The Way of the Knife Read online

  More than a decade later, with another Democratic president in charge, Blair would try once again to get between the CIA and the White House. It would be fatal to his career.

  4: RUMSFELD’S SPIES

  “We seem to have created our own CIA, but like Topsy, uncoordinated and uncontrolled.”

  —Deputy Secretary of Defense Frank Carlucci, 1982

  “Given the nature of our world, isn’t it conceivable that the Department ought not to be in a position of near total dependence on CIA in situations such as this?”

  —Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, 2001

  In November 2001, as teams of American Green Berets, CIA operatives, and Afghan warlords were dislodging the Taliban forces from Kabul and Kandahar, Donald Rumsfeld flew to Fort Bragg, North Carolina, a sprawling base in Fayetteville that for years had been home to large numbers of the military’s special-operations troops. It was primarily meant to be a day for glad-handing, with Rumsfeld meeting with the Special Forces commanders to thank them for what had been, thus far, a surprisingly easy invasion of Afghanistan.

  After a morning of congratulations and PowerPoint presentations, Rumsfeld was driven to a walled-off compound straddling Fort Bragg and adjacent to Pope Air Force Base. It was the home of the Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC), a highly classified organization comprised mostly of Army Delta Force operatives and members of the Naval Special Warfare Development Group, commonly called SEAL Team Six. JSOC was a small operational arm of the larger U.S. Special Operations Command, and at the time the Pentagon refused to acknowledge the group even existed.

  JSOC put on a show for the visiting defense secretary. To demonstrate its ability to insert commandos into countries undetected, soldiers parachuted out of a plane and landed right in front of Rumsfeld. One of them, wearing a suit and carrying a briefcase, shed his parachute and walked away from the landing zone in his wingtip shoes. Rumsfeld was also taken to a “shoot house,” where he watched a practice hostage-rescue operation—the JSOC operatives pretending to kill off all hostage-takers without harming the captives. Rumsfeld was immediately sold.

  By that point, the special-operations group was well experienced in showing off for visiting officials. Years earlier, in 1986, Representative Dick Cheney went to Fort Bragg for a day of meetings with Delta Force commanders and heard about how Delta Force was using databases to mine information about possible terrorism threats. In the middle of a briefing about LexisNexis—the now-ubiquitous news-and-document database that was then a novelty—Cheney asked the military briefer to search the database for his name. The top story was a news article about a bill in the House of Representatives that Cheney had sponsored and how another congressman had said the day before that he would vote against it.

  Cheney was livid. He ordered the watch officer to track down the congressman and then, from inside the operations center, he screamed at the man over the phone. “We had to clear the place out,” remembered Thomas O’Connell, then a top JSOC intelligence officer, who said that Cheney seemed like “a changed man” when he saw the power of using databases to gather information about specific individuals. From that point on, said O’Connell, “Cheney was in his comfort zone dealing with special operators.”

  Seventeen years later, on a similar pilgrimage to Fort Bragg, Cheney’s old mentor Donald Rumsfeld also thought he was getting a glimpse of the future. Accompanying Rumsfeld on the trip was Robert Andrews, who had been at Rumsfeld’s side almost constantly in the weeks since the September 11 attacks. Andrews was the Pentagon’s top civilian official in charge of special operations, and, like Virgil in Dante’s Inferno, he had been guiding Rumsfeld through a dark world, which had expanded dramatically since Rumsfeld’s first tour as defense secretary, during the Ford administration.

  Rumsfeld couldn’t have found a more experienced guide. A folksy native of Spartanburg, South Carolina, Andrews graduated with a chemical-engineering degree from the University of Florida in 1960 and joined the Army as part of an ROTC commitment he thought would keep him in uniform for just two years. Instead, by 1963 he had joined the Green Berets and began what would turn into five decades immersed in the world of special operations and intelligence. The following year, he left for Vietnam as a young Special Forces captain, bound for the first of two tours as part of a covert paramilitary unit running a secret war against North Vietnam with sabotage, assassination, and black propaganda. The group, known officially by the bland bureaucratic name Military Assistance Command, Vietnam—Studies and Observation Group (MACV–SOG), conducted the largest and most intricate covert operations the United States had carried out since the days of the OSS.

