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Company Man INTRODUCTION The Tale of the “Torture” Tapes
In early November 2010, the Justice Department announced its decision not to bring obstruction-of-justice charges against the CIA officials who had been involved in the decision, five years earlier, to destroy videotapes depicting the Agency’s 2002 interrogation of an Al Qaeda operative named Abu Zubaydah. He was not just any terrorist thug. Zubaydah was a senior figure in the Al Qaeda hierarchy at the time of the 9/11 terrorist attacks, and he had been the CIA’s first significant “catch” in the post-9/11 era. As such, he was also the first high-level Osama bin Laden lieutenant to be spirited off to one of the Agency’s newly constructed covert detention facilities—what would come to be infamously known around the world as “the CIA’s secret prisons.” Zubaydah had another dubious distinction: He was the first CIA detainee ever to be waterboarded. The CIA had captured it all on videotape. Three years later, the Agency burned the tapes.
The Justice Department criminal investigation into the tapes’ destruction, which lasted almost three years, was led by John Durham, a career federal prosecutor from Connecticut brought in specifically for the task. He was appointed in December 2007, shortly after the New York Times broke the story in a series of page 1 articles by Mark Mazzetti and Scott Shane. The series ignited an immediate firestorm in the media and Congress. As the Times accurately reported, no one in the CIA had ever told anyone in Congress that it had destroyed the tapes.
It was a hell of a story about a hell of a mess. And I knew it better than anyone, since I was the only member of the CIA’s top leadership to have been part of the episode from the beginning to just about its end. I was the Agency’s chief legal advisor for most of the eight years encompassing the story. The tale of the tapes’ destruction and its aftermath bedeviled me right up to the time of my retirement from the CIA in December 2009, after more than thirty years of service. The saga ended for me only when Justice announced there would be no indictments.
For the first three years, I fended off repeated entreaties from my Agency colleagues that I approve destroying the tapes, only to have them go behind my back and destroy them anyway in 2005. Then, after the story exploded in the media, I was the only CIA official to be hauled before Congress and grilled—alone—by two dozen angry lawmakers. Two years later, in September 2009, I had to testify for seven hours before a grand jury convened by the prosecutor, Durham.
The case was still hanging over me when I left the Agency for good two months later. In a long career fraught with dealing with controversies, it was the final one, and it was unfinished business. And so I could not drift gently, at long last, into a peaceful retirement. Would I be called back to testify before Congress? Before the grand jury? Would I be prosecuted for something I said, or something I did, somewhere along the way?
The November 2010 Justice Department announcement that there would be no indictments brought me a mixed range of emotions. First, of course, I felt a huge sense of belated relief. At the same time, it seemed oddly anticlimactic—by November 2010, the tapes’ destruction was old news, a distant if unpleasant memory.
Finally, it all struck me as very ironic. The entire affair, long and tortuous as it turned out to be, had begun for me way back at a time when I thought I was getting out of the line of fire at the CIA.
In October 2002, my nearly one-year tour of duty as acting general counsel was coming to a close. The Senate had just confirmed Scott Muller as the new CIA general counsel.
By this time, twenty-five years into my CIA career, I had “broken in” a number of incoming general counsels, so I had the drill down pat: The Office of the General Counsel (OGC) staff prepared briefing books containing summaries of key classified policy and legal documents as well as ongoing programs (per standard procedure, no incoming GC had access to classified information before reporting for duty), and I put together a list of the “hot” items that the new guy would have to confront the day he arrived on the job.
I felt a profound sense of relief about passing the Agency’s legal baton. Barely a year after 9/11, I could have put fifty items on the “hot” list. It seemed like every day we were facing a new, imminent Al Qaeda threat. And we had been operating in an entirely new and perilous legal terrain, capturing, brutally interrogating, and conducting lethal operations against senior Al Qaeda figures. I didn’t want Scott totally overwhelmed on his first day of work, so I was determined to keep the list short.
