Good Hunting: An American Spymaster's Story (19 page)

Back in Rome, shortly before the end of my tour, I got blindsided by press reports that the CIA had devised and implemented a plan in the mid-1950s to organize a clandestine network of operatives in Italy and across Western Europe whose job it would be to form a resistance movement should the Soviets invade or should the Communists prevail in Italian elections. Supported with secret caches of money and weapons, the network had subsequently been placed under NATO auspices until Giulio Andreotti, Italy’s prime minister from the Christian Democracy Party, revealed its existence to the Italian parliament. The whole thing seems far-fetched today, but in the climate of the time it was a real concern that the Communists would seize power throughout Western Europe or that the Soviet Union might take control by military force. This was particularly true in Italy, where the second-largest European Communist Party that existed outside Moscow had a real shot at coming to power in the 1950s. It was from this fear that Operation Gladio (from the Latin word for sword) was born and would continue to operate after the fall of Europe.

Gladio provided not only real material support to the resistance, but also a guarantee of U.S. loyalty to Italy. “They knew that the U.S. was serious about supporting Italy and giving them a means to defend themselves,” said Hugh Montgomery, a former Rome station chief. “It was a major factor for stability in Italy and across the region.”
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Gladio did outlive its usefulness, however, and should have been quietly dismantled, as many similar activities throughout Western Europe were. I first learned about Gladio from the local press when Prime Minister Andreotti revealed to parliament the existence of a clandestine network of between six hundred and a thousand operatives and more than one hundred weapons caches in secret locations throughout the country, a network that had been dormant for decades. It created huge local headlines but was hardly a blip in the U.S. media. According to Andreotti, Gladio was put under the command of Italian military intelligence in the 1980s, and though technically still in existence, most of the weapons caches had been dismantled. Apparently all postwar prime ministers had been briefed on Gladio. Andreotti’s hand was forced by a Venice magistrate who stumbled on documents describing Gladio while investigating a decades-old car bombing. The media and political figures quickly fell to speculating about Gladio’s possible involvement in the political violence that had plagued Italy over the past three decades, culminating in the Bologna railway station massacre. These stories included outrageous allegations and preposterous speculation. But they certainly had their believers, and the blowback from them continues today in some Italian quarters. There wasn’t much for us to do except weather the firestorm.

The controversy kept me busy until the very end of my tour. Wrapping up a family’s affairs in a foreign country after a two- or three-year posting was always fraught with entanglements. When it came time to leave Italy, for example, we engaged in the ritual garage sale. There was a strict agency weight allowance for shipping, so we needed to strip down our belongings. Pat enjoyed running the sales and was an expert at it. She could sell anything to anybody. I wisely ended up in the background, organizing the items and setting up tables. Near the end of one sale, a dapperly dressed young man came into the house and started looking through Pat’s dresses. He said he wanted to purchase them for his sister, but it soon became apparent that he was a transvestite, which was not as socially acceptable then as it is today. The children and I sat on the staircase watching in fascination as Pat put him at ease, bantering about how well her blue dresses matched his eyes and how a tuck here or there would make a perfect fit. She sold most of the dresses to him, and he left extremely pleased. Once again, I couldn’t help thinking that my wife should have been working full-time doing recruitment pitches.

When we left Rome, Daniel Serwer, the State Department’s deputy chief of mission, gave me a plastic sword as a going-away gift. Despite his good humor and our good working relationship, I had the feeling he thought I had been holding out on him by not telling him about the long-inactive program. His suspicions notwithstanding, the Agency had lost interest in Gladio many years earlier and had no hand in what emerged years later as some of these same stay-behind individuals became involved in rather unseemly local political action.

It was around the time of our departure that Howard Hart came through the station on a farewell tour of sorts. Hart was the first director of the CIA’s Counter Narcotics Center (CNC), a standing interagency task force set up at Langley to fight global drug trafficking and all the related crime, from murder to money laundering (the name was later changed to the Crime and Narcotics Center). Hart’s position at CNC spoke to his closeness to the man who had replaced Casey as CIA director, William H. Webster, the only man to serve as head of both the FBI (from 1978 to 1987) and the CIA (from 1987 to 1991). Given his law enforcement background, Webster, a former federal judge, was intensely focused on the war on drugs, as was the White House.

