The Family Jewels (18 page)

The first notorious rendition took place in Pakistan. With Counter-Terrorist Center intelligence and FBI eavesdropping, by March 2002 the CIA had identified a wide array of suspected Al Qaeda safe houses. Here there was local cooperation. A Pakistani security officer actually provided the crucial information, tracing a telephone wire to a nearby house that proved to be the real enemy hideout. On March 27, 2002, late in the afternoon (Washington date and time; 1 a.m. on the 28th in Pakistan), Pakistani authorities simultaneously raided sixteen places that on the basis of the U.S. surveillance information could have been Al Qaeda safe houses. Islamabad station chief Robert Grenier supervised the operation. FBI special agents accompanied some field units, CIA officers others. At the Shahbaz Cottage, a gaudily painted building in Faisalabad, the Americans struck gold. Circumstances are disputed between John Kiriakou, a CIA team leader with one of the Pakistani takedown units, and Jose Rodriguez, chief of operations for the Counter-Terrorist Center.
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Kiriakou reports leading the CIA team with the Faisalabad assault unit. Rodriguez insists Kiriakou accompanied a different team.

There was a shootout in the terrorists' second-floor apartment, in the stairwell, and on the roof. Among those captured was Abu Zubaydah, whose name, CIA Director George Tenet relates, “had been all over our threat reporting” even before 9/11.
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Zubaydah was hit in the leg, stomach, and groin. Rodriguez insists Zubaydah's injuries were inflicted by a single bullet ricocheting through his body. Pakistani special forces wanted to kill Zubaydah in revenge for the loss of one of their men in the gun battle. Kiriakou convinced the Pakistani commander to take the terrorist to the hospital instead. Rodriguez gives him no credit for that. Zubaydah would have died except that Kiriakou stanched the bleeding long enough for doctors to stabilize him. Here was an enemy who seemed worth the effort. After Grenier's appeals, Pakistani authorities handed over the wounded man. Alvin B. Krongard, Langley's executive director, happened to be on the board of Johns Hopkins University Hospital, which lent the CIA a top surgeon to treat Zubaydah. The—classified—place where Zubaydah was taken was in, shall we say, Thailand.

Abu Zubaydah's capture crystallized an American dilemma. What to do with HVDs had been a sore point all along. The Pakistanis had captured another man, Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi, in the borderlands during December, and that fellow had been taken to the U.S. military prison at Bagram air base in Afghanistan. But al-Libi, erstwhile chief of an Al Qaeda training camp, had been an unknown when taken, his identity discovered only when his particulars were fed through intelligence databases. Holding him at a regular military facility was okay until the CIA knew who he was. After that it endangered security—too many would see al-Libi, note he was treated differently, and wonder why. So he was handed over to the Egyptians, who tortured him. That cast doubt on al-Libi's information, and the detainee later recanted his
confession. That could not happen again. Zubaydah had been targeted. For CIA, Bagram was out of the question.

Another factor consumed Washington. In previous high-profile terrorist cases, like that of the truck bombing of a United States barracks in Saudi Arabia in 1995, or the boat bombing of a U.S. warship at Aden in 2000, CIA and FBI investigators had been frustrated because Saudi and Yemeni local authorities restricted their access to terrorist suspects. The Americans were desperate to conduct unilateral interrogations. That could only be done at a U.S.-controlled facility. This was the origin of the notorious CIA “black prisons.” The first was merely a safe house, the place where the agency took Abu Zubaydah as soon as it was okay to get him out of Pakistan. Jose Rodriguez of the Counter-Terrorist Center cleared the project with the Thais, arranged for construction of a prison facility within the same house, and traveled to Thailand to check on the arrangements personally.

The point of unilateral interrogations was to manage all aspects of the approach to the detainee, as well as focus the questioning precisely as American inquisitors wished. It also permitted unlimited follow-up and re-interrogation. Two elements were keys to success: the state of knowledge of the background and particulars of an HVD—the intelligence—and the methods of interrogation. Prior knowledge was not a trivial matter. Consider the Nosenko case: in working against the KGB, the CIA had acquired extensive operational experience plus the benefit of long years of data collection with attendant opportunity to accumulate files. One reason for doubts about Nosenko was that so many of his assertions could be checked against this knowledge base and found wanting.

