The Way of the Knife (7 page)

The CIA’s ambivalence about carrying out assassinations went back to the spy agency’s predecessor, the Office of Strategic Services. Created in 1942 under the leadership of its fierce commander, William J. Donovan, the OSS was a paramilitary organization first, espionage service second. Donovan’s “glorious amateurs” spent much of World War II sabotaging railways, blowing up bridges, and arming Nazi resisters throughout the European theater. Still, even Donovan got cold feet at the end of the war about a program to train assassins to kill Nazi leaders. By 1945, the OSS had trained about one hundred Wehrmacht deserters to hunt down German leaders—from Adolf Hitler and Hermann Göring down to every SS officer above the rank of captain. For those organized killings, the agents working for the “Cross Project” would be paid two hundred dollars per month. But the teams were never sent into Germany; Donovan wrote to his staff that such a “wholesale assassination” program would “invite only trouble for the OSS.” Instead of killing top Nazis, Donovan said that they ought to be kidnapped and interrogated for intelligence.
The war ended before any kidnappings
could take place.

Decades later, the Senate committee led by Frank Church, of Idaho, had originally intended to look only at domestic abuses by the agency, such as illegal wiretaps. But in early 1975, President Gerald Ford made an offhand comment to reporters, saying that if investigators dug deep enough, they might uncover a number of CIA attempts to assassinate foreign leaders. When his remarks went public, the Church Committee made assassinations
the principal focus of its hearings
.

For six months, senators heard about plots to kill Patrice Lumumba, in the Congo, and to position an exploding seashell near where Fidel Castro snorkeled in Cuba. The iconic image of the hearings came when committee members passed around a pistol that the CIA had built to shoot poison darts and Senator Barry Goldwater pointed the gun into the air as he looked through its sights. CIA director William Colby tried to make clear that the weapon had never been used, but the image endured. Before the committee had even wrapped up its work, President Ford signed an executive order banning the government from carrying out assassinations of foreign heads of state or other foreign politicians.

If anything, President Ford’s assassination ban was his attempt to put limits on his Oval Office successors, to prevent future presidents from being too easily drawn into black operations. The Church Committee pointed out that, for all the CIA’s questionable activities during its early decades, it was always the White House encouraging reckless operations like coup attempts and killing foreign leaders. The CIA offered secrecy, and secrecy had always seduced American presidents.

As Senator Church wrote in his committee’s final report, “
once the capability
for covert activity is established, the pressures brought to bear on the President to use it are immense.” Church questioned whether America even needed the CIA at all. Instead of keeping a “regiment of cloak-and-dagger men” at the president’s disposal, Church believed that the State Department would be more than capable of taking on covert operations if the need arose but should do so only in the case of dire emergency, perhaps to “
avert a nuclear holocaust or save a civilization
.”

—

CHURCH DIDN’T GET
his wish, but the CIA had been duly chastened by the time that Ross Newland graduated from Trinity College, in Connecticut, in the late 1970s. The son of an international businessman, he had spent most of his life in Latin America and Spain, and spoke fluent Spanish. Given his upbringing and interest in international affairs, Newland figured that he might be destined for a career as a diplomat, but he chose first to pursue a master’s degree at the
London School of Economics
.

At an opulent holiday party in December 1978, at the residence of the American ambassador in Madrid, Newland was recruited to become a spy. He had flown from London to Madrid to see his parents, who were living in Spain, and during the party a man in his early fifties approached him and told him he worked at the embassy. After fifteen minutes of small talk, in both English and Spanish, the man asked Newland if he wanted to walk through the gardens of the residence and speak in private.

The man was Nestor Sanchez, the CIA’s station chief in Madrid and a veteran clandestine officer whose storied career in the secret service was in its twilight. An ardent anticommunist, Sanchez had joined the CIA not long after its founding and had been at the center of many of the covert operations investigated by the Church Committee. He had helped engineer the successful 1954 coup against Jacobo Árbenz Guzmán, in Guatemala, and had given a poison-filled syringe disguised as a writing pen to a Cuban agent
in an attempt to kill Castro
.

