ALTHOUGHM CASEY WASN’T bucking for DCI, he thought Turner probably didn’t believe him. In fact Casey wanted Secretary of State or Defense. State and Defense counted. They would, by all reasonable anticipation, be the instruments for a new Reagan foreign and military policy. But Casey understood that he might have to settle for less, or for nothing. He was not one of the President-elect’s California intimates, and clearly the Californians were going to dominate. He had come late to the Reagan campaign, and his final role as campaign manager, exalted at least in theory, was partly accidental. He had not been a longtime, committed Reaganaut.
Earlier the previous year, 1979, Casey had received a call out of the blue from candidate Reagan, soliciting help. Casey was a dedicated lifelong Republican who practiced a rich man’s law from his office at 200 Park Avenue in New York. He had made millions from a string of highly speculative investments, from good luck and intuition with the stock market, and from his authorship or editorship of some two dozen tax, investment and legal books. Money gave him the time to play in his favorite game of politics. Having served as campaign worker, organizer, speech writer and Republican convention-goer dating back to 1940, he had had several senior federal posts in the Nixon and Ford administrations, the most prominent being chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission in 1973-74.
“It’s too early to join your campaign,” Casey told Reagan during that phone solicitation. He explained that his reluctance to sign up now should not be taken as a lack of sympathy. On the contrary.
He grabbed his checkbook and hastily filled in $1,000 to the Reagan candidacy, as he had done for all the other Republican hopefuls. It was the maximum allowable individual contribution. He scrawled his name at the bottom of the check, the W in “William” a slashing parody of the grammar-school penmanship he had learned at Public Schools 13 and 89 six decades earlier in the lower-middle-class Queens community of Elmhurst in New York. The y at the end of “Casey” was a strong textbook y with a nearly straight, long downstroke and a beautiful, exquisitely curled loop, as if he had created a signature that was self-confident but not self-important.
There had been nine “Tardy” marks and a letter-grade C in conduct on his report card in the second half of sixth grade at P.S. 89, his only grammar-school grade lower than a B. His academic work had been graded A. His classmates called him “Volcano.” Since that year, 1924, his life had been a steady march to the other, better side of the tracks. He learned to play golf by caddying, and now he belonged to a good club. In 1934-35, he attended the Catholic University School of Social Work, where most students were priests, nuns and others with strong religious convictions. At the bottom of his scholastic record someone scrawled, “Very good.” But Casey concluded that social work was for women, and left for law school. This very year he had given away the equivalent of a social worker’s annual salary in charitable contributions, $21,970, through a foundation he had set up in 1958. He was a common man of uncommon wealth. He hoped he was a heavyweight, a man of means, a man of affairs who had learned the art of advancement on two tracks: first through personal wealth and business; second through experience in government, boards, commissions and political involvement. All this had been earned, he realized, at the partial expense of his reputation. Many saw him as an unsavory businessman, a corner-cutter who had made quick money through a string of opportunistic investments and countless business aggressions, a magnet for controversy. He was known as a man who astutely played the stock market he had once regulated. At times he appeared indifferent to criticism, accustomed to lawsuits, but underneath Casey craved acceptance and respect. With all his devotions, his church, his Republicanism, his stock portfolio, he could appear flexible about ideas, but not about people. His friends received his total loyalty. But Casey showed a hundred different faces to a hundred different worlds.
Reagan had called Casey again. He wanted more than the $1,000. He was coming east for a fund-raiser on Long Island, Casey’s home. Could they meet? Casey agreed. The two had breakfast at a motel near Casey’s home, a large Victorian-era estate named Mayknoll.
The two men schmoozed easily over the Republican election prospects for an hour and a half. Casey had heard that Reagan was shallow, but found him knowledgeable enough about economics and national-security issues. Reagan didn’t delve deeply, but his instincts on these matters seemed sound, and they conformed with Casey’s convictions about a free market, strong defense and active anti-Communism. Reagan was only two years older, and the two men shared a generational view. Both had been poor as children. Casey was attracted to the variety in Reagan’s life—as sportscaster, actor, labor union officer, governor, and conservative spokesman with stamina. It mirrored somewhat the variety in Casey’s own—lawyer, author, OSS spymaster, amateur historian (he was presently writing a book on the OSS) and former government official. They had both seen the Depression and four wars. They both found genuine satisfaction in a well-told story and a good, hearty laugh. More important, though, both had contempt for Jimmy Carter and what they thought was his weakness, his indecisiveness and his unhealthy, hand-wringing anxiety.
Soon Casey was invited to California to be on the executive committee of the Reagan campaign task force on issues. It was a bone, he knew, but it was involvement. He flew out, looked at the issue books and met Meese and the Reagans’ closest friend, a small, pleasant man named Michael Deaver.
“I want you to come into town and have lunch with Ron and Nancy Reagan,” Casey was soon saying to his rich Republican friends, inviting them to a fund-raiser. If they hesitated, he added, “Listen, you don’t want to be out of it, do you? This fellow’s going to win. This fellow’s going to be President.” Casey knew how to squeeze out the New York Republican money. Working the phone persistently, he was instrumental in collecting $500,000 for the Reagan campaign in late 1979. When Reagan’s campaign manager, John P. Sears, was fired, in early 1980, the candidate asked Casey to take over.
