Our Land Rover pulled up to the gate outside the tall, featureless walls of an aging prison built of gray concrete and misery. The man sitting in front of me made a cell phone call. Gates at least twenty feet tall and about the width of a panel truck creaked open on some invisible mechanism that protested the intrusion. A Klaxon was bleating, the noise loud and alarming.
I stretched my neck to see around the head of the security escort in front of me. I was looking into a mantrap for vehicles, a long narrow chute maybe twenty feet wide with concrete walls that went up forty or fifty feet. Openings for firing down on the mantrap were scattered up the vertical walls. I looked up. Far above I could see a small rectangle of blue sky. I could just make out a large bird riding the thermals at an impossible height. The gates closed behind us, and I heard the locking mechanism drive home. I felt trapped. Totally exposed. There was no place to hide.
Nobody moved. Our escort said something into his phone. A door opened. It seemed small, dwarfed by the towering walls of the mantrap. It was the only opening I could see other than the gate we had come in through and the gun ports and windows well above the ground.
Then we were inside. My recollection is of a huge open space several hundred feet square rising up four or five stories. I could see platforms on each floor with cells lining the circumference along the outside wall of the building. It was a giant rusted cage.
A labyrinth of rusted steel bars and gates led to metal stairs that took us past each floor as we ascended to our destination. I could see prisoners, some in their cells and some gathered in clusters in community areas, all under the watchful eye of their keepers. There was the incomprehensible noise of too many conversations taking place at once. The harsh smell of cigarettes mingled with the scent of overcooked prison food.
On one of the top floors I was taken to an office, one of the only rooms with walls instead of cell bars. I could smell coffee. Sitting behind an ancient metal desk was a prison official. He was fussing with a coffeemaker. Sitting in a comfortable chair on the other side of the room was the prisoner I had been sent there to talk to. The topic of conversation was going to be organized crime and the smuggling of fissionable nuclear material. My job was to spend time with the prisoner and then suggest ways for our weapons of mass destruction (WMD) experts to get him to reveal where he got the small amount of material he had been caught with and more information about what he was planning to do with it.
It would be easy to imagine that most of my work for the CIA Counterterrorism Center’s Special Missions Department involved conducting enhanced interrogations. Readers could be forgiven if they thought that I spent most of my time applying EITs to detainees in an effort to secure actionable intelligence. But in truth, the intense use of enhanced interrogation techniques on each high-value detainee usually tapered off on average about seventy-two hours after we started using them. We may have been authorized to use EITs for longer, but by seventy-two hours detainees usually were starting to look for ways to cooperate, and thanks to the conditioning process, I rarely had to use walling when a detainee drifted back into being duplicitous.
Over the course of my involvement with the CIA’s interrogation program, I conducted enhanced interrogations on only five high-value detainees. In order of occurrence, they were Abu Zubaydah, Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri, Ramzi bin al-Shibh, KSM, and Abu Yasir al-Jaza’iri. I estimate that there were at most four months total during which I applied any EITs even once during the day (a very liberal estimate). That’s out of the seven years, nine months, and twelve days (almost ninety-five months) that I worked for the Counterterrorism Center. Do the math and you’ll see that I applied EITs on fewer than 5 percent of the days I worked for the CTC. Most of the work I did as a CIA interrogator working for the CTC’s Special Missions Department didn’t involve EITs at all. This chapter is about what I did the other 95 percent of the time.
My Non-EIT Work with Detainees
In addition to the five detainees listed above, I conducted noncoercive, social influence–based interrogations and debriefings of another nine high-value detainees.
Six of them had received some EITs, but they had become compliant before I first questioned them. They were Abu Faraj al-Libbi, Ammar al-Baluchi, Hambali, Mustafa Ahmed al-Hawsawi, Walid bin Attash, and Hassan Ghul. Muhammad Rahim al Afghani was never compliant.
Two of the detainees I questioned were essentially cooperative from the start and as a result required no EITs. They were Gouled Hassan Ahmed and Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi.
The detainees I spent the least time with were Hassan Ghul, Hambali, and Muhammad Rahim. The detainees I spent the most time with were Abu Zubaydah and KSM. I spent thousands of hours with those two over the years.
I did not interrogate or debrief any midlevel or low-level detainees. Not one. And although I visited all the black sites holding high-value detainees, I never visited or worked at any of the handful of black sites holding midlevel and low-level detainees except once briefly during al-Nashiri’s initial rendition, as was discussed in chapter 3.
Most of my support for the interrogation program consisted of conducting non-EIT, social influence–based interrogations and debriefings. In this fashion, I facilitated the questioning of high-value detainees such as KSM by countless subject matter experts, debriefers, and targeters over the years during which the interrogation program existed. I debriefed detainees myself, and I interviewed detainees to answer questions submitted by the 9/11 Commission.
My job supporting the 9/11 Commission was to take its list of questions and interview detainees such as Abu Zubaydah, Ramzi bin al-Shibh, and Mustafa Ahmed al-Hawsawi (KSM’s bookkeeper) about the details of their involvement in the 9/11 attacks. Those interviews were conducted long after EITs were discontinued, and the detainees were more or less cooperative. The 9/11 Commission report remains the most comprehensive publicly available account of the events leading up to the 9/11 attacks and is well worth reading. A study done by NBC News in 2009 showed that more than a quarter of all the footnotes in the 9/11 Commission report refer to information from high-value detainees.
Morale Visits
Another key task for interrogators was to perform what we called maintenance visits, an unfortunate and uninformative name for what were really morale visits intended to counteract the effects of isolation on cooperative detainees.
