AFTER SETTLING INTO HIS NEW OFFICE on the seventh floor of the State Department, Tony Motley called Clarridge. “I’m devoting a whole day to it, and I want to come out there.” Motley wanted the full dose.
Clarridge brought out maps, lists, charts, files. He was a walking encyclopedia on the operation, the detailed geography, hills, roads, weather, and every important contra personality. “A real asshole,” Clarridge said many times of the various contra leaders. There were, however, many tough fighters, for example “these animals down south.” That was Pastora, Commander Zero. On occasion, Clarridge would remark that someone else was a “good guy.”
In some respects, the contras were the Hell’s Angels of Central America, but, overall, Motley was impressed. Clarridge had created an army and had a personal, hands-on working knowledge that was staggering. “How come you know so much,” Motley asked, “for a guy coming out of Europe, the Middle East, dealing with ragheads?”
“These people are Mediterranean Latin,” Clarridge replied. “I’ve dealt with Italians, North Africa. I know the type. They tell you what you want to hear, they figure six ways to say no, they have a love-hate relationship with America.”
So, Motley asked, what’s next?
“Fucking Casey wants something that makes news,” Clarridge said, explaining that they were all under tremendous pressure to get the contras to come out of the hills. Beating bands of Sandinistas in the mountains was no longer enough, he complained. Casey wanted the contras to “do the urban bit.” Clarridge quoted Casey as saying, “Get something.” This “news” was not just going to be for domestic political consumption in the United States. It was to establish credibility within Nicaragua for the contras.
This sounded reasonable to Motley.
We can’t just fucking jump from the hills to the cities, Clarridge said with exasperation. It is much more complicated. The ragtag contras wouldn’t do any better than any hill people going into any city. It takes them forty days to get into a city, creating a resupply nightmare.
So what are you going to do?
Clarridge smiled. There was a way, always some way. He’d find some one-time operation, something to make a big splash. War was hell and you had to improvise.
Casey was determined to do everything possible to protect the Nicaragua operation. That meant soothing his ailing relations with two potential saboteurs—Congress and the media.
For the past two and a half years, he realized, he had had the wrong man handling these sensitive relations. He was J. William Doswell, who headed the CIA’s Office of External Affairs. A lifelong Democrat who had supported Reagan in 1980, Doswell, fifty-three, had no previous intelligence background. He had been a newspaper publisher and one of the most successful lobbyists in the gentlemanly Virginia legislature. But Doswell had less enthusiasm for the Nicaragua operation than Casey, who no longer could afford to have a salesman who had any doubt about their product. Doswell thought Casey’s disdain for Congress and his confrontational style counterproductive.
He was exhausted and left. Casey decided to put the agency’s best foot forward with two new separate high-powered offices, one for Congress and another for the media. Both would be headed by covert operators—practitioners of the art they would have to sell.
Casey picked Clair Elroy George, a survivor of twenty-seven years in the DO, as the new head of congressional relations. George had a good, outgoing sense of humor and was strong on CIA tradecraft. Within the agency George was an old-warhorse symbol of the CIA at its best and proudest.
In 1975, in the midst of the Church and Pike investigations, Richard Welch, the CIA station chief in Athens, had been gunned down in an ambush outside his home. Though the residence of the station chief was well known in Athens—it was even pointed out on local bus tours—the killing generated a surge of public sympathy for the CIA. Welch’s CIA position had been published by disaffected former agents caught up in the anti-CIA fervor of the times. But Welch, dead, rendered a final service to his CIA. He became a martyr, his body arriving in the United States to live television coverage, his full-military-honors funeral attended by CIA Director William Colby and President Ford, his caisson the same one that had carried the body of the slain President John F. Kennedy.
Despite the danger of the Athens station, the CIA had sent a man into the breach. It was Clair George, whose presence lobbying the Congress would be a useful reminder of bravery. George accepted the job, went to the committees, and promised them a whole new ball game of cooperation and mutual trust.
About this time, George V. Lauder, the No. 2 in the Inspector General’s Office, the in-house watchdog at the CIA, got word that he was wanted in Casey’s office.
Lauder was one of the original breed of covert operators, going back to the salad days of the 1950s. He had a law degree and nearly thirty-two years with the CIA. A tall, rumpled man who wore clothes that looked like college remnants, Lauder was a true believer in the CIA’s mission and achievements. A clumsy man who often spoke too loudly and with exaggerated cadence and language, he was not the “gray man,” but he was nonetheless a seasoned, dedicated spy.
