Daniel Jones had always been friendly with the CIA personnel who stood outside his door.



When he needed to take something out of the secured room where he read mountains of their classified material, they typically obliged. An informal understanding had taken hold after years of working together, usually during off-peak hours, so closely that Jones had parking privileges at an agency satellite office not far from its McLean, Virginia, headquarters. They would ask Jones if anything he wanted to remove contained real names or cover names of any agency officials, assets or partners, or anything that could compromise an operation. He would say no. They would nod, he would wish them a good night, and they would go their separate ways.

After midnight in the summer of 2013, Jones deliberately violated that accord.

Jones, a counter-terrorism staffer, had become the chief investigator for the Senate intelligence committee, the CIA’s congressional overseer, on its biggest inquiry. For five years, he had been methodically sifting through internal CIA accounts of its infamous torture program, a process that had begun after the committee learned – thanks to a New York Times article, not the agency – that a senior official had destroyed videotapes that recorded infamously brutal interrogations. The subsequent committee inquiry had deeply strained a relationship with Langley that both sides badly wanted to maintain. The source of that strain was simple: having read millions of internal emails, cables and accounts of agency torture, Jones had come to believe everything the CIA had told Congress, the Bush and Obama White Houses and the public was a lie.

Senate investigator breaks silence about CIA's 'failed coverup' of torture report Read more

There was one document in particular that proved it. Jones and his team had found it years before, placed mysteriously onto a shared computer network drive the Senate intelligence committee investigators were using in northern Virginia, not far from CIA headquarters. But they hadn’t appreciated its full significance until the agency, in an attempt at refuting a report that was still far from publication, told Barack Obama’s staff that the committee was pushing a hysterical interpretation of the agency’s fateful post-9/11 embrace of torture. The document, prepared for Leon Panetta when he was CIA director, had reached the same conclusions about the torture program that Jones had. As long as Jones had it, he would be able to show that the agency knew full well how brutal the torture was; how ineffective its torturers considered it to be; and how thoroughly the CIA had covered all of that up.

As long as Jones had the document, that is. Lurking in the back of his mind was the event that had led him to devote five years of ceaseless work, through nights and weekends: the CIA had already destroyed evidence of torture. It did that before the Senate had launched an investigation, and long before that investigation had turned acrimonious.

Inside the small room in Virginia the CIA had set up for the Senate investigators, Jones reached for his canvas messenger bag. He slipped crucial printed-out passages of what he called the Panetta Review into the bag and secured its lock. Sometime after 1am, Jones walked out, carrying his bag as he always did, and neglecting to tell the agency security personnel what it contained. After years of working together, no one asked him to open the bag.

Outside the CIA satellite office in Virginia Facebook Twitter Pinterest Photograph: Alamy

Jones walked to the parking lot until he found his black Porsche Boxster. He tossed the bag onto the passenger seat and drove across the Potomac river, not stopping until he reached the Hart Senate office building on Capitol Hill. It was hours before dawn, but Jones walked into the building, sped to the second floor where the committee did its work, and placed the locked bag into a committee safe.

We had crossed a bridge. For the first time we had knowingly violated a CIA agreement Daniel Jones

Jones, by accord, had significant access to classified agency material. He would not be leaking the Panetta Review to the public. He was ensuring its preservation so Congress could exercise its constitutionally mandated oversight on an agency with a vivid recent history of document destruction on precisely this issue. But Jones, in his first-ever interview, acknowledged to the Guardian: “We had crossed a bridge. For the first time we had knowingly violated a CIA agreement.”

It was an unfathomable turn of events, and it would have severe repercussions. Jones had years of training and experience handling classified material: before joining the Senate committee staff, he was an FBI counter-terrorism analyst. The Senate committee was not favorably inclined toward absconding with intelligence documents: its leadership was spending summer 2013 excoriating NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden as a traitor. But, Jones said: “I was afraid [the document] would be destroyed … I was the one saying, ‘We have to do this.’”

Jones takes “full responsibility” for taking the document, but will not clarify who actually made the decision. Senators on the committee say they learned about it after the fact rather than directing him to take the document, and support the decision to this day.

“I don’t disagree with it. I mean, look, Director [John] Brennan tried very hard to cover up the Panetta Review,” said Senator Ron Wyden, an Oregon Democrat and longtime intelligence committee member.

The Panetta Review saga would spur a furious CIA to take an extraordinary step: it would spy on its own legislative overseers – especially Jones. The episode would spill out publicly the following March, when top committee Democrat Dianne Feinstein, who had already taken a huge political risk in pushing the torture inquiry, accused the CIA on the Senate floor of triggering what she called a constitutional crisis. Both sides requested the justice department pursue a criminal investigation on the other. The bitterness would nearly overshadow a landmark report, a fraction of which was released to the public in December 2014, that documented in chilling detail the depravations CIA inflicted on terrorism suspects after 9/11.

