One of an interrogator’s jobs is to get inside the mind of the person being questioned. In the case of an Islamic terrorist such as Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, it’s important to understand the core beliefs and motivations that underlie his involvement in violent jihad and figure out why he’s trying carefully to protect some pieces of information but not others.
Let me show you what I mean by giving you a peek at what I believe was going on inside KSM’s head as he waited for interrogations to start at the black site.
KSM is sitting, back against the wall, chained to the floor of a damp room in the basement of an aging building. It is dank and smells of dust and mildew. Dingy white paint covers the walls and ceiling. Sunk into the cracked concrete floor is a steel eyebolt to which KSM’s leg shackles are chained. On the ceiling is another eyebolt. He almost doesn’t notice it and wonders what it’s for.
A little less than an hour has passed since KSM’s first contact with an interrogator at this new place. The man said he wanted information to stop operations inside the United States. KSM had that information but had no intention of providing it. KSM had a different set of priorities.
KSM’s hands are shaking, but he’s confident he’ll be all right. This is the third or fourth place the Americans have tried to question him. He won the battles of wits and wills at the other sites, and he is sure he will win this one, too. He believes that even if things get rough, he can hold out until it is too late for the CIA to do anything about the upcoming attacks. Soon they will know.
As he waits, KSM sorts through his priorities. The most important is protecting Sheikh Usama. Whatever happens, KSM is willing to die rather than tell the American infidels anything that will help them locate the sheikh.
His next priority is to protect information that could help the infidels stop future terror attacks against the United States. KSM has several in the works. Some of them could rival 9/11 in death and destruction. It’s important that preparations for them continue.
KSM needs to be especially careful not to give up information that could be used to capture or kill brothers working on these operations, such as Hambali’s plan to crash hijacked aircraft into the tallest buildings on the West Coast. KSM also wants to protect the jihadi brothers and sisters he already has on the ground inside the United States. There’s Iyman Faris, a jihadist working on a plot to cut the suspension cables on the Brooklyn Bridge with specially designed explosive tools and collapse it during rush hour, when it is packed with cars and people. Because the technology is unfamiliar, some have made fun of this plot, asserting that it is far-fetched. But with my background in explosive technology, I can tell you those tools really exist and with enough of them, properly placed, you can bring down a suspension bridge. Then there is Uzair Paracha, who has been working with KSM to smuggle special explosive devices into the United States to blow up gas stations along the East Coast.
KSM has thousands of other details in his head about al-Qa’ida’s strategic plans, operatives, and activities. Although this information could help the Americans, it is less important to him. He can hand out these details like candy to the interrogators if necessary, using them like a relief valve to take the pressure off if things get too intense.
He has been in custody only a few days. He runs through a quick mental list of throwaway items: abandoned plots, long-dead brothers, things the infidels should already know from other captured detainees. He can use these things, he thinks, to stall, to give the brothers a chance to “adjust themselves”: a chance to change their e-mail accounts, wipe their computers, destroy their cell phones, abandon safe houses, and flee deeper into hiding.
The door to his cell opens. Enormous men enter dressed completely in black. Not a bit of skin showing. Eyes covered with mirrored goggles. He sees himself in them. KSM tries to talk to the guards, but they act as if they don’t hear him. Without speaking they undo his leg chains and stand him up against the wall. This part of the wall is different. It is covered with burlap and bounces a little when the guards press his back against it. They put a black hood over his head. Then KSM hears the door open and footsteps approach in the dark.
Bruce walks toward KSM. What he sees resembles a hooded troll. KSM is short, with a grotesque potbelly. His body, what can be seen of it, is covered with finger-length black hair that KSM sheds like a cat losing its winter coat.
Bruce is carrying a rolled-up towel duct-taped to form the protective collar that we used to prevent whiplash when bouncing someone off a walling wall. He slowly moves the rolled towel over KSM’s hooded head and cinches it the way he would if he was adjusting his grip on the towel before walling KSM. Bruce then lets it go and carefully repositions the rolled towel on KSM’s neck and shoulders.
Bruce slowly pulls the hood off KSM’s head. KSM closes one eye and blinks up at him. The look on his face says, “This guy is scarier than the first one.”
