Jose Rodriguez
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Jose Rodriguez is a senior Central Intelligence Agency officer of the post-September 11 era and one of the figures most prominently named by John Kiriakou in his account of agency wrongdoing in connection with the enhanced interrogation program. Kiriakou identifies Rodriguez, alongside George Tenet, John McLaughlin, Michael Morell, and Rick Pavitt, as among the senior officials responsible for "a lot of crimes that were committed in the name of national security" during the agency's post-9/11 detention and interrogation operations, and has separately named Rodriguez as one of the people he holds responsible for his own treatment. Elsewhere Kiriakou calls him flatly "a stone cold killer," naming him, as director of the Counterterrorism Center who went on to become CIA deputy director for operations, among his real detractors at the agency.

The Pakistan visit, and the contrast with Cofer Black

Per John Kiriakou, Rodriguez visited Pakistan in early 2002 with Cofer Black, who had just been named Ambassador-at-Large for Counterterrorism, Rodriguez was about to take Black's old position at CTC. Kiriakou was their control officer. The contrast was stark. Black charmed the Pakistanis and joked with them constantly; Rodriguez "never spoke a word" through the meetings and the banquet.

Running the interrogation programme

Deploying Mitchell and Jessen

Rodriguez ran the operational deployment of Mitchell and Jessen's enhanced interrogation techniques at CIA black sites, and, in Kiriakou's account, ordered the training for the torturers. "Every time Mitchell and Jessen were put in charge of the interrogation sessions at the black sites, every FBI person in the country would leave."

Destroying the tapes

Rodriguez is identified, in the cold-open montage of Dalton Fischer Podcast (/sources) Part 1, as the official responsible for the destruction of "92 other tapes that ... show Abu Zubaydah and Abd al-Nashiri being waterboarded." Told by the White House Counsel not to destroy them, he had the tapes thrown into an "industrial grinder" and pulverized beyond recovery, conduct for which Kiriakou calls him a "war criminal" who should face international charges.

In his memoir, Kiriakou says, Rodriguez wrote that he had ordered Gina Haspel to order the tapes destroyed, and gave as his reason neither obstruction nor cover-up but the fear that the recordings would eventually leak and "people would judge them out of context and come to a false conclusion about the CIA." Kiriakou's assessment of the rationale is one word: "that's ludicrous."

The promotion he tried to block

Kiriakou dates the professional cost of his refusal precisely: his promotion panel met a week after he turned down certification in the enhanced interrogation techniques, and he was passed over, this immediately after returning from Pakistan, where he had taken part in what he calls the biggest counterterrorism capture in CIA history, including Abu Zubaydah. In other tellings he dates it to one month after that capture.

The formula Rodriguez used before the panel is the same in every telling; the reason he attached to it is not. In one, the offence is the transfer: "Jose Rodriguez was so mad at me he never forgave me for that. He actually passed me over for promotion. He said I displayed a shocking lack of commitment to counterterrorism, can you imagine, because I left the counterterrorism office to go up to the executive floor. So I didn't care. And then the deputy director uh promoted me anyway over Jose's objections." In the others, it is the refusal to torture: Rodriguez, who had replaced Cofer Black as chief of counterterrorism, told the panel that Kiriakou had "demonstrated a shocking lack of commitment to counterterrorism because I wouldn't be trained in this torture program."

The outcome was reversed either way. The deputy director, the senior officer Kiriakou had consulted that morning, "promoted me with a stroke of his pen" while warning him that the position he had taken "is going to hurt you." Kiriakou's answer was that he did not care.

"Don't drop the soap"

A few days before Kiriakou reported to prison in 2013, four days, in one telling, Rodriguez, then CIA deputy director for operations and, in Kiriakou's description, "the godfather of the CIA's torture program, the deputy director of the CIA", sent him a mocking tweet: "Don't drop the soap," a reference to sexual assault in prison. Kiriakou gave himself an hour to cool off before answering. The reply is given as "Jose, I am on the right side of history and you are not" in one telling and "Jose, I'm on the right side of history and you are not" in another; either way he left it there.

He treats the exchange as settled in his favour: "I know all these years later that I was right. I was right and he was wrong. I know I can sleep at night, so it was worth it."

The ledger he sets against his own sentence is the book. At a Strand Book Store event, an audience member observed that Rodriguez, who Kiriakou says probably illegally destroyed the torture tapes, went on to write a book about torture and received a $6 million book advance for it. Kiriakou's own figure for the advance, given in 2018, is $4 million, and he sets it directly against his own sentence: Rodriguez took the advance, "and you received two years in federal prison."

The two-tier point, February 2013

Asked eight days after his own sentencing who ought to be in prison instead, Kiriakou worked down the chain rather than across it, "put aside the people who actually did the day-to-day torture. What about the people who conceived of the policy, who implemented the policy? The attorneys that papered over it with crazed legal analysis?", and ended on one man, described by his act rather than named: "or the man who destroyed evidence of the torture in the tapes. He's enjoying a book tour right now, and he's going around Washington giving speeches on how great torture is."

The conclusion is the two-tier point in its earliest form: "none of them are in prison, and none of them will ever be prosecuted for the crimes that they've committed." Alongside it he gives the line the interview was titled for, "I've always thought that if I had actually tortured someone, I would be free today."

Kiriakou notes that there are now arrest warrants for Rodriguez in every European Union country.

After the agency

Rodriguez retired decorated and lives in St Augustine, Florida, next door to Rick Praau, who ran the special activities division, the two of them literally next door to one another. Kiriakou's assessment of him is unhedged: he believes Rodriguez is a psychopath, points to a career in which he was on the wrong side of the issue dozens of times and was reprimanded countless times before becoming responsible for the torture programme, and objects most to the fact that he wants America to think of him as some kind of hero. Neither man, in his view, will ever be brought to justice.

Kiriakou's framing

Kiriakou's recurring analysis is that Rodriguez and others of his rank operated under the conviction that they were doing right:

> I'm confident that Jose Rodriguez thinks he's the good guy and that James Mitchell and Bruce Jessen think they're the good guys, no doubt in my mind.

This is the foundation of his broader critique that the CIA's personnel-selection process puts "sociopaths in positions of authority where they come to believe that they're above the law, and that because they're the good guys they can and should do anything that they want to do."

In post-2007 discussions of Kiriakou's view of accountability, he draws a categorical distinction between Rodriguez (and the others above) and John Brennan: Brennan, in Kiriakou's framework, "plotted against an elected president of the United States", a different and, in Kiriakou's view, more dangerous category of conduct than the EIT-era crimes.

In November 2023, Kiriakou stated publicly that he would welcome the opportunity to debate Rodriguez and James Mitchell on neutral ground: "I would like to have you in here just as I would like to have Jim Mitchell in here, Jose Rodriguez, sure, and decide for myself, and I hope the listeners do the same."

See also

- Enhanced interrogation techniques
- Mitchell and Jessen
- Abu Zubaydah
- George Tenet
- John Brennan
- John Kiriakou
