The CIA's deputy director of operations personally oversaw the cover-up of the death of a detainee at a secret agency facility in Afghanistan, a magazine article alleges.
In 2002 Steve Kappes, then the deputy director of operations, "helped tailor the agency’s paper trail regarding the death of a detainee at a secret CIA interrogation facility in Afghanistan, known internally as the Salt Pit," reports Jeff Stein at Washingtonian.com.
The detainee froze to death after being doused with water, stripped naked, and left alone overnight, according to reports in the Washington Post and Los Angeles Times. He was secretly buried and his death kept “off-the-books,” the Post said.An Associated Press story last week identified the dead prisoner as Gul Rahman, "a suspected militant." Rahman's death was "the only one known from a secret prison network that the CIA operated overseas after the Sept. 11 attacks," AP reported.
According to two former officials who read a CIA inspector general’s report on the incident, Kappes coached the base chief—whose identity is being withheld at the request of the CIA—on how to respond to the agency’s investigators. They would report it as an accident.
