Central Intelligence Agency

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September 11 Attacks

On September 11, 2001, the United States suffered the most devastating terrorist attack in its history. In coordinated attacks, 19 hijackers belonging to the radical Islamic group al-Qaeda seized four commercial passenger jets and turned them into, effectively, guided missiles. The hijackers crashed two of the jets into the twin towers of the World Trade Center in New York City, causing the buildings to collapse. The third hijacked jet crashed into the Pentagon in Arlington, Virginia, the headquarters of U.S. military operations. The fourth jet crashed in an area southeast of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, after passengers tried to overcome the hijackers. Almost 3,000 people died in the attacks. The U.S. government soon identified Saudi exile Osama bin Laden, the leader of al-Qaeda, as the financier of the attacks. See September 11 Attacks.

The September 11 attacks prompted intense criticism of U.S. intelligence agencies and their failure to discover the terrorist plot. In 2003 a congressional committee investigating the attacks released a report that detailed systemic problems in the U.S. government’s counterterrorism efforts prior to the attacks, including poor organization, inadequate resources and training, and a failure to appreciate the likelihood of an attack on U.S. soil. The inquiry criticized the CIA for failing to monitor suspected terrorists, including two men who turned out to be hijackers. As a result of the CIA’s failure to share key information with the FBI about the men, the FBI missed “perhaps the intelligence community’s best chance to unravel the September 11 plot.” The committee recommended that the government create a Cabinet-level director of national intelligence to oversee all agencies in the intelligence community.

In 2004 an independent commission tasked with investigating the September 11 attacks further detailed the CIA’s missteps prior to the attacks. The 9/11 Commission, known officially as the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States, noted that before the attacks, “no other agency did more to attack al-Qaeda than the CIA.” But it faulted the agency for relying on foreign agents, instead of U.S. personnel, in its efforts to capture bin Laden and his senior lieutenants.

The commission also concluded that the CIA director had “too many jobs”—managing the intelligence community, running the CIA, and serving as intelligence analyst-in-chief for the president—to do all of them effectively. Like the congressional committee that preceded it, the 9/11 Commission recommended the creation of a national intelligence director reporting directly to the president, managing the CIA director and other senior intelligence officials. It also urged the government to create a new National Counterterrorism Center, overseen by the national intelligence director, to analyze all terrorism-related information collected by government agencies and to plan counterterrorism operations.

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In December 2004 the U.S. Congress adopted the Intelligence Reform and Terrorism Prevention Act. The legislation was controversial, however, because some critics said it did not give the director of national intelligence (DNI) enough authority. Under the law the DNI lacks the authority to hire or fire the heads of agencies under the DNI’s supervision, and the DNI can only monitor, rather than control, the budgets of those agencies.

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The CIA and Weapons of Mass Destruction

The CIA also came under criticism in 2003 and 2004 for its claims prior to the U.S.-Iraq War that the regime of Saddam Hussein in Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction (WMD). The CIA’s National Intelligence Estimate on “Iraq’s Continuing Programs for Weapons of Mass Destruction,” released in 2002 and partially declassified in 2003, was advanced as the official justification for the decision of President George W. Bush to invade Iraq. The report said Iraq possessed chemical weapons for use in missiles, had an active biological weapons program, and had “started reconstituting” a program to build nuclear weapons. The report also cited the claims of a “foreign government service” that Iraq had arranged to buy several tons of pure uranium, which is used to make nuclear weapons, from the African nation of Niger.

None of these claims was supported when the Iraq Survey Group, a team of U.S. weapons inspectors led by David Kay, released an interim report in October 2003, more than six months after the United States invaded and occupied Iraq. The assertion that Iraq had tried to obtain pure uranium—a claim that was featured prominently in President Bush’s State of the Union speech in January 2003—was shown to be based on forged documents. In January 2004 Kay reported to Congress that U.S. intelligence on Iraq’s alleged weapons of mass destruction was “all wrong, probably.” No weapons of mass destruction were found, and Kay said that since 1991 Iraq had no program to make chemical weapons. These findings were supported in the final report on Iraq’s weapons programs prepared by the special adviser to the CIA director in September 2004. In February 2004 President Bush appointed a special panel to investigate why the CIA and other U.S. intelligence agencies failed in their assessment of Iraq.

