History > 2015 > USA > C.I.A. (I)

Overkill on a C.I.A. Leak Case

MAY 13, 2015

The New York Times

By THE EDITORIAL BOARD

The Opinion Pages | Editorial

Would America really be safer if Jeffrey Sterling had been sentenced to more than 20 years in prison?

That outrageous punishment would have satisfied the Justice Department in the sentencing of Mr. Sterling, the former Central Intelligence Agency officer convicted of leaking classified information about Iran’s nuclear program to a reporter for The New York Times.

A federal judge in Virginia rightly believed that was far too long. In a significant rebuke to the Obama administration’s dogged-yet-selective crusade against leaks, Judge Leonie Brinkema of Federal District Court quickly rejected the government’s request and sentenced Mr. Sterling to three and a half years behind bars.

In January, Mr. Sterling was found guilty of violating federal laws, including the Espionage Act, by disclosing details about a covert operation involving a former Russian scientist and C.I.A. informant who gave Iran intentionally faulty schematics in an attempt to forestall the country’s nuclear capabilities. James Risen, a reporter for The Times, wrote about the operation in his 2006 book, “State of War.” He has refused to identify his sources despite facing a threat of jail time that ended only days before Mr. Sterling’s trial.

The government argued at trial that the leak had disrupted the operation and endangered national security. Judge Brinkema did not appear to buy that claim, which was called “overwrought hyperbole” by one C.I.A. veteran in a letter to the court. She instead focused on Mr. Sterling’s jeopardizing the safety of an informant, whose identity she said was “the most critical secret” an intelligence officer keeps. “If you knowingly reveal these secrets, there’s going to be a price to be paid.”

Mr. Sterling, who maintains his innocence and may appeal his conviction, is only the latest target of the Obama administration, which has charged more public servants with leaks to journalists than all previous administrations combined. He joins at least three other C.I.A. officers and contractors in receiving prison time for leaking classified information.

In light of these prosecutions, it is worth considering the degree to which this White House seems to value secrecy over accountability.

It fixates on certain leakers, and the reporters they work with, even as it neglects to prosecute anyone for, say, the torture of the detainees at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, and elsewhere, or for the intentional destruction of videotapes documenting that torture.

It pleads with newspapers not to print the name of a senior officer behind the C.I.A.’s interrogation and targeted-killing programs, even as it allowed David Petraeus, the former C.I.A. chief, to plead to a misdemeanor for giving his biographer (and lover) classified information, including the names of covert officers. Mr. Petraeus got probation and a fine.

Of course, we already know that torture and drone strikes pose a profound threat to America’s national security and the safety of its citizens abroad. After all, the murderers of the Islamic State did not dress their victims in orange jumpsuits for no reason; they did it to evoke the horrors of the Guantánamo prison camp.

The government enjoys great flexibility from courts and the American public in deciding how best to protect national security. When it abuses that flexibility — by going after journalists and their sources with a century-old law intended for Communist spies, or by to failing to hold torturers accountable — the nation is made less safe.

Correction: May 13, 2015

An earlier version of this editorial referred imprecisely to the Justice Department’s sentencing recommendation for Mr. Sterling. The Justice Department sought a “severe” sentence, and agreed that a sentencing range of 19.5 TO 24 years had been correctly calculated under federal guidelines, but did not specifically recommend a number of years.

Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook and Twitter, and sign up for the Opinion Today newsletter.

A version of this editorial appears in print on May 13, 2015, on page A26 of the New York edition with the headline: Overkill on a C.I.A. Leak Case.

Overkill on a C.I.A. Leak Case,
NYT,
MAY 13, 2015,
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/05/13/opinion/overkill-on-a-cia-leak-case.html

C.I.A. Cash

Ended Up in Coffers of Al Qaeda

 

MARCH 14, 2015

The New York Times

By MATTHEW ROSENBERG

WASHINGTON — In the spring of 2010, Afghan officials struck a deal to free an Afghan diplomat held hostage by Al Qaeda. But the price was steep — $5 million — and senior security officials were scrambling to come up with the money.