It was something Casey had worked for all his life. Politics was his first love.
Back at the 1952 Republican convention, Casey, then only thirty-nine, had watched with disappointment as the conservative Senator Robert A. Taft was beaten out by Dwight D. Eisenhower for the Republican presidential nomination. Shortly after, Casey shared his view of this with twenty-six-year-old William F. Buckley, Jr., already launched on his high-wire act as the conservative boy wonder with his book God and Man at Yale. Casey and Buckley were members of the anti-Communist, anti-liberal fraternity in New York City. It was a very small club, maybe fifty members. There was practically a secret handshake, Buckley used to joke. Casey told Buckley, “If I had managed that campaign, Taft would’ve won the nomination,” and Buckley remembered the remark for years. So in 1980, when Reagan called his friend Buckley to tell him, “I’ve fired John Sears and I’ve hired Bill Casey,” Buckley was delighted. As far as Buckley was concerned, Casey was a true believer with only one minor, forgivable deviation. In 1966, two years after Barry Goldwater’s disastrous run for the presidency, Casey had launched his first and, thank God, only campaign for public office. He had sought the Republican congressional nomination from his district on the North Shore of Long Island with the backing of the Nelson Rockefeller-Jacob K. Javits wing of the party. Steven B. Derounian, a Goldwaterite, won the Republican nomination, and Casey returned to behind the scenes, where Buckley and many New York Republicans thought he belonged.
As the new Reagan campaign manager, Casey had to assess the power centers around Reagan. The looks, the voices, the glances, the subtle deference told one story: Nancy. Actor James Stewart had once remarked, “If Ronald Reagan had married Nancy the first time, she could’ve got him an Academy Award.” Casey could see that Nancy Reagan was the premier student in identifying her husband’s interests.
But Casey was not always comfortable with the hard right-wingers in the campaign. “There’re some crazies around us and I’m a member of the Council on Foreign Relations,” he told a campaign associate. He didn’t add that he had initially been rejected for membership and was furious that only when he became undersecretary of state in 1973 had he been invited to join. Casey had been tempted to throw the invitation in the toilet and tell them to go to hell, but had calmly accepted. It was a useful if pretentious credential.
Certain campaign members and some reporters described Casey as “spacey.” He abandoned laundry all over Washington and Los Angeles. Sometimes he traveled without a suitcase and just bought clean clothes when he needed them. On one occasion Deaver sat next to him at a meeting and, from his body odor, concluded that Casey had not had time to shop. The next day Casey was scrubbed clean, apparently having been made aware of his oversight. But Deaver realized that when Casey was on a mission he let nothing get in his way. He worked nights, weekends. It was a single-mindedness that had to be admired.
One month before the election, anticipating a Reagan victory, Casey created a little-noticed interim foreign-policy advisory board, selecting a group of seventeen senior experts, including former President Ford and other Republican and Democratic high-profilers. He chaired the group, assigning papers and studies. Some thought he was placing himself center stage as a potential Secretary of State. When he had served briefly as undersecretary of state for economic affairs in 1973-74, he had been forced out by the then Secretary, Henry A. Kissinger. Casey had left little impact and had merited a single perfunctory reference in Kissinger’s 2,690-page two-volume memoir, but he placed Kissinger on Reagan’s advisory board.
The group identified an immediate and important challenge to the incoming Administration. It was the Communist insurgency in a tiny Central American country. Casey decided that El Salvador was, symbolically, the most important place in the world. If the United States could not handle a threat in its backyard, Reagan’s credibility would be at risk in the rest of the world. Casey was dumbfounded to learn that the CIA had closed its station in El Salvador in 1973 to save money and had reopened it only in 1978. That left a five-year gap. How could that be? What was going on at the CIA? Intelligence was supposed to be a first line of defense. It would have no role in defense or offense if there was no effort to get information.
The day after Turner’s November 20 briefing, Reagan flew back to California. While he was waiting to take office, the soul of the Reagan Administration was up for grabs. No one recognized this more than his conservative friends in California and elsewhere. They had arranged for Reagan to receive an important visitor from abroad. He was Colonel Alexandre de Marenches, the head of the French equivalent of the CIA, the Service of External Documentation and Counterespionage, the SDECE. Marenches was a well-known figure in European conservative circles. A large, mustached patrician with an American wife, he had headed the SDECE for ten years. The SDECE, nicknamed the “Swimming Pool” because its headquarters buildings are located near the Tourelles swimming pool on the outskirts of Paris, had played heavily in French internal politics. Marenches had in his office a map of the world that showed the spread of Communism in red. Small versions of the map were handed out to official visitors. Several years earlier he had given one of his maps to Admiral Turner during an official liaison meeting between the two intelligence chiefs.
