John Rizzo served for 34 years as a lawyer at the CIA culminating with 7 years as the Agency’s chief legal officer. He is the author of Company Man: Thirty Years of Controversy and Crisis in the CIA, from which this article is adapted.

In the weeks after 9/11, the name Abu Zubaydah seemed to pop up daily at the five o’clock meeting that CIA Director George Tenet convened each night with the Agency’s counterterrorism brain trust. Shards of information about him were turning up in all sorts of independent, separate source reports. It was becoming apparent that Zubaydah was an essential al Qaeda player—especially when it came to organizing attacks, smuggling operatives across borders, procuring forged documents and arranging safe haven for terrorist fugitives and trainees. Apart from Osama bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahiri, he was considered the biggest, and most elusive, al Qaeda fish out there. The talk at the CIA reminded me of Where’s Waldo?—he seemed to be everywhere, and nowhere.

Then, in February of 2002, a new, promising lead about Zubaydah’s possible location in Pakistan appeared on the screen. Weeks earlier, the CIA’s equivalent of an APB was sent to stations around the world. The order was to take Zubaydah alive if at all possible. Now the CIA’s Counterterrorism Center (CTC) sprang into action, with Tenet cracking the whip—pressing for more information—every night. In the wee hours of March 28, 2002, the Agency hit the jackpot. A team of Pakistani commandos stormed into a house in Faisalabad, where they encountered both Zubaydah and a furious gunfight. In the process, Zubaydah was shot up badly, but taken into custody alive.


So now we had him. It was the best—actually the first—piece of good news for the Agency since 9/11. And as acting general counsel of the CIA, it was a development that would come to shape the next few years of my life—as well as America’s burgeoning “war on terror.” I didn’t know it then, but Zubaydah’s capture would set the stage for some of the most consequential, and controversial, legal choices the Bush administration would confront.

After he was whisked away to a secret CIA black site, Zubaydah’s health improved and the more he realized he wasn’t going to die, the more confident, the more arrogant, he grew. Zubaydah soon took to taunting our people, making clear that he knew far more about ongoing al Qaeda plots than he was ever going to tell us. They told Tenet at one of the five o’clock sessions in early March that the Agency needed to do something to change the equation with Zubaydah, to shift the dynamics of the interrogation. The “Joe Friday” approach was never going to work with him. Come up with something, and come up with it fast, the director instructed.

***

About a week later, a couple of our lawyers (our contingent at the CTC had tripled from three to nine since 9/11) came to my office. They told me about a different approach the CTC had just devised to deal with Zubaydah. It had a deceptively bland name: “Enhanced Interrogation Techniques,” and from the start they were called EITs for short. During my previous 25 years as an Agency lawyer, I had never heard of anything remotely like this.

Evidently aware of the distinct possibility that what they were proposing would scare the hell out of me, the CTC contingent prefaced their presentation with a number of assurances: The EITs they were proposing to employ on Zubaydah were not techniques the CTC had just dreamed up; with a couple of exceptions, the U.S. military had used them for years in training exercises (called SERE, for Survival, Evasion, Resistance, and Escape) on thousands of soldiers to prepare them in case they were captured and subjected to such methods by the enemy. Further, CTC analysts, psychologists and a couple of outside consultants had carefully culled only those EITs from the SERE menu that they believed best suited, and most likely, to break Zubaydah’s resistance. Finally, the EITs would be judiciously applied, beginning with the ones that were least coercive, for a limited period of time, and would end as soon as Zubaydah demonstrated that he was no longer resisting and was ready to cooperate. They had no intention of employing EITs any longer or any more harshly than was absolutely necessary. While I don’t remember them saying it exactly, their message was implicit: We want no part of torture.

I had been around the CIA long enough ... to develop a gut instinct about what could get the Agency—and its people—into trouble down the road. And this had huge, unprecedented trouble written all over it.

“OK,” I said, bracing myself. “Describe everything you’d like to do. In the order you’d do them. In detail, and take your time.”

And so they began. The following is my best recollection of the way the CTC guys described their proposed techniques to me. Later, there would come written documents, describing them in more detail (some techniques would be added and some would be subtracted from this list). But this is what I recall being told at the very beginning, on this day in my office in early April 2002, about the proposed EITs. It’s not easy to forget.

• Attention grasp: The interrogator would grab Zubaydah by the collar with both hands, pulling him closer to the interrogator.

• Walling: The interrogator would shove Zubaydah backward shoulder blades first, into a flexible false wall that would be designed to produce a loud noise. Zubaydah would have a protective collar placed on him to protect against whiplash.

