Worthy Fights: A Memoir of Leadership in War and Peace

by Leon Panetta

  Obama sat in a wingback chair, and I sat on the couch to his left. The officers also sat on couches. Jeremy pulled up a chair, and we were joined by one other White House aide, Deputy Chief of Staff Mona Sutphen.

  The president spoke first. “Look,” he said, “we have a court hearing tomorrow, and our lawyers think we are going to lose this case. I basically agree with them. And then not only will we have to turn over the memos, but we’ll be accused of being obstinate. If we are going to get the same result, I’d at least like us to get the credit for being transparent.”

  He then turned to me.

  I began, “I brought these guys here because I want you to hear about the impact of revealing interrogation memos.” Then I summarized my concerns about the release of the memos. Most important, I added, I wanted the president to have the benefit of the agency’s best minds on this topic.

  The president had already told us what he was thinking, but he stressed that he was open to input. Every person from the agency who was with me that day spoke against the release, some cautiously, others vehemently. The president listened. He never looked at his watch or showed any sign of impatience. He asked a few questions and seemed genuinely to appreciate the depth of conviction, sincerity, and anxiety that our people conveyed. Once everyone had spoken, he paused for a moment. “Let me take this one back,” he said. He did not promise to change his mind, but he did listen, and his willingness to consider those objections impressed my colleagues immensely. Before we left, he also accepted my invitation to come visit the CIA at the earliest opportunity.

  The following day, he ruled against us and released the documents. In doing so, however, the president took great pains to avoid jeopardizing his relationship with the CIA, which he recognized was crucial to his success. He carefully balanced his remarks, noting that while he believed “strongly in transparency and accountability,” he also recognized the need to protect certain classified information in a “dangerous world.” The “exceptional circumstances” surrounding these memos compelled their release, he insisted. He also had comforting words for officers of the CIA: “In releasing these memos it is our intention to assure those who carried out their duties relying in good faith upon legal advice from the Department of Justice that they will not be subject to prosecution.”

  Despite those assurances, and even though many of the techniques described in the memos had already been publicly reported, their release created the expected stir. There was something chillingly banal about the methodical detailing of “dietary manipulation,” “nudity,” and other techniques leading up to waterboarding, which the lawyers approved even though they recognized that it induced the sensation of drowning and thus did “cause fear and panic.”1

  I wasn’t surprised at the president’s decision. I recognized that the concerns of the CIA had to be balanced against other imperatives of the administration, and I understood the president’s rationale. In addition, the president’s decision was considerably softened by the other news I got that day: He intended to visit the CIA as soon as he returned from Mexico. On April 20, he did.

  When the president arrived at Langley that afternoon, he rode up the elevator and I met him when he got out at the seventh floor inside my office suite. First the president joined me on the couches in my office for a short discussion with Steve Kappes, whom Obama had personally called before releasing the memos. Joining us from the White House were Rahm Emanuel and John Brennan. Denny Blair was also there. We chatted about the memo release, but quickly pivoted to the importance of keeping the pressure on Al Qaeda. Obama knew the agency well enough to know that if Kappes had doubts about his resolve, others would share them; alternatively, Kappes’s endorsement would persuade many of our colleagues that the president could be trusted. The president addressed Kappes directly and made clear that he was not shrinking from the fight against Al Qaeda.

  Next we gathered a few dozen officers from across the agency for the chance to speak with the president. The officers selected for this meeting were in their seats thirty minutes prior to the event, which was held in a conference room in my office suite. They waited in silence. As he entered, they stood politely, but there was uneasiness in the room. The president spoke first, standing behind a small lectern in the front that had been brought by the White House advance staff. He acknowledged that his decision to release the memos had come over my objections, and stressed that he understood the reservations CIA officers had regarding a review of practices that he had deplored but that they had undertaken with authorization. As he had a few days earlier, he stressed that no one would be prosecuted who had stayed within the legal authority laid out in the memos.

  The president’s ease and confidence, coupled with his clear appreciation of the equities at stake, went a long way to mollifying the concerns in the room. A number of officers asked cautious questions, and then one mustered up her courage and said what many were undoubtedly thinking. Her voice quavering slightly, she pleaded with Obama to recognize her commitment and that of her colleagues to protecting the country from a genuine threat. For her—and for many of my new associates—the underlying fear of the new president and his administration was not so much that Obama would put CIA officers in jail but rather that his unwillingness to condone rough interrogation reflected a larger sense that Al Qaeda wasn’t really that grave a threat.

  “Al Qaeda is dangerous,” this officer said emphatically. “We need to keep after it.”

  Obama nodded, plainly moved. “I get it,” he said.

  It occurred to me in that moment that the workforce could handle revelations about the prior administration’s counterterrorism policies. Our employees even could withstand investigations and recriminations. What they could not abide was any suggestion that we were flinching in our commitment to the mission.

