SENATOR PATRICK J. LEAHY, a lanky Vermont Democrat on the Intelligence Committee, watched a few skimpy secrets fly in committee briefings, but he was often uncomfortable. As with a magician’s deck of cards, there was no telling if hearing or seeing should be believing. Members received the overview summary; or a system name and description from a spycraft catalogue; or a line-item budget entry; sometimes a bit of insider information about a head of state.
Leahy was a Watergate baby, elected to the Senate at thirty-four after Nixon’s resignation, the only Democratic senator in the history of Vermont. He was used to the outside. Skeptical of secret concentrations of power—particularly in the Reagan government—Leahy wondered what he would see if all the intelligence cards were revealed. In eight years as the Chittenden County prosecutor, he had tried all the important cases personally. Getting your hands and eyes on the evidence was the only way to find out what was going on.
Each senator had a staff member assigned him—a so-called “designatee”—to guide him through the complicated, jargon-laden maze of intelligence. Leahy had inherited Ted Ralston from a former member, and Ralston had told him that if he wanted to understand intelligence he would have to learn about the National Security Agency and intercepts. A satellite called VORTEX targeted special areas of the world and provided listening capabilities equivalent to a U.S. embassy listening post in the various countries. The NSA was the source of the most and the best information. Interpretation of intercepts took painstaking hours of listening, detecting patterns, frequencies, new methods and communications links, determining routing, deciphering meaning.
That’s where the action is, Ralston said. Intelligence-gathering had become frightfully technical: you had to learn what could be done and how, and get a grasp on what was coming in future years. Ralston suggested that Leahy visit NSA facilities abroad, and a European trip was planned.
Ralston had had a close relationship with Inman during the Admiral’s era as head of the NSA, 1977 to 1981. He was in charge of arms control monitoring by the Senate committee and was one of three staffers intimately familiar with the NSA. Ralston had bought Inman a set of four stars when Inman was promoted to full admiral as Casey’s deputy. New stars were normally bestowed by the newly promoted flag officer’s family.
Over the years Inman had guided Ralston through the labyrinth of technical-intelligence-gathering, and Ralston had kept Inman informed about goings-on at the Senate committee, so that when Inman made his rounds with the senators, or came up for a briefing, he knew what each senator cared about.
Like two veteran case officers they worked each other well. Each had both a reason and a need to know. If Inman was, on many or even all occasions, able to be solicitous with the senators, at times uncannily so, that made both their jobs easier. If Inman made a strong, positive impression on the senators, both Republicans and Democrats, it was to the benefit of the committee and the process of oversight. No one complained, though several staff members thought their professional association had evolved into personal fealty. After all, Inman was supposed to be working for Casey, and Ralston for Leahy.
Senator Leahy and Ralston visited the NSA facility at Harrogate, some two hundred miles north of London in the Yorkshire moors.
Leahy had practical questions about the capabilities for communications intercepts. The Russians were massing tanks at the Polish border, and Leahy wanted to know whether the Harrogate station could pick up communications from individual tanks.
What about the megawatts (millions of watts) of this exotic subsystem? Ralston asked before anyone at Harrogate could answer Leahy. As he rubbernecked through the VIP tour, Ralston asked technical questions that revealed his dazzling knowledge. Leahy wanted his own questions answered over his staffer’s, but Ralston seemed unable to control himself in the spy candy store. He wondered aloud about the overhead systems, and, yes, what about the connection with the NSA facility on the opposite side of the world at Pine Gap in Australia?
“Shut up,” Leahy said caustically. “Let me ask the questions.”
As they went on to Germany, Leahy daydreamed about tossing Ralston out of the plane. In Turkey, Ralston grabbed a handful of the U.S. Ambassador’s cigars from the embassy humidor, and Leahy told his administrative assistant later, “I don’t know what to do with that son of a bitch.”
Upon his return to the States, Leahy figured out what to do. He fired Ralston.
Ralston applied for a job on the intelligence community staff downtown on F Street. It was one of the areas Casey had left to Inman. As a Senate staffer, Ralston had not had to take lie detector tests, but part of the application procedure at the intelligence community included a polygraph. So he was given a routine examination. Several of the basic questions concerned Ralston’s handling of classified material. Had he ever taken classified documents home?
It was not unusual for busy government employees to take classified documents home. That’s why the question was there. The practice was so common that it was a perfect test of whether someone was being straightforward. The purpose was not to uncover innocuous infractions but to find serious security breaches, leakers or, in rare cases, a spy. But the question presented a real predicament, and it was one of the reasons so many people had such distaste for the polygraph. Answers had to be yes or no. Major and minor matters got lumped together. The choice was to acknowledge or gut it out and risk flunking.
Ralston did not pass. He had taken home a copy of a secret report he had written on what the U.S. intelligence agencies had been doing in Iran since World War II. Ralston’s polygraph trouble was devastating both to him and to Inman. There would be no job on the intelligence community staff. Worse, the new staff director of the Senate Intelligence Committee, Rob Simmons, launched an investigation of Ralston. There was more. Ralston had taken home about five hundred pages of classified documents. Some of them were top secret. He had returned some of the papers to the committee security director and some directly to the CIA. In the Iran study a couple of sensitive human sources could have been identified; they were not named, but someone might have deduced their identity from the document.
Simmons drew up a list of the documents Ralston had taken and sent it to the CIA, asking them for a routine damage assessment.
Shortly afterward, Simmons received a memo from the CIA. It said there was no evidence that the documents had actually been compromised. Though they had been improperly stored in Ralston’s home, there was no indication that anyone else ever saw or handled them, so no compromise, no damage.
Simmons couldn’t believe the reasoning. Damage assessments normally considered the worst possible case. Storage of such documents in a nonsecure area automatically meant possible compromise. But there was something more troubling. Simmons traced the memo and its conclusion from the CIA to Ralston’s friend and godfather, Bobby Inman. Simmons thought that Inman might be protecting Ralston, so he began a full-scale internal investigation.
It was tedious work, but, by checking back into the files, Simmons found that Ralston had either signed out or signed disclosure forms on nearly every important or sensitive document and report that came to or through the committee, going back years. If he had read it all, Ralston could be an encyclopedist of the U.S. intelligence capabilities and operations.
