Playing to the Edge: American Intelligence in the Age of Terror (44 page)

It would be useful to keep in mind that even if such things—Abu Ghraib, Guantánamo, black sites, Iraq, Israel—might serve (in different degrees) as convenient symbols, they are not at the core of the jihadist narrative. Sayyid Qutb, the Egyptian whose writings form the theological base of modern jihadism, visited the United States in the late 1940s. He described it as a soulless, materialistic place and equated green lawns with greed, and jazz with bestiality. He criticized church socials in conservative Greeley, Colorado, for what he saw as their overt sexuality and condemned our emphasis on civil over divine law. Such beliefs reinforce a worldview where the corruption of modernism itself, represented by Jews and Crusaders, threatens the harmony of Islam. In such an all-defining Manichean universe, American actions might, at the margins, affect the power of the jihadist message, but if they do, we might look to our sexual mores as much as how we choose to defend ourselves.

I will admit that how we choose to defend ourselves
does
affect
European
elites and
European
government and media circles. But those groups do as much huffing and puffing over American targeted killings (which expanded after 2008), renditions (which continued), and electronic espionage (which became less secret) as they do over detentions (which were curtailed) and interrogations (which stopped). And all their objections are anchored in a broader belief system that challenges the current American view toward the utility and legitimacy of force in the modern world. In short, it, too, is part of a much larger conversation.

Another of the “facts” being contested was whether or not the techniques worked; if they didn’t, there was little reason to protect them now.

I argued publicly that they did work and had been vital for national security. In a Fox News interview the Sunday after the release of the memos, I said, “The facts of the case are that the use of these techniques against these terrorists made us safer. It really did work. . . . President Bush, in September of ’06, outlined how one detainee led to another, led to another, with the use of these techniques.”

Indeed, following the release of the DOJ memos, DNI Blair confirmed in a message he sent to the entire intelligence community that “high-value information came from interrogations in which those methods were used and provided a deeper understanding of the al-Qaeda organization that was attacking this country.” Even though those words were mysteriously removed from the version of Blair’s note that was released to the press, the administration could not contradict his or CIA’s conclusions on this point without exposing themselves to a charge that they were politicizing intelligence.

(Five years later Democrats on the Senate Intelligence Committee aggressively challenged the effectiveness argument, but in 2009 the president did not.)

At a press conference marking his first hundred days in office, the president defended his January executive order banning enhanced techniques. “I am absolutely convinced it was the right thing to do,
not because there might not have been information that was yielded by these various detainees who were subjected to this treatment.
”

That put some distance between the president and the program’s more strident critics. As I said in the Fox interview, “Most of the people who oppose these techniques want to be able to say, I don’t want my nation doing this (which is a purely honorable position),
and they didn’t work anyway
. The back half of that sentence isn’t true.” I continued, “The honorable position has to be, even though these techniques worked, I don’t want you to do that. That takes courage. The other sentence doesn’t.”

From all accounts, even after considerable deliberation, the NSC
principals had been divided on the question of releasing the DOJ memos. Some reports suggest that there had been talk of releasing a heavily redacted version of the opinions (the CIA position) balanced by a commitment to launch a presidential commission to review the whole history of interrogation techniques (a concession to “transparency”).

In the end, though, the president was faced with a binary choice: release the memos largely intact (the DOJ position) or decide to substantially protect the documents and fight their release in court (the CIA position).

According to the
Washington Post
, with his counselors divided, the president held a late-night meeting in which he assigned one advisor to argue for release of the memos (Greg Craig) and another to argue against (Denis McDonough). At the end of the mock debate, the president opted for release and personally dictated a draft of his public announcement for the next day.

This decision was the same one that Greg Craig had announced to CIA four weeks earlier. Nothing had changed but the date.

I got a call on the morning of April 16 from Director Panetta’s chief of staff telling me that the DOJ memos would be released with minimal redactions. That was followed by a call from John Brennan, former CIA senior and now Jim Jones’s deputy for Homeland Security. John was in Mexico City awaiting the president’s arrival there. I gave him little comfort, decrying the decision as a “fundamental dishonesty” toward the officers of the agency.

Within the next hour, I was called by Jim Jones from Air Force One en route to Mexico with the president. The best I could offer Jim was that I knew how to respect the person and the office of the president but that “I could not just make stuff up.” He easily acknowledged that. It was a bad connection. We lost contact at least three times, and I’m sure Jim was as frustrated with the circumstances of our dialogue as I was.

I called former attorney general Mike Mukasey. He and I had drafted an op-ed laying out our objections to the president’s decision. We hit the core of our case very early in the piece:

The release of these opinions was unnecessary as a legal matter, and is unsound as a matter of policy. Its effect will be to invite the kind of institutional timidity and fear of recrimination that weakened intelligence gathering in the past, and that we came sorely to regret on September 11, 2001.

We struck out against the arguments in favor of release:

Proponents of the release have argued that the techniques have been abandoned and thus there is no point in keeping them secret any longer; that they were in any event ineffective; that their disclosure was somehow legally compelled; and that they cost us more in the coin of world opinion than they were worth. None of these claims survives scrutiny.

We had held off publishing the op-ed until the president’s final decision, since we didn’t want to make it harder for the president to do the right thing (as we saw it) by attaching the names of two Bush administration formers to arguments against release.

Although the piece was about twice the length of a normal op-ed, the
Wall Street Journal
agreed to fit it into the next day’s paper.

