‘We Could Have Done This the Right Way’

"I've kept my mouth shut about all this for seven years," Soufan says. But now, with the declassification of Justice memos and the public assertions by Cheney and others that "enhanced" techniques worked, Soufan feels compelled to speak out. "I was in the middle of this, and it's not true that these [aggressive] techniques were effective," he says. "We were able to get the information about Khalid Sheikh Mohammed in a couple of days. We didn't have to do any of this [torture]. We could have done this the right way."

Soufan's assertion was buttressed by Philip Zelikow, the former executive director of the 9/11 Commission, who last week called Soufan "one of the most impressive intelligence agents—from any agency" that the panel encountered. After joining the Bush administration in 2005, Zelikow argued against the enhanced-interrogation techniques. He wrote a memo questioning the legal justification for the methods—advice he says the White House ordered destroyed.

For their part, CIA officials dispute Soufan's argument that harsh methods weren't productive. They say that early on, Zubaydah stopped talking—and that after the FBI agents left the scene, the enhanced interrogations produced important information that led to the capture of Ramzi bin al-Shibh, a key 9/11 plotter.

The debate will only intensify in the weeks ahead. People who were not privy to the more gruesome aspects of this secret war now want to know what was done in America's name and how those decisions were made. Soufan's account and the torture memos released to date provide some answers. But they also raise just as many questions, especially about how the legal approval for enhanced interrogations came about. Now, with the Obama administration in office and Democrats controlling Congress, pressure is growing for a "truth commission" or, perhaps, even criminal prosecutions.

As Soufan tells the story, he challenged a CIA official at the scene about the agency's legal authority to do what it was doing. "We're the United States of America, and we don't do that kind of thing," he recalls shouting at one point. But the CIA official, whom Soufan refuses to name because the agent's identity is still classified, brushed aside Soufan's concerns. He told him in April 2002 that the aggressive techniques already had gotten approval from the "highest levels" in Washington, says Soufan. The official even waved a document in front of Soufan, saying the approvals "are coming from Gonzales," a reference to Alberto Gonzales, then the White House counsel and later the attorney general. (A lawyer for Gonzales declined to comment.)

What this document was—and what, exactly, it authorized—is unclear. Soufan notes that, at that point, there had not been any talk in his presence of waterboarding, the most extreme of the techniques. But, as he later told Justice Department investigators, Soufan considered the methods he witnessed to be "borderline torture." A CIA spokesman declined to comment on what Soufan may have been shown, but wrote in an e-mail to NEWSWEEK: "The Aug. 1, 2002, memo from the Department of Justice wasn't the first piece of legal guidance for the [interrogation] program." "There are still gaping holes in the record," says Jameel Jaffer, the American Civil Liberties Union lawyer who spearheaded the Freedom of Information Act lawsuit that forced the disclosure of the Justice memos. The ACLU is now suing for further disclosures.