A Kidnapping in Milan: The CIA on Trial

by Hendricks, Steve

  IN THE EARLY frigidity of the Cold War, not long after the last of the Second World War’s fifty million dead had been buried, the United States began studying how best to extract information from its enemies. During the late war, America had resisted the temptation to torture, notwithstanding that Germany and Japan had tortured maniacally. But the fifty million dead seem to have eaten away at American forbearance, and the American elite had come to see in the Soviet Union the greatest threat yet to the nation and the democratic capitalism for which it stood. Dreadful means might be justified in pursuit of self-preservation. Little is known about the government’s earliest studies on interrogation, but it is certain the CIA and Department of Defense experimented with “unorthodox” methods on captured spies in Germany, Japan, and the Panama Canal Zone. Some of the captives are believed to have expired.

  Since neither the CIA nor the Defense Department knew much about coercive interrogation, they also studied the work of more experienced coercers like the KGB, the Soviet secret police. The Americans learned that sometimes the KGB used the crudest of brutalities, as when they put inverted cups containing rats on the stomachs of victims, then heated the cups with flames, which drove the rats to flee the heat by chewing through their victims. (Orwell used a variant of this torture in the climax of 1984.) But often the KGB deemed crudity unnecessary. There were subtler ways to break a person.

  One way was to make a prisoner sit or stand without moving. This did not sound grueling, but, as Defense researchers reported, “Any fixed position which is maintained over a long period of time ultimately produces excruciating pain.” The researchers found that although some men could withstand the pain of forced standing, “sooner or later all men succumb to the circulatory failure it produces. After 18 to 24 hours of continuous standing, there is an accumulation of fluid in the tissues of the legs… . The ankles and feet of the prisoner swell to twice their normal circumference. The edema may rise up the legs as high as the middle of the thighs. The skin becomes tense and intensely painful. Large blisters develop, which break and exude water serum. The accumulation of the body fluid in the legs produces impairment of the circulation. The heart rate increases, and fainting may occur. Eventually there is renal shutdown, and urine production ceases… . [The victims] usually develop a delirious state, characterized by disorientation, fear, delusions, and visual hallucinations… . [This] is a form of physical torture, in spite of the fact that the prisoners and KGB officers alike do not ordinarily perceive it as such.” That an officer might not perceive it as such was a bonus: he was more likely to be willing to inflict a torture that he did not regard as one. The same was true for the willingness of a nation, as the United States would learn after 2001.

  The KGB also broke prisoners by denying them sleep. A prisoner would be set to walking in circles, which would keep her awake the first day or two, but eventually she would fall asleep on her feet and would have to be beaten and kicked. In time, blows would fail to keep her awake, and her head would have to be thrust in a bucket of ice water. After some days, reality would recede from her. She might think her captives were her friends and wonder why they would not let her rest. She might have trouble recalling her job or address or the name of her brother or the fact that she was married. If she tried to spell her name or count to ten, she might fail. Her entire being would be reduced to a single desire: “to sleep, to sleep just a little, not to get up, to lie, to rest, to forget,” in the words of Israeli prime minister Menachem Begin, a victim of the KGB method. That moment was a good one to ask for a confession.

  Seeing promise in such methods, the CIA commissioned its own experiments, one of the more important of which was conducted at Canada’s McGill University in 1957 and was disguised as a study to prevent accidents on highways and railroads. The McGill researchers paid twenty-two college students to lie on their backs for a week in featureless cubicles. To minimize visual stimuli, they were made to wear translucent goggles, and the lights were kept on day and night. To minimize auditory stimuli, the cubicles were soundproofed, a low white noise played continuously, and U-shaped pillows were curved around their heads. The pillows also denied the students the tactile stimulation of moving their heads against their mattresses, and a pair of thick gloves did the same for their hands. The consequences were swift. After only four hours, most of the volunteers could not hold a train of thought. After two or three days, in a few cases, the volunteers’ “very identity had begun to disintegrate.” The majority quit before the week was up, and all of them hallucinated. One heard a choir, another saw squirrels with bags slung over their shoulders marching in file, and another felt a small spaceship fire pellets at him. Later the CIA would conclude, “Extreme deprivation of sensory stimuli induces unbearable stress and anxiety and is a form of torture.”

