, the one that lives were waiting under, to be saved or lost. That, I guess, is when I snapped.
A little background first: After Iran released the last of the American hostages in 1991, the White House kept its fingers crossed that Iran was finally out of the terrorism business. By December, however, it was becoming apparent that Iran had simply switched battlefields. The CIA picked up information that several leaders of the Saudi Hizballah had traveled to Tehran. Obviously something was brewing. After the meeting, the Iranian Pasdaran opened a training base in the Biqa’ for Saudi Hizballah terrorist cadres. It issued the terrorists false passports and provided all the funding they needed, and in July 1995, the Iranian-trained networks started to watch American facilities in Saudi Arabia, including the consulate in Jeddah. When a cleric in Qum, Iran’s most holy city, issued a fatwa, or religious finding, to conduct attacks in Saudi Arabia, the White House braced itself for the worst. The first attack came against the Saudi National Guard facility in Riyadh in November 1995, killing five Americans. The Khobar barracks were hit on June 25, 1996, killing nineteen Americans.
Just as ominously, the CIA was learning about the first tentative contacts between Osama bin Laden and Iran. In December 1995 one of bin Laden’s Egyptian associates visited Tehran and met with several officers from the Ministry of Intelligence and Security. The U.S. wasn’t sure bin Laden had reached an agreement with the Iranians on a strategic relationship, but we in the intelligence community suspected he had. Bin Laden desperately needed the terrorist expertise Iran possessed. Our fears were confirmed, as I’ve mentioned, when bin Laden met an Iranian intelligence officer in Afghanistan in July 1996 to hammer out a strategic relationship. The possibility of a grand terrorist alliance aimed against the U.S. was staggering. It wasn’t something we could just ignore.
By then I was a group chief and could instruct my stations to do essentially what I wanted, so I leaned on our offices in the Caspian and Central Asia to concentrate on the Iranian target. Early in 1996 one place came up with a plan to bug a clandestine Pasdaran facility. At that point we had no idea what the Pasdaran was doing in the Caspian, but the possibility always existed that it intended to open a third front, in addition to Saudi Arabia. Any information would have been helpful.
I knew the routine and called Sheila Heslin for her permission to go ahead. I described what we intended to do, what we expected the take to be, and what the benefit would be to U.S. interests in the region. I could feel a frigid Arctic air coming over the telephone line.
Less than twenty minutes later, my green phone rang—the superencrypted communications line used for discussing sensitive information. Rand Beers was on the other end. “What’s this about the Iranian Pasdaran and some audio operation?” he asked.
“Yeah, what’s the problem?”
“Well, Heslin’s worried about the blowback.”
“The blowback?”
“She’s afraid the Iranians will take revenge on Amoco’s people in Azerbaijan.”
Even though Beers had just handed me a gem about how the NSC worked, I was furious. “Do you mean to tell me we have to stop an operation against a terrorist group—one perhaps responsible for killing five Americans in Saudi Arabia—to protect Amoco’s balance sheets?”
“Well, I wouldn’t put it that way,” Beers said.
“Fine, I’ll call Congress and tell them that Sheila Heslin, Amoco’s ambassador to the NSC, no longer wants us to target the Iranian Pasdaran because we’re worried about Amoco’s profits.”
Like a good bureaucrat, I fired off what is called a spot report to the deputy director of operations, Dave Cohen, about my conversation with Beers. I never got a response, but Beers called back that same day to tell me the NSC had had a change of mind and decided not to object to South Group’s targeting the Pasdaran. Congress and Iran had a certain resonance in the White House.
I remember thinking that it should have been a big moment. After all the bureaucratic infighting, all those internal and external battles within the intelligence community, I had finally won one. For a moment, at least, the battle against terrorism had trumped the battle for oil money. But I was just so tired of it all. We were talking about lives, for God’s sake. The fight shouldn’t have been so difficult.
“This is the way the world ends,” T. S. Eliot wrote in “The Hollow Men.” “Not with a bang but a whimper.”
ROGER TAMRAZ DISAPPEARED from my life as suddenly as he had appeared. He never called again after the December 7 meeting when he told his story to Bill Lofgren. Although I ran into him several times in 1996, our conversations were stiff and formal. There wasn’t a word about campaign financing or Roger’s plans to fund Yeltsin’s campaign. He had obviously heard that I’d ratted him out. Another bureaucrat without vision, he must have thought.
Lofgren asked me to put on paper everything Roger had told me, from my first official meeting in May to our last one on December 7. I wrote it all up, from the White House price list to Fowler’s call. I even devoted a full page to the Milan meeting and the possibility that Tamraz might be planning to channel Russian money into the 1996 U.S. presidential campaign. My memo was duly logged out of South Group on December 28, 1995. A copy was put in the group’s chronological file. I wouldn’t hear about it again until I found reference to it splashed across the American press two years later.