IN DICKENS’S A CHRISTMAS CAROL, JACOB MARLEY’S SPIRIT APPEARS TO Ebenezer Scrooge in a late-night vision and tells him that he will come to perdition unless he gives up his greed, selfishness, and arrogance.
Marley warns that ghosts will visit Scrooge, who will end as a chained, tormented ghost himself if he doesn’t heed the message. The past was childhood and that spirit was pleasant. The present is starker. For Langley, as for Scrooge, the ghosts change with the era. Of late, for Langley, there is even competition for ghost of the present. It seems appropriate to let both have their say. It sharpens our sense of how far the Central Intelligence Agency has migrated from its youthful ideals. This is a dark picture of a dark period, only slightly ameliorated by such CIA triumphs as the initial campaign in Afghanistan, which drove out the Taliban leadership in just a few months in 2001–2002; the shutdown of the nuclear-smuggling A. Q. Khan network; or, in 2004, the Libyan divestment of its entire nuclear weapons program. Had the story stopped there, the CIA would have looked good. As it is, there is a major problem.
THE CIA DOES NOT DO TORTURE
Porter Goss makes a good spirit to start with. When George Tenet tired of the Bush people using the CIA as punching bag for their incredible stupidities in invading Iraq, Goss followed him at Langley. Goss had assisted in that—he was the overseer at the time, chairman of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence (HPSCI), and the Florida congressman made sure HPSCI failed in its oversight role by refusing to do any serious postmortem on the intelligence failures and the way intelligence was corrupted to support the Iraq invasion.
For the CIA, this was a time of transition, with the United States just creating a new supernumerary position, the director of national intelligence, to assume the task of boss over all U.S. intelligence. Goss became the last director of central intelligence, the job title of the official who headed both the CIA and the intelligence community as a whole. For six months, Porter Goss served as DCI, then for a little over a year as a diminished director of the Central Intelligence Agency alone. He had actually studied ancient Greek as an undergraduate at Yale. His time at Langley, appropriately, added up to tragedy.
The moment would be as turbulent as it was transitional. At his nomination hearing, fellow Florida politician Senator Bill Nelson declared that intelligence reform had become urgent and that Porter J. Goss could do it. The nominee himself estimated that rebuilding agency capabilities could take more than five years. Terrorism continued to be the most urgent task, good intelligence crucial; the agency must increase its take from spies, do better analysis, and protect and reinvigorate the machine spies. “You have my word,” Goss promised when asked whether he and the CIA would cooperate in oversight inquiries into the interrogation programs.
From September 2004, when Goss took over the CIA, until July 2006, when he left, Porter J. Goss on his own never briefed Congress on interrogations—not the Gang of Four, not the Gang of Eight, no one—according to an official CIA chronology of agency congressional briefings released five years later. Lesser officials handled all contacts—except where Vice President Cheney entered the lists to overawe doubters—and then Goss might accompany him. In 2015 Director Goss contributed a piece to the Rebuttal compendium that former CIA persons put out to parry the Senate committee’s report. There he claimed, “I briefed both the HPSCI and the SSCI . . . in 2004 and 2005. . . . Defenders of the SSCI Democrats might argue that the briefings were not in sufficient detail or that not every Committee Member was included.” The deception is subtle and deplorable. The facts are as noted in Langley’s official record.
In March 2005, a couple of weeks after President George W. Bush visited to laud CIA employees’ dedication, the New York Times published a major exposé on agency torture. Jennifer Millerwise, a spokeswoman Goss had hired from the 2004 Bush-Cheney presidential campaign, countered, “The truth is exactly what Director Goss said it was: ‘We don’t do torture.’” At the time there was a CIA contract officer, David Passaro, on his way to trial for the death under interrogation of a detainee. Those things seemed antithetical. Naturally Congress wanted to know more. No briefing. In mid-April, after a generic counterterror update, the Senate intelligence committee sent Langley questions for the record. Goss’s CIA waited two months before replying and then kept its silence on the worst “enhanced interrogation techniques.”
Goss and the CIA often found themselves in reactive mode. The New York Times story triggered a debate within the agency about going public. Before long there were even talking points. But officials remained reluctant to speak openly, wanting to attribute comments to the proverbial unnamed source. Langley itself takes the position that only official acknowledgment ends secrecy, so that would have accomplished nothing. Nevertheless, the CIA spin doctors put together a four-page scenario for how to “roll out” the interrogations.
The CTC and the gunslingers all got into the act. On April 25, a CTC lawyer, aware that Goss wanted to defend Greystone in public, commented, “We need to have the 7th Floor confront the inconsistency in filing a [secrecy] declaration” in the case of David Passaro, and at the same time planning to reveal darn near the entire program. He finished acidly: “These goals are not obviously compatible.”
Director Goss talked to the press, not Congress. Goss claimed neutrality in the congressional debate over John McCain’s 2005 bill to ban cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment of detainees, and to restrict interrogators to methods detailed in official U.S. Army field manuals. The spy chief commissioned a “blue ribbon panel” review of interrogation methods that reported to him that September. Results were divided. Some opined that there were no external standards for comparison and no objective way to measure efficiency, plus, due to secrecy, no way to compare Greystone with any other program. Others maintained that both DO operatives and DI analysts agreed they were getting more than half their information about Al Qaeda from hostile interrogation.
Mr. Goss spoke of misinformation deluding the public, refused to describe CIA methods, but repeated his mantra, “This agency does not do torture. Torture does not work. We use lawful capabilities to collect vital information, and we do it in a variety of unique and innovative ways.” Goss wrote in the Rebuttal compendium, “Successfully fighting . . . brutal radicals will require capturing, holding, and questioning the enemy.” His rejoinder—that if opponents (Goss mentions Senator Feinstein) had a better plan, they had not revealed it—both suggests that Goss really is talking about torture and implies that, so far as he is concerned, anything goes. Equally to the point, the logic of this argument is that criminal acts are the norm and that the burden for change should be on opponents of torture, not its perpetrators. That is certainly false.
Senator Thad Cochrane commented that he never learned what waterboarding really was until, a couple of days before the Washington Post blew the lid off black prisons, Dick Cheney attended a Republican congressional breakfast and presided over a briefing. At that point, of course, CIA and White House efforts to get the newspaper to quash Dana Priest’s story had failed. Cheney knew what portended. In his later rebuttal to the Senate torture report, Mr. Goss admitted, “It is true that specific sources and methods were not generally spelled out in most CIA briefings on the Hill and that extra-sensitive intelligence was limited to the ‘Gang of Eight,’ the senior leadership.” The same CIA briefing record referred to above discloses that, until the Bush administration found itself in the political fight against McCain’s legislation, only members of the senior leadership were briefed at all.
Then came the Goss purge. Perhaps it began with Mary O. McCarthy. McCarthy had the reputation of a solid analyst who played by the rules. An Africa specialist, she had risen steadily, serving as national intelligence officer for warning and on the NSC’s intelligence staff, where she handled the White House end of congressional notifications. McCarthy had been the one who tried to save President Clinton from ordering cruise missiles to attack an innocent Sudanese chemical plant. Later she took a sabbatical and attended law school, only to return to Langley in 2004 as deputy inspector general. In June 2005, she was startled to hear a senior agency official repeatedly insist that the CIA did not violate the international convention on torture or seek to do so. Of course, Helgerson’s office had probed this very question and reported critically shortly before Porter Goss ascended to director. There existed a possibility that the oversight committees, not to mention the IG, would never get to the bottom of the story.
McCarthy became a target of the CIA’s leak investigation after the Washington Post revelations. She had, in fact, spoken to Post correspondent Dana Priest, but it’s impossible to know what role, if any, the CIA person had in the story. A wide range of associates agree that McCarthy had always been extremely scrupulous in her handling of classified information. Porter Goss fired McCarthy, a senior officer, in April 2006, ten days before she became eligible to retire.
The punitive nature of the top floor’s treatment of McCarthy itself says something about the CIA and torture. It contrasts with Goss’s failure to take any action on Jose Rodriguez, who put the agency in deep jeopardy by conspiring to destroy the torture tapes immediately after the Washington Post disclosure. An agency officer working for legality experienced censure while a bull-headed spy walked away.
Goss took charge of a CIA pushing hard on detainee interrogation, with Jose Rodriguez sending CTC snatch teams around the world. By the time Goss left, the spies would be destroying evidence. Along the way, the roadster careened from one disaster to another. With rhetoric going in that promised to unleash the agency for more vigorous operations, break the CIA out of risk aversion, and make it more effective, Director Goss accomplished the reverse.
