The Spymasters: How the CIA Directors Shape History and the Future

Posted on October 21, 2020 by Luke Ford

Chris Whipple writes in his 2020 book:

* Petraeus, Brennan’s predecessor, had suffered a precipitous fall from grace. The celebrated former commander of the International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) in Afghanistan, and architect of the Iraq War “surge,” Petraeus brought military acumen to the agency, but also a sense of entitlement that one CIA wag called “four-star general disease.” Rumors of Petraeus’s demands for special treatment while traveling became grist for Langley’s gossip mill, and undermined his authority. Barely more than a year had elapsed, during which Petraeus had recovered from that rocky start, when he was caught sharing top secret information with his biographer and lover; within days he’d resigned.

* Two directors who arrived on a mission to shake up the CIA—James Schlesinger, for Richard Nixon, and Stansfield Stansfield Turner, for Jimmy Carter—also crashed and burned. Schlesinger, brilliant but condescending and arrogant, abruptly fired more than one thousand veteran operatives; after five months Nixon moved him to the Pentagon as secretary of defense. Schlesinger was so unpopular at the CIA that he was given extra security guards after a slew of death threats. Turner, a spit-and-polish former Navy admiral, was earnest but too straitlaced for the rough-and-tumble spy business, and no match in the bureaucratic wars for Carter’s wily national security adviser, Zbigniew Brzezinski. Turner would preside over one of history’s greatest intelligence debacles: the CIA’s failure to anticipate the 1979 Iranian revolution.
Another cautionary tale comes from the tenure of John Deutch, Bill Clinton’s director. A former deputy director of defense and MIT chemistry professor, Deutch was a visionary intellectual who helped usher in the era of unmanned drone warfare. Michael Morell, a two-time acting director, considered him the most intelligent person he’d ever met, followed by Barack Obama. But Deutch was politically tone-deaf. He insulted the CIA workforce, saying they weren’t as smart as their Pentagon counterparts. And he assured Clinton that he’d get rid of Saddam Hussein through a CIA-sponsored coup; unfortunately, the covert operation was penetrated by the Iraqis and failed miserably, leaving Kurdish allies abandoned. (And not for the last time; decades later the Kurds in northern Syria would be abandoned again by Donald Trump.) Deutch resigned after seventeen months. Soon thereafter top secret classified material was found on his home computer, and he was stripped of his security clearance.
Other directors were towering figures who transformed the CIA. Allen Dulles, who served Dwight Eisenhower, was a fierce Cold Warrior who ran the agency like a personal fiefdom; to combat the Soviets, he launched audacious covert operations that toppled governments in Iran and Guatemala. William Colby, who’d fought behind enemy lines as a young paratrooper for the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), the CIA’s precursor, during World War II, made public the agency’s darkest secrets—the so-called Family Jewels. In so doing he earned the enmity of the CIA’s secretive old guard, but the respect of those who valued his transparency, and arguably saved the agency. Colby’s death by drowning in 1996—at the age of seventy-six—while canoeing near his weekend house in Maryland, still strikes some of his colleagues as suspicious.

* When George H. W. Bush, with no intelligence experience but with a stint as envoy to the People’s Republic of China, became director, he was convinced it was the end of his political career. But Bush rescued the agency from scandal, restored its morale and reputation, and set the stage for his eventual presidency.
Few directors wielded more power than William Casey, who was empowered by Ronald Reagan to fight communism around the globe. A disheveled character who careened around CIA headquarters, mumbling unintelligibly, Casey waged covert wars against the Soviets and their proxies; on his watch, the mujahideen, armed with Stinger missiles by the CIA, turned the tide against the Soviet Red Army in Afghanistan. But later, in a bid to free American hostages in Lebanon, Casey spearheaded a harebrained plot to trade arms to Iran and illegally divert profits to the Central American guerrillas known as the contras. At the height of that scandal, Casey died of a brain tumor; he was so famously devious that one senator, unconvinced, asked to see the body as proof.
No one knew more about the CIA than Robert Gates, a suffer-no-fools analyst who rose through the ranks to become director under President George H. W. Bush. On his first bid for the top job, Gates withdrew his nomination after fierce criticism of his role in the Iran-contra scandal. He succeeded on his second attempt a few years later, though he was accused of exaggerating Soviet military capabilities, a charge he denied. As director, Gates helped President George H. W. Bush navigate the dangerous shoals of the post–Cold War world after the Soviets’ collapse.

* The most popular directors of the modern era were George Tenet and Leon Panetta. Charismatic, energetic, and down-to-earth, Tenet warned George W. Bush’s White House of an imminent Al Qaeda attack in the summer of 2001, months before 9/11, a warning that went unheeded by the Bush administration. He also launched the CIA’s lightning invasion of Afghanistan, routing the Taliban.

* The notion that the CIA has bungled its way through the last fifty years—missing real threats and ginning up false evidence for fake ones—is a common belief. It’s a version of history culminating in the agency’s botched estimate of Iraq’s WMDs. And Iraq has hardly been the agency’s only debacle. The CIA has had its share of intelligence failures—from missing Iran’s 1979 revolution to misjudging Russia’s social media assault on the 2016 U.S. presidential election.
But that is a skewed version of history. The CIA has succeeded in disrupting terrorist plots and saving lives. It has also sounded alarms that politicians chose not to hear. Contrary to conventional wisdom, in the months before 9/11, though it could not specify the target, the agency repeatedly warned of an imminent attack by Al Qaeda; it was the Bush White House, not the CIA, that was asleep at the switch. More than an intelligence failure, the 9/11 attacks represented a dereliction of duty by policymakers. As Director Helms observed, “
It’s not enough to ring the bell; you have to make sure the other guy hears it.”

* Founded in 1947 to prevent a repetition of the attack on Pearl Harbor, the CIA mostly met that challenge during the Cold War: It was never blindsided by a Soviet attack, or surprised by a military advance that altered the balance of power.

* Perhaps the only president who understood the agency’s capabilities was George H. W. Bush, a former director. Another exception, arguably, was Dwight Eisenhower, who knew something about intelligence from his stint as D-Day commander.

* Leon Panetta was shocked to discover that he faced life-and-death decisions as director every day. When it came to authorizing lethal drone strikes—when innocent civilians were in the crosshairs—the devoutly Catholic director lamented: “You have to be true to yourself—and just hope that ultimately God agrees with you.” In the aftermath of 9/11, when prisoners were subjected to enhanced interrogation techniques, Director Tenet and his defenders insisted the methods prevented attacks and saved innocent lives. But McLaughlin, one of those defenders, concedes, “There’s an answer to that, which is: Slavery worked too but it was still wrong.”

* Helms’s standing with LBJ improved markedly after war broke out in the Middle East in 1967.
In the fall of that year, the Israelis warned the U.S. that without American help they faced defeat at the hands of their Arab enemies. Helms assured LBJ of the contrary. The CIA estimated that not only would Israel defeat her Arab neighbors but that the war would last no more than seven days. That prediction looked prescient after Israel’s lightning victory in the Six-Day War. Helms proudly called it “the intelligence bingo of my time.”

* Now that he was outside the tent, [James Jesus] Angleton started lobbing stones back in. He gave rambling, apparently inebriated interviews, lambasting Colby for his naïveté. One Sunday morning, he called Hersh at his home. “Do you know what you have done?” he asked. “You’ve blown my cover. My wife, in thirty-one years of marriage, was never aware of my activity until your story.
Now she’s left me.” In fact, Cicely Angleton had left him to go live in Arizona, but it had nothing to do with Hersh—and she knew exactly what her husband did for a living. The master spy seemed a lost soul. Leslie Gelb, who’d left the Defense Department to become one of Hersh’s colleagues at the Times , remembered seeing Angleton on a Georgetown street corner. “He was the scariest-looking thing, slouched against the window of a store with his feet out in front of him, smoking a cigarette, just looking up at the sky.”

* It is remarkable how rarely CIA directors know when they’re about to be fired. They may be able to predict the duration of the Six-Day War to within twenty-four hours. But when their necks are on the chopping block they’re usually the last to realize it.

* But there is one family member for whom Bill Colby, in life and death, is still a mystery. A few years after his father’s death, filmmaker Carl Colby, Paul’s younger brother, made a documentary, The Man Nobody Knew: In Search of My Father, CIA Spymaster William Colby . The film drove a wedge between Carl and the rest of the family; Paul and Sally stopped speaking with him. On one level, the film is a straightforward, even admiring account of Colby’s journey from the OSS to the pinnacle of the intelligence world. On another, it suggests Colby’s complicity in the atrocities of Phoenix, implying that his father endured a kind of dark night of the soul.

* The notion that heading the CIA would be a political death sentence spoke volumes about the agency. Bush returned to Washington the following month to a flurry of terrible headlines.

