Company Man: Thirty Years of Controversy and Crisis in the CIA (14 page)

The confession stood on its own, but the worries we in the CIA had were nagging and persistent. At the time that the hapless, dumb Kampiles wandered into the crosshairs, the FBI had focused on another suspect. Someone who was living in a midwestern city whose name was quite close to “Ruggeri/Ruggerio,” that tantalizing shard of a clue passed along by our source. The Bureau was, in fact, about to get a court order to wiretap the poor guy and secretly search his house. Once Kampiles confessed, the FBI dropped its plans. To this day the anonymous, law-abiding Mr. Ruggeri/Ruggerio doubtless has no clue how close he came to being sucked into an international espionage case.

But the mysterious Ruggeri/Ruggerio bell could not be unrung. In all of his otherwise self-incriminating statements, Kampiles insisted he never gave his Russian handler any name, real or bogus. What made the Russians think that was what his name was?

It was much more than a curiously loose end to the case against Kampiles. It was potentially Brady material—
Brady
being a landmark Supreme Court case compelling the government in any criminal case to turn over to the defense any information in its files potentially exculpatory to the defendant. And surely we were in that territory here—the FBI not only had that lead, but had been chasing it down right up to the moment Kampiles obligingly popped up. And it seemed to point to someone other than Kampiles as the culprit.

The thought of providing to the defense any information that could conceivably be tied back to our source was, well, inconceivable to the CIA. Director Turner would have gone to President Carter—and that’s what it would have taken—to get him to order the attorney general to abort the prosecution. And a confessed traitor—a CIA employee, no less—would get away with what he did, courtesy of the CIA’s intercession. It would have ignited a huge, unprecedented firestorm. But it was conceivable.

The sense of dread and impending doom haunted me for weeks. The defense was filing a blizzard of motions asking all sorts of open-ended questions, and every week or so my boss, Tony Lapham, and I—the only CIA lawyers knowledgeable about the source—would agonize over a particular query that seemed to come close to the verboten area. Meanwhile, those cleared at the DOJ—the “kitchen sink” boys—were warily watching, too, seemingly all too ready to say “Okay, guys, that’s it. We gotta tell the defense.” Kampiles’s defense counsel sensed something was up, even if he didn’t know what, and kept probing. We kept dodging every bullet, but I thought it was only a matter of time.

But then, a few days before the trial was to begin, with CIA and FBI agents knowledgeable about the source slated to testify, a miracle happened.

Someone in the small circle of government officials clued in to the source—I’d like to say it was me, but it wasn’t—remembered seeing something at some point in the thousands of pages that made up the Kampiles investigative file. It was only a sentence or two, buried in the huge pile. Kampiles happened to mention to somebody, either his FBI interrogators or the people in the CIA to whom he confided, what clothes he was wearing when he met with his Soviet handler in Athens. He purposely dressed like a tourist, he said. Khaki pants and a rugby shirt. Not just any rugby shirt, he added, but one made by Rugger. With “Rugger” stitched on the left breast.

The nagging mystery was finally, suddenly solved. Kampiles’s Soviet handler must have figured the thing was a damn monogram. And no doubt proudly so reported it up his chain of command. With a little bit of mangled spelling.

Well, I thought for the first but far from the last time in my career, everybody in the spy trade screws up once in a while. And then I thought, also for the first but not the last time in my career, this is the kind of stuff I could never make up.

After that, the trial was almost an afterthought. With the Justice Department’s prodding, we grudgingly agreed to let the presiding judge, a no-nonsense midwesterner named Phil McNagny, look at the “Ruggeri/Ruggerio” information alone inside his chambers. I hand-carried the documents to him myself and waited outside to retrieve them when he was done. He confirmed what we knew already: The information was extremely sensitive, and extremely inculpatory to Kampiles. The defense would not see it, and nothing in the trial would get anywhere near it.

