IN EIGHTEEN MONTHS AS DCI, Casey had received a technical education, particularly in the supersecret overhead systems, the satellites used for photography and gathering signals intelligence. He became knowledgeable about state-of-the-art technology, and he pushed for the best even when it was the most expensive. Though not sold on the idea that technical intelligence was all-important, he had come to see that it provided key pieces in the mosaic.
With satellite photography, his people could count Soviet tanks. Through imagery enhancement—the second-or third-phase exploitation or refinement of the basic photography—they could determine whether a tank was in working order. The early-warning system could normally detect any movement of Soviet forces, or a major new weapons program. Satellites might miss tightly held research and development projects in the Soviet Union, where a few people were working secretly, away from the population centers or military bases, but that was about all they missed.
Casey was facing a huge decision on one of the U.S. intelligence community’s most top-secret and important research and development projects in overhead systems. It was being billed as the biggest technological spy development of the 1980s.
First code-named “Indigo” and now “Lacrosse,” the new overhead satellite system would use the most advanced radar to provide all-weather and day-night capability. Using radar imaging—the enhancement of radar signals—computers could create the equivalent of photographs. Clouds and darkness would cease to be barriers. There was the possibility that sometime a future system might see through buildings.
But Lacrosse would eventually cost more than $1 billion, a staggering sum even if it worked. There were vast cost overruns and numerous problems already in the development stage. The Martin Marietta Corporation was the principal contractor, and General Electric was doing the ground processing—the handling of the signal after it arrived at the ground stations.
Funding of about $200 million was needed to keep Lacrosse alive for 1983. Martin Marietta needed the money now; the “drop-dead date” was approaching. Hundreds of millions of dollars had to be provided or the project would die. Casey called some of these expensive projects “one-sies,” because often only one would be built.
Those of his critics who thought Casey was all covert action were mistaken. The $200 million needed now equaled his entire covert-action budget, and here was the Director anteing up that amount for a preliminary expenditure on a satellite system that he hoped would never be discussed in public. Because of the secrecy, the public debates lacked this sense of proportion, he felt.
Though the Soviets had radar imaging, the intelligence reports showed they did not have the computer power or the processing sophistication to create good-quality, high-resolution pictures. So Lacrosse could give the U.S. a significant edge.
Casey had been briefed on the history of the U.S. satellite systems. It had been a remarkable twelve years since 1971, when the first Big Bird was launched. The giant flying spy satellite—some fifty-five feet across—took extraordinary photographs. But the film had to be ejected from the satellite, retrieved, and developed on the ground. Appropriately, gold canisters or buckets were used to protect the Big Bird’s exposed film from various rays in space. The gold canisters, stacked to the ceiling in one storage facility, were a metaphor for the expensive satellite program.
In December 1976, just before Carter came to office, the first KH-11 satellite had been launched. This was the big breakthrough of the 1970s, because KH-11 provided the first real-time photographic capability sending back to earth high-quality telephoto television signals. The pictures of the Soviet Union or the tanks were nearly instantaneous, giving the CIA and the Pentagon details of what was going on that moment.
The real-time KH-11 satellite, of course, did not eject film, but transmitted its pictures back to earth in radio waves. The Soviets monitored the ejection of film to identify a photo satellite. Since KH-11 was also a signals intelligence platform, the Soviets did not suspect that the passing satellite was taking pictures. Thus they failed to conceal or camouflage various military installations and equipment, including the missile silo doors, when the satellite passed over. Soviet ignorance had created an enormous U.S. advantage.
The great secret of the KH-11 capability lasted only about a year. William Kampiles, a disgruntled low-level CIA watch center employee, sold a copy of the top-secret KH-11 manual to the Soviets for three thousand dollars. The CIA knew something had happened when the Soviets began closing silo doors as the KH-11 passed over. Kampiles was caught, convicted of espionage and sentenced to forty years in jail, but the damage was done.
There was one negative for Casey in Lacrosse. That system and its successor systems would be the means to verify the next arms control agreement, if there ever was one. Casey wasn’t opposed to arms control entirely, but he felt that the importance of reducing the number of nuclear weapons, was merely symbolic. Suppose there were a third fewer nuclear weapons, or a half fewer? The world could still be destroyed. The Soviets were a world power because of their vast military machine, not because of their economy, culture or business acumen. Their military alone bestowed superpower status upon them. Casey was sure that the Soviets would never really want to give up much of what gave them their place in the sun.
But that was no reason to stop Lacrosse. Casey decided to go ahead with the $200 million for Lacrosse in the budget submitted to Congress.
Boland, the chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, opposed Lacrosse. The overruns and problems seemed insurmountable, and the National Reconnaissance Office (NRO), which managed the satellite systems, had lied about the cost. It became a moral issue for Boland.
These satellites, and the so-called “black” CIA, NSA and other intelligence projects, were buried in the Defense budget, which Democrat Boland felt needed cutting. The Defense Department was also concerned that Lacrosse was taking money away from the military. So the House cut the funding from the secret portion of the Pentagon’s 1983 budget.
Goldwater’s Senate committee retained Casey’s $200 million Lacrosse request, so Boland and his vice-chairman, Ken Robinson, had a sit-down with Goldwater and Moynihan.
