I interviewed former CIA analyst, Larry C. Johnson for about a half-hour last week. I wanted to pick his brain about his experiences at the Agency, and get some insight into some of the big events that have caused controversy over the last 30 years.
We talked about the Church Commission, the Contras, the mujahideen, William Casey, George H.W. Bush and the Iran-Contra scandal, Aldrich Ames, James Woolsey, the lead-up the war in Iraq, and a lot more. Unfortunately, although I recorded our conversation, Larry’s voice didn’t come out loud enough for me to create an accurate transcription. So, I’ll do my best to relate what he told me, based on the questions I asked.
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We started out discussing two recent books about the CIA. One is Charlie Wilson’s War by George Crile, and the other was Blowing My Cover: My Life as a CIA Spy by Lindsay Moran.
Ms. Moran’s book is a behind the scenes look at how CIA operatives are trained. It goes into great detail about the methods used by our clandestine services to teach operatives how to recruit agents, how to detect a tail, how to maintain a cover story, and much, much more. Mr. Johnson expressed dismay that the CIA had allowed the book to be published. In his opinion, the book revealed way too much information that would be of use to our enemies.
I asked him whether Moran’s depiction of her training was reminiscent of his own training back in 1985. He told me that it was very similar, but with a minor difference. When Mr. Johnson went through his training, his group was made up of people destined for both the Directorate of Intelligence and the Directorate of Operations. Whereas, it appears Ms. Moran’s group was entirely made up of D.O. recruits. Perhaps the CIA has made some changes in how they segregate and train recruits.
Mr. Johnson shared my enthusiasm for Charlie Wilson’s War. He remarked several times that it is a great book. For those of you who are not familiar with the book, it details the one-man crusade of former Texas Congressman, Charlie Wilson, to arm the mujahideen for their fight against the Soviets. But it also has an amazing portrait of the CIA’s role in the Soviet-Afghan War, largely told through super-operative Gust Avrokatos’s experiences. Avrokatos was a Greek immigrant who attended Carnegie-Mellon University before joining the Agency. In the book, Avrokatos went into great detail about the inferiority complex he felt, and was made to feel, because he didn’t come from an Ivy League school. Since Mr. Johnson went to the University of Missouri, I asked him if he shared any of the same feelings with Avrokatos.
Mr. Johnson said that the culture of the CIA was changing by the time he joined in 1985. The CIA was bringing in more and more recruits from outside the traditional schools and so there was less of a distinction between Ivies and non-Ivies. He was much more concerned about a different cultural problem. As he put it, the CIA had always recruited the best of the best, and it had a culture of everyone sticking together. But after Director Casey became ill, the code of honor broke down. In the fallout from the Iran-Contra scandal, lower level agents were sold out by bigwigs like Clair George. Mr. Johnson used Joseph F. Fernandez as the best example of this. As the Walsh Report itself reported:
For those of you unfamiliar with the case, Fernandez was indicted for “conspiring with North, Secord and others to defraud the United States, obstructing an investigation by the Tower Commission, and making false statements.” Fernandez’s legal problems were real, but his treatment by the CIA was unnecessary. Fernandez was fired two months short of his fiftieth birthday when his pension would have kicked in. He had worked at the Agency for twenty-five years and had seven children to support. His treatment sent a chilling message throughout the intelligence community.
For Johnson, this betrayal led to significant problems. Lower level operatives felt vulnerable. If they were asked to carry out orders of questionable legality, would they be sold out by higher-ups if those actions came to light? The Iran-Contra affair even made management nervous. Johnson used Bob Baer’s experiences in Iraq as an example. Baer was training Iraqis to fight against Saddam’s regime. They were taught how to kill members of the regime, but were forbidden from attempting to kill Saddam because it would violate an executive order against assassinations. The same problem would recur in Afghanistan, when the CIA was reluctant to give the Northern Alliance the authority to assassinate Usama bin-Laden.
I found it interesting that Johnson attributed the onset of a morale problem to the late 1980’s because many people have pegged the onset in the mid-1970’s when the Church Commission report came out detailing some of the more embarrassing excesses of the Agency’s history. Johnson acknowledged that the Church Committee unearthed some difficult to justify information. But, he insisted that the Agency was a strawman. For Johnson, blaming the Agency for its excesses in the 50’s and 60’s is akin to blaming low level MP’s for Abu Ghraib. The people ultimately responsible for the Agency’s activities are the policy makers. He said the policy makers need to decide what kind of Agency they want. But if they expect the CIA to go out and hunt and kill bad guys they shouldn’t express shock at how the job gets done.
