June 22, 2017 • 39 mins
What happens when a terrorist has a change of heart?
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:15):
Pushkin. I have a theory that the most interesting autobiographies
are the ones written by second tier people. I'm not
using second tier in a derogatory sense like second rate.
I mean it in a sense of hierarchy. When the
people on the top tier tell their story, it's invariably boring.
(00:39):
They have too much to lose by being honest. Their
public stature works against them on the page because they know.
Anything they write that's even vaguely controversial or opinionated, in
other words, anything interesting, it's going to get dissected and
distorted by the media. But the memoir of the person
under the general or the president or the CEO, the
(01:00):
person you've never heard of, that person has a lot
less to lose, and their memoirs are where the gold lies.
Not long ago, I picked up a book called Company Man,
Thirty Years of Controversy and Crisis in the CIA. It
was by a man named John Rizzo. I checked the
(01:21):
book flap for Rizzo's bio. He wasn't the director of
the CIA, or the deputy director, or even the Head
of Operations, which is the person who runs all the spies. No.
Rizzo was an attorney in the agency's legal Department, eventually
rising to acting General counsel. When I saw Rizzo's book,
(01:41):
I thought, BINGO, I have to read this. I was
not disappointed. My name is Malcolm Gladwell. You're listening to
Revisionist History, my podcast about Things Overlooked and Misunderstood. This
episode is about a story John Rizzou tells on page
(02:03):
one forty eight of his autobiography. It's a story about
a spy, a very good one, and what happened to
him him. Right after I read it, I got in
touch with Rizzo. I asked him if I could interview
him about the story of the spy. He said, of course.
Then in his email he added a PostScript, PS, interesting
(02:26):
that you focused on that episode. When I finished the manuscript,
I figured that if any single anecdote in the book
would garner public attention, that would be the one. As
it turned out, I don't remember anyone ever asking me
or otherwise talking about it, which I found puzzling. Yes,
(02:48):
it's puzzling.
Speaker 2 (02:51):
I mean it was probably forty maybe. As I say,
I saw pictures of him, photos of them. At the time.
Speaker 1 (02:57):
I'm sitting at Rizzo's kitchen table at his house in Washington,
d c. He's telling me about the spy he mentioned
in his autobiography.
Speaker 2 (03:06):
And he looked like al Pacino, no circa godfather too.
He was at Europe, I mean, he was European looking.
He's to a young man, and I think he reached
sort of, you know, a stage in his life that
he felt remorse skills about what he had done in
his youth and in his formative years. You know, as
(03:27):
simple and confounding as that. I mean, I don't, honestly,
I don't recall another instance of an asset coming to
us under those kinds of circumstances.
Speaker 1 (03:39):
An asset is CIA speak for a source, someone on
the inside. This asset, the man who looked like al
Pacino was a terrorist. Do you know the details of
his how he approached the CIA to say I've had
a change of heart.
Speaker 2 (03:57):
I you know, I believed he just volunteered his services,
and I think he just walked into an embassy.
Speaker 1 (04:05):
And what was what do we know about the quality
of the information he was providing.
Speaker 2 (04:10):
It was very good. You know. He was considered the
highly reliable and he he didn't want much money. That
was the other interesting thing. He didn't want money. I
mean it wasn't you know most assets didn't want money.
Speaker 1 (04:25):
Why didn't he want money?
Speaker 2 (04:27):
Because he said that he was doing this for his conscience,
to make up and it was an act of expiation.
Speaker 1 (04:36):
An act of expiation. You will want to take sides
when you finish this story. My advice to you is don't.
If you make a list of the greatest investigative reporters
of a last generation, there's Bob Woodward at the top.
(04:57):
There's Mark Bowden, who wrote Blackhawk Down, Seymour Hirsch who
wrote for the New York Times for many years, and
then The New Yorker, Steve Cale, Jane Mayer. There's a
guy who I sett when I first started my career
at the Washington Post many years ago, Mike Isikoff, who
was a bulldog. And somewhere in that top cluster of
(05:17):
investigative reporters is Tim Weiner. He's one of the few
journalists ever to have won both a Pulitzer Prize and
a National Book Award. In the nineteen eighties, Weiner worked
at the Philadelphia Inquirer, and his first foreign assignment was
covering the overthrow of the Filipino dictator Ferdinand Marcos. When
Weiner came back, he convinced his editor to send him
(05:40):
to Afghanistan, where the CIA was then secretly funding the
mujah Hadeen in their battle against the Soviet occupation.
Speaker 3 (05:47):
I called up the CIA, which had and always has
had a public information office, and I said, hey, I'm
going to Afghanistan. I understand you people do country briefings
from time to time for foreign correspondence. How about it?
And he said absolutely not hung up the phone. If
(06:09):
I went to Afghanistan. I had a jolly old time.
Came back and I hadn't been back in Washington for
more than a day when my phone rang.
Speaker 1 (06:16):
It was a public information officer from the CIA. This
time he was friendly. He said, why don't you come
by for that briefing.
Speaker 3 (06:25):
So off I went through the CIA, which is in
the woods, about eight miles outside of the White House,
checkpoint one, checkpoint two, checkpoint three, into the lobby of
the CIA, and up on the left hand wall, in
great gold letters, it says from the Gospel of John,
and ye shall know the truth, and the truth will
make you free. So I'm hooked already. I go up
(06:48):
to the seventh floor, which is where the executive suites
were and there are four CIA officers sitting around a
table for my quote briefing unquote, But they really only
wanted to know one thing from me, which was what's
it like. These were supposed to be the four top ciaxps.
(07:09):
It's on Afghanistan. They'd never been to Afghanistan. So I
walked out of there thinking, I'm going to devote the
rest of my life to making a study of this agency.
I was completely fascinated.
Speaker 1 (07:28):
Why I went to The New York Times in nineteen
ninety three continued covering the agency all throughout the nineteen nineties.
He was very, very good at it. When I was
covering the CIA during the Aldrich Ames affair, you may
remember that Ames was a senior CIA officer who worked
there for more than thirty years, and he ended up
telling the KGB everything he knew, including the names of
(07:51):
the agency's assets inside the Soviet Union. It was one
of the most damaging cases of espionage in American history.
Speaker 3 (07:59):
Ames is under arrest, and I'm thinking I should go
interview Ames. I wonder where Ames is right now, and
as it turned out, he was in a county jail.
So I go to the county jail and I say,
I'd like to talk to prisoner Alder James. And I've
walked into the interview room and there was Alda James.
(08:20):
We talked.
Speaker 1 (08:23):
How long did you talk to him?
Speaker 4 (08:24):
For?
Speaker 3 (08:24):
Well about an hour?
Speaker 2 (08:26):
Wait?
Speaker 1 (08:26):
You stopped after an hour? Did they stop?
Speaker 2 (08:29):
You know?
Speaker 3 (08:30):
It's a visiting hour, Tim, this.
Speaker 1 (08:32):
Is the greatest scoop of your It's a school.
Speaker 3 (08:36):
And I gave my phone number and he called me collect,
you know, on a regular basis. And I did a
number of stories based on first hand interviews where he
essentially confessed to everything he'd done and gave me some
rather vivid descriptions of life inside the CIA, most of
(08:57):
which were true and demonstrably true.
Speaker 1 (09:00):
Maybe you have to have been a reporter to understand
how fantastic that story is. I was a reporter at
the Washington Post for ten years. I would have assumed
that the worst spy in American history was under triple
lockdown somewhere, whisked away by helicopter to a black side.
