The president, who had been standing at a lectern, came out from behind it, changed his tone, and—waving his finger in the air—began a short lecture on the need for morality.
The agency has a secure instant messaging system called Sametime. Shortly after the session ended, the network was lighting up with comments supportive of the officer as word of the exchange spread.
The president then went to the concourse to speak to about a thousand agency employees, many of whom had been waiting for hours to see him.
Standing in front of the wall of stars for the agency’s fallen, the president praised the agency’s work and said he knew that “the last few days have been difficult.” He justified the release “as a consequence of a court case that was pending and to which it was very difficult for us to mount an effective legal defense.” He also asserted, “So much of the information was public—had been publicly acknowledged. The covert nature of the information had been compromised.”
The president then urged agency officers not to be “discouraged by what’s happened in the last few weeks. Don’t be discouraged that we have to acknowledge potentially we’ve made some mistakes. That’s how we learn.”
One officer told me that the agency consensus was that that last passage sounded a lot like Mister Rogers. The president apparently saw this as one of those teachable moments, while the agency’s counterterrorism workforce continued to believe that the past policies were not mistakes at all, but were a central reason why the country had not suffered an attack in more than seven years.
The president was right to go to Langley, and there is no doubt that the agency’s officers appreciated his offer of support. But this episode raised issues that could not be fixed by one visit or one speech or one photo op.
Washington Post columnist David Ignatius writes frequently about CIA. He is often a critic, but his comments are rarely without affection or respect for the agency and its people.
Two days after the president’s visit, Ignatius—who has always been well wired into the CIA alumni association—published a savage column in the Washington Post. “Sad to say,” he began, “it’s slow roll time at Langley after the release of interrogation memos that, in the words of one veteran officer, ‘hit the agency like a car bomb in the driveway.’”
Ignatius noted that the president had tried in his personal visit on Monday to reassure the agency workforce: “He said all the right things about the agency’s clandestine role. But it had the look of a campaign event, with employees hooting and hollering and the president reading from his teleprompter with a backdrop of stars that commemorate the CIA’s fallen warriors.”
Ignatius’s judgment was that “Obama seems to think he can have it both ways—authorizing an unprecedented disclosure of CIA operational methods and at the same time galvanizing a clandestine service whose best days, he told them Monday, are ‘yet to come.’ Life doesn’t work that way—even for charismatic politicians.”
Many Langley veterans now believed that it was only a matter of time before the long knives were out for the agency and perhaps for its officers as well.
The day after his Langley visit the president refused to rule out legal action against lawyers who crafted the DOJ memos; human rights groups handed Attorney General Holder a petition with 250,000 signatures demanding a special prosecutor; and UN officials and human rights lawyers were predicting that—absent US prosecutions—European courts would investigate American officials suspected of violating the ban on torture.
In the media and political frenzy that followed the release of the memos, charges and countercharges were hurled about. When a CIA-prepared timeline of congressional briefings on interrogation techniques was leaked to the press, the question of who in Congress was briefed, when, and what they were told became a critical subplot to the whole drama.
About a month after the release of the memos (which, remember, was done to put the whole issue of interrogation behind us), a headline in the Capitol Hill daily Politico screamed, “Democrats: CIA Out to Get Us.”
Two days later the Speaker of the House explicitly accused the agency of lying to Congress—both with respect to the use of enhanced interrogation methods (“The CIA comes to Congress, withholds information about the timing and use of this subject”) and more generally (“They mislead us all the time”).
Senator Feinstein, chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee, hastened to back up Pelosi, charging, “The CIA is not an agency that is above not telling the truth,” and Congresswoman Anna Eshoo, of the House Intelligence Committee, chimed in, “You have to play twenty questions with them. They are not forthcoming with information.”
In a letter to the workforce designed to be made available to the press, Director Panetta shot back, “It is not our policy or practice to mislead Congress. That is against our laws and our values. . . . [O]ur contemporaneous records from September 2002 indicate that CIA officers briefed truthfully on the interrogation of Abu Zubaida, describing ‘the enhanced techniques that had been employed.’”
To say that the whole mess had now become quite ugly was an understatement. And it wasn’t over.
The driving force within the administration for making the memos public was Eric Holder.
While campaigning for the president, Holder had identified CIA interrogations as torture, even though he had never been briefed on the specifics of the program. He also promised a reckoning of CIA activities. That pretty much put him on the same ground as candidate Obama. As president, though, Obama had softened his views. When the Bush-era DOJ opinions were released in April, for example, he cautioned, “This is a time for reflection, not retribution.”
Holder apparently never got the memo. He and his staff, according to published accounts, expected release to lead to “a groundswell of support for an independent probe.”
When it didn’t, they persevered. By summer the AG was pushing to release the CIA inspector general’s 2004 classified report on the interrogation program and to reopen investigations of agency officers.