* Bush would be starting cold, knowing almost nothing about the clandestine service. And he would have to gain the respect of its covert operatives, those “Scottish tribes waiting for the English King,” as Cofer Black, the veteran operative, had described them. Frank Wisner Jr. summed up Bush’s challenge in his own colorful way: “He had to master the spies, find a way to live with them, and direct them to be successful—or be hung up by his balls.”

* The CIA, unlike the FBI, was unaccustomed to pleading its case to the public. There was no agency equivalent of the hagiographic hit television show, The F.B.I. , starring Efrem Zimbalist Jr. “Intelligence has no constituency,” explained Richard Kerr, an analyst who spent thirty-two years at the agency, rising to deputy director. “The bureau has always had a constituency, they’ve been very good at PR. The Marines have always been really good at it. The CIA has no people out there who say, ‘Oh yeah, it’s a great organization,’ except the people who work there.”

* There were many reasons for the CIA’s Iran debacle: incompetence, wishful thinking, a failure of imagination, deception by the Shah himself—and secret deals that rendered the agency blind. Iran was virtually the only major country in which the CIA had no contact with the government’s opposition. How could that be? Because the Shah wanted it that way. Everyone—including, ironically, the ambassador to Tehran, Richard Helms—was willing to wear blinders to keep the Shah happy. Even more than his oil, the U.S. needed access to listening sites on Iran’s border with the Soviet Union. Helms’s old friend Burton Gerber, then an operative stationed in Tehran, recalled: “Everyone in the leadership gang—that includes Helms and my station chief—was very nervous about doing anything that could upset the Iranians because of the importance of the sites.”

* William Casey would become the most powerful CIA director since Allen Dulles, fighting covert wars against the Soviets in every corner of the globe. But Casey’s determination to run the CIA like an off-the-books enterprise, and his flouting of rules, would trigger the most serious political crisis since Watergate.

* Because there were no rules, in Casey’s view, congressional oversight was an annoyance.

* Casey chose an unlikely person as his Deputy Director of Operations (DDO): a streetwise entrepreneur named Max Hugel. Hugel (pronounced Who -gull) had made a fortune selling sewing machines and investing on Wall Street; as a businessman, he was even less scrupulous than Casey. Five-foot-two inches tall, sporting a toupee, a shirt open to his navel, and gold chains, Hugel cut a ridiculous figure amid the gray suits of Langley. He knew nothing about spycraft. This didn’t faze Casey; he thought Hugel was exactly the kind of unorthodox, idiosyncratic thinker the Directorate of Operations needed.

* Casey believed the showdown over Soviet expansionism would come in America’s backyard. Alan Fiers, who ran the CIA’s Central American Task Force, recalled a conversation with the director: “
Alan, you know the Soviet Union is tremendously overextended and they’re vulnerable. If America challenges the Soviets at every turn and ultimately defeats them in one place, that will shatter the mythology… and it will all start to unravel. Nicaragua is that place.”
During the 1980 election campaign, the head of French intelligence had made a prediction to Reagan. As Admiral Inman recalled: “He told Governor Reagan, ‘You are going to be tested, militarily, by the Soviets in your first year in office. And that will probably take place in Central America.’ ” A leftist faction known as the Sandinistas had taken power in Nicaragua and they were supplying arms to a guerrilla insurgency fighting a rightist government in El Salvador. This was the threat Reagan and Casey had been expecting. During the final days of his presidency, Carter had approved covert opera tions to thwart this communist menace. At Casey’s urging, Reagan accelerated those programs.

* Jack Devine, a veteran operative who’d worked under every director since Richard Helms, thought no one topped [Robert] Gates at working the levers of power in the intelligence community, the White House, and Capitol Hill. “Pound for pound, he was the best bureaucrat we ever had. He knew how to run the U.S. government.”

* Upon becoming director, Gates had reached out to his old boss, Richard Helms, the iconic CIA director, then retired for twenty years. The old spymaster and the new director had lunch alone in the private dining room high above the woods of Langley. They surveyed the state of the world and compared notes on intelligence-gathering and covert operations. Then Helms paused. He looked his young protégé in the eye to make sure he had his attention. Helms had one more bit of wisdom to impart. “I just have one piece of advice for you,” Helms said. “Never go home at night without wondering where the mole is.”
Gates was stunned. Was it possible that the CIA, at that moment, was compromised by a Russian mole?

* When it came to killing bin Laden, the legal bureaucracy reinforced Clinton’s skittishness. As Clarke explained: “Janet Reno, the attorney general, had a problem with saying, ‘Just go kill him.’ So we’d say, ‘Try to apprehend him.’ We already had bin Laden under sealed indictment, so we could arrest him. But only if that failed could you kill him.” The legal contortions drove Cofer Black up the wall. “I mean, I love this,” he said sarcastically. “This is such a Washington thing: Our instructions were to capture him. And that’s what we attempted to do. And the difference between capturing—and the alternative—is significant.”
Tenet was equally reluctant to kill bin Laden. His reasons weren’t just legalistic. “The CIA always used that as their excuse for not killing him,” said Clarke, “but in fact they just didn’t want to get in the killing business.” In Tenet’s view, the issue went to the heart of his role as CIA director.

* Now, in the spring of 2001, the warning lights were flashing again. Tenet presented to the Bush national security team an updated version of the Blue Sky paper, an aggressive paramilitary assault on the Afghan sanctuary. Bush’s NSC team not only rejected it, they deep-sixed it. “The word back was, ‘We’re not quite ready to consider this,’ ” said Tenet. “ ‘We don’t want the clock to start ticking.’ ” What did that mean? Tenet would not say. But the message seemed clear: In the event of a major Al Qaeda attack, the Bush administration did not want anyone to know that they’d been warned.
To Bush’s advisers, the enemies were nations, not terrorists. This group included Vice President Dick Cheney, Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz, the deputy secretary of defense, and Douglas Feith, the undersecretary of defense for policy. “Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, Feith, and others were worried over Saddam Hussein, Iran, and missile defense, getting radar in Czechoslovakia, ballistic missiles in Poland,” said Charlie Allen. “That’s what was driving them. They were in another world, a time machine.”
Dick Clarke pressed Condoleezza Rice, Bush’s national security adviser, to convene a principals meeting to address the Al Qaeda threat. But there was no getting through to her. “They were mentally stuck back eight years ago, the last time they were in power,” said Black. “They were used to terrorists being euro-lefties: you know, drink champagne by night, blow things up during the day. So it was very difficult to communicate the urgency to this.”
In truth, the administration was obsessed with one country: Iraq. “It was transparently clear to me and to George Tenet very early in the administration,” said Clarke, “that the Bush inner circle had come into office with the intention of going to war with Iraq.” The very first National Security Council meeting was devoted to Iraq. There’d be seventeen NSC meetings devoted to Saddam in the first year alone. “George knew what they wanted from day one,” said Clarke. “We all did.”
But Al Qaeda demanded attention. At the Counterterrorism Center, Black and his team were monitoring a constant stream of threats. “For us the system was blinking red in the sense that we thought what we were uncovering was a top-down plot,” said Tenet. “Something was being ordered from Afghanistan out. But it was very difficult for us to figure out what it was.”

* July 10, 2001. Tenet picked up the white phone that connected his office to the White House. George W. Bush was traveling that day in Boston, but Tenet got through to Rice. “I said, ‘Condi, I have to come see you.’ It was one of the rare times in my seven years as director where I said, ‘I have to come see you. We’re comin’ right now.’ ”
When they got to the White House, Tenet, Black, and Blee met in the national security adviser’s office with Rice and Clarke. To underline the urgency, the CIA team sat not on the couch but at the table. Then Blee began his briefing with a PowerPoint presentation. “I always did PowerPoint,” he said, “and I personally wrote, ‘this is what I am going to tell Condi Rice, this is what I am going to tell the DCI,’ because I knew after the fact everybody would say, ‘Yeah, Rich never told me that.’ ”
Blee got straight to the point. “There will be significant terrorist attacks against the United States in the coming weeks or months,” he said. “The attacks will be spectacular. They may be multiple. Al-Qaeda’s intention is the destruction of the United States.” He continued: “This is an attack that is intended to cause thousands of American casualties somewhere. We cannot say it will be New York City or the United States, but it is geared toward U.S. citizens.”
When Blee finished, Rice spoke up: “What should we do now?”
Cofer Black slammed his fist on the table. “This country’s got to go on a war footing now!” he snapped. Tenet was silent. He left the talking to his deputies.
Afterward, on their way across the West Wing parking lot, Black and Blee high-fived each other, convinced their message had been heard. “Cofer and I came out and said, ‘Boom. We hit a home run. She got it,’ ” said Blee. “I mean, Condi said all the right things: ‘We’ve got to do something, policy papers need to move forward, we’ve got to be more aggressive.’ ” Even Black, the eternal cynic, was sanguine: “We congratulated each other: We thought we’d finally gotten through to these people. We had executed our responsibilities.”
The trouble was, their warning had not been heard. One might expect the nation’s top national security official to do something when alerted to an imminent, catastrophic attack. But Rice took no action. Alert levels were raised for U.S. personnel abroad, but there was no White House follow-up; no principals meeting was convened to discuss how to respond to the threat. “What happened?” I asked Black, almost fifteen years later. He paused. “Yeah, what did happen? Nothing happened.” To Blee, Rice’s inaction was incomprehensible. “We’re going to her and saying, ‘We need help.’ There should have been some order that said, ‘INS do more, FBI do more, NSA do more, DOD get ready.’ She didn’t do any of that. From July to September, nothing happened.”
Rice would later write that that her memory of the meeting was “
not very crisp because we were discussing the threat every day.” It makes you wonder what it would have taken to get her attention. As one senior intelligence official put it: “When the director of Central Intelligence, the chief of counterterrorism, and the head of the Bin Laden Unit are saying, ‘Fuck me. They’re coming. Thousands of people are going to die. Get it on,’ the correct response is not to do nothing. The correct response is to call a principals meeting.”

