2

CASEY MOVED INTO A SUITE at the Jefferson Hotel in downtown Washington several weeks before the formal announcement of his appointment. These would be important weeks to move behind the scenes and quietly do his homework. He had a good general idea of what the CIA did, but he lacked the details which, of course, were everything. His understanding of post-World War II secrets was limited. In 1969, President Nixon had named him to an advisory council for the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency. Casey had, as required, signed a document swearing him to secrecy and granting him access to Sensitive Compartmented Information for a top-secret arms-control-verification satellite reconnaissance program. He knew that the satellites were one of the new wonders, and he wanted to learn as much as possible. Several years earlier, he had served for a year on the President’s Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board (PFIAB), a high-powered nonpartisan community of elders to whom the White House owed a favor. PFIAB was told some of the secrets and in return was supposed to audit the performance of U.S. intelligence agencies for the President.

The Jefferson Hotel’s owner, Edward Bennett Williams, one of the city’s most celebrated criminal lawyers, the man who had defended Helms, stopped by to see him. Casey enjoyed Williams’s booming, back-slapping prattle, his playing the rogue Democrat to Casey’s rogue Republican. Williams had served on the PFIAB with Casey, and, like everyone else Casey encountered, he had strong opinions about Casey’s new task. Williams was a powerful figure in Washington; his clients ranged from the late Teamsters Union president Jimmy Hoffa to The Washington Post.

Williams argued vehemently to Casey that U.S. intelligence had been reduced to rubble not just by Carter but earlier by President Ford. Banging the air with a large fist, Williams used the word “dismantled,” the very description employed in the 1980 Republican platform. During the Ford Administration, the Soviets had intercepted phone calls from nearly half a dozen places in the Washington area. U.S. intelligence had read some of the Soviet “take” from these phone calls, including some of what went back to Moscow, but Ford’s Justice Department had instituted a rule that inhibited the FBI and the NSA from continuing this practice, in order to protect the privacy of the U.S. citizens. Williams thought it ridiculous—the Soviets could tap calls, but not the U.S. intelligence agencies.

“They were stealing and we couldn’t look in our pockets to see what had been taken,” Williams said.

Casey nodded.

Intelligence, knowledge of the other side’s plans and capabilities, is the most important thing in winning, Williams said. “You have got to know,” he said in his head-coach style. “If you don’t, you’re dead.”

As for the CIA, Williams said in classic overstatement, “The CIA is like a great dog that got hit by a truck. You can only say, ‘He was a great dog until he got hit by a truck.’” He threw an arm around Casey as if to say, “Go get ’em, boy.”

Casey was determined that Williams’s great dog was going to be revived.

Casey next phoned up his old OSS roommate, Richard Helms, to say it was official.

Good, thought Helms. Damn good. Perfect. They agreed to lunch on Monday, December 1.

Helms had had several years since Iran to reflect on his tenure in the CIA, particularly as director. He frequently huddled with former colleagues and old memories, and he conducted a continuous seminar on the subject with himself. The year before, Thomas Powers’s book called The Man Who Kept the Secrets: Richard Helms and the CIA had been well received. Some of the reviewers had said the book told what it was really like to be DCI. Not possible. No one could know. Even when his wife, Cynthia, and three leading conservative columnists, Buckley, William Safire and George Will, each told him it was brilliantly written, Helms could not bring himself to accept that. He was working it out in his own mind, mind-writing a continuously revised and updated memoir to himself, in which he was piercing the shades and screens of his life. There was much to learn—fragments of recollection, snatches of dialogue from White House meetings, and the elusive meanings. He’d never get it all back. Nor was the answer in any file; the records and the paper trails could lie.

Helms calculated that his problem as DCI had sprung from the simple fact that he had had no real, personal relationship with the Presidents he had served. His no-contest plea to the misdemeanor charge was a case in point.

Helms had produced his notes from the September 15, 1970, meeting with Nixon at which the covert action in Chile had been ordered directly by the President. Nixon had been insistent: Marxist candidate Salvador Allende had to be prevented from taking office. How many people had ever seen a President of the United States on fire? It was a sight. There was no choice but to carry out the order. Helms’s notes quoted Nixon: “One in 10 chance perhaps, but save Chile!…$10 million available, more if necessary…. make the economy scream.”

