‘I don’t regret it’: ex-CIA agent who inspired Zero Dark Thirty defends waterboarding
In the 2012 Hollywood hit Zero Dark Thirty, a red-haired Central Intelligence Agency analyst played by Jessica Chastain travels to a secret CIA prison and watches a colleague waterboard a screaming al-Qaida suspect, then lock him in a box a little bigger than a mini-fridge, to make him talk.
In 2002, red-haired CIA analyst Alfreda Scheuer, then known by her maiden name Bikowsky, traveled to a secret CIA prison to watch the torture of al-Qaida suspect Abu Zubaydah, who was waterboarded and locked in a “dog box”, Senate investigators reported.
The CIA had granted the filmmakers unprecedented access to agency officials, and outlets from NBC News to the New Yorker reported that Chastain’s character was patterned partially on Scheuer, citing her position but omitting her name because the agency said her work was classified.
For two decades Scheuer was a central figure in some of the major controversies of America’s war on Islamist extremist groups, including secret detention centers and brutal interrogations. CIA operatives normally operate in a dark, shadowy world, but Scheuer’s experiences found the spotlight.
Scheuer retired from her most recent role as deputy chief of Homeland and Strategic Threats late in 2021 and agreed to talk to Reuters this year.
It’s the first interview she has ever done, she said, and she decided to speak to make clear she was not forced out of the agency but left on her own terms. By policy, the CIA doesn’t discuss individual employees or confirm whether they worked at the agency.
Over several calls that lasted two and half hours, Scheuer said she couldn’t discuss individual cases because they were classified. But in a broad sense, she said waterboarding cited in government reports was not torture, insisted such techniques can work and said any criticism of her was largely the result of her taking risks to combat terrorism.
Ex-CIA analyst Alfreda Scheuer is shown in a screenshot of her beauty and life coaching website YBeU beauty personal coaching. Photograph: YBEU/Reuters
“I got bloodied,” she said, alluding to criticism of her agency in government and media reports, “and kept coming back to try again and again to do something. I’m proud that I wasn’t on the sidelines. I didn’t bury my head in the sand.”
The New Yorker once dubbed Scheuer, again citing her position but omitting her name, as the “Queen of Torture,” writing that “she gleefully participated in torture sessions”.
Scheuer called the description, which found its way into multiple media reports, false and a caricature. She believes a male operative would not have been described the same way.
“I got that title because I was in the arena,” she said. “In fact, I raised my hand loud and proud and you know, I don’t regret it at all.”
A Senate investigation does not allege Scheuer personally tortured any suspects. She said her role was as a “subject matter expert”, not an interrogator.
“There is a very clear line between an interrogator and a debriefer,” she said. “A debriefer is a subject matter expert who asks questions.”
The CIA’s press secretary, Susan Miller, declined to comment about Scheuer, but said simply: “CIA’s use of enhanced interrogation techniques ended in 2007.”
Now out of the CIA, Scheuer’s career has taken a turn: She is a life coach, running a business called YBeU Beauty, focusing on helping women “look good, feel good, and do good”. It is a world removed from her prior life, with the website featuring photos of her, thoughtful and confident.
Scheuer says she was recruited to the CIA while a graduate student at Tufts University’s Fletcher School in 1988 by the now-deceased CIA officer Duane “Dewey” Clarridge, who founded the agency’s counterterrorism center.
Clarridge would go on to face a perjury indictment for his testimony about the Iran-Contra affair. He was pardoned by President George HW Bush before trial.
In 1996, the CIA started a unit specifically to target Osama bin Laden, who was emerging as a new phenomenon in extremism. The Zero Dark Thirty main character is thought to be based on an amalgam of CIA operatives, including Scheuer, though she was not central in the quest to hunt down Bin Laden.
The new unit was called Alec Station, headed by a CIA analyst named Michael Scheuer. She told Reuters she joined Alec Station in 1999, after Michael Scheuer had left as chief. They married in 2014 and she took his name.
Michael Scheuer has in recent years espoused conspiracy theories, and called on then president Donald Trump to impose martial law after he lost the 2020 election. He has said QAnon, the bogus conspiracy theory that Trump was battling pedophiles among senior Democrats, Hollywood and the imagined “deep state”, has often been correct.
Michael Scheuer declined an interview request. Scheuer will not say if she agreed with her husband’s ideas but said she debates him on some issues.
After joining Alec Station, Scheuer rose to deputy chief and then, she says, its chief.
A 2005 CIA inspector general report said the CIA “failed to pass the travel information” about al-Qaida attackers to the FBI before the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks on the US. Scheuer disputes that the CIA was at fault.