Inside the CIA (43 page)

John McMahon, the former deputy director of Central Intelligence under Casey, said, “I witnessed more leaks coming out of the administration than out of Congress. I felt Congress was always fairly responsible.

“The only time in my experience when they really began to leak was when the Nicaragua program became so controversial,” McMahon said. “Literally, we would give a presentation to Congress, and before we could get downstairs, there was a press conference where it was being passed out what we were doing.”
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Baker would later say that while he was director of public affairs, no U.S. reporter double-crossed or misquoted him. Often, he found, it was the CIA’s own carelessness with information that led to the stories that CIA people so detested. Or the administration had leaked a story in order to push its own agenda.

“Baker’s approach was to get out in front of the news, to know the reporters, to have some idea of what they were working on, and to be helpful when possible,” Engelberg of the
New York Times
said. “On several occasions, he said we would rather you thought hard before you printed that. It was a very different kind of relationship [than with Casey’s public affairs office].”

As a result, Engelberg said, “There were stories where we treaded initially more softly than we otherwise would have because we were presented with what we considered to be reasonable objections. I would have to say that because of the way Webster dealt with the press—which is with a more open manner—we were more likely to give them the benefit of the doubt.”
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Eventually, FBI director William S. Sessions offered Baker the job of assistant FBI director for criminal investigations. For an FBI agent, this was like offering a Supreme Court judgeship to a lawyer. Baker left the CIA and rejoined the FBI in May 1989.

Still not sure he could be comfortable with a CIA officer in the job, Webster replaced Baker with James W. Greenleaf, another FBI executive. Greenleaf had been assistant FBI director for training, which meant he headed the FBI’s training
center at Quantico, Virginia. Before that, he had headed the laboratory division.

Like Baker, Greenleaf had a hard time adjusting to the special characteristics of the CIA. Each year, the agency holds a family day to commemorate the September 18 founding of the agency, a day when husbands, wives, and children can come to see where their parents or spouses work. Greenleaf got the idea that the agency could pass out CIA T-shirts, shorts, and caps. At Quantico, anyone could buy FBI shirts, shorts, or running outfits. But the Office of Security vetoed the idea. It was the same old problem that later led to Webster’s rejection of the CIA employee association’s plan to sell CIA mugs. What if the children of covert employees call attention to their parents’ employment by wearing the garb?
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Unlike Baker, Greenleaf had no qualms about playing tennis with the boss. After Webster’s first wife died and George Bush invited him to his Kennebunkport home, Greenleaf went along and played doubles with the then vice president, Webster, and a neighbor.

Greenleaf, like Baker, came away impressed by the CIA. He felt the agency was one of the most misunderstood agencies in the government.

When Greenleaf left in May 1990 to become the FBI’s associate deputy director for administration, Webster felt comfortable enough with the CIA and its people to give the job to a CIA officer. He chose Joseph R. DeTrani, who had headed the CIA’s Office of Technical Service, the unit that makes the tools of the spy trade. DeTrani was smart, witty, and direct. Before he left, Baker had recommended him as his replacement.

“They all seem to have the same style: smooth in the good sense of the word, quick-witted, able to take a jab and keep rolling,” Russell Bruemmer said of Webster’s choices as public affairs directors.

DeTrani came into the job joking that public relations within the CIA is an oxymoron. After a year, he was saying that he had been wrong: the concept of public relations did not conflict with the CIA’s mission.

Today, the Office of Public Affairs has twenty-eight employees,
including secretaries. Besides two people who handle media inquiries and four others who clip papers and help in the media area, the staff includes members of the Publication Review Board, which reviews manuscripts, the director’s speechwriters, and an academic coordinator.

Some critics said that in emphasizing public relations, Webster was promoting himself at the expense of the agency. It was a shortsighted view. The truth is that one hand washed the other.

“That is like saying capitalists are mainly interested in making a profit,” Engelberg of the
New York Times
observed. “That’s true, but in doing that, they make the economy work better. I think Webster was terrified that something the agency does is going to end up on the front page of the
New York Times
or
Washington Post.
He would look like an idiot, the president would be angry at him, and his reputation would be ruined. That’s true. So?”

The other side was that by being more open with the press, Webster was taking a risk. What if his policy backfired? What if the agency helped a reporter who wrote a story that damaged an operation? What if the agency turned against him, and the president became displeased with him?

It was so much easier and safer to sit back, as in the old days, and say “no comment.” But to Webster, this was the only way an intelligence agency could function effectively in a democracy.

As a lawyer and former judge, Webster felt just as strongly about the need for an aggressive office of general counsel as he did about an active press office. He wanted a first-rate legal department, one whose advice would be actively sought by CIA executives. But to many, an office of general counsel seemed even more out of place at the CIA than an office of public affairs.

F
OR MUCH OF THE
CIA’
S EXISTENCE, THE
O
FFICE OF
General Counsel occupied a tenuous position within the CIA, and with good reason. It was the CIA’s job to break laws, not to follow them. While the laws that the CIA broke were those of other countries, it was easy for the distinction between foreign laws and American laws to be lost. In establishing the agency, Congress seemed to lend support to the notion that the CIA was a law unto itself by outlining in only the skimpiest detail what it was supposed to do. Beyond centralizing the collection of intelligence, it was supposed to advise the National Security Council on intelligence matters, protect intelligence sources and methods, never exercise police or internal security functions, and “perform such other functions and duties related to intelligence affecting the national security as the NSC may from time to time direct.”
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By reviewing the legislative history of the 1947 act, one could divine that Congress also intended the CIA to collect
intelligence by engaging in espionage overseas. But nowhere in the law was covert action mentioned, and no other restrictions were placed on the new agency’s activities.
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Lawrence R. Houston, the agency’s first general counsel, helped draft the law establishing the agency. According to him, the clause permitting the agency to engage in “such other functions” as the NSC directed referred only to intelligence collection, not to covert action. An avuncular graduate of Harvard College and the University of Virginia School of Law, Houston was the first to admit that, by later using the clause to justify covert action, the agency was probably stretching the original intent.

