Gina Haspel facts for kids
Quick facts for kids
Gina Haspel
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Official portrait, 2017
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| 7th Director of the Central Intelligence Agency | |
| In office May 21, 2018 – January 20, 2021 (Acting: April 26, 2018 – May 21, 2018) |
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| President | Donald Trump |
| Deputy | Vaughn Bishop |
| Preceded by | Mike Pompeo |
| Succeeded by | William J. Burns |
| 6th Deputy Director of the Central Intelligence Agency | |
| In office February 2, 2017 – May 21, 2018 |
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| President | Donald Trump |
| Preceded by | David Cohen |
| Succeeded by | Vaughn Bishop |
| Director of the National Clandestine Service | |
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Acting
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| In office February 28, 2013 – May 7, 2013 |
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| President | Barack Obama |
| Preceded by | John Bennett |
| Succeeded by | Frank Archibald |
| Personal details | |
| Born |
Gina Cheri Walker
October 1, 1956 Ashland, Kentucky, U.S. |
| Spouse |
Jeff Haspel
(m. 1976; div. 1985) |
| Education | University of Kentucky University of Louisville (BA) Northeastern University (Cert) |
| Awards | Presidential Rank Award Donovan Award Intelligence Medal of Merit |
Gina Cheri Walker Haspel (born October 1, 1956) is an American intelligence officer who was the director of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) from May 21, 2018, to January 20, 2021. She was the agency's deputy director from 2017 to 2018 under Mike Pompeo, and became acting director on April 26, 2018, after Pompeo became U.S. secretary of state. She was later nominated and confirmed to the role, making her the first woman to become CIA director on a permanent basis.
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Early life
Haspel was born Gina Cheri Walker on October 1, 1956, in Ashland, Kentucky. Her father served in the United States Air Force. She has four siblings.
Haspel attended high school in the United Kingdom. She was a student at the University of Kentucky for three years and transferred for her senior year to the University of Louisville, where she graduated in May 1978 with a Bachelor of Science in languages and journalism. From 1980 to 1981, she worked as a civilian library coordinator at Fort Devens in Massachusetts. She received a paralegal certificate from Northeastern University in 1982 and worked as a paralegal until she was hired by the CIA.
Early career
Early CIA career
Haspel joined the CIA in January 1985 as a reports officer. She held several undercover overseas positions. Her first field assignment was from 1987 to 1989 in Ethiopia, Central Eurasia, Turkey, followed by several assignments in Europe and Central Eurasia from 1990 to 2001. From 1996 to 1998, Haspel served as station chief in Baku, Azerbaijan.
From 2001 to 2003, her position was listed as Deputy Group Chief, Counterterrorism Center.
Between October and December 2002, Haspel was assigned to oversee a secret CIA prison in Thailand Detention Site GREEN, code-named Cat's Eye, which housed persons suspected of involvement in Al-Qaeda. The prison was part of the US government's "extraordinary rendition" program after the September 11 attacks, and used torture techniques such as waterboarding. According to a former senior CIA official, Haspel arrived as station chief after the interrogation of Abu Zubaydah but was chief during the waterboarding of Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri.
On January 8, 2019, Carol Rosenberg, of the Miami Herald, reported that partially redacted transcripts from a pre-trial hearing of Guantanamo Military Commission of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, seemed to indicate that Haspel had been the "Chief of Base" of a clandestine CIA detention site on the Guantanamo Bay Naval Station, in the 2003–2004 period.
National Clandestine Service leadership
Haspel served as the deputy director of the National Clandestine Service, deputy director of the National Clandestine Service for Foreign Intelligence and Covert Action, and chief of staff for the director of the National Clandestine Service.
In 2005, Haspel was the chief of staff to Jose Rodriguez, Director of the National Clandestine Service. In his memoir, Rodriguez wrote that Haspel had drafted a cable in 2005 ordering the destruction of dozens of videotapes made at the black site in Thailand in response to mounting public scrutiny of the program. At the Senate confirmation hearing considering her nomination to head the CIA, Haspel explained that the tapes had been destroyed in order to protect the identities of CIA officers whose faces were visible, at a time when leaks of US intelligence were rampant.
In 2013, John Brennan, then the director of Central Intelligence, named Haspel as acting director of the National Clandestine Service, which carries out covert operations around the globe. However, she was not appointed to the position permanently due to criticism about her involvement in the Rendition, Detention and Interrogation program. Her permanent appointment was opposed by Dianne Feinstein and others in the Senate.
Deputy Director of the CIA
On February 2, 2017, President Trump appointed Haspel Deputy Director of the CIA, a position that does not require Senate confirmation.
On February 8, 2017, several members of the Senate intelligence committee urged Trump to reconsider his appointment of Haspel as deputy director.
On February 15, 2017, Spencer Ackerman reported on psychologists Bruce Jessen and James Mitchell, the architects of the "enhanced interrogation" program that was designed to break Zubaydah and was subsequently used on other detainees at the CIA's secret prisons around the world. Jessen and Mitchell are being sued by Sulaiman Abdulla Salim, Mohamed Ahmed Ben Soud, and Obaid Ullah over torture designed by the psychologists. Jessen and Mitchell are seeking to compel Haspel, and her colleague James Cotsana, to testify on their behalf.
