88 Days to Kandahar: A CIA Diary

by Grenier, Robert L.

  On the final day of my trip, as I stood looking up at the Afghan flag above Hamid Karzai’s palace, I could yet take satisfaction in what we had accomplished on both sides of the Pak-Afghan border. But I was beginning to think that perhaps those successes, too easily achieved, could come undone.

  Chapter 45

  * * *

  THE UNRAVELING

  THE GREATEST CHALLENGES I faced as director of CTC did not come from terrorists. You might have thought, given the importance of what we were doing for the security of the nation, and the fact that we had thwarted thus far all attempts to reprise 9/11, CTC would have friends everywhere. But you’d be wrong. In 2005 we were under attack from all sides, and our most formidable enemies included other elements of the executive branch, the Congress, and the press. If good fortune had given some people license to become complacent, I had no such luxury. Al-Qa’ida had not hit us again, but it was not for want of trying. Other nations had not been so lucky: Bali, Indonesia, was struck by a devastating attack in October 2002, and Madrid in March 2004, to name a couple. London would be hit in July 2005, and Bali again later that year. My job was to make sure that CTC’s ability to protect us was maintained and enhanced. But as I surveyed the landscape on my return to Washington in May 2005, beginning at the seventh floor of my own headquarters and extending out across the Potomac to the capital city beyond, I could hardly find a single friend in a position to help me. This was the start of the loneliest but perhaps the most strangely exhilarating six months of my life.

  Shortly before I took over CTC, Congress had passed legislation creating the National Counterterrorism Center. The reasons were obvious. After the report of the 9/11 Commission, documenting (among many other things) intelligence failures that had contributed to the disaster, Congress had to be seen to act in some way. The measures already taken to correct systemic problems involved improved information sharing and work practices, and were not readily visible to the public. Congress couldn’t take credit for them. But creating a new government bureaucracy is highly visible.

  At the same time, the framers of the Intelligence Reform and Terrorism Prevention Act of 2004, which created NCTC, were very well aware of the critical operational work CIA was doing around the world, and didn’t want to interfere with it. They certainly didn’t want to be blamed for the next terrorist attack. So they did something seemingly safe: They took the Terrorist Threat Integration Center (TTIC), a new organization created since 9/11 to improve information sharing between the domestic law enforcement and foreign intelligence communities, and gave it a new name and a new, important-sounding mandate. The National Counterterrorism Center would henceforth have “primary responsibility” for intelligence analysis, though CIA and the other intelligence agencies could continue to do it as well. NCTC could expressly not do counterterrorism operations overseas. That risked creating havoc. But by creating another government entity to “connect the dots” that CIA and others had failed to connect in the past—well, Congress must have thought, what was the harm in that? The law of unintended consequences took over from there.

  The vast majority of the federal government’s best terrorism analysts were in the Directorate of Intelligence’s Office of Terrorism Analysis, which was the analytic wing of CTC. The acting head of NCTC was John Brennan, a good friend of over twenty years’ standing, highly ambitious and a talented bureaucratic infighter. Years later, he would hold the senior counterterrorism job in the Obama White House, and then become director of CIA. Trying to bring federal intelligence and law enforcement to cooperate more closely with states and localities was important, but it was difficult, thankless work. Now Brennan seized the opportunity to take over preparation of high-profile terrorism analysis for the president and senior policymakers. Using the newly passed legislation as a stick, he successfully pressured the CIA leadership into giving up significant numbers of CTC’s terrorism analysts, whom he organized, along with others from elsewhere in the intelligence community, into a structure mirroring that in CTC. We were taking the same analysts whom Congress saw as having failed, putting them in a different place, and pretending this would solve the problem.

  It was an aggressively bad idea. Before long, analysts who had formerly been colleagues were in rival organizations, competing viciously for the right to take the lead on analytic pieces for the President’s Daily Brief. It was a huge duplication of effort at a time when there simply weren’t enough seasoned analysts to go around. It served the analysts themselves very badly. NCTC was in no position to effectively recruit, train, or develop career analysts in the way that CIA’s Directorate of Intelligence could. For CTC, whose strength had long been in using the same analysts to support operations and to write finished intelligence, the loss of these people both weakened our analytic depth and threatened to hurt our operations. Worse, there was no end in sight. NCTC was constantly pressing for yet more of our analysts. My organization was being picked apart.

  Less than a week into my tenure, I sat down with Brennan to make him an offer. Rather than progressively raiding CTC of its analysts to create a rival organization, I asked, why not just take all of it? All the key agencies—CIA, the FBI, and the Defense Intelligence Agency—had large, dedicated counterterrorism organizations. Why not create a real national counterterrorism center by bringing these units together? They would remain functional parts of their parent organizations, from whom they would continue to derive their legal authorities and to receive administrative and “back-office” support, but would be “matrixed” together into a coherent organization in which sharing of analysts and other resources would be facilitated, and cross-government activities far better coordinated. This was what CTC had done successfully on a smaller scale in bringing together elements of completely independent directorates within CIA. Now we could do the same thing, but on a much grander scale, this time under Brennan’s direction. Rather than fighting for a place at the counterterrorism table with a nascent, immature organization, Brennan could instead have me and the chiefs of all the principal federal counterterrorism organizations sitting around his conference room every morning, answerable to him.