The CIA has stopped defending its torture program but not its personnel. While it has reknit its relationship to the committee, thanks to a GOP leadership that has all but disavowed the torture investigation, it continues to maintain that the torture report is inaccurate. Obama, whose trusted aide John Brennan runs the CIA, kept the report at arm’s length, with his administration declining even to read it.

But the CIA has gone beyond successfully suppressing the report. In a grim echo of Jones’s fears, the agency’s inspector general, Langley recently revealed, destroyed its copy – allegedly an accident. Accountability for torture has been the exclusive province of a committee investigation greeted with antipathy by Obama. While Obama prides himself on ending CIA torture, the Republican presidential nominee, Donald Trump, has vowed if elected to “bring back a hell of a lot worse than waterboarding”. Key CIA leaders defending the agency against the committee, including Brennan and former director Michael Morrell, are reportedly seeking to run Langley under Hillary Clinton.

This is the inside story of the Senate investigation into torture and the crisis with the CIA it spurred. It is formed from interviews with critical players in the drama, supported by voluminous internal reports and publicly available documents. Jones agreed to provide new details but would not discuss classified information with the Guardian.

When it came time for Brennan to talk publicly about the Senate inquiry, long after Jones’s predawn drive, he spent five minutes fitting the CIA’s torturers into the context of 9/11. But 9/11 changed Jones’s life as well.

A native of central Pennsylvania, Jones, now 41 years old, taught in Baltimore in his early 20s as part of the Teach for America program encouraging service in inner-city schools. After 9/11, he recalled, he wanted to influence public policy over the emerging war on terrorism, and sought work on Capitol Hill. An aide to Tom Daschle, then the Senate Democratic leader, advised Jones to instead spend several years at a counter-terrorism agency, like the CIA or FBI. The aide would eventually cross paths with Jones in a different capacity – he was Denis McDonough, the Obama confidant who would become White House chief of staff.

Jones arrived at the FBI in 2003 and spent the next four years there. The bureau was in the midst of a transformation: a generation after Congress had drastically reduced its domestic intelligence-gathering functions, following Nixon-era scandals, 9/11 had compelled its re-entry into the business of pre-empting homegrown terrorists. Jones set up shop in the counter-terrorism division as an analyst, primarily focused on al-Qaida and Sunni extremist groups and occasionally traveling overseas for his work. At one point, he was even detailed to the CIA.

But his future in the bureau was always limited, as he wasn’t a special agent, the field operatives who form the heart of the FBI. Sticking to his plan, Jones arrived on the Hill in January 2007, where his intelligence credentials helped find him a place working for Jay Rockefeller, a West Virginia Democrat and the chairman of the Senate intelligence committee.

Rockefeller told the Guardian that while Jones’s FBI experience qualified him to work on counter-terrorism issues on the committee, Jones’s time as a Baltimore teacher attracted Rockefeller’s interest.

“His decision to make this contribution before he began his career in national security told me something about his character and it was something to which I could relate. He impressed me then and I have only come to admire him more in the years since,” Rockefeller, who retired from the Senate in 2015, said.

The intelligence committee is a culture all to itself. Unlike most congressional panels, the vast majority of its work occurs in secret. The byzantine rules of classification restrict staffers who might bolster legislators’ knowledge from accessing significant relevant information. Membership, particularly on committee leadership, instantly boosts the profile of ambitious legislators, who become de facto surrogates for intelligence officials on cable news. All of this means that a committee tasked as the primary avenue for imposing accountability on secret agencies faces the ever-present risk of becoming captive to the agencies they oversee.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Photograph: Laurence Mathieu-Léger/The Guardian

Each element of the 16-agency intelligence community responds to the committee differently. As every intelligence service carries an inherent risk of scandal, they all have an abiding interest in keeping the panel on its side. The National Security Agency, the most powerful and technically sophisticated aspect of US intelligence, tends to send briefers to the Hill who wax loquaciously about the complicated details of its digital surveillance – which lends them an advantage over legislators afraid to admit what they don’t understand. The CIA, however, tends to duck uncomfortable questions by telling senators they’ll send responses later, the better to ensure accurate answers, and secure in the knowledge that busy legislators won’t often follow up. Yet its high-handed style tends not to provoke legislators who would prefer a close relationship with an agency many are inclined to see as performing unsavory tasks for the greater national good.

