Authors: Ronald Kessler
At ten
A.M
., Webster met with John L. Helgerson, the Central Intelligence Agency’s deputy director for intelligence. It was Helgerson’s job to make sense of all the agency’s reports from human spies, billion-dollar satellites, and eavesdroppers on communications, and to predict the most likely course of events. This was one of their regular meetings, but they spent most of their time talking about the Iraqi threat
to Kuwait. Helgerson warned that, based on the latest information, Saddam Hussein would most likely invade Kuwait within a matter of days. The only question was how much of Kuwait he would take and whether he would go on to invade Saudi Arabia.
Webster later conferred with Richard J. Kerr, the deputy director of Central Intelligence, and with Richard F. Stolz, the deputy director for operations. Stolz had the job of directing the agency’s human-spy operations, along with covert action. That was the area that had gotten the CIA into so much trouble—for example, in the abortive invasion of Cuba at the Bay of Pigs, and more recently in the Iran-contra affair.
At twelve-thirty
P.M.
, Webster had lunch with Donald Graham, publisher of the
Washington Post,
in the director’s dining room. He then met with officials from the CIA’s National Collection Division. Among other things, the division—now merged into a new Domestic Resources Division—interviews businessmen and other travelers after they return from overseas trips. The officials told Webster that they were starting to obtain plans for Iraqi chemical and biological weapons factories from the companies that had built the plants.
Just after six-thirty
P.M.
, Webster took the elevator back to the CIA’s underground garage, where his CIA car and a chase car were waiting to return him to his red brick home on a secluded street off Bradley Boulevard.
During the day, the Office of Security guards who drove him back and forth remained in a glass-enclosed cubicle lined with closed-circuit television monitors across from his office. Technicians from the Office of Security swept his office for bugs every few months and installed special devices on his windowpanes to prevent possible KGB eavesdropping using laser beams.
At first, Webster had refused to allow the security guards to stay in his home at night. Later, he had relented. In any case, the house was protected by alarms that would bring CIA guards, FBI agents, and Montgomery County police officers running.
Webster had just fed a biscuit to his basset hound, Babs, when the white phone in his study rang. The phone was a
direct, secure link to the White House. It was seven-thirty
P.M.
on Wednesday, August 1, 1990.
Brent Scowcroft, the President’s assistant for national affairs, was on the other end. Scowcroft had been getting scattered, unconfirmed reports that Iraqi forces might be surging over the Kuwaiti border. Scowcroft wanted to know what else Webster knew about it.
Ever since November 1989, the CIA had been warning in top-secret reports that Saddam Hussein had aggressive intentions and wanted to dominate the Middle East. But the CIA predicted it would take three years before the Iraqi leader recovered enough from the costs of the Iran-Iraq war to take action. On July 23, 1990, the CIA reported that Saddam Hussein was moving troops toward Kuwait and that an invasion was possible. A few hours before Scowcroft called Webster, CIA deputy director Kerr had told the State Department, based on intercepted communications, that an invasion would occur within the next twenty-four hours.
Webster told Scowcroft he would find out what was new and get back to him. He called the CIA’s operations office, a communications center at Langley that is manned twenty-four hours a day. The center had gotten the same reports. Webster called Scowcroft back and told him he knew nothing further.
By eight that evening, the invasion had begun, setting into motion a chain of events that would culminate with Iraq’s defeat by American and allied forces by February 27, 1991. In the intervening months, the CIA would generate most of the intelligence needed to evaluate Saddam Hussein’s intentions and then to prosecute the war. Before the war began on January 16, 1991, the agency would send some five hundred reports to the White House on the effect of economic sanctions against Iraq, on Saddam Hussein’s preparations for war, and on the Iraqi leader’s character and personality. Through Webster’s control of the National Reconnaissance Office committee that assigns satellite coverage, the CIA would position satellites over the Middle East so that the military could see their targets on television monitors in real time. The agency would obtain the engineering and architectural plans of key
Iraqi targets. It would assess Iraqi troop strength and morale. It would predict in the President’s Daily Brief that Saddam Hussein would unleash an oil spill on the Persian Gulf and that he would use other scorched-earth tactics before withdrawing from Kuwait. The CIA would coordinate propaganda efforts such as distribution of leaflets and establishment of a clandestine radio station urging Iraqi soldiers to surrender. And it would help to free some of the Americans taken hostage by Saddam Hussein in the early stages of the conflict.