They first turned to a secret fund that the Central Intelligence Agency bankrolled with monthly cash deliveries to the presidential palace in Kabul, according to several Afghan officials involved in the episode. The Afghan government, they said, had already squirreled away about $1 million from that fund.

Within weeks, that money and $4 million more provided from other countries was handed over to Al Qaeda, replenishing its coffers after a relentless C.I.A. campaign of drone strikes in Pakistan had decimated the militant network’s upper ranks.

“God blessed us with a good amount of money this month,” Atiyah Abd al-Rahman, the group’s general manager, wrote in a letter to Osama bin Laden in June 2010, noting that the cash would be used for weapons and other operational needs.

Bin Laden urged caution, fearing the Americans knew about the payment and had laced the cash with radiation or poison, or were tracking it. “There is a possibility — not a very strong one — that the Americans are aware of the money delivery,” he wrote back, “and that they accepted the arrangement of the payment on the basis that the money will be moving under air surveillance.”

The C.I.A.’s contribution to Qaeda’s bottom line, though, was no well-laid trap. It was just another in a long list of examples of how the United States, largely because of poor oversight and loose financial controls, has sometimes inadvertently financed the very militants it is fighting.

While refusing to pay ransoms for Americans kidnapped by Al Qaeda, the Taliban or, more recently, the Islamic State, the United States has spent hundreds of billions of dollars over the last decade at war in Iraq and Afghanistan, some of which has been siphoned off to enemy fighters.

The letters about the 2010 ransom were included in correspondence between Bin Laden and Mr. Rahman that was submitted as evidence by federal prosecutors at the Brooklyn trial of Abid Naseer, a Pakistani Qaeda operative who was convicted this month of supporting terrorism and conspiring to bomb a British shopping center.

The letters were unearthed from the cache of computers and documents seized by Navy SEALs during the 2011 raid in which Bin Laden was killed in Abbottabad, Pakistan, and had been classified until introduced as evidence at the trial.

Details of the C.I.A.’s previously unreported contribution to the ransom demanded by Al Qaeda were drawn from the letters and from interviews with Afghan and Western officials speaking on the condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the issue. The C.I.A. declined to comment.

The diplomat freed in exchange for the cash, Abdul Khaliq Farahi, was serving as the Afghan consul general in Peshawar, Pakistan, when he was kidnapped in September 2008 as he drove to work. He had been weeks away from taking up his new job as Afghanistan’s ambassador to Pakistan.

Afghan and Pakistani insurgents had grabbed Mr. Farahi, but within days they turned him over to Qaeda members. He was held for more than two years.

The Afghan government had no direct contact with Al Qaeda, stymieing negotiations until the Haqqani network, an Afghan insurgent faction with close ties to Al Qaeda, stepped in to mediate.

Qaeda leaders wanted some captive militants released, and from the letters it appeared that they calibrated their offer, asking only for men held by Afghan authorities, not those imprisoned by the Americans, who would refuse the demand as a matter of policy. But the Afghans refused to release any prisoners, “so we decided to proceed with a financial exchange,” Mr. Rahman wrote in the June 2010 letter. “The amount we agreed on in the deal was $5 million.”

The first $2 million was delivered shortly before that letter was written. In it, Mr. Rahman asked Bin Laden if he needed money, and said “we have also designated a fair amount to strengthen the organization militarily by stockpiling good weapons.” (The Qaeda leaders named in the letters were identified by aliases. Bin Laden, for instance, signed his letters Zamray; Mr. Rahman, who was killed in a drone strike in Pakistan in August 2011, went by the alias Mahmud.)

The cash would also be used to aid the families of Qaeda fighters held prisoner in Afghanistan, and some was given to Ayman al-Zawahri, who would succeed Bin Laden as the Qaeda leader and was identified in the letters under the alias Abu-Muhammad, Mr. Rahman said.

Other militant groups had already heard about the ransom payment and had their hands out, Mr. Rahman reported. “As you know, you cannot control the news,” he wrote. “They are asking us to give them money, may God help us.”

