VEIL – The Secret Wars of the CIA, 1981-1987

Selected parts which mention Suriname, read the full book!

VEIL: The top-secret code word for covert operations undertaken in the latter years of the Reagan Administration to influence events abroad

Now, McMahon and covert action bumped heads again. Exiles from the small country of Suriname, a former Dutch colony on the north coast of South America just above Brazil, had come to the agency seeking support. These Dutch exiles wanted nothing less than to overthrow the authoritarian government of Lieutenant Colonel Desi Bouterse, who had pro-Communist leanings and had brutally executed fifteen people, including his chief political opponents and some journalists and union leaders.

Casey was all for the idea; Bouterse was nothing but leftist trouble, and the Dutch exiles seemed credible. But Casey and McMahon agreed that they needed an independent evaluation. The Directorate of Operations drafted an “enabling finding” that authorized a limited covert action to see whether CIA support of the exiles made sense, whether they had a chance to oust Bouterse. An actual operation to attempt the overthrow or to provide direct lethal support to the exiles would require a separate, regular finding. President Reagan signed the “enabling finding,” and several hundred thousand dollars was allocated to send a CIA team into Suriname to gather intelligence and do a coup-feasibility study.

McMahon briefed the matter to the Senate Intelligence Committee. He was met by a chorus of “You’ve got to be kidding.” Why, several senators asked, is the Reagan Administration considering a coup in a country that has no significance? The Suriname people were primitive and gentle, much like Tahitians in the South Pacific. The population was about 350,000. That’s the size of Tucson, Arizona. Goldwater, particularly, was incensed, declaring, “That’s the dumbest fucking idea I ever heard of in my life.”

McMahon replied that the Bouterse government was talking with the Cubans and the government of Grenada, a tiny Caribbean island also led by a leftist government. The CIA had a group of Dutch exiles who would do the work. When had a U.S.-supported coup such as this ever worked? McMahon had to go back to the CIA-backed 1954 coup in Guatemala to find an answer. He made it clear that the enabling finding meant only that the Administration was looking into the possibility, and that a go-ahead would require another finding and the committee would be notified.

It wasn’t enough. After the briefing, the committee agreed to send a letter of protest to President Reagan, telling him of its opposition to covert action in Suriname. Goldwater sent a personal message to Reagan saying, in effect, “Do you really need this?”

In the House committee also, there was overwhelming bipartisan opposition. When the CIA team did return, they had little intelligence and reported that a coup was probably not achievable.

The plan was dropped, but McMahon was shaken up on the play. He rededicated himself to keeping the CIA out of comic-book operations.

After Enders had gone, Casey and Kirkpatrick tried to promote Constantine Menges as his replacement. The Assistant Secretary automatically chaired the interagency group that ran the covert operation. But Shultz did not want a right-wing zealot.

A compromise was found in L. Anthony Motley, the U.S. ambassador to Brazil. A profane, happy-go-lucky forty-four-year-old, Motley had been an Alaska real-estate entrepreneur and a Republican fund-raiser. He had been born in Brazil and spoke Portuguese fluently. Reagan and Deaver had been impressed with his cut-the-red-tape style on an earlier presidential trip to Brazil.

And Casey thought he had guts. That spring the CIA had had a report that several Libyan planes that were scheduled to stop in Brazil on their way to Nicaragua were carrying arms, not medical supplies as the Libyans claimed. Motley had called Casey. “I’ll make my move,” he said, “go around the Foreign Minister, get the planes searched and stopped, but I’ve got to be sure this isn’t somebody guessing.” Casey had come up with a copy of the real manifest from a human source in Libya. The planes were stopped and seventy tons of weapons and explosives were uncovered, creating a double-barreled propaganda victory over both Libya and Nicaragua.

Casey was also impressed with Motley’s intelligence-gathering in Brazil. He regularly had steak and beer with the Brazilian President, and he filed brilliant reports that outshone the CIA station’s as well as the NSA intercepts.

