See No Evil: The True Story of a Ground Soldier in the CIA's War on Terrorism (31 page)

By then I was a group chief and could instruct my stations to do essentially what I wanted, so I leaned on our offices in the Caspian and Central Asia to concentrate on the Iranian target. Early in 1996 one place came up with a plan to bug a clandestine Pasdaran facility. At that point we had no idea what the Pasdaran was doing in the Caspian, but the possibility always existed that it intended to open a third front, in addition to Saudi Arabia. Any information would have been helpful.

I knew the routine and called Sheila Heslin for her permission to go ahead. I described what we intended to do, what we expected the take to be, and what the benefit would be to US interests in the region. I could feel a frigid Arctic air coming over the telephone line.

Less than twenty minutes later, my green phone rang - the super encrypted communications line used for discussing sensitive information. Rand Beers was on the other end. ‘What’s this about the Iranian Pasdaran and some audio operation?’ he asked.

‘Yeah, what’s the problem?’

‘Well, Heslin’s worried about the blowback.’

‘The blowback?’

‘She’s afraid the Iranians will take revenge on Amoco’s people in Azerbaijan.’

Even though Beers had just handed me a gem about how the NSC worked, I was furious. ‘Do you mean to tell me we have to stop an operation against a terrorist group - one perhaps responsible for killing five Americans in Saudi Arabia - to protect Amoco’s balance sheets?’

‘Well, I wouldn’t put it that way,’ Beers said.

‘Fine, I’ll call Congress and tell them that Sheila Heslin, Amoco’s ambassador to the NSC, no longer wants us to target the Iranian Pasdaran because we’re worried about Amoco’s profits.’

Like a good bureaucrat, I fired off what is called a spot report to the deputy director of operations, Dave Cohen, about my conversation with Beers. I never got a response, but Beers called back that same day to tell me the NSC had had a change of mind and decided not to object to South Group’s targeting the Pasdaran. Congress and Iran had a certain resonance in the White House.

I remember thinking that it should have been a big moment. After all the bureaucratic infighting, all those internal and external battles within the intelligence community, I had finally won one. For a moment, at least, the battle against terrorism had trumped the battle for oil money. But I was just so tired of it all. We were talking about lives, for God’s sake. The fight shouldn’t have been so difficult.

‘This is the way the world ends,’ T. S. Eliot wrote in ‘The Hollow Men.’ ‘Not with a bang but a whimper.’

Roger Tamraz disappeared from my life as suddenly as he had appeared. He never called again after the December 7 meeting when he told his story to Bill Lofgren. Although I ran into him several times in 1996, our conversations were stiff and formal. There wasn’t a word about campaign financing or Roger’s plans to fund Yeltsin’s campaign. He had obviously heard that I’d ratted him out. Another bureaucrat without vision, he must have thought.

Lofgren asked me to put on paper everything Roger had told me, from my first official meeting in May to our last one on December 7. I wrote it all up, from the White House price list to Fowler’s call. I even devoted a full page to the Milan meeting and the possibility that Tamraz might be planning to channel Russian money into the 1996 US presidential campaign. My memo was duly logged out of South Group on December 28, 1995. A copy was put in the group’s chronological file. I wouldn’t hear about it again until I found reference to it splashed across the American press two years later.

In March 1997, I called Bill Lofgren, who had by now retired, and told him that I’d had seen enough of what was going on in the White House and intended to blow the whistle. Bill didn’t say anything for a moment. I could almost hear his brain crunching through the possible consequences.

‘Do it,’ he finally said, all doubt banished.

It wasn’t easy advice for Bill to give. For starters, he knew as well as I did that whistle-blowers are among the least popular subspecies in Washington, where everyone who counts seems to feed off the same two or three teats. Why ruin a good thing by calling attention to the truth?

