Abu Zubaydah simply wasn’t talking. Before he shut down, he had at least engaged with the interrogators. True, he employed a variety of resistance techniques to protect the things he wanted to keep secret: he hedged, feigned forgetfulness, answered questions with questions, glossed over critical facts, and provided superficial details while trying to sidestep the specifics that would make the information actionable. But by engaging, Abu Zubaydah occasionally revealed a piece of information that CIA analysts and targeters could combine with other intelligence to make it actionable. But after the run-in with the FBI agents, he completely disengaged. The FBI’s efforts to bribe him into cooperating made matters worse.
CIA targeters and analysts were sure he had information he was holding back that could save lives. I was asked by Jose Rodriguez, who by that time had been elevated to chief of the CIA Counterterrorism Center, to accompany other senior members of the interrogation team back to the United States to attend a meeting at Langley. The agenda was to discuss Abu Zubaydah’s interrogation thus far and what could be done to get him not only talking again but providing fuller and more complete answers than he had provided before.
The meeting started with physicians providing a medical update. The discussion then went around the room as the senior operations officer who served as COB at the black site, analysts, targeters, and an agency criminal investigator all provided their assessments of the successes and failures of the first few months of Abu Zubaydah’s interrogation. CIA analysts contrasted the information gotten from Abu Zubaydah with threat updates from elsewhere, emphasizing credible intelligence that suggested that another wave of catastrophic attacks was imminent.
It was clear to me from discussions I had been part of and from comments I’d overheard that CIA officers and agency lawyers had been thinking for some months about getting rough, if necessary, to stop future attacks. The lawyers said that the president, using his constitutional authority, had directed that al-Qa’ida operatives in CIA custody be treated as unlawful combatants rather than prisoners of war (POWs), a designation that at that time meant al-Qa’ida terrorists did not qualify for the protections of the Third Geneva Convention. I understood that because of this they were considering using coercive physical pressure on high-value detainees who were withholding information if they were convinced a detainee had information that could save lives. Officers were being asked to think outside the box. I had been asked to do that myself several times.
In the climate of fear after 9/11 and with near certainty among intelligence experts that follow-on terror attacks by radical jihadists were imminent, CIA officers were encouraged by political leaders to do everything and anything that was legal, to take it right up to the line of what was lawful if necessary to get actionable intelligence. I realized as I sat and listened that CIA officers were going to use physical coercion to interrogate Abu Zubaydah; it was just a question of which techniques they decided to use.
Eventually it was my turn to make comments and answer questions. Jose asked me to discuss some of the resistance-to-interrogation ploys I’d seen Abu Zubaydah use, such as hedging, distracting with less important or dead-end topics, glossing over critical facts, and providing vague, superficial details. I also emphasized his success at turning the interrogators against one another. It’s called “splitting” in psychology and is similar to the way crafty teenagers play parents against each other.
Abu Zubaydah was manipulating each interrogator to believe that he had a special relationship with the terrorist and that he would finally deliver the mother lode if the interrogator could just cut the others out of the picture.
I believe his splitting technique was especially effective on Soufan, who made several pitches early on to be the primary interrogator of Abu Zubaydah. He told me and the operational psychologist who replaced the first one, “There is only one interrogator you need to question Abu Zubaydah. It is Ali Soufan, Ali Soufan, Ali Soufan.” Meanwhile, Abu Zubaydah led him on with tidbits implying he was about to deliver the goods but instead provided information that was vague, superficial, and nonactionable.
I also outlined the way Abu Zubaydah would distract interrogators by providing hours of details on some terror operative who, when interrogators asked where Abu Zubaydah thought he might be, would turn out to be long dead, killed fighting during the jihad against the Soviets in Afghanistan decades before. He did the same thing with terror plots. He would spend hours going into detail, only to acknowledge that the plot in question was against the Soviets or other targets decades back. He also would willingly provide vague details of past successful plots against U.S. targets of interest and the jihadi brothers killed in them. These were not things that would allow CIA officers to stop upcoming attacks but things that suggested he might have been part of a conspiracy and could be useful during prosecution. This was something that would meet Soufan’s goals but not the CIA’s.
Since I was certain the CIA intended to use physical coercion, I suggested that if they were going to go down that path, they should consider using a clearly defined set of some of the harsh techniques employed by U.S. military SERE schools. I knew these techniques had been used for over five decades without significant injuries to train warfighters to protect secrets. I had been subjected to them myself, I had used them to train others, and I had researched the injury rates associated with them when I helped the Air Force Survival School revise its approach to resistance training after the first Gulf War.
As a psychologist with a strong background in emotionally demanding resistance to interrogation training, I knew things could escalate quickly and get out of hand if interrogators were allowed to make stuff up on the fly. In my opinion, the techniques the CIA used, whatever they were, needed to be carefully controlled and monitored to prevent “abusive drift,” a term Bruce and I used to describe the tendency for the intensity of physical coercion to escalate in the absence of careful supervision by noninvolved observers. That was why I thought it important that whatever was done be clearly laid out and authorized.
I think in retrospect that the troublesome things done later on by the few officers who did go outside approved guidelines illustrates how bad it could have been throughout the CIA’s interrogation program without a carefully crafted list of techniques approved by the Department of Justice and closely monitored during implementation.
In the highly volatile atmosphere in the months after 9/11, with the ongoing fear of another catastrophic attack looming and the clamor to do anything it took to prevent it, the decision to adopt specific procedures that became known as enhanced interrogation techniques (EITs) was the right one. Although they were unpleasant, their use protected detainees from being subjected to unproven and perhaps harsher techniques made up on the fly that could have been much worse.
One false claim subsequently made by my critics and critics of the CIA’s interrogation program is that I somehow manipulated the CIA into adopting coercive techniques to the exclusion of other measures. The claim asserts that if it had not been for me, the CIA would have used traditional rapport-based law enforcement approaches to interrogate detainees rather than coercion.
That is simply not true. CIA officers had been using a rapport-based approach with Abu Zubaydah, and it clearly wasn’t working. They had already decided to get rough. The question was how that would be achieved.
At the meeting, I described some of the SERE techniques that eventually were adopted.
Jose asked how long I thought it would take to know whether a detainee exposed to those techniques would be willing to cooperate or would “take his secrets to the grave.” I told him thirty days. In my mind that was the upper limit. I fully expected that it would take a lot less time than that for hard-case high-value detainees initially intent on withholding information to begin engaging with interrogators and debriefers in ways that allowed a switch to non-EIT, social influence–based approaches. Social influence tactics are defined as noncoercive techniques, devices, procedures, and manipulations a person or a group can use to change the thoughts, feelings, and actions of another individual or group. That’s an academic definition. It may be simpler to think of social influence techniques as ways we can interact with others to influence what they think, feel, and do.
In that meeting I described some of the harsh techniques that were in use for SERE training, but the topic of waterboarding did not come up. In fact, I didn’t think of waterboarding until later that night back in my hotel room. I was mulling over the different SERE techniques, making a short list of the ones I thought were most effective, when it dawned on me that I had left waterboarding, the most effective SERE technique I knew of, off the list I had discussed with Rodriguez earlier that day.
