Torture and morale inside the CIA is John Kiriakou’s answer to a question he called a good one: how the torture programme affected the mood of the agency at the time, and how it looks to his former colleagues in retrospect.[1]
The compartment
His first point is that for a long stretch there was no morale effect at all, because there was no knowledge. “in the beginning, the compartment was so tightly controlled that nobody knew that this tiny band of officers was torturing people. Nobody knew until um I’m going to say six or eight months after the torture began.”[2]
The split
Once it was known, the effect was division rather than uniform revulsion. “It affected morale. It split morale. There there were a lot of guys who were true believers that not only was this something that we should be doing, they were enjoying doing it.”[2]
The direction of travel, on his account, was one way: “more and more people objected as more and more people became informed. It It split morale. It damaged morale.”[3] The forms those objections took — curtailment cables, resignations from the site, Office of Medical Services doctors refusing on oath grounds — are recorded separately.
The pullback, and what survived it
Kiriakou dates the reversal and attributes it to the director: “then by 2005, enough people knew about it and objected to it that George Tenet pulled back.”[2]
He is careful about what that did and did not stop. “they were torturing people from August of 2002 until the middle of 2005. But they kept the secret prisons going and they kept while there wasn’t like active torture in the secret prisons after 2005, there was active torture at Guantanamo.”[3]
The dating here differs from other accounts Kiriakou has given of when and by whom the programme was shut down; he has elsewhere attributed the closure to Porter Goss in 2006 on the grounds that it was producing nothing of value. The 2005 date in this telling marks a pullback at the secret sites rather than the end of the programme.[3]