The Way of the Knife (10 page)

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 the 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.”

The following year, when American troops were planning to invade Grenada to rescue a group of medical students taken as hostages, the mission commander refused to include the ISA in the operation because he didn’t trust the outfit or its leader, Colonel King. As it turned out, American commandos fumbled around the Caribbean island in October 1983 with little idea of where the medical students were being held. “
Our intelligence about Grenada
was lousy,” recalled Dewey Clarridge, who was chief of the CIA’s Latin America division at the time. “We were operating virtually in the dark.”

If things weren’t bad enough for the ISA, the CIA was also trying to gut its operations. The spy agency was suspicious of the military building an intelligence empire and dismissive of the idea that military officers could be any good at espionage. This partly reflected a wider insecurity at Langley about the Pentagon. Since its founding, in 1947, the CIA had been the Pentagon’s smaller sibling, dwarfed by the Defense Department’s manpower and muscle in the Washington budget wars. The CIA director didn’t even control most of America’s big-ticket intelligence programs; the constellation of spy satellites and global listening posts that accounted for 80 percent of what the United States spent on spying was funded through the Pentagon’s budget. During his first stint as defense secretary, under President Ford, Rumsfeld fought frequent turf battles with the CIA and White House, arguing that if he was paying for these programs, he was going to control them.

If there was one area where the CIA figured it had an advantage over the Pentagon, it was in the realm of human spying. So when the Pentagon created a program like the ISA, many at the CIA saw it as a direct threat to the agency’s existence. CIA leaders whispered into the ears of members of the congressional intelligence committees that the Pentagon’s spies were amateurs and were tripping over CIA case officers overseas. Covert operations could be blown, they said, and undercover officers might die.

Of course, the fact that the CIA was trying to undermine Pentagon spying efforts made military leaders trust the CIA even less and want to expand their own spying operations even more. During one meeting in 1983, when CIA director William Casey met with the Joint Chiefs inside the Pentagon’s secure conference room, known as “The Tank,” General Meyer was, as usual, complaining that the CIA never did anything to help the military. Casey tried to quiet the general by pointing out that his predecessor, Admiral Stansfield Turner, had been a military man. But General Meyer would have none of it. “
Mr. Casey, what you say
is true,” he said. “But that son of a bitch didn’t do a goddamned thing for the military during all his time at CIA.”

—

EVEN AFTER THE INSPECTOR
general’s report, and even after Carlucci tried to get rid of Colonel King’s group, it never went away. In fact, the unit would eventually become a cornerstone of Rumsfeld’s efforts to dramatically expand the Pentagon’s spying operations. By late 2001, the ISA had evolved into the secret spying unit, code-named Gray Fox, that began working with Asad Munir and Pakistani spies in western Pakistan. Based just beyond the Washington beltway, at Fort Belvoir, Virginia, Gray Fox comprised several hundred operatives working undercover in overseas assignments. They specialized in planting eavesdropping devices in hard-to-reach places—the devices could then link up to the large listening stations that the National Security Agency had set up around the globe.

But in 2001, the group was such a little-discussed, fringe organization that it had been nicknamed “The Secret Army of Northern Virginia.” When Rumsfeld first met the commander of Gray Fox and learned details of the group’s operations, he said, “
If I had known
you guys were doing all this before 9/11, I’d probably have thrown you all in jail.” But with Rumsfeld now consumed with improving and better coordinating the Pentagon’s somewhat meager human spying capabilities, he ordered an increase in Gray Fox’s budget and closer coordination between the spying unit and Joint Special Operations Command, the secretive unit that had so impressed Rumsfeld during his trip to Fort Bragg in November 2001. Since that day, Rumsfeld increasingly had come to see JSOC as exactly the secret army he needed to fight a global war.

But JSOC in 2001 was in no position to be Rumsfeld’s Praetorian Guard for a worldwide conflict. Delta Force and SEAL Team Six were niche forces, comprising no more than several hundred operatives and unable to sustain themselves for operations lasting more than two days. Delta Force trained almost exclusively for hostage-rescue missions, and SEAL Team Six had spent years training for the mission of securing America’s nuclear arsenal inside the country if the need should ever arise. Neither had had the training or equipment for far-flung operations lasting weeks or months.

“Rumsfeld just got the notion that [JSOC] has this capability to get in anywhere, kill all the right people and save all the right people—why not use this thing?” said Robert Andrews. “What he didn’t realize was that it wasn’t set up for sustained combat operations.”

But Rumsfeld saw the appeal in JSOC’s independence. It could be a strike force answering directly to the defense secretary and the president, not under the control of some four-star general worried about his turf. It could be like the CIA’s Directorate of Operations—unburdened by the weight of a hidebound military bureaucracy. If Rumsfeld could throw money at the command, allowing Delta Force and SEAL Team Six to enlarge their ranks and buy enough equipment for lengthy overseas deployments, he figured he could send it virtually anywhere.

But was it even legal for him to do that? The Pentagon’s activities are governed by Title 10 of the United States Code, and Congress historically has tried to limit how the military operates outside of declared war zones. This is partly born from concerns that American soldiers operating beyond battlefields could be caught and tried as spies rather than granted the usual Geneva Convention protections. By contrast, the president can order the CIA (which is governed by Title 50)
to send its officers anywhere in the world
. Under those rules, if a CIA officer is caught spying in a hostile country, the American government might deny any knowledge of his activities and let him rot in jail.

After the Iran–Contra scandal of the 1980s, Congress tried to place even more restrictions on secret operations. The Intelligence Authorization Act of 1991 mandated that all covert actions be authorized by a written presidential finding, explaining the need for the secret activity, and that the White House notify the House and Senate intelligence committees shortly after the finding is issued to the CIA. And yet the 1991 act contained a significant loophole: It exempted the Pentagon from these burdensome requirements if the military was conducting secret operations it considered to be “traditional military activities.”