Helms knew what was missing from the notes: he had not written down what he had said. His recollection was that he had replied, “You are giving me almost an impossible job.” It was a doomed covert plan—too little, too late, inadequate preparation.

Helms’s good friend Kissinger had told him later that much of what Nixon said was not to be taken literally, let alone seen as an order. Often Nixon was merely expressing his frustration—“Do something, Henry!” Kissinger said Nixon didn’t always mean what he said. To Henry, this was a simple truth. He knew it from experience. Unfortunately Helms hadn’t known. Nixon was not available in an important, personal way to his Director of Central Intelligence. He distrusted the agency, thought of it as an institution filled with Ivy Leaguers and Eastern-establishment liberals. And not knowing his chief very well or understanding him, Helms had left the Oval Office that day in 1970 with a mission. As he later testified, “If I ever carried the marshal’s baton in my knapsack out of the Oval Office, it was that day.” It was a choice of words he would regret.

Helms, of course, knew even more. The key to the order was Nixon’s relationship to Donald Kendall, chairman and chief executive officer of PepsiCo, which had a Pepsi-Cola bottling plant in Chile. Kendall had given his firm’s corporate account to Nixon when Nixon began practicing law in New York. The anti-Allende operation was essentially a business decision; Kendall and other U.S. firms didn’t want a Marxist leader in Chile. Helms and the CIA had been misused, and his silence before the Senate committee had been partly out of embarrassment for the CIA, the President and himself. He had failed to prevent the worst covert action since the Bay of Pigs. He had broken his own law: “Covert action is like a damn good drug. It works, but if you take too much of it, it will kill you.” Allen Dulles, the DCI in the Eisenhower years, had said, If you want a little CIA, some agency in a remote, dusty corner, get out of covert operations. Presidents always want a hidden way of doing things. That’s how the CIA gets its clout with the White House, Dulles said.

Helms was pro-President—all Presidents. Even though trying to argue with Richard Nixon was like “talking into a gale,” as he once said, he wanted to comply. And Helms had agreed when Nixon told him, “I don’t want the goddamn CIA to make policy anymore.” The agency is to serve Presidents who are the makers of foreign and military policy. Those of Helms’s generation, including Casey, knew that orders were to be obeyed.

“Maybe we took too many orders from Presidents,” Helms once remarked, adding proudly, “but we obeyed them.”

And if that meant that intelligence had to take the heat, then so be it. If that meant that intelligence officers had to fry, and many of them did just that, then so be that too. There was no other way to run things. So Helms had taken the heat. It was his turn. And it was only a testimonial parking ticket, wasn’t it? Former DCI James R. Schlesinger had seconded Ed Williams’s “badge of honor” accolade, calling the plea “a kind of dueling scar.”

Casey, as DCI, was going to have some protections, Helms figured. Casey knew “the Company’s” history and he knew his President. There was no need to go over it at their lunch. Helms had always hated it when a former DCI looked over his shoulder. He vowed never to do it, even in advance. So as Helms prepared for the lunch with Casey he was determined to avoid anything that resembled a lecture. He did not want to teach Casey how to suck eggs, and certainly he did not want to sound that way. Better to say too little.

But there was one matter Helms felt he could help with, without sounding patronizing. That was the people. His son, Dennis, had interned at the agency for a summer while in college. One evening Dennis had told his father that he was very lucky to have worked at the CIA. Why? Helms had asked. He never forgot the answer: “Because the people there are so civilized.” That was it. There was a sense of decency out there; it was the great barrier reef to the toughness, the deception, the impossibility of playing by the Marquess of Queensberry rules on the world stage. Inside the agency, among themselves, they were all Caesar’s wife—no lies, straight dealing.

On Monday, December 1, at the lunch hour, Helms appeared at the door of Casey’s small suite at the Jefferson. They shook hands warmly. Casey was still basking in the afterglow of the election victory. He was pleased and elated to be riding a tidal wave of history, to be an instrument of the Reagan revolution.

Bill, you’re a natural and it’s wonderful, Helms said, smiling. His eyes almost closed when he smiled or laughed, as if Helms had discovered some cosmic irony in the joy or fun of the moment.