On his California trip, Marenches had more than a colored map to offer. For the French official, spying was a most serious business, one to be undertaken at great risk, with expectations of great return. He held in low esteem the CIA habit of hiding its agents abroad undercover as diplomats in American embassies; the CIA station chief and the senior officers—often all CIA officers—were quickly identifiable, making a mockery of their espionage. It was more effective, if more difficult, to operate undercover as an airplane salesman or someone simply out in society. Real spying involved total immersion; it was strenuous exercise. European intelligence services at times used journalists as cover for spying, but the Americans shunned this. Free speech was valued over national security. Spies posing as diplomats were, in Marenches’ eyes, pretenders.
Marenches talked to the President-elect about shared conservative principles—the menace of Communism, the danger of weakness in military and intelligence matters. But he spoke in general themes.
“Aren’t you going to give me advice?” Reagan asked. “Everyone has advice for me.”
“I can only tell you about people,” Marenches replied. (He spoke perfect English; he believed that languages were a must for an intelligence officer.) He could only tell the President-elect about “people you should see and people you shouldn’t see.”
“Who should I see?”
Marenches mentioned Alexander Solzhenitsyn, the Soviet author. He understood the nature of the Soviet evil. Also Reagan should see Jonas Savimbi, the resistance leader in Angola who was fighting the Communist regime in that key southwest-African nation. The United States had given covert CIA support to Savimbi, but it had been cut off when Congress in 1976 passed the so-called Clark Amendment banning covert action in Angola.
“When you want to learn about hell, you should talk to people who have been there,” the French chief declared.
“Who shouldn’t I see?” Reagan said.
“Many,” Marenches said. “But I will give you one who stands for them all—Armand Hammer.” Hammer was the chairman of Occidental Petroleum and longtime friend of many Soviet leaders. He was the symbol of détente.
“Funny,” Reagan said, “I see him often. Every time I go to the barbershop, he’s there.”
“See what I mean?” Marenches said.
Hammer had recently made a standing request: Every time Reagan scheduled a haircut at Drucker’s in Beverly Hills, Hammer wanted an appointment in the next chair.*
Marenches had an additional thought. “Don’t trust the CIA. These are not serious people.” The French intelligence chief did not mean that the CIA had a mole or lax security or that it leaked to newspapers. He was referring to its lack of purposefulness.
Reagan repeated Marenches’ warning—“Don’t trust the CIA”—to George Bush, who had been CIA chief in 1976-77. Bush thought it was hogwash, but all the same it obviously left a deep impression on Reagan. Bush had already told one of his CIA friends that, given Reagan’s detached management style and his unfamiliarity with intelligence matters, it was important that the President have a CIA director he felt close to, someone he trusted fully, particularly on the issue of purposefulness. Now, after the Marenches warning, that was even more important.
Casey watched with some dismay as the Reagan Cabinet selection went forward. There was a list of three names for each Cabinet post, and he was on for State and Defense, but there was no overall coordinator. Instead, as in the campaign, there were pockets of authority, none of them absolute. There were Meese and the California Kitchen Cabinet, there were the individual ambitions of the hopefuls, and there was Reagan himself, now back at his Palisades home in California. Things got screwed up terribly and quickly. Reagan had decided finally that George P. Schultz, the former Nixon and Ford Cabinet member (Labor Secretary, Office of Management and Budget director, Treasury Secretary) was his first choice for State. Apparently thinking the groundwork had been laid, Reagan had called Shultz. The trouble was, Shultz had been told that he was on the Treasury list.
“I’m interested in having you join my Cabinet,” the President-elect told Shultz with unintentional ambiguity.
Shultz, assuming that it was Treasury, turned it down.
Deaver, who was in the room when Reagan made the call, didn’t learn until months later what had happened. Shultz would have accepted State.
Reagan’s second choice, Alexander M. Haig, Jr., emerged as the front-runner for State, and Nancy Reagan favored him. She thought Haig had star quality—he was handsome, forceful, had military bearing, was charming and warm. A leading man. It became clear that the gap in Reagan’s foreign-policy background could not be bridged by Casey’s foreign-policy advisory board and Haig had it all. He was a four-star general who had commanded NATO forces in Europe, he had White House experience as Kissinger’s deputy and as Nixon’s chief of staff.
“I won’t get State,” Casey told a friend. “We all supported Haig. We need the prestige.”
And Caspar W. Weinberger, an old Reagan California friend, landed Defense.
Casey, miffed, went home to New York to catch up on the rest of his life, but it was not nearly as exciting as what was going on in Washington and California, where the rest of the Cabinet was being selected. He kept in touch with Meese. Casey let it be known that he wanted to serve in the Cabinet, but there were not many positions left. DCI, the natural slot, was not Cabinet. Meese, aware of Casey’s wounded feelings, told him that DCI could easily be made Cabinet rank. There was more discussion.
Meese told Deaver, “Bill Casey wants to be head of the CIA.”
“I think that’s a mistake,” Deaver replied. “I don’t think we can give that kind of a job to a political hack.”
Meese made it clear that the deal was about to be cut. Casey was a good man, he knew intelligence, and he deserved a senior post if he wanted it. Deaver said no more. Meese went to Reagan and proposed Casey for CIA, and that the DCI be made a Cabinet post.
