Top Secret America, its exponential growth and ever-widening circle of secrecy, had been set in motion by one overwhelming force: the explosion in the number of covert and clandestine operations against al-Qaeda leaders and people suspected of supporting them. These operations had become larger, and involved more American and foreign operatives, than any secret undertaking in the nation’s history. John Rizzo, the man who approved all those operations after 9/11, told me after he retired from thirty-four years at the CIA that “the cumulative number” of covert operations during the cold war “pales in comparison to the number of programs, number of activities the CIA was asked to carry out in the aftermath of 9/11 in the counterterrorism area.”
By design, this unprecedented expansion was invisible to the American people. But hints of what was happening began to leak out in whispered conversations. People inside the government began to tell stories about enemy fighters in Afghanistan who would arrive at American battlefield detention facilities having been kneecapped on the trip in, or of detainees who had been punched, kicked, and stuffed in small, hot boxes under the blazing summer sun to get them to talk to interrogators. Others were being denied food, shackled to the walls, and kept standing or crouching for hours on end. These measures were all part of a panicked attempt to get the prisoners to tell the Americans what they knew about Osama bin Laden and coming attacks against the United States.
Other sources described a detention site at Bagram Airfield controlled by an organization other than the U.S. Army, which ran the base. Even regular American soldiers weren’t allowed to enter. Eventually I found a former U.S. Navy SEAL who was also trained as an interrogator. He put a name to the list of interrogation methods other sources had been telling me about—“stress and duress” techniques: Standing for long periods of time. Imprisonment in cramped quarters. Limited diet. Sleep deprivation. I had covered the military for many years, and I knew this sort of thing had not been done in the decades prior to 9/11.
I called up the White House’s National Security Council spokesman for a comment about the stress and duress techniques and the existence of the mysterious facility. He said, for the record, “The United States is treating enemy combatants in U.S. government control, wherever held, humanely and in a manner consistent with the principles of the Third Geneva Convention of 1949.” It sounded like a complete denial. But how could all these sources be wrong? Or how could the White House believe that those interrogation methods conformed with the Geneva Conventions?
In the middle of investigating these strange tales, the administration offered an official hint about what was going on. On September 26, 2002, the House and Senate Intelligence Committees invited Cofer Black, former head of the CIA’s Counterterrorism Center, to testify. A decade earlier, Black had helped capture Carlos the Jackal, one of the most infamous terrorists of his time. Black had been given the CIA counterterrorism job before 9/11, when it was a low-profile assignment; now he led the agency’s war. He had CIA director George Tenet’s ear and the president’s attention. He didn’t really even need to report to his immediate boss, the CIA director of operations.
The CIA, Black told Congress that day, had been granted new forms of “operational flexibility” in dealing with suspected terrorists. Then, his voice deepening with drama and arrogance, he told the intelligence committee, “This is a very classified area. But I have to say that—all you need to know—there was a before 9/11, and there was an after 9/11. After 9/11 the gloves come off.” Most people focused on the references to the gloves coming off, which was certainly an enticing statement. But I couldn’t forget that other phrase, “all you need to know.”
Why was it up to this civil servant, no matter how well respected he was among his colleagues, to decide what anyone else, even the elected representatives he was addressing, did and did not need to know about the deadliest enemy facing the United States? Obviously details about the timing and location of operations, the exact technologies used, and the particular sources involved would need to remain secret. But why would anyone just simply trust the government with all that power and responsibility? It seemed almost un-American that a small group of people at the White House and within the CIA could decide that only they should know how the world really worked, while the rest of the citizenry was expected to assume that they would figure out how to defeat such an elusive foe all on their own, do the right thing, and then tell the truth if they messed up. Black’s phrase would ring in my ears for years.
Just a week after Black’s testimony, the public got a sample of what “the gloves… off” meant. On November 3, 2002, using a Predator drone armed with two five-foot-long Hellfire missiles, the CIA killed several people in a car driving through the desert in Yemen, a country with which the United States was not at war. The dead were an al-Qaeda leader, Abu Ali al-Harithi, who was suspected of masterminding the 2000 attack on the USS Cole, and a naturalized U.S. citizen from Yemen, Ahmed Hijazi.
The CIA was ecstatic. Its new secret weapon had worked. Not only had it killed a single terrorist in a remote location before he ever heard the buzzing of the drone engine, but it gave the White House confidence that it could wage war covertly in any part of the world and deny its involvement if necessary. But not this time. Despite their habit of hiding in the shadows, senior CIA leaders were so proud of what had happened that they wanted to share it with the public, a decision that would become quite controversial within the rank and file.
