ASSISTANT SECRETARY OF STATE TONY MOTLEY wanted to do his part for the Nicaragua operation, which was running out of money. Alaska Senator Ted Stevens—Motley’s mentor—headed the Senate appropriations subcommittee for defense. Instead of dealing with Goldwater’s Intelligence Committee (the authorizing committee), Motley suggested that the Administration try an end run as Charlie Wilson had done. Who gives a shit about the Intelligence Committee, Motley argued, when the Administration could deal directly in the real world—the appropriations committee that handled the money. So Motley carried a request for $21 million more for Nicaragua to Stevens, and explained that there was probably only a one-in-five chance of sneaking it through this way.
Stevens agreed to give it a try.
Before the first step could be taken, Goldwater found out. The goddamn Administration, he said, was its own worst enemy. It was a mindless, insensitive act, contrary to long-standing Senate rules and customs. He was their friend, on their side, in the same party. The CIA congressional-relations man, Clair George, said that it was Tony Motley’s doing and that the White House did not know.
Nonetheless, on March 12, 1984, Goldwater and Moynihan wrote a secret letter directly to President Reagan strongly protesting the violation of Senate protocol. A copy of the letter was sent to Casey. Secretary of State George Shultz offered an apology to Goldwater.
This brought Goldwater back to the Administration’s side, and late Thursday night, April 5, he was on the Senate floor attempting to win the $21 million for Casey. It was after the cocktail hour, and Goldwater, still suffering from various hip ailments and operations, was well medicated. At seventy-five, he was two years older than President Reagan, but as willing as ever to slug it out. Serving up the standard pro-Administration line, Goldwater chastised his colleagues for “congressional meddling with the efforts by the President to defend the national security.”
As Goldwater spoke, Senator Biden, one of the more outspoken Casey critics on the Intelligence Committee, was at his small desk reading a classified memo prepared by a committee staff member. The memo stated that the CIA had played a direct role in placing underwater mines in three Nicaraguan harbors. This, according to the memo, all had been done by “unilaterally controlled Latino assets”—the UCLAs. Biden was surprised. He hadn’t known about this, but it was possible that he had missed a hearing or a briefing. So he stood up and carried the memo over to his fellow Intelligence Committee member, Republican Bill Cohen.
Cohen read carefully. The memo made it clear that the CIA had planned, ordered and carried out harbor-mining. This was not a matter of support or supply. This was direct CIA action. Mining was not a borderline covert activity. It was one step further along the road than that memorable day when the Managua airport was attacked. Mining was an act of war. The squalor of the entire operation became clearer than ever, Cohen thought.
He walked over to Goldwater and handed the memo to him.
“Barry, what the fuck is this?” Cohen asked sharply. “Is this true? Why haven’t I been told?”
Goldwater, angry and caught off balance, asked for permission to speak on the floor, and began reading the classified memo to his colleagues. Goldwater’s staff director, Rob Simmons, raced over to Cohen, demanding, “Get him off, get him down, stop him from reading that.”
It was one of Simmons’s nightmares that Goldwater or some other senator might take to the floor with sensitive, classified information, giving Casey and the CIA ammunition to further cut back on the information flow and brand the committee untrustworthy.
Cohen didn’t move fast enough on Goldwater, and Simmons shot across the floor himself and almost pulled the memo from Goldwater’s hands.
Goldwater and Simmons looked at each other. Mining? Why hadn’t they been told? They, if anybody, were supposed to know. Was this something that Casey had passed on to Goldwater personally? Goldwater said it was not. Simmons said he hadn’t a clue, either. They had saved the covert program several times in the last couple of years. Why were they kept in the dark?
“You get hold of Bill Casey,” Goldwater said, “and find out what the fuck’s going on.”
Simmons had Goldwater’s reading excised from The Congressional Record. Nonetheless, David Rogers, a reporter for The Wall Street Journal, had it in the next morning’s paper, though the account was somewhat understated—“U.S. Role in Mining Nicaraguan Harbors Reportedly Is Larger Than First Thought.”
Simmons spent the next day trying to get John McMahon on the phone.
“I’ve been busy,” McMahon said when Simmons finally reached him.
“Did you know about this?” Simmons asked coldly.
McMahon was evasive, but he said that Casey had told the committee members at a breakfast at the CIA.
Simmons checked. Goldwater had never been to one of Casey’s breakfasts at the CIA.
The information came in slowly to the Senate committee. About seventy-five so-called “firecracker” mines had been laid on the bottom in three Nicaraguan harbors. But many of the homemade mines had up to 300 pounds of C-4 explosive. Simmons had worked with C-4, and 300 pounds was enough for a giant explosion. A number of merchant seamen or fishermen had been wounded and there was a report that one had been killed. Before the mining, Nicaragua had received much of its oil from Mexico and Europe. Now the Soviets had become the chief supplier of oil, providing up to 80 percent. So, Simmons calculated, the first immediate result of the mining had been to drive the Nicaraguans further into the arms of the Soviet Union.
Simmons could remember, from his time as a DO officer, the expression the real cowboys used for this kind of harassment: “Let’s bring a little pee on them.” The mining was like the CIA operations run out of Miami against Cuba in the 1960s. The CIA had become the bogeyman, and that helped Castro secure total control over the population.
