The Family Jewels (36 page)

Other important books go directly to intelligence “sources and methods,” where the Board demonstrates considerable ambivalence. Not long after 9/11, CIA disguise experts Antonio and Jonna Mendez came out with a volume on their specialty and thanked the Board for helping them avoid the shoals of secret information.
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As CIA director in 2005, Porter Goss initiated a revision of Board regulations. Goss, of course, was the man who countenanced the destruction of videotape evidence in the CIA torture scandal. In 2006 a retired agency counterintelligence chief, James M. Olson, published a study that framed a variety of espionage dilemmas as moral questions, solicited the comments of a range of persons from inside and outside the agency, and elaborated on the commentaries.
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Olson noted the Review Board as cooperative, although several pages of his text would be blacked out.

At the time that tome was in press another book, on espionage tradecraft, was before the Board. By Robert Wallace, retired director of the CIA's Office of Technical Services, and H. Keith Melton, a historian of espionage gadgetry, the work would cover the waterfront of technological wizardry and show how such devices had figured in the spy wars. The authors cleared their project with the Board and got sample chapters approved in July 2004. Wallace himself, on active service, had participated in PRB clearances, and he wrote with a view to protecting sensitive information. The manuscript crossed the Board's transom in the fall of 2005. Wallace heard nothing for half a year. In March 2006 the authors were told that just the parts of their narrative that dealt with World War II were approved. The rest, including even the sample chapters, 95 percent of the work, was to stay secret.
Wallace hired a lawyer and appealed, leading to another eight-month hiatus. Before taking the agency to court, the authors appealed to a senior official, and in February 2007 most of the manuscript was suddenly cleared, and much of the rest followed that summer. The resulting book lauded CIA technologists.
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A different experience awaited Ishmael Jones, a clandestine service officer who had labored for the CIA under deep cover starting in 1989 and became so frustrated he left the agency to encourage reform of what he saw as a Soviet-style bureaucracy. The pseudonymous Jones incorporated his views in a manuscript that noted many ways in which agency management had acted in counterproductive, even silly, ways to cover its ass or pursue careerist goals. Jones sent his text to the Review Board in April 2007. A month later he was told clearance had been denied. Jones, who had read dozens of CIA memoirs more revealing than his, and had taken pains to avoid including anything secret, was stunned. He asked PRB to identify any places where the text contained classified information and promised to remove it. Several exchanges took place on this matter, and court records from both sides indicate no secrets were actually involved. Rather, the Board apparently indicated that the manuscript might be acceptable if rewritten in the third person, but once Jones had done that, PRB approved the release of just a few paragraphs. In January 2008, when Jones protested the extent of the excisions, the CIA took that as an appeal of the Board's decision, and said nothing further until the frustrated officer proceeded to publish. Jones's highly critical account of hidebound and creaky methods appeared at midyear.
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Langley filed suit against Jones for breaching the fiduciary trust implied by secrecy agreements, charging he failed to seek prepublication approval—because he had not waited for final agency action or sued the CIA himself—and therefore damaged the United States by “undermining of confidence
and trust in the CIA and its prepublication review process.” Using the Snepp precedent, the agency demanded it be awarded Jones's earnings.
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The court rejected the defendant's efforts to change venue, request for a jury trial, and argument that Vietnam-era judgments of national security damage cannot be applied at this late date. Jones's contention that the CIA had gone beyond its mandate and was acting as censor was also rejected. In November 2011, without court trial, the federal judge awarded the CIA everything it had sought. But Jones had arranged to donate all proceeds to a fund for disabled agency veterans, and there were no proceeds to seize.

Other recent illustrations concern the emerging literature of the war on terror. Writing a preemptive defense of his actions on renditions and torture tapes, and with former agency PR chief Bill Harlow at his side, Jose Rodriguez had pretty clear sailing. Not so the critics. Not even the initial U.S. invasion of Afghanistan—where the agency has a proud story to tell—escaped scrutiny. Henry A. Crumpton, the CIA's top field commander, found the Board members courteous and timely, “although incorrect in some of their excisions.”