The committee’s internal politics also operate outside the partisan straightjackets that the broader Congress eagerly wears. Aside from the vanishingly few public hearings it holds – an annual threat briefing, a budget briefing, nominations for senior intelligence appointees – its work occurs in secret. That secrecy prevents the public from knowing the overwhelming amount of activity about its intelligence services. It also affords committee members the leeway to take positions in tensions with party leadership or to ask questions of intelligence briefers that don’t track conveniently with what their more ideological constituents would prefer. While there is a limit to how bipartisan or cross-ideological the committee will behave – former staffers are quick to point out that their work still occurs on the hyper-partisan Hill – both senators and staff describe the closed-door committee work as a venue where unity concerning national security can occur.

“It’s absolutely what people hope Congress is,” Jones recalled.

The torture report began in such a manner.

In November 2005, a senior CIA official named Jose Rodriguez destroyed 92 videotapes depicting the brutal 2002 interrogations of two detainees, Abu Zubaydah and Abdel Rahim Nashiri. Rodriguez’s tapes destruction remained a secret to his congressional overseers for two years, until a 6 December 2007 New York Times article revealed it; they barely even knew the CIA taped interrogations at all. Outrage was swift and, while tilted toward the Democrats, bipartisan, to include the éminences grises of the 9/11 commission. Even the US justice department began an ultimately fruitless inquiry. The Senate committee, then controlled by the Democrat Rockefeller, demanded an explanation.

Abu Zubaydah. Photograph: AP

Michael Hayden, the CIA director, provided an assurance. The CIA did not destroy evidence, Hayden told them, because the agency had extensive records of the interrogations, from field cables, memoranda and internal emails. It was the first time the committee had learned about the documentation of one of the agency’s major operations. Jones, a committee lawyer named Alissa Starzak and two Republican staffers were tasked with combing through Langley archives and documenting what would have been on the destroyed tapes.

Both Jones and Starzak – who declined comment to the Guardian – knew they would be looking through a soda straw. (The GOP staffers stopped coming to Langley after two or three visits, Jones recalls.) The material they reviewed covered only April to December of 2002. It occurred around only one black site, in Thailand, and concerned just two detainees. The heavily redacted material went only one way: cables back to headquarters, containing nothing about what agency leaders instructed their field operatives to do. Yet the material was extensive: the paper documents the agency permitted the staffers to see looked to Jones like an Encyclopedia Britannica.

What they found, over a half a year’s work examining just two detainees’ interrogations from the first year of the torture program, shocked them. It was widely known by 2008 that Abu Zubaydah was tortured. But Jones and Starzak did not expect to see internal accounts detailing, by the minute, what the CIA did to him. They didn’t know, for instance, that interrogators had tortured him to the point that he would obey, like a dog, when they would snap their fingers, nor that they left a man suspected of knowing al-Qaida’s secrets alone for 47 days. The cables describe Abu Zubaydah as kept naked, filthy, stinking, shaking with fear, shoved inside a filth-riddled wooden box, defecating on himself. Agency personnel, in the official communications, get emotional and request transfers rather than continue torturing men they come to believe lack relevant information on terrorism. It immediately raised the question of what the CIA was really doing to dozens of other detainees at its black sites.

“I don’t think the CIA even knew what they were giving us, to be honest,” Jones said.

“These cables were the most graphic of all the cables to exist. Later on, as you go through the program, the cables get less and less detailed. To the credit of the agency personnel who were working on it, they were very detailed. … Everything that we were told was basically the opposite of what happened.”

That detail gave Jones his first recognition of the gulf between what the CIA actually did and what it told everyone outside of Langley that it did. Jones ended up creating a 29-page Microsoft Excel spreadsheet of the early days of CIA torture.

Behind closed doors in the Hart building, Jones presented his findings to the committee on 11 February 2009. Both Republicans and Democrats were shocked by “the incredible brutality of the program at a level beyond which anybody imagined,” Jones said.

The Hart Senate office building. 11 February 2009 Facebook Twitter Pinterest senate-building Photograph: Sam Morris/This is a test

“At the back of the report, for what we called the ‘tapes investigation’, the staff created a chart that depicted the most torturous 17 days of Abu Zubaydah’s interrogation. It was almost a minute-by-minute chronology of what the CIA was doing to Abu Zubaydah, and how Abu Zubaydah reacted,” recalled Rockefeller.

“I think everyone on the committee – Democrat and Republican alike – was quite taken by this section of the report. It was hard to deny the ineffectiveness of the CIA interrogations, the brutality, or the fact that the committee had been deeply misled by the CIA.”

