88 Days to Kandahar: A CIA Diary (56 page)

All of those we captured in the early, pre-Zubayda days, the low-level operatives and fighters, we placed as rapidly as possible into U.S. military custody to be flown out of Pakistan. We could try to question only a relative few of them. Most, no doubt, knew little of value to us. But even if they did, we were ill-equipped to extract it. The detainees were being kept in regular Pakistani jails, where they had ready access to one another and could coordinate their stories. They were brought to the Clubhouse for debriefing for a few hours at a time. My officers did the best they could, but they were not trained to elicit information from hostile parties, and those being questioned had little incentive to cooperate. Those doing the questioning had a general idea of what we
were looking for, and several spoke Arabic; but in addition to a lack of skills appropriate to an adversarial setting, they did not have the comprehensive knowledge of al-Qa’ida and its members that was critically important to the undertaking.

In presiding over this mess, it became obvious to me that if CIA were to be successful in rapidly gaining information from the so-called “high-value targets” whom we hoped to capture, we would need a serious, focused effort to do so. In short, we would need everything I didn’t have in Pakistan. We would need to have complete control over the detainees, so that we could set the environment and determine the conditions in which they would be questioned. We would need to be seen by them as the sole determiners of their fate, whether we were or not. Most important, we would need to have the means of bringing all available information to bear on their questioning. The most powerful tool in a terrorist interrogation is knowledge. The detainee must be convinced that there is a distinct possibility that we already know the answer to any question put to him. If he has a compelling interest in convincing his questioner of his truthfulness, the questioner’s knowledge is a powerful threat—often more so than any coercive methods we might name.

Two of the distinguishing features of CTC’s program were the methods it was permitted to employ, and the secret locations where it was conducted. The bar to admittance was high: only so-called HVDs, “high-value detainees”—those strongly suspected of having information concerning future terrorist attacks—were accepted. In most cases they had been captured by cooperating foreign security services, the Pakistanis in particular, and turned over to CIA. The agency would then “render” them to a so-called “black site,” a prison which a cooperating country would allow us to build and control entirely on our own. The reason for black sites was the perceived need for CIA to control all aspects of the detainee’s incarceration and interrogation. We did not want a detainee to have contact with any outside persons or entities; he would have to deal with us. And we would not trust anyone else to deal with him. In any individual case the lives of hundreds or thousands of innocent people might be at stake.

The other distinguishing feature of the program was the use of what we euphemistically called “enhanced interrogation techniques,” or EITs. Again, this involved methods we would not trust to anyone else, lest they go too far and we be accused of “outsourcing torture.” At the beginning of the program, the EITs had famously included “waterboarding,” which gave the sensation of drowning. Previously employed against many American servicemen as part of their counter-interrogation training, it was not physically dangerous but absolutely terrifying to most human beings. Only three of the detainees, Abu Zubayda, ‘Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri, and, most infamously, Khalid Shaykh Mohammed (KSM), the mastermind of the 9/11 attacks, were ever waterboarded. KSM was a particularly hard case. A man with the blood of over 3,000 Americans on his hands, his stock answer to any question regarding future terrorist attacks was, “Soon you will see.”

Even so, as the interrogation program matured and methods were refined, the interrogators concluded that waterboarding was superfluous and unnecessary. The practice was abandoned in 2003, well before I arrived on the scene. The other EITs were not nearly so harsh. They were designed and administered so that the detainee would not be physically harmed, but would be frightened, humiliated, and psychologically worn down, especially through sleep deprivation. Still, it was a grim business at best.

Whatever else one might think of the program, and whether or not one agreed with its methods, it was an efficient, highly disciplined program by the time I inherited it. But the political climate it was operating in had changed markedly. It is striking now just how uncontroversial these interrogations were in the early years, at least for those few members of Congress who were briefed on the details. Among the general public, fearful of another devastating attack, there seemed little concern for the tender sensibilities of terrorists. The administration would have done well to have harnessed that latent public and congressional support early on. Instead, Vice President Cheney, who had the final say, restricted congressional notification to the minimum permitted by law, and nothing was revealed publicly.

But three years after 9/11, the fear which had gripped the nation
was beginning to subside, and questions about Bush administration counterterrorism policies were being raised in various quarters, especially in Congress. This was probably a healthy thing. But what most affected public perceptions of detention and interrogation practices was the wave of revulsion, both at home and abroad, generated by public dissemination in April 2004 of shocking photographs of Iraqi detainees at Abu Ghraib prison being abused by leering American troops. Separate reports of abuse at Guantánamo only fed the fire. CIA’s legally approved interrogation program may have had no connection to the brutal freelancing being conducted by untrained and ill-supervised U.S. troops in Iraq and Cuba, but all three were soon conflated in the public mind. As the military was called before Congress to publicly explain how such abuses could have been allowed to occur and how they would be prevented from ever happening again, it was natural to question what CIA was up to, particularly as rumors of aggressive CIA interrogations were cropping up in the press.

In early 2005, as congressional restiveness increased, Cheney belatedly agreed to bring more members of the oversight committees fully into the picture. I insisted on participating in these briefings myself. Never did I hear an objection to our practices, even from Democrats; reactions ran more along the lines of one Republican, who expressed surprise: “You mean that’s it? That’s all you’re doing? They did worse to me in boot camp!” That sort of congressional feedback, though, only gave the illusion of support. Our erstwhile friends on the Hill would pull a disappearing act later, when the going got rough.

