Case of Spy in Anti-Terrorist Mission Points Up CIA’s Perils

The wires from the polygraph machine had come off, and finally the intense questioning by investigators from the Central Intelligence Agency was over.

Robert Cleare, an American spy who had once been on the CIA’s career fast track, had just endured a combined total of 19 hours of interrogation by his employer.

Yet even as his grilling was completed in the fall of 1993, Cleare’s troubles were just beginning.

The CIA’s office of the inspector general--in effect, the agency’s internal affairs division--now was convinced that Cleare was a good spy gone bad. Investigators charged that Cleare drank too much, had abused his secret position in the agency’s Cairo station by sleeping with the secretary of an Arab ambassador and had accepted bribes. But worst of all, they alleged, he had knowingly issued U.S. visas based on forged documents--possibly for use by Egyptian terrorists trying to enter the United States.

In fact, Cleare had secretly become the focus of a sensitive investigation into the CIA’s role in granting Sheik Omar Abdel Rahman entry into the United States before his disciples bombed New York City’s World Trade Center in 1993.

Thus the case was a nightmare for the CIA, one that has remained secret until now. It raised the specter of political scandal for the agency just as it was trying to come to grips with its role in a post-Cold War world in which terrorists and drug dealers have replaced Soviet KGB agents as the CIA’s main adversaries.

Indeed, as the CIA searches for new missions, no job may offer as much promise--or pose as many risks--as the fight against international terrorism. To uncover terrorists and stop them before they reach American shores, the United States needs an espionage network.

But those tasks often require different methods than those developed by the CIA in its nearly 50-year battle against the Soviet Union. Terrorists don’t usually put in appearances on the diplomatic cocktail circuit the way KGB operatives once did; CIA officers have to get their hands dirty--and perhaps engage in questionable activities--to get close to them.

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As a result, the investigation into Cleare’s activities and the CIA’s efforts to penetrate Abdel Rahman’s Islamic organization offer a rare glimpse into the dangers the CIA runs when it mounts such clandestine operations against terrorist targets.

It also provides insight into the intelligence efforts that were directed at the Abdel Rahman organization before the World Trade Center attack--but which failed to prevent it.

Cleare was a cover name the CIA officer used in Cairo; The Times has agreed not to publish his real name for his protection in his new life.

Abdel Rahman, sentenced to life in prison in January for plotting what prosecutors called a “war of urban terrorism” against the United States, had been on the CIA’s radar screen in Egypt years before the New York bombing. And Cleare had been the CIA’s man assigned to penetrate his Islamic extremist organization.

Yet not only did the agency fail to stop Abdel Rahman before he and his conspirators entered the United States and became a threat, but Cleare’s efforts caused a tempest inside the CIA and ultimately destroyed a promising agent’s career.

Cleare says he tried to explain everything to the CIA investigators, insisting that he was just working all the angles in an undercover effort to get inside a group that was both tightly knit and deadly.

“What was done was done to meet operational objectives, and, occasionally, we bend the rules to meet them--and we are expected to,” he said. “If we didn’t, then the State Department could do everything overseas.”

He insists that he did not aid Egyptian terrorists. His supporters in U.S. intelligence add that if his mistakes did cause security risks, they were inadvertent--making a formal CIA inspector general’s investigation excessively punitive.

His private life, including his drinking, did not help his case, all acknowledge.

“Espionage is an ambiguous business,” one source familiar with the case said. “If you engage in it, you better make sure the rest of your life is unambiguous.”

U.S. intelligence officials insist that they found little ambiguous in the charges against Cleare.

Enumerating the allegations, a U.S. intelligence official familiar with the case said: “These actions were in violation of a number of agency regulations and policies, and constituted potential violations of U.S. law.” The conclusion, he said, was that “his employment with the agency be terminated.”

Abdel Rahman, a 57-year-old cleric with extremist views and a fanatical following among some Muslims in Egypt and the United States, emerged as a force to be reckoned with following the 1981 assassination of Egyptian President Anwar Sadat by a renegade Islamic group in the Egyptian army.

Although he was acquitted of charges related to the assassination, Abdel Rahman had developed a following of militants opposed to Egypt’s conciliation with Israel and in support of a rigidly Islamic state. He also had visited Afghanistan and shown active support for Arab fighters backing the Afghan rebels in their war against the occupying Soviet army.

The CIA’s Cairo station saw Abdel Rahman as a worthy target of its espionage and began working in the 1980s to try to penetrate his organization. According to several sources familiar with the operation, the CIA wanted to learn whether his Islamic supporters posed a serious political or terrorist threat, either in Egypt or against the West.

Cleare, an Arab expert, was assigned to the Cairo station in 1987, and his former managers say he appeared at the time to be headed for great things. “He looked for a while like he was a fast burner,” one source said.

In May 1989, he was assigned to handle a CIA “asset” with links to Abdel Rahman’s organization: an Egyptian attorney who did legal work for the sheik and members of his Islamic group.

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In return for the attorney’s help in providing information about the Abdel Rahman network, Cleare provided the attorney with special help in getting U.S. government visas for his clients.

Providing special approvals for visas was a powerful lever in Cleare’s espionage relationship; legal permission to enter the United States is often hard to get and is highly prized in many parts of the world.

Cleare says the attorney began to give the CIA good inside information about the organizational structure of the cells of Islamic radicals in Egypt, how they communicated, how they kept their identities and activities secret.

“The attorney was giving me excellent information about the Islamic fundamentalist scene,” Cleare said. “And his reporting was getting good marks [from CIA management]. His information was, as I remember, never contradicted by other corroborating intelligence. At no point did he say, ‘We are going to commit terrorist activities,’ but we [at the CIA] thought he would tell us if it turned to that--at least we hoped he would.”