But Bin Laden was clearly worried that the payout was an American ruse intended to reveal the locations of senior Qaeda leaders. “It seems a bit strange somewhat because in a country like Afghanistan, usually they would not pay this kind of money to free one of their men,” he wrote.

“Is any of his relatives a big official?” he continued, referring to Mr. Farahi, the diplomat. It was a prescient question: Mr. Farahi was the son-in-law of a man who had served as a mentor to then-President Hamid Karzai.

Advocating caution, Bin Laden advised Mr. Rahman to change the money into a different currency at one bank, and then go to another and exchange the money again into whatever currency was preferred. “The reason for doing that is to be on the safe side in case harmful substances or radiation is put on paper money,” Bin Laden wrote.

Neither of the two men appeared to have known where the money actually came from. Aside from the C.I.A. money, Afghan officials said that Pakistan contributed nearly half the ransom in an effort to end what it viewed as a disruptive sideshow in its relations with Afghanistan. The remainder came from Iran and Persian Gulf states, which had also contributed to the Afghan president’s secret fund.

In a letter dated Nov. 23, 2010, Mr. Rahman reported to Bin Laden that the remaining $3 million had been received and that Mr. Farahi had been released.

The C.I.A., meanwhile, continued dropping off bags of cash — ranging each time from a few hundred thousand dollars to more than $1 million — at the presidential palace every month until last year, when Mr. Karzai stepped down.

The money was used to buy the loyalty of warlords, legislators and other prominent — and potentially troublesome — Afghans, helping the palace finance a vast patronage network that secured Mr. Karzai’s power base. It was also used to cover expenses that needed to be kept off the books, such as clandestine diplomatic trips, and for more mundane costs, including rent payments for the guesthouses where some senior officials lived.

The cash flow has slowed since a new president, Ashraf Ghani, assumed office in September, Afghan officials said, refusing to elaborate. But they added that cash was still coming in, and that it was not clear how robust any current American constraints on it are.

“It’s cash,” said a former Afghan security official. “Once it’s at the palace, they can’t do a thing about how it gets spent.”
 

A version of this article appears in print on March 15, 2015, on page A1 of the New York edition with the headline: Cash From C.I.A. Ends Up as Part of Qaeda Funds.

C.I.A. Cash Ended Up in Coffers of Al Qaeda, NYT,
MARCH 14, 2015,
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/03/15/world/asia/cia-funds-found-their-way-into-al-qaeda-coffers.html

C.I.A. Report Found

Value of Brutal Interrogation

Was Inflated

JAN. 20, 2015

The New York Times

By MARK MAZZETTI

WASHINGTON — Years before the release in December of a Senate Intelligence Committee report detailing the C.I.A.’s use of torture and deceit in its detention program, an internal review by the agency found that the C.I.A. had repeatedly overstated the value of intelligence gained during the brutal interrogations of some of its detainees.

The internal report, more than 1,000 pages in length, came to be known as the Panetta Review after Leon E. Panetta, who, as the C.I.A.’s director, ordered that it be done in 2009. At least one of its authors won an agency award for her work, according to a recent briefing that the agency’s inspector general gave to staff members of the Senate Intelligence Committee.

The contents of the Panetta Review, which remain classified, are now central to simmering battles over the Intelligence Committee’s conclusions about the efficacy of torture and the C.I.A.’s allegations that committee staffers improperly took the review from an agency facility. The C.I.A. has publicly distanced itself from the report’s findings, saying that it was an incomplete and cursory review of documents, and has blocked its release under the Freedom of Information Act.

New details of the Panetta Review, presented last month by the C.I.A. inspector general in a briefing to the committee, came as Senator Richard M. Burr of North Carolina, the new chairman of the Intelligence Committee, wrote to President Obama with an odd request: He wants the committee’s report back.

Mr. Burr sent a letter last week to the White House saying that his Democratic predecessor, Senator Dianne Feinstein, should never have transmitted the entire 6,700-page report to numerous departments and agencies within the executive branch — and requested that all copies of the report be “returned immediately,” according to people who have seen the letter.