KSM’s eyes widen when Bruce takes hold of the rolled-up towel and says in a cadence and voice quality that sounds like vintage Clint Eastwood, “When my friend spoke with you the last time, he told you we wanted information to stop operations inside the United States.” With each pause in the Eastwood-like cadence, Bruce adjusts the rolled towel. Cinching it. Releasing it. Both hands working the grip.
“My friend said the next time someone spoke to you, he would ask you for that information. I’m that someone. We want information to stop operations in the United States. This is your last chance. Give us what we’re asking for and nothing bad will happen to you.”
KSM mutters something about being the mastermind of 9/11, voice deliberately low, hoping to distract Bruce with information about an old operation that would be useful for a court case but not as valuable for disrupting new attacks. We had been told not to be distracted by this.
As soon as the mention of 9/11 leaves KSM’s mouth, Bruce pulls him forward in an attention grasp, using the rolled towel to support his neck. KSM’s naked potbelly swings out away from his body and bounces off Bruce’s upper thighs.
Bruce leans into KSM’s ear and softly says, “Is what you’re telling me going to help us stop operations inside the United States?”
KSM shakes his head, not speaking. Not looking at Bruce.
“No?” asks Bruce. “I didn’t think so.”
Then Bruce bounces KSM off the walling wall several times, careful to keep KSM’s feet on the ground and protect his neck and the back of his head. The fluid sloshing around in KSM’s inner ear starts the room swimming. Suspended inside the hollow walling wall, the plywood clapper slams back and forth each time KSM’s shoulders are bounced off the wall, making a hell of a racket, adding to the disorienting effect. The noise is thunderous. The experience is disorienting but not painful. I know because Bruce and I had it done to us many times as part of our resistance training.
When the walling stopped, Bruce once again stood KSM against the walling wall, held him until he was sure he could stand unassisted, and then carefully and gently arranged the rolled-up towel around KSM’s neck as if he were smoothing crumpled clothing on a child.
“Let’s start again,” Bruce said in a low, pleasant voice.
This is how KSM’s first enhanced interrogation session began. After that, Bruce and I and the Preacher interrogated KSM in rotating shifts around the clock, sometimes alone, sometimes in pairs, sometimes all three of us. Since KSM had already resisted intense physical pressure at another site, we escalated more quickly than we might have otherwise because his confidence and defiant attitude rendered less coercive measures ineffective.
Over the next three weeks or so we followed the interrogation plan approved by headquarters, escalating from less physical techniques such as the attention grasp to waterboarding. As it turned out, the waterboard wasn’t effective on KSM and we weren’t willing or authorized to do the kinds of things that would make it work. He beat it by using two strategies. First, he sometimes swallowed the water, prompting the physician monitoring the interrogations to require the use of normal saline instead of bottled water to avoid a potentially dangerous condition known as hyponatremia or water intoxication. The second thing KSM did was somehow open his sinus passages and let the water enter through his nose and pour out of his mouth as fast as we poured it on the cloth. I don’t know how he did it. It looked like a magic trick.
KSM also figured out that there were limits to how long we were allowed to pour water during any single application. Once he discovered this, he would use his fingers to count off the number of seconds water was being poured and then gesture with a slashing motion of his left hand for us to stop as we approached the upper limits. I don’t know how he did this either, but it was remarkable.
I was also impressed with how little the reality of being waterboarded seemed to upset him. At one point, early in his interrogations and before he had been exposed to much sleep deprivation, we momentarily left the room where he was being waterboarded so that he couldn’t overhear us as we spoke with a subject matter expert. The physician, the guards, and the COB remained in the room but didn’t interact with him. When we returned a couple of minutes later, KSM was asleep, strapped to the waterboard. Snoring!
KSM’s resistance finally was overcome with a combination of walling and sleep deprivation. It wasn’t that he broke and suddenly spilled his guts. It was the result of a gradual conditioning process that I will explain here publicly for the first time.
First a little background.
To appreciate the problem Bruce and I faced, you have to step back and consider it from our perspective. It was a year and a half since the 9/11 attacks; while Americans were struggling to get their lives back to normal, at the CIA things were still in a state of emergency. They were struggling to counter the threat of more mass-casualty attacks at home while undertaking high-risk operations to find, capture, or kill those who had blindsided us on 9/11. They needed to build liaison partnerships in other parts of the world and redirect massive amounts of money and resources. The threat level had not changed significantly since 9/11. In many ways it was the worst-case scenario.
