John Spinelli came up with a fresh angle—news that a couple of Aideed bodyguards were ready to betray him for the reward money. They only had to be picked up and spirited out of the warlord zone. Jones had a bad feeling about the operation but left it up to his deputy. Spinelli scouted the area by chopper and returned with four CIA bodyguards early the next morning. In the interval Italian peacekeepers responsible for that sector began handing over to Nigerians, and the Somalis attacked. Spinelli’s jeeps were caught in the fighting. Spinelli was shot in the neck, a CIA casualty. General Garrison had him flown to Ramstein for treatment.

  Mike Shanklin maintained contact with a couple of teams of gunmen who had worked for his network. When one spotted an Aideed lieutenant, the Rangers made a new raid. Troops arrived within half an hour, but the quarry had flown. Another Condor brainstorm resulted in the sole result of this campaign: Shanklin remembered a plan to have his top agent give Aideed a walking stick with a concealed tracking device. Condor asked Jones what had happened to the thing, and the station chief found it in a storeroom. Shanklin passed the stick to an agent, who gave it to an important aide, Osman Ato, an Aideed financier. The CIA used a helicopter to monitor movements of whoever had the walking stick. The chopper followed the device as a car stopped at a gas station below, and Delta made an instant drop-in, capturing Ato.

  Admiral Howe radiated optimism, the only higher-up to do so. Others had a sense of foreboding. A fresh four-point plan approved by the NSC Deputies Committee on August 16 seemed less sanguine than the old one. Garrett Jones saw a report from headquarters titled “Looming Foreign Policy Disaster.” Langley pressured the station to advise on U.S. operations and intentions, which left Jones angry at being asked to spy on his own side instead of the enemy. In October, a few days after the Ato capture, he cabled Bill Piekney an “eyes only” message complaining that the Delta Force had been misused, that the myopic focus on Aideed would not solve Somali problems, and that Jonathan Howe had no idea what he was doing. “THINGS ARE BAD AND GETTING WORSE,” the cable began. Piekney told the station chief to shut up and get on with it. The next day came the battle of Mogadishu.

  “Cheetah,” one of Jones’s scarce case officers, was in charge of the newest network, based on a splinter group from Aideed’s forces. Early on October 3 Cheetah reported a gathering of Aideed’s top aides. “Wart Hog,” the CIA officer now heading the Delta support team, radioed that the agent should indicate the building by stopping his car next to it and putting up the hood. The agent complied. Garrison ordered a raid. Jones, standing next to him, cabled this to Langley, but the initial reports were all good. In the space of minutes success turned to disaster as a chopper, damaged, went down, and for hours the focus became saving its crew and security team, then the men who went to rescue them. More helicopters were lost or damaged, as were vehicles from the quick-reaction forces sent in on the ground. Today it is believed that an early action of the Al Qaeda terrorists had been to train Aideed’s gunmen on tactics against copters.

  The next morning General Garrison presided over a gloomy review at his command post. Military action to rescue the missing was ruled out. Sending out choppers to call the men’s names on loudspeakers, trivial as it seemed, became the choice. The military and spooks turned to the UN representative present, Kenneth L. Cain, who felt like the first time he had been called upon in law school. Cain said his job was to listen to the options and report to the UN command.

  “Why don’t you go talk to some imam and ask him for help?” Garrett Jones sneered.

  Cain thought the station chief’s expression was one of disgust.

  Eighteen American troopers were killed and another eighty-four wounded in the disastrous gun battle. Another American, one of the chopper pilots, was captured and his body dragged through the streets. It was recovered afterward only by making a deal with Aideed. The United States would refrain from further retaliation.

  Task Force Ranger now packed up and went home. Admiral Howe left too, replaced by his predecessor Robert Oakley, who had gotten along with Aideed, and the UN command made a truce with the warlords. When the UN pulled out of The Dish in 1995 their information unit left behind several boxes of U.S. intelligence documents, causing more heartache at Langley. In a way it had been Saigon all over again, albeit on a small scale.