Now that Johnson has become an outspoken critic of the Bush administration many on the right are trying to portray him as a partisan Democrat. That is an inaccurate description. I asked him about his opinions on the two biggest foreign policy initiatives of the 1980’s: the Contras and the arming of the mujahideen.
When asked whether the arming of the mujahideen had been worth the price in blowback, he said that it was not the policy that was responsible for the blowback, but our subsequent abandonment of Afghanistan and our policies toward Pakistan that led to our current predicament. For Johnson, the initial policy was sound.
I then asked him whether, despite Congress’s prohibition, he sympathized with Reagan’s overall policy of arming the Contras. He said he did and that our policy had been successful. He wishes Reagan had gone to Congress and insisted on his Nicaraguan strategy, rather than breaking the law.
Johnson strongly endorsed the leadership of William Casey, who headed up the agency throughout the Iran-Contra period. While asserting that Casey could occasionally get “out-of-control”, Johnson felt that a lot of the problems the Agency suffered in the aftermath of Iran-Contra would have been avoided if Casey hadn’t died. I asked about the leadership of Casey’s replacement, William Webster. Johnson didn’t have much to say other than to note that Webster was obsessed with his tennis game.
[as an aside, I also asked Johnson about Bobby Ray Inman’s claim that Bill Casey hated George H.W. Bush and probably kept him out of the loop on important aspects of Iran-Contra. He didn’t have any personal knowledge of the Casey/Bush relationship, but he said he was sure that both Bush and Reagan were fully aware of the most salient details.]
Not many partisan Democrats will assert support for our 1980’s policies in Central America or have positive things to say about William Casey. As for our policy in Afghanistan, Johnson’s position might strike a lot of liberals as somewhat off-putting. I asked him if he didn’t find a policy of riling up and radicalizing Muslims against Soviet atheism to be a cynical policy. He agreed that it was very cynical, but went on to say that he didn’t have a problem with cynical policies if they served the interests of the country.
I next asked Johnson about the Aldrich Ames incident. He told me that it had been very disruptive. He had a colleague who was suspended for two years because he was under suspicion of being the mole. In a Kafkaesque scene, Johnson’s friend was actually questioned about the leaks by none other than Ames, who was the true guilty party.
I was interested in Johnson’s opinions of James Woolsey, especially in light of Woolsey’s recent whole-hearted embrace of the neo-conservative agenda. Woolsey was the DCI from 1993 to 1995. Johnson made some interesting observations. According to Johnson, the Clinton administration came into power without a lot of foreign policy experience. They initially suffered from a bit of arrogance and a bit of naivety, and Clinton didn’t show much interest in Woolsey, or in the CIA. However, after a while the Clintons came around to the idea that they needed some tough guys to take care of tough tasks around the world. As far as Woolsey, Johnson was fairly dismissive, citing his lack of experience as either an analyst or an operative, Johnson described him as a wholly political appointment.
When I asked him why Woolsey was going around before the war endorsing the hair-brained theories of Laurie Mylroie, Johnson was contemptuous. He likened Woolsey’s credulity to a man too fond of his Scotch (although his language was quite a bit more colorful). When I questioned whether Woolsey was truly credulous or merely found Mylroie’s theories convenient, Johnson asserted that some of the neo-cons were true believers and it was possible Woolsey was really taken in.
Johnson and I next launched into a discussion on why he decided to leave the CIA, which led to an interesting conversation on the lead-up to the Iraq War. In Johnson’s last year he was given two distinguished service awards, but he ran into a problem with the Promotion Panel. He was informed that there were questions about the integrity of his analysis. Every morning Johnson was responsible for providing message traffic from Latin America to the front office for review. He had to decide which information was pertinent and would be of interest. “In my last year I got a new branch chief, who had no experience in Latin America. Unbeknownst to me, she was forwarding messages to the front office that differed from mine. Instead of asking me to explain the discrepancy in what messages were being selected, the panel just assumed that I was withholding material. The most critical resource an analyst possesses is his or her integrity. I decided to leave the CIA, because I was unwilling to work in an organization that would make judgments based on assumptions rather than seek out facts easily in their grasp. Unfortunately for the country, this aspect of CIA behavior came back to haunt us during the lead up to the war in Iraq.” .
The Downing Street Leaks demonstrated that the facts were ‘fixed around the policy’. How many analysts were confronted with questions about the ‘integrity of their analysis’ when their analysis was inconsistent with the worst-case scenarios being espoused by Cheney, Rice, and Bush? And if the decision to invade Iraq was finalized in April of 2002, was there really any sincere effort at impartial analysis thereafter? Or did the CIA’s job become more a matter of preparing domestic and international opinion for the war? Johnson agreed these were good questions.
[Note: Larry has reviewed this article and approved its characterization of our conversation.]