Most important, Motley was willing to play a little rough and dirty. After the CIA’s plan to overthrow the leader of Suriname proved unfeasible, the Brazilian intelligence service had drummed up its first covert operation. Brazil and Suriname shared a border of about 100 miles. With Motley’s encouragement and with slight assistance from the CIA, the Brazilian service had sent intelligence agents into Suriname posing as teachers, to wean the Suriname government away from the Cubans. The leader, Lieutenant Colonel Bouterse, later did turn away from the Cubans, and Brazilian intelligence informed Motley that all records of the sensitive operation had been destroyed.

Motley was called to Washington, where Shultz told him that he was being promoted to assistant secretary. “Let’s not have the contra operation become an election issue,” Shultz instructed. “At the same time, we can’t let the Sandinistas up.”

At a White House meeting, Jim Baker gave Motley the same guidance. The President’s policy, Baker said, was to maximize heat on Nicaragua but avoid a public collision.

Casey realized that this represented Deaver’s assessment. Deaver was in charge of the President’s popularity, which was the driving force in the White House. Nicaragua was considered a negative; the White House had never been able to get ahead of the curve of public opinion on this, despite the President’s convictions and repeated public explanations.

Bill Clark, on the other hand, was determined on a pro-contra, anti-Sandinista policy. He had had Jesuit training and believed in a vertical chain of command from the lord on down, and the President was the lord in foreign policy, and Clark his deputy. But, for the moment, Deaver and public opinion held the upper hand. The result was mounting tension between Clark and Deaver.

Unable to sell Menges to Shultz, Casey still had to get him out of the CIA, where he had become a lightning rod. CIA analysts agreed that there was a Soviet Communist threat out there in the world and that their job was to determine how much and where. Menges assumed total evil, everywhere. His numerous CIA critics called him “the Constant Menace.” He was creating friction between Casey and McMahon. It was the one major Casey personnel decision that was eating away at McMahon. He could not tolerate Menges’ ideological fervor. And Menges had served his useful purpose, Casey felt, by raising consciousness about the potential subversive threat in ordinary events.

“These intelligence bureaucrats don’t know what they are talking about,” Menges would say, and Casey had loved it. He liked having some key assistants to his right, making his positions seem more reasonable. But Menges’ time was up. Bill Clark asked Menges to join the NSC staff. Casey told Menges that he could have more influence there, that Clark was key, that he had Reagan’s trust, and that he shared Reagan’s view of the Soviets.

Motley supervised relations with more than thirty countries in Latin America—any place with a stamp and a flag—and he had spent much of the past ten days dealing with the tiny Caribbean island of Grenada, only 133 square miles in area, population 110,000, producer of about a third of the world’s annual consumption of nutmeg. The island had become a minor obsession for the President. Its leader, Maurice Bishop, a young, charismatic Marxist, was building a 9,000-foot jet runway; Cuba was assisting, and the Soviets had been granted permission to use it.

Reagan had complained publicly of “the Soviet-Cuban militarization of Grenada” and had released a classified reconnaissance photograph showing a Cuban barracks and the airstrip construction. His Administration feared the formation of a red triangle in the hemisphere, with Cuba to the north, Nicaragua to the west, and Grenada to the east ninety miles from the South American mainland.

Motley had gone on alert when a group of extremists, which the CIA identified as even more closely affiliated with the Cubans, had staged a coup. On October 19, Bishop was executed. The new leftists imposed a twenty-four-hour-a-day curfew and placed the country under virtual house arrest. Motley called in the State Department crisis group. Its immediate concern was the 1,000 United States citizens, mostly students, who lived on Grenada. The State Department had contact with no one who said they represented a government; no one seemed to want to say he was part of the government, and with no government there could be no diplomacy. Motley initiated contact with the British and the Canadians to discuss possible joint evacuation of all their citizens.

Continuing efforts to make diplomatic contact on the island were rebuffed. The CIA had no real sources. With the U.S. government blind, officials began imagining the worst.

