Nemesis: The Last Days of the American Republic

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Central Intelligence Agency:

The President’s Private Army

The enormous apparatus of government intelligence and spy operations, of subsidized think tanks and research institutes, and the entire discipline of “strategic studies” failed to prepare the ground for our understanding of what is arguably the most momentous political event of this century. In understanding the collapse of communism and the Soviet state, the supposed experts have been virtually irrelevant.

—RONALD STEEL,

Temptations of a Superpower (1995)

Let me tell you about these intelligence guys. When I was growing up in Texas, we had a cow named Bessie. I’d get her in the stanchion, seat myself, and squeeze out a pail of fresh milk. One day, I’d worked hard and gotten a full pail of milk, but I wasn’t paying attention and old Bessie swung her shit-smeared tail through that bucket of milk. Now, you know, that’s what these intelligence guys do. You work hard and get a good program or policy going, and they swing a shit-smeared tail through it.

—PRESIDENT LYNDON JOHNSON,

quoted by Robert M. Gates, From the Shadows (1996)

Two weeks after George Bush’s re-election as president in November 2004, Porter J. Goss, the newly appointed director of central intelligence (DCI), wrote an internal memorandum to all employees that said in part, “[Our job is to] support the administration and its policies in our work. As agency employees, we do not identify with, support, or champion opposition to the administration or its policies.”¹ Translated from bureaucratese, this directive essentially passes the following message to the CIA’s employees: “You have always worked for the White House. I’m just reminding you of that fact. The intelligence you produce must first and foremost protect the president from being held accountable for anything he has done, ordered, or said concerning Iraq, Osama bin Laden, preventive war, torturing captives, the ‘war on terror,’ or any other subject on which critics might challenge him.”

As it turns out, much of the information the Central Intelligence Agency had already produced on these subjects was false, misleading, or carefully circumscribed by administration needs and desires, as were key intelligence estimates derived from fabrications inspired by the president, the vice president, and the secretary of defense. Goss was merely trying to warn, and so head off, the increasing numbers of outraged, courageous CIA truth tellers who were leaking information harmful to the president before going down in flames. As Thomas Powers, an authority on the CIA, reminds us, “No one can understand, much less predict, the behavior of the CIA who does not understand that the agency works for the president. I know of no exceptions to this general rule. In practice it means that in the end the CIA will always bend to the wishes of the president.... The general rule applies both to intelligence and to operations: what the CIA says, as well as what it does, will shape itself over time to what the president wants.”²

Since everything the CIA writes and does is secret, including its budget (regardless of article 1, section 9, of the Constitution, which says “a regular Statement and Account of the Receipts and Expenditures of all public Money shall be published from time to time”), accountability to the elected representatives of the people or even an accurate historical record of actions is today inconceivable. Congressional oversight of the agency— and many other, ever-expanding intelligence outfits in the U.S. government, including the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) and the National Security Agency (NSA)—is, at best, a theatrical performance designed to distract and mislead the few Americans left who are concerned about constitutional government. In fact, the president’s untrammeled control of the CIA is probably the single most extraordinary power the imperial presidency possesses—totally beyond the balance of powers intended to protect the United States from the rise of a tyrant.

This situation is hardly new, although in late 2004, former CIA analyst Melvin A. Goodman declared that the Bush administration’s record in relation to the CIA represented “the worst intelligence scandal in the nation’s history.”³ Perhaps no comment caught the reality of the agency’s role better than James Schlesinger back in 1973. When the former chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission, who had briefly succeeded Richard Helms as CIA director before becoming secretary of defense, arrived at the agency’s Virginia “campus,” he immediately announced: “I am here to see that you guys don’t screw Richard Nixon.”⁴ Schlesinger wanted to protect the Watergate-embattled president from revelations that the CIA, on Nixon’s orders, had tried to cover up the break-in of the headquarters of the Democratic National Committee by his personal agents as well as the agency’s illegal infiltration of the anti-Vietnam War movement within the United States. (At the time, the CIA was prohibited from domestic spying operations.) Schlesinger underscored his point by noting that he would be reporting directly to White House chief of staff Bob Haldeman, not, as Helms had done, to National Security Adviser Henry Kissinger.

In George W. Bush’s White House, Goss did not need to bother going directly to Karl Rove, Bush’s political “brain,” since the president’s outgoing and incoming national security advisers, Condoleezza Rice and Stephen J. Hadley, spent the years 2001 to 2004 under Rove’s tutelage working to reelect the president.⁵ Moreover, in April 2005, Goss’s position as director of central intelligence changed. He became merely the director of the Central Intelligence Agency, not the director of Central Intelligence, which has now become the purview of the newly appointed director of National Intelligence, John Negroponte, who presides over the fifteen separate federal intelligence agencies in a post-9/11 attempt to bring some coherence and coordination to them. As a result, Goss no longer briefed the president every morning on the CIA’s view of the world, and he attended National Security Council meetings only at Negroponte’s invitation. In May 2006, Bush fired Goss and replaced him with a four-star air force general, Michael Hayden, former director of the nation’s eavesdropping and cryptological intelligence unit, the National Security Agency. Scott Ritter, author of Iraq Confidential: The Untold Story of the Intelligence Conspiracy to Undermine the U.N. and Overthrow Saddam Hussein, commented that “Goss’s tenure [as director of the CIA] will go down in history as one of the worst ever (followed closely by that of George Tenet).”⁶ Whether anything has actually changed other than some titles and bureaucrats is, however, an open question.

Whatever happens, the CIA will remain first and foremost the president’s private army, officially accountable to no other branch of the government. How this could be so, why the CIA was created, what it actually does, and the ways presidents since 1947 have twisted it to their own ends remains a widely misunderstood set of topics, crucial to the waning of American democracy. In fact, the term “intelligence” has always rested uneasily in the name “Central Intelligence Agency.” There is no question that the CIA was created in 1947 on the orders of President Truman for the sole purpose of acquiring, evaluating, and coordinating information collected both through espionage and from the public record, concerning the national security of the United States. Truman was determined to prevent another surprise attack on the United States like Pearl Harbor and to ensure that all information available to the government was compiled and presented to him in a timely and usable form.

The National Security Act of 1947 placed the CIA under the explicit direction of the National Security Council (NSC), the president’s chief staff unit—composed of appointed members not subject to congressional approval—focused on making decisions about war and peace. The CIA was given five functions, four of them dealing with the collection, coordination, and dissemination of intelligence. It was the fifth—a vaguely worded passage that allowed the CIA to “perform such other functions and duties related to intelligence affecting the national security as the National Security Council may from time to time direct”—that turned the CIA into the personal, secret, unaccountable army of the president. At least since 1953, when it secretly overthrew the democratically elected government of Iran, the CIA has often been ordered into battle without Congress having declared war, as the Constitution requires.

Clandestine or covert operations, although nowhere actually mentioned in the CIA’s enabling statutes, quickly became the agency’s main activity. As Loch K. Johnson, one of the CIA’s most impartial congressional analysts and former chief assistant to Senator Frank Church, chairman of the post-Watergate Senate Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities, observed, “The covert action shop had become a place for rapid promotion within the agency.”⁷ The Directorate of Operations (DO) soon absorbed two-thirds of the CIA’s budget and personnel, while the Directorate of Intelligence limped along, regularly producing bland documents known as National Intelligence Estimates (NIEs)—summaries of intelligence gathered by all the various intelligence agencies, including those in the Department of Defense. I personally read a good many of these when I served, from 1967 to 1973, as an outside consultant to what was then known as the CIA’s Office of National Estimates. This consulting function was abolished by Kissinger and Schlesinger during Nixon’s second term precisely because they did not want outsiders interfering with their ability to tell the president what to think.⁸

Meanwhile, CIA covert operations were mobilized in support of various criminal, dictatorial, or militarist organizations around the world so long as they were (or pretended to be) anticommunist. CIA operatives also planted false information in foreign newspapers and covertly fed large amounts of money to members of the Christian Democratic Party in Italy and the Liberal Democratic Party in Japan, to King Hussein of Jordan, and to clients in Greece, West Germany, Egypt, Sudan, Suriname, Mauritius, the Philippines, Iran, Ecuador, and Chile. Clandestine agents devoted themselves to such tasks as depressing the global prices of agricultural products in order to damage uncooperative Third World countries, attempting to assassinate foreign leaders, and sponsoring guerrilla wars or insurgencies in places as diverse as the Ukraine, Poland, Albania, Hungary, Indonesia, China, Tibet, Oman, Malaysia, Iraq, the Dominican Republic, Venezuela, North Korea, Bolivia, Laos, Cambodia, Vietnam, Thailand, Haiti, Guatemala, Cuba, Greece, Turkey, Vietnam, Afghanistan, Angola, and Nicaragua, to name only a few of those on the public record.⁹

All this was justified by the Cold War and no one beyond a very small group inside the executive branch was supposed to know anything about most of these activities, although over the years much information about them became public. The Central Intelligence Act of 1949 modified the National Security Act of 1947 with a series of revisions that, in the words of the pioneer scholar of the CIA Harry Howe Ransom, were meant “to permit [the CIA] a secrecy so absolute that accountability might be impossible.”¹⁰ No congressional oversight of the agency in any form existed until 1974, when, in the wake of Watergate, the Church Committee exposed the CIA’s illegal domestic surveillance, its assassinations of overseas leaders, and its lying to Congress. The committee’s report led Congress to create intelligence committees in both houses, but even that modest attempt at instituting oversight procedures has been thwarted by excessive secrecy—which the CIA has managed to impose on the work of Congress meant to bring a little sunlight to the agency. Since the mid-1970s, governmental secrecy has expanded exponentially, and Vice President Dick Cheney has made it his personal crusade to try to reverse the Church Committee’s reforms.¹¹

The irony is that Congress created the “central” intelligence agency in 1947 to concentrate vital information in one place and ensure that it went to the president and all other officials with a need-to-know. Instead the intelligence “community” has become a hotbed of competition, turf wars, and confusion. Failure to get intelligence into the right hands had clearly been one of the reasons for the catastrophic surprise of December 7, 1941, and—despite the multibillions that went into the CIA and other intelligence units and the spread of a culture of secrecy—it would be again on September 11, 2001. Overclassification and the use of secrecy to protect political and bureaucratic careers and departmental jurisdictions have rendered the entire intelligence apparatus unable to focus on much of anything.¹² To further enhance secrecy and add to the confusion, the president and the CIA have increasingly turned to completely “off-the-books” operations. The unsuccessful attempt to rig the Iraqi election of January 30, 2005, in favor of the White House’s preferred candidate, former CIA operative Iyad Allawi, by using “retired” agents, funds not appropriated by Congress, and other means is but one contemporary example of this phenomenon.¹³ The public learns about these operations, if it ever does, only as a result of leaks by insiders. The CIA belongs as much to the president as the Praetorian Guard once belonged to the Roman emperors.

Regardless of what it spends most of its time doing, the CIA is still tasked with providing accurate information to the president to enable him to avoid a surprise attack and protect the nation’s security. In the foyer of the CIA’s headquarters at Langley, Virginia, is inscribed a biblical quotation: “And ye shall know the truth and the truth shall make you free” (John 8:32). Loch Johnson suggests that Allen Dulles, former director of the CIA under Presidents Dwight Eisenhower and John F. Kennedy, probably thought it meant, “And ye shall know the truth—if ye be me, or the president.”¹⁴ Richard Helms, former DCI under Presidents Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon, once maintained to the Washington Post’s Bob Woodward that the early-warning function of the CIA “is everything, and underline everything.”¹⁵ But the CIA’s mandate to provide such often unrequested (and sometimes unwelcome) information to a president constitutes a potential restraint on the president’s freedom of action. It may, as in the case of the Bush administration and warnings about 9/11, threaten to totally derail his policies, particularly since such intelligence is very rarely certain or unambiguous. If anything, over the years, the powers of the director of the CIA to compel a president to read and attend to an unwanted intelligence estimate have been systematically diluted.

When information supposedly supplied to the president about a possible attack or any other matter under the CIA’s purview is leaked to the public, both the agency and the intelligence in question tend to become politically radioactive. Such revelations have usually taken one of two forms. In the first instance, the president turns out to have been shielded from or refused to read or respond to accurate intelligence. In the second instance, the president secretly orders the suppression of the intelligence or has intelligence fabricated about a nonexistent danger to support his preferred policies. President Bush has engaged in both types of behavior, but he is certainly not the first president to do so.

