“You weren’t in favor.”
“I thought she didn’t know what she was getting into. But she never listened to me. I was hoping they wouldn’t take her. She was high-strung after that second tour, and I hoped somebody would notice. But she’d been in Iraq, so she had the clearances. And docs weren’t exactly lining up for the work. And shrinks, they know how to fake it. Couple months later, she was on a plane to Warsaw.”
“What was she doing?”
“She didn’t tell me much. I had the impression they wanted her to make sure they pushed the prisoners to the limit but no further. And to fix them up if they did go too far.”
“How did she feel about that?”
“Look. I was only getting snapshots. Talking to her a couple times a week. I think . . . part of her rolled right through it. Maybe even liked it for a while. Then something happened, a few months in, and she hated herself for liking it. And she’d volunteered, so that was worse. She couldn’t put it on anybody else.”
Callar stopped, but Wells didn’t think the story was done. “Then, near the end, there was another incident.”
“Incident.”
“Before you ask, I don’t know what. Not a clue. But when she got back, she was in bad shape. Taking a whole pharmacy worth of stuff. Ambien, the sleeping pills. Antidepressants. Then Xanax, Klonopin. She was prescribing it for herself and getting docs she knew to give it to her.”
“That doesn’t prove she killed herself,” Wells said. Callar’s eyes flickered and his face softened. “All I’m saying is, whatever happened, it came out of something over there. You’re sure you don’t know what it was.”
“Have you not been listening to me? She didn’t talk about anything operational. She was a good soldier girl. You want to know what happened over there, check the records. If you can find them. Talk to the rest of the squad, everyone who’s left.”
“Rachel ever discuss the rest of the squad? Hint who was pushing too hard?”
Now the uncertainty disappeared from Callar’s eyes. “One time. She said, ‘Steve, you’ll never believe what that nasty colonel did today. Ripped out a prisoner’s heart. Reached right into his chest. Fried it up and ate it.’ What have I been saying? She didn’t talk about anything operational. You’re just like those FBI dweebs. You pretend to listen, but you don’t.”
Callar slopped more whiskey in his glass, sucked it down. Though he didn’t seem drunk to Wells. The months in this dark house must have turned his liver into an alcohol-processing machine.
“You have a gun?” Wells said. Apropos of nothing.
“Do I have a gun? No.”
“Did you ever?”
“Yeah. Put it in a safe deposit a couple months back. Came to the conclusion that a nine and finding your wife dead don’t mix. How ’bout you, John? You must be carrying.”
Wells opened his jacket to reveal the empty holster. “In the car.”
“Not scared of me?” Callar laughed. He drank the last of his whiskey, pushed himself up. “Where are my manners? Lemme show you around.”
Callar led Wells up the solid wooden stairs, leaving the light behind. Wells stepped carefully in the dark. Upstairs, Callar opened a door and flicked on another of the ghostly fluorescent lights that he favored. The bed was a modern version of an old sleigh, dark wood and a rounded headboard. The mattress was bare.
“Do you believe in God, John?”
“Used to pray every day. Now I’m not sure.”
“I am. I’m sure. It’s all void. Sound and fury signifying nothing. An accident of biology. Cosmic joke. Whatever you want to call it.”
Wells didn’t feel like arguing. “Ever think about opening a window? Let that California sun in? Stop creeping out the neighbors. You know what they called the prison, don’t you, Steve? The Midnight House. You’ve got your very own version going.”
“See the stain? On the mattress?”
But the thick white top of the mattress seemed spotless.
Callar flipped on the ceiling light. Still, Wells couldn’t understand what he meant. The bedroom was as bloodless as the kitchen. A handful of framed pictures on the bedside table provided the only evidence of life. Callar and Rachel at a baseball game. Callar and Rachel in a rain forest somewhere.
“Pretty.”
“Think that makes me feel better?” Callar nudged Wells. “See the stain.”
“I don’t.”
“That’s ’cause it’s not there,” Callar said. “There’s nothing left of her. Not even that. Nothing but what I have in my head. And if I leave this house, that’s gone, too.”
“You’ll have your memories wherever you are.”
“Then I may as well stay here.”
“Let me ask you—”
Callar put a not-very-friendly hand on Wells’s arm. “No more. Come on, Johnny. Time to go.”
Wells turned to Callar. He had more questions: Could she have been having an affair? How come you never had kids? And, most of all, Were you always this crazy? But the set of Callar’s face left no room for argument.
“When should I come back?”
“When you find the real killer. You and O. J.” Callar squeezed Wells’s biceps, digging his fingers into the muscle. Callar would be an ugly fighter, fueled by alcohol and rage. Wells let him squeeze.
“This thing you’re living, I’m sorry for it. For you. But whoever did this, they’re still out there. You can help us. Help yourself.”
“Please leave my house.”
WELLS LEFT CALLAR’S HAUNTED castle behind. Ten minutes later he stopped at a Starbucks, ordered a large black coffee—he could never bring himself to say venti. He found a table in the corner and spent an hour poring over the police and FBI files on crazy Steve Callar, trying to figure out if Callar could have killed his wife. For whatever reason.
But he couldn’t have. Not unless he’d figured out how to teleport the six hundred miles from Phoenix to San Diego. During his weekend in Arizona, he’d only been off shift once, between midnight and 8 a.m. on Sunday. The last flight from Phoenix to San Diego was at 9:55 p.m. Callar couldn’t possibly have made it.
SO WELLS HEADED UP the 5, leaving San Diego behind and heading for Los Angeles and a red-eye back to Washington. But he made one stop along the way, at a bookstore in Anaheim, where he leafed through a shelf of histories about Germany and World War II, wondering what had provoked Jerry Williams to start reading about the Nazis.
17
STARE KIEJKUTY. JULY 2008
When Kenneth Karp stepped into Mohammed Fariz’s cell, Mohammed sat in his usual position, rocking back and forth in the right rear corner. He closed his eyes as Karp slid the door shut.
“Come on, dude,” Karp said. “You’re hurting my feelings.”
Mohammed was the forgotten detainee, the second Pakistani arrested during the raid in Islamabad, the seventeen-year-old in the Batman T-shirt who’d shot Dwayne Maggs in the leg and made a fuss on the flight between Pakistan and Poland.
In his month at the Midnight House, Mohammed had been difficult. Some days he read his Quran, prayed on a regular schedule, ate his meals without complaint. But others he spent mumbling to himself and squatting in a corner of his cell. Two days before he had refused his dinner, violating 673’s rules, which required detainees to eat every day.
The Rangers called Karp to find out why.
“It’s poison,” Mohammed said.
“It’s the same as we eat,” Karp said. Which wasn’t exactly true. Mohammed and bin Zari got the leftovers from the base cafeteria. Breakfast was an overripe banana, hunks of bread, and a strange sugary jam. Lunch was toast and soup. Dinner was overcooked mystery meat with soggy rice or french fries that seemed to be made out of cardboard. And the portions were small, a deliberate effort to ensure that the prisoners were always slightly hungry.
But even if the food wasn’t gourmet, Karp could promise it hadn’t been spiked. He wasn’t a fan of giving prisoners LSD or PCP. The effects were too uncertain. So
me guys even enjoyed the trips.
Karp picked up the blue plastic bowl that held Mohammed’s dinner, lifted a piece of meat to his mouth. Salty, leathery, tasteless, with bits of gristle that had a sandy texture. “Yummy,” he said, the meat still in his mouth. He choked it down. “See. It’s fine.”
He handed the bowl to Mohammed, who tossed it against the wall.
Under other circumstances, that misbehavior would have earned Mohammed a week in a punishment cell. But Karp and the rest of 673 were busy with bin Zari. Karp couldn’t deal with another problem.
“Fine, Mohammed,” he said in Pashto. “You want to be hungry, your choice.” For two days, Mohammed went back to eating, and Karp thought he had learned his lesson. But now he was back in the corner.
IN CIA JARGON, detainees like Mohammed were “dancers.” They weren’t the most openly resistant prisoners. But their unpredictable cycles of defiance and cooperation made them among the most difficult detainees.
Some dancers were mentally unstable, unable to distinguish fantasy from reality. Others used the technique as a form of passive resistance, a way to incite their jailers. Openly angry prisoners invited brutal retaliation. By alternating—“dancing”—between resistance and compliance, a canny jihadi could slow an interrogation, giving himself time to resist.
Within the agency, the most famous dancer was a Taliban commander who went by the single name Jadhouri. In 2006, a Ranger platoon in Afghanistan captured Jadhouri in anattack on a Talib-controlled village near the Pakistan border. The raid had been routine, except at the end, when Jadhouri ran out of a one-room hut, his hands raised in surrender. Seconds later, a grenade blew out the hut. When the Rangers checked inside, they found fragments of a laptop. Jadhouri had apparently taken the time to strap a grenade to the computer’s case before giving up. The Rangers did what they could to recover the laptop, but the explosion had launched it to computer heaven.
Jadhouri was sent to the prison at Bagram, the American air base north of Kabul, where the interrogators took over. For a week, he insisted that the Rangers were mistaken about the laptop. The grenade had blown up accidentally, he said. His questioners lost patience, threatened to send him to Guantánamo, doused him with buckets of cold water. Jadhouri stopped talking. In response, he was kept awake for sixty hours straight. Still, he refused to speak.
Then, on a December Sunday a week before Christmas, a lung-burning wind blowing off the Kush, Jadhouri produced a single piece of toilet paper that became known as the Square. On it he had drawn squiggles and crosses—representing streams and mountains—and written the names of three North-West Frontier villages. At its center, a small X, which Jadhouri claimed represented a hideout used by Osama bin Laden. Jadhouri said he was in regular touch with bin Laden’s bodyguards and that he had destroyed the laptop because it held messages from bin Laden.
The interrogators at Bagram viewed the Square skeptically. Still: bin Laden. And Jadhouri must have had some reason for blowing up the laptop.
Unfortunately, the Square itself was too small and badly drawn to be deciphered. Giving Jadhouri access to mapmaking software was unthinkable, so the interrogators made him redraw the map on a whiteboard. When Jadhouri pronounced himself finished, the whiteboard was photographed and the images uploaded to the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency, the Defense Department unit responsible for mapping the world.
Two days later, the NGIA’s verdict came back. The map was worse than useless. Intentionally or accidentally, Jadhouri’s version of the North-West Frontier included roads that didn’t exist and a river that seemed to be in Tajikistan. Even disregarding those errors, the target area covered four hundred square miles. Either Jadhouri had a terrible sense of direction or the map was entirely fictitious.
Against their better judgment, the interrogators took one more shot, bringing in an NGIA mapmaker who specialized in central Asian geography. After a day, the mapmaker reported back that the more questions Jadhouri answered, the vaguer the map became. Jadhouri spent two weeks in an isolation cell as punishment.
When he was released, he had a gift for his captors: another square, this one supposedly revealing bin Laden’s “true and correct” location. By then even the most humorless of the interrogators got the joke. Jadhouri was returned to the general prison population and encouraged to use toilet paper for its intended purpose. The mystery of the exploding laptop was never solved.
The legend of the Square quickly passed from Bagram to Guantánamo and the rest of the secret prisons the CIA had scattered around the globe. Along the way, it acquired flourishes meant to prove its ridiculousness. In one, Jadhouri had marked the Square in blood rather than ink. In another, the toilet paper was already partially used. And in a third, the fiction wasn’t discovered until two Special Operations teams had been put in the air for an attack on the hideout.
KARP DIDN’T FIND the stories funny. The interrogators in Bagram should never have believed such an obvious lie. Even worse, they’d failed to punish Jadhouri properly for embarrassing them. The test of wills between detainees and interrogators never ended. Whenever a prisoner won, even for a single day, his victory encouraged other detainees to resist. Isolating prisoners destroyed that dynamic, one reason that the Midnight House worked so well. Here, detainees couldn’t depend on a big group to sustain them.
For interrogations to succeed, detainees had to feel—not just understand but feel—that they were beaten, Karp thought. They had to wake up every day knowing that their captors controlled every choice they made. Only then would they tell the truth.
In the years immediately after 9/11, Karp’s view had been standard at the agency and the Pentagon. But now Langley and the army had—officially, anyway—backed away from using force or coercion on detainees. At Guantánamo, the FBI’s hands-off model was the default. The Feds argued that rough tactics were illegal, made prosecutions impossible, and didn’t work anyway. Ill treatment made detainees more resistant, not less. The way to get information was to build relationships with prisoners and reward them for help.
In the FBI model, a dishonest detainee was subject to steady questioning that made him layer lie upon lie on his answers. Eventually, his story collapsed of its own weight. At that point, the agents demanded the truth, and the detainee—knowing that he’d been beaten—gave in. The technique was a classic investigative strategy that detectives in the United States had used for generations.
To which Karp could only say, What planet are you on? He had never seen a prisoner who minded being caught in a lie. Arabs and Afghans, especially, loved to tell tales. Catch them lying, break down their stories, and they apologized, smiled, and started all over again.
And only a few detainees could be bribed, in Karp’s experience. Most jihadis sneered at offers of books, or better food, or extra time to exercise. Nor were they frightened by the threat that they’d spend their lives in prison, especially not at Guantánamo, where they lived among fellow Muslims. No, they needed to know they would be punished for lying, or refusing to talk. They needed to feel fear. They needed to be broken. Then they would tell the truth. Sometimes.
Anyone who thought that the FBI’s tactics would work against jihadis needed to look at American prisons, which were filled with criminals who had accepted long jail terms instead of testifying against friends or relatives in return for shorter sentences. Stop snitching. Hell, Barry Bonds’s trainer had gone to jail instead of admitting what he knew about Bonds’s steroid use. And the guy had won. Eventually, the Feds had let him out. Which was fine, as far as Karp was concerned. Steroid use wasn’t a capital crime.
But if the trainer kept his mouth shut for no better reason than to protect Barry Bonds, nobody should be surprised when religious fanatics weren’t helpful to their interrogators. When Karp pointed out these inconvenient facts to his counterparts at the FBI, and asked, “So, what do we do with the seventy percent of the jihadis who flat-out refuse to talk?” their answer was, “We lock ’em up and keep working.�
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That argument had carried the day, more or less. Coercive interrogations had once been discussed at the highest levels of the Pentagon, Langley, and the White House. No longer. The secret charter that 673 had received from the President said only that the members of the unit couldn’t be prosecuted. The charter said nothing about why such an exemption might be necessary. The people in charge still wanted the information that 673 could provide, but they no longer wanted to know how 673 was getting it. Karp understood. September 11 had faded. Most Americans had forgotten Osama bin Laden existed.
But the threat hadn’t changed, Karp thought. Just because Al Qaeda hadn’t pulled off an attack on American soil since 2001 didn’t mean it had stopped trying. And Pakistan was more volatile than ever. If it fell to an Islamist coup, Al Qaeda would have a nuclear bomb within its grasp. Karp sometimes thought that his mission was to make himself the most hated man in America, because he’d be hated only as long as the threat seemed unreal.
So, Karp counted himself lucky to be at the Midnight House, where he could operate the way he needed to. The top guys at the agency, the army, they knew the truth. Even if they would no longer admit it. They knew the United States needed one prison where its interrogators wouldn’t have lawyers or the Red Cross watching them.
KARP STEPPED close to Mohammed, stood over him.
“Mohammed.”
“Who are you?” Mohammed said in Pashto. “Why do you bother me?”
Karp picked him up, shoved him against the rough wall of the cell. Mohammed’s muscles twitched, and Karp wished the kid would fight him a little, come back to earth. But he didn’t. His black eyes were dull, his breath bitter, as though something inside him was rotting. He had left Poland, gone somewhere Karp couldn’t reach.
The Midnight House Page 20
