The Family Jewels (21 page)

On May 11, 2004, CIA attorney Scott Muller received explicit instructions from White House lawyers David Addington and Alberto Gonzales that Langley should preserve the tapes. In July, Rodriguez and James Pavitt, the new and outgoing chiefs of the clandestine service, presented the results of the Inspector General's torture investigation to the Gang of Four. The IG's report included extensive discussion of the tapes. Scott Muller and John Helgerson disputed
whether CIA techniques violated provisions of the Geneva Conventions. Muller left the CIA not long afterwards. Here was a concrete instance in which restricting presentations to Congress avoided accountability for an abuse by preventing oversight.

But the ground was shifting. When the CIA presented new requests for approvals that fall, the NSC sent back word it no longer wanted to be involved. In January 2005, nominated as attorney general in his own right, Alberto Gonzales was confronted at length about the interrogations at his Senate hearings. The Bush operative proved uninformative before Congress, but within the Justice Department he made sure the John Yoo legal opinions were replaced by a new set of papers that argued the arcana more thoroughly.

In March 2005, with Senator Pat Roberts wavering in his support for the HVD Program, Vice President Cheney took the extraordinary step of presiding at a CIA congressional briefing. Roberts dutifully subsided. In the meantime, Dusty Foggo, having now become the agency's executive director, and John A. Rizzo, its acting General Counsel, toured the black prisons to assure CIA people their actions were lawful. Really this assurance ought to have been conveyed by Porter Goss, but he had little stock with the rank and file after indulging in a bloody purge upon his arrival at Langley. Jose Rodriguez still pushed for operational tempo.

Senator John A. McCain, who had been a prisoner tortured by Hanoi during the Vietnam war, moved in the fall to craft legislation that would outlaw torture all over again. McCain aimed at the U.S. military, and built his project around the strictures in the military's field manual on interrogations—similar to the CIA's “KU/Bark” document—but agency officers were naturally concerned the statute would be broadened to include them. Director Goss, pressured both to accept additional restrictions and to continue the interrogations, let the congressional debate take its course. But
Vice President Cheney intervened, even leading one discussion when the Senate Armed Services Committee was considering the McCain bill. The McCain legislation passed the Senate on October 5, by an overwhelming vote of 90 to 9. At a luncheon meeting of Republican senators on Halloween, Cheney had the room cleared of staff and launched into a talk extolling the virtues of “enhanced interrogation.” Just before Christmas, Porter Goss sent President Bush a memorandum asserting that the Detainee Treatment Act exposed CIA officers to legal jeopardy for actions they had been told were lawful. Goss suspended further hostile interrogations.

As Cheney already knew but the legislators did not,
Washington Post
reporter Dana Priest now had the story of the CIA's black prisons. The Bush administration made a serious effort to spike it. At Porter Goss's request, Jose Rodriguez became the first line of defense. The leaves were piling up around CIA headquarters at Langley when Rodriguez invited Priest to meet. By his account this was a rare encounter with a journalist.
⁴⁹
The session took place in his office on a November day. Sitting on his colonial-style sofa, Rodriguez argued without irony that the story would cause difficulties for U.S. allies, as if it were the press reporting and not the CIA's own operations that lay at the root of the problem. Dana Priest was not impressed.
⁵⁰
Next,
Post
editor Leonard Downie found himself summoned to 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. There he found President Bush, Vice President Cheney, and John Negroponte, the Director of National Intelligence, all gathered to greet him. They mounted a full-court press to convince Downie to kill the story on national security grounds. The
Washington Post
editor, who had kept Priest's story under continuous review as she reported it, had had many discussions with his editors on the national security issues involved. Downie informed President Bush and his cohorts that the
Post
would go ahead with publication but agreed to withhold the names of countries where black prisons had been located.

