CIA bides its time

[Valin]

Washington Examiner:

Reuel Marc Gerecht

January 12, 2015

 

The CIA’s Directorate of Operations doesn’t have an acute memory. But it does have durable institutional sentiments. So here’s a guess: In a few years, few operatives in the clandestine service will remember Langley’s rebuttal to a recent Senate report on detention and harsh interrogation practices after the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks.

 

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Certainly there were agents who personally wanted nothing to do with the harsh tactics used against al Qaeda’s faithful, but their numbers were probably quite small. Men and women of a realist creed have always been attracted to the operations directorate. Such realism — the willingness to run foreign agents in life-threatening circumstances — engenders a rough but attentive respect for human nature. Case officers scrutinize foreigners for the conceits and virtues that might gel into treason. Once upon a time, such realism was common among leftists who thrived in, if not dominated, the CIA. Liberals such as William Colby, a staunch, save-the-whales kind of liberal, who proudly oversaw and defended the Phoenix Program in the Vietnam War, were common into the 1970s. The man who ran Iranian covert action in the 1980s when I started working on the Iran desk was an Adlai Stevenson social democrat who, when he wasn’t dreaming of overthrowing the mullahs, was working in food banks for the poor.

 

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It may take a year or two for CIA sentiment to congeal on the issue of enhanced interrogation, but it’s a very good guess that it will come to accept the opinion of Jose Rodriguez Jr., former head of clandestine service and the National Counterterrorism Center. In his book Hard Measures: How Aggressive CIA Actions After 9/11 Saved American Lives, he makes the case for the utility and morality of the treatment of jihadis after 9/11. CNN national security analyst Robert Baer, an unorthodox former case officer from the Near East Division, suggests that the CIA descended into torture because Rodriguez, a longtime Latin America Division officer, helped design and run the detention and enhanced interrogation programs, and he brought many colleagues into the counterterrorism center. Latin America officers have a reputation for being looser and rougher — a byproduct, perhaps, of working in authoritarian, macho cultures where the struggle against communism has been real.

 

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