On October 12, 2000, the guided missile destroyer USS Cole was at anchor in the Yemeni seaport of Aden refueling. A small boat pulled alongside the warship, and when it got close—too close—an enormous explosive charge was detonated, killing seventeen American sailors and injuring thirty-nine. The billion-dollar warship nearly sank thanks to a few thousand dollars of explosives and several young Arab men willing to martyr themselves.
Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri was the amir, or commander, of the Cole attack. As a reward for his success, al-Qa’ida promoted him to its chief of operations in the Arabian Peninsula, commanding cells of radical jihadists spread throughout the region, all of them plotting terror attacks.
It took a little more than two years, but al-Nashiri finally was captured in the United Arab Emirates (UAE) in November 2002.
When apprehended, al-Nashiri was in the final stages of completing operational plans for al-Qa’ida suicide bombers to crash a small plane into another Western warship, this one anchored in Port Rashid in the UAE.
Since I initially had been deployed immediately after Abu Zubaydah’s capture, I had been away from home more than 206 days. This stretch had been broken only once five months earlier, and then for less than nine days. Now I was home again, looking forward to a longer break, but that wasn’t to be.
I was home less than a week when my summons to CIA headquarters came about midday. “Drop whatever you’re doing and report to CIA headquarters immediately,” I was told by the voice on the phone. “Be prepared to deploy to some undisclosed location for an unspecified period of time.” Unlike my first deployment for the CTC, this time I had a chance to bring functional shoes and more than one pair of pants.
On arrival at CIA headquarters, I was told they had captured al-Nashiri and wanted me on the rendition flight that was taking him from where he was being held temporarily to a black site. “You can use the flight to get a sense of what he’s like,” my briefer said, “and start interrogations as soon as he arrives at the black site.”
Being on board the renditions flight also would give me a chance to talk to those holding him, providing an opportunity to discuss how he had reacted to his initial questioning and to hear firsthand what he had told them.
At headquarters, I was introduced to a subject matter expert who had targeted al-Nashiri. She too would be on the rendition flight and stay for his initial interrogations. Her job was to guide those of us interrogating al-Nashiri through the maze of chatter and threat reporting, pull the information we needed from the CIA’s enormous resources, and write the cables and reports headquarters wanted. She was to receive intelligence requirements sent by headquarters and provide us with enough background details to put them in context. Her most important job was to take what al-Nashiri said and turn it into raw intelligence. A dark-haired, scary-smart ball of energy—that’s how I remember her.
Another person on the rendition flight who would stay during al-Nashiri’s initial interrogations was our linguist. Al-Nashiri’s English was poor, and so it was important to have a translator skilled enough to do real-time simultaneous word-for-word translations. Word-for-word translations are critical because many indicators of deception are flagged by how things are said as much as by what is said. As an interrogator, I didn’t want a translator to tell me what he or she (the interpreter) thought al-Nashiri meant. I wanted a precise translation. Our linguist for this mission was superb. He was about ten years older than I, with silver hair and wise eyes, and was quick to smile. I told him what I needed.
“No problem with simultaneous word-for-word translations,” he said. “And I spent years moving money around the Middle East, so I know the dialect and slang of Saudi Arabs of Yemeni descent. I can catch weasel words and highlight inconsistencies.”
Perfect, I thought.
When it came time to hand over al-Nashiri, an SUV and chase cars sped across the asphalt taxiway toward our aircraft. On arrival, al-Nashiri was helped out of the vehicle transporting him. His hands were cuffed. He wore Arab dress, consisting of a white thoub, a one-piece gown that covers the whole body, and a shumagg, a red and white scarflike head cover. The only thing missing was the ogal, the heavy black rope band that sits on top of the head to hold Arab headgear in place. It was missing for safety reasons.
Arab officers who were dressed similarly flanked al-Nashiri and slowly walked him across the tarmac toward our plane, head scarves flapping in the wind. I was surprised at how small he was. I had expected the Cole bomber to be imposing, but he was just a little man in Arab dress.
The handover was done in silence. Our crew, wearing black ski masks, took physical control of al-Nashiri by placing him in a grappling hold that I won’t describe here for security reasons. I don’t want our enemies to be able to train to defeat it.
They checked al-Nashiri for weapons, traded out handcuffs, and then stripped him. Medical personnel on the flight performed a quick exam and cavity search and then photographed al-Nashiri to document his physical condition at the handover.