In 1961, at the time of the Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba, Richard Bissell, then head of the Directorate of Operations, gained the ear of President John F. Kennedy and assured him that elated Cubans would welcome American-supported insurgents, strew rose petals in their path, and help U.S.-based Cuban exiles overthrow the Castro government. Bissell simply did not show Kennedy estimates, also in his possession, that indicated the depth of Cuban leader Fidel Castro’s popularity, suggesting that no popular uprising would occur and that the invasion would surely fail dismally.

Similarly, in May 1970, in the midst of the Vietnam War, as President Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger plotted their “incursion” into Cambodia, the CIA’s Board of National Estimates (BNE) concluded that “an American invasion of Cambodia would fail to deter North Vietnamese continuation of the war.”¹⁶ DCI Helms did not even bother to deliver this estimate to the White House, knowing what the BNE did not—that the decision to invade had already been made and was unstoppable. Robert M. Gates, former DCI under Presidents George H. W. Bush and Bill Clinton, puts it this way: “It has been my experience over the years that the usual response of a policymaker to intelligence with which he disagrees or which he finds unpalatable is to ignore it.”¹⁷

Examples of the outright distortion or fabrication of intelligence are rarer, but they have occurred. During the Vietnam War, General William Westmoreland, U.S. military commander from 1964 to 1968, omitted from his estimate of enemy forces all communist guerrillas and informal local defense forces—perhaps as many as 120,000–150,000 fighters— which another military estimate indicated had been responsible for up to 40 percent of American losses. His apparent intent was to make victory in Vietnam look more plausible. On March 14, 1967, DCI Helms included Westmoreland’s figures in an NIE going to the White House even though he “knew that the figures on enemy troop strength in Vietnam provided by military intelligence were wrong—or, at any rate, quite different from CIA figures. Yet he signed the estimate without dissent. The apparent reason, according to his biographer, was that ‘he did not want a fight with the military, supported by [National Security Adviser Walt] Rostow at the White House.’“¹⁸

Another example of the suppression or distortion of intelligence occurred in 1969-70 over the issue of whether or not the Soviet SS-9 ICBM (intercontinental ballistic missile) could carry three warheads and whether those warheads could be fired at separate and distinct targets— that is, whether or not the SS-9 carried MIRVs (multiple independently targetable reentry vehicles). If true, this would perhaps have given the Soviet Union a first-strike capability against the United States. The SS-9 came in four models, the first of which had its initial flight test on September 23, 1963, and began to be deployed in the summer of 1967. All Western intelligence agencies agreed that models one through three carried a single warhead, some with huge yields (in the range of eighteen megatons). Disagreement arose over model four, which seemed to carry three warheads that might—or might not—have been independently targetable.

National Security Adviser Henry Kissinger and Secretary of Defense Melvin Laird argued that the fourth version of the SS-9 was a MIRVed weapon; the CIA in its NIE on the subject claimed that it was not. At first the CIA rejected the pressure coming from the policy makers and, in fact, strengthened its evidence against MIRVs. Ultimately, however, DCI Helms removed the paragraph arguing against Soviet preparations for a first strike after “an assistant to [Secretary of Defense Laird] informed Helms that the statement contradicted the public position of the Secretary.”¹⁹ As it turned out, the CIA was right. The SS-9s were armed with MRVs (multiple reentry vehicles), not MIRVs—that is, they could produce only a cluster of explosions in a single area. The Soviet Union did not deploy MIRVs until 1976, six years after the United States had done so.²⁰ So it was we, not they, who accelerated the nuclear arms race—and we did so on the basis of fabricated intelligence.

When it comes to ignoring accurate CIA intelligence, the preeminent example in the Bush administration was National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice’s indifference to al-Qaeda—she also rejected warnings on the subject from officials of the departing Clinton administration—and her failure to ensure that the president read and understood the explicit warnings of an imminent surprise attack that the agency delivered to her. On August 6, 2001, in a blunt one-page analysis headlined, “Bin Laden Determined to Strike in U.S.,” the CIA presented its President’s Daily Brief to Bush at his Crawford, Texas, ranch. According to Steve Coll of the Washington Post, “The report included the possibility that bin Laden operatives would seek to hijack airplanes. The hijacking threat, mentioned twice, was one of several possibilities outlined. There was no specific information about when or where such an attack might occur.”²¹

After the extent of its failure became known, and under extreme pressure from the public and families of the victims of 9/11, the Bush administration reluctantly authorized the creation of a National Commission on Terrorist Attacks upon the United States (also known as the 9/11 Commission) and permitted National Security Adviser Rice to testify before it in public. But the fix was in: the commission was constrained to concentrate on “intelligence failures” instead of the failure of policy makers to heed the intelligence that came their way, and on the need to “reform” the CIA—but not to such an extent as to damage the president’s ability to blame it for his mistakes and use it in future operations of his choice.

After the 9/11 attacks and the Bush administration’s decision to go to war with Iraq, the focus shifted from ignoring unwanted intelligence to actively creating false intelligence that would support its regime-change war of choice. The critical item in the administration’s rush to war was the NIE of October 1, 2002, entitled “Iraq’s Continuing Program for Weapons of Mass Destruction,” which became known inside the agency as the “whore of Babylon.”²² It explicitly endorsed Vice President Cheney’s contention of August 26, 2002—”We know that Saddam has resumed his efforts to acquire nuclear weapons”—and was signed by DCI George Tenet with “high confidence.” “The intelligence process,” wrote CIA veteran analyst Ray McGovern, “was not the only thing undermined. So was the Constitution. Various drafts of the NIE, reinforced with heavy doses of ‘mushroom-cloud’ rhetoric, were used to deceive congressmen and senators into ceding to the executive their prerogative to declare war—the all-important prerogative that the framers of the Constitution took great care to reserve exclusively to our elected representatives in Congress.”

In succeeding months, numerous review commissions revealed that the October NIE was only one of numerous failures by the government’s supposed truth tellers to do what the people of the United States pay them to do. The Senate Intelligence Committee, the 9/11 Commission, and the CIA’s Iraq Survey Group, under Charles Duelfer, all reported that the CIA’s intelligence on Iraqi WMD was largely fictitious. Even more dangerous for the White House, these reports suggested that much of this intelligence had been manufactured by neoconservative officials in the Pentagon long eager to invade Iraq.

In particular, the third-highest-ranking civilian defense official in the Pentagon, Douglas Feith, had set up the Office of Special Plans, devoted to going through all the raw intelligence available to the various spy agencies and ferreting out items that offered possible evidence of (or hints of evidence of) links between Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden.

It was this effort to get around both the CIA and the Defense Intelligence Agency, neither of whose analysts had found any links or ties between Iraq and the 9/11 attacks, that eventually led some officials to break ranks and charge publicly that the war against Iraq was in fact undercutting the “war on terrorism.” The most prominent of these whistle-blowers were Richard A. Clarke, the White House’s coordinator for counterterrorism in both the Clinton and Bush administrations, who published a tell-all book, Against All Enemies, and the CIA’s Michael Scheuer, who, in his book Imperial Hubris and in a letter to the House and Senate Intelligence Committees entitled “How Not to Catch a Terrorist,” charged: “In the CIA’s core, U.S.-based Bin Laden operational unit today there are fewer Directorate of Operations officers with substantive expertise on al-Qaeda than there were on 11 September 2001.”²³

But there were others. In July 2003, after over twenty years of service, Lieutenant Colonel Karen Kwiatkowski resigned her air force commission and left the Pentagon’s Near East and South Asia department to reveal how Feith’s Iraq-war-planning unit had manufactured scare stories about Iraq’s weapons and its ties to terrorists.²⁴ Former ambassador Joseph C. Wilson, with experience in several African countries and on the National Security Council, was asked by the CIA to go to the Saharan nation of Niger to investigate allegations that it had secretly sold uranium to Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, charges that President Bush had endorsed with his famous “sixteen words” in his January 28, 2003, State of the Union address. When the Bush administration continued to retail intelligence on the subject of Niger “yellowcake” that it knew to be forged and false, Wilson went public with an op-ed in the New York Times in which, among other things, he wrote, “Based on my experience with the administration in the months leading up to the war, I have little choice but to conclude that some of the intelligence related to Iraq’s nuclear weapons program was twisted to exaggerate the Iraqi threat.”²⁵ In retaliation, top administration officials conspired to “out” his wife, an undercover CIA agent working on nuclear proliferation and weapons of mass destruction. This was clearly meant to be a warning to any other officials or former officials who might care to leak or come forward with information damaging to the administration.

Gary C. Schroen, CIA station chief in Islamabad, Pakistan, from 1996 to 1999, has provided secret details about the way the agency paid off Afghanistan’s Northern Alliance warlords in the autumn of 2001 to reopen the civil war against the Taliban in Afghanistan and on the bungling of U.S. Special Forces in the subsequent campaign.²⁶ Melissa Boyle Mahle, a former CIA clandestine services officer fluent in Arabic, denounced former director George Tenet for his “total denial of failure” after September 11, 2001.²⁷ Although not an American whistle-blower, the late British foreign secretary Robin Cook also deserves mention as the only cabinet-rank statesman in any country to resign over the war in Iraq—he stepped down as leader of the House of Commons in 2003 to protest the invasion—and then to denounce official lies that were being told about the threat posed by Saddam Hussein. “Instead of using intelligence as evidence on which to base a decision about policy,” he charged, “we used intelligence as the basis on which to justify a policy on which we had already settled.”²⁸

After George Tenet resigned as George Bush’s DCI in July 2004 and went on the lecture circuit at $35,000 an appearance—he had earned well over a half million dollars by November 2004—Bush appointed Porter Goss to stanch the leaks at Langley.²⁹ The Senate confirmed him by a vote of 77 to 17 (six senators did not vote), suggesting the increasing worthlessness of Senate oversight of the executive branch. The new head of the CIA quickly got rid of as many messengers like Scheuer as he could identify. Goss had clearly been ordered to make it appear that the agency misled the president (rather than the other way around, as was actually the case). He was then supposed to shake up what he called a “dysfunctional” organization.

Before representing the Fourteenth District of Florida in the House for some sixteen years, Goss worked in the CIA’s Directorate of Operations (DO). During that time he was stationed primarily in Latin America, and rumors persist that he left the agency under a cloud. In 1995, he was appointed to the House Intelligence Committee and, in 1997, the ex-agent became its chairman. There is no evidence that he ever did anything useful in this position, like investigating the intelligence lapses that preceded 9/11 or the failure of the CIA to place a single spy anywhere in Saddam Hussein’s regime. During the 2004 election campaign he actually gave speeches attacking candidate John Kerry for “slashing intelligence funding” without mentioning that, in 1995, he himself had cosponsored a measure calling for the firing of 20 percent of all CIA personnel over five years.

Goss brought with him to the agency a group of Republican activist staff members from the House Intelligence Committee and set them up in prominent executive positions. They helped unleash a witch hunt against any and all intelligence officers who sought to put accuracy and integrity ahead of service to George W. Bush. Goss began his shake-up of the CIA by forcing out the director and deputy director of operations, even though this is not the primary place where the failures of the CIA in recent years have occurred. (This, in turn, led to speculation that it was a way to keep his own service record in the DO under wraps.) Shortly thereafter, Goss fired Jami A. Miscik, deputy director for intelligence, who had worked in the agency since 1983 and was a close associate of George Tenet. She had led the Directorate of Intelligence since May 2002, a period in which much of the false reporting on Iraq occurred. It might have seemed logical that Miscik would be held responsible for the politicized intelligence produced on her watch; but under the circumstances it seems clear that she was actually a scapegoat for President Bush and Vice President Cheney, who ordered up the false intelligence in the first place.³⁰ As Spencer Ackerman of the New Republic has written, “If Goss thought the CIA was dysfunctional before, he has guaranteed that it is now.”³¹

At the same time, President Bush ordered that the number of clandestine service officers within the agency be doubled, placing a much greater emphasis on covert operations.³² The CIA remains the main executive-branch department in charge of overthrowing foreign governments, promoting regimes of state terrorism, kidnapping people of interest to the administration and sending them to friendly foreign countries to be tortured and/or killed, assassination and the torture of prisoners in violation of international and domestic law, and numerous other “wet” exercises that both the president and the country in which they are executed want to be able to deny.

