The First Interrogation

What are they? Wise men or fools? If wise, why do you go to war with them? If fools, what does it matter to you what they think?

—Epictetus, Discourses,
Handbook, Fragments, III.22.37

Dusty, hot, and dry streets, typical of so many I had known in the Third World during my career, surrounded our office. I flashed my passport to a guard at the first barricade. He nodded once, smiled slightly, and, his eyes continuing to watch the streets, quickly passed me through the entrance to the standard metal detectors, pat-downs, and heavy blast doors. Formal, fit, young officers, whom I always had trouble hearing, standing behind bulletproof glass checked my passport, glancing up at me, impassive and deliberate, to study my face. They handed me a badge and called my escort from our front office to come meet me. I had a short wait in a formal, largely empty reception area, staring at the overlarge, cult-of-personality and banana-republic-like portraits of the president and vice president on the wall. Then I was through the barriers and into the quiet, mostly empty halls, always a stark contrast with the turmoil and noise outside; without exception, wherever I was in the world, I ran into someone I knew from some earlier post or operation; this time it was a colleague whom I had last seen a decade earlier. We shared a moment of good-natured, flippant banter, and then the chief’s secretary nodded me into the chief’s office, and on to what I expected to be the standard positive, can-do discussions.

There was a twist to the pattern this time. This was a very high-priority, high-risk case. “Peter,” the COS, a trim, impressive former military man, had a longer history of working the al-Qa’ida target than almost any officer in the service. There was no routine conversation with yet another TDYer this time. Peter wanted to establish his control, quickly get a sense as to whether I was up to the job, and make sure I did exactly as I was told. The leash was tighter on me to start, and his eyes were on me more than usual. This case had to be run right, it had not been well-run to date, by an analyst with poor social and psychological skills, and I had arrived to provide “adult supervision” to a delicate, complicated, labor-intensive case. And Peter did not know me yet.

There was no welcome or introductory conversation. Peter looked at me, peremptory and challenging.

“You are not a professional interrogator, are you?”

“No.”

“You will take your lead from our liaison partners. This is their turf. We will go out together later today and I will introduce you. This is their turf. Understood?”

I understood and took no offense. The COS was harried, that was clear from my few minutes waiting outside his office with his secretary, and overworked. The Seventh Floor was watching closely. He could not allow such a high-profile case to be messed up. The reins might loosen as I established my credibility. They did later, and I found Peter to be one of the best leaders for whom I had ever worked.

I was given the desk of an officer who had been surged for several months to XXXXXXXXXXX and parts unknown, in a small rectangular office cluttered with safes, maps, and three desks. One of my new officemates was in the field when I arrived. This proved to be the case most of the time, so that I rarely saw him. Various TDYers were to use his space during my time in-country.

The other new officemate was there when I arrived, though, and greeted me cordially. “Jack” was a young first-tour officer, strongly built XXXXXXX like all the Irish kids with whom I had played hockey growing up. I found over the succeeding weeks that he combined the practicality of the street, the focus of an idealistic junior officer, and, when dealing with a more senior officer, the irreverence yet appropriate deference of someone with a well-centered and stable personality. Jack came to enjoy watching me fulminate about one frustration or another, and appreciated literally working alongside a much more experienced officer, to see how one could sometimes successfully maneuver the system and bureaucracy to get things done. I had, probably wide-eyed, paid the same attention, and felt a sense of privilege, many years earlier when I had been “number thirteen on a staff of twelve” on what was then the small CT office. Jack was to prove a good man to spend months with sitting elbow to elbow.

Jack showed me around the office and then took me down to the small cafeteria for lunch. I stopped in the men’s room on the way. I stepped to the urinal and unzipped my fly, only to stop mid-action and stare, bemused, in front of me.

“Oh, for God’s sake,” I said, standing there, half undone. Whoever had installed the urinal had fixed it so high up on the wall that I literally had to stand on my tiptoes, lean back, and aim up to pee into it. This was absurd, and really hard to do. Stupid Third Worlders, I thought, in the end succeeding in the peculiar task imposed upon me. Fortunately, I was the only person in the men’s room, so no one heard me cuss or saw me standing nonplussed, fly down, dick in hand, in front of a chest-high urinal.

Jack and I made the standard introductory small talk over lunch: sports, where we had worked and on what, who we knew, origins, and so on. Unfortunately, Jack was a Yankees fan, and immediately betrayed typical self-satisfied condescension to me, as ardent a Red Sox fan as one could be. Once we had established decent rapport and I had decided that Jack was a decent guy, I asked him, “What’s with the men’s room here?”

“What’s with the men’s room? What do you mean?”

I looked at him and reconsidered. I had just arrived and he did not know me yet.

“Oh, it was just sort of old and a little messy, that’s all,” I said.