“You know,” Goldwater told Simmons, “I feel like a boob. I misled my colleagues.” The committee existed to prevent such surprises, and Goldwater felt that he had failed. The mining, Goldwater said, endangered neutral shipping. A British ship had been hit. Imagine what would happen if an American ship hit a British mine secretly laid in some port. Goldwater shook his head. “You tell Casey that he’s on his own. I’ve pulled his nuts out of the fire often enough.”
Goldwater went off for the weekend to the Quinns’ farm on the Eastern Shore of Maryland. It had become Goldwater’s regular weekend retreat, where he did various electronic chores—fixing the TV antenna or wiring up stereo speakers. It was a beautiful spring weekend, but Goldwater could not shake the feeling of betrayal. It just struck him dumb. Obviously, the Administration and Casey had no confidence in him.
Goldwater carried a little cassette dictating machine which he regularly filled with notes, ideas and letters. Pushing the record button, he began a “Dear Bill” letter to Casey:
“…I’ve been trying to figure out how I can most easily tell you my feelings about the discovery of the President having approved mining some of the harbors of Central America.
“It gets down to one, little, simple phrase: I am pissed off!”
Goldwater ordered it sent to Casey.
Casey called Quinn. “I don’t understand the degree of his concern,” Casey said. “He’s so exercised.”
Quinn reminded Casey that Goldwater cooled as rapidly as he got hot. Casey acknowledged that and hung up. He too was pissed off. He too felt caught in the middle, this time between the White House/State Department, which wanted more in Nicaragua, and the Congress, which wanted less.
Casey had been asked by the White House whether there was not some way to divert money from other CIA operations or “slush funds” to the Nicaraguan operation. Couldn’t the CIA just dip into the $50 million contingency? Wasn’t that its purpose?
The contingency fund was for emergency operations, or to be used when Congress was not in session. Casey knew he would be tarred and feathered if he took an extra penny for Nicaragua. And further, McMahon, general counsel Sporkin and the others in the DO were vehemently opposed to any effort that might make it appear that congressional will was being thwarted. A legal opinion was drawn up that warned sternly against any attempt to skirt the letter or the spirit of the congressional authority.
Casey had thought the mining was a dream operation: results without real bloodshed. Now it looked as though the only blood might be his own. Reports showed that the mines were doing the job. Just recently seven ships had been hit by mines in Corinto, the largest Nicaraguan port. Other ships were turning back. Cotton was stacked two stories high there awaiting ships willing to brave the harbor. Coffee beans and sugarcane, Nicaragua’s two other major exports, were also piling up. There was talk inside Nicaragua of economic devastation.
Newspapers had widely reported the mining and its impact. Statements by the Sandinista leadership charging the United States with responsibility had been published. So why was the Senate surprised? Casey and his aides went to the transcripts of his previous top-secret presentations to the Senate committee. There in clear prose was all he needed—a rare, graphic vindication.
A month earlier, on March 8, Casey had said to the full committee, “Magnetic mines have been placed in the Pacific harbor of Corinto and the Atlantic harbor of El Bluff, as well as the oil terminal at Puerto Sandino.” Then five days later, on March 13, Casey repeated the same sentence, omitting only the word “magnetic” because some of the mines were activated by the sound of a ship passing overhead.
This was no offhand disclosure. He had said it, and the committee members had had no questions. If no one had understood, that was their problem. Casey went to see Bud McFarlane at the White House, where the mining was now perceived as a blunder, especially by Jim Baker. In principle, no one had been opposed to the mining when it was approved. The question was, why couldn’t it have been kept covert.
McFarlane thought Casey was one of the strong, independent forces he had to attempt to coordinate. Casey had a separate, well-defined agenda and a mandate given to him by the President. But at times, especially in various maneuverings or compromises with Congress, Casey could be a problem. McFarlane, who had worked several years on the Hill, found it pigheaded and self-defeating that Casey would not get along with the intelligence committees—the obvious source of the latest flap.
But this time Casey cited the record of his March 8 and March 13 testimony, plunking down copies of his testimony before the national-security adviser. What more was he supposed to do? Goldwater’s tirade had been because the Senator was tired or overmedicated or both.
McFarlane seemed convinced.
On Tuesday, April 10, Casey made a detailed presentation to a group of senators not on the Intelligence Committee, explaining how and when he had told the committee. He had spent a hundred hours up on the Hill testifying. As always, he said, we answered any question the committee or an individual senator asked at any time. Overall, the mining was not that important or integral a part of the covert operation. All the fuss was unnecessary.
Some senators criticized the indiscriminate nature of a mining operation. On the mine that had gone off under a British ship, one senator asked, What were we doing trying to harass our closest ally? Another mine had been detonated by a Soviet vessel. Did Casey want to start World War III? How would the United States react if a U.S. merchant ship had run into a mine field laid by the KGB?
Casey went to the Intelligence Committee. It was apparent from the reaction, particularly among Republicans, that there had been a monumental lapse in communication. Though Casey had said it, no one had heard or comprehended.
