See No Evil: The True Story of a Ground Soldier in the CIA's War on Terrorism (30 page)

One thing was clear: Whether you were an oil company or an oil country, if you wanted to put something in play in the nation’s capital, you had better be ready to pay.

Never intimidated by big oil, Roger Tamraz was putting his lobbying campaign on wartime footing, as I found out when my phone rang two days after I got back from Azerbaijan.

‘I gave your name and telephone number to Don Fowler,’ Roger said without preamble.’ He’s going to call you. I told him about us, about our project.’

I drew a blank. ‘Don Fowler?’

‘The Democratic National Chairman. He’s on our side.’

‘You gave this phone number to the Democratic National Chairman?’

Tamraz didn’t see any problem, but then he rarely did. As for me, I saw a boatload. The number Roger had given Don Fowler was the unclassified one that marked me as CIA, and Washington had a long history that proved intelligence gathering and partisan politics were a lethal mix. As soon as I hung up with Roger, I called Fowler. He wasn’t in, but I left my cover number and hoped he would tear up the other one.

A little after two, he called back on the CIA line.

‘Don Fowler here.’ I could hear a PA system in the background. Fowler was calling from an airport telephone booth. ‘I’m a friend of Roger’s. He tells me you’re writing a paper about him for the White House.’

In fact, I had told Roger about the memos we had sent the NSC in response to Sheila Heslin’s little tasker. If the CIA was sending papers around Washington acknowledging a relationship with Tamraz that it had committed to keeping secret, the least I could do was tell him. It was his ass on the line.

‘Son, I need a copy of that paper to show the president. He needs to know about everything Roger has done for this country. Let me know where I can pick it up.’

Now, this called for some truly fast thinking. I could deny knowing Roger, but was it wise to lie to someone close to the president? Or I could admit knowing Roger but deny there was a paper, another lie but maybe just a tad more attractive. Then I realized there was a third way.

‘Sir,’ I said, ‘I cannot talk about what Roger may or may not have done for this country. And if a paper exists, as Roger says, then it’s at the White-House. You’ll be able to find it there.’

I was proud of myself. I’d given Fowler a line of pure bureaucratic bullshit. As for the memo, let Heslin tell Fowler he couldn’t have it.

Fowler, obviously annoyed that I wasn’t going to play, snorted and hung up.

Suddenly the game was getting very rich. Right number or not, Fowler knew he was calling the CIA, and I knew what he wanted: my help in overcoming Heslin’s opposition to letting Roger in. That’s what Roger had asked me for in the beginning, and I was certain that was what he wanted now from Fowler.

I also sensed that a cold call from the chairman of the DNC to a midlevel DO case officer under a very dark cloud had the makings of a Titanic-size disaster, so I called an FBI agent friend and asked his advice. He whistled appreciatively and then got down to business.

‘What you do now is spread it all around Langley like manure,’ he advised. ‘Tell as many people as you can. Document it wherever you can. Because when this thing goes down, whatever it is you’ve managed to stick your nose into, no one is going to remember talking to you.’

I started with my manager in the Central Eurasian Division. There was a look of pure horror on his face when I told the story. I couldn’t find the lawyer for my division, so I went to see the one assigned to the Near East Division. To my eternal gratitude, as soon as I walked out of his office, he sent an e-mail summarizing our conversation to Bob Caudel, the CE Division lawyer; John Rizzo, the DO’s lawyer; and Rob Davis, the same genius who told me the Iraq investigation would be a good thing for me. Later, when the whole thing exploded, that e-mail would save my skin.

I couldn’t resist calling Heslin, hoping to get a rise out of her. By now I was learning to keep a journal to compare events and times and to help fill out the matrices. I placed the call on October 23. Here’s what my notes say about our conversation.

Me: ‘You know Roger’s going to make it into the White House. He’s going to get his meeting with Clinton.’

Her: ‘That’s the stupidest thing I’ve heard in a long time. Roger’s on the Secret Service blacklist. I know because I put him there. He can’t get into the White House. Period.’

Me: ‘He’s going to do it through Don Fowler.’

Her: ‘No, he’s not. What do you people use for brains out there?’

I could almost see the phone slam down.