Simmons determined that for practical purposes Ralston had been Inman’s spy on the Senate Intelligence Committee about committee activities and plans. It was a most informal spying relationship, Simmons realized, and perhaps spying was too harsh a word. There was nothing illegal about it, nothing improper, merely unseemly. For both the committee and the CIA, for both Ralston and Inman. From his ten years as a CIA operations officer, Simmons knew that some of the best spies did not realize what they were doing. They got caught in a web, convinced that they were gathering information for their side. The best spying was subtle, embedded in normal intercourse, so that everyone could say, “Just doing my job.” In the daily, unconscious, unthinking acts of communication—reading, talking, questioning—reams of information would be disseminated to the wrong places. The Ralston affair was perhaps nothing more than a careless leeching by two men.
Simmons outlined the problem for Goldwater. The chairman elected finally not to refer the matter to the Justice Department for prosecution. There were several reasons: Ralston apparently intended no harm; no damage to the national security and no compromise could be proven; and if it became public it would be an ugly mess, severely damaging the oversight process and the credibility of the committee; and, finally, there was the Inman angle, which Goldwater could not stand to see aired and subject to misinterpretation. Simmons had Ralston’s security clearance pulled.
“Good,” said Goldwater, apparently concluding that that was about the right punishment. Ralston was unable to obtain a new clearance when he tried to get a job with a major defense contractor.
Some of the committee staff members were still having lunch with Ralston, so Simmons convened the entire staff and explained that Ralston was persona non grata; they would be better off without Ted Ralston in their lives.
Senator Leahy was dumbfounded when Ralston asked him for a reference.
In his final report, Simmons concluded that it was possibly the biggest compromise of classified material from Congress, and certainly the biggest from the Senate committee. He ordered a security review of everything at the committee, thousands of documents. After a search that sent security officers into every file cabinet and corner of the committee spaces, it was determined that forty documents were unaccounted for. Most of these were years old (and many had been signed out to a former senior committee staffer), and Simmons decided that there wasn’t much that could be done about it. A number of important lessons had been learned.
Later, when Casey complained about alleged leaks from the committee, Simmons defended their security record. “What about the guy who took all the documents?” Casey asked. But he said no more, and did nothing.*
For Inman, the suggestion that Ralston was his spy was absurd. By definition a spy and his spymaster—presumably Inman himself in this concocted scenario—operated against the interests they were supposed to be serving. Well, Inman served no other interest than United States intelligence. Nor had Ralston. Yes, Ralston had made mistakes, but no harm had come from them. That anyone could see this as espionage showed deep bureaucratic sickness. It reflected a prevalent view, both within the CIA and within the congressional oversight committees, that the other was an enemy to be treated as a hostile intelligence service.
Casey’s view of the oversight committees was simple. When it came to big secrets, his instructions were, “Limit access. Don’t go brief.”
With Ralston gone and Goldwater in the hospital for nearly three months, Inman felt cut off. To top it off, William Safire, the New York Times columnist, had been taking a number of informed jabs at Inman, calling him a “detentnik” who controlled Goldwater and opposed covert action. Most recently Safire had charged in a column that Inman was “planting a phony story with reporters that Israel was publicizing the Libyan assassination teams (the hit teams) in order to set up an air strike at the Libyan nuclear reactor…”
Inman felt this attack personally. He had not planted anything; it was obviously a leak to Safire from a pro-Israel source who was smarting over Inman’s insistence that Israel not get any satellite photos that could be used in an offensive raid, as had been the case in the bombing of the Iraqi nuclear reactor. Inman felt that the Israelis would do almost anything against Qaddafi and Libya. In fact, he believed that the Israelis would assassinate Qaddafi if they felt it would earn enough points with the United States.
But Inman had a darker suspicion about Safire’s attacks. Perhaps the criticism had been directly or indirectly provided by Casey. Inman knew there was a back-channel relationship between Casey and Safire, going back some fifteen years. Safire had managed Casey’s unsuccessful 1966 run for Congress, even sending Casey to a speech coach, who had failed to cure his mumbling. Circumstantial evidence of more recent contact between Casey and Safire had fallen recently into Inman’s lap. It was one of those bits of information an intelligence officer places in data storage. An editor at The New York Times had called Inman with an urgent request. Arthur Ochs Sulzberger, his publisher, was trying to call Casey, using Casey’s unlisted, personal home number, but getting no answer. Was the number correct? the editor asked, reading it off. It was a number that Casey had given to a few people, including Inman, and Inman was surprised that the Times had it.
So, the Times editor said, Bill Safire had the right number.
Yes, Inman said.
Inman could not be sure that Casey had had a role in Safire’s blasts, but he could not shake his hunch or the wariness he felt toward Casey.
At 3 P.M. the day after New Year’s, President Reagan met with Deaver and Bill Clark at the Walter Annenberg estate, Sunnylands, in Rancho Mirage, California. For two and a half hours the three discussed the National Security Council. Allen was resigning. The President decided that Clark would move over from the State Department as the new national-security adviser. Clark would be granted “direct” access to the President and would be the sole White House spokesman on foreign affairs, according to a memo of the conversation prepared by Clark.
Casey was glad to hear about this. Clark, who had served as his chief of staff when Reagan was governor of California, was an intimate of the President and a staunch anti-Communist.
After his appointment was announced, Clark sought Inman’s advice on what to do with his National Security Council staff. Inman told him to clean it out, especially the NSC staffer on intelligence. Kenneth de Graffenreid. Clark listened carefully and avoided committing himself, and Inman realized that he had announced a declaration of war on de Graffenreid.
De Graffenreid’s agenda was counterintelligence, and he had turned his attention to a new-fad hypothesis called “Camouflage, Concealment and Deception” (CCD), which emphasized Soviet efforts to deceive. De Graffenreid wanted to examine the possibility that some of the intelligence gathered by the United States could be part of a vast Soviet hoax—particularly satellite photos and communications intercepts. It was logical, he argued, that the Soviets conducted deception operations. Since the U.S. had never really uncovered one, it was important to examine the possibility that some larger, successful deception was under way and had been missed.
Inman believed in the basic NSA position on these matters: what was heard and seen came in relatively pure. Skepticism was necessary, and occasionally there might be deception, but the far side of skepticism was paranoia. If the Soviets erected electronic and photographic Potemkin Villages, they would have neither time nor money for much else. The vastness of the intelligence “take” from the Soviet Union and the pattern and continuity going back years, even decades, made de Graffenreid’s axiom impossible, Inman concluded.