One thing that the critics often get wrong about the CIA’s enhanced interrogation program has to do with the isolation of high-value detainees. It’s true that until a detainee started cooperating, he was being questioned or was alone in his cell, but usually this lasted a few days to a few weeks at most. After they started cooperating, it was to the CIA’s advantage for high-value detainees not to become depressed and withdrawn, as most people held in isolation eventually do.
The CIA took positive steps to lessen the debilitating impact of isolation. For example, the security guards stopped wearing their head-to-toe black outfits. Interrogators and the COBs of the sites would routinely visit the detainees for morale visits in debriefing rooms, in their cells, or in specially constructed movie and game rooms. In the last location, the detainee and the visitor might play board games, watch movies and recorded soccer games, discuss books the detainees were reading, help the detainees with their English, or talk about anything a detainee had on his mind. Psychologists and medical personnel would stop by for checkups and evaluations. Dentists were flown in to fix their teeth. The detainees got better medical care than those of us who were questioning and guarding them.
Don’t get me wrong. They were still detained at a CIA black site, but the high-value detainees weren’t left alone chained to the wall in a dark hole. In fact, they occasionally complained, as KSM did, that they didn’t have enough time to themselves for solitary contemplation.
At some point, I don’t recall precisely when but later in the program’s life span, to further lessen the impact of isolation, cooperative detainees were allowed to spend time with other detainees. They could pray, watch movies or soccer games, or eat meals together under careful supervision. We tried to arrange it so that a detainee in a more positive mood spent time with one who seemed more down. For example, we often had Abu Zubaydah spend time with al-Nashiri.
A few detainees, such as Abu Zubaydah and Hassan Ghul, liked to work out with weights or play basketball. As the facilities improved, it was not unusual for one of the interrogators to be in the gym with Abu Zubaydah chatting about his exercise goals while he lifted weights. The CIA supplied Abu Zubaydah with dietary supplements, and at one point he got really muscular.
Hassan Ghul was very athletic and liked playing one-on-one basketball. Midmorning frequently would find one of the interrogators in the open-air gym for an hour or so of shooting hoops and playing HORSE with Ghul at his request. HORSE is a game in which a player tries to match the shot made by the previous player. Ghul was very competitive and often would bet push-ups that he could make a hard basket or that the interrogator would miss when it was his turn. I recall one instance when Ghul lost on an easy shot and in frustration threw the basketball hard against the concrete wall surrounding the court. He was standing too close, and it ricocheted off the wall and slammed him in the face, knocking him down. Ghul was laughing when the interrogator helped him up and while he paid off his push-up debt.
Detainees were allowed to do almost anything that kept them occupied and out of trouble. Hassan Ghul and Hambali both liked doing martial arts alone in their cells. The guards were initially uncomfortable with it, but since neither detainee ever made an aggressive move, it was allowed. Ghul is the terrorist doing karate in the viral al-Qa’ida recruiting video that was shot before 9/11. In the video a masked Hassan Ghul does a head-high spinning kick. It wasn’t unusual to glance at the closed circuit TV and see him stretching or practicing high kicks in his cell.
The detainees weren’t staying in a five-star hotel, but it wasn’t twenty-three hours a day in isolation in a federal supermax prison cell either.
The things the detainees would choose to talk about during our morale visits could be odd. One time Bruce and I were at one of the black sites together because we happened to have a day or two of overlap before the handoff. The morning I’m writing about, we were splitting up the morale visits. I finished one, stopped by the control room to see who was next on the list, and located Bruce on the closed circuit TV. I saw him with KSM. Bruce was comforting KSM, who was in his arms like a child, crying on his shoulder. I stopped by to see what was going on. KSM’s wife had been pregnant when he was captured, and now KSM was despondent because he knew it was past time for the child to be born but no one would tell him whether the birth had been successful, whether the child was a girl or a boy, or the child’s name.
KSM loved his family, and despite what a monster he was, it was heartbreaking to see him crying in Bruce’s arms. After that, Bruce and I mentioned to Jose Rodriguez’s chief of staff that we thought it was important to give KSM news about his new baby. We thought it was the humane thing to do and believed it would keep his mood up and help ensure his continued cooperation. She got permission and found out the information, and Bruce and I eventually told KSM he had a new baby boy. We also told him his son’s name. KSM cried and thanked Bruce. He then looked at us and said, “A man’s sons are all he leaves of himself in the world.” Too bad he didn’t feel that way about other people’s children.
Not all visits to detainees by CIA personnel worked out so well. Once a clinical psychologist, a contractor, was evaluating KSM. During the visit he started telling KSM he would burn in hell for killing innocent people. He then launched into a religious harangue, cursing KSM, telling him Allah was not a real God, screaming at him. KSM started screaming back. The guards had to pull the psychologist out. One of the interrogators—I think it was Bruce—had to calm down KSM. That contract psychologist was never allowed to interact with KSM again, but I did see him at other black sites evaluating other detainees. If it had been up to me, he would not have had any contact with detainees after his blowup with KSM because he had let his feelings get in the way of his objectivity. But this incident occurred during that period, discussed earlier, when Bruce and I were transitioning out of performing duties as psychologists, and so the agency had to continue using this guy because so few people had been briefed on the program.
Life on the Road
During our travels Bruce and I tried to maintain some sense of normality. Here are two stories that illustrate how we were often unsuccessful.
Whenever we got the chance, Bruce and I, either together or alone, would go running. Sometimes, because we were trying to keep our footprint in the area small, we would be restricted to running around the perimeter of the building at night and had to do it a hundred times or maybe more to get any mileage. Later, when the facilities improved, we could run inside on a treadmill. But that was a poor substitute because we both liked running outside. Occasionally, however, we would find ourselves somewhere where the probability of our being linked with the agency was remote and we could actually run out in the countryside.