I would have waited for the press release. But Weiner
is a kind of person who would assume that if
(09:21):
the intelligence establishment was naive and disorganized enough to have
its clock cleaned, by a KGB mole. Then it was
probably naive and disorganized enough to park that same mole
unattended in the county jail.
Speaker 3 (09:34):
And I covered them like you would cover a courthouse
or the cops, or Congress or the White House. They're
an arm of the government, like the Internal Revenue Service
or the Post Office. They happened to be a secret
arm of government.
Speaker 1 (09:53):
Weiner would later write a book called Legacy of Ashes.
That's how he won his National Book Award. It's an
amazing book, easily the best history of the CIA ever written.
Some people within the agency thought that one was biased
against them, that in his reporting, and particularly in Legacy
(10:13):
of Ashes, he went on too long about what the
agency had done wrong, and that he said too little
about what the agency did right. I understand why they
think that way, but I'm not sure that assessment is fair.
Weiner is not biased. He's aggressive. You only have to
meet him to understand that he has one of those big, square,
(10:35):
impressive heads, barrel chest, the kind of self confidence that
you have to have if you're in his line of work.
He's a kind of relentlessness about him. I can't remember
how many times we talked on the phone and went
back and forth in emails before he agreed to sit
down with me. He kept it up for weeks, clarifying, probing,
(10:56):
why do you want to do this story? What are
your intentions? Weiner is aggressive because over the course of
his career, he needed to be aggressive. It's not like
the CIA puts out colorful brochures highlighting its latest initiatives.
It's a secret agency. There's a man named Jeffrey Smith
(11:18):
who will figure in this story as well. Smith used
to be the general counsel for the CIA. He's very
much a member of the intelligence establishment, genteel, bookish. He's
now in private practice at one of the most prestigious
of DC law firms, Arnold and Porter. And one of
the things that Smith says is it's a good thing
for the agency that reporters like Tim Winer are aggressive.
(11:40):
The agency needs a free press.
Speaker 5 (11:43):
It keeps you honest. It's not unlike congressional oversight. If
any government agency is asked to do something or is
considering something, the CIA, you have to think, this is
probably something that is going to have to be reported
to our two oversight committees. How are they going to
react and what happens if it leaks, how do we
(12:08):
explain what doing? And that question comes up all the time,
and without a press it wouldn't come.
Speaker 1 (12:15):
Up, So you need needs yes, Does the CIA always
remember that?
Speaker 5 (12:27):
In the ranks, some people don't see it that way.
As you get more senior, you do see it that way.
And the senior people have to explain to the younger
people as are coming up through the ranks why that's necessary.
Speaker 1 (12:47):
Why do we put up with a hugely powerful agency
like the CIA, with a budget in the tens of billions,
doing things we know very little about, because we're confident
that if the CIA does something truly evil or stupid,
the press will find out and let us know. Weiner
lives by this idea. He devoted his career to it.
Speaker 3 (13:09):
What does the CIA look like in the absence of
free press? It looks like the KGB. We have a
uniquely American problem here, Malcolm. We're trying to run a
secret intelligence service in an open, democratic society. The Russians
don't do that, the Chinese don't do that, not even
(13:29):
the British do that. We need to have a constant
tug of war between a free press, a cantankerous press,
a skeptical press, and the powerful institutions of our government.
But there are going to be arguments.
Speaker 1 (13:50):
Believe me, they were arguments.
Speaker 5 (13:54):
He's the world's most wanted man, the son of a
wealthy Venezuelan lawyer.
Speaker 1 (13:57):
His profession is spreading terror worldwide.
Speaker 5 (14:00):
He has links with groups like that.
Speaker 1 (14:02):
The most notorious terrorist of the nineteen seventies and nineteen
eighties was a man named Ilitch Ramirez Sanchez, so known
as Carlos the Jackal. He was born in Venezuela, but
worked closely with a radical group called the Popular Front
for the Liberation of Palestine, setting bombs assassinating people. He
was thought to be responsible for the deaths of more
(14:23):
than eighty people. He played a role in the massacre
of Israeli athletes at the Munich Olympic Games in nineteen
seventy two. Carlos the Jackal was almost as notorious in
his day as a Soma Ben Lauden was in ours.
He was the subject of a massive international manhunt that
went on for years. Finally, in nineteen ninety four, he
(14:43):
was captured in Sudan by French intelligence. How did they
find him because of a tip from the CIA. Where
did the CIA get its information from a man who
was once high up in the same world as the Jackal?
The guy John Rizzo wrote about the asset who looked
like Alpuccino. Here's Rizzo again.
Speaker 2 (15:03):
Yeah, usually you work case officers, work potential sources and
assets for months to years before even pitching them to help.
This guy just walked, I mean just just walked in.
So yeah, I mean, at the time is recruitment. There
was a great excitement, eagerness that this is one of
the few guys, the best guy we have inside a
(15:23):
terrorist organization.
Speaker 1 (15:25):
So you never met him, but you saw a picture
of him, and you say, you describe him as looking
like al Pacino. There was something kind of glamorous about him.
Speaker 2 (15:34):
Is that what?
Speaker 5 (15:35):
Yeah?
Speaker 2 (15:35):
Yeah, sleek, dark hair, is European looking. I mean he
was not you know, he was not your jihadi. I
mean he was he was Westernized.
Speaker 1 (15:50):
Al Pacino helped the CIA find Carlos the Jackal, but
by the following year, the summer of nineteen ninety five,
the CIA found itself in crisis. The Aldrich Aims scandal
had devastated the agency's reputation. What's more, the Cold War
was over, and since the CIA was essentially created to
(16:11):
fight the Cold War, lots of people in Washington, serious
people wondered if the United States even needed the agency anymore.
Then all kinds of stories broke about shady characters the
agency was mixed up with in Central America, murderers, drug dealers.
It was the last straw. President Clinton brought in a
new director, John Deutsch, with the mandate to clean house.
(16:35):
Deutsche ordered what's called an asset scrub, a review of
every spy, informant, an asset on a CIA payroll, with
a specific emphasis on ethical considerations. As the CIA's General Counsel,
Jeff Smith was in the middle.
Speaker 5 (16:51):
Of it, were there assets who had committed major felonase
human rights violations or had attacked Americans? And so we
added that dimension to the assets scrub that was currently underway.
Speaker 1 (17:06):
And one of the files the agency reviewed was that
of al Pacino. John Rizzo was Jeff Smith's deputy. He
was in the middle of it as well.
Speaker 2 (17:15):
It was discovered that he had actually committed terrorist acts
against Americans, bombings in Europe, and that he had wounded
some with his bombs. I mean, obviously the intent was
to kill them. Now that was somehow missed. Now I
don't know how it was, mister, whether frankly it was
(17:37):
just overlooked, but it should have been a red flag.
Speaker 1 (17:43):
You can imagine what some people inside the CIA thought
of the asset scrub. The function of a spy's service
is to find out what the bad guys are doing,
and the best way you find out what the bad
guys are doing is to have another bad guy tell you. Right,
So why would you have a rule saying the CIA
needs to be extra careful about hiring bad guys, but
(18:04):
at the same time as a group that says, look,
the agency is a mess. We might not have a
future unless we clean up our act. We have to
play by the rules.
Speaker 2 (18:14):
So what that meant was, we've belatedly discovered that we
should have reviewed his record before entering into a relationship
with them, and we should have actually gone to the
law enforcement, the FBI, Department of Justice at the outset
before we even began a relationship. And I would have
(18:35):
been the guy to do it, was to go to justice.
The out that we did not do that.
Speaker 1 (18:39):
In the middle of all that handbringing, someone calls Tim Winer.
