In a black site on the other side of the world, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the mastermind of the September 11, 2001, terror attacks, stood naked, hands and feet shackled, glaring at me. His unruly mop of hair and full dark beard had been shorn. With his short stature and his fat belly, KSM, as he had come to be known, looked more like an angry, defiant Buddha than the world’s most wanted terrorist. It was March 2003.

“Call me Mukhtar,” KSM demanded in perfect, easily understood English and with a hint of pride in his voice. Then, in a lecturing tone, he added, “Mukhtar means ‘the Brain.’ I was the amir of the 9/11 attacks.” Amir means “commander” in Arabic.

I told him that I wasn’t there for a confession and that although we were interested in what he had to say about the attacks on 9/11, someone else would go over that with him later. “I’m here,” I said, “to see if you are willing to talk to us about the other attacks you have planned, the ones that haven’t occurred yet.”

KSM smirked and then said, “I’ll think about talking when I get to New York, meet the cowboy, President Bush, and talk to my lawyer.”

It was my turn to smile. “That’s not going to happen,” I said, slowly shaking my head. “You see, you’ve disappeared. As far as anyone knows, you no longer exist. But it doesn’t have to be that way.

“We caught you,” I explained. “You know the brothers are going to find out and adjust themselves,” I continued, using the wording that another top terrorist, Abu Zubaydah, had used about seven months earlier, when he finally started cooperating.

“All we want is information to stop operations,” I said in a neutral tone of voice. “If you talk to us, if you answer our questions, then we will improve your conditions and nothing bad will happen to you. No one will harm you. But if you play games with us, if you jerk us around, then you will make yourself suffer needlessly.”

I paused and said nothing for a minute or so to see if KSM would respond. He did not.

I went on. “No one here wants to hurt you, but we’re not going away and we’re not going to stand by and let more innocent people die. We know you have information we can use to stop operations, and we’re here to get it out of you.”

KSM got a small twinkle in his eyes, nonchalantly picked at hairs on the back of his shackled hands, and stared back at me.

I leaned forward, placed my mouth next to his ear, and said in a low, serious voice, “This is your one opportunity to forever change what happens to you, now and in the future. The offer is on the table until I walk out of this room. After that, you won’t like what happens next.” Then I told him, “We want information to stop operations inside the United States. We want to know who. We want to know where. We want to know when. We know you have people inside the United States. Let’s start there. Who are they and where are they?”

KSM looked up at me defiantly and half smiled. “Soon you will know,” he said, taunting me. “The Brain always has something to think about, but I have nothing for you.”

I looked away, glancing up at the camera through which I knew the others were watching. Then I looked back to him and said, “The next time somebody talks to you, he is going to ask you for information to stop operations inside the United States. He’s going to ask you about the people you have there. How you answer that question is going to determine what happens next.”

I turned and walked out of the room. Our effort to avoid using harsh interrogation methods on KSM, methods the CIA had dubbed “enhanced interrogation techniques,” was abandoned. An hour later he again refused to answer, and things got much worse in KSM’s world.

Thus began my involvement in the interrogation of KSM, the man behind the 9/11 attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon and the crash of United Flight 93. But my story doesn’t start here. It begins about a year earlier.

In early April 2002, I was driving on I-95 just outside of Philadelphia, weaving in and out of heavy afternoon traffic and fussing with a malfunctioning GPS, when my cell phone rang. It was the chief of the department that housed the CIA’s operational psychologists.

“Come back immediately,” he said. He sounded excited. I had been at Langley earlier that day for a meeting.

“I can’t,” I said, trying to sort out what was going on and still stay in my own lane in the heavy traffic. “Why?” At first I thought it might have something to do with the professional services arrangement I had to consult with the CIA. They had put me under contract in August 2001 to help develop new strategies for making assessments of foreign CIA operatives (known as “assets”) in high-risk situations. But by reading between the lines of what the department head was saying, I realized it couldn’t have anything to do with that. He was too excited.

I pressed him, but he wouldn’t give me any more details. He said he couldn’t. He stressed that it was critical that I be back at CIA headquarters early the next afternoon for briefings and planning sessions. “You should be ready to leave the country immediately after the meetings,” he said with an unmistakable undertone of urgency and importance.

This seemed very odd. I had not signed up to be a clandestine operative whose job it was to fly off in the middle of the night. It wasn’t in my contract. I had been hired to be a consultant for the CIA, leveraging my PhD in psychology and my research skills, not my crisis intervention skills or my background as a bomb tech. I thought I’d put unexpected calls to report immediately behind me when I retired from the military eight months previously.

In the car with me were Dr. John Bruce Jessen—a former air force colleague of mine—and the CIA operational psychologist who handled my contract. We were on our way to Philadelphia to ask Dr. Martin Seligman, a renowned psychologist, if he would be a guest speaker at a U.S. Air Force–sponsored conference in San Diego that summer. The conference was for operational psychologists who worked with U.S. and allied military services providing Survival, Evasion, Resistance, and Escape (SERE) training for members at high risk of capture. SERE’s focus was to develop strategies that fighting men and women could use to survive the stress and shock of being held as hostages or POWs, keep their honor intact, and emotionally adjust once they were freed and returned home.

We spent that night in Philadelphia, excited about the prospect of asking Dr. Seligman if he would volunteer to give a talk on “learned optimism” to the hundred or so psychologists and survival trainers slated to gather in San Diego that summer. All thoughts about the call earlier in the day were put aside. Bruce and I discussed the logistics of the summer conference that he had organized and at which we were both scheduled to do presentations. I broached the idea of Bruce leaving the Department of Defense (DOD) and joining me as an independent contractor, an issue I had first raised during a Canadian ice-climbing trip we took the previous December. But Bruce remained noncommittal. He was a senior DOD employee and was hesitant to walk away from the time he had invested toward retirement.