A couple of weeks before he arrived in November 2002, however, I learned about something I had no choice but to add to the list. Three months earlier, CIA officers, in a secret Agency detention facility overseas, began videotaping the first top Al Qaeda operative in our custody. He was also the first terrorist subjected to the Agency’s Enhanced Interrogation Techniques (EITs). The sessions were captured on the tapes, apparently in graphic detail. Jose Rodriguez, the chief of our Counterterrorist Center (CTC), came to me seeking permission to destroy the tapes. Immediately.
The story began in March 2002, when the CIA and its Pakistani counterparts, with a combination of meticulous intelligence work and good luck, captured a senior Al Qaeda operative named Abu Zubaydah in Pakistan’s third-largest city, Faisalabad. It didn’t come off quietly—there was a furious gun battle, and Zubaydah was shot three times. The Agency rushed a team of doctors from Johns Hopkins to Pakistan to save his life. It was hardly a humanitarian gesture; our intelligence indicated that Zubaydah was Al Qaeda’s main logistics planner for attacks against the United States. The CIA was desperate to keep him alive in order to find out what he knew about any upcoming attacks. This was barely six months after 9/11, and the government was still seized with dread about another horrific strike coming any day.
Zubaydah pulled through, and as soon as the doctors determined he was well enough to travel, he was whisked from Pakistan to the first of a succession of overseas detention facilities that would eventually enter into the public lexicon as “black sites” or “secret prisons.” Zubaydah, a young, smart, cold-blooded, unrepentant psychopath, was the first really “big fish” the Agency had caught post-9/11. Soon after the questioning began, CIA inquisitors became convinced, based on his smug and arrogant responses, that he knew a lot more than he was telling about Al Qaeda’s terrorist plans. By early April 2002, the Agency, lacking other options and desperate to stop another cataclysmic attack, made the fateful decision to explore tougher methods to try to get Zubaydah to talk. This was how the “enhanced interrogation program” came to be, along with yet another word soon to enter the public lexicon: waterboarding.
Later in the book I will provide an eyewitness narrative of the period from April through July 2002, when the Agency conceived the EIT program, which I shepherded through policy review at the White House and legal review at the Justice Department. This process culminated on August 1, when the Justice Department issued to me the first of what would come to be known infamously as the “torture memos,” which legally approved waterboarding and other brutal interrogation tactics against Zubaydah. After I received the Justice memo, the waterboarding of Zubaydah began, with my knowledge and concurrence.
What I didn’t know then and wouldn’t know until two months later was the decision—I could never determine whether someone at CIA Headquarters or in the field with Zubaydah came up with the idea—to videotape Zubaydah around the clock while he was in custody, including periods of interrogation. When he first told me about the videotaping in October 2002, Jose offered two reasons. First, our people at the interrogation site wanted to make sure everything Zubaydah said was recorded and preserved. They were taking careful and copious contemporaneous notes, which were duly transcribed in cables sent back to CIA Headquarters every day, but they were terrified they might miss something. It’s important to note here that, prior to 9/11, the CIA had never in my quarter-century experience held and questioned anyone incommunicado. In a popular culture steeped with films, TV shows, and potboiler spy novels portraying the CIA as a no-holds-barred instrument of mayhem, this may be hard for an outsider to believe. But it’s true. The videotaping was seen not just as a reference tool but as a security blanket.
The other reason Jose gave me for the decision to videotape Zubaydah was more basic: His people didn’t want the SOB to die on them. CIA medical personnel at the detention facility monitored Zubaydah round the clock, but he was about to face some very tough interrogation in the most solitary of confinements. If Zubaydah were to die in captivity, who would believe—either inside or outside the CIA—that they weren’t to blame? Videotaping Zubaydah in captivity would cover their asses.
After several days of taping, however, everyone who had bought into the idea looked at the videotapes, compared them with the notes transcribed and forwarded to headquarters, and concluded that the notes captured everything Zubaydah was saying. In fact, the notes were better; Zubaydah’s voice was occasionally inaudible on the recordings, but the interrogators had been able to get down most everything he was saying. Besides that, Zubaydah had recovered from his wounds and was exhibiting no desire to journey to the afterlife—even with the seventy-two virgins presumably awaiting his arrival—anytime soon. The hundred or so hours of videotapes were packed up and stored at the detention facility.
