CASEY WENT TO SEE NSA Director Bobby Inman. The NSA was the inner circle of secrets—the communications intercepts and breaking of codes. It was apparent to Casey from his briefings that it frequently delivered the goods. And after four years of erecting walls and protecting his turf from Turner, Casey was aware that Inman had his back up a bit.
Look, Casey said at the beginning of their meeting, I know that you were approached about becoming the deputy and that you turned it down. “I regret that.”
Inman relaxed. He said that the weeks after the election had been particularly uncomfortable for him personally and professionally, because Goldwater and others were pushing him for DCI.
Casey grunted.
Inman praised the NSA. The agency had forty thousand people spread all around the world at listening posts and at Fort Meade headquarters in Maryland. A key part was the Directorate of Operations and within it the Soviet group of one thousand, mostly civilians, at Fort Meade. Most of them spoke or read some Russian. Intercepted communications provided some of the best intelligence on the Soviets. It was less than anyone wished, but, taking it as a whole, the NSA should be able to tell whether the Soviets were planning a major military move. Another group managed communications intercepts from Asia, and a third group all “other” countries. The list of “other” target countries was growing. Every Secretary of State and every national-security adviser wants more, insists on knowing what the other guy is doing, Inman said.
Inman’s central concern was the need for massive investment. Areas of the world were uncovered. The NSA was confronting new, sophisticated coding methods being used by the Soviets and others. And there were more signals out there. They had to focus on timeliness, he said. Getting, sorting, decoding if possible and routing the intelligence to the users. Listening equipment mounted on orbiting satellites could relay intercepted communications instantly, but again the question was the amount of time it took to process it. It was too long.
Casey was in agreement.
Inman said that in a crisis the intelligence might be sitting on some tape, or in some computer, or awaiting translation. For example, of the various room or office eavesdropping devices placed around the world, there was, at that time, no case where the NSA had real-time listening—a person in place with earphones at all times, ready to pass on an urgent intercept. There were not enough people, and it would be a mind-numbing task to maintain such a watch. Information had to be culled from the massive influx of intercepts by computers programmed to pick out key words or names.
Casey asked lots of questions. Despite his thrown-together appearance, Inman found Casey to be alert, not sleepy. His questions had no CIA turf angle or CIA spin on them, as Inman had come to expect from Turner.
Casey left the meeting concerned that Inman thought there could be another intelligence failure similar to that at Pearl Harbor when the decoded Japanese messages had not made it to the proper people.
On December 18 Casey went over to F Street, where Turner had his offices to supervise the intelligence community. Turner had indicated that he had some really important subjects to discuss, and though Casey thought Turner seemed still to be fighting his own, lost battles, he figured he had better hear him out.
Turner said he wanted to talk about code words. The system of compartmentalizing the most sensitive information with individual code words was a mess, he said. It was the primary means of controlling classified information. There were dozens of code words both for operations and for capabilities. The NSA, the Navy and even the Operations Directorate of the CIA ran their own code-words systems. On one satellite system of great importance, Turner explained, about fifty thousand people had the code-word clearance. He had added it up himself: everyone on the manufacturing floor, from the ten contractors involved in building the system; all the communications people; even the President’s personal secretary. The fifty thousand did not include all the alumni who once had had the code-word clearance and had moved on.
Turner explained with excitement that he had a way of reducing compartmented information to five code words for all information above top secret. He had a name, “Apex.” The five code words would be PHOTINT, all overhead satellite and spy-plane photography; COMINT, all communications intercepts; HUMINT, all human sources; TECHINT, all technical matters; and ROYAL, a new code word for special techniques or operations that were particularly sensitive—which could be limited to fewer than a hundred of the most senior people.
Casey nodded politely. He wondered how this would cut back access to sensitive information. Would someone who dealt with human sources in one country be granted access to all human sources in all countries? He didn’t ask. Turner was fired up, presenting Apex as if he had discovered the Ten Commandments.
Turner said that the NSA was resisting, it was fighting him because Apex would give the DCI control of communications intercepts.
