Speak Easy

Former CIA analyst Ray McGovern was en route to Atlanta in early May when he read that Donald Rumsfeld would be there giving a talk. McGovern had spent 27 years with the CIA before retiring in 1990. In the run-up to Colin Powell's now-infamous presentation to the U.N. Security Council on Saddam Hussein's supposed WMD, McGovern had enlisted four other former CIA colleagues to form a group they called vips--Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity. The group had drafted a same-day rebuttal of Powell's case against Iraq. And, over the next three years, vips kept at it, producing eleven more communiques and expanding to include some 50 members. Now that the 66-year-old McGovern finally had the chance to confront the defense secretary in person, he wasn't going to miss it.McGovern says he didn't really know what he would ask during the event's Q&A. But, when Rumsfeld responded to a heckler with a lecture about how lying is a charge "frequently leveled against the president for one reason or another, and it is so wrong, and so unfair, and so destructive," something inside McGovern snapped. "I was appalled at that sanctimonious reaction," he says. "The president? She didn't say `the president.' She said you!" And so began a more than four-minute dialogue with the Pentagon chief, with McGovern asking why Rumsfeld would "lie to get us into a war" and Rumsfeld denying that he had. At its climax, McGovern simply cut the seething defense secretary off: "You said you knew where [Saddam's weapons] were: `Near Tikrit, near Baghdad, and north, east, south, and west of there.' Those are your words." This observation earned McGovern jeers from the generally pro-administration crowd and an elbow to the solar plexus from a security official, who began ushering him out before Rummy intervened. But the p.r. damage had been done. Within hours, footage of the tongue-tied defense secretary was all over cable and the Internet. There was a time when seeing a former CIA man publicly dress down a top administration official would have caused jaws to drop. In an earlier era, the spook-turned-gadfly would have been declared persona non grata by his erstwhile colleagues and expelled from the brotherhood of spies. But, in a stark break with tradition, today's CIA officials are seamlessly moving on to second careers as authors of polemics, crusading pundits--even bona fide activists. In the year before McGovern's outburst, former operative Gary Berntsen published a detailed book about his experiences in Afghanistan, which cast the Bush administration in an unflattering light. Paul Pillar, now a professor at Georgetown University, penned a scathing article in Foreign Affairs after resigning as a top Middle East analyst last year. Tyler Drumheller, the head of the Agency's European operations until 2005, gave a "60 Minutes" interview denouncing the administration's use of intelligence. And then there's Michael Scheuer, the former head of the CIA's bin Laden analytical unit, who didn't even wait to leave the Agency before writing a book critical of the Bush administration and the George Tenet-era CIA. Scheuer initially published his book anonymously, but he outed himself late in the 2004 presidential campaign. Just what did Scheuer's colleagues think of this ultimate violation of CIA omerta? "I must have signed 300 to 400 copies [for people] within the Agency." It was no accident that the CIA McGovern joined as a Soviet analyst in 1963 resembled an Ivy League secret society. As Evan Thomas writes in The Very Best Men, his account of the CIA's early postwar years, spymasters like Frank Wisner focused their recruiting efforts on Ivy League colleges to find men pre- equipped with an "old-school" ethos. And, of course, the virtue the old CIA hands prized above all else was discretion. True to their Skull and Bones pedigree, most CIA men were loath to acknowledge they even worked for the Agency, much less disclose what they did there. Perhaps the most vivid personification of this code was Richard Helms, a longtime Wisner deputy who became CIA director in the mid-'60s. While testifying before a Senate panel a decade later, Helms refused to come clean about the CIA's role in undermining the Chilean government--and was eventually prosecuted for withholding information from Congress. But, following his sentencing, Helms returned to the CIA fold a hero. A roomful of retired operatives greeted him with a standing ovation--and even passed around a basket to pay his $2,000 fine. The flip side of this mentality was swift punishment for anyone who aired the Agency's dirty laundry. In 1978, a former Angola station chief named John Stockwell published a book flaying the CIA for its brutal tactics against the country's rebel groups. Stockwell tried to distinguish between the hardworking rank and file, whom he respected, and the Agency as a whole, which he deemed out of control. But former colleagues ostracized him nonetheless. "He was perceived as an acidic critic," recalls former CIA counterterrorism chief Vincent Cannistraro. "People thought it was in poor form." This is the CIA that shaped McGovern. In 1968, for example, he learned of a cable by a Vietnam analyst colleague reporting that U.S. forces faced twice as many Vietcong troops as the Pentagon's generals were acknowledging. McGovern was tempted to leak the information to The New York Times in order to expose the futility of the Johnson administration's war effort. In the end, though, he kept his mouth shut, too worried about ruining his career. The end of the cold war eroded the CIA's code of silence in two important ways. First, it dampened some of the urgency CIA hands felt in their workaday lives. During the cold war, "the danger to agents