But as the attorney was giving Cleare more information, he was demanding more and more access to the visa-approval process at the U.S. Embassy--and Cleare says he began to feel he was in danger of losing control of the relationship.

Desperate to keep the attorney as an asset, other intelligence sources believe, Cleare began going too far in getting visas through the embassy.

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He was fearful of losing his source, said one person familiar with the case. “Every CIA case officer knows the feeling: Are you in control of your relationship, or is the [source] in control? In this case, the problem apparently became that he was desperate to hold on to this [attorney]” and was giving up too much for his cooperation.

The CIA’s inspector general later charged that the attorney submitted forged documents for clients, and Cleare continued to arrange approvals. In all, the CIA investigation later concluded, he provided nonimmigrant visas for 20 people, “10 to 15 of whom did not properly qualify.”

Cleare insists that he never knowingly approved visas based on forged documents. And while some of those who received visas may have been questionable, he says, they did not seem to be dangerous.

“This whole visa relationship put me in an awkward position,” he said. “I didn’t know quite how to fulfill both my roles well. I was a good [intelligence] case officer, but not a good [visa] consular officer.”

And while Cleare was getting inside information on the Abdel Rahman organization, it was not enough to head off what was beginning to unfold.

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Abdel Rahman’s group was prospering; some followers gradually began making their way to the United States, later forming a volatile core in the New York City area. U.S. intelligence and law enforcement agencies were not able to defuse the threat. And according to CIA investigators, several of the people with suspected terrorist leanings may have been beneficiaries of Cleare’s visa help.

Still, had Cleare’s actions all been clearly well-intentioned, the final judgment on them might have been more lenient. But his personal behavior clouded the question.

He drank to excess, both supporters and critics say, and sometimes accepted free drinks, dinners and small gifts from the attorney and from other sources he helped with visas.

According to investigators, he received free accommodations from the manager of a major hotel in Cairo. And, while married, he had an affair with the Egyptian secretary of an Arab ambassador after providing her with a visa to enter the United States.

“He had a pile of acts that, if done in an effort to enrich himself, would have been criminal,” said a source close to the case. “If done to enhance operations, they would not be.”

Nevertheless, Cleare’s problems did not become an issue before his tenure in Cairo ended. In 1990, he received a transfer to a good job in Yemen and was in line for a promotion to an important field post.

Then the roof began falling in.

A periodic security review conducted on CIA officers turned up troubling clues about his conduct. Meanwhile, a CIA officer who had known Cleare in Cairo told CIA management he didn’t want a new assignment as Cleare’s deputy. In 1992, Cleare was ordered to return to a desk job at headquarters in Langley, Va., where his supervisors could monitor him to see if he could straighten out his life.

Then a rental truck containing a massive bomb exploded under the World Trade Center on Feb. 26, 1993, killing six people and shining an intense spotlight on the group Cleare had tried to penetrate. Questions surfaced about how the Islamic radicals could have carried out such a devastating plot--and how they had gotten into the United States in the first place.

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Abdel Rahman had arrived in New York in July 1990, using a U.S. visa he had obtained in the Sudan, and had become a leader at storefront mosques in Brooklyn, N.Y., and Jersey City, N.J.

In an explosive finding, a State Department probe determined that even though Abdel Rahman’s name appeared on a “watch list” of foreigners banned from entry, he had obtained three U.S. visas from CIA agents who had been working undercover as State Department officials in the visa lines at the U.S. embassies in Cairo and Khartoum, Sudan.

The CIA connection could have raised questions about whether the spy agency had secret links to or was somehow helping the man at the heart of a major terrorist conspiracy against the United States.

Under questioning, Cleare insisted that he had not approved any of Abdel Rahman’s visas. In fact, the only record of Cleare’s signature on an Abdel Rahman visa application was a rejection--not an approval.

Later, it was determined that Abdel Rahman had slipped through because of unrelated glitches in distributing updated watch lists to U.S. embassies, particularly smaller outposts.

Nevertheless, attention was focused on Cleare, and CIA investigators became convinced that he was guilty of wrongdoing in connection with the other visas. Cleare says none of his visas went to any of the four people subsequently convicted in the World Trade Center blast or the nine convicted with Abdel Rahman in the larger, anti-U.S. conspiracy. But U.S. intelligence officials say several recipients were clearly security risks who “had been arrested or were about to be arrested by local government officials” in Egypt.

Cleare only made things worse during his interrogation, sources close to the case say.

“He said that he had tried to describe all the ambiguities of the case during these 19 hours,” said one person close to the case. “He was guilty of stupidity for trying to get into operational ambiguities while hooked up to a polygraph machine, when he should have just been saying yes or no.”

In 1994, a CIA personnel evaluation board ruled that there was evidence of improper behavior and recommended Cleare’s termination.

But even today, some intelligence sources sympathetic to Cleare are not certain whether he was guilty as charged and whether his actions in Cairo involved understandable risks in a very difficult and dangerous game.

“You can’t dismiss the possibility that he may have inadvertently helped [Abdel] Rahman’s organization because of his ambiguous behavior,” said one intelligence source familiar with the case.

“I’m still convinced that he did not purposefully aid and abet [Abdel] Rahman’s organization, that this guy was not purposefully trafficking with terrorists,” the source said. “But it is possible that he inadvertently helped somebody in [Abdel] Rahman’s organization get visas.”

Cleare says he is trying to put the debacle behind him.

“Very good people get caught up in a dirty business and you get soiled,” he said.