Goldwater felt intensely about Lacrosse. He made a speech. The spy planes—the famous U-2 and the less famous SR-71 (SR for Strategic Reconnaissance)—had cost overruns and all kinds of problems, but look how they had added a whole new dimension to intelligence-gathering. How could anyone calculate cost in the vital secret intelligence war in the sky? The issues went right to the core of congressional responsibility. The risk was not doing enough. The risk was in falling behind. The President and Casey wanted this. Radar imaging was working at the 26th Tactical Wing in Germany for the border between East and West, where the real-time read-out from the planes was relayed to ground stations. Lacrosse wasn’t perfect, but there was more than promise.
Determined, Goldwater offered his opinion: “We’ll take it at any cost.” He paused, and finally added the words “And it could work to prevent war.”
Boland still held out, but he had been softened.
Okay, Goldwater said, since they could not resolve the difference he would let the armed-services committees take care of it. In the Senate, Goldwater’s committee shared responsibility for intelligence matters, including the budget, with the Senate Armed Services Committee. In the House, Boland’s committee was more nearly autonomous. Goldwater remarked that the Senate Armed Services Committee, chaired by John Tower, a Texas Republican, was meeting just down the hall. He was sure that Tower would go along with Lacrosse. At that, Goldwater pushed his chair back, stood up and limped down the hall, apparently determined to deliver the issue—and, by implication, some of the power over it—into Tower’s hands.
Boland knew he could not face down the entire Senate. The armed-services committees wielded great power because they were handling a military budget of more than $200 billion, and if the chairman wanted a $200 million project he would get it. That was one one-thousandth of the total—peanuts.
Boland was flustered as Goldwater began his slow, unsteady amble down the corridor. He scooted over to his fellow Democrat, Moynihan.
“Well,” Boland said, “what do we do?” He did not relish a disagreement among Democrats on this issue. It was clearly a long walk down the hall, and Goldwater’s hip hurt. It also was obvious it would be better if the two intelligence committees could settle the matter themselves.
“I recede,” Boland said abruptly, agreeing to one year’s funding. “Stop Goldwater!”
An aide was dispatched to run down the hall with the news: “They just caved.” The tactical maneuver had worked. Goldwater was convinced that one of the most consequential intelligence programs was safely under way. He turned, smiled and trudged back. He agreed that if there were future cost overruns the plug would be pulled.
When word was passed to Martin Marietta, there was a big celebration. Once the ground processing problems were licked, Lacrosse was set to be launched in space from the National Aeronautical and Space Agency’s latest achievement—a future space shuttle mission.
There was, however, a matter on which Boland would not recede: the covert Nicaragua operation. He didn’t like it, and his friend House Speaker O’Neill hated it, too, and was a missionary in his opposition.
O’Neill’s aunt Eunice Tolan, who had died the previous year at ninety-one, had been a Maryknoll nun. The Maryknoll missionary order exerted a profound and almost mystical influence on O’Neill. With his aunt gone, another Maryknoller, Peggy Healy, who was based in Nicaragua, corresponded with O’Neill. She painted a picture of Nicaragua torn by civil war—a war encouraged, supported and masterminded by the CIA. Politics was a world of shifting sands, loyalties and values, but nuns and priests spoke the truth, O’Neill believed.
“I believe every word,” he told an aide after one two-hour meeting with Sister Healy. He spoke with absolute fervor. The covert war conjured up all the negative feelings of the Ugly American and CIA manipulation. O’Neill recalled the United Fruit Company, the American entity that had given rise to the appellation “banana republic.” Covert support for the contras cast the United States in that older role of neo-colonialist exploiter.
Boland could accept the Administration’s goal of trying to stop Nicaragua from exporting its fight to El Salvador, but it was clear that the CIA was supporting camps in Honduras from which the contra resistance staged hit-and-run missions into Nicaragua. His select committee of nine Democrats and five Republicans, carefully chosen by O’Neill and Boland, represented the strategic center of the House of Representatives. Any action from that committee would almost certainly be approved by the full House. Boland wanted to cut the funding for the Nicaragua operation completely, and he had the backing of his committee. Goldwater was seeking some middle ground between Boland and full funding. In the House-Senate conference in August 1982 it was agreed to include language that prohibited the CIA and the Defense Department from furnishing military equipment, training or support to anyone “for the purpose of overthrowing the Government of Nicaragua.”
The language was kept secret in the authorization bill and was approved by both the Senate and the House.
But on November 1, 1982, Boland read Newsweek’s election-week cover story, “America’s Secret War, Target: Nicaragua.” The article said that the covert operation had expanded into “a larger plan to undermine the Sandinista government.” Casey, appearing before Boland’s committee, claimed that the chief aim of the operation was still arms interdiction. Great success had been achieved, he said. The contra force had grown to 4,000. That was eight times the initial 500-man force that had been proposed the year before. This growth, Casey argued, was based on the widespread hatred of the Sandinistas. Central America did not want Communism, and this was the clearest measurable manifestation of that sentiment.
