Good Hunting: An American Spymaster's Story (12 page)

The next day, Clarridge and I had meetings with officials about developing an invasion team, with Clarridge talking about bringing in South Koreans and Gurkhas. They were incredulous, but they had a quintessential Latin response: Sure, sounds like a great idea;
we’ll look into it
. Afterward, one official came to me and said, off the record, “Jack, we haven’t tapped your phone, but we’re going to start to tomorrow, and the reason is this is too important and we want to make sure you’re playing it straight.” What a unique approach to running a telephone tap operation! Since I never used the phone for operational matters, it posed no security threat. We always assume our phones are tapped.

Clarridge and his team went off to Brazil to sell the invasion plan. Brazil wanted numerous questions answered before considering it. Ultimately, the Americans were waved off, thanks to opposition in Latin America and on Capitol Hill, where people had come to their senses. One congressman went so far as to say publicly that it was the dumbest operation he had ever heard of. I continue to find it amusing for the absurdity of it and the bizarreness of that period. At that point in my career, I still had the view that you could humor bad policies because they would surely die under their own weight.

Iran-Contra changed all that. By now, Congress had passed the Boland Amendment, effectively stopping the CIA from providing support to the Contras. But officials in the executive branch were continuing to find ways to aid the cause on a covert basis.

Clarridge was circumspect when he phoned in 1985, saying only that Casey would be calling momentarily. The White House had already decided that shipping arms to Iran could gain the release of seven American hostages being held in Lebanon by Iranian-backed terrorists. Clarridge had, unwittingly, already helped facilitate a shipment of arms from Tel Aviv, through Lisbon, to Tehran, using the Israelis as middlemen. He would be indicted years later for his testimony about this, although he pleaded not guilty and consistently said he believed the flight contained parts for oil drilling. He was ultimately pardoned by President George H. W. Bush, in 1992.

As he predicted, that day in December 1985, I was summoned to the seventh floor within five minutes. Casey welcomed me into his office. He told me there was someone who had useful information about Iran, and he wanted me to meet him. His name was Manucher Ghorbanifar, a disreputable Iranian arms dealer.

I didn’t even have to leave the building to check him out. We already had a thick file on him dating back to January 1980, showing a history of false leads and bad information peddled with an eye toward padding his own finances. He’d failed two polygraphs, and we’d issued what’s popularly called a “burn notice” on him. These are fairly rare official statements that the subject is known to be untrustworthy. Ghorbanifar, according to his file, was to be regarded as an intelligence fabricator and a nuisance. He hadn’t come to the Agency directly but, rather, through a foreign policy activist who was at the time a consultant to the NSC.

I met with the NSC consultant at his Georgetown home later that month. I used an alias because I had grave concerns about being exposed to Ghorbanifar. The consultant talked with enthusiasm about the arms dealer. He was proud of the work they were doing: they were going to free U.S. hostages held by Hezbollah in Lebanon, he told me, by arranging a sale of U.S. arms to the Iranians. I was shocked. I had never heard of such an operation, and given what I had just read about Ghorbanifar, I could hardly believe he was the middleman in such an undertaking. The NSC consultant assured me the whole thing had White House approval. Not only that, it was already under way. The release of a hostage, the Reverend Benjamin Weir, in September of that year, had been the result, he believed, of their help in shipping 96 TOW antitank missiles to Tehran. Weir, a Presbyterian missionary and teacher for almost thirty years in Lebanon, had been kidnapped sixteen months earlier from a street in Beirut by Islamic Jihad Organization, a terrorist group backed by Iran. The Iranians had then reneged on a promise to release six other hostages in exchange for another 408 TOWs in September, and they failed to release any hostages after another 18 Hawk antiaircraft missiles had been sent in November. The early arms shipments to Iran were made through the Israelis, so that the Reagan administration would not be accused of contravening its own arms embargo against Iran. Reagan approved the shipments out of concern for the hostages. But now the U.S. Marine lieutenant colonel Oliver North, from the NSC, was proposing that the United States itself sell arms to the Iranians. What wasn’t clear to me or anyone else at the Agency, with the possible exception of Casey, was that proceeds from steep markups on the weapons would go to supporting the Nicaraguan Contras, in contravention of the Boland Amendment, which prohibited such assistance.

