R. James Woolsey, CIA director under Clinton, dies at 84

Woolsey fought budget cuts and the Aldrich Ames spy case

R. James Woolsey Jr., who headed the Central Intelligence Agency in the first two years of the Clinton administration when Congress was seeking to slash its budget and the agency was reeling from the discovery that one of its senior employees had sold secrets to Moscow, died Tuesday at his home in Washington, D.C. He was 84.

His wife, Conchita Sarnoff, said the cause was a stroke.

Before becoming director of the CIA in 1993, Woolsey had established himself as a bipartisan national-security specialist who served as an arms-control negotiator during the Reagan and George H.W. Bush administrations and as undersecretary of the Navy during the Carter administration.

Woolsey became director of the CIA as the Cold War had recently been declared over and Americans expected a “peace dividend” in the form of lower spending on national security, leaving him fighting to avoid steep cuts in the CIA budget. During his February 1993 confirmation hearing before a Senate committee, he argued that intelligence-gathering remained vital.

“Yes, we have slain a large dragon,” he said, alluding to the collapse of the Soviet Union. “But we live now in a jungle filled with a bewildering variety of poisonous snakes. And in many ways, the dragon was easier to keep track of.” Terrorism, North Korean missiles and Russian crime gangs were among the new threats he identified.

Shortly after arriving at the CIA, Woolsey learned that the Federal Bureau of Investigation was investigating a senior CIA official, Aldrich Ames. In February 1994, Ames was arrested and accused of selling national security secrets to the Kremlin for nearly a decade. The Wall Street Journal reported that Ames, a senior CIA officer who admitted selling U.S. intelligence secrets to Moscow for $2.5 million, died in January at a federal prison in Cumberland, Md.

Congressional oversight committees pushed Woolsey to fire people for failing to discover the betrayal earlier and denounced his refusal to do so. In a 2010 oral history at the University of Virginia, Woolsey said that he couldn’t find anyone to fire because those most responsible for the failure had retired. He reprimanded 11 current and former officials.

Woolsey was frustrated by a lack of access to President Bill Clinton, who appointed him to the top CIA job. He told the Washington Post he could recall only two face-to-face meetings with Clinton during his nearly two years as CIA director and said he conveyed information to White House officials rather than directly to the president. “I didn’t have a bad relationship with him, I just had no relationship,” Woolsey told the Post.

Much of his time was consumed by congressional oversight hearings, which he likened to “a shark pool.” Among his toughest critics was Sen. Dennis DeConcini, an Arizona Democrat who served as chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee. DeConcini said Woolsey was running the CIA in a business-as-usual mode when it needed a complete overhaul.

In December 1995, Woolsey submitted his resignation and returned to private law practice.

One of his rare public-relations triumphs as CIA director was cooperation with public health officials. Responding to a request from the Health and Human Services Department, he agreed to share the CIA’s expertise in analyzing fuzzy satellite photographs with medical researchers seeking better ways to spot signs of breast cancer. “We noticed that, with not much change, the algorithms that we used to help analysts identify dispersed missiles were very useful in denoting calcifications of breast tissue ducts,” he said in the oral history. The collaboration was dubbed the “missiles to mammograms” project.

Robert James Woolsey Jr., an only child known as Jim, was born Sept. 21, 1941, in Tulsa, Okla. At Stanford University, he was a member of the debate team and earned a bachelor’s degree in 1963. He studied at Oxford as a Rhodes scholar before earning a law degree in 1968 at Yale, where he served as managing editor of the law review.

In the late 1960s, he served as an Army lieutenant at the Pentagon, having joined the Reserve Officers’ Training Corps in college. His first meeting with Paul Nitze, then deputy defense secretary, was at a wedding reception in Washington, where Nitze berated the young man for his opposition to the Vietnam War. Nitze later hired Woolsey in 1969 as a member of the U.S. delegation to the Strategic Arms Limitation Talks. In the early 1970s, Woolsey served as general counsel of the Senate Armed Services Committee.

A Democrat, Woolsey held relatively hawkish defense views that aligned him with conservative national-security specialists, including Brent Scowcroft and Richard Perle.

During the 1992 election, Woolsey endorsed Clinton and made a small campaign contribution but did not expect to be offered any role at the CIA. He was surprised to be summoned to Little Rock, Ark., in December 1992 for a late-night one-on-one with the president-elect. “We talked about Oklahoma and Arkansas football,” Woolsey recalled. “We talked about where it was good to fish in the Ozarks.” One topic they barely mentioned was the CIA.

Aside from his wife, he is survived by three sons from his previous marriage to Suzanne Haley, which ended in divorce. He later was married to Nancye Miller. He married Sarnoff in 2020. She is the author of “TrafficKing: The Jeffrey Epstein Case.”

In his oral history, Woolsey offered this advice to presidents choosing CIA directors: “You want to make sure you never offer the job to anybody who wants to be liked.”