* At the end of the month [of July], George Tenet and his counterterrorism team met in the conference room outside his office. “We were just thinking about all of this and trying to figure out how this attack might occur,” Tenet recalled. Until now, the intelligence had pointed to an attack on American interests overseas. Suddenly Blee spoke up. “They’re coming here,” he said.
In the silence that followed, Tenet said, “You could feel the oxygen come out of the room.”

* At 8:46 a.m. on September 11, 2001, George Tenet was having breakfast at Washington’s St. Regis Hotel with former Oklahoma senator David Boren. “The head of my security detail came over to me and said a plane had hit one of the towers of the World Trade Center,” he recalled. “My instinctual reaction was, ‘This is Al Qaeda. I’ve gotta go.’ ”
The drive to Langley took twelve minutes, an eternity to Tenet, who had no secure phone reception. Upon his arrival at CIA headquarters, the director went to the seventh floor and huddled with Cofer Black, head of the Counterterrorism Center, and his senior staff. Both of the World Trade towers were ablaze; Tenet, remembering an Al Qaeda plot to crash a plane into Langley headquarters, ordered nonessential CIA personnel to go home, and the rest to move to another building. But Black was having none of it; he refused to evacuate his staff. “People could die,” Tenet told his notoriously gruff lieutenant. Black replied: “Well, sir, then they’re just going to have to die.” The Counterterrorism Center was staying put.
George W. Bush had been speaking to an elementary school class in Florida that morning. Later, aboard Air Force One, he summoned his CIA briefer, Michael Morell, to his cabin. “Michael, who did this?” the president demanded. Morell replied that he’d bet his children’s future that it was Al Qaeda. For hours, Tenet tried to reach Bush but couldn’t get a clear connection. Finally, a little after 3 p.m., in a video conference with Tenet from Offutt Air Force Base in Nebraska, the president learned the truth: On the passenger manifests of the hijacked planes were the names of known Al Qaeda terrorists Khalid al-Midhar and Nawaf al-Hazmi.
The 9/11 Commission would famously call the nation’s inabil ity to prevent the attacks a “failure of imagination.” But that wasn’t really true: Not only had the CIA been warning all summer about an imminent attack but it had previously warned of an Al Qaeda attempt to hijack commercial airliners. In 1995, in the so-called Bojinka plot, Al Qaeda operatives had planned to commandeer as many as ten commercial flights out of Manila in the Philippines and blow up the planes over the Pacific; the plot was foiled when the terrorists’ safe house caught fire. The CIA had warned that its failure wouldn’t deter Al Qaeda from deploying airliners as weapons again. “So dismissing something because it didn’t occur,” said Tenet, “turns out to be a terrible, terrible mistake.”
In retrospect, Tenet thought the real failure was the administration’s refusal, in the face of the CIA’s warnings, to take defensive precautions on a national scale. Only an effort involving the CIA, FBI, Federal Aviation Administration (FAA), and other agencies could have thwarted the attacks. “An entire government failed to recognize all the things that needed to be done,” he said. “When you don’t have a system of protection and defense built in place, when you don’t understand what’s going on inside the United States, when you don’t button up your airports, button up your buildings, harden your cockpits, change your visa policies, create a mechanism where there’s a quick swivel between foreign and domestic intelligence, you’re going to get hurt.”
But no one wanted to hear that prior to 9/11, and afterward the CIA bore the brunt of the blame; after all, in Washington there are only policy successes and intelligence failures. The 9/11 Commission Report never mentioned the July 10 meeting at which Tenet and his team warned Condi Rice. That was odd, because Tenet testified about the meeting in a closed session. Rich Blee, head of the Bin Laden Unit, who led the July 10 briefing, believed that both the commission and Congress were determined to deflect blame. “A deliberate effort was made by both the Democratic and Republican leadership to give Bill Clinton a pass and George Bush a pass—and I think Condi Rice got a pass.”

* The trouble began on Petraeus’s first day. All over Langley, a rumor had spread: Arriving at his suite on the seventh floor after a brisk morning run, the director was served a plate of bananas. But there was a problem. The bananas were sliced improperly. Petraeus wasn’t happy. Henceforth, he let everyone know, his bananas should be sliced… just so.
There may be no workplace in the world where gossip travels faster than at CIA headquarters at Langley. That’s because the work force handles top secret material that can’t be discussed with anyone else. Within hours, Petraeus’s rumored commandment about bananas was the talk of the CIA.
The bananas episode was followed by other stories of entitled behavior. Petraeus complained that his apples were too small. One aide was chewed out for failing to properly hand off a water bottle during a morning run. Before leaving a room, the new director supposedly would wait for someone to put his coat on for him. “Sir, we don’t do that here,” someone finally said.
“Petraeus was just a fish out of water,” said Ned Price, a former analyst. “He came from a culture that is just about the opposite of Langley’s culture. The military is hierarchical. It’s large. It’s bureaucratic. The agency is relatively small. It prides itself on its ability to be nimble. And he brought a formality and hierarchy to the building that I think rubbed a lot of people the wrong way.”
Eyebrows were also raised by Petraeus’s exacting and specific travel demands. “If you ever really want to get the unvarnished view of what a director is like, talk to the people who support him,” said one officer. “Holy Christ, the eye rolls, I mean, the faces people made.” The pièce de résistance for Langley gossips was an instruction sent to CIA stations before Petraeus’s visits. “There was this cable that was circulated around that was guidance to station chiefs,” recalled a former senior intelligence official. It reminded him of a story about the 1980s rock group Van Halen; the band had a rider in its contract demanding that all the brown M&Ms be removed from its candy bowls. “Petraeus had his own rider—with everything he wanted in his hotel room,” said this official. “It wasn’t a thousand brown M&Ms—but it was a bathtub of ice, thirty-one bananas… stuff like that.”
According to one other official, there was something else in Petraeus’s rider that was unusual. Station chiefs were advised: “Don’t ask him tough questions.”
Petraeus told me that accounts of his entitled behavior are untrue. The story about sliced bananas, he insisted, is “absolute nonsense—I eat my bananas whole.” After years of being deployed in Iraq and Afghanistan,” he said, “my needs were pretty simple—just don’t keep me from doing my morning run!” Yet multiple CIA officers said that Petraeus suffered from “four-star general disease.” The perception damaged the new director’s leadership right out of the gate. “The slicing of the bananas and the prep, all of that stuff, the support guys were just completely repulsed by all that,” said one officer. “It was a real contrast with directors who came up through the agency and treated all of those people almost deferentially. That was not Petraeus’s style.”
Petraeus’s management style also took getting used to. “He’s not a warm and fuzzy guy,” said a former top intelligence official. “He’s not Leon Panetta or George Tenet. He’s not a hug-you kind of guy. He’s a give-an-order kind of guy—and his attitude was, ‘I expect it to get done and I’m going to ask for the next five days whether it’s done yet.’ ”
Petraeus was better at managing up; Obama respected his knowledge and experience. But some of Obama’s inner circle said he was slow to grasp the CIA director’s role as honest broker. “What the president needs when he’s making a decision is the best available intel,” said McDonough. “He doesn’t need another policy voice from his intel guy. I think that was a really hard transition for General Petraeus to make.”
Obama was a stickler about separating intelligence from policy; he expected his CIA director to deliver his brief and depart. “He was meticulous about that,” said James Clapper, the Director of National Intelligence. “Whenever I’d go in the Oval to brief him, he wouldn’t start a conversation with his team until I was out of the room.” But Petraeus opined on policy. “A lot of times Dave would come straight with a policy brief,” said McDonough.
Obama and his CIA director locked horns over Middle East policy. Petraeus had strong views on the unfolding disaster in Syria; he argued for arming rebel groups to take the fight to the regime of Bashar al-Assad. After all, Obama had declared publicly that the Syrian dictator would have to step down. When Petraeus made his argument, the usually professorial Obama got right in his CIA director’s face. “The president was sparky,” said McDonough. “He’d push back. Notwithstanding his respect for David, they went at it.” Petraeus’s advocacy for the rebels stemmed from deeply held conviction about the stakes. Petraeus, according to a former senior government official, believed that Obama’s indecision—and his refusal to establish a no fly/no drive zone—had led to more than half of Syria’s population being displaced, the death of over 500,000 Syrians, and the establishment of the ISIS caliphate.