Inman was unhappy that de Graffenreid, a forty-one-year-old former Navy pilot who had spent only a year on the Hill as an investigator and another year at the DIA, could have so much influence. But Inman realized that in many ways the intelligence community, which had been set up to serve the President, in practical terms worked for the NSC. A powerful, well-placed and highly opinionated staff member could drive intelligence priorities as well as resources—even policy.
De Graffenreid adopted one of Inman’s methods of control. He promoted a comprehensive counterintelligence study much along the lines of the “Intelligence Capabilities 1985-90” study that Inman had pushed successfully. Bureaucratic barriers needed to be broken down among the FBI, the CIA and the military intelligence agencies, de Graffenreid said. If necessary a centralized counterintelligence authority with centralized records should be created. The split of counterintelligence functions at the U.S. borders (CIA abroad, FBI at home) was artificial. It was a civil-liberties bugaboo to worry whether they were joined. It was not a distinction the KGB observed.
Clark’s arrival at the NSC was an opportunity for de Graffenreid. De Graffenreid carried to Clark for the President’s signature a proposed National Security Decision Directive (NSDD) calling for a broad counter-intelligence study. Clark was enthusiastic about it.
Word came back to Inman that de Graffenreid would stay on the NSC staff. It was delivered by Clark’s new deputy, Bud McFarlane, who had moved from State with him. He told Inman that de Graffenreid had important support.
Soon Inman received the NSDD signed by Reagan, setting up two potentially powerful Senior Interagency Groups (SIG) for intelligence—one chaired by FBI Director Webster, the other by Deputy Secretary of Defense Carlucci.
Inman had been beaten in a major bureaucratic battle. It was clear that de Graffenreid not only was staying but had found a place of influence.
Casey was not comfortable with the new NSDD on counterintelligence which gave policy control to the FBI and Defense, but he did not think it was a big deal. Certainly it was not turf to worry about. He marveled at the ability of longtime government servants to take such battles seriously. Perhaps, Inman concluded, Casey had a point. He tried to cool down.
After a year, Inman had come to regard Casey as a “piece of work,” a term that Casey often applied to the oddballs in their midst. Casey was a combination of hard and soft. Just recently there had been a National Intelligence Estimate on the Middle East, and four strong views had been expressed: one by CIA experts, another by the DIA, one by Inman and one by Casey personally. Had Casey exercised his authority as DCI to overrule everyone and put forward his own view as the main conclusion? No. He had simply, and rather courageously, Inman felt, taken all four views to the President.
But on the operations and covert-action side, Inman was growing increasingly troubled. Casey was aligning the CIA with some of the major unsavory characters in the world.
Casey had received a visit from Israeli Defense Minister Ariel Sharon, a burly, truculent former general with extreme hawkish ideas. Israel was giving covert paramilitary support to the main Christian militia in Lebanon—the rightist Phalangist party, headed by Bashir Gemayel, a baby-faced ruthless warlord. At thirty-four, Gemayel had developed into one of Lebanon’s most important and charismatic leaders, forging a unique and powerful future role for himself. The Israeli game plan was working, and Sharon wanted $10 million in secret CIA paramilitary support to go to Gemayel.
Inman was opposed. In 1978, Bashir’s forces had made a lightning attack on the summer-resort home of Tony Frangieh, the political heir to the rival Christian faction, slaughtering him, his wife, their two-year-old daughter, the bodyguards and even the domestic staff. In 1980, Bashir’s militia had come close to wiping out the rival Christian militia of Lebanon’s ex-president Camille Chamoun.
Bashir was a savage murderer.
But there was more—something hidden in the intelligence files.
Back in the 1970s, after studying political science and law in Lebanon, Bashir had come to the United States to work for a Washington law firm and had been recruited by the CIA. As the youngest of the six children of Pierre Gemayel, he was no doubt destined to relative obscurity in the powerful family. The older son would inherit leadership in the Phalangist party, founded in 1936 as a sports and military youth movement. Bashir was not an agent who was controlled, though he was paid CIA money regularly and given a crypt—a special coded designator—so that his reports could circulate widely with very few people knowing the source’s identity. The payments were initially token amounts of several thousand dollars—a straight exchange of cash for information.
But in 1976, after Bashir defied Lebanese custom and took charge of the militia in place of his older brother, both the payments and his importance to the CIA grew. The CIA maintained a large presence in Beirut, the crossroads of the Middle East, the most Westernized of the Arab capitals, teeming with intrigue, as powerful and wealthy Lebanese traveled the region, providing good intelligence about less accessible Arab countries. Bashir’s role, and the quality and scope of his information, expanded. The CIA soon considered him a “regional influential,” a major asset. At the same time, within Lebanon, he was evolving into a leader with wide appeal, a patriotic visionary who spoke of a “new Lebanon.”
Inman thought that Bashir was still a murderer, and that the CIA should not dance with this devil anymore and should not provide the $10 million in covert assistance to his militia. The Israelis and Sharon were cooking up something; they had too much influence in Lebanon, and were seeking more. Sharon, who was close to his fellow former general Al Haig, turned up the heat all through the top reaches of the Reagan Administration. Soon his pressure was being transmitted through Haig.
Casey considered the reports from the stations. Oddly, his station in Beirut was anti-Bashir. It agreed with Inman that he was a barbarian and a cynical manipulator who played off the Israelis and the Americans, crying on any available shoulder to obtain support and equipment. The Tel Aviv station, reflecting the Israeli-Sharon view, maintained that Bashir was moving up fast, a likely leader who would stabilize Lebanon. It expressed no admiration but advised an accommodation to reality. Casey appreciated a sense of inevitability. At times the CIA had to work with some undesirables. Bashir also was deeply antagonistic to the PLO, which Casey knew was a real threat to Israel.
Inman lost that argument too. President Reagan signed a top-secret finding authorizing the $10 million covert aid to Bashir’s militia.
