Deep State

by Marc Ambinder

  McChrystal inherited a command that included the military’s brightest and boldest but also most overburdened. Indeed, his predecessor, Major General Dell Dailey, wanted to scale back JSOC’s missions after Afghanistan in order to give the teams time to regroup. Rangers, in particular, had just finished Operation Winter Strike, clearing large swaths of territory in Afghanistan at the end of 2003. Task Force 1-21, JSOC’s regional task force, followed. The demands on JSOC were prodigious, and it lacked a strategy or central focus for success. Even though the spigot of money for counterterrorism operations was open, the Command often had to beg to get a fixed-wing aircraft in the air. Simply put, JSOC lacked the resources, the structure, and the strategy to carry out its mission. McChrystal’s first instinct was true to his infantry roots: he wanted more combined arms training for the units, but he quickly realized he had a much larger problem. As the war in Iraq turned ugly, no one really knew how to solve what in military terms was known as the “OODA problem.”

  An OODA loop is a term coined by the late military strategist John Boyd to refer to the way fighting organizations adapt: observe, orient, decide, and act. The challenge of fighting insurgencies is that smaller groups tend to outlast their larger adversaries because small groups have OODA loops measured in nanoseconds when compared with the lumbering decision chains of major world armies. The enemy is thus always a step ahead of even armies with the best technology and hardened soldiers.

  Complicating matters was the existence of excess “blinks” between the development of a piece of intelligence and its use on the battlefield. Most of the actionable intelligence the United States received came from foreign sources (the Brits were particularly good in Iraq, as were the Kurds). The National Security Agency had yet to get a full read on Iraq’s rudimentary but highly distributed cell telephone network. The U.S. intelligence community bickered over high-tech surveillance resources, and agencies refused to talk to one another. British journalist Mark Urban, writing in Task Force Black, a narrative history about U.S.-UK cooperation in Iraq, quotes a senior British officer as saying that the CIA’s refusal to share information with even its own countrymen was “catastrophic.”

  Such confusion and desperation are two reasons harsh interrogations seemed morally permissible at the time. At the very least, enemy combatants would say something, which would set in motion kinetic operations. This at least gave the appearance of movement toward a goal.

  In the early days of the chase for al-Qaeda and the Taliban in Afghanistan, the CIA and the U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) did most of the interrogating. JSOC intelligence gatherers watched but did not participate. By October 2002, an internal JSOC assessment of interrogations at Bagram Airfield, Afghanistan, and Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, found that the resistance techniques of enemy combatants “outmatched” the interrogation techniques of U.S. forces. Higher headquarters was not satisfied with the results, and JSOC picked up the rope. The Command established a task force to determine whether its operators should directly interrogate the “designated unlawful combatants” they captured. One month later, U.S. military survival, evasion, resistance, and escape (SERE) instructors taught certain members of JSOC the finer points of harsh interrogation. (These operators, like all members of the special operations forces community, had previously attended SERE school as prisoners so as to learn how to effectively resist torture.) Around this time, some JSOC operators were read in to a classified program called MATCHBOX that included direct authorization to use certain aggressive interrogation techniques in the field (for example, the best way to throw a detainee against a wall).

  Who chartered MATCHBOX (also known by the unclassified nickname COPPER GREEN, as revealed by journalist Seymour Hersh) remains a mystery. No one wants to take credit for it. Yet as a result of the program, JSOC adopted a standard operating procedure (SOP) for Afghanistan that included the use of stress positions, barking dogs, and sleep deprivation, among various other physical inducements.

  When JSOC Task Force 6-26 set up operations in Iraq, it extended the practice, copying the SOP in its entirety, essentially only changing “Afghanistan” to “Iraq” on its letterhead. The primary mission of 6-26 was to hunt, kill, or capture high-value targets. At the top of the list: former senior members of the Baathist regime, followed by al-Qaeda and foreign fighters who flocked to the war zone en masse seeking a pound of Uncle Sam’s flesh.

