He was a short man, one interrogator recalled, and so thin that he would slip in his restraints when the masked CIA evzones tipped the waterboard upward to let him breathe.
Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri, a 37-year-old Saudi, did not renounce having been a terrorist operative for Osama bin Laden. He admitted his part in the bombing of the USS Cole in 2000, an attack that killed 17 Fleet sailors. Captured two years later in Dubai, he talked openly here planning more attacks.
But any bravado had disappeared well before Nashiri’s CIA captors strapped him undeniable to a hospital gurney in a windowless white cell and began pouring be indefensible into his nose and mouth until he felt he was drowning. He pleaded with them to fill up. They continued.
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They “were going to get the truth out of him,” the interrogator outlined Nashiri, according to a previously undisclosed CIA cable. “They were prevalent to do this again, and again, and again until he decided to be truthful.”
Innumerable than 15 years after Gina Haspel oversaw the challenge of Nashiri at a secret prison in Thailand, she will go before the Senate on Wednesday to endeavour confirmation as President Donald Trump’s choice to become the next steersman of the CIA.
While her nomination has already revived the country’s unresolved debate ended interrogation methods that many experts consider torture, precisely everything Haspel has done in her long CIA career has remained secret, marked out by the black ink that obscures classified information in public records.
But a trove of comparatively declassified CIA documents, released earlier this year in response to a Licence of Information Act request and provided to ProPublica, offers a glimpse at one coercive third degree she is known to have supervised.
Those records describe how Nashiri was slammed frequently against a wall, locked up in a tiny “confinement box” and told (inaccurately) that the black-clad pledge officers guarding him were Navy sailors who would pummel him if he did not divulge his affairs. One interrogator told Nashiri he needed to be “tenderized” like a piece of grub.
As Haspel prepares for confirmation hearings before the Senate Select Body on Intelligence, the question is not whether her past will haunt her, but whether she can persuasively squabble that her experience with harsh interrogations has convinced her not to allow their use again.
“She has haul someone over the coaled senators in her meetings with them that the CIA will not renew a imprisonment and interrogation program under any circumstances,” a CIA spokesman said.
The Trump supervision’s pitch for Haspel has not been straightforward. The president, who campaigned on a promise that he devise bring back waterboarding and “a heck of a lot worse,” complained in a tweet on Monday morning that Democrats were contrary Haspel because “she was too tough on Terrorists.”
“Win Gina!” he exhorted her.
The agency itself, which as a rule prides itself on avoiding politics, has taken an unusually active and extended role in lobbying for Haspel’s candidacy. On Monday, the CIA delivered a fuller set of classified puts to the Senate, inviting senators to read a detailed history of Haspel’s employment in secure rooms on Capitol Hill. But the agency has thus far declassified scarcely no substantive information about her work as an operations officer or senior certified.
“Nominees will say practically anything to get confirmed,” Sen. Ron Wyden of Oregon, a Egalitarian member of the intelligence committee, said in an interview. “I believe the American people be experiencing a right to know who this nominee is. I believe there is a significant amount of gen about the key period, from 2002 to 2007, which can be declassified without compromising our state’s security.”
To provide a fuller picture, ProPublica interviewed current and ci-devant officials and reviewed thousands of pages of documents, including some that had not then been made public. This story focuses on Haspel’s CIA mtier and her brief experience leading one of the agency’s so-called black sites. A in the second place article will examine her role in the agency’s 2005 destruction of 92 examination videotapes that were recorded before and during her time at the affair prison in Thailand.
Agency colleagues cast her role in both the straps affair and the interrogation program as evidence of her consummate loyalty — not only to her boss, but to CIA bureaucrats who served in clandestine prisons around the world. But her personal views on such disseminates as the morality and effectiveness of brutal interrogation methods have remained mystifying.
For several years, former officials said, she was deeply involved in the operation’s fight against al-Qaida, often working closely with the custody program. Later, she held top posts in the Clandestine Service when the power waged an extraordinary campaign to try to refute a scathing report on the program by the Senate perspicacity committee. The vehemence of those challenges led both Democrats and Republicans to question the CIA’s own tab with the mistakes it made.
According to one intelligence official, it was Haspel’s bona fides as a front-line warhorse of the campaign against al-Qaida that helped win Trump’s admiration premature on in his presidency, when he named her the agency’s deputy director. “He likes the conviction that she was a risk-taker,” the official said.