Casey saw a man who made life hard for himself. Turner radiated defeat and seemed unsettled, advertising the fact that he had never gotten a handle on things and that after four years he was still slugging it out with the NSA. It seemed to be about labels and turf. Casey just didn’t give much of a shit about labels, but didn’t want to say so. Those weren’t intelligence issues. If anything, Casey figured he would need more compartments and code words, since that was the main instrument for keeping secrets. Turner’s performance was almost embarrassing. Casey’s laugh was soft.
The Admiral rolled on. Economic intelligence: he wanted to make it public. He had two deputies at the intelligence community with its staff of more than two hundred. Two deputies were a good idea—one for the budget, one to set priorities (collection and tasking) he said.
Casey had had enough. Okay, who do you think should be my deputy? He had a list of three names. Fred Ikle, a think-tank and arms control specialist.
Don’t know him, Turner said.
Hank Knoche?
Not capable of doing the job, Turner replied. Knoche, who had been Turner’s deputy for a short time, had once told the agency people that Turner was well-meaning and that they would bring him around to their way of thinking.
Inman?
A capable man, Turner said. “There are two distinct disadvantages. One: Inman has steadfastly resisted a strong DCI, and if you’re going to be a strong DCI that will be a problem. Two: given the NSA-CIA rivalry, the CIA will be suspicious of him.”
Casey thanked Turner and left.
Turner revised his opinion of Casey; he was a good listener.
Casey was still unsure about the deputy slot. Turner’s arguments had focused on Inman as the resistant director of the NSA. If Inman came to the CIA, those supposed disadvantages could easily become advantages. A star player for the rival club could become a champ for your club, especially if he were traded under circumstances he found favorable. Casey decided to spend some time with Turner’s deputy, Frank C. Carlucci III, a no-nonsense veteran bureaucratic hand. Carlucci was a state-of-the-art survivor: Foreign Service officer; Deputy Secretary of Health, Education and Welfare; deputy director of the Office of Management and Budget; ambassador to Portugal.
Who should be deputy? Casey inquired, knowing that Carlucci was out of the running since he was going to Defense to be Cap Weinberger’s deputy.
There’s only one person, Carlucci said: Bobby Inman. If you don’t pick him, Cap Weinberger and I are going to reorganize all defense-related intelligence—DIA, NSA and the service intelligence agencies—around him, and put him in charge. The implication was that Casey as DCI would want Inman in his control as deputy, not outside in the Defense Department.
Just before Christmas, Casey went out to Langley to see Turner again.
Turner handed Casey a copy of the CIA’s report on its mistreatment of Soviet KGB defector Yuri Nosenko in the 1960s. As far as Turner was concerned this was one of the great CIA crimes. Nosenko had been suspected by some agency paranoids of being a double agent sent to provide the CIA with information that would prove that the KGB had no connection with John F. Kennedy’s assassin, Lee Harvey Oswald. Nosenko had been kept in an eight-by-eight-foot cell for 1,277 days, more than three years, as part of some smarmy chess game played inside by agency counterintelligence experts over which Soviet defector was a plant. It’s important that you read the report, Turner said, important that you understand what can happen, what can go wrong. Turner wasn’t sure it couldn’t happen again.
Casey accepted the report, but thought it weird that Turner would dwell on events nearly two decades old.
Turner had something else for Casey, he said, producing a notebook. It listed the top twenty or twenty-five jobs in the CIA, who held each job then, how long they had been in it, and his recommendations—the number-one,-two and-three candidates to take over the particular job. Especially the DO.
Casey took this too, though he saw that Turner didn’t understand that he had just hurt seventy-five careers; the blessing of the Ancien Régime was certainly a mixed endorsement.
Turner said he was taking his last trip abroad as DCI, to China to close a top-secret deal for two Soviet-missile-monitoring stations to replace those lost in Iran. He would be traveling under an alias, wearing a CIA-supplied disguise that included a mustache.
