IN MARCH 1997, I called Bill Lofgren, who had by now retired, and told him that I’d had seen enough of what was going on in the White House and intended to blow the whistle. Bill didn’t say anything for a moment. I could almost hear his brain crunching through the possible consequences.
“Do it,” he finally said, all doubt banished.
It wasn’t easy advice for Bill to give. For starters, he knew as well as I did that whistle-blowers are among the least popular subspecies in Washington, where everyone who counts seems to feed off the same two or three teats. Why ruin a good thing by calling attention to the truth?
Bill also had a personal stake in my keeping silent. After he retired from the CIA, he hung out his shingle as a consultant on the former Soviet Union. One of the first clients to call was Roger Tamraz, who still had problems in Azerbaijan and wanted Bill’s advice on how to solve them. It was only a small contract, but it at least paid the telephone bills in the early going. When we kidded Bill about working for a wanted felon, he laughed and noted the fancy pedigrees he had joined. If Senator Kennedy’s wife could work for Tamraz, why couldn’t he? And wasn’t it Tamraz who had helped foot the bill for Clinton’s fiftieth-birthday gala in New York and attended the White House showing of Independence Day? If Roger had rehabilitated himself enough to befriend the president of the United States, Lofgren didn’t see why he couldn’t do a little honest work for him.
Deciding to blow the whistle was hard enough. Finding someone to blow it to proved damn near impossible. First I tried calling the office of Alabama Democrat-turned-Republican senator Richard Shelby. A member of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence (SSCI), Shelby had fired the opening shot in the Clinton campaign-finance scandal when he asked the NSC for its records on suspicious campaign donors. I figured he needed all the help he could get, but obviously I was wrong.
When Shelby’s office didn’t return my call, I tried an end run to him through John Millis, chief of staff on the House intelligence committee. Millis was a former CIA case officer who had quit to work for Congress. I’d replaced him in Rabat and knew that even though he held a highly charged political job, he was discreet and lived by a strict code of integrity. He wouldn’t dime me out to the CIA.
Millis laughed when I told him the story. “Do you have any idea what you’re doing?”
I considered telling him about all my suspicions and then left it by telling him about Tamraz’s buying access to the president.
“They’ll come after you. You’ll find yourself a very lonely man in this town. Anyhow, I’ll pass the word to Shelby,” Millis said as he hung up.
I don’t know if he did pass the word, but I didn’t hear anything more from Millis or Shelby, so I called the Justice Department task force investigating campaign financing and volunteered to come downtown and share what I knew. When I alerted my boss to what I had done, alarm bells went off all over Langley’s seventh floor. The general counsel’s office immediately called the task force to cancel my meeting. “We’re sorry, he [Baer] went out of channels,” the task force was told. The CIA would do its own investigation and get back to Justice when the inquiry was complete.
In theory, that all sounded just fine. The CIA had picked up the aroma of questionable campaign financing long before Congress and the press had. It had even started doing its own damage assessment, trying to root out the skeletons in the closet. But all the trails seemed to end up going cold.
There was the case of Larry Wallace, for instance. An old business crony of former White House chief of staff Mack McLarty, Wallace held an open day pass to the White House and a letter naming him an ex-officio representative of the president. Basically, thanks to McLarty, he could come and go as he pleased, and he certainly did. Wallace used the letter to drum up business overseas, including with Yasir Arafat. He eventually hit a speed bump in Belgrade when he made the mistake of letting Slobodan Milosevic make a copy of the letter. Our office in Belgrade got ahold of a copy and faxed it back to headquarters, which prompted the Central European Division to open a file on Wallace. (The CIA can collect information on Americans if there is good evidence they are spies or making common purpose with the enemy.) But Wallace’s file was lost before it could be turned over to congressional and Justice investigators.
Then there was the case of Lieutenant Colonel Liu Chao Ying, of Chinese military intelligence. It was Liu who gave Johnny Chung the famous $300,000 to put into Bill Clinton’s campaign. Chung must have had other things on his mind, because he forwarded only $20,000 to the DNC, but what wasn’t known was that one of our case officers had been in touch with Liu while this was all going on. It was particularly embarrassing because the CIA had neglected to tell Justice about her.