“It’s fine with me,” Reagan said. That was the extent of his involvement, other than to call Casey with the offer.
Casey’s response was cool. He told the President-elect that he wanted to think it over and consult his wife, Sophia.
Fine, Reagan said patiently, but he later expressed his surprise. What had happened? He had thought it was all set. Did Casey want CIA or not?
In a small, spare fourth-floor office on K Street in the middle of downtown Washington, a lean, well-preserved man who had a kind of enduring dignity and polish watched the Reagan victory with great though detached interest. He was squinting, which meant he was thinking. He was a hard thinker. He wore a neatly pressed dark suit, the mandatory handkerchief, dark socks held up by old-fashioned garters, well but not conspicuously polished shoes. His gray hair was slicked back with some thick tonic from a previous era, but not in such great quantities as to prevent a few strands from curling up above his collar.
The sign on the door said “Safeer Company.” It was an international consulting firm. Safeer was the Farsi word for “ambassador.” He had been U.S. ambassador to Iran from 1973 to 1976. To someone unfamiliar with his manner, the man might have seemed nervous. But to acquaintances this edginess was recognized as attentiveness. He was all ears and all eyes as he made calls, took long lunches with old friends, weighed new arguments, read the newspapers carefully, including the odd items—one paragraph on a new Defense Minister in Greece, a vote in the Norwegian Parliament, the Japanese trade surplus. He was an intelligence officer, if not now by position, by temperament—an obsessive sifter of information.
Richard Helms, one of the enduring symbols, controversies and legends of the CIA, turned his analytic power on the succession. Helms’s ties, affections, convictions and past were all agency. He had been OSS in World War II; he had joined the CIA in 1947 when it was formed; he had taken over the Operations Directorate after the Bay of Pigs (at that time the Operations job was called DDP—deputy director for plans); and he had been DCI from 1966 to 1973 during Vietnam—not the beginning or the end, but the tormenting middle years. Helms’s era also had included the beginnings of Watergate, though he had been shuffled off as ambassador to Iran by Nixon before the end.
Now, in 1980, the CIA was certainly about to turn another corner, to be jostled, redeemed or demeaned once again by a new President. Helms’s candidate was Bill Casey. Casey could protect the traditions. Helms had known him for thirty-five years, going back to the days when they had both served in the OSS in London. When he arrived there in 1945, Helms was assigned to work for Casey and didn’t have a place to live. “Hell, come stay with us,” Casey said. He invited Helms to share an apartment on Grosvenor Street. Indeed, “Hell, come stay with us” summed up for Helms the Casey approach: quick, direct solutions; warm, friendly, accommodating, no formality, profane, convention-defying. Helms had rarely seen Casey in the last year of the war, because they were both so busy. He thought that Casey’s OSS background gave him a fundamental understanding of intelligence work. They had been trained by the British, and CIA traditions were British traditions. The secret service and the silent service. As Helms often said, “We are the silent service, and silence begins here.” Casey understood the shock and betrayal that Helms and his followers had felt by the disclosures during recent investigations of the CIA—the Church and Pike committees in Congress, and the Rockefeller Commission. Helms thought there was no necessity for such testimony as had been demanded, all those papers going up to the Congress. There was a time when no one from the CIA would have thought of writing a book. In the last decade there had been a number. It was almost inconceivable to him.
At the CIA, one was prepared to take the risks associated with intelligence work. But no one had imagined that the peril would come from one’s own government, that one’s own government would turn on him. Helms said he had worn his ass nearly raw sitting on the flights coming back from Iran for the inquisitions, including the one that had finally engulfed him. He had, three years before, pleaded no contest to a misdemeanor charge in criminal case 77-650, United States of America v Richard M. Helms, for not testifying “fully and completely” to a Senate committee about CIA covert operations in Chile during the Nixon presidency. The sentence was a $2,000 fine and a suspended two-year jail term, delivered with a lecture from the judge, who had accused Helms of “dishonor” in open court. Helms’s lawyer, Edward Bennett Williams, had told the press that his client would “wear this conviction like a badge of honor, like a banner.” And Helms had tried. There were thoughtful people who considered the charges unjust. Helms had attempted to save a secret, to keep a covert operation ordered by the President from unnecessary ears. The criterion in disseminating information about sensitive intelligence had always been whether those brought into the circle of secrets truly had to know in order to do their job. Need to know had to be absolute. Presidents and DCIs frequently didn’t need the nitty-gritty details, the names of sources, the exact technology. It had been simple common sense to dodge the questions about Chile.
The memory of his no-contest plea still stung. It was a stain in spite of the widespread support he had received. (Afterward he had been given a standing ovation by four hundred retired intelligence officers at the Kenwood Country Club in Bethesda, Maryland, where two wastebaskets were stuffed with cash and checks to pay the $2,000 fine.) There was something not tidy about the outcome. There was a conflict between the pledge to keep secrets and the medling and pursuit of secrets by the Congress. What were the new rules? Did the new rules jeopardize important secrets?