The next morning, we asked Dr. Seligman about addressing our conference and he was gracious enough to accept. By early afternoon my companions and I were back at CIA headquarters in Langley. On arrival Bruce and I immediately were escorted by the department head who had called me the day before into a briefing in the agency’s Counterterrorism Center.

I didn’t know it at the time, but we had been asked to attend because a few months earlier Bruce and I had written a paper describing the resistance to interrogation techniques that terrorists familiar with the “Manchester Manual” were likely to use. The Manchester Manual is a set of how-to instructions for resisting interrogation. It was created from resistance-to-interrogation course materials stolen from U.S. Army Special Forces at Fort Bragg, North Carolina, by Ali Mohammed, a former Egyptian military officer who had immigrated to the United States and enlisted in the U.S. Army Special Forces. It turned out Mohammed was a valuable al-Qa’ida asset, and the information he stole from the U.S. military ended up being widely circulated in multiple languages among Islamic jihadists.

The windowless conference room in the CIA Counterterrorism Center (CTC) was crowded with analysts, operations officers, case officers, physicians, an agency operational psychologist assigned to CTC, and senior CTC personnel. Also present were a group of targeting analysts: people whose specialty was pinpointing the location of terrorists. The place was packed. Some CIA officers sat at the main table, and many more sat or stood crammed against the walls. All were talking, waiting for the meeting to start. I knew few of the people in the room; to me it was a buzzing sea of unfamiliar faces. The room crackled with excitement. I could tell something big had happened.

—

The deputy chief of the CTC, Jose Rodriguez, arrived to chair the meeting. A Puerto Rico–born career member of the clandestine service, Jose was all business. He quickly asked a female officer, who I would later learn worked in CTC’s bin Ladin targeting group, Alec Station, to lay out some ground rules for the meeting. She said the information about to be discussed was highly compartmentalized and could not be released to any organization outside the CIA, including the Department of Defense. Bruce Jessen raised his hand and said that he was a DOD civilian employee. He was politely asked to leave. “No harm, no foul,” he said to me as he got up to go, meaning he wasn’t offended. We had both worked with “need to know” secrets before and were familiar with the routine.

Great start, I thought to myself. Someone in the CIA had invited Bruce to the meeting, and now someone else was inviting him to leave. I had a sinking feeling that I was going to be on my own, without his help. At that point I had known Bruce for fourteen years. We had worked on a lot of top secret projects together. But I was new to the CIA. I was only four months into my contract, and although I had consulted with them in the past, I wasn’t part of their culture.

One or two others left as well: CIA employees, I guessed, who apparently did not have the right security clearance or were not necessary for the meeting. Later, I found out that some left to complete arrangements for the interrogation team’s departure.

Everyone looked at his or her shoes for a bit as Bruce and the others gathered their things and departed. Once the door shut behind them, we were told that a prominent al-Qa’ida operative called Abu Zubaydah had just been captured in a raid in Pakistan. He had been severely wounded, and we were told he might not survive. Another CIA officer quickly walked us through a remarkable sequence of events that had culminated in Abu Zubaydah’s capture. The briefer explained that to date Abu Zubaydah was the highest-ranking operative working with al-Qa’ida ever taken into U.S. custody. She said that it was believed that he would personally know many Al-Qa’ida members because of his role in training jihadists, forging identity documents, and arranging clandestine travel. As a result, it was widely believed that Abu Zubaydah might also be aware of al-Qa’ida’s plans for follow-on attacks on the United States. Because he ran training camps for Islamic jihadists, someone said, there was a good possibility that he had been trained to resist interrogation. Months later Abu Zubaydah would tell me that he not only had studied resistance to interrogation, he had taught it in his training camp.

A physician briefed us on Abu Zubaydah’s medical condition. CIA lawyers briefed us about a “presidential finding” that authorized the CIA to capture, detain, and interrogate people like Abu Zubaydah. During this meeting, I heard for the first of many times that “the gloves are off” and that the CIA had to do everything that was legally possible to prevent another catastrophic terror attack. Both the fear of a second wave of attacks and the pressure from the president and Congress to stop them were palpable in the room.

It was obvious that several planning meetings had taken place since Abu Zubaydah’s capture. The CTC’s leaders were in the finishing stages of putting together an interrogation team that would be dispatched later that night. To my surprise, I was asked to deploy with that team. I was told that my role was to observe Abu Zubaydah’s interrogations and identify resistance techniques he might be using to prevent interrogators from obtaining actionable intelligence that might prevent the next attack. I also was asked to help the team brainstorm possible countermeasures if that became necessary, using my resistance-to-interrogation background to get him to cooperate. I was told to “think outside the box.”

Although such a mission wasn’t part of my contract, this didn’t seem like an odd request to me. They were asking me to do something I had done many times before. I had spent thousands of hours in resistance-to-interrogation training laboratories monitoring warfighters as they attempted to protect secrets both before and after training in specialized techniques to thwart interrogations. I had received basic and advanced resistance-to-interrogation training myself. And I had worked to identify resistance techniques employed by nuclear bomber aircrews and counterterrorist units in readiness exercises that realistically tested their ability to protect secrets.

Nor was I a stranger to real-world psychological profiling. Among other things, I had worked as a psychologist on a hostage negotiation team, with real-world experience profiling and predicting the behavior of armed barricaded subjects and suicidal individuals. Also, my background on the bomb squad had taught me to get inside the minds of those planting improvised explosive devices to get a better feel for their goals in using the devices and likely triggering mechanisms. Both provide invaluable insight into the way the device is likely to function. I’d helped the Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC) chief psychologist develop strategies for the psychological profiling of war criminals and terrorists and developed techniques for profiling and predicting the behavior during rescue of hostages wired into improvised explosive devices.

Being asked to tell CIA interrogators which resistance-to-interrogation techniques Abu Zubaydah was using didn’t seem like an unusual request. My career had been full of unusual requests.