Casey continued his meetings with the CIA transition team. Papers were flying. Despite his proclivity for new ideas and for risk-taking, he had learned from previous government jobs that the new man in charge had to move slowly, that he had to count to ten before acting. That had been drummed into his head by one of his closest friends, his longtime law partner Leonard W. Hall, who had been the Republican National Committee chairman during the Eisenhower years and had managed Ike’s post-heart attack reelection campaign in 1956. Hall had died the previous year, but for fifteen years Casey and he had had a regular Saturday lunch at the same Italian restaurant, Caminari’s in Locust Valley, Long Island. The amiable Hall had taught Casey to reach out and connect to people—the workers and secretaries, everyone if possible. But the real lesson had been “Prudence,” Casey would say.
Casey could be his own Wild Bill Donovan. But with Hall gone, who would counsel prudence? Casey latched onto John Bross, and Bross was arguing that the transition team’s suggestions stank. Nonofficial cover for covert operators abroad would reduce them to a bunch of traveling airplane-parts salesmen. They would have no credibility with foreign officials. Spying and operations had to be conducted from a position of strength. The prestige of the United States government had to be on the line, and that would happen only if the spies had diplomatic standing. Without an undercover role in the embassies, how would a person have secure communications to Washington? How would classified files be stored? In a room in the downtown Hilton? Bross argued that the crazies on the transition team were trying to sell Casey a bill of goods from some spy novel, some romantic notion of a golden espionage past. Well, it never existed and probably never will. Dr. No from some James Bond novel is not our opposition. It’s not a matter of destroying Dr. No’s headquarters. The Russians are all over the place and will remain so. It’s a more subtle, permanent game.
Casey pushed back. He saw the merit of Bross’s arguments, but his gut told him to shake things up.
“Ah, come on, Bill,” Bross said, “surely a solution can be found that won’t be so disruptive.”
Casey heard “Prudence.”
The final transition report was finished on December 22. On Christmas Day Casey told Bross that the transition team had folded. It had become a debating society. “They’re trying to get me in trouble out there,” he said. The time had come to draw up his own agenda.
Bross was relieved. Some of the bad witches were dead. For the moment.
After the New Year, Casey and Bross met for lunch in the members’ grill at the Metropolitan Club, the most exclusive downtown Washington club.
My top priority, Casey said, is going to be the analytical estimates, the written assessments of the future. Not only do they need improving, but everything, all the intelligence feeds to the estimates. They will help identify weaknesses about our sources and weaknesses in people. The estimates are also the link to the White House and the President, the policy-making.
Bross agreed.
I was once paid six hundred thousand dollars a year to write tax summaries and manuals, Casey said (exaggerating his annual income). Taking lots of complicated information and boiling and distilling it to the essential is what I do well, he said.
Ah, Bross thought. He was struck that Casey felt the need to brag, but he thought the estimates were the right first priority.
Casey said the focus on the estimates would allow him to establish relations personally with each of the intelligence chiefs at State, the military, the NSA, the FBI, elsewhere. “Stan had a feud with each,” he added derisively.
His second priority was going to be a new presidential executive order that would loosen the restrictions on intelligence-gathering. Third, he wanted more money and manpower for intelligence. The immediate problem, he said, is people. What were Bross’s views on the key jobs?
Inman, Bross said, should be deputy. “Bill, you’ll need someone who has real stature and access, someone who will hold his own in debates with the Defense Department. He’ll have that cold. The State Department—he’ll have standing there as a respected moderate military man. He has Goldwater in his hip pocket, and reigns as favorite son on the Hill.”
Casey nodded. But clearly he still was hesitating.
Why not? Bross asked.
For one reason, he doesn’t want the job.
Bobby is a military man and will do what he is told, Bross said. Maybe a fourth star would sweeten it.
Casey mumbled. The conversation turned to other jobs. How about an executive assistant for me? he asked.
Perhaps the most important choice you’ll make, Bross said. You’ll need someone who knows the way things work, who knows the National Security Council, the staff, the precise power centers, the paper flow, someone who knows Defense and State intimately.
Casey asked Bross to find the right fellow. Keep your eye out, he said. I’ve been going through stacks of personnel files, looking for candidates for all the jobs. This was really important, Casey stressed. No mumble, but his arm was thwacking the air in the sedate members’ grill.
Bross was now getting the impression that Casey was afflicted with the disease Bross called “I’ll-freshen-this-place-up-by-bringing-in-my-people.” This was pure Donovan. He had promoted some funny people, characters who were not mainline. In a big organization with eccentric functions, Bross knew, some eccentric personalities were likely to surface, oddballs who would get the job done. Most of the lock-pickers did not come from the best boarding schools.
