CHAPTER ELEVEN

BILL CLINTON, WOOLSEY, DEUTCH, AND TENET

The CIA Without the Cold War

William Casey’s resignation in January 1987 set the revolving door of the DCI’s office in motion again. He had been DCI for six years. Over the next ten years the Intelligence Community would have four different directors before George Tenet arrived and settled in for a seven-year tenure (the second longest, behind Allen Dulles).

Like Jimmy Carter, Bill Clinton inherited a DCI who carried the taint of a close association with a Republican administration. Bob Gates was strongly associated with Reagan, Bush, and Republican foreign policy. He was not acceptable to the new administration.

Clinton left his replacement DCI and each of two successors largely alone. There were no close political associations, as with Reagan and Casey, and no close working relationships, as with Bush and Gates. Clinton’s appointees as DCI were largely apolitical. This is somewhat surprising since Clinton is so political a person. But because Clinton had so little to do with them, the DCIs would be largely free from political influences and considerations.

Clinton’s first DCI, R. James Woolsey, was definitely not from the CIA club. Even worse in the eyes of some people in the Intelligence Community, he was a former military official who had been walking the halls of the Pentagon. Earlier in his career he had been on Nixon’s National Security Council staff, and had been on several arms control negotiating teams. From this perspective, he was potentially a good choice, as the CIA was shifting to arms control monitoring as a key mission.

From another perspective, Woolsey’s having been in the Reagan and Bush administrations would keep Clinton from appearing soft in the foreign policy arena. But from a career perspective, moving to the CIA was a real change in trajectory. Woolsey had been moving on a path that led to secretary of defense. The CIA was a diversion for someone whose service as undersecretary of the navy could be seen as a stepping-stone to secretary of defense.¹ He found himself meeting President Clinton in Little Rock sometime past midnight on December 21, 1992. They had a vague conversation about world events but did not directly discuss whether Woolsey would be offered the DCI slot. Based on this meeting, Clinton felt that “Woolsey was clearly intelligent and interested in the job.”² The next day, Woolsey, at Clinton’s request, went to see Wes Hubbell at the Rose Law Firm and answered questions about possible conflicts of interest. Still no job offer. Woolsey later found out from the secretary of state designee, Warren Christopher, that Clinton had tapped him for DCI.

He was informed of his nomination when Christopher gave him what amounted to a polite order to attend a press conference at which the nomination would be announced. But first, Woolsey reported to future press secretary Dee Dee Myers and to Clinton advisor George Stephanopoulos for a spin session. There was some concern on Myers’s part that a reporter might try to paint Clinton’s appointments as “a bunch of Carter administration retreads.” Woolsey pointed out that he had also served in the Bush administration with ambassadorial rank. Myers was surprised: “Admiral Woolsey, I didn’t know you served in the Bush administration.” Woolsey replied, “I’m afraid I’m not an admiral, Ms. Myers. I never rose above the rank of captain in the army.” Myers was glad they’d had this little talk. “In that case,” she said, “I better take the word ‘admiral’ out of the press release.”³

It seems that Woolsey’s most attractive feature, as far as the Clinton team was concerned, was the fact that he was known on Capitol Hill as “the Republicans’ favorite Democrat,” a man with solid credentials and conservative leanings where defense was concerned.⁴ Having a DCI candidate who wouldn’t come under fire during confirmation was more important to Clinton than picking someone with whom he knew he could work. Clinton didn’t really plan on a close relationship with his DCI.

This lack of a strong relationship between Woolsey and Clinton must count as a missed opportunity during the interlude between the end of the Cold War and the 9/11 attacks. The CIA was an organization crying out for new direction. No one discussed doing away with the military, the NSA, or the NRO, but some, like Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan, wondered if we needed a CIA. Only a solid presidential partnership with a forward-thinking DCI could have defined a new mission for the CIA in the dramatically and rapidly changing world environment.

Clinton was not as concerned with what the intelligence establishment did as he was with fulfilling his campaign promise to cut out $7.5 billion, or about a quarter of the intelligence budget. As many in the Agency saw it, an organization that could legitimately claim a major contribution to victory in the Cold War was to be rewarded by being decimated. However, it was by no means intelligence alone that was being cut at this time. Congress was focused on a “peace dividend”—money that could be diverted from spending on national security to domestic programs.

