The Way of the Knife (8 page)

“I thought this was so nuts,” Newland recalled. “That’s not the way we were taught. But that’s the way you do it in a paramilitary situation.”

The American effort in Nicaragua steadily unraveled amid revelations that money had been diverted to the Contras from the sale of HAWK missiles to Iran, a sale brokered by Oliver North in an attempt to secure the release of American hostages held in Beirut. Newland watched as the Iran–Contra investigation slowly ensnared his CIA bosses, past and present. His station chief in Bolivia, Jim Adkins, who had moved to Honduras to run Contra operations from the north, was fired from the agency when it emerged he had authorized helicopter flights to carry supplies into Nicaragua. Joe Fernandez was indicted on June 20, 1988, on counts of obstruction of justice and making false statements, although the charges were eventually dropped. Nestor Sanchez, Newland’s first mentor at the CIA, was suspected of involvement in the illegal operations while working at the Pentagon but was never charged with a crime.

The Contra debacle was a searing experience for Newland. He disagreed with much of what he witnessed in Central America, but he was bitter that agency officers were being bled dry defending themselves while senior White House officials escaped punishment. But it taught him a lesson that he would apply years later, when President George W. Bush authorized the CIA to carry out the most extensive covert-operations campaign in its history, after the September 11 attacks. That lesson? Get everything in writing.

“When we got into things like lethal authorities, detention policies, all of these things, I made sure this was signed up and down Pennsylvania Avenue,” he recalls. “Why? Because I had been there before.”

—

IT WOULD BE ANOTHER
five years before Iran–Contra investigators would catch up to Dewey Clarridge and indict him on perjury charges. But before that, he convinced Casey to upend the agency’s bureaucracy to deal with a threat that neither the CIA nor the Pentagon had spent much time thinking about: Islamic terrorism.

In a two-year span beginning in 1983, terrorist groups with names unfamiliar to most Americans went on a stunning international killing spree. The spate of attacks began when a bomb ripped through the American embassy in Beirut and killed sixty-three employees, including eight CIA officers. Later that year, a truck packed with explosives killed 241 Marines sleeping in their barracks in Beirut, an attack that had been ordered by an underground terror cell called the Islamic Jihad Organization (a cover name at the time for Hezbollah) to protest the military’s ill-advised deployment to Lebanon. In June 1985, Lebanese hijackers killed a U.S. Navy diver during the TWA Flight 847 hostage standoff, and in October 1985 a Palestinian terrorist known as Abu Abbas hijacked the
Achille Lauro
cruise ship, ordering the killing of a sixty-nine-year-old American tourist named Leon Klinghoffer. His body was thrown overboard.

Struggling for a response, Reagan officials considered giving the CIA the authority to hunt and kill Lebanese terrorists using teams of local hit men. Oliver North wrote a draft of a presidential finding that included language giving the CIA
authority to “neutralize
” militants with deadly force. Casey was intrigued by the idea of using Lebanese hit men, but his deputy was appalled. John McMahon, who still bore scars from the congressional investigations of the 1970s and had grown weary of Casey’s exploits, was enraged when he heard about the plan. He was sure that creating hit squads violated President Ford’s assassination ban. “
Do you know what
intelligence means to these people?” he asked Casey, referring to White House officials. “It’s tossing a bomb. It’s blowing up people.” And, he said, any blowback from a decision to start killing terrorists would be felt not at the White House but at the CIA. “To the rest of the world,” he warned Casey, “it’s not administration policy, it’s not an NSC idea—it’s those crazy bastards at CIA.”

But Casey was not convinced by McMahon’s objections, and he threw his support behind Oliver North’s proposal. In November 1984, President Reagan signed a secret finding authorizing the CIA and the Pentagon’s Joint Special Operations Command to go ahead with
the training of Lebanese hit men
. But the plan was never carried out, and the finding was ultimately rescinded by Reagan amid opposition from the State Department and the CIA’s old guard. Former CIA director Richard Helms, weighing in from his retirement, told an aide to Vice President George H. W. Bush that the United States should not adopt the Israeli model of “
fighting terrorism with terrorism
.”

