Authors: John Kiriakou
The Reluctant Spy (26 page)
On November 18, 2003, my dad fell down the steps and hit his headâhard. They life-flighted him to Pittsburgh, but he died eight hours after the fall. My mother was so distraught by his sudden
death that the stress aggravated a case of diabetic retinopathy, and she began to go blind. Needless to say, she couldn't drive anymore.
I took two weeks of leave to settle my dad's estate, to get his finances in shape, and, of course, to do my best to console my mom. I also made arrangements with my cousin Maria, who lived nearby in New Castle, to pick up my kids and get them to my folks' house. But I also needed at least a small change at the office, too. I didn't think it would be too much to ask, but I guess I forgot who'd have to sign off on the request.
When I returned to my new assignment in early December, Mary Margaret called and asked me to come to her office. She had the deputy chief with her, a spineless cipher who's now the chief, and she expressed her condolences. I thanked her and used the opportunity to ask her for a favor.
I explained the personal situation I now faced. Official hours were 9 a.m. to 5 p.m.
“Would it be possible,” I asked, “if I worked eight to four every other Friday so I could get to my kids an hour earlier?”
She just stared at me, then said, “Well, eight to four isn't nine to five, is it?”
“Mary Margaret, I risk losing my kids here.”
“You should have thought of that before you came here.”
“Okay.” I got up and left.
Later on, as I sat in my office with my head in my hands, a colleague wandered in.
“Rough day?” she asked.
Oh, yeah, I said, then replayed my little drama with Mary Margaret.
She asked whether I remembered an Alice Callahan, an analyst for the agency in the early nineties. Alice had left the CIA and was now working for a big accounting and consulting firm. Apparently, the firm had a group that did risk analysis and competitive intelligence and had been hiring people with our skills.
I gave Alice a call; she reported that her firm had an opening in its McLean, Virginia, office and that I should fax my résumé to her.
I did just that, but before sending it off, I vetted every single word and entry against a booklet the CIA's career center made available; the booklet said exactly what a CIA employee could say in a résumé without violating the agency's secrecy rules.
The interview process was familiar: There were a lot of psychological tests that posed ethical dilemmas. One that I found particularly interesting was this: Did you ever consciously violate the rules and not regret it?
My answer, I told my interviewer, would have to be yes. She asked about the context.
“I worked with a guy who had a series of security violations,” I said. “He'd forget to spin the dial on the lock on his safe. Or he'd forget to put some classified paper in the safe. Well, the room was vaulted and alarmed, so nobody was going to wander in off the street and say, âOh, look at this classified document on trade secrets' or something like that.”
The chief warned him: One more time and you're out and on the next plane to headquarters. Sure enough, I walked into the vault one morning and saw a classified document on his desk. So I shredded it. Am I sorry I did that? Not really. I knew it hadn't been compromised. But did I violate the rules? Yes, clearly, I did.
I won't belabor the back-and-forth with the firm. They offered me a job, and I accepted. I really had no other alternative. Mary Margaret had made it clear that she didn't give a fig about my dedication to the CIA and my belief in its mission, my years of award-winning service, or my desire to continue a career in an organization that had become an emotional, as well as professional, part of my life. She was demanding that I make a choice between my second family and my first family. Ask any committed parent: That's not a choice at all.
Still, my journey with Mary Margaret was far from over. It was like being pecked to death by ducks.
When I told her I would be leaving and where I was going, she asked whether I'd sought the job.
“No, they sought me,” I said. The truth was, it was a mutual courtship. But it was none of her business how I came to the job.
She asked whether I'd had my résumé cleared. I told her I didn't write a résumé. Okay, that was a lie, but I'd had enough. At that point, I figured I owed that woman nothing.
“Oh, so you're saying they just decided they had to have John Kiriakou and came and got you?”
“That's exactly what I'm saying.”
She dropped it, but we weren't done.
One of Mary Margaret's underlings came to me on my penultimate day on the job and apologetically explained what his boss wanted done.
“Look, she told me to whack you on your PAR.” PAR was the acronym for Performance Appraisal Report. “It's a parting shot. It'll have my signature on it, but it doesn't come from me. I'm being ordered to do this.”