It also became quickly apparent that Clinton would keep his DCI at more than arm’s length, further dampening CIA morale. There was the bizarre incident when a small private plane nearly crashed into the White House but landed short on the lawn. It wasn’t long before the joke was making the Washington rounds that it was Woolsey trying to get some face time with Clinton. Woolsey seemed to be the only major player on the national security team to be accorded this arm’s length treatment. The NSC staff “regularly interacted with the Chief Executive,” recalled counterterrorism expert Richard Clarke.⁵ Still, Clinton did not ignore the CIA’s product. He read it just like he read and retained every piece of information with which he came in contact. “Every morning I start my day with an intelligence report. The intelligence I receive informs just about every foreign policy decision we make,” he claimed.⁶ But he did not want to be briefed, probably because the CIA’s briefers and procedures were too formal for him.

The Clinton administration’s primary focus was its domestic agenda. Clinton believed it was his mandate. The common wisdom was that Bush had lost the election because he focused too much on foreign affairs. Even covert action, relished by most presidents from Truman to Bush, suffered. The first casualty was the termination of Bush’s covert funding of the Iraqi National Congress, a collection of Iraqi expatriates. According to one CIA insider, during the presidency of George H. W. Bush, “the question we kept getting from the White House was ‘How much do you need?’ After Clinton and [Assistant for National Security Anthony] Lake came in, it changed to ‘How much can you get along on?’ ”⁷

When Woolsey took office, he almost immediately started lobbying against the cuts that Clinton had proposed during the campaign. If the cuts went ahead, Woolsey argued, we’d miss out on acquiring a new generation of satellites. Clinton backed down, but left Woolsey to convince Congress on his own. Woolsey didn’t help his own case, however. At his first closed-door session with the SSCI he came on a bit strong. Thus began what one reporter called “one of Washington’s great Hatfield-McCoy disputes” between Woolsey and SSCI chairman Dennis DeConcini, “a highly personal, two-year fight.”⁸ Said DeConcini, “Woolsey felt like he knew best, and nobody could tell him otherwise.”⁹

In the absence of cover from the president, Woolsey was at the mercy of Congress. He was called to testify in open hearings eight times in 1993. The members of the committee were well aware of the distant relationship between Woolsey and Clinton. Democratic Representative Dan Glickman, chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, noted that “there is a serious distance between the White House and the CIA.”¹⁰ Several senators went so far as to secretly discuss going to the White House to demand that Woolsey be fired.

As much as he wanted to focus on the domestic agenda and shift resources to deficit reduction and domestic programs, Clinton found after entering office that he had been left holding the bag in Somalia. The CIA said Somalia was an untenable situation. They had good intelligence on Somalia thanks to agents developed when the Horn of Africa was a Cold War hot spot. Bush’s national security team had been unanimous in supporting a humanitarian mission and in 1992 had opted to send in U.S. troops to head up a multinational force. The mission was limited in scope—to just keeping the peace in the area surrounding Mogadishu. Then, in mid-mission, the United States went through a change of president, a change of DCI, and a change in the UN’s mission.

The UN assembly decided to restore a central government to Somalia. This sparked a war against the foreign peacekeepers by the forces of the rebel Mohammed Farah Aidid. The CIA’s initial predictions for a successful operation now clouded. Two hundred thousand people had loyalties to Aidid. A limited war against this warlord was not possible. Despite an impressive intelligence network in the region, U.S. and UN forces were never able to nail down Aidid. When the CIA finally did get a human asset in his inner circle, that source of information was eliminated when a U.S. Black Hawk helicopter, responding to military intelligence, opened fire on a building where the CIA’s asset and Aidid supporters were holding a meeting. Everyone inside was killed.