Casey was a street-smart, tough New Yorker, and New York, in Helms’s view, was a mean, lonesome town. You survived or went down. And Casey had outlasted most. Casey was no prissy boy; you couldn’t be a priss and survive as DCI. Helms had learned from the Kennedys at the Bay of Pigs. The Kennedys wanted results. They wanted Castro out—dead, though they never said it in as many words. If Helms, who was running covert operations then, had said it couldn’t be done, he would have been out.
The tradecraft of spying had changed since World War II. There would be a lot for Casey to learn. Reconnaissance satellites meant, as Helms once put it, “We are going to spy, not by looking up your asshole, but we are going to spy by looking down on your head.”
Helms knew enough to say nothing, not indirectly, not behind the scenes, not a word for his old roommate. He might kill Casey’s chances, certainly not help them. He did what he had done best for so many years. He remained silent.
Senator Barry M. Goldwater, the crusty conscience of the Republican Party, had almost whooped with delight at the Reagan victory. Goldwater felt a special bond with Reagan. Reagan’s political career had been launched in 1964 when he delivered a stirring nationally televised government-bashing half-hour speech supporting Goldwater’s presidential candidacy. The 1980 presidential election was as sweet a vindication as a man gets, Goldwater thought. It was as if a younger brother were moving into the White House. And with the Reagan landslide the Republicans had finally gained control of the Senate, making Goldwater’s political world even sweeter.
Vice-chairman of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence during the Carter-Turner years, Goldwater, at seventy-one, was now moving up to be chairman of the committee, a powerful new instrument born of the investigations of the 1970s. As a member of the Church Committee that had investigated the CIA in 1975-76, he had flatly refused to sign its final reports because of what he considered their unbearably self-righteous, moralizing tone. The CIA, he felt, had had much too much shit kicked its way.
This was a moment in history to do the absolute right thing—no compromises. Goldwater, a tanned, well-groomed man of commanding presence, was reinvigorated. Despite some problems with his hips, there was a new energy as he moved around, a new iron in his voice.
And he had a solution: find a man for DCI who was totally trustworthy, and let him keep the secrets and get Congress out of the agency’s goddamn hair.
One of Goldwater’s first steps as the new Intelligence Committee chairman was to bring his best friend, Lieutenant General William W. Quinn, U.S. Army retired, onto the staff of the committee as an unpaid consultant. West Point class of 1933, World War II intelligence officer and the first deputy director of the Defense Intelligence Agency, Quinn was a jovial, laid-back but determined man. He was both family and a drinking buddy to Goldwater, whose wife hated Washington and wasn’t around much. Goldwater had cocktails and dinner with Quinn and his wife, Bette, about twice a week and regularly spent the weekend at their farm on the Maryland Eastern Shore.
Quinn had filled an important but unsung role in U.S. intelligence. After the war, Lieutenant Colonel Quinn had been in charge of the Strategic Services Unit (SSU), whose job it was to wind down OSS operations. Goldwater admired the way he had marched up to Congress in 1946, requested a closed committee session for five minutes on his meager budget, and finagled an additional $8 million in unvouchered funds to pay his secret sources. Aware that legislators love to hear secrets, Quinn had shared with the committee some information about his sources. One was a maid at the Russian headquarters in Berlin who lifted vital intelligence from wastebaskets; a second was an embassy code clerk who allowed the U.S. to read all the messages of another major country; a third, in yet another embassy, had been paid ten thousand dollars for the Soviet Baltic fleet’s war plan. The closed session had lasted twenty minutes, and Quinn had used the $8 million to preserve a nucleus of agents and sources for the CIA, which was formed the next year, in 1947.
Though a report that Casey would be the new DCI had been in the newspapers, Goldwater disagreed with the choice. He had his own candidate. “Bobby,” he told Quinn. “It’s got to be Bobby.”
Bobby was Admiral Bobby Ray Inman, who had headed the National Security Agency for the preceding four years under Carter. The NSA was the largest and most secretive of the intelligence agencies and had a budget several times the size of the CIA’s. The sprawling headquarters at Fort George Meade in the Maryland suburbs ran listening posts worldwide on land and from orbiting satellites. It broke the codes of both enemies and friends, and was on the frontier of new technology. NSA had no human spies and had escaped relatively unexamined during the investigations into the CIA.
Goldwater thought that Inman was an intelligence genius, a man who understood science, politics and human nature. He was also a skilled congressional hand-holder.
In twenty-eight years of naval service, Inman had risen through the officer ranks to three-star admiral, the only intelligence specialist to serve as executive assistant and senior aide to the Vice-Chief of Naval Operations (1972-73)—a post normally reserved for officers who have held ship commands. He had gone on to be the director of Naval Intelligence (1974-76) and the No. 2 at the Pentagon’s Defense Intelligence Agency (1976-77) before heading the NSA. Inman knew the intelligence business cold. He was the best source on everything from the latest spy satellite to the bureaucratic maneuvering required to get intelligence programs going. He had a fabulous memory.