Senator David Durenberger, a Minnesota Republican, was incredulous. It seemed to him that the DCI was saying that the United States had committed an act of war for the hell of it. Cohen was still stewing. There was a hole in the logic. Casey was saying that the mines were designed to do little damage, and yet mining was a general act of belligerency. Why take such a risk if there was no military or strategic value? The mining was being perceived as an escalation of an ambiguous and unclear policy. When do you call the secret war off? Cohen wondered. When does covert action become simple (or complicated) war? The committee was there to be a top-secret sounding board; if a new operation passed by them without heavy opposition, it would likely be tolerated by the public. The committee could have warned Casey about the mining.
Wallop was one of the few senators on Casey’s side. Criticizing the mining as a half-measure, he said they might as well blow up everyone and everything in Nicaragua. Several liberal Democrats suggested that the only way out was to make the entire contra program overt, suggesting that they would support such a move. Wallop laughed. He figured they would say that only in a closed and classified hearing. Some Democrats began saying in public that the next step was sending U.S. combat troops, and several press reports suggested that such plans were afoot. So Casey, Shultz, Weinberger and McFarlane issued an extraordinary three-page public statement under all four names, saying in part: “We state emphatically that we have not considered, nor have we developed plans to use U.S. military forces to invade Nicaragua or any other Central American country.”
It was too late. The Senate, seized with antiwar fever, delivered the coup de théâtre the night the statement was released. In a tone that suggested that Casey shoots his friends too, Goldwater said on the Senate floor that the previous week he had had his remarks struck from The Congressional Record—the first time in almost thirty years of Senate service.
“I am forced to apologize to the members of my committee because I did not know the facts on this case,” Goldwater said. “And I apologize to all members of the Senate for the same reason.”
It was clear that a moral boundary had been crossed and some loathsome fragment of sin excavated. There was a crucial division that separated the acceptable from the unacceptable. Mining was unacceptable. The debate asked the question: Have we, as a nation, no decency? It was almost as though the mining was a “national” act, a statement of national character. Mining was sneaky, a shadowy endeavor, akin to planting a bomb in a restaurant, a trap for the unsuspecting and innocent. Goldwater’s disapproval magnified the issue. He loomed as an arbiter of toughness and common sense. Privately he called the mining “the dumbest fucking idea I ever heard of.”
Senator Edward Kennedy introduced a nonbinding, sense-of-the-Congress resolution condemning the mining and proclaiming that no money could be spent for the “planning, directing, or supporting the mining of the ports or territorial water of Nicaragua.”
It passed 84 to 12.
Casey could not believe that the Republican-controlled Senate would do this. The senators might disagree, but this was national policy—approved by the President and carried out by the CIA, after proper notification of Congress. The vote was not a rejection. It was self-mortification.
At a state dinner for the President of the Dominican Republic, President Reagan said publicly of the Senate vote, “If it is not binding, I can live with it. I think there is a great hysteria raised about this whole thing. We are not going to war.”
Goldwater’s letter to Casey leaked from the Senate and was broadcast and printed with no expletives deleted.
The next day, April 11, 1984, Senator Leahy had drinks with two of his aides in his hideaway office in the Senate. It was a small, cavelike room that had once been used by Daniel Webster. Leahy was pleased. As far as he was concerned the mining exposed the bankruptcy of the entire covert operation. Furthermore, he said he knew for sure that Casey was not trying to deceive the senators or keep them, particularly Goldwater, from knowing about the mining.
Why?
Because Leahy had known about it for weeks. His father had died and he had been out for several weeks. Upon his return to the Senate, he had asked for a CIA briefing to update him on the Nicaragua operation. The CIA had laid out the mining in detail. No way would they tell him and consciously keep it from Goldwater.
Why had he not said or done something?
Because, Leahy said, the mining was a logical extension of an undeclared, secret war. Once you accepted the assumption that there was a need for such a covert operation, the mining made sense. Of course, he accepted none of those assumptions. He didn’t think covert action was a substitute for a long-term, reasoned foreign policy. There was an unstable, makeshift, on-again, off-again quality to any covert operation. In fact, Leahy said, Casey was justified in being stunned by the outcry. The Congress had gone along with everything else in the secret war. Why not this?
It’s an act of war, one of the aides said.
Leahy almost laughed. What did they think organizing and supplying the contra army of thousands was? Peace?
“This thing is a watershed,” Leahy said, because it will split the intelligence committee and destroy the bipartisanship. “There have been many unanimous votes—we have been a sounding board for many cockamamie ideas.” He promised that in the future that would not work as well. Casey and the Administration, he said, need a united committee to tell them when the ideas and plans are crazy. The committee acts as a final screening, and if there is general consensus or agreement, then something can be turned off or stopped.
“I’ve never seen Casey so on the defensive,” Leahy said. “They are like a bunch of kids sitting down there. It’s like playing cowboys and Indians, playing games, a Saturday-afternoon matinée.” It’s not going to work, he said. “We’ve put people in motion whom we have no control over.”The end result, he said, would likely be some kind of combat in Central America.
