Company Man: Thirty Years of Controversy and Crisis in the CIA Read Free

anyone . . . I mean, Jesus. I trusted Jose and believed his assurances that everything on the tapes was within the approved guidelines, but once they were gone, and once someone on the outside inevitably found out about the tapes and what had happened to them, who was going to accept those assurances at face value?
    So that was the big turd dumped on my desk shortly before the arrival of the new general counsel. “Who else in senior management knows about the tapes and what you want to do with them?” I asked Jose. “Whatabout Pavitt?,” referring to his superior, Jim Pavitt, the head of CIA covert operations.
    “Pavitt knows, and he’s ready to authorize the destruction, but he said I needed to get your okay,” Jose responded.
    “Where is George Tenet on this?” I then asked as calmly as I could, referring to the CIA director.
    “I don’t know. I haven’t spoken to him about it.”
    I informed Jose that he was not to do anything with those tapes. Not then, and not until further notice. I needed to talk about this with the new general counsel.
    Poor Scott Muller, I thought. Here he was coming in from private life, with a totally blank slate, and now I had to firehose him not only on a counterterrorist program of an unprecedented scope and nature, but also, by the way, on an urgent request to destroy hair-raising evidence about the program. I was hoping he wouldn’t quickly conclude he was joining an organization, and inheriting a deputy, who were completely crazy.

    Thankfully, Scott proved to be a quick study and not easily rattled. He agreed that precipitously destroying the tapes was a terrible idea. At the same time, after hearing out Jose and Jim Pavitt, he came to the same conclusion I had: These were honorable men whose deep concerns about the security risks the tapes posed to the interrogators were genuine. Absent some legal requirement that the tapes had to be preserved forever, Scott and I were not prepared to simply rule out ever destroying them. As we put it to Director Tenet in late December 2002 (Scott insisted that we deliver the message together), “the question is not whether to destroy the tapes, but when.”
    First, we decided, a CIA lawyer had to review every minute of the tapes, but it had to be someone with no connection to the interrogation program who could look at them with no preconceived notions or stake about what was on them. We settled on John McPherson, one of our most experienced lawyers, and the chief of the CIA’s Litigation Division. He was someone I knew to be disciplined, thorough, and unflappable. John had had no prior role, or even any knowledge of, the interrogation program, but we thought it made sense to bring him into the loop, given the certainty that the program would be implicated in prosecutions of captured Al Qaeda terrorists in the years to come.
    In the days after Christmas 2002, John traveled to the country where Zubaydah had been held and where the sole set of tapes in existence was under zealous guard in the local CIA office. By this time, Zubaydah had been moved to a new detention facility in another part of the world. But the last thing we needed was to have the damn things get somehow lost or damaged in transit.
    John methodically plowed through the roughly hundred hours of videotape, each tape recording a day’s work of interrogation. Ninety-six of the videotapes were recordings of the Zubaydah sessions. (There were also recordings of the interrogation of Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri, a key perpetrator of the October 2000 bombing of the USS Cole . He was captured in October 2002 and taped only briefly before the CTC halted all videotaping.) Much of the ninety-six tapes depicted Zubaydah simply being questioned or sitting alone in his cell, so John skimmed those parts. But he painstakingly watched the segments where EITs were being applied. He compared everything that the interrogators said and did, and everything Zubaydah said and did, with the daily