Word: caseys
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...sometimes his personal demeanor, seemed designed to keep secrets. He mumbled and seemed to bumble, and wherever he worked in his dozen years as a top federal official, his desk and even his clothes suggested a mindless disarray. When the Tower commission tried to find out why a memo Casey had written about the Iran-contra affair never reached the White House, his aide's explanation seemed almost plausible: Casey had put it in the wrong...
...behind the befuddled pose lurked one of Washington's shrewdest and most agile minds -- an avid reader with a remarkable memory. Casey's skills at deception, in fact, helped him launch his career with the secretive Office of Strategic Services in World War II (he planted spies in Nazi-occupied Europe) and finally brought him his last and highest post, as a CIA director who particularly favored covert operations...
Toward the end of his distinguished if always faintly controversial career, however, Casey's reputation for keen intellect seemed at odds with his testimony before members of Congress last Dec. 10. To pointed inquiries on Iranscam, he repeatedly answered, "I don't know." The Senate Intelligence Committee had planned to quiz him on Dec. 16, but he suffered a seizure the day before and then underwent surgery for a cancerous tumor in his brain. He never recovered, and spent his last months in and out of hospitals...
Throughout his private and public career, Casey had been supremely self- confident and aggressive. Born in New York City, he was a postwar success as an attorney, a university lecturer on law and the author of humdrum books like How Federal Tax Angles Multiply Real Estate Profits. Not a humble man, he once boasted, "I was never in a law firm where I wasn't bringing in 75% of the business...
...Secord described his contra supply operation to William Casey, then director of the CIA, at three meetings during the period when any Government assistance to the Nicaraguan rebels was forbidden by Congress. One of those meetings was held in the White House. Casey approved of the supposedly private arms operation. In an interview with TIME last December, which turned out to be his final public comment on the affair before he was hospitalized for a brain tumor, Casey insisted, "We were barred from being involved with the contras, and we kept away from that." Secord said he doubted Casey knew...