By contrast, U.S. intelligence against Al Qaeda was in its infancy. For a long time in the 1990s, the CIA could not even agree whether Osama bin Laden functioned as a commander or merely a financier. The situation with Abu
Zubaydah was similar. Some thought him the Al Qaeda field commander who had taken over after the November 2001 death of Mohammed Atef (see
Chapter 6
); others saw Zubaydah as the group's logistics chief. Many agreed that he was a senior leader. One view was that the man was a mastermind who had not only trained operatives but authored the Al Qaeda textbook on resisting interrogation. Others viewed Abu Zubaydah as not even an Al Qaeda member, but more a hanger-on and facilitator, who functioned as travel agent and arranged the movements of the 9/11 plotters, among others. Jose Rodriguez insists that Zubaydah's actual status was a meaningless distinction—and it was—
except
that Americans might harbor much greater enmity for someone they thought Al Qaeda versus another who was not.

Reactions to the Zubaydah capture reflect the uncertainties. Operatives of the Counter-Terrorist Center showed a photo of the wounded man to a source who told them the detainee was not Abu Zubaydah after all. As a result, according to FBI inquisitor Ali Soufan, the CTC literally missed the plane—they failed to put an interrogation team on the Gulfstream sent to retrieve Zubaydah from Pakistan. The FBI did not repeat that error. Soufan made the CIA flight along with the Johns Hopkins doctor and other Bureau specialists. As a result it was the FBI, not the agency, that got the first crack at the captive.
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Understanding who Zubaydah was had consequences for CIA's expectations for what he would know. A basic problem in the entire terrorism interrogation mess is that hopes for what the detainee must know, should know, might know, ought to be expected to know, too often substituted for questioning built from a solid knowledge base. No doubt this factor diminished later on, but in 2002 it was rampant. When the detainee did not answer as anticipated, the response was to think he was lying. Then the inquisitors would want to force out the “truth”—and they thought they had an instrument
for that. On the assumption that all detainees would lie, in December 2001 a pair of psychologist consultants to the CIA had proposed a design for interrogations that would break down the captive, make him dependent on the inquisitors, and supposedly elicit what the agency wanted. Proposed measures included stripping the HVDs naked; depriving them of sleep; putting them in discomfiting “stress positions” for prolonged periods; subjecting them to heat and cold, loud music, intense questioning in very lengthy sessions, grabbing by the neck, pushing against the wall, facial slaps, belly slaps, confinement in a box; and even pretending to drown them in a technique called “waterboarding.”

Many of these same methods had been used against Yuri Nosenko without affecting his story. Such techniques had long been rejected in the CIA's own “KU/Bark Manual.” Several of these, in particular waterboarding, are torture. American military men had been court-martialed for waterboarding in the Philippine insurrection of 1899–1902. Japanese were sent up for war crimes on the same basis after World War II. The method had been popular during the Spanish Inquisition and plainly understood as torture then. Psychological manipulations can be tantamount to torture as well. Torture is illegal under United States law, international treaty, and the Geneva Conventions, which prohibit any action that has the purpose or effect of dehumanizing a person. In the CIA's terror war program, these things were sanitized by the euphemism “enhanced interrogation techniques.” By definition, strong-arm methods meant flirting with Family Jewels.

Meanwhile, the FBI interrogation team of Ali Soufan and Steven Gaudin were actually questioning Abu Zubaydah. According to Soufan, they achieved good results: the captive gave up the name and
nom de guerre
of Al Qaeda commander Khalid Sheik Mohammed, the real mastermind of the 9/11 plot; the name of American citizen and terrorist wannabe
Jose Padilla, soon arrested on his return to Chicago; and leads to a terror plot that could be broken up. Rodriguez disputes Soufan's account of the questioning, alleging not only that it was CIA, not FBI, which elicited information from Zubaydah, but even that the detainee objected to Soufan's methods, not those of the agency. For good measure Rodriguez accuses his FBI counterparts of an obsession with obtaining trial evidence, not intelligence.
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These disputes cannot be resolved on the basis of the public record to this point, but eventually data should emerge that will provide greater precision.

