Company Man: Thirty Years of Controversy and Crisis in the CIA (52 page)

Even though Panetta had lost the debate on the memos, he won something perhaps even more important and enduring: the gratitude and respect of the CIA workforce. By and large, the Agency remains a closed, silent place to the outside world, but inside the building and in the CIA’s secret offices around the world, news always travels fast and far. Before long, word of Panetta’s dogged, seemingly quixotic efforts to go to the mat with the White House spread throughout those cloistered environs. It was a fight, we all recognized, that he could have easily and logically avoided; after all, he had no connection whatsoever to the disbanded EIT program and was already on the record as having publicly decried it as “torture,” just like Obama had done. Yet he jumped into the fray, ferociously and to the end.

At the time, a few cynical outside pundits speculated that Panetta was only going through the motions, giving lip service to the CIA “old boy network.” That is bunk. I was there by his side at the time, and I never once doubted his motives or his sincerity. Neither did anyone in the CIA clandestine service, a population collectively endowed with a well-honed bullshit detector. From that point forward, Leon Panetta was not just a “made” man, so to speak, but the beloved capo in the eyes of the far-flung Agency family.

In the years since my retirement, I have been asked on occasion what attributes I think a CIA director has to have to be successful. There are three, I believe: 1) access to and clout with the president; 2) credibility
and influence with Congress; and 3) respect and trust from the workforce. Most of the eleven directors I worked under had one of those attributes. A few had two. Leon Panetta, in my opinion, is the only one who had all three.

The formerly top-secret OLC memos hit the streets on April 16, 2009. There were four of them in all: the August 1, 2002, “Bybee II” memo listing and approving the original set of EITs, plus three memos authored in 2005 by Steve Bradbury, one of Bybee’s successors as head of the OLC. All of them, as I indicated earlier in this book, described the EITs in graphic and, yes, chilling detail, just as I had intended when I requested the OLC’s views all those years ago. And, as the addressee, my name was right there in bold print, for all the world to see, at the top of each of the memos. The media, of course, had a field day with them. For the next couple of weeks, they were excerpted, analyzed, and widely (if not unanimously) attacked in all the major newspapers and cable networks. In all of this eye-glazing marination of every word of the memos, the conspicuous presence of my name on all of them drew predictable attention.

On April 19, the
Washington Post
published an article headlined “Justice Department Memos’ Careful Legalese Obscured Harsh Reality.” It had a box with photos of Jay Bybee, John Yoo, Steve Bradbury, and me (“the legal minds behind the [EIT] program,” the caption read) and a summary of what each of us was doing now. I was the only one listed as still holding the same job—acting CIA general counsel—as the ones we had in 2002 and 2005, when the memos were prepared. On April 29, National Public Radio ran a piece titled “In Torture Memo Furor, Rizzo’s Name Is at the Top,” duly noting that I was “still in charge . . . of well over 100 CIA lawyers.” Even my old antagonist Senator Ron Wyden popped up again out of nowhere, telling Rachel Maddow on MSNBC on April 28 about how “bizarre, even by Washington, D.C., standards” it was that I was still the top legal advisor at the Agency.

Just what I needed, in the waning weeks of my career. (Panetta’s pithy counsel was to ignore the shots: “Fuck ’em,” he told me.) By then, at least, I could see the light at the end of the tunnel. A very smart and seasoned Washington lawyer named Stephen Preston had been identified as my replacement, and his name was wending its way through the confirmation process. By June, my name once again had largely drifted out of the
press. There was only one small, final insult to endure: I was told that during Preston’s courtesy call on Senator Dianne Feinstein, she told him she hoped my continuing presence wouldn’t “poison” his tenure. This from a woman who had never deigned to have a conversation with me during her seven years on the Intelligence Committee.

None of this should leave the impression that the last few months of my career were depressing. In fact, I felt a deep sense of satisfaction and relief. Preston, I knew, would do well in his stewardship of the Office of General Counsel. Panetta was a continuing joy to be around; I like to think that we became friends in the relatively short time I worked for him. I was proud of the 120 or so lawyers who made up the CIA’s legal team; over three decades, I had played a role in hiring and mentoring the careers of virtually all of them. One of my old bosses in the OGC, Stan Sporkin, once told me that in the final analysis, the only true legacy the head of a legal office has is the quality of the young lawyers he brings on board and leaves behind when he departs. I never forgot that, and I believe I did pretty well in adhering to Stan’s dictum.

In terms of my own career, I had gotten far more out of my thirty-four-year roller-coaster ride than I ever could have hoped for. There was no doubt in my mind about that. There was also no doubt in my mind that it was time for the ride to end.

