CIA's Most Secret Paramilitary Missions: Syria, Drone Strikes & Torture

Within the Central Intelligence Agency, there's a shadow paramilitary group that carries out missions so classified, the

US government denies any and all involvement. Some believe that these guys are a necessary check against those

who wish to do us harm, while others say they're an unaccountable arm of the US government run a muck. Even though many

of their missions will remain buried forever, a few have leaked through the cracks in the form of declassified files

and whistleblowers. They've uncovered everything from secret drone killings to interrogation programs. So today we're

going to do an iceberg style video where we start with the most crazy and end with the most absolute bat insane CIA

paramilitary missions ever executed. There are no secrets that time does not reveal. The first operation comes to us

from Syria. This mission was the single largest CIA covert weapons and training program of the entire 21st century. at

least so far. In 2012, Simon Chase, who's a former British special forces operator, was hired to help on this

particular mission. The way the mission started was Chase had been trying to build a normal life while he was back

home in between contracting gigs in Iraq and Afghanistan. He was living near the beach with his family in California

attempting the whole clean civilian life thing. When he checked his phone, though, and saw that Michael S. had

called, he knew the drill. Chase drove to a nearby Radio Shack that he' never been to before. He bought a burner phone

with cash and called Michael back. Michael, Simon, what's up? I've got some friends in the Middle East who need

advice. Can you help? He knew what that meant. Chase pulled out the SIM card of the burer phone, snapped them both in

half, and threw them out. He jumped on the next flight to the East Coast to meet Michael in DC the next morning at

the Hayes Adam Hotel, which is just a few hundred feet away from the White House. To find out more about how this

kind of covert mission actually works, I spoke with former CIA paramilitary officer and former United States Deputy

Assistant Secretary of Defense for the Middle East, Mick Mulroy, which doesn't mean it's always what you think of, you

know, totally kitted up and, you know, working out of a jock. And it could be very civilian looking. So, they have to

have the ability, not just in appearance, but also in the way they talk and stuff to to not always give out

the air of somebody's in the military. You have to be able to be comfortable walking into a diplomatic cocktail party

in Paris as you would be leading a raid to capture somebody in in Somalia. This is exactly the kind of covert mission

that Simon Chase claimed to be assigned to. And the hotel he was meeting his point of contact at would be one of the

first steps. This isn't some random Marriott. The Hayes Adams has a long history as a CIA hangout. It's where

numerous coups and covert actions have been plotted in the past. There, Michael introduced Chase to Anthony, who was a

former US official, the type of guy who lives in airports and speaks three different languages. Here's where it

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Anthony explained that he was doing work for a US State Department registered charity called the Syrian Support Group,

which had raised $600 million from wealthy Qatari, Saudi, and Syrian businessmen. And he claimed that they

were trying to help Syrian families displaced by the civil war, but the State Department couldn't officially be

involved. And here's where Chase came in. Chase called him out saying he wasn't buying that for a second. Why

wouldn't they be able to help a charity out? Anthony got to the point and said the US government doesn't want to be

openly involved at this point and that his mission was to assess what the Free Syrian Army rebels needed in terms of

operational support, equipment, and training. Translation: Go to Syria, meet the rebels, figure out what weapons they

need, and do it off the books. Title 50 is for the Central Intelligence Agency. So, Title 50 specifically gives the

organization the ability of complete deniability. Covert means they could flat out ask the White House, did you do

this operation? And they can say, "No, I don't know what you're talking about." But it comes with risks, right? So, if

you're not with the US government and something's compromised, you're not with the US government. So the diplomatic

protections that come with being identified with the US government aren't there. You come, you're basically a

different status as somebody who at least appears to be doing things on their own. Chase went with a trusted

former buddy from the SAS, code named Rabo. They were driven to a private airfield and loaded onto an old Russian

prop plane that flew them into Syria under the cover of night. As they were on their way, they learned that the Free

Syrian army had somewhere between two and 8,000 soldiers at the outset of the Syrian civil war back in July of 2011.

