Inside the CIA (44 page)

It was clear to Bruemmer that CIA officers had been influenced by Casey’s attitude. Casey didn’t like congressional oversight. He was selective himself in what he said, giving answers that were technically correct but factually misleading. It was not surprising to Bruemmer that officers under the director wound up emulating him.

As for Casey’s involvement, Bruemmer came away as mystified as everyone else. On the one hand, there was the testimony of Oliver North, who had directed the shipment of arms to Iran and the diversion of excess payments from some of the arms sales to the contra rebels fighting the Sandinista regime in Nicaragua in violation of a congressional prohibition known as the Boland Amendment. North said Casey had masterminded the operation. On the other hand, CIA officials whom Bruemmer trusted and who had some involvement in the matter insisted that North had exaggerated Casey’s role. What was clear was that Casey tried to insulate the CIA’s employees from his activities, a tip-off that Casey realized it would not be easy to involve the CIA in illegal activities.

In the end, only a handful of CIA employees were found to have detailed knowledge of aspects of the affair.
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One of them, Alan D. Fiers, Jr., who directed the CIA’s covert operations in Central America from 1984 to 1986, later pled guilty to two misdemeanor counts of withholding information from Congress. In doing so, he said in federal court in Washington
that Clair E. George, then deputy director for operations, and other CIA superiors told him not to tell Congress about the CIA’s early knowledge of the diversion of funds from the sale of arms to Iran to support the Nicaraguan rebels.
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After Bruemmer finished his report on Iran-contra, Webster asked him in 1988 to become the agency’s general counsel. When he first came to the agency as special counsel in 1987, Bruemmer had laid down one condition: that his office would be in the main building, not in rented buildings in McLean. As a result, Bruemmer had an office on the seventh floor. A few doors from Webster’s office, it was on the same hallway as the offices of the deputy director for operations and the deputy director for intelligence.

When Webster asked him to become general counsel a year later, Bruemmer jokingly laid down a new condition: that he would have nothing to do with Freedom of Information Act requests. In fact, the function was handled by the Office of Information Technology within the Directorate of Administration. But when the requests generated lawsuits, the general counsel became involved. As far as Bruemmer was concerned, handling the requests was a thankless job, one that only earned the enmity of agency employees for giving out information and the enmity of requesters because the process always took so long, and so much of the information was blacked out.
*

At the time, the general counsel’s office was still off campus. Bruemmer continued to work at headquarters until the rest of his staff moved to the new building in January 1989.

Both Webster and Bruemmer wanted to upgrade the importance of the office. It was not an effective part of the decision-making process; lawyers were often consulted after the fact. In part, that was because of the slowness of the office. CIA officers became frustrated because it took so long for the general counsel’s office to get back to them when they did ask its opinion.

“The general attitude [of the general counsel’s office] was to say no and to take a long time in saying it,” a former operations officer said.

On the other hand, the lawyers sometimes were not consulted because of a disinclination to take their advice. It was not until John N. McMahon, then deputy director of Central Intelligence, learned about the CIA’s involvement in the effort to trade arms for hostages in Iran that Stanley Sporkin, the CIA’s general counsel under William Casey, was asked about the issue. Sporkin said that for the effort to continue, a presidential finding should be issued. But no one asked the general counsel’s office about diverting money from the arms sales to the effort to support the contras in Nicaragua: the answer almost certainly would have been that it would have been illegal.
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“What we set out to do was get the lawyers involved in the decision-making process early,” Bruemmer said. “Not to make the decisions but to point out the legal pitfalls and help structure proposals to address them. Over and over again we told my office—and Webster said this as well—that the job of a lawyer is not to say
no,
but to say
yes if
or
no but
and help people do what they want to do within the structure of the law.”
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Bruemmer began sitting in at the Tuesday breakfast that Webster had with eight of his senior staff. Then Bruemmer became a regular at Wednesday-morning meetings held by the deputy director of Central Intelligence with the agency’s deputy directors. He also sat in on Friday-morning meetings held by the deputy directors.