So when do you first get wind of the retired terrorist?
Speaker 3 (18:48):
As I recall in the late spring or early summer
of nineteen ninety five, I get word from inside the
CI that we have a problem here, and I begin
to make inquiries.
Speaker 1 (19:07):
So somebody from is the CIA? What is their motivation
for telling you this?
Speaker 3 (19:14):
The CIA has screwed up. It has failed to inform
the Justice Department that they have an asset on their books,
a foreign agent who has again euphemistically American blood on
his hands.
Speaker 1 (19:30):
So why do they want to call the New York Times.
Speaker 3 (19:36):
To write or wrong? Because sometimes public disclosure is the
only way to write a wrong.
Speaker 1 (19:47):
Do you think it's ea? Did they think it would
be easier for them to fulfill their obligation to inform
the Justice Department if there was a kind of leak
of this fact.
Speaker 3 (20:01):
First, there was a battle royal going on inside the
CIA over the scrub.
Speaker 1 (20:09):
So Deutsche's pushing that and within the agency there's a
considerable amount of pushback, so they're anticipating this is going
to be a struggle.
Speaker 3 (20:17):
A considerable amount of pushback is an understatement. There was
fierce opposition.
Speaker 1 (20:24):
So I'm guessing the people who call you are the
ones who are in favor of the scrub.
Speaker 3 (20:31):
The people who call me are patriots who love their
country and who were sworn to uphold Let me rephrase that.
The people who called me, I believe, are patriots who
love their country and are motivated to live by their
(20:55):
oath to uphold the Constitution and obey the laws of
the United States.
Speaker 1 (21:01):
Why or Waits continues to ask around. Then, late in
the summer of nineteen ninety five, the CIA decides to
take its medicine. Rizzo goes to the Department of Justice
and tells them good, bad and ugly about their al pacino.
Speaker 2 (21:18):
They were upset, you know, basically, why are you just
telling us this now? You know, why didn't you tell
us before you got in bed with this guy? So, yeah,
they were upsets. I knew they would be. You have
to weigh this guy is, you know, gold, against the
fact that, well, you know, he's got attempted murder of
(21:39):
Americans on his resume.
Speaker 1 (21:42):
At the same time Rizzo's having that conversation, the head
of the CIA's counter Terrorism Center went to Capitol Hill
and briefed members of Congress about the acid scrub. They
weren't happy either. People all over Washington. Now knew about
al Pacino, people in the Department of Justice, people in
the White House, people on the Hill, representatives, senators, staffers,
(22:07):
and Winer's phone rings.
Speaker 3 (22:09):
Again, my rule of thumb on a story like this
is and I want to have three sources, and I
want to make sure that the second source is not
the first source, in which case I have one source. Right,
So I had two sources. I did get a call.
(22:35):
The call was a call to have a conversation outside
of the normal circuits of the telephone lines. The conversation
was with a member of Congress. At this point, I
have three sources. Subsequently, there was a fourth who is
(23:01):
an American diplomat, was an American diplomat at the time.
Speaker 1 (23:05):
Winnercalls the CIA Press office and talks to the agency's
Oaksmith at the time, Dennis Box. I met Box in
a restaurant in northern Virginia.
Speaker 4 (23:15):
And it was at that point where they said this
is not good, this is this is really gonna put
somebody at risk. And I said, said, well, let's invite
him in and try to lay out for him. You
know what's gonna what the risk is. He said, he
(23:36):
sat in my office with the head of counter Terrorism Center.
Speaker 1 (23:39):
Yeah, and what was do you remember much? What was
the what was the nature of the conversation.
Speaker 4 (23:45):
Well, it was pretty straightforward. It was he's got a
fairly mild demeanor. He's not at least with us. He
you know, he wasn't aggressive or abrasive. I mean, he
was just kind of laying out, here's here's what I have,
here's what I've been told. But it was the detail.
It was the details of this particular asset that got
(24:06):
our folks worked up.
Speaker 1 (24:08):
This particular asset meaning Alpucino, Bach says, the head of
the counter Terrorism Center explained all the specific things that
if published, would put al Pacino in danger. He tried
to interest Winer instead in a broader story about the
asset scrub, which wasn't really a secret at that point.
(24:29):
These kinds of conversations between reporters and government officials are
not unusual. This is how Washington works. In the United Kingdom,
there is something commonly known as a d notice, which
is a government order issued to a media organization saying
you shouldn't publish what you want to publish because it
endangers national security. If this story were taking place in
(24:54):
the United Kingdom. The minute winer called to say, I
know about al Pucino. The British government would have slapped
a D notice on him, end of story. But the
United States doesn't have dnotices. It has a constitutional right
to freedom of the press. So what happens instead is
a negotiation. The reporter comes in, he or she gets briefed.
(25:16):
Maybe the head of the CIA calls the editor of
the Washington Post or the New York Times and says, look,
we're really uncomfortable with this. Here's why. Just as I
was writing this episode, the Washington Post reported that in
a meeting with Russian officials, President Trump lets slip some
very sensitive intelligence from an ally. It was about the
(25:39):
intention of Middle East terrorists to use laptops as bombs.
Huge story, but if you read the initial news accounts closely,
it's obvious that the reporters held some information back. They
didn't tell us which American ally gave us that information.
It seems like they knew the location of the spy,
(26:00):
but they didn't tell us that either. This is what
I'm talking about. Somewhere along the line, there was clearly
a conversation between those reports and the CIA and the
reporters listened and then said, we're going to disclose what
we think is necessary to make the point about the
recklessness of the president, but we're willing to withhold details
(26:20):
that you tell us might damage national security. Jeff Smith
says he's been involved in lots of these conversations, both
on the government end and now on the media end,
because he has media organizations among his clients.
Speaker 5 (26:34):
One of the things I fault the government is too
frequently the government just says, well, harm could result. That
then leaves my clients when I'm on the client side
in the terrible at the lemo of saying, well, what's
the harm? We can't tell you.
Speaker 1 (26:49):
But Smith, as you can imagine, can see the government's
side as well. If you're the CIA trying to convince
a reporter or an editor not to spill a secret,
you have to tell them enough about the secret so
that they understand what's at stake. What you don't want
to do is reveal even more the secret than what
has already been revealed. And all of this respecting the
(27:09):
fact that the press in America can, at least in principle,
do pretty much whatever it wants.
Speaker 5 (27:16):
What the government tries to do is indicate gradations of harm.
This is really bad, this is less bad, and leaving
the editorial judgments to the press. But the government should
not be in the business of saying, we agree, you
can print this.
Speaker 1 (27:37):
It's tricky from the.
Speaker 5 (27:39):
National security side. You have to trust the editors of
the publishers or whomever you're talking to and tell them
why and as specific as you can what the harm
would be, so that they can make a judgment. It's
then incumbent upon the editors to take that seriously.
Speaker 1 (28:01):
This is exactly the kind of elaborate dance Winer and
the head of the counter Terrorism Center are having in
the summer of nineteen ninety five. In Rizzo's book, he
says that some of the things the counter terrorism chief
told Weiner left him bug eyed with shock. Weiner says,
that's nonsense. But the point is this. The conversation. Wasn't
(28:21):
the CIA giving instructions to the New York Times. That's
not how the balance between a free press and a
clandestine service works. Did the counter terrorism chief say to you,
don't mention his guidele.
Speaker 3 (28:39):
It was a strong preference of the counter terrorism chief
that certain identifying details that were known to me stay
out of the public realm, and I agreed with that.