• Facial hold: The interrogator, holding Zubaydah’s head immobile, would put one open palm on each side of his face, keeping fingertips away from Zubaydah’s eyes.

• Insult slap: The interrogator would slap Zubaydah in the face, taking care to keep his fingers spread and to strike between the chin and the earlobe. The idea would be to startle/humiliate Zubaydah and disabuse him of the notion that he wouldn’t be physically hit.

• Cramped confinement: The interrogator would put Zubaydah in a box—either a “big” one (allowing him to stand) for up to 18 hours, or a “small” one (where he would have to curl up) for up to two hours. For the small box, the interrogator would have the option to place a harmless insect inside. (At this point, I couldn’t resist interjecting: “Why an insect?” The response: “Zubaydah hates bugs. It’ll be something harmless, but he won’t know that.” The bug gambit, apparently, was not something ever done by the U.S. military in its SERE training.)

• Wall standing: The interrogator would have Zubaydah stand facing a wall from about four feet away, have him stretch his arms straight out in front of him, so that his fingers were touching the wall and could support his weight. He would be made to hold that position indefinitely, so as to induce discomfort or fatigue.

• Stress positions: The interrogator would have Zubaydah either sit on the floor with his legs extended in front of him and his arms raised over his head, or kneel on the floor while leaning back at a 45-degree angle. Again, the intent would be to cause discomfort or fatigue.

• Sleep deprivation: Zubaydah would be made to stay awake for up to 11 days at a time.

• Waterboarding: The interrogator would strap Zubaydah to an inclined bench, with his feet slightly elevated. A cloth would be placed over his forehead and eyes, and water would be applied to the cloth in a controlled manner—for 20 to 40 seconds from a height of 12 to 24 inches. The intention would be simulate the sensation of drowning. There was also another technique that I’m barred from describing that was so gruesome that the Justice Department later stopped short of approving it.

For an hour, the CTC briefers described the techniques, supplementing their verbal explanations with demonstrations (on each other) of some of the more relatively benign proposed EITs. I have to admit that I didn’t ask a lot of questions; I was left largely speechless. Some of the techniques they described sounded like something out of a Three Stooges slapstick routine. Others sounded sadistic and terrifying.

After the briefers left, I took a long walk around the headquarters compound, smoking a cigar and trying to process what I had just heard and to figure out what the hell to do next. What I had to think about—bugs in boxes and simulated drowning—would have been unimaginable to me only an hour before. My first reaction was to tell the CTC, at a minimum, to forget waterboarding. It just seemed so frightening, like a plot line from an Edgar Allan Poe story. Besides, I had been around the CIA long enough, had been through enough of its misadventures and controversies, to develop a gut instinct about what could get the Agency—and its people—into trouble down the road. And this had huge, unprecedented trouble written all over it.

Already my career had been pockmarked by episodes of crisis and controversy. I arrived in the mid-1970s in the wake of the Church Committee hearings, which I had watched as a young attorney (I figured then that if the CIA didn’t already have lawyers, it was going to need them). I had a front-row seat to the covert operations in Central America in the ’80s, the Iran-contra scandal later that decade, the Ames spy case in the early ’90s, the “dirty asset” flap a couple of years after that. My experience gave me confidence that I could squelch at least the more aggressive proposed EITs, then and there, if I wanted to. It would have been a relatively easy thing to do, actually. But over the next day or two, as I turned things over and over in my mind, I concluded that the issue was anything but easy. We were less than six months removed from 9/11; the nation was still in the throes of fear and dread about another catastrophic attack; cascading intelligence reports were indicating the threat of attack; and the CIA had in its custody the one guy who would likely know when, where and by whom the next plot would be carried out. And he was taunting and mocking us about it. At the same time, the CIA was being pilloried in Congress and the media for having been “risk averse” in the years leading up to 9/11—too unimaginative, too timid about dealing with the evil forces in the world.

With all of that churning in my head, I couldn’t shake the ultimate nightmare scenario: another attack happens, and Zubaydah gleefully tells his CIA handlers he knew all about it and boasts that we never got him to tell us about it in time. All because at the moment of reckoning, the Agency had shied away from doing what it knew was unavoidable, what was essential, to extract that information from him. And with hundreds and perhaps thousands of Americans again lying dead on the streets or in rubble somewhere, I would know deep down that I was at least in part responsible. In the final analysis, I could not countenance the thought of having to live with that.