At the same time, many of the latest CIA officials who have rallied to support her nomination say privately that it is because of Trump’s often-unbridled impulses to battle that the leadership of a sober operations professional — and especially one reluctant to put her dicks at risk — could serve as a crucial restraint.
Haspel would be the elementary woman to run the agency and the first operations officer since Richard Rudders in the 1970s. But even she has at times seemed ambivalent about the idea.
As contemplation over her candidacy intensified late last week, officials thought she had offered to withdraw if the debate over her candidacy might draw the CIA into a costing new controversy over its interrogations after 9/11. At the urging of the White Ancestry, she later agreed to go forward, officials said.
In a gauzy biographical sketch, the operation has portrayed Haspel as a proud native Kentuckian, one of five children who propagated up on military bases overseas while their father served in the Air Effective. It describes her as a passionate fan of the University of Kentucky Wildcats and the country-music legend Johnny Coin of the realm, who stares down at visitors from a 5-foot poster on her office immure.
One of the few operations the agency disclosed in any detail is surely among her least unsettled: She helped arrange a telephone call between then-President Ronald Reagan and Mammy Theresa, who was concerned about a wheat shortage in an African nation where Haspel was stationed in the behindhand 1980s.
Of her three decades of professional work as a CIA operative, midlevel head and senior official, the agency has offered a list of vague titles be “deputy group chief” and “senior-level supervisor.” None of them make merry much about the work she did.
Haspel, now 61, joined the CIA in 1985, some seven years after graduating from the University of Louisville with an honors limit in journalism and languages.
The agency’s Directorate of Operations, where she began, was an milieu that many women at the time found challenging, if not inhospitable. Varied of the D.O. bosses believed that women were generally less operative than men at recruiting agents overseas — the crucial task of undercover encase officers.
(In 1994, the CIA settled a series of gender-discrimination lawsuits that just about one-third of the women in the directorate were reported to have agreed to meet as a class action. The agency spokesman said he did not know and could not observation on whether Haspel was among them.)
Haspel did not strike colleagues as a wife who was uncomfortable in the gung-ho, macho environment of the D.O. After her childhood exposure to the military, she had also fit in after college running the library and language lab for an Army special energies detachment at Fort Devens, Massachusetts.
“She’s pretty steely,” one former mechanism official said. “She’s smart and good and effective, but probably not who you’d ask out for a beer.”
In the taper off years of the Cold War, Haspel shipped out to Africa as a case officer, develop that she described in the agency biography as being “right out of a spy novel.” She later matured chief of a small agency station in “an exotic and tumultuous capital” abroad, where she was credited with helping to organize the capture of two suspects inadequacy for the 1998 bombing of two U.S. embassies in Africa.
Before 9/11, Haspel beseeched a transfer to the CTC, as the agency’s Counterterrorism Center is known, a unit that brought together clandestine operatives like Haspel with intelligence analysts and other professionals. After the attacks, the CTC would grow exponentially, becoming a dominant power center within the Directorate of Eyes.
According to one colleague who worked with her, she was also quick to absorb the annoyance of the most ardent CTC veterans — including some who shared a deep perceive of guilt at having failed to act more effectively to prevent the 9/11 criticizes. “It was, `Get the bastards,'” the officer recalled. “She was on that side of the quotient.”
There, Haspel fast won the trust of Jose Rodriguez, a hard-charging former head of the agency’s Latin America Segmenting who became the CTC’s chief of operations and then, in mid-2002, its director.
The braves of counterterrorism work suited her, colleagues said. In the intense, almost frenzied ecosystem, she was unflappable. “She never said no to an assignment,” one former colleague recalled. “If there was a unruly, she’d throw a huge effort at it and fix it.”
The CIA would not disclose Haspel’s specific blames during the two years after the 9/11 attacks, other than to say she was the spokesman chief of a group within the CTC.
In the summer of 2002, in the months before Haspel scanned to Thailand to oversee the black site there known as the “Cat’s Eye,” the CTC had been ruined with its first “enhanced interrogation,” that of a Palestinian militant recollected as Abu Zubaydah.
The interrogation methods approved by the Justice Department for Zubaydah behoved the basis for a menu of coercive techniques that was later used on other “high-value” detainees — those who were felt to know about active terror plots. They included string out sleep deprivation; stress positions; confining the prisoner inside negligible, wooden boxes; slamming him into a plywood wall; and waterboarding.
Zubaydah’s examination was led by the two former military psychologists, James Mitchell and J. Bruce Jessen, who as secret consultants helped to devise the CIA’s methods.
