Playing to the Edge: American Intelligence in the Age of Terror (22 page)

I got another, even more subtle test, a few weeks later in a counterterrorism update. The briefer, a member of the band of sisters that helped track down bin Laden, laid a complex spider chart out in front of me and proceeded to show the obscure connections that were driving her analysis. I actually knew something about this and began to ask a series of questions, causing a slight smile to form on her lips. Again, I later learned that I had been facing a roomful of skeptics, but had begun to change their minds. In their view, I was more substantive and more interactive than the average director. Everyone brings his own strengths to a job. This was one of mine.

At my first formal staff meeting on the seventh floor, I walked into the conference room, and nobody stood up. Interesting, I thought. This is a different culture.

I sat down and began: “I didn’t hire any of you people, and if that’s a problem for you, you’ve got forty-eight hours to tell me. Otherwise, I’m going to assume you’re on my team.” That was the senior-level version of “Nobody sent me up here to blow anything up.” I had three people come and talk to me, but only one left (for personal reasons).

My offer did not apply to the Gosslings, that small group of advisors
that Porter had brought with him from Congress. They had to go, but not because I was convinced they had done anything wrong. Frankly, I didn’t care and I wasn’t going to spend any time finding out. They had to go because CIA needed a fresh break between directors.

I directed that while they were still on the payroll, they would not report for work at CIA headquarters but at one of our outlying facilities. And then I told the general counsel and head of personnel to use my full authorities to build as platinum a parachute as we could for each one of them. They got great severance packages. There is a good reason that the director of CIA has extraordinary personnel authorities. You don’t want people knowing big secrets leaving the agency with big grudges.

Of course, I had to identify exactly whom I meant. A lot of people worked for Porter. It was natural that many agency veterans would have been close to the director. I directed that those who had parachuted in with Director Goss had to go. Those who were here all along with the infantry would stay.

The best of the Gosslings was Mike Kostiw, whose earlier career with the agency was cut short two decades before over whether or not he intended to pay for a pound of bacon he had grabbed at a local supermarket. Kostiw understood my current decision and later frequently dropped by for friendly and useful conversations.

Kostiw’s longtime sponsor, Senator John McCain, wasn’t nearly as understanding. He called me, and in a tirade, placed the entire blame for Kostiw’s fate on Steve Kappes. It was all I could do to interrupt and note that it could not have been Kappes’s fault, since he was not yet on board. “I did this, Senator.” Click.

It didn’t take very long to realize, as I began settling into the job, that the biggest immediate challenge would be dealing with what I came to think of as the elephant in the room—CIA’s program for detaining and interrogating senior al-Qaeda members. We were still holding leaders of the terrorist organization in a network of secret prisons, which Dana Priest of the
Washington Post
had written about the previous fall. Predictable outrage ensued, at home and abroad. Shortly after the
Post
articles,
the
New York Times
reported that CIA’s inspector general had issued a classified report suggesting that interrogation techniques used in those secret prisons, including waterboarding, might violate the international Convention Against Torture. These issues—this black cloud—had to be dealt with, that was obvious.

To me it was clear that this could no longer continue as just George Bush’s program or CIA’s program. We had to build up a consensus to make it America’s program by explaining and justifying whom we held, where, for how long, and what techniques we used when interrogating them. Presidents—any president—get to do one-offs based on raw executive authority, but long-term programs, like this one had become, needed broad political support. I quickly realized that I had to be willing to pull back on some things and perhaps be less aggressive if that was needed to build up such a consensus.

In one sense, inside the administration, I was pushing on an open Oval Office door. Although he never specifically said this to me, the president was already working to make the programs on which he was relying available to his successors. That meant building political consensus and political support.

We were going to continue seizing people, and some would be transferred to a third party through a process known as rendition—the apprehension and extrajudicial transfer of an individual from one country to another—but we would still want to keep some ourselves and we would still need some place to hold them. And we needed legal clarity on which of those thirteen previously authorized interrogation techniques—including waterboarding, slapping, nudity, sleep deprivation, and food rationing—we wanted to continue using. Porter wisely had put all of them on hold after the Detainee Treatment Act changed the legal landscape in late 2005. I knew some would be taken off the table, but I wanted to preserve others for our interrogators.

The Department of Defense was in the process of rewriting the Army Field Manual on interrogations, trying to get right with the American people after genuine abuses by army guards at Abu Ghraib prison outside
Baghdad, where Iraqi detainees were led on leashes and physically and sexually abused. We knew the military would produce an extremely conservative document—too conservative, perhaps, for a war against the most dangerous and violent terrorist organization on the planet.

At my office at Langley I had access to several three-ring binders, each four or five inches thick, that were pretty much the
encyclopedia detainus
—they had everything in them, from legal opinions, to what interrogation techniques we used against which people, how many reports we got from each detainee, everything. I would take them home on weekends and thoroughly read and master them.

I also had interrogators come in and talk to me about their experiences. There was one I gained a great deal of respect for. He had interrogated Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the al-Qaeda mastermind of the September 11 terrorist attacks. He had built up a personal relationship with KSM, who was born in Kuwait of Pakistani and Bosnian descent and was captured in Pakistan in 2003. The officer is still undercover, so I can’t use his name. KSM referred to him as Amir, a term of respect for the man who had waterboarded him and made him feel, over and over again, as though he were drowning. The interrogation techniques—in KSM’s case, especially sleep deprivation—had pushed him into what the interrogators called a zone of cooperation from his previous zone of defiance and after that, KSM’s questioning resembled more an interview than an interrogation. The information we got from him and others was incredibly valuable.

