Playing to the Edge: American Intelligence in the Age of Terror (26 page)

She knew al-Qaeda cold, but like everyone else in this new enterprise, she was feeling her way. She asked Zubaida questions to explore his knowledge and his truthfulness. At team meetings she had to give her assessment. She told me that she was struck by the degree of certainty that the interrogators demanded of her that Zubaida was lying or withholding before they would agree to continue with the enhanced techniques.

They did, of course, until Zubaida became compliant, and then he became a torrent of information. She described him in some sessions as chatting “like an adolescent girl at a slumber party.” Even here, though, knowledge was still power. She would entice Zubaida to share his views with questions reflecting CIA knowledge of al-Qaeda well beyond his expectations. He confirmed some data points, challenged some, and filled in the blanks between others. She would even sometimes prompt him with recently acquired sensitive intelligence (no problem telling him—he wasn’t going anywhere). A lot of the data he (and other detainees) revealed looked on the surface like trivia—what kind of car, who else was at the meeting, casual relationships, an e-mail address—but it built up the storehouse of granular information that would be used to build threads to ultimately kill and capture terrorists and disrupt plots.

Speaking in 2015, she observed that even then, a week didn’t go by that she didn’t want to check a data point or follow up an issue with one or another of the detainees. (She couldn’t, of course.) She spoke almost longingly of the days when the agency could keep going back to detainees to check details, challenge them with newly acquired data, or play one detainee off against another.

She reminded me that one of the key clues in the pursuit of bin Laden was that KSM and Abu Faraj obviously lied when confronted with new information about bin Laden’s courier. That was just another thread in a complex and slowly woven fabric.

As I’ve said, historically the agency had had thirteen approved techniques, including waterboarding, cramped confinement, stress positions, and water dousing. In 2006–2007 we were proposing to cut the authorized techniques in half, eliminating all of the above, while retaining a grasp of the lapels and of the chin, two slaps (a backhanded belly slap and an insult slap to the face), and the authority to manipulate diet and sleep. Enforced nudity was sometimes on and sometimes off our amended list. I have said that the interrogators wanted it, since it could quickly be turned on and off, but Secretary of State Rice and Steve Hadley had concerns.

I think it was the image. I know that Steve regretted not better understanding the history of waterboarding and the association of a technique by the same name with Japanese war criminals and the Philippine insurrection. This time we talked it through. I took nudity off the list. I had a high regard for their views, and besides, this was about creating consensus. Still, we were edging close to the line about which the vice president often cautioned me: Will these be effective enough?

None of this, by the way, was to pass judgment on the past use of nudity or any other technique. I was always careful to emphasize that. George Tenet and Porter Goss had their circumstances; I had mine. And in late 2006 we had more knowledge of al-Qaeda, deeper penetrations of its network, and better understanding of its threats than we had had in 2002 or 2004. I could afford to give up some things, especially if that led to the kind of political consensus we were seeking.

I wanted Congress to be part of that consensus. That required a serious discussion with them. That discussion never happened. The members were too busy yelling at us and at one another.

The House Intelligence Committee was especially contentious, particularly after the November midterms put the committee into Democrat
hands. The new chairman, Silvestre Reyes, was a Vietnam veteran, a former border patrol officer, and perhaps the most decent man in Congress. I had once flown to his hometown of El Paso to give a speech at the local university, and he made sure that our military jet home was stocked with tortillas from his favorite local restaurant. He had been trashed shortly before taking over the committee by Jeff Stein, then the
Congressional Quarterly
’s national security editor, when Reyes failed to distinguish al-Qaeda as a Sunni organization. We didn’t care. It had been an ambush. Stein was tough and knowledgeable, but he specialized in snark. We were more impressed by Reyes’s honesty. We’d fill him in on the rest.

