WILLIAM CASEY, SECRET WARRIOR

• Document Type: CREST
• Collection: General CIA Records
• Document Number (FOIA) /ESDN (CREST): CIA-RDP90-00965R000807640001-9
• Release Decision: RIPPUB
• Original Classification: K
• Document Page Count: 1
• Document Creation Date: December 22, 2016
• Document Release Date: January 12, 2012
• Sequence Number: 1
• Publication Date: February 5, 1987
• Content Type: OPEN SOURCE

STAT
Declassified in Part - Sanitized Copy Approved for Release 2012/01/12 : CIA-RDP90-00965R000807640001-9
WASHINGTON POST
5 February 1987
Edwin At Yoder Jr.
William
Casey,
Secret
Warrior
The William Camera at Central Intelli.'
gence en3~d'For personal reasons everyone
regrets. But the timing, while he didn't
choose it, spared him an appointed battle
with the congressional oversight commit-
tees that might well have been his longest
and last. When he fell ill in December,
Congress was just beginning to dissect the
Iran-contra affair; and the half of Casey's
involvement had not been told, least of all
by him. More surely will be.
Casey's stewardship at the CIA was
productive by the standards of bureaucrat;
is enhancement. He increased the budge
and the personnel. And with Ronald
Reagan's blessing, the White House check-
rein gave way to a long and elastic leash,
The agency, meaning essentially its
operations or "dirty tricks" side, regained
some freedom from what Casey and other
apostles of unfettered secret war-making
saw as pussyfooting restrictions. Cases
was of the view that "most of the highly
publicized charges made against the CIA in
the '70s turned out to be false." He acted
accordingly.
He had a point of sorts. To a degree, thu0
agency had been unfairly pummeled fot
illegal initiatives that were the result of
presidential orders. Some resumption of
trust was in order, and healthy.
But Casey exaggerated the agency's in-
nocence as much as savage critics exagger-
ated its roguishness. This reverse mirror
image of the critics' view, turning the
Church and Pike committee verdicts upside
down, was a recipe for trouble. Trouble
followed-lots of it.
With the president's encouragement,
Casey treated the congressional oversigh$
committees, charged with monitoring so.
cret activities, as nuisances to be baffled;
His biggest job of obfuscation, before Iraq;
was the concealment of CIA mining of
Nicaragua's harbors, a part of the Reagartl
Casey crusade against the Sandinista go a
ernment. ;;
When the leaders of the Senate InteW3
gence Committee, Barry Goldwater an?
Daniel Patrick Moynihan, rebelled against
this high-handedness, Casey claimed that
they had been "briefed" on the mining
operation. Moynihan found one vague ref
erence to the mining in a 64-page briefing
transcript. This, it seemed, was "briefing'
a la Casey. Such encounters ignited a sort
of low-level guerrilla struggle between the
director of Central Intelligence and his
Capitol Hill overseers. Casey often capitu-
lated to the overseers' view, but the capit-
ulations were tactical.
From its inception, the contra movement
has been Casey's pet project. The contra
were at first represented to the oversight
committees as a small "strike force" to
interdict Nicaraguan arms shipments to lye
Salvador. Such prevarication aroused con'.
gressional distrust and restrictions, which
were in turn airily ignored. But set aside as secondary, or in a
case elusive, the tangled issues of lega
ty-for instance, the bizarre practice of
legalizing congressional forbidden acts with
secret presidential "findings." Such she-
nanigans clearly twisted, if they did not
pervert, legislative intent. But they were
less important than allowing unchecked
secret operations to wag the dog of natilift
policy, in Central America and elsel
where.
Casey has been the walking embodiment
these past six years of one side of II
fundamental dilemma that has haunted the
CIA for all 40 years of its history- if secre
operations are useful in protecting the
national security, how do you ensure
those who undertake them remain aecounn -
able?
Whatever his virtues may be, Wi?luii
Casey treated congressional concern on this
score as if it were the negligible whim 4
liberal wimps, not a serious issue. He took as
unreconstructed view: secret wars were ek
ecutive-branch business. It was a noetalgig
throwback to a past. Casey stood for the
view (and he was far from alone in it) thpf
when the secret war-making capacity clashelt
with accountability, so much the worse foe
accountability.
But Congress, even at its most consetvae
tive, has given unalterable notice that the
Casey view is not acceptable. No doubt,
Casey did many things right, but he fought
an ill-advised and arrogant rear-guard acti against accountability. He renewed a fight
the secret warriors had already lost, aftd
should have.
Declassified in Part - Sanitized Copy Approved for Release 2012/01/12 : CIA-RDP90-00965R000807640001-9