# Gina Haspel Career CIA officer who served as **Director of the Central Intelligence Agency (2018–2021)** under the Trump administration — the first woman to lead the agency — after a long clandestine career and a stint as Deputy Director under [[Mike Pompeo]]. Her ascent was among the most controversial intelligence-leadership confirmations in modern memory because of her documented role in the agency's post-9/11 torture program. ## The Thailand Black Site Between roughly October and December 2002, Haspel oversaw a secret CIA detention facility in Thailand (Detention Site GREEN, code-named "Cat's Eye"), where terrorism suspects were subjected to "enhanced interrogation." Declassified cables — surfaced through a 2018 Freedom of Information lawsuit by the National Security Archive — documented torture at the site, including the waterboarding and confinement of detainee Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri while Haspel was base chief. The cables were either authorized or written by Haspel. ## The Destruction of the Tapes Haspel was also involved in the 2005 destruction of **92 videotapes** documenting interrogations at the black sites — a major controversy over the deliberate elimination of evidence of the torture program. She drafted a cable, on behalf of her superior Jose Rodriguez, ordering the tapes destroyed amid mounting scrutiny. At her 2018 confirmation hearing she defended the destruction as protecting the identities of CIA officers whose faces were visible during a period of frequent leaks. ## Confirmation and Tenure Despite the controversy — and over the objections of human-rights groups and some senators who viewed her record as disqualifying — Haspel was confirmed as CIA Director in 2018. She was generally regarded as an institutionalist who, during a turbulent period, defended the agency's professional ranks; she served until the end of the Trump administration in January 2021. ## Why She Matters Here Haspel's career is a touchstone for the **post-9/11 torture program and its normalization**: the elevation of an officer central to the black-site and tape-destruction controversies to the agency's top job, with bipartisan-enough acquiescence to confirm her, marks how far the "War on Terror"-era erosion of legal norms had been absorbed into the national-security establishment. Within this KB she connects to [[Mike Pompeo]] (under whom she was deputy and whom she succeeded) and to the broader Trump-administration record on executive power and accountability. (See [[Mike Pompeo]].) ## See Also - [[Mike Pompeo]] — Predecessor as CIA Director; she was his deputy - [[Donald Trump]] — The administration that elevated her