Good Hunting: An American Spymaster's Story (22 page)

There was no miscommunication there. Everyone laughed nervously, but the context was clear: the Russians understood that by introducing the Stinger missile to Afghanistan, we had been doing our job and trying to win the war. And they were doing their job, and afterward, life had gone on in a civilized manner. That certainly isn’t the case now, with al-Qaeda, with whom there can be no dialogue or operational understanding. The task is simply to destroy them.

There was another incident that occurred before we went to the Friendship Bridge, this time in Moscow, that was incredibly illuminating. The Russians took us to a historic museum just after five o’clock in the afternoon. There was a corporal guarding the museum gate. The KGB colonel told him we wanted to go inside.

“It’s after five; you can’t come in,” the guard said.

“I’m here with the KGB general!” the colonel said, whipping out his KGB credentials. In the past, this would have terrorized anybody.

“Well, it’s after five, and I don’t care who you are. You can’t come in,” the guard said.

We all walked away sheepishly, which was an extremely humiliating experience for the head of KGB counterintelligence and the colonel. The next day, the colonel called our local chief and told him that the museum guard had been replaced. But I wasn’t sure they even had the power to get rid of him. When I went back to my office at the CNC in Washington, I wrote a trip report and told many people that story. At that point, I knew the Soviet game was over, because they had lost the intestinal fortitude to clamp down and instill the fear in their people that is necessary to hold a dictatorship in place. That was in June 1991, and the government fell in August.

NINE

A New Boss, a Bad Penny, and a Principled Heroin Dissent

Washington, 1990–92

Shortly after my return from Russia, at the end of August 1991, Webster stepped down as DCI and was replaced by Richard J. Kerr, who held the position as interim director while Congress considered President Bush’s nomination of Robert M. Gates, who had been forced to withdraw his nomination four years earlier because of concerns that he knew more about Iran-Contra than he’d acknowledged. As we now know, with the perspective of more than twenty years, Gates served with great distinction as secretary of defense under George W. Bush, who brought him in to smooth out the situation left behind by Donald Rumsfeld, as well as under Barack Obama, who kept him on at the Pentagon as a gesture of bipartisanship. At Defense, Gates engendered support from the troops, who genuinely liked and respected him. In fact, he mastered serving the needs of soldiers and of the White House. At the time he was nominated to run the CIA, I thought he was a very smart analyst, particularly with respect to the Soviet Union. Above all, I thought he knew how to work the bureaucracy better than anyone else I had ever met in government. He was finally confirmed by the Senate in early November, in what was a personal vindication, with both Republicans and Democrats saying they did not believe Gates had ever tried to cover up the Iran-Contra scandal.

Shortly after Gates moved into the director’s spacious office on the seventh floor, Roeber and I met with him at around seven o’clock one evening. Unlike the more modest approach I had taken with Casey in setting up the Afghan Task Force, I told Gates that we were expanding operations and needed more resources; Roeber had developed a solid visual presentation to support the requested increase. Gates had just returned from downtown looking frazzled but had squeezed us in to hear our pitch. When we entered, he motioned for us to sit down on his sofa. The office was dark except for a small light on his desk. He sat directly across from us and looked us in the eye. He listened to us motionless for about twenty minutes, without any questions or body language. At the end of our presentation, he returned to his desk without a word, and we exited the room. When Roeber and I were outside his office, we looked at each other and agreed that we clearly had bombed. We returned to our office dejected, thinking of how we would adjust our plan to press ahead. However, Gates’s assistant called the next day and, to our amazement, reported that the DCI had authorized the increase. As good as his word, he had the money and staff reprogrammed shortly thereafter.

As director of the CNC and then director for Latin America, I made a couple of trips to Colombia to better understand the operations against Escobar, the Medellín Cartel, and the Cali Cartel. It was by far the most dangerous place we were working at the time. On one of the trips there and to Bolivia, I accompanied Senators Dennis DeConcini (Arizona) and Bob Graham (Florida) and Representative Henry Hyde (Illinois) on their chartered aircraft. CIA officials in the region opened the door wide for us, granting broad access to the highest levels of government and our joint intelligence programs. We visited the liaison facilities and made helicopter trips into the interior to check out cocaine labs that had been set up in the jungle.

