Suzanne Goldenberg

“They provide disturbing evidence that the Defense Department adopted inhuman interrogation methods, methods that the FBI described as torture,” said Jameel Jaffer, an attorney at the ACLU. “The Department of Defense adopted these policies. They weren’t just a matter of an aberration, or low-level soldiers engaging in abuse.”

There was no comment from the Pentagon.

The documents suggest that FBI officials involved in questioning at Guantánamo and in Iraq were frequent witnesses to interrogation practices that went against FBI policy. An urgent report last June to FBI Director Robert Mueller describes how an official came forward after witnessing strangulation and burning. It said the account was “based on his knowledge that … were engaged in a cover-up of these abuses.”

Another memo, dated Jan. 21, 2004, which discusses a practice by some interrogators of impersonating FBI agents, mentions Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz, suggesting that the policy was approved high in the Pentagon. “This technique, and all of those used in these scenarios, was approved by the Dep Sec Def,” reads the memo. The FBI agents believed that by impersonating agents, military interrogators were trying to exploit the rapport the agency had established with some inmates.

The agents believed that such tactics produced no useful intelligence; they also threatened the FBI’s image. “If this detainee is ever released or his story made public in any way interrogators will not be held accountable because these torture techniques were done by the ‘FBI’ interrogators,” a Dec. 2003 memo warns.

In a document dated last July, an FBI agent at Guantánamo tells his supervisors he was upset by the interrogation methods used by military interrogators and government contractors. “I did observe treatment that was not only aggressive, but personally very upsetting,” the memo said. The treatment included chaining detainees to the floor in the fetal position and subjecting them to extreme heat or cold. “Most times they had urinated or defecated on themselves and had been left there for 24 hours or more,” one memo said.

In Moussaoui’s case, delays, legal wrangling and courtroom outbursts turned the test case into a bizarre spectacle punctuated by the suspect’s outbursts and volatile behavior. Moussaoui’s mental state was the prime consideration before the U.S. District Judge Leonie Brinkema, who issued her decision after a one-hour private meeting with Moussaoui Wednesday morning.

The meeting was convened two weeks after Moussaoui wrote to the judge indicating that after more than three and a half years in prison he was willing to plead guilty to conspiracy and terrorism, even though these admissions would carry the death penalty.

According to some reports, Moussaoui’s decision arose from his conviction that that would enable him to move immediately toward an appeal before the U.S. Supreme Court. However, his court-appointed lawyers argue that he is unfit to stand trial, and they have objected to his decision.

But, two years after stripping Moussaoui of the right to conduct his own defense, Brinkema evidently was persuaded that he was mentally competent. It also appears that Brinkema received assurances that Moussaoui would not reverse his decision, as he did in 2002 when he withdrew a guilty plea after one week.

If he does decide to stick with his decision and plead guilty Thursday, he faces the very real possibility of a death sentence, since it is unlikely that the prosecutors will relent on their demand for the ultimate penalty.

Moussaoui, 36, a French citizen of Moroccan extraction, was arrested a month before the Sept. 11 attacks. U.S. prosecutors believe that he is the so-called 20th man, the missing hijacker who was to have joined the 19 others who commandeered the aircraft that flew into the Pentagon and the World Trade Center.

Moussaoui admits to membership in al-Qaida, but maintains he was training for a different operation. His trial has been delayed on three occasions and marked by arguments over his demands to interview other al-Qaida members in U.S. custody, who he says could clear him.

Mahle’s years at the agency, described in her new book, “Denial and Deception: An Insider’s View of the CIA From Iran-Contra to 9/11,” were full of such what-ifs. Some are deeply personal, involving the choices Mahle made between career and family. Other choices were not of her making, but haunt her just as fiercely — like the bureaucratic wrangling that allowed the escape of al-Qaida leader Khalid Sheikh Muhammad just as Mahle was closing in on him.

Now under interrogation by the CIA at an undisclosed location, Muhammad was the destructive visionary behind the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks. The original terror plot called for the simultaneous hijacking of 10 aircraft; Osama bin Laden clipped Muhammad’s wings, telling him his plans were too ambitious.

In 1995, while Mahle was working in the Middle East, a man fitting Muhammad’s description turned up in Qatar. At the time, Muhammad was a shadowy figure, and his exact importance to al-Qaida was relatively unknown — as indeed was bin Laden’s. But the CIA believed Muhammad was involved in a bungled plot in the Philippines and in the 1993 attack on the World Trade Center. “He wasn’t in the top 10, but he had still killed Americans,” she says.

Mahle was assigned the task of hunting him down, verifying his identity — the CIA had a set of fingerprints — and putting him under the control of the U.S. authorities. In her reports back to CIA headquarters, Mahle was all for a “snatch,” spiriting Muhammad out of the country in secret. She says she feared officials in the Qatari government sympathetic to extremists would tip off Muhammad if a formal request were made for his arrest.

She argued her case to the highest reaches of the National Security Agency, where she was eventually overruled. The United States lodged a request with local authorities for Muhammad’s extradition, and almost immediately the man Mahle had been hunting disappeared. Had she had her way, she believes, the post-Sept. 11 world might have been a very different place. “He had these two ideas in his mind as early as 1994. If he had been removed from the operational environment there might still have been a 9/11, but I doubt it would have [been] multiple airplanes crashing into an iconic building,” she says.

