Good Hunting: An American Spymaster's Story (11 page)

Years later I would be reminded of this episode when I ran into former secretary of state Henry Kissinger at the Four Seasons restaurant in New York City. I spotted him across the room and reintroduced myself, noting our mutual experience in Chile. He politely said we should have lunch and talk about it. While I agreed, I didn’t expect to hear from him and was very surprised when I returned to my office to find that there was already a note on my desk setting up a lunch with Kissinger. Over that lunch, it didn’t take him long to get to his real and perhaps only interest: Hadn’t Allende been planning an
autogolpe
shortly before the military ousted him? Kissinger clearly was disappointed by my response—that while that might eventually have been a possibility, at the time there was no credible reporting supporting the military’s allegation. This was at odds with Kissinger’s long-held views. Not surprisingly, it was the last time we had lunch together.

The station did try, after the coup, to establish closer ties with the junta, but it was a rocky road. We continued to hear disturbing reports—about mass arrests, torture, and the murder of people regarded as subversives. Many Chileans were not troubled by these actions. They had truly feared the MIR and didn’t fully believe that the military would harm innocent civilians. They were wrong. In a secret memo dated September 24, 1973, less than two weeks after the coup, the station reported that “the deaths of the great majority of persons killed in cleanup operations against extremists … are not recorded. Only the Junta members will have a really clear idea of the correct death figures, which they will probably keep secret.” On October 12, 1973, another memo quoted a source as saying that sixteen hundred civilians had been killed between September 11 and October 10.
21
Swept up in the military’s wave of repression were two Americans, Frank Teruggi and Charles Horman, whose kidnapping and murder in the immediate aftermath of the coup inspired the 1982 Jack Lemmon–Sissy Spacek movie
Missing
. The movie’s unfriendly presentation of the CIA has helped fuel a persistent, and bogus, theory that the CIA was somehow involved in the murders. Agency officer James E. Anderson became involved in the very emotionally disturbing search for the bodies of Horman and Teruggi. After the bodies were found, Anderson was deeply distraught about the murders for years to come.

Within two weeks of the coup, we also got our first inkling that Pinochet did not plan to hold elections. One of my colleagues had a political source who’d anticipated a role in the new government. This source had relatives in the military who must have given him the bad news; he came to my colleague chagrined. “They’re not handing it back,” he said, meaning the military was not handing power back to the politicians. The military was angry at the political parties we had worked so hard to defend. It felt as if the politicians’ failure to defeat Allende electorally or curb him legislatively had forced the military to act in a way it hadn’t wanted to. But now that it had seized power, it was not going to return it to the politicians to let them muck things up again.

If we made a mistake in Chile after the coup, it was a policy mistake. According to a longtime Agency colleague and friend who also was in Chile at the time, “We didn’t put enough pressure on Pinochet to move to a civilian government.” That said, no one at the station would ever have imagined that the Pinochet dictatorship would last until 1991. We still felt we’d accomplished the mission we’d been given: we had prevented the establishment of a left-wing regime aligned with Castro that could have become a Soviet asset in our hemisphere. In fact, as we climbed, over the years, to the highest levels at Langley, the case officers involved in that extraordinary operation became known around the CIA as the Chile Mafia.

We were seriously disillusioned, though, at the unforeseen consequences of the coup: the brutality and repression of the Pinochet regime. Obviously this has troubled me over the years, but it has not shaken my faith in covert action, at least not in “good” covert action. When I arrived in Santiago, every indication we had was that the Allende government had its eyes set on undermining the political opposition and threatening free media. In that environment, it was fair game to support those parties and the media in resisting. I’m convinced that if the military had not intervened in September 1973, our covert action programs would have sustained the opposition until the next election and that the Allende government would have been defeated at the ballot box. That would have been a far preferable outcome to the Pinochet regime.

