Good Hunting: An American Spymaster's Story (31 page)

“Well,” Lake said, “I did run into former NSC director Brent Scowcroft the other day, and he asked, ‘Is the Agency still giving you that lousy reporting on Iran?’” Everybody in the room laughed nervously. Then Lake said, “And by the way, you’re not doing so hot on North Korea.” I was stunned. This was our top consumer, one step removed from the president of the United States, and he had just delivered a devastating critique of our performance on two of the most important targets we had.

I found the exchange extremely disturbing and went back to my office to write a cable to all our field stations. My intention was to be as blunt as Lake had been in his comments. Some people still remember the cable, because it stunned the DO. It was a departure from the sort of staid cables we were all used to. In essence, I told our field officers that according to our biggest and most important customer, we were not cutting it and we needed to do better. The cable had a polarizing, even shocking effect. Though no one came back to me to challenge my observations directly, a number of senior officers did not like the message and let it be known by sending messages out on the underground bongo drums that eventually reached my ears. Their reaction said to me that, from their perspective, it was wrong to highlight shortcomings so starkly. Others took the message in stride as a call to improve. One senior officer, who had been preparing at the time to retire, said that this cable gave him renewed faith and convinced him to stay on.
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In short, my candor—and Lake’s—cut two ways.

What I was getting at in my cable was this: we needed to raise the bar on performance on the tough targets, and the managers had to take the lead on this at every level. We needed to ask: Did we have the right people in the right jobs, and were we hiring and promoting the right mix of people? Did we have enough officers in the DO who were the equivalent of fighter pilots, male and female, using all the creativity and all the guile that the challenge required?

I tried to get at these quality issues in the strategic plan I developed to reform the Directorate of Operations. When I had told Price earlier in my tenure as ADDO that I planned to undertake a new and comprehensive strategic plan, he agreed without hesitation. The feeling in the directorate was that, if reform was to happen, it would have to be led from within. We wanted to modify ourselves before somebody else did it. We were concerned that someone making changes from the outside might make it more difficult for us to do our jobs. I was aided in this work by our chief of plans, Dick Calder, a top-notch officer. My only self-criticism today is that I probably should have stepped out even further, although at the time I thought I was pushing the envelope as much as possible.

It was surprising to me, in a global intelligence service, how little time and energy was actually spent on strategic issues. We hired very bright officers, but a large percentage of them wanted to do only tactical planning. Many would rather have worried about how to arrange a “chance” encounter with a Chinese or North Korean official than think strategically about how best to tackle the Chinese or North Korean regimes. We often spent all day putting out fires without leaving any time to ask the right strategic questions, which was imperative given the times in which we were living. In the mid-1990s we were post-Ames, in the midst of downsizing, and wondering who we were and how we needed to restructure ourselves to remain relevant. “It’s common to say that we were the world’s second-oldest profession and that profession doesn’t change, but things were changing, and we had to take a serious look at ourselves,” Calder said. “If we were going to be able to answer our customers’ new questions, we had to aggressively develop new resources and assets.”
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The strategic reform plan we put together in 1995 had as a cornerstone the key judgment that the greatest national security threat facing America was “domestic terrorism.” It laid out specific reforms for the clandestine service: increasing focus on transnational issues such as terrorism and narcotics; leveraging the broadest capabilities of the Agency to make our work more relevant; creating multidisciplinary centers to pull together analytical, technical, and support capabilities; attracting and retaining the best talent for the future of the service; implementing new counterintelligence procedures, including policies for screening, clearance, and personnel; increasing technical skills within the service, which had previously focused primarily on source-running skills; and maximizing our “tooth-to-tail ratio,” which has to do with how many people are carrying out missions versus how many are required to support those missions.

While we never completely executed all the parts of the strategic plan, we did make progress on multiple fronts, including bringing the Directorate of Operations and the Directorate of Intelligence closer together. With the construction of a new headquarters building at Langley, a major reorganization of office space took place. The DO officers all wanted to remain huddled together, totally separated from their analyst colleagues. Dave Cohen, my counterpart in the DI, and I decided to knock down the wall, literally, that separated the DDI’s suite of offices from the DDO’s. Somewhere in the archives there is a photo of both us in hard hats, hammers in hand. It was symbolic of the change that needed to come about.

The integration was substantive as well as organizational. When we co-located the regional analytical and operational divisions, it put more analytical input into our intelligence collection and got DI officers involved in the direct assignment of priorities, collection targets, and analysis. Like anything bureaucratic, there were some pro forma steps to it, but it was a serious effort that had a positive impact.
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It was amazing how easy it was to dictate this change. I simply brought in the DO’s chief of support and told him to make it happen. God knows what chaos that produced, but I was determined to break down the walls.

During this period, there were also several misguided reforms that I was able to redirect and prevent. Most stemmed from the need to draw down our budget as part of the post–Cold War “peace dividend.” One such reform was a proposal to combine the Africa and Latin America Divisions. The DO program managers at the time apparently wanted to merge the two divisions to appease the budgeters. But that was a fool’s errand. At a joint meeting of senior officers from both divisions, I simply announced it was not going to happen, and that was the end of it. Area expertise is a highly valued commodity in the intelligence business and should not be tampered with lightly. Every division has its own unique culture and operating style, and we needed to have dedicated officers in each who knew they could make their careers there. Furthermore, it cannot be overlooked that the United States has vastly different national security interests in those regions. As many before me have noted, nobody in the U.S. government seems to be too concerned about Africa until a crisis strikes there. And one always does, as we can see from the unrest and growth of terrorism in the continent. For example, nobody cared about Somalia until Delta Force showed up there in 1993 looking for Mohammed Farah Aidid and desperately needed intelligence support. And today, Africa is a hotbed of Islamic terrorism.