We need some people with broad business experience, Casey said, we need to bring in some outsiders.
Sure, Bross said.
“One of the things I want to do is get a job for Who-gul,” Casey said, destroying the name of Max Hugel.
“Who-gul?” Bross asked. “Who’s that?”
“Who-gul,” Casey said.
Bross still didn’t catch the name.
Casey was determined to find a place in the CIA for Hugel, a most successful businessman who had worked closely with him on the Reagan campaign. Hugel had recruited a cadre of workers from minorities and special-voter-interest groups.
“There are lots of jobs,” Bross said finally.
They agreed that Bross would move into a desk outside Casey’s office after the inaugural. There he could watch the world go by and help locate the ideal executive assistant for Casey.
Casey went back to Langley and on his new authority had several of Turner’s key deputies brief him.
What about covert action? Casey inquired. What had been going on during the Carter years? Was the Directorate of Operations so rusty it creaked? He wanted details.
There were three phases of covert action in the four years, the briefers said. The first and least intrusive form of covert action was propaganda, and it constituted what had become the first phase of limited clandestine activism during the Carter-Turner era. Brzezinski, in particular, had shown great interest in shipping books into Communist countries. The so-called book program involved smuggling thousands of books and other written material behind the Iron Curtain. This, Casey was told, could not change, let alone nudge the course of history, but there had been a feeling that the gospel of democracy should be made available. Turner, they explained, had called the book program a “covert action toy,” a “Brzezinski throwaway,” a “fly-by-night operation.”
Casey was appalled at Turner’s cynicism. He made a mental note to make sure he expanded these propaganda programs dramatically. Words, he believed, could make a difference. They were ideas, and ideas mattered.
What else? Casey asked impatiently.
The second phase involved covert undertakings designed primarily to cement relations with friendly nations, particularly the British and the Saudis. These joint operations were supposed to demonstrate Carter’s new toughness late in his administration. The main operation was a limited paramilitary support program to undermine the Soviet-supported Marxist state of South Yemen. The operation was under way, and several small teams of Yemenis were being trained to blow up bridges and so forth. Turner had pronounced it “harebrained,” and left it to his deputy, Frank Carlucci, to supervise the covert plan.
Why? Casey asked.
Turner had felt the White House was always too anxious to please the British, who were behind the South Yemen operation, and he had worried that the CIA was sharing too much sensitive intelligence with the leaky MI-6, the British foreign-intelligence service. The British had a virtual intelligence stranglehold on the United States, Turner felt, and were receiving too much.
Casey said he liked the British. What else?
Faced with the December 1979 Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, the briefers told him, the Carter Administration had entered into the third phase of its covert program, launching its only serious, large-scale paramilitary support operation. Again it was Brzezinski who had pushed the hardest, believing that the Soviets had overextended themselves. Afghanistan was their Vietnam, and Brzezinski wanted it boldly and ruthlessly exploited. Bleed them, he had said.
Turner’s attitude?
The Director, the briefers explained, had wondered long and hard whether it was permissible to use other people’s lives for the geopolitical interests of the United States. For the first time, CIA-supplied weapons would be killing regular Soviet Army troops. In Afghanistan the Soviets had about ninety thousand. Turner had worried that U.S. policy was to fight to the last dead Afghan, but he had supported the operation in the end. Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Pakistan and China also were helping the Afghan resistance. The total cost was about $100 million.
Casey’s confirmation hearing before the Senate Intelligence Committee was scheduled for Tuesday, January 13, 1981, a week before the Reagan inaugural. He set to work. It would be his fifth confirmation hearing, and he had learned not to use the forum to parade his opinions or dip into a barrel of self-serving recollections, nor to go unarmed and unprepared. Ten years earlier, during the confirmation hearing on his appointment as SEC chairman, he had winged it and almost scuttled his nomination after he had to retract his testimony about a plagiarism suit against him. The 1971 memory was an unpleasant one.*
So this time Casey prepared carefully. DCI was a major post, sure to have high visibility, and he personally crafted his forty-paragraph opening statement, designing it to avoid trouble. That meant minimizing commitments, pleading ignorance and uncertainty, and assuring the senators that things were not yet decided. It would be easy to say little, since senators love to hear themselves talk, Casey thought.
