Torture-Tainted CIA Official Leaves Agency … after Being Shown the Exit

The early retirement of Stephen Kappes after a dark record as deputy director of the CIA looks like punishment for a spy skilled in the worst methods of torture and deserving of the International Criminal Court. By getting rid of the spy tied to the agency’s secret prisons, President Obama can show that he still holds the reins of an institution that has lost much of its credibility.

Stephen Kappes, number two at the CIA, just stepped down from his position. He did this of his own accord, sources close to the U.S. Intelligence Agency say, because he asked for and received an early retirement. For other observers, among them those from the Voltaire site that revealed this bit of news, this departure is like an easy exit offered to a man who incarnates, on the operational level, the worst derivatives of the warlike administration of President George W. Bush. But in any case, this master-spy is definitively burned by disgrace. The time has come for him to return to his work at the Armor Group, a security office based in London, for which his position was, until 2007, executive vice president.

When we look at Stephen Kappes, a pathology expert of barely sixty, a man as mysterious as the secrets of the world into which he entered at the age of 30, we go from one error to the next in a “criminal mind” prowling on velvet, and without regret. In 2004, he was, for the first time, sacrificed by the neoconservative cartel of the White House clustered around the official duo made up of Donald Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney. In the wake of the turbulence caused by the invasion of Iraq by American and British forces, the Bush administration, then caught in the throes of a flagrant lie regarding the non-existent weapons of mass destruction, cleaned out the CIA. “For the nation,” the administration put back into service a veteran of Langley (CIA headquarters) turned Republican congressman whose war cry is: Whenever needed, resort to “deadly force, for example in the relevant cases against members of al-Qaida planning attacks against the United States.”*

Before al-Qaida, Porter Goss, to whom I’m referring, was implicated in all the dirty tricks of the CIA, notably in Latin and South America. He was one of the architects of the envoy of Cuban counter-revolutionaries for the Bay of Pigs invasion against Fidel Castro in April 1961. He probably played his part in the murderous stalking of Ernesto Che Guevara. As concurring sources remind us, he was also involved with the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962. Saddled up by the visionaries of the Bush administration, Goss soullessly purged all those opposed to the affirmation of the messianic line of the Bush clan by forcing them to quit the Agency. Among his victims were Stephen Kappes, but also Michael Sulick, the all-powerful director of the U.S. National Clandestine Service.

In particular, Porter Goss’ task had become to remove from the CIA all those who refused to support the Bush administration during the Niger uranium scandal. To validate their thesis of weapons of mass destruction as the pretext for invading Iraq, Bush, Colin Powell and their friends used the CIA to fabricate false documents “proving” that Saddam Hussein had imported uranium from Niger to carry out his dark plans. The Niger hoax was superbly deconstructed by a courageous and independent diplomat, Joseph Wilson… whose work would later compel General Powell, who proudly brandished the false documents before the U.N. Security Council several weeks before the Iraq expedition, to admit that he was “wrong.” But the damage was already done…

But all of these events are not enough to make Stephen Kappes a saint, if indeed that word exists in the intelligence community. Porter Goss was swept from the head of the CIA by its bosses in 2006 in favor of General Michael Hayden, and Kappes came through the front door to become the Agency’s number two man before being confirmed by Leon Panetta, the interim successor of Hayden, upon the arrival of Barack Obama to the White House. As they say in this insular world, only a tough guy could be responsible for such an impressive number of pitiful scandals and yet remain unpunished.

Kappes, The Spy Obama Didn’t Love

Kappes is presented as one of the operational directors of the program to establish itinerant CIA prisons outside of U.S. territory. Disseminated in almost 70 countries, among them ex-Soviet Bloc countries, France, Germany, Great Britain, Morocco and several African countries, these CIA prisons were catalogued and denounced by human rights organizations as locations where acts of torture were committed by Americans under the auspices of the “war on terror,” instigated by the events of September 11. Since this “special” program against “terrorists” was directly related to Guantanamo, Stephen Kappes also exercised a determining influence on the infra-human “management” of prisoners penned up in that portion of Cuban territory.

In addition to being an officer in the prestigious Marine Corps and a specialist in the surveillance of nuclear capacity developments in Iran for several years, Kappes is also a soldier who knows how to shut up his enemies and show his men the “right way.” According to several reports by the American press, he gave the order to quickly burn Gul Rahman, a prisoner captured by the CIA in Afghanistan, whose torture he tried to hide. Between the mountains of Afghanistan and Pakistan, Kappes and his faithful companion Michael Sulick were also shown to have supported the execution of targeted assassinations through the systematic use of drones, pilotless planes that apparently create more civilian victims than “enemy combatant” ones.

Unable to close Guantanamo as he had promised during his electoral campaign, President Barack Obama is eliminating the prison’s symbols. Kappes is among them. The famous spy most probably saved the White House from having a “Libyan file” along the lines of the highly questionable “Iranian Nuclear file,” since it seems as though it is to him that the United States owes Colonel Muammar al-Gaddafi’s renunciation of his nuclear ambitions, as reported by Jeune Afrique in October 2006.

And the U.S. is also indebted to him for revising the role played by the Pakistani engineer, Abdul Qadeer Khan, in the dissemination of nuclear arms in certain countries. But Kappes has the (well earned) misfortune of owning, on his sole and unique person, the entirety of the hatred of which America has (justifiably) been the target since September 2001. His last tour ended dramatically. In a turn for the worse with a Jordanian al-Qaida jihadist, he experienced a real-life tale of a wolf in sheep’s clothing. A fatal error allowed Khalil al-Balawi to penetrate the interior of an American base in Afghanistan, his body covered with explosives. The result: ten-odd dead, among them officers of the CIA. It was the second to last day of last year.

To replace Kappes, Obama promoted Michael Morrel, CIA number three and “close friend” of President Bush. Following the attacks of September 11, Morrel was, according to the Voltaire site, “the one who informed the president that it was not a small plane, but a big carrier which struck the first tower of the World Trade Center. And also the one who was with him during his flight, immediately feeding him with the arguments serving to accuse Osama Bin Laden.” By leaving strategists in the Pentagon and the National Security Council (NSC) and unloading a “useful” man into a sensitive position, Obama undoubtedly reassures those who still hope that under no circumstances will he become a baby Bush in the hands of the militant-millenarian clan of Rumsfeld, Cheney, et al. In this country teeming with hundreds of new militias affiliated with the extreme right, nothing is a given, even the sacredness of laws and rights guaranteed by the fathers of [American] independence. George W. Bush and his cronies clearly showed that for almost a decade.

* Quote could not be verified