Defection Games (Dan Gordon Intelligence Thriller) (24 page)

“I was born in Yazd, Iran,” Madani said. “But isn’t that in the file in front of you?”

Hank shrugged in a kind of mock apology. “Yes, but you know how it is. We have to follow the routine.”

“Oh, yes, yes,
of
course,” said Madani, nodding and waving his hand in a conciliatory way, as if to say, “Oh, of course, I’ve done this myself.” Although he sounded relaxed, I knew he was not. Behind him, just visible through the corner of his eye, sat a man in sunglasses and a raincoat, a man here without explanation. Madani could also see the man in the mirror in front of him. The man was not here to ask questions, he was not taking notes. He was simply sitting. He was there for one reason: to unsettle the person interviewed. Physical violence could often lead a suspect to man up, to steel himself against his
interrogators, and therefore was not dependably effective. To unsettle the person interviewed, though—to make him unsure of what was happening and why he was here, to make him question his own perception of what was happening right in front of him -- this relatively subtle technique, unlike violence, was often tremendously effective. And the “quiet man in sunglasses” was a tried and true way of making the person interviewed very, very ill at ease, and a suspect who is ill at ease is, in the hand of a skilled interrogator, easy to trip up, to trap in his own lies. I’d seen and practiced it time and time again.

“And the street you grew up on?” He asked. Again, apparently reading from the open file in front of him.

“Besat Street.”

“The elementary school you went to?”

“
Seyyed Al Shohada Elementary School
.”

At this, Madani moved his head around, just slightly, for just a split second, as though stretching his neck. I’d seen this “neck stretch” move before. Because even though a suspect will always be positioned in such a way that he can see the man with the sunglasses in the mirror, for whatever reason, the suspect always seems to develop an urge to turn and look at the man in the flesh. But he has to fight that
urge,
he knows he has to
fight that urge, because to turn at look would be to show your cards. To turn and look would be admitting there was something remiss
here,
that you’re wondering who the hell is behind you, that you’re nervous, that something isn’t right. And so instead, suspects do what Madani just did. They stretch their necks. And still, the urge, the wondering, grows.

“So, you were recruited into Iran’s Revolutionary Guard, when….” Doyle asked, trailing off. As he trailed off, he was shuffling through the file as if trying to find something, as though looking for something lost. Two tried and effective techniques were going here at once. 1) By “trailing off” the interrogator is still, very much by design, giving off a disinterested air designed to lull the suspect, and 2) the shuffling of papers, again by design, seems disheveled and disorganized, so the interrogator seems absent-minded, a non-threat. Anyway. Until the suspect realizes yet again that there is a man just behind him, sitting, staring.

“I was twenty,” Madani said, voice perfectly modulated to neutral. He watched intently as Doyle continued rifling through his file. “My cousin had been recruited the year earlier and put in a good word.” That neutral voice: I had to hand it to him. Madani seemed, still, remarkably at ease. Even I might have mistaken his composure as true if it hadn’t been for that split-
second neck stretch. Madani was Iranian after all. Iranians, I knew through experience, were notoriously difficult to read.

I could feel the mood in the room shift. Hank sat up straight. Doyle stopped shuffling papers.

I wrote on my pad. “Madani is wrong here. He said he was born in 1952 and recruited to the Revolutionary Guards when he was 20,
that’s
in 1972. However the Islamic Revolution was in 1979 and the Guards were first established in May 1979.” So he was off by
7 years, a too substantial discrepancy. Was it a slip of the tongue or a crack in the wall that the Iranian VEVAK must have built around him to create the fake Madani? I didn’t want to interrupt the flow of questions, and therefore saved it for a later opportunity. If he was indeed
fake
as I suspected, then VEVAK did a sloppy job here.

“How about marriage? You were how old?”

“24.”

“And where did you get married?” Hank closed the file in front of him, and slipped it into his briefcase.

“Aref, Yazd,” Madani answered.

“Hmmmm,” Hank said. “In fact, weren’t you married in Tehran?”  Hank didn’t look at the file now; he looked Madani in
the eye.  In fact, Hank had already known everything in the file. He had never had a need to open it in the first place. It was a prop, merely, another thing used to distract Madani, another thing in the room Madani could focus on: when interrogators looked at a file while they asked questions, so would the suspect. Suspects liked distraction. But now the file was closed, and Hank was looking Madani squarely in the eye, and the only way Madani could maintain the composure of someone telling the truth would be to look back.

“Oh,” he said. “Tehran was the place of my second marriage.” Madani’s eyes met Hank’s. Then he looked at Doyle.
And then at me.

“Your second marriage,” said Doyle.
A simple technique, repeating back to the suspect what he just said.
Putting the suspect even more ill-at-ease.

“Yes. My second wife is much younger, so of course when I think marriage, I think of her. Surely you understand.” Madani half-smiled here, looking from man to man; he was making an unconvincing play at male “bonding.”

“What about Yazd? You said you went to school there?  But you didn’t. Didn’t you tell us during our initial contacts that you went to Imam Muhammad School, which was right next to your
home?” Now you are telling me you went to a different school that is more than 3 kilometers away. How did you get to school? As a young boy you didn’t drive, did you?

Madani again stretched his neck,
then
squeezed it as if he had a crick in it.

“That was a long time ago. How am I supposed to remember the road to my elementary school? I’ve lived a lifetime since then. Please. We are all reasonable men here.”

“That road didn’t just lead to your elementary school. You grew up on that road.”