The waiter took their order.

Helms didn’t need to remind Casey that the CIA had had a rough time in the last decade—Watergate, the investigations, Admiral Turner. The result, Helms felt, was that no one was willing to take chances anymore, let alone risk his life. Well, as they knew, great intelligence operations involved both.

Casey agreed heartily. Since the senior appointments in the agency would be key, he asked whether Helms thought Inman would be the right fellow as deputy.

Congress would not be an easy road, Helms said. It was not the same as before the investigations. Some collaboration had to be worked out. Helms said that he had met Inman just once several weeks before. He had seemed sound and might provide a good fit: a ready-made relationship with Goldwater, a background with the NSA, the technical side that Casey couldn’t know that well. Inman also knew military intelligence, which was important; the Pentagon always, eternally, had its hand in every intelligence pie in town. It would be rational to pick Inman.

Casey said he wasn’t sure; he would have to think about it.

Helms felt he couldn’t say more. It would not be plausible for him to push a man he had met just once for such a key post. He sensed Casey’s resistance.

“Look,” Helms continued, “why don’t you get some people who can help you, that you can consult with?” The various factions would be warring for Casey’s attention. Too easy to misstep, get the wrong advice. Casey could use a good guide. The way Casey came to understand the past would, in large measure, determine his course.

Casey seemed agreeable.

Someone with a historical perspective, Helms said.

Yes, exactly.

And Helms had just the man. One good guy, someone Casey knew during the war, someone sound, someone who would not leak on Casey. John Bross.

Casey’s face lit up. The perfect man. Casey had known Bross in his OSS days. In his just-completed manuscript on the clandestine war against Hitler he had described Bross as a gentle, urbane man who was a parachutist and an expert in sabotage and hand-to-hand combat.

Helms suggested Bross because he had been with the agency for twenty years, had been a division chief in the Directorate of Operations, the comptroller, had handled the intelligence community, was low-key, didn’t flap and was a lawyer. As important, Bross was a man neither of the right nor of the left. Helms had calculated carefully. The danger, the threat to the CIA, came from both the right and the left. Maybe the left had had its way in the 1970s and the investigations, causing their trouble. But the right could do its own mischief. Helms had another concern, one he didn’t voice because he didn’t want to lecture and he hadn’t been asked a specific question. But in 1966, when he was appointed DCI from the ranks, Lyndon Johnson had told Helms to go out there to Langley and break some crockery, shake things up, kick some ass. Helms had found that unnecessary. Too much faith was placed in reorganization schemes. In 1966 reorganization was bullshit, and Helms suspected that it would be bullshit in 1980. Bross would see that. Bross would also have the time; he was independently wealthy and lived on the Potomac River several miles from the agency.

Casey jotted Bross’s name on a napkin and said he would contact him at once.

They had not really touched on sensitive matters, but the lunch was over.

Helms felt that Casey was a jumble of contradictions. He had detected an absence of excitement on Casey’s part. For reasons Helms could not clearly identify, he had the impression that Casey really wanted to be Secretary of State.

Later Casey moved out of the Jefferson Hotel at the urging of CIA security. The Soviet Embassy was half a block down Sixteenth Street, and they had the technology to aim electronic sensors in parabolic antennas and eavesdrop on Casey’s conversations.

Williams thought the alarm laughable. There was no way, he joked in front of Casey, that the Soviets would have any more luck deciphering his mumbles than anyone else.

In his old rambling house on the Potomac, John Bross received Casey’s call. Casey confirmed that he was going to be Reagan’s DCI and invited Bross to join the CIA transition team and assist during the months ahead. Bross was sixty-nine, and this was perhaps his final call to serve his agency; he accepted at once. The assignment might be among his most important: a new administration always had new ideas, and some could be dangerous.

Bross had a jovial manner and he was a charter member of the old boys’ intelligence-oversight club, a powerful alumni association that kept its hands unofficially in agency business, seeing to its well-being whenever possible. He also dabbled within the foreign-policy establishment of ex-officials. Bross was often included in the boards, the commissions, the private lunches.