That was a good trick even for an experienced spook. Porter Goss, a veteran agency operations officer, had spent a dozen years in the DO—in Miami with JM/Wave, on the covert action staff, spanning the Cord Meyer years of the Ramparts imbroglio, finishing in London. Both Goss and Jose Rodriguez had served in the Dominican Republic, and their friendship kept the heat down on the seventh floor when Rodriguez conspired against evidence.
His CIA career ended by a medical event in London, Goss retired to Sanibel Island, off Fort Myers in Florida, where he found a network of former spooks and grounded sailors and airmen. On top of his experience in the trade, Porter Goss learned politics, starting with that circle to make a second career at age thirty-four. He worked his way up through city council, mayor, five years on the Lee County Commission, then as Republican member of the House of Representatives from 1989 onward. All those skills finally came to nothing.
Porter Goss came to Langley with his own crew of aides, rousing more ire than anyone since Stansfield Turner appeared with his alleged Navy Mafia. An actual purge followed. Goss’s henchmen looked at files, sized up officers, and made demands. Heads rolled.
The most notorious of these belonged to one of the CIA’s top women, Mary Margaret Graham. When she took the clandestine operations course at the Farm in 1979, there were only five other women there, and as was typical, after two years, only a pair were left. Graham went on to great things, including the National Intelligence Medal in 1996 and the Donovan Award in 2001, when she headed the CIA station in New York. Graham had compiled the CIA’s operations budget, and had been a senior counterintelligence officer. She crossed swords over Kyle D. Foggo, whom Goss had discovered on a cruise, as a logistics chief at the CIA base at Frankfurt, Germany. Goss wanted to catapult Foggo up to the agency’s number-three position, executive director. Graham and Jeanette Moore, chief of the Office of Security, looked at Foggo’s file and found complaints. “Dusty” Foggo apparently had a reputation as a hard-drinking womanizer. They took the issue to Goss aide Patrick Murray in November 2004. Murray, one of the “Gosslings” from HPSCI, upbraided the women for raising this issue and threatened them if there were any leak.
Graham went to the associate chief of the DO, Michael Sulick, and related Murray’s over-the-top response. Sulick cautioned Murray against such treatment of employees. At that point, chief of staff Murray escalated, demanding of DDO Stephen Kappes that Sulick be fired. At a meeting with Director Goss in mid-November, the boss took his Gossling’s side. Both Kappes and Sulick resigned. That was how Jose Rodriguez got his promotion to head the DO, replacing Kappes. Rodriguez handpicked Robert Richer as his associate, the kind of fellow you want with you in a foxhole, as Jose saw it. Fleeing Langley and Goss, with the brass, were thirty to forty top officers, including more than a dozen division chiefs, station chiefs, or department heads. Mary Graham became one; she joined the Office of the Director of National Intelligence.
As for Dusty Foggo, he turned out worse than advertised, leaving under a cloud in 2006, later convicted of fraud, conspiracy, and money laundering.
Director Goss ended the daily five p.m. threat-matrix sessions that George Tenet had used to tweak CIA strategy. Goss wanted only private briefings, a few times a week. That worked for him, but it missed the point. The threat-matrix huddles had become the main tool for senior officials to calibrate their efforts. Goss also objected to the ceremonial roles of a CIA director, disparaging the speeches and talks the spy chieftain typically makes.
The more Porter Goss cut back, the less feel folk had. Director Goss notoriously circulated a round-robin message to chiefs of station that, when planning for intelligence chiefs in their countries to visit the United States, meetings with the CIA director should be set for Tuesdays or Thursdays. The spy chieftain seemed unavailable. Agency programs floundered too.
Sidestepping Langley’s constant rhetoric as to how well it was doing, and without saying the CIA had been broken, Goss had told Congress five years would be necessary to reanimate it. So clandestine chief Rodriguez began work on a five-year plan to double the size of the clandestine service. His associate Robert Richer headed the working group and labored on the details with the barons for months. At the end, CIA gathered its station chiefs from around the world at headquarters for the first time. They conferred in the “Bubble.” Rob Richer did not last long past his work on the strategic plan. A year into Goss’s reign, the DO’s principal associate director, Richer, left too—with a blast at Goss delivered to a Senate hearing.
The man from Sanibel had a certain hapless quality. On a European cruise during which he visited Slovakia, Goss arranged for a meeting at an organic farm because he was a big fan of natural food and wanted to see how the Slovaks did organics. That raised eyebrows. More serious would be the director’s blurting out to the press, in the summer of 2005, that he “knew” where Osama bin Laden was hiding out, but diplomatic niceties prevented him from doing anything about it. In fact, agency operative Michael Morell records that Goss was so worried about one of the Pakistani border regions, he ordered spooks to flood the zone. It became the largest surge of CIA resources since September 11. This time the raised eyebrows were at the White House, where officials were trying to keep a positive spin on U.S.-Pakistani relations.
In Italy, on Goss’s watch, the authorities issued arrest warrants for CIA participants in the kidnapping of Abu Omar.
Representative Jane Harman, ranking member on the HPSCI when Goss had been chairman, made her own Middle East cruise about a year after her colleague moved to Langley. At a major CIA station, she asked for a show of hands on who understood where Goss was taking the agency. Almost no hands went up. Around this time Director Goss approved seeking a warrant extension of the bugs on an individual, reportedly an Israeli, on whose phone Harman had been overheard. Though counterintelligence framed the excuse, the action inevitably had its chilling aspect, especially where Mr. Goss, at HPSCI, had torpedoed any investigation of the hugely controversial intelligence purporting to justify George Bush’s invasion of Iraq. Harman had been a major proponent of that inquiry.
In June 2005 came the report of a presidential commission that had studied U.S. intelligence on weapons of mass destruction. Goss flaccidly announced that “at CIA, we are improving how we do our business,” and attributed the serious errors CIA had made on Iraqi weapons to agency budget cuts from the 1990s. That fall, after digesting the investigative report of the public-private commission that had investigated the failures of 9/11, Inspector General John Helgerson released the IG’s own review focused specifically on agency accountability. Director Goss maintained that the review unveiled no mysteries: “After great consideration of this report and its conclusions, I will not convene an accountability board to judge the performance of any individual CIA officers.”
Meanwhile Director Goss, who had spoken of new CIA stations in Latin America and of unleashing the agency, presided over an evaporation of recruiting. The President’s Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board questioned the recruiting drought and blamed the decline on morale at Langley. Goss’s witch hunt after the CIA black prisons leak, which involved a rare speech, an op-ed article in the New York Times, plus the firing of Mary McCarthy, did little to improve morale. Director Goss did not long survive the debacle. Barely a month later, he appeared at the White House with President George W. Bush to announce his departure. With typical Gossian aplomb, he spoke of record numbers of new agency employees, better training than ever, and Langley’s “field forward” approach.
Under Porter J. Goss, the Central Intelligence Agency experienced its latest instance of a director hiring a crook to a top post (the jury remains out on Bill Casey’s enthusiasm for Max Hugel), saw the director sanction obstruction of justice by a subordinate while firing an officer who objected to CIA prevarication, and witnessed the director deliberately refusing to apply accountability processes for officers involved in the greatest intelligence disaster of the age. Agents feared the director as he purged those who disagreed, worried as the duping of Congress continued, and shivered as Italian authorities issued criminal indictments for CIA officers. There is much to ponder in the ghost of Porter J. Goss. In Freud’s disquisitions on the uncanny, he postulates the evil eye as one of the most recurrent superstitions.
THE CIA DOES NOT DESTROY TORTURE TAPES
Marching alongside the director was his gunslinger John A. Rizzo. John had been at Langley the morning of September 11, 2001, and like so many Americans he watched on TV as the horrors unfolded. Director Tenet and a few key officials, including his boss, general counsel Robert N. McNamara Jr., went to the printing plant, out by the perimeter fence and likely to escape destruction if a plane came at the CIA. The evacuation order created bedlam, so Rizzo decided to stay where he was, in the OGC office on the seventh floor of the old headquarters building. Anticipating that President Bush would demand a full-scale assault on Al Qaeda networks and that investigations would probe preattack intelligence failures, lawyer Rizzo began listing possible covert actions. Later they could be compared with directives on the books to see what was permitted. His list included “capture, detain, and question.” Following the day of carnage, Bob McNamara took Rizzo’s list and collaborated with NSC officials to craft a presidential finding in less than a week. President Bush approved it the day he saw it.
