Hard Measures

by Jose A. Rodriguez, Jr.

  The constant presence of IG staff within CTC became a fact of life for us. I had monthly meetings with John Helgerson, the IG, during which we compared notes on the many efforts his staff had on delving into the work of mine. For the most part ours was not an adversarial relationship.

  The more access the IG staff got, the more they wanted, and I tried to be helpful. I ordered that IG staffers be given access to some of CTC’s most sensitive materials, including the database with operational traffic coming in from the black sites with the full details of information obtained from our most senior al-Qa’ida detainees and a complete description of the techniques used to acquire it.

  While all this was going on, the IG’s staff was also working on an investigation into how 9/11 happened. Their investigation was parallel with and separate from the other intense reviews such as the Joint Congressional Inquiry and the 9/11 Commission. The people who were most critical to answering questions for those investigations were our most valuable CTC officers, who also were in the fight against al-Qa’ida going forward. They were constantly being pulled away from their efforts to stop the next attack to look back at how the last one had happened. While this was emotionally and physically draining for them, it was one of my leadership challenges to explain to them that both efforts—looking back and looking forward—were critical and needed our full support.

  There are lots of problems with IG investigations. I know that, having been personally slammed in a few of them, my criticisms will be viewed by many with skepticism. But only those who have been subjected to the special scrutiny of the IG staff, an experience that one of my colleagues described as like being “a test dummy at a proctologist’s college”—can fully understand.

  To be brutally honest, one of the biggest problems with the CIA’s IG staff is that the Agency’s best and brightest don’t usually seek assignments there. If you are a fast-tracking analyst, scientist, or case officer, the last thing you want to do with your career is take a several-year-long timeout to second-guess your former colleagues who are doing the real work. People assigned to the IG staff are generally “on rotation”—that means they are loaned to the IG from other parts of the Agency. Who gets encouraged to take an assignment there? Mostly people whose absence at the home office will not be missed. This sets up a potential, almost inevitable, ugly clash. You take people whose careers have been not stellar and you ask them to rate and examine their former colleagues. It is like middle school, where you give a few kids a reflective vest and badge and make them crossing guards. They can’t wait to start blowing the whistle on their more popular friends.

  In addition to bringing in staffers who have chips on their shoulders, the IG also brought in people who had noticeable agendas. For example, one of the most senior officers on the staff was married to one of the Agency’s most vitriolic external critics.

  It is bad enough that the personnel were flawed, but the process used by the IG’s reporting was also stacked against their targets. Since 1989, the CIA inspector general has been a “statutory IG.” That means that he (and, so far, it has always been a “he”) is appointed by the president and confirmed by the Senate. He is independent and does not view himself as working for the CIA director. He can and does report his findings directly to Congress. The Agency’s director has the power, though rarely exercised, to restrain the IG from releasing some particularly sensitive information. Doing so runs the risk of being accused of a cover-up, however, so the IG is immensely powerful.

  As I learned when I was first the target of the IG during my time in the Latin America Division, while the person under investigation has the right to respond to charges, the IG is under no obligation to include that response in his report. When the IG’s (often flawed) report goes to Capitol Hill, the written rebuttal from the people he has skewered rarely goes with it. Sometimes the IG’s report is declassified and made public and again, the self-defense provided by those who are the targets almost never reaches the public eye.

  Some people argue that a statutory IG is a violation of the constitutional separation-of-powers provision. You have the IG, essentially an employee of Congress, sitting in executive branch meetings, embedded in executive branch operations, and responsible for the most part only to his masters on the Hill.

  During my time in CTC and as head of the National Clandestine Service, the IG’s staff produced numerous badly flawed reports. But some of the worst damage done by the IG’s staff came from activities that themselves deserved investigation. But who audits the auditors? Who inspects the inspectors? And who investigates the investigators?