Lauder felt that Casey had been a breath of much-needed fresh air for the CIA, immediately accepting of the undercover, behind-the-scenes role—the very opposite of Turner. When Turner was DCI and Lauder the deputy Latin America division chief, Lauder had been unable to convince him that the CIA was not off on its own, running a secret covert operation in Jamaica without the DCI’s knowledge. Lauder had failed to convince Turner to keep a meager $1,500 annual-retainer payment for a foreign newspaper editor who assisted the CIA—all because the congressional oversight committees were nervous. Casey had eliminated the atmosphere of distrust inside.
When Lauder entered Casey’s office, he knew it was time for an assignment change but was not sure what Casey had in mind.
“Congratulations,” Casey said to Lauder.
“What for?” Lauder asked suspiciously.
“I’ve selected you to be my new director of public affairs.”
“What did I do to deserve that?”
Casey said that the agency needed someone to handle the news media—to stop damaging stories. It might have been a mistake to close things off so entirely, because the news media was getting access to CIA information through the Congress or the White House, State and Defense Departments.
Lauder said he had spent a lifetime avoiding the news media—had even kept his own CIA status secret from a relative who was a newspaper reporter.
You’re selected, Casey said firmly.
Lauder effectively clicked his heels.
A DO officer instinctively savored a moment like this: the call from the top. In such obedience there was a comforting, almost exhilarating recognition of being a part. Lauder had risked his life many times out in the field. The press room could be no more dangerous.
Casey knew he would get his assent. That was one of the things he liked about these people in DO. And Lauder was, according to his personnel record, a staunch loyalist. But he also was a realist, and as deputy inspector general he had been involved in checking to see what arms had been interdicted in the Nicaragua covert operation. Lauder had been honest enough to say that though several caches of weapons had been discovered, the operation had not had any impact on the arms flow. “We did not find a mouse,” he had once said. But Lauder was still a supporter of the operation.
First he would have to spread the word that Casey now had an active press officer, then he would have to get to know the reporters and learn how they operated. He would make himself available, establish relationships with the reporters, try to determine who could be trusted and at least let Casey know when some story that might be trouble was in the pipeline. He would have to gather information and see if he couldn’t—recruit was not exactly the word, but it was close. Maybe handling reporters might not be too different from his previous work.
“Casey Traded Heavily in Stocks,” John McMahon read on the front page of The Washington Post the morning of June 2, 1983.
“Oh shit,” McMahon said. Casey’s annual financial disclosure form had once again provided fodder. The form showed that Casey had bought at least $1.5 million in stocks in a single twenty-six-day period. McMahon had laughed the first several times he heard the joke that “CIA” really meant Casey Investing Again. Casey had adamantly refused to put his investments in a blind trust, saying that his investment adviser of twenty years really made the decisions. All except one, when McMahon had forced Casey to sell his IBM stock or recuse himself from a major decision on agency computers. The stock then doubled in value. Casey felt it underscored his integrity.
McMahon had tried several times gently to push a blind trust. Casey refused. A crazy screening process within the agency had been set up in which McMahon and the other top officials were regularly given a list of the dozens of companies in which Casey had interests. But it was impossible to keep track, and hoots of laughter went up at Langley as memos circulated tracking the shifting sands of Casey’s portfolio (Add Delta Airlines, delete La Quinta Motor Inns, said one memo). Even Goldwater had tried, writing a sarcastic letter to Casey noting that Casey was rich enough and wouldn’t be able to take his assets with him after death. Casey replied that the Intelligence Committee members had similar access to sensitive intelligence and where were their blind trusts?
McMahon realized that the screening arrangement hadn’t worked perfectly, and research showed that thirteen companies in the Casey portfolio had done business with the CIA during the previous year, ranging from $12.00 to nearly $4 million.
Does the CIA need this? McMahon wondered. No. McMahon wanted to bring to the surface the cool sphinxlike reserve of the tax attorney in his boss.
He went to Casey. The public impression, he said, was that Casey was up here phoning his stockbroker half a dozen times a day, cavorting with Wall Street, dipping into secret intelligence to get a step up on other investors.
“It’s a goddamn lie,” Casey said.