In July 2004 the U.S. Senate Select Committee on Intelligence released another scathing report on the CIA’s prewar intelligence assessments. According to the report, most of the agency’s key judgments about Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction were “either overstated, or were not supported by, the underlying intelligence reporting.” Intelligence analysts fell victim to “groupthink,” basing their conclusions on what they expected to find while ignoring evidence that Iraq did not have banned weapons, the report concluded. The report depicted the CIA as a “risk-averse corporate culture,” finding that the agency did not have a single spy inside Iraq after 1998 to monitor the country’s weapons programs. It was later revealed, however, that the CIA had made contact with a member of Saddam Hussein’s inner circle who told the agency that Iraq had destroyed its chemical weapons and did not have a nuclear weapons program. This information was reportedly relayed to officials within the Bush administration prior to the U.S. invasion.

Many observers believed there were other shortcomings in the U.S. strategy for Iraq, notably the failure to organize an international alliance and the alienation of potential Middle Eastern allies just when their help was needed. But public debate focused on the intelligence issue, and as in the past, the CIA found itself in danger of being the scapegoat for political failures. In 2004 CIA director George Tenet resigned, citing personal reasons. Following the reelection of President Bush in November 2004, more senior CIA officials resigned, reportedly under pressure from newly appointed CIA director Porter Goss and because they were suspected of leaking information to the media that was unfavorable to the Bush administration.

Despite its faulty intelligence on Iraq, the CIA could claim success in 2004 in helping uncover a black market in nuclear weapons technology created by Pakistani nuclear scientist Abdul Qadeer Khan. Findings by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), the CIA, and other intelligence agencies were presented to Pakistani president Pervez Musharraf, who placed Khan under house arrest. The investigation revealed a widespread network that furnished technology and designs for making nuclear weapons to Iran, Libya, and North Korea. In 2003 CIA intelligence had helped lead to the seizure of a ship loaded with material for use in making nuclear weapons. The ship was bound for Libya, and the discovery of its cargo was a factor in causing Libya openly to renounce its nuclear weapons program in 2004. See also Arms Control; Nuclear Weapons Proliferation; Pakistan.

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Secret Prisons, Torture, and Renditions

In 2005 the CIA was accused of operating secret prisons in Europe, as well as kidnapping and rendering terrorist suspects to other countries (a practice known as extraordinary rendition) despite knowing that such countries used torture in interrogations. The CIA itself was also accused of using torture or other harsh interrogation practices in violation of U.S. and international law. The seriousness of the accusations was underscored by the actions of an Italian court, which issued arrest warrants for 22 CIA agents and asked the Italian government to seek their extradition for trial. An Italian prosecutor accused the agents of kidnapping a radical Muslim cleric, Osama Moustafa Hassan Nasr, also known as Abu Omar, in Milan in February 2003 and flying him to Egypt, where Nasr claimed he was tortured by Egyptian authorities. An Italian judge subsequently indicted 25 CIA agents, a U.S. Air Force colonel, and several Italian intelligence officers in February 2007. The trial began in Milan in 2007, although all of the Americans were tried in absentia. In March 2009 the judge in the trial threw out evidence seized in a raid on a Rome apartment but allowed evidence obtained by wiretaps.

In November 2005 the Washington Post reported the existence of a secret CIA prison network in Europe that held as many as 100 terrorist suspects. The Post refrained from identifying the countries at the request of the Bush administration. The Bush administration initially refused to confirm or deny the existence of the prison network, which was reportedly dismantled and moved elsewhere after the Post report appeared. But in September 2006 President Bush acknowledged the existence of the secret prison network. Bush said the prison network was being closed down and that 14 “high value” prisoners were being transferred to the U.S. military base at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, for trial. In all about 100 terrorist suspects had been detained in the prison network, according to administration officials. Officials of the European Union (EU) condemned the secret prisons, saying they violated international humanitarian law and international criminal law. See also Guantánamo Scandal.

In June 2007 a report by the Council of Europe confirmed that the CIA operated secret prisons from 2003 to 2005 in Poland and Romania where prisoners were denied access to the Red Cross as required by the Geneva Conventions. The report concluded that “the CIA committed a whole series of illegal acts in Europe by abducting individuals, detaining them in secret locations, and subjecting them to interrogation techniques tantamount to torture.” The same month that the report was released six human rights organizations charged that the CIA continued to hold 39 terrorist suspects in secret prisons. In October 2007 an official within the Bush administration conceded that the CIA continued to operate detention facilities.

