THE ALARM WOKE the Director of Central Intelligence, Admiral Stansfield Turner. He hated getting up in the morning, and he had set the alarm for the last possible minute—7 A.M.—this Thursday, November 20, 1980. It was the 383rd day of the Iran hostage crisis; the fifty-two Americans held captive in Tehran had sunk Jimmy Carter’s presidency earlier that month. Turner was to give an intelligence briefing to President-elect Ronald Reagan later that day.
Earlier in the year, a twenty-four-hour-a-day security guard had been placed on the ground floor of Turner’s house for several weeks, after the Federal Bureau of Investigation found some Iranians holding target practice with high-powered rifles on the outskirts of Washington. But the security was gone now, and the house was quiet.
At fifty-six, a retired four-star admiral, Turner was in his prime. A systems analyst, a Navy “thinker” and a Rhodes Scholar, he tried always to look beyond the day to the larger issues. But he was an emotional man, and now, caught between old and new bosses, he was pulled by a range of contradictory feelings about the transition period.
First, he had to gauge when and how to pass on the real secrets to Reagan—the potentially explosive and dangerous operations and spying techniques that the new President would need to understand. This was the stuff at the bottom of the barrel that had not leaked to the news media or been lost to Soviet espionage. The passing of this knowledge would have to be man to man, just the two of them, until Reagan designated those he was going to trust with it. Turner could not divulge the secrets in front of the political hangers-on who had hovered at two earlier briefings and who could be expected to be in attendance at today’s briefing. In one of the most secret intelligence operations that Turner would eventually have to explain to the President-elect, the lives of more than a hundred men were regularly at risk.
Turner also needed to direct Reagan’s attention to the broad philosophical issues involved—the opportunities and hazards of spying and covert action. This was where a President could make real choices, and Reagan had promised a reinvigoration.
Turner wanted to improve his own read on Reagan. In the previous briefings, Reagan had been ostensibly outgoing but ultimately inaccessible. There had been a lightness and a detached congeniality as Reagan waved Turner on, seeming to bat away the problems of the world with a laugh, a Hollywood story, a line of conservative dogma. What a contrast to the grave, almost ruthless grillings Turner had endured with Carter. The more he was exposed to Reagan, the more Turner had come to doubt the man’s basic thoughtfulness. He had described him privately as “stupid.”
The last matter Turner had to consider was his own future. He wanted to convey his willingness, his desire even, to stay on as DCI. Reagan and the Republican platform had charged that Carter had bottled up the Central Intelligence Agency, making it virtually impossible for the agency to conduct effective espionage. The Republicans had argued that Turner, as director, was overly responsive to the Carter human-rights campaign, and that he was so enamored of the latest satellite and electronic eavesdropping technology, which was clean, passive and comparatively safe, that he took no chances. The word “debilitated” had been used about the agency. Turner thought he could rebut this if the President-elect gave him a hearing. His CIA had run some operations that would knock the socks off Ronald Reagan.
“Reagan doesn’t want to politicize the agency and will see we’re on the right track,” Turner had told his top aides. They had scoffed at the Director’s suggestion that he was not finished. His old Navy friend Herb Hetu, a retired captain and the agency’s public-affairs chief, thought Turner needed some reality therapy.
“No way will they keep you,” Hetu told him, “no way. They spent the campaign shooting your nuts off.”
Turner stuck to his optimism. It was hard at times. Just before the presidential election, he had gathered his fifteen top deputies for a management seminar at Camp Peary, “the farm,” the agency’s secret training facility and academy in the Virginia countryside. Half joking, he had asked for a secret straw vote. It was a glass of cold water in the face as the vote was tallied on a blackboard: Carter 2; Reagan 13. That would just about reflect Reagan’s 489-to-44 Electoral College victory.
The morning after the election had been particularly bad. The joy in the corridors at CIA headquarters at Langley was palpable. CIA people weren’t quite hanging out of the windows cheering, but many had treated Reagan’s victory like Liberation Day in Paris.