One plan that succeeded was the capture of Aidid’s financial backer, Osman Ato. The CIA’s Directorate of Science and Technology had managed to plant a homing transmitter in Ato’s vicinity. A dramatic scene unfolded in north Mogadishu. With a helicopter tracking Ato from afar, a man on the ground confirmed Ato was in the suspect car when it stopped for gas. A helicopter full of Delta Force troops descended, and a sniper immobilized the car with a bullet through the engine block. Troops swarmed the car and arrested Ato. But lieutenants would never substitute for Aidid. A quick capture of Aidid would have spared the Clinton administration the embarrassment of bringing the troops home from a mission still unaccomplished. A disastrous raid on October 3, 1993, by troops from Delta Force and Army Rangers and targeted on two of Aidid’s lieutenants, cost the joint force eighteen dead and seventy-three wounded, and led to the administration’s deciding to withdraw our forces from Somalia.

Whereas in Somalia the CIA appeared unable to serve policy, in Haiti it appeared to work directly against policy. During the Cold War, the Agency had become cozy with the Haitian military, just as it did throughout Central America—as long as the generals weren’t Communists. In Haiti, their most prominent asset was Lt. General Raoul Cedras, who appeared to support Haiti’s elections and transition to democratic rule. But even when Cedras turned on Haiti’s elected president, Jean-Bertrand Aristide, by joining a coup that sent Aristide into exile, the Agency wouldn’t drop him from the CIA payroll.

This crisis of leadership in Haiti was already full blown when Clinton entered office. Driven by fear of armed gangs, thousands of Haitians were making dangerous voyages on improvised boats in attempts to reach Florida. President Bush ordered them returned to Haiti. Candidate Clinton promised a more humanitarian treatment. During the transition period, the CIA showed him overhead photos demonstrating that his promises had spurred an increase in boat building. They forecast two hundred thousand new refugees as a direct result of his promises. Clinton had to pull back quickly from his position of permitting Haitians to apply for asylum.

However, Clinton was clear on his foreign-policy objectives: “I want to emphasize how important it is to me personally to restore the democratic government to Haiti and how important it is to the United States that we return President Aristide to power.”¹¹ In October 1993, he ordered thirteen hundred marines to the island with food and supplies on a humanitarian mission. At the dock in Port-au-Prince, an angry mob shouting anti-American slogans and “Somalia!” made it impossible for them to leave their ship. It took a much larger force and more concerted effort to get aid to Haiti and to restore democratic rule.

And then it emerged that there had been an intelligence relationship between the CIA and the military junta all along. Emmanuel Constant, an admitted CIA asset and leader of a brutal paramilitary arm of the junta, had organized the mob on the docks. The Agency had courted the worst elements in the junta, as it often has had to deal with similar people throughout the world. However, as the New York Times noted in an editorial, in the case of Haiti the CIA had lost sight of providing intelligence and was interfering with policy.¹²

Somalia and Haiti reinforced whatever reasons President Clinton had for keeping his distance from the CIA. Then Aldrich Ames provided another. As noted earlier, Ames was an officer in the Directorate of Operations and revealed to have been a spy for the Soviet Union from 1985 to 1994. He had enough security clearances to compromise more than one hundred operations and was responsible for the executions of at least ten Soviets who were spying for the United States. In the CIA, he acted almost as though he wanted to get caught. He was often drunk, careless, slothful, and ignored rules and procedures. His behavior should have raised serious questions at the CIA long before he was finally found out.

Woolsey’s response to the Ames scandal was roundly criticized. A reporter for Time wrote that he “acted more like a lawyer defending a client rather than a director intent on cleaning up the worst spy scandal in the agency’s history.”¹³ He was characterized as waiting for an investigation instead of acting, and of merely scolding, in writing, eleven officers (some retired) who had been negligent. Unfortunately for Woolsey, his hands were, essentially, tied. He acknowledged that four of the officers did deserve more than a written reprimand.¹⁴ Three of them, however, had already retired and were beyond punishment. The remaining officer was scheduled to retire imminently. Nonetheless, the CIA rank and file felt a series of reprimands was inadequate punishment for one of the most serious breaches of security in the CIA’s history. The congressional committees on intelligence were equally upset and wanted heads to roll for the Agency’s having taken nine years to identify Ames.

