Company Man: Thirty Years of Controversy and Crisis in the CIA Read Online Free PDF

Agency would return to the leadership of the intelligence committees to inform them of the Agency’s intention to go ahead and destroy the tapes.
    That was the game plan. In truth, I never thought that destruction was a realistic possibility. There were too many people adamantly opposed to the idea. Too many potential risks and complications. And it had now been over four years since the 9/11 attacks, and questions and concerns were beginning to surface in the media and Congress about the CIA’s still top-secret detention and interrogation program. The tapes were not going to be destroyed, I confidently concluded, not soon and probably not ever.
    A few days later I received an e-mail from one of the two lawyers working with Jose’s people on the language that would be included in the cable “teeing up” the request for approval to destroy the tapes. I had thought they were still at this first step of the process. But what I got in the e-mail was a cable, forwarded without comment, that headquarters had just received from the field installation holding the tapes. The cable was terse but its message was unmistakable: Pursuant to headquarters authorization, the tapes had just been destroyed.
    Within seconds of reading it, I e-mailed my own one-word comment back to him: “WHAT?!?!”

    In those first dizzying moments, I wasn’t sure from whom to demand an explanation first. Jose Rodriguez or my own lawyers? Since Jose’s office was right down the hall and my lawyers were in an adjacent building on the CIA’s Langley Campus, I opted for Jose. As I raced out of my office I told my assistant to get the two lawyers up to my office. Now.
    I knew Jose was around, but I couldn’t find him in his office. I ran into his deputy and blurted out what I had just learned. He seemed to know all about it. “I understand your lawyers chopped on it,” he replied calmly, meaning they were aware of and approved the destruction order. He only seemed surprised that I was surprised.
    Now my head was spinning.
    I ran back to my office, where my lawyers were waiting, holding a copy of the cable from headquarters that authorized the destruction a day or two earlier. Each was normally unflappable in demeanor, but on this occasion they looked shaken. Did they see this thing before it went out? I asked as evenly as I could. Absolutely not, they both assured me. In fact, they said, there was language in it that bore no resemblance to what they had been working on with Jose’s staff. I had worked with these two guys for two decades, and I trusted their word completely. What sealed it for me, though, was the “coordination” line at the bottom of the cable, which appears on all outgoing CIA operational cables in order to record who in headquarters has seen and agreed to the contents. In my career, my name was probably on thousands of such cables; the whole point is to document that a CIA lawyer has concurred in the message. It was an axiom passed down through three generations of CIA operatives: To cover your ass, get a lawyer’s name on your cable.
    No names of CIA lawyers were on the coordination line of the cable Jose signed authorizing the tapes’ destruction. Case closed. My guys never saw it before it went out.
    I began grilling my two lawyers about their conversations with Jose and his people in the hours before the cable was sent. Did he tell either lawyer what he was about to do? No, they responded. So what did he say to them? Well, they said, they remember him asking two questions: If there were any “legal impediments” to destroying the tapes, and if he had the “legal” authority to order destruction. They told him they were not aware of any legal impediments, meaning there were no court cases or pending investigations that required preservation of the tapes. They also said they had told Jose he had the legal authority to destroy them.
    Both of their answers were technically accurate, as best I could tell. But that was beside