It was made clear to me that decisions regarding what would be done during interrogations were the responsibility of the senior CIA officer serving as chief of base (COB) at a secret location that they referred to as “the black site.” It was during this meeting that I also heard that CIA intended to videotape the Abu Zubaydah interrogations. Their rationale at the time was that he was critically wounded, weak, and hard to understand. They were concerned that he might die before the team could figure out what he was trying to say. If he died, they wanted to be able to show that the agency didn’t cause his demise. No one there could have imagined how much controversy the decision to videotape would cause.

After the meeting broke up, I received a more in-depth briefing on Abu Zubaydah from Jennifer Matthews, the primary CIA officer who had been targeting and tracking him. She was joined by several of her coworkers. They took me into a smaller conference room and showed me colorful link charts and graphs while going into detail about what was known about Abu Zubaydah’s background, jihadist activities, and known associates. It was a massive data dump, like being fed from a fire hose. Jennifer was excited and talked fast. She said that at that point, a little more than six months after the attacks of 9/11, very little was known about al-Qa’ida. Her eyes flashed when she stressed that Abu Zubaydah represented the intelligence community’s first solid chance to gain insight into the inner workings of al-Qa’ida’s hierarchy and operational plans. She said that obtaining actionable intelligence from him was critical to preventing the follow-up terrorist attacks that were expected to occur on U.S. soil at any time. She said there were indications that the next attack might involve chemical, biological, or nuclear devices, resulting in catastrophic loss of innocent life. (Tragically, Jennifer and eight others would be killed by an al-Qa’ida suicide bomber in Khost, Afghanistan, in December 2009.)

The afternoon progressed, evening arrived, and the time to leave for the black site was getting close. I was in a bind. Although the decision to ask me to be part of the interrogation team had been debated and resolved before I arrived at CIA headquarters that afternoon, it was new information to me. I had left my home outside Fort Bragg, North Carolina, a couple of days before, expecting to be gone overnight. The only clothing I had with me was the suit I was wearing and the jeans and polo shirt I had worn driving up. Now I was being asked to leave the country for who knows where or how long with a crumpled suit, one change of clothes, and a pair of operationally worthless dress shoes. To complicate matters, my contract with the CIA did not cover what they were asking me to do. Both had to be remedied that night before departure.

The early evening was spent negotiating a new contract. Because of time constraints, it was written in ballpoint ink on the front side of a single sheet of yellow legal paper. After some back-and-forth with the contracting office to iron out details, we agreed on terms and I was finally free to scramble hurriedly through a nearby shopping center in Tyson’s Corner to buy a suitcase, work shoes, and a few clothes for the trip.

The expectation was that I would be gone for two weeks. I called my wife and told her I was going on an unexpected trip. My wife was used to my leaving on a moment’s notice at all hours of the day and night for unpredictable amounts of time. She took it in stride. At that time, we had been married thirty-two years. Over the course of that time, I had been on a bomb squad and often had been called away to work on emergencies involving explosive devices or dropped into aircraft crashes to disarm dangerous missiles and bombs in the remote Alaskan wilderness. I had been on a hostage negotiation team and had been called out to work on barricaded gunmen and attempted suicides. As a psychologist, I had worked in acute psychiatric emergencies, with sudden calls to deal with everything from mass shootings to homicidal psychiatric patients. And in the last phase of my air force career, I had been an operational psychologist, part of an air force special operations unit.

I couldn’t tell Kathy where I was going, but she was used to that as well. And I couldn’t tell her how I was traveling or when I would be able to contact her again. I told her I would be home in a couple of weeks and would call if I could. But I never did call during that deployment. I couldn’t. I wasn’t allowed to contact her. Every few weeks a CIA officer from agency headquarters would ring to let her know I was still alive and healthy. I did not see home again for several months.

—

I wasn’t told where we were going until we were in the air. There was lots of time to sit and think. I thought about 9/11 and how I got involved with the CIA. Between 1998 and early 2000, I’d done several briefings for the agency’s operational psychologists and officers on a variety of topics, but I had never expressed any interest in working for the agency.

Then, in May 2001, I was mowing the side yard of the house my wife and I were renting in a lakeside community near Fort Bragg. My wife stuck her head out the front door and shouted at me. I couldn’t hear her over the noise of the mower, and so I shut it down.

“There is a guy on the phone from the CIA. He wants to talk to you about your job interview.”

I walked over, brushing the dirt and grass clippings off my pants. “What job interview? I don’t have an application in with the CIA,” I said.

She looked at me and shrugged, then passed me the cordless phone.

Curious, I answered. “Hi, it’s Jim.”

“Dr. Mitchell,” said the man on the other end of the line. “I’m calling to set up the travel arrangements for your job interview. Do you prefer to fly or drive?”

“I’m a little confused. I didn’t apply for a job at CIA.”

“I have a request to make travel arrangements for your job interview. Are you saying you don’t want to come?”

“No, no,” I said. “Let’s make the arrangements.”

We did. On the day before my appointment, I drove up to the DC area and stayed overnight in the hotel he booked for me. The next day I found my way through security and into a remote parking lot. I was parked about as far from the building as you could be and remain inside the fence. It was raining hard, and I didn’t have an umbrella. When I got inside the main building I was a wet mess. I wandered around until I found the room designated on my paperwork. Since I had not expected to hike a half mile in the rain and then wander around in a maze with confusing room numbers to get to where I needed to be, I was about fifteen minutes late.

When I entered the room, there was a panel of five or six people sitting at a long table facing a single chair. I introduced myself and sat down, apologizing for being late. They said it was understandable given the weather, and we made a little small talk about my drive up. Eventually the man in the center of the group asked me, “What made you apply for a job at the CIA?”

“I didn’t apply for a job.”

“You don’t want to work for the CIA? You didn’t put in a job application?”

“No. I never approached you guys. I’m going to get out of the air force in a few months and I want to do some contracting, but I want to start my own business.”

“Then why did you come?”

“Good question,” I said. “You guys called me, and I was curious about why you did that.”