The Senate confirmed Stephen Preston as CIA general counsel in early July 2009. Stephen asked me to remain on board for a transition period, and we settled on a Labor Day date for my departure from the OGC. He told me he wished I would stay longer, and I think he was sincere about that. I will confess to having occasional twinges of “separation anxiety” at that time about how I was going to adjust to being outside the secret world I had been happily dwelling in for so long. Being privy to secrets, after all, is something that’s alluring, seductive, exciting, special. I worried that it might also be addictive, and here I was about to go cold turkey.

But they were twinges, that’s all. The inescapable reality was that I needed to walk away. I had been an architect, who had turned into a public symbol, of a hugely controversial Bush-era program that the new president had not just ended, but had repudiated in the harshest possible terms. I had no business trying to hang around in the Obama administration.
It would be an unfair burden to Panetta and Preston. The Agency needed a clean break from the past, and I represented the past. I didn’t want to have to be pushed out, as I had seen happen all too frequently to aging Agency veterans over the years who couldn’t accept that their time was over. It was always such a painful and embarrassing thing to watch. Besides, I was now over sixty, and I had spent literally more than half of my life at the CIA. It was never my goal to close out my career by keeling over in the halls of Langley. Enough was enough.

I moved out of the GC’s office to make room for Preston. I moved to a small adjacent office, and I tried to be as helpful to the new guy in his acclimation process as I could. (Lord knows, I had plenty of experience doing that.) Mostly, though, I tried to stay out of the way. In the late morning of my last day in the office, the quiet Friday before the long Labor Day weekend, I wrote my final e-mail to the staff. I knew that many of them had already departed for the weekend and wouldn’t see it until after I was gone. That was the way I wanted it.

It was a farewell message captioned “Checkout Time at the Hotel OGC.” Determined that it not be syrupy or maudlin, I ended the e-mail by quoting the ’50s-era comedian and satirist Mort Sahl, someone most of the lawyers were likely too young to have ever heard of. Identifying him as a “noted philosopher,” I lifted a quote from the title of one of Sahl’s old comedy albums. “The future,” I wrote in my departing words, “lies ahead.”

I then turned off my computer and left the building. The fact was, I had no plans, no idea really, about what lay ahead for me in the future. Except that after the CIA, I was never going to seek another full-time job again.

Why did I feel that way? I can’t really explain it, except to say that maybe it was for the same reason DiMaggio never remarried after Monroe.

August 30, 2012, marked yet another milestone in the tangled and turbulent decade-long history of the Agency’s post-9/11 detention and interrogation program. On that day, on the cusp of the Labor Day weekend, the Justice Department released a brief written statement from Attorney General Eric Holder that at long last eliminated the possibility that, after years of investigations and rancorous public debate, any CIA officers would be criminally charged for abuse of prisoners in the aftermath of the 9/11 terrorist attacks. Out of the more than one hundred cases Holder’s DOJ team had been investigating—actually, reinvestigating—over the previous three years, it had all come down to the deaths of two detainees allegedly at CIA hands, one in Afghanistan, and the other in Iraq in 2003. The terse Holder statement announced that “because the admissible evidence would not be sufficient to obtain and sustain a conviction beyond a reasonable doubt,” the Justice Department was not going to prosecute anyone for the two deaths.

And, on that oddly quiet and anticlimactic note, it all finally ended. No one from the CIA faced the specter of prison for abusing a detainee.

I was sitting alone at home, with my Agency career ever more distant in the rearview mirror of my life, when I saw the announcement on one of the cable networks. My reaction was a sense of relief combined with a lingering degree of bitter frustration that a result so predictable was nonetheless so long in coming.

The final two cases examined in the Holder probe—the details remain mostly classified—were long known to many of us in the CIA; indeed, it was the Agency itself that reported the two deaths to Justice shortly after each occurred. So there was no institutional effort to cover anything up. It was nonetheless apparent from the outset that a handful of CIA officers
involved in each case made serious errors in judgment for which they were investigated and disciplined at the time; whether their conduct rose to the level of criminality was less clear, which is why the DOJ was brought into the loop. Holder’s decision not to prosecute did not come until a decade later.

Neither of the detainees involved, however, had anything to do with the enhanced interrogation program. The death in Afghanistan was in another CIA facility. That is no excuse, of course. But at the same time, I and other senior Agency officials also deserve our share of criticism—in our single-minded focus on establishing rules for and closely monitoring the treatment of the likes of Zubaydah and KSM, we didn’t devote sufficient attention and resources in those frantic early years to other, less significant detainees captured on the battlefield and held elsewhere. In the wake of the death in Afghanistan, we tried our utmost to do better in this regard, and I think we did.