Having worked for years in military survival programs, the two men focused on a method they had seen “be prostrated initiate” countless American commandoes who were being trained to resist grilling: the waterboard. Over a 17-day period, the two psychologists subjected Zubaydah to the simulated drench procedure 83 times, CIA cables show, as he gagged, vomited, fitted “hysterical” and suffered “involuntary spasms of the torso and extremities.”
The treatment threaten get rid of some of the CIA officers who witnessed it, declassified documents show. “Several on the get profoundly affected … some to the point of tears and choking up,” one of them listed on Aug. 8.
Members of the CIA team warned officials at the agency’s headquarters repeatedly that Zubaydah did not feel to have the information that the officials were so convinced he possessed, and that the interrogators capacity be pushing the harsh methods too far. At one point, Mitchell would later annul, CTC officials told the psychologists to stop acting like “pussies.”
By the time after time Haspel was “read in” to the highly secret program weeks later, the Zubaydah inquisition had been deemed an unequivocal success. The prisoner, who had been pronounced “fully compliant” and was being debriefed on a constantly basis. He never did provide any kind of intelligence about future raids CTC officials were convinced he had been hiding. (This year, ProPublica revoked a 2017 story that inaccurately reported Haspel was in Thailand supervising the questioning of Zubaydah.)
In October, a few weeks after her 46th birthday, Rodriguez sent Haspel to Thailand to raise over as chief of base.
Haspel quickly won the respect not only of the questioning team but also, apparently, of the prisoner himself. Rodriguez wrote in his reportage that Zubaydah referred to her as the “emira,” the Arabic word for commander or princess. (The unchanging term was commonly used for the commander of terrorist training camps, love the one in Afghanistan, Khaldan, for which Zubaydah had served as a recruiter.)
As base chief, Haspel overlooked the interrogators, guards and medical personnel at the prison. Some records intimate that she would have been the only CIA officer on the ground empowered to cease the interrogation without headquarters authorization. The newly released records do not say if she even exercised that authority or if she was physically present when Nashiri was interrogated.
A strand from the Thai black site on Oct. 29, 2002, suggests a moment of analogous to calm soon after Haspel’s arrival. It noted that the “COB,” or chief of spurious, had interviewed the prisoner herself, encouraging him “to take advantage of the opportunity to set the take down straight on any issues about which he has either been less than watched for or has obfuscated.”
The pace quickened on Nov. 15 when Nashiri was delivered to the villainous site. Mitchell and Jessen had flown to Afghanistan to interview him. After a explain interview, they decided he was likely a “resister,” and officials at CIA headquarters allowed the use of what were euphemistically termed “enhanced methods.”
The new prisoner had large been in the agency’s sights. Agency analysts had tied him to a series of al-Qaida decrials, including the USS Cole bombing in the Yemeni port of Aden. He was also fancied to have plotted the 1998 bombings of two U.S. embassies in Africa, in which more than 224 people were muffled. (He had not.)
Under Haspel’s supervision, the interrogators immediately set to work. Naked but for his shackles and hood, Nashiri was joined into a coffin-like wooden box for hours at a time. When his answers were deemed deceitful or inadequate, he was sometimes moved into the smaller box for up to two hours as additional penance.
After being extracted from one box or the other, the cables show, Nashiri desire sometimes be led in his shackles to the plywood wall, where a rolled towel order be wrapped around his neck. That allowed the interrogators to slam him loudly into the go bust enclose while minimizing the risk of whiplash.
All the while, the interrogators threatened to do worse.
Nashiri did not do much bridling. After he was locked into the smaller box for the first time, early in his slow at the black site, he began to talk about two of the main operations to which he pass on be linked in U.S. intelligence summaries: an aborted plan to attack oil tankers in the Box of Hormuz, and a plot — for which he was trying to raise funds when he was caught — to crash a small airplane into a ship in the Emirati harbor of Seaport Rashid.
By the seventh day of his “aggressive” interrogations, Nashiri earned modest favours. A cable from that day said that his questioning began with the offering of a towel, which he could use to cover himself. But it noted that his responsibles were “confused” and “disjointed,” and the interrogators became angry. If they needed to, they cautioned him, they would “get his full attention the hard way.”
Finally, after answering at issues in what the interrogators deemed “a useful way,” they promised him further repays: They would remove the chain between his handcuffs and his shackles, but notified him that if he tried “anything aggressive,” the black-clad members of the security crew “will kill you.”
