On September 16, 2001, Dick Cheney warned that in order to deal with the terrorism threat: “We have to work the dark side, if you will. Spend time in the shadows of the intelligence world.” It was as though the CIA was being directed to venture into unfamiliar territory.

An ABC News report broadcast in 1979 detailing secret CIA programs conducting experiments on unwitting human subjects, testing the effects of LSD and other methods of mind control, serves however as a useful reminder that the agency has a long history of working the dark side.

Amnesty International: A ruling today by the European Court of Human Rights on the CIA’s detention and rendition of German national Khaled El-Masri has been hailed as a historic moment.

The European Court has held unanimously that Macedonia was responsible for the German national’s unlawful detention, enforced disappearance, torture and other ill-treatment, and for his transfer out of Macedonia to locations where he suffered further serious violations of his human rights. It also said that Macedonia did not satisfy its obligation to carry out an effective investigation.

On 31 December 2003, the Macedonian authorities arrested El-Masri, who is of Lebanese descent, after he entered Macedonia from Serbia. They held him incommunicado, subjecting him to enforced disappearance, repeated interrogations and to ill-treatment until 23 January 2004, when they handed him over to CIA agents.

As part of a covert, US-led rendition and secret detention programme, the CIA transferred El-Masri to a secret detention facility in Afghanistan. There he was held unlawfully in secret and denied access to a lawyer. His enforced disappearance continued for over four months, during which he was subjected to torture and other ill-treatment. Finally, on 28 May 2004, El-Masri was put on a plane and flown to Albania where he was released

Amnesty International and the International Committee of Jurists (ICJ) said today’s ruling was significant because for the first time it holds a European state accountable for its involvement in the secret US-led programme.

Amnesty International’s expert on counter-terrorism and human rights, Julia Hall, said:

“This judgment confirms the role Macedonia played in the CIA rendition and secret detention programmes, and is an important step towards accountability for European complicity in rendition and torture.

“Macedonia is not alone. Many other European governments colluded with the USA to abduct, transfer, ‘disappear’ and torture people in the course of rendition operations. This judgment represents progress, but much more needs to be done to ensure accountability across Europe.”

The International Committee of Jurists Secretary General Wilder Tayler said:

“This ruling is historic. It recognises that the CIA rendition and secret detention system involved torture and enforced disappearances. It emphasises that both the victims and the public have the right to know the truth about these serious violations. It affirms without doubt that Europe cannot be an area of impunity but it must be a place of redress and accountability where international human rights law obligations are not bypassed but fulfilled.

“Other European governments – such as Poland, Lithuania, and Romania, against which cases are also pending with the Court – should note today’s European Court judgment and take measures to ensure that the truth is told, thorough, effective, independent and impartial investigations are carried out and those responsible are held accountable.”

Amnesty and the ICJ also stressed that the court’s ruling serves to highlight the absence of accountability in the USA, with the court noting that a claim filed against the CIA by El-Masri was dismissed by the US courts after the US government invoked “state secrets privilege”.

A report in the Washington Post focuses on a female CIA clandestine officer who is depicted in the lead roll in the new film, ‘Zero Dark Thirty,’ about the assassination of Osama bin Laden.

This spring, she was among a handful of employees given the agency’s Distinguished Intelligence Medal, its highest honor except for those who have come under direct fire. But when dozens of others were given lesser awards, the female officer lashed out.

“She hit ‘reply all’ ” to an e-mail announcement of the awards, a second former CIA official said. The thrust of her message, the former official said, was: “You guys tried to obstruct me. You fought me. Only I deserve the award.”

Over the past year, she was denied a promotion that would have raised her civil service rank from GS-13 to GS-14, bringing an additional $16,000 in annual pay.

Officials said the woman was given a cash bonus for her work on the bin Laden mission and has since moved on to a new counterterrorism assignment. They declined to say why the promotion was blocked.

The move stunned the woman’s former associates, despite her reputation for clashing with colleagues.

“Do you know how many CIA officers are jerks?” the former official said. “If that was a disqualifier, the whole National Clandestine Service would be gone.”

The targeter’s contacts with the “Zero Dark Thirty” filmmakers have also been examined as part of an inquiry, apparently by the CIA inspector general, into the information that agency officials shared with outsiders about the bin Laden raid.

