SINCE CARTER AND TURNER had hit an iceberg in Iran, Casey read everything he could find in the agency on the subject. Like many he was still wondering, What had the CIA been doing? Could American intelligence have failed as badly as DIA chief Tighe said? How had the CIA missed the precariousness of the Shah’s position, his physical condition, his utter weakness? One of Casey’s jobs was to make sure it never happened again—in Iran or anywhere else.
The CIA had probed the failed hostage rescue mission in the spring of 1980, when malfunctioning helicopters forced cancellation; the pictures of the wreckage in the Iranian desert had become a symbol of Carter’s impotence. The mission supposedly had been DDO John McMahon’s finest hour, because he had infiltrated some half-dozen agents inside Iran to assist. Casey thought that was way too low. Six months after the hostages were taken, the CIA should have had many more agents inside. Casey forwarded to President Reagan a top-secret after-action report on the rescue mission. It underscored the inadequacy of these human sources.
Another top-secret study that had been prepared for Turner, “Iran Postmortem,” went a long way toward describing the CIA role in the overall Iran catastrophe. Stamped “NODIS”—no distribution to others than Turner and a few top deputies and aides—it was a one-hundred-page analysis on why and how the CIA had missed the Iranian revolution.
The study had been done by Robert Jervis, a Columbia University political scientist brought in as a CIA scholar-in-residence. Expert in studying misperceptions in decision-making, Jervis had been granted access to everything the CIA analysts had at the time—human-source reports, all the State Department cable traffic, the “eyes only” messages, NSA intercepts. He had spent two months going through two file drawers of this data and had interviewed the four main CIA analysts who had done nearly all the work on the intelligence distributed to the White House, State and elsewhere.
“Iran Postmortem” began with a soft point: Iran was a hard case to get right, and a good person could easily get it wrong; there was almost no other instance in which a leader like the Shah, with vast military and security forces, had been overthrown by unarmed rebels. Then the study proceeded to tear apart the CIA’s handling of Iran.
The intelligence problems:
Iran proved one of Casey’s long-held views: intelligence could not sit idle; every effort had to be made to get the policy-makers to act.
National-security adviser Brzezinski had wanted the Shah to use force to quell the street rebellions; Secretary of State Vance opposed force. The President couldn’t decide. And the crux was that the Shah would not act unless he was told by the President of the United States what to do. Carter’s hesitation, the Shah’s hesitation, was all the revolutionaries had needed to flourish and eventually win.
The analytic side of the CIA needed a shake-up, Casey determined. Some heads needed to be thumped and perhaps even to roll. Casey also had to replace DDO John McMahon. His cautious approach in Operations was not going over at the White House.
In a meeting McMahon had had with Allen and his deputy Bud Nance, a retired Navy rear admiral, Nance had proposed that the CIA launch a covert operation to sabotage a floating drydock off the coast of Ethiopia. Satellite photography showed that the Soviets almost always had one of their destroyers or frigates in the drydock.
“No way,” McMahon had said. “We’re not going to get involved in that.” It would be an act of war.
After the meeting, Allen told Nance, “The rogue elephant is now a chicken.”
Casey decided to move McMahon to head the analytic directorate.
Khomeini was a frequent topic of conversation in White House meetings. There was sentiment to remove him if possible. After some discussion with the President, who seemed more than usually attentive, Casey was asked to see if some covert plan might be undertaken to oust Khomeini and replace him with Reza Pahlavi, the young son of the late Shah. When Casey presented this idea at Langley, all the faces turned ashen. Iran was a tar baby. The Pahlavi family was even worse. No one in the DO wanted anything to do with this. The State Department also resisted. But Casey, reading his President, felt that the Administration had to act. The best he could come up with was a covert-action finding that authorized the CIA to conduct exploratory discussions with the various anti-Khomeini exile groups to see which, if any, might be able to mount an opposition. Casey presented the finding to the White House as a necessary first step, and the President signed it.
As Casey perused the flow of current intelligence and the old files—he liked to read old files—his attention kept being drawn to the tiny impoverished agricultural country of El Salvador.
El Salvador—“The Savior,” so named by the Spanish conquistadors—had a population of about 4.5 million and the smallest land mass of the Central American republics, just the size and almost the shape of Massachusetts. Nestled on the Pacific coast, seemingly hidden and tucked up on the belly of Central America, it offered no direct ocean access to Cuba, except through the Panama Canal. But there was a growing Communist insurgency in El Salvador. To lose in that backyard—or, as Reagan called it, the “frontyard”—of the U.S. would be unforgivable.
Casey wanted answers. Who was supporting the leftist El Salvadoran insurgency? Where was the military support? The political support? What were the lines of communication? How was all this possible right under the nose of the United States? How might it be stopped?
Reagan was ordering a gradual increase of the number of U.S. military advisers from twenty to just over fifty to assist the Salvadoran government. Press attention was focused on the number, as if it were a thermometer that measured the bellicose temperature of the new Administration. The numbers were the media’s trip wire that would sound the alert if the United States was heading for another Vietnam.