  Encouraged, McGill’s researchers devised other tests for the CIA but did away with volunteers who might quit mid-study. Over several years, more than one hundred psychiatric patients were either unwittingly or wittingly but unwillingly experimented on. The special research of D. Ewen Cameron, a past president of the American Psychiatric Association, was “depatterning.” To depattern a patient, Dr. Cameron drugged her into a coma, kept her comatose for up to three months, then revived her and gave her electroconvulsive shocks three times a day at charges up to forty times the norm for a month. After that, he strapped onto her head a football helmet equipped with speakers, through which he played a single, looped message—“My mother hates me” was one—up to half a million times over three weeks. His patients became psychotic. In another of Cameron’s experiments, captives were kept for up to five weeks in the sensory-deprivation cubes that had broken most of the student volunteers in a few days. Decades later, some of his victims were still “depatterned.” Two had a disorder that kept them from recognizing people’s faces. In the 1980s the U.S. government compensated the victims modestly, and the American Psychiatric Association claimed “deep regret” over the experiments, but the Canadian Psychiatric Association rejected calls for remorse and extolled McGill’s psychiatrists for a tradition of therapeutic excellence.

  Further studies taught the CIA and Defense Department about other simple but devastating methods of breaking prisoners. Solitary confinement, for example, could cause damage to a prisoner’s brain “much like that which occurs if he is beaten, starved, or deprived of sleep.” Disturbing a prisoner’s sense of time—retarding and advancing clocks, serving meals at odd hours, shutting out daylight—could also madden a man. Researchers for the Defense Department concluded, “Isolation, anxiety, fatigue, lack of sleep, uncomfortable temperatures, and chronic hunger … lead to serious disturbances of many bodily processes; there is no reason to differentiate them from any other form of torture.”

  The CIA theorized that the onset of such disturbances might be hastened by drugs like LSD, amphetamines, and heroin, and in the 1950s and 1960s its scientists tested the theory on prisoners of war in Korea, partygoers in New York (whose drinks were spiked), johns in San Francisco (drugged by whores in the CIA’s pay), convicts in Kentucky (kept on LSD “trips” for eleven weeks), and on its own scientists. One of the scientists, Frank Olson, suffered a nervous breakdown after his encounter with an LSD-spiked cocktail and subsequently hurtled through a window on the tenth floor of a New York hotel. The coroner said Olson committed suicide, but the family’s pathologist said he had suffered a blunt-force trauma to his head before crashing through the window. The family believed Olson was murdered because he had soured on the mind-control program. Ultimately, however, the CIA decided that mind-control drugs were unpredictable and usually unnecessary. Simpler methods worked best.

  Those methods worked all the better if begun early—if possible, from the moment the victim was captured. He should be taken, the CIA concluded, at a time “when his mental and physical resistance is at its lowest” and in a manner that caused him “the maximum amount of mental discomfort.” Complete surprise and a show of overwhelming force were ideal. T
hese precepts probably explained the jarring shout from the man in the van on Via Guerzoni, followed immediately by the terrifying boom of the rear door ripping open, followed in turn by the adamantine grip on Abu Omar, the swift heaving of him into the hold, and the slamming shut of the door. Succeeding acts, the CIA decided, should further disorient the victim and erode his capacity to resist. An immediate beating would do. So would hooding, which was better than blindfolding, because a hood made a person feel more cut off from the world. Stripping and dressing him in something unfamiliar and ill-fitting were good too. “It is very important,” the CIA concluded, “that the arresting party behave in such a manner as to impress the subject with their efficiency,” which convinced a captive of his impotence. Decades before the CIA carried out its first rendition, it had the science of seizing a man pat.

