Inside Outt

most important thing is that we find those tapes, or verify their destruction.”
    “How are we going to do that?”
    Ulrich closed his eyes and suppressed the urge to shout. If he could work with just one competent organization. Just one.
    “You need to put together a team,” he said. “Comprised of people with the right talents and the right incentives.”
    “Meaning?”
    “Meaning, how many field interrogators are featured in those videos?”
    Clements shrugged. “Maybe a half dozen.”
    “Military experience?”
    “Of course. They’re all Spec Ops veterans, now with Ground Branch.”
    “Good, then they have the talent. And they’ll understand that if those videos ever get out, the least they can expect will be public ostracism. More likely, prison. That means we can trust them.”
    The three Agency men were nodding now. They were getting it. Slow as ever, but educable if you took the time and trouble to spell things out, if you showed them the one narrow route that offered a chance of saving them.
    “Recall those men from the field. I don’t care what they’re working ono, I don’t care what their priorities are, as of this moment they have a new assignment. You run the investigation, reporting directly to me. You manage the field, I manage the political cover. There are a lot of people, people from both parties, who have a reason to want those tapes secured. If we need their cooperation, I’ll make sure we have it.”
    Clements nodded. “How much are you going to tell the vice president?”
    “Let me worry about that. For now, everything is need-to-know. And speaking of which, communication on this is face-to-face or by secure phone only. No writing, no paper trails.”
    Ulrich glanced down at a small sign in the pathway next to him. Through the frost obscuring the face of it he read
Silence and Respect
.
    He took off a glove, reached into his coat pocket, and clicked off the Dictaphone he’d been running since this otherwise off-the-record meeting began. Then he took out a tube of ChapStick to conceal what he’d really been up to. He rubbed the ChapStick across his lips, dropped it back into his pocket, and pulled the glove back on. It wasn’t the first time he’d taped these sorts of conversations, and he doubted it would be the last. He knew he would never need the recordings, but it would still feel good to have them. If his enemies ever breached all his other defenses and threatened to close in on him, he could brandish his recordings like a suicide bomb. A last-ditch threat in case the worst should ever happen. And the worst had never looked more likely than it did right now.
    Still, on balance he was starting to feel a little better. He’d been rattled there for a moment, true, especially when they’d mentioned the Caspers, but that was before he’d had a chance to consider the options. Now, the more he thought about it, the more he realized he had assets he could deploy. Everybody was exposed on this, if not legally, then at least politically. The main thing was, he had a plan. And no one could work a plan the way he could.
    “Remember,” he said. “
The New York Times
. Two interrogation tapes, as far as you know, destroyed years ago. Now go. Get it done.”

New York Times
, December 6, 2007
CIA DESTROYED TAPES OF INTERROGATIONS
WASHINGTON— The Central Intelligence Agency in 2005 destroyed at least two videotapes documenting the interrogation of two al Qaeda operatives in the Agency’s custody, a step it took in the midst of congressional and legal scrutiny about the CIA’s secret detention program.
The videotapes showed Agency operatives in 2002 subjecting terror suspects—including Abu Zubaydah, the first detainee in CIA custody—to severe interrogation techniques. They were destroyed in part because officers were concerned that tapes documenting controversial interrogation methods could expose Agency officials to greater risk of legal jeopardy.
The CIA said today that the decision to destroy the tapes had been made “within the CIA itself,” and they were destroyed to protect the safety of undercover officers and because they no longer had intelligence value.

PART 1
    All told, more than three thousand suspected terrorists have been arrested in many countries. And many others have met a different fate. Let’s put it this way: they are no longer a problem to the United States and our friends and allies.