(29:01):
I mean, what is the point of publishing the guy's
country of origin, the intelligence service he worked for, the
specific time and date in place of the attacks. Does
the reader need to know that? No, the story's about
the balancing test. I knew who we worked for, I
knew the specific time and place of the attacks, and
(29:23):
I knew how grievous the attacks had been. Every detail
of that was scrubbed of my own free will and
volition from that story, based on my principle that I
do not want to publish anything they can get anybody hurt.
Speaker 1 (29:45):
But Winer made it clear to the CIA that he
wasn't going to leave al Pacino out of the story entirely.
He was going to reveal that al Pacino was the
source who helped find Carlos the jackal that Paccino had
and I'm quoting from the story. Winer eventually wrote a
brutal resume. He had been involved in two bombings in
Western Europe in the mid nineteen eighties that had injured Americans,
(30:09):
and he had only broken with his terrorist group in
nineteen eighty seven. Four separate people someone inside the CIA,
a congressman, a diplomat, and someone else in the know
had told Weiner about Alpucino. Al Pacino was the person
about whom the agency had failed to tell Congress and
the Justice Department. From Winer's perspective, al Pucino was the story.
(30:36):
Jeff Smith says that when he realized what Winer intended
to publish, his heart sank. What was the in general,
the feeling within the agency about the possibility of this
story being written.
Speaker 5 (30:52):
Anger, anger that it had leaked so quickly, and then
a real desire it that we do all we could
to not have the details of what this individual had
told us and what happened come out.
Speaker 1 (31:10):
When you say what happened, do you mean are you
talking specifically about this individual's involvement with fingering or help
define to your mind that was the identifying Yes. Yes,
the agency scrambled to get in touch with al Pacino.
They had to warn him. Here's Rizzo again.
Speaker 2 (31:28):
You can't just call up an assentence that made me,
you know, made me in the cafe around the corner
of the hour. I mean that located signal emergency meeting
was necessary. I think the meeting actually took place, either
just immediately before the story came out or on the
day the story came out.
Speaker 1 (31:49):
And what did the assets say during the meeting when.
Speaker 2 (31:51):
Told this, Well, I was told that he was flabbergast,
felt absolutely betrayed. How could this happen? How could you
do this to me? I'm a dead man, you know.
And our case officer broken news to him, offered immediate evacuation,
(32:12):
safe haven, get the hell out of there, and he refused.
He just walked away. You betrayed me, and that was it,
he just walked.
Speaker 1 (32:31):
The story ran on August twenty first, nineteen ninety five,
on the front page of the New York Times CIA
re examines hiring of ex terrorist as agent. It was
also translated and ran in newspapers around the world. Al
Pacino's case officer put a copy of the Greek version
on his wall, and when the case officer was asked why,
(32:51):
I'm told, he said, I do this because it is
a reminder to all of us in this division about
the consequences of breaking faith with your asset. One of
the most famous of all New Testament stories is what
happened to Tarsus on the Road to Damascus Saul was
(33:14):
a strong opponent of the early Christian Church. He persecuted
the early Christians, the Bible says beyond measure. He stood
by and watched as one of the earliest of Jesus' followers, Stephen,
was stoned to death. And then one day on the
road to Damascus, Saul had a vision of the resurrected
(33:34):
Jesus and converted to Christianity. Saul became Paul, cornerstone of
the early Christian Church. Saul was allowed to become Paul.
That's the point of the story of Paul's epiphany. He
had been the sworn enemy of the early Church, and
then he said that he had changed his mind, that
he regretted his previous acts, and he was forgiven. That
(33:59):
idea that we are allowed to transform ourselves has been
central to our culture ever since. The man we've been
calling al Pucino was a sworn enemy of the West.
He helped plant bombs in Western Europe that killed and
injured innocent people. And then he had an epiphany. He
(34:19):
walked into an American embassy. He said, I don't want money,
I just want to atone for the evil that I
have done. But in al Pucino's case. We did not
allow him to transform himself. The CIA went to Congress
and the Department of Justice to confess they had hired
an ex terrorist with a terrible past, even though he
(34:42):
was an ex terrorist who only came to us because
he had repudiated his terrible past. The Justice Department says,
why didn't you tell us before you got in bed
with this guy? As if he were still the guy
you would never want to get in bed with. The
headline to Winer's story says, CIA re examines hiring of
(35:03):
ex terrorist as agent as if the central fact about
al Pacino was his past associations, his brutal resume. As
Winer put it, a resume is a list of accomplishments.
But al Pacino did not consider his past record and accomplishment.
He wanted to repudiate it. That was the whole point
(35:23):
of him walking into an embassy and offering us everything
he knew. Remember what Rizzo said about why al Pacino
did not want money. He said he was doing this
for his conscience. It was an act of expiation. Expiation
is the act of making amends or reparation for guilt
or wrongdoing. Atonement. He asked for atonement. We pretended to
(35:50):
give it to him, then we took it away. What's
wrong with us? So what happened to al Pacino? I
think you can guess. Very soon after the New York
Times story ran, he was killed by his former terrorist colleagues.
They identified him, they tracked him down. When I said
(36:16):
at the beginning that you would feel the urge to
take sides, and that you shouldn't, I was talking about
this moment. We can argue all day about what is
and is not an appropriate leak, or about who's to
blame when negotiations break down between the government and the
press over a sensitive story. But if you get too
(36:39):
lost in picking a side in that argument, you lose
track of Alpucino, whoever he was, this man who risked
his life for a country other than his own, asking
only in return that he be granted absolution. I never
found out anything more about al Pucino. There is apparently
(37:02):
a long story about what happened to him and how
he was killed, but it's still classified. The CIA people
were only free to talk about Tim Weiner. Tim Weiner
only wanted to talk about the CIA.
Speaker 3 (37:16):
I think there's a problem with that. Story as Rizzo
tells it, just as he thinks there's a problem with
my story is published. I respect his right to his opinion.
Speaker 1 (37:29):
To winer Rizzo was just blaming him for a problem
of the CIA's own creation. They were the ones who
opened up al Pacino's file.
Speaker 3 (37:38):
If they hadn't screwed up their own procedures and arguably
violated a presidential directive on how you handle a problem
like this, then they wouldn't have had to go to
the FBI and Capitol Hill, and I wouldn't have gotten
my third and eventually my fourth source on this story.
Where's the leak? Here? The leak is because the CIA
(37:59):
violated its own guidelines and practices, and mister Rizzo, who
is a good lawyer and a capable lawyer, you know,
has made a false and arguably defamatory argument here, which
is the New York Times got an asset killed.
Speaker 1 (38:22):
False and defamatory. One side puts the front page of
The New York Times up on the wall. The other
side says, don't blame me, I'm just the messenger. Can
we at least agree that we should have forgiven al
Pacino his sins and that, however it happened, he was wronged.
And maybe if you run a front page story about
(38:43):
a man one day and right after he gets killed,
even if you don't think it was your fault exactly,
maybe you should run a little explanation of what happened,
or even just have a moment of silence, a little
bit of remorse. What was the reaction in house the
New York Times the story?
Speaker 3 (38:59):
Do you remember the reaction in house at the New
York Times. There were a lot of page one stories
about the CIA in that era, and I don't think
that there was a major reaction at all.
Speaker 1 (39:20):
What happens after the story runs, Life goes on? Revision's
(39:41):
History is produced by me LaBelle and Jacob Smith, with
Camille Baptista, Stephanie Daniel, and Sillomarra Martinez White. Our editor
is Julia Barton. Flaonon Williams is our engineer. Original music
by Luis Sciarra. Special thanks to Andy Bauers and Jacob
Weisberger Panople. I'm Malcolm Gladwell,
Pushkin. I have a theory that the most interesting autobiographies
are the ones written by second tier people. I'm not
using second tier in a derogatory sense like second rate.
