IN SEPTEMBER, Casey was spending lots of time at Langley raising consciousness about a possible terrorist attack in the closing weeks of the campaign. He summoned operations officers and analysts to his office, called others, poked around the building, pounding down the corridors, popping into offices and the operations center. He made it clear that the entire U.S. intelligence community was on terrorist alert. He dreaded that a strike again by mad bombers would show the impotence of the United States. The political repercussions could be substantial. Reagan’s presidency stood for strength. Nothing in the last years had demonstrated weakness more than an inability to stop these attacks.
For seventeen months Casey had been throwing assets at the problem—training, information exchange, the development of a network involving some one hundred countries. There had been significant upgrading in forty countries of CIA capabilities in paramilitary training, hostage rescue and VIP protection. The CIA had just trained sixty Lebanese. Nearly fifty people at CIA headquarters worked exclusively on terrorism, as well as dozens more at the NSA and in the military intelligence services. Casey demanded results, and there had been some success. Intelligence had determined that Spain’s ambassador to Lebanon was being tracked, and the CIA had suggested he leave Lebanon. He did not and was later kidnapped.
The attention to terrorism generated more reports, and finally a flood of information, much of it of dubious value. Operationally, the CIA was still having almost no luck in penetrating Middle East terrorist groups. The reason was simple, Casey concluded. Terrorists knew that CIA agents couldn’t kill because they could not target people for assassination. An applicant to a terrorist group was given an immediate test—go kill someone.
Some of the most concrete information was coming in classified reports showing that explosives and timed fuse bombs were being moved by Iranians operating out of their embassy in Damascus under the protection of diplomatic immunity. In August, reports had shown that explosives had been moved into Lebanon, where the trail was lost. With the Marines gone, the U.S. ambassador’s residence and the American Embassy annex in the relative security of Christian East Beirut were the remaining major targets. The CIA and other intelligence agencies cranked out reports. There was a here-we-go-again flavor but not much exactness to the warnings.
At 11:40 A.M. Thursday, September 20, a van with diplomatic license plates pulled into the U.S. Embassy annex in East Beirut, zigzagging and threading its way around the staggered row of concrete dragon’s teeth designed to slow all vehicles. One guard’s M16 jammed. The security guard for the British ambassador, who was visiting the embassy, opened fire, pumping five shots into the van, which headed into a parked vehicle some thirty feet short of the ramp leading to the garage underneath the embassy. The van detonated, leaving a crater twenty-six feet in diameter. At least twenty-four people were killed, including two American servicemen. Another ninety were wounded, including U.S. Ambassador Reginald Bartholomew, who was buried in the rubble but emerged with only minor injuries.
Casey was sick. Top-secret overhead photography later showed that the van, or one just like it, had been practicing outside a mock-up of the embassy annex in the Bekaa Valley. American intelligence concluded that Hizbollah—the Party of God—and Sheikh Fadlallah were behind this attack, just as they had been behind the 1983 bombings at the embassy and the Marine barracks. In the preelection period, Casey quickly saw, no one in the White House was in the mood to retaliate, having held fire for many months, and after more serious attacks. After all, this could have been much worse.
One of the most intriguing after-action reports came from a Lebanese intelligence service lieutenant colonel. It showed the tight planning that had gone into the operation. The van had left Muslim West Beirut that morning. Two accomplices wearing uniforms of the Lebanese police force followed in an orange BMW. On the way to the embassy annex, the van accidentally hit a small Opel. The driver of the Opel got out and tried to talk to the van driver. The driver was subdued and seemed catatonic. He looked neither to the left nor the right. The Opel driver could not get his attention. At that point the two accomplices walked up and offered the Opel driver 2,000 Lebanese pounds—about $300—many times the cost of fixing his Opel. The driver took the money and left. A Lebanese who witnessed this heard the explosion at the U.S. Embassy annex about ten minutes later and went to Lebanese intelligence. They were never able to find the driver of the Opel, but they believed the witness’s story. The CIA could not be certain, but the report suggested that the van driver had been drugged before his suicide mission.
The Lebanese intelligence service wanted more than the $2 million it received each year to pay agents, and Casey had promised to see whether he could get it. The Lebanese were doing what they could to provide intelligence on terrorist attacks and the relationship between the CIA and the Lebanese service was drawing closer.