• The CIA had reliable intelligence indicating that a catastrophic terror attack, possibly involving a nuclear device, was in the works and could occur at any moment.
• The CIA was under tremendous political and psychological pressure to do “whatever it took” to stop the next attack.
• In order to stop it, CIA needed perishable, time-urgent information.
• KSM, a senior al-Qa’ida leader with the blood of thousands of Americans on his hands, almost certainly had that information and was refusing to provide it.
• Previous efforts to question him had revealed that KSM was a hard-core jihadist, psychologically resilient, highly skilled at protecting information, and tough enough to withstand earlier efforts to coerce it out of him.
• KSM wanted to see future attacks succeed; knew that if he provided the information the CIA wanted, the attacks could be stopped; and was demonstrably willing to endure significant hardship to protect what he knew.
For many at the CIA it felt like a ticking time bomb scenario. It was actually worse from my perspective. I had been on a bomb squad, I had worked hostage negotiations and armed standoffs, and I never feared as much for those around me as I did during those first chaotic months after 9/11. The threat of another catastrophic attack was palpable. You could feel it in the briefing rooms and see it taking its toll behind the eyes of CIA officers scrambling to do all they could to make up for having missed the first attack by stopping the next one.
KSM had demonstrated that tea and biscuits weren’t going to get him to provide the information necessary to stop attacks. After KSM was captured and before he was rendered out of Pakistan, two CIA officers had tried to question him using standard debriefing and rapport-building techniques. One CIA officer went so far as to dress head to toe in traditional Pakistani clothing for tea and “respectful conversation.” Later, KSM described him to me and Bruce as a “clown,” saying the officer was “a fool” if he thought KSM was going to inform on his “brothers” because someone put on Pakistani garb and served him tea and treats.
You weren’t going to bully the information out of him, either. Here is how I know. KSM was not moved directly to where we interrogated him. The rendition stopped for several days at another remote black site, where KSM was interrogated by a third CIA officer, the same chief interrogator I had reported earlier for using unapproved EITs.
During this stopover, the chief interrogator and KSM got into what a senior agency psychologist who observed it called “a battle of wills,” a contest that, according to the psychologist, KSM won. The battle of wills was over KSM’s refusal to address the chief interrogator as “sir” each time KSM spoke to him, something that never occurred to me or Bruce to ask any detainee to do.
The psychologist told us that with each refusal, the chief interrogator used more and more physical coercion and became more and more obsessed with “breaking KSM’s will.” So much so that forcing KSM to call him “sir” became the single-minded focus of the last several interrogation sessions before KSM was moved to our location.
The senior agency psychologist (who was not an interrogator but had been resistance-trained in SERE school) told us that in his view, KSM had deliberately drawn the chief interrogator into this battle of wills to derail the interrogations and protect information. KSM avoided answering questions about future al-Qa’ida attacks and operatives still at large by refusing to address the chief interrogator as “sir,” knowing his refusal would irk the chief interrogator, who would stop questioning him and try to bully him into compliance. Winning that battle of wills strengthened KSM’s confidence that if he just held out long enough, he could keep his secrets.
In my opinion, we would never get the information the CIA needed to stop future attacks by trying to beat it out of him, though there was pressure from some to do just that. It would have been wrong, and it would have been ineffective. You might be able to coerce him to capitulate one time, to squirt out one piece of information. But there were too many questions that needed to be answered, too many unknowns that the analysts and targeters needed to piece in their link charts and analytical formulations, for beating it out of him to be a successful long-term strategy for stopping future attacks. We needed him to cooperate.
But how do you do that? How do you get a terrorist who is willing to suffer to protect information to start cooperating?
CIA senior leadership tasked us with getting KSM to comply. Accomplishing that required two things. First, because we wanted KSM to cooperate during questioning when no EITs were being used, we had to condition him so that the mere thought of being deceitful triggered fear and emotional discomfort. Second, to keep his cooperation going, we had to condition him to experience a sense of relief when he did cooperate. This required us to use two very different naturally occurring learning processes.