  Just after the fall of Saddam Hussein, U.S. Army Rangers claimed a small Iraqi military base near Baghdad International Airport for use by special operations forces. Camp Nama, as it is called, was purposed to hold enemy combatants thought to possess actionable intelligence about the locations of 6-26 targets. The limits of enemy interrogation as defined in a revised, more humane SOP soon fell by the wayside. Personnel from Task Force 6-26 (with the participation of members of the DIA) subjected prisoners to intense physical, psychological, and occasionally lethal interrogation.

  The Senate Armed Services Committee investigation into detainee abuse in Iraq includes several harrowing accounts of the interactions between conventional military officers and JSOC commanders. Reportedly, special operations officers acted as though they were above the law, and the Senate review later concluded that JSOC interrogators regularly brutalized their detainees. At the time, members of both the CIA and the DIA sent word up their respective chains of command that JSOC was possibly breaking the law. An effort by the Defense Department requiring JSOC to adhere to its own set of interrogation standards was ignored. One senior Joint Staff official testified that he would give 6-26 commanders a copy of the new SOP to sign every day. Every day, it would be “lost.” It was never signed.

  During numerous visits by outside personnel, higher-ranking non-JSOC officers halted interrogations midway. JSOC personnel seemed to be flaunting their harsh techniques with impunity. It got so bad that by late 2003 the DIA, the FBI, and British interrogation teams stopped all cooperation with JSOC.

  The lack of accountability was startling to long-term military interrogators such as Lieutenant Colonel Steven Kleinman, who had been dispatched to Iraq to review and modify JSOC detainee operations. One Iraqi was picked up for allegedly knowing a lot about bridges. The bridges in question turned out to be of the calcium-and-enamel variety—he was a dentist. Kleinman later testified that he considered the JSOC facility to be “uncontrolled.”

  McChrystal commanded JSOC for more than a year before the harsh interrogations finally stopped. People close to McChrystal say that when he toured Camp Nama facilities, the interrogators would be on their best behavior and seemed to be following the classified SOP he had approved. By the end of 2004, however, it became clear that the abuses were habitual and institutionalized. According to Urban, the British Special Air Service (SAS) informed McChrystal that it would no longer participate in operations where detainees were sent to “black” sites, which now included a kennel-like compound near Balad, Iraq, and another at Bagram Airfield in Afghanistan. Up until that point, SAS units had been instrumental in helping JSOC uncover the rudiments of an intelligence railway that allowed al-Qaeda to penetrate Iraq so easily.

  McChrystal ordered deputy commanding general Eric Fiel to quietly review the practices at Camp Nama. The review, which remains classified and locked in a vault at Pope Army Airfield, resulted in disciplinary action against more than forty JSOC personnel. Several promising careers—including that of the colonel responsible for Nama at the time of the abuses—were ended. McChrystal has since told associates that he did not fully appreciate the degree to which interrogators at all levels lacked guidance and direction.

  When the extent of the abuses at Camp Nama was made public, Under Secretary of Defense Cambone was furious at McChrystal, accusing the general of abusing the authority given to him. McChrystal, to put it mildly, did not appreciate being blamed for a program he had not created and by most accounts knew almost nothing about. A still-classified internal Pentagon investigation of McChrystal was initiated on Cambone’s insistence.
Its conclusions are not publicly available, but based on McChrystal’s meteoric rise, one can extrapolate that the conclusions did not undermine confidence in the Pope.

  In some ways, the detainee abuse scandals gave McChrystal a platform to clean house at JSOC, and by most accounts he did. He flew to JSOC operating locations around the world and insisted that the era of harsh interrogations—except in the direst of circumstances—was over.

  “My sense is that we just didn’t know much about how to work or handle the detainees,” said a senior military official whose service at JSOC spanned the Afghanistan and Iraq campaigns. “The mistakes that were made during our initial forays into detainee exploitation were more about ignorance and just trying to figure out this art, rather than any malicious attempt to violate any policies or regulations. We also suffered from a lack of trained personnel who didn’t understand what was effective interrogation.” But then, he added, “General McChrystal’s leadership drove the need for a fix and professionalizing the force, and then general [Michael] Flynn drove the execution.”