Some senators, particularly Republicans, were taken aback at the idea that the CIA would perform such acts. But Jones’s presentations that CIA interrogators knew the torture was useless – contradicting years of agency spin – did not attract significant interest from the senators.

“To me, I thought that’s what people would be taken with – holy shit, we’ve been sold a bill of goods,” he said. “But what they were really taken with was the brutality. … There was a bipartisan consensus that this can’t be the end, there’s got to be a final product, there’s got to be more here.”

I don’t think the CIA even knew what they were giving us Daniel Jones

Less than a month later, on 5 March 2009, the committee voted 14-1 to expand the investigation, the dissenting vote being Georgia Republican Saxby Chambliss. Instead of examining Rodriguez’s destruction of the videotapes, now the Senate committee would investigate the entire torture program. Part of Jones’s new mandate was to assess whether the CIA “accurately described” its torture program within the Bush administration and to Congress. Still, some of the Republican members imposed limits on the investigation’s scope: Jones couldn’t look at the Bush White House, just the CIA.

The announced inquiry came at an uncomfortable time for the CIA and the White House. Since Obama won the presidency in November, human rights groups had spent four months pressing for a reckoning with torture.

While Obama shut down the torture program on his second day in office, he also said that his focus as president would be to “look forward as opposed to looking backwards”. A senior campaign aide and former senior CIA official, John Brennan, became his chief White House adviser for counter-terrorism, a signal that Obama did not wish to have antagonistic relations with Langley. His choice for CIA director, after Brennan’s equivocations on torture raised red flags for liberals, was Leon Panetta, a longtime Democratic congressman and consummate insider.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest President-elect Barack Obama in January 2009.

Obama’s eagerness to turn the page on torture alarmed some of his allies. The Democratic chairmen of the House and Senate judiciary committees, Patrick Leahy and John Conyers, were pushing for broad investigations into both torture and mass surveillance.

In February 2009, Antonio Taguba, the army major general who blew the whistle on Abu Ghraib, joined a coalition of 18 human rights groups pressing Obama and the Democratic Congress for an independent truth commission on torture. They had support from very senior Democratic legislators, including House speaker Nancy Pelosi, Senate judiciary chairman Patrick Leahy and House judiciary chairman John Conyers. Activists petitioned attorney general Eric Holder to appoint a special prosecutor for the agency.

If the White House and the CIA didn’t like the intelligence committee looking into the CIA’s recent past, they would like an unpredictable 9/11 Commission-style panel and an independent prosecutor far less. The secretive panel, with its longstanding ties to Langley and its Democratic leadership, seemed like a safer option. An added political benefit was the committee’s new chair: Dianne Feinstein of California, who had a long history of disappointing liberals over national security.

Still, the CIA had some caveats.

Usually, when the Senate committee investigates the intelligence agencies, it does so on its home territory. The business of the committee, to include investigations, occurs in secure, locked rooms at the Hart building. Members and staff leave their phones outside; staff who lack the appropriate security clearances do not enter. The entire premise of the intelligence committees, established in the 1970s, was their unique fitness within Congress to handle classified material in order to provide accountability on secret agencies.

Panetta wanted a different arrangement. The CIA was forecasting the provision of between three and six million pages of relevant documents. Panetta’s aides voiced concern that they could not abide names of operatives, locations of black sites and countries cooperating in the torture program transiting to Capitol Hill. Either the committee would have to wait on the delivery of the documents until after the agency painstakingly redacted its material – a process with no defined endpoint and likely to last months, if not years – or it could set up shop in a satellite CIA facility in northern Virginia.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest At CIA headquarters in Langley in February 2009. Photograph: J Scott Applewhite/AP

“Every other investigation the committee conducted when I was chairman was done from the intelligence committee’s offices – offices that are fully secured and certified to hold the most sensitive and classified information that exists,” said Rockefeller.

“The CIA’s detention and interrogation program was the exception.”

The proposed arrangement discomfited the committee. Both Jones and Louis Tucker, the GOP staff director, agreed that the investigation should unfold in the Hart building, the same as any the panel would conduct.

Feinstein was giving their concerns teeth. Her meetings with Panetta, whose “intelligence and integrity” she praised in his confirmation hearing that February, showed a hard edge. Behind closed doors, in early June, Feinstein pressed Panetta for access to documents. Panetta, a salty politician, raised his voice, referenced their long history together, and said she was asking for unprecedented access. Feinstein raised hers back, and threatened to send subpoenas to the CIA. Here were two fixtures of decades of California Democratic politics, sizing each other up to determine who would dominate whom.

