But officials said the document did not assess the quality of those reports. It also did not attempt to determine which methods were yielding the best information, or explore whether the agency's understanding of Al Qaeda would have suffered significantly without the use of coercive techniques.
"Certainly you got additional considerable volume of reporting when you started up with anything enhanced," the U.S. intelligence official said. "But nobody went back to say exactly what were the conditions under which we learned that which was the most useful."
In fact, Helgerson's team had steered away from that question by design, the official said, hoping that agency leaders would turn to interrogation experts for a thorough study on which methods were working and which should be discarded.
White House National Security Council officials who saw the inspector general's report became concerned with its conclusions, current and former officials said. Stephen Hadley, then the deputy national security advisor, was particularly persistent on pushing the CIA director to follow up on the inspector general's recommendation.
Goss, who had taken the helm at the CIA four months after the inspector general's report was filed, eventually complied. But Helgerson had envisioned a group of experts, perhaps including specialists from the FBI; Goss turned instead to two former government officials with little background in interrogation.
Gardner Peckham, a national security advisor to former House Speaker Newt Gingrich, produced the approximately 10-page document that praised the program. It concluded that the program was "very structured and very disciplined," said a former official familiar with its contents, but did not assess the effectiveness of various methods.
A separate report, submitted by John Hamre, a former deputy Defense secretary, was similar in scope and led to no significant alterations of the program. Hamre and Peckham both declined to comment.
Despite the high-level attention, former Bush administration officials said they never saw the results of the audits that Goss had commissioned.
"They never came and presented anything to the White House that said in response to the I.G. report they have commissioned a review," said one such official. "They essentially came back with the recommendations that this was the program and it couldn't be changed."
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greg.miller@latimes.com
Julian E. Barnes in Washington and Doyle McManus in Los Angeles contributed to this report.
