Original subtitles

Eighteen months after 9/11, the war on terror shifted from

Afghanistan to Iraq.

At the time, the public sentiment to go to war was very high.

It was jingoistic.

We're going to be met as liberators.

This'll be over in no time, it'll be a cakewalk.

Go inside, go inside, go inside.

Go inside, go inside.

And it was an utter disaster.

We had been force fed a lot of lies,

and I liken it to falling down Alice's rabbit hole,

where white is black and black is white.

As in Afghanistan 18 months earlier,

Iraq fell to the U.S. military within a few weeks.

But with Saddam Hussein barely overthrown, a series of

failures and scandals began for the White House and the CIA.

The war on terror was turning against the United States.

In Afghanistan, the counter terrorism issue was handled by CIA in the lead.

Iraq was totally different.

The U.S. military obviously undertook a conventional invasion.

And then what we had was a very odd situation, I will put it,

in which we installed what

was called the Coalition Provisional Authority, the CPA,

a transitional government led by an American.

Bush sends out an acolyte of Henry Kissinger's name,

L. Paul Bremer, to be the American viceroy of Iraq.

The coalition forces did not come to colonize Iraq.

We came to overthrow a despotic regime. That we've done.

Now our job is to turn and help the Iraqi

people regain control of their own destiny. Thank you very much.

Bremer, on his own, without any coordination with the State

Department or the CIA, proclaims two orders,

his first two orders, upon becoming the imperial viceroy of Iraq.

The Ba'ath Party, which was the glue that held Iraq together,

is to be disbanded and the Iraqi army is to be disarmed.

If you were a professional, not just a government professional,

but if you were a college professor

or if you, you know, ran a company, you had to be part

of the Ba'ath Party.

And one of the first things the Bush administration does when it

comes in is to dismantle that

whole infrastructure, send those professionals home,

make them, you know, suddenly desperate

to have income, make them resentful and angry.

It was the perfect condition for an insurgency to form.

That decision was not supported by those of us on the ground.

And I remember Charlie Seidel, the station chief,

was very angry about this.

And I know for a fact he made his opinions very clear to

Paul Bremer and to others.

Seidel is probably the most experienced and accomplished

Arabist in the CIA, or indeed the government of the United States.

And he goes to Bremer, and he runs up the steps of the palace

that Bremer is occupying,

and he says, "First of all, don't do this.

"Second, if you do this, you'll have 50,000 enemies in

the city by nightfall."

I am today establishing an Iraqi de Ba'athification Council

to advise me on how best to implement

the de Ba'athification policies and to ensure that the structure

and influence of the Ba'ath Party is eliminated for good.

Another step to assure that the future of Iraq

is much brighter than the past.

Another case in which excellent intelligence from the CIA was ignored.

Not the first time, not the last.

This decision marked a turning point in the war.

Overnight, hundreds of thousands of public servants were dismissed

with no hope of taking part in the building of a new Iraq.

Iraqi soldiers were demobilized, but nobody thought

of retrieving their weapons.

We want America out of this country.

We hate America.

They have no responsibility.

Their army, drunk, and they're driving on the roads, killing innocent people.

We want America out of this country.

They may have hated Saddam, but now they hate the Americans.

Yes, yeah.

We had made a mistake in outlawing the Ba'ath Party.

In some ways, it was a Formula 4 insurgency.

So our mission in Iraq very quickly became very much a

counterterrorism mission.

Within two months after the invasion, when things turned very violent,

when the euphoria of freedom

evaporated and they started to really, elements of the former regime

started to be, you know, attack.

So, I went home after about six months being gone.

When I came home, I had a case of post traumatic stress.

I was seeing dead bodies, guts and brains.

Having trouble sleeping, I was having nightmares.

Post traumatic stress is from all the things that I had seen

maybe had done, kind of all the death up close and personal.

I don't think anyone is ever prepared to see that.

I wasn't a member of the U.S. military.

I was a CIA case officer who spoke Arabic, who was a patriot,

who volunteered for this service.

But seeing, you know, people killed in front of you,

regardless of whether you thought you were prepared for it,

that's something else.

At that time, the relationship between CIA

and the White House, it was tense.

