CIA Bides its Time

It’s doubtful whether a soul will recall in any detail, let alone read afresh, the 6,700-page report, which is probably already at the bottom of the unread paper stacks that always litter CIA offices. It’s also a good guess that most operatives will view the “truth telling” efforts and “atonement” of Sen. Dianne Feinstein and her Democratic colleagues in the same way as most of the officers I met after joining the Directorate of Operations in 1985 viewed the Church and Pike Committees’ investigations of covert action in the 1970s — as tendentious, hyperbolic, dishonest inquiries that reinforced Republican sympathies among the case-officer cadre.

Feinstein has told us that she decided to release the “torture report” because “history” was going to “judge us by our commitment to a just society governed by law and the willingness to face an ugly truth and say ‘never again.’ ” The senator will be disappointed. Whether or not the CIA should feel ashamed of its performance post-9/11, it won’t. If the opportunity arises, the president commands, and senior members of Congress assent (and they always do), America’s shadow warriors won’t be deterred from using “ugly” practices.

Certainly there were agents who personally wanted nothing to do with the harsh tactics used against al Qaeda’s faithful, but their numbers were probably quite small. Men and women of a realist creed have always been attracted to the operations directorate. Such realism — the willingness to run foreign agents in life-threatening circumstances — engenders a rough but attentive respect for human nature. Case officers scrutinize foreigners for the conceits and virtues that might gel into treason. Once upon a time, such realism was common among leftists who thrived in, if not dominated, the CIA. Liberals such as William Colby, a staunch, save-the-whales kind of liberal, who proudly oversaw and defended the Phoenix Program in the Vietnam War, were common into the 1970s. The man who ran Iranian covert action in the 1980s when I started working on the Iran desk was an Adlai Stevenson social democrat who, when he wasn’t dreaming of overthrowing the mullahs, was working in food banks for the poor.

The Left’s mainstream view of the Phoenix Program — an illicit, murderous campaign in an unnecessary, immoral war— surely is more damning than today’s denunciation of the CIA’s counterterrorist extremes: torturing savage jihadis can’t be worse than killing innocent Vietnamese. And yet inside the CIA, when there were still a good many liberals serving in operations, angst about Phoenix in the 1970s didn’t appear to be widespread; by the 1980s, most case officers really could not have cared less about counterinsurgency against the Viet Cong — except among East Asia Division officers who had served in Cambodia, Laos, and South Vietnam and usually remained deeply nostalgic for their lives there.

The Iran-Contra affair offers another illuminating instance of the ethical divide between the American Left and rank-and-file agents within the operations directorate. I landed on the Iran desk when this tempest arose. Many case officers within the Directorate of Operations’ Near East Division were upset with William Casey, then the much-beloved director of central intelligence, since it was clear that the White House and Casey, not Casey and Langley, were running this operation. The CIA was certainly doing its part. It was trying as best it could to explain the Islamic Republic’s internal politics. The chief of the Near East Division, Thomas Twetten, and George Cave, the Persian-speaking, semi-retired, unofficial lord of Iranian operations who accompanied Oliver North and Robert McFarlane to Tehran, were writing memos on who was a “moderate” in Iran.

Most desk and field officers remained distant from the affair, and certainly didn’t view it, as Washington’s Democratic foreign policy establishment did, as a challenge to American democracy. It occasionally intruded into the daily routine — as when the desk chief hid in a cinema in McLean, Va., to avoid uncomfortable telephone calls or a summons to testify before Congress. When the paramilitary head of “the Farm,” Langley’s primary training facility near Williamsburg, decided to show a home movie of him firing a recoilless cannon from a high-speed needle boat at a Sandinista oil facility, my paramilitary operations class applauded. Most of us were aware that the film didn’t square with the official CIA story then being given to Congress. The naughtiness added to the joie du triomphe.

It may take a year or two for CIA sentiment to congeal on the issue of enhanced interrogation, but it’s a very good guess that it will come to accept the opinion of Jose Rodriguez Jr., former head of clandestine service and the National Counterterrorism Center. In his book Hard Measures: How Aggressive CIA Actions After 9/11 Saved American Lives, he makes the case for the utility and morality of the treatment of jihadis after 9/11. CNN national security analyst Robert Baer, an unorthodox former case officer from the Near East Division, suggests that the CIA descended into torture because Rodriguez, a longtime Latin America Division officer, helped design and run the detention and enhanced interrogation programs, and he brought many colleagues into the counterterrorism center. Latin America officers have a reputation for being looser and rougher — a byproduct, perhaps, of working in authoritarian, macho cultures where the struggle against communism has been real.

Senior officers bring their own kind with them as they move to big staff jobs. The Near East Division has had the closest and tensest relationship with the counterterrorism center since its inception. Its officers have filled many of the most important counterterrorist staff slots, and they had front-row seats in the counterterrorism rendition program begun under President Clinton.