Clair George could see his twenty-seven-year CIA career ending in flames. He alternated between defensiveness and contrition. “We busted our ass to keep them informed,” he shouted into the phone to one caller. “We brief them, brief them! brief them! I don’t know what the fuck to do.” And, he said, the senators now think, “Those evil bastards” out at the CIA. It was all politics, and each legislator was positioning himself according to the latest winds. “The only thing more we could have done is install a teletype down there and let them see the daily cables!” He felt that some of the senators might have legitimate gripes. Others didn’t. And others were just lying and posturing. “If some had been shown movies, they would not be satisfied.”
George had been in tighter spots, and when he cooled off he realized that the covert war, the mining, was of course a sensitive issue. “It is as emotional an issue as we can have in our time, and we are perceived to have hidden it. This is so fucking demoralizing!”
He felt that Goldwater was a good man, a dedicated supporter. When Goldwater said he was not satisfied, that carried a lot of weight. When Goldwater said he was pissed off, he carried the whole Senate.
How was Casey handling the criticism? George was asked. Casey was attending a family funeral that day.
“With strength,” George said, adding admiringly, “He has balls of magnesium!”
In his nine months as head of congressional relations, George had had a regular monthly lunch at a downtown restaurant with Goldwater’s staff director Rob Simmons to insure that there was regular communication.
Simmons realized he had been had. George was treating Congress like the host government in a foreign country where he was sent to spy. Simmons told George, “I don’t consider you my case officer and I hope you don’t think of yourself as my case officer.”
“No, no, no,” George said. Simmons said technical compliance by burying the mining in two long statements was insufficient. The committee needed and expected a tip-off to what was important. George had no answer, and their relationship was over.
The next day, I went to the CIA to be briefed for a trip I was making to Libya. The Libyan Foreign Minister had said that I should be able to interview Qaddafi. I was surprised that one of the briefers was a very senior officer in the DO, a cool, perfectly dressed man with no smile. His message was: Qaddafi feels increasingly threatened and has turned up the heat and the assassination squads on any external anti-Qaddafi group. Qaddafi is a man of big, big dreams, a leader without a true base or center, a man in search of a country, the DO officer said. He moves all the time, sleeping in different places, fearing and thinking that the CIA is trying to kill him.
I didn’t ask whether the CIA was trying. The DO officer’s manner seemed to turn aside the question as I contemplated asking it.
Qaddafi is trying to break out of a psychological vise, he said. He is like Castro, implacable, but also in Arab fashion trying to approach his enemies; sending signals to the United States that he would like to talk. The officer alternated between labeling Qaddafi treacherous and calling him weak. For example, Qaddafi, he said, has female bodyguards, knowing that an Arab assassin would have trouble shooting a woman. Clever, the officer said. Qaddafi’s reinterpretation of Islam has caused problems, “his irregular fundamentalism” placing a cloud over his relationship with Iran and the Shiite world. And Khomeini refused to accept an invitation to meet with Qaddafi, “an extraordinary snub.”
Qaddafi’s relationship with the Soviets is cynical and practical, he said. There is no formal or secret agreement. It is a mercenary relationship. Qaddafi buys so much from them, a billion a year, but that is also to insure redundancy so that he won’t have to go begging for spare parts, the officer explained.
What about the reports that Qaddafi is supplying arms to Nicaragua?
It’s the “Third World Club,” the officer said. More solidarity than anything. The arms to Nicaragua are not substantial, only small arms.
He noted that the Libyan economy is primitive and so it is hard to hurt. Economic sanctions mean little.
What should I ask Qaddafi?
Poker-faced, the officer suggested that I ought to ask, “I understand you are full of sleeping pills—you look drugged. Do you have trouble sleeping?”
There was a kind of social and intellectual disdain for Qaddafi, a tendency almost to twit him. But there was also the combatant’s esteem. The officer said that Qaddafi had had a respiratory problem when he was in his twenties, and was not in great health. Qaddafi, he said, is overwrought, high-strung, capable of doing much and of doing little, and has recently been making morbid references in his speeches.
I had received valid information, I thought, a rather carefully calibrated introduction, but I also had a lingering feeling that this master covert operator had been planting a seed. He had overdone it slightly, painting the Libyan leader a little too much a loon. As I reviewed the conversation and my notes, I realized I couldn’t tell whether I was being “fed.” As facts or analysis, it seemed honest, straight, certainly helpful. But I couldn’t get rid of the notion that the suggested question to Qaddafi had other purposes.
As I was leaving late that afternoon, one of Casey’s senior deputies who was familiar with the Nicaragua operation took me aside and suggested we talk. We went into his seventh-floor office, and the door was closed. This was “background,” he said, plopping himself down in a chair. He knew that meant I could use the information as long as I didn’t identify him or the agency by name.
It was virtually the end of the Nicaragua operation, he said flatly. The DO had just been informed that the money would run out next week, perhaps as early as Sunday. Three days from now. The accounts showed that two weeks ago $22 million of the allocated $24 million had already been spent, leaving $2 million. Clearly the requested $21 million more was not going to be forthcoming from an enraged Congress. He laughed hard, recalled the Senate anti-mining vote, 82 to 12, and noted the likelihood that the House was about to do the same (it did so, by a vote of 281 to 111, several hours later). So steps were going to be taken to begin the painful process of disengagement, he said, get the agency out.
