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

reports the interrogators sent back to CIA Headquarters. He particularly focused on the waterboarding sessions.
    After three days, John was done. His conclusions, contained in a written report, boiled down to this: The reports were accurate and complete, and the interrogators had done nothing to Zubaydah that was outside the guidelines or not described in the reports. But when he returned home I made sure to ask him about two things he hadn’t covered in his written findings. Were the faces of the interrogators visible? “Clear as day, and over and over again,” he replied in his usual just-the-facts way. And what about Zubaydah, when he was being waterboarded? “Up close and personal. Some crying. Some gagging. Just very unpleasant to look at.”
    No wonder Jose wants them to be destroyed, I thought.
    By comparison, the next item on our to-do list was easy: telling Congress about the existence of the tapes and why the Agency intended to destroy them as soon as feasible. Scott was part of the team dispatched in late January 2003 to brief Senators Pat Roberts and Jay Rockefeller, the leaders of the Senate Intelligence Committee, and their House counterparts, Porter Goss and Jane Harman. Their reactions, as Scott later reported to me, were typical of those of congressional leaders in any dicey, sensitive briefing I had ever participated in or heard about in myyears at the CIA. They sat there, clearly uncomfortable, said little if anything in response to what they were being force-fed, with a “Why are you telling me this?” look frozen on their faces, and gave every impression of wanting desperately to get the hell out of the room.
    In fairness, I should note that shortly thereafter Jane Harman did send a letter to the CIA expressing concern about the wisdom of destroying the tapes. Otherwise, none of the leaders ever followed up about the issue until the story leaked to the media almost five years later.
    Still, even with our lawyer’s report in hand and the congressional notification box checked, Scott and I weren’t prepared to green-light the destruction. Far from it. In 2003, several internal and external investigations were under way in which the tapes were potentially relevant, and we had to see how each would play out.
    Early that year, CIA inspector general John Helgerson began a review of the still-unfolding interrogation program. We told Helgerson about the tapes, and he wanted his people to look at them. Helgerson’s office was already in the midst of a major investigation into the CIA’s failure to uncover and prevent the 9/11 attacks, and the CTC was the focus of the investigation. The tension between the two offices within the CIA was palpable. What’s more, Helgerson, an Agency veteran of more than three decades, had expressed to me misgivings about the wisdom and morality of the interrogation program. But I had developed great respect for him over the years as professional and fair-minded. I don’t recall anyone expressing any objection to giving the IG access to the tapes, and a couple of Helgerson’s investigators reviewed all of them sometime in 2003. In its report on the interrogation program issued in May 2004, the Office of the Inspector General (OIG) made a number of references to the tapes. It noted that it had looked at the tapes and, apart from questioning the CTC’s numbers on how many waterboarding sessions were conducted, did not find that any unauthorized techniques were used on Zubaydah.
    The IG report was sent to the two intelligence committees shortly after its completion in May 2004 for review by the committees’ leadership. None of the four leaders would ever ask to look at the tapes. None of them ever inquired about their status, even though the CIA had put them on notice more than a year earlier that the Agency intended to destroy the tapes at some point. None of them ever asked anything aboutthe tapes. Not, that is, until the shit hit the fan years later, courtesy of the New