Gina Haspel
===========

Gina Haspel was the Director of the Central Intelligence Agency under President Trump's first term. Per John Kiriakou, she and Mike Pompeo were the two "very, very bad people" Trump appointed to the position across his first term, and Trump's later choice of her specifically, knowing her history, Kiriakou reads as a deliberate signal that he wanted "the loyalist" in the chair, someone who would do as told.

"Bloody Gina"

Kiriakou says CIA officers, himself included, called her "Bloody Gina" for a specific reason: she flew out to the secret black site to sit in on one of the torture sessions "just because she could ... just to sit there and enjoy it and take it all in." When her appointment as CIA Director was announced, Kiriakou wrote a Washington Post op-ed opposing her nomination, repeating the nickname and calling her "1,000% pro-torture" and, citing her more than thirty years at the agency, "the definition of the deep state."

Haspel was Kiriakou's second-line boss and was, per his account, intimately involved in the enhanced interrogation program at every level, planning, execution, management, and administration. At the end of September 2002 she flew to the secret site and personally took over leadership of one detainee's interrogation: Rahim al-Nashiri, alleged mastermind of the USS Cole bombing. Kiriakou has said he made the "who takes pleasure in watching torture" characterization publicly on Democracy Now! and did not do so lightly: managing a secret site where torture occurs is one thing, he argues, but attending sessions as an observer when not operationally required is another. "Who takes pleasure in watching the torture of another human being? I don't care if the guy is an alleged terrorist." Elsewhere he says Haspel had no operational reason to fly halfway around the world just to watch a man being tortured, "she went out to that torture site just because she wanted to. She didn't have business out there. She wanted to actually watch [Abu Zubaydah] being tortured", and that a co-panelist on a 2026 broadcast independently corroborated it, saying Haspel had "personally participated" at a torture site while publicly claiming to represent the women's liberation movement.

Kiriakou has at times drawn the line more narrowly than his own sharpest phrasing. Asked in 2018 whether Haspel was present when Abu Zubaydah was tortured, he acknowledged that the CIA disputed her presence on that particular day and set the question aside as beside the point: "that's not even the issue. We know that she was there on the day that [al-Nashiri] initially was tortured, and she oversaw his torture." What was not in dispute, in his account, was the post, chief of staff of the Counterterrorism Center, deputy to Jose Rodriguez.

Asked for a one-line assessment of Haspel in July 2026, he answered without qualification: "Bloody Gina Haspel, a war criminal", in the same sequence in which he called John Brennan the worst of the criminals.

Jim Mitchell (of Mitchell and Jessen) later testified, in litigation over his own role, that Haspel was not only in charge of the torture program at the original secret site holding Abu Zubaydah and Nashiri, but had also served as chief at Guantanamo, a fact Kiriakou says was previously unknown. Kiriakou traces her career path through the program: she served as chief of staff to Jose Rodriguez, director of the CIA's Counterterrorism Center, at the time Rodriguez ordered the torture tapes destroyed; when Rodriguez was promoted to deputy director for operations, he made Haspel director of the Counterterrorism Center herself, a position she held from roughly 2008 to 2011 or 2012.

Destroying the torture tapes

Kiriakou says Haspel personally destroyed the CIA's torture tapes, video recordings of interrogation sessions, by feeding them into an industrial document grinder, after having been specifically told by White House Counsel Harriet Miers not to destroy them. He says she acted on an email from Jose Rodriguez instructing her to destroy any evidence related to the tapes, and that she complied.

An earlier account specifies the instrument and the direction of travel: Haspel "personally wrote and transmitted the cable from CIA headquarters to the secret site ordering the chief of base to destroy those tapes", destroying, in Kiriakou's characterization, evidence of a serious felony. He notes that 92 hours of video had been under a directive to be preserved as evidence.

The Washington Post op-ed and the fight over her nomination

The morning Trump named Haspel CIA director in 2017, Kiriakou says he got a call from the Washington Post asking him to write an op-ed opposing her, to run in the high-circulation Sunday Outlook section; the paper gave him an unlimited word count, and he produced roughly 1,200 words arguing against her confirmation, repeating the "Bloody Gina" nickname and calling her the mother of the torture program and "the definition of the deep state." He argues her promotion sent a message to the CIA workforce that war crimes and defying congressional oversight lead to advancement, and separately that it functioned as a recruitment tool for al-Qaeda and ISIS, who could point to her appointment as proof that the United States wanted a fight. He speculates Trump chose her, the ultimate agency insider, specifically hoping to get around institutional resistance to his presidency, a strategy Kiriakou says didn't work, because the CIA remained in charge regardless of who sat in the director's chair.