Boland was angered. Somewhere, as the authority had passed from the President to Langley, through the ideological prism of Casey with the support of the Administration, to the covert operators and the CIA stations in Central America, and finally into the hands of the contra leaders and their fighters, a massive change had taken place. Boland decided to go public. On December 8, 1982, he read on the House floor his phrase prohibiting the use of funds to overthrow the Nicaraguan government. It was quickly tagged the “Boland Amendment.” The least secret covert operation was now officially public. As an amendment to the Intelligence Authorization Act the language passed unanimously, 411 to 0.
Moynihan too was becoming increasingly disturbed, and Dewey Clarridge was more and more part of the problem. He had come to brief the Senate committee in secret, placing a map of Nicaragua before the senators. He had explained a plan to split Nicaragua in half: an east side and a west side, just like New York City, or Beirut, to be more accurate. As Clarridge told it, the CIA-backed contras would take the east side, and the Sandinistas would be left with the capital, Managua, and the west side. Moynihan thought this was mad. The CIA had only fifty people running the operation. The splitting of the country would be a major military feat.
Moynihan could imagine cartoonist Herblock’s rendition of the scene, the gung-ho shape of Clarridge laying out his fantasy behind closed doors, perhaps cutting the map with scissors, demonstrating the ease with which the division would take place—all playing to a bunch of beefy, sleepy legislators with long cigars.
Goldwater leaned over to Moynihan and said sarcastically, “Sounds like war to me!”
Moynihan nodded. What could they do? It was all top secret.
In the following weeks, Moynihan heard no more. Apparently the Clarridge plan had gone nowhere, but Moynihan had lost his confidence in them all. Clarridge reflected Casey, and Casey the Administration. The operation was becoming a curse.
On December 9, the day after the Boland proposal passed the House unanimously, Casey came to the Senate committee to argue that arms interdiction remained the primary goal, but that the CIA was hoping to “harass” and pressure the Nicaraguan government to become “more democratic” and perhaps to accept some moderates into the government.
Moynihan felt there was a question of political literacy. “If you say these people, the Sandinistas,” he told Casey “are the people you say they are, and I’m prepared to believe you, then they won’t become more democratic…. You can overthrow them or leave them alone, but you can’t do this in-between thing.” And how, Moynihan wondered, can you draw the lines between harassment and an effort to overthrow them? To the Sandinistas it probably all looks the same—most unfriendly activity.
His goals, Casey said, were to stop the spread of Communism and to make the Nicaraguan government pay a high price for its choice. The CIA wanted to keep the Nicaraguan government “off balance,” he explained.
The word hung in the air.
Moynihan saw that the Administration was looking for a way to make its enterprise appear just one degree more severe than a harsh diplomatic note. But what about the contras themselves? Moynihan asked. They are fighting to overthrow the government and gain power for themselves. They are not, could not, be fighting just to interdict arms. No one would do that.
His question was not answered. Casey simply repeated that the CIA had to work with what was available: the CIA was supporting the contras, it had not created them.
Moynihan was by now very uncomfortable. The Administration and the Congress were supporting an operation that wouldn’t work and was heading for disaster. He wrote to Casey saying that the Senate committee supported the “Boland Amendment.” Familiar with Casey’s lawyerly dodges, Moynihan said he expected the CIA to conform to both the letter and the spirit of its language. Moynihan introduced the Boland measure in the Senate, and it was passed.
Casey’s reaction was simple: the new language did not prohibit anything they were already doing. It was a lawyer’s game, divining “purpose,” it had to do with state of mind, something elusive, an unavoidable, perhaps even useful ambiguity. He told the White House there would be no problems, and on December 21, 1982, Reagan signed the Boland Amendment into law.
Casey’s CIA counsel, Stan Sporkin, immediately assembled the best agency lawyers at Langley. Even though it was almost the Christmas holiday season, Sporkin said they had to come up with something at once.
“This thing is going to come back and bite us in the ass like nothing you’ve ever seen,” he said. Congress would be watching from the CIA’s back pocket on the Boland Amendment. It could be a “Trojan Horse,” he said. It was just short of a setup for the agency. “They’ll be watching, looking for a violation,” Sporkin explained. He wanted ideas on compliance.
The other lawyers resisted, saying the law was an attempt to enforce a negative; the agency just had to make sure nothing was done “for the purpose” of overthrowing the Sandinistas. “Well,” said one agency lawyer, “we can do it for all other purposes.”
“We can’t be cute,” Sporkin said. He said they had to have a broader notion of their task. The contra operation, he noted, was important at the White House and for their Director. The lawyers had an obligation. This, he said, is what counseling is all about, preventing problems, not just responding to them. He drafted a tough list of dos and don’ts for Casey to issue to the field. It reminded everyone that the operation was not to “overthrow,” and that none of the normal means of executing a coup—particularly assassination—could be supported or employed, directly or indirectly. Assassination was already banned by executive order, but Sporkin felt it did not hurt to restate it.
“Stan, you don’t know how to write,” Casey said, and he reworked the language, making it tougher. They could live with this.
The Director of Operations, John Stein, thought the list of prohibitions and guidelines was a terrific idea to protect them all, and Casey approved sending it in a cable to the Honduras station, which was overseeing the operation and the contra camps. The single-spaced cable of several pages took the Boland Amendment with faithful literalness: nothing should be done—no equipment, training, support, meetings, conversations—specifically “for the purpose of” overthrowing the government of Nicaragua. Contra leaders or fighters who talked about using CIA assistance for such purposes had to be cut off.
