Alfreda Frances Bikowsky

Alfreda Frances Bikowsky (born 1965) is a career Central Intelligence Agency officer who has headed the Bin Laden Issue Station and the Global Jihad unit. Bikowsky's identity is not publicly acknowledged by the Agency, but was deduced by independent investigative journalists in 2011.[1] In January 2014, the Washington Post named her and tied her to a pre-9/11 intelligence failure and the extraordinary rendition of Khalid El-Masri.[2] The Senate Intelligence Committee report on CIA torture, released in December 2014, showed that Bikowsky was not only a key part of the torture program, but also one of its chief apologists, resulting in the media giving her the moniker "The Unidentified Queen Of Torture".[3][4][5]

Regardless of the fact that Bikowsky was publicly named by many media outlets in connection to illegal torture programs carried out against large numbers of innocent foreign civilians, for reasons unknown the cia ordered various news agencies (including NBC and The New Yorker) to refrain from publishing her name in the senate torture report released in December 2014. A low level employee, ryan trapani, was quoted as saying that "We would strongly object to attaching anyone’s name given the current environment," and left a voicemail with The Intercept saying “There are crazy people in this world and we are trying to mitigate those threats," while refusing to offer a response pertaining to the negative revelations of Bikowsky in the senate torture report, instead attempting to appropriate some measure of value to the attempt by john brennan to characterize the portrayal of the "value" of the agency's illegal torture program in the torture report as disputable and erroneous after it was described as "misrepresented".[5]

Bikowsky married her former boss Michael Scheuer in December 2014.[6]

CIA career

Bikowsky started her CIA career in the 1990s as a Soviet analyst.[7][8](p273) She was brought into the Bin Laden Issue Station when it was created in 1996 by its first Chief, Michael Scheuer.[8](p35) Sometime after the USS Cole bombing in October 2000, she was promoted to Deputy Chief of the Bin Laden Issue Station.[9] By March 2003, she had been appointed Chief of the station.[8](p273) The station was closed in late 2005.[10]

Ken Silverstein reported that Bikowsky was a top candidate to be CIA Deputy Chief of Station in Baghdad in 2007.[11] However, a CIA spokesman later wrote to Silverstein to say Bikowsky was not considered for the position and to dispute the characterization of her in the post.[12]

In 2008, Jane Mayer reported that Bikowsky held "a top post handling sensitive matters in the Middle East."[13] It was reported in 2011 that Bikowsky had been promoted to the head of the CIA's Global Jihad unit.[14] She is a top CIA official, equivalent of a general in the military.[3]

According to the Senate Intelligence Committee report on CIA torture, Bikowsky was at the center of the CIA's effort to justify its use of "enhanced interrogation" techniques. She testified to the Senate Intelligence Committee in February 2007 that enhanced interrogation saved at least hundreds of American lives. The report lists three other claims Bikowsky made in that hearing and claims they are all inaccurate.[15] Bikowsky's pseudonym was redacted at least three dozen times in the report.[3]

Blocking intelligence sharing before September 11, 2001

Bikowsky was a senior staff member at the Bin Laden Issue Station in January 2000.[16] She was the direct supervisor of Michael Anne Casey, a woman CIA staff operations officer who was assigned to track future 9/11 hijacker Khalid al-Mihdhar at an al-Qaeda operatives' meeting in Malaysia in early January 2000.[9] Casey blocked a draft cable written by Doug Miller, a FBI agent detailed to the Bin Laden Issue Station, to the FBI warning that al-Mihdhar had a multiple-entry visa for travel to the U.S.[17][18](p240) Mark Rossini, another FBI agent first assigned to the Bin Laden Issue Station in 1999,[18](p233) testified that Casey also verbally ordered him to not share information with FBI headquarters about al-Mihdhar or Nawaf al-Hazmi, who was traveling with al-Mihdhar.[1][19] Rossini further stated that Bikowsky told congressional investigators in 2002 that she hand-delivered al-Mihdhar's visa information to FBI headquarters. This was later proven false by FBI log books.[1] The CIA shared some details about al-Mihdhar with the FBI at that time, but not that he had a valid visa to enter the U.S.[18](pp244–7)

