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

by Michael Morell

  CIA director David Petraeus gave the first task to the Agency’s general counsel, and gave me, his deputy, the second task. Specifically, he asked me to chair an accountability board of senior officers to sit in judgment of Rodriguez’s action. But given Rodriguez’s past seniority, the ordeal he’d gone through while being investigated by Durham over three years, and the complexity of the subject, I elected to handle the assignment solo. That he was being subjected to another review came as something of a surprise to Rodriguez, who’d thought that Durham’s decision ended the matter. I chose to break the news to him over a drink at a nearby hotel. I explained what the director had asked me to do, and how I’d decided to handle it. Rodriguez told me that he appreciated the way I was handling the matter and answered all my questions about what he’d done and why with thoroughness and honesty.

  After reviewing the matter extensively over the course of a month or so, I had Rodriguez come to my office on December 21, 2011, to hear my decision. I told him that, although I knew he believed that he’d done the Agency and its officers a service by ordering the destruction of the tapes, I believed his action had been inappropriate. I told him that the written record made it clear that he’d known that his bosses, not to mention the White House counsel, did not want the tapes destroyed and that “no organization can function if its officers ignore the wishes of their superiors and just do what they think is right.” I went on, “Jose, you would not have stood for it if people working under you took actions that they knew you were opposed to.” I told him that, given all this, I had decided to issue him a letter of reprimand in order to send a signal to the workforce that the chain of command is sacrosanct. He thanked me again for the manner in which I’d handled the matter, but made it clear to me that he still believed his actions had been necessary and justified and therefore appropriate. I know he continues to believe that to this day. (Because this was an internal personnel matter, I asked for and obtained the permission of Rodriguez to tell this story.)

  * * *

  The first of the two inquiries to reach closure was the Justice Department’s. In late June 2011, Attorney General Holder announced the results of the preliminary investigation by John Durham. Holder said publicly what I had already known via private conversations—that Durham had examined every single interaction that CIA had had with any detainee and that his review had examined whether any unauthorized interrogation techniques had been used by CIA officers, and if so, whether such techniques had constituted a violation of the torture statute or any other applicable statute.

  After two years of investigation, Durham decided that only two matters—the deaths of two detainees—required a full criminal investigation. These cases are well known publicly, but for legal reasons I am not permitted to discuss them here. Importantly, Durham determined that an expanded criminal investigation was not warranted in any other interrogation matter.

  Just a year later—in August 2012—Durham concluded the investigation into the two detainee deaths, announcing that he would not be filing any charges in either case. But this was not a complete exoneration—as not only had two people died, but Durham told Director Petraeus and me that if the statute of limitations had not run out, he would likely have brought criminal charges in the two cases (even though DOJ had declined prosecution in these two cases when the deaths were first brought to its attention years earlier).

  Next was the SSCI study—still very much a Democratic staff report. In the late fall of 2012, after more than three years of effort, committee staffers declared that they were done. A six-thousand-plus-page report and a five-hundred-plus-page “summary and conclusions” were submitted to the committee. Chairman Feinstein wanted to vote on the report in December. The timing was critical. While almost all Republicans on the committee were opposed to the way the investigation had been conducted, and therefore to the report itself, Senator Olympia Snowe, a Republican from Maine, was supportive of it. But she was going to retire at the end of the then-current Congress, only days away. So Senator Feinstein wanted to hold a vote while Snowe was still in office so that an endorsement of the investigation could not strictly be called a “party line” vote.

  Feinstein left nothing to chance and invited Harry Reid, who as senate majority leader was an ex officio member of the committee, to attend and address the assembled senators. This was a highly unusual move. Indeed, I am not aware of another case where the senate majority leader has attended a committee meeting. I have been told that Reid advised the assembled senators that the report—which neither he nor many (if any) of the other members had read in full—was the most important piece of intelligence oversight since the Pike Committee report in the 1970s. I have also been told that the senate minority leader, Mitch McConnell, was unaware that Reid had been invited and was later furious that he had not been extended the same courtesy. The report was approved by a vote of nine to six—along strict party lines, with the exception of Snowe.

  Sitting in my office over a weekend, I read the summary and conclusions of the report. It was stunning both in its scope and in the depth of its condemnation of CIA activities involving al Qa‘ida detainees. It made a number of significant charges, including that (1) the detention and interrogation programs did not produce intelligence of unique value (this was later revised by the committee staff to say EITs did not produce intelligence of value); (2) CIA had frequently gone beyond the techniques authorized by the Department of Justice; (3) CIA had mismanaged the program throughout its history; and (4) CIA had systematically misled the White House, the Justice Department, Congress, and the American public about the program (that is, CIA lied). I remember thinking, “If even half of this is true, this is awful.” The report was compelling—well written, its judgments seemingly backed up by facts, and heavily footnoted. It made me wonder what the truth really was, as the allegations did not sound like the Agency where I had worked for thirty years and was then leading. I vowed to withhold judgment until I saw the Agency’s review of the report.