Casey, the official continued, is considering a request to another friendly country to take up the slack and send money to the contras until the funding problem is solved.
You said you were on the verge of disengagement.
Oh, the official said, Casey thinks we’ll eventually get the new money, that the mining storm will blow over. But “the Director,” he said for emphasis, is the only one here at the agency who thinks that.
What country is he going to ask?
Saudi Arabia, but no final decision has been made.
I wrote it down in my notes. It had to be clear to him that I would publish this, but it was not clear to me whether what I was being told was a trial balloon or whether I had been told in the hope that publication would sabotage the possibility of asking the Saudis for help.
This official described to me how Casey had been the moving force behind the secret war and the controversial mining. “Casey cooked this whole thing up,” he said categorically.
I scribbled the word “distancing” in my notes; evidently this was an attempt to separate the mainline CIA from Casey and Casey’s war, “cooked up” or whatever.
There was much opposition in the building to the whole thing, the official volunteered. John McMahon believed from the beginning that it was folly, ill-conceived.
There had been whispers of this before, but I was surprised to have it put to me so directly, and I asked a few questions. The official looked at me as if I were asking him which side Abraham Lincoln had been on in the Civil War.
“John just knew it would come to this, where there would not be enough public and congressional support and we’d withdraw,” he said flatly. He turned to the State Department, which had recently issued a legal opinion saying the mining was “self-defense.” The State Department opinion “unfortunately is bullshit,” the official said scornfully. The real issue was that it proved once again that the left and right hands of the Administration did not know what the other was doing. Nothing like that would have come out of the CIA legal department, he said.
The whole operation, he continued glumly, was pretty much a bust. While the effort was hurting the Nicaraguan economy, it had not slowed the flow of arms into El Salvador. “It went down after Grenada, but now it’s going up and may even be higher.”
But, I said, we all know the real reason is to overthrow the Sandinistas.
He laughed, and laughed again. Ha, ha, ha. Oh, that was funny, no fucking chance of that either.
Simple arithmetic, he said. Outnumbered four to one. The Sandinistas had a military and police force of about 75,000. And the National Security Council had pegged the ceiling on the number of CIA-supported contras at 18,000. At maximum the contras had 15,000 operating and the till was nearly dry. End of operation.
I made a number of phone calls to see whether the broad outline was correct. It at least represented the position of the agency professional core. I had talked with George Lauder, the CIA spokesman, about McMahon’s position on the Nicaragua operation. The McMahon position opposing the operation was known all over the agency and all over the Hill, he said. Lauder added only that whatever personal opinions and conclusions McMahon may have voiced, he was not opposed to any current CIA operations. The story ran as the lead on the next morning’s front page under a large, three-column headline, “CIA Funds Run Short for Covert Operation.”
When I got to the office the next morning, there was a call from Lauder. I was pretty sure that Casey would be upset with his portrayal as chief architect of the operation. A deputy, identified as an “informed source” in the story, was quoted as saying, “Casey cooked this whole thing up.” Lauder was icy and said he had a statement that John McMahon had told him to issue, shotgun style, to all main news organizations.
McMahon? I asked.
Lauder began reciting: “I am anxious to refute the reference to my views on our Nicaraguan activities which appeared in The Washington Post in its April 13 edition. While Director Casey encourages debate on all our intelligence proposals, he and I are of one mind when it comes to agency activities and that includes those involving the Sandinistas in Nicaragua. This position is also shared by other senior agency officials.”
What the hell am I supposed to do with that? I asked.
I don’t know, Lauder said, up to you, and he said he had to run.
McMahon’s statement was thrown into the bottom of one of the next day’s mining stories—there were three or four each day now.
There were sophisticated forces in the CIA itself now that were arrayed against Casey. The CIA official who had cornered me the day before knew the art of propaganda: scatter the seeds of doubt, water them, let them spring up, and cut them down if necessary. The groundwork was being laid for the postmortem of the Nicaragua operation. McMahon, the repository of good sense, had been opposed all along, had seen the inevitable bailout from Casey’s “cooked-up” war. At the same time, he was on record with a loyal-to-the-Director declaration. McMahon was squarely on both sides of the issue. If the operation turned out to be the disaster it seemed to be becoming, he and his allies could point to the original account, and to his track record of doubt. Should the operation flourish, they could point to his rare public pronouncement in which he declared himself to Casey.
Over at the State Department, Tony Motley read McMahon’s public statement with amusement. In nearly a year as the working-level point man for the Administration on the covert Nicaragua operation, Motley had come to a deeply cynical view of internal maneuverings at the CIA. McMahon was the most accomplished bureaucratic infighter. Unparalleled. Anyone who knew him knew that McMahon was fighting more than Nicaragua. He was after the paramilitary capability Casey was trying to re-create. The commando days of the CIA were over, McMahon had decided, with rare exceptions like Afghanistan. He had said it a hundred times: the CIA was supposed to steal secrets and to analyze. Period.