As CIA officers knew it would, after the horror, Congress rallied to the flag. When the oversight committees were handed copies of the finding, on September 18, the day after Bush signed it, overseers asked if the agency needed more. John Rizzo described the finding: “Multiple pages in length, it was the most comprehensive, most ambitious, most aggressive, and most risky Finding I was ever involved in. One short paragraph authorized the capture and detention of Al Qaeda terrorists, another authorized taking lethal action against them.”
Langley hustled, generating a heap of business for the gunslingers, furnishing legal advice on international security sweeps the CIA developed in concert with friends across the globe, negotiating details of arrangements with foreign spy services, and handling domestic aspects of CIA operations. For some time, Bob McNamara had been planning to depart, and in October 2001 he did. That left Rizzo the acting general counsel of the Central Intelligence Agency.
It would be an amazing time. The operational tempo—no matter what Tenet’s successors claim—grew, peaked, and remained at that high level for months, all while parallel operations aimed at nuclear technology smugglers and the Libyan program. Acting counsel Rizzo found himself in uncharted waters, from skull sessions in the director’s office puzzling over the choice of mystery ships versus deserted islands for black prisons to advising the CTC on permissible techniques.
Attorney Rizzo will aver that the CIA used interrogation methods approved by the Department of Justice (DOJ). Agency officers, particularly those at CTC, will agree. The senior people who banded together to rebut the Senate torture report will intone that its conclusions that the CIA resorted to unapproved techniques or that agency methods were harsher than it told Justice are wrong. That debate may never be resolved. But three things are beyond dispute. The CIA’s enhanced interrogations began on April 13, 2002, whereas no DOJ legal memoranda existed until August. The agency’s psychologists “Dunbar” and “Swigert” began plying their trade before the legal memos existed. And Langley solicited the Justice memos and supplied lists of methods it wanted approved. When CTC first went to the general counsel for approval, John Rizzo, by his own account, volunteered to take the list to DOJ. Another way to put that is that Rizzo did not want his fingerprints on the decision. All of that was squarely within OGC’s purview.
Imagine Mr. Rizzo’s upset when, in 2003 and repeatedly thereafter, the crucial Justice Department memos were invalidated and withdrawn. The periodic fights to obtain new versions of the supposed justification became a theme over the remainder of Rizzo’s agency career. There is another matter on which his advice remains shrouded. The security sweeps going on around the world got agency help. Some were unilateral. In numerous cases that involved aircraft and action teams, landing in foreign countries to take custody of people, conveying them to other places, sometimes CIA black prisons, sometimes elsewhere. How did the gunslinger advise? The Abu Omar kidnapping in Italy is a case in point. Some nations were cooperative and witting, the record on others remains obscure. Every one of those “renditions” meant dealing in some way with international and national laws on use of airspace, plus national laws on border control, customs and immigration, extradition, the carrying and use of firearms, and much more.
Until October 2002, when Scott Muller became counsel, Mr. Rizzo’s voice dominated. The change relieved John Rizzo of the burden of answering all the late-night emergency phone calls, but there were still multiple headaches. Muller arrived just in time for the Bush administration’s invasion of Iraq, which involved a manipulation of intelligence reporting and a White House attempt to cast the CIA as driving the issue, but the war in Iraq revealed the supposed threat as phony. Muller fancied himself a crisis manager, but Langley had ensnared itself in a host of unmanageable crises.
When Richard Cheney’s aides blew the cover of clandestine service officer Valerie Plame in a gambit to discredit a critic of the Iraq deception, Langley swam in a poisonous fountain. Attorney Rizzo sent the obligatory notice to the Justice Department, but he saw the leak as minor, couldn’t remember ever meeting Plame, and figured the likelihood of a Justice investigation minimal. That affair led to the criminal prosecution of I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby, the vice president’s chief of staff. Cheney was the CIA’s biggest White House customer. Then in the spring of 2004, the revelation of photographs of how military interrogators at Abu Ghraib in Iraq had mistreated detainees resulted in a public outcry, multiple new investigations, and charges that the CIA used similar tactics. The story was getting uncomfortably close. John Rizzo foresaw a “drip by drip” slow-motion disclosure of the truth.
Scott Muller had been on a cruise to the black sites, and Langley flung him into the soup with White House aides over the interrogations. Langley’s inspector general weighed in with his own investigations at just this point. Muller, who had clerked for the Watergate special prosecutor’s task force back in the day, had had a bellyful. Abu Ghraib became the last straw. One day in July, he told John Rizzo he was resigning, that day. Less than a week later, George Tenet resigned too. Stunning. When Porter Goss arrived, John Rizzo was the CIA’s acting general counsel again. From his top-floor perch, the attorney watched the broad Potomac, where the distance to the White House daily seemed longer, and Capitol Hill, where congressional anger seemed hotter every day.
The most furious man at Langley when Jose Rodriguez had the torture tapes destroyed was not Director Goss but gunslinger Rizzo. Not only had the CIA’s lawyer had to track each White House order to preserve the material; he’d had to listen to Congress say the same thing. Plus, the General Counsel’s Office had certified to courts that the CIA had not destroyed evidence, which the tapes were. Plus again, Rizzo understood how Jose had gamed the system, collaring lesser lawyers on assignment to the Counterterrorism Center, people beholden to the National Clandestine Service (DO), less to the general counsel.
Rodriguez knew what Rizzo would have told him. At a meeting with Goss, the counsel had pointed out that the clandestine service chief really wanted a final determination on the tapes. Rodriguez heard Goss reiterate the advice he had given when still on the Hill—preserve the tapes at the station where the black site had been. But Goss failed to order that they be kept. Rizzo would have repeated Goss’s advice and reminded Rodriguez of White House instructions that it be consulted prior to any action. The CIA operative needed to avoid that conversation.
Instead, through his chief of staff, Rodriguez asked CTC lawyers Robert Eatinger and Stephen Hermes if he had the authority to order the tapes’ destruction by himself.
Mr. Rizzo argues that Rodriguez and others who sought destruction on security grounds were sincere and deserved a full hearing. On that basis, he permitted Eatinger and Hermes to answer the narrow question. They kept away from the weightier matter of legal constraints—more than twenty court orders were in effect requiring the CIA to preserve evidence in various cases, and neither the CTC lawyers nor Rodriguez had the authority to determine whether the tapes constituted evidence. Absent such a ruling, any action regarding tapes in potential evidence ought to have been prohibited.
Rizzo concedes he had been naïve. “I have often wondered,” he writes, “whether I should have gone to Jose at that point and told him, ‘Forget it, Jose. No one is ever going to agree to destruction.’ I came to conclude that telling him that wouldn’t have made any difference.”
The action format offered one last opportunity to prevent the destruction. Jose Rodriguez no longer led the CTC. Its chief, Robert Grenier, would approve the cable too. Along with Jose’s staff chief, lawyers Eatinger and Hermes drafted language so the Bangkok Station chief would frame the question just right. Grenier had a more evolved sensibility—one reason for his difficulties with Rodriguez—and he had been wrestling for some time with increasing inertia in the detainee program. But perhaps because of his problems with Rodriguez, Grenier did not object. Sent on the back channel, the cable asked the station to dispatch a routine request on the front channel. On November 8, 2005, a front-channel cable from Langley, 081855Z Nov 2005, mentioned the Bangkok message and approved the request to destroy tapes “FOR THE REASONS CITED THEREIN.”
Rodriguez’s maneuver aimed to make it seem like the initiative for destroying the tapes came from elsewhere. Like Richard Helms and the Bay of Pigs or John Rizzo and legal advice on interrogation methods, Rodriguez wanted to leave no fingerprints on the op. Chief of staff Gina Haspel posed the key questions to CTC lawyers. She and the attorneys wrote the message. The Bangkok Station asked for the destruction. Rodriguez widened the circle further with Grenier and Rizzo, to whom he sent a copy of the dispatch—too late to stop it.
Describing this sequence of actions to Congress in the aftermath, the next CIA director, General Michael Hayden, maintained, “It was an agency decision—you can take it to the bank.”
John Rizzo watched with horror as this kabuki play unfolded. In Bangkok a bonfire took place. Videotapes melted. The station reported successful destruction. The Bush administration for months had privately been noodling over what to do with the CIA detainees. Pieces of their story had been emerging; host countries were restive. That had been one reason the agency had had to keep changing prison locations. After the Washington Post revelation, there were more demands to get out. White House officials queried CTC’s Grenier whether the CIA would go on using “enhanced interrogation.” The agency man answered no. The CTC chief would not budge. The McCain bill passed, and President Bush signed it.
