Clair Elroy George was a veteran of the Central Intelligence Agency's (CIA) clandestine service who oversaw all global espionage activities for the agency in the mid-1980s. According to The New York Times, George was “a consummate spymaster who moved the chess pieces in the CIA’s clandestine games of intrigue.”
After serving in Korea and Japan as an enlisted man in Army
Intelligence, George was one of the CIA’s earliest recruits. As such
George challenged the traditional image of early CIA recruits. He was
not a son of privilege and lacked an Ivy League pedigree. By many
accounts, he developed a loyal following for his ebullient manner and
courage working in some of the world’s most volatile regions.
[3]
After a highly-decorated career lasting nearly thirty years,
including dangerous assignments in Beirut and Athens, George served for
three years in the Reagan Administration as
Deputy Director for Operations.
[4] He was the third-ranking official at the CIA under
William Casey.
George made headlines when he became the highest-ranking target of
investigation and prosecution in the Iran Contra Affair. After a first
mistrial, George was eventually found guilty by a jury on only two
counts of false statements to congressional committees investigating the
Iran-Contra Affair. He was pardoned by President
George H. W. Bush
two weeks later along with others involved and was never convicted. The
special prosecutor immediately thereafter moved to vacate the
indictments against George altogether. In 1996, one of the laws used
against George was held unconstitutional by the U.S. Supreme Court in an
unrelated case.
[5]
After his retirement from the CIA, George continued to hold legendary
hero status in the intelligence community and was a successful
consultant on international matters. He also volunteered nightly for the
Suicide Hotline. He died in
Bethesda at age 81 of cardiac arrest.
[6] His wife of 45 years, Mary, a figure in her own right as a model CIA wife, died in 2008.
(August 3, 1930 – August 11, 2011)
Beginnings
Clair Elroy George was born Aug. 3, 1930 in
Pittsburgh. His family moved several times, ending up in the western
Pennsylvania steel-mill town of
Beaver Falls, Pa., when he was 9. George would often proudly point out that he was raised in Beaver Falls.
His father was a dairy chemist who worked for the
United States Department of Agriculture.
The younger George, nicknamed “Red” because of his hair color, was an
academic standout and a flamboyant drummer in his high school swing
band and president of the student council. He would later have to join
the union to work as a drummer in local dance bands. He worked in a
steel mill.
Later he majored in political science and debated at
Pennsylvania State University, graduating in 1952. He was set to enroll in
Columbia Law School when he joined the Army instead in the midst of the
Korean War.
He learned Chinese and worked in counterintelligence. He joined the CIA
after being impressed by agency officers he met in the Far East.
In 1960, George married a CIA secretary, Mary Atkinson. She died in 2008.
[8] They had two daughters both born in Paris while George was assigned to Bamako, Mali.
Long CIA service
As the CIA’s deputy director of operations for three years of the
Reagan administration, the third-highest post in the spy agency, George
was responsible for cloak-and-dagger activities worldwide. He reached
this pinnacle after three decades of working as a spy around the world,
specializing in recruiting foreign agents to spy on their own countries
for the United States.
After the
Korean War,
George joined the CIA in 1955. Through cunning and mettle, he advanced
through the ranks of the clandestine service, working in Cold War proxy
zones in Asia, Africa, the Middle East and Europe. He went from Hong
Kong to Paris, from Mali to New Delhi.
The
Washington Post Magazine
in 1992 quoted a colleague as calling George “a top-notch street man”
who operated in what spies call the “night soil circuit” — the less
desirable posts of the world.
George served as the CIA’s station chief in Beirut when civil war
erupted there in 1975. His successor would be kidnapped and
assassinated. The following year he volunteered to replace the
Athens
station chief, who had just been assassinated by left-wing terrorists.
This gesture, perhaps more than anything, brought him recognition as a
dedicated officer willing to make his safety secondary to the needs of
the agency.
[9]
George returned permanently to Washington in 1979. He placed first
out of 100 candidates in a promotions ranking and was put in charge of
the agency’s African division.
William J. Casey,
whom Reagan had named director of central intelligence, appointed
George to successively higher positions, among them as the CIA’s liaison
to Congress. He served later as deputy director from 1984 until his
retirement in 1987.
Distinctions and medals
George was highly decorated by his country. He was the recipient of
three Distinguished Intelligence Medals from 1983 to 1988 and was
awarded the Intelligence Medal of Merit.
Iran-Contra Affair
George was the highest-ranking CIA official to stand trial over the
biggest White House scandal since Watergate: a White House-led operation
to covertly sell weapons to Iran and divert the profits to right-wing
Nicaraguan rebels known as the
Contras.
The operation had been engineered out of the White House by Marine Lt. Col.
Oliver North, who served on the
National Security Council staff. North was then aided by CIA Director
William Casey.
