The Interrogator

COS and I were listening to a TDYer, just arrived from Headquarters to serve on my CAPTUS team. By this point, the TDYer constituted my entire team. There were not enough officers worldwide to accomplish all the DO’s missions and operations for the Global War on Terror. The resource demands on the DO to wage the War on Terror made it difficult to sustain an intense HVT interrogation like the CAPTUS case for the entire length of the interrogation. It was difficult to staff such long-term, ad hoc operations as the CAPTUS case; there were few officers to go around, and fewer still able or willing to leave their normal assignments, lives, and families for an indeterminate number of months.

The resource issue was real. I had also kept my COS and Headquarters informed of liaison’s growing conviction that CAPTUS might not be the critical individual in al-Qa’ida that we had told them he was. Liaison had resource constraints, too. And I knew that I was progressively at odds with Wilmington and Headquarters. The thoughts and frustrations echoed in my head, long before the CIA Inspector General wrote them: “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].” Finally, I knew that Wilmington and Headquarters would prefer to run the case without having to work through liaison and worry about how the case affected relations with them.

Hotel California! I had heard a couple of whispered, furtive allusions to Hotel California, but even in the DO few knew of it. Its name evoked the Hidden Hand and Dark Arts of our Global War on Terror. It was rumored that it was where the hard cases went. Hotel California was run from our Point Zero Station—itself a place of legend, deeply engaged in the Global War on Terror.²⁵ I knew of it at all only because I was running an HVT case. I perceived it as a place for the most recalcitrant, most dangerous of all terrorist cases. I saw no reason to send CAPTUS there. This was a disturbing development, although not a surprise. Nor was I surprised to learn of Headquarters’ thoughts via a TDYer, rather than by cable. One always learned the ruminations and critical atmospheric information needed in the DO by one-on-one meetings. Cables tended to formalize decisions, but the issues were worked out as much as possible in conversation first.

“I don’t mind pressuring CAPTUS,” I said, as usual perched on the edge of a desk, one leg on the ground, the other hanging free. “I think liaison is getting a little tired. But they’re okay. They’re okay. Hotel California?” I shook my head in doubt and ill ease. “I dunno. I don’t think so. No. He doesn’t need to go there. To accomplish what? Screw him over? For what? He’s talking. He’s talking to me. The case is moving where it should. On the whole, we’re getting what CAPTUS can provide—with some exceptions. But he’s putting out. He is.”

Peter, the COS, sat silently at his desk, listening. The three of us were cramped into his tiny office, the door closed. There was barely enough room for us. Maps covered the wall behind me, haphazardly tacked up and overlapping with each other. He pondered our comments a moment, leaning back in his seat, relaxed but in command. No meeting lasted more than a few minutes with Peter. He expected a short description of the issue at hand, solicited relevant comments and divergent views, decided, and then dismissed us.

“If he goes to Hotel California, the case’ll be put on ice, basically. It’ll have to start over, but no one will be able to do it. No one will do it. Instead of an officer who knows the case, he’ll rot. I want to run it here.”

As the case had progressed, my cables had stated more and more clearly my growing conviction that CAPTUS was not what we had assessed him to be. My offline remarks, as always is the case, were even more frank: that we had de facto, as I started to state furtively but intensely with colleagues in one-on-one conversations, and then more openly, “got the wrong guy.” We had rendered the man we wanted to render; we had gotten our target. What I meant was that our assessment of the information we had was wrong, that we had erroneously inflated CAPTUS’s importance and role, and that CAPTUS was not the al-Qa’ida operative we had taken him to be. I had become convinced that CAPTUS 161

was more like a train conductor who sells a criminal a ticket; to me, this did not make him complicit or part of the al-Qa’ida network.

I was running the interrogation team in the field. I had been running the case now for a substantial period of time. Almost always, the officer in the field knows the facts of a case, can see more clearly than Headquarters or anyone else involved. This was certainly the case now. I knew I had a better picture than Headquarters or our analysts, who never ran operations, did not meet with assets, and were not well-equipped on the whole to assess an asset’s psychological and human motivations, and who, frankly, often were conceptually constricted by a worldview defined by cubicles filled with middle-class white guys, few of whom had lived many years abroad and who had the default perspective of Omaha or Des Moines. Good officers, and good Headquarters managers, always tried to defer to the field.

When a case goes wrong in the Directorate of Operations and outsiders learn about it, it is referred to as a “flap.” My assessment of the case shattered a lot of presumptions and erroneous decisions. No one wanted a flap.

I informed Headquarters a number of times over the succeeding weeks, orally via the returning TDYer and in my operational cables, that I believed the best way to run the CAPTUS interrogation was as it was being run, and that I did not see merit in sending him, at this time, to Hotel California. This was all conducted collegially, in the way that issues are addressed in the DO. Headquarters acquiesced, but I knew that it did not agree with my approach.

More than anything, CAPTUS was now caught in the bureaucratic dynamic I had experienced countless times before as a case officer: Once the institution settles on a perspective and a course of action, it interprets other views as proofs of error. Critical thought degenerates into rigid orthodoxy. If the premises and perspective are correct, all is well, and the system checks the excesses of officers who are inexperienced, or biased, or simply wrong. Any institution must have accepted views and practices. No institution can function like a college seminar, subjecting all issues to endless rumination. But the dominant paradigm will reject any challenge and becomes blind to error.

One risks excommunication to challenge orthodoxy, even if it maintains that the sun revolves around the earth, or that we must sacrifice humans to propitiate the gods, or, well, or that men are not quite what we believed.