Good Hunting: An American Spymaster's Story (33 page)

Even before he was finally confirmed by the Senate in July, Tenet told me he wanted me to be his deputy director for operations and to start thinking about whom I wanted to be my deputy. But by the time I had traveled back to Washington and we had lunch several weeks later, I sensed something had changed. Indeed, Tenet confided to me that he was under pressure to consider Jack Downing, an experienced officer who had recently retired after holding the distinction of being the only person ever to have served as chief in both Moscow and another denied area. The day before the official announcement, Tenet called me and said he had decided to go in a “different direction”—with Downing.

Soon after being installed as director of the DO, Downing pulled me aside and asked if I would remain in my new position for another year. Downing did not know me well, so I assumed this was Tenet’s idea. Ultimately, I told Tenet that it might be time for me to leave the Agency, but I would return and run the Directorate of Science and Technology if it were available. Tenet seemed surprised by my interest, but it became clear in time that he preferred a scientist in the position.

Game-changing technological breakthroughs—the U-2, spy satellites, drones, the Glomar Explorer—had been a big part of the CIA’s history of covert action and espionage. I thought technology was moving so fast that it would be exciting to be part of the effort to try to harness it for intelligence purposes. There was a real opportunity to bring technology into the intelligence business. Woolsey, as director, had recognized the intelligence potential of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) and had pushed for the Predator, in the face of what was essentially disinterest at the Pentagon. Tom Twetten, as deputy director for operations, brought the directorate together with the National Security Agency and pioneered special intelligence-collection efforts that fused human intelligence (HUMINT) and signals intelligence (SIGINT).

From the perspective of the Agency, Tenet would become one of the better-liked directors. But he and I had a fundamental disagreement that I assume directly affected his choice. Tenet’s view was that the directorate needed to heal after Deutch’s tenure, the lingering problems associated with Iran-Contra, the Ames betrayal, and other smaller headaches. I felt we needed to move forward with robust change and not worry so much about healing. A strong intelligence program in and of itself will take care of the healing. We agreed to disagree. I was disappointed he had changed his mind about picking me as DO director, but like so many disappointments in life, this one turned out in time to be good fortune. I really could not have gone down the path with Tenet on “enhanced interrogations” after the September 11, 2001, terror attacks. Nor could I have abided the way intelligence on weapons of mass destruction was handled in the run-up to the Iraq War in 2003. He made the right choice for both of us.

As it happened, I saw the disastrous Iraq War coming. Since the 1991 Gulf War, the Agency had been reaching out to Iraqi exiles all over the world, to size up their contacts and capabilities. I considered it a good thing, in the mid-1990s, that the Agency was just ending its relationship with the well-known Iraqi exile Ahmed Chalabi, who headed an umbrella organization called the Iraqi National Congress. He was an American-educated Iraqi from a prominent Shi’a family whose ambition was to topple Saddam Hussein, ending his rule in Iraq. Chalabi had support in Washington and had gained the backing of the Agency for a time. He seemed to be uniquely capable of lobbying Washington, and indeed, he would say anything that we needed to hear to bolster arguments for intervention. But he represented only one of many Iraqi dissident networks with which the Agency engaged to determine if we had or could develop a robust network inside Iraq.

Chalabi fell out of favor with the CIA and the White House in 1995, after he allegedly plotted an uprising from the Kurdish-controlled areas in northern Iraq that was aimed at triggering a rolling coup inside Saddam Hussein’s military. The Clinton administration gave the plan no chance at succeeding and explicitly told Chalabi not to proceed with it. Chalabi reportedly undertook the initiative anyway, only to have the plan upended when the Kurdish leader Masoud Barzani refused to support it. The United States soured on Chalabi, who seemed to have little support and few assets inside the country and was spending his time and money on propaganda efforts to enhance his image in the United States. Ultimately, it was clear that we were paying Chalabi too much for his modest capability. If there were any dissenters on this in the Agency, they were among a few midlevel officers who apparently liked working with Chalabi and found him useful.

