Did A Dead Man Tell No Tales?

By Richard Zoglin

Not since Charles Foster Kane's immortal "Rosebud" has a deathbed utterance caused such a stir. CIA Director William Casey, partly paralyzed and gravely ill following brain surgery, was in Washington's Georgetown University Hospital last winter when an unexpected visitor entered his room. It was Washington Post Reporter Bob Woodward, who had interviewed Casey off and on for four years and had somehow slipped through CIA security for one last encounter. So Woodward says in his new book, Veil: The Secret Wars of the CIA, 1981-1987 (Simon & Schuster; $21.95), relating that the interview lasted just four minutes and Casey managed only 19 words. But before drifting off to sleep, he seemed to clear up one of the chief mysteries in the Iran-contra scandal.

+ "You knew, didn't you?" Woodward asked, inquiring whether Casey was aware that funds from the sale of arms to Iran were being diverted to the Nicaraguan contras. "His head jerked up hard," Woodward writes. "He stared, and finally nodded yes."

"Why?" Woodward asked. Casey's faint reply: "I believed."

It was the perfect ending for Woodward's dramatic spy saga. Too perfect, in the view of some. Casey's widow Sophia flatly denied that Woodward had seen her late husband in the hospital. Ronald Reagan branded Woodward's account an "awful lot of fiction." Others questioned whether, even if true, Casey's dying nod and the tantalizingly ambiguous "I believed" were enough to close the books on the CIA director's involvement in the Iran-contra affair. Though Lieut. Colonel Oliver North testified in July that Casey had embraced the diversion as the "ultimate covert operation" and many suspect he was the mastermind behind it, Casey had never publicly admitted knowledge of the operation.

The controversy over Casey's deathbed interview was just one of several that swirled last week around Woodward's book. In chronicling Casey's six-year tenure as the nation's chief intelligence officer, which ended with his resignation and death earlier this year, Woodward provides new details about a cloak of covert CIA operations. Among the most startling: Casey had arranged with Saudi Arabia to assassinate Sheik Mohammed Hussein Fadlallah, leader of the militant Lebanese Shi'ite faction known as Hizballah. The 1985 car bombing, supposedly financed by the Saudis, killed 80 people in a Beirut suburb but left Fadlallah unharmed. These and other disclosures drew a barrage of denials, as well as cries from the intelligence community that telling such provocative tales, true or false, harms U.S. spying capabilities. Woodward's account also raised fresh questions about Congress's ability to control a "rogue" CIA director bent on circumventing the law.

Controversy is nothing new for Woodward. With ex-Post Colleague Carl Bernstein, he unraveled much of the Watergate scandal and later authored or co-authored juicy accounts of the inside workings of the Supreme Court (The Brethren) and the drug-related death of John Belushi (Wired). In familiar Woodward style, Veil reads as much like a novel as a work of journalism, with scenes, dialogue and characters' thoughts re-created. Woodward says he talked to more than 250 people, but his revelations are not directly attributed to specific sources. While this makes the book's credibility hard for a reader to evaluate, it does suppress any interference in what is a lively read: copies of Veil are selling rapidly, and Simon & Schuster has already ordered a third printing.

Many readers were thumbing directly to the last two pages, where Woodward recounts his final meeting with the ailing CIA chief. Sophia Casey insists that Woodward "never got in to see my husband," claiming that either she or her daughter was at Casey's bedside constantly. "We had our food brought up there," she says. "There was a lavatory there. We never had to go out of the room." What's more, she says, the incapacitated Casey was unable to talk. But a knowledgeable medical source at Georgetown University Hospital says that Casey, though gravely ill, was not totally incapable of speaking. Monsignor J. Joshua Mundell, who visited Casey about twice a week, told TIME: "He was in very bad shape. It was hard for him to form words." But not impossible; Mundell acknowledges that Casey could have spoken the words reported by Woodward "if he had wanted to."

Woodward admits that his first attempt to enter Casey's hospital room in late January was thwarted by a CIA guard. Woodward says he returned a few days later but refuses to give more details of how he got in, presumably to protect the insider who helped him. He denies that he used an alias or disguised himself as a doctor. "Why was I the only journalist who tried to visit the hospital when Casey held the key ((to a central question in the Iran-contra affair))?" asks Woodward. "It's Journalism 101."

In his book Woodward portrays Casey as a wily and aggressive director who made the CIA his personal instrument of foreign policy. In early 1985 Woodward reports, Casey went "off the books" to enlist Saudi help in carrying out three covert operations. One was the attempted assassination of Sheik Fadlallah, who had been linked to the bombings of American facilities in Beirut. After that plot failed, Woodward writes, the Saudis offered Fadlallah a $2 million bribe to cease his terrorist attacks. He accepted, and the attacks stopped.