  A few minutes later, the president appeared downstairs in the grand entryway of the CIA, familiar to every viewer of Homeland or any one of dozens of CIA-based dramas. There, on the iconic tile floor and before the wall on which the names of fallen officers are inscribed, he and I were greeted to a raucous, warm welcome—so warm, in fact, that it took both of us slightly by surprise. The CIA is a unique agency with a singular mission, but its employees are no longer just the Ivy League spies of the early Cold War. Today’s CIA draws from all walks of American life, and the boisterous applause for the new president—from seasoned CIA officers, cafeteria workers, gift shop employees, and security guards—was a reminder of the exuberance so many Americans felt for this young, inspiring new chief executive.

  I laughed that the crowd seemed awfully loud for a group known as “silent warriors,” and the president was interrupted time and again by laughter and applause.

  The heart of his speech deserves to be quoted at length:

  There have been some conversations that I’ve had with senior folks here at Langley in which I think people have expressed understandable anxiety and concern. So I want to make a point that I just made in the smaller group. I understand that it’s hard when you are asked to protect the American people against people who have no scruples and would willingly and gladly kill innocents. Al Qaeda is not constrained by a constitution. Many of our adversaries are not constrained by a belief in freedom of speech or representation in court or rule of law. So I’m sure that sometimes it seems as if that means we’re operating with one hand tied behind our back or that those who would argue for a higher standard are naive. I understand that. You know, I watch the cable shows once in a while.

  What makes the United States special, and what makes you special, is precisely the fact that we are willing to uphold our values and our ideals even when it’s hard, not just when it’s easy, even when we are afraid and under threat, not just when it’s expedient to do so. That’s what makes us different. So, yes, you’ve got a harder job, and so do I. And that’s okay, because that’s why we can take such extraordinary pride in being Americans. And over the long
term, that is why I believe we will defeat our enemies, because we’re on the better side of history.

  So don’t be discouraged by what’s happened in the last few weeks. Don’t be discouraged that we have to acknowledge, potentially, we’ve made some mistakes. That’s how we learn. But the fact that we are willing to acknowledge them and then move forward, that is precisely why I am proud to be President of the United States, and that’s why you should be proud to be members of the CIA.2

  Before I leave the discussion of enhanced interrogation, let me add a personal note. As director of the CIA, I never had to grapple with the legal and moral implications of extracting information from a prisoner by stripping him naked, slapping him, depriving him of sleep, or making him think he’s drowning. President Obama abolished those practices before I was even confirmed. I do, however, believe he was right to take that action, even if it has consequences that many critics of the practices would prefer not to acknowledge.

  Extremists on both sides of the interrogation debate avoid subtleties and prefer to shade the conversation in their favor by ignoring what they dislike to hear. Proponents, such as former CIA counterterrorism chief Jose Rodriguez, maintain that without those techniques, America will be helpless against fanatical enemies such as Al Qaeda.3 Rodriguez is an admirable public servant, and he makes a good case, but his analysis underplays the important intelligence leads gained without resorting to harsh interrogation and pays too little heed to the damage done to American values by stooping to the practice. On the other side, many critics of those same techniques contend that humiliating or inflicting psychological pressure on a prisoner yields little and that the same information could be gotten through strong questioning pursuant to military guidelines—a position that Bob Mueller of the FBI made to me in one of our early conversations.

  In support of that position, some critics of enhanced interrogation argue that none of the harshly interrogated suspects coughed up information that led directly to the eventual elimination of, most notably, Osama bin Laden. That’s true, but only up to a point. Harsh interrogation did cause some prisoners to yield to their captors and produced leads that helped our government understand Al Qaeda’s organization, methods, and leadership. The interrogation techniques so coolly described in those memos are not intended to jolt a prisoner into a sudden admission, but rather to break him down and convince him that he has no choice but to cooperate. In many instances, that is precisely what happened. No one shouted out bin Laden’s address when strapped to a waterboard. Rather, it was the slow accumulation of leads, one building on the last, some extracted, unfortunately, after unsavory techniques were used.

  At bottom, we know we got important, even critical intelligence from individuals subjected to these enhanced interrogation techniques. What we can’t know—what we’ll never know—is whether those were the only ways to elicit that information.

  If a future president ever asked me whether we should go back to those techniques, I would say no. I believe they cut too deeply into America’s sense of itself. We take deserved pride in being a country devoted to decency and respect for human dignity, and shoving a man into a box is incompatible with those ideals. It is foolish to maintain that those interrogations did not achieve anything, but it is also callous to pretend that we did not sacrifice idealism in return for those leads. Similarly, we should be clear-eyed about the fact that we gave up those practices at a cost—that there is information we might never have received had interrogators not been allowed to inflict pressure, anxiety, and even pain on subjects. I believe we must pay that cost anyway. We are truer to our ideals now that we have renounced enhanced interrogation, and in the long run it is our ideals that will cause us to prevail. As the president said, our ultimate victory against those who seek to destroy this country will be won not just by force but by our determination to stay true to the “better side of history.” That will make it a victory worth savoring.

