Context of 'January 2009: Obama Sends Team to Confer with CIA over Torture, Secret Prisons'

Almost two years after resigning from the CIA (see Early November, 2004), Stephen Kappes agrees to return as deputy director for the new agency head, General Michael Hayden. Kappes is leaving his position as the chief operating officer for ArmorGroup International, a British security firm, to take the position. He is a former Marine with 25 years of service in the CIA. He is fluent in Russian and Farsi, and took part in agency operations against Iran while serving in the Frankfurt, Germany, station. After the 1991 Gulf War, Kappes reopened the CIA’s Kuwait station. He also was a key participant in the agency’s attempts to find information on nuclear black marketeer A. Q. Khan. He was deputy director for operations under former CIA chief George Tenet before coming into conflict with Tenet’s replacement, Porter Goss (see September 24, 2004). Kappes was one of the first of many CIA officials to leave the agency under Goss’s tenure, either by resignation or by firing as Goss attempted to purge the agency of all but Bush administration loyalists (see November-December 2004). [New York Times, 5/30/2006; Time, 6/1/2006] In May, CNN reported that Kappes was being offered the job in part to assuage concerns among members of the Senate Intelligence Committee, who doubt Hayden’s ability to lead the agency and question whether he will run it in a nonpartisan fashion. Many observers see Kappes’s return both as a repudiation of Goss, who abruptly resigned over allegations of involvement with prostitutes and bribery schemes (see May 5, 2006), and as a potential brake on any possible instances of Hayden putting his loyalty to the Bush administration over his loyalties to the CIA and the nation. John Negroponte, the director of national intelligence, said when Kappes’s nomination for the position was announced: “I believe that Mike’s appointment, and I think together if the appointment of Steve Kappes goes through, I think that’s going to be a boost for the morale out there. And I think they’re going to welcome this new leadership.” Hayden himself has said that Kappes’s return is a signal that “amateur hour” is over. Former clandestine CIA agent Milt Bearden says, “The simple fact is that he is a very solid choice to come to the agency at a time when it is extremely wobbly.” And a former top CIA official says: “The really good people are happy he’s coming back. The ones who are scared of him should be scared of him.” [CNN, 5/9/2006; New York Times, 5/30/2006]

Entity Tags: Michael Hayden, ArmorGroup International, John Negroponte, Stephen Kappes, Central Intelligence Agency, Senate Intelligence Committee, Milt Bearden

Timeline Tags: Civil Liberties

President-elect Barack Obama orders two days of secret briefings with the CIA on interrogation policies and procedures. He sends his chief counsel, Gregory Craig; his nominated National Security Adviser, James Jones; foreign policy adviser Denis McDonough; former senators David Boren (D-OK) and Chuck Hagel (R-NE); and former CIA general counsel Jeffrey H. Smith to Langley. They meet with CIA Director Michael Hayden, his deputy Stephen Kappes, and about 20 senior CIA officials, who brief Obama’s team on the agency’s counterterrorism and rendition programs. In the briefings, Hayden and his colleagues argue for the preservation of the agency’s secret prison and torture programs. Hayden acknowledges that the agency stopped using the secret prisons in 2006, and says that agency operatives stopped using waterboarding as an interrogation method in 2003. He wants the CIA to retain its option to use other “harsh methods” as needed. During the briefings, CIA officials acknowledge that some foreign intelligence agencies have begun withholding information about suspected terrorists from the agency for fear that they might become implicated in the eventual torture of those suspects. As Boren and Smith will later recall, the group is not convinced that whatever useful intelligence those methods may have garnered warrants keeping them as an option. “They said that they had produced valuable intelligence,” Smith will recall. “We took them at their word.” However, the group decides that “whatever utility it had at the outset… the secret prisons and enhanced techniques were no longer playing a useful role—the costs outweighed the gains.” Those costs include the palpable damage to America’s identity and values, and the lost credibility and prestige among many of its closest allies. Boren will later call attending the briefings “one of the most deeply disturbing experiences I have had.… I wanted to take a bath when I heard it. I was ashamed of it.” He believes that “fear was used to justify the use of techniques that violate our values and weaken our intelligence,” and that the agency did not prove those methods “are particularly effective at getting the truth.” [Washington Post, 4/24/2009]

