Since that day in 1973, Pavitt had been carefully climbing the agency ladder with clandestine assignments in Austria, Germany, Malaysia, and Luxembourg before eventually being named, in 1992, to the National Security Council as the top intelligence officer during the first Bush administration. A year later, with the election of Bill Clinton, George Tenet would take his place.
In 1995, as Tenet became the agency’s deputy director, Pavitt took charge of a new counterproliferation division within the DO. Its job, in addition to secretly tracking the transfer of weapons of mass destruction, was to actively halt or disrupt the deadly shipments of the same. According to one former CIA official, this involved such risky missions as arranging the hijacking of ships transporting the materials to and from North Korea as they passed through the pirate-filled waters of the Straits of Malacca. Finally, in August 1999, Tenet named Pavitt to be the Deputy Director of Operations and head of the Clandestine Service—the country’s master spy. “I run America’s espionage service,” Pavitt would later proudly boast. “I run the spy service of America.”
But when Pavitt walked into the sixth-floor conference room for the first of his weekly DO meetings, the Clandestine Service was still struggling to recover from nearly a decade of neglect. Sitting at the head of the long conference table, Pavitt was surrounded by the ghosts of America’s secret past. Along the gray, sound-absorbing walls were the photographs of the men who, as deputy directors of operations, had directed America’s Clandestine Service for nearly half a century: from the black-and-white snapshots of Allen Dulles, pipe in hand, rimless glasses, an expression both knowing and inquisitive, to the sober, official color photo of his most recent predecessor, Jack Downing, square-jawed and silver-haired in front of the Stars and Stripes.
As he sat, waiting for his new staff to arrive, Pavitt may have wondered how his picture might be viewed years from now. Would he be among the legendary or the forgotten? The famous or the infamous? For all his successes, Dulles was ultimately fired by President Kennedy for his role in the Bay of Pigs disaster. Frank Wisner, Dulles’s successor, committed suicide. Richard Helms, who left the agency as Pavitt was just arriving, would receive a suspended prison sentence for withholding from Congress information on the CIA’s covert operations in Chile. And Clair George would be indicted for his role in the Iran-contra scandal.
Soon Pavitt’s division chiefs—Europe, Africa, East Asia, the Near East—began filing in. Long known as the “barons,” they would take their specific seats around the table according to strict tradition and territoriality. His chief of counterintelligence would sit at the opposite end of the table, and the heads of the lesser staffs would occupy stiff chairs along the wall. By then Pavitt’s secret kingdom had shrunk to about 5,000 people, with less than a thousand actual case officers engaged in overseas missions. And the DO was running no more than ten to fifteen operations at any time around the world.
Nearly three years later, in April 2001, Pavitt sat in his seventh-floor office overlooking an endless expanse of leafy green treetops, reflecting about the past and worrying about the future. Arty prints covered the walls: a Toulouse-Lautrec, a poster from a turn-of-the-century international hygiene conference with a giant eyeball staring down from the center, an antique map of Russia. On his desk—a thick sheet of glass supported by silver steel legs—was a silver cup with an assortment of Mont Blanc pens as thick as Cuban cigars. And on the wall behind him was a clock with the ominous words “Last Flight Out.”
“Our resources were perilously depleted earlier in this decade,” he said, “when people, and some in the intelligence business, thought that the end of the Cold War meant the end to danger and uncertainty in this world.” With a flash of anger, Pavitt growled. “For too long we accepted the perspective that, well, we could always do more with less. What unadulterated horseshit—do more with less. And you had crazies around this [intelligence] community say if you can’t do more with less, you can do better with less. We drew a line in the sand and said that is wrong . . . It doesn’t cost a lot of money to run America’s spy service if you look at what it costs to spot, assess, develop, and recruit spies to steal secrets.”
