John Rizzo's book, "Company Man", is much like the author himself: smart, insightful, wry, self-deprecating, funny, and charming. I spent a quarter-century working for, with, and around John Rizzo at CIA, and I recommend the book to anyone who would like an insider's view of some of the most remarkable and now public national security episodes at the highest levels of the U.S. government during the last thirty years.
Rizzo arrived at CIA in 1976 as a dark-haired naif with a vague notion that intelligence law might be more interesting than the drudgery at the U.S. Customs Service in the Treasury Department that he had been doing fresh out of law school.
He was right about that. He left thirty-plus years later with his hair white and his personal file full of some of the most fascinating things a lawyer could ever do.
He almost immediately began a long and mutual love affair with the directorate at CIA whose mission includes acquiring secrets, catching spies, and stopping terrorists. It has been known by various names, most of the time being called the Directorate of Operations (the "DO") and now clumsily relabeled the National Clandestine Service. He rose up through the ranks of the career attorneys at CIA by dint of three characteristics lacking in most lawyers: a sense of humor, good nature, and an uncanny sense of how to successfully maneuver among a cacophony of competing equity holders both inside and outside of the Agency. He was a true adept.
His career was bracketed from beginning to end by deep involvement in the law, lore, and politics of covert action, much beloved by the seven presidents he served. The list of CIA activities he describes in his book reads like a Tolstoy novel: the Church Committee, William Casey, the Iran-Contra Affair, the Ames spy case, the rise of Al Qaeda, the 911 attacks, Valerie Plame, and the world-wide counterterrorist activities of the Agency.
And he was there, unlike a lot of others who never set foot at CIA or had any access to classified information. For example, how could Tim Weiner write a credible book purporting to be a history of the Agency without authorized access to any classified information? He didn't even get the meaning of the title of his book right. According to Agency historians who looked up the actual quote, "A Legacy of Ashes" was a phrase President Eisenhower directed at the military intelligence establishment, not CIA.
Rizzo's book does not shy away from his most controversial assignment related to enhanced interrogation techniques and treatment of high value detainees. The introduction of the book is titled, "The Tale of the Torture Tapes," and it provides the most detailed and accurate description of a program authorized by the president, found legal by the Department of Justice, and agreed to by the leadership of the intelligence oversight committees and the House and Senate. This ultimately scuppered his nomination to be the CIA's General Counsel, a Senate-confirmed position. His description of the process, decision-making, and agonizing that went into the establishment, oversight, and review of the program is both the most accurate to date and the most chilling, not because of the techniques used but rather the effect it had on highly dedicated and conscientious civil servants who carried it out.
When your lawyers have to get lawyers, you might as well pack up and leave.
The most striking parts of the book to an old hand like me are his wonderful descriptions of the many characters he ran into over the many years: Bill Casey, Stan Sporkin, George Tenet, Yuri Nosenko, Dewey Clarridge, Cofer Black, John Bellinger, Pat Fitzgerald, John Deutch, and a host of others, including the traitor Aldrich Ames.
Rizzo's interactions with members of Congress, including the shabby treatment he received during his confirmation process, should be required reading for any lawyer or policy-maker with designs on saving the world in Washington. Rizzo was entirely too polite in his book. Read Bob Gates's descriptions of Congress in his book, "Duty": Members of the House Foreign Affairs Committee were "rude, nasty, and stupid." Senators were "hypocritical and obtuse." And the most complete: "I saw most of Congress as uncivil, incompetent at fulfilling their basic constitutional responsibilities...micromanagerial, parochial, hypocritical, egotistical, thin-skinned and prone to put self (and re-election) before country."
With the exception of Porter Goss and maybe David Boren, that's about right, from my years (including military service) working for eight presidents, eleven administrations, nine DCIs/ directors of CIA, and ten CIA general counsels.
As for Ron Wyden, who is much in the news lately and who seemed to take a personal dislike to Rizzo and the lead in unfairly trashing his nomination and ability--well, for someone who looks like a badly-aged Howdy-Doody, he's a perfect representative of those spineless dweebs infesting U.S. politics who would have been feebly waving their ACLU cards as the Soviet jackboots came up their streets and the mushroom cloud blossomed over Washington, all the while bleating, "Our government is after your liberties!"
If you want the views and memories of an actual insider participant in CIA history, as opposed to ignorant outsiders, read this book. It has as companions several other good memoirs written by Rizzo's contemporaries: "The Art of Intelligence" by Ambassador Hank Crumpton, "Hard Measures" by Jose Rodriguez, “At the Center of the Storm" by George Tenet, "Circle of Treason" by Sandy Grimes and Jeanne Vertefeuille.
All honorable, distinguished, and unabashed patriots.
And they were actually there.
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Ben de Jong
Especially interesting when it comes to relations between the CIA on the one hand and the US Goverment and Congress on the other
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on February 23, 2014
