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The War Profiteers - War Crimes,
Kidnappings & Torture |
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August 13th,
2009 - A Window Into C.I.A.’s Embrace of Secret Jails |
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A Window Into C.I.A.’s
Embrace of Secret Jails By David Johnston & Mark Mazzetti New York Times August 13, 2009 Washington - In March 2003,
two C.I.A. officials surprised Kyle D. Foggo, then the chief of the agency’s
main European supply base, with an unusual request. They wanted his help
building secret prisons to hold some of the world’s most threatening
terrorists. Mr. Foggo, nicknamed Dusty,
was known inside the agency as a cigar-waving, bourbon-drinking operator,
someone who could get a cargo plane flying anywhere in the world or quickly
obtain weapons, food, money - whatever the C.I.A. needed. His unit in Frankfurt,
Germany, was strained by the spy agency’s operations in Afghanistan and Iraq,
but Mr. Foggo agreed to the assignment. “It was too sensitive to be
handled by headquarters,” he said in an interview. “I was proud to help my
nation.” With that, Mr. Foggo went on
to oversee construction of three detention centers, each built to house about
a half-dozen detainees, according to former intelligence officials and others
briefed on the matter. One jail was a renovated building on a busy street in
Bucharest, Romania, the officials disclosed. Another was a steel-beam
structure at a remote site in Morocco that was apparently never used. The
third, another remodeling project, was outside another former Eastern bloc
city. They were designed to appear identical, so prisoners would be
disoriented and not know where they were if they were shuttled back and
forth. They were kept in isolated cells. The existence of the network
of prisons to detain and interrogate senior operatives of Al Qaeda has long
been known, but details about them have been a closely guarded secret. In
recent interviews, though, several former intelligence officials have
provided a fuller account of how they were built, where they were located and
life inside them. Mr. Foggo acknowledged a
role, which has never been previously reported. He pleaded guilty last year
to a fraud charge involving a contractor that equipped the C.I.A. jails and
provided other supplies to the agency, and he is now serving a three-year
sentence in a Kentucky prison. The C.I.A. prisons would
become one of the Bush administration’s most extraordinary counterterrorism
programs, but setting them up was fairly mundane, according to the
intelligence officials. Mr. Foggo relied on C.I.A.
finance officers, engineers and contract workers to build the jails. As they
neared completion, he turned to a small company linked to Brent R. Wilkes, an
old friend and a San Diego military contractor. The business provided
toilets, plumbing equipment, stereos, video games, bedding, night vision
goggles, earplugs and wrap-around sunglasses. Some products were bought at
Target and Wal-Mart, among other vendors, and flown overseas. Nothing exotic
was required for the infamous waterboards - they were built on the spot from
locally available materials, the officials said. Mr. Foggo, 55, would not
discuss classified details about the jails. He was not charged with
wrongdoing in connection with the secret prisons, but instead accused of
steering other C.I.A. business to Mr. Wilkes’ companies in exchange for
expensive vacations and other favors. Before leaving the C.I.A. in 2006, he
had become its third-highest official, and his plea was an embarrassment for
the agency. After the 2001 terrorist
attacks, the intelligence world’s embrace of dark-of-night snatch-and-grabs,
hidden prisons and interrogation tactics that critics condemned as torture
has stained the C.I.A.’s reputation and led to legal challenges,
investigations and internal divisions that may take years to resolve. The
Justice Department is now considering opening a criminal investigation, with
much of the attention focused on the agency’s network of secret prisons,
which have become known as the “black sites.” From Fringes to Spotlight The demands of the wars in
Iraq and Afghanistan had transformed Mr. Foggo from a fringe player into the
C.I.A.’s indispensable man. Before the 9/11 attacks, the Frankfurt base was a
relatively sleepy resupply center, running one or two flights a month to
outlying stations. Within days of the attacks, Mr. Foggo had a budget of $7
million, which quickly tripled. He managed dozens of
employees, directing nearly daily flights of cargo planes loaded with pallets
of supplies, including saddles, bridles and horse feed for the mounted tribal
forces that the spy agency recruited. Within weeks, he emptied the C.I.A.’s
stockpile of AK-47s and ammunition at a Midwest depot. He was a logical choice for
the prison project: aggressive, resourceful, patriotic, ready to dispense a
favor; some inside the C.I.A. jokingly compared him to Milo Minderbinder, the
fictional character who rose from mess hall officer to the black-market magnate
of Joseph Heller’s World War II novel “Catch-22.” Early in the fight against
Al Qaeda, agency officials relied heavily on American allies to help detain
people suspected of terrorism in makeshift facilities in countries like
Thailand. But by the time two C.I.A. officials met with Mr. Foggo in 2003,
that arrangement was under threat, according to people briefed on the
situation. In Thailand, for example, local officials were said to be growing
uneasy about a black site outside Bangkok code-named Cat’s Eye. (The agency
would eventually change the code name for the Thai prison, fearing it would
appear racially insensitive.) The C.I.A. wanted its own, more permanent
detention centers. Eventually, the agency’s
network would encompass at least eight detention centers, including one in
the Middle East, one each in Iraq and Afghanistan and a maximum-security
long-term site at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, that was dubbed Strawberry Fields,
officials said. (It was named after a Beatles song after C.I.A. officials joked
that the detainees would be held there, as the lyric put it, “forever.”) The C.I.A. has never
officially disclosed the exact number of prisoners it once held, but top
officials have put the figure at fewer than 100. At the detention centers Mr.
