Company Man: Thirty Years of Controversy and Crisis in the CIA (42 page)

A couple of days later I sent the requisite “crimes report” to the Justice Department on the unauthorized disclosure contained in the Risen book that had caused all the commotion. It coincided with the publication of the book, which went on to become a best seller. It would take almost four years, but in December 2010 the Obama Justice Department filed a ten-count indictment against a disgruntled former CIA undercover officer named Jeffrey Sterling, charging him with being the source of the leak to Risen. As this is written, the case has yet to go to trial because of extended procedural wrangling between the parties. Among other things, the prosecutors have subpoenaed Risen to testify at the trial about his sources. Risen has fought against testifying, claiming that the freedom-of-the-press guarantees in the Bill of Rights grant him a “reporter privilege.”

The public controversy—and the behind-the-scenes machinations—surrounding the EIT program carried over into the new year of 2006. Media leaks about the program were now gushing, as newspapers, newsmagazines, and TV networks vied with each other on a daily basis to produce “exclusive” investigative pieces on the CIA “black sites” and what were now described as “brutal” or “torture” techniques the Agency was applying to its detainees. The word
waterboarding
was on its way to becoming firmly established in the national lexicon. It all made for sensational, headline-grabbing stuff. All of us involved in the program could only look on, silent and helpless, as collectively we were being publicly portrayed as untethered, sadistic goons. For its part, Congress offered no support or solace; still only a handful in Congress were privy to the underlying facts and demonstrable intelligence benefits the program was providing, and they weren’t talking.

However, there was one curious episode during this general time frame where the CIA—in the person of yours truly—had to negotiate with a journalist to keep a key, extremely dicey element of our covert counterterrorist efforts from becoming public. Actually, it had nothing to do with the EIT program. Instead, it involved the Agency’s innovative, complex initiative to uncover Al Qaeda’s worldwide financial network. The program was hatched in the early days after 9/11 as a joint CIA/Treasury Department effort to “follow the money” being generated by Al Qaeda. Like other post-9/11 CIA counterterrorist actions, it was unprecedented in its audacity and scope. In the years leading up to 9/11, the Agency had periodically floated something along its lines to policy makers
in the Clinton and Bush administrations as one of the most effective ways to attack Al Qaeda at its roots, only to be summarily rebuffed each time. I remember being archly lectured by my counterparts at Treasury and State that the United States followed a strict policy, based on long-standing international conventions and understandings, not to engage whatsoever in practices that compromise the “sanctity” of worldwide financial networks. I vividly recall the use of the word
sanctity
because its quasi-religious connotation struck me as a peculiar status to accord a bunch of wheeling-and-dealing, ethically challenged fat-cat bankers.

Anyway, passenger jets being crashed into crowded buildings at the hub of the financial world served to dissipate erstwhile concerns about “sanctity,” and post-9/11, the CIA was given the green light to begin a full-bore offensive against the Al Qaeda money machine. From the start, it proved enormously successful on a number of levels, not the least of which was that—unlike the EIT program—the details of this tightly held program remained secret. And secrecy was particularly essential for these operations—not only was there the risk of Al Qaeda being tipped off, but the sub-rosa, cooperative role played by foreign governments could also be exposed.

The sudden threat to the entire thing unraveling in public came in the unlikely person of Paul O’Neill, treasury secretary for the first two years of the Bush administration. I should emphasize at the outset that O’Neill bears absolutely no responsibility for the crisis, which was ignited when he was forced to resign his position at the end of 2002 after a relatively short, rocky tenure. Instead, the blame lies at the feet of the top levels of the Treasury bureaucracy, which made a decision to grant O’Neill’s departing request for electronic copies of all documents—thousands and thousands of them—that had come to his personal attention during his time in office. His former subordinates obliged his request by transferring everything onto DVDs and shipping them off to him shortly after he returned to private life. They did so without apparently bothering to review the stuff first—it wasn’t scrubbed for any concerns about the privacy of others, sensitive proprietary information . . . or highly classified intelligence matters. Writing about this years later, among all the flaps and screwups I observed in the government, I still consider what Treasury did to be unique in terms of its astonishing carelessness.