As senior SERE psychologists, Bruce Jessen and I had spent several years trying to get the Navy SERE School to abandon its use of waterboarding not because it didn’t work but because we thought it was too effective. One hundred percent of the warfighters exposed to it in training capitulated even if it cost them their jobs. In my view, waterboarding students did the enemy’s job for them. The point of resistance training is to teach students that they can protect secrets, but my personal experience interviewing POWs and warfighters who had been waterboarded at the Navy SERE School was that after waterboarding they didn’t believe they could protect secrets anymore. I told Jose about waterboarding at a meeting the next day.
A day or so later Rodriguez asked me if I would help put together an interrogation program using EITs. I told him I would, thinking I would remain in the role I had occupied during the first few months, pointing out resistance techniques employed by the detainees and advising on the psychological aspects of interrogation. But that was not what he had in mind. Jose not only wanted me to help them craft the program, he wanted me to conduct the interrogations using EITs myself.
I was surprised. And reluctant. I knew that if I agreed, my life as I knew it would be over. I would never again be able to work as a psychologist. Hesitantly, I said, “I can help you find somebody—” But then one of Jose’s colleagues cut me off, saying, “Knowing all you know about the threat, if you’re not willing to help, how can we ask someone else?”
My mind flashed to the victims of 9/11, to the “falling man” who chose to dive headfirst off the Twin Towers rather than burn to death, and to the passengers of United Flight 93 who bravely sacrificed their lives to save the lives of other Americans. I thought, if they can sacrifice their lives, I can do this. I didn’t want to, but I would.
Thus, I agreed. “But,” I said, “I can’t do it by myself. I need someone more familiar with the techniques than I am.” Rodriguez said, “Who do you need?” I said, “Bruce Jessen.” He was on board by the end of the next week.
Back in my room that night I had trouble sleeping. The magnitude of what I had agreed to do for Rodriguez was gnawing at me. In the stillness of my hotel room with nothing to distract me, two things were pulling at the edge of my thoughts, keeping me awake: Could I do it and should I do it?
Could I do it? I ran a mental checklist of experiences that prepared me to do what they were asking and concluded that I could, especially with Bruce’s help.
Rodriguez wasn’t asking me to do law enforcement interrogations. They had tried that already and it wasn’t working, and I knew they were going to have a CIA law enforcement interrogation expert deployed with us. By this time, I’d watched him and the two FBI agents conduct hundreds of interrogations.
I also knew that they were going to get rough with Abu Zubaydah whether I helped or not.
No, my question concerned my qualifications to put together a psychologically based interrogation program that would condition Abu Zubaydah to cooperate and my ability to interrogate him using it. I knew it would have to be based on what is called Pavlovian classical conditioning (more on this later), and I was very familiar with that because my early training was as a behavioral psychologist. I had used Pavlovian conditioning many, many times to help people overcome fear and anxiety. I thought about how to use it for what Rodriguez was asking me to do.
Then I ran through a mental checklist of other things that prepared me for this assignment. At that time, I had thirteen years of experience with resistance-to-interrogation training, but that wasn’t all.
I had undergone both basic and advanced resistance-to-interrogation training myself. I had experienced all the enhanced measures I eventually recommended except for waterboarding. (I experienced that before we waterboarded Abu Zubaydah.) Also, I had been taught to use enhanced measures and had applied them in training situations.
In those thirteen years I spent over fourteen thousand hours monitoring the psychological reactions of warfighters attempting to withhold information during interrogation laboratory exercises that employed enhanced measures. The behavioral and emotional responses of both instructors and students during those exercises could be unpredictable.
I had observed hundreds of survival instructors and DOD interrogators apply enhanced measures. My job was to note what went wrong, what caused those problems, and what could be done to prevent similar outcomes in the future. A big component of that was to monitor and directly intervene to prevent escalating abusive drift in the brutality of enhanced measures that could lead to increased risk of lasting mental or physical harm among students.
I had watched thousands of trained and untrained people try to lie or use sophisticated resistance techniques to protect information under conditions that involved the use of the same coercive psychological and physical pressures I had proposed that the CIA consider. I had monitored people trying to be deceptive before they were trained to resist and then watched the same people apply what they had learned after resistance training.
I had observed a select set of the special-mission warfighters who were interrogated several times over a period of years. In this setting, part of my job was to help put together interrogation plans that were as realistic as possible and used enhanced measures to challenge the will to resist in people who were too cocky or strengthen the will to resist in those who were overwhelmed without producing lasting mental or physical harm.
I conducted in excess of 215 post–resistance-to-interrogation training psychological debriefs for groups ranging from ten to one hundred twenty people, discussing their psychological reactions to captivity and interrogation using enhanced measures.
I worked to develop strategies for resisting sexual exploitation and media exploitation as an interrogation tool. I developed resistance-to-interrogation strategies for women. I spearheaded a survival school program to increase the realism of training while reducing the risk of physical and mental harm.
I studied the types and rates of injuries associated with using enhanced measures, and in the course of that work I identified which measures had the desired effect while reducing the risk of lasting mental or physical harm.
I worked with a survival school commander who was an ex-POW to conduct interrogation and exploitation activities during an air force mission readiness test in which aircrews tasked with flying nuclear weapons were captured and interrogated in a nontraining environment to evaluate the effectiveness of their resistance training.
I had studied and written and lectured on the social influence and self-persuasion mechanisms that turn ordinary people into terrorists, on the psychological aspects of interrogation and resistance to interrogation, and on the use of coercive psychological and physical pressures during interrogations and resistance-to-interrogation training.
Equally important, as a psychologist with a PhD in clinical psychology and decades of experience dealing with people during my training and as a professional, I knew how to establish rapport and ask questions. That’s what psychologists do. It is the core skill they acquire.
Moreover, I had extensive experience questioning hostile, deceptive subjects for suitability for continued duty assessments, security evaluations, psychological profiling, sanity evaluations, and forensic assessments for individuals who had committed a variety of criminal offenses, including murder, sexual assault, kidnapping, and child sexual assault. I had conducted psychological autopsies. All of which I was trained to do with the appropriate course work and supervision.
In addition, I was a trained and experienced bomb tech (explosive ordnance disposal technician) who learned investigative procedures in school and applied them in working incidents involving explosive devices.
Finally, I was a law enforcement–trained and experienced hostage/crisis negotiator who had handled barricaded gunmen and numerous suicidal individuals and de-escalated combative and delusional people.
I was not your typical mental health–focused psychologist. Some at the CIA knew this. In fact, the agency would later tell Congress in a classified report talking about me and Bruce, “We believe their expertise was so unique that we would have been derelict had we not sought them out when it became clear that CIA would be heading into the uncharted territory of the program.”
Okay, I thought. I could do it. The next question was, Should I do it?
For some people, I know the answer would have been no. I respect that. But as I lay there that night and thought, I decided I had a duty to use what I knew to protect American citizens and our way of life. I was told that another deadly attack could occur at any moment, possibly involving a nuclear device or chemical or biological agents. I concluded that conducting coercive interrogations on a small number of Islamic terrorists who were actively withholding information that could disrupt a potentially catastrophic attack was justified as long as those methods were lawful, authorized, and carefully monitored. I dismissed the notion, later put forward by some, that it was somehow unfair or unethical to put the lives of thousands of innocent Americans ahead of the interests of a handful of Islamic terrorists who not only had made the personal decision to attack us and continued to try to mount terror attacks but also had continued deliberately to withhold information that could stop attacks and save lives. Instead, I concluded that it would be immoral and unethical to ignore my obligation to use what I knew to defend our citizens and our way of life against enemies who themselves had initiated the conflict and whose stated goal was to destroy us.