  ALTHOUGH CIA OFFICIALS knew crudity was not needed to break a captive, they did not foreswear it. As throughout history, once one accepted the use of torture, it was hard to limit its forms. The CIA’s Phoenix program during the Vietnam War was a vast application of crudity, a “pump and dump—pumping suspects for information by torture and then dumping the bodies,” as Alfred McCoy wrote in his indispensable A Question of Torture. The pumpers and dumpers were U.S. and South Vietnamese soldiers whom the CIA trained in interrogation. Some of the trainees went on to coil wires around their victims’ testicles or stick wires into their vaginas, then send high-voltage current through them. Other interrogators shoved dowels into victims’ ears and when their answers proved unsatisfactory tapped the dowels by degrees until they penetrated deep into their brains. It was an agonizing death. Other interrogators, more patient, simply starved prisoners until they talked or died. In another CIA program in Vietnam, a neurosurgeon implanted electrodes in the brains of three POWs and transmitted radio signals to them in hope of stirring them to violence, but the subjects only vomited and shat themselves. Their utility spent, they were shot by Green Berets and their bodies burned. In another experiment, CIA psychiatrists tried to induce Vietcong prisoners to talk by giving them twelve electroconvulsive treatments in a single day. None divulged any secrets, so every day thereafter they were convulsed eight or nine times. One prisoner died after a week, and the rest died over the next few weeks. None talked. Victims of other tortures talked, but unhelpfully, like the man who confessed to being a CIA spy, a hermaphrodite, a Buddhist monk, a Catholic bishop, and the son of the king of Cambodia. He was in fact a mere schoolteacher. Interrogators in the South Vietnamese Army had a slogan: “If they aren’t Vietcong, beat them until they are. If they are Vietcong, beat them until they aren’t.” It was a good prescription for revenge but not for intelligence.

  The CIA and Defense Department knew or would soon know that information obtained under torture was unreliable. A few years after the Vietnam War, the CIA instructed its officers, “Intense physical pain is quite likely to produce false confessions, fabricated to avoid additional punishment,” and the Army instructed its troops, “Use of torture is not only illegal but also it is a poor technique that yields unreliable results, may damage subsequent collection efforts, and can induce the source to say what he thinks the HUMINT [human intelligence] collector wants to hear.” The CIA and Defense Department also knew there were alternatives to torture. Sherwood Moran, a Marine Corps major, wrote a manual during the Second World War on how to establish “intellectual and spiritual” rapport with supposedly barbaric, unreachable enemies. The manual was based on Moran’s success convincing Japanese POWs to reveal their comrades’ positions and battle plans. It became a classic in interrogation circles.

  The Phoenix program achieved no comparable success. Although its graduates tortured thousands and killed, by the CIA’s count, 20,587 (by the count of the South Vietnamese government, 40,994), a CIA commander in Vietnam told Alfred McCoy, “The truth is that never in the history of our work in Vietnam did we get one clear-cut, high-ranking Vietcong agent.” President Nixon rewarded the CIA officer who ran Phoenix, William Colby, with the directorship of the CIA.

  The United States did not train just the Vietnamese in the American way of torture. It also trained police and soldiers of other countries of the Third World, particularly countries ruled by despots who took a hard line against Communism. If the despots also opposed lesser leftisms, so much the better. Only a few details about the trainings have become known. In Uruguay in the late 1960s a CIA officer was reported to have taught policemen how to electrocute prisoners by demonstrating on four beggars from the streets of Montevideo, all of whom were electrocuted to death. “The special horror of the course was its academic, almost clinical atmosphere,” one of the purported witnesses wrote. Another course, taught in Texas by the U.S. Army, was described by a Honduran sergeant: “They taught us psychological methods—to study the fears and weaknesses of a prisoner: make him stand up, don’t let him sleep, keep him naked and isolated, put rats and cockroaches in his cell, give him bad food, serve him dead animals, throw cold water on him, change the temperature.” The curriculum may have been implemented; a Marxist tortured in Honduras said she was given dead birds and rats for dinner, was kept standing for hours without sleep or the use of a toilet, and had freezing water thrown on her naked body at half-hour intervals.

