Woman who ran secret prison bypassed as top spy

ADAM GOLDMAN, Associated Press, By ADAM GOLDMAN and KIMBERLY DOZIER, Associated Press | May 7, 2013 | Updated: May 7, 2013 5:51pm

WASHINGTON (AP) — One of the CIA’s highest-ranking women, who once ran a CIA prison in Thailand where terror suspects were waterboarded, has been bypassed for the agency’s top spy job.

The officer, who remains undercover, was a finalist for the job and would have become the first female chief of clandestine operations.

As one of the last remaining senior CIA officers who held leadership roles in the agency’s interrogation and detention program, however, she was a politically risky pick.

Sen. Dianne Feinstein, the Senate Intelligence Committee‘s top Democrat, has criticized the interrogation program and personally urged CIA Director John Brennan not to promote the woman, according to a former senior intelligence briefed on the call.

Through a spokesman, Feinstein said she "conveyed my views to Mr. Brennan."

CIA spokeswoman Jennifer Youngblood said the assertion that the officer was passed over because of her involvement in the interrogation program was "absolutely not true."

More than a decade after it last used waterboarding, an interrogation technique that simulates drowning, the CIA is still hounded by the legacy of a tactic that the U.S. government regarded as torture before the Bush administration authorized its use against terrorist suspects. Brennan’s ties to the interrogation program delayed for years his nomination to lead the CIA and Feinstein wants the agency to declassify a 6,000-page report on the interrogation program.

While many details about the program have become public, much is still shrouded in secrecy, making it impossible to evaluate its successes. Harsh interrogations led to some information, but also generated a lot of false information. And whether any of it could have been done without waterboarding, sleep deprivation and forcing people into small boxes is unknowable.

The officer briefly ran a secret CIA prison where accused terrorists Abu Zubayada and Abd al-Nashiri were waterboarded in 2002, according to current and former U.S. intelligence officials. She was also a senior manager in the Counterterrorism Center helping run operations in the war on terror.

She also served as chief of staff to Jose Rodriguez and helped carry out his order that the CIA destroy its waterboarding videos. That order prompted a lengthy Justice Department investigation that ended without charges.

Instead of picking the female officer, Brennan turned instead to the head of the CIA’s Latin American Division, a former station chief in Pakistan who former officials said once ran the covert action that helped remove Serbian President Slobodan Milosevic from power. That program is regarded inside the CIA as a blueprint for running a successful peaceful covert action.

The former officials spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss the CIA’s operations publicly.

The name of the new head of the clandestine service is widely known in intelligence, diplomatic and journalistic circles, as is the name of the woman who was passed over. Both have declared their CIA affiliations with foreign governments around the world. The CIA, however, maintains that the names should not be made public because they are technically undercover.

Former acting CIA Director John McLaughlin, who was part of the panel that helped select the next clandestine service leader, said the interrogation program "did not come up" in their discussions.

"The people moving into senior positions are extraordinarily accomplished and will do exceptional jobs," he said.

Another former officer saw the choice as a Brennan nod to Capitol Hill.

"It’s a very political job. Its first criterion is not that you are a super spook. It’s to handle all the … politics of the clandestine service," including working with Congress, said former intelligence officer Reuel Gerecht, now at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, a Washington-based think tank. "Brennan was not going to put anyone in that position who had done anything controversial in any way."

Women constitute nearly half of the agency’s workforce but only about 30 percent of what is known as the Senior Intelligence Service. The CIA had determined that for every one woman achieving her SIS rank last year, four men got theirs.

"If the 2012 outcome were to be repeated in the coming years, such a trend would lead to diminishing representation of women at the senior ranks," according to a declassified CIA report.

In announcing his new clandestine chief, Brennan also promoted women to be his chief of staff and the agency’s executive director.

"Women will hold fully half of the positions on his current leadership team," the agency said in a news release.

It is unclear what the female officer who was passed over will do next. She ran the CIA stations in London and New York.

"The officer chosen is a wonderful choice, and the woman not chosen was an equally wonderful choice," said former CIA Director Michael Hayden, who worked with both. "And I would hope that the agency can continue to make use of both of them in prominent leadership positions."

Associated Press writer Matt Apuzzo contributed to this report.

VİDEO : Secret CIA Human Experiments in the United States: MK-ULTRA Mind Control Research Program

VİDEO LİNK :

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=c4f9Hs0s1jQ

Comic Sheds Light on Secret Army Spy Unit

In a dark corner of American special operations there exists, alongside the Army’s Delta Force and the Navy’s Osama bin Laden-killing SEAL Team Six, a small unit of Army spies known as the Intelligence Support Activity.

