by Steve Coll
In addition to the moral problem, indirect interrogations by secret police employing torture produced imperfect intelligence. The agency had acknowledged in congressional briefings that torture produced false testimony. Even where abusive questioning by Egyptian or Syrian police might also produce reliable information, “We couldn’t control interviews done by others, had limited ability to ask time-urgent follow-on questions,” and were constrained by whatever the liaison service wanted to withhold or invent for its own reasons, as the Counterterrorist Center’s Jose Rodriguez put it. Even close allies didn’t have the same interest in prioritizing American security when conducting prisoner interrogations. Still, during the late 1990s, the Clinton administration had embraced rendition of terrorism prisoners to countries such as Egypt as an essential tool in its campaign against Al Qaeda. About seventy prisoners were shuttled from one country to another by the C.I.A. during the Clinton years. The branch also carried out more straightforward renditions, bringing indicted criminals to the United States to face trial.13 The Rendition, Detention and Interrogation Group inside the Counterterrorist Center contracted for Gulfstream jets, pilots, and security guards and managed these transfers. Yet the renditions group was mainly a prisoner transfer outfit. It operated no prisons of its own and had no cadre of expert interrogators.
The Counterterrorist Center had another connection to the black arts of torture. Its Psychological Operations group had ties to Special Forces counterparts at Fort Bragg. The base was home to the Survival, Evasion, Resistance and Escape program, or S.E.R.E., which sought to prepare pilots and other personnel for the possibility of capture. The program used psychologists to act as enemy interrogators and deliberately placed thousands of American trainees under intense physical and psychological pressure, to help them learn what they might have to endure in captivity. The Air Force and the Navy had used waterboarding on thousands of trainees as part of the curriculum. The C.I.A.’s Counterterrorist Center had several ties to the S.E.R.E. program. Ric Prado, one of Cofer Black’s deputies, had gone through the training when he was an Air Force Special Operations rescue specialist, before he joined the C.I.A., although he had not been placed on a waterboard. The agency also maintained ties to James Mitchell, an Air Force psychologist who had worked in the S.E.R.E. program, and Bruce Jessen, who had also worked there. Mitchell retired from the military in mid-2001. That year the C.I.A. hired him as an adviser. By the following spring he was consulting for the Counterterrorist Center. Mitchell and Jessen were familiar with a document recovered in Manchester, England, that appeared to be a manual for Al Qaeda and allied volunteers, suggesting how they might resist interrogation. They wrote a paper for the C.I.A. about how to recognize when Al Qaeda prisoners might be resisting interrogation. They pointed out that the manual instructed Al Qaeda prisoners to “stick to a pre-coordinated cover story during interrogation, request legal council [sic], complain about treatment and conditions, ask for medical attention, and then report that they have been tortured and mistreated regardless of the actual events.” At C.T.C., Mitchell joined a discussion about how to overcome such tactics through the application of various kinds of pressure on prisoners. Some C.I.A. officers threw around terms like “learned helplessness,” an idea derived from experiments carried out on dogs by University of Pennsylvania psychologists during the 1960s. In the C.I.A.’s distorted adaptation of the work, it considered whether, if a prisoner concluded that he had lost control over his conditions, in addition to becoming passive and depressed, he might also cooperate with his jailers. A problem with this hypothesis was that “learned helplessness” actually describes conditions where the subject is so broken and discouraged that he won’t even try to escape, given the opportunity. It was not a good way to encourage cooperation—that required the prisoner to have a sense of hope for improvement. Mitchell and Jessen later said that they tried to impress upon C.I.A. officers new to the field that the purpose of S.E.R.E. interrogation techniques was to induce the prisoner to cooperate.14
Early in 2002, an Al Qaeda operative named Abu Zubaydah, who was well known to the Counterterrorist Center, surfaced in telephone intercepts from Pakistan. He was a Palestinian who had been raised in Saudi Arabia and had been one of the few Al Qaeda suspects to speak openly on the telephone and use e-mail over a period of years. His visibility and his involvement in arranging travel and housing for Al Qaeda members heightened the C.I.A.’s interest in him. The early 2002 intercepts showed that Zubaydah was in Pakistan but not where. The C.T.C. formed a task force to hunt him down, with forward elements deployed to Islamabad Station.15
