The Family Jewels (19 page)

As with other aspects of the war on terror, there are questions as to how well the Bush administration met its obligation to keep the congressional oversight committees fully and currently informed. Langley later produced several different documents detailing when the agency reckoned that Congress had been told of various developments.
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In
one, CIA described George Bush's marching orders, his presidential finding on October 3, 2001; and mentions notifying Congress of Abu Zubaydah's capture on April 15, 2002. There was no mention of interrogation methods. A second CIA list, explicitly titled “Interrogation Briefings to the Hill,” records meetings with both the House and Senate committees on April 24, including “references to techniques.” This document confirms the questioning of Abu Zubaydah had already begun, and it notes the presence of Nancy Pelosi, the ranking minority member on the House side.

Much later, in 2009, amid bitter controversy over who in Congress had been told of CIA torture, and when, and how much they knew, Langley made public a supposedly definitive list captioned “Member Briefings on Enhanced Interrogation Techniques.” Langley's 2009 document dropped any reference to the April 24, 2002, congressional briefings. The controversy of that moment revolved around Representative Pelosi, by then speaker of the House, whom the CIA listed as attending a September 4, 2002, meeting where torture methods were described. Jose Rodriguez specifically claims that he led the agency team at the briefing, that by this point Abu Zubaydah was a compliant detainee, that CTC officers detailed all the interrogation methods employed on him, and that Nancy Pelosi attended.
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Pelosi insists she did not learn of waterboarding until February 2003, and even then was given the impression the methods were legally approved but not necessarily in use against detainees. Porter J. Goss, the House committee chairman in 2002, who would follow George Tenet at the head of the CIA, weighed in with his recollection that techniques had been thoroughly aired that September and both Republican and Democratic leaders had supported them.
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Criticism of Pelosi raged. Senator Jay Rockefeller IV, of the Senate's oversight panel, questioned the accuracy of CIA's record, pointing out a different error: he had received the torture talk on September 4, 2003, though
Langley's document had him in an earlier entry, marked as receiving a “later individual briefing.”
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It appears that Nancy Pelosi was right. The CIA document “Interrogation Briefings,” only declassified in 2010, has Representative Jane Harman, not Pelosi, attending the September 2002 briefing. Moreover, the contents of the agency's record of a February 2003 meeting indicates it was only
then
that Congress was told of the Yoo memos, hence waterboarding. Pelosi
could not
have learned of waterboarding at the House committee meeting that she attended in April 2002. The Porter Goss commentary cited above actually makes no specific assertion of Pelosi's presence, glossing over the matter by referring only to the minority political party. In the context of the dispute over Representative Pelosi, in addition, the juxtaposition of CIA's two lists raises other questions, as does the Rodriguez memoir. The agency operative dates the inception of the harsh methods to June 2002, but confirms that Abu Zubaydah was under interrogation using several different techniques from shortly after his capture.

Amid the controversy over Pelosi, another key point has gone unnoticed. The April 24 CIA briefing sessions were open to the full oversight committees on both the House and Senate sides and did include mention of interrogations. The documents make clear—and Porter Goss's article confirms—that subsequent briefings, beginning in September 2002, were restricted to the Gang of Four. Thus a subject that had been within bounds for intelligence oversight was suddenly restricted. The committees would not be “fully and currently informed” of CIA torture until late 2006. To its use of illegal techniques, papered over with dubious legal opinions, the CIA added minimization of intelligence oversight. The cutting of this Family Jewel was complete within a year of the 9/11 attacks.

By far the worst aspect of all this is that it evaded proper legislative superintendence. The notification rules put in
place after the painful Guatemalan affair were honored in form but robbed of content. What Congress was told consistently ran behind what CIA was doing—except where it was a matter of claiming credit. Langley briefed quickly on the capture of Abu Zubaydah, but waited months until broaching how he was being treated. By restricting
that
information to the Gang of Four, the CIA pulled a curtain of secrecy over its actions. As with the NSA's eavesdropping, it was impossible for the Four to conduct meaningful oversight. The Bush administration approach was quite deliberate. Its point was to retain freedom of action. With Family Jewels, manipulations of the record always serve a purpose.