CIA covert operations are distinguished from military assaults carried out by the Department of Defense (which is also rapidly expanding its covert operations) chiefly by the requirement that the president must be able plausibly to deny that he ordered them or that he even knew about them. Covert operations are therefore protected by the most rigorous secrecy. As Loch Johnson observes, this sort of secrecy also destroys the last shreds of agency accountability. “Under a system of plausible denial it often becomes uncertain who really does know about, and has approved of, any given covert action. The lines of accountability wash away like markings in the sand.”³³

From the creation of the CIA in 1947 down to the Hughes-Ryan Act of 1974 (formally entitled Section 602(a) of the Foreign Assistance Act of 1974), there were virtually no officials of government who actually supervised or gave approval for covert acts or knew in detail about them or what they were supposed to accomplish. “The foreign policy establishment in Washington trusted the CIA,” Thomas Powers wrote in 1979, “and still trusts it, for that matter, but beyond governing circles the political foundation of the CIA rested on nothing more substantial than a popular fascination with espionage and a conviction that we are the good guys.”³⁴ The Church Committee estimated that the National Security Council itself knew about and approved of no more than about 14 percent of all covert actions from 1961 to 1975.³⁵

For example, when it came to investigating the CIAs several attempts to assassinate President Fidel Castro of Cuba (and a few other heads of state), the Church Committee had to throw in the towel. Numerous cabinet officials, including Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara, testified under oath that it was unthinkable that either Presidents Eisenhower or Kennedy had authorized such a mission. As Powers writes, “The committee was forced to confess in the end that while it had no evidence that the CIA had been a rogue elephant rampaging out of control, it also had no evidence that Eisenhower or Kennedy or anyone speaking in one of their names had ordered the CIA to kill Castro. The only indisputable fact was that the CIA did, in fact, try to do so.”³⁶ Plausible denial, extreme secrecy, the power of the presidency, and a culture of loyalty to the agency rather than to the Constitution cause this kind of endemic confusion—exceedingly useful to those in power—about who is responsible for what the CIA does, a problem that still haunts the government today.

The 1974 Hughes-Ryan Act, named after its authors, Senator Harold E. Hughes (Democrat from Iowa) and Representative Leo J. Ryan (Democrat from California), for the first time tried to enforce the CIAs accountability to the elected representatives of the people. It states that “No funds ... may be expended by or on behalf of the Central Intelligence Agency for operations in foreign countries ... unless and until the President finds that each such operation is important to the national security of the United States.” The verb “finds” is the origin of the odd term “finding,” which is governmental argot for the document that the president now signs approving and setting into motion a covert operation. The law also stipulates that the president must give the appropriate committees of Congress “in a timely fashion” a description of each operation and its scope.

This law has not worked well. In the middle of the Reagan administration, members of Congress first read in the newspapers that, on orders of the president’s national security adviser, Vice Admiral John M. Poindexter, CIA operatives were covertly and illegally selling arms to the revolutionary government of Iran and using the funds thus obtained to finance a congressionally forbidden insurgency against the elected government of Nicaragua. This disaster led to much stronger demands for intelligence oversight, but the president and his secret army found numerous ways to get around such pressures. For example, in lieu of a specific finding, “worldwide findings” have given the CIA blanket authority to conduct certain types of unspecified covert operations—say, those against terrorists. Operations have also been “privatized” by getting foreign governments and U.S. corporations to pay for them, or kept totally hidden via “off the books” personnel and funds. To illustrate what the CIA does best, let us look briefly at its record in Chile, in Afghanistan, and in carrying out so-called extraordinary renditions.

CIA activities in Chile, ranging from the early 1960s to 1990, occurred in both the pre- and postaccountability eras. Before 1974, they were intended to overthrow the oldest and most stable democracy in Latin America, dating from the country’s independence in 1818, and replace it with “the vilest of Latin American dictators in recent history.”³⁷ Having to report to Congress had little effect on CIA operations in Chile. If findings were ever signed and passed to Capitol Hill, we have no record of them. What we do have is a vast archive of thousands of highly classified reports and cables from the Oval Office, the CIA, the National Security Council, the State Department, the American embassy in Santiago, and the FBI that the U.S. government was forced to declassify because of the blowback that the operations themselves generated, including lawsuits by Chilean torture victims and demands for the arrest and trial of former secretary of state Henry Kissinger.³⁸

Chile was certainly not the first instance in which the United States government used its clandestine services to manipulate, undermine, or overthrow a fellow democracy. It had done so in many other places, including Italy in 1947-48, Iran in 1953, Guatemala in 1954, Indonesia in 1957-58, Brazil from 1961 to 1964, Greece from 1964 to 1974, South Korea from 1961 to 1987, and the Philippines in every year since it gained its independence from the United States in 1946. But Chile provides us with the first written record of a U.S. president ordering the overthrow of a democratically elected government—namely, the handwritten notes of CIA director Richard Helms reflecting the orders given to him by President Richard Nixon in the White House on September 15, 1970.³⁹ Even the heavily censored CIA documents released to the Church Committee in 1975 led Senator Church to produce his own definition of “covert action.” It is a “semantic disguise for murder, coercion, blackmail, bribery, the spreading of lies, and consorting with known torturers and international terrorists.”⁴⁰

From the moment the Kennedy administration came to power in 1961 until the overthrow and death of Chile’s president Salvador Allende on September 11, 1973, the CIA spent some $12 million on a massive “black” propaganda campaign to support Allende’s primary political opponent, Eduardo Frei, the candidate of the Christian Democratic Party, and to denigrate Allende as a stooge of the Soviet Union. In addition, the International Telephone and Telegraph Corporation (which owned the Chilean telephone system) and other American-owned businesses in Chile gave the CIA an extra $1.5 million to help discredit Allende. ITT properties in Chile, including two Sheraton Hotels, were worth at least $153 million. In July 1970, two months before Allende was elected president, John McCone, director of central intelligence from 1961 to 1965 and in 1970 a member of the board of directors of ITT, set up an appointment with then DCI Richard Helms. He offered money and cooperation from ITT “for the purpose of assisting any [U.S.] government plan ... to stop Allende.” ITT presented a plan “aimed at inducing economic collapse” in Chile.⁴¹

In the 1964 election, the CIA directly underwrote more than half of Frei’s campaign expenses. It spent more than $2.6 million in support of the election of the Christian Democratic candidate. More sinister was the agency’s disinformation campaign, which it later held up as a model of how to do it. The Church Committee reported, “Extensive use was made of the press, radio, films, pamphlets, posters, leaflets, direct mailings, paper streamers, and wall painting. It was a ‘scare campaign,’ which relied heavily on images of Soviet tanks and Cuban firing squads and was directed especially to women.”⁴² The CIA placed radio spots that featured the sound of a machine gun, followed by a woman’s cry: “They have killed my child—the communists.” One poster, printed in the thousands, showed children with a hammer and sickle stamped on their foreheads. Juanita Castro, Fidel’s anticommunist sister, said on the radio, “If the Reds win in Chile, no type of religious activity will be possible.... Chilean mothers, I know you will not allow your children to be taken from you and sent to the Communist bloc, as in the case of Cuba.”⁴³

The CIA boasted that it produced and planted in various media around the world some 726 stories against an Allende presidency. Most of these appeared first in Latin American newspapers and were later reprinted in Chilean ones; some appeared in the CIA’s own secret outlets, which included Der Monat in Germany, Encounter in Britain, the Daily American of Rome, and the South Pacific Mail of Santiago. Some seeped into the New York Times and the Washington Post, including the idea that Allende was a paid agent of the USSR.⁴⁴ In 1964, these “dirty tricks” produced the desired results. Frei received 56 percent of the vote to Allende’s 39 percent, an unprecedented and almost statistically impossible outcome, given Chile’s multiparty electoral system. The targeted scare tactics worked well. While Chilean men voted for Allende by a plurality of more than 67,000, women gave Frei 469,000 more votes than Allende.⁴⁵ As a reward and an insurance policy, the U.S. government promptly began to pay off Frei. Under the U.S.’s Alliance for Progress, a scheme to prevent the spread of leftist views in Latin America, “Chile received more American aid per capita than just about any other country in the world—Vietnam excepted.”⁴⁶

The next presidential election was scheduled for September 4, 1970. Even though the CIA kept up its blistering disinformation campaign, Chilean voters had become warier of the increasingly preposterous American propaganda and its “false flag” agents who tried to convince Chilean business and military elites that “an Allende victory means violence and Stalinist repression.” As a matter of fact, there was no issue of potential Soviet influence in Chile. Allende was not a communist and, in any case, after he came to power in 1970 the Soviet Union wisely urged him to “put his relations with the United States in order.”⁴⁷ In August 1970, Henry Kissinger had ordered a special national intelligence estimate to answer the question “What would happen in the event of an Allende victory?” It concluded: “An Allende election carried no military, strategic, or regional threat to U.S. interests in security and stability.”⁴⁸

In the September 4 election, Allende finally won a plurality, but not a majority, of the vote. However, he confidently expected that on October 24 the Chilean Congress would choose him to be president—normal parliamentary practice.

In an attempt to prevent this, the Nixon White House and the CIA sprang into action. On October 16, 1970, CIA headquarters dispatched a secret “eyes only” cable to Henry Hecksher, the CIA Santiago station chief. The actual sender, presumably DCI Helms, is blacked out in the text. “It is firm and continuous policy that Allende be overthrown by a coup. It would be much preferable to have this transpire prior to 24 October, but efforts in this regard will continue vigorously beyond this date. We are to continue to generate maximum pressure toward this end utilizing every appropriate resource. It is imperative that these actions be implemented clandestinely and securely so that the USG [United States government] and American hand be well hidden.”⁴⁹

For months, the CIA had been sounding out senior Chilean military officers on the issue of a coup, promising extensive help to any who agreed to participate. The agency’s operatives soon discovered that the main obstacle was the commander in chief of the army, General Rene Schneider, who represented what the CIA called “the apolitical, constitution-oriented inertia of the Chilean military.”⁵⁰ Therefore, the CIA set out to find and arm dissident Chilean forces who would assassinate him. One group it approached asked for submachine guns, ammunition, and $50,000 to do the job, and the agency obliged, shipping the weapons from Washington to Santiago in the regular diplomatic pouch.⁵¹ Local CIA agents then delivered them to the plotters at 2 a.m. on October 22, 1970; at 8 a.m. the assassins surrounded General Schneider’s chauffeur-driven car, knocked out the rear window, and fatally wounded him. He died in a hospital three days later.

The CIA went to great lengths to cover its tracks, including paying hush money to the conspirators and driving to a general’s home to retrieve the guns they had given him. Colonel Paul Wimert, the military attaché in the U.S. embassy in Santiago, had to pistol-whip the general to force him to comply.⁵² The agency then dumped the machine guns in the ocean to ensure that they could not be traced back to the U.S. government.

But Washington and the CIA had overplayed their hands. “Far from fostering a coup climate,” Peter Kornbluh, the chief Chilean specialist at the National Security Archive in Washington, D.C., writes, “the Schneider shooting produced an overwhelming public and political repudiation of violence and a clear reaffirmation of Chile’s civil, constitutional tradition.”⁵³ The Chilean Congress voted 153 to 57 to ratify Allende as president, with all seventy-four senators and congressmen from the Christian Democratic Party voting with Allende’s own party. This result did not, however, even begin to slow down Washington’s venomous campaign. For the next three years, the Nixon administration tried in every way to undermine Allende by producing economic chaos in Chile, and the CIA worked tirelessly to find a suitable general to put in power. They finally identified a likely candidate in the summer of 1971—the cruel, ruthless, and corrupt General Augusto Pinochet.

The Chilean military under Pinochet finally moved against Allende on “the other 9/11”—September 11, 1973. During the attack on La Moneda, the presidential palace, Pinochet’s forces offered Allende an airplane to fly him and his family into exile. (Pinochet was taped giving radio instructions to his troops, in which he says, “That plane will never land.”⁵⁴) Allende apparently took his own life rather than agreeing to any offer or allowing himself to be captured. He was found dead of gunshot wounds in his office around 2 p.m. on September 11.

