Playing to the Edge: American Intelligence in the Age of Terror

by Michael V. Hayden

  During the summer of 2006 there had been a rough consensus that the new suite of techniques would work in most cases. I wasn’t ready to throw that judgment overboard now. As Thomas Edison once said, “Many of life’s failures are people who did not realize how close they were to success when they gave up.”

  We knew that Rahim had been a fixer and facilitator, and we had good reporting that senior al-Qaeda folks along the Afghanistan-Pakistan border had started to relocate when he was captured. They apparently thought he knew something. So there were no easy choices. Cut bait and perhaps lose a real chance to get important intelligence. Press on and embrace the moral dilemma that it might lead to naught. I decided that we would try one more time.

  It didn’t work. Despite our best efforts at coercion and kindness (we tried both), Rahim told us little before we transferred him to Guantánamo in early 2008. Our lack of success with him was an important data point, but I wasn’t prepared to declare it a trend line. We kept the program in place for the remainder of 2008, but since we had no more detainees, we weren’t able to harvest any additional data points. The interrogators on-site concurred with our decision to stop with Rahim; in fact, we did it based on their recommendation. One later confided to me, though, that he was fully confident they would have made Rahim compliant if they could have used the full set of previous techniques.

  We gave Congress detailed updates on Abdul Hadi and Rahim and even made the captures public when each was shipped to Guantánamo. The reports to Congress were received largely without comment (or objection), but there was no sign that they ever helped our relationship with them much.

  By late 2007, things were so bad that it was hard to imagine how we could make things with the Hill any worse. Unfortunately, we found a way.

  In November, Mark Mazzetti of the New York Times was circling like a bird of prey over what he considered a blockbuster story. Our network began to light up as CIA alumni called in with reports that Mazzetti was chasing after the destruction of videotapes that had been made of some early interrogations. He was obviously closing in on that final pro forma phone call to the agency for comment before hitting the send button.

  Two years earlier Jose Rodriguez had ordered the destruction of about a hundred tapes of the interrogations of Abu Zubaida and Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri, the first two HVDs. Most of the tapes showed the detainees sitting around in their cells, but they also contained some graphic images of interrogation techniques being applied.

  Jose said he did it to protect his officers who were visible on the tapes. He’ll be forever remembered at the agency as a hero for it, but he did it through a narrow legal window (they weren’t respondent to any internal, legislative, or judicial inquiries) and over the objections and without the approval of Director Goss, DNI Negroponte, and the White House legal advisor—all of whom were furious with him.

  The tapes were neither created nor destroyed on my watch (as my talented public affairs chief, Mark Mansfield, kindly pointed out in his backgrounders), but I was in the chair as the story was about to break. I personally informed the president of the saga and told him that the White House should deflect all questions upriver to Langley. This was our mess. The president confirmed that he had never been briefed on the existence or the destruction of the tapes and that he would be more than happy to have his staff state that fact as they redirected inquiries to us.

  Back at Langley I decided to preempt Mazzetti and send an unclassified letter to the workforce (designed to be released publicly) describing the history of the tapes. I wanted first shot at shaping the story line. Besides, even though Mazzetti was a professional, he had kept us in the dark on this one, so we didn’t owe him a damn thing.

  Mansfield called Mazzetti to let him know we had a statement on the tapes that we would release based on our own timetable. Mansfield then shot a copy to Pam Hess, the intelligence reporter for the Associated Press. Giving our story to a wire service would give it maximum exposure. And the Associated Press wasn’t the New York Times.

  In the letter I pointed out that in 2003 the leadership of the two intelligence committees had been briefed that the tapes existed and that the agency intended to destroy them. I also said that the tapes had been reviewed by the inspector general, who found them consistent with the reporting cables from the black site. We had no further use for the tapes, which had been made to help write and verify reporting cables. Actually, they hadn’t been very useful in the first place.

