Woodward Writes a Leaker’s Dream, and CIA’s a ‘Hero’ Again

It’s a smash hit of the Washington political season, the new book about CIA covert activities in the Reagan Administration by Washington Post reporter Bob Woodward.

Anonymous intelligence officials call in journalists and cluckingly deplore the disclosure of so many secrets. Mrs. William Casey, widow of the former CIA director who is the central figure in the book, staunchly goes on television to deny that her husband gave Woodward a deathbed interview admitting complicity in the illegal diversion of Iranian arms sales profits to the Nicaraguan contras .

Yet amid all the sensation and outrage, we may well be missing the underlying significance of “Veil: The Secret Wars of the CIA”--the considerable irony of its title. For whatever Woodward’s book reveals about the CIA--and careful readers will find much less substance than either critics or admirers have claimed--it tells us a good deal about the sociology of knowledge in Washington, about the tangled, often incestuous currents between government and press, about who knows what, why, when, to what end, and ultimately about politics and power in our era of crafted image and information.

First, deathbed revelation or no, there is Casey’s avuncular, seemingly confessional relationship with Woodward. The author claims dozens of interviews with the director. A fraction of that seems to be more exact but still notable. Not since J. Edgar Hoover quietly opened his back door to favorites like Walter Winchell has a senior U.S. intelligence official been quite so available for long, private, off-the-record sessions.

But then, like so much else in the book, in the inner world of Washington none of this is nearly so odd as it seems at first glance.

William Casey was scarcely a stranger to the mutually beneficial traffic between officials and reporters or authors. A quarter century before, he was the discreet go-between, almost agent and editor, for a campaign biography of the vice president, a book called “The Real Nixon,” which had many of the same intimate touches that mark “Veil.” Even more intriguing, there is reason to speculate that Casey’s connections to Woodward and the supposedly hostile Washington Post go back to Watergate, and to the writer’s earlier sensational books, co-authored with Carl Bernstein, “All the President’s Men” and “The Final Days.” Then discreetly on the edge of the Nixon regime, Casey’s past as former OSS officer, Republican fund-raiser, and general fixer gave him unique access to the legal, political and intelligence precincts of the tottering Administration. Add to that Casey’s deep distrust of Nixon’s detente with the Soviet Union and China, his preference for the Republican right, and few other insiders fit so well into the composite shadowy profile of Woodward’s famous Deep Throat.

What reawakens this seamy history is the character and content of Woodward’s new book. Of its kind, it belongs to a classic Washington genre. Only the evidence is missing. Only the witnesses are anonymous, leakers invisible to the naked eye, along with their motives.

It is not as if Woodward has pored painstakingly over the field, digging for the confirming or contradictory documentation, cross-checking the myriad public and private accounts at home and abroad, working the careful, demanding, verifiable chemistry that is true investigative journalism on any subject, and particularly life-and-death, multibillion-dollar issues of national security. Without attribution or palpable sources, without a lone footnote or reference save all those intimate meetings with Casey, “Veil” resembles nothing so much as the raw, unconfirmed intelligence that no junior CIA officer would dare credit.

For all its advertised gravity and authority, it is inherently unreliable, though we can indeed rely on Woodward’s claim that he has talked with Casey and with many other intelligence insiders, and that he is reporting what they told him. It is the difference, we should understand, between journalism and history on one hand, and tribal politics on the other.

With rare clarity--both for what is there and what is not--the book reflects what the nameless leakers wanted Woodward and the rest of us to know. As Tallulah Bankhead used to say, there is less here than meets the eye, and much in the actual book that is very different from the initial media impression of the controversy.

The real hero of this book is the CIA itself. It stands there, gifted, stoic, ever professional. When the swashbuckling director gets caught out mining Nicaraguan harbors or shuffling shady money, he is an embarrassing rogue, and worse, “non-professional.” The serious mistakes--Casey and the Saudis arranging to plant the car bomb in Beirut that killed so many innocents, Lt. Col. Oliver North hatching the contra diversion, Robert McFarlane and the NSC staff cooking up the sale of weapons to the Ayatollah, the Pentagon botching the raid on Libya because of some “high-tech” failure--are not the agency’s.

The agency’s world emerges intact in “Veil.” As always, it is a dangerous place. “When you sit here each day, and see all this, see all the Russians are doing . . .,” we hear Casey say ominously. And then there are the Sandinistas, or the timid and untrustworthy Congress absorbed in its petty political advantage, or the cautious, inert bureaucrats in the State Department. If the CIA has missed a little intelligence on terrorism--say, the bombing of the Marine barracks or the U.S. Embassy in Beirut--it is only because the professionals have been “demoralized” by all the political carping and the “micro-managing” by Congress. When the Soviets recruit a seedy ex-CIA man who has been carelessly fired and forgotten and he then betrays most of our Moscow operation, or when a U.S. code breaker sells the Russians vital secrets because he’s bankrupt, those are “personnel” slips, and the blame goes to people who are already retired or let go.

Yet in more than 500 pages devoted to “secret wars,” we learn next to nothing about our spy agency’s intimate and crucial relations with Israeli intelligence, the key to so much from the Iran-contra scandal to the Persian Gulf crisis; about the CIA’s liaison with the South African or Mexican secret police, which shape policies and politics in those two caldrons; about the CIA’s significant role in Central American sabotage of arms-control diplomacy with the Soviet Union. At one point, Woodward says that Casey would block a Nicaraguan peace plan “if he had to throw himself under the wheels of Air Force One,” or, of nuclear weapons, that Casey “didn’t believe in arms control.” But those are only tidbits, disembodied, and soon we’re back to the real problems--the cowardly Congress or bureaucratic sniping.

Woodward’s sources for all this are not truly invisible, of course. When you know the players and the game, they emerge from the mists--Adm. Bobby Inman, former Casey deputy (and Woodward’s old Navy friend); Adm. Stansfield Turner, former CIA director whose own book Woodward helped produce; John McMahon, Casey’s former deputy for covert operations, and on and on through the upper and middle ranks. They are not men uttering simple untruths, or even legitimate secrets. Most of Woodward’s stories of actual covert actions turn out to have been widely reported well before “Veil,” many of them by the Post. But these are men who see themselves and foreign policy through the special prism, the justifying myths, of their insular world--and who, it should be added, know how to tell a story.

Meanwhile, we will have to look elsewhere for the substance of our problem, the genuine meaning and safe limits of an intelligence agency in the 1980s and ‘90s, the objective “score card” on the Reagan regime’s troubled relations with the rest of the world, and, not least, the perils posed by reporters who act as verbatim scribes for the permanent government.

One thinks of Casey looking down on all this, not begrudging for a moment the book’s hype or profits. It’s a leaker’s dream, after all, to have the backgrounder swallowed whole, to have the subtle exculpation advertised as sensational indictment. “You’re destined to be right only a part of the time,” Casey says to Woodward toward the end. The art of the game--and the tragedy for the rest of us--is that we will never know which part.