* Bruce Riedel, the former Middle East analyst, had left the agency for a job at the Brookings Institution. One day he got a phone call from a woman who was working on a book about Petraeus. She was attending a Brookings dinner event that night; could she stop by his office beforehand for an interview? Her name was Paula Broadwell.
“At about 5:00 p.m. in the evening she shows up,” Riedel recalled. “And she is dressed in this tight little black cocktail dress with platform heels six inches high. I was sitting there saying to myself, ‘Who comes to a Brookings dinner in a cocktail dress? That’s not our thing.’ And it never occurred to me. Thirty years in the intelligence business! It was right in front of my face and I couldn’t put it together!”
Broadwell was researching All-In: The Education of General David Petraeus. Since November 2011, she’d also been having an affair with the celebrated general, whom she’d met during his tour in Afghanistan. Broadwell had sent harassing emails to a Florida socialite named Jill Kelley, a family friend of the Petraeuses. After Kelley reported the emails to the FBI, the Bureau traced them to Broadwell—and discovered intimate messages to the CIA director in an email account they shared. The director and Broadwell had tried to conceal their email correspondence by accessing them in a draft folder. But with the FBI’s discovery, their secret emerged.
On October 26, 2012, agents from the bureau’s Tampa, Florida, office came to Langley, where they questioned the CIA director about his secret email account. Petraeus admitted to the affair with Broadwell, saying he’d lost his “moral compass.” When asked if he’d shared classified information with his lover, Petraeus denied it.
But that wasn’t true. Executing a search warrant at Broadwell’s home, investigators found more than one hundred photographs of highly classified information from eight bound notebooks belonging to Petraeus. They included code words for secret intelligence programs, the identities of covert officers, and confidential discussions with the NSC. Disclosure of these secrets could have caused “exceptionally grave damage,” according to the government.

* [Michael] Morell had set his sights on becoming director. He was respected but not beloved by his fellow analysts. “I think he had a tendency to kiss up and to kick down,” said one. “I think the power went to his head a little bit. It wasn’t all that long ago that he was writing PDBs and briefing them. Now he would pepper us: How do you know this? And why do we think that? And who is the source of that? When was it collected? And he would follow up with twelve taskings a day. And whether he wanted to make his authority known, or whether he really needed the information, I never quite understood.”

* Trump believed the CIA had been emasculated under Obama. Director Brennan had imposed strict rules on the Directorate of Operations. (“Some of the country’s greatest heroes were there,” Brennan told me, “but there were also people who thought the end justifies the means.”) Now Pompeo declared that the gloves were coming off; operatives would be left alone to do their jobs. A retired senior intelligence official spoke to a friend in the DO: “I asked, ‘So how are things going?’ He said, ‘It’s great. We can do what we want to do. We don’t have a lot of handwringing. We don’t have to go down to the White House, or if we do, they all kind of approve it.’ ”
“One of my colleagues was a longtime CIA guy,” recalled Rasmussen, the NCTC head. “And when Trump won and Pompeo was named director, he said, ‘It’s not Make America Great Again, it’s Make CIA Great Again.’ ” That meant “more willingness to put more people closer to harm’s way, to work with the Syrian rebels, or to spot for Iraqi forces in Mosul as they’re doing bombing campaigns. Or being closer to the fight. It wasn’t as if they went from zero to sixty, it was that they went from sixty to eighty.”
Whether this made the CIA great or not depended on your point of view. During the campaign Trump had said that the U.S. should kill terrorists and take out their families. Early on, Trump was shown video of a lethal drone strike on a terrorist’s lair; the drone operator waited before pulling the trigger until innocents cleared the area. Trump seemed baffled by this. “Why did you wait?” he asked. “Because killing noncombatants is a crime!” one CIA officer said to me privately. While some at the agency welcomed Trump’s anything-goes ethos, others were appalled by his complete lack of empathy.

Posted in CIA | Comments Off on The Spymasters: How the CIA Directors Shape History and the Future

2010: CNN’s Jeffrey Toobin made ‘shockingly sexual’ proposition to well-known media figure, she claims

Posted on October 20, 2020 by Luke Ford

From the New York Daily News in 2010:

Jeffrey Toobin’s baby mama drama continues.

Even as he deals with his estranged mistress’ claim that he fathered her child, the married CNN legal analyst, 49, is denying accounts that his eye started wandering years ago.

Long before he hooked up with Casey Greenfield, 36, the fetching attorney whose father is famed CBS News analyst Jeff Greenfield, he is said to have made a play for a well-known media figure.

The woman, who met Toobin about 15 years ago, contends he hit on her repeatedly, using some shockingly sexual come-on lines.

“I was at a party in Washington,” the woman tells us. “He came up behind me and whispered in my ear …”

This being a family newspaper, we can’t repeat what Toobin allegedly told the woman he’d like to do to her. But the woman recalls, “I didn’t even know who he was. I couldn’t believe my ears. It was so disgusting. At the time, I never even knew people did that.

“I said, ‘What did you just say?’ He just chuckled.”

Though she thought about walking away, she did entertain a conversation with Toobin.

“Later,” she says, “he followed me to my hotel room. He tried to invite himself in. He said, ‘You know you want it.’ I said, ‘No, actually I don’t.'”

The woman says Toobin “really chased me for a while. He called me at the office and left several sick messages.” Again, we can’t repeat them. Suffice it to say, he allegedly reiterated his first overture, only more graphically. Says the woman, “It was so vile.” She assures us the episode went nowhere.

Meanwhile, another source claims that Toobin definitely seemed to enjoy his research in 2008, when he visited the Miami Velvet swingers club while reporting a New Yorker profile about political consultant Roger Stone.

Toobin wrote in that piece about how he visited the sex club because that was where Stone said he’d first heard that former Gov. Eliot Spitzer had a hooker habit.

What Toobin didn’t write, according to a witness, was that he stayed at the club well after Stone had left.

“There were a couple of women there who recognized him,” says the source. “One said, loudly, ‘It’s Jeffrey Toobin from CNN!'” Even so, says the source, “I saw him checking out the group room, where naked couples were having sex on mattresses on the floor. He was standing on the periphery. He had his clothes on, but he seemed to be into watching.”

Toobin has been married to his Harvard sweetheart, Amy McIntosh, 51, since 1986. They have two teenage children. Last week, he was still wearing his wedding ring when he appeared in Manhattan Family Court to deal with custody and support issues related to the child he allegedly fathered with Greenfield last year.

From the New York Times:

MS. GREENFIELD’s time in those trenches began in 2008, when, as a first-year associate at Gibson Dunn, a strait-laced corporate law firm, she found herself single and pregnant at 35.

The presumptive father was Mr. Toobin, a senior political analyst for CNN, staff writer for The New Yorker, best-selling author, married father of two teenagers and a close friend of Justice Elena Kagan of the Supreme Court, a classmate of his from Harvard Law. Ms. Greenfield met Mr. Toobin in the Condé Nast cafeteria when, while taking a breather from law school in her mid-20s, she worked as a fact-checker for Glamour magazine. They fell into a secretive off-and-on relationship spanning nearly a decade.

When Ms. Greenfield first informed him of her pregnancy, she said, Mr. Toobin questioned the paternity, balked at submitting to a test and vowed to take no responsibility for a baby he wasn’t sure was his. Both hired lawyers. Inevitably, the tabloids and gossip sites took notice of the scandal, dropping increasingly detailed hints about the behind-the-scenes drama.