With the White House keeping its distance from the scandal, Woolsey was never more alone. Representative Dan Glickman remarked, “The magnitude of the losses cried out for more active White House participation.” But, he continued, “Woolsey did it all by himself, which minimized its qualitative and quantitative importance.”¹⁵ Only after the dust had settled did Clinton decide, under pressure from his former secretary of defense, his vice president, and his assistant for national security, that it was time for an overhaul of the Intelligence Community.

The first step (this being Washington) was to form a commission. At this point Congress inserted itself into the process, demanding a congressional panel rather than an executive commission. What came out was a joint effort, with former Defense Secretary Les Aspin leading a group of six members of the President’s Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board and ten members appointed by Congress, including two senators and two representatives. (Aspin died in May 1995, three months into the process. Clinton replaced him with Carter’s secretary of defense, Harold Brown.) Senator John Warner, one of the two senators on the commission, and a supporter of Jim Woolsey,¹⁶ sponsored the legislation creating the commission. Warner was concerned that Woolsey was being unfairly treated and also thought that a commission would help the battered Agency.

This was the largest and most inclusive review of the Intelligence Community since 1975, and is notable for the fact that none of its major recommendations have been implemented. The review suggested a six-year term for the DCI (hoping to place him beyond a single four-year administration, and thus above politics); a smaller and more focused Community; public disclosure of the Intelligence Community budget; and more openness, accountability, and oversight. Surprisingly, it recommended against the creation of a director of national intelligence over the entire Intelligence Community, separate from the CIA.

The ideas of separating the roles of DCI and head of the CIA and enhancing the authorities of the DCI over the Intelligence Community are recurring themes that go well back in the Community’s history. In July 1961, the President’s Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board had proposed to President Kennedy that the two jobs be separated. While Kennedy did not endorse the recommendation, in January 1962, as noted earlier, he directed DCI John McCone to leave the day-to-day operations of the CIA to his deputy and “to carry out your primary task as DCI.”¹⁷ In 1976, the Church Committee of the Senate recommended that the president consider separating the DCI from the CIA and that the authorities of the DCI over the Intelligence Community be enhanced. In response, President Ford issued a written directive encouraging his DCI to delegate management of the CIA to his deputy. In 1977, President Carter gave me oral instructions to focus on managing the Intelligence Community. In 1987, Senator Arlen Specter, then a member of the SSCI, introduced legislation to create a director of national intelligence, separate from the head of the CIA, but nothing came of it. It took the intelligence failure associated with 9/11 to galvanize the Congress into legislating the separation of the two jobs.

Beyond Ames, another problem that had been festering for decades and that erupted on Woolsey’s watch was the complaint of hundreds of women in the CIA about sexual harassment and a glass ceiling. A shocking 45 percent of the Agency’s female officers complained of harassment. The conventional wisdom was that the Directorate of Operations was the worst offender. Not surprisingly, the nature of espionage requires CIA case officers overseas to work at all hours, day and night. They are often required to meet their contacts in sleazy environments, and work with unsavory people who offer sexual inducements. In such circumstances, CIA women overseas are particularly vulnerable to harassment from agents or even their own colleagues. In one instance during my tenure as DCI, I had to discipline a very senior male officer for using a CIA “safe house” (a place to rendezvous with agents) for an affair with his mistress. Woolsey was sympathetic to the women’s complaints. He characterized the Directorate of Operations as “a fraternity . . . a white male one.”¹⁸ The CIA eventually settled most of the lawsuits, paying out almost a million dollars in back pay.

In dealing with Congress over the budget, Woolsey found himself taking the heat for the fact that the National Reconnaissance Office (which manages spy satellites) had gone $159 million over budget. Congress was understandably annoyed at having to discover this on its own. It looked as though Woolsey had been trying to hide the information. Once again, Woolsey didn’t get a lifeline or even a gesture of support from the White House, which had by that time decided, in the words of one senior official, “Woolsey has been miscast.”¹⁹

This lack of support, plus the lack of face time with the president, had to be wearing on Woolsey. On Christmas Day 1994, he asked his wife and three teenage sons to vote on whether he should continue as DCI. He said he would abstain from the vote. The tally came out four for resigning. The next day, Woolsey called Clinton to tell him he was on his way out, wrote his letter of resignation, recorded a video communication for the CIA workers he was leaving behind, and flew to the Caribbean.²⁰ “Mr. Woolsey’s greater failing was that he settled for tinkering with an intelligence system that needs a complete overhaul and a fresh look at its annual $28 billion budget,” the New York Times opined.²¹ Woolsey saw the problem as rooted in a lack of presidential support. In 1996, he endorsed Bob Dole for president.