For the agency, this was like a recurring bad dream. The entire IG report had been available to the leadership of the intelligence committees since 2004 and to all members of the committees and an extensive number of staffers since 2006.
The agency had cooperated extensively in the prosecution of an agency contractor who was convicted for manslaughter following the death of one detainee. The agency had also referred other findings of inappropriate behavior to the Department of Justice, where they were reviewed thoroughly by career prosecutors in the Eastern District of Virginia, who ultimately declined further prosecutions. (Holder later admitted that he had not read the career prosecutors’ declinations.) Finally, following the prosecutors’ decision not to act, the agency took its own disciplinary action, where appropriate.
Leon Panetta reportedly opposed further DOJ actions in a series of profanity-laced outbursts in the Situation Room. He also took the unusual step in early August of penning an op-ed in the Washington Post. He reported, “Last month, at a meeting overseas of intelligence service chiefs, one of my counterparts from a major Western ally pulled me aside. Why, he asked, is Washington so consumed with what the CIA did in the past, when the most pressing national security concerns are in the present? It was a very good question.”
To no avail. Within a few weeks the administration released a lightly redacted version of the CIA inspector general’s 2004 report, more Department of Justice legal opinions, as well as a stack of correspondence between CIA and the Office of Legal Counsel. Holder also announced that he had directed John Durham, who was already investigating the agency’s destruction of videotapes (see chapter 12), to expand his inquiry to determine whether a full criminal investigation of agency conduct was warranted.
The president had at least tacitly sided with his attorney general. Leon had been unable to stop the train. Now seven of his predecessors stepped forward t
o try their hand. In mid-September we wrote the president urging him to reverse Holder’s decision to reopen the criminal investigations. The letter rehearsed the usual arguments: foreign services will be more reluctant to collaborate; agency officers will become more risk-averse; public disclosures will help al-Qaeda elude US intelligence.
The core argument, however, was one of fairness. “If criminal investigations closed by career prosecutors during one administration can so easily be reopened at the direction of political appointees in the next, declinations of prosecution will be rendered meaningless. . . . [Officers] must believe there is permanence in the legal rules that govern their actions.”
Former CIA directors are not an especially close-knit group. They may get together once or twice a year to hear from the current director, but they served different presidents in different times, under different circumstances. It would be hard to get them all to agree that a certain day was Tuesday.
But, once we got the language down, getting agreement to sign the letter was not a heavy lift. All but three former living directors signed the document. Bob Gates was serving as secretary of defense, so we didn’t even inform him. George H. W. Bush was a former president, and it would have been inappropriate for us to ask him to comment on the actions of a successor. Admiral Stansfield Turner, who was approaching his eighty-sixth birthday, simply deferred on the grounds that he was not current on the issue. We didn’t press him.
It was axiomatic that three of us—Goss, Tenet, and I—would sign; after all, we ran the program. But Woolsey and Deutch were long gone, after having served in the Clinton administration. William Webster was a former federal judge and head of the FBI. And Jim Schlesinger’s body of work included an investigation into DOD’s abuse of prisoners at Abu Ghraib.
All that said, we did not impress. The president noted our concerns with a fairly dismissive, “I appreciate the former CIA directors wanting to look out for an institution that they helped to build.” Although he repeated his preference to “look forward and not backward,” he declined to intervene.
The investigation lasted a full three years, during which scores of agency officers were interviewed and many appeared before a grand jury.
The whole affair created a sense of siege at the agency. In February 2010, after the death of seven agency officers and contractors in the suicide bombing at Khost, the agency held a memorial service in a large tent in front of the Original Headquarters Building. The president attended, as did other political leaders like Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi.
Several eulogists were from the Counterterrorism Center, the very people most affected by Holder’s and the president’s decisions and by Pelosi’s accusation that the agency routinely lies. One eulogist may have signaled the sense of the “them vs. us” estrangement when she highlighted “the privilege of being part of a real band of brothers and sisters engaged in a common struggle.” There was an almost unspoken, “We’re glad you’re here but this is really about us. We were doing this before you got here and we will be doing this after you leave.”
The disclosures and renewed investigations were even the cause for some dark humor at the agency. At General Counsel John Rizzo’s retirement in late 2009, the emcee was reading a series of letters—testimonials to John’s work. As he was closing, he said that he had one more. While reaching for a document in his pocket, he described it as being personally for John from Attorney General Holder. “John,” he read, “you have the right to remain silent.” It was several minutes before the laughter had died down enough for the ceremony to continue.
But the impact of multiple investigations was no joke. CIA was servicing Durham’s investigation into the destruction of the tapes, the reinvestigation into incidents detailed in the IG report, and accelerated congressional inquiries on a variety of fronts. Beyond the impact on morale, foreign relations, and the willingness to embrace risk, there was just a raw manpower bill that the agency had to pay. And it was a high-end manpower bill, to boot. Responding to all those inquiries required some of the best talent the agency had to offer. A permanent office was set up on the seventh floor opposite the director’s suite to manage the flow.