Posted in Jeffrey Toobin | Comments Off on 2010: CNN’s Jeffrey Toobin made ‘shockingly sexual’ proposition to well-known media figure, she claims

True Crimes and Misdemeanors: The Investigation of Donald Trump

Posted on October 18, 2020 by Luke Ford

Jeffrey Toobin writes in this 2020 book:

* The assignment involved a good deal of time spent in a hotel in Baltimore, and it was at the restaurant there that [Jeannie] Rhee explained to Mueller her philosophy of the buffet, which she had learned from her parents. One should always order the buffet, Rhee asserted, but then load up one’s plate with proteins—especially meat—and avoid carbohydrates, like rice. Proteins were expensive, and carbs were cheap. As a customer, the best bang for your buck were the proteins, and Rhee could be found at the hotel buffet every morning with her plate full of bacon and sausage. Mueller found Rhee’s dollar-based intensity on the subject of food fascinating and bizarre, and he proceeded to needle her about it relentlessly over the course of their time together. Mueller’s subordinates often said that they could tell they remained in his good graces if he continued to tease them about something. For Rhee, it was the “boo-fay,” as Mueller pronounced it, as if it were some exotic culinary passion rather than a staple of high school cafeterias. Mueller despised all forms of pretension, including in food, where his tastes were relentlessly bland. Rhee’s passion on the subject, and her intensity generally, marked a significant contrast to Mueller’s aristocratic reserve.

In making hiring decisions, at the Office of Special Counsel and elsewhere, Mueller often said he was looking for people who were “sparky”—that is, dynamic and energetic. This was notable because Mueller himself rarely exuded spark—a kind of looming intensity, to be sure, but not in a way that was any more colorful than his white shirts. Rhee, in contrast, was all spark, all immigrant hustle, always looking for an edge. She was loud, aggressive, and opinionated, which was not to everyone’s taste, especially since she rarely dialed down the sparkiness. But that kind of attitude was exactly what Mueller wanted.

* But there was a kind of method to Giuliani’s approach. He understood, as Dowd and Cobb did not, that the struggle between Trump and Mueller was essentially political, not legal. In the current, polarized political environment, Giuliani could make any claim he wanted on Trump’s behalf, and it would be embraced by the president’s supporters, like Hannity. It made sense, then, to get the real story of the Stormy Daniels payments out in public. Giuliani had to get the truth out because he knew that Cohen might flip, and Trump’s checks to Cohen reimbursing him for the money paid to Daniels might be revealed at some point (as they were). In light of this, Giuliani thought he should get ahead of the story. He never had to worry about Trump’s supporters criticizing the president for flip-flopping, or lying, because his supporters never criticized him for anything.
As Trump’s lead attorney, Giuliani was responsible for defending him in a complex series of overlapping investigations—of his campaign’s connections to Russia, of possible obstruction of justice in the White House, and of the hush money payments to Daniels and McDougal. But Giuliani never even bothered to learn the facts of the cases, preferring instead to bluster off the top of his head.

* Giuliani thought (as did Trump) that the most important objective was always to stay on offense against their enemies. On Hannity and elsewhere, Giuliani adopted the president’s characterization of the Mueller investigation as a “witch hunt.” He denounced the president’s pursuers as “thugs” and worse. As for the FBI agents who searched Cohen’s home and office, Giuliani called them “storm troopers,” comparing federal law enforcement officials to Nazis—a remarkable statement coming from a former U.S. Attorney. (Cohen said that the agents were “extremely professional, courteous, and respectful.”) With no evidence, Giuliani accused Mueller of leaking to the press. He argued, again on no evidence, that Attorney General Sessions should appoint a special counsel to investigate Mueller. “Investigate the ‘investigation and investigators,’ ” he tweeted. “Unlike the illegal Mueller appointment you will be able to cite, as law requires, alleged crimes.” As ever, Mueller responded to these attacks with silence.

* Giuliani recognized what worked for Trump—insults, diversions, lies—could work for him as well. And it did work. Giuliani, in a very determined way, sought to turn Mueller into just another Trump enemy, just another Democrat (even though Mueller is a Republican). When Mueller was appointed, polls showed bipartisan support for him, but after Giuliani’s attacks public opinion about the special counsel divided along the same partisan lines as on any other issue. Giuliani brought Mueller down to his level—and Trump’s. Giuliani’s apotheosis—the moment that best summed up his service to the president—came on Meet the Press . Giuliani had said that one reason Trump might not do an interview with Mueller was that the prosecutor might set a “perjury trap.” But Chuck Todd, the host, asked Giuliani whether a perjury trap could even exist, since a witness who told the truth couldn’t be trapped. Giuliani responded, “When you tell me that, you know, he should testify because he’s going to tell the truth and he shouldn’t worry, well that’s so silly because it’s somebody’s version of the truth. Not the truth.”

* It’s a myth that defendants plead guilty, agree to cooperate, or even just start to tell the truth because they have attacks of conscience or religious awakenings. They do so because they believe the alternatives would be worse for them. To cite the most obvious example, defendants plead guilty and cooperate because they think that going to trial will result in a conviction and a longer sentence. For this reason, prosecutors thrive on fear. Without fear, defendants—even ordinary witnesses—feel emboldened to challenge and defy prosecutors. However, a president who is under investigation has a unique ability to remove the element of fear for those who might be witnesses against him. A president can issue pardons.

* Prosecutors in complex white-collar investigations make progress in one way—by persuading targets to plead guilty and cooperate against higher-ups. The plea by Rick Gates, Manafort’s deputy, was an important step for Mueller in that vein. But the special counsel’s team needed more people to flip—among them, Manafort himself, Flynn, Cohen, and Roger Stone. But after Trump and Giuliani started talking about pardons, their discussions of cooperating stalled, or never started in the first place. In all, then, Giuliani might have sometimes looked silly on television, but he delivered real accomplishments for his client: he set loose the president to turn the Republican base against Mueller; he used pardon talk to shut down the pipeline of cooperators; he cleaned up the facts of the Stormy Daniels situation so the president was not continuing to defend a false version of what transpired. As 2018 began, Mueller’s investigation was soaring as indictments and guilty pleas mounted. Just a couple of months after Giuliani took charge, Mueller’s work was stalled, and it never recovered its momentum. For this, Giuliani deserves a large measure of credit or blame, depending on one’s perspective.

* By May 2018, when Mueller completed his first year on the job, he was no longer perceived as the hero, with bipartisan acclaim, that he had been when Rosenstein named him.

* As the next presidential contest began, Biden appeared to be Trump’s most formidable Democratic rival. Early polls showed him leading Trump, often by substantial margins. But the president had an instinct for the political jugular, and he knew that Biden had a potential vulnerability. The story wasn’t a secret—the basic outlines had been known for years—but Trump understood how he and a compliant news media could convert a minor problem into a mortal threat. What had worked with Hillary Clinton’s emails could work with Joe Biden’s son.

* Then, in 2014, he [Hunter Biden] was named to the board of Burisma, one of the largest natural gas producers in Ukraine. Hunter had no apparent qualifications in the field or the region, other than his relationship to his father, whom President Obama had assigned to oversee relations with the government of Ukraine. Hunter’s position at Burisma had at least the potential for conflict of interest with his father. At a minimum, the situation looked seedy; at worst, corrupt.
Giuliani told Trump that Hunter Biden’s work in Ukraine represented a potential gold mine of opposition research.

* Mueller kept his word. He made no news before Congress. Instead, unfortunately, he was the news—his performance. As Donald Trump knew better than anyone, television is about appearance at least as much as substance, and Mueller had failed at both levels. He looked bad and said little. Mueller had come of age at a different era in American justice and American life, when modesty and self-effacement were ascendant values. There was something admirable in his embrace of this vanishing world.

Posted in America | Comments Off on True Crimes and Misdemeanors: The Investigation of Donald Trump

Too Close to Call: The Thirty-Six-Day Battle to Decide the 2000 Election

Posted on October 18, 2020 by Luke Ford

Jeffrey Toobin writes in this 2001 book:

* The Eighth Congressional District in Indiana stretches along the southwestern corner of the state, from the university town of Bloomington to the industrial city of Evansville. The district had been so evenly balanced between Democrats and Republicans that it elected four different congressmen in four consecutive elections in the 1970s. In 1984, the incumbent Democrat, Frank McCloskey, was seeking his first re-election against an aggressive challenge from a Republican named Richard McIntyre. The election-night totals put McCloskey ahead by 72 votes, but it quickly became apparent that the votes in one precinct had been counted twice. When the votes were retallied, McIntyre was ahead by 34. A recount—and a political war—followed.

An army of Washington lawyers trooped out to the district for the battle, and young Ben Ginsberg wound up leading the Republican crusade. (The Democrats included Chris Sautter, who would later co-author The Recount Primer with Jack Young.) The recount showed McIntyre ahead by 418 votes, and the Indiana secretary of state certified the Republican victory, but the Democratic House, led by a rising star named Tony Coelho (later Gore’s campaign chairman), refused to seat McIntyre. In January, when the new Congress began work, “Indiana 8” was left vacant while the Democrats scrambled for a new way to count the votes. The House majority set up a task force to “study” the election results, a process that dragged on until April. Ultimately, the House voted along straight party lines to certify the Democrat, McCloskey, as the winner by 4 votes. As even many Democrats would acknowledge later, it was as close to an outright theft as had occurred in modern American political history.