In Bross’s view, Casey was a solid choice. He had known him since 1943, and the two had kept in touch. In the 1960s, Bross had had a couple of foreign-policy heavyweights to dinner with Casey. One, a classic Soviet-basher, had taken Bross aside and said of Casey, “That man really understood what I was saying.” The next day the other guest, a moderate, had told Bross he’d been pleased that Casey had understood his arguments. Casey was not a fanatic. Bross could capitalize on that, though he knew that he would be talking across a divide. Harvard ’33, Harvard Law ’36; Bross was Eastern establishment and Casey was fighting Irishman, but the connection was Donovan, their dear old leader. Bross could see that Casey was modeling himself after Donovan. And among Donovan’s traits were loyalty and intense personal relations. Bross decided to make himself completely available to Casey. And he knew that Casey would open up. It was Donovan’s way: establish and nurture.

Bross dropped around to assess the transition team. He found its leader, Middendorf, useless. The three Republican aides from the Senate Intelligence Committee, including an extremely conservative fire-thrower named Angelo Codevilla, had been assigned to the team and were writing attack documents. Their plan called for the CIA to be divided into three parts. The first would be an elite, hardball covert-operations division that would launch secret wars to thwart the Soviets, would increase the number of spies dramatically and would get the agents out of the embassies and into nonofficial cover—businesses and consulting firms. The second would be a crack analysis division that would pit groups and agencies against one another to insure tough-mindedness. The third, supported by Middendorf, would be a new superagency combining FBI and CIA counter-intelligence functions. This last, Bross felt, would be particularly disastrous, dragging the CIA into domestic intelligence.

The right-wing aides on the transition team had been in opposition too long and were not used to getting their way, Bross concluded. They over-stated their case; they created plans that would destroy the CIA’s integrity. Bross was also aware that he was not welcome, that he came across as the old veteran steeped in the 1950s view that the Cold War was a perpetual engagement. The transition team was plotting a way to win it, with no sense of the risk of going too far. There was no balance. Lots of missionary work with Casey would be required to ensure that the new DCI was not captured by the right wing.

Casey next contacted William E. Colby, who had been DCI during the most turbulent thirty months at the CIA, 1973 to 1975. The final days of Watergate, the end of Nixon, a full year of investigations. Colby was a pariah in many intelligence circles, where he was thought to be the only politically liberal DCI. He had presided over a hemorrhage of CIA documents and secrets to the Congress. He may have had little choice, but he was perceived to have betrayed the code of silence, omertà, and to have committed the cardinal sin of turning in a colleague. Faced with official investigations and what he considered near-hysterical public and media pressures, Colby had forwarded information to the Justice Department that had triggered the Helms perjury investigation. To the old boys, this was unnecessary. It was as if a Pope had betrayed his predecessor.

Casey had never met Colby during the war, but they knew each other through the OSS veterans’ organization, and there were no casual acquaintances among the OSS vets. They had been in it together. Colby had parachuted behind enemy lines after D-Day as a member of one of the Jedburgh Teams, whose job it was to stir French resistance behind German lines. (Jedburgh was a town in Scotland famous for its border wars, and Jedburgh justice meant “Hang them first, try them afterward.”)

Casey told Colby that he was “going to take the job” and wanted to chat. Colby agreed to come over to the Reagan transition offices on M Street. He planned to be blunt. He had been out of the CIA for five years, ever since he was fired by President Ford for being the captain on the bridge when the CIA collided with the “investigations” and secrets were spilled. Colby was a courteous man who returned phone calls, opened doors, moved around smiling with deference to all. A small, lean man with plain, military-issue spectacles, Colby in no way looked CIA, let alone a director. Give him a smock, a comb and a pair of scissors and he would fit into a Norman Rockwell painting of a small-town barber. He was smart (Phi Beta Kappa, Princeton class of ’40 and a Columbia Law degree in 1947), and when he removed his glasses his appearance changed. There was a toughness, a hard edge to the eyes, imperturbable, almost cold. There was a Jedburgh Justice side to this man.