I mean it in a sense of hierarchy. When the
people on the top tier tell their story, it's invariably boring.
(00:39):
They have too much to lose by being honest. Their
public stature works against them on the page because they know.
Anything they write that's even vaguely controversial or opinionated, in
other words, anything interesting, it's going to get dissected and
distorted by the media. But the memoir of the person
under the general or the president or the CEO, the
(01:00):
person you've never heard of, that person has a lot
less to lose, and their memoirs are where the gold lies.
Not long ago, I picked up a book called Company Man,
Thirty Years of Controversy and Crisis in the CIA. It
was by a man named John Rizzo. I checked the
(01:21):
book flap for Rizzo's bio. He wasn't the director of
the CIA, or the deputy director, or even the Head
of Operations, which is the person who runs all the spies. No.
Rizzo was an attorney in the agency's legal Department, eventually
rising to acting General counsel. When I saw Rizzo's book,
(01:41):
I thought, BINGO, I have to read this. I was
not disappointed. My name is Malcolm Gladwell. You're listening to
Revisionist History, my podcast about Things Overlooked and Misunderstood. This
episode is about a story John Rizzou tells on page
(02:03):
one forty eight of his autobiography. It's a story about
a spy, a very good one, and what happened to
him him. Right after I read it, I got in
touch with Rizzo. I asked him if I could interview
him about the story of the spy. He said, of course.
Then in his email he added a PostScript, PS, interesting
(02:26):
that you focused on that episode. When I finished the manuscript,
I figured that if any single anecdote in the book
would garner public attention, that would be the one. As
it turned out, I don't remember anyone ever asking me
or otherwise talking about it, which I found puzzling. Yes,
(02:48):
it's puzzling.
Speaker 2 (02:51):
I mean it was probably forty maybe. As I say,
I saw pictures of him, photos of them. At the time.
Speaker 1 (02:57):
I'm sitting at Rizzo's kitchen table at his house in Washington,
d c. He's telling me about the spy he mentioned
in his autobiography.
Speaker 2 (03:06):
And he looked like al Pacino, no circa godfather too.
He was at Europe, I mean, he was European looking.
He's to a young man, and I think he reached
sort of, you know, a stage in his life that
he felt remorse skills about what he had done in
his youth and in his formative years. You know, as
(03:27):
simple and confounding as that. I mean, I don't, honestly,
I don't recall another instance of an asset coming to
us under those kinds of circumstances.
Speaker 1 (03:39):
An asset is CIA speak for a source, someone on
the inside. This asset, the man who looked like al
Pacino was a terrorist. Do you know the details of
his how he approached the CIA to say I've had
a change of heart.
Speaker 2 (03:57):
I you know, I believed he just volunteered his services,
and I think he just walked into an embassy.
Speaker 1 (04:05):
And what was what do we know about the quality
of the information he was providing.
Speaker 2 (04:10):
It was very good. You know. He was considered the
highly reliable and he he didn't want much money. That
was the other interesting thing. He didn't want money. I
mean it wasn't you know most assets didn't want money.
Speaker 1 (04:25):
Why didn't he want money?
Speaker 2 (04:27):
Because he said that he was doing this for his conscience,
to make up and it was an act of expiation.
Speaker 1 (04:36):
An act of expiation. You will want to take sides
when you finish this story. My advice to you is don't.
If you make a list of the greatest investigative reporters
of a last generation, there's Bob Woodward at the top.
(04:57):
There's Mark Bowden, who wrote Blackhawk Down, Seymour Hirsch who
wrote for the New York Times for many years, and
then The New Yorker, Steve Cale, Jane Mayer. There's a
guy who I sett when I first started my career
at the Washington Post many years ago, Mike Isikoff, who
was a bulldog. And somewhere in that top cluster of
(05:17):
investigative reporters is Tim Weiner. He's one of the few
journalists ever to have won both a Pulitzer Prize and
a National Book Award. In the nineteen eighties, Weiner worked
at the Philadelphia Inquirer, and his first foreign assignment was
covering the overthrow of the Filipino dictator Ferdinand Marcos. When
Weiner came back, he convinced his editor to send him
(05:40):
to Afghanistan, where the CIA was then secretly funding the
mujah Hadeen in their battle against the Soviet occupation.
Speaker 3 (05:47):
I called up the CIA, which had and always has
had a public information office, and I said, hey, I'm
going to Afghanistan. I understand you people do country briefings
from time to time for foreign correspondence. How about it?
And he said absolutely not hung up the phone. If
(06:09):
I went to Afghanistan. I had a jolly old time.
Came back and I hadn't been back in Washington for
more than a day when my phone rang.
Speaker 1 (06:16):
It was a public information officer from the CIA. This
time he was friendly. He said, why don't you come
by for that briefing.
Speaker 3 (06:25):
So off I went through the CIA, which is in
the woods, about eight miles outside of the White House,
checkpoint one, checkpoint two, checkpoint three, into the lobby of
the CIA, and up on the left hand wall, in
great gold letters, it says from the Gospel of John,
and ye shall know the truth, and the truth will
make you free. So I'm hooked already. I go up
(06:48):
to the seventh floor, which is where the executive suites
were and there are four CIA officers sitting around a
table for my quote briefing unquote, But they really only
wanted to know one thing from me, which was what's
it like. These were supposed to be the four top ciaxps.
(07:09):
It's on Afghanistan. They'd never been to Afghanistan. So I
walked out of there thinking, I'm going to devote the
rest of my life to making a study of this agency.
I was completely fascinated.
Speaker 1 (07:28):
Why I went to The New York Times in nineteen
ninety three continued covering the agency all throughout the nineteen nineties.
He was very, very good at it. When I was
covering the CIA during the Aldrich Ames affair, you may
remember that Ames was a senior CIA officer who worked
there for more than thirty years, and he ended up
telling the KGB everything he knew, including the names of
(07:51):
the agency's assets inside the Soviet Union. It was one
of the most damaging cases of espionage in American history.
Speaker 3 (07:59):
Ames is under arrest, and I'm thinking I should go
interview Ames. I wonder where Ames is right now, and
as it turned out, he was in a county jail.
So I go to the county jail and I say,
I'd like to talk to prisoner Alder James. And I've
walked into the interview room and there was Alda James.
(08:20):
We talked.
Speaker 1 (08:23):
How long did you talk to him?
Speaker 4 (08:24):
For?
Speaker 3 (08:24):
Well about an hour?
Speaker 2 (08:26):
Wait?
Speaker 1 (08:26):
You stopped after an hour? Did they stop?
Speaker 2 (08:29):
You know?
Speaker 3 (08:30):
It's a visiting hour, Tim, this.
Speaker 1 (08:32):
Is the greatest scoop of your It's a school.
Speaker 3 (08:36):
And I gave my phone number and he called me collect,
you know, on a regular basis. And I did a
number of stories based on first hand interviews where he
essentially confessed to everything he'd done and gave me some
rather vivid descriptions of life inside the CIA, most of
(08:57):
which were true and demonstrably true.
Speaker 1 (09:00):
Maybe you have to have been a reporter to understand
how fantastic that story is. I was a reporter at
the Washington Post for ten years. I would have assumed
that the worst spy in American history was under triple
lockdown somewhere, whisked away by helicopter to a black side.
I would have waited for the press release. But Weiner
is a kind of person who would assume that if
(09:21):
the intelligence establishment was naive and disorganized enough to have
its clock cleaned, by a KGB mole. Then it was
probably naive and disorganized enough to park that same mole
unattended in the county jail.