Internal e-mails released this year under Freedom of Information Act requests showed how the agency set up repeated visits for Boal, allowing him to tour the “vault” where the raid was planned and even see a mock-up of the Abbottabad compound.

Former CIA officials said agency enthusiasm for the film has been tempered as details about it have surfaced, including the fact that the movie opens with a harrowing waterboarding scene in a secret CIA prison.

Gregory D. Johnsen writes: With the resignation of David H. Petraeus, President Obama now has a chance to appoint a new C.I.A. director. Unfortunately, one of the leading candidates for the job is John O. Brennan, who is largely responsible for America’s current flawed counterterrorism strategy, which relies too heavily on drone strikes that frequently kill civilians and provide Al Qaeda with countless new recruits. Rather than keeping us safe, this strategy is putting the United States at greater risk.

For all of the Obama administration’s foreign policy successes — from ending the war in Iraq to killing Osama bin Laden — the most enduring policy legacy of the past four years may well turn out to be an approach to counterterrorism that American officials call the “Yemen model,” a mixture of drone strikes and Special Forces raids targeting Al Qaeda leaders.

Mr. Brennan is the president’s chief counterterrorism adviser and the architect of this model. In a recent speech, he claimed that there was “little evidence that these actions are generating widespread anti-American sentiment or recruits for A.Q.A.P.,” referring to Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula.

Mr. Brennan’s assertion was either shockingly naïve or deliberately misleading. Testimonies from Qaeda fighters and interviews I and local journalists have conducted across Yemen attest to the centrality of civilian casualties in explaining Al Qaeda’s rapid growth there. The United States is killing women, children and members of key tribes. “Each time they kill a tribesman, they create more fighters for Al Qaeda,” one Yemeni explained to me over tea in Sana, the capital, last month. Another told CNN, after a failed strike, “I would not be surprised if a hundred tribesmen joined Al Qaeda as a result of the latest drone mistake.”

Rather than promote the author of a failing strategy, we need a C.I.A. director who will halt the agency’s creeping militarization and restore it to what it does best: collecting human intelligence. It is an intelligence agency, not a lightweight version of Joint Special Operations Command. And until America wins the intelligence war, missiles will continue to hit the wrong targets, kill too many civilians and drive young men into the waiting arms of our enemies. [Continue reading…]

Stephen Kinzer writes: Walking through the lobby of the Central Intelligence Agency headquarters in Langley, Va., after handing in his resignation on Friday, David H. Petraeus passed a bas-relief sculpture of Allen Dulles, who led the agency in the 1950s and early ’60s. Below it is the motto, “His Monument Is Around Us.”

Both men ran the C.I.A. during some of its most active years, Dulles during the early cold war and Mr. Petraeus during the era of drone strikes and counterinsurgency operations. And both, it turns out, had high-profile extramarital affairs.

But private life for a C.I.A. director today is apparently quite different from what it was in the Dulles era. Mr. Petraeus resigned after admitting to a single affair; Allen Dulles had, as his sister, Eleanor, wrote later, “at least a hundred.”

Indeed, the contrast between Dulles’s story and that of Mr. Petraeus reflects how fully the life of public servants has changed in the United States.

Dulles ran the agency from 1953 to 1961, and he had a profound effect on America’s role in the cold war. Together with his brother, Secretary of State John Foster Dulles, he exercised enormous power and helped overthrow governments from Iran to Guatemala to Congo.

He was also a serial adulterer. Dulles was married in 1920, but he and his wife, Clover, had a difficult home life. She was sensitive and introverted, while he was handsome and charming — and a skilled seducer. [Continue reading…]

The Washington Post reports: The timing of the resignation has caused a controversy, with members of Congress and others questioning why the disclosure was not made until after Tuesday’s election. Some have also complained that the FBI did not notify the White House and senior members of Congress earlier that the CIA director was under investigation.

The law enforcement officials did not provide an exact timeline for the investigation, but they said that the inquiry started at least several weeks ago. They said investigators thought they were dealing with a routine harassment case until they discovered the e-mails were traced to a private e-mail account belonging to Petraeus.