The first process we used is called classical conditioning or Pavlovian conditioning, after Ivan Pavlov, the man who first described this learning phenomenon. Here is a simple textbook description of how classical conditioning can be used to get a previously neutral stimulus (such as the sound of a buzzer) to evoke fear. In this scenario, the person is hooked up to a machine that delivers mild but aversive shocks. The buzzer sounds, and a shock is delivered. After a few presentations (or pairings) of the buzzer with a shock, the sound of the previously neutral buzzer starts to evoke fear. Eventually the sound of the buzzer alone evokes a conditioned fear response even if the shock doesn’t follow. In the end, the success or failure of the conditioning process depends on the timing of the buzzer and the shock. The shock has to occur within a few moments after the buzzer sounds or the buzzer won’t come to elicit fear.
To condition KSM and the other detainees to experience fear and emotional discomfort when they thought about being deceitful, we had to time the application of an aversive EIT such as walling to start when they were thinking about withholding information and stop when they were thinking about anything else. We couldn’t know for sure what they were thinking, but we could judge from their behavior when they were looking for a way out of the situation. If they showed any sign, no matter how small, that they were genuinely looking for some way to cooperate, we would reinforce that. But the primary objective at this point was to pair the naturally occurring discomfort and distress of the EITs with the urge to deceive. Pair in the sense that I’m using the term means to be sure that both occur at approximately the same time. Contiguous is the word psychologists use to describe this relationship. It worked best when the effort to be deceptive occurred first and EITs were applied a few heartbeats later. It’s a more complicated version of the classical conditioning process described in the previous paragraph, and again, timing is critical.
To tap into the second naturally occurring learning process and condition KSM and other detainees to experience a sense of relief when they cooperated, we had to orchestrate events so that they could escape or avoid the adverse consequences of being deceitful when and only when they actually tried to cooperate, even if in the beginning that cooperation was minuscule. This is called avoidance conditioning by psychologists. It is one of the hardwired, natural ways humans learn to escape uncomfortable situations. We learn to avoid things that cause us discomfort and distress and seek out those which make us feel better.
After conditioning, detainees still can resist providing information, much as people who are afraid to go to the dentist still can force themselves to go. But the thought of trying to withhold information causes acute distress and anxiety. After their conditioning was complete, the high-value detainees Bruce and I worked with generally feared holding back. When they did hold back, the emotional distress displayed in their body language alerted us that they were trying to hide something.
Some interrogators understood the conditioning process better than others and were more proficient at getting the timing right. Overusing or underusing EITs or using them at the wrong time disrupted conditioning for the desired response. Some interrogators, such as the chief of interrogations, didn’t even try to condition compliance. They simply tried to keep the pressure up until the detainee broke.
Contrary to what has been reported in the press, in the early days of the program, Bruce and I were not involved in the CIA’s initial interrogation training. In fact, we didn’t even know about it at first. The training was handled by a CIA employee who formerly had been a SERE instructor and the chief interrogator. We didn’t know what they taught, but whenever Bruce and I worked with a new interrogator, we explained the need for timing in the conditioning process. On the basis of their reactions, I got the impression that timing wasn’t emphasized in the early CIA interrogator courses with which we weren’t involved.
When the Counterterrorism Center leadership learned that some of their personnel in the field were going beyond what they were authorized to do, they took steps to rein them in. As the haul of captured bin Ladin operatives grew (in part because of intelligence gained in our earlier interrogation of people such as Abu Zubaydah), there was a need for more interrogators.
By then the chief interrogator had been removed from the program for cause, and in 2004 Bruce and I were asked to become involved in CIA interrogator training. We made a point of explaining how to use the conditioning process in the interrogation courses we taught. We believed the uneven effectiveness among interrogators trained in early CIA interrogation courses, and the fact that some of those interrogators resorted to unauthorized techniques to break a detainee’s resistance, was a result of not understanding the powerful learning principles that underlie the enhanced interrogation process and overfocusing on EITs rather than the way they should be applied.
In addition, not every detainee responded to the EITs with the same emotions or emotional intensity. Remember, KSM fell asleep on the waterboard moments after we stepped away from him. That’s why for some detainees walling was enough but with others we had to try a variety of EITs before we found a combination that was effective. Some people’s nervous systems are naturally slower to form the learned associations that are the neural machine language of emotional conditioning; that’s just how it is.
Early on, KSM didn’t display many signs of cooperation, and it wasn’t because he didn’t understand: he spoke excellent English. In the beginning when he did act cooperatively and we stopped the EITs, what he offered was usually a detail about a dead person or a decades-old terror plot or a piece of perishable information well past its use-by date. To condition him not to do this, we applied EITs (usually walling) as soon as it became apparent that he was being duplicitous.
