NB: THIS TRANSCRIPT WAS TYPED FROM A TRANSCRIPTION UNIT RECORDING AND NOT COPIED FROM AN ORIGINAL SCRIPT: BECAUSE OF THE POSSIBILITY OF MIS- HEARING AND THE DIFFICULTY, IN SOME CASES OF IDENTIFYING INDIVIDUAL SPEAKERS, THE BBC CANNOT VOUCH FOR ITS ACCURACY. ........................................................................ PANORAMA "Deep Down and Dirty" RECORDED FROM TRANSMISSION: BBC-1 DATE: 3:12:00 ........................................................................ GEORGE BUSH: Our enemies are evil and they're ruthless. I want justice. There's an old poster out west, as I recall, that said "Wanted, Dead or Alive". PETER TAYLOR: In the aftermath of September 11th President Bush expressed the feelings of most of a shocked America. Nothing, it seemed, was to stand in the way of bringing Bin Laden and his henchmen to justice. The nation burned with anger and demanded revenge. DUANE CLARRIDGE Chief of Counter-Terrorism Centre CIA 1986-88 I don't want him brought to trial and incarcerated in this country. I don't want to see a dead body because that just makes for a martyr. I just want him to disappear. You know.. concrete shoes, dropped into the Indian Ocean takes care of dead part of 'dead or alive'. TAYLOR: But if Osama bin Laden is brought back dead rather than alive, or brought back at all, doesn't that simply create another hundred Osama bin Ladens? JIM WOOLSEY Director, CIA, 1993-95 Not necessarily. We are going to have to kill a lot of terrorists, and we are going to have to remove at least one or two regimes that now support terrorism. TAYLOR: That's the view of many of the former CIA agents we talked to in tonight's Panorama. They speak out with remarkable candour. 'Dead or alive' implies that gloves are now off in America's war against terrorism, ridding Afghanistan of the Taliban and Al Qaeda is only the beginning of a global offensive, much of it fought in the shadows. JACK DEVINE Head of Afghanistan Task Force CIA, 1986-87 There's a secret war that will be taking place. It's going to have to be a quiet, perpetual effort to face down this menacing threat. TAYLOR: And will the CIA's hands be untied? DEVINE: I think they were untied by 12 o'clock on September 11th. TAYLOR: There's no doubt the CIA is running free, and for its life. This week's carnage in the fortress at Mazar-e-Sharif shows just how deep down and dirty the CIA has got. Suddenly its agents stare death in the face in a war of medieval savagery. DAVE: There's hundreds of dead here at least, and I'm not... I don't know how many Americans are... (voice drowned by mortar fire) I think one was killed, I'm not sure.. I'm not sure. TAYLOR: This CIA agent called Dave is calling in air strikes. He's just seen his partner killed by rioting Taliban prisoners. Seldom are undercover agents seen, let alone in mortal danger. Admiral STANSFIELD TURNER Director, CIA, 1977-81 This is not a Marquis of Queensbury game we're talking about. Spying is dirty business. LARRY JOHNSON Central American Division CIA, 1985-89 Rats live in sewers. If you're going to get into the sewer to get the rats, you're going to get covered with slime. You're going to get covered with faecal material, recognise it, deal with it, then make a choice. Either you want to get rid of the rats which means you've got to get into the sewers, or you've got to learn to live with the rats. TAYLOR: After fighting deep down and dirty for years, an obscure incident in the Guatemalan Jungle tied the CIA's hands. It was the direct result of Jennifer Harbury's quest for her missing husband. It's an astonishing story. Harbury, a Harvard educated lawyer, was convinced he was still alive and opened the grave where she'd been told he'd been buried. She never dreamt she'd uncover the CIA's dirty hands in the process. The fallout shook the CIA, shackled its operations and played a part in the Intelligence failure of September 11th. HARBURY: I opened the grave and there was a young man there 15 years too young, 5 centimetres too short with completely different scars and different teeth. (at graveside examining skull) I can already tell it's not him. It's missing the lower extraction behind the right side canine on the lower jaw, but after that, that's not him. JENNIFER HARBURY Wife of Bamaca It was very harrowing, and in fact we had to open four different graves to find the grave where a young man in olive green, the orange uniform, was buried. The other three were civilians and they didn't match the autopsy reports, and literally people were wrenching decomposed heads out of the grave, placing them in a bucket and handing them to me and asking me if that was my husband or not, and if not, why not. TAYLOR: Her missing husband was a guerrilla leader called Ephraim Bamaca. Bamaca