“All during this drafting of the act, all during the presentations to congressional committees and debates, and all during the consideration in Congress, there was no mention of covert action,” Houston said. “It was entirely intelligence. The CIA’s function was to do the best collection and coordination of intelligence information and to produce intelligence assessments and estimates. That was [to be] the sole product.”
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It was only after the law was passed, at the direction of Truman administration officials, that Houston wrote an opinion saying that covert action could be carried out by the CIA if the president gave it a directive and if Congress gave it the money to carry it out.

“I was not particularly happy about this, but you have to remember the great pressure to do something [about the communist menace],” Houston said.

With few other legal restrictions and little oversight, the CIA was soon plotting assassination attempts and even violating existing laws on the grounds the national security required it. Only rarely did the CIA consult the general counsel on activities later determined by the Church Committee and the Rockefeller Commission to be abuses. For example, the general counsel knew nothing of the CIA’s plans to assassinate Fidel Castro. In those few instances when the general counsel was informed, the lawyers objected, and the practices were stopped.

In an effort to identify narcotics traffickers, the CIA in the
fall of 1973 began intercepting telephone calls made between the U.S. and Latin America. John S. Warner, then Houston’s deputy, pointed out that it was against the law to eavesdrop on American citizens, and the CIA stopped the practice. Earlier, Warner objected when he learned that Richard Helms had approved the imprisonment of Yuri I. Nosenko, the KGB major who had defected to the U.S. in 1964. Because of objections from Warner and others, Helms ordered a review of the case. Eventually, the CIA released Nosenko.
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In view of the general counsel’s status, it was not surprising that the office was considered a backwater. While it had lured some good lawyers from respected law firms because of the interesting work, others who were not as sharp far outnumbered them. Other government lawyers who dealt with the office found it to be sleepy, particularly before the Church Committee hearings. William Casey symbolically downgraded the office even further by banishing it from the CIA’s compound to rented buildings in McLean.

That began to change under William Webster. As a lawyer and former judge, Webster wanted a first-rate legal department. His entire approach to government emphasized adherence to the Constitution, and he was not going to tolerate any winking at the law. Webster began in September 1987 by appointing Russell J. Bruemmer, his thirty-five-year-old former special assistant at the FBI, as special counsel to investigate the agency’s involvement in the Iran-contra affair.

Bruemmer had left the FBI to join Wilmer, Cutler & Pickering. Webster admired Bruemmer’s sharp legal mind, his ability to absorb vast quantities of information and make sense of it, and his low-key approach. Six feet two inches tall, with blond hair and a mustache, Bruemmer had grown up in Iowa, where his father was a college financial administrator. He had graduated magna cum laude from the University of Michigan’s law school and had been editor in chief of the
University of Michigan Journal of Law Reform.

Bruemmer became close to Webster when Webster first moved to Washington to become FBI director. Webster’s first wife, Drusilla, had stayed behind so their daughter could finish the school year at her high school. After Webster left the
FBI, Bruemmer maintained a social relationship with Webster. Many thought the two had a father-son relationship.

At the CIA, it became Bruemmer’s job to find out what the role of agency employees had been in the Iran-contra affair and to recommend disciplinary action if warranted. The Iran-contra scandal broke in November 1986 with disclosures that the Reagan administration had secretly sold arms to Iran in exchange for help in obtaining the release of U.S. hostages in Lebanon and at the same time, had used profits from the sales to pay for covert military assistance to the Nicaraguan contras.

Webster could have swept the CIA’s involvement under the rug by saying—as Police Chief Daryl F. Gates said of the beating of a black motorist by Los Angeles police officers—that the abuses that occurred during the Iran-contra affair were an aberration.

Every year, the CIA quietly terminated five to ten employees for embezzlement or security questions. But the concept of meting out punishment for misjudgment, failure to follow established procedure, or not being truthful with appropriate authorities was alien. Those CIA employees who administered LSD to unsuspecting Americans—an act considered by most CIA officers to be the most unforgivable offense in the CIA’s history of abuses—received only a letter of reprimand from Allen Dulles. The letters were not placed in their personnel files.
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Webster’s life at the CIA would have been far easier if he had forgotten about Iran-contra. But that was not Webster’s way. He chose his battles carefully. Allowing CIA mugs to be sold by the agency’s employee activity association was not an issue worth alienating employees over. Misusing the CIA in violation of the law was.

As a result of Bruemmer’s investigation, Webster dismissed two CIA employees who had not been candid with the inspector general. They had not lied, but they had not told the whole story. The CIA issued letters of reprimand to four others, and one employee was demoted.
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Bruemmer found that several other key officials—Thomas A. Twetten, then assistant deputy director for operations, and
Robert Gates, then deputy director of Central Intelligence—had received bits and pieces of information about Iran-contra, but did not realize at the time what was happening. On the other hand, Twetten, who would later succeed Richard Stolz as deputy director for operations, had taken positive steps to protect the agency: he warned that Manucher Ghorbanifar, one of the middlemen in the shipment of arms to Iran, should not be trusted. He advised White House aide Oliver L. North that it was not a good idea to use nongovernment people in his clandestine operation. While Twetten became involved in overseeing the distribution of funds for some of the operation, he made sure that what he did was authorized and within the law. Moreover, every penny had been properly accounted for.