NIBBLING OREOS
There, then, he sat, holding up that imbecile candle
in the heart of that almighty forlornness. There, then,
he sat, the sign and symbol of a man without faith,
hopelessly holding up hope in the midst of despair.
—Herman Melville, Moby-Dick
I had the office to myself, with a box of Oreos. Jack was off working somewhere. I sat at my computer, nearly in the dark, pinching my lips with my thumb and forefinger as I read incoming traffic.
The TDYer’s question concerning Hotel California, and my subsequent exchanges with Headquarters, had made clear to me that Headquarters’ patience was wearing thin, and that operational changes to the case were coming. I had a lot to mull over on my drives to and from the interrogation facility, and evenings sitting in the back of the hotel lounge.
CAPTUS was my world, he was an HVT, but he was one small piece in the Agency’s huge effort to identify, track, disrupt, and destroy al-Qa’ida and all jihadists. The institution—the DO and CTC—were running flat out. Pressure was tremendous to “maintain a high-ops tempo.” Many were convinced that al-Qa’ida was planning multiple attacks and we could not ease up even a moment. The number of terrorist threat reports coming from the DO was huge; to someone just entering the swirling tides of counterterrorism work, the threats initially appeared almost overwhelming. The images of the World Trade towers and of the fighting in Afghanistan were present realities.
It was natural to accept the standard view: that the United States faced a coherent, growing, pervasive, and imminent worldwide terrorist threat. Our leaders affirmed that such was the case, based in part upon the information provided them by the Intelligence Community. The entire institution looked for, then reported, pieces of this narrative, and therefore believed it. Individuals, and institutions, naturally find information to confirm their convictions and illusions. And 3,000 moldering corpses, following years of lethal attacks abroad against American interests, were powerful arguments.
This was the atmosphere and mind-set in which CAPTUS had been tracked, and rendered. It was natural for an officer in the DO to believe that CAPTUS was the critical player in the al-Qa’ida network that he was presented as being. Of course he was; the Agency would not have rendered him otherwise. The internal traffic and the intelligence collected about CAPTUS by our colleagues—most of whom I knew to be selfless and dedicated officers—had seemed overwhelming . . . I reasoned the same way in my work prior to and after 9/11 concerning Iraq’s possession of weapons of mass destruction. I had worked the issue; I had seen the reports; I knew that almost all of my colleagues acted sincerely; I accepted that my colleagues sought the facts and sought to challenge their premises. Except . . . except when positions became ossified and official, and then, to challenge orthodoxy was apostasy. . . . The pressure on an individual officer to conform to the dominant paradigm is exceptionally difficult, and dangerous, to challenge.
To challenge any paradigm requires awareness of its parameters and limitations. Few of us can do this. The DO and CIA, like any bureaucracy, were hard to stop once a direction had been taken; it did not actually think; it moved and fulfilled obligations. Even to have a chance of noticing flaws in the operating perspective for terrorist operations would require an experienced officer, knowledgeable of terrorist organizations and capabilities. He would need to be even more knowledgeable of how to interpret and assess raw reporting, of how to read the assumptions and careerism in so much of it. He would need experience and awareness of the innocence of so many officers, and of the pressure on officers to recruit and report. He would have to be cognizant of and experienced in dealing with the desire of officers and the institution to be relevant and players on important issues, which shaped so much reporting; and of the pressure and distorting biases of policy makers—demanding information of the Agency and yet wary of it as hesitant, or clueless, or out of control. And then, even if an officer combined all these perspectives, experience, and insights, and came to a different conclusion about some elements of the U.S. government’s terrorism paradigm and operations . . . the result usually played out like my conversation with the prim, matronly hotel receptionist.
The only way to change the dynamic of the case would be to succeed in inducing, or obliging, him to answer clearly the small percentage of questions that, for a variety of reasons, he had not answered to my, or Headquarters’, satisfaction. In my view, this was highly unlikely to occur, and as far as I was concerned, there were legal and, frankly, moral constraints on how to interrogate someone acceptably.
With these thoughts in mind, the next Headquarters operational cable was not a surprise, but still it made me wince and purse my lips when I read it on the computer screen.
“Goddamn it,” I said to no one. I bit an Oreo in half, then tossed the remainder in the wastebasket, irritated with myself for having eaten it. Then I was irritated with myself for having thrown it into the wastebasket. I took another Oreo and stuffed it into my mouth, then felt guilty about eating yet another one. I tossed the whole box of Oreos into the wastebasket, so that I could not eat any more of them. Then I felt stupid and wasteful and that I had acted compulsively. So I picked the box out of the trash and stuffed another Oreo into my mouth as I sat staring at the screen. CAPTUS is really screwed now, I thought.
The situation was perverse. My instructions were at odds with what I knew to be the correct way to interrogate CAPTUS (and just about any detainee).
I decided that the only possible way remaining to keep CAPTUS from being transferred to Hotel California was to be harder than I had ever been with him, on the slim hope that he would speak clearly about the areas he had refused, or been unable, to talk about. It would be my last flimsy chance to protect CAPTUS from a much worse situation, and it would be his last chance to help himself; but I knew this would prove a vain effort to scare him into sharing his last secrets. The clock had just about run out.
I stuffed another Oreo into my mouth, then in exasperation took the box and left it in the common area of the station, so that it would be at least momentarily beyond my reach. If someone else ate them, I couldn’t. I did not enjoy the Oreo and wished I had not eaten it.
.
. We had a right to err; we also had a duty to rectify error if we could, in particular when it affected people’s lives, even those of our enemies. I found no support for this view at Headquarters. But the reality was that even the possibility of shifting the direction of the case was diminishing. So I could only carry on, doing what I could within the shrinking circle of influence that I had. 
.
. Forget about my efforts to establish rapport, 
extract information through a human relationship. No, he was a terrorist and we would no longer allow him to play us along. Headquarters’ concession to the approach I had been advocating and practicing and, I suppose, to me, however, was to state that it would be unnecessary to send CAPTUS to Hotel California if he very quickly provided the information Headquarters believed him to possess.
.