On March 13, President Donald Trump fired Secretary of State Rex Tillerson—via Twitter—and replaced him with the director of the Central Intelligence Agency, Mike Pompeo. The choice of Pompeo to lead the State Department is an excellent one. At Langley, he earned the respect of a bureaucracy deeply skeptical of the president. His foreign-policy qualifications from his three terms in the House of Representatives are beyond reproach. And he understands (as many secretaries of state have not) that the aim of our foreign policy is not to make the world’s diplomatic elite love and appreciate the United States.
An equally important and encouraging part of Trump’s shake-up is his nomination of Pompeo’s deputy, Gina Haspel, to lead the CIA.
She is a career intelligence officer and has served as CIA station chief in locations around the globe, including the crucial London station. Her integrity and skill are unchallenged. She has, moreover, a reputation for impartiality. The capacity to separate one’s political views from one’s duties is crucial in most high-level government work, but particularly in the clandestine services. By all accounts Haspel is apolitical. Or at least no one seems to know what her politics are.
Yet she will not be portrayed as the superbly competent public servant she is by the media and her congressional detractors in the weeks to come. Already Haspel’s critics have begun attacking her as a shadowy grand inquisitor with no regard for international norms or common decency; the menacing terms “black site,” “torture,” “waterboarding,” “interrogation,” and “dark chapter” will hang about her confirmation hearings as they did in the first media reports about her nomination.
A Washington Post reporter, Erica Werner, called Haspel a “torture overseer” the moment her nomination became public. (The tweet has since been deleted.) The Daily Beast wrote of the CIA detention center in Thailand supposedly overseen by Haspel as a “torture laboratory.” Kentucky senator Rand Paul, mixing his characteristic sanctimony with carelessness, called her a “cheerleader for waterboarding” and related an anecdote in which a CIA station chief mocks an al Qaeda detainee during an interrogation. The story comes from James E. Mitchell’s book Enhanced Interrogation, and Mitchell attributes this conduct to an unnamed man, not to Gina Haspel.
The ultimate source of these libels is a 2014 report produced by the Democratic staff of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence. The Feinstein Report, as it’s known, claimed to be an objective analysis of the CIA’s detention and interrogation programs in the years after September 11, 2001. It was much more a political stunt. CIA employees named in the report, up to and including former director Michael Hayden, were made to sign nondisclosure agreements merely for the privilege of reading the allegations against them. Other than the report’s executive summary, it has never been made public—allowing the debate’s most partisan and least informed participants to level wild accusations against Bush administration officials, often without the bother of supporting those accusations with evidence.
Haspel’s career details remain unclear (as befits a professional spy), but she was almost certainly associated with the CIA’s post-9/11 interrogation program. That the program was flawed is beyond doubt—some abuses took place, the program lacked full accountability, and in certain cases officials tried to exaggerate its effectiveness. But the Feinstein Report’s contention that the program’s enhanced-interrogation techniques produced no useful information was a brazen lie. So was the report’s broad and mostly detail-free claim that the program was characterized by wanton abuse and torture.
The CIA detention program produced valuable intelligence, as former CIA interrogator Jason Beale (a pseudonym) explained in detail in these pages in 2014. Fair-minded people can disagree about whether waterboarding a known terrorist for actionable intelligence on his plans and network is intrinsically immoral. We do not think so. What isn’t debatable is that enhanced interrogation produced results. That is why, as Beale pointed out, Barack Obama changed his mind when he became president in 2009. Whereas candidate Obama glibly asserted that “torture” doesn’t work because people will “say anything” to make it stop, President Obama shifted his argument: The “core question,” he then argued, was “Could we have gotten that same information without resorting to these techniques?”
That is a fair question and one Americans can debate. But Gina Haspel’s service is no part of that debate. She served her country in the tasks assigned to her. As Hayden said to us this week, “Gina did exactly what we asked her to do.”
Congressional Democrats will no doubt demand to know every detail of Haspel’s role in the interrogation program. Many of the lawmakers who will upbraid her for her association with “torture” and “black sites” knew and approved of the agency’s interrogation techniques in 2002 and only feigned outrage years later. Haspel’s confirmation hearings will likely turn into a debate about the Bush administration’s handling of the war on terror. Republicans on the Senate Intelligence Committee had better come prepared to challenge their colleagues’ exhibitionism. Gina Haspel is a strong and capable woman. She would be the first female to lead the CIA, and we can expect she will do so with great skill and professionalism.
