CIA Admits to Spying on Senate Staffers

By Spencer Ackerman, Guardian UK

31 July 14

John Brennan issues apology after acknowledging that agency spied on Senate intelligence committee’s staff members

he director of the Central Intelligence Agency, John Brennan, issued an extraordinary apology to leaders of the US Senate intelligence committee on Thursday, conceding that the agency employees spied on committee staff and reversing months of furious and public denials.

Brennan acknowledged that an internal investigation had found agency security personnel transgressed a firewall set up on a CIA network, called RDINet, which allowed Senate committee investigators to review agency documents for their landmark inquiry into CIA torture.

The admission brings Brenan’s already rocky tenure at the head of the CIA under renewed question. One senator on the panel said he had lost confidence in Brennan.

“Some CIA employees acted in a manner inconsistent with the common understanding reached between SSCI and the CIA in 2009 regarding access to the RDINet,” CIA spokesman Dean Boyd said in a statement to reporters, using the acronym for the Senate select committee on intelligence.

In March, the committee chairwoman, Senator Dianne Feinstein of California, accused the agency of violating constitutional boundaries by spying on the Senate.

Feinstein has yet to comment on the CIA statement. But Mark Udall of Colorado, a Demorat on the Senate panel, tweeted that “Brennan misled public” and pledged to “fight for change at the CIA”.

But her fellow committee member Mark Udall, a Colorado Democrat, called Brennan’s future into question.

“From the unprecedented hacking of congressional staff computers and continued leaks undermining the Senate intelligence committee’s investigation of the CIA’s detention and interrogation program to his abject failure to acknowledge any wrongdoing by the agency, I have lost confidence in John Brennan,” Udall said.

“I also believe the administration should appoint an independent counsel to look into what I believe could be the violation of multiple provisions of the Constitution as well as federal criminal statutes and executive order 12333,” he added, referring to a Reagan-era presidential directive defining the roles of the intelligence agencies.

Senator Ron Wyden, an Oregon Democrat on the panel and one of the agency’s harsher critics, said the CIA inspector general had vindicated the committee but stopped short of calling for Brennan’s resignation.

“What’s needed now is a public apology from director Brennan to staff and the committee, a full accounting of how this occurred and a commitment there will be no further attempts to undermine Congressional oversight of CIA activities,” Wyden said.

Boyd said Brennan has asked a former committee member, Evan Bayh, a former Indiana Democratic senator, to review the recommendations of the agency inspector general – which vindicated Feinstein and prompted Brennan’s apology – and advise Brennan on next steps.

That advice, Boyd said, “could include potential disciplinary measures and/or steps to address systemic issues.”

Steve Aftergood of the Federation of American Scientists, a longtime observer of the CIA, called its Thursday statement a “conciliatory gesture” to the committee’s leaders. “If Senator Feinstein is satisfied with the apology then the affair is effectively over. If she contends there was a fundamental breach that cannot be corrected with a mere apology then some further action might be needed,” Aftergood said.

McClatchy first reported the apology on Thursday.

Feinstein, in her dramatic speech on the Senate floor in March, said the agency breached the firewall to obstruct the committee’s investigation of the agency’s torture of post-9/11 terrorism detainees, a years-long effort expected to be partially declassified in the coming days or weeks. That investigation was itself prompted by a different coverup: the destruction of videotapes of brutal interrogations by a senior official, Jose Rodriguez.

Despite that, the committee has concluded that the torture was an ineffective means of gathering intelligence on al-Qaida – contradicting years of CIA assurances it was crucial – and that the agency lied to its overseers about its value.

Brennan, a confidante of Barack Obama and a senior agency official when the “rendition, detention and interrogation” program was established, immediately denied that his officials had spied on their overseers.

“As far as the allegations of, you know, CIA hacking into, you know, Senate computers, nothing could be further from the truth. I mean we wouldn’t do that. I mean, that’s just beyond the – you know, the scope of reason in terms of what we would do,” Brennan said on the day of Feinstein’s accusation.

“If I did something wrong,” Brennan continued in March, “I will go to the president, and I will explain to him exactly what I did, and what the findings were. And he is the one who can ask me to stay or to go.”

The White House, where Brennan worked as Obama’s senior counter-terrorism aide before becoming CIA director in March 2013, did not immediately respond to inquiries asking if Obama retained confidence in Brennan.

The Obama administration has walked a delicate line over the torture report. Obama has insisted its prompt and thorough declassification – which has taken nearly four months – is a priority. Yet he appointed the CIA itself as the lead agency to determine what aspects of a report directly implicating CIA activities the public can see.

Even before he was sworn in, Obama disappointed civil-liberties supporters by indicating his disinclination to prosecuting agency and ex-Bush administration officials who ordered and implemented the torture program. In 2012, a special prosecutor ended an inquiry without bringing charges. Only one man, a former CIA contractor named David Passaro, has gone to jail in connection to the CIA’s post-9/11 torture.

Brennan’s apology also complicates a developing CIA pushback against a report that agency officials, current and former, consider shoddy. George Tenet, the former director whom Brennan served and who oversaw the brutal practices – where suspected terrorists were subjected to simulated drowning, had guns fired by their heads, were kept in undisclosed prisons for years and were sent to countries like Gadhafi’s Libya and Assad’s Syria for even more abusive treatment – is said to be developing a public strategy to attack the committee once the report is released.

The agency, consistent with a pattern that has held since 9/11, appears out of danger from criminal liability. Earlier this month, a Justice Department probe, also first reported by McClatchy, declined to pursue an investigation into Feinstein’s now-vindicated charges.