Bush and Cheney's dirty secrets

A former top CIA official blows the whistle on bogus intelligence, covert kidnappings and the alleged torture of terror suspects.

By Georg Mascolo and Holger Stark

Read more: Politics, News, Iraq, CIA, Torture

Feb. 5, 2007 | Tyler Drumheller, 54, had a 25-year career working for the CIA. In 2001, he was promoted to become the intelligence agency's chief of European operations. The controversial kidnappings by CIA agents of suspected al-Qaida terrorists -- including the German-Syrian Mohammed Haydar Zammar and the German-Lebanese Khaled el-Masri -- happened under his watch. Drumheller, who retired in 2005, recently published his memoir, "On the Brink," in the United States. He spoke recently about the CIA's role in international kidnappings and alleged torture (including Europe's cooperation with the U.S. government), Dick Cheney's mandate to go to the "dark side" in the war on terror, and the bogus intelligence that unleashed the nightmare in Iraq.

Arrest warrants have been issued in Europe for a number of your former colleagues. They are suspected of involvement in the illegal kidnappings of suspected terrorists as part of the so-called renditions program. Doesn't this worry you?

No. I'm not worried, but I am not allowed to discuss the issue.

One of the cases is the now-famous kidnapping of Khalid el-Masri, a German-Lebanese who was taken into custody at the end of 2003 in Macedonia and later flown to Afghanistan. How could the CIA allow an innocent person to be arrested?

I'm not allowed by the agency to comment on any of those cases or the so-called secret prisons. I would love to, but I can't. We have a lifelong secrecy agreement, and they are very, very strict about what you can say.

The so-called rendition program saw the kidnapping of suspected Islamist extremists, who were taken to third countries. Were you involved in the program?

I would be lying if I said no. I have very complicated feelings about the whole issue. I do see the purpose of renditions if they are carried out properly. Guys sitting around talking about carrying out attacks as they smoke their pipes in the comfort of a European capital tend to get put off the idea if they learn that a like-minded individual has been plucked out of safety and sent elsewhere to pay for his crimes.

But at the very least, don't you need to be certain that the targets of those renditions aren't innocent people?

It was Vice President Dick Cheney who talked about the "dark side" we have to turn on. When he spoke those words, he was articulating a policy that amounted to "go out and get them." His remarks were evidence of the underlying approach of the administration, which was basically to turn the military and the agency loose and let them pay for the consequences of any unfortunate -- or illegal -- occurrences.

So there was no clear guidance of what is allowed in the so-called war on terrorism?

Every responsible chief in the CIA knows that the more covert the action, the greater the need for a clear policy and a defined target. I once had to brief Condoleezza Rice on a rendition operation, and her chief concern was not whether it was the right thing to do, but what the president would think about it. I would have expected a big meeting, a debate about whether to proceed with the plan, a couple of hours of consideration of the pros and cons. We should have been talking about the value of the target, whether the threat he presented warranted such a potentially controversial intervention.

This was no way to run a covert policy. If the White House wants to take extraordinary measures to win, it can't just let things go through without any discussion about their value and morality.

Perhaps the White House wanted to gloss over its own responsibility?

Let me give you a general thought: From the perspective of the White House, it was smart to blur the lines about what was acceptable and what was not in the war on terrorism. It meant that whenever someone was overzealous in some dark interrogation cell, President Bush and his entourage could blame someone else. The rendition teams are drawn from paramilitary officers who are brave and colorful. They are the men who went into Baghdad before the bombs and into Afghanistan before the army. If they didn't do paramilitary actions for a living, they would probably be robbing banks. Perhaps the Bush administration deliberately created a gray area on renditions.

Investigations by various European officials are trying to ascertain the extent to which European governments cooperated with the CIA after the Sept. 11 terror attacks. How close is the relationship?

On terrorist issues, very close -- we did some very good things with the Europeans. Two weeks after Sept. 11, August Hanning [the head of the German foreign intelligence service, the BND] came with a delegation to discuss how we can make cooperation better. Elements of the Bush administration developed the view that European personal privacy laws were somehow to blame, that the Europeans are too slow. We can be very frustrating to work with. I always said, "Stop preaching to them. The Europeans have been dealing with terrorism for years. We can learn from their successes and failures."

Next page: "Never before have I seen the manipulation of intelligence that has played out since Bush took office"