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He did not dispute them. Gary C. Schroen, whose account of leading the first CIA operational group into Afghanistan is a testament to a heroic agency, had to fight over much of his account, including such silliness as identifying the type of Russian-built helicopter that conveyed his team into the country—readily apparent from photos that appear in the book. Like others before him, Schroen contrived aliases for everyone who accompanied him and obscured the identities of those at headquarters. He recalled the review as long and tedious, noting, “I had no idea . . . that so many of the details that I included in the first draft . . . would be considered sensitive and would be marked for exclusion.” But he decided the process, which ultimately cleared most of his text, had been fair. The Review Board told Schroen his book was the most
detailed account of an agency covert operation ever approved for publication.
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One who took heart from Schroen's experience was Gary Berntsen, his colleague and successor as the CIA's Afghan team leader, whose bout with the censors was even less pleasant. Berntsen was an experienced officer, loyal to the agency, and had already self-censored his narrative. Yet the clearance, he recalled, “turned out to be the most surreal and frustrating experiences [
sic
] in my life.” After repeated delays he filed suit, and a federal judge ordered the CIA to liberate his manuscript, acceding to forty pages of deletions, including items such as the mileage between cities in Afghanistan—measurable on any map—and the name of William Buckley, a CIA officer murdered by extremists in Lebanon in the 1980s, whose case has figured in many writings. Berntsen had to file suit again and obtain an injunction before the CIA would respond to his appeal to restore some of the material, and adjudication of those deletions was yet to be completed when his book went to press.
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Those CIA officers for whom national security became the God That Failed, who sought to write about their disillusion, have had their works parsed ruthlessly at the Publications Review Board. Their substantive reporting has been dealt with elsewhere, but the CIA reaction to their narratives has not. John Kiriakou is the newest poster boy. He survived prepublication review after not one but several appeals. The agency veteran credits PRB for permitting those appeals, and he accommodated Langley by changing names, disguising or eliminating some locales, and blurring certain true events.
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But Kiriakou spoke to reporters, divulging the name of an agency colleague and commenting—inaccurately, as it turns out—on waterboarding. His wife, a fellow CIA officer, was forced to resign. John Kiriakou was indicted for breaching
the Intelligence Identities Protection Act and for other transgressions. One of the four counts in the government's bill of particulars charges Kiriakou with lying to the Publications Review Board. No one has ever been indicted for such a crime. The potential chilling effect is incalculable. If former CIA persons can be sent to prison for their dealings with the PRB, there is no end to the mischief this will cause. Defense lawyers in the Kiriakou case informed government attorneys that at court they would present evidence on, among other things, the arbitrary actions of the Publications Review Board, which had, in fact, approved Kiriakou's manuscript. But the CIA's interest in avoiding public testimony on PRB operations cannot yet be demonstrated. Intent on obtaining a result that would at least add weight to the Intelligence Identities Protection Act, prosecutors offered a plea bargain. Kiriakou took the deal. In October 2012 he pled guilty to revealing the name of a covert operative. Several months later he was sentenced to thirty months in prison. John Kiriakou's case may become a brick in the fortress of secrecy.

Glenn Carle became another casualty of the agency's drive to minimize flap potential. Carle's account of the CIA's wayward path encountered fierce obstruction, with demands for redaction of 40 percent of his manuscript and the final excision of about a third. He “literally” rewrote the book a dozen times to meet the censors' demands. Carle fought for months to be able to mention a urinal and had to scrap for passages that described the color of fog, indicated that agency officers disagreed, or commented that someone spoke authoritatively or another seemed a fool. Quotations from the poet T. S. Eliot were suppressed, as was his use of the word “kidnap” from a previous book the CIA itself had cleared. The agency prevented Carle's using numerous details, leaving surviving pages laced with deletions.