In Motley’s opinion, McMahon was disloyal. It was he who followed up after Casey, often within a few hours, carefully edging the Director’s policy the other way, always with well-crafted indirectness. It was hard to find a single phrase or sentence from McMahon that contradicted the boss. He knew how to present the opposite side as if it were an abstraction: “Critics will say…” But often the weight of McMahon’s statements and position went the other way. “John, I’m confused,” Motley once said to McMahon. “The Director said the exact opposite.” It was a highwire act, and Motley was often convinced that McMahon had gone off the end and would be fired. But it never happened. Motley finally concluded that McMahon had figured out Casey better than anyone else, understood that Casey felt it necessary to have someone pushing him hard. But that was not a sufficient explanation, and Motley wondered whether McMahon maybe had something on Casey. Motley had once said jokingly, “McMahon had somehow caught Casey sucking cock!”
When McMahon heard that, he burst into uncontrollable laughter and his flabby face turned beet red. He seemed as if he might explode, fly out over the orange chairs in his seventh-floor office, break through the large picture windows and plunge over the balcony onto the Virginia countryside. The very excessiveness of his reaction was a perfect diversion, because he didn’t have to comment. He let the laughter die and he had said nothing.
At his alma mater, Holy Cross, he had been called “Smiling Jack” and a “Mother Hen,” according to his yearbook, “most welcome in any bull session. His hearty laugh is a sure thing after every anecdote,” even distinguishable in a crowded, dark movie theater—“a deep-throated roar.” His senior thesis: “The Emotional Conflict of Four of Shakespeare’s Tragic Heroines.” A man of mystery, conflict and mordant wit, he had learned to play Casey perfectly.
Casey just didn’t believe that McMahon had been disloyal. “I don’t believe it,” Casey said firmly when asked about possible disloyalty or discrepancy.
Motley finally figured out the answer: the CIA was going through an identity crisis, wrestling with its role in the world. Were its people dirty-tricksters? Yes, when asked to be. They served the Director and the President. Did they fight the Soviets at every turn, at all costs? Yes. Did they watch the entire world? They tried. Were they the intellectual, high-camp analysts, turning a phrase, doing brilliant “papers” that dazzled the few who had the security clearances to read them? Did they do Casey’s bidding? Or the bidding of the institution, with McMahon as their spokesman? There weren’t complete answers to these questions, Motley concluded, and the answers seemed to change daily. So the agency was run in an atmosphere of total contradiction.
A daily environment of changing answers can lead to more than an identity crisis, Motley realized. If it is not stabilized, the result can be, even for an institution, a nervous breakdown. It had happened in the 1970s. It could happen again. Half the agency men seemed to be following Casey around panting, bowing to his every wish—Dewey Clarridge for one. The other half seemed to pause—John McMahon for one—pondering this question: What after the storm of this man?
On Friday afternoon, April 13, Goldwater left for a trip to the Far East. Moynihan became acting chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, which placed the mining fiasco in his lap. Moynihan had been mortified to learn of the mining first from The Wall Street Journal because he had not been on the Senate floor that night. He had called Clair George.
“Clair, what have you done?” Moynihan asked. “What are you doing to us?”
“The ship that did the mining,” George responded, “is now, as we talk, passing through the Panama Canal.” No more mines would be laid, he promised.
That wasn’t enough. Moynihan had watched with relish as Goldwater dished out his “I-am-pissed-off” letter and as the Congress came down firmly against mining. Casey and McMahon were going to come by later in the day to go over the entire matter with Moynihan. Maybe that would straighten things out.
When Casey and McMahon arrived at Moynihan’s office, Moynihan came out smiling and threw his arms around Casey. Casey had a question: Was Goldwater losing his marbles?
Moynihan seemed willing to forgive because Casey seemed to half apologize. But later Moynihan saw a front-page story in The Washington Times reporting on NSC adviser McFarlane’s statements at a Naval Academy conference about the mining: “Every important detail…shared in full…as provided by law…faithfully” with the oversight committees. Moynihan had helped draft the Intelligence Oversight Act of 1980 that required the committees to be “fully and currently informed of all intelligence activities.”
It just hadn’t happened. The mining reference was twenty-seven words, about ten seconds in a two-hour-and-eighteen-minute presentation; one sentence in eighty-four pages of transcript. Moynihan decided that the CIA posture amounted to a flat rejection of Goldwater’s letter. In an interview with ABC Television’s David Brinkley show that afternoon, which was to be broadcast Sunday, April 15, Moynihan said, “Senator Goldwater made his judgment as clear as words could do, and four or five days after that they still reject his judgment, so they now have my judgment in the only way I can make it, which is to say, I resign.” He was quitting as vice-chairman.
Senator Durenberger lashed out at Casey, saying that “on a 0 to 10 scale, Casey rates a 2 on the trust factor.” For Time he went further: “There is no use in our meeting with Bill Casey. None of us believe him. The cavalier, almost arrogant fashion in which he has treated us as individuals has turned the whole committee against him.”
President Reagan stayed above the fray. Over the weekend he appeared at the downtown Washington Hilton Hotel for the White House Correspondents Association annual black-tie dinner.