With his boyish, toothy smile, large head, thick glasses, Inman looked like a grown-up whiz kid. He was one of the few intelligence officials who would talk to reporters and get them to hold off on stories that compromised intelligence. He had nurtured all the important relationships in the Congress. Goldwater could not recall an instance in which Inman had failed to return a phone call or to track down an answer on the rare occasion when he didn’t know it.
Goldwater worried over Inman with Quinn. He wanted to make sure he got Inman the job. “I have an input on this,” he said. “The security of the country should be above politics. Bobby is in the saddle. He’s apolitical. He’s a dedicated sailor, an absolute natural for the job.”
Quinn loved Goldwater and he felt free to tell him when he was off base, but he agreed about Inman. “I’m going to see the head man on this,” Goldwater told him.
It was easy for Goldwater to slip in to see the President-elect and explain his unqualified enthusiasm for Inman. The most capable man in the field, he said, a man in a category by himself. Reagan listened but seemed unconvinced. Goldwater banged the drum very hard, making it clear that the new Administration would have a lock on the Hill for intelligence matters if Inman were DCI.
Reagan replied that he preferred an outsider, and it was going to be Bill Casey.
Perhaps, Goldwater suggested, this was the one appointment he was owed.
Jovially, avoiding confrontation, Reagan dismissed the issue. “You are going to get Casey.”
Goldwater went back to his friend Quinn.
“Barry,” Quinn said, “don’t underestimate Bill Casey. He was not born yesterday.”
Goldwater had had so many political disappointments. This was minor, but he couldn’t see the reasoning and was irked.
Quinn told him that Casey had always been an advocate for intelligence, keeping lines of communication open, calling often, following the Defense Intelligence Agency during its formative years in the early 1960s. Back in 1964, he had been instrumental in seeing that Quinn received the William J. Donovan Award, named after the founder of OSS and the father of American intelligence.
Goldwater wasn’t any happier.
Quinn said that Casey appreciated the art of intelligence, the power of facts and information, what’s expected of intelligence officers, the dedication and application. Casey was fascinated by intrigue, Quinn said. “He loves mystery. He loves the cloak, and he loves a little of the dagger.”
Goldwater told Quinn, “They’re fucking it up.”
Inman watched the early transition wars from the other side of the world. He was in New Zealand at one of the NSA’s listening posts. He relished the possibility of becoming Reagan’s DCI and was keenly aware that he had a powerful patron in Goldwater. Cool and mild on the outside, Inman was within a very passionate man, restless and ambitious.
Every day but Sunday, Inman rose at 4 A.M. In those early-morning hours, uninterrupted, he did his careful thinking and reading. The essence of good intelligence work was anticipation. There was no way to figure everything, but you had to be there and ready, even in New Zealand.
The NSA stood as an island. Though basically a military institution and part of the Defense Department, it had responsibilities to the DCI, whose job included the coordination of intelligence budgets, priorities and targets. Because the NSA was something of a stepchild, Inman felt he had to be its link to the rest of the world, so he worked the White House, the Congress, the Pentagon and the news media like a lobbyist. He had access and he gave access.
Inman had kept DCI Turner out of the NSA’s hair through his alliances with powerful figures in the Carter Administration. He made sure that national-security adviser Brzezinski received the raw communications intercepts he coveted so much, but at the same time he felt strongly that the NSA should remain within the Defense Department in order to keep its focus on military information—the key to early warning, the key to preventing war.
In New Zealand, Inman took a call from J. William Middendorf II, who was heading the CIA transition team for Reagan. Middendorf had been the Secretary of the Navy when Inman was the Navy’s intelligence chief.
It looked as though Casey was going to become DCI, Middendorf said. It had not been announced, and there seemed to be some uncertainty in Middendorf’s voice. But he was calling to inquire whether Inman was interested in the No. 2 spot at the CIA—the job of DDCI, the Director’s deputy and alter ego in the intelligence community.
Inman said he had no interest. He was set to retire from the military next summer, and, as an intelligence specialist, by tradition he normally could not rise higher than three stars.
This was an easy no for him. Deputy was not enough. He saw the Reagan Administration as a necessary counterweight to the Carter years. Carter had perhaps too many illusions about the Soviets, but Reagan had too few. Neither had the sense of balance Inman preferred.
Several days later, when Inman was back in Washington, Middendorf renewed the invitation. Politely, Inman pushed it away again. He would soon be fifty, and at that age he still had a chance to start a new career, perhaps make some money in business.
Helms was hearing all the talk about Inman and he wanted to see for himself. He did not really know Inman, having left the CIA in 1973, the year before Inman became head of Naval Intelligence. Helms asked Jack Maury, a former CIA Soviet specialist, to arrange a lunch. Maury, a beloved, tweedy, cheerful old boy from an established Virginia family, had served twenty-eight years with the CIA, the last six as Helms’s liaison with Congress just before the investigations.
Inman felt that he was being courted for membership in an elite club. These were the covert operators with whom he felt ill at ease. There was a running feud between the CIA and the NSA—human operations versus machines, daring actions against systematic method, James Bond as opposed to the cipher clerk in wire-framed glasses. But they were going out of their way, almost soliciting his views.