Porter Goss wanted to continue the hostile interrogation program. He had written a letter to that effect late in December and structured a Power-Point briefing to threaten that the CIA would stop the interrogations if it couldn’t use “enhanced” methods. Secretary Condoleezza Rice called out Director Goss right there. It was almost his last appearance at the White House. The same frosty winds buffeted Bob Grenier. On February 3, Jose Rodriguez summoned Grenier to the top floor at Langley to fire him.
Jose Rodriguez enjoyed a soft landing after the destruction of the tapes, as did John Rizzo, who failed to enforce the various holds placed on them. By then, however, the OGC’s plate had been heaped with another weighty matter, the drone war, in which the CIA and the U.S. military, in particular its Special Operations Command, were on the offensive, using armed unmanned aerial vehicles—UAVs, or drones—to fire at enemies on the ground. For reasons that will become apparent, John Rizzo stood at the center of the drone war, much as he occupied that position in the struggle over the detainees.
Drone technology had been coming for a long time. The CIA had used drones in conjunction with its SR-71 spy planes, and the U.S. military had had a variety of them. Traditionally these were a form of reconnaissance aircraft, programed to follow a given flight path and to take pictures to be processed. Three things made the old-fashioned UAV into the modern drone. First, televised pictures relayed to the ground replaced still photography permitting real-time scouting. Second, the television sensors plus aircraft avionics, communications, and automation allowed a remote pilot to actually fly the aircraft. The UAV could then respond to situations, not simply follow a preplanned trajectory. The third element—missing until recently—would be remote-controlled weaponry for the warplane.
This kind of technology existed by the 1980s. The CIA first used it in Bosnia, where a small UAV called the Gnat, controlled from vans at local airfields, helped guide peacekeeping forces. The Gnat’s ability to stay in the sky for long periods—twenty-four hours even—impressed Langley. A UAV called the Predator had already begun taking shape, made by California’s General Atomics Corporation, designed by the Israeli inventor of the Gnat alongside American innovators. Predator was bigger, could carry more, and fly farther, higher, and longer. The craft could link through communications satellites for truly remote control from hundreds or thousands of miles away.
The agency experimented with Predators in the late 1990s, and the Air Force first made use of them in 1996. Some at Langley wanted in badly, and conceived of a mission nicknamed Afghan Eyes, in which a Predator detachment would be deployed to Pakistan and used to spy on Al Qaeda. A meeting in the director’s conference room at Langley on Memorial Day of 2000 found the DDO plus George Tenet’s deputy, Air Force General John A. Gordon, opposed to the idea. Briefed on it, Tenet also seemed resistant. But White House officials plus a cabal of CIA advocates kept pushing. Technologists had just perfected the remote links. Operatives arranged with Uzbekistan to base the Predators and controlled the mission from an American base in Germany. The CIA had a schedule of prayer times at Osama bin Laden’s hideout and timed the Predator to orbit then. One noon in late September, the Predator pictured a tall robed man who had to be bin Laden. Langley was hooked.
Armament made the Predator UAV into the drone. The CIA and Air Force fought over who would fund this, with Langley pleading it had no money. In June 2000 higher authority ordered each to put up around $2 million for arming the UAV. The cost could be so low because a suitable weapon already existed—the AGM-114 Hellfire missile—originally created as a self-guided weapon to destroy enemy tanks. The only things required were to hang the missiles on the aircraft and install systems to transfer target information to the pilot and launch the missile. Experiments with the prototype drone took place at China Lake, in the Mojave Desert, long a U.S. weapons test center. By August 2001, Predator stood ready. Lieutenant General John “Soup” Campbell, another Air Force fellow detached to the agency, held political-military exercises centered on how to use the armed Predators.
By the summer of 2001, the CIA had begun asking for presidential approval to fly the weaponized Predator. Conversations were desultory. Director Tenet wavered, at times favoring an agency attack role, elsewhere pronouncing it a terrible idea. In fact, Tenet’s last meeting with the NSC Principals Committee prior to 9/11 centered on this very subject. Bush’s presidential finding after 9/11 suddenly incorporated “lethal” mission authority. That meant drone strikes. The CIA speedily got Pakistani agreement to a Predator detachment close to the Afghan target.
The legal headaches brought John Rizzo into this action. Flying scout missions from Uzbekistan, controlled from Germany, was one thing. A lethal mission flown from anywhere required German approval. Director Tenet broached many matters at his five p.m. threat-matrix staff sessions, but the really secret issues went to conversations held afterward. During one of these Tenet told Rizzo that no one wanted a CIA attack program subject to German veto. Rizzo agreed. The alternative would be to reconfigure the communications and guidance protocols to control the drones from American soil. The technologists took care of that. They also modified the Hellfire missiles to make them more dependable and effective, and they developed a larger, even more capable drone, the Reaper.
Other concerns included the principle of the thing. Israel had been making targeted strikes against Palestinians. Just months before 9/11, the United States had protested these as extrajudicial killings. Now Langley proposed to do the same. The arguments over that thorny issue are still secret today. Who should pay for crashed Predators the agency borrowed from the Air Force? Tenet argued the Air Force. It thought the opposite. And there was the chain of command—who should press the button in a lethal drone strike? Tenet felt most comfortable with the military handling those aspects. Buzzy Krongard, his executive director, and Predator advocate Charlie Allen were both happy with the CIA taking the shot. Rizzo’s advice is not recorded. The White House told Langley to go ahead but ordered SOCOM into action too. The resulting parallel drone campaigns from both the military and the agency set up twin operating mechanisms. So began the CIA’s notorious drone strikes.
The missions were ramped up in parallel with the CIA’s covert campaign to topple the Taliban and its protected ally Al Qaeda. One strike, which alert CIA teams managed to abort at the last moment, would have hit Americans themselves and their Afghan allies. A more successful attack took place in mid-November 2001. It killed Mohammed Atef, thought to have been Al Qaeda’s top military commander, at his home outside Kabul. The first deliberately targeted strike took place on February 4, 2002. The target is thought to have been Osama bin Laden, who had escaped from pursuers at Tora Bora mountain a month earlier.
After that, the drone program assumed a certain routine. Porter Goss told one interviewer that President Bush had no need to waive or modify the prohibition on CIA assassinations that had been in effect since Gerald Ford’s time, because “lethal force . . . is a concept most Americans are fairly comfortable with.” As did associates, including lawyer Rizzo, Director Goss fudged the distinction between combat and drone strikes. He justified killing “where you’re trying to bring well-known criminals to justice,” and they have been properly identified, a capture attempt is made, and “the person resists and tries to take a shot at our law enforcement people.” In the CIA and military drone attacks, the targets are often not well known (at times they are not known at all), no capture is attempted, and there is no enemy shooting back. Like the CIA detainee project, secret Justice Department legal memoranda underlay the drone attacks.
Once the first few strikes occurred, Bush’s White House wanted to hear only about results. Top leaders sought to preserve deniability. CIA directors were more directly involved, and they might participate in targeting decisions when the quarry was a sufficiently bad guy—and in the early days most were. But the day-to-day marshaling of files, compilation of “cases,” and maintenance of the hit list—and, yes, there was a list—fell to John Rizzo. There were thirty or so names on the list at any given time. Field commanders, CIA stations, or Washington would “nominate” targets and explain why. Rizzo would open a case file, summarizing the pros and cons in a memorandum to higher authority. At times the lawyer himself acted as that authority. “How many law professors have signed off on a death warrant?” Rizzo rhetorically asked a Newsweek magazine reporter, knowing that “one” (Barack Obama) was the correct answer (Rizzo had never been a law professor). “I was concerned it be done in the cleanest possible way.” Counsel Rizzo often joined the command team when CIA drone attacks were under way.
The offer John Rizzo couldn’t refuse came near the end of 2005. By then, the videotapes episode notwithstanding, the lawyer had become increasingly close to his CIA director, and Porter Goss offered to make Rizzo a candidate for general counsel. The gunslinger was now on his third stint as acting counsel. Each time, directors left him in place for months or years. John wanted the formal title that went with the job. In his memoir, Rizzo notes that his appointment could inspire the 120-odd agency attorneys to think that they, too, might rise to the top. No career CIA legal person had ever been general counsel. (One reason was the law—Section 20 of the Central Intelligence Agency Act of 1949 provides for an individual “appointed from civilian life by the President.”) Bush went ahead to nominate John Rizzo.