  No doubt, when Bradley Manning turned his trove of secrets over to WikiLeaks, everyone involved assumed that they would find something scandalous on the scale of waterboarding, black sites, or Abu Ghraib. With conflicts as complicated and sprawling as the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, those who were most skeptical of American military power were sure there must have been the murder of civilians, the corruption of foreign politicians, breaches of the Geneva Conventions, or at least collusion with some lesser of evils. When there wasn’t anything grand enough, they worked to create something with the “Collateral Murder” tape.

  This is not to claim the government is not currently engaged in morally or tactically questionable activities. Obviously, that’s impossible to say definitively, and skepticism will always be warranted. At the same time, this is no longer Hoover and Eisenhower’s national security state. So many people know about sensitive operations—people in lower levels of authority, with “civilian” mindsets and unlimited access to new ways to leak—that it’s clear that Eisenhower’s “someday” is now “someday soon.” The period between the time that a secret is established and the time that it is disclosed has narrowed significantly, and those running operations of any sort can’t depend on a thoughtful history judging them, but a heated and partisan present.

  While this change owes a lot to the radical growth of the secrecy machine after 9/11 and the concurrent rise of the Internet, it really began in the 1970s. For the first time, that was when Americans really got a picture of what went on in the more secret corridors of power, and it wasn’t always pretty.

  Notes

  1. Dwight D. Eisenhower, Mandate for Change, 1953–1956 (New York: Doubleday, 1963), 90.

  2. Ralph E. Weber, Spymasters: Ten CIA Officers in Their Own Words (Wilmington, DE: Scholarly Resources, 1999), 117.

  3. D. K. R. Crosswell, Beetle: The Life of General Walter Bedell Smith (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2010), 48.

  4. Ibid.

  5. Tim Weiner, Legacy of Ashes: The History of the CIA (New York: Doubleday, 2007), 80.

  6. Ibid., 76.

  7. Roger Z. George and Robert D. Kline, eds., Intelligence and the National Security Strategist: Enduring Issues and Challenges (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2005), 437.

  8. Ibid.; David M. Barrett, The CIA and Congress: The Untold Story from Truman to Kennedy (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2005), 380.

  9. Christopher Andrew, For the President’s Eyes Only: Secret Intelligence and the American Presidency from Washington to Bush (New York: HarperPerennial, 1996), 222.

  10. Barrett, The CIA and Congress, 385.

  11. Clarence R. Wyatt, Paper Soldiers: The American Press and the Vietnam War (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), 20.

  12. Ronald Kessler, The CIA at War (New York: St. Martin’s, 2003), 67.

  13. Ibid.

  14. Barrett, The CIA and Congress, 381–382.

  15. Ibid., 386.

  16. Kessler, The CIA at War, 68.

  17. Barrett, The CIA and Congress, 416.

  18. Donald Rumsfeld, memorandum to Steve Cambone, September 12, 2003.

  19. General Wayne Downing, memorandum for the Secretary of Defense and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Special Operations Force Assessment, November 9, 2005. http://library.rumsfeld.com/doclib/sp/413/2005-11-09%20from%20General%20Wayne%20Downing%20re%20Special%20Operations%20Force%20Assesment.pdf.

  CHAPTER 6

  The Horrors Book

  On December 22, 1974, Sy Hersh pulled back the drapes of the Central Intelligence Agency, and sunlight annihilated everything in its path. Under the headline “Huge C.I.A. Operation Reported in U.S. Against Anti-War Forces, Other Dissidents in Nixon Years,” the New York Times reported that the CIA had engaged in widespread domestic spying in flagrant violation of its charter. Hersh’s reporting was incomplete and distorted, but it was sufficient to light a fuse that ended in an explosion at Langley. According to the report, the Company had engaged in mass “break-ins, wiretapping, and the surreptitious inspection of mail.” It had allegedly accumulated ten thousand files on U.S. citizens. The targets weren’t necessarily spies or saboteurs; they were antiwar activists and members of Congress.

