ASKING THE RIGHT QUESTIONS, AND ASKING THE RIGHT WAY
In the late summer of 2009, Mike Heimbach gave me a call. He said, I need you to go to Denver to help them work on a CT case. The case was called High Rise. It involved a potential plot to attack mass transportation in a major city. I asked, When do you need me to go? He answered, Tomorrow.
High Rise was heating up. Because the Denver field office had not had much experience with counterterrorism, the case was causing some struggle. A situation like the one unfolding in Colorado creates a lot of special needs, just in terms of information flow. The director requires regular updates, and a thick stream of intelligence has to be nimbly routed among various departments at headquarters and throughout the intel community. Asking a field office to manage all that in the middle of a crisis is onerous. If they don’t execute flawlessly, they’re liable to get buried. Today, with the benefit of lots of counterterror crisis experience, headquarters collaborates well with the field. A decade ago, when the FBI began experimenting with sending HQ agents to the field as liaisons, agents in field offices sometimes felt they were being bigfooted by a babysitter. That was the reception I faced in Denver.
The subject of High Rise was Najibullah Zazi, a twenty-four-year-old Afghani raised in Pakistan and then in Flushing, Queens. After high school, Zazi ran a coffee cart in lower Manhattan, near Ground Zero. Along with two of his high school friends, Adis Medunjanin and Zarein Ahmedzay, Zazi became radicalized. Following his father’s lead, Zazi sided with Taliban sympathizers at his local mosque. He and his friends watched hundreds of lectures by jihadist imams. They watched internet videos of American soldiers being ambushed. Zazi also fell into debt and went bankrupt.
In 2008, he and his friends traveled to Pakistan. They connected with highly placed al-Qaeda terrorists, who provided weapons training and taught them to build bombs. They went through what amounted to Terrorism 101—complete with graduation—and came back to the U.S. Together, they hatched a plan to detonate homemade explosives on the New York City subway. They planned to do this on September 11, 2009—the eighth anniversary of 9/11. Intelligence indicated they were directed by influential al-Qaeda operatives, possibly including Rashid Rauf, a key figure in the London airliner plot.
Back in the U.S., Zazi and his parents moved to Colorado, where Zazi conducted experiments in bomb building. He was following directions he’d been given in Pakistan. He would go to beauty-supply stores and buy chemicals like hydrogen peroxide in bulk. (When an employee at one of the beauty-supply stores made a comment about the volume of his purchases, Zazi said, “I have a lot of girlfriends.”) He rented hotel rooms where he practiced cooking the peroxide down to potent concentrations. On Memorial Day weekend 2009, the FBI got a tip that Zazi’s communications to his trainer back in Pakistan had been intercepted. That’s what set us to looking at him.
By the time I got involved, Zazi had completed his experiments. He had taken the bomb-making materials he’d constructed, put them in his rental car, and started driving to New York. Along the way, he got pulled over for speeding—upward of a hundred miles per hour—but the materials were not found. On the weekend of the 9/11 anniversary, he was in New York. He and his associates were tipped off to FBI and New York Police Department surveillance by Ahmad Wais Afzali, a Queens imam who knew them and who was also serving as a source on this case for the NYPD’s Intelligence Division. (The imam’s double-agent work later caught up with him—he was charged with making a false statement in a terrorism investigation and, as part of a plea deal, he left the U.S. for Saudi Arabia.)
Spooked by the surveillance, Zazi hopped a flight back to Colorado. Unbeknownst to him, more than a few of his fellow passengers were undercover FBI agents. By the time I arrived, Zazi was still in Colorado, and he knew that we knew something and were investigating him vigorously.
Any major case like this is chaotic. The whole field office works on it. Everybody operates around the clock. In the FBI, the agent who opens a case or is the first assigned to a case owns that case, period. The case agent is king. Every case agent has a partner, a co–case agent, who lends a hand. But essentially the case agent is responsible for every aspect of the investigation for that case, from surveillance to warrants to evidence analysis to interviews. In a typical case, such as a onetime bank robbery, handling the details is straightforward. A massive national-security case that involves multiple field offices, multiple search warrants, mountains of evidence, and thousands of pages of handwritten notes needing to be transcribed can turn anyone into a one-armed paper hanger. It’s more than any one human being can handle.
You have to run those cases in a different way: Assign discrete elements of the investigation to discrete teams and create a structure of oversight for each slice of the pie. One agent, for instance, will be in charge of phones. Whatever phones we come across, whatever phones we seize, whatever phones we’re interested in, we lob them over to you, the phone person in charge of the phone bucket. The phone person should be able to say at any given moment how many phones we have, whose phones we have, what kinds of phones those are, which ones we’re able to get into, which ones are encrypted and we can’t get into, what we’re doing to pursue access to those phones, and where the process stands on each of those phones. If we seized the main suspect’s T-Mobile phone, has the warrant been served on T-Mobile? If so, did we get the results back? If so, have the results been uploaded into the system and analyzed? Even that list of questions, for multiple phones from multiple suspects, pretty quickly becomes overwhelming for any individual. So the person in charge of the phone bucket generally oversees a team of people working various aspects of the enterprise. It’s a grueling job.
