BOOK REVIEW: Black Site: The CIA in the Post-9/11 World
by Philip Mudd, former Deputy Director of the CIA Counterterrorist Center and FBI National Security Branch
Reviewed by Christopher Messina
The subject of Black Site: The CIA in the Post-9/11 World is one many Americans will have strong opinions about. For the first time, someone with firsthand experience, Philip Mudd, provides us with a factual reporting of the development, implementation and dissolution of one of the most important and controversial projects of the CIA. Mudd describes the external and internal events which led to the creation and implementation of the CIA’s Program of detention and interrogation of Al-Qaeda terrorists in the wake of the 9/11 attacks. He has done an admirable job of writing as objectively as possible concerning the events both internal and external to the CIA and how those have played out over time.
Having lived through the attacks on the Twin Towers in September 2001, I am firmly of the opinion that when dealing with a vicious, evil, motivated and devious opponent who has proven his willingness and ability to murder Americans, there are few if any boundaries which should not be crossed. At the same time, I temper that belief with the understanding that what one does in the heat of battle affects one differently and is judged differently than the same actions taken repeatedly, over time with planning and deliberation. The very real debates both personal and policy-wise form the heart of the tensions Mudd illuminates so crisply.
His examination of the period between the fall of the Berlin Wall and the 9/11 attacks is worth pondering carefully. It is very hard to turn a bureaucracy on a dime and it is also hard to know when additional budget should be allocated to a federal agency whose mission seems complete or at least lessened. After the Cold War, many optimists believed America had entered a post-conflict world. The Soviet Union had collapsed, and history had come to an end. In an environment like that, the CIA could easily appear to be less needed or even obsolete.
That did not mean that the dedicated men and women of the clandestine service were playing ping pong at Langley while riding out their careers to retirement. Quite the contrary: they were as active and motivated as before, but budgetary priorities caused shifts in funding and the Counterterrorist Center received a relatively small slice of the CIA budgetary pie.
The very uncertain nature of the world means that national defense priorities are driven by external, often unexpected factors. The analysts at the CIA who were focused on Osama bin Laden and the various Islamist terrorist acts and threats around the world worked hard to make sense of the bits and pieces of unconnected data they received. Hindsight is sometimes 20/20, and many pieces of a puzzle only reveal their connectedness and import after an event has taken place. They tried valiantly throughout the late 1990s to get politicians and policymakers to focus more closely on this emerging threat, with limited success, even after things like the USS Cole and African embassy bombings.
Once the sun set on September 11, there was a high degree of unity amongst Americans about the need for a vigorous response to make sure the evil that visited our shores on that day would never be repeated. Fast-moving events created their own momentum. Mudd writes clearly that the battlefield capture of terrorists, in Afghanistan created the need for a place and a process to get from them whatever information they might possess.
As time fades, people forget the overall urgency of those early days. The fear of further attacks in America and elsewhere was strong. Gleaning crucial information to disrupt and prevent subsequent attacks was the priority. Despite the CIA’s continuing Hollywood depiction, sustained interrogation of a prisoner is not in their core skill set. The FBI has the deepest experience with interrogation tactics. A good deal of the origins of the CIA’s interrogation program began in partnership with the FBI.
But the two agencies have very different roles. The FBI wants to elicit as much detailed, comprehensive information as possible that can be used as solid evidence to convict a suspect at trial. The CIA wants to collect any and all scraps of information from multiple sources in order to paint a picture of a threat which is often out of focus. As the structured process of creating a legal and operational framework for detaining high value prisoners in black sites for interrogation was put in place, the FBI, military and even host governments were removed from what became known as “the Program.” This was done in part to limit the number of people aware of specific sites and prisoners but also to keep as tight a control as possible over the way interrogations were conducted.
One of the biggest problems with sustained, secretive missions like the Program is that political winds change. Ironically, the Program’s success in helping prevent and disrupt a great number of planned terrorist attacks led to the supposedly safe environment in which politicians and others could say, “See? We didn’t need to make such difficult choices and engage in enhanced interrogation techniques like sleep deprivation and waterboarding. The threat was overblown.”
Mudd’s clearest writing is in the first 2/3rds of the book, when he writes about the factual history of the Program. The latter third is a murkier narrative – not because of any limitations of him as a writer, but because the clarity and unity of purpose of September 12, 2001 had faded into political polarization and squabbling. Indeed, a number of the officials involved in formulating the Program’s legal basis were censured and otherwise punished within a decade of the worst mass murder on American soil.
By saying publicly “We tortured some folks” in August 2014, President Obama not only betrayed the dedicated CIA officers who implemented the Program in a focused, personally difficult effort to do anything possible to destroy Al Qaeda and protect America and our allies from mass murder. He also severely mischaracterized a complex and intensively-thought-out mission to protect Americans.
In his phrasing, he fed the fires of controversy and knee-jerk judgment by arm-chair warriors who never had to make difficult decisions in a fraught time. To the extent that the American government “made some evil, murdering terrorists physically and mentally uncomfortable temporarily in order to gain valuable intelligence,” that is not the same thing linguistically as “torturing some folks,” a distinction one of our most effective public orators certainly understood.
I agree with the late Senator John McCain that no matter how wrapped in process, intention and legal justification, in the end, a civilized nation doing anything that even smells like “torture” will end up in a public relations nightmare; the stories people tell about events are always simplified narratives. The false narrative promulgated by Obama and others has now entered the global consciousness of people who pay attention to things like this. Here’s a passage from the otherwise-excellent 2011 book by Stephen Pinker, The Better Angels of Our Nature; Why Violence Has Declined, in which he describes the history of judicial torture in Western societies.
"Torture, of course, is not a thing of the past. It has been carried out in modern times by police states, by mobs during ethnic cleansings and genocides, and by democratic governments in interrogations and counterinsurgency operations, most infamously during the administration of George W. Bush following the 9/11 attacks. [Pinker, p.130]"
Pinker tosses out that clause as a pure fact, devoid of debate. It appears in a bestselling book by a thoughtful academic which one can assume was subject to a rigorous editorial process. The long-term damage done to America’s image in the world has to be weighed against taking the risks of embarking on anything that remotely looks like torture.
The flip side to drawing a line saying “we should never pressure dangerous, evil detainees who have proven their capacity for mass murder” based on my Pinker example above is that oftentimes doing the right thing has to be done, regardless of what anyone thinks in the future.
I had breakfast with an Austrian colleague a few months back in DC. He was recounting his visit to the Udvar-Hazy Smithsonian Museum and opined that the way in which the Enola Gay was presented was in poor taste, because it glorified mass murder. My blood pressure skyrocketed at this critique of the plane that saved possibly hundreds of thousands of American lives to end a war the Japanese and Germans had started, coming from a descendant of those former adversaries. How many Americans would now say that Hiroshima and Nagasaki were “unnecessary” from the comfort of distance?
Mudd has written a very thoughtful book examining the very complex intersection of public policy, ever-shifting public opinion and the need in real-time for difficult decisions to be made. Anyone who has an opinion on the Program or an interest in American foreign policy should read it.
Black Site: The CIA in the Post-9/11 World earns a prestigious four out of four trench coats.
Christopher Messina is an investor and entrepreneur who works in global capital markets, cybersecurity, commodities and technology. He is Co-Founder and CEO of CrowdFill, a next-generation asset trading fintech firm, is on the Board of North American Nickel and is an Advisor to Digital Gamma, the world’s first cryptocurrency prime brokerage.
(Ed Note: The Cipher Brief gets paid a small commission based on purchases made via the links provided in this review).
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