Exactly, McMahon said. But the aroma wouldn’t go away. Casey was in an untenable position. On the one hand he was insisting that he didn’t exercise his opportunity to buy and sell stocks, that his investment adviser did it. On the other, he was insisting on retaining that unexercised option. There was no way he was going to have it both ways. So it gets down to one question: Given your habit of letting your adviser make the decisions, would it make any difference if it was a blind trust?
“Not really,” Casey answered.
“Well, goddamn do it.”
Casey gazed back stonily.
On Monday, July 18, Casey issued a public statement saying that during his first two and a half years as DCI he had had “a de facto blind trust” that had been both legal and proper. “Nevertheless, to avoid further confusion and misunderstanding, I plan to establish a formal, blind trust.”
Late in the summer, Casey left on a secret trip to Africa and the Middle East to visit the stations. He still had an almost physical need to see for himself. Like the plaza in Dallas where JFK had been shot, everything looked different, meant more, when you actually stood there. The station chiefs still needed his personal, hands-on prodding to conduct more intelligence-gathering in the field, to get out of the embassies, to expand relations with locals, to attend political-party meetings undercover.
Accompanied by half a dozen aides on a special VIP Air Force jet, Casey planned to cover eleven countries in eighteen days. After crossing the Atlantic, they stopped first in Senegal and then the Ivory Coast in West Africa. In these countries, as in all he would visit, Casey saw the heads of state or government, the chiefs of intelligence or their deputies, visited with the U.S. ambassadors, and had the station chiefs drive him around as he peppered them with questions. How far from the palace to the army barracks? To the university? Who’s the chief opposition leader? What are the KGB men like?
After West Africa, there was the 500-mile flight to Nigeria. The road from the airport into the capital, Lagos, was a sea of cars and street vendors. It took hours to traverse it. The deputy chief of Nigerian intelligence led a team that attempted to clear the way. “Imagine John McMahon trying to clear the George Washington Parkway for them,” one of Casey’s aides said. Casey’s car came to a halt. A native tapped on the window and attempted to sell the DCI a fifty-foot garden hose. “Not exactly an impulse-buy item on the way from the airport,” Casey remarked.
In Zaire, formerly the Congo, Casey met with the leader Joseph Mobutu. CIA ties with Mobutu dated back to 1960, the year the CIA had planned the assassination of the Congolese nationalist leader Patrice Lumumba. An August 25, 1960, cable to the CIA station chief from then DCI Allen Dulles stated that Lumumba’s “removal must be an urgent and prime objective and that under existing conditions this should be a high priority of our covert action.” Before the CIA plot could be effected, Lumumba was murdered by another group of Mobutu supporters. Casey had an important, personal relationship with Mobutu, and now they exchanged intelligence.
The Director wrote out some remarks in French to give at a dinner that night. “After World War Two,” he said, “I attended a dinner held by resistance leaders, and I spoke as I do now, in French. The next day’s newspaper said that Mr. Casey spoke in his native tongue. I realized that meant they thought my French was so fluent that I was a Frenchman, or perhaps that my French was so bad that they thought I was speaking English.”
The room broke up.
The party then flew to Zambia and next headed for South Africa. Casey went to the cockpit and directed the pilot to fly very low up the Zambezi River and pull up only as they passed directly over the spectacular Victoria Falls. One pass was not enough, and he requested another as he stared out the window. In Pretoria, he made the usual rounds within the government, the embassy and the station, and attended a barbecue luncheon in the countryside with a dozen of South Africa’s business executives. One of them, who knew nothing about Casey’s background, remarked afterward, “This guy is smart. He could make money in business.”
Casey admired the South African intelligence service and maintained close ties to it. South Africa appreciated Communism’s threat to their region, and had provided probably $200 million in assistance to the rebel movement of Jonas Savimbi, who was fighting the Marxist regime in Angola. Casey still hoped to obtain a repeal of the 1976 Clark Amendment which banned covert CIA assistance to Savimbi. He promised officials that the agency would join the fray as soon as possible.
Casey’s laundry had piled up in the hot climate, and he turned over nearly everything he had to the hotel’s valet service, which had promised twenty-four-hour service. By the midnight before their scheduled 6 A.M. departure his clothes were not back. His security men had to break into the hotel laundry to retrieve them so that he could stay on schedule. The next stops were Zimbabwe and then Kenya, where they arrived at about 10 P.M. Casey had two meetings that night with business acquaintances, and at breakfast the station chief was almost embarrassed by Casey’s familiarity with the country.