In one relatively uninhabited place we were passing through, Bruce and I decided to go for a long run through nearby woods and over the hills on a narrow dirt path. We started off on a dirt road. About a hundred yards before the place where we needed to cut off into the woods we saw five or six buffalo calves. They were standing in the middle of the dirt road by themselves, looking off into heavy vegetation in the swampy areas that fell away on both sides. We slowed but kept advancing when we didn’t see any adults. When we were forty or fifty feet from the calves, one of them made a noise that sounded like a blending of a mew, a bleat, and a bellow.
The tall weeds and vegetation on each side of the road erupted, and suddenly Bruce and I found ourselves surrounded by a large herd of buffalo that formed a protective circle around the calves. They were enormous, each about the size of a military Humvee. They flipped their ears and shook their enormous heads and chewed and stretched their necks out, sniffing the air.
Bruce and I had stopped and were contemplating what to do next when they started trotting toward us in a mass, bellowing. The whole herd, maybe forty-five or fifty buffalo. We turned on our heels. Bruce took off running back down the middle of the dirt road in the direction from which we had come. I sprinted away from the road for the trees.
It didn’t matter; the buffalo caught both of us. I heard Bruce yelling, “Where are you? You’re abandoning me, hiding in the trees?”
“No,” I shouted back. “I’m trying to lure them away from you.” Something that was completely untrue that I made up on the spot. Having grown up being chased by cows, I knew we were not going to outrun them and I was looking for a way up off the ground where they couldn’t reach me. In my panicked thinking, running down the middle of the road didn’t seem like such a great idea.
But neither strategy worked, and we found ourselves surrounded by slobbering buffalo. To my surprise they were pushy but not aggressive. They brushed against me. They smelled my arms and thighs with nostrils the size of dinner plates. They looked at me with eyeballs the size of softballs. They put their big knobby heads down and wanted me to scratch them between their horns. Their very menacing-looking horns. I walked back up to the road followed by about half the herd, bumping and shoving, pushing others away with their heads and horns. The other half had congregated around Bruce. I could just make out the black T-shirt and yellow running shorts he was wearing between the legs and backs and bellies and butts and flipping tails of the enormous beasts.
“I think they want us to milk them,” I heard Bruce say from inside the buffalo scrum. I was trying to work my way through the herd, carefully threading my way to him, hoping not to get kicked or gored or stepped on as I elbowed my way through the monsters. They would look around at me as I flanked one of them and smell my arms as I walked by.
“It’s just a hypothesis,” Bruce said. “Reach down and grab a teat and see if I’m right. Grab two if you want to run the definitive field test.”
The buffalo escorted us to where the narrow path broke away from the dirt road and headed off into the woods. Some buffalo mingled on the roadbed, and others disappeared back into the swampy areas.
Bruce and I were back to running. We made a mental note to come back by a different route and settled into an eight- or nine-mile cross-country run. We thought the excitement was behind us. Now it was just one foot in front of the other, sometimes making small talk but mostly lost in our own thoughts. I remember wondering if I had enough water. We dropped down over a steep hill and into a deeply wooded area. Brush and vegetation and bushes closed in on the trail and made it feel like we were running in a cave.
Suddenly behind me, right on my heels, was a loud, horrible screech, somewhere between an elk’s rutting call and the noise an angry horse makes just before it hands you your ass. Both Bruce and I were startled, and I can say with certainty that I have never before nor since performed a vertical leap of such raw power, height, and distance. We moved, high stepping like something out of a Road Runner cartoon. Poof: all that remained was dust, swirling leaves, and maybe just a little bit of pee.
A hundred yards on we stopped. I was so scared that my running shoes ran on for another quarter mile without me. We looked back, alert and ready to fight for our lives, expecting the Abominable Snowman or a skunk-ape or a Tasmanian devil or something grizzly at least eight feet tall and made of claws and teeth.
But instead we saw a dwarf donkey stallion about two feet high at its withers. It brayed and showed its teeth and pawed the ground as if it were going to charge us. It wanted us out of its territory. Behind it, four or five equally tiny donkey mares and the cutest little donkey foal hardly bigger than a tiny dog came cautiously out of the bushes. The foal was curious and started toward us. The stallion put himself between us and the foal. The foal kept trying to get around the stallion and with each run got closer and closer to us. Bruce and I decided we better head on down the trail. It would be embarrassing to get our backsides kicked by something that was only a couple of feet tall and ate grass.
We wanted to avoid all that coming back, and so our eight-mile run became more like twelve because we had to drop over a ridgeline to cut over to a trail that wound back to the parking area a different way. After we were safely back at the car, I told Bruce that maybe there was something to be said for running inside on treadmills.
The second story illustrating the difficulty of maintaining normality was potentially much more serious. Bruce was in the passenger seat of an SUV, and it was well after dark. The only light was the cone of illumination from the black Range Rover’s headlights. The streets were narrow and filled with debris from the shot-up buildings and mud walls on both sides of what seemed like more of an alley than a roadway.
Suddenly, Bruce and his companions were cut off by a vehicle that blocked the road in front of them. The CIA officer who was driving threw the SUV into reverse, stomped on the gas, and was immediately rammed on the passenger side by a second vehicle. The long gun, the MP4, slid off the front seat and became jammed in the seat brackets. The linguist riding in the backseat was initially thrown to the floor but then clambered over the backseat and began yelling what sounded like a prayer of supplication. Something shattered the window on Bruce’s door. Broken glass flew everywhere.
Bruce was drawing his Glock from his holster but stopped when he noticed that their Range Rover was surrounded by dozens of screaming tribesmen brandishing AK-47s and gesturing for them to get out of the damaged SUV.