To emphasize the Administration’s seriousness about arms interdiction, President Reagan signed off on a separate top-secret finding for Guatemala, which shares a border of nearly one hundred miles with El Salvador. This finding was to permit the gathering of information and to act on the arms flows along that border. There were reports that weapons were being transferred in trucks supposedly carrying fruit; the trucks were bonded and could not be searched at the border. Sophisticated detection stations were built to sound an alarm when a truck with large concentrations of weapons-grade metal passed. A building was erected and about sixty men trained for the monitoring. A few shipments of arms were stopped, but word about the detection stations leaked out, and little more was discovered. The cost of the detection operation was more than $1 million.
The National Security Agency communications intercepts were not yielding the evidence Casey wanted to demonstrate that Nicaragua was supporting the arms flow to the Salvadoran rebels. These leftist rebels used their radios skillfully, keeping their communications short, using one-time code pads, not using the air except when absolutely necessary, and observing radio silence with professional discipline at all other times, he concluded. Other times the rebels stayed off the airwaves altogether, using land telephone lines that had to be tapped to intercept. Or at times they used couriers and runners. The rebels had better communications security than the Salvadoran military. Cubans, perhaps even Soviet advisers, were behind this, thus depriving Casey of the kind of convincing evidence that could have won congressional and public support for the operation.
“The hardest thing in this world to prove is what is self-evident,” he said many times, but he didn’t have the goods, and many in his own agency were not sure this proof existed, at least on a scale to justify the Nicaragua covert action.
Senator Leahy decided to visit Central America for a first-hand look. All the world is a fingerbowl for an aggressive senator from the Intelligence Committee, and Leahy was anxious to plunge an exparte digit or two into Casey’s war. To avoid partisan crossfire Leahy asked Goldwater’s staff director, Rob Simmons, to accompany him. Simmons had a special session with DDCI John McMahon to make it clear that the trip was not a junket. They wanted to go into detail with the station chiefs in four key countries: Honduras, where the major contra operation was run; El Salvador, where the leftist rebels were threatening; Guatemala, where the CIA was also trying to stop the arms flow under the separate finding; and Panama, where the CIA had a super-secret training site for the contras.
Leahy, Simmons, three other Senate staffers, a military escort officer and a CIA legislative liaison officer from Langley made up the traveling party. Casey had requested that the CIA have someone on the trip and chose Burton L. Hutchings, an experienced officer who knew the station chief in Panama. The others joked that he was “the eyes and ears of Langley.”
Based on the CIA briefings and CIA promises, Leahy had formed an idea of what to expect: the contras were to stay in small units; the contras would not capture and hold territory; they had pledged to work to prevent atrocities; former Somoza-regime war criminals were to be kept out of the leadership. The CIA was to be once, even twice removed from actual operations.
After a routine visit to the interdiction site in Guatemala, the seven men flew to Tegucigalpa, the capital of Honduras, and stayed at the plush residence of the ambassador. Leahy came to like the station chief, who seemed serious and informed.
The CIA had set up a separate base in a Tegucigalpa safe house to manage the contras program. The chief of the base was a former Army Special Forces lieutenant colonel named Ray Doty. He had a direct communications link to CIA headquarters—“a dedicated point-to-point circuit,” in communications jargon, with a scrambled top-secret code. Though Doty was subordinate to the station chief in the capital, the base was the operational arm of the covert action. Doty had run paramilitary training in the CIA’s war in Laos during the Vietnam War.
Doty, a man in his late forties, said at his briefing that the training camps in Honduras were the best he had ever seen. Of the seven contra combat units, Doty explained, five had been sent across the border into Nicaragua. He brought out a map of Nicaragua showing vast areas of the country progressively shaded, forecasting the combat units’ movement south. These combat units were to link up with those coming up from the south through Costa Rica.
“Wait a minute, wait a minute,” Leahy interrupted. That was a link-up covering more than 200 miles, a sweep across the eastern half of Nicaragua. This had the look of the old Clarridge plan to split the country. “And this looks like you’re planning to overthrow the Sandinistas,” Leahy said.
“No,” Doty replied, “absolutely not.” He knew that Congress had prohibited the expenditure of money “for the purpose” of ousting the government. Casey’s cable was there, posted on a bulletin board.
“Well, what the hell do you think your plan is going to do if it succeeds?” Leahy asked.
“It will break the overland route between this eastern side and Managua, which is near the west coast,” Doty said. The east coast, on the Caribbean, receives supplies by sea from Cuba and the Soviets. With the overland route severed, the Cubans and the Soviets would have to use the Panama Canal and come up the Pacific, or western side. Thus the arms flow is being interdicted, he said.
“Wait again,” Leahy said. How was this going to look to the Sandinistas, to have their country divided in two—split down the middle—and for the United States to be saying we are not trying to overthrow their government?
Doty retorted that since El Salvador did not face the Caribbean, and had just a coast on the Pacific facing southwest, the operation was straight arms interdiction—cutting the flow from Cuba to Nicaragua to El Salvador.