In fact, as the case officer found out, the less headquarters heard about Liu, the better. When she sent a cable asking if Chung had some White House appointment—his business card sported an embossed presidential seal in the corner—headquarters never responded. Nor did it want to think too hard about a company Liu had ties to: China National Aero-Technology Import and Export Corporation, which was secretly negotiating with Iran to exchange sophisticated arms, many of U.S. design, for oil.
The CIA did eventually send the Justice task force a set of Tamraz documents, but they had been cherry-picked to make certain nothing would see the light of day that suggested the agency had dropped the ball. In the meantime, someone leaked the administration’s spin on Roger Tamraz to Wall Street Journal reporter Michael Frisby.
It was only when Shelby got word of Frisby’s story that he decided I was worth his time. The CIA bundled me up in a van and sent me downtown to the Hart Office Building and the offices of the SSCI. Six of us were in attendance. Shelby and his aide sat on my left. The CIA’s general counsel, Mike O’Neil, and the head of congressional affairs, John Moseman, sat across the table. Senator Bob Kerrey wasn’t there, as I had hoped. A Vietnam combat veteran, Kerrey not only had guts, he understood how the political sands shift in Washington. But I was happy to see that his SSCI staffer Chris Straub had filled in for him. Straub and I and another congressional staffer had spent three days in northern Iraq, traveling around and talking about the CIA and what it was trying to do there. I liked him, and I think he felt he could trust me.
Whatever hopes I had for the meeting, though, were dashed when it quickly became clear that it was precooked. Like the Justice task force, Shelby was shown only the documents the CIA wanted him to see. He hadn’t even heard about the possibility that Tamraz might have funneled Russian money into the DNC, nor am I certain he would have much cared if he had. All Shelby was after was more ammo to shoot down Tony Lake’s nomination as CIA director. Shelby had never gotten over Lake’s giving Iran a wink and a nod to go into Bosnia.
I was determined to tell my story whether the senator wanted to hear it or not, so at a pause in the conversation, I asked Shelby: “Senator, do you know how Roger Tamraz found his way into the White House? It was through Senator Kennedy.”
“Sir, we are not here to talk about my esteemed colleague,” Shelby cut me off, much faster than I thought he was capable of responding.
Now annoyed, he stood up and announced that the meeting was over. He’d gotten whatever he needed to use against Lake, and he had no intention of sticking around to hear my thoughts on big oil, campaign financing, or the ethics of his colleagues.
I was about to give up on ever telling more of the story when Straub pulled me aside as we were walking out. “What the hell is going on?” he asked.
“A lot. And if you put me up in front of a full committee hearing, I’ll spell it out.”
I told him about Amoco, and about Heslin’s opposition to the Iranian Pasdaran bugging.
“Is it really that bad?”
“Yes, Chris, I think it is.”
Straub talked to Kerrey that afternoon. The following Saturday, Kerrey called President Clinton to let him know he could no longer support Lake’s nomination for CIA director. Lake withdrew his nomination the next day. It should have been a triumphant moment, but there was no time to celebrate.
KGB DEFECTOR YURI NOSENKO should have served as example enough of what happens to someone who’s off message at the CIA. When Nosenko offered a version of Lee Harvey Oswald and the Kennedy assassination that didn’t fit with the agency’s corporate view, he was sent to solitary confinement at the Farm for three years. I don’t know why I thought I’d be treated any differently.
At eight-thirty A. M. on March 18, 1997, I presented myself to the CIA inspector general exactly as ordered. I was shown into a room without any windows. A mahogany conference table separated me from the two men sitting directly across from me. With their bloodless, pinched faces and identical Dacron suits, they could have passed for twins. Neither of them offered his name.
Before I could even sit down, the nastier of the two fired the first shot: “Did you keep a record of the documents you destroyed?”
I didn’t say anything as I took on board what was happening. Destroying official documents is a crime, a felony. Soon they had let loose a withering enfilade of questions about the December 28 memo, the one Bill Lofgren had asked me to prepare in which I had set down everything that had passed with Roger Tamraz.
“Look,” I finally said. “Is it logical to frame myself by writing a memo that details someone else’s crime, file it away in the chrons for all the world to see, and then destroy it? Anyhow, go ask Paul Redmond how it ended up in his safe. That’s proof enough I didn’t destroy it.”