As the interrogations progressed and the conditioned associations formed, KSM shifted his priorities from protecting information to trying to find answers that would allow him to avoid EITs. As protecting information became less of an immediate priority, KSM started looking for ways to provide just enough truthful information to avoid EITs but still protect his most important secrets.
Gradually KSM began to offer bits and pieces of better information, as expected, at the beginning of a new session, before EITs were applied. As this new phase started, he initially offered information that in his mind had a lower priority than protecting Sheikh Usama or his own attack plans. But that meant answering questions instead of rocking, chanting, issuing threats, and taunting interrogators. It also meant that information became available to analysts that though it was not a top priority for KSM to protect was useful for expanding our understanding of al-Qa’ida, targeting al-Qa’ida operatives, and aiding in the interrogations of other detainees. It was also the initial opening for us to begin using social influence techniques.
We got useful information in this phase, but we wanted his answers to be more full and complete. We also wanted him to work directly with the subject matter experts, who could debrief him more proficiently than we could.
About this time, KSM adopted a resistance technique I’ve seen many times with savvy resisters. Bruce and I call it hiding in the truth. This technique involves telling a version of the truth that is uninformative and not responsive to the question, usually by leaving out critical details, emphasizing irrelevancies, or using language ploys to link details that are accurate standing alone but misleading when presented together. Watch politicians on the Sunday talk shows to see this technique in practice. I’ve seen this tactic trip up skilled interrogators and debriefers.
Even so, once KSM started looking for ways to answer questions, we could gradually back off the use of EITs and shift to social influence strategies to shape his cooperation. In the beginning of this phase we couldn’t back off completely, because withholding information by hiding in the truth and other, less subtle resistance ploys had to be discouraged if we were going to move him to the debriefing stage. But at the same time, we didn’t want to go back to full-on EITs that took him out of the moment, so to speak. At this stage, forcing him to deal with the question being asked was critical.
I had thought about this problem when helping the CIA put this program together. Earlier in this chapter I explained how the repeated pairings that occur in classical conditioning can result in something as benign as the sound of a buzzer evoking a reflexive response such as fear without any adverse event happening. We took advantage of this learning phenomenon to create an opportunity to use fewer EITs later by making the rolled-up towel we used to protect the detainees during walling an object that evoked fear.
Here is how we did that. In the limited time EITs were in play (detainees usually started trying to cooperate about seventy-two hours after EITs began), Bruce and I always started every interrogation with the same conditioning ritual. The detainee would be standing against the walling wall, hooded. The interrogator would enter the room and slowly and gently run the rolled towel over the top of the detainee’s head from the forehead to the back of the neck. We then would spend several minutes adjusting it, as if searching for the perfect grip. We did this because we wanted the towel to become a fear-inducing object: an omen of what might happen next, a harbinger of what was to come if they didn’t cooperate. Once that Pavlovian association was formed, the towel represented a potential adverse consequence and elicited a conditioned fear response without our having to resort to the physical discomfort of EITs.
We put the towel around the necks of detainees each time they were questioned and used it to wall them if necessary. Later, when the detainees were in the beginning stages of transitioning out of EITs—sometimes cooperating and sometimes holding back—we would carry the towel into the room with us, put it around their necks, and slowly pull off their hoods. If they started answering questions, we would make a show of removing the towel, saying something like “I guess we won’t be needing this today. But I’ll put it over here just in case.” If they started lying to us or being duplicitous, we would put the towel around their necks using the same slow ritual and wall them.
Later, as their cooperation increased, we would walk in, pull off the hood, show them the towel, and ask, “Am I going to need this?” They would usually reply “No,” and we would say, “Okay. I’m going to take you at your word.” And a noncoercive interrogation would begin.
Gradually we went from placing the towel in a detainee’s sight line on a nearby table to making a show of moving it out of the room. At that stage, when detainees started holding back, we’d glance in the direction of the towel before actually moving toward it. More often than not, that was all it took to get them back on track. Finally, when detainees were in full debriefing mode, the rolled towel never made an appearance.
