Curtailment cables is the term John Kiriakou uses for the requests he says he read, from his post as executive assistant to the CIA’s deputy director for operations, from officers at the agency’s secret prisons asking to end their tours early rather than continue participating in the interrogation programme.
What a curtailment is
Kiriakou defines a curtailment as a request to come home before the end of an assignment, and describes it as career-ending: an officer who makes one, in his words, will never get promoted again. [1]
What the cables said
He has described two kinds of reporting arriving from the black sites. The first came from the contract psychologists James Mitchell and Bruce Jessen, whose cables he calls sociopathic — clinical and dry, reporting that everything was fine, that the waterboarding technique had been employed and that the prisoner had opened up and provided information. Kiriakou’s response to that characterisation is direct: he says they drowned him, that he had to be revived with CPR, that he then stopped talking for six months, and that the material reported in the cable had been taken from the FBI agent who had actually got him talking. [2]
The second kind came from CIA employees — psychologists, psychiatrists, nurses and physicians — writing back to say that they had not signed up for this, that nobody had told them the agency was going to start torturing prisoners, and that they wanted to come home. [1] In another telling Kiriakou renders one such cable as a physician writing that he had taken the Hippocratic oath, that this was not what he had signed up for, that he quit and wished to return to headquarters, and says there were dozens of people objecting to the programme. [3]
The inference Kiriakou drew
His conclusion at the time, he has said, was that somebody was going to say something — that with that volume of objection, someone would blow the whistle. He then waited. In one account he gives the wait as five and a half years. [4] He notes that whistles were blown on the secret prisons and on renditions, and that a film called Rendition appeared in the meantime, but that nobody said anything about torture. [5]
He resigned from the CIA in 2004, giving as his reason a divorce and the move of his young sons to Ohio with his former wife. [4]