Hard Measures

by Jose A. Rodriguez, Jr.

  From that point on, finding Abu Ahmed al-Kuwaiti became one of our top intelligence-collection priorities. About two years later we learned the true name of the man we sought. That was progress, but it wasn’t enough. Now the CIA had to find him.

  One of my biggest regrets is that we were not able to find this man while I was at the Agency. The courier exercised excellent tradecraft, maintaining a low profile and generally avoiding using methods of communication that might trip him up. Then, sometime after I left the CIA, he made a mistake. He slipped and did something that allowed U.S. intelligence to find him. From there, using great patience and skill, CIA officers eventually were able to trace him to the compound in Abbottabad and assemble the intelligence case that led to the successful raid on May 2, 2011. It all started with information a detainee provided after receiving EITs bolstered by information that KSM and Abu Faraj al-Libi (who both became compliant after receiving EITs) gave us, whether they meant to or not.

  President Obama and his national security team deserve great credit for following the trail to its conclusion and making the gutsy decision to send in the U.S. special operations forces team that performed so magnificently. In the immediate aftermath, some of the president’s senior staff “committed truth”—they confirmed the role the EITs played in bringing UBL to his much-deserved demise. Then–CIA director Leon Panetta told NBC’s Brian Williams, “We had multiple series of sources that provided information with regards to this situation … clearly some of it came from detainees [and] they used these enhanced interrogation techniques against some of those detainees.” Williams followed up by asking Panetta if waterboarding was part of the “enhanced interrogation techniques” that he had just mentioned and Panetta said: “That’s correct.”

  As difficult as conducting interrogation and debriefings at secret locations might be, none of it would have been possible without the CIA’s ability to quickly, safely, and quietly move detainees around the world. This capability has widely and inaccurately been dubbed “torture flights” by some in the chattering class. They were nothing of the sort.

  While there is much that I still cannot reveal about the process, I am free to lift the veil a bit on some of it. The CIA first got involved in making significant international moves of prisoners not after 9/11 but in the early 1990s during the Clinton administration. More than seventy prisoners had been clandestinely moved in the seven years leading up to September 11.

  Moving detainees around clandestinely is an extraordinarily difficult thing to do. The officers in the Agency’s branch in charge of renditions had become very adept at it. Over the years, the CIA has had the use of a small fleet of special aircraft.

  Almost invariably, missions would arise with little or no notice and it would be necessary to get an aircraft quickly and quietly to some remote location and just as quickly and quietly spirit a high-value passenger off to another location. The planning of such missions was very precise. Renditions branch officers prided themselves on having an aircraft on the ground at the ultimate destination at whatever time was stated in the operational plan. Sometimes we would be unable to tell the pilots where they were going until they were in the air. Even then, at times the ultimate destination changed while they were en route.

  On the ground at a stop, aircraft wait their turn for a refueling truck. Our officers, when in a rush (which was generally the case), would find the ground support personnel and start peeling off hundred-dollar bills to ensure our place at the head of the refueling queue.

  The team we had working on transportation was nothing if not resourceful. I remember one instance in which one of our aircraft landed in a remote spot. While it was on the ground, a local airport worker lost control of a forklift and punched a hole in the wing of our bird. The crew sent a digital picture of the damage back to the States along with their plan, which was to cover the puncture with duct tape. They did, and completed the mission. A week or so later the aircraft made it home to the U.S., where the damage was repaired.

  On another occasion we had two aircraft trying to get to a very remote location. There were mountains surrounding the airfield. The weather was awful, with visibility at about 250 feet. To make matters worse, the field had no navigation aids, no tower, and no lights. No one on either airplane had been to the location before. After several abortive attempts to land, they were able to reach one of our contacts on the ground. That person drove his jeep onto the runway and flashed his headlights, providing enough of a beacon for the first airplane to land.