  Once the story broke (on the day of our Christmas party, unfortunately, but we had to hurry to preempt the Times), all hell broke loose. Senator Kennedy recalled Watergate from the Senate floor. “We haven’t seen anything like this since the eighteen-and-a-half-minute gap in the tapes of President Richard Nixon,” he thundered in a blistering speech. The intel committees held multiple hearings and vented their anger that more members had not personally been informed about the tapes and their destruction. Rush Holt, a consistent agency critic, took control of the investigation in the House. Commentators had a field day, alleging that evidence of heinous crimes had been destroyed. Amid the furor, the attorney general commissioned federal prosecutor John Durham to see if any laws had been broken.

  At the height of all this handwringing, in February 2008, during an open session of the Senate Intelligence Committee with C-SPAN cameras rolling, I tried to rein in the wildest speculation.

  “CIA has waterboarded three people,” I casually noted. “Zubaida, Nashiri, and Khalid Sheikh Mohammed. The last waterboarding was in March 2003.” The names of those waterboarded had never been made public before, nor had the last date that the technique had been used. It was a modest backfire against a raging inferno of speculation and accusations.

  While the members were taking a moment to figure out how to respond to what I had just said (we had not given any forewarning), I added that the use of the technique reflected the circumstances of the time, the fear of further catastrophic attacks, and our lack of knowledge of al-Qaeda. Two days later in front of the House, again in open session, I refused to speculate on whether waterboarding would still be legal with both circumstances and law having changed. We weren’t asking for it and it hadn’t been used for almost five years. Period.

  Things died down a bit after that as John Durham’s criminal investigation effectively dampened any congressional enthusiasm for further inquiries. Besides, as the presidential campaign heated up, it was clear that any real determination on a way ahead awaited the outcome in November.

  That outcome sealed the fate of CIA detentions and interrogations despite agency arguments to the contrary (chapter 19). And then, over the next several years, the new administration and congressional Democrats pulled the agency through a series of wringers for its past behavior (chapter 20).

  Outside of overt combat operations on battlefields in Iraq and Afghanistan, America (not just CIA) was largely out of the detention and interrogation business. We had finally succeeded in making it so legally difficult and so politically dangerous to grab and hold someone that we would simply default to the kill switch to take terrorists off the battlefield.

  THIRTEEN

  GOING HOME

  PITTSBURGH, PA, 1945–2014

  In the 1997 hit film Grosse Pointe Blank, John Cusack plays an assassin back in town for his high school’s ten-year reunion. Searching for his boyhood home, he discovers that the site is now a convenience store. “You can never go home again,” he phones his psychiatrist, “but I guess you can shop there.”

  In my case, I guess I can buy Steelers gear there. My boyhood home was on the site of Three Rivers Stadium and later Heinz Field on the Northside (now called the North Shore) of Pittsburgh. The house was actually torn down to facilitate the construction of the first stadium.

  The neighborhood was great, tucked between the main line of the Pennsylvania Railroad and the north bank of the Allegheny River. It could fairly be called industrial, wit
h some light manufacturing (including Clark Candy), lots of truck parks, and a good number of bars.

  The place was typically ethnic—Irish, Italian, one square block African American—and old-country identities were still strong. When I jumped onto a board with a nail in it in the second grade, one Irish neighbor stuck the offending metal into a potato to speed my recovery.

  The neighborhood was also largely Catholic. You could see most everybody at Sunday Mass at St. Peter’s, and most of the kids—and there were a lot of them—attended the church grade school run by the Sisters of Mercy.

  Sports were everyone’s outlet. Throw a ball out, and it would draw a crowd, no matter the season. Not that there were any proper fields. There was nothing anywhere near us that could be called a lawn. There was one small concrete playground, an unpaved parking lot or two, and then there was always the street. “Go deep. Hook at the Buick. I’ll hit you there.”

