COMMENTARY on Bill Casey
David Gries
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There are only two additions and one comment I can usefully add
to Jim McCullough's vivid, evenhanded description of the events
that overwhelmed CIA's seventh floor during November and December
1986 ("Personal Reflections on Bill Casey's Last Month at
CIA," by James McCullough; Studies in Intelligence, summer
1995). I do want to record, however, that with customary modesty
McCullough fails to note his own steadying influence as a voice
of reason and common sense during those troubled months.
The first addition concerns the atmosphere on the seventh floor
during the last 10 days of November 1986. As McCullough relates,
19-21 November was occupied with preparing Casey's first
Congressional testimony scheduled for 21 November. The meeting to
discuss the testimony held late on the afternoon of 20 November
was characteristic of the confusion that gripped the seventh
floor during that period. Although all the seats were taken
around Casey's ample conference table, no one present was
able--or perhaps willing--to fit together all elements of the
Iran-Contra puzzle.
In fact, the atmosphere at the meeting was surreal: many of the
participants seemingly were more interested in protecting
themselves than in assisting Casey, who was visibly exhausted and
at times incoherent. It was clear to McCullough and me that the
next morning we would be accompanying a badly confused Director
to Congress. We both felt that we had let the boss down, that he
was headed for trouble, and that we had not done enough to
prepare him.
The second addition concerns Casey's condition when, on 10
December, McCullough and I again accompanied him to Congress, on
this occasion to the cavernous hearing room of the House
International Relations Committee. It was at this hearing,
described in McCullough's article, that I first began to realize
that Casey was ill, perhaps very ill. Something was clearly wrong
with his motor control, to the extent that he lurched from side
to side in his chair, while we took turns trying to keep the
microphone within range of what by then was a barely audible
mumble.
When late in the hearing Casey asked for a break, it took four of
us--two security officers, McCullough, and myself--to steer him,
stumbling repeatedly, up the risers to the back of the hearing
room, down a flight of steps, and along a narrow corridor to his
destination. The return trip was equally perilous. Not long
afterward, Chairman Dante Fascell, recognizing that his witness
was in no condition to continue, adjourned the hearing.
The hearing was, as McCullough writes, "another dismal
performance." It was also the beginning of a tragedy, a
larger-than-life man destroyed by a small tumor, just at the time
when he needed all his powers to defend himself from questionable
charges that he was the mastermind behind the Reagan
administration's worst foreign policy disaster. After his
death--after the opportunity for rebuttal that died with him--the
charges grew in scope and detail, their creators safe from
Casey's reach.
Next, I would like to comment on the role of excessive secrecy in
first creating and then deepening public suspicion of CIA
involvement in the Iran-Contra affair, an ill-advised effort that
was devised, managed, and bungled by the staff of the National
Security Council with support around the margins from CIA, NSA,
and the Pentagon.
The essence of secrecy is compartmentation. Applied horizontally
across CIA's organizational structure, compartmentation helps
keep the secrets, a necessary goal in any intelligence agency.
But in the Iran-Contra affair, compartmentation was also applied
vertically inside CIA's chain of command. Thus, McCullough's
remark that, in October 1986, he "became aware for the first
time of the general outline of the NSC Staff's management of and
CIA's support for the administration's efforts to trade arms for
hostages."
McCullough was not alone. Many of the officers working directly
for Bill Casey knew little or nothing of these events until long
after they had occurred. Casey's General Counsel was unaware
until after the event of the November 1985 use of a CIA
proprietary aircraft to ferry missiles to Iran. The officers
charged with meeting the press and with representing CIA to
Congress (including myself) were operating in near-total
ignorance until Clair George briefed Congressional staffers on 18
November 1986.
Further, vertical compartmentation impeded and, in some cases,
defeated efforts not only to put all the facts on the table in
preparation for the Congressional hearings McCullough describes,
but also to provide documents, first to Congress and later to the
Independent Counsel as he pursued his investigation. McCullough
writes that knowledge of CIA's role was "scattered around
the DO." The description is too kind. In fact, it required
months to pull the scattered pieces together into an accurate
account and years
to provide complete documentary evidence to investigating
authorities.
I recall vividly the frustration felt by members of the Executive
Director's Iran-Contra review committee, as we were told with
numbing regularity that excessive compartmentation made it nearly
impossible to reconstruct events and locate relevant documents.
In the end, these failings led much of the public to an
inaccurate, but understandable, conclusion. CIA was deeply
involved in the affair, and Bill Casey was its mastermind.
What lessons does the Iran-Contra affair teach? First, vertical
compartmentation is a sure prescription for trouble whenever
officers are called to account for actions about which they have
incomplete knowledge. In the Iran-Contra affair, probably only
one officer positioned three levels down from the Director's
office had complete or nearly complete knowledge. Casey's loose
management style and his contempt for the chain of command were
partly to blame for permitting this to happen. Misleading
testimony to Congress and inaccurate briefings of the press were
among the consequences.
Second, prudent management of a high-risk operation, especially
one in which another government organization is calling the
shots, is impossible without making accurate information
available to a circle wide enough to permit debate of different
courses of action. In the Iran-Contra affair, vigorous debate on
the seventh floor might have mitigated the most damaging
mistakes, such as mishandling Presidential Findings.
Third, vertical compartmentation must not be a shield to conceal
poor judgment or provide protection from accountability, as was
the case in two Central American stations, where violations of
Congressional prohibitions against supplying the Contras
continued without knowledge of officers at higher levels in the
chain of command. Although I now look at CIA from the outside
rather than from the inside and thus often lack relevant
information, my impressions of some of CIA's recent troubles is
that many of the lessons of the Iran-Contra affair have not been
learned.
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