The Intelligence Committee publicly released only the report’s executive summary. But Congress has since changed hands, and the committee is now controlled by Republican lawmakers like Mr. Burr who have long opposed the committee’s detention investigation, which they said was a partisan effort to discredit the C.I.A. and the Bush administration.

The ongoing controversies, more than a month after Intelligence Committee Democrats released their explosive findings about the C.I.A’s detention and interrogation program, signal just how much all sides are still positioning to control the history of one of America’s most polarizing recent episodes. The latest actions show that Republicans and the C.I.A. are still fighting to challenge the conclusions of a report they consider to be a partisan smear.

The internal C.I.A. review ordered by Mr. Panetta was an attempt by the agency to better understand millions of documents that the C.I.A. was handing over to the committee as it began its investigation into the Bush-era detention program.

The result of the internal review, led by Peter Clement, who at the time was the agency’s deputy director of intelligence for analytic programs, was a series of memos on what the documents revealed about the internal workings of the program.

One of the report’s findings, according to people who have seen the document, was that the C.I.A. repeatedly claimed that important intelligence to thwart terror plots and track down Qaeda operatives had come from the interrogation sessions of Khalid Shaikh Mohammed when, in fact, the intelligence had other origins.

The C.I.A. has long maintained that the interrogation of Mr. Mohammed, a chief planner of the Sept. 11 attacks, was central to disrupting a number of terror plots, including Qaeda plans to attack the West Coast. Mr. Mohammed was one of the C.I.A. detainees subjected to the most brutal interrogation methods, including waterboarding.

According to a briefing that the C.I.A. inspector general, David B. Buckley, gave to the congressional staff members in December, a C.I.A. employee who had worked on the Panetta Review complained in 2010 that the agency had never corrected public statements about what was or was not obtained from torture sessions.

The identity of the C.I.A. employee is not publicly known, and it is unclear whether she protested to other agency officials.

The Panetta Review played a central role in another of Mr. Buckley’s investigations. Last year, he admonished five C.I.A. employees for their role in accessing a computer network used by Senate staff members working on the detention report — an action they carried out to determine how the staff members had gained access to the internal review.

A recent C.I.A. accountability panel essentially overturned his findings, recommending that the five employees not be punished. Mr. Buckley is planning to leave the C.I.A. at the end of the month to “pursue an opportunity in the private sector,” according to an agency news release.

Since the fight over the Panetta Review erupted last year, the C.I.A. has said it was not required to give the document to the Intelligence Committee.

In a court filing last month as part of a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit, a C.I.A. officer said that the review had been stopped abruptly in 2010, had not covered all of the documents the agency had given to the committee and “had not been formally reviewed or relied upon by the C.I.A.’s senior leadership.”

“Each document is stamped ‘DELIBERATIVE PROCESS PRIVILEGED DOCUMENT’ at the top of every page, and most of the documents are marked ‘DRAFT’ on every page as well,” wrote the C.I.A. officer, Martha M. Lutz.

Ryan Trapani, a C.I.A. spokesman, said in a statement Tuesday that the agency’s June 2013 response to the Intelligence Committee’s report was “the only official, reviewed, confirmed and approved position on these issues by the agency.”

Mr. Burr’s unusual letter to Mr. Obama might have been written with an eye toward future Freedom of Information Act lawsuits. Congress is not subject to such requests, and any success he has in getting the Obama administration to return all copies of the Senate report to the Intelligence Committee could hinder attempts to someday have the report declassified and released publicly.

A spokeswoman for Mr. Burr did not return a request seeking comment on the letter. A White House spokesman declined to comment on how the Obama administration planned to respond.

Steven Aftergood, director of the Federation of American Scientists project on government secrecy, said he could recall no analogous case of the Senate’s trying to get the executive branch to return a document.

He said Mr. Burr was within his rights to ask for the report back. “But if Senator Burr thinks he can erase the report from the historical record, he is likely to be mistaken,” Mr. Aftergood said.

C.I.A. Report Found Value of Brutal Interrogation Was Inflated,
NYT,
JAN 20, 2015,
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/01/21/world/
cia-report-found-value-of-brutal-interrogation-was-inflated.html