The guy in the middle looked at me, seemingly confused, and then slowly turned his head to look at a surprisingly tall dark-haired man sitting to his right. “This is your doing,” he said. It was a declaration, not a question.

There’s a little nod of the head from the tall man. The man in the middle stands, looks at a woman to his left, and says, “We’re not needed here.” All but two of the people at the table gather their pens and legal pads and leave.

“Let’s go down to the cafeteria and get a cup of coffee,” the big guy says, “and we’ll tell you why you’re here.”

He wanted to offer me a job as chief of a research branch in the department that housed the operational psychologists. He told me a little about it. I said the job sounded interesting but I didn’t want to be a government employee. I couldn’t imagine living in the DC area, and I really wanted to start my own business. He was gracious about it. We talked for a while longer, and he told me one of his best officers had recommended that he offer me the job because we had known each other for almost two decades. “Look,” he said, “call me when you are out of the air force. We’re going to bring somebody in for that job you just turned down. I’ll hook you up with him. We will need subcontractors.”

In late August 2001, I returned to the CIA, met with the man who took the job originally offered to me, and agreed to do some subcontracting for them completely unrelated to SERE training. My intention was to have a small personal services contract with the CIA and pick and choose among interesting projects. Little did I realize how the decision to take that contract would derail my life.

On the morning of 9/11 I was home working on a report for a different client. My neighbor, a retired Green Beret sergeant major, called: “A plane just hit the World Trade Center. There’s a big fire. It’s on TV right now.”

I hung up, switched on the set in the living room, and watched. American Airlines Flight 11 had already crashed into the North Tower, and flames were boiling out of the windows and out of the gaping hole the plane had torn in the side of the building. I thought there was no way a plane could get that far off course by accident.

Within moments of that thought, the second passenger jet, United Airlines Flight 175, slammed into the South Tower. My heart sank. I felt a tremendous sadness for the loss of life. I watched people jump to their death rather than burn alive. I heard comments about the number of people falling out of the sky. I watched as the building collapsed and people fled the dust cloud, covered with ash. News broke that a third plane, American Airlines Flight 77, had slammed into the Pentagon and a fourth, United Flight 93, had crashed into a field near Shanksville, Pennsylvania. It felt like we were in a running street battle, blindsided by an enemy trying to destroy our way of life. I thought, What’s next?

I sat for a while on the floor in my living room, staring blankly at the TV as images of death and destruction and chaos flitted across the screen. I vacillated between profound sadness for the suffering of the victims of the attacks and a blood fever that made me want to get up right then, find the cowards who had ordered this, and fix it so that they could never do it again. I thought about driving to ground zero to volunteer. I thought about asking the air force to take me out of inactive reserves.

Instead, I called my contact at the CIA. As soon as he picked up his phone I said, “I want to be part of the solution.” No small talk. No salutations. No greeting.

“You will be,” he said. “We’ll all have to be part of it. It’s the only way our nation will survive this.”

Now, six months later, sitting on a private chartered jet speeding along at forty-five thousand feet toward the black site, I thought this might be the way I could help. I had not asked to be here, but now that I was, I was all in.

I sat next to the Counterterrorism Center operational psychologist. Big guy. Ruddy-faced. He told me he was against my coming along as part of the team, but one of the CTC lawyers had recommended to Alec Station, the CTC unit responsible for targeting al-Qa’ida, that I be included and his objection had been brushed aside. He made it clear that he would be making all the decisions and that any recommendations concerning the psychological aspects of the interrogation would be coming from him. I’d learned a long time earlier not to be offended by this sort of posturing. It frequently went away when you got on the ground and started working.

The operational psychologist told me that our task on the way over was to rough out a design for the cell where Abu Zubaydah was to be held. We were told that because of his importance as a potential source of intelligence and the severity of his injury, the cell had to be lit twenty-four hours a day. Closed circuit TV cameras were also required. We wanted Abu Zubaydah to be focused on the interrogators and the cell not to be a source of distracting stimulation, and so we recommended that they paint it white. Speakers were needed so that music could be played, mostly as sound masking for security reasons because the guards were situated just outside the door, but also, if ordered, as an irritant to wear on him if he chose not to cooperate. The finished product looked like a jail cell in an American cowboy movie, a big white jail cell with black steel bars and a steel bar door across the front.

The First Few Weeks

Shortly after arriving at the black site on the other side of the world, we met with CIA officers who had been dealing with Abu Zubaydah since he had arrived there from Pakistan and two FBI special agents. One FBI agent was an Arabic-speaking Shia Muslim named Ali Soufan; the other was a fit, red-haired, more senior special agent who spoke with a New England accent. I name Soufan here only because in the ensuing dozen years he has spoken frequently and publicly about the several months he spent there.

By the time we got to the black site, Abu Zubaydah’s identity had been confirmed definitively. Abu Zubaydah had almost died after being shot in an exchange of automatic-weapons fire on the roof of the building where he was captured. A doctor from Johns Hopkins who flew over with us saved his life and stabilized his condition.

For the first couple of weeks Abu Zubaydah was in the hospital, drifting in and out of consciousness. To convince his captors that he was worth saving, he gave up one or two tidbits that turned out to be valuable. He told me years later that he thought the American government knew or eventually would find out what he told the CIA and FBI interrogators while he was in the hospital. His gambit paid off.

While Abu Zubaydah was hospitalized, my day consisted of morning meetings with the rest of the team to discuss the intelligence requirements: the questions the CIA wanted answered. The CIA and FBI interrogators would lay out their game plan for the day, outlining which topics they were going to try to cover and how they were going to approach doing it. In the beginning, Abu Zubaydah was responsive for only a few minutes every now and then throughout the day, and the interrogators spent most of the day in his hospital room waiting for the opportunity to talk with him.

