SpyTalk: The CIA’s complicated relationship with Egypt
►http://voices.washingtonpost.com/spy-talk/2011/01/the_cias_complicated_relations.html?goback=.gde_1784957_membe
The CIA’s man to see in Cairo was Omar Suleiman, the Egyptian intelligence boss whom Hosni Mubarak nudged from the shadows Saturday to be his vice president.
“Omar Suleiman negotiated directly with top [CIA] officials” on the renditions, Jane Mayer wrote in “Dark Side: The Inside Story of How The War on Terror Turned into a War on American Ideals.”
Edward S. Walker, the American ambassador in Cairo at the time, described Suleiman as “very bright, very realistic,” according to the account of Mayer and others. The envoy said that Suleiman was aware of the flap potential of “some of the negative things that the Egyptians engaged in, of torture and so on.”
Walker added that Suleiman “was not squeamish, by the way.”
At the same time, diplomats in the American Embassy were critical of CIA-funded Egyptian security projects, Walker told the British journalist Stephen Grey, including a "program to train Egyptian special operations forces in counterterrorism arrests.”
The trouble, though, was that "too many people died while fleeing...It got to be a little too obvious, and the agency got very nervous about this,’” Walker told Grey.