“We’re Americans,” the CIA officer shouted, “Americans.”
The screaming stopped. The tribesmen still pointed their weapons in their general direction, but the atmosphere was not as charged with malice. The mob parted, and a man stepped out of the crowd and approached. “Americans?” he asked in English.
“Yes,” the CIA officer replied in kind. “We got turned around on these narrow streets.” He pointed to the photograph of a martyred warlord kept on the sun visor of the Land Rover. It was a gutsy move. Any warlord’s tribe that was against Americans would have shot them instantly.
“Get out of here,” the man said with a dismissive wave of his hand, “and never come back.”
They disentangled the Range Rover, backing it out of the rubble and away from the truck that had rammed them. It was beat up, with broken windows and smashed door panels, but it ran.
I saw the Range Rover a few days later awaiting repair in a fenced-in vehicle lot. It was hard to believe that no one was seriously injured when it was rammed in the ambush. But providence or good judgment or just blind luck was in play, and other than an ass-chewing by the COS no one was worse for the experience. In fact, some could argue they were wiser by having the operational necessity of staying situationally aware, not overreacting in emergencies, securing firearms, and perfecting defensive driving indelibly ingrained without any scars to show for the lesson.
The Terrorist Think Tank
When KSM started cooperating, useful information didn’t just trickle out of him; it came in a flood. So much so that we set up a process that eventually was called the Terrorist Think Tank.
The idea was to use the high-value detainees in CIA custody as a brain trust made up of senior terrorists who would unknowingly work together to address our intelligence requirements and provide insight into the mindset and worldview of this elite group of people who were trying to kill us. Our intent was to use this information to undermine future terrorist operations.
Interrogators, debriefers, and subject matter experts could quickly query high-value detainees on a variety of intelligence-related subjects. For example, we could show the same surveillance photograph to multiple high-value detainees in short order, using what we learned from each to question the others in real time. Sometimes we circled back when detainees later provided information that suggested that those who had been questioned earlier had additional information that they were hiding or had forgotten or that we had not asked for in a way that would pull for what they knew. Here is an example of how something as simple as showing a photo might yield dividends beyond the identification of the main target of the surveillance.
For reasons of classification, I can’t go into too many details, but imagine that we showed a photograph of a suspected terrorist to the detainees in the think tank. Several might know the main suspect, but one might recognize jihadi brothers in the background. Armed with that knowledge, interrogators, debriefers, or subject matter experts could go back to detainees who had been interviewed earlier and question them in more detail, all within a few minutes or hours of first receiving the photograph. This significantly cut down the turnaround time and often created a kind of synergy that resulted in more complete answers than did questioning detainees days apart. The same kind of thing happened with identifying voices, decoding encrypted messages, or identifying the significance of different locations where terrorists were thought to be hiding out and filling in details about them. It also allowed us to ask them one by one how they would go about locating a detainee in hiding or help us understand al-Qa’ida attack planning. When President Bush ordered that detainees in CIA custody be transferred to the military at Guantanamo Bay in 2006, the loss of this capability was in my opinion a major setback. Terrorists killed in Predator attacks can’t provide insight into the intentions of the leaders of various groups that are our mortal enemies. Generally, neither can outsourcing interrogations to foreign services.
Let me tell you about an interesting characteristic of captured high-value detainees who were more or less compliant. Bruce and I noticed early on that when they first started cooperating, high-value detainees would answer questions exactly as asked, nothing more. Initially most would not volunteer any information or correct your question if you were off base. Some never got over this. But Abu Zubaydah and KSM both passed through this stage and eventually provided information beyond what was being sought.
For example, there were times after EITs had been discontinued for months when I would ask KSM something and he would provide an answer. Then he would say, “But that’s not the question I would ask,” and he would rephrase the question in a way that would call for information not in the original intelligence requirement. Then he would say, “Now ask me that question.” I would, and he would provide a fuller and more complete answer to the issue I was asking about. It was his way of providing the information without volunteering it in the absence of a specific question.
I once asked KSM and Abu Zubaydah why detainees went through this phase of answering questions exactly as asked. Both told me that once a brother believed in his heart that he could be forced to provide information, there was no sin in answering questions precisely as they were put to him (this we knew already), but it was a sin to volunteer information your enemies weren’t asking for and might not know you had. It was a betrayal of Allah and of the brothers still fighting. The result was that we sometimes had to play a form of the children’s game Battleship. Interrogators would lob questions at the detainee, and the detainee wouldn’t respond with the sought-after information until one of the questions struck the mark. This insight became important when I later began to provide consultation to foreign law enforcement and intelligence services on noncoercive interrogations and used the lessons learned from the Terrorist Think Tank.
The Terrorist Think Tank project also allowed us to interview the detainees to gain insight into their worldview and mindset.
One illuminating discussion I remember involved talking with Khallad Bin Attash about his March 2001 role in blowing up the two sixth-century Buddhas carved into the sandstone cliffs in the Bamiyan Valley northwest of Kabul, Afghanistan. It is a UNESCO World Heritage Site. Bin Attash told me that Mullah Omar, leader of the Taliban, wanted the Buddhas destroyed because they were idols. Allah condemns idol worship, he explained, and demands that all idols be destroyed. This is the primary reason ISIS is destroying the ancient carvings, statues, and artwork as it razes Iraq and Syria, stripping the gold out of churches as it destroys them and looting museums and smashing antiquities.
Bin Attash said that the Taliban wanted to destroy the idols but didn’t know much about explosives, and so al-Qa’ida sent him to help them because he was an explosives expert. He said he showed the Taliban how to set the charges and then helped them destroy the idols. I asked him how he felt about destroying a World Heritage Site that people traveled from around the world to visit.