Technically Doty might be correct, Leahy realized, but he was not buying. What control is the CIA able to exercise over the contra combat units? Leahy and the staff members asked.
Since the CIA has given the contras the communications equipment, Doty said, the CIA has the frequencies and listens in secretly to see whether the contras are adhering to the plans and operation that have been outlined.
What if the contras don’t say everything on the air?
Well, Doty said, we’re recruiting people within the contra force to spy for us and they’ll report back.
How many do you have recruited?
“We’ve got a line on one or two,” Doty said, “but we’re just getting started.”
How will these “spies” report?
Face-to-face meetings, Doty explained.
They’ll just walk into your safe house here, risking their lives? So you’ll see them, say, twice a year?
“Hey,” Doty said, “we’ll work it out.”
Leahy felt this must have been what it was like in Saigon during the early 1960s, a slush fund of good intentions, big plans and small steps toward war.
In the U.S. Embassy in Tegucigalpa, officials told Leahy and the others that the embassy was staking the outcome on some kind of negotiations. They expressed concern about the small war that was being ginned up around them.
Next Leahy had a private meeting with the Honduran armed-forces chief, General Gustavo A´lvarez, who was in charge of the Honduran end of the operation.
“Hell,” Álvarez told Leahy, “we’ll have our soldiers in Managua by Christmas.”
“Hey, wait,” Leahy said. U.S. policy is specifically designed not to overthrow.
“Oh, yeah,” Álvarez said, but wouldn’t it be great to do it anyway?
The group flew to Panama. Dewey Clarridge had left just the day before. Using the alias “Dewey Maroni,” he was visiting the CIA stations in the region. He would arrive with cigars and brandy, the agency equivalent of pressing the flesh, keeping the station chiefs up much of the night reviewing professional and personal matters and recounting “old war” and “new war” stories.
Leahy’s briefing with the station chief was scheduled for the next day, but he went in as a matter of courtesy to say hello and introduce himself. The Senator said he wanted particular information on the Nicaragua program, specifically on its dimensions—time, money and numbers of people involved.
“Division chief has instructed me not to answer,” the station chief replied, referring to Clarridge.
Leahy and Simmons were astonished, and tried to get through to McMahon in Washington without luck.
The next day the station chief repeated his instructions.
“I intend to get answers and will stay until I do,” Leahy said.
The station wouldn’t let Leahy or Simmons get a message out to Casey or McMahon. Leahy threatened to use the regular telephone to call McMahon. That could be a security breach, particularly if Leahy unleashed his temper over an unsecure line.
By 11 P.M. Leahy got a secure message out.
Seven hours later, about 6 A.M., there was a knock on the door of his hotel room.
There was Clarridge, wearing what Leahy thought could only be described as an Italian silk safari suit, custom-made jacket and pants. There were no pleasantries, and the hotel radio was turned on to thwart possible eavesdropping.
“Who do we have here?” Leahy asked sarcastically. “Tinker, tailor, soldier…” Pause. “…sailor.” As in the children’s rhyme, not “spy” as in the Le Carré novel.
“You know me,” Clarridge said. “You have some questions, Senator?”
“As a member of the Senate Intelligence Committee, my oversight is not limited to Washington, D.C.,” Leahy said formally. “When I travel to the stations I expect answers, and in this case I had the assurances of John McMahon.” Leahy explained that they had a cover story to give to the news media so that the trip into Panama would not be linked to the contra operation.
Clarridge sat down on the bed. The strongman leader of Panama, General Manuel Antonio Noriega, the former head of Panamanian military intelligence, has for some time been a key provider and facilitator for the CIA, Clarridge explained reluctantly. But Noriega plays both sides and has cozy relations with the Cubans—an advantage and disadvantage to the CIA because sometimes Noriega provides good Cuban intelligence. Of course, there’s no telling what he’s providing the Cubans. In all, this is a deadly game. Nonetheless, Noriega is going to allow the CIA to set up a contra training facility here. The facility has to be kept secret at almost any cost. If it leaks, Noriega will have grounds to cancel and refuse to allow the training.
Why train contras in Panama, which is three countries south of El Salvador? What does that have to do with arms interdiction?
To prepare contras to hit Nicaragua from the south through Costa Rica, Clarridge replied.
Leahy pictured the map of the region: there was Costa Rica some 300 miles from El Salvador. This was clearly not arms interdiction.
The group’s next and final stop was to be El Salvador, but the NSA forwarded a message to Panama about a report that some of the right-wingers in El Salvador were planning to shoot down a U.S. congressional plane. Senator Christopher Dodd, who was also flying into El Salvador at about the same time, was apparently the target. Simmons suggested they put a sign on their plane saying: “Don’t Shoot, right-wing senator’s assistant on board.”
Back in Washington, Leahy and the staffers put together a long top-secret report. It contained memoranda of conversations from each of the meetings. The conclusion was inescapable: the operation was bigger in nearly every respect than it had been described. Not just the numbers of contras—now heading for 5,500—but everything about it was big. The U.S. military had undertaken intelligence-gathering efforts costing millions of dollars; support or training or interdiction efforts were under way throughout Central America. All of Central America—Guatemala, Costa Rica, El Salvador, Honduras, even Panama—was being knit together into an anti-Nicaragua alliance.