Whatever the moral, ethical, or political considerations involved, what made the enhanced interrogation techniques legally dicey was the international Convention Against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment, to which the United States was a signatory, and which therefore had the force of U.S. federal law. Anyone might agree in the abstract that “torture and other cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment” were abhorrent, and should not be allowed. The tricky bit was to define such treatment in practical terms. If, in questioning a known terrorist thought to hold information about an imminent terrorist attack, the American public might wish
us to have the option to use means beyond what U.S. police might typically employ in a precinct house with a lawyer present, as they most certainly did, the question was: How far, precisely, can one go without violating the law? The EITs were spelled out in great detail for the Department of Justice, which approved their use in August 2002.

That initial answer from the Office of Legal Counsel at Justice necessarily involved a degree of subjective judgment, and that judgment was likely to be affected by the political environment, the degree of public fear of terrorist attack, and the beliefs of the individual lawyers concerned. Unsurprisingly, two years later, after some key personnel changes, the Office of Legal Counsel’s practical interpretations of the law changed with them.

For CIA, the situation was doubly difficult. We were charged with preventing the next mass terrorist attack by al-Qa’ida. We knew by early 2005 that information we had extracted from the high-value detainees—including through use, in some cases, of aggressive interrogations—had prevented several such attacks at different stages of maturity. Of the approximately one hundred individuals interrogated by CIA during the seven-year life of the program, both before and after my tenure at CTC, only a minority were ever administered enhanced interrogation techniques; a majority of the captives willingly cooperated without resort to any extreme measures. Still, the techniques had been highly effective against a number of hard cases. With the fear of attack constantly hanging over our heads, no one wanted to be in the position of having to live with the thought that we had failed to employ all the legal means at our disposal to protect the country. Again, the question was: Where is the legal red line?

When I took over CTC, we no longer had a definitive answer. As my lawyers in CTC explained it, the Department of Justice had backed off its earlier interpretation of what was permissible under international law, but had not updated its specific judgment regarding whether use of the enhanced interrogation techniques was legal. Instead, they had given us a dodge: The law against torture would not apply in our case, because any signatory to the international convention was only responsible for actions taking place on its territory. CIA was operating
outside U.S. territory, and so was not subject to the law. If that sounds flimsy, it’s because it was. We insisted on a new legal judgment on the techniques to replace the one Justice had rescinded—one we could rely upon even if we were operating on U.S. territory. In the spring of 2005, we finally got the supportive legal guidance we wanted, but it would provide only fleeting comfort.

If I was facing enormous difficulties outside CIA, I wasn’t getting much love at home, either. My relationship with Jose Rodriquez, the hastily elevated head of the Clandestine Service, had gotten off to a shaky start and had deteriorated steadily from there. By late spring 2005 the rift was an open secret, and the subject of many rumors.

As best I could intuit the problem, Rodriguez wanted me to run the center as he had done. His occasional questions of me usually involved the minutia of day-to-day operations, and that was where he wanted me to be focused. He couldn’t understand why I was wasting so much of my time with the White House, with Congress, and with the Pentagon, to say nothing of my misbegotten strategic planning. In his time at CTC, he had avoided all of that.

Of course, I inevitably spent much of my time engaged on operational issues, especially those where we needed help from outside CTC. In the last half of 2005 alone, after my lengthy trip to Pakistan and Afghanistan, I traveled to Tampa and Doha, Qatar, for operational coordination with CENTCOM; twice to East Africa, where Somalia was becoming a worry; once to Europe for coordination with allies; and once to the Middle East. Ultimately, operations drove everything we did.

But I found my boss’s attitude incomprehensible. Our operations were going extremely well. My senior operations managers were terrific—certainly at least as capable as I was. I didn’t have the time to duplicate their efforts—not when our analysts were being hijacked, the government wouldn’t devote the resources necessary to conduct a proper drone war, operations were being thwarted by poor relations with the Pentagon, my workforce lacked support, parts of my organization were working at cross-purposes and, worst of all, the legal basis of our detention and interrogation program was under multipronged attack. My ops guys didn’t need kibitzing; they needed the support that
only their director could give them. Rodriguez’s views, though never directly expressed to me, were clear enough; I just didn’t have time for them. In deference to his interests, I stopped going to his morning meetings, and sent my chief of operations, instead.

From the start of 2005, Steve Hadley, newly promoted to national security advisor after serving four years as deputy to Condoleezza Rice, understood that aspects of CIA’s detention program were simply not sustainable. Already there were detainees in CIA’s prisons who had long since outlived their usefulness as intelligence sources. We couldn’t keep such individuals indefinitely; sooner or later they would have to come to light, be declared to the International Committee of the Red Cross, and be given some form of due process, whether they ultimately went to trial or not. As I said repeatedly in interagency meetings in those days, we couldn’t simply “disappear” people. If we couldn’t risk returning them to their home countries where they might well be set free, where could we send them? They would have to surface somewhere. When that happened, the U.S. government would have to say something publicly about where they had come from and where they had been since their capture, which in many cases had been publicized. Word about their interrogations would also get out. We would need something to say about that as well. There would be a huge “public diplomacy” aspect to what we came to refer to as the “end game.”

The fate of CIA’s detainees was also linked to Guantánamo. Public and congressional pressure was increasing to shut the place down and to adjudicate the status of inmates there—to release those who could be safely released, to repatriate those who could not be tried in court but whose governments could be trusted to incarcerate or monitor them, and to prosecute those who could be tried by military commissions. Throughout the early fall of 2005, I participated in endless meetings at the working level, as well as at the Deputies’ Committee and Principals’ Committee levels, all dealing with the “end game.” There was much thrashing about, but nothing ever seemed to get resolved. Everything was dependent upon everything else, and the Department of Defense seemed reluctant to do anything. DoD had supposedly been preparing for years to hold military commission trials. They continued
to go through the motions, but nothing ever happened. It was mysterious: Secretary Rumsfeld was a fierce taskmaster. If he’d wanted results, surely he’d have gotten them.