After a 2,200-mile flight to Cairo, Casey met with Egyptian President Mubarak and then spent hours with the station chief, who oversaw one of the biggest CIA facilities outside the United States; most of the weapons and support to the Afghan rebels flowed through Egypt. The entourage then proceeded to Turkey, which, with its borders on the Soviet Union, the Black Sea, Syria, Iraq and the Mediterranean, was, in Casey’s opinion, one of the most vital but strategically overlooked countries in the world. The final stop was a visit with King Hassan in Morocco. All of these relations were vital, and Casey was not going to let one slip by. Not only did the agency provide security and intelligence to these countries, but its favors to their leaders included providing them with the latest medicine, government airplanes, and contacts that arranged for their nationals to get an education in the United States.
Back at Andrews Air Force Base, Casey’s aides were so exhausted they almost had to be carried home. The DCI went directly to Langley.
Senator William S. Cohen, a Republican from Maine who had been on the Senate Intelligence Committee for only nine months, took an opportunity after one committee hearing to have a few words with Casey. As a Republican, Cohen wanted to support the Administration on Nicaragua. He knew that Goldwater had personally recruited him for the committee. But, Cohen added, he sensed that Casey and Goldwater could easily lose the consensus in the committee. The Goldwater compromise hung by a thread.
If you cut out the money for the Nicaragua operation, Casey said, Congress is going to be responsible for what happens.
Cohen was skittish. Casey might be right. The President had called Cohen personally. “Bill, guess what I’m calling about?” Reagan had said, and, as always, he had been very low-key and solicitous. “We’d like to get your help if we can.” Cohen had told the President that he would support the Administration but that he was concerned.
Casey told Cohen that he should visit Central America. See for yourself, go to Nicaragua, talk to the Sandinistas. They’ll talk to a United States senator.
To Cohen, a former prosecutor, going to the scene and examining witnesses were appealing. He tried always to be precise, to know the facts. To learn about the arcane world of signals intelligence, he had read through all 532 pages of The Puzzle Palace, the 1982 book on the National Security Agency by James Bamford. The answer for the Nicaragua operation wasn’t in some book or briefing, but in the field.
Cohen did not fall neatly into any point on the political spectrum, and he was a poet—his own volume, Of Sons and Seasons, had been published in 1978. He was also a fact man. In 1974 Cohen had been a key swing vote on the House Judiciary Committee that voted to impeach Nixon. Before the “smoking-gun” tape had been revealed, Cohen had spoken, in a nationally televised debate, about drawing inferences properly: “If you went to sleep on the ground outside here, and woke up with fresh snow on the ground, certainly you would reasonably conclude that snow had fallen during the night even if you did not see it.”
One of Cohen’s best friends in the Senate was Colorado Democrat Gary Hart. For several years the two had been secretly writing a spy novel, born of a late-night Senate session when they had talked about their suspicions of intelligence agencies and operatives. The novel, The Double Man, seemed destined, if not for commercial success, at least as a bipartisan novelty toy. The hero was a senator who headed an investigation into worldwide terrorism; one of the villains was the CIA Director, who kept things from the Senator’s committee and planted a woman agent, or “mole,” in the committee to report back to the CIA.
In the Senate dining room one afternoon during that summer of 1983, Cohen approached Hart, who had previously served on both the Church Committee and the Intelligence Committee. Hart had begun his run for the Democratic presidential nomination and was still way back in the pack, with only 4 percent of the Democrats favoring him for the 1984 presidential nomination.
“You know, you’ve got to broaden what you do,” Cohen chided. He proposed that Hart attach himself to some issue on which emotions ran deep—like Central America.
From his time on the Church Committee, Hart had concluded that the CIA bungled covert operations like Nicaragua. He had immersed himself in the secret 8,000-page record of the CIA assassination plots in the 1950s and 1960s, especially those against Castro. It was a macabre tale: the Kennedy brothers, Robert and John—Hart’s heroes and models—entangled in the ultimate, sordid expediency, “plausible deniability.” It was a world without official records of the planning, the approval, the implementation or the ultimate failure. But there were shattering and sickening pieces of data.
For instance, in one of the anti-Castro plots, a CIA agent code-named AM/LASH was given a ballpoint pen rigged with a hypodermic needle so fine that Castro might not notice its insertion. The CIA case officer had recommended the use of Blackleaf-40, a commercially available high-grade poison. The delivery of the assassination device took place on November 22, 1963. A CIA Inspector General’s Report of 1967, made available to the committee, noted almost off-handedly, “It is likely that at the very moment President Kennedy was shot.”