The search for a new DCI appears to have centered on candidates with backgrounds in the military or in civilian oversight of the military. John Deutch, deputy secretary of defense, and Admiral William Crowe (retired), former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and then ambassador to the United Kingdom, both received offers and both declined. Retired Air Force General Michael Carns accepted. At first, he looked like the perfect candidate to gain approval of the Senate—no one had heard of him. A closer look revealed someone truly respected and qualified. He had a Harvard business degree, had flown two hundred combat missions during Vietnam, had been vice chief of staff of the Air Force, and enjoyed support from Colin Powell and Robert Gates. “I think it’s a first-rate appointment,” Gates told a reporter. “While he has not been in the business, he understands intelligence.”²² I was impressed and flattered when Carns contacted me and said he would like to get together and ask my advice. One would think that someone who had held the number of sensitive jobs Carns had would have been through a thorough background check. In the course of the investigation for DCI, however, the FBI found irregularities in the hiring of, payments to, and efforts on behalf of foreign-born domestic help. Carns withdrew his nomination before he appeared before the Senate.

So the offer went back to Deutch and with it a lot of pressure from Clinton. I was present at one instance of this pressure. The president had invited a group of retired military officers who had supported him in the election campaign to lunch at the White House. Deutch was also there, and in his remarks to us the president said that he was hoping Deutch would accept his offer of becoming DCI. Deutch finally relented and became the first foreign-born DCI, having been born in Brussels in 1938 and naturalized in 1945. There was no question as to his intelligence and governmental experience. He’d been a professor of chemistry, chairman of the chemistry department, dean of science, and provost at MIT. He’d served as director of energy research, acting assistant secretary for energy technology, and undersecretary at the U.S. Department of Energy. At the Department of Defense, he was a systems analyst when I first met him,²³ then became undersecretary for acquisition and technology, and was serving as deputy secretary when he was tapped for DCI.

Deutch’s confirmation sailed through the Senate with a unanimous vote. His promise to start reform at the CIA was a problem from the CIA’s perspective, but not as much as the fact that it was clear that what Deutch really wanted was to be secretary of defense. The only person who’d pulled off such a move was James Schlesinger.

Deutch helped implement one of the biggest downsizings in CIA history, from around twenty-two thousand employees during the Reagan era to about sixteen thousand in 1998. The actual numbers are classified. This was twice the reduction recommended by Al Gore’s National Performance Review. Earning even more animosity from all levels of the CIA, Deutch also brought in some new people. One of them was George Tenet, who Deutch did not know well but who came with the experience of having been majority staff director at the SSCI from 1988 to 1993 and in charge of intelligence on the NSC staff from 1993 to 1995.

Some of the first CIA professionals to go were the chief of the Latin American Division and the station chief in Guatemala. Deutch had walked into an unfolding scandal regarding Guatemala. Back in 1990, an American innkeeper, Michael DeVine, had been tortured and killed in a remote section of Guatemala. The CIA soon found out that one of its own Guatemalan assets, an army colonel, had been responsible. The colonel was a brutal figure in a dirty war against Guatemala’s indigenous population that had claimed two hundred thousand lives. But by killing an American, had he gone too far? While it did inform the Justice Department, the CIA neglected to tell either the State Department or Congress. It did not cut off ties to the colonel. In fact, he received an additional $44,000 of U.S. taxpayer money. Nor was he held accountable for the similar torture-murder of Efrain Bamaca Velasquez, a Guatemalan who was married to an American lawyer.