For Casey that was not the issue. CIA reports showed that planeloads of weapons had been delivered to the Salvadoran rebels from neighboring Nicaragua. He could see from reports going back to Carter that the evidence was overwhelming. Two days before Carter left office, there had been a draft memo for his signature stating that U.S. aid to Nicaragua should be denied because there was “compelling and conclusive” evidence that Nicaragua was supporting the rebels in El Salvador. The evidence was an intelligence windfall in the diaries and papers of the secretary general of the small El Salvadoran Communist Party, Shafik Handal. They recounted trips to the Soviet Union, Eastern Europe, other Soviet Bloc countries and Cuba; agreements had been reached on ammunition and medical supplies to be shipped through Cuba and Nicaragua. American-made M-16 rifles had been seized from rebels in El Salvador; the serial numbers showed conclusively that the weapons had been lost to the North Vietnamese during the Vietnam War. It was a near-perfect case, painting a paper picture of Communist global conspiracy that conformed with Casey’s predisposition. The hands of the Soviet Union, Cuba, North Vietnam, Eastern Europe and Nicaragua were all involved in directing a supply route aimed at El Salvador. The case was almost as tight as a drum.
Carter had not signed the memo, and the issue had been left for Reagan. In its last year, the Carter Administration had fought hard and won congressional approval for $75 million in aid to Nicaragua; but Congress had required that before the aid could be forwarded the President must certify that Nicaragua was not supporting insurgencies anywhere in Central America, and Carter had been on the brink of pulling the plug on the U.S. assistance.
The real issue in Central America turned on Nicaragua and its eighteen-month-old Marxist government. The Nicaraguan leaders were members of the Sandinista party, named for a martyred guerrilla leader, Augusto Sandino, killed in 1934 by the first Somoza family ruler. Nicaragua, with seven times the land of El Salvador, was strategically located and had large coastlines on both the Caribbean to the east and the Pacific to the west.
Casey was intrigued to find that within six months of the Sandinista takeover, President Carter had signed a top-secret finding authorizing the CIA to provide political support to opponents of the Sandinistas—money and backing to encourage and embolden the political opposition, newsprint and funds to keep the newspaper La Prensa alive. Designed to work against one-party rule, the operation was a standard political-action program to boost the democratic alternative to the Sandinistas—to develop alternatives to parties and people thought to be close to the Soviet Union and its line.
This covert action was intended to build ties for the agency to the political center, to keep an opposition alive and insure that the agency would have contacts and friends among new leaders or a new government. Several hundred thousand dollars had been spent covertly, but for Casey its importance was more symbolic, demonstrating that the previous administration had at least seen the danger from the Sandinistas. A stand had been quietly taken against them, and the nonleftists knew that the United States was on their side.
Casey was discovering that the CIA had virtually no good intelligence penetrations or human sources among the Sandinistas. Right-wing dictator Anastasio Somoza’s intelligence service had had such penetrations, but when he fled the country the intelligence files had been left behind and had fallen into the Sandinistas’ hands. The Sandinistas then eliminated the Somoza “collaborators,” who were the CIA’s main sources. The situation reminded Casey of the CIA’s reliance on SAVAK in Iran. Indeed, he was discovering that throughout the Third World the CIA was feeding too much off in-country intelligence services or people identified with ruling interests. He wanted “unilateral” human assets—sources paid and controlled exclusively by the CIA, people less subject to the whims and fortunes of those in power, especially in unstable regions of Latin America and Africa.
The intelligence showed that Cuba had deeply penetrated the Nicaraguan government. About five hundred Cubans were well entrenched in the Nicaraguan military, intelligence service and key communications facilities. The Palestine Liberation Organization was active in the country, and its chairman, Yasir Arafat, had visited Nicaragua. In addition, Casey found that the whole Communist world had an active presence there—the Soviets, the North Koreans and the Eastern Bloc countries.
Nicaragua had become a safety zone for the El Salvador rebels—a place to do all the things that cannot normally be done in the middle of a guerrilla conflict: rest troops, find sanctuary, move in and out of the fighting.
Two months after their victory, the Sandinista leadership had met in secret for a three-day marathon session to outline their goals. An internal report, seventeen pages in translation, became known as “the 72-Hour Document.” It was filled with references to “class struggle,” “vanguard party,” “traitorous bourgeoisie” and “revolutionary internationalism.” The Sandinista fight was against “American imperialism, the rabid enemy of all peoples who are struggling to achieve their definitive liberation.”
It contained a ringing declaration that the Sandinistas meant to assist “national liberation” movements in Central America.
Casey believed they had the means, the philosophy and the faith to try.
In Managua, the capital of Nicaragua, U.S. Ambassador Lawrence Pezzullo saw the Sandinista problem as at least controllable, perhaps even solvable through diplomacy. Pezzullo, a fifty-five-year-old career diplomat, considered the Sandinistas a bunch of kids not qualified to run the corner grocery store. And in fact most of the Sandinista leaders had been teenagers when they joined the fight against Somoza. Gutsy and tough, they had been handed a victory they did not expect against Somoza, and thrown into power without a blueprint to govern. Pezzullo, a Latin America specialist, recognized that much of the Latin America intelligentsia leaned toward Marxism. But these people could generally be dealt with; it was important for a diplomat not to take their intellectual pretensions too seriously. At times, he knew, the United States had to be forgiven its rhetoric, especially what was flowing from the mouth of the new Secretary of State. Pezzullo saw the Sandinistas as a practical problem, which in diplomatic terms, Pezzullo’s terms, meant carrot and stick. He had pushed hard for the $75 million in U.S. aid in 1980. It had given him the carrot. He kept a close watch on the CIA reporting. There was no doubt the Sandinistas were, as he put it, “pollinating”—helping other rebellions, such as the one in El Salvador. He had raised this directly with the Sandinista leadership in 1980. Jaime Wheelock, the Nicaraguan Minister of Agricultural Development and a member of the ruling group, had told Pezzullo, “It’s none of your business.”