And part of the reason this was so murky was because technically the CIA isn't supposed to work with any NOS's or

charity groups as a cover. So they held out pockets of territory throughout the country, this resistant force,

especially in the west, which is where they landed on a rough dirt air strip near Aleppo. And they got received by a

man in his 60s named General Sabir. He was a defected Syrian officer now commanding a faction at the FSA, the

Free Syrian Army. They were in poor shape. They had some Toyotas, some 50 cals, and basically some untrained dudes

with rifles. And that was essentially it. Chase watched in horror as the Free Syrian Army fighters tried to clear

unexloded cluster bombs that Assad had fired at civilians with shovels. He saw how Assad's bombing killed innocent

young civilians. And they were scured away at that point into a concrete structure where they hurried down a

staircase into a makeshift hospital where several doctors were working in terrible conditions with primitive and

unsterilized equipment performing amputations with a carpenters saw under the light of a single dim light bulb

powered by a diesel generator. They left at that point, but the guys went back to Washington DC. They told them how bad it

was there. And then the officials in DC said that they needed hard evidence of genocide and atrocities in order for the

United States to get involved. That's part of what factf finding missions do is they develop the evidence necessary

for that presidential factf finding authorization that then authorizes a title 50 mission. I mean the primary job

of course for the CIA is to collect information intelligence, right? So, uh, clandestinely

that informs the products that they produce for policy makers to then make decisions. We need to make decisions

based on facts of what the adversary intends to do. We need to know how they're thinking and what they're

thinking because that's going to be how we direct our assets. It's important because deniability is really important.

It's just part of the national security kind of arsenal. So, they had whiplash. They had to go back to Syria where they

continued pressing forward deeper into the city. Chase and his buddy Robo took controlled well- aimed shots. They took

pairs of single fired 5.56 rounds and 762 shots at multiple Syrian government soldiers. They were able to hold them

off and organize a resistance group to help them push deeper and deeper in. It was just the two of them. They were

getting into firefights and they needed to find proof of chemical weapons attacks. And what they saw was a

horrific scene. The same scene that they were looking for. Chase said, quote, "We were on our bellies near the lip of the

trench trying to forget the bodies beneath us. And the bodies beneath them were that they were taking cover from

were incoming small arms hits that were impacting around them. And the corpses under them were dead civilians that had

died from Assad's chemical weapon attack." They took out their own pictures at that point and he got a bag

filled with the toxic white powder of the chemical weapons. With evidence in hand of the chemical weapon attack,

Chase flew back to Washington DC and the mission was green lit. It was no longer about reconnaissance. It was about

procurement. The objective now was to find and purchase a massive arsenal of non United States traceable weaponry to

arm the Free Syrian Army. Official estimates are that the CIA arms program was about $1.5 billion dollars over

several years. The money went through regional partners, primarily Jordan, Turkey, and Saudi Arabia, that all

agreed to work on this CIA operation to supply weapons, ammo, tactical training, and groundtoround assistance. CIA

paramilitary officers worked closely with allied intelligence services and military special operations from all

these countries. These operatives built and managed a secret training base inside Jordan and southern Turkey where

they vetted Syrian rebels and gave them marksmanship training, communications, and medical training as well as small

unit tactics. The training emphasized guerrilla warfare, but largely it was about anti-tank and anti-aircraft

weapons. And this is kind of the bread and butter of foreign intelligence services around the world. A lot of them

do this kind of covert missions where they run weapon systems to rebel groups. There are missions too sensitive for

official special forces, Delta or the SEALs. These are called zero footprint operations that are handed to men who on

paper don't exist. These are contractors and they do their job and their job is to do the deniable downright dirty work

of governments that can't officially be there. They had tow missiles and stinger missiles that were designed to level the

battlefield against Assad's way overpowered armored columns and air power. We know this is a CIA operation

that actually was conducted at the time called Operation Timber Sycamore. You may not have ever heard about it. Chase

set up a pipeline of untraceable AK-47s and heavy weapons from an Iraqi in Kurdistan. So sometimes there's this

erroneous belief that, you know, the CIA is a rogue elephant is what they called this in the 70s. Um that's just not the

case. It's approved by the uh president. and it goes through all the legal hacks to make sure it's legal and then the

agency carries it out and the uh Senate Select Committee on Intelligence and the House Select Committee on Intelligence