was brought up in this Mayan village in the heart of the jungle. In Guatemala Mayans are like the blacks of South Africa in the days of apartheid. Poverty and discrimination are part of the air they breathe. HARBURY: He grew up on a plantation in South Western Guatemala. He went out every day to basically chop cotton and pick coffee for the plantation owner where he lived. He was very impoverished. He had educated himself in the mountains. He had learnt to read and write in the mountains. TAYLOR: The CIA had meddled in Guatemala since 1954 when it orchestrated a military coup. The generals were supported and armed by Washington. America was fighting the Cold War with the CIA under orders to stem the Communist tide in Central America. To the agency, the Guatemalan Army was the defender of America's freedom. A civil war raged. The earth was scorched as hundreds of villages were wiped off the map. Tens of thousands were killed. Harbury's husband, Bamaca, was Washington's enemy too. TERRY WARD Chief of Latin America Division CIA, 1990-92 He was a leader of an insurgent organisation that had been declared by the US Government as our enemy basically because we supported for many, many years the Guatemalan Government against this organisation which was a Marxist/Leninist organisation. The US Government decided, and many different administrations had decided, that these people were not friends of ours. TAYLOR: Bamaca left his village to fight the regime that oppressed his people. That's how he first met the Harvard lawyer when she was researching a book. In time they fell in love and Bamaca and Jennifer got married. HARBURY: He didn't allow anyone to salute him. He didn't allow anyone to call him by his title which was Commandante. He wouldn't permit that. He felt that that would go to his head and make him less good a leader. TAYLOR: Why did he take up arms? HARBURY: Because in Guatemala civilian reform was simply not permitted by the Guatemalan military. "In 1992 Bamaca was involved in a shoot-out with Guatemalan soldiers deep in the jungle." HARBURY: There was a brief skirmish with the army. There was a great deal of smoke and explosions and he vanished into thin air, with his back pack, with his boots, with his rifle. The army announced shortly after that that he had killed himself in combat to avoid being captured alive and tortured which would have been routine on the part of the military. LARRY JOHNSON Central American Division CIA, 1985-89 If you're going to go out and play in the middle of the freeway or the expressway you do run a risk of getting run over. You know.. Bamaca too, he played.. he pursued what he thought was right and he paid a price for it. TAYLOR: Captured guerrillas like Bamaca were handed over to Guatemalan intelligence officers and made to talk. The methods used were not pretty. Despite the army's insistence that Bamaca was dead, Harbury believed he was still alive and being tortured. As a lawyer she knew from cases she'd handled what went on behind the walls of this secret interrogation centre where she believed her husband was held. HARBURY: They're pulling his fingernails out, they could be amputating his genitals, they could be filling his eye sockets with mud, they could be burning him with cigarettes. Those are all things that I saw many, many times in the morgue, so he was either dead or that's what was happening to him. Deep Down and Dirty CIA Headquarters Langley, Virginia BUSH: You see the enemy, they like to hide, they think they can hide, but we know better. TAYLOR: The CIA lost no sleep over the disappearance of guerrillas in Guatemala. The agency's mission is to warn the President of threats to America. On September 11th it failed. What it lacked was human intelligence, the single most important weapon in the arsenal of counter-terrorism. Ambassador L. PAUL BREMER III National Commission on Terrorism What you have to have in effect is a spy. These groups are almost impossible to infiltrate. That is to say it's very hard to take a British or American citizen and put him into those groups because the groups are tribal. Sometimes just family level. So you have to recruit somebody out of that group which is a difficult recruitment job, and we've had some successes but not enough. And unless you get that kind of human intelligence you're going to continue to have this kind of intelligence failure. TAYLOR: But penetrating terrorist cells is a risky and dangerous business. It's an activity many veterans feel the CIA has neglected for years. DUANE CLARRIDGE Chief of Counter-Terrorism Centre CIA 1986-88 People first of all haven't been risk takers for the last 15 years in that place, that's what intelligence organisations are supposed to be about, taking