Several newspaper reports, citing current and former intelligence sources, charged that interrogation techniques in the secret prison network included waterboarding (controlled drowning), stress positions, sleep deprivation, and exposure to cold and to loud noise, practices that most human rights organizations recognize as torture. The Bush administration denied that it practiced torture, but in October 2007 the New York Times disclosed the existence of a classified Justice Department memo that allowed U.S. interrogators to use head-slapping, waterboarding, and exposure to cold.

A German citizen, Khaled al Masri, filed a lawsuit in U.S. courts in 2005, charging that he was kidnapped, imprisoned in a U.S.-run facility in Afghanistan, and tortured. German Chancellor Angela Merkel said the United States had acknowledged that it made a “mistake” in imprisoning the man. But U.S. courts denied al Masri’s right to sue, and in 2007 the U.S. Supreme Court refused to hear his appeal. Thirteen CIA agents still faced arrest in Germany in connection with the kidnapping of al Masri, but in 2007 Germany discontinued its efforts to have the agents extradited.

United States and international law forbid rendering a prisoner to a country known to practice torture. Rendition is a practice sometimes used by countries when they wish to avoid time-consuming legal procedures to transfer a person from one country to another country, often to face trial in their home country. (Ordinarily, such transfers are done legally through extradition or deportation procedures.) Extraordinary rendition is the practice of abducting or seizing a person for transfer to another country, not necessarily the person’s home country, for purposes of interrogation, rather than trial.

During the Bush administration, several former prisoners came forward to charge that they had been rendered to countries such as Egypt, Jordan, and Syria, which the U.S. Department of State has listed for years as nations known to practice torture. In 2006 the Canadian government exonerated a Canadian citizen, Maher Arar, who had been taken into custody by U.S. authorities as a suspected terrorist and rendered to Syria, where he was imprisoned and tortured. The following year Canada’s prime minister offered Arar a formal apology and 10.5 million Canadian dollars in compensation. Other examples of extraordinary rendition also came to light, and journalists estimated that as many as 150 people had been subjected to extraordinary rendition from 2001 to 2009.

The charges of torture, inhumane and degrading treatment, and illegal rendition raised concerns within the CIA because they involved breaches of the Geneva Conventions, and such breaches can be prosecuted under the U.S. War Crimes Act. The Bush administration contended that there were no illegalities because a congressional resolution in September 2001 authorizing the use of force in the war on terror gave the president the power to carry out any actions necessary to protect national security. The administration further argued that the Geneva Conventions did not apply in a war involving “illegal combatants.” The legal basis of this argument, however, was undermined in 2006 by a U.S. Supreme Court ruling in Hamdan v. Rumsfeld (see Donald Rumsfeld). The ruling rejected similar administration arguments that had been used to justify the creation of special military commissions to try terrorist suspects. In response to the Court’s ruling, the U.S. Congress passed the Military Commissions Act of 2006, which included a provision granting immunity to CIA and other government employees for their handling of terrorist suspects during the period from September 11, 2001, to the passage of the Detainee Treatment Act of 2005.

Shortly after Barack Obama became U.S. president in January 2009 he issued Executive Order 13491, which set up a task force to study the practice of rendition. The order required that any future renditions conform to U.S. law and U.S. international obligations. The order explicitly ensured the humane treatment of individuals in U.S. custody and declared that any renditions should not result in individuals being tortured. However, the Obama administration opposed a lawsuit brought by Binyam Mohamed and four other men who claimed that they were abducted by the CIA and flown to other countries where they were tortured. The Obama administration cited the state secrets privilege in opposing the civil suit, which was brought against Jeppesen Dataplan, Inc., a subsidiary of The Boeing Company. The company allegedly carried out many of the CIA rendition flights. Mohamed claimed that he was rendered to Morocco, where he said he was subjected to genital mutilation, among other tortures. The Obama administration successfully opposed the release of British government documents that Mohamed’s lawyers said would confirm the fact that he was tortured.