While the CIA would make some mistakes, such as overestimating the number of Iraqi troops in Kuwait, its record overall during the Persian Gulf War would be impressive.
By midnight, Webster was back behind his mahogany desk in his office at the CIA, surrounded by four telephones, six in-boxes, and fifteen direct “hot lines” to the CIA’s senior officials. On his walls were dozens of mementos of his career as a lawyer, judge, and director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation and then the CIA: a photo of Webster with President Bush and two of Millie’s puppies romping on the White House lawn; a photo of Webster giving President Reagan a pistol that could be used to pull off riding boots; a copy of a painting of President Lincoln signing the Emancipation Proclamation, given to Webster, a Civil War buff, by the Society of Former Special Agents of the FBI.
At sixty-six, Webster had an ageless face, thin lips, and a high forehead. His slightly graying black hair was always immaculately combed. He was a study in contrasts, an austere man who liked to be called “judge” to emphasize his separation from the agency and the abuses that had occurred in the past, who surrounded himself with brilliant young lawyers as if he were still in his judge’s chambers, and who wore Brooks Brothers suits, monogrammed button-down shirts, and gold tie clips. At the same time, Webster was then dating—and would soon marry—Lynda Jo Clugston, a highly attractive thirty-four-year-old blonde who was director of sales and marketing at the Watergate Hotel in Washington. Webster had dated a number of attractive women, from tennis pro Kathy Kemper to syndicated columnist Karen Feld, since the death of his wife, Drusilla, in 1984. Webster was a highly
competitive tennis player who recognized that “tennis diplomacy” could win more support in Washington than the most eloquent testimony before congressional oversight committees. He had played with everyone from George Bush when Bush was vice president to Zsa Zsa Gabor.
Despite his stern demeanor, Webster had a sense of humor, occasionally signing letters to friends “00-14,” doubling James Bond’s code number because he was the fourteenth director of Central Intelligence. One of Webster’s most treasured possessions, given to him by an assistant at the FBI, was a two-foot-high brown bear dressed in judicial robes, tennis shoes, an FBI T-shirt, and pin-striped pants, its hands clutching a tennis racket.
As he prepared to meet representatives of Middle East intelligence services to exchange views at one
A.M
. on August 2, Webster was feeling good about the CIA and the role it played. To be sure, he still found some offices lacking. But when he first became director of Central Intelligence on May 26, 1987, he was shocked to find that agency officials on more than one occasion had failed to tell him the truth. Not that they lied outright; they were too smart for that. But by telling only half the story, by answering questions precisely, by not addressing the real intent of Webster’s questions, they had misled him, just as some CIA officers had misled the agency’s inspector general and the presidentially appointed Tower Commission when they had investigated the CIA’s role in the Iran-contra affair.
Moreover, Webster had found that the CIA’s methods for making decisions were woefully inadequate. Plans for undertaking covert action were approved rather informally, and the hard questions were often not addressed: What would happen if it became public? Would it make sense to the American people? Does it conform with American law? Above all, Webster was a lawyer, a man who wanted facts to be backed up and procedures to be followed. Too often he found that when he asked the source of a statement, the answer was “Johnny Smith on the third floor told me.” As a judge, first on the district court level and then on the appeals court level,
his opinions had been replete with citations. He wanted the same documentation to back up reports at the CIA.
Webster found the attitude of some CIA officials about Congress and the congressional oversight process infuriating. “They’re not entitled to know that; we don’t have to tell them that,” some of them said. In briefing books presented to him before he testified on Capitol Hill, CIA officials prepared expected questions with suggested answers. Repeatedly, Webster found, the answers did not tell the whole truth.
