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A CIA veteran on what ‘Zero Dark Thirty’ gets wrong about the bin Laden manhunt

By Jose A. Rodriguez Jr,January 03, 2013

(Page 2 of 3)

Inspired perhaps more by past movies than first-hand accounts, “Zero Dark Thirty” shows detainees being asked a question, tortured a little, asked another question and then tortured some more. That did not happen. Detainees were given the opportunity to cooperate. If they resisted and were believed to hold critical information, they might receive — with Washington’s approval — some of the enhanced techniques, such as being grabbed by the collar, deprived of sleep or, in rare cases, waterboarded. (The Justice Department assured us in writing at the time that these techniques did not constitute torture.) When the detainee became compliant, the techniques stopped — forever.

Some of those objecting to the movie are doing so not because of how the interrogations are depicted, but because of what the movie implies came out of them. The film suggests that waterboarding directly contributed to obtaining vital information about bin Laden’s courier — a break that eventually led to the al-Qaeda leader. Opponents of the CIA are quick to insist that waterboarding played no role in tracking him down. Both the movie and those critics are wrong.

The first substantive information about the courier came in 2004 from a detainee who received some enhanced interrogation techniques but was not waterboarded. Although we had heard the nom de guerre Abu Ahmed al-Kuwaiti, until that time we were unaware of the central role he played in bin Laden’s communications. Subsequently, as we always did, we checked out this information with other detainees. Khalid Sheik Mohammed, who had been waterboarded, was by then cooperating with us to some extent. He denied any knowledge of the courier, but so adamantly that we knew we were on to something. We then intercepted secret messages that Mohammed was sending to other detainees, ordering them to say nothing about al-Kuwaiti.

After obtaining this essential lead on the courier, years of meticulous intelligence work followed. Having the black sites and compliant terrorists allowed us to repeatedly go back to the detainees to check leads, ask follow-up questions and clarify information. Without that capacity, we would have been lost.

“Zero Dark Thirty” has some minor flaws that will be laughable to CIA veterans. For example, early in the film, the agency’s chief of station in Islamabad walks around with a CIA lapel pin — not the best of tradecraft. Agency officers talk openly in hotels and restaurants about ongoing operations, and a junior officer threatens to have her boss hauled in front of a congressional oversight committee. (Now that would be torture.)

But Bigelow and Boal get a lot of things right, too. They portray the hunt for bin Laden as a 10-year marathon, rather than a sprint ordered by a new president. The film gives a glimpse of the extraordinary cooperation between the CIA and the U.S. military, a relationship that has only deepened in the years since Sept. 11, 2001.

And, if you pay close attention, “Zero Dark Thirty” also concedes that it was a matrix of intelligence capabilities — including interrogation, other human intelligence, expert analysis, signals intelligence and imagery analysis — that came together to lead the SEALs to bin Laden’s hideout in Abbottabad. I say “if you pay close attention” because the intelligence tradecraft is overwhelmed by the intense and misleading interrogation scenes at the start of the movie.

I had to smile at one scene in which a White House official demands more information from the CIA, only to be asked how the agency is supposed to obtain it when the detention and interrogation program has been taken away. The screenwriter seemed to catch the nuance that the administration has made the CIA’s job much harder.

No doubt, the filmmakers had a very difficult task. They had to boil down a decade of grueling work into a few hours — and make it entertaining. It is impossible for even the most skilled filmmakers to fully capture the context of the times. During the first few years after Sept. 11, the CIA was under enormous pressure, fearing an imminent and deadlier reprise of the attacks. There were credible reports of al-Qaeda seeking fissile nuclear material. Those who say we should have taken a more cautious and deliberate approach to finding out what men like Mohammed knew never stood in our shoes.

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