Behind Trump’s latest round of departures,
U.S. President Donald Trump on Tuesday nominated CIA veteran Gina Haspel to be the spy agency’s next director, tapping a woman who spent multiple tours overseas and is respected by the workforce but is deeply tied to the agency’s use of brutal interrogation measures on terrorism suspects.
Haspel, 61, would become the first woman to lead the CIA if she is confirmed to succeed outgoing director Mike Pompeo, who has been nominated to serve as Secretary of State. Haspel’s selection faced immediate opposition from some lawmakers and human rights groups because of her prominent role in one of the agency’s darkest chapters.
Haspel was in charge of one of the CIA’s “black site” prisons where detainees were subjected to waterboarding and other harrowing interrogation measures widely condemned as torture.
When those methods were exposed and their legality came under scrutiny, Haspel was among a group of CIA officials involved in the decision to destroy videotapes of interrogation sessions that left some detainees on the brink of physical collapse.
Trump announced the move on Twitter on Tuesday, saying that Pompeo would move to the State Department and that Haspel would “become the new Director of the CIA, and the first woman so chosen. Congratulations to all!”
Jameel Jaffer, formerly deputy legal director of the ACLU, said Tuesday on his Twitter feed that Haspel is “quite literally a war criminal.”
Haspel spent much of her 33-year CIA career in undercover assignments overseas and at CIA headquarters, including serving as the agency’s top representative in London and as the acting head of its clandestine service in 2013.
Current and former U.S. intelligence officials who have worked with Haspel praised her as an effective leader who could be expected to stand up to the pressures that Trump has often placed on spy agencies — including his denunciations of the intelligence community’s conclusion that Russia interfered in the 2016 election.
Officials described Haspel as a consummate “insider” and said CIA employees would greet her appointment with some relief, because an intelligence veteran would be back in charge.
Haspel has almost no public profile. But she is a visible presence inside CIA headquarters, running day-to-day operations while Pompeo handles the public-facing aspects of the job, making speeches and media appearances, and meeting with the president.
“This is not someone who has sharp elbows, but she is a sharp competitor,” said a former senior intelligence official, who insisted on anonymity to discuss Haspel.
Inside CIA, Haspel has advocated a more aggressive approach to overseas operations. She had also led the agency’s work on Russia, which could put her at odds with a president who has accused intelligence officials of trying to undermine his election by stating that Russia interfered in the 2016 election to help get Trump elected.
Her extensive involvement in a covert program that used harrowing interrogation measures on al-Qaida suspects resurfaced last year when she was named deputy director of the CIA after Trump had signalled as a presidential candidate that he would consider reestablishing agency prisons and resuming interrogation methods that President Barack Obama had banned. Trump never followed through on that plan, which was opposed by senior members of his administration including Secretary of Defense Jim Mattis.
Haspel ran one of the first CIA black sites, a compound in Thailand code-named “Cat’s Eye,” where al-Qaida suspects Zayn al-Abidin Muhammed Hussein, better known as Abu Zubaida, and Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri were subjected to waterboarding and other techniques in 2002.
A Senate report on the program described the frightening toll inflicted. At one point, the report said, Zubaida was left “completely unresponsive, with bubbles rising through his open, full mouth.”
Internal CIA memos cited in a Senate report on the agency’s interrogation program described agency officials who witnessed the treatment as distraught and concerned about its legality. “Several on the team profoundly affected,” one agency employee wrote, “... some to the point of tears and choking up.”
Haspel later served as chief of staff to the head of the agency’s Counterterrorism Center, Jose Rodriguez, when he ordered the destruction of dozens of videotapes made at the Thailand site.
Rodriguez wrote in his memoir that Haspel “drafted a cable” ordering the tapes’ destruction in 2005 as the program came under mounting public scrutiny.