WASHINGTON — In late 2005, the retiring CIA station chief in Bangkok sent a classified cable to his superiors in Langley, Va., asking if he could destroy videotapes recorded at a secret CIA prison in Thailand that in part portrayed intelligence officers using simulated drowning to extract information from suspected al-Qaida members.
The tapes had been sitting in the station chief’s safe, in the U.S. Embassy compound, for nearly three years. The station chief was insistent because he was retiring and wanted to resolve the matter before he left, CIA officials told The Washington Post.
And in November 2005, a published report that detailed a secret CIA prison system provoked an international outcry.
Those circumstances pushed the CIA’s then-director of clandestine operations, Jose Rodriguez Jr., to act against the earlier advice of at least five senior CIA and White House officials, who had counseled the agency since 2003 that the tapes should be preserved. Rodriguez consulted CIA lawyers and officials, who told him that he had the legal right to order the destruction.
In his view, he received their implicit support to do so, according to his attorney, Robert Bennett.
In a classified response to the station chief, Rodriguez ordered the tapes’ destruction, CIA officials say. The Justice Department and the House intelligence committee are now investigating whether that deed constituted a violation of law or an obstruction of justice. John Rizzo, the CIA’s acting general counsel, is scheduled to discuss the matter in a closed House intelligence committee hearing scheduled today.
According to interviews with more than two dozen current and former U.S. officials familiar with the debate, the taping was conducted from August to December 2002 to demonstrate that interrogators were following the detailed rules set by lawyers and medical experts in Washington, and were not causing a detainee’s death.
The principal motive for the tape’s destruction was the clandestine operations division’s worry that the tapes’ fate could be snatched out of their hands, the officials said. They feared that the agency could be publicly shamed and that those involved in waterboarding and other extreme interrogation techniques would be hauled before a grand jury or a congressional inquiry — a circumstance now partly unfolding anyway.
Many of those involved recalled conversations in which senior CIA and White House officials advised against destroying the tapes, but without expressly prohibiting it, leaving a vacuum of specific instructions.
They said that Rodriguez then interpreted the absence of a decision to order the tapes’ preservation as a tacit approval of their destruction.
Recorded on the tapes was the coercive questioning of two senior al-Qaida suspects: Zayn al-Abidin Muhammed Hussein, known as Abu Zubaida, and Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri, who were captured by U.S. forces in 2002. They show Zubaida undergoing waterboarding, which involved strapping him to a board and pouring water over his nose and mouth, creating the sensation of imminent drowning.
Al-Nashiri later also underwent the same treatment.
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