Some sources inside government, and former military officials and lawyers in particular, had questions about the legality of the drone attack. “Wasn’t that assassination?” I asked the cranky CIA spokesman, William Harlow, knowing that assassination had been outlawed decades ago. “They attacked us, remember?” he yelled over the phone. “Don’t you get it?”
Not everyone was so sure, however, that the missile attack was a justified response to 9/11. Even solid supporters of the CIA questioned it. “This ought to be a last resort for the United States,” Jeffrey H. Smith, a former general counsel at the CIA, told me. The preferable route, he said, would be to capture and try terrorists, and share the evidence of guilt with the world. “To the extent you do more and more of this, it begins to look like it is policy,” he said. After a while, such pinpoint targeting of individuals might “suggest that it’s acceptable behavior to assassinate people…. Assassination as a norm of international conduct exposes American leaders and Americans overseas.”
The existence of armed Predators had been hidden deep down in layers of government secrecy. Before 9/11, unarmed surveillance Predators had been flown by air force pilots operating under the conventional rules of war. Lethal strikes by manned aircraft in all wars, including the last one in Kosovo, had been an armed services responsibility, too.
Over lunch, another source outlined how the target in an attack like the one in Yemen would be selected. There was a process, he explained. It involved lots of people. There was a list. It was hard to get on. Those on it—high-value targets, or HVTs, in official lingo—were either killed or captured; those captured by the CIA were apparently providing good information, the source said, critical leads in preventing new attacks.
Were the high-value targets in Afghanistan?
Not all of them, he said, before changing the subject.
I called a former agency analyst for a more detailed explanation. He said my lunch date was probably referring to “renditions.” Renditions had started under President Clinton and had been “very helpful,” he said. Suspected, detained terrorists or fugitives found in one country would be secretly transported by the CIA back to their own countries, where they were wanted by the courts or internal intelligence agencies. The CIA rendered these people “to the bar of justice”: to the courts in a third country, the source said, even if the court were in Saudi Arabia or Egypt, where fair trials for terrorist suspects were rare and torture was routine.
Renditions, another person said, came with lots of legal review. The third country usually needed an arrest warrant for the person. Many of the renditions carried out during the Clinton administration involved sending members of the religiously extreme Muslim Brotherhood and Egyptian Islamic Jihad to Egypt, which had outlawed both groups. Egyptian Islamic Jihad had carried out the assassination of former president Anwar al-Sadat; in its ranks was the man who would become al-Qaeda’s number two, Ayman al-Zawahiri. It was reported that the Egyptian intelligence services tortured many of these prisoners during interrogations, including Zawahiri.
Another man with lots of experience in the secret world was helpful, too. At a dark restaurant, over a bowl of vegetable soup and saltine crackers, I asked whether these current renditions were like those carried out in the Clinton administration.
“Not exactly.”
“In what way ‘not exactly’?”
They are “extraordinary renditions,” the source said. “The CIA needs to get information from them. It’s completely, 100 percent legal. It’s an ongoing war. The EITs [enhanced interrogation techniques—another new acronym I’d never heard] have been approved by a zillion lawyers.” When I asked him for some examples of EITs, he replied, “Can’t say exactly,” and we moved on in the conversation.
A few weeks later, I found myself sitting on a broken park bench in a seedy part of Washington, DC, with another source. “EITs,” I said. “What are those?”
“You know I can’t tell you that. It’s classified. I won’t tell you anything that’s classified.”
Okay.
“Everything’s medically supervised,” the source said.
“By doctors? That makes sense,” I responded.
“Yeah.”
“By agency doctors?” I asked.
“From OMS.”
We were both whispering.
“Must be hard on them.”
“They’ve been cleared psychologically.”
“Makes sense.”
“You wouldn’t believe the kinds of things I hear… cigarette burns on the hands… reminds me of Nazi Germany.”
“Who used cigarettes?”
“I told you, I’m not going to tell you anything classified.”
I Googled “OMS” when I got back to the office. “Office of Medical Services, CIA” popped up. I typed in “CIA.gov” and began looking around the website.
Career Opportunities, Medical Officer: Are you up to the challenge? The Office of Medical Services is hiring individuals with medical degrees and board certification in primary care specialties to provide medical care and advice to Agency employees, dependents and assets. Positions are available for overseas assignments.
Salary: $127,542
All applicants must successfully complete a thorough medical and psychological exam, a polygraph interview and an extensive background investigation. US citizenship is required.
