THE CIA is looking for a few good spies. Applicants for jobs with the clandestine service, advertised on the agency’s recruitment website, must cope with “fast-moving, ambiguous and unstructured situations” and must have “rock-solid judgment”.
It may also help if they know a good lawyer and can afford millions of dollars in legal fees to protect themselves from government investigators. A decision by the US Justice Department last week to proceed with investigations of alleged interrogation abuses has plunged the CIA into a legal and moral quagmire that threatens yet more trouble for President Obama’s administration.
The appointment of a special prosecutor to examine cases of alleged torture during interrogations of suspected terrorists has divided senior Obama aides and angered former agency officials, who warn that US intelligence gathering may be badly impaired if spies feel betrayed by the government.
The CIA officers who took part in terrorist interrogations believed their actions were “authorised by President George W Bush and approved by the Justice Department”, said Jeffrey Smith, a former legal counsel to the CIA. He added: “Prosecutions would set the dangerous precedent that criminal law can be used to settle policy differences.”
Another former official warned that CIA agents “now have to fight Al-Qaeda and the US government at the same time”. A third added that counter-terrorist agents were effectively being told “their ass is grass – this will accelerate an already high shortage of senior officers”.
Robert Grenier, a former CIA station chief in Pakistan, said the message to new recruits was “if they’re asked to do that mission and things go bad, the politicians are going to run for cover and they’re going to [be] facing the music alone”.
Leon Panetta, the CIA director appointed by Obama, is reported to have promised legal aid for agents caught up in the investigation ordered by Eric Holder, the attorney-general, so as to help to calm staff who think the agency is being made a scapegoat.
Obama spent much of last week on the golf course enjoying a family holiday on Martha’s Vineyard, while key members of his national security team were at loggerheads over how the long-running controversy over terrorist interrogations should be handled.
An ABC News report that Panetta and Holder had engaged in a “profanity-laced screaming match” over the interrogation issue was denied by a CIA spokesman. Yet several officials warned of a return to the interagency rivalries blamed for the intelligence breakdowns preceding the September 11 attacks.
Obama is trying to steer a precarious path between idealists who want Bush and Dick Cheney, his vice-president, in the dock for authorising torture and other abuses, and pragmatists who warn that prosecutions of former officials could rip America apart.
The president believes CIA officers should not be prosecuted for actions previously declared legal by their political masters. John Brennan, Obama’s adviser on counter-terrorism, said: “The president is a sophisticated thinker and understands the implications of these decisions and events, but sometimes you just cannot wipe the slate clean.”
Holder, a long-time Obama friend, is the first African-American attorney-general. He acknowledged his decision would be “controversial” but ultimately decided there was too much evidence of “inhumane” interrogations – in particular the widely condemned practice known as “waterboarding” – for them to be swept aside.
According to heavily edited sections of a previously classified 2004 report made public last week, interrogators threatened detainees with unloaded weapons and a power drill, staged mock executions and threatened violence to their family members. The report also questioned how necessary it was to subject Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the 9/11 mastermind, to 183 instances of waterboarding.
It is a problem for Obama that any formal investigation and subsequent charges risk the public identification of CIA agents. This has been a sensitive issue ever since the Bush White House was accused of deliberately blowing the cover of Valerie Plame, a CIA agent married to Joseph Wilson – a critic of Bush’s policies.
Visiting CIA headquarters in April, Obama assured staff there was “nothing more important than protecting the identity of CIA officers”. Yet last week one former officer claimed the announcement of a special prosecutor had sparked a flurry of e-mails from disgusted agents saying: “Can you help me find a job? I’m tired of the second-guessing.”
Last week Fred Hitz, a former CIA inspector-general, predicted difficulty in recruiting talented people for clandestine jobs: “If an officer can’t be assured the orders he’s given . . . are going to be upheld and . . . [not] used against him at a future time, I don’t see how you’re going to get good people to do this work.”
Source:The times
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