Tim Weiner is a former New York Times correspondent and the author of five books. This article is adapted from his latest, One Man Against The World: The Tragedy of Richard Nixon, published by Henry Holt and Company, LLC. Copyright © 2015 by Tim Weiner. All rights reserved.

Officers of the CIA’s clandestine service working overseas are compelled to be a kind of legal criminal. Their crucial job—before Sept. 11—was to convince foreigners to commit treason, using cash and cunning as inducements. Thus they would steal secrets in the name of the national security of the United States. To do so, spies abroad had to lie about who they were and what they did.

But when they got back to Washington, they had to tell the truth to their fellow Americans. They had to trust—and be trusted by—the people who gave them their marching orders. They could not deceive those they served at headquarters, at the White House, the National Security Council and the State Department.


What is striking about this week’s Senate report on the Bush administration’s torture program—what is new—is not the fact that CIA officers may have violated the laws of God or the Geneva Convention setting up torturing prisons in the black sites of Afghanistan and Thailand and Poland. We knew that.

What is shocking is the continuing claim of the CIA’s leaders that torture worked. And that is a damnable lie, a devastating deceit and a self-deception that poses a danger to the agency and the American people.

The continuing insistence that torture produced unique intelligence and saved uncounted lives is where the logic of the CIA’s leaders fails. The Senate report makes this excruciatingly clear.

“The use of the CIA’s enhanced interrogation techniques was not an effective means of obtaining accurate information or gaining detainee cooperation,” it says. “Multiple CIA detainees fabricated information, resulting in faulty intelligence. Detainees provided fabricated information on critical intelligence issues, including the terrorist threats which the CIA identified as its highest priorities.”

The CIA had some experience with torture—or “enhanced interrogation techniques,” if you prefer—and secret prisons before Sept. 11. During the Korean War, it held suspected double agents in clandestine cells in occupied Germany and Japan. Later in the 1950s and the early ’60s, it conducted mind-control experiments on unwitting human guinea pigs—mostly mental patients and prisoners, “people who could not fight back,” as one agency officer put it. In one case, a mental patient in Kentucky was dosed with LSD continuously for 174 days. The CIA’s search for a truth serum, something that could be used for interrogations, failed.

The CIA took a defector from the Soviet intelligence service, Yuri Nosenko, who it suspected might have secret information on the assassination of President Kennedy, and held him in a secret prison under the harshest conditions and ceaseless interrogation for nearly four years before deciding he was innocent. The CIA officer who investigated the Nosenko case called it “an abomination.”

In the 1980s, a CIA officer devised an interrogation manual for the use of the U.S.-backed contras fighting the government of Nicaragua, which included the use of violence to elicit information. The CIA’s inspector general recommended that the officer be admonished for inappropriate use of interrogation techniques. It appears from the Senate report that this same man became the officer in charge of CIA interrogations in 2002.

Yet the CIA had concluded before Sept. 11 that torture does not work. Richard Stolz, chief of the CIA’s clandestine service under Presidents Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush, testified to Congress: “Physical abuse or other degrading treatment was rejected not only because it is wrong, but because it has historically proven to be ineffective.” To quote from the agency’s own manuals, reproduced in the Senate report: “Inhumane physical or psychological techniques are counterproductive because they do not produce intelligence and will probably result in false answers.”

Stop right here and grasp this fact: People being tortured might say anything to stop the pain, including invented and imaginary information. And false intelligence is worse than no intelligence at all.

At the time of the Sept. 11 attacks, every member of the agency’s clandestine services had a handbook that said that the CIA does not engage in “human rights violations,” which it defined as: “Torture, cruel, inhuman, degrading treatment or punishment, or prolonged detention without charges or trial.”

When it came to torture, the CIA’s officers had what they thought was a blank check from the White House, through its Office of Legal Counsel, and from the leaders of the agency itself, up to and including its directors. Like the carte blanche written by Cardinal Richelieu, minister of France, in Alexandre Dumas’ The Three Musketeers (“It is by my order and for the good of the state that the bearer of this has done what he has done”), the license granted them could serve as an all-purpose alibi.

The idea that torture works might have convinced the makers of Zero Dark Thirty. Even some CIA commanders who knew or should have known better may still buy it. But no one who reads the Senate report can conceivably swallow it.

The report painstakingly dissects 20 cases, “the most frequent and prominent examples of purported counterterrorism successes that the CIA has attributed to the use of its enhanced interrogation techniques,” and found the claim that torture worked to be wrong.

“In some cases, there was no relationship between the cited counterterrorism success and any information provided by detainees during or after the use of the CIA's enhanced interrogation techniques,” it says. “In the remaining cases, the CIA inaccurately claimed that specific, otherwise unavailable information was acquired from a CIA detainee ‘as a result’ of the CIA's enhanced interrogation techniques.”

So who changed the rules and the rationales to justify torture as an intelligence-gathering technique? And how is it possible that senior CIA officers insist that torture magically began to work after Sept. 11?

The answer to the first question is, sadly, the White House lawyers who came up with shaky theories of self-defense for the commander in chief. They had a precedent or two. In 1839, anti-British rebels planned to invade Canada by crossing the Niagara on a steamer. A British force entered the United States, set the ship ablaze and sent it over the falls. Two Americans were killed.

The secretary of state, Daniel Webster, said the British could justify sinking the ship and killing the Americans by proving “a necessity of self-defense, instant, overwhelming, leaving no choice of means, and no moment for deliberation.” There, in a nutshell, is a reasonable legal theory setting limits on capturing or killing a suspected terrorist.

But the CIA—and the White House—did have a moment for deliberation in the months and years after Sept. 11, after the great waves of fear of an imminent follow-on attack subsided. And it was in those months and years that senior CIA officers should have asked themselves if they had a choice of means that excluded torture and cruel, inhuman, degrading treatment or punishment.

They clearly did not have that deliberation. And now once again we must ask ourselves if we, as Americans, are capable of running a secret intelligence service in an open, democratic society.

One lesson we may have learned in the years since the Sept. 11 attacks is that no terrorist group can damage or destroy the United States and its Constitution. Only we can do that to ourselves.

One further lesson between the lines of the Senate report bears repeating. The CIA is not “a rogue elephant,” in the deathless phrase of Senator Frank Church, who ran the pioneering congressional investigation of the agency four decades ago. If the beast tramples people, it’s the mahout, the elephant driver, who is to blame. There was clearly one person driving this program, whether he knew what the elephant was doing in his name or not.

The mahout in the Senate report is the president of the United States.