  There was one legitimate field, Monument Hill, that was on top of a four-hundred-foot-high humpbacked hill just north of the neighborhood. The name came from a Civil War memorial that had been moved to, and later removed from, its eastern edge years before. It was nothing fancy. Well cared for with permanent stands, but a skin, heavily oiled field (that means no grass—ever—for those not lucky enough to have experienced it). For us, though, it was the best. Most of my weekend days and weekday nights from May through August were spent there. I got good enough at baseball there to earn a letter and hit .316 as a senior in high school.

  There was always enthusiasm for local sports teams or heroes. You could collect enough “pop” bottles around the neighborhood on a weekday summer morning to make enough money for streetcar fare and a $1.50 general admission ticket to sit behind Roberto Clemente in right at Forbes Field. That Clemente was the city’s greatest pro athlete—ever—might be suggested by the precise height of the right-field wall in Pittsburgh’s newest ballpark, PNC Park. The wall is twenty-four feet high to commemorate Clemente’s number as a Pirate.

  And then there were the Steelers. Another St. Peter’s parish family was named Rooney. They owned the football club. Oldest son Dan—later president of the team and still later ambassador to Ireland for Barack Obama—coached the grade school football team, and I was his quarterback in the eighth grade. “The only kid who could remember the plays” was his explanation. I later worked at Steelers training camps to help pay for college, and when I was in graduate school and Dan’s schedule with the team got too demanding, I took over his grade school coaching duties and actually brought home the city championship my last year.

  We were attached to the Steelers. As a young man, my grandfather Mike Murray used to run with Art Rooney, the scion of the family. My aunt Pat, my mom’s younger sister, was a contemporary and classmate of several of the Rooney boys. We all went to the same church. No surprise, then, that I listened with near tears in my eyes to the Steelers’ first Super Bowl win on Armed Forces Radio at a B-52 base on Guam in 1975. (Things got better. I was in the owner’s box for Super Bowl wins five and six in 2006 and 2009.)

  We lived in my grandfather Mike Murray’s home, a row-house rental except that the rest of the row had been torn down, with my mom (Sadie), dad (Harry), and siblings Debby and Harry III. We had twin sisters who had died shortly after birth when I was about ten. I’ve prayed for their souls at Mass every Sunday for more than half a century.

  Dad was a welder at Allis-Chalmers, not far from the house, but he retired early when the Pittsburgh plant closed. Mom filled in where she could. Years later, when I was a senior officer in the air force, she and a few friends formed the cleaning staff for a local office building.

  My granddad was one of the most generous men I have ever known. He took me fishing and camping. Because of him, our house was the neighborhood gathering place for pinochle, BBQ ribs on Saturday night, or just sitting on the stoop to listen to the Pirates on the radio. He supplemented his meager income in the shipping room of a printing company by running football pools and numbers. Where I grew up, that was as natural as going to church on Sunday. When I was an altar boy and served early Mass on weekdays and ran home for a quick breakfast before school, my mom would clear Granddad’s “paperwork” off the kitchen table for me.

  Mom and Dad took great care of us, limited only by their resources. Supper was always a family event. Although it was the usual basic Irish immigrant fare—well-cooked meat, potatoes, vegetables—Sadie’s baked beans were a requested dish at every family and neighborhood picnic, wake, wedding, and christening for fifty years.

  Mom and Dad emphasized our education, since theirs had been limited by economic demands during the Depression. Mom finished tenth grade. I still remember her reading Treasure Island aloud to me, complete with pirate accents, as a bedtime story every night over several weeks.

  Dad finished eighth grade. He had been a promising athlete before economics, war, and bad knees intervened. He taught me a lot. I bat left, throw right because of him. Despite his best efforts, though, I wasn’t going to get any athletic scholarships.

  So the education my folks imposed on me was as important as it was good, first with the Sisters of Mercy at St. Peter’s. I thought at the time that the order was badly misnamed, and years later during debates over CIA’s enhanced interrogation techniques, I took pains to remind my audience that I had experienced four of the techniques (two grasps and two slaps) in diocesan grade school. Still, the education was first-rate and basic. No frills.