On October 25 my group finally finished the follow-up on Roger Tamraz. What with summer vacations and transfers, and ordering up the remaining volumes of Roger’s file from archives, the memo had been lingering in the office since June. I would have preferred that the memo had been sent before Fowler’s call, to avoid even the hint of any influence. But the memo spoke for itself. It included not only all the derogatory information we had sent to Heslin back on May 19 but newly inserted details about BCCI as well. It wasn’t going to get Roger indicted, but it was an honest, accurate account of everything the DO knew about him.

The problems with the October memo came after it left South Group. Tamraz was starting to make a lot of people nervous. When the October memo landed on Dave Cohen’s desk, duly logged in as DDO 95-3136, he didn’t like the smell of things. The memo stated right on the cover sheet that Tamraz was rubbing elbows with the DNC and the White House crowd. So Cohen, who hadn’t gotten to be director of operations because he lacked the political instinct for self-survival, bucked it up to the general counsel’s office, accompanied by a handwritten marginal note from his assistant: ‘We’ve already forwarded NSC info on Tamraz. PYI: he is a US citizen, so I’ve asked DO/LGL to O. K. passage of file info to NSC.’

Cohen wasn’t the only one running for cover. On November 13, 1995, Paul Redmond, the deputy director for counterintelligence, sent the October memo to George Tenet, then deputy director and soon to be number one. Although it said right on the cover sheet in black and white that Tamraz was in touch with Fowler and Heslin, as well as a bunch of other politicians, Tenet wrote in the margin,’ Have not fully read. Please pay careful attention here.’ Tenet doesn’t have the time to read a two-page memo concerning financial ties between the president of the United States and an indicted middleman? Frankly, if I’d been in Tenet’s position, I would have checked out for the day and pretended I hadn’t seen the memo at all. There was no way to win on that one.

The general counsel’s office apparently was oblivious to the executive jitters on the seventh floor. In that narrow legal view of the world, it didn’t matter whether Tamraz was in contact with Osama bin Laden or Jesus Christ. The rule was simple, and never mind any competing findings: The CIA did not send derogatory information on American citizens to other government agencies, including the White House. Accordingly, the Office of General Counsel duly removed every negative comment about Tamraz and sent it back to Cohen. Now absolved of any responsibility, Cohen then faxed it to Heslin on December 26, 1995. Requested in June, the follow-up memo arrived nearly seven months late and didn’t say a bad thing about Roger. Little wonder that Heslin, in her complete ignorance about the CIA, believed she’d stumbled onto an evil and venal CIA conspiracy.

If only that had been the end of it. On December 6 I met Roger Tamraz for lunch, at his request. We sat at one of those semicircular booths at the Four Seasons, overlooking the C O Canal. Businessmen preferred these tables because they could lean head to head and whisper without being overheard.

‘Well, I did it,’ Roger said, very proud of himself. ‘I met the president.’

‘How’d you manage to do that, Roger?’ I asked, although I knew the moment the words left my mouth that they shouldn’t have.

‘It was easy. Fowler gave me price list of what I could get for campaign donations, from a night in the Lincoln Bedroom to a one-on-one with the president in the Oval Office.’

I must have looked like I’d just swallowed my napkin ring.

‘I started out small - a coffee,’ Tamraz said, proud of his frugality.’ got to mention my Armenian route to Bill. He was intrigued and wanted to talk more about it.’

‘Heslin’s going to love this,’ I thought out loud. In truth, I, too, was a little alarmed that the president of the United States had become plain old ‘Bill’ to Roger. Tamraz wasn’t a man you wanted to let too far into your good graces.

‘No, no,’ he went on. ‘It’s gone much further than that. Tomorrow I have my one-on-one in the Oval Office. Bill and I are going to work out a strategy for the whole area. I’ve opened a channel to Russia.’

‘A channel to Russia?’ The last time Tamraz was involved in a diplomatic channel, he ended up losing a bank.

‘In fact, I just got back from a meeting with the Russians in Milan. I saw Alexander Korzhakov and Pavel Borodin.’

On the upside, Korzhakov and Borodin ran Russia during those many days and nights when Boris Yeltsin was too drunk to find the hotline. On the downside, Korzhakov and Borodin also doubled as Yeltsin’s bagmen. Borodin would be arrested on a Swiss money-laundering charge in January 2001 in New York, on his way to George W. Bush’s inauguration.

‘They told me Yeltsin would like to help Clinton’s reelection campaign. You know . . . with money.’

By now I was almost out of my seat. Roger obviously had lost his mind. I wished desperately that we had taken a larger table, one with more space between the two of us.

‘And here’s the best part for our project.’