Once our morning meeting broke up, the operational psychologist and I would return to the black site and check on the progress of building the cell where he would be moved if and when his health permitted. Then we would come back, watch videotapes of Abu Zubaydah being questioned, and participate in what the military calls a “hot wash” of how the interrogations went that day. After that we would discuss what information, if any, had been obtained. Finally, we reviewed any new messages that had come in from headquarters during the day. In the beginning twelve-hour days were common, stretching out to sixteen- to eighteen-hour days after Abu Zubaydah was moved from the hospital to the black site.

I didn’t mind the long hours. I really didn’t like where the operational psychologist and I were assigned to stay during the initial two weeks and tried to avoid being in my room. That room was large, made of stone, with almost no furniture except a sad bed and a shabby dresser that wobbled and lurched whenever I tried to pull out a broken drawer. My bathroom, also all stone, was outfitted with leaky mismatched fixtures from another century. There was no shower, and the bottom of the giant stone tub was V-shaped, making it impossible for me to stand up. Being in my room was like camping out in a mausoleum. There was actually an echo. I could hear it when I kicked off my shoes. Other than that it was okay.

Abu Zubaydah said he was grateful that the CIA saved his life and then progressively became less responsive to questions. He played the FBI and CIA interrogators off one another. He said, “I’ll tell you anything,” and then told them almost nothing of consequence, just enough to keep them expecting the mother lode at any moment.

When Abu Zubaydah was medically stable, he was moved to the black site. While working long shifts there, I sometimes slept on one of the two cots where the security guards had their monitors stationed just outside his cell. The interrogation team had moved our billets to be closer to the black site. My new room was an oasis compared with the last place, but I spent only a few hours there. It was very primitive, with no electronics, but was pleasant and restful. Best of all, it had a working shower.

I can’t tell you how many people there were at the black site. The CIA is funny about numbers, but as has been partially reported elsewhere, there were two FBI special agents and more than a handful of CIA officers. (One of the CIA officers was the chief of base. He also interrogated Abu Zubaydah. The second CIA officer who interrogated Abu Zubaydah was an expert in the Reid technique of law enforcement interrogations.) There were also computer and communications geeks, analysts, targeters, subject matter experts, many, many agency police officers to act as security guards, two psychologists (counting me), nurses, and a physician.

After Abu Zubaydah was transferred to his cell, the typical day went something like this. We would meet in the morning to review intelligence requirements and go over e-mail and cable traffic from headquarters. The interrogators would review the plans for their sessions, the physician would go over Abu Zubaydah’s medical condition, and then the COB would go around the room and anyone who had any issues to bring up could discuss them. Interrogations sometimes ran around the clock, with interrogators being switched while Abu Zubaydah remained awake. Care was taken to make sure he didn’t get so sleepy that his ability to attend to and understand questions was thrown off. Everyone knew that anyone could stop an interrogation at any time for safety reasons.

After an interrogation was over, the interrogator would debrief those of us who were around, and I would give my observations about resistance strategies I observed Abu Zubaydah using and provide an estimate of how successful he had been in that endeavor. The physicians would talk about how the session affected Abu Zubaydah’s medical condition, and the analysts and targeters would give a rough estimate of how useful or actionable the information obtained from him in that session was. Abu Zubaydah’s medical care took precedence over other activities, and the physician and nurses carefully monitored his condition. The CIA and FBI sometimes interrogated together and sometimes worked separately. How many interrogations there were a day depended on the medical care Abu Zubaydah required and how the interrogators were working that day.

Early on during Abu Zubaydah’s detention at the first black site, while his leg wound was still healing, his physicians wanted him to sit most of the day to keep the weight off it. We provided him with one of the dozen or so identical heavy plastic patio chairs we used for seating at the black site. At some point, out of meanness, boredom, or contempt, he began breaking them.

The first time Abu Zubaydah broke a chair, we were willing to write it off as a defect in the product. The chair’s legs were splayed, and the plastic was so weakened where the legs attached to the seat bottom that it would no longer support its own weight. But the guards were suspicious; they said they had seen him bouncing up and down just before the chair collapsed.

The chair was replaced with an identical one, and Abu Zubaydah broke it within a day. It took several hours, but he put the time and effort into it, and this time he didn’t try to hide what he was doing. He bounced up and down until the legs splayed and the chair collapsed and he fell out onto the floor. The COB asked him not to do that anymore.

The guards replaced the second broken chair with a third, and it met the same fate. The guards replaced it with a fourth, and he started bouncing up and down on that one. Abu Zubaydah seemed intent on breaking every chair the guards put in his cell.

My job at the time was to consult on the psychological aspects of Abu Zubaydah’s detention and interrogation, and so the COB asked me to come up with something that would stop him from breaking the chairs. He was concerned that Abu Zubaydah might hurt himself on the concrete floor when one of the chairs collapsed and he went sprawling.

Because Abu Zubaydah seemed intent on making a contest out of breaking the chairs, I knew asking him to stop would be more of a reward than a deterrent. Instead, I recommended using what in psychology is called a paradoxical intervention. The idea, based on the notion that people do things for a reason, is to prescribe more of the behavior you are trying to eliminate. It’s sometimes called reverse psychology.

I reasoned that for the intervention to work, we needed Abu Zubaydah to believe that we had so many plastic patio chairs that we weren’t bothered when he broke them. I had the guards collect all the identical patio chairs we had on-site, but that wasn’t enough, and so we had fifteen chairs identical to ours brought to the black site. When we added the new ones to the ones we already had, we ended up with two stacks of identical chairs, both reaching from the floor to the high ceiling.

The guards waited until the next time Abu Zubaydah started bouncing up and down in his chair. They then wordlessly carried in the two huge stacks of chairs and placed them within his sight line just outside his cell door, prepositioning the chairs so that they would be handy the next time a broken one needed to be replaced. The guards turned and left without even looking in Abu Zubaydah’s direction. He stopped bouncing up and down in his chair. His eyes traveled up the two stacks of chairs from floor to ceiling and back down again. He covered his mouth with his hands and shook his head. The chair breaking stopped and never started again.

—

Two weeks after Abu Zubaydah was moved to the black site, the operational psychologist left and was replaced by another who stayed with the team throughout.