Here Mr. Rizzo fell into the black hole of the increasingly hostile relations between the Bush administration and congressional overseers, who believed they were being scorned. For a CIA officer who had come on board in the wake of the Church Committee crisis and had witnessed the bloodletting of Iran-Contra, the situation had all the same portents. Indeed his nomination was held up. It would be nearly eighteen months, until June 19, 2007, when Rizzo had his nomination hearing. He decided to face the bull head on and spoke the lesson he’d learned from Iran-Contra, lasting and indelible: “CIA courts disaster whenever it loses sight of the absolute necessity to inform the intelligence committees on a timely basis [of] what they need to know.” Langley’s lawyer averred that his service in the terror war—mentioning the Greystone detentions but not the drones—had been the most challenging of his career. He said he expected to discuss everything in closed, executive session. The senators hammered him in the open, so badly that Rizzo recalls a “public flogging.” Senator Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI) pressed Rizzo on whether there were other DOJ opinions, besides the ones justifying interrogation techniques, being withheld from Congress. That came uncomfortably close to asking about justifications for targeted killing.
“There are no other opinions . . . that fall into that category,” Rizzo announced.
Michigan Democrat Carl Levin, who had apparently crossed swords at a prehearing private meeting, continued to pursue Rizzo on torture. Senator Ron Wyden (D-OR) engaged him on his own expression of respect for oversight, and listened as the gunslinger blew smoke to claim that the Bush notification practices had been full and current. Wyden also broached the matter of whether a president has legal authority to direct the CIA to capture and detain United States citizens overseas, an allusion to the American mullah Anwar al-Awlaki, on the drone hit list. Rizzo squirmed until the committee chairman moved that exchange into closed session. Senator Wyden eventually blocked the Rizzo nomination, which the Bush administration finally withdrew.
Under President Bush, the Central Intelligence Agency carried out its first targeted killing inside Pakistan in 2004. It was the only attack in Pakistan that year, followed by three each in the next couple of years. But then the program ramped up, with five drone strikes in 2007 and thirty-eight during Bush’s last year. There are discrepancies in the publicly available data for the Obama years, but by any measure President Obama hurled more drone strikes during 2009 than in all the Bush era. In Pakistan alone the total is about 52. The number peaked at 128 in 2010, before President Obama formulated a new command framework, with key choices regularly brought to the White House, a Pentagon process for the military drone missions, and a CIA procedure to govern flights.
Recently Obama radically reduced attacks in Pakistan, but the SOCOM attacks continue, and the CIA has widened its role in such other theaters as Yemen. In July 2016, the director of national intelligence (DNI) released a fact sheet disclosing that from Obama’s inauguration through the end of 2015 there had been a total of 473 drone strikes, eliminating roughly 2,500 enemy combatants while causing no more than 64 to 116 civilian deaths. That figure conflicts with other tabulations of civilian casualties and is absurdly low.
In the summer of 2011, human rights advocates filed information reports to Pakistani authorities as a first step in seeking an international arrest warrant to prosecute John Rizzo in that country. In August 2015, Buzzy Krongard, who had been ready to push the button on CIA drone attacks, was caught—by the hapless Transportation Security Administration—attempting to board a flight at Baltimore-Washington International Airport with a loaded 9mm pistol in his carry-on bag. Naturally Mr. Krongard explained that he had inadvertently grabbed the wrong suitcase in his rush to get to the airport, but the larger question is why the former CIA official feels he needs to travel armed. There are ghosts here.
The spirit of Rizzo has much to teach. Langley’s gunslingers in the early years complemented the operatives, of whom many were also lawyers. They had common understanding and purpose. More recently, with the lawyers as gunslingers, the levels of arrogance and disdain have risen, and the legal advice appears to have deteriorated. The drive to be relevant, to keep the director’s esteem, seems to have carried the spirits into stormy seas. Rizzo’s role in the torture memos, in the detainee program, in the consultants’ contracts, in the CTC snatch missions, and in the drone program were in each case objectionable for a conscientious lawyer. Meanwhile, in keeping with our increasingly apparent trend, John Rizzo suffered no ill effects from these ventures. He kept his job. Mr. Rizzo didn’t need the title. The man who followed Porter Goss continued to rely upon him.
THE SAME KIND OF DRILL
On September 11, 2001, General Michael V. Hayden had been the director of the National Security Agency (NSA) at Fort Meade for two and a half years. The crisis of that day began with Hayden groggy, headed in after staying up late to watch the Denver Broncos beat the New York Giants 31–10 in a Monday night football game marking a stadium opening. At first, everything routine, the NSA operations center had nothing to note. Mike Hayden took time to get a haircut. Once he was in his office, an executive assistant appeared, breathlessly reporting that an airplane had crashed into one of the World Trade Center towers in lower Manhattan. When the other tower got hit too, Hayden realized he needed to do something, a thought only confirmed when yet another airplane smashed into the Pentagon. In Washington, false reports of explosions at the State Department pumped up the fear. Director Hayden ordered security to evacuate the headquarters complex.
Not long afterward, George Tenet phoned from the CIA to ask what intelligence Hayden’s people might have on unfolding events. There were a couple of items on the NSA’s intercept logs, with vague mentions of coming events, but no context or detail.
Even that much Hayden owed to the people in his counterterror unit, and that would be the one element Director Hayden decided to keep on the job. They were not evacuated. Later that day, Hayden went upstairs to visit. The story that far is clear. After that it starts to fragment. The general first recounted it on October 17, 2002, at a session of the joint inquiry into the 9/11 attacks held by the oversight committees of Congress. Hayden described them as “hard at work, they were defiantly tacking up blackout curtains to mask their location.” By early 2006, in a speech at the National Press Club, Hayden changed this to “seeing the NSA counterterrorism shop in tears while we were hanging up blackout curtains around their windows.” In his 2016 memoir, it morphed to Hayden visiting the counterterror shop, walking from one workstation to another, gripping a shoulder here or there, while the analysts labored and “the maintenance staff was tacking up blackout curtains over the windows.”
These discrepancies are minor but characteristic. The same October 2002 joint committee appearance marks the starting point for a more consequential obfuscation. Director Hayden noted that just three weeks earlier, the NSA had signed contracts for a $300 million project, Trailblazer, which was “our effort to revolutionize how we produce SIGINT in a digital age.” Bringing the electronic spy agency into the twenty-first century certainly preoccupied him, but far from accomplishing the mission Trailblazer became a huge morass.
By 2006, in Hayden’s Press Club speech, he was acutely aware of the project’s failure. When a reporter asked about NSA whistleblowers—a question that did not mention Trailblazer but zeroed in on officials who had complained about it, initially through channels—Hayden’s reply changed the subject. At his nomination hearing, for the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, he conceded “deltas” (technospeak, using the mathematical symbol for change, to suggest cost overruns without having to say so) of several hundred million dollars. The general went on to say, “We’ve had pretty good success with the front-end in terms of collection,” that Trailblazer aimed at helping sort through those masses of data, and that when the NSA asked industry “for something that no one had yet invented, they weren’t any better at inventing it than we were doing it ourselves.” But, in terms of engaging industry, Hayden remarked, “A personal view, now—looking back—we overachieved.” The other thing he’d learned was how to preserve a degree of cooperation between agency and industry. And “we don’t profit by trying to do moon shots.”
Later that year, after he was nominated for CIA director, senators at Hayden’s confirmation hearing probed him on this very statement. By then the press was reporting billion-dollar cost overruns on Trailblazer, and both the New York Times and Baltimore Sun had investigative reports exposing the program, one appearing that very day. “What my memory tells me I said,” Hayden replied, “was that a lot of the failure on the Trailblazer program was that we were trying to overachieve. . . . I can’t ever think of my saying we were overachieving in Trailblazer.” In his memoir, Hayden says, “We were also trying to do too much, too quickly. Trailblazer comprised multiple moon shots.” The former NSA boss goes on to describe the agency whistleblowers as purveyors of a competing technology, engaged in guerrilla warfare by making end runs to HPSCI staff. Hayden doesn’t mention the degree to which government authorities persecuted the whistleblowers, accusing them of leaking classified information, some of that beginning right after Mr. Hayden’s congressional hearing.
The National Security Agency’s notorious Stellar Wind scandal over blanket electronic eavesdropping contains many more examples. Michael Hayden’s attitude seems to have been that facts are malleable in the service of goals, enough so to warrant thinking of him as a fabulist. Again and again, in locales ranging from congressional inquiries to speeches to media appearances, Hayden referred to the NSA eavesdropping as subject to the most rigorous oversight imaginable. But—just like CIA prisons and torture—until its cover disintegrated, notice of the bugging would be restricted to the Gang of Eight. The “oversight” amounted to the NSA’s IG and its lawyers. In the kind of sports analogy Hayden loved, all of it was “inside baseball.” The lawyers, it turned out, never even wrote an opinion on the surveillance. NSA’s director satisfied himself based on comments from Bush presidential attorney Alberto Gonzales, another of those flawed DOJ memos, and conversations with his own gunslingers. Hayden himself did not read the Justice Department paper. He answered a question at the Press Club thus: “I have an order whose lawfulness has been attested to by NSA lawyers who do this for a living.” Inside baseball.
