Railroaders place to shoot the shit.

WASHINGTON The proclamation that President George W. Bush issued on June 26, 2003, to mark the United Nations International Day in Support of Victims of Torture seemed innocuous, one of dozens of high-minded statements published and duly ignored each year.

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Times Topics: C.I.A. Interrogations

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The United States is committed to the worldwide elimination of torture and we are leading this fight by example, Mr. Bush declared, vowing to prosecute torture and to prevent other cruel and unusual punishment.

But inside the Central Intelligence Agency, the statement set off alarms. The agencys top lawyer, Scott W. Muller, called the White House to complain. The statement by the president could unnerve the C.I.A. interrogators Mr. Bush had authorized to use brutal tactics on members of Al Qaeda, Mr. Muller said, raising fears that political winds could change and make them scapegoats.

White House officials reaffirmed their support for the C.I.A. methods. But the exchange was a harbinger of the conflict between the coercive interrogations and the United States historical stance against torture that would deeply divide the Bush administration and ultimately undo the program.

The aftershocks of the interrogation policy continue. President Obamas recent decision to release Bush administration legal memorandums on interrogation and to fend off calls for a broad investigation has only fueled debate over the efficacy, legality and morality of what was done. Just last week, bloggers seized upon a new video clip of Condoleezza Rice, a former secretary of state, sharply defending the program to a Stanford undergraduate and saying nothing about the bitter internal arguments that accompanied the demise of the program.

Most news accounts of the C.I.A. program have focused on how it was approved and operated. This is the story of its unraveling, based on interviews with more than a dozen former Bush administration officials. They insisted on anonymity because they feared being enmeshed in future investigations or public controversy, but they shed new light on the battle about the C.I.A. methods that grew passionate in Mr. Bushs second term.

The consensus of top administration officials about the C.I.A. interrogation program, which they had approved without debate or dissent in 2002, began to fall apart the next year.

Acutely aware that the agency would be blamed if the policies lost political support, nervous C.I.A. officials began to curb its practices much earlier than most Americans know: no one was waterboarded after March 2003, and coercive interrogation methods were shelved altogether in 2005.

Yet even as interrogation methods were scaled back, former officials now say, the battle inside the Bush administration over which ones should be permitted only grew hotter. There would be a tense phone call over the programs future during the 2005 Christmas holidays from Stephen J. Hadley, the national security adviser, to Porter J. Goss, the C.I.A. director; a White House showdown the next year between Ms. Rice and Vice President Dick Cheney; and Ms. Rices refusal in 2007 to endorse the executive order with which Mr. Bush sought to revive the C.I.A. program.

The real trouble began on May 7, 2004, the day the C.I.A. inspector general, John L. Helgerson, completed a devastating report. In thousands of pages, it challenged the legality of some interrogation methods, found that interrogators were exceeding the rules imposed by the Justice Department and questioned the effectiveness of the entire program.

C.I.A. officials had sold the interrogation program to the White House. Now, the director of central intelligence, George J. Tenet, knew that the inspector generals report could be a noose for White House officials to hang the C.I.A. Mr. Tenet ordered a temporary halt to the harshest interrogation methods.

The report landed on the desks of some White House officials who were already having their doubts about the wisdom of the C.I.A.s harsh methods. John B. Bellinger III, who, as the National Security Councils top lawyer, played a role in discussions when the program was approved in 2002, by the next year had begun to research past ill-fated British and Israeli use of torture and grew doubtful about the wisdom of the techniques.

Mr. Bellinger shared his doubts with his boss, Ms. Rice, then the national security adviser, who began to reconsider her strong support for the program.

If the inspector generals report was a body blow to the C.I.A. program, the bill passed by Congress the next year was a knockout punch. Provoked by the abuse scandal at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq and pushed by Senator John McCain, Republican of Arizona, who had been tortured by the North Vietnamese, the 2005 bill banned cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment.

Top C.I.A. officials then feared that the agencys methods could actually be illegal. Mr. Goss, who had succeeded Mr. Tenet at the C.I.A., wrote a memorandum to the White House saying the agency would carry out no harsh interrogations without new Justice Department approval.

The national security adviser, Mr. Hadley, was angered by the C.I.A.s response. He called Mr. Goss at home over the Christmas holidays to complain; Mr. Goss, backed by his lawyers, would not budge. Mr. Hadley decided he could not push the C.I.A. to do what it thought might be illegal.

Nobody knew it then, but the C.I.A.s fateful experiment in harsh interrogation was over. The enhanced interrogation, already scaled back, would not be used again.

But Bush administration officials could not agree about what to do with the agencys prisoners. Already, disclosures of secret prisons in Eastern Europe had prompted the C.I.A. to fly many in a hurry to Afghanistan.

Mr. Cheney led those who argued that publicly acknowledging the detainees would reveal secrets and expose the program to exaggerated accusations of torture.