Entity Tags: Greg Craig, Central Intelligence Agency, Barack Obama, Chuck Hagel, Denis McDonough, James L. Jones, Stephen Kappes, David Boren, Jeffrey H. Smith, Michael Hayden

Timeline Tags: Torture of US Captives

White House counsel Greg Craig says that the executive orders given by President Obama in his first days in office, particularly those outlawing torture (see January 22, 2009) and closing Guantanamo (see January 22, 2009) have been in the works for over a year. Craig also notes that Obama has not finished issuing reforms, and has deliberately put off grappling with several of the most thorny legal issues. Craig says that as Obama prepared to issue the orders, he was “very clear in his own mind about what he wanted to accomplish, and what he wanted to leave open for further consultation with experts.”
Process Began before First Presidential Caucus - Craig says that the thinking and discussion behind these orders, and orders which have yet to be issued, began in Iowa in January 2008, before the first presidential caucus. Obama met with former high-ranking military officers who opposed the Bush administration’s legalization of harsh interrogation tactics, including retired four-star generals Dave Maddox and Joseph Hoar. They were sickened at the abuses committed at Abu Ghraib prison, and, as reporter Jane Mayer writes, “disheartened by what they regarded as the illegal and dangerous degradation of military standards.” They had formed what Mayer calls “an unlikely alliance with the legal advocacy group Human Rights First, and had begun lobbying the candidates of both parties to close the loopholes that Bush had opened for torture.” The retired flag officers lectured Obama on the responsibilities of being commander in chief, and warned the candidate that everything he said would be taken as an order by military personnel. As Mayer writes, “Any wiggle room for abusive interrogations, they emphasized, would be construed as permission.” Craig describes the meeting as the beginning of “an education process.”
'Joy' that US is 'Getting Back on Track' - In December 2008, after Obama’s election, the same group of retired flag officers met with Craig and Attorney General-designate Eric Holder. Both Craig and Holder were impressed with arguments made by retired Marine general and conservative Republican Charles Krulak, who argued that ending the Bush administration’s coercive interrogation and detention regime was “right for America and right for the world.” Krulak promised that if the Obama administration would do what he calls “the right thing,” which he acknowledged will not be politically easy, that he would personally “fly cover” for it. Sixteen of those flag officers joined Obama for the signing of the executive order banning torture. After the signing, Obama met with the officers and several administration officials. “It was hugely important to the president to have the input from these military people,” Craig says, “not only because of their proven concern for protecting the American people—they’d dedicated their lives to it—but also because some had their own experience they could speak from.” During that meeting, retired Major General Paul Eaton called torture “the tool of the lazy, the stupid, and the pseudo-tough. It’s also perhaps the greatest recruiting tool that the terrorists have.” Retired Admiral John Hutson said after the meeting that the feeling in the room “was joy, perhaps, that the country was getting back on track.”
Uncertainty at CIA - Some CIA officials are less enthusiastic about Obama’s changes. They insist that their so-called “enhanced interrogation techniques” have provided critical intelligence, and, as Craig says, “They disagree in some respect” with Obama’s position. Many CIA officials wonder if they will be forced to follow the same interrogation rules as the military. Obama has indeed stopped torture, Craig says, but the president “is somewhat sympathetic to the spies’ argument that their mission and circumstances are different.” Craig says that during the campaign, Obama’s legal, intelligence, and national security advisers visited CIA headquarters in Langley for two intensive briefings with current and former intelligence officials. The issue of “enhanced interrogation tactics” was discussed, and the advisers asked the intelligence veterans to perform a cost-benefit analysis of such tactics. Craig says, “There was unanimity among Obama’s expert advisers that to change the practices would not in any material way affect the collection of intelligence.” [New Yorker, 1/25/2009]

Entity Tags: Paul Eaton, Dave Maddox, Charles Krulak, Central Intelligence Agency, Barack Obama, Eric Holder, Greg Craig, Human Rights First, Jane Mayer, Joseph Hoar, John D. Hutson, Obama administration

Timeline Tags: Civil Liberties