Terror war feeds a covert explosion
WASHINGTON – The effort President Bush authorized shortly after Sept. 11, 2001, to fight al-Qaida has grown into the largest CIA covert action program since the height of the Cold War, expanding despite a growing outcry at home and abroad over its clandestine tactics, according to former and current intelligence officials and congressional and administration sources.
The broad-based effort, known within the agency by the initials GST, is compartmentalized into dozens of highly classified individual programs, the details of which are known mainly to those directly involved.
GST includes programs allowing the CIA to capture al-Qaida suspects with help from foreign intelligence services, to maintain secret prisons abroad, to use interrogation techniques that some lawyers say violate international treaties, and to maintain a fleet of aircraft to move detainees around the globe. Other compartments within GST give the CIA enhanced ability to mine international financial records and eavesdrop worldwide.
Over the past two years, as aspects of this umbrella effort have burst into public view, the revelations have prompted protests and official investigations in countries that work with the United States, as well as condemnation by international human rights activists and criticism by Congress.
Still, virtually all the programs continue to operate largely as they were set up, according to current and former officials. These sources say Bush’s commitment to maintaining the GST program and his belief in its legality have been a key to resisting pressure to change course. “In the past, presidents set up buffers to distance themselves from covert action,” said A. John Radsan, assistant general counsel at the CIA from 2002 to 2004. “But this president, who is breaking down the boundaries between covert action and conventional war, seems to relish the secret findings and the dirty details of operations.”
The administration’s decisions to rely on a small circle of lawyers for legal interpretations that justify the CIA’s covert programs and not to consult widely with Congress on them have also helped insulate the efforts, said several sources.
Bush has never confirmed the existence of a covert program, but he was recently forced to defend the approach in general terms, citing wartime responsibilities to protect the nation. In November, responding to questions on the CIA’s clandestine prisons, he said the nation confronts an enemy that “lurks and plots and plans and wants to hurt America again.”
This month he went into more detail, defending the National Security Agency’s warrantless eavesdropping within the United States. That program is separate from the GST program, but three lawyers involved said the legal rationale for the NSA program is essentially the same one used to support GST, which is an abbreviation of a classified code name for the umbrella covert action program.
The administration contends it is still acting in self-defense after the Sept. 11 attacks, that the battlefield is worldwide, and that everything it has approved is consistent with the demands made by Congress on Sept. 14, 2001, when it passed a resolution authorizing “all necessary and appropriate force against those nations, organizations, or persons (the president) determines planned, authorized, committed, or aided the terrorist attacks.”
“Everything is done in the name of self-defense, so they can do anything because nothing is forbidden in the war powers act,” said one official who was briefed on the program and who is skeptical of its legal underpinnings. “It’s an amazing legal justification that allows them to do anything,” said the official, who like others spoke on the condition of anonymity.
The interpretation undergirds the administration’s determination not to waver under public protest or threat of legislative action. For example, after The Washington Post disclosed the existence of secret prisons in several Eastern European democracies, the CIA closed them down because of an uproar in Europe. But the detainees were moved elsewhere to similar CIA prisons, referred to as “black sites” in classified documents.
The CIA has stuck with its overall approaches, defending and in some cases refining them. The agency is working to establish procedures in the event a prisoner dies in custody. One proposal among mid-level officers calls for rushing in a CIA pathologist for an autopsy and then quickly burning the body, according to two sources.
In June, the CIA temporarily suspended its interrogation program after a controversy over disclosure of an Aug. 1, 2002, memorandum from the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel that defined torture in an unconventional way. The White House withdrew and replaced the memo. But the hold on the CIA’s interrogation activities was eventually removed, several intelligence officials said.
The authorized techniques include “waterboarding” and “water dousing,” both meant to make prisoners think they are drowning; hard slapping; isolation; sleep deprivation; liquid diets; and stress positions – often used, intelligence officials say, in combination to enhance the effect.
