It was 11pm, in the chill of January, but Daniel Jones needed a run around the Capitol.

During the winter of early 2014 Jones’s only chance for serenity was these late hours. The CIA was demanding his boss, Senate intelligence committee chairwoman Dianne Feinstein, fire him. Feinstein’s Republican colleagues, once supportive of Jones, were demanding he testify.

Testimony was treacherous. Sheldon Whitehouse, a Rhode Island senator and former federal prosecutor, warned Jones that asserting his rights against self-incrimination or seeking a lawyer’s counsel could give committee Republicans a political lever against his highly controversial work. The CIA would soon formally insist that the US justice department actually prosecute Jones, the Senate staffer who had devoted over six years of his life to investigating the CIA’s infamous post-9/11 torture program.



Jones, a former FBI counter-terrorism analyst, wanted to testify. The CIA had pushed him past the point where he could back down. Its lies, documented in a 6,700-page secret report which Jones was constantly rewriting that winter, were compounding: to Congress, to Barack Obama, to George W Bush, to the press, to the public. The lies were not random misstatements. They were directional, in the service of covering up the brutality of what it did to at least 119 terrorist suspects – some clearly innocent – it held in a global network of secret prisons. Jones was on the verge of exposing the coverup. As he saw it, the personalized intensity of the CIA’s attacks on him, and the unprecedented steps they were taking, validated the account he had compiled after combing through over 6m classified CIA documents.

Jones put his Bose earbuds in, cued up a Tragically Hip record, and ran.

It couldn’t be that long of a lap, just enough to clear his head and work the frustrations out. Jones would need to be back in the Senate intelligence committee’s secured, classified offices very soon. Each day brought a new calculation: it might be the last that the committee had access to its own classified report. The CIA had gone “into war mode” with its congressional overseers, Jones told the Guardian. There was no choice but to work deeply into the night, leaving Capitol Hill at 3 or 4 in the morning, with breaks only for a run, and then back to work by 8 or 9 to repeat the cycle.

Less than a year had passed since the CIA had communicated to the Senate that its exhaustive torture report, drawn from millions of the agency’s own documents, was significantly incorrect. Less than a year had passed since Jones, unbeknownst to the CIA, had locked in a committee safe crucial portions of one such record, called the Panetta Review, in which the CIA had come to the same conclusions about torture as Jones had. But now the agency was letting the committee know it was not playing around – and that it was coming for Jones himself.

From August to September 2013 Jones had more than a dozen meetings with agency officials lasting 60 hours to attempt to reconcile their objections with findings in his 6,700-page classified report. It got to the point where Jones would take a whiteboard with him. That way, he could sketch out the timelines he found in CIA cables for when the agency learned specific aspects of its terrorism intelligence. He attempted to demonstrate contradictions from what the CIA said publicly – and how the claimed basis for those CIA statements occurred before this-or-that torture session the agency said was the genesis of the information.

“It should be noted that at no point in those discussions did [Senate] staff ask CIA to reconcile the CIA June 2013 response to the Panetta Review,” said CIA spokesman Ryan Trapani. “In fact, at no time in those discussions did [committee] staff indicate that they had a copy of the Panetta Review.”

In September 2013, Jones told Feinstein that continuing such fact-free discussions was pointless. Feinstein was concerned Jones was too close to the report to be objective, but she backed his decision. With the report stuck in limbo, she gave him a new challenge: redo the report, incorporating aspects of the CIA’s response, and putting what they found to be wrong about that response in the footnotes.



“Basically, her thing was: make them own their response,” Jones said. The effect was to expand a 250-page executive summary to over 500 pages, “doubling the amount of information”, all as the CIA continued to object. The agency and the committee were arraying for battle.

Just before Thanksgiving, Feinstein formally wrote to CIA director John Brennan requesting the entire 1,000-plus page Panetta Review. Jones had not taken the full document back from the satellite location, only the sections necessary to show busy senators that the agency concluded it had misled its political masters about the futility of its torture. The CIA said it would not provide it. This time, it would be Feinstein’s allies on the committee who escalated.

On 17 December, the CIA sent its choice for its next top attorney, Caroline Krass, to the committee for a nomination hearing. Shortly before the hearing, a CIA attorney, Darrin Hostetler, met with Jones in private, once again sparring over the agency’s response. Once again, Jones reminded Hostetler that the Panetta Review supported his conclusions. “I’m done talking to you, Dan,” Hostetler said, ending the meeting. An agency official who worked with Jones at the satellite location apologized to Jones for Hostetler’s behavior.



During the hearing, Mark Udall, a Colorado Democrat, lit into Krass. Unexpectedly, Udall mentioned the existence of the Panetta Review in public for the first time, demanding the disclosure of the document. Among the reasons for Udall’s fervor: in August 2013, after the CIA had condemned the committee report in contradiction of the Panetta Review, its former chief lawyer Stephen Preston told Udall in writing that the agency provided the committee with “inaccurate information related to aspects of the [torture] program” – a major point the CIA was now disputing.



Jones was visible on the staff dias behind Udall. Hostetler walked out of the hearing.

