Company Man: Thirty Years of Controversy and Crisis in the CIA (40 page)

The prisons I visited were hiding in plain sight, each housed in a squat, nondescript building that blended into the surroundings. The unmarked, unremarkable van carrying us would be whisked into an underground garage through an entrance tucked into the back of the building, where the steel gate magically opened just as our car approached it. Once inside, our waiting escorts took us through a number of locked security-coded doors and down some twisting hallways to the command center for an initial briefing by the Agency officers supervising the facility. Because there were no windows anywhere, it was hard to tell if we were now above ground level or still underground. The atmosphere was distinctly claustrophobic, and everything was very quiet.

The most striking feature in the command center was the bank of TV monitors mounted on the walls. And it was there, on the screens, that I first saw them, those guys whose fates had consumed so much of my time for the previous three years. They looked so . . . small, each in his
individual cell, either sleeping, eating, or praying. So seemingly peaceful and harmless.

“Where are they?” I asked one of the guys assigned to watch the monitors 24/7.

“Down the hall,” he replied laconically. “You came during quiet time.”

I knew beforehand that we couldn’t personally interact with the detainees; our psychologists and analysts stressed how important it was to minimize the number of people the detainees were exposed to, the fear being that master manipulators such as KSM and Zubaydah would seize on any new face as an excuse to bloviate, prevaricate, and otherwise try to one-up and divert their regular inquisitors. Still, having come all this way, I thought it was important for me to personally get some feel, some sense, of the conditions under which they were living. So arrangements were quickly made for KSM and a couple of the others to be separately shuttled to the facility’s interview rooms so I could enter their surroundings and take a look.

So down Dusty and I went, escorted by the chief of the facility, through another set of hallways and through more locked doors, into the cell block. The first things I noticed were the overhead lights—bright but not blinding. “They are kept on twenty-four/seven,” the chief explained. “Bright enough so we can see everything they’re up to, but not so bright that they can’t sleep. These guys don’t seem to have any trouble sleeping.”

And then I was struck by the music that was filling the cell block. It was the same music I had heard, but didn’t take much notice of, when we first entered the command center. Only now it was louder, though not deafening. But it was the choice of music that I found most startling. Coming through the speakers on the ceiling were syrupy, familiar-sounding pop ballads warbled in English by a woman. “Who is that?” I wondered aloud.

“Anne Murray,” the chief replied matter-of-factly, referring to the ’70s-era Canadian soft-rock singer. “We keep the volume up loud enough just so the detainee can’t hear some sound or voice that he’s not supposed to.”

“But why Anne Murray, of all people?” I asked. Was it some subtle psychological ploy?

“No particular reason,” the chief shrugged. “I just happen to like her songs.”

As I pondered the question of whether being involuntarily subjected
to Anne Murray’s musical offerings could be construed as cruel or inhumane treatment, I looked at the cells. They seemed large enough as far as cells go—maybe fifteen by twenty feet. Each had a stainless-steel toilet, a mattress, and a small table nailed to the floor, also in stainless steel. An individual shower stall was located nearby. Painted concrete floor and walls. Bars, not slabs, on the cell door, to ease the sense of claustrophobia. Everything looking and smelling clean, almost antiseptic. “All according to U.S. Bureau of Prisons standards,” the chief noted. “Much better digs than what these characters had on the outside.” I didn’t know about that, but I was satisfied, looking at the surroundings with my own eyes, that these were hardly dungeons.

After a visit to a small room containing a makeshift prison library and another filled with medical supplies, Dusty and I returned to the command center to talk to the staff. This was taking place in 2005, remember. None of the most severe EITs, such as waterboarding, had been employed for some time. Most of the detainees had been in our custody for at least a year—for KSM, it had been two years; for Zubaydah, it had been three. They were all compliant, and as cooperative as they would ever be. I was struck by the almost paternalistic pride the staff had in some of these remorseless killers—they told us how KSM, for example, had become a lecturer of sorts, holding forth at length about all things Al Qaeda. I found the staff’s attitude entirely understandable yet nonetheless weirdly disconcerting; it was as if I were seeing the Stockholm syndrome in reverse, with the captors forming a bond of sorts with the captives they were cooped up with in those windowless, locked-down facilities.

But I don’t want to overstate things. The staff at these secret facilities were dedicated professionals, and they never lost sight of who these detainees were. At the same time, they were realists, and they understood, better than anyone else, that with each passing day these detainees were getting more stale. The raison d’être of the EIT program, after all, was to acquire information about Al Qaeda plots and capabilities and/or bin Laden’s location. And people such as KSM and Zubaydah, cut off from the action and held incommunicado for years, no longer had much current information to provide on those things, even if they were now willing to provide it.

So that realization, more than anything else, is what drove the questions
that were directed at me. We don’t want any of these guys to die on us, the staffs at these secret prisons would tell me, sometimes in a group, sometimes in quiet, offline conversations. Do you people back in Washington have a plan about what to do with them? What’s the endgame?

Unfortunately, I didn’t know what to tell them, because as 2005 played out, the fact was that none of us at headquarters really knew. Not that we weren’t trying.

Following Bush’s reelection in November 2004, he reshuffled his senior national security team on the Principals Committee. Colin Powell and John Ashcroft left the administration, with Condi Rice and Al Gonzales moving over from the White House to replace them at State and Justice, respectively. Don Rumsfeld, however, remained in place at the DOD, and his presence, more than anything else, would serve to stymie the CIA’s increasingly urgent entreaties to the Principals to adopt a strategy to take detainees such as KSM and the other 9/11 plotters out of our prisons. We wanted to be done with them and, four years after 9/11, we wanted them to face justice.