Thus began Pinochet’s seventeen-year dictatorship and reign of terror—sponsored and paid for by the U.S. government. During this period, the Chilean military was responsible for the murder, disappearance, or death by torture of some 3,197 citizens, according to the postdictatorship Report of the Chilean National Commission on Truth and Reconciliation, released in 1991. In November 2004, the National Commission on Political Imprisonment and Torture, chaired by Monsignor Sergio Valech, published a twelve-hundred-page report that documented more than 27,000 confirmed cases of political imprisonment and “the most grotesque forms of torture.”⁵⁵

Pinochet’s major instrument of oppression was the army’s Directorate of National Intelligence (DINA), headed by Colonel Manuel Contreras. In addition to carrying out fierce repression within Chile, Contreras was the creator of Operation Condor, which a top-secret CIA report describes laconically as “a cooperative effort by the intelligence/security services of several South American countries to combat terrorism and subversion.”⁵⁶ It was, in fact, a conspiracy among the intelligence services of Chile, Argentina, Paraguay, Uruguay, and Bolivia, subsequently joined by Brazil, and backed by the Nixon administration, to hunt down and assassinate leftists within these countries and, in particular, those living abroad in exile. Kornbluh describes Condor as “the most sinister state-sponsored terrorist network in the Western hemisphere, if not in the world.”⁵⁷ John Dinges, a Columbia University professor and author of The Condor Years, estimates that Condor agents killed at least 13,000 people in the six participating countries.⁵⁸

Among its trademark atrocities were the car-bomb killings of the exiled general Carlos Prats and his wife—Prats had been General Schneider’s successor—in Buenos Aires on September 30, 1974, and of Orlando Letelier, Allende’s ambassador to Washington and later foreign minister, and his twenty-six-year-old American colleague, Ronni Karpen Moffitt, on a street in Washington, D.C., on September 21, 1976. Both assassinations were carried out by the most famous member of DINA’s foreign branch, Michael Vernon Townley, an American born in Waterloo, Iowa. The killing of Letelier and an American citizen in the nation’s capital was one of the most flagrant acts of international terrorism carried out in the United States prior to September 11, 2001. It set off a furious FBI investigation that ultimately led Chile to turn over Townley, who confessed to his role in the crime. During this period, the CIA was notoriously passive, lacking all signs of interest in the Letelier case—even though on August 25, 1975, the agency had hosted a luncheon for Colonel Contreras in Washington and that same year put him on its payroll, making a personal payment to him of $5,000.⁵⁹ The CIA has, to date, never been directly connected to the Letelier murder, but many of the most critical documents about the case remain secret and many questions remain about the full scope of the agency’s role in Chilean politics.

In reaction to the Letelier case, the Carter administration imposed sanctions on Chile, but these were quickly lifted when Ronald Reagan came to power. Pinochet’s regime was a particular favorite of both Reagan and British prime minister Margaret Thatcher. The end of the military dictatorship came only when the passive resistance of the people of Chile forced Pinochet to hold a plebiscite. On October 5, 1988, with 98 percent of eligible Chileans turning out, 54.7 percent voted to end the dictatorship. Pinochet left office and electoral politics were hesitantly restored, but the military thoroughly protected itself through various amnesty laws and other measures.

Pinochet was ultimately discredited by two events. On October 16, 1998, while he was visiting London for medical treatments, a British judge signed a warrant for his arrest after a Spanish judge sought his extradition to face trial for the torture of Spanish citizens in Chile. Held under house arrest near London for 503 days, he was finally returned to Chile, where the international controversy over the arrest of a former head of state for human rights violations made it increasingly impossible for the Chilean courts to continue to honor the immunity he had essentially granted himself.⁶⁰ Public opinion in Chile finally turned decisively against him when a U.S. Senate committee, investigating money laundering by the Riggs Bank of Washington, D.C., revealed that between 1974 and 1997 various countries around the world had paid Pinochet some $12.3 million. In 1976, the U.S. government alone contributed some $3 million. Pinochet and his wife had siphoned off between $4 million and $8 million of these funds and hired the Riggs Bank to hide the money for them in secret, frequently moved accounts. On December 24, 2004, a Chilean special investigation into Pinochet’s wealth determined that between 1985 and 2002, he had actually hidden $16 million—twice the previously reported amount—at Riggs. The revelation that, with so much money stashed away, he was still receiving a monthly pension of $2,000 utterly destroyed his claim that he had done everything “for the good of Chile.”⁶¹

As in Chile, so in Afghanistan, the CIA record was filled with payoffs, murders, corrupt public officials in Washington, and support for local villains. The Afghan operation, according to several CIA partisans, was “the biggest, meanest, and far and away most successful CIA campaign in history.”⁶² That was the short-term view. As a matter of fact, the CIA’s covert operations in Afghanistan from 1979 to the victory of the Taliban in 1996 produced the worst instance of blowback among all of America’s secret wars—namely, al-Qaeda’s attack on New York and Washington on September 11, 2001. Neither the United States nor the world can stand many more “victories” of that sort.

The Carter administration deliberately provoked the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, which occurred on Christmas Eve 1979. In his 1996 memoir, former CIA director Robert Gates acknowledges that the American intelligence services began to aid the anti-Soviet mujahideen guerrillas not after the Russian invasion but six months before it.⁶³ On July 3, 1979, President Carter signed a finding authorizing secret aid to the opponents of the pro-Soviet regime then ruling in Kabul. His purpose—and that of his national security adviser, Zbigniew Brzezinski—was to provoke a full-scale Soviet military intervention. Carter wanted to tie down the USSR and so prevent its leaders from exploiting the 1979 anti-American revolution in Iran. In addition, as Brzezinski put it, “We now have the opportunity of giving to the USSR its Vietnam War.”⁶⁴

Before it was over, the CIA and the USSR between them turned Afghanistan, which had been a functioning state with a healthy middle class, into a warring collection of tribes, Islamic sects, and heroin-producing warlords. In human terms, the effort cost 1.8 million Afghan casualties and sent 2.6 million fleeing as refugees, while ten million unexploded land mines were left strewn around the country. It also took the lives of about 15,000 Soviet soldiers and contributed to the dissolution of the USSR.

The destruction of Afghanistan actually began in 1973. In that year, General Sardar Mohammed Daoud, the cousin and brother-in-law of King Zahir Shah, overthrew the king, declared Afghanistan a republic, and instituted a program of modernization. Zahir Shah went into exile in Rome. These developments made possible the rise of the People’s Democratic Party of Afghanistan, a pro-Soviet communist party, which, in early 1978, with extensive help from the USSR, overthrew then president Daoud.

The communists’ policies of secularization in turn provoked a violent response from devout Islamists. The anticommunist revolt that began in western Afghanistan in March 1979 was initially a response to a government initiative to teach girls to read, something that devout Sunnis opposed. A triumvirate of anticommunist nations—the United States, Pakistan, and Saudi Arabia—came to the aid of the rebels. Each had diverse, even contradictory motives for doing so, but the United States did not take these differences seriously until it was too late. By the time the Americans woke up, at the end of the 1990s, the radical Islamist Taliban had established a fundamentalist government of the most extreme sort in Kabul. Recognized only by Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates, it granted Osama bin Laden freedom of action and offered him protection from American efforts to capture or kill him.

During the 1980s, the Cold War shaped the perspectives of the Reagan White House and of the CIA. Both wanted to see as many Soviet soldiers as possible killed, the “Evil Empire” drained, and an aura of rugged machismo as well as credibility restored to the United States that they feared had been lost when the Shah of Iran was overthrown. As it turned out, other than pinning down Soviet troops beyond the borders of the USSR, the CIA had no coherent strategy for its Afghan war and seemed almost entirely innocent of the history, culture, religion, and aspirations of the country or its own allies. Howard Hart, the CIA representative in the Pakistani capital, said that the agency told him, in effect, “You’re a young man; here’s your bag of money, go raise hell. Don’t fuck it up, just go out there and kill Soviets.”⁶⁵

Hart’s marching orders came from a most peculiar American, one of the few CIA directors who was genuinely close to his president. Educated by Jesuits, William Casey, Reagan’s DCI from January 1981 to January 1987, was a Catholic Knight of Malta. The Washington Post’s Steve Coll in his book Ghost Wars describes Casey’s religiosity this way: “Statues of the Virgin Mary filled his mansion, ‘Maryknoll,’ on Long Island. He attended mass daily and urged Christianity on anyone who asked his advice. Once settled at the CIA, he began to funnel covert action funds through the Catholic Church to anticommunists in Poland and Central America, sometimes in violation of American law. He believed fervently that by increasing the Catholic Church’s reach and power he could contain communism’s advance, or reverse it.”⁶⁶ From Casey’s convictions grew the most important U.S. foreign policies of the 1980s—support for a clandestine anti-Soviet crusade in Afghanistan and sponsorship of an Operation Condor-like campaign of state terrorism in Nicaragua, El Salvador, and Guatemala.

Casey knew next to nothing about Islam or the grievances of Middle Eastern nations against Western imperialism. He saw political Islam and the Catholic Church as natural allies in covert actions against Soviet imperialism. He believed that the USSR was trying to strike at the United States in Central America and in the oil-producing states of the Middle East. He supported Islam as an answer to the Soviet Union’s atheism and he sometimes even confused lay Catholic organizations such as the right-wing Opus Dei with the Muslim Brotherhood, the Egyptian extremist organization in which Ayman al-Zawahiri, Osama bin Laden’s chief lieutenant, became a passionate member. The Muslim Brotherhood’s branch in Pakistan, the Jamaat-e-Islami, was strongly backed by the Pakistani army, and Casey, more than any other American, was responsible for creating an alliance of the CIA, Saudi intelligence, and the intelligence forces of General Mohammed Zia-ul-Haq, Pakistan’s military dictator from 1977 to 1988. On the suggestion of the Pakistani Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) organization, Casey went so far as to print thousands of copies of the Koran, which he shipped to the Afghan frontier for distribution in Afghanistan and Soviet Uzbekistan. Without presidential authority, he also fomented Muslim attacks inside the USSR and always maintained that the CIA’s clandestine officers were too timid. He preferred the type represented by his friend Oliver North, the marine lieutenant colonel at the heart of the Iran-Contra scandal, who, as a top Reagan administration official, organized the clandestine selling of weapons to Iran (for use against Iraq) in order to generate funds for the Nicaraguan Contra rebel group in violation of U.S. law.⁶⁷

Over time, Casey’s position hardened into CIA dogma that its agents, protected by secrecy from ever having their ignorance exposed, enforced in every way they could. The agency resolutely refused to help choose winners and losers among the Afghan jihad’s guerrilla leaders. The result was that, as Coll puts it, “Zia-ul-Haq’s political and religious agenda in Afghanistan gradually became the CIA’s own.”⁶⁸ In the era after Casey, some scholars, journalists, and members of Congress questioned the agency’s lavish support of the murderous Pakistan-backed Islamist Afghan general Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, especially after he refused to shake hands with Ronald Reagan because he was an “infidel.” But Milton Bear-den, the Islamabad station chief from 1986 to 1989, and Frank Anderson, chief of the Afghan task force at Langley, vehemently defended Hekmatyar on the grounds that “he fielded the most effective anti-Soviet fighters.”⁶⁹

Perhaps the most remarkable aspect of the CIA’s operations in Afghanistan was the roles played in them by two wholly out-of-control Americans, one a member of the Appropriations Committee of Congress and the other an exceptionally ruthless CIA clandestine services officer who, once he had teamed up with the congressman, operated more or less independent of any agency supervision. Nothing more readily illustrates the dangers of secrecy in the United States government than the ways an ignoramus of a congressman and a high-ranking CIA thug managed to hijack American foreign policy. Under the covert guidance of Representative Charlie Wilson and CIA operative Gust Avrakotos, the agency flooded Afghanistan with an incredible array of extremely dangerous weapons and “unapologetically mov[ed] to equip and train cadres of high tech holy warriors in the art of waging a war of urban terror against a modern superpower”—initially, the USSR.⁷⁰

From 1973 to 1996, Charlie Wilson represented the Second District of Texas in the House of Representatives. He had graduated from the Naval Academy in 1956, eighth from the bottom of his class and with more demerits than any other cadet in Annapolis’s history. After serving in the Texas state legislature, he arrived in Washington in 1973 and quickly became known as “Good Time Charlie, the biggest playboy in Congress.”

