Company Man: Thirty Years of Controversy and Crisis in the CIA (11 page)

I was dispatched by the OGC to visit several of our stations in South America on what were called “parish visits,” a program started shortly after I arrived and geared to give all of us wide-eyed neophytes some exposure to what life is like in the field. Typically, it involves hitting a few stations of varying size in the region, meeting our people in the CIA office, and fielding any informal legal questions they might have (and maybe pass on the latest hallway gossip from headquarters). Since I was still so new and unformed, I didn’t have much to offer in the way of advice or gossip. As it happened, however, my traveling companion from Washington was a senior officer from the Office of Logistics, the entity responsible for maintaining the CIA’s worldwide network of office and supply facilities. He was a crusty, garrulous Agency veteran who loved to hold forth on anything, so I left most of the talking to him.

At one of our last stops, we went through the usual drill, with all station personnel summoned to an all-hands meeting in a secured conference room. Sitting almost directly across from me was the number two guy in the station, and he was definitely giving off a vibe of not really wanting to be there. Not hostile, but rather bored with the whole thing and eager to get the hell out of there to go back to do real work. The more I looked at him, though, the more I had the feeling that I had seen him somewhere before. He looked to be in his late forties, so he wasn’t a guy I could have
met in high school or college. And he didn’t give his name, so that was no help. Yet I couldn’t shake the gnawing feeling that I had seen his face before. As soon as the meeting broke up, he bolted as quickly as he could.

I then left to do some sightseeing, but all through the day, and back at my hotel room later, I found myself still trying to place him. Lying in my lumpy bed in the middle of the night, I bolted upright. I suddenly pictured him, except that he was twenty years younger. It was a photo, actually, and it was on a . . . baseball card. As a young boy in the ’50s, I obsessively bought them (at a nickel a pack) and voraciously studied all the pictures on the front and stats on the back. And somehow one card came back into my head that night, all those years later. That same impassive face, staring out from beneath a baseball cap. An obscure utility player on one of those teams of the mid-’50s that routinely pummeled my beloved, downtrodden Red Sox.

I had to be sure, because otherwise I knew it would stick in my craw indefinitely. We had to leave for our next stop the following day, but I made it a point to go to the station one last time, where, summoning what little nerve I had at the time, I marched into his office and just blurted it out: “Are you the guy on my baseball card?” He looked up from his desk, slightly surprised. After a pause, he gave me a small smile and replied, “Yup, and you’re the first guy from work in years who’s asked me about it.” Suddenly, improbably, that broke the ice, and he invited me for coffee in the cafeteria, where for an hour he regaled me with stories about the off-the-field exploits of his legendary carousing teammates. He also gave me my first, candid glimpse of what it was like to live the life of a CIA case officer abroad, as he had done for virtually all of his two-decades-long career. (He would continue to serve, mostly overseas, until his retirement in the mid-’80s.)

I sat there, mesmerized. Partly because he was the first, battle-hardened “street spook” ever to open up to me. But mostly because there I was, in this little cafeteria in this faraway place, talking to a guy on a baseball card magically reincarnated. It was on the plane that night that it really hit me for the first time about the CIA: This is an amazing place, with amazing people.

Late that year, I made the acquaintance of a storied figure in the CIA’s history, a man who would offer me a valuable lesson about life in the Agency. It came in the form of informal, but prescient, career advice.

His name was Cord Meyer. In his 2001 obituary, the
Washington Post
observed that his “life was characterized by great privilege and considerable personal tragedy.” The product of a wealthy and well-connected family, Meyer graduated early from Yale to join the marines shortly after the start of World War II. He was grievously wounded in combat in the Pacific, and while recovering wrote dispatches for U.S. magazines and later a prizewinning book. His politics were decidedly liberal (the FBI suspected him of Communist sympathies), and by all accounts he had stunned his liberal friends by deciding to join the CIA. He would spend the next quarter-century there, gaining increasing stature, and occasionally enduring media controversy, for his groundbreaking but highly covert anti-Communist initiatives. Over the years, Meyer fully earned his reputation inside the CIA, and inside the salons of Georgetown society, as a patrician, dashing, enigmatic swashbuckler.

At the end of 1976, when I first met him, he was largely a burned-out case. By the time Stansfield Turner arrived as Jimmy Carter’s DCI in March 1977, Meyer had been shunted aside, given a do-nothing job with the amorphous title of “special assistant” to Turner, a man he grew to despise. (He contemptuously referred to Turner as “His Eminence.”) Our paths crossed when I was assigned to help draft a new internal regulation governing CIA relationships with the U.S. media; with nothing else to do, and with his background in journalism, Meyer passed the word to Lapham that he would be happy to help.

From the beginning, Meyer was a mysterious, compelling figure to me. It was very similar to my initial reaction to Lyman Kirkpatrick at Brown a decade before. Like Kirkpatrick, he conveyed an aura born of privilege and a life in the shadows. They had the same refined features, including the carefully coiffed, thick gray hair (these guys from the “Good Shepherd” generation all seemed to have great hair) and the tweedy, expensive clothes. Both had a serious and visible physical disability, yet somehow it made them look even more intimidating and glamorous: For Kirkpatrick it was a wheelchair, for Meyer it was a black eye patch, one he had worn since losing an eye in World War II combat.