But Jose’s sudden desire that October to destroy the tapes was not spurred by an urgent need to eliminate unnecessary clutter. It was based on what the tapes showed.
The round-the-clock videotaping had lasted only a few days in August 2002 before it was stopped, and the bulk of it recorded Zubaydah alone in his cell, either saying prayers, sleeping, reading, or otherwise—um—entertaining himself. The rest of the tapes showed the interrogation sessions, and Jose assured me that the scenes of Zubaydah being waterboarded, comprising only a small portion of the tapes, were uncensored, and everything had followed the guidelines formulated by CIA Headquarters and approved by the Justice Department in its August 1 top-secret memorandum to me (the so-called torture memo). That was his good news. His bad news was that the scenes were “tough to watch” and, more to the point, clearly showed the faces of the CIA employees and contractors on the scene.
Jose was convinced that someday, somewhere, somehow, the tapes would become public and the identities of the interrogators inevitably “outed.” “Sixty Minutes will do slow-mo, stop-action pictures of their faces,” Jose emotionally put it to me, “and they and their families will become targets for some Al Qaeda crazy wherever they are.”
I had known Jose for over a decade, and I had no reason to doubt his sincerity or his word. A short, dark man in his late forties whose voice carried the lilt of his upbringing in Puerto Rico, Jose (who had a law degree) could be fiery and over the top rhetorically at times, but I always found him to be honest, straightforward, and utterly without guile—traits I suspect the public would not normally ascribe to a longtime CIA operative. He was an honorable, decent guy, and I considered him a friend. I still do.
I also didn’t think at the time that Jose and his colleagues were being paranoid in fearing that the tapes would someday be made public. If all my years and experience at the CIA taught me anything, it’s that virtually every secret doesn’t stay secret forever, and that the shelf life of new secrets is getting shorter all the time. As I write this today, consider all that happened in the eight years since I first learned about the tapes: the steady stream of media leaks about “secret prisons” and “waterboarding”; the ensuing drumbeat of outrage from elements of Congress, pundits, and the academic community as the shock and horror of 9/11 receded into history; and finally, a new president and his attorney general who publicly repudiated and voluntarily declassified virtually every detail of the CIA’s interrogation program. If those tapes were still in existence, what do you suppose are the chances they would now be in the public domain? Somewhere between probably and slam-dunk.
But that is now, and this was then. Although I sympathized with Jose’s motivations, I thought destroying the tapes was fraught with enormous risk for the Agency. Any minimally competent attorney would instinctively react the same way if his client were to come to him seeking the go-ahead to destroy sensitive materials in his possession, even if the client was not under any cloud of suspicion or investigation. Someone does something like that when he has something to hide.
And the tapes, obviously, were not ordinary material. Given who Zubaydah was, and given why it was considered so critical to get him to talk, a Congress and a nation still shell-shocked by 9/11 might have understood and even supported such tactics. Indeed, only a month earlier, in September 2002, the bipartisan leadership of Congress (the so-called Gang of 8) had been briefed by the CIA on the newly approved techniques, including waterboarding, and expressed no concern whatsoever. But to have this disturbing stuff captured on videotape, and then to destroy it without telling anyone . . . I mean, Jesus. I trusted Jose and believed his assurances that everything on the tapes was within the approved guidelines, but once they were gone, and once someone on the outside inevitably found out about the tapes and what had happened to them, who was going to accept those assurances at face value?
So that was the big turd dumped on my desk shortly before the arrival of the new general counsel. “Who else in senior management knows about the tapes and what you want to do with them?” I asked Jose. “What about Pavitt?,” referring to his superior, Jim Pavitt, the head of CIA covert operations.
“Pavitt knows, and he’s ready to authorize the destruction, but he said I needed to get your okay,” Jose responded.
“Where is George Tenet on this?” I then asked as calmly as I could, referring to the CIA director.