Physical searches aren’t a whole lot simpler. And you never know when a demanding, complicated operation is going to suddenly get much more complicated. I got to Denver just before the field office executed search warrants at Zazi’s apartment and at the home of his aunt and uncle. Executing such warrants involves seizing such a massive amount of potential evidence that no one person can fully keep track of what the organization has. In this case, one of the main things we were looking for was bomb-making material. During the search of one of Zazi’s residences, agents opened the door to a bedroom closet and found a five-gallon Igloo cooler filled with white powder. Who keeps five gallons of white powder in a cooler on the floor of a bedroom closet? The team immediately thought it might have found enough of the peroxide-based explosive TATP to take down the entire building. So on an already full day, Denver had to cordon off the area, lock down the apartment complex, evacuate the building, and bring in bomb-recovery personnel. It turned out that the bucket the agents had left in place contained … five gallons of flour.
Every crisis has moments like this. A big pack of investigators can be like a bunch of very young kids playing soccer: Everybody chases the ball. In any game where everybody chases the ball, you can be sure that almost everybody is ignoring important stuff that needs doing. So in every crisis, you have to keep a kind of balance about the situation, and an inward distance, despite the fact that your mind is blowing up at all the crazy things that are happening. Effective response to chaos involves keeping meticulous order.
In the midst of all this, Zazi called the FBI field office, out of the blue, and said, I want to talk. We did not ask Zazi to be interviewed. He just volunteered and was coming in. The case agent got a heads-up about the development. He came to me and said, Zazi’s coming in. What do you think I should ask him?
Inside, my response was like smothering a silent scream as I considered how, in this situation and cases like it, the Bureau should have had a whole team of people involved: those who knew everything about Zazi’s life, family, and associates; those who were plugged into all of the information we’d collected from the investigation in New York; and those who could distill from this mass of information the requirements—that is, the questions and topics—that we wanted Zazi to discuss. I also wondered, for this important interview, whether the case agent was the right person to do it. If the case agent is new to the job, maybe not. If the case agent’s career has been mostly focused on national security, maybe not. It has been my impression that agents who mainly work counterterrorism have conducted fewer interviews than agents who do criminal work. Zazi’s was one of the more mature and better-organized domestic terrorist plots we’d encountered since 9/11. Improvising did not feel like the right way to do this. That said, I had faith in this case agent.
All right, I said. Forget about everything else. We sat down. We gamed out a little strategy for this interview. Because Zazi had called and offered to come in, the first approach would be to let him talk. About anything he wanted to talk about. From there, questions about his life, his family, and his beliefs would be productive, nonconfrontational ways to build rapport and fill in any blanks we had in terms of background information. Each question he felt comfortable answering would subtly establish a pattern: The case agent would ask a question and Zazi would answer it. Slowly the case agent would weave in facts that we knew to be true. Zazi would either admit them, incriminating himself, or he would lie about them.
Zazi came in with his attorney. The initial interview went on for many hours. We broke for dinner. Ordered pizza. The case agent did the interview. I sat in on some of it. I also observed it from another room. The interview took place across three days. In the in-between times, the case agent and I would talk.
Interviews raise all kinds of questions about technique. What should you show someone during an interview, if you want to confront them? You ask the suspect if he’s done something, he denies it, and you have a document, like a transcript of an intercept, in which he admits having done it. Do you want to place that document in front of him or not? That can be a very powerful thing to do in an interview. But it can also compromise the case, because the suspect then knows what surveillance you have. In a national-security case, the question of disclosure is even more complicated, because the document you want to use—or the information contained in that document—could be classified. If it is, you can’t use that document or that information before having conversations with headquarters and with lawyers, and perhaps going through a process of declassification, which is also complicated. The way that you proceed, laying bricks of an argument in the right order and direction to build a proper legal justification, determines whether the results of that interview will be effective and useful or not. Zazi made categorical denials in his interviews that we were later able to punch through, and he made statements that were absolutely devastating to him.
The Denver field office did a great job on High Rise. They stepped up, as Mike Heimbach would have said. The case agent’s interview with Zazi pulled enough information that, combined with other evidence, he could write a solid complaint. Zazi was charged, presented for arraignment, and taken into custody before I left. Ultimately he pleaded guilty to conspiracy to use a weapon of mass destruction, conspiracy to commit murder in a foreign country, and providing material support to a terrorist organization. After his conviction, while incarcerated at the Metropolitan Detention Center, in Brooklyn, Zazi cooperated with the government. He testified about his terrorist experiences. Someday, when the government decides it is time, he will be sentenced for his crimes. Meanwhile, his associates were also brought to justice. Zarein Ahmedzay pleaded guilty and is cooperating. Adis Medunjanin was convicted at trial of multiple terrorist offenses and was sentenced to life in prison. For me, those two weeks in Colorado opened a wide window onto a set of problems that, at the time, I had no idea I would work on practically every waking moment for the next two years.
Those next two years started at the Denver airport. My phone rang as I was about to board my flight home. The call was from Art Cummings’s office. Cummings and the director wanted to see me right away, that afternoon, after I landed in D.C.
I first met Art Cummings during Operation Overt. Art had been serving as the special agent in charge for counterterrorism at the Washington field office. We had heard that the director had pulled him out of there and thrown him back to counterterrorism at headquarters to keep an eye on us. I remember feeling as if this were Mueller’s way of saying he didn’t entirely trust what we were doing.
The notion that Cummings would be a force to hold us back was quickly dispelled. He was a former Navy SEAL. He spoke Mandarin fluently. He had started in the Bureau as a field agent in L.A. doing crack cases in Compton in the 1980s. The first thing that hit me about Cummings was his eyes. They are blue, but it’s not the color that counts. It’s the way the eyes move, the way they lock on to you, the way they look through you as you talk. Without saying anything at all, Cummings seemed to be saying, Oh yeah? You think so? That’s what you got? If you gave him a good idea, he responded with a better one. If you gave him a great idea, he wanted more of them.