He seemed to take great pride in the key role he had played and suggested that the fact that it was a World Heritage Site made it that much more important to destroy the idols, not less, as we in the West might foolishly assume. He said that because the place was so famous, lots of idolaters went there to worship, resulting in much sinning. He said that his destruction of the Buddhas was the same thing as the Prophet Muhammad’s destruction of the hundreds of idols in the Kaaba, an act of faith to rid the world of idolatry. The Kaaba is a cube-shaped structure in Mecca, Saudi Arabia, long thought by Muslims to have been built by the prophet Abraham and his son Ishmael in pre-Islamic antiquity and a destination for Muslims during their annual pilgrimage. In Muhammad’s time it supposedly was filled with 360 idols of various pre-Islamic gods that he destroyed. Bin Attash said that Allah would see his participation in destroying the Buddhas as an act of love and devotion and reward him in paradise.
Though those of us in the West may see the uniqueness, the beauty, and the status of the Bamiyan Valley Buddhas at a UNESCO World Heritage Site as reasons to protect these antiquities, those subscribing to Bin Attash’s brand of Islam view those qualities as reasons to destroy them.
When I discussed a religious topic with a high-value detainee, my goal was to understand his beliefs, not criticize them. Later, when I got the chance, I would read about the topic in English translations of original Islamic documents such as the Koran or the Sunnah (sayings and teachings of Prophet Muhammad) or the hadiths (stories about Muhammad’s life and deeds) or a volume of Sharia law such as Reliance of the Traveller. After reading about the topic or discussing it with other detainees, I often would stop in to see the original detainee for clarification and to try to get a more nuanced understanding of his worldview, especially as it related to attacking America, and a better feel for how the religious principles we had discussed guided his cooperation or resistance when questioned.
Americans often assume that for the most part terrorists think the way we do, but those who subscribe to al-Qa’ida and ISIS’s brand of Islam do not. The interviews that Bruce and I and others did as part of the Terrorist Think Tank highlighted several dangerous ideas that are part of the worldview of these violent jihadists, ideas that increase the likelihood of violent terror attacks against the West, especially America.
They believe that Muslims who subscribe to their brand of Islam are superior people chosen by Allah for a special destiny: true dominion over the world. They believe that Allah has commanded them to establish dominion by any means necessary, including violence. They believe that because the West, especially America, is so strong, the only hope for achieving this destiny and obtaining their God-given entitlement to rule the world is through violent jihad. They believe that the fact that we oppose their taking over the world and imposing their religious values on us proves that we harbor harmful intentions that make them vulnerable; therefore, we are a threat that must be destroyed.
People who harbor these dangerous ideas are not likely to adopt the live-and-let-live prospective of most Americans. They don’t think the way we do, and they seek to use these differences, our tolerance, our values, and our freedoms as weapons to aid in our destruction.
“It is inevitable,” Abu Zubaydah once said to me with a wry smile and a tone of absolute confidence. “It is Allah’s will.”
He was explaining to me that the imposition of Salafist Islam on all of humanity could not be stopped or defeated, only delayed. However, even such delays, he said, were part of Allah’s larger plan: the alignment of events in preparation for the return of the Mahdi, the Prophet Muhammad’s successor who will conquer the world for Islam and whose arrival portends the apocalyptic End of Days when the damned are judged and the blessed start to taste the pleasures of paradise.
I don’t know how I expected him to act during the exchange, but I wouldn’t have been surprised to hear veiled threats or sense a hostile urge to strike out. But there was none of that. No belligerence, no angry spewing of Koranic verses, no fanatical Islamic rants, just an amused twinkle in his eyes and the sense that as he was explaining his beliefs to me, he was experiencing the joy of giving his life over to something that was greater than he was.
We didn’t start off talking about the apocalypse; we started off talking about how Abu Zubaydah had lost his way morally as a teenager and about how he returned to the true path of Islam by strictly relying on the words and deeds of the Prophet Muhammad for guidance in how to act in all things.
Allah had blessed him, he said, with discontentment—an ache to do more for his Palestinian people—and a hatred of the Jews, gifts that motivated him to seek fulfillment beyond a life of material possessions and the pleasures of women and Pepsi. Taking up the jihad allowed him to focus those gifts and gave his life renewed purpose. Abu Zubaydah said that by surrendering to Allah’s will and accepting his obligation to wage jihad he became a mujahideen, a holy warrior, in a continuous line that stretched back unbroken to the Prophet Muhammad.
We drifted into discussing the apocalypse and the End of Days, and our conversation carried us into talking about why it was so important to impose his brand of Islam on the rest of the world. The spread of Islam and the imposition of strict Sharia law are important preparations for the end of the world, one of the things that must happen before the souls of good Muslims trapped in their graves can enter paradise on Judgment Day.
I got the impression that Abu Zubaydah viewed imposing his brand of Islam on all humanity as an act of devotion, not as a hostile act but rather as an invitation to join him in the bliss that comes from actively surrendering oneself to the one true god. You become Abu Zubaydah’s enemy only when you reject that invitation and by doing so declare yourself an enemy of Allah and thus subject to being conquered or killed by any means consistent with Koranic revelation and the teaching of the Prophet Muhammad.
Abu Zubaydah told me that Allah imposed on him the obligation as a mujahideen to take the fight to his enemies wherever they were and to never quit, with the full knowledge that if he stalled or fell in battle, future generations of mujahideen would rise up and faithfully carry on the struggle until all of society was under Sharia law or the apocalyptic End of Days was at hand.
