Company Man: Thirty Years of Controversy and Crisis in the CIA by John Rizzo Page A

guy you just met?”
    “Because,” he replied in what to my ringing ears now sounded like the King’s English, “you are their lawyer, and I know they never ask me about this because they fear I will sue them. Well, tell them I will never sue them. Never. But you also tell them, I will never forget what they did.”
    Somehow late that night, I got to my little motel. The most drunken night of my life was followed by the worst hangover of my life. Then Nosenko picked me up at the motel, looking fresh as a daisy, and once again made me an offer I couldn’t refuse—he would take me to the judge. And so we walked, me with considerable difficulty, through the picture-book town square to the old courthouse, with Nosenko buoyantly calling out greetings to all the locals we passed. “I don’t know that you are supposed to be seen with me,” I suggested plaintively. “We look too conspicuous.”
    “The only one conspicuous is you,” he snorted. “You are the one wearing the fancy suit.”
    After I saw the judge, Nosenko drove me to the airport, but we said nothing to each other about what we had talked about the night before. The flight back to D.C., of course, was bumpy all the way, and I thought I might be about to die for my country, either in a crash or, more likely, from “wotka”-induced nausea.
    I did manage to scribble down notes quoting everything Nosenko told me the long night before. After that trip, I didn’t have any occasion to think about things like putting somebody in solitary confinement, or trying to get a prisoner to talk, or what is or isn’t torture. Not until a quarter-century later, after 9/11.

    Another astonishing thing I discovered in my first few years at the Agency was how extensively it interacted with some of the highest-level sectors of American society—the academic, media, and corporate communities in particular. It was not a case of the Agency spying on them; that was clearly verboten in the new post–Church Committee world we were living in. In fact, an outsider might reasonably assume that none of these institutions, in the post-Watergate era, would ever want to have anything to do with the big, bad CIA.
    But once I was on the inside, I quickly learned that that was not the case. Some of these folks, mindful of the professional and personal risks of doing so, continued to come forward to offer their services tothe Agency—even in the late ’70s, when the CIA’s reputation and influence had just taken a sustained battering. This realization crystallized for me during yet another lucky assignment that came my way in late 1976. For the first time in its history (and, truth to tell, to forestall potential congressional initiatives in this area), the CIA set out to establish written policies governing the scope and intent of the relationships it would henceforth have with U.S. members of the media, the clergy, and the academic and corporate communities. And I was chosen to draft the proposed policies for the CIA leadership—and ultimately the director—to review and approve. Once again, it was a challenging and infinitely fascinating assignment for a young guy still new to the intelligence world. And, of course, it bore absolutely no relation to anything I ever studied in law school.
    I was given only a few basic marching orders: First, no U.S. journalist, clergyman, academic, or businessman was going to be manipulated or duped into any secret work for us. In the unique bureaucratese of the spy business, this was translated into the phrase “no operational use on an unwitting basis.” Second, the policies should not be written so as to prohibit any confidential relationships with members of these sectors. But third, the threshold criteria for establishing any relationship should be rigorous and subject to careful internal oversight. No one in the CIA was going to recruit, or accept an offer of services, from a U.S. journalist, academic, businessman, or clergyman on a whim or