On the ground, the plan was to split the country east-west by summer, attack from the north through Honduras and the south through Costa Rica, and be in Managua by Christmas. It was war from all points of the compass. The operation was totally different from what had been presented by the CIA briefers in Washington. It was obvious that covert policy was frequently out ahead of or overriding stated or implied U.S. foreign policy. A regional war was getting off the ground, and much of the planning was unspoken and subtle.
At the next Senate committee meeting, Leahy asked for fifteen minutes to present a summary.
“Oh shit,” Goldwater whispered, “that guy talks too much.”
Enders was attempting to keep the Nicaragua operation embedded, if not hidden, in the larger Central American strategy. He wanted to keep the covert action from looming too large with the public, with Congress or even within the Administration. In his estimation, Casey was not a crass Cold Warrior and they had been working together with a set of broad concepts—democracy, economic assistance, covert action. Enders had carefully designed the mix so that Vietnam sensibilities would not be shocked. Tailored this way, Administration policy was marketable to Congress. But the perspective had changed in the White House, largely because of the new national-security adviser, Bill Clark.
“Too little, too late,” Clark was saying. He had a sense that the Administration policy was going under.
Enders argued that Congress had the hammer. Those in Congress who fully opposed the covert operation constituted a minority; so did those who fully supported it. For Congress to be held, the 10 to 15 percent in the middle had to be convinced. “The only way to do that is to demonstrate that Administration policy is the road to peace and settlement,” Enders said. “Negotiations cannot be abandoned.” Realism dictated that Administration policy be tailored to the Congress.
Clark said that if the middle-of-the-roaders and the Democrats were confronted in a national debate, they could not remain in opposition. He would relish such a debate. He wanted to discipline Congress, to remind it that the President could go talk directly to the voters. Public opinion could be mobilized.
Smelling trouble, Enders set down his thoughts, urging the maintenance of a regional “two-track” strategy. In Nicaragua, that meant continuing covert support to the contras but attempting to force the Sandinistas to negotiate with the contras. In El Salvador, it meant continuing the support to the government and Duarte, plus forcing negotiations between the government and the leftist guerrillas. The goal would be a broad settlement that would remove the forces of the Soviet Union, Cuba and the United States from the region.
Clark obtained a copy of Enders’s memo, and he was boiling. Enders was trying to cap his career with some breakthrough, a professional success at the expense of consistency in Administration policy, Clark felt. No way was the United States going to pull out of Central America and abandon its friends. To Clark, this could be a repeat of Carter’s mistake—saying one thing, doing another. He sent Enders’s report to the President, arguing that it showed Enders was not adhering to Administration policy.
On February 10, 1983, Enders’s memo leaked to the news media, and inside the White House he was accused of incipient defeatism. Clark made it clear that not only did he himself have a distaste for negotiations, but he was not sure the White House wanted the centrist congressional support. A major political battle might best serve the President.
Casey told Enders that he remained skeptical of a negotiating strategy, but that he was not opposed to the attempt and saw that it provided the Administration and the CIA good cover in the intelligence committees. Then in March, Casey called Enders.
“Tom,” Casey said, “I know you got your difficulties, but in addition to Bill Clark you got another guy after you. Mike Deaver.”
“Thanks for the tip, buddy,” Enders replied, realizing that that meant Nancy Reagan.
Casey had heard Deaver referring to Enders as “tea and crumpets” and the “striped-pants set.” That was fatal.
Casey was pleased to see the White House preparing to step out front on Central America. In fact, Bill Clark seemed to be nicely reorienting foreign policy.
One of Casey’s chief pipelines into the White House was Reagan speechwriter Anthony R. Dolan, winner of the 1978 Pulitzer Prize for investigative reporting. Casey had brought Dolan to the 1980 Reagan campaign. Dolan was a true believer in the conservative cause, a protégé of William F. Buckley, Jr., and had seen the 1980 presidential campaign as the final game of the World Series for Western civilization. He had landed in the President’s speechwriting office. Though he was kept leashed by Jim Baker, Dolan filled a role as the Reagan attack dog. A steady stream of notes, ideas and phone calls flowed between the DCI and Dolan.
Dolan admired Casey’s cooler version of true conservative commitment. He admired the way Casey took criticism, which Dolan felt was comparable to the criticism of General Grant for taking casualties in pursuing General Robert E. Lee. Shots had to be fired and political hell paid on occasion. Casey did not brood about his press clippings. He was too busy. Happily, he was a man who found the world, its books, its ideas and its challenges more interesting than he found himself.
Casey promoted Dolan’s talents to Clark. Dolan was assigned a relatively routine speech that the President was to give to a convention of fundamentalist ministers. In reworking it, Dolan believed that finally he had tapped into the President’s subconscious.
On March 8, 1983, at 3:04 P.M., the President addressed the National Association of Evangelicals in the Citrus Crown Ballroom of the Sheraton Twin Towers Hotel in Orlando, Florida. Quoting the Declaration of Independence, C. S. Lewis, Whittaker Chambers and Tom Paine, the President called the Soviet Union “an evil empire.”