  And for President Gerald Ford, that was the good news.

  Two weeks later, in an Oval Office meeting with the president, Secretary of State Henry Kissinger would describe “the horrors book”—an accounting by William Colby, the newly appointed director of central intelligence, of Agency activities over the years. The litany of abuses, though ended years before and “undertaken in totally different circumstances than today’s,” left the president “concerned that the CIA would be destroyed.”1

  Among the legal violations by the Agency that most alarmed Colby:

  A two-year confinement and interrogation of a Russian defector. Because former director of central intelligence John McCone approved the defector’s imprisonment on U.S. soil, which was highly unusual, the Agency had possibly violated kidnapping laws.

  The surveillance of investigative journalists Jack Anderson, Mike Getler, Brit Hume, Victor Marchetti, Robert Allen, and Paul Scott, among others.

  CIA plots to assassinate Fidel Castro of Cuba, Patrice Lumumba of Congo, and Rafael Trujillo of the Dominican Republic. (The Agency had no active involvement in the deaths of the latter two, and no success against Castro.)

  And Colby was still digging.2

  That day, the president signed Executive Order 11828, establishing a commission led by Vice President Nelson Rockefeller to “ascertain and evaluate any facts relating to activities conducted within the United States by the Central Intelligence Agency which give rise to questions of compliance with the provisions of [law].” Furthermore, the commission was charged with evaluating the legal mechanisms designed to keep the CIA in line, and advising the president as needed. It was to be a White House end run around those calling for a full-scale investigation.

  Congress, by and large, was not impressed.

  On February 20, 1975, the White House national security team gathered in Secretary of State Kissinger’s office. The secretary opened the meeting by noting that “the nature of covert operations will have a curious aspect to the average mind and out of perspective it could look inexplicable.” Kissinger didn’t have the same problem in mind that Eisenhower did when he said there’d be a storm; the negative reaction he was predicting was entirely domestic and entirely political. The result of open congressional investigations, Kissinger predicted, “could be the drying up of the imaginations of the people on which we depend if people think they will be indicted ten years later for what they do.”3

  In Kissinger’s office were the men who knew where the bodies were buried. There was little love lost among one another, and since they had been tempered under Nixon, there was little doubt that should the hammer drop, no one in the room could trust anyone or one another. Already, Colby sat squarely in Kissinger�
��s crosshairs for having gone to the Justice Department to set matters straight. Colby, more than anyone else in the room, not only knew the secrets but lived them as a highly decorated U.S. Army paratrooper, a CIA case officer, CIA station chief in Saigon, and overseer of the paramilitary Phoenix Program. Where Kissinger wanted entrenchment, Colby immediately and unilaterally embraced transparency, offering Justice a forthright assessment of the CIA’s “family jewels.”

  Executive privilege would allow the White House to resist congressional subpoena authority and control what got out. This would protect not only the men in power, but also secret geopolitical alliances. Said Kissinger, “We have to demonstrate to foreign countries we aren’t too dangerous to cooperate with because of leaks.” (Thirty years later, the Obama administration would fret over the same concern in the aftermath of WikiLeaks.)

  J. Edgar Hoover had died three years before, after putting in a full day at the office. His beloved Bureau, whose image he had spent a lifetime protecting, was now imperiled. Up to the end, however, the director proved to be the most effective operator in Washington. He sensed change in the air, and by 1965 he had discontinued electronic surveillance, garbage searches, and involvement with the Postal Service.4 By 1971, he had ended the Bureau’s blackest of black operations—the COINTELPRO (Counter Intelligence Program) investigations—whose techniques, initially designed to destroy the Communist Party of the USA in the 1950s, would later spread into such activities as exposing homosexuals and extramarital affairs and planting false evidence in order to have suspected communists arrested by local law enforcement.5 By February 20, 1975, the FBI was fully divested of its misadventures.

  The most telling exchange of the meeting was between Phillip Areeda, deputy counsel to the president, and Kissinger. Areeda explained that Senator Frank Church planned to look “into the legal, moral and political cost-effectiveness aspects of [covert operations].”