The initial concern was that someone had broken into the CIA director’s e-mail account, leading to concerns about potential security breaches, according to the officials. As the investigation proceeded and more e-mails emerged, along with [Paula] Broadwell’s role, FBI investigators realized they had uncovered an affair between Petraeus and Broadwell, the officials said.

The investigators first interviewed Petraeus about two weeks ago, the officials said. Petraeus was told at the time that no criminal charges would be forthcoming and the idea of him resigning was not raised, the officials said.

One of the law enforcement officials said Justice Department officials were unclear on what steps to take next because they had determined that there had been no crime and no breach of security.

It was not until Tuesday that the Justice Department notified James Clapper, the director of national intelligence, that compromising material about Petraeus had been uncovered as part of an investigation, according to a senior intelligence official. Clapper then spoke with Petraeus and told him to resign.

“Director Clapper learned of the situation from the FBI on Tuesday evening around 5 p.m.,” the intelligence official said. “In subsequent conversations with Director Petraeus, Director Clapper advised Director Petraeus to resign.”

The official declined to say whether Petraeus had considered resigning at that point, but he said it was quickly clear to Clapper that stepping down was “the right thing to do” for Petraeus.

The official said that Clapper has been fully briefed on all aspects of the FBI investigation and has not called for the DNI or CIA to conduct a follow-on probe or damage assessment — indicating that Clapper does not see the case as a security threat.

The New York Times reports: A former Central Intelligence Agency officer accused of leaking to journalists the identities of two former colleagues involved in the agency’s detention and interrogation program for high-level Qaeda suspects pleaded guilty on Tuesday to a single charge. The plea deal was a victory for the Obama administration’s crackdown on unauthorized disclosures of government secrets.

The former officer, John Kiriakou, 48, stood in a federal courtroom in the Eastern District of Virginia and told the judge that he had violated the Intelligence Identities Protection Act by disclosing the name of a former colleague to a reporter, who has been identified as Matthew Cole, formerly of ABC News. Under the terms of the plea deal, Mr. Kiriakou will be sentenced to two and a half years in prison.

But prosecutors agreed to drop several other charges, including accusations that he identified another colleague involved in interrogations to a different journalist, Scott Shane of The New York Times, and that he lied to a C.I.A. publication board reviewing his memoir.

Mr. Kiriakou worked for the C.I.A. from 1990 to 2004. He was a leader of the team that located and captured Abu Zubaydah, a suspected high-level member of Al Qaeda, in Pakistan in 2002. He came to public attention in late 2007 when he gave an interview to ABC News portraying the suffocation technique called waterboarding as torture, but calling it necessary. It later emerged that he significantly understated the C.I.A.’s use of the technique.

Mr. Kiriakou spoke calmly in court as he stood to face the judge, Leonie M. Brinkema. His lawyer, Robert Trout, stood beside him as the judge asked him a series of questions to make sure he understood the details and ramifications of his plea before she asked him how he would plead.

“Guilty,” he said, nodding slightly.

The former C.I.A. officer raised only one objection during the proceedings, questioning why a statement of facts to which he signed included admissions about some of the other charges that prosecutors had agreed to drop. The judge told him that such admissions were “window dressing” that would not change the outcome of the case, and he agreed to keep them in.

Judge Brinkema set a hearing to sentence Mr. Kiriakou formally on Jan. 25. But she indicated that she thought the 30-month term in the plea deal was appropriate, noting that it was the same term that I. Lewis Libby Jr., the former chief of staff to Vice President Dick Cheney, received for obstruction charges in connection with the investigation into the disclosure of the identity of Valerie Plame Wilson. President George W. Bush later commuted Mr. Libby’s prison term.

The Washington Post reports: The CIA is urging the White House to approve a significant expansion of the agency’s fleet of armed drones, a move that would extend the spy service’s decade-long transformation into a paramilitary force, U.S. officials said.

The proposal by CIA Director David H. Petraeus would bolster the agency’s ability to sustain its campaigns of lethal strikes in Pakistan and Yemen and be able, if directed, to shift aircraft to emerging al-Qaeda threats in North Africa or other trouble spots, officials said.

If approved, the CIA could add as many as 10 drones, the officials said, to an inventory that has ranged between 30 and 35 over the past few years.