A rift between the CIA interrogators and Soufan started to form early on. The more senior red-haired FBI agent was well liked and worked well with the CIA team, but Soufan did not. The CIA officers and FBI agents at the black site seemed to have different agendas. The CIA officers were focused exclusively on obtaining actionable information to stop potential upcoming terror attacks. In contrast, the FBI, especially Soufan, seemed interested in obtaining a confession of wrongdoing and building a criminal case. Soufan seemed more interested in following his own line of questioning than on focusing on intelligence requirements coming from CIA headquarters.

Shortly after I initially arrived, one of the CIA officers who had been there all along took me aside and told me about a puzzling interaction he had witnessed involving Ali Soufan. He told me that Soufan walked over to where Abu Zubaydah lay drifting in and out of consciousness in the back of a vehicle, briefly looked at the detainee, and then told those present, “This man is not Abu Zubaydah. I am an expert on Abu Zubaydah. I have studied Abu Zubaydah. I know Abu Zubaydah, and this man is not him.” The CIA officer said that shortly after that Abu Zubaydah identified himself to the FBI agents and Soufan acted as if he thought all along it was him. Soufan’s confusion can be explained by the fact that, as we later learned, Abu Zubaydah had recently undergone plastic surgery to conceal his identity. This became significant later on.

One of the many misleading impressions that have been left with the public is that in the early days of Abu Zubaydah’s detention, he gave up treasure troves of information solely as the result of bonding with the FBI team and establishing rapport with them. But he didn’t. Otherwise the CIA never would have changed tactics. Abu Zubaydah made it clear that he was unwilling to cooperate in any significant manner in the hospital. After transfer to the black site he was subjected to sleep deprivation, nudity, loud noise, and dietary manipulation, which, though approved by CIA headquarters and not as harsh as the techniques that would be authorized later by the Department of Justice, were rougher than traditional law enforcement interrogation methods. Abu Zubaydah’s early disclosures to CIA and FBI interrogators of threats against the United States occurred during exposure to the harsher tactics.

A good illustration of the early combined use of rapport plus harsh tactics such as sleep deprivation was Abu Zubaydah’s identification of an al-Qa’ida operative who wanted to set off a “dirty bomb”—an improvised explosive device laced with radiological material—in a major U.S. city. Abu Zubaydah sent the operative, who turned out to be José Padilla, to KSM to “join others on the ground” inside the United States. The so-called dirty bomber was captured in May 2002 entering the United States with $5,000 in cash and instructions from KSM to blow up apartment buildings in Chicago’s financial district during rush hour. The idea was to rent an apartment, seal the air leaks, fill it with natural gas, and then remotely detonate it, raining fire and falling debris on innocent people trying to get to work. Here is the real story of how José Padilla was identified.

After he was moved from the hospital, Abu Zubaydah realized that he wasn’t going to die. Watching the interrogations, I could see the change in his resistance posture. His initial willingness to provide answers, even vague ones consisting of one or two words, began to fade, and he started using a variety of resistance techniques to protect information.

After consultation with CIA headquarters, the team started depriving Abu Zubaydah of sleep to weaken his resistance and resolve. We questioned him around the clock with both FBI and CIA interrogators working in tag teams. This went on for about three days.

—

By then Abu Zubaydah was nodding off and slurring his words. We wanted him tired but not incapacitated, and so he was allowed to sleep for three hours. That way he could focus better on questions and his answers wouldn’t be compromised. After that, except for catnaps that were too short for quality sleep, he was kept awake and questioned for two more days.

Late at night on the fourth or fifth day of Abu Zubaydah’s disrupted sleep, the redheaded FBI agent was questioning him again about potential attacks in the United States. I was monitoring that interrogation, and it seemed possible to me that Abu Zubaydah was approaching some kind of tipping point, a time when his sleepiness would shift his priority from protecting information to obtaining rest. He was mumbling about fragments of dreams concerning people who wanted to attack America. He said they were intruding, flitting in and out of his waking thoughts, but he was too tired to make sense of it. From the bits and pieces of what he said, he seemed to be struggling, searching for some way to reconcile his overwhelming need for sleep with his desire to keep faith with what he believed Allah and his radical Islamist ideology demanded of him.

The FBI agent noticed it too and stepped out of the cell to consult with me. We focused on figuring out a way for Abu Zubaydah to reconcile the conflict he was experiencing between his obligation to protect jihadi brothers still on the loose and his urge to give up some information because of his biological need for sleep.

As a psychologist, I knew that when asked a question we focus our attention on those things we know that would answer that question. We can’t help it. Even if we choose not to say it out loud, the answer flits through our minds and is reflected in our physiological responses. The FBI agent had been asking Abu Zubaydah about potential attacks in the United States, and so I knew Abu Zubaydah’s attention had been channeled to the things that he believed were a real threat to American lives. I thought perhaps it was this threat information that was flitting in and out of his thoughts, leaking out as dream fragments during bursts of microsleep and maybe causing him to try on the idea of talking about what he had on his mind in order to get some rest.

The FBI agent and I figured that if we could find a way to get Abu Zubaydah to think it was okay to tell us about those intrusive thoughts and dream fragments, there was a good possibility he would reveal some threat information.

Fortunately, in earlier interrogations, the FBI agent had been trying to establish rapport with Abu Zubaydah by saying he was thinking of marrying a Muslim girl and converting to Islam. We reasoned that we could use this as a way forward. Abu Zubaydah was comfortable discussing Islamic beliefs with the agent. He was also tired and extremely suggestible. We wanted to use that suggestibility but not plant false information, and so we had to be careful about our next steps. We had to get him to tell us what was on his mind without asking leading questions that could plant false memories.

Together, we hit on the idea of Abu Zubaydah praying the Istikharah, an Islamic prayer asking Allah for guidance when a person is confused or unable to choose between conflicting alternatives. Traditionally it is believed that Allah answers this prayer and provides correct guidance through a dream or an idea that comes to the person immediately upon waking.

