Haspel, Spies and Videotapes
Jose Rodriguez, the CIA official who ordered CIA officers to destroy a cache of videotapes that had documented the treatment of two terror suspects, says he told Gina Haspel what he intended to do. President Trump’s pick to head the CIA said she had no idea he planned to act without approval from senior officials.
by Tim Golden May 9, 2:30 a.m. EDT
In November 2005, the CIA’s chief of undercover operations, Jose Rodriguez, turned to his closest aide for help in a crisis. Congress was threatening an investigation into the agency’s secret prisons overseas, and The Washington Post had just published new details of the so-called black sites on its front page. Rodriguez feared that the furor could pry loose videotapes that showed CIA officers brutally interrogating two terror suspects.
Rodriguez’s chief of staff, Gina Haspel, had directed the waterboarding of one suspect herself. Both Rodriguez and Haspel had been lobbying for years for permission to destroy the tapes, only to have the CIA’s requests rejected again and again by senior Bush administration officials.
Now, however, Rodriguez was determined to go ahead anyway. The tapes were locked in a CIA safe halfway across the world, but Rodriguez was not alone in thinking they were a ticking bomb that could threaten some of the interrogators and devastate the agency’s reputation.
“She — like everyone else around me — wanted the tapes destroyed,” Rodriguez said of Haspel in an interview. “It was something where we expected our agency to protect its people and do the right thing.”
As Haspel goes before the Senate Intelligence Committee on Wednesday as President Donald Trump’s nominee to lead the CIA, her role in the tapes affair remains a central focus of controversy in a career that also included her supervision of a terror suspect’s interrogation using methods now widely seen as torture.
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https://www.propublica.org/article/haspel-spies-and-videotape
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