The Great War of Our Time: The CIA's Fight Against Terrorism--From Al Qa'ida to ISIS

by Michael Morell

  Contrast that with the conclusions at others:

  • The US military was ordered to stand down and not come to the aid of the State Department and CIA officers in Benghazi. Wrong. The House Armed Services Committee report on Benghazi, the House Intelligence Committee report on the issue, and the Senate Intelligence Committee report on Benghazi all specifically concluded that this assertion was false.

  • The CIA officers in Benghazi were ordered to stand down and not come to the rescue of their comrades at the TMF. Wrong, as I have already explained. Again, the Senate Intelligence Committee and the House Intelligence Committee said there was no evidence to support this allegation.

  • There was a conspiracy between CIA and the White House to spin the Benghazi story in a way that would protect the political interests of the president and Secretary Clinton. Again, wrong. There was no such conspiracy, as I have already explained, and there is no evidence to support such a theory. No committee of Congress that has studied Benghazi has come to this conclusion.

  The second irony is that some believe the CIA leadership, including me, should have forced the analysts to accept COS Tripoli’s view that there had not been a protest outside the TMF, while at the same time they firmly reject another view of the COS, who wrote that one of the possible motivations for the attack on the TMF had been the YouTube video. These critics cannot have it both ways—accepting from a source, our COS, what fits their narrative and rejecting from the same source what does not.

  Finally, the third and most important irony: my critics have alleged that I misled the American people about what happened in Benghazi, while the truth is that they are the ones misleading the public—in almost everything they say about the issue. For example, in multiple commentaries after my open testimony before the House Intelligence Committee, a small number of members of Congress and a small segment of the media got many facts wrong in talking about me and my role in Benghazi. As Daniel Patrick Moynihan once said, “Everyone is entitled to his own opinion, but not to his own facts.”

  The best example of this is an op-ed written in the days after my testimony by Michael Mukasey, who was an attorney general in the Bush administration, and who was writing in support of my critics. In only a dozen paragraphs, Mukasey, a former US district judge as well as a former US attorney, made seven factual errors. Here are a handful:

  • Mr. Mukasey wrote, “Mr. Morell changed ‘terrorist’ to ‘extremist’ ” in the talking points. No, I did not. As is clear from the e-mails released by the White House in the spring of 2013, no one changed “terrorist” to “extremist.” The original draft of the talking points, written by our most senior terrorism analyst, said “extremist.”

  • Mr. Mukasey wrote, “He [meaning me] substituted ‘demonstration’ for ‘attack’ ” in the talking points. No, I did not. As my sworn testimony and the e-mails make clear, this change was made by others at the Agency and before I ever saw the talking points.

  • Mr. Mukasey wrote, “Yet the CIA was asked soon after the attack by the White House to help draft ‘talking points,’ which should have tipped him [again meaning me] off that some extramural talking was planned.” Not even close. No one has ever claimed that the White House asked for the talking points. Again, as all the evidence makes clear, the House Intelligence Committee asked Director Petraeus for the talking points.

  Even Representative Trey Gowdy, the leader of the House Select Committee on Benghazi, got his facts wrong in the days immediately following his appointment as chairman of the committee. Gowdy, before being elected to Congress, was a career federal and state prosecutor and a very good one. He rightfully prides himself on uncovering the facts and letting them take him to a conclusion. But even he made mistakes.

  In media appearances after his appointment as chairman, Gowdy said that I had changed “attacks” to “demonstrations” in the CIA talking points. This is untrue. He said that I had changed “terrorist” to “extremist” in the talking points. This is untrue. And he said that the initial draft of the talking points had included the warnings that CIA had provided to the State Department. Again, this is untrue. Later drafts included the warning language, but not the initial draft and not the final one. Even the Congress’s best and brightest was getting things wrong about Benghazi.

  In a press conference after my testimony, Senators McCain and Graham made a similar number of factual errors in attempting to argue that my appearance had raised more questions than it answered. Senator McCain said that the Tripoli station chief had reported “immediately” after the attack that there had been no protest. This report was not immediate; it came over three days after the attacks. The senator also said I had been the acting director at the time of the attacks. Wrong again. I was deputy director. Dave Petraeus was the director. For his part, Senator Graham said that he knew I had not removed the reference to al Qa‘ida from the talking points, “but he [meaning me] did everything else.” False. Many others within and outside CIA made changes to the talking points.

  I do not know why my critics have gotten the details so wrong. Perhaps it was poor staff work. Perhaps it was the inaccurate facts repeated over and over again by some in the media. Some of Gowdy’s inaccurate statements, for example, mirrored those of Michael Mukasey. In any case, such inaccuracies have serious consequences because inaccurate facts lead to inaccurate narratives and inaccurate conclusions—which lead to inaccurate understandings on the part of the American people. The administration’s critics were doing exactly what they accused the administration of doing.