Casey arrived promptly that morning, wearing an expensive dark, wide-pinstriped banker’s suit. Goldwater called the hearing to order at 10 A.M. He asked the committee vice-chairman, Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan, the New York Democrat who had served in the Nixon Administration, to introduce Casey. Moynihan, an academic by temperament, instinct and speech, rolled out his mellifluous, high-Eastern cadence. For the moment it would be some of Moynihan’s be-true-to-your-state, son-of-New-York, local-boy-makes-good parochialism.
“It is the distinguished quality of this man,” Moynihan said, “that he has, in one form or another, served every American President since Franklin Roosevelt, when he joined the U.S. Navy in the Second World War. His career is too well known to require any recitation from me, save to make the somewhat sad observation, what the French call fin de ligne [end of the line], Bill Casey will surely be the last member of the OSS to direct the CIA.”
Casey sat uneasily at the witness table. He blinked passively, his hands moving about, searching for some activity.
Goldwater spoke. Something was wrong, he said. There was not enough intelligence, it was not good enough. “Congressional investigations, mood of Congress, and so forth, has inhibited intelligence operatives around the world from exploiting targets of opportunity…. A number of operatives are spending an inordinate amount of time in developing defensive memos in anticipation of investigations or criticisms of their actions.”
After opening proclamations from three more senators, Casey darted his head toward the microphone. His goals would be “rebuilding, performance, security.”
“The CIA, in particular, suffers institutional self-doubt,” he said. “Many of its most competent officers have retired or are about to retire. The morale of much of the agency is said to be low. Too many have worked to reduce the feeling of self-worth of intelligence officers.”
In the preceding weeks Casey had seen it too often, he said—a hesitation and an indirection of expression, a defensiveness. He spoke of the remedies—confidence, trust, honor.
“This is not the time for another bureaucratic shakeup of the CIA,” he stated forcefully. He thought the so-called intelligence failures in recent years had been cases in which the facts were available but there had been faulty analysis or misguided policy. He promised to present all relevant information and all views to the President. Twice he pledged to work closely with Congress.
Casey had something for everyone—“rebuilding” for the right, “civil liberties” for the left. The Reagan landslide was trouble for the Democrats, Moynihan, among others, knew all too well. The Democrats would have to walk a fine line. There could be no more attempts to disembowel the CIA, no more Frank Church charges about the CIA as “a rogue elephant on a rampage.” Moynihan didn’t believe in that approach in the first place. An effective CIA was a prerequisite to national security. Moynihan felt he had no illusions about the Soviets; they could play very dirty.
Moynihan also had few illusions about the capacity of the CIA to deliver useful intelligence. When he was ambassador to India, from 1973 to 1975, his CIA station chief had often rushed in with Indian government secrets in special folders denoting importance, but then the Indian leadership would do something that was not mentioned in the folders; it was clear to him that the CIA was missing a great deal.
When it was his turn to question Casey, Moynihan referred to the recently enacted law that required the DCI to keep the committee “fully and currently informed of all intelligence activities…including any significant anticipated intelligence activity.” Moynihan noted that in some cases the President could direct that only the chairman and the vice-chairman of the Senate and House intelligence committees be informed. This was reserved for “extraordinary circumstances affecting the vital interests of the United States…to preserve the secrecy necessary for very sensitive cases…
“Now, there is, however, a gray area,” Moynihan said, leaning forward, his voice rising to a familiar singsong he reverted to when he knew he was on top of the central issue. He noted that the law, in a preamble, said that all this had to be “consistent with the President’s duties under the Constitution” and consistent with executive-branch responsibilities to protect against unauthorized disclosure of classified information, intelligence sources and methods.
“So since we say it must be done ‘consistent with,’ we concede the point that there may be occasions when it’s inconsistent,” Moynihan said. With that concession, the law nonetheless said that some notification would have to take place at some point even after the event. “Therefore there is no exception to our being informed.” What was Casey’s judgment on “that measure of ambiguity?…Because, as you know, there has been an occasion in a long and distinguished career in which it has been charged that you have not been forthcoming to the Congress with materials requested by the Congress.”