Iyad Allawi, another Iraqi exile, by contrast, looked like a more serious player. After the U.S. invasion in 2003, he became prime minister of Iraq. Dave Manners was an experienced and effective officer who worked with Allawi. Manners describes Allawi as a true Iraqi patriot and “the only Iraqi I have ever met who was completely unafraid of Saddam Hussein.” This was a significant assessment, considering that Allawi and his wife had been attacked in their Surrey, England, home in 1978 by ax-wielding assassins believed to have been sent by Saddam. Allawi spent almost a year in the hospital recuperating before resuming his resistance activities.
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Allawi’s role in the operation was to recruit senior Iraqi military leaders and inspire them to defect to Jordan to organize an opposition force in exile. When Manners met with these senior officers, he understood why we had easily defeated them in the first Gulf War. They were not an impressive lot. However, one Iraqi general, Mohammed Abdullah al-Shahwani, was a different story. According to Manners, al-Shahwani was a courageous, hands-on special operations commander who was well respected inside Iraq and inspired devotion in his troops. As a result, he represented a threat to Saddam, and he eventually had to flee to Jordan for fear of assassination. Because special operations units tended to be of a high caliber in Iraq and loyal to their commanders, and because of al-Shahwani’s contacts throughout Iraq, he had some promise.

The Allawi/al-Shahwani operation produced a large volume of credible intelligence for the Clinton administration in the mid-1990s, but the Agency leadership remained uncertain as to the reliability and capability of the network they were trying to organize inside Iraq.
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One way to establish that network’s reliability was to ask its members to follow an instruction that could be verified. Our Iraqi partners wanted us to provide explosives that they could use to take down some of the regime’s communications towers. This act would serve multiple purposes: it would demonstrate the network’s reliability to Washington, start to degrade the regime’s internal security apparatus, and at the same time send a message to the Iraqi army that Saddam was vulnerable. The administration policy makers were not prepared to take the step of using explosives, so with some misgivings, al-Shahwani was asked instead to smuggle in microwave transmission disruptors to his supporters in Iraq so they could interfere with transmission from specified communications towers at a specified time.

Manners noted that the devices looked like something out of a science-fiction movie, hardly a discreet technology. In the end, al-Shahwani’s network was able to smuggle in the devices and carry out their instructions—but their operation was compromised and fell apart, and many Iraqi officers lost their lives.

The Agency was right to be cautious about moving forward with the exiles, but there were critical shortcomings from the get-go. Although there was a desire for regime change in Iraq, the funding allocated was minuscule. This type of regime change cannot be accomplished on budgets of $20 to $30 million. In addition, Manners rightly points out that the network probably did not have the forces necessary to make something significant happen as a follow-on. The regime was crumbling around the edges, but these resistance groups lacked the heft to oust Saddam. Still, there was a feeling that this exile operation could be added to a containment operation designed to isolate Saddam, one that included no-fly zones over northern and southern Iraq, WMD inspections, and humanitarian support to the Kurds and others in the north.

Several people involved in the operation point out that it also went on for too long. All operations are perishable, especially when they are not receiving the high-level financial and policy support required for success. Not surprisingly, the Allawi/al-Shahwani program ended in bloodshed when Saddam arrested and executed several dozen Iraqis working with the exile leaders.

No doubt the administration’s limited commitment frustrated both the opposition community and the officers in Amman who were working with the Iraqis. What the Iraqi operation brings to light is the inherent tension in covert operations between the more optimistic field officers, who form deep relationships with our partners in-country and who work to piece together operations in challenging and dangerous circumstances, and the decision makers who must view the larger foreign policy landscape from a more detached perspective. During this period, the Clinton administration had several other priorities vying for its attention. It had undertaken a failed humanitarian experiment in Somalia and a successful intervention in Haiti. The ever-present Bosnia struggle and subsequent Dayton Accord were an overriding focus as well. Rightly or wrongly, it is not altogether surprising that the administration decided to pass on the operation and concentrate most of its resources and focus elsewhere.

