Fifty-five years ago, when work began on the CIA’s new headquarters at Langley, Virginia, Allen W Dulles, the spy agency’s first civilian director, stipulated that its motto, taken from St John’s Gospel, should be inscribed at the building’s entrance. To this day, anyone who enters the vast complex is confronted by the engraving: ‘And ye shall know the truth and the truth shall make you free’.
It is unlikely that the thousands of employees who work there are feeling particularly liberated in the wake of the US Senate Intelligence Committee’s damning report into the agency’s controversial programme to detain and interrogate terrorism suspects after the September 11 attacks.
President Obama insists that Americans should continue to consider CIA officers as “patriots” to whom the country owes “a profound debt of gratitude”. But there will be many at Langley who feel a deep sense of betrayal that, yet again, the agency has found itself caught in the crosshairs of a bitter political battle between Republicans and Democrats over how best to confront the threat posed by Islamist terrorists.
Indeed, there are many current and former CIA officials who are already questioning the veracity of the committee’s account.
Within hours of Senator Dianne Feinstein, the committee’s chairman, releasing the report, John O Brennan, the agency’s current director, who was appointed by Mr Obama only last year, launched an attack on the findings, claiming they were “incomplete and selective”.
Brennan was particularly keen to reject the report’s assertion that the CIA had deliberately misled politicians and the public about its activities. “The record does not support the study’s inference that the agency systematically and intentionally misled each of these audiences on the effectiveness of the programme,” he said. These sentiments were echoed by one of his Republican predecessors, Michael Hayden, who denounced the report as reading like “a shrill prosecutorial screed rather than a dispassionate historical study”.
As Democrats enjoy a clear majority on the intelligence committee, it was clear from the outset that their primary motivation was to settle old scores against the Bush administration. Consequently, the end product can hardly be hailed as a truthful and full account of what actually happened during one of the darker episodes in the agency’s troubled history.
If political malice was the objective, the outcome has been to inflict enormous damage both to the CIA’s reputation, as well as its ability to maintain its effectiveness in dealing with terrorist groups.
Arguably, it is the suggestion that elements within the CIA were in effect concealing certain operations from their political masters that will cause most concern. For all its considerable accomplishments over the years, the reason the CIA is the subject of so many conspiracy theories is that it remains tainted by several episodes when it went “rogue” — that is, undertook operations without proper authorisation.
The real problem the CIA and other intelligence agencies face — British intelligence officers have also been accused of complicity in the CIA’s interrogation programme — is dealing with the undisputed evidence that operatives systematically abused their captives in a manner most civilised people will view as torture.
The CIA and its allies in the West must now persuade moderates that these mistakes are firmly confined to history, and assure critics that their default position will always be to abide by the rule of law, rather than to indulge in knee-jerk responses.
In the CIA’s defence the main reason any of the abuse happened was because, like other intelligence agencies, everyone was caught off guard by the enormity of the September 11 attacks. If the comparisons with Pearl Harbour made by Bush at the time now seem an exaggeration, the attacks nevertheless induced a mood of blind panic that led the CIA to respond in ways it now regrets.
But if any good is to come from the past decade’s controversies, it is that the West has learnt from its mistakes.