I’m an Interviewer Now

On ne peut pas employer de menteurs professionels sans leur donner le monopole de la vérité. (One cannot employ professional liars without giving them the monopoly on truth.)

—Volkoff, Le Montage

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A morning or two after the bagpipe dinner, I was sitting at one of the free desks in my office starting to write a cable about the previous day’s interrogation before heading off to see CAPTUS. Jack, my burly, first-tour officemate, sat at his desk a few feet away. I was musing about what I was writing, slouched far back in my seat. We would have a staff meeting in a few minutes. I shifted screens to check incoming traffic. I started to read a general guidance cable that had arrived from Headquarters overnight.

I chortled derisively at the computer. Jack turned his head. He was becoming familiar with my habit of denouncing the computer as though it were alive, and was amused by it.

“I’m an interviewer now,” I told him, deadpan.

Jack raised his eyebrows expectantly. He knew there would be some ironic twist to my comment.

“The DO is standardizing practices concerning all detainees. We have new procedures to follow. There’s a new protocol. They say they’re professionalizing our practices. No more ad hoc stuff. From now on, all cables concerning detainees—all my cables about CAPTUS—will refer to interrogations as ‘interviews.’” Here I laughed. “We are not to use the term ‘interrogation’ any more. So,” I concluded with a tone of sufficiency, “I am an ‘interviewer’ now.”

It was obvious to all of us that the Agency wanted to avoid future problems, or accusations that our treatment of detainees had been as harsh as an “interrogation” might imply. In the staff meeting that morning, of course, I presented the change of practice in a relatively straightforward manner. The COS had a dry sense of humor, but subversive irony would have been inappropriate for a diverse group of junior and experienced officers; he was also no-nonsense and the staff meeting needed to set a tone of positive focus. So I betrayed my cynical amusement by my expression but remained professional and factual.

From then on, of course, some of us made jaded, acidic, and largely humorless jokes about this petty effort at cover-your-ass bureaucratic obfuscation, I more than most. I learned that this guidance came from some legal staff in the Agency, which was no surprise, concerned that the Agency act appropriately and not expose itself to criticism or challenge by subsequent investigators. I couldn’t help but think of the scene in Marathon Man in which Laurence Olivier holds Dustin Hoffman strapped into a dentist’s chair, and tortures him for information by drilling holes in Hoffman’s front teeth without any Novocain, while repeating in soothing tones, “No pain, no pain. There is no pain.” I also thought, of course, of 1984, where words were assigned meanings opposite to the truth, so that events sounded benign, whatever the reality. After receiving this surreal cable I took to characterizing my involvement in this phase of the War on Terror to colleagues as “interviewing some of our most prestigious guests.”

When the staff meeting had finished I asked Jack to go down with me to the cafeteria for a coffee. We stepped into the hallway to take the elevator.

“You go ahead,” I told him, changing my mind a little. “I’ll join you. I have to use the head.”

I jogged down the stairs to use a men’s room on the way to the cafeteria, instead of stopping in the one by our office. I entered and stepped up to the urinal. But I stopped in my tracks, before unzipping my fly.

“This is not possible!” I said to no one. This urinal, too, was located high up on the wall, just like the one by my office. I would have had to contort myself like before to conduct my business, and that surely badly.

I had been doing some thinking about my previous idiotic episode. I realized that, in fact, only authorized Americans were ever allowed into these XXXXXXXX spaces. The fool who had installed these stupid things had actually been some American contractor with a security clearance. It wasn’t the locals. At least, some American had run the show. I used a stall instead, and did so for the remainder of my time in country.

Jack and I chatted calmly in the cafeteria, a matter of starting the day as much as anything.

“Jack, you haven’t noticed anything about the men’s rooms here?”

“You look normal, Glenn, but I’m starting to think you are weird.”

“No, really,” I said through my laughter. “Nothing? You haven’t noticed anything?”

“I do not think about our men’s rooms . . . as you do.”

“The urinals. The urinals! Doesn’t anyone ever pee around here? The urinals are like five feet off the ground or something. You have to stand on your tiptoes and pee way up into the air to use the stupid things! They’re all that way. It’s completely retarded. You’ve never noticed that?”

“Well, no,” Jack said, growing serious. “It must be just that you have a really, really short dick.”

Of course, thereafter Jack occasionally arched his eyebrows at me when the men’s room came up in conversation.

Over the days, a trend emerged: My assessments of the case consistently, and progressively, diverged from those of Headquarters. XXXXXXXXX XXXX XXXXXXXXXXX XXXXXXXXXXX XXXXXXXXXXX XXXXXXXXXXX XXXXXXXXXXX XXXXXXXXXXX XXXXXXXXXXX XXXXXXXXXXX XXXXXXXXXXX XXXXXXXXXXX XXXXXXXXXXX XXXXXXXXXXX XXXXXXXXXXX XXXXXXXXXXX XXXXXXXXXXX XXXXXXXXXXX XXXXXXXXXXX XXXXXXXXXXX XXXXXXXXXXX XXXXXXX.

I now had been involved in the CAPTUS case for weeks; it had become mine. From the first briefing I had received at Headquarters I had been surprised that we had decided to “render” CAPTUS, rather than try to penetrate his operations or turn him to our use. The rendition was like an excision; it would obviously shut CAPTUS down, but I thought it would almost certainly reveal our hand and show al-Qa’ida that we were onto this part of the al-Qa’ida network. Bringing a terrorist to justice had trumped our more classic penetration and collection work. I took it that the decision had been made to treat the CAPTUS case as a war-fighting and disruption operation, with the intelligence collected a useful but secondary objective. We wanted to destroy al-Qa’ida and save lives. At Headquarters, I was just being read into the case; I listened, tried to learn, and was in no position to say anything.

My initial case officer reaction and instincts returned strongly, however, as I came to know the case, and to assume fully the role of the field officer responsible for it. Having rendered CAPTUS, we could now obtain what he knew—perhaps. But CAPTUS would be replaced quickly; we would almost surely not have insight or access to this new individual and would have to develop it all over again. We had signaled our knowledge to our enemies of whatever CAPTUS had touched or been involved in by rendering him.

I was also coming to feel that CAPTUS’s involvement with al-Qa’ida was because he had had little choice—he could cooperate or risk grave personal problems. It was safer for him not to ask too many questions. Al-Qa’ida used him, yes, but he was no terrorist, and his conscious complicity was questionable.

There was little chance now we could turn CAPTUS and use him as an asset, since his rendition had occurred weeks earlier. But I thought it still might be barely possible. It would be better operationally to have CAPTUS committed to serving us, and finding out new information, than to keep him indefinitely in detention. And freeing the man and running him in the field as an asset would be more just, given my assessment of him, than letting him rot in a cell. I was determined to explore whether I could turn back the clock and do operationally what I felt should have been done in the first place.

“Goddamn it! Blow me.”

I was reading the morning traffic two days after sending out my request to Headquarters for a courier. Jack turned his head toward me, an expectant smile forming on one corner of his mouth.

“Do you always talk to your computer? It’s inanimate, you know. And you are vulgar.”

“Headquarters won’t send a courier to pick up CAPTUS’s goddamned documents. No courier available.”

“Oh. That sucks. Good support you’re getting there, Glenn.”

I thought a moment, as I continued staring at the computer screen.

“Screw ’em. I have a whole interrogation team. I’ll send someone myself to get them. I’ll worry about it when I get back. For now, I gotta go see CAPTUS and Little Guy.”

I shut down the computer and headed to the interrogation facility.