  In 2004 and 2005, the Agency became increasingly alarmed about stories that appeared in the mainstream media with sensitive details of our detention and interrogation programs. Some of the details that leaked were known to only a relative handful of people in the U.S. government—almost all of whom were at the CIA. People at the Agency like to think that most damaging leaks of sensitive information come from Congress, the White House, or some other agency that has a dispute with the CIA. But in this case it was pretty obvious that the culprit or culprits were in-house.

  Concern about this problem came to a crescendo about the time Porter Goss and his team arrived at the CIA. One of Goss’s mandates was to try to stop the leaks coming from Langley, and I fully supported him. Goss’s number-three man, Dusty Foggo, demanded that the Agency’s office of security get to the bottom of the mess. Some of Goss’s senior staffers guessed that the leaks might be coming out of the IG’s office. (What gave them that idea, I do not know.) Foggo told the security staff to make sure the IG was scrutinized. (It must have been somewhat surreal for the security folks, since something that neither the Goss staff nor I knew then was that at the very same time, the IG staff was working with the Department of Justice and CIA security on an investigation of Foggo. Dusty would later be indicted and plead guilty in a contracting fraud case and be sentenced to thirty-seven months in federal prison.)

  I knew nothing about Dusty’s problems at the time—I simply recognized the urgent need to plug the leaks coming from within the Agency on some of our most sensitive programs. Very few people were “read in” on the programs in question. And many of those people were quite senior, so no one was out of suspicion—including me. The office of security built a matrix of the range of people who were known to be aware of some of the most sensitive details that had leaked.

  I agreed that the best place to start was to go to each of those people and ask them to submit to a “single issue” polygraph exam. Agency officers are accustomed to periodic polygraph tests. When first entering the Agency and periodically thereafter you are subjected to lengthy in-depth sessions strapped to a machine designed to determine if you are being truthful when answering a broad range of security and lifestyle-related questions. But in this case there was just one issue: Have you shared information about the CIA’s interrogation and detention program with anyone unauthorized to receive it? The only way to ensure that we didn’t inappropriately target anyone based on preconceived notions about who might be responsible was to start at the very top and polygraph the most senior people who were knowledgeable about the program.

  I volunteered to be polygraphed, as did Porter Goss. Some twenty to thirty people, including the IG himself, were put “on the box,” as it is called in the Agency. The polygraph (widely and incorrectly known as a “lie detector”) is not perfect. It can generate false-positive reports. The people in security were worried. “Oh God, what if the director has a false positive on this?” they asked themselves. Fortunately, neither Goss, nor I, nor the others in the first group showed deception on the test.

  Security then expanded their search to a slightly wider range of people—somewhat lower on the totem pole but still fully read in on the program. Four or five people had trouble with their polygraph exams. Some on Goss’s staff wanted to immediately brief Congress about the status of the investigation, including the names of the possible suspects. Fortunately, that wa
sn’t done, because, as sure as night follows day, the names of some of the suspected leakers would have leaked, ruining their careers. We weren’t yet sure enough about any of them.

  With the set of potential candidates, however, security began to drill down. Soon they found hard evidence that one of them, a senior official in the Inspector General’s Office, had been in regular telephone contact with reporters, including Dana Priest of the Washington Post. The Agency has strict rules about unauthorized contact with the media. Even without passing on classified information, talking to the media without approval is a violation of Agency regulations and can get you fired. My understanding is that at first she denied any contact with the media. When presented with evidence to the contrary, she admitted that there had been some discussion but nothing sensitive. The polygraph indicated otherwise. Eventually the officer revealed she had had discussions that seemed to me well beyond any reasonable explanation. She blamed the reporter for tricking her into confirming things that she had not planned to discuss.

