James E. Mitchell - Enhanced Interrogation: Inside the Minds and Motives of the Islamic Terrorists Trying to Destroy America

You need to leave your home immediately. It was the chief of security for the CIA on the phone. We have a credible death threat by ISIS against your life, and we want you to evacuate until we determine how viable it is. ISIS had tweeted a request that a jihadist cut my head off, and according to the CIA , someone had just volunteered to do the job. The agencys security officer said it was possible the person was already en route. It was December 2014.

Minutes later the FBI was in my driveway. Later, the local sheriffs departments SWAT team commanders were in my living room and wandering around my yard, determining likely avenues of assault and deciding where to position men for the best shot. As it started getting dark, retired SEAL team members and special operators from various shadowy counterterrorist units who had gotten wind of the threat called, offering to bring their long guns to watch our backs while my wife and I slept. My bedroom smelled of gun oil. My house felt like a kill zone for anyone stupid enough to try to breach its security.

A target had been placed on my back and was endangering my family. Sadly, the notion that my family and I might be targets was not new. I had interrogated the worst terrorists in the world for the CIA the al-Qaida operatives who had sucker-punched the United States in the September 11, 2001, terror attacks that had killed approximately three thousand innocent Americansand although the CIA had tried to keep my identity secret, lawyers for the terrorists made sure the killers, and thus anyone those killers could smuggle messages out to, knew who I was.

My thoughts flashed back to July 2009, when officers from the CIA s counterintelligence unit sat on a rumpled bed in a small, nondescript motel off the interstate. An aging air conditioner rattled and clanked. The noise was like sitting next to a running bus; that was good because it masked the sound of our conversation. The air smelled of dank mold and burned coffee.

Do you recognize any of these people? one officer asked me.

Well, this one is me, obviously, and I know three or four of these other guys, I said, leafing through the stack of photos he had handed me a few minutes before. Several were obviously surveillance photos surreptitiously taken outside homes and office buildings. The one of me was a drivers license photo.

All the photos had been found recently in the cell of Mustafa Ahmed al-Hawsawi, an al-Qaida planner and financier now in Guantanamo Bay, during a routine search for contraband. The photos had been obtained surreptitiously by private investigators hired by the lawyers defending the terrorists who attacked the United States. The attorneys smuggled the photos into the cells of terrorists held there, including Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the mastermind of the 9/11 attacks, to reveal the true names of CIA interrogators who had questioned them. I was told by the counterintelligence agents that I needed to watch my back. My life and the lives of my family might be in danger because it was possible that my true name, home address, and image also had been passed to terrorists still at large.

Since items going in and out of detainee lockup at Gitmo are supposed to be searched for contraband, you might ask yourself how those photos got past the guards. The lawyers did it by hiding them among documents that could not be searched because of attorney-client privilege.

Later, when the incident was being investigated by a reluctant Department of Justice, the lawyers who were responsible claimed that sneaking around taking surreptitious photos of CIA officers (many of whom were undercover) and contractors was a legitimate enterprise motivated by a deep concern for providing the best defense for the terrorists they were representing.

I was concerned when those lawyers gave my true name and location to the terrorists they were defending, but those terrorists were locked up, and the threat was hypothetical. That concern was nothing compared with the way I felt after the phone call from CIA security in December 2014 alerting me that a terrorist might actually be coming to harm me and my family. I was frightened for my wife, ramped up and angry. Not at ISIS but at those who had put a target on my back. Here is how that happened.

In December 2014 Senator Dianne Feinstein and her Democratic colleagues on the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence ( SSCI ) released a report on the CIA s Rendition, Detention, and Interrogation program, claiming it was the programs definitive history.

But it wasnt. Feinstein and her colleagues had ransacked through millions of CIA documents, selecting those which supported her claims and ignoring the ones that didnt. They refused to interview any of the CIA officers or contractors who actually had been involved in the program, including me. After five years and $40 million they released a one-sided report that claimed the CIA s interrogation program tortured detainees; was run by lying, incompetent, and corrupt senior CIA officers; and produced not one detail of intelligence value: zero, nothing, nada, zilch, diddly-squata ridiculous and categorically untrue claim.