um oversee it. So, we have to go explain what we did. So, but that's it gives the uh the agency authority to be deniable

uh completely legally deniable. I want to be clear, Mick is neither confirming nor denying any of these stories. He's

merely providing us with context and information on how to understand key concepts around how the agency actually

works. And I know a lot of you are going to say that Mick is my handler, but that is not true. That's actually Carl. Chase

claims that he helped set up a covert weapons pipeline disguised as a security firm using political connections through

his fixer, Asso Anoir. Fixers are very important when you're on the ground in a foreign country. They know everything

from the language to how things operate there and who you need to know to get what done. That was the son of the

region's top intelligence official. So they could bypass red tape though. That's who their fixer was. So Rachel

Marsden was a columnist in the Baltimore Sun and she suggested that Timber Sycamore, the CIA op, involved the

arming and funding of independent military contractors by the Saudi intelligence along with the CIA's

training of pro-American militias inside Syria. She believed it was aimed at overthrowing the Assad government and

installing a new Syrian government that was friendly to the United States and Saudi Arabia's interests. By spring

2012, Chase's weapon pipeline that he opened up was booming. It was going from Benghazi in Libya to Urbil in Iraq to

then the Syrian rebels. It was running at full speed with hundreds of arms flowing weekly and they were having

early battlefield success keeping Assad's forces at bay. But as you might know, Benghazi became a chaotic hot

spot. CIA state contractors operated side by side without coordination. And despite warning signs, DC demanded

heavier and heavier weapons to help get to the Syrian fighters. In April 2014, Seymour Hirs, yes, the same Seymour Hirs

who blew up the CIA spot back in the 1970s, he wrote an essay published in the London Review of Books, which

describes an anonymous former senior US intelligence official claiming that the US diplomatic outpost in Libya's

Benghazi, had no real political role, and existed basically just to provide a cover for a secret CIA arms pipeline

that was supporting the Syrian rebels in early 2012. According to Hersh's source, it was called the Rat Line, and it was a

means of channeling all that military weaponry from Gaddafi's arsenal into Syrian rebels hands. At its height,

15,000 Syrian fighters were believed to be armed from multiple factions. The CIA involvement extended beyond just

training to direct logistical support, arranging weapon shipments, securing safe routes for rebel movements, and

coordinating intelligence sharing to target regime units. Some CIA operatives also even participated in frontline

reconnaissance, battlefield assessments, and they provided realtime intel to commanders in Washington DC. And some

say they were even involved with on the ground fighting. There is, in my estimation, no letup in the threats that

are waged against the United States. We are, like it or not, I like it, um, the leader of the free world. We're the

longest continuous democracy and I think there's responsibility with that. People look to us to lead and that's what makes

America what America is. And there's also a surge in autocracies. uh the there is a sizable portion of the world

lives under some form uh of a totalitarian system. They don't play by the same rules, right? So we uh

yes, the CIA is very capable, but no, the CIA doesn't do whatever it wants. It has specific rules that are put on them.

It has oversight committees in the House and the Senate who um who ultimately are the one that funds it, so they have

authority. We're not. But that that's not the case with uh the intelligence services in China and Russia uh or or in

Iran or North Korea or or a lot of other countries that uh quite frankly um do what they want when they want and often

times don't even care that people know. I always find it interesting how these operations are exposed or leaked. Timber

Sycamore was exposed publicly by journalism and a mix of US officials leaking it. US weapons were clearly also

showing up in Syria and captured rebels were talking about being trained by Americans. It very well could have

deliberately been leaked, which is often done purposefully. These leaks are known as a tactic in DC that's used to sway

policy. In this case, the leaks may have been intended to justify or accelerate the program's termination because in

2017, it was shut down. And even before that, once the Benghazi attacks happened in 2012, it forced the CIA to relocate

and tighten their operations, especially in Libya, cutting off that pipeline. Timber Sycamore did continue, but it was

reduced and then ultimately eliminated. It had mixed results. Many weapons ended up in the hands of jihadists, including

ISIS affiliates. But it helped the rebels hold on in those early years. And a decade later, those same rebels would

finally become successful and topple Assad and are now in control of Syria. This comes to us from a book called Zero

Footprint that claims to be non-fiction. Although there is stuff in there that's always murky and designed to give

plausible deniability. Even if 50% of it's true, it's totally not. Three can keep a secret if two of them are dead.