Department of Defense, and particularly

the Secretary of Defense, Secretary Rumsfeld,

were claiming that no, no, this is just a handful

of Ba'athist dead enders, these people didn't

really represent anything, and that this whole thing

was very quickly gonna go away.

I picked up a newspaper today and I couldn't believe it.

I read eight headlines that talked about chaos,

violence, unrest.

Do I think those words are unrepresentative? Yes.

By denying the evidence,

the White House sought to keep its control of the narrative.

But soon after the invasion, in the U.S.,

journalists and a number of CIA officers

began to openly question Colin Powell's presentation

to the United Nations.

What if the Bush administration had

been lying all along?

We spent a lot of time as reporters in 2003

looking at the bits of evidence

that the administration put up

saying that there was a weapons of mass destruction program

in Iraq.

One very persuasive bit of evidence that Colin Powell mentioned

specifically and the administration

people talked about endlessly was these mobile biological weapons labs.

The source of that information was a defector who became,

his code name was Curveball.

This is Rafid Ahmad Alwan at a Baghdad wedding in 1993,

six years before he became the key

Iraqi source known as Curveball.

Some of us at the CIA wanted to find out who this Curveball was.

So I went to Iraq to investigate.

His family was still in Baghdad.

We wanted to talk to them because they knew more about his

history than anybody else.

They told us that he had left that chemical engineering

job years and years ago.

Well that's not what Curveball told the Germans.

He said he continued to work at this engineering center all the

way until March of 1999 when he

left Iraq and went to Europe and ended up in Germany.

So here's the family corroborating that information

and telling us a number of things

that contradicted what Rafid had told the Germans.

So at that point, we knew all of this was a fabrication,

none of this is true.

But we got spun up, we got convinced of a threat that was

based on a very imaginative

and an ultimately very deceptive informant.

I wrote a field report on our investigation,

and the conclusion was Curveball is without a doubt a fabricator.

Everything he said, he made up.

Flew back to CIA headquarters,

and I knew they were all very angry with me.

I want to get that published.

They wouldn't let me publish it.

People from the White House who continued to push a

certain narrative because they needed to be true politically.

If you weren't taking the side of the administration, that means

you're siding with the terrorists.

You're a suspicious citizen.

You're not really a good patriot.

It was, in a way, dangerous to voice opposition to the prevailing view.

My husband, Joe, and I were being depicted as traitors, liars.

It was ridiculous, but painful.

Early in 2002, less than a year before the invasion of Iraq,

Valerie Plame was working undercover for the CIA.

She was then married to Joseph C. Wilson, a senior American diplomat.

The CIA asked her husband to investigate allegations that,

as the White House claimed, Saddam Hussein

was seeking to manufacture nuclear weapons.

The dictator had apparently tried to purchase

uranium in Niger, a country that Wilson knew well.

One day, my boss asked me if I could ask my husband,

Ambassador Joe Wilson, if he could

come into headquarters the following week,

have a meeting about this.

I said, "Sure, yes, of course."

Joe explained in the meeting that there were other American

ranking officials on the ground there

that had completely written off these reports

of this yellowcake uranium is totally bogus.

But he said, "Listen, if you still really want me to go,

"of course I'll go. We're public servants.

"We want to serve our country. Yes, of course."

And so Joe Wilson went to Niger,

met with the officials he knew.

They assured him, "This is all false.

We did not sell anything to Iraq."

And so Joe came back from that, and told the agency

what he found out, and the agency shared that with the White House.

Honestly, at that moment in time, we both felt good.

A question had been asked, we were able to answer it,

and that was the end of it.

Until...

Mr. Speaker, the President of the United States.

January of 2003, when then President Bush

gave his State of the Union Address.

The British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought

significant quantities of uranium from Africa.

Our intelligence sources tell us that he has attempted to purchase

high strength aluminum tubes

suitable for nuclear weapons production.

Saddam Hussein has not credibly explained these activities.

He clearly has much to hide.

Soon as the president said those infamous 16 words

about Saddam Hussein seeking yellowcake uranium,

Joe was talking to his former colleagues

at the State Department, speaking to staffers

and elected officials on the Hill,

trying to understand what was behind this.

