A Legacy of Contempt

CLAIR GEORGE WAS BACK IN WASHington last week, after a Maine vacation where he satisfied his voracious reading habit and worked on his tennis serve. Next month he will be playing for higher stakes as federal prosecutors try to nail him for lying to Congress about the Iran-contra affair. Though the former CIA chief of clandestine operations received a respite three weeks ago when a jury could not reach a verdict on nine counts of perjury, making false statements and obstruction of justice, he now faces a retrial at the hands of special prosecutor Craig Gillen. Just as he did last time, Gillen can be expected to put the entire CIA on trial by charging that George was merely the pawn in an agency that had consistently shown contempt for Congress, for due process and ultimately for the American people.

It will be up to a new jury to decide whether George was guilty of criminal perjury. Steven Kirk, the original foreman, said his fellow jurors had found George evasive, duplicitous and dissembling; they could not agree on conviction because they chose to wrestle with the narrow issue of George's "technical" responsibility to Congress. But Gillen used expert testimony and thousands of newly declassified documents to prove his point: that key officials of the CIA had blindly served the White House in circumventing Congress by providing aid to the Nicaraguan contras in defiance of the Boland amendment. Concedes a CIA veteran: "In the crunch, as an institution, it failed the people."

The agency has always felt a special allegiance to the President. Although it was created by Congress, and is funded annually by congressional appropriations, generations of CIA topsiders have enjoyed a privileged entree at the Oval Office. The agency hiser three decades in the agency's clandestine service, he was imbued with the shadow-world ethos of the cold war. His generation of CIA officers perceived themselves in an intensely personal crusade against the Evil Empire. George valiantly fought these looking-glass battles in extraordinarily dangerous assignments in Beirut and Athens, where his predecessor had been assassinated. It was a covert existence in which professional spies like George routinely broke other nations' laws. It was part of their job to lie about their identities, their missions, their actions -- but not to their own superiors. And especially not to Congress. "That," says former CIA staffer Vincent Cannistraro, "was the no-no."

Yet few beliefs were as widely shared by agency types as their low regard for Capitol Hill. In the 1970s, following embarrassing revelations about failed assassinations and bungled covert operations, Congress set up an oversight system and tried to put the agency on a swidely shared by agency types as their low regard for Capitol Hill. In the 1970s, following embarrassing revelations about failed assassinations and bungled covert operations, Congress set up an oversight system and tried to put the agency on a shorter leash. Some CIA officials, including former Director William Colby, applauded the move. "I thought things had changed for good," says Colby.