Back at the Counter-Terrorist Center, operations chief Rodriguez called in one of the agency's psychologist consultants and gave him a contract to advise CIA's own team, sent to question Zubaydah once the inquisition was underway.

In Washington the high command of the secret war huddled on its instructions to the field. George J. Tenet writes, “It took until August to get clear guidance on what Agency officers could legally do.”
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That statement cloaks a darker reality. It is logical—and apparent from the account by national security advisor Condoleezza Rice—that an initial meeting on methods took place immediately upon Abu Zubaydah's capture. She recounts that President Bush asked whether the proposed interrogation program was necessary and if it would be legal. The president ordered senior officials to discuss the matter with CIA. Vice President Cheney, Attorney General John Ashcroft, Rice, and her deputy saw Tenet that same afternoon. An investigation by the Senate Armed Services Committee confirms that the agency sought this approval in the spring of 2002.
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Dick Cheney affirms the process consumed several months and resulted in legal opinions. “George said that he would argue to the President that the program was necessary,” Rice notes. “He explained in general what techniques he would recommend, including waterboarding, and the safeguards that would be employed, including the presence of medical personnel.”
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Ashcroft
promised the Justice Department would review the techniques for legality.

In May there was another high-level meeting, at which the CIA reported it believed Abu Zubaydah was withholding information. The agency listed specific coercive countermeasures. Jose Rodriguez recounts taking a team from his shop to an NSC Principals meeting with those officials, plus Alberto Gonzales, where the CTC described its aggressive methods in detail. “I got the sense from no one,” Rodriguez writes, “that our menu of techniques had gone too far.”
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In June the CTC operations chief commissioned his consultants to convert their interrogation design into an actual program. The prisoner would be checked by doctors as questioning proceeded. Much like Pete Bagley with Yuri Nosenko, the CIA considered that medical observation somehow excused inquisitors' behavior. In any case, the policy moved forward. NSC lawyer John Bellinger raised objections but did not press them.

Legal advice fell to John Yoo, the one lawyer at DOJ's Office of Legal Counsel with Top Secret clearance. Work on a preliminary version of his study began in April with minimal help from others. On July 13 CIA lawyers met with Gonzales and Bellinger of the White House plus FBI and Justice officials to study the plan. Four days later Director Tenet saw Condoleezza Rice. She delivered the word: the CIA could proceed, provided the Justice Department agreed. That was fine with Tenet, anxious to protect officers from criminal jeopardy. On July 24 John Yoo called the CIA attorney's office to report that Ashcroft would approve the proposed methods.

At Justice, John Yoo produced a pair of new drafts. These went to his superior, Jay S. Bybee, for final review. The memos eventually bore his name. Bybee later maintained he had had minimal time to examine them because Langley insisted it needed to start the coercive interrogation at the beginning of August. The Justice Department met that
deadline. Its approval took the form of one paper sent to CIA lawyer John Rizzo, making legal arguments to support a specific set of techniques the agency had proposed, plus a letter to White House lawyer Alberto R. Gonzales summarizing this material, finding bases for legal defenses against war crimes charges, and covering a copy of the longer opinion.

A detailed critique of the Yoo memos, their arguments, or the fashion in which they were compiled is beyond our scope here. They have been extensively picked apart by experts.
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The papers built on Yoo's expansive vision of presidential power. They constructed novel definitions of pain and suffering to argue that various forms of injury inflicted on a person would not fall into prohibited categories, and approved the CIA's list of aggressive measures. All this was disgraceful—the Yoo memos would be rescinded by the Justice Department later, Attorney General Michael B. Mukasey would publicly label them a “mistake,” and the lawyers involved remain under a cloud. More important for present purposes are three points: First is the flaw in a system that could construe a Justice Department opinion as tantamount to a Supreme Court decision legalizing torture. Second, the CIA not only took the Justice paper as a hunting license against detainees, it either misrepresented the severity of the interrogation methods it intended to employ, or else it exceeded in practice what had been proposed in theory. Third—and also essential—reading between the lines suggests
the CIA did not wait for the Justice Department go-ahead
to begin strong-arming detainees.