evening “off-hours,” or at port stops, we were free to be tourists. It always seemed awkward running into the speakers. Stumbling upon Hayden on the Lido deck in his sandals and khaki shorts as he dined with his wife, while bikini-clad cruisers got drunk in a nearby hot tub, somehow felt voyeuristic.
Hayden and Goss were not thrilled that three reporters were on board, but they were generous with their time and had agreed to meet us in the Silk Den that evening. For most of the meeting my friend Colin Freeze, who covers national security for the Globe and Mail, was on the edge of his seat, leaning forward, with a big mischievous grin and his fingers constantly running through his curly blond hair as he talked. Colin was extremely knowledgeable about terrorism issues and had a thirst for security information that bordered on obsession. I liked to tease him that he was the Columbo of journalists, always getting the story, but only by asking questions that jockeyed in and out like a frustrated driver determined to parallel park.
Colin had just called Hayden and Goss “doubting Thomases.” I wasn’t sure where he was going with that angle, but the fidgety Colin certainly had the former spy bosses’ rapt attention. Thomas, the most circumspect apostle, he explained, demanded to see Christ’s wounds before acknowledging that he had been crucified. Could Hayden and Goss still be denying that terrorism suspects were tortured in the Middle Eastern prisons where the CIA had sent them for interrogation (a controversial process known as “rendition”) when it was well documented that prisoners were whipped with cables, beaten, threatened with rape, or held in grave-like cells in those detention centres? Hayden seemed amused but told Colin he was Catholic and the comment was out of line. The CIA, he said emphatically, as Goss and Jeanine Hayden nodded, never encouraged, never acquiesced and never engaged in torture either directly, or with a nod or a wink.
That was when I raised the question of waterboarding KSM.
Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, KSM as he was widely known, was arguably the biggest al Qaeda fish captured by 2010. Junior in al Qaeda’s hierarchy only to Osama bin Laden and Egyptian doctor Ayman al-Zawahiri, KSM was fingered as the architect of the September 11, 2001, attacks. The Pentagon claimed he was also responsible for a variety of other plots, including the kidnapping and beheading of Wall Street Journal correspondent Daniel Pearl. KSM had been held at one of the CIA secret prisons overseas known as “black sites” before his transfer to Guantanamo Bay in 2006. He was an arrogant self-professed murderer and one of three “high-value detainees” who had been interrogated using the CIA’s post-9/11 “enhanced” technique of waterboarding, which means he was strapped on a gurney, his body inclined, his face covered with a cloth while his interrogators poured cold water up his nose for up to forty seconds. The purpose is to induce the sensation of drowning. KSM had undergone 183 waterboarding sessions.
In January 2009, newly elected U.S. president Barack Obama called waterboarding “torture.” Goss, a former CIA officer and Republican congressman from Florida who had been appointed head of the spy agency in 2004, called it “effective.”
“But 183 times?” I asked him. The number was not the point, but it made the scenario seem even more ludicrous.
This is how the bar nuts came into play.
“Do you know what 183 means?” Goss asked.
Out plopped an almond. “One.” A cashew. “Two.” Peanut. “Three.”
It looked so benign while cruising the Atlantic.
Waterboarding predated Goss’s two-year term at the CIA, but he was there in 2005 when the agency destroyed tapes recording its practice. A criminal investigation followed but the U.S. Justice Department did not lay any charges. The CIA said the tapes needed to be destroyed to protect the interrogators. Critics accused the agency of covering up illegal acts.
“Enhanced interrogation techniques” were not used during Hayden’s tenure either, and he closed the black sites and transferred the remaining detainees to Guantanamo in 2006. But Hayden said he was also weary of “self-righteous” criticism and second-guessing.
“I understand there are moral judgments to be made and honest men differ,” Hayden told me on another day, as passengers in tacky Hawaiian shirts strolled past. “What I’m saying, however, is that process resulted in valuable intelligence that made America and citizens of the West safe. So you don’t get to say, ‘I don’t want you doing it and it didn’t work anyway.’ The front half of that sentence is yours, as a human being, the back half of that sentence is based on fact, and the facts are it did work. So the sentence you get to say is, ‘Even though it may have worked, I don’t want you doing it.’ I understand that sentence. It’s a very noble sentence.”
When I later pressed Porter Goss on Hayden’s point, asking how journalists, who were paid to be doubting Thomases, could simply accept their assertions that “harsh interrogations” saved lives, that waterboarding provided actionable intelligence, or that renditions had worked in “Ninety-eight per cent of cases,” Goss looked exasperated.
“We are a clandestine intelligence service,” he said one afternoon as we sat on chaise longues. Then he leaned forward. “Clandestine intelligence. Clandestine intelligence. Clandestine intelligence. Clandestine intelligence. What about that is it that the media doesn’t get?”
The thing is, I do understand the intelligence idiom of “need-to-know” and accept that not everything can be made public. Sources need protection and some interrogation methods do also. And I understand that we rarely hear about successful intelligence operations. We almost always hear about the failures. I also respect the value of good intelligence and have met spies, cops and members of armed forces worldwide whom I greatly admire.
And I am not naive to the horrors of ruthless, radical organizations that do not respect any rule of law. A teenager had his limbs amputated because he wouldn’t join the cause; a thirteen-year-old girl was stoned to death on charges of adultery; and a beautiful pregnant woman from Toronto was widowed because al Qaeda decided to target the World Trade Center. Their names are Ismail, Asho and Cindy.
But I have also seen the power of al Qaeda propagandists and know where faulty intelligence can lead. I have interviewed many men whose reputations were destroyed by false claims of terrorism. Nothing, except perhaps being erroneously labelled a pedophile, is harder to shake. Bush wrote in his memoir that his “blood was boiling” on 9/11. “We were going to find out who did this, and kick their ass,” he wrote. But ass-kicking had consequences. Why did it seem that all too often efforts to make the world safer only made it more dangerous?
Since the evening of September 11, 2001, standing amid the remains of the World Trade Center, I have been envious of those who see issues of national security as black and white. As a journalist, lucky enough to have extensively travelled seeking answers, I have the curse, and blessing, of seeing the world in shades of grey.
As it was for many, 9/11 was the first time I had tried to understand how world events could puncture our own bubble of security. As a twenty-nine-year-old crime reporter for the Toronto Star I knew more at the time about the Bloods and Crips than Osama bin Laden. On September 10 I had written about a sixteen-year-old gun-toting purse-snatcher and questioned why his elderly victim had not come forward.
Everyone has his or her own 9/11 story. Some missed one of the four hijacked flights and would spend their lives wondering why a traffic jam or last-minute emergency allowed them to be spared. Some watched the towers fall and would never be the same again. People remember exactly where they were and how they found out, the event seared in memory like that of the first moon landing, or the assassinations of Martin Luther King Jr. or John F. Kennedy. A friend of mine in Toronto said she ran to her children’s school and brought them home to keep them close.
After
