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

the point, and Jose had to have known it. He had been on notice by me for three years that the fate of the tapes was not his call. It had nothing to do with his “legal authority.” He had chosen to ignore and defy the White House, the director of national intelligence, and the director of the CIA. And, of course, me.
    In my thirty-four-year career at CIA, I never felt as upset and betrayed as I did that morning.
    Somewhere in the maelstrom of running between offices, trying topiece together what had happened, I barged into the director’s office—about thirty yards down the hall and around the corner from mine—to tell him what I had learned. At the time, I thought I was the one who broke the news of the destruction to him, but in reviewing the internal Agency e-mails later, it appears that either Porter’s chief of staff, Pat Murray, or someone on Jose’s staff had told Porter earlier that morning. In any event, when I saw him he seemed as nonplussed about the developments as I was. I had gotten to know Porter well in the year since he arrived at the CIA, and despite his background as a politician, I had come to judge him as utterly without artifice. In the years since, there has been occasional speculation that Porter had to have known in advance what Jose was up to. I didn’t believe that then, and I don’t believe that now.
    “What’s done is done,” I told him, doing my best to regain composure by grasping at a cliché. We agreed that we needed to inform the outside “stakeholders,” and we divided up this exceedingly unpleasant duty. Goss would tell DNI Negroponte, and I would tell Harriet Miers. As for the leadership of the intelligence committees, Porter had some definite ideas. He would inform them—Pat Roberts and Jay Rockefeller on the Senate side, Pete Hoekstra and Jane Harman from the House—in one of his regular, off-the-record meetings with them. But not with any of their staffers present. Just a year removed from being a member of Congress himself, he told me he didn’t trust the staffers not to leak the information. He would tell the members when he could get them alone.
    There was one final loose end, which was what to do about Jose. “I’ll deal with him separately,” Porter said. Which was fine with me. I was too pissed off and hurt at that point to talk to him. Besides, I was not Jose’s boss. Goss was. It was his responsibility to deal with his act of gross insubordination.
    I called Harriet Miers a short time later. I don’t remember the details of that talk, which is odd because I like to think I have a pretty good memory and would vividly recall something like that. I later saw a contemporaneous e-mail from another senior CIA official whom I apparently told about the call. He said I described Harriet as “livid.” Sounds about right to me.
    Because Jose’s office was yards away from mine in the Agency’s seventh-floor executive wing, in the days and weeks that followed I inevitably ran into him in the halls or at meetings that we both attended. Itwas awkward at first, but he was still in place and I still had to work with him. Besides, in spite of everything, I still liked and respected the guy. Eventually, he briefly broached the subject of the destruction with me. “It was my decision, and I take responsibility for it,” he simply said. I never asked him why he had gone around me to order the destruction. I am convinced he did it because he realized, after three years of relentless pleas, that he was never going to get the go-ahead to destroy the tapes. Not from me, certainly. Maybe, in his own way, he was trying to protect me. I’d like to think that, at least.
    It would be two years before the tapes’ destruction episode would reenter my life. With a vengeance.

    Those next two years were a time of tumult for the Agency, and for me. Details about the detention and interrogation program, still shrouded in the highest secrecy and officially known to only a relative