Al-Nashiri was re-dressed in a dark sweatshirt and sweatpants. His eyes were covered with a blindfold. Earphones attached to a cassette player that was playing music were placed over his ears to limit what he could hear during the flight. Then he was hooded, feet shackled, and led, almost carried, onto the plane, all without anyone talking. The only noises were the wind, the sound of vehicles idling, and bird calls off in the distance.
Then something happened that set back our interrogation of al-Nashiri.
As I was getting ready to board the aircraft, the CIA officers handing over the detainee tried to give me a letter-size envelope with a photocopy of an address book he had had with him when he was captured. In it, al-Nashiri had handwritten names and phone numbers with cash amounts penned next to them in the margins. The CIA officers had made a copy of that address book to send along so that the interrogation team could start questioning al-Nashiri about what was in it as soon as we reached the black site and started the interrogations.
The address book wasn’t in code, and so anyone able to read Arabic could translate what was there. But you couldn’t deduce what the money was for or how it fit into the bigger picture of al-Nashiri’s various attack plans. Nor could you infer where the jihadists listed in that address book currently were or what they were doing. Al-Nashiri would have to provide that information, and it would be much easier, once interrogations started, to keep him on track if we could point to a name and question him about the notes he had scribbled in the margin next to it.
However, security personnel on the aircraft refused to let me bring the photocopied pages of the address book on board even though once they were out of the envelope, there were fewer than a dozen loose pages of ordinary copy paper. They were adamant, insisting that it was against regulations. They told me they couldn’t let me bring the photocopy paper on board because it might be “a potential explosive hazard.”
Bullshit, I thought. For years early in my air force career, I was an explosive ordnance disposal (EOD) technician. I know the difference between copy paper and explosives. The local CIA officer holding the loose pages stood there, looking at us as if we had completely lost our minds, saying something like, “It’s just paper. It’s been in our custody the whole time.”
I thought the security guys were being unnecessarily cautious and said so, but the mission commander concurred with them, and the copy of the address book was left behind. In my opinion, that refusal set back the interrogations by several days while the address book circuitously made its way via official channels first to CIA headquarters and then, after multiple frantic requests, back across the world to the black site where we were questioning al-Nashiri.
When I got off the plane after the first leg of the journey at an intermediary stop, Bruce was waiting on the tarmac, but I didn’t recognize him. He was kitted up with protective gear and weapons. His hair, usually short, was long and scraggly. He had a scruffy full beard and wore a headdress and overvest that made him blend with the locals so that he wouldn’t stand out so much as an American.
I walked right by him, a man I’d worked next to for fourteen years. I would have kept going if he hadn’t called my name. Even then, after we made eye contact, I didn’t know who he was until I recognized his voice when he greeted me.
Because of the threat level and because al-Nashiri had been captured in the act of putting together a terror attack, headquarters didn’t want us to wait until he was settled in at the black site days later to find out if he was willing to answer questions. If he was, they wanted us to start servicing intelligence requirements right away. Therefore, while we were waiting for the follow-on aircraft, I conducted the neutral probe to assess whether al-Nashiri would be willing to answer questions without us having to use EITs.
I had been told al-Nashiri was uncooperative before being handed over to the CIA. He mentioned a few attack plans but refused to provide actionable details. Those holding him said he taunted them and tried to bargain for his release. But people can and often do change their minds, even terrorists, and I had no interest in getting rough if it was unnecessary. We always preferred not to have to use EITs.
I questioned al-Nashiri in a long, narrow makeshift interrogation room. It was part of a complex of rooms and cells situated inside a big steel building on some dusty back road that I couldn’t find again if I had a map to the place and a GPS. The rooms were plywood boxes plopped down inside a giant windowless shed. Twenty feet or more of open space reared up between the top of the enclosed box that made up the room and the tin roof barely visible in the overhead gloom. The interrogation room had plywood walls and halogen lamps on yellow tree stands, the kinds of lamps you might see in an auto mechanic’s garage or on a construction site. Dust was everywhere. You could see it drifting in the beams of the halogen lamps.
I positioned al-Nashiri against one of the makeshift walls and pulled the black hood off his head. He blinked, looking up at me, eyes adjusting to the bright light that backlit me and hid the others in the room. I folded the hood and placed it around his neck like a shawl.
“What would you like me to call you?” I asked in a neutral tone.
“I’m Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri,” he said. “I’m also called Mullah Bilal, Bilal, and Abu Ahmad. I am the amir of the Cole attack. Allah be praised, we killed many American sailors.” A thin smile crossed his face. It might have been nerves.