After a shower, Turner dressed and sat down to read for a few minutes. He picked up the weekly Christian Science lesson. If he didn’t pause now, there would be no other opportunity during the day. He liked to think that his was the intellectual branch of Christianity—the mind and the spirit over all else.
The lesson for the next Sunday said: “…vehemently tell your patient that he must awake. Turn his gaze from the false evidence of the senses…” Look inward, the message said. It was, Turner conceded, an odd point, perhaps, for the head of the largest and most sophisticated intelligence service in the world. But he had witnessed the power of these teachings. His mother had survived the 1920s when her father lost his money in the stock market and took his own life. Later, when Turner’s only brother died in an automobile accident, Turner had immersed himself in his religion to deal with the unexplainable tragedy and the pain. With a red pen Turner had underlined “Trials are proofs of God’s care.”
There wasn’t any time left, and he rose, knowing he was neglecting the lesson. A solid, compact five feet nine and a half inches, Turner bounded down the stairs to breakfast—“ramming speed,” his aides called it. His thick gray hair was usually slightly windblown in the breeze he created as he moved along. The pale blue eyes, the beaming brief smile and the Rotary Club manner suggested anything but CIA.
At the breakfast table, he drank juice and hot water with lemon. Christian Science meant no stimulants, no coffee. Turner didn’t even like the taste of coffee ice cream.
The Washington Post was there: “Casey Is Reported in Line for Directorship of CIA.” Turner grabbed the paper. He had heard nothing whatsoever about that possibility. The “Casey” was William J. Casey, the sixty-seven-year-old Reagan campaign chairman. Turner felt that such a choice would be a step backward, absolutely wrong. Richard Nixon had appointed his 1968 campaign manager, John N. Mitchell, Attorney General. Was the CIA this year’s political war trophy?
Turner read: “Casey worked for the Office of Strategic Services (OSS)—the CIA’s organizational ancestor—during World War II.” He thought that was irrelevant, like getting some old World War II admiral to head the Fleet. The OSS was the old-hand, old-boy network as far as Turner was concerned. OSS remnants and OSS attitudes still endured at the agency and had created major troubles for Turner. These men were the operators, the inner agency, the band of brothers. In a crunch with the White House or the Congress, the band of brothers might get it in the neck, as had happened during the CIA investigations in the mid-1970s. But the old-timers survived because they were needed. Every President, every DCI needed the dedicated secretive operatives who did the dirty work. They formed a club that didn’t meet. They were gung-ho in the service of secret projects, the sort of people who could thrive in an environment where even the rewards were secret. They were both a strength and a weakness in the CIA. And here was a brother apparently emerging from the woodwork. The Post said Casey had been in charge of dropping spies behind German lines during the last six months of World War II. That was thirty-five years ago.
Turner had expected they would extend him the courtesy of informing him that he was going to be replaced before they told the newspapers. The story might be a trial balloon or simply wrong. He had not even heard of Casey until the presidential campaign. Reagan had announced at his first press conference as President-elect, two weeks before, that Casey would be returning to his private law practice.
The prospect of dismissal only strengthened Turner’s conviction that he had guided the CIA out of the dark, turbulent period of the mid-1970s—the upheavals that came in the aftermath of Vietnam and Watergate, the congressional investigations that had dug deeply into the secret CIA past: plots to assassinate foreign leaders, the feeding of dangerous experimental hallucinogenic drugs to the unsuspecting, the stockpiling of small amounts of poison and venom banned by presidential order, clandestine mail openings, and spying on Americans who opposed the Vietnam War. He had brought the CIA out of the cowboy era, countered what he felt was a warped, obsessively secretive culture, and demonstrated that the agency could operate effectively under reforms that required strict accounting to congressional intelligence committees, even for the most sensitive operations. The operations of his CIA were sound, they had the support of Congress. If they were understood, they would have the support of Reagan and of the American people, Turner believed.