In the end I decided I should do it. This wouldn’t be the last time I had to examine the ethics and morality of what I was being asked to do.
Less than a week after the CTC had decided to move ahead with efforts to incorporate SERE interrogation techniques into the CIA’s interrogation program, Jose asked me to accompany him to go see the CIA’s director, George Tenet. That meeting took place in the early evening in Tenet’s wood-paneled office on the seventh floor of agency headquarters. John Rizzo, the CIA’s chief legal advisor, was also there. Rodriguez introduced me and said that I was the person who had agreed to help them put together the CIA’s interrogation program. Tenet and Rizzo greeted me graciously, and we shook hands. Then we all sat down around a coffee table in the front section of the director’s large private office. Floor-to-ceiling windows on one side looked out toward the Potomac River and beyond that to Washington, DC.
It was apparent that both Tenet and Rizzo already had been briefed about what CTC was about to propose. Rodriguez quickly laid out the idea of incorporating the SERE techniques to the director and his chief legal advisor. In his initial remarks, Jose made it clear that he wanted Tenet’s approval before moving ahead, and he then asked me to walk them through a brief description of each technique.
I remember illustrating some of the techniques that were harder to visualize with hand gestures and occasionally getting out of my seat to demonstrate, because that sometimes seemed like the clearest way to get across what was being proposed. Tenet and Rizzo listened intently and asked lots of questions. They were particularly interested in the fact that all the techniques we were discussing had been used on thousands of U.S. military personnel at high risk of capture for fifty-plus years.
As the meeting wound down and it was obvious that Jose was waiting for Tenet to tell him if he should press forward, Tenet stood up from his chair at the coffee table. He made eye contact with Rizzo and motioned with his head for him to follow as he stepped behind a large desk deeper in the room. Tenet began rummaging around in a cigar case and then turned his head away from those of us sitting around the coffee table and in a low voice, probably so that he would not be overheard, told Rizzo, “Make sure this is legal before we do it.” Tenet then stuck the unlit cigar in his mouth, turned toward us, and told Rodriguez to press forward but to be sure the Justice Department was fully on board and considered these steps legal before the techniques actually were employed.
Getting that clearance took a couple of months. What I didn’t know at the time but subsequently learned was that Tenet, Rodriguez, Rizzo, and others also spent that time getting the approval of the White House lawyers; the national security advisor, Condoleezza Rice; and Vice President Cheney. Rice in turn had briefed the president. In his 2011 memoir, Bush wrote that he personally approved the use of the interrogation techniques.
Let me step back. Before I recommended him for the CIA’s interrogation program, Dr. John Bruce Jessen had been a SERE psychologist for eighteen years, first as the chief psychologist at the U.S. Air Force Survival School and then for a longer period as the senior Defense Department SERE psychologist. In those roles he had debriefed and helped repatriate numerous returning hostages and POWs, both civilian and military. He had spent thousands of hours working in the highly volatile resistance-training laboratories both at the basic school and at DOD-level advanced training courses. During that time he had observed literally thousands of people of varied ethnic backgrounds, intellect, and job assignments attempt to be deceptive and hold back intelligence information during the use of enhanced pressures. Not only had he worked as a psychologist monitoring instructors and students, after receiving extensive training he worked as a senior instructor applying the SERE interrogation techniques on which the CIA’s program was to be based. He had attended several intelligence-gathering interrogation courses and was familiar with standard law enforcement interrogation techniques. Over the years, he had consulted with the military special operations, the CIA, and the FBI on a variety of topics. But more than this, he was and remains my friend. He was my climbing partner, and I trusted him with my life. For years not only had we worked together professionally, we had had each other’s back on big scary ice climbs and dangerous mountaineering adventures. To me it was only natural to seek Bruce’s help. He had the one-of-a-kind skills this mission required and was someone in whom I had complete confidence.
Shortly after Bruce was read into the program in June, the two of us were shown to a small cubicle at CIA headquarters and asked to provide a list and short descriptions of how the EITs would be applied. This is a list of the techniques that finally were approved:
• Attention grasp. Grasping the detainee with both hands, with one hand on each side of the collar opening, in a controlled and quick motion. In the same motion as the grasp, the detainee is drawn toward the interrogator.
• Walling. The detainee is pulled forward and then quickly and firmly pushed into a flexible false wall so that his shoulder blades hit the wall. His head and neck are supported with a rolled towel to prevent whiplash.
• Facial hold. The interrogator places an open palm on either side of the detainee’s face with the interrogator’s fingertips kept well way from the detainee’s eyes.
• Facial or insult slap. The interrogator’s fingers are slightly spread apart, and his hand makes contact with the area between the tip of the detainee’s chin and the bottom of the corresponding earlobe.
• Cramped confinement. The detainee is placed in a confined space, typically a small or large box, which is usually dark. Confinement in the smaller space lasts no more than two hours, and in the larger space it lasts for up to eighteen hours.
• Insects. Harmless insects can be placed in the confinement box with the detainee.
• Stress positions. The detainee sits on the floor with his legs extended straight out in front of him and with his arms raised above his head, or kneels on the floor while leaning back at a 45-degree angle.
• Wall standing. The detainee may stand about four to five feet from a wall with his feet spread approximately to shoulder width. His arms are stretched out in front of him, and his fingers rest on the wall to support all of his body weight. The detainee is not allowed to reposition his hands or feet.
• Sleep deprivation. Not to exceed eleven days at a time.
• Waterboard. The detainee is bound to a bench with his feet elevated above his head. The detainee’s head is immobilized, and an interrogator places a cloth over the detainee’s mouth and nose while pouring water onto the cloth in a controlled manner. Airflow is restricted for twenty to forty seconds, and the technique produces the sensation of drowning and suffocation.
The list we provided the CIA was only a partial list of the coercive techniques used at that time in DOD SERE training. Two techniques that we recommended against using and that thus never made the list that the CIA sought approvals for were “manhandling” and “smoking.” In manhandling, a towel is rolled up and placed like a cervical collar around the neck. The person then is pulled forward until he is on his tiptoes and violently shaken back and forth in a figure-eight pattern. A review of SERE-related injuries that I conducted when the U.S. Air Force was updating its resistance-to-interrogation training after the first Gulf War revealed that manhandling resulted in lower-back and whiplash injuries to the neck that could keep pilots from flying for weeks. As for smoking, the navy has two SERE schools and smoking was used by the one that didn’t use waterboarding. It was used on students who were too cocky. The technique consisted of blowing smoke in a student’s face until the student became nauseous, capitulated by providing information, and changed his attitude.
As we were drawing up the list, I spoke to CTC lawyers about the possibility of using a particular non–physically coercive technique. It involved using a confederate to trick a detainee into believing the confederate was being waterboarded because that person refused to answer, when in fact the confederate wasn’t really being waterboarded. It just looked and sounded that way from the flailing legs and gurgling noises the collaborator was coached to make. This method has been used effectively in advanced resistance-to-interrogation training to get warfighters to give up protected information even when doing so might cost them the jobs they are applying for. It required that no actual physical coercion be used, but the lawyers told me this probably would violate the torture conventions because the detainee being questioned was led to believe that a fellow Islamic terrorist was in danger of imminent harm.