However ambivalent we were about Iraq and the threat posed by Saddam Hussein, the CIA clearly saw Osama bin Laden as a global terrorist menace in August 1996 when his first anti-American fatwa, “Declaration of War Against the Americans Occupying the Land of the Two Holy Places,” was published in
Al-Quds Al-Arabi
, a London-based newspaper. In it, Bin Laden called on Muslims to drive American soldiers out of Saudi Arabia and praised several attacks on Americans, particularly the 1993 battle of Mogadishu that ended in the death of American soldiers and precipitated the U.S. withdrawal from Somalia.
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For almost a decade, the Agency had been focused on the threat of Islamic fundamentalism.

As head of the Agency’s operations in 1994 and 1995, I had brought the noted political scientist Samuel Huntington to Langley to talk with the division chiefs about his theory detailed in a
Foreign Affairs
article titled “A Clash of Civilizations.” He argued that the primary fault lines in the post–Cold War world would be cultural and religious. His views resonated with us.

The Bosnia issue was certainly on the front burner at this point, as well. With the end of the Cold War, Yugoslavia had disintegrated along ethnic lines into several republics dominated by nationalist parties. Bosnia and Herzegovina, which was made up mostly of Serbs, Croats, and Bosnians, had slid into a bloody civil war. Although the United Nations authorized a small peacekeeping force for Bosnia, it proved powerless to stop the fighting characterized by violence against civilians on all sides. Scenes of brutal ethnic cleansing by the Bosnian Serb army— particularly in the UN safe haven of Srebrenica—and its four-year siege of the multiethnic capital, Sarajevo, finally induced the Clinton administration to prod our European partners into providing NATO air support for the newly established Bosnian Muslim–Croat alliance. NATO support and U.S. pressure resulted in the Dayton Accords, negotiated at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in Dayton, Ohio, in November 1995 and formally signed in Paris in December.

Early on in my new post, Pat and I visited London to see my old friend David Spedding, or “C,” the secretive head of MI6 with whom I had served in Chile. Pat and I had the good fortune to be David and his wife’s guests at the world-renowned Henley Royal Regatta, an annual rowing race on the Thames in Henley-on-Thames, where Sir David had a house. Even as a kid from Philadelphia, I was familiar with the races. Grace Kelly’s father, Jack Kelly, was an Irish immigrant’s son and a brick-building magnate from Philadelphia. He was also America’s beloved oarsman and a triple Olympic gold medal winner who was famously denied admittance to the Henley regatta because he had worked with his hands and was not a “gentleman.” His son, Jack, however, was able to even the score by competing and winning in the Henley races years later.

The opportunity was of particular interest to me because as a college student I had briefly rowed out of the vespers boat club in Philadelphia and for the North Wildwood Beach Patrol. I came to the event prepared to sit in the viewing stands with my binoculars to watch the races. But it soon became clear that this would be a social occasion. Thus, we found ourselves stopping by various tents set up for the team clubs and regularly sipping a Pimm’s, a British drink that is reminiscent of a mint julep without the mint. The whole event was great fun, especially watching many of the long-graduated alumni of Cambridge and Oxford sporting their school jackets without first having visited their tailors to have the jackets let out. I doubt if Pat and I saw more than two or three races that day. As I often did at such events, I had brought along a camera to take photos to memorialize the day. Early on it was made clear, however, that taking photos was considered déclassé. I was able, nonetheless, to draw Sir David and Lady Spedding into one snapshot, which I treasure as a memento of them and the day.

I also was offered an opportunity to meet the Queen of England. Complicating matters of high protocol was the question of how I would be described to Her Majesty, in terms of my precise function within the U.S. government, but I wasn’t worried. I was prepared to take the entire event in stride. She was a British queen and my relatives had had a tough run with her predecessors, but I was prepared to let bygones be bygones. We were eventually met by a formally dressed protocol officer, who described in detail how each of us would enter the room one by one and be introduced to Her Majesty. The women were expected to curtsey, and they were anxious about getting it right. The protocol officer wisely said don’t fuss, have fun, the Queen has seen everything at these events, including people placing themselves prostrate on the ground. I was starting to get into the spirit of the day.