CIA torture methods designed by psychologists

From Vanity Fair, where this article is filed, with no apparent intention of irony, under "The War on Terror":

Rorschach and Awe
America's coercive interrogation methods were reverse-engineered by two C.I.A. psychologists who had spent their careers training U.S. soldiers to endure Communist-style torture techniques.
by Katherine Eban
July 17, 2007

Abu Zubaydah was a mess. It was early April 2002, and the al-Qaeda lieutenant had been shot in the groin during a firefight in Pakistan, then captured by the Special Forces and flown to a safe house in Thailand. Now he was experiencing life as America's first high-value detainee in the wake of 9/11. A medical team and a cluster of F.B.I. and C.I.A. agents stood vigil, all fearing that the next attack on America could happen at any moment. It didn't matter that Zubaydah was unable to eat, drink, sit up, or control his bowels. They wanted him to talk.

A C.I.A. interrogation team was expected but hadn't yet arrived. But the F.B.I. agents who had been nursing his wounds and cleaning him after he'd soiled himself asked Zubaydah what he knew. The detainee said something about a plot against an ally, then began slipping into sepsis. He was probably going to die.

The team cabled the morsel of intelligence to C.I.A. headquarters, where it was received with delight by Director George Tenet. "I want to congratulate our officers on the ground," he told a gathering of agents at Langley. When someone explained that the F.B.I. had obtained the information, Tenet blew up and demanded that the C.I.A. get there immediately, say those who were later told of the meeting. Tenet's instructions were clear: Zubaydah was to be kept alive at all costs. (Through his publisher, George Tenet declined to be interviewed.)

Zubaydah was stabilized at the nearest hospital, and the F.B.I. continued its questioning using its typical rapport-building techniques. An agent showed him photographs of suspected al-Qaeda members until Zubaydah finally spoke up, blurting out that "Moktar," or Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, had planned 9/11. He then proceeded to lay out the details of the plot. America learned the truth of how 9/11 was organized because a detainee had come to trust his captors after they treated him humanely.

It was an extraordinary success story. But it was one that would evaporate with the arrival of the C.I.A's interrogation team. At the direction of an accompanying psychologist, the team planned to conduct a psychic demolition in which they'd get Zubaydah to reveal everything by severing his sense of personality and scaring him almost to death.

This is the approach President Bush appeared to have in mind when, in a lengthy public address last year, he cited the "tough" but successful interrogation of Zubaydah to defend the C.I.A.'s secret prisons, America's use of coercive interrogation tactics, and the abolishment of habeas corpus for detainees. He said that Zubaydah had been questioned using an "alternative set" of tactics formulated by the C.I.A. This program, he said, was fully monitored by the C.I.A.'s inspector general and required extensive training for interrogators before they were allowed to question captured terrorists.

While the methods were certainly unorthodox, there is little evidence they were necesssary, given the success of the rapport-building approach until that point.

I did not set out to discover how America got into the business of torturing detainees. I wasn't even trying to learn how America found out who was behind 9/11. I was attempting to explain why psychologists, alone among medical professionals, were participating in military interrogations at Guantánamo Bay and elsewhere.

Both army leaders and military psychologists say that psychologists help to make interrogations "safe, legal and effective." But last fall, a psychologist named Jean Maria Arrigo came to see me with a disturbing claim about the American Psychological Association, her profession's 148,000-member trade group. Arrigo had sat on a specially convened A.P.A. task force that, in July 2005, had ruled that psychologists could assist in military interrogations, despite angry objections from many in the profession. The task force also determined that, in cases where international human-rights law conflicts with U.S. law, psychologists could defer to the much looser U.S. standards—what Arrigo called the "Rumsfeld definition" of humane treatment.

Arrigo and several others with her, including a representative from Physicians for Human Rights, had come to believe that the task force had been rigged—stacked with military members (6 of the 10 had ties to the armed services), monitored by observers with undisclosed conflicts of interest, and programmed to reach preordained conclusions.

One theory was that the A.P.A. had given its stamp of approval to military interrogations as part of a quid pro quo. In exchange, they suspected, the Pentagon was working to allow psychologists—who, unlike psychiatrists, are not medical doctors—to prescribe medication, dramatically increasing their income. (The military has championed modern-day psychology since World War II, and continues to be one of the largest single employers of psychologists through its network of veterans' hospitals. It also funded a prescription-drug training program for military psychologists in the early 90s.)

A.P.A. leaders deny any backroom deals and insist that psychologists have helped to stop the abuse of detainees. They say that the association will investigate any reports of ethical lapses by its members.

While there was no "smoking gun" amid the stack of documents Arrigo gave me, my reporting eventually led me to an even graver discovery. After a 10-month investigation comprising more than 70 interviews as well as a detailed review of public and confidential documents, I pieced together the account of the Abu Zubaydah interrogation that appears in this article. I also discovered that psychologists weren't merely complicit in America's aggressive new interrogation regime. Psychologists, working in secrecy, had actually designed the tactics and trained interrogators in them while on contract to the C.I.A.

Two psychologists in particular played a central role: James Elmer Mitchell, who was attached to the C.I.A. team that eventually arrived in Thailand, and his colleague Bruce Jessen. Neither served on the task force or are A.P.A. members. Both worked in a classified military training program known as sere—for Survival, Evasion, Resistance, Escape—which trains soldiers to endure captivity in enemy hands. Mitchell and Jessen reverse-engineered the tactics inflicted on sere trainees for use on detainees in the global war on terror, according to psychologists and others with direct knowledge of their activities. The C.I.A. put them in charge of training interrogators in the brutal techniques, including "waterboarding," at its network of "black sites." In a statement, Mitchell and Jessen said, "We are proud of the work we have done for our country."

