The Way of the Knife

by Mark Mazzetti

  Waterboarding was one of a number of interrogation techniques that had been authorized by the Justice Department, but Helgerson’s report also detailed a pattern of freelancing in the black sites, what the inspector general called “unauthorized, improvised, inhumane, and undocumented” detention-and-interrogation techniques. There were instances of interrogators conducting mock executions to scare the detainees into talking; one CIA interrogator pointed a spinning drill at a prisoner’s head.

  The CIA’s secret prison program had grown from a single, spartan facility in Bangkok, Thailand, to an archipelago of jails throughout the world. Jose Rodriguez, the head of the Counterterrorist Center, had intended the prisons to be a more permanent alternative to the Thailand site, which had originally been code-named “Cat’s Eye” but later renamed when CIA officers thought the designation seemed racially insensitive. Thailand was where the CIA had held its first two prisoners, Abu Zubaydah and Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri, but as the CIA and its partner spy services began rounding up dozens of prisoners in Afghanistan, Pakistan, and other countries, Rodgriguez and CTC officers decided the spy agency needed far more prison space.

  The CIA’s detention-and-interrogation program would become the most infamous and divisive aspect of the Bush administration’s strategy against al Qaeda, but the way the CIA set up the black prisons was somewhat prosaic. Rodriguez ordered a team at the Counterterrorist Center to work with engineers and outside contractors, and when the prisons were near completion the CIA hired a small supply company to provide toilets, plumbing equipment, earplugs, bedding, and other prison supplies. The contractors bought some of the equipment at Target and Walmart and flew it to the jails: one of them in a nondescript building on a busy street in Bucharest, Romania, and another in Lithuania. The waterboards were bought locally, constructed from lumber purchased near some of the secret sites.

  The jails were small—intended to house about half a dozen detainees—and the cells had some special features designed specially to accommodate the brutal methods used by CIA interrogators, such as flexible, plywood-covered walls that might soften the impact of someone being slammed into a wall. The detainees were prevented from communicating with one another and were kept in solitary confinement for twenty-three hours a day. The remaining hour was for exercise, when CIA security officers wearing black ski masks removed the prisoners from their cells. By 2004, CIA prison wardens had imposed a system of reward and punishment. Detainees who were considered well behaved received books and DVDs. The entertainment was taken away if the prisoner misbehaved. The CIA, an espionage service created after World War II to inform American presidents about the world around them, had become the Department of Secret Corrections.

  Concerns about the CIA’s interrogation program had been percolating in parts of the Bush administration even before Helgerson’s report, but still only a small circle of officials were aware of the secret prisons. This had sometimes led to bizarre discussions between the White House and the CIA. In June 2003, for instance, the White House was set to commemorate a day set aside by the United Nations to support torture victims. The White House press office had prepared a bland statement about how the United States is “committed to the worldwide elimination of torture” and was “leading the fight by example.”

  But the United States wasn’t, in fact, leading by example, and the draft statement unnerved some senior officers at the CIA. Scott Muller, the agency’s top lawyer, told the White House he was concerned about the press release, given that the kinds of interrogation methods that President Bush had authorized for the CIA were widely considered torture. The concern at Langley, Muller said, was that the CIA could be turned into a scapegoat were the political winds to shift. The press release never went out.

  The report by Helgerson hinted at some of the angst inside the CIA. Several officers involved in the detention program, it stated, worried they might “be vulnerable to legal action in the United States or abroad and that the U.S. government will not stand behind them.” The White House and Justice Department had blessed the program, and George Tenet had lobbied for the CIA to take charge of the prisoners, but some of the older hands at Langley felt sure they had seen the movie before: during the Church Committee investigations and the Iran–Contra scandal. A day of reckoning would come, they believed, when the Bush White House would use the inspector general’s report as a noose to hang the CIA.

  The report was the beginning of the end for the detention-and-interrogation program. The prisons would stay open for several more years, and new detainees were occasionally picked up and taken to the secret sites, but the agency would eventually stop using waterboarding and some of the other roughest interrogation techniques. Senior officials at Langley began looking for ways to offload the prisoners to the Pentagon, but those who couldn’t be transferred languished in the secret jails as the Bush administration frantically searched for an endgame for the prison program.

  The greatest impact of Helgerson’s report was felt inside the CIA’s Counterterrorist Center, which was at the vanguard of the spy agency’s global terror hunt. The CTC had focused on capturing al Qaeda operatives, interrogating them either in CIA jails or outsourcing interrogations to the spy services of Pakistan, Egypt, Jordan, and elsewhere, and then using the fruits of the interrogations to hunt down more terror suspects. This strategy, the thinking went, would one day lead the CIA to Osama bin Laden.