He hired only good-looking women for his staff because, as he told visitors in his booming voice, “You can teach ‘em to type but you can’t teach ‘em to grow tits,” and was known for escorting “a parade of beauty queens ... to White House parties.”⁷¹ His biographer describes him as “a seemingly corrupt, cocaine snorting, scandal prone womanizer who the CIA was convinced could only get the agency into terrible trouble if it permitted him to become involved in any way in its operations.”⁷² Nonetheless, he managed to do so thanks to lax congressional oversight and corruption.

Wilson’s partner in influencing CIA policy toward Afghanistan was Gust Avrakotos, the son of working-class Greek immigrants from the steel workers’ town of Aliquippa, Pennsylvania. Only in 1960 had the CIA begun to recruit officers for the Directorate of Operations from among what it called “new Americans,” meaning ethnics, such as Chinese-, Japanese-, Hispanic-, and Greek-Americans. Up until then, it had followed the British model, taking only Ivy League sons of the Eastern establishment. Avrakotos joined the CIA in 1961 and came to nurture a hatred for the blue bloods, or “cake eaters,” as he called them, who looked down on him. After spook school at Camp Peary, next door to Jamestown, Virginia, he was posted to Athens because he was fluent in Greek, and he remained there right through the CIA-sponsored reign of terror of the Greek colonels. He left the country in 1978 but could not get another decent assignment—he tried for Helsinki—because the head of the European Division regarded him as too uncouth to send to any European capital. He sat around Langley for a long period without any work until he was recruited by John McGaffin, head of the Afghan program. “If it’s really true that you have nothing to do,” McGaffin said, “why not come upstairs? We’re killing Russians.”⁷³

If Charlie Wilson was the moneybags and spark plug of this pair, Avrakotos was the street fighter who relished arming the tribesmen in Afghanistan with Kalashnikovs and Stinger surface-to-air shoulder-fired missiles. In 1976, Wilson became a member of the House Appropriations Committee at a time when its chairman used to have a sign mounted over his desk: “Them that has the gold make the rules.” Wilson acted on this principle and advanced rapidly on this most powerful of all congressional committees. He was first appointed to the Foreign Operations Subcommittee, which doles out foreign aid. He then did a big favor for Speaker Tip O’Neill and, in return, O’Neill assigned Wilson to the Defense Appropriations Subcommittee.

Wilson soon discovered that all of the CIA’s budget and 40 percent of the Pentagon’s budget is “black”—that is, totally hidden from the public and all but a privileged few congressmen. As a member of the Defense Appropriations Subcommittee, he could add virtually any amount of money to whatever black project he supported. In short, he had stumbled upon the world of “earmarks,” a euphemism that refers to the power of members of Congress to insert into appropriations bills funds for special projects that the executive branch has not asked for and that are often not in the nation’s best interest.

The practice of earmarking continues in widespread use at the present time. In 1998, the 2,000 earmarks slipped into all thirteen appropriations bills had an overall value of $10.6 billion. By 2004, the numbers had grown to 15,584 earmarks worth $32.7 billion. In a 2005 interview, Wilson, by then a lobbyist for Pakistan, said, “We would never have won the [anti-Soviet Afghan] war if it hadn’t been for earmarking because the [CIA] would have never spent the money the way we wanted it to.”⁷⁴ So long as Wilson did favors for other members on the subcommittee by supporting defense projects in their districts, they never objected to his private obsessions. In 1986, Wilson was finally able to join the House’s Intelligence Committee, which only added to his ability to earmark, doubling and tripling the secret funds he could direct to Afghan operations.

Like several influential Americans with right-wing political orientations, Wilson came under the influence of the charismatic head of Pakistan’s army, General Mohammed Zia-ul-Haq. In July 1977, Zia had seized power, declared martial law, and in 1979 hanged the president who had promoted him, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto. In retaliation, President Jimmy Carter cut off all U.S. aid to Pakistan. However, in 1980, Congressman Wilson visited Pakistan at the urging of a conservative lady friend from Houston and came under the spell of the general. He also learned for the first time about the heroic anticommunist mujahideen who were fighting against the Soviet Union across the border in Afghanistan, and became a convert to their cause. Using earmarked funds, he restored Zia’s aid money and added several million dollars to the CIA’s efforts to arm the Afghan guerrillas, each dollar of which the Saudi government secretly matched. Pakistan provided the fighters with sanctuary, training, arms, and even sent its own officers into Afghanistan as advisers on military operations. Saudi Arabia served as the fighters’ banker, providing hundreds of millions with no strings attached. Several governments, including Egypt, China, and Israel, secretly supplied arms.

However, Pakistan’s motives in Afghanistan were very different from those of the United States. Zia was a devout Muslim and a passionate supporter of Islamist groups in his own country, Afghanistan, and throughout the world, but he was not a fanatic and had some quite practical reasons for supporting Afghanistan’s jihadists.

Zia feared above all that Pakistan would be squeezed between a Soviet-dominated Afghanistan and a hostile India. He also had to guard against an independence movement among the Pashtuns, the largest tribal group in Afghanistan and one of the largest in Pakistan, that, if successful, might cause the breakup of Pakistan. In other words, while he backed the Islamic militants in Afghanistan and Pakistan on religious grounds, he was quite prepared to use them strategically. From the beginning, Zia demanded that all weapons and aid for the Afghans from whatever source first pass through the hands of Pakistan’s military intelligence, the ISI. The CIA was delighted to agree. In doing so, the agency helped lay the foundation not just for the decimation of Afghanistan and the rise of the Taliban but for Pakistan’s anti-Indian insurgency in Kashmir in the 1990s.

Congressman Wilson’s greatest preoccupation in cooperating with Zia was to supply the Afghans with weaponry that would be effective against the Soviets’ most feared weapon—the Mi-24 Hind helicopter gunship. The Red Army used it to slaughter innumerable mujahideen as well as— in Vietnam War fashion—to shoot up Afghan villages. Wilson actually favored giving the Afghans the Oerlikon antiaircraft gun made in Switzerland. (It was later charged that he was on the take from the Zurich-based manufacturer of the weapon.)⁷⁵ His CIA sidekick Avrakotos considered it too heavy for guerrillas to move easily but could not openly stand in Wilson’s way. After months of controversy, the Joint Chiefs of Staff finally dropped their objections to supplying the Afghans with the far lighter American-made Stinger shoulder-fired missile, which had never before been used in combat. It proved to be murderous against the relatively slow-moving Hinds, and Soviet premier Mikhail Gorbachev decided to cut his losses by getting out altogether. In Wilson’s post-Soviet-withdrawal tour of Afghanistan, mujahideen fighters triumphantly fired their Stingers just for his benefit. They also presented him with a souvenir—part of the launcher of the first Stinger to bring down a Hind gunship—which he still proudly displays today in his Washington office.

Zia died in a mysterious plane crash on August 17, 1988, four months after a set of Geneva Accords ratified the formal terms of Soviet withdrawal from Afghanistan. As the Soviet troops departed, the warlord Hekmatyar embarked on a clandestine plan to eliminate his rivals and establish his Islamic party, dominated by the Muslim Brotherhood, as the most powerful national force in Afghanistan.

Meanwhile, with the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, followed by the implosion of the USSR in 1991, the United States lost virtually all interest in Afghanistan. The pro-Soviet government in Kabul did not fall immediately. Hekmatyar was never ultimately as good as the CIA imagined him to be. His only real accomplishment was to plunge the country into a murderous civil war. In 1994, both Pakistan and Saudi Arabia transferred their secret support to the newly created Taliban, who proved to be the most militarily effective of the warring groups. On September 26, 1996, the Taliban conquered Kabul, now practically a city of rubble. The next day they killed the formerly Soviet-backed President Najibullah, expelled eight thousand female undergraduate students from Kabul University, and fired a similar number of women schoolteachers. As the Taliban closed in on his palace, Najibullah told reporters: “If fundamentalism comes to Afghanistan, war will continue for many years. Afghanistan will turn into a center of world smuggling for narcotic drugs. Afghanistan will be turned into a center for terrorism.”⁷⁶ His predictions would prove all too accurate.

Saudi Arabian motives differed from those of both the United States and Pakistan. Saudi Arabia is, after all, the only modern nation-state created by jihad. The Saudi royal family, which came to power at the head of a movement of Wahhabi religious extremists, espoused Islamic radicalism elsewhere as a way to keep it under control in their kingdom. “Middle-class, pious Saudis flush with oil wealth,” Steve Coll writes, “embraced the Afghan cause as American churchgoers might respond to an African famine or a Turkish earthquake.... The money flowing from the kingdom arrived at the Afghan frontier in all shapes and sizes: gold jewelry dropped on offering plates by merchants’ wives in Jedda mosques; bags of cash delivered by businessmen to Riyadh charities as zakat, an annual Islamic tithe; fat checks written from semi-official government accounts by minor Saudi princes; bountiful proceeds raised in annual telethons led by Prince Salman, the governor of Riyadh; and richest of all were the annual transfers from the Saudi General Intelligence Department, or Istakhbarat, to the CIA’s Swiss bank accounts.”⁷⁷

From the moment agency money and weapons started to flow to the mujahideen in 1980, Saudi Arabia matched U.S. payments dollar for dollar. The Saudis also bypassed Pakistan’s ISI and supplied funds directly to groups in Afghanistan they favored, particularly the one led by their own pious young millionaire Osama bin Laden. According to the CIA’s Milton Bearden, private Saudi and Arab funding of up to $25 million a month flowed to Afghan Islamist armies. Equally important, starting in 1986, Pakistan trained between 16,000 and 18,000 fresh Muslim recruits on the Afghan frontier every year, and another 6,500 or so were instructed by Afghans inside the country beyond ISI control. Most of these eventually joined bin Laden’s fundamentalist army of 35,000 “Arab Afghans.”⁷⁸

Even after the Soviet Union withdrew from Afghanistan in 1988, the CIA continued to follow Pakistani initiatives, such as aiding Hekmatyar’s successor, the one-eyed Mullah Omar, leader of the Taliban, and watched Afghanistan descend into one of the more horrific civil wars of the twentieth century. The CIA did not fully awaken to its naive and ill-informed reading of Afghan politics (which was a typical Cold War superpower’s blindness to the distinctiveness of contested local areas) until after bin Laden bombed the U.S. embassies in Nairobi and Dar es Salaam on August 7, 1998. Even then, the agency defined the Islamist threat almost exclusively in terms of Osama bin Laden’s leadership of al-Qaeda and failed to take in the larger context, including the policies of Pakistani military intelligence, or the funds flowing to the Taliban and al-Qaeda from Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates. Instead, it devoted itself solely to trying to capture or kill bin Laden himself.

On February 23, 1998, bin Laden had summoned newspaper and TV reporters to the camp at Khost, in the eastern part of Afghanistan, that the CIA had built for him at the height of the anti-Soviet jihad. There he announced the creation of a new organization—the International Islamic Front for Jihad Against Jews and Crusaders—and issued a manifesto saying that “to kill and fight Americans and their allies, whether civilian or military, is an obligation for every Muslim who is able to do so in any country.” Just over five months later, he and his associates put this manifesto into effect with their devastating embassy truck bombings in Africa.

By then the CIA had identified bin Laden’s family compound in the open desert near Kandahar Airport, a collection of buildings called Tarnak Farm. It is possible that more satellite footage has been taken of this site than of any other place on Earth; one famous picture seems to show bin Laden standing outside the home of one of his wives. The CIA conceived an elaborate plot to kidnap bin Laden from Tarnak Farm with the help of Afghan operatives and spirit him out of the country, but CIA director George Tenet canceled the project because of the high risk of civilian casualties (for which the operations wing of the agency would later scorn him). Meanwhile, the Clinton White House ordered submarines to be stationed in the northern Arabian Sea with the map coordinates of Tarnak Farm preloaded into their missile-guidance systems. They were waiting for hard evidence from the CIA that bin Laden was in residence.⁷⁹

Within days of the East Africa bombings, President Clinton signed a top secret finding authorizing the CIA to use lethal force against bin Laden. On August 20, 1998, he ordered seventy-five cruise missiles, costing $750,000 each, to be fired at the Zawhar Kili camp (about seven miles south of Khost), reportedly the site of a major al-Qaeda meeting. The attack killed twenty-one Pakistanis but bin Laden had been forewarned, perhaps by Saudi intelligence. Two of the missiles fell into Pakistan, causing Islamabad to denounce the U.S. action. At the same time, the United States fired thirteen cruise missiles into a chemical plant in Khartoum that the CIA claimed was partly owned by bin Laden and secretly manufacturing nerve gas. (It was actually a pharmaceutical factory.)