The thing that most impressed me about these discussions and similar discussions I had with other high-value detainees was the certainty of their beliefs. They were not using religion as an excuse for what they did. Instead, they acted as they did because their strict and literal reading of the Koran and the hadiths caused them to believe that they were steadfastly following the prescribed rules of war against infidels laid out by Allah in revelations to the Prophet Muhammad.
As others have pointed out, we see a similar nexus between belief and action with ISIS as they attempt to purify the land they conquer in their fight to reestablish the Islamic caliphate in Iraq and Syria. Slavery, crucifixion, beheading, burning, stoning, looting, hacking off limbs, blinding, throwing gays off tall places, raping captives as spoils of war—these are not modern innovations but a revival of medieval customs drawn from the exegesis of ancient holy texts and carried out by Islamists deliberately trying to breathe new life into dormant Islamic traditions. To them, the conquest and slaughter of Allah’s enemies, especially those who are helpless to prevent it, is a blissful act of worship done for the love of their god, not out of hatred for their enemies.
To expect ardent subscribers to these beliefs to abandon them willingly is dangerously unrealistic.
Helping Debriefers and Subject Matter Experts Question HVDs
“You’re a liar, a son of a bitch, and you’re always going to be a lying son of a bitch.” The white-haired lady was leaning over the table, yelling in Ramzi bin al-Shibh’s face. His eyes bugged out. He rolled them and looked over at me with a “see what I have to put up with?” expression.
I was there because bin al-Shibh was giving one of the CIA’s best debriefers a hard time. He had been lying to her. Their relationship had been contentious because she was scary smart and very assertive and bin al-Shibh thought women were chattel to be possessed and do his bidding, with no right to question a man’s decisions. It was a spicy mix, but she was generally good at getting information out of him and had been questioning him for several weeks. It wasn’t the first time she had debriefed him, either. She knew about his attitude toward women. But this time they were getting on each other’s nerves. She was really fed up with him.
Headquarters sent me there to see if I could sort it out and get bin al-Shibh to admit he had lied and get on with the debriefing. Thank goodness, I was going to be there only one night.
I don’t even remember what the questioning was about. Something to do with one of KSM’s terror plots, I think. Anyway, I spent a half hour or so with her going over what bin al-Shibh had told her and what she thought he was lying about. She told me she wanted to “cut his nuts off.” Not an option, really, although the thought of him fathering children makes me shudder even today.
Later I talked alone with bin al-Shibh. “That woman does not know her place.” Now it was his turn to tell me his side of events. “She talks down to me….Me…bin al-Shibh!” as if he couldn’t get his mind around it.
“What do you think she told me about you? I mean, what’s her side of the story?”
“She says I’m a liar. That there has to be more than what I’ve told her. She called me an ugly name.”
“Yeah, she’s a scary lady,” I said, hoping to disarm him with a little “we guys have got to stick together” empathy. “But are you lying to her?”
“Maybe,” he said, and gave me a conspiratorial look that said he clearly was, and out of spite at that.
“So what’s next? How do we get past this?”
“Bring me somebody else to talk to me—a man.”
“Not going to happen. You’re doing this out of spite. Headquarters is never going to let you pick and choose who you work with. You have to work with her. Here’s a suggestion. Why don’t you tell me what you lied to her about and the two of us will come up with some way to tell her.”
He told me. As I said, I don’t remember what it was, but I’m sure it had something to do with stuff other detainees had told us and that bin al-Shibh would not acknowledge as true. I told him, “She’s too smart for you to try to claim you just now remembered something like that, something she’s been asking you about for days. You’re better off coming clean.”
Bin al-Shibh agreed. I could tell he wasn’t looking forward to it. He was acting like a kid who had been caught shoplifting and now was being forced to admit it to the store manager and apologize.
To smooth things, I got together with the white-haired lady before our meeting with bin al-Shibh and stressed that it was important for her not to punish him for coming clean about lying because it would make it less likely that he would admit to lying in the future. She said she understood.
Once the three of us were in the meeting room, I said, “Bin al-Shibh has something he wants to tell you.” And then bin al-Shibh admitted he had lied to her out of spite because he didn’t like her. I think it would have gone smoothly if he had not disparagingly addressed her as “woman” during his apology.
She was out of her seat and in his face before I could say anything, again calling him a son of a bitch and a liar. But unlike when the FBI called Abu Zubaydah a son of a bitch, I got the impression this wasn’t the first time bin al-Shibh had been called that. He looked over at me and gave me a “see what this woman is like?” gesture. The look wasn’t something that pleased the white-haired lady. It prompted her to aim another string of invectives at him and the stink eye at me.
I told bin al-Shibh, “Don’t be looking to me to rescue you. You brought this on yourself. You know what she is like. You’ve been talking to her for weeks. This is what happens when you lie to her.” To her I said, “He admitted he lied and is ready to answer your questions. Let’s do that. Let’s ask him your questions and see if he keeps his word.” This earned me another glance, albeit with less stink eye this time. But she understood my point and calmed down. She admonished bin al-Shibh not to lie to her again and then debriefed him on the topic he had been lying to her about. The two of them seemed to have worked out their differences, at least temporarily. I left the black site and was never called in to help the white-haired woman again. Bin al-Shibh, however, continued to be difficult.
The debriefers and targeters and subject matter experts were amazing professionals, and most of the time nothing like that happened. But the vignette above is an example of the sorts of problems I was dispatched to resolve to make it possible for those professionals to debrief high-value detainees.
Here is another story. A young CIA officer, not a contractor, got into a dispute with al-Nashiri. As I mentioned in chapter 3, al-Nashiri could be very difficult to deal with, especially when he had a migraine headache. On this occasion, al-Nashiri pitched a fit and once again smeared snot and feces on the cameras and walls in his cell. The young CIA officer and several of the guards went into the cell with the intention of forcing him to clean it up. Things escalated, and the young CIA officer told the COB that he intended to physically force al-Nashiri to comply if necessary.
