Having declined training in what the CIA was calling enhanced interrogation techniques, John Kiriakou says he began hearing rumours about where the techniques were being applied.
The rumours
“Then I heard rumours that we had created this system of secret prisons around the world that even the heads of state in these countries didn’t know that we had these secret prisons there.”[1]
The mechanism
The arrangements, as he describes them, bypassed the political level of the host government entirely: “these were deals struck between the head of the CIA and the head of whatever that country’s service was.”[1]
The design was provisional. “These weren’t meant to be permanent facilities. They were just meant to extract information where we didn’t have to worry about laws or human rights.”[2]
Kiriakou gives the same functional description of a black site elsewhere: a place that is more or less off the books, that officially does not exist, and whose existence is in many cases withheld from the congressional oversight committees as well — so that a captured prisoner could be interrogated “without having to worry about the law, about ethics or morality or the FBI breathing down their backs.”[3]
What he knew and when
The limit he places on his own knowledge is unusually explicit. “Those of us who weren’t read into these programs only got this in bits and pieces. I had no idea how extensive the secret prison system was until a couple of years after I left the agency and I read about it in the press.”[2]
That is a significant qualification, because at the relevant moment Kiriakou was executive assistant to the deputy director for operations — a post he describes as giving him sight of every cable produced by every CIA officer in the world. Compartmentation, on his account, held even there.
The consequence
What the arrangement produced, in his telling, is the collapse he describes elsewhere: “that’s how this torture program spiraled out of control. There were people who were murdered in the course of their interrogations.”[4]