I cannot say for certain if O’Neill originally sought his records in
order to write his memoirs, but in any case they played a key role in a best-selling book in 2004,
The Price of Loyalty: George W. Bush, the White House, and the Education of Paul O’Neill
, written with O’Neill’s full cooperation by Ron Suskind, a well-known, experienced reporter with a Pulitzer Prize among his credentials. The book itself, while highly critical of various Bush administration policies, didn’t raise a ripple at the Agency. What we didn’t know then was that Suskind had his own copy of the O’Neill DVDs. And he was smart enough to recognize what he had—buried in the thousands of documents were accounts of National Security Council deliberations in which the top-secret CIA/Treasury joint operations against Al Qaeda were laid out in raw, comprehensive detail, with names, places, and dates. It was a journalist’s ultimate wet dream, and Suskind clearly understood what had fallen into his lap.

To his credit, it was Suskind himself who first alerted the Bush administration that he was in possession of some extremely sensitive CIA operational information. Coincidentally or not, he was working on a new book, one in which he would catalogue the inner workings of the government’s post-9/11 counterterrorist offensive against Al Qaeda. As I say, Suskind was a smart guy, and he did a smart thing, enlisting WilmerHale, a blue-chip, politically connected D.C. law firm, to represent his interests. He wanted to make a deal. Much as I was tempted, given all the crises du jour I was juggling, to delegate the matter to someone else in the OGC, I decided I needed to handle the mess myself. For one thing, my boss was now Porter Goss, and Porter, not to put too fine a point on it, was contemptuous of most investigative journalists. His visceral reaction, when it came to reporters, was to treat them with malign neglect. But he was a realist, too, and he recognized Suskind had the Agency over a barrel. Suskind, after all, got access to the documents in question through O’Neill and only because Treasury had blithely set them loose without any strings attached. I told Porter that, under the circumstances, our leverage was limited. Legal action against a high-profile journalist like Suskind and/or against O’Neill, a Bush cabinet appointee turned harsh critic, would have been time-consuming and messy, with no guarantee that CIA information could be retrieved and protected.

“Make the best deal you can,” Porter responded grudgingly, “but you need to do it yourself.”

Thus began a series a negotiating sessions with the WilmerHale attorneys,
led by Randy Moss, former head of the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel during the Clinton administration. I knew Randy well and trusted him completely to handle this delicate matter in a responsible, discreet way. I was accompanied to the sessions at the WilmerHale offices by the CTC’s chief of financial operations, a brilliant, somewhat intense man who had masterminded the plans against Al Qaeda that were described in the O’Neill documents. As best I can recall, one or two Treasury representatives also attended. Suskind himself was nowhere to be seen.

We were making progress with Randy and his colleagues, albeit slowly. The discussions centered around how the government could get access to the massive volume of documents—the Agency, at least, still wasn’t certain how many pertained to our operations and the precise level of detail they contained—and then figure out a way for the sensitive stuff to be redacted.

The talks were civil, with neither side issuing any threats or ultimatums. But they dragged on for a while, into early 2006, and Ron Suskind, waiting in the wings, apparently got impatient. One day, I got a call out of the blue in my office. It was from Suskind. We still hadn’t met, but right off the bat, he put us on a first-name basis. “John,” the staccato voice crackled on the other end of the line, “you and I can work this out ourselves. We need to get together, just the two of us.”

I was startled, to say the least. I had always avoided reporters during my CIA career, and suddenly here was one on the phone with me, and he was going around his lawyers, to boot. I put Suskind off until I could contact Randy Moss to make sure he knew what was happening. I don’t know if he did until I informed him, but Randy said he was fine with me meeting alone with his client. So was Porter, who seemed somewhere between baffled and appalled by the abrupt turn of events. So, with some trepidation, I called Suskind back and agreed to meet.

