Inside the CIA (16 page)

“The agency became very depressed because the information within the agency became public,” John McMahon, a former CIA deputy director of operations under Casey, said. “It was the first time a lot of the employees knew some of the things that the agency did. This . . . screwing around with the drugs just everybody abhorred.

“The agency deserved to be chastised over that crap,” McMahon said. “Even though it was just a handful of people in the agency who did it, and they’re a bunch of jerks, the fact is that the atmosphere permitted it. That’s why I’m a great proponent of oversight. Oversight is the greatest protection for the agency because it precludes these things from happening.”

As one might expect, most of the abuses had occurred in the Directorate of Operations, the clandestine service devoted to breaking the laws of other countries. This raised the question
of whether people who choose to be spies could ever be trusted to obey the law in this country.

“Evangelists do not necessarily do well in the CIA,” Saunders said. “The nature of the work may require that you go overseas and break the law—foreign law, not American law. You may have to cheat and steal and tell some lies about working for some funky organization other than the CIA. It can be a pretty schizophrenic existence, and not everyone can keep their marbles rolling right.”

But the best officers keep it all in perspective.

“They may spend the good part of the day trying to figure out how to spirit the code cards out of the local Soviet embassy, but when the sun goes down, they punch out and take the wife and kids to the movies,” Saunders said. “Those who don’t punch out sometimes find it is more than they can handle.
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“I don’t think anybody in the CIA ever had a problem with responsible scrutiny and regulation,” Saunders said. “The problem is irresponsible scrutiny. The winks and nods and tacit approvals: ‘I don’t want to hear these things. Don’t tell me this. I need to deny any knowledge.’ Yet when an operation goes awry, these very same people turn on you.”

Despite all the abuses, “probably the CIA as an organization has fewer criminal indictments than any other branch of the government, certainly fewer than Congress,” Thomas Polgar, a former CIA officer, said. “Day in and day out, the level of morality in the agency, particularly in the clandestine service where there are opportunities to do otherwise, has been quite high.”
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Simmons, the former staff director of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence and a former CIA officer himself, said the CIA never was a rogue elephant.

“What you had was an elephant taking orders from the White House,” he said. “The president and his men were instructing the elephant. The CIA also generated ideas. If a clandestine organization is tasked by the president to come up with a solution to a problem, there is a tendency to say, ‘Let’s do something.’”

For most Americans who lived through the hearings in 1975
and 1976, the revelations of assassination plots and attempts to remove Castro’s beard are their only picture of the CIA and what it is all about. Because the agency operates in secret, they have no way of knowing of the changes that have taken place.

“I think the first thing that’s important to recognize is the generational change in the agency,” said Robert M. Gates, deputy director of Central Intelligence under Webster and Casey and later director of Central Intelligence. “The bulk of the people that founded the agency and were around for its so-called halcyon days for the most part had retired by the mid to late 1970s.

“The result is that today only a quarter of the agency worked there before the Church Committee. So what you have is a whole new generation of employees and managers who have grown up in the agency in an atmosphere of both intense public scrutiny of the agency and an environment of congressional oversight. I think this group of people has grown up very much accepting of congressional oversight,” Gates said.
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Today, as a result of the Church Committee hearings, the CIA and other intelligence organizations come under the jurisdiction of House and Senate select committees on intelligence. The Senate committee has fifteen members and forty staff members, including twenty-five professionals, who concentrate on particular subjects or geographic areas. The majority and minority members have access to the same information and the same staff members.

Staff members receive briefings from CIA officers in room SH 219 of the Hart Office Building, around the corner from the committee. An unmarked door opens into a foyer guarded by a member of the Capitol Hill police. Only members or staff of the committee are allowed any farther. If they bring visitors, the visitors must sign in.

Inside is one of the most secure installations in the U.S. government—a bugproof, soundproof chamber that would give the wiliest KGB bugging expert a run for his money. Protected by vaulted doors, it is a room within a room, raised so that all sides can be inspected for bugs. Made of steel, the
room prevents any electromagnetic waves from entering or leaving. Even the electrical supply is filtered electronically to prevent any signal emanations.

The inner room is divided into smaller rooms where CIA and National Security Agency briefers drop the biggest secrets in Washington. There is also a hearing room where the senators take closed testimony. It has mauve chairs and a map of the world over the horseshoe-shaped desk where the senators sit.

The witness desk is outfitted with a public address system, but it was not loud enough to make former CIA director William J. Casey’s muttering audible, so the committee installed a separate system just for Casey. It allowed senators to plug in earphones and turn up the volume. But it did no good—those who knew him say Casey was perfectly understandable, but only when he wanted to be heard—and the system is not now used.

The House committee is largely a mirror image of the Senate committee, except that it has a staff for the minority party and one for the majority party. The House committee has nineteen members and twenty-two staff members, including fourteen professionals. In addition to passing on everything the Senate committee approves, the House committee approves the budget for tactical intelligence and related activities by the military. Known as TIARA, this amounts to $11 billion a year.

The committees receive all of the CIA’s finished products such as the National Intelligence Estimates and the National Intelligence Daily. Occasionally, staff members visit Langley to look at raw files, as the Senate committee did during an investigation of the CIA’s activities in El Salvador. The Senate committee has three certified public accountants who examine the books of the agencies.