“Look, to be perfectly frank,” Pezzullo had responded, unsheathing the stick, “I’ve spent ten months fighting for this goddamn money [the $75 million], and if that’s your attitude I’ll tell you to fuck off.”
Wheelock had argued that Nicaragua had a right to its own foreign policy, and that American aid should not be used as blackmail.
Pezzullo considered Wheelock the best-educated and wisest leader in the Sandinista leadership, though he had less power than the others. Still he would carry back Pezzullo’s message. In Pezzullo’s view, he was the most housebroken.
“You have a sovereign right to do what you want,” Pezzullo said, “and we have a sovereign right to do what we want, which is to do nothing and give you no money.”
Pezzullo felt that the CIA station was arguing, both to him and back to Langley, that if something looks like a duck and walks like a duck it is a duck. Therefore if a Sandinista is a Communist he or she must be controlled by Cuba and Moscow. The initial intelligence in 1980 on the Sandinista revolutionary exploits over the border had been spotty—third-hand sources not clearly identified, no pictures, no documents. After Reagan’s election victory, when the telltale papers of the Salvadoran Communist leader Handal came into CIA hands, Pezzullo had gone straight to Tomas Borge, the powerful Minister of the Interior, and asked who was helping the Salvadoran rebels.
“You know, Pezzullo,” Borge replied, “you’re making too much of nothing. Those are friends.”
“Friends my ass!” Pezzullo had shouted. And thus began ten grueling conversations and meetings in which Pezzullo tried first to get the Sandinistas to acknowledge that they were involved as a government in supporting the Salvadoran insurgency, and then to get them to see the consequences of that action. To the new Reagan Administration their involvement would be a mortal sin, an alignment that would put the Sandinistas irrevocably in the Russian-Cuban camp.
In mid-February, Secretary of State Haig called Pezzullo to Washington for consultation. The remaining $15 million in aid to Nicaragua had been suspended but not terminated. Pezzullo felt that it should be kept that way. It was their only financial leverage, and he believed that his ranting and raving at least had the Sandinistas’ attention.
When he arrived in Washington, Pezzullo read a secret option paper that had been prepared for Haig. There were three options, and all called for permanently terminating the assistance. Pezzullo told Haig that the options were for all practical purposes the same. There had to be another one. Pezzullo called it “a zero option,” meaning there would be no change. This was to maximize the diplomatic pressure, to keep it ferocious. There were already some reliable signs that the arms flow was drying up. After a long discussion, Haig said, “I’ll buy the zero option.”
The Secretary took the ambassador to the White House, where Pezzullo argued to Reagan that it was still possible to deal with the Sandinistas, that diplomacy was working. He was encouraged when the President suggested that overinvolvement by the United States could compound the problem. Reagan quoted an unidentified Mexican friend: “Don’t make the mistake of Americanizing the Central American problem.”
Later, Pezzullo told Haig that they shouldn’t kid themselves about some fundamental facts: The Sandinistas felt very close to the Salvadoran rebels and that was not going to change. The Sandinista revolutionary kinship was not going to be sold out for $15 million. But the United States might alter some behavior, work against the arms support to the rebels. Haig said he understood.
“Or you’re going to have to spend a helluva lot of energy to get rid of these guys,” Pezzullo added, alluding to the unspoken alternative—a covert paramilitary operation to attempt an overthrow. “And to do that you’re going to have to mount something big. They’re tough kids—you’d have to mount one hell of an operation to get them out of there, and you know I don’t see it happening and I don’t think we can do it.” Pezzullo added that the new Administration, with its conservative, anti-Communist credentials, could have an effect if the Sandinistas could be convinced that the United States was serious and not going to bend.
“Oh no, we can handle that,” Haig replied.
Haig, trained by Kissinger and Nixon, knew how to play for keeps. As a young Army officer he had watched America fumble in Korea and then in Vietnam, failures of resolve in his view. The advice or the intelligence may have been bad, but the real problem had been a collapse of will. Now he was the briefing officer for a new President unschooled in foreign affairs. The issues had to be forced on the President.
Haig was looking beyond Nicaragua. He was arguing passionately that something should be done to choke off the export of arms from Cuba. He wanted a blockade. “Go to the source,” he pleaded in White House meetings. Lay down a “marker.”
“This is one you can win,” he told the President.
Casey was opposed, as was everyone else at the top of the Administration. Meese, Baker and Deaver were concerned that Haig would generate war fever and scare the public into believing Reagan was going to get the United States involved militarily in Central America. They wanted to keep the President’s eye on the domestic ball—economic reform and the promised tax reform. A foreign crisis or a military confrontation, especially with Cuba, with all the overtones of the Cuban Missile Crisis blockade of 1962, would upset the domestic agenda.