A month before the election, Turner had taken a week at home to shut out the daily routine and write a report on his stewardship of the last four years and his plan for the next four. Dated October 17, 1980, stamped “DCI EYES ONLY,” the seven-page outline was more than top secret. “Goals-/Turnover Notes” told a story that would surprise the President-elect and his team. Yes, Turner had had trouble controlling some of the wilder impulses of the cowboys and the brothers, but he had finally gained control and many of those old hands were now gone. But there was a larger problem. The CIA had frayed nerves. Resistance and timidity often marked the Directorate of Operations, the espionage branch, the secretive and exclusive arm that ran the CIA stations and spying abroad and undertook covert actions when the President authorized secret interference in the affairs of other countries.
Turner had suggested new covert operations on a number of occasions, and the directorate had balked. In one instance, on his own, without consulting the White House, Turner had sent a testing-the-waters note to the Deputy Director for Operations, the DDO, inquiring what might be done to oust three leaders who were troublesome to U.S. interests—Cuba’s leader Fidel Castro, Iran’s leader Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, and Libya’s Muammar Qaddafi. The response from the DDO was: No, please; there wasn’t a viable political opposition in any of the three countries, or the CIA didn’t know enough about it to support a movement or a party or a leader. All Turner had been looking for was some way to funnel covert money or assistance to some groups or individuals inside these countries. Assassination was banned by executive order, signed by President Ford in 1976 and reaffirmed by Carter. Turner agreed with the ban entirely, but even so, somehow the operatives had feared that he was going to take them down a dangerous road. Turner had been surprised at the depth of their reluctance. No matter how he had explored the matter, however, the DDO had come up blank. They were uncomfortable at the prospect of serious meddling in other nations’ affairs, even though that was their job. True, some money was being passed to anti-Khomeini forces outside Iran, but that was, at least in the view of the White House, designed to punish Khomeini or to establish some contacts in the event of a counter-revolution.
Turner had also proposed to the directorate that the agency devise a limited covert action plan to find and assist some centrist politician in Guatemala, perhaps even to get some up-and-coming Guatemalan onto the CIA payroll. Political violence was rampant in Guatemala. It was classic Central American standoff: a rightist military government versus leftist-Marxist guerrillas. Hundreds had died that year. In Turner’s opinion this was precisely the kind of situation where covert political support of moderates could serve U.S. interests.
The directorate had reacted as if he had proposed inviting the KGB to his 9 A.M. senior-staff meetings. The covert operators argued that such an operation would run a great risk of putting the CIA out ahead of Administration policy, which in any case was not at all clear. Suppose the guy they picked didn’t work out. Suppose he became a Frankenstein’s monster. Suppose they built him up and then President Carter or some other President wanted to go in another direction. It was too easy to be wrong. The outcry had been unanimous, and Turner had not dared even raise the suggestion at the White House. National-security adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski would almost certainly have supported some covert program, but Carter would likely have engaged in a hesitation waltz. A fact of life of the Carter presidency was that the President had vacillated between the “tough” view of the world provided by Brzezinski and the “soft” view of Secretary of State Cyrus Vance. Turner had once referred privately to Carter as a “peacenik.”
Earlier that month, on November 14, Turner had put additional views and private thoughts into another memo. Under the heading “White House” he had written, “Sources of conflict.” The list was long, but many of the problems flowed to and from national-security adviser Brzezinski, who seemed to think that the CIA worked for him. On one arms control intelligence issue, when Turner dug in his heels, Brzezinski had told him, “You’re not the Supreme Court. You’re not a fourth branch of government. You’re got to decide who you work for.”
Brzezinski loved raw intelligence. The National Security Agency, which intercepted foreign communications, often provided him with transcripts of some head of state talking, or with the decoded political analysis that some foreign embassy in Washington had sent back to its capital. “Did you see that intercept?” Brzezinski would ask. Turner felt that Brzezinski made the typical junior analyst’s mistake, believing that it was possible to explain large events by isolated cables or intercepts. Too often the NSA picked up some blowhard, or a misinformed and self-important official, or an ambassador reporting more than he knew. Turner had written under the heading “NSA”: “Uni-source analysis is dangerous.”
