The CIA's Espionage and Obama's Secrets

Accused of having spied on the Senate, the CIA is asking the president for help. Obama must decide what to do. Otherwise, there is the risk of new revelations coming out …

When we enter the labyrinthine game of mirrors that is politics and espionage, there is the risk of finding ourselves in front of a door that doesn’t open. The right path is either next to us or behind us. But the shadows, the lights and the reflected images have been misleading. Constantly moving, even so, sooner or later we will find it and leave — maybe after we have found another door, one that we were not looking for. The U.S. Senate, the CIA and the White House are all struggling with this game. It is up to us to work out where it is leading.

Dispute between the Senate and the CIA

Since yesterday, a serious constitutional crisis looms over Washington. Dianne Feinstein, a Democrat, has accused the CIA of spying on employees of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, trying to steal documents and putting undue pressure on her staff. This is the culmination of an almost year-long arm-wrestle between Langley and the governmental organization that has investigated the CIA’s activities since 9/11. But it is only another quarter of the match; it is not the end.

The point of contention is a 6,300-page report that the committee drafted over three years, from 2009 to 2012. The report was completed in December 2012 and approved with a majority vote: nine in favor and six against. After this vote, the CIA sent a 120-page memorandum to contest the foundations of the report: Years of coercive methods in the fight against terrorism have not produced a single bit of (useful) information for Intelligence. Kidnappings, torture, imprisonments: all useless. To defeat the enemy, more is (was) needed.

The Report on the CIA’s Prisons

The committee has always refused to change these foundations. It has made them on the basis of thousands of CIA documents contained in a classified database. Names, dates, events, methods used in interrogations. Paperwork that should have only been in the hands of those at the head of the CIA instead ended up on the computers of senators. The pressure started then. Langley sought to find those responsible for these documents, telling the committee’s staff members that they committed a crime the moment they came into possession of them. The dispute had been going on behind closed doors when Dianne Feinstein decided to make it public.

This came about because we are close to the release of the (as yet) secret report by the Senate committee on the CIA, the announcement of which was made public several months ago; Barack Obama has said he agreed with it, which is another complication for Langley. If the commander in chief has given the green light, nothing can stop the machine that, in the end, will allow the American people to know exactly what the CIA did during the years of the war on terror.

No one knows all the details — apart from the CIA and the report drafters — but it makes us think that the report reveals information that the agency would gladly have kept hidden: the kidnapping of presumed terrorists, interrogations and torture happening in secret CIA prisons. From what has been understood from those nearly 4,000 pages, a more serious culpability and acts even more brutal than those we have always thought (or known of) so far, are shown.

It is true that, being newly installed and after having signed the executive order to put an end to the use of torture in interrogations, Barack Obama promised that not one intelligence officer would be prosecuted for operations carried out under the directive of the George W. Bush administration. However, it is also true that the complete release of the report and its conclusions would be a heavy blow to Langley — a very heavy blow, strong enough to undermine its credibility.

The White House and the Secrets of the Current War on Terror

The White House wants, at all costs, to stay out of the dispute between the Senate and the CIA. But in reality, it finds itself in the middle. John Brennan, the man Obama wanted in charge of the agency, said, after Dianne Feinstein’s denouncement: “If I did something wrong, I will go to the president and I will explain to him exactly what I did. And he is the one who can ask me to stay or to go.”

Brennan’s words, as the mastermind behind the drone war and the secret keeper of the American cyberwars, do not sound reassuring for the White House. It is a way of asking Obama to join in the dispute with the Senate — either in favor of or against the CIA.

In any case, it would be a problem for him. If Obama supports the agency, he risks being accused of wanting to legitimize the methods used during those years of the war on terror. If instead he stops supporting Langley, he will disavow the man he chose to put in charge of the CIA (and thus his own security policy) and leave himself open to malicious revenge from the intelligence sector.

It would not be the first time. It is no surprise that many analysts draw upon a historical analogy: the leaks about Iraq in 2004, which embarrassed George W. Bush so much. These were released by the CIA, who wanted to embarrass the man that had put the blame for the false information about the weapons of mass destruction (WMD) on Langley.

In reality, the stakes — the subject of the dispute between the White House and the CIA — are not the agency’s activities during Bush’s years in charge, but rather those carried out under Obama’s. There are not any presidents exempt from the shadows, in terms of intelligence. Not even in the case of the current one.

There are many secrets of the drone war in Langley’s possession — the witnessed murders, affected civilians, operations launched by mistake, the president’s decisions. If we have to disclose the circumstances of the past, why not do the same with those of the present? The game of mirrors pushes us toward Capitol Hill but, to resolve the Senate-Brennan case, the right path to follow will be the one that leads to Pennsylvania Avenue.