At some point, generally about midway in the conditioning process described above, a debriefer usually joined the interrogators in the room, taking turns asking questions and taking notes but not participating in the rough stuff, if any even occurred. This was done to ease the transition from interrogators asking all the questions to debriefers directly questioning the detainees. Over time, the interrogators asked fewer questions and the debriefers asked more. The debriefers were, after all, the subject matter experts who wrote the intelligence reports. It was better for them than for me to ask the questions.
Even after detainees were as compliant as they were going to be and debriefers were asking most if not all of the questions, it was useful to have an interrogator in the room. Debriefers came and went every few weeks, but there was a small number of interrogators dealing with the high-value detainees, and they stayed longer and spent thousands of hours with the detainees. They knew a detainee’s idiosyncratic mannerisms, signs he was trying to be deceptive, and the sorts of debriefer behaviors that made questioning specific detainees such as KSM easier or harder.
Critics of the enhanced interrogation program allege that the CIA started using physically coercive EITs on KSM too quickly. They say that the CIA didn’t give him ample opportunity to demonstrate his unwillingness to answer questions before getting physical. This is simply not true. KSM was given multiple opportunities to answer questions before he arrived at the black site where interrogations with EITs started in earnest.
For example, while he was still in Pakistan, where he had been captured and was awaiting rendition, CIA officers attempted to question KSM. He responded with taunts and by rocking back and forth, chanting verses from the Koran, and refusing to cooperate. Furthermore, after leaving Pakistan, KSM was held briefly at a second location before he was transported to the black site where those of us in the primary interrogation team were waiting. At this second location, KSM was given another opportunity to talk. Again he refused and was (in my opinion) unfortunately subjected to a short regime of physical coercion, some of which was not approved by the DOJ. Finally, when KSM arrived at our location, we started at square one. We gave him a third opportunity to talk during our neutral probe, and again he responded with taunts and veiled threats. KSM had plenty of chances to talk before things got rough. He simply chose not to. If he had cooperated at any point, KSM would not have been subjected to harsh interrogations. It is as simple as that.
The typical noncoercive debriefing went like this. The guards would escort the hooded detainee into the debriefing room and sit him in a chair. One of the interrogators would come in, take the hood off, and make a bit of small talk to ascertain the detainee’s mood and disposition that day. We would ask how the detainees had slept and if they needed anything. If they did need something or had complaints, we told them we would come back after the debriefing and figure out what we could do to address the issue. Most important, we would ask them if they had thought of anything overnight they would like to tell us. Often, this was when one of the detainees would offer clarifications and volunteer to discuss new information about al-Qa’ida operatives and plans. We would get a quick sense of what it was and then alert the debriefer so that he or she would know to inquire about the topic.
Then the debriefer entered the room. Early in a detainee’s debriefing phase, interrogators would stay for the entire debriefing. Later, as the detainee became more compliant and the debriefer more proficient with that detainee, we would excuse ourselves once it was clear that the detainee was cooperating and monitor the debriefing on closed circuit TV. After the debriefing was over, interrogators would stop by the debriefing room for what we called a fireside chat and follow up on any concerns raised by the detainee before the debriefing.
In the beginning, before the CIA implemented a training course, CIA sections sent their “best and brightest” to be debriefers, and these individuals were, with few exceptions, excellent. Later, when promotions and the logistic demands of supporting both the war on terror and the war in Iraq forced the parts of the agency that provided officers to be less discriminating, debriefers varied greatly in their skill and approach. Some debriefers were excellent, most were competent, and a very few were train wrecks.
I recall one CIA officer who showed up to debrief Hambali, the leader of the 2002 Bali hotel bombings, dressed entirely in black jungle fatigues, hell-bent on interrogating rather than debriefing Hambali. The officer raised a fuss when the interrogator on-site told him that his approach probably would shut down Hambali and lead to fewer rather than more answers. Finally, the COB ordered the officer to change both his clothes and his approach, but the debriefing was still contentious and went nowhere.
Most marginal debriefers were not that obvious. Some floundered after trying to trick a detainee into revealing information that the debriefer suspected he was hiding, and failing to elicit that information. These debriefers would get angry when the detainee didn’t fall for the trick and then accuse the detainee of lying, often claiming that it was “inconceivable” that the detainee couldn’t recall someone in the background of a crowded meeting from years before, as if memory worked like a videotape, accurately recording exact details of conversations and peripheral events.
