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spoke fairly good English, because of Casey’s tendency to mumble. This official liked to pontificate—and Casey fell asleep. I started interpreting louder and louder. Eventually, Casey woke up. I was never quite sure whether it was fatigue or a strategic ploy by Casey to take the air out of his visitor’s puffery. I had heard from others that they had had similar experiences in meetings with the director. Nevertheless, when our meeting was over and the official and I walked out of Casey’s office, neither of us said anything, but we both knew that the foreign spy chief had just been insulted. It gave me some psychological leverage over him, given our unspoken agreement that we were going to keep this between us. We never discussed it again, but our relationship improved after Casey fell asleep on him.
    Casey reveled in running the CIA. When I served as station chief in Argentina in the early 1980s, I learned at one point that he wanted to come for a visit after the country’s disastrous war against the British over the Falkland Islands, a war that led to the toppling of Argentina’s military junta. The Argentines weren’t happy about the director’s planned visit, but I told them he was determined to come, and they reluctantly acquiesced—on the condition that he fly into a clandestine airport, keep a low profile, and use a false passport. I sent a cable back to Washington telling headquarters as much. In response, I was told by one of the director’s aides, “Casey is going to fly in on a C-130 with his wife, doctor, and a team of advisers, as well as his dog and kids. He’s not flying into a half-assed airport. He’s flying into the main airport in Buenos Aires, and he wants a band playing”—an exaggeration for effect, I’m sure.
    I went back to the Argentines and told them, in less vivid language, of Casey’s plans, and they flatly turned him down. They were fearful of the potential damaging publicity that might jeopardize their position in the delicate transfer of power to civilian rule. Before I could get a cable back to Washington telling the director of central intelligence (DCI) the Argentines’ response, the trip was canceled. Another Latin American country chief of station had beaten us to the punch with a similar rejection of Casey’s proposed visit. I was relieved on several levels.
    Around the same time, I attended a CIA conference with Casey in Panama. It was a logistical nightmare for CIA officials, who had to coordinate not only the director’s visit but also the visits of other Agency officials from around the hemisphere. I was impressed by their organization, but they were thrown off course when Casey asked if everyone could stay an extra night for a breakfast meeting the next morning. He added, “We will keep it simple. Coffee and donuts.” They hustled about to make the necessary travel arrangements, but procuring U.S.-style donuts was impossible in Panama in those days. Every five minutes during the breakfast, Casey would bellow in obvious annoyance, “Where are the donuts?” Of course, they never appeared, and in a thank-you cable to the chiefs following the conference, Casey signed off with “ NEXT TIME, YOU WILL GET DONUTS .”
    I was spared having to host Casey in any of my foreign postings. He never ended up coming to visit me, and I could not help but think that the Argentine officials had had a point in their refusal to meet Casey’s demands: the director of the CIA should come into a country with a very low profile and without an entourage. Before Casey, directors did not travel often, for security reasons. Today, the director travels with the fanfare of most cabinet-level dignitaries, as Casey had demanded. I have always been opposed to this type of director travel. But I should give Casey his due: in all his grandiosity, he reenergized the Agency after the Carter doldrums, and he was a covert operator at heart, going all the way back to his OSS days. He also had