It was time for a middle course. Casey favored something between doing nothing and a military action like a naval blockade of Cuba. Covert action was designed for just this purpose—slow, steady, purposeful, secret. He had a finding drafted. It was not targeted on the source of the trouble, Cuba, or the intermediary, Nicaragua, but on the country that was threatened, El Salvador. The finding called for propaganda and political support—legitimacy and financial backing to moderate Christian Democrats and military officers in El Salvador.
On March 4, the President signed the top-secret finding.
One beneficiary of the CIA assistance was a fifty-five-year-old civil engineer who had been educated in the United States, at Notre Dame University—José Napoleón Duarte. He was listed in the files as a CIA asset with a coded cryptonym. CIA assets run from “casual informants,” who might not know they are giving information to the CIA, to the fullblown “controlled assets,” who are paid and directed by the CIA. There is a broad gap in between, which was where Duarte fit. He had been a good source of intelligence over many years, but he was a man of independence who was in no sense controlled and may not have known he was giving information to the CIA. Casey preferred it that way. A strong leader was not going to be moved about the chessboard by the CIA. It was not realistic. Currently, Duarte headed the American-backed civilian-military junta that governed El Salvador.
Back at Langley, Admiral Bobby Inman was installed in the deputy’s large seventh-floor office adjoining the DCI’s. Both offices overlook the lush Virginia countryside. All that is visible is treetops, giving the impression that the CIA is secluded in the middle of a giant forest.
Tuesday morning, March 10, Inman’s overriding concern was a New York Times front-page headline: “Intelligence Groups Seek Power to Gain Data on U.S. Citizens.”
The story reported a proposed new executive order that would lift some of the restrictions on CIA spying and counterespionage in the United States. Someone had got his hands on a sixteen-page proposed executive-order revision that had been drafted at the CIA and that Inman had seen just the day before. He had regarded the draft as a disaster, conceived in the fear that somehow the CIA didn’t have enough power.
During the first days of the new Administration, Casey had put the CIA legal staff to work on a new executive order. It was this first draft that had proposed repealing the restrictions on the CIA which had been put in place by Ford and Carter. The draft cut the Justice Department out of its role in reviewing covert operations; it also, by implication, would have given the CIA the authority to conduct covert operations in the United States; and the ban on CIA electronic surveillance and surreptitious entries within the U.S. would have been lifted. Inman knew immediately that it was not going to be easy to put this back into the bottle. Civil-liberties activists were gearing for an assault, and that would give the Administration hard-liners more reasons to hold their ground.
Inman had seen stacks and stacks of paper pile up on Casey’s desk in the adjoining office. Now, to his distress, he found that Casey had initialed the draft executive order, meaning that he had seen it and approved. Inman suspected that Casey had not read it or at least not thought it through. The Director had voiced concern that the old executive orders used disparaging adjectives such as “clandestine” and “covert” to describe agency activity. He had wanted positive words. Inman decided to act as if the draft had gone too far the other way. He knew that if anything like this was ever approved, he would have to resign.
Only a dramatic, public position from the CIA could strangle the draft proposal in its crib. Casey was in the Far East, and Inman was acting DCI, and so, without consulting anyone he invited the press to Langley headquarters for a rare on-the-record press conference.
Appearing in uniform, Inman labeled the document a “first draft” that had no real standing other than some ideas and a first-blush attempt. “To the best of my knowledge,” he said, “there is no intent to proceed anywhere down that line.”
At the White House, national-security adviser Allen was furious. But Meese, to whom Allen reported, more or less agreed with Inman. He said the Administration was not going to put the CIA into the business of domestic spying. Inman concluded that Meese was the more important ally.
When Casey returned, he chided Inman for not calling him about the press conference. He thought Inman was grandstanding to press-generated worries that the CIA was going to spy on Americans. But, he added, he had no desire to do any such thing. There was not enough spying on foreigners.
On March 17 Casey delivered a St. Patrick’s Day speech in New York on Irishmen, God, passion and patriotism. In it he declared, “Some things are right and some things are wrong, eternally right and eternally wrong.”
John Bross, who was still helping Casey, realized that he meant it. There is a moment when a man speaks his mind, and a moment when he speaks his heart, and a rarer moment when he speaks both. Bross sensed that this was Casey’s. The tough, cold, even hard Irishman was sure he knew right from wrong.
Several days later, Casey invited Pezzullo, who was again in Washington, to his office to talk about the Sandinistas. Pezzullo had just been told that the U.S. aid to the Sandinistas was going to be cut off entirely, and he was unhappy. He had argued unsuccessfully, in this round at the State Department, that the United States was giving away its cards and that closing the negotiating door could be disastrous. But Casey wanted his assessment. No one knew the Sandinistas or Latin America better.
When Pezzullo arrived at CIA headquarters, he was greeted by John McMahon, still the DDO, Nestor D. Sanchez, a senior Latin America expert and a diplomat in the U.S. Embassy in Managua who was the CIA station chief under Pezzullo.
Look, Sanchez warned Pezzullo, Director Casey rarely spends more than fifteen minutes in these briefings, so state your case simply. He gets impatient, restless. If you go longer, he’s likely to nod off.
Can you do business with the Sandinistas? Casey asked. What are they like?