As for Hart, he had served as a spymaster in the Middle East, and now, at fifty, he was determined to retire. We spent a fair amount of time together while he was in Rome. We had known each other for some years, and we had a good, though not close, relationship. Near the end of the visit, he announced that he planned to tell Judge Webster when he returned to headquarters that I should replace him at CNC. Was I interested? I said I was, and that it sounded like a very intriguing task, running one of the new interagency “centers,” which reminded me of the multidisciplinary nature of the Afghan Task Force.

In this age of war and terrorism, it’s hard to properly convey how important the war on drugs was for the White House and Congress—and in turn for the CIA, the FBI, the Pentagon, and other agencies. Many agencies, including the CIA and the FBI, had resisted this particular struggle for years. But as the White House focused attention on the problem and appropriated large amounts of money to stop the drug trade, it was not surprising that everyone in the intelligence community was looking to play on this field.

Hart was as good as his word. He recommended me to Judge Webster, and I flew to the States to interview with him. Soon after, Pat and I started preparing to leave the wonders of Rome behind.

SEVEN

Selling the Linear Strategy, One Lunch at a Time

Washington, 1990–92

I took over the Counter Narcotics Center in December 1990, more than a year after Pablo Escobar’s
sicarios
assassinated Senator Luis Carlos Galán, the Liberal Party candidate for president in Colombia. Galán was about to address a rally of ten thousand in Soacha, south of Bogotá, when a gunman, spraying bullets that wounded ten others onstage, shot him twice in the stomach. Earlier that day in August 1989, hit men from Escobar’s Medellín Cartel had murdered Colonel Waldemar Franklin Quintero, a provincial police chief who had been leading the fight against the organization responsible for about 80 percent of the world’s cocaine. By day’s end, Virgilio Barco Vargas, Colombia’s president, promised in a nationwide address to renew Colombia’s treaty with the United States for extraditing suspected drug dealers.

Because the war on drugs was then regarded as a top national security priority, President Reagan had signed a classified National Security Decision Directive in 1986 authorizing the Pentagon to become involved in stopping the trafficking of narcotics across the U.S. border, which the document called “a national security threat.” Shortly after Galán’s murder, President Bush then signed NSDD 18, which authorized $250 million for the Pentagon, the FBI, the CIA, and other agencies to fight the drug cartels. He also authorized U.S. Special Operations Forces to train the Colombian military and police.
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By the time I arrived at the CNC, the administration had unveiled an $8.8 billion Andean strategy for funding the Drug Enforcement Agency, the State Department, and the CIA in a major thrust to take down the drug cartels.

Judge Webster, in his second year as director of central intelligence, created the Counter Narcotics Center in April 1989, making counternarcotics his top priority. He was a highly regarded public servant, having served as a federal judge and director of the FBI, where he was praised for his integrity and political soundness. I, too, respected the judge and found him to be a gentleman in the true sense of the word.

The “center” construct called for bringing together into a coherent unit the CIA’s three primary disciplines—operations, analysis, and technology—and including representatives from the FBI, the DEA, the National Security Agency, the Defense Department, Customs, Immigration, the Coast Guard, and other agencies. The CIA’s Counterterrorism Center was the first interagency center, and it was formed in 1986. It resided in the Directorate of Operations and was the first major experiment in creating an interdisciplinary team that could combine CIA operations officers, analysts, technologists with SIGINT (signals intelligence), specialists from the NSA, FBI agents, and military weapons experts, among others. A counterintelligence center was created two years later, also in the Directorate of Operations.

