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

by Rizzo, John

  In August 2009, still in his first few months in office, Holder blindsided everyone at the Agency—especially me—by publicly announcing that Justice was going to reopen all of the old detainee abuse cases. Just like that, with no explanation about what was so flawed, or what was missing, in the career prosecutors’ decision only three years earlier not to prosecute. New or overlooked evidence? New or overlooked witnesses? Evidently not, according to the Holder aides I talked to. In fact, one of them privately told me, Holder hadn’t bothered to read the career prosecutors’ reports on why they had recommended against prosecution. I was at a loss to understand why Holder was taking such an extraordinary step, reopening cases that had only gotten older, staler, in the ensuing years. It made absolutely no sense. It was also, I thought, a profoundly unfair thing to do to the Agency’s drained and beleaguered workforce. Only a few months earlier, when President Obama took the extraordinary step of declassifying the Bush-era “torture memos,” he nonetheless pledged that his new administration henceforth would “look forward, not backward” and not rehash all the controversies of the past. Holder’s out-of-the-blue decision gave the lie to that.

  By this time, I was nearly out the door at the Agency, but what I was subsequently told by my erstwhile colleagues was all too depressingly predictable. Once again, dozens of rank-and-file employees faced grillings by gimlet-eyed prosecutors and FBI agents on what they might have said or done in the course of events that took place years before. Bewildered employees who had only been on the periphery of these long-ago events felt compelled to hire private lawyers. Untold amounts of CIA funds and manpower—not to mention focus and morale—were chewed up in the process. In 2011, Holder announced that Justice was dropping its inquiry into all the cases save for two, for which there now would be full-blown investigations. Yet more Agency resources had to be called upon, more Agency personnel diverted and disrupted from their regular duties.

  Finally, mercifully, the end came with the curt written statement released in Holder’s name on August 30, 2012, throwing in the towel. While it didn’t offer much in the way of explanation, the statement did cryptically allude to problems with “statute of limitations and jurisdictional provisions.” Sitting at home, reading those words, I could only ruefully smile. They sounded almost exactly like the legalistic code words the career Justice Department prosecutors had given me, in 2006, for deciding not to pursue prosecution of the very same cases. Basically, it is Justice saying: Look, these were incidents that took place a long time ago, in isolated, war-torn locales, where we have no body to examine and no reliable evidence or available eyewitnesses. Evidently, it took Holder and his staff until 2012 to reach the same conclusion their predecessors had come to six long years earlier. The only things that had changed were that the cases had gotten even older, and that probably millions of additional taxpayer dollars had been blown on a corrosive and feckless exercise.

  I was struck by one other brief phrase in the Holder statement. It said the decision not to prosecute “was not intended to, and does not resolve, broader questions regarding the propriety of the examined conduct.” The conduct Holder was referring to was that of the Agency, not his own.

  EPILOGUE

  Lessons Learned and a Look Forward

  In January 1976, I arrived at the CIA as a naïve, unworldly twenty-eight-year-old guy. I came aboard based solely on a hunch and a huge leap of faith. In the ensuing thirty-four years, I met people, traveled to places, and dealt with issues that were at once wonderfully unimaginable and endlessly fascinating. I managed to climb farther up the ladder than any career CIA lawyer had ascended before. And I wound up becoming an unlikely and controversial public figure in the late stages of my career, which spanned the entire modern history of the Agency. So it’s a fair question to ask: What conclusions have I drawn, what lessons did I learn, from all that time, all those experiences, at the CIA?

  First, let me address the momentous, fateful years since the attacks of September 11, 2001. To me, the most ironic lesson to be drawn by the post-9/11 era is this: It is far less legally risky, and in many quarters considered far more morally justifiable, to stalk and kill a dangerous terrorist than it is to capture and aggressively interrogate one. That at least is the de facto consensus that emerged over the first post-9/11 decade among influential segments of the U.S. Congress, the media, and the human rights community. How else to explain all the noisy outrage and long, splashy investigative articles about CIA secret prisons and interrogation techniques, while all the while Al Qaeda operatives were getting blown to bits, in plain sight, by U.S. drone aircraft without generating a ripple of criticism anywhere in Congress, the media, or from any international human rights organization? To these entities, killing didn’t appear to be that big a deal, up through the time I retired at the end of 2009.

  By contrast, for many of us at the CIA, being directed by the president of the United States to target people for death—even Al Qaeda terrorists—was always a big deal. Late in his administration, Bill Clinton had issued some ambiguously worded and highly caveated MONs to the Agency about killing bin Laden and any of his cohorts who might be unlucky enough to be around him at the time. With bin Laden nowhere to be found, the Agency never came close to putting him in its crosshairs. That moment would not come until the night of May 2, 2011, in that walled compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan.

  I still find it so odd, so perverse, that the same groups that were stridently attacking the EIT program as not just lawless but morally repugnant—the (mostly) Democrats in Congress, the ACLU, Amnesty International, even the United Nations—until recently couldn’t seem to muster a scintilla of concern, much less outrage, about a U.S. program of summary, targeted killings—even ones that occasionally caused the deaths of innocent bystanders—that was being simultaneously conducted with results that all the world could see.

