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Authors: Mark Mazzetti
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network of former special-operations troops and CIA officers who refused to work with the spy agency because it was too risk-averse and too dependent on foreign intelligence services like the ISI.
They had formed what he called a “shadow CIA” and were willing to gather intelligence that might be used for special-operations missions. As for the person running this shadow CIA, Furlong referred to him only as “the old man.”
—
DUANE “DEWEY” CLARRIDGE, age seventy-seven, never passed quietly into retirement. It wasn’t his style; and besides, there were too many old scores to be settled. He had left the CIA amid the fallout from the Iran–Contra affair, convinced that his bosses had made him a scapegoat. He considered his indictment two years later for lying to Congress about his role in Iran–Contra as the work of a partisan witch hunt.
When President George H. W. Bush pardoned Clarridge and other Iran–Contra figures—including former defense secretary Caspar Weinberger—during the waning days of his presidency on Christmas Eve 1992, Clarridge felt some degree of vindication. He had the presidential pardon framed, and he displayed it in a hallway of his home. It was the first thing that visitors saw when they entered.
He wrote a memoir in the late 1990s, A Spy for All Seasons, offering vivid details about many of his Cold War exploits, and he stayed committed to Republican causes. As a private consultant in 1998, he worked with retired general Wayne Downing—the former head of Joint Special Operations Command—on a plan to insert thousands of Iraqi exiles and American commandos into Iraq to bring down Saddam Hussein’s regime. The proposal had the endorsement of Ahmed Chalabi, the head of the Iraqi National Congress and a favorite of Republicans advocating a war in Iraq, but it was dismissed by the commander of U.S. Central Command as fantasy. The commander, General Anthony Zinni, referred to the Downing–Clarridge plan as “Bay of Goats.”
When the United States did finally get around to overthrowing Saddam Hussein, in 2003, Clarridge raised money for various private efforts to prove, against all evidence, that the Iraqi dictator had stashes of chemical and biological weapons around the country. All the while, he remained an unflinching cheerleader for American intervention overseas. In one exchange during a 2007 interview, he angrily defended many of the CIA’s most notorious operations, saying it was the duty of the United States to exert its will overseas.
“We’ll intervene whenever we decide it’s in our national-security interests to intervene,” Clarridge told a reporter. “And if you don’t like it, lump it.
“ Get used to it, world , we’re not going to put up with nonsense.”
But he had also soured on the CIA. That same year he gave a speech in Arkansas about how much the CIA’s human-intelligence operations had atrophied over the years. The spy agency couldn’t get reliable information about the regimes in Iran and North Korea, he said, because it had become too dependent on spy satellites and electronic eavesdropping. He believed the problem was that nervous lawyers held too much sway at Langley and routinely scuttled proposals for risky intelligence-collection missions. He began dreaming of a new model for espionage, something smaller and leaner than the CIA and beholden to no foreign government. It would be like the Office of Strategic Services but updated for the world of the twenty-first century—a world dominated by corporations, loose international criminal and terror networks, and multinational institutions.
Private spying was not an entirely new idea. After World War II, OSS founder William Donovan was so despondent that President Truman had not named him the first director of central intelligence he decided to set up an intelligence operation of his own. During business trips to Europe he collected information about Soviet activities from American ambassadors
They had formed what he called a “shadow CIA” and were willing to gather intelligence that might be used for special-operations missions. As for the person running this shadow CIA, Furlong referred to him only as “the old man.”
—
DUANE “DEWEY” CLARRIDGE, age seventy-seven, never passed quietly into retirement. It wasn’t his style; and besides, there were too many old scores to be settled. He had left the CIA amid the fallout from the Iran–Contra affair, convinced that his bosses had made him a scapegoat. He considered his indictment two years later for lying to Congress about his role in Iran–Contra as the work of a partisan witch hunt.
When President George H. W. Bush pardoned Clarridge and other Iran–Contra figures—including former defense secretary Caspar Weinberger—during the waning days of his presidency on Christmas Eve 1992, Clarridge felt some degree of vindication. He had the presidential pardon framed, and he displayed it in a hallway of his home. It was the first thing that visitors saw when they entered.
He wrote a memoir in the late 1990s, A Spy for All Seasons, offering vivid details about many of his Cold War exploits, and he stayed committed to Republican causes. As a private consultant in 1998, he worked with retired general Wayne Downing—the former head of Joint Special Operations Command—on a plan to insert thousands of Iraqi exiles and American commandos into Iraq to bring down Saddam Hussein’s regime. The proposal had the endorsement of Ahmed Chalabi, the head of the Iraqi National Congress and a favorite of Republicans advocating a war in Iraq, but it was dismissed by the commander of U.S. Central Command as fantasy. The commander, General Anthony Zinni, referred to the Downing–Clarridge plan as “Bay of Goats.”
When the United States did finally get around to overthrowing Saddam Hussein, in 2003, Clarridge raised money for various private efforts to prove, against all evidence, that the Iraqi dictator had stashes of chemical and biological weapons around the country. All the while, he remained an unflinching cheerleader for American intervention overseas. In one exchange during a 2007 interview, he angrily defended many of the CIA’s most notorious operations, saying it was the duty of the United States to exert its will overseas.
“We’ll intervene whenever we decide it’s in our national-security interests to intervene,” Clarridge told a reporter. “And if you don’t like it, lump it.
“ Get used to it, world , we’re not going to put up with nonsense.”
But he had also soured on the CIA. That same year he gave a speech in Arkansas about how much the CIA’s human-intelligence operations had atrophied over the years. The spy agency couldn’t get reliable information about the regimes in Iran and North Korea, he said, because it had become too dependent on spy satellites and electronic eavesdropping. He believed the problem was that nervous lawyers held too much sway at Langley and routinely scuttled proposals for risky intelligence-collection missions. He began dreaming of a new model for espionage, something smaller and leaner than the CIA and beholden to no foreign government. It would be like the Office of Strategic Services but updated for the world of the twenty-first century—a world dominated by corporations, loose international criminal and terror networks, and multinational institutions.
Private spying was not an entirely new idea. After World War II, OSS founder William Donovan was so despondent that President Truman had not named him the first director of central intelligence he decided to set up an intelligence operation of his own. During business trips to Europe he collected information about Soviet activities from American ambassadors
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