But the committee had to consider the reality of the task it was confronting. It had taken over a year to investigate just two interrogations related to the tapes, and in truth, primarily one, as Nashiri did not come into CIA custody at the Thai black site until December 2002, the tail end of the period Jones and Starzak investigated. The CIA did not produce any documents until the middle of 2008. How much time would they lose if they waited for the agency to redact at least 3m documents concerning more than 100 detainees?

Everything that we were told was basically the opposite of what happened Dan Jones

The CIA offer came to look acceptable. Jones and his team would drive out to the satellite location. They would have an office, lit bright white and windowless, in its basement. While there, Jones believed, they would receive access to a computer network, known as RDINet – for “Rendition, Detention and Interrogation” – hived off from the internet, accessible to them alone, onto which the CIA would place the documents. It was unusual, but they found, compared to the alternatives, they could live with it. Jones’s team set to work at the site on 18 May.

Days later, Panetta and Feinstein came to a final agreement on access. Several letters document their accord, with a final one from Panetta on 12 June saying “an agreement was reached between CIA and SSCI staff personnel regarding operating procedures for the SSCI review of material related to the CIA’s detention and interrogation programs.” The letter said the CIA would establish “a walled-off network share-drive” that only the Senate staff would access for work, and that “CIA access to the walled off network shared drive will be limited to CIA information technology staff, except as authorized by the committee or its staff.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Letter dated 12 June 2009 from CIA director Panetta to Dianne Feinstein. Photograph: CIA

An earlier accord, dated 28 May, also referred to establishing a “share-drive [that] can be segregated with only SSCI access and walled-off CIA IT administrators, except as otherwise authorized by SSCI.” That document was titled Memorandum of Understanding Senate Select Committee on Intelligence’s Review of CIA’s Detention and Interrogation Program – something agency reviews would later claim, as controversy over the inquiry reached a crisis point, did not exist.

Ironically for an agency whose concerns were premised on security breaches, now it had to hire IT contractors to set up the network for the committee staff. Documents did not actually arrive until 22 June, and then, they were maddeningly difficult to search through, as the agency insisted on using an obscure and not terribly functional search tool. The staff the CIA posted to liaise with the investigators were “openly hostile”, Jones said, and dragged their feet on responding to Jones’s concerns.

Then the CIA was hit by what seemed like a bombshell. In August 2009, US attorney general Eric Holder expanded the remit of the prosecutor looking at the tapes destruction, John Durham, to include the torture program, much as the Senate committee had. The justice department’s new mandate was not as broad as the Senate’s. It would only concern itself with torture that exceeded the boundaries set for the CIA by the Bush-era justice department. Still, for all of Obama’s emphasis on looking forward and not backward, now the CIA had to face its greatest fear since launching the torture program: possible prosecution.

Holder’s decision, ironically, would ultimately hinder the committee more than the CIA, and lead to a criticism that the agency would later use as a cudgel against the Senate.

Typically, when the justice department and congressional inquiries coincide, the two will communicate in order to deconflict their tasks and their access. In the case of the dual torture investigations, it should have been easy: Durham’s team accessed CIA documents in the exact same building that Jones’s team did.

But every effort Jones made to talk with Durham failed. “Even later, he refused to meet with us,” Jones said.

Through a spokesman, Durham, an assistant US attorney in Connecticut, declined to be interviewed for this story.

The lack of communication had serious consequences. Without Durham specifying who at CIA he did and did not need to interview, Jones could interview no one, as the CIA would not make available for congressional interview people potentially subject to criminal penalty. Jones could not even get Durham to confirm which agency officials prosecutors had no interest in interviewing. “Regrettably, that made it difficult for our committee to do interviews. So the judgment was, use the record,” said Wyden, the Oregon Democrat on the panel.



But when the Senate investigators discovered discrepancies between what the cables they read indicated and what CIA leaders represented internally or publicly, they would be unable to solicit answers from the people in question.

Durham’s investigation led to the first partisan break on the committee. The committee’s vice-chairman and top Republican, Kit Bond of Missouri, informed Feinstein that GOP members and staff were withdrawing. The special prosecutor had put the committee – and CIA officials – in an untenable position, Bond said publicly on 25 September: “What current or former CIA employee would be willing to gamble his freedom by answering the committee’s questions?”

By then, the Republican staff had largely withdrawn from the investigation already, with many not bothering to show up to the Virginia facility. Feinstein had already complained about that to Bond in early April. And other strains were evident in the committee’s bipartisanship: a top Republican aide, Kathleen Rice, maintained it would be too onerous to require the CIA to list for the investigators all its black-site detainees.

Bond did not stop at withholding Republican support for the investigation.