Casey was not as confident about the Israelis. He knew that they had penetrated Lebanon and Syria with first-class agents, but there was a strong feeling that the Israelis were holding out and that it might be endangering American lives. Relations between the CIA and the Mossad had deteriorated after Israel invaded Lebanon, and the U.S. withdrew the Marines. Lebanon had been a disaster for both countries, and nothing sours relations like shared failure. The agencies worked together without liking each other. Mossad officials disparaged the CIA, one calling its agents “players who can’t play.” Peter Mandy, the No. 2 in the Mossad, controlled all liaison with the CIA. In Lebanon, CIA and Mossad agents were not permitted to deal directly with one another. There was a feeling in the CIA that Mandy was miserly, dispensing bits of the Mossad’s precious human-source reports only when it served Israeli interests.
The assessment at Langley was that the CIA-Israeli intelligence-sharing was a one-way street. Casey had to pressure the Israelis, let them know there was trouble. He could do it himself, but that might be too much pressure.
He decided finally to send McMahon to Israel. McMahon carried sufficient weight to read the Mossad the riot act: henceforth, the CIA would expect all information that might relate to a terrorist attack against U.S. installations. Please, and God damn it, McMahon argued. He felt that he had made only superficial progress; the Mossad was, in the end, like the CIA: it trusted no one.
The September 20 bombing dramatized intelligence problems, if not a breakdown, and Casey had some explaining to do at the White House. His response was simple. He went back ten years to the Church investigation, as well as the Carter Administration—both had crushed the spirit of the CIA, he said. An intelligence penetration or the cultivation of a source was feared more for the trouble it could cause than for its potential benefit. He couldn’t rebuild a human-source network in four years.
For instance, President Carter had stopped the secret payments to King Hussein of Jordan in 1977 when the press found out about them. Carter somehow had felt that it was unsavory. Under Casey, the CIA had begun a new covert operation with Jordan to gather and share intelligence on terrorists and the PLO. But, having been burned in public by Carter, the King was wary and distrustful. Memories were long in the Middle East, Casey pointed out.
One person bought Casey’s argument—Reagan. Six days after this latest Beirut bombing, the President was on the campaign trail in Bowling Green, Ohio. A student asked him about the security at U.S. embassies. He said, “We’re feeling the effects today of the near-destruction of our intelligence capability in recent years before we came here.” He added that previously the attitude had been that “spying is somehow dishonest and let’s get rid of our intelligence agents…. And we did that to a large extent.”
If there was any doubt about the target of this grenade, White House aides later explained to reporters that it was intended for Carter and Turner. The next day Carter blasted back, saying that Reagan’s charge was “personally insulting and too gross in its implications to ignore.” Calling the charge “completely false,” Carter went on to say that the calamities in the Middle East were a result of “the President’s own deeply flawed policy and inadequate security precautions in the face of proven danger.”
Turner responded publicly, his voice almost quivering as he read a statement: “Mr. Reagan’s comments are undignified and unworthy of a President. It is Reagan who has damaged the CIA by putting in people of questionable character…he has politicized the CIA with Casey.” He asked, “What do you read about CIA today? You read about a director who has shady financial dealings and is involved in questionable legality and propriety in the secret war in Nicaragua…. No wonder they are not collecting intelligence in Beirut, because they’re trying to undermine the government of Nicaragua.”
Casey read the back-and-forth carefully, but he was not about to be drawn into partisan crossfire. He declined public comment. But he knew what Reagan meant. The issue was not numbers, money or personnel, though they were all part of it. The real problem was the climate of distrust that Turner had fostered. The spirit of the agency had to be can-do, and Turner had made it don’t-you-dare, Casey thought.
The flap died, but Casey was satisfied that the voters understood what it was all about.
After spending the summer stewing about resigning as the NIO for Latin America, John Horton gave a long on-the-record interview to a reporter for a Portland, Maine, newspaper. Without mentioning Mexico by name, Horton said that there had been an important intelligence estimate and that Casey had “kept constant pressure on me to redo it.”
“I refused to redo it, so he finally had the thing rewritten over my dead body, so to speak,” Horton said. “As an intelligence officer, I don’t work for an administration, I work for the government.”
It took three weeks for the news of Horton’s public complaint to reach the Washington news media in full. On September 28, The New York Times had a front-page story, “Analyst Reported to Leave CIA in a Clash with Casey on Mexico.”