To a question about CIA secrets from someone without the proper security clearance or the need to know, Colby’s face would grow small and seem to disappear, running for cover behind his glasses and into his eye sockets. His palms would turn out and his shoulders fly toward his ears. He didn’t remember. He couldn’t say. He didn’t care. It was the great universal disavowal, and to those who knew him it meant: go no further, No Trespassing. To an artful question, his dodge was even better. When body and facial language might provide a clue, Colby would slip into silence. Feelings were the natural enemy of the CIA operative. In his autobiography, Honorable Men, published in 1978, he included himself among the CIA’s “gray men,” those who drew little or no attention to themselves but who could perform their assigned tasks with precision and spine.

In dealing with all the investigations of the intelligence agencies, Colby had taken special care to protect the National Security Agency by sharply narrowing inquiry into its work. The NSA broke more codes and intercepted more communications than anyone on the outside could imagine. It had become the heart of “the product,” as Colby called the work of the intelligence agencies. If there was any sleight-of-hand in the way he had opened things up, that was it. Protection of the NSA was the unwritten chapter in the investigations, and Colby was happy to keep it that way. The NSA played by tight rules, but the degree of its intrusion into the world’s privacy was not fully comprehended. Colby thought that Casey probably had the best chance of succeeding at CIA; he had better credentials than “any of us,” meaning the real insiders. Casey was a good mix: historian (Colby had read his little-known book on the American Revolutionary War battles, Where and How the War Was Fought), a lawyer (Colby had a desk manual for lawyers that Casey had authored), a man with an apparently broad acquaintance with foreign affairs, and a risk-taker in business. In his endless hours and years of self-examination since leaving the CIA, Colby had come to feel that perhaps he had not taken enough risks. Casey would. And Casey would have that crucial political and personal connection with the President that meant access.

At the Reagan transition office, in a shabby and beat-up room, Colby greeted Casey exuberantly. The torch was passed in their handshake.

“You’re a natural for it,” Colby said. “Your relationship with the President is a big plus.” His tone was wistful. “It’s a great job.”

Casey seemed to want to listen. What were Colby’s mistakes? His assessment? His advice?

“Look,” Colby began, “you organize the bloody place any way you want. It’s there to serve you.” The whole job was advising the President. “You’ll be at the NSC meetings in the White House and you’re all by yourself. You’ve got to know what’s happening—you’ve got to come up with instant estimates on the spot.” Good advice in a crisis was the ball game. Analysis in a pinch was “everything.”

Casey seemed a little taken aback, but he concentrated his entire attention on Colby.

“You are the President’s intelligence officer,” Colby said. That is the job. Do that well and the rest should be easy. All the bureaucratic stuff can be handled by others. Intelligence should not sit still at the White House when policy options come up for discussion. The DCI is not a main player in determining policy, but it is important to speak up if there is a clear, desirable course.

“You need an analytic center that asks the right questions,” Colby said. And that directorate is presently organized all wrong, by disciplines—politics, economics, the military, nuclear strategic questions, like a university.

“I’m not going to tell you how to run your railroad,” he said, but if he were back as DCI he would reorganize the analysis division by geography. Then there would be experts who could weigh and analyze the whole situation in a country or a region. He once had had a meeting with sixteen CIA experts in the room, each with his special area or discipline, and he was the only one who was looking at the entire picture. That made no sense at all. Those brainy people weren’t encouraged to let their good minds roam beyond their narrow corridors.

The quality of advice to the President hinges on having good analysis, Colby said. Many of the elements necessary to it are public and in the press. Coupled with intelligence, a lot can be deduced. Those deductions have to be the best, requiring the best minds and as many as possible. The system is not set up to do that well. If intelligence did its job, ironically it would be proven wrong. Good intelligence and accurate projections would trigger steps by policy-makers that would avert problems and catastrophes. They say you can’t predict the future, but it is the CIA’s job to do it every day.

“The staff is really pretty good,” Colby said. “Very high talent. They are loyal and will serve you. But don’t get confused, you can override the staff.”

Colby said there was fragmentation among the directorates—analysis, operations and technical. The heads of those directorates ran their own shows. He had moved against it, but not enough.

Particularly in the Directorate of Operations. He had come from there, had run it for a while. It’s a closed culture, very inward, Colby said. Group loyalty runs very high. But the strength of the CIA comes from the stations abroad run by the DO. Young people abroad, often in their thirties, become chiefs of station and have to handle all the management, security, secret operations, occasional diplomacy, and the risks. They are in charge, not like State Department Foreign Service officers, who oversee only their secretaries and whose every move is dictated by a State Department cable.