The agency had famously little experience in conducting interrogations or in eliciting "ticking time bomb" information from detainees. Yet, remarkably, it turned to Mitchell and Jessen, who were equally inexperienced and had no proof of their tactics' effectiveness, say several of their former colleagues. Steve Kleinman, an Air Force Reserve colonel and expert in human-intelligence operations, says he finds it astonishing that the C.I.A. "chose two clinical psychologists who had no intelligence background whatsoever, who had never conducted an interrogation … to do something that had never been proven in the real world."

The tactics were a "voodoo science," says Michael Rolince, former section chief of the F.B.I.'s International Terrorism Operations. According to a person familiar with the methods, the basic approach was to "break down [the detainees] through isolation, white noise, completely take away their ability to predict the future, create dependence on interrogators."

Interrogators who were sent for classified training inevitably wound up in a Mitchell-Jessen "shop," and some balked at their methods. Instead of the careful training touted by President Bush, some recruits allegedly received on-the-job training during brutal interrogations that effectively unfolded as live demonstrations.

Mitchell and Jessen's methods were so controversial that, among colleagues, the reaction to their names alone became a litmus test of one's attitude toward coercion and human rights. Their critics called them the "Mormon mafia" (a reference to their shared religion) and the "poster boys" (referring to the F.B.I.'s "most wanted" posters, which are where some thought their activities would land them).

The reversed sere tactics they originated have come to shatter various American communities, putting law enforcement and intelligence gathering on a collision course, fostering dissent within the C.I.A., and sparking a war among psychologists over professional identity that has even led to a threat of physical violence at a normally staid A.P.A. meeting. The spread of the tactics—and the photographs of their wild misuse at Abu Ghraib—devastated America's reputation in the Muslim world. All the while, Mitchell and Jessen have remained more or less behind the curtain, their almost messianic belief in the value of breaking down detainees permeating interrogations throughout the war effort.

"I think [Mitchell and Jessen] have caused more harm to American national security than they'll ever understand," says Kleinman.

The bitterest irony is that the tactics seem to have been adopted by interrogators throughout the U.S. military in part because of a myth that whipped across continents and jumped from the intelligence to the military communities: the false impression that reverse-engineered sere tactics were the only thing that got Abu Zubaydah to talk.

Each branch of the U.S. military offers a variant of the sere training curriculum. The course simulates the experience of being held prisoner by enemy forces who do not observe the Geneva Conventions. The program evolved after American G.I.'s captured during the Korean War made false confessions under torture. Sure enough, those in sere training found that they would say anything to get the torment to stop.

During a typical three-week training course, participants endure waterboarding, forced nudity, extreme temperatures, sexual and religious ridicule, agonizing stress positions, and starvation-level rations. Some lose up to 15 pounds. "You're not going to die, but you think you are," says Rolince.

James Mitchell and Bruce Jessen played a key role in developing the Air Force's sere program, which was administered in Spokane, Washington. Dr. Bryce Lefever, command psychologist on the U.S.S. Enterprise and a former sere trainer who worked with Mitchell and Jessen at the Fairchild Air Base, says he was waterboarded during his own training. "It was terrifying," he remembers. "I said to myself, 'They can't kill me because it's only an exercise.' But you're strapped to an inclined gurney and you're in four-point restraint, your head is almost immobilized, and they pour water between your nose and your mouth, so if you're likely to breathe, you're going to get a lot of water. You go into an oxygen panic."

sere psychologists such as Mitchell and Jessen play two crucial roles. They screen the trainers who play interrogators, to ensure that they are stable personalities who aren't likely to drift into sadism, and they function as psychic safety officers. If a trainer emerges from an exercise unable to smile, for example, he is viewed as "too into the problem," says Dr. Lefever, and is likely to be removed.

In an ever more dangerous world, some sere trainers realized that they could market their expertise to corporations and government agencies that send executives and other employees overseas, and a survival-training industry sprang into being.

Mitchell's entry into private contracting began less than three months before September 11 with a scientific consulting company called Knowledge Works, L.L.C. He registered it in North Carolina with the help of another sere psychologist he'd worked with at Fort Bragg, Dr. John Chin. Since then, he has formed several similar companies, including the Wizard Shop (which he renamed Mind Science) and What If, L.L.C.

In Spokane, several survival companies share space with Mitchell, Jessen & Associates. The firm's executive offices sit behind a locked door with a security code that the receptionist shields from view. There, Mitchell, Jessen maintains a Secure Compartmented Information Facility, or scif, for handling classified materials under C.I.A. guidelines, says a person familiar with the facility. But instead of training C.E.O.'s to survive capture, the company principally instructs interrogators on how to break down detainees.

The sere methods it teaches are based on Communist interrogation techniques that were never designed to get good information. Their goal, says Kleinman, was to generate propaganda by getting beaten-down American hostages to make statements against U.S. interests.

The best and most reliable information comes from people who are relaxed and perceive little threat. "Why would you use evasive training tactics to elicit information?" says Dr. Michael Gelles, former chief psychologist of the Naval Criminal Investigative Service.

The sere tactics aren't just morally and legally wrong, critics say; they're tactically wrong. They produce false leads and hazy memories. "[Mitchell and Jessen] argue, 'We can make people talk,'" says Kleinman. "I have one question. 'About what?'" As one military member who worked in the sere community says, "Getting somebody to talk and getting someone to give you valid information are two very different things."