This created something of a sensation. Later that month, the President unveiled his Strategic Defense Initiative, or “Star Wars” plan, to defend against Soviet missiles by deploying weapons in space. The Soviets branded Reagan a “lunatic.”
In this atmosphere of fervent anti-Communism, Casey could survive, even flourish, but not Enders. The battleground was Nicaragua. Reagan, Clark and Casey were playing hardball, and were questioning the patriotism of anyone who wanted to continue a dialogue. Enders viewed the proper policy as one that would get the Soviets and the Cubans out of Nicaragua. But U.S. policy now was clearly to get the Sandinistas out also.
Enders was removed and sent to Spain as U.S. ambassador. He took several months to get out of town, and there were a number of major going-away dinners. Casey attended them all. As if his presence was not statement enough, Casey rose at one to give a toast. He spoke well of Enders’s work, emphasizing his distinguished career, projecting a sense of long association with Enders, the things they had been through together. He was not particularly articulate, but he was empathetic and warm, making it clear that he and Enders would always be friends.
By the spring of 1983, John McMahon’s own worries about Casey, the CIA and the contras were increasing. The ranking House Intelligence Committee Republican, Ken Robinson, braced McMahon one day about the growing number of contras. Why had 500 grown to 5,500? Robinson, an Administration and CIA loyalist, was almost harsh. McMahon answered that the intelligence committees were being fully briefed. But, he explained, the members were losing track because often months elapsed between hearings. It was easy to imagine that the latest update had been only last week. But in the intervening months the contras might have hit a village and signed up a hundred more, and a hundred more in the next village. They could not turn away new recruits, this expression of popular support. Sensing the skepticism, McMahon acknowledged the agency’s active recruiting program to sign up young fighters with the contras. Of course the numbers were growing. But Robinson was not happy, and McMahon figured that his testiness meant the Nicaragua program was headed for further trouble.
McMahon also appeared before a closed session of the Senate Intelligence Committee, where there was sniping from all quarters—suspicion, even hostility, about each number, as well as about the program’s broad intentions and goals.
Leahy jumped hard on McMahon: “You guys are setting yourselves up for a fall.” The operation was going to get out of hand and it probably wouldn’t succeed. “No one is going to blame the White House,” Leahy said, “or the State Department or the Pentagon for this.” When this all fails, Leahy said, the CIA will be blamed. It’s their war, not Reagan’s war, or even Casey’s war, but the CIA’s war. Reagan, Casey, McMahon will be out of office someday, but the agency will have to remain. The Intelligence Committee has some obligation to protect the institutions of American intelligence-gathering, Leahy said. “So do you.”
Yes, McMahon said, he agreed. The contra operation is going to get the agency in trouble, deep trouble, he said. It’s going to get the Congress in trouble, too. McMahon turned red and began waving his hands for emphasis. He had been there in the 1970s when the agency was driven right down into the pits with public opinion, the press, the Congress. Its entire mission, he said, was endangered every time it was exposed as the implementer of U.S. foreign policy.
Deep emotions began to pour forth. McMahon said this exposure would not just hurt his buddies in the agency, or his particular notion of how they ought to gather intelligence and run operations, but would destroy the value of anything the CIA might do. The reputation of the CIA was on the line. No less. At the same time, they had to go along with what the President and the Director ordered. They ordered and supported this operation each step of the way. So the task was to find a way to work themselves out of this hole—to protect the CIA but obey the orders. And they, the senators on the oversight committee, should realize that he understood those high stakes. He needed their help, he said.
There was silence in the hearing room when McMahon had finished.
With the expansion of the secret war, the CIA was running out of funds for the contras. Casey decided to reprogram some money from the secret contingency fund. This “put and take” fund of about $50 million was always available in an emergency, or when Congress was not in session. After the emergency, or when Congress reconvened, the money would be authorized and the fund replenished. Several million dollars was left over from the failed operation to provide security and intelligence assistance to Bashir Gemayel. Those funds were reprogrammed to the contras. But there was a delay of at least three weeks or perhaps six weeks, depending on how the calculation was made, before the paperwork arrived at the Senate Intelligence Committee, informing it of the transfer.
Given the mounting sensitivities about the operation, the delay in giving the routine notification to the committee renewed feelings that the CIA was not leveling with its overseers. A secret hearing was scheduled, and the CIA comptroller, Daniel Childs, was called to testify. Childs, a former aide on the committee to Senator Inouye, said that the several million was just a small item and he had bigger matters on his mind. Inouye, a moderate Democrat, was angry.
Some of the Democrats saw it as an opportunity to string Casey up.
But Senator Malcolm Wallop found another angle. The record showed that Casey had been out of town at the time of the disbursement. It was McMahon who had not acted promptly. This was almost too good to be true. Wallop was delighted. McMahon, the admin officer par excellence, had not moved the paper on his desk, a bureaucratic crime of the first order. Wallop’s colleagues who were hunting for Casey’s scalp on this had come up instead with McMahon’s. McMahon had to explain his slip to each of the key senators. In the course of this, he realized he was not up to speed on the Nicaragua operation. He had not realized the magnitude of Casey’s and Clarridge’s undertakings from one end of Central America to the other. He was the deputy director and he had been bypassed, there was no other word for it. The situation was intolerable.
