Company Man: Thirty Years of Controversy and Crisis in the CIA (10 page)

Coming from the lumbering and impersonal bureaucracy of the Treasury Department, I was startled and delighted by the working environment I found myself in. I noticed from the very beginning how everyone was energized and enthusiastic about what they were working on, and that, provided no outsiders were within earshot, they would talk shop everywhere inside the large cone of silence that was CIA Headquarters—not just in their offices but on the elevators, in the gym, walking out to the parking lot, in the employee cafeteria, and so on. The institutional camaraderie, the feeling of we’re-all-in-this-together, was palpable.

Everyone I encountered in those first few weeks—the security guards, the secretaries, the analysts, the operatives, and yes, even the lawyers—radiated a sense of pride and esprit de corps. For someone just arriving from another part of the government, it was a revelation. I would come to understand that a lot of this camaraderie and sense of shared mission derived from the fact that everyone in the CIA, no matter where one is in the pecking order, had to endure a long and exhaustive security clearance process (especially that great equalizer, the polygraph exam) in order to enter this new secret world, and we were all pledged not to discuss any of our classified work to anyone on the outside. The knowledge that we were all part of an exclusive, selective, secret club—that no one on the outside could ever really fully know or understand—created an unspoken but unique and unbreakable bond.

It gradually dawned on me that working in a secret intelligence organization
inevitably affects an employee’s personal interactions outside the office. In my case, it was never as stark as it is for someone who is “undercover,” that is, a CIA employee who is posing as an employee of another U.S. government agency. They are required to “live their cover,” sometimes even with their relatives and friends. For them, routine, day-to-day private business transactions—like getting a commercial bank loan or buying life insurance—can become awkward and complicated.

CIA attorneys, on the other hand, are allowed to freely acknowledge our Agency affiliation to family, friends, and the outside world (except when traveling abroad). Still, I decided early on to be somewhat circumspect in whom I told about working for the CIA. My family knew, of course, as did my close friends from college and law school. But I was careful around strangers—people I would run into at bars, on airplanes, and so on. For one thing, you can never be sure who you are talking to. Besides, dropping the CIA name to people you don’t know frequently prompts questions like “No kidding! So what kinds of things do you work on?” Which, obviously, you can’t talk about. On top of that, you then have to endure a lot of dumb James Bond or Maxwell Smart jokes.

As my years at the CIA wore on, I became more comfortable about maintaining this pose in public, but during my first months at the Agency I found it rather frustrating. The place and the work were so fascinating that the natural human instinct was to want to talk about it. I thought being at the CIA was extremely cool, and I will admit to a youthful temptation to flaunt it. Holding it all in, especially when I was still under thirty, was tough.

What’s more, I was struck by how much scope and impact CIA lawyers, even one as wet behind the ears as I was, had on the day-to-day mission of the Agency. The OGC had about the same number of lawyers in it as my former office at Customs, but the OGC—and the rest of the Agency—was much less hierarchal, and we lawyers were given wide sway and discretion in the way we did our jobs. From the first day, I was not only allowed but encouraged to write and sign my own memos and letters going outside the office, which sounds like a small thing but was something I had never experienced before in my brief legal career. And whatever any of us said or wrote seemed to be accepted and followed—albeit on some occasions with some grousing—by our clients in the Agency. (I always considered everyone in the CIA as a “client,” from
the director on down. I viewed myself as an attorney for all Agency personnel, and that my job was to advise them on the law and protect them from jeopardy for doing their jobs.) It belied the perception that many outsiders had of the CIA being an untrammeled, anything-goes monolith that did whatever it wanted, wherever it wanted, regardless of the law. If that had been true in the ’50s and ’60s—and it apparently was, to a large extent—that was not the CIA I found when I arrived.

To me the atmosphere at the CIA seemed so bracing, so alive in my early days there. I was too new, too starry-eyed to realize that the Church investigation, and the opprobrium from Congress and the media it had spawned, had left the organization dispirited and on the defensive. It was a state of affairs that I would come to understand all too often in the years to come.

In the aftermath of the Church investigation, Congress and the Ford administration had rapidly put into place a series of reforms that established the legal and political framework under which the CIA has operated ever since. Committees were created in the House and Senate to monitor and scrutinize the activities of the CIA and other intelligence agencies; laws were passed that for the first time mandated prior presidential authorization of covert operations; President Ford issued a detailed executive order (which has been reaffirmed by subsequent presidents and remains virtually intact to this day) setting out the criteria under which the intelligence community can collect information on U.S. citizens while also prohibiting the assassination of foreign leaders and covert actions inside the United States; and, for its part, the CIA began to establish a wide range of internal regulations governing how it would henceforth interact and establish relationships with sensitive sectors of American society, including the media, the clergy, and the academic and corporate communities. Although I didn’t know it at the time, these would be the areas that would occupy me for most of my career at the CIA.

At the end of January 1976, George H. W. Bush succeeded Colby as DCI. I remember hearing some of the Agency’s old-timers grouse. This guy had no intelligence experience, they would mutter as I nodded sympathetically. He was a longtime political partisan, had even served in Congress, and was obviously a henchman for the president, coming here to dismantle the place.