  Andrews returned from Vietnam and wrote a book, The Village War, about the extensive intelligence networks in South Vietnamese hamlets that the Communists had set up during the early 1960s and used to outmaneuver South Vietnamese and American forces during the war. The book was based almost exclusively on interrogation reports of captured North Vietnamese Army and Viet Cong soldiers and the accounts of North Vietnamese defectors. Andrews’s book was widely read inside the CIA, and in 1975, just after Saigon fell to troops from the North, he was asked to work at Langley as the head of a team scrubbing the agency’s classified analysis of Vietnam.

  “Essentially, it was looking at intelligence failures,” recalled Andrews, who came to realize that America’s problems in Vietnam had as much to do with a deep ignorance of the culture and psychology of the Vietnamese as any specific military blunders. He stayed at the CIA for five years before leaving to work in the defense industry and begin writing a string of spy thrillers and mysteries, including one called The Towers. The book was about a former CIA operative frantically trying to defuse a terrorist plot inside the United States. On the cover was a picture of the World Trade Center.

  Andrews was sixty-four years old when he returned to the Pentagon in 2001, and he was sitting by Rumsfeld’s side on September 25, when General Charles Holland, head of U.S. Special Operations Command (SOCOM), provided the first briefing about how the military would fight its war against al Qaeda. Rumsfeld had ordered Holland to come up with a plan for a worldwide campaign beyond the al Qaeda stronghold of Afghanistan, and when Rumsfeld gathered his aides around a conference table, he had expected to be told that might be possible.

  The briefing got off to a promising start, when Holland showed a map and ticked off the list of countries—Afghanistan, Pakistan, Somalia, Yemen, Mauritania, even parts of Latin America—where the military believed Osama bin Laden’s lieutenants were hiding. Rumsfeld became animated and interrupted the general.

  “How soon can we begin operations in these countries?” he asked.

  Holland considered the question. After a pause, he told Rumsfeld exactly what the irascible defense secretary didn’t want to hear.

  “Well, it would be difficult, because we don’t have any actionable intelligence,” Holland replied.

  There was another problem: SOCOM wasn’t even prepared to fight that kind of war—or any war, for that matter. The command’s job was only to train special-operations troops, get them ready to fight, and send them off to the Pentagon’s other regional military headquarters in the Middle East, the Pacific, and elsewhere. The regional commanders jealously guarded their own patches of the globe and looked dimly at the prospect of SOCOM running its own missions on their turf.

  Things then went from bad to worse when Rumsfeld asked Holland another question, one he figured might get an acceptable response. When would special-operations troops get into Afghanistan and begin the war there?

  “When we get clearance from the CIA,” Holland replied.

  Robert Andrews looked over at Rumsfeld, whom Andrews recalled was in the process of “screwing himself into the ceiling.” In a matter of minutes, he had been told that not only did his expensive special-operations troops lack any intelligence about al Qaeda; they also couldn’t even go to the battlefield without getting permission from George Tenet and the CIA.

 
This was something that frustrated Rumsfeld frequently during the months after the September 11 attacks, so often that he once complained to General Tommy Franks, commander of U.S. Central Command and the general in charge of the Afghan war, that even though the Defense Department was many times the size of the CIA, the military was like “little birds in a nest, waiting for someone to drop food in their mouths.” Days after the war in Afghanistan began he had dashed off an acerbic memo to Joint Chiefs chairman General Richard Myers. “Given the nature of our world,” Rumsfeld wrote, “isn’t it conceivable that the Department ought not to be in a position of near total dependence on CIA in situations such as this?”