Director of the CIA
Nomination
On March 13, 2018, President Donald Trump announced he would nominate Haspel to be the Director of the Central Intelligence Agency, replacing Mike Pompeo—whom he tapped to become the new Secretary of State. Once confirmed by the Senate, Haspel became the first woman to serve as permanent Director of the CIA (Meroe Park served as Associate Deputy Director from 2013 to 2017, and acting director for three days in January 2017). Robert Baer, who once supervised Haspel at the CIA, found her to be "smart, tough and effective. Foreign liaison services who have worked with her uniformly walked away impressed."
Republican senator Rand Paul said he would oppose the nomination, saying "To really appoint the head cheerleader for waterboarding to be head of the CIA? I mean, how could you trust somebody who did that to be in charge of the CIA? To read of her glee during the waterboarding is just absolutely appalling." Soon after Paul made this statement, the allegation that Haspel had mocked those being interrogated was retracted. Doug Stafford, an aide for Paul, said, "According to multiple published, undisputed accounts, she oversaw a black site and she further destroyed evidence of torture. This should preclude her from ever running the CIA."
Republican senator and former presidential candidate John McCain called on Haspel to provide a detailed account of her participation in the CIA's detention program from 2001 to 2009, including whether she directed the use of so-called "enhanced interrogation techniques" and to clarify her role in the 2005 destruction of interrogation videotapes. In the Senate, McCain was a staunch opponent of torture, having been tortured as a prisoner of war in North Vietnam. McCain further called upon Haspel to commit to declassifying the 2014 Senate Intelligence Committee report on CIA torture.
Multiple senators have criticized the CIA for what they believe is selectivity in declassifying superficial and positive information about her career to generate positive coverage, while simultaneously refusing to declassify any "meaningful" information about her career.
More than 50 former senior U.S. government officials, including six former Directors of the CIA and three former directors of national intelligence, signed a letter supporting her nomination. They included former Directors of the CIA John Brennan, Leon Panetta and Michael Morell, former Director of the NSA and CIA Michael Hayden, and former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper. In April, a group of 109 retired generals and admirals signed a letter expressing "profound concern" over Haspel's nomination due to her record and alleged involvement in the CIA's use of torture and the subsequent destruction of evidence. Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting criticized press coverage that portrayed Haspel's nomination as a victory for feminism. On May 10, The Washington Post Editorial Board expressed its opposition to Haspel's nomination for not condemning the CIA's now-defunct torture program as immoral. On May 12, the first two Senate Democrats, Joe Donnelly of Indiana and Joe Manchin of West Virginia, announced their support for Haspel's nomination.
On May 9, 2018, Haspel appeared before the Senate Intelligence Committee for a confirmation hearing.
On May 14, Haspel sent a letter to Senator Mark Warner of Virginia stating that, in hindsight, the CIA should not have operated its interrogation and detention program. Shortly thereafter, Warner announced he would back Haspel when the Senate Intelligence Committee voted on whether to refer her nomination to the full Senate.
She was approved for confirmation by the Senate Intelligence Committee on May 16 by a 10–5 vote, with two Democrats voting in favor. The next day, Haspel was confirmed by the full Senate, on a mostly party-line, 54–45 vote. Paul and Jeff Flake of Arizona were the only Republican nays, and six Democrats — Donnelly, Manchin, Warner, Heidi Heitkamp of North Dakota, Bill Nelson of Florida, and Jeanne Shaheen of New Hampshire — voted yes. McCain, who had urged his colleagues to reject her nomination, did not cast a vote, as he was hospitalized at the time.
Tenure
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Haspel was officially sworn in on May 21, 2018, becoming the first woman to serve as Director of the Central Intelligence Agency on a permanent basis.
On January 29, 2019, during a Senate Intelligence Committee hearing, Haspel reported that the CIA was "pleased" with the first Trump administration's March 2018 expulsion of 61 Russian diplomats following the poisoning of Sergei and Yulia Skripal. Haspel added that the CIA did not object to the Treasury Department's decision in December 2018 to remove sanctions on three Russian companies tied to Russian oligarch Oleg Deripaska, a close associate of Russian President Vladimir Putin. On the subject of recent relations between North Korea and the United States, Haspel stated, "I think our analysts would assess that they value the dialogue with the United States, and we do see indications that Kim Jong-un is trying to navigate a path toward some kind of better future for the North Korean people."
By May 2019, Haspel had hired many women in senior positions.
In December 2020, she became the subject of a death hoax. According to social media claims, Haspel was either killed, injured, or arrested in a CIA raid on a server farm in Frankfurt. Several fact-checking projects debunked these claims, and were unable to find any evidence that Haspel had died or that a raid had taken place. The CIA announced her retirement after 36 years of service, via a tweet, on January 19, 2021, one day prior to the presidential transition from Trump to Joe Biden. William J. Burns had been selected by Biden on January 11 to succeed Haspel pending Senate confirmation. Burns was sworn in as the new director on March 19, 2021.
After retiring from the CIA, Haspel began advising the law firm King & Spalding in July 2021.
Awards and recognition
Haspel has received a number of awards, including the George H. W. Bush Award for excellence in counterterrorism, the Donovan Award, the Intelligence Medal of Merit, and the Presidential Rank Award
Personal life
Haspel married Jeff Haspel, who served in the United States Army, c. 1976; they were divorced in 1985. From 2001 to 2018 she owned a home in Ashburn, Virginia.
See also
In Spanish: Gina Haspel para niños
- Criticism of the war on terror
- Extrajudicial prisoners of the United States
- Senate Intelligence Committee report on CIA torture
