Cheney Is Linked to Concealment of C.I.A. Project

[XXPANTHAXX]

The Central Intelligence Agency withheld information about a secret
counterterrorism program from Congress for eight years on direct orders
from former Vice President Dick Cheney, the agency’s director, Leon E.
Panetta, has told the Senate and House intelligence committees, two
people with direct knowledge of the matter said Saturday.

The report that Mr. Cheney was behind the decision to conceal the
still-unidentified program from Congress deepened the mystery
surrounding it, suggesting that the Bush administration had put a high
priority on the program and its secrecy.

Mr. Panetta, who ended the program when he first learned of its
existence from subordinates on June 23, briefed the two intelligence
committees about it in separate closed sessions the next day.

Efforts to reach Mr. Cheney through relatives and associates were
unsuccessful.

The question of how completely the C.I.A. informed Congress about
sensitive programs has been hotly disputed by Democrats and Republicans
since May, when Speaker Nancy Pelosi accused the agency of failing to
reveal in 2002 that it was waterboarding a terrorism suspect, a claim
Mr. Panetta rejected.

The law requires the president to make sure the intelligence committees
“are kept fully and currently informed of the intelligence activities of
the United States, including any significant anticipated intelligence
activity.” But the language of the statute, the amended National
Security Act of 1947, leaves some leeway for judgment, saying such
briefings should be done “to the extent consistent with due regard for
the protection from unauthorized disclosure of classified information
relating to sensitive intelligence sources and methods or other
exceptionally sensitive matters.”

In addition, for covert action programs, a particularly secret category
in which the role of the United States is hidden, the law says that
briefings can be limited to the so-called Gang of Eight, consisting of
the Republican and Democratic leaders of both houses of Congress and of
their intelligence committees.

The disclosure about Mr. Cheney’s role in the unidentified C.I.A.
program comes a day after an inspector general’s report underscored the
central role of the former vice president’s office in restricting to a
small circle of officials knowledge of the National Security Agency’s
program of eavesdropping without warrants, a degree of secrecy that the
report concluded had hurt the effectiveness of the counterterrorism
surveillance effort.

An intelligence agency spokesman, Paul Gimigliano, declined on Saturday
to comment on the report of Mr. Cheney’s role.

“It’s not agency practice to discuss what may or may not have been said
in a classified briefing,” Mr. Gimigliano said. “When a C.I.A. unit
brought this matter to Director Panetta’s attention, it was with the
recommendation that it be shared appropriately with Congress. That was
also his view, and he took swift, decisive action to put it into
effect.”

Members of Congress have differed on the significance of the program,
whose details remained secret and which even some Democrats have said
was properly classified. Most of those interviewed, however, have said
that it was an important activity that should have been disclosed to the
intelligence committees.

Intelligence and Congressional officials have said the unidentified
program did not involve the C.I.A. interrogation program and did not
involve domestic intelligence activities. They have said the program was
started by the counterterrorism center at the C.I.A. shortly after the
attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, but never became fully operational, involving
planning and some training that took place off and on from 2001 until
this year.

In the tense months after Sept. 11, when Bush administration officials
believed new Qaeda attacks could occur at any moment, intelligence
officials brainstormed about radical countermeasures. It was in that
atmosphere that the unidentified program was devised and deliberately
concealed from Congress, officials said.

Representative Peter Hoekstra of Michigan, the top Republican on the
House intelligence committee, said last week that he believed Congress
would have approved of the program only in the angry and panicky days
after 9/11, on 9/12, he said, but not later, after fears and tempers had
begun to cool.

One intelligence official, who would speak about the classified program
only on condition of anonymity, said there was no resistance inside the
C.I.A. to Mr. Panetta’s decision to end the program last month.

“Because this program never went fully operational and hadn’t been
briefed as Panetta thought it should have been, his decision to kill it
was neither difficult nor controversial,” the official said. “That’s
worth remembering amid all the drama.”

Bill Harlow, a spokesman for George J. Tenet, who was the C.I.A.
director when the unidentified program began, declined to comment on
Saturday, noting that the program remained classified.

In the eight years of his vice presidency, Mr. Cheney was the Bush
administration’s most vehement defender of the secrecy of government
activities, particularly in the intelligence arena. He went to the
Supreme Court to keep secret the advisers to his task force on energy,
and won.

A report released on Friday by the inspectors general of five agencies
about the National Security Agency’s domestic surveillance program makes
clear that Mr. Cheney’s legal adviser, David S. Addington, had to
approve personally every government official who was told about the
program. The report said “the exceptionally compartmented nature of the
program” frustrated F.B.I. agents who were assigned to follow up on tips
it had turned up.

Mr. Addington could not be reached for comment on Saturday.

Questions over the adequacy and the truthfulness of the C.I.A.’s
briefings for Congress date to the creation of the intelligence
oversight committees in the 1970s after disclosures of agency
assassination and mind-control programs and other abuses. But complaints
increased in the Bush years, when the C.I.A. and other intelligence
agencies took the major role in pursuing Al Qaeda.

The use of harsh interrogation methods, including waterboarding, for
instance, was first described to a handful of lawmakers for the first
time in September 2002. Ms. Pelosi and the C.I.A. have disagreed about
what she was told, but in any case, the briefing occurred only after a
terrorism suspect, Abu Zubaydah, had been waterboarded 83 times.

Democrats in Congress, who contend that the Bush administration
improperly limited Congressional briefings on intelligence, are seeking
to change the National Security Act to permit the full intelligence
committees to be briefed on more matters. President Obama, however, has
threatened to veto the intelligence authorization bill if the changes go
too far, and the proposal is now being negotiated by the White House and
the intelligence committees.

Representative Jan Schakowsky, a Democrat of Illinois on the House
committee, wrote on Friday to the chairman, Representative Silvestre
Reyes, a Democrat of Texas, to demand an investigation of the
unidentified program and why Congress was not told of it. Aides said Mr.
Reyes was reviewing the matter.

“There’s been a history of difficulty in getting the C.I.A. to tell us
what they should,” said Representative Adam Smith, a Democrat of
Washington. “We will absolutely be held accountable for anything the
agency does.”

Mr. Hoekstra, the intelligence committee’s ranking Republican, said he
would not judge the agency harshly in the case of the unidentified
program, because it was not fully operational. But he said that in
general, the agency had not been as forthcoming as the law required.

“We have to pull the information out of them to get what we need,” Mr.
Hoekstra said.

[Jalili]

Not surprising actually obvious, when some one tries any and every method to find something your doing wrong they're really just trying to see if you found out some information about what they are really doing.