Behind the scenes, CIA Director Porter Goss – until last year the Republican chairman of the House intelligence committee – has gathered ammunition to defend the program.
After a CIA inspector general’s report in the spring of 2004 found that some authorized techniques violated international law, Goss asked two national security experts to study the program’s effectiveness.
Gardner Peckham, an adviser to then-House Speaker Newt Gingrich, R-Ga., concluded the interrogation techniques had been effective, said an intelligence official familiar with the result. John Hamre, deputy defense secretary under President Clinton, offered a more ambiguous conclusion. Both declined to comment.
The only apparent roadblock that could yet prompt significant change in the CIA’s approach is a law passed this month prohibiting torture and cruel and inhumane treatment of prisoners in U.S. custody.
It is still unclear how the law, sponsored by Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., will be implemented. But two intelligence experts said the CIA will be required to draw up clear guidelines and to get all special interrogation techniques approved by a wider range of government lawyers who hold a more conventional interpretation of international treaty obligations.
“The executive branch will not pull back unless it has to,” said a former Justice Department lawyer involved in the initial discussions on executive power. “Because if it pulls back unilaterally and another attack occurs, it will get blamed.”
The top-secret presidential finding Bush signed six days after the Sept. 11 attacks empowered the intelligence agencies in a way not seen since World War II, and it ordered them to create what would become the GST program.
Written findings are required by the National Security Act of 1947 before the CIA can undertake a covert action. A covert action may not violate the Constitution or any U.S. law. But such actions can, and often do, violate laws of the foreign countries in which they take place, said experts.
The CIA faced the day after the attacks with few al-Qaida informants, a tiny paramilitary division and no interrogators, much less a system for transporting suspected terrorists and keeping them hidden for interrogation.
Besides fighting the war in Afghanistan, the agency set about to put in place an intelligence-gathering network that relies heavily on foreign security services and their deeper knowledge of local terrorism groups. With billions of dollars appropriated each year by Congress, the CIA has established joint counterterrorism intelligence centers in more than two dozen countries, and it has enlisted at least eight countries, including several in Eastern Europe, to allow secret prisons on their soil.
Working behind the scenes, the CIA has gained approval from foreign governments to whisk suspected terrorists off streets or out of police custody into a clandestine prison system that includes the CIA’s black sites and facilities run by intelligence agencies in other countries.
The presidential finding also permitted the CIA to create paramilitary teams to hunt and kill designated individuals anywhere in the world, according to sources.
In four years, the GST has become larger than the CIA’s covert action programs in Afghanistan and Central America in the 1980s, according to current and former intelligence officials. Indeed, the CIA, working with foreign counterparts, has been responsible for virtually all of the success the United States has had in capturing or killing al-Qaida leaders since Sept. 11.
One way the White House has limited debate over its program was to virtually shut Congress out during the early years. Congress, for its part, raised only weak and sporadic protest. The administration sometimes refused to give committees charged with overseeing intelligence agencies the details they requested. It also cut the number of members of Congress routinely briefed on these matters, usually to four members – the chairmen and ranking Democratic members of the House and Senate intelligence panels.
John D. Rockefeller IV of West Virginia, ranking Democrat on the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, complained in a 2003 letter to Vice President Dick Cheney that his briefing on the NSA eavesdropping was unsatisfactory.
Some former CIA officers now worry that the agency alone will be held responsible for actions authorized by Bush and approved by the White House’s lawyers.
Duane R. “Dewey” Clarridge, who directed the CIA’s covert efforts to support the Nicaraguan contras in the 1980s, said the nature of CIA work overseas is, and should be, risky and sometimes ugly. “You have a spy agency because the spy agency is going to break laws overseas. If you don’t want it to do those dastardly things, don’t have it. You can have the State Department.”
But a former CIA officer said the agency “lost its way” after Sept. 11, rarely refusing or questioning an administration request. The unorthodox measures “have got to be flushed out of the system,” the former officer said. “That’s how it works in this country.”