Enemies Within by Matt Apuzzo, Adam Goldman Read Free Book Online

craft. CIA veterans swiftly delivered their verdict—anonymously—in the pages of America’s newspapers and magazines. One retired officer told U.S. News & World Report in 1995 that Cohen had a “management by fear” philosophy. Another described him as “a company man from the word go” who will “find out which way the wind is blowing and then go with it.” In the Washington Times , a former officer said Cohen was a hard-nosed outsider who wasn’t very well liked.
    It didn’t help that Cohen had a reputation for an acerbic leadership style and an abrasive personality. He liked to swear, and, in the words of one longtime colleague, “If he thought you were an idiot, he’d say so.” That was one of his favorite words. For subordinates, it wasn’t clear what was worse, being called an idiot in the middle of a meeting or wondering whether Cohen was calling them an idiot after they’d left the room.
    He’d call subordinates at any hour to talk through whatever had popped up in his head. It kept people constantly wondering what issue they would be pulled onto next. But while Cohen could be intimidating and aggressive, he was also prescient. He had been one of the first people in the agency, well before the Berlin Wall came down in 1989, to talk seriously about globalization. Cohen envisioned a world where economies became intertwined, where multinational corporations blurred the political boundaries between nations, and where terrorists and criminals operated across borders. 8
    Colleagues called him a fast talker, a reference both to the speed with which he spoke and to the fact that some saw him as a confidenceman, always playing the angles. Melvin Goodman, an expert on the Soviet Union who worked with Cohen in the 1980s, regarded him as a quick study and a hard worker but believed he was cooking the intelligence to curry favor with his hard-line anti-Communist bosses. “He’s the kind of guy who, after you deal with him, you feel like you should wash your hands,” Goodman would remark years later. 9
    John Deutch and Cohen got along well, however. Deutch, a native of Brussels, Belgium, who, like Cohen, was educated in Massachusetts, saw his new deputy as direct and plainspoken. As far as he was concerned, the fact that Cohen had never run a covert operation overseas and had spent most of his career as an analyst in no way disqualified him from overseeing the agency’s worldwide spying efforts.
    “Who the fuck cares” where someone comes from as long as he’s qualified? Deutch said. “I think that’s silly.” 10
    Still, longtime operatives looked for any reason to dislike Cohen. Early in his tenure, he held a meeting with the senior leaders overseeing Middle East operations. As he talked, he referred to the citizens of Jordan—the Jordanians—as “the Jordans.” The room was filled with the agency’s foremost experts on the Middle East, who looked at one another with blank stares that reflected a shared thought: “What is this guy doing running operations?” 11
    Cohen’s tenure could have been an opportunity to remake the clandestine service for a post–Cold War world. Ames and Guatemala forced an unusual level of introspection onto an agency that was institutionally averse to it. And Cohen was undoubtedly capable of anticipating the next big thing. But any interest that Cohen had in long-term planning was overrun by Congress and the White House.
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    Bill Clinton had come to office in 1993 promising to cut the roughly $30 billion annual intelligence budget. On Capitol Hill, the mood was even worse. The chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, DennisDeConcini, thought the CIA’s reports were too unreliable to justify such a hefty price tag. New York senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan introduced a bill to abolish the CIA. The Guatemala scandal had revealed that the agency was doing business with people who had awful human rights records. Congress demanded a reckoning.
    In