  But now the ground had shifted, and counterterrorism officials were forced to rethink the strategy for the secret war. Armed drones, and targeted killing in general, offered a new direction for a spy agency that had begun to feel burned by its years in the detention-and-interrogation business. Killing by remote control was the antithesis of the dirty, intimate work of interrogation. It somehow seemed cleaner, less personal. Targeted killings were cheered by Republicans and Democrats alike, and using drones flown by pilots who were stationed thousands of miles away from the war made the whole strategy seem risk-free. After the killing of Nek Muhammad in Pakistan—carried out just a month after John Helgerson’s report was completed—the CIA began to see its future: not as the long-term jailers of America’s enemies but as a military organization that could erase them.

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  IN 2004, Jose Rodriguez even tried to resurrect a killing program that had been proposed, and then abandoned, during the first year after the September 11 attacks. It was the plan to cobble together paramilitary hit squads to kill terror suspects across the globe, from Europe to the Middle East to South Asia. Vice President Dick Cheney had given his approval for the program when Rodriguez and fellow CTC officer Enrique Prado presented the plan to the White House in December 2001. Unlike what people saw in movies, the CIA had no in-house cadre of assassins, and the program would have brought the spy agency more in line with its glamorized Hollywood version. But George Tenet had never authorized any missions, and the plans had been temporarily shelved.

  Like Rodriguez, Prado was a veteran of the CIA’s Latin America division, and he had played a leading role in Nicaragua’s Contra war during the 1980s. He transferred to the Counterterrorist Center in 1996, and during the months after the September 11 attacks Prado had been a tutor of sorts for Rodriguez about the workings of al Qaeda. After the meeting with Cheney in December 2001, Prado had been put in charge of recruiting CIA officers to train for the killing missions.

  When Rodriguez decided to reopen the program in 2004, his close friend Prado had left the CIA for Blackwater USA, the private military company that was in the midst of a dramatic expansion with the help of millions of dollars in contracts from the State Department, the Pentagon, and the CIA. So Rodriguez arrived at an astonishing solution: He decided to outsource the killing program to Blackwater employees.

  The company’s founder, Erik Prince, was already a favorite son in the Bush administration and was looking to burrow deeper into America’s clandestine establishment. Prince had arrived on the scene with impeccable timing. The CIA couldn’t find enough of its own p
ersonnel to meet the demands of its large covert stations in Kabul and Baghdad, and the spy agency turned to Blackwater’s private guards for secret missions—from protection of CIA officers to intelligence gathering to snatch-and-grab operations—that once had been reserved only for fully trained CIA employees. Eventually, the CIA even hired Blackwater to load bombs and missiles on Predator and Reaper drones in Pakistan.

  Prince regularly invited top CIA officers to the Kentucky Derby, or down to Blackwater’s headquarters, in eastern North Carolina’s Great Dismal Swamp, for a day of shooting at the company’s expansive training grounds. And he successfully poached top CIA officials, including Prado and Cofer Black, the former head of the Counterterrorist Center, with big salary offers. Prado, now working for Blackwater, had the opportunity to sell programs back to the government that he had originally developed while at the CIA.

  Prince did not see the outsourcing of war as anything novel, merely an evolution of a centuries-old phenomenon. During one visit to Langley, he pitched senior CIA officers on a Blackwater “quick-reaction force,” a cadre of operatives the CIA could use to carry out paramilitary assignments in the far reaches of the world. He began his presentation with a sweeping statement. “From the earliest days of the American republic,” he said, “the nation has relied on mercenaries for its defense.” CIA officials ultimately rejected the plan.

  Blackwater’s reputation for reckless behavior, cemented during a September 2007 incident during which Blackwater operatives killed seventeen Iraqis at a traffic stop in Baghdad, would eventually turn Prince and his company into symbols of America’s misadventures in Iraq. He would lament that Democrats in Congress painted him as a war profiteer even as he was “paying for all sorts of intelligence activities to support American national security out of my own pocket.” This was true, but often the money that Blackwater spent on secret projects was like an R&D fund, used to develop products and services that could be sold to the government for millions of dollars. He pitched CIA case officers in Pakistan on ideas for stealth aircrafts, and Asia operatives on a plan to smuggle CIA informants out of China by having them swim underwater using a Navy SEAL–style rebreather all the way to the submersed vessel. There was a problem with this plan: Most of the CIA’s informants in China were eighty-year-old generals who would never have survived an underwater swim with a rebreather.

  Former CIA officers who joined Blackwater were aggressive in their attempts to expand the company’s business with the spy agency. On at least one occasion, a top CIA lawyer had to call the company to warn that ex-spies were on the edge of breaking “revolving door” laws that restrict retired government employees from lobbying their former agencies. Beyond Blackwater’s work for the CIA, Prado considered selling the Drug Enforcement Administration on a plan to use a network of foreign spies Blackwater had cultivated that could “do everything from surveillance to ground truth to disruption operations,” according to an internal Blackwater e-mail. “Deniability is built in and should be a big plus,” he wrote.