In fact, said Pavitt, his life had become much more complicated over the past decade. “We worry about all sorts of places. Who are getting delivery systems, nuclear, biological, or chemical capabilities, or trying to,” he said. “Terrorism has become a much, much, much larger problem. Organized crime, narcotics—all issues we have to worry about—have grown significantly since the end of the Cold War. The only thing that hasn’t grown significantly are the resources I have to work with.”
Continuing Downing’s efforts to rebuild the Clandestine Service, and reinvigorating the agency’s presence overseas, Pavitt began the largest recruitment drive for new case officers in its history. From 1998 to 1999, the number of job offers jumped 52 percent and, with additional money from Congress, five hundred new case officers were hired. He also continued to revitalize The Farm, which once doubled as the private hunting preserve for senior officials on weekend getaways. “The quail shooting has been banned,” said Pavitt. “I’ve got people, extraordinary young men and women with extraordinary backgrounds, signing up to be intelligence officers. They’ve got good foreign-language skills, average age is about thirty, they’ve got good overseas experience, advanced degrees. I pay them $45,000, I challenge them, I push them, I make them jump out of an airplane five times just to make them do something they think they can’t do. And then I send them off to places around the world where life is dangerous.”
“Needless to say,” said Pavitt in the spring of 2001, “at the start of the twenty-first century my operational agenda is running higher than ever, higher than anyone expected in the aftermath of the Cold War. Somalia, Haiti, Bosnia, Rwanda, Burundi, Iraq, Kosovo, East Timor, I could go on and on and on and on.”
But while the Clandestine Service focused on building up its numbers, there was little attention paid to changing the downward spiral of its performance. Even though hundreds of new recruits were being pumped through The Farm on their eighteen-month training cycle, the instruction by September 2001 was still basically the same as it was during the middle of the Cold War. Rather than focus on penetrating terrorist organizations, the emphasis remained directed toward recruiting foreign-embassy officials at cocktail parties. According to a Clandestine Service officer who went through The Farm shortly before 2001, little that was taught at The Farm was relevant to the targets the United States was facing in the post–Cold War world. And many of the instructors were retired with only Cold War experience. One course involved ways to recruit an agent, according to an interview with a case officer who went through the program in the late 1990s:
They have the three sets: a bump, where you try to meet someone you don’t know, you haven’t been introduced to yet. And then there’s the embassy meetings; and then there’s meeting someone through someone else. And there is always a set way that that’s done. But it was usually in the traditionally way—it was nothing creative, nothing to really meet the demands of today’s intelligence.
I was supposed to meet someone at a bagel store. I was given his description, but I’d never met him before. My job was bump into him as if it was a natural incident. Start up a conversation, and then from then on your goal was to get another meeting. Usually it’s places in Williamsburg [Virginia]. It went okay. Again, the goal was to stay under the radar. So if we didn’t do anything that annoyed one particular person, they [the instructors] wouldn’t make your life miserable.
They gave you some ideas and then there was some room for your own creativity. But after a while you pick up on patterns, you know what certain instructors like, and you knew what worked, and you just learn that thinking so much outside the box isn’t rewarded. I think they’re still struggling to find their identity, because after the Cold War, their strategy changed, the roles changed, and they still can’t identify what their role is.
The one thing they really did not like was when I asked why certain things happened. They just couldn’t answer it. Everything was, “What are you going to do, it’s the way it has been done.” And I just said, “Why does it have to be done that way?” They engineered something really bad. “Well, why is it done that way?” It’s not a culture that promotes innovation.
According to the DO officer, there was virtually no focus on infiltration of Middle Eastern terrorist organizations, or even on recruiting potential terrorist sources:
It was still very traditional. Even after the African Embassy bombings, the only new thing they incorporated was maybe a direct threat to the embassy, or to American personnel and how to handle that administratively. But even those exercises depended on a walk-in. And how often do you get that lucky?