As they lunched, it was clear that Inman and Helms shared an overriding conviction about the purpose of the intelligence agencies. Mistakes had been made—including some on Helms’s watch—because of a failure to warn the President or the Congress that some trouble was brewing, Early warning, preventing surprises, was everything, they agreed. (“It’s everything and underline everything,” Helms once said in his elegant voice, jiggling a thin finger with determination.) It was a fact that the President and the Congress would go the distance with the CIA or the NSA if they had prior warning, even if there was a screw-up.
Helms left convinced that Inman was bright and sensible and would make a good addition to the Reagan intelligence team.
Inman saw more signs of trouble. Richard Allen was going to get national-security adviser, the old Brzezinski and Kissinger post. Allen was a deeply suspicious right-winger, who had privately charged that the NSA and Inman were intercepting his telephone conversations during the transition and reporting them to the Carter White House. It was a false and outrageous charge, Inman knew. He had made sure that the NSA didn’t collect intelligence in the United States, and that when it did pick up an overseas communication by a U.S. citizen the rules were strictly obeyed. Those rules meant that the intercept would not be used or circulated unless there was reason to believe the communication involved espionage or a crime. Inman felt he could only deflect Allen’s charge. He didn’t want a fight with the new national-security adviser. But Allen’s paranoia startled Inman. Allen was close to some members of the CIA transition team who were pushing some hysterical nonsense that the regulations resulting from the Church Committee investigation, which were in force during the Carter Administration, made it impossible to track down spies and for the intelligence agencies to gather information.
Vice-President-elect George Bush had passed a worried warning to Inman that Reagan was falling under the spell of the extremists. Most alarming was the well-poisoning visit that the French intelligence chief had made to the President-elect telling him that the CIA could not be trusted.
Inman felt caught in the crossfire. Defense Secretary-designate Caspar Weinberger asked him to come by and offered him a fourth star to head Pentagon intelligence, as a kind of overall chief of the NSA and the DIA. Inman suspected that it would be a nothing job, just another layer between the top and the real power. Soon this offer became a request that he retire from the Navy and take a post as assistant secretary of defense for Pentagon intelligence—the same job in different wrapping. Inman said no again.
Casey was still contemplating Reagan’s offer of DCI. He moved about the streets of New York, once again appreciating real city life. The fall air was bracing, but reentry was less than satisfying. Casey normally did not fret over decisions, but he was going to take a couple of days on this one. In 1975, when he resigned as head of the Export-Import Bank, a post which admitted him to the central bankers’ club, he had not expected or planned to come back to Washington to live and work. His years of government service, 1971 to 1975, had been the scandal years.
He felt that his mere presence in the Nixon Administration had sucked him into the whirlpool of investigations. Because of a dispute over the handling of some International Telephone and Telegraph Company files during the 1972 election year, when he headed the SEC, he had been subject to a perjury investigation. “The main focus in the perjury investigation was William Casey,” said a confidential memo from the Watergate Special Prosecutor’s Office that was never made public. Casey had arranged to ship to the Justice Department thirty-four boxes of ITT documents and thirteen “politically sensitive” interoffice memos and letters, out of the hands of a congressional subpoena. The deputy attorney general had sworn that it was Casey’s idea. Casey had denied this and testified that Justice had requested the files. The prosecutor’s memo added, “Casey’s entire statement here is deceptive, both as to his dealings with Justice and Dean”—a reference to then Nixon White House counsel John W. Dean. Casey was never charged. He was a small fish. While the memo repeatedly described his testimony as “evasive,” it concluded that conviction of Casey “simply had such a low chance of success that it could not be brought.” Casey thought it was stupid, but it had made him wary.
There had been other brushes with investigations. Nixon Attorney General Mitchell and chief Nixon campaign fund-raiser Maurice H. Stans were indicted—and later acquitted—for accepting a $200,000 campaign contribution from international swindler Robert Vesco, who was trying to influence one of Casey’s SEC cases. Casey wasn’t bothered by any of this, he assured friends. He had been a prosecution witness, waving to defendant Mitchell as he took the stand. He was clean. But those Watergate times had not been the happiest. Casey and Sophia had returned to New York, and one of Casey’s favorite two-liners became “You know the best thing about Washington? It’s only an hour to New York.”
Two years later, they sold their house at 2501 Massachusetts Avenue, the Embassy Row of Washington, to the People’s Republic of Bangladesh for $550,000. Sophia, his wife of forty years, a small, white-haired loyal and intense fixture of support at his side, would never forgive him for selling that house if they went back to Washington.
Their New York life now centered around their family compound, Mayknoll, the Victorian waterfront landmark on the North Shore of Long Island. He coveted time there, especially the weekends, among his books or at The Creek golf course a quick drive away. Casey was a double-bogey golfer shooting about two strokes over par on each hole; it was a fabulous day if he broke 100 for eighteen holes. But he loved the walk over the course, the outdoors. He had many old friends, and the Caseys’ only child, Bernadette, who was now in her mid thirties, was very close to her parents. Three years earlier they had bought a $350,000 home on Ocean Boulevard in West Palm Beach, Florida, for the winter months. He was not discontent with his life.