  It was a desire for “deniability” that led Jose Rodriguez to take the extraordinary step of outsourcing a lethal CIA program to an American company. The CIA signed Prince and Prado to a personal services contract, and the two men began devising plans to carry out surveillance of potential targets, including some of the same men—like Pakistani nuclear scientist A. Q. Khan—whom the CIA had first proposed killing in 2001 during the meeting with Cheney. Prince and Prado would oversee the program, and the hand of the United States would, in theory, be hidden. Prince and Prado envisioned that the Blackwater hit teams would ultimately be under CIA control, but once they were given missions they would have a large degree of autonomy. “We were building a unilateral, unattributable capability,” Prince later said during an interview with Vanity Fair. “If it went bad, we weren’t expecting the chief of station, the ambassador, or anyone to bail us out.”

  As it happened, they never needed to be bailed out. Like the first iteration of the assassination program, no killing operations were carried out during this phase of the hit-team program. Prince and Prado had overseen the training of the Blackwater teams, but Prince blames “institutional osteoporosis” for why the Blackwater assassins were never dispatched to kill terrorists.

  Given the support the program had from senior managers like Rodriguez, why not? Amazingly, it wasn’t because of legal concerns either at the CIA or the White House. Lawyers at the CIA had given their approval to involve Prince and Prado in the killing operation, but senior CIA officials were ultimately unconvinced that the agency would be able to keep its role in the program hidden. Blackwater had developed a web of subsidiary companies to hide its CIA work, but it likely would not have been difficult for foreign governments to untangle the web and trace operations back to Prince and, ultimately, the CIA.

  “The more you outsource an operation, the more deniable it becomes,” explained one senior CIA officer involved in the decision to terminate Blackwater’s role in the assassination program. “But you’re also giving up control of the operation. And if that guy screws up, it’s still your fault.”

  The ill-conceived Blackwater phase of the killing program remains—like the earlier iteration of the program—a closely guarded government secret. Even in retirement, former Counterterrorist Center officer Hank Crumpton is prohibited by the CIA from giving details about the time that he worked on the first phase of the program. But in an interview, he said he found it puzzling that the United States still seemed to make a distinction between killing people from a distance using an armed drone and training humans to do the killing themselves.

  If the country is going to allow the CIA to do one, he said, should it really be queasy about allowing the other? “How we apply lethal force, and where we apply lethal force—that’s a huge debate that we really haven’t had,” he said. “There seems to be no problem with a Hellfire shot against a designated enemy in a place like Afghanistan, the tribal areas of Pakistan, Somalia, or Yemen.” In those places, he said, it seems like just another part of war.

  But, he asked, what if a suspected terrorist is in a place like Paris, or Hamburg, or somewhere else where drones can’t fly, “and you use a CIA or [military] operative on the ground to shoot him in the back of the head?

  “Then,” he said, “it’s viewed as an assassination.”

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  STILL, each hit the CIA took for its detention-and-interrogation program pushed CIA leaders further to one side of a morbid calculation: that the agency would be far better off killing, rather than jailing, terror suspects. In late 2005 Congress passed the Detainee Treatment Act, which included a provision banning “cruel, inhuman, and degrading” treatment of any prisoner in American custody, including CIA black sites. There was now the potential that covert officers working at the CIA prisons could be prosecuted for their work, and the specter of criminal investigations and congressional hearings hung over Langley.

  These fears already had led Jose Rodriguez to order the destruction of dozens of videotapes that gave a minute-by-minute chronicle of the ordeals of al Qaeda operatives Abu Zubaydah and Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri during CIA interrogations. Rodriguez, who had been promoted yet again and now had the powerful job of head of the Directorate of Operations—running all CIA covert-action and espionage operations across the globe—worried that the faces of the undercover officers were clearly visible on the tapes. With the toxic details of the prison program leaking out, he thought the officers might face both legal and physical jeopardy. In early November 2005, he sent a secret cable to the CIA’s Bangkok Station, where the tapes were being kept in a safe, and ordered that they be fed into an industrial-strength shredder. Seven steel blades went to work on the tapes, pulverizing them into tiny shards that were vacuumed out of the shredder and dumped into plastic trash bags.

  But even after destroying vestiges of the early days of the prison program, the CIA faced more uncertainty with the passage of the new law by Congress. Days after the Detainee
Treatment Act was passed, CIA director Porter Goss wrote a letter to the White House. The CIA would shut down all interrogations, he wrote, until the Justice Department could render a judgment about whether the CIA techniques violated the new law.

  White House officials were incensed when they received the letter. National Security Advisor Stephen Hadley thought Goss’s memo was pure posturing—the CIA trying to cover its back in the event of future investigations. Hadley called the CIA director at home on Christmas Day and accused him of not being a “team player.” But Goss wouldn’t budge, and it became clear to officials in the White House that all of the hyperventilating at the CIA, Washington’s most paranoid institution, wasn’t going to subside unless something was done to calm the spies down.

  The job fell to Andrew Card, President Bush’s chief of staff. Card drove out to Langley intending to soothe the fears at CIA headquarters, but his visit was a disaster. Inside a packed conference room, Card thanked the assembled CIA officers for their service and their hard work but refused to make any firm declarations that agency officers wouldn’t be criminally liable for participating in the detention-and-interrogation program.