Bob Gates, the deputy for intelligence, felt mildly betrayed. Horton hadn’t hinted he would go public. It was Horton’s one experience in the analytic world, and he obviously didn’t understand it. Pressure was the name of the game. There was always pressure from the State Department or the Pentagon or the Navy, the Army, the White House. It was when the CIA struck a nerve or hit upon an important issue, or when its conclusions might have a real impact on policy, that people began screaming.
State was always hostile to the South Africa work the CIA was doing, and the hard-line Assistant Secretary of Defense, Richard Perle, always disagreed with CIA analysis on the Soviet strategic capability. Gates himself had, the previous year, reopened the issue of Soviet defense spending and concluded that it was lower than the DIA had been saying. This was like trying to revise one of the Ten Commandments, but Gates had plunged into the thicket. That was pressure. Horton didn’t understand real pressure. Yes, the debate could get pretty rough. Casey could hand it out. These things needed to be tested, and the discussion often became adversarial, hot. In Gates’s view, Horton had mistaken legitimate intellectual pressure for political pressure.
Just six weeks before the presidential election, Casey now had to contend with Horton. He felt that Horton had tried to keep out of the estimate information that corroborated the possibility of Mexico’s collapse. Casey was determined that there be no estimate on his watch that said something like “The Shah of Iran will have five years in power” and then he’s out in months.
The Director was also irritated at Horton’s claim that he worked for the “government” and not some particular administration. It was as if Horton thought there was an additional branch of government, a permanent corps of keepers. In Casey’s opinion, this was just the bureaucracy. And it was the trouble with government, not the solution.
Casey wrote Horton a personal letter. When Horton read it, he felt as if Casey were accusing him of growing long hair and taking drugs. For all his contention that he wanted a full range of opinion, Casey obviously hadn’t wanted an alternative view of his process of doing the estimates. Casey had become part of the Reagan Administration policy-making cabal, and his primary concern was his desire to overthrow the government of Nicaragua. Mexico wasn’t going along, it was too uppity in foreign affairs, it was charting an independent course of nonintervention and negotiation. At least unconsciously, Horton thought, Casey had intended the estimate to be a dagger aimed at the heart of Mexico.
Democrats on the Senate Intelligence Committee saw an opportunity. Moynihan read the estimate. A 1-in-5 chance of instability seemed well founded. Since Mexico had for all practical purposes been bankrupt, for Jesus Christ’s sakes—bankrupt!—Moynihan judged that it was not unreasonable to predict some problem. He rather liked the idea of giving it a numerical probability. At least when someone waded through all the marvelously crafted concerns there was a forecast that might be of some use.After all, when people started saying there was an 80 or 90 percent chance of rain, one took one’s umbrella.
And the House Intelligence Committee, no friend of Casey’s, came to his defense, saying in a public report that it had “examined the earlier drafts and the final version of that particular NIE and found that dissenting views were printed at the very beginning of the study, a practice the committee applauds.”
On Friday, October 12, Casey held a reception for the staff members of both the Senate and House intelligence committees in the executive dining room of the seventh-floor headquarters at Langley. It was an act of conciliation. He also wanted to thank them, to celebrate the final passage of a new law that exempted key DO, scientific and technical, and security files from the despised Freedom of Information Act.* The President was going to sign it into law on Monday. Passage symbolized a new, off-our-back attitude toward the CIA.
At the reception, Casey pressed flesh as he made the rounds. He hadn’t testified before the Senate committee for nearly five months and had no plans to do so in the near future.
Rob Simmons approached him and mentioned that the main points in the 1980 Republican platform relating to intelligence had already been accomplished. In addition to the Freedom of Information Act revisions, the PFIAB had been reconstituted; an identities-of-agents bill had been passed in 1982 making it illegal to wantonly publish the names of agents; counterintelligence was being rebuilt and reemphasized; and the intelligence budget had been increased 50 percent in the last four years.
Casey jotted these down on a piece of paper. It was a good record.
The next day, Saturday, Casey rose early. It was one of those perfect football-weekend days, or a time to play golf. But he would be going to the office. He had been out of the country paying visits to stations, and he wanted to keep the momentum going at Langley. The Director’s presence at headquarters on Saturday sent a subliminal message to all, those who were there and those who were not. On Monday there would be notes, calls, scribbled inquiries. Casey left a trail. He didn’t want to get rusty. Though he had put on a blue blazer, a shirt and a tie, he had chosen his green plaid pants—“Republican fund-raisers”—to mark the informality of a Saturday.