The entire time he worked with us at LX-1, Art lived on a friend’s boat, which was docked in a marina in Annapolis. His family lived in Richmond, where his sons were in school; and rather than moving them all to D.C., he decided to sleep on this boat. It was no luxury craft. It had a bench that served as a seat during the day and as Art’s bed at night. It did not have heating or air-conditioning, or a galley or bathroom. Art bathed and dressed every morning in the public restroom of the marina. At night, on his way home, he bought a tuna sandwich and ate on the boat. His austere existence added to Art’s mystique.
As soon as he joined the team at LX-1, Art set his sights on the CIA. He was convinced that the agency, for whatever reason, was not sharing with us all the knowledge about Overt that it was getting from the Brits. Were there any U.S.-based plotters? Were any associates of UK suspects living in the country? He demanded a seat at the agency’s secure video teleconferences with the Brits. I accompanied him as his plus-one. After the TV went dark, Art would sometimes accuse the senior CIA officer in the room of holding back. He would demand to know why we hadn’t heard some of this stuff until now. It was a level of confrontation I had never seen before.
Upon arriving in Washington after receiving my summons at the Denver airport, I made my way to Art’s office and asked him what was up. He said, It’s that hig thing. Hig thing? I didn’t know what he was talking about. Hig! he repeated—and then it clicked. HIG must be an acronym, since half the words out of an agent’s mouth are acronyms. He went on: HIG—the High-Value Detainee Interrogation Group. A new interagency effort. We’re going to revamp the way we do interrogations and interviews of terrorism suspects.
Then we were off to the director’s office—which meant, in the first instance, presenting ourselves to Wanda Siford, Mueller’s secretary, assistant, and Praetorian Guard. She had spent much of her adult life serving directors in the FBI. Wanda was the FBI, or at least some hard-shelled part of it. Competence personified—dressed and coiffed with enormous dignity and professionalism—she sat behind a high desk in the inner reception area of the director’s suite. I knew Wanda as an older woman, at the end of a long and esteemed career. She embraced her role as the director’s protector and commanded the respect, and fear, of the highest ranks of the organization.
Wanda looked at us, picked up the phone, and called Mueller. She hung up and swept her hand to the left, signaling that we were to proceed. We passed through the conference room and entered the director’s office. The space had been built for J. Edgar Hoover, though he died before he could move into it. The office is not opulent and does not occupy a corner. It looks across Pennsylvania Avenue to the Justice Department. Congress has set a limit on the amount of money that presidential appointees are allowed to spend on office furniture, and the limit is low—five thousand dollars per appointee during the duration of an appointment. For an FBI director, that’s ten years, the period fixed in order to keep the appointment as much above politics as possible. FBI directors never do much decorating. But the office has a sense of grandeur nonetheless. These walls have seen seven FBI directors work with eight presidents and fourteen attorneys general. They have witnessed moments of triumph, such as the capture of Ramzi Yousef, one of the perpetrators of the 1993 attack on the World Trade Center, and moments of anger and disgust, as when the Bureau reckoned with the treason of agent Robert Hanssen. Since the Hoover building’s dedication in 1975, thirty-nine FBI agents have died in the line of duty, and from this office the first calls went out to spouses and families.
Mueller sat behind his desk. He started by asking me questions about the Zazi case. Then he turned to the matter at hand. He asked, What’s your plan next?
I said I was looking forward to continuing what I was doing. He said, Uh-huh, okay. And then he said, Well, there is this other thing that’s come up. President Obama has asked the FBI to take responsibility for building and running a new group, to be called the HIG. He explained the basics. It was an effort to professionalize how the government conducted interrogations of high-value terrorist suspects detained overseas. He described it as an effort to get away from the abuses that had occurred at Abu Ghraib and in other controversial CIA programs. He said, The new president wants to do things differently. There’s been a study about this, and a recommendation that came about as a result, and we’ve been asked to take charge. And we’re going to do it. And you’re going to do it. You’re going to build it.
I had not been aware of this study. I didn’t know what the recommendations were. This was not something I had much experience with.
Mueller said, Don’t worry about that. You can read all that. CIA and the Department of Defense will be your partners, but they’re not going to like it. There are things they don’t want to do that they are going to have to do. You will be the director. Your job is to make this work. That is the whole of your job description. If you start knocking heads with the Agency and with DOD, and you can’t get them to agree, then get them to agree. And when you absolutely can’t get them to agree, I don’t want you to fight with them. Come to me, and I will fight those fights for you. Because your job is to build it and make it work.
After all this, Mueller asked, Is there anything else you would like to tell me? I thought I saw an opening and tried to take it. I said, Sir, I’ll do whatever you want me to do. But if you’re asking my preference, what I would like to do is work counterterrorism. Mueller looked at me, cocked his head slightly to one side, and said, You know what I like to do?
No, sir, I said.
I like to try homicide cases. And look what I’m doing.