  Rumsfeld had long been critical of the intelligence agency. In 1998, when he was chairman of an independent commission to assess the ballistic-missile threat to the United States, he wrote a letter to Tenet that was a withering indictment of CIA judgments about the missile capabilities of Iran and North Korea. But now, in the midst of a new war, he realized he envied the spy agency’s ability to send its operatives anywhere, at any time, without having to ask permission. “You can legitimately trace the change in warfare back to the realization that we didn’t have the intelligence to fight the war we wanted to fight,” said Andrews about his boss’s decisions in the year after the September 11 attacks.

  Rumsfeld concluded that the only answer was to make the Pentagon more like the CIA.

  —

  DONALD RUMSFELD’S CONCERNS weren’t entirely new. In 1980, after a fiery debacle in the Dasht-e Kavir, Iran’s Great Salt Desert, the Pentagon decided it needed more of its own spies.

  The clandestine mission that April to rescue fifty-two hostages imprisoned in the American-embassy compound in Tehran was snakebitten from the start: Three of the eight helicopters involved in the rescue operation developed mechanical problems on the way to the remote landing strip; another crash-landed at the rendezvous point; and, shortly after commanders gave the order to abort the mission, a helicopter caught in a sandstorm collided with a military cargo plane, killing eight soldiers in an explosion that lit up the desert sky.

  And yet the botched mission in Iran was not, in the military’s view, simply a tragic confluence of naive expectations, poor planning, and failed execution. In the minds of some of the commandos who watched their friends die in the explosions in the desert, Operation Eagle Claw had been partly undone by the failure of the Central Intelligence Agency to provide tactical information about what to expect during the mission.

  Even before its disastrous conclusion, the operation had been beset by fights between the CIA and the military about how to gather intelligence for the mission. The spy agency had already shown it was unable to understand the dynamics of the Iranian Revolution, with CIA director Stansfield Turner lamenting during National Security Council meetings that the agency had few sources in the country and was largely relying on American newspaper reports and the BBC for information. The Delta Force commander for the mission didn’t trust the CIA officers assigned to collect intelligence in Iran before the operation, so he sent former Green Beret Richard Meadows into the country to conduct surveillance of the embassy compound where the hostages were being held. Traveling on a fake Irish passport and masking his West Virginia accent with a brogue, Meadows had cleared customs posing as “Richard Keith,” a European automobile executive.

  Of course, the American troops never even made it into Tehran to carry out the rescue. But generals at the Pentagon complained that the Defense Department had no ability to send its own people on clandestine spying missions to help pave the way for commando operations. In a memorandum to the head of the Defense Intelligence Agency in December 1980, one general on the Pentagon’s Joint Staff wrote about a “serious and persistent information deficiency” and the need for a group of “reliable human observers.” With the Pentagon making plans for a second rescue attempt in Iran, the Joint Chiefs of Staff hastily created a group of such observers. It became known as the Field Operations Group.

  The group bore the unfortunate acronym FOG, and did very little. The hostages were released on the day of President Reagan’s inauguration, in January 1981, making another rescue attempt in Iran unnecessary. But even after FOG was disbanded, Army chief of staff Edward Meyer saw the need for a permanent cadre of Pentagon spies and, at one Pentagon meeting, barked, “I’ll be damned if we ever get caught in another Iranian hostage situation where we can’t find out what’s going on or where we can’t get into the country.” The military’s Intelligence Support Activity (ISA) was born.

  These programs during the early 1980s weren’t the Pentagon’s first foray into the human-intelligence game. But previous spying efforts had been halting, in part because of resistance from top generals and admirals, who thought that soldiers shouldn’t also be spies. But the Operation Eagle Claw fiasco gave greater leverage to those who wanted to expand the Pentagon’s ranks of human spies, most prominently the Army’s General Meyer. The Intelligence Support Activity opened an office inside the Pentagon with approximately fifty people but with ambitions of growing to five times that size. The unit’s official blazon featured various symbols to represent the failed Iranian rescue mission and carried the phrase SEND ME, drawn from a passage from the Book of Isaiah: “Also I heard the voice of the Lord, saying, ‘Whom shall I send, and who will go for us?’ Then I said, ‘Here am I! Send me.’”