“I don’t know. I haven’t spoken to him about it.”
I informed Jose that he was not to do anything with those tapes. Not then, and not until further notice. I needed to talk about this with the new general counsel.
Poor Scott Muller, I thought. Here he was coming in from private life, with a totally blank slate, and now I had to firehose him not only on a counterterrorist program of an unprecedented scope and nature, but also, by the way, on an urgent request to destroy hair-raising evidence about the program. I was hoping he wouldn’t quickly conclude he was joining an organization, and inheriting a deputy, who were completely crazy.
Thankfully, Scott proved to be a quick study and not easily rattled. He agreed that precipitously destroying the tapes was a terrible idea. At t...
Revue de presse :
In early November 2010, the Justice Department announced its decision not to bring obstruction-of-justice charges against the CIA officials who had been involved in the decision, five years earlier, to destroy videotapes depicting the Agency’s 2002 interrogation of an Al Qaeda operative named Abu Zubaydah. He was not just any terrorist thug. Zubaydah was a senior figure in the Al Qaeda hierarchy at the time of the 9/11 terrorist attacks, and he had been the CIA’s first significant “catch” in the post-9/11 era. As such, he was also the first high-level Osama bin Laden lieutenant to be spirited off to one of the Agency’s newly constructed covert detention facilities—what would come to be infamously known around the world as “the CIA’s secret prisons.” Zubaydah had another dubious distinction: He was the first CIA detainee ever to be waterboarded. The CIA had captured it all on videotape. Three years later, the Agency burned the tapes.
The Justice Department criminal investigation into the tapes’ destruction, which lasted almost three years, was led by John Durham, a career federal prosecutor from Connecticut brought in specifically for the task. He was appointed in December 2007, shortly after the New York Times broke the story in a series of page 1 articles by Mark Mazzetti and Scott Shane. The series ignited an immediate firestorm in the media and Congress. As the Times accurately reported, no one in the CIA had ever told anyone in Congress that it had destroyed the tapes.
It was a hell of a story about a hell of a mess. And I knew it better than anyone, since I was the only member of the CIA’s top leadership to have been part of the episode from the beginning to just about its end. I was the Agency’s chief legal advisor for most of the eight years encompassing the story. The tale of the tapes’ destruction and its aftermath bedeviled me right up to the time of my retirement from the CIA in December 2009, after more than thirty years of service. The saga ended for me only when Justice announced there would be no indictments.
For the first three years, I fended off repeated entreaties from my Agency colleagues that I approve destroying the tapes, only to have them go behind my back and destroy them anyway in 2005. Then, after the story exploded in the media, I was the only CIA official to be hauled before Congress and grilled—alone—by two dozen angry lawmakers. Two years later, in September 2009, I had to testify for seven hours before a grand jury convened by the prosecutor, Durham.
The case was still hanging over me when I left the Agency for good two months later. In a long career fraught with dealing with controversies, it was the final one, and it was unfinished business. And so I could not drift gently, at long last, into a peaceful retirement. Would I be called back to testify before Congress? Before the grand jury? Would I be prosecuted for something I said, or something I did, somewhere along the way?
The November 2010 Justice Department announcement that there would be no indictments brought me a mixed range of emotions. First, of course, I felt a huge sense of belated relief. At the same time, it seemed oddly anticlimactic—by November 2010, the tapes’ destruction was old news, a distant if unpleasant memory.
Finally, it all struck me as very ironic. The entire affair, long and tortuous as it turned out to be, had begun for me way back at a time when I thought I was getting out of the line of fire at the CIA.
In October 2002, my nearly one-year tour of duty as acting general counsel was coming to a close. The Senate had just confirmed Scott Muller as the new CIA general counsel.
By this time, twenty-five years into my CIA career, I had “broken in” a number of incoming general counsels, so I had the drill down pat: The Office of the General Counsel (OGC) staff prepared briefing books containing summaries of key classified policy and legal documents as well as ongoing programs (per standard procedure, no incoming GC had access to classified information before reporting for duty), and I put together a list of the “hot” items that the new guy would have to confront the day he arrived on the job.