By mid-March 1982, Inman had made another personal assessment. In two weeks he would turn fifty. He had risen as high in the Navy as possible. The only higher post he might seek was DCI, and that was unavailable. He was approaching a point of no return in his life. If he was going to begin a second career, he had to start now. He couldn’t stand the prospect of some washout job as consultant, or as arms salesman, or hustling real estate on the Maryland Eastern Shore, a depository for retired senior military officers. His teenage sons, Thomas and William, would be going to college soon. The bare fact was that Inman could not afford to send them to expensive private colleges. After nearly thirty years in the Navy, he had three assets—his mortgaged (8 percent, 22-years at Arlington Trust Company) four-bedroom house in Arlington, Virginia, a few thousand dollars in the Navy Federal Credit Union and a couple of thousand in U.S. Savings Bonds. (Casey would have laughed that someone would put money in such a low-yield investment; Casey had zero in savings bonds.)
Inman also realized that his interest in intelligence was waning. He had been fascinated for years with how to get intelligence, and for years after that with what the intelligence meant. But all those breakfasts Casey had taken him to with Haig or Weinberger had kindled his interest in how to use intelligence. That was policy, and policy was what counted, he now knew. He was in the wrong job.
That March, public disclosure of the Nicaragua operation had brought several problems into focus. Casey and Dewey Clarridge were running the project. DDO John Stein had complained to Inman that he was being cut out. Though the general operation was not kept from Inman, it was going on around him. He had to crowbar in just to find out details, and he did not like what he found. Covert assistance was about to be given to Eden Pastora, a former Sandinista, the notorious Commander Zero who had broken with the Sandinistas after the revolution. Pastora was a “barracuda,” Inman said, the Central American equivalent of Lebanon’s Bashir Gemayel. Pastora operated out of Costa Rica, which was to the south of Nicaragua. El Salvador was north of Nicaragua. All someone had to do was look at a map and see that Pastora was operating more than three hundred miles from any possible supply routes for arms into El Salvador. That simple fact put the lie to assertions that the Nicaragua operation was for the purpose of interdicting arms. Inman knew that assistance to Pastora was intended to demolish and oust the Sandinistas. The uncompromising, even snarling comments from Casey about the Nicaraguan regime told Inman all he needed to know.
As Inman looked further, his distrust grew. He asked questions, he looked at more files, he began to question the underlying reasons for making the Nicaragua program covert. He concluded that the Administration did not want it out in the open where they would have to pay the domestic political price. It was covert in order to avoid a public debate, Inman was now absolutely convinced. With the operation public, no one seemed to care. The clear message was that Reagan and Casey could get away with covert operations even if they became public. The State Department, the White House, Casey would all want more. Diplomacy was a long, drawn-out process, very frustrating. Covert action was, at first blush, cheaper and certainly less frustrating. That was naive. The quick, covert fix was a fantasy.
Inman never liked the Operations Directorate people, going back to 1965 when he had been the assistant naval attaché in Stockholm. He had had a terrific source who provided significant military information on other countries. The CIA station, small and arrogant, had tried to steal his source, and failing that tried to burn the source, dropping hints to Swedish authorities that they had a “blabber-mouth.” Inman never forgot.
When had one of the directorate’s paramilitary covert plans worked? Not ever, in Inman’s view. And even if it were to, a new, U.S.-backed government could easily turn out to be worse than the one it had replaced, or it might not be able to govern or to hold power.
It had probably been sound to mount covert action in Afghanistan after the Soviets invaded. Or when the Soviets used Cuban proxy troops. This could raise the cost for Russia. Covert action could effectively counter a Soviet propaganda campaign. But that was generally it.
Inman was concerned about the clandestine mind-set that was dominating the business of intelligence-gathering. The sensitive collection operations—phone taps, room bugs and other equipment placements abroad—were being expanded. Such clandestine technical collection had its appeal and could yield intelligence coups that went down well at the White House—the verbatim conversations of a prime minister, for example. Inman had been surprised at the amount of amorous activities that was picked up. But in four years as director of the NSA, he had learned the downside of such efforts. There was the danger of exposure, though that was not seriously considered. In addition, such efforts had limited life spans, eighteen months to two years. The bug would be found, the batteries would wear out, or there might be some malfunction; a key target would be transferred to a different job; or some countermeasure would be developed intentionally, or by accident.
The nonclandestine operations—satellite photography, collecting radio and other signals, the decoding of messages—that did not require the secret placement of a bug or a phone tap were more reliable and less vulnerable. This methodical, workmanlike approach did not conform with the new clandestine mind-set or with Casey’s impatience. Casey liked to make a splash at the White House.
The previous Christmas, Inman’s older son, referring to his father’s grueling hours and the tension, had put a question to him that was still resonating: “Where’s the quality of life in all this?”
Inman left for what was supposed to be a two-week getaway in Hawaii. After ten days, he returned to Langley and intentionally barged in on Casey and Clarridge. They were busy building an army, and Inman had some questions: Where are the contras going? Where is the CIA heading? The Administration? Is there a plan? Won’t the Pastora connection make it clear that this is not an arms interdiction program? Do we know who these people are? They are not fighting to save El Salvador. They want power, don’t they? This is an operation to overthrow a government, isn’t it? That raises problems with the finding that authorized the program. The agency is on the verge, in the midst, of exceeding that authority, isn’t it?
Casey and Clarridge didn’t have answers, and they didn’t like the questions. This was Administration policy, approved all the way up the line to the President—perhaps not in the finding, but it was what Ronald Reagan wanted. Casey was sure he was on solid ground.
After half an hour, Inman stiffened, uncomfortably aware of his proximity to raw anger. Bonfires were burning inside. He marveled momentarily at his absolute consternation. Casey and Clarridge, uncaring, intoxicated with their certitudes, were not listening. Inman was an outsider. An obstacle.
Finally he rose and stormed out. There was nothing to say.
Inman had never done that before. His advancement through the officer ranks of naval intelligence had been based on an ability to convey soothing impressions, avoid confrontations. He had crossed a threshold with Casey, and with himself.
Casey found Inman brilliant but brittle—a golden boy worried about his own image, unwilling to risk it, or the agency’s, to get a tough job done, too concerned about how covert action went down with his liberal, Democrat and media friends. Inman’s departure would be trouble with the Congress, but that could be handled. Inman’s bipartisan popularity was a cushion up there, doubtless. But he now understood all the parts of the DCI’s job, and a deputy less concerned with his press clippings could be more useful.
Inman believed there remained only the formality of resignation. On March 22 he composed a three-paragraph letter to President Reagan, reminding the President, “I reluctantly accepted your request last year that I serve as the deputy Director of Central Intelligence…. Accordingly, I would be grateful if you would accept my resignation.”