Sanchez told Newland he might make a good CIA case officer and gave his name to the agency’s station in London. Three months later, Newland was sitting in a bare room at CIA headquarters waiting for his psychological evaluation. A man walked in, sat down, and asked Newland only two questions.

“So, you grew up in Mexico?”

“Yes.”

“What’s the difference between an enchilada and a tostada?”

Though puzzled by the question, Newland nevertheless explained the difference between the two dishes. After a brief chat about Mexican food, Newland politely told his interviewer that they better start the psychological evaluation because he needed to get to his next interview.

“And he said, ‘No, we’re done,’” Newland remembers. Ross Newland was in the CIA.

He finished up at the London School of Economics and officially joined the spy agency on November 5, 1979. It was just a day after students in Iran stormed the American embassy and six weeks before Soviet paratroopers landed in Kabul as the vanguard of the hundreds of thousands of troops who would invade Afghanistan over the following months. The two events convulsed CIA headquarters, especially the fifty-three members of Ross Newland’s class. Top agency officials ordered all trainees except those fluent in a language not spoken in the Muslim world to be funneled toward assignments in the Middle East or Central Asia.

Because he spoke Spanish, Newland was one of a dozen trainees excluded from the “draft.” By the time Newland had completed his case-officer training, Ronald Reagan had become president and the CIA had a newfound interest in Latin America. Cocaine was flowing over the border into the United States, and the Reagan administration was deeply worried about the growing power of leftist guerrilla movements in Central America. Newland had a mentor in Nestor Sanchez, who by then had left Madrid and taken over the CIA’s Latin America division. From his perch at headquarters Sanchez was able to guide Newland’s early career, and he put him at the center of the action.

He was sent first to Bolivia, then the world’s cocaine capital, where he was directed to cultivate sources in the drug cartels. He spent much of his time in the Bolivian lowlands, posing as an American businessman and trying to make friends among the drug-runners in the city of Santa Cruz. He drank with them, bet on cockfights, met their wives and mistresses, and drove with them out of the city to eat duck with mango and pineapple in ramshackle bungalows along the road leading into the jungle.

When he wasn’t in Santa Cruz, he was in the Bolivian capital of La Paz, awaiting the next coup attempt. The CIA station in Bolivia took pride in predicting each coup before it happened, and the agency officers there didn’t want to blow their perfect track record. But Newland got a bracing dose of reality about his place in the world when the one successful military overthrow during his tour in Bolivia earned only a small mention on the inside pages of the
New York Times.
The previous four attempts hadn’t even made it into the paper.

The Reagan administration had identified the Bolivian government as a partner in the war on drugs. But as he started to penetrate the Bolivian drug networks, Newland began to write intelligence reports about the rampant corruption among top officials in La Paz, many of whom were on the payroll of the cartels. The minister of the interior was protecting the drug kingpins from prosecution, and they were paying him off in ranches, jewels, and cash. The reports were hardly what the American ambassador in La Paz wanted to read.

For Newland, the experience in Bolivia was a first glimpse of how Washington’s policy of propping up corrupt governments to serve a singular goal—in this case the war on drugs—could undermine long-term American interests. He also began to question whether the CIA should really be in charge of the drug war, or whether the Reagan administration had just leaned on the agency because messy wars are best fought in secret. Two decades later he would have similar questions about the CIA’s role in the war against terrorists.