Rendition of Maher Arar

Former CIA officer John Kiriakou was interviewed about the arrest and extraordinary rendition of Canadian citizen Maher Arar, which occurred in September 2002 at John F. Kennedy International Airport. Kiriakou said a senior woman CIA counter-terrorism officer ordered the rendition over the objections of her subordinates. Arar was sent to Syria where he was tortured and held for almost one year. In reference to the episode, he referred to the film Zero Dark Thirty.[20]

Interrogation of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed

Bikowsky has been identified as "the redheaded former Soviet analyst who had been in the Bin Laden Unit during Michael Scheuer's supervision"[8](p273) in Jane Mayer's book, The Dark Side.[9] After Khalid Sheikh Mohammed was captured in March 2003, Mayer writes of Bikowsky:

Despite the CIA's insistence on the professionalism of its interrogation program, according to two well-informed Agency sources, one particularly overzealous female officer had to be reprimanded for her role. After Mohammed was captured, the woman, who headed the Al Qaeda unit in the CTC, was so excited she flew at government expense to the black site where Mohammed was held so that she could personally watch him being waterboarded. ... Coworkers said she had no legitimate reason to be present during Mohammed's interrogation. She was not an interrogator. "She thought it would be cool to be in the room," a former colleague said. (p. 273)[8]

The Senate torture report claims Bikowsky participated in the interrogation and that claims she made about the results were "almost entirely inaccurate."[3]

Rendition of Khalid El-Masri

In late January 2004, Bikowsky, as head of the Bin Laden Issue Station, made the decision extraordinarily render Khalid El-Masri to Afghanistan for four months without any evidence in hand.[7][8](pp282–3)[14] El-Masri's name was a different transliteration of Khalid al-Masri, the name of a person who had supposedly met Ramzi bin al-Shibh and Marwan al-Shehhi on a train in Germany.[7][21] Even after El-Masri's passport was checked and his identity as a different person was confirmed in March, Bikowsky still wanted him held in detention in Afghanistan.[8](pp284–5) El-Masri was eventually released in late May.[7] The CIA Inspector General determined that there was no legal justification for rendering El-Masri.[14] Bikowsky received no reprimand for the incident, because then-CIA Director Michael Hayden said he didn't want to deter the initiative of counter-terrorism employees.[14]

In 2015, the European Center for Constitutional and Human Rights, a German non-profit human rights organization, filed a criminal complaint in Germany asking for a federal criminal investigation of Bikowsky for the rendition and torture of El-Masri. Germany's Code of Crimes against International Law does not require the accused to be in Germany or the crime to have been committed there. The complaint cited the U.S. Senate Intelligence Committee report on torture as proof of Bikowsky's involvement.[22]

Who is Rich Blee?

In 2011, independent journalists Ray Nowosielski and John Duffy planned to release an audio documentary entitled Who is Rich Blee? The documentary focused on the CIA's Bin Laden Issue Station before 9/11 and how certain CIA officials blocked information on future 9/11 hijackers from reaching the FBI. They planned to be the first to reveal the identity of two CIA agents, including Bikowsky, who had previously only been identified as "Frances" in an AP news story from 2011 or as a red-headed CIA agent in Jane Mayer's The Dark Side.[8][14] However, after receiving threats of prosecution under the Intelligence Identities Protection Act from the CIA, Duffy and Nowosielski decided to release the documentary with the names redacted.[16] They claim that their webmaster later posted an email containing the identities by accident. The identities then spread to the wider Internet.[1][23][24]

Representation In Film: Zero Dark Thirty

Bikowsky's career and personality were the main models for the character "Maya" in the film Zero Dark Thirty, although Maya is a composite character of several women involved in finding Osama Bin Laden.[4][25] The film aroused controversy for its depiction of the use of torture to elicit information from terrorist suspects.[26]

