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  BLACK SITE

  The CIA in the Post-9/11 World

  PHILIP MUDD

  This book is for my sisters, Laura, Ellen, and Clare. Every day, we walk different paths, in different places. But the paths never seem to matter. Every day, you offer me a light. You help me make choices, you make me laugh, you help me through tough moments. You guys never fail to pull your brother along, with kindness, patience, and humor. And always love. I can try to say it, but I just can’t ever thank you enough. I love you all.

  CONTENTS

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  PREFACE

  1. The Lean Years

  2. Risk Avoidance

  3. The Prelude to the Program

  4. The CIA Revolutionizes

  5. The Problem with Prisoners

  6. Salt Pit

  7. The First Program Prisoner

  8. The Definition of Pain

  9. The Second Wave

  10. The Fateful Decisions

  11. Expansion and Training

  12. Maturation

  13. The Program Goes Public

  14. Endgame

  15. Ethics and Reflections

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  This book is based largely on interviews with dozens of former Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) officers, from former CIA directors to individuals directly involved in the management and oversight of the CIA’s secret detention and interrogation of al-Qa’ida prisoners. Those interviews, supplemented by readings from the literature published about the Program during the past decade, were conducted in 2015–2016, mostly in person but also by phone and Skype. I assured those officers of anonymity; where their names appear here, it was with their approval. A handful of them declined interviews. A few important players have died.

  I also had personal experience in the Program, reading the intelligence derived from detainee debriefings and then, as the Counterterrorism Center’s deputy director from 2003 to 2005, participating in decisions about the interrogations. The book is a third-person narrative, though. I only witnessed bits and pieces of the events described here, and shuffling in the text between my experiences and those of dozens of other officers would confuse the narrative. For the sake of maintaining a consistent third-person voice, I have avoided mixing in first-person references in the broader narrative.

  This is not a history. It is a snapshot of events based on the memories and thoughts of those who were there.

  PREFACE

  One summer morning, as a routine repair was taking place, sparks drifted down an elevator shaft at CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia. It wasn’t long before some oily rags in the basement ignited, sending smoke back up the shaft and into the hallways and resulting in an evacuation of the buildings. This wasn’t a false alarm but instead the real thing, a near-miss that would be a chance for Agency executives to study how the CIA’s regularly scheduled emergency evacuation practices on the leafy northern Virginia compound would work out in a live scenario. The small fire that ensued wasn’t disastrous or life-threatening, and the evacuation that followed was the type of event that might otherwise be forgotten. If not, that is, for the timing.

  The Agency’s response wasn’t stellar. The thousands of Agency employees at the CIA’s expansive Langley compound occasionally went through the motions of practice fire drills, streaming down stairwells onto sidewalks and parking lots, but those were orchestrated, and not particularly energetic. Confusion surrounded this modestly serious event, which irked the CIA’s executive director. A. B. Krongard, known universally inside and outside the Agency as “Buzzy,” the senior official responsible for management at the Langley complex of buildings that make up the CIA’s Headquarters compound, was in his element that day. A crusty former Marine, he liked to jokingly impress other officers with his physical fitness. But as he had helped clear the halls that day, he was underwhelmed by what he saw.

  The agency quickly spearheaded an after-action study, the sort of rearview-mirror look at an event that any bureaucracy might undertake to determine how to improve policies and procedures. Krongard led the review. A veteran of the investment world and the CIA’s third-ranking official, Krongard had taken a hiatus from banking to help his friend, CIA director George Tenet, rebuild a CIA that had been downsized during the post–Soviet Union budget cuts of the 1990s. Known in the Agency as the “ExDir,” a shortened version of his formal title, he was the senior-most official on the business side of the Agency, responsible for everything from human resources and budgeting to emergency response.

  Krongard drove the review, surely with the same relentless, no-nonsense style that characterized his blunt handling of every problem that ended up on his desk. He had a reputation as a quick decision-maker; as he later said, “I’ve been criticized by some who say I never met a decision I didn’t like. Well, they’re right.”

  Motivating any senior executive to focus on emergency response in peacetime isn’t easy; the senior Agency officials participating in that after-action planning might have imagined that they were putting in place procedures for another fire or the snow emergencies that periodically shut down the federal government and snarled traffic around the CIA’s large suburban parking lots. Those sparks spiraling down the elevator shaft, the dirty rags, the smoke, the recognition that the evacuation plan for the buildings that comprise the Agency’s headquarters campus wasn’t as good as it should have been—all these events happened during the late summer of 2001.