It had taken Constantine Menges several months to disengage from the CIA, and he had just arrived at the NSC two weeks earlier to head the Latin American section. He was deeply disappointed. He had taken his post under Clark, whom he considered a judicious implementer of the President’s will, and was now going to serve under McFarlane, whom he considered a surrogate for the State Department compromisers. McFarlane was no Reaganite and lacked the moral courage to be a real national-security adviser, Menges felt. In his first days, Menges had seized on the Grenada crisis, and had drafted a short plan for the protection of U.S. citizens there. McFarlane had looked upon this with some wonder but had agreed to consider it.

Menges shared his plan with some hard-line friends in the Defense Department. One official told him to be careful, that McFarlane would use it as a pretext to remove him. Menges showed it to Lieutenant Colonel North. North was skeptical: there had been repeated hesitation; the State Department would favor negotiations. Menges also mentioned his plan to Casey. The DCI said merely that it sounded interesting.

Menges was convinced that the Soviets were intent on using Grenada, with its deep-water port and its new runway, as a staging island for Soviet nuclear missiles on submarines or aircraft.

McFarlane agreed to have one of the Administration’s most secret meetings for crisis management, the so-called CPPG, Crisis Preplanning Group, meet on Grenada. That evening, at about 6:30, Menges spoke with Casey on the secure phone. The DCI was leaving soon for another trip abroad, and Menges was about to explain that McFarlane had been presented with the plan and had agreed to the CPPG meeting. Upon reflection, the probability of McFarlane’s acting, let alone taking the plan to the President, seemed so low to Menges that he did not mention it to Casey.

The next morning, October 20, Vice-Admiral John Poindexter, McFarlane’s deputy, convened the CPPG. Poindexter included Motley, Menges, North, and Clarridge and the key people from Defense. To minimize attention, the group gathered in Room 208 of the EOB, the latest high-tech operations center, which included the most advanced computer, audiovisual and secure communications systems.

Intelligence showed that a Cuban transport, Heroic Vietnam, was in port on the small island. Menges argued that Castro had forces of nearly 300,000 and could airlift thousands to Grenada on short notice. He proposed an “in-out rescue.” Given this opportunity, he argued that Communism should be eliminated permanently, and democracy restored, also permanently. He offered his argument that to do less would be to leave the Communists with a base for nuclear weapons.

At 6 P.M., Vice-President Bush convened the Special Situations Group, the highest-level crisis management group in the Reagan Administration. Fear of a new leftist government taking Americans hostage raised the ghost of Iran. “Forceful extraction” and “surgical strike” were both discussed.

McFarlane wanted to keep a twenty-one-ship Navy flotilla, including the aircraft carrier U.S.S. Independence, bound for Lebanon on a track that would take it to the Caribbean—just in case it was needed. The Joint Chiefs refused to do so without a presidential order. McFarlane said it was crazy that he had to have a presidential order to keep one aircraft-carrier group going in a certain direction. The Chairman of the JCS, General John W. Vessey, dug in.

McFarlane drafted an order, which the President signed. The Navy flotilla was kept on course for the Caribbean.

General Vessey at first opposed military action, but when it became clear that Americans might have to be rescued from several locations on the island, the JCS said it would be necessary to secure the entire island. Menges sought out Darman and made the argument for the full-fledged restoration of democracy. He hoped to soften up Jim Baker. From his two years in the CIA, Menges had the arguments down pat: Cuban aggression had gone unchecked in the 1970s when Castro dispatched thousands of troops to Africa—Angola, Mozambique and Ethiopia. Since the Nicaraguan revolution in 1979, this hemisphere was clearly the new target, with thousands of Cuban advisers being used to prop up the Sandinistas. This was a once-in-a-lifetime chance, the island small, a manageable operation.

Casey and Shultz saw an opportunity. The absence of a government on Grenada provided a rare chance to invoke mutual-security agreements the United States had with other small Caribbean islands.

“Hey,” Casey said at one point, “fuck it, let’s dump these bastards.”

Shultz was at first inclined to a less ambitious scheme, but he favored readiness for possible military action. Reagan’s other normally fractious and divided senior advisers and Cabinet officers agreed.