Praising Reagan for commencing the “rebuilding” of the intelligence agencies, Inman said, “You and Director Casey, have my best wishes for continued success.” Before handing the letter to Casey, he sent copies to Bush, Weinberger and Clark, insuring that it was final. Casey was peeved and worried that it would leak, but the resignation was kept quiet as Casey began the search for a replacement.
On Wednesday, April 21, 1982—about six weeks after the Post ran the story on the Nicaragua covert operation—I went to see Goldwater, hoping to find out whether the CIA had informed him fully about the operation. Senate offices are attended to as racing cars are by pit crews. There are mementos and awards crowding walls and tables, all the signs of status and party. In Goldwater’s office, not a pencil was out of place. The only singular feature was the stack of ham radio equipment on a table behind his desk.
“When Ben,” Goldwater said, referring to Bradlee, “called me on the Central America thing, there weren’t ten words out of his mouth and I knew he knew about the whole thing. So what I did was say, ‘Ah, uh, uh, I don’t recall anything about that. Why don’t you call Bill Casey.’ I played dumb with Ben.”
He had misled us but not lied. It seemed a too subtle distinction.
“I thought the American people should know about that,” Goldwater added. “In fact, I’m tickled to death it was made public.” He had confirmed the operation on the record to Time for that reason.
He explained his theory of the CIA’s “overt covert” operation—secret but public: that was good, no one would be caught by surprise, no justifiable public outcry down the road. A covert operation was the lesser of two evils because it avoided sending U.S. troops, he said. “A lot of this stuff should be made public. The American people should know what is being done—seventy-five percent of what we hear [in intelligence briefings] should come out.
“We are out of the business of overthrowing governments. We may cause a little economic trouble, a little publicity [propaganda] and other aid, but we don’t overthrow governments.” He was stern and emphatic. It was not a moral position, rather a statement of the political and practical reality.
Was intelligence on the Soviet Union any good?
“We don’t have many eyeballs in there now,” Goldwater said. “I knew about twelve years ago we had only five sets of eyeballs there working for us.
“We have the best electronic intelligence now of anyone,” he said confidently, “but maybe not for long.”
What about the satellites?
“I’ve been trying to get them to put out these [satellite photos], but they say, ‘No, no, no!’ because they would look so good in magazines but they say the Russians can tell.” The Russians would be able to calculate our exact capabilities and it’s beyond their expectation, he indicated.
“Well,” Goldwater said, leaning back and lowering his voice again, “pictures are not that important anymore. We have a new—” he began and then broke off. “I can’t talk about it at all, but it’s spooky. I wish some night we could go on a trip, and it’s amazing, you’d see.” Through some infrared or electromagnetic or even advance radar technology, the United States apparently had something that was better than a picture.
Goldwater moved the discussion away.
What about Casey?
“A fine man,” Goldwater said. “Honest. A real spy when he was with the OSS, a real guy with a”—and Goldwater raised his hand as if to stick an imaginary knife in his desk—“dagger.” He smiled.
“But,” he continued, shaking his head, “we do it differently now, and he is not a pro.
“I call him Flappy.” The Senator puckered out his lips in pantomime and suddenly blew hard, causing his lips to spit a fine spray into the air.
Casey’s lack of forthrightness was also a problem. “So when I want to know what’s going on I call Inman,” Goldwater said. “As soon as I pick up the phone I can tell from the first word whether he [Inman] is going to tell me anything.” Pause. “You know we are going to lose Admiral Inman?”
There was not even a rumor going around about this. Is it final, Inman is going?
“Yes, it is,” Goldwater replied, indicating that he had tried to prevent it, “and we’re going to have trouble finding his replacement.”
A Goldwater aide passed word to the White House that Goldwater had spilled the Inman story. Later that day the White House announced Inman’s resignation and released a pro-forma letter just out of the typewriter.
Two days later, Senator Richard G. Lugar, a conservative Indiana Republican on the Intelligence Committee, announced that he intended to “send some signals” publicly to the White House about Inman’s replacement. Lugar, a friend of Inman’s since they had served together as junior intelligence officers in the late fifties, said that as far as the Senate committee was concerned Inman was “our man.” Without a professional replacement, the committee would be cut off. “Bill Casey is a very able American who has made some pretty good decisions,” Lugar said, and then took a square shot at him. “But there are complexities that would take more years to understand than Casey will be alive.
“We voted for Casey and Inman as a package—Casey because he has access to the President, Inman because he knows what’s going on.”
Casey was well aware that the DCI was a public whipping boy, and he expected to get cuffed around by the Democrats and the intelligence-suspicious liberals. But Lugar was a fellow Republican, and generally soft-spoken. Casey suspected Inman’s hand.
In his interviews, Inman skirted the issues that had divided him from Casey and the Administration. He felt he was right, but these were policy decisions to be made by the President and the DCI. There would be no public denunciations, no sour grapes, no disloyalty. He said simply that he had lost his zest for bureaucratic battle, that his relations with Casey were good, but not close.
In farewell, Casey asked him why they had not been close. And why had Inman said that to the press?
Inman pointed out how complimentary he had been of Casey in his public statements.
But Casey was offended. “Cold,” he finally snapped.
For Inman, it was the simple truth. They had not been close. They disagreed about too much, intelligence, the world.
Inman took a job as head of a research consortium, Microelectronics and Computer Technology Corporation (MCC) set up in Texas by ten large high-tech firms to develop a supercomputer that might come close to thinking, integrating and merging data, breaking any code.
Among the several hundred employees of MCC was former Senate Intelligence Committee staffer Ted Ralston. Casey and Inman never spoke again.
Casey was given forty-eight hours by the White House to come up with a deputy acceptable to the Senate committee. The only choice was John McMahon, the former DDO under Turner, former head of the analytic side, and now the executive director of the CIA, technically the No. 3 man. Not hard driving or single-minded enough to be a good DDO, an effective DDO, McMahon had found the line between independence and loyalty. He could put up a fuss but he knew how to take orders. He did so without resentment. He was not a lackey like Hugel, nor an outsider like Inman. He was skeptical of but not a detractor of covert action.