Covert action is necessary and can be helpful, Colby said. A propaganda operation or covert political support to a struggling centrist leader often makes sense. A covert plan in basic conformity with publicly stated Administration policy can work. If it leaks, it will not come as any great surprise and criticism will be minimal. But there must be a natural political base of support in the country where the covert operation is carried out—a true resistance or political opposition. The CIA cannot create one.

He wasn’t a great advocate of covert action. It had been a dirty word during his time as DCI. In the 1950s, covert action had taken up 50 percent of the CIA budget. When he left, it was down to about 4 percent. Casey and Colby shared the same impression that the outgoing Carter Administration had become more activist with covert operations in the last year or two.

Colby turned to the Congress, which he had come to know only too well; in his last year it had occupied half his time. The new intelligence committees were all right. The arrangement was workable. It was now important that Congress, through those committees, understand what intelligence work was all about. That could be done only by sharing the secrets. It was possible to calibrate the process to minimize the risk and still get the understanding.

One subject remained, the most important—the Soviet Union, the “hard” intelligence target. Colby remarked that the Soviets couldn’t keep their country and their society closed up as tight as in the past. Though there was, regrettably, no Moscow counterpart to Aviation Week, the U.S. magazine that regularly published vital technical and military secrets, opportunities were opening up in Russia.

“Don’t forget,” he said, “though you’ve got magnificent technology, work to get real penetrations there. It’s tough.” Get to the sacred circle of Soviet leadership. No one has been able to, but you might do it. Speaking to a man he knew to be famous for taking financial and business risks, Colby baited Casey, “It’s worth taking a few losses.”

Casey seemed to know what that meant.

Any penetration of the Soviet Union by the CIA could turn out to be a double agent, Colby stated. “If you get a bad one on occasion,” he advised, “you’d get five good ones in the meantime—you get burned once in a while but continue.” Such intelligence was vital and could make the difference. Casey was the man and this was the time.

Casey nodded, sitting still, his eyes intent and fixed on Colby as if the two were in a therapy session.

“Don’t worry about the midseventies anymore,” Colby said. He felt he had got the past out of the way, perhaps atoned for it for all of them, exorcised it. “Go to work,” he said.

Casey replied that he might need to call on Colby at some time in the future. Casey was friendly, charming. There was no distance. Only, he had said very little.

Colby left with a strong, even intense feeling of goodwill. Casey was a good shrink.

Casey figured he owed Stan Turner a phone call.

“Stan,” Casey said, “the rumors about me taking over that were not true a couple of weeks ago are now true. It’s come to pass—I’ll be the new DCI.”

Fine, Turner said. He offered no congratulation. One of Turner’s deputies was in the office and he wanted to keep Casey’s news secret, hoping to tell his people himself, on his own schedule.

Casey was a little put off by the chilly reply, but the two agreed to meet soon. Turner was a strange man, Casey felt. It would be best to bypass him as much as possible during the transition.

On December 9, Casey arrived at Turner’s office at the Old Executive Office Building, fourth deck. He took short, unsure steps as if his feet were sore or someone had put a handful of gravel in each shoe. But he was in great, high spirits.

“Ronald Reagan may want to be President at age sixty-nine,” Casey opened, “but I sure don’t want to be Secretary of State at age sixty-seven—have to do all that travel and diplomacy.” He waved his hand, letting it flutter in the air. This was the unwieldy flap of an old man, suggesting more than the ten years’ age difference with Turner.

“Well,” Turner replied, “you will find that as DCI you’re going to have to meet a lot of people. All the traveling intelligence chiefs that come through town are going to want to talk to you.”

Casey wondered how many that could be.

“In the case of the French,” Turner said, “there is no chief of intelligence as such.” Marenches, as head of the SDECE, is the closest, but there is no DCI equivalent, no overall coordinator. “So the chief of counterintelligence is going to want to meet you, the French FBI is going to want to meet you, and they are all going to think of themselves as your peer.”

