The Way of the Knife (9 page)

Deutch believed that the CIA’s role of supporting the military was so essential that in 1995 he also created a top-level job to serve as a liaison to the Pentagon, a post that would be held by a senior military officer. Some inside the agency joked that embedding CIA operatives inside military commands and flag officers inside the intelligence agency was the bureaucratic equivalent of a hostage swap.

The first military officer tapped for the CIA job was Vice Admiral Dennis C. Blair, a wiry Yankee from Kittery, Maine, who had graduated from the Naval Academy in 1968 and went on to Oxford University as a Rhodes scholar, where he became friends with a young Bill Clinton. Blair met resistance almost immediately from CIA officers who were skeptical about the three-star admiral with a dim view of the CIA’s track record on covert action.

As Blair saw it, the agency should be focusing on collecting and analyzing intelligence, not on black operations that only served to get the United States in trouble. “
Going back to the history
of CIA covert operations, I think you can make the argument that if we had done none of them we would probably be better off, and certainly no worse off than we are today,” Blair would say years later.

Some at Langley saw Blair as a Pentagon mole. But his presence also raised bigger fears that the Pentagon would consume the agency and that the CIA would lose its spot as the president’s loyal intelligence service. The men, as Dewey Clarridge had said, marched for the president.

Blair soon found himself fighting battles with the CIA’s Directorate of Operations on the biggest issue of the time, the war in the Balkans. One of the fights was over a new surveillance tool the CIA had borrowed from the Air Force to spy in Bosnia, a gangly, insect-like airplane called the RQ-1 Predator. The CIA had been flying the Predator to spy on Serbian troop positions, and senior agency officers proposed installing video screens inside the White House to allow President Clinton and his aides to watch the live drone feed. Blair admired the CIA’s initiative in developing the Predator but thought it would be a waste of the president’s precious time watching a drone feed. He suspected that the CIA’s clandestine service was just trying to show off its new toy for President Clinton.

“
What’s the president
going to do with it?” Blair remembers asking. “And they said, ‘It needs to go into the White House in case the president wants to know what’s going on in Bosnia.’

“And I said, ‘That’s ridiculous! The president is not going to look through this little soda straw!’”

Deutch ultimately sided with Blair, and the CIA never fed the Predator video into the White House. It was a silly fight, but for Blair, that episode and other battles he fought with the agency’s clandestine service were telling reminders that the Directorate of Operations would try to bite any arm trying to block its direct path to the Oval Office.

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

I
n 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.