And yet, when it came time to extract intelligence from suspected al-Qaeda detainees, sere experts became "the only other game in town," according to a report, "Educing Information, Interrogation: Science and Art," put out last December by the Intelligence Science Board of the National Defense Intelligence College.

Exactly how that happened remains unclear. Many people assume that Special Forces operatives looked around for interrogation methods, recalled their sere training, and decided to try the techniques. But the introduction and spread of the tactics were more purposeful, and therefore "far more sinister," says John Sifton, a senior researcher at Human Rights Watch.

Mitchell and Jessen, Sifton says, offered a "patina of pseudo-science that made the C.I.A. and military officials think these guys were experts in unlocking the human mind. It's one thing to say, 'Take off the gloves.' It's another to say there was a science to it. sere came in as the science."

The use of "scientific credentials in the service of cruel and unlawful practices" harkens back to the Cold War, according to Leonard Rubenstein, executive director of Physicians for Human Rights. Back then, mental-health professionals working with the C.I.A. used hallucinogenic drugs, hypnosis, and extreme sensory deprivation on unwitting subjects to develop mind-control techniques. "We really thought we learned this lesson—that ambition to help national security is no excuse for throwing out ethics and science," Rubenstein says.

Some of those who encountered Mitchell and Jessen at the annual conference of all the military's sere programs were skeptical of their assertions. "Jim would make statements like, 'We know how people are responding to stress,'" one sere researcher recalls. "He always said he would show us data, but it would never arrive."

In truth, many did not consider Mitchell and Jessen to be scientists. They possessed no data about the impact of sere training on the human psyche, say former associates. Nor were they "operational psychologists," like the profilers who work for law enforcement. (Think of Jodie Foster's character in The Silence of the Lambs.) But they wanted to be, according to several former colleagues.

"It's a seductive role if you work with [elite] combat-type guys," says the military member who works in the sere community. "There is this wannabe kind of phenomenon. You lose role identity."

Dr. Gelles, who had been at the forefront of trying to stop coercive interrogations at Guantánamo, calls it the "op-doc syndrome": "These sere guys, who were essentially like school counselors, wanted to be in a position where they had the solution to the operational challenge. They cannot help themselves."

But in the incestuous world of the Special Forces, where all psychologists are referred to as "Doc" and revered as experts, "no one ever questions that you might not have a clue what you're talking about," says an intelligence expert who opposed the use of sere tactics.

For a 2005 article in The New Yorker that raised the question of whether sere tactics had been reverse-engineered, Jane Mayer asked Mitchell if he was a C.I.A. contractor. He refused to confirm or deny the claim. But the newly minted op-docs Mitchell and Jessen had been among the experts who gathered at a daylong workshop in Arlington, Virginia, in July 2003, to debate the effectiveness of truth serum and other coercive techniques. The conference, titled "Science of Deception: Integration of Practice and Theory," was funded by the C.I.A. and co-hosted by the American Psychological Association and the Rand Corporation. One of its organizers was Kirk Hubbard, then chief of the C.I.A.'s Research and Analysis Branch. Mitchell and Jessen were named on the attendance list as C.I.A. contractors.

A key participant said that, before the conference, Hubbard called and warned him not to publicly identify attendees from the C.I.A. or ask them what they do, saying, "These people have jobs where deception and interviewing is very important."

Hubbard, who recently retired from the C.I.A., told me when I called him at his home in Montana that he has "no use for liberals who think we should be soft on terrorists." Asked about the work of Mitchell and Jessen, he was silent for a long time, then said, "I can't tell you anything about that."

Mitchell left one clue to his activities in corporate records. In 2004, he filed a notice with North Carolina's secretary of state formally dissolving Knowledge Works. In it, he wrote, "All members of this LLC moved out of the state of NC in March 2002, and subsequently Knowledge Works, LLC ceased to do business 29 March 2002."

Abu Zubaydah had been captured in Pakistan the day before.

One of the first on-the-ground tests for Mitchell's theories was the interrogation of Zubaydah. When he and the other members of the C.I.A. team arrived in Thailand, they immediately put a stop to the efforts at rapport building (which would also yield the name of José Padilla, an American citizen and supposed al-Qaeda operative now on trial in Miami for conspiring to murder and maim people in a foreign country).

Mitchell had a tougher approach in mind. The C.I.A. interrogators explained that they were going to become Zubaydah's "God." If he refused to cooperate, he would lose his clothes and his comforts one by one. At the safe house, the interrogators isolated him. They would enter his room just once a day to say, "You know what I want," then leave again.

As Zubaydah clammed up, Mitchell seemed to conclude that Zubaydah would talk only when he had been reduced to complete helplessness and dependence. With that goal in mind, the C.I.A. team began building a coffin in which they planned to bury the detainee alive.

A furor erupted over the legality of this move, which does not appear to have been carried out. (Every human-rights treaty and American law governing the treatment of prisoners prohibits death threats and simulated killings.) But the C.I.A. had a ready rejoinder: the methods had already been approved by White House lawyers. Mitchell was accompanied by another psychologist, Dr. R. Scott Shumate, then chief operational psychologist for the C.I.A.'s counterterrorism center. Surprisingly, Shumate opposed the extreme methods and packed his bags in disgust, leaving before the most dire tactics had commenced. He later told associates that it had been a mistake for the C.I.A. to hire Mitchell.

With Shumate gone, the interrogators were free to unleash what they called the "sere school" techniques. These included blasting the Red Hot Chili Peppers at top volume, stripping Zubaydah naked, and making his room so cold that his body turned blue, as The New York Times reported last year.