The Administration needed a firmer grounding, more legitimacy. The 9,000-foot runway, the fear for the 1,000 Americans, the absence of a government did not quite justify a full-scale invasion. The President’s advisers did not want to have to say that the Administration had just decided to violate international law.

The solution surfaced the next day, Friday, October 21. Prime Minister Eugenia Charles of Dominica, another small Caribbean island, headed a group called the Organization of Eastern Caribbean States. They were meeting that day in Barbados, and word was sent to them that the likelihood of U.S. military action would be substantially increased if they requested it. The OECS decided to do so, phrasing their request for U.S. assistance to restore order and democracy on Grenada. The oral request was passed to the White House, which, in turn, asked that the OECS issue a formal written request for intervention.

Charles was a sixty-four-year-old passionately pro-American leader who Motley felt made British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher seem like a kitten. Menges considered her a Caribbean Jeane Kirkpatrick. In 1982, the United States had begun supplying funds to build a thirty-mile, $10 million road on Dominica.

CIA records show that at one point $100,000 had been passed to her government for a secret support operation. For the CIA, the $100,000 provided supplemental leverage, and a key senator on the Intelligence Committee considered it a “payoff.” Charles firmly denied any knowledge of any direct payment to her, her party or her government. She said that her decision to request U.S. intervention was based solely on her assessment and that of the leaders of the other islands in the group, Antigua, St. Lucia and St. Vincent.

That evening Menges and North spent three hours drafting a National Security Decision Directive for the President to order an invasion. It was sent to Reagan, Shultz and McFarlane, who were now in Augusta, Georgia, for a weekend of golf. Reagan did not sign it.

Menges urged that the NSC prepare for Soviet countermoves. He said they might encourage the Libyans to launch a terrorist attack; or they might move in Berlin or Korea. He called Motley on the secure phone and said this invasion might deter Suriname from moving closer to Cuba.

At 9 A.M. Saturday, October 22, the National Security Council met. In Washington, Bush, Poindexter, McMahon, Motley, Menges and North gathered in Room 208. Using secure speaker hookups from Georgia, the President, Shultz and McFarlane joined in. By 11:30 there was full consensus.

The next day, October 23, the day of the Marine bombing in Beirut, Charles’s group transmitted an eight-point written request for intervention. The deaths of the servicemen were a personal blow to Reagan, who was keenly aware of his role as Commander in Chief. That many servicemen had not been lost since Vietnam. He voiced a feeling that sinister forces were at work—terrorists in Lebanon, Communists in Grenada. That day he signed the formal order for the Grenada invasion.

Casey had a case officer, one of the few women in the DO, who had been to Grenada for observation under deep cover several weeks earlier. She was dispatched a second time to gather intelligence before the invasion. This would be the first large-scale military intervention in the hemisphere since the 1965 invasion of the Dominican Republic. All four U.S. military services wanted, and received, a piece of the action.

The next day Charles was flown to Washington secretly in a U.S. government plane. North worried that the Beirut bombing would absorb all the attention and become grounds for canceling the invasion. He slept that night in his office.

The morning of October 25, the U.S. force, plus several hundred token soldiers from the other Caribbean nations requesting the intervention, began operations and landings. They encountered stiff resistance, and had little better than gas station maps to use on the island. Intelligence had not warned of antiaircraft weapons. Three U.S. helicopters were shot down. In all, nineteen U.S. servicemen were killed and another 115 wounded.

At 7:30 that morning an unusually early fire was burning in the Oval Office fireplace. Reagan, Shultz, McFarlane and Menges met there with Prime Minister Charles for about a half hour over juice and coffee. The President asked her to join him for a press briefing later that morning. She agreed. Menges took her to the White House dining room, where he explained that the American news media would be hostile, negative and difficult. He assisted her in working out answers to meet the skepticism.

At the last minute, the State Department deleted from the President’s statement the phrase “restore democracy” as a reason for the invasion. Menges argued, however, that its absence would make it appear that the Administration wanted a right-wing government on the island. The phrase was reinserted.