I listened patiently to the NSC consultant and agreed to meet the following day with him, Ghorbanifar, and North. Then I made a beeline for the home of Bert Dunn, who was chief of the Near East Division. A West Virginia lawyer who was also a smart, seasoned, and highly respected officer, Dunn had spent a great deal of time on the ground in the Middle East and Southeast Asia and knew it like the back of his hand. He had run into the likes of Ghorbanifar in his travels. He arranged a meeting for us with Casey and Clair George, head of the Directorate of Operations (DO), for the next day, before my rendezvous with Ghorbanifar, the NSC consultant, and North. At the appointed hour, we went to the director’s office and I related what I’d been told. Clair George let out a moan and bent over like he’d been punched, his head in his hands. It appeared to me that he was hearing this for the first time. By contrast, Casey sat quietly listening and asked me to keep my appointment.

I was the first to arrive at the NSC consultant’s house. North and Ghorbanifar came in shortly after me, grinning and in high spirits. I took an instant dislike to Ghorbanifar. His first gesture was to reach into his bag and take out three large cans of very expensive Iranian caviar, one for each of us. I handed mine right back to him. “I can’t take that,” I said. “It’s against the rules.” Clearly chagrined, he attempted to turn on the charm to try to win me over. I suspect he knew he wasn’t making progress, but he is the type of hustler who believes that somehow, in the end, he will prevail.

The next day, I briefed Casey, Bert Dunn, and Clair George on the details of the meeting about the NSC-sponsored arms-for-hostages operation. I told them I was even more convinced that Ghorbanifar could not be trusted. To my surprise, Casey told me to keep dealing with him. I said, “If we’re going to go forward with this, we need to polygraph him.” I was confident of the results and thought for sure they would torpedo Ghorbanifar.

In addition to the grave policy issues, I was beginning to have career concerns. From what I was hearing, I was afraid there might be no recourse but to vote with my feet. I went home that night and in a state of agitation told my wife, “I might have to resign. I just can’t do this one.” Pat, not surprisingly, didn’t flinch, simply saying, “Do what you have to do. We will survive.”

We administered the polygraph to Ghorbanifar at a hotel in Georgetown a few days later. The polygrapher asked him about a dozen questions. The test results indicated that Ghorbanifar had lied on virtually all the relevant questions. The only things he answered truthfully, as I recall, were his name and nationality. I went straight to Bert Dunn and shared the results.

Ghorbanifar, meanwhile, apparently went straight to the NSC consultant, complaining that the polygraph test had been more expansive than he expected and that he had been physically injured by the examination techniques—a laughable claim. Nonetheless, the consultant called the CIA twenty-four-hour watch center, which handles after-duty communications. He demanded to talk to me, and reportedly threatened that he would have me fired if I didn’t call him back immediately. Of course, when referring to me he used the alias I’d given him, so it took the watch officer some time to figure out whom he was talking about.

Clair called to ask about the results of the polygraph. When I told him about Ghorbanifar’s rather spectacular failure, he said, “The hell with him.” We were supposed to meet with Casey the next morning to brief him, but the meeting was called off for an unexplained reason. Clair told me that Ghorbanifar’s lies had led everyone to the same conclusion: we wanted no part of any operation he was involved with. “The DO is out of it,” he said. I was to have no more contact with Ghorbanifar or the NSC consultant.

I was satisfied. Not only did I not have to make a career-ending move, but I figured I had helped the U.S. government back off from a policy disaster. Shortly after meeting Ghorbanifar for the first time, I had written a note to senior management calling the arms-for-hostages deal with Iran “inimical to U.S. interests” and calling Ghorbanifar “a fabricator who has deliberately deceived the U.S. government concerning his information and activities.” But mine was a short-lived feeling of satisfaction. What I did not count on was that Casey would simply transfer the arms-for-hostages operation to an analyst in the Directorate of Intelligence. He told Charlie Allen, our senior antiterrorism analyst and head of the Hostage Location Task Force, to meet with Ghorbanifar to take another look at him and figure out what he might be able to tell us.