I thought it odd at the time and even odder today. We were being told we might get permission to actually waterboard a detainee—to use physical coercion for refusal to answer questions—but we couldn’t trick that detainee into answering questions by using only his sense of responsibility for another detainee’s harsh treatment even though no harsh treatment was being used.
I think it would have worked. Here’s why. Years later, I got Abu Zubaydah to act as a confederate to get another senior al-Qa’ida operative, Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri, to clean his cell. In a fit of rage, al-Nashiri had trashed it with his own urine and fecal matter. Abu Zubaydah agreed to go in with me and pretend I was making him clean up al-Nashiri’s mess. I sat al-Nashiri in a chair with a clear view of the mess he had made. I then told him that since he was too good to clean up his own mess, someone else would pay for his arrogance and he could just sit there and watch. I brought Abu Zubaydah in and put him to work with a mop and bucket. Up to that point al-Nashiri was unaware that he was being held at the same black site as Abu Zubaydah. Al-Nashiri immediately recognized Abu Zubaydah (that says something about how well known Abu Zubaydah was among al-Qa’ida operatives). Al-Nashiri leaped to his feet and frantically insisted that Abu Zubaydah was a very important man and that he couldn’t stand the idea of such a high-ranking person being forced to clean up a mess for which he was not responsible. Al-Nashiri grabbed the cleaning tools from Abu Zubaydah and did the cleaning himself.
Fake waterboarding was not the only non–physically coercive technique ruled out by the lawyers because of concerns about what the detainees would think was going on even if what they believed was happening wasn’t really happening at all. For example, we were told that we couldn’t lead a detainee to believe that we were preparing to move him to a federal prison where he would be put in the general population with people who were likely to harm him even if it wasn’t true. Again, it was the detainee’s belief about being in danger of imminent harm that was the sticking point.
Bruce and I recommended the techniques we did because we were familiar with them and thought they would lend themselves to a Pavlovian process to condition compliance. We knew we needed a lot more experience with the waterboard. We decided to use the time waiting for DOJ approval to get familiar enough to use it safely or determine that we should recommend against its use. We knew we would have a physician on hand while we were getting familiar with waterboarding, the chance to work out emergency procedures, and the opportunity to practice the procedure before actually using it. We made up our minds that we were both going to experience it before we waterboarded Abu Zubaydah.
After we compiled the list, the CIA’s operational psychologists were asked to perform due diligence, independent of us, to be sure the techniques were unlikely to result in severe or prolonged mental harm. I was told that they called the DOD agency that oversees all the military SERE schools and learned that the techniques being considered had indeed been used safely for more than fifty years.
One common misconception is that the descriptions of EITs we provided were intended to be exactly the same as those used in the basic resistance-to-interrogation training that took place in U.S. military SERE schools. That was not the case. Instead, we based our descriptions on how they were employed in the DOD-level advanced resistance-to-interrogation exercises used to train warfighters who already had been trained to protect secrets at the basic SERE schools. (We had been told that senior high-value al-Qa’ida detainees might have been trained to resist interrogation and thought that we would need to use advanced techniques to break through their defenses.) This advanced training still falls under the SERE umbrella but is far more realistic and in-depth than are the basic courses. It focuses more on protecting secrets than the basic courses do. It’s like getting a master’s degree in protecting secrets. It is often used as part of the selection process by military units with clandestine missions. Not passing the advanced course by failing to protect secrets often kept otherwise war-ready candidates with years of military experience who were on the short list for assignment from being selected for specialized units with top secret missions.
Shortly after handing in the list, Bruce and I were deployed to the black site to await further instructions. We used the time to practice and get ready in case approvals were granted. We received briefings from medical personnel about the kinds of medical emergencies that might occur during the use of EITs. We practiced emergency procedures until all the members of the team understood where they were supposed to be during an emergency and what they were supposed to do. We refreshed our familiarity with the techniques, especially waterboarding, and practiced, practiced, practiced. CIA operations officers and analysts would be upstairs while Bruce and I would be downstairs with the guards practicing each step in the process, from prisoner handling to what to do in case a detainee got violent, to the actual use of EITs. In this period we received in-depth briefings on Abu Zubaydah and al-Qa’ida from subject matter experts on scene. We also reviewed intelligence requirements. Targeters and analysts told us which threats we should focus on first and how they thought we could best fill in the blanks. In addition, our Arab linguist briefed us on important cultural and religious factors. Finally, the CIA criminal investigator who had been deployed to advise us on law enforcement interrogation techniques went over the various methods of employing them with us.
We also observed Abu Zubaydah every day. In recent years some people have alleged that we couldn’t have been all that concerned about what information Abu Zubaydah had in his head since there was a gap in his interrogation. That is not true at all. But since he had shut down and because we were instructed by CIA headquarters to wait for legal and policy authorization, at the black site our hands were tied.
Meanwhile, psychologists back at headquarters had completed a psychological profile of our high-value detainee, and so we reviewed that. We read his very extensive diaries. We tried to find out as much as we could about Abu Zubaydah. Fortunately for us, we had the CIA’s vast resources to draw on. We also had the tapes of the earlier interrogations conducted by the CIA and FBI. We reviewed the resistance techniques Abu Zubaydah used and identified his poker “tells,” or body language that would tip us off to when he was telling the truth and when he was being deceitful. We saw how the wording of different questions aroused his suspicions or put him at ease. I had observed most, if not all, of the interrogations of Abu Zubaydah in real time, but it was helpful to review some of the more important ones with Bruce. Counting all the previous interrogations by the FBI and CIA, I had observed and participated in the debriefing of hundreds of Abu Zubaydah’s interrogations. I had observed the CIA’s direct questioning approach, the FBI’s rapport-building approach, the CIA law enforcement expert’s use of the nine-step Reid technique of interrogation, and a combination of these approaches used with the coercive pressures that were authorized at the time.
In early August 2002, once the Department of Justice and the White House had approved the use of EITs, the enhanced interrogation of Abu Zubaydah began. The FBI had left the black site by then. The team on-site consisted of the chief of base; a handful of operations officers; several analysts and targeters; a reports officer; medical personnel, including a physician; an operational psychologist (with a PhD in clinical psychology who was charged with monitoring the mental health of both Abu Zubaydah and the interrogators); an Arab translator (at least two people on-site spoke Arabic, but Abu Zubaydah had lived in the United States and spoke excellent English); a lot of guards; and a subject matter expert on law enforcement interrogations. And, of course, me and Bruce.
The COB informed us that the Justice Department had reviewed the proposed list of EITs and determined that the CIA could lawfully apply ten of them in Abu Zubaydah’s interrogations. The COB reviewed a cable summarizing the legal approvals. The cable from CIA headquarters gave explicit guidance on the use of the EITs on Abu Zubaydah and then the go-ahead to start.
The whole team discussed how the interrogation would unfold, including when and if EITs would be introduced. We were all still hoping they wouldn’t be necessary. There was a chance of that since Abu Zubaydah had been in relative isolation for a while and might have decided to cooperate. When put in isolation, he had been left a crayon (for his safety and ours, as opposed to leaving a pen or pencil) and paper. He was instructed to pass a note to the guards when he had something to communicate. He never used the crayon. But we still wanted a fair assessment of his resistance posture before possibly introducing physically coercive measures.