Foggo helped build, several former intelligence officials said, the jails
were small, and though they were built to house about a half-dozen detainees
they rarely held more than four. The cells were constructed
with special features to prevent injury to the prisoners during
interrogations: nonslip floors and flexible, plywood-covered walls to soften
the impact of being slammed into the wall. The detainees, held in cells
far enough apart to prevent communication with one another, were kept in
solitary confinement 23 hours a day. For their one hour of daily exercise,
they were taken out of their cells by C.I.A. security officers wearing black
ski masks to hide their identities and to intimidate the detainees, according
to the intelligence officials. Just like prisons in the
United States, the jailers imposed a reward and punishment system:
well-behaved detainees received books, DVDs and other forms of entertainment,
which were taken away if they misbehaved, the officials said. C.I.A. analysts served
90-day tours at the prison sites to assist the interrogations. But by the
time the new prisons were built in mid-2003 or later, the harshest C.I.A.
interrogation practices - including waterboarding - had been discontinued. Winning a Promotion Mr. Foggo’s success in Frankfurt,
including his work on the prisons, won him a promotion back in Washington. In
November 2004, he was named the C.I.A.’s executive director, in effect its
day-to-day administrative chief. The appointment raised some
eyebrows at the agency. “It was like taking a senior NCO and telling him he
now runs the regiment,” said A. B. Krongard, the C.I.A.’s executive director
from 2001 to 2004. “It popped people’s eyes.” Mr. Foggo soon became
embroiled in agency infighting. The C.I.A. was reeling from criticism that it
had exaggerated Iraq’s weapons programs. Mr. Foggo came to Washington as part
of a new team that almost immediately began firing top C.I.A. officials,
causing anger among veteran clandestine officers. Mr. Foggo’s fast rise and
blunt approach unsettled some headquarters officials, according to Brant G.
Bassett, a former agency officer and friend who served with Mr. Foggo. “Dusty went in there with a
blowtorch,” Mr. Bassett said. “Some people were overjoyed, but there were a
few others who said, we’ve got to take this guy down.” In 2005, before he came
under investigation, Mr. Foggo and other officials, including John Rizzo, the
agency’s top lawyer, paid a rare visit to some of the prison sites, assuring
C.I.A. employees that their activities were legal, according to former
intelligence officials. Mr. Foggo also met with representatives of Eastern
European security services that had helped with the prisons. He expressed gratitude
and offered assistance - a gesture the officials politely declined. In February 2007, Mr. Foggo
and Mr. Wilkes were indicted. Prosecutors believed that the C.I.A. had paid
an inflated price to Archer Logistics, a business connected to Mr. Wilkes
that had a $1.7 million C.I.A. supply contract. In return, the prosecutors claimed,
Mr. Wilkes had taken Mr. Foggo on expensive vacations, paid for his meals at
expensive restaurants and promised him a lucrative job when he retired. “I was taking a trip with my
best friend,” Mr. Foggo said in his defense. “It looked bad, but we had been
taking trips together since we were 17 years old.” Mr. Foggo said he had turned
to Mr. Wilkes’ companies to bypass the cumbersome C.I.A. bureaucracy, not to
provide a sweetheart deal to his oldest friend. “I needed something done by
someone I trusted in private industry,” Mr. Foggo said. Downfall in Court Mr. Wilkes maintains his
innocence, but he was eventually convicted in a bribery scandal involving
former Representative Randall Cunningham of California. Mr. Foggo pleaded
guilty and is serving a sentence on the fraud count, but he still maintains
that he was unfairly prosecuted. His lawyer, Mark J.
MacDougall, said he believed that Mr. Foggo’s legal problems stemmed in part
from controversies over his stint as executive director. “Nobody ever accused
Dusty Foggo of putting a dime in his pocket, failing to do his job, or
compromising national security,” Mr. MacDougall said. “Dusty may have made
some mistakes, but this case was driven by professional animosity at C.I.A.
and personal ambition.” When Mr. Foggo’s lawyers
tried unsuccessfully to obtain access to agency files about his role in the
prison program, prosecutors complained that he was trying to disclose a
secret program. Mr. Foggo claimed that he was reluctant to divulge his role
in classified programs and pleaded guilty, in part, to avoid revealing his
secrets. In an Aug. 1, 2007, letter,
a C.I.A. lawyer informed Mr. Foggo’s lawyers that they could not review any
classified files related to the prisons. The agency’s letter concluded, “In light
of the president’s statements regarding the extraordinary value and
sensitivity of the C.I.A. terrorist detention and interrogation program, the
C.I.A. denies your request in its entirety.” Copyright 2009 The New York
Times Company External link: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/13/world/13foggo.html |