  As conditions worsened, the airplane on the ground positioned itself on the end of the runway with its right wing on the centerline. Blinking its nose light, it provided just enough guidance for the second plane to find the airstrip through the mist and fog and touch down at the opposite end of the runway. As the second arrival rolled toward them, the crew of the first plane found themselves praying that the brakes on the other airplane worked well. They did.

  There are lots of stories floating around about how detainees were treated on these flights. The stories almost always suggest that our “guests” were abused and mistreated from the moment they boarded the aircraft. Like so much that has been written about our efforts, this, too, is wrong.

  The onboard team would mark down any bumps, bruises, bandages, scars, or anomalies that the detainee might have. They wanted to be able to demonstrate when they got to their ultimate destination that the passenger was in the same condition in which he boarded.

  When moving hardened terrorists on long, international flights, you don’t want to have to deal with taking passengers to use the tiny onboard airplane lavatory. So the detainees were given sedatives, and they slept through much of the lengthy journey. Throughout the flight, Agency personnel checked their vital signs and made sure they were properly hydrated.

  Most often there were only one or two detainees on a flight. There were times, however, such as when we had to close down one black site and open another, that as many as fourteen detainees were moved on a single flight. The logistics for such a complex operation were demanding.

  The arrangements at the black sites were similarly precise. We took great pains to construct facilities that would safely and securely contain the detainees while maximizing our ability to gather intelligence from them. Since we had never been in the detention business, Agency officers visited the U.S. Bureau of Prisons to learn about how to create the most effective holding facility.

  Our sites were designed to create a complete loss of orientation on the part of the detainees. They were in a completely sterile environment with no distractions. They had no idea where they were or what was going on outside their cell, let alone elsewhere in the world. There was one thing we did that ran against the concept of disorientation. Each holding cell had an arrow painted on the floor pointed toward Mecca for prayers. Our officers charged with constructing the holding facilities took compasses into each cell to make sure they accurately indicated the direction toward the Ka’aba, the holiest place in Islam.

  Occasionally, attempts to spruce up the detainees’ living quarters were rebuffed, however. For example, at one point, after they had become compliant, Agency officers hung some posters in the detainees’ cells. Ramzi bin al-Shibh objected, however, because the poster in his cell had a picture of a bird on it. “Only Allah can make images of birds!” he said, and he demanded the poster be removed. It was.

  The sense of isolation alone was sufficient to motivate many of the detainees to begin cooperation. Whether they cooperated or not, we took exceptionally good care of them. The detainees had access to outstanding medical, dental, and even vision care. When one of the detainees developed an infected toe, we flew in a specialist to deal with it. The medical care they received far exceeded that which was available to their captors.

  The food the detainees received was halal—prepared in ways acceptable to Islam. The food our officers ate was often less scrupulously crafted. At one site Agency officers termed the typical meal “chork
”—because they were uncertain whether it was chicken or pork.

  In the early days of their detention, some of the al-Qa’ida operatives were placed on reduced-calorie diets, relying heavily on liquid Ensure, which, true to its name, ensured that the detainees received sufficient vitamins and nutrients. Some of our guests grew quite fond of the drink. Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, in particular, was a huge fan of chocolate Ensure. When one of our senior officers who was with KSM during his first few weeks of detention saw him again about a year later, KSM patted his vastly reduced waistline and proclaimed: “See, the CIA diet works! I’ve been trying to lose weight for years, but you guys know the secret.” KSM became so weight conscious that he maintained his own chart in his cell happily tracking his ever-diminishing girth.

  After the detainees became cooperative, Agency officers worked hard to keep them relatively happy. The detainees were asked for a list of reading material they would like to have, and CIA officers would go out and purchase the books and operate a lending library for all their “guests.”

  Within hours of our capture of Abu Zubaydah, the world knew that he was in custody somewhere. The word of the takedown of other senior AQ leaders quickly became public knowledge as well. At first the media seemed to accept that these terrorists were being held somewhere without much question. There were lots of leaks (authorized and not) about some of the information we were gaining from our debriefings.

