New C.I.A. Deputy Director, Gina Haspel, Had Leading Role in Torture

As a clandestine officer at the Central Intelligence Agency in 2002, Gina Haspel oversaw the torture of two terrorism suspects and later took part in an order to destroy videotapes documenting their brutal interrogations at a secret prison in Thailand.

.. On Thursday, Ms. Haspel was named the deputy director of the C.I.A.

.. the C.I.A. was a rare public signal of how, under the Trump administration, the agency is being led by officials who appear to take a far kinder view of one of its darker chapters than their immediate predecessors.

.. But President Trump has said repeatedly that he thinks torture works. And the new C.I.A. chief, Mike Pompeo, has said that waterboarding and other techniques do not even constitute torture, and praised as “patriots” those who used such methods in the early days of the fight against Al Qaeda.

.. The C.I.A.’s first overseas detention site was in Thailand. It was run by Ms. Haspel, who oversaw the brutal interrogations of two detainees, Abu Zubaydah and Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri.

.. Mr. Zubaydah alone was waterboarded 83 times in a single month, had his head repeatedly slammed into walls and endured other harsh methods before interrogators decided he had no useful information to provide.

.. The sessions were videotaped and the recordings stored in a safe at the C.I.A. station in Thailand until 2005, when they were ordered destroyed. By then, Ms. Haspel was serving at C.I.A. headquarters, and it was her name that was on the cable carrying the destruction orders.

.. The list notably included prominent Obama administration officials, such as James R. Clapper Jr., the former director of national intelligence (“very pleased”), and Michael J. Morell, who twice served as the C.I.A.’s acting director (“I applaud the appointment”).

.. Mr. Pompeo’s decision to elevate Ms. Haspel is also likely to be seen by the C.I.A.’s rank-and-file as a vote of confidence in their work from their new director, despite Mr. Trump’s dismissal of the intelligence community throughout his campaign and in the months between his election and inauguration.

.. The open disdain with which Mr. Trump mocked the C.I.A., especially after intelligence agencies said they believed that Russia had tried to swing the election in his favor, had raised concerns at the agency of a repeat of the unhappy tenure of a former director, Porter J. Goss.