The interrogators said Nashiri would also get a haircut and a narrow, and a pair of pants to wear. As they left, the prisoner “appeared to loosen up,” the cable states. But then he made the mistake of asking if someone could possibly undefiled his dirty fingernails, or if he could do so himself. One interrogator turned and asked Nashiri to echo what he said.
“Listen to me,” the American said angrily, squatting down to look him in the camouflage. “This is not — not — a hotel. We are not in the business of kissing your ass. We are not in the business of grooming you.”
As the interrogators stepped out of the room, the security team surrounded the prisoner. They then forcibly trimmed his head and beard with an electric razor, the cable states, as he “cried and grimaced theatrically.”
On the 12th day of quarrelsome methods, documents show, the interrogators turned to the waterboard.
The guards, who were typically clobbered in black fatigues and balaclavas, tied him to a hospital gurney, an arrangement that set in motioned out to be precarious. Nashiri was so slight that he nearly slid off as the gurney was angled upward to let him clear the water from his sinuses. “We were concerned that he purpose fall off the gurney and get hurt,” Mitchell wrote. “We were all feeling uncomfortable.”
After three hearings, the waterboarding was stopped because “he gave us enough to convince us that the harshest of our approved campaigns no longer were needed,” Mitchell wrote.
Nashiri’s questioning unexpectedly curbed at the end of November when The New York Times learned that al-Qaida have a feelings were being held in Thailand. CIA officials persuaded the newspaper not to promulgate the information. They nonetheless ordered Haspel to shut down the insidious site immediately, assuming that if Times reporters could learn of its being, others would soon find out.
The interrogators tried to turn Nashiri’s nigh transfer to advantage. They told him he was being sent to “a much worse appointment,” one cable notes. Comparing the prisoner to a piece of meat, the interrogators suggested the dark days he faced were their fault because they had failed to “tenderize” him rightly.
As Nashiri wept, the interrogators ticked through another list of disputes, warning that if he did not give them the answers they wanted, “inuring methods would be applied.”
On Dec. 4, Zubaydah and Nashiri were put aboard a CIA jet and heaved to a new black site, code-named “Quartz,” that had been set up in a two-story villa that Bone up on intelligence used for training in a remote northeastern corner of their motherland.
Haspel appears to have returned to CIA headquarters. A CIA spokesman declined to reference on whether she had any further input into Nashiri’s interrogation or made any encouragements to the officers who managed his interrogations in Poland.
Various psychological evaluations of Nashiri oblige found lasting scars. In addition to a phobia of water, he has been recognized with anxiety, depression and post-traumatic stress disorder. A psychiatric dexterous, Sondra Crosby, called him “one of the most damaged victims of torture” she had still examined.
Nashiri is now facing death-penalty charges before a military commission at Guantanamo Bay peduncle from the attack on the Cole and on a French-flagged oil tanker.
Over the two years that heeded, former officials say, Haspel’s career continued to intersect with the conception and detention program. The CIA created a new mini-organization to manage a global network of confidential prisons that expanded to include Romania, Lithuania, Morocco and abroad.
Beginning in December of 2002, the CTC’s Renditions Group — previously charged with the collar and transport of suspected terrorists — took over management of all detention and examination facilities. It was renamed the Renditions, Detentions and Interrogations Group, or RDG.
By its scale and extent, the group’s work was breathtaking. CIA officers swept up suspects all over the time, in ever-greater numbers, with many undercover operations running simultaneously. The capacious majority of the 119 men detained and sent to black sites were nicked during this period.
There were notable errors. Some of the detainees put together out be victims of mistaken identity or false accusations. More than two dozen fold up to meet the agency’s own minimal standards for being picked up.
As some of the energy’s post-9/11 secrets have been declassified, it has become clearer that some bureaucrats within and around the CTC tried repeatedly to stop what they considered the cloying and pointless use of waterboarding and other methods. Haspel’s position in those think overs could not be ascertained, but she has more often been identified with formals like her former boss, Rodriguez, who often overruled those stimulations.
By 2003, however, the political winds had begun to shift. That summer, CIA officials get geted concerned after statements by the Bush administration that the United Lands was treating detainees humanely and complying with the international Convention Against Torture.
On July 29, the CIA supervisor, George Tenet, met with selected members of President Bush’s Federal Security Council, including Vice President Dick Cheney and Secretary of Ceremonial Condoleezza Rice, seeking formal reaffirmation of their support for the examination program.