  John was momentarily intrigued, but just as quickly seemed to sense a trap. From his questions, I could see he doubted whether he would be able to control people who still belonged simultaneously to independent agencies. For him, this might be like invading China: You would be enveloped and overwhelmed by those whom you had nominally conquered. A veil fell over his eyes; he had no interest.

  Undeterred, I continued to promote the idea elsewhere. The head of CIA’s Directorate of Intelligence indicated he would go along, but only if and when we were about to lose all our terrorism analysts. Other agencies were either opposed or apathetic; in any case, they saw no urgency. They weren’t under attack by NCTC. Fran Townsend, the president’s senior advisor on both counterterrorism and homeland security and a canny political operator, could see I was fighting an uphill battle. She expressed interest and encouraged me to continue—on my own.

  When Brennan was passed over in his quest to be named the permanent director of NCTC, I made another pitch to his successor, retired Admiral Scott Redd. He responded very frankly. A long career in government had taught him that if you didn’t have direct command of the troops you were leading, you had nothing. The immutable laws of bureaucratic survival had won out, again, over effective government. The debilitating rivalry between CTC and NCTC continued. It would fester for years to come.

  As our terrorist adversaries around the globe fell victim to our close cooperation with other intelligence and security services, and retreated increasingly into ungoverned spaces beyond the effective reach of allied governments, use of Predator drones was becoming increasingly important. I am not at liberty to discuss much of this, but let us say that the U.S. government in this period was not putting a premium on the use of drones—by any government entity—in the global counterterrorism fight. In 2005, with Iraq going up in flames, every available Predator co
ming off the assembly line was being sent there. This seemed unwise to me, but with Tenet gone, there was no one at CIA of his stature with the respect or force of personality to make a case for even a modest reallocation of DoD resources elsewhere. I argued for it everywhere I could, in the executive branch and even with congressional committees. I found sympathy for my views, but nothing more.

  Yet of all the challenges CTC faced during that fateful year of 2005, the controversies surrounding detainees, interrogations, and secret prisons were by far the greatest. When I first arrived, the CIA terrorist interrogation program had been in existence for nearly three years. It had begun just after our capture of Abu Zubayda in Pakistan in 2002, and evolved greatly since then.

  Interrogation is not a core function, nor is it a traditional skill of the CIA. Yes, the organization did have a small number of experienced interrogators, most of whom were also polygraph operators. Barry McManus, who dealt with Dr. Bashir, the Pak nuclear scientist, was one of these. But there were only a few of them, and their skills and experience varied widely. Case officers, who reflect the traditional methods of the Clandestine Service, depend upon the willing collaboration of their sources; they are trained in manipulation, not intimidation or coercion. But it is a core aspect of CIA culture that it responds to the needs of the moment. Given direction from the president, it quickly becomes whatever its masters need it to be.

  I was not involved in the interrogation of Abu Zubayda, or in the subsequent construction of a formal program to detain and interrogate the senior al-Qa’ida members whose capture would follow. Once Abu Zubayda was dispatched aboard a CIA plane, I and my station were back at work to capture more like him. But I could readily understand why CIA needed a controlled, disciplined interrogation program. The alternative was something like what I had in Pakistan.

  All of those we captured in the early, pre-Zubayda days, the low-level operatives and fighters, we placed as rapidly as possible into U.S. military custody to be flown out of Pakistan. We could try to question only a relative few of them. Most, no doubt, knew little of value to us. But even if they did, we were ill-equipped to extract it. The detainees were being kept in regular Pakistani jails, where they had ready access to one another and could coordinate their stories. They were brought to the Clubhouse for debriefing for a few hours at a time. My officers did the best they could, but they were not trained to elicit information from hostile parties, and those being questioned had little incentive to cooperate. Those doing the questioning had a general idea of what we were looking for, and several spoke Arabic; but in addition to a lack of skills appropriate to an adversarial setting, they did not have the comprehensive knowledge of al-Qa’ida and its members that was critically important to the undertaking.

  In presiding over this mess, it became obvious to me that if CIA were to be successful in rapidly gaining information from the so-called “high-value targets” whom we hoped to capture, we would need a serious, focused effort to do so. In short, we would need everything I didn’t have in Pakistan. We would need to have complete control over the detainees, so that we could set the environment and determine the conditions in which they would be questioned. We would need to be seen by them as the sole determiners of their fate, whether we were or not. Most important, we would need to have the means of bringing all available information to bear on their questioning. The most powerful tool in a terrorist interrogation is knowledge. The detainee must be convinced that there is a distinct possibility that we already know the answer to any question put to him. If he has a compelling interest in convincing his questioner of his truthfulness, the questioner’s knowledge is a powerful threat—often more so than any coercive methods we might name.