At least in part, the attitude was a holdover from Webster’s predecessor, William J. Casey, who had developed nonresponsiveness to oversight into an art form. The Senate Select Committee on Intelligence had even built a special amplifying system into its bug-proof hearing room in an effort to make Casey’s muttering intelligible. What the senators did not realize was that, when he wanted to be understood, Casey spoke as clearly as John F. Kennedy. That kind of arrogance had gotten the agency involved in the Iran-contra mess in the first place.
Not long after Webster took over the agency in 1987, stories began appearing in the press that he was about to be replaced. Even though Bush had asked Webster to continue to head the agency after Bush became president, the stories persisted, saying he was not doing a good job, that Bush was dissatisfied with him, that he spent all his time playing tennis, and that he would not last another month. The fact that Webster remained in office years after the stories had appeared did not prevent new ones from being published. Meanwhile, rumors circulated that the CIA was drifting, that it had become bloated by bureaucrats, that morale was bad, that it had stopped doing anything worthwhile.
Clearly, some of the people around Bush were unhappy with Webster. He was a lawyer and a former judge who had been brought in to impose order on the CIA. He was not a foreign policy expert and felt uncomfortable posing as one. But Bush had no problems with him, and each time one of the stories appeared, Bush called Webster on the phone, dropped him a note, or took him aside after their almost daily morning meetings. The president would crack some joke
about the media and assure him that he was fully satisfied with his performance and wanted him to stay on. Several times, Webster offered to resign, and Bush had insisted that he remain.
The disparity between the public perception and the reality could be a metaphor for the CIA itself, for no agency of government is so little understood or so misunderstood. That, of course, is the way the founders of the agency had wanted it—men such as William J. (“Wild Bill”) Donovan, Allen W. Dulles, John A. McCone, and Richard Helms. They were the men who kept the secrets and were proud of it. They saw no conflict in running a secret intelligence organization within a free society. Nor did they see any reason to let the rest of America know what they were doing. They asked only—as Helms asked the American Society of Newspaper Editors in 1971—to take it in part on faith that “we, too, are honorable men devoted to her [the nation’s] service.” Even the most devastating charges, from accusations of drug running to murder, were met by a stoic—some would say masochistic—“no comment.”
Aided and abetted by a Congress that shirked its oversight duties, “the company,” as it was called in its early days, was answerable only to the president. It had a “can do” spirit, a willingness to tackle any problem in an era when the United States legitimately felt threatened by the advancing armies of the Soviet Union and the Cold War.
Then came Watergate and Vietnam, when the government lied about the progress of the war and President Nixon covered up White House involvement in the break-in at Democratic National Committee headquarters. When Seymour Hersh of the
New York Times
broke the story in December 1974 that the CIA had violated its charter by spying on Americans who were against the war, Congress could no longer look the other way.
In 1975, a committee headed by the late Sen. Frank Church, an Idaho Democrat, began an investigation that would profoundly alter the way the CIA did business. The committee and a president’s commission chaired by Vice President Nelson A. Rockefeller found that the CIA for twenty years had
illegally intercepted and opened mail between the United States and the Soviet bloc; had kept dossiers on thousands of American citizens and indexed the names of 300,000 American citizens who had no connection with espionage; had infiltrated dissident groups in the Washington, D.C., area; had experimented with LSD on unsuspecting Americans, leading to one suicide; and had unsuccessfully attempted to kill at least five foreign leaders, including Cuban premier Fidel Castro.
Most of these actions had been approved if not ordered by the presidents at the time. Most were known to cabinet officers as well, including attorneys general. Most of the abuses had stopped by the time they were exposed. And nearly all the abuses had been uncovered by the CIA itself. James R. Schlesinger, as director of Central Intelligence, had ordered CIA employees in 1973 to report any activities that might be “outside the legislative charter of this agency.”
1
The result was the “family jewels,” 693 pages of single-spaced documents that William E. Colby brought to the attention of Congress after he had been nominated as CIA director. Once he became director of Central Intelligence, Colby confirmed for Hersh the basic points of his story, giving the
Times
greater confidence about running it.