In Accra, Ghana, at 6 A.M. on Christmas Eve 2009, the young man checked out of the Tops Hotel and went to the airport, where he did not speak to another soul. He flew to Lagos and on to Amsterdam, and then boarded Northwest Airlines Flight 253 to Detroit. En route, he watched the video map, waiting for the plane to cross into U.S. airspace, because his teacher had instructed him, “Wait until you are in the U.S., then bring the plane down.” When the airplane was over the U.S., the young man went into the restroom. He brushed his teeth. He put on perfume. He prayed. He returned to his seat and covered his lap and legs with a pillow and blanket. He reached inside his clothing and depressed the plunger to activate the bomb inside his pants. The bomb in his pants made a hissing sound and then a loud pop, as if a bottle had been uncorked—and apparently that was all. The young man thought his bomb had failed. He started thinking that he would have to wear the failed bomb in his pants as he passed through immigration before throwing it away in the men’s room. Then his skin began to burn. He tried to take off his pants and underwear. The bomb and his clothes and his skin were on fire now. There was dark smoke rising from his body. There were flames. Seeing the fire, he thought maybe he had not failed. Maybe the bomb would explode, bring down the plane, and kill all the passengers, and his martyrdom mission would be complete.
I had seen a lot. I had never seen 302s like these: reports on the case of Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab—the so-called Underwear Bomber, who was being held in Michigan after his failed attempt, on Christmas Day 2009, to blow up that Northwest Airlines flight. Here was an al-Qaeda terrorist who—after a long, carefully planned process of patiently executed interviews—was divulging every detail of his radicalization and the planning of his attack. Every detail, right down to the architecture of the compound in Yemen where he trained. I read every page, every sentence, the Detroit field office pushed into the system. Read with rooting interest, though I’d already heard a lot of it. The case of the Underwear Bomber was the first deployment of elements of what would become the High-Value Detainee Interrogation Group that Mueller had assigned me to run.
At the HIG, I was in some ways more removed than I had been from the action—I never went to Detroit, never left my vault at LX-1. I was also more in charge of what was happening. I influenced the response to this case in ways known only to a small inner circle, while at the same time managing how our work would eventually be seen by the world beyond that group. Running the HIG, I crossed over to the dark side. Crossed into the realm of law enforcement where politics exerts decisive influence on outcomes in ways no honest person would deny.
I mean politics in two senses—one functional and necessary, the other toxic and obstructionist. Politics in the first sense—small-“p” politics—means the navigation of human relationships. Politics in that sense is the DNA of law enforcement. Law enforcement manages the shape of society with respect to legal parameters of acceptable behavior—parameters set by the Constitution and defined by statutes. The second kind of politics—party politics—means the execution of partisan strategy for purely political advantage. That kind of politics should have no place in American law enforcement. The only circumstance that might effectively force law enforcement to be partisan, in the two-party American political system, would be if one party unambiguously ceased to respect the laws and the Constitution.
At the HIG, I saw the first kind of politics operate in law enforcement at the highest levels. I began to know, and to some degree exercise, the inherently strange and fine-grained phenomenon of power. I also saw the second kind of politics encroach upon law enforcement—saw partisanship intensify to the point where it seemed almost to threaten the constitutional and legal system.
The HIG was born in a whirlwind, and at the center of the whirlwind stood a prison, Camp X-Ray, at the U.S. military detention facility at Guantánamo Bay. Campaigning for president in 2008, Barack Obama had promised to close Guantánamo. His Republican opponents wanted Guantánamo kept open. This was a disagreement about many things, but centrally it was a disagreement about the best way to get intelligence from suspected terrorists.
Obama believed the War on Terror had led the U.S. in the wrong direction. Like many Democrats (and many others), he believed the use of “enhanced” interrogation techniques, such as waterboarding, amounted to outright torture and had compromised our values as a nation. He also believed that forms of interrogation that fell short of “enhanced” were ultimately more effective. Many Republicans, but by no means all, saw the War on Terror from a different angle. They believed all terrorist suspects, including U.S. citizens, should be treated as enemy combatants—with no rights or constitutional protections. They believed the military and the intelligence agencies should use whatever interrogation methods they thought would get results. The ends justified the means.
Three days after Obama’s inauguration, he signed Executive Order 13491—“Ensuring Lawful Interrogations”—which established a task force to evaluate the federal government’s interrogation and detainee-transfer policies. The next document he signed, Executive Order 13492, ordered the closure of the detention facilities at Guantánamo Bay. The first policy documents of the new administration, these orders became choice targets for Obama’s political opponents. Most congressional Republicans would not have cared if the executive orders had been blank, or filled with Holy Scripture. As Obama’s first forays into counterterrorism policy, these orders were bound to be condemned for political advantage.
In August 2009, the presidential task force recommended two interrogation reforms. The first was to create an interagency group to conduct interrogations of high-value terrorist suspects—the CIA would be involved, and the Department of Defense; the FBI would run the group, and it would report to the National Security Council at the White House. The second was to ban the use of enhanced interrogation techniques by any U.S. government entity. From now on, only techniques from the U.S. Army Field Manual and those used by federal law enforcement, which had been compiled to be in conformity with the Geneva Conventions, would be allowed. The president accepted both of these recommendations and asked Director Mueller to create the High-Value Detainee Interrogation Group.
At the beginning, the only things I knew about the group were that it was supposed to exist; that it would be a three-way effort by the FBI, CIA, and Defense Department; and that whatever was not in the Army Field Manual would be off-limits. I read the Field Manual. I read the manual’s breakdown of interrogation phases and its definitions and taxonomies of each: the five main ways to approach a subject; the five main kinds of questions to ask; the many subcategories of both; and the permutations of ways to combine them. The terms, when listed one after another—Fear-Up, Fear-Down, Pride and Ego, Futility, We Know All, File and Dossier, Establish Your Identity, Repetition, Rapid Fire, Silent, Change of Scene—triggered a scatter of associations: goofy, clinical, ominous. But “Developing Rapport,” the foundation of all approaches and modes of questioning in the Field Manual, was already second nature to me, from all the interviews I’d done over the years.
