When it comes to villainous bureaucrats, it’s hard to assign a ranking for the most sinister aura, cumulative harm wrought on humanity, and general unpleasantness wrapped up in one. But Ronald Reagan’s CIA chief William Casey is definitely near the head of the pack. Prior to overseeing the CIA, Casey worked in military intelligence during World War II and thereafter offered up to postwar business elites that most unholy of statutory concoctions: the tax shelter (he wrote the book on the subject). He went on to serve on Ronald Reagan’s transition team, during which time he was said to fly to Rome where, departing from a black windowless C-141 jet, he visited the Vatican to brief Pope John Paul II on the latest developments in the war on communism. At the end of his life, Casey was directly implicated in the Iran-Contra scandal, narrowly avoiding prosecution when he was hospitalized less than 24 hours before Congress called on him to testify. He died of a brain tumor soon after.
Casey’s vampiric persona bears little resemblance to presidential candidate Joe Biden, a career politician who has spent close to four decades in Congress cultivating an image of patriotism, trustworthiness, and bipartisanship. But records in the CIA CREST archive, unsealed in 2017, detail Biden’s role in supporting Casey’s rise, and ushering in one of the darkest eras of the CIA’s history. In a classified memo sent to intelligence staff in the early ’80s, Casey praised Biden for giving the most serious threat to the CIA’s unchecked power—the Justice Department—a good thrashing. Casey highlighted “the tongue lashing [Biden] gave Justice for their passive attitude and general ineffectiveness,” as well as “his demand that if his grey mail legislation which he sponsored was not enough to enable them to go after leaks, they tell them what else needs to be done. The partnership between the two careerists was initiated by legislation sponsored by Biden attempting to ban graymailing, a tactic used in leaker trials in which classified documents are requested by the defense during discovery to pressure the government into dropping its case. This legislation would be Biden’s entry into a precarious balancing act between surveillance hawks like Casey and a liberal establishment wary of the intelligence community’s long history of overreach. Graymail represented for Biden the type of middle-of-the-road, bipartisan legislation that everyone could get behind.