Bruce objected. I objected. We had both dealt successfully with al-Nashiri when he was in one of these moods, and we knew nothing good would come of trying to force him physically. We knew that if that happened, al-Nashiri would be out of sorts for weeks. Bruce voiced his objections to the COB. They got into a bit of an argument. The young CIA officer who wanted to force the issue was a blue badger, an agency employee. We were contractors: green badgers with no authority. The young CIA officer acted like Bruce was trying to order him around rather than just trying to save us all a lot of grief dealing with al-Nashiri later. The COB initially sided with the young CIA officer.
What they did not know was that al-Nashiri had a ritual he insisted on following when he had a headache. The ritual was simple: he wanted to take two aspirin with caffeine and an antacid tablet, put toilet paper in his ears, and then wrap his head in a towel. Allow him to follow it and he was no problem at all. Keep him from doing it and he would throw feces around his cell and fight you. Medical personnel had made the aspirin and antacid available to him, but al-Nashiri seldom directly asked for them. Instead, he would stand in front of the camera and indicate that he had a headache through a series of grunts and then pantomime a headache by placing his hands on his temples and rocking from side to side. If you didn’t know what he was doing, it looked a little nuts. With the turnover at the site, the guards didn’t know what they were looking at, and things quickly escalated. Finally Bruce got through to the COB, who let me go into al-Nashiri’s cell alone and take care of the problem without further incident.
Other examples of detainee challenges were described in earlier chapters. KSM’s office hours and vitamin disputes, the debriefer who alienated KSM by claiming to know more about KSM than he did himself, and subject matter experts looking for Perry Mason moments are all examples of the sorts of things Bruce and I dealt with to facilitate detainee debriefings.
Consultation with Foreign Liaison Services
Starting in 2004, the chief of the CTC’s Special Missions Department began sending me to consult with non-Western foreign intelligence and law enforcement services that were detaining terrorists who were thought to have information that the CIA needed to stop attacks against the United States and our allies.
My marching orders were clear. No physical coercion could be involved. If I saw any rough stuff, no matter how minor, I was to leave the scene immediately and report it. I was to have no direct contact with detainees held in foreign custody. I couldn’t even be in the room when detainees were questioned. I was to observe through one-way mirrors or on closed circuit TV.
My job was to help liaison partners develop interrogation strategies and individualized interrogation plans tailored to the high-value detainees they had in custody. The aim was to better service CIA intelligence requirements.
This was a somewhat complicated process. I started by learning as much as I could about the specific person being detained by a foreign liaison. I then familiarized myself with the specific questions the CIA wanted to have answered. Fortunately for me, I was always accompanied by one or more brilliant subject matter experts, analysts, and targeters who knew far more about how the detained terrorist fit into the threat matrix than I ever could. I then met with the foreign interrogators to get to know them and find out about their interrogation approaches.
After that, I watched liaison interrogations in real time, accompanied by subject matter experts who could provide me and the liaison with immediate feedback about whether the CIA’s questions were being answered. Usually, after covering each major section of the questions, the interrogator would take a short break and check in with us. That gave us a chance to provide feedback about how adequately our questions were being answered. If the interrogator was finding out what we needed to know, we quickly discussed the next set of questions; if the detainee was withholding, we came up with a game plan for what to do next in the interrogation session tailored to that terrorist in that time and place. After each session was over, we would meet with the liaison interrogators and their bosses and hot-wash the session. I spent a surprising amount of time teaching basic questioning skills.
Some liaison interrogators were brilliant; others, not so much. This was one reason analysts were often unhappy with the responses they got back from liaison services before the CIA established its own interrogation program. It was also the reason I was asked to get involved.
Previously, CIA officers would provide a list of questions several pages long with supporting facts and suggested ways of asking the questions. Then they would get back answers from the liaison that were only marginally useful if not completely worthless.
For some liaison services, interrogators learned their skills on the job as an apprentice to a senior investigator without formal training. A lot of my work consisted of watching what the interrogator was doing during interrogations and then providing training to address the shortfalls.
For example, I would teach interrogators to construct time lines around critical events and fill in key pieces of information, particularly about a detainee’s actions. I also taught them how to recognize the importance of vague answers. Vagueness in an answer to a specific question is a clear indication that additional follow-up is needed that focuses specifically on the vague parts. It doesn’t mean the detainee necessarily knows the answer, but it does mean additional questioning is required.
I would spend some time talking about how human memory works. Interrogators and debriefers often have to make real-time intuitive judgments about what is reasonable for a detainee to remember or forget. Some thought that memories were recalled and played back like a movie; they are instead reconstructed.
I taught them how to help detainees think back and reconstruct important events. I reviewed the impact of emotions on recall, pointing out how the emotions in play when events happen influence what can be remembered later. I also explained how the emotions they experience during recall influence how memories are re-created and thus the information available to the interrogator. I covered the things that can distort recall and plant false memories. And I reviewed questioning techniques that increase the risk of eliciting false confessions, inaccurate descriptions of real past events, or the recall of confabulated information and cautioned against their use.
I shared what we had learned about the tendency of detained jihadists who appeared to be cooperating to answer questions exactly as asked and not as was intended by the interrogator. And I passed along other observations about frequently observed resistance strategies employed by captured terrorists.
When questioning a detainee about a letter written or addressed to that detainee, liaison interrogators would often hand the letter to the detainee and ask, “Is this your letter?” The reply was almost always “No.” Even if the answer wasn’t “No,” the interrogator usually took back the letter before the detainee could read it and then started asking questions about the letter’s content. Detainees who were intent on withholding would often use the way the interrogator handled the letter and the way the interrogator’s questions jumped around to delay responding and withhold information.
