It was 11pm, in the chill of January, but Daniel Jones needed a run around the Capitol.


During the winter of early 2014 Jones’s only chance for serenity was these late hours. The CIA was demanding his boss, Senate intelligence committee chairwoman Dianne Feinstein, fire him. Feinstein’s Republican colleagues, once supportive of Jones, were demanding he testify.
Testimony was treacherous. Sheldon Whitehouse, a Rhode Island senator and former federal prosecutor, warned Jones that asserting his rights against self-incrimination or seeking a lawyer’s counsel could give committee Republicans a political lever against his highly controversial work. The CIA would soon formally insist that the US justice department actually prosecute Jones, the Senate staffer who had devoted over six years of his life to investigating the CIA’s infamous post-9/11 torture program.
Jones, a former FBI counter-terrorism analyst, wanted to testify. The CIA had pushed him past the point where he could back down. Its lies, documented in a 6,700-page secret report which Jones was constantly rewriting that winter, were compounding: to Congress, to Barack Obama, to George W Bush, to the press, to the public. The lies were not random misstatements. They were directional, in the service of covering up the brutality of what it did to at least 119 terrorist suspects – some clearly innocent – it held in a global network of secret prisons. Jones was on the verge of exposing the coverup. As he saw it, the personalized intensity of the CIA’s attacks on him, and the unprecedented steps they were taking, validated the account he had compiled after combing through over 6m classified CIA documents.


Jones put his Bose earbuds in, cued up a Tragically Hip record, and ran.
It couldn’t be that long of a lap, just enough to clear his head and work the frustrations out. Jones would need to be back in the Senate intelligence committee’s secured, classified offices very soon. Each day brought a new calculation: it might be the last that the committee had access to its own classified report. The CIA had gone “into war mode” with its congressional overseers, Jones told the Guardian. There was no choice but to work deeply into the night, leaving Capitol Hill at 3 or 4 in the morning, with breaks only for a run, and then back to work by 8 or 9 to repeat the cycle.
Less than a year had passed since the CIA had communicated to the Senate that its exhaustive torture report, drawn from millions of the agency’s own documents, was significantly incorrect. Less than a year had passed since Jones, unbeknownst to the CIA, had locked in a committee safe crucial portions of one such record, called the Panetta Review, in which the CIA had come to the same conclusions about torture as Jones had. But now the agency was letting the committee know it was not playing around – and that it was coming for Jones himself.
From August to September 2013 Jones had more than a dozen meetings with agency officials lasting 60 hours to attempt to reconcile their objections with findings in his 6,700-page classified report. It got to the point where Jones would take a whiteboard with him. That way, he could sketch out the timelines he found in CIA cables for when the agency learned specific aspects of its terrorism intelligence. He attempted to demonstrate contradictions from what the CIA said publicly – and how the claimed basis for those CIA statements occurred before this-or-that torture session the agency said was the genesis of the information.
“It should be noted that at no point in those discussions did [Senate] staff ask CIA to reconcile the CIA June 2013 response to the Panetta Review,” said CIA spokesman Ryan Trapani. “In fact, at no time in those discussions did [committee] staff indicate that they had a copy of the Panetta Review.”


In September 2013, Jones told Feinstein that continuing such fact-free discussions was pointless. Feinstein was concerned Jones was too close to the report to be objective, but she backed his decision. With the report stuck in limbo, she gave him a new challenge: redo the report, incorporating aspects of the CIA’s response, and putting what they found to be wrong about that response in the footnotes.
“Basically, her thing was: make them own their response,” Jones said. The effect was to expand a 250-page executive summary to over 500 pages, “doubling the amount of information”, all as the CIA continued to object. The agency and the committee were arraying for battle.
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Just before Thanksgiving, Feinstein formally wrote to CIA director John Brennan requesting the entire 1,000-plus page Panetta Review. Jones had not taken the full document back from the satellite location, only the sections necessary to show busy senators that the agency concluded it had misled its political masters about the futility of its torture. The CIA said it would not provide it. This time, it would be Feinstein’s allies on the committee who escalated.
On 17 December, the CIA sent its choice for its next top attorney, Caroline Krass, to the committee for a nomination hearing. Shortly before the hearing, a CIA attorney, Darrin Hostetler, met with Jones in private, once again sparring over the agency’s response. Once again, Jones reminded Hostetler that the Panetta Review supported his conclusions. “I’m done talking to you, Dan,” Hostetler said, ending the meeting. An agency official who worked with Jones at the satellite location apologized to Jones for Hostetler’s behavior.
During the hearing, Mark Udall, a Colorado Democrat, lit into Krass. Unexpectedly, Udall mentioned the existence of the Panetta Review in public for the first time, demanding the disclosure of the document. Among the reasons for Udall’s fervor: in August 2013, after the CIA had condemned the committee report in contradiction of the Panetta Review, its former chief lawyer Stephen Preston told Udall in writing that the agency provided the committee with “inaccurate information related to aspects of the [torture] program” – a major point the CIA was now disputing.