All of us benefited from the firsthand experience. Everyone on the ground extended themselves and provided us with an excellent opportunity to “kick the tires,” whether it was the helicopter trip into the jungles of Bolivia where we looked at a recently raided drug production site, or our sit-down with the special police team in Bogotá that later had a direct role in the takedown of Escobar.

Travel as a CNC director came with many lessons—and not all of them were related to the drug war. On a trip to Asia, I stopped in Japan en route to Thailand to meet with the Japanese minister of justice to talk counternarcotics. Feeling a bit groggy from the long flight but seeking to break the ice with the taciturn minister, I commented on his elegant fish tank, asking if it was difficult to feed so many diverse fish in one tank. He replied that it was no problem at all, and we went on to have a productive discussion about our efforts to fight the opium trade in the region. I was pleased with myself for being able to open him up with the question about his fish—until the next day, when a carefully wrapped miniature fish tank from the minister arrived at my hotel. It was full of mechanical fish—exactly like those in the minister’s office—which naturally did not require any feeding whatsoever. I smiled, thinking about the laugh the Japanese must have had at my expense, and made a note to be more aware of my surroundings even when jet-lagged.

On a visit to Colombia, I stayed at a colleague’s residence in Bogotá. He was an old friend, and we had served together in Chile. He may have regretted my stay. When I got up around six o’clock one morning, I used his guest bathroom to freshen up, but somehow I grabbed the sink faucet so hard that I ripped it off the wall and water began spurting all over the apartment. I snapped him out of his deep sleep with a shout that startled him so much that, as I recall, he reached for his weapon and ran in to join me. He thought that we had been raided by the traffickers. We couldn’t find the turn-off valve, and the water kept flooding the room. Finally he was able to rouse the building’s superintendent, who managed to turn off the water. What a way to start the morning. We packed up quickly and joined the ambassador in a heavily armored convoy to visit Colombian president César Gaviria. He probably thought he was safer there than in the flooded apartment with me.

As I was approaching the end of my time in the center, Rick Ames ended up on my doorstep again, like a bad penny. This time a friend delivered him—Milt Bearden, my colleague from the Afghan Task Force days. Bearden was chief of the Russia Division, which had a billet in the CNC, and he implored me to take Ames off his hands. He seemed to be concerned about Rick’s reliability in handling sensitive Russian data, given his history with alcohol. At the same time, Bearden touted Ames’s Russian-language skills, though these were not in high demand at the CNC at that time.

There was something in Milt’s voice that suggested this was more than just a favor. My first question was “Is he drinking?” The CNC was a large operation, and it would be hard to track Rick and keep an eye on his intake. Milt assured me he wasn’t.

In the end, I agreed to it. We put Ames on a Turkey project, which he seemed to take genuine pride in, even though by then he was a long-term agent of the KGB. I had little interaction with Rick and no social encounters with him.

Unbeknownst to me, Ames by now had become a suspect in a great mole hunt being conducted by our colleagues in another part of the CIA. His name had first surfaced on a list of almost two hundred CIA employees who had had access to the identities of all the agents we’d lost in the Soviet Union. Several days before Bearden called me, Ames had been interviewed by the mole hunters. By the time he reported for duty at the CNC, one of them was convinced he was a spy.

Equally problematic—and more directly related to the drug war—was my responsibility as CNC chief for producing national intelligence estimates on drug production. Every year there were battles royal over our findings. These estimates impact policy makers’ decisions about how to spend counternarcotics funds and how to allocate personnel. Every agency had a vested interest in the outcome, and it was the CNC’s job to serve as an honest broker and to produce the most objective product possible.

In 1992, Roeber led one of the most controversial estimates on heroin production. Many of the law enforcement agencies and the military wanted to downplay the spike in poppy production worldwide, since a high number would mean they might be forced to commit more of their stretched resources. Again, it is worth remembering that at this time counternarcotics remained a top national security priority. The world was at peace, and terrorism was not the overarching problem it would become in the late 1990s.