The outcome has broad implications for counterterrorism policy and whether the CIA gradually returns to an organization focused mainly on gathering intelligence, or remains a central player in the targeted killing of terrorism suspects abroad.

U.S. officials said that the proposal was recently submitted to the National Security Council, but that the White House has not made a decision. In the past, officials from the Pentagon and other departments have raised concerns about the CIA’s expanding arsenal and involvement in lethal operations, but a senior Defense official said that the Pentagon had not opposed the agency’s current plan.
[…]
The administration has touted the collaboration between the CIA and the military in counterterrorism operations, contributing to a blurring of their traditional roles. In Yemen, the agency routinely “borrows” the aircraft of the military’s Joint Special Operations Command to carry out strikes. The JSOC is increasingly engaged in activities that resemble espionage.

The CIA’s request for more drones indicates that Petraeus has become convinced that there are limits to those sharing arrangements, and that the agency needs full control over a larger number of aircraft.

The U.S. military’s fleet dwarfs that of the CIA. A Pentagon report issued this year counted 246 Predators, Reapers and Global Hawks in the Air Force inventory alone, with hundreds of other remotely piloted aircraft distributed among the Army, the Navy and the Marines.

Petraeus, who had control of large portions of those fleets while serving as U.S. commander in Iraq and Afghanistan, has had to adjust to a different resource scale at the CIA, officials said. The agency’s budget has begun to tighten, after double-digit increases over much of the past decade.
[…]
The CIA also maintains a separate, smaller fleet of stealth surveillance aircraft. Stealth drones were used to monitor bin Laden’s compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan. Their use in surveillance flights over Iran’s nuclear facilities was exposed when one crashed in that country last year.

Any move to expand the reach of the CIA’s fleet of armed drones probably would require the agency to establish additional secret bases. The agency relies on U.S. military pilots to fly the planes from bases in the southwestern United States but has been reluctant to share overseas landing strips with the Defense Department.

Gary Sick writes: The American embassy in Tehran was attacked and its residents imprisoned almost exactly 33 years ago, November 4, 1979. The 444-day ordeal of the hostage crisis burned itself into the American collective consciousness. It was America’s first contact with radical Islam. It was our first televised foreign policy crisis. It was the subtext for Jimmy Carter’s unsuccessful reelection campaign. And it has shaped US attitudes and policies toward Iran ever since.

Most Americans — even the under-33 generation — have some recollection of those events: photos of blindfolded diplomats; angry crowds of bearded young men waving their fists at the TV cameras; wreckage of helicopters in the Iranian desert after the failed rescue mission; triumphal homecoming parades.

Several episodes, however, have largely been forgotten. Who recalls that 13 blacks and women were released by the Iranians in the first few weeks of the crisis in a crude bid to polarize American public opinion? And how many people remember the six Americans who hid out in the Canadian embassy after evading capture, and who were later smuggled out of Iran in full sight of the militiamen at Mehrabad Airport?

This latter part of the story, dubbed the “Canadian Caper,” was a brief burst of good news in the midst of an otherwise grim daily dose of frustration and anger. Canadian Ambassador Ken Taylor rightly became an American hero. However, the details of the rescue were classified. Any direct connection of the CIA to the operation, or even excessive gloating, could have been dangerous to the remaining 53 hostages. So it was not until many years later that the full story was revealed. For most Americans, it receded to the status of a footnote.

No longer. Ben Affleck has taken the essence of the story, given it the full Hollywood treatment, and released it this weekend to excellent reviews. Affleck directs and stars as Tony Mendez, the CIA disguise specialist who came up with the unlikely cover story and personally shepherded the six through the airport on January 28, 1980, in the guise of a Canadian film crew exploring sites for a sci-fi thriller named Argo.

Viewed simply as a spy thriller, Argo is brilliantly edgy and entertaining. Affleck doesn’t overplay his role. He resists what must have been a temptation to inject a large dose of James Bond into his character. Instead, he plays a talented guy separated from his young son, as he and his wife take some “time off.” As Mendez, he comes up with an outlandish plan and sells it with some difficulty to a skeptical bureaucracy as, admittedly, the “best bad idea we’ve got.” It was a time, after all, when almost all options available to the US administration were unattractive. [Continue reading…]