Newt Gingrich said that the fight over Indiana 8 marked a turning point in the radicalization of the Republican minority in the House. (At the time, Representative Dick Cheney, of Wyoming, said of the recount battle, “I think we ought to go to war. There’s unanimity. We need bold and dramatic action.”) In a broad sense, Indiana 8 helped convince an entire generation of Republicans in Washington that the Democratic Party was not just politically misguided but fundamentally cynical and deeply corrupt. Fights like this one set the rhetorical tone of the Gingrich years in the House, and the Republican air of moral certainty had only grown stronger through the Clinton years and into the election of 2000. In a way, there was a bracing absence of cynicism in the Republican style of this era. Whether the subject was Monica Lewinsky or the vote in Florida, Ginsberg and his colleagues operated at a sustained pitch of perpetual outrage.

“Recounts change lives,” Ginsberg would often say. Indiana 8 changed his. Ginsberg’s anger over the Democrats’ tactics in that race turned him from a part-time volunteer to a full-time Republican Party activist, and he spent the next decade as the general counsel to various campaign committees, leading up to the Republican National Committee. In 1993, he joined the large lobbying firm of Patton Boggs, but he kept a close hand in party activities. He signed on early with George W. Bush’s campaign. Over the years, Ginsberg’s once-full head of hair retreated to a few wisps around a bald dome, but his passion never faded. As he listened to the honeyed phrases come forth from the Democrats on the Today show (“Count all the votes”), Ginsberg knew it was time once again, in Dick Cheney’s words, to go to war.

* Al Gore turned into the Ancient Mariner of the Florida recount, the man who couldn’t stop talking about his plight. There was an almost compulsive quality to his lobbying of the press. He called network anchormen, substitute network anchormen, and weekend network anchormen, not to mention cable personalities, newspaper columnists, and the editorial board of his beloved New York Times. Yet, as so often was the case, he never proved a very successful messenger. From Election Day forward, Gore had believed the Washington conventional wisdom that the public would quickly run out of patience with the recount. This turned out to be largely false. Throughout his effort to count the votes, Gore maintained remarkable popularity despite the many crises of the period—even through the “military”-absentee-voting controversy and the certification of the election by Katherine Harris. True, the numbers of people supporting Gore’s efforts dropped in early December, falling to around 40 percent in most polls. But notwithstanding the predictions, there was never a hemorrhage of support. The recount cause inspired loyalty, even if Gore himself did not.

The vice president’s neediness seemed to inspire a degree of contempt from those who interviewed him. On CBS’s 60 Minutes, on Sunday, December 3, Lesley Stahl practically baited Gore. “You’re not really reaching the public with this argument,” she informed him. “You’ve been making it over and over: ‘Every vote has to be counted.’ There is more of a sense that you’re asking, you know, to change the rules of the game. Can you go on if you lose the public?” Gore responded in his by now familiar singsong style: “The public, I think, has shown a remarkable amount of patience and a determination to see that all the votes are counted. Of course, it is split . . .”

“But it’s slipping. It’s slipping,” Stahl said.

“Well, you know, I—this isn’t easy for—for any of us in this country,” he replied. “And I know that the Bush family, same as my family, is wanting this to be over, and I—and I know the American family wants it to be over. But as strongly as people feel about that, they feel even more strongly that every legally cast vote should be counted.” The “count all the votes” theme had less visceral impact than “we wuz robbed,” but the cautious vice president would never allow the latter sentiment to pass his lips.

If Gore’s mission looked like a lonely crusade, that’s because it was. The vice president’s political operation in Washington belatedly brought together surrogates to speak for him in Florida, but it was a halfhearted endeavor on both ends. Gore didn’t have the kind of relationships with elected officials in which he felt comfortable asking them to go to Florida, and in turn, few Democratic politicians felt like putting themselves out for Gore. The Bush team, by contrast, ran its surrogates’ program out of Tallahassee and came up with more than a dozen names to fill a white marker board every day. “CBS Morning News—Gov. Racicot,” “CNN Midday—Gov. Whitman,” and so on. The surrogates’ operation also displayed the trademark Bush-team cockiness. Once the contest ended, Republican media adviser Dorrance Smith grew so confident about Gore hurting his own cause that he took to telling bookers, “We’d really like you to put Gore out again.”

* Far from ending with the inauguration, the politics of the recount became a touchstone of the new administration. To be sure, the recount reflected the personalities of the two candidates, but the early days of the Bush presidency also suggested that those thirty-six days displayed the DNA of the contemporary Democratic and Republican parties: the party of process versus the party of results, reliance on elite opinion versus trust in public opinion, the agony of deliberation versus the exercise of power. It took a little while for quasi-official Washington to understand this. For example, on the day after Bush declared victory, R. W. Apple, Jr., wrote in The New York Times: “Mr. Bush will need to foster the kind of bipartisan cooperation he promised during his campaign. To accomplish that, the Texas governor will have to choose his issues carefully and weigh with caution how hard to push his viewpoint on contentious questions like abortion and the sweeping tax cut he has pledged.” If he had won, Al Gore might actually have taken this kind of advice.

George W. Bush, by contrast, ran his new administration with the same air of jaunty confidence he had exhibited during the recount. The symbols and words of bipartisanship turned out to be just that. On his first day in office, Bush signed an executive order banning U.S. funding for international family-planning organizations that provide or counsel for abortions. As his first major legislative initiative, he advocated and won passage of the largest income-tax cut in a generation, just as he had pledged to do during the campaign. Bush didn’t modulate his views or his agenda just because the conventional wisdom suggested that he should. He had run as a committed political conservative, and that was the kind of president he would be.

Bush’s straight-ahead approach did exact costs in the closely divided capital. In May 2001, Republican senator Jim Jeffords, of Vermont, citing the rightward tilt of the Bush administration, switched to an independent affiliation, putting the Senate in Democratic hands for the first time in more than six years. But Jeffords’s defection had no discernible impact on the way Bush conducted his presidency. George W. Bush was a man of strong and steady convictions. And nothing—not the loss of the Senate, the advice of the Washington establishment, or the extraordinary circumstances of his victory—would change what he believed or how he behaved.

Posted in America | Comments Off on Too Close to Call: The Thirty-Six-Day Battle to Decide the 2000 Election

Ghettoside: A True Story of Murder in America

Posted on October 15, 2020 by Luke Ford

Jill Leovy writes in this 2015 book:

* [John] Skaggs had been a homicide detective for twenty years. In that time, he had been in a thousand living rooms like this one—each with its large TV, Afrocentric knickknacks, and imponderable grief.

* Skaggs, like most LAPD cops, was a Republican.

* She lived in a federally subsidized rental apartment, and she was a Democrat who would weep in front of CNN later that fall when Barack Obama won the presidential election, wishing her mother were still alive to see it.

* Homicide had ravaged the country’s black population for a century or more. But it was at best a curiosity to the mainstream.

* They [black men] were the nation’s number one crime victims. They were the people hurt most badly and most often, just 6 percent of the country’s population but nearly 40 percent of those murdered. People talked a lot about crime in America, but they tended to gloss over this aspect—that a plurality of those killed were not women, children, infants, elders, nor victims of workplace or school shootings. Rather, they were legions of America’s black men, many of them unemployed and criminally involved. They were murdered every day, in every city, their bodies stacking up by the thousands, year after year.

* According to the old unwritten code of the Los Angeles Police Department, Dovon’s was a nothing murder. “NHI—No Human Involved,” the cops used to say. It was only the newest shorthand for the idea that murders of blacks somehow didn’t count. “ Nigger life’s cheap now,” a white Tennessean offered during Reconstruction, when asked to explain why black-on-black killing drew so little notice.
A congressional witness a few years later reported that when black men in Louisiana were killed, “ a simple mention is made of it, perhaps orally or in print, and nothing is done. There is no investigation made.” A late-nineteenth-century Louisiana newspaper editorial said, “If negroes continue to slaughter each other, we will have to conclude that Providence has chosen to exterminate them in this way.” In 1915, a South Carolina official explained the pardon of a black man who had killed another black: “ This is a case of one negro killing another—the old familiar song.” In 1930s Mississippi, the anthropologist Hortense Powdermaker examined the workings of criminal justice and concluded that “the attitude of the Whites and of the courts … is one of complaisance toward violence among the Negroes.” Studying Natchez, Mississippi, in the same period, a racially mixed team of social anthropologists observed that “the injury or death of a Negro is not considered by the whites to be a serious matter.” An Alabama sheriff of the era was more concise: “ One less nigger,” he said. In 1968, a New York journalist testifying as part of the Kerner Commission’s investigation of riots across the country said that “for decades, little if any law enforcement enforcement has prevailed among Negroes in America.… If a black man kills a black man, the law is generally enforced at its minimum.”
Carter Spikes, once a member of the black Businessman Gang in South Central Los Angeles, recalled that through the seventies police “didn’t care what black people did to each other. A nigger killing another nigger was no big deal.”