In late March, anticipating Zubaydah’s capture, the agency renewed debate about its detention and interrogation options. On March 27, the C.I.A. produced a PowerPoint presentation, “Options for Incarcerating Abu Zubaydah.” The presentation rejected putting the Pentagon in control “in large part because of the lack of security and the fact that Abu Zubaydah would have to be declared to the International Committee of the Red Cross,” as Senate investigators later put it, summarizing the classified slide deck. The PowerPoint also raised doubts about Guantánamo Bay because of its “lack of secrecy” and the “possible loss of control to U.S. military and/or F.B.I.”16
On March 28, Pakistani forces raided a house in Faisalabad, Pakistan, shot and wounded Abu Zubaydah, and placed him in custody at a Pakistani military hospital. George Tenet approved a proposal to approach Thailand about hosting a secret prison where Zubaydah could be held and questioned. Tenet discussed the plan with National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice and her deputy, Stephen Hadley, so they could brief President Bush. On March 29, Bush approved the C.I.A.’s plan.17
The F.B.I. sent agents to question Zubaydah. The C.I.A. sent a career officer to run the base and also dispatched James Mitchell for advice. Abu Zubaydah was placed in an all-white room that was lit twenty-four hours a day. (Mitchell later defended the detention conditions as necessary to supervise the prisoner’s wounds and medical care.) The C.I.A.’s team clashed with F.B.I. agents, including an Arabic-speaking agent named Ali H. Soufan, who sought to use the interrogation methods of law enforcement, which are designed to establish a close rapport with the prisoner, to draw him gradually into disclosures, and to build a legal case that would stand scrutiny in a court of law. The C.I.A.’s officers, still animated by fear of some unknown Al Qaeda nuclear plot, urgently sought information from the prisoner that would prevent future attacks. The C.I.A.’s officers and consulting psychologist acquired “tremendous influence,” an F.B.I. agent reported to his headquarters.18
The C.I.A.’s prisons now departed from Army Field Manual and F.B.I. practices into a science fiction–tinged dystopia of intimidation and dominance over prisoners. A C.I.A. cable from April described Zubaydah’s cell in Thailand as “white with no natural lighting or windows, but with four halogen lights pointed into the cell. An air conditioner was also in the room. A white curtain separated the interrogation room from the cell. . . . Security officers wore all black uniforms, including boots, gloves, balaclavas, and goggles,” to protect the officers’ identities, but also to prevent the prisoner “from seeing the security guards as individuals who he may attempt to establish a relationship or dialogue with.”19
The stage was set for the most shockingly bureaucratized descent into the application of pseudoscience on human subjects by the C.I.A. since the agency’s notorious MK Ultra Project, during the 1950s and 1960s, when the agency used L.S.D. and other drugs on involuntary subjects in an effort to develop techniques for mind control.
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Early in May 2002, Tenet informed Cofer Black that he wanted to make a change in the Counterterrorist Center’s leadership. Tenet said he was proud of Black’s work before and after September 11, and retained confidence in him, but that it was time for a change. “I did not volunteer to leave,” Black admitted later. “And of course, I will say that I was tired. No doubt about that.”
His struggles to ele
vate the counterterrorism mission within the C.I.A. bureaucracy had placed Black in relentless conflict with colleagues over slots and budgets. These were “trying psychological circumstances because there was a lot of competition with other components in the Agency,” as he put it. “So we were having to fight all the time.” Tenet offered Black any job he wanted at C.I.A., but Black and his wife did not want to go overseas again and he certainly didn’t want to run a part of the bureaucracy that had been resisting counterterrorism, as he saw it. He ended up accepting nomination as the State Department’s global counterterrorism ambassador. Tenet’s decision to replace Black was seen by some at C.T.C. as a revanchist victory by James Pavitt and the regional leaders in the mainstream Directorate of Operations.20
The Africa Division clan that had gathered around Black before and after September 11 now scattered. Rich Blee rotated out of Kabul Station that spring. The C.I.A. offered him a management position, but he wanted something closer to the action, so he contacted the F.B.I. and asked if they would take him on as a special C.I.A. adviser at the bureau, starting in the summer of 2002. Hank Crumpton took an academic sabbatical to study for a master’s degree at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies.