As I dove deeper into this program as a new director, I could see that all of this had been done out of a sense of duty, not enthusiasm, and no one was defending using waterboarding and the other aggressive techniques against all enemies in all circumstances. We were not trying to make a universal case. The techniques were for this one time for this one enemy—fanatically religiously motivated—who had flown jet airliners into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, killing thousands, and would do so again and again if they had the chance.

Abu Zubaida, a Saudi national and al-Qaeda leader who was arrested
in Pakistan in 2002, was the first terrorist waterboarded by CIA. When he was all done, he actually said that we owed this to all the “brothers” who would come into the interrogation program. Cooperating with us was a sin, he said, and he could go to hell. But Allah teaches that he will not send a burden that is more than we can bear, he told us, and we had done that. And therefore he could cooperate with us and still go to paradise.

By late July, I had spent the better part of two months taking all of this in. I had become a sponge, reading the binders, talking to people, weighing multiple points of view. I could have walked away from this and recommended to the president that we shut the program down. I had to make a choice. Was this right? Was this worth it?

I thought about the similar circumstances surrounding the beginnings of the Stellarwind program. Now, like then, I knew that pushing forward would bring its own risks and inevitable controversies.

I decided that the CIA program
as we were re-crafting it
would be worth the freight and that we could buy down the tariff if we aggressively briefed Congress and solicited some public support from it; if we briefed the American people in as open a way as possible; and if we quietly informed our allies more fully of the parameters and limits of what we were doing.

My first challenge would be within the executive branch. I remember sitting at my desk on the seventh floor of our headquarters in Langley overlooking the sylvan woods of northern Virginia, turning around to face my computer, and drafting a two-page memo on what we needed to do. It would become my talking points for a meeting I scheduled with Steve Hadley, the national security advisor, in early August.

I briefed Steve on five big points related to CIA’s black sites. “Number one—really important—we’re not the nation’s jailers,” I explained. “There’s got to be an exit strategy.” We still had a number of people in those prisons. “I don’t claim the intelligence value of these guys is zero, but it’s low enough now that other things are more important.” In truth, detainee reporting had slowed down dramatically. There had been no
new entrants for nearly a year, EITs had been suspended, and we judged that only a few of the residuals (like Abu Zubaida and Khalid Sheikh Mohammed) still retained significant intelligence value. In the first half of 2006, only about 5 percent of CT reporting had come from detainees.

There were some detainees whom we wanted to hand over to the Department of Defense prison at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba. And there were some we could send to other countries for continued detention. The dividing line, I told Hadley, was what we called an RTB—a Reason to Believe we could prosecute them. If we had an RTB, they went in the Gitmo column, and if we didn’t, they were going to a country that had a legitimate interest in them.

“Number two, Steve, we still need to keep open our options for holding terrorists and interrogating them, especially with the Pentagon rewriting the Army Field Manual on interrogations in a way that took even such techniques as sleep management—pretty much what we do to our own military recruits—off the table at Guantánamo and other DOD prisons.

“Number three, as we capture terrorists in the future, we will think of holding them for only about sixty days at a time, and we won’t put anybody in detention without an exit strategy.” We could always decide to hold them for another sixty days, or another, if we thought they still possessed valuable information, but we would have to make an affirmative decision to do so. Absent this approach, detention for many would become open-ended, as it had for people we’d been holding for three and a half years. Besides, we found that immediate requirements had usually been met within thirty to sixty days following transfer to CIA custody, and tactical information more dated than that was of diminished value.

“The fourth element is that we still want to have lawful authority on interrogation techniques we feel we need,” I said. My interrogators wanted to be able to use seven. Four were
de minimis
—two aggressive grasps, and two slaps. The fifth and sixth were diet and sleep manipulation to weaken
resistance, as long as they didn’t cause permanent damage to anyone. The seventh was nudity, which the interrogators really wanted since its “on-off switch” was so immediate.

None of this was particularly pleasant. I’ve been asked on television how I felt about the full set of thirteen techniques that had been approved earlier, including waterboarding. Would I have approved waterboarding someone? My answer was that I thanked God I didn’t have to make that decision. And, in a very real sense, I didn’t have to, because others did. Folks who have been spared that decision should keep that in mind before they jump to criticize.

Finally, I explained to Hadley, “I want to brief the full membership of the House and Senate Intelligence Committees on everything we have done and everything we have gained, except the locations of the sites, and tell them we want to go forward with the program under the strictures I just described.”

Up to this point, we’d only been briefing the so-called gang of eight—the leadership of the House and Senate as well as the chair and ranking members of the two intelligence committees. But if we wanted more political support, we had to tell more politicians what we were doing. That was the plan.

The fulcrum point of this whole discussion was in a videoconference a short time later while I was down in Key West on vacation for the last days of August. We were staying in one of the town houses at a Defense Department facility called Truman Annex, and I walked over to a secure videoconference room in the office of a counterdrug task force to make pretty much the same case I had made to Steve Hadley to the president and the vice president. For the videoconference, I was dressed Florida vacation casual, while the president, vice president, and national security advisor were all in starched shirts, suits, and ties in the White House Situation Room.

I repeated some of the things I had told Steve about this needing to be America’s program: operationally, I can’t manage interrogation techniques and detention procedures with an on-off switch every two years based on
the American election cycle. I need some stability. So I am willing to give up some things that are lawful—things we could do if we wanted to—in order to get consensus on what it is we will do.

I knew that the president wanted to publicly lay out the whole plan in a White House address—what we’d done, what we’d gained, and how we intended to go.

“Mr. President, we are right now at your moment of highest political leverage on this issue. We will have emptied the black sites right before your speech, and you will be able to set forth, without apology, everything we’ve done, and what we’re going to continue to do, again, without apology.”