“Then things totally went to hell,” Jones said.

Unbeknownst to Jones, Udall or Feinstein, the public reference to the Panetta Review so alarmed the CIA as to prompt a milestone event in its history. Since 2009, the CIA had maintained a firewalled network on which the Senate could view internal documents relevant to its torture inquiry. It was known as RDINet, for “rendition, detention and interrogation.” By mutual agreement, the CIA was not supposed to access the Senate’s side of the network for any reason aside from picayune IT help. But at least five agency officials would surreptitiously transgress the network firewalls, view the Senate investigators’ work, and reconstruct Jones’s emails. Their rationale, established in a subsequent internal investigation, was to determine if the Senate deliberately exploited an evident flaw in the architecture of the network to digitally acquire the Panetta Review – which they did not want the Senate to have.

It was an extreme step. After Congress overhauled the CIA in the 1970s, the agency was not supposed to spy on Americans domestically except in extremely circumscribed circumstances. Now it was turning its spywork onto the elected officials tasked with overseeing it.



The CIA had gone into war mode Daniel Jones

“Every officer is clearly, I would say rigorously, trained that CIA is a foreign intelligence service. We have a legal mandate to conduct intelligence operations on non-American entities ... It’s very clear, the distinction, and then elaborate, the working out of what may and may not be done,” said Glenn Carle, a retired CIA officer.

Carle continued: “For the agency to penetrate a firewalled network used by the United States Senate is flat criminal activity. There’s no discussion about it. I’m literally laughing. You can’t rationalize that.”

Oregon Democratic senator Ron Wyden flatly called it “spying on our staff”. The CIA vigorously disputes that characterization. CIA director Brennan, whom Carle praises as an “honorable guy”, was informed about the firewall breach almost as soon as the agency began its fateful operations.

Beginning on 9 January 2014, agency officials created a “dummy account” that looked to the network like it came from Jones’s team, something beyond the limits of the 2009 agreements between the committee and the CIA about network access. They logged in, searched for the Panetta Review on the Senate side of the network and found it. The next day, they searched their own side to determine if they had the Panetta Review. They didn’t find it, presumed they might have been hacked, and set to find out what happened. They took screenshots of what they found. Yet never once did they discuss their findings with Jones, whose technical ineptitude might have disabused them of the theory that he had either deliberately hacked a classified network or been savvy enough to exploit a vulnerability.



CIA headquarters at Langley. 9 January 2014 Facebook Twitter Pinterest Photograph: AP

According to a subsequent inspector-general report, an unnamed CIA official – whom Vice News’s Jason Leopold has reported is Hostetler – got the agency’s Counterintelligence Center involved on 9 January by saying there was a “forthcoming D/CIA tasking”, a reference to Brennan. The unnamed official said Brennan wanted a report by “that afternoon” into Senate use of the network, stretching from 1 March 2009 to 31 December 2013. The CIA inspector general, David Buckley, would later find that “conflicting information” prevented him from determining “whether any of D/CIA Brennan’s senior staff, much less the DCI himself, approved any of the taskings.” But an agency attorney, unusually, gave an operational order.

Brennan learned at least the outline of what would become the breach on 9 January, the very first day it was conceived. The director would later say he knew then of some review, but did not specifically recall if anyone briefing him explained how they knew the location of, among other documents, the Panetta Review. Brennan discussed the issue with CIA personnel over the next two days, and tasked them to “use whatever means necessary” to find out how it was that the documents appeared on the Senate side of the firewall. Brennan said he only asked “are we sure” the documents were genuine CIA material and that he desired a better understanding of how RDINet worked.

[The CIA] was turning its spywork onto the elected officials tasked with overseeing it

While Brennan would later say he denied directing anyone at the CIA to examine the Senate’s use of the system, the technical staff, examined and passed around screenshots of what was on the Senate network drives. By 11 January – a Saturday – the CIA official Vice identified as Hostetler spoke with Brennan and learned Brennan had discussed the issue with Denis McDonough, the White House chief of staff and a powerful ally. The official would later say he believed himself authorized by Brennan “to gather the necessary agency personnel and components who would normally be involved in such an effort”.

Hostetler, through a representative, declined to speak with the Guardian. Nor did the White House make McDonough available for an interview. But an official said: “Neither Denis McDonough nor anyone else at the White House was notified of the searches before they began. As such, and to be sure, the White House did not authorize them.”

On Monday, 13 January, a meeting gathered, chaired by the third-highest ranking official at CIA, Meroe Park, and attended by Counterintelligence Center personnel. Their concern was determining if there was an “innocent” or nefarious explanation for the Senate’s acquisition of the Panetta Review, something Brennan would need to know. The meeting heard how it would be possible to perform an operation to find out, one that would involve intrusive digital forensics on their Senate overseers. An attendee would later say no one in attendance objected.





Brennan learned of this discussion the next day, 14 January. Multiple official accounts have Brennan essentially alarmed to hear that senior counterintelligence officials were involved in what could easily be understood as spying on the Senate. Brennan indicated a concern that the optics of the situation were perilous for the CIA. He ordered the work stopped – what he would tell the inspector general was a “stand down” order. The official Vice reported is Hostetler characterized it merely as a “pause”.