Jones was visible on the staff dias behind Udall. Hostetler walked out of the hearing.
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“Then things totally went to hell,” Jones said.
Unbeknownst to Jones, Udall or Feinstein, the public reference to the Panetta Review so alarmed the CIA as to prompt a milestone event in its history. Since 2009, the CIA had maintained a firewalled network on which the Senate could view internal documents relevant to its torture inquiry. It was known as RDINet, for “rendition, detention and interrogation.” By mutual agreement, the CIA was not supposed to access the Senate’s side of the network for any reason aside from picayune IT help. But at least five agency officials would surreptitiously transgress the network firewalls, view the Senate investigators’ work, and reconstruct Jones’s emails. Their rationale, established in a subsequent internal investigation, was to determine if the Senate deliberately exploited an evident flaw in the architecture of the network to digitally acquire the Panetta Review – which they did not want the Senate to have.
It was an extreme step. After Congress overhauled the CIA in the 1970s, the agency was not supposed to spy on Americans domestically except in extremely circumscribed circumstances. Now it was turning its spywork onto the elected officials tasked with overseeing it.


“Every officer is clearly, I would say rigorously, trained that CIA is a foreign intelligence service. We have a legal mandate to conduct intelligence operations on non-American entities ... It’s very clear, the distinction, and then elaborate, the working out of what may and may not be done,” said Glenn Carle, a retired CIA officer.
Carle continued: “For the agency to penetrate a firewalled network used by the United States Senate is flat criminal activity. There’s no discussion about it. I’m literally laughing. You can’t rationalize that.”
Oregon Democratic senator Ron Wyden flatly called it “spying on our staff”. The CIA vigorously disputes that characterization. CIA director Brennan, whom Carle praises as an “honorable guy”, was informed about the firewall breach almost as soon as the agency began its fateful operations.
Beginning on 9 January 2014, agency officials created a “dummy account” that looked to the network like it came from Jones’s team, something beyond the limits of the 2009 agreements between the committee and the CIA about network access. They logged in, searched for the Panetta Review on the Senate side of the network and found it. The next day, they searched their own side to determine if they had the Panetta Review. They didn’t find it, presumed they might have been hacked, and set to find out what happened. They took screenshots of what they found. Yet never once did they discuss their findings with Jones, whose technical ineptitude might have disabused them of the theory that he had either deliberately hacked a classified network or been savvy enough to exploit a vulnerability.


CIA headquarters at Langley
9 January 2014

CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia.
According to a subsequent inspector-general report, an unnamed CIA official – whom Vice News’s Jason Leopold has reported is Hostetler – got the agency’s Counterintelligence Center involved on 9 January by saying there was a “forthcoming D/CIA tasking”, a reference to Brennan. The unnamed official said Brennan wanted a report by “that afternoon” into Senate use of the network, stretching from 1 March 2009 to 31 December 2013. The CIA inspector general, David Buckley, would later find that “conflicting information” prevented him from determining “whether any of D/CIA Brennan’s senior staff, much less the DCI himself, approved any of the taskings.” But an agency attorney, unusually, gave an operational order.
Brennan learned at least the outline of what would become the breach on 9 January, the very first day it was conceived. The director would later say he knew then of some review, but did not specifically recall if anyone briefing him explained how they knew the location of, among other documents, the Panetta Review. Brennan discussed the issue with CIA personnel over the next two days, and tasked them to “use whatever means necessary” to find out how it was that the documents appeared on the Senate side of the firewall. Brennan said he only asked “are we sure” the documents were genuine CIA material and that he desired a better understanding of how RDINet worked.