Obama’s newly appointed director of the CIA, Leon Panetta, a former member of Congress and chief of staff in the administration of President Bill Clinton, assured Congress during his confirmation hearings that no CIA agents would be prosecuted for following legal orders from the Justice Department under Bush, even if those orders allowed torture or other inhumane treatment. Panetta said the CIA would continue rendering detainees to other countries but not if they believed the prisoners would be tortured. However, civil liberties groups argued that the same assurances had been given by the Bush administration. Many civil liberties advocates also noted that following orders is not considered an acceptable defense for war crimes or crimes against humanity. Panetta was confirmed as CIA director in February 2009, reporting to the director of national intelligence (DNI), retired Admiral Dennis Blair.

In March 2009 the U.S. journalist Mark Danner disclosed a confidential report prepared by the International Committee of the Red Cross concerning the treatment of the 14 detainees who were transferred from the CIA’s secret prisons to the Guantánamo detention facility. The Red Cross was allowed to visit and interview the detainees following their transfer, and it prepared a report for the CIA’s general counsel based on its findings. The Red Cross concluded that “[t]he allegations of ill treatment of the detainees indicate that, in many cases, the ill treatment to which they were subjected while held in the C.I.A. program, either singly or in combination, constituted torture. In addition, many other elements of the ill treatment, either singly or in combination, constituted cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment.” Among the findings were that the detainees were subjected to waterboarding, stress positions, loud music, confinement to boxes without light or without being able to stand, and being collared around the neck and slammed against walls.

In April the Obama administration released four Justice Department memorandums sought in a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit brought by the American Civil Liberties Union. CIA director Panetta opposed the release of the documents, but Attorney General Eric Holder argued for the release. Obama reportedly concluded that as a result of unauthorized disclosures to the media, the basic contents of the memos were already publicly known. One of the memos was written in August 2002 by Jay S. Bybee, then the head of the Office of Legal Counsel in the Justice Department, and three others were written in 2005 by Steven G. Bradbury, who held the same office.

The memos revealed that the Justice Department had specifically authorized a variety of torture and other harsh interrogation techniques, including waterboarding, stress positions, sleep deprivation over a consecutive 11-day period, confinement to boxes, slamming detainees against walls, and other measures. The memos found that if these techniques met certain criteria, then they would not violate the Convention Against Torture’s prohibition against intentionally inflicting “severe pain or suffering.” At least two al-Qaeda detainees—Abu Zubaydah and Khalid Sheikh Muhammad, the alleged mastermind of the September 11 attacks—were waterboarded a total of 266 times, according to the memos. Muhammad was waterboarded 183 times over a 30-day period, or an average of 6 times a day.

Obama condemned the practices, saying they undermined the nation’s moral authority and failed to make the nation safer. However, he ruled out any prosecutions of CIA officers who were following what they believed to be legal orders. At a press conference he cautioned that he did not wish to interfere in investigations into whether the lawyers who drafted the memos had violated the law or legal ethics.

Release of the memos prompted a backlash of criticism from former CIA director General Michael Hayden. Hayden asserted that the interrogation techniques had produced valuable intelligence, causing Zubaydah to reveal information leading to the capture of Ramzi bin al-Shibh, who was subsequently charged with helping coordinate the September 11 attacks. Former vice president Cheney also defended the interrogation methods and called for the declassification of government documents that he said would demonstrate their effectiveness. Critics countered that the information could have been obtained through lawful methods.

The declassification of the Justice Department memos coincided with the publication of a report by the Senate Armed Services Committee detailing the results of the committee’s lengthy investigation into the interrogation programs carried out by both the CIA and the U.S. military. The report found evidence that the Bush administration had anticipated the use of special interrogation techniques long before any al-Qaeda suspects had been detained, contrary to administration claims that the decision to use enhanced interrogation techniques was made only after al-Qaeda detainees had become uncooperative. The Armed Services Committee found that the CIA contracted in early March 2002 with two psychologists who worked for a U.S. military program known as Survival Evasion Resistance Escape (SERE), which was designed to train U.S. military personnel in how to resist torture. The program copied methods allegedly used by Chinese military forces during the Korean War (1950-1953) to obtain propaganda statements by U.S. prisoners of war. The report also found that Bush administration officials put pressure on CIA interrogators to find a link between al-Qaeda and the Iraq regime of Saddam Hussein. Even though some interrogators protested that they believed certain detainees had no further information to offer, they said they were pressured to keep applying the interrogation techniques.