  * * *

  I was acting director for four months of the Benghazi controversy—from early November 2012 until March—and I directed that two studies be undertaken—one on why our analysis had been wrong with regard to the protest and another on how we could have done a better job on the talking points. Both studies found fault inside the Agency, and both studies offered extensive lessons learned. I sent the first study—on the analysis—to Congress in January 2013. But for months the White House would not allow me to send the second study—on the talking points—to the Hill, citing executive privilege. I finally did so without asking—after the White House had released publicly all the e-mails related to the talking points. But that did not happen until a few weeks before I left government. It should have happened much sooner.

  In my opinion two broad lessons can be learned from all this. First, CIA should stay out of the talking point business—especially on issues that are being seized upon for political purposes. Those who want to speak publicly on a national security issue should write their own talking points, and then CIA can advise them on what is accurate and unclassified—but holding the pen in the first instance is fraught with peril. CIA officers are not trained to communicate with the American people, and sometimes we do not do it well. The best example is that to us, “extremists” was synonymous with “terrorists.” That was clearly not the case for many in the public.

  Second, when an administration finds itself in a mess like this, the best remedy is transparency, as early and as fully as possible. I know that sounds odd coming from someone who has spent his life at a secretive agency—but we would have been much better off if the administration had released the full surveillance video of the attacks of 9/11/12, had released its own talking points on the issue, and had released the chain of e-mails on the evolution of the CIA talking points as soon as Benghazi started to become politically controversial. And it was a mistake on the part of the administration to withhold materials from Congress on any aspect of Benghazi.

  * * *

  What is most frustrating to me is that all the hubbub over the talking points and politics has meant that much of the public has missed the key question—in the years ahead, how are we going to keep American diplomats as safe as possible overseas? Benghazi will not be the last US diplomatic post to be attacked by terrorists. There will be many other attempts, and some will be successful. We need to do a better job to protecting those who serve our nation ov
erseas.

  I see three keys to mitigating this threat. One: At some spots in the world, the United States will need tactical warning, the same kind of tactical warning we have on a battlefield to protect our soldiers. If we’d had that in Benghazi, we almost certainly would have heard the chatter as the extremists were preparing to attack both the TMF and the Annex. Any advance warning—even one just minutes ahead—could have been the difference between life and death. Two: We must provide the best and latest security for Americans serving overseas. They are putting their lives on the line for their country, and they deserve the very best security. That did not happen in the case of Benghazi. And three: We and our allies must oppose and combat terrorists wherever they pose a threat to us—or they will come after us. All three of these responses cost money, of course—a lot of money. The bottom line is that protecting Americans abroad cannot be done on the cheap.

  * * *

  My final point has to do with the raw nature of America’s current political system. Politicians are so fixated on scoring points and thinking in terms of partisan advantage that they project these same attitudes and behaviors on public servants. They have a hard time understanding that intelligence professionals are trained to be objective, not political. They have a hard time remembering that we serve Democrats and Republicans with the same professionalism and dedication. Accusing CIA of playing politics with talking points comes naturally to those who think and work only in a political environment and who survive by shaping talking points (or thirty-second spots) regardless of the facts.

  * * *

  April 14, 2014, House Intelligence Committee hearing on Benghazi. Selected excerpt:

  THE CHAIRMAN (MR. MIKE ROGERS, CONGRESSMAN FROM MICHIGAN’S EIGHTH CONGRESSIONAL DISTRICT): Mr. Morell.… At any time did you have any verbal conversations with anybody at the White House about what the nature of those talking points were and what they needed to look like?

  Mr. Morell: No, sir.

  THE CHAIRMAN: At any time did you have any conversation with anybody at the White House, and I mean anybody, that had anything to do with preparing Susan Rice for going out and being the face for America on that September 16?

  Mr. Morell: No, sir. In fact, I didn’t even know she was going to be on the Sunday shows.

  * * *

  April 14, 2014, House Intelligence Committee hearing on Benghazi. Selected quotes:

  MS. JAN SCHAKOWSKY, CONGRESSWOMAN FROM ILLINOIS’S NINTH CONGRESSIONAL DISTRICT: Thank you, Mr. Morell. I really appreciate your testimony and, given your three decades of service to our nation and always looking to protecting our security and never in a partisan role or spirit, I believe what you are telling us today.

  MR. JAMES LANGEVIN, CONGRESSMAN FROM RHODE ISLAND’S SECOND CONGRESSIONAL DISTRICT: You have always put the country first and, in my opinion, have always done your duty and been very candid and forthcoming in your testimony before the committee whenever you’ve appeared before me when I was there, since I’ve been on this committee. And the fact that you are here, voluntarily here, today reinforces how seriously you believe in the truth.

  CHAPTER 11

  Tortured Logic

  Every new job has its obstacles. In the case of the position I started on July 5, 2006, as the number three official in CIA, the doorway to my new office had recently been blocked by crime scene tape. No kidding. As I mentioned earlier, the previous occupant of the office, Dusty Foggo, was under investigation for a variety of wrongdoings and later pleaded guilty to corruption in steering a CIA contract to a friend. The investigation included an FBI raid in mid-May 2006 on his office at CIA and one on his home. Foggo eventually ended up serving several years in federal prison.