—

WHEN NEWLAND WAS DISPATCHED
to Bolivia, the CIA’s Latin America division was a relatively sleepy corner of the spy agency’s Directorate of Operations. But it would soon become the center of the CIA’s universe, largely because of dynamics many pay grades above Newland. In June 1981, Nestor Sanchez left the agency for the Pentagon. His replacement was Duane R. Clarridge, a gin-drinking and hard-charging spy of the old school who was exactly in the mold sought by William J. Casey, Ronald Reagan’s newly installed CIA chief. Known to all as “Dewey,” Clarridge grew up in a New Hampshire family of staunch Republicans (his nickname was a tribute to Governor Thomas E. Dewey, of New York) and earned degrees from Brown and Columbia before joining the CIA in 1955. He was eager to battle the Soviet Union on
each shadowy front of the Cold War
. By 1981, he had served undercover in Nepal, India, Turkey, and Italy, often posing as a businessman and using pseudonyms like
Dewey Marone and Dax Preston LeBaron
. With a high-octane personality and a preference for white suits and pocket squares, Clarridge attracted a following among younger undercover officers. He was fond of saying that the CIA’s clandestine service “marches for the president,” but his push for aggressive clandestine operations sometimes
infuriated State Department diplomats
. Clarridge’s boss in Rome, Ambassador Richard Gardner, called him “
shallow and devious
.”

When he returned to Washington, in 1981, Clarridge quickly developed a rapport with Casey. On Clarridge’s first day back at CIA headquarters, Casey called him into his office and said that the Reagan administration was worried about Cuba and the Sandinista government in Nicaragua “exporting revolution” throughout Central America, particularly to El Salvador. Within a week, Clarridge came back with a plan:

Take the war to Nicaragua.

Start killing Cubans.

Casey, a former OSS man, embraced the plan immediately. He told Clarridge to draft a secret finding for the president to sign, authorizing
a covert war in Central America
. It was very early into his presidency, but Ronald Reagan was already accelerating covert activities both in Latin America and in Afghanistan, where he increased support to the mujahedeen fighting Soviet troops. Reagan was initiating a new turn of the cycle: The “risk-averse” CIA was once again running secret wars abroad.

Clarridge was just the man to be in charge of the Central American front, and he used a CIA slush fund to buy guns, ammunition, mules, and heavy weapons for the Nicaraguan Contras, the rebels resisting the government. He worked closely with the Pentagon’s special-operations troops, and with an aide at the White House National Security Council, Lt. Colonel Oliver North, to build the Contras up into a guerrilla force he hoped would preoccupy the Sandinista government and prevent it from spreading its influence around America’s backyard. The CIA’s budget for Nicaragua was tiny; Clarridge and the agency’s Latin America hands used to joke that the U.S. Navy pushed trash of greater value off its aircraft carriers in a single morning
than the CIA had to spend
in Nicaragua in an entire year.

—

ROSS NEWLAND AND MANY
of his peers at the CIA saw the wars in Central America as exactly what the spy agency needed to avoid. But by 1985 Newland’s work in the CIA’s Latin America division brought him to the heart of the covert wars of the Reagan era. He arrived in Costa Rica just months after a secret CIA operation to mine Nicaragua’s harbors had unleashed a fury in Congress and ultimately led lawmakers to put new rules in place about when the intelligence committees were to be notified about
CIA covert-action programs
.

The mining operation, which Dewey Clarridge claims he dreamt up over a glass of gin and a cigar, cost Clarridge his job as chief of the Latin America division. He moved laterally inside the CIA’s clandestine service, taking over CIA operations in Europe.

In Costa Rica, Newland saw firsthand the war that Dewey Clarridge had built. CIA officers in Costa Rica were managing the southern front of the Contra war; the northern operations were run out of Honduras. Congress had, by then, banned the Reagan administration from supporting the Nicaraguan rebels, but the CIA’s station chief in Costa Rica, Joe Fernandez, was working with Oliver North to deliver supplies to the rebels.

Newland’s job was to penetrate the government in the capital of Managua in order to determine the plans and intentions of senior Nicaraguan political and military officials—traditional espionage work. He met with agents, wrote intelligence reports about the strategy of the Sandinista government, and put those reports into the stream of classified cables going back to Langley.

What was bizarre, however, was that other CIA officers in charge of running the Contras were doing the exact same thing. American covert officers would make decisions about which Sandinista targets the Contras should hit and then write up intelligence reports predicting which targets were about to be hit. The cables were sent back to Washington, and, not surprisingly, the predictions were usually correct. The CIA was, in other words, generating its own intelligence.