At 9:07 A.M. the President appeared in the press room to announce the invasion. “Early this morning, forces from six Caribbean democracies and the United States began a landing,” the President said. The first reason he gave for the action was “an urgent, formal request from the five member nations of the OECS,” chaired by Charles. Reagan introduced her, and she, appearing by Reagan’s side, said, “It is not a matter of an invasion. It is a matter of preventing this thing [Marxism] from spreading to all the islands.”

Her forceful presentation at the White House and during a round of other interviews and speeches was a public-relations coup for the White House. Reagan was later shown a videotape of his joint press appearance with Mrs. Charles.

“Wow,” the President said, “she was great!”

Menges discovered that North not only was key to Grenada but was the primary officer on all armed resistance support operations, including the contras. The compartments in the NSC were so restricted that virtually no one other than McFarlane and Poindexter was involved. The memos and messages on the subjects had the narrowest distribution. As the head of the Latin American section, Menges had little idea what was happening.

North was working an incredible eighty-five to ninety hours a week, more than the usual sixty to seventy-five put in by the other NSC staffers. “Ollie,” Menges said one day, “you have four wonderful children. We’re not at war now. Why don’t you spend some time with these wonderful children?”

“You’re right,” North replied. “Next week.”

The DCI felt that he had done the job at the CIA of conveying the explicit message of the Reagan Administration: America and strength. The world was not safer, because the Soviets were still bent on expansion, but the United States was in a better position to cope.

He shook his head at the mention of the alleged and much-acclaimed passion he supposedly had for covert action. “That’s bullshit,” Casey said. “I am the chief analyst.” His real job was as Bill Colby had described, running down to the White House with informed analysis, new information. Each day there was a different problem in a different part of the world.

One big turnaround in the Reagan years so far, Casey felt, was the Soviet Union. The Soviets were hurting; their economy was a mess and corruption was rampant, according to the best, latest CIA information. The Soviets had halted their “We’re-the-future” talk by and large. Because they weren’t. As Casey surveyed the world, it was clear that some good things were happening through covert action assistance to insurgencies. In spite of his boast that he was the chief analyst, Casey kept coming back to covert action.

There was good news for the Afghanistan operation in particular. On the ground, in those mountains and in some of the most god-awful terrain in the world, the Russians were getting the tar beaten out of them, Casey thought, and CIA support was increasing.

In Angola, even though U.S. covert assistance had been banned, there was an insurgency movement of 250,000 headed by Jonas Savimbi.

In Cambodia, about fifty thousand were fighting the Vietnamese Army, the fourth-largest army in the world, to what he claimed was a virtual standstill, and CIA assistance was still only about $5 million a year.

In Ethiopia, the resistance to the Marxist government was also in good shape, though most meaningful assistance was coming covertly from Saudi Arabia; the CIA role was nonlethal aid.

The contras were active in Nicaragua despite the withdrawal of U.S. support. Overall, this controversial operation had been a great success. Casey felt strongly that if honest elections were held, the Sandinistas would lose. Their support was dissolving under the opposition from the Catholic Church and the pressure from the contras.

In El Salvador, the U.S.-backed army had become more aggressive against the four rebel units. Intelligence indicated that the Soviets and the Cubans were thinking that they would not win this one, and were willing to pull out in order to solidify their position in Nicaragua. He thought that the U.S. might have lost El Salvador if the pressure had not been kept on.

Casey conceded that some of these operations could be messy, risky, dangerous. But the alternative was to let things drift as they had done under Carter. Together with a full program of diplomatic, propaganda and economic pressures, covert action was effective. There was a time, he acknowledged, when the covert action had been too big a part of the Nicaragua effort.

He felt that in the last three and a half years he had won one point with his critics. The CIA could not be obsessively concerned with its reputation. It worked for the President. If the President’s policies took a beating, so would the CIA. But so would the State Department or the Army. Those institutions—CIA, State, Army—were not so fragile that they couldn’t withstand setbacks and criticism.