This pathetic guy was covering his ass. He said more than once that he knew I had
wasta
. He'd had one Middle East tour, but he didn't speak Arabic. He did know an Arabic word for influence, though, and he was right: I did have some friends in high places at headquarters, and I suppose that added up to
wasta
.
“You do whatever you have to do,” I told him. “But when you call her back, and I know you will, you tell her that I have documented absolutely everything that has happened to me here since the day I arrived. And you tell her, I don't care how important she is, I am not afraid of her.”
Five minutes later, my secure phone rang.
“Hello, John.”
“Hello, Mary Margaret.”
“Can you come up to the office?”
“Certainly, Mary Margaret.”
I called Katherine and filled her in. She was nervous: “Oh, my God, don't lose your temper. Don't lose your temper with her.” But it was probably too late for that advice. Not every situation lights my short fuse, as Katherine certainly knew. But she also knew my history with the agency and about the fight with the Greek baker, among other episodes. This was one of those times, she figured, when I'd find it difficult to remain cool and collected.
Mary Margaret's secretary greeted me, told me to go in, and wished me good luck.
Mary Margaret wasn't alone. She had a top operations officer with herâa tame witness, I figured, and said as much to him. He didn't say a word.
She started calmly: “I understand you had quite an emotional outburst this morning.”
I laughed. “Oh, Mary Margaret, no, no, no, I didn't have an emotional outburst. When I have an emotional outburst, people are going to read about it on the front page of
The New York Times
. That's an emotional outburst.”
“And you're not afraid of me.” It wasn't a question.
“Indeed, I'm not.”
“Well, I think we should lay our cards on the table,” Mary Margaret said. “I want to know what you have in this so-called file of yours.”
“Mary Margaret, tomorrow is my last day. All I ask of you is to write a PAR that accurately reflects my performance here.”
“I'm asking you a direct question,” she said. “What do you have in this file?”
“And I'm telling you I don't think what I have in my file is relevant unless I don't get a PAR that accurately reflects my performance here.”
Now, her tone wasn't so calm: “Let's just cut the bullshit. I'm going to write exactly what I think of you.”
“And then I'm going to write exactly what I
know
of you. But
what I write is going to go to the committees and to
The Washington Post
. And then you can deal with the fallout.”
It was like I'd jabbed her with a Taser. She was visibly twitchy.
“All right, Mr. Tough Guy, I think you're full of shit.”
She had finally lit the short fuse. “Okay, here's what I have,” I said. “I work in an atmosphere that encourages sexual harassment.”
“What? Are you kidding me?”
“I work in a group with three women, and I have a branch chief who is your protégé and who feels completely free to use the word âcunt' in our branch meetingsâto the point where the secretary covers her ears and pleads with him not to use it again. People can't use a single sentence without the word âfuck' in it. I've never worked in an environment like this, and it's the kind of environment you've created.”
“That's nonsense,” she said. “I would never encourage an environment like that.”
“Oh, really? And what about the Asian I was developing? When you told my branch chief to tell me to take the Asian guy to a strip club, spend two thousand dollars, and get blow jobs for the both of us at the end of the night?
“And what would the committee think if I'm spending two thousand dollars not just at a strip club, but a strip club owned by a big-time crime family? That's where you tell us to take our developmentals? To a mobbed-up strip club? To spend taxpayer money?”
It was like I'd punched her in the stomach. Her voice went quiet.
“Can you give me five minutes, please?”
I got up and walked out. The secretary had a big grin on her face.
“How's it going in there?”
“In the beginning, not so well,” I said. “But I think I've got her on the run.” People had begun to gather. Apparently, our voices had carried. Oh, hell, we'd been screaming at each other.
“We're pulling for you,” the secretary said.
The secretary's phone was lit up; Mary Margaret had obviously
called someone at headquarters. Five minutes turned into fifteen or twenty. Then she opened the door and asked me to come in. I sat in the same chair.
She got right to it. “What exactly do you want?”
“I'll repeat myself,” and I did. “I'm not asking for any favors.”
“I want you to promise me, in front of him”âshe pointed at the Ops chiefâ“that what was said in this room is going to stay in this room.”
“I want to read my PAR first.”
