MIGHTY CASEY

• Document Type: CREST
• Collection: General CIA Records
• Document Number (FOIA) /ESDN (CREST): CIA-RDP90-00965R000807540012-8
• Release Decision: RIPPUB
• Original Classification: K
• Document Page Count: 3
• Document Creation Date: December 22, 2016
• Document Release Date: January 12, 2012
• Sequence Number: 12
• Publication Date: October 18, 1987
• Content Type: OPEN SOURCE

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Declassified in Part - Sanitized Copy Approved for Release 2012/01/12 : CIA-RDP90-00965R000807540012-8
ew cork Times KiW)AV I
rV[ The Washington Times
The Wall Street Journal
The Christian Science Monitor
M Casey New York Daily News
USA Today
The Chicago Tribune
VEIL
The Secret Wars of the CIA 1981-1987.
By Bob Woodward
Illustrated 543 pp. New York:
Simon & Schuster. $21.95.
By David C. Martin
WILLIAM CASEY, it seems,
was the only member of the
Reagan Cabinet who had the
courage of the President's
convictions. "I believed," Casey told Bob
Woodward in the now disputed final scene
of "Veik The Secret Wars of the CIA 1981-
1987." Casey believed not only in the^Presi-e
dent's "evil empire" brand of anti-Commu-
nism but also in taking risks. That's what
set him apart from ordinary believers like
Secretary of Defense Caspar Weinberger.
Casey had the instincts of a venture capi-
talist; but as Director of CCn cal Intellp
gence he was playing not with money but
withpeeplels'iiives. If Mr. Woodward has it
right, Casey's penchant for running risks
cost 80 innocent people their lives when an
"off-the-books" attempt to assassinate
Sheik Mohammed Hussein Fadlallah, the
spiritual leader of Hezbollah, Lebanon's
Party of God, misfired.
That and the deathbed scene in which
Casey confesses to knowing of the diver-
sion of profits from the Iran arms sales to
the contras in Nicaragua are the most spec-
tacular revelations in "Veil" and the focus of
the extraordinary uproar which has at-
tended its publication. But the revelations
are not what is so captivating about this
book, which reads much better in full length
than in the excerpts which have appeared in
newspapers and magazines. The revelations
are merely the bold strokes in a penetrating,
profane and sometimes brilliant portrait of
what textbooks dryly call "the intelligence
community."
HERE are moments when Mr. Wood-
ward, putting himself in the mind of
one of his protagonists, jots down
aphorisms worthy of John le Carre:
"The best spying was subtle, embedded in
normal intercourse, so that everyone could
say, 'Just doing my job.' " "His philosophy
was simple: the more you know, the less
chance of war." There are descriptions of
well-known denizens of the Federal bureau-
cracy that will stick with them for the rest of
their lives. Stanley Sporkin, Casey's general
counsel at the C.I.A. and former scourge of
Wall Street as the head of enforcement for
the Securities and Exchange Commission,
"looked like an overweight Vegas pit boss."
Date
Adm. Stansfield Turner, the former Director
of Central Intelligence, was "a man who
made life hard for himself." There is even
wit to leaven the secret wars and double
dealings. When some of his wartime buddies
come to Casey's defense in one of his many
confrontations with the Senate and House In-
telligence Committees, Mr. Woodward-
writes that "a comrade was down in enemy
territory, the Congress of the United States."
Mr. Woodward, an assistant managing edi-
tor of The Washington Post, has got into the
belly of the beast. It's all here, from Amer-
ican submarines tapping into a Soviet under-
sea communications cable to a slightly ine-
briated Barry Goldwater reading aloud from
a classified document on the floor of the Sen-
ate - your tax dollars at work. This is no ar-
cheological dig through the skeletons of the
past. This is real-time intelligence, right up
to January of this year when Casey, no
longer able to write his name, resigned. Had
he lived, Casey would have spent much of his
remaining time in office coping with the fall-
out from this book, no doubt denying stead-
fastly that he was one of Mr. Woodward's
sources. It will be a long time, if ever, before
another Director of Central Intelligence
grants a reporter the kind of access Casey
apparently gave Mr. Woodward.
As Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan is
quoted as saying, Casey was "what the
French call fin de ligne," the last Director of
Central Intelligence to have learned the craft
during World War II as a member of the Of-
fice of Strategic Services. It is surely no coin-
cidence that the directors who lasted the
longest - Allen Dulles, Richard Helms and
Casey - were all veterans of the O.S.S.,
beneficiaries of the mystique that surrounds
the nation's first silent service, a mystique
skillfully nurtured by a socially and politi-
cally powerful alumni organization of which
Casey was a leading light. Casey's experi-
ence in running agents behind German lines
was largely irrelevant to the high-tech world
of 1980's espionage, yet service in O.S.S. still
conferred a special, present-at-the-creation
aura which guaranteed his acceptance at the
C.I.A.
Mr. Woodward reports that when Richard
Helms, the archetypal American spy,
learned Casey was to be the new Director of
the agency, he thought to himself, "Damn
good. Perfect." The two men had shared an
apartment in London during the war, and
Mr. Helms liked "the Casev approach: quick,
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tion-defying." In taking over from Stanfield
Turner, Casey was succeeding a man who
"had never once seen an intelligence report
that was worth risking someone's life" and
who "wondered long and hard whether it was
permissible to use other people's lives for the
geopolitical interests of the United States."
Casey was exactly what the old boys like Mr.
Helms felt was needed to shock the C.I.A. out
of the moralistic and legalistic paralysis to
which it had supposedly succumbed under
Admiral Turner. But Mr. Helms was not pre-
pared for the lengths to which Casey was
willing to go.
Casey set off a firestorm among the old
boys by naming Max Hugel, a businessman
with no espionage experience, as his Deputy
Director for Operations. With the newspa-
pers full of headlines like "Daggers Drawn
for New CIA 'Spymaster,"' Mr. Woodward
writes, "Casey and Hugel discussed the mat-
ter and agreed that things were going well,
not badly. They were challenging the status
quo, and the status quo didn't like it." The
fact that Casey finally had to cut Mr. Hugel
loose in the face of allegations of impropriety
in his prior business dealings did not in the
least diminish the director's appetite for
turning the status quo on its head.
That status quo had produced the Iran
debacle - the most sophisticated and high-
priced intelligence service in the world
caught utterly flat-footed by a momentous
political upheaval. Mr. Woodward para-
phrases a top-secret "Iran Postmortem"
that concludes that the C.I.A. had become
just another one of Washington's paper fac-
tories. "The CIA was not set up to jump
ahead on a fast-moving situation, and the
analysts had become enmeshed in the daily
production line,.. feeding the National Intel-
ligence Daily or the President's Daily Brief.
... There were few outside catalysts to jar
the thinking of the analysts ... no intellectual
badminton.... No method existed to ponder
alternative explanations of the data." One of
the first intelligence estimates Casey saw
was entitled "Libya: Aims and Vulnerabil.
ities," and to his mind it was "written by
equivocators for equivocators." Full of
"coulds," "mights" and "possibles," Mr.
Woodward writes, "the document put the in-
telligence agencies in the bureaucratically
secure position of being able, no matter what
happened, to dust off the estimate and say,
'See, we told you. We said that could happen.'
To say everything was to say almost nothing,
Casey thought."
Casey was not the first and certainly not
the last director to be dissatisfied with the
quality of intelligence estimates. Ambiguity
is endemic to the business. In "A World of Se-
crets: The Uses and Limits of Intelligence,"
Walter Laqueur quotes from an internal
C.I.A. publication in which a veteran esti-
mate writer counsels that "the wise drafter
will stop and point both ways." No wonder
that in 1975 a Presidential commission con-
cluded that National Intelligence Estimates
"appeared to have little impact on policy
makers."
r any one man could bring the C.I.A. to
life, it was Casey. He had everything -
physical energy, intellectual horsepow-
er. old boy credentials, access to the
President. He was vastly more impressive
than the wobbly, inarticulate old man the
public saw going in and out of closed-door
hearings on Capitol Hill. When he prowled
the corridors, "people ... moved out of his
way, very nearly saluted." He was looking
for the next Iran - Mexico? the Philippines?