That really upset Joe Wilson.

He thought, "Well, wait a minute. Doesn't the White House,

didn't CIA share my information with them?"

So, he started to think that somebody

is spinning this information and hyping it.

And essentially, he was told, "Hey, buddy.

"If you wanna do anything about this, you're gonna have to do it on your own

"because this is part of the package. Deal with it."

Four months after the start of the war,

Joe Wilson decided, despite the risks he faced,

to confront the Bush administration with its lies.

So he wrote an op-ed that was published in July of 2003,

saying, "What I didn't find in Africa."

And it really caused a stir.

The White House was very angry.

And they turned around and started to target his wife,

Valerie, who was undercover at the CIA.

A week after Joe's op-ed piece came out,

there was a column by a conservative columnist,

Robert Novak.

He sort of threw in there that Joe Wilson's wife,

Valerie Plame, worked for the CIA.

It felt like a gut punch.

The only people who knew that I worked for the CIA

were my parents and my brother.

And then it became this political whirlwind,

this media hotspot.

Robert Novak's column revealed the covert identity of Valerie Plame,

and it's still not known who in the U.S. government made

her identity public.

Who leaked the identity of a CIA operative to

journalists in Washington?

Who blew Valerie Plame's cover?

It's a very serious offense to release the name

or to kind of unmask an undercover CIA officer.

The administration did that.

They did it deliberately and maliciously

in order to discredit any contrary arguments

about the existence of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.

So all of a sudden, our address, our names,

my CIA affiliation is everywhere.

These disturbed people can easily find us.

I worry terribly about the safety of my children.

I went to the CIA security office

to try to get some additional security,

at least on my home, and they declined to do so,

which was a terrible disappointment.

It was the first time in the history of the CIA

that the name of an active officer

had been revealed by the powers that be.

Despite these counter tactics,

Washington couldn't hide the failures of its war on terror anymore.

Two years after 9/11,

locating bin Laden was no longer the CIA's priority.

He was unfindable, and even worse,

his organization, Al Qaeda, was now being dispatched to Iraq

to step up its holy war on America.

You know, the irony is that Al Qaeda comes to Iraq

when Iraq falls into utter chaos.

The Bush administration created a situation

where Al Qaeda is in Iraq,

but it was not there when the U.S. invaded Iraq.

At this time, I'm working for the Iraq task force.

There is some discussion about Abu Musab al Zarqawi.

Americans are incapable of delivering basic

services to the people.

Water, electricity, and the country is going to hell

under its American occupation.

It's very easy for Zarqawi to recruit fighters and terrorists

into the ranks of Al Qaeda in Iraq.

Our analysts were telling us that there were

a significant number of known jihadists

from around the world who were beginning to flock into Iraq.

CIA officers work 24/7 to extract

bits of insight from intelligence

and put those pieces together to create a pattern of life picture

of men like Zarqawi.

It was just a matter of time before C.I.A. was able to

pinpoint Zarqawi's location and ultimately to kill him.

With a 500 pound bomb, the target had been fully engaged.

Last night in Iraq, United States military forces killed the terrorist,

Zarkawi.

Zarqawi is dead, but the difficult and necessary

mission in Iraq continues.

We can expect the terrorists and insurgents to carry on without him.

We can expect the sectarian violence to continue.

The death of Al Qaeda in Iraq's leader was a symbolic victory

for the United States.

Except that Al Qaeda's ranks continued to swell

and terrorist attacks increased in number as America was

unable to prevent them.

After Afghanistan and Iraq, it was the turn of other countries

to be blighted by these attacks, including Syria.

I went back to the Middle East, and for me,

Syria was my favorite posting.

In many ways, I was out of the hunt against Al Qaeda.

That was much more of kind of traditional intelligence collection.

And that's not done by accident.

I had enough kind of time doing some hard stuff,

and it was good for me to get

back to a posting in which I would see my family every night.

September 12, 2006, was not a good day.

I was at the U.S. Embassy in Damascus, Syria.

I was getting a cup of coffee at one of the embassy offices.

And I heard automatic weapons fire.

And then I heard some explosions, which turned out were

grenades that were hitting the roof of the embassy.

