Their first assignment, after the towers fell, was to help interrogate Abu Zubaydah, one of the first high-level Al Qaeda operatives to be captured. They would go on to personally question many other “high value” suspected terrorists over eight years in a variety of black sites around the world. Of them all, KSM was the biggest prize.
“He just struck me as being brilliant,” Mitchell recalled. During their sessions, Mitchell would ask him a question, and KSM would answer: “That’s not the question I would ask. You’ll get an answer and you’ll find it useful and you’ll think that’s all you need. But really the question I would ask is this question.” Mitchell says he would then ask KSM’s question of KSM himself, “and he would give a much more detailed, much more global answer.” KSM would hold forth on the tactics of terrorist engagement, on his strategic vision, on the goals of jihad. Had he not been captured, KSM had all manner of follow-ups to 9/11 planned. “His descriptions of the low-tech, lone-wolf attacks were horrifying,” Mitchell said. “The fact that he sits around and thinks about economy of scale when it comes to killing people…” He shook his head.
“He completely creeped me out when he was talking about Daniel Pearl. That was the most…I cried and still do, because it was horrific.” Daniel Pearl was the Wall Street Journal reporter kidnapped—and then killed—in Pakistan in January 2002. KSM brought up the subject of Pearl without being asked, then got out of his chair and demonstrated—with what Mitchell thought was a touch of relish—the technique he had used in beheading Pearl with a knife. “What was horrific about it was he acted like he had some sort of an intimate relationship with Daniel. He kept calling him ‘Daniel’ in that voice like they were not really lovers, but they were best friends or something. It was just the creepiest thing.”
But all that was later—after KSM opened up. In March 2003, when Mitchell and Jessen first confronted him, tiny and hairy and potbellied, things were very different.
“You’ve got to remember at that particular time [we] had credible evidence that Al Qaeda had another big wave of attacks coming,” Mitchell said.
There was a lot of chatter. We knew that Osama bin Laden had met with the Pakistani scientists who were passing out nuclear technology, and [we] knew that the Pakistani scientists had said to Bin Laden, “The biggest problem is getting the nuclear material.” Bin Laden had said, “What if we’ve already got it?” That just sent chills through the whole intelligence community.
The CIA had people walking around Manhattan with Geiger counters, looking for a dirty bomb. Washington was on high alert. And when KSM was first captured, the feeling was that if anyone knew anything about the planned attacks, it would be him. But KSM wasn’t talking, and Mitchell wasn’t optimistic. KSM was a hard case.
The first set of interrogators sent to question KSM had tried to be friendly. They made him comfortable and brewed him some tea and asked respectful questions. They’d gotten nowhere. He had simply looked at them and rocked back and forth.
Then KSM had been handed over to someone Mitchell calls the “new sheriff in town,” an interrogator who Mitchell says crossed the line into sadism—contorting KSM into a variety of “stress” positions, like taping his hands together behind his back, then raising them up over his head, so that his shoulders almost popped out. “This guy told me that he had learned his interrogation approaches in South America from the communist rebels,” Mitchell said. “He got into a battle of wills with KSM. The new sheriff had this idea that he wanted to be called sir. That’s all he focused on.” KSM had no intention of calling anyone sir. After a week of trying, the new sheriff gave up. The prisoner was handed over to Mitchell and Jessen.
What happened next is a matter of great controversy. The methods of interrogation used on KSM have been the subject of lawsuits, congressional investigations, and endless public debate. Those who approve refer to the measures as “enhanced interrogation techniques”—EITs. Those on the other side call them torture. But let us leave aside those broader ethical questions for a moment, and focus on what the interrogation of KSM can tell us about the two puzzles.