Flashback to Quantico. A classroom. The teacher was John Hess. Hess was old—he had been around, it seemed, since J. Edgar Hoover was a kid. He had served for much of his career as an agent in Montpelier, Vermont—not an al-Qaeda hotbed. The course I took with him was called Interview and Interrogation.
In class, somebody asked, What’s the difference between an interview and an interrogation? Hess answered, When you are convinced of someone’s guilt to a moral certainty, it’s an interrogation. I remember thinking, How am I going to know when that happens? And that was his point, I think. Moral certainty is rare.
When I became an agent, I learned that the FBI does very little interrogation. It does a lot of interviews. Here is another difference between interviews and interrogation: Interviews take place in a longer-term context. Interviews help agents build relationships. Relationships nurture informants. The job is to create in someone’s mind a sense that you are worthy of trust. That you are competent. A professional. Doing the right thing. The challenge is demonstrating that your interests are in alignment—even if your ultimate goals are not the same. The agent who believes that he can take hardened criminals, show them the light of patriotism, and teach them the right way to live is the agent you will find in the back booth at O’Malley’s nodding for another shot at 4:58 P.M.
In most interviews, all an agent has to do is demonstrate that talking to and working with the Bureau is a good idea—to convince a person that talking about bad things they’ve done is in their best interest, which often comes in the form of a reduced sentence. Some interviews become confrontational or hostile. That’s necessary every once in a while—but not all that often if you’ve properly sized up what’s important to someone in an initial conversation.
Compared to the work of the Bureau, pure intelligence efforts by the CIA and the Defense Department relied more heavily on interrogation. To start the HIG, I learned a lot about how both agencies approached the job: their goals, their strengths and weaknesses. Their approach was intelligence driven. They did well on some of those things that—for instance, in the Zazi case—I had observed the Bureau doing poorly. Analysts were central to the process. Before intelligence case officers interrogated a detained terrorist, they conferred with analysts—experts in the subject matter. The analyst with the best knowledge of the terrorist group and the terrorist activity provided requirements. In the intelligence world, a “requirement” is a need for information, prompting a question to be asked. So this was the great strength of their approach: There was nothing vague or open-ended about it. Every question was shaped by intelligence and driven to expand intelligence. The weakness of their approach was its inflexibility. Interrogations proceeded down a checklist: What do you know of Osama bin Laden? Where is Osama bin Laden located? Who did you speak to last week about Osama bin Laden? If the person didn’t answer, he didn’t answer. That’s what the cable would report.
Defense interrogations involved slightly more in the way of rapport building than CIA interrogations did, but only as defined and allowed by the Army Field Manual. Military interrogators cannot, for instance, give a person any food or drink unless the Field Manual approach explicitly allows offers of food and drink. And in order to employ that approach, senior ranks must approve the interrogator’s written plan in advance. The interrogation plan names the approaches to be used and explains precisely the ways in which they will be used.
An FBI interview flies by the seat of its pants. This is its greatest strength and biggest weakness. We don’t do homework like the Agency. We don’t have the meticulous organizational skills of Defense. But FBI interrogators know how to read the subject. They know how to respond to the subject’s reactions to questions. They know how to borrow from and weave together various approaches. This guy looks hungry: I think I can warm him up a little bit if I give him a cup of coffee and let him smoke a cigarette.
Three agencies, three approaches. A case study of an age-old conflict: flexibility versus organization. Everybody needs some of both. I hoped the HIG could come up with a synthesis that would improve on all three approaches.
Setting up the HIG, I got a crash course in establishing a government program. The president had signed executive orders, but the presidential pen is not a magic wand. I had to figure out how to get a staff. How to find office space. How to make the space secure for working with classified material. DOD sent me an experienced interrogator to work with. I hopped the Metro to Rosslyn and together we made some scratch marks on a yellow legal pad. Riveting stuff, which I will spare you.
On we limped, to Christmas. Family. Presents. Breakfast. Down to the basement for some exercise. Turned a TV on. Breaking news: Northwest Airlines Flight 253—“… the Underwear Bomber was taken into custody…”
My first thought was, I am so glad to be out of counterterrorism. If I were in counterterrorism right now, I’d be on the way into the office, barking at the phone: Who is this guy, where is he from, who does he know, is there another on the way, what do we need to get out in front of here? But not today—I’m running the HIG, and I don’t even have interrogators on board yet.
Cue the phone call—it was Art Cummings, asking, You got your team out there? I said, What team? Art said, Bullshit. This is the biggest thing that’s happened in ages, and the HIG should be a part of this.
Fortunately, Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab was not ready to talk right away. On arrest, he went straight into surgery to treat serious burns of his groin, genitals, and legs. When he came out, he invoked his right to counsel. This gave me time to figure out what to do.
A few things happened. As soon as Abdulmutallab was taken into custody, the Detroit field office identified his family in Nigeria. His father was a prominent banker. He had many brothers and sisters. Detroit sent an agent to Nigeria to connect with them. The agent was there to explain to the family how the U.S. justice system worked and how it would be to Abdulmutallab’s benefit for him to cooperate and talk—how cooperation could affect his sentence, where he served his time, and the conditions under which he served his time. He was dead-to-rights guilty of trying to destroy an airplane. But there were still ways cooperation could have a positive impact on his outcome. The agent was also there to listen. If we wanted Abdulmutallab to open up and share intelligence, we needed to know how to talk to him. We needed to know how he came to find himself on a Northwest Airlines flight with a bomb in his underwear. The agent convinced Abdulmutallab’s mother and uncle to come back to Detroit, to meet with Abdulmutallab in jail, and to try to help us convince him to cooperate.