Speaker 3 (09:34):
And I covered them like you would cover a courthouse
or the cops, or Congress or the White House. They're
an arm of the government, like the Internal Revenue Service
or the Post Office. They happened to be a secret
arm of government.
Speaker 1 (09:53):
Weiner would later write a book called Legacy of Ashes.
That's how he won his National Book Award. It's an
amazing book, easily the best history of the CIA ever written.
Some people within the agency thought that one was biased
against them, that in his reporting, and particularly in Legacy
(10:13):
of Ashes, he went on too long about what the
agency had done wrong, and that he said too little
about what the agency did right. I understand why they
think that way, but I'm not sure that assessment is fair.
Weiner is not biased. He's aggressive. You only have to
meet him to understand that he has one of those big, square,
(10:35):
impressive heads, barrel chest, the kind of self confidence that
you have to have if you're in his line of work.
He's a kind of relentlessness about him. I can't remember
how many times we talked on the phone and went
back and forth in emails before he agreed to sit
down with me. He kept it up for weeks, clarifying, probing,
(10:56):
why do you want to do this story? What are
your intentions? Weiner is aggressive because over the course of
his career, he needed to be aggressive. It's not like
the CIA puts out colorful brochures highlighting its latest initiatives.
It's a secret agency. There's a man named Jeffrey Smith
(11:18):
who will figure in this story as well. Smith used
to be the general counsel for the CIA. He's very
much a member of the intelligence establishment, genteel, bookish. He's
now in private practice at one of the most prestigious
of DC law firms, Arnold and Porter. And one of
the things that Smith says is it's a good thing
for the agency that reporters like Tim Winer are aggressive.
(11:40):
The agency needs a free press.
Speaker 5 (11:43):
It keeps you honest. It's not unlike congressional oversight. If
any government agency is asked to do something or is
considering something, the CIA, you have to think, this is
probably something that is going to have to be reported
to our two oversight committees. How are they going to
react and what happens if it leaks, how do we
(12:08):
explain what doing? And that question comes up all the time,
and without a press it wouldn't come.
Speaker 1 (12:15):
Up, So you need needs yes, Does the CIA always
remember that?
Speaker 5 (12:27):
In the ranks, some people don't see it that way.
As you get more senior, you do see it that way.
And the senior people have to explain to the younger
people as are coming up through the ranks why that's necessary.
Speaker 1 (12:47):
Why do we put up with a hugely powerful agency
like the CIA, with a budget in the tens of billions,
doing things we know very little about, because we're confident
that if the CIA does something truly evil or stupid,
the press will find out and let us know. Weiner
lives by this idea. He devoted his career to it.
Speaker 3 (13:09):
What does the CIA look like in the absence of
free press? It looks like the KGB. We have a
uniquely American problem here, Malcolm. We're trying to run a
secret intelligence service in an open, democratic society. The Russians
don't do that, the Chinese don't do that, not even
(13:29):
the British do that. We need to have a constant
tug of war between a free press, a cantankerous press,
a skeptical press, and the powerful institutions of our government.
But there are going to be arguments.
Speaker 1 (13:50):
Believe me, they were arguments.
Speaker 5 (13:54):
He's the world's most wanted man, the son of a
wealthy Venezuelan lawyer.
Speaker 1 (13:57):
His profession is spreading terror worldwide.
Speaker 5 (14:00):
He has links with groups like that.
Speaker 1 (14:02):
The most notorious terrorist of the nineteen seventies and nineteen
eighties was a man named Ilitch Ramirez Sanchez, so known
as Carlos the Jackal. He was born in Venezuela, but
worked closely with a radical group called the Popular Front
for the Liberation of Palestine, setting bombs assassinating people. He
was thought to be responsible for the deaths of more
(14:23):
than eighty people. He played a role in the massacre
of Israeli athletes at the Munich Olympic Games in nineteen
seventy two. Carlos the Jackal was almost as notorious in
his day as a Soma Ben Lauden was in ours.
He was the subject of a massive international manhunt that
went on for years. Finally, in nineteen ninety four, he
(14:43):
was captured in Sudan by French intelligence. How did they
find him because of a tip from the CIA. Where
did the CIA get its information from a man who
was once high up in the same world as the Jackal?
The guy John Rizzo wrote about the asset who looked
like Alpuccino. Here's Rizzo again.
Speaker 2 (15:03):
Yeah, usually you work case officers, work potential sources and
assets for months to years before even pitching them to help.
This guy just walked, I mean just just walked in.
So yeah, I mean, at the time is recruitment. There
was a great excitement, eagerness that this is one of
the few guys, the best guy we have inside a
(15:23):
terrorist organization.
Speaker 1 (15:25):
So you never met him, but you saw a picture
of him, and you say, you describe him as looking
like al Pacino. There was something kind of glamorous about him.
Speaker 2 (15:34):
Is that what?
Speaker 5 (15:35):
Yeah?
Speaker 2 (15:35):
Yeah, sleek, dark hair, is European looking. I mean he
was not you know, he was not your jihadi. I
mean he was he was Westernized.
Speaker 1 (15:50):
Al Pacino helped the CIA find Carlos the Jackal, but
by the following year, the summer of nineteen ninety five,
the CIA found itself in crisis. The Aldrich Aims scandal
had devastated the agency's reputation. What's more, the Cold War
was over, and since the CIA was essentially created to
(16:11):
fight the Cold War, lots of people in Washington, serious
people wondered if the United States even needed the agency anymore.
Then all kinds of stories broke about shady characters the
agency was mixed up with in Central America, murderers, drug dealers.
It was the last straw. President Clinton brought in a
new director, John Deutsch, with the mandate to clean house.
(16:35):
Deutsche ordered what's called an asset scrub, a review of
every spy, informant, an asset on a CIA payroll, with
a specific emphasis on ethical considerations. As the CIA's General Counsel,
Jeff Smith was in the middle.
Speaker 5 (16:51):
Of it, were there assets who had committed major felonase
human rights violations or had attacked Americans? And so we
added that dimension to the assets scrub that was currently underway.
Speaker 1 (17:06):
And one of the files the agency reviewed was that
of al Pacino. John Rizzo was Jeff Smith's deputy. He
was in the middle of it as well.
Speaker 2 (17:15):
It was discovered that he had actually committed terrorist acts
against Americans, bombings in Europe, and that he had wounded
some with his bombs. I mean, obviously the intent was
to kill them. Now that was somehow missed. Now I
don't know how it was, mister, whether frankly it was
(17:37):
just overlooked, but it should have been a red flag.
Speaker 1 (17:43):
You can imagine what some people inside the CIA thought
of the asset scrub. The function of a spy's service
is to find out what the bad guys are doing,
and the best way you find out what the bad
guys are doing is to have another bad guy tell you. Right,
So why would you have a rule saying the CIA
needs to be extra careful about hiring bad guys, but
(18:04):
at the same time as a group that says, look,
the agency is a mess. We might not have a
future unless we clean up our act. We have to
play by the rules.
Speaker 2 (18:14):
So what that meant was, we've belatedly discovered that we
should have reviewed his record before entering into a relationship
with them, and we should have actually gone to the
law enforcement, the FBI, Department of Justice at the outset
before we even began a relationship. And I would have
(18:35):
been the guy to do it, was to go to justice.
The out that we did not do that.
Speaker 1 (18:39):
In the middle of all that handbringing, someone calls Tim Winer.
So when do you first get wind of the retired terrorist?
