Unmasking the Pseudonyms in the Senate Torture Report

The 2014 Senate Intelligence Committee report on CIA interrogation practices used an extensive system of pseudonyms and code names to obscure the identities of personnel, detention facilities, and contractors involved in the program. Investigative journalists and open-source researchers subsequently worked to decode many of these pseudonyms, piecing together the real names behind the redactions.

Several fundamental questions remained unresolved after the report’s publication: the identities of certain detainees referenced only by letter designations, and the location of at least one undisclosed detention facility. The compiled findings below represent what investigators were able to determine.

CIA Black Site Locations Decoded

The Senate report used color-coded designations for each detention facility. Researchers and journalists identified the following locations:

• BLACK — Romania
• BLUE (codenamed “Quartz”) — Stare Kiejkuty, Poland
• BROWN — Afghanistan
• COBALT (the “Salt Pit”) — Afghanistan
• GRAY — Afghanistan
• GREEN — Thailand
• INDIGO — Guantanamo Bay
• MAROON — Guantanamo Bay
• ORANGE — Afghanistan
• VIOLET — Lithuania
• RED — Unknown. This site appears only once in the report (page 140 of 499), and the entry is almost entirely redacted. It could be an additional facility in one of the countries listed above or an entirely different location.

The Contractors: Mitchell, Jessen and Associates

The report referred to the primary interrogation contractor as “Company Y,” which was identified as Mitchell, Jessen & Associates, based in Spokane, Washington. The firm was founded by psychologists James Mitchell and Bruce Jessen, who designed the CIA’s so-called “enhanced interrogation” program.

The “Associates” listed under Company Y were identified as David Ayers, Randall Spivey, James Sporleder, Joseph Matarazzo, and Roger Aldrich. The CIA reportedly paid the firm more than $80 million for its services.

Notably, there is no “Company X” in the Senate report. However, several other companies were linked to the CIA’s rendition flight operations, including Premier Executive Transport Services (incorporated in Dedham, Massachusetts, with fictitious officer names such as “Coleen Bornt,” “Brian Dice,” and “Tyler Edward Tate”), Stevens Express Leasing, Richmor Aviation, Rapid AirTrans, and Path Corporation.

The report also references a “Business Q,” which was associated with an individual named Zubair who had connections to the Southeast Asian militant leader Hambali.

Pseudonyms for the Interrogation Psychologists

The two principal architects of the interrogation program were given the following pseudonyms in the report:

• “Grayson Swigert” — identified as James Mitchell
• “Hammond Dunbar” — identified as Bruce Jessen

CIA Officers Identified

Several CIA officers referenced in the report were subsequently identified:

• CIA Officer 1 — Matthew Zirbel, the COBALT site manager. Zirbel received only a 10-day suspension following the death of detainee Gul Rahman at the Salt Pit. That suspension was overruled by his supervisor, Kyle “Dusty” Foggo, who was later convicted on corruption charges unrelated to the interrogation program.
• CIA Officer 2 — Albert El Gamil, who served as an interrogator at both COBALT and BLUE before retiring from the CIA in 2004.
• CIA Chief of Station, Warsaw — Ron Czarnetsky, who held the position from 2002 to 2005, placing him in charge during the period when site BLUE was operational in Poland.
• Alfreda Frances Bikowsky — A CIA officer who reportedly traveled to the BLUE site in Poland in March 2003 on her own initiative and at her own expense to observe waterboarding sessions. She was reportedly told the sessions were “not supposed to be entertainment.”

Assets, Detainees, and Unresolved Questions

The report references two CIA assets by letter designation: Asset X, who was directly involved in the capture of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, and Asset Y, who provided intelligence reports on Janat Gul.

A Person 1 is described as a member of the al-Ghuraba group with an interest in airplanes and aviation, though intelligence reportedly indicated this interest was unrelated to terrorist activity.

Two detainees remain particularly elusive: Detainee R, who was held by a foreign government before being rendered to CIA custody, and Detainee S, also held by a foreign government. Their identities were never publicly confirmed.

The identification of these pseudonyms represented a significant effort by journalists and researchers to establish accountability for a program that the Senate committee itself concluded involved brutality that went beyond what the CIA had represented to policymakers and oversight bodies.