* John Skaggs stood in opposition to this inheritance. His whole working life was devoted to one end: making black lives expensive. Expensive, and worth answering for, with all the force and persistence the state could muster. Skaggs had treated the murder of Dovon Harris like the hottest celebrity crime in town. He had applied every resource he possessed, worked every angle of the system, and solved it swiftly, unequivocally.

* America has long been more violent than other developed nations, and black-on-black homicide is much of the reason. This is not new. Measurements are problematic, since few official efforts were made to track black homicide before 1950. But historians have traced disproportionately high black homicide rates all the way back to the late nineteenth century, and in the early twentieth, “nonwhite” homicide rates exceeded those of whites in all cities that reported federal data. In the 1920s, a scholar concluded that black death rates from homicide nationwide were about seven times white rates. In the 1930s, Southern observers also noticed startling rates of black violence, and in the 1940s, a Philadelphia study found that black men died from homicide at twelve times the white rate. When the U.S. government began publishing data specific to blacks in 1950, it revealed that same gap nationwide. The black homicide death rate remained as much as ten times higher than the white rate in 1960 and 1970, and has been five to seven times higher for most of the past thirty years.
Mysteriously, in modern-day Los Angeles, young black men are murdered two to four times more frequently than young Hispanic men, though blacks and Hispanics live in the same neighborhoods. This stands out because L.A., unlike well-known murder centers such as Detroit, has a relatively small black population, and it is in decline. By Skaggs’s time, there were few solidly black neighborhoods left; most black residents of South Los Angeles lived in majority-Hispanic neighborhoods. Yet black men died here as they died in cities with large and concentrated black populations, like New Orleans, Washington, D.C., and Chicago—more often than anyone else, and nearly always at the hands of black assailants. In L.A., it was strange how all those bullets seemed to find their black targets in such an ethnically jumbled place; it was, as one young man put it, as if black men had bull’s-eyes on their backs.
Violent crime was plummeting in Los Angeles County, as it was across the country, by the spring of 2007, when Dovon Harris was murdered. But the disparity between black male death rates and those of everybody else remained nearly as large as ever. No matter how much crime dropped, the American homicide problem remained maddeningly, mystifyingly, disproportionately black.

* Despite so much evidence of a particularly black homicide problem, however, there was relatively little research or activism specific to black-on-black murder. That gruesome history of Southern racism made the topic an uncomfortable one for many Americans. One of the enduring tropes of racist lore had been the “black beast,” the inferior black man who could not control his impulses and was prone to violence. By the early twenty-first century, popular consensus held that any emphasis on high rates of black criminality risked invoking the stigma of white racism. So people were careful about how they spoke of it.
Researchers describe skirting the subject for fear of being labeled racist. Activists have sought to minimize it. “When the discussion turns to violent crime,” legal scholar James Forman, Jr., has pointed out, “ progressives tend to avoid or change the subject.” Privately, some black civil-rights advocates describe feeling embarrassed and baffled by the stubborn persistence of the problem. “Like incest,” is how one L.A. street activist, Najee Ali, put it, talking of the shame and secrecy the issue evokes. Other concerned blacks cite their fear of inflaming white racism: Why emphasize what seems sure to be used against them?
Yet the statistical truth was undeniable, and most Americans understood it intuitively even if they didn’t talk about it in polite company.

* Randall Kennedy: “It does no good to pretend that blacks and whites are similarly situated with respect to either rates of perpetration or rates of victimization. They are not,” Kennedy wrote. “The familiar dismal statistics and the countless tragedies behind them are not figments of some Negrophobe’s imagination.”

* Black humor helped. But it still got to him—the him—the attitude of black residents down here. They were shooting each other but still seemed to think the police were the problem. “Po-Po , ” they sneered. Once, De La Rosa had to stand guard over the body of a black man until paramedics arrived. An angry crowd closed in on him, accusing him of disrespecting the murdered man’s body. Some of them tried to drag the corpse away. The police used an official term for this occasional hazard: “lynching.” Some felt uncomfortable saying it. They associated the word with the noose, not the mobs that once yanked people from police to kill or rescue them. De La Rosa held back the crowd. “You don’t care because he’s a black man!” someone yelled. De La Rosa was stunned. Why did they think race was a part of this? Sometimes, in the Seventy-seventh, De La Rosa had the sense that he was no longer in America. As if he had pulled off the freeway into another world.

* To other cops, ghettoside was where patrol cars were dinged, computer keyboards sticky, workdays long, and staph infections antibiotic-resistant. To work down there was to feel a sense of futility, forgo promotions, and deal with all those stressful, dreary, depressing problems poor black people had. But to Skaggs, ghettoside was the place to be, the place where there was real work to be done. He radiated contentment as he worked its streets. He wheeled down filthy alleys in his crisp shirts and expensive ties, always rested, his sedan always freshly washed and vacuumed.

* The qualities that make great homicide detectives are different from the qualities that make great patrol cops. But they are related. Wally Tennelle had a baseline of attributes that steer many young people toward police work. Although he was not college-educated, he was smart and energetic. Police work can be a haven for brainy, action-oriented people who do not, for some reason, gravitate toward formal education—the type afflicted with what DeeDee Tennelle diagnosed in her whole family as “a touch of ADD.”
It made them uniquely suited for a job that was carried out almost entirely out of doors and involved sleepless nights, relentless bursts of activity, and the ability to move from one situation to the next quickly without leaving too much behind. A great cop—or a great detective—needed to be smart and quick, but not necessarily bookish or terribly analytical. A good memory, a talent for improvisation, a keen interest in people, and a buoyancy of spirit—one had to like “capering”—ensured that the hyperactive flourished in a job that left others wilting with stress.

* “Nobody cares” was a universal lament south of the Ten during the Big Years, and for many years after.

[LF: Were the accomplishments of those who died sufficient for wider society to mourn them? You can’t expect out-groups to care about you just because you once breathed.]

* Very few murders were covered in the media. Television stations covered more than the papers, but without any particular consistency, and many, many deaths received no mention by any media outlet, especially if the victims were black. It rankled deeply. The lack of media coverage seemed to convey that black-on-black homicide was “small potatoes” in the eyes of the world, said a father who lost a daughter. “Nothing on the news!” a mother cried, weeping, at the sight of a journalist the day after her son was murdered. “ Please write about it! Please!”

* “I remember a banner headline in the Los Angeles Times one weekend,” recalled a detective named Paul Mize. “A bomb in Beirut had killed six people. We had nine murders that weekend, and not a one of them made the paper. Not one.”

* But to brass, detective work was “strictly reactive,” as one high-ranking officer called it, dismissing the whole function. Crime prevention was seen as more progressive, and so competing priorities always seemed to win out over investigations: preventive patrol projects, gang sweeps. “Just all upside down,” said a Newton homicide detective named Johnny Villa.
Law, of course, isn’t like hygiene, and crime “prevention” inevitably leads to stereotyping people as potential threats. But “proactive” patrol work sounded better. Prevention carried an added bonus, as legal scholar Carol Steiker has noted: it gave police wide latitude, since the Constitution places many constraints on legal procedure after a crime, far fewer before it.

* The smallest ghettoside spat seemed to escalate to violence, as if absent law, people were left with no other means of bringing a dispute to a close. Debts and competition over goods and women—especially women—drove many killings. But insults, snitching, drunken antics, and the classic—unwanted party guests—also were common homicide motives. Small conflicts divided people into hostile camps and triggered lasting feuds. Every grudge seemed to harbor explosive potential. It would ignite when antagonists met by chance, gunfire erupting in streets or liquor stores. Vengeance was a staple motive. In some circles, retaliation for murder was considered all but mandatory. It was striking how openly people discussed it, even debating the merits from the pulpit at funerals.

* When the Swedish social scientist Gunnar Myrdal studied the black South in the 1940s, he found that, despite rampant complaints about law enforcement, black Southerners everywhere also said they wanted more policing—to protect them from other black people.

* Wally Tennelle was idiosyncratic, even a little radical. He lived in the Seventy-seventh Division.
Among LAPD officers, the proscription against living in the city of Los Angeles went without saying. It was something that had long annoyed various liberal critics of the department. For years, most officers in the department had refused to live in the city they policed and instead commuted into the city from distant suburbs. They formed little red-state bastions sprinkled around the five-county area of Southern California—Santa Clarita and Simi Valley to the north, Chino and as far as Temecula to the east, and Orange County to the south. But with a few exceptions, such as San Pedro, a historic enclave of ethnic whites, Los Angeles was considered off-limits, the length and breadth of this beautiful city disdained by its police.

