Inside the CIA (22 page)

While Casey was generally pleased with the work of the Directorate of Operations, he was not at all pleased with the work of the Directorate of Intelligence. To Casey, the analysts were a bunch of liberals—fuzzy-headed thinkers who did not know about the hard realities in the world and were afraid to venture opinions.

“Casey’s first priority was to improve the estimating process,” said John A. Bross, a longtime CIA operative whom Casey brought out from retirement to be one of his assistants. “He found a very disorganized system. Estimates had gotten very thinned down. Bill’s priority was to get the estimates back into a stronger posture and let people take stronger positions.”
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Yet the direction Casey took was always in line with his conservative worldview. Soon, he found himself colliding with the CIA’s most hallowed commandment: thou shalt not cook the books.

To goad the bureaucracy, Casey hired Herbert E. Meyer, a thirty-six-year-old editor of
Fortune
whose book,
War Against Progress,
had been widely cited during Reagan’s 1980 presidential campaign. The book was an attack on opponents of real estate and technological development. At first, Meyer, a cigar-smoking, smart, cocky man, was Casey’s special assistant. In 1983, he got a much larger role as a vice chairman of the National Intelligence Council, the group of national intelligence officers who prepare the national intelligence estimates. In that job, Meyer helped manage production of all the CIA’s estimates. At the same time, he continued to act as Casey’s assistant.

Meyer brought to the job both a conservative bent and a journalist’s probing mind. He decided CIA analysts were too isolated from the rest of the world, too insular in their approach. Meyer had contacts abroad with politicians, statesmen, and chief executive officers of major corporations. While it was the job of the Directorate of Operations to obtain information in the field, it seemed to Meyer that the analysts should also have their own contacts and sources.

“In New York, when I was at
Fortune,
you would walk around at lunch and pick up a book,” Meyer would say. “The people at that agency have had lunch in the executive dining room for years. That is very destructive. You don’t take an intelligence engine and put it out in the woods. It breeds ignorance, arrogance.”
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“If you are in the business of seeing trends, of seeing the future, government is not one of the places where one would
be likely to work,” he would say. “The rewards are much greater in journalism, politics, business, academia, and think tanks. The moment you start taking the C and maybe B students, they will hire other C and B students. Over time, you have an institution that is not operating the way it should. They want consensus rather than dissent. That isn’t good enough in a fast-changing world.”

Thus when Meyer suggested exploring a new issue that happened to support his conservative worldview, it was hard for anyone to accuse him of trying to distort the estimating process. His approach was to question, to probe, and to argue. Moreover, much as his views seemed out of place with prevailing thought, he sometimes was right.

Whether Meyer actually changed analysts’ lunch habits so they began seeing outsiders more, and whether that had any effect, is a matter that can be argued. But his feisty approach clearly produced fresh thinking.

“He [Meyer] brought a considerable freshness as an outsider to the organization, although he probably ruffled professional feathers because of his nontraditional approach and because many people did not like his political views, which are conservative,” Graham E. Fuller, who was a national intelligence officer at the time and succeeded Meyer as a vice chairman, said. “But he did nothing but ask tough questions of people and engage them in debate. He did not dictate what our office would say. He would say, ‘Have you considered this or that?’
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A lot of people disagreed with Meyer, including me,” Fuller said. “But I heard him out. I think he had some useful things to say. Because of his conservative background, a lot of people dismissed what he said.”

In much the same way, Casey would question and fulminate. Because he was the director, his views were taken much more seriously than Meyer’s. But Casey soon learned that there was only so far he could go. He could not push the CIA officers into saying something they did not want to say or that they felt they could not support. But Casey tried, and the result was a series of spats—some public, some private—that
created the appearance during Casey’s tenure that the agency’s analytical side was losing its integrity.