The Church Committee found no connection between the Cuban plots and the Kennedy assassination, but Hart did not believe it was coincidence. It was almost like Cohen’s morning snow on the ground. He had not seen it fall, but he knew something had happened.
Early on the morning of Thursday, September 8, Cohen, Hart and a Marine major escort officer left on an Air Force C-140, due to land in Managua about 9:15 A.M.
About an hour outside the Nicaraguan capital, the pilots were told that the Augusto César Sandino Airport was closed. There had been some kind of air attack. A propeller-driven twin-engine Cessna with a 500-pound bomb strapped under each wing had been shot down, crashing into the control tower and the terminal building.
The senators’ Air Force plane circled for about forty-five minutes before it was rerouted to the Honduran capital. Once there, they phoned Washington to try to find out what had happened. Word meanwhile came from Managua that the airport would be opened for them.
After they finally arrived at the Managua terminal, in the early afternoon, Hart was astonished at the destruction. Smoke damage was everywhere and the center of the terminal was wiped out. Broken glass and oil were scattered all about. And the fuselage of the downed plane was cut in half. The pilot and the co-pilot were both dead. Forty people waiting for flights had run for their lives. One worker had been killed. The VIP room where the senators were to have given their press conference had also been hit. Cohen calculated that if they had arrived before schedule that morning, they might be dead.
The Nicaraguan news media was there to ask questions.
One reporter said that the bombing attack was obviously a CIA-supported contra raid.
“The CIA is not that dumb,” Cohen said.
The Nicaraguan officials produced a briefcase which had been retrieved from the plane. Cohen and Hart peered inside. There was a manifest instructing the pilot to meet someone in Costa Rica at a certain restaurant, a bill of lading from Miami and the pilot’s Florida driver’s license, U.S. Social Security card and American credit cards.
And there was more, including some code-word identifications for the operation and the contract. Both Cohen and Hart recognized them as authentic CIA paperwork.
The Sandinista officials explained that the airport normally had only two antiaircraft guns in place. But that morning, they said, they had increased the number to seventeen. The attack had been anticipated. As the senators talked to more officials, it was clear to them that the Sandinistas were obtaining inside intelligence on the contras. They went on to receive a military briefing from the Sandinistas and later met with Nicaraguan junta coordinator Daniel Ortega, who gave them a hard-ass, anti-American lecture in front of the press.
When Cohen tried to turn the tables a bit and ask about the leading Nicaraguan newspaper, La Prensa, which had been closed down for anti-government criticism, the reporters shut off the cameras.
That evening, Hart and Cohen had dinner with Nora Astorga, a Nicaraguan society woman turned Sandinista guerrilla fighter. Astorga, thirty-four, was a legend. In 1978 she had lured a top Somoza general, the number-two man in the hated Somoza National Guard, Reynaldo Pérez Vega, who was known as “the Dog,” to her bedroom, where his throat was slit by three Sandinista commandos. The senators were also told that in a moment of revolutionary zeal “the Dog’s” testicles were cut off. Astorga had several months earlier been proposed as Nicaragua’s ambassador to the United States. The Reagan Administration had rejected her. Cohen and Hart enjoyed the joke that had made the rounds in Managua about her: Don’t ask Nora Astorga, “Your place or mine?,” and if she asks you to stay the night, don’t. It seemed a fitting close to the day.
After dinner, Cohen and Hart, both exhausted, went for a midnight meeting with the CIA station chief. They reported that information on contra operations was leaking to the Sandinistas. The station chief hesitated, shuffled around, began to justify the bombing raid, an initial effort by Eden Pastora’s “new air force.”
Hart was tightly wound and popped off. These stupid, fucking operations are what will kill the CIA, thinking you can get away with something like this, he said. The pilot had the name and phone number of a CIA operator from the U.S. Embassy in Costa Rica in his pocket.
A civilian airport, Cohen said, not even a military target. How could they think it would achieve anything? It would be a fundamental mistake to turn the people of Nicaragua against the contras, and that’s exactly what will happen. There had been dozens of civilians in that airport. Suppose someone had tried to bomb a civilian airport in the States?
The station chief said that it was intended to show that the contras were serious and could strike at the capital.
What do you think this was, asked Hart, yelling, some kind of first Doolittle raid over Tokyo?