Yes, they respond to our pressure, Pezzullo said, but they are slippery. The Sandinista leadership is unstable; lots of internal intrigue can be exploited.
If you were Castro, whom would you support in the ruling group?
The Ortega brothers, Pezzullo replied, referring to Daniel Ortega and his brother, Humberto Ortega, the Defense Minister. The Cubans were probably banking on Borge, a corrupt and unstable man, in Pezzullo’s view. Castro is wired in, and whatever he has going won’t come unstuck, Pezzullo added. Cubans are all over the place and they are pains in the ass, but they are clumsy. Borge had recently complained to Pezzullo about the Cubans and had made jokes about them. Some member of the Soviet Politburo had come through Managua, and Borge had protested angrily to him about being ordered about like some party hack.
What do the Sandinistas want? Casey asked.
For one, they wanted a relationship with the United States. Proof was what had happened to the arms flow into El Salvador.
“That thing was cut off, wasn’t it?” Casey asked.
Precisely, Pezzullo said. Nothing had come down the Nicaraguan pipeline since the major airfield they used was closed. The planes had been decommissioned, the ambassador explained, and the main network of Costa Rican pilots disbanded.
McMahon, Sanchez and the station chief agreed. There were several defectors who supported this, and a Costa Rican pilot who had crashed had confirmed a great deal about the supply network. The Cuban coordinator of the Salvadoran network had left. The only qualification was that one of the radio networks seemed still to be operating, and there was always the possibility that some avenue created elsewhere had gone undetected.
That caveat annoyed Pezzullo. He argued that they could deal only with what they knew. And the CIA, in fact all the reporting, showed nothing moving by land, air or sea.
Everyone, including Casey, agreed with that.
Yet, Pezzullo said, I don’t want to kid you. The Sandinistas will always have their hearts and sympathies with the Salvadoran rebels. They will consort with them, provide safe haven, take care of the sick, allow them to transit Nicaragua to Cuba and back the other way. But on the arms flow, if we continue to show the cost, we may stay their hand.
But, Casey said, the country is becoming a nest of Soviets, Cubans, etcetera. That was his worry.
We should keep cool, Pezzullo argued, make our case and not be driven by rhetoric, either ours or theirs.
How strong is the Sandinistas’ control? Casey inquired.
It is eroding, Pezzullo said, adding carefully that the erosion was not in the revolution’s control, but rather with some of the leaders, their respectability, their popularity. “You’d be terribly mistaken if you think that the revolution is unpopular—the revolution is very popular and these fellows are cloaking themselves in the revolution. And the more you attack the revolution, the more you strengthen them.” The Somoza era was one of humiliation, and criticism of the revolution—particularly by the United States—is interpreted as support for the past, for Somoza. So the Sandinistas want to defend against any counterrevolution. They are paranoid. They are soldiers; they have been outgunned for years, so they like tanks and artillery. It makes them feel secure. They want to concentrate power. The Cubans have convinced them that that is the way to go, the way to preserve the revolution.
“Should we knock these guys over?” Casey asked. Would Pezzullo advocate covert action to overthrow the Sandinistas?
If you go that route, Pezzullo said, repeating what he had told Haig, you’ll have to put in more than you might think. The Sandinistas are the best fighters in Central America.
After nearly an hour, Casey indicated that he had heard enough.
Pezzullo left with the operations people. McMahon expressed his pleasure; he was glad that Casey had been so interested. McMahon had no heart for any kind of a covert operation. Some of Pezzullo’s arguments were among those he had been making.
Pezzullo thought Casey had been a terrific listener, quite reasonable. But he knew that raw intelligence information could build a false case, weighty as it might seem on paper. Casey was obviously concerned about the Cubans in Nicaragua, and this naturally meant that the CIA, the NSA and the military intelligence services had been formally instructed, or “tasked,” to gather as much intelligence on the matter as possible. Intelligence tasking often led analysts to paint the worst case. The 500 Cubans looked huge. After Iran, no one wanted to miss the next disaster. Yet the numbers didn’t address the question of effectiveness. In Pezzullo’s opinion, the Cuban presence was deeply undercut by the attitude of the Nicaraguan leaders; Borge had even laughed. But laughter was not an intelligence topic of normal interest, though Pezzullo felt at times that it should be.
Pezzullo returned to Managua, and the suspension of the U.S. aid was announced by the State Department in Washington. Though State applauded the cut in the arms flow to El Salvador and said there was “no hard evidence of arms movements through Nicaragua during the past few weeks,” the suspension of aid triggered a barrage of anti-U.S. hostility. The Sandinistas’ newspaper called the decision “Yankee economic aggression” and their television said, “The final objective of the warmongers is to finish off popular power in our nation.”
Pezzullo was sure the Administration had taken away all its usable influence, almost nullifying his reason for being. The ambassador had no hand now.
Two months and ten days into his presidency, Reagan was shot by John W. Hinckley, Jr. The bullet, lodged about an inch away from his heart, was removed during surgery. “Honey, I forgot to duck,” he told Nancy, and to his doctors he quipped, “Please tell me you’re Republicans.” His display of courage and optimism won universal praise. When Reagan left the hospital on April 11, after a two-week stay, the cameras were allowed in close to record the almost miraculous recovery of this seventy-year-old President. Though slightly thinner in the face, he emerged cheerful, wearing a red cardigan sweater. He and Nancy had an arm around each other, their other arms high in the air, just as on that night nine months earlier, on a raised platform, when Reagan had accepted the Republican presidential nomination. The famous smile was intact, as was the presidency.