Bruemmer served on a task force that developed a new structure to improve the operations of the inspector general’s
office, and on another task force that led to establishment of the counternarcotics center.

Later, Bruemmer became involved in the decision made by Webster to withhold from public disclosure by the courts classified information relating to Joseph F. Fernandez, a twenty-two-year veteran of the agency who was CIA station chief in Costa Rica from 1984 to 1986. In that role, Fernandez aided North in secretly resupplying the contras at a time when Congress had prohibited all U.S. military aid to the Nicaraguan rebels. In April 1989, Fernandez was indicted for making false statements about his involvement in the Iran-contra affair to the CIA inspector general and to the Presidential Review Board headed by the late Sen. John G. Tower.

Fernandez claimed the material withheld by the CIA would show that CIA officials knew of his activities and that therefore he had no need to lie about them. Attorney General Richard Thornburgh backed Webster’s decision to withhold the documents, saying use of the classified material in the trial would cause “serious damage to the national security.”

The Classified Information Procedures Act of 1980 provides ways for classified information to be handled by a court without making it public. For example, after classified information has been seen by the judge, the defense, and the prosecution, the information can be disclosed in a trial in summary form. Instead of naming a country, the summary might refer to it as a “Latin American country.”

None of the information Webster wanted to withhold from public disclosure was really new. Most of it had already appeared in the press. But Webster accepted the position of Stolz, then the deputy director for operations, and others, who said that for the CIA to confirm—even in a judge’s chambers—that a company was used as a CIA front, or that a country helped the CIA, would breach the trust that others place in the agency and would embarrass the countries involved.

Both Bruemmer and Webster felt that the kind of information they withheld in the Fernandez case was similar to the information withheld by the CIA at Webster’s direction
in the trial of Oliver North. In the North case, U.S. District Court judge Gerhard A. Gesell in Washington had allowed the trial to proceed. However, U.S. District Court judge Claude M. Hilton in Alexandria threw out the charges against Fernandez, saying the former CIA officer could not receive a fair trial without the ability to use the documents. Webster and Bruemmer believed that if Gesell had been the judge on the case, the trial would have been allowed to proceed.
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Bruemmer made it a point to drop in every day on Webster and the deputy directors. They were his clients, and he wanted them to feel he was accessible. He established a particularly close relationship with Stolz, who relied on him more and more for his advice. Even if an operation was taking place overseas, there were all kinds of tricky legal questions. For example, a proposed action might fall somewhere between a covert action and an intelligence operation. Should Congress be told under the law that requires notification of covert actions? Much of the agency’s day-to-day activity was governed by Executive Order 12333, which even the lawyers found confusing.

Meanwhile, in the fall of 1988, Bruemmer settled a lawsuit filed against the CIA by people who had unknowingly been subjected to mind-control drug testing by Dr. D. Ewen Cameron of the Allan Memorial Institute of McGill University in Montreal. To try to alter human behavior, Cameron subjected patients who had come to him for help with psychiatric problems to LSD, electroshock treatment up to seventy-five times the normal level, and drug-induced sleep that lasted for weeks—all without their consent.

After learning of the experiments, the CIA had used a front organization to provide funding for Dr. Cameron in exchange for access to his results. While Bruemmer thought the government would have won the case, he decided the bad publicity from a trial would not be worth it. Under the settlement, the seven defendants received a total of about $750,000.
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Bruemmer left in 1990 to return to his partnership at Wilmer, Cutler & Pickering. To replace Bruemmer, Webster appointed Elizabeth Rindskopf. A former general counsel at the National Security Agency who had previously worked as
a civil rights lawyer, Rindskopf had dealt with Webster and Bruemmer on a variety of cases while at NSA.

Rindskopf had raised the hackles of independent counsel Lawrence E. Walsh because of the way she refused to provide him with NSA information relating to the Iran-contra affair. On the other hand, while at NSA, she had sided with agency employees who had had difficulty getting their writing cleared for publication. Often, it took a year to obtain clearance, and Rindskopf took on the NSA offices that resisted changes she wanted to speed the review process.