The trial lasted a week, and the jury came back after ten hours. Kampiles was found guilty of espionage and subsequently sentenced to forty years.

As for our source, I heard nothing more about him until a number of years later, when I learned that the Agency had just safely brought him in from the cold and resettled him in the United States. Which made me happy.

By 1979, Carter—despite his earlier stance, and like all presidents of all political stripes before and after him—was turning to the CIA as a uniquely valuable tool when unpredictable and ominous events in the world forced his hand. The Soviet Union had not only invaded Afghanistan but encouraged and supported, via weapons and advisors, proxy regimes there as well as in Africa and, especially, Central America, where the Sandinistas seized control in Nicaragua and fomented leftist insurgencies in its neighboring countries. Meanwhile, the shah of Iran was overthrown by the virulently anti-American forces of Ayatollah Khomeini, culminating in their November 1979 seizure of the U.S. embassy, with 52 U.S. Government employees (including CIA personnel) held hostage.

As it happened, this was also about the time when I received what turned out to be my career-making job assignment: I was named to the
post of legal advisor to the Directorate of Operations (DO). The DO was shorthand for the CIA’s clandestine service, the entity responsible for all undercover activities. For someone with less than four years of Agency experience, it was a plum position. I was given an office situated inside the spaces of the DO, working literally in the midst of the covert or “dark” side of CIA. At the time, it was the only legal assignment in the CIA located outside the physical confines of the OGC. (Today, there are about sixty such “on-site” lawyers scattered throughout virtually every component of the Agency.) I was never really told by my boss, Dan Silver (who had succeeded Tony Lapham as general counsel the year before), why he chose me for the job, but one reason quickly became apparent as soon as I settled into my new digs. My predecessor in the position was seen by many as brusque and condescending, and the word had been passed through the DO “rat line” (these guys were spies, after all) to avoid dealing with the DO lawyer if at all possible. So for the first few weeks after I arrived, I was the proverbial Maytag repairman from those old TV commercials—sitting in my office waiting in vain for my phone to ring.

Gradually, as I doggedly engaged in a sort of missionary work inside the cloistered environment of the DO, the tide began to turn, and I started to get phone calls and “walk-in” office visits by the clandestine service officers. I did my best to put them at ease and be responsive to all comers, whether junior or senior in rank. (I was told that my predecessor in his final months had taken to demanding to know the salary level of every DO caller before consenting to take the call.) In those early weeks I learned a lasting lesson about the psyche of CIA covert operatives, at least as far as how they relate to lawyers: They are totally focused on the mission but completely un-Machiavellian when seeking legal advice (otherwise, they wouldn’t be coming in the first place). They ask only that their lawyer not look or act like he thinks they are idiots, lunatics, or criminals.

And as 1979 turned into 1980, with the Carter administration finally rebooting the moribund CIA covert-action capabilities, my job as the DO legal advisor began to have booming business. I had to engage in crash, on-the-job training as the architect of another arcane CIA legal art form: Presidential Findings. These are the instruments, mandated by Congress in the mid-’70s, by which the president is required to personally approve in writing all covert-action programs. Congress created this
process to end forever the practice of undocumented, “wink and a nod” marching orders that presidents issued to the CIA in the halcyon years of the ’50s through the early ’70s, leading to everything from foreign coups to assassination plots.

From the time the congressional requirement legally kicked in, in the mid-’70s, up to 1979, covert action was virtually nonexistent, so I was operating on a largely blank page in trying to figure out how to write a Finding. The process would always begin the same way: A directive would come from the National Security Council (NSC), or sometimes the president himself, to draw up a covert-action proposal (defined as an activity designed to influence conditions abroad so that our government’s hand is not acknowledged or apparent) involving a particular objective. The CIA would then come up with a menu of options—it could run the gamut from a propaganda campaign to organizing an armed insurgency. The White House would pick and choose the options it was prepared to endorse, and that’s where I would come in. I would draft the Finding for the president’s signature, incorporating the White House’s wishes in language specific enough to accurately convey the mandate but broad enough not to require going back to the president for a new imprimatur for every new “wrinkle” after the program was launched.