I recommended that first the detainee be asked to hold the document and read it completely through out loud. Then the detainee should be asked to read it out loud again, only this time, when the detainee got to a portion of the letter that we were interested in, the interrogator should stop him and say something like “What were you thinking of when you wrote those words you just read?” or “What does this word refer to?” or “How did you think [the letter’s recipient] would interpret what you just read?” or some similar question related to what had just been read out loud.
From a psychological point of view the initial readthrough activated the areas of memory associated with the document, making it easier to recall why the document was originally created. The readthrough also had the added effect of triggering, for lack of a better term, “guilty knowledge” concerning the intent behind writing the letter. This guilty knowledge made it more likely that a detainee’s body language and word choice would betray efforts to withhold information because he was mentally engaged with what was in the document. It was easier for him to be deceptive when he could deal with it at a distance, much harder when he had just read aloud incriminating content that was either written by or intended for him.
One challenge that was unique to working with Muslim interrogators was the impact of Islam on their interactions with a detainee during interrogation. Often the detainees I was sent to offer advice on interrogating were enrolled in an Islamic reeducation-rehabilitation process. In the course of rehabilitation, a detainee would review his life story and the choices he made from the perspective of following the true path of a Muslim man. The problem this created for interrogations was that once the religious teachers working with the detainee declared that he had returned to the true path (i.e., repented and abandoned his terrorist ideologies), the interrogators were bound by their religion and in some cases by government policy to accept his answers at face value.
At first this confused me. It seemed obvious that terrorists lie and that accepting anything one of them said at face value was risky. When I asked the foreign interrogators I worked with to explain the reasoning to me, I was told that it was based on a strict interpretation of Sharia law. It was in most cases a sin to lie blatantly to another Muslim; it was also a sin to accuse another Muslim of lying to you without proof. Interrogators who didn’t appear to accept the word of a terrorist who had been declared by religious scholars to be back on the true path risked committing the sin of taking the word of an infidel over that of a True Muslim and of getting sideways with leaders who wanted the rehabilitation programs to succeed.
I encountered this a fair bit and worked with interrogators to help them brainstorm ways to readdress things that the detainee was clearly lying about without appearing to question his word. The detainee was in a bind, because if he admitted he was lying, he would be off the true path of a Muslim man and possibly committing religious crimes that in their minds had far worse consequences than trying to blow up a few Americans. Often my contribution was to help interrogators devise and orchestrate face-saving ways for the detainee to “suddenly recall” important details or to pray the Istikharah to receive guidance from Allah and tell the interrogator what was “revealed” in dreams. It was not the first time liaison interrogators had dealt with the problem. Some were much better than I was at devising work-arounds. My contribution often amounted to helping them psychologically tailor the face-saving device to the specific detainee’s temperament and worldview.
My presence also served another critical function. Most of the CIA subject matter experts I worked with were women—brilliant, attractive, competent, outspoken women—and some Muslim male interrogators had issues working with them. Hell, they scared me. It was helpful for me to be around. Since subject matter experts always accompanied me, these interrogators could save face and work with the knowledgeable females by including me in the conversation. They weren’t supposed to be alone with women they weren’t related to. I was a male escort, and some interrogators were more comfortable if I was there. In retrospect, I think it would be more accurate to say that the subject matter experts dragged me along as camouflage so that they could do their jobs protecting Americans while being immersed in a culture that didn’t appreciate the capabilities of Western women. Although I’ve seen subordinates act like male chauvinists, I never saw this problem with the senior leadership of any liaison services with which I consulted. Those leaders tended to be bright, Western-educated, and not as prejudiced toward women.
“There is a man on an airplane right now, headed to the United States, and we fear he may be a troublemaker.”
It was late 2006, the middle of the night in a Middle Eastern country. The man who asked to see me urgently was sitting at a conference table with four or five cell phones fanned out in front of him like a hand of playing cards. We were drinking strong cardamom tea. I could smell it and the faint honey aroma that emanated off the pastries.
“Here are his details,” he said, sliding a folded piece of paper across the table to me. “You might want to keep an eye on him when he gets to the United States.”
I glanced at the contents and then slid the folded paper to the CIA officer sitting beside me.
“Any chance he will make mischief on the plane ride over?” I asked.
“No. His girlfriend says he is going to the States to take an engineering class, but he has said that he would like to do operations against the United States, and we’re concerned that he might act out once he gets there. You should keep an eye on him.”
Then the CIA officers and the subject matter expert who accompanied me from home on this trip joined the conversation, going over more precisely why the liaison was concerned enough that they would feel compelled to tell us about the suspect and providing more details about what the actual threat might be. It seemed the liaison had tried to stop this person from leaving for the United States, but the flight had left before they had had a chance to pull him off it.
This illustrates what for me was one of the most interesting aspects of my work with foreign liaison officers. After I had worked with their interrogators, the leadership of the liaison services often would ask for me by name to attend late-night meetings. They would pass bits of intelligence to me. They would tell me things, often alarming things, that would end up in intelligence reports and urgent cables sent back home. One of the COSs of a Middle Eastern country recognized this, took me under his wing, and had me attend meetings with him. Later we would split the report-writing chores.
In many ways these foreign liaison trips were some of the most productive times I spent working for the agency, as were working one-off problems, helping debriefers and subject matter experts obtain intelligence without using coercion, and furthering our understanding of terrorist beliefs, motives, and priorities. But the 5 percent of my time that I had spent that involved EITs always came back to haunt me.