“What’s all that talk about a breakdown of White House communications? How come nobody told me?” Laughter. “Well, I know this: I’ve laid down the law, though, to everyone there from now on about anything that happens, that no matter what time it is, wake me, even if it’s in the middle of a Cabinet meeting.” Laughter. The official presidential documents recorded that the President received twenty-six more laughs.
He did not refer to the mining.
Casey gave a long interview to U.S. News & World Report in which he declared, “I think that people in the long run are less concerned about reports of mining Nicaraguan harbors than they are about the danger of creating a wave of immigration into this country if Central America or any part of it should fall under Soviet-Cuban domination.” Over the weekend, in a salvage operation, the CIA released agency figures on the hemispheric threat offered by the Soviets and the Cubans: up to 10,000 Soviets in Cuba, but only 100 in Nicaragua; and possibly 10,000 Cubans in Nicaragua. The CIA and the DIA had had several six-hour meetings to come up with a reliable estimate and had failed to do so. The numbers were flaky. But numbers couldn’t cloak the problem. Nor did a CIA statement that claimed, “The subject of mining of Nicaraguan ports has been discussed with members or staffers of the committees and other members of Congress 11 times.”
Simmons publicly laid into Clair George, saying the congressional liaison man had “the same mind-set as Casey…. That match is a prescription for disaster.”
At the CIA, John McMahon saw the matter spinning out of control, putting Casey and the agency back in the soup. With Goldwater in the Far East and Moynihan on the warpath, McMahon phoned Simmons. McMahon, an administrative officer, knew what it was like to be cut out. Simmons was probably furious because he felt like a fool. Yes, he was supposed to be informed by the CIA, but it was also his job to find out. Simmons had to know from his previous work at the CIA that good intelligence—even intelligence to which he was entitled—did not come on a silver platter. Simmons needed a little bucking up.
“Hi, Rob,” McMahon said.
“Hello, John,” Simmons replied.
“Look,” McMahon said, “we’ve got to cut down the noise level. This is hurting everyone. Why don’t you work your side and I’ll work mine.” They were all about to self-immolate. McMahon’s pitch was they had crazy bosses and it was up to them to keep the ship afloat—good staff men to the end.
Simmons replied that Goldwater was being attacked, and that false and very misleading statements were being given to the press, and that he had in these circumstances an obligation to set the record straight. Casey and Clair George had not kept them informed. Goldwater’s work on the committee for five years had been undercut. The work had been supposed to help create a new image for the CIA, insure protections for all, money, rebuilding the bridges. Five years of honest effort had been destroyed by this idiotic lapse in communication. Barry and I feel we’re in the dustbin and our whole philosophical approach—trust, confidence—has been shattered, Simmons said.
McMahon said he understood. The pieces had to be picked up. He was encouraging.
“Having got that off my chest,” Simmons finally relented. “Okay, let’s tone down the rhetoric.”
Within the White House and the National Security Council there was concern that Casey had poisoned the well in Congress, making further intelligence or foreign-policy maneuvers by the Administration more difficult. Still committed to an aggressive Central America policy, the White House wanted to reframe the debate, get it away from a discussion of Casey’s forthrightness, the CIA and covert action.
Casey, on the other hand, saw the covert war in Nicaragua partly as a war of nerves. It was crucial that the CIA not let the Sandinistas up. Pressure. Harassment. Diversion. Hit them from all sides. All fronts.
Casey’s fear was that the current flap would lead to White House hesitation. Downtown was the real constituency. He never wanted to lose sight of that. This led Casey to the eternal problem of reading the White House. It spoke with too many voices. It wasn’t hard to figure what the President wanted—no U.S. combat troops and virtually all the covert support possible. But in the tug and pull among the staff, things sometimes came out differently. On one hand, Jim Baker had ordained election-year caution. On the other, someone on Bud McFarlane’s National Security Council staff was always coming up with a new action plan. One called for a blockade of Nicaragua. In its extreme version, the plan seemed to call for almost half the U.S. fleet to control all the sea lanes going into Nicaragua. Casey never took too much of that seriously. But neither could he discard it. There was no telling when the President would act. It had happened unexpectedly in Grenada.
The passive Reagan approach to decision-making compounded the problem. Casey knew, clear as a bell, where Ronald Reagan stood, what he believed, but there was no telling what Reagan would do. “Yes,” the President would say. Then “Well…” Then “No.” “Yes…well…no” became a metaphor. There were many other variations—starting with a “no” and skidding through a “yes” to eventual irresolution. Jim Baker had buttoned up Reagan’s decision-making completely. Casey could get his say, he could even get a private meeting with Reagan in the White House residence. Casey played this card about twice a year. The President was always so friendly, all ears and nods. But at the end of the meeting or later, through Baker or McFarlane, came the inevitable questions. What does George or Cap think? That brought Shultz and Weinberger into the issue. Properly so, but then the wobbly seesawing would begin. “Yes…well…no.”
Reagan didn’t chair, formally or informally, the National Security Council meetings or the more important NSPGs. McFarlane usually did so. Reagan would be given a one-sheet agenda, indicating what each person was going to talk about and for how many minutes. Most of the time was spent on status reports. Often the decisions went out later over McFarlane’s signature for the President.