In early April 2010, Feinstein, frustrated with the lack of access to agency personnel, wrote to Panetta requesting interviews. It was a preliminary step: at that point, she sought little more than Panetta’s assurance to begin processing interviews on the committee’s behalf.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Photograph: Pablo Martinez Monsivais/AP

Bond rejected Feinstein’s request – not only in a letter to her two weeks later, but in a letter to Panetta a few days after that, urging him not to make CIA officials available to the committee. His stated rationale was the same: steering agency employees out of criminal danger. But as Bond also objected to document requests of the sort Panetta had already agreed to provide, Jones suspected other motives.

Jones had lost the support of the committee Republicans. “At this point, they’re working on behalf of CIA,” he said. Bond did not reply to a request for an interview.

Panetta, and his successors, never approved any interviews the committee sought with agency personnel. It wasn’t only officials involved in the program who were constrained in speaking with Jones. In October 2009, during a visit to Langley, Jones sought to interview staff from the inspector general’s office, which had investigated interrogations in 2004. Stephen Preston, the CIA’s lead attorney, stood in the hallway outside his office and insisted he be able to attend the meeting, explicitly to monitor what they discussed on behalf of Panetta. Voices were raised, and Jones’s team marched out of Langley rather than hold the meeting on those terms. Preston – who declined comment to the Guardian – finally relented, and an unmonitored meeting occurred the following month.

“When Director Panetta agreed to provide [the committee] with unprecedented access to CIA documents to pursue its review, the Office of General Counsel was established as the sole conduit for requests and responses to the committee,” said CIA spokesman Ryan Trapani.

“There was a meeting with [committee] staff and OIG where the General Counsel participated in that role. It is our understanding that when topics moved to issues unrelated to the review, the General Counsel left and the meeting between [committee] staff and the OIG proceeded.”

Jones’s fight with the CIA was just beginning.

It turned out that those contractors the committee thought the CIA hired to aid in collecting responsive documents were also acting as gatekeepers. They would review torture documents three times before disseminating them to the investigators to determine not only relevance, but whether higher-ups ought to make the call to turn them over. In some cases, the chain went up to the White House, to review for executive privilege – advisory conversations with White House staff, a broad category that typically keeps a record within the hands of an administration.

White House counsel Greg Craig, his successor Bob Bauer, and Don Verilli were involved in the review, with their colleague Kate Shaw trekking to the off-site location. The attorneys would describe the documents flagged for them to Jones and Starzak, case by case, and ask if they were interested in them. In several cases, the volume of documents meant the CIA had already unwittingly turned over copies of documents flagged for executive privilege review – and, once informed of that, the White House attorneys would roll their eyes and move on.

The White House involvement helped Feinstein navigate the first outright crisis in CIA-committee relations over the torture inquiry. In March 2010 Jones and his colleagues started noticing that they had difficulty accessing documents they knew they already had. Simple search terms weren’t retrieving certain records anymore.

“We noticed they were gone right away,” Jones said.

It would have been easy to disappear documents, even in substantial amounts. The agency had provided millions of pages. The only way it could have happened was for the agency to have removed the information from a computer network the CIA set up for the Senate that Jones did not know the agency could access.

Confronted, the CIA pointed to the tech consultants. Then they pointed the finger at the White House, suggesting that Obama’s attorneys ordered them to remove the documents – a much bigger accusation, with serious implications. Feinstein, alarmed, turned to the White House, and on 12 March, Jones met with White House lawyers, who denied ordering the removal of anything.

In a process that remains opaque to Jones, the CIA investigated internally and, months later, determined they had removed over 900 documents from the committee. It happened twice – with another, smaller wave of removals occurring in May, months after Feinstein first brought the issue to the White House. And it was a violation of the agreements the agency had reached with the committee about the conduct of the inquiry.



“This really upset us early on, because it would never have happened if we had conducted this investigation like we conducted every other CIA and intelligence community investigation, which is that it happens at our location, on our computers,” Jones said.

Ultimately, new White House counsel Bauer conveyed verbally to the chairwoman that the CIA would not remove any more documents. On 17 May, the CIA apologized to Feinstein as well. The committee never got the removed documents back, but at least had alternate copies of some .

“It wasn’t like, we thought, they would enter into our computers and search them, or go through them,” Jones said, with a wry laugh.

Around then, the CIA’s contractor staff largely turned over. The new crew were “more cordial, open, informal”, Jones remembered. (“Those working relationships were professional and I am unaware of any need for bolstering,” the CIA’s Trapani said.) They dragged their feet on document requests less. Some would even complain, in shared frustration with Jones’s team, that their superiors were taking too long to release material.

