Inside the CIA (35 page)

“I want people in the DO who are risk takers, not risk seekers,” Webster said at Richard Stolz’s retirement party at the end of 1990.

Particularly after Kuwait, Webster—like directors before
him—pushed for more foreign-language training. To upgrade training generally, he tried to promote officers who did a stint as CIA teachers. And he emphasized more reporting on economic issues.

Webster wanted more accountability in the agency and more clarity in its reports. He hated acronyms and he hated the word
feel.
People could
believe
or
state
or
conclude,
but they could never
feel.

“We are not paid to feel,” Webster wrote in a memo to CIA employees. “We are paid to think.”

Webster could not stand it when CIA officials submitted papers to him without attributing where they had gotten the information. In answer to some questions, he was handed background papers that did not say who had written them or who had submitted them. He demanded that each paper he received carry the name of the author, the author’s office, and his or her telephone extension.

Webster was used to having personable FBI agents as his security guards. At the CIA, the guards were from the Office of Security, and they were anything but personable. Indeed, the young men assigned to guard Webster seemed to think they were the gestapo. Ramrod stiff, they bristled if anyone asked them their names. At receptions attended by Webster, they clung to the walls, looking like rent-a-cops in a grade B movie.

One weekend, William Baker’s wife, Robin, decided to surprise Baker when her husband and Webster were due in New Jersey to attend a party given by Malcolm Forbes. Originally from New Jersey, Robin Baker drove from her parents’ home to the airport, her Labrador retriever on a leash. There, she saw Webster’s security detail with squiggly wires sprouting from their ears. The plane had not yet arrived. When she approached her husband and Webster, she did not want to alarm the guards, so she introduced herself.

“Hello, I’m Mrs. Baker. I’m married to Bill Baker, who is flying in with the director,” she said as the dog wagged his tail. “I just wanted you to know I’m here to greet my husband so you know who I am.”
212

The guard did not respond.

“I guess I’ll go and find somebody else to talk to,” she said.

The man ignored her.

Several minutes later, two guards came over to her and brusquely asked her for identification. Then they demanded proof that she was married to Baker. Having just gotten married, she had trouble finding a credit card in her handbag with her husband’s name on it. The guards acted as if they had just caught her breaking into a bank, and she was livid.

Baker never told Webster of the incident, but Webster himself had become unhappy with the guards’ style. With Webster’s approval, Baker met with the head of the security detail.

“We need to go to charm school together,” Baker said. He then met with all the guards.

“Look, this is what the director expects,” he said. “In addition to the professionalism which you have, he expects a little more than that.”

Baker said he did not want them to be so tight. He gave them a supply of his business cards.

“If you’re at a function or party with him, and someone asks if you’re CIA, and you can’t quite tell them that, hand them my card,” Baker said. “Say, ‘If you have any questions, call this gentleman.’”
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Webster found one of the CIA’s biggest problems was the fact that each directorate is a separate fiefdom, with the Directorate of Operations usually the most dominant. The DO tended to be suspicious of the Directorate of Intelligence, which in turn resented not being fully trusted. There were constant complaints from both sides. Meanwhile, the CIA’s other two directorates resented being looked down upon.
214

Webster wanted more cross-pollination, and he began to rotate people so that they worked for two or three of the directorates during their careers.

“At the CIA, they are kings of their own dominion,” a former Webster assistant said. “It is set up so loyalties are within directorate. You make your career within that division. You make or break your career based on loyalty to a specific boss, not the head of an agency or the head of a different division.”

Turner had encountered the same problem.

“I think the biggest problem is coordination among the various branches,” he said.
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The attitude was entirely different from that of the FBI, where the FBI director and the special agent in charge of each field office were the unquestioned bosses. Like the FBI, the CIA was a semimilitary organization that obeyed orders. But the boss at the CIA was the head of one’s own division, not the head of the agency.

The result was that the directorates were not eager to share information with each other. While some secrecy was necessary, Webster and his assistants found it was often used to enhance people’s own importance, hampering everyone’s work. Despite the fact that they had clearances for virtually every program, the assistants were sometimes prevented from knowing what they felt they needed to know.

“Very few people [at the CIA] know the complete picture because very few are allowed to know it,” McGregor said. “That is what makes it so difficult to get at the whole truth. This is exacerbated by the fact that so very few feel any loyalty to the head of the agency. Rather, their loyalties are to the heads of their divisions or their directorates.”
216

These attitudes contributed to the agency’s involvement in the Iran-contra affair.

“Agency people . . . from the director on down, actively shunned information,” Robert Gates, then the deputy director for Central Intelligence, later told the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence. “We didn’t want to know how the contras were being funded ... we actively discouraged people from telling us things.”
217

Webster decided that the CIA’s inspector general was not tough enough to do the job of policing the agency, a fact underscored by what happened during the Iran-contra affair. Historically, the office was the domain of amiable CIA officers who were at the end of their careers and did not want to rock the boat. If a CIA director did not like the inspector general’s criticisms, he could remove him. Back in 1960, after a review of the Office of Security, the inspector general recommended that the CIA prepare a “cover story” if the agency’s mail-opening
program were ever uncovered. The report made no mention of the fact the program was illegal.