He had been pushy, had insisted on enterprise. As Casey looked down the scorecard, he checked off some other important successes:

• For the first time, real attention had been paid to technological transfers by the hundreds of Soviet-inspired or Soviet-backed trading companies set up to circumvent the law and buy high-technology equipment and plans.
• The intelligence exchange with China was very fruitful, not only listening posts but other intelligence, human and technical. The Soviets, in particular, would find it a nasty shock if they knew details.
• Overall surveillance of the Soviet Union was improved. There were better techniques to monitor its ballistic-missile submarines.
• There was penetration of the international banking system, allowing a steady flow of data from the real, secret sets of books kept by many foreign banks that showed some hidden investing by the Soviet Union.
• Improved CIA counterintelligence had achieved new penetrations. There had also been several high-level defections from the KGB that could not be publicized. The CIA doubted they were double agents.
• The CIA was closer to worldwide coverage for the first time; there were efforts to have some assets or collection resources devoted to each country in the world, no matter how remote, no matter how small.
• Recruitment of agents in the Third World was up, doubled in Central America.
• Attention was being focused on some long-range problems. The CIA was the only agency looking systematically at potential problems that might arise in five or ten years, or more. It was studying the trends in the Third World to the year 2000—food resources, water, economic development. Questions such as what happens when the population of Mexico City hits 40 million; the impact of the drug supply in Latin America into the distant future. With automobiles made more and more out of plastic and less out of aluminum, what was going to happen to countries that produced bauxite? One such country was Suriname; nearly two thirds of its gross national product came from bauxite. In some cases, problems might be addressed earlier and cheaper. At the least Casey wanted them identified.
• On arms control, Casey was not prepared to say whether a future agreement could be verified or not. He didn’t believe in arms control.
• A special quarterly watch list of potentially unstable countries was circulated. At the top of the list was the Philippines, beset by insurgency and by political uncertainty.

Casey had molded and organized the CIA to assist its six true clients—the President, the Vice-President, the White House chief of staff, the Secretaries of State and Defense, and the national-security adviser. The CIA was not set up to service Congress, it was not there for the news media or for the public. Though he occasionally courted others, Casey’s essential message to any but his major clients was “Fuck you.”

In many respects, Casey realized that his directorship was a high-wire act, conducted in an atmosphere of no real restraints other than those he himself imposed. Since self-denial was not his style, and the intelligence account his free and clear, he demanded everything.

The NSA’s intercept program, for example, was now so comprehensive that senior officials had access to more material reporting back some of their own comments or alleged comments. An innocent social visit to an embassy reception could turn into an embarrassment for a Cabinet officer. The next morning’s intercept packet would contain the ambassador’s intercepted report back to his capital, quoting an unnamed U.S. official; under the NSA rules, the names of U.S. citizens, even Cabinet officers, were deleted. Yet at times the social pages of the newspapers reported who attended the embassy parties, and it took minimum detective work to determine the U.S. citizen.

The intercepts also revealed the frequency with which the foreign ambassadors in Washington distorted their reports and overstated their intimacy with senior U.S. officials, who in some cases seriously curtailed their dealings with embassy people and avoided the embassy cocktail circuit.

In one example, intercepts showed that the Japanese had developed a good source in the State Department on important trade negotiations. American officials read in some wonder the point-by-point U.S. positions even before they had been presented to other U.S. departments concerned with the negotiations. Casey only smiled at this. He was reversing a trend, putting the United States back in a winning position on all fronts.

In his own way—private, personal, idiosyncratic—Casey found the roots of espionage idealistic. There was something, in this case the United States, for which it was worth fighting, even fighting hard and dirty. Casey was pleased with his agency but on a scale of 1 to 10 he would give it only a 7. Probably 7 was par, good, but not the best. It was possible to do better. That was why he was going to work that Saturday morning. To keep the ideas moving. That was what interested him. He had little patience for show-and-tell briefings and administering. He kept the notes and the queries flowing. Winston Churchill had a notepad headed “Action Today.” That was what Casey wanted.