I, in fact, had no idea how my memo had ended up in the safe of the deputy director for counterintelligence, but its mere existence there seemed to me proof enough that I had papered the executive suites of the CIA with the damn thing. It was almost as if I hadn’t said anything at all. “Just tell us why you destroyed the December 28 memo,” one of the twins said. “You might get off easy.”
After an hour, even they got tired of asking the same question over and over. “How much did Tamraz pay you to clean up the October memo?” one of them asked.
They ignored me when I countered that the cover sheets proved that the general counsel’s office had done the scrubbing, not me.
The questioning shifted again. “Why did you badger Sheila Heslin to take Tamraz’s name off the Secret Service blacklist?”
I exploded. “It’s not true. No officer in my position would dare cross an NSC staffer and survive to tell about it.” If that was the story Heslin was telling, I thought, she had obviously gone around the bend.
“That’s not what she says,” one of them came back at me. “She says you pressured her to remove Tamraz’s name from the White House blacklist. She says you called her at least a dozen times with the same demand. You scared her.”
I considered telling them about a dinner I had hosted for an Azeri delegation six months earlier, on September 15, at La Chaumiere in Georgetown. I’d included several government officials, including Heslin. Not only had she lobbied for the invite, she even cadged a ride home from me afterward, at a time when I supposedly had her scared half to death. Go figure, but I knew my new pals wouldn’t be interested. Instead I used my last trump card—Heslin’s internal White House e-mails. You had to read only a few of them to conclude she had lost her grip on reality.
“Take a look at Heslin’s e-mails,” I said, and offered to make copies. “She seriously believes the CIA is behind a conspiracy to take over the world.”
They weren’t interested in looking at them, either. “We’re investigating you, not Heslin,” one of my interrogators said.
“By the way,” I finally asked, “how long have you guys worked for the agency?” Although they both were wearing blue CIA staffer badges, something didn’t smell right.
They looked at each other and nodded. Apparently, they had no choice but to tell me. “We’re from the Secret Service.”
Lovely, I thought. Two outsiders had been put in charge of an internal CIA investigation.
THE NEXT MORNING six men in black and a woman in a puce dress buttoned up to the neck descended on South Group like Ostrogoths sacking Rome. They barred everyone from leaving; then, without saying a word, they started rifling through safes, ripping apart files, and throwing them onto the floor. It looked like a typhoon had hit the place.
Soon they were interviewing my employees behind closed doors. Invariably, the first question was: “Do you have an attorney? If not, you might consider retaining one.” It was pure intimidation. With only one or two exceptions, no one had been working there in 1995 at the time I was meeting Tamraz. But just in case the message didn’t sink in, notifications began flashing across monitors that afternoon that the inspector general was in the process of auditing their computers. This wasn’t a particularly subtle threat: Misusing a computer in the CIA got you fired. Before long I found myself sitting alone in South Group. Everyone who could found a job elsewhere.
In mid-May I took a routine medical exam. A computer-generated notice landed on my desk on May 30 informing me that I’d passed, but a few days later, as I was making preparations for a short European trip, I got a new notice that there had been a “problem” with my physical. A staff doctor had not signed it, I was told, and I would have to take another one. When that turned out to be a load of baloney, I was told I needed a “routine” psychological exam. That wasn’t true, either: The CIA doesn’t require psychological exams unless an employee is going to a hardship post like Moscow or Peking. Clearly, my employer was trying to send a message: I needed to shut my mouth or risk going to the loony bin. I’m sure someone up on the seventh floor wondered if Yuri Nosenko’s cell was available.
AS THE CLINTON campaign-finance scandal moved forward in the courts and toward a showdown in Congress, it became apparent to me that the Justice Department task force, like the CIA, wasn’t looking for the truth, the whole truth, or anything like the truth.
In a pre–grand jury session on June 5, I told Laura Ingersol, the head of the Justice task force, about my dealings with Tamraz. Her deputy and an FBI agent attended the meetings. Ingersol listened patiently, took notes, read the Tamraz documents—she had a complete set—and asked some very good, pertinent questions.