It began on March 1, 1981, when the
New York Times Magazine
ran an excerpt of Claire Sterling’s book
The Terror Network: The Secret War of International Terrorism,
which suggested that the Soviets were providing the weapons, training, and sanctuary for terrorists as part of the Soviet effort to undermine Western democracy. The CIA had never said anything like this. Casey wanted the agency’s analysts to follow up and discover if Sterling’s facts were right. The CIA director had long suspected that the Soviets were in control of world terrorism, using thugs from all over the world as fronts for their own devious purposes.

What came out in the form of a draft estimate was ambiguous and not at all what Casey had wanted. According to those involved in preparing the estimate, the evidence available to the CIA at the time did not support Casey’s or Claire Sterling’s views.

“It was a question of semantics,” said David D. Whipple, later national intelligence officer for terrorism. “He [Casey] would say, ‘They [the Soviets] support them, and therefore they are responsible.’ We would both go before a congressional committee. Casey would say, ‘They are responsible,’ and go back to work at noon and leave me to face the committee in the afternoon. I would try to erase what he said, because I was trying to differentiate between Soviet support for so-called national liberation struggles and actual direction of terrorist activities.
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“There was pressure internally to say more than we could professionally justify, and most of us resisted that,” Whipple said. “Casey was on the right. An NIO can’t be as far forward leaning as he was. . . . Everything you say has to be supported by intelligence. You can’t sit there and interpret facts. Casey had a way of going beyond that sometimes.” Whipple said that despite more recent revelations of East-bloc support of terrorists, “I don’t think they’ll ever prove that the Soviets instigated actions of terrorism, but they certainly supported people and groups who did engage in terrorism.”

“The analysts were afraid they would be accused of engaging
in some political act,” said Adm. Bobby R. Inman, who was deputy director of Central Intelligence at the time. “The first draft bent over backward to avoid that. In any intelligence report, you identify assumptions. It said there is not conclusive evidence that this or that. I read it and put a note on it saying, ‘This sounds like the prosecutor’s argument on why he decided not to prosecute the case.’”
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Casey was more blunt. He wrote on the draft, “This is a bunch of shit.” According to Inman, Casey was concerned more with the lack of logic and flow than with the conclusion.

“I’ve seen other instances where he [Casey] had strongly different personal views, but the paper in those cases was very well written. He would say it was well composed or well done,” Inman said. “He then attached a memo on it to the president saying, ‘I don’t agree with this,’ or, ‘I think they are too bashful and my own view is this.’ He never took off his very conservative lenses about how he made his own valuation. But he was the most cautious DCI I’ve seen about not trying to change somebody else’s words to shape a view.”

“I think Casey sensitized—that’s an understatement—the intelligence community to that possibility [that the Soviets directed terrorists],” Fuller said. “The community was required to think more carefully about it. In the end, the community did not feel there was a sufficient case. . . . In the end, he didn’t fight the problem.”

Casey’s intervention, his fervently conservative viewpoint, and his repeated involvement in the politics of the Reagan administration made him suspect in the eyes of CIA professionals—suspicions that sharpened after it turned out Casey had improperly and disastrously embroiled the agency’s Directorate of Operations in the Iran-contra affair.

Another major flap came on September 28,1984, when the
Washington Post
reported that John R. Horton, who had been national intelligence officer for Latin America, had resigned when Casey rewrote an estimate on Mexico to fit U.S. policy. According to the article, Horton had taken a moderate view about prospects in Mexico, and Casey wanted a hard-line approach that said the Mexican government would move to the left and become destabilized.

The newspaper story made good copy, but the facts were quite different. The impetus for the estimate had come from Meyer and Casey when they began hearing anecdotes from friends in Mexico about worsening conditions there. For example, the owner of an executive search firm said everyone he knew was sending his kids to the U.S. Middle managers were said to be leaving the country.

