Good Hunting: An American Spymaster's Story (30 page)

It started out with an early morning call to our French desk by Rollie Flynn and David Shedd, the executive officers for the seventh floor, who inquired about an “Immediate” cable received early that morning notifying us of the compromise of our Paris operations. Right away we recognized that we had a major problem in front of us, one with extraordinary political and foreign policy implications. There had been a low-burning feud for some time with the French security services because of their aggressive targeting of U.S. businessmen, especially in the aerospace sector. The long-standing feud first became public in 1993 when a document surfaced showing that the French had specifically targeted twenty-one U.S. companies.
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This did not come as a surprise to us, since for years we were well aware that the French were running black bag operations, breaking into the hotel rooms of American business executives in Paris and copying sensitive business data and strategies.

In response to this, Woolsey made a rare public statement that year to a group of Chicago businessmen, advising them that the United States would be countering the aggressive French behavior of bugging rooms and stealing documents. He went on to memorably comment that there would be “no more Mr. Nice Guy” as far as the French were concerned. True to his word, we aggressively pursued the recruitment of French government sources willing to part with French trade secrets in entertainment rights and telecommunications.
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It is relatively uncommon for allies to target each other’s internal political or economic interests. The vast majority of the intelligence work in allied countries is focused on common enemies residing in the host country—Russians, Cubans, Iranians, terrorists, North Koreans, narcotraffickers. But this ceased to be the case in France, where Woolsey had the field operators endeavoring to recruit French government officials for trade secrets.

By 1995, the French security service was monitoring a few of our officers who were working on developing government sources in the French economic area. In February of that year, they decided to spring their trap. The timing was suspiciously political: it was in the middle of a hotly contested French presidential election, and it looked like an attempt to direct attention away from a French government scandal involving domestic wiretapping of local political figures. The French were also upset because several months earlier we had quietly declared a former senior French official “persona non grata” for operating in the United States against U.S. targets and had had him kicked out of the country, a process known as being PNG’d.

With this as a backdrop, the French minister of the interior, Charles Pasqua, summoned the U.S. ambassador, Pamela Churchill Harriman, that same month. The minister unceremoniously confronted the prominent British-born socialite with evidence of CIA operations directed against French government officials, including photos of clandestine meetings, copies of false identity documents, credit card imprints, and hotel registrations. Harriman reportedly tried to defuse the situation, to no avail. In the end, the French government officially asked that the chief, Dick Holm, and four of his subordinates depart the country. To make matters worse, the French immediately leaked this development to the press. This was quite shocking. Normally a tête-à-tête like this occurred out of public view, allowing liaison cooperation to continue unimpeded.

Once the incident became public, there was no way to put the genie back in the bottle. The U.S. officers in Paris went into an immediate lockdown operationally, and a few top officers had to be called home. There also was concern about the case officers’ dependents, especially the possible need for children to be pulled out of school on short notice. We were able to push back the departures for six weeks, which gave some of the families an opportunity to make a relatively orderly exit from Paris. It still was a very heavy task for the officers and their families.

This action by the French was particularly troubling because it had been directed against Holm, a distinguished professional who years earlier had been badly burned and scarred in an airplane crash in the Congo. The heroic story was well-known, and he was widely admired by his colleagues for his bravery.
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On this flight, his Cuban pilot lost his bearings in a thunderstorm and crash-landed in the jungle. As the right wing was sheared off the airplane, Holm was sprayed with gasoline and was terribly burned from head to foot. Rescued after ten days in the bush, he spent two years at Walter Reed Army Medical Center. He was blind for a year, but when he recovered his sight he went back to the field, serving with high distinction in China and Hong Kong. The Paris incident sadly put an end to Holm’s career with the Agency, and he retired shortly after returning to the United States.

No sooner had this crisis passed than another arose when Representative Robert G. Torricelli, a New Jersey Democrat, said in a letter to President Clinton that the CIA had failed to disclose information that one of its paid informants, a Guatemalan military intelligence officer named Colonel Julio Roberto Alpirez, had allegedly witnessed the murders in 1990 of an American expatriate, Michael Devine (no relation), and Efrain Bamaca, a Guatemalan leftist married to the Harvard-educated American lawyer Jennifer Harbury. (Alpirez had denied that he was a CIA informant and that he had knowledge of the murders.) When the Agency formally notified the House and Senate Intelligence Committees of this lapse, I found myself involved in one of the single most difficult issues I had faced in managing relations on Capitol Hill.

Part of the challenge came from our own insular nature. As a former seventh-floor colleague noted, the Directorate of Operations, unlike the Directorate of Intelligence, tended not to rotate many officers out to Congress or other parts of the government. This changed to a degree in subsequent years, but in those days our officers did not have much of a presence around town in Washington. As a result, even within the government there were few who really understood what we did. Without those sorts of social relationships, we did not always have a reservoir of trust and understanding with our counterparts on the Hill or elsewhere in the executive branch. This made misunderstandings more likely and meant that dealing with the aftermath of a flap or problem could be even harder.

The Agency had reported the allegation involving Alpirez to the Department of Justice in 1991, but had not informed the congressional intelligence committees, which it was required to do under the 1980 Intelligence Oversight Act. Agency officials determined that the information had been included in briefing notes in 1991, but for some reason this was never delivered to Congress. Both committees felt they had been deliberately deceived, which wasn’t the case, and the Senate committee went so far as to hold a highly unusual public meeting to express its displeasure over what it perceived as CIA stonewalling.