Later that day, they wrote a PAR that did accurately reflect my performance during my six months under Mary Margaret's thumb. And I never said anything to the intelligence committees in Congress or to
The Washington Post
. Much later, I learned that Mary Margaret had sent a “burn notice” on me to the CIA director of personnel. In it, she apparently said I was a horrible person and a bad officer who should never be rehired if I ever tried to rejoin the agency. And she sent it the very day I left the CIA.
Mary Margaret Graham served one tour overseas in thirty yearsâand that one tour was not as an operations officer. After I left the agency, she rose to become the deputy director of national intelligence for collectionâone of the top deputies to Director of National Intelligence Mike McConnell. She retired in early 2008.
Am I proud of how I behaved during my final days at the CIA? Hardly. I used words I rarely use, especially in mixed company, and I used bullyboy tactics when a more civil approach might have produced the same outcome. But I doubt it.
Consider my last conversation with Mary Margaret, a classic of sorts. “You have a big day tomorrow,” she said in a saccharine sweet voice. “Packing and whatever it is you have to do. Why don't you just take the day off?” Maybe she was worried I'd do something to sabotage her. Who knows? I politely declined the offer.
“No, I insist, you take an admin day and we won't count it toward your vacation.”
“I don't think so, thanks. There's always a chance someone might send a cable to headquarters and accuse me of time and attendance fraud. Count on me tomorrow.”
So I went to the office and worked a normal day. I went to some meetings, I sat in on a seminar, I had coffee with a guy from Jordan.
I finished my day and turned in my badge. And then I went home.
YOU NEVER LEAVE
the CIA, not really. You may resign in midcareer, as I did, or you may spend a working lifetime in its service before retirement and a gold watch, but the agency always remains a presence in your life. How could it not? The CIA, preferring to operate in government's invisible corridors, has become a lightning rod for unwanted attention over the six-plus decades since its founding. Its tightly wound culture both cements and fractures friendships, depending on the circumstances. It is a force that tugs at the sleeve of former employees, gently but insistently, even though you may have moved on.
In the late autumn of 2007, more than three years removed from agency employment, I hadn't been paying close attention to many of the issues then top of mind among intelligence professionals when I got a phone call from Richard Esposito, a reporter for ABC News. Years earlier, I had confirmed for Rich a story he had heard from a friend elsewhere in the federal government, and we had stayed in touch. Now he was calling about the story then dominating the headlines: The CIA had acknowledged that videotapes of harsh interrogations of some al-Qaeda prisoners had been destroyed even though agency and White House lawyers had urged that they be preserved. (Eighteen months later, the number of destroyed tapes was revealed; instead of a handful, as suspected earlier, some ninety-two tapes had been destroyed.) Rich's colleague, Brian Ross, ABC's chief investigative reporter, had asked him to ring me up because they had information that I might know something about what was
on the tapes. If I did and if I was prepared to discuss it, he said, Ross wanted to interview me on camera.
I was equivocal, telling Esposito that I'd get back to him shortly with a firm answer. Katherine, my wife and the love of my life, is wise and cautious by nature, and her instincts were that I should politely decline this particular invitation. If you decide to do it, she added, you must be very careful about what you say. I knew what she meant. There was no way I could or would reveal classified information. But if I could help to clarify the issue, I felt the interview would be worth doing. I waited a couple of days, got back to Esposito, and told him I'd be happy to cooperate in any way I could so long as it did not involve classified information.
It wasn't my first brush with television that fall. In October, both ABC News and NBC News had interviewed me about an August trip I'd made to Afghanistan at the behest of Paramount Pictures, which had turned the giant best seller
The Kite Runner
into a film and now worried about the safety of its twelve-year-old Afghan stars. The film included a male rape scene, crucial to the story and muted on film, but still potentially inflammatory in Afghanistan's conservative social culture. My job was to see if Paramount's fears were justified; if they were, Paramount would take steps before the movie opened to evacuate the boys to a safe haven in the region, where they could be raised and educated until they reached adulthood. The concerns
were
justified, and in October, Richard Klein, a Middle East expert at McLarty Associates in Washington, flew to the United Arab Emirates to make the arrangements for the boys' new life.
The two networks sent camera crews to my house in suburban Virginia, filmed twenty minutes of an interview about my role in the film's off-screen ending, and cut the tape to twenty or thirty seconds of broadcast time on the evening news. I assumed ABC had pretty much the same thing in mind for the interview about the trashed interrogation tapes.