Bruce and I had benefited from hours of in-depth briefings from the analysts and targeters on scene and from reading finished intelligence reports focusing on Abu Zubaydah, but we were not professional analysts and never believed or implied that we were skilled enough to evaluate the intelligence value of the things he or any other detainee reported. That wasn’t our job, and we were the wrong people to do it. On-site were some of the CIA’s most skilled career analysts and targeters, subject matter experts who had followed Abu Zubaydah’s activities and had access to intelligence materials that we did not have. Not only that, they were plugged into the CIA’s and other government agencies’ massive intelligence databases and could search inside them and quickly retrieve information to aid in the interrogations. Bruce and I were not the right people to evaluate how actionable what he told us was.
Our job was to get Abu Zubaydah talking again, ask the questions the analysts and targeters wanted us to ask, and then, when he began to cooperate a little, transition to having the right subject matter experts conduct their own debriefings while we sat in to monitor the way he interacted with them. It was their job, often with the real-time help of analysts at headquarters, to evaluate the quality and quantity of the information Abu Zubaydah provided, determine how actionable it was, and keep us informed so that we could adjust our interrogations.
The plan, which was approved by headquarters, became a template for future interrogations using EITs on other senior al-Qa’ida leaders. The interrogation was to start with what we referred to as a “neutral probe.” It was a noncoercive questioning of Abu Zubaydah to assess his willingness to answer questions about potential attacks against the United States. The wording and content of our questions had been worked out with targeters to be sure it covered the topics in which they were most interested. The approach was to be businesslike without coming across as either aggressive or overly friendly.
Because I look more like somebody’s uncle than an interrogator, I was chosen to do the neutral probe. The probe had no set time limit. If Abu Zubaydah was willing to provide information that the analysts and targeters monitoring via closed circuit TV on-site judged useful, the use of EITs would be abandoned or delayed unless and until he started to resist again. If Abu Zubaydah refused to answer questions or used resistance techniques to thwart questioning, the plan was for EITs to be introduced, starting with lesser coercive techniques and ending if necessary with the waterboard. I say “if necessary” because if at any point in the escalation of EITs Abu Zubaydah started answering questions, EITs would be discontinued. This didn’t happen with Abu Zubaydah, but it did later with several other detainees who quickly decided to cooperate after being subjected to only a few of the more benign techniques. Quick compliance became more common after rumors of the harsh tactics began to leak into the press.
Before starting, the team took the time to go over security procedures for the interrogation. Assignments were given to each of the guards, and they were told what to do if Abu Zubaydah attacked me in the cell. During previous interrogations when CIA and FBI interrogators had been in his cell, Abu Zubaydah had been sitting in a chair, feet shackled and hands cuffed in front of him to the cell’s bars. Although he could move his hands up and down the vertical bar and shift his position in the chair to get more comfortable, he was unable to get up and move around. But this time, because we wanted to alert him to a change in tactics, when I entered his cell, he was free to move around with only his feet shackled.
Because we were to be standing in the middle of the cell talking, our staff wanted to be sure that I was protected if things got out of hand. But the guards were instructed not to intervene unless I was really in trouble. Minor contact with me, even if aggressive, shouldn’t trigger a takedown. I could protect myself in the short run. I had practiced karate in the past and learned and used humane takedown procedures while working on staff on locked wards in psychiatric hospitals. I knew that with him shackled, I had more freedom of movement and could cover up and get out of reach. We didn’t want to interrupt the interrogation unless it was absolutely necessary, because we didn’t want Abu Zubaydah to think he could stop interrogations by aggressively acting out. It turned out this precaution was totally unnecessary.
Abu Zubaydah had a still-healing leg wound extending over most of one thigh. We had to be sure we didn’t aggravate it. We reviewed the list of approved EITs with the physician at the black site to determine which ones, if any, could be used on Abu Zubaydah. We also discussed how to reduce the chances of hurting him and what we were to do in case of a medical emergency. We had gone over this before, but it was important that no real harm come to Abu Zubaydah. There was a fully stocked emergency room crash cart stationed behind a curtain just outside his cell, not more than a dozen feet from where the interrogations were to take place.
Finally, the COB made it clear that we needed to err on the side of caution. He said that anyone could stop an ongoing interrogation at any time for any reason. Bruce and I were to stand down immediately if any member of the team raised a concern. We would clear it up later. No interrogation I was involved in, however, was ever stopped unexpectedly. Sometimes someone would send in a note with additional questions to ask, or a request for more details on a topic, and at other times we were given background information that could be incorporated into questioning, but I was never interrupted during any interrogation because of medical or security concerns.
As the time to start the first interrogation approached, the COB; the law enforcement interrogation expert; the physician; the psychologist; a handful of debriefers, report writers, and targeters; and a double handful of security personnel gathered outside Abu Zubaydah’s cell to watch on closed circuit TV.
Interrogations Begin
Abu Zubaydah seemed startled when I walked into his cell. I could tell he was wondering who I was. Although I had been watching him for almost six months, he had never laid eyes on me. He seemed nervous, maybe because he didn’t recognize me or maybe because he wasn’t seated and cuffed to the bars as was typical when someone entered his cell. It was probably both.
As I approached him, he circled the cell like a cat, staying at least an arm’s length away from me, making intense eye contact. He initially glared at me and then softened his gaze when he figured out I wasn’t there to attack him.
From the outside the cell seemed white and bright; it looked very different standing inside it. The lights shining into the cell created a shadow barrier that made peering more than a couple of feet beyond the cell bars almost impossible. I had been in a bad rock band when I was a kid, and the feeling was similar to being on stage trying to look out into the audience. It was also warmer than I had expected. I figured it was because of the lights.
I started by asking him what he would like me to call him. He said, “Zayn.” Then I said, “I understand, Zayn, that you and al-Qa’ida have declared war on the United States. In your diary and your discussions with my friends who questioned you before, you mentioned several different attacks you’d like to see take place in the United States.” I listed the attacks.
He said yes in a matter-of-fact fashion.
I went on, “You even said you would like to see a nuclear bomb set off in the United States. And you talked about sending Abu Ameriki [the nickname he used for José Padilla, an American-born al-Qa’ida operative] to KSM so that he could later join others KSM already had on the ground in the United States and set off a dirty bomb. But you only gave us vague information, held back details about how he was traveling, and claimed you didn’t know his real name. We caught him and know that’s not true. And you talked about other attacks, but each time you gave only vague information, or claimed you didn’t remember important points, or tried to distract us with dead ends and stuff you made up.”
We continued to circle each other in the center of the cell. He was listening intently. I could see he was wondering where I was going with this.
I said, “Washington thinks you are holding back important details that could help us stop operations in the United States and save innocent lives. That’s what we want…information to stop operations inside the United States. We know you don’t have all of it, but you have some of it and Washington thinks you’re deliberately keeping it from us.”
He just looked at me and shrugged. He seemed to be saying, “So what?” with his body language.
“Zayn,” I said, “in every man’s life there are moments of opportunity that open and close. Moments of choice when the decision you make forever changes what happens to you. This is one of those moments. I want to be sure you understand that, because you only have until I walk out of this room to determine what happens next. If you work with us and try to provide full and complete answers, even if you don’t know everything, we will improve your conditions and nothing bad will happen. But if you jerk us around, if you try to hide information or disengage like you did when my friends tried to talk to you, you won’t like what happens next. The decision is yours.”