There had been a constant struggle with Brzezinski, who was at times predatory. “You haven’t got a single asset in the Soviet Union,” he once charged at a meeting with Turner’s senior deputies. In fact Turner had developed several Soviet assets, though there had been only one he was sure was genuine, and two had been lost, probably killed—he could not be certain.
What had started out in 1977 as Turner’s thrice-weekly intelligence briefings for the President had been cut to once a week, and then to once every two weeks. He blamed that on Brzezinski, who once offered the opinion that his former graduate students at Columbia University turned out better analyses than the CIA.
When the Shah of Iran came to the United States for medical treatment in October 1979, two weeks before the American hostages were taken in Tehran, the White House had wanted the CIA to bug the deposed Iranian ruler’s hospital room to discover what the mercurial, cancer-stricken man intended to do. Turner had argued that the Shah had the same rights as a U.S. citizen and that, by law, the CIA couldn’t gather intelligence in the United States. But he was given a written order. He swallowed hard and authorized the electronic surveillance of the Shah’s three private rooms on the seventeenth floor of a New York City hospital, though he still thought it improper.
Carter and Brzezinski regarded intelligence as a tool, like the plumbing. When it didn’t work, when the “bug” was not instantly in place, or when the CIA could not foresee the future, there was hell to pay. Turner realized, dimly at times, starkly at other times, that he was isolated both from his own agency and from the President he served.
In an attempt to reach out to the President-elect, Turner had given a copy of his second memo to a member of the transition team that was looking at the CIA for the new Administration. It had been returned to him marked up in pencil with suggestions that called for an abrupt conversion of the agency into an arm of anti-Soviet analysis and covert action. Where Turner had listed some positive attributes of the CIA, he had found the scrawled comment “Too liberal, afraid of political controversy.” On the congressional intelligence oversight committees and their staffs, the Reagan team member had written: “Left wing must go to extent possible.” Turner had also noted in his outline that the CIA could not “withstand another scandal.” A handwritten note said, “Climate has changed. Will change more. If we operate on fear basis, will do very little.” Where Turner had referred to the paramilitary capability of the CIA—the most activist, most interventionist arm—the scrawled comment was: “Must rebuild.” Well, good luck on that, Turner thought.
As Turner finished breakfast, his driver, Ennis Brown, appeared in the driveway to take him downtown to the Reagan briefing. He climbed into the back, where the overnight and morning messages were in a folder for him. The dark government Oldsmobile went down Skipwith Road, onto Route 123 and into the morning traffic. Brown weaved in and out, darting professionally around the slower cars, speeding creatively, taking advantage of each passing opportunity.
A lone CIA security guard, one of four who rotated as the Admiral’s protection, rode shotgun in the front seat. His eyes swept over the landscape, looking for the unusual. It was a beautiful sunny fall day, but the bulletproof windows in the Oldsmobile didn’t roll down, so no one inside could enjoy it. The car had full high-security accessories, armor-plating and anti-mine flooring.
Turner shuffled and fidgeted in the back. He wanted to focus on the positive, the most creative, imaginative and gutsy undertakings. An intelligence outsider like Reagan, who had never held a full-time federal post, would probably not have a clue about what was involved. Turner’s presentations over the next month might still help him keep his job.
One of the most secret operations was the SNCP, the Special Navy Control Program—“Navy Special,” as it was called—in which U.S. submarines trailed Russian subs and also conducted high-risk surveillance and intelligence-gathering around the Soviet Union, at times inside Soviet territorial waters or in its harbors. Its activities included the planting of sophisticated electronic recording devices, or “pods,” to tap into communications channels in an array of key Soviet undersea cables. These were probably the most sensitive operations of all. They risked the lives of all on board, putting the submarine, its crew and an assigned NSA team in jeopardy. It was the pride of the Navy, which loved the macho, daring exploits. Each mission had to be approved by the President. A nuclear sub went to sea, placed the tap pod, left the area and waited for weeks before coming in to retrieve the tapes from the recording device that had been installed on the cable. The tapes then had to be brought back to the NSA, and the information was distributed to only a few in the CIA, the Defense Department and the White House. At times Turner thought the information was of marginal value given the dangers.