I assumed wrong. Brian Ross met me at ABC News's Washington studios on DeSales Street, sat me down, and interviewed me for forty-five minutes. When it was over, we exchanged a few pleasantries and shook hands, then Brian took off. A cameraman wandered over and volunteered that he thought the interview was “terrific,” by which he meant that it was filled with news. “I wouldn't be surprised if they put it on the Web site because that was really interesting.” Uh-oh, I thought. Had I gone too far?
The interview was supposed to be about the destroyed tapes, but Ross spent only the first two or three minutes on them before he segued to the issue of waterboarding and Abu Zubaydah. I probably should have demurred then and there, saying that these were subjects I didn't want to discuss publicly. Instead, I responded to Brian's questions.
President Bush had talked about the use of enhanced interrogation techniques on al-Qaeda prisoners, although he and others in the administration had never addressed the specifics. At that point, the torture memos were classifiedâoff-limits to any current or former CIA officer inclined to go public. Still, Human Rights Watch and other nongovernmental organizations had been saying for more than two years that waterboarding was one of the enhanced techniques; if it was a secret that a few high-value al-Qaeda prisoners had been waterboarded, it was the worst-kept secret in Washington by December 2007. I honestly did not think that what I was saying was classified or even particularly sensitive, so I talked about Abu Zubaydah being waterboarded.
Waterboarding is torture, I told Ross, but it was legal and even justified, given the time and context of its use. People needed to understand the mind-set of the agencyâindeed, the entire national-security apparatus of our governmentâin the months after 9/11. We were taken by surprise, and Osama bin Laden and his murderous sidekick, Ayman al-Zawahiri, were boasting of bigger strikes to come. We had to take them at their word and try to do everything
humanly possible to forestall further attacks. Waterboarding and other enhanced interrogation techniques went through an elaborate review processâby attorneys for the National Security Council and the Justice Department, by Attorney General John Ashcroft, and by National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice. There was nothing willy-nilly about it. Only after all these people had signed off on the techniques did the proposal go to the president for his signature. That was my take on it at that moment in late 2007, no more, no less.
I couldn't go into specifics, but I did tell Ross that what we learned from Abu Zubaydah probably had saved lives and disrupted attacks against American and allied interests. I also told him about my own experienceâthat I had been asked whether I wanted to be trained in these techniques, had sought guidance from a senior officer in the clandestine service, and had declined the training afterward based in part on the officer's wise and generous counsel.
On Monday morning, December 10, 2007, Brian Ross called to say that he and Esposito were going to put up a piece on ABC News's Web site, based on the interview, complete with video links to excerpts. That was what I expected based on what the ABC cameraman had suggested a couple days earlier. What I hadn't expected was what Ross said next: ABC News planned to run a three-minute segment on
World News with Charlie Gibson
that evening, followed by an eleven-minute clip on
Nightline
later on. The next day,
Good Morning America
would get its bite of the apple with a five-minute segment.
Ross invited me up to New York to watch
Nightline
go live. By the time I landed at LaGuardia Airport,
World News
had finished up and my cell phone had twenty-six voice mails, mostly from reporters at other networks seeking interviews. SomeoneâI could never track down the actual source amid all the denialsâhad given out my number, which apparently was being passed around like a
joint at a college fraternity party. Okay, I thought, I'm committed to this now and had better see it through, for better or worse.
I returned as many of the calls as I could before crashing at my hotel, then started making the rounds the next morning. The
Today
show, 5 a.m.
CNN American Morning
, 6 a.m. CBS's
Early Show
, 7 a.m. Then it was midday news programs. At FOX, someone asked: Is it true you're a protégé of Ted Kennedy and you're running for Congress in Virginia? It was getting just that crazy.
One interviewer suggested I was guilty of hypocrisy: How could I reconcile my endorsement of waterboarding as legal and necessary under extraordinary circumstances and at the same time refuse to engage in it myself? A majority of Americans support the death penalty, I said, but I defy you to point out who in this studio would be willing to administer the lethal injection.