Clinton was assured that the cooperation between the CIA and the Guatemalan army intelligence death squads was over. As details of the DeVine and Bamaca Velasquez killings surfaced, Secretary of State Warren Christopher said on Face the Nation, “I’m satisfied there’s no money going down there now.” He was wrong. There was money going down there, and neither he nor the president knew about it. It was money to support what the CIA called a “liaison relationship.” According to a White House official, this was “not something that rose to the president’s level.”²⁴ When he learned of it, Clinton ordered all funding cut immediately and later had the Intelligence Oversight Board investigate.

“In the course of our review,” the panel wrote, “we found that several CIA assets were credibly alleged to have ordered, planned or participated in serious human rights violations such as assassination, extrajudicial execution, torture or kidnapping. These actions were while they were assets—and the CIA’s Directorate of Operations headquarters was aware at the time of the allegations.”²⁵ Clinton has been quite often blamed for not getting more involved in the CIA, and rightly so. But with these scandals and that of Haiti all rooted in events that predated his presidency, it is understandable that he would not want to get too close. In the case of Guatemala, Clinton decided in 1999 to apologize on behalf of the nation, infuriating conservatives and the CIA’s old guard: “For the United States it is important that I state clearly that support for military forces and intelligence units which engaged in violence and widespread repression was wrong, and the United States must not repeat that mistake.”²⁶

Another early hot issue for Deutch was the morass in the former Yugoslavia. CIA analysts had concluded back in 1990 that the country would cease to function in 1991 and would break up by 1992. Clinton ordered U-2 flights over Bosnia not long after taking office, but it took pressure from the UN ambassador, Madeleine Albright, to get agents on the ground in Bosnia to interview former prisoners. Albright, one of the few true hawks on Bosnia, presented a pair of U-2 photographs to the UN in August 1995. The scene was Srebrenica, and the first photo showed an empty field. The second one showed a series of freshly covered mass graves. It took a special appeal from Albright to make use of these photos. They’d been taken for tactical military reasons, not for the reasons she wanted to show them. “I alternate between being impressed with what intelligence can do and depressed at how slow it can be in making it all happen,” she told a reporter.²⁷

In neither covert action nor reporting did the CIA leave a very strong impression by its performance during the Yugoslavian crises in Bosnia and then Kosovo. A proposed covert training program was outrageously expensive, a coup plot against Yugoslavian leader Slobodan Milosevic never got off the ground, and faulty CIA targeting led to a precision-guided bomb utterly destroying the Chinese embassy and killing five. The CIA’s DO was at a low point. It had been unable to capture a warlord in a primitive African country or to dispatch a petty Yugoslav dictator.

Nor could the CIA deal with that thorn in the side of U.S. foreign policy, Saddam Hussein. In the 1980s, we supported Saddam Hussein because he was engaged in a war with Iran, which had become our nemesis in the Middle East. The CIA even supplied satellite photography to the Iraqis. By Clinton’s time we were working against both regimes. In an effort to overthrow Saddam Hussein, Woolsey had continued funding of the Iraqi National Congress that began under George H. W. Bush. Deutch thought he would have better luck with the Iraqi National Accord (INA), which had Saudi backing and was full of former military officers who believed they could erode support for Hussein with their broadcast network and their high-level contacts. Clinton approved $6 million for the INA’s efforts, which were eagerly backed by Deutch and the Saudis, with the caveat that the coup would not put the Shiites in power. Everyone involved underestimated the powerful grip Hussein had on his military. He effortlessly penetrated the INA, gathered the necessary counterintelligence, and in June 1996 had about one hundred plotters rounded up and quickly executed. He then turned to take his frustrations out, once again, on the Kurds in the north, known allies of the CIA.

Things were not working out well for DCI Deutch. The newly elected Republican Congress had a different agenda for the Intelligence Community. SSCI chairman Arlen Specter told Deutch that the committee would function as his “board of directors.”²⁸ Meanwhile, the staff director of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence (HPSCI) stated that “the three worst Directors of Central Intelligence ever were John Deutch, John Deutch, and John Deutch.”²⁹ This was not going to be a cozy relationship. Congress could assert itself so aggressively because Clinton, even though he was becoming more interested in foreign affairs and, by extension, the CIA, was still a distant manager.