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President Clinton’s pick to replace Woolsey as CIA director at the beginning of 1995 was Michael P. C. Carns, a retired air force general. But on March 10, after withdrawing the nomination in light of alleged immigration violations by Carns involving a Filipino household employee, he tapped John M. Deutch, an MIT chemistry professor serving as deputy secretary of defense, to run the Agency. He selected George J. Tenet, a former Senate Intelligence Committee staffer then serving on Clinton’s National Security Council, to be deputy director. Almost no one at the CIA had a good feel for Deutch at the time, but it seemed that his nomination would be good for the Agency, given his close access to the White House and his prominent role at the Pentagon.

The arrival of a new director at Langley is always met with trepidation. Although for the most part it does not create sleepless nights for the rank and file, for many employees it is still a moment to consider what direction their work may take in the months and years ahead. For the most senior officers, the stakes are higher. For us, a new director could mean reassignment or early departure from the service. As such, we approached our new director with a great deal of caution.

The head of the Directorate of Operations at the time was Ted Price, an experienced China hand who spoke Mandarin and who had taken a nontraditional path to the top. He and I had been friends over our long careers and worked well together, albeit with different styles and backgrounds. Price already had a positive relationship with Deutch, who at the time was his neighbor. After Clinton tapped Deutch to head the CIA, they had met at Deutch’s home, and Price came away from the meeting believing he had reached an “understanding” with Deutch that he would stay on as head of the DO. Around that time, Price also brought Tenet down to the Farm in Virginia, where new recruits receive their spy training. Price thought he and Tenet shared a view about the future, and that they would be working together in the years ahead. Shortly thereafter, however, at his Senate confirmation hearings, Deutch announced that, in the wake of the Ames case, the Guatemala scandal involving Colonel Alpirez, and various other small scandals and controversies, he would replace the DO’s senior leadership as he moved to rid the Agency of its Cold War spy mentality. Supposedly, there had been a private meeting of the new leadership at which members of the Deutch team decided, unanimously, that Ted Price had to go.

Soon after seeing Deutch’s statements to Congress on television, Price turned in his badge and left, leaving a long and distinguished career behind him.

Before the confirmation hearings, I had been more relaxed about Deutch than I should have been, because Price had shared with me his impression that he had an arrangement with the new director. The minute Price walked out the door, I was left to pick up the pieces and run the DO, but with a very uncertain future myself. Deutch’s announcement to the world that there would be a shakeup at the top of the Directorate of Operations looked like it would mark the beginning of the end of my tenure there, and because of this concern, I put the job of station chief in a major European country in my inside pocket as insurance. But I was not about to quit cold turkey. Price and I could not both leave, and I did not feel like quitting, especially since I had seen the bureaucratic ball bounce around in strange and unexpected ways in the past.

With my position considerably more precarious than normal, I wasn’t sure what I would face when I met the new DCI once he moved into his office at headquarters. Fortunately, I got a lucky break the first time I met him officially, which made it much easier to deal with him than I had anticipated.

Early in Deutch’s tenure, his secretary called to notify me that he would like to chat. The staff had prepared me well for this briefing, and I had all the key data at my fingertips. But Deutch had a quick and fertile mind, and his questions could be quite penetrating and detail-oriented. A great deal was riding on this meeting, and I knew that first impressions were critical in such situations.

In recent years, I had been in the director’s office numerous times and felt at home. The DCI’s office is well-appointed but far from opulent when compared to those of other department heads and cabinet members. It has a broad window spanning its length and looking out, from its seventh-floor perch, onto a densely wooded area. It is not much larger or more decorative than my office, just fifty feet away, and we shared essentially the same panoramic view. My office, however, had a regular visitor, a large hawk that perched on the windowsill for hours on end and added a little mystery.

Despite my comfort being in the DCI’s office, I was thrown off balance when I was escorted into the room by the secretary only to find Director Deutch sitting in his underwear in a leather chair with his leg propped up and a huge ice pack pressed against an injured knee. In a split second he went from Mr. Director to a mortal human being. We laughed about it before getting down to business. From that point on, I always had a very comfortable relationship with Deutch, one in which I felt I could be candid and open with him. We often kidded each other good-naturedly. He was self-confident and very smart, and did not feel insecure dealing in frank discourse; in fact, he valued it. Not all directors did.

In the small dining room just off his office, Deutch had hung a painting of former director James Schlesinger. I wondered if he realized that Schlesinger was held in low esteem at Langley because of his handling of a reduction in force during the Carter years. He oversaw the unseemly firing of a few hundred experienced officers. He also had a bird-watching hobby that left him wandering around the wooded areas near the Agency; it did not go over well. Tenet later had the portrait replaced with a picture of Richard Helms.

In early May, once he had officially taken over, Deutch had a town hall meeting with Agency employees in which he said he had formed a committee to recommend candidates to replace Price. “That process will take some time,” he said. “During that time, I intend to rely on Jack Devine as the acting deputy director for operations, and to work very closely with every individual in the DO at a time when I know there is a lot of lack of knowledge—and a lot of unjust criticism—about what that group has done.”

I was interviewed for the DDO job by John McMahon, the former CIA deputy director who was ostensibly heading Deutch’s search committee, but in fact Nora Slatkin, the executive director, was calling the shots at the DCI’s behest. Of course, I wanted to stay on to finish the job I had started, and I was committed to doing so if at all possible, but the odds were very slim that the DCI could back away from his public pronouncements about seeking a new DDO. Nevertheless, I was somewhat surprised that Deutch and I developed a positive relationship. He seemed to value my opinion as he and his administration tried to get their sea legs and eventually pursued their own agenda.