On 15 January 2014, Brennan called an emergency discussion with Feinstein and top committee Republican Saxby Chambliss. They met in a secured room on the Hill. Brennan had brought the acting top CIA lawyer, Robert Eatinger, whom Jones had discovered had provided legal advice to the agency’s Counterterrorist Center, which was deeply involved in the torture. If Brennan was worried, he did not convey that to the senators.

Brennan read a statement. He revealed that the agency had conducted a “search” of the computer network it had set up for the Senate – unlike every previous investigation at the agency, the CIA had demanded it only produce documentation on torture at a facility it controlled – and discovered that the Senate investigators had inappropriate access to the Panetta Review. The staffers, he said, had to be “disciplined”. A CIA network, Brennan was implying, had been compromised. (The CIA would not comment on this meeting, but pointed to a 27 January letter from Brennan to Feinstein to characterize it.)

Jones understood Brennan’s statement to be a demand for the senators to fire him. Brennan didn’t use his name, but Jones was the chief investigator, the one constantly and most consistently working at the CIA facility. On multiple levels, Jones was shocked. Not only was the director of the CIA telling his legislative overseers that their choice to conduct oversight was unacceptable, he was revealing that the network operated in a manner that the Senate thought “was impossible”, with the CIA able to access the Senate’s investigative work.

Even more startling: although someone at the CIA in 2010 had placed the Panetta Review on the Senate side of the network, Brennan was suggesting that Jones was a master hacker, able to force his way into the CIA’s classified files. In truth, Jones was barely tech-literate: “I am really good at Microsoft Word. That’s it.”

But Brennan wasn’t describing the basis for believing his claims. Instead, he told Chambliss and Feinstein the search would not be the CIA’s last. To protect the security of an agency network, Brennan said, the agency would need to conduct more searches, ostensibly to find whatever vulnerability he implied Jones had exploited, and proposed a joint search with Senate assistance.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Photograph: Mandel Ngan/AFP/Getty Images

Feinstein, in a letter sent two days later, refused. She requested that Brennan not conduct the searches, offering to suspend staff access to the network, and reminded him of the “separation of powers issues” at stake in the CIA taking such an aggressive step against the Senate.

But despite both Feinstein’s refusal and Brennan’s “stand down” order, the CIA continued looking deeper into the Senate’s use of the network.

On 16 January, according to CIA documents acquired through the Freedom of Information Act by Vice News’s Leopold, the agency called upon a digital unit called the Cyber Blue Team, which hunts for vulnerabilities in agency networks. The next day – the day Feinstein put her refusal to join an inquiry into her staff in writing to Brennan – Cyber Blue Team reviewed “forensically reconstructed emails” between Senate staffers only accessible on their side of RDINet. The team prepared a report that same day assessing the Senate use of the network, delivering it to “senior agency leadership” on 21 January.

Jones had been able to convince Senate Republicans naturally inclined to believe the CIA that his meager tech skills undermined Brennan’s accusation. But that could hardly win them over in what they were seeing as a battle between the CIA and Senate Democrats. Combative, Jones was prepared to testify about the episode. But while he had no family and little to lose, several of his colleagues on the investigative staff had spouses, children and career ambitions. They would be the casualties of escalation. He opted against testimony. The option would ultimately be overtaken by events.

The CIA’s move against the Senate committee quickly showed signs of backfiring. In late January, Buckley, the CIA’s inspector general, confronted Brennan about the on-network searches of the Senate investigators. He told Brennan that he needed to open an investigation – and Brennan responded by ordering Buckley to investigate. But Buckley went further than Brennan apparently calculated, and referred the matter to the US justice department. Suddenly, the CIA was back in a position its leaders thought it had escaped – in the crosshairs of potential prosecution.

Buckley – who declined comment to the Guardian – told the committee of his referral on 4 February, only a week after he started examine the breach. It leaked to the New York Times on 4 March.

Agency attorney Eatinger launched what the CIA considered a response necessitated by a theft concern and the committee considered a counter-gambit. On 7 February, the senior lawyer made his own criminal referral to the justice department: this one on Jones, ostensibly for improper network access. Eatinger had a conflict: Jones’s narrative referred to his role in the torture program 1,600 times. It took mere weeks for an account of Senate staff taking the Panetta Review from the CIA offsite location to leak to reporters. To Jones, the whole thing validated the apocryphal credo of spywork: deny everything, admit nothing, make counter-accusations.

Everything had escalated past the point of no return. Jones had finished his edits and rewrites to the committee report. It awaited a Senate vote on declassification. But now all of that was overshadowed by a fight with the CIA that had moved into the realm of back and forth criminal accusation.

Jones thought the accusation was self-evidently absurd, enough to discredit the agency as engaged in bald-faced retaliation and wounding itself politically. “I was wrong about that. It was actually pretty astute of them,” he recollected.