In a veiled allusion to the vast dragnet already eavesdropping on Americans, in October 2002 with the 9/11 Joint Inquiry, the general spoke of a need to “find the right balance between protecting our security and protecting our liberty.” At the Press Club speech: “It is not a driftnet over Dearborn or Lackawanna or Freemont.” Oregon senator Ron Wyden challenged him at the May 18, 2006, confirmation hearing. Having admitted to NSA eavesdropping, Hayden had insisted on six separate occasions that this was limited to domestic-to-international calls. The former NSA chief defended himself, saying that in 2002 he had been trying to be careful, while in his 2006 appearance he had been saying the most he could without crossing into classified territory.
When her turn came, California Democrat Dianne Feinstein put a series of more significant questions to the general. Without doubt this strategy had been discussed among committee Democrats, in hopes Hayden might be more responsive to Feinstein, who had long cultivated the spooks. On rendition, the general didn’t know. Length of detention? The prospective CIA director wanted to keep that question for secret session. Utility of interrogation? The same. Was waterboarding a professional interrogation technique? Closed session. Had the CIA obtained new guidance since passage of the McCain Act?—which Hayden insisted did not apply to Langley. Closed session. A discussion of the agency’s IG investigation into extralegal interrogations? It should be held for the secret testimony. Iran? Closed session. More on how the CIA could not be bound by the law on torture? Hayden wanted the closed session.
The microphone, still live when the chairman gaveled this hearing to a close, recorded Dianne Feinstein’s peeved remark to a colleague: “He didn’t answer any of the questions!”
Later, when questioning resumed after lunch, Wisconsin’s Russell Feingold asked General Hayden for a pledge to provide the committee with information on intelligence activities, including covert activities, previously restricted to the Gang of Eight. Feingold quoted the language, right out of the National Security Act, wherein the executive—including the CIA, NSA, and all the other agencies—were prohibited from withholding from Congress any information necessary for it to fulfill its oversight duties.
“I’m sorry,” Michael Hayden replied. “I’m just not familiar with the requirements under the law for that.” It was bravado—or defiance. The general closed the briefing book in front of him. In his memoir Hayden writes, “This was getting to be pointless bantering.”
Senator Wyden summed up the perplexities in one question. “What’s to say that, if you’re confirmed to head the CIA, we won’t go through exactly this kind of drill with you over there?”
Ron Wyden posed the right question. General Hayden shot back that the senators were simply going to have to make a judgment on his character. And they did. The Hayden nomination passed out of committee. The full Senate confirmed him on a vote of 79 against 15. The general got a copy of the roll-call list, had it framed, and hung it on his wall. Mr. Hayden titles his memoir Playing to the Edge, a football metaphor referring to a strategy of aggression, where players employ tactics to the very point referees might call foul, hoping for every advantage. His time at Langley would be just like that.
Director Hayden initially concerned himself with ramping up CIA operations. Porter Goss had begun this. Hayden’s reforms were essentially the same. He cut to four years the time envisioned to carry them out, but a little over a year had passed since Goss, his friend, had unveiled the program. Drone strikes held steady for a time but doubled in Hayden’s second year, and increased exponentially after that. He sought to maintain the “operations tempo” and constantly exhorted CIA employees to keep up the pace. The general brought back Stephen Kappes, purged earlier, as his deputy director over the entire agency. The Gosslings were drummed out. Even the historians were to be put to work furthering operational objectives—the Center for the Study of Intelligence was tasked for “lessons learned” reports.
One of Director Hayden’s first cruises took him to Iraq, Afghanistan, and Pakistan with Jose Rodriguez. Each country posed headaches that kept the spy chieftain occupied. The Shiite prime minister of Iraq never trusted his CIA-sponsored intelligence boss. Incessant car bombs, sectarian infighting, and the continuing disarray among Iraqi security forces were seeds of disaster. Director Hayden supported the “surge” of American troops into Iraq that helped short-circuit civil war. The military figures who controlled Pakistan remained reluctant to war against Islamic fundamentalists and refused to avert their gaze from India, the country’s central conflict partner. In Afghanistan, where the CIA funneled more than $1 million a month to President Hamid Karzai, the Afghan chief proved quite pleasant, but spoke defiantly of America all the time. Karzai continued his dialogue with the CIA—as you might expect—even after Afghan relations with the United States soured.
President Bush wanted to be kept up-to-date on CIA covert operations, so on Thursday mornings he gave Hayden half an hour. Emphasizing high operational tempo, Langley’s chief ranged the world. And he began using the sessions to push the line that Al Qaeda, already brazen, had become steadily more powerful in Pakistan’s tribal territories. “The main point was that as bad as this might be for Afghanistan and our forces there, this was fundamentally becoming a threat to the homeland.”
Michael Hayden had a lot more to talk about. John Rizzo observed Hayden closely and said he “loved being a spymaster, by which I mean he reveled in conceiving and running covert operations involving real people and back-alley intrigue.” Hayden told Bush about everything from the agency’s secret contacts with Libyan intelligence to its inability to detect a fully articulated Syrian nuclear weapons program to uncovering the efforts of convicted spy Harold Nicolson—one of the moles Russia had actually recruited inside the CIA—to get his own son to spy also. Then there was the disastrous Khalid El-Masri case, which began on Jose Rodriguez’s watch. An innocent German with almost the same name as 9/11 terrorist Khalid al-Masri was swept up by Macedonian security on the last day of 2002. El-Masri would be handed over to the CIA, rendered to a black prison in Afghanistan, and tortured for months. Eventually the agency dropped him on a road near where he’d been taken, with nothing. When El-Masri went public, there were German diplomatic protests and another public relations disaster for CIA.
Naturally, Langley’s inspector general mounted an investigation. John Helgerson issued the report on July 16, 2007. There were issues about El-Masri’s treatment and the manner of his release. According to Michael Hayden, Helgerson’s report improperly fastened onto one CIA official, by then the Alec Station chief within the CTC. Hayden thought her a splendid analyst with encyclopedic knowledge of the target. He wouldn’t think of replacing her. The IG, in contrast, wanted the analyst hauled before an accountability board. Identified elsewhere as Alfreda Bikowsky, she had recommended the German be held without meeting CIA guidelines for detention, and once it had been established they had the wrong man, she opposed releasing him. Although Director Hayden pointed to the delay as one of his concerns with the Masri case, he refused any action against Bikowsky, who, even worse, had also been associated with a key CIA failure before 9/11—not informing the FBI that it knew an Al Qaeda operative, later one of the hijackers, had entered the United States. That omission had figured in a previous IG report.
Not very many CIA officers are implicated in multiple inspector general inquiries. In addition, Bikowsky had been involved in the torture in Poland of detainee Khalid Sheik Mohammed. The worst that happened to her was to be passed over for deputy chief of station in Baghdad. Instead she became deputy chief of the CTC. By the end of General Hayden’s tour, the Counterterrorism Center comprised nearly a third of the entire Central Intelligence Agency.
Director Hayden notified congressional overseers of the El-Masri case, as well as his strong belief that it helped to accept mistakes. After one more of Helgerson’s reports, an exhaustive inquiry into George Tenet’s worst day—the 2001 shootdown of American missionaries over Peru—Mr. Hayden turned the tables. He had his special counsel, Robert Dietz, the former NSA lawyer who had certified domestic spying as kosher, investigate the Inspector General’s Office on the excuse that it might be the source of the leaks that annoyed Hayden so much. He had told the SSCI that “the American intelligence business has too much become the football in American political discourse,” and that the CIA needed to get out of the news, as either subject or actor. Nevertheless, the general ordered an action sure to leak as well as to chill everyone at Langley.
Officially, the Dietz inquiry, completed in October 2007, centered on eliminating the confusion for line officers between legal advice emanating from the inspector general versus the general counsel. Dietz pitched his recommendations to IG Helgerson the week before Halloween. General Hayden put out an all-hands bulletin to make sure everybody got the message. Officers could appreciate the outcome: IG interviews with subjects and witnesses should be videotaped; individuals who had undergone interviews would be given the opportunity to review (and dispute) reports based on them; a “quality control” officer would be placed in the IG’s office; and an ombudsman would field complaints about investigations. The inspector general, for the trouble he had taken, was punished. Laden with so many details, Michael Hayden’s memoir never mentions this chilling inquiry or, indeed, John Helgerson.