Bill also had a personal stake in my keeping silent. After he retired from the CIA, he hung out his shingle as a consultant on the former Soviet Union. One of the first clients to call was Roger Tamraz, who still had problems in Azerbaijan and wanted Bill’s advice on how to solve them. It was only a small contract, but it at least paid the telephone bills in the early going. When we kidded Bill about working for a wanted felon, he laughed and noted the fancy pedigrees he had joined. If Senator Kennedy’s wife could work for Tamraz, why couldn’t he? And wasn’t it Tamraz who had helped foot the bill for Clinton’s fiftieth-birthday gala in New York and attended the White House showing of Independence Day? If Roger had rehabilitated himself enough to befriend the president of the United States, Lofgren didn’t see why he couldn’t do a little honest work for him.

Deciding to blow the whistle was hard enough. Finding someone to blow it to proved damn near impossible. First I tried calling the office of Alabama Democrat-turned-Republican senator Richard Shelby. A member of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence (SSCI), Shelby had fired the opening shot in the Clinton campaign-finance scandal when he asked the NSC for its records on suspicious campaign donors. I figured he needed all the help he could get, but obviously I was wrong.

When Shelby’s office didn’t return my call, I tried an end run to him through John Millis, chief of staff on the House intelligence committee. Millis was a former CIA case officer who had quit to work for Congress. I’d replaced him in Rabat and knew that even though he held a highly charged political job, he was discreet and lived by a strict code of integrity. He wouldn’t dime me out to the CIA.

Millis laughed when I told him the story.’ Do you have any idea what you’re doing?’

I considered telling him about all my suspicions and then left it by telling him about Tamraz’s buying access to the president.

‘They’ll come after you. You’ll find yourself a very lonely man in this town. Anyhow, I’ll pass the word to Shelby,’ Millis said as he hung up.

I don’t know if he did pass the word, but I didn’t hear anything more from Millis or Shelby, so I called the Justice Department task force investigating campaign financing and volunteered to come downtown and share what I knew. When I alerted my boss to what I had done, alarm bells went off all over Langley’s seventh floor. The general counsel’s office immediately called the task force to cancel my meeting.’ We’re sorry, he [Baer] went out of channels,’ the task force was told. The CIA would do its own investigation and get back to Justice when the inquiry was complete.

In theory, that all sounded just fine. The CIA had picked up the aroma of questionable campaign financing long before Congress and the press had. It had even started doing its own damage assessment, trying to root out the skeletons in the closet. But all the trails seemed to end up going cold. .

There was the case of Larry Wallace, for instance. An old business crony of former White House chief of staff Mack McLarty Wallace held an open day pass to the White House and a letter naming him an ex-officio representative of the president. Basically, thanks to McLarty, he could come and go as he pleased, and he certainly did. Wallace used the letter to drum up business overseas, including with Yasir Arafat. He eventually hit a speed bump in Belgrade when he made the mistake of letting Slobodan Milosevic make a copy of the letter. Our office in Belgrade got a hold of a copy and faxed it back to headquarters, which prompted the Central European Division to open a file on Wallace. (The CIA can collect information on Americans if there is good evidence they are spies or making common purpose with the enemy.) But Wallace’s file was lost before it could be turned over to congressional and Justice investigators.

Then there was the case of Lieutenant Colonel Liu Chao Ying, of Chinese military intelligence. It was Liu who gave Johnny Chung the famous $300,000 to put into Bill Clinton’s campaign. Chung must have had other things on his mind, because he forwarded only $20,000 to the DNC, but what wasn’t known was that one of our case officers had been in touch with Liu while this was all going on. It was particularly embarrassing because the CIA had neglected to tell Justice about her.

In fact, as the case officer found out, the less headquarters heard about Liu, the better. When she sent a cable asking if Chung had some White House appointment - his business card sported an embossed presidential seal in the corner - headquarters never responded. Nor did it want to think too hard about a company Liu had ties to: China National Aero-Technology Import and Export Corporation, which was secretly negotiating with Iran to exchange sophisticated arms, many of US design, for oil.