  A senior officer from the Latin America division replaced Garrett Jones, who retired in 1997. John Spinelli resigned in March 1998 after failing to get the CIA to change its disability rules to match those of other federal agencies. He later went to court to force that change. At last report that litigation continued. Mike Shanklin received an Intelligence Star for his bravery, left the agency, then had his security clearance stripped because he could not pass a lie detector test. The test broke down beginning with questions about his wife, an Italian doctor he had met in The Dish and consoled over the loss of her companion, his former star agent. Two Medals of Honor were awarded to U.S. fighters in the battle.

  The Senate Armed Services Committee and the President’s Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board both decided after study that the intelligence support in Somalia had been as good as could be expected. It was the policy that had failed. Bill Clinton recalls that “the battle of Mogadishu haunted me.” Only afterward did Clinton convene his full National Security Council on the subject for the first time. The Dish became his Bay of Pigs. “The Somalia tragedy shocked Clinton into taking control of his foreign policy and his bureaucracy,” NSC executive secretary Nancy Soderberg writes. “Mogadishu was a strategic setback,” notes Clinton’s national security adviser, Anthony Lake, “not only in perceptions of the United States abroad, but in our confidence at home.” Lake recalls the battle as the worst moment of the first term of Clinton’s presidency. All three use the image of the Bay of Pigs.

  The President’s Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board had been in decline since Ronald Reagan’s day. The first President Bush had left the board alone for a year, then cut it back by more than half in a replay of Reagan’s 1985 purge. The revamped six-member board he placed under former Senator John G. Tower. Bush selected strong members with good grounding in intelligence work. They included a former deputy director of central intelligence, a director of the National Security Agency, a CIA estimator and NSC staff official, plus a couple of technologists, one of whom, John M. Deutch, would presently head the CIA himself. But the board left as few tracks as the Bush-era Intelligence Oversight Board, headed by a political figure, former Governor James Thompson of Illinois.

  President Clinton retained both institutions, appointing Adm. William J. Crowe, a former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, to lead the PFIAB. Like Reagan, Clinton had a tendency to use board membership as a political reward. Among his appointments was Zoe E. Baird, soon after she failed to attain the post of attorney general. On the other hand the Clinton PFIAB did real work. Its postmortem on the Mogadishu disaster has been noted. Somalia brought more changes than the board anticipated—the failure forced Les Aspin to resign as secretary of defense, and Bill Clinton then gave him the board chairmanship. Admiral Crowe went to London as U.S. ambassador to the Court of St. James. The Aspin appointment led to one of the most important developments of the decade for U.S. intelligence.

  Energetic and hyperactive, Aspin had no intention of slowing down. Instead he wanted to make PFIAB the center for thinking about post–Cold War intelligence restructuring. In this he had competition, for projecting the future shape of the community concerned many. The House intelligence committee, several Washington think tanks, and the Council on Foreign Relations each had their own vision. Former officials like the NSA’s William Odom advocated reorganization too, then or later. But Les Aspin used the Somalia disaster to press Clinton for either a PFIAB study or a presidential commission made up entirely or primarily of board members.

  Even on this idea Aspin had competitors. Four months after Mogadishu the FBI arrested CIA officer Aldrich Ames, whom agency counterspies had finally identified as the man responsible for many agent losses.* The Ames arrest focused enormous attention on the DO and led to demands for a review for quite different reasons. Virginia Republican Senator John W. Warner stood out among those who called for an examination. Warner, one of the few to have looked deeply at the Mogadishu debacle from an oversight standpoint, had actually stood in front of Garrett Jones and complimented him on the job CIA had done in The Dish. Now, in the wake of Ames, he wanted a shakedown.

  Clinton had no stomach for a policy review of U.S. intelligence. He rejected the PFIAB study and did nothing until Warner provided for a presidential commission in the bill authorizing the CIA budget. The administration opposed this too until Aspin offered a compromise that became law. Les Aspin himself became chairman of the commission and John Warner a member. Including Aspin, seven of seventeen members were on PFIAB.

  Although Clinton gave Les Aspin a broad role in the review, the president’s delays—he waited months before making his selections—showed reluctance to engage these issues. Aspin moved on his own, finally starting the review process in February 1995. Three months later the chairman suffered a stroke, a coma set in, and then Les Aspin lay dead. President Clinton brought in Harold Brown, a noted technologist and former secretary of defense in the Carter administration. The review became known as the Aspin-Brown Commission.