The American public and many critics around the world were skeptical about both the claims and the motivation for the attacks because three days earlier Clinton had publicly confessed to his sexual liaison with Monica Lewinsky. The film Wag the Dog had also just been released. In it a president in the middle of an election campaign is charged with molesting a “Girl Guide” and manufactures a fake war against an Eastern European country in order to distract public attention. As a result, Clinton became more cautious, while he and his aides began to question the quality of the CIA’s intelligence they were being offered. The May 1999 bombing of the Chinese embassy in Belgrade by an American B-2 stealth bomber, thanks to faulty intelligence, further discredited the agency during Clinton’s air assault against Serbia. (A year later, DCI Tenet would fire an intelligence officer and reprimand six managers, including a senior official, for their bungling of that incident.)⁸⁰ The Clinton administration made two more unsuccessful attempts to capture or kill bin Laden. He was, of course, still around as the second Bush administration began, and he ordered the infamous strikes against the United States itself. He then survived the American invasion of Afghanistan to fight another day (and release endless videotaped analyses and exhortations to his followers for years to come).

In the end, the CIAs covert operations in Afghanistan were detrimental to any American foreign policy goals. They usually became entangled in hopeless webs of secrecy and ignorance, invariably laying the foundations for devastating future blowback operations. Former presidential terrorism adviser Richard Clarke argues that “the CIA used its classification rules not only to protect its agents but also to deflect outside scrutiny of its covert operations,” and Peter Tomsen, the American liaison with the Afghan anti-Soviet resistance during the late 1980s, concluded that “America s failed policies in Afghanistan flowed in part from the compartmented, top secret isolation in which the CIA always sought to work.”⁸¹

A more recent example of CIA folly overlaid by baroque attempts at secrecy, all on orders from the president, is the carrying out of extraordinary renditions—a bit of official jargon intended to hide one of the more morally depraved practices of the executive branch of the U.S. government. “Extraordinary renditions” simply mean the CIA kidnappings of terror suspects off the streets of foreign cities, flying them either to countries with no record of human rights protections or else to secret CIA prisons outside the U.S., and there having them tortured. The practice seems today to have become an integral part of the imperial presidency, protected by the argument developed by administration lawyers that in time of war (even when that war has been unilaterally declared by the president and deemed a generational struggle) the president as commander in chief is essentially beyond the law.

Secret police and state terrorist agencies normally try to disguise what they are doing by hiding behind bland euphemisms for their most odious operations. As long ago as the eighteenth century, Voltaire observed, “Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities.” On sanitizing language, the Stanford University psychologist Albert Bandura writes, “By camouflaging pernicious activities in innocent or sanitizing parlance, the activities lose much of their repugnancy. Bombing missions are described as ‘servicing the target/ in the likeness of a public utility. The attacks become ‘clean, surgical strikes/ arousing imagery of curative activities. The civilians whom the bomb kills are linguistically converted to ‘collateral damage.’... In the vocabulary of the lawbreakers in Nixon’s administration, criminal conspiracy became a ‘game plan,’ and the conspirators were ‘team players,’ like the best of sportsmen.”⁸²

Typifying this deliberate whitewashing, the Nazi Party’s SS had its “transportations,” meaning the shipping of trainloads of prisoners to death camps; the British had their “civilizing mission” in Kenya, meaning the rounding up of members of the indigenous population and sodomizing, castrating, and killing thousands of them; the Japanese had their “comfort women,” meaning girls and women they kidnapped in occupied countries and forced at gunpoint to work as frontline prostitutes; and the CIA has its “renditions.” This is an unusual locution. In most dictionaries, a “rendition” is a performance or an interpretation of a piece of music or a role in a play, as in: “That was a nice rendition of Duke Ellington’s ‘Jubilee Stomp.’“ But the CIA uses it as a transitive verb—to render (as in “render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar’s”), to hand over, to surrender.

There is no evidence that such illegal kidnappings have ever contributed anything to the security of the United States, but according to retired FBI agent Dan Coleman, who blew the whistle on the CIA’s torturing of prisoners at Guantanamo Bay, “The CIA liked rendition from the start. They loved that these guys would just disappear off the books, and never be heard of again. They were proud of it.”⁸³ The CIA added the term “extraordinary” to indicate that this was not just the capture of a fugitive abroad and the rendering of him or her to U.S. authorities to stand trial but that the target would disappear into the netherworld of some foreign prison, probably an idea learned from colleagues in Chile and Argentina when these countries were military dictatorships and from its work with Central American death squads during the Reagan administration.⁸⁴

As far as is publicly known, the first CIA rendition was a sting operation carried out jointly with the FBI in September 1987. Code-named “Operation Goldenrod,” it occurred in the wake of a series of airplane hijackings between 1984 and 1986. Congress had passed laws making air piracy and attacks on Americans abroad federal crimes, and in 1986 President Reagan signed a finding authorizing the CIA to kidnap foreigners wanted for terrorism and return them for trial in the United States. On June 11, 1985, Fawaz Yunis and four other heavily armed Lebanese took control of Royal Jordanian Airlines Flight 402 in Beirut. They ordered it flown out over the Mediterranean as far as Tunis, beat the Jordanian sky marshals on board, and returned to Beirut where they released the hostages, blew up the plane, and escaped. American hostages had been on board but were not harmed. Two years later, the CIA and FBI lured Yunis to a yacht in international waters off Cyprus with the promise that he would be part of a big drug-smuggling deal. Instead, he was taken into U.S. custody and transported to Washington. On March 14, 1989, he was convicted in federal court of aircraft piracy, hostage-taking, and conspiracy. On March 28, 2005, after sixteen years in an American prison, he was released and deported to Lebanon. There have been various legal challenges to the precedent set by this case, but it is generally regarded as a well-conducted law-enforcement operation.⁸⁵

The Clinton-Bush version of extraordinary rendition is far more sinister. Michael Scheuer, the former CIA official who criticized the agency and the Bush administration for their alleged timidity in pursuing terrorists, takes credit for creating the program. In an interview with the New Yorkers Jane Mayer, he claimed: “In 1995, American agents proposed the rendition program to Egypt, making clear that [the CIA] had the resources to track, capture, and transport terrorist suspects globally— including access to a small fleet of aircraft.”⁸⁶ At the time, Scheuer was in charge of the Bin Laden Unit in the CIAs Counterterrorism Center and was extremely frustrated by his inability to move against al-Qaeda operatives whom the agency had identified and located.

On the basis of the new agreement with Egypt, between 1995 and 1998 the CIA carried out a series of renditions aimed particularly at Islamic freedom fighters working in the Balkans, many of them originally from Egypt. Virtually all the people the CIA kidnapped in these operations were killed after being delivered into Egyptian hands. Predictably enough, these kidnappings generated blowback, although ordinary Americans did not perceive it as such because the actions that provoked the retaliation were, of course, kept totally secret. On August 5, 1998, the International Islamic Front for Jihad, in a letter to an Arab-language newspaper in London, promised a reprisal for recent U.S. renditions from Albania. Two days later, al-Qaeda blew up the U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania with a loss of 224 lives.⁸⁷ The U.S. renditions continued with the CIA and FBI carrying out some two dozen of them in 1999 and 2000.⁸⁸ These, in turn, helped provoke the attacks on the navy destroyer USS Cole in the Yemeni port of Aden on October 12, 2000. Former CIA director George Tenet testified before the 9/11 Commission that there were more than seventy renditions leading up to 9/11.

Within days of the September 11, 2001, attacks, President Bush expanded the original finding Bill Clinton had signed, giving the CIA authority to act without case-by-case approval from Washington.⁸⁹ No one knows the exact number of renditions after that date, but the New York Times quotes “former government officials” as saying, “Since the September 11 attacks, the CIA has flown 100 to 150 suspected terrorists from one foreign country to another.”⁹⁰ These numbers are probably a significant underestimate. Using methods I shall describe below, the London Times, CBS News’s 60 Minutes, and other sources were able to identify at least 600 flights of CIA airplanes to forty different countries, including 30 trips to Jordan, 19 to Afghanistan, 17 to Morocco, 16 to Iraq, with stops in Egypt, Libya, and Guantanamo.⁹¹ Aircraft known to be involved in CIA rendition operations have landed at British airports at least 210 times since 9/11.⁹²

In April 2006, investigations ordered by the European Parliament upped the number of such flights significantly beyond what had been previously imagined by anyone. According to Dan Bilefsky of the New York Times, “data gathered from air safety regulators and others found that the Central Intelligence Agency had flown 1,000 undeclared flights over European territory since 2001.” After this disclosure, the Council of Europe ordered its own investigation based mostly on flight logs provided by the European Union’s air traffic agency, Eurocontrol. Its sixty-seven-page report concluded that fourteen European nations, including Britain, Germany, Italy, Sweden, Romania, and Poland, had colluded with the CIA to seize and hold terror suspects without filing charges against them, fly them to secret detention centers, and establish prisons for them in Europe and elsewhere. The report concluded that the United States and its collaborators had violated international human rights law, including the European Convention on Human Rights.⁹³

We have a few hints from official statements about the possible size of the rendition program. In his 2003 State of the Union address, President Bush said that some terrorism suspects who were not caught and brought to trial had been “otherwise dealt with,” and he then observed that “more than 3,000 suspected terrorists have been arrested in many countries, and many others have met a different fate. Let’s put it this way: they are no longer a problem to the United States and our friends and allies.” In April 2003, Cofer Black, who from 1999 to 2002 had been head of the CIA’s Counterterrorism Center, added: “A large number of terrorist suspects were not able to launch an attack last year because they are in prison. More than 3,000 of them are al-Qaeda terrorists and they were arrested in over 100 countries.”⁹⁴

According to Dana Priest and Joe Stephens of the Washington Post, “Much larger than the group of prisoners held by the CIA are those who have been captured and transported around the world by the CIA and other agencies of the U.S. government for interrogation by foreign intelligence services.”⁹⁵ If this statement is true, the number of post-9/11 renditions could be quite large. Human Rights Watch has identified at least twenty-four secret detention and interrogation centers worldwide operated by the CIA. These include: al-Jafr prison in the southern desert of Jordan; Kohat prison in Pakistan; holding sites in Afghanistan including in Kabul and Kandahar, at Bagram Air Base and Camp Salerno, near Khost; at least three locations in Iraq, including CIA-controlled parts of Abu Ghraib prison; at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, the Camp Echo complex, and the new Camp 6; a secret location at Al-Udeid Air Base, Qatar; prisons in Egypt, Thailand, and in brigs on U.S. ships at sea; at least two CIA prisons in the old Soviet satellites in Eastern Europe, probably in Poland and Romania; in Morocco at secret police headquarters in Temara, near the capital, Rabat, and at a new CIA torture center under construction at Ain Aouda, south of Rabat’s diplomatic district; and possibly at the U.S. naval base on the British island of Diego Garcia in the Indian Ocean.⁹⁶

The people held in this U.S. version of the gulag are known as “ghost detainees,” completely off-the-books. No charges are ever filed against them, and they are hidden away even from the inspectors of the International Committee of the Red Cross. In an unusual typology of rendition sites, Robert Baer, a former CIA operative in the Middle East and the author of Sleeping with the Devil: How Washington Sold Our Soul for Saudi Crude, has commented, “We pick up a suspect or we arrange for one of our partner countries to do it. Then the suspect is placed on a civilian transport to a third country where, let’s make no bones about it, they use torture. If you want a good interrogation, you send someone to Jordan. If you want them to be killed, you send them to Egypt or Syria. Either way, the U.S. cannot be blamed as it is not doing the heavy work.”⁹⁷

Despite a near fanatical desire for secrecy, the CIA’s rendition capers began to be exposed to public scrutiny less than six weeks after 9/11. This was almost inevitable, although completely unanticipated by the agency, when it chose to conduct abductions via the world of civil aviation. The CIA’s operatives seemed not to understand that international airports are simply loaded with knowledgeable people at all hours of the day and night—aircrews, flight controllers, ticket clerks, baggage handlers, refuelers, airplane cleaners, police and customs officers, and passengers—many of whom are alert to everything going on around them.