One of his senior assistants at the agency came by his house for an 8:30 breakfast. It was a chance to review the first term, though Casey already had his mind on the second. It was twenty-four days to the election, and then almost certainly another four years for both Reagan and himself. Sophia, still in her bathrobe, set out apple cider, fried eggs, bacon and stacks of toast. Casey was relaxed and in a good mood as he sat at the dining-room table.
Sophia gave him total support. To Casey, she was the polar opposite of the wife of John le Carré’s fictional British master spy George Smiley. Ann Smiley was self-centered and a drifter. Sophia was a woman of total devotion, her short white hair combed forward, no expensive hairstyle, perhaps a touch of hair spray. Since the day they married, on George Washington’s Birthday during the war, she had stuck by him. Their marriage was like the church. Sophia was one immeasurable advantage Casey had over Smiley.
The DCI felt that he had done the job at the CIA of conveying the explicit message of the Reagan Administration: America and strength. The world was not safer, because the Soviets were still bent on expansion, but the United States was in a better position to cope.
He shook his head at the mention of the alleged and much acclaimed passion he supposedly had for covert action. “That’s bullshit,” Casey said. “I am the chief analyst.” His real job was as Bill Colby had described, running down to the White House with informed analysis, new information. Each day there was a different problem in a different part of the world.
One big turnaround in the Reagan years so far, Casey felt, was the Soviet Union. The Soviets were hurting; their economy was a mess and corruption was rampant, according to the best, latest CIA information. The Soviets had halted their “We’re-the-future” talk by and large. Because they weren’t. As Casey surveyed the world, it was clear that some good things were happening through covert action assistance to insurgencies. In spite of his boast that he was the chief analyst, Casey kept coming back to covert action.
Casey conceded that some of these operations could be messy, risky, dangerous. But the alternative was to let things drift as they had done under Carter. Together with a full program of diplomatic, propaganda and economic pressures, covert action was effective. There was a time, he acknowledged, when the covert action had been too big a part of the Nicaragua effort.
He felt that in the last three and a half years he had won one point with his critics. The CIA could not be obsessively concerned with its reputation. It worked for the President. If the President’s policies took a beating, so would the CIA. But so would the State Department or the Army. Those institutions—CIA, State, Army—were not so fragile that they couldn’t withstand setbacks and criticism.
He had been pushy, had insisted on enterprise. As Casey looked down the scorecard, he checked off some other important successes:
Casey had molded and organized the CIA to assist its six true clients—the President, the Vice-President, the White House chief of staff, the Secretaries of State and Defense and the national-security adviser. The CIA was not set up to service Congress, it was not there for the news media or for the public. Though he occasionally courted others, Casey’s essential message to any but his major clients was “Fuck you.”
In many respects Casey realized that his directorship was a high-wire act, conducted in an atmosphere of no real restraints other than those he himself imposed. Since self-denial was not his style, and the intelligence account his free and clear, he demanded everything. The NSA’s intercept program, for example, was now so comprehensive that senior officials had access to more material reporting back some of their own comments or alleged comments. An innocent social visit to an embassy reception could turn into an embarrassment for a Cabinet officer. The next morning’s intercept packet would contain the ambassador’s intercepted report back to his capital, quoting an unnamed U.S. official; under the NSA rules the names of U.S. citizens, even Cabinet officers, were deleted.Yet at times the social pages of the newspapers reported who attended the embassy parties and it took minimum detective work to determine the U.S. citizen.
The intercepts also revealed the frequency with which the foreign ambassadors in Washington distorted their reports and overstated their intimacy with senior U.S. officials, who in some cases seriously curtailed their dealings with embassy people and avoided the embassy cocktail circuit.
In one example, intercepts showed that the Japanese had developed a good source in the State Department on important trade negotiations. American officials read in some wonder the point-by-point U.S. positions even before they had been presented to other U.S. departments concerned with the negotiations.
Casey only smiled at this. He was reversing a trend, putting the United States back in a winning position on all fronts.
In his own way—private, personal, idiosyncratic—Casey found the roots of espionage idealistic. There was something, in this case the United States, for which it was worth fighting, even fighting hard and dirty. Casey was pleased with his agency but on a scale of 1 to 10 he would give it only a 7. Probably 7 was par, good, but not the best. It was possible to do better. That was why he was going to work that Saturday morning. To keep the ideas moving. That was what interested him. He had little patience for show-and-tell briefings and administering. He kept the notes and the queries flowing. Winston Churchill had a notepad headed “Action Today.” That was what Casey wanted.