Today the office of general counsel has 125 employees, including 60 lawyers, compared with 14 lawyers before the Church Committee hearings. The office now details attorneys to most of the directorates, including the directorate of operations. There, eight lawyers sit in on many of the meetings held by the agency’s top spy—something that would have been bitterly resisted in earlier years.

A
S THE
C
OLD
W
AR ENDED, NEWSPAPERS AND MAGAZINES
carried stories questioning the role of the CIA. Now that the Soviet threat had diminished, was it relevant? Should the agency turn its attention to economic matters? Should it emphasize analysis more than human spying? Should it emphasize human spying more than technical surveillance? Should its staff be cut? Should it be abolished?

As with almost everything else concerning the CIA, there was a gap between the public perception and the reality. Even at the height of the Cold War, the CIA had allocated no more than 12 percent of its budget to spying on the Soviets, excluding the costs of major technical collection systems. With the exception of Great Britain, Canada, and Australia, the CIA had always spied on every country in the world. The reason was that no one knew when a country such as Iraq, which the U.S. had supported during its war with Iran, might decide to threaten U.S. interests.

Well before the media questioning began, the CIA had started shifting its resources. Soviets were no longer the first-priority target in many stations around the world. Counter-terrorism, counternarcotics, nuclear proliferation, and economic issues assumed greater importance. When the Persian Gulf War began, the CIA reallocated money from the rest of its divisions to the Near East Division to cope with that crisis. As the Soviets released their grip on Eastern Europe, the CIA prepared to deal with friendly governments there. In one year alone, two thousand new publications sprang up in Eastern Europe, and each had to be reviewed as well. Covert action had already been cut to no more than a dozen programs a year, compared with hundreds in the 1950s and early 1960s.

Meanwhile, the CIA began planning reductions in staff. For the past ten years, the CIA’s staff had been increasing by an average of five hundred a year. But over the next six years, Congress had mandated a 15 percent cut in personnel. Within the Directorate of Operations, this would mean a reduction of 890 positions.

“Twenty years ago, we watched the Soviet Union,” William Webster said just before he retired in 1991 as director of Central Intelligence. “We listened for hiccups. Today, we have an entirely different picture. The Soviet hegemony over Eastern Europe is gone. We have new countries seeking relationships with us. We have the Soviet Union in turmoil. It’s a different kind of instability. It [the end of the Cold War] also unlocked a lot of old rivalries and hatreds. Yugoslavia is breaking up. You have regional conflicts everywhere. We were not poised to deal with every kind of regional conflict.”
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To deal with the future, Webster took a slot for the CIA’s executive director, a largely irrelevant position used primarily to sign off on financial matters, and used it in the fall of 1990 to create a new position—deputy director for planning and coordination. The first official in the job was Gary E. Foster, a former director of the Office of Medical Service within the CIA.

Unlike the other deputy directors, Foster had no directorate under him. With offices on the seventh floor of the CIA’s old
building, Foster had a staff of just twenty. It was his job to be a catalyst—to bring together CIA officers from each of the directorates to help chart the agency’s future.

A short man with a salt-and-pepper beard, Foster set up twenty-four teams of officers from the relevant directorates to look into a range of issues, from counterintelligence, economics, and weapons proliferation to training, the agency’s work force, and how the CIA deals with its assets or agents. Each of the task forces produced working papers to take the CIA into the next century.

“The key is flexibility,” Foster would say. “Each plan must be reevaluated every year.”

Meanwhile, the CIA was buffeted by a range of criticism, much of it uninformed. Some said the agency had failed to predict the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait, which was not true, or that it had failed to predict that hardliners would seek to topple the government of Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev, as they did in August 1991. That also was not true. As Sen. David L. Boren, the Oklahoma Democrat who headed the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, said just after the coup failed, “For several months now, the President and those of us in the congressional leadership have been told by the intelligence community that we had to take very, very seriously the possibility of this kind of coup.”