Good Hunting: An American Spymaster's Story Read online

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  For Pat, without whom this story would not have been possible

  and

  for all the CIA personnel who have served their country gallantly

  Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Notice

  Dedication

  Introduction

  1. Inside the Invisible Government

  2. Mules, Pickup Trucks, and Stinger Missiles

  3. “Your Friend Called from the Airport”

  4. “We Need to Polygraph Him”

  5. “Jack, This Changes It All, Doesn’t It?”

  6. Do I Lie to the Pope, or Break Cover?

  7. Selling the Linear Strategy, One Lunch at a Time

  8. Jousting with the Soviets: When I Knew It Was Over

  9. A New Boss, a Bad Penny, and a Principled Heroin Dissent

  10. The Rooster and the Train

  11. Raising the Bar

  12. Undisclosed

  13. Splitting a Steak

  14. Good Hunting

  Postscript

  People Consulted

  Acknowledgments

  Index

  Photographs

  A Note About the Author

  Copyright

  Introduction

  There’s a model truck on the windowsill of my office overlooking Central Park that takes me back to the border towns in Pakistan with just a glimpse. Very few of my clients ever comment on it. They come to my firm in Midtown in New York City with all sorts of thorny problems and ask for help figuring out exactly what is going on. They’re usually doing business in an environment, or with people, they don’t fully understand, and they want to know the risks involved and how best to proceed. The truck, in fact, symbolizes a life in the intelligence world, and in turn the reason they have come to my office in the first place. Charlie Wilson gave it to me as a reminder of the guns and ammunition we moved across the border into Afghanistan. Charlie was a Democratic congressman from Texas who developed an intense interest in the Afghan mujahideen and their determined opposition to the Soviet Union’s occupation of their country in the 1980s. I ran the last, and largest, covert operation of the Cold War as head of the Central Intelligence Agency’s Afghan Task Force.

  Afghanistan will always loom large in my mind as the crowning accomplishment of my past work as an intelligence officer—and one of the greatest challenges ahead for the CIA and the American intelligence community. I’m in the corporate intelligence business now, commanding a distributed network of hundreds of contacts who in turn have hundreds of sources they can tap into around the world. It’s fair to say that I can put a tail on someone just about anywhere in the world faster than most spy agencies. I’ve assessed the risk of a chem-bio attack at Madison Square Garden, vetted the prospective owner of an NBA franchise, foiled a cyberthief in China, and freed trucks in Moscow belonging to one of the world’s great magicians. My work obviously colors the way I think about the future of U.S. intelligence, where I still occasionally serve in an advisory capacity, having kept my clearances active. Of course, it’s my thirty-two-year career at the CIA that has made me the intelligence professional I am, even though I scrupulously avoid contact with former agents, sources, or foreign intelligence officers I knew on the job.

  When I walked away from the CIA in 1998 with nothing but a government pension, I thought I had my feelings under control. I thought I was done. But over the years, I’ve never quite been able to let go. This book is my best shot at sorting out my complex emotions and experiences. I served during the middle years of the CIA—from Nixon to Clinton—and know that period of CIA history intimately. I lived it, I breathed it, and I loved it. During those times, we ended many of our cables with the phrase “GOOD HUNTING,” which referred to the covert, relentless pursuit of our enemies and sources of intelligence. And so it has been the “hunting” conducted by U.S. intelligence officers and their diplomatic and military brethren that led us to victory in the Cold War, as well as to the dismantling of al-Qaeda. Yet I still feel the Central Intelligence Agency, caricatured and lionized by Hollywood, remains one of the least-understood instruments of the U.S. government. Agency critics tend to focus on failed operations that are exposed or compromised, either by screwups in execution, leaks in Washington, or the release or declassification of once-secret cables. But these accounts typically shed little light on either the CIA’s internal culture and discipline or the professionalism among its officers. I don’t want to hide behind the cliché often cited by those who’ve run the CIA that our relatively few failures become public while our many successes remain secret. But there is more than a little truth to that. In over thirty years, I never saw or participated in a “rogue operation”—something the CIA executed on its own without explicit approval from the White House. My seven overseas postings, interspersed with headquarters assignments, also made me understand how valuable it is that the CIA plants its flag in almost every country. The president and other members of the U.S. national security community cannot know when a country will suddenly take on strategic importance. Grounding in foreign capitals, and an ability to influence events through covert means, is critical for Washington. No one can provide those things better than the CIA.