The next day, Sunday, Casey was alerted to an Associated Press wire report that disclosed a CIA guerrilla-warfare training manual advising the Nicaraguan contras on “selective use of violence” to “neutralize carefully selected and planned targets such as court judges, police and state security officials, etc.” By Wednesday, The New York Times had the story on the front page: “CIA Primer Tells Nicaraguan Rebels How to Kill.” It was difficult to avoid the logic that “neutralize” meant assassination. The ninety-page manual also urged the contras to “kidnap all officials or agents of the Sandinista government…”
Casey hadn’t seen the manual, but he realized that it was a bombshell and that he had had an important if indirect role in the decision to prepare it. “Psychological Operations in Guerrilla Warfare” had been drawn up and given limited distribution to the contras a year earlier, after Casey’s trip to Central America. He had pushed hard to give the contras some political context, arguing that armed bands roaming the mountains on hit-and-run missions weren’t going to make a real difference. The contras had to get into the villages and the cities, spread their message, develop political organization, build political backing. The manual had been devised as an educational tool.
Now Casey took a pencil to the manual, scribbled and underlined. The manual was a muddle, a grab bag of ideas, often contradictory, and filled with revolutionary and psychological jargon—“self-criticism,” “group discussions.”
There was information on how to set up a guerrilla camp, and detailed instructions on how to avoid hostile feeling among the local residents. “Construct a latrine and a hole where wastes and garbage will be buried,” Casey read. He laughed. The madness of it would be funny under other circumstances. The manual called for “implicit terror” and denounced “explicit terror.”
Under “Shock Troops” he read: “These men should be equipped with weapons (knives, razors, chains, clubs, bludgeons) and should march slightly behind the innocent and gullible participants.”
The word “neutralize” appeared under the heading “Selective Use of Violence for Propagandistic Effects.” After a Sandinista official had been selected, the manual said, “it is absolutely necessary to gather together the population affected, so that they will be present, take part in the act, and formulate accusations against the oppressor.” One sentence had been edited out of some editions of the manual, but unfortunately not all. It said, “If possible, professional criminals will be hired to carry out selective ‘jobs.’” This was embarrassingly reminiscent of the CIA’s hiring of John Roselli, a member of the Mafia, to assassinate Castro in the early sixties.
Assassination was like no other subject in the American psyche, Casey knew. No subject so challenged the national self-image and moral credibility. Assassination was the Scarlet A of American politics. The use of the word “neutralize” was probably worse than the use of the word “assassination” because it suggested the shadowy, plausible deniability that was supposed to be the bread and butter of CIA operations. In that concealed world, the agency never said what it meant anyway.
Casey was deeply concerned that no one in the chain of command at the CIA had seen the peril of trying to reduce warfare to words. It wasn’t logical to go off in two directions, warning against and advocating violence.
The nature of guerrilla warfare revealed itself in the manual. The goal was to crush the constituted government. The take-no-prisoners style could not be denied. To imagine it otherwise would be truly naive. But to reduce it to writing?
A political firestorm erupted. House Intelligence Committee Chairman Boland said that the manual espoused “the doctrine of Lenin, not Jefferson. It embraces the Communist revolutionary tactics the United States is pledged to defeat throughout the world.” Goldwater demanded a full briefing for the Senate committee. There were calls for a special prosecutor, and for Casey’s head. There were accusations, principally from Democrats, that the United States was sponsoring terrorism. By the end of the day Casey was bananas.
The next day, he decided that he would release a statement pledging an investigation, but the issue of the manual and all it implied so dominated the news that he had to go down to the White House, which now stepped in to take control. The President’s name was substituted for Casey’s on a statement which said: “The Administration has not advocated or condoned political assassination or any other attacks on civilians, nor will we.” Casey was told to have the CIA inspector general investigate, and the President’s intelligence oversight board was directed to launch a separate probe. Both the House and the Senate committees started their own inquiries.
Part of Casey wanted to emerge from the shadows and shout back, What the hell do you expect? It’s a war, not a picnic. It’s messy and violent. People are getting killed down there. It’s like that. The world is like that.
On Sunday, October 21, the second televised debate between Reagan and Mondale took place. Like tens of millions, Casey tuned in. The first question put to Reagan was a sharp one about the assassination manual, as it was now being called.
“Is this not, in effect, our own state-sponsored terrorism?” he was asked by syndicated columnist Georgie Anne Geyer.