  From the earliest days after 9/11, the Agency’s priority was to capture Al Qaeda leaders, not kill them. Except when it came to bin Laden, whenever the location of an important Al Qaeda operative came on the screen, the preferred option was to try to take him into custody if at all possible. In March 2002, when Abu Zubaydah was located in a house in Faisalabad, the Agency ordered its Pakistani colleagues to take him alive. Zubaydah, however, declined to go quietly and was seriously wounded in the ensuing gunfight. Rather than let him die, the CIA moved heaven and earth to get him the medical care that saved his life. Subsequently, he was subjected to extensive waterboarding, as was Khalid Sheik Mohammad a year later. Both men, of course, would go on to become the two most prominent and productive subjects of the Agency’s enhanced interrogation program.

  That the CIA so instinctively and insistently hewed to this approach shouldn’t be surprising. First and foremost, it is an intelligence-collection organization, and collection of intelligence from human beings is in its institutional DNA. Always has been. You can’t collect intelligence—whether about an upcoming catastrophic attack on the homeland or anything else—from a dead man. It’s as simple as that. Accordingly, during my time in the post-9/11 years, killing terrorists was the final option. And certainly not the only option.

  Now, flash forward to today. Times have changed indeed. As this is written, bin Laden has been dead and buried for two years; the EIT program has been dead and buried for four years, as have the CIA secret prisons. Thus, by all appearances, the Agency is out of the detention and interrogation business. So what continues to be the fulcrum of the Obama administration’s offensive against Al Qaeda? According to a nonstop stream of media accounts over the past four years (which is all I have to go on by now), it’s killing people, a lot of people, via a relentless and escalating barrage of drone attacks. Apparently even a U.S. citizen or two along the way. I don’t doubt that virtually all of them were bad guys who richly deserved their fate. Yet it also seems evident that the U.S. Government’s efforts to capture and interrogate Al Qaeda operatives overseas have effectively ground to a halt. Again, according to media rep
orts, the Obama administration’s scorecard in this regard at this writing: one terrorist detained.

  So the question ultimately becomes: Was the Obama administration’s enthusiastic embrace of a robust, aggressive policy to kill terrorists directly connected to, even compelled by, its decision to repudiate a robust, aggressive policy of capturing and interrogating them? Obama aides (notably, my old friend and colleague John Brennan) have adamantly denied it. With due respect to John, I don’t believe you need to be a sage CIA analyst to connect the dots on this one.

  Which leads to the question of what the CIA’s assigned antiterrorism role will be in the future. I can’t imagine the Agency ever again coming close to running detention facilities or engaging in any sort of even mildly coercive interrogation practices. Given the seemingly enduring controversy over the legacy of “waterboarding” and “black sites”—the widespread popularity and vitriol generated by the 2012 film Zero Dark Thirty is but one example of this phenomenon—I can’t see any president ever reopening that can of worms again. What’s more, no CIA director in his or her right mind would ever let the organization go down that path again. To do so would be beyond folly. I don’t think even another catastrophic 9/11-like attack will change that.

  Aggressive all-out intelligence collection against terrorists and terrorist threats? Absolutely. Intelligence collection, as I noted earlier, has always been the lifeblood of the Agency. There has always been a consensus that it is not only an appropriate but a vital CIA mission. Plus, there has seldom been any political risk or downside to spying, save for those relatively few cases where the CIA has been caught red-handed bugging some foreign government installation or trying to recruit a foreign government official. In any case, the worst fall-out result is a compromised operation, the attendant political embarrassment, and maybe some snarky media stories. It is a rare case indeed for someone to get killed carrying out, or being the target of, a CIA intelligence-collection operation.

  Which brings me to what the future holds for the CIA to conduct covert actions aimed at terrorists. It has been only in the last year or so that segments of Congress, the media, and the human rights community have begun criticizing the U.S. Government’s lethal drone operations, a practice that dates back more than a decade. This delayed reaction is attributable to two factors, I believe. First, the Obama administration has upped the ante, dramatically expanding the numbers of drone strikes, the permissible targets, and the number of foreign locations in the bull’s-eye. The second factor, which admittedly reflects a certain cynicism on my part, is that there is no longer any EIT program for the critics to kick around. Human rights and civil liberties groups, notably the ACLU, have needed a new national security bogeyman to attack, so belatedly, after being studiously quiet about it for years, the drone program is now on their (ahem) target list.

  Whatever. I believe that the drone program is here to stay, not just under Obama but whoever his successors may be. In the counterterrorist arena, for sure, but someday soon drone attacks are likely to be aimed at hostile foreign governments deemed to pose an imminent threat to unleash weapons of mass destruction against the West, our allies, or even their own people. The technology has gotten so good and is bound to get better. Drone attacks are antiseptic, stealthy, and—after the recent long-running adventures in Afghanistan and Iraq—a far more preferable option for any presidential administration than “boots on the ground” and flag-draped coffins arriving at Dover Air Force Base. When those drone strikes happen, count on whatever administration that carries them out to trot out its lawyers to duly rationalize its lethal actions as being totally in accordance with international law.