I felt a profound sense of relief about passing the Agency’s legal baton. Barely a year after 9/11, I could have put fifty items on the “hot” list. It seemed like every day we were facing a new, imminent Al Qaeda threat. And we had been operating in an entirely new and perilous legal terrain, capturing, brutally interrogating, and conducting lethal operations against senior Al Qaeda figures. I didn’t want Scott totally overwhelmed on his first day of work, so I was determined to keep the list short.
A couple of weeks before he arrived in November 2002, however, I learned about something I had no choice but to add to the list. Three months earlier, CIA officers, in a secret Agency detention facility overseas, began videotaping the first top Al Qaeda operative in our custody. He was also the first terrorist subjected to the Agency’s Enhanced Interrogation Techniques (EITs). The sessions were captured on the tapes, apparently in graphic detail. Jose Rodriguez, the chief of our Counterterrorist Center (CTC), came to me seeking permission to destroy the tapes. Immediately.
The story began in March 2002, when the CIA and its Pakistani counterparts, with a combination of meticulous intelligence work and good luck, captured a senior Al Qaeda operative named Abu Zubaydah in Pakistan’s third-largest city, Faisalabad. It didn’t come off quietly—there was a furious gun battle, and Zubaydah was shot three times. The Agency rushed a team of doctors from Johns Hopkins to Pakistan to save his life. It was hardly a humanitarian gesture; our intelligence indicated that Zubaydah was Al Qaeda’s main logistics planner for attacks against the United States. The CIA was desperate to keep him alive in order to find out what he knew about any upcoming attacks. This was barely six months after 9/11, and the government was still seized with dread about another horrific strike coming any day.
Zubaydah pulled through, and as soon as the doctors determined he was well enough to travel, he was whisked from Pakistan to the first of a succession of overseas detention facilities that would eventually enter into the public lexicon as “black sites” or “secret prisons.” Zubaydah, a young, smart, cold-blooded, unrepentant psychopath, was the first really “big fish” the Agency had caught post-9/11. Soon after the questioning began, CIA inquisitors became convinced, based on his smug and arrogant responses, that he knew a lot more than he was telling about Al Qaeda’s terrorist plans. By early April 2002, the Agency, lacking other options and desperate to stop another cataclysmic attack, made the fateful decision to explore tougher methods to try to get Zubaydah to talk. This was how the “enhanced interrogation program” came to be, along with yet another word soon to enter the public lexicon: waterboarding.
Later in the book I will provide an eyewitness narrative of the period from April through July 2002, when the Agency conceived the EIT program, which I shepherded through policy review at the White House and legal review at the Justice Department. This process culminated on August 1, when the Justice Department issued to me the first of what would come to be known infamously as the “torture memos,” which legally approved waterboarding and other brutal interrogation tactics against Zubaydah. After I received the Justice memo, the waterboarding of Zubaydah began, with my knowledge and concurrence.
What I didn’t know then and wouldn’t know until two months later was the decision—I could never determine whether someone at CIA Headquarters or in the field with Zubaydah came up with the idea—to videotape Zubaydah around the clock while he was in custody, including periods of interrogation. When he first told me about the videotaping in October 2002, Jose offered two reasons. First, our people at the interrogation site wanted to make sure everything Zubaydah said was recorded and preserved. They were taking careful and copious contemporaneous notes, which were duly transcribed in cables sent back to CIA Headquarters every day, but they were terrified they might miss something. It’s important to note here that, prior to 9/11, the CIA had never in my quarter-century experience held and questioned anyone incommunicado. In a popular culture steeped with films, TV shows, and potboiler spy novels portraying the CIA as a no-holds-barred instrument of mayhem, this may be hard for an outsider to believe. But it’s true. The videotaping was seen not just as a reference tool but as a security blanket.