calculated risks. TAYLOR: And if it doesn't? CLARRIDGE: It isn't much of an intelligence organisation and you see failures like we've seen recently. TAYLOR: In the past the CIA took risks, for example with Yasir Arafat's PLO. The agency had no scruples about dealing with unsavouries like Abu Hassan Salameh, Arafat's right-hand man. CLARRIDGE: He was a bon viveur, loved women, loved booze, in a way a good friend. I mean he could be a good friend, fun to be around actually, but a killer. September 1972 The Munich Olympics were attacked by Black September, a mask for Arafat's group. Salamay was alleged to have been the mastermind. Despite heavy security, 11 Israelis were massacred. CLARRIDGE: In those days at least we sometimes dealt with people who had blood on their hands because unfortunately they tend to know more about what the terrorists are up to than do the Mother Theresas of this world. TERRY WARD Chief of Latin America Division CIA, 1990-92 Let's say for example that Osama bin Laden's Chief Lieutenant, who had coordinated and given the order to fly airplanes into the World Trade Centre and kill 5000 people, sent you a message through a trusted intermediary and said 'Hey, I'm tired of running, tired of living in a cave, I want to cooperate, here's a way that we can get together and I will give you Bin Laden... TAYLOR: You take him don't you? WARD: Of course you take him. Guatemala TAYLOR: Harbury confronted the Guatemalan Government but got nowhere. She was convinced she was being lied to. To force the issue she embarked on a hunger strike drinking water but nothing else. She was determined to get the authorities to reveal the truth about her husband. She called him by his guerrilla name 'Everardo'. Guatemala City November 1994 JENNIFER HARBURY Wife of Bamaca I felt that if I really wanted to show commitment to Everardo, if I really wanted to save his life, that was probably the only thing that would save his life would be for me to literally go into convulsions on the front steps of the National Palace. I knew that it would mean blindness, I know it would mean convulsions, I knew it would mean kidney failure, I know it would mean brain damage, so I lay down in front of their national palace and said is it "you're move". And that lasted for 32 days. I knew I was very strong and that I'd be fine for quite a while, and I figured I could certainly outlast the nervious system of the Guatemalan military who certainly were not about to let a white woman who went to the Harvard Law School go into convulsions on their steps under TV camera. And I just thought maybe, if he's alive, maybe this'll be what it takes. 60 Minutes REPORTER: Today Jennifer is camped out in the main square of Guatemala City in front of the Presidential Palace.... TAYLOR: Harbury appeared to have made a breakthrough when America's answer to Panorama took up her cause. REPORTER: ... what has happened to her husband who she says was captured by the Guatemalan Army more than two years ago and has not been heard from since. "Despite the publicity Jennifer Harbury was still being spun the same line by the State Department." RICK NUCCIO US State Department 1993-97 We know you're frustrated by what you're told by the Guatemalan Government. We don't endorse what they're telling you but we don't have other information that would give us a different answer to your question than the one you've been given so far. TAYLOR: In frustration Harbury transferred her protest to Washington, the real seat of power in Guatemala. She was convinced Everardo might still be alive. She decided to confront President Clinton and his celebrated commitment to human rights. HARBURY: I went back on my hunger strike but this time it was in front of the White House because it was now very clear to me that they were all lying to me and that they knew exactly where he was and what had become of him. Deep Down and Dirty BUSH: They have killed thousands of our citizens, and seek to kill many more. They seek to overthrow friendly governments to force America to retreat from the world. They seek weapons of mass destruction. But we're seeking them. (Cheers) TAYLOR: Nearly 20 years earlier George Bush senior was Vice President. Like father - like son. BUSH Snr: We're not going to let a bunch of insidious terrorists, cowards, shape the foreign policy of the United States, and I'm damned sure hasn't shaken the courage of these men. TAYLOR: September 11th was not the first time Islamic extremists had inflicted grievous loss on America, nor was it the first time that the White House had threatened swift and terrible revenge. The Lebanon taught America a bloody lesson in fighting terrorism words have to be matched with deeds. 