Yet he conceded that sometimes the submarine returned with a rich harvest of data about the Soviet military. It was one of the few operations that acquired large amounts of high-quality hard intelligence out of the Soviet Union. On occasion, the “take” included Soviet officials talking to one another, revealing their uncertainties, their lies and their weaknesses. Like many successful intelligence operations, the opportunity was based on the other side’s mistake. The Soviets had assumed that these undersea cables couldn’t be tapped, so the communications links used comparatively unsophisticated coding systems, or in some cases no coding at all.
Another project was Indigo, a new highly secret satellite system in development that could be the key to verifying future arms control agreements with the Soviets. Using radar-imaging, Indigo would see through clouds and work at night, when photographic satellites were blind. This would be particularly important over Eastern Europe, where the so-called “demon cloud cover” could sit for days or weeks.
Some of the best intelligence-gathering operations were conducted abroad by Special Collection Elements (SCE), elite CIA and National Security Agency teams that ran eavesdropping operations with the latest gadgets in many foreign capitals. The SCEs could perform espionage miracles, delivering verbatim transcripts from high-level foreign-government meetings in Europe, the Middle East and Asia, and phone conversations between key politicians. It supplemented the regular CIA officers who spied undercover from the U.S. embassies.
In his “DCI EYES ONLY” memo, Turner had written, “Greater need for intelligence on allies and friends.” Spying on friends, Turner believed, was sticky but essential business. The Shah of Iran had been a great friend of the United States and the CIA, and his intelligence service, the dreaded SAVAK, had been the agency’s main pipeline in Iran. What a mistake, Turner had come to realize. He and his CIA had studiously misread Khomeini as a benign, senile cleric, and now he held the United States hostage. No one, Turner concluded, could surprise like a friend. It was almost easier with unfriendly nations; the CIA knew what to expect.
Since the shock of the Iranian revolution, Turner had attempted to increase the network of paid agents in foreign governments and foreign intelligence services, including some allies and friends. Egypt was an example. A CIA security operation in Egypt, designed to provide President Anwar Sadat with protection and with warnings of coup and assassination plots, also provided the CIA with electronic and human access to Egypt’s government, its society and its leader. Sadat smoked dope and had anxiety attacks, but Turner never paid any attention to this palace gossip. The CIA, however, was not likely to be surprised by Sadat or by events in Egypt. The place was wired.
From intelligence reports, Turner knew that Crown Prince Fahd of Saudi Arabia did a good deal of drinking, contrary to the strict proscriptions of his Muslim religion. Turner also had top-secret reports on the health of Soviet Premier Leonid Brezhnev that were helpful to the White House, particularly on the eve of negotiating sessions. Intelligence support on arms control was very good; the NSA was able to decode some information from Soviet missile tests. But political intelligence about the goings-on in the Politburo, the highest council of the Soviet Union, was weak to nonexistent. It was what Carter and Brzezinski had wanted most, and Turner had been unable to deliver much.
In his time at the CIA, Turner had never once seen an intelligence report that was worth risking someone’s life. Nonetheless, he had pushed for more. It was his job. Only once in four years had he turned down a proposal for a sensitive collection operation overseas to gather intelligence; it was to have been a repeat of an earlier, successful operation, and Turner had thought going in a second time too risky.
Over the next two months, it would be Turner’s job to introduce the new President to these realities and to much more. Reagan would have to see the entire floor plan of intelligence operations, how they fit together, what their limitations were.
For instance, in an operation called Cervical Rub, a code name selected at random, a sophisticated electronic device disguised and constructed to look like a tree limb, complete with bark covering, was to be “planted” in a tree outside a Soviet air base in Eastern Europe to collect data on advanced Soviet MiG radars. The base was next to a park frequented by picnickers, and an agent had only to go over a fence some Sunday, climb a tree and screw the device into place. But Cervical Rub had been delayed because the only available CIA operative was a non-European, and it was considered too risky to send him among the Sunday picnickers, where he would stand out.