Tenet elevated Jose Rodriguez to replace Black as the Counterterrorist Center’s director. “To many insiders,” Rodriguez recognized, “it was quite a surprise.” He had spent the great majority of his career in Latin America and had “only modest experience in counterterrorism,” yet he was being handed a position where “you might expect to find the most seasoned Arabic-speaking Middle East hand.” Rodriguez had grown up in South America and the Caribbean before arriving in the United States at about eighteen to attend the University of Florida. After finishing law school there, he joined the C.I.A. as an operative. He was a classmate of Cofer Black’s at the Farm. He rose into the Senior Intelligence Service but had setbacks. At one point he was removed as Latin America Division chief in the Directorate of Operations after what he considered to be “a very biased and unfair Inspector General investigation” of actions he had taken to aid an imprisoned friend. Yet Rodriguez had suffered no serious harm from that reprimand and went on to run the C.I.A. station in Mexico City. He was a hard-line but popular figure, humorous, an attentive manager, but he was not known as a geopolitical thinker or a sophisticated Washington hand. He avoided delivering congressional briefings, sending more polished analysts in his stead. As evidenced by his dustup with the C.I.A.’s inspector general, his antennae about what might be regarded as controversial or unethical were not always reliable.21
Rodriguez was very close to Ric Prado, the S.E.R.E. graduate who had worked on the front lines of the Contra guerrilla war against the Sandinistas in Nicaragua. Prado had no role in decision making about interrogation methods for C.I.A. prisoners, but he and Rodriguez both regarded squeamishness about harsh interrogations as misplaced and naïve, a symptom of “political correctness,” in Rodriguez’s phrase, that had to be set aside given that “we were under the constant threat of new and even more deadly attacks, and time was of the essence.” Prado reminded him, referring to his own experience of S.E.R.E., alongside many other Special Forces trainees, “I’ve been through this crap and so has every G.I. Joe that ever wore a funny hat in the military. It’s not plucking fingernails.” Of course, the military men who endured S.E.R.E. were volunteers and were given a safe word to exclaim if they felt in jeopardy. That would not be true of C.I.A. prisoners.22
Rodriguez felt the F.B.I. had done what it could to interrogate Zubaydah but when the prisoner recovered his strength, he stopped cooperating. In July 2002, Rodriguez asked Mitchell how long it would take them to put “more aggressive” pressure on the prisoner than the noise and sleep deprivation that had already been employed, in order to determine whether Zubaydah would break or was the sort of hard man to “take any secrets with him to the grave.” Mitchell and Rodriguez met often. On July 8, they attended a meeting with C.I.A. officers from ALEC Station, the Office of Medical Services, agency lawyers, an F.B.I. liaison, and others. Afterward, according to Mitchell, he drew up a list of possible techniques at the C.T.C. director’s request. He said later that he was concerned that, otherwise, the government would just proceed to beat Zubaydah up, and that would produce, in his experience, no useful information. Mitchell’s initial list of techniques did not include waterboarding, according to him. He added that technique later after reflecting upon how, in S.E.R.E. training, as he now told Rodriguez, “the thing that is rumored to [be] most effective on Navy fighter pilots is waterboarding.” Mitchell “had no idea” if it was legal. He thought the C.I.A. would bring someone in to evaluate that. Rodriguez asked Mitchell to join the effort. A career C.I.A. officer would control the secret prison and was ultimately responsible, but Mitchell would be the lead subject matter expert. Mitchell speculated that they would know whether Zubaydah would break in “thirty days” if they were given permission to apply the new techniques.23
The F.B.I. withdrew its agents. Director Robert Mueller, a Princeton-educated former Marine and federal prosecutor, was a politically sophisticated Washington hand. Arriving at the bureau that summer, Rich Blee advocated for joint interrogations teams made up of bureau agents and C.I.A. officers, teams that would combine F.B.I. interrogation expertise with the C.I.A.’s worldwide intelligence collection. But Mueller could see where the C.I.A. was going in Thailand, with Tenet’s full support, and he wanted no part of it. Tenet fronted for Jose Rodriguez with the Bush White House. John Rizzo, the C.I.A.’s general counsel, insisted that the Department of Justice write memos expressing an opinion about whether the harsh techniques Mitchell described were legal. By August 1, Jay S. Bybee, an assistant attorney general, had issued internal classified memoranda later infamous as “the torture memos.” They ratified the legality of ten of the C.I.A.’s proposed “enhanced interrogation techniques,” including waterboarding, but not “mock burial,” a second severe technique that Mitchell had originally listed and that Rodriguez had proposed.24