23 October 1983 After a suicide bomber had blown up the Beirut Embassy, another drove a truck packed with explosives into the US Army's base - 241 marines died in the rubble. Then, as now, elite special forces were sent in to locate the whereabouts of those responsible. COWAN: Well after the bombing of the marine compound, our team's mission, going back in there, was to find ways to strike back at those who were involved in the bombing of the compound. I would say the long-term goal of running intelligence operations or localising these guys would have been at some point to run a mission against them to take them out. TAYLOR: To kill them? BILL COWAN Former member, US Special Forces Not to kill 'em. Not to capture 'em, not to bring 'em back for trial, that wasn't in our.. or the United State's bailey wick at that point. We were looking at retaliating for killing Americans. TAYLOR: After the terrible events in Lebanon the White House promised to avenge the dead. Most of the CIA station two including its chief, Robert Ames. had been wiped out, but the rhetoric proved hollow. COWAN: The Pentagon, the bureaucracy, people in the White House just did not have a stomach for striking back at people who had killed a lot of Americans. TAYLOR: And America left the Lebanon. America was humiliated and America was driven out by three suicide bombers driving trucks. COWAN: We left Lebanon with our tails between our legs and I'm sure anybody that through the years has thought about striking in America has remembered that we didn't have much of a sense of going back after people who had done things to us. TAYLOR: Although the CIA knew the identities of those responsible, there was no sudden bomb or bullet to pay them back. Ironically it was back in 1976 when George Bush senior was CIA Director that assassinations were forbidden by presidential executive order. The order followed the revelation of CIA plots to assassinate Fidel Castro. It even applied to taking out Saddam Hussein, America's prime candidate for removal before Bin Laden headed the wanted list. When dissident Kurds, advised by the CIA, were eager to do the agency's dirty work for it, they had to be reined in. No wonder the Hawks were frustrated. LARRY JOHNSON Central American Division CIA, 1985-89 I mean good God! We want to kill Saddam but now we're into this crazy world where we can train Kurds to kill Iraqis, as long as they're not Saddam, but Saddam's the problem but we can't kill him because that's against the executive order. TAYLOR: Despite the adulation, Saddam was constantly in the sights of the Kurdish dissidents who plotted against him. But the CIA could only go so far. WHITLEY BRUNER Head of Iraq Task Force CIA, 1990-91 You could certainly talk to them about organising cells.. opposition cells in the military or inside Iraq wherever the coup plotters happened to come from. TAYLOR: Saying we're going to kill Saddam. BRUNER: Say we're going to kill Saddam and this is what we're going to do, but I mean we basically put them off. They would be surprised the first time they heard this but then you'd just say "Can't do it, sorry." JOHNSON: We have now gone into a world of Alice in Wonderland. We're on drugs, we are hallucinating and that kind of insanity in part has contributed to what lead to September 11th. TAYLOR: Although there has been no official word about rescinding the official executive order, a poster depicting America's most wanted leaves little to the imagination. There's no need for the caption 'Dead of Alive'. DUANE CLARRIDGE Chief of Counter-Terrorism Centre CIA 1986-88 I'm not talking about helter-skelter, you know.. sort of every two-bit terrorist, but I think there are certain wicked people that need to be removed from the playing field. TAYLOR: Removed? CLARRIDGE: Removed. TAYLOR: Taken out. CLARRIDGE: Taken out. Slaughtered. TAYLOR: But are there limits to what the CIA can and should do? Who is going to hunt them down and pull the trigger? Is killing a job for the CIA or hired guns? Admiral STANSFIELD TURNER Director, CIA, 1977-81 If we're really going to send people in with pistols or rifles, probably better to get the special forces out of the military to go and do that than an actual CIA group. Then you come to the question well maybe the CIA has to hire this foreign person to do this for you because maybe only the foreign person can gain access to the needed place, and that worries the devil out of me. Guatemala "As a result of Jennifer Harbury's hunger strike the US government delved further into the death of her husband Bamaca. The CIA became nervous." RICK NUCCIO US State Department, 1993-97 The desk officer discovered a cable from, if I remember, the spring of '93 before I had joined the State Department, that gave a clear indication not only