It was much easier said than done. Part of the problem was a matter of logistics. Shipping them off for custody by a third country was out of the question—some of these people had the blood of three thousand innocent Americans on their hands, and ceding control over them to a foreign government was unthinkable. If they were brought to the States and held in a federal prison somewhere, the DOJ warned that they would immediately “lawyer up” and start tying up the government in legal knots, with petitions for habeas corpus and the like. Besides, no politician on Capitol Hill would sit still for someone like KSM being held, much less tried, in his or her locality. Too much exposure, too much risk for a retaliatory Al Qaeda attack, on the congressman’s home turf. No, the DOJ adamantly insisted, putting these guys on trial in the United States was a nonstarter, not even on a U.S. military base.

That left the Guantánamo Bay Naval Base in Cuba, where our detainees could be transferred and held somewhere in proximity to the detention facility built to house hundreds of Al Qaeda foot soldiers captured on the battlefield in the first months after 9/11. That way, they would face justice in the form of the U.S. military commission structure the Bush administration created in the wake of the attacks. If these newly created
commissions were designed to be used for anyone, the theory went, it would be for KSM and his 9/11 cohorts.

Gitmo and the military commissions were a perfectly logical solution for our detainees, except for a couple of what would prove to be insurmountable obstacles. First, because of factors both within and outside the DOD’s control, the military commissions’ structure existed largely only on paper. Nobody detained at Gitmo had yet been brought to trial, and no trials were on the horizon. Condi Rice, the newly installed secretary of state, was pushing for putting a “big fish”—such as KSM—on trial first. The new attorney general, Al Gonzales, signaled he was willing to go along; his career DOJ subordinates were doubtless relieved they would be out of the crosshairs. The DOD and the military, for their part, pushed back: Unsure of the viability of their jerry-rigged, untested commission structure, they wanted to test-drive the thing by putting some of the lowest-lying fruit, some Al Qaeda spear-carriers, through the process first.

The real DOD resistance, however, was more basic, and it came from the top. Don Rumsfeld wanted no part of the CIA detainees. From the outset of the EIT program three years before, he had kept his distance, ducking Principals’ meetings on the topic when he could, shuffling his papers and saying little at the meetings he couldn’t avoid. And now, in 2005, he had the nightmarish legacy of Abu Ghraib continuing to bedevil him. The last thing he needed was to take on the CIA hot potatoes like “black sites” and “waterboarding.” To be sure, I never heard Rumsfeld or his people ever come out and say that during this period. Still, his passive-aggressive approach to the issue, his subtle foot-dragging, was an unmistakable sign to us at the Agency. And it was effective. KSM and the others remained in the CIA secret prisons.

Around this time, a new figure entered the small circle of administration officials cleared into the EIT program. Harriet Miers was named White House counsel, filling the spot vacated by Al Gonzales when he became attorney general. Like Al, Harriet was a lawyer from Texas with long personal ties to President Bush. Her previous White House post was as cabinet secretary, where we had never crossed paths and where as best I could tell she had not been in the loop on intelligence matters.

Shortly after 9/11, Al Gonzales had asked me to begin coming to his office on the second floor of the White House West Wing on a weekly basis to discuss new and ongoing legal developments in the Agency’s
covert-action operations against Al Qaeda. My old friend David Addington, the highly influential and opinionated counsel/alter ego to Vice President Cheney, typically sat in on the meetings. When Harriet took over for Al, she continued the practice. Her first priority was to learn everything there was to know about the secret prisons and EIT program. So, after first wading through all the OLC memos that had been issued, Harriet spent most of her time in those early weekly meetings peppering me, in a polite and studious way, with questions about how exactly the black site was being run, how the detainees were being treated, and other nuts-and-bolts kinds of things. All the while, she would be taking notes with what I noticed was impeccable penmanship. It was a style markedly different from her predecessor, Al Gonzales, who had treated his weekly sessions with me as a sort of free-floating dialogue, often deferring to David Addington on where and how the conversation proceeded.

I soon came to learn that Harriet, notwithstanding her gentle, soft-spoken demeanor, had a steely and dogged resolve about particular aspects of the EIT program that mattered to her most. First and foremost, she focused on the physical condition of the detainees who had been subjected to EITs. By 2005 we had about twenty of them in our custody, and some had been there since 2002. As I have noted, one of the major factors driving the CIA’s efforts to get the Bush administration to settle on an “endgame” strategy was a basic dread that sooner or later one or more of them would die in captivity. For me, at least, I can’t say that it was motivated by any real sense of human compassion. Rather, I was worried that if and when they started keeling over—especially if it was someone linked directly to the 9/11 attacks—not only would they never face justice, the interrogation tactics the Agency had employed on them would inevitably be linked to their demise, no matter how attenuated or even specious those links were. In the political climate of 2005, I envisioned a topsy-turvy scenario where a dead terrorist would be elevated to victim status, and the CIA be reduced to the role of the accused.

I sensed that Harriet’s immediate and continuing focus on the detainees’ physical well-being was less self-centered than profound. For her, it seemed to be a matter of simple humanity. And so, in her own quietly persistent way, she single-handedly pressed the subject in Principals’ meetings and in lower-level sessions she regularly convened with me and other senior administration lawyers from 2005 into 2006. She
demanded to be kept apprised of any and all maladies each of the detainees was suffering, and what steps the Agency was taking to treat them. As it happened, none of them ever had any life-threatening emergencies or conditions during their time in Agency custody. The problems that would arise were ones anybody, anywhere might have—I recall cases of impacted molars, occasional gastric issues, things like that. The fact was, these characters were getting more and better medical attention than they had ever had in their lives. And yet Harriet didn’t let up.