Casey had brought no notes, no list of questions, so Turner hoped to direct the agenda. Casey seemed only mildly interested, but now and then a penetrating glance would flash from behind his glasses.

“Do you see any objection to me being put in the Cabinet?” Casey asked flatly. Elevation to the Cabinet had been a condition of his accepting, though he didn’t mention this to Turner.

Turner said that even though the DCI was not currently a Cabinet post, Reagan could easily do it. The salary level, however, would be one step below a Cabinet secretary’s, about $10,000 less, unless the Congress increased it.

Under no circumstances did Casey want less than Cabinet status, but the $10,000 clearly made no difference.

As they talked, a call came in from national-security adviser Brzezinski. Turner did not wish to air dirty Carter Administration linen in front of Casey, so he excused himself and stepped out to take the call.

Casey found this odd. Clearly there was bad blood between Turner and Brzezinski when there should have been a natural alliance between the Admiral and the hard-line national-security adviser. Casey had been able to piece together from the briefings some of what had been going on.

Turner had been predicting that the Soviets would invade Poland under the guise of a military exercise. He had good satellite photography showing a massing of Soviet forces on the border, and he had some supersecret human source inside Poland. Everyone was on high alert. Brzezinski had launched a public campaign to warn the world and to try to scare off the Soviets. He had sprayed the Soviets with back-channel, secret diplomatic warnings through France and India. But he wanted to put out still more information, and Turner was resisting. Each time Brzezinski released a detail or sounded as if he was certain, some source or some method of intelligence-gathering was at risk. But Brzezinski was insisting that the claims must be made credible and that the President would not allow a passive stance on this. The Soviets had to be deprived of secrecy and surprise. (The banner headline in The Washington Post the previous morning had read: “Concern Grows on Soviet Plans in Poland.”)

Brzezinski had arranged for the leaders of the Solidarity labor union in Warsaw to get phone calls warning them. Internal resistance was surfacing as union members started shutting down plants, cutting off communications lines, flooding mines.

Casey waited a long time in Turner’s office, and both men felt awkward when Turner finally returned. They were not being candid with each other.

You can make yourself an absolute hero at the CIA, Turner said. Get the Reagan transition team out of the building. They are talking about a purge of the civil-service ranks. And this, Turner said, is, as you might expect, very much feared.

Casey was unreceptive. He made it clear that he knew a lot about intelligence—from his OSS background, from his year on the President’s Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board.

Turner smiled to himself. He was surprised that Casey had no inclination to get into the philosophy, the things Turner had dwelled on in his memos. Didn’t Casey want to know that covert action would be resisted by the operations arm?

Casey had a few questions about the average work day and the mechanics of the job. After an hour and twenty minutes, he stood up to leave. He had been caught short by Turner’s demeanor—all steamy, tightly wound anxiety and frustration.

Two days later, Thursday, December 11, Turner went over to give another intelligence briefing to Reagan and Casey. Reagan had moved to Blair House, the presidential guest house, diagonally across Pennsylvania Avenue from the White House. Turner was directed to a large groundfloor room. The Soviet-U.S. strategic balance was on the agenda; this was certainly the major issue of the day; it involved a long, detailed examination of the Soviet warfighting capacity. Meese asked Turner to drop the whole subject. It was a political hot potato, because Reagan had implied and stated throughout his campaign that the Soviets had nuclear superiority or were on the verge of achieving it. Turner agreed; a replay of the campaign would serve no purpose.

Therefore, the first subject was the Soviet economy. Turner said it was in trouble. The Soviets had a demographic problem and insufficient numbers of new workers; they had not licked inefficiency; annual overall economic growth was expected to decline from around 5 percent to about 2 percent—a stunning slump. Next, as he charged through issues relating to the Soviet Union and China, Turner was still itching to make his pitch on the Soviet-U.S. strategic balance. It was too important to skip, and he was deeply involved in drafting the annual top-secret National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) on Soviet intentions and capabilities, called NIE 11-3-8. Since he had both Reagan and Casey listening, Turner decided without missing a beat to restore the topic to the agenda.