Rendition has never been nice. Daniel Benjamin and Steven Simon, who served in the Clinton and Obama administrations and wrote the best book on the rise of al Qaeda, The Age of Sacred Terror, have tried to suggest that “bad” rendition started with George W. Bush while “good” rendition was the rule under Clinton. They wrote in The Next Attack, a book which predicted a holy-warrior maelstrom against America under President Bush:

“In the pre-9/11 period, the United States worked to ensure that it was living up to its laws and values in the rendition process. No one was rendered to any country that did not have an indictment or warrant or other legal proceeding of some kind against that person. The U.S. government required assurances from the governments to whom individuals were rendered that they would be treated in accordance with international human rights standards, and U.S. officials evaluated the practices of these countries to make certain their assurances were reliable. As one former CIA lawyer put it, ‘We never sent someone to a country where they would be tortured. We didn’t do business with those people — it was off the table.’ ”

Really? Benjamin and Simon know that we rendered jihadists to Jordan, Egypt, or Saudi Arabia during the Clinton administration. The street police in these countries severely beat people for pickpocketing. To borrow from the late Christopher Hitchens, Arab internal security services don’t do, as the CIA did in its black sites, “foreplay” to torture. When they are honest, senior CIA operatives will confess how much easier their liaison work is when they are cooperating with effective police states. Overseas intelligence work can encourage a certain callousness that is in most other realms of human interaction distasteful if not repellant. No one who has even the foggiest idea of how CIA station chiefs operate in the Middle East and Central Asia can possibly believe that our officials pay visits to the locals and say: “You must not mistreat these dangerous Islamic radicals because doing so would violate international human rights standards and we just can’t abide that. So please, incarcerate these men (so we don’t have to), interrogate them only according to humane standards — we all know that pain doesn’t work in interrogations — and give us all the information that you glean from them, as quickly as you possibly can. Thank you.”

The odd truth is the harsh tactics that the agency deployed against al Qaeda were actually an effort to be kind. Most of Langley’s operatives probably did not regard the methods used against al Qaeda’s elite as torture, since they all know how many agent networks have been torn apart by foreign security officers who had figured out how to apply pain as an investigative tool. They instinctively disbelieve the idea that FBI interrogation methods, developed in a democracy with great sensitivity about civil liberties, are always and everywhere effective. They are reflexively skeptical of the quintessentially American narrative of Feinstein that we can have our cake and eat it, too. Although the average CIA case officer has little in common with Hitchens, who was at different times a Trotskyite and a Vanity Fair columnist, he would probably agree with the writer’s observations about being waterboarded:

“When contrasted to actual torture, waterboarding is more like foreplay. No thumbscrew, no pincers, no electrodes, no rack. Can one say this of those who have been captured by the tormentors and murderers of (say) Daniel Pearl? On this analysis, any call to indict the United States for torture is therefore a lame and diseased attempt to arrive at a moral equivalence between those who defend civilization and those who exploit its freedoms to hollow it out, and ultimately to bring it down. I myself do not trust anybody who does not clearly understand this viewpoint.”

CIA case officers may have been shockingly lame in how they developed their detention and aggressive interrogation programs. Feinstein’s report rings true here. CIA espionage methods often don’t make much sense. The American penchant for bureaucracy, which dwarfs anything even the French ever devised, corrodes clandestine intelligence collection, covert action, and analysis. It relentlessly dumbs people down. The mediocrities who populate the senior ranks of the CIA can make a rank anti-American bigot such as author John Le Carre look subtle. And the haphazardness of war is always with us. My liberal Democratic uncle, a decorated veteran from the Italian campaign in World War II, gently reproved me when I was questioning American military tactics in Vietnam. He reminded me that FUBAR — “fucked up beyond all recognition” — was an acronym well known among American soldiers of his generation.

The post-9/11 world actually defied the power of Langley’s bureaucracy. Men like Rodriguez innovated. It’s a remarkable achievement given that the rest of Langley, in analysis and operations, continued to calcify. Active-duty case officers tell me that the CIA has more or less returned to its pre-9/11 standard of just getting by. Despite the CIA’s long-standing distaste for the FBI, Langley is probably relieved to let it take the lead in counterterrorist interrogations, which is what has happened. Barring a terrorist attack of heart-stopping magnitude, Langley isn’t going to volunteer its rough services to the executive branch. And barring such an attack, no American president will ask.

We have begun a new chapter in counterterrorism: the Obama-Feinstein Reset. Washington will continue to use drone attacks, in dwindling numbers and efficacy as American troops withdraw from Afghanistan and CIA and U.S. military personnel find themselves unable to operate — liaise productively with foreign internal-security and intelligence services — in a tumultuous Middle East. The “actionable” intelligence and essential land bases just won’t be there.