Efforts at de-escalation failed. In mid-January, within days of the network search, Brennan briefed the Senate majority leader, Democrat Harry Reid of Nevada. Reid, who is close to Feinstein, told him that in the interests of avoiding a crisis, Brennan ought to apologize. Brennan flatly refused, insisting the agency had nothing to apologize for.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Photograph: J Scott Applewhite/AP

The White House counsel, Kathryn Ruemmler, attempted to contain the damage. Ruemmler came to the Hill that winter, in a series of meetings with both the full committee and its leadership, to take the temperature of Senate-CIA relations down from their white-hot level. According to participants in those meetings, if Brennan was unyielding, Ruemmler was balanced. Feinstein brought up the 2010 document disappearance as a prologue for the current imbroglio. Ruemmler told her she had a valid point.

Reid, a pivotal ally for the White House on Capitol Hill, did not want to be backed into a corner. After the criminal referral, Reid spoke to McDonough and conveyed that if Brennan was unwilling to apologize, he was not willing to defend Brennan should the episode become public. McDonough was noncommittal. A week later, Reid received a phone call from Barack Obama.



To Reid’s surprise, the president defended the CIA’s actions. Obama rattled off the CIA’s side of the story: the Senate staff had taken CIA documents and the agency had no choice but to handle the matter as it did.

“Mr President,” Reid said, “I wish you could hear yourself.”

According to a former senior Senate aide, the episode stiffened Reid’s inclination to defend Feinstein to the hilt. In early March, Reid contacted Feinstein, who was considering exposing the episode, and assured her of his full support in the battle to come. “We gave them ample opportunity” to settle the issue, he told her.

On 11 March, Jones got word that Feinstein was going to say something on the Senate floor. He had written her a speech detailing the origins and developments of the oversight battle with Langley, but he didn’t know if Feinstein would actually deliver it. Feinstein got along well with Brennan on other matters, and taking on Brennan carried the risk of taking on Obama, the president Brennan had cultivated since Obama’s first campaign.

Instead, Feinstein laid into the CIA with an intensity unseen since the 1970s Church Committee, where legislators described an unbridled agency that spied on Americans as eagerly as they spied on foreign adversaries. The agency searches “may have undermined the constitutional framework essential to effective congressional oversight of intelligence activities or any other government function,” Feinstein charged.

She foreshadowed the next fight within the committee and wrapped it in the constitution: declassifying the torture report. Not only would a public version ensure torture “will never again be considered or permitted”, Feinstein said, but the CIA’s reprisal against Jones meant the Senate faced a “defining moment” testing whether the committee could effectively perform its oversight, “or whether our work can be thwarted by those we oversee”.

Feinstein’s speech occurred hours before Brennan had committed to a public appearance at the Council on Foreign Relations. Moderator Andrea Mitchell could not refrain from soliciting a response to Feinstein. To the incredulity of Jones, Brennan, who had been at the very least briefed on all of this from inception – who had told Feinstein and Chambliss on 15 January it had happened – denied everything.

“As far as the allegations of, you know, CIA hacking into, you know, Senate computers, nothing could be further from the truth. I mean we wouldn’t do that. I mean, that’s just beyond the – you know, the scope of reason in terms of what we would do,” Brennan said.

Mr President, I wish you could hear yourself Senator Harry Reid

The years of clashing with the CIA behind closed doors had now exploded into public view. The CIA contacted reporters to provide the agency’s preferred version of events, and observers took a scalpel to distinctions between searching and hacking. The implications of Feinstein’s charges were profound. If the CIA would lie about torture, what else would it lie about? If it would spy on its legislative overseers, who wouldn’t the agency spy on?

Shocked by Brennan’s denial, Reid had the Senate sergeant-at-arms conduct his own investigation. Reid wrote to the attorney general, Eric Holder, on 19 March to take into account the “serious separation of powers implications” of the CIA’s search, which he said “seemingly attempted to intimidate [the agency’s] overseers”.

The sergeant-at-arms inquiry has been a forgotten aspect of the saga. One knowledgeable source said it ended up inconclusive. CIA’s Trapani noted: “Despite pledges of an investigation by the Senate sergeant-at-arms, there is no corresponding public record that sheds light on or explains fully the actions of [committee] staff.”

Feinstein’s speech had another impact, this one intentional. On 3 April, the committee voted 11-3 to authorize a declassified version of the torture report. Senate Republicans who had long rejected the report’s findings joined Democrats who embraced them. Even Chambliss voted in favor of declassification, saying : “We need to get this behind us.”

Yet the CIA had an ally Feinstein may not have appreciated: the Oval Office. The White House announced that same day that the CIA itself would lead the declassification review. Formally, a White House official told the Guardian, Director of National Intelligence James Clapper spearheaded it. The intelligence community would effectively choose which of its embarrassments to spare the public from learning.

Carl Levin, a longtime Democratic senator from Michigan who retired in 2015, said he was “disappointed” with the White House’s overall lack of support for the committee.

“The White House declined to lead the declassification effort, and instead gave the declassification review to the very agency, the CIA, that the Senate committee was investigating,” Levin told the Guardian.