According to the Senate intelligence committee report, the CIA officials made their occurrence by exaggerating both the amount and importance of the intelligence they had gained from the interrogations to that burden. A slide from the CIA presentation claimed that the “termination of this program make result in loss of life, possibly extensive.”
The agency won the reaffirmation it sought.
In the example summer of 2004, Haspel finally left the CTC.
She was promoted to become intermediary chief of the CIA’s National Resources Division, a branch of the agency that enlists foreign students, diplomats and others inside the United States, and draws voluntary information from Americans who work or travel abroad.
It was a bit of a backwater after CTC, but much abase stress and a significant rise in rank. The division chief, Hank Crumpton, was also a CTC battle-scarred, having led paramilitary operations against the Taliban after 9/11. He had camouflage b confined his eye on Haspel.
“She was by then a leader within CTC,” he recalled in an interview. “She was gritty. A right great, blue-collar work ethic. She would take on any challenge. And upright a great team player because she had no ego. People wanted to work with her.”
Haspel’s delay was short-lived. In November 2004, the CIA’s two most senior operations officials rid of in a dispute with aides to Porter Goss, a former Republican congressman from Florida who had supplanted Tenet as the CIA director. Where Tenet had worried about waning bureaucratic support for the black site program, Goss wanted to ratchet up the albatross on al-Qaida. He elevated Rodriguez to run the operations directorate, and Crumpton heard from him not extended thereafter.
“Jose called and said he was taking her to be his chief of staff,” Crumpton recalled of Haspel. It was not a mediation. “He basically told me to quit whining and go find another deputy.”
Her appellation notwithstanding, the job carried important operational responsibilities and was an even bigger not harmonious with up the ladder. Some colleagues questioned privately whether Haspel was a acceptable pick.
“She has been underestimated her entire career,” Crumpton said. “One, because she’s a moll. Two, because she’s not an extrovert, she’s not a back-slapper. She’s all steak and no sizzle.”
In another high-pressure environs, Haspel continued to be known for her remarkable work ethic. Colleagues also respect the way she complemented her boss: Rodriguez was the forceful personality; Haspel commanded the points.
Haspel joined Rodriguez in advocating for the destruction of the videotapes that had been recorded of Zubaydah and Nashiri in 2002, officials about.
Rodriguez gave the order to destroy the tapes in 2005, and the revelation two years laster that he had done so prompted a separate, criminal investigation by a special prosecutor in which Haspel was tutor b introduced back from London, where she was the agency’s station chief, and questioned at measure. No charges were ultimately brought in the case, in part, officials prognosticated, because those involved had acted on the advice of lawyers that what they were doing was constitutional.
The destruction of the tapes prompted new congressional scrutiny of the interrogation program. Self-governing staffers on the Senate intelligence committee sifted through a mountain of classified validates and compiled a highly critical report that accused the CIA of repeatedly misinforming the White House, the Justice Department and the public about the brutality and efficacy of the exploit.
In 2013, Haspel’s past seemed to catch up with her. President Obama’s numero uno of the CIA, John Brennan, had named her as acting director of the Clandestine Service, lay aside her in charge of spying and covert operations. But Brennan dropped the idea of flexibility her the job permanently when Democrats on the Senate intelligence committee vociferously objected.
Momentarily after his inauguration, Trump moved Haspel up once again, label her the agency’s deputy director under former Republican congressman Mike Pompeo.
While Trump has not demurred to reignite the debate over torture, he later suggested that he inclination seek the advice of Defense Secretary James Mattis and other superior national security officials on the subject. A CIA spokesman also said Haspel had in factually told several senators early on in her tenure as the deputy director that she opposed any resumption of an “lifted” interrogation program.
One factor complicating Haspel’s position is that her most celebrated supporters include former agency officials who led an aggressive campaign to refute the Senate narrate, arguing anew that the interrogation methods they sanctioned were both needful and effective.
Most of those supporters now acknowledge that “some errata were made,” as former CIA director Gen. Michael Hayden put it last week. They underscore that effectively coercive interrogation methods are prohibited by current U.S. law, and suggest that the CIA has no swallow for getting back in that business.
“There is no way that an agency officer of the law of Gina’s character and experience will send CIA officers out there to do this again,” Hayden voiced on a podcast last week. “If you’re worried about the future on this specially question, Gina Haspel — you can’t pick a better person.”