that we knew about the Bamaca case but that part of what Jennifer was saying that seemed rather incredible, that Bamaca had been captured and kept alive in some sort of re-education between "some horrible sort of camp where guerrillas were tortured and tried to be turned into informants for the government" this case that she had argued was true for her husband appeared to be confirmed by this cable. TAYLOR: And when you saw the cable, what was your reaction? NUCCIO: Well it was an amazed... I was distressed, overwrought. I uttered a few expletives that I assume I can't utter on European television, and said this case.. this cable makes me out to be a liar. TAYLOR: Harbury's single-handed crusade was coming dangerously close to uncovering a CIA connection to her husband's fate. It came as no surprise that its field officers were working with unsavouries in Central America. TERRY WARD Chief of Latin America Division CIA, 1990-92 We tried over and over to show them, to convince them, that certain crimes of interrogation for example were counterproductive. TAYLOR: Torture? WARD: Yes. TAYLOR: But torture happened, didn't it. WARD: Sure it happened. TAYLOR: There were tortures, executions, kidnappings, the whole gamut. WARD: Sure. TAYLOR: And these are the people you're dealing with. WARD: These are the people we're dealing with. A lot of the people that we're dealing with were also victims of torture and killing and assassination and so on. TAYLOR: By 1995, as a result of her tireless efforts, Harbury finally obtained vital secret intelligence documents under America's Freedom of Information Act. Although vast swathes were deleted, enough remained to reveal startling information about the senior Guatemalan officer involved in Bamaca's fate. His name was Colonel Julio Roberto Alpirez. He's described as an extremely violent man who has murdered guerrilla prisoners. JENNIFER HARBURY Wife of Bamaca He was in charge of his interrogation sessions including the time period he was being drugged, interrogated and held in a full body cast, and it does state that he was present and gave the order for him to be flown off the coast and tossed out of the helicopter. TAYLOR: Another CIA secret document says "It was known within the army that Alpirez was the individual who killed Bamaca but senior ranking officers had decided not to do anything with the information." But there were conflicting reports. HARBURY: Whether or not he gave the direct order for his murder, or agreed to a group decision to have him murdered I don't know. Was he responsible for his torture and murder, either individually or jointly? Yes, of course he was. That is made very clear in all the CIA records. TAYLOR: But the most dramatic revelation of all lay buried in a top secret CIA document. It was the smoking gun behind the death of Harbury's husband. Alpirez, it said, had been a former "CIA paid asset". No wonder the CIA link had been covered up. Roughly how much was he paid? WARD: I don't have the slightest recall of that. TAYLOR: The report said around $40,000. Would that make sense? WARD: If it was an accrual over a period of time - yes. RICK NUCCIO US State Department, 1993-97 The Central Intelligence Agency, at its core, has, as a value, to protect its assets, whatever they do, to whomever they do it, the protection of those assets is their principle priority, and laws can be violated, or human lives disposed of, if necessary, to protect the identity of their assets. LARRY JOHNSON Central American Division CIA, 1985-89 The armchair liberals get to sit back after the fact and say oh my God we broke some eggs when we made omelettes. How terrible for the chickens. The fact of the matter was that the violence and the human rights abuses that were underway in Central America existed long before the United States showed up there. HARBURY: The information came out and it was officially admitted that he was tortured, secretly detained and assassinated without trial by a group of military intelligence officials several of whom were on CIA payroll. TAYLOR: Would the case have aroused such controversy had Bamaca not been married to a Harvard educated American citizen? WARD: If anything it goes to prove that Harvard doesn't necessarily mean that you're educated or intelligent. For a Harvard educated woman to marry a guerrilla and then to have some doubts that a guerrilla in Guatemala might get killed by the Guatemalan military, if that came to her as a shocking revelation, you know.. her parents perhaps should go back and ask for a refund from Harvard. "But there was a real price to pay back at CIA Headquarters." TERRY WARD Chief of Latin America Division CIA, 1990-92 As it turned out, I was asked to retire.. I was forced to retire. TAYLOR: You were sacked? WARD: Yes because of managerial and procedural shortcomings. JOHNSON: It was an abomination. Terry Ward is an honourable man. He served his country according to the rules that were laid out for him. He did everything by the book. Deep Down and Dirty [Bush - Off Camera] We're going to smoke 'em out of their caves and get 'em running, and we're going to use every means at our disposal to do so. TAYLOR: Terrorists are not bound by laws or restrained by moral scruples. They play dirty, and the CIA can play dirty too, often by using covert action. Throughout the Cold War especially when Bill Casey was director, the agency used proxies to do the dirty work. The Soviet invasion of Afghanistan was the classic case. But proxies can rebound and turn against their creator. That's exactly what happened here. By 1985 the American supported Mujahideen were losing the war because of Soviet air power, so the CIA supplied them with Stinger missiles. They were channelled through Pakistan's equivalent of the CIA. The tables were turned. JACK DEVINE Head of Afghan Task Force CIA, 1986-87 I remember seeing videos in the decision making process of that awesome weapon and I've never flown in a helicopter again and felt secure. To watch a missile fired in the wrong direction and turn and hit its target, it's a frightening thing. I think again, as we look back on the event.. the introduction of the Stingers, it drove the Russians out of Afghanistan. Admiral STANSFIELD TURNER Director, CIA, 1977-81 I think it was a major turning point in the whole Cold War. It made the Soviets realise that they weren't as powerful as they thought they were. It made them realise they have bigger problems on their borders than they thought they had, and led in many ways to the eventual collapse of the Soviet Union. TAYLOR: When the Soviets were driven out of Afghanistan America left too. But as the CIA departed, it left behind warring factions of the Mujahideen, armed to the teeth by America. Some went on to become the Taliban with the support of Pakistan. This was the sting in the tail. TURNER: We had only so much control once we gave the arms to the Pakistanis, and they favoured the group that became the Taliban. So, what do we do? Even if we detected they were funnelling more to group A than Groups B and C and D that we favoured, we'd either have to call the whole thing off or keep lecturing them but I mean we didn't have full control over what happened to these things once they crossed the border into Afghanistan as to which tribe got which. TAYLOR: But you effectively armed, trained and supported the Taliban who are now America's deadly enemy. TURNER: Do you think a democracy, when confronted with a real problem today, is going to say maybe in 20 years this'll backfire so I won't do it. Deep Down and Dirty - Again BUSH: We'll frighten 'em and one by one we're bringing them to justice. [Applause] TAYLOR: The killers of Harbury's husband were never brought to justice, but the repercussions were seismic. In 1995, as a direct result of her crusade, the CIA introduced new guidelines for recruiting its assets. They were known as the scrub order, all assets now had to be scrutinised to make sure they were relatively clean. The effect was devastating. WHITLEY BRUNER Head of Iraq Task Force CIA, 1990-91 The Guatemala case in '95 proved to a lot of people in the field that they were not going to get backed up. In other words, if they did something which headquarters didn't like - you're toast. TERRY WARD Chief of Latin America Division CIA, 1990-92 You really have to avoid setting up a situation in which particularly young officers who were out there working hard and doing the real hard stuff, are afraid to take chances. They spend their time doing easy stuff instead of the hard stuff like recruiting terrorists because they're afraid that some day it might come back to bite them. TAYLOR: Was Terry Ward toast? BRUNER: Terry Ward was toast, yes. "Although the CIA had always monitored its 'assets', the 'scrub order' of the 1995 significantly tightened the guidelines." BRUNER: The message to the base is that you are going to get fired if you screw up, and that is not.. in that kind of an organisation in which risk taking is the only way that you're going to get agents or be able to handle agents, that is chilling, absolutely chilling. LARRY JOHNSON Central American Division CIA, 1985-89 If you've ever seen a dog that's been beaten, and then you raise your hand at the dog and the dog cowers, that's CIA. CIA became the cowering dog, no longer willing to go out for a walk with the master. They were so used to the master saying come on, let's go for a walk. You get hooked up and then you get walloped, and as a result, I've