Ultimately, the F.B.I. pulled its agents from the scene and ruled that they could not be present any time coercive tactics were used, says Michael Rolince. It was a momentous decision that effectively gave the C.I.A. complete control of interrogations.

While it was the F.B.I.'s rapport-building that had prompted Zubaydah to talk, the C.I.A. would go on to claim credit for breaking Zubaydah, and celebrate Mitchell as a psychological wizard who held the key to getting hardened terrorists to talk. Word soon spread that Mitchell and Jessen had been awarded a medal by the C.I.A. for their advanced interrogation techniques. While the claim is impossible to confirm, what matters is that others believed it. The reputed success of the tactics was "absolutely in the ether," says one Pentagon civilian who worked on detainee policy.

In response to detailed questions from Vanity Fair, Mitchell and Jessen said in a statement, "The advice we have provided, and the actions we have taken have been legal and ethical. We resolutely oppose torture. Under no circumstances have we ever endorsed, nor would we endorse, the use of interrogation methods designed to do physical or psychological harm."

The C.I.A. would not comment on Mitchell's and Jessen's role. However, a C.I.A. spokesman said the agency's interrogation program was implemented lawfully and had produced vital intelligence.

Dr. Shumate, who now works in the Defense Department as director of the Behavioral Sciences Directorate within the Counterintelligence Field Activity (cifa), did not respond to interview requests. But a cifa spokesman said that Dr. Shumate, who served on the A.P.A.'s task force, supported the association's "guidelines that psychologists conduct themselves in an ethical and professional manner regardless of mission assignment or activity."

Colonel Brittain P. Mallow, 51, was the ultimate straight-up soldier: blue-eyed and poker-faced, with a winning if seldom-seen smile. After 9/11, he was put in command of the Defense Department's Criminal Investigative Task Force (C.I.T.F.), which was charged with assessing which detainees at Guantánamo Bay should be prosecuted. Mallow, who has an advanced degree in Middle East studies and a working knowledge of Arabic, foresaw that the interrogations would be culturally difficult. So his team called on Dr. Michael Gelles, of the Naval Criminal Investigative Service, to form a Behavioral Science Consultation Team (bsct, pronounced "biscuit") of non-clinical psychologists. Its mission was to help establish rapport with detainees.

By the summer of 2002, Mallow was hearing disturbing reports of blasting music and strobe lights coming from the interrogation booths. This was the work of Task Force 170, the Pentagon unit in charge of intelligence gathering in the Southern Command. According to one of Mallow's deputies, the members of Task Force 170 considered the C.I.T.F. to be soft on detainees. They were "hell-bent" on using harsher tactics, another C.I.T.F. official says.

"There were a number of claims that coercive methods had achieved results" during "interrogations in other places," Mallow says. The other C.I.T.F. official recalls that a Task Force 170 officer told him, "Other people are using this stuff, and they're getting praised." (A Pentagon spokesman said all questioning at Guantánamo is lawful and falls within the limits set by the army field manual.)

At a Pentagon meeting where Mallow protested the methods, he says that a civilian official named Marshall Billingslea told him, "You don't know what you're talking about." Billingslea insisted that the coercive approach worked.

Just months after Zubaydah's interrogation, the myth of Mitchell and Jessen's success in breaking him had made its way from Thailand to Guantánamo to Washington, and the reversed sere tactics had become associated with recognition and inside knowledge.

In late spring, Mallow met with Major General Michael E. Dunlavey, who was about to take over as commander of the newly combined JTF-GTMO 170 (Joint Task Force Guantánamo). Mallow briefed Dunlavey on his bsct team's rapport-building efforts and offered him full access to the psychologists. About a month later, he claims, Dunlavey had appropriated the acronym but set up a separate bsct team, cobbled together in part from clinical psychologists already at Guantánamo. Before activating the new bsct team, Dunlavey sent its members to Fort Bragg for a four-day sere-school workshop. (Dunlavey, now a juvenile-court judge in Erie, Pennsylvania, did not respond to requests for comment.)

On December 2, 2002, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld granted JTF-GTMO 170's request to apply coercive tactics in interrogations. The only techniques he rejected were waterboarding and death threats. Within a week, the task force had drafted a five-page, typo-ridden document entitled "JTF GTMO 'SERE' Interrogation Standard Operating Procedure."

The document, which has never before been made public, states, "The premise behind this is that the interrogation tactics used at US military sere schools are appropriate for use in real-world interrogations" and "can be used to break real detainees."

The document is divided into four categories: "Degradation," "Physical Debilitation," "Isolation and Monopoliztion [sic] of Perception," and "Demonstrated Omnipotence." The tactics include "slaps," "forceful removal of detainees' clothing," "stress positions," "hooding," "manhandling," and "walling," which entails grabbing the detainee by his shirt and hoisting him against a specially constructed wall.

"Note that all tactics are strictly non-lethal," the memo states, adding, "it is critical that interrogators do 'cross the line' when utilizing the tactics." The word "not" was presumably omitted by accident.

It is not clear whether the guidelines were ever formally adopted. But the instructions suggest that the military command wanted psychologists to be involved so they could lead interrogators up to the line, then stop them from crossing it.

In a bizarre mixture of solicitude and sadism, the memo details how to calibrate the infliction of harm. It dictates that the "[insult] slap will be initiated no more than 12–14 inches (or one shoulder width) from the detainee's face … to preclude any tendency to wind up or uppercut." And interrogators are advised that, when stripping off a prisoner's clothes, "tearing motions shall be downward to prevent pulling the detainee off balance." In short, the sere-inspired interrogations would be violent. And therefore, psychologists were needed to help make these more dangerous interrogations safer.