Important Notice: Friends, family, individuals, or organizations may be interested to learn that you are an applicant for or an employee of the CIA. Their interest, however, may not be benign or in your best interest. You cannot control whom they would tell. We therefore ask you to exercise discretion and good judgment in disclosing your interest in a position with the Agency. You will receive further guidance on this topic as you proceed through your CIA employment processing.
With these nuggets, I pulled my car up to the curb outside a local deli. A new source got in. We drove around the corner and parked. He was worried about the legality of things going on at the agency but didn’t say what he meant by that. He fretted about the damage to the CIA and its people. “We’ll be hung out to dry.” We talked for an hour, and although he didn’t say much then, I could tell he really wanted to say more.
The CIA is the president’s personal sword of power in foreign lands if all else fails, one he can use without asking Congress first. If the president asked, the agency would attempt to overthrow governments, as it tried but failed to do in Cuba, North Vietnam, Nicaragua, and Angola, and successfully did in Chile, Guatemala, the Congo, Iran, and, twice, in—of all places—Afghanistan.
The CIA is the one agency in the U.S. government that was created by law (the National Security Act of 1947 and Title 10 of the U.S. Code) to do things overseas that no other agency in government is allowed to do: CIA operatives blackmail foreign bureaucrats into stealing state secrets, or bribe them with money, sex, alcohol, medical care for ailing relatives, or a private school education for their children; or they appeal to their sense of a greater good. They steal secrets themselves, using spy gear that can distinguish the words typed on a computer keypad from faint differences in keystroke sounds. They covertly help one foreign political party over another, hoping to ensure that the “right” people gain power.
To facilitate these covert actions required help from many of the code-named programs Arkin was discovering. The deep layers of secrecy were to keep terrorists, foreign spies, and reporters away. We were in terrible company and often treated accordingly, especially by President Bush’s cabinet members, conservative members of Congress, and cable television pundits who especially liked to label us traitors.
Even the government officials whose job was to deal with the media often weren’t any better. Harlow, the CIA’s spokesman, often lost his temper when I asked for direct access to people doing secret things. Having traveled the world with the military, I just didn’t understand why I was failing to progress with the CIA. Maybe I wasn’t using the right terminology or phrases, or hadn’t found the right people to ask. But the obvious answer was made clear to me one day when Harlow finally got tired of the badgering and let me have it, explaining in a very loud voice why, for the umpteenth time, he had no comment to my questions. “This is a goddamn secret organization! That’s why!”
So, like other intelligence beat reporters trying to describe the post-9/11 world, I had to use more indirect methods. For example, when I had gathered half a dozen specific leads, I would run them by a couple of good sources I had known for many years. “I’ve always said you were an accurate reporter,” is the only response I would get back. It wasn’t much, but it told me I was on the right track.
Over the next four years, as more sources became willing to provide pieces of the puzzle, a portrait of the CIA’s most deeply buried covert action program began to emerge. It was code-named Greystone.
Greystone had hundreds of subcomponents, including post-9/11 detention, interrogation, and rendition programs, and all the required logistics, from airplanes used to fly detainees around the world to fake names for the secret prisons overseas where detainees were kept in isolation, sometimes for years.
Greystone was one of the big reasons the CIA’s relatively small portion of Top Secret America had grown so quickly and involved so many private contractors. It included hundreds of CIA employees and hundreds of officials in foreign intelligence services, though only a handful knew any more than their tiny slice of the pie.
Greystone was executed in a series of countries where the CIA and its counterparts overseas believed al-Qaeda, its followers, and new affiliates were located. Originally, this included Afghanistan, Pakistan, Indonesia, Malaysia, Thailand, the Philippines, Uzbekistan, Somalia, Germany, France, Italy, Kosovo, and Macedonia. It did not include Iraq, because al-Qaeda was not there.
In the beginning, no one outside the small circle of people executing the operations knew the program existed, and even those people didn’t know every single subprogram under the larger Greystone umbrella. By White House design, that small circle did not include Secretary of State Colin Powell, who was supposed to be in charge of U.S. relations with foreign countries, or his general counsel, William Taft. Nor did it include the four-star regional commanders who managed U.S. military relations and operations in different parts of the world, or the members of the House and Senate Intelligence Committees, who were supposed to oversee every major operation undertaken by the CIA.
Such limitation and compartmentalization were applied to programs like Greystone, which was called, in CIA parlance, a Controlled Access Program (CAP). The Pentagon’s version of one is called a Special Access Program (SAP). They exist to give the CIA and the Pentagon extra protection against unauthorized disclosure.
By 2002, President Bush was ordering war preparations in Iraq, too, based on the belief that Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein was building a biological, chemical, and nuclear weapons capacity that he might one day share with al-Qaeda or use himself against the United States.