Brennan’s major ally at the White House was someone Jones knew well from a decade before. Chief of staff McDonough had encouraged Jones to join the security apparatus when Jones was an aspirant Senate staffer and McDonough was a Senate leadership aide. McDonough was one of Obama’s closest confidants, with him on his Senate staff , through the presidential campaign and to his tenure as a deputy national security adviser. He assumed his current job right as Brennan, another White House senior staffer and campaign veteran, went to Langley.

“Denis played a much more central role in this than any of us thought he would,” Jones said. “The feeling was that he just backed CIA.”

A criminal prosecution does not have to advance particularly far to ruin someone’s life. The arcane provisions of Senate rules place senior staff in an exquisite financial bind. Such staff are banned from receiving gifts worth more than a pittance, as those gifts might be used to purchase influence. But included in that category is pro-bono legal assistance.

While senators themselves can get legal aid if needed through campaign funding, they cannot themselves provide it to their staff. Feinstein and her predecessor as committee chair, Jay Rockefeller, set up a defense fund, according to a knowledgable source, but couldn’t actually use it to protect aides facing legal jeopardy.

Jones learned all of that when he had to seek legal representation. The cost of the retainer quoted to him made him wince: as a teacher, an FBI officer and a Senate staffer, “I had not amassed a large amount of wealth.”

But Jones was single. He did not have children. The potential prosecution of his colleagues on the committee staff who did was having a “devastating” effect. Emotionally, psychologically, the search scandal hung over everything they did, especially as they were about to do final battle with the CIA over declassification. The longer the process draws out, he said, “you can destroy someone financially.”

But on 30 April, less than a month after the committee voted to declassify the report’s executive summary, the justice department sent word to the CIA attorney that it had “no prosecutorial interest” in pursuing a case against the Senate staffers. It would be the beginning of the Senate’s vindication on this controversy.

Jones took no victory lap. His pace was grueling, and they had not even begun the declassification discussions. The Republican senators were still musing about making him testify. The CIA-Senate fight loomed over every conversation with the White House, and in the committee. During that spring and summer, Brennan would still arrive on Capitol Hill to brief the senators on various intelligence matters. Substantive discussion would be consumed by legislators demanding more information about the various investigations around the search, and Brennan declining.

Brennan’s position became untenable on 18 July. Buckley, the inspector general, concluded in a classified report that at least five CIA officials – including, conspicuously, two attorneys – “improperly accessed [committee] Majority staff shared drives on the RDINet”. In an ironic echo of the torture report’s findings that the CIA misled the government about its detainee abuse, Buckley called out a “lack of candor” among the three technical staff he interviewed. And he found that Eatinger’s prosecutorial referral from February was “unfounded” as it went beyond the findings that the Cyber Blue Team had reached about Senate behavior on RDINet.

Although Buckley concluded that the committee and the CIA did not reach “signed memorand[a] of understanding”, his report attached several 2009-era CIA-Senate letters referring to consensus that the only CIA access to RDINet’s committee side would come from IT staff “for IT maintenance and support”. (“I think we are all in agreement on the computer issue,” an unnamed CIA official had written to the committee back on 8 June 2009.) One of those CIA documents was even called Memorandum of Understanding. It would be an issue in a skirmish to come.

The CIA didn’t want the committee staff to have access to Buckley’s report, even in classified form, as it contained the names of agency officials and sensitive units implicated in the episode. But within days, Buckley conveyed his findings to committee senators. While Jones could not attend a members-only briefing, he quickly learned that senators were told, unequivocally, that he had done nothing wrong.

“At that point, I felt significantly vindicated,” Jones said.

“The CIA’s own inspector general found that CIA inappropriately searched the Senate’s computers,” said Levin, the former senator.

“The CIA and the White House held no one accountable for these actions.”

Feinstein had a conversation with Brennan shortly afterward. On 31 July, Feinstein put out a statement that included a devastating line: “Director Brennan apologized for these actions.” It was less categorical than many on the committee wanted. Vice’s Leopold would ultimately acquire and publish a letter from Brennan formally apologizing, but the director never sent it, opting to apologize “in person for the specific search that went beyond his instructions at the time,” the CIA’s Trapani said. But Feinstein got her desired result: headlines around the world indicated Brennan had taken a step back. Udall immediately called on Brennan to resign. Speculation shot through Washington over whether he would.



“He admitted that the CIA’s actions were inappropriate, but he continues to deny that searching through a Senate committee’s files and emails is spying on the committee. It’s pretty bizarre when the CIA director doesn’t seem to know what the word ‘spying’ means,” said Wyden.

Jay Rockefeller, the West Virginia Democrat and former committee chairman, did not join Udall in calling for Brennan’s resignation. But, he said, “I did express my profound disappointment to Director Brennan on more than one occasion. My assessment at the time was that, despite Director Brennan having perhaps irreparably damaged his credibility with much of the committee, he was still capable of at least partially redeeming himself by holding people at the CIA accountable and publicly apologizing.” There would be no such public apology.

The CIA and the White House held no one accountable for these actions Former senator Carl Levin

Barely half a year after the CIA had turned its powers against its overseers, the committee had won two consecutive victories. Chambliss, the panel’s top Republican, called on the CIA to deal with the five offending officials “very harshly”. But the fight was far from over.

