Casey’s Revenge

This chapter describes how the author's first story on the intelligence beat not only put him in the middle of a vicious turf war between the two most powerful figures in the Reagan administration for control over US foreign policy, but it unleashed the intelligence community's retribution on him for reporting that embarrassed them. Secretary of State George Shultz, believing the United States should deal with the new Soviet leader, was pushing for a summit meeting between Reagan and Gorbachev. CIA director William Casey, who had managed Reagan's reelection campaign and who, like Reagan, was deeply anti-Communist, was doing all he could to derail any meeting. In early August of 1986, just as Shultz was about to announce that a Reagan–Gorbachev summit would be held in Reykjavik on October 11–12, a Russian diplomat was arrested in a sting operation in New York. The Russians immediately retaliated with a sting of their own and arrested the U.S. News & World Report Moscow correspondent Nick Daniloff on espionage charges.