  After a while, the media started an all-out effort to uncover and expose where the detainees were being held. It was not an easy thing for them to find out. We deliberately kept the circle of people who knew where the black sites were to a very small number. We didn’t tell the FBI. We told only the highest levels of the State Department. Many people, even those within the Agency with the highest security clearances, were not clued in. As far as I know, the location of the black sites was not even shared with the president. It is not that senior White House officials weren’t trusted, but rather that they simply did not have a “need to know.”

  After a while, media accounts speculating about the location of the black sites, and the conditions under which the detainees were being held, started to emerge. Many of these accounts were wrong. But eventually some started getting closer to the truth. At one point when one news organization was about to report on the location of the site where Abu Zubaydah and others were being held, I made the decision to quickly close that site and send our detainees to another location thousands of miles away.

  Several times during my tenure we felt obliged to close one well-functioning facility and move to another because we were unable to maintain the secrecy of the site. It became so routine that we started causing additional black sites to be constructed in anticipation of the current ones being exposed.

  I remember that we had spent millions of dollars building a new facility on another continent thousands of miles away. The chief of that country’s intelligence service urgently asked to come see me. He appeared to be tremendously embarrassed when I met with him. He nervously confessed that the heat was just too much from journalists (mostly American) who were sniffing around trying to find where we might be holding the worst terrorists on the planet. “Mr. Rodriguez,” he said to me, “my country simply cannot take the risk of helping yours in this way.” I told him I understood, and regretted that we had put them in an awkward position. It made no sense to express anger or frustration with him, and besides, I hoped there would be other, less-onerous ways for him and his country to help us in the future.

  In the fall of 2005, Washington Post reporter Dana Priest was working on a story that eventually was called “CIA Holds Terror Suspects in Secret Prisons.” Hearing that such a story was about to be published, the CIA director, Porter Goss, asked me to meet with her, off-the-record, to see if I could convince her that such a story would harm U.S. national security, put some of our allies around the world in a very difficult position, and potentially disrupt a program that was providing intelligence that was producing real results and helping keep the country safe.

  I was still undercover at the time, and my full name was not publicly known (although some media had reported that the head of CIA’s operations was a person who could be described only as “Jose”). I was quite happy to have had almost no dealings with American journalists in my decades of Agency service. From what I knew about the media’s passion for revealing anything secret, I had little hope of convincing Priest to keep the black sites in the dark. But the stakes were high, so I agreed to give it a shot.

  Priest was escorted to my office and presented me with an unsolicited autographed copy of a book she had written the previous year about the U.S. military. That failed to soften my stance on the lack of wisdom of her proceeding with her article as planned. She laid out a rough outline of what she planned to write. While she had some facts wrong, she had others uncomfortably right. I made my case for why such an article—right or wrong—would be damaging. I could see I was not winning her over. In the end, the Post did agree to fuzz up some information about the location of supposed sites, but the overall impact of the article and others that followed and expanded on it was most unhelpful.

  One final story on the black site shuffle. When we grew concerned that the identity of the first location where Abu Zubaydah was interrogated was about to leak, I issued an order that the facility be closed in ninety-six hours and the detainees be moved to a new site. The Agency officers on scene quickly began packing up the material they needed to take with them to the next location and destroying anything else so as to leave no reminders of what had taken place there. Agency officers serving in hot spots around the world are quite accustomed to minimizing their footprint in case they have to “bug out” on short notice. In this case, the base chief sought guidance on a number of things, including a pile of ninety-two videotapes that were stacked in a jumble on a bookcase in her office. The tapes had been made during the early days of AZ’s interrogation. Some midlevel person in CTC, whose name I do not know, correctly believing that we weren’t getting any useful intelligence from the tapes, recommended that they be thrown onto a bonfire that was being lit nearby. The tapes were scooped up and about to be turned into useless slag when a follow-up cable from headquarters came in saying: “Hold up on the tapes. We think they should be retained for a little while longer.” Had that message been delayed by even a few minutes, my life in the years following would have been considerably easier.