Less than a week after the CTC gave me the EIT briefing, I attended a not-uncommon “rump” session in Tenet’s office after the daily five o’clock meeting. The topic was whether to move forward with the EIT proposal (because of the plan’s sensitivity, it was never discussed at the larger meeting in those early days). Tenet asked me if I thought the EITs were legal. My staff had done some hurried research on the torture statute and this was a moment I knew was coming.

“Well,” I responded, “some of the techniques seem OK, but others are very harsh, even brutal. What I can’t do is sit here and tell you now if it legally constitutes torture. And if it does meet the torture threshold, it doesn’t matter what the justification is, even if it’s being done to prevent another 9/11.” Everybody just looked at me. Understandably, nobody in the room found that response satisfying. Finally, someone—I believe it was the CTC chief, Jose Rodriguez—broke the silence and declared, “Our people won’t do anything that involves torture.”

“You’re damn right,” Tenet interjected. I couldn’t tell if their reaction was based on the law or their moral dictates, but it was exactly the right response. “Look,” I said, “let me take this to the Justice Department, to get something definitive, something in writing. We tell them everything we want to do, every detail about how we would conduct the EITs. And let them make the final legal call. And not just settle for a simple yes or no—we make them go on the record for every single one of the techniques, especially if it’s a yes.”

I was punting, of course, but it was a strategic punt. The Justice Department—specifically, its Office of Legal Counsel (OLC)—has always served as the final arbiter inside the executive branch for legal interpretation of federal statutes and the U.S. Constitution. I wanted a written OLC memo to give the Agency—for lack of a better term—legal cover. It would serve as something that we could keep, and wave around if necessary, in the months and years to come, when memories would fade or be conveniently altered to tack with the shifting political winds. An OLC legal memorandum—the executive branch’s functional equivalent of a Supreme Court opinion—would protect the Agency and its people forevermore. It would be as good as gold, I figured confidently. Too confidently, as things would turn out.

***

By this point—early April 2002—Zubaydah had been in custody for two weeks, and the Counterterrorism Center was more convinced than ever that he was holding out. Time was of the essence.

Right away, I called John Bellinger, legal adviser to the National Security Council, and in April we met with John Yoo, the number-two guy in the OLC, and Mike Chertoff, head of the Justice Department’s Criminal Division. Yoo had become the Bush administration’s designated go-to guy in the OLC for the most important and sensitive post-9/11 legal issues. I arrived at the meeting with two of our lawyers and described the proposal and the legal implications. The idea was to give them—Yoo, especially—enough detail either to get the formal legal review underway or to tell us we had lost our senses and that a lot of this stuff clearly constituted torture (not surprisingly, the bug in the box and the waterboarding elicited the bulk of their questions).

The meeting broke up with Yoo agreeing to start work on a memo. I emphasized that we didn’t have the luxury of time—Zubaydah was sitting in his cell, perhaps with knowledge of another imminent attack, and basically he was giving his interrogators the finger. That was as close as I got to advocating the EITs. I returned to the Agency and told our people that this initial meeting went about as well for the CIA as could be expected: We had not been summarily dismissed as lunatics or aspiring criminals.

Three months later, on July 13, the group assembled in Bellinger’s office again. Other than responding to OLC requests for additional, specific factual information, the Agency did not play a role in any of the OLC’s internal deliberations. By the end of the meeting, I knew that the OLC was going to write a memorandum giving a bright green light to the EITs.

When the 18-page memo arrived, the Agency quickly converted it into a detailed “guidance” cable that was sent to the black site where Zubaydah was being held—and the enhanced interrogations began. The site soon reported back that Zubaydah was still being resistant; accordingly, pursuant to the protocols that had been set up, headquarters then approved the use of waterboarding. Over a period of several days, the technique was applied 83 times (meaning each occasion where water was poured onto the cloth covering his face—not, as some critics would later charge, the number of times Zubaydah was actually strapped up for a session). Just days after the EITs began, they ended. Zubaydah had reached what our outside psychologist consultants called “learned helplessness.” He began to talk. A lot. The site reported that Zubaydah was becoming downright loquacious, in fact.

Among other revelations, Zubaydah provided information that soon led to the capture of two other al Qaeda “big fish.” One was Ramzi bin al-Shibh, a member of al Qaeda’s “Hamburg cell” and a close associate of several of the 9/11 hijackers. The other was Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri, a key figure in the October 2000 al Qaeda bombing of the Navy warship USS Cole in the Gulf of Aden. A few months later, in March 2003, one of the the biggest al Qaeda fish of all—Khalid Sheikh Mohammed (KSM)—was caught in the CIA net. Mohammed was the undisputed (least of all by him) mastermind of the 9/11 attacks and proud personal butcher of the Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl.