And there's a car bomb that exploded.

It was, you know, one of those moments

in which, you know, your life is kind of flashing by you.

So one of the things that we have to do

after a terrorist attack, of course,

is try to gather the DNA of the terrorists.

We want to identify who they are.

One of the suicide bombers who blew himself up,

there were pieces of his body everywhere.

And so for the right reasons,

I picked up kind of a chunk of his head.

It looked like a piece of beef jerky.

Like it looked like a piece of shawarma.

I put it in a plastic bag and I threw it in our freezer in the embassy.

What was funny is later on, when someone who worked on

counterterrorism called and said,

"Hey, can we get that? We understand that you have some

DNA from the attackers,"

I thought to myself, "What did I do with this?"

And I said, "I think it's in the fridge."

And other people in the office were like, "What?

My lunch is in there every day."

So I went into the freezer and took it out, and that's where

one of the pieces of the head of the suicide bomber was.

The attack makes it clear that the United States

faces terrorist attacks against Americans

and American outposts from the Mediterranean to the Hindu Kush.

This is the seed of ISIS, planted by George Bush.

The increasing size of Al Qaeda in the Middle East wasn't

Washington's only problem.

In the spring of 2004, after the lies about weapons of mass destruction,

the press revealed yet another scandal

surrounding the War on Terror.

The Americans' torture and abuse of prisoners in

Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq.

The photos hit like a bombshell.

They confirmed rumors that had been doing the rounds in press circles.

Terror was not the sole province of one side.

I started hearing about unusual detention sites

called Black Sites.

We learned that the government classified the enemy

as unlawful enemy combatants.

So they don't have prisoner of war status

in the eyes of the military and the CIA,

which means they can be treated differently.

And nobody in the government would give us information

because remember, it was all classified.

And that made me just keep asking and keep asking.

And there are people who are willing to tell us a little bit.

Torture never works.

It was wrong strategically

and it was wrong morally and ethically.

One day I was coming to the black site.

I discovered interrogation methods

used by some CIA agents on detainees.

One of the first high value detainees

during the war in terror was a person by the name of Abu Zubaydah.

Like many other Al Qaeda members,

Abu Zubaydah flees Afghanistan after the American attack.

He is later captured in Pakistan.

President Bush immediately announces

that this guy is like the number three guy in Al Qaeda.

He was nothing of the sort.

He was never the number three figure in Al Qaeda.

You might call him a master logistician.

So he was put on a CIA aircraft

and they fly him off to a site in Thailand.

I was tasked to join a CIA team,

me and another FBI agent, to interrogate him.

So we went to a facility that later on

became known as a black site.

They brought him in.

We spoke with CIA boss over there in that area.

We said, "So what do you want to do? Who's going to be interrogating him?

Because we get instruction that it's a CIA operation."

The torture of Abu Zubaydah,

which is recorded on videotape,

there were CI officers and analysts witnessing this

who were brought to tears.

Who were horrified about what they saw.

So I was in total shock.

I said, "This is horrible, dude."

Then I just called the FBI, called the director's office.

And he said, "Look, you know what?

"You guys, we don't do these kind of things in the FBI,

"so just come back."

I remember that day.

I arrive at headquarters and I begin to see cables coming from

the secret site to headquarters

from people saying, "Whoa, I never signed up for this.

This is torture. I quit."

One secretary saw a torture session and she faints, she's so upset.

We see cables from other people involved saying,

"I want to come home, I never wanted to do this."

And so I thought, well, certainly somebody's going to say something.

Somebody's going to go to the media.

The Washington Post publishes the Black Sites story.

And there wasn't just that there were Black Sites, it was what

they were doing to people in Black Sites.

It was what some of the CIA officers who were in the

battlefield alone were doing to their detainees.

Shortly after that, the head of the clandestine service, Jose Rodriguez,

decides on his own to destroy the videotapes that they've made

of some of the interrogations.

Rodriguez wants these tapes destroyed because if

they ever became public,

it would make Abu Ghraib look like a picnic.

Later that week, President George W. Bush gives

a press conference and one of the reporters

says, "There are reports from human rights organizations

saying that the CIA is torturing its prisoners."

And the president looks directly in the camera and says...