“No,” Reagan said. “But I’m glad you asked that question, because I know it’s on many people’s minds.” He proceeded haltingly to claim that only twelve copies of the manual had got out with the offending language, and that it was the head of the CIA in Nicaragua who had supervised the manual’s publication and printing.
“Mr. President, you are implying that the CIA in Nicaragua is directing the contras there?” Geyer asked.
“I’m afraid I misspoke when I said a CIA head in Nicaragua,” Reagan said. “There is not someone there directing all of this activity.” He then said it was CIA men stationed elsewhere in Central America.
“What is the President charged with doing when he takes his oath of office?” Mondale asked in rebuttal, challenging Reagan with a lecture about political terror and assassinations.
Reagan stumbled badly in the debate. Many asked whether the President was senile. The Wall Street Journal had already asked the question directly, publicly, in its lead front-page story: “New Question in Race: Is Oldest President Now Showing His Age?”
Casey was worried. This affair contained all the ingredients of calamity. Though Congress was not in session, the Senate Intelligence Committee demanded a briefing for those members still in town, and for the staff. Two relatively junior DO officers who had been involved in the Nicaragua operation for only about a month were sent up to the Hill.
Casey could make sure the investigations were not completed or released until after the election. Meanwhile, he needed someone out front defending the CIA publicly, someone independent, someone with credibility. Since his relations with Goldwater had been somewhat repaired after the mining fiasco, Casey decided to see whether he could enlist the Senator. But the Intelligence Committee chairman was back home in Arizona. Casey decided to dispatch a hand-carried explanation. He sent a draft press release for Goldwater to issue saying that there was nothing to the manual.
But Goldwater passed word back from Arizona that he could not, and would not, comment until the investigations were completed, adding again, as he had often on the mining incident, “I’m tired of pulling Casey’s nuts out of the fire.” He said don’t send anyone out here, he was resting.
Casey needed a big play. In spite of Goldwater’s snub, he decided to send the DDO himself, Clair George, and another senior operations officer, Vincent M. Cannistraro, to Arizona. The Senator would be impressed with such senior men flying almost clear across the country, Casey hoped.
George and Cannistraro boarded an afternoon flight, using assumed cover names, arrived in Arizona about 4 P.M. and took a taxi to Goldwater’s house. Goldwater was in no mood. No, he didn’t want to listen, no, he wasn’t ready to make a statement.
But look here, George tried to explain gently—
No, Goldwater said flatly. They had better leave. The DDO and his assistant were soon on a plane back to Washington.
Senator Moynihan recognized the manual for what it was. At Harvard he had read a paper on Mao Tse-tung’s technique of insurgency: identify the landowner, single him out and have a public trial. Focus the hate on one person, make the people in the village vote and then witness the execution. It was an effective bonding technique. He had seen it in a Green Beret manual during the Vietnam War. It brought the populace into the rebellion, gave them a stake, a feeling of satisfaction, a feeling that things were going to be better, that justice would be served.
When the CIA had made certain that none of its top officials, including Casey, McMahon, Stein and Clarridge (who couldn’t read it because he didn’t know Spanish), had reviewed or approved the manual, that conclusion was passed to the White House. That much of the investigation could be released. It took Casey out of the direct line of fire.
The next day, Casey wrote a personal letter to each member of the House and Senate intelligence committees, trying to explain it away. Taken as a whole, in context, addressing its thrust and purpose, the manual was intended to moderate behavior, he said.
But the Director was exhausted. As far as he was concerned, the real story was how the press and the congressional Democrats operated hand in hand. An Associated Press reporter had obtained a copy of the manual and had passed it to the House Intelligence Committee. The committee had authenticated it as a CIA product, the reporter had his story, and the committee had jumped up and down. Casey’s public-affairs man, George Lauder, threatened that someday he would write a story on the leaks out of the Hill committees. Lauder joked that he was going to entitle his book “How Everyone Leaked and Pissed on America.”
Shultz had come up with a Nicaragua peace plan and he wanted to deliver it to the President, who was in Des Moinés campaigning. Casey conferred with Weinberger and Kirkpatrick. Shultz had to be stopped, they agreed. Casey nearly had to throw himself under the wheels of Air Force One and make it clear there would be plenty of resignations if the Secretary of State went forward. Shultz backed off.
On November 6, Reagan won reelection with 59 percent of the vote, carrying forty-nine states, all but Mondale’s Minnesota and the District of Columbia.