Jack took my comment as a throwaway remark, maybe a little anal.

“Well, this is hardly Park Avenue, you know.”

“Yeah.”

The reasons I had been sent out started to become apparent on the drive through the city and into the countryside to the liaison service’s facility, where the interrogations occurred. Roger, the analyst who had been running the case, insisted someone from the station drive him to the facility, because he was not comfortable driving in a Third World city, and he feared getting lost and finding himself left to his own devices. Only the COS and the interrogation team could interact with liaison on such a sensitive case; Roger’s timorousness obliged the COS to waste his time on one case, often to act as chauffeur for someone who was always tense and sour, and to keep the interrogation team leader from totally alienating our liaison hosts.

The first “interrogation” I observed was a disaster. Roger knew more about CAPTUS than anyone alive, probably. This was why he led the initial interrogation team. But his knowledge consisted of the link analysis one does XXXXXXXXXXX XXXXXXXXXXX XXXXXXXXXXX XXXXXXXXXXX XXX XXXXXXXXXXX XXXX . . . while sitting in his windowless cubicle in the basement of CIA Headquarters. He had no social skills, or insights to human behavior, even of the man he had devoted his life to catching. He showed no interest in or knowledge of foreign cultures, or of how to smooth any interpersonal exchange for personal advantage. Roger interrogated like this:

XXXXXXXXXXX XXXXXXXXXXX XXXXXXXXXXX XXXXXXXXX

XXXXXXXXXXX XXXXXXXXXXX XXXXXXXXXXX XX

XXXXXXXXXXX XXXXXXXXXXX XXXXXXXXXXX XXXXXXXXXXX XXXXXXXXXXX

XXXXXXXXXXX XXXXXXXXXXX XXXXXXXXXXX XXXXXXXXX

XXXXXXXXXXX XXXXXXXXXXX XXXX

XXXXXXXXXX.1

That was about it; XXXXXXXXXXX XXXXXXXXXXX XXXXXXXX. Roger disliked the answers he heard—they did not fit his preconceptions—while growing more and more dyspeptic.

As the CIA Inspector General’s Special Review: Counterterrorism, Detention and Interrogation Activities (2003–7123-IG) would note two years later in its overall characterization of CIA interrogation practices, Roger’s manner and assumptions represented the typical position of Headquarters and of Headquarters-based terrorism analysts, who found themselves involved in some part of the interrogation apparatus:

The Agency lacked adequate linguists or subject matter experts and had very little hard knowledge of what particular Al-Qaida leaders—who later became detainees—knew. This lack of knowledge led analysts to speculate about what a detainee “should know,” vice information the analyst could objectively demonstrate the detainee did know. If a detainee did not respond to a question posed to him, the assumption at Headquarters was that the detainee was holding back and knew more; consequently, Headquarters recommended resumption of EITs [Enhanced Interrogation Techniques].2

In short, Roger broke the most basic rule of interrogation, and of human relations, once again laid out decades ago in the KUBARK manual: “The assumption of hostility, or the use of pressure tactics at first encounter, may make a subject resistant who would have responded to . . . an initial assumption of good will.”

Afterward, Roger remained angry and wrote that CAPTUS was stonewalling and a liar. XXXXXXXXXXX XXXXXXXXXXX XXXXXXX XXXXXXXXXXX XXXXXXXXXXX XXXX. I was incensed. This struck me as absurd, stupid; it demonstrated a shocking ignorance and incompetence concerning human dynamics, personality, elicitation, conversation, and, I quickly determined, interrogation. But this “analysis” and the consequent instructions I received concerning the case would prove a recurring and growing point of tension between Headquarters and me throughout my time running the CAPTUS case in the field.

Roger was also ill, and broke down into uncontrollable spasms of wretched coughing and sweating, leaving CAPTUS—and all of us in Roger’s presence—alarmed that he either suffered from tuberculosis or was infecting us all with some debilitating respiratory affliction.

At the same time, Roger ignored our liaison hosts and partners, or treated them in a surly manner, as though they, too, were the enemy. He was unable to speak to liaison directly, did not interact with them, refused to find his way alone through the city or to leave the office or his hotel, and largely ignored the entire multiagency interrogation team there to support him in the interrogation.

I left that first “interrogation” appalled. It was immediately obvious why the COS was so tense, why his control of the case had become so tight, and why I had been brought in.

The next day’s interrogation was the same: chaperoning through the city, lack of interaction with and disdain for our liaison partners, interrogations consisting of denunciations of CAPTUS, Roger hacking and wheezing his way through any human interaction.