This government does not torture people.

You know, we stick to U.S. law and our international obligations.

The American people expect their government to take action

to protect them from further attack.

And that's exactly what this government is doing.

And that's exactly what we'll continue to do.

And I say to my wife, "He's lying.

He's looking the American people in the eye, and he's lying to us."

And I decide I'm going to tell the truth.

A few days later, John Kiriakou blew his own cover.

He made a number of appearances on U.S. TV channels

to reveal what was really going on at the black sites.

Where was the permission given, in your opinion?

The highest levels of the CIA?

Was the White House involved in that decision?

Absolutely. This isn't something that's done willy nilly.

This was a policy decision that was made at the White House

with concurrence from the

National Security Council and the Justice Department.

He particularly denounced a practice used by the CIA called

waterboarding, which causes

prisoners to experience the sensation of drowning, so forcing them

to speak, a practice qualified as torture.

And I say three things in that interview.

I say that the CIA is torturing its prisoners.

I say that torture is official U.S. government policy.

It's not the result of a rogue.

And I say that the policy had been personally approved by

the president himself.

When John made revelations, I got in touch with him

immediately afterwards and I said,

you know, "Nobody talks about this. Nobody talks about this.

I thought he was making a big mistake.

It was all still classified at the time.

John Kiriakou was a whistleblower and the CIA hates whistleblowers.

Within the next 24 hours, the CIA files what's called a crimes report

against me saying that I have revealed classified information

and so the FBI begins to investigate me.

Teams of FBI agents follow me everywhere I'm going.

They investigate me from December of 2007

to December of 2008.

In January of 2012, I'm finally arrested

and charged with five felonies,

including three counts of espionage.

So, of course, I have to fight.

I hire the best lawyers money can buy.

The fact that he confirmed something

that the CIA never confirmed

was enough to get him a prison sentence.

And in the end, I take a plea.

It calls for 30 months in prison,

of which I would do 23 months, and the case is done.

And so I take the deal.

John Kiriakou never took part in the torturing of CIA prisoners,

but he will go down in history

as the only person to be indicted

and sentenced to jail amid the entire scandal.

His account, along with a number of revelations in the press

forced the Senate, the main check on executive power,

to investigate the CIA's practices.

My name is Daniel J. Jones

and I was the main investigator for the committee's report

on the CIA's detention and interrogation program.

Just the production of materials for that took three years.

And that amounted, at the very end of the day,

to be 6.3 million pages of records.

That includes emails, it includes CIA cables, highly classified CIA records.

One of the key findings of the Senate's report was that there

was at least 119 CIA detainees.

At least 39 of them were subjected to the CIA's enhanced

interrogation techniques.

Now it's very important to say "at least," right?

Some of the records are unclear.

Some records were destroyed.

We often hear about waterboarding, but there were plenty of

other aggressive and terrible

techniques that were happening at these black sites.

Rectal feeding and rectal rehydration

were used as interrogation tactics.

They parade solid food into a blender and put a tube in his anus

and infused this information,

this material, into him.

It was, again, used as a torture tactic.

Before the report comes out, the CIA is saying that the Senate

report and its findings are

inaccurate, and they don't think it should be released.

We understand that they went into Senate computers and searched

the records and searched our

drafting of the report, searched our comments, searched our emails.

The CIA was very unhappy about the report.

The report exposes brutality that stands in stark contrast

to our values as a nation.

It chronicles a stain on our history that must never be

allowed to happen again.

The CIA said these techniques are necessary.

Necessary to obtain otherwise unavailable

intelligence that saves lives.

And in fact, we saw these enhanced interrogation techniques,

which most people refer to as torture, were ineffective.

To me, that is a very convenient out to say,

oh, we should never do this, this is torture.

Oh, and by the way, it never works.

Well, I never bought that.

I have no concerns about it.

And the reason for that is because the individuals,

these were terrorists,

people who had already murdered thousands of people.

So I used it, we all used it, to help protect

and keep the people over here feeling safe.

I know we've tortured in the past.

We tortured in Vietnam, we tortured in the Philippines,

we tortured at Wounded Knee.

I know we've done that, but we have never,

never in our history condoned it at the presidential level.