Therefore, we decided to try to reframe Abu Zubaydah’s intrusive dream fragments as a sign that Allah might be trying to communicate with him through dreams and images as he nodded off during questioning. We didn’t care whether he believed this or simply used it as a face-saving device that would allow him to give us information and get some sleep.

The FBI special agent did an amazing job. He went back into the cell and, playing off something Abu Zubaydah said, brought up the idea of the Istikharah as if it were a spontaneous part of the conversation. The FBI agent asked Abu Zubaydah what he thought about the possibility that Allah might be trying to provide guidance to him by way of the dream fragments that kept intruding into his sleepy thoughts.

Abu Zubaydah seized on the idea and said that he had been seeing a fleeting image of an American who wanted to do dirty bombs in the United States but was too tired to remember much about it. Abu Zubaydah said he needed several hours of sleep before he would be able to tell the FBI agent about this person. The FBI agent and I had discussed this before he went in. We knew that if our tactic worked, we were going to have to let Abu Zubaydah sleep, but we didn’t want to let him sleep so long that the effects of sleep deprivation fully wore off.

I remembered the story of Ernest Shackleton, a British explorer who had saved his men after his ship, the Endurance, had been crushed in Antarctic pack ice. At one point while crossing the glaciered, avalanche-prone mountains of South Georgia Island his men became too exhausted to continue. He lied to them to save their lives. Shackleton ordered a brief rest, let them fall asleep for five minutes, and then woke them and told them they had slept a half hour. After that they climbed down the mountains to the Stromness whaling station and safety. I suggested that we use the same ruse on Abu Zubaydah. He had no way to tell time and could not know how long we let him sleep.

When Abu Zubaydah said he wanted to pray the Istikharah, the FBI agent got a commitment from him to discuss his dreams when he woke up and then told him we were going to let him sleep for four hours.

But we didn’t. We woke him up after only two hours and gave him time to pray, eat, and complete a medical checkup. This was the routine when he had been allowed to sleep uninterruptedly, and we thought following it would help us pull off the deception.

FBI agents and CIA officers then questioned Abu Zubaydah. He started by telling us how he had prayed the Istikharah and had received guidance to tell us about two brothers he had sent to KSM. He then told us he had sent two operatives, Abu Ameriki and Abu Jamaki, to KSM to join the others KSM already had on the ground in the United States. Abu Zubaydah said he sent the brothers to KSM because they were “too hot” to attack America and were driving him crazy with talk about dirty bombs. He said the brothers were so insistent that he thought they might compromise his security and draw the attention of the Pakistani authorities.

He said that he didn’t think Abu Ameriki could pull off a dirty bomb attack. It wasn’t practical, he said; the radiological material would be too hard to find, and Abu Ameriki wasn’t smart enough to build a dirty bomb. I got the impression that Abu Zubaydah thought Abu Ameriki was the brains of the outfit and the other one, Abu Jamaki, was his sidekick. Abu Zubaydah said he thought KSM probably would use them for some other kind of terror attack because he was always working on some way to attack America.

Abu Zubaydah claimed he didn’t know Abu Ameriki and Abu Jamaki’s real names, how they were traveling, or anything else that would help us capture them, something that turned out to be untrue. I recognized what he was doing at the time as an effort to “hide in the truth,” a favorite technique employed by high-value detainees in which they give up vague, technically truthful information while trying to hold back details that would make what they told you actionable.

An intelligence report based on Abu Zubaydah’s threat information was released almost immediately. Fortunately, a CIA officer in Pakistan recalled a report of a possible illegal traveler regarding a man who matched Abu Ameriki’s description. Ten days earlier, two men, José Padilla and Binyan Muhammad, had been traveling together, trying to leave Pakistan. Muhammad’s passport was fake, and he was detained by Pakistani authorities, but Padilla had a valid American passport and was allowed to leave.

The importance of the suspicious traveler alert was recognized by the CIA officer in Pakistan because of the intelligence report that came out of our black site. The suspicious traveler report contained Abu Ameriki’s true name, José Padilla, and the intelligence report said Abu Zubaydah had sent someone matching his description to KSM to use for attacks in the United States. Clearly it was important to find Padilla and stop him. Neither report would have been sufficient alone. This example illustrates how analysts and targeters work together to put vague, seemingly unrelated information together and make it actionable, in this case resulting in the arrest of Padilla before he could kill innocent Americans.

FBI Agent Soufan has claimed multiple times in the press and before Congress that FBI agents acting alone using only rapport-building interrogation techniques obtained the information that led to the capture of José Padilla and derailed a potentially catastrophic terror attack on U.S. soil. But in truth it was a team effort. If I were passing out a most valuable player award, it wouldn’t go to Soufan but to the red-haired FBI agent who initially made the breakthrough with Abu Zubaydah that night. At the same time, you can’t discount the role of sleep deprivation in weakening Abu Zubaydah’s resolve and shifting his priorities from protecting information to getting some rest. The initial breakthrough happened after 126 hours of sleep deprivation during around-the-clock interrogations conducted over a little more than five and a half days. That is hardly “rapport only” interrogation.

—

As the month of June approached, Abu Zubaydah’s health got better and his attitude got worse. He became less forthcoming and more arrogant, sometimes sullen and withdrawn and sometimes taunting.

Most of the time, Abu Zubaydah carried himself with the dignity and grace of a caged cat, similar to the way Star Wars fans might imagine a Jedi Knight would carry himself if held captive by his enemies. However, when the mood to be petulant struck, he would drop the noble-warrior facade and a crude thug would emerge. At times, Abu Zubaydah could be unbelievably contemptuous of his CIA and FBI interrogators. The two FBI agents were questioning him once about al-Qa’ida’s efforts to acquire radioactive material to build an improvised nuclear bomb. Abu Zubaydah appeared disengaged from the conversation and looked lost in thought, waiting for them to shut up and go away. At one point, while they were pressing him to be more specific about past conversations with al-Qa’ida operatives seeking nuclear weapons, he leaned forward as if he were about to say something important. The FBI agents leaned in. Abu Zubaydah then let loose a long, noisy, wet-sounding fart while looking them straight in the eye. From the looks of disgust on the faces of the FBI agents as we watched them on closed circuit TV, it must have smelled exceptionally foul. As the sound of the fart faded, Abu Zubaydah said, “Now, that’s nuclear,” and laughed uproariously as the FBI agents awkwardly tried to go back to questioning him.