Reagan’s closest advisers soon learned it was an act. The next morning the President limped from his bedroom to an adjoining room in the upstairs residence. He emerged slowly, walking with the hesitant steps of an old man. He was pale and disoriented. Those who observed were frightened. Reagan hobbled to a seat in the Yellow Oval Room, started to sit down and fell the rest of the way, collapsing into his chair.
He spoke a few words in a raspy whisper and then had to stop to catch his breath. He looked lost. The pause wasn’t enough, and his hands reached for an inhalator, a large masklike breathing device sitting next to his chair. As he sucked in oxygen, the room was filled with a wheezing sound.
Reagan could concentrate for only a few minutes at a time, then he faded mentally and physically, his wounded lung dependent on the inhalator. During the following days, he was able to work or remain attentive only an hour or so a day.
Meese, Baker, Deaver and the few others who were granted access to the President were gravely concerned. This was supposed to be the beginning of the Reagan presidency, but at moments it seemed the end of Reagan, the Reagan they knew. At times he was overcome with pain, he seemed in constant discomfort. His hearty, reassuring voice sounded permanently injured, his words gravelly and uncertain. His aides began to consider the possibility that his was going to be a crippled presidency. That it would, at its very beginning, devolve into something similar to Woodrow Wilson’s at the end, a caretaker presidency, and they reduced—or elevated—to a team of Mrs. Wilsons.
All the senior aides were intent on protecting this terrible secret and their own uncertainty, at least until the prognosis was clearer. Those, like Casey, with intelligence or law enforcement responsibility were reminded of the vulnerability of the presidency, the necessity to take every extra measure of security to protect the country and its institutions. The precariousness of the world situation seemed clear enough. These men sensed that more than the President had been wounded.
On the day of the shooting, March 30, 1981, many things had gone haywire, exposing weaknesses in both people and systems. Asked on live television, “Who’s running the government right now?,” spokesman Larry Speakes had flubbed, “I cannot answer that question at this time.” Haig, watching this shaky performance in the Situation Room, had marched before the cameras and misread the Constitution, placing himself after the Vice-President, who was not in Washington, in the chain of presidential succession: “As of now, I am in control here, in the White House.”
At the hospital, the President’s military aide, the emergency-war-orders officer, who carried the codes and orders that might be used by a President to launch nuclear weapons, had entered into a losing battle with the FBI. Seizing Reagan’s possessions and clothes as possible evidence, the FBI had carried off the President’s secret personal code card, which he kept in his wallet. The card provides a code that can be used to authenticate nuclear-strike orders in an emergency, should the President have to use unsecure voice communication to the military. Officials insisted there was no loss of control over U.S. nuclear forces, but the confusion pointed to a weakness in fail-safe management of nuclear weapons.
Now the President’s condition heightened a feeling of executive disorientation. Slowly Reagan’s voice returned, and he had periods that suggested he was on the road back. Ten days of rest in the White House residence were helping, and on April 21 he spoke on a radio talk show to lobby for his spending-and tax-cut plans. The next day he granted an interview to the senior wire-service reporters and seemed fine. But he had no endurance, and his aides still worried.
On Saturday, April 25, the Reagans went for a weekend to Camp David in Maryland. The spring days at the mountain retreat seemed to perform a miracle. When the President returned to Washington, he had snapped back and the crisis abated. But everyone who had seen or knew was on edge.
The Reagan presidency, from the inside, would never be the same. That sense of peril, that anyone or anything might strike—terrorists, a quick move from the Soviets, other adversaries—became a permanent, ingrained maxim of Administration policy.
Nowhere was this more true, or more deeply felt, than in the office of the DCI.
Casey immediately realized that an unanticipated part of his job was protecting the President. Whenever an intelligence report was received about some plot against Reagan—however bizarre or improbable—Casey followed up. The operations people and the analysts often responded that such reports were not to be taken seriously and generally amounted to nothing more than two guys in a bar in Tanzania saying they would like to shoot Reagan.
“I want a team on it,” Casey ordered after each report.
Casey had a complete check done in CIA files on John Hinckley. Aware that, nearly twenty years after the Kennedy assassination, questions lingered about the connections between Lee Harvey Oswald and the KGB, Casey wanted to make sure this time. But there was nothing. He rechecked, he did everything except go down to records himself. But the assassination attempt made Casey more concerned with the work being done on the special estimate on the Soviets and terrorism. He wanted to insure that the CIA inquiry into that left no stone unturned.
Casey had been impressed by a cover story in The New York Times Magazine on March 1, “Terrorism: Tracing the International Network,” by Claire Sterling. Adapted from The Terror Network, the book that had so impressed Haig, it began with a quote from Haig’s headline-making assertion of Soviet involvement in international terrorism.