*   *   *

As I was preparing to depart Santiago in 1974, I began to turn my assets over to my replacement, a newly arrived case officer. One of these assets was a Chilean politician. I made it a general policy not to use an alias with public figures, because you run a high risk of meeting them in a casual setting in the presence of others. Under these circumstances, it is quite easy to find yourself being referred to by your alias. Still, I asked the new case officer how he wanted to handle the introduction. He had had a few tours abroad, but he nonetheless decided that he wanted to use “good tradecraft” and meet the politician under an alias. Shortly thereafter, the politician invited the two of us and our wives to a dinner. The case officer’s wife sat next to him. I could overhear parts of the discussion and heard her refer to her husband several times by his true name. At one point, the politician paused the discussion and said with a huge smile and for all to hear, “Don’t you know your husband’s name?” Flustered, his wife said she “confuses him all the time with his brother.” We all laughed at her clumsy response. The jig was up.

When a new station chief arrived shortly before my departure, he asked me to write a memo about the situation in Chile. I produced a rather blunt document suggesting that the United States start using the very same covert action tactics on Pinochet that we had used against Allende, to bring about a return of a democratic government. I doubt the station chief agreed at the time or sent my memo to Washington—if for no other reason than to protect my career, since it surely would have seemed a brash assessment by a first-tour case officer. But Chile taught me a lesson about unintended consequences that has served me well. If the coup that toppled Allende was an episode that has plagued the CIA ever since, for all the wrong reasons, my next reminder to be careful what we wished for was even more disastrous. Like the coup in Chile, it was instigated by the White House, and as in Chile we were, to a great extent, left holding the bag.

FOUR

“We Need to Polygraph Him”

Washington, 1985–86

One morning in early 2011 a story on the front page of
The New York Times
brought back a rush of memories. My former colleague Duane R. “Dewey” Clarridge was in the news again. Two decades after his indictment and pardon in Iran-Contra, he was running a private intelligence operation in Afghanistan under a multimillion-dollar Pentagon contract. I was astounded but not completely surprised, given Dewey’s energy and charisma. As I read the piece, I remembered the call.

I was sitting in my Langley office in December of 1985 when Clarridge rang me out of the blue. By that point in our careers, we knew each other well, having worked together for a few years in Latin America, though we’d both moved on since then. Clarridge was chief of the Europe Division. I was head of the Near East Division’s Iran branch at headquarters. He was calling to tell me to expect to hear very soon from Director Casey. “It’s very urgent and extremely important,” he told me. He didn’t say the call would involve secret arms shipments to Iran.

Clarridge was a swashbuckling officer whose gung-ho support of the Contras, the right-wing rebel groups opposing Nicaragua’s Sandinista government, made him a Casey favorite. The director had first taken a liking to Clarridge when he was serving as chief of station in Rome, then made him head of the Latin America Division, with authority for overseeing development of the Contra force, even though Clarridge couldn’t speak Spanish and had no background in the region.
1
He had charisma and knew how to motivate people, and at the end of the day, running a division at the CIA was about leadership and driving the culture. We were a very top-down organization.

From his time in Rome, Clarridge dressed with Italian-style flair. He favored light suits and often had a silk handkerchief peeking out of his breast pocket, in red or blue to match his tie. Soon several of the station chiefs started sporting handkerchiefs as well. Once, when we were both back in Washington, during lunch in the Executive Dining Room, Clarridge pulled out a monocle to peer at the menu. I laughed profusely. “I might go for the handkerchief,” I said, “but I’ll be damned if I’m going to start using a monocle to emulate your style.” He got a little testy over my remark, but to the best of my knowledge, he never wore the monocle again. I’m convinced that if he’d worn it to the chiefs of station conference, many of the chiefs would soon have been running around with monocles.

This tendency to emulate leaders can be a good thing, if it’s not taken to an extreme. If you want to lead the Agency and you are trying to live by the creed on the wall in the lobby—“And Ye Shall Know the Truth and the Truth Shall Make You Free”—it’s a great trait. But if you’re motivated by a desire to please the president politically and the policy makers no matter what, it can lead to contaminated intelligence and unwise operational activity.