Clandestine service chief Rodriguez had told colleagues that he was not going to let his people get nailed for what they had been ordered to do. More than a decade earlier he had earned a CIA reprimand for poor judgment in intervening with authorities in the Dominican Republic to secure the release of a friend caught holding drugs. During Iran-Contra, from El Salvador, Rodriguez had seen his agency mentors Jim Adkins and Jack McCavitt cashiered for following what they thought were legal orders. In the Guatemala affair he witnessed the crucifixion of Terry Ward and Fred Brugger from a perch with the CIA station in Buenos Aires. Now, not trusting that locations would stay secret, Rodriguez immediately issued orders to shut down the black prison in Thailand within ninety-six hours. He feared a new purge. Priest's story would win a Pulitzer Prize. It appeared in the
Post
on November 2.
⁵¹

With revelation of the black prisons, Rodriguez moved to ensure the destruction of the agency's torture tapes. By November 2005 Langley was under standing orders from the president's counsel, Harriet Miers, to refer to the White House before doing anything with the tapes. Jose Rodriguez insists no one ever told him, though John Rizzo in the counsel's office was acutely aware of White House sensitivity. John Negroponte, the Director of National Intelligence and Porter Goss's boss, also resisted destroying the tapes. They had become evidence in a court case when CIA materials were subpoenaed by the federal judge trying terrorist Zacarias Moussaoui. And destruction of the tapes had been opposed by a galaxy of officials, even in Dick Cheney's office. Jose Rodriguez dismissed all of that.

The CIA's operations chief began by consulting lawyers Robert Eatinger and Stephen Hermes, not attorneys from Rizzo's office but with CTC. The best alternative would be to appear to be responding to a request from the agency's station chief in Thailand. Rodriguez instructed CTC chief
Robert Grenier to draft language for the cable, which would be sent to the Bangkok station by back channel. The station chief could then paste the text into a cable to Langley. Robert Grenier did as requested on November 4, though he took the precaution of also sending his text for approval to Rizzo's office. The latter somehow missed this action.

The back-channel message went to Bangkok. In due course, at 9:04 a.m., Washington time, on November 8, Bangkok originated an “EYES ONLY” cable to Director Goss requesting permission to destroy the tapes based on the fact they were no longer material to the Inspector General's investigation, plus the General Counsel's determination that written materials “accurately” recorded the interrogations.
⁵²
Jose Rodriguez stumbles on this point: he retails
two
versions of what happened to the tapes. One follows the outline given here, but in another place the spy chieftain writes, “Some midlevel person in CTC, whose name I do not know, correctly believing we weren't getting any useful intelligence from the tapes, recommended that they be thrown onto a bonfire that was being lit nearby.”
⁵³
The tapes were about to be turned into useless molten plastic when a Langley cable ordered them preserved. There is no declassified record of such an eleventh-hour action to save the torture tapes, only one of the effort to destroy them.

Late that Saturday night Rodriguez replied with a message instructing Bangkok to destroy the tapes “as proposed . . . for the reasons cited.”
⁵⁴
He did this personally, in an exception to his usual procedures. By his own account Rodriguez thought, “I was just getting rid of some ugly visuals that could put the lives of my people at risk. I took a deep breath of weary satisfaction and hit Send.”
⁵⁵
The CIA station reported the next day that the tapes had been dealt with as ordered. Their elimination had consumed a little over three hours. Agency officials informed Porter Goss. John Rizzo was furious, though he never confronted Jose Rodriguez. At Goss's afternoon staff
meeting Rodriguez told the director, according to another officer present, “if there was any heat he would take it.” Goss laughed and shot back, “Actually it would be [me] . . . who would take the heat.” Goss had opposed destroying the tapes when he headed the House intelligence committee. Now he approved. “If the tapes ever got into [the] public domain . . . they would make us look terrible; it would be devastating to us.”
⁵⁶
So are Family Jewels born.

Revelation of the black sites triggered a storm of controversy. This came at a moment when Condoleezza Rice, now secretary of state, was in Europe. The European press, even less enamored of the war on terror than the American, handled Rice with some savagery. The McCain bill was guaranteed approval. President Bush signed it into law at the end of December. Not long afterwards Jose Rodriguez engineered the dismissal of his successor at the Counter-Terrorist Center, Robert Grenier. If heads had to roll they could be someone else's.