That was the ITT files, Moynihan noted. “Now, as you expect us to have done, we looked into this matter prior to this hearing, and I took the liberty of getting in touch with Mr. Stanley Sporkin,…a distinguished public servant by anyone’s standards.” Moynihan produced a letter from Sporkin, the legendary chief of enforcement of the SEC, who had for years been a self-appointed special business prosecution force.
Moynihan had been looking for dirt from Sporkin, a hero to anti-business Democrats, but instead he had received a standing ovation for Casey based on their work together at the SEC. Sporkin had spoken of Casey’s “perceptive and thoughtful analysis” and “imaginative and wise decision” in one case in question.
Casey was off the hook; Moynihan didn’t even have a question about the past. He turned to the future. “How do you feel about telling this committee things we need to know and you would just as soon not more than two people in the world know?”
“Well, Senator,” Casey replied, “I intend to comply fully with the spirit and the letter…I cannot conceive now of any circumstances under which they would result in my not being able to provide this committee with the information it requires.”
“Well, I thank you, sir,” Moynihan said, believing he had obtained a full pledge. “I heard you say that you could not conceive any circumstances in which you could not share information with this committee.”
Gently Casey repeated himself: “I said I cannot now conceive.”
Moynihan smiled. “You said not now conceive, and not for nothing did you go to the Fordham Law School.”
It was Casey’s turn to smile. He had gone to Fordham as an undergraduate. His law school had been St. John’s; but he didn’t correct the Senator.
Casey stepped lightly through the rest of the questioning. He tried to keep his replies to one word or a sentence. To a question about the phrase then in vogue “It’s time to unleash the CIA”: “I have not used that phrase.” About a possible new executive order: “I haven’t made up my mind.” About what he had done since the election: “I spent most of my time catching up with my law practice and assessing the financial damage that I sustained during the campaign.” About the CIA transition team: “an amoebalike creature.” On management issues Casey said, “My general style in this has been to set objectives and give people authority to go after those objectives, hold them to their performance, and not get into detailed management. If they don’t perform, then you get somebody else.”
When Senator Joseph R. Biden, Jr., a Delaware Democrat, hinted that they were having a problem understanding, and that Casey should pull the microphone close, Casey did so, adding, “I have it in my lap now.”
Goldwater had some questions. “Are you giving any thought to an assistant?”
“A lot of thought, yes,” Casey replied dryly, realizing that the drumbeat was about to begin.
“I think I would be correct in informing you that Admiral Robert Inman is held in very high regard by this committee…” Goldwater said, deadpan. “And we, I think, again speaking for the committee, do not want to see just some political person sent over here to be your assistant…. I think Admiral Inman would be a great addition.”
“I hope he can see his way to come,” Casey said, conceding that the job was Inman’s if he wanted it.
“I raise the point because I read in the paper that there were quite a few others being considered for your assistant, and I never heard a word of any of them,” Goldwater said, and repeated, “And we know Bobby Inman.”
“I didn’t see that list,” Casey said, throwing the bait back at Goldwater. “I will have to get that list.” He added tauntingly, “Maybe some of them might be good.”
“Well, I won’t even tell you where I saw it,” Goldwater replied.
Biden pressed on accountability. Casey was not hesitant to push back to this young senator. “I think there is a point at which rigid accountability, detailed accountability, can impair performance, and I think that that should be recognized.” Biden’s questions ran to paragraphs, and Casey batted them away: “I do not have a considered personal view and I do not want to express an unconsidered personal view.” “No.” “None.” “I will look into that.”
Then Biden jumped on the Inman bandwagon: “the absolute best, unquestionably the absolute best person in every respect that has ever testified before this committee.” Dangling the carrot, Biden said that if Inman got the deputy’s post, then, “When you get a problem…you send him up. He knows a way around us.”