The day the op-ed ran, Senator Rand Paul (R-KY) called Kiriakou and invited him to Capitol Hill, where the two used a whiteboard in Paul's office to strategize how to block Haspel's nomination; a week later, when the vote came, Paul voted to confirm her anyway. Speaking while the nomination was still pending, Kiriakou described Paul as the only real hope against it, Paul had announced not merely that he would vote no but that he would filibuster, and put the arithmetic against him: Senate minority leader Chuck Schumer had announced he would not whip votes, which with five Democrats up for reelection in states Trump had carried by at least ten points meant, in Kiriakou's reading, "go ahead and vote yes on Gina Haspel. So right off the top, the vote is probably lost." He also reported, from friends still on the Senate Foreign Relations and Intelligence Committees, that Haspel was at that moment meeting the intelligence committee's members one by one and promising them that if confirmed she would not break the law, an assurance he treated as self-defeating: "if you have to go out on a limb and promise that you're not going to break the law ... then I think we need somebody else." Kiriakou also went on NPR to discuss the op-ed; he says the host, whom he identifies as Steve Inskeep, attacked his sourcing on air, and that Kiriakou raised his voice and told Inskeep to get his facts straight before pointing fingers, then walked off after roughly five minutes, telling the producer never to call him again, he says he was never invited back to NPR.

Kiriakou also says he believes Haspel, who has "beef" with former CIA director John Brennan predating her own directorship, has reason to cooperate with investigators against Brennan in order to ingratiate herself with Trump, a dynamic he attributes to CIA officers generally being, in his words, "sociopaths" who care only about themselves.

During her Senate confirmation hearing, Kiriakou notes the irony that Haspel, one of the founders of the torture program who personally destroyed evidence of torture sessions, testified that the program had been a mistake and should never have been implemented.

Confirmation, closest in CIA director history

Haspel's Senate confirmation vote was the closest of any CIA director in history. She secured confirmation by attracting five Democratic votes, doing so by promising she would never institute such a program again. Kiriakou's observation: "When you have to promise not to break the law again, maybe you're the wrong person for the job. Maybe we need a person in the job who wouldn't break the law in the first place." Kiriakou frames Haspel, alongside Mike Pompeo, as one of the two worst possible choices Trump could have made for CIA director, Pompeo for his politics, Haspel as "the consummate insider who flew out to the secret site just to watch people being tortured just for the hell of it."

Asked why people like Haspel continue to rise despite torture's documented ineffectiveness, Kiriakou says it is because the program made people feel something was being accomplished and gave a sense of vengeance for the September 11 deaths, even though it did not work.

Army Field Manual, a stroke of the president's pen

Kiriakou described the McCain-Feinstein Amendment as requiring all U.S. government interrogators to abide by the Army Field Manual, a limitation, in his view, because the Manual is only an executive-branch document. A president can amend it unilaterally by executive order; Congress need not weigh in, and does not even need to be notified. "If this president or some subsequent president wanted to reinstate a torture program, he could do so in five minutes."

Cited as proof Trump is persuadable

Kiriakou and other members of Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity wrote against Haspel's nomination as CIA director. A year later, asked to explain to Julian Assange's supporters why appointments like hers, Elliott Abrams's and John Bolton's should dampen their hopes of a pardon, he argued the reverse: those choices showed Donald Trump had been "clearly influenced by other neocons", and "if he can be influenced one way, I believe actually that he can be influenced in another way as well. It's just a question of getting to him." See Kiriakou on influencing Trump.

The Ukraine complaint on her desk

Kiriakou places Haspel by name in the routing of the 2019 Ukraine call complaint. From the complainant's immediate supervisors it went to the attorneys in the Office of General Counsel and up through the leadership: "it went to Gina Haspel, it went to the IG, it went to every Tom, Dick and Harry it seems at every senior level of the CIA," and only then to the inspector general of the Director of National Intelligence.

What he could not account for was her public silence once the affair broke. Two weeks later he noted that "we haven't heard a single word from Gina Haspel", a director appointed by the president whose agency was now the source of the complaint against him, and put the question in the classic form: "What's her role in all this? What did she know, and when did she know it?" He left the question open rather than answering it, noting only that Haspel had been popular not just with her predecessor Mike Pompeo but with Pompeo's predecessor John Brennan.

His objection is to the breadth of that circulation rather than to Haspel's own handling. What should have been a supervisor-to-inspector-general-to-oversight-committee transmission became, in his description, a document with the agency leadership's fingerprints on it before Congress saw it at all.

See also

- Enhanced interrogation
- Abu Zubaydah
- McCain-Feinstein Amendment
- John Kiriakou