The information on Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction was another one of the secrets so well buried beneath so many layers of classification that very few people in the CIA or Pentagon had actually seen the evidence themselves to support the assertion that such weapons existed.
Only the congressional intelligence committees and the defense appropriations subcommittees that drew up the budget for the intelligence agencies were privy to regular classified briefings. This gave these congressional groups a special role in overseeing intelligence activities, a role unlike that assumed by any of the other congressional committees. As war with Iraq became likely, members of Congress clamored for more information and for the intelligence community to get together and produce what is known as a National Intelligence Estimate (NIE), an analysis by the National Intelligence Council with input from all the intelligence agencies.1 It is considered the most authoritative work on a particular question, in this case, Does Iraq possess WMD, and how likely is Saddam Hussein to use them against the United States? But when the NIE arrived on Capitol Hill, no more than six senators, and only a handful of House members, ever actually bothered to read beyond the five-page executive summary of the ninety-two-page document laying out the government’s information on Iraq’s weapons capabilities.
Reviewing all the intelligence was exceptionally arduous and inconvenient. Because the NIE was so highly classified, members of Congress couldn’t have a copy delivered to their offices or sent to them via email. Instead, they had to walk over to one of the secure reading rooms and sit alone. They could not enlist the help of an aide, and they were not allowed to take notes. The document was dense, “like the Brahms of music,” as Democratic West Virginia senator John D. Rockefeller IV described it to me after he had read it. It contained many qualifying footnotes that even the most dedicated reader might miss, including an important dissenting opinion from the State Department Intelligence and Research branch that cast great doubt on the NIE’s overall assertions that Iraq probably possessed chemical and biological weapons and was well on its way to developing nuclear ones, too.
Congress’s oversight of intelligence was unlike any other job it performed. Since just about everything in the realm of terrorism was classified, members of Congress were the only outsiders allowed to know what was happening inside, and they played their role badly. Even when a select few members were briefed on President Bush’s controversial counterterrorism tactics—warrantless wiretaps by the National Security Agency, targeted killings by the agency or military, extreme interrogations, which were the EITs my sources were raising questions about—any concerns they had were muted by extreme secrecy, and they could not go public given nondisclosure agreements that even these elected officials were made to sign. When it came time for members of Congress to analyze whether the risk from Iraq warranted going to war, they seemed too busy with other things—like keeping up with annual budget requests and their constituents back home—to study the information that was available. After all, even Colin Powell, respected on both sides of the aisle and seen as honest, had confirmed that the WMD were there and that something had to be done.
None of the top secret code names and job descriptions that Arkin was finding were for the congressional staffers on the intelligence committees who were supposed to do all the work to monitor the phenomenal growth in Top Secret America. Two committees do the lion’s share of the intelligence oversight: the House and Senate Permanent Select Committees on Intelligence and the House and Senate Appropriations Subcommittees on Defense. Yet the number of staffers on each has not grown much at all in the decade since the 9/11 attacks. The number of staffers with knowledge of and experience with the most costly and technologically complex agencies, the National Security Agency and the National Reconnaissance Organization, which manages multi-billion-dollar eavesdropping and spy satellite programs, actually declined. On the authorization committees, which set policy and design budgets, there were no more than four staffers dealing with the NSA and the NRO.
The leaders of the House and Senate Intelligence Committees, who often were the only members briefed by the CIA on covert action, were not allowed to consult with their lawyers or the specialized staff members steeped in the issues, even if they had the appropriate security clearances. Instead, these members of Congress were left on their own to make sense of highly technical issues such as surveillance of fiber-optic cables in the Internet communications grid structure, or the legal interpretations, history, and nuances of a particular regulation in the law governing electronic searches and seizures.
The poor quality of congressional oversight wasn’t just a matter of money and staff, though. When members voted to approve the use of military force against Iraq, which in effect approved the presumptive deaths of thousands of U.S. men and women in uniform, they didn’t do it after studying the best information available or conducting exhaustive hearings; they simply took President Bush and his well-qualified national security team at their word.
So much information hidden away in compartments like Greystone created a government system that became distorted by its own secrecy. Take, for instance, the German intelligence source code-named Curveball, an Iraqi living in Germany whose stories about Saddam’s biological weapons so greatly influenced thinking at the top of the U.S. government. Because his identity was so closely held, in a compartment within a compartment, it wasn’t vetted in a rigorous manner and, as a result, his lies were not publicly revealed until long after the war began. And only in February 2011 did he confess publicly, in an account published by the Guardian newspaper in Britain. Rafid Ahmed Alwan al-Janabi, who was Curveball in flesh and blood, admitted that he had fabricated stories for intelligence officers about mobile bioweapons trucks and clandestine bioweapons laboratories in an effort to bring down Saddam Hussein. “I had a chance to fabricate something to topple the regime. I and my sons are proud of that and we are proud that we were the reason to give Iraq the margin of democracy.”