The overriding issue in the strategic balance, he told the President-elect, is not the number of missiles or bombs, or the brute force of the Soviet missiles. It’s not how many weapons that matters, it’s what they can do. And that means not just counting—not just the numbers, but going the next step and attempting to project what might happen in a nuclear exchange. Generally, if the Soviets launched a first strike, and we retaliated, the remaining forces on both sides would be roughly equivalent. There would be a standoff.

In fact, he said with a studious air, after a Soviet first strike the United States would have enough strategic nuclear weapons to destroy all Soviet cities with populations over 100,000.

This meant that the Soviet advantage was not real. The only weakness in this judgment was whether the analysts had underestimated how much the Soviets could destroy in a first strike. But Turner felt they had it about right. That was the message: worry about the vulnerability of our strategic nuclear forces, not the numbers.

This was heresy to Reagan, who had campaigned on the charge that the United States was dangerously behind, that more military spending and new weapons systems were essential. Reagan, Meese and Allen sat mute.

And Casey kept quiet, too. Arms control that might cut the number of nuclear weapons in half was bullshit. What difference would it make, he thought. There would still be enough to destroy the world.

Turner brought up civil defense, a Reagan hobbyhorse. Reagan had suggested during the campaign that the Soviets were sheltering their population and preparing for nuclear war.

“Yes,” Reagan now said as Turner broached the subject, “we need more of that.”

“No, sir,” Turner said, “I disagree.” The CIA had just concluded that less than 10 percent of the Soviet urban population could be sheltered. And alleged Soviet plans to evacuate were untested. Imagine trying to get eight million people out of Moscow during a Russian winter.

After the briefing, Reagan got up to leave and headed toward the stairs. Turner followed him.

“Could I have a private word with you, sir?”

“Yes,” Reagan said, smiling, pausing on the stairs. He was always willing to listen. The others, including Casey, seemed to fade away, abiding naturally by his wish.

“Sir,” Turner began, standing on the stairs, “there are some things that are so sensitive that we are doing.” He stopped for emphasis, catching Reagan’s eye. This was it. Every person, certainly any President-elect, had to imagine that these things existed. The bottom of the secrets barrel.

Reagan was looking at him intently, as if he had half anticipated this, half feared it.

“President Carter restricted these in the White House to two or three people,” Turner said to underline the seriousness. “For instance, Hamilton Jordan did not know these things.” Jordan had been Carter’s top political strategist and his White House chief of staff. “Sir, I have not touched on them yet. I would like to give you and Vice-President Bush—just among the three of us—a briefing on the eight most sensitive things that we are doing.”

Sure, Reagan said.

Turner said that these were not necessarily the most important, but were the most sensitive and would be the most harmed by a leak or a compromise. “Then,” Turner continued, “you will be able to decide who in the White House staff, in your staff, you want to have access to this material.”

Reagan agreed, and Turner walked away.

Casey came up to him. “My appointment is going to be announced.”

“When?”

“In three hours.”

Three hours?

Casey said he’d forgotten to pass the word along.

Turner raced out to his Oldsmobile and back to the agency. He was furious that they had given him only several hours’ notice—an unthinkable slight. He felt it was important that his staff get the news from him. Once at headquarters, he called together the fourteen top deputies and assistants who were normally at the thrice-weekly 9 A.M. meeting. They gathered in the small, cramped conference room across from his office. Turner was not fond of that conference room. So many bad memories, bad times, the countless occasions when the staff had presented him with difficult decisions on important matters, or requests to do something. And rarely was there anyone present who knew enough about the subject, who had the in-depth knowledge to answer his questions.

Turner walked over to the conference room and made the announcement. He was somber and sad.

That afternoon, Casey came onto the ballroom stage at the Mayflower Hotel in downtown Washington and stood with seven other Reagan Cabinet-level appointees before a blue curtain. James Brady, the affable spokesman of the Reagan transition team, made the announcements for the President-elect.

That evening, Katharine Graham, chairman of the Washington Post Company, gave a dinner in Reagan’s honor at her home in Georgetown. Bill and Sophia Casey were among the seventy guests. Casey was seated with Mary Graham, wife of Post publisher Donald Graham, on one side, and Nancy Kissinger, wife of the former Secretary of State, on the other. He was exuberant, a little tipsy, and talked a lot about the campaign.