The CIA did eventually send the Justice task force a set of Tamraz documents, but they had been cherry-picked to make certain nothing would see the light of day that suggested the agency had dropped the ball. In the meantime, someone leaked the administration’s spin on Roger Tamraz to Wall Street Journal reporter Michael Frisby It was only when Shelby got word of Frisby’s story that he decided I was worth his time. The CIA bundled me up in a van and sent me downtown to the Hart Office Building and the offices of the SSCI. Six of us were in attendance. Shelby and his aide sat on my left. The CIA’s general counsel, Mike O’Neil, and the head of congressional affairs, John Moseman, sat across the table. Senator Bob Kerrey wasn’t there, as I had hoped. A Vietnam combat veteran, Kerrey not only had guts, he understood how the political sands shift in Washington. But I was happy to see that his SSCI staffer Chris Straub had filled in for him. Straub and I and another congressional staffer had spent three days in northern Iraq, traveling around and talking about the CIA and what it was trying to do there. I liked him, and I think he felt he could trust me.

Whatever hopes I had for the meeting, though, were dashed when it quickly became clear that it was precooked. Like the Justice task force, Shelby was shown only the documents the CIA wanted him to see. He hadn’t even heard about the possibility that Tamraz might have funneled Russian money into the DNC, nor am I certain he would have much cared if he had. All Shelby was after was more ammo to shoot down Tony Lake’s nomination as CIA director. Shelby had never gotten over Lake’s giving Iran a wink and a nod to go into Bosnia.

I was determined to tell my story whether the senator wanted to hear it or not, so at a pause in the conversation, I asked Shelby: ‘Senator, do you know how Roger Tamraz found his way into the White House? It was through Senator Kennedy.’

‘Sir, we are not here to talk about my esteemed colleague,’ Shelby cut me off, much faster than I thought he was capable of responding.

Now annoyed, he stood up and announced that the meeting was over. He’d gotten whatever he needed to use against Lake, and he had no intention of sticking around to hear my thoughts on big oil, campaign financing, or the ethics of his colleagues.

I was about to give up on ever telling more of the story when Straub pulled me aside as we were walking out. ‘What the hell is going on?’ he asked.

‘A lot. And if you put me up in front of a full committee hearing, I’ll spell it out.’

I told him about Amoco, and about Heslin’s opposition to the Iranian Pasdaran bugging.

‘Is it really that bad?’

‘Yes, Chris, I think it is.’

Straub talked to Kerrey that afternoon. The following Saturday, Kerrey called President Clinton to let him know he could no longer support Lake’s nomination for CIA director. Lake withdrew his nomination the next day. It should have been a triumphant moment, but there was no time to celebrate.

KGB defector Yuri Nosenko should have served as example enough of what happens to someone who’s off message at the CIA. When Nosenko offered a version of Lee Harvey Oswald and the Kennedy assassination that didn’t fit with the agency’s corporate view, he was sent to solitary confinement at the Farm for three years. I don’t know why I thought I’d be treated any differently.

At eight-thirty AM. on March 18, 1997, I presented myself to the CIA inspector general exactly as ordered. I was shown into a room without any windows. A mahogany conference table separated me from the two men sitting directly across from me. With their bloodless, pinched faces and identical Dacron suits, they could have passed for twins. Neither of them offered his name.

Before I could even sit down, the nastier of the two fired the first shot: ‘Did you keep a record of the documents you destroyed?’

I didn’t say anything as I took on board what was happening. Destroying official documents is a crime, a felony. Soon they had let loose a withering enfilade of questions about the December 28 memo, the one Bill Lofgren had asked me to prepare in which I had set down everything that had passed with Roger Tamraz.

‘Look,’ I finally said. ‘Is it logical to frame myself by writing a memo that details someone else’s crime, file it away in the chrons for all the world to see, and then destroy it? Anyhow, go ask Paul Redmond how it ended up in his safe. That’s proof enough I didn’t destroy it.’