I then asked him one of the questions the targeters and analysts had developed. He shook his head and said, “I don’t have anything for you.” We continued to circle each other. I don’t know how long this went on, but I gave him ample time to change his answer. I encouraged. I told him I was disappointed. He made a “what did you expect?” face. I asked the same question again in a different way. He indicated that he understood what I wanted. I reiterated that although I knew he might not know everything, he knew something that would help us answer this question, some small detail, a snippet of conversation, something he had overheard or been told at a meeting, travel arrangements he had made, or documents he had forged.
Nothing. I got no response from him. I asked another question. Again he just looked at me blankly. This went on a bit longer, and I realized he was pushing the test button, testing to see if I was bluffing, something that trained resisters do to distinguish real threats from bluffs. I shrugged and said, “It’s your choice. You can stop this anytime. The next time someone comes in to question you, they’re going to ask you this question.” I told him the question and said, “How you answer will determine what happens next.”
Then I think I signaled the guards, and they brought in a large wooden black box. It was about as big as a wooden crate one would need to ship a full-sized American refrigerator, only taller. It was big enough for him to stand in, but if you were claustrophobic, you would not want to be placed in it. Abu Zubaydah stared at it.
Following the headquarters-approved interrogation plan, I told Abu Zubaydah, “This is your new home.” I motioned, and the guards placed him inside.
Abu Zubaydah was given a lidded bucket he could use to go to the bathroom in and sit on if he grew tired of standing. He was left in the box overnight. The box was monitored continuously by medical personnel. While he was in the stand-up box, we built a “walling wall” in his cell. A walling wall is a flexible wooden wall built of quarter-inch plywood with no studs in the middle of its span and a plywood clapper suspended inside. It is intentionally designed to have a lot of give and make a loud noise when someone’s shoulders are bounced off it. It’s disorienting because of the noise and the movement of fluid in the inner ear.
Early the next morning, the guards opened the box, shackled Abu Zubaydah, hooded him, took him out, and placed him against the newly built walling wall. Bruce put the rolled-up towel we used as a safety collar around his neck and pulled him forward into an attention grasp. He then bounced Abu Zubaydah’s shoulders off the walling wall maybe three or four times. Each time it made a big boom. It was like when professional wrestlers throw each other around the ring. The noise is more dramatic than the effect.
After that, Bruce put Abu Zubaydah’s back against the walling wall and slowly pulled off the hood. Bruce then asked him the question I had instructed him to think about at the end of the last session. This is called bridging. It reorients the person being questioned to the last session and signals that you are not going to forget what you were asking him before. It is important to start each new session with the bridging question even if your primary intent in the current session is to ask about other topics. That is the time when detainees who wish to avoid the next EIT session most often begin to answer questions on point. Once they started cooperating, we often would get the most useful information early because the detainees had the opportunity to think about the bridging question between debriefings. Of course, it also gives a detainee time to fabricate a response, but in the beginning we asked questions we already knew the answers to or information that analysts could easily verify on the basis of information they either already had or could readily check.
Years later, Abu Zubaydah reported to the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) that he was initially bounced headfirst off a concrete wall. That did not happen. He didn’t know he was against the flexible walling wall. Because he was hooded when his shoulders were bounced off it, he didn’t know it was there. I think he assumed it was the concrete wall because concrete was what his cell walls were made of when he was put in the box and he hadn’t seen the walling wall yet. The notion that he was rammed headfirst into a concrete wall is an exaggeration. The guards were there to protect Abu Zubaydah from us as much as to protect us from him. The COB, medical personnel, and operational psychologist would have stopped the session immediately and reported us to headquarters if we had done that.
Abu Zubaydah’s answer to the bridging question was vague and meaningless. It was clear that he still wasn’t ready to provide any new information. He continued to claim ignorance or answer with vague generalities with no information value. Therefore, Bruce used a few of the other EITs, such as the facial hold and facial slap and a stress position that wouldn’t irritate Abu Zubaydah’s injury, while asking questions and demanding answers. When Bruce was convinced Abu Zubaydah would not be forthcoming, he ended the session with the same bridging question I had left Zubaydah with at the end of the previous session. Abu Zubaydah was put back in the stand-up box.
Bruce and I then went for a long walk. This would become our habit after sessions using EITs, especially the ones involving waterboarding. We didn’t like using EITs, and we used the walks to think about what we were being asked to do and consider whether we were making the right decision in continuing. I often felt that I was balancing my sense of morality against the cost of innocent lives. Because there was credible intelligence that another wave of catastrophic attacks was imminent, I couldn’t bring myself to soothe my conscience by putting the lives of others at risk. Neither, I think, could Bruce. But we had a line, and we checked every day to be sure we hadn’t crossed it.
Later, after headquarters approved, the decision was made to move on to waterboarding. Although I did not know it at the time, I have since been told that every time there was a significant escalation in interrogation techniques, Washington had to give its okay.
With the exception of the short description the CIA sent to the Justice Department for approval, I have yet to see an accurate depiction of how waterboarding was carried out in this program. I’ve read numerous accounts in the press and seen several videos of journalists being waterboarded, but none of them accurately represented what was done in our program.
Ever since he had been moved from the hospital to the black site, physicians had kept Abu Zubaydah on a diet of mostly red beans and rice. Medical personnel wanted ten hours to pass after a meal before he was waterboarded. They also required us to waterboard him on a full-size hospital gurney, one of the wheeled ones used in surgery suites and emergency rooms. They reasoned that in case of medical emergency, he would already be on a gurney for treatment. It was awkward, but the gurney could be reclined to a 45-degree angle. The guards had practiced lifting the head end of the gurney with a volunteer roughly Abu Zubaydah’s size strapped to it to ensure that Zubaydah’s head could be raised quickly and safely to a vertical position to clear his sinuses after longer pours. It was doable, but it took a lot of people. One guard timed how long the water was poured and counted off the seconds with his fingers. Other guards were positioned at various spots around the gurney for lifting and security.
Bruce poured the water out of a one-liter plastic bottle, and I controlled the duration of the pours by standing at the top by Abu Zubaydah’s head, raising and lowering a black cloth to cover his face. When I lowered the cloth, Bruce was to pour. I would watch the guard count out the seconds. When I raised the cloth, Bruce was to stop immediately. The legal guidance said we could pour water for twenty to forty seconds, allow the person to breathe unimpeded for three or four breaths, and then lower the cloth and pour water for another twenty to forty seconds, and so on, for twenty minutes. That would have been one waterboarding session with multiple applications or pours of water.
However, it quickly became apparent that twenty seconds was too long for the shortest pour. During one of the longer pours, Abu Zubaydah seemed slow to expel the water from his sinuses. After the guards raised him to a vertical position, I waited a couple of heartbeats and then pressed on his chest, and he immediately cleared. Shortly after that, to our surprise, even though more than the recommended ten hours had passed since his last meal, Abu Zubaydah threw up undigested beans and rice. (This prompted medical personnel to switch him to a diet of Ensure.) As they had practiced, the guards immediately raised the gurney so that Abu Zubaydah wouldn’t breathe in any thrown-up food.
