Inside the CIA (40 page)

Because of fear of protests, the university officer who knows of a CIA relationship—in many cases the president of the university—keeps the matter to himself. When it comes out, it appears that the CIA—rather than the university—was trying to hide something. For example, in June 1991, a major controversy erupted over the fact that M. Richard Rose, the president of the Rochester Institute of Technology, had taken a sabbatical to work for the CIA without informing the university where he would be working. The fact that the university had received contracts amounting to $5 million over five years then became an issue.

Rose later admitted that he had made a mistake by failing to inform the trustees that he would be working at the CIA.
He also admitted he should have let others at the university know of the CIA contracts.
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In the end, there was nothing wrong with the relationship—only that Rose had chosen to keep it secret.

Still another kind of controversy erupted in the fall of 1990 at the University of Connecticut, where a CIA officer from the Foreign Resources Branch had asked for information on foreign students enrolled there.
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Under Executive Order 12333, which governs the agency’s domestic activities, this was perfectly permissible. So long as the target is foreign, the CIA can obtain information on students and attempt to recruit them for later spying once they return to their countries. But by asking for lists of foreign students, the FR officer had used an unnecessarily intrusive and clumsy approach. It would have been far better for him to ask contacts he had developed for names of possible candidates for recruitment.

To try to demonstrate that the CIA is not a bogeyman, Turner and Hetu began inviting presidents of universities to the CIA for all-day programs designed to acquaint them with the agency and what it does. Later, under Casey, the CIA started an officer-in-residence program, paying CIA officers—eleven at last count—to teach at universities for two-year stints. In that way, the CIA hoped to show students that agency officers are human beings. Finally, under Turner and Hetu, the agency began selling maps and analytical studies to the public.
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Besides coordinating academic exchanges, clearing manuscripts, and responding to press inquiries, Hetu arranged during his four-year tenure for hundreds of background briefings for reporters interested in particular issues being pursued by the agency’s analysts. For example, a newsmagazine interested in the Soviet economy might obtain a briefing from CIA analysts working on the issue. It was never startling stuff, but reporters found the briefings helped to fill in gaps. By enhancing the CIA’s credibility and building bridges to reporters, the practice helped the agency as well.

By executive order, the CIA may not disseminate propaganda, whether true or false, in the U.S. If there is any possibility that information disseminated abroad might
unintentionally wind up influencing the U.S., the activity must be approved by the DCI. But in the case of briefings to reporters, the source—the CIA—is known and openly acknowledged to reporters. The practice of giving briefings therefore does not violate any U.S. government policies.

When Casey became DCI, he abruptly ordered Hetu to stop the briefings. Hetu wrote him a one-page memo explaining that the practice helped the CIA’s credibility with the media.

“We have never been burned,” Hetu wrote.
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The next morning, Casey asked Hetu, “Have you stopped the briefings?”

“I wrote you a memo on it,” Hetu replied.

“I didn’t ask you to debate it,” Casey said. “I asked you to stop it. Now I’m ordering you to stop it. Stop it today. If you have any scheduled today, cancel them.”

Later that day, Casey called Hetu.

“You can let them come in if they will do some work for us overseas and report to us when they get back,” Casey said.
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Hetu realized Casey was asking him to break the CIA’s policies against using the press in operations, policies that went back even before the Church Committee hearings.

“It’s against our policies. We’re not allowed to task them,” Hetu said. “We would get nailed.”

Soon, Casey replaced Hetu with George V. Lauder, a former CIA operations officer. Ironically, Lauder reinstituted the briefings, but on a much more limited basis. With the stated objective of lowering the agency’s profile, Casey on June 4, 1981, reorganized the office of public affairs as a branch within a larger office. As in the agency’s relations with Congress, the CIA’s relations with the press quickly began to deteriorate.

Stephen Engelberg had just begun covering the intelligence beat for the
New York Times
when he wrote a story saying Vitaly S. Yurchenko, the high-ranking KGB officer who had defected to the U.S. in August 1985, had “identified several employees of the Central Intelligence Agency as Soviet agents.” According to the September 27, 1985, story, it was
not clear “whether those reportedly involved were contract employees or full-fledged CIA officers.”

The night before the story ran, Engelberg called Lauder at home and read it to him over the phone. In journalism, one cannot be more fair than that. By reading the story to him, Engelberg had provided the agency with every opportunity to deny the story, or to offer reasons why it should not run.

Based on Lauder’s response, the story that ran the next day said, “George Lauder, a CIA spokesman, said he would have no comment on any defections or on suggestions that double agents had been discovered.”
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Nevertheless, later that day, the CIA issued a statement denying the
Times’
story.

“An agency spokeswoman, without identifying the defector, said only that a story in Friday’s edition of the
New York Times
on CIA turncoats ‘is untrue,’” United Press International reported.
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Engelberg felt he had been stabbed in the back. He had gone to the trouble of reading the story to Lauder before it ran, laying all his cards on the table. If Lauder had issued a denial then, the denial would have appeared in the story. If Lauder had questioned a particular fact, Engelberg would have had an opportunity to go back to his sources and question them further.

As it was, the agency had lied. Yurchenko had identified Edward Lee Howard, a former CIA officer, as an agent for the KGB. Technically, the CIA could argue that Howard was a single employee and was no longer working for the agency. The
Times,
on the other hand, had referred to “CIA employees,” implying that there was more than one and that they were still employed by the CIA. But that was nit-picking and possibly not correct either. In addition to Howard, Yurchenko provided clues that are still being pursued about others who worked for the KGB. When Engelberg’s story appeared, they may still have been detailed to the CIA or may still have been working for the agency as contract employees.

Thus the thrust of Engelberg’s story was correct. The CIA had publicly called into question the accuracy of his work after he had taken unusual pains to make sure it was accurate.