Well, the station chief said, the contras are free agents and the CIA cannot control them. They pick their targets.
What kind of stupid idiot would carry the CIA paperwork in a briefcase on a covert bombing raid? Hart asked. You’re fools, incompetents. Raging and red-faced, Hart shouted, “This is bad politics, bad diplomacy and bad operations.”
The station chief sent a high-priority cable to CIA headquarters, explaining that two very, very unhappy senators were about to return to Washington.
The same day, Tony Motley, traveling in Honduras, received word of the failed bombing raid. He called Clarridge.
“Dewey,” Motley said, “you’re fucking crazy! How can you do this when the Assistant Secretary of State for the region is in Honduras? I don’t want any more shit like that going on when I’m traveling.”
“Look,” Clarridge replied, “there isn’t any instant command and control on this. You can’t pin down an operation—whether it’s going to happen this day or that day. You can only get within several days.” Casey wanted news, something to get attention, Clarridge added. Well, the contras were out of the mountains as the Director had demanded.
The next day Cohen and Hart went to El Salvador. They visited the village of San Lorenzo, where a Communist rebel attack had cut power, reduced a church to rubble and destroyed the looms used to produce blankets, a major source of income.
Traveling around El Salvador, they flew in an old helicopter without doors that had been used in Vietnam. Cohen had donned a pair of earphones so that he could hear the pilots talk. Once up about 1,200 feet over the capital, San Salvador, the helicopter started suddenly to drop.
“God damn, I’m losing fluid fast,” the pilot shouted. “I’m going to park this motherfucker down!”
Cohen thought they would go down over the big city, be killed and not by the Communist-backed rebels. How fitting to go that way—not from a gun, not from shots fired in anger or as part of this great surrogate confrontation between superpowers, but because of a leak in the hydraulic fluid system.
The pilot tore into his maintenance manual, and all of a sudden the helo was shooting up, up and up to ten thousand feet. It was more than frightening, leaving their stomachs at one thousand feet.
“What’s going on?” Cohen demanded.
“Have to get out of the range of the fifty-caliber machine fire from the rebels,” the military escort answered.
Cohen decided that if they were going down, he wanted it to be from one thousand feet, not ten thousand. One of his own, earlier poems, “Free Fall,” came to mind: “I have no fear of flying/No fear of dying. The process,/Yes, the act (if seconds long), Yes.”
But the helo did not crash.
When Cohen was back in Washington, Casey came by his Senate office.
The CIA, Casey said emphatically, did not authorize that bombing.
It was dumb, Cohen said, worse than dumb. There wasn’t even a sophisticated method for releasing the bombs.
Casey didn’t agree or disagree. He could see that Cohen was not happy. A man who has had a brush with death feels differently about everything, Casey realized. In a friendly way he asked for Cohen’s impressions.
Cohen said, You have to realize that your operations—the contra operations—are penetrated. The nightmare of any military or intelligence leader has come true. The antiaircraft batteries had been increased at the airport from two to seventeen. Casey promised to check into that.
Cohen later learned that the plane used in the bombing raid had been supplied by the CIA, and one CIA official told him that the raid had been approved pretty much up the line in the agency. The contra leader Pastora had been behind the raid.
He was not told that the raid stemmed from Casey’s pressure to make news.
Nonetheless, Cohen felt there was no way for him to try to make an issue of the bombing raid, since it might appear that his concern was only his own safety. He decided he could keep supporting the covert program as long as it was useful in pressuring the Sandinistas to negotiate, but that he could never embrace the operation fully. And he didn’t feel right about Casey. He was slippery. Obviously he had not told him the full story.
Casey also asked Hart out to the CIA for coffee.
I just want to assure you that no one wanted to kill you, Casey explained.
Hart said that his problem was that someone, anyone—the CIA or the contras on their own—would undertake such an idiotic mission. An attack like that on civilians could sow an unimaginable amount of hate.
Casey said, I realize how upset Cohen and you must have been.
You miss my point, Hart replied. I really don’t care about that. It is the policy, the ideas and the people behind such stupidity. How could it happen?
“Our policy is to support the democratic forces,” Casey said. “We want them to retake the country if we can’t force the Sandinistas to moderate.”
Hart saw no distinction between that “retake” and the “overthrow” that was prohibited by law.
“We’ve got Commander Zero down there,” Casey said, referring proudly to Pastora. “They have to be allowed to do their own thing.” The goal in the bombing was to show that the contra operation is not just a border skirmish but a national effort against the Sandinista government, Casey said.