The other reason Jose gave me for the decision to videotape Zubaydah was more basic: His people didn’t want the SOB to die on them. CIA medical personnel at the detention facility monitored Zubaydah round the clock, but he was about to face some very tough interrogation in the most solitary of confinements. If Zubaydah were to die in captivity, who would believe—either inside or outside the CIA—that they weren’t to blame? Videotaping Zubaydah in captivity would cover their asses.
After several days of taping, however, everyone who had bought into the idea looked at the videotapes, compared them with the notes transcribed and forwarded to headquarters, and concluded that the notes captured everything Zubaydah was saying. In fact, the notes were better; Zubaydah’s voice was occasionally inaudible on the recordings, but the interrogators had been able to get down most everything he was saying. Besides that, Zubaydah had recovered from his wounds and was exhibiting no desire to journey to the afterlife—even with the seventy-two virgins presumably awaiting his arrival—anytime soon. The hundred or so hours of videotapes were packed up and stored at the detention facility.
But Jose’s sudden desire that October to destroy the tapes was not spurred by an urgent need to eliminate unnecessary clutter. It was based on what the tapes showed.
The round-the-clock videotaping had lasted only a few days in August 2002 before it was stopped, and the bulk of it recorded Zubaydah alone in his cell, either saying prayers, sleeping, reading, or otherwise—um—entertaining himself. The rest of the tapes showed the interrogation sessions, and Jose assured me that the scenes of Zubaydah being waterboarded, comprising only a small portion of the tapes, were uncensored, and everything had followed the guidelines formulated by CIA Headquarters and approved by the Justice Department in its August 1 top-secret memorandum to me (the so-called torture memo). That was his good news. His bad news was that the scenes were “tough to watch” and, more to the point, clearly showed the faces of the CIA employees and contractors on the scene.
Jose was convinced that someday, somewhere, somehow, the tapes would become public and the identities of the interrogators inevitably “outed.” “Sixty Minutes will do slow-mo, stop-action pictures of their faces,” Jose emotionally put it to me, “and they and their families will become targets for some Al Qaeda crazy wherever they are.”
I had known Jose for over a decade, and I had no reason to doubt his sincerity or his word. A short, dark man in his late forties whose voice carried the lilt of his upbringing in Puerto Rico, Jose (who had a law degree) could be fiery and over the top rhetorically at times, but I always found him to be honest, straightforward, and utterly without guile—traits I suspect the public would not normally ascribe to a longtime CIA operative. He was an honorable, decent guy, and I considered him a friend. I still do.
I also didn’t think at the time that Jose and his colleagues were being paranoid in fearing that the tapes would someday be made public. If all my years and experience at the CIA taught me anything, it’s that virtually every secret doesn’t stay secret forever, and that the shelf life of new secrets is getting shorter all the time. As I write this today, consider all that happened in the eight years since I first learned about the tapes: the steady stream of media leaks about “secret prisons” and “waterboarding”; the ensuing drumbeat of outrage from elements of Congress, pundits, and the academic community as the shock and horror of 9/11 receded into history; and finally, a new president and his attorney general who publicly repudiated and voluntarily declassified virtually every detail of the CIA’s interrogation program. If those tapes were still in existence, what do you suppose are the chances they would now be in the public domain? Somewhere between probably and slam-dunk.
But that is now, and this was then. Although I sympathized with Jose’s motivations, I thought destroying the tapes was fraught with enormous risk for the Agency. Any minimally competent attorney would instinctively react the same way if his client were to come to him seeking the go-ahead to destroy sensitive materials in his possession, even if the client was not under any cloud of suspicion or investigation. Someone does something like that when he has something to hide.
And the tapes, obviously, were not ordinary material. Given who Zubaydah was, and given why it was considered so critical to get him to talk, a Congress and a nation still shell-shocked by 9/11 might have understood and even supported such tactics. Indeed, only a month earlier, in September 2002, the bipartisan leadership of Congress (the so-called Gang of 8) had been briefed by the CIA on the newly approved techniques, including waterboarding, and expressed no concern whatsoever. But to have this disturbing stuff captured on videotape, and then to destroy it without telling anyone . . . I mean, Jesus. I trusted Jose and believed his assurances that everything on the tapes was within the approved guidelines, but once they were gone, and once someone on the outside inevitably found out about the tapes and what had happened to them, who was going to accept those assurances at face value?