  I want to set the record straight, to the best of my ability, for history’s sake, about the Agency’s essential intelligence contributions to national security. And I want to talk about the future of the CIA post-Iraq and -Afghanistan, with the nation fatigued by large ground wars but still in need of protection against an array of enemies, from al-Qaeda to the Mexican drug cartels, from Iran to North Korea. Like it or not, a powerful intelligence service capable of stealing secrets from our adversaries and mounting effective covert operations is, for the United States, an imperative of modern statecraft. I hope, after many years of war, we do not come to resemble those whom T. S. Eliot wrote about at the end of World War I in his poem “The Hollow Men.” In it, he describes leaders as “shape without form, shade without color, paralyzed force, gesture without motion.” I saw few such people in the CIA. The model truck on my windowsill speaks to my belief in the efficacy of covert action. It is true that the CIA’s biggest mistakes involved covert action. But it is also true that these mistakes, without exception, also involved operations carried out at the behest of presidents pursuing flawed policies. And for every covert action that failed spectacularly, there have been others that enabled presidents and policy makers to achieve ends in the nation’s interest with an unseen hand, which is almost always preferable to a heavy footprint. Through hard experience, including running all CIA operations in the mid-1990s, I understand the difference between good covert action that is effective and representative of the best of American values, and bad covert action that is poorly conceived and destined to fail. I have developed over the years a set of principles designed to ensure the former and prevent the latter. It’s time that the policy makers and Congress conduct a comprehensive review of covert action, its appropriate use, and general principles of operation so we can come to a better appreciation of what the CIA can do for the nation at this complex moment in our history. Needless to say, this can’t become a public debate about ongoing operations that would jeopardize our people, allies, and national interests. Such a discussion can more appropriately be handled through the existing oversight proce
ss. But it is nevertheless imperative.

  I have been engaged in all aspects of the spy business. I’ve written in invisible ink and run black bag jobs. I have argued against flawed coup plots and directed the largest covert action of the Cold War. I spoke out inside the CIA against the operation in the mid-1980s to send missiles to Iran (to no avail) and ran the clandestine service during the drawdown after the Cold War and the aftermath of two devastating betrayals, one by the CIA mole Aldrich Ames, and the other by the FBI turncoat Robert Hanssen. I am writing this memoir now to demonstrate the necessity of using the CIA and covert action to their fullest potential at this critical period of history. If not, we will have lost the opportunity to exploit these important tools of statecraft, with potentially grave consequences. After spending billions on intelligence since the 9/11 terror attacks, I still believe we’re underinvesting in spies: instead we have been militarizing intelligence in a way that ultimately will detract from our ability to engage in espionage and conduct covert action. I’m not an apologist for the CIA, and I have publicly criticized certain of its practices. Thomas Polgar, the legendary CIA station chief in Saigon, was a straight shooter and never afraid to speak up on matters of principle. His assessments in Vietnam—what was known and not known during the war—were hugely controversial. I asked him once why he was willing to take on such issues. “When you get to the level I’m at, you have an obligation to stand up for what you believe,” he said. When I was deputy director of operations, I passed his remark on to departing station chiefs before they took up their new assignments abroad, because I do believe it’s true. This was a trait that was encouraged and fostered by many others as well, in the formative years of my career at the CIA. I hope this trait has continued to be emphasized to this day.