Meanwhile, back in March 2002, the questioning of terrorist Abu Zubaydah began before he left the hospital and continued throughout his time in Thailand. Thus, the interrogation was in progress
for four months
before John Yoo's legal opinion even existed. At first the inquisitors were the FBI team. Ali Soufan recounts getting important early information from Zubaydah, adding that Director Tenet was amazed this intel began flowing without the aggressive methods.
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Dick Cheney admits this was the case.
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Asking that congratulations be sent to the CIA interrogation team, Tenet was dismayed to learn the Counter-Terrorist Center (CTC) had yet to put any inquisitors in place and it was the FBI that was securing the intelligence. A CTC team was on the next plane to Bangkok. The group included a questioner, a polygrapher, an agency psychologist, and one of the private contractors who had proposed the strong-arm methods. When CIA began to use them, Abu Zubaydah clammed up. A cable exchanged between Langley and the field in late April shows the CIA was already taping interrogation sessions.
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In an “EYES ONLY” cable on May 6, headquarters issued explicit instructions for handling the videotapes, noting, “though
we recognize that the tapes might be cumbersome to store, they offer evidence of Abu Zubaydah's condition/treatment . . . that may be of value in the future (apart from actionable intelligence).”
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The CIA interrogations stalled. The private contractor tried nudity, loud music, then sleep deprivation. The contractor, who had never actually interrogated anyone before, applied increasingly harsh methods with no effect. In frustration, agency officers gave way to the FBI team, which again succeeded in getting information from Zubaydah. But CIA analysts questioned their product, while Langley pressed to implement its strong-arm program. In June the FBI interrogators, not willing to be part of this any longer, returned to the United States. Then the agency started in with its euphemistically termed “enhanced interrogation techniques.” Before the CIA was done with Abu Zubaydah, he would be waterboarded eighty-three times.

Clandestine service officers, Jose A. Rodriguez felt, needed to be defended forcefully. Once, at a retreat called for senior agency officers to clear the air, Rodriguez darkly warned critics to get out of the way of those at the “pointy” end of the spear. That is certainly where he put himself. By 2002 Rodriguez had spent a quarter of a century with the agency's spooky arm. In Washington without an assignment on September 11, 2001, Rodriguez had rushed to Langley and pitched in to help at CTC. He made himself indispensable to Cofer Black, then the unit's boss, and was soon the effective operations chief for the Center. Born in Mayaguez, Puerto Rico, Rodriguez also considered himself the top
puertoriqueño
at the CIA, though there he had competition from Carmen Medina, a rising star in Langley's intelligence directorate. Rodriguez was an operations officer, a spy. He had spent his entire career in the Latin America
Division. Counterterrorism was what he fell into after 9/11, but he threw himself at the problem without skipping a beat. The Counter-Terrorist Center was moving quickly on rendition, and the function of an operations chief, the third man in a CIA unit, was to exert direct control over field teams and serve as conduit for the boss's messages to station chiefs. With Cofer Black preoccupied managing alliances with foreign security services, the fifty-four-year-old Rodriguez inevitably became the major player supervising day-to-day operations.

The Counter-Terrorist Center was riding high. According to human rights reports and international flight records, Abu Zubaydah's capture was just one of thirty-nine renditions carried out between 9/11 and mid-2002, and CTC could also take credit for the elimination of an Al Qaeda commander killed by drone in Afghanistan, and another terrorist leader dispatched the same way in Yemen. It was a time of change at the Center, with a huge influx of personnel, expanded missions, and a plethora of fresh responsibilities. The CTC conference room morphed into an operations center and then into an Al Qaeda task force office. The Center's rank and file mushroomed from 300 to 1,500, both analysts and operators. There were desks in the hallway of its first-floor office suite. Cofer Black, nearing the end of his tour, was set to retire, and soon pulled away to prepare for the inevitable public investigation of agency failures before September 11. Henry Crumpton, the erstwhile CTC deputy director, had been drafted away to lead the CIA's field operation in Afghanistan, then went to the State Department as government-wide counter-terror coordinator. Ben Bonk, his replacement, was an analyst. Given the need for an experienced hand at the helm of CTC, and the high prestige the Center had gained, George Tenet promoted Jose Rodriguez to head CTC in May 2002.