Brennan announced he would convene an “accountability board” to examine the network-search debacle. More crucially, the very next day, the CIA was set to deliver to the committee the version of the torture report it was comfortable with the public seeing, as Congress and the political world departed for the traditional August recess. If the committee had wanted to release that heavily blacked-out version, it could have done so, and avoided its next battle with the CIA – and the White House.

Unlike in 2010, the White House would not mediate between the agency and the committee. It would simply back John Brennan.

Barack Obama, the president who ended the CIA’s torture program by executive order his second full day in office, entered the White House briefing room on 1 August 2014. “We tortured some folks,” he memorably said.

What Obama said afterward received less attention, but Jones can recount it to this day.

“It’s important for us not to feel too sanctimonious in retrospect about the tough job those folks [at the CIA] had,” said the president.

White House briefing room. 1 August 2014 Facebook Twitter Pinterest Photograph: Rex/Shutterstock

The proposed declassifications the CIA would deliver back to the committee reflected that sentiment and far more. It would be difficult for a reader to feel “sanctimonious” about torture, as it would be difficult to understand what the CIA had actually done.



When Jones had drafted the report over the years, he had not taken a hardline approach to transparency. The former FBI official deliberately obscured many things he considered reasonably outside the public’s knowledge. No draft of the report had ever contained the true name of a CIA official involved in the program, nor the countries where the black sites were. All were given cover names, and not even the agency’s official cover names at that. It was how it had been in previous committee reports. Jones considered it uncontroversial.

But the CIA fought release of all of that. The entire saga of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the admitted 9/11 mastermind whom the CIA waterboarded the most – a story the report told at great length – was blacked out, known in official parlance as “redaction”. The CIA would not permit publication of the names of the 119 detainees the committee could find the agency detained. No country’s cover name could be public. No pseudonym of a CIA officer could be public.

“They redacted all references to Allah,” Jones said. “Like, really? Under what national security concern?”

The effect of the redactions was to obscure the story of what happened. CIA officials involved in the torture had persisted, thrived and been promoted within the agency, including individuals whom Jones had concluded helped mislead the Bush administration and the public. Jones had told, with cover names, that aspect of the story. Readers would have found it difficult to follow detainees from black site to black site, and more so to place pseudonymous interrogators at any. “You couldn’t follow the narrative arc,” Jones said.

The CIA’s black magic marker looked cynical when considering that numerous senior agency officials involved with torture had published memoirs covering much of this material. CIA director George Tenet, ex-lawyer John Rizzo, even Jose Rodriguez, whose destruction of videotaped evidence of torture had occasioned the report – all had books out, books that had been cleared by the CIA’s pre-publication review. The agency, with support from the White House, had permitted Hollywood film-makers unprecedented access for the 2012 film Zero Dark Thirty, which told the CIA’s torture story the way the agency wanted it told – and in contradiction of what the Senate had found actually happened.

After years of fighting with the CIA for access and accuracy, and brawling over accusations of criminality, Jones’s new brief was to argue for rolling back the redactions. In 2010, when the CIA removed documents from the Senate side of RDINet, both sides turned to the White House to mediate the dispute. Now, the Senate negotiators were across the table from the CIA and the White House together. Meetings that lasted “hours and hours” from August to December occurred at the White House – some even in the Situation Room – or on Capitol Hill, not the CIA. Jones remembered going practically paragraph by paragraph over declassification in the 525-page executive summary.

For the CIA’s part, cover names for agency officials would end up being fig leaves, once attentive readers began poring over the report.

“A pseudonym itself is little protection when a host of other information about that officer is made public and will be seen and possibly utilized by adversaries and foreign intelligence services,” said agency spokesman Trapani.

Trapani called the declassification discussions “designed to preserve the committee’s narrative of the CIA program for the public, while also protecting critical national security interests – including the safety and security of US personnel and ongoing intelligence operations.”



McDonough was a presence in the meetings, even those where he delegated attendance to National Security Council staffers or White House attorneys. The fact that the White House chief of staff would personally oversee the negotiations spoke to the gravity of the issue. Jones cannot recall a single issue on which McDonough or his team backed the Senate, and only when the agency would agree to relent would McDonough concur. There would be no help from the White House.

“During the process,” a White House official said, “Denis represented the views of the president and advocated on behalf of the redactions the inter-agency [process] assessed necessary to protect sensitive information.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Photograph: Nicholas Kamm/AFP/Getty Images

McDonough’s position was particularly startling to Jones considering that Obama had taken an explicit position on classification. An executive order Obama issued in December 2009, intended to enforce his pledge to run the “most transparent administration in history”, explicitly barred the agencies from “conceal[ing] violations of law, inefficiency, or administrative error”. Citing national security exemptions required an argument for why release would harm US “national defense or foreign relations”, rather than being an end of discussion.

“The administration didn’t come to us with arguments for why they were redacting information, other than ‘this is hurtful to national security.’ What we would do would be to go to the statute and say, ‘This is unclassified, because the law says this, this, this and this,’ and they would just say, ‘Well, it’s a national security issue, we can’t release this,” Jones said. “‘The world will end if this information is out,’ and then you find out it’s been out for four years – either they’ve officially declassified it, or they allowed CIA officers to talk about it in books.”