I zeroed in on the fact that Tamraz didn’t have a penny in his name, at least any accounts we knew about. OCL, Delaware, was a phantom company, with something like $250 in its Citibank account and no employees or other assets. It was the same thing with OCL, Panama: no assets, no money. The company was run out of a lawyer’s office. Since Roger appeared to be broke, wasn’t there a strong possibility that the money he shelled out to the Clinton people had come from some other source? Maybe even the KGB? Yes, Ingersol allowed, that might be so.
In front of the grand jury, though, the source of Roger’s money was the last thing on Ingersol’s mind. When I tried to bring up the evidence that Russian money might be going into the campaign, she called a recess. After we returned and I tried to raise the subject again, she cut me off cold. When I asked her if she wanted to know the truth or continue with her pointless questions, she threatened me with contempt. Ingersol avoided the Russian angle and the Milan meetings altogether. She didn’t have a single question about Tamraz’s claims that he’d bought access to the White House. Nothing about Don Fowler’s price list. Nothing about his hiring Ted Kennedy’s wife. Nothing about Secretary of State Warren Christopher’s son being on his payroll. Nothing about the other political figures—Democratic senator Tom Harkin of Iowa among them—who appeared to have solicited donations from the always affable, always generous Tamraz. Nothing at all. It was as if I somehow had accidentally found my way into the wrong grand-jury hearing.
But it wasn’t until her very last question that I understood where she intended to take the grand jury. “Did Tamraz ever offer you a job?” she asked, looking around the room to make sure the jurors understood the serious implications of her question.
There it was, in all its beauty: the one question solely meant to discredit everything I had managed to get in about Russia and the DNC. Like every good prosecutor, Ingersol already knew the answer. She’d talked to enough of Tamraz’s acquaintances to know he offered everyone he met a job, from the waiter at the Four Seasons to two congressional staffers who flew out to Geneva to interview him. He’d probably even offered one to Heslin. The grand jury, though, knew none of that. In the version of events Ingersol had scripted for them, the whole Tamraz affair boiled down to a venal CIA officer playing the system—a perfect red herring to draw attention away from his DNC donations and the Russians. Obviously, Laura Ingersol knew who signed the paychecks at Justice.
The Senate’s televised hearings on campaign financing were no different. No one wanted to touch the Russian-money question. The only thing anyone seemed to care about were the titillating rumors about the CIA. And why not? A CIA officer who fronted for a shady oilman of Middle Eastern descent satisfied everyone’s interests. Senators Kennedy, Harkin, and others certainly didn’t want to linger long over Roger Tamraz’s largesse. The Republicans also knew that the National Republican Senatorial Committee had solicited Roger’s money, as had the Reagan administration. And of course Democrats were understandably squeamish about the possibility that KGB rubles perhaps had purchased some first-rate face time with the commander in chief. Roger might not have been called at all if it weren’t for his entertainment value. Sitting alone without a lawyer as he promised to double his contributions to $600,000 the next time around, Roger provided a brilliant coup de théâtre with which to bring the curtain down on the whole sham operation.
As for me, I made it into the hearings as a sound bite, most notably when Illinois Democratic senator Dick Durbin, who had clearly bought in to Heslin’s version of events, said of me: “What does this guy do for a living? It sounds like he worked for the Chamber of Commerce.” But I couldn’t help noticing that I was the only witness to be disinvited from appearing in person. Senator Fred Thompson had probably heard that once I started to open up my fat mouth about foreign money oozing around American politics, there’d be no way to close it. Instead of an appearance, the CIA wrote up a one-page stipulation of fact that said basically nothing.
HOW DO YOU CALL an end to a career that has taken you so far into the heart of darkness and shown you so many of the secrets that lie there? I didn’t want to go out bitter, but I didn’t want to just slink away, either. I’d spent a quarter century building up a body of knowledge and a set of instincts about some of the worst people and most dangerous organizations on the planet. I decided to find out, really find out to the best of my knowledge, what the truth was behind Iranian-sponsored terrorism.