The new Speaker of the House, Nancy Pelosi, had picked Reyes because of her personal feud with the obvious choice, senior intelligence Democrat and fellow Californian Jane Harman. Harman was just too centrist on security issues and too soft on Bush. Pelosi then packed the committee with loyalists. Anna Eshoo (CA), Rush Holt (NJ), Jan Schakowsky (IL), and John Tierney (MA) had impeccable liberal credentials and were, well, tough to brief.

Hearings often became shouting matches. In one session I was asked if I would waterboard my daughter. Then (in lieu of a question) I was accused of looking bored during a lengthy lecture on the American political system and how this chamber was “the people’s house.” One member candidly admitted that he was just opposed to
all
covert action. There were moments (a lot of them, actually) when I was convinced that several members were opposed not just to some of the agency’s actions, but to its existence.

One agency senior left such a session, commenting, “I had no idea people treated other people that way.”

Republicans had their issues too. Pete Hoekstra (MI) was jealously protective of congressional prerogatives and routinely and angrily complained to us about the limited flow of information from the executive branch.

We were kind of on his side. After all, CIA had pushed for extending the briefing on black sites to all members of the intelligence committee
and to staff. We also pushed to brief the leadership of our appropriations committee, Jack Murtha (D-PA) and Bill Young (R-FL).

That session didn’t go well. Murtha was a friend, a western Pennsylvanian, and a Steelers fan like me, who had actually introduced me in my PDDNI confirmation hearing. I had lent him my cassette tapes of Shelby Foote reading his magnificent history of the Battle of Gettysburg to listen to on his drives between Washington and Johnstown. So I was surprised when Murtha jumped all over me when I entered the briefing room. His ostensible reason was my tardiness (less than five minutes because of traffic), but it was so uncharacteristic that I suspected that there had to be more. That was confirmed when Murtha excused himself rather than being briefed on the details of interrogation techniques. He didn’t want to know, and he didn’t want to be there.

The Senate Intelligence Committee was marginally more civilized than its House counterpart, but the dialogue there was no more productive. In one case Senator Feinstein had been publicly excoriating the agency for slamming the heads of prisoners into walls, like ramming skulls into turnbuckles during a World Wrestling Federation death match.

I dutifully got on the senator’s calendar and briefed her and her staff director on the now eliminated technique of “walling”: pushing the shoulders of a detainee whose neck had been braced into a false plywood wall that gave off a loud bang. She took notes while staring at me solemnly and then proceeded to publicly repeat the same accusation a few days later.

Senator Jay Rockefeller (D-WV), a veteran member of the intelligence committee, became its chair in 2007. I had briefed him multiple times, and although we were never close, I think there was some mutual respect (even though we did routinely spar over Pitt and West Virginia football). The relationship, such as it was, steadily deteriorated. At one private session with just his staff director and my legislative affairs chief with us, he abruptly interrupted the flow of conversation to challenge me: “You don’t believe in oversight, do you?” I still don’t know what prompted it, since I was briefing him on a sensitive activity at the meeting. Over time the
senator was increasingly reluctant to accept briefings on material that wasn’t cleared for release to the whole committee. “Why are you telling me this?” he once asked.

I testified on detentions and interrogations to the full oversight committees of both houses in September and November 2006 and again in April 2007. The April 2007 session with the SSCI was typical. Fourteen senators attended all or part of the hearing along with twenty-one staff. Those are big numbers for a sensitive covert action.

Besides the usual coterie of backbenchers, I brought John Rizzo, the general counsel, Steve Bradbury from Justice, and one of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed’s principal interrogators, someone KSM took to calling Amir, to testify with me. I often deferred to them for details.

We also brought documentation. We handed each senator a matrix with thirty or so names down the left side and the thirteen formerly authorized techniques across the top. The Xs in the boxes that were formed showed which detainee had undergone which techniques. We also discussed another important metric, the intelligence derived from the detainees, some eight thousand reports.