As he advanced, McMahon had become persuaded that besides the exotic technical intelligence and the inside human sources, the agency had to get what he called “the ground truth.” That meant not just servicing the dead drops but getting out into the churches and the bread lines behind the Iron Curtain.
One of the agency’s former undercover men, turned spy novelist, had written that the CIA perhaps had once had the most brilliant people ever brought together in one organization, people who understood every country in the world—except their own. McMahon knew it was so easy to lose touch.
There was no better way to receive a dose of ground truth than to make the rounds in the Congress. Since a DDCI had to be confirmed by the Senate, McMahon called on a number of senators on the Intelligence Committee, and he found that the main topic was always Casey. There was distrust everywhere. It ranged from senators who wanted to make sure McMahon would be available to answer questions, to those like Pat Leahy who wanted a pledge etched in stone that McMahon would be their early-warning system.
As McMahon made the correct promises, he was surprised that so many of the senators were spring-loaded against Casey. McMahon thought Casey was too smart to bullshit the senators, but clearly they felt that he did. Afterward, as he sat down with Casey, he thought the DCI was entitled to an honest appraisal. Of the fifteen senators, McMahon reported, more than half had their pistols cocked.
“Bill,” McMahon said, “you’ve got some stroking to do on the Hill.”
Yeah, okay, Casey agreed.
That spring, Casey had another hot spot to watch as Argentina invaded and seized the British crown colony the Falkland Islands. The Reagan Administration, after initially trying to remain neutral, eventually sided with its old ally. There were press reports that the British had benefited from U.S. satellite photos. Casey did not correct this misinformation. Actually, the region of the remote South Atlantic was not covered by satellite. Later, the U.S. put up a satellite to cover the region, and the Soviets followed with two of their own.
The real intelligence breakthroughs had come from good human sources that were tied to the ruling junta in Buenos Aires. Argentina, taking seriously the declarations of American UN Ambassador Kirkpatrick, had deluded itself that the United States might remain neutral. So Argentine officers and officials provided a steady flow of intelligence to the CIA station and the U.S. military attachés in Buenos Aires, who forwarded it to Langley and on to the State Department and the White House. It was then only a matter of who could beat a path more quickly to the British.
Casey thought the North Atlantic Treaty Organization was a leaky “sieve,” but, as a certified Anglophile, he made sure the channel between the CIA and MI-6 was open. Intelligence was gathered to be used. And the President had defined the policy tilt toward the British. So delivering a batch of secrets to an ally struggling through war, not to mention a period of political stress—Prime Minister Thatcher’s continuation in office hinged on the outcome—was what it was all about. This was one intelligence success that could not be publicized.
The tilt toward Britain in the Falklands would eventually drive Argentina out of the Nicaragua operation, ending its “fig leaf” cover for what was becoming a CIA project, but that too was all to the good. It would give Clarridge a freer hand to build his contra army, Casey concluded. Casey’s admiration for Clarridge only increased as he went about his task. No detail was too small; no obstacle too great.
On Wednesday, May 26, 1982, at 10:30 A.M., McMahon appeared before a closed session of the Senate committee to begin his confirmation hearing.
He said in testimony that it was a pleasure to have the congressional committees looking over the agency’s shoulders; their review imposed a discipline on the CIA. He did not want intelligence to be some dark enterprise removed from the political process. In an unusually candid assessment, he said the committees protected him: “I for one, as an individual who has had to testify before the oversight committees, drew a great deal of comfort knowing that I was sharing with them, with the representatives of the American people, our programs and what we were up to…It was a protection to me as an individual and it was a protection to the institutions to know that Congress was a joint partner in these programs.”
Moynihan wanted to make it clear that the committee too needed protection. “We have to be able to believe that everything that we need to know you will tell us. We have no independent sources of information. We have to trust—” He paused. “If you ever learned that wrong information is being given to this committee—that the committee is being misinformed or misled—would you consider it a matter of personal honor and professional responsibility to tell this committee that that was happening?”
“Yes, sir,” McMahon replied. “I cannot imagine anyone in the intelligence community in a position of responsibility ever attempting to mislead or misconstrue facts or events to Congress.”
“I just want to make one final thought,” Moynihan said, staring over at McMahon, “…it is not your job and ought never to be your job not to imagine something bad happening.”
“I stand corrected, Senator,” McMahon replied.
Other senators questioned Casey’s honesty more directly. They were asking McMahon to rat on his boss, to admit that Casey might mislead them. “I can’t imagine anyone over me doing that,” McMahon said.
Moynihan pounced: there was that lack of imagination again. He interrupted, insisting that McMahon had to deal with the possibilities of bad things happening.
“I would correct the record, Senator,” McMahon answered.
The next day McMahon appeared in public before the committee.
Moynihan said, “If anyone would like to know what it means to be a professional career intelligence officer in this country, they would do well to read the financial-disclosure statement of Mr. McMahon, which consists of thirty blank pages.”
The room erupted in laughter.
“There’s a tin cup at the end of that,” McMahon said, pointing at the table.
More laughter.
McMahon’s net worth was meager. His 1981 salary was $52,749; all other income amounted to $658 in interest from about $10,000 in the CIA credit union; his home in the suburbs was valued at about $170,000, less a $30,000 mortgage to his in-laws.
Senator Malcolm Wallop, the ultraconservative Republican from Wyoming, was convinced that agency professionals like McMahon were concerned primarily with protecting the reputation of the agency, rather than implementing the Reagan mandate. Men like that were siphoning off the energy and political will of even strong conservatives like Casey, he thought. Wallop believed that Casey was letting the agency run him. Even in covert action, Casey’s speciality, once again there had not been enough gain. There was an unwillingness to put the country’s money, men and prestige on the line for things that might make a real difference. Agents abroad were not given the electronic capabilities and the authority they needed. Cheap, relatively risk-free little electronic taps and bugs could be placed all over, but the CIA station chiefs had to get approval from headquarters before going ahead. The result was too much caution. Intelligence conducted operations to dazzle themselves—“technological navel-gazing,” Wallop termed it—often devoting millions of dollars to gather worthless juicy gossip about the private lives or the health or the movements of world leaders, or high-resolution photographs of faces and cars.
The CIA, Wallop said, did not cope well with new ideas or with anyone who questioned its assumptions. With a chance to express his frustration, he lashed out at McMahon, hurling such invectives as “professionalism,” “petty bureaucratic treason” and “no-fault intelligence policy.”