The message was not lost on Casey. He had better get Inman, if only as the front man to the committee. Inman had not just done his job before the committee. He had gone to some determined length to perfect and cultivate his image.*
In the days remaining before Reagan took office, Casey followed the intelligence data, particularly on the Iran hostage crisis. He saw the importance of the National Security Agency, which was intercepting communications and breaking important coded messages between Iran and Algeria; the latter country had entered the negotiations as a mediator. It was very important that there be no misunderstanding, that Iran and the Algerians receive precise and accurate information on the U.S. positions. The intercepts were a double check to be sure the Algerians and the Iranians heard and knew what the United States was saying. Several times the intercepts revealed that the positions had been garbled by the mediators, and the U.S. negotiators were able quickly to make corrections. Casey was impressed; this was the kind of intelligence support the White House needed. He noted that NSA Director Inman was directly in touch with the President and others in the White House much of the time.
Casey, like the rest of the intelligence community, was also watching Poland. The forecasted Soviet invasion didn’t materialize. As is often the case, the answer was provided in a fragment of information. The CIA had details on the Soviet mobilization plans, including the tedious lists of which troops were supposed to go where. Some of this came from the BIGOT-list colonel on the Polish General Staff. An invasion required precise timing and coordination of vast resources. Mobilization required the harvest trucks from western Russia for transportation. But the satellite photography showed that the trucks had not even been brought to the Polish border. Perhaps the massing of troops on the border had been a bluff, designed to stiffen the Polish government’s policy toward Solidarity? Or perhaps Brzezinski’s public railing and warnings through diplomatic channels had scared the Soviets off? With the satellite photos, with the Polish General Staff colonel, with other intelligence, Casey was struck that so much remained a mystery still.
Casey also watched with some consternation as Admiral Turner coped with the final serious intelligence business remaining in his term. It was the top-secret estimate on the Soviet-U.S. strategic balance, NIE 11-3-8, which addressed both the capabilities and the intentions of the USSR. After some last-minute back-and-forth, Turner finished it and sent the final printed version to all the key national-security and intelligence officials, including the President. Such estimates are DCI documents and he can say whatever he wishes, knowing that other intelligence agencies can and will tack on their dissents. Because the DCI is also the CIA director, the CIA’s position is traditionally his. The CIA had never dissented from the DCI. But this time there was such substantial disagreement within the CIA over Turner’s view that for the first time he allowed the CIA representative to dissent in the published estimate. Casey found Turner’s view on this no more persuasive in writing than in the Admiral’s earlier oral presentation to the President. He also found a fallacy in Turner’s argument: even though the United States might have enough nuclear weapons to retaliate after a Soviet first strike even though this deterrence seemed potent, the Soviets might not react logically. After all, war was not logical.
Casey felt that Turner was analyzing away the American disadvantage. Paper and “rational thought” were no substitutes for military superiority. The influence of any such estimate in policy-making would rest in its unanimity—one document with the collective voice of the intelligence agencies and the DCI.
Casey would have to endure one last encounter with the outgoing DCI. On Thursday, January 15, with five days to go before the inaugural, Turner was presenting the final secrets to Reagan, Bush and Casey. It was not Reagan who had requested the meeting; Turner had more or less insisted.
It was a cold morning. Bush and Casey joined Reagan in a private room at Blair House for the briefing. The men of the new Administration were uneasy and expectant.
The most important covert action, Turner told them, was the secret support to the resistance in Afghanistan. The CIA also had limited assets in place and some plans for Iran if Ayatollah Khomeini was ousted or if the fifty-two U.S. hostages in Tehran started getting killed.
But, Turner explained, the really dicey operations were not the covert actions. The real secrets were sensitive intelligence-collection efforts, some so secret and important that each day that went by without their exposure made the day a success.
First, there were human sources who if exposed would be not just lost but killed. He revealed some, including a senior official in the Indian government who was a CIA asset. This man sent out information on weapons which the Soviets supplied to India; his specialty was air defense.