He wanted his field stations to stop living off
host-country intelligence services and start
recruiting spies of their own. He wanted
more agents behind the Iron Curtain. "He
made it clear that he was willing to take
chances. Yes, he said, there would be mis-
takes. He expected mistakes.... 'So what?'
he said. 'Proves we're active.' If there were
no mistakes, there was not enough effort."
But effort, particularly all the effort which
went into supporting anti-Communist insur-
gencies, was often nothing more than an illu-
sion of progress in making the world safe for
democracy. Voicing the doubts held by for-
mer Deputy Director of Central Intelligence
Bobby R. Inman, Mr. Woodward points out
that "the secret covert action provided... an
administration, particularly a new one, with
the comfort of action; the feeling that there
was, a secret way- -to get things done, that
there-was an undercover foreign policy qui-
etly moving U. S . interests forward" Mean-
ingfu1oovert action is almost a contradiction
in terms. To really advance American inter-
ests - overthrow the Sandinistas, for in-
stance - it would have to become so large
that it could no longer be covert.
As all the world now knows, Casey tried too
hard, made too many mistakes. Mr. Wood-
ward's chronicle of his tenure at the C.I.A. is
a case study in how much any one man can
change a bureaucracy. The answer is very
little. As Frank McCulloch, the editor of The
Sacramento Bee, once said in a
different context, it is like trying
to change the course of an air-
craft carrier by sitting on the
stern and trailing your hand in
the water. Casey increased the
intelligence budget by 50 percent
and channeled hundreds of mil-
lions of dollars to anti-Commu-
nist guerrillas all over the world,
but he barely budged the bureau-
cracy. He shook it like a limp
rag, stirring up dust, but when he
was finished, it resumed its prior
shape. As John McMahon, a for-
mer Deputy Director of the
agency, explained to a Congress
that was questioning the wisdom
of Casey's adventures, the task
for C.I.A. careerists "was to find
a way to work themselves out of
this hole - to protect the CIA but
obey the orders."
Continued
34,
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 unique asset." Admiral Inman
said he was "a piece of work," a
phrase Casey himself often ap-
plied to oddballs. Casey was
serving Ronald Reagan not
wisely but too well, laboring tire-
lessly for a President he seemed
to regard as nothing more than a
failed actor whose only talent
was the ability to memorize a
script at a glance. Casey's loy-
alty was to the cause, not the
man, and his modus operandi
was that of a spy, not a Cabinet
member. "One of the first rules
of espionage was the protection
of good sources," Mr. Woodward
writes. "Elaborate diversions
and false trails were often con-
structed to protect such sources.
To lie was nothing, even to lie in
public or under oath was per-
haps insignificant compared to
the risks the source had taken."
"To lie was nothing." How
much of what Casey told Mr.
Woodward was a lie? Although
Mr. Woodward's access to Casey
and their love-hate, reporter-spy
relationship are central to the
book, it remains unclear exactly
what Casey told him. Mr. Wood-
ward is alone with Casey for two
hours on a flight from Boston to
Washington. "He proceeded to
answer most questions as we
ranged over subjects including
General Donovan, the new all-
weather satellite Lacrosse, the
Nicaraguan operation, his kid-
napped Beirut station chief." Ex-
actly what Casey said about
these subjects is left to the
reader to wonder. Elsewhere in
the book, Mr. Woodward reveals
that Lacrosse is a new recon-
naissance satellite that uses
radar imaging to see through
clouds and darkness- That would
seem to be an extraordinary
revelation, telling the Russians
they can no k m er count on night
or bad weather to conceal their
activities. Did the Director of
Central R a man
swarm to protect intem
sources and methods, Sim tlat/
With Casey dead, why is.
Mir
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Mr. McMahon could backfill. Mr.