In case you're interested, Patrick Baker and I just launched our new podcast called Simple Sabotage. It's all about

talking about current events and defense news in a fun and entertaining way. If you want to check it out, link is in the

description. Our next unhinged CIA paramilitary op comes to us from Afghanistan in 2001 when the CIA asked

for something very specific, a Predator drone armed with a Hellfire missile. We've seen how drones have recently

upended modern warfare in Iran and Russia, attacking from within, deep within their soil. But let's see how it

all started. How did drone operations start with the CIA? Wait, that wasn't a CIA op too, was it? Over there in

Ukraine and Russia and Iran. Right. Right guys, the CIA asked for the armed predator drone because they wanted to

kill Osama bin Laden without having to get too much clearance. According to the nation, the CIA launched its first

purely covert armed predator strike on February 4th, 2002 in eastern Afghanistan. The Hellfire missile was

fired at a group of three, including a tall man with robes who they believed was Osama bin Laden himself. Local

witnesses later claimed it was actually a group of civilians collecting scrap metal. CIA paramilitary officers are the

ones in charge of gathering target information for drone strikes in Yemen, Iraq, and Pakistan. It's often

intelligence operatives doing the work on the ground, not because necessarily they have capabilities that special

forces do not, but largely because they have zero footprint. They go where conventional or even special forces

aren't allowed legally. largely because they have that nifty title 50 that gives them the plausible deniability that

other elite units do not have and could work in countries that are not declared a war zone officially. This is part of

the reason why there's a ton of lawyers at the agency writing these authorizations up. During the Bush White

House, they authorized 52 drone strikes outside the war theaters during the 8-year term of his administration. These

were officially called small footprint operations by the US military according to since widely leaked documents called

the drone papers. Well, it's it's more like drone PowerPoint slides, which gives us a whole new meaning of death by

PowerPoint because these detail how CIA operators on the ground coordinated with drones overhead to achieve a 75% kill or

capture rate by working with partner forces on the ground as well to interdict terrorists inside Somalia and

Yemen. And they coordinated these programs over the course of sometimes 6 months to a year. This PowerPoint says,

the PowerPoint reveals how the United States quietly built up a network of small footprint quote unquote drone

bases across Somalia, Yemen, and the whole horn of Africa, not only to fly surveillance, but to shorten their

flight sorty distances and maintain persistent kill coverage. President Obama's administration decided to no

longer conduct any of the enhanced interrogations or torture on the one hand, but on the other hand, they

increased targeted drone strikes by a metric ton. During those 8 years, it was 10 times higher with over 500 drone

strikes that killed more than 3,700 people. These hits came from a kill or capture list and the government hit list

for terrorists. Basically, it was their official government knockoff list. Officials held what were called terror

Tuesday meetings where Obama would personally approve names for execution. That makes the Taco Tuesdays that we

have at this company here seem pretty freaking lame. There are a string of success stories in 2006 from these

operations that explain why they double down on them so much. A CIA drone strike in Pakistan killed Abu Al- Masari, who

was an al-Qaeda top bomb maker. Up next was Measud who was responsible for orchestrating dozens of kamicazi

bombings in Pakistan that killed civilians and US soldiers in Afghanistan as well. He was linked to assassination

of a former prime minister in Pakistan. Dude was a bad guy who needed to get smoked. On August 5th, 2009, officials

at the Central Intelligence Agency inside Langley, Virginia, were able to watch a crisp, highquality video of him

sitting on his rooftop just chilling at his father-in-law's house. The agency launched two Hellfire missiles at him

and poof, all that was left was his upper half of his body afterwards, just his torso. But the strike also killed

his wife and father-in-law. There's a misconception that because drones are operated from two miles up in the sky,

sometimes thousands of miles away remotely, that there aren't spies on the ground walking them in on target. For

most drone strikes, there was a CIA ground branch asset working alongside them, gathering intel and creating a

target package. They collected intel from a host of different sources, from human to cell phone metadata. And if the

phone was in the wrong hands at the wrong time, whoops. But by 2011, America was going buck wild with their drone

strikes. UAVs helped track and kill Anoir alawaki. He was a US-born cleric turned terrorist in Yemen. But keep that

in mind. He was US-born. But he did inspire multiple terror plots against the West. No charges though, no trial.

