Hard Measures

by Jose A. Rodriguez, Jr.

  Once I became chief of CTC, I was asked to attend twice-a-year meetings with the Russians. The leader of the U.S. delegation was Deputy Secretary of State Rich Armitage. Although I would have liked to avoid the meetings, since they produced little measurable result, Armitage insisted I go along. Perhaps he felt comfortable that, like Cofer, I would speak my mind, and when necessary was willing to launch stacks of paper into the Moscow skies.

  Traveling overseas on official business was an important part of my duties. In my last job I spent about a week out of every month overseas. Generally, I passed up on traveling on big government jets and preferred low-key arrivals on commercial flights. Often I traveled alone or with a single aide. When I arrived in a foreign country, however, assuming that my visit was declared to the host government and they knew I was coming, I would get the red carpet treatment. Fixers from the host country intelligence service would meet me planeside and whisk me past the usual customs and immigration formalities. It was quite different coming home, however. When your name is Jose Rodriguez, I can assure you that it is hard to convince the TSA you don’t bear special scrutiny. I almost never got back into the country without being pulled into secondary screening by earnest Homeland Security officials.

  Getting back and forth to work while Stateside was less of an adventure. When you are undercover, as I was for most of my career, you are advised to vary your routes to work and engage in surveillance detection routes (called SDRs) to make sure you are not being followed. I admit that when I varied my path to and from work it generally had more to do with traffic conditions than it did with trying to avoid bad guys who might be trailing me.

  Like the stereotypical spy, I do enjoy fast cars. Late in my career I purchased a Corvette, which I would drive to work with the top down on good-weather days. Shortly after I got the car, I was visiting one of the CIA’s outlying buildings in the northern Virginia area. As I passed through the entry gate, a security barrier accidentally malfunctioned, popping up from the ground and wrecking the nose of my much-loved Vette. The folklore in the Office of Security is that the car was a total loss, but in truth they had to repair only a badly mangled front end. I was fortunate that I wasn’t traveling the way I often did on weekends, on my motorcycle. A rogue security barrier under a Harley would not have been pretty.

  One of the challenges of life as a CIA officer is maintaining a good balance between work and home life. Far too often I saw colleagues and subordinates get so wrapped up in defending the homeland that they paid too little attention to their own home front. Particularly when you are engaged in something as all-consuming as counterterrorism, it is easy to convince yourself that you are indispensable or that pulling an all-nighter at work can make the difference between life and death. During my time as head of CTC, I spent much, much more time trying to convince people to go home than I did explaining why they had to stay at work.

  I was also a strong proponent of my officers’ cluing their spouses in on their work. Many people at the Agency took the approach that our work was so secret that they couldn’t share a whisper of what they did with the people closest too them. That is a big mistake. While you don’t have to give away the most sensitive details of what you do, if you try to withhold everything from your spouse, and then disappear at odd hours for agent meetings, or depart on no notice for unexpected stretches of time, it won’t be long before your mate will start wondering about the real nature of the secrets you are hiding. Operationally, it is also a good idea to let your spouse know where you are going in case you don’t come back on time. That way he or she can alert your colleagues in the office so they can start searching for you.

  It is unfair to keep so much of your life hidden from your spouse. Agency regulations permit its case officers to use discretion on what information to share, and I always encouraged my folks to lean toward openness. Patti was always a huge asset to my career. Ambassadors, diplomats, foreign officials, and even presidents and dictators always loved her. With her charm, intelligence, and good looks, she would disarm them, and they loved having her around. As a result, we were invited to many events that made it easier for me to do my job—collect intelligence. Patti is a wonderful hostess and made people feel comfortable when they visited our home, and they always wanted to come back. But she is also very insightful about people and would often caution me about those who she sensed were shady or could not be trusted.

  Traveling with Patti made my life easier, too. Whenever we went through an airport, if she was along I would breeze through customs and immigration. But when flying by myself I was often singled out and harassed.

  I was on the road so much and so consumed with work that a very heavy burden on the home front fell on Patti. She was chief of station at home taking care of the children, our finances, our real estate, and other challenges. I was blessed that she was always supportive of my career and cheerfully followed me (kids in tow) to some dangerous, unhealthy, and unsavory places.

  I would never have been able to achieve half of the success I did without her.

  Another tricky part of life undercover is what to share with your kids—and when. While you can expect a spouse to understand the need for operational cover, you can’t count on a child to be able to resist blurting out your true employer during “show and tell” time at the elementary school. Agency families carefully judge when their kids are old enough to be let in on the secret of what Mom or Dad does for a living and to be counted on to help maintain the cover.

