Company Man: Thirty Years of Controversy and Crisis in the CIA (7 page)

On the way out, the HPSCI security staff offered to escort me in a way that would shield me from the cameras and reporters still staked out in the Rotunda. I declined because this time I had something I did want to say publicly. Pausing under the TV lights and in front of the microphones, I made a four-word statement: “I told the truth.” Then I turned and waded my way back through the crush of tourists to the Agency van, waiting outside where I had left it four hours before.

My appearance garnered some favorable reviews. The HPSCI leaders, Reyes and Pete Hoekstra, told reporters afterward that I had been a “cooperative” witness, with Reyes adding that I had “provided highly detailed” responses and “walked the committee through the entire matter, dating back to 2002.”
Legal Times
, a nationwide periodical for the legal community, ran a front-page story (including a large photo of me giving that wave) headlined “The Company’s Man,” recounting my HPSCI appearance and Agency career in largely positive terms. Another legal publication I had never heard of,
Corporate Counsel
, even did a piece on my appearance. The title: “Not Spooked: CIA Lawyer John Rizzo Keeps His Cool in Contentious Congressional Hearings.”

For myself, I was just relieved that I had emerged from the hearing in one piece. With John Durham’s criminal investigation in full stream, the HPSCI never bothered calling another witness. The long-running tape-destruction saga was finally behind me. Almost.

Nearly two years later, in the late summer of 2009, I was summoned to testify before the federal grand jury impaneled to determine if any crimes had been committed in the destruction of the tapes. By this time I did have legal counsel, a longtime friend named Larry Barcella, a former federal prosecutor and one of Washington’s best criminal defense lawyers. My sworn four-hour testimony before the HPSCI had occurred almost two years earlier, and I had not had access to the hearing transcript in close to that long (the intelligence committees have never allowed the CIA to keep copies of their transcripts). And now I would have to give sworn testimony to the grand jury, with Durham’s prosecutors painstakingly marching me through the whole complicated story again. I am far from a maven on criminal law, but I knew that the easiest way to get myself in big-time legal trouble would be to tell Durham’s investigators
anything under oath that, even inadvertently, was at variance with what I had said under oath at the HPSCI all that time ago. Which is why I retained Larry, whom I trusted like a brother.

My grand jury testimony, conducted over two sessions, stretched to seven hours. I had to recount the whole story in detail one last time. Days before my final grand jury appearance in September 2009, I submitted my retirement papers to the CIA. After thirty-four years at the Agency, and seven years after the fateful decision was made to create the videotapes of the interrogation of Abu Zubaydah.

It was time.

The Agency I left at the end of 2009 was very different from the Agency I had joined in the beginning of 1976—except that both times the CIA was in turmoil. I hardly grasped it at the time, but my arrival at the CIA coincided with a number of seismic legal and institutional changes in the U.S. intelligence community.

Right before Christmas 1974, just a few months after Richard Nixon had resigned in disgrace following the Watergate scandal, the CIA for the first time in its history had been thrust into a harsh public spotlight. An explosive series of page 1 stories in the
New York Times
by Seymour Hersh had detailed a stunning array of questionable and in some cases illegal covert operations stretching back over twenty-five years—operations that included bizarre assassination plots against Fidel Castro and other foreign leaders, drug experiments on unsuspecting U.S. citizens, domestic surveillance of anti–Vietnam War groups on college campuses and elsewhere, and a massive program to monitor the mail of Americans thought to be opposed to the policies of the Johnson and Nixon administrations. This led in 1975 to a sensational series of congressional hearings led by Senator Frank Church, a theatrical politician with presidential aspirations. A passel of current and former senior CIA operatives were paraded before millions of TV viewers, and Church and his colleagues obligingly posed for the cameras with guns and other weapons used in the assassination plots.

I found myself intensely drawn to the proceedings. I had never—save for my brief exposure to a professor in college named Lyman Kirkpatrick, which I will talk about later in the book—given any thought to the
CIA during my life up to that point. I had read a couple of Ian Fleming’s James Bond novels and seen a few of the Sean Connery movie adaptations in high school, and I thought they were entertaining in a fantastical, mindless sort of way. I knew very little about the CIA’s history—that it was founded at the end of World War II, for instance, as the country’s first and preeminent intelligence service—or any of its current or past leaders. I guess I was vaguely aware that it was headquartered in suburban Virginia and that its mission was all sorts of highly secret derring-do, but that was about it.

In that respect, I was probably typical of most Americans at that period in the nation’s history. In the decades before the Hersh articles and Church hearings blew the lid off in the mid-’70s, the CIA operated in a largely black vacuum, mostly ignored by the mainstream media and coddled by the very few senior members of Congress who were ever told anything the Agency was doing (and, by all accounts, CIA directors never told them very much). The CIA even stiffed the Warren Commission in its landmark 1964 investigation into the death of President Kennedy—and got away with it.