McMahon sat and took it, but it was clear to all that he was a candidate of neither the left nor the right.
Goldwater was tired of surprises, so he had had four senior staff members read all of McMahon’s personnel and security files. The six-inch file showed that McMahon was clean; he had never been near the assassination plots, the drug tests, the domestic spying exposed in the 1970s. There was a single security violation: an unlocked safe had once been found in his office. But that violation told volumes about McMahon. It had been a secretary’s fault, and with one more security violation she would not have gotten a scheduled raise in pay. McMahon, the loyalty-down manager, had taken the rap.
So Goldwater threw a few softballs to McMahon, and then Biden praised Inman and turned to Casey. “With some of us at least, the utterances of Mr. Casey are not always as—well, we do not always leap at them to embrace them as being the whole story when he makes them.” Biden then gave a speech about the need for McMahon to act as a monitor for the committee.
Goldwater said that Inman used to signal them when Casey strayed. “I think if the new Deputy Director will develop the habit that the Admiral had of pulling up his socks when there was something being said…”
A roar of laughter went up.
“Or else,” Biden added, “slide your chair back. He used to just slide it back like this.”
“If I may comment,” McMahon said, “Mr. Chairman, and also to Senator Biden, I think when the Director hears or reads of the perceptions that you have, he will certainly move to allay your fears and correct that, and I think he will do that personally in any future testimony.”
The committee approved McMahon’s nomination unanimously, and the Senate followed.
That the Operations arm was indeed rusty came home vividly to Casey in late March 1982. A thirteen-man team of Yemenis sponsored by the CIA that had been sent into the Soviet-dominated state of South Yemen on the Arabian Peninsula for sabotage work was captured. The operation, carried out in conjunction with Saudi intelligence, had been one of the few paramilitary support operations authorized by the Carter Administration and had been in preparation ever since. The Yemenis were tortured and confessed that they had been trained by the CIA. Where was the deniability for the CIA? Casey wondered. Where was the operational security? In the paperwork setting out the covert plan, the Yemenis were supposed only to deal with intermediaries or cutouts, so that they would not know the CIA was involved. But the only way to make the operation credible to the Yemeni recruits had been to reveal the CIA role.
A second team of Yemenis, already inserted into South Yemen, had to be withdrawn and the operation ended. Several weeks later, prosecutors in South Yemen announced that all thirteen men of the first team had pleaded guilty to smuggling explosives to blow up oil installations and other key targets. They also had confessed their CIA sponsorship. Three members of the team were given fifteen-year prison terms. The others were executed.
In contrast, Casey’s first covert paramilitary operation, the support to Habré in Chad, paid off. On June 7, 1982, about two thousand of Habré’s men took control of Ndjamena, the capital of Chad, and set up a provisional government. For the moment, Qaddafi’s influence in Chad was reduced and his nose “bloodied,” as Haig and Casey wanted. The Libyan leader now had a hostile French-and U.S.-supported government along the six-hundred-mile border to his south.
The atmosphere was right, finally, to win White House support for a limited covert support operation to the active anti-Communist resistance in Cambodia. Assistance to the Angola resistance was banned by law; and the operations in Nicaragua and Afghanistan were under way.
The mere mention of covert activity in Southeast Asia stood hair on end throughout the agency. The region was the supreme tar baby. But Casey insisted that they look beyond the past. Administration policy had to be consistent: the effort to aid anyone fighting Communists had to be universal. The Soviets supported subversion worldwide; the United States could do no less. The problem was that the primary opposition to the Communist regime in Cambodia, which was a puppet of Vietnam, was the Khmer Rouge. Also Communist, the KR, as it was known, was a notoriously savage group. The KR had killed one million, possibly as many as three million, Cambodians during the time it ruled the country, 1975 to 1979.
But there were two other non-Communist Cambodian resistance groups, and Casey argued that funds could be funneled to them. The agency had unilateral assets in the Thailand military, through which the money could be channeled to make sure it did not aid the Khmer Rouge.
A number of State Department officials disagreed, arguing that the Khmer Rouge was joined in a loose coalition with the two non-Communist groups and was dominant. To help the non-Communists was to help the KR.
Casey had to settle for nonlethal assistance, and in the fall of 1982 President Reagan signed a finding authorizing up to $5 million in aid to the non-Communists. Though the money could not go for weapons, it would free up other money to buy military equipment.
That spring, Casey met with Israeli Defense Minister Sharon, who was in Washington making the rounds. Lebanon and the PLO strongholds there were on Sharon’s mind. He spoke of countermoves—if Lebanon does this, then Israel will do that; if the PLO strikes here, Israel will strike there. “Lebanon,” Sharon said, his tone dripping sarcasm, as if the country were a geographic fiction. “Don’t be surprised. Let’s get the cards on the table. If you don’t do something, we will. We won’t tolerate it.”
Casey understood that Lebanon was the one Arab state where Israel could extend its influence, and he concluded that Sharon wanted to create circumstances that would justify an Israeli military move. Things will happen in Lebanon and there will be no choice, Sharon said. It was also clear that Sharon had Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin mesmerized. Sharon was calling the shots.
Casey appreciated Sharon’s style, seeing him as both an activist and a thinker, a man who had a sense both of his country’s vulnerability and its destiny.
On June 6, 1982, Israel invaded Lebanon, declaring its intention to drive the PLO terrorists out of southern Lebanon. It cited as justification the attempted assassination of its ambassador to London three days earlier and called its invasion “Operation Peace for Galilee.”
Israeli intelligence, the CIA and soon the British knew that this stated reason was bogus. The Israeli ambassador’s assailants were part of the Abu Nidal faction that had split off from the PLO and was at war with the mainline PLO, harbored in Lebanon. The Israelis were striking the wrong Palestinians, but in Sharon’s view that made little difference. Within days, his Israeli Defense Force (IDF) was on the outskirts of Beirut.
The CIA analysis painted a picture of great opportunity and great risk.
Casey convened a meeting in his office. One question was whether Israel was using U.S.-supplied weapons, and many at the meeting voiced concern that the U.S. would be seen as an accomplice and Congress would raise questions.
“I don’t give a fuck about that,” Casey said. “The situation is fluid. Anything can happen. How do we turn this to our national interest? That’s the question I want answered.”