No question but that Rodriguez loved the work. Emulating Cofer Black, he spanned the globe, touching base with CIA
units, leaving many day-to-day tasks in the hands of his deputy or chief of operations. There were new agency operations centers distributed around the world to be established under Black's program for cooperation with key allies. The CTC had a big piece of that action. The black prisons had to be fashioned from whole cloth. In due course the Thai government tired of hosting a CIA prison and demanded changes. There Rodriguez had an assist from Kyle D. (“Dusty”) Foggo, chief of the agency's logistics base in Frankfurt. Foggo, approached in the spring of 2003, helped with the next set of prisons, set up in Morocco, Romania, and Lithuania. Some prisoners were returned to Bagram after all. Later facilities were established in Poland and perhaps Egypt. The air support infrastructure had to be regularized for ghost planes to be routinely available. And, of course, CIA officers long trained using the KU/Bark Manual needed convincing that “enhanced interrogation techniques” were necessary. Rodriguez was the ringmaster, proselytizing, commanding, demanding, and imploring everywhere he went. He pulled CTC into the new era.

Under Jose Rodriguez, CTC activity accelerated to blazing speed. The 9/11 plotters Khalid Sheik Mohammed and Ramzi bin al-Shibh were apprehended on the basis of information from Abu Zubaydah, as was Binyam Mohamed. The Indonesian terrorist leader Hambali was taken in the summer of 2003. There were fifty renditions in all on Rodriguez's CTC watch, in addition to all the garden variety arrests by various countries' security services acting alongside the Central Intelligence Agency.

As for CIA torture, the water was boiling on that within months. The interrogation of Abu Zubaydah was ongoing. He was actually judged compliant prior to his final waterboarding session, but was subjected to the procedure anyway. Another terrorist, Abd el-Rahim al-Nashiri, became the audience for a mock execution. Guards fired a gun outside his cell and al-Nashiri was conducted down the hall past a CIA man,
shackled and hooded, lying on the floor pretending to be dead. He was also threatened with an electric drill. Dismayed officers complained up the line. The agency's director of operations, James L. Pavitt, informed the Inspector General John Helgerson and asked for an IG inquiry. And yet Jose Rodriguez believes the cruelest thing done to al-Nashiri was when two of his CIA inquisitors blew cigar smoke in his face.
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Langley now put the interrogation program on a more formal basis. Jim Pavitt sent a team to Thailand for a firsthand look at procedures. The agency instituted a training course for prospective inquisitors in November 2002. Meanwhile, CIA's top lawyers audited the interrogation tapes.
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The goal was to check them against logbooks and the daily cables updating headquarters, ensuring the written record corresponded to what the tapes showed. The tapes themselves could then be destroyed. Lawyer John McPherson of the Office of General Counsel (OGC) did the work. There were ninety-two tapes, thirty-one of Zubaydah, the rest of Nashiri. A CIA record of Helgerson's interview with an OGC lawyer—his name deleted but presumably McPherson—reveals that the tape review was uneven. McPherson found the labeling spotty, some tapes undated, others with nothing but start times. He had to put them in some kind of order. Some tapes contained just a half hour or so of content, some were blank, on some the audio or video was poor. Others had clearly been repeatedly started and stopped. The lawyer maintained he had watched the whole set, either in real time or at fast forward.
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On January 9, 2003, McPherson wrote a memo that concluded the written records accurately reflected the tapes. The Helgerson investigation, by contrast, established that nearly a dozen tapes were blank, two had only a couple of minutes recorded, and another pair were broken. No tapes documented a twenty-one-hour period featuring two waterboarding sessions.
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Inspector General John Helger son issued one report specifically on the Nashiri case and another
on the interrogations overall. He began to meet with Rodriguez on a routine basis, once a month.