It wasn’t: Here’s this group, let’s try to design some operation to penetrate that group. It was never like that. Everything was always passive. Or a lot of the exercises were designed so that the person you met had a cousin who knew someone who is a member of a group that is very anti-American. It was almost handed to you. And then of course you have a natural broker to introduce you to the person you want to meet in this anti-American group. It wasn’t that imaginative—everything was very prescribed.
I think a lot of it is risk: What if that person died, and then who’s going to have to assume responsibility for that? I found them very risk-averse. And the one thing I learned throughout the whole place was you advance by staying under the radar, by not taking a political stance. And just making friends with the right people. And that’s how you advance. You don’t voice unpopular opinions.
Many in this officer’s class were in their late twenties and early thirties. “They attempted to recruit older people with more life experience, and they realized that it backfired because we weren’t as controllable,” the person said. “So in successive classes we found that the age had dropped, the requirements had dropped for language. I was just surprised, because some of them were just out of college with no work experience. We kept noticing that the newer people, they were much younger and usually they tend to come straight from college. And then we sort of realized that the pendulum had swung in the other direction.”
The vast majority of DO officers fresh from The Farm were still being sent under light diplomatic cover to comfy embassy jobs around the world, from Rio to Rome, posing as State Department employees. There they would attempt to recruit other diplomats, government officials, or potential sources at cocktail parties and other functions. It was the way it had always been done—tradition. Like the rigid order in which the division chiefs sat around the DO conference table, and even parked their cars according to the prescribed pecking order.
The agency case officers, however, were unlikely to bump into an Al Qaeda source in a bagel shop in Virginia, or a coffee shop along Vienna’s Ring Road. And the threats were not coming from Rio or Rome, or even from Moscow. They were clearly coming from terrorist organizations within the Middle East—violent groups that over the decade had left a long trail of death and destruction, from the first World Trade Center bombing to the attack on the American embassies in East Africa to the assault on the USS
Cole
.
Yet little thought seems to have been given to attempting to penetrate Al Qaeda with agency employees—cleared American citizens with Middle Eastern appearances, knowledge, and language abilities specifically recruited and trained to bore into the organization. Not only was Al Qaeda never penetrated by CIA officers, it appears that the agency never once even tried to infiltrate the group. The philosophy was, and still is, that groups like Al Qaeda are too tough—or too dangerous—to penetrate using agency personnel, so why even try. “You’ve got the close family, tribal ties,” said a senior CIA official in a December 2003 interview. “It’s a whole different ball game as far as penetrating Al Qaeda.”
In an agency that constantly boasted of risk-taking and derring-do, there seemed to be little of it. In reality, working for CIA was a very safe occupation. On average, the CIA loses slightly over one person a year in the line of duty—seventy-nine since the agency was formed in 1947. By comparison, forty-one New Jersey law-enforcement officers died in the line of duty in 2001 alone.
Another reason for the agency’s failure to use its own people to try to penetrate the terrorist organizations may have been a reluctance to dirty its own hands. Throughout his career, J. Edgar Hoover refused to allow FBI agents to work undercover, feeling they were above such things. Only after he died did the bureau begin using agents to penetrate and infiltrate groups such as the Mafia, and the results were often spectacular.
One official who spent much of the 1990s in the Clandestine Service and still works for the agency said the CIA is so tied to American embassies around the world, it was almost as if they were connected by umbilical cords. That Clandestine Service officers would be sent to live in caves or infiltrate Al Qaeda was out of the question. “You’re asking them to leave the mother ship, and the mother ship is the embassy, and the embassy provides all the nurturing we would ever need,” the person said in a late 2003 interview. “We get a commissary and we get cable television and we get rent-free housing and all the utilities paid for, and we get cars to drive around in, and we get to go on the cocktail circuit and be witty and charming and everybody loves us. Don’t ask us to leave the mother ship—that is the issue. We’re just tied to this embassy structure—this cocktail-circuit structure with an umbilical cord. Since the Cold War we really didn’t know what we were doing, but we continued to trudge along, saying Russia’s still the target and everything else is not important.”