  On September 17, 2001, President Bush gave the CIA extraordinary authority in pursuing the terrorist threat. Presidential authorizations are mechanisms by which the Agency carries out its covert clandestine activities. Despite the popular misconception, we didn’t freelance or just make things up as we went along. The parameters of significant actions are clearly laid out and the Agency is told what it can and cannot do, when and where it can do it, and what tools are at its disposal. These authorities are briefed to the leadership of the House and Senate intelligence committees and to the appropriations committees to facilitate oversight as well.

  The September 17 authorities were sweeping in scope. We were authorized to go after al-Qa’ida leaders around the world and bring them down so that they could not orchestrate another terrorist attack like the devastating one that had happened less than a week before. While the identity and general location of the principal targets were fairly well known (Usama bin Ladin and his top aides were generally thought to be in Afghanistan and Pakistan), it was clear that this was truly a “global” war on terror. Al-Qa’ida had contacts and operatives in a score of countries. Going after them in a war zone was fairly straightforward. But what of those who might be hiding in plain sight elsewhere? Obviously, where local governments were willing and able to assist, these individuals became targets of law enforcement that would seek to detain, interrogate, and arrest them. In some cases, we found it necessary and useful to “assist” terrorists to get from where they were to somewhere else where their interrogation could be ensured. This was the “r
endition” program I discussed earlier. The term “extraordinary rendition” was an invention of the press.

  It occurred to me, however, that potentially there was another category of person—a known bad actor of the worst sort who was living not in a war zone but somewhere from which we could not remove him via such proceedings as extradition or by rendition. It seemed to me that for a superpower like the United States, the president should have at his disposal the capability of removing that person permanently in order to protect U.S. interests.

  There was already plenty of authority, if we could find a terrorist in a war zone, for the president to order B-52s to carpet-bomb his location—or fire scores of cruise missiles into the area where he was believed to be hiding. Should we not, we asked ourselves, have the capability to much more surgically remove a threat when other means, such as arrest, are not available? The military had the capability, using special operations forces units such as Navy SEALS, to parachute into a situation and take strong military action, as they demonstrated nearly a decade later when they killed Usama bin Ladin. Most major police forces have SWAT teams with snipers who can be used in criminal standoffs. But, despite the popularity of Jason Bourne movies or Mitch Rapp novels, there was no such capability for the president to order the clandestine elimination of an existential threat to the United States outside a foreign war zone.

  I fully understood that this would be highly controversial and a capability that would be used under the most rare and dire circumstances, if at all. But I thought that if the circumstances ever arose in which the country needed such knowhow, it would be too late to try to develop the necessary skills or to establish the legal basis for allowing us to use them.

  I believe there should be a thoughtful debate about what is necessary and moral for a country to survive. It had been the policy of the U.S. government since the Clinton administration, fully approved by Congress, to support regime change in Iraq. If Saddam could have been removed with a single bullet, might that not have been preferable to a war that killed hundreds of thousands of Iraqis, cost thousands of American lives, created tens of thousands of amputees, and saddled U.S. taxpayers with estimated direct costs of nearly $1 trillion? More recently, more than $1 billion was expended by the United States and hundreds of millions more by our NATO allies to try to remove Libya’s Muammar Qadhafi from power. Thousands of people were killed in the operation; many were noncombatants. Officials danced around trying to explain how airstrikes on Qadhafi’s residences and offices were not designed to kill him. Is it less moral to have a leader like Qadhafi succumb to what some euphemistically referred to as “the ultimate brush pass,” or to bomb his headquarters, hoping he somehow meets his demise, along with the hundreds or perhaps thousands of others who surely will be collateral damage?