At a time when the CIA has yet to recover from the colossal failure of the World Trade Center attacks, Mahle’s is one of three female spies to come in from the cold with books on the world of espionage. Her book was published at the same time as a novel by Stella Rimington, the first woman to head MI-5, and a critical memoir by another former CIA agent, Lindsay Moran.

The publishing boom comes at a time when the CIA is braced for yet more uncomfortable revelations — this time about discrimination within its ranks. Last week, Janine Brookner, a former station chief in Jamaica, began efforts to file the first class-action suit against the agency on behalf of women agents who say they lost their jobs because of sexism. This has caused a frisson in Washington, which, despite Rimington’s example, does not appear entirely comfortable with the idea of female spies. In a recent TV appearance, Mahle was asked by CNN anchor Wolf Blitzer: “If you’re roaming around Ramallah or Jericho or Nablus on the West Bank, in any of these towns, an attractive American woman, a blonde, all these guys probably think you’re out there, you’re coming on to them.”

Such attitudes have occasionally eclipsed the criticisms Mahle has made of the agency. In her view, the CIA was hobbled over the years by low morale and budget cuts, which made it slow to react and overly bureaucratic. In a changing world, the agency was also fatally blinkered — a last preserve of white, middle-class men.” I can’t tell you how many minority applicants — Arab Americans, Chinese Americans, Korean Americans, Indian Americans — whom I lost to security or suitability,” she writes in her book.

Women who made it past those gates weren’t entirely welcome, either, especially out in the field, where there was a stubborn belief that women were not fit to recruit agents or run spy networks. They would be fatally handicapped by their gender, the old adage went, especially in the Middle East or Latin America, where they would not be granted full respect.

Mahle had a different experience. “I found the Arab male infinitely more predictable and manageable than Near East Division management,” she writes. “With the latter, I always felt that I was walking on eggs. I sensed that at the first mistake, my career would be ended, because I did not have protectors in the old-boy system.”

Her years at the CIA coincided with a period of great upheaval at the agency. She was recruited from university in the mid-’80s, soon after the Iran-Contra affair, a time when public distrust of the spy agency was at its height. Mahle, studying Middle East politics and international relations at graduate school, needed a job; the CIA needed an Arabic speaker.

She fell into the spy game, immersing herself in a shadowy world where lying to friends and relations was routine. In the old days, agents were barred from revealing what they did for a living; nowadays it is compulsory for agents to tell their spouses they work at the CIA. In Mahle’s time, it was discretionary. She told her husband and her father, but did not dare tell her mother until she went abroad, fearful of the anxiety it would cause her.

Soon after Mahle moved to East Jerusalem in the late 1990s, a bomb went off near her house. “My mother was apoplectic,” she says. “I can only imagine what she would have thought if she knew I was chasing terrorists rather than just avoiding them.” But maintaining the deception was exhausting. “I am very close to my mother, and this was a very big piece of my life to keep secret,” she says.

Her departure in 2002, during the aftermath of 9/11, was a forced exit. Mahle is barred from discussing the circumstances beyond the fact that she lost her security clearance for “lack of candor” about her contacts with Palestinians.

Her last posting outside the U.S. for the agency was in Israel and the occupied territories, and much of her job focused on building up the Palestinian security services and keeping tabs on militant groups — although CIA regulations barred her from making direct contact with militants. She was also responsible for broader security arrangements, which meant that in 1998, she found herself making arrangements for a presidential visit from a hospital delivery room. Mahle went into labor six days before President Clinton made his historic visit to Israel and the territories. But there was no question of switching off her duties.

“There were a lot of security details that needed to be nailed down, and it was a high-threat environment,” she says. “I had meetings scheduled. I had places to be. The Secret Service was in town.” Mahle’s daughter was born in the morning. By evening she was back on the job. “I remember thinking it was poor planning on my part,” she says. But she had little choice; the CIA did not have maternity leave.

Other choices she confronted were heartbreaking. Soon after the Palestinian intifada erupted in September 2000, her daughter was just a toddler. Mahle, charged with assessing the dangers posed to U.S. citizens by the rising violence, advised the evacuation of all Americans from East Jerusalem. That included her daughter, but she could not leave her post to bring the child to safety. “Jerusalem was still smoldering from the riots and it was very difficult to navigate. I remember thinking that it was my job to go to my family at this time, and I couldn’t do it. I had to send my [bodyguards] instead,” she says.

She phoned home, and told the nanny to pack the baby photographs. “It was just one of those moments where you have to choose, and I made a decision based on my work. I felt I had failed my family.”

Now, after more than a decade roaming the Middle East, Mahle lives in an affluent suburb of Washington with her husband and daughter. But she retains the habits of her former life, arriving early for meetings to scope out the surroundings, choosing restaurant tables with a clear view of the exit.

She no longer has to worry about swathing herself in dark robes and head scarf — her method for disappearing into the crowd in the Middle East. When we meet at Washington’s Union Station, Mahle, who is tall, carries a bright pink tote and matching handbag.