President Donald Trump intends to nominate Gina Haspel, deputy director of the Central Intelligence Agency to be the agency’s next director, the White House announced on Tuesday.
If confirmed, Haspel would be the first woman to lead the CIA, replacing current director Mike Pompeo, whom Trump picked to replace Rex Tillerson as secretary of State.
Haspel is a career intelligence officer and a frequent participant in Trump’s Oval Office intelligence briefings, along with Pompeo.
Yet Haspel’s Senate confirmation process is expected to be complicated by her role in the CIA’s “black site” program, in which terrorism suspects were extrajudicially detained and tortured.
Oregon Sen. Ron Wyden pledged to oppose Haspel’s nomination Tuesday, saying in a statement that Haspel’s “background makes her unsuitable” to lead the CIA. “If Ms. Haspel seeks to serve at the highest levels of U.S. intelligence, the government can no longer cover up disturbing facts from her past,” he said.
Launched following the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, the secret prison network was condemned by human-rights groups, who said the CIA’s “enhanced interrogation” methods violated international laws against the use of torture. One of President Barack Obama’s first official acts was to end the black site program.
In 2002, Haspel was running a black site prison in Thailand where terrorism suspect Abu Zubaydah was held following his capture in Pakistan. In Thailand, Zubaydah was waterboarded 83 times, locked in a coffin, slammed against the wall and deprived of sleep, according to a landmark congressional report on the CIA’s torture program.
It was only after Zubaydah was tortured for months that CIA agents realized they were mistaken: He was not, in fact, a leader of al Qaeda. Zubaydah is currently being held at the U.S. detention center in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.
From 2003 to 2005, Haspel was chief of staff to the CIA director of clandestine operations, Jose Rodriguez. In his 2013 memoir, “Hard Measures,” Rodriguez described how Haspel directed agents to use an industrial strength shredder in 2005 to destroy videotapes of CIA interrogations conducted at black sites.
In February 2017, Trump named Haspel to be the CIA’s deputy director, prompting Democratic senators to write a letter protesting her appointment. The public version of the letter from Oregon’s Wyden and Sen. Martin Heinrich of New Mexico said only that Haspel’s “background makes her unsuitable for the position.” Their reasons for saying this were detailed in a separate, classified letter that has not been made public.
In a statement Tuesday, Haspel said that, if confirmed, she looks forward “to providing President Trump the outstanding intelligence support he has grown to expect during his first year in office.”