“Yes,” I said. “Yes, you did. But that’s not what I’m here to ask you about. I want to know about the other attacks you have planned. Someone told me you arranged to have explosives delivered for the attack on another warship, the attack you were working on just before you were captured. I want to know where you were getting the explosives, who was delivering them, and where the explosives are now. And I want to know about other attacks you have planned, the ones against Americans.”
“I told those other people holding me that if they took me to the Saudi border, gave me a car, and let me go, I would tell them where the explosives were as I drove away,” he said. “I make you the same offer. I would shout it out the window as I drive off. I promise.”
“Not going to happen,” I said. “The people that handed you over to us told me you made that offer to them. They wouldn’t do it, and I won’t either. What I will do is give you the chance to avoid a lot of discomfort and distress later by answering questions now about the attack you had planned against the warship in Port Rashid or by telling me about some other attack. For example, who was bringing you the explosives? How were you planning on obtaining an aircraft? Now that you are captured, who will try to carry out the attack? That’s a lot of questions, I know. But it will give you a sense of what I’m interested in.”
“Just let me go,” al-Nashiri said. “I can find my own way out of—” and he mentioned a country.
“What makes you think you’re there?” I asked.
“The way it smells,” he said. “I lived here. I know this place.”
“I don’t think you know where you are,” I said, not willing to confirm or deny the location of our intermediate location. “And I’m not letting you go. It’s just not going to happen,” I said, realizing the interview was going nowhere and starting to transition into my “you-don’t-have-a-lot-of-time-to-make-a-decision” pitch.
“I want information to stop operations,” I said. “You have until I walk out of this room to show me that you’re willing to answer questions in a civilized way; after that, you’re not going to like what happens next.”
“If you’re not going to let me go, I have nothing to say to you.”
“The next time someone talks to you,” I said, moving into the bridging question, “he will ask about the Port Rashid attack. He will want to know who was working with you. Where that person is now. And what happened to the explosives. Answer any one of these questions and nothing bad will happen to you. Refuse and you will bring unnecessary misery upon yourself. It can be avoided.”
The guards returned al-Nashiri to his cell. I followed them back. Although he wasn’t in my custody, I felt responsible for him. I wanted to see where he would be spending the night. I didn’t like the place; it resembled a horse stall more than a cell. I made sure he had water and plenty of blankets. I then told the indigenous guards that he was not to be fooled with: no disciplinary action, no visitors, and no taking him out of his cell unless there was a genuine emergency. Then I checked that his cuffs and shackles weren’t too tight and left him.
Later, while the subject matter expert and I were standing in the makeshift interrogation room discussing the report she was going to send back to headquarters that evening, Bruce told me that another detainee with an amazing resistance posture was being questioned in a nearby room. Bruce said the detainee was refusing to acknowledge who he was despite being confronted with a driver’s license bearing his photograph that the detainee had had on him when captured. Bruce said the detainee was highly skilled at resisting interrogation and tough. He steadfastly refused to give up any information while maintaining a polite and apparently cooperative demeanor. Bruce said the detainee was so good, he might have been resistance-trained.
As I was leaving the shed, I stopped by the room where the detainee was being interrogated. He was sitting on the floor with his back against the plywood wall, his wrists and ankles raw and bloody underneath handcuffs and shackles. He looked bad. Not sick so much as just not right.
“How are you?” I asked.
“Very well, thank you,” he said in perfect English. “And you?”
“I’m fine. Is there anything I can do for you? Anything I can get you…or bring you?”
“No, thank you. I’m fine.” He said it as casually as if we were acquaintances who happened to bump into each other in the parking lot of a coffee shop.
The CIA officer handed me the license with the detainee’s photo and said, “He says this isn’t him. He’s been insisting on that for days.”
I wasn’t there to interrogate the detainee, but I took the license, looked at the photo, and showed it to him. Pointing to his picture, I asked, “This isn’t you?”
“No,” he said. “That’s not me. He looks like me, but I don’t know who he is.”
“It sure looks like you,” I said, tilting my head to one side. “And you had it on you. Kind of suspicious, don’t you think?”
“I know; it seems odd. I can’t explain it, but it’s not me. I don’t know where they got that,” he said, his voice calm and pleasant.
I didn’t want to get into a prolonged exchange with the detainee. I just wanted to see firsthand his resistance posture, and so I handed the license back and asked if I could speak to the CIA officer questioning him outside the cell.