The agency also appears to have been totally ignorant of the world of hobbyist airplane spotters or the fact that the Federal Aviation Administration’s registry of all airplanes licensed to American owners is Internet accessible, as is its archive of airplane logs and flight plans, or the degree to which the CIA’s criminal activities over several decades have mobilized a large cadre of amateur intelligence analysts. According to Mark Hosenball of Newsweek, “U.S. intel sources complain that ‘plane spotters’—hobbyists who photograph airplanes landing or departing local airports and post the pix on the Internet—made it possible for CIA critics to assemble details of a clandestine transport system the agency set up to secretly move cargo and people—including terrorist suspects— around the world.”⁹⁸

On October 26, 2001, a Pakistani journalist named Masood Anwar broke a story in an Islamabad newspaper. Pakistani intelligence officers, he reported, had handed over to U.S. authorities a Yemeni microbiologist named Jamil Qasim Saeed Mohammed. He was allegedly wanted in connection with the bombing of the USS Cole. The handover occurred early in the morning of October 23 in a remote area of Karachi Airport, where airport staff nonetheless observed and reported to Anwar that the captive was hustled aboard a white, twin-engined, turboprop Gulfstream V executive jet with the registration number N379P—and this is crucially important—painted on its tail. It took off at 2:40 a.m. for an unknown destination. As the Washington Post later reported, at 19:54:04 on October 26, Anwar’s story was posted on the FreeRepublic.com Web site. Thirteen minutes later a blogger provided the aircraft’s registered owner—namely, Premier Executive Transport Services, Inc., 339 Washington Street, Dedham, Massachusetts. Shortly after, another reader posted a message saying, “Sounds like a generic name. Kind of like Air America” (the CIA’s secret airline, not shut down until 1976, which had flown weapons and supplies into, and heroin out of, Laos during the Vietnam War).⁹⁹

I happen to know something about airplane spotting because from 1947 until the early 1960s, I was a passionate participant in this activity. In 1956,1 was one of three cofounders of the American Aviation Historical Society, the leading organization of airplane spotters and photographers in the United States, which in 2005 published the fiftieth volume of its journal.¹⁰⁰ Dana Priest describes airplane spotters as hobbyists “standing at the end of runways with high-powered binoculars and cameras to record the flights of military and private aircraft.”¹⁰¹ This is accurate enough as far as it goes, but there is more to airplane spotting than just collecting raw information. Watching airplanes closely and recording the squadron markings and serial numbers on them goes back to the last days of the London Blitz during World War II.

On January 2, 1941, with official support, Temple Press Ltd. published the first issue of the Aeroplane Spotter, a twelve-page newspaper intended to improve the quality of aircraft recognition among British civilian air defense volunteers. It ceased publication on July 10, 1948, after 217 issues. This legendary periodical included photos and silhouettes of the major aircraft types, both friend and foe, and was the first publication to pay attention to military serial numbers, changes in the registry of civilian aircraft, camouflage schemes, squadron markings, and unusual personal insignia. Such markings are important because, once a data base has been compiled, an analyst can use it to infer the number of a particular aircraft or its variant in service, to deduce the size and composition of squadrons, and to keep track of sales, modifications, and losses. The Aeroplane Spotter remains to this day an invaluable historical reference on the aircraft of the Luftwaffe, the Royal Air Force, and the U.S. Army Air Corps during World War II. Its legacy lives on in the activities of today’s airplane spotters, including their Web sites that publish not just photos and data but also search engines that can trace virtually any aircraft through its serial or registration number.¹⁰²

Based on the work of spotters, journalists, and airport workers around the world, many crucial details about the CIA’s rendition fleet have been made public. As of late September 2005, the CIA had leased a fleet of perhaps thirty-three aircraft that it has used for various purposes but particularly for extraordinary renditions.¹⁰³ Most of these planes have been identified and their “N” numbers recorded. (N is the international civil aviation code letter assigned to American airplanes, just as G stands for British planes, F for French, D for German, and / for Japanese.) The CIA acquired its fleet through classified contracts issued by an obscure military agency called the Navy Engineering Logistics Office (NELO) located in Arlington, Virginia. (NELO is not even listed in the U.S. Government Manual the official compilation of federal departments, agencies, and offices.)¹⁰⁴ The registered owners of the planes are some ten fake aviation companies with untraceable executives, many of whose addresses are post office boxes in northern Virginia (near CIA headquarters in Langley). The listed officers of the companies have social security numbers all issued when they were over fifty years old, strong evidence of the creation of a new or fake identity.

When the press identifies one of these aircraft and tries to contact the company that allegedly owns it, the aircraft is usually quickly “sold” to another shell company and the registration number changed. Thus, for example, the Gulfstream V, N379P, spotted at Karachi Airport in October 2001, was manufactured in 1999 (constructor’s number 581, the only identification on an aircraft that never changes and is always listed on registers) and initially licensed as N581GA. After the CIA acquired it, the number was changed to N379P and its phantom owner became Premier Executive Transport Services of Dedham, Massachusetts. It was engaged in several important renditions from 2001 to 2003. In December 2003, the Shannon Peace Campers, an antiwar group of airplane spotters at Shannon International Airport in Ireland, outed it on the Internet as the “Guantanamo Bay Express.” The same month N379P became N8068V, still owned by Premier Executive Transport. The Shannon spotters saw it three more times during 2004 in its new livery; then, on December 1, 2004, the plane was “sold” to Bayard Foreign Marketing, LLC, 921 S.W. Washington Street, Portland, Oregon, another CIA front company, and relicensed as N44982.¹⁰⁵

The CIA’s known fleet consists of two Gulfstreams, a small Cessna, three Lockheed Hercules cargo aircraft, a Gulfstream 1159a, a Learjet 35A, an old DC-3, two Boeing 737s, and a fifty-three-passenger De Havilland DH8. The De Havilland was photographed by plane spotters in Afghanistan.¹⁰⁶ The agency’s second Gulfstream was registered N829MG when it was used on October 8, 2002, to fly the Canadian citizen Maher Arar from John F. Kennedy Airport, New York, to Jordan and on to Syria, where he was held in a coffin-sized cell and tortured for ten months before being told that his arrest had been a mistake. After the exposure of this disgraceful incident, the Gulfstream’s registration was changed to N259SK.¹⁰⁷

The main base for these aircraft is a remote corner of Johnson County Airport in Smithfield, North Carolina, where they are serviced by Aero Contractors Ltd., a company founded in 1979 by Jim Rhyne, a legendary CIA officer and the former chief pilot for Air America.¹⁰⁸ The airport is convenient to nearby Fort Bragg, headquarters of the Special Forces, and has no control tower that would allow unauthorized persons to see into the enclave. The fact that Aero’s aircraft have permission to land at any U.S. military base worldwide is a dead giveaway to their provenance, since, according to the Chicago Tribunes John Crewdson,”Only nine companies [including Premier Executive Transport Services] ... have Pentagon permission to land aircraft at military bases worldwide.”¹⁰⁹

The CIA’s transfer of two Egyptian refugees from Bromma Airport, Stockholm, to Cairo on December 18, 2001, using Gulfstream N379P, is one of the best-documented renditions on record. On May 17, 2004, Stockholm’s TV4 program Kalla Fakta {Cold Facts) aired a more or less complete expose of what happened. The broadcasters obtained on-camera statements from many of the participants, including Sven Linder, former Swedish ambassador to Egypt; Arne Andersson, the Swedish Security Police (SAPO) officer in charge; Mary Ellen McGuiness, spokesperson for Premier Executive Transport Services; Hans Dahlgren, Swedish vice foreign minister; and above all Paul Forell, a police inspector with twenty-five years’ experience who was on duty at Bromma Airport that day. Many others spoke to TV4 on an anonymous basis.¹¹⁰

The Swedish case is of major political importance because it revealed that Swedish authorities collaborated with the CIA. It is now clear that in a number of European countries, some of the local intelligence people were in on these renditions to one degree or another and that throughout Europe several governments pretended ignorance and simply looked the other way. Given the one thousand CIA flights to European destinations, it is hard to imagine that local governments could have been completely ignorant of their purposes. Whether all Western European governments were involved; whether some of their intelligence services were functionally working for the CIA rather than their own governments; or whether deniability had been built into their arrangements with the CIA, we do not know. But obviously more was going on than merely bad Americans and good but ignorant Europeans.

No evidence has ever been offered that the two men the CIA kidnapped from Sweden and then delivered to the tender mercies of the Egyptians had participated in terrorist activities. In September 2000, after many years as a fugitive from the Egyptian dictatorship, Ahmed Agiza, age thirty-nine, with his wife and four children, arrived in Sweden (his fifth child was born after they were admitted). Muhammed al-Zery, age thirty-three, fled Egypt illegally in 1991, having been tortured by the authorities. He entered Sweden in August 1999. The Swedish Migration Board judged in both cases that the men, who were acquainted with each other but did not live in the same Swedish city, needed protection and should be granted asylum.

At about 5:00 p.m. on December 18, 2001, the Swedish secret police picked up Agiza on a street on his way home from a Swedish-language class in Karlstad; minutes later they nabbed al-Zery in a shop in Stockholm. Kjell Jönsson, al-Zery’s attorney, testified that he received a call from his client that afternoon, only to be interrupted when someone said, “Put the receiver down.” He promptly called the officials in charge of al-Zery ’s case at the Foreign Office but got only busy signals; the rest of the ministry was at a Christmas party. The police transported the two Egyptians to the Stockholm city airport, Bromma, an hour before it was scheduled to close. The police cars were quickly admitted and drove to the office of Police Inspector Paul Forell, who was on duty. There, obviously by prior agreement, they were met by eight balaclava-wearing Americans in business suits who had landed a few minutes earlier in N379P. The Americans used scissors to cut the clothes off Agiza and al-Zery, who were still in handcuffs and ankle chains. They then inserted suppositories presumably containing tranquilizers into their anuses, dressed them in diapers and jumpsuits, and took them out to the Gulfstream. At 21:49, the Egyptians, Americans, and two SAPO officers took off for Cairo.

The decision to expel the two Egyptians had been made at noon that same day by Prime Minister Goran Persson and his government, although there is some reason to believe that they thought they were merely extraditing the two at Egypt’s request and had no knowledge of the American involvement. The Swedish government received formal assurances from the Egyptians that the two men would be treated fairly and would not be harmed. TV4 claimed that the Americans had supplied evidence that the two Egyptians were terrorists. The TV journalists concluded, “A few months after the attack on the World Trade Center, Sweden accepted to become a pawn in the United States’ worldwide manhunt.” They traced the Gulfstream back to Premier Executive Transport Services in Massachusetts and, when they inquired about chartering the plane itself, were told: “It only flies for the U.S. government.” Arne Andersson of SAPO refused to supply details about the operation, saying to TV4 only, “This could disturb our relations with another service, and it could also affect the foreign relations of Sweden. As a nation.”

As details of what had happened began to leak out, embarrassing the Swedish government, its ambassador in Cairo was ordered to look into the matter. He discovered that after some two years of intermittent torture of both men, the Egyptian authorities decided that al-Zery was innocent and sent him back to his native village, ordering him not to leave it without official permission. They sentenced Agiza to twenty-five years in Masra Tora Prison for membership in a radical organization, presumably the Muslim Brotherhood. Visits to the prison by the Swedish ambassador produced only meetings with the warden and no interviews with Agiza, whose wife and five children remain in Sweden but are faced with the continual threat of deportation.