Created more than 30 years ago, the ISA has had its hand in almost every high-profile American special operation around the world in recent history, and countless others, according to published reports and special operations veterans with firsthand knowledge of the group.

And though relatively little is known about the secret unit — the military still refuses to acknowledge its existence — a new, colorful picture of the group has emerged through, of all things, a comic book.

In the panels of the comic "The Activity," writer Nathan Edmondson and artist Mitch Gerads create a cell-shaded version of the ISA’s world in which the plot is fictional, but much of the rest rings true, even to those few familiar with the comic’s real-life counterpart.

One former member of the special operations community, who requested anonymity to speak about the ISA, told ABC News that while the comic clearly condenses intelligence-gathering timelines and significantly expands the ISA’s duties for the sake of dramatic story telling, he was surprised at its overall accuracy.

"There’s a lot more gunplay [in the comic] and a lot less of the mundane day-to-day intelligence collection," he said. "[But] the mission profiles, the types of missions are accurate… They [the writers] actually do know the unit to which they’re referring."

That’s likely because Edmondson said the comic is written with input from current and former members of the broader community of America’s military elite.

"Half [of the comic] is based on or lifted from real stories," Edmondson told ABC News. "The mission may not be real, but it’s not outside the realm of possibility."

For example, to write one sequence, Edmondson said he reached out to a group of Navy SEALs and asked them how they would conduct a certain operation. He said the SEALs were happy to help him make the story as accurate as possible without giving away any operational secrets.

More than once Edmondson said he made up a storyline or piece of technology only to be quietly asked by his military acquaintances not to include it in the comic — he had accidentally stumbled too close to the truth.

Jack Murphy, a former Special Forces soldier and Managing Editor at the special operations website SOFREP.com, told ABC News that he helped Edmondson with some of the military chatter and lingo that the characters use in the comic.

"It’s important to get it right. People are a lot smarter [about special operations]," he said. "It’s not giving away operational secrets or anything like that."

A comic or book done well, Murphy said, "gives credit to the soldier on the ground, the one working behind the scenes," without putting him in danger.

‘We Don’t Know a Lot About What These Guys Do’

According to the few books written about the ISA, and the smattering of newspaper articles over the last 30 years that have identified the unit, the Intelligence Support Activity began in the early 1980s after the military’s disastrous attempt to rescue Americans during the Iran Hostage Crisis.

One of the many lessons the military took from that deadly incident was that the CIA’s intelligence gathering efforts often did not extend to some very specific, tactically-oriented information that would be necessary to launch clandestine military operations. So rather than rely on the Agency, the military went about setting up its own intelligence-gathering network around the globe and created the ISA to be its specialists in human and signals intelligence.

Often, the ISA’s job resembles the work of the CIA: They enter foreign countries under cover identities, track persons of interest both on foot and using sophisticated signals interception technology and, depending on the mission, potentially pave the way for the "door kickers" – meaning the "shooters" of SEAL Team Six or Delta Force – to come in for more hands-on action. Many of their missions are designed to give the U.S. government total deniability, according to the former special operations service member.

The New York Times first revealed the ISA’s existence back in 1983 and the unit has since found its way into the public light in brief spurts ever since for their reported role in everything from joint American-Colombian anti-drug operations in the 1990s to secret counter-terrorist campaigns in the Horn of Africa in the 2000s.

"The missions are wide-ranging, that’s one of the hardest parts about the job," the ex-special operations service member said.

But unlike Delta Force, which was the subject of several action movies in the late 1980s and early 1990s as well as a more recent television series, and SEAL Team Six, the interest in which skyrocketed after U.S. officials revealed that was the unit that conducted the raid that killed Osama bin Laden in May 2011, the ISA has managed to keep a relatively low profile.

This report has referred to the unit as the ISA, as have other publications, but the codename of the unit changes constantly to protect its operations, and the unit’s membership and actions are tightly held secrets, kept from others in the military elite.

"Even in the special operations community, we don’t know a lot about what these guys do," said Murphy. "We only get glimpses every now and then… Secrecy is really paramount."

Edmondson said he chose the ISA as the subject for the comic because he wanted to tell a story that hasn’t been done before and claims he’s only seen support for his work from the special operations community, including several people that have agreed to help him.

A spokesperson for U.S. Special Operations Command, which is the umbrella group that oversees each service branch’s special operations as well as the Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC) under which the ISA reportedly falls, told ABC News his office was unaware of the comic but said the command is always concerned when "potentially classified information is highlighted."

The spokesperson declined to discuss the matter further, however, saying, "I won’t comment on whether a unit like the one in the comic book does or does not exist."