At the end of January, I sent a couple of people to Detroit. Not to take over the investigation, but to help the Detroit agents with their interviews the way I had helped Denver with Zazi. One of the people I sent was Joe Yungwirth, a former Special Forces officer and a former member of the FBI fly team—agents who deploy overseas when we need to put additional eyes and ears on the ground. If something big pops up for our legat in Abuja, for example, we’ll send a fly team guy out there to help. They are prepared to dig in and stay for a while—months at a time. Joe had a lot of experience with fast, deep learning. I also sent a few subject-matter experts up there, and a reports officer to help them get the paperwork out quickly. All of these people went on to play key roles in the HIG.
It was a very low-key, low-visibility deployment. They helped design, and eventually became, the infrastructure for the conversation that the intelligence community wanted to have with Abdulmutallab. It turned out to be a very challenging interview.
Abdulmutallab was, and probably is to this day, a reticent, closed-off, quiet man. He is very pious, with a black-and-white view of the world. Everything beyond the parameters of his religious beliefs is alien and condemned. Despite the severity of his burns, he never requested or accepted a single pain pill. He wore regular clothes, stayed in his cell, ate like everybody else, and would not outwardly acknowledge what had to be great physical suffering. He spoke to no one else in the facility. He kept completely to himself.
At the heart of every good interrogation or interview is a relationship, one in which the interviewee begins to trust the interviewer and decides that talking is in his or her best interest. Here we had a young man who was isolated, injured, and profoundly devout. The Detroit agents, with assistance from our team, rightly concluded that Abdulmutallab’s family were in the best position to convince him that he could trust the FBI. The agents initiated the ultimate interrogation of Abdulmutallab by getting the family to convince him to talk to us.
When he did start talking, he told us the story of how he became connected with Anwar al-Awlaki. From my first days in counterterrorism, I had been conscious of, and actively tracking, Awlaki. Born in America to Yemeni parents, Awlaki grew up to be a charismatic jihadi preacher and al-Qaeda recruiter. After 9/11, he fled from the U.S. to Yemen. By the time I came to counterterrorism, Awlaki was on his way to becoming the most effective popularizer of militant Islam in the English-speaking world. Budding terrorists hoarded Awlaki’s lectures on CDs. Awlaki was connected to my very first case at ITOS-1, just before Operation Overt. When the original, core al-Qaeda began to weaken, Awlaki became a leader of that group’s first and most dangerous offshoot, al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP). His lectures influenced Najibullah Zazi. And he was a mentor to Nidal Malik Hasan, who killed thirteen and injured thirty-two more in a mass shooting at Fort Hood, Texas, one month before Abdulmutallab boarded the plane to Detroit.
Abdulmutallab told us about traveling to Yemen’s Shabwah Province, where he was a guest in Awlaki’s house. He described how Awlaki introduced him to the foremost terrorist bomb maker in the world, a man named Ibrahim Hassan al-Asiri, who went on to create devices such as the printer-cartridge bomb years later. It was Asiri who taught Abdulmutallab how to handle, wear, and deploy the underwear bomb. Abdulmutallab provided granular information on terrorist operations, amounting to a sweeping portrait of al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula’s inner workings—a portrait that helped to guide U.S. intelligence operations for some time to come.
At breaks, and after interrogation sessions, Joe would call to tell me what had happened. At the same time, interrogators were disseminating the results to reports officers—not just handing off their notes but carefully walking them through them, so that no one would get hung up on illegible handwriting or unfamiliar terms. Within the intelligence community, we disseminated this information as broadly as we could, to show other agencies the potential of an expert-assisted interrogation. The FBI has a reputation for not sharing information in a timely fashion. I wanted to change that reputation. Every gesture like this—every mechanical refinement of workflow—would help convince another person or two in the intelligence community that this collaboration was a good idea.
And to persuade the field offices that this was not a land grab, I made sure Joe worked closely with the local case agent, the Detroit agent who had gone to Nigeria. Because the goal was not just to suck the intelligence out of Abdulmutallab and leave him there. The goal was to create an ongoing relationship with the suspect. Keeping the local case agent involved through the whole process ensured that someone in Detroit would be able to keep the conversation going.
Is terrorism a crime or an act of war? Should terrorists be tried in the justice system or handled by the military? Because Abdulmutallab was a direct agent of AQAP, and because he exercised his right to remain silent for some time after being given his Miranda warning, this case—and involvement in this case by some of us who later made up the HIG—immediately became an easy way for both Republicans and Democrats to express their views on the U.S. government’s appropriate response to terrorism.
For Democrats, the HIG became a symbol of a better way forward, after the notorious episodes of prisoner abuse at Abu Ghraib, Bagram Air Base, and elsewhere. They saw the HIG as a smarter, more efficient, more effective way of interrogating terrorist suspects. For Republicans, the HIG was a sign of how far the country had fallen and proof that the U.S. had gone soft on terrorism. What were we doing sending FBI people in front of terrorists and reading them their rights? Terrorists don’t have rights. They deserve whatever they get.
When I went to the Hill to brief members of Congress and testify before committees, that was the conversation I became a part of. A conversation with no middle ground. I went to the Hill to brief or testify about the HIG more than fifteen times during my first year on the job. These were my initial experiences testifying before Congress, and the first few times I went, members of Congress wanted to hear about Abdulmutallab.