  The ISA was set up in 1981 with a large black budget, a brash, hard-charging Army colonel as its commander, and permission to carry out secret spying operations without even having to notify the Joint Chiefs of Staff. They were the perfect ingredients for a toxic recipe. The world of secret operations is filled with Type-A personalities, and a clandestine unit with unlimited funds and a vague mission is bound to push legal boundaries. The ISA run by Colonel Jerry King was no exception.

  Almost from the beginning, King launched a number of off-the-books operations around the globe. Undoubtedly the most colorful was an operation to funnel money and equipment to a retired Green Beret planning a private mission to rescue American POWs suspected of being held in Laos. For several years, James “Bo” Gritz had been traveling to Southeast Asia to gather information about possible POWs, trips that were bankrolled by Texas tycoon H. Ross Perot. By early 1981, shortly after the creation of the ISA, Gritz believed he had found hard evidence that dozens of POWs were being held at a camp in central Laos. The information had come from a satellite image of the camp taken years earlier, in which the figures B and 52 seemed to have been formed—a possible signal from POWs to whomever might be watching from the sky.

  He began planning a rescue mission and even gave it a code name: Velvet Hammer. Gritz assembled a team of twenty-five retired Special Forces soldiers, trained them at a camp in Florida, and sent a separate group to Thailand to lay the groundwork for the mission into Laos. As Gritz prepared for the mission, many members of the ISA contacted him and offered their support: tens of thousands of dollars’ worth of camera equipment, radios, plane tickets to Bangkok, and polygraph equipment to determine whether local sources providing information about the POW camp might be lying. The ISA also gave satellite photos and other intelligence information to Gritz’s team.

  Colonel King had begun supporting Gritz without notifying top Pentagon officials. That turned out to be a problem, as the Joint Chiefs of Staff all the while had secretly been drawing up their own plans for a rescue mission at the exact same camp in Laos. The Joint Chiefs’ plan called for sending a reconnaissance team of Laotian mercenaries across the border from Thailand into Laos to determine whether there were indeed any POWs being held there. If the mercenaries found proof that the POWs were at the camp, the Pentagon would launch a rescue operation modeled after the Iranian hostage rescue mission, sending a Delta Force team into the camp.

  When top Pentagon and CIA officials learned about Gritz’s parallel rescue mission, secretly supported by the ISA, they threatened to shut the group down. They thought that Gritz’s freelancing had endangered th
e official rescue operation and that Colonel King had gone beyond his brief. As it turned out, no rescue missions were carried out on the camp in Laos, and no definitive proof was ever found that POWs were held there. Secretary of Defense Caspar Weinberger ordered the Pentagon inspector general to investigate all of the ISA’s operations. Besides the Gritz episode, the ISA had also been secretly running undercover operations in Panama City to monitor General Manuel Noriega and was involved at the margins of an extensive network of front companies used for covert military activities around the world. The network of companies, part of a program called Yellow Fruit, helped enable some of the secret deals of the Iran–Contra scandal that came to light several years later.

  The inspector general’s report on the ISA was blistering. It portrayed the group as a rogue unit with little adult supervision and documented profligate spending by the intelligence unit, including a string of bizarre purchases: a Rolls-Royce, a hot-air balloon, and a dune buggy. The report stunned both Weinberger and Deputy Secretary of Defense Frank Carlucci. In May 1982, Carlucci wrote a memo calling the report “disturbing in the extreme.” Carlucci had arrived at the Pentagon from the CIA, where he had been Admiral Stansfield Turner’s deputy and had seen the toll that years of unsupervised black operations had taken on the CIA.

  “We should have learned the lesson of the ’70s,” Carlucci wrote in his memo about the inspector general’s report, but instead “we have created an organization that is unaccountable.” He made a comparison to the character of Topsy, from Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin, a young slave girl whose origins and growth nobody in the book could explain: “We seem to have created our own CIA,” he wrote, “but like Topsy, uncoordinated and uncontrolled.”