  Two of the distinguishing features of CTC’s program were the methods it was permitted to employ, and the secret locations where it was conducted. The bar to admittance was high: only so-called HVDs, “high-value detainees”—those strongly suspected of having information concerning future terrorist attacks—were accepted. In most cases they had been captured by cooperating foreign security services, the Pakistanis in particular, and turned over to CIA. The agency would then “render” them to a so-called “black site,” a prison which a cooperating country would allow us to build and control entirely on our own. The reason for black sites was the perceived need for CIA to control all aspects of the detainee’s incarceration and interrogation. We did not want a detainee to have contact with any outside persons or entities; he would have to deal with us. And we would not trust anyone else to deal with him. In any individual case the lives of hundreds or thousands of innocent people might be at stake.

  The other distinguishing feature of the program was the use of what we euphemistically called “enhanced interrogation techniques,” or EITs. Again, this involved methods we would not trust to anyone else, lest they go too far and we be accused of “outsourcing torture.” At the beginning of the program, the EITs had famously included “waterboarding,” which gave the sensation of drowning. Previously employed against many American servicemen as part of their counter-interrogation training, it was not physically dangerous but absolutely terrifying to most human beings. Only three of the detainees, Abu Zubayda, ‘Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri, and, most infamously, Khalid Shaykh Mohammed (KSM), the mastermind of the 9/11 attacks, were ever waterboarded. KSM was a particularly hard case. A man with the blood of over 3,000 Americans on his hands, his stock answer to any question regarding future terrorist attacks was, “Soon you will see.”

  Even so, as the interrogation program matured and methods were refined, the interrogators concluded that waterboarding was superfluous and unnecessary. The practice was abandoned in 2003, well before I arrived on the scene. The other EITs were not nearly so harsh. They were designed and administered so that the detainee would not be physically harmed, but would be frightened, humiliated, and psychologically worn down, especially through sleep deprivation. Still, it was a grim business at best.

  Whatever else one might think of the program, and whether or not one agreed with its methods, it was an efficient, highly disciplined program by the time I inherited it. But the political climate it was operating in had changed markedly. It is striking now just how uncontroversial these interrogations were in the early years, at least for those few members of Congress who were briefed on the details. Among the general public, fearful of another devastating attack, there seemed little concern for the tender sensibilities of terrorists. The administration would have done well to have harnessed that latent public and congressional support early on. Instead, Vice President Cheney, who had the final say, restricted congressional notification to the minimum permitted by law, and nothing was revealed publicly.

  But three years after 9/11, the fear which had gripped the nation was beginning to subside, and questions about Bush administration counterterrorism policies were being raised in various quarters, especially in Congress. This was probably a healthy thing. But what most affected public perceptions of detention and interrogation practices was the wave of revulsion, both at home and abroad, generated by public dissemination in April 2004 of shocking photographs of Iraqi detainees at Abu Ghraib prison being abused by leering American troops. Separate reports of abuse at Guantánamo only fed the fire. CIA’s legally approved interrogation program may have had no connection to the brutal freelancing being conducted by untrained and ill-supervised U.S. troops in Iraq and Cuba, but all three were soon conflated in the public mind. As the military was called before Congress to publicly explain how such abuses could have been allowed to occur and how they would be prevented from ever happening again, it was natural to question what CIA was up to, particularly as rumors of aggressive CIA interrogations were cropping up in the press.

  In early 2005, as congressional restiveness increased, Cheney belatedly agreed to bring more members of the oversight committees fully into the picture. I insisted on participating in these briefings myself. Never did I hear an objection to our practices, even from Democrats; reacti
ons ran more along the lines of one Republican, who expressed surprise: “You mean that’s it? That’s all you’re doing? They did worse to me in boot camp!” That sort of congressional feedback, though, only gave the illusion of support. Our erstwhile friends on the Hill would pull a disappearing act later, when the going got rough.

  Whatever the moral, ethical, or political considerations involved, what made the enhanced interrogation techniques legally dicey was the international Convention Against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment, to which the United States was a signatory, and which therefore had the force of U.S. federal law. Anyone might agree in the abstract that “torture and other cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment” were abhorrent, and should not be allowed. The tricky bit was to define such treatment in practical terms. If, in questioning a known terrorist thought to hold information about an imminent terrorist attack, the American public might wish us to have the option to use means beyond what U.S. police might typically employ in a precinct house with a lawyer present, as they most certainly did, the question was: How far, precisely, can one go without violating the law? The EITs were spelled out in great detail for the Department of Justice, which approved their use in August 2002.