I really wished he’d stop calling it ‘our’ project.

‘Yeltsin will sign off on the Armenian route, but in return he’ll want some money for his campaign. It will be no problem. We talked about a ballpark figure of a hundred million. The Chinese promised all the money I need. Yeltsin even agreed to let a little money leak into Bill’s campaign. Everyone walks away from this a winner. I can’t wait to see the president and tell him.’

I raced back to Langley after we had finished and told Roger’s story to Bill Lofgren, the tough and irascible Central Eurasian Division chief.

‘That’s utter and complete bullshit ‘Bill responded. ‘I don’t believe him.’

Just to be certain, he picked up the telephone and asked his secretary to get Rome on the line. He wanted to find out if Borodin and Korzhakov really had been in Milan on December 1 and 2, as Tamraz claimed. Always start with the facts you can establish.

The following day, after we learned that the two Russians really had been where Roger said they were, I brought Lofgren to see Tamraz so he could get the story straight from the horse’s mouth. Roger repeated it almost verbatim. He was still planning to see Clinton that afternoon. The only new twist was that Roger now had on display an official White House photograph of himself talking to Clinton over coffee.

When we got back to headquarters, Lofgren called then director John Deutch and told him the story. Deutch’s assistant called back the same afternoon. He said the president was going to Paris shortly and had no plans to meet Tamraz. ‘I think you have a problem with your source. Apparently, he’s a liar,’ the assistant told Lofgren.

Four days later, Fowler called. ‘Son, have you changed your mind about that memo?’

Unaware that the October memo was still being scrubbed and polished by the deputy director of operations and the general counsel’s office, I told Fowler again that if any CIA paper on Tamraz existed, it was with Sheila Heslin. He could get it from her.

‘That damn broad won’t give me any thing,’ Fowler grumbled.

With that, I decided to throw caution to the winds. If anyone was going to know just how deeply the major oil companies were into the NSC, it was going to be Don Fowler.

‘Mr. Fowler, I believe your problem is with the big boys, and the biggest bully seems to be Amoco. It doesn’t appreciate an interloper like Roger poaching in its preserve. That’s why he’s been frozen out of the White House.’

‘You’re goddamned right. I know exactly what Amoco is doing, and Amoco ‘s ambassador at the NSC, Heslin.’

‘Well, it seems she’s got you pretty well trumped.’

‘We’ll see about that,’ Fowler said as he hung up the phone.

If it had been just a matter of money or even political corruption, I might have been able to walk away from all I had learned about big oil, the White House, and the NSC. Elective politics always breed a certain amount of nastiness. What I couldn’t get around, though, was this: Every time I turned over a new rock, there was something even nastier underneath. Finally I got to the ugliest rock of all, the one that lives were waiting under, to be saved or lost. That, I guess, is when I snapped.

A little background first: After Iran released the last of the American hostages in 1991, the White House kept its fingers crossed that Iran was finally out of the terrorism business. By December, however, it was becoming apparent that Iran had simply switched battlefields. The CIA picked up information that several leaders of the Saudi Hezbollah had traveled to Tehran. Obviously something was brewing. After the meeting, the Iranian Pasdaran opened a training base in the Biqa for Saudi Hezbollah terrorist cadres. It issued the terrorists false passports and provided all the funding they needed, and in July 1995, the Iranian-trained networks started to watch American facilities in Saudi Arabia, including the consulate in Jeddah. When a cleric in Qum, Iran’s most holy city, issued a fatwa, or religious finding, to conduct attacks in Saudi Arabia, the White House braced itself for the worst. The first attack came against the Saudi National Guard facility in Riyadh in November 1995, killing five Americans. The Khobar barracks were hit on June 25, 1996, killing nineteen Americans.

Just as ominously, the CIA was learning about the first tentative contacts between Osama bin Laden and Iran. In December 1995 one of bin Laden’s Egyptian associates visited Tehran and met with several officers from the Ministry of Intelligence and Security. The US wasn’t sure bin Laden had reached an agreement with the Iranians on a strategic relationship, but we in the intelligence community suspected he had. Bin Laden desperately needed the terrorist expertise Iran possessed. Our fears were confirmed, as I’ve mentioned, when bin Laden met an Iranian intelligence officer in Afghanistan in July 1996 to hammer out a strategic relationship. The possibility of a grand terrorist alliance aimed against the US was staggering. It wasn’t something we could just ignore.