Understandably, Engelberg was furious. He called Lauder and ripped into him.

“This is dirty pool,” he told him. “You had your shot last night, you waited until the story appeared, now you issue your statement. You’re calling me a liar in public, and I resent it.”
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“My absolute bottom line was we weren’t going to tell anybody any lies,” Lauder would later say. “To the best of my knowledge, we never did.” But he said he has no recollection of the details of the story.
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After that experience, Engelberg operated differently. He wrote a subsequent story saying that Yurchenko had identified a former National Security Agency employee as working for the Soviets. At the time, the FBI was keeping the former employee, Ronald W. Pelton, under constant surveillance while the bureau tried to develop more information on him. The
Times
story could have warned Pelton that he was under suspicion, prompting him to try to hide his tracks or try to flee. So far as anyone at the FBI knows, Pelton did not learn about the story. But this time Engelberg was not going to give the CIA the opportunity to pass on his story. He simply ran it without calling Lauder for comment. If the CIA had approached Engelberg to hold off on the story, the reporter would most likely have told the agency to bug off.

“At that point, I was so angry at George Lauder and the CIA that it would have taken a lot for me to hold anything back,” Engelberg would later say. “I was not going to call George Lauder and say, ‘George, this is what I got,’” Engelberg said. “He had lost that right.”
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When William Webster became director of Central Intelligence, those kinds of encounters became a thing of the past. Besides the president, Webster saw the press and Congress as his two most important constituencies. As Webster would often state, it was all part of keeping the agency accountable and remembering that it was there to serve the American people. He had learned a few things about handling the press from the FBI, which was highly sophisticated at feeding reporters just enough to keep them happy without blowing cases.

Webster wanted a change in the way the CIA dealt with the press, and he gave considerable thought to whom he should appoint as his director of public affairs.

“The PR person is one of the most important choices you make over time, because you can’t see the press as much as you’d like to,” Webster explained later in his office at the CIA. “They [the press] figure that if the PR person is trustworthy and helpful and honest, that must be the kind of person I [as director] want. If they are not, they figure I [the director] put them there.
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“I didn’t think I could find anyone in this organization, given their training, who could be open with the press,” Webster said. For that reason, he chose as his first director of public affairs William M. Baker, who was assistant FBI director for public and congressional affairs when Webster was at the bureau.

Baker, then forty-seven, had movie star good looks, with a tanned, youthful-looking face and innocent-looking blue eyes. He had remarkable antennae that could sense exactly what people wanted before they expressed it, and he had a direct approach that made people want to cooperate with him.

Baker’s appointment generated the usual false reports about Webster’s motives in choosing him. According to these rumors, the two were close friends who played tennis together. In fact, Baker had first come to Webster’s attention when Baker was in charge of a unit in the FBI’s personnel office that deals with transfers.

Baker had denied a request by a female agent for a transfer from one FBI office to another. Her husband had been transferred by his work, and she wanted to move with him to the new location. Both offices were within commuting distance, so the agent would not have been greatly inconvenienced in either case. Webster asked Baker to reconsider, saying it was a hardship case. Baker held his ground, and Webster called him to his office.
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Baker outlined his reasons: he said twenty-seven other agents had previously asked to transfer to the same office, and it would not be fair to them to put the female agent ahead of them.

“We have to have fairness in our transfer policy,” Baker said. “If a female is involved because of her husband’s occupation, certainly we should consider that. But there are agents with more seniority who wanted the same office, and in my opinion, some have a tougher hardship.”

Webster agreed with Baker and denied the transfer. If a subordinate could defend a position with a good factual argument, Webster would go with it.

Later, Baker was in charge of the FBI’s Portland, Oregon, field office in 1983 when a Northwest Airlines jet was skyjacked. Webster was impressed by Baker’s cool demeanor and forthright answers when he was interviewed about the crime on the evening news.

Based on several recommendations, Webster appointed Baker to take charge of the FBI’s public relations in 1984. In that job, Baker got to travel with Webster when he gave speeches, and he became one of Webster’s most trusted advisers.

One of Baker’s friends said he must have gotten the job because he played tennis and had gone to a good college—the University of Virginia. The truth was the opposite. Not only had Baker never played tennis with Webster, Baker made sure he never did. Webster had heard that Baker played, and before one of their out-of-town trips, he asked him to bring along his tennis racket. Baker said he no longer played.

Baker did not want to be known as a crony who had gotten his job because of friendship. He would help find other tennis partners for Webster during their trips. But when Webster was playing tennis, Baker took advantage of the time off to relax and jog.

Baker also avoided visiting Webster’s farm near St. Louis. One of Webster’s St. Louis friends had told him the farm was “as rough as a cob,” and Baker vowed he would never go there. People who did not know the true reason thought he never visited the farm because he was afraid of horses. They were not far from the truth, since he detested horses.

When Webster asked Baker to take charge of public affairs at the CIA, Webster asked Baker if he wanted to be detailed
from the FBI. After they discussed it, they agreed that would send the wrong message, so Baker resigned from the FBI and joined the CIA.

Like everyone else, Baker had to undergo a polygraph examination and a background check by the CIA’s Office of Security. One day, Baker’s wife, Robin, was taking their trash to the incinerator in their apartment complex in Maryland. A man identified himself as being from the Defense Department. In fact, he was from the CIA’s Office of Security.

“Do you know Bill Baker?” the man asked her.

“He is my husband,” she said.

Flustered, the man explained that he was supposed to do a background check on Baker. He quickly retreated.

When Baker took over the CIA’s public affairs in June 1987, he found that much of the good work Herb Hetu had accomplished under Turner had been torpedoed by Casey. Baker had to begin the job all over again of explaining to the agency why it was important to let the public know in a general way what the CIA was doing.