Soon, the reverse-engineered sere tactics that had been designed by Mitchell and Jessen, road-tested in the C.I.A.'s black sites, and adopted in Guantánamo were being used in Iraq as well. One intelligence officer recalled witnessing a live demonstration of the tactics. The detainee was on his knees in a room painted black and forced to hold an iron bar in his extended hands while interrogators slapped him repeatedly. The man was then taken into a bunker, where he was stripped naked, blindfolded, and shackled. He was ordered to be left that way for 12 hours.

At the Abu Ghraib prison, military policemen on the night shift adopted the tactics to hideous effect. In what amounted to a down-market parody of the praise heaped on Mitchell and Jessen, Specialist Charles A. Graner Jr., a former prison guard from Pennsylvania, received a commendation for his work "softening up" detainees, according to the documentary The Ghosts of Abu Ghraib. He appears repeatedly in photographs, smiling and giving thumbs-up before human pyramids of naked detainees. In 2005, he was convicted on charges of abuse. In their statement, Mitchell and Jessen said that they were "appalled by reports" of alleged abuses at Abu Ghraib and Guantánamo and had not been involved with them in any way.

Supreme Court justice Antonin Scalia recently made his case for heavy-handed interrogation tactics via a surprisingly current pop-culture reference. "Jack Bauer saved Los Angeles," he told a panel of judges, referring to the torturer protagonist of the Fox series 24. "Are you going to convict Jack Bauer?"

In the real world, however, it is increasingly clear that the U.S. has sacrificed its global image for tactics that are at best ineffective. "We are not aware of any convincing evidence that coercive tactics work better than other methods of obtaining actionable intelligence," said Senator Carl Levin, Democrat of Michigan.

Under Levin's leadership, the Senate Armed Services Committee has been probing the military's alleged mistreatment of detainees and intends to hold hearings. In a statement to Vanity Fair, Levin says that he finds the reported use of sere tactics in interrogations "very troubling," and that his committee is looking specifically at "the accountability of officials for actions or failures to act."

Mitchell and Jessen have become a focus of the investigation. In June, the online news magazine Salon reported that the Defense Department, responding to a request from Levin's committee, ordered top Pentagon officials to preserve any documents mentioning the two psychologists or their company in Spokane.

Meanwhile, business appears to be booming at Mitchell, Jessen & Associates. It has 120 employees and specializes in "understanding, predicting, and improving performance in high-risk and extreme situations," according to a recruitment ad at a recent job fair for people with top security clearances.

The principals of Mitchell, Jessen & Associates are raking in money. According to people familiar with their compensation, they get paid more than $1,000 per day plus expenses, tax free, for their overseas work. It beats military pay. Mitchell has built his dream house in Florida. He also purchased a BMW through one of his companies. "Taxpayers are paying at least half a million dollars a year for these two knuckleheads to do voodoo," says one of the people familiar with their pay arrangements.

Last December, the nation's best-known interrogation experts joined together to release a report, called "Educing Information," that sought to comprehensively address the question of which methods work in interrogations.

Scott Shumate served as an adviser to the report, which concluded that there is no evidence that reverse-engineered sere tactics work, or that sere psychologists make for capable interrogators. One chapter, authored by Kleinman, concludes: "Employment of resistance interrogators—whether as consultants or as practitioners—is an example of the proverbial attempt to place the square peg in the round hole."

But it is one of the features of our war on terror that myths die hard. Just think of the al-Qaeda–Iraq connection, or Saddam Hussein's W.M.D. In late 2005, as Senator John McCain was pressing the Bush administration to ban torture techniques, one of the nation's top researchers of stress in sere trainees claims to have received a call from Samantha Ravitch, the deputy assistant for national security in Vice President Dick Cheney's office. She wanted to know if the researcher had found any evidence that uncontrollable stress would make people more likely to talk.

Katherine Eban is a Brooklyn-based journalist and Alicia Patterson fellow who writes about issues of public health and homeland security. Her book, Dangerous Doses: A True Story of Cops, Counterfeiters, and the Contamination of America's Drug Supply, was excerpted in the May 2005 issue of Vanity Fair.

CIA to air decades of its dirty laundry

I really disagree fundamentally with the idea of keeping entire branches of government secret from the public. How can we claim to be a democracy when we don't even know what our government is doing? Clearly, hiding the CIA and NSA's operations from public scrutiny has led to the many abuses that are about to be admitted by the CIA, as the Washington Post reports. Keeping the CIA and NSA hidden allows us to wallow in the myth of American benevolence and support for democracy. We can deny all these abuses by the CIA because they are never admitted by our leaders, whom we trust. But now they are admitted. But since they happened 30 years ago, we can pretend they were "abuses" that were long ago stopped, and that the secret CIA is not engaging in them anymore. It's like a religion. We have faith in our country not to do such things, and we deny all evidence to the contrary.

CIA to Air Decades of Its Dirty Laundry
By Karen DeYoung and Walter Pincus
Washington Post
June 22, 2007

The CIA will declassify hundreds of pages of long-secret records detailing some of the intelligence agency's worst illegal abuses -- the so-called "family jewels" documenting a quarter-century of overseas assassination attempts, domestic spying, kidnapping and infiltration of leftist groups from the 1950s to the 1970s, CIA Director Michael V. Hayden said yesterday.

