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

“undercover,” that is, a CIA employee who is posing as an employee of another U.S. government agency. They are required to “live their cover,” sometimes even with their relatives and friends. For them, routine, day-to-day private business transactions—like getting a commercial bank loan or buying life insurance—can become awkward and complicated.
    CIA attorneys, on the other hand, are allowed to freely acknowledge our Agency affiliation to family, friends, and the outside world (except when traveling abroad). Still, I decided early on to be somewhat circumspect in whom I told about working for the CIA. My family knew, of course, as did my close friends from college and law school. But I was careful around strangers—people I would run into at bars, on airplanes, and so on. For one thing, you can never be sure who you are talking to. Besides, dropping the CIA name to people you don’t know frequently prompts questions like “No kidding! So what kinds of things do you work on?” Which, obviously, you can’t talk about. On top of that, you then have to endure a lot of dumb James Bond or Maxwell Smart jokes.
    As my years at the CIA wore on, I became more comfortable about maintaining this pose in public, but during my first months at the Agency I found it rather frustrating. The place and the work were so fascinating that the natural human instinct was to want to talk about it. I thought being at the CIA was extremely cool, and I will admit to a youthful temptation to flaunt it. Holding it all in, especially when I was still under thirty, was tough.
    What’s more, I was struck by how much scope and impact CIA lawyers, even one as wet behind the ears as I was, had on the day-to-day mission of the Agency. The OGC had about the same number of lawyers in it as my former office at Customs, but the OGC—and the rest of the Agency—was much less hierarchal, and we lawyers were given wide sway and discretion in the way we did our jobs. From the first day, I was not only allowed but encouraged to write and sign my own memos and letters going outside the office, which sounds like a small thing but was something I had never experienced before in my brief legal career. And whatever any of us said or wrote seemed to be accepted and followed—albeit on some occasions with some grousing—by our clients in the Agency. (I always considered everyone in the CIA as a “client,” fromthe director on down. I viewed myself as an attorney for all Agency personnel, and that my job was to advise them on the law and protect them from jeopardy for doing their jobs.) It belied the perception that many outsiders had of the CIA being an untrammeled, anything-goes monolith that did whatever it wanted, wherever it wanted, regardless of the law. If that had been true in the ’50s and ’60s—and it apparently was, to a large extent—that was not the CIA I found when I arrived.
    To me the atmosphere at the CIA seemed so bracing, so alive in my early days there. I was too new, too starry-eyed to realize that the Church investigation, and the opprobrium from Congress and the media it had spawned, had left the organization dispirited and on the defensive. It was a state of affairs that I would come to understand all too often in the years to come.
    In the aftermath of the Church investigation, Congress and the Ford administration had rapidly put into place a series of reforms that established the legal and political framework under which the CIA has operated ever since. Committees were created in the House and Senate to monitor and scrutinize the activities of the CIA and other intelligence agencies; laws were passed that for the first time mandated prior presidential authorization of covert operations; President Ford issued a detailed executive order (which has been reaffirmed by subsequent presidents and remains virtually intact to this day) setting out the criteria under which the intelligence community can collect information on U.S.