  In a meeting in the director’s office with other senior officials, Dusty Foggo recommended (tongue in cheek, I hope) that the officer be taken out to the Agency’s courtyard and hanged as an example to others. While that was considerably more extreme than what I favored, and although she claimed to have violated no law, I believed that prosecution was certainly called for. Press accounts said that the officer was later fired and marched out of the building in disgrace. In the end she was allowed to retire (which she was about to do anyway), so the price of betraying her oath was small indeed. I am at a loss to explain why she wasn’t prosecuted. There is always a calculus on the part of the government of avoiding going after leakers, because if you do so, much more information about sensitive programs may be exposed in the course of a trial. Nonetheless, letting someone escape with little, if any, sanction for such acts hardly provides a message of deterrence to those left behind.

  Leaks like this person’s did great damage to the CIA. They did damage to allied countries that volunteered to help us and saw their assistance repaid with exposure in the press. But the leaks also did great damage to the Office of the Inspector General. The IG Office was already vastly distrusted within the Agency because of its holier-than-thou attitude and the prosecutorial way they routinely treated fellow CIA employees. Now they had demonstrated that they could not be trusted with the secrets shared with them. The question arose: Who will watch the watchers?

  The general disgust over the way the IG Office operated within the CIA led Agency director Mike Hayden in May 2007 to courageously order one of his senior advisors, Bob Dietz, to conduct a study of how the IG functioned. I say “courageously” because to many outsiders the IG is a sacred cow. The notion of questioning anything about the way the office performed its duties would cause outrage among those who treated IG pronouncements as holy writ.

  Hayden wanted the review of the IG operation to be conducted quietly. He simply wanted to know if the many complaints he was hearing from his workforce about them were well-founded.

  Naturally, the existence of the internal inquiry leaked. The New York Times reported that the review had caused “anxiety and anger in Mr. Helgerson’s office and aroused concern on Capitol Hill.” Dietz had been general counsel at the National Security Agency when Hayden was its director and was a trusted counselor to him at the CIA. An Agency spokesman told the Times that Hayden’s goal was to help the IG staff “do its vital work even better.”

  At one point, after the four-month study was launched, John Helgerson, the IG, is said to have told senior Agency officials, “You have no idea how much toll this investigation has taken on my staff!” I’m sure my colleagues in CTC who had been under constant scrutiny from the IG for the past seven years shed some tears for the IG’s staff.

  In the end, as a result of Dietz’s study, about fifteen procedural steps were implemented to try to restore trust in the IG process. Among them, Hayden ordered the establishment of an ombudsman whom Agency employees could go to if they felt unfairly treated by the IG. That was a long way from solving the problem, but it was a start.

  When Dietz’s study was completed, there was little fanfare. Hayden asked Helgerson about sending it to Capitol Hill. Normally a strong proponent of congressional notification, Helgerson demurred, saying there was no need, since this was just “an internal matter.” Oddly, most of the substance of Dietz’s findings didn’t leak. The fact that there was a study under way did get out—and when Congress heard about it, and realized that they had not been officially informed, quite predictably they went crazy.

  The self-inflicted wounds we faced came not only from the IG staff. There were a number of self-proclaimed experts who spoke out through the press, made speeches, and wrote books that greatly clouded the public understanding of CIA operations post-9/11. Many of these critics came from inside the tent. The closer they could claim to have been to the scene of what they called a crime and the more loudly they denounced our actions, the more they were embraced by large segments of the media. I’ve already touched on some of these gadflies.

  There was the former FBI agent who was involved during the early days after Abu Zubaydah was captured. He has declared himself a leading expert on radical Islam and convinced the media that, based on his native Arabic-speaking skills, he is one of America’s leading experts on terrorism. The truth is that this former agent was not only held in low regard by the CIA officers with whom he worked, but also, as I understand it, fellow FBI colleagues were privately quite dismissive of his performance and attitude. While he had experience in other investigations, he has grossly exaggerated his role concerning his brief involvement in Abu Zubaydah’s case and turned it into a manifesto about how he was always right and the CIA was always wrong on dealing with terrorists.