The documents, to be publicly released next week, also include accounts of break-ins and theft, the agency's opening of private mail to and from China and the Soviet Union, wiretaps and surveillance of journalists, and a series of "unwitting" tests on U.S. civilians, including the use of drugs.

"Most of it is unflattering, but it is CIA's history," Hayden said in a speech to a conference of foreign policy historians. The documents have been sought for decades by historians, journalists and conspiracy theorists and have been the subject of many fruitless Freedom of Information Act requests.

In anticipation of the CIA's release, the National Security Archive at George Washington University yesterday published a separate set of documents from January 1975 detailing internal government discussions of the abuses. Those documents portray a rising sense of panic within the administration of President Gerald R. Ford that what then-CIA Director William E. Colby called "skeletons" in the CIA's closet had begun to be revealed in news accounts.

A New York Times article by reporter Seymour Hersh about the CIA's infiltration of antiwar groups, published in December 1974, was "just the tip of the iceberg," then-Secretary of State Henry A. Kissinger warned Ford, according to a Jan. 3 memorandum of their conversation.

Kissinger warned that if other operations were divulged, "blood will flow," saying, "For example, Robert Kennedy personally managed the operation on the assassination of [Cuban President Fidel] Castro." Kennedy was the attorney general from 1961 to 1964.

Worried that the disclosures could lead to criminal prosecutions, Kissinger added that "when the FBI has a hunting license into the CIA, this could end up worse for the country than Watergate," the scandal that led to the fall of the Nixon administration the previous year.

In a meeting at which Colby detailed the worst abuses -- after telling the president "we have a 25-year old institution which has done some things it shouldn't have" -- Ford said he would appoint a presidential commission to look into the matter. "We don't want to destroy but to preserve the CIA. But we want to make sure that illegal operations and those outside the [CIA] charter don't happen," Ford said.

Most of the major incidents and operations in the reports to be released next week were revealed in varying detail during congressional investigations that led to widespread intelligence reforms and increased oversight. But the treasure-trove of CIA documents, generated as the Vietnam War wound down and agency involvement in Nixon's "dirty tricks" political campaign began to be revealed, is expected to provide far more comprehensive accounts, written by the agency itself.

The reports, known collectively by historians and CIA officials as the "family jewels," were initially produced in response to a 1973 request by then-CIA Director James R. Schlesinger. Alarmed by press accounts of CIA involvement in Watergate under his predecessor, Schlesinger asked the agency's employees to inform him of all operations that were "outside" the agency's legal charter.

This process was unprecedented at the agency, where only a few officials had previously been privy to the scope of its illegal activities. Schlesinger collected the reports, some of which dated to the 1950s, in a folder that was inherited by his successor, Colby, in September of that year.

But it was not until Hersh's article that Colby took the file to the White House. The National Security Archive release included a six-page summary of a conversation on Jan. 3, 1975, in which Colby briefed the Justice Department for the first time on the extent of the "skeletons."

Operations listed in the report began in 1953, when the CIA's counterintelligence staff started a 20-year program to screen and in some cases open mail between the United States and the Soviet Union passing through a New York airport. A similar program in San Francisco intercepted mail to and from China from 1969 to 1972. Under its charter, the CIA is prohibited from domestic operations.

Colby told Ford that the program had collected four letters to actress and antiwar activist Jane Fonda and said the entire effort was "illegal, and we stopped it in 1973."

Among several new details, the summary document reveals a 1969 program about CIA efforts against "the international activities of radicals and black militants." Undercover CIA agents were placed inside U.S. peace groups and sent abroad as credentialed members to identify any foreign contacts. This came at a time when the Soviet Union was suspected of financing and influencing U.S. domestic organizations.

The program included "information on the domestic activities" of the organizations and led to the accumulation of 10,000 American names, which Colby told Silberman were retained "as a result of the tendency of bureaucrats to retain paper whether they needed it or acted on it or not," according to the summary memo.

CIA surveillance of Michael Getler, then The Washington Post's national security reporter, was conducted between October 1971 and April 1972 under direct authorization by then-Director Richard Helms, the memo said. Getler had written a story published on Oct. 18, 1971, sparked by what Colby called "an obvious intelligence leak," headlined "Soviet Subs Are Reported Cuba-Bound."

Getler, who is now the ombudsman for the Public Broadcasting Service, said yesterday that he learned of the surveillance in 1975, when The Post published an article based on a secret report by congressional investigators. The story said that the CIA used physical surveillance against "five Americans" and listed Getler, the late columnist Jack Anderson and Victor Marchetti, a former CIA employee who had just written a book critical of the agency.

"I never knew about it at the time, although it was a full 24 hours a day with teams of people following me, looking for my sources," Getler said. He said he went to see Colby afterward, with Washington lawyer Joseph Califano. Getler recalled, "Colby said it happened under Helms and apologized and said it wouldn't happen again."

Personal surveillance was conducted on Anderson and three of his staff members, including Brit Hume, now with Fox News, for two months in 1972 after Anderson wrote of the administration's "tilt toward Pakistan." The 1972 surveillance of Marchetti was carried out "to determine contacts with CIA employees," the summary said.

CIA monitoring and infiltration of antiwar dissident groups took place between 1967 and 1971 at a time when the public was turning against the Vietnam War. Agency officials "covertly monitored" groups in the Washington area "who were considered to pose a threat to CIA installations." Some of the information "might have been distributed to the FBI," the summary said. Other "skeletons" listed in the summary included:

· The confinement by the CIA of a Russian defector, suspected by the CIA as a possible "fake," in Maryland and Virginia safe houses for two years, beginning in 1964. Colby speculated that this might be "a violation of the kidnapping laws."