Brian Latell, a respected CIA analyst, was assigned to write a draft of the estimate. Usually, analysts base their conclusions on material available at headquarters, including traffic from stations. But Latell also traveled to Mexico, where Meyer kept in touch with him. Latell then wrote a draft of an estimate that concluded there was a possibility—later set at one in five—that Mexico would become destabilized in the next three to five years. That view coincided with the concerns of Meyer and Casey, who felt U.S. policymakers should at least be alerted to the possibility that Mexico could become a serious problem.

Meyer put a copy in his safe. Horton, a former station chief in Mexico City, disagreed with the draft. He exercised his right as the national intelligence officer in charge of the area to write a final version that disagreed with Latell’s conclusions. Instead, he took a somewhat more sanguine view of developments in the country. But Meyer, as a vice chairman of the National Intelligence Council, exercised his right to change the estimate essentially back to Latell’s draft.

“Horton’s problem was we exercised our right to edit what he said,” Meyer later said. “He never said the draft [he wrote] was the second one. He turned the expert’s draft around. We turned it back. He had a right. I also had a right.”
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“It was a fresh and provocative approach written by an analyst on Mexico which suggested a sharp recasting of our thoughts about Mexico,” Fuller said. “This analyst, who is immensely respected and knows the field, suggested this was not the only approach, but it deserved real consideration. Casey insisted that this aspect of analysis be given reasonable credence within the body of the overall estimate.”
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Said Fuller, “If you say things will be the same, you’ll probably be right seventy-five percent of the time. When credible
analysts come up with fresh approaches, it behooves managers of intelligence to pay special attention.”

“Casey ironically thought Horton was trying to suppress what the analyst had said. You had a bitter debate about it. But it was an honest estimate. It began on the first page of the finished estimate with virtually half the community dissenting from the pessimistic view,” Robert Gates, who was then chairman of the National Intelligence Council, said.

As events unfolded in Mexico, they turned out to fall somewhere in between Horton’s approach and Latell and Meyer’s, but the incident further strengthened the perception that Casey was cooking the books. The truth was Casey did listen to facts and would back down if given a good argument. For the CIA’s top officials, Casey’s conservative bent was never any problem. They had enough standing to take him on.

“I felt when I went into Casey, there was a first-class intellect at work who would listen and argue and respond, which was extremely gratifying to senior intelligence analysts, as opposed to people who are weak and not particularly seized with the substance of the thing,” Fuller said.

Yet no one can say for sure how much effect Casey’s ideology might have had on lower-level analysts, any more than one can demonstrate the effect of a conservative or liberal newspaper publisher on the way his reporters cover the news. While Casey’s constant questioning was stimulating, it all pointed in the same direction. Unlike his successor, William Webster, Casey was an observer with a political agenda. He was therefore at odds with the purposes of the CIA—to present the facts and just the facts, as they are, rather than how policymakers may want them to be.

While it turned out that Casey and Meyer were right on a number of issues, they also turned out to be wrong a number of times. In 1983, Meyer wrote a series of memos saying the Soviet economy was in a shambles, which proved to be far closer to the truth than what the CIA’s estimates were saying. Casey handed the memos to Reagan. On the other hand, the same series suggested that the shootdown of a Korean Airlines passenger jet on September 1, 1983, was a dire Soviet plot.
Meyer’s memo predicted that there would be more such incidents.

The majority report of the congressional Iran-contra committees later said Casey “misrepresented or selectively used” available intelligence to win support for the Nicaraguan contras in certain limited areas. It said he pressured operations officers—as opposed to analysts in the Directorate of Intelligence—to change some reports on the contras, overstated their supply problems in one high-level meeting, and wrote a letter to President Reagan that distorted the attitudes of Central American leaders toward the American contra policy.

Certainly Casey’s intervention created an
appearance
of lack of objectivity. In a business where integrity is critical, such an impression can be just as damaging as an outright effort to cook the books. Yet overall, the CIA continued to produce estimates that conflicted with Casey’s views, demonstrating that ultimately, he had little or no effect on the process.