Inside the CIA (36 page)

At the end of the breakfast, Webster looked at her and said, “Well, I think I’m ready to make this decision. I’d like you to come and work for me.”

McGregor had planned to inform Webster that she was pregnant before he offered her the job. Now that that was no longer possible, she wanted to tell him before she accepted. McGregor wanted to tell Webster in private, so that he could quietly withdraw the offer, if he chose to do so, without any embarrassment. She was aware that Webster employed two assistants, and if she were on maternity leave, he would be left stranded. Not only would she be the first woman in the job, but McGregor would be pregnant in a sea of macho FBI agents.
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But both Gutman and Hassler were at the breakfast, and McGregor said she would have to think about it.

Webster was furious with his two assistants. He had understood that they would bring him only a candidate who wanted the job. He hated rejection, and after the breakfast, he raked them over the coals for not doing their homework.
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When she got back to her office, McGregor called Gutman.

“There is something I have to discuss personally with the judge,” she said.

“Well, what is it?” he asked.

“Something personal,” she said, cringing.

Webster was on a flight to Atlanta. When he called back, McGregor was in a meeting of partners working on a federal criminal case. They did not know of her application to the FBI.

“Nancy, the director of the FBI is calling,” a secretary announced.

The others at the table looked shocked.

McGregor excused herself and took the call in another office. She explained the problem, and Webster took it in stride.

“What a relief,” he said. “I was afraid you were going to tell me that you were a drug addict. That would have caused a problem.”

At the FBI, McGregor had to change from being a lawyer who kept a pile of papers on her desk to someone who locked up all her papers at night in a safe. She visited the FBI’s shooting range at Quantico, Virginia, and rode with the director to conferences. She would wander into the executive dining room and munch on the superb chocolate chip cookies made by Ray, the chef. When she found the dining room served Webster eggs and bacon or sausages every morning, she got the chief to vary the menu with healthier food such as fruit and cereal.

McGregor reviewed such sensitive matters as requests for wiretaps in counterintelligence cases and proposals to arrest spies. Webster wanted every question answered before he signed off on such matters, and if all the material had not been presented, she sent the memos back for more work. If something went wrong, she was often the first person to tell Webster. Her rapport with him was so good that FBI executives joked that if they wanted to break any bad news to the director, they would do it either through her or with her present.

On the other hand, even though Webster had been using them ever since he came to the FBI, some of the more seasoned FBI executives questioned Webster’s use of assistants. They had spent their careers building enough trust so they would be allowed to see the most sensitive secrets in the
government. Now young lawyers with no experience in FBI work were being allowed to see even more than they were.

Phillip Parker, the deputy assistant FBI director for operations in the counterintelligence division, was one of the FBI executives who came to call the assistants “munchkins.” It was not that he questioned their loyalty or trustworthiness; it was just that he found the thought of entrusting so much to inexperienced people unnerving.

On the other hand, James E. Nolan, who preceded Parker in the same job, saw no problem with them.

“It gave him a sounding board when he thought maybe the career people were stacking the deck on him. He could get somebody else to look at it,” Nolan said.

When Webster moved to the CIA, McGregor went with him. By then, Hassler had been replaced by Mark E. Matthews, a magna cum laude graduate of Harvard College. McGregor’s son, Ben, had just been born. McGregor took the required polygraph test at CIA headquarters. Since she was still nursing at the time, she had to leave the baby with a relative who lived near the compound so she could race back in time to feed him.

McGregor regarded the CIA with a healthy skepticism. In part because of turf battles, FBI agents often derided the CIA in private. They questioned its competence and its adherence to the law. She came to the new job with similar questions.

In turn, CIA officials treated McGregor and the other assistants with suspicion. She was the only woman among the top twenty CIA officials and aides who met with Webster every Tuesday morning. Early on, at one of the Tuesday meetings, Bill Baker turned to her and cracked, “You could be the answer to one of those ‘What’s Wrong with This Picture?’ shows.”

The assistants did not know the difference between an “agent” and an “officer.” Yet in some cases, it seemed to operations officers that the assistants felt they knew more than the officers did about intelligence.

For the assistants, extracting information was like pulling teeth.

“When we first came to the agency, it was clear that we
would have to fight for our jobs,” McGregor recalled. “So many of the employees were just unwilling to share information with anyone other than the director, and I’m not sure at the beginning they were always willing to share with the director. They are so used to compartmenting everything. We often got the impression that we had to ask precisely the right question to get the information we were looking for. But they were not going to help find the right one. That sort of attitude makes you uncertain whether you have ever gotten the whole story.”

John Bellinger, who replaced McGregor as an assistant at the CIA, sensed alarm bells going off every time he called someone in the Directorate of Operations. Usually, a higher-level official called him back with the answer to his question, rather than the person he had called.

The assistants found they had to fight to get parking near the building and to be allowed to eat in the executive dining room, a prime perquisite. The food was prepared by graduates of the Culinary Institute of America. When members of Congress or heads of foreign intelligence services came to dine, Webster would joke that the CIA ran the dining room. The chefs served salmon fillet with béarnaise sauce and pork chops with caramelized apples and angel-hair pasta for just $4 to $5.50.

To the people around Webster, it seemed they had been tossed into a sea of Casey lovers. By its very nature, the CIA seemed less hospitable than the FBI, which was populated by garrulous agents. McGregor found the CIA types to be more intellectual, more book smart than FBI agents, who tended to be down-to-earth, unaffected people.

“I found the CIA people reticent and not very easy to socialize with,” McGregor said. “There were few people who opened up. That’s probably due to their training and the nature of the spy business. My guess is we were extremely unpopular, coming in as we did with the director and immediately having access to people and information that took others years to acquire. We bent over backwards to blend in, though, not to interject our personalities.”