Hart tried again to engage the Director in a discussion of the counter-productive nature of such operations.
Casey replied that he thought Hart had some good ideas on defense and he would like to get together with Hart and Senator Sam Nunn of Georgia, another defense expert, and talk about various defense issues.
Hart left, certain that the CIA was veering out of control and would blow up someday. Casey did not call him again, about defense issues or anything else.
Two weeks later, on September 20, Casey and Shultz appeared before the Senate Intelligence Committee to make the case for the Nicaragua operation. Acting on the Senate committee’s four-month-old request, Reagan had finally signed a new finding designed to chart a semantic course between simple arms interdiction and overthrowing the Sandinistas. The top-secret document was two pages long, consisting of five paragraphs—the longest finding that Reagan had ever signed. It authorized “material support and guidance to the Nicaraguan resistance groups.”
The goals were:
An implied goal was democratization within Nicaragua, to create pressures for human rights, civil liberties, a free press and the opening of the political process to the opposition. This would appeal to the Democrats and the moderates of both parties, Casey felt. He was not unaware that this was precisely the accommodation for which Enders had been criticized and eventually fired. But the center was his only hope, since the House had voted to cut off the $80 million for the covert program that he had requested. The House vote of 228 to 195 had followed three days of extraordinary public debate on the Nicaragua operation. Casey thought it an unseemly outpouring of liberal guilt.
Casey liked having Shultz along. Shultz was thought to be the Administration moderate. As they outlined the finding, all seemed to go well.
Moynihan was thinking that this must have been how the Vietnam War began. Yes, certainly it was different, but the underlying currents were the same—seemingly rational step followed by rational step, denying the real-world meaning of certain actions, portraying them as benign when they weren’t. He felt that Casey and Shultz had to be fooling themselves or the committee. Anyone who read the finding, as he had, had to see the consequences, though they were hidden and unstated. The finding said the CIA wanted to stop the Sandinista chief foreign-policy aim of spreading revolution, and wanted to alter its internal policies relating to elections, civil rights and ultimately the makeup of its government. It was like saying you wanted to blow someone’s brains out but had no intent to kill. Moynihan could be still no longer. He jumped in and tried quietly to raise this point. Even though the CIA says the finding is not designed to overthrow the regime, he said, the net cumulative effect of these actions and goals makes it obvious what the Administration wants.
On the Republican right, Wallop agreed essentially with Moynihan’s analysis, but his solution was different. “Why don’t we say what we believe?”
“Sounds okay to me,” Goldwater said.
“We ought to overthrow’em,” interjected Senator Jake Garn, a conservative Republican from Utah.
No, said Casey and Shultz. They would adhere to the prohibition of the Boland Amendment—nothing “for the purpose of” overthrowing. Moynihan’s point was soon lost in the discussion. Casey believed that a substantial bone had been thrown to the Democrats, giving a human-rights wrapping to the fundamental anti-Communism of the Reagan Administration. The senators were realistic politicians. This finding was the best they were going to get. The committee had requested the restatement in a new finding. The members had been party to the covert operation for nearly two years, and the finding simply described what was happening. To reject it would be to disavow their own participation. That, Casey calculated, was unlikely.
Two days later, the committee voted 13 to 2 to accept, with only Senators Leahy and Biden opposed.
That summer the first serious public fissure appeared among Reagan’s inner circle when White House chief of staff Baker said it was Casey who had provided him with briefing papers that President Carter had used to prepare himself for the nationally televised debate in the 1980 presidential campaign. Investigations by Congress and the FBI were launched.
“I have no recollection that I ever received, heard of or learned in any other way,” Casey said of the briefing book. He and Baker had a Sunday sit-down together to see if they could get their stories straight, put the controversy to rest and even find some grounds for resolving the disagreement. “Say you saw it,” Baker urged, pleading that it wouldn’t get Casey into trouble. Casey hardened his position. No, he had not seen it, and he had not given the briefing book or papers to Baker, not to anyone.
Old campaign memos began to surface. One was from Hugel, who had been a campaign aide to Casey. It claimed the Reagan campaign had a “mole” in the Carter camp. This tantalizing bit of information suggested that Hugel’s first espionage work for Casey might have been before they both went to the CIA.