In the weeks immediately after 9/11, it seems that the CIA conducted a global vacuuming operation seeking to “disappear” suspicious young Islamic men from various countries, including our own. In the course of these activities the agency acquired the names of Agiza and al-Zery, then pressured the SAPO to arrest them and turn them over to a rendition team. At least some Swedish authorities involved knew that transferring any prisoner to a country where he might be tortured was a violation of Swedish law as well as of article 3 of the 1984 U.N. Convention Against Torture, which Sweden had signed and ratified. This case damaged Sweden’s reputation as a champion of the international protection of human rights.

In the spring of 2004, a Swedish parliamentary investigation concluded that CIA agents had indeed broken the country’s laws by subjecting the two Egyptians to “inhumane treatment.” The Swedish security police chief Klas Bergenstrand assured the press that his agency would never again allow foreign agents to interfere in Swedish affairs. In August 2005, the neighboring Danish government announced that it was prohibiting CIA flights of any sort through its airspace. The CIA has never said anything about this case.¹¹¹

The Swedish affair accomplished nothing other than ruining the lives of two men, a wife, and children, for no reason other than showing off the hubris of the CIA. By contrast, the CIA caper that began in Milan, Italy, on February 17, 2003, would be a farce—but one that severely worsened U.S. relations with a long-standing ally, interrupted an ongoing Italian intelligence operation, led to the disappearance and possible death of an Islamic imam, and politically weakened the then Italian prime minister, Silvio Berlusconi. The bunglers who thought up and executed this escapade have aptly been termed “the spies who came in from the hot tub.”¹¹²

On June 24, 2005, an Italian judge signed a 213-page criminal arrest warrant for thirteen CIA operatives, including the former Milan station chief Robert Seldon Lady, charging them with kidnapping an Egyptian in Milan who held political refugee status in Italy. The victim was also under Italian police surveillance as a possible recruiter of mujahideen for service in Afghanistan and Iraq, although recruiting fighters for foreign battles is not illegal in Italy. The warrants for the thirteen CIA men and women, together with their photos, were forwarded to the European police authority, which authorized their arrest anywhere on the continent. It is the first time that a fellow NATO member has ever filed criminal complaints against employees of the United States government acting in an official capacity. In late July, another Italian court issued arrest warrants for six more CIA operatives, bringing the total number to nineteen (thirteen men and six women). Ultimately, the Italians issued extradition requests to the United States for twenty-two CIA operatives based on a 477-page police analysis of what they had done.¹¹³ All of them except for Station Chief Lady were working under assumed names and had left Italy.

The abductee in this case is (or was) a forty-two-year-old Islamic cleric, Hassan Mustafa Osama Nasr, known as “Abu Omar.” In 1991, if not earlier, Omar fled Egypt for Albania because he belonged to the outlawed Muslim organization Jamaat al-Islamiyya and the police were after him. In Tirana, the Albanian capital, he worked for four years for various Islamic charities, but did not himself participate in any illegal activities. After 9/11, the Bush administration labeled the charities he worked for as supporters of terrorists. While in Tirana he married an Albanian woman, Marsela Glina, and they had a daughter and a son.

In 1995, at the urging of the CIA, the Albanian National Intelligence Service recruited Omar as an informer. He readily agreed to cooperate. The Albanians did not pay him, but they did help smooth out a dispute he had with the landlady of the bakery he had opened, and they fixed his residence permit after his marriage. Abu Omar was the first Arab willing to betray his colleagues to the Albanians, and the information the Albanians supplied to the CIA, thanks to him, greatly elevated the CIAs respect for their service. However, after a few weeks for unknown reasons—perhaps his fellow Islamic exiles got wind of his cooperation with the police—he and his family fled the country. The CIA later informed the Albanians that he was living in Germany. In 1997, he surfaced in Rome where he was granted political refugee status. Shortly thereafter, he moved to Milan, the center of radical Islamist activities in Italy, and began preaching at a mosque that had a reputation as a gathering place for religious and political extremists. The Italian counterterrorism police placed a tap on his telephone, while hiding microphones in his apartment and at another mosque where he preached. Although the police believed they had enough evidence to arrest him for “associating with terrorists,” they held off because the information they were gathering via the wiretaps was proving valuable and they were sharing it with the CIA.¹¹⁴

On Monday, February 17, 2003, shortly after noon, Abu Omar was walking down the Via Guerzoni toward a mosque to attend daily prayers when he was stopped by an officer of Italy’s paramilitary carabinieri police force. According to the Milan prosecutor, Armando Spataro, the Italian carabiniere had been hired by the CIA to approach Abu Omar and conduct a routine documents check. The participation of the Italian police officer, code-named “Ludwig,” has raised suspicions that the Sismi, the Italian intelligence service, was cooperating with the Americans. Former prime minister Berlusconi’s office has repeatedly denied any role, but the Milanese prosecutors are doubtful and are continuing their investigation.¹¹⁵

According to a passerby’s account, two men speaking “bad” Italian then emerged from a parked white van, sprayed a chemical in Abu Omar’s face, and hustled him into the van, which drove away at high speed followed by at least one and possibly two other cars. Between 2 and 5 p.m., the van drove northeast to the NATO air base at Aviano where it was met by a U.S. Air Force officer, Lieutenant Colonel Joseph Romano, who escorted it to the flight line. Abu Omar was put aboard a civilian Learjet and flown to Ramstein Air Base in Germany. There, he was transferred to a civilian Gulfstream, which departed at 8:30 that night for Cairo. When Omar’s plane arrived in Cairo early on the morning of February 18, Egyptian authorities took him into custody. Accompanying Omar to Egypt in the Gulfstream was CIA Milan station chief Robert Lady.¹¹⁶

Although Italian political leaders have steadfastly maintained that they did not collaborate in any way with this kidnapping, it is obvious that police authorities knew a great deal about it. The nineteen-person CIA abduction team of commandos, drivers, and lookouts left an astonishing trail of evidence that suggests they were utterly indifferent to the possibility that they were being observed. The first operative arrived in Milan on December 7, 2002, and stayed at the Milan Westin Palace, according to court documents. The others started arriving in early January and by February 1, 2003, virtually all of them were there. They did not hide in safe houses or private homes but checked into four-star palaces like the Milan Hilton ($340 a night) and the Star Hotel ($325 a night). Seven of the Americans stayed at the Principe di Savoia—billed as “one of the world’s most luxuriously appointed hotels”—for between three days and three weeks at nightly rates of $450. Eating lavishly at gourmet restaurants, they ran up bills of at least $144,984, which they paid for with Diners Club cards that matched their fake passports. At each hotel, the staff photocopied their passports, which is how the police obtained their photos if not their real names.¹¹⁷ After the delivery of Abu Omar to Aviano, four of the Americans checked into luxury hotels in Venice and others took vacations along the picturesque Mediterranean coast north of Tuscany, all still on the government tab.

Most embarrassingly, the U.S. embassy in Rome had supplied the CIA agents with a large number of Italian cell phones, on which they communicated with each other while planning the abduction, during the actual operation, and en route to Aviano. All their transmissions were recorded by the Italian police. No one can explain this lapse in tradecraft. Unless its power is completely off and its antenna retracted, a European mobile phone remains in constant contact with the nearest cell-base station even when not in use. Since a phone is served by several base stations at any given time, investigators can easily triangulate its location. In cities like Milan, where the network of base stations is dense and overlapping, such tracking can be done with a margin of error of just a few yards.¹¹⁸ Thus, the Italian police were able to follow everything that the nineteen agents did both prior to and on the actual day of the rendition.

After Abu Omar’s disappearance, the Italian police opened a missing person s investigation but did not pursue it very vigorously. That changed radically in April and May 2004, when Omar unexpectedly telephoned his wife from Cairo and explained that he had been kidnapped and taken to U.S. air bases in Italy and Germany, flown to Cairo, and tortured by the Egyptian police. The Italian authorities recorded these calls, having kept the wiretap on Omar’s apartment in place. He informed his wife that he had been let out of prison but remained under house arrest. There is speculation that, as a result of reports on these conversations in Italian newspapers, the Egyptian police rearrested him. In any case, as far as is known, he remains in Egyptian custody, not charged with any crime but allowed occasional visits by his mother.

There is still no explanation for the CIA’s sloppy work in Milan— except that some of its operatives seemed to have wanted a nice holiday at the taxpayers’ expense and believed they could operate with complete impunity in Silvio Berlusconi’s Italy. The Milan case goes into the record books as one more foolish and counterproductive felony committed by the CIA on the orders of the president. Ironically, the Milan CIA station chief had bought a house in Asti, near Turin, and planned to retire there. As the police bore down on him, he and his wife hurriedly fled their home, and a comfortable old age in Italy ceased to be an option for them.

Unfortunately, carrying out extraordinary renditions such as the ones in Sweden and Italy, torturing captives in secret prisons, shipping weapons to Islamic jihadists without checking their backgrounds or motives, and undermining democratically elected governments that are not fully on our political wavelength are the daily work of the Central Intelligence Agency. That was not always the case nor was it the intent of its founders or the expectations of its officials during its earliest years. As conceived in the National Security Act of 1947, the CIAs main function was to compile and analyze raw intelligence to make it useful to the president. Its job was to help him see the big picture, put the latest crisis in historical and economic perspective, give early warning on the likely crises of the future, and evaluate whether political instability in one country or another was of any importance or interest to the United States. It was a civilian, nonpartisan organization, without vested interests such as those of the military-industrial complex, and staffed by seasoned, occasionally wise analysts with broad comparative knowledge of the world and our place in it. As the New York Times’s Tim Weiner notes, “Once upon a time in the Cold War, the CIA could produce strategic intelligence. It countered the Pentagon’s wildly overstated estimates of Soviet military power. It cautioned that the war in Vietnam could not be won by military force. It helped keep the Cold War cold.”¹¹⁹

One of the CIA’s best-known historians, Thomas Powers, laments, “The resignation of Porter Goss after 18 months of trying to run the Central Intelligence Agency and the nomination [subsequently confirmed] of General Michael Hayden to take his place make unmistakable something that actually occurred a year ago: the CIA, as it existed for 50 years, is gone.”¹²⁰ I think it was actually gone long before. My own view is that President Bush’s manipulation of intelligence to deceive the country into going to war and then blaming his failure on the CIA’s “false intelligence” delivered only the final coup de grace to the CIA’s strategic-intelligence function. Henceforth, the CIA will no longer have even a vestigial role in trying to discern the forces influencing our foreign policies. That work will now be done, if it is done at all, by the new director of national intelligence. The downgraded CIA will attend to such things as assassinations, dirty tricks, renditions, and engineering foreign coups. In the intelligence field it will be restricted to informing our presidents and generals about current affairs—the “Wikipedia of Washington,” as John McLaughlin, deputy director and acting director of central intelligence from October 2000 to September 2004, calls it.¹²¹

Thomas Powers is unquestionably correct when he writes, “Historically the CIA had a customer base of one—the president.” But equally historically, it was not understood at the beginning that the CIA would become the president’s private army as well as his private adviser. Over the years, presidents shaped what the CIA would become. They increasingly believed that its strategic intelligence was a nuisance while its covert side greatly enhanced their freedom of action. Perhaps the idea of supplying leaders with strategic perspectives from an independent, nonpolitical source was always unrealistic. It seemed that the CIA only worked more or less as it was intended when the secretary of state and the director of central intelligence were brothers—as John Foster and Allen Dulles were under President Eisenhower. The reality was and is that presidents like having a private army and do not like to be contradicted by officials not fully under their control. Thus the clandestine service long ago began to surpass the intelligence side of the agency in terms of promotions, finances, and prestige. In May 2006, Bush merely put strategic analysis to sleep once and for all and turned over truth-telling to a brand-new bureaucracy of personal loyalists and the vested interests of the Pentagon.

This means that we are now blinder than usual in understanding what is going on in the world. But, equally important, our liberties are also seriously at risk. The CIAs strategic intelligence did not enhance the power of the president except insofar as it allowed him to do his job more effectively. It was, in fact, a modest restraint on a rogue president trying to assume the prerogatives of a king. The CIAs bag of dirty tricks, on the other hand, is a defining characteristic of the imperial presidency. It is a source of unchecked power that can gravely threaten the nation—as George W. Bush’s misuse of power in starting the war in Iraq demonstrated. The so-called reforms of the CIA in 2006 have probably further shortened the life of the American republic.