Intelligence is sometimes described as putting the pieces of a jigsaw puzzle together, except that we hardly ever get to see the picture on the top of the puzzle box. The individuals that CIA detained gave us many new puzzle pieces, but most important, given their positions in al-Qaeda, oftentimes they had seen the picture on the top of the box too.

The National Intelligence Council published an estimate on the threat to the homeland in the summer of 2007. The NIE’s judgments were shaped by the intelligence we obtained from our detention program. More than 70 percent of the human intelligence reporting used in that estimate was based on information from detainees.

I tried to show Congress the care with which the program was now being run. The average age of those interrogating detainees was forty-three. Once they were selected, they had to complete more than 250 hours of specialized training before they were allowed to come
face-to-face with a terrorist. And we required additional fieldwork under the direct supervision of an experienced officer before a new interrogator could direct an interrogation.

I was committed to making Congress a partner in all this. My Congressional Affairs chief, Chris Walker, was an experienced Hill hand. He had worked for Speaker Denny Hastert before coming to us. Chris dutifully responded to my direction to keep the committees “fully and currently” informed about
all
agency activities. We set indoor records for CNs (Congressional Notifications), formal hearings, and briefings.

Over one twelve-month period CIA officers testified at fifty-seven congressional hearings and completed twenty-nine congressionally legislated reports. We answered 1,140 QFRs—that’s Questions for the Record—as well as 254 other letters, queries, and requests.

CIA experts gave more than five hundred briefings to members of Congress and their staffs. (The 110th Congress was in legislative session for 349 days, so we were providing more than one briefing per legislative day.)

I personally briefed the Hill nine times just on RDI (rendition, detention, and interrogation).

The oversight committees were exhaustive in their demands for ever more detailed information, like how many lumens of light and decibels of sound detainees were subjected to while in CIA custody. One congressman wanted to know whether or not CIA complied with “buy America” legal requirements for construction materials used in black sites overseas.

We answered the questions, but the times were tough: we were talking about controversial things on behalf of a weakened president with the opposition in control of both chambers and a lot of people positioning themselves for a run for president. Not good circumstances. Briefings on Iraq became so caustic that I told Chris that analysts were empowered to simply leave if the abuse became excessive.

And it wasn’t just CIA. In March 2008 DNI Mike McConnell had arranged a two-day off-site at a CIA location in Virginia for members of
the House Intelligence Committee. We were to have a short introductory session followed by drinks and dinner Sunday night and then a good day of work Monday before returning to the capital.

Of course, most of the IC leadership was in the comm center before sunrise on Monday checking their cable traffic and the press clips. One story caught our eye. Siobhan Gorman, a smart reporter formerly of the
Baltimore Sun
but now at the
Wall Street Journal
, had filed a long, page-one story that screamed exposé on ominous-sounding data-collection programs at NSA. Except that three NSA directors—me, McConnell, and the current DIRNSA, Keith Alexander—couldn’t quite figure out what it was about. That’s unusual. When a story appears in the press, even when incomplete or inaccurate, you can usually discern the actual activity behind the headline. Not this time.

So DNI McConnell decided to go off-script (with our enthusiastic support) and directed that copies of the article be made and put at everyone’s place for the morning session. He invited everyone to read the piece and then began the discussion with a plea to the members that only they had the credibility to defend the IC when such stories appeared. We were an open book to them, so they were well positioned to scotch such rumors. Sounded reasonable to me.

Not so much to them. The first member to speak baldly stated that he would not do that, since he “did not know that story was untrue.” And things went downhill from there. One member flatly accused Keith Alexander of lying to him. Another, out of the blue, attacked the director of the National Reconnaissance Office for secretly putting “weapons in space,” a charge so outrageous that we expected harboring space aliens would be the next allegation. A third member shifted the topic only slightly by observing that the real problem was their being forced to rely on a bunch of white guys and that racial and gender diversity would markedly improve American intelligence. We finally got back on the original agenda, but the damage had been done; the whole thing left a gaping hole below the waterline.