Credit the general for giving fair warning. Answering a senator as to his sense of the limits of permissible action in 2005, General Hayden had replied, “You should expect of me that I’m right up to that line.” The line became something with real meaning for Michael V. Hayden. As candidate for Langley’s top floor, Hayden reflected on the moderation of the NSA since the mid-1970s and characterized it as it having “played a bit back from the line.” The title of his memoir, titled Playing to the Edge, is another allusion to lines.
One aspect of playing to the edge was to extract something, always, for anything, from every situation. Never give anything away. Secrecy became one place he did that. General Hayden had problems on the declassification front. Two sets of documents were up for review under the Freedom of Information Act. One, the notorious Family Jewels, had been in the queue for a decade and a half. The National Security Archive, which had requested the set, was prepared to sue. The archive’s director, Thomas Blanton, and its attorney Meredith Fuchs had been in conversations with CIA declassification officials, reminding them of the request, pointing out that release of the documents would give Langley something to talk about besides torture.
The other set were the documents known as the President’s Daily Briefs (PDBs), the stream of daily intelligence reporting to the White House. They’ve been compiled on a near- daily basis since Jack Kennedy sat in the Oval Office. Many of these had great historical value, but only very recent ones are important from an intelligence standpoint. Hayden was desperate to keep the PDBs secret. He played the two ends against the middle, appearing in June 2007 at the annual conference of the Society of Historians of American Foreign Relations. There Hayden announced release of the Family Jewels. When the question period came around, he answered the inevitable queries on PDBs by declaring that these, essentially equivalent to newspapers, were really purveyors of CIA “sources and methods” and so-called predecisional documents, which had to be protected. Hayden gathered the declassification staff, the historians, the Publications Review Board, and the spokespersons into his executive office. Suddenly all aspects of CIA history and its documentary record were controlled by the spin doctors.
Just to cap this, a requestor, joined by the National Security Archive, ultimately did sue for release of the PDBs. The courts ruled that Langley could keep PDBs secret for the moment but no longer could it apply a blanket exemption. The agency would actually have to review documents for release. By 2015, some time after Hayden’s tenure, it suddenly seemed desirable to declassify the PDBs, and the agency sponsored a conference at the Lyndon B. Johnson Library in Austin, Texas, where more than 2,500 were put into the public domain at once, covering the presidencies of Kennedy and Johnson. Later, another conference at the Nixon Library heralded release of PDBs of the Nixon-Ford era. It became apparent immediately that, except for generic references, there were no “sources and methods” in these documents. When a former CIA officer who used to work on the PDBs reflected on the documents—full of facts—he quoted General Hayden: “If it’s a fact, it ain’t intelligence.”
The top spook’s concern back in the day had plainly been for show.
His speech to the diplomatic historians also featured Hayden’s reference to what became his mantra of the “covenant” with the American people. Langley’s chieftain said, “Here’s an informal yardstick I use: if I could tell my brother back in Pittsburgh or my sister in Steubenville what CIA has done and why, would it make sense to them? Would they accept it as reasonable?” He recognized that the agency functioned on a grant of trust, not power, in keeping with the law. “The best way to strengthen the trust of the American people,” Hayden said at his confirmation hearing, “is to earn it by obeying the law and by showing what is best about this country.” That came close to plagiarizing George Tenet. But whereas Tenet had done something to further the goal of a compact, Hayden did not. Somewhere down the line, Hayden’s covenant degenerated into the purely bureaucratic—the claim that an op ordered by the president and reviewed by the chain of command was automatically within bounds—a completely different notion and one that notably excluded Capitol Hill.
The general’s antipathy for congressional oversight comes across in Playing to the Edge. Regardless of Hayden’s boredom at lengthy disquisitions on congressional wisdom, its disturbing questioning as to whether he would have waterboarded his kids, and comparisons of detainee treatment with World Wrestling Federation bouts, the issues were real and the national security too important for a CIA chief to hinge them on personal antipathy. Hayden notes it had been a difficult time—an embattled president, both houses of Congress in the hands of the opposition, several members posturing to run for president. The former spy chief leaves unstated the implication that those persons might have gone after CIA to further their political chances.
So what? Oversight should apply only when the president is omniscient and his party is in control of Congress? (Wait and see the oversight under President Donald Trump.) Hayden’s responsibility was to fit into oversight, not the other way around. Here is a good place to spend a moment on this. Professionals in the departments and agencies, well aware that politicians have their narrow, parochial interests, are reluctant to be patient. They are also anxious to protect favorite projects. But the authority is clear—congressional oversight of intelligence, like civilian control of the armed forces, is set by law and necessary for the functioning of the republic. Legislators stymied by the executive’s playing to the edge are prone to react by adopting increasingly dim views of intelligence work overall. When party majorities switch in Congress, high-handed treatment of overseers is likely to result in investigations.
Michael V. Hayden actually gave subordinates permission to walk out on congressional hearings if they decided the sessions had become abusive. In another place, the agency chief attests he received more cooperation from the International Committee of the Red Cross than from Congress. What did matter, a lot, was that CIA aversion to oversight and contempt for politicians multiplied the impact of Bush White House arrogance. Hayden deplores what the Senate intelligence committee did with its torture inquiry, but he had a role in triggering it.
The director lost stature with Congress in particular with the revelation of the NSA eavesdropping, which President Bush acknowledged and dubbed the Terrorist Surveillance Program. Michael Hayden took hits as pitchman. When the general went up for appointment to the ODNI, Barbara Mikulski, a respected member, made a ringing endorsement when introducing Hayden to the Senate intelligence committee. With the CIA nomination, barely a year later, the senator stayed away. So did some others who had lauded him in the past. In commenting on the 2005 hearing, the general credits John P. Murtha (who had gone second) with introducing him, and does not mention Mikulski at all. Fabulism? Michael Hayden’s tin ear? No matter.
For Director Hayden, who struggled to preserve Langley’s hostile interrogation program, relations with Capitol Hill would be critical. He provides data on briefings given, reports completed, congressional testimony, letters answered, and so forth, as if the statistics, and not the quality of the interchanges, are the measure of merit. In fact, if the CIA were stonewalling, these metrics only indicate the intensity of congressional efforts to penetrate the cone of silence. In no way do they measure the CIA’s responsiveness. Had the agency answered to the satisfaction of overseers, the numbers would actually be lower.
“It didn’t take 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—the CIA’s program for detaining and interrogating senior al-Qaeda members.”
Hayden knew Project Greystone could not go on as before. Only about 5 percent of terrorism intelligence was coming from detainees by now, and Langley had been forced to reject many reports produced under duress as fabrications. It had become like the bad old days of Cold War “paper mills.”
The general nevertheless thought a reconfigured program might work—new Justice Department memos to carve out an exception to the Detainee Treatment Act (and deal with a fresh Supreme Court decision, Hamdan v. Rumsfeld, as well), a new list of interrogation techniques, confinement either at Guantánamo or in third countries, a commitment to hold detainees no more than sixty days without additional permission, and an actual move to bring in Congress by briefing the full committees. The CIA director went to the White House, explaining his idea to NSC staff chief Stephen Hadley. On September 6, 2006, President Bush formally acknowledged the CIA’s black prisons, ordered them dismantled and the remaining fourteen prisoners sent to Guantánamo Bay. Bush also said the most aggressive techniques had been used on only three detainees—and Hayden followed, saying there had been only about a hundred prisoners and repeating the small number for those subjected to the harshest treatment.
Bush’s order opened a new front, the home front, for the detainee program. Where previously the controversy had been hidden by confining it to the Gang of Eight, suddenly it was in the open. As the president spoke, Director Hayden went before the full oversight committees in each house of Congress—the HPSCI twice, plus a separate encounter with Jane Harman—and presented the first full briefs on Greystone. Hayden also met with Senate leaders. After that the pace and adversarial intensity increased. In February 2007, contract officer David Passaro received a sentence of eight and a half years in prison for killing a detainee in CIA custody.
Two months later, Director Hayden and lawyer Rizzo showed up to present the SSCI a detailed review of Greystone. This April 12 testimony apparently riled the committee. From records the CIA later censored and declassified, one could find questionable elements in this briefing, including Hayden’s statement that neither FBI nor CIA inquisitors got anything out of Abu Zubaydah until after he had been tortured. Senate investigators later filled nearly forty pages with side-by-side comparisons of SSCI questions and Hayden’s replies against facts established from CIA documents. Among the highlights was the account by one of Hayden’s assistants of an order to find a date, any date, for which he could truthfully report that the number of detainees was ninety-eight.