Republicans would ask, Isn’t it true you didn’t even get in front of him for weeks before he lawyered up, and he didn’t want to talk to you? And you lost all that time, and you didn’t get much of anything out of him? I would answer, Yes, true, he wasn’t questioned the night he was arrested, but we did convince him to cooperate, and we collected significant intelligence. They did not want to hear that. They were not willing to acknowledge what we learned. They could only see the case as an example of a single effect of Obama’s new policy, an effect they viewed like this: Now a terrorist could get arrested and be treated like a criminal defendant—be allowed to tell the federal government, Screw you, I don’t want to talk.
Democratic congressman Adam Schiff, a former U.S. attorney from California—and now the chairman of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence—was one of the few members of Congress who asked to have a real conversation with me, one on one, about interrogation. He said, I’m really interested in this concept of the HIG, tell me about it. He wanted to know what works, what doesn’t, how he could help. Was he doing that because he had been told to support the president’s agenda? Or was he legitimately interested in finding a mode of interrogation that was guided by the Constitution and the rule of law? I got the sense that he was legitimately interested in national security. I was looking for friends. I took them where I found them.
The pitch of rhetoric around the interrogation of terrorist suspects—and about the HIG—rose higher through 2010 and into 2011, as the House flipped and the Tea Party moved Republicans even further to the right. I was constantly appearing on the Hill and elsewhere around town, arguing that a constitutionally consistent approach to interrogation works. Sometimes you’ll get a guy who decides not to talk, and in this country we have to respect that. Most suspects who decide not to talk on the day they’re arrested do talk eventually. And rapport building—the relationship-building process of getting to know suspects, breaking down their defenses positively, building trust—gets you higher-quality, better intelligence than scaring the hell out of them or beating them into telling you anything you want to hear to make the beating stop. That’s my position. Always has been and always will be. I’m not throwing a rock at anybody who’s done interrogations differently. But my experience has been that law-enforcement interview techniques produce great volumes of valuable intelligence.
More than half of Congress disagreed, because law-enforcement techniques were not in their political playbook. Mike Rogers, a Republican from Michigan, became chair of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence in January of 2011. He said one of his first priorities as chair was to get rid of the HIG. Rogers was hard to deal with in part because he had once been an FBI agent. He spent about five years in the Chicago field office, where he worked on organized crime—enough time to give him some dog-with-bone opinions.
What I learned, in my appearances on the Hill, was that the goal of every trip up there was survival. There was no convincing anyone of anything. Everyone walks into the room with predrafted talking points and questions. Success is coming out with a sound bite that will advance an agenda. A congressional hearing is not fact-finding. It’s theater. As the witness, you have one goal: Get out alive.
When I wasn’t battling my way through the Capitol building, I was in LX-1 building teams. Teams were organized by target. The HIG charter designated two kinds of targets for our deployments, predesignated and pop-up.
Predesignated targets were the highest of the high-value people. If Osama bin Laden or Anwar al-Awlaki ended up in detention, the HIG would deploy predesignated teams on those people. To create that list of targets, we sent out a survey to the agencies and had knowledgeable people rate each terrorist on a few different scales, such as operational value or intelligence value. We then submitted the list of the top twenty-four to the National Security Council for approval.
Pop-up targets were more common. Anyone anywhere in the intelligence community could nominate a target for a pop-up HIG deployment. Abdulmutallab was a pop-up. Nobody knew who he was before he got on that plane, but then he became the most important person for anyone to talk to. Any person captured who knew a lot about Awlaki, Asiri, or al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula would be a prime pop-up candidate.
Each team had interrogators, analysts, and reports officers. The FBI and the Defense Department provided a lot of these resources. The CIA always provided the fewest. The CIA is the smallest of the intelligence services and is very careful, to the point of reticence, about assigning people and spending money.
We were constantly poring over intelligence traffic to pick up information about high-value targets who had been detained. The Agency held back on this kind of information, too. One notable early failure for the HIG was missing the chance to interrogate a high-level terrorist leader who had been captured and held by Pakistani forces in early 2010. The CIA was allowed to question him, but (as Newsweek reported at the time) the HIG was not. On the Hill, members of Congress grilled me about this lapse: If the HIG is so good, why did you miss this guy? To expose all the details of interagency tension would have been a mistake. Frustrated as I was with my reluctant CIA partners, calling them to account in front of Congress would only have made things worse.
Art Cummings and Director Mueller wanted frequent updates from me about relations with the Agency. I tried and tried to make it work, and finally had to tell them I couldn’t. Mueller said, Okay, I’m coming in. He set up a meeting at Langley with the CIA director, Leon Panetta, and a few of us went and joined them. The seventh-floor conference room was gorgeous: hardwood paneling, a forty-acre table, bottles of water and little mats in front of every chair. And in the middle of the table sat a bowl of fresh raspberries. I had never seen a fresh raspberry in a government office before. Had not known such things could exist in such places. We had no fresh raspberries in the Hoover building. I really wanted to eat one, but I did not eat one. I opened the bottle of water next to my place mat—heard the little whoosh, felt the rush of air on the edges of my fingers. It was fizzy water. These guys knew how to live.
The Agency team came in, including Panetta, whom I’d never met before. He whipped off his suit coat, threw it on a chair, looked sideways at Mueller, and said, Get the hell over here, you son of a bitch! The back-slapping, the questions: How’s that golf game? Do you still suck? How’s Ann? How’s Sylvia? Mueller took his own jacket off, put it on the back of his chair. We all sat down.