Casey had hoped that the rash of terrorism would end as quickly as it began. But some CIA officers at the time thought that Casey simply didn’t understand
the new threat
, and a bloody Christmastime attack at the El Al ticket counters inside the Vienna and Rome airports in 1985
destroyed any hope that terrorism
would fade away. Palestinian gunmen doped up on amphetamines killed nineteen people during the airport spree. The grisliness of the attacks was driven home to Americans through the death of an eleven-year-old American named Natasha Simpson. A terrorist shot the girl at close range as she lay in her father’s arms.

Shortly after the attacks in Vienna and Rome, Clarridge made his argument to Casey for a new CIA campaign against Islamic terrorism. Clarridge thought the agency was in a defensive crouch, and he won the director’s blessing to begin
an expansive new war
.

Clarridge’s proposal was to create a dedicated group inside the CIA devoted solely to international terrorism. It would be a “fusion center” where clandestine officers would work next to analysts, piecing together clues about possible threats and gathering intelligence in order to capture or kill terrorist leaders. What sounds like a standard bureaucratic reorganization was, at the time, quite controversial. The CIA is actually a fragmented, cliquish culture, more like a public high school than many inside the agency care to admit. Jockish paramilitary officers tend to shun the nerdy analysts, who regard the paramilitary operatives as knuckle-draggers. At the top of the pyramid are the case officers—the spies who go out into the world—who believe they are doing the real work of the CIA and like to boast that they don’t follow orders from desk jockeys at headquarters.

There was immediate resistance to Clarridge’s idea from clandestine officers with Middle East experience. They believed that the center would be staffed by officers who didn’t understand the nuances of the Islamic world and would create messes that the officers stationed overseas would have to clean up. Chasing terrorists, they sniffed, was police work, better suited to the FBI than the CIA. Finally, many officers simply didn’t trust Clarridge and saw the center as empire building. The Counterterrorist Center was, therefore, born amid the similar tensions that the CIA would experience after the September 11 attacks—between case officers in Islamabad and CTC operatives at Langley, between those pushing for unilateral operations and those warning that such operations could shatter delicate relations with foreign intelligence services.

Casey ignored the internal objections and approved Clarridge’s proposal, and the Counterterrorist Center began operations on February 1, 1986. The CTC’s birth narrative was familiar: The White House was struggling with a problem it couldn’t find an answer for, so it looked to the CIA for a solution. And the CIA was happy to oblige.

The creation of the CTC was also significant because, from the beginning, CTC officers worked closely with military special-operations troops and allowed the military to be a partner in clandestine missions. The Pentagon’s Special Operations Command was founded one year after the CTC, and operatives from both organizations viewed each other as kindred souls, imbued with the spirit of Bill Donovan’s OSS. Unlike other parts of the CIA, the Counterterrorist Center didn’t turn up its nose at the military. The Pentagon’s commandos were partners with the terrorist hunters at the CTC.

When the Counterterrorist Center began operations, there were no ongoing covert operations against international terrorist groups, and the CTC began working with Army paramilitary units like Delta Force
to penetrate the Abu Nidal organization and Hezbollah
. Lawyers working for President Reagan drew up secret legal memos concluding that hunting and killing terrorists did not violate the 1976 assassination ban, just as lawyers working for Presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama would do decades later. These terrorist groups were plotting attacks against Americans, the lawyers argued, so killing them would be self-defense, not assassination.

But getting the legal authorities is only one step, and it doesn’t guarantee that politicians will bless specific lethal operations. During the early years of the Counterterrorist Center, the White House had little political capital to spend convincing Congress of the need to kill terrorists in secret. The Iran–Contra investigations had sapped the energies from Reagan’s national-security team and given more clout to advisers like National Security Advisor Colin Powell and Secretary of State George Shultz, who urged against any more overseas exploits. There was no longer the stomach for a fight, recalled Fred Turco, who was Dewey Clarridge’s deputy at the CTC and later took over the center. “
The wheels had fallen off for Reagan
.”