Maybe, I thought, the search would lead me to what I considered the biggest secret of all, the one that had been gnawing at me for more than thirteen years: Who bombed the U.S. embassy in Beirut, and why had they never been brought to justice? I wanted to tie up loose ends, especially after being pulled off the trail to spend time in Tajikistan and northern Iraq, and the embassy bombing was the loosest end of my career as far as I was concerned. But there was more to it than just satisfying myself. Whoever bombed the embassy was clearly someone to be reckoned with. He—or it or they—had the will, the experience, and the determination to do enormous damage. If we couldn’t identify who had done it, if we couldn’t even learn what kind of explosives had been used, chances are it would all happen again, maybe at a far greater magnitude. I didn’t want that on my conscience if I could avoid it, and by now it had become obvious to me that the new, politically correct CIA was neither up to nor interested in the challenge.
There was one more advantage to tackling Iranian terrorism for an encore: Not only was it familiar territory, but I was also convinced it was the last issue Washington politicians would try to manipulate to their personal benefit. Sure, I’d seen Sheila Heslin try to block our operation against the Iranian Pasdaran to help an oil company, but she was one person and was eventually overruled. I’d also heard rumors that the Clinton administration was putting the brakes on the investigation into the Khobar barracks bombing. But I figured that had to be an exaggeration: Even the White House wouldn’t dare cover up a terrorist attack in which nineteen servicemen were killed.
I started out by running a computer search for intelligence we knew to be factual on the hostages in Lebanon. The first thing I noticed was that, by the time Iran made the decision to release the hostages in March 1991, it had given up any attempt to hide its hand. Two senior Pasdaran officials, Feridoun Mehdi-Nezhad and Hossein Mosleh, directly supervised the releases. Then, on April 28, 1991, both men flew to Damascus to see ’Imad Mughniyah. Their message was clear: Iran was getting out of the hostage business, and so was the super-shadowy Islamic Jihad Organization. The orders, they said, came directly from Iran’s spiritual leader, Ayatollah Khameini. Mughniyah left the same day for Beirut and started making preparations to carry out Iran’s orders. By September 1991 Mehdi-Nezhad and Mosleh were in Beirut pretty much full time, closing down safe houses, paying off guards, and preparing communiqués, as well as reassuring the IJO that Iran wasn’t getting out of the terrorism business entirely. There was still work for the IJO.
Once I was sure I had that trail down, I went back to the 1987 release of French hostages, looking for comparables. In fact, the process played out much the same way. After then prime minister Jacques Chirac agreed to give Iran everything it wanted, we watched Mehdi-Nezhad and Mosleh roll into action, handing down orders to the Iranian Pasdaran office in Lebanon and the IJO. On November 26, 1987, the Pasdaran office at the Shaykh Abdallah barracks composed and translated into Arabic a communiqué related to the two hostages, Roger Auque and Jean-Louis Normandin. The next day, the communiqué and the Frenchmen went free.
The deeper into the files, the more I was struck by the fact Mehdi-Nezhad and Mosleh were at the center of every major Pasdaran terrorist operation. Their involvement went back to the early eighties, when the two were assigned to Balabakk after the Israeli invasion. They were also there when our own American hostages were incarcerated in the married officers’ quarters, and they kept showing up at the edge of other events as well. Mehdi-Nezhad met with Mughniyah’s deputy halfway through the hijacking of TWA Flight 847. As the hijacking drama was playing itself out on the tarmac at Beirut International Airport, Mosleh could be seen talking to Mughniyah at planeside. We didn’t know the subject, but it had to be something important for Mughniyah to take time out of his busy, murderous day.
Mehdi-Nezhad, especially, seemed to be involved in more than just Lebanese-based terrorism. In 1989 he personally led an Iranian hit team that assassinated a Kurdish leader in Vienna. One of his Lebanese agents, Talal Hamiyah, was involved in two attacks in Buenos Aires. He was implicated in the Al-Khobar barracks attack in Saudi Arabia. Mehdi-Nezhad, you will recall, showed up in the Pan Am 103 chronicles: in January 1988 in Tripoli, Libya, and again in July 1988 in Frankfurt—six months before Pan Am 103 exploded over Lockerbie. Was he the Pasdaran officer who met Muhammad Hafiz Dalqamuni in the Damur refugee camp and instructed him to blow up an American airplane? It was circumstantial at best, but the man did have a track record.