But the pressure was on CIA and mounted steadily. Amid fierce public debate over the reality of torture and the meaning of “enhanced interrogation techniques,” Langley failed to rise to the level of its alleged convictions. Florida Senator Bill Nelson, a former astronaut, decided to undergo waterboarding himself so as to form a personal opinion of its severity. In spite of the fact that the agency could have controlled this experiment far more tightly than it did with its prisoners, and that it would have had medical staff right there to intervene, the CIA director refused to permit Senator Nelson to be waterboarded. The agency could not have withstood the heat had anything gone wrong.

By the fall of 2006 the HVD Program could no longer be sustained. That September President Bush publicly acknowledged its existence, as well as that of the black prisons, ordering them closed and the remaining detainees transferred to Guantanamo Bay. General Michael V. Hayden, a new CIA
chief, brought the full congressional oversight committees into the picture for the first time. The administration would soon be circling the wagons to protect itself. That is the way with Family Jewels.

But the directives that enabled the CIA to engage in renditions and operate clandestine detention facilities remained on the books. In January 2009, on the second day of his presidency, Barack Obama signed an executive order banning torture and ordering the closure of the detainee facility at Guantanamo Bay, as well as prohibiting black prisons. The directive Obama signed had been modified: when the CIA saw it in draft, Langley's top lawyer complained to the new president's chief counsel. John Rizzo told the White House lawyer that the language in the executive order would preclude CIA from holding detainees even for the short length of time necessary to arrange their rendition. The text of the Obama executive order was changed to permit the agency to do that. The move to close Guantanamo also failed, though over a longer period of time. That, too, is the way with Family Jewels.

6

ASSASSINATION

One of the most notorious Family Jewels appears in the original documents primarily in the form of successive versions of a denial Bill Colby wrote for public consumption, a brief note on a plot against an African leader, and a short report on the Central Intelligence Agency's contacts with the Mafia. The degree to which the CIA had been involved in assassination plots long remained a mystery wrapped in an enigma. Kennedy assassination buffs speculate on whether Langley's schemes aimed at Fidel Castro had led to some Cuban role in the murder of the president, or alternatively whether the CIA itself had somehow been involved. The murder of Ngo Dinh Diem in South Vietnam was often laid at the CIA's doorstep. Newspaper columnist Drew Pearson had published a series of pieces in 1967 on CIA-Mafia associations and their role in plots against Castro, leading President Lyndon Baines Johnson to fuss that the agency must think it could run some kind of “Murder Incorporated” assassination unit. That led Dick Helms to order up an Inspector General's report on the Castro plots. But little of this found its way into the Family Jewels documents, because they focused on domestic activities, not foreign ones.

Nor did assassinations form part of President Ford's marching orders for the Rockefeller Commission. After his exchanges with Director Richard Helms and Henry Kissinger (see
Chapter 2
), and his own experience on the Warren Commission, Ford was careful to try and keep the subject off the docket. Ironically, after the White House's strenuous efforts at damage control, it was Gerald R. Ford himself who put this Family Jewel on the agenda.

Jerry Ford injected assassination into the Year of Intelligence by mistake. It began innocently enough. During Ford's time as vice president under Richard Nixon, the
New York Times
had him to lunch at its Washington Bureau. As president, in January 1975 Ford returned the favor, arranging an intimate lunch in the family quarters dining room on the second floor of the East Wing. Those around the table engaged in some amiable ruminations.
Times
executives and editors posed questions on the issues of the day. Late in the conversation, Abe Rosenthal, the newspaper's executive editor, asked Ford how he thought the Rockefeller Commission could have much credibility, given that its members were largely defense-oriented and could be expected to protect the CIA. The president repeated what he had told Dick Helms on January 4: that he had selected the commissioners carefully and drawn their terms of reference narrowly to ensure they stayed on domestic issues and did not intrude into foreign matters that were “a cesspool.” America's image was important.