I, in fact, had no idea how my memo had ended up in the safe of the deputy director for counterintelligence, but its mere existence there seemed to me proof enough that I had papered the executive suites of the CIA with the damn thing. It was almost as if I hadn’t said anything at all.’ Just tell us why you destroyed the December 28 memo,’ one of the twins said. ‘You might get off easy.’

After an hour, even they got tired of asking the same question over and over. ‘How much did Tamraz pay you to clean up the October memo?’ one of them asked.

They ignored me when I countered that the cover sheets proved that the general counsel’s office had done the scrubbing, not me.

The questioning shifted again. ‘Why did you badger Sheila Heslin to take Tamraz’s name off the Secret Service blacklist?’

I exploded. ‘It’s not true. No officer in my position would dare cross an NSC staffer and survive to tell about it.’ If that was the story Heslin was telling, I thought, she had obviously gone around the bend.

‘That’s not what she says,’ one of them came back at me. ‘She says you pressured her to remove Tamraz’s name from the White House blacklist. She says you called her at least a dozen times with the same demand. You scared her.’

I considered telling them about a dinner I had hosted for an Azeri delegation six months earlier, on September 15, at La Chaumiere in Georgetown. I’d included several government officials, including Heslin. Not only had she lobbied for the invite, she even cadged a ride home from me afterward, at a time when I supposedly had her scared half to death. Go figure, but I knew my new pals wouldn’t be interested. Instead I used my last trump card - Heslin’s internal White House e-mails. You had to read only a few of them to conclude she had lost her grip on reality.

‘Take a look at Heslin’s e-mails,’ I said, and offered to make copies. ‘She seriously believes the CIA is behind a conspiracy to take over the world.’

They weren’t interested in looking at them, either. ‘We’re investigating you, not Heslin,’ one of my interrogators said.

‘By the way’ I finally asked, ‘how long have you guys worked for the agency?’ Although they both were wearing blue CIA staffer badges, something didn’t smell right.

They looked at each other and nodded. Apparently, they had no choice but to tell me. ‘We’re from the Secret Service.’

Lovely, I thought. Two outsiders had been put in charge of an internal CIA investigation.

The next morning six men in black and a woman in a puce dress buttoned up to the neck descended on South Group like Ostrogoths sacking Rome. They barred everyone from leaving; then, without saying a word, they started rifling through safes, ripping apart files, and throwing them onto the floor. It looked like a typhoon had hit the place.

Soon they were interviewing my employees behind closed doors. Invariably, the first question was: ‘Do you have an attorney? If not, you might consider retaining one.’ It was pure intimidation. With only one or two exceptions, no one had been working there in 1995 at the time I was meeting Tamraz. But just in case the message didn’t sink in, notifications began flashing across monitors that afternoon that the inspector general was in the process of auditing their computers. This wasn’t a particularly subtle threat: Misusing a computer in the CIA got you fired. Before long I found myself sitting alone in South Group. Everyone who could found a job elsewhere.

In mid-May I took a routine medical exam. A computer-generated notice landed on my desk on May 30 informing me that I’d passed, but a few days later, as I was making preparations for a short European trip, I got a new notice that there had been a ‘problem ‘with my physical. A staff doctor had not signed it, I was told, and I would have to take another one. When that turned out to be a load of baloney, I was told I needed a ‘routine’ psychological exam. That wasn’t true, either: The CIA doesn’t require psychological exams unless an employee is going to a hardship post like Moscow or Peking. Clearly, my employer was trying to send a message: I needed to shut my mouth or risk going to the loony bin. I’m sure someone up on the seventh floor wondered if Yuri Nosenko’s cell was available.

As the Clinton campaign-finance scandal moved forward in the courts and toward a showdown in Congress, it became apparent to me that the Justice Department task force, like the CIA, wasn’t looking for the truth, the whole truth, or anything like the truth.