  In our case, we broke the news to our boys that their dad was in the CIA when they each were about twelve years old. You have to handle those conversations carefully. There are stories around the Agency of similar revelations that, at least initially, didn’t go down so well. One father explained to his son that he was “sort of a spy,” to which the boy responded, “You mean we are Russian?” In my case, I made sure both sons understood I was working on behalf of the U.S.A. When I broke cover with my oldest son, Nic, and told him I really worked for the CIA, he said: “Cool, Pop, is your name really Jose Rodriguez?” The timing of revealing my true line of work with our second son, Alec, was not entirely of my choosing. This was when we were in Mexico and a major local publication put my name and affiliation on the cover of their news magazine. He was a little confused by the situation at first, but both boys were proud of their pop’s career and success at the CIA.

  When most people think about the CIA, they don’t reflect on family matters. Usually the images that come to mind are quite different. I get it. The actions that my colleagues and I took in the war on terrorism are highly controversial. When you are working for a clandestine organization, fighting a shadowy enemy, what you did and didn’t do will inevitably be shrouded in mystery and misperception.

  I feel an obligation, however, to try to penetrate that fog and frontally address many of the ethical, moral, and practical questions that critics, pundits, friends, and enemies have raised. There is far too much misinformation out there, leading good people to leap to the wrong conclusions about our activities. Part of the problem is that much of the conventional wisdom, the things that “everybody knows,” is wrong.

  The best way to deal with this is for me to address some of the fundamental questions and accusations that I get from those who wish to second-guess what we did. The questions range from baseline questions about who we are and the principles we are trying to protect and defend, to those that focus on the practicalities and effectiveness of our tactics.

  If you were to sum up the overarching question about this period that we receive from our critics, it might be stated in three words: “How could you?” How could you torture fellow human beings? The question stems from one of the most fundamentally incorrect “everyone knows” statements. “Everyone knows what you did was torture.” Wrong.

  Let there be no doubt. The treatment that a small handful of terrorists received at our hands was unpleasant. It was unpleasant for them and, not insignificantly, unpleasant for us. But
we went to great lengths to make sure that it was legal, safe, and effective. We went to the seniormost legal officials in our government and asked, demanded really, legal rulings in writing of what could be done without crossing the line. We went back to those officials several times to ask for reaffirmation, and during one period in 2004 when some of the officials wavered, we suspended the program until we received assurances that we were on solid legal ground.

  In recent years some outside legal scholars, and those who pretend to be, have challenged the legal judgments of those who authorized the enhanced interrogation program. That is their right, but the men and women of the intelligence community don’t have the ability or luxury of shopping around for legal opinions. The Department of Justice senior officials who provided our guidelines are sometimes accused of telling us what we wanted to hear. But those officials, at the top of the food chain for U.S. government lawyers, gave us their best judgments and we had no reason to believe they were incorrect, then or now.

  Whether or not the EIT program was legal, many critics argue that it was unnecessary because we could have obtained the same information using traditional interrogation techniques. Some disgruntled FBI special agents in particular push this notion. Could we have gotten the same information using typical FBI practices? Maybe. If we had all the time in the world, perhaps we could have. But we did not. You cannot overstate the urgency that we felt about getting answers quickly. The small number of people who were subjected to the EIT program were among the few people in the world who had in their heads information that we knew could stop another, possibly imminent, devastating attack that might rival 9/11 in scale. Typical law enforcement interrogation tactics are designed to unravel who committed past crimes and to gather evidence that can be used in a court of law to punish the guilty. We knew who had committed the past crime, and while taking the surviving senior al-Qa’ida leadership to trial would be somewhat satisfying, we were much more focused on stopping the next attack.

  It is important to note that we are not claiming universal applicability for EITs. We implemented the program specifically for these terrorists, in these circumstances, and for this period of time. We chose not to get into an argument with theorists who say that rapport building is the best or only way to go. From their point of view, EITs could not work in theory. Our position was: Your theories are irrelevant. The techniques worked in practice.

  The typical criminal whom law enforcement deals with bears little resemblance to the kinds of people we were handling. A drug lord in a cartel pushes narcotics not because heroin is a religion to him; he does so to make a profit. So when captured, he may be motivated to cooperate in the hope of receiving a reduced sentence, favorable treatment for his family, or some other carrot. A senior al-Qa’ida operative, on the other hand, is part of a jihad. He is not looking for favors and in fact generally would welcome being made a martyr. Many dismiss any thought of their family’s future comfort, saying that their fate is in Allah’s hands. They have been trained to resist interrogation and consider it a major victory if they can hold out just long enough for another major attack that they were privy to to be carried out.

  Sure, some critics say, eventually you can get anyone to talk, but when they do so they will be saying whatever they need to say to get the pain and discomfort to stop. To start with, it is important to remember that the interrogation tactics are not about pain. If they were designed to inflict pain on the detainee, there are many other ways that could be done. (In the days immediately after 9/11, the CIA received communications from hundreds of average Americans wanting to do what they could to help us punish al-Qa’ida for its acts. I remember one letter we received from one person who wrote: “I’m a dentist. Trust me, I can inflict pain.”) Rather than to inflict pain, our goal was to induce a sense of hopelessness in the detainees. We wanted them to quickly reach the conclusion that withholding information from us was folly and that we already knew a lot of information and would eventually learn the rest, so they might as well cooperate now to avoid a lot of unnecessary discomfort.