But the good ones were really good: cordial, businesslike, able to provide context to aid recall without asking leading questions. They took the time to establish rapport and tailor questions to a specific detainee to understand that particular detainee’s response style. This made the questioning easier and allowed the debriefer to figure out if a detainee who didn’t engage was trying to hide information or just having a bad day. They tended to stick to open-ended questions to avoid leading the detainee and didn’t get into a huff if the detainee seemed to have a bad attitude.
Some debriefers would enter the room weighed down with maps or charts or photographs or technical intelligence that had been cleared to share with the detainee, others with just a simple notepad and pen. Most often the debriefer had a list of intelligence requirements with possible questions for reference and notes fleshing out important points.
Debriefers and subject matter experts worked tirelessly, away from their families for weeks, living under virtual house arrest, often writing reports or debriefing detainees late into the night. When new captures occurred, like the interrogators and others at the site, the debriefers would work all night and long into the next day, taking advantage of the flood of new information that previously captured detainees felt the sudden urge to “clarify” or correct once they were confronted with a capture photo of someone new. Debriefers also fed information to interrogators questioning the new arrival. If the new captive offered a piece of information, debriefers and interrogators often could check the databases and query other detainees immediately.
Contrary to the false claims made in Feinstein’s report, after enhanced interrogation, KSM and other high-value detainees in the program provided enormous amounts of unique intelligence that, as the CIA’s official response notes, “helped the US disrupt plots, capture terrorists, better understand the enemy, prevent another mass casualty attack, and save lives.” Information gained from those detainees also aided U.S. law enforcement efforts to capture and prosecute terrorists operating inside the United States.
For example, information obtained from KSM after enhanced interrogations was used to disrupt a second wave of terror attacks aimed at crashing hijacked aircraft into multiple buildings on the West Coast and across the United States. KSM’s reporting was a critical link in the capture and detention of Hambali (mastermind of the 2002 Bali hotel bombings that killed two hundred people) and the seventeen non-Arab students his terror cell was grooming to be pilots and provide the muscle to subdue passengers on the hijacked airplanes that would crash into the Library Tower in California, the Plaza Bank in Washington State, the Sears Tower in Chicago, and possibly other places.
Also, information obtained from KSM after enhanced interrogations led to the arrest of Iyman Faris, an al-Qa’ida sleeper inside the United States tasked with attacking the Brooklyn Bridge during rush hour. The CIA has reaffirmed that KSM’s reporting “informed and focused the investigation” for FBI and law enforcement officials questioning Faris.
In addition, information obtained from KSM and others after enhanced interrogations played a key role in disrupting terror attacks against Heathrow Airport and the Canary Wharf financial district in London, England.
Moreover, information obtained from KSM and others after enhanced interrogations contributed to the identification of Jafar al-Tayyar, an al-Qa’ida operative who was also known as Adnan Gulshair el Shukrijumah. Significantly, he held a U.S. passport. Before his identification, al-Tayyar could travel in and out of the United States with ease and had been dispatched by al-Qa’ida to surveil nuclear power plants, the homes of past presidents, historical landmarks, dams, subways, bridges, and buildings for attack planning. He was named in a federal indictment for plotting suicide bomb attacks on New York’s subway system. After identification by KSM and Abu Zubaydah, Shukrijumah had to go into hiding. He was reported killed by Pakistani forces in December 2014.
Additionally, information obtained from KSM after enhanced interrogations led to the identification and arrest of the U.S.-based Pakistani businessman Saifullah Paracha and his son, Uzair. They were working with KSM to smuggle explosives into the United States and advance KSM’s plot to blow up gas stations along the East Coast.
Finally, KSM was critical to finding bin Ladin.
That’s five plots disrupted and several terrorists detained or killed, including bin Ladin. There are many other examples, but cataloging them is not my purpose in this book. If you’re interested in what really happened and want more details about the kinds of intelligence obtained from the CIA’s detention and interrogation program that kept Americans safe, there are many sources to consult. For example, you can read the CIA’s comments on the SSCI report on the Rendition, Detention, and Interrogation program, paying special attention to the twenty case studies included in the back of the document. You can read the SSCI Minority Views, starting on page 29 and running through page 73. Or you can read Courting Disaster by Marc Thiessen or Hard Measures by Jose Rodriguez.