Report: CIA Deputy Director Helped Cover Up Detainee Death

Created: April 01, 2010 10:16 | Last updated: July 31, 2020 00:00

That’s a shocking account about Steve Kappes, then the powerful associate deputy CIA director for operations, provided by The Washington Post’s Jeff Stein in a new Washingtonian profile of the powerful and widely respected deputy director:

According to an internal investigation, [Kappes] helped tailor the agency’s paper trail regarding the death of a detainee at a secret CIA interrogation facility in Afghanistan, known internally as the Salt Pit.

The detainee froze to death after being doused with water, stripped naked, and left alone overnight, according to reports in the Washington Post and Los Angeles Times. He was secretly buried and his death kept “off-the-books,” the Post said.

According to two former officials who read a CIA inspector general’s report on the incident, Kappes coached the base chief—whose identity is being withheld at the request of the CIA—on how to respond to the agency’s investigators. They would report it as an accident.

A CIA spokesman vigorously denied all aspects of that account to Stein, whose sources stand by it. I am filing a Freedom of Information Act request this morning for the CIA inspector general’s report allegedly implicating Kappes in the Salt Pit death.