I don’t know exactly why, but Meyer seemed to take a paternal shine to me. He invited me to lunch a few times at one of his favorite local haunts, a dark and quiet Turkish restaurant in nearby McLean. I particularly remember one lunch in the fall of 1976 because it took place not long after
the public revelation of one more truth-is-stranger-than-fiction piece of Meyer’s past. That July, the magazine
New Times
, a long-since-defunct countercultural periodical similar in style to
Rolling Stone
, published a long article entitled “The Curious Aftermath of JFK’s Best and Brightest Affair.” It chronicled the story of Meyer’s former wife, Mary, who had been murdered in 1964 on the Potomac River towpath near her Georgetown home. The murder was never solved, but the article mostly focused on the Meyers’ troubled marriage (they had divorced in 1958), his shadowy CIA career, and—most sensationally—the fact that Mary Meyer carried on an affair with President Kennedy in the early ’60s. It hinted at a possible furtive Agency role in the murder or, at a minimum, in an effort to cover up evidence of the affair in the days after the murder occurred.

It was a mysterious, lurid, utterly irresistible tale that was still resonating in the media the day we had lunch, and God, I was bursting to ask Meyer about it. But I knew I just couldn’t do so—it would have been unbelievably tasteless, and besides, Meyer still intimidated me a bit.

But then, out of nowhere, Meyer began talking about Kennedy, about how the president used to summon him to the Oval Office to discuss Agency operations. He talked about Kennedy in an admiring way, which I found exceedingly odd under the circumstances. Indeed, the fact that he brought up Kennedy’s name at all was strange. Meyer soon dropped the subject of Kennedy and went on, in an offhand sort of way, to offer me some career advice, perhaps because he was about to retire.

Meyer’s own career had largely foundered in the early ’70s after his name was publicly linked to the CIA’s clandestine role in reviewing the galleys of a book critical of the CIA, as well as the Agency’s secret subsidy of the National Student Association. The activities took place years before, yet they still clearly weighed heavily on him. And there was a lesson from what had happened to him that he wanted to impart. “To succeed at the Agency,” Meyer counseled, “you can’t ever get your name into the newspapers.”

I was grateful and flattered that he cared enough to offer me advice, but I couldn’t imagine how it would ever apply in my CIA career. And, sure enough, I did stay safely under the media radar for the next twenty-five years. Until, that is, the months and years after the 9/11 attacks.

Jimmy Carter had taken office in January 1977 after vowing during his campaign to curb the “rogue elephant”—the phrase coined by Senator Church for the CIA. His first nominee for director, Ted Sorensen, had to drop out because of his perceived anti-CIA animus in the past. (In his memoirs three decades later, Sorensen suggested that his failed nomination was in part due to some sort of covert cabal against him by CIA insiders. What nonsense.) Carter then appointed a navy admiral, Stansfield Turner, a starchy, self-righteous man with no previous intelligence experience, who quickly proceeded to alienate the workforce by slashing the ranks of CIA operational personnel. The Agency, still trying to recover from the impact of the Church Committee revelations, was a largely ignored, shrunken, demoralized shell of its fabled image in those first couple of years of the Carter administration.

However, for my part, I was still enthralled with my job, particularly with the breathtaking diversity of matters that the OGC handled. With only eighteen lawyers, the legal office didn’t have the luxury of assigning us specific areas of practice, say, litigation or administrative law. So we were all deemed “generalists,” meaning the legal assignments from all over the building were parceled out across the office as they came in.

I was beginning to realize that practicing law at the CIA was unlike any other attorney job in the government. Few federal statutes were meant to apply to the Agency’s activities, and those that did traced back to the late ’40s and were, by congressional design, cryptic and ambiguously worded. Judicial precedents (basic “case law,” as it’s called) were virtually nonexistent. It was as if lawmakers and judges implicitly recognized
that the existence and work of the CIA were by definition secret, and they were content to keep it that way. So trying to do legal research was a largely fruitless exercise.

And the assignments were about things that law schools could never prepare you for.

Defectors, for example. Beginning with the CIA Act of 1949, Congress gave the Agency unique authority to identify foreign government officials and other individuals of interest and recruit them to the U.S. side by offering one of the Agency’s ultimate “carrots”: resettlement in the United States, with new identities and new lives. Up through the end of the Cold War, the vast majority of these defectors were from the Soviet Union. Some had been recruited by the CIA to operate “in place” until they had lost their operational value or, more frequently, were in danger of being uncovered. Others, however, were so-called walk-ins, meaning they simply decided to jump ship from their countries and seek refuge in a new life of freedom and plenty in the United States.

By the very nature of who they are, defectors have always been at once among the Agency’s most valuable and most vexing accounts. They are, after all, essentially traitors to their country or cause, and they come weighed down with all sorts of psychological baggage—senses of guilt, entitlement, grandiosity, and so on. Often, they are simply not very nice people, demanding enormous tax-free bankrolling and constant pampering and indulgence. And the CIA is responsible for their care and well-being for the rest of their lives, long after they have lost any value as sources of intelligence. I should note that some defectors over the years have shown the character, pride, and wherewithal to become self-supporting, productive citizens in their new American surroundings. But from three decades of dealing with these guys, I have to say that more of them than not have proved to be morally bankrupt basket cases and enormous pains in the ass.

Still, the Agency has always thrown a huge amount of resources and effort into its defector program, because every once in a while a defector can be an intelligence gold mine. And during the Cold War, probably the most highly sought-after prize was an active-duty officer from the Soviet KGB.

All of which brings me to Yuri Nosenko, a complex, controversial, and irresistibly fascinating character I encountered in early 1977. A decade
earlier, the CIA had given him a new name, a new “life history,” and a new life in a bucolic, Mayberry-like little town in the southeast United States—a seemingly unlikely, fish-out-of-water landing spot for a hulking KGB apparatchik with the gap-toothed mug of Ernest Borgnine and the gravelly Russian-soaked drawl of Akim Tamiroff.