· The "very productive" 1963 wiretapping of two columnists -- Robert Allen and Paul Scott -- whose conversations included talks with 12 senators and six congressmen.

· Break-ins by the CIA's office of security at the homes of one current and one former CIA official suspected of retaining classified documents.

· CIA-funded testing of American citizens, "including reactions to certain drugs."

The CIA documents scheduled for release next week, Hayden said yesterday, "provide a glimpse of a very different time and a very different agency."

Barred by secrecy restrictions from correcting "misinformation," he said, the CIA is at the mercy of the press. "Unfortunately, there seems to be an instinct among some in the media today to take a few pieces of information, which may or may not be accurate, and run with them to the darkest corner of the room," Hayden said.

Hayden's speech and some questions that followed evoked more recent criticism of the intelligence community, which has been accused of illegal wiretapping, infiltration of antiwar groups, and kidnapping and torturing of terrorism suspects.

"It's surely part of [Hayden's] program now to draw a bright line with the past," said National Security Archive Director Thomas S. Blanton. "But it's uncanny how the government keeps dipping into the black bag." Newly revealed details of ancient CIA operations, Blanton said, "are pretty resonant today."

Bush authorizes new covert action against Iran

As one of the comments to this ABC News article points out, "Wasn’t too long after Johnson started covert programs against North Vietnam (Operation 34A) that the 'Tonkin Gulf Incident' took place, escalating the war in Vietnam." As another comment speculates, "this so called surge in Iraq was just positioning troops to take on Iran." With other news that Bush is planning to double the combat troops in Iraq by Christmas, it does look like we might have another war on our hands just in time for the 2008 elections.

Bush Authorizes New Covert Action Against Iran
by Brian Ross / Richard Esposito
ABC News
May 23, 2007

The CIA has received secret presidential approval to mount a covert “black” operation to destabilize the Iranian government, current and former officials in the intelligence community tell the Blotter on ABCNews.com.

The sources, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the sensitive nature of the subject, say President Bush has signed a “nonlethal presidential finding” that puts into motion a CIA plan that reportedly includes a coordinated campaign of propaganda, disinformation and manipulation of Iran’s currency and international financial transactions.

“I can’t confirm or deny whether such a program exists or whether the president signed it, but it would be consistent with an overall American approach trying to find ways to put pressure on the regime,” said Bruce Riedel, a recently retired CIA senior official who dealt with Iran and other countries in the region.

A National Security Council spokesperson, Gordon Johndroe, said, “The White House does not comment on intelligence matters.” A CIA spokesperson said, “As a matter of course, we do not comment on allegations of covert activity.”

The sources say the CIA developed the covert plan over the last year and received approval from White House officials and other officials in the intelligence community.

Officials say the covert plan is designed to pressure Iran to stop its nuclear enrichment program and end aid to insurgents in Iraq.

“There are some channels where the United States government may want to do things without its hand showing, and legally, therefore, the administration would, if it’s doing that, need an intelligence finding and would need to tell the Congress,” said ABC News consultant Richard Clarke, a former White House counterterrorism official.

Current and former intelligence officials say the approval of the covert action means the Bush administration, for the time being, has decided not to pursue a military option against Iran.

“Vice President Cheney helped to lead the side favoring a military strike,” said former CIA official Riedel, “but I think they have come to the conclusion that a military strike has more downsides than upsides.”

The covert action plan comes as U.S. officials have confirmed Iran had dramatically increased its ability to produce nuclear weapons material, at a pace that experts said would give them the ability to build a nuclear bomb in two years.

Riedel says economic pressure on Iran may be the most effective tool available to the CIA, particularly in going after secret accounts used to fund the nuclear program.

“The kind of dealings that the Iranian Revolution Guards are going to do, in terms of purchasing nuclear and missile components, are likely to be extremely secret, and you’re going to have to work very, very hard to find them, and that’s exactly the kind of thing the CIA’s nonproliferation center and others would be expert at trying to look into,” Riedel said.

Under the law, the CIA needs an official presidential finding to carry out such covert actions. The CIA is permitted to mount covert “collection” operations without a presidential finding.

“Presidential findings” are kept secret but reported to the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence and other key congressional leaders.

The “nonlethal” aspect of the presidential finding means CIA officers may not use deadly force in carrying out the secret operations against Iran.

Still, some fear that even a nonlethal covert CIA program carries great risks.

“I think everybody in the region knows that there is a proxy war already afoot with the United States supporting anti-Iranian elements in the region as well as opposition groups within Iran,” said Vali Nasr, adjunct senior fellow for Mideast studies at the Council on Foreign Relations.

“And this covert action is now being escalated by the new U.S. directive, and that can very quickly lead to Iranian retaliation and a cycle of escalation can follow,” Nasr said.

Other “lethal” findings have authorized CIA covert actions against al Qaeda, terrorism and nuclear proliferation.

Also briefed on the CIA proposal, according to intelligence sources, were National Security Advisor Steve Hadley and Deputy National Security Advisor Elliott Abrams.

“The entire plan has been blessed by Abrams, in particular,” said one intelligence source familiar with the plan. “And Hadley had to put his chop on it.”

Abrams’ last involvement with attempting to destabilize a foreign government led to criminal charges.

He pleaded guilty in October 1991 to two misdemeanor counts of withholding information from Congress about the Reagan administration’s ill-fated efforts to destabilize the Nicaraguan Sandinista government in Central America, known as the Iran-Contra affair. Abrams was later pardoned by President George H. W. Bush in December 1992.