He was just poof, gone, deleted by a drone strike. This started to raise some deep uncomfortable questions about

constitutional concerns about due process. Critics said that it set a dangerous precedent that basically gave

the government unilateral power to kill Americans abroad based on secret intelligence that no one was able to

really look at. On the other hand, the drone program became a precision tool for eliminating senior jihadists with a

near zero risk to US personnel. CIA contractors would operate out of secret bases in Nevada, Djibouti, and Diego

Garcia. They could kill someone on the other side of the planet during a lunch break. The CIA's program was so

secretive that even the drone strikes weren't acknowledged publicly for many years. Then came the stories. The

wedding party in Yemen blown up in 2013 by mistake. The rescue missions in Pakistan where an American hostage

Weinstein and an Italian aid worker low Porto were accidentally killed by a drone strike authorized by the CIA. In

2015, a ton of classified information was leaked to the Intercept by Daniel Hail. After he left the Air Force and

became a contractor, he leaked 17 documents on the program containing details about the kill lists and

civilian casualties of the drone strikes. It revealed the true extent of America's worldwide drone killing

operation. And it was shocking to see for those who don't like to see how the sausage gets made. To many, it appeared

like assassinations by another name, targeted killings. It revealed that 90% of people in certain drone strikes were

not the intended target. These were authorized and defended all the way up the chain of command. John Brennan,

Obama's counterterrorism, SAR, and later CIA director, argued in 2012 that the drone strikes were ethical and just,

even while reports were showing that many people were dying, innocent people. Meanwhile, inside the CIA, there were

growing concerns. But one CIA officers told the New York Times, "If we kill them faster than they can recruit, we

win." But what if every missile breeds three more insurgents itself? Annie Jacobson wrote in her book, Surprise,

Kill Vanish, where she interviewed CIA paramilitary officers, quote, "Officially called signature strikes,

these drone strikes were directed against groups of individuals who had been observed keeping company with known

terrorists." In the press, signature strikes quickly became known as crowd kills. The joke was that when the CIA

sees three guys doing jumping jacks, the agency thinks it's a terrorist training camp. That was reported by the New York

Times, citing an official that in Yemen and Somalia, al-Qaeda, and ISIS use these civilian deaths from these drone

strikes as propaganda, framing the US as a foreign occupier, operating invisible death machines from above. By the late

2010s, the CIA drone program had become a fixture of US foreign policy. Presidents came and went, but the drone

fleet kept humming. Bush started the fire. Obama flamed it. Trump then loosened restrictions on it. Biden

promised reforms for it, but it continued. The infrastructure of secret executions from the sky has remained

intact. And now we've seen two of America's partners, Israel and Ukraine, conduct a new evolution of warfare where

drones in just a matter of weeks apart were able to pull off a new evolution of drone warfare. The core dilemma is that

while the United States needs an effective intelligence agency to anticipate threats, prevent wars, and

protect national interests, the CIA has had mixed results. It's meant to be a precise tool for understanding the

world. And yet they often have to act blindly. Errors that they make have great great consequences and high stakes

that other jobs in national security don't have to deal with. They can cause catastrophic blowback making some other

jobs. I think it's this attempt to live up to lofty values in America and in the West and then have those ethics mixed

with the need to do dirty work against evil people that need to be destroyed. This is part of what I would call the

paradox of American power. In wartime, truth is so precious that she should always be attended by a bodyguard of

lies. If you're enjoying this episode, why don't you grab one of our enhanced interrogation world tour t-shirts. CIA

denied. Cappy army approved. Or you could check out the other hats we have and t-shirts. The link is in the

description. We need to give context of what the CIA really is. The agency was born from the World War II era OSS

Commandos and they were created officially with the National Security Act of 1947. At the time, you might be

surprised to learn, but America was one of the last countries in the entire world to actually create a foreign

intelligence service of their own. Their purpose was to provide the president with foresight about what America's

enemies were really thinking and to fight fire with fire when absolutely necessary. the paramilitary wing of the