The next day, Sunday, Casey was alerted to an Associated Press wire report that disclosed a CIA guerrilla-warfare training manual advising the Nicaraguan contras on “selective use of violence” to “neutralize carefully selected and planned targets such as court judges, police and state security officials, etc.” By Wednesday, The New York Times had the story on the front page: “CIA Primer Tells Nicaraguan Rebels How to Kill.” It was difficult to avoid the logic that “neutralize” meant assassination. The ninety-page manual also urged the contras to “kidnap all officials or agents of the Sandinista government…”

Casey hadn’t seen the manual, but he realized that it was a bombshell and that he had had an important if indirect role in the decision to prepare it. “Psychological Operations in Guerrilla Warfare” had been drawn up and given limited distribution to the contras a year earlier, after Casey’s trip to Central America. He had pushed hard to give the contras some political context, arguing that armed bands roaming the mountains on hit-and-run missions weren’t going to make a real difference. The contras had to get into the villages and the cities, spread their message, develop political organization, build political backing. The manual had been devised as an educational tool.

Now Casey took a pencil to the manual, scribbled and underlined. The manual was a muddle, a grab bag of ideas, often contradictory, and filled with revolutionary and psychological jargon—“self-criticism,” “group discussions.” There was information on how to set up a guerrilla camp, and detailed instructions on how to avoid hostile feeling among the local residents. “Construct a latrine and a hole where wastes and garbage will be buried,” Casey read. He laughed. The madness of it would be funny under other circumstances. The manual called for “implicit terror” and denounced “explicit terror.”

Under “Shock Troops” he read: “These men should be equipped with weapons (knives, razors, chains, clubs, bludgeons) and should march slightly behind the innocent and gullible participants.”

The word “neutralize” appeared under the heading “Selective Use of Violence for Propagandistic Effects.” After a Sandinista official had been selected, the manual said, “it is absolutely necessary to gather together the population affected, so that they will be present, take part in the act, and formulate accusations against the oppressor.” One sentence had been edited out of some editions of the manual, but unfortunately not all. It said, “If possible, professional criminals will be hired to carry out selective ‘jobs.’” This was embarrassingly reminiscent of the CIA’s hiring of John Roselli, a member of the Mafia, to assassinate Castro in the early sixties.

Assassination was like no other subject in the American psyche, Casey knew. No subject so challenged the national self-image and moral credibility. Assassination was the Scarlet A of American politics. The use of the word “neutralize” was probably worse than the use of the word “assassination” because it suggested the shadowy, plausible deniability that was supposed to be the bread and butter of CIA operations. In that concealed world, the agency never said what it meant anyway.

Casey was deeply concerned that no one in the chain of command at the CIA had seen the peril of trying to reduce warfare to words. It wasn’t logical to go off in two directions, warning against and advocating violence. The nature of guerrilla warfare revealed itself in the manual. The goal was to crush the constituted government. The take-no-prisoners style could not be denied. To imagine it otherwise would be truly naive. But to reduce it to writing?

A political firestorm erupted. House Intelligence Committee Chairman Boland said that the manual espoused “the doctrine of Lenin, not Jefferson. It embraces the Communist revolutionary tactics the United States is pledged to defeat throughout the world.” Goldwater demanded a full briefing for the Senate committee. There were calls for a special prosecutor, and for Casey’s head. There were accusations, principally from Democrats, that the United States was sponsoring terrorism. By the end of the day Casey was bananas.

The next day, he decided that he would release a statement pledging an investigation, but the issue of the manual and all it implied so dominated the news that he had to go down to the White House, which now stepped in to take control. The President’s name was substituted for Casey’s on a statement which said: “The Administration has not advocated or condoned political assassination or any other attacks on civilians, nor will we.” Casey was told to have the CIA inspector general investigate, and the President’s intelligence oversight board was directed to launch a separate probe. Both the House and the Senate committees started their own inquiries.

Part of Casey wanted to emerge from the shadows and shout back, What the hell do you expect? It’s a war, not a picnic. It’s messy and violent. People are getting killed down there. It’s like that. The world is like that.