Bush did make some organizational changes, and one in particular affected me directly. He sacked the general counsel, John Warner, who had been a CIA lawyer since it had come into existence. He was also, of course, the man who had just hired me. Bush brought in an outsider named Tony Lapham, a former federal prosecutor and a partner in a prestigious D.C. law firm. He was not yet forty years old, and all anyone knew about him was that he and Bush seemed to share similar roots—namely, both had a Yale background and were the scions of aristocratic, old-money families.

Barely one month into the job, I had a new immediate boss and a new big boss. I suppose I should have found the situation disconcerting, but I didn’t. All I knew was that I was part of an organization with which I was already unabashedly in love.

I was assigned a secretary that I shared with another newly arrived lawyer and a small private office on the seventh floor, just yards away from the CIA director’s office suite down the hall. It was prime headquarters real estate; the Office of General Counsel was still small enough that we all snugly fit in a single, strategically located corridor. (A quarter-century later, with the OGC six times larger and scattered all over the building, I moved into the general counsel’s spacious front office for good. It was in the exact same spot where my first office had been all those years before. I had come full circle, literally.)

Even with the size of the staff doubled, we were still fewer than twenty lawyers to oversee the activities of a workforce approaching many thousands of people all over the world. All of us had to be immediately thrown into the fray, dealing with issues from a murky world of intrigue that I, at least, had never remotely contemplated, much less prepared for in my law school studies. Inevitably, during my first few months of gingerly groping around in this strange new world, I made a few memorable blunders, and I learned a few lasting lessons.

I vividly recall the first time I was allowed to attend a meeting chaired by the director in his conference room a few steps from his office on the seventh floor. Then and now, it looks much like any conference room of any corporate CEO, with dark-wood-paneled walls (albeit with no windows) and an oblong polished wood table big enough to accommodate the thirty or so sofa-style chairs encircling it. On the wall was not the string of clocks recording the time of world capitals such as Moscow, Beijing, and so on that you see in countless CIA-themed movies; rather, it
was an unremarkable series of circular logos of all the fifteen or so agencies in the intelligence community.

It was sometime in the spring of 1976, and I was there because Tony Lapham asked me to tag along with him. The subject of the meeting was the continuation of benefits for the survivors of CIA sources (“assets,” in Agency vernacular) killed in the abortive 1961 Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba. The legal issues were actually quite dry, but it was thrilling nonetheless. My God, I thought to myself, I am being allowed into the inner sanctum, the director’s conference room, to attend a meeting having to do (however tangentially) with the Bay of Pigs.

When we got there, about twenty people were already sitting around the table. Tony casually plopped into one of the empty chairs, and almost clinging to his coattails, I dutifully sat in the chair next to him, doing my best to act like I belonged. Director Bush was running late, so while Tony chatted with the guy on his other side, I scanned the faces around the table, almost all of which were unfamiliar. I did recognize by sight a man who looked to be about fifty, sitting directly across me. His name was Ted Shackley, the number two man in the clandestine service, and he was a fabled character inside the Agency. A wunderkind in the spy world, Shackley was in his early thirties when he headed up the CIA’s massive and aggressive anti-Castro operations run out of a base in Miami in the ’60s. Later in that decade he was station chief in Laos and Vietnam, where the Agency’s activities were also massive and aggressive.

Shackley’s name was quietly bandied about inside the CIA with a combination of awe and fear, and it wasn’t just because of his meteoric rise and his history of dangerous exploits in world hot spots. People referred to him as “the Ghost,” in large part because of his physical appearance. In many ways he looked like the perfect spy, which is to say he was literally colorless. His hair wasn’t dark, but it wasn’t exactly gray or white, either; it was just sallow. His complexion was similarly pallid, and it was said that it had always been that way, even when he was working those years in the sun of Southeast Asia and southern Florida. It was also said his wardrobe had never varied, no matter where he was—a nondescript dark suit and tie and white shirt. Finally, people would talk about how his demeanor eerily complemented his appearance—clinical, detached, cold.

And there he was, perfectly matching the description, sitting across from me. I cast a couple of furtive glances his way, and damn, if he wasn’t
coldly staring through his black horn-rimmed eyeglasses directly back at me. And then Shackley leaned across slightly and spoke to me, in a quiet voice that had a hint of icy disdain: “I don’t know who you are, but you are sitting in the director’s chair.”

The room suddenly erupted into laughter. Even Lapham, a man I was learning had a disarming, puckish sense of humor, was softly chuckling. Now I can see the humor. Then I was only mortified. It did teach me a lasting lesson, however. I learned where the director sits in his conference room.

Truly learning about the Agency’s culture and atmospherics required actually plunging into the job. No orientation program could convey the kinds of people who worked there—where they came from and what their back stories were. I would come to discover that they represent an astonishing cross section of American society. This reality first hit me on my first overseas trip for the CIA, in mid-1976.