THE PHANTOM I kept running up against in my investigation was the IJO. It seemed to pop into existence whenever some new horror was inflicted in the Middle East and elsewhere, and then it seemed to slip completely back into the shadows again. We knew it had deep ties to the Iranian Pasdaran, but we knew next to nothing about its command structure, its recruiting methods, its personnel, its training bases, or anything else. How was it possible? More to the point, how could you ever begin to solve the embassy bombing and other outrages if you could never penetrate the group that took credit for so many of them?
And then it occurred to me, as clearly as it had been hidden the moment before: The IJO had never existed. It was only a name the Pasdaran used for communiqués to claim terrorist operations. What’s more, the CIA knew the IJO was merely a front for the Iranians. It was clear from the documents I dredged up that, by at least 1997, the CIA knew the Pasdaran’s command structure inside and out, just as it knew that Ayatollah Ali Khameini and President Rafsanjani approved every terrorist operation to come out of Iran. As I looked at the evidence in front of me, the conclusion was unavoidable: The Islamic Republic of Iran had declared a secret war against the United States, and the United States had chosen to ignore it.
I had to be missing something, I felt, so I went to see an analyst who had followed Iran since the 1979 revolution. I’ll call him Jim. A maverick, Jim made a lot of people in the bureaucracy uncomfortable. He stuck to the facts and wouldn’t budge no matter how hot it got. The only solution was to take him off a sensitive account like Iran, but like me, Jim kept his own files.
I laid out for Jim what I’d found. I showed him the pile of documents I’d assembled, the important parts underlined in yellow. “Who do Mehdi-Nezhad and Mosleh work for?” I asked.
“That’s a question I once struggled with myself,” Jim said, pushing the papers back to me. He’d already seen them. “Mosleh was the interesting case. Early on, in 1983, we came across his name. At first he was referred to only as Shaykh Hossein from Khurasan. We didn’t have a full name for him or a title, and no one paid much attention to him. The assumption was that he was a rogue operator and had no position in the Iranian government.
“I didn’t ignore him, though. He seemed to be everywhere there was trouble. He often met Mughniyah. It wasn’t until later, after the Algerians fingered Mughniyah, that a member of the IJO put it together and identified him by his full name, Hossein Mosleh. Using a little regressive analysis, I determined that Mosleh had organized the IJO. He had good connections with Fatah, and he organized the IJO along the lines of Fatah’s Black September—no identifiable leaders, no office, no logo. In other words, no return address for its terrorist operations. And yes, you’re right. The IJO is a fiction, meant only to hide the Iranian hand in its operations.”
“I’d already more or less figured that out,” I said. “But how long ago did the CIA know it?”
“I’m trying to tell you. Right from the beginning. It was there in black and white, at least if you looked at the evidence objectively.”
Jim pulled out a stack of files and leafed through them, pulling out the best reports to show me.
“Why didn’t I know this when I was in Beirut?” I asked, my jaw slack.
“Because all the good stuff was squirreled away in the Hostage Task Force.”
Made up of a half-dozen analysts who convened privately from time to time to discuss hostage issues, the HostageTask Force kept no minutes, produced no disseminated assessments, and maintained no computer databases. Under normal circumstances, it would have prepared what is called an National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) on the hostages and Iranian terrorism. But this didn’t happen. The raw reporting on Iran was simply buried, all to keep it out of the hands of Congress and the press. Incidentally, the same thing happened with Saudi Arabia. The CIA was not allowed to produce an NIE on the growing fundamentalist threat there. Had it leaked, it would have offended the Saudi royal family. All this I should have worked out before now.
I had one last question. “What did we know about Iran and the 1983 embassy bombing?”
Jim sucked in some air and reached in the back of his safe to pull out a three-page paper. “Take a look at this puppy.”
It was an intelligence report from March 1982—a full thirteen months before the embassy bombing—stating that Iran was in touch with a network capable of destroying the U.S. embassy in Beirut. A subsequent report even specified a date the operation should be carried out. The source was firsthand and its reliability rock solid.