Then Mueller leaned back—easy, heavy lidded—and said, All right, what the hell are we gonna do with this thing? What are we gonna do? Panetta said, We’re gonna do it. What do you need? Mueller looked at me: What do you need? I said, Well, sir, I need three analysts and a logistics officer. Panetta said, Fine! Done! Next week.
They moved on to other topics. The whole meeting seemed unnecessary. And in that way it was a lesson. This is how government works. There’s no need to get histrionic and polarized and scream and yell. We all want the same thing. Sometimes we don’t all agree on how to get where we’re going, but if we just sit down and talk, we can figure it out.
A year later, in September, Anwar al-Awlaki was killed by a drone strike in Yemen. The following month, Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab pleaded guilty to all eight charges on which he was indicted, including conspiracy to commit an act of terrorism transcending national boundaries, attempted murder within the special aircraft jurisdiction of the United States, and attempted use of a weapon of mass destruction. At some point, after all the cooperation he provided in all the interrogation sessions, he just shut down. He went back into his shell, and off to Colorado—to ADX Florence, the federal Supermax prison. Five years after that, in 2017, in response to a Freedom of Information Act request from The New York Times, the U.S. government released almost two hundred pages of the 302s of Abdulmutallab’s interrogation. The same ones I’d read in the FBI computer system back when they’d first been filed. The Times story about the documents, by Scott Shane, noted that Abdulmutallab, in his interrogation, had “tried to reconstruct the layout of a training camp, Mr. Awlaki’s house and many other Qaeda buildings. His descriptions were so precise that it is likely they have helped shape targeting decisions in the American drone campaign in Yemen.”
Now, to bring the story forward: During the 2016 campaign, candidate Donald Trump was clear about his views on some traditional hot-button national-security issues, such as the use of torture (he was for it), the prosecution of foreign terrorists in regular criminal courts rather than by military tribunals (he was against it), and the future of the detention facility at Guantánamo (he wanted to keep it open and put more people in it).
For many of us in national-security positions, this was like being dragged back into a part of your past that you did not wish to revisit. We had been through these issues before, fought these battles many times, and over the years found what we believed were the best ways to do the job of keeping America safe. After eight years of finding ways to hold, interrogate, and prosecute terrorists that did not involve sending them to Cuba—eight years of doing these things successfully, with a track record that “enhanced” methods have not matched—we found ourselves having these conversations all over again. And needing to justify our success all over again. And arguing once again that torture, in addition to being wrong, was not necessary—and not even helpful—to the project of collecting the best, most reliable intelligence from subjects. And trying to persuade policy makers once again that confinement for life in maximum-security federal prisons—from which no one has ever escaped—without the possibility of parole was a pretty reliable way to keep terrorists from harming anyone. All the facts were on our side, but I got the distinct feeling that we might lose the arguments this time.
Attorney General Sessions had strong preconceived beliefs about all of these issues. Early in the new administration, George Toscas, the deputy attorney general in the National Security Division, expertly used the ongoing trial of a hard-core al-Qaeda fighter known as Spin Ghul as an example to show why trying a foreign terrorist here in the United States was sometimes the only reasonable course. Ghul was responsible for the deaths of two American servicemen in Afghanistan in 2003. After spending years in a Libyan prison, he was arrested for attacking a police officer on a boat while en route to Italy. The Italians couldn’t prosecute him for anything other than simple assault, and Ghul was likely to be released into the wilds of Western Europe—only a plane ride from the United States. The Italians would never give him to us if they knew he would be sent to Guantánamo—most Western nations did not approve of our use of that facility, or of the jerry-built and controversial legal regime that had grown up around it, and the European Union’s Court of Human Rights would not permit such a transfer. But they would give him to us for federal criminal prosecution. Ghul was tried and convicted in New York and will spend the rest of his days in prison. The attorney general was not impressed.
The issue came to a head a few months later with the case of a detainee in custody overseas—a detainee whose situation, suffice it to say, was parallel to the case of Spin Ghul. The attorney general flat-out refused to allow this detainee into the United States for trial. He seemed not to appreciate that the likely alternative was the detainee’s imminent release from custody.
And he did not just oppose bringing the detainee here—he was volcanically offended that we had even proposed it. This sent Sessions into a mode that I witnessed a number of times: He would grab the arms on his chair and prop himself up a bit higher in his seat. His face would redden. His voice would rise. Then he would stare, not at anyone in particular, but at the table, his eyes darting back and forth, as he berated us for treating terrorists like criminals. For giving constitutional rights to enemy combatants. He was not able to see the work as we saw it: as taking one more terrorist out of circulation.
At a Principals Committee meeting in early 2018, I remember Sessions erupting at Defense Secretary James Mattis over another aspect of the same issue. He tore into Mattis for the Defense Department’s role in detaining terrorists on foreign battlefields and then proposing that those detainees be tried in U.S. courts. Defense was creating problems that Justice had to solve, Sessions declared. Mattis politely answered that he would work on establishing a facility for detaining military combatants in the United States.
Nobody even bothered to point out to the attorney general that the so-called problems he believed Defense created for Justice were in fact an example of how the system was supposed to work: a prime example of two very different departments, with different powers and different techniques, collaborating on their shared mission. No one said this, I think, because everyone understood that such collaboration was no longer valued by the federal government’s most powerful decision makers. Not anymore. This was the new team. Things were going to be different.