  Foggo was a West Coast wheeler-dealer—so the new CIA director, Mike Hayden, had probably wanted someone with my Midwestern straight-arrow image to try to restore respect for the office. After all, in addition to being in charge of administration, budgets, IT, security, and HR, I was also in charge of maintaining good order and discipline at the Agency.

  Foggo, only a mid-level officer when he was promoted to the top of the Agency, had gotten the job by taking very good care of congressional staffers when they visited him in his previous assignment at an overseas post. Foggo treated the staffers well (two weeks after I started in the new job, I found twenty to twenty-five bottles of expensive liquor in a credenza in my office, a special treat for the “right” visitors to Foggo’s office) while bad-mouthing his director George Tenet and the other senior leaders of the Agency. Great guy.

  * * *

  Two days after I started, one of the Agency’s senior attorneys paid me a visit. He said he needed to “read me into [brief me on] a compartmented program.” That is CIA-speak for being brought into the circle of trust on a sensitive operation—in this case the Agency’s detention and interrogation programs. The programs involved the Agency’s establishment, after 9/11, of several secret prisons around the world and the use of harsh interrogation techniques to obtain critical information from the most senior and hardened al Qa‘ida leaders that we kept in those prisons. The programs had been in place since 2002.

  After I signed a document—essentially saying that I understood I could go to jail if I ever disclosed the information in an unauthorized way—the attorney briefed me on the locations of the Agency’s secret detention facilities. He also briefed me on the “enhanced interrogation techniques” (or EITs—CIA’s name for the harsh techniques) designed to teach detainees that they had resisted as much as they could, that they were helpless, and therefore that it was acceptable for them to answer our questions thoroughly and truthfully. He explained each technique in detail. I remember thinking that a few of the techniques, in particular waterboarding, were extraordinarily harsh, but I also learned that of the ten techniques that had originally been authorized only six were still in use, including grabbing detainees to get their attention and depriving them of sleep. Waterboarding was no longer authorized and, in fact, had not been utilized in over three years.

  The lawyer also explained that only about a hundred people had ever been detained by CIA and that of those, fewer than a third had been subjected to enhanced techniques. He noted only three had been waterboarded—the last session having taken place in 2003. He also told me that the techniques were used for only a short time on any detainee (a few days to a few weeks early in their multi-year-long detentions). And he noted that by the time I was being briefed, with hardly any new senior terrorist operatives being caught, the remaining EITs were barely in use at all. But they could still be used if we caught some senior al Qa‘ida associate with knowledge of impending attacks or Bin Ladin’s current location.

  * * *

  On November 4, 2008, the country elected Barack Obama to be our forty-fourth president. His victory was decisive. Obama received 53 percent of the popular vote, the most for a Democrat in over half a century. And he won 365 electoral votes to John McCain’s 173. In terms of the new president’s beloved sport, basketball, it was a blowout.

  Obama wanted to bring considerable forward-looking change to America, but one thing that his victory unleashed was an unrelenting look backward at some of the counterterrorism tools that the Bush administration had used in the aftermath of 9/11. Among those, and by far the most controversial, were CIA’s rendition, detention, and interrogation programs (often lumped together by the acronym RDI). Renditions, a long-standing practice and the key counterterrorism tool used by the Clinton administration, involved CIA’s transporting terrorist suspects from where they were captured to their countries of origin or elsewhere, where they were wanted on charges or otherwise put into a legal process.

  The new president had made his position on these programs clear during the election campaign. He had called for an end to renditions, calling the practice “shipping away prisoners in the dead of night to be tortured in far-off countries.” He’d likewise called for an end to “secret prisons to jail people beyond the reach of the law.” He’d labeled harsh
interrogation techniques “torture.” And he’d suggested that all these practices were inconsistent with American leadership in the world and its commitment to humanity, decency, and respect for all individuals.

  * * *

  Months before the election, the intelligence community began preparing for a new president, and the director of national intelligence at the time, Mike McConnell, asked me—at the time serving as CIA’s director for intelligence, the Agency’s chief analyst—to play a large role in the transition. As had been done historically, the intelligence community offered national security briefings to the candidates. Along with a team, I briefed John McCain—who, given his long service in Congress, particularly on the Senate Armed Services Committee, did not need a briefing. He knew as much as we did about national security.

  And, along with another team, I provided Sarah Palin with her first-ever national security briefing. I was impressed with Governor Palin’s interest in what motivated individual foreign leaders, and it was clear she had a natural understanding of people and how to deal with them. But her knowledge of the world was diametrically opposed to that of her running mate. She knew almost nothing about the key foreign policy and national security issues of the day. In contrast to the many questions she asked about people, she asked almost none about the issues themselves. She was in over her head, she seemed to me to know it, and it was not her fault. I felt sorry she had been put in that situation.

  In addition to giving oral briefings to the candidates, we prepared briefing papers for the senior officials that the new president would bring along with him. We also prepared two briefing packages for the president-elect himself—a package on CIA’s most sensitive programs (of which fewer than ten copies were made) and a book of short biographies of all the world leaders who were likely to call the winner to congratulate him.