The EITs were used on KSM, all doughy five feet three inches of him, again and again for weeks. Finally, his interrogators reported back that his resistance had been broken. He was prepared to talk. What technique ultimately brought him to “learned helplessness”? The interrogators seemed divided, but when I later talked to the one that I knew longest and best, a guy I knew to be a total straight shooter, he had no doubt. “It was the sleep deprivation,” he told me as we smoked cigars during a walk around headquarters one day. “We figured out KSM would rather die than not be able to sleep. Besides, he also figured out after a while that we weren’t going to waterboard him to death.”

***

During these early months of the EIT program, a small, select group of senior government policymakers—members of the National Security Council’s Principals Committee—were being brought into the loop at meetings held every month or so in the cramped White House Situation Room.

President Bush, who frequently chaired meetings in the White House Situation Room, wasn't there when the National Security Council’s Principals Committee would meet to review the progress of the enhanced interrogation program. | Eric Draper/AP Photo

As a backbencher in many of these meetings, I found it fascinating to observe the body language and dynamics of the various principals as Tenet would give detailed updates on the specifics of the EITs and how they were being administered. Some, such as Andy Card, the White House chief of staff, and Richard Myers, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, would sit there stoically. Attorney General John Ashcroft was mostly quiet except for emphasizing repeatedly that the EITs were lawful. Secretary of Defense Don Rumsfeld was notable more for his frequent, conspicuous absences during these sessions—he kept trying to get his chief intelligence deputy to attend in his place but was always rebuffed by the White House. It was quickly apparent that Rumsfeld didn’t want to get his fingerprints anywhere near the EITs. Understandably, Tenet spent more time talking about waterboarding than anything else. Yet I don’t recall there ever being much in the way of resistance from any of his colleagues around the table. What instead sticks in my mind is how national security adviser Condoleezza Rice, for instance, seemed troubled by the fact that the detainees were required to be nude when undergoing some of the EITs.

The most interesting figure of all at these meetings was Secretary of State Colin Powell. Now, there was a man giving off an unmistakable vibe of being there out of a sense of duty but intensely uncomfortable about it.

But the most interesting figure of all at these meetings was Secretary of State Colin Powell. Now, there was a man giving off an unmistakable vibe of being there out of a sense of duty but intensely uncomfortable about it. At the end of each EIT update session, Powell, who seemed to view sleep deprivation as the most grueling of all the techniques, would bolt out of the Situation Room as fast as he could.

While Vice President Dick Cheney occasionally would sit in on the sessions, the one senior national security official who I believe was not knowledgeable about the EITs was President George W. Bush himself. He was not present at any of the Principals Committee meetings held by the National Security Council (in my experience over the years, it was rare for any president to attend such sessions), and none of the principals at any of the EIT sessions during this period—August 2002 through 2003—ever alluded to the president knowing anything about them or expressing the view that he needed to be told. I also never heard anything to that effect in the numerous other separate discussions on EITs we had with individual principals.

In fact, as late as 2005, I relayed to Steve Hadley, who had succeeded Rice as national security adviser, a recommendation by the CIA inspector general that President Bush be briefed on what the EITs were. Hadley responded evenly: “That recommendation will be taken under advisement.” I did not hear anything further on the subject.

So I was startled, to say the least, when I read Decision Points, President Bush’s 2010 memoir. In it, Bush not only forthrightly defended the use and effectiveness of EITs but put himself in the middle of their conception and employment on Zubaydah and KSM. On pages 168 through 171, he wrote the following:

[In late March 2002] CIA experts drew up a list of interrogation techniques that differed from those Zubaydah had successfully resisted. George [Tenet] assured me all interrogations would be performed by experienced intelligence professionals who had undergone extensive training. Medical personnel would be on-site to guarantee that the detainee was not physically or mentally harmed. . . .

I took a look at the list of techniques. There were two that I felt went too far, even if they were legal. I directed the CIA not to use them. ...

[On March 1, 2003,] George Tenet asked if he had permission to use enhanced interrogation techniques, including waterboarding, on Khalid Shaikh Mohammed... . “Damn right,” I said.