  The review wasn’t particularly memorable, one of a hundred priorities consuming CIA executives that summer. But, in retrospect, it was one of the inflection points that helped an Agency move from its back foot to a war footing relatively quickly. Not much prepared the CIA for the roles and responsibilities its officers assumed after the attacks. In the fall of 2001, everybody in America assumed there would be more catastrophic tragedies. It didn’t seem as though anything could stop the shadowy al-Qa’ida adversary that Americans came to know overnight. Immediately afterward, the anthrax attacks hit America. Official Washington inevitably drew the conclusion that this was another al-Qa’ida attack, this time with a weapon of mass destruction, a WMD agent. Al-Qa’ida had been researching the bacteria, and the logic that they might attempt to rock the United States with an anthrax campaign immediately on the heels of 9/11 made sense. Washington was on its toes, and no one then would have guessed that the attacks were in fact tied to a disaffected American scientist. Simply put, America and the CIA were caught off-guard. Back then, everyone thought al-Qa’ida had infiltrated more terrorists in America, and that the next catastrophic attack was possible any day.

  The hardest part of piecing together the memories of that period—what the Agency did, and why—centers on the insoluble problem of helping later generations understand the fears, the urgency of the moment, and the overwhelming tension surrounding the one core question: Can we move quickly enough to stop the next one? And if we don’t, what are the consequences? Agency officers had to adjust to a new era of the CIA, one that shifted rapidly from an intelligence organization to a war-fighting operation.

  Abu Zubaydah was perhaps the biggest riddle the Agency struggled to solve during that first year. Agency operators were accustomed to dealing in tough areas—including everything from the former Soviet Union to war zones in Africa, Latin America, and Southeast Asia—but they were not accustomed to dealing with hostile detainees. They chose to take on the new challenge, running risks that they vaguely understood but could not entirely foresee.

  The CIA’s overall mission also shifted, beyond the confines of detainee interrogations. Traditional intelligence typically supports war fighters from the US military, supplying them with information about the adversary’s capabilities and intent as well as information about weapons systems, missile prog
rams, and diplomatic advances. In the new counterterrorism world, the Agency was often the action arm for the information its agents collected. CIA officers gathered intelligence about al-Qa’ida leaders and then turned around and passed that information on to CIA operators who hunted down those leaders in operations that spanned the globe.

  As CIA officials wrestled with the realities of this new counterterrorism landscape, accompanied by huge budget increases and vastly expanded latitude for action, they also came face-to-face with another challenge. When they began capturing senior al-Qa’ida terrorists, they were not prepared to build and manage their own prison system for the new detainees. Far from it; CIA officers had never even considered detaining prisoners as an option, and the CIA as an organization had no experience or capability in managing prisons. Nor were CIA officers recruited, trained, or practiced in dealing with recalcitrant prisoners who refused to give up the secrets that might stop the next plot.

  That left the Agency with a dilemma. CIA managers felt a personal and professional responsibility to stop the next wave of al-Qa’ida killings; the prisoners they later took, in the minds of the CIA executives who ran the Agency, held clues that might stop another round of tragedy. Senior officials at the CIA correctly assumed that critics would later assail them for secret prisoners and harsh interrogations. The knot they had to untangle: either conduct the interrogations and try to break the al-Qa’ida prisoners who might hold critical intelligence clues or pass off the prisoners to another US government entity that wouldn’t have the same legal authorities, clandestine mission, and willing officers to perform the interrogation mission.

  Life at Langley was transformed by this expansive vision of the Agency’s role. CIA officers interpreted orders from the president on down as simple: do whatever it takes to ensure this doesn’t happen again. Many CIA officers also saw another reality in this mission: if the next attack happens in America, they thought, it’s on us. They felt they had to do whatever it took to prevent thousands more dead. Almost anything.

  In the midst of this swirling mix of new resources, legal authorities, presidential mandates, public expectations, and personal responsibility, CIA officers faced another predicament when they captured their first high-profile terrorist, Abu Zubaydah: he wouldn’t talk. “We [had] to change the equation,” said one of the driving forces behind the CIA’s interrogation program. “I don’t remember an ‘aha’ moment,” he added, “it was just an everyday frustration. The White House was asking every day about Abu Zubaydah, and we had nothing.”

  What happened next has become one of the most controversial covert operations in America’s history, the transfer of more than a hundred al-Qa’ida prisoners to “black sites,” secret CIA prisons around the world. Even more controversial, though, was the creation and implementation of a variety of interrogation methods, called Enhanced Interrogation Techniques (or EITs) by the Agency and torture by some, that were designed to compel al-Qa’ida prisoners to speak.

  These prisons, and these techniques, were often referred to by CIA officers, then and today, by two words: the Program.

  Academics and journalists have long reported on and opined about the effectiveness and appropriateness of the CIA’s imprisonment and harsh interrogation of prisoners. The US Senate has issued multiple formal reports about the CIA’s actions, typically reports that are drafted along partisan lines. The CIA itself responded to the Senate’s report with a narrow rebuttal that focused on the Senate’s allegations; the rebuttal is not an explanation or description of the Program as a whole. Meanwhile, various individual CIA officers have commented on or written about their roles in the Program.

  No one, however, has interviewed a broad cross section of the players involved, and no narrative compiles their views of how they decided to develop the Program; what they thought about their decisions; how they implemented this detention and interrogation program when they had little or no expertise; and what they think today about the efficacy and ethics of the now-closed detention facilities.

