When interrogation subjects coughed up some seemingly vital new information about new plots or al Qaeda personalities, the CIA had few means to check it against reports supplied by spies under its control, either in the terrorist group or elsewhere.
Everything they were hearing was new. By many accounts interrogators slapping suspects like hamburger patties didn't have a clue whether they were telling the truth. They didn't have independent sources of information to know what was up.
The lack of spies on the ground startled CIA officer Sam Faddis when he slipped into northern Iraq a few months before the 2003 invasion.
Faddis was in charge of a CIA team that targeted an al Qaeda cell in Kurdistan. When he arrived to lead the operation, he discovered that the CIA had "not a single" spy in the area, despite years of targeting Saddam Hussein, and Iran, just across the border.
When his team eventually caught a few terrorist suspects and interrogated them, they didn't know what to believe.
He doubts the situation has changed much -- although the CIA began insisting in 2001 that it was a whole new ball game, as if terrorists and other foreigners were taking numbers to work for the CIA.
Doesn't sound like it.
"It would be a nice feeling if we were able to listen to all this stuff coming out of one of these [prisoner's] mouths and be able to say, 'We know all that. Tell us something we don't know,'" Faddis told me during a brief chat Thursday.
As for CIA headquarters officials reportedly ordering interrogators to go back and hammer subjects again and again, even after they'd been milked dry, Faddis asked, "Why were they hanging desperately on every word they could wring out of the detainees?"
Because, he said, the agency didn't have much coming in from other sources -- spies -- and they were desperate to prevent another attack.
Faddis said he dismissed whispers that agency interrogators can gone over to the dark side. He had never witnessed, much less applied, torture in his 25 years at the CIA.
"When I heard rumors that the interrogations were going beyond the pale, I didn't believe it," he said in an interview Thursday. "We weren't taught that. And we didn't believe in it."
Faddis retired, disillusioned with the agency, in May 2008.
Arthur Keller, a former CIA case officer in Pakistan, says much the same. (Case officers are the CIA operatives who actually recruit foreigners to spy for the United States.)
Harsh interrogations weren't secret for long where the CIA set up shop in the Third World after 9/11, with a new, aggressive attitude toward suspects it captured.
Word seeped out via cooperative intelligence services, the local police -- secret and otherwise--as well as the guards, and detainees themselves, about what was going behind the high walled, heavily guarded compounds in Afghanistan, Iraq, Pakistan, Thailand and elsewhere.
Then the ignominious cell phone pictures from Abu Ghraib surfaced, putting faces on the rumors. The trickle of whistpers became a torrent.
It hurt CIA recruitment, Keller said.
"Historically speaking, the CIA has greatly benefited from volunteers (known as walk-ins) who approach the CIA and volunteer to spy for it, often for reasons of conscience, money, or, as is so often the case with human beings, a mixture of motives," Keller wrote last year in a piece about interrogations that he said no one would publish.
"Never got an explanation why," he said via e-mail. "You'd think at least one of the major venues would try and cover something simply because the other majors weren't looking at it. Nope. And now there is a feeding frenzy on the topic."
"As a former CIA case officer, I believe the biggest drawback behind the use of harsh interrogation tactics is that it blackens the international reputation of the USA in general, and the CIA in particular, making potential walk-ins less willing to spy for the U.S," he wrote.
It's, well, a vicious circle. Faced with a spy gap, the CIA has put greater and greater pressure on interrogators to wring confessions from suspects.
And what do they get?
Leads, we call them in the news biz. Nothing more -- something that needs to be checked out.
With a second source.
Before sending the Predators up.
Jeff Stein, a onetime MI case officer, can be reached at jstein@cq.com.
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Comments
The camera on the tip of the missile is the second source, didn't you know that?
Posted by: delta9
| April 24, 2009 4:11 AM
On page 11 of the May 30th 2005 OLC "torture memo", it notes that in 2004, intelligence derived from detainees accounted for around half of the CTC's intelligence reports. If half of CIA's intel is coming from a bunch of prisoners, what does this say about the rest of CIA collection efforts?
Posted by: illmal
| April 24, 2009 1:34 PM
Let's not kid ourselves into believing that the CIA's reputation will be muddied with the Middle Eastern, African or Asian intelligence services they collaborate with. Most of them "do" torture, bribery, blackmail, and many other things considered illegal or unethical by Ameicans. Torture is ineffective at gaining information. Countries that use it do so as a means of inflicting punishment, intimidating the public into being obedient, or just plain old fashioned amusement in the case of some middle eastern dictators. America used it because arrogant, unskilled politicians were calling the shots instead of real professionals, and some people valued advancing their careers more than doing their job. Someone needs to do the intelligence overhaul that we all knew was needed in 2001, and it shouldn't just apply to the CIA. America can't afford to have incompetents and career-minded bueaucrats doing the jobs of CIA or FBI Agents. The world is getting more dangerous by the day.
Posted by: Moe
| April 25, 2009 5:40 PM
I hear you, Moe. I don't entirely agree with your statement that "America used [torture] because arrogant, unskilled politicians were calling the shots instead of real professionals," because the so-called "real professionals" were in residence at CIA when Bush officials came calling. How would you explain that the FBI resisted their pressure and pretty quickly refused to be involved in torture?
But I do agree, based on my own sources, that "some people valued advancing their careers more than doing their job" -- by dodging assignments in counterterrorism. Evidence for that is all too abundant. -js
Posted by: Jeff Stein
| May 13, 2009 11:04 PM
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