  Same at the regional Catholic high school, North Catholic. Classic parochial fare. Discipline. Required curriculum. Theology. Latin. Classics. History. The whole liberal arts tradition. That was supplemented by one of those neighborhood libraries that robber baron/philanthropist Andrew Carnegie dotted throughout his adopted city. I was a regular at the Northside branch. Pretty much worked my way through the history stacks.

  A local school, Duquesne University, was the natural choice for college: Catholic, affordable, and near home. I was on active duty with America’s air force before I ever sat in a classroom that didn’t have a crucifix in it. I was also in the air force before I needed a car to get to school. Grade school, high school, and college were all within walking distance, and public transportation was there in bad weather. I have sometimes wondered if my later, more global, lifestyle was a reaction to those early years.

  There was a war on in Vietnam while I was at Duquesne. In my neighborhood, universal military service actually meant universal—everyone served—so I opted for ROTC so that I could at least go as an officer. We didn’t have any kind of strong military tradition at home. Dad served in North Africa and France in the Signal Corps in World War II, and my uncle, my mom’s younger brother, lied about his age to join the marines, cruised around the Mediterranean for a while, and then ended up surrounded by tens of thousands of Chinese “volunteers” during the marines’ icy retreat from the Chosin Reservoir in Korea. One of my first memories of TV was my grandfather staring worriedly at the newscasts during that time.

  The air force let me stay on at Duquesne to get a master’s degree in history before I entered active duty in the summer of 1969. Service life didn’t come a moment too soon. I had married a Duquesne classmate, Jeanine Carrier from Chicago, still the best decision of my life. We had an infant, Margaret, and our second, Michael, was on the way. The prospect of steady pay and dependable medical care never looked better.

  Although we would visit family and go to occasional Steelers and Pirates games and my elongated vowels in words like out or down or fire would occasionally prompt a question about my being from Pittsburgh, we would never go back there to live. Little exceptional in that. The city exported college graduates and others for more than two decades as the mills that had been the city’s lifeblood shut down. Good people. Good town. No work.

  The city would eventually revive based on education and health care and sustaining a variety of corporate headquarters. It became
a white-collar town, but kept its blue-collar attitude. All three rivers are now clean enough to fish, but the city population is about half its former size.

  Uninformed NFL analysts are prone to say that the Steelers travel well when black-and-gold-clad fans waving the team’s trademark Terrible Towels show up for Steelers road games. In November 2008, I was at FedEx Field to watch the Steelers and the Redskins play on a Monday night. Because of crowd noise, the Redskins (the home team) had to go to a silent snap count. One Redskin, asked after the game why that had happened, angrily pointed out, “Because we couldn’t hear the f—ing QB.” But that crowd noise was less about the Steelers traveling well and more about a great diaspora of Pittsburghers in the 1970s and 1980s for whom the team remained their strongest link to home.

  Every Christmas season the director and deputy director of CIA stand in the lobby for photos and shake hands and exchange holiday greetings with whoever is willing. It lasts for hours. An amazing number of folks at such events identified themselves to me as being from western Pennsylvania.

  I also had a fair number of Pittsburghers in my security detail at CIA. Jeanine and I had Steelers season tickets and made every game we could. For me, watching the action between those white lines from 1:00 p.m. to 4:00 p.m. on Sundays was a complete break with the rest of the world. Apparently, security didn’t mind the four-plus-hour drive each way to Heinz Field. Steelers security treated us well: total access passes for all of us to ease entry and exit. Everyone could see the game. CIA security never wanted for volunteers for the trip.

  What I and others took from Pittsburgh was the blue-collar ethic of the region, an ethic well captured in the words of World War II combat journalist Ernie Pyle during a 1937 visit to the city: “People here just work.” For years a yellowed copy of that article has been affixed to a bulletin board at the topside station of the Monongahela Incline, one of the hillside funiculars that still service the city.