Both Clinton and Deutch believed that the 1990s presented an opportunity to fashion a more open and accountable CIA. Clinton ordered the largest declassification project ever—fifty million pages of official records dating back to before World War II and up to the Vietnam era. But he, like most presidents, also had a secret side when it came to his own administration. There were sixty thousand more documents classified in 1993 than in the previous year under George H. W. Bush. And Bush is the one with the reputation for secrecy. Deutch, for his part, said he was “in favor of as much declassification and as much openness as possible.”³⁰ (I found this approach both amusing and satisfying. One of the hallmarks of my administration as DCI was openness. This was, however, absolutely anathema to the CIA professionals in the late 1970s. I reasoned that the Church Committee had raked the Agency over the coals and that only by publicizing whatever we could of CIA accomplishments could we retain public support. The Agency’s public affairs officer, Herb Hetu, whom I brought in with me, came to me one day and said, “Stan, do whatever you want to on openness, but don’t use that term—it drives the CIA pros right up the wall.”³¹) In late 1996, Deutch got his taste of what an open and accountable DCI would have to face.

The San Jose Mercury News had published an article about the “Dark Alliance” between the CIA and known drug smugglers during the contra wars in Central America. It accused the Agency and its assets of introducing crack cocaine to Los Angeles. Deutch did something admirable but ultimately fruitless. He flew to Los Angeles to face an angry crowd in South Central that had been stoked by Congresswoman Maxine Waters. Here, he faced blame from concerned citizens and conspiracy theorists alike for actions taken long before he was DCI. The investigation, completed long after he left the position of DCI, concluded that, indeed, as the CIA inspector general told Congress, “There are instances where the CIA did not, in an expeditious or consistent fashion, cut off relationships with individuals supporting the Contra program alleged to have engaged in drug trafficking activity, or try to resolve the allegations.”³² Nonetheless, the SSCI’s investigation in 1996 did not find information to support the allegation of CIA involvement in U.S. drug sales to finance the contras.

Understandably, Deutch was fed up and exhausted. When the position of secretary of defense went to William Cohen, Deutch resigned and went back to MIT. Clinton now joined Truman and Nixon in a three-way tie for the record of burning out DCIs. “I hated to lose John Deutch at the CIA,” Clinton wrote. “He had done a fine job as deputy secretary of defense, then had stepped into the tough CIA job after Jim Woolsey’s brief tenure.”³³ Plus, now Clinton had to find a new DCI and get him confirmed.

Finding a nominee proved not to be so difficult. Anthony Lake had served well as assistant for national security. Perhaps Clinton would finally have a good working relationship with his DCI. The problem was that now he had to contend with a Republican Congress. Once again, an ethics problem turned up. It could have been viewed either as an innocent oversight—Lake had failed to divest stocks in a timely manner—or a willful conflict of interest. Congress was also upset over revelations that the Clinton team had either turned a blind eye to or encouraged Iran to send weapons to the beleaguered Bosnians—a “green light” they called it. Either way, they railed on Lake for not informing them as assistant for national security. The confirmation hearings dragged on for four months, becoming, according to Lake, “nasty and brutish without being short.”³⁴ Lake held on until March 17, 1997, when he told Clinton he wanted out. “If it had been up to me,” Clinton recalled, “I would have carried on the fight for a year if that’s what it took to get a vote. But I could see Tony had had enough.”³⁵ “It was a case of character assassination,” asserted Senate Minority Leader Tom Daschle. “The intelligence committee has become an extension of the Republican Senate Campaign Committee.”³⁶

Clinton nominated George Tenet on March 19, 1997. Lake, after some thirty years of public service, became a historical footnote. Tenet was Deutch’s deputy director from July 1995 through the remainder of Deutch’s tenure—December 15, 1996—and was currently acting director. Adding in his time on the staffs of the SSCI and the NSC, he had spent virtually ten years in intelligence. Like Deutch before him, he had no problem with confirmation. Unlike Deutch, he worked to remain in Congress’s good graces. He seemed to realize that with the president studiously avoiding the CIA, he needed to work closely with Congress. Tenet did “tremendously effective feeding and caring on Capitol Hill. His congressional affairs shop is very slick, and I admire them for that,” recalled a former CIA analyst.³⁷

