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.

Five years of frustration boiled over when Sen. Dianne Feinstein flayed the CIA on the Senate floor Tuesday. She accused the agency of lying, cheating and stealing to block a 6,300-page report on the CIA’s secret prisons and torture from seeing the light of day. In essence, she said, the CIA was spying on the Senate Intelligence Committee’s staff to cover its own misdeeds.

We need spies. But it’s a devil’s bargain. If you have a standing army projecting power around the world, you also need an intelligence service to help the military understand what’s happening out there. But if you have an intelligence service, you’re going to have secrecy and deception. How much can we tolerate? That’s the issue here.


Blood will out, and three former CIA directors, along with their counterterrorism chiefs and counselors, have stained our national honor with their conduct of the secret prison program and their attempts to shape the accounts of its aftermath. The time is long overdue for public hearings on what went on inside the secret prisons, a program authorized by President George W. Bush shortly after the Sept. 11 attacks and banned by President Barack Obama when he took office in January 2009.

Those hearings had better happen soon. If they don’t, the United States may have to give up on the idea of running a secret intelligence service in an open democracy.

Feinstein, a liberal San Franciscan who rose through the ranks of California’s Democratic politics, has led the Intelligence Committee for five years. Her staff has been working on a report about the secret prisons ever since. She has widely been regarded as a sleepy watchdog, especially regarding the NSA’s secret surveillance.

But on Tuesday, she rose with a resounding roar. She strongly suggested that the CIA violated the law and the Constitution by obstructing her committee’s report, rifling through its computer files through warrantless searches in violation of the Fourth Amendment and breaking the CIA’s own charter, which prohibits its acting as America’s secret police.

Lying is essential to spying. When you work as a CIA officer overseas, you have to lie about who you are and what you do to steal secrets. Espionage is by definition illegal everywhere; a CIA officer abroad must break the law of the land where he or she works. You are duty-bound to lie, cheat and steal.

But when you return to work in Washington, you cannot lie to your fellow Americans. You’d better have a well-calibrated moral gyroscope—especially if you tortured or killed people in secret prisons; if you knew first-hand what happened in those cells; or if you later learned “the horrible details of a CIA program that never, never, never should have happened,” as Feinstein said Tuesday. Those details, she said, are “far different and far more harsh” than we now know.

Sen. Dianne Feinstein with John Brennan, then President Obama's nominee for director of the CIA, in January 2013. | Getty

It’s a delicate balance between deception in the day-to-day business of collecting secret intelligence and the perilous practice of deceiving your superiors. Intelligence is a difficult, dirty, dangerous business; like any human endeavor, it is prone to failure. A CIA case officer may be tempted to tailor intelligence reports to make failure look like success. A superior who suspects he is being spun has a ready riposte: “Don’t case-officer me.”

When the CIA case-officers a senator, it runs the risk of undergoing torture American-style. We have two ways of making them talk: hours of on-camera interrogation for the brass or the threat of slammer time for their subordinates.

Feinstein has been case-officered once too often. One item in her speech explains why she broke her watchdog’s chain. She said the CIA’s acting general counsel, who oversaw aspects of the secret prisons program (and is mentioned in the report 1,600 times), has filed a crimes report with the Justice Department, accusing the committee’s staff of purloining the CIA’s files. Those files were open to the Senate staff under an elaborate agreement. Going after the committee arguably was an act of political cupidity or criminal stupidity. It certainly reflects the parting advice of Porter Goss, Bush’s second CIA director, when he stepped down in 2005: “Admit nothing, deny everything and make counter-accusations.”

The senator thinks she has been subjected to a continuous and contemptuous blockade. This puts the agency on dangerous terrain. Either the stonewalling continues or the CIA’s leaders, past and present, must be called to testify under oath, in public, and explain the executive summary of the report.

The witness list should start with the former CIA directors George Tenet, Goss and Michael Hayden, who served under Bush. Next up should be Jose Rodriguez, who was chief of the CIA’s Clandestine Service in 2005, when he ordered the destruction of secret-prison videotapes depicting torture. The sworn testimony of Kyle “Dusty” Foggo, the No. 3 man at the CIA back then, would be useful. He was the CIA’s executive director and provided logistical support for the program—and he went to prison in 2009, for acts of fraud while he was executive director.

We’ve gone through this agonizing process before. The 9/11 panel in 2004, the Iran-Contra hearings of 1987 and the Church Committee of 1975, which inaugurated the era of congressional oversight of the CIA, each exposed egregious violations of the laws of God and man and common sense at the agency. Each led to important legal and institutional changes at the CIA. Each was vital to the exceptional American experiment in governing secret intelligence operations under law.

Almost no one has read the Senate report on the CIA’s secret prisons. But a few aspects within it are clear, if you’ve been following the few-and-far-between hearings of the committee since 2009. Intelligence on counterterrorism has been doctored to deceive. The report says torture provided little or no useful intelligence. Our intellocrats insist it did. If so, should we keep the implements of inhumanity in the toolbox of intelligence?

The CIA says it wants to turn the page on this unpublished chapter. You can’t turn the page if you haven’t read it. The fact that torture is an indelible stain on the honor of the United States cannot remain an issue for another day. Print the report, take the testimony and let some light dispel this darkness.