In June 2001, Abrams was named by then National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice to head the National Security Council’s office for democracy, human rights and international operations. On Feb. 2, 2005, National Security Advisor Hadley appointed Abrams deputy assistant to the president and deputy national security advisor for global democracy strategy, one of the nation’s most senior national security positions.

As earlier reported on the Blotter on ABCNews.com, the United States has supported and encouraged an Iranian militant group, Jundullah, that has conducted deadly raids inside Iran from bases on the rugged Iran-Pakistan-Afghanistan “tri-border region.”

U.S. officials deny any “direct funding” of Jundullah groups but say the leader of Jundullah was in regular contact with U.S. officials.

American intelligence sources say Jundullah has received money and weapons through the Afghanistan and Pakistan military and Pakistan’s intelligence service. Pakistan has officially denied any connection.

A report broadcast on Iranian TV last Sunday said Iranian authorities had captured 10 men crossing the border with $500,000 in cash along with “maps of sensitive areas” and “modern spy equipment.”

A senior Pakistani official told ABCNews.com the 10 men were members of Jundullah.

The leader of the Jundullah group, according to the Pakistani official, has been recruiting and training “hundreds of men” for “unspecified missions” across the border in Iran.

Lyndon Johnson ordered Kennedy assassination, says dying CIA officer

Rolling Stone has a deathbed confession of an ex-CIA agent who says Lyndon Johnson plotted the assassination of John F. Kennedy:

That time in Miami, with Saint by his bed and disease eating away at him and him thinking he's six months away from death, E. Howard finally put pen to paper and started writing. Saint had been working toward this moment for a long while, and now it was going to happen. He got his father an A&W diet root beer, then sat down in the old man's wheelchair and waited.

E. Howard scribbled the initials "LBJ," standing for Kennedy's ambitious vice president, Lyndon Johnson. Under "LBJ," connected by a line, he wrote the name Cord Meyer. Meyer was a CIA agent whose wife had an affair with JFK; later she was murdered, a case that's never been solved. Next his father connected to Meyer's name the name Bill Harvey, another CIA agent; also connected to Meyer's name was the name David Morales, yet another CIA man and a well-known, particularly vicious black-op specialist. And then his father connected to Morales' name, with a line, the framed words "French Gunman Grassy Knoll."

So there it was, according to E. Howard Hunt. LBJ had Kennedy killed. It had long been speculated upon. But now E. Howard was saying that's the way it was. And that Lee Harvey Oswald wasn't the only shooter in Dallas. There was also, on the grassy knoll, a French gunman, presumably the Corsican Mafia assassin Lucien Sarti, who has figured prominently in other assassination theories.

"By the time he handed me the paper, I was in a state of shock," Saint says. "His whole life, to me and everybody else, he'd always professed to not know anything about any of it. But I knew this had to be the truth. If my dad was going to make anything up, he would have made something up about the Mafia, or Castro, or Khrushchev. He didn't like Johnson. But you don't falsely implicate your own country, for Christ's sake. My father is old-school, a dyed-in-the-wool patriot, and that's the last thing he would do."

Later that week, E. Howard also gave Saint two sheets of paper that contained a fuller narrative. It starts out with LBJ again, connecting him to Cord Meyer, then goes on: "Cord Meyer discusses a plot with [David Atlee] Phillips who brings in Wm. Harvey and Antonio Veciana. He meets with Oswald in Mexico City. . . . Then Veciana meets w/ Frank Sturgis in Miami and enlists David Morales in anticipation of killing JFK there. But LBJ changes itinerary to Dallas, citing personal reasons."

David Atlee Phillips, the CIA's Cuban operations chief in Miami at the time of JFK's death, knew E. Howard from the Guatemala-coup days. Veciana is a member of the Cuban exile community. Sturgis, like Saint's father, is supposed to have been one of the three tramps photographed in Dealey Plaza. Sturgis was also one of the Watergate plotters, and he is a man whom E. Howard, under oath, has repeatedly sworn to have not met until Watergate, so to Saint the mention of his name was big news.

In the next few paragraphs, E. Howard goes on to describe the extent of his own involvement. It revolves around a meeting he claims he attended, in 1963, with Morales and Sturgis. It takes place in a Miami hotel room. Here's what happens:

Morales leaves the room, at which point Sturgis makes reference to a "Big Event" and asks E. Howard, "Are you with us?"

E. Howard asks Sturgis what he's talking about.

Sturgis says, "Killing JFK."

E. Howard, "incredulous," says to Sturgis, "You seem to have everything you need. Why do you need me?" In the handwritten narrative, Sturgis' response is unclear, though what E. Howard says to Sturgis next isn't: He says he won't "get involved in anything involving Bill Harvey, who is an alcoholic psycho."

After that, the meeting ends. E. Howard goes back to his "normal" life and "like the rest of the country . . . is stunned by JFK's death and realizes how lucky he is not to have had a direct role."

After reading what his father had written, St. John was stunned too. His father had not only implicated LBJ, he'd also, with a few swift marks of a pen, put the lie to almost everything he'd sworn to, under oath, about his knowledge of the assassination. Saint had a million more questions. But his father was exhausted and needed to sleep, and then Saint had to leave town without finishing their talk, though a few weeks later he did receive in the mail a tape recording from his dad. E. Howard's voice on the cassette is weak and grasping, and he sometimes wanders down unrelated pathways. But he essentially remakes the same points he made in his handwritten narrative.