The CIA man, Phalangist militia leader Bashir Gemayel, was playing an increasingly important role in Lebanon, and over the years Bashir had developed close relations with Sharon and the Israeli Mossad. The CIA had played matchmaker, putting the Christians and the Israelis in touch with each other, making Bashir a shared CIA-Mossad intelligence asset.
There was an inclination in the CIA to side with the Christians over the Muslims in Lebanon. But old CIA hands who had served in Lebanon knew that the Christians, particularly Bashir and his Phalangists, were as brutal as anyone. The relationship was hazardous.
“What worthwhile relationship isn’t?” Casey asked, trying to calm the agency’s hand-wringers.
There were indications that Bashir was headed for the presidency. He had eliminated his competition among the Christian factions. His good relations with the invading Israelis gave him a lever. The pro-Israeli elements within Lebanon looked on Bashir as the new light. The anti-Israeli elements (Muslims and leftist Druze led by Walid Jumblatt) considered Bashir the only person who might be able to get the Israelis to withdraw. Bashir had become the rallying point.
Casey approved a plan for the CIA to sever its formal relationship with Bashir, who clearly now had more important things to do than work for the CIA. Since the 1977 public disclosure that King Hussein of Jordan had been a CIA paid agent for twenty years, the agency had been reluctant to keep heads of state on the payroll. As Bashir was thrust more into the limelight, an exposure could end his career, if not his life. The relationship was one of the most guarded secrets. Everything was being done to protect it, but there was never any absolute guarantee.
On August 23, two and a half months after the Israeli invasion, Bashir was elected president of Lebanon, slated to take office the next month. The few who knew about the recently severed CIA relationship could feel only a mixture of joy and horror. Lebanon was a country of no permanent friends, no permanent enemies. The very things that made Bashir the likely leader left him with numerous enemies. The Muslims were fortified by the rise of Ayatollah Khomeini in Iran; the well-financed PLO still had a presence in Lebanon, though the evacuation from Beirut of eleven thousand PLO fighters, including Chairman Arafat, had begun.
Strategically allied with Israel and the United States, a Lebanon under Bashir would upset the regional balance of power. Powerful Syria to the north and the west had occupied the Bekaa Valley in Lebanon since 1976 and, in fact, considered all of Lebanon part of greater Syria. Syria’s Soviet allies were also unhappy.
Faced with this array of internal and external enemies, Bashir passed a message to the CIA requesting that he be provided with covert security and intelligence assistance.
Casey felt the CIA had an obligation to help Bashir. It could not be done in the open. A large-scale covert operation was necessary. To be effective, the CIA would have to become more closely involved with the Lebanese intelligence service. It would have to share sophisticated weapons as well as equipment for electronic surveillance and communications. President Reagan approved a finding for the support operation that called for an initial expenditure of about $600,000. It was projected to grow quickly to more than $2 million a year, perhaps $4 million.
On the afternoon of September 14, 1982, nine days before he was to take office, Bashir Gemayel was speaking at the local office of his Phalangist Party in East Beirut. He was scheduled to meet at five with a group of Israeli intelligence officers touring Beirut. But at 4:10 a bomb detonated, bringing the building down and killing him.
The CIA had not had time to get its covert-assistance program into play. There was no evidence that the CIA relationship had leaked. Still, it was a major disaster for the CIA to have a former asset assassinated. The several million dollars allocated for the security operation was put on hold and kept in the presidential contingency fund.
The assassination was the first in a chain of calamitous events. Within two days, Israeli forces allowed Phalangist units to enter Palestinian refugee camps in Beirut on a mission of revenge. The names of two of those camps, Sabra and Shatilla, would become a part of the history of massacre. Israeli intelligence calculated that there were 700 to 800 Palestinian victims, many of them women and children. The accounts of the slaughter stunned the civilized world—bodies of diapered babies, the elderly, corpses in stacks. Even horses, dogs and cats were butchered. Breasts and penises had been cut off; a Christian cross was carved into the flesh of some victims. Pregnant women had their wombs torn open.
Within two weeks, the U.S. Marines had taken up a strategic location in barracks near the airport. As a peacekeeping mission, they had no specific goal other than to assist Lebanon and oversee the eventual withdrawal of foreign forces.
Both the Mossad and Israeli military intelligence began inquiries to determine who had killed Bashir. The bomb was traced to Habib Chartouny, twenty-six, whose family were members of the Syrian People’s Party, rivals of the Phalangists. Pooling intelligence with the Lebanese, the Israelis established that Chartouny had installed a long-range electronic detonator for the bomb.
Chartouny’s “operator,” or case officer, was a captain in the Syrian intelligence service named Nassif. He had convinced the young Chartouny that the bomb was designed to scare Bashir, not to kill him. After sifting the intelligence, including all the Mossad’s best Syrian agents, surveillance reports and electronic intercepts, the Israelis established that Nassif reported directly to Lieutenant Colonel Mohammed G’anen, who was in charge of Syrian intelligence operations in Lebanon. Both Syrian Army and Air Force intelligence had some knowledge of the planned bombing, as did the brother of Syrian President Hafez Assad, Rifaat Assad, who headed the country’s security forces.
The Israelis believed that President Assad had such an iron grip on his country that he had to have known that such a plan was under way. But there was no proof, and the intelligence reports showing the complicity of the Syrian intelligence officers were highly classified.
Casey saw these reports, provided by Israeli intelligence. They were convincing enough. But, just as important, it was necessary to consider who had benefited most from Bashir’s death. Who wanted a weak Lebanon? Who most feared a strong tie between Israel and Lebanon? The answer was obviously Syria. Still, in the end, Casey had to accept the unwillingness of the White House and the State Department to publicize a Syrian role.
The head of Israeli military intelligence, Major General Saguy, knew that any attempt by the U.S. to exploit this information about Syrian involvement would be counterproductive. Saguy had long been skeptical about his country’s relations with the Gemayel Phalangists, and he realized that the United States now had the Lebanese monkey on its back, that the Administration would have to deal with Syria to achieve anything resembling a settlement in Lebanon. Accusation might be satisfying propaganda, but would prevent Syrian cooperation.
Casey had an intelligence failure on his hands. The CIA relationship with Bashir, the decision to break it off, Bashir’s request for protection, the Administration’s decision to grant it, and the subsequent assassination were a mess. But it was a highly classified mess. It stayed secret.