Company Man: Thirty Years of Controversy and Crisis in the CIA

Acronyms

Introduction: The Tale of the “Torture” Tapes

1: Entering the Secret Club (1975–1976)

2: Not Your Everyday Legal Issues (1977–1980)

3: Enter William Casey and a Whole New Ball Game (1981–1984)

4: The Calm Before the Storm (1985)

5: The Wheels Come Off (1986)

6: Reality TV: The Iran-Contra Hearings (1987)

7: The Iran-Contra Hangover (1988–1992)

8: Dealing with Devils (1993–1996)

9: Bin Laden Bursts Out (1997–2001)

10: The Attacks and the Response (September 2001–January 2002)

11: The Birth of the Enhanced Interrogation Program (2002)

12: Trouble on the EIT Front, and the Valerie Plame Diversion (2003–2004)

13: Enter Porter Goss (2005)

14: An Offer I Couldn’t Refuse (2006)

15: Out of the Shadows and Into the Spotlight (2007)

16: A Failed Nomination, and the End of a Program (2007–2008)

17: The Arrival of Obama, and a Long Goodbye (2009)

Postscript

Epilogue: Lessons Learned and a Look Forward

Photographs

Acknowledgments

About John Rizzo

Index

For my family

CONGRESS

MISCELLANEOUS ACRONYMS AND TERMS

In early November 2010, the Justice Department announced its decision not to bring obstruction-of-justice charges against the CIA officials who had been involved in the decision, five years earlier, to destroy videotapes depicting the Agency’s 2002 interrogation of an Al Qaeda operative named Abu Zubaydah. He was not just any terrorist thug. Zubaydah was a senior figure in the Al Qaeda hierarchy at the time of the 9/11 terrorist attacks, and he had been the CIA’s first significant “catch” in the post-9/11 era. As such, he was also the first high-level Osama bin Laden lieutenant to be spirited off to one of the Agency’s newly constructed covert detention facilities—what would come to be infamously known around the world as “the CIA’s secret prisons.” Zubaydah had another dubious distinction: He was the first CIA detainee ever to be waterboarded. The CIA had captured it all on videotape. Three years later, the Agency burned the tapes.

The Justice Department criminal investigation into the tapes’ destruction, which lasted almost three years, was led by John Durham, a career federal prosecutor from Connecticut brought in specifically for the task. He was appointed in December 2007, shortly after the
New York Times
broke the story in a series of page 1 articles by Mark Mazzetti and Scott Shane. The series ignited an immediate firestorm in the media and Congress. As the
Times
accurately reported, no one in the CIA had ever told anyone in Congress that it had destroyed the tapes.

It was a hell of a story about a hell of a mess. And I knew it better than anyone, since I was the only member of the CIA’s top leadership to have been part of the episode from the beginning to just about its end. I was the Agency’s chief legal advisor for most of the eight years encompassing
the story. The tale of the tapes’ destruction and its aftermath bedeviled me right up to the time of my retirement from the CIA in December 2009, after more than thirty years of service. The saga ended for me only when Justice announced there would be no indictments.

For the first three years, I fended off repeated entreaties from my Agency colleagues that I approve destroying the tapes, only to have them go behind my back and destroy them anyway in 2005. Then, after the story exploded in the media, I was the only CIA official to be hauled before Congress and grilled—alone—by two dozen angry lawmakers. Two years later, in September 2009, I had to testify for seven hours before a grand jury convened by the prosecutor, Durham.

The case was still hanging over me when I left the Agency for good two months later. In a long career fraught with dealing with controversies, it was the final one, and it was unfinished business. And so I could not drift gently, at long last, into a peaceful retirement. Would I be called back to testify before Congress? Before the grand jury? Would I be prosecuted for something I said, or something I did, somewhere along the way?

The November 2010 Justice Department announcement that there would be no indictments brought me a mixed range of emotions. First, of course, I felt a huge sense of belated relief. At the same time, it seemed oddly anticlimactic—by November 2010, the tapes’ destruction was old news, a distant if unpleasant memory.

Finally, it all struck me as very ironic. The entire affair, long and tortuous as it turned out to be, had begun for me way back at a time when I thought I was getting out of the line of fire at the CIA.

In October 2002, my nearly one-year tour of duty as acting general counsel was coming to a close. The Senate had just confirmed Scott Muller as the new CIA general counsel.

By this time, twenty-five years into my CIA career, I had “broken in” a number of incoming general counsels, so I had the drill down pat: The Office of the General Counsel (OGC) staff prepared briefing books containing summaries of key classified policy and legal documents as well as ongoing programs (per standard procedure, no incoming GC had access to classified information before reporting for duty), and I put together a list of the “hot” items that the new guy would have to confront the day he arrived on the job.

I felt a profound sense of relief about passing the Agency’s legal baton. Barely a year after 9/11, I could have put fifty items on the “hot” list. It seemed like every day we were facing a new, imminent Al Qaeda threat. And we had been operating in an entirely new and perilous legal terrain, capturing, brutally interrogating, and conducting lethal operations against senior Al Qaeda figures. I didn’t want Scott totally overwhelmed on his first day of work, so I was determined to keep the list short.

A couple of weeks before he arrived in November 2002, however, I learned about something I had no choice but to add to the list. Three months earlier, CIA officers, in a secret Agency detention facility overseas, began videotaping the first top Al Qaeda operative in our custody. He was also the first terrorist subjected to the Agency’s Enhanced Interrogation Techniques (EITs). The sessions were captured on the tapes, apparently in graphic detail. Jose Rodriguez, the chief of our Counterterrorist Center (CTC), came to me seeking permission to destroy the tapes. Immediately.