  The group wrote its report by the due date and put out 150 pages of closely reasoned text plus appendices. Readers gleaned that intelligence would be crucial in the new world and that there needed to be international cooperation along with coordinated response to global issues. Aspin-Brown advocated a new “national” agency, one to bring the photo interpreters and map experts together. There would be plenty of text on policy guidance, space reconnaissance, technical collection, even oversight. But the twin concerns of the initiators were virtually invisible in the final report: both covert operations and counterintelligence were submerged in snippets of text within general treatises on broad issues.

  In its final report Aspin-Brown acknowledged that covert action remained the most controversial activity but recommended that the capability be maintained to give presidents an option short of military force. The commissioners cited most witnesses, as well as the 1975 Rockefeller Commission, to support covert action for specific U.S. policy goals and subject to careful processes of approval.

  The commission offered the caveats that covert methods should be no more aggressive than needed to accomplish the objective, and that actions should be undertaken only where compelling reasons precluded disclosure of U.S. involvement. The commissioners elsewhere conceded criticism that the Directorate for Operations had become parochial and insular, calling that a cliché and recommending the CIA rotate DO officers through outside assignments. They defended covert action by crediting it with success in thwarting terrorist incidents, smashing drug cartels, and attaining goals without resort to the military. The two or three pages on this were dwarfed by the many devoted to organizational issues (where only minor reforms made the final report) and the dozens on intelligence collection means, technical and otherwise. Accounts by commission staff make clear that talk about covert action by the commissioners, witnesses, and staff had been lively, extensive, and disputatious, much more so than reflected in the actual report.

  Among the hearings before the commission was a day, July 14, 1995, that could reasonably have been called “Seventh Floor Day.” Four of the five witnesses had been either the DCI or deputy (the fifth had been deputy director for intelligence). They included Dick Helms, Judge Webster, John McMahon, and R. James Woolsey. Woolsey? The commission would hear from the sitting director of central intelligence several weeks later, but the truth is that the sun of Clinton’s first DCI had risen and set in the relatively brief interval between his inauguration and this commission review.

  Jim Woolsey, a Democrat at the time, and a lawyer, was an outside import to Langley. He knew a certain amount about spy satellites as a defense intellectual active on nuclear issues, but his closest brush with the CIA had come in 1989, when Woolsey in his legal role represented Charlie Allen trying to buck a reprimand for Iran-Contra. The term “neoconservative” was coming into use then, but in 1992 Woolsey would have been better recognized as a Jackson Democrat, one of the acolytes of Washington State’s Henry Jackson, a conservative on defense. He had sat on presidential commissions during the Reagan era, when Brent Scowcroft brought Woolsey onto a group studying nuclear forces. He and Scowcroft collaborated on articles advocating strategic force solutions, and early in the first Bush administration Scowcroft had tried to tap Woolsey to shepherd a policy review on that subject. Woolsey had been a negotiator on force reductions in Europe. He had also served as undersecretary of the navy in the Carter administration, counsel to the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency, briefly a member of the Kissinger NSC staff, and an army officer during Vietnam days.

  Woolsey contributed policy advice to Michael Dukakis’s presidential campaign in 1988 and did the same for Clinton in 1992. That summer Sandy Berger, who coordinated national security for the campaign, brought together a group with—as Clinton himself puts it in his memoir—“more robust views on national security and defense than our party typically projected.” The group, which endorsed Clinton, included Woolsey. The candidate listened and satisfied himself that his conservative flank had been covered. Clinton recounts that he wanted to appoint House intelligence committee chairman Dave McCurdy as DCI, but McCurdy refused. The congressman probably recommended Woolsey in his stead—McCurdy headed an advocacy group in which Woolsey participated as his second. Woolsey had also known Les Aspin since 1971 and several times contributed to Aspin political campaigns. In any event, just before Christmas Sandy Berger summoned Jim Woolsey to Little Rock for what the Washington lawyer expected to be a consultation on whom to appoint to head the CIA. Instead Clinton offered the job to him.