“Come to Bread and Chocolate on Connecticut Avenue at two o’clock tomorrow. Sit in the back of the place and I’ll find you,” he told me in urgent, furtive tones. Jeez, I thought to myself as I hung up the phone. It’s like I was meeting some secret agent or something.

The next day, I arrived at Bread and Chocolate—a fancy coffee and pastry place—at the appointed time. It was dark and mostly empty, so I sat at a table in the back and waited. I ordered coffee, which came in a cup
about the size of a rain barrel. A few minutes later, Suskind walked in quickly and sat down. Then he began talking. And kept talking, nonstop, for about an hour.

To establish his bona fides, he began by assuring me he wasn’t interested in endangering national security and would do whatever I thought was necessary to ensure the security of the O’Neill files (as would O’Neill himself, he quickly added). The book he was writing would be “a positive story, a heroic story” about “Team Tenet.” I had never heard the latter phrase before, and I was instinctively wary about any journalist claiming he was writing something “positive” about the CIA. But he was on a roll, so I just went with it, sipping my vat of coffee.

Eventually, Suskind got to his main pitch. He wanted the CIA’s cooperation in the form of interviews with some of our people “in the trenches” of the counterterrorist war. Not Tenet himself or the people close to him—he cryptically alluded to being already in contact with some of them. Rather, he said he wanted to talk to people at the staff level, “the real heroes,” as he put it. On and on he went, until I finally told him I had to go. I had barely gotten a word in, but he had exhausted me. “Let me get back to you,” I said before finally escaping.

I reported all of it to Porter. For all of his fast-talking melodramatics, I found Suskind oddly likable. He had never linked his requests for interviews as a quid pro quo for giving us the O’Neill files. He didn’t have to. I recommended to a clearly skeptical Porter that we make the deal. “Okay,” Porter finally said, “but I wonder if he is being straight with us.”

So I made the arrangements. Three of our preeminent Al Qaeda experts from the CTC separately met with Suskind, chaperoned by the CIA public affairs staff. It took a lot of reassurance on my part to get them to do it—CIA personnel, by nature and training, are spooked about talking to the media. Still, they gave Suskind some nuggets of insider stuff—war stories, really—about what the Agency was doing in its offensive against Al Qaeda. He seemed satisfied enough, at least for the time being. But he was a reporter, after all, and he soon wanted more. When he called me again, a few weeks before the book’s scheduled publication date, Suskind’s voice was tinged with even more urgency and furtiveness than I remembered, which I didn’t think was possible.

Suskind had a simple (!) request: He wanted to interview the CIA source who had led us to Khalid Sheikh Mohammed in 2003. Once again,
Suskind rattled off all of his reasons in a dizzying cascade of words. As I listened, it occurred to me that he knew more about the guy than I did. This time, however, I did manage to squeeze in a few sentences. “I’ll check, Ron, but I think that’s a bridge too far,” I said, in what might have been the biggest understatement of my career. I never checked, and I never spoke to Suskind again.

In the end, Suskind did keep his end of the bargain. He let the government gain access to his O’Neill documents, and it took a squadron of people—from the CIA and other federal agencies—to wade through all of it. It was a laborious and time-consuming process, but it eventually happened.

Also, Suskind kept the most sensitive, damaging information about the CTC’s financial operations against Al Qaeda out of his book,
The One Percent Doctrine
, which came out later in 2006. It was written the way Suskind talked: entertaining, breathless, rhetorically over the top. It became a best seller.

A coda to the story: Notwithstanding Suskind’s omission of the most damaging details about the CTC’s financial operations,
The One Percent Doctrine
was honeycombed with other classified information. I had no idea that Suskind had any of it, or where it came from. But Suskind had his job, and I had mine. Shortly after the book came out, the Agency filed a “crimes report” with the Justice Department about the unauthorized disclosures.

It wasn’t personal. It was strictly business.