The point was that operations were chancy. A great many things had to fall into place. Intelligence on Soviet radar might be more important than certain Politburo information. But the CIA could not keep tabs on the whole world.
Turner’s Oldsmobile approached Lafayette Park, across from the White House, and turned down one-way Jackson Place. It stopped before No. 716, a government-owned brick town house where Reagan was staying. Turner stepped out and charged up the six steps.
Reagan’s temporary residence was a nondescript twenty-two-foot-wide four-story 113-year-old building. Six years earlier, Vice-President Nelson A. Rockefeller had used the high-security town house as headquarters for a commission he headed that was investigating the CIA’s questionable domestic activities. Reagan had been one of the eight members, though he had not been very active, attending only ten of the commission’s twenty-six meetings. When its final report was issued, Reagan had defended the CIA, saying, “In any bureaucracy of about sixteen thousand people there are going to be individuals who make mistakes and do things they shouldn’t do.”
Soon after Turner entered, Reagan came down and greeted him warmly. The President-elect showed no anxiety, no impatience, only a natural kindliness. His retinue included George Bush, the Vice-President-elect, who had been the DCI Turner had succeeded. Reagan’s top aide, Edwin Meese III, an amiable lawyer, stood to the side. Three other aides were present. And Bill Casey.
Turner briefed them on the European military balance and Central America. He gave an update on Poland, where the Soviets were threatening an invasion to crush the independent Solidarity trade union. Overhead satellite reconnaissance photographs and electronic communications intercepts picked up from places like Berlin—the intelligence collection capital of the world—provided a good account.
There was also human intelligence, Turner added suggestively.
Casey cocked his head.
Turner was tempted to disclose, but he did not, that the CIA had a deep-penetration spy, a colonel on the Polish General Staff, who provided a steady flow of intelligence out of Warsaw on the intentions of the Poles and the Soviets. The colonel’s sensitive reports were circulated on a BIGOT list only to the most senior U.S. officials who had an absolute need to know. The reports were hand-carried to each official in a folder with a distinguishing blue border or a wide blue stripe denoting a sensitive human source. Carter, Vice-President Walter F. Mondale and Brzezinski were the only ones from the White House with regular BIGOT-list or “blue-stripe” access. The colonel’s name, Kuklinski, was never included in these reports, and only a few CIA officers knew it.
As Turner guided the tour of the world’s hot spots, he glanced periodically at Casey. There was something about Casey that was not zestful. He slurred his words, and his speech was like a shortwave broadcast, fading in and out. The few strands of wiry white hair on the edges of his bald head each embarked on its own stubborn course, further contributing to the appearance of the absentminded professor. His ears were overlarge, even flappy. Deep facial wrinkles shot down from each end of his flat nose, passing his mouth on either side to fall beyond his chin and lose themselves in prominent jowls. He seemed in disarray. Even so, Turner sensed that Casey was listening attentively.
Afterward, Casey walked over. He looked vaguely hunchbacked as he extended a personal welcome with exaggerated but, Turner felt, genuine bonhomie, his elbow high in the air, his large mitt flying to catch Turner’s.
“Hello, Stan,” Casey said loudly, with a big smile. He drew Turner aside.
“The story about me taking over,” Casey said, mushing his words. “It’s not true. Nothing has been decided yet.” It was hardly an absolute knockdown of the story. Perhaps detecting Turner’s concern, Casey added, “I’m not bucking for your job.”
Turner left deeply uncertain about his future and the CIA’s. There were signs that he was out, but not for sure.
Later that day Meese passed a message through the Carter White House to Turner. Meese was generally viewed as the voice of authority on key senior appointments for the incoming administration and already was considered a kind of deputy President-elect. Meese wanted it known that he had not put out the Casey story that day. But he also left the impression that Casey’s appointment was not out of the question.