WASHINGTON - As a clandestine officer at the CIA in 2002, Gina Haspel oversaw the torture of two terrorism suspects and later took part in an order to destroy videotapes documenting their brutal interrogations at a secret prison in Thailand.
On Thursday, Ms Haspel was named the deputy director of the CIA.
The elevation of Ms Haspel, a veteran widely respected among her colleagues, to the No.2 job at the CIA was a rare public signal of how, under the Trump administration, the agency is being led by officials who appear to take a far kinder view of one of its darker chapters than their immediate predecessors.
Over the past eight years, CIA leaders defended dozens of agency personnel who had taken part in the now-banned torture programme, even as they vowed never to resume the same harsh interrogation methods. But President Donald Trump has said repeatedly that he thinks torture works. And the new CIA chief, Mike Pompeo, has said that waterboarding and other techniques do not even constitute torture and praised as "patriots" those who used such methods in the early days of the fight against al-Qaeda.
Ms Haspel, who has spent most of her career undercover, would certainly fall within Mr Pompeo’s description. She played a direct role in the CIA’s "extraordinary rendition programme," under which captured militants were handed to foreign governments and held at secret facilities, where they were tortured by agency personnel.
The CIA’s first overseas detention site was in Thailand. It was run by Ms Haspel, who oversaw the brutal interrogations of two detainees, Abu Zubaydah and Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri.
Mr Zubaydah alone was waterboarded 83 times in a single month, had his head repeatedly slammed into walls and endured other harsh methods before interrogators decided he had no useful information to provide.
The sessions were videotaped and the recordings stored in a safe at the CIA station in Thailand until 2005, when they were ordered destroyed. By then, Ms Haspel was serving at CIA headquarters, and it was her name that was on the cable carrying the destruction orders.
The agency maintains that the decision to destroy the recordings was made by Ms Haspel’s boss at the time, Jose Rodriguez, who was the head of the CIA’s clandestine service.
But years later, when the CIA wanted to name Ms Haspel to run clandestine operations, senator Dianne Feinstein of California, then the senior Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee, blocked the promotion over Ms Haspel’s role in the interrogation programme and the destruction of the tapes.
On Thursday, critics of the CIA questioned the choice of Ms Haspel.
Mr Pompeo "must explain to the American people how his promotion of someone allegedly involved in running a torture site squares with his own sworn promises to Congress that he will reject all forms of torture and abuse", said Christopher Anders, the deputy director of the American Civil Liberties Union’s office in Washington.
- Senate Intelligence Committee report on the CIA’s use of torture (525 pages, December 2014)
The conflicting views of Ms Haspel were clear in the reactions to her promotion on Thursday from members of Congress. Democrats expressed concern about how she would approach the issue of torture, while Republicans were fulsome in their praise.
Representative Devin Nunes (Republican, California), chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, noted that Ms Haspel was the first woman to serve as deputy director and said she had "impressed us with her dedication, forthrightness and her deep commitment to the intelligence community".
Within the CIA, Ms Haspel is similarly respected, and the agency’s announcement about her promotion came with a long list of testimonials from retired officials. The list notably included prominent Obama administration officials, such as James R. Clapper Jr, the former director of national intelligence ("very pleased"), and Michael J. Morell, who twice served as the CIA’s acting director ("I applaud the appointment").
The praise for Ms Haspel, despite her role in torturing detainees, reflects the agency’s ambivalent attitude toward those who participated in the interrogation programme. The Bush administration declared the methods legal, and the view within the CIA was that those who used the techniques were doing their jobs.
At the same time, many at the agency have little eagerness to see torture return. Where Ms Haspel falls on the issue is not clear -- as an undercover CIA official, she was not offering public opinions on government policy -- and neither she nor Mr Pompeo could order agency personnel to resume the practice, because it is now against the law.
Mr Pompeo’s decision to elevate Ms Haspel is also likely to be seen by the CIA’s rank-and-file as a vote of confidence in their work from their new director, despite Mr Trump’s dismissal of the intelligence community throughout his campaign and in the months between his election and inauguration.
The open disdain with which Mr Trump mocked the CIA, especially after intelligence agencies said they believed that Russia had tried to swing the election in his favour, had raised concerns at the agency of a repeat of the unhappy tenure of a former director, Porter J. Goss.
Mr Goss took over the CIA in 2004, when the agency was widely viewed as being at odds with the Bush administration over the Iraq War, and his marching orders were to end what the White House viewed as a campaign of leaks by insiders who opposed administration policies. He lasted less than two years after his attempt to crack down on leaks drove many veterans out of the CIA.
Thai governments have denied knowledge the so-called black sites existed in Thailand.