  Thus, I would respectfully predict that future presidents will not only continue to be in the business of killing, but will double down on it. And that the CIA will salute the commander in chief and be in the middle of it, without hesitation or resistance.

  I mean, anything is less risky than building “black sites” again.

  Finally, let me offer some “big picture” observations about the CIA—the lessons I drew from my experience there and what I think the future will bring for the organization.

  Foremost, I learned over time that the Agency is a remarkably resilient organization. My career was pockmarked by episodes of crisis and controversy at the CIA. Actually, it was bookmarked with them—I arrived in the mid-’70s in the wake (and because) of the Church Committee revelations, and I retired three decades later dogged by the tumult of the defunct enhanced interrogation program. Along the way, there were the Casey crusades in Central America in the ’80s, the Iran-contra scandal later that decade, the Ames spy case in the early ’90s, the “dirty asset” flap a couple of years after that, and, of course, the 9/11 attacks and the Iraq WMD fiasco shortly after the turn of the new millennium.

  Each time, doomsayers in Congress and the media decried the performance, the integrity, and even the raison d’être of the institution itself. And each time, the Agency has weathered the storm and bounced back. Why? Two primary reasons, I think.

  First, every one of the seven presidents I served came to turn to and depend on the CIA. Granted, for Carter and Clinton, it took a while, but like the others, they came around. Presidents learn that the Agency is a unique asset—it can move quickly, without the normal fiscal or operational constraints of other agencies, and it can do what it does in secret. It has no other client, no other master, than the occupant of the Oval Office. The CIA, in short, is a president’s personal pop stand. It does what—and only what—he (or she) tells it to do, including covert action. Especially covert action. None of them is going to give that up, and so the Agency survives, no matter what.

  Second, the CIA abides because of the people who work there. Most, like I did, spend much of their professional lives there. You never get impervious to the recurring crises and controversies that buffet the place, but after a time you come to learn that each will pass. The organization will take its lumps, learn some lessons, and move on. And so will you.

  Take the CIA Office of General Counsel. The majority of the lawyers there have joined the office in the post-9/11 era, like the rest of the current CIA workforce. They are young enough not to have been exposed to its run-up but old enough to be seared by memories of the horror. I hired a bunch of them myself, and dozens more have arrived since I left. (Another lesson I have learned over the years: the CIA will always have lawyers, lots of them, and they will be woven into the fabric of everything the Agency does.) If experience is any guide, many of them will stay there for decades, like I did. They will see their share of controversies and crises, and maybe get sucked into them, like I did. But they will learn, and they will persevere, like I did. Because they love the organization and what it stands for, like I did.

  And perhaps, if they are lucky—like I was—a few will someday, when they are much older, have the opportunity to put their experiences down in writing, to give their young colleagues and their fellow citizens on the outside a sense of what it was all like, what it was all about, and why it was all worth it.

  Which, now that all is said and done, are the reasons I decided to write this book.

  My first CIA-badge photograph when I entered on duty in January 1976. Note the dark hair and bewildered expression.

  Aerial view of CIA headquarters “campus.” My home away from home for thirty-four years. (Photographs in the Carol M. Highsmith Archive, Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division)

  William Colby and George H. W. Bush, the first two CIA directors I served under. I went on to work for ten more. (AP Photo/John Duricka)

  Ankle deep in mud in the Dead Sea in 1981. The photographer was from a foreign intelligence service; the bottle of beer was from Egypt.

  A surreptitious photo of me taken by a foreign intelligence service while I was traveling abroad circa 1985. That night, the photo was slipped under my hotel door, apparently just to let me know that my movements were being watched.

  Oliver North testifying
before the Iran-contra committee in July 1987. I first met Ollie several years earlier, before he became famous. (AP Photo/Lana Harris)

  Duane (Dewey) Clarridge. The most colorful, controversial CIA operative I ever dealt with. Iran-contra destroyed his career. (The New York Times)

  With director Bob Gates at his farewell ceremony in late 1992. He was a CIA “lifer” like me, and I came to like and respect him immensely.

  Aldrich Ames after his arrest in 1994. The most evil, destructive CIA traitor in history. I couldn’t seem to avoid him after he first came under suspicion. (AP Photo/Wilfredo Lee)

  President Bush with director George Tenet at CIA headquarters in March 2001. I was surprised and delighted when the new president kept George at the helm. (AP Photo/Pablo Martinez)

  Getting an award from director George Tenet in late 2002 after my first stint as acting general counsel. My wife, Sharon, is in the middle. George’s inscription on the photo: “Well, you kept me out of the slammer.” George was the most “regular guy” director I ever worked for.

  With my CIA colleague Jennifer Millerwise at the U.S. military airport in Kabul, Afghanistan, in 2005. Two Washington desk jockeys in Kevlar jackets.