  • • •

  Although the president ruled against me in the debate over the memos, my defense of the CIA’s position helped make clear that I was willing to fight for my new colleagues. That went a long way toward establishing my leadership internally. Externally, however, we still had a big challenge. That was especially true on the Hill, where the CIA has historically served as a convenient whipping boy, and it was certainly the case in early 2009. Democrats were in control of both houses of Congress and thus controlled both intelligence committees, and Democrats are not famously supportive of the CIA. By the end of the Bush years they had so thoroughly honed their attacks on the agency that they seemed incapable of shifting gears.

  My first trips to the Hill to meet with the committees reflected the built-up mistrust between the members and the agency. We met in formal hearing rooms, with the members seated above and before me and my deputies. They would take turns barking questions at me, demanding documents, and openly displaying their skepticism of my answers. Pete Hoekstra, the ranking Republican on the House Intelligence Committee, was a particularly aggressive questioner, lacing his queries with partisan innuendo. Democrats were not immune and often used the hearings to lob partisan volleys at their Republican colleagues. At times I felt like shaking them and saying, “People, the election is over. Time to move on.”

  Bill Danvers, my able congressional liaison, had an idea to change the format of the meetings, moving from the hearing-style venues to gathering around a table. We drank coffee and talked as colleagues rather than talking up or down to one another. Right away the atmosphere changed from a grilling to a conversation, and we established a tone of respectful engagement. I painstakingly briefed the committees on anything that seemed germane to their oversight and attempted to answer all questions. As I reminded them, I came from Congress, and I knew the importance of its function.

  There is a difference, however, between respect and subservience. I was not prepared to simply roll over. In May, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, a leading critic of Bush-era intelligence activities who had chaired the House Intelligence Committee in the early 2000s, spoke at a press conference and, in response to a question from Jon Karl, stated that she had been briefed on waterboarding but that the agency had assured her it had not engaged in that practice. That seemed hard to believe. We had records that she and her colleagues were briefed on September 4, 2002, and were told in that session that Abu Zubaydah, the CIA’s very first detainee, was subjected to waterboarding.

  I watched Pelosi’s press conference from my office with Steve Kappes and Jeremy. Both thought we would have to respond publicly. As Pelosi well knew, it’s a crime to lie to Congress, so she was accusing top officials of the CIA not only of having concealed a matter of intense national security importance but also conceivably of having committed a federal offense.

  I had no particular desire to wage war with the Speaker of the House—a fellow Democrat and a fellow Californian whom I had known since my days in Congress, when we often got together for dinner—but I certainly was not going to let my deputies be accused of lying when the record so clearly contradicted the claims against them. I prepared a chart of forty congressional briefings, including the one from 2002, and released it publicly. I also invited members of Congress and their aides to review the full notes of the meetings, which remained classified. Most important, I worked with Jeremy and our public affairs chief, Paul Gimigliano, to craft an e-mail to CIA employees that we also released to the news media. It read, in part:

  There is a long tradition in Washington of making political hay out of our business. It predates my service with this great institution, and it will be around long after I’m gone. But the political debates about interrogation reached a new decibel level yesterday when the CIA was accused of lying to Congress.

  Let me be clear: It is not our policy or practice to lie to Congress. That is against our laws and our values. . . . Our contemporaneous records from Sept 2002 indicate that the CIA officer briefed truthfully on the interrogatio
n of Abu Zubayda, describing the “enhanced techniques that had been employed.”

  My advice—indeed, my direction—to you is straightforward: ignore the noise and stay focused on your mission. We have too much work to do to be distracted from our job of protecting this country. . . . We are an Agency of high integrity, professionalism and dedication. Our task is to tell it like it is—even if that’s not what people always want to hear. Keep it up. Our national security depends on it.

  “Tell it like it is”—if ever there was a shorthand for the CIA mission, that was it. Pelosi amended her story in the face of our response, but continued to insist that while she was present at the briefing when waterboarding was mentioned, she was told only that the method had been authorized, not that it had been used.* I let the matter drop, believing that I had done what I could. That ended the flap, and I reached out to her a few weeks later. “I regret we went through that,” I told her, “but I hope we can work together.” Pelosi knows politics better than just about anyone; she agreed to put the issue behind us.

  The dispute with the Speaker notwithstanding, relations with the Hill gradually improved, both in tone and substance. I traveled often to Congress personally, and I worked to unearth any operations or policy matters that deserved the attention of the committees. One of those has recently become the source of some controversy, so it bears special mention.

  In June, a couple of our people in the National Clandestine Service somewhat sheepishly informed me of a program they felt they should bring to my attention. As they explained it, it was a counterterrorism program designed to locate terrorists across the world. Even though the program had only been planned—that is, it had not gone “operational”—it was still an important change in the way the CIA would do its business. The Bush White House had blessed the program. But the agency had not briefed the congressional intelligence committees about the training that had been done, the money spent, or some of the people the agency was working with in this effort, which some agency officials justified because the program was still not operational. Yet I was concerned, because I knew Congress would hit the roof if it found out about this activity from a press leak or through some other channel.