CIA pick forced from shadows for confirmation
Chosen to oversee spy agency, Haspel faces spotlight of controversy
WASHINGTON — Gina Haspel, a Kentucky native, loves Johnny Cash so much she keeps a 5-foot-tall poster of the country music star in her office at the Central Intelligence Agency. She became a spy more than three decades ago, a time when few women filled that job, and rose through the ranks holding some of the agency’s most sensitive posts. She once orchestrated a last-minute operation that captured two terrorists linked to the bombing of an embassy — earning one of the agency’s highest honors, according to her official biography.
When she appears before the U.S. Senate as President Donald Trump’s nominee to run the agency, however, all that could fade in the glare of one chapter in a long career — her role after the Sept. 11 attacks, when she was stationed at a “black site” in Thailand where detainees were waterboarded.
Haspel’s supporters, who include intelligence veterans from both political parties, say the full measure of her experience has perfectly prepared her to head the nation’s top spy agency. Not only would she be the first woman to hold that job, she would be only the second director in the agency’s history to have spent an entire career in its clandestine service — responsible for the difficult decisions that officers in the field face every day.
She remained undercover until last year, when she took over the agency’s No. 2 position, and her agency-approved biography leaves many gaps.
The agency won’t say what role she played in counterterrorism operations or in which countries she served — although it’s known her first overseas assignment was in Africa, and she once headed the agency’s station in London, a prestigious posting involving close coordination with the United States’ closest ally.
That classified background poses a challenge for senators vetting her nomination.
“I think the more transparency, the better,” said Sen. Mark Warner, D-Va., the ranking Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee.
Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., has demanded more information from Haspel, focusing on her role in Bush-era “enhanced interrogation techniques.” He has sent her a detailed list of questions about waterboarding, forced nudity, slapping and sleep deprivation.
“We now know that these techniques not only failed to deliver actionable intelligence, but actually produced false and misleading information,” wrote McCain, who suffered torture as a prisoner of war in Vietnam.
“The use of torture compromised our values, stained our national honor, and threatened our historical reputation,” he wrote.
Haspel’s personal views on tor- ture remain unclear, as do her thoughts on challenges facing the United States, including Russian political interference, North Korea’s nuclear program and the grinding battle against Islamic State in the Middle East.
All of that will face close scrutiny when her hearings convene.
“No one really likes to go through it,” said Michael Vickers, a former intelligence and defense official who went through the confirmation process twice during his career. “People have compared it to a proctology exam. You get your life laid out.”
The process could prove especially intense in the closely divided Senate. Republicans hold 51 seats in the Senate, but GOP Sen. Rand Paul of Kentucky has already announced his opposition to Haspel. McCain’s support is in doubt as he spends time away from the Senate battling cancer.
That means Haspel will almost certainly need some Democratic votes. A pivotal one could be that of Sen. Dianne Feinstein of California, the previous Democratic chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee, who led the drafting of a 2014 report criticizing the use of torture.
When Trump announced Haspel’s nomination, Feinstein said, “To the best of my knowledge she has been a good deputy director.”
But she has since toughened her rhetoric, saying she was “very wary” of promoting someone “so heavily involved in the torture program.”
“Her experience may have served her well as deputy, but the top position is another matter entirely,” Feinstein said.
Haspel, 61, was born in Ashland, Ky., the first of five children, but grew up on military bases around the world while her father served in the Air Force, the CIA says. She returned to Kentucky to attend the University of Kentucky, later finishing a journalism degree with honors at the University of Louisville in 1978, the university confirmed.
After graduating, she got a job running the library and foreign language lab at a Special Forces base in Massachusetts. Vickers, a Green Beret at the time, remembers bumping into the studious and eager young contractor at the library and suggesting a career at the CIA.
Anxious for a job that would let her work overseas and use her love of languages, Haspel banged out an application on her manual typewriter and dropped it in the mail.
“I wanted to be part of something bigger than just me,” Haspel said in one of a handful of statements released by the agency.
The CIA was trying to diversify beyond white, male Ivy League graduates, and Haspel began a 33year career in which, former colleagues said, she earned respect by taking tough assignments and navigating the agency with a quiet professionalism.
“She is just as good at the corridors of Washington as she is in the back alleys in the Middle East,” said Hank Crumpton, one of several former CIA officers who have spoken out in her support.
The agency has deployed its public relations apparatus to support Haspel’s nomination, releasing a biography with cinematic detail but also many gaps.
Her experiences read like redacted CliffsNotes from a spy thriller — the agency says Haspel “learned to recruit and handle agents” but not in which nations; she “survived a coup d’etat” but not when; and “ran a small station in an exotic and tumultuous capital” but not where.
Haspel also gained expertise with a country dominating today’s headlines — Russia.
While based at agency headquarters in Langley, Va., she worked on operations to recruit Russian agents who could feed intelligence back to the United States, according to Michael Sulick, a former CIA official stationed in Moscow after the collapse of the Soviet Union. He described her as “calm, very unflappable, very smart.”