Attempting to determine whether there had been an organized campaign espionage operation, I went to interview Casey on September 28 at his EOB suite next to the White House. I had never met or talked with him. Casey’s corner office was very large, an ornate Victorian room well suited for ceremony. His welcome was warm, hearty, though he did not look me in the eye. He was much larger than I had expected, and there was a rickety swagger as he stepped forward, as if he might tip over. His face and head seemed not just old, but haggard.
The Director wore a well-tailored conservative blue suit. His shirt was perfectly pressed, the collar stiff and the tie clearly expensive. My eyes darted to the desk. There were stacks of folders and paper, almost a foot high. The covers had large TOP SECRET markings in red denoting communications intercepts. He came around from the desk and sat down. He seemed midly impatient, as if to say, Get to your point.
I quickly summarized some things I had heard.
“Hearsay,” Casey said, almost hissing the word.
When I tried to take notes, he snapped, “This is off the record.” He said that I could come back the next day for quotes, but this session was for my understanding, and he wanted me to see how preposterous Baker’s accusation was. Casey’s tone and demeanor announced that I’d be out in the hall if I didn’t go along. Each time I raised an issue, he produced a document to support his specific position: in one case a six-page memo; in another a five-inch-thick blue binder that Hugel had done for the campaign. He handed it to me, and I began to thumb through. The volume was standard boilerplate, press releases and long lists of groups and individuals who had supported Reagan. Padding.
Casey came over and almost snatched the Hugel binder out of my hands. Nothing secret there, see, he said as it disappeared from my lap.
I indicated that I wanted to look more, or perhaps study the binder.
No, Casey said.
So while we’re on the subject of Hugel, I said, what about the memo he supposedly sent?
Casey said the FBI had obtained the Hugel memo out of the file storage from the 1980 campaign.
What did it say?
Casey shrugged his shoulders. He didn’t know, or care, or wasn’t going to say.
But there was such a memo?
He nodded yes, but added nothing, allowing me to have the silence. His churning body language almost commanded that we move on, but he sat there bearish and in control.
What about memos from Tony Dolan, the newspaperman whom Casey had brought to the Reagan campaign and who was now a White House speechwriter?
Another cosmic shrug. Casey was at the files again and showed me a memo about the purported misuse of federal employees by the Carter White House, and referring to Dolan’s “source” in a department.
May I have a copy?
Casey took it politely but forcefully out of my hands. It was just this side of a snatch. No, he said.
Casey was dealing out memos fast now. He flashed a few more, adding that it was all nonsense, standard campaign information. “There was one memo from Dolan and one from Hugel about having sources, but there was no intelligence operation and it doesn’t mean a damn thing.”
Would you testify under oath?
Sure, gladly, he said, dabbing reflectively at the spot halfway between his chin and his lower lip, his head cocked up, as if wondering why I was wasting his time on this. “This is a goddamn dry hole.” He had a very effective way of waiting out a question he saw no point in answering. He just sat. These questions were the small ones where the answer, any answer, might lead him down a path he did not want to take, or down one that could only lead to trouble, contradiction. He avoided engaging in any speculative banter, the kind of acceptance or dismissal of theories that can be useful.
I tried to go over something we had already covered once.
Casey stood up. “Look, I got to go to a meeting.” He then took his stack of top-secret papers and prepared to place them in his briefcase. The stack was so high that he momentarily lost control and they sprayed out on his desk. In a few seconds he had the briefcase stuffed and closed. We walked out together, and he handed the briefcase to his security man. Casey was obviously late for an appointment. I followed him out, and we kept talking. He was almost running down the hall as I left him. He and the CIA security man entered an elevator, the door shut quietly and they were gone.
There was never any real investigation of the matter by the FBI or the Congress, and “Debategate” disappeared. Up in the Senate, Goldwater’s and Casey’s old friend, General William Quinn, watched the unfolding story with relish and several good chuckles. It was no riddle for him. The former G-2 intelligence officer in Quinn sensed that Casey had done it. Quinn couldn’t prove it. Casey played by the rules, like any good intelligence officer. One of the first rules of espionage was the protection of good sources. Elaborate diversions and false trails were often constructed to protect such sources. To lie was nothing, even to lie in public or under oath was perhaps insignificant compared to the risks the source had taken. And nothing probably instilled more confidence or a sense of mutual danger than for the source to see the case officer out there on a limb, even publicly. The secret source, if there was one, probably slept well at night knowing that exposure could bring down his case officer, who in this instance may well have been the DCI himself.