While Brennan would later say he denied directing anyone at the CIA to examine the Senate’s use of the system, the technical staff, examined and passed around screenshots of what was on the Senate network drives. By 11 January – a Saturday – the CIA official Vice identified as Hostetler spoke with Brennan and learned Brennan had discussed the issue with Denis McDonough, the White House chief of staff and a powerful ally. The official would later say he believed himself authorized by Brennan “to gather the necessary agency personnel and components who would normally be involved in such an effort”.
Hostetler, through a representative, declined to speak with the Guardian. Nor did the White House make McDonough available for an interview. But an official said: “Neither Denis McDonough nor anyone else at the White House was notified of the searches before they began. As such, and to be sure, the White House did not authorize them.”
On Monday, 13 January, a meeting gathered, chaired by the third-highest ranking official at CIA, Meroe Park, and attended by Counterintelligence Center personnel. Their concern was determining if there was an “innocent” or nefarious explanation for the Senate’s acquisition of the Panetta Review, something Brennan would need to know. The meeting heard how it would be possible to perform an operation to find out, one that would involve intrusive digital forensics on their Senate overseers. An attendee would later say no one in attendance objected.


From a report released by the CIA inspector general in July 2014

From a report released by the CIA inspector general in July 2014



Photograph: Guardian

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Brennan learned of this discussion the next day, 14 January. Multiple official accounts have Brennan essentially alarmed to hear that senior counterintelligence officials were involved in what could easily be understood as spying on the Senate. Brennan indicated a concern that the optics of the situation were perilous for the CIA. He ordered the work stopped – what he would tell the inspector general was a “stand down” order. The official Vice reported is Hostetler characterized it merely as a “pause”.
On 15 January 2014, Brennan called an emergency discussion with Feinstein and top committee Republican Saxby Chambliss. They met in a secured room on the Hill. Brennan had brought the acting top CIA lawyer, Robert Eatinger, whom Jones had discovered had provided legal advice to the agency’s Counterterrorist Center, which was deeply involved in the torture. If Brennan was worried, he did not convey that to the senators.
Brennan read a statement. He revealed that the agency had conducted a “search” of the computer network it had set up for the Senate – unlike every previous investigation at the agency, the CIA had demanded it only produce documentation on torture at a facility it controlled – and discovered that the Senate investigators had inappropriate access to the Panetta Review. The staffers, he said, had to be “disciplined”. A CIA network, Brennan was implying, had been compromised. (The CIA would not comment on this meeting, but pointed to a 27 January letter from Brennan to Feinstein to characterize it.)
Jones understood Brennan’s statement to be a demand for the senators to fire him. Brennan didn’t use his name, but Jones was the chief investigator, the one constantly and most consistently working at the CIA facility. On multiple levels, Jones was shocked. Not only was the director of the CIA telling his legislative overseers that their choice to conduct oversight was unacceptable, he was revealing that the network operated in a manner that the Senate thought “was impossible”, with the CIA able to access the Senate’s investigative work.
Even more startling: although someone at the CIA in 2010 had placed the Panetta Review on the Senate side of the network, Brennan was suggesting that Jones was a master hacker, able to force his way into the CIA’s classified files. In truth, Jones was barely tech-literate: “I am really good at Microsoft Word. That’s it.”
But Brennan wasn’t describing the basis for believing his claims. Instead, he told Chambliss and Feinstein the search would not be the CIA’s last. To protect the security of an agency network, Brennan said, the agency would need to conduct more searches, ostensibly to find whatever vulnerability he implied Jones had exploited, and proposed a joint search with Senate assistance.