It was clear that our prospects of getting the actionable intelligence we needed were fading. Talk of using more coercive interrogation methods increased at CIA headquarters, as did talk of the FBI leaving the black site. Soufan said he was uncomfortable about some of the nontraditional interrogation techniques already in use. His superior, the redheaded FBI special agent, was less so, as he indicated to the FBI inspector general (IG) a couple years later when asked during the Justice Department IG investigation into FBI participation in detainee interrogations. The CIA made it clear that it was in charge and did not want to wait around to see if Abu Zubaydah would suddenly become talkative in response to FBI relationship-building efforts. After a while, the FBI decided to try some new tactics.

Two incidents happened involving the FBI that in my opinion shut down Abu Zubaydah completely and hastened the CIA’s decision to use more coercive pressures on him. The first was when the FBI agents, frustrated with Abu Zubaydah’s continued resistance, decided to go Sipowicz, as they referred to it. Andy Sipowicz was a character from NYPD Blue, a TV cop show, known for his angry and aggressive interrogation style. The FBI agents reasoned that they had built up enough rapport with Abu Zubaydah that if they suddenly displayed a lot of anger, Abu Zubaydah might fear the loss of their relationship and provide more information. Early in the session, one of the agents called Abu Zubaydah a “son of a bitch.” The phrase was used the way we do in the West to refer to someone who makes us angry, but that was not how Abu Zubaydah took it. He translated it literally, thinking that the FBI agent had called his mother a dog. Dogs are considered vile and filthy in Arab culture. Abu Zubaydah had a close and loving relationship with his mother. When he heard the slur, he became angry, stopped talking, and refused to make eye contact. The FBI agents persisted at trying to get him to engage and eventually out of frustration called him a “motherfucker.” There was dead silence for a dozen heartbeats. Then Abu Zubaydah shut down and completely disengaged. The session was a total failure.

The second incident occurred when, in a desperate attempt to repair the damage done during the Sipowicz debacle, the FBI agents tried to sell Abu Zubaydah on the idea of working for them. The notion of trying that tactic had been discussed before, but they had been told by the CIA personnel in charge not to do it. That didn’t stop the FBI. Shortly after the FBI agents had been told not to “pitch” Abu Zubaydah (the term of art for trying to recruit someone to be a double agent), the CIA operational psychologist and I were watching the two FBI agents try to question an unresponsive Abu Zubaydah when, in a sort of tag-team approach, they began to offer him incentives for working with them. They started out by saying, “America remembers her friends,” and went on to imply that in exchange for his cooperation, they could arrange for the U.S. government to take care of his mother and pay him. I say “imply” because they never stated this directly, though the meaning was clear. They even suggested they could bring him candy and Pepsi and improve his confinement conditions. Abu Zubaydah listened and then leaned back in his chair and said: “What makes you think I would abandon Allah for money or Pepsi?” He told them he was done with them and put his hand on his crotch and said they should “go home and have babies.” After that he refused to answer questions from any of the interrogators.

The FBI agents made one last effort to get Abu Zubaydah to talk to them again. That session ended with one of the FBI agents lying on the floor outside of his cell, holding Abu Zubaydah’s hand and pleading with him to talk to them, and the other inside trying to smooth things over. Abu Zubaydah was sitting in his chair, leaning back, his hand on his crotch, acting like an indifferent urban street thug, ignoring their pleas.

During this time, Soufan became more argumentative at meetings and was quick to show his anger. One day while a CIA operational psychologist and I were watching Abu Zubaydah on closed circuit TV monitors between interrogations, Soufan came into the room where we were. We were sitting on cots with our backs against the wall. Soufan approached, screaming at me. He said he wanted to arrest me. It was apparent he blamed me for the increasing friction between him and CIA personnel at the black site. I have no idea what triggered the outburst. I sat there for a while listening, thinking he just needed to vent. He told me I was the source of all his problems because the CIA was listening to me, not to him.

To me this sounded ridiculous. The black site was run by a CIA officer called the chief of base (COB) who reported to the chief of the CIA’s Counterterrorism Center, who in turn took orders from the senior leadership of the CIA. I had zero decision-making power. My activities were controlled by the COB.

I reminded Soufan that I was just a consultant and told him I wasn’t the person making decisions. When I suggested that he talk to the COB about his complaints, Soufan loomed over where I was sitting and threatened to hit me. I stood up in case he tried. As I stood, our faces were inches apart and he started bouncing his chest off mine, yelling threats.

Although Soufan is about fifteen years younger than I am, I said: “Ali, you may be an FBI agent, but if you hit me I’m going to knock you on your ass.”

It was then that the operational psychologist, still sitting, eyes the size of saucers, spoke up in a calm, commanding voice that didn’t quite match the look of incredulity on his face. He told Soufan to calm down, insisted that I wasn’t the source of his problems, and told me to disengage.

Maybe it was because he realized there was a witness to his outburst, but Soufan immediately backed off and apologized for threatening me. “I’m Arab,” he said, “hot-blooded and quick to show my emotions.”

After he left the room, the psychologist and I discussed how unrealistically angry Soufan was at me. The psychologist told me to watch myself and not provoke him. I went upstairs and reported the incident to the COB. It was then I found out that Soufan was leaving the site. His FBI colleague stayed for several more weeks.

I thought it would be the last I would ever hear of Ali Soufan. Unfortunately, I was wrong.