I was wondering why, if the agency was sure of the detainee’s true identity, the focus was on getting him to admit who he was. My background in resistance training told me that focusing on getting him to confess his identity was providing the detainee with the opportunity to protect information that was more important. The focus gave him a chance to keep away from sensitive topics, to make interrogations nonproductive by keeping the focus on getting him to admit who he was. As a resistance technique, the goal is not to convince those questioning you that you’re telling the truth but rather to convince them that you are not going to change your answer. And he definitely wasn’t going to do that.
As I thought about it and listened to the CIA officer discuss the case, I realized that was indeed the goal of the detainee’s resistance posture: to convince his questioners that he wasn’t going to change his answers and to use his refusal to identify himself as a deliberate technique to circle away from sensitive areas and refocus the questioning on getting him to admit who he was. When asked about something he should know, given his identity, the detainee would claim there was no way he could know that kind of information since he wasn’t that person.
I was told that the detainee displayed the same cordial but defiant resistance posture no matter what question they asked him. The thinking seemed to be that if they could get him to admit who he was, it would break his resistance and he might be more willing to answer other questions. We briefly discussed my impressions of the detainee’s resistance posture; they matched what Bruce already had shared with the CIA officer. I did not offer any suggestions for how he should be interrogated. That was not why I was there.
“I think you need to get a medic down here to look at his wrists and ankles,” I said as I was about to leave. “He doesn’t look right to me.”
The CIA officer said that he thought the same thing and that Bruce had mentioned it as well. He said he would ask the medic to stop by when he got a chance.
By coincidence, late that same afternoon I saw the medic as I was walking up the steps into the aging historic building used as CIA headquarters. I recognized him from another assignment. After a bit of small talk, I said, “When you get the chance, you might want to stop by the cells and check Gul Rahman’s wrists and ankles. They look bad, and he doesn’t look quite right.”
“I can’t. I don’t have time for that,” he said, shaking his head and looking over my shoulder into the distance. “I have hundreds of people to take care of and no real help. I’m swamped. I barely get any sleep as it is.”
We exchanged words, and as I became more insistent, he flared and said, “I’m not here to provide medical care for fucking terrorists!” It was clear he felt overwhelmed and understaffed.
A few days later Gul Rahman was dead. (I mention him by name only because his death has been declassified and I don’t want readers to think I’m talking about an unreported death.) Reports say he died of exposure after he had been mistreated by the indigenous guards.
It’s easy in hindsight for people like me to postulate about what should have been done and criticize those who were there doing the real work. But I’m not going to do that, because Rahman certainly did not look like he was about to die when I saw him. Otherwise I would have pushed harder to get him seen. Maybe, in hindsight, I should have, but I didn’t. When I saw him, he looked like he needed medical attention for his wrists and ankles. And I thought, based on the concerns Bruce and I raised and the things the CIA officer in charge of the facility had said, that Gul Rahman would be seen by medical personnel.
The description of Bruce’s activities at this black site is an example of how Feinstein’s Democratic staffers cherry-picked documents to create a misleading narrative. Their report leaves you with the false impression that Bruce did not raise concerns about the grim conditions or the brutal treatment of detainees at that site. I know that isn’t true.
Bruce wrote a multipage report advising both headquarters and the host country COS that conditions at that site needed quick and drastic improvement. He raised concerns about the unsupervised brutality, recommended that trained interrogators be sent to the site, suggested that the CIA provide blankets and space heaters, cautioned that an American presence should be at the holding facility, especially at night, and advised that the guard force be changed from indigenous personnel, who may have had a beef with the detainees, to CIA security officers.
Bruce and I tried to brief the chief of station, but the COS would not meet with us. I also know Bruce discussed these recommendations when he returned to headquarters and met with the deputy chief of the CTC, who asked him in a good-natured way at the start of that meeting if he was the psychologist “creating a stir” by complaining about conditions at that black site. The deputy chief of the CTC heard Bruce out and showed interest in and concern about what he had to say. Later, Bruce outlined his observations and concerns to the CIA inspector general, John Helgerson. These documents should have been available to those putting together the Democrats’ SSCI study.
But you don’t get that impression when you read the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence majority report. Their selective use of cited source documents and the way they framed the narrative make it seem that Bruce recommended that conditions be made harsher rather than more humane. The opposite was true.
Feinstein’s report also makes a big deal out of the fact that Bruce made interrogation recommendations. Of course he did. Although this site eventually would be brought under the control of the newly stood up Rendition, Detention, and Interrogation Group—a branch that consolidated the CIA’s interrogation efforts under the supervision and control of one section—it was not yet part of that section, not part of the interrogation program for which we were working. That was why headquarters sent Bruce there: to provide recommendations for interrogating some of the detainees they were holding there and to question one in particular.