The deceptions of Ana Montes and Bernie Madoff, the confusion over Amanda Knox, the plights of Graham Spanier and Emily Doe are all evidence of the underlying problem we have in making sense of people we do not know. Default to truth is a crucially important strategy that occasionally and unavoidably leads us astray. Transparency is a seemingly commonsense assumption that turns out to be an illusion. Both, however, raise the same question: once we accept our shortcomings, what should we do? Before we return to Sandra Bland—and what exactly happened on that roadside in Texas—I want to talk about perhaps the most extreme version of the talking-to-strangers problem: a terrorist who wants to hold on to his secrets, and an interrogator who is willing to go to almost any lengths to pry them free.
2.
Mitchell and Jessen met in Spokane, Washington, where they were both staff psychologists for the Air Force’s SERE program—Survival, Evasion, Resistance, Escape. All branches of the U.S. military have their own versions of SERE, which involves teaching key personnel what to do in the event that they fall into enemy hands.
The exercise would begin with the local police rounding up Air Force officers, unannounced, and bringing them to a detention center mocked up as an enemy POW camp. “They just stop them and arrest them,” Mitchell said. “Then they hand them over to whoever’s going to do the operational-readiness test.”
One exercise involved crews of the bombers that carry nuclear weapons. Everything about their mission was classified. If they were to crash in hostile territory, you can imagine how curious their captors would be about the contents of their planes. The SERE program was supposed to prepare a flight crew for what might happen.
The subjects would be cold, hungry, forced to stand—awake—inside a box for days. Then came the interrogation. “You would see if you could try and extract that information from them,” Mitchell said. He says it was “very realistic.” One particularly effective technique developed at SERE was “walling.” You wrap a towel around someone’s neck to support their head, then bang them up against a specially constructed wall.
“You do it on a fake wall,” Mitchell explained:
It’s got a clapper behind it and it makes a tremendous amount of noise and there’s a lot of give, and your ears start swirling. You don’t do it in a way to cause damage to the person. I mean, it’s like a wrestling mat, only louder. It’s not painful, it’s just confusing. It’s disruptive to your train of thought, and you’re off balance. Not only physically off balance—I mean, you’re just off balance.
Mitchell’s responsibility was to help design the SERE program, and that meant he occasionally went through the training protocol himself. Once, he says, he was part of a SERE exercise involving one of the oldest tricks in the interrogation business: the interrogator threatens not the subject, but a colleague of the subject’s. In Mitchell’s experience, men and women react very differently to this scenario. The men tend to fold. The women don’t.
“If you are a female pilot and they said they were going to do something to the other airman, the attitude of a lot of them was, ‘It sucks to be you,’” he said. “‘You do your job, I’m going to do mine. I’m going to protect the secrets. I’m sorry this has happened to you, but you knew this when you signed up.’” Mitchell first saw this when he debriefed women who had been held as POWs during Desert Storm.
They would drag those women out and threaten to beat them every time the men wouldn’t talk. And [the women] were angry at the men for not holding out, and they said, “Maybe I would have gotten a beating, maybe I would have got sexually molested, but it would have happened one time. By showing them that the way to get the keys to the kingdom was to drag me out, it happened every time. So let me do my job. You do your job.”
In the SERE exercise, Mitchell was paired with a woman, a senior-ranking Air Force officer. Her interrogators said they would torture Mitchell unless she talk
ed. True to form, she said, “I’m not talking.” Mitchell said:
They put me in a fifty-five-gallon drum that was buried in the ground, put a lid on it, covered it up with dirt. At the top of the drum, protruding through the lid, was a hose spewing cold water.…Unbeknownst to me because of the way they positioned me, the drain holes were at the very top, at the level of my nose.
Slowly the barrel filled with water.
Mitchell: I’m pretty sure they wouldn’t kill the next psychologist to come to the school, I was pretty sure of that, but I wasn’t convinced of that. You know what I mean?
MG: How did you feel when that was happening?
Mitchell: I wasn’t happy, because your knees are up against your chest and you can’t get out. Your arms are down beside you. You can’t move. They put a strap underneath you and lower you into the thing.
MG: At what point were you removed?
Mitchell: An hour or so later.
MG: How high was the water?
Mitchell: It comes right up to your nose. It comes right up so you really don’t know. I mean, the thing’s coming up around your neck, it’s coming up around your ears.