  The former agent has mischaracterized both his role and that of Agency officers and contractors in the early interrogation. Having provided his spin for years on background to various reporters and authors, he then “reluctantly” confirmed his own tale in appearances in the media and in a book. He has created quite a myth.

  The most egregious of his many misstatements is that “we never got any actionable intelligence, comparatively to what we got before, when [the EITs] were going on.” This absurd statement has been disputed by every CIA director and director of national intelligence since 9/11. It is made by a person who, after the summer of 2002, and before the first EIT was ever applied, was no longer even privy to what intelligence had been obtained from whom in the Agency’s interrogation program. When back at FBI headquarters or in the field, he might have seen a subset of the intelligence derived from the detainees, but it would have been presented in such a fashion that it would not have been immediately discernible to him who the source was.

  I don’t want to give the impression that I am picking only on the FBI. The CIA also has several alumni of its own whose statements, media appearances, and books have subtracted from the sum of accurate knowledge on the Agency’s interrogation program.

  There was a midlevel Agency officer who was present in Pakistan when Abu Zubaydah was captured. He went on to convince the media that he had led the effort to get AZ, when, as I understand it, some say he was not even in the same city at the time of the takedown. After leaving the CIA, he somehow persuaded Hollywood to hire him as an advisor on the film The Kite Runner. When that movie was coming out in December 2007, he told people he was trying to build on his reputation and was considering writing a book about his life that could be made into a screenplay.

  At one point, I’m told, he sent an email to friends saying, “Hey everybody, watch me on ABC talking about The Kite Runner.” What he didn’t know was that ABC wasn’t interested in his views on a movie. They were interested in talking about waterboarding, a subject that he knew little about. That didn’t stop him from talking, however.

  On national TV, he declared that waterboarding was “torture”—but that it was sadly necessary and effective, since Abu Zu
baydah required only a single thirty- to thirty-five-second session, “and from that day on he answered [our] every question.” In the coming days, this former Agency officer was interviewed on countless television programs, appeared in many print media stories, and obtained a paid consulting contract with ABC News.

  About a year and a half later, a declassified CIA IG report was released showing that (at least in the mind of the IG) Abu Zubaydah had been waterboarded eighty-three times, not the one time the kite-flying former officer described. While the IG was wrong, too, their report demonstrated that the former Agency officer was not a good source. So how did he handle that disclosure? By saying that he heard the reports of the single waterboarding around the water cooler at CIA HQ and implying that the Agency had put out false information in the hallways, knowing that years later some of our employees would leak it, thereby misleading the American public. He told reporters, “In retrospect, it was a valuable lesson in how the CIA uses the fine arts of deception even among its own.” His reward for his less-than-believable account? A book deal and a job as a U.S. Senate investigator.

  One final story about these great pretenders. In the spring of 2011, I got word that news organizations were calling around regarding doing stories about a soon-to-be-published book by a former CIA officer who said he had been deeply involved in the interrogation program and was now calling it “torture.” This officer, the media had been told, was a noted expert on counterterrorism. I had never heard of him. I spoke with a number of my former colleagues. They had never heard of him either. After considerable digging, we finally found someone who could confirm that at one time the guy had at least worked at the CIA. Turns out that he was stashed at Agency headquarters toward the end of a mediocre career while being investigated on several series of charges of wrongdoing and malfeasance. A requirement popped up for someone who spoke a particular language, and he was tapped for a short-term project. In his book, he lets readers leap to the conclusion that the man must be an expert in Arabic. In truth, it was one of the Romance languages. He was sent on a short assignment with specific instructions to have nothing to do with the actual interrogation of a prisoner then being held by a foreign intelligence service. His role was simply to be a go-between for the CIA and that intelligence service. That brief exposure, stretched beyond all credulity, turned into a book that sought to expose what he now says were the evil and unproductive CIA efforts to interrogate prisoners. While I have no desire to parse someone else’s book, in my view, his would comfortably rest on the fiction shelves.