Two important facts were left out of Feinstein’s report. First, Bruce raised concerns about the treatment of detainees and recommended that if they were planning on using EITs at this site, they should get the appropriate training and stick to interrogation techniques reviewed by the DOJ and approved by headquarters. Second, at the time of Gul Rahman’s unfortunate death, this black site was not one of the enhanced interrogation program’s facilities. It was under the control of the chief of station, the senior CIA officer for the country where it was situated. Headquarters simply arranged for us to hold al-Nashiri at the site temporarily while we waited for a follow-on flight to our final destination. CIA leadership moved the management of this troubled site under the newly created Rendition, Detention, and Interrogation (RDI) Group specifically to address the grave safety and management concerns raised by the detainee’s death. Feinstein’s report makes it seem like this black site was always an RDI facility and smears the people who were sent in to clean it up with mistakes that were made before they took over.
For me, on the ground at the time, I could tell it was headed for some sort of trouble. Bruce and I spent hours the day I flew in with al-Nashiri cataloging potential problems, and I know he reported them before Gul Rahman’s death.
Earlier on the day I arrived, we drove straight from the airport to where the detainees were being held. As evening approached, it became necessary to find a place to sleep. That was not an easy task. The place was crawling with CIA officers, and every spot where someone could sleep was crammed with personnel. People were stacked so tightly that in some cases they might as well have been sharing the same bed.
Bruce and I finally were assigned sleeping quarters in a converted broom closet where three army cots had been crowded into a space hardly large enough for two. We were almost on top of each other in our sleeping bags. We had to walk on the beds to enter and leave the room.
It was uncomfortable, but not as uncomfortable as the sleeping arrangements made for our linguist. He was assigned to sleep under the pool table in the bar, which remained open until after midnight. The next day, when our usually good-natured linguist showed up, he was a mess. Half his shirt was not tucked into his pants, his eyes were red, and his hair was askew. He complained bitterly about the noise in the bar.
“Horrible racket,” he said. “Loud music and people shouting all night. They were playing pool right on top of the table I was under, trying to sleep. They stepped on my hands and kicked me in the head. I didn’t get any rest at all. I had to scrunch up in a little ball. Noise and feet…all night long…noise and feet. Finger pain. Finger pain.”
Bruce and I started laughing. The mental image of our dignified linguist lying under a pool table in one of the most popular bars in that region of the world, trying to sleep in all that racket while trained killers and intelligence officers from all over the world stepped on his fingers, seemed like something out of a situation comedy on TV or a movie. Before he walked up, we had been bitching to each other about sleeping in that damn broom closet, but now we realized we had been given the cushy quarters.
Our laughter did not amuse the linguist, who familiarized us with a couple of Arabic cusswords and showed us one or two instructive finger gestures.
Sometime on the second day, the aircraft we would use for the last leg of the rendition arrived. We watched it drop out of the sky, gathered our stuff, and followed the security convoy that took al-Nashiri to the plane.
Once there, al-Nashiri underwent the same preflight loading procedures as before. He was strip-searched, medically examined, cavity-searched, and reshackled for rendition. The security staff from the holding site had already blindfolded him, put on headphones, and hooded him.
A problem developed when we asked the mission commander about loading our bags. The commander said that we were not authorized to get on the plane. He said something about a new interrogation branch that was being stood up and said we weren’t part of it. I told him that leaving us behind had to be a mistake because we were al-Nashiri’s interrogation team. Headquarters had specifically ordered us to be on that rendition flight with al-Nashiri. I argued that because of the importance of interrogating al-Nashiri, it made no sense for him to arrive at the black site without us, thus delaying the interrogations. The mission commander still refused. I asked him how we were to get to the black site if not on the rendition aircraft.
“Don’t know, don’t care,” he said.
I suggested that he contact headquarters for clarification.
“Given the importance of questioning al-Nashiri as quickly as possible,” I said, “there will be a shit storm back home if the rendition aircraft leaves us, al-Nashiri’s interrogation team, stranded, delaying interrogations unnecessarily.”
He said that people stuck where we were were always trying to scam rides off of them.
“We aren’t trying to scam a ride,” I said. “We are just trying to do our job the way headquarters told us to. Leave us here and I’ll make sure that headquarters knows where to direct that shit storm.”