Woodward's account of the incident was denied last week by the Saudi press agency and by Fadlallah's office. President Reagan also denied any knowledge of the affair. "Never would I sign anything that would authorize an assassination," he said. "I never have, and I never will, and I didn't." & Meanwhile, House and Senate intelligence committees reviewed their files to see if they were misled about the CIA's role in the assassination attempt.

Veil also gives a detailed account of the CIA's history of covert support for the Nicaraguan contras and reveals that the agency, beginning in the Carter years, gave financial aid to La Prensa, the opposition newspaper that was shut down for 15 months by the Sandinista government before reopening last week. Past charges by the Sandinistas that the paper was CIA-supported have been denied, and Publisher Violeta Chamorro last week labeled Woodward's revelation "totally false."

Among the book's other disclosures: Bashir Gemayel, the Christian leader assassinated after being elected President of Lebanon in 1982, had been on the CIA payroll for years; the agency monitored Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak's phone conversations during the Achille Lauro crisis; and Argentine officials supplied intelligence data to the CIA during the Falklands war, information that was passed along to Britain, Argentina's enemy in the conflict. Woodward relates that a suspect being interrogated for the 1983 bombing of the U.S. embassy in Lebanon died after being tortured by a CIA officer with an electroshock device. (The officer involved was later fired.) There are gossipy revelations about Libyan Leader Muammar Gaddafi (according to CIA intelligence, he liked to wear high-heeled shoes and makeup) and piquant glimpses inside the Reagan inner circle. After Reagan was shot in 1981, Woodward says, his recovery was far slower than the White House acknowledged, and some aides "began to consider the possibility that his was going to be a crippled presidency." Even when Reagan was healthy, Woodward says, Casey found the President strangely passive, lackadaisical in work habits and reluctant to make decisions.

While many of Veil's revelations remain to be corroborated, a number of former CIA officials interviewed by TIME, including ex-CIA Chiefs William Colby and Stansfield Turner and former Deputy Chief Bobby Inman, gave the book generally good marks for accuracy in the episodes with which they were directly involved. Their major complaint is Woodward's habit of overdramatizing and embellishing quotes. Says Inman: "Everything's just a couple of degrees more colorful than it really was."

A more serious objection from many in the intelligence community is that Woodward's expose has divulged classified information that will damage U.S. spying efforts. The book, for example, includes a detailed explanation of Ivy Bells, an eavesdropping operation aimed at Soviet underwater cables, betrayed to Moscow by Spy Ronald Pelton -- details that the Post refrained from printing last year in response to pleas from Casey that it would harm national security. Woodward insists he carefully weighed security considerations and excised any information that might damage ongoing operations. Still, ex-CIA Director Richard Helms charged that such disclosures harm the agency's credibility with potential sources and will "play havoc with our recruiting." Senior intelligence officials are so distressed that they are considering prosecuting Woodward under statutes that make it illegal to publish secret communication techniques or information.

Some journalists had just the opposite complaint. Why, they wondered, did Woodward (who has written some 75 stories about the CIA and related topics for the Post since January 1986) not go to press immediately with several of his revelations, especially Casey's deathbed interview? "If you allow your reporter to keep the best nuggets for a book, I don't think you as an editor are doing your job," says Dennis Britton, deputy managing editor of the Los Angeles Times.

Post editors say they knew about the deathbed interview but decided not to run it because it was too "ambiguous." The Post did print a Woodward story in 1985 on CIA involvement in the Fadlallah assassination attempt. But it made no mention of the role of Casey and the Saudis, information that Woodward says he learned only last July. In any event, Post editors contend that the paper benefited greatly from Woodward's dual role. "It isn't enough that the Washington Post, thanks to Bob Woodward, got all these stories first," said Executive Editor Benjamin C. Bradlee. "It's that we didn't get them to fit some schedule that the critics think was more appropriate."

Some Casey intimates contest Woodward's claim that the reporter had "more than four dozen interviews or substantive discussions" with Casey, who was notoriously distrustful of the press. "I know of all the meetings," says George Lauder, director of public affairs under Casey. "The only way you can reach that number is add all the cocktail chatter and parties." Yet CIA sources believe at least some sensitive details had to have come from Casey. In Woodward's opinion, Casey talked to him as a defensive measure, to learn $ exactly how much he knew about CIA operations. Thus Veil offers a final posthumous irony: Bill Casey, who complained so frequently about Government leaks, may have been the most skilled leaker in Washington. After all, who will ever be able to prove or disprove what the late director may have told Bob Woodward?

With reporting by Jay Peterzell and Bruce van Voorst/Washington