and people operating overseas was clear," says Dick Kerr, the CIA's deputy director in the early '90s. "Today's world is more cloudy, ambiguous." Second, the aftermath of the cold war brought political considerations closer to the CIA's doorstep. The embarrassment of the Aldrich Ames espionage scandal, congressional scrutiny of the Agency's shady friends, and a general impatience with government secrecy all nudged the CIA toward greater transparency. This was the backdrop when a former operative named Dewey Clarridge submitted a manuscript to the Agency's Publications Review Board (PRB) in the spring of 1996. Clarridge worried that the censors would force him to delete large chunks of the book, a detailed account of his CIA glory days. But the changes Langley asked for were trivial, and people in the intelligence community took note. "Clarridge raised eyebrows," says Cannistraro, who left the CIA in 1991. "People realized you could write books and retire overtly ... rather than maintain lifelong cover." Indeed, in the late '90s, the chairman of the PRB, John Hollister Hedley, conceded he'd established a new precedent with the Clarridge book--aptly named the "Clarridge Precedent": Former operatives still couldn't reveal "sources, cover arrangements, sensitive liaison relationships, or covert facilities." But they could now disclose where they had served and speak generally about what they had done there. If the post-cold-war atmosphere provided the first break in the CIA code of silence, the Bush administration's epic battles with the Agency over Iraq--and over assigning blame for flawed intelligence--came close to obliterating it. In the conservative telling, the CIA Bush inherited is a cesspool of Democratic partisans and countercultural liberals. "C.I.A. officials were betting their agency on a Kerry victory," wrote David Brooks in a column following the election. The recent deluge of CIA criticism, say conservatives, is an example of Langley showing its ideological stripes. But that's simply not the case. In fact, while the early, Ivy-dominated CIA really was a bastion of liberalism (albeit one tempered by devout anti- communism), the demographics of the Agency shifted dramatically between the late '60s and the late '70s. The churning over Vietnam made cold war liberals a dying breed; in their place came a generation of New Left types skeptical of the CIA's shadowy m.o. "For my generation, the last thing in the world you would do ... is join the CIA," says Bob Baer, who arrived at the Agency from Berkeley in 1976. "The view was that it was out assassinating people.... I wouldn't dare tell some of my liberal friends." Increasingly, the CIA has been populated by a kind of nonideological moderate--a figure too square to be caught up in any countercultural zeitgeist, and not so ambitious as to frown on a government payscale. "I was raised by a Marine, educated by Jesuits all my life," says Scheuer. Probably the easiest way to summarize the reigning worldview within the CIA these days is pragmatic, heavily empirical, and tending toward foreign policy realism. This worldview, not surprisingly, made George H.W. Bush's administration an ideal one from the perspective of the Agency. The CIA felt extremely comfortable with everyone from Bush himself--a former CIA director--to his top national security aides. McGovern, who was one of then-Vice President Bush's daily CIA briefers during the early '80s, gushes about the assignment. "It was a delight," he recalls. After he retired, McGovern and Bush remained in periodic contact. When the former president delivered the commencement speech at his son's college graduation, McGovern arranged for a private meeting in which the three snapped photos and reminisced about old times. For former CIA officials, fond memories of Bush 41 led to high expectations for Bush 43--particularly after eight years in which the CIA's status had declined along with Washington's interest in foreign policy. "It started out looking like it was going to be a Powell-like administration, with a pragmatist in charge," says a wistful Frank Anderson, former head of the Agency's Near East division. When I asked Pillar which candidate Langley preferred in 2000, he chuckled as though it were a no-brainer. "I think it's likely that a lot [of us] voted for Bush." As it happened, the honeymoon lasted approximately until September 11, when the administration reoriented its foreign policy around Iraq. And that's when the floodgates burst open. Scheuer wrote his book Imperial Hubris because he believed the U.S. invasion of Iraq had made the scourge of jihadi terrorism "geometrically worse." He was so aggrieved by attacks on the CIA's credibility that, according to The Washington Post, he once lectured a certain CIA critic named John McCain in the green room of a network talk show: "Sir, I'm a Republican, I vote Republican, and I thought your comments were scurrilous." As for Berntsen, says Baer, 20 years ago a guy like him "would have gone and lived somewhere remote in Northern Virginia.... He might go off to lament the decline of the Agency, but he'd do it in stony silence." Last year, Berntsen's Jawbreaker bashed the Pentagon for letting Osama bin Laden escape from Afghanistan. For his part, McGovern had spent the '90s working at a variety of charitable foundations in inner-city Washington, largely disengaged from the major foreign policy debates of the day. But, amid the rush to war--and the mainstream media's credulity toward the administration's claims--he felt a duty to get involved: "We'd been educated and trained at taxpayer expense in the really important discipline of analysis. We never thought we would be turning the tools on our own government." He wasn't the only one.