  In this vein, I was troubled by torture and waterboarding and other extrajudicial tactics that became part of the Agency’s operational program in the years after 9/11, and made my view clear to the CIA leadership and to the media without compromising any sources or methods. I should note that I am fiercely nonpartisan—as were most of those I worked with at Langley. It is essential to maintain balance and objectivity in the intelligence business. Objectivity’s value to the system is often not fully appreciated. Likewise, I found the attempt to politicize intelligence on weapons of mass destruction in Iraq deeply disturbing.

  The most glaring example was related to a questionable source known as “Curveball.” The CIA had given this oddly apt code name to a young Iraqi chemical engineer named Ahmed Hassan Mohammed, according to Curveball: Spies, Lies, and the Con Man Who Caused a War, by Bob Drogin, a veteran reporter for the Los Angeles Times. Curveball surfaced in Munich in 1999 seeking asylum, and fed German intelligence a fabricated story about Saddam Hussein’s secret network of biological weapons factories, which could be moved from place to place on trailer trucks. This unverified information was sent to the White House, despite concerns about Curveball’s reliability voiced by a cadre of experienced Agency officers. Curveball’s bogus story ended up in President Bush’s 2003 State of the Union address, two months before America invaded Iraq, and in Secretary of State Colin Powell’s dramatic presentation to the UN Security Council on February 5, 2003, making the case for military action against Saddam. The CIA finally pressured German intelligence to arrange a debriefing of Curveball in March 2004, a year after the invasion of Iraq. The veteran CIA operations officer who interviewed him concluded that Curveball was a liar, and the Agency put out a worldwide notice: “Key Mobile BW Source Deemed Unreliable.”2 This episode did incalculable damage to the CIA’s credibility.

  In the wake of the weapons of mass destruction scandal, I decided despite my nonpartisan politics to serve on Barack Obama’s intelligence committee in his first campaign. There I had a single focus: to try to protect the historically independent role of intelligence and to resist the use of its capabilities in wrongheaded actions in the war in Iraq or “nation building” in Afghanistan. That said, during Obama’s first term, I publicly and privately challenged the administration for not keeping enough heat on Osama bin Laden and for pursuing a doomed, Soviet-like military strategy in Afghanistan to the chagrin of many in the CIA. I wasn’t surprised when the CIA and U.S. Special Forces finally tracked Bin Laden down and killed him in Pakistan in May 2011, not far from where we might have killed him a decade earlier. I had wrongly assumed that this would have happened in the months immediately following 9/11.

  Intrigue drew me to Langley as a young man, and I came across plenty of it, beginning with my first assignment in the basement at headquarters, analyzing cables as I awaited training as a clandestine operations officer. One of my fellow analysts, Rick Ames, would go down a dark and treacherous path that haunted me many years later when we found ourselves together in the Rome station. Training prepared me for a range of missions, but not betrayal by one of our own.

  I served under eleven CIA directors. Through all the leadership changes, my colleagues and I remained apolitical and disciplined. We prided ourselves on telling it like it was, not like the White House wanted it to be, and so did our counterparts on the analytic side of the administration. While CIA officers are a microcosm of American politics, fairly evenly split between Republicans and Democrats, we all checked our politics at the door and took great pride in our public service. I took quite seriously the words from scripture chiseled in marble in the CIA’s lobby: AND YE SHALL KNOW THE TRUTH AND THE TRUTH SHALL MAKE YOU FREE.

  Throughout my career, I always felt I could speak truth to power, inside and outside the Agency. I tried always to do this to the best of my ability, and I was never punished for doing so. My first chief in Central America had a plaque over his door, adorned with two mud-stained pigs and a saying that went something like “If you wrestle with pigs, you’ll end up with mud on you.” He wanted us to know: if you start dealing with unsavory people, or conduct unsavory operations, you should expect to get stained in the process. Back then, I thought it was a rather inelegant way to describe our business, especially by a senior officer. Over time, however, I’ve come to truly value the import of that observation, having wrestled with unsavory characters throughout my career—and ending up in the mud on occasion. Over the years that expression became more and more relevant for me, and I quote it even today.