Even though ten months had passed and there had been no follow-on attacks even approaching the scale of September 11, there remained “a hysteria” that more attacks were coming, as a senior intelligence official involved put it. “That was just the consensus.” A second factor was that the C.I.A. and allied European intelligence services had developed scant insights into Al Qaeda’s leadership despite a full year of effort. Bin Laden and Zawahiri had disappeared. They and other leaders had curtailed electronic communications. Human agent reporting such as the “fire ant” program along the Afghanistan-Pakistan border had produced only fragmented and even counterproductive intelligence. Fresh Al Qaeda detainees looked more promising. Abu Zubaydah’s knowledge of Al Qaeda operations would be recent enough to be helpful. If he could be made to disclose what he knew accurately, he could provide lifesaving insights not otherwise available, the thinking went. “We were flying blind,” a former senior British intelligence officer recalled. “We didn’t know who was where and what they were doing. Detainee debriefings were all we had.” Robert Gates, a career C.I.A. analyst who later served as secretary of defense for both the Bush and Obama administrations, later blamed the “overload” of threat reporting arriving each day at the desks of cabinet and senior White House officials, with “all the filters” off and no sound way to determine which intelligence was reliable and which was not. “A lot of the measures, including the renditions, Guantánamo, the enhanced interrogation techniques—all were out of a sense of desperation to get information because we had so little.” Rodriguez remained convinced that he had made the right decisions, sought the right approvals, and delivered results in fresh intelligence from prisoners subjected to waterboarding that justified his risk taking. Officers in the Bin Laden unit of C.T.C. and elsewhere at the agency, including in Tenet’s office, backed him fully. If there were dissenters in the C.I.A. informed of the decisions and willing to risk their careers to stop the plan in the summer
of 2002, their whistle-blowing remains unknown.
One basic problem was competence and experience. At the C.I.A. and MI6, its British counterpart, “Detainee interrogation is no part of a foreign intelligence officer’s training,” as the former British officer put it. So the C.I.A. “turned to contractors who claimed to know what they were doing.”25 The moral and strategic failures that flowed from the C.I.A. interrogation program born that summer, as well as similar programs in Iraq and Guantánamo (approved by Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld), had many consequences. One was to color the experience a significant number of Afghans had of the American intervention in their country.
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Bagram served as the prisoner collection and transshipment point for the C.I.A. and the Pentagon. Record keeping by the C.I.A. was so poor that investigators later had difficulty piecing together which prisoners had been under the agency’s control at Bagram and what had been done to them. Beatings, shouting, humiliation, and threats were commonplace. The prisoners were held in about half a dozen large cells wrapped in barbed wire, each named after an Al Qaeda attack: Nairobi, USS Cole, et cetera. Interrogators occasionally tried to convert prisoners to Christianity. Every Afghan who passed through Bagram—whether as a prisoner, an interpreter, or prison staff—became part of an ever denser network, spreading testimony to family, village, and tribe about the Americans.
At C.I.A. headquarters, desperation, fear, groupthink, pseudoscience, and misplaced faith in aggression and the humiliation of enemy prisoners shaped the agency’s program as it grew. Forward in Afghanistan, managerial incompetence, stupidity, and cruelty were the more important factors. As Afghanistan looked more and more like a backwater without a significant Al Qaeda presence, and as the invasion of Iraq beckoned, the C.I.A. increasingly deployed rookies, lightly experienced officers, and officers with troubled records to Bagram, Kandahar, and the Omega bases. The agency’s talent pool in the clandestine service was thin. Demographically, it looked like a barbell—a sizable cadre of experienced Senior Intelligence Service and colonel-level officers toward the ends of their careers, and a sizable influx of rookies inducted in a massive surge after 2001. Generally, the C.I.A.’s “A” team now deployed to Iraq, the wider Middle East, and Pakistan, some officers working on Afghanistan concluded. The “B” team too often went to Afghanistan, they believed.