Sometimes the administration wouldn’t even do that; or after the negotiators conceded to the Senate there was no national security basis for classification, the White House and CIA had a fallback contention, one for which Jones said made the discussions like beating his head against a wall.

“There’s two arguments. You would put the lives of the CIA officers at risk, the lives of their families at risk. And then, the latter one, which always seemed to be the real reason because the other stuff just didn’t hold any water, was that this will really hurt morale at the CIA, this is a morale issue. And they would openly say that, as if that was a reasonable response to making something classified,” said Jones.

‘The world will end if this information is out,’ and then you find out it’s been out for years Daniel Jones

At those points, Jones would pull out Obama’s own executive order and quote it to the CIA, the White House staff, even McDonough. “We had it with us at every one of our meetings,” he said.

Nor was the agency consistent. It would not permit the Senate to publish pseudonyms of its officers. But it relented on allowing the report to use them for the contractor psychologists James Mitchell and Bruce Jessen, who designed the torture program and even participated in interrogations. Although any argument about protecting the safety of the lives and families of agency officials would apply equally to Mitchell and Jessen, the report calls them, unlike any CIA employee, “Swigert” and “Dunbar”.

The drawn-out discussions would not always involve staff. In mid-October, McDonough flew to San Francisco to speak with Feinstein without Jones present. Feinstein pleaded for the use of agency cover names to appear in the report, but McDonough refused, even as she asked for fewer and fewer of them.

“It was a battle we ended up losing. We wanted to include our own pseudonyms so you could follow a particular individual through the report. We went right up until the end,” Jones said.

But the White House and the CIA could afford a drawn-out process in a way Feinstein and her staff could not. It was a midterm election year, and the Democrats were widely forecast to lose the Senate, a circumstance that came to pass on election day, 4 November. Feinstein lost her gavel. A GOP that had vacillated between unsupportive of the torture inquiry and hostile to it would be in power come January. The race was truly on.

“After the election, the declassification of the report is at stake, whether it ever becomes public,” Jones said. “We were not in a position of power.”

Exasperation with McDonough exploded immediately after the Democrats lost the election. McDonough attended a Senate Democratic caucus meeting. Feinstein, whose demeanor is universally described as calm, excoriated him – “just fucking floored him”, the former senior Senate aide said – accusing McDonough of being relieved the Democrats lost the chamber because now the administration could run out the clock on making the report public. Feinstein said McDonough had violated agreements they had reached on redactions and called the administration duplicitous.

McDonough’s response echoed Obama’s August press conference. He said that the families of hardworking CIA officials would be vulnerable in the event that the Senate’s disclosure of their identities led to physical danger. It was an incendiary charge, given that no CIA agent’s real name appeared even in the classified version of the report.

Most party-caucus meetings center around a lunch discussion and break when senators need to leave for votes. But anger at McDonough, both personal and as a proxy for the White House, was white-hot. They held McDonough at the meeting through the voting and came back to vent more spleen.

“They really said flat out to McDonough, ‘You’re protecting what happened, you’re no better than what had happened in the Bush administration,’” said the ex-senior aide present.

“This was a very spirited conversation,” said Wyden, who was in attendance.

“It was very tense,” said Jones, one of the few staffers at the meeting.

There was another issue, one not before revealed, that went down to the wire – the very last thing on which McDonough and the CIA would not yield an inch.

It’s pretty bizarre when the CIA director doesn’t seem to know what the word ‘spying’ means Senator Ron Wyden

Senior CIA officials had assured the Senate that the personnel performing the interrogations were vetted rigorously. Former director Michael Hayden told the committee in 2007 that “all of those involved in the questioning of detainees are carefully chosen and screened for demonstrated professional judgment and maturity.”

It was not always true. The committee had learned that some CIA interrogators had records of violent acts in their personal lives – to include domestic abuse and even sexual assault. Even without listing names or pseudonyms, Langley refused to let that fact become public, no matter how tenuously connected to US national security it was.

“CIA conducted extensive analysis of the possible use of possible pseudonyms in the [Senate] report and determined that to do so would risk publicly revealing the true names of those officers, as well as the names of officers not associated with the program, and the identification of their family members,” said the CIA’s Trapani. “The administration did not support making disclosures that would put US government personnel and their families at additional risk.”

It was Friday 5 December 2014. The lame-duck session of Congress was nearly ended, and with it, Democratic control of the Senate. The committee, the CIA and McDonough had reached agreement on the entire report, except for the section – a single paragraph – alluding to the questionable backgrounds of its interrogators.

McDonough would not back down. “It was a long meeting,” Jones remembered, and the CIA was not even present. McDonough said the administration would agree to release the report “as is”. But first the paragraph had to change.

The meeting became an endurance test. Finally, the committee representatives found a degree of acceptable language from McDonough.