  Ian Fleming’s Casino Royale introduced the world in 1953 to the indomitable 007, James Bond, a man dedicated to covert action. But when I think of the top intelligence officers I’ve read about, John le Carré’s greatest character, George Smiley, more often comes to mind. He is cunning but restrained, charming but deeply analytic, and ruthless when need be. He is also patriotic, and loyal to what Le Carré calls the “Circus.” Many of the actual CIA legends I encountered over the years would have felt right at home in Le Carré’s fictional world: Tom Polgar; the “Blond Ghost,” Ted Shackley; Dewey Clarridge, the Latin America chief who once showed up in Venezuela pushing a covert action coup in Suriname; Nestor D. Sanchez, the operative who handled the Cuban point man in the CIA’s plot to assassinate Castro; Milt Bearden, the highly effective and flamboyant chief in Islamabad who was so funny, he could have done stand-up comedy; Clair George, the clandestine chief who blanched at the plan to sell missiles to Iran but still got indicted (and then pardoned) in Iran-Contra; David Spedding, head of the British Secret Intelligence Service, MI6, who was otherwise known as C, for “Chief”; as well as most of the CIA leaders who I got to know very well indeed over the past fifty years.

  My very first station chief, Ray Warren, remains the CIA operator I look up to most. He taught me the importance of tradecraft, and paying attention to the smallest of details, so operations would not be compromised. More important, he stressed maintaining the integrity of our reporting and staying within the lines of established U.S. policy. While simply stated, this is not always easy to accomplish in a very street-tough business where you have to deal with some of the world’s more disreputable characters. We live to recruit, which is a sanitized wa
y of saying we live to convince people to commit treason on our behalf by selling us the secrets of their homelands. This is difficult to do even when an asset has been alienated by his country’s antidemocratic system. But we sign up to this mission because we are deeply committed to protecting America’s national interest and our way of life. To accomplish this, all CIA operatives must become hunters.

  ONE

  Inside the Invisible Government

  The Farm, 1969

  It never occurred to me growing up that I would someday join the Central Intelligence Agency. I was the son of an Irish-Catholic heating contractor. My forebears were weavers and farmers who immigrated to the United States in the wake of the potato famine of 1846, settling in South Philadelphia and joining the building trades and the police department. But somehow covert action was in my DNA, a fact I came to understand in 1966 when my wife, Pat, gave me a book for my twenty-sixth birthday.

  The Invisible Government, by David Wise and Thomas B. Ross, was intended as an exposé. The reader was supposed to be shocked and outraged by its revelations of a vast and secret intelligence bureaucracy, a CIA that had become so powerful that it threatened the very democracy it had been created to preserve. But a careful reading belied the book’s argument. In fact, rather than an out-of-control intelligence community engaged in clandestine operations that endangered the nation, the book revealed a system of safeguards put in place by President Dwight D. Eisenhower. Reading it, I was struck by the sense of mission and vitality of the Agency, and I was so intrigued and energized by the covert operations described in its pages—not to mention the presumed adventure of living and working with foreigners in exotic places—that as soon as I finished the book, I sent off a letter to the Agency seeking employment.

  At the time, I was a high school social studies teacher in suburban Philadelphia, and the CIA was the furthest thing from my mind. I supplemented teaching with summertime work loading and unloading trucks at a food distribution center in South Philly, where I got closer to the rock and rumble of life in dangerous foreign settings. I had to join the Teamsters union to work there, and heard Teamsters boss Jimmy Hoffa speak at the Philadelphia Convention Hall. He reminded me of Castro as he rambled on nonstop for over an hour, but his charisma was undeniable. The Teamsters were a tough lot. Once, I was let off work early to attend the wake of a coworker. When I asked what had happened, I was told in hushed tones that the man had organized a dissident labor group and ended up in a fight that included baseball bats.