My position on waterboarding was nuanced, but television and talk radio were reducing it to black-and-white. Here we go again, I thought. After my Afghanistan run, I had coauthored an op-ed with Rich Klein of McLarty Associates. The piece, which ran in the
Los Angeles Times
and was picked up by eighty other papers, took issue with former defense secretary Donald Rumsfeld's assertion that Afghanistan was a peaceable kingdom with democracy taking firm root. In my experience, Kabul was an armed camp, and the situation there and throughout the country was deteriorating, not improving. Our piece drew fire from the talk-show terrorists, with Rush Limbaugh and Laura Ingraham, among others, labeling me an American-hating traitor for taking on Rumsfeld.
Now, these same people were calling me an American patriot because of my reluctant defense of waterboarding. On the left, opinion was divided. Some bloggers called me a hero for saying that waterboarding was torture; others were ready to string me up for torturing prisoners even though I hadn't participated in such acts. People just fixated on the sound bite that seemed to support their own view of the world. Before it was over, I got more than a dozen death
threats. The local police were great about cruising our house every couple of hours, just to make sure there wasn't a can-do fanatic among the crank callers.
SINCE THEN, OF
course, much has changed. We've tightened border security and airport security, and we have improved our counterterrorism capabilities. In the historic presidential campaign of 2008, the Republican nominee, Senator John McCain, the Democratic nominee, Senator Barack Obama, and his chief rival in the primaries, Senator Hillary Clinton, now our secretary of state, all labeled waterboarding as torture and rejected its use in the future. President Obama emphatically punctuated the point: He issued an executive order during his first days in office that limited all interrogations to the techniques used by the American military and detailed in the
U.S. Army Field Manual
. Then, in April 2009, the president declassified the memos on enhanced interrogation techniques and told CIA personnel that they would not be prosecuted for actions driven by the White House and Justice Department. That was a wise decision by our president.
Still, as of this writing, a prosecutor appointed by Attorney General Eric Holder is trying to determine whether CIA interrogations should be subject to a full criminal investigation. If the Justice Department decides to go ahead, it would effectively break President Obama's pledge to the CIA, since the Agency had legal cover, however dubious, to employ enhanced interrogation techniques. It would also be practically impossible for Justice Department lawyers to avert their eyes and ignore the people in the Bush Administration who seeded the legal ground for CIA interrogators.
Seven former CIA directors, serving Democratic and Republican presidents stretching back nearly four decades, have petitioned President Obama to reverse Holder's decision to press the case on CIA interrogations. They make the argument that a U.S. Attorney has already looked into allegations that Agency employees or contractors
had exceeded their legal authority; in all cases save one, the U.S. Attorney declined to prosecute. “If criminal investigations closed by career prosecutors during one administration can so easily be reopened at the direction of political appointees in the next,” they wrote, the decision not to prosecute would be rendered meaningless.
It's a fair point, as is their contention that cooperative efforts with the intelligence agencies of other countries would be jeopardized. I also agree with President Obama that his administration needs to look forward, not back. No one is above the law, but it probably would be difficult, if not impossible, to make a case against those claiming they gave the best legal advice they could, however flawed it turned out to be. I suspect the many reviews and Congressional inquiries of post-9/11 treatment of detainees will yield a relatively complete portrait that includes sins of omission as well as commission by the CIA and other government entities. Meanwhile, our country has huge problems at home and abroad that need the full attention of our leaders.
What I told Brian Ross in late 2007 was wrong on a couple of counts. I suggested that Abu Zubaydah had lasted only thirty or thirty-five seconds during his waterboarding before he begged his interrogators to stop; after that, I said he opened up and gave the agency actionable intelligence. I wasn't there when the interrogation took place; instead, I relied on what I'd heard and read inside the agency at the time. Now, we know that Abu Zubaydah was waterboarded eighty-three times in a single month, raising questions about how much useful information he actually supplied. In retrospect, it was a valuable lesson in how the CIA uses the arts of deception even among its own.
The national debate on waterboarding and other forms of torture got a second wind early in Obama's presidency, and I'm proud to have played a small part in it. In a larger sense, this is not an American conversation that has ended. If we have learned anything since 9/11, we have learned anew that a tension exists between
protecting our national security and ensuring the human rights guaranteed in that most precious of documents, the U.S. Constitution. Our challenge, in a world of unprecedented threats, is to strike a balance between the polaritiesâto find that place where the two can live reasonably, if not comfortably, side by side. It won't be easy. But then, it never was.