  One of the earliest recipients of the CIA’s training was Egypt. The trainers were former Nazi commanders from Germany who were recruited by the CIA not long after the Second World War, probably because the agency was then inexperienced in brutality and wanted men of expertise. One of the Nazis was SS Sturmbannführer (Storm-Trooper Leader) Alois Brunner, whom Adolf Eichmann described as one of his best men and who, during the war, trained Nazi field commanders to liquidate Jewish ghettos across Europe. By one estimate, Brunner personally ordered 128,000 Jews to death camps. Long afterward he said his great regret in life was not having murdered more Jews. Another of the CIA’s trainers in Egypt was SS Obersturmbannführer (Senior Storm-Trooper Leader) Otto Skorzeny, who rescued Benito Mussolini in 1943 after his capture by Partisans and who plotted the assassinations, all in vain, of Stalin, Churchill, Roosevelt, and Eisenhower. A Nazi publication once described Skorzeny as “Hitler’s favorite commando.” The Nazi trainers were supervised in Egypt by a CIA officer on long-term loan to the country’s de facto ruler (and eventual president) Nasser, but neither the number of Nazis nor the particulars of their curriculum are known. After they finished their work, some went to Tehran and trained Iran’s secret service, the Savak, whose savagery was impressive even by the debased standards of Third World dictatorships. Others may have trained security forces elsewhere. Alois Brunner settled, perhaps suggestively, in Syria, where Israel’s Mossad apparently tried to assassinate him by letter bomb, which, however, deprived him only of a few fingers and an eye.

  Nasser’s relationship with the CIA was complicated, largely because he entertained alliances with both the Soviet Union and the United States. In the early going, in addition to training his security forces, the CIA helped him build and run a radio station, gave him several million dollars, and promised more aid to come. When the White House did not follow through on the aid, Nasser took $3 million of the CIA’s original grant and built a latticework minaret as tall as the Washington Monument, a height meant to insult. The CIA dubbed it “Nasser’s prick” and planted explosives at its base to (as it were) blow it, but the Egyptians discovered the charges. The Egyptian name for the tower was “Roosevelt’s erection,” in honor of CIA officer Kermit Roosevelt, grandson of Teddy. Nasser’s relations with the West reached their nadir in 1956, when he nationalized the Suez Canal and the dispossessed British proposed to assassinate him. President Eisenhower vetoed the proposal in favor of a campaign of subversion, but the CIA did not handle it deftly. For example, its officers carelessly exposed a newspaper publisher, Mustafa Amin, whom they were paying to print pro-American articles, and Nasser had him imprisoned and tortured. Later there was a détente between the United States and Nasser, and in the last years of his rule the C
IA tipped him to a plot by military officers to overthrow him. The purge he undertook was so remorseless that even some CIA officials were alarmed.

  The relationship between Egypt and the United States became more stable after Anwar Sadat succeeded Nasser, rejected his socialism, and, eventually, made peace with Israel. Billions of American dollars and other assistance flowed to Cairo in consequence and made Egypt the second-largest recipient of U.S. foreign aid. (Israel was first.) For a time America’s embassy in Cairo was its largest in the world. Included in the aid was more training for Egypt’s military and security services. In the 1990s, when Gamaa began killing by the dozen, the CIA tutored President Mubarak’s special forces in the hunting of terrorists, although the program eventually had to be canceled because, as U.S. ambassador Edward Walker said, “Too many people … died while fleeing. It got to be a little too obvious.”

  When Bill Clinton decided to start extraordinarily rendering suspected terrorists, it was, therefore, natural—indeed almost inevitable—that he turned to Mubarak to receive many of the victims. In addition to the longstanding ties between the United States and Egypt, many of the world’s most troublesome terrorists were Egyptian, and Mubarak had long demanded their repatriation by the countries that had given them refuge. He seems to have been only too pleased to open his dungeons to America. The CIA would later say that before September 11, 2001, it extraordinarily rendered about seventy men. It did not say to which countries, but Egypt almost certainly received the largest number. There could have been little doubt about how the victims were treated. “If you want a serious interrogation,” said Robert Baer, who for years was a CIA officer in the Middle East, “you send a prisoner to Jordan. If you want them to be tortured, you send them to Syria. If you want someone to disappear—never to see them again—you send them to Egypt.” It was understood that an Egyptian disappearance would be preceded by torture.