If the CIA has them, they are buried in a vault so low, not even Panetta would be allowed to access it.

My guess is that they are destroyed, like the tapes. Destruction of records pertaining to CIA operations is nothing new. The classic case study of this would be the MKULTRA files. The following is from a memo by Members of the [President Clinton’s] Advisory Committee on Human Radiation Experiments to Advisory Committee Staff (6/27/94):

MKULTRA was the subject of extensive internal, congressional, and outside investigations in the 1970s. In 1973, the CIA purposefully destroyed most of the MKULTRA files concerning its research and testing on human behavior. In 1977, the agency uncovered additional MKULTRA files in the budget and fiscal records that were not indexed under the name MKULTRA. These documents detailed over 150 subprojects that the CIA funded in this area, but no evidence was uncovered at that time concerning the use of radiation….

Most of the MKULTRA records were deliberately destroyed in 1973 by the order of then DCI Richard Helms, who waived the internal CIA regulation (CSI-7O-l0) governing retirement of inactive records.4 {4 Helms testified that he agreed to destroy the records because “there had been relationships with outsiders in government agencies and other organizations and that these would be sensitive in this kind of a thing but that since the program was over and finished and done with, we thought we would just get rid of files as well, so that anybody who assisted us in the past would not be subject to follow-up questions, embarrassment, if you will.” Church Committee, Book I, at 404.} The Church Committee found some records, but also noted that the practice of MKULTRA at the time was “to maintain no records of the planning and approval of test programs.” Church Committee, Book I, at 406. MKULTRA itself was technically closed out in 1964, but some of its work was transferred to the Office of Research and Development (ORD) within the DS&T under the name MKSEARCH and continued into the l97Os.5 {5 John Marks, in The Search for the “Manchurian Candidate” cited one ORD project that involved bombarding “bacteria with ultraviolet radiation in order to create deviant strains.”}

In other words, the MKULTRA program would have gone unknown and unnoticed, if some of the files hadn’t escaped destruction because of a quirk of the filing system. Note, too, that the “the practice of MKULTRA at the time was ‘to maintain no records of the planning and approval of test programs.’” It is reasonable to assume that the same SOP pertains in the case of the torture program.

At a 1977 hearing before the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, Senator Kennedy noted of the destruction of the MKULTRA documents:

Perhaps most disturbing of all was the fact that the extent of experimentation on human subjects was unknown. The records of all these activities were destroyed in January 1973, at the instruction of then CIA Director Richard Helms. In spite of persistent inquiries by both the Health Subcommittee and the Intelligence Committee, no additional records or information were forthcoming. And no one — no single individual — could be found who remembered the details, not the Director of the CIA, who ordered the documents destroyed, not the official responsible for the program, nor any of his associates.

Note that, even when there was clear evidence — and Helms would testify under oath regarding this — that the Director of the CIA himself had destroyed documents, nothing was really done about it. Now, that was over 30 years ago, and this is a different time… or is it?

For those interested in the history of this subject, there was a NY Times article in Sept. 1977 that told a slightly different story, placing responsibility of the destruction of the MKULTRA files on Dr. Sidney Gottlieb, the head of Technical Services Division, CIA (quoted from blog post by Michael Otterman):

Dr. Gottlieb said he had destroyed the files on his own initiative and not, as was previously reported, under orders from Richard Helms, then Director of Central Intelligence. Mr. Helms testified under oath in 1975 that he never ordered the destruction of the drug records.

A document that came to light in today’s hearing indicated that Dr. Gottlieb’s deputy had attempted to stop the destruction of these files. Asked about this, Dr. Gottlieb replied, “I can’t recall”.

This wasn’t the first time that Helms was implicated in the destruction of relevant documents. A similar thing happened over the scandal of CIA domestic spying on antiwar activists. This is from an interview Helms did with David Frost in 1978 (as posted in “adapted” form at the CIA’s website):

Do you agree with the Rockefeller Commission’s view that you exercised poor judgment in January of ‘73 by destroying documents that might have contained evidence?

Tapes-not documents-were destroyed. No, I don’t agree.

One recorder was attached to my telephone and the other could be used to record conversations in my office. Neither, may I say, was activated by sound; both required the pushing of a button.

These tapes contained material having to do with foreign policy and US intelligence; they would have been damaging to our foreign policy, if they had gotten into the public domain. I thought that then, I think so now.

Not taken seriously. It was the springboard for me to kind of relook up this material, and then I just put it out there b/c I think it’s relevant.

But here is one serious thought (not heavy, but serious): I don’t think it makes sense to divide our characterization of the CIA into either criminal or incompetent. It’s both of these, some of the time, i.e., not all of the time. The criminality stems from its service to a hegemonic foreign policy and the fact they have been allowed to operate in secret, bringing out all the worst traits in human nature, and anathema to good organizational standards.

The latter is one major reason they are often inept: responsibility is not delegated, and accountability isn’t structured as in a normal institution (operating under decent organizational norms). As a result, corruption in all its sundry forms has crept in over the decades, culminating in the CIA contractors fiasco. We have yet, as this scandal unfolds, to touch upon the smarmy and violent milieu out of which Mitchell and Jessen arose.

The final problem is structural, as the CIA has two primary tasks: intelligence analysis and covert operations. The two are not compatible, and the former has suffered at the hands of the latter over the years, especially financially. To some degree, the same problems have infected other U.S. intelligence agencies, although I really only have the NSA in mind as I type this.

So, the CIA is neither criminal or inept. But it has engaged in multiple, terrible crimes, and has shown tremendous incompetence on numerous occasions. We must go after each, respectively. I do think, though, that the CIA is an organizational nightmare, and that its secret function, in particular covert action, is incompatible with an open society or a democracy.