  Regarding the allegation that we “tortured” people until they “would say anything to get us to stop,” one of my former colleagues said: “What bothers me is that our critics not only believe we are evil, they think we are stupid.”

  The people who were asking the questions, and the people who were analyzing the answers, were among the leading experts on al-Qa’ida in the world. Often they knew the answers to questions before they were asked. Always they double-checked the information six ways from Sunday before accepting it as credible. As we got more and more al-Qa’ida leaders in custody, we were able to play one off against the other. We would ask a question, get a response, and then say, “Oh, really? That’s not what KSM said, he said X.” We would ask factual questions, such as “Where did you travel to in 1999?” When the detainee said, “Nowhere,” we would say, “No, actually you went to Tanganyika and stayed at the Hill Top Hotel.” They quickly learned not to mislead us. Still, we never assumed that what a detainee was telling us was true. But after you caught them in a few lies, and the specter of renewed EITs (which they didn’t know we were very unlikely to return to) arose in their minds, they generally gave you something close enough to the truth.

  After a while, our debriefers got to know the detainees extremely well. One of the detainees had the habit of licking his lips right before engaging in a fabrication. When asked a question one day, he said, “Well,” and then exhibited the “tell” by licking his lips. His debriefer stopped him before going on and said, “This is where you are about to lie to me, isn’t it?” The detainee hung his head and mumbled, “Yes.” After a pause, he went on to answer truthfully.

  Another of the common errors is the assumption that detainees were subjected to enhanced interrogation for months or years on end. Or the belief that every time we came up with a new question, if the detainee didn’t tell us what we wanted to hear, we subjected him to harsh treatment all over again.

  In fact, most of the detainees in CIA custody received none of the EITs. Only about thirty out of one hundred or so were subjected to any of the techniques. The techniques stopped as soon as the detainee became compliant and agreed to cooperate. And in virtually every case, they never again were subjected to EITs. Of these thirty detainees who received any EITs, only three—let me say that again, three—were ever waterboarded. Even for those three who went through most if not all of the EITs before being waterboarded, the entire time between first being asked if they wanted to cooperate and refusing, through the use of escalating procedures up to waterboarding, took a matter of as little as seven to at most less than thirty days.

  Even for those critics who understood that the EITs were not applied for a lengthy period, there was often a lack of understanding of their continuing benefit. For example, following the death of Usama bin Ladin in May 2011, a National Security Council spokesman implied that EITs did not contribute to UBL’s demise because much of the intelligence on his whereabouts came long after the EITs stopped. Hello! That is the way it is supposed to work.

  We never suggested that the EITs would be a panacea. Once detainees became compliant, that did not mean that they would tell us everything they knew. They would still try to protect their most cherished secrets. But they told us much, much more than they would have otherwise, and, often unwittingly, they gave us insights that unlocked the mysteries we wanted to unravel most. During one debriefing session, one of our people asked a senior detainee, “What is it you fear most about these sessions?” After thinking for a moment, he responded: “I am afraid I might inadvertently tell you something which leads to the capture of the Sheikh” (Usama bin Ladin). Well, all right then, we have a place to start.

  The detainees were always trying to game the system. At one point we discovered that KSM was trying to signal his fellow detainees (using a method I cannot describe). In one message he instructed another detainee to “tell them nothing about the courier.” Short of giving us
a name, you couldn’t ask for a better tipoff.

  Why didn’t the detainees simply give up UBL’s location when they became compliant? Two reasons: Most of them had no idea where he was and all of them tried mightily to protect that information. They did, however, provide us bits of information that, over the period of years, allowed targeting analysts to determine that the use of couriers would be the key to finding bin Ladin, and they provided us the alias of the main courier, which eventually led to the determination of his true name and location.

  One of the most frustrating charges is the one that goes something like this: “Waterboarding must not work; otherwise you would not have had to do it to KSM 183 times and to Abu Zubaydah 83.” The charge is frustrating for a number of reasons, not the least of which is that the CIA’s own inspector general created the canard. It is a measure of the care and precision with which we conducted the program that Agency officers recorded every drip of water that was used in the waterboard process. In some of the fanciful simulations and animations used by the critics to illustrate the process, they show huge buckets of water or fully charged hoses being used. In fact the water was dispensed in short splashes from ordinary plastic water bottles. Each time the bottle was tipped counted as one application. So the “183 times” that we get credited/blamed for waterboarding KSM in fact involved only 183 splashes of water (applications).