MG: You’re in darkness?
Mitchell: Oh yeah.…Maybe it wasn’t an hour, maybe it was less than that. I’m sure it was, otherwise I’d have some hypothermia. It felt like an hour. Anyway I’m in this thing, and they lower you down, and I think, “Oh, they’re going to put me in a barrel, see if I’m claustrophobic. I’m not. No big deal to me.” Oh no. They stick the hose in, put that little metal lid on, and then cover it up with rocks.
MG: Do they tell you beforehand what they’re going to do?
Mitchell: They tell you as they’re doing it.
MG: Everything they were doing to the trainees at SERE they did to you as well?
Mitchell: Oh yeah.
As Mitchell put it, “A lot of people spent time in that barrel.” At the time, that was part of the standard course.
Mitchell: I also took the advanced course. If you think the basic course is rough.…Dude.
3.
This is where the CIA’s “Enhanced Interrogation” program came from. The CIA came to Mitchell and Jessen and asked for their advice. The two of them had been working for years, designing and implementing what they believed to be the most effective interrogation technique imaginable, and the agency wanted to know what worked. So Mitchell and Jessen made a list, at the top of which was sleep deprivation, walling, and waterboarding. Waterboarding is where you’re placed on a gurney with your head lower than your feet, a cloth is placed over your face, and water is poured into your mouth and nose to produce the sensation of drowning. As it happened, waterboarding was one of the few techniques Mitchell and Jessen didn’t use at SERE. From the Air Force’s perspective, waterboarding was too good. They were trying to teach their people that resisting torture was possible, so it made little sense to expose them to a technique that, for most people, made resistance impossible.1 But to use on suspected terrorists? To many in the CIA, it made sense. As a precautionary step, he and Jessen tried it out on themselves first, each waterboarding the other—two sessions in total for each of them, using the most aggressive protocol, the forty-second continuous pour.
“We wanted to be sure the physicians could develop safety procedures and the guards knew what they were going to do, and we wanted to know what [the detainees] were going to experience,” he said.
MG: So describe what it was like.
Mitchell: You ever been on a super tall building and thought you might jump off? Knowing you wouldn’t jump off, but thought you might jump off? That’s what it felt like to me. I didn’t feel like I was going to die, I felt like I was afraid I was going to die.
When the Justice Department sent two senior attorneys to the interrogation site to confirm the legality of the techniques under consideration, Mitchell and Jessen waterboarded them too. One of the lawyers, he remembers, sat up afterward, dried her hair, and said simply, “Well, that sucked.”
Mitchell and Jessen developed a protocol. If a detainee was reluctant to answer questions, they would start with the mildest of “enhanced measures.” If the detainee persisted, they would escalate. Walling was a favorite, as was sleep deprivation. The Justice Department’s rules were that seventy-two hours of sleep deprivation was the maximum, but Mitchell and Jessen found that unnecessary. What they preferred to do was to let someone sleep, but not sleep enough; to systematically break up their REM cycles.
Waterboarding was the technique of last resort. They used a hospital gurney, tilted at 45 degrees. The Justice Department allowed them to pour at twenty- to forty-second intervals, separated by three breaths, for a total of twenty minutes. They preferred one forty-second pour, two twenty-second pours, and the remainder at three to ten seconds. “The main point,” Mitchell said,
is you don’t want it to go in their lungs, you just want it to go in their sinuses. We had no interest in drowning the person. We originally used water out of a one-liter bottle, but the physicians wanted us to use saline because some people swallowed the water and they didn’t want [them] to have water intoxication.
Before the first pour, they took a black T-shirt and lowered it over the subject’s face, covering their nose. “The cloth goes like this,” Mitchell said, miming the lowering of the shirt.
And then you lift the cloth up, and then you put the cloth down, and then you lift the cloth up, and then you put the cloth down, and you lift the cloth up, and you put the cloth down.