McMahon, like Admiral Inman
before him, finally left, bullied
into submission by a man whom
both seemed to regard with
equal parts awe and distaste.
Mr. McMahon called Casey "a
in Part -
what the Director told him? He
seems to be teasing the reader
deliberately, much as he and his
Watergate partner Carl Bern-
stein did in "All the President's
Men," dropping just enough
clues to the identity of their
anonymous source Deep Throat
to keep the guessing game alive
without revealing the secret. It is
an effective novelistic. technique
but less than satisfactory jour-
nalism - titillating without in-
forming. There was no doubt
good reason for protecting Deep
Throat, but Casey is beyond pro-
tecting. There is too much mys-
tery here.
Even the title of the book,
"Veil," a code word for covert ac-
tion, was kept secret by Simon &
Schuster right up to publication
date, purportedly on the grounds
that the publisher did not want to
alert the spies to how deeply Mr.
Woodward had penetrated their
operations. In fact, the code word
"Veil" and an explanation of its
significance appeared in The
Wall Street Journal on July 17.
Mystery about the title can be
excused as prepublication hype.
Mystery about what Casey told
Mr. Woodward goes to the heart
of the matter. One of the great
difficulties in writing about intel-
ligence operations is knowing for
certain when you have hit truth
or just another cover story. In
the end, you have to take other
people's word for it. How exten-
sively did Mr. Woodward rely on
the word of a man for whom "to
lie was nothing"?
scribesv two run-ins
between the C.I.A.
and the press in
which I was a participant. In one
case, he's got it flat wrong. In the
other, it's garbled. In another in-
stance, Mr. Woodward reports
that a C.I.A. officer named Vin-
cent Cannistraro traveled under
an assumed name to Arizona to
brief Senator Barry Goldwater
on a controversial guerrilla
manual provided to the Nicara-
guan contras. Mr. Cannistraro,
who now works at the Pentagon,
says he never made such a trip.
Small matters, none of them cen-
tral to Mr. Woodward's story.
The question only Mr. Woodward
can answer is: how thoroughly
did he verify the more sensa-
tional elements of his story?
Casey's widow claims the
deathbed scene never took place
and that her late husband was
too much the patriot to reveal se-
crets to a journalist or speak ill
of the President She is a poign-
ant figure, blindsided in her
mourning by a hard-nosed re-
porter, but Sophia Casey has
been too quick to denounce what
is largely a sympathetic por-
trait, certainly more sympa-
thetic than the one likely to be
painted by the foal report of the
Iran-contra committees. "He
was a man who found the world,
OB books its ideas and Us chal-
lenges more interesting than he
found himsal4" Mr. Woodward
writes. Not even a widow could
object to that 0
David C. Martin wrote "A Wilderness
of Mirrors," about the C.I.A. He is the CBS
News Pentagon correspondent and is
working on a book on counterterrorism.
The Chief Plants a Bug
Casey decided he would
have to set an example. For
some time, one of his Middle
East stations had been
talking about placing an
eavesdropping device in the I
office of one of the senior
officials in that country....
At the station it was back
and forth about the risk
assessment; there was
hesitancy and floundering as
placed the bug during a
courtesy visit to the official
- another violation of
tradecraft. By one account,
ti i inserted a thin,
niaturized, long-stemmed
microphone and
mitting device shaped
~lr large needle in asofa
do nn ?ar .- - cu. iw during his visit. By
-A',.ar+T another account lit l was
the DO[ Directorate of Operations)
officers debated how to make an entry
into the office. They had raised
irresolution to an art form. "I'll do it
myself, goddamn it," Casey said.
Though it was totally against tradecraft
practice to use even a DO officer for
such a mission, (Casey 1, insisting,
built. Trojan-horse style.
into the binding of a book that Casey
brought as a gift for the official. One
senior agency officer insisted that the
story was apocryphal, but others said it
was true. Among DO officers it was
accepted as gospel. Casey only smiled
when I asked him about the incident
several years later. From "veil
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