Aspects of the operation violated a congressionally-mandated
restriction of overt U.S. support of the Contras. George initially told
Congress that CIA was not involved in the operation, and he later
apologized for being evasive. He said he was trying to protect the
agency.
George would later explain that he had reservations about the
operation all along but said he did not push hard enough to stop it
outright. “At no time — which maybe I should have — did I dash into the
director’s office and say, ‘Hey, Bill, we have got to stop all this
stuff,’ ” George testified before Congress in 1987.
[10]
In the early 1980s, Casey brought George into the top management
ranks, and he became unwillingly — some said unwittingly — embroiled in
the Iran-contra affair.
As deputy director for operations from 1984 until his retirement in
1987 — essentially the man who presided over the agency’s
multibillion-dollar cloak-and-dagger activities in every cranny of the
world — George became a target for congressional and independent
investigators looking into the imbroglio.
The Iran-contra operation began to unravel after an American cargo
plane ferrying arms to Nicaraguan rebels was shot down in October 1986
by Sandinista forces. Congress, which had prohibited military aid to the
contras, asked George and others at CIA to explain what had happened.
George said he “categorically” denied CIA’s involvement to Senate
staff. This boomeranged on him as the extent of Iran-contra began to
unfold.
Called back to Congress in 1987, George said he’d been “almost
megalomaniacal in trying to prove one thing: that we were not involved
in that activity because it would have been illegal.”
Motivated by loyalty to CIA, he said he had not answered as fully as
he might have. He said he had “perceived my charter too small” when
initially hauled before Congress, but he added, “I don’t lie, and I did
not mean to lie.”
Casey died in May 1987. FBI Director
William Webster
took over CIA with a mandate to clean house. That December, George was
asked to retire. In September 1991, George was indicted on 9 counts,
including making false statements to Congress. After the first court
case ended in a mistrial, a federal jury at a second trial found guilt
in December 1992 over two charges, but George was never convicted. On
Christmas Eve, President
George H. W. Bush pardoned George and several other former administration officials, including former defense secretary
Caspar W. Weinberger.
The special prosecutor immediately thereafter moved to vacate the
indictments against George altogether. In 1996, one of the laws used
against George was held unconstitutional by the U.S. Supreme Court in an
unrelated case.
[11]
Amid the Iran-contra investigations, George seemed to take the long
view of a seasoned operative who knew the nature of politics and
spycraft — and their shadowy nexus. He told congressional Iran-Contra
investigators in 1987: “This is not the first administration and will
not be the last that becomes totally frustrated with its spy service.”
[12]
Professional reputation
Bob Woodward, in his 1987 book,
Veil: The Secret Wars of CIA 1981-1987, said veteran spies regarded George as “an old warhorse symbol of the CIA at its best and proudest.”
[13]
Jack Devine, who oversaw CIA operations in
Afghanistan and
Iran under George, told the
Washington Post that his former boss was widely admired for shunning self-promotion and self-aggrandizement.
Devine described George’s management style: “If you wanted Paris,
he’d send you to Somalia, and when you were done in Somalia, he’d send
you to Paris. He wanted to know if you were a committed operator, or are
you a dandy who wants to be pushing cookies around the diplomatic
circuit? That’s how he sized people up.”
[14]
Richard Viets,
a Foreign Service officer who was in India at the same time as George
and who went on to become an ambassador, said George had the perfect
personality for the agency. “He exudes trust and friendliness,” he said,
“but in fact is duplicitous as hell.”
George’s devotion to CIA was appreciated by agency employees and
retirees, who raised hundreds of thousands of dollars for his defense
and came to his trial to show support. Some, who came to be known as
“the Readers,” volunteered to pore through mountains of classified
material assembled for the trial in search of useful evidence.
During George’s trial, the defense repeatedly tried to inform the
jury of his espionage achievements, which prosecutors tried to quash
because they might impress jurors. Finally, Judge
Royce C. Lamberth told prosecutors they could admit “something equivalent to war-hero status” and leave it at that.
[15]
After the CIA
After his distinguished CIA career, George worked as a consultant for a variety of international interests from
Halliburton to
Ringling Brothers to European aristocrats.
Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Circus
found George’s talents especially useful as they sought the defection
and recruitment of performers and athletes from totalitarian countries.
The secretive Feld family that owns the circus also drew George again
into headlines for his alleged role in efforts by the Felds to spy on
critics of the family and its circus. George testified in court that he
worked as a consultant in the early 1990s for
Kenneth Jeffrey Feld and the
Ringling Brothers and Barnum & Bailey Circus
where he was involved in the surveillance of a journalist who was
writing about the Feld family, and of various animal rights groups such
as
PETA.
[16]
In his retirement, George also volunteered nightly for the Suicide Hotline from his
Bethesda
home, receiving calls anonymously and again using his well-honed people
skills literally to cheer people up. At the end, Clair George was most
of all a devoted father and a grandfather.
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