Baker and Darman got the daily phone log of every call in to Reagan and every one that he placed. Separate logs were kept for the regular phone lines and the secure line, which Reagan didn’t like because of his hearing problem. The Secret Service kept a log of all his movements and meetings; even the White House ushers kept logs. There was a weekend log, even of Nancy’s social calls, lunches and dinners, Some of Nancy’s activities often drifted into the President’s orbit. A talk with the President after a simple greeting or a quick hello could become, in the mind of the visitor, a firm expression or even a decision. So Baker or Darman followed up everything, making sure nothing escaped their net. The President was obviously comfortable with the system, and no one broke through.
But the mining disclosure now required some White House decisions. Casey had intelligence reports showing tons of material flowing into El Salvador, some from Nicaragua. He pressed the White House with intelligence information about a possible major autumn offensive by the leftist rebels in El Salvador. He compared such an eventuality to the famous Tet offensive of 1968 in Vietnam. It was strong language, but in the election year it commanded attention.
Motley believed the intelligence, but it was fragmented, not simple. “All you need is that thirty-second news clip that proves it to put this debate to bed,” he told Casey. But the news clip never came.
After a series of meetings and discussions at the White House, Casey obtained as clear a decision from the President as he was going to get. Reagan agreed: Until the November election, the CIA would conduct a “holding action” in the covert program. When he was reelected, as he expected, the Administration would go all out, obtain more money for the contras some way, gain the upper hand and win.
For Casey, a holding action meant he was going to have to mend some fences in Congress. That included a personal, door-to-door grovel. One of his first visits was with Senator Richard Lugar, the Indiana Republican on the Intelligence Committee who was also chairman of the Republican senatorial-campaign committee. Lugar said they had a bad situation, and Casey said he had tried to keep everyone informed, but acknowledged that the brief references to the mining were not satisfactory.
Casey wanted to undo the Moynihan resignation. Moynihan was basically a hard-liner on foreign policy and had been useful to the CIA. A more liberal, anti-CIA Democrat such as Leahy as the Intelligence Committee vice-chairman would be disaster.
Casey went to see Moynihan in his Senate office. Sitting in the leather chair by Moynihan’s office fireplace, the Director was contrite.
He made it clear that it had been his job to keep the committee informed at a level the senators found satisfactory. If they were not satisfied, no matter how sincere or conscientious his efforts, he had failed them. He stopped just short of saying that his failure broke the legal requirement for congressional notification. “I profoundly apologize,” Casey said. Adding a personal appeal, he requested that Moynihan stay on as the vice-chairman.
Moynihan was touched. Casey seemed quite sincere—what a complicated man, so many different personalities. There was no way to reject such an apology. Moynihan agreed to withdraw his resignation.
The final act of contrition for Casey, on hands and knees, was a handwritten letter of apology to Goldwater.
On Thursday, April 26, Casey faced the music and met with the full committee. The atmosphere was tense, because some members felt that up to this point Casey was saying only that what hadn’t happened in the first place would never happen again.
But Casey quickly shifted ground and acknowledged that the briefings had not been adequate. He wished he had done more. There was no intention to hide anything, some of the senators had been told, the House had been told.
A question about the mining itself: Wasn’t it illegal?
No, Casey said.
This unleashed the pent-up resentment, and nearly everyone pounced hard on Casey, raising questions about law, good sense, judgment, practicality, competence. Hadn’t ships of our friends, the British and the French, been hit by the mines? Why had the Administration declared in advance that it would not abide by a decision on the mining by the World Court, flouting the law in the face of the rest of the world? Wasn’t mining state-supported terrorism? Hadn’t all this added up to the United States being convicted before the eyes of the international community?
Casey said, “I apologize profoundly.”
Jake Garn, the Utah Republican, was enraged. He felt that the two sentences had been clear and amounted to satisfactory notification. The CIA had always answered his questions, even if he had to go out to their headquarters to get the answers.
“You’re all assholes,” Garn screamed, “you’re all assholes—the whole Congress is full of assholes, all five hundred thirty-five members are assholes.”
Members stood up, including Moynihan, who wanted to prevent a further confrontation. “Smile,” Moynihan said, “when you call me an asshole.”
Garn later wrote to Goldwater and apologized for disrupting the committee.
After the meeting, the committee issued a public statement saying that Casey concurred in the assessment that the committee “was not adequately informed in a timely manner” about the mining and the speedboat attacks on the Nicaraguan harbors. The committee and Casey agreed to develop new procedures to guarantee there was no repeat of this lapse.
At a meeting with the President’s Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board, Casey suggested that it appoint a subcommittee to investigate the mining. The chief question to be answered: How did it leak?
“You are a master of diversion,” said board member Edward Bennett Williams. “You are caught with a smoking gun in your hand, and you yell robbery.”
Casey laughed. There was no leak investigation.
Later, when McFarlane was up in the Senate, Moynihan disputed his public claim that the committee had been fully and adequately informed about the mining.
“Then what I was told was either disingenuous or someone was lying,” McFarlane replied.
In a closed-door session with the committee, McFarlane summarized the mining incident: “In addition, you have to look to the future and, learning from the past, make sure that you don’t make the same mistake again, if indeed you have.”