It was important that they did. Both Judge Mukasey and I believed that the public debate needed a calm, coherent counterpoint to what the administration was sure to lay out. I also felt very strongly that the agency workforce needed to hear this voice as quickly as possible, especially since Director Panetta was in no position to make any of the points himself.

I was right. One career operations officer told me, “Friday was an incredibly dark day but I was very proud when I read your piece.” Another said, “I read your piece, which captured the moment and the stakes with precision and clarity. Thank God someone is saying what must be said.”

The president knew that the release of the memos would hit the agency hard, so the following Monday he visited Langley. He privately met with
and answered questions from members of the CTC before the public event in the concourse. By all accounts it was a lighthearted affair with a series of friendly questions until the call went out for “one more question” and a CTC veteran who had been standing in the back of the room with two others raised a hand. Steve Kappes motioned to Director Panetta to recognize the officer, which he did.

The officer thanked the president for coming, conceded that the RDI (rendition, detention, and interrogation) program raised controversial moral and legal questions, but then asked if the president agreed that they could go back and tell their workforce that what they had done in the program had saved lives.

The president, who had been standing at a lectern, came out from behind it, changed his tone, and—waving his finger in the air—began a short lecture on the need for morality.

The agency has a secure instant messaging system called Sametime. Shortly after the session ended, the network was lighting up with comments supportive of the officer as word of the exchange spread.

The president then went to the concourse to speak to about a thousand agency employees, many of whom had been waiting for hours to see him.

Standing in front of the wall of stars for the agency’s fallen, the president praised the agency’s work and said he knew that “the last few days have been difficult.” He justified the release “as a consequence of a court case that was pending and to which it was very difficult for us to mount an effective legal defense.” He also asserted, “So much of the information was public—had been publicly acknowledged. The covert nature of the information had been compromised.”

The president then urged agency officers not to be “discouraged by what’s happened in the last few weeks. Don’t be discouraged that we have to acknowledge potentially we’ve made some mistakes. That’s how we learn.”

One officer told me that the agency consensus was that that last passage sounded a lot like
Mister Rogers
. The president apparently saw this as
one of those teachable moments, while the agency’s counterterrorism workforce continued to believe that the past policies were not mistakes at all, but were a central reason why the country had not suffered an attack in more than seven years.

The president was right to go to Langley, and there is no doubt that the agency’s officers appreciated his offer of support. But this episode raised issues that could not be fixed by one visit or one speech or one photo op.

Washington Post
columnist David Ignatius writes frequently about CIA. He is often a critic, but his comments are rarely without affection or respect for the agency and its people.

Two days after the president’s visit, Ignatius—who has always been well wired into the CIA alumni association—published a savage column in the
Washington Post
. “Sad to say,” he began, “it’s slow roll time at Langley after the release of interrogation memos that, in the words of one veteran officer, ‘hit the agency like a car bomb in the driveway.’”

Ignatius noted that the president had tried in his personal visit on Monday to reassure the agency workforce: “He said all the right things about the agency’s clandestine role. But it had the look of a campaign event, with employees hooting and hollering and the president reading from his teleprompter with a backdrop of stars that commemorate the CIA’s fallen warriors.”

Ignatius’s judgment was that “Obama seems to think he can have it both ways—authorizing an unprecedented disclosure of CIA operational methods and at the same time galvanizing a clandestine service whose best days, he told them Monday, are ‘yet to come.’ Life doesn’t work that way—even for charismatic politicians.”

Many Langley veterans now believed that it was only a matter of time before the long knives were out for the agency and perhaps for its officers as well.

The day after his Langley visit the president refused to rule out legal action against lawyers who crafted the DOJ memos; human rights groups handed Attorney General Holder a petition with 250,000 signatures
demanding a special prosecutor; and UN officials and human rights lawyers were predicting that—absent US prosecutions—European courts would investigate American officials suspected of violating the ban on torture.

In the media and political frenzy that followed the release of the memos, charges and countercharges were hurled about. When a CIA-prepared timeline of congressional briefings on interrogation techniques was leaked to the press, the question of who in Congress was briefed, when, and what they were told became a critical subplot to the whole drama.

About a month after the release of the memos (which, remember, was done to put the whole issue of interrogation behind us), a headline in the Capitol Hill daily
Politico
screamed, “Democrats: CIA Out to Get Us.”

Two days later the Speaker of the House explicitly accused the agency of lying to Congress—both with respect to the use of enhanced interrogation methods (“The CIA comes to Congress, withholds information about the timing and use of this subject”) and more generally (“They mislead us all the time”).

Senator Feinstein, chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee, hastened to back up Pelosi, charging, “The CIA is not an agency that is above not telling the truth,” and Congresswoman Anna Eshoo, of the House Intelligence Committee, chimed in, “You have to play twenty questions with them. They are not forthcoming with information.”

In a letter to the workforce designed to be made available to the press, Director Panetta shot back, “It is not our policy or practice to mislead Congress. That is against our laws and our values. . . . [O]ur contemporaneous records from September 2002 indicate that CIA officers briefed truthfully on the interrogation of Abu Zubaida, describing ‘the enhanced techniques that had been employed.’”

To say that the whole mess had now become quite ugly was an understatement. And it wasn’t over.

The driving force within the administration for making the memos public was Eric Holder.

While campaigning for the president, Holder had identified CIA interrogations as torture, even though he had never been briefed on the specifics of the program. He also promised a reckoning of CIA activities. That pretty much put him on the same ground as candidate Obama. As president, though, Obama had softened his views. When the Bush-era DOJ opinions were released in April, for example, he cautioned, “This is a time for reflection, not retribution.”