According to Tom Gilligan, a former CIA operations officer, “Operations officers seldom suffered permanent career damage for poor performance or incompetence, even when agents were killed or compromised.” Yet when Gilligan appealed a decision not to give his station more officers, he found his performance was down-rated because of it. He felt he could not bring the problem to the attention of the CIA’s inspector general because of the inspector general’s lack of independence. What is needed, Gilligan said, is inspectors general who “come from outside the organization.”
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Before Congress created an office of inspector general, Webster elevated the importance of the job. He appointed William F. Donnelly, a tough, respected officer who acted as one of Webster’s advisers, to the position. At the same time, Webster did not favor the approach proposed by Congress. In response to the Iran-contra affair, the oversight committees decided that the inspector general should be appointed by the president with confirmation by the Senate. Then only the president could fire him. Congress also wanted access to the inspector general’s reports, which generally went only to the director and the affected departments within the CIA. Even though nineteen other federal agencies had independent watchdogs approved by Congress, Webster saw the proposal as a reflection on his own performance. He was the director of Central Intelligence, and he was charged with making sure the CIA conformed to the laws. It was a question of accountability. If he failed, he should be replaced. But he insisted the inspector general should answer to him, not to Congress or to the president.

What most troubled Rep. Dave McCurdy, an Oklahoma Democrat who led the fight for the bill, was Congress’s lack of access to reports prepared by the inspector general.

“I wanted to find out how effective they were, how much support they had,” said McCurdy, who later became chairman of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence. “The more I got into it, the more I was concerned. There was no way for us to find out. ‘Let me see some of your
reports.’ ‘You can’t have them.’ ‘Can I have an index so I can pick a couple?’ ‘No.’

“I think Webster totally mishandled the whole situation,” McCurdy said. “I said I believe we have a right to see the reports, not as to individuals, but on general policy considerations and how the Soviet division is doing. He said you are not entitled to it, kind of exerting executive privilege. The reason was more micromanagement. He didn’t want us to invade his executive turf.”
219

Webster lost the battle, and Congress passed a law establishing an independent inspector general at the CIA. Frederick P. Hitz, a lawyer and former CIA officer who was Webster’s choice, got the job and took office in November 1990.

Besides investigating allegations of wrongdoing or mismanagement, Hitz continued the practice of examining each office and station every five years to determine if they are doing their job. That entails reading reports and cable traffic to see how agents are being handled, whether good judgment is being exercised in recruiting agents, and whether resources are being used wisely.

The complaints examined by the office ranged from allegations of defalcations to matters of taste. Just before Hitz took over as inspector general, the office had received a complaint by some female employees that the unisex barbershop in the old building provided copies of
Playboy
and
Penthouse
for customers to read while waiting. Without issuing a formal ruling, the office quietly resolved the matter by telling the barbers to drop the offending magazines.

If Webster lost the battle over an independent inspector general, he won on most issues requiring congressional approval. While his credibility and cooperative approach contributed to that record, it was also a result of good staff work. In that arena, Webster had a secret weapon—his special assistants.

I
T WAS THE JOB OF
W
ILLIAM
W
EBSTER’S SPECIAL ASSISTANTS
to clone themselves, to find similarly qualified and brilliant lawyers to replace them after their two-year stints were up. So in July 1986, Howard W. Gutman and William T. Hassler, then Webster’s assistants at the FBI, began calling friends and contacts at prestigious law firms to find a good candidate to replace Gutman.

Like the rest of Webster’s assistants, both men had dream résumés. Gutman, for example, had graduated fifth in a class of 650 from Columbia University. He had graduated magna cum laude from Harvard Law School. He was a member of Phi Beta Kappa. He had been a law clerk to Supreme Court justice Potter Stewart. Later, he joined Williams & Connolly, eventually becoming a partner.

The two assistants knew that Webster favored Ivy League graduates, particularly from Harvard or Yale. After extensive inquiries, Gutman called Nancy D McGregor, a twenty-eight-year-old
lawyer who had graduated from Barnard College and Harvard Law School.

Then at Steptoe & Johnson, McGregor was not only a very good lawyer but extremely personable and attractive. With green eyes and brown hair, she had a direct approach that allowed her to say exactly what she wanted without creating bad feelings. She could be persistent in her questioning, yet tactful. When she decided to do something, she pursued it relentlessly and courageously. Yet she could be disarmingly charming.

Born in Pittsburgh, McGregor was the daughter of Jack McGregor, a lawyer and former Pennsylvania state senator. Her father had treated her like a friend and colleague, keeping her informed on what he was doing and asking her advice. When McGregor was six, her family became worried when they couldn’t find her one afternoon. It later turned out she had been canvassing the street, asking neighbors to vote for her father.

McGregor had been working for Steptoe & Johnson for two years, handling white-collar criminal cases, when a partner in the firm said Gutman had approached him asking for recommendations on candidates for Webster’s special assistant. Within Washington legal circles, the job was a plum. Not only did it give lawyers access to government at the highest levels, it was also a stepping-stone to a partnership in one of the top law firms.

“We decided you are the person we would like to propose for this,” the partner said.

Everything she had heard about the job made it sound very desirable—a chance to participate in the investigation rather than the defense of white-collar crimes, to see a lot of secret information very few people ever see, and to work for what she felt was a great institution with a lot of commitment. Yet she would not be leaving the career track.

McGregor said she would like to be considered. Besides Gutman and Hassler, John Hotis, Webster’s third special assistant who stayed on as a superclerk, interviewed her at the FBI. Three weeks later, Gutman called her to say the judge would like to see her for breakfast.

McGregor attended the breakfast in the FBI’s executive dining room hours after she learned she was pregnant with her first child. One of Webster’s assistants had told her she was one of a number of attorneys being considered for the job, and that Webster still had others to interview. She had no idea Webster would offer her the job on the spot.

Webster explained the purpose of the special assistants. They were to be outsiders who would take a fresh look at the bureau’s activities—a new set of eyes that would judge issues by the standards of the public and the community. As lawyers, Webster wanted them to measure proposals against guidelines and statutes. But he also wanted the assistants to look at the FBI like John Q. Public to see if things made sense.