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Valerie Plame Wilson Scandal

Agency morale was at a low point in the buildup to and in the aftermath of the U.S. invasion of Iraq. Revelations regarding CIA conduct were leaked by former and current intelligence officials concerned about the legality of interrogation practices and angry that internal CIA assessments casting doubt on Iraq’s possession of weapons of mass destruction were, in their view, ignored or manipulated. There was fury over the revelation that a covert agent, Valerie Plame Wilson, was publicly exposed, apparently in political retribution for the actions of her husband, former U.S. ambassador Joseph Wilson. The deliberate exposure of a covert or clandestine CIA agent by a government official is a violation of the Intelligence Identities Protection Act.

Wilson had traveled to Niger in 2002 at the request of the CIA to investigate the allegation that Iraq had attempted to obtain uranium from that country in an effort to build up a secret nuclear weapons capability. Wilson returned with the finding that it would have been “exceedingly difficult” for Iraq to have obtained uranium because the ore was controlled by foreign-run consortiums that were strictly monitored by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA). Wilson leaked this finding to a New York Times columnist and in July 2003 wrote an op-ed piece for the Times identifying himself, his mission, and his findings. About a week later the newspaper columnist Robert D. Novak identified Wilson’s wife by her maiden name, Valerie Plame, and revealed that she was a CIA agent.

The CIA requested that the Justice Department investigate whether a violation of the Intelligence Identities Protection Act had occurred, and the Justice Department appointed a special counsel to carry out the inquiry. In October 2005 special counsel Patrick Fitzgerald, after a two-year-long investigation, indicted I. Lewis Libby, Jr., the chief of staff to Vice President Dick Cheney, charging him with obstruction of justice, false statement, and perjury.

In May 2006, with Libby’s case still pending, Porter Goss resigned suddenly as director of the CIA, and was replaced by former head of the NSA, Michael Hayden. Although the move came as a surprise to many, media reports painted a picture of low morale at the agency with ongoing internal investigations into leaks and corruption. Reports also suggested that President Bush had lost confidence in Goss, and that Goss had resigned after disagreements with Director of National Intelligence John Negroponte over the future of the agency. The appointment of Hayden, a U.S. Air Force general, generated some controversy as critics questioned how a military man would keep the agency independent of the Department of Defense. Also, as head of the NSA, Hayden had been responsible for a program of electronic surveillance from 1999 to 2005 that had eavesdropped on Americans without first having obtained legal warrants. Hayden cited his most pressing task as director of the CIA as keeping the agency in the shadows and not in the newspapers, while rebuilding confidence in its ability to gather accurate intelligence.

In early 2007 Negroponte resigned as director of national intelligence, and the trial of Libby got under way in Washington, D.C. Retired Navy Admiral Mike McConnell, head of the NSA from 1992 to 1996, replaced Negroponte. In March a jury found Libby guilty of two counts of perjury and two counts of obstruction of justice. He was sentenced to 30 months in prison, a fine of $250,000, and a period of probation of two years, but in July, President Bush commuted Libby’s prison sentence and said he would not rule out the possibility of a pardon.

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CIA Inspector General Under Fire

In August 2007 the CIA released the results of an internal investigation by its inspector general into the agency’s handling of counterterrorism efforts, specifically in relation to the September 11 terrorist attacks. Only the executive summary of the inspector general’s report was made public and then only at the insistence of Congress, but it largely corroborated the findings of the September 11 commission. The report by Inspector General John L. Helgerson allegedly angered top CIA officials, who disagreed with its findings.

The report recommended that accountability boards be established to discipline CIA agents for the agency’s failures in regard to the September 11 attacks. The inspector general found that from 50 to 60 CIA officials knew as early as 2000 that two of the men who became September 11 hijackers were associated with al-Qaeda. Nevertheless, they failed to have the men placed on a terrorist watch-list maintained by the State Department and monitored by the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI). Both men subsequently gained entry into the United States. The report specifically recommended that former CIA director George Tenet and the former director of its Counterterrorist Center, J. Cofer Black, be held accountable.

The inspector general came under fire again in October 2007 for his ongoing investigation of CIA detention and interrogation policies. Helgerson had already angered top CIA officials with his 2004 finding that CIA interrogation practices violated the Convention Against Torture and Cruel, Inhuman, and Degrading Treatment. Now, CIA director Hayden took the unusual step of opening an internal inquiry into the inspector general’s office after receiving complaints that Helgerson was conducting an unfair and biased investigation. The move raised questions about the ability of the inspector general to act independently of the CIA director, as required by law.

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