Had more doubts been aired about Curveball’s credibility early on, maybe Powell would have had doubts about his presentation to a rapt audience at the United Nations a month before the 2003 invasion. “We have firsthand descriptions of biological weapons factories on wheels,” Powell said. “The source was an eyewitness—an Iraqi chemical engineer who supervised one of these facilities. He actually was present during biological agent production runs. He was also at the site when an accident occurred in 1998. Twelve technicians died.” None of that was true.
To understand how far the government has fallen into the bottomless well of official secrets, step into William Bosanko’s stately pale-yellow office at the National Archives on Pennsylvania Avenue, not far from the White House. With only twenty-three employees, his agency, the obscure Information Security Oversight Office (ISOO), is supposed to ensure that the entire government classifies and protects its documents properly. But since 2001, the number of newly classified documents has tripled to over 23 million, while his staff has barely grown. Bosanko said that with so few resources, ISOO has not even attempted to gain access to the government’s Special Access Programs.
Bosanko’s office has studied how much the federal government spends just to keep secrets secret. The price tag: $10 billion a year.
“Today the classification system is in crisis,” said Bosanko. “We are failing at the most basic requirements,” including training officials not to overclassify documents and periodically assessing whether some material can be declassified. But does that make us any less safe?
“Yes, absolutely,” he said, “because the real secrets don’t get the right protection.”
Curveball’s identity and the information he gave German intelligence, which they shared with the U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency, was handled using the authority conferred by Executive Order 12958, signed by President Clinton in April 1995. The order updated similar ones going back to President Truman establishing a system of national security information and designated classes of information: confidential, secret, and top secret. The order gave permission for certain top intelligence and defense officials to create vaults of information to which only a few people would have the combination.
These vaults—the aforementioned SAPs and CAPs—are distinguished from all other classified information by their “BIGOT” lists.2 A BIGOT list is the list of specific individuals who have access to each compartment. Anyone not on the list, no matter how highly cleared, must not be told what’s inside.
The intelligence community itself still doesn’t have a complete picture of all its CAPs and SAPs. In late 2010, a friendly man in charge of a new Controlled Access Program Coordination Office (CAPCO) in the Office of the Director of National Intelligence began compiling a database of these programs. The database itself, the man explained to me, is a compartmented secret, a mystery box that contains itself.
After years of work, CAPCO’s database contained the barest basics: code names, rationale for compartmentation, any significant changes since inception. It does not include the substance of the programs and it does not include most of the Defense Department’s relevant programs, which means it is missing a lot.
How much? When the names of the Defense Department’s SAPs are printed out and delivered to the leadership of the congressional defense committees every March 1, the list is three hundred pages long—and those are just the names of the programs. The database doesn’t include two other categories of deep secrets: “waived SAPs” and “unacknowledged SAPs,” neither of which the full committees have to be briefed on. Nor does it contain the many Special Access Programs that can be hosted within the other federal agencies, a list that includes the Departments of Homeland Security, State, Justice, and Energy. And it only really contains the top-level program of an entire genealogical tree of programs. “Let’s say you have a dresser in your bedroom—that’s the top-level thing,” explained the man. “Within that dresser you have twelve drawers we call ‘compartments.’ Now, each of those drawers you might open, and let’s say one of them is a sock drawer. You have a divider in there for all your socks. Well, those are ‘subcompartments.’ ”
The compartments are sealed so tightly that even officials above someone in the reporting and command chain may not be aware of what’s going on below.
The secrecy surrounding these compartments and sock drawers is so dense that even the people who supervise the system don’t understand the terminology or use it correctly. Or, as the man in charge of the database described it: “Someone will be giving a briefing and they’ll say, ‘Subcompartment,’ and three guys will go, ‘That’s not a subcompartment.’ ” I later interviewed an even more senior official in charge of reviewing the database man’s work, and he wasn’t sure what CAP stood for, either, much less what was included in, and what was excluded from, that category of secrets.
Greystone, for example, is a dresser. Renditions is a compartment. Contract airplanes is a subcompartment. Renditions to a particular country—say, Thailand—is a sock drawer.
In all, the CAPCO says that there are 212 dressers, or Control Systems—the top layer—in the intelligence world. But not only does this not count all the drawers in each of the dressers or all the compartments within each drawer, it doesn’t reach across all agencies and departments.