Eventually, the mission commander agreed to let me and Bruce on the plane but didn’t want to take the subject matter expert or the linguist. I refused to get on the plane without them, and finally, after a lot of bickering, we were all allowed to board.
Once at the black site, we reviewed the intelligence requirements and then submitted a detailed interrogation plan and waited for approval to proceed from headquarters.
While we were waiting, Bruce and I talked with Abu Zubaydah about waterboarding. By then he had been cooperating for several months, and even though I hadn’t seen him for a couple of weeks, I was confident he would help if he could. I thought he was the best source available to help us fully understand how Islamic terrorists were likely to respond to the waterboard and how we could avoid using it, if possible. We told him that we didn’t like doing it. We asked him to help us come up with some way to get the brothers to provide information we could use to stop attacks, information they were trying to protect, without the use of waterboarding or other harsh interrogation techniques.
“No, no,” Abu Zubaydah said adamantly. “You must do this for all the brothers. If you don’t and he talks, the brother has sinned. Allah will punish him.”
“I’m not following,” I said, thinking I had misheard him. “You think we should use harsh techniques more often?”
“No,” he said. “Not more often; only enough. Allah does not expect more of a man than he is capable,” Abu Zubaydah explained. “He knows our limitations. Allah does not expect me to lift a mountain and is not disappointed when I can’t. There is no sin. Once a brother has held out as long as he can and cannot hold out any longer, he has fulfilled his obligation to Allah and there is no sin in answering questions.”
“Are you saying we need to push brothers to the point that they can’t hold out any longer each time we want a question answered or it’s a sin for them to tell us what we want to know?” I asked, not liking the idea.
“No,” Abu Zubaydah said. “A brother doesn’t have to hold out as much as he can each time. Allah does not expect me to go around trying to lift mountains when I know in my heart I can’t. As long as the brother knows he will eventually be forced to give up information, he can answer questions and still keep faith with Allah.”
I said, “This sounds like a justification for using hard times [Abu Zubaydah’s term for EITs] on all the brothers.”
“Not so,” Abu Zubaydah said. “That would be a mistake. The line is different for each brother. Some brothers are incapable of withstanding any hard times. They will talk without pain. Other brothers can stand a great deal to protect secrets. Allah will look into their hearts and know. If a brother who can take more pain to protect secrets doesn’t, then Allah will know and he will punish him. You must only use as much as Allah would expect to help the brother and no more. If you use more than you need to, Allah will know and he will punish you.”
At the start of the first enhanced interrogation al-Nashiri was given the opportunity to answer the bridging question before any EITs were used. He refused. He also refused to answer any questions generated by the intelligence requirements. He would not talk about attacks he was planning against American interests inside or outside the United States, but he did say he would talk about the Cole attack. He seemed proud of and almost bragged about the number of Americans he had killed. But we weren’t there for a confession. When it became clear that he had no intention of cooperating, we began to use the EITs.
At some point, following the headquarters-approved plan, al-Nashiri was waterboarded. But not without difficulty. He was a really small guy. Security personnel had trouble securely strapping him to the large hospital gurney that the medical personnel wanted us to use as a waterboard at the time. When the guards stood the gurney up on end so that he could clear his sinuses, al-Nashiri would slide down, and his arms and hands would almost slip out from under the wide Velcro bands designed to hold him in place. We were concerned that he would fall off the gurney and get hurt. We were all feeling uncomfortable, but Bruce was the first to state it aloud.
The interrogation team discontinued waterboarding al-Nashiri after three sessions. Problems strapping him to the gurney were not the deciding factor. There was another, more compelling reason we stopped without trying to find an alternative method of securing al-Nashiri to the gurney.
We didn’t have to, because al-Nashiri started offering up bits and pieces of information before the next EIT session started, and we began switching to noncoercive social influence techniques to question him. His address book finally had arrived at the black site, and al-Nashiri started to open up about who the jihadists listed in the book were and what the money he had written in the margins next to the names was for. Although not fully cooperative, he gave us enough help to convince us that the harshest of our approved tactics no longer were needed.
Because Abu Zubaydah was being held in a nearby cell and by that point was answering questions quite helpfully, we were able to ask him about the people al-Nashiri named and the attack plans al-Nashiri disclosed. We would leave al-Nashiri’s cell, walk over to Abu Zubaydah’s, and ask him, “Who is this brother? Tell us about his activities.” If we had photographs of al-Nashiri’s men, we could show them to Abu Zubaydah—without sharing with him what al-Nashiri had offered up—and compare what he had to say with what al-Nashiri told us. Often Abu Zubaydah knew the men. He had trained some of them. He was forthcoming and provided us with information we could use to get al-Nashiri to elaborate more fully on some areas of interest to headquarters.