CIA. Their motto is Tersia Opio, which in Latin stands for third option. What that means is it's the solution after

diplomacy has failed and war could hopefully still be avoided. The wing that we're focused on today is that

paramilitary side. They're the shadow soldiers of the intelligence world, part spy, part soldier, and part foreign

policy expert. In 2009, the organization looked like this. What this document shows us is that the agency split

between the operational side which are like the trigger pullers and the analysis side which are the bean

counters. The special activities center has two groups that we know of called special operations group and the

political action group. These guys often don't look like your stereotypical warriors. They wear pink boat shirts

with blue jeans and white sneakers while they topple governments, run black sites, and hunt terrorists around the

world. Between the 1950s and the 1970s, the CIA went absolutely buck wild. They went crazy. They were considered a rogue

organization. They conducted political assassinations, domestic spying. They supported some coups around the world

that ultimately weren't even in the country's national interest. They operated with almost impunity and almost

zero oversight from the government. An article written in the New York Times by Seymour Hirs, keep that name in mind,

it's going to come up again, it called the CIA out and blew up their spot, which led to the US Senate, their 1975

church committee. And that investigation revealed CIA crimes that absolutely outraged the public. In response, the US

government cracked down on and created restrictions on the CIA. They lassoed them in and tried to rein all of their

operations in. A desk is a dangerous place from which to view the world. That's why today there's a law that's

called US Code Title 50. It governs how the CIA operates. A US president now has to inform Congress and keep them up to

date. There's a congressional approval process and oversight of their covert missions. People often hear the term

covert and they confuse it with clandestine. The two are actually not interchangeable. There's an important

distinction, but in Hollywood, they often call it the same thing. So, under Title 50, what that means

interchangeably in Hollywood, but there's a major difference in the real world. Under Title 50 authorization,

covert action is when the effects of an operation will be visible, but the US government will deny being involved,

like when they arm rebel groups in Syria. If operatives are caught, they may end up in foreign prisons where the

US government will still deny that they're even affiliated. Clandestine means quote unquote hidden. So, the goal

is for the operation to not be noticed at all, like secretly placing a surveillance device inside a foreign

embassy without being detected or flying a innocent surveillance drone over a country. Clandestine operations do not

require a lawyer with a big presidential finding. It has to be less justified. And there's far less legal scrutiny than

covert actions. The Church Committee ended up leading to hundreds of CIA officers getting fired. In 1977,

Director Turner launched a major purge of the AY's clandestine operations branch. They essentially cleaned out and

swept away their sins and tried to come clean, revealing all their family jewels, so to speak. In CIA lore, it's a

real cannon event called the Halloween massacre. Nearly 20% of the force was let go in an attempt to regain public

trust. They also codified into law that assassinations were off the table. No more assassinating leaders as a foreign

policy tool. However, our first story is the perfect example of how what is and isn't an assassination can end up being

a gray area. And it's now been over 50 years since the last time the CIA placed serious restrictions on itself, cleaned

house, and aired those secret family jewels for all to see. Since then, their power has grown considerably. This next

story is the enhanced interrogation program that I think is evidence of just how powerful the CIA had become. Again,

before the waterboarding, before the rendition flights and the black sites, there was a man in a hotel room in

Pakistan being asked politely. That man was Abu Zabada, the first high-value detainee captured by the CIA after 9/11.

And he wasn't saying much. So, the CIA turned to something a little bit stronger than polite conversation. They

called it enhanced interrogation. Others would later call it torture. Either way, it happened and it happened a lot. In

fact, it happened at the outpost that I was in in Iraq. Whenever we raided and captured bomb makers and insurgents, we

handed them off to the Iraqis who could get more creative with their methods of interrogation than the United States

legally could. Loophole achieved, ethical questions averted, traumatization later in life unlocked.

The agency has a history with getting people to talk and all intelligence groups do this kind of crap. I did a

video once on China's MSS, Russia's KGB. They do some dark This is a dark world that we're talking about that all

them play by different rules based on their targets. During the Cold War, the CIA studied human behavior obsessively.