It was an ugly sight. Abu Zubaydah had beans and rice stuck to his face and in his chest hair. Because the fluid around his lips was kind of thick, it bubbled as he breathed in and out. We wiped it off with a hood and waited what seemed like a long time to see if medical personnel were going to intervene. When they didn’t (although one stuck his head in the door for a confirming glance) and we were sure Abu Zubaydah was breathing properly, we did one or two more short pours so that he didn’t get the idea that a dramatic display would stop the procedures. Then we took him off the waterboard.
I decided on the spot to shorten the pours. It seemed to me that most of the pours should not be longer than three to ten seconds, with no more than two pours lasting twenty seconds and only one pour lasting forty seconds. I didn’t think it was safe to take full advantage of the length of time Justice Department guidance would have allowed us to pour water on the cloth or to use as much water as was permitted. I reasoned that if the Justice Department approved a pour of twenty seconds, it should not object to ones much shorter than that. When I had the chance, I checked with a CTC attorney, and he agreed.
Critics of the program assert that there was some evil motive behind my shortening the length of time water was poured on the cloth. They assume the end result somehow made the experience rougher on the detainees we waterboarded. But that is not the case. We did not exceed the total number of pours the Office of Legal Counsel’s guidance would have allowed. In addition, by shortening the pours, we actually allowed the detainees to breathe more often and used less water than the OLC required.
It has often been alleged that we waterboarded Abu Zubaydah eighty-three times. This is nonsense. Eighty-three is the number of times Bruce tipped the bottle and poured water. Abu Zubaydah later told the ICRC that he was waterboarded five times. That is closer to the correct number of times he was strapped to the gurney and subjected to the technique.
During the waterboarding session we told Abu Zubaydah that we wanted information to stop operations inside the United States. We wanted to know what the plots were, when they were going to happen, who was involved, and where the attacks were going to occur. We said he could stop what was happening to him immediately if he showed us he was willing to provide information that could help locate the people involved.
We paused at several points during the session when Abu Zubaydah said something. We would listen to what he had to say and then ask, “Is what you’re telling me going to help us stop operations in the United States?”
He would say, “No.”
“I thought not,” one of us would say, and we would go back to waterboarding him.
In that first session, Abu Zubaydah was so panicked that we didn’t think he would provide reliable information on the waterboard. We weren’t expecting him to. The program was not designed to extract information while the EITs were being administered. It wasn’t pour water, demand a confession, pour water, ask a leading question. That was not how it worked. We weren’t looking for a false confession and had to avoid asking him leading questions because we did not want him making up what he thought we wanted to hear.
The waterboard induces fear and panic. It is scary and uncomfortable but not painful. I know because I was waterboarded in July 2002 during practice and preparations for using the waterboard as one of the enhanced interrogation techniques. Both Bruce and I thought it was important that we experience what Abu Zubaydah was going to experience so that we could better assess his reaction. We knew Abu Zubaydah would dread the next session and wanted to plant the idea that there was a clear way to avoid it. He could simply start answering questions before it began. It was like dealing with someone who dreads going to the dentist. Apprehension builds in the hours between waterboard sessions. The closer it gets to the next one, the more he looks for ways to avoid it. We wanted to be sure he understood there was a clear way to stop the next session before it began. Abu Zubaydah’s highest level of apprehension occurred when he was hooded and stood against the walling wall just before the next session started; that was the time he would be most apt to offer useful information he had been withholding. Thus, when the waterboard session ended and before he was left in his cell, we said, “The next time we come back, we are going to ask you this question,” and then we told him the question. We then said, “Take some time, pull yourself together, and think about it. Because if you answer our questions the next time, this won’t happen again.”
This was the pattern. We would do one interrogation session in the morning using EITs without the waterboard and one session in the afternoon with the waterboard. Because of concerns about the next wave of attacks, the early interrogations always started with a focus on attacks inside the United States and for the first few days remained there. But headquarters started sending intelligence requirements that, though still related to attacks on the U.S. homeland, focused on locational information for al-Qa’ida operatives in general, their leadership structure, and their capabilities. We also questioned him about potential overseas attacks on U.S. interests or allies. We showed Abu Zubaydah photographs of terrorists to identify and asked him how he would go about locating those people if he were to escape or be set free.
We started sprinkling these questions into our interrogations. After about seventy-two hours, Abu Zubaydah gradually started answering them, but he did more than that. Over time, where he previously had pleaded ignorance or provided short vague answers lacking detail, he started putting his answers into a larger context, providing background and unsolicited details on the topics we were asking about. He acknowledged knowing very well people he previously had described as mere acquaintances and described his interactions with them beyond the narrow focus of the question, often walking us through conversations he had had with them while providing personal details about their background, relatives, known associates, and training. He started providing fuller and more complete answers about al-Qa’ida’s leadership and structure. Headquarters started sending more and more intelligence requirements that focused on al-Qa’ida’s organizational structure, its key members, their decision-making processes, their operational intent, and their current capabilities.
As Abu Zubaydah began to offer up information that the targeters and analysts on-site judged valuable and wanted more of, we asked for permission to stop using EITs, especially the waterboard. To our surprise, however, headquarters ordered us to continue waterboarding him. None of us at the black site liked hearing this. For several days in a row we questioned the necessity of continuing the EITs, but every day we received cables, phone calls, or e-mails instructing us to continue waterboarding Abu Zubaydah. At one point Bruce and I pushed back hard and threatened to quit. We were told, “He’s turning you; you are not turning him.” The officers we were dealing with—midlevel CTC officials—really pissed us off by saying, “You’ve lost your spines.” They insisted that if we didn’t keep waterboarding Abu Zubaydah and another attack happened in the United States, it would be “your fault.”
Faced with this, we did two things. The COB, our leader at the black site, conveyed our concerns to the chief of station (COS), the CIA officer in charge in the country in which we were stationed. And Bruce and I dialed back the intensity of the EITs we were using.
The COS had been keeping up with developments but wanted a better sense of our concerns. He wanted to observe Abu Zubaydah being waterboarded. When he visited the black site, I recommended that we suit him up in the head-to-toe black garb worn by the guards and have him in the room when we waterboarded Abu Zubaydah. Bruce objected. He pulled me out of the meeting and told me that to him it seemed voyeuristic, unnecessary, and demeaning to Abu Zubaydah’s dignity. I agreed. It was all those things. But I feared that watching Abu Zubaydah being waterboarded on a monitor wouldn’t convey the intensity of it. It was just too sterile, like watching a video game. I thought the COS needed to be in the cell, where he could hear Abu Zubaydah, smell the smells, and feel the spray of water and snot when Abu Zubaydah cleared his sinuses. But I had another, more compelling reason. Because the sessions were being recorded, I wanted somebody important on those tapes with us, especially if they were going to try to force us to continue. Bruce didn’t buy my first argument, but he accepted the second.
After he observed Abu Zubaydah being waterboarded, the COS set up a videoconference with the leadership at the CTC so that we could discuss the issue. Those of us at the black site thought that those at headquarters didn’t have a good idea what waterboarding was really like. They talked about it as if it were some kind of sterile, impersonal procedure. Therefore, to prepare for the conference call, the criminal investigator at the site spliced together a video of what a typical waterboarding session looked like and then added in multiple scenes of Abu Zubaydah clearing water from his sinuses taken from several different sessions.