That is to say, have a president sign a finding

so you can torture people.

And that's what we did.

The Bush administration methodically

and brutally imposed its doctrine for eight years.

Having sworn to avenge America and eliminate Al Qaeda,

the US president left the White House faced with a stalemate.

A country bogged down in an endless war

and a discredited CIA.

A page turned with the election of Barack Obama,

who would soon withdraw U.S. troops from Iraq.

For the CIA, it was also the promise of a new era.

Obama's first CIA director was Leon Panetta.

And the CIA as an institution was very skeptical of Panetta coming in

because Panetta had been quite forthright

that torture was un American.

When the president called me, I asked the question, "Why? Why me?"

And the president said,

"Because I think you can help restore

the credibility of the CIA."

Number two, he made clear that he wanted to make sure

that we did everything we could to go after Osama bin Laden.

In so many words,

goddammit, why can't you people find Osama bin Laden?

Soon after the meeting with the president

that I went back to the CIA,

I immediately had to make the decision

to appoint a task force to conduct the search for bin Laden.

Sometimes they'd say, "We don't have any news."

And I would say, "You know, that's not acceptable.

"If you have no news, I expect you to come up

"with five new ideas about how to be able

"to go after Bin Laden."

And they did that.

So one very interesting possible clue

to finding Osama bin Laden comes unexpectedly

from the country of Jordan in 2009.

The Jordanians told us about a possible source

who might be able to lead us to bin Laden.

Individual, his name is Balawi.

He reportedly was a doctor

who had been active on extremist web forums.

And had been working with Zawahiri,

who was the second in command of Al Qaeda,

who had medical problems.

You know, having that ability to assess

a potential Asian candidate is invaluable.

And it's something that we strive for all the time.

So, you know, it came down to the idea

of we have to meet this person

with the notion of, you know,

possibly having access to the number two in Al Qaeda,

arguably, you know, one of the world's most wanted terrorists.

We finally were able to set up a meeting

where this source would be brought to our team, our CIA team,

for them to be able to determine whether or not

he was somebody we could trust.

We held a meeting at a secret CIA base

in southern Afghanistan called Camp Chapman.

Making this meeting happen is difficult, of course.

There are logistical problems,

one of which is this young man's anxieties.

Balawi, he's afraid of being seen by someone.

He's afraid that some, you know, Taliban informant

will spot him and report him to

al Qaeda and then he will get killed.

And so he's insisting on very, very specific,

very particular security safeguards.

He wants to be able to have access to the CIA facility

without really having the kind

of pat down or security checks that you would normally

receive for such a meeting.

Balawi drives into this facility in a car without being checked at all.

We will get you, CIA team.

Inshallah, we will get you down.

Look, this is for you.

It's not a watch.

It's a detonator.

To kill as much as I can.

To kill you, to kill your partner, your Jordanian partner.

Inshallah, I go to the Paradise, and you will be sent to the hell.

Inshallah.

Eight American families received terrible news today.

A suicide bomber struck a U.S. military base

in the eastern part of Afghanistan.

The CIA says seven of its employees were killed

and six others wounded in a suicide bombing

at a base in Afghanistan.

It was one of the deadliest attacks in CIA history.

I knew all of 'em.

I knew all of 'em.

It was just an atrocious experience.

Yeah, I'm getting even emotional thinking about it.

So, it was tough.

I cried.

Yeah, I couldn't believe it.

I just could not.

Yeah.

Service in CIA is a very personal experience.

It's not a job, it's a lifestyle profession.

Almost every family said to me,

"I want you to continue to do the mission

"that our loved ones were involved in."

And I said, "You're right,

"and I will do everything we can to find bin Laden."

After this disaster for the CIA,

there's a recommitment to try to come up with new ideas

and new plans, to investigate old leads,

to try to find bin Laden,

the person ultimately responsible for these attacks.

And they ended up providing some of the insights

that led the CIA to find a key courier

who was visiting bin Laden secretly.

To the town of Abbottabad in Pakistan.

The compound was three times the size of other compounds.

It had 18 foot walls on one side,

12 foot walls on another side,

barbed wire at the top,

and there was a mysterious family

that was living on the third floor.