They wanted to understand how their enemies thought. LSD experiments at McGill University, mindontrolling

projects like MK Ultra, and the Kubark counterintelligence interrogation manual. The Kubark manual written in

1963 outlined everything from sleep deprivation to sensory disorientation, but always with the caveat, don't leave

any marks. That golden rule would carry over to the war on terror with a few upgrades, as we'll see. In the wake of

9/11 terror attacks, the CIA was handed essentially a blank check and a hunting license. On September 17th, 2001,

President Bush signed a covert action finding, giving the CIA unprecedented authority to capture and kill suspected

terrorists. This wasn't your dad's CIA anymore. The Directorate of Operations started building a global network of

black sites. Poland, Lithuania, Thailand, Romania, Morocco. These were all countries where the Geneva

Conventions were more of a suggestion than a rule and they opened up famous black sites at each of these locations.

Geneva suggestions, we should say. The enhanced interrogation program began with Abu Zabada, who was captured in

March 2002. The CIA believed he was a top al-Qaeda planner and assumed he had actionable intelligence on the next big

attack, but he didn't. But no one knew it at the time. What they did know was that Zaboda was defiant and

uncooperative. So, the CIA went to its new psychological consultants, James Mitchell and Bruce Jensen, two former

Air Force SEIR psychologists, who had no real experience with interrogating anyone, but claimed that they could

reverse engineer resistance training that they did understand. Mitchell and Jensen had read the Kubark manual, and

they knew how to break someone down. First came the walling, quote unquote, which was slamming detainees into a

plywood wall. Then stress positions like having to sit in a really uncomfortable position for a long period of time. Then

sleep deprivation for up to 180 hours. That's over 7 days awake. Then came water boarding which they administered

83 times to Zaba. He was strapped to a gurnie, tilted back, and had water poured over his mouth and nose until he

convulsed and passed out. Then they woke him up and did it again. CIA officers watching the interrogation were

horrified. This is something that we should not be doing, one of them wrote in a cable. Another admitted it felt

like a mock execution. The program continued though. In 2003, Khaled Shik Muhammad, the architect of 9/11, was

captured and waterboarded over 180 times. He eventually confessed to planning attacks on bridges,

skyscrapers, even a plot to blow up Panama's canal. But years later, Senate investigations concluded that much of

what he said was either exaggerated, fabricated, or already known. So, what did America get out of all of this?

According to a 2014 Senate Intelligence Committee report, the 6,700 page document, of which only 500 something

pages were declassified, it concluded that the CIA's torture program was brutal and effective. They claimed

enhanced interrogation saved lives. The CIA's own internal communications revealed doubts, cover-ups, and frantic

efforts to protect the agency. Jose Rodriguez, head of the CIA's clandestine service, ordered the destruction of 90

videootapes of interrogations in 2005 over 90, fearing a public backlash. He said, quote, "It was just too horrible

to watch." Rodriguez would later defend his decision, saying, "We needed to protect our people, period." Others

didn't escape so cleanly, though. CIA case officer John Carco, who spoke to the media in 2007 and confirmed the use

of waterboarding, was sentenced to 30 months in federal prison, not for torture, but for leaking classified

information. The program officially ended in 2009 when President Obama signed Executive Order 13491, banning

torture and requiring all interrogations to follow the US Army Field Manual. The most shocking part, it wasn't a secret.

The program was known, briefed, and approved at the highest levels of the government. As one CIA officer put it,

"We weren't rogue. We were the tip of the spear." To me, the most chilling part of this program is what I think it

stood for. In some ways, it may have been less about getting information and more about exacting a revenge from an

enemy that was often elusive. It may have been about punishment for the sake of what was done on 9/11 more than

anything else. One of the things Osama bin Laden believed and said a lot, they were weak and didn't have stomach for

war or death. These horrific torture programs may have been a message to America's enemies that the nation is

capable of unmatched levels of violence. That's all we've got for CIA paramilitary operations on this episode

of the series. If you want to see more, because there are certainly a lot more, let me know by hitting the like and

subscribe button. If you want to read the sources and show notes, as always, just go to cappy army.com to check them

out. There you can also get exclusive content or our shows podcast if you want to join the membersonly on YouTube.

Thank you. I'm your average infanterman, Chris Cappy. Ending transmission