Three years and six days after the attorney general reopened investigations, he and prosecutor John Durham announced that they would not pursue criminal charges against anyone in CIA’s RDI program. The bloodletting, at least inside the executive branch, appeared to be over.
Holder had been consistent throughout: messianic in his focus, politically tone-deaf, and indifferent to contrary evidence and views.
Panetta was equally consistent, warning that by focusing on the past, we were risking the present and the future.
The president seemed to want to have it both ways. He came out looking inconsistent to people on both sides of the issue.
He may have viewed splitting the difference as his best principled alternative, but it also had a political appeal. The president had a problem. To the disappointment of many, he had doubled down on much of his predecessor’s counterterrorism programs. Telephone metadata. State secrets. Renditions. Targeted killings. Military commissions. Frankly, there was a bigger difference between President Bush’s first and second terms than there was between him and his successor.
And that was a political problem for President Obama, who campaigned fundamentally on not being George Bush. Let me show you how different I really am, the president must have reasoned. Let me show you what I stopped. And so he released the interrogation memos and allowed (perhaps supported—the record is not clear) his attorney general to release more documents and reopen already closed cases.
The folks at CIA paid a heavy personal price, but perhaps they shouldn’t have felt surprised or offended. Personally the president had showed them some appreciation, but this was business and they were props.
And there was more to come.
About the time in 2012 that Holder was standing down the Durham inquiry, my cell phone rang and George Tenet asked me if I had heard about the “SSCI report.” I was vaguely aware that Democrat committee staff had been working on something, but I truly had to plead ignorance. “Haven’t we seen this movie before, George?” I asked.
In fact, we hadn’t, which became really clear two days after the 2012 presidential election. George, Porter Goss, John McLaughlin, and I (directors and acting directors during the RDI program) had arranged for an agency update. Michael Morell, the deputy director and a good friend to all of us, took the meeting and outlined the draft SSCI Democrat report that the agency had recently received. It was an unrelenting prosecutorial screed that accused us and the agency of going beyond our authorities and lying to everyone about that and about the effectiveness of the program. We were all more than a little stunned. And angry. We asked how the Democrat staff could arrive at those conclusions without talking to any of us.
We also asked why this was being done. We were told that the SSCI staff director had said because Senator Feinstein wanted to be sure that this would never happen again, which struck us as a conclusion that then launched a search for data.
The agency was as livid about the report as we were, and they were going to push back hard, since the draft had been selective in citing documents, had errors of fact, and seemed ignorant of the way that intelligence really worked.
It was obvious that this was really going to be interesting when the public pissing started just a few weeks later over (of all things) a movie, Zero Dark Thirty, that dramatized the intelligence work that led to the killing of Osama bin Laden. There were complaints that the intelligence and special operations communities had leaned too far forward helping director Kathryn Bigelow and screenwriter Mark Boal. Several members of the Senate demanded that Sony Pictures issue a disclaimer on the role of CIA interrogations in the hunt.
It took two more years of arguing between CIA, the White House, and the SSCI Democrat staff about data, analytic tradecraft, and class
ification before a five-hundred-plus-page summary of the Feinstein report finally saw the light of day. During that time, the former seniors implicated in the report met or teleconferenced periodically to stay updated and to prepare a response.
It would be hard to overstate our anger, but responding to the calumny was going to be challenging. We were only given a two-week window in August 2014 in which we could actually access the summary report, the agency’s 130-plus-page response, and the SSCI Republicans’ 150-plus-page rebuttal. With prior travel commitments, I managed to squeeze in about four hours of reading one afternoon.
Undeterred, we submitted our own Freedom of Information Act requests to CIA to get other documents to buttress our case. Bill Harlow, George Tenet’s superb public affairs chief, built a Web site, ciasavedlives .com, so that we could make documents available to the press and public. We offered background briefings to any print or video journalist who would care to listen. John McLaughlin crafted a magnificent 2,300-word op-ed that we pre-positioned with the Wall Street Journal’s Web site along with a shorter version for the print edition. The op-ed was signed by the three directors and the three deputy directors who had managed the RDI program. I wrote a companion piece for the British press, all to be triggered by the release of the Feinstein report itself, which finally took place on December 12, 2014.
John’s argument in the Journal summarized our case:
The Senate Intelligence Committee’s report on Central Intelligence Agency detention and interrogation of terrorists, prepared only by the Democratic majority staff, is . . . a one-sided study marred by errors of fact and interpretation—essentially a poorly done and partisan attack on the agency that has done the most to protect America after the 9/11 attacks.
Playing to the Edge: American Intelligence in the Age of Terror Page 43