  Our response was well considered. I was acting director at the time and I put our best officers on the project—but no one who had been personally involved in the program. I took my own chief of staff, Greg Tarbell, one of the most analytically brilliant officers at the Agency, off-line for several weeks to thoroughly scrub our response. Greg had large sheets of paper taped to the walls of his office in his attempt to keep track of the all the facts in each of the SSCI’s conclusions and case studies.

  As our officers were coming to closure on their views of the report, I was beginning to receive updates on what they were finding—and it was not flattering to the authors of the SSCI study. They found that the committee had correctly pointed out that the Agency had not managed the program well in its early days, which had resulted in the mistreatment of some detainees and the death of one (but the committee had failed to note that the Agency’s inspector general had identified this as a problem early on and it had been quickly fixed). But they also found that the majority of the committee’s conclusions were simply wrong. In particular, they concluded that the committee’s analysis about the effectiveness of the program was seriously flawed and that the Agency had indeed generated a treasure trove of intelligence.

  I believe that the SSCI staff that produced the committee’s study did a great disservice to the committee, the Central Intelligence Agency, and the country. It appears to me that the staffers wrote the report that they thought their political masters wanted to see. Their prosecutor’s brief was intended to figuratively go for the death penalty. I believe they fell in love with material that appeared to confirm what they wanted to see and found ways of explaining away facts that did not fit their narrative.

  Senator Feinstein also bears significant responsibility for the many flaws in the report. She made her very strong views on the appropriateness of CIA’s program known to her staff—a step that undoubtedly made it difficult for those writing a report to be objective. This is an error that even the most junior of manage
rs of analysis at CIA would never make. And Senator Feinstein was told on numerous occasions about the serious flaws in the report—including by me several times. At one meeting, I walked her through specific examples in the report of errors of fact, errors of logic, and errors of context (the latter situation is where the presented facts are accurate but other missing facts are necessary to understand the issue). And I pointed out that the examples were just the tip of the iceberg. I told her the report was riddled with such mistakes.

  Errors of fact: Page six of the report’s Findings and Conclusions reads “The CIA restricted access to information about the program from members of the Committee beyond the chairman and vice chairman until September 6, 2006…” Wrong. The CIA did not restrict access; the White House did. There is also an error of context here: Nowhere does the report state that some of the committee leaders who were briefed, including SSCI Chairman Pat Roberts and HPSCI Chairman Porter Goss, supported limiting knowledge of the program only to the leadership. They did not want their members briefed either.

  Errors of logic: The report’s very first finding reads: “The CIA’s use of its enhanced interrogation techniques was not an effective means of acquiring intelligence or gaining cooperation from detainees.” Here is the first fact provided to support that judgment: “… seven of the 39 CIA detainees known to have been subjected to the CIA’s enhanced interrogation techniques produced no intelligence while in CIA custody.” Hmm. Does that mean that thirty-two of thirty-nine did produce intelligence? Sounds like an argument that EITs worked, not the other way around.

  Errors of context: In arguing that the CIA impeded congressional oversight of the program, the report states “The CIA did not brief the leadership of the Senate Select Committee on the CIA’s enhanced interrogation techniques until September 2002, after the techniques had been approved and used.” That is true, and it sounds bad. But the report conveniently left out some other interesting facts that shed a different light on this issue. The report does not say that EITs were first used on Abu Zubaydah in August 2002, while the Congress was on summer recess. The HPSCI leadership was briefed on September 4, and the SSCI leadership was briefed on September 27. Hardly withholding information from Congress.

  These multiple types of errors occur throughout the report’s thousands of pages. Most of the errors are ones that even a smart high school student would not make. Many, including me, have said publicly that the report is deeply flawed. These are the reasons why. The report is not the history of the program the Senator Feinstein has said it is; it is one of the worst pieces of analysis that this thirty-three-year veteran of analysis at CIA has ever seen.

  * * *

  Never has a program generated such controversy and debate. Was it legal or was it torture? Was it effective or not? Was it necessary or not? Was it the right thing to do or not? Given that the program was one of the CIA’s main responses to 9/11 and to the further threat posed by Bin Ladin and al Qa‘ida, I would like to weigh in on the subject.

  The first point to make is that we are actually talking about two different programs. One is the detainee program—CIA’s establishment of secret prisons around the world where we held high-value detainees. And the second is the use of enhanced interrogation techniques—harsh measures—to extract information that detainees were otherwise unwilling to provide. This is an important distinction because you can have the detention program without the EIT program. To merge the two programs in a report is doing history a disservice. Each needs to be addressed separately.