Generally, the Senate committee holds as many as eighteen budget hearings each year on what is known as the national foreign intelligence budget—some $18.3 billion a year. Of that sum, the CIA receives $3.2 billion. The greatest allocation—$6.2 billion—goes to the National Reconnaissance Office, which is in charge of developing satellites. The
next highest sum of $3.9 billion goes to NSA. Together with tactical collection, the total spent for intelligence by the U.S. government is $29.3 billion a year.
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In addition to budget hearings, the committees hold hearings on subjects like the Soviet Union or particular problems, such as the poor security at the old American embassy in Moscow. Sometimes, the committees’ best information comes from the press, as happened when
Al Shiraa,
a Lebanese magazine, reported on November 3, 1986, that then national security adviser Robert McFarlane had accompanied a shipment of U.S. arms to Iran, opening up the Iran-contra scandal.

Under the 1974 Hughes-Ryan Amendment, a presidential finding declaring it is in the national interest had to precede any covert action. Each covert action had to be reported in “timely fashion” to the Senate and House committees. In 1980, Congress amended the National Security Act of 1947 to add a new section on oversight of intelligence activities. Under that section, the CIA had to keep the two intelligence committees informed of “significant anticipated intelligence activity,” which would include any unusual and especially sensitive intelligence gathering in friendly countries. In 1991, Congress passed new legislation that added more precise definitions and safeguards to the reporting requirements. It also broadened the requirements to cover any U.S. government entity, including the National Security Council.

In practice, the CIA informs the committees of any important events—covert action and unusual intelligence operations—within forty-eight hours. Most spying in friendly countries is not considered unusual and therefore is not reported. Only rarely do congressional committees learn identities of assets or agents, and then it is usually when one has gone bad and created problems.

Until William Webster became director of Central Intelligence, the committees rejected a covert action at least once a year, usually when it had something to do with supporting candidates in elections in foreign countries. One or both of the committees then wrote a letter to the president. If the president insists on going ahead with a plan, either of the
committees can stop the funding for the project. More recently, the committees—while never enthusiastic about covert action—have almost never rejected a proposal.

Looking into requests for covert action takes up 30 percent to 40 percent of the time of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, according to former staff director Robert R. Simmons.

“Covert action is a high-profile item for congressional oversight,” he said. “Does that mean mistakes can’t be made? No. But it is politically charged. It is budgeted on a line-item basis.”

When Casey was director of Central Intelligence, the CIA engaged in covert action without obtaining a presidential finding in order to carry out the Iran-contra scheme. A year after arms had been shipped to Iran, Casey, at the insistence of his deputy, John McMahon, asked President Reagan to issue a finding. That finding authorized the sales retroactively. The finding specified that Congress was not to be told about it. John Poindexter, the national security adviser at the time, testified that he destroyed the only copy of the December 1985 finding, to save the president political embarrassment.
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The CIA had come full circle from the days of the Church Committee hearings. Again it had violated the law by acceding to pressure from the White House. Again it had gotten itself into trouble by not informing Congress of its activities.

“In intelligence, you have to lie, cheat, and steal to get the truth,” Simmons, the former staff director of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, said. “The reason is it is for your national security. But it must stop when you are dealing with your own government. Sometimes it didn’t. Some of them treated Congress as they would a foreign country.
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“If you read the Constitution, which many of those people have never done, they would find the founding fathers described the powers of the legislature first,” Simmons said.

But this time, there was a difference. In the Iran-contra affair, Congress was not at fault for not wanting to hear about it. And this time the CIA’s role in the arms sales and the diversion of profits to the contra rebels was that of expediter. Both Casey and Oliver North knew that they could not get
the CIA itself to arrange and carry out the operations. The CIA could be pushed only so far, and setting up proprietaries—companies owned by the CIA as a cover—and arranging the details of arms shipments was the most it would do. That was why Oliver North had to arrange for the operation to be carried out by a self-financed arm of the National Security Council.

“It shows Casey could not use the agency, even though he was an aggressive director,” Miller, the former staff director of the Church Committee, said.

But there is another side to the story, one that rarely comes out. That is the pressure that members of Congress sometimes bring to bear on the agency to violate its own rules. Sometimes the pressure is to buy from constituents, to reinstate security clearances for employees whose clearances have been revoked, or to locate buildings in home districts of members of Congress—a rather routine occurrence in government. But at times the pressure takes a more unusual turn.

In May 1990, the CIA invited Rep. Bud Shuster, a Pennsylvania Republican and a member of the House Select Committee on Intelligence, to speak at the agency’s training center at Camp Peary in Virginia. The CIA said the agency would fly him down for the talk on a Thursday and fly him back the same day. Shuster agreed to do it, but asked to be flown back instead to Hagerstown, Maryland, not far from Chambers-burg, Pennsylvania, at the center of his district.

Since Hagerstown is 60 miles beyond Washington, the CIA’s plane would have had to travel an extra 120 miles to accommodate Shuster. The agency told him it would be against government regulations to fly him the extra distance.

Shuster said he was going to his home state for legitimate business. But that made no difference to the CIA. As a member of Congress, Shuster had an official allowance to cover trips. If he went beyond that allowance, he was personally liable for them. Under the complex rules that bind government agencies, the CIA could only pick up and return Shuster to his office in Washington.

Infuriated, Shuster refused to give the talk, and on May 8, 1990, he wrote an angry letter to William Webster. Likening
the CIA’s decision to “risk aversion” in the intelligence business, Shuster said the symbol of the intelligence community had become a turtle with its head pulled in. He called the agency’s officials “Lilliputians”—small-minded, petty people.

“Judge, you’ve got a problem. We’ve got a problem. I fear for the security of my country,” he wrote.
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Instead of Congress’s berating the CIA for breaking the law, a member of Congress was now berating the agency for refusing to go against government regulations. Like the agency when it broke the law, Shuster was using the rubric of national security to justify his own ill-advised actions.