Literally, when you lift the cloth up, the pourer stops pouring. There’s a guy up there with a stopwatch and he’s counting the seconds so I know how many seconds it’s going on. We’ve got a physician right there.
The room was crowded. Typically, the chief of base would be there, the intelligence analyst responsible for the case, and a psychologist, among others. Another group was outside, watching the proceedings on a large TV monitor: more CIA experts, a lawyer, guards—a big group.
No questions were asked during the process. That was for later.
Mitchell: You’re not screaming at the guy. Literally, you’re pouring the water, and you’re saying to him in a not-quite-conversational tone, but not an aggressive tone, “It doesn’t have to be this way. We want information to stop operations inside the United States. We know you don’t have all of it, but we know you have some of it.…” I’m saying it to him as it’s happening, “It doesn’t have to be this way. This is your choice.”
MG: How do you know—in general, with EITs—how do you know when you’ve gone as far as you need to go?
Mitchell: They start talking to you.
Talking meant specifics—details, names, facts.
Mitchell: You’d give him a picture and say, “Who’s this guy?” He’d say, “Well, this guy is this guy, but you know, the guy in the back, that guy in the back is this guy, and this is where he’s at…” and you know—so he would go beyond the question.
Mitchell and Jessen focused on compliance. They wanted their subjects to talk and volunteer information and answer questions. And from the beginning with KSM, they were convinced they would need every technique in their arsenal to get him to talk. He wasn’t a foot soldier on the fringes of Al Qaeda, someone ambivalent about his participation in terrorist acts. Foot soldiers are easy. They have little to say—and little to lose by saying it. They’ll cooperate with their interrogators because they realize it is their best chance of winning their freedom.
But KSM knew he wasn’t seeing daylight again, ever. He had no incentive to cooperate. Mitchell knew all the psychological interrogation techniques used by the people who didn’t believe in enhanced interrogation, and he thought they would work just fine on what he called “common terrorists that you catch on the battlefield, like the everyday jihadists that were fighting Americans.” But not on “the hard-core guys.”
And KSM was a hard-core guy. Mitchell and Jessen could use only walling and sleep deprivation to get him to talk because,
incredibly, waterboarding did not work on him. Somehow KSM was able to open his sinuses, and the water that flowed into his nose would simply flow out his mouth. No one understood how he did it. Mitchell calls it a magic trick. After a few sessions, KSM grasped the cadence of the pours. He would mock the room by counting down the remaining seconds on his fingers—then making a slashing gesture with his hand when it was over. Once, in the middle of a session, Mitchell and Jessen ducked out of the room to confer with a colleague; when they came back inside, KSM was snoring. “He was asleep,” Mitchell said, laughing at the memory. “I know I’m laughing at this potentially horrific image that people have, but there is a piece of this…” He shook his head in wonderment. “I’d never heard of it,” he said. “I’m telling you, when the CIA was doing due diligence, they called JPRA.” JPRA is a Pentagon agency that monitors the various SERE programs run by the service branches. They had a file on waterboarding. “The person they talked to there said it’s 100 percent effective on our students. We have never had anyone not capitulate.”
Mitchell and Jessen gave KSM the full treatment for three weeks. Finally, he stopped resisting. But KSM’s hard-won compliance didn’t mean his case was now open-and-shut. In fact, the difficulties were just beginning.
4.
A few years before 9/11, a psychiatrist named Charles Morgan was at a military neuroscience conference. He was researching post-traumatic stress syndrome, trying to understand why some veterans suffer from PTSD and why others, who go through exactly the same experiences, emerge unscathed. Morgan was talking to his colleagues about how hard it was to study the question, because what you really wanted to do was to identify a group of people before they had a traumatic experience and track their reactions in real time. But how could you do that? There was no war going on at the time, and it wasn’t as though he could arrange for all his research subjects to simultaneously get robbed at gunpoint, or suffer some devastating loss. Morgan jokes that the best idea he could come up with was to study couples on the eve of their wedding day.
Talking to Strangers Page 19