* Watts claimed an equal share of the city’s best attributes. It was Mediterranean and golden, with air that was soft in summer and crisp in winter. Gardens there burst with bird-of-paradise flowers and purple-blooming jacarandas. Palm trees lined streets, their glossy fronds flashing in the sun. There were still paddocks in Compton and a stable in Athens, and people rode horses up the grassy median of Broadway. They sat on couches on front porches, barbecued in their driveways on summer evenings as their children played.
The setting made much of the literature about the urban “underclass” based on observations in places such as Philadelphia, Baltimore, and the Bronx seem like some dark fantasy. A foreign visitor in 2008 said she was surprised by the pleasant surroundings; referencing George Kelling and James Q. Wilson’s famous essay, she noted that there were no broken windows at all.

* Only people who weren’t familiar with this kind of “inner-city” environment would attribute its problems to alienation or lack of community solidarity. The truth was that “community spirit” in the sense of both local pride and connections among neighbors was far more in evidence in Watts than elsewhere. It was one of the defining aspects of the ghettoside setting: a substantial portion of the area’s residents were related to each other through extended family ties, marriage, or other intimate connections. Relatives who were only nominally related by blood often saw each other daily, ate together, celebrated together, quarreled and comforted each other. They shared food, money, and living quarters.
They raised each other’s children. They traded off transportation and housework… In contrast to wealthier neighborhoods, where most people worked at day jobs and neighbors knew each other in passing or not at all, the unemployed people of these places were home all day, hanging out together, confined to a few blocks.

* Among officers in the division, the company line was that most of South Bureau’s population were “good people.” But a minority—some cops put it at 1 percent, some as high as 15 percent—were “knuckleheads.” This term referred to unemployed, criminally involved men, and gang members, especially black ones.
Blacks “could better their lives, but they don’t,” said one officer of Hispanic ethnicity. “They love it. They love selling drugs. They love forcing old people out of their homes so they can sell drugs there.” Said a white officer: “The true victims are Hispanic. Black suspects prey on Hispanic victims.” There was plenty of Hispanic crime and “gang activity,” too. But the hard-core underclass in Watts was black, and it was impossible for patrol cops not to see that. All day long, their radios buzzed with familiar suspect descriptions. “Male black, five-six to six-two, eighteen to thirty-five, white shirt, black pants,” a gang officer intoned drily, reading aloud from a report in the Watts station one day. All the cops present laughed, for they all sought the same suspect. But even as officers laughed, some cops also searched their souls, trying to figure out how to accommodate their experiences at work with the antiracism they shared with most of their countrymen.
They sometimes wrestled with race in disarming ways. No one in the wider world seemed to want to talk about it, but black residents, to many officers, appeared more violent than Hispanics. Their own eyes told them so. Statistics backed them up. Few officers wanted to believe that black people were somehow intrinsically wired for violence.

* Nearly every official who dealt closely with crime in Watts felt the same way. “ They have their own businesses … their own law!” prosecutor Joe Porras said of the participants in the gang cases he tried in Compton Courthouse. “It’s a parallel world, and you are trying to bring your law into it.” Cops and prosecutors felt like door-to-door salesmen, trying to peddle a legal system no one wanted anything to do with.

* Compassionate by nature, Barling was unafraid to air his distress over the bloodshed in Watts. He was appalled by the Monster, tormented by what he perceived as the public’s indifference and political neglect, baffled by the black tilt to the stats. “It’s either society’s racism, or something is wrong with them—something wrong just with black people. And I don’t believe that!” Barling said, his voice rising in distress. “I believe we are all created equally, men, women, all races! That’s why I cannot buy that.”

* By the late twentieth century, the criminal justice system was no longer very corrupt. Many police and prosecutors were sincere and professional, and legal outcomes were relatively color-blind. But because the reach of the system was so limited, the results were similar to those produced by masquerade justice. Even when criminal justice procedures were clean and fair, violent-crime investigations remained too ineffective and threadbare to counter the scale of black-on-black murder.

* If you don’t incapacitate violent actors, they keep pushing people around until someone makes them stop. When violent people are permitted to operate with impunity, they get their way . Advantage tilts to them. Others are forced to do their bidding.
No amount of “community” feeling or activism can eclipse this dynamic. People often assert that the solution to homicide is for the so-called community to “step up.” It is a pernicious distortion. People like Jessica Midkiff cannot be expected to stand up to killers. They need safety, not stronger moral conviction. They need some powerful outside force to sweep in and take their tormentors away.

* Her parents had split while Jessica was young, and she said that an abusive stepfather had raped her repeatedly. By the time she was eleven, she was performing oral sex for cash, food, and clothes. She was turning tricks in cars by fourteen.
Prostitutes such as Midkiff are effectively slaves. But they tend to spin a narrative about their own lives that suggests more agency. Midkiff referred to various pimps over the years as “boyfriends.” Some were pimpier than others. In her mind, there existed the possibility of a man being “kind of like a pimp.” She had straight pimps who kept her with a stable of other prostitutes and appropriated all her earnings. She also had boyfriends like Derrick Starks, with whom she was paired as a couple but who also asked her to turn tricks now and then.
Her daughter’s father, who had gotten Jessica pregnant while she was a student at Washington High, had been one of the few men in her life who was not abusive and didn’t try to pimp her. But after his brother was murdered, he joined a gang and ended up in prison, she said.
While still an adolescent, Midkiff traveled as a prostitute. She worked in Los Angeles, Riverside, Las Vegas, and parts of Arizona. She worked Sunset Boulevard, peddling ten-minute intervals in cars: oral sex for $50, intercourse for $100, both for $150. She was hired by a professional football player and for pricey all-night parties, once earning $850 for a single trick. She’d also worked Figueroa Street—that dangerous bargain basement for prostitutes. You were down-and-out when you found yourself working the long murderous stretch that plunged southward along the Harbor Freeway. Years later, the thought of it still caused her to shudder. “I hate Figueroa,” she said.

* Prostitutes tended to be among the most dysfunctional people in the street environment, their problems intractable, their unreliability profound.

* Brent Josephson, the old ghettoside hand from the previous generation, had a memorable story from the peak years. It involved a scoop-and-carry homicide case in a park. Assigned after the fact, with the evidence cleared away and no witnesses, Josephson was standing helplessly at the scene, thinking he didn’t have a prayer of solving the case, when he noticed a skinny Hispanic youth in the distance. Josephson called out to him, thinking the kid might have some pointers. Thunderstruck, the young man hung his head and shuffled over. “You got me,” he told Josephson, and proceeded to confess. The specter of an LAPD detective beckoning from across the park had apparently been too much for him. It was like a summons from God.

* “As homicide creeps up, witness cooperation drops off,” he said. A feedback loop exists between murder rates and ambient fear;

* For the city of L.A., it is clear that demographic change is an important driver. The city’s black population is fast disappearing: black Angelenos were once nearly a fifth of the city’s population, but they made up a scant 9 percent in the 2010 census. Their numbers have been dropping steadily each year as the city’s black residents scatter to the exurbs. To some extent, their high homicide rates travel with them.

* enrollment of working-age African Americans in SSI in 2009 was nearly twice their representation in the population, and African American children made up nearly one-third of SSI recipients age fifteen to seventeen.

* Money translates to autonomy. Economic autonomy is like legal autonomy. It helps break apart homicidal enclaves by reducing interdependence and lowering the stakes of conflicts. The many indigent black men who now report themselves to be “on disability”—many of them with mental disabilities, such as ADD and bipolar disorder—signal an unprecedented income stream for a population that once suffered near-absolute economic marginalization. An eight-hundred-dollar-a-month check for an unemployed black ex-felon makes a big difference in his life. The risks and benefits of various hustles surely appear different to him. He can move, ditch his homeys, commit fewer crimes, walk away from more fights. Doubtless many people will criticize this trend and decry the expense of SSI. But this author can’t condemn a program that appears to have saved so many from being murdered or maimed.

* Another factor reducing murder rates is a bleak one—large numbers of black men in prison. Imprisonment brings down homicide rates because it keeps black men safe, and they are far less likely to become victims in prison than outside it. California’s rate of imprisonment increased fivefold between 1972 and 2000. Homicide deaths among this largely black and Latino population of tens of thousands number just a handful per year. But this is, it need hardly be said, a rotten—and expensive—way to combat the problem. Other factors, such as the shift to cellphone sales of drugs, the abuse of legal pharmaceuticals, computer games that keep adolescents indoors, and the improved conduct of police (former chief Bernard Parks deserves much credit for the latter in L.A.), probably count, too.
People are much safer, on the whole, in America than they used to be, and this is good. But anyone who tracks homicide in L.A. County and elsewhere still can’t escape the obvious: black men remain disproportionately victimized.

Posted in Blacks, Los Angeles, Murder | Comments Off on Ghettoside: A True Story of Murder in America