Speaker 3 (18:48):
As I recall in the late spring or early summer
of nineteen ninety five, I get word from inside the
CI that we have a problem here, and I begin
to make inquiries.
Speaker 1 (19:07):
So somebody from is the CIA? What is their motivation
for telling you this?
Speaker 3 (19:14):
The CIA has screwed up. It has failed to inform
the Justice Department that they have an asset on their books,
a foreign agent who has again euphemistically American blood on
his hands.
Speaker 1 (19:30):
So why do they want to call the New York Times.
Speaker 3 (19:36):
To write or wrong? Because sometimes public disclosure is the
only way to write a wrong.
Speaker 1 (19:47):
Do you think it's ea? Did they think it would
be easier for them to fulfill their obligation to inform
the Justice Department if there was a kind of leak
of this fact.
Speaker 3 (20:01):
First, there was a battle royal going on inside the
CIA over the scrub.
Speaker 1 (20:09):
So Deutsche's pushing that and within the agency there's a
considerable amount of pushback, so they're anticipating this is going
to be a struggle.
Speaker 3 (20:17):
A considerable amount of pushback is an understatement. There was
fierce opposition.
Speaker 1 (20:24):
So I'm guessing the people who call you are the
ones who are in favor of the scrub.
Speaker 3 (20:31):
The people who call me are patriots who love their
country and who were sworn to uphold Let me rephrase that.
The people who called me, I believe, are patriots who
love their country and are motivated to live by their
(20:55):
oath to uphold the Constitution and obey the laws of
the United States.
Speaker 1 (21:01):
Why or Waits continues to ask around. Then, late in
the summer of nineteen ninety five, the CIA decides to
take its medicine. Rizzo goes to the Department of Justice
and tells them good, bad and ugly about their al pacino.
Speaker 2 (21:18):
They were upset, you know, basically, why are you just
telling us this now? You know, why didn't you tell
us before you got in bed with this guy? So, yeah,
they were upsets. I knew they would be. You have
to weigh this guy is, you know, gold, against the
fact that, well, you know, he's got attempted murder of
(21:39):
Americans on his resume.
Speaker 1 (21:42):
At the same time Rizzo's having that conversation, the head
of the CIA's counter Terrorism Center went to Capitol Hill
and briefed members of Congress about the acid scrub. They
weren't happy either. People all over Washington. Now knew about
al Pacino, people in the Department of Justice, people in
the White House, people on the Hill, representatives, senators, staffers,
(22:07):
and Winer's phone rings.
Speaker 3 (22:09):
Again, my rule of thumb on a story like this
is and I want to have three sources, and I
want to make sure that the second source is not
the first source, in which case I have one source. Right,
So I had two sources. I did get a call.
(22:35):
The call was a call to have a conversation outside
of the normal circuits of the telephone lines. The conversation
was with a member of Congress. At this point, I
have three sources. Subsequently, there was a fourth who is
(23:01):
an American diplomat, was an American diplomat at the time.
Speaker 1 (23:05):
Winnercalls the CIA Press office and talks to the agency's
Oaksmith at the time, Dennis Box. I met Box in
a restaurant in northern Virginia.
Speaker 4 (23:15):
And it was at that point where they said this
is not good, this is this is really gonna put
somebody at risk. And I said, said, well, let's invite
him in and try to lay out for him. You
know what's gonna what the risk is. He said, he
(23:36):
sat in my office with the head of counter Terrorism Center.
Speaker 1 (23:39):
Yeah, and what was do you remember much? What was
the what was the nature of the conversation.
Speaker 4 (23:45):
Well, it was pretty straightforward. It was he's got a
fairly mild demeanor. He's not at least with us. He
you know, he wasn't aggressive or abrasive. I mean, he
was just kind of laying out, here's here's what I have,
here's what I've been told. But it was the detail.
It was the details of this particular asset that got
(24:06):
our folks worked up.
Speaker 1 (24:08):
This particular asset meaning Alpucino, Bach says, the head of
the counter Terrorism Center explained all the specific things that
if published, would put al Pacino in danger. He tried
to interest Winer instead in a broader story about the
asset scrub, which wasn't really a secret at that point.
(24:29):
These kinds of conversations between reporters and government officials are
not unusual. This is how Washington works. In the United Kingdom,
there is something commonly known as a d notice, which
is a government order issued to a media organization saying
you shouldn't publish what you want to publish because it
endangers national security. If this story were taking place in
(24:54):
the United Kingdom. The minute winer called to say, I
know about al Pucino. The British government would have slapped
a D notice on him, end of story. But the
United States doesn't have dnotices. It has a constitutional right
to freedom of the press. So what happens instead is
a negotiation. The reporter comes in, he or she gets briefed.
(25:16):
Maybe the head of the CIA calls the editor of
the Washington Post or the New York Times and says, look,
we're really uncomfortable with this. Here's why. Just as I
was writing this episode, the Washington Post reported that in
a meeting with Russian officials, President Trump lets slip some
very sensitive intelligence from an ally. It was about the
(25:39):
intention of Middle East terrorists to use laptops as bombs.
Huge story, but if you read the initial news accounts closely,
it's obvious that the reporters held some information back. They
didn't tell us which American ally gave us that information.
It seems like they knew the location of the spy,
(26:00):
but they didn't tell us that either. This is what
I'm talking about. Somewhere along the line, there was clearly
a conversation between those reports and the CIA and the
reporters listened and then said, we're going to disclose what
we think is necessary to make the point about the
recklessness of the president, but we're willing to withhold details
(26:20):
that you tell us might damage national security. Jeff Smith
says he's been involved in lots of these conversations, both
on the government end and now on the media end,
because he has media organizations among his clients.
Speaker 5 (26:34):
One of the things I fault the government is too
frequently the government just says, well, harm could result. That
then leaves my clients when I'm on the client side
in the terrible at the lemo of saying, well, what's
the harm? We can't tell you.
Speaker 1 (26:49):
But Smith, as you can imagine, can see the government's
side as well. If you're the CIA trying to convince
a reporter or an editor not to spill a secret,
you have to tell them enough about the secret so
that they understand what's at stake. What you don't want
to do is reveal even more the secret than what
has already been revealed. And all of this respecting the
(27:09):
fact that the press in America can, at least in principle,
do pretty much whatever it wants.
Speaker 5 (27:16):
What the government tries to do is indicate gradations of harm.
This is really bad, this is less bad, and leaving
the editorial judgments to the press. But the government should
not be in the business of saying, we agree, you
can print this.
Speaker 1 (27:37):
It's tricky from the.
Speaker 5 (27:39):
National security side. You have to trust the editors of
the publishers or whomever you're talking to and tell them
why and as specific as you can what the harm
would be, so that they can make a judgment. It's
then incumbent upon the editors to take that seriously.
Speaker 1 (28:01):
This is exactly the kind of elaborate dance Winer and
the head of the counter Terrorism Center are having in
the summer of nineteen ninety five. In Rizzo's book, he
says that some of the things the counter terrorism chief
told Weiner left him bug eyed with shock. Weiner says,
that's nonsense. But the point is this. The conversation. Wasn't
(28:21):
the CIA giving instructions to the New York Times. That's
not how the balance between a free press and a
clandestine service works. Did the counter terrorism chief say to you,
don't mention his guidele.
Speaker 3 (28:39):
It was a strong preference of the counter terrorism chief
that certain identifying details that were known to me stay
out of the public realm, and I agreed with that.