Only the most senior intelligence officials are allowed to look inside all the Control Systems, but they really don’t have the time to do that. Likewise, at the Defense Department, where more than two-thirds of all intelligence programs reside, only a handful of “Super-Users” are allowed to see all the Special Access Programs. But while the president, the director of national intelligence, the national security adviser, and anyone else the president designates are allowed to see everything, they would never have the time or the inclination to get that far down into the details.
“There’s only one entity in the entire universe that has visibility on all SAPs—that’s God,” James R. Clapper, then director of Pentagon intelligence programs, told me.
The Super-Users at the Defense Department have access to all the department’s secrets and to many, but not all, of the intelligence agencies’ secrets. Some Super-Users, including the defense secretary and the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, are included by law in the elite group; the defense secretary determines who else may have access. When Donald Rumsfeld ran the Pentagon, his disdain of the military was symbolized by the fact that he took Super-User status away from several positions to which it was attached previously, including the J2 (the intelligence chief on the Joint Chiefs of Staff). Rumsfeld’s successor, Robert Gates, immediately restored the J2’s access.
Two Super-Users told me there was simply no way they could keep up with so much sensitive work. “I’m not going to live long enough to be briefed on everything,” was how one put it. The other recounted that for his initial briefing, he was escorted into a tiny, dark room, seated at a small table, and told he couldn’t take notes. Reports of program after program after program began flashing on a screen until in frustration he yelled, “Stop!” “I wasn’t remembering any of it,” he said.
When Rumsfeld’s successor, Robert Gates, asked retired army lieutenant general John R. Vines to examine the method for tracking the Defense Department’s most sensitive programs, he was stunned by the size and scope of what fell under his review. Vines was familiar with complex organizations—he had commanded 145,000 troops in Iraq. But he found the system for tracking sensitive programs too complex and confusing even for people on the inside to understand, and inaccessible to the CIA and other agencies that needed to coordinate with the department. He couldn’t find anyone, except the secretary of defense, who had access to all the department’s programs, and the secretary certainly wouldn’t have the time to keep up with even a sliver of what was available to him.
“I’m not aware of any agency with the authority, responsibility, or a process in place to coordinate all these interagency and commercial activities,” Vines said in an interview. “The complexity of this system defies description.”
The complexity and lack of accountability made it impossible, he said, to tell whether the country was safer because of all this spending and because of the particular programs the money was spent on. Yes, you could give the system credit for the lack of big attacks, Vines mused, but who really knew whether that was because these programs had stopped serious plots? There could be some other reason. And if the prevention of major terrorist attacks was due to just one or two of the existing programs, how could those few successes be singled out?
Michael Hayden, the former director of the CIA and the NSA, had a different view of the complexity. “I was in government service for forty years; most of that was in intelligence,” he told PBS’s Frontline. “I would never claim to you that I knew all the compartments…. I could not possibly claim that I knew everything that was going on…. Is that a good thing? Probably not. Can we avoid it? Probably not. Can we make it less of a burdensome problem than it is today? Probably. And we need to work on that. But this is just a reflection of complexity, not any vice.”
The multiple layers of secrecy aren’t simply an impediment to good government; they affected the wars themselves. There wasn’t a senior officer who didn’t have stories about the negative effect of compartmentalization and secrecy in the real world. One air force officer who had served in Afghanistan recalled that only after Operation Mountain Storm, the largest coordinated military counterterrorism operation of 2004, did he learn of a compartmented technology to detect campfires from satellites which, he said, would have been useful to him. But it had been hidden from him and, even though lives were at stake, no one had thought to include him on the BIGOT list.
Vines had his own stories from the battlefield. When he was ground commander in Iraq, and then in Afghanistan, his troops would unknowingly capture CIA informants. “This happened to me maybe forty, fifty times,” he recalled. “We caused the agency major problems.” He proposed a solution: place a CIA liaison in his targeting cell to warn them away from certain people. “I told them, ‘I don’t need to know anything about the source, you just tell me no, not him.’ ” But the agency, afraid of compromising sources by letting even military officers with the highest security clearances know who they were, would not go for it. Better to risk having an informant be caught or even killed than to let an army officer know of his existence.
According to several senior leaders, only about half of the 150 most highly classified technological programs within the Defense Department are allowed to be shared with the staff in charge of developing war plans for individual adversarial countries. The other half are visible only to senior officials at the Office of the Secretary of Defense level. A few of the programs are only known by the team that developed the technology, the security officer in charge of keeping it secret, and the secretary of defense himself. This means that a decade after 9/11, some war plans are developed without the ability to incorporate the most exquisite, life-saving technologies available.