The operations side of the CIA was where Tenet focused his attention. The epic slide in personnel was over, and it was now time to rebuild and recruit. Tenet saw a “global role” for the CIA and reversed the tendencies of his two predecessors toward more technical collection. The CIA would have to “rebuild our field strength,” he claimed, if it “wanted to stay in the intelligence business.”³⁸ In this, he was supported closely by, almost in partnership with, Representative Porter Goss from Florida, a former CIA agent and a future DCI. “This is going to be a long-term rebuild,” Goss claimed.³⁹ Goss thought that “the cupboard is nearly bare in the area of human intelligence.” And he wanted “more arrows in the quiver” for covert action, namely “cyberspace” and “mind management.”⁴⁰ The president was being routinely lambasted for letting the CIA’s network of agents deteriorate.

There were other ways Tenet wanted to take the CIA back in time so as to take it forward: reversing the trend toward openness was one of them. He released the Intelligence Community budget in 1997, because of an FOIA lawsuit, and did so again the following year, but in 1999 refused. His predecessor had promised to declassify files on eleven major covert operations. Tenet stopped it at two (Guatemala and the Bay of Pigs), claiming that the CIA didn’t have the manpower to vet the rest.

Clinton actually appeared a little more involved once Tenet was DCI, but not consistently enough and not in the way Tenet really needed. Clinton wanted to enhance Tenet’s role in coordinating the Intelligence Community, but he didn’t provide the follow-up support that a DCI needs. “Every time you try to give me more authority,” Tenet told Clinton, “you get me in a fight with a building much bigger than mine [that is, the Pentagon].”⁴¹ But Clinton very actively engaged Tenet and the CIA in a new and nontraditional direction—a peace effort in the Middle East. Tenet reportedly resisted, but in the end he dutifully followed orders.

In mid-October 1998 at the Wye River plantation in eastern Maryland, the Israelis and the Palestinians sat down to peace talks. Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu felt he could accept the Palestinian Authority’s having a more heavily armed police force only if there were an assured way to monitor it. Clinton called in the CIA as an “honest broker” of information between the Israelis and the Palestinians. A lot of CIA employees saw this as dangerous, because it carried the Agency close to having an investment in the success of a policy. Others saw it in line with activities such as verification of arms control treaties, which the CIA had carried on for years. Tenet claimed, “The CIA is not making policy, but helping carry it out. This is consistent with the agency’s history of fighting terrorism and helping friends and allies in the region live together peacefully and safely.”⁴² Former DCI Woolsey worried that the DCI might be turning into a negotiator. One would hope that the CIA used this opportunity to develop more knowledge about and assets within the world of Islamic terrorism, which, by this time, was high on everyone’s list of concerns.

The CIA publishes a classified in-house magazine, Studies in Intelligence, which can offer fascinating insights into the thinking of the analysts, managers, and case officers who run the CIA. In 1997, it published an article subtitled “The Coming Intelligence Failure.” At a time when efforts to beef up the CIA were focused on collection, the article predicted, “The year is 2001. . . . At a time when the interrelationship among political, economic, military, social, and cultural factors had become increasingly complex, no agency was postured to conduct truly integrated analysis. From the vantage point of 2001, intelligence failure is inevitable.”⁴³

As the second Clinton term wound down, Porter Goss claimed that the administration had “crippled our intelligence capabilities. . . . In every single management area of foreign policy that affects national security we aren’t very good under the Clinton Administration. There are no successes that I can think of that are particularly grand.” Goss gave his colleagues (and himself) credit for what progress had been made: “The Hill has filled the vacuum on championing the cause of intelligence. We did not get a lot of support from the Administration. I don’t think they use intelligence well.”⁴⁴ It was around this time that Goss made it known that he was ready and willing to serve as DCI. But he specifically wanted to do so under a Republican president. The notion of a politically neutral DCI seemed to have been lost.