In the couple of years before he joined the Reagan campaign, Casey had started another book, his best, he believed. Tentatively entitled “The Clandestine War Against Hitler,” the six-hundred-page manuscript recounted the OSS spying in World War II and had two main characters. The first was Casey. The second was Casey’s mentor and surrogate father, General William “Wild Bill” Donovan. Casey drew a loving portrait of the OSS founder, a roly-poly man with soft blue eyes and an unrelenting curiosity and drive. Donovan had been twice the age of the thirty-year-old Lieutenant (junior grade) Casey when they met in Washington in 1943, but he had closed the multiple gaps of generation, military rank, education and social background. Donovan wanted to know what someone could do. Results counted. “The perfect is the enemy of the good,” Donovan said often. Casey would have walked through fire for him. Donovan always visited the scene of the action, showing up at nearly every Allied invasion as if it were opening night on Broadway.
Donovan had bestowed great responsibility on Casey during the last six months of the war. Casey had written a memo saying, “OSS must be ready to step up the placing of agents within Germany.” Donovan wanted an instant spy network behind German lines, and he named Casey “Chief of Secret Intelligence for the European Theatre.” As best Casey could remember, Donovan’s command was no more than “Get some guys into Germany.” What was lacking in detail was made up in authority. Casey, by then a thirty-one-year-old full lieutenant, commanded colonels and dealt with British and American generals more or less as equals. Ordered out of uniform, he was sent to Selfridge’s on Oxford Street in London to buy a gray suit that would blur, if not conceal, the distinctions in rank.
Casey had thrown himself into every detail of spy-running. Selecting credible spies was difficult. Americans just wouldn’t cut it at Gestapo headquarters in downtown Berlin. Some forty anti-Nazi POWs were chosen—a violation of the Geneva Convention. Casey didn’t blink. Necessity.
Creating cover was an art. An attic archive in London provided newspaper clippings about what was going on inside Germany so that the spies would know the latest news. Documents were forged and clothes with German labels obtained. Casey begged for the planes for agent drops. Without a secure communications system the spies would not be able to get their information out, so a low-power transmitter, called a “Joan Eleanor,” which could broadcast to a circling plane was developed and put into service. Casey checked drop times, maps and even moon tables. He established a Division of Intelligence Procurement to determine what exact information was wanted from the spies. The answers weren’t obvious and it required balancing the needs of the senior Allied commanders (who would have loved to have Hitler’s General Staff’s morning meeting minutes) with what was obtainable. The first priority was German troop movements in and out of major railroad centers, the most visible clue to Hitler’s plans and troubles. The second was potential bombing targets. Casey always saw his agents off.
By February 1945 there were two agents inside Berlin. By the next month, Casey had thirty teams. “A chess game against the clock,” he had written in his manuscript. By the next month, he had fifty-eight teams inside Germany. One team, code-named Chauffeur, used prostitutes as spies. It was war.
Now as he contemplated the post of DCI, Casey tried to summarize his conclusions about intelligence. He called it “the complex process of mosaic-making.” Bits and pieces comprised the intelligence puzzle. Things didn’t turn out as you expected. It was possible to infer if you had many pieces, but to infer with a few was a mistake. After the liberation of Germany he had been thunderstruck on a drive from Munich through southern Germany to Pilsen when all he could see were white flags. A sheet here, a towel, a shirt. No one had asked the Germans for this abject display. It mocked the idea that this had been a master race. The Germany he had imagined when he sat in London headquarters creating a spy network didn’t exist.
“Intelligence,” he wrote in this latest book, “is still a very uncertain, fragile and complex commodity.” Besides gathering the information, evaluating its accuracy, seeing how it fit into the rest of the information—the “mosaic”—and determining meaning, he wrote that intelligence included attracting powerful attention and then forcing a decision. The intelligence person was not passive. It would be a giant miscalculation, Casey felt, to limit the role of intelligence or the intelligence-gatherer. Getting, sifting, distributing intelligence was only the start.
“Then you have to get him to act,” he wrote.
He could not help but write a few unkind words about the Carter Administration: “Right now as we crusade for human rights in countries which do not threaten us, we conceal from public view the photos we take of slave labor camps in Siberia.” There was a moral dimension to intelligence that could not be escaped. There was, too, Casey figured, a moral dimension to life that could not be escaped. He had gone to Dachau a few days after it was liberated in April 1945. And he would never forget the piles of shoes, the bones and the decaying human skin. People had done this to people? It was unthinkable. There was verifiable evil in the world. There were sides, and a person had to choose.
And as he reflected, Casey came to realize that he yearned to go back to intelligence work. The Reagan sweep had to go forward and not bounce back—surge on past the inevitable counterforces. Accepting DCI would give him a chance to plead for an understanding of the world of secrets. Admiral Turner had been an intruder. Casey would go in as a brother. His talk with Sophia lasted only ten minutes. She called it a “love-story” job for him. He told Reagan yes.