Jones attempted to accommodate his CIA counterparts. Agency officials would occasionally come to him, expressing concern that some documents they provided were marginally related to interrogations, but they contained information about ongoing and unrelated operations. Some of them contained material that was especially sensitive, particularly for contemporary agency activities, but didn’t shed significant light on torture. He let them “pull the documents … This happened throughout, even up until the very end.”

The agency made other changes that eased the committee’s task. Later in 2010, CIA got rid of the clunky old search tool, following longstanding complaints from both Jones and Durham’s investigators, and replaced the network search function with a Google interface. Easier sifting was “hugely important”, Jones said, as the agency kept piling material on.

This would never have happened if we had conducted this investigation … at our location, our computers Daniel Jones

The year 2010 gave way to 2011 and 2012. Panetta left to run the Pentagon and David Petraeus, the retired general, took his place. Petraeus seemed “supportive” of the inquiry, recalled Jones. Yet as the committee staff worked nights and weekends at the satellite CIA office, some wondered if the deluge of documentation was a tactic to ensure the investigation collapsed under the weight of accumulated material.

Even with the glut of documentation, the Senate team did not have sufficient evidence to give an account of a major aspect of the CIA’s post-9/11 apparatus: rendition.

Renditions, used before 9/11, were extrajudicial transfers of captured people; after 9/11, a variant, called “extraordinary rendition”, sent captives to the custody of allied intelligence services, neither American nor the country of a detainee’s origin. Some of the CIA’s closest rendition partners worked for the world’s most brutal dictators: Syria’s Bashar al-Assad, Libya’s Muammar Gaddafi, Pakistan’s Pervez Musharraf, Egypt’s Hosni Mubarak.



The rendition infrastructure was even bigger than that of the black sites, which the CIA itself ran. More detainees ran through it than the at least 119 held at the black sites. But once detainees moved into a different intelligence service’s custody, the records the CIA retained of them were scant, or secondhand, or both. It posed a problem for an investigation that sought rigorous internal documentation for every claim it would make. The more time the Senate spent attempting to run down rendition leads, the more it would delay its investigation of the CIA’s interrogations and detentions. And after all, the mandate for the inquiry set by the committee was to determine what the CIA did to men it detained, not what its partners did.



“It was a killer not to cover it, but you’ve got to draw a line,” Jones said. Much CIA documentation the committee had referring to rendition amounted to “hearsay”, not enough to responsibly present.



“Those rendition records don’t involve people who were technically detained by the CIA. These are transients. The records are just not there.”

But the consequence of that decision was profound. While ultimately the classified version of Jones’s report would contain information on CIA renditions, the vast majority of the CIA’s renditions operations – operations that left still-untold numbers of people disappeared, severely wounded, and likely worse – have been lost to history.

Among legislators, the inquiry became background noise. Bond had relinquished the vice-chairmanship to Saxby Chambliss of Georgia, who in 2009 had been the only dissenting vote against launching the investigation. Feinstein, on five different occasions, asked the GOP to rejoin the inquiry, to no avail.

It took until August 2012 for the CIA to cease the bulk document production. (The CIA disputes this, and Trapani said it continued to “facilitate and support” Senate document access until December 2014.) By then, the staff estimated they had the equivalent of two urban libraries. Jones had been writing the classified report incrementally. Starting in October 2011, Feinstein had him send pieces of the report to the committee, Democrats and Republicans, so no one was taken by surprise.

In December 2012, Jones finished the report. It was at that point 6,200 pages long and entirely secret. In a sign of the diminished partisan consensus around torture, the vote to adopt the report was 9-6, with Maine moderate Olympia Snowe the only Republican to assent. Now would come the next fight: to declassify the report.

But since the committee had a more immediate task, Feinstein and the Democrats decided to leverage it. On 7 February 2013, Obama confidant John Brennan had his confirmation hearing with the panel to run his beloved CIA. By now, the CIA had overcome its major fear over torture accountability: Durham’s investigation had concluded in summer 2012 and had prosecuted no one. There would be no criminal accountability for torture, and it was an open question whether the public would ever read Jones’s report. The committee sought Brennan’s attitude toward the inquiry.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Brennan is sworn in to testify at his confirmation hearing on 7 February 2013. Photograph: Jason Reed/Reuters

Brennan equivocated on torture throughout the hearing. Although he was the agency’s deputy executive director when the program began, he minimized his knowledge of it. (A former CIA officer who has long known Brennan and who has since criticized torture, Glenn Carle, told the Guardian: “He has never been a proponent of this stuff.”) Brennan called waterboarding “reprehensible” but would not, under repeated questioning, call it torture. He promised outright to provide the committee with his “full and honest views” after reading the torture report, but when pressed on declassifying it, said: “I would have to take that declassification request under serious consideration, obviously.”

