Civil Rights Battles Trained CIA Lawyer

As a lawyer in her 20s, Elizabeth Rindskopf represented draft dodgers. Now 48, she represents an agency much reviled by those Vietnam-era peaceniks.

She is the top attorney at the Central Intelligence Agency.

She appears almost too genteel to be mixed up with people who read others’ mail, yet her soft-spoken, almost self-effacing demeanor conceals no-nonsense steel, a no-holds-barred candor.

“We do misrepresent, lie, steal on occasion,” she said in an interview at CIA headquarters in Langley, Va. “But once you get beyond the question of whether we ought to do espionage, this is as ethical a group of people as you’ll find.”

She believes her background as a civil rights lawyer in the South is the best qualification for confronting the inherent contradiction between civil liberties and national security.

“You really want someone with that kind of bias on the inside of an agency that’s so secret,” she said.

Protecting secrets landed her at the center of one of the most celebrated legal cases of the 1980s, the Iran-Contra affair.

At that time she represented the supersecret National Security Agency, which eavesdrops on communications around the world, and she refused to release many documents requested by the defense.

Her refusal led to clashes with Independent Counsel Lawrence Walsh. It ultimately resulted in several major charges against former White House aide Oliver North being dropped because the judge found that North could not be properly defended against them without the NSA documents.

Unaccustomed to dealing with the press--this was her first interview since she became general counsel two years ago--Rindskopf was perhaps more outspoken than other government officials tend to be when speaking on the record.

“My early career had some hallmarks of a bomb-thrower,” she said. Her blue eyes sparkled with humor as she described her days with Legal Services in Atlanta, and then as a lawyer representing the NAACP. The Vietnam War was anathema, as was the “quote-unquote Establishment,” she said with a rueful smile.

That arrogance, as she now describes it, became tempered over the years by “some humility” and a realization that “there were people on both sides trying to do the right thing.”

The CIA, she is convinced, is doing the right thing.

Rindskopf is hardly enamored of spy lore (“I try never to read spy novels”). She is, however, an ardent defender of espionage.

She concedes that, at times, the CIA has chosen “very clumsy--or sometimes even worse--approaches.” She sees her job, and that of the 60 lawyers she supervises, as guiding the agency so that it stays within legal guidelines.

Since she took the job, the agency has greatly increased the number of lawyers assigned to the Directorate of Operations, the arm of the CIA that does the actual spying. “Riding shotgun” over the operatives, she said, allows the lawyers to nip potential legal problems in the bud.

Widowed 20 years ago when her husband, also a civil rights lawyer, died in a freak car accident in Georgia, Rindskopf has not remarried. Her 21-year-old daughter is a history major.

She is the first woman ever to hold the CIA’s top legal post--and odd woman out in the male-dominated upper echelons of the agency.

That’s nothing unusual for her. She was one of nine women in her class of 360 at the University of Michigan Law School; she was one of the two women among 22 attorneys ranked by the National Law Journal last year as the most influential in Washington.

At the NSA, where many staffers are military and male, she was also unusual.

“It was an advantage,” she said. Some of the men were paternalistic; others were disarmed by her being a woman.

She can be disarming, agreed Britt Snider, chief counsel of the Senate Intelligence Committee, which oversees the activities of the CIA and its sister intelligence agencies.

Yet, “her demeanor is deceptive. She’s tough, in terms of representing her clients,” he added.

She tries to cooperate with the committee but there are disagreements, he said. Nonetheless, she is a “woman with a lot of integrity.”