spoken to several former colleagues, they say "We aren't taking any chances." TAYLOR: Which leaves the $64,000 question: were Guatemala and the scrub order partly to blame for the catastrophic black hole in intelligence on September 11th? JIM WOOLSEY Director, CIA, 1993-95 I think these guidelines may be part of the reason. They made it harder. They deterred case officers from recruiting terrorists. We had a number of case officers tell us this, both the current and former. I think these guidelines were a very, very bad idea. Political correctness and fighting terrorism often don't work well together. TAYLOR: But has ground zero now consigned the lessons of Guatemala and elsewhere to history? Are there not limits to what the American public is prepared to let the CIA do? AMERICAN PUBLIC OPINION WOMAN: We need to put somebody on the ground to go get Osama bin Laden. I think we need to do it. MAN: To me it's just commonsense that obviously you've got to go get the guy. WOMAN: I find it just shocking to listen to some of these callers to see how wantonly they talk about killing people in other countries. MAN: If Bin Laden's the guy we want, let's go out and send the assassination team out and get him. TERRY WARD Chief of Latin America Division CIA, 1990-92 I think those recurring scenes of those airplanes flying into the towers are very good medicine in an ironic sense to enable us to go out and do the kinds of things that we need to do. TAYLOR: Are results more important than human rights? CLARRIDGE: Oh.. you're asking the wrong person. (laughs) Oh Peter... within limits. Admiral STANSFIELD TURNER Director, CIA, 1977-81 We are loosening a lot of controls in this country, not only on the CIA but on the FBI, on the normal freedoms and liberties that we all have, and most of us think that's necessary under this circumstance, but I don't think we let everything just go. We don't want to lose what we're fighting for which are the principles and the freedoms and the liberties of a democracy and a free society. TAYLOR: September 11th has underlined the dilemma that always faces intelligence agencies in liberal democracies. How to resolve the conflicting imperatives of human rights and beating the terrorists. JOHNSON: If we're saying the goal of the CIA is to make sure that folks behave themselves, that's not the mission of the Central Intelligence Agency, that's the mission of human rights watch. Let them do that. The mission of intelligence is understanding what the other people are thinking and finding out what they don't want you to know. HARBURY: If we allow the right wing to use the flag of the World Trade Centre to erase all of the civil rights and human rights advances that we have made since the 50s, or even since World War One with the Geneva Conventions, then we've already lost the war. Everything we think of as defining ourselves as Americans is gone. TAYLOR: The first combat fatality in America's new war against terrorism was a CIA agent - Mike Span. He died this week in the bloody chaos that erupted inside the fortress in Mazar-e-Sharif. To America Mike Span is now a hero. He laid down his life for the victims of September 11th. Today in Afghanistan the CIA is once again working with unsavouries - this time the Northern Alliance. The full role of the CIA inside the mud caked walls of the fortress is, as yet, unclear. Dave escaped, taking with him the knowledge of what really happened. If there's an inquiry and the CIA comes under scrutiny, will the present come to haunt the future once again. WARD: Maybe people will look back somewhat in the same way as they did in the 90s looking back into the 80s and say we didn't draw the lines in the right places, we should have been more concerned with the backgrounds of some of the people we used, some of the people we're recruiting today in Afghanistan for example. I hope not. I think that it would be bad for our officers today out there doing the job to have to worry about that, about history repeating itself. _________ www.bbc.co.uk panorama CREDITS Reporter Peter Taylor Film Camera Alex Hanson Sound Recordist Alex Sullivan VT Editor Boyd Nagle Dubbing Mixer Simon Price Graphic Design Julie Tritton Kaye Huddy Colourist Geoff Hockney Production Team Rebecca Maidens Ben Peachey Debbie Penait Amanda Vaughan-Barratt Film Research Stuart Robertson Pat Goudvis Production Manager Martha Estcourt Unit Manager Maria Ellis Assistant Producer Sarah Hann Film Editors Simon Thorne Andy Worboys Producer Sam Collyns Deputy Editor Andrew Bell Editor Mike Robinson 14 ______________________________________________________________________________________________________ Transcribed by 1-Stop Express Services, London W2 1JG Tel: 020 7724 7953 E-mail 1-stop@msn.com