Page 470 of the report, long after the narrative had ended, referred to “a number of personnel whose backgrounds include notable derogatory information calling into question their eligibility for employment, their access to classified information, and their participation in CIA interrogation activities.” Most of that information was known to the agency. The report continued: “This group of officers included individuals who, among other issues, had engaged in inappropriate detainee interrogations, had workplace anger management issues, and had reportedly admitted to sexual assault.”

“I was like, ‘Alright, this doesn’t do it justice, but at least people will get the idea,’” Jones said. “This was done to water down the backgrounds of people involved in the program.”

Six years after Jones began looking into CIA torture, it seemed like a section of the Senate report would finally see the light of day. But at the end of the meeting, the committee received an unexpected surprise. John Kerry, the secretary of state, longtime Massachusetts senator, war hero and 2004 Democratic presidential nominee, called Feinstein. It would be a near-death experience for the torture inquiry.

Kerry was urging his old Senate colleagues to delay the report’s release. It was a tenuous moment globally, he argued. The coalition against the Islamic State would be jeopardized by an inflammatory report about the CIA torturing Muslims. Americans’ lives and property abroad could be jeopardized.

By that point, there were many aspects of the CIA’s entreaties that no longer held sway with Democratic senators. But Kerry could not be dismissed out of hand. Many senators on the committee had close working relationships, even friendships, with Kerry. They knew him not to inflate threats.

Technically, all Kerry was asking was a delay in the report’s release. But the political reality, with the Republicans set to take over the Senate, was that delay was fatal. There was another inescapable certainty. Should the worst occur, and violence follow the release of the torture report, every senator whose name graced its cover would have to answer for it.



Had James Clapper, the director of national intelligence, not intervened at that critical moment, it is possible that the Democratic senators would have capitulated and buried the report.

By the weekend, the committee received a five-page document prepared by Clapper’s office (ODNI), the entity nominally in charge of the 16 intelligence agencies. It purported to forecast the outcome of the report’s release. Jones described it as “a farce”.

ODNI’s assessment was riddled with factual errors, and from those errors extrapolated dire consequences, including violence and damage to intelligence relationships. It falsely claimed the report, even in classified form, identified countries that hosted black sites. By that point, even committee senators reliant on staff for details of the report could see how wrong it was. When asked, a senior ODNI official telegraphed indifference to the accuracy of the document. Jones recalls the official saying: “It doesn’t matter what’s in the report. It matters what people think is.”

If the administration’s goal was to suppress the torture report, Clapper pulled defeat from the jaws of victory. No longer were senators fixated on Kerry’s warning. According to multiple sources, they were convinced an administration they wanted badly to believe was on their side was willing to insult their intelligence, all in the service of helping the CIA cover up an act the president himself had vociferously opposed.

“It was a poorly done intelligence product with clear factual errors and it inaccurately described the study we were about to release,” said Rockefeller.

“Ultimately, yes, I think for some senators, the angle and clear errors in that intelligence assessment played a role in their decision to support the release of the redacted Executive Summary of the Study. My only regret is we did not work to declassify more.”

Timothy Barrett, an ODNI spokesman, said the directorship supported the redacted release of the summary but “had a duty to warn policymakers about the possible consequences of release of the report in order to enable preparation and effective measures to protect American citizens and interests. This assessment could not be limited to the text of the report in a vacuum, but had to consider the effect of its release in light of other information that had already been reported – and public perceptions.”

The report that’s out is not the report we would have chosen to put out Daniel Jones

On 9 December, the committee released the executive summary. It sent shockwaves through Washington and around the world, and demands for additional accountability swelled. But it yielded no riots, no violence and no death.

“That lack of violence does not reflect a lack of threats. In fact, the government took steps to mitigate threats — including from terrorists — in the wake of the report’s release,” Barrett said.

“The intelligence community stands by its assessment of the potential consequences from release of the report. Indeed, in discussions with senior representatives of the ODNI, members of the committee acknowledged that there were risks to releasing the report.”

Jones’s life had been consumed by the inquiry.

“Dan Jones always, always, tried to keep this focused on the facts,” said Wyden.

“He spent six years of his life riding point on this. I felt that every time we spoke about it, he was reflecting the kind of professionalism and objectivity, which is what under normal circumstances gets you a bipartisan inquiry.”

But Jones felt relief more than he felt victory, particularly when he observed the gap between what he wanted in the report’s executive summary and what the public ultimately saw.

“After the Senate is lost in November, and you’re not getting any sense of urgency from the White House or the CIA on the redaction process, and they’re holding their ground pretty firm, the report that’s out is not the report we would have chosen to put out. It is what it is.”

According to a White House official, the fact that the committee released a report that was “93% declassified” – a figure also cited by the CIA – testified to the “stringent review and the narrow criteria employed in determining redactions” – criteria intended to “obscure sensitive information whose release would pose a significant danger to our national security or to the security of US government personnel.”

Regarding the percentage of the review declassified, Jones observed: “It’s really what you redact, not the percentage. Are those redactions consistent with Obama’s executive order on declassification?”

Next: The CIA bashes the Senate report. The Obama administration buries it. Feinstein bans CIA torture legally, and Jones leaves the Senate.