No response was forthcoming to the declassification request. But on 27 June 2013, the CIA sent a 100-plus page response to the committee raising a host of objections to the Senate’s conclusions.

The agency dissented from the conclusion that torture “did not produce unique intelligence that led terrorist plots to be disrupted, terrorists to be captured, or lives to be saved.” That “flawed conclusion” led to another, the agency claimed: that the CIA “resisted internal and external oversight and deliberately misrepresented to Congress, the executive branch, the media, and the American people” the truth about its torture.

Rejecting an assessment that the agency “misrepresented” the program – lied about torture, less euphemistically – the agency said: “The factual record maintained by the agency does not support such conclusions.”

Jones was stunned, and for a very particular reason. For years, he had been in possession of a specific agency document that not only supported those conclusions, it reached them itself – what a senator on the committee, Mark Udall of Colorado, would later call a “smoking gun”.

The document was the Panetta Review. Much of it remains a mystery to Jones even today: whether he or another staffer found it on the network, whether the agency meant them to receive it, or if an agency whistleblower slipped it onto the Senate drive. Nor does the CIA have an answer to the puzzle: “CIA does not know how [Senate] staff acquired the unauthorized documents,” Trapani said. But Jones recalls discovering it around 2010 and “pretty immediately” understanding its significance.

“When we saw this document, we weren’t like, ‘Oh, great, we got the CIA.’ It was: ‘Oh, Jesus Christ, thank God – we’re not crazy,’” he said. “This was high stakes. A lot was riding on it. It was a relief.”

They called it the Panetta Review because the agency prepared a summary of its renditions, detentions and interrogations work for Director Panetta, who had come to Langley after Obama shut the program down. One version was a Microsoft Word document, clearly a draft, with the function allowing users to see each others’ changes enabled. Another version, apparently more final, was a PDF. Iterations by CIA were clear on view: “You could see the attorneys looking at it and saying, ‘Well, let’s make sure we can back this up, can you add more citations?’”

The final version of the Panetta Review, Jones said, was more than 1,000 pages long. The CIA has represented it as “summaries of documents being provided to the [committee] … highlighting the most noteworthy information contained in the millions of pages of documents being made available,” as agency attorney Martha Lutz would tell a court after Vice reporter Jason Leopold sought to acquire the still-classified document. Jones said that description is incorrect.

“It’s a narrative, plain and simple. ‘This is Abu Zubaydah’s interrogation.’ ‘This is KSM [Khalid Shaikh Mohammed].’ They’re topic oriented: ‘These are the inaccurate things we told the president.’ It’s a final findings document. It has 13 findings. And one is, basically, they provided inaccurate information to support the use of EITs,” or enhanced interrogation techniques, the agency’s preferred euphemism for torture.



Lutz would later tell a federal court that “even the post polished versions remained drafts and were subject to change”. The CIA stopped compiling the Panetta Review in 2010 after Durham told Preston that CIA risked complicating any prosecution if it “made different judgments than the prosecutors had reached”, Charlie Savage reported in his 2015 book Power Wars.

What’s so shocking about that is that we thought this problem … was limited to the Bush administration Dan Jones

Useful as the document was, it took on brand new significance now that the CIA was denying the conclusions that it had endorsed in the Panetta Review.

“I did not think they were going to say: ‘None of this is right, you’re all wrong.’ I expected to receive the Panetta Review,” Jones said.

“What’s so shocking about that is that we thought this problem – the CIA providing inaccurate information to the president – was limited to the Bush administration, to [ex-directors] Tenet, Goss and Hayden. This is John Brennan’s CIA, Obama’s CIA. There’s a famous picture of Brennan briefing the president with their response in May of 2013, before we received their response. They’re providing inaccurate information to the president of the United States in the present day.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Barack Obama talks with John Brennan, center, and chief of staff Denis McDonough in the West Wing of the White House, May 2013. Photograph: Pete Souza/The White House

And the CIA, Jones knew, had a very recent history of destroying videotapes recording torture. It was the reason he had spent five and a half years sifting through the agency’s darkest secrets. Even more recently, the CIA had removed hundreds of documents, surreptitiously and in violation of the understanding the committee thought it reached with the agency, from the Senate files.

Jones walked to his car and drove to the satellite CIA office. His life would never be the same.

Next: ‘A constitutional crisis.’ An incensed CIA spies on Jones. Accusations fly between the CIA and the Senate.

This article was amended on 10 September 2016. The original version said tenure on the Senate intelligence committee is term limited. A 2005 law repealed those limitations.