Between these sessions, I had of course started the “hallway” conversations that were so crucial to any operation, where one learned what was really happening, established one’s credibility, protected oneself, or insinuated one’s own positions into the web of rumor and whispered confidences. I began to learn who stuck up for whom, and who called whom a fool or a snake. I had coffee with an officer named Selma, a member of the interrogation team who had arrived with Roger. She said that in the very first interrogation of CAPTUS, Roger had wanted to put a heavy bag over CAPTUS’s head and then sit there shouting at him. Selma looked at me wide-eyed as she related Roger’s method, smiled ruefully, and exclaimed, “I mean, what was that about? What sort of crazy shit is that?” She said that the COS had been aghast. As Roger bellowed and belittled CAPTUS the COS pulled Selma aside and whispered, “Can’t you stop this? Do something!” She said that she replied, “I can’t. I’m not one of you guys [CIA]. He’s yours. You’ve got to.” She laughed. “Then you showed up a few days later.”

By my third day I decided I had to end the debacle.

I used one of Roger’s coughing fits—our liaison partners wide-eyed in concern and growing irritation that Roger accomplished nothing, and did so rudely—to send him back to his hotel, to get him out of the way, and off the case. The COS was present, and visibly struggled not to explode in anger at Roger in front of our liaison hosts. Over Roger’s croaks, rocking, and moans, I told our liaison partners that we were sending Roger home “so that he can die out of our sight,” garnering a useful laugh; later, back at the station, I unkindly characterized Roger as “diseased,” getting laughs there, too, but the COS was only too glad to act upon my larger meaning, and that was the end of Roger as a member of the interrogation team.

Peter had been impressed, relieved, really, that I needed only to be given the address of the interrogation location and took care of myself and that I did not need, or want, his involvement in the case, and he liked how I had moved quickly to remove Roger and resolve his corrosive effects on our work. He was pleased with the easy rapport I established with liaison. I deferred to them; I interacted with them; I asked them their views; I treated them as peers, who nonetheless owned the turf; I showed clear deference, without losing independence of action, to the senior liaison officer. I found this officer to be wary, aggressive, and sullen, but this did not matter. He was the man in charge, and so I made a point of having the best relations I could manage with him. As a result, Peter started to give me more independence in running the interrogation and our relations with liaison about the case. He was obviously relieved to have someone competent on the job, and to have one less task that he had to perform.

I had been struck in the first interrogation session I had observed to find that, as so often is the case when conducting operations, there appeared to be little or no plan about how to accomplish our task. On a typical operation in the DO, too, even if one managed to come up with a sound plan of action, time pressures, resource shortages, and competing operational demands often obliged officers to conduct operations on the fly, acting as coherently as possible in the swirl of events, but without being able to act according to a strategic “plan.” Good officers improvised well, to unanticipated circumstances and without prearranged support, and realized that usually there was no higher structure guiding events. XXXXXXXXXXX XXXXXXXXXXX XXXXXXXX XXXXXXXXXXX XXXXXXXXXXX XXXXXXXXXXX XXXXXXXXXXX XXXXXXXXXXX XXXXXXXXXXX XXXXXXXXXXX XXXXXXXXXXX XXXXXXXXXX. The CAPTUS case was no different, for all the years of work that had gone into identifying and capturing him. The interrogation process for CAPTUS—as for all detainees, for that matter—was evolved on the fly . . . just as I had been pulled from my job one minute and the next had been sent around the world. CAPTUS was viewed, in my view simplistically, as a XXXXXXXXXXX X detainee XXXXXXXXXX, who should answer questions when asked . . . and that was the end of it. Years before, I had had a conversation with my officemate of the moment, a former sergeant in the Army who saw through foolishness with the wisdom of having had to live amidst it for years. He had just come back from a staff meeting and was laughing about how typically it had gone.

“Well,” he said, “the boss just told us the plan: ‘Go get ’em.’ . . . That was it. ‘Go get ‘em.’ That’s the plan? That’s the plan?! ‘Go get ’em’?”

That was the situation I stepped into: tubercular coughs, interrogation by denunciation, an overburdened, wary, and pissed-off COS, alienated liaison partners, Seventh Floor attention every day to our slightest action, the order to “do whatever it took to get him to talk . . . and to do so now,” and the instruction to “walk out of the room if necessary” so that I would not see anything unacceptable according to U.S. standards in the treatment of prisoners during interrogations.

1 The six redacted lines relate a generic question and response, and use an exclamation point. They do not describe what specifically we sought to learn, who CAPTUS was, what he had been doing before rendition—no “source” or “method” is revealed. Apparently the CIA fears that the redacted passage would either humiliate the organization for incompetence or expose its officers to ridicule; unless the Agency considers obtuse incompetence a secret intelligence method.

2 The CIA Inspector General’s Special Review also noted (paragraph 264) that “some participants in the Program, particularly field interrogators, judge that CTC assessments to the effect that detainees are withholding information are not always supported by an objective evaluation of available information and the evaluation of the interrogators but are too heavily based, instead, on presumptions of what the individual might or should know.”