See also

References

  1. 1 2 3 4 O'Connor, Rory; Nowosielski, Ray (October 14, 2011). "Insiders voice doubts about CIA's 9/11 Story". Salon. Archived from the original on March 11, 2014. Retrieved February 3, 2016.
  2. ↑ Miller, Greg; Goldman, Adam (January 12, 2014). "A hard-edged defender of spy agencies". Washington Post. Retrieved August 13, 2014.
  3. 1 2 3 4 Cole, Matthew (December 16, 2014). "Bin Laden Expert Accused of Shaping CIA Deception on 'Torture' Program". NBC News. Retrieved February 2, 2016.
  4. 1 2 Mayer, Jane (December 18, 2014). "The Unidentified Queen of Torture". New Yorker. Retrieved December 18, 2014.
  5. 1 2 Greenwald, Glenn; Maass, Peter (December 19, 2014). "Meet Alfreda Bikowsky, the Senior Officer at the Center of the CIA's Torture Scandals". The Intercept. Retrieved June 25, 2015.
  6. ↑ Roston, Aram (January 26, 2016). "CIA's "Queen Of Torture" Married To Former CIA Official Who Urges War Between Sunnis And Shiites". BuzzFeed News. Retrieved February 2, 2016.
  7. 1 2 3 4 Priest, Dana (December 4, 2005). "Wrongful Imprisonment: Anatomy of a CIA Mistake". Washington Post. Retrieved July 2, 2013.
  8. 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 Mayer, Jane (2008). The Dark Side. New York: Anchor Books. ISBN 978-0307456298.
  9. 1 2 3 Nowosielski, Ray; Duffy, John (September 20, 2011). "Secrecy Kills - Press". secrecykills.com. Archived from the original on November 27, 2011.
  10. ↑ Mazzetti, Mark (July 4, 2006). "C.I.A. Closes Unit Focused on Capture of bin Laden". New York Times. Retrieved July 30, 2013.
  11. ↑ Silverstein, Ken (23 March 2007). "Next Stop, Baghdad Station". Harper's. Archived from the original on 10 September 2011.
  12. ↑ Silverstein, Ken (16 April 2007). "Missed Appointments: The CIA Responds". Harper's. Archived from the original on 12 October 2011.
  13. ↑ Mayer, Jane (15 July 2008). "The Battle for a Country's Soul". New York Review of Books. Retrieved 9 July 2013.
  14. 1 2 3 4 5 Goldman, Adam; Apuzzo, Matt (February 9, 2011). "CIA officers make grave mistakes, get promoted". NBCNews.com. Associated Press. Retrieved July 2, 2013.
  15. ↑ Bruck, Connie (22 June 2015). "The Inside War". The New Yorker. Retrieved 19 October 2015.
  16. 1 2 Nowosielski, Ray; Duffy, John (September 20, 2011). "Secrecy Kills - Transcript". secrecykills.com. Archived from the original on November 26, 2011.
  17. ↑ 9/11 Commission (July 22, 2004). "The 9/11 Commission Report, Notes" (PDF). p. 502, note 44.
  18. 1 2 3 "A Review of the FBI's Handling of Intelligence Information Related to the September 11 Attacks" (PDF). Office of Inspector General. U.S. Department of Justice. November 2004. Retrieved July 10, 2013. Michael Anne Casey is "Michelle", Doug Miller is "Dwight", and Mark Rossini is "Malcolm".
  19. ↑ Bamford, James; Willis, Scott (February 3, 2009). "The Spy Factory". PBS. Retrieved July 2, 2013.
  20. ↑ Panetta, Alexander (April 5, 2015). "CIA agents tried to stop arrest and torture of Canadian Maher Arar, former spy says". National Post. Canadian Press. Retrieved April 8, 2015.
  21. ↑ 9/11 Commission (July 22, 2004). "The 9/11 Commission Report, Chapter 5" (PDF). p. 165.
  22. ↑ Braw, Elisabeth (October 19, 2015). "German human rights group files suit against CIA 'Queen of Torture'". ALJAZEERA America. Retrieved February 2, 2016.
  23. ↑ Edmonds, Sibel (21 September 2011). "BFP Breaking News: Confirmed Identity of the CIA Official behind 9/11, Rendition & Torture Cases is Revealed". Boiling Frogs Post. Retrieved 1 June 2015.
  24. ↑ Cook, John (22 September 2011). "Chief of CIA's 'Global Jihad Unit' Revealed Online". Gawker. Archived from the original on 11 June 2015. Retrieved 1 June 2015.
  25. ↑ Hill, Logan (January 11, 2013). "Secrets of 'Zero Dark Thirty'". Rolling Stone. Retrieved April 7, 2015.
  26. ↑ Mayer, Jane (December 14, 2012). "Zero Conscience in "Zero Dark Thirty"". The New Yorker. Retrieved April 7, 2015.

External links

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