Jose Rodriguez chaired the videoconference. My take was that he was trying to be an honest arbitrator of the issue. He seemed focused on preventing another attack inside the United States and wanted to do it in the most straightforward way possible. He was being assailed by advocates on both sides of the argument but seemed objective and not locked in on any single approach. We showed the videotape and voiced our opinion that we didn’t need to continue using EITs, especially waterboarding. Not surprisingly, some in the room with Rodriguez objected. One or two objected vigorously. They insisted we continue waterboarding Abu Zubaydah for at least thirty days. That was when it dawned on me that my answer months before to Jose Rodriguez’s question about how long it would take for me to believe a person subjected to EITs “either didn’t have the information or was going to take it to the grave with them” had come back to haunt us. I pointed out that that comment was made before waterboarding was incorporated into the list of potential EITs and didn’t apply anymore. Bruce and I told them we would not continue routinely waterboarding Abu Zubaydah. We asked them to send their “most skeptical” analyst or targeter and some high-ranking person whose honesty and integrity they trusted to observe a waterboarding session and then subsequently question Abu Zubaydah without EITs.
Those of us at the black site believed that if they came and saw in person the kind and quality of information Abu Zubaydah was providing, they would agree that we didn’t need to continue harsh interrogations. For our part, Bruce and I firmly believed that Abu Zubaydah would go beyond just answering their questions and would recognize what they were looking for and volunteer unasked for details and clarifications they might not have thought of.
The videoconference ended with them agreeing to send the people we requested and our obtaining permission to suspend waterboarding Abu Zubaydah until the visitors arrived, at which time we would waterboard him for what Bruce and I agreed between ourselves would be one last time. We didn’t want to waterboard him again, but we believed if we didn’t, we probably would be replaced by other people who would not be as reluctant to use coercion as we were.
The officers we requested from headquarters arrived, headed by a highly respected senior operations officer and accompanied by the person who had been most skeptical about stopping the harsh interrogations in our back-and-forth communication with headquarters and during the videoconference. There were others. I don’t remember all of them, but one was a CTC senior attorney. I was glad to see him.
We waterboarded Abu Zubaydah with them in the cell, unmasked and on camera. It was ugly and hard to do. After it was over, we washed Abu Zubaydah with warm water, cleaned him up, and told him we never wanted to do that again. He cried and promised to work for the CIA. Everyone, even those observing, was tearful.
Later in the day, after Abu Zubaydah had a chance to recover, the senior officer in charge of the visitors and the most skeptical person took turns questioning him. They spent hours with him. They came out seemingly pleased with the information they obtained, saying he was a “treasure trove” of knowledge. They agreed we should stop EITs because the information we could get without them was too important and could be combined with other intelligence and used to stop attacks. They spent several more days questioning Abu Zubaydah, having in-depth conversations with maps and charts and photographs. Then they left.
About a week passed. Abu Zubaydah was answering questions. He was providing information on Ramzi bin al-Shibh, one of KSM’s operatives, who he said was probably in Karachi, Pakistan, working with KSM. Bin al-Shibh was later caught and provided information that helped us capture KSM. Abu Zubaydah was providing fuller and more complete answers to questions about terrorists who could move in and out of the United States with relative ease, such as Jafar al-Tayyar, a U.S. citizen with pilot training who had lived in Florida. During this time, Abu Zubaydah was also providing information that helped lead to the capture of Hassan Ghul, whose information about Usama bin Ladin’s courier helped lead to the location and killing of bin Ladin.
We were told his answers were being verified and more often than not were truthful. Then we received notification that headquarters was considering restarting EITs on him. We were confused. He seemed to be trying to answer our questions, and I hadn’t seen him employ any of the resistance techniques he had used earlier. It seemed obvious that the analysts at headquarters were bothered by something they hadn’t shared with us.
They were. It turned out that when Abu Zubaydah was captured, he had several videotapes in his possession with short scenes of him claiming credit for attacks. Initially they did not tell us about the tapes, perhaps thinking that knowledge of their existence would somehow color our interrogation.
I believe that it was these tapes that were prompting headquarters to reconsider EITs.
Abu Zubaydah needed to clearly and credibly explain the purpose of those tapes. We told him that headquarters was thinking about going back to the “bad times,” which is what he called the harsh interrogations, unless he came clean about why he had made the tapes and what he intended to do with them.
Abu Zubaydah quickly and convincingly explained their origin. He said that he had been captured about two weeks before his planned departure from Pakistan for Iran, where he intended to set up his own jihadi group, which would be like al-Qa’ida. Although he had no problem with al-Qa’ida wanting to attack the United States, what he was most interested in was focusing on attacks against the Jews in Israel. Al-Qa’ida, he said, didn’t seem very interested in that. Abu Zubaydah told us that al-Qa’ida leaders insisted that if you destroyed America, you would “cut the head off the snake.” Not happy with that strategy, he was planning on setting up his own organization so that he could target Israel instead.
The most difficult part of setting up your own terror cell, he explained, was obtaining funding. He claimed to have $500,000 but said that wasn’t going to be enough. For him to raise more money, he reasoned, donors needed to see him in the news claiming credit for terror attacks. At the same time, he knew the United States was hunting him and feared that having his face on TV would make it easier for the Americans to capture him. He then came up with the idea of filming lots of short videos of him claiming credit for attacks and then getting plastic surgery to change his appearance. He speculated that if he was on TV with Abu Zubaydah’s old face claiming credit for new attacks, his surgically altered new face would make it safer for him to move around and avoid capture. Immediately after he made the videos, he had plastic surgery. But, he said, the Pakistani doctor who did it was, in his words, a “quack,” the operation was botched, and he got an infection that made him go blind in one eye. The surgery was intended to soften his Arab features, but you could still recognize him from photographs. He was disappointed. The officers writing reports passed his explanation back to headquarters, and we received no more threats of restarting harsh interrogations from them.
Some human rights groups have publicly accused the CIA of blinding Abu Zubaydah, speculating that he now has to wear an eye patch because of injuries incurred during some brutal interrogation gone wrong. The truth is, however, that Abu Zubaydah’s pirate look was the result of his own attempt to become a terrorist Internet celebrity while hiding in plain sight. Abu Zubaydah is blind in his left eye because he wanted to be famous and came up with a comic book scheme to make it happen. He wanted to be a supervillain, the face of terror on the Internet, raising money to attack and kill innocent victims while living the high life safely, protected by a new face. As often happens with people driven by twisted ambition, it backfired on him.
We used EITs on Abu Zubaydah for a little over two weeks total. We didn’t use them again. After that, Bruce and I spent over seventy days questioning him using noncoercive, rapport-based, and social influence approaches before I left the black site and Bruce stayed to continue the mission without me. Headquarters wanted one of us to take a break so that we could rotate being at the black site. I was told to go home first because in the previous seven months I had spent less than nine days at home.
I left feeling good about what we had accomplished. I knew Abu Zubaydah was continuing to hold back some information—they all did—but he was cooperative enough that headquarters seemed pleased with the information he was providing. The targeters and analysts told me that his information had increased their understanding of the enemy significantly. They said they had combined his information with intelligence from other sources and were using it actively to disrupt future attacks and capture terrorists who were still at large. I believed them. I had seen Abu Zubaydah progress from using resistance-to-interrogation techniques to thwart questioning to answering questions with details beyond the scope of what was being asked. I was certain he would be pivotal to helping us capture the terrorists who had attacked us on 9/11.