Writing a Finding was thus a delicate and tricky endeavor, and I had no road map to follow. But orders for covert-action campaigns in Afghanistan and Central America first came out of the chute from the White House in late 1979, and they came quickly, so we at the CIA had to move quickly. Those first Findings were terse—two or three short paragraphs at the most—because the Carter White House was cautious about letting out too much “leash” to the CIA, and because we at the CIA had never really written any of the damn things before, so we erred on the side of brevity. Beginning in the mid-’80s, Findings would expand in length to more than a page, and they would keep getting longer, becoming almost mini–white papers in later years. But at the beginning, they were short and to the point. On one side of the page, the target country or region would be identified. On the opposite side, the actions the CIA would be authorized by the president to undertake.

Dan Silver and I cobbled together a shorthand vernacular for particular kinds of actions, the idea being that they could be plugged in as appropriate in all future Findings, thereby developing a glossary for covert
action. When “political action” is authorized, that means influencing a foreign government’s viewpoint toward the United States and/or U.S. policy objectives. It could include buying the favor of a local politician or creating a political movement abroad (the phrase does not include, however, the CIA effecting an outcome in a foreign election; something that aggressive and risky, we decided, required explicit presidential authorization). Some of the phrases we came up with were admittedly a bit sanitized, largely because we recognized that it was unlikely that any White House, and in particular the Carter White House, would countenance the president signing a directive to the CIA authorizing deception and misinformation campaigns or, in the ultimate case, killing people. No president would affix his signature to a piece of paper that contained the words
lie
or
kill
, so the former sort of activity was dubbed “all forms of propaganda,” while the latter was described as “lethal action.” Nonetheless, everyone involved would know what those terms meant, from the president to the congressional intelligence committees that receive copies of Findings.

Afghanistan was a particular challenge. President Carter ladled out our authorities carefully and incrementally, Finding by Finding. At first, we were not permitted to give arms or ammunition to the Afghan resistance (“lethal equipment” in Finding-speak), only “cash” and “logistical support.” This sort of calibration worked much better for us desk jockeys in Washington than it did for the CIA people in the field. I remember a visit early on from the chief of the CIA’s Afghan Task Force, who had a bewildering question about, of all things, mules. It seemed that the Afghan resistance fighters were in dire need of them to navigate the rugged Afghan topography and, in particular, to carry arms and attack the Soviet-backed forces. So, would the CIA’s providing them constitute “logistical support,” which was permitted, or “lethal equipment,” which was verboten? And the chief said he needed an answer right away—time was of the essence. As for almost every other question I had to confront as the DO lawyer, there was no statute or court precedent to help guide me on the appropriate legal status accorded mules. So I paused briefly, pondering whether or not a mule could be “lethal” in circumstances other than kicking some poor guy in the head. Deciding on pure gut instinct that a mule more properly belongs in the “logistical” category, I told our guy that we could provide the mules.

Navigating the Carter Findings on Central America, and Nicaragua especially, presented much more significant obstacles. In Afghanistan, at least the objective was clear from the outset: Get the Soviets, and their puppet government, out. In Central America, the objectives were subtler: deterring the Soviets, the Cubans, and their Sandinista acolytes from spreading their influence throughout the region. Our authorities stopped short of overthrowing the Sandinista regime in Nicaragua. That meant making a Nicaraguan resistance movement viable—hence, the Carter Findings authorized “political action”—but not strong enough militarily to force a change in government. And that’s what the Nicaraguan resistance (soon to be forever known as the “contras”) wanted and needed from the United States—because otherwise the contras knew they would be crushed by the increasingly despotic and brutal Sandinista regime. Regime change was their objective, but not the U.S. Government’s.