So that was the big turd dumped on my desk shortly before the arrival of the new general counsel. “Who else in senior management knows about the tapes and what you want to do with them?” I asked Jose. “What about Pavitt?,” referring to his superior, Jim Pavitt, the head of CIA covert operations.
“Pavitt knows, and he’s ready to authorize the destruction, but he said I needed to get your okay,” Jose responded.
“Where is George Tenet on this?” I then asked as calmly as I could, referring to the CIA director.
“I don’t know. I haven’t spoken to him about it.”
I informed Jose that he was not to do anything with those tapes. Not then, and not until further notice. I needed to talk about this with the new general counsel.
Poor Scott Muller, I thought. Here he was coming in from private life, with a totally blank slate, and now I had to firehose him not only on a counterterrorist program of an unprecedented scope and nature, but also, by the way, on an urgent request to destroy hair-raising evidence about the program. I was hoping he wouldn’t quickly conclude he was joining an organization, and inheriting a deputy, who were completely crazy.
Thankfully, Scott proved to be a quick study and not easily rattled. He agreed that precipitously destroying the tapes was a terrible idea. At t...
'A larger than life character, with great style, nobody worked harder to protect the nation and the men and women of CIA than John Rizzo. Company Man offers fresh insights into the some of the most highly debated national security issues of our time, from the perspective of an honest and dedicated public servant ... A must read.' - George J. Tenet, former director of central intelligence 'The most influential career lawyer in CIA history.' - Los Angeles Times 'A wonderful book by a man who was in the eye of the storm for thirty-four years. Told with humor and unfailing appreciation for the politics of espionage, Company Man is the best book out there on the modern CIA.' - Robert Baer, New York Times-bestselling author of See No Evil and The Perfect Kill 'John Rizzo, formerly the CIA's top attorney, has superbly captured the scope of his fascinating career in Company Man. Not only does he cover the major espionage and covert action of the decades he served, he also conveys an enduring and critical lesson for all liberal democracies - the centrality of the rule of law at the nexus of foreign policy and intelligence. John, who always provided clear and honest counsel to the CIA's Clandestine Service, has crafted an important book with the same sense of intellectual integrity and duty.' - Ambassador Henry A. Crumpton, New York Times-bestselling author of The Art of Intelligence, Chairman & CEO of Crumpton Group LLC and 24-year veteran of the CIA's Clandestine Service 'John Rizzo has seen it all in his 30 years as a CIA lawyer, and he tells the truth in this absorbing, well-written memoir of his life as a Company Man. Think of Tom Hagen, the Corleone family lawyer in "The Godfather," and you begin to get the flavor of what Rizzo had seen and heard. He draws vivid portraits of the agency's great characters and their sometimes outrageous schemes. The best thing about the book is that you sense Rizzo never stopped being a lawyer or trying to give his clients good, straight-up advice. If you're interested in the inside life of the CIA, read this book!' - David Ignatius, Washington Post columnist and New York Times-bestselling author of Body of Lies 'When the CIA was in trouble, big trouble, it called John - Rizzo knows where the bodies are buried because he helped stash them. Body Counts reads like the CIA's conscience: what the CIA was thinking as it shifted from collecting information to killing terrorists after 9/11. Why did the CIA violently interrogate suspects and then destroy the evidence? Rizzo knows, and he's talking.' - Richard Engel, NBC News Chief Foreign Correspondent and author of War Journal 'Company Man is simply the most revealing insider account to date of the top ranks of the CIA during its most historic - and controversial - era. There is news and humor in every chapter. Frankly, I often found myself wondering why the CIA's pre-publication censors signed off on some of it.' - --Dana Priest, two-time Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist for the Washington Post and co-author of Top Secret America
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- ÉditeurTantor Media Inc
- Date d'édition2014
- ISBN 10 1494531968
- ISBN 13 9781494531966
- ReliureCD
- Evaluation vendeur
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