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Valerie Plame, a clandestine service officer who worked to prevent nuclear proliferation, was victimized by Bush
administration officials intent on evading accountability for their disastrous decision to attack Iraq. Plame's undercover status as a CIA officer, supposed to be guarded under the Intelligence Identities Protection Act—ironically a product of the agency's frantic appeals after the Phil Agee fiasco—was revealed by aides to Vice President Richard Cheney. Her husband, retired ambassador Joseph Wilson, had published an opinion piece revealing the lack of evidence for the administration's charge that Iraq was buying uranium from the African nation of Niger. Cheney sought to retaliate. Cheney's national security deputy, I. Lewis Libby, was prosecuted and convicted for Plame's outing. Her cover blown, Plame felt obliged to leave. But when she attempted to write about her career, the CIA drained Plame's memoir, refusing clearance for her to include numerous details that formed part of the Libby trial record or had been widely discussed in the press. Review Board chairman Richard Puhl even denied Plame's mention of the dates of her service at CIA, which had been the subject of routine, unclassified correspondence with its retirement office that had been printed in the
Congressional Record
. Publisher Simon & Schuster sued in an attempt to compel the Publications Review Board to approve the material, but the courts succumbed to the CIA's usual dark claims of national security “damage.” Simon & Schuster eventually commissioned reporter Laura Rozen to write an afterword with elements that had been cut from Valerie Plame Wilson's manuscript.
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The CIA has even reached beyond Langley, applying its scissors to manuscripts from employees of other agencies, like State Department nation-builder Peter Van Buren, who participated in the Iraq war with the so-called Provincial Reconstruction Teams. This diplomat, who had served in many posts in close cooperation with the military and other agencies, shepherded his manuscript through State's clearance. Shortly before publication, the department's censors
informed him that the CIA was asking for changes to his text. Van Buren decided to go ahead anyway.
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Then there was FBI interrogator Ali Soufan, who had worked with the agency in questioning Al Qaeda captive Abu Zubaydah. He broke with CIA counterparts when it became a matter of torturing the man. Soufan's manuscript survived FBI's clearance process only to be stalled, just weeks from publication, by CIA demands for a host of cuts. Langley's faxes ordering revisions totaled 181 pages, nearly a third of the length of the text itself. The CIA's official spokesperson, questioned about these demands, termed it “ridiculous” that the agency's basis for action was that it did not like the content of Soufan's book, and reiterated the standard boilerplate that the Review Board only sought to protect classified information.
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According to Soufan, the FBI had no obligation to clear the book with Langley, since he had no contractual relationship with the CIA and had never reported to it. When he demonstrated that the demanded cuts concerned information in the public domain, were FBI material, or consisted of previously declassified CIA data, the Publications Review Board withdrew its demands but came back with an even more extensive list. Committed to a certain date for publication, Soufan made the cuts. Among them were quotes from unclassified testimony presented in public before Congress and broadcast live on national television, material drawn from the 9/11 Commission reports, the words “I” and “me,” and use of the word “station” for the contingents of CIA personnel assigned to U.S. embassies abroad. Soufan believes that he was required to delete from his own book details appearing in Jose Rodriguez's memoir. He asked the FBI to review the deletions. Not satisfied, he sued.
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The Soufan suit is now in an early stage in the courts, and he intends to see it through.
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Secrecy is compromised when everything is deemed
secret—more so when what is deemed classified is manipulated, whether for political purposes or any others. It was inevitable that the record of the Publications Review Board would eventually come under scrutiny. In the late 1990s, when Board chairman John Hedley published the first real examination of the unit in the agency's in-house magazine, the PRB had been moderating its approach, and Hedley could offer an optimistic view. In the war on terror, that is no longer possible. Members of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence wrote CIA Director General David Petraeus in the spring of 2012 to express concern at the Publications Review Board's behavior. Press reports at this writing indicate the CIA has begun an internal investigation of the PRB. While such an inquiry may be a move forward, it could also represent a tactical maneuver. The Board's actions and methods will be central to the Soufan civil suit. Langley needs to be in a position to offer some kind of substantive evidence, if only to avoid a deeper probe into its Publications Review Board. Substantial stakes ride on the outcome.