Two days after Ghorbanifar failed the polygraph, and a day after Clair George declared that the Directorate of Operations would have nothing to do with him, Allen said he had spent five hours with Ghorbanifar at the NSC consultant’s home.
2
Allen has said that he made pretty much the same appraisal I did: Ghorbanifar could not be trusted and was looking mostly to line his own pockets. But Allen, like Casey, held out hope that the arms dealer, whatever his motives and whatever false leads he might generate, might also provide information that would help get the American hostages back home.

The hostages were a grave concern for Reagan, and for the Agency, especially after William Buckley was seized in Beirut, where he was chief of station, in 1984. Clair George’s chief of staff, Norm Gardner, had been a close friend of Buckley’s, and to this day he feels unreasonably responsible for Buckley’s capture. He had encouraged Buckley to go to Beirut, reasoning that, for Buckley, unmarried and childless, the post would not be as great a hardship as it would be for a family man. Only after Buckley was taken did Norm begin to berate himself for overlooking what a meticulous, organized man Buckley was, how beholden to schedules and patterns. It was Buckley’s predictability that supposedly enabled Hezbollah to capture him. And they knew whom they had. The station chief was tortured mercilessly. We later learned that he died as a result of the torture, before the arms-for-hostages deal even started, but at the time, there was hope that we could get him out.

With Ghorbanifar still very much in the picture, Tom Twetten, Dunn’s deputy, came to me stoically and started an ominous conversation by saying, “You’re not going to like this,” and indeed I did not. He said the president had signed a presidential finding (an executive directive) to trade missiles for hostages using Ghorbanifar as the middleman. Twetten asked if, under these circumstances, I would arrange the logistics and flights with retired major general Richard Secord of the Air Force, who was providing support for the operation. Knowing where I stood on Ghorbanifar, he added, “And you don’t have to deal with Ghorbanifar.” I agreed to help. In my mind, once the president authorized the mission, we had crossed the Rubicon. There now was no turning back. Since a decision had been made to proceed with the operation, I agreed to do what I could to make sure there were no logistical mishaps that would further increase the political risks associated with this high-stakes task. I would handle the complicated logistics and sensitive finances for the Agency, working with Secord and North. Arrangements had to be made for pallets of missiles to be loaded onto planes and paid for through the appropriate covert mechanism. I met once with Secord, in Northern Virginia, and once with North, at CIA headquarters. There were also a few meetings with North at the White House, where it was all business—no socializing or kibitzing.

On the night of the first flight, in February 1986, I went to the operations center at CIA headquarters, because it was the only place where we had special monitoring equipment for listening to the crew preparing for takeoff with the TOW missiles in the cargo hold. Since a part of me couldn’t quite believe this was happening, I wanted to be there just in case something went wrong or, at a minimum, to report the plane’s orderly departure. A few days later the missiles arrived in Tehran, and the compensatory funds were wired to the United States. This marked the beginning of what became the biggest scandal of the Reagan administration, one that engulfed the CIA and, at its peak, threatened to bring down the White House.

At that time, the Agency had a program focused on Iran. It included trying to locate assets and recruit sources. Cataclysmic political events, such as the Iranian Revolution, produce large communities of exiles. Many of them maintain lines of communication to, and networks of contacts in, their homeland. In the case of Iran, we spent a great deal of time meeting with such groups and trying to develop an organization that would bring them together. We helped establish an office for a political opposition group, with headquarters in Europe, but it was never very effective. Its members were a disparate bunch, ranging from leftists to royalists, and they spent a lot of time fighting among themselves and squandering money.

At one point we thought Reza Cyrus Pahlavi, the U.S.-educated son of the deposed Shah of Iran, might be a unifying force. But it would have been a very long stretch to assume that the son could play the same role his father had played decades earlier. His father had come to power in 1953 with essential CIA support. Kermit “Kim” Roosevelt, Teddy Roosevelt’s grandson, along with first-tour operations officer Rocky Stone, coordinated the now well-known Operation Ajax, which ousted the Iranian prime minister Mohammad Mossadegh in an orchestrated coup d’état. (Rocky Stone, remember, was the chief of the Soviet Division who during training in 1969 urged me to join his group.) I recall how in our discussion back then, he told me that in the midst of the coup, he had had to dress the shah, who couldn’t dress himself because he was too nervous. The shah remained grateful to the CIA, and to Kim Roosevelt and Rocky Stone in particular, for many years.