Another lingering question I wanted to answer before I gave up on my research: I’d always had my suspicions about what became known as the “second channel” in the Iran-contra affair—the one that opened up after the go-between Ghorbanifar proved such a bust. Ali Hashemi-Bahramani, President Rafsanjani’s nephew, had been the primary person in the second channel, but a second Iranian had appeared with Bahramani near the end of the affair, at a meeting held on October 29, 1986, in Mainz, Germany, with Ollie North and George Cave. At the time, I couldn’t figure out who he was or why he had come; now I rifled through the Iran-contra files until I found what I was looking for. About halfway through the meeting, a mysterious Iranian who called himself Ayyub Mozzafari showed up. And what was his true name? I can’t reveal the evidence here, but the answer was beyond challenge: Feridoun Mehdi-Nezhad. In seeking the release of the hostages, the American government was doing business with Iran’s master terrorist. But almost as good, I found out that Mehdi-Nezhad is now in Iranian president Mohammad Khatami’s camp—the same Khatami official Washington looks at as the hope for better relations between the U.S. and Iran.
There was one final thing I decided to look into: the relationship between Mughniyah and Osama bin Laden. If there was one, which two pieces of fragmentary evidence suggested, it would be America’s worst nightmare. We suspected strongly and immediately that bin Laden had a hand in the November 1995 bombing of the Egyptian embassy in Islamabad, Pakistan; his fingerprints were all over it. Shortly afterward we learned that Mughniyah’s deputy had provided a stolen Lebanese passport to one of the planners of the bombing. Six months later we found out that one of bin Laden’s most dangerous associates was calling one of Mughniyah’s offices in Beirut. Neither piece of evidence amounts to a smoking gun, but both should scare anyone who knows how terrorism works.
As for me, both items added to a growing rage that I was having more and more trouble containing. Whether it was Osama bin Laden, Yasir Arafat, Iranian terrorism, Saddam Hussein, or any of the other evils that so threaten the world, the Clinton administration seemed determined to sweep them all under the carpet. Ronald Reagan and George Bush before Clinton were not much better. The mantra at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue seemed to be: Get through the term. Keep the bad news from the newspapers. Dump the naysayers. Gather money for the next election—gobs and gobs of it—and let some other administration down the line deal with it all. Worst of all, my CIA had decided to go along for the ride. Now that such horrendous neglect has come home to roost in such misery-provoking ways, I take no pleasure whatsoever in having been right.
AS MY RESEARCH drew to an end in late November 1997, I began thinking seriously about resigning from the CIA. The FBI and our own inspector-general investigations had told me what I needed to know about the agency. Politics had seeped down to its lowest levels, into operations, where I worked. I’d always assumed the DO was immune. I was wrong.
I’d joined the CIA hoping to get at a slice of truth not available to everyone. I’d even succeeded, in a sense. In my last months there, I unraveled the Beirut embassy bombing, at least to my satisfaction: Iran ordered it, and a Fatah network carried it out. Along the way, I’d also gotten to see the underbelly of a collapsing superpower, and I’d spent my days and too many nights with a cast of characters that no novelist could create. For all its ups and downs, it had been a good run, and now it was time to go. I also knew I had used up my goodwill chits. The CIA I’d spent twenty-one years serving was changing a lot faster than I could adapt. Maybe I should have tried to move up into management and change it from the top, but that wasn’t me.
One Friday afternoon I walked up the seven flights of stairs to the office of the director of operations, Jack Downing, and handed my letter of resignation to his assistant. “This cowboy is hanging up his spurs,” I said, my voice trembling slightly. Downing immediately asked to see me. He tried for twenty minutes to convince me that the CIA was going to go back to the way it was and there was a place for me. I could see, though, that he knew it wasn’t the truth. The agency had become an ocean liner; turning it would take decades, assuming the powers that be even wanted to alter its course.
“I’m sorry to see you go,” Downing finally said. “I promise you’ll get a medal for your remarkable career.”
True to his word, he arranged for me to be awarded the Career Intelligence Medal on March 11, 1998, officially signed by my old Georgetown classmate George Tenet. The medal turned out to be one secret the CIA was willing to keep. I didn’t learn about it until two years later, when some friends finally called and told me. Still, I love it, especially the part of the citation that reads: He repeatedly put himself in personal danger, working the hardest targets, in service to his country.
Maybe, after all, someone had noticed.