“It’s still going to be a scandal,” Clements said, apparently determined not to keep up.

“Of course it’s going to be a scandal,” Ulrich said, disgusted that his Hey, we’re all in this together pep talk apparently had accomplished nothing. “And you might even have to resign for it. Would you rather own up to not even knowing where the tapes are or how many there actually were or what the hell happened to them? How do you think the Fourth Circuit would respond if you said, ‘Sorry, we don’t know where the tapes are, we can’t find them’? You think they’d actually believe you could be that inept? You and I know better, but the court? They’d think it was a cover-up because no one could be so stupid as to misplace ninety-two tapes that, if they ever see the light of day, would be the most damaging national security leak in the history of the nation. You’d have so many outside investigations up your ass you’d spend the rest of your life trying to shit them out.”

Clements glared, but took the rebuke. “I still don’t see what this gets us.”

“Number one, it gets us time-time to conduct our own investigation, from the inside. If we do that, with a little luck we recover the tapes ourselves, do what should have been done in the first place, and the truth never gets out. The only way you’re going to cover this up is by ‘confessing’ to a lesser crime. How can you not see that? The media will jump all over the confession because for Christ’s sake, no one would confess to destroying those tapes if he hadn’t actually done it. No one will suspect the confession is actually concealing something worse, and for now the revelation of a few destroyed tapes will obscure the existence of just how many tapes there really were and what actually happened to them. Think the Forest Service, starting small, controlled fires to prevent the big ones, all right? How much more do I need to spell this out for you?”

“It’ll never work,” Clements said. “Someone will smell political opportunity. We’ll never avoid an investigation.”

“No? Haven’t you been briefing Congress on the program?”

“Just the gang of eight,” Clements said, using shorthand for the Democratic and Republican heads of the House and Senate, and the chair and ranking minority member of the House and Senate Intelligence Committees. “But we’ve been deliberately fuzzy on the details.”

“The details don’t matter,” Ulrich said. “What matters is that the briefings took place. You think the Speaker of the House wants to get into a public fight over what she was told and when she was told it? She loses that battle just by having to fight it.”

Were they getting it? He still wasn’t sure.

“Plus, I know how you guys work. What did Goss testify to Congress that time? ‘It may be only a matter of time before al Qaeda attacks the United States,’ wasn’t that it? May be, but maybe it won’t be? My God, how many positions can you take in the same sentence? Go back to your records, I’ll bet you can find something in a briefing about videotapes and whether they should be preserved. I guarantee someone dropped some casual mention just in case there was ever a problem later. Work this right and you can use the media to implicate anyone. And the gang of eight will know it.”

There was a pause while they absorbed the diagnosis. Dire, with a brutal treatment regimen, but not without hope.

“I’m not taking all the heat for this,” Clements said. “I’m not going down alone.”

Ulrich could almost have smiled. Clements was in. Now they were just negotiating price.

“Then find someone at CIA who will. Who’s in a position to have authorized the destruction of those tapes? Get to that person. Use whatever leverage you need to. And make sure he’s on board.”

“There’s no one else. That would be a decision for the director of the National Clandestine Service. Anything else will look like bullshit.”

“Then pin it on Killman’s predecessor. He’s got a nice cushy job in the private sector now, right? Intelligence contractor, making four times his government salary? You can’t provide him with the right incentives to play ball? You don’t have any dirt on him?”

Clements smiled, the smile of someone who’s been smelling blood in the water and only just realized it was coming from someone else. “I’ll see what can be done.”

“But remember,” Ulrich said, “all this is doing is buying us time. The 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 on, 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 came out with 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.”

The 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.