Roeber was a strong leader in any meeting and knew how to press hard on people who came to the table with shoddy data and analysis. This made him an extremely valuable ally for me but did not endear him to those who felt the sting of his penetrating questions. The 1992 CNC data clearly showed a substantial increase in heroin production, but the rest of the intelligence community wanted no part of this conclusion. Some of the participating agencies became so vexed by the numbers that the level of dissent had reached DCI Gates. He was, in turn, pressing John Helgerson, the CIA’s top analyst, to see what all the fuss was about. Helgerson rarely became involved in counternarcotics matters, but on this occasion he set up a special meeting to tell me that many in the intelligence community were accusing Roeber of the mortal sin of the “politicization of intelligence.” The charge made no sense. I explained the situation to Helgerson and assured him that Roeber and the CNC were just doing their jobs.

In the end, the estimate produced by the intelligence community went against our views, which were voted down by representatives from other agencies. The assigned non-CIA writer drafted a vanilla product. To his credit, Gates signed off on a CNC dissent of the key judgments in the heroin estimate. We were proud in the CNC that we had dissented. It epitomized what I believe to be key to good analysis: independence of thought. As it turned out, heroin continued to grow as a worldwide problem and remains a major problem today in Afghanistan, where it has greatly complicated our efforts to combat the Taliban there.

It was around this time that Pablo Escobar “escaped” from prison. Government authorities tried to move him to a more rigid prison, but he was tipped off and escaped under highly suspicious circumstances. Thus, the hunt for Escobar began. He was hounded from two sides. On one side, we intercepted his communications. And four days after his escape, U.S. military forces arrived in Colombia to train the Colombian police and military in his capture. On the other front, Escobar’s rivals in the Cali Cartel financed the creation of “Los Pepes” (Los Perseguidos por Pablo Escobar), led by the infamous right-wing paramilitary officer Carlos Castaño. He led the group of vigilantes who helped hunt down Escobar and were thought to have ties to the Colombian National Police. The CIA didn’t run Los Pepes and didn’t give it any support. The Cali Cartel obviously benefited the most from the activities of Los Pepes, but the Colombian military and police did, too. One colleague said, “Thank goodness for Los Pepes. We didn’t support them, but they provided a service that we couldn’t do. These people had the Medellín Cartel scared to death.” The U.S. ambassador to Colombia at the time, Morris Busby, said that “Los Pepes ended up being an excuse for any and all killings,” and we made it clear to President Gaviria that we would pull our support if we learned the Colombian government was behind them. Jay Brant, an experienced Latin America case officer, said, “As far as I know, no U.S. government organization had any contact with Los Pepes. They were a bunch of terrorists.”

There was, in fact, a standing rule that if it was discovered that any of our assets were involved in a breach of human rights or a violation of U.S. law, the Agency would have to cut off contact and/or turn them over to Justice. Brant remembered a highly legalized environment in the CIA at the time and stressed that there was great sensitivity about human rights. The Agency’s lawyers were all over it. There was some concern at the State Department, the Pentagon, and even in the Agency’s Directorate of Intelligence that some of the intercepts and other technical information we were passing to our liaison partners in Colombia were ending up in the hands of Los Pepes. When information is passed to legitimate liaison counterparts, there are never guarantees that some of it will not be siphoned off. All you can do is put down markers with liaisons and try to keep an independent check on things. To the best of my knowledge, we were never aware of information ending up in the wrong hands in Colombia, but I can’t really prove it. Los Pepes was quite effective in countering the violence of the traffickers at first. But as time went by, it, too, became corrupt and indiscriminately violent. It certainly was not our creation or our tool.

As I approached my second anniversary at the CNC with Escobar still on the loose, Tom Twetten, my old friend and mentor, who had risen to deputy director for operations, asked me if I would like to accompany him on a trip to India, He thought it would be worth asking the Indians to cooperate with us on counternarcotics. George Crile, in
Charlie Wilson’s War
, notes that Gust Avrakotos did not hold Twetten in high regard. Avrakotos not only missed Twetten’s essence but greatly underestimated his intellect, operational acumen, and tough-mindedness. While Twetten may have appeared mild-mannered, he had that exceptional blend of political acumen and sharp operational skills. I never sat in on a meeting with him and foreign dignitaries or U.S. government officials when he wasn’t constantly assessing the situation or analyzing the next move on the board. He also was not afraid to ask the tough question: “Will you work for me as a spy?” We had worked closely together going all the way back to Iran-Contra and Afghanistan.