Central Intelligence Anxiety

After that, a division emerged between what a former senior Agency official described to me as the "SS crowd" and the "Wehrmacht crowd," the "hard edged" and the "smarter and better informed." He said, "People managed not to take assignments. There were senior people who would not go to meetings if they thought that extraordinary rendition or enhanced interrogation techniques were going to be discussed."

Sure enough, when public opinion finally shifted, the administration left the spooks to twist in the wind. "The Bush administration ordered it and approved it and then never came to the Agency's defense when it hit the fan," the former operative said. "The hypocrisy is breathtaking." That prompted a former CIA counterterrorism officer, John Kiriakou, to go on national television to point out that administration officials had been briefed in detail about the Zubaydah interrogation and others. For his trouble, Kiriakou now is reportedly the subject of an FBI investigation focused on whether he disclosed classified information.

What about Congress? "They have known for a long time that [the CIA] uses stress positions and hypothermia and waterboarding and sleep deprivation—and they haven't done anything about it," says Marty Lederman, a former Justice Department attorney who now teaches law at Georgetown University. "They don't disagree with it. And if they do disagree with it, what are they going to do about it? The default position is to have closed hearings, which is preposterous. The intelligence oversight committees are totally captured by the intelligence community."