All of this was news to me. And some of it didn’t compute. The president reviewed the EITs to be used on Zubaydah in advance? When would that have been? The Agency began them just a couple of days after we got the go-ahead memo from the OLC. As for the two techniques he said he vetoed, I have no idea what they could have been. As far as I knew, only one technique was dropped, but that was by mutual consent of the CIA and the Justice Department. Finally, there would have been no need to consult with the president in advance before using EITs on KSM—a few weeks after the techniques were approved for Zubaydah, we had gotten the OK from Justice that all the EITs it had green-lit for use on Zubaydah could also be applied to similarly key al Qaeda figures like KSM.

I was in daily contact with Tenet in the run-up to the authorization of the EITs and their use on Zubaydah and the other detainees in the 2002 to 2003 time frame. All during that time, Tenet had said nothing about any conversations he had with the president about EITs, much less any instructions or approvals coming from Bush. It simply didn’t seem conceivable that Tenet wouldn’t have passed something like that on to those of us who were running the program. I was simply curious as hell—just what was Bush talking about? Had I been missing something this important all along?

After reading Bush’s book, I sent Tenet an email in November 2010 in which I posed the question as directly as I could: Were Bush’s assertions accurate? Tenet’s response was just as direct: He did not recall ever briefing Bush on any of the specific EITs.

I am left baffled by all this. I view President Bush as a man of great integrity, but how could Tenet—how could anyone, for that matter—ever forget having conversations with the president of the United States about something like that? It’s impossible.

Rizzo believes that President Bush was not aware of the CIA's enhanced interrogation techniques. Yet in his memoir, Bush (pictured here with former CIA Director George Tenet in 2001) claims Tenet briefed him on the program. | Pablo Martinez Monsivais/AP Photo

In the final analysis, I find the episode perplexing but nonetheless admirable on Bush’s part, odd as that sounds. My experience over the years is that a president, and those closest around him, instinctively try to put some distance between him and risky, politically controversial covert actions the CIA is carrying out, even when those actions are being conducted pursuant to a specific authorization by the president. This phenomenon is sometimes referred to as “plausible deniability.” In his memoir, however, Bush does the exact opposite: He squarely puts himself up to his neck in the creation and implementation of the most contentious counterterrorist program in the post-9/11 era when, in fact, he wasn’t.

Now, that’s a stand-up guy.

***

Today, the EIT program has been dead and buried for four years, as have the CIA secret prisons. Thus, by all appearances, the Agency is out of the detention and interrogation business. To me, the most ironic lesson to be drawn by the post-9/11 era is this: It is far less legally risky, and in many quarters considered far more morally justifiable, to stalk and kill a dangerous terrorist than it is to capture and aggressively interrogate one. When Abu Zubaydah was located in a house in Faisalabad, the Agency ordered its Pakistani colleagues to take him alive. After wounding him, the CIA moved heaven and earth to get him the medical care that saved his life. Subsequently, he was subjected to extensive waterboarding, as was Khalid Sheik Mohammad a year later. Both men, of course, would go on to become the two most prominent and productive subjects of the Agency’s enhanced interrogation program. That the CIA so instinctively and insistently hewed to this approach shouldn’t be surprising. First and foremost, it is an intelligence-collection organization. You can’t collect intelligence from a dead man.

According to a nonstop stream of media accounts over the past four years, the fulcrum of the Obama administration’s strategy is killing people, a lot of people, via a relentless and escalating barrage of drone attacks. I don’t doubt that virtually all of them were bad guys who richly deserved their fate. Yet it also seems evident that the U.S. government’s efforts to capture and interrogate al Qaeda operatives overseas have effectively ground to a halt.

So where does that leave the CIA in combating terrorism? I can’t imagine the Agency ever again coming close to running detention facilities or engaging in any sort of even mildly coercive interrogation practices. Given the enduring controversy over the legacy of “waterboarding” and “black sites”—the widespread vitriol generated by the popular 2012 film Zero Dark Thirty is but one example of this phenomenon—I can’t see any president ever reopening that can of worms. What’s more, no CIA director in his or her right mind would ever let the organization go down that path again. To do so would be beyond folly. I don’t think even another catastrophic 9/11-like attack will change that.

I would respectfully predict that future presidents will not only continue to be in the business of killing, but will double down on it. And that the CIA will salute the commander in chief and be in the middle of it, without hesitation or resistance.

Excerpted from COMPANY MAN: Thirty Years of Controversy and Crisis in the CIA by John Rizzo. Copyright © 2014 by John Rizzo. Reprinted by permission of Scribner, a Division of Simon & Schuster, Inc.