Sterling noted ruefully that even CIA experts were telling journalists that Haig’s charge was “nothing more than an old cold warrior’s refrain” and that there was no hard evidence. Casey was struck by Sterling’s conclusion: “There is massive proof that the Soviet Union and its surrogates, over the last decade, have provided the weapons, training and sanctuary for a worldwide terror network aimed at the destabilization of Western democratic society.” She posited a “Guerrilla International” as Cubans, KGB instructors, Palestinians and Red Brigades intertwined in their conspiracies, holding conventions and meetings at various terrorist training camps.
Casey had marked up his copy of the article and carried it to the office. He asked John Bross to get on the subject. He said it looked as though Sterling sure had the names, the dates and the locations of those who planned and carried out murders and bombings. Her three case studies were Turkish terrorists, the IRA in Northern Ireland and the Italian Red Brigade. Direct KGB connections were cited in each.
Her article suggests that the press is out ahead of the CIA, Casey said. He wanted the experts in the building to provide an explanation. The main analysts and operations people were brought together.
Papers flew around the room as Langley’s experts underlined portions of the nine-page piece, trying to correlate what was in the CIA files and penetrate the Sterling method. Sterling had written that “a kind of postgraduate school in international terrorism emerged” in South Yemen. Foreign guests to the campus supposedly included members of various terrorist groups including the Red Brigades. Because South Yemen was “a Soviet satellite state tightly controlled by the KGB,” the implication was obvious: Red Brigades were Soviet surrogates.
In all the CIA files, the staff could find only one instance, in one report, of a member of the Red Brigades having visited a camp in South Yemen. But the tone and sweep of Sterling’s article asserted that somehow the Red Brigades had “links” to the KGB. When? Where? How? In itself, the visit of one Red Brigade member was suggestive, but there was nothing more. The result, for the purposes of serious intelligence conclusions, was zero, no more significant than two gangsters passing each other on the street or being at the same bar. The questions remained: What did they do? Say? Or, more importantly, plan?
The covert operators argued that Sterling’s method was preposterous. Her verdict followed from flawed reasoning—a kind of McCarthyist “linkmanship.” In her three case studies, Turkey, Northern Ireland and Italy became, by some leap of logic, “target nations” of the Soviets. In each section, the KGB was mentioned once.
Meanwhile, the national-intelligence officer for the Soviet Union—the senior Soviet analytic post in the U.S. intelligence agencies—had finished sifting the available intelligence for the special estimate on the Soviet involvement in terrorism. His draft took a strong anti-Sterling line. Casey was appalled. It pretty much cleared the Soviets of involvement in terrorism, saying there was little evidence that they encouraged it.
“Read Claire Sterling’s book,” Casey said, “and forget this mush.” He added tartly, “I paid $13.95 for this and it told me more than you bastards whom I pay $50,000 a year.” The Soviet hand, he said, was not going to show directly with the kind of evidence they could take to a court of law. Based on Soviet statements of intent, a willingness to work with terrorists and a realization that terrorism befuddled the West, it would be logical for the Soviets to promote it, Casey felt. It is “bullshit,” he said, to think that proof would be marched in on a platter. “You have to form a judgment.”
Inman concurred. He thought the agency’s draft was way out of line. “This reads like a brief for the defense,” he said.
Casey also got a hot letter from DIA chief General Tighe complaining about the draft. Tighe believed, almost as an article of faith, that the Soviets were involved in terrorism even if it couldn’t be proved. The Soviets loudly claimed they were not. To Tighe that was reason enough to conclude the opposite. Second, Tighe said, there is a serious counterintelligence problem: why believe the sources who said the Soviets were not involved? Didn’t these sources have reason to distance themselves from the Soviets?
Casey liked Tighe’s hard edge. This was not a court of law, and there was no reason to presume the Soviets innocent. Casey asked the General to have the DIA prepare its own draft. Tighe, pleased with the opportunity, put a hardline DIA analyst on the case. Predictably, a draft that went to the other extreme soon emerged from the DIA.
Casey had a standoff, two drafts that contradicted each other—the CIA draft that found the Soviets largely uninvolved, the DIA that found them guilty.
Several weeks later, Casey received a memo from Lincoln Gordon, a former president of Johns Hopkins University, who was one of three members of a senior review panel at the CIA charged with bringing non-intelligence professional and academic review to the formal estimates.
The CIA draft, Gordon wrote, had a startlingly narrow definition of terrorism, dealing only with the “pure” terrorists like the Baader-Meinhof Gang in Germany, the Red Brigade in Italy, the Red Army faction in Japan. These groups were interested in violence for the sake of violence; they were nihilists. An attempt to define terrorism by its motivation was not enough, he said. In a practical sense, terrorism had to be defined by acts. A bomb going off in a Paris bistro was an intelligence problem whether it was carried out by nihilists or was part of some internal struggle among factions of the Palestine Liberation Organization, whether it was carried out for propaganda purposes or for political objectives. On the other hand, Gordon said, the DIA draft held that any violent action against constituted authority was a form of terrorism. That would make George Washington and Robert E. Lee terrorists.
Casey told Gordon to undertake his own draft of the Soviet-terrorism estimate. Gordon gathered all the raw intelligence and sifted through it. The bulk came from the NSA, including intercepts of communications on open, nonsecure radio links or telephone lines, and some that came from broken codes. Information from coded messages was designated code word UMBRA and was among the most sensitive. Technical intelligence, including satellite photographs, was not very much help. Moreover, Gordon found that the human intelligence was poor and it was difficult to assess the reliability of informants, many of whom had been paid. He developed a rule: unless a second source, and preferably a third, confirmed something, it was not given any credence. There were many cases where one informant or source said something that had no backup.