CIA director John Brennan

CIA director John Brennan



Photograph: Mandel Ngan/AFP/Getty Images
Feinstein, in a letter sent two days later, refused. She requested that Brennan not conduct the searches, offering to suspend staff access to the network, and reminded him of the “separation of powers issues” at stake in the CIA taking such an aggressive step against the Senate.
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But despite both Feinstein’s refusal and Brennan’s “stand down” order, the CIA continued looking deeper into the Senate’s use of the network.
On 16 January, according to CIA documents acquired through the Freedom of Information Act by Vice News’s Leopold, the agency called upon a digital unit called the Cyber Blue Team, which hunts for vulnerabilities in agency networks. The next day – the day Feinstein put her refusal to join an inquiry into her staff in writing to Brennan – Cyber Blue Team reviewed “forensically reconstructed emails” between Senate staffers only accessible on their side of RDINet. The team prepared a report that same day assessing the Senate use of the network, delivering it to “senior agency leadership” on 21 January.
Jones had been able to convince Senate Republicans naturally inclined to believe the CIA that his meager tech skills undermined Brennan’s accusation. But that could hardly win them over in what they were seeing as a battle between the CIA and Senate Democrats. Combative, Jones was prepared to testify about the episode. But while he had no family and little to lose, several of his colleagues on the investigative staff had spouses, children and career ambitions. They would be the casualties of escalation. He opted against testimony. The option would ultimately be overtaken by events.
The CIA’s move against the Senate committee quickly showed signs of backfiring. In late January, Buckley, the CIA’s inspector general, confronted Brennan about the on-network searches of the Senate investigators. He told Brennan that he needed to open an investigation – and Brennan responded by ordering Buckley to investigate. But Buckley went further than Brennan apparently calculated, and referred the matter to the US justice department. Suddenly, the CIA was back in a position its leaders thought it had escaped – in the crosshairs of potential prosecution.
Buckley – who declined comment to the Guardian – told the committee of his referral on 4 February, only a week after he started examine the breach. It leaked to the New York Times on 4 March.
Agency attorney Eatinger launched what the CIA considered a response necessitated by a theft concern and the committee considered a counter-gambit. On 7 February, the senior lawyer made his own criminal referral to the justice department: this one on Jones, ostensibly for improper network access. Eatinger had a conflict: Jones’s narrative referred to his role in the torture program 1,600 times. It took mere weeks for an account of Senate staff taking the Panetta Review from the CIA offsite location to leak to reporters. To Jones, the whole thing validated the apocryphal credo of spywork: deny everything, admit nothing, make counter-accusations.
Everything had escalated past the point of no return. Jones had finished his edits and rewrites to the committee report. It awaited a Senate vote on declassification. But now all of that was overshadowed by a fight with the CIA that had moved into the realm of back and forth criminal accusation.
Jones thought the accusation was self-evidently absurd, enough to discredit the agency as engaged in bald-faced retaliation and wounding itself politically. “I was wrong about that. It was actually pretty astute of them,” he recollected.
Efforts at de-escalation failed. In mid-January, within days of the network search, Brennan briefed the Senate majority leader, Democrat Harry Reid of Nevada. Reid, who is close to Feinstein, told him that in the interests of avoiding a crisis, Brennan ought to apologize. Brennan flatly refused, insisting the agency had nothing to apologize for.


Senator Harry Reid

Senator Harry Reid



Photograph: J Scott Applewhite/AP
The White House counsel, Kathryn Ruemmler, attempted to contain the damage. Ruemmler came to the Hill that winter, in a series of meetings with both the full committee and its leadership, to take the temperature of Senate-CIA relations down from their white-hot level. According to participants in those meetings, if Brennan was unyielding, Ruemmler was balanced. Feinstein brought up the 2010 document disappearance as a prologue for the current imbroglio. Ruemmler told her she had a valid point.
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Reid, a pivotal ally for the White House on Capitol Hill, did not want to be backed into a corner. After the criminal referral, Reid spoke to McDonough and conveyed that if Brennan was unwilling to apologize, he was not willing to defend Brennan should the episode become public. McDonough was noncommittal. A week later, Reid received a phone call from Barack Obama.
To Reid’s surprise, the president defended the CIA’s actions. Obama rattled off the CIA’s side of the story: the Senate staff had taken CIA documents and the agency had no choice but to handle the matter as it did.
“Mr President,” Reid said, “I wish you could hear yourself.”
According to a former senior Senate aide, the episode stiffened Reid’s inclination to defend Feinstein to the hilt. In early March, Reid contacted Feinstein, who was considering exposing the episode, and assured her of his full support in the battle to come. “We gave them ample opportunity” to settle the issue, he told her.
On 11 March, Jones got word that Feinstein was going to say something on the Senate floor. He had written her a speech detailing the origins and developments of the oversight battle with Langley, but he didn’t know if Feinstein would actually deliver it. Feinstein got along well with Brennan on other matters, and taking on Brennan carried the risk of taking on Obama, the president Brennan had cultivated since Obama’s first campaign.
Instead, Feinstein laid into the CIA with an intensity unseen since the 1970s Church Committee, where legislators described an unbridled agency that spied on Americans as eagerly as they spied on foreign adversaries. The agency searches “may have undermined the constitutional framework essential to effective congressional oversight of intelligence activities or any other government function,” Feinstein charged.