This hearing represented the first appearance of Counterterrorism Center officials at an oversight meeting in more than two years. Equally perplexing was the presentation on thirteen CIA “enhanced interrogation techniques,” because in the CIA’s 2002 conversations with the Justice Department, John Rizzo had listed just ten, and those were the only ones John Yoo had considered in his infamous legal memoranda.
The discrepancy between what CIA said (in 2007) the approved techniques were, and what the Justice Department had actually considered in 2002, likely rang alarm bells at Langley. After this hearing the Senate committee asked for the agency’s documents underlying the Yoo analyses. No answer. President Bush had refused to give Congress the legal memoranda themselves, affording the CIA a cloak to hide behind. The committee waited more than a year, then repeated its demand in a June 5, 2008, letter, followed by “numerous verbal requests.” There had been no CIA response by late 2008, when the SSCI chairman wrote again.
Mr. Hayden dismisses the Senate committee’s critique of his April 2007 testimony as small potatoes. His defense centers on having John Rizzo and a CTC interrogator with him, with whom he checked statements, and that, having come on board much more recently, he might “simply get a few things wrong.” Actually, Senate investigators found fault with the testimony on more than two dozen issues, often in multiple instances—a clear sign of sticking to talking points. And the post-testimony refusal to provide requested documents or answer questions for the record cannot be attributed to misunderstanding or ignorance.
Meanwhile, the CIA took custody of another prisoner in July 2007. Hayden sent President Bush a letter requesting an executive order that interpreted the Geneva conventions in a way that carved out a CIA exemption from the latest laws prohibiting torture. The CIA chief dispatched a group including “Dunbar” and “Swigert” to brief Secretary Rice on a new menu of proposed interrogation methods. Condoleezza Rice curtly told them she would oppose anything that included nudity but that other techniques didn’t bother her. Nudity disappeared from the CIA menu not as Mr. Hayden maintains—sometimes on, sometimes off—but as a specific device to gain the support of the secretary. Fabulism. Bush launched the executive order. Langley had its ducks lined up. In August 2007, General Hayden laid out his revised “Greystone lite” schema on Capitol Hill. Senators were beginning to sound skeptical when questioning the legal bases for the program. The House committee proved even more combative.
Then came the firestorm. On December 7, the New York Times reported the destruction of torture videotapes back in 2005. The Times, quickly followed by the Washington Post, linked Jose Rodriguez to this action. Other media outlets joined the hunt. Director Hayden issued a statement to CIA employees minimizing the event. He claimed the tapes were destroyed only when they were not relevant to any proceeding—including judicial—and maintained that the congressional committees knew all about it. That lie poured gasoline on the fire.
The very next day, the House intelligence committee protested. Hayden’s account simply was not true. Chairman Silvestre Reyes (D-TX) had been Hayden’s friend. He cited an offhand remark on one occasion and a brief mention in a letter to a single HPSCI member. That was not notification, Reyes and his vice chairman wrote. The vice chairman, Peter Hoekstra, a Republican who had saved Langley from much of the fallout of the Iraq debacle, followed up a couple of days later, telling Hayden it was unacceptable that Langley had not publicly corrected Hayden’s statement. This was the Nicaraguan harbor mining fiasco all over again.
If Reyes was not satisfied, CIA adversaries among the public and on the Hill were even less likely to be. The Senate intelligence committee called upon Hayden for testimony specifically on the history of the tapes and opened the session by upbraiding the director for presuming to say the tapes were of no importance to any SSCI investigation. This hearing on December 12, 2007, led directly to the Senate committee’s investigation of the CIA torture program, so it is just silly for our friends at Langley to insist, as many did, that the investigation blew up out of nowhere as a political attack.
Director Hayden discussed the history of the videotapes. Chairman Jay Rockefeller asked to be given all material the director referred to, including e-mails, cables, and legal opinions. Senator Sheldon Whitehouse asked about differences between the videos and their written summaries. Hayden replied that a set of operational cables constituted “a more than adequate representation of the tapes,” and while CIA did not normally share cables, the tapes no longer existed. He claimed that the agency would have shared the tapes if SSCI had asked for them; therefore the committee could see the cables. A week later, the Senate committee sent a letter enumerating many items it wanted to see, with the tape messages heading the list.
The House intelligence committee was even more upset. Silvestre Reyes wanted a full investigation. Jose Rodriguez, the former operations chief, scotched that by threatening to invoke his Fifth Amendment right to silence. The maneuver there played on Iran-Contra, about which Congress had compelled testimony by overriding the Fifth Amendment with grants of limited immunity, which had ended up derailing criminal prosecutions of indicted suspects.
Peter Hoekstra complained that when he had been HPSCI chairman in 2005, Langley had never told him about any tapes. Hayden had still not corrected his statement to agency employees. At a follow-up grilling of John Rizzo in January, members from both political parties voted to have the room cleared of all CIA persons save the attorney. The House committee then told Rizzo documents they had seen portrayed an agency out of control.
When HPSCI staff went to Langley to review a summary of the torture cables, they were handed a two-page document. Staff members were insulted that the agency might think this would satisfy their need to see records, upset that the CIA would demand their presence to view such a small amount of such vague material rather than just send it over to their own secure vault, and outraged that House committee requests had already gone unanswered more than two months. They blamed agency congressional liaison Christopher Walker for the runaround.
At the end of January 2008, by letter, Director Hayden informed the Senate intelligence committee of his internal investigation of the inspector general’s office, which raised eyebrows on the Hill. After this, the committee sent two of its own staff to look at the actual CIA torture cables. Daniel Jones put the most time into this research, which took place at Langley on nights and weekends. Like the House staff, Senate investigators rejected summary handouts CIA tried to foist on them. On April 21, Chairman Rockefeller wrote to General Hayden stating that many December requests remained unfilled, and others were censored in key places, even though Senate members had full security clearances.
In the summer of 2008, the committee finally secured access to the Justice Department legal opinions, and from those concluded that the torture methods described in CIA cables exceeded anything DOJ had authorized. The Senate committee posed questions for the record in September, noting that requested materials from the CIA’s side—John Rizzo’s side—of the Justice Department memoranda had gone unanswered for more than seventeen months. On October 17, CIA congressional liaison Chris Walker refused to supply the information.
More than a year passed before the SSCI review of the agency’s cables had finished. Barack Obama had been elected president of the United States. Michael Hayden’s time had expired.
Obama brought in a new CIA chief. The Senate intelligence committee got a new chairperson, Dianne Feinstein, a California Democrat. But the whole matter of CIA torture had become a raw sore, an open wound, hidden behind a fig leaf, the agency stonewalling congressional overseers and hiding that, too, behind curtains of secrecy.
All this while, Michael V. Hayden was on television and speechifying—on shows like Meet the Press and at venues like the Atlantic Council, saying publicly that the CIA does not torture but that it can because it is not bound by the Detainee Treatment Act—while privately asking the president for an edict to make that true. In secret he held the rampart against discovery. That also makes Hayden a fabulist. For this ghost, reality is imagined. To his way of thinking, congressional investigation started because people who wanted to be president needed to posture, not because Michael Hayden promised access to CIA documents, then tried to foist substitutes, then simply refused. Such ghosts encourage contempt that harms the Central Intelligence Agency.
And the stonewalling had everything to do with Hayden’s operational goals. Pakistan remained the key front in the CIA’s secret war, and it had been only the previous year that President Bush had approved a more aggressive posture, with less coddling of Pakistani political and especially military authorities. Bush had been feeling toward that, approving a crossborder SEAL mission late in 2005 and a huge scheme called Valiant Pursuit to get bin Laden in 2007. Hayden contributed to a National Intelligence Estimate that saw Al Qaeda as on the march again. As a result, Bush approved more drone strikes; there were thirty-eight in his last year, an increase of over 700 percent.
The strategy gave Director Hayden that much more incentive to preserve torture. He planned to pare down the menu, hold the prisoners for a limited time, and implicate Congress by drawing it into the circle. Had Hayden given up, those documents from before his watch would not have been so sensitive. A responsible investigation could have been devoted to them and to the program that had created them. Playing to the edge guaranteed that the Senate torture investigation would occur, would take place against an increasingly adversarial backdrop, and would come back to bite Langley. This ghost casts a shadow over the whole future of the Central Intelligence Agency. The spirit of Langley’s future already had its hands full dealing with the consequences.