—

ROSS NEWLAND LEFT
the jungles of Central America cynical about how the Iran–Contra scandal had shattered the agency’s clandestine service. But unlike his CIA bosses, he had not become enmeshed in the unfolding scandal; in fact, he received a promotion. He and several of his contemporaries were elevated to become chiefs of overseas stations in Eastern Europe, jobs that put them in charge of agency operations in various Soviet satellite states. Still in his early thirties, Newland became the youngest station chief in the history of the CIA’s division handling Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union. In 1988, the CIA didn’t see that as much of a risk.

“They put us there because they were pretty confident that nothing was going to happen,” said Newland. “And, boy, did they fuck up.”

Within a year, the Berlin Wall had crumbled and revolution had spread throughout Eastern Europe. As the CIA’s top officer in Romania, Newland was in charge of keeping the Bush administration informed about the collapse of the regime of Nicolae Ceausescu, who fled Bucharest with his wife as crowds swelled in the streets during the week before Christmas 1989. On Christmas Day, with Romanian paratroopers holding Nicolae and Elena Ceausescu in custody, Newland found himself trying to convince the officers of the unit holding the couple not to execute them without at least conducting some kind of trial. At least, that’s what Newland’s bosses at Langley had told him to tell the Romanian troops. “And so we forced them to go through a trial, and it lasted, like, twenty minutes,” he said. When that formality was dispensed with, the platoon commander asked for three volunteers to form a firing squad. But when the Romanian dictator and his wife were put up against the wall, their hands bound behind their backs, the entire platoon opened fire.

With the end of the Cold War came the end of the CIA’s defining mission. Countering the advance of Communism had been the agency’s lodestar, justifying decades of far-flung operations in Latin America, the Middle East, and Europe. The budget cuts to the Pentagon and CIA during the 1990s hit the agency’s clandestine service particularly hard, with overseas stations shuttered and the total number of CIA case officers slashed. Overall spending on human-intelligence collection was
cut by 22 percent
over the decade. President Clinton, America’s first baby-boomer president and a onetime Vietnam War protester, was a natural skeptic of the CIA and gave his spy chiefs little time during his first term. R. James Woolsey Jr., Clinton’s first CIA director, said that Clinton paid little attention to intelligence issues and had private meetings with his spy chief only once a year. “We had very little access, frankly,” Woolsey said. After he left the CIA he joked that the man who crashed a stolen Cessna plane on the South Lawn of the White House, in September 1994, was actually him
trying to get a meeting with the president
.

The agency was also still facing a reckoning for the aggressive operations in Latin America overseen by Dewey Clarridge in the 1980s. In 1996, an intelligence-oversight board issued a report detailing the extensive human-rights abuses carried out for more than a decade by CIA assets in Guatemala. It alleged that between 1984 and 1986 several CIA informants were alleged to have “
ordered, planned, or participated
in serious human-rights violations such as assassination, extrajudicial execution, torture, or kidnapping while they were assets—and that the CIA was contemporaneously aware of many of the allegations.” The Guatemala revelations had been trickling out for years, leading CIA director John M. Deutch to impose new restrictions on agency case officers consorting with unsavory characters. The drug lords with whom Ross Newland had once bet on cockfights in Bolivia would now be off-limits to CIA officers, as would terrorists who might be attempting to kill Americans.

Deutch, a chemist with a Ph.D. from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, came to Langley from the Pentagon after President Clinton removed James Woolsey from the CIA job in 1995. He wanted to build spy satellites and overseas listening posts, not send clandestine officers on swashbuckling secret missions. He didn’t trust the agency’s clandestine service, and they treated him like a virus that had invaded the host body.

One of his initiatives was to have the CIA work more closely with the military on issues other than counterterrorism, which by the mid-nineties had returned to being an issue of little importance at the CIA. Since the end of the Gulf War, in 1991, Pentagon generals had complained that the CIA had been useless in penetrating Saddam Hussein’s regime before the war broke out and just as bad in helping the military hunt Iraqi forces in the desert. Deutch ordered CIA officers to serve in military command posts around the globe to make sure that the agency was giving its best intelligence on global threats.