(29:01):
I mean, what is the point of publishing the guy's
country of origin, the intelligence service he worked for, the
specific time and date in place of the attacks. Does
the reader need to know that? No, the story's about
the balancing test. I knew who we worked for, I
knew the specific time and place of the attacks, and
(29:23):
I knew how grievous the attacks had been. Every detail
of that was scrubbed of my own free will and
volition from that story, based on my principle that I
do not want to publish anything they can get anybody hurt.
Speaker 1 (29:45):
But Winer made it clear to the CIA that he
wasn't going to leave al Pacino out of the story entirely.
He was going to reveal that al Pacino was the
source who helped find Carlos the jackal that Paccino had
and I'm quoting from the story. Winer eventually wrote a
brutal resume. He had been involved in two bombings in
Western Europe in the mid nineteen eighties that had injured Americans,
(30:09):
and he had only broken with his terrorist group in
nineteen eighty seven. Four separate people someone inside the CIA,
a congressman, a diplomat, and someone else in the know
had told Weiner about Alpucino. Al Pacino was the person
about whom the agency had failed to tell Congress and
the Justice Department. From Winer's perspective, al Pucino was the story.
(30:36):
Jeff Smith says that when he realized what Winer intended
to publish, his heart sank. What was the in general,
the feeling within the agency about the possibility of this
story being written.
Speaker 5 (30:52):
Anger, anger that it had leaked so quickly, and then
a real desire it that we do all we could
to not have the details of what this individual had
told us and what happened come out.
Speaker 1 (31:10):
When you say what happened, do you mean are you
talking specifically about this individual's involvement with fingering or help
define to your mind that was the identifying Yes. Yes,
the agency scrambled to get in touch with al Pacino.
They had to warn him. Here's Rizzo again.
Speaker 2 (31:28):
You can't just call up an assentence that made me,
you know, made me in the cafe around the corner
of the hour. I mean that located signal emergency meeting
was necessary. I think the meeting actually took place, either
just immediately before the story came out or on the
day the story came out.
Speaker 1 (31:49):
And what did the assets say during the meeting when.
Speaker 2 (31:51):
Told this, Well, I was told that he was flabbergast,
felt absolutely betrayed. How could this happen? How could you
do this to me? I'm a dead man, you know.
And our case officer broken news to him, offered immediate evacuation,
(32:12):
safe haven, get the hell out of there, and he refused.
He just walked away. You betrayed me, and that was it,
he just walked.
Speaker 1 (32:31):
The story ran on August twenty first, nineteen ninety five,
on the front page of the New York Times CIA
re examines hiring of ex terrorist as agent. It was
also translated and ran in newspapers around the world. Al
Pacino's case officer put a copy of the Greek version
on his wall, and when the case officer was asked why,
(32:51):
I'm told, he said, I do this because it is
a reminder to all of us in this division about
the consequences of breaking faith with your asset. One of
the most famous of all New Testament stories is what
happened to Tarsus on the Road to Damascus Saul was
(33:14):
a strong opponent of the early Christian Church. He persecuted
the early Christians, the Bible says beyond measure. He stood
by and watched as one of the earliest of Jesus' followers, Stephen,
was stoned to death. And then one day on the
road to Damascus, Saul had a vision of the resurrected
(33:34):
Jesus and converted to Christianity. Saul became Paul, cornerstone of
the early Christian Church. Saul was allowed to become Paul.
That's the point of the story of Paul's epiphany. He
had been the sworn enemy of the early Church, and
then he said that he had changed his mind, that
he regretted his previous acts, and he was forgiven. That
(33:59):
idea that we are allowed to transform ourselves has been
central to our culture ever since. The man we've been
calling al Pucino was a sworn enemy of the West.
He helped plant bombs in Western Europe that killed and
injured innocent people. And then he had an epiphany. He
(34:19):
walked into an American embassy. He said, I don't want money,
I just want to atone for the evil that I
have done. But in al Pucino's case. We did not
allow him to transform himself. The CIA went to Congress
and the Department of Justice to confess they had hired
an ex terrorist with a terrible past, even though he
(34:42):
was an ex terrorist who only came to us because
he had repudiated his terrible past. The Justice Department says,
why didn't you tell us before you got in bed
with this guy? As if he were still the guy
you would never want to get in bed with. The
headline to Winer's story says, CIA re examines hiring of
(35:03):
ex terrorist as agent as if the central fact about
al Pacino was his past associations, his brutal resume. As
Winer put it, a resume is a list of accomplishments.
But al Pacino did not consider his past record and accomplishment.
He wanted to repudiate it. That was the whole point
(35:23):
of him walking into an embassy and offering us everything
he knew. Remember what Rizzo said about why al Pacino
did not want money. He said he was doing this
for his conscience. It was an act of expiation. Expiation
is the act of making amends or reparation for guilt
or wrongdoing. Atonement. He asked for atonement. We pretended to
(35:50):
give it to him, then we took it away. What's
wrong with us? So what happened to al Pacino? I
think you can guess. Very soon after the New York
Times story ran, he was killed by his former terrorist colleagues.
They identified him, they tracked him down. When I said
(36:16):
at the beginning that you would feel the urge to
take sides, and that you shouldn't, I was talking about
this moment. We can argue all day about what is
and is not an appropriate leak, or about who's to
blame when negotiations break down between the government and the
press over a sensitive story. But if you get too
(36:39):
lost in picking a side in that argument, you lose
track of Alpucino, whoever he was, this man who risked
his life for a country other than his own, asking
only in return that he be granted absolution. I never
found out anything more about al Pucino. There is apparently
(37:02):
a long story about what happened to him and how
he was killed, but it's still classified. The CIA people
were only free to talk about Tim Weiner. Tim Weiner
only wanted to talk about the CIA.
Speaker 3 (37:16):
I think there's a problem with that. Story as Rizzo
tells it, just as he thinks there's a problem with
my story is published. I respect his right to his opinion.
Speaker 1 (37:29):
To winer Rizzo was just blaming him for a problem
of the CIA's own creation. They were the ones who
opened up al Pacino's file.
Speaker 3 (37:38):
If they hadn't screwed up their own procedures and arguably
violated a presidential directive on how you handle a problem
like this, then they wouldn't have had to go to
the FBI and Capitol Hill, and I wouldn't have gotten
my third and eventually my fourth source on this story.
Where's the leak? Here? The leak is because the CIA
(37:59):
violated its own guidelines and practices, and mister Rizzo, who
is a good lawyer and a capable lawyer, you know,
has made a false and arguably defamatory argument here, which
is the New York Times got an asset killed.
Speaker 1 (38:22):
False and defamatory. One side puts the front page of
The New York Times up on the wall. The other
side says, don't blame me, I'm just the messenger. Can
we at least agree that we should have forgiven al
Pacino his sins and that, however it happened, he was wronged.
And maybe if you run a front page story about
(38:43):
a man one day and right after he gets killed,
even if you don't think it was your fault exactly,
maybe you should run a little explanation of what happened,
or even just have a moment of silence, a little
bit of remorse. What was the reaction in house the
New York Times the story?
Speaker 3 (38:59):
Do you remember the reaction in house at the New
York Times. There were a lot of page one stories
about the CIA in that era, and I don't think
that there was a major reaction at all.
Speaker 1 (39:20):
What happens after the story runs, Life goes on? Revision's
(39:41):
History is produced by me LaBelle and Jacob Smith, with
Camille Baptista, Stephanie Daniel, and Sillomarra Martinez White. Our editor
is Julia Barton. Flaonon Williams is our engineer. Original music
by Luis Sciarra. Special thanks to Andy Bauers and Jacob
Weisberger Panople. I'm Malcolm Gladwell,
Host
Malcolm Gladwell
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