As the committees investigated, Frederick Brugger, who had served as chief of station in Guatemala from 1991 to 1993, was under intense scrutiny. He apparently had not notified the U.S. ambassador that Alpirez was a paid CIA agent. Brugger was a solid citizen and a good operator, but he was rather rigid in his body language during his first presentation to the committee. As a consequence, when he was preparing to go down and testify again and came to my office, he brought along his lawyer, fearing legal vulnerability. The lawyer projected a sense of mild hostility and, in an off-putting way, wanted to know who from the DO would testify with Brugger.

“I’m going down with him,” I said curtly, cutting him off. The lawyer backed off. I thought nothing of it at the time, but after the meeting ended I received a call from the General Counsel’s Office. “We really don’t think it’s a good idea for you to go down with Fred,” a very senior Agency attorney advised. “Some here think it might not be helpful for your career.”

“Look. It doesn’t matter to me what they think,” I said. “There is no choice here. Even if I were disinclined to go down to the Hill with him, which I am not, I would have to go anyway, since no one in my chair can expect to lead this directorate and not support one of our officers in a crisis.”

“That’s your choice, but it’s not well received down here,” the lawyer said.

Equally important, I thought Brugger and his boss, Terry Ward, who had served as chief of the Latin America Division from 1990 to 1992, were innocent of deliberately deceiving Congress. Their failure to inform Congress about the 1991 intelligence report about Colonel Alpirez, I believed, had been inadvertent. But beyond the issue of guilt or innocence, I thought my presence could be helpful up on the Hill, given my experience there and in Latin America. In the end, Brugger handled himself quite well, and we survived the hearing intact.

The Guatemala incident brought into sharp focus, in the context of congressional oversight, the issue of what sort of people the Agency could or should be involved with. Obviously, the world of espionage is full of all kinds of people, some more unsavory than others. During this time, a feeling was emerging within the Agency that some of those responsible for our oversight were pushing us to limit our dealings with undesirable individuals. According to Dick Calder, our chief of plans, “We felt that, if we were only going to be able to deal with choir boys, we were going to be put at a terrible disadvantage. This was not an attempt to pass over what had happened in Guatemala—actually, I believe this incident led to new rules and regulations about our activities—but we felt the pendulum was swinging too far. There was an implication that the people we were dealing with would have to pass a sainthood test before we could deal with them. But if you think about disrupting terrorist attacks or collecting intelligence on other sensitive activities, it would be impossible to operate that way. That is not to say we should accept every agent, and certainly not condone illegal activities, but the idea that people or whole organizations that failed to meet a certain standard could be off-limits would have presented a major problem.” This tension still exists today, particularly in the context of the type of people the Agency and others must deal with to penetrate terrorist organizations and foil their plots. It is a core challenge for any intelligence agency, particularly one working on behalf of a democratically elected government. The military and particularly our Special Forces also face this challenge with regard to whom they train and equip in the field. A couple of simple tests can form our best defense: Is there bipartisan support in Congress for what we are doing? Would the American people support it?

Indeed, testifying before the House and Senate Permanent Select Committees on Intelligence became one of my most important responsibilities, both to protect officers such as Brugger and Ward and to shield the CIA from the budget-cutting mentality pervasive in the post–Cold War atmosphere. I ended up using our strategic plan for the Directorate of Operations—which I had more or less laid out in my job interview with Woolsey and Studeman—as a tool to aid us in our relations with Congress. I had to be sure that the people who provided us with financial and political support understood what we were doing and where we were going. America’s sense of our role in the world was unclear during the mid-1990s. The Cold War was over, and the sea change after 9/11 was still to come. Some members of Congress and the public at large were asking questions about whether there was even a need for America to maintain robust intelligence capabilities. Having a strategic plan helped me to explain as clearly as possible—both to those who were supportive and those who were not—what we were trying to do, and how that fit into other government priorities.

“The Agency always has a difficult time with the Hill because the Agency has a proclivity for not telling the whole story, under the notion that it is protecting sources and methods,” said Studeman, describing the structural challenges inherent in the Agency’s relationship with Congress. “This makes the Hill feel like it has to drag the information out of the Agency. Meanwhile, Congress can be difficult to deal with because of its tendency to go public and hold open hearings on sensitive subjects instead of discussing them behind closed doors. It used to be possible to talk to the leadership about the most sensitive matters, on the basis of disclosing only to the Gang of Eight—the majority and minority chairs of the two Intelligence and two Armed Services Committees. As time passed, fewer of the Gang of Eight wanted the sole responsibility for knowing sensitive information, which led to the desire to expose more committee members as insurance against the possibility of information becoming public in the future.”
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In this environment, leaks are not inevitable, but maintaining operational security gets even harder. Directorate of Operations officers hold sensitive information very closely, and many—even those who believe in and support the idea of Congress having an oversight role—have trouble really warming to what Congress views as our responsibility for putting everything on the table.

Given the inherent challenges in the relationship, there is an art to dealing with Congress, but there are also skills to be learned. Stan Moscowitz, the Agency’s head of legislative affairs, took me aside after my first appearance on the Hill. I thought it had gone very well, but he clearly had misgivings. “When you go down there and they ask you a question,” he said, “you have to immediately answer yes or no, and then explain the issue in more detail if you wish. Otherwise they think you’re obfuscating, as they did today.” It was one of the single best pieces of advice I ever got in terms of dealing with Congress.

In addition to communicating with Congress, those who work on the seventh floor are responsible for maintaining the CIA’s relationship with the president, our most important customer. In early 1995, to offset blowback from media rumblings that President Clinton was not paying enough attention to the CIA, national security adviser Tony Lake came out to CIA headquarters in Langley for a meeting with senior leaders. He made very positive comments about the importance of intelligence to the White House. Everything was going fine; it was a lovefest. But then a GS-13 note taker on the back bench asked, “Mr. Lake, is there anything we’re not doing right?”