Webster placed the Counter Narcotics Center within the Directorate of Intelligence because the DI leaders had complained when the first two centers went to the DO and had made a hard pitch for a center of their own. The DO was only too happy to let the DI have it. Historically, the Agency had run away from narcotics. There was a conviction that if we became involved in the drug war, it would contaminate our officers and corrupt the Agency. Within the DO, going after the hard Soviet, Chinese, and Cuban targets had been considered noble and necessary during the Cold War, while “drugs and thugs” seemed less part of the geopolitical game and more of a law enforcement concern. So it is not surprising that no one was sorry to see DEA take the lead in the war on drugs. However, when counternarcotics became Webster’s number one target and the CIA started receiving greatly enhanced budgets, more personnel, and White House attention, everyone became more interested in this target. The can-do spirit and perseverance of the Agency, said Jerry Svat, a former deputy chief of the Latin America Division and later deputy chief of Africa division, won over those in the CIA who were reluctant to get involved in something seemingly intractable, with difficult targets, turf battles among U.S. agencies, and high risks for those operating in the field. By the time the Berlin Wall fell and the Soviet Union collapsed, the CNC was growing rapidly in significance.
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Two major narcotics cartels operating out of Colombia, Medellín and Cali, virtually controlled the world supply of cocaine, a multibillion-dollar business when I took over the reins of the CNC. While the Cali Cartel maintained a low profile, the head of the Medellín Cartel, Pablo Escobar, the “world’s greatest outlaw,” was an international celebrity, drawing worldwide publicity, which he seemingly relished. As late as 1989,
Forbes
magazine named him the seventh-wealthiest person in the world, with an estimated personal fortune of $25 billion. While he had been born into poverty, he managed to climb the criminal ladder quickly, from petty thief and bodyguard to major drug smuggler. He reportedly was a millionaire by the age of twenty-two. By the mid-1970s he was well positioned to take advantage of the steep demand for cocaine in the United States, and at the peak of this epidemic, he was allegedly shipping twenty to thirty tons of cocaine monthly to the United States.

Escobar was able to control his share of the market by mastering the art of intimidation and corruption. His approach was straightforward and became widely known as
plata o plomo
—“silver or lead.” In other words, you either accepted his bribe money or you were shot. It was not a hard choice for many. Escobar was brash in using violence, even under circumstances that guaranteed international publicity—the Galán assassination, the bombing of Avianca Flight 203, and the attack on the Colombian government’s security headquarters not long thereafter. (Avianca 203 blew up shortly after takeoff from Bogotá on November 27, 1989, killing all 107 people on board. The headquarters bombing, an attempt to assassinate the Colombian security chief Miguel Maza Márquez, killed fifty-two and injured hundreds.) It would be wrong to assume that all officials and policeman would succumb to this corruption. Quite to the contrary: despite the risk to life and limb, thousands of honest policemen, judges, and government officials paid with their lives for resisting Escobar’s threats. Sadly, in the process of fighting the traffickers, Colombia became the murder capital of the world. In the fall of 1998, the country was averaging thousands of murders a year.

Webster put me in charge when the center was approaching its second year. I think he liked my background in Latin America, a track record in covert action, and highly valuable experience from my days running the Afghan Task Force, which required bringing different disciplines under one roof, much as the CNC was now doing. The Afghan experience had made me a believer in the value of locating analysts and operators and military and technical experts in one office. The center took this model to another level.

As head of a relatively new center with a lot of high-level attention, I needed to set the tone and establish two strategic priorities to help guide our work against the drug cartels and meet the objectives as articulated by the policy makers. The first priority was to overcome historic inter- and intra-agency rivalries, so that the various departments and agencies could work together against this difficult target. The second was to build up the resources, capabilities, and esprit de corps of the center that were necessary to carry out counternarcotics programs successfully.

Webster had created the CNC after the new headquarters building was completed. The only space that Howard Hart, its first director, could find was on the bottom floor, an underground area without windows. Most of those on the CNC’s large staff of around two hundred found it depressing to work all day without sunlight, especially when many reported to work before the sun rose and did not leave until after it had set. But the work was challenging and exciting, and no one complained. The workforce was divided fairly evenly among analysts, operations officers, and technologists working together as one team—the big idea behind the center—and it worked. There were also between twenty-five and thirty representatives from the DEA, the FBI, the NSA, the DOD, Customs, the Treasury, and the State Department. A torrent of intelligence flowed into the center around the clock, from agent reports to imagery from spy satellites capable of seeing through thick jungle foliage to detect clandestine airstrips in coca-growing regions.