  A decade after the CIA transferred the Program’s final prisoners to the Guantanamo Bay detention facility, those officers have finally spoken through this book. I interviewed several dozen over the course of more than a year, from former directors and deputy directors to those who managed the interrogation sites from headquarters, and those who interrogated prisoners at black sites.

  The most difficult part of this book has been reconstructing, for future generations, future historians, and everyday readers, what the environment was like at CIA headquarters in Langley during the dark years. History has dulled the sense of immediacy, profound threat, and pervasive responsibility CIA officers felt at that time. The CIA officers speaking today, usually anonymously, believe overwhelmingly that they were in a race against time will be lost in the debates about the Program, and in the inevitable critiques leveled by future historians. This book is an attempt to re-create that tension, but no narrative will ever fully succeed. History is better with facts than feelings.

  This book is not designed to change the views of those who have drawn firm conclusions about the Program. Instead, it is an attempt to allow readers to step back in time, and to experience the world as CIA officers knew it. For both sides of the interrogation debate, the goal is the same: walk away realizing that the decisions behind this program were not easy and that oversimplifying the debate into black and white obscures what was, and still is, a morally difficult problem. The decision-makers were cognizant of the minefields they were navigating. They made choices when times were different, times that are hard to imagine today. Any observer might walk away understanding that this was a hard, and thankfully closed, chapter for America, and a unique time for its secret intelligence service.

  BLACK SITE

  1

  The Lean Years

  The Soviet Union was crumbling, and then suddenly gone. The fall of the Berlin Wall was a victory for the Central Intelligence Agency and for America. It was supposed to be the beginning of the unipolar world, with the United States at the center of global power during a time of hope for the millions of Americans who had lived under the threat of a nuclear exchange with the Soviets. It was also an era of downsizing for the US government agencies and departments that had spent decades fighting the spread of Soviet-style communism.

  The Cold War had defined the Agency since its inception. The CIA traced its origins back to World War II, when the Agency’s predecessor, the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), conducted sabotage behind enemy lines, collected intelligence, and supported secret opposition cells. After the war, President Harry S. Truman determined that America needed a long-term, centralized organization dedicated to fusing intelligence from various sources. This centralized federal agency would stand in contrast to the more ad hoc approach before the war that left some judging that the United States missed the Pearl Harbor warning signals from Japan because no single government organization had primary responsibility for analyzing intelligence.

  The National Security Act of 1947 enshrined the new CIA as the country’s focal point for collecting, disseminating, and analyzing information related to events overseas. During the 1950s, the Agency’s reach grew far beyond the OSS’s origins, extending to support for coups in such countries as Guatemala and Iran. Those years, at the heart of the Cold War, also led the Agency to focus its resources on the one threat that consumed America: Communism, and in particular the reach and spread of the Soviet Union.

  Later decades, from the 1960s through the 1970s, brought probing questions, from how the Agency’s failed Bay of Pigs operation in Cuba had gone so wrong to whether the long-term effects of US-sponsored coups were counterproductive. Iran’s theocratic revolution in 1979 brought to power religious clerics who saw the United States as the backbone of the repressive regime of the Shah of Iran they despised, and the shadow of American intervention in Iranian politics during the 1950s still hangs over America’s tense relationship with Tehran. Congressional probes in the 1970
s, particularly the Church Committee, exposed CIA operations that included sabotage and assassinations of foreign leaders.* Those hearings heralded more congressional oversight of CIA activities and resulted in an executive order, signed by Gerald Ford, prohibiting CIA involvement in assassinations.

  The veil of secrecy over the Agency that had characterized its first decades, and the congressional drive to reform the CIA, started defining Washington’s attitude toward intelligence as the 1970s progressed. Through the 1980s and into the 1990s the Agency again suffered through a cycle of secret support to anti-Communist regimes followed by inquiries into how far the Agency had gone in covert assistance to sometimes brutal regimes. This culminated in the explosive investigation into the Iran-Contra affair, the illegal sale of weapons to Iran and the use of the proceeds from those sales to support Contra rebels fighting Nicaragua’s leftist leaders.

  And then came the Soviet collapse in 1991. The justification for a sprawling intelligence apparatus in Washington almost immediately seemed outmoded, and the aftermath of the fall was difficult for the US intelligence community. Assumptions about the end of the Soviet threat were accompanied by rosy estimates about how much the United States could save by cutting the sprawling defense industry—what Dwight Eisenhower called the “military-industrial complex”—that had grown so massively during the post–World War II years of the nuclear arms race and the global effort to blunt Communism. “Dragons and snakes,” says one former CIA executive, reflecting on attitudes during the years after the fall of the Soviet Union. “We killed the dragon [the Soviet Union] at the end of the Cold War. There are only snakes left.”

  Through the 1980s and 1990s, even before the decline of the Soviet Union, the counterterrorism business at Langley stood alone as a different type of operating environment within the Agency. The terrorist threat to the United States overseas changed dramatically during those years, which pushed Agency executives to design a new counterterrorism program.