A key human source in the Soviet Union worked at the Moscow Aeronautical Institute. A. G. Tolkachev provided “hard copy documentation”—the plans, specifications and test data on both operational Soviet weapons systems and other new systems being developed. His intelligence was the jewel of all jewels. He provided a look at the world of Soviet weapons that was unobtainable elsewhere—reams on their fighter planes, bombers and missiles. The intelligence take included reports on the capabilities and, most important, the vulnerabilities of some key parts of the Soviet arsenal. But he also opened a window into the future—the research, development and new generations of weapons, particularly on new radar-defeating “stealth” technology. Estimates were that his intelligence was worth billions of dollars.
Turner said that Reagan would want to decide who, beyond his Vice-President and the DCI, should know of even the existence of such a source. That obviously was up to the President, he added.
A second category of sensitive collection operations involved spying on our friends and allies, one of the all-time thorny problems. His philosophy, one he hoped the new Administration would adopt, was that such operations were necessary and, if anything, should be expanded. Much was done with passive technical means—satellite photos, interception of communications, a well-placed microphone. Risk of exposure could most likely come from a leak or a spy inside one of the U.S. intelligence agencies. Special Collection Elements—teams of two to three CIA and NSA personnel—in several dozens of our embassies provided some amazing material. The world expected the United States to spy on the Soviets; an eavesdropping device or electronic interception capability discovered there would be followed by a routine expulsion or diplomatic note. That game was known and defined. But serious public-relations and diplomatic problems would erupt if the extent or, God help us, the exact targets of U.S. spying on friends leaked or were exposed. Turner provided some examples. Casey had already done some research and was surprised that there were so few of these sensitive collection operations with microphones or human sources—some three dozen by his count.
Offering another example, Turner explained how the CIA and the NSA had the Egyptian government wired electronically and had agents from top to bottom. For all practical purposes, Egyptian President Anwar Sadat was a full known quantity to the CIA and the U.S. government. Intelligence-sharing operations with several friendly governments also provided some important intelligence-gathering opportunities.
A third category were special operations involving sources and methods that would gravely weaken national security if lost. Turner explained in detail the submarine cable-tapping operations under the Special Navy Control Program. When Bush was DCI, the submarines had had to stay directly over the cable, increasing the risk and tying up a submarine for weeks at a time. Now Navy Special had high-technology pods that could be placed over the underwater cables, left to record the communications for weeks or months, and then retrieved. This was done with a wraparound, breakaway pod which did not have to make physical contact with the transmission wires that ran inside the large cable. If the cable was lifted from the ocean floor by the Soviets for inspection or maintenance, there was no indication it had been tapped. Each operation, especially inside Soviet territorial waters, had to be approved by the President.
No intelligence mission placed so many lives at risk. There had been collisions, one at least with a Soviet submarine, and there had been other incidents. Should a submarine be captured the repercussions could be a U-2 spy plane and a Pueblo spy ship incident all wrapped into one. Or worse.
The CIA and the NSA had found some important nonmaritime uses for the devices by tapping into communication lines on land, either on wires running between telephone poles or on buried cables.
There were intelligence-gathering capabilities and equipment in place that had not been activated but were held in reserve in case of an emergency or war. These included backup to existing methods, but also some capabilities and sources that were there just in case. But the intelligence agencies didn’t have enough war reserve, because it was hard to get money from the budget for expensive items that were not being used. No one wanted to pay for the future.
NSA code-breaking was also a sensitive area. Of the twenty principal target countries, well, in summary it was possible to break some of the codes some of the time, but not all of them all of the time, Turner said. There were dozens of other countries that were not primary targets and the NSA could break their codes. A key here was tapping into signals and communications links that various countries, especially the Soviets, did not expect the United States to be able to reach, such as the undersea cables or those within their countries. They often didn’t use the highest-grade encryption on these circuits, sometimes none at all. In some cases, simply by noting the increase in communications traffic or the activation of new circuits, even without breaking the code, the NSA could get a “tip-off,” say, that a missile test was about to commence, enabling U.S. collection assets, such as the RC-135 reconnaissance airborne listening post, to be put into place to gather more data.
There were automated remote relays that could be installed or dropped in various countries to send back intercepted communications. In some instances, the NSA had found “leakage” in microwave communications links that could be intercepted.
In summary, Turner said, there were countless opportunities—many exploited, many not yet imagined.
Casey left with the feeling that there just wasn’t enough. Why? What had kept this great intelligence machine in standby?