At the time of the Church hearings, I was working at the U.S. Customs Service, part of the Treasury Department. It had a small office of about fifteen lawyers, and its portfolio included everything from narcotics enforcement to international trade issues. For a rookie lawyer, the job at Customs was fine. The work was reasonably interesting, I got to travel some, I liked the people I worked with, and the hours certainly weren’t backbreaking—everybody was in the office by 8:30 a.m., and everybody left at precisely 5:00 p.m. By 1975, however, I was quietly yearning for something different and more challenging. While playing hooky from work, I was glued to my TV, watching the Church Committee proceedings with a mixture of fascination and revulsion. Was this what the CIA was really like?

That was my first reaction. My second reaction was to wonder whether the CIA had any lawyers in its organization. I had no idea, but with Congress and the media demanding top-to-bottom reforms, I figured that if the CIA didn’t already have lawyers, it was going to need them. A lot of them.

There was nothing in my background or previous life experience to suggest that I would ever work for the CIA. I was born on October 6, 1947,
in the central Massachusetts city of Worcester, the product of a classic melting-pot marriage—an Irish American mother and an Italian American father. My dad’s immigrant father, a stonemason by trade, died when my father, Arthur, was sixteen, and that was when he became a man, taking on the role of a surrogate father to his two kid brothers. (He also had five older brothers.) My dad took on all sorts of part-time jobs to support the family, and at the same time attended classes at night at Bentley College in Boston, earning a business degree in 1932. Starting at the bottom, he then began what would be a very successful fifty-year career in the retail department-store business. Throughout his life, my dad was a quiet, somewhat shy, hardworking, thoroughly honest and decent man. Above all, he loved and cared for his family—his mother, his brothers, his wife, and his children.

My mother, Frances, was the daughter of a pharmacist. She was the middle child of five, two of whom died of tuberculosis in their twenties. Despite these early tragedies, my mom lived her entire life with her inherited Irish sense of wit, indomitability, and fierce loyalty to her family. More outgoing and socially active than my dad (she joined a bowling league and exercise club in her fifties), she adored and supported him unstintingly for the more than half century they were married, up to the day my dad died in 1996. She passed away two years later.

I can summarize my childhood and adolescence in five words: very happy and very uneventful. I was the youngest of three children, and the only boy. In a close-knit Italian-Irish American family, that meant I was pampered and indulged from the day I was born. My two older sisters, Maria and Nancy, accepted this with remarkable equanimity. In fact, they were unwaveringly protective of their kid brother as we were growing up (and continue to be to this day). When I was twelve, my dad got a big new job in Boston, so our family moved from Worcester to Wayland, a small town about twenty miles outside the Hub.

I spent my junior high and high school years in the excellent Wayland public schools. I was a pretty good student and active in things like the yearbook and newspaper, but I had no career ideas, save for a vague notion about becoming a Boston sports reporter. My logic was airtight: I could not only go free to Red Sox, Patriots, Celtics, and Bruins games, but get paid to do so, to boot.

Entering my senior year of high school in the fall of 1964, I was facing
my first major life decision, which was where to go to college. With the help of Mr. Lewis Oxford, my kindly if somewhat bemused high school guidance counselor, I considered the Ivy League schools. Although my grades had been fairly good, and I had done well on the SATs, I knew my credentials were not exactly eye-popping. So I immediately ruled out Harvard, Yale, and Princeton. Dartmouth or Cornell? Too rural. Columbia or Penn? Too smack dab in the middle of big cities.

That left Brown University, in sleepier Providence, Rhode Island. In the years to come, Brown would become among the most chic and selective of the Ivy schools, but in the mid-’60s it was widely viewed as a safe fallback school for an aspiring Ivy Leaguer. For me, it was my first and only realistic choice. And lo and behold, I got in, much to the evident relief and surprise of the patient Mr. Oxford.

My parents were thrilled. Although my sisters had gone to Tufts, I was the first member of the extended Rizzo family to go to an Ivy League college.

I arrived at Brown in September 1965 and graduated with a bachelor’s degree in political science in June 1969. They were the most formative years of my life, and I loved every minute I spent there. Little of it had to do with academics, however. What Brown really taught me was how to go from being a naïve, immature kid to being a grown man. I joined a fraternity, Beta Theta Pi, where I met a group of guys that would become lifelong friends, and which gave me a lifelong taste for fine clothes and good cigars. Being at Brown, and especially being at Beta, also gave me a badly needed set of social skills. I like to think that, on balance, it was a worthwhile return on investment for my proud parents, who happily paid every cent of my tuition plus a generous allowance, which I spent with gusto.

Looking back, the way I arrived at the decision to apply to Brown was markedly similar to the way I arrived at the decision, a decade later, to apply to the CIA. Essentially, both decisions were made on the basis of a leap-of-faith hunch. They were two of the best decisions I made in my life.