Interviews with current and former US officials and others close to the investigation show that Rodriguez’s order was at odds with years of directives from CIA lawyers and the White House.
Rodriguez knew there would be political fallout for the decision, according to documents and interviews, so he sought a legal opinion in a way to gain needed legal cover to get the tapes destroyed, but not so much that anyone would stop him.
The destruction of the tapes wiped away the most graphic evidence of the CIA’s now-closed network of overseas prisons, where suspected terrorists were interrogated for information using some of the most aggressive tactics in US history.
Critics of that George W. Bush-era program point to the tapes’ destruction and say his administration was trying to cover its tracks, but the reality is more complex.
The decision by Rodriguez to leave the lawyers he had consulted off his cabled order to destroy the tapes was so unusual that a top CIA official noted it in an internal e-mail just days later. The omission is now an important part of the Justice Department’s 2 1/2-year investigation into whether destroying the tapes was a crime.
Prosecutors have focused on a little-used section of the 2002 Sarbanes-Oxley accounting law that makes it illegal to destroy documents, even if no court has ordered them kept and no investigator has asked for them.
Rodriguez, who wasn’t disciplined for what some former officials told prosecutors amounted to insubordination, is frequently back at CIA headquarters as a contractor.
The Associated Press has compiled an account of how the tapes were destroyed, a narrative that among other things underlines the challenges prosecutors face in bringing charges.
Most of the people interviewed spoke on condition of anonymity because of the continuing investigation. Some of the officials directly involved declined comment or were unavailable.