My substantive disagreement with Clarridge, if I could call it that, came in 1981, when he invited all his station chiefs back to the Washington area to talk about the Contras. The Contras were already receiving substantial support from the Reagan administration, through the CIA, but Clarridge was considering arming the groups, and he went around the table and asked each of us what we thought about it. I was one of only two who voiced a strong objection. I was, and remain, constitutionally opposed to building up exile forces as part of covert action programs. Instead, my strong inclination is to build up internal forces. I felt the main fight should have been inside Nicaragua, and I said so. If you can’t move it inside, don’t move it. I also thought that using other Latin Americans to train the Contras in Honduras was foolhardy, given nationalist sensitivities in the region. After I spoke up, challenging him, Clarridge walked out of the room in a huff, but he apparently didn’t hold it against me.

“He was apprehensive about another potentially volatile operation and was frank in expressing his reservations,” Clarridge wrote of me in his memoir,
A Spy for All Seasons
. “I appreciated his honesty,” he continued. “There were some, however, who were not so kind. They saw him as someone motivated largely by a desire to advance his career.”

That’s nonsense. Challenging a new superior in a public forum is hardly the recommended path for career advancement. But it is quite true that speaking truth to power never hurt my career—and so it was with Clarridge. I could argue with him, and he wasn’t intimidated; he held his ground, and I never felt that I was being penalized for speaking frankly to him. He was aware that I’d been around a long time by then, and that I knew the area well. I had a voice. He indicated that I was entitled to be listened to but not necessarily agreed with.

In 1982, during my tour in South America, Clarridge tried to convince me to take over the Central America Task Force, the operations group at headquarters responsible for organizing all matériel and personnel support for the Contras, despite my outspoken opposition to the Contra program. I had disagreed forcefully with those on the task force who wanted to shut down an opposition newspaper in Nicaragua,
La Prensa
, that was being menaced by the government. They thought this could be used to show how undemocratic the government was. But from my days working with the opposition media in Chile, I pressed the point that the paper could be an invaluable tool. Not to my surprise, the owners themselves wanted to keep up the fight and they stayed in business, to the chagrin of my colleagues.

I told Clarridge I wasn’t the right choice for the job.

“I really don’t want to do this one,” I told him. “You and I have a serious difference about how to tackle the task.”

“It’s not a problem,” he said.

“Dewey, this isn’t a problem for you,” I said, “but it’s a problem for me. I don’t agree with the Contra strategy, and if I take the job, I rightfully would be expected to carry out your plans.”

Clearly, he was unhappy with my response. It took something off our relationship, which was fully understandable under the circumstances.

The next time I saw him was in 1983. As we headed toward town, he announced that he had something extremely important he wanted to discuss. I expected him to try to change my mind about the Contras and started to push back, when he interrupted me to say he wasn’t there to talk about Nicaragua—“I’m here to work up an invasion of Suriname, from here,” he said. I don’t want to say I never get dumbfounded, but it was a stunner. Suriname, on the northeast coast of South America between Guyana to the west and French Guiana to the east, had been a Dutch colony until 1975. Both Dutch exiles and senior officials in the Reagan administration, including those in the CIA, did not want to see either the Soviet Union or Cuba expand their facilities in Suriname. The exiles, I understand, had asked the Agency for help overthrowing Suriname’s Communist-leaning government.

Later that night we met at the Hilton with the commanding general of the U.S. Southern Command, Paul Gorman, and with Judge William P. Clark, Jr., the national security adviser under Reagan. I arrived late because my daughter Amy had been attacked at our front door by an armed robber who jumped out of a car and, with accomplices, tried not only to rip off her gold necklace but to force her into the car. Amy was a strong-willed and feisty teenager who somehow managed to pull herself free, and the robbers fled the scene with only the necklace. Nevertheless, the security team arrived, and a report had to be prepared for the police. I relayed the story to Clarridge, Gorman, and Clark when I arrived for our meeting, anticipating some sympathy, and was surprised at how quickly they passed over it and got down to talking about Suriname. It was a good indicator of just how serious and driven they were about the task. That said, it was one of the craziest operations I’d ever heard proposed in my career. It defied all of my basic rules for covert action and had little chance of success.