He went to Casey to explain that he could function as deputy only if he was in the loop. There could be no repeat of the Inman experience. Neither of them wanted that. Casey stared and then agreed; new procedures were established, the paperwork would pass through McMahon.
Seeing more only increased McMahon’s unease. In his best I-am-loyal-to-you style, he urged that they try to find another way; perhaps now that the operation was out in the open, it belonged in the hands of the Defense Department. It did, after all, have the appearance of war.
Casey didn’t like the idea. If the CIA couldn’t handle the tough questions, if it had to shuffle them off to the military, the paramilitary capability that he had vowed to restore would be a joke. These operations were the hard calls. In addition, the military didn’t have the stomach for such an operation. On top of all that, a superpower could not take on a pipsqueak nation like Nicaragua with a frontal military assault.
McMahon argued passionately, insisting that he was on Casey’s side. He had been there in the 1970s, during the investigations, the low morale, the crack-up and the crippling of the agency that Casey had halted.
Casey suggested that they both talk to others on the National Security Council. The idea of passing the operation to the Defense Department was presented to Weinberger, Bill Clark and George Shultz, who had replaced Haig as Secretary of State the previous year.
Weinberger’s response was simple: over his dead body would the Defense Department take over. He was determined to keep the military out of anything that did not have the full backing of Congress and the public. And this operation already smelled of no confidence.
The Secretary of State said he found the covert approach manageable on the diplomatic front. That would become impossible if the Pentagon took over.
Clark agreed that the operation was best in the hands of the CIA. He praised Casey’s efforts. Clarridge was performing miracles. Clark saw victory on the horizon.
The President was effusive. “Bill and the CIA are doing the right thing,” Reagan said.
Goldwater instructed the Senate committee lawyers to see whether the operation could not be funded directly and openly through the Defense Department. The lawyers found about a dozen legal obstacles, and Goldwater concluded that he was stuck. A Defense Department military operation would be war, it would require a congressional declaration. Who wanted to declare war on Nicaragua? Covert action had that one advantage, even if the covert was a fiction, the emperor’s latest new clothes. Though it was not recognized under international law and various treaties, nations were going to conduct covert action anyway. So no nation was likely to call the U.S. on it.
Over in the House, Boland wondered whether a fence of some sort might not be built in Honduras to prevent arms flowing from Nicaragua into El Salvador. The cost estimate on Boland’s idea—privately dubbed the Boland Line—indicated that it might cost $300 million to $500 million. It was quickly dropped.
Casey reported the President’s tribute to the CIA to McMahon, who acquiesced. The Nicaragua operation was with the CIA to stay. Casey, after all, had let him make his pitch. Now, under the rules of loyalty up and loyalty down, the situation required that McMahon support Casey.
Now, McMahon and covert action bumped heads again. Exiles from the small country of Suriname, a former Dutch colony on the north coast of South America just above Brazil, had come to the agency seeking support. These Dutch exiles wanted nothing less than to overthrow the authoritarian government of Lieutenant Colonel Desi Bouterse, who had pro-Communist leanings and had brutally executed fifteen people, including his chief political opponents and some journalists and union leaders.
Casey was all for the idea; Bouterse was nothing but leftist trouble, and the Dutch exiles seemed credible. But Casey and McMahon agreed that they needed an independent evaluation. The Directorate of Operations drafted an “enabling finding” that authorized a limited covert action to see whether CIA support of the exiles made sense, whether they had a chance to oust Bouterse. An actual operation to attempt the overthrow or to provide direct lethal support to the exiles would require a separate, regular finding. President Reagan signed the “enabling finding,” and several hundred thousand dollars was allocated to send a CIA team into Suriname to gather intelligence and do a coup-feasibility study.
McMahon briefed the matter to the Senate Intelligence Committee. He was met by a chorus of “You’ve got to be kidding.” Why, several senators asked, is the Reagan Administration considering a coup in a country that has no significance? The Suriname people were primitive and gentle, much like Tahitians in the South Pacific. The population was about 350,000. That’s the size of Tucson, Arizona. Goldwater, particularly, was incensed, declaring, “That’s the dumbest fucking idea I ever heard of in my life.”
McMahon replied that the Bouterse government was talking with the Cubans and the government of Grenada, a tiny Caribbean island also led by a leftist government. The CIA had a group of Dutch exiles who would do the work.
When had a U.S.-supported coup such as this ever worked?
McMahon had to go back to the CIA-backed 1954 coup in Guatemala to find an answer. He made it clear that the enabling finding meant only that the Administration was looking into the possibility, and that a go-ahead would require another finding and the committee would be notified.
It wasn’t enough. After the briefing, the committee agreed to send a letter of protest to President Reagan, telling him of its opposition to covert action in Suriname.
Goldwater sent a personal message to Reagan saying, in effect, “Do you really need this?”
In the House committee also there was overwhelming bipartisan opposition. When the CIA team did return, they had little intelligence and reported that a coup was probably not achievable.
The plan was dropped, but McMahon was shaken up on the play. He rededicated himself to keeping the CIA out of comic-book operations.