As our questioning of al-Nashiri continued, he discussed a number of attack plans. His answers were often so vague about actionable details that some at headquarters didn’t want to abandon EITs altogether; however, his answers were not so vague that Bruce and I thought the harshest EITs were necessary. We recommended against using them, and headquarters gave us permission not to use them.
I think al-Nashiri reasoned that since we had his address book, there was no point hiding things he imagined we could find out anyway by using available leads. It provided him with a face-saving way to answer questions less evasively and gave us a chance to use social influence techniques to take him outside the circle of things he wanted to talk about. Getting him comfortable talking about things he thought we could find out with enough effort or already knew made it easier for al-Nashiri to answer questions about topics he preferred not to discuss. Our job was to use that comfort to move him gradually outside the circle of things he was willing to talk about and farther into areas he was trying to avoid.
Here is an example of how he would combine bits and pieces of a real threat (the Port Rashid plot) with ridiculous assertions to delay dealing with topics he wanted to avoid.
“One idea,” al-Nashiri said, “was to use the attack on the warship in Port Rashid as a practice run for flying a small airplane into a U.S. aircraft carrier. We’d pack the plane with explosives and then get a couple of shahids [martyrs] to crash it into the carrier deck.”
We had discontinued EITs days before, and on this particular day we were asking al-Nashiri about potential attacks against U.S. interests. He had mentioned a list of plots in various stages of completion, including planned attacks on the Diplomatic Quarter in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia. (Subsequently there were successful terrorist attacks there in May and November 2003. Combined, there were 56 people killed and 282 injured.)
“An aircraft carrier?” I said, trying to keep the incredulity out of my voice. “Have you ever seen the complement of warships that protect a U.S. aircraft carrier? It wouldn’t be like the Japanese kamikazes in World War II. Carriers have over-the-horizon radar, defensive missiles, Phalanx guns, and fighter jets flying continuously. They’re usually accompanied by many other warships. Once you violated their protected airspace, they’d shoot you out of the sky. And your idea is to have a couple of brothers fly a small plane past all these defenses and into a carrier?”
Al-Nashiri smiled sheepishly. “I never said it was a good idea. Just one of the ideas we talked about as possible future plans. We hadn’t got past thinking about it.”
“It’s not like the Cole attack. How would you even get brothers to volunteer for a mission with so little chance of success? It seems more like straight suicide than martyrdom.”
“Lots of brothers volunteer as martyrs. No problem getting someone to fly the plane. I just ask.”
“So let me see if I understand. You have a bunch of al-Qa’ida jihadists who want to go head-to-head against one of the most powerful warships on the planet and the battle group accompanying it, using just a small plane packed with explosives as a weapon?”
Al-Nashiri smiled. “It seems silly when you put it like that.”
“If you promise to fill it up with al-Qa’ida operatives, I think I can put you in contact with a U.S. government official who might get you a larger plane. Maybe something big enough to hold several hundred brothers. It would be like chartering a private aircraft straight to paradise. All you need to do is tell us where the brothers are so we can pick them up and give them a ride to the airport.”
“Not a good idea, like I said…just something we talked about.” Al-Nashiri was laughing and shaking his head.
“Ah,” I said. “We both know this carrier attack was not something you were seriously working on. Just a distraction for you and me to talk about. Let’s talk about something more practical, maybe a little further along, like your plan to attack the Diplomatic Quarter in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia.”
We got the information about who was going to do the attack and the general targets, but the timing was to be determined by emerging circumstances in the target area. After al-Nashiri’s capture, his terror operatives fled deeper into hiding and changed their security practices, and Saudi officials were unable to disrupt the attack before it occurred. They were, however, on heightened alert and were able to respond quickly at the scene of the attack.
One thing that al-Nashiri made clear was that until Usama bin Ladin went into hiding and stopped directly communicating with operatives in the field, al-Nashiri was his go-to guy for carrying out maritime attacks. According to al-Nashiri, one plot that bin Ladin had him working on was a plan to sink multiple civilian oil tankers in the Strait of Hormuz, a narrow opening connecting the Persian Gulf with the Arabian Sea. Al-Nashiri’s task was to find and outfit a large cargo vessel that could be used like an aircraft carrier to launch multiple explosive-laden small boats to be piloted by suicide bombers who would each ram an oil tanker. The idea was to trigger economic chaos in the international oil market by creating an ecological disaster that clogged the Strait of Hormuz with burning oil tankers and millions of gallons of spilled crude oil.
