Out From The Shadows

Here is a fact about spies you won't find in your average thriller: they worry about getting sued. Veteran CIA officers know from sorry experience that secrets, especially big ones, rarely stay secret forever. When the unseemly details do come to light, it's the agency that often takes the fall. So when President George W. Bush at last acknowledged the existence of an international network of secret CIA prisons where "high value" terror suspects were housed and interrogated, some officials at the agency began worrying about their futures. Would ugly details be revealed about the methods used to extract information from prisoners? And if so, could Clandestine Service officers be taken to court by detainees claiming they were tortured?

To protect themselves, many CIA officers take out insurance policies, according to current and former intelligence officials who, like all agency employees, would not be named. For a $300 yearly premium, Wright & Co. (known around the agency as Wright Brothers) will cover legal fees for CIA employees sued in the line of duty. Last week, at CIA headquarters, agency employees darkly joked among themselves about the possible fallout to come. "A lot of people are checking their Wright Brothers insurance," says a former senior Clandestine Service official.

If the president gets his way, those policies will never have to pay out. Now that the prisons are effectively closed and 14 of the remaining detainees--including suspected 9/11 mastermind Khalid Shaikh Mohammed--have been moved to Guantánamo Bay, administration officials are working out the many complex details of bringing them to trial. The White House insists on military trials that would allow secret evidence--and permit the use of confessions extracted under extreme physical duress. This might keep some embarrassing details from spilling out that could put the interrogators in legal jeopardy and do political harm to the president, who has denied the use of torture. One administration fear has been the spectacle of the suspects' lawyers running to the cameras with claims of mistreatment.

But Congress must approve the trial rules, and that may not be as easy as the president once thought. Many on Capitol Hill insist on tribunals that will convince Americans, and the world, that justice has been done. Some of Bush's strongest opposition may come from within his own party. In the narrowly divided Senate, a small but influential group of Republicans, all military vets, is challenging the president's proposal. They have indicated they may hold up Bush's plan unless he agrees to soften his insistence on the use of secret evidence--where the defendant cannot see classified details of the case against him--and revisit the question of using confessions obtained under extreme physical duress. Democrats quickly aligned themselves with the renegade Republicans.

A just-released Senate report on prewar intelligence highlighted the unreliability of forced confession. Ibn Al-Shaykh al-Libi, a high-ranking Qaeda suspect captured by the United States soon after 9/11 and "rendered" to Egypt, told interrogators that Osama bin Laden had sent operatives to Iraq for chemical- and biological-weapons training. It became a key administration claim for the supposed link between Iraq and Al Qaeda. But the report revealed that after the ground war, al-Libi admitted he'd made it all up so his Egyptian interrogators would stop beating him.

Bush has long known that a confrontation over tribunals was coming. Two years ago, the administration began a sweeping review of the program aimed at finding a way to hold military trials for the captured suspects. According to a senior administration official (who, following policy, agreed to speak on the condition of anonymity), high-ranking aides were concerned that the only Qaeda suspect brought to justice was Zacarias Moussaoui, who had never even met any of the 9/11 hijackers. Meanwhile, high-level 9/11 conspirators like Khalid Shaikh Mohammed and Ramzi bin al-Shibh were languishing in secret cells, out of the courts' reach--and out of the public's mind. Bringing the prisoners to trial "reminds people what this is all about," says the official.

External pressure helped force Bush's hand. The prisons' secrecy was blown when The Washington Post exposed the locations of some of the facilities. And a Supreme Court ruling in June, which said captured terror suspects must be treated according to the Geneva Conventions, put the program's future in question. (The CIA, which had never wanted the burden of running the secret prisons in the first place, had also lobbied the White House to end the program. A former senior agency official says: "The agency was desperate to get rid of this.")

The timing of last week's announcement, just before the fifth anniversary of 9/11, was no accident. It allowed the White House to showcase its successes in capturing terrorists, and to put pressure on Congress to quickly approve the tribunals. "There were obviously messaging opportunities," says a senior Bush aide. "We could sit back and let the war be defined by the media and our critics, or we can define it ourselves."

The White House may not have anticipated such determined opposition from Republicans. Senators Lindsey Graham, John McCain and John Warner, all members of the Senate Armed Services Committee, are worried about the appearance of show trials that diminish the standing of the United States in the world. Graham is particularly incensed by the idea that the suspects could be convicted--and sentenced to death--without seeing the evidence against them. "Can you imagine somebody being led to the death chamber and asking on the way, 'What did I do?' " he asks. "This would be a legal and PR disaster."

In public, the White House is taking a firm line, saying it will stick with its version. But privately, it concedes it will have to come to a deal with the three wayward Republicans. "I am confident we're going to work that out," the senior Bush aide says. That alone may be enough to bring along Democrats, who don't want to be seen as coddling terrorists. Which is exactly how the White House will tar them if they try to put the administration's interrogation methods on trial alongside the terror suspects. "We'll see if the Democrats come out and say they believe these Al Qaeda members have the same rights as our U.S. military," says another senior White House aide.

The secret prisons may now be empty, but there are still plenty of unanswered questions about the program. The 14 suspects shipped to Guantánamo account for only a small portion of the approximately 100 prisoners cycled through the system. Asked by NEWSWEEK about their fate, an intelligence official would say only that none died in the program. Those who are unaccounted for may have been rendered to other countries, where they could face continued interrogation. It's just those sorts of details that Clandestine officers--and their insurance agents--would just as soon keep quiet.