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

hunch—there had to be a strong reason to believe that they could provide a real benefit to the Agency’s intelligence mission. For use of a journalist or clergyman, the personal approval of the director would be required.
    What I found especially surprising was how much people in those professions were willing, and sometimes downright eager, to get into bed with us. Academics and journalists in particular were a strong-willed, independent lot. They had a lot to lose, after all. The universities and news organizations that employed them made it clear that any secret association with the CIA required senior management approval and that any individual who didn’t get it risked severe sanctions. In 1977, Harvard University established written policies along these lines for its faculty and staff, and its president, Derek Bok, wrote to Director Turner imploring that the CIA help enforce them by pledging it wouldn’t enter into any confidential relationship with a Harvard employee without makingsure the employee first cleared it with his/her bosses. Since I was already working on putting together CIA policies in this area, I was told to draft the response.
    Now, Stansfield Turner was no hard-core zealot on behalf of the Agency’s clandestine side; in fact, he was by nature suspicious of the spy world’s mystique. But on this matter he pushed back hard at Harvard: He told me to draft a response stating that he had no intention of forswearing any future secret relationships with Harvard personnel and would certainly not make any of them get approval from their bosses before agreeing to help the Agency in a given instance. He took the same stance the next year when news organizations sought the same kind of commitment. To Turner, and to every CIA director from every administration in the next three decades, the issue was pretty simple: If a U.S. citizen is willing to enter into a confidential relationship with the CIA because he/she wants to help the country, that is between the Agency and the individual, and no one else. And in most cases I would come across over the years, the individual in question would be adamant about keeping the relationship secret, partly because of fears of retribution, not just by U.S. adversaries abroad but also by their own employers, but also partly because they felt strongly—more strongly than the CIA did, actually—that if they wanted to help the CIA, it was their right and no one else’s damn business. The policies I helped establish for the Agency in this always-sensitive area remain in effect to this day.
    I also was surprised and gratified to discover how much the U.S. corporate sector was (and continues to be) willing to provide secret support to the CIA and its national security mission. American companies—especially those with significant international interests—have far more to lose than to gain in having associations with the CIA. Unlike its counterparts in many other governments in the world, including our European allies, the CIA has never adopted a policy of giving U.S. companies a “leg up” in pursuing overseas business. If they help, therefore, it is simply a matter of their doing so out of a sense of patriotic duty. And if the association is somehow exposed, they are left wide open to charges of being CIA “dupes” or “fronts” and face the real risk of seeing their international business interests dry up or even expropriated.
    For the CIA, an internationally connected U.S. company or businessman can be a uniquely valuable resource. They go places and make foreigncontacts that U.S. government representatives—whether diplomats or intelligence personnel operating undercover—cannot. And they offer a wide range of intelligence services, from serving as the CIA’s “eyes and ears” to letting one of our clandestine officers pose as a company employee while stationed abroad—a so-called nonofficial cover officer (NOC).
    In 1978, I was dispatched to meet with the CEO