Al-Nashiri told me he found a cargo ship and outfitted it. He said his jihadi brothers were unable to pilot it because of its size and because they weren’t familiar with the controls that operated it. He said he hired a crew of Yemeni pirates to sail the vessel for him. But that didn’t work out, because while his operatives were still trying to find the small boats to use to ram the oil tankers, the pirates he had hired took the cargo ship out for a test run and never came back.
“They stole your ship?” I said, hardly believing what I was hearing.
Al-Nashiri shrugged. “They were Yemeni,” he said, as if that explained everything. “They can’t be trusted.”
Al-Nashiri said the October 2002 attack on the French oil supertanker Limburg off the coast of Yemen was a remnant of that larger operation.
Al-Nashiri said that bin Ladin provided a lot of hands-on guidance. For example, he had given al-Nashiri exact specifications for the cargo ship he tasked him to purchase. Al-Nashiri said bin Ladin would work out the details of the terror attacks and then trust al-Nashiri to carry them out. Al-Nashiri said he wasn’t so good at coming up with ideas and that made it hard for him after bin Ladin went underground. My impression of al-Nashiri was that he was very concrete in his thinking and had trouble adapting to unanticipated events when left without supervision and guidance from bin Ladin.
Al-Nashiri was captured in the UAE. He was living with a Chechen “escort” as a girlfriend and driving a new high-end BMW paid for with Allah’s money: donations intended for jihad. I asked him about this because his big-spender lifestyle was so different from the simple lifestyles usually adopted by Islamic jihadists. He said that was the point. His spending and running around with an escort was intended to hide his al-Qa’ida affiliation. He said he even put on a Speedo swimsuit and frequented a large water park as part of his disguise.
“Really?” I said. “You spent Allah’s money to play on a Slip’N Slide?”
He said, “Maybe I was casing the park for an operation.”
I said, “Not really.”
“No,” he admitted. “I like water parks.”
You can see that he was somewhat engaging. We thought that with patience and a knowledgeable debriefer, al-Nashiri could be nudged without physical coercion into providing fuller and more complete answers.
But we didn’t get a chance to see if our impression was accurate. Provoked by fears that it would soon be compromised, headquarters decided in a matter of a few weeks—maybe just days—to hastily close the black site where we were and move the detainees to a new site, one that had just been built by the recently created Rendition, Detention, and Interrogation (RDI) branch.
We scrambled to get the detainees ready to relocate. The COB, in concert with headquarters, decided that I should be on the rendition flight that moved them. I was told to help the new interrogation team any way I could. I thought I was going there as an interrogator.
Before I departed, the COB handed me a pouch containing a computer with our black site’s intelligence reports and cables on it. She told me what it was and asked me to hand carry it to the new black site.
As before, I had trouble getting the pouch on board the rendition aircraft.
I didn’t have a dog in the fight about taking the computer versus leaving it behind. I was just the guy who wasn’t supposed to allow it to leave his possession. Take it. Leave it. I didn’t care. But since the COB was someone I respected and didn’t want to disappoint and they might need the information on the computer at the next site, I wasn’t going to leave it without a fight. Finally, someone—maybe the COB or another CIA officer—interceded with the mission commander and I was allowed to bring it on board.
I was displeased with how roughly the rendition team handled Abu Zubaydah and al-Nashiri as they prepared them for transport. I thought they were manhandled more than they needed to be, particularly since by that time Abu Zubaydah was cooperating and al-Nashiri was starting to make progress. I mentioned this to the mission commander, and he told me to mind my own “fucking business.”
Later, after more rendition flights, I came to appreciate that the job of the mission commander and the security team on that plane is to relocate the detainees without injury or incident. Having a well-rehearsed standard set of safety procedures is one way of doing that. Establishing overwhelming total control right away discourages detainees who might otherwise become belligerent from acting out.
My acute displeasure with how Abu Zubaydah was being handled brought home to me for the first time the fact that I was starting to feel protective of him. In many ways, I felt that he had mostly held to his agreement to work with us and that unless and until he showed that he was going to become belligerent or stopped cooperating, we owed it to him not to treat him as if he had just been captured every time we moved him. But I had little say about it, because I wasn’t in charge and it wasn’t my decision to make. And maybe it’s good that it wasn’t.