  The second point is that context is everything. In order to thoughtfully consider the program, it is very important to understand what the key decision-makers at the time—President Bush, National Security Advisor Condi Rice, and Director Tenet—were facing every day.

  My last official action aboard Air Force One on 9/11 was to brief President Bush regarding an intelligence report that George Tenet’s staff at CIA had just sent me. While the credibility of the source was unknown, the information itself was stunning but believable given what had occurred fewer than twelve hours earlier. The report, provided to us by one of the many foreign intelligence services with which we work closely, indicated that al Qa‘ida had prepared a second wave of attacks. This possibility was already in everyone’s mind, but here it was in black and white. The president read the report very closely, handed it back to me, and simply said, “Thank you, Michael.”

  This report began what became an avalanche—literally thousands—of intelligence reports in the months following 9/11 that strongly indicated that al Qa‘ida would hit us again in the homeland.

  Some of these reports talked about the possible use of weapons of mass destruction by al Qa‘ida—chemical weapons, biological weapons, and even crude nuclear devices. This too was believable, as it matched pre-9/11 reporting on the group’s interest in such weapons and was consistent with post-9/11 reporting about Bin Ladin meeting with Pakistani nuclear scientists, and with what we were learning from now having access to al Qa‘ida’s former training camps in Afghanistan. What we were finding there included hands-on research into poisons and crude chemical weapons and, most worrisome, work on producing anthrax, a deadly biological weapon. Just a small amount of anthrax—a single gram—contains a hundred million lethal doses. If produced and disseminated effectively, a small amount of anthrax released in the fast-moving air of a subway system could kill hundreds of thousands of people.

  It was the longest sustained period of significant threat reporting that I experienced in my fifteen years of working the al Qa‘ida issue. We were certain we were going to be attacked again. During the five-minute walk from Tenet’s “downtown” office in the Old Executive Office Building to the West Wing of the White House, Tenet and I, aware of all the intelligence, would routinely ask each other, “Is today the day we get hit again?” I seriously thought a nuclear detonation in New York or Washington was a possibility—to the point of telling my wife (we were living near Dulles Airport at the time, some thirty miles west of D.C.) that if such an attack were to happen in Washington to put the kids in the car and start driving west and not stop. It was surreal.

  This reporting—reinforced by Richard Reid’s attempt to bring down an American Airlines flight from Paris to Miami in late December 2001—put tremendous pressure on the White House in general and on CIA in particular to prevent another attack. Most important, it was impossible to forget for an instant that three thousand people had been killed in a little over an hour by only nineteen terrorists. And now we had reporting that another such tragedy, or even worse, might be right around the corner.

  This deluge of threat reporting coincided with the capture of senior al Qa‘ida operative Abu Zubaydah in March 2002. Zubaydah had extensive knowledge of al Qa‘ida personnel and operations. While briefly cooperative, Zubaydah, under standard interrogation techniques, later became defiant and evasive. It was clear that he was holding back information—information that could foil attacks and possibly save lives.

  It was in this context that professional intelligence officers in CIA’s Counterterrorism Center came to the leadership of the Agency and recommended using a set of harsh interrogation techniques. In short, they walked into the director’s office and said, “If we do not use these techniques, Americans are going to die.” This statement was not hyperbole. It was exactly what our officers thought, and there was good reason to think it. Once convinced, George Tenet had a similar conversation with the White House, and the interrogation program was born.

  Where did the idea originate for using the particular set of techniques that was the program—attention grasp, walling, facial hold, facial slap, cramped confinement, insects, wall standing, stress positions, sleep deprivation, and waterboarding? They came from two psychologists—contractors working for the Agency—who helped train US servicemen to resist harsh interrogations if captured on the battlefield and who, in providing such training, learned that certain techniques were effective in getting people to a state of comp
liance in responding to questions. These were the techniques that the contractors suggested to CIA when it became clear that the most hardened and ideologically committed al Qa‘ida operatives would not cooperate.

  * * *

  The CIA detention program—the creation of our own prisons, known as “black sites”—came somewhat earlier. We and our allies were capturing individuals we believed were aware of future plots, as well as the whereabouts of other senior leaders who were plotting against America. The Department of Defense refused to take them—so we had only two options at the time: bring them to the United States and put them into a judicial process, or turn them over to their countries of origin. In neither case could we guarantee that we would get intelligence from them. So we proposed a new option: create our own detention system, where we could ask them any question we wanted at any time. We could also monitor them continuously to acquire any intelligence they might disclose in conversations with other detainees. The sites were set up with the knowledge and cooperation of the host governments, who wanted our thanks, some financial support, and our silence. While we delivered on the first two promises, we, as a country, were not able to deliver on the third.