When Webster first came to the CIA, he visited each of
the agencies in the intelligence community. Often, he took McGregor along. During a briefing at the Defense Intelligence Agency, a military man looked her over, looked at Webster, and said, “Judge, you got a real pretty one here.”

Webster stared back at him and said icily, “Yes, and she’s smart as a whip.”

McGregor could tell Webster was annoyed. McGregor was impressed by the way Webster handled it.

It was McGregor’s mission to set up a system so that the paper that flowed to Webster was written in a format with which he was comfortable. It seemed to her that the quality of the internal paperwork was not as polished as that of the FBI. While the CIA did a magnificent job at writing reports and estimates for the policymakers, the agency was not used to writing papers and reports as logically and clearly for internal use. Moreover, everything was presented in jargon and acronyms. The special assistants could not figure them out. As a lawyer, Webster wanted everything presented in a clear, coherent, and cohesive way. McGregor began sending papers back with requests for more information, more clarity, and fewer acronyms.

“At first, I found it a somewhat confusing place,” said Bruemmer, who had been Webster’s assistant at the FBI and later became his chief counsel at the CIA. “There are a number of things that agency officers, particularly operations officers, view as second nature—living cover, compartmentation, the inscrutability. The notion of not talking to reporters and wondering why reporters quote things that give the Soviets a leg up.”

Despite the problems, McGregor was uncomfortable with only one covert action proposal that came before the CARG committee. It seemed to her that the proposed action was a little risky. But it appeared the CIA was adhering strictly to the Constitution and the law.

As John Hotis, Webster’s superclerk, would observe, many of the decisions at the CIA required a theologian rather than a lawyer, particularly when it came to the question of assassinations. Assassinations had long been banned, but not everyone was sure why.

“I never understood why bombing innocent people is more morally permissible than the assassination of a single one.” said Thomas Polgar, a former CIA station chief, citing such situations as the bombing of Iraq.

But what if a group supported by the CIA decides to assassinate someone? Does that mean the CIA has violated the executive order? If so, the CIA would probably have to withdraw its support from dozens of groups around the world. At Webster’s request, the Justice Department issued a legal opinion that said that under existing executive orders, the CIA is not precluded from supporting people who engage in violence that leads to the killing of a foreign leader, so long as the CIA does not support the plans and is not aware of them. In practice, the CIA warns such groups that it will not condone assassination and will cut off support if one occurs.

Still, because of compartmentation, McGregor did not feel she had a handle on what the entire agency was doing. Even though she was cleared for nearly every top-secret program in the agency, getting information out of CIA officials remained extremely difficult. The problem was not so much the higher-level officials, who understood that Webster needed accurate information. Rather, it tended to be the lower-level case officers who gave her a hard time.

The Directorate of Operations is like a wild animal in the woods, a senior lawyer in the agency told John Bellinger.

“You have to stand stock-still and let them sniff you all over before they come to accept you,” he confided.

Slowly, the DO came to accept the assistants.

“I found them all doing their best to get along,” said Clair George, who was deputy director for operations when Webster took over. “I think they did the best they could.”
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If operations officers were taciturn, they also did not understand the need for taking disciplinary action against those who had violated the trust the agency placed in them. After Webster disciplined officers for not telling the truth to the inspector general and the Tower Commission about the agency’s involvement in the Iran-contra scandal, an aide to Clair George visited McGregor in her office at the end of the director’s suite of offices on the seventh floor of the old building.
The aide sat down on McGregor’s couch and gave her a stricken look.

“This is the worst day in the history of the DO [Directorate of Operations],” the man said.

McGregor was unsympathetic. It seemed to her that the officer’s thinking was myopic. As he saw it, it was an outrage for the DCI to take action against operations officers. It was demoralizing and devastating to the troops of the clandestine service.

“I can’t believe that you see this as affecting just the DO,” she said. “Look at how some of the actions of the DO have affected the image of the whole agency. The agency is being dragged through the mud by Congress and the media and the administration. It is taking the fall for the whole fiasco.”

To McGregor, the encounter illustrated the extent to which some CIA officials felt loyalty foremost to their own directorate rather than to the agency as a whole.

McGregor also could not understand the criticism she sometimes heard in the building that Webster was anxious to please Congress and the public.

“That is exactly the way it should be,” she thought. “The agency can be responsive to Congress without sacrificing its mission.”

McGregor did not need to fight a lot of battles. She could find the information she needed one way or another. Only rarely did she bother Webster with one of her own problems. He had enough to do, she felt. Often people came to her with problems that they hoped she would pass along to the director. Seldom did she do so. Webster wanted his assistants to be his “eyes and ears,” as he put it, but it was not her job to be a conduit for anything she was told. However, if she felt the complaint was legitimate, she passed it along to Webster or to Gates, then deputy director for Central Intelligence. It was a constant balancing act between acting as a facilitator and acting as an independent analyst.

McGregor had a hand in resurrecting moribund plans to build a day care center for children of agency employees. The idea had originated with Harry E. Fitzwater, a deputy director for administration under Casey. However, without some word
that it was important to the director, the plans had been pushed aside. McGregor brought it up with Webster at one of his breakfast meetings with his assistants. He said to go ahead. The Langley Children’s Center opened in its own 10,000-square-foot building in the fall of 1989, with 104 children enrolled.

One of McGregor’s more fascinating projects entailed reading top-secret reports of cases that both the CIA and FBI had been involved in and had screwed up. For example, the CIA had provoked Edward Lee Howard into spying for the Soviets by firing him on the spot. Then the FBI fumbled by letting him slip past bureau agents watching him in Santa Fe, New Mexico. Reading the reports, McGregor saw how each agency justified its own actions.