The Reluctant Spy (21 page)

Let's stipulate for the sake of argument that such practices produce a desired result. Different intelligence arms of our government may not always agree that a specific interrogation produced actionable information.

But even if torture works, it cannot be tolerated—not in one case or a thousand or a million. If their efficacy becomes the measure of abhorrent acts, all sorts of unspeakable crimes somehow become acceptable. Barack Obama got it right when he de classified the OLC memos of 2002 and 2005: “Torture,” the president of the United States said, “corrodes the character of a country.”

EVEN THOUGH ENHANCED
techniques were supposed to be used only on the highest-profile, toughest, most important al-Qaeda prisoners, word of their existence got out pretty quickly. By this time, we had already invaded Iraq, and military interrogators there—including a few agency contractors—were using these harsh methods, and some gruesomely inhumane variations of them, on their prisoners. The military wasn't bound by a presidential finding approving the techniques or by an agreement negotiated between the agency and the Justice Department. There was no oversight and no accountability, which meant interrogation was destined to spin out of control. The result was Abu Ghraib, a dark stain on the U.S. Army and, because some CIA contractors were involved, on the agency as well.

Then there was Guantánamo, which posed a special challenge for U.S. interrogators, military and nonmilitary. Our forces were picking up large numbers of combatants, or people identified as combatants, in Afghanistan during the first six months of the U.S. presence there. At first, a prison was opened at Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan. It was pretty grisly and filled up fast. With the numbers building, Guantánamo became a logical place to consider as an additional detention center. In my view, the original idea was a good one. This was an unconventional war with unconventional detainees, many of whom may not have even committed crimes. The United States and its allies had to put them somewhere while their status was determined.

Guantánamo allowed us, we thought, to park a prisoner for a
limited period of time until we could get to the bottom of his story. Then he could be either released to his home country or put on trial. I don't think anybody had any idea that hundreds of prisoners, many of them innocent, would spend years of their lives in political and legal limbo in Cuba, with no right to trial and no review of their cases. As I see it, this was not the original intent of Guantánamo and is yet another stain on the Bush administration's complete failure to come up with a policy on detention and interrogation and then to stick with it. The original intent was good. The result was a national disgrace.

The mistake made early on was sending just about everyone to Gitmo. American troops and their allies were capturing shepherds and mechanics and opium farmers. What to do? Send them to Guantánamo. Compounding this mistake was a U.S. government program that paid a bounty to the Northern Alliance, the coalition of Afghan tribes that worked with the CIA and U.S. Special Forces to bring down the Taliban, for every foreigner turned over to American forces. At the time, there were plenty of foreigners in Afghanistan who were just minding their own business, including many Pakistanis. For that matter, there were plenty of Afghans, unaffiliated with the Northern Alliance, who fell into the same category. Members of the alliance would grab these people, turn them over to the U.S. military, and claim they were terrorists. Then it was off to Guantánamo.

The place was overfilled because the Americans took at face value what the Northern Alliance was telling us. We would have been much better off keeping the Afghans in Afghanistan and sending the Pakistanis home to be interrogated in their own country. Indeed, that was something I pushed for when I was in Pakistan. I thought Pakistanis we caught in our various raids ought to be turned over to Pakistani authorities, and Afghans should be turned over to the Afghans. It made no sense to me to capture a Pakistani in Pakistan, for example, and then take him out of Pakistan and eventually ship
him to Guantánamo. Besides, turning those prisoners over to their governments would have freed up more space in Guantánamo for the real al-Qaeda people we were catching.

There was also the problem of high-profile prisoners. Should their American wardens send them to Guantánamo? It didn't seem feasible. First, the facility was full. Second, detainees there were living in contained but open areas—in effect, large cages visible to one and all. Assuming that some of the prisoners would recognize, say, Abu Zubaydah or Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, the custodians of Guantánamo could end up with a riot on their hands.

Abu Zubaydah, the first major al-Qaeda figure captured, was the obvious test case. He was found in Pakistan, where we had no reliable facility to imprison him and where his medical condition might not get the highly skilled attention the agency wanted for him. He couldn't be shipped to Afghanistan, where prison conditions were terrible. That's when agency brass began to think about the possibility of third countries for these high-profile al-Qaeda types. The negotiations were so tightly held that perhaps only a half-dozen CIA people knew about them at the time. The operation had a code name—let's give it the fictitious label “Emerald” here. Emerald was a military facility, the first of the secret prisons—“black sites” in the vernacular—where top al-Qaeda people were shipped for interrogation after their capture. Abu Zubaydah was Emerald's first occupant.

Prisons were set up in other countries as well. Each secret facility housed a relatively small number of prisoners, each of them isolated from all the others. In some cases, enhanced techniques were used, but only by authorized CIA personnel and generally in combination with low-key, more conversational methods—bad cop, good cop, if you will, generally in accordance with the
U.S. Army Field Manual
on interrogation. At least that's what we were led to believe at the time.

It's difficult to keep anything secret in Washington and in the
U.S. government. Inevitably, word of these offshore facilities found its way into the press.

But our concerns weren't focused solely on these top-tier enemy combatants. Another group filling Guantánamo and Afghan facilities included somewhat lower-profile detainees, perceived to have far less information of value to our antiterrorism efforts. Many of these enemy combatants, after questioning by our people, were returned to their countries of origin—Egyptians to Egypt, Saudis to Saudi Arabia, and so on. The process, known as “rendition” because it fit the legal definition of turning over a person from one entity or jurisdiction to another, generated a lot of controversy when it went public in the press.

The attention was hardly surprising. These detainees were being passed along to governments and intelligence services not known for their gentle treatment of your average street protester, much less someone who had admitted to having been trained by al-Qaeda. I confess to some ambivalence about rendition, extraordinary—that is, without a formal legal proceeding—or otherwise. Most of these people were trained in one of al-Qaeda's camps to kill Americans. We didn't want to keep them in Afghanistan because they weren't Afghans. And many of them hadn't even committed a crime in Afghanistan. Why is it wrong for us to ship them back to their native countries? Even though these prisoners might be treated harshly back home, I had no problem with rendition. I had a tougher time caring about these guys. Should we send them to Guantánamo, where they get three squares a day and better medical care than half of America? I had a problem with
that
. We obviously made some mistakes—for example, sending a guy to the tougher of the two countries when he had dual citizenship. But as I understand it, these mistakes were few and far between. Most prisoners rendered to home countries wound up being released after relatively short periods of detention.

But the issue of rendition needs to be seen in a larger context.

Someone in the Bush administration—former defense secretary Donald Rumsfeld, I believe—once worried aloud about whether we could kill the terrorists faster than their leaders and religious enablers could churn out new recruits. However crudely he put it, Rumsfeld was touching on an important point. Bin Laden and his support system in madrassas and conservative Islamic societies attract recruits with a devil's mix of Muslim victimization, radical Islam, false promises, and the vision of a reborn caliphate spreading across the Near East, Middle East, and beyond. These young men, effectively brainwashed, march forward like robotic figures in some video game, fighting Americans in Afghanistan, conducting suicide bombings where they can, and otherwise responding to the instructions of their masters.

We can wage war against this irregular army of lunatics, and we can certainly kill a lot of them. But we also know, as some top U.S. military officers have acknowledged, that the larger challenge is to win hearts and minds—to win an epic conflict fought on moral and political battlefields. I've come around to the view that, while we must do everything we can to prevent terrorists from attacking us, we also need to wage war on these other battlefields, where the force of our ideas matters as much as, if not more, than our force of arms.

You cannot have grown up as I did, in a household that revered the United States and what it stands for, and not believe in American exceptionalism. Our country salutes more than martial music and the flag. We also pledge fealty to what “Stars and Stripes Forever” represents: our written Constitution and our belief in standards of behavior that set an example for people and cultures everywhere on Earth.

There are things we should not do, even in the name of national security. One of them, I now firmly believe, is torture.

WHEN I RETURNED
from Pakistan in late spring 2002, I took up an assignment as a branch chief in the Counterterrorist Center's Osama bin Laden unit, a group set up in the mid-1990s to focus on the terrorist's increasingly brutal activities. The spot was something of a placeholder until Bob Grenier returned to headquarters from his work in Pakistan. Bob had been promoted to associate deputy director of operations for policy support, a mouthful of a title that hadn't existed before because the job itself hadn't existed. Grenier needed an executive assistant; he thought I'd done well in Pakistan, and I was flattered when he chose me for his new team. Both of us, though, were a bit baffled by our marching orders or, more precisely, the lack of them. There was no job description, but Bob took “policy support” to mean what the words said—that he would be the agency's counterterrorism liaison to the White House and to the larger policy community that included the Departments of Defense and State, as well as the appropriate committees of Congress.

My first day on the job was August 1, 2002, and it was a bracing eye-opener to say the least. After we exchanged a few pleasantries and reminiscences about Pakistan, Bob told me we had to go upstairs to be read into a compartment—that is, a zone of CIA business or an agency decision so secret that knowledge of it was limited to a small subset of people.

“What compartment?”

“I don't know,” Grenier said. “It's apparently so sensitive that they won't even discuss it over the phone. They won't tell us anything
until we sign the secrecy document.” This was unusual, though not unprecedented: Waterboarding had been a compartmented decision, with only a few people in the know.

Upstairs was the floor where Iraq operations were quartered. We went into the office of the director. I cannot use his name here for security reasons.

“What is this?” It wasn't an angry question; Bob was interested in
some
hint of the activity or decision before signing documents. That seemed a reasonable position to me as well.

“I can't say anything until you sign the secrecy agreements,” the director said. We signed six of them, just page after page after page of secrecy agreements. The agency sometimes goes overboard on this sort of thing. For all we knew at that moment, we'd just agreed to never reveal the identity of the new bottled-water vendor supplying the CIA cafeteria.