As long as President Obama is in office, the United States will probably not try to capture and interrogate Islamic terrorists, for this would mean adding to the inmates at Guantanamo Bay. And any interrogation of a jihadist will open up the prickly question that Obama would prefer to avoid: What if the FBI fails to extract any useful information? What if the Marquess of Queensberry rules of good cop-bad cop rapport building don’t work? What if captured terrorists are thrown into the criminal justice system, which means they get lawyers to monitor the FBI’s avuncular efforts? Washington is a leaky town. Capturing and interrogating holy warriors today would be difficult to do discreetly. If the FBI fails, Langley will find a way to let the world know.

To beef up counterterrorism against an obviously growing threat (witness last week’s attack on the Charlie Hebdo magazine staff in Paris), Obama could try to reanimate a rendition program secretly. The Clinton and Bush administrations found rendition useful both to collect intelligence and to get rid of terrorists who could not be successfully tried in a U.S. court. Having damning intelligence information on a jihadist is not the same thing as having admissible, verifiable court evidence. Authors Benjamin and Simon thought that ending renditions would be “a major loss and have a crippling effect in the fight against terror.” For Obama, however, the downsides to rendition are now likely too great. Such a tergiversation would morally gut the president on the Left and open him to withering ridicule on the Right. With only two years left in office, Obama probably is more inclined to polish his moral legacy than to take all available action to avoid another catastrophic jihadist attack, which, even in the best of intelligence circumstances, remains an abstract threat until the moment it is not.

The Obama-Feinstein Reset means the CIA will lose the institutional knowledge it gained from enhanced interrogations since 9/11. Many critics have ripped the agency for not having a professional cadre of jihadist interrogators before 9/11. How exactly the agency was supposed to develop such skills and staff before Langley was allowed to capture and detain jihadists is never explained. Before 9/11, the FBI had near zero knowledge of the Islamic world. As Benjamin and Simon piquantly put it: “FBI senior managers did not know that there was a difference between Sunni and Shi’ite Muslims, while at the top tier of management, officials did not know the most basic facts about al-Qaeda.” After 9/11, the now-praised FBI interrogation teams were just applying, with typical confidence, their domestic methods overseas.

Sophisticated skills are highly perishable. In the best of circumstances, the CIA has an atrocious habit of rotating officers from one intelligence domain to a completely unrelated area. The myth of the qualified peripatetic generalist (case officers have a lot in common with foreign correspondents) has repeatedly crippled and embarrassed the institution in clandestine intelligence collection and covert action. Most case officers probably don’t care much about what Obama and Feinstein think of them or their profession. (Most case officers really don’t care all that much about what the CIA director thinks of them since he is usually far removed from the insular world in which they operate.) But they do respond to incentives. There is neither glory nor much money waiting for officers now to develop the language and cultural skills necessary to tackle Islamic militants up close and personal. It takes proper schooling and years of work to develop the wherewithal needed in interrogations. One interrogation may be the raison d’etre of a case officer’s life.

It is delusional to believe that the FBI, overwhelmingly a domestic organization, will ever be much good at this with foreigners. Only the CIA has the potential to do this well. But it, too, will come up short unless opportunities exist for its operatives, on their own or through liaison channels, to gain firsthand experience deconstructing Muslim militants. The normal routine of espionage, at least as Langley practices it, isn’t likely to help many officers advance. Presidents set a mood that matters in government, even in the clandestine service, the most self-contained association in Washington. And Obama’s mood isn’t adventurous. Gaining earthy counterterrorist expertise at the CIA may now be too politically difficult for any Democratic or Republican president. Obama looked at this problem and answered it with killer drones.

So the clandestine service will lie in wait. It is a reactive, not reflective, institution. The Obama-Feinstein Reset will probably hold through future administrations so long as Islamic terrorists don’t badly wound the United States again. But if another massive terrorist strike occurs, the agency will surely respond in the same way it repeatedly has responded to the orders of American presidents. It will push the envelope. Its operational and patriotic DNA will override the cover-your-ass bureaucratic ethos, although agency officials now might surreptitiously tape briefings they give to senior lawmakers about the extraordinary measures they are taking.

And the CIA may well push too far and tarnish the United States. But unless that embarrassment is bipartisan, Langley will easily overcome any shame or guilt. CIA sentiments are now clearly on the right-hand side of the American political divide. That’s not a healthy situation for the agency or the country. But cynicism is a hallmark of the clandestine service. It is a pillar of its bureaucratic strength. Case officers quickly learn that no good deed ever goes unpunished. They take the hit, adapt, and move on.

Reuel Marc Gerecht, a former Middle East-targets officer in the CIA's National Clandestine Service, is a senior fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies.