The Faithful Spy

by Alex Berenson

  The White Book also noted that pain was a subjective concept, differing from one person to another. Thus any amount of pain was allowed, as long as it did not produce “severe and permanent” injury. The White Book also noted, dryly, that “pain should not necessarily substitute for more traditional methods of interrogation. The threat of pain is often more effective than pain itself.”

  FAROUK’S JOURNEY HAD begun in Baghdad.

  They locked his hands behind his back even as he was still on his knees, on the roof, with Zayd’s body a few feet away. A man in an American military uniform pulled a hood over his head and tightened it around his neck. The world went black. The hood was too tight. They surely hadn’t meant to make it so tight. He couldn’t breathe. He took one shallow breath, then another, fighting for air through the bag. Soon he was panting like a dog. His throat tightened as he began to panic. He was going to pass out. He was going to die up here. His breaths came faster and faster, until he was hyperventilating and the roof seemed to fall away under him.

  Stay calm, Farouk told himself. They wouldn’t kill you this way. Relax. Breathe. He slowed down his breathing. And after a few minutes he realized he was still alive. He focused on his other senses, the shouting of the men around him, the rough fabric of the hood touching his face, the wetness where his saliva had trickled onto the inside of the hood.

  Two men grabbed him and pulled him up. He stumbled. A moment later he felt a punch into his thick stomach. He grunted and fell. He rolled onto his side. The pain and surprise were enormous, and now he really couldn’t breathe. He mashed his face against the rough roof, hoping he could drag the bag off his head.

  “Allah,” he said. “Allah.” He felt the stick of a needle in his leg. A silver peace spread to his brain and his fear vanished. Then the blackness overtook him. The nightmare ended.

  BUT WHEN HE woke he found that it hadn’t ended after all. He opened his eyes and saw nothing, nothing but the most profound blackness possible. He seemed to be swimming inside it, swimming in a sea of blackness. The hood. He must still be wearing the hood. He tried to pull it off…and realized his hands were locked behind his back. With that thought his shoulders began to ache. His legs too, for his ankles were manacled to the floor. And yet his flabby buttocks were exposed to the cool air. The chair he was on had no seat, and his pants had been cut off. Also, oddly, it felt as if a tiny alligator clip was attached to his right index finger, and a Velcro strap to his left ankle. He tried to rub them off but found he couldn’t.

  And he was thirsty. He licked his dry lips with his dry tongue.

  “Salaam alaikum,” he said, his voice a rasp.

  No answer. He tried again, more loudly this time. “Alaikum salaam. Hello.” And now a real shout: “Allahu akbar.”

  But no one answered, and Farouk suddenly realized he could hear nothing at all. Not a sound. Not the rush of the wind or the bark of a dog or the hum of a car’s engine. No inside sounds either, like pipes or air conditioning. His ears seemed to have been stuffed with cotton, only they weren’t.

  Could the Americans have forgotten him here, wherever here was? Would he die of thirst?

  Farouk pulled himself back. He needed to stay focused. I’m a scientist, he thought. I must use my mind. My name is Farouk Khan. The kafirs have taken me prisoner. How long ago? I don’t know. Where am I? I don’t know. They drugged me, put me to sleep, moved me somewhere. Fine. He breathed in and out, and realized that someone had cut a hole in the mask so he could breathe more easily. Good.

  Why are they doing this to me? They want to know about the Geiger counter. Of course. That beast Zayd had been right. He should have left it in the storeroom, though the Americans would have found it anyway.

  He tried to relax. He wasn’t an illiterate peasant. He knew the Americans had rules. They could make him wear this hood, but they couldn’t hurt him too much. They would ask him their questions, and then would put him on a plane to Guantánamo. If they asked him about the Geiger counter, he would say…he would say that he didn’t even know what it was. He should make up a name. A Shia name would be best. Hussein, then. He would call himself Hussein. As long as he didn’t tell them who he was or what he was doing in Iraq, he would be fine.

  The Americans had rules. He just needed to stay calm.

  BUT STAYING CALM got harder as the seconds stretched into hours. He thought of his wife, Zeena, of his sons and daughters, of the dirty concrete floors of the lab where he had worked, of the black stone of the Kaaba, which he had never seen except in photographs. Of the glorious moment when he had met Sheikh bin Laden, of Zayd picking his nose as they waited for the peasants to arrive with their yellowcake. Of the lead box that he had bought from Dmitri, and the havoc it would wreak. He smiled at that memory. But always his thirst distracted him, pulled him back to this empty black room. And his bladder had grown uncomfortably full. And what if he needed to empty his bowels? Was that why they had cut open his pants?

  “Swine,” he said aloud. “Kafirs. My name is Hussein. Hussein Ali.” His voice rose. “Let me go!” He repeated himself a dozen times, a hundred times, until his voice cracked and crumbled and his face flushed under his hood.

  Someone had to respond. But no one did.

  PERHAPS THE AMERICANS really had forgotten him. No, that was impossible. This was a game. They wanted to scare him. But Allah would protect him.

  And so he waited, fighting his fear, licking his dry lips and counting slowly to one thousand and back down again. But his dread deepened in the silence, along with his thirst.

  “Please,” he said quietly. “Please.”

  LATER. HE DIDN’T know how much later, couldn’t imagine, and suddenly a torrent of water drenched him. Freezing water, painfully cold, stinging him through his hood and his clothes. So cold. Yet Farouk turned up his head to drink, thankful even for this, for any sign that they knew he was here.

  “Allahu akbar,” he mumbled. He had asked and Allah had provided. He drank and drank even after he was full, afraid that the water might not come again.

  But the cold flow kept coming, and deliverance quickly turned to a new kind of misery. He squirmed left and right, but he couldn’t escape the stream. The water saturated his clothes until they couldn’t hold another drop, then soaked his skin. Water trickled along his stomach, down his legs, off his feet. He could feel it pool on the floor and rise to his ankles.

  He began to shiver. He hadn’t realized how blessed he had been just a few minutes before. To be dry. How he hated these Americans and their tricks. They were laughing at him somewhere, he knew. He should be angry. But he was only afraid and cold. How long would they let him sit here, and what would they do next? “Allah,” he said, “I beg your forgiveness.” And again: “Please.”

  LATER. A NEEDLE jabbed into his back. Almost before he could register its sting the blackness had taken him again.

  HE WOKE UP on a sagging cot in a small room, a thin blanket over his body. He sat up. He was naked. He could see. His hood had been taken off, and the room was lit by a ceiling bulb. His hands were cuffed in front of him, but his legs were free.

  A pile of clothes lay on the floor, a loose shirt and sweatpants with an elastic waistband. He awkwardly pulled on the pants and shirt, and his spirits brightened. They had realized there was no use hurting him. He had survived their test. So he hoped.

  He shivered as a cough shook his body. He sat on the cot and tried to think. He felt tired and hungry, slightly feverish. But otherwise okay. They wanted to scare him, these Americans. But he wouldn’t give in. He waited a few more minutes. Then, feeling as though he had no choice, he stood up and tugged at the door. To his shock, it opened.

  FAROUK HAD KEPT them waiting. Which fit his profile, Saul thought. They could see him on the monitors as he sat on the cot scratching his head. He was rattled and getting sick, and the oximeter and pulse monitors showed that he had reacted badly to his time in the hole, although he had slowly brought himself under control. Saul was not surpri
sed. Farouk was a scientist, not a killer like Khalid Sheikh Mohammed. The hole was deeply disconcerting to anyone who wasn’t flat-out psychotic.

  But Saul had learned not to underestimate these guys. They were highly motivated. Their faith gave them extra strength. They never broke all at once, not the important ones. They gave up a little, and then they started lying again. Getting everything took time.

  Saul was the lead interrogator in Task Force 121, a Delta Force major with a doctorate in psychiatry from Duke. He pushed the limits of the White Book, he knew. Even some other interrogators worried that his methods crossed into…the T-word…a word that he didn’t even like to think to himself. Sometimes, after a particularly draining session, Saul worried too. He didn’t want to look in the mirror one day and see Josef Mengele. He wondered what his parents or his wife would think if they saw what he was doing on CNN.

  But Saul had never killed any of his prisoners, or hurt one in a way that wouldn’t heal. He pushed the limits, but if he wasn’t clear on whether a procedure was permitted, he asked Colonel Yates, a military lawyer permanently attached to 121. The questions were never written down; the colonel didn’t want to end up on CNN either. Still, Yates’s mere presence checked the worst impulses of the interrogators. And they closely monitored the prisoners’ health, if only to make sure their techniques were working. The interrogators in 121 had interrogated close to one hundred prisoners, and only one had died, of a huge heart attack that probably would have hit him in any case.

  The TF 121 interrogators had other restrictions. They never worked alone, and they took two-month breaks twice a year. Once a year they were interviewed by army psychiatrists and took a long personality test. The rules were supposed to prevent them from developing God complexes—a real risk, Saul knew. Having this much power over another human being, not just the power to kill but the power to hurt, could be intoxicating. Look at the other side, cutting throats on camera. Nothing could be more repulsive. Yet Saul understood the impulse, the sick thrill of making another human being cringe and beg for his life…or beg for death because the pain was too much.

  Yes, he was on a slippery slope, and he knew it. But he slipped only far enough to get the information he needed. Saul rarely had moral qualms about his job. In his office he kept a paperweight engraved with a quotation from George Orwell: “People sleep peaceably in their beds at night only because rough men stand ready to do violence on their behalf.” He had broken Khalid Sheikh Mohammed. He had disrupted at least three attacks, saved hundreds of civilians. He didn’t know their names, and they would never know his, but they were still real.

  And the men he questioned, the Farouks of the world? They weren’t innocent. They weren’t Iraqi farmers caught in dragnets and taken to Abu Ghraib. They were terrorists, real ones, who knew the risks they had chosen to take. Saul had nothing but contempt for the Amnesty International types who whined that any coercive tactic was unfair. If those weaklings believed that men like Farouk would give up their secrets over tea and crumpets, they were even more naive than he thought.

  The real problem was that the tactics that TF 121 had pioneered had spread much too widely, Saul thought. Coercion should be used only when necessary—under close supervision, and on prisoners who could reasonably be expected to have good information. He didn’t understand why twenty-two-year-old corporals from West Virginia who’d never learned basic interrogation techniques were beating up detainees at Abu Ghraib and Guantánamo and Bagram in Afghanistan. Not that anyone at the Pentagon had asked his opinion.

  As for the argument that his methods shouldn’t be used because they didn’t work, Saul could only laugh. Of course they worked. They worked too well, in fact, which was why they couldn’t be used in police investigations. After a few weeks with him, most people would admit to anything, even crimes they hadn’t committed, simply to get out. Those forced confessions were almost worthless, because even the questioner couldn’t tell if they were true.

  But Saul wasn’t trying to solve crimes. He was trying to stop them. He wanted information about attacks that hadn’t happened yet. The location of hidden bombs. The structure of terrorist cells. The real names and addresses of operatives. Concrete, verifiable information. He didn’t care how often he was lied to, as long as he got the truth at the end. Lies only drew out the pain. Eventually every detainee understood that, and when they did, they gave him what he wanted.

  FAROUK WALKED OUT of his cell and into a larger room that had a table at its center.

  Two big men walked into the room. “Sit,” one said in English. Farouk saw no reason to pretend that he didn’t understand. He sat. One man stood behind him, while the other manacled his legs to the chair. Then they brought out a plate of bread, a bowl of hummus, and a glass of orange juice.

  Saliva filled Farouk’s mouth. He could never remember being so hungry, not even as a boy when his mother had to make three kilograms of flour last a week. He wondered if the food was safe. One of the men dipped a piece of bread into the hummus and ate. At that Farouk dipped his head toward the table and shoveled food into his mouth with his cuffed hands. The glorious food filled his belly, and he felt a momentary rush of gratitude toward his captors. He stifled the reaction immediately. Don’t thank the kafirs, he told himself. That’s what they want.

  After he finished, the men cleared away the plates and walked out, leaving Farouk to sit alone. He suddenly felt strangely fatigued. He wanted nothing more than to put his head on the table and sleep, and a few minutes later he did just that.

  SNAP! THE LIGHTS shone brightly as Farouk tried to shake the mustiness from his head. A new man stood over him. Someone else shook him from behind. Why had he fallen asleep? And for how long? The hummus must have been laced with something. He was a fool. He wiped at a line of drool trickling from his mouth.

  “Wake up,” the man said. He was tall, with dark hair and a neatly trimmed goatee. He set a thick folder on the table. Farouk shook himself desperately. He needed to be clearheaded.

  The man sat across from Farouk and took a pack of Marlboros from his jacket. “Cigarette?”

  “No,” Farouk said, though he badly wanted one.

  The man shrugged. “Suit yourself. What’s your name?”

  “Hussein. What’s yours?”

  “My name doesn’t matter. And I think you’re lying to me. What’s your name?”

  “Hussein. Hussein Ali,” Farouk said. “I’m a farmer from Basra. This is all a mistake.”

  “You’re not even Iraqi. Don’t insult me.” The nameless man smiled a small cold smile. “For the last time. What’s your name?”

  “I told you,” Farouk said as sincerely as he could. “Hussein.”

  “Do you want to go back in the hole?”

  Not that, Farouk thought. Please not that. He swallowed hard and tried to keep his composure as his interrogator tapped a Marlboro from the pack on the table.

  “Do you want to go back in the hole? Yes or no?”

  “Of course not,” Farouk said. “But my name is Hussein.” As long as he stayed calm he could outsmart this American.

  NOW, SAUL TOLD himself. Show this bastard who’s in charge. He opened the folder. “Your name is Farouk Khan,” he said. “You were born in Peshawar, Pakistan, in 1954. You attended the University of Delft in the Netherlands as an exchange student. You received a bachelor’s degree in physics, and then an advanced degree. Upon your return to Pakistan, you were hired by the government.”

  Farouk had been foolish to carry a Pakistani passport, even one with a fake name, Saul thought. Pakistani intelligence had identified him and revealed his past to Task Force 121, though only in the vaguest terms. The Pakistanis didn’t talk much about their nuclear weapons program, not even to America. But the Pakistani silence didn’t matter. Once the CIA knew Farouk’s real name, the agency dug up enough information for a psychological profile of him. The goal was to make Farouk believe they knew everything about him and that lying would be a waste of time. To their
subjects, the best interrogators appeared all-seeing as well as all-powerful.

  FAROUK’S HEAD SNAPPED back as the man read. He had to fight to keep from retching. How could the American know all this?

  “My name is Hussein,” he said desperately.

  The man with the goatee stopped reading, stood, and slapped Farouk across the face. Farouk yelped, from the shock as much as the pain. To be slapped like a woman was intolerable. Yet Farouk somehow knew he deserved the punishment for lying so foolishly.

  “Don’t be stupid. Your name is Farouk Khan. You lost your government job in 2000. Would you like to tell me why?”

  Farouk said nothing.

  “It doesn’t matter,” the man said. “I already know.” He stepped back and lit his cigarette. “You are 174 centimeters tall and you weigh 105 kilos.” Five foot eight and 231 pounds. “You have a resting heart rate of approximately ninety beats per minute. Your blood pressure is 170 over 110. You are in poor health, and you have reacted badly to the stress you have faced so far. The minimal stress.”

  “Allahu akbar,” Farouk murmured to himself. His blood seemed to have left his body. He could not control his shivering.

  The nameless interrogator took a deep drag on his Marlboro. “Yes, God is great,” he said. “But God has nothing to do with this.” He leaned over Farouk, holding his cigarette close to the prisoner’s face. “Farouk, you’re a smart man. An educated man,” he said. “You know the United States has a prison camp at Guantánamo Bay.” He waited.

  “Yes,” Farouk rasped.

  “And it is no secret that detainees in Guantánamo are treated well. They receive three meals a day. They pray freely. You may even have heard that they have lawyers, yes?”