Compartmented secrecy can also undermine the normal chain of command when senior officials use it to cut out rivals or when subordinates are ordered to keep secrets from their commanders. One military communications officer recalled how he was forced to sign a document prohibiting him from disclosing the existence of a Special Access Program he was assigned to by the civilian office of the secretary of defense. The officer was even prohibited from telling his four-star commander, with whom he worked closely every day. The four-star was not part of the operation; therefore, he had no need to know about it, the rules said. In this case, the communications officer was now also reporting to a second, parallel chain of command that was invisible to his regular boss. The arrangement was extremely uncomfortable for the subordinate, as he worked closely with his commander, and the two were supposed to trust each other’s judgment.
Defenders of this knotty system of compartmentalization believe such maximum secrecy is essential to maintaining America’s edge against its enemies. At the CIA, which works mainly overseas, many of these sensitive activities involve working closely with foreign intelligence services. This collaboration has been responsible for capturing, or helping U.S. teams capture, the majority of senior terrorists. The CIA argues that foreign agencies will not agree to help the agency unless the partnerships are kept secret, and that they will even be denied if made public by the media. But it is also reasonable to assume that these relationships would repair themselves with time, as they often do, according to many intelligence officials, because foreign countries understand that the CIA has by far the best technical means of spying on terrorist groups and has the most extensive understanding of how they are webbed together internationally.
The relationship between the CIA and its partners is actually much firmer than the headlines would have readers believe. And for a handful of countries, such as Britain, Australia, Canada, Germany, Jordan, Poland, France, and Saudi Arabia, the relationship with the CIA is steadfast. Even when relations go haywire in public, deep in the sock drawer, business remains brisk. This is a function of common interests.
Poland, for example, believes it needs an alliance with the United States to guard against Russian influence. The CIA’s close, post–cold war tie with Warsaw was cemented in the early 1990s after Polish special forces helped rescue a group of stranded CIA operatives in western Iraq during the first Gulf War. The agency showed its gratitude by funding and training a new Polish special forces unit called GROM. The unit was allowed to do things the Americans could not, as General Sławomir Petelicki, the blond, swashbuckling father of GROM, said as we careened around the streets of Warsaw one afternoon while I held onto the car door for dear life. Someone else told me what he might have been referring to: during the surge in Iraq, GROM commandos were permitted to kill people that U.S. forces could not. At the time, American snipers had to see a weapon in a target’s hand before they could shoot. But the elite Polish snipers had more permissive rules of engagement; they could shoot anyone on the streets of Fallujah with a cell phone in hand after curfew, several U.S. military sources said. GROM commandos were considered to be so useful, yet another source explained, that they were assigned to various CIA units in Afghanistan and worked both under the command of the agency’s chief of station and the U.S. Navy SEALs.
GROM had also been among the first on the ground in Iraq, along with the CIA, even before the war began. To prove it, one former senior intelligence official in Warsaw brought to our interview the citation he had received, along with the American Legion of Merit medal. It was signed by Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and had been awarded for “highly sensitive and successful operations in support of Operation Iraqi Freedom, from July 2002 to Dec. 3, 2003.” The war did not begin until March 2003.
The U.S.-Jordanian intelligence relationship goes back even further. One U.S. officer spent much of his career at the side of King Hussein’s son, Abdullah, teaching him about bilateral codependence between the United States and Jordan and preparing him for a time when he would be the country’s leader and the United States would be asking him for covert favors, just as it had asked his father. When it was obvious that sending American case officers to get close to al-Qaeda followers would not work, the Jordanians volunteered to help out. Five years after 9/11, I found myself in the lobby of the Georgetown Ritz-Carlton listening to a senior Jordanian intelligence officer brag about how his undercover agents had participated in snatching terrorists from around the world. I confirmed his story with several U.S. sources. Such cooperative ventures are the tendrils of Top Secret America.
The relationship with the British is closest of all. A variety of foreign websites showing jihadists beheading Westerners and training recruits in bomb making had been traced back to the United States via IP addresses. American officials were paralyzed by an ongoing debate over whether U.S. law barred the National Security Agency and the CIA from disrupting sites like this that resided, electronically, in the United States, even though their webmasters lived overseas. Lacking clear guidance, it was quicker and easier to suggest to a close ally like Britain that it do it instead. More than once, the British intelligence service had done the favor, covertly destroying the offending sites.
