It sounds like something out of Homeland: at a secret location somewhere off the campus of the CIA, the agency leases a space and hires contractors to run a top-secret network, which it fills with millions of pages of documents dumped from the agency’s internal network. But that’s apparently exactly what the CIA did for more than three years as part of an agreement to share data with the staff of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence on its controversial detention and interrogation program.

And it’s also how the agency was able to gain access to the computers and shared network drive used by committee staffers in a search that Senator Diane Feinstein contended today crossed multiple legal and constitutional boundaries. In a speech on the Senate floor this morning, Feinstein detailed the strange arrangement and accused the CIA of breaking its agreement with the committee on multiple occasions. She also accused the agency of reportedly filing a criminal report against committee staffers with the Justice Department in “a potential effort to intimidate this staff.”

The details shared by Feinstein show the length to which the CIA went to try to control the scope of the data that was shared with Senate staffers—and still managed to give them more than some officials in the agency wanted to. Even with multiple levels of oversight, the CIA managed to hand over the data along with an internal review of that very data, which included the agency’s own damning assessment of the interrogation program.

Rent-a-SCIF

The Senate Intelligence Committee maintains its own sensitive compartmented information facility (SCIF) at the Hart Senate Office Building on Capitol Hill. And in most cases, documents related to Senate investigations of the intelligence community are held by the committee there, largely to prevent agencies from trying to cover for themselves.

But when the committee launched a full investigation into the CIA’s interrogation program in 2009, then-CIA Director Leon Panetta agreed to give access to documents, but he said he would only give access to all of them at a facility controlled by the CIA.

The documents would have to go through “a multi-layer screening process,” Feinstein said, before being turned over—a task which the CIA hired an army of contractors to perform. Panetta agreed the facility would have a stand-alone network not connected to the CIA’s that could only be accessed by CIA personnel with the permission of the Senate staff. To that end, the CIA leased a special facility in Northern Virginia and hired contractors to run its network.

There were reasons for the Senate committee to be concerned about CIA access to the data. The investigation had been kicked off as a result of a review of transcripts from video tapes of “enhanced” interrogations made by the CIA—videos that had been destroyed by the agency despite opposition from the Bush White House counsel and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence. So the committee staff was keen to preserve whatever it found rather than have the CIA make something conveniently disappear.

Because documents were provided in a giant data dump without any supporting index, or even a directory structure, committee staffers often saved copies of documents they found using a CIA-provided search engine to a local drive on their computers in the facility or to a shared network drive, or printed them out to save in a safe onsite. The staffers would then be allowed to remove documents they had printed out to bring them back to the SCIF at Hart Office Building—but only after a CIA official redacted the names of non-executive CIA employees and information about the foreign locations where prisoners were held and subjected to “enhanced” interrogation techniques such as water-boarding.

That’s how it was supposed to work. But soon after the CIA started to push data over to the Senate facility, it became apparent that the agency reserved the right to recall documents after the fact—by removing them from the network.

Remote delete

In May of 2010, as the documents continued to stream in, some of the committee staffers realized documents they had looked at earlier had disappeared. As it turned out, in two separate incidents, CIA employees had accessed the network without committee approval and had deleted approximately 920 documents from the network’s storage.

Sen. Feinstein said that “CIA staff first denied they had removed the documents, then they blamed IT support personnel and then said removal of the documents was ordered by the White House.” Feinstein went to White House counsel about the removal, and the complaint was rapidly escalated. The CIA apologized for the removal and gave assurances that it wouldn’t happen again.

But it would happen again, later in 2010, according to Feinstein, after the discovery of draft documents within the shared data that were part of an internal review ordered by Leon Panetta. The so-called Panetta review documents were actually summaries of the same documents that made up the majority of what the committee staff was reviewing for its report, but they included “analysis and acknowledgement of signs of wrongdoing,” Feinstein said.

The documents were marked as “deliberative” and “privileged”—meaning that they were intended not to be shared with the Senate under claims of executive privilege. But since they had been shared as part of the data dump, Feinstein said, there was no legal reason for the staff to not review the documents.

It is not known whether the CIA inadvertently shared the documents that somehow made it through the contractor’s screening process or if they were deliberately added to the data dump by the CIA or possibly by an internal whistleblower. Regardless, shortly after the draft documents were discovered, they started disappearing from the document store—so staffers copied the ones that remained to their local hard drives and printed out copies to preserve them. Staffers also made their own redacted copies of the documents—removing CIA non-executive employee names and locations, as the CIA would have done with other documents—and transported them back to the Hart SCIF for safekeeping.

Closing the barn door after the horse redaction

All of this came to a head when the committee produced its final 6,300-page study on detention and interrogation late last year. The CIA contested some of the findings of the report—findings that were supported by the CIA’s own draft internal review. In a number of communications with CIA Director John Brennan and other agency officials, Feinstein and committee members requested the final copy of the review. Brennan refused.

Colorado Sen. Mark Udall publicly pointed this out during the confirmation hearing for CIA General Counsel Caroline Krass in December and asked why the CIA would not turn over the Panetta review. Krass has not been confirmed for the job, and a career CIA lawyer is still acting general counsel.

A month later, Feinstein said, Brennan called for an “emergency meeting” with the committee and informed the committee leadership “that CIA personnel had conducted a search of the (secure) facility... of not just the documents, but the walled-off network drive containing the committee's own work documents and communications.” That search, she said, was followed by the allegation that the committee staff had “obtained documents through illegal means,” she said.

According to Feinstein, Brennan told the committee he was going to order further forensic analysis of the committee’s network at the CIA-leased facility. Feinstein objected and sent a barrage of letters asking for explanation of the legal justifications for the search—none of which Brennan responded to.

The search was the subject of a CIA inspector general investigation of an official. That investigation has now been forwarded to the Justice Department for possible criminal prosecution. At the same time, the CIA’s acting general counsel has reportedly filed a complaint with the Justice Department, claiming Senate staffers acted criminally in obtaining the documents.

Feinstein all but accused the CIA’s acting general counsel, Robert Eatinger, of instigating the search and filing of a criminal complaint against Senate staff as part of a cover-up.

Eatinger, whom Feinstein mentioned by title only, may have a personal reason to be concerned with the committee’s report—the lawyer was previously chief attorney for the CIA’s interrogations division, and Feinstein said he is “mentioned by name 1,600 times in our study.”