  R. James Woolsey got off on the wrong foot, and his situation only worsened. He proved both unlucky and unskilled as DCI. The Mogadishu debacle had already begun building. Barely a week before Woolsey’s confirmation hearing a Pakistani extremist went on a shooting spree at the road intersection outside CIA headquarters, throwing Langley into a rage as two agency officers died and three were wounded merely for stopping at a red light.

  The new director knew enough to warn Congress that a garden of snakes had replaced the single dragon as the threat in the post–Cold War world. But Woolsey used that analogy to argue that Americans, instead of enjoying a Cold War dividend—a reduction in U.S. intelligence budgets—ought to spend as much or more. Director Woolsey gave token support to Clinton plans to cut intelligence spending by a billion dollars the first year, toward an overall reduction of $7 billion over five years, but he really wanted something very different. The DCI got into a table-pounding exchange with Congress in May at a secret hearing where he sputtered that reductions would gut the agency.

  Soon Jim Woolsey would hardly be on speaking terms with Dave McCurdy or his successor, Representative Dan Glickman. Woolsey’s relations with Senate committee chairman Dennis DeConcini deteriorated even more. The DCI proved wooden with the spooks, endearing no one when he had an encrypted lock installed on his office door at Langley. He raised hackles among the secrecy cult when he announced that the CIA would declassify Cold War records, including those from covert action. That he merely repeated Bob Gates’s promise made little difference. Plain hysteria followed his initiating personnel cuts—a government-wide review by Vice President Al Gore ordered them, but Woolsey wanted them deeper and quicker. Actually Woolsey directed the cuts away from the DO, but few secret warriors paid any attention to that.

  The DCI did no better with the White House. Several times Woolsey tried to take the President’s Daily Brief to Clinton, only to be ignored. National security adviser Anthony Lake and Sandy Berger, now deputy, also gave the CIA short shrift. Journalists attributed their attitude to experience (for Lake, at least) in the Nixon White House. When a small plane crashed on White House grounds in 1993, wags joked it was Woolsey trying to get in to see the president. Woolsey showed how bad it was when he began telling the joke on himself.

  Barely had Woolsey become comfortable on the Seventh Floor when controversy broke out over the CIA and Haiti. Troubles on that Caribbean island had been brewing for months. In fact Americans trapped in The Dish consoled themselves by listening to the news from Haiti. A military coup against the government of Jean Bertrand Aristide brought matters to a head. Questions arose about links between the CIA and the groups of thugs and militia spearheading the violence, plus Haitian officers involved with drug runners. The chief thug had been a CIA asset. Then Brian Latell, a senior CIA analyst, briefed Congress on an agency psychological profile of Aristide, noting that he was mentally unstable and had been in a Canadian psychiatric hospital. That could not be confirmed. Woolsey gamely pretended there was no egg on Langley’s face, telling a TV audience the CIA had been pretty good on Haiti. At the White House, Nancy Soderberg of the NSC staff scored the Aristide profile “a textbook case of the politicization of intelligence.” Meanwhile the Mogadishu chickens came home to roost. Director Woolsey packed DO boss Tom Twetten off to London, replacing him with Hugh E. “Ted” Price, then the chief of the fusion center for counterespionage. Within months the arrest of Aldrich Ames called Price’s leadership of the spy hunt into question.

  Director Woolsey defended Price, and he spent a good deal of energy on the Directorate for Operations. The DO still consumed more than half the CIA budget, reported at $3 billion at this time, but was widely seen as afflicted with low morale. Covert action fell to 5 percent of DO spending. The four-to-five-month paramilitary course at Camp Peary was cut back. The directorate closed fifteen stations in Africa. Of course, that still left something on the order of a hundred CIA stations. Over a few years’ time more than half a dozen station chiefs were replaced for cause, though some of the causes were trumped up. In Cyprus a chief had stolen a religious icon; in Bonn the German government asked for the recall; in Paris the French did the same; in Peru a station chief drew a pistol on his own staff. The subjects—or victims, depending on one’s point of view—included Richard Holm and Milt Bearden.