Covert CIA prisons, the so-called black sites,3 also resided deep down in a compartment of Greystone, designed never to be found. But, as I learned in the process of discovering their locations, there are always going to be limits to protecting anything so highly controversial, no matter what kind of classification label is attached to it. In the end, this is what makes the obsession with secrecy so harmful to the nation’s security. Secrets cannot be totally secured by locks or code names or encrypted email or even vaults underground, and acting as if they can be is dangerous, even to national security. The security of secrets ultimately depends upon human beings. Even though many intelligence officers live and work among their own kind, they still have all sorts of reasons for talking about what they know: pride, angst, guilt, a need for praise, a desire to correct the record or to explain away something that sounds evil, or to save the agency from itself, or to stop wrongdoing. As Ben Franklin once noted, “Three may keep a secret, if two of them are dead.”
Sources expressed every reason imaginable for helping me try to figure out where the CIA was holding its prisoners. Some thought the program was a terrible idea because, although the White House encouraged and signed off on the matter, the CIA would be left holding a very stinky bag once it became public. A secret involving human beings, prisons, companies with false names, employees with false addresses—such a massive exercise in clandestine duplicity could not hold forever, and, in one source’s opinion, senior agency officials should have realized that from the start.
“They won’t face up to the problem,” said one source who spoke with me years ago. “They have no long-term plan” for where to keep the captives. Some CIA old-timers believed that revealing the covert prisons’ existence could ruin the agency’s reputation, which was why they wanted to make sure I had the whole picture, not just the cartoon version. The president’s lawyers, after all, had signed legal opinions declaring that the prisons and the way prisoners were interrogated were legal. The president had even approved of the program. Other people said they despised what they believed the CIA had become: “We’ve become bounty hunters,” one said in disgust. Too much time and energy was spent running the program’s stealth infrastructure. “Just let us do our mission and let other people run the fucking penal system.”
One morning as I was preparing to leave my hotel room during a trip I made to one Eastern European capital in my effort to locate the prisons, the telephone rang. A CIA officer from headquarters in Langley was on the line. The agency had learned of my visit from some of the people I had interviewed the day before, who had apparently called headquarters in a panic. “My phone has been ringing off the hook,” the CIA officer on the line said. “Countries are freaking out about the questions you are asking. Can you close that line of questioning, please… it could affect ongoing operations as we speak. It’s having real implications. We could have to stop doing things.”
I listened politely but promised nothing.
I was summoned to CIA headquarters upon my return. A senior operations officer in the Counterterrorism Center was waiting for me. He explained that the center had tripled in size since 9/11 and was more dependent than ever on foreign intelligence services to find suspected terrorists. Writing about the secret prisons would embarrass the partners who had agreed to host them in their countries, he said. They might stop cooperating with the United States on other programs. “In many cases they are violating their own laws by helping us,” he said. “In many cases we get the approval of the president but not anyone else.” Those words were supposed to reassure me but had the opposite effect. Should the Post be complicit in something illegal under the laws of the countries in which the prisons were located?
Many of the citizens in those Eastern European democracies had made great sacrifices and taken huge risks to get out from under the corrupting influence of their Soviet-era intelligence services. It seemed hypocritical, even contrary to U.S. long-term interests, for an administration that said its goal was to create democracies out of Iraq and Afghanistan now to be effectively undermining the legal system in Eastern Europe by cutting private deals with intelligence officials there in exchange for U.S. money and equipment that would make them more powerful.
Why do you need prisons in the first place, I asked, trying to elicit a more detailed explanation. Why not bring the detainees to trial?
“Because they would get lawyered-up, and our job, first and foremost, is to obtain information from them,” he said.
Why didn’t the agency just give the captives access to the International Committee of the Red Cross? By treaty, the ICRC has access to detained military combatants.
White House lawyers had declared al-Qaeda operatives to be unlawful combatants not worthy of such protections, he said. Besides, “countries do this secretly. There are other legal issues involved…. There are a number of things in a democracy”—he stumbled over his explanation—“like how to balance individual rights with national security concerns.”4
A year later President Bush publicly acknowledged the program’s existence, announced he was closing the prisons, and said that the remaining detainees had been transferred into the military justice system at the Guantánamo Bay prison in Cuba. Although there were some hard feelings against Washington among European leaders, the countries involved5 and other allies in Europe did not bolt from cooperating, and there is no indication that the national security of the United States was gravely harmed by the disclosure.
As we would discover over the course of our investigation into Top Secret America, many things would remain unknown, but the existence of covert prisons was no longer one of them. And, now, neither is this: that not all of the disappeared have been accounted for. At least a dozen people once held by the CIA remain nowhere to be found.