On May 13, Pope John Paul II was shot and wounded in St. Peter’s Square, Rome. Casey, a Catholic, was revolted that anyone would try to take the Holy Father’s life. Since 1978, when Cardinal Karol Wojtyla of Poland had been elected Pope, no one had emerged more as a symbol of righteous anti-Communism than this Pontiff from behind the Iron Curtain. John Paul’s spirit, by many accounts, had planted the seed that had led to the formation of the Solidarity trade union in August 1980.
The next morning, May 14, Casey gathered the National Foreign Intelligence Board at its headquarters on F Street in downtown Washington, near the White House. The topic was the pending estimate on the Soviets and terrorism. He wanted an answer. The attempted assassinations of the President and the Pope within six weeks of each other had heightened the awareness of terrorism and the vulnerability of leaders. What was going on? There was no evidence to suggest that the two events were related. Or that the Soviets had a role in either. But something was fishy and he wanted to make sure intelligence was all over the possibilities. Every lead or possible connection was to be followed up, and he was to be informed at once.
Casey wanted to know whether the Soviets were up to something. If so, the policy-makers at a different table, the one in the White House where Casey also sat, would have a bigger problem.
Copies of Lincoln Gordon’s new draft, about twenty pages, had been circulated, and Gordon had been invited to give a brief presentation to the board.
Gordon said his draft SNIE, “Soviet Support for International Terrorism,” had arrived at something between the CIA and DIA extremes. Part of the problem was the confusion over what constituted terrorism. Clearly, the Soviets supported Third World wars of liberation against entrenched autocratic regimes or others sympathetic to the West. Soviet willingness to provide money for arms, training and other assistance—in other words, to encourage liberation—meant there would be violence and terrorism. Certainly, there would be less terrorism if the Soviet superpower did not export revolution abroad. But, he said, the intelligence provided no evidence that the Soviets were playing a mighty Wurlitzer organ of terrorism. There were some cases in which they had actually discouraged terrorism. The U.S. ambassador to Nepal had been warned by the Russians of a kidnap plot by four Arabs. The Bulgarians had let the West German police arrest a member of the Baader-Meinhof Gang in 1978. At times, the Soviets seemed to have determined that thwarting terrorism furthered their objectives, and at other times that terrorism promoted them. Their assistance, particularly through their satellites East Germany and Bulgaria, also clearly contributed, at least indirectly, to more terrorism because these countries aided some extreme groups such as the PLO.
Overall, however, Gordon said, the Soviets were not using terrorism as a primary tool to destabilize the Third World and the Western nations. The clear implication, Gordon felt, was a strong refutation of Haig’s public charge and Sterling’s thesis. There was just no evidence.
Tighe was not satisfied. He had come armed with a stack of cables which, he said, implicated the Soviets in ten to twelve instances of terrorism that had eluded Gordon, some of them fairly recent.
Gordon felt he was being accused of overlooking evidence. A heated discussion followed as the group tried to sort out the meaning of various scraps of intelligence.
“I don’t know if this affects the conclusions,” Casey finally said, “but let’s send it back.” The Gordon draft estimate was not approved, it would not be published, it would go back for rewrite.
Four days later, on May 18, Gordon convened the working group from each agency and painstakingly they went through the references the DIA had dug out. All but two or three had been reviewed earlier and rejected because there had been no second source. After some haggling, some words but no conclusions were altered.
On May 27, the secret estimate was issued to the departments and the White House. It stated that the Soviets were not the hidden hand behind international terrorism. At the end it addressed the implications for intelligence needs in the future—as estimates are intended to do. The conclusion: human intelligence must be strengthened and some way must be found to penetrate the terrorist organizations for timely intelligence on planned operations.
Gordon felt that Casey had been open-minded on the matter and had not let his ideology drive the conclusions. At the same time it was clear that Casey would not have been upset if they had found more Soviet tracks on the terrorist landscape.
But Gordon discovered a final irony. It turned out that a small part of Claire Sterling’s information had come from an Italian press story on the Red Brigade. The story was part of an old, small-scale CIA covert propaganda operation. Sterling apparently had picked up some of it in her research. Domestic fallout, or replay of information in the United States, called “blowback,” is one of the nightmares both for the CIA and for journalists, particularly when it receives wide attention or is disputed.
Gordon found the sequence particularly telling: from CIA propaganda to Sterling’s book galleys, to Haig’s reading of the galleys, to Haig’s press conference, then Haig’s comments picked up in the New York Times article by Sterling, then finally in Sterling’s book. Even though Gordon felt that the CIA had finally sorted through all this to an essentially thoughtful position, that estimate was classified secret. Neither it nor its conclusions was made public. As far as the American public was concerned, the Soviets still stood publicly branded by the Secretary of State as active supporters of terrorism. And the record was never corrected.
Gordon wondered what the Soviets thought of all this. What additional erosion was there in the relationship? What attitude would they have toward other public declarations by the United States? Did the war of words between the two superpowers have much meaning? What price in credibility, if any, had been paid?