“You don’t know what you are talking about. You didn’t ask me what road I grew up on!” His tone of voice was angry, even impatient.
How dare you.

The man in the sunglasses stood up, and walked behind Madani. Madani turned to watch, and as he did, as fast as lightning, Doyle reached across the table, grabbed Madani’s head and slammed it on the table, twice. With his massive hand, he held it there. Madani’s nose started bleeding, dripping thick blood on the table. “I’ve got a lot of other things to do today,” Doyle said. “So let me make this brief. You are on a military base, which means you have no access to a lawyer. No one knows you’re here. To us, unless you tell us what we need to know, you
are nothing.
Nothing,
” he raised his voice. “I’m telling you all this because I want to make you feel right at home. We’ve created little slice of Iran for you, right here in this room. Here you have no rights. You’re a ghost. Anything can happen to you here.
Anything at all.
I think the Iranians who sent you want you dead, and we could just make that happen if you continue bullshitting us. Hey, I never thought we’d have a joinder of interests with Iran,” he chortled.

At that, Hank pulled out from under the table what looked like an old-fashioned doctor’s bag, a kind of leather satchel. He put it on the table, and said nothing.

Doyle slammed Madani’s head down again, in his huge palm.

And again.

“Wait!” yelled the man calling himself Madani.

Doyle stopped.

“Please. Let me talk to Mr. Kraus — please.”

And that is how I made my “good cop” entrance. The agents exchanged looks, nodded and left; I sat down with Madani; I looked at him gently. I told him to tell me the truth, that he had a choice here.
A choice between misery and freedom.
To me, it seemed an easy one. I told him so.

“I am
Cyrus Madani
,” he said. “
I am.”
His eyes beseeched me. Doyle’s finger had made long bruises on his cheek but his nose had stopped bleeding; Madani, I knew, had to be smarting with shame.

“Let me ask you, as a member of the Revolutionary Guard, what kind of work did you do?”

The man listed fairly accurately the various positions that Madani had held.

“And your house, surely you had servants?”

“Of course”

And we went back and forth for two hours. I needed to know if he did any kind of manual labor.
Any at all.
Of course a member of the
Guard
wouldn’t, but perhaps he had a hobby. Perhaps he liked building things. Perhaps he liked gardening. Unlikely, I knew. And his answers were all no, no, no.

I looked at him. I reached over, grabbed one of his hands, turned it over. They were rough.
A farmer’s hands.
Not the hand of a general of the Guard.

“We know, Madani. Or whatever your real name is. We already know.”

He looked at me,
then
looked away.

“Do you know Abdul Karim Zarqawi?”

“Who?

I repeated the name.

“I don’t recall, I met so many people in my life time. Maybe.”

“Try to think again, Abdul Karim Zarqawi?”

“Maybe.”

“What’s maybe? Yes, or no?”

“I don’t recall.”

“Abdul Karim Zarqawi was your neighbor for ten years, living one floor below your apartment. The families used to go out together, and you don’t remember him?”

“Ahaa, that Abdul Karim Zarqawi, I now remember him of course. I don’t know how I could forget. Yes, yes, I remember him.”

“What was his wife’s name?”

“Help me here,” he said, “I’m embarrassed for forgetting.”

“Fatma,” I said,

“Of course, Fatma, I remember now. Thanks for reminding me.”

I got up. “There’s no point in continuing. There’s no such person Abdul Karim Zarqawi. Madani never had neighbors living below his apartment because he always lived in single family homes, detached or semidetached. You are a liar. I’ll have to send in the two other interrogators,” I said in faked despair. “You’ve given me nothing. You and I know
it’s
bullshit, you are not General Cyrus Madani. Who are you?”

“OK,” he said. “OK.”

But I immediately discovered it was not “OK” because he repeated his mantra, ‘I’m General Cyrus Madani.’

"Look here,” I said, have you heard of the CIA enhanced interrogation techniques?”

There was a frightened look on his face. But he didn’t answer. Fear of the unknown is the strongest fear you can instill in an interrogated person.

“Let me tell you what they are, and you can choose in which order they will be applied to you.  First, there’s the a
ttention Grab
: I’ll shake you like a salt dish over a salad; if that doesn’t help I’ll inflict pain on your belly. That will cause you a lot of pain. I know that doctors advised against doing it because it could cause lasting internal damage. But hey, there
are no doctors here to tell me that. And then I could waterboard you.”

He raised his eyes in fear.

“You are giving me no choice,” I said, “you are not a prisoner of war, or a refugee, you came here voluntarily. You have no rights, nothing. You’re a spy, you came to spy on us. Therefore, we have every reason to treat you as such. You know what they do to spies in Iran? Why should you be treated any differently by us?”

I noticed that his lower jaw had a sudden tremor.

“Let me tell you what waterboarding is,” I said, “You’ll be bound to an inclined board, feet raised and head slightly below the feet. Cellophane will be wrapped over you face and water will be poured over you. You’ll feel that you are drowning. And you might. I’m told that on the average, most people beg to confess in 14 seconds.  Al Qaeda's toughest detainee won the
championship,
he was able to last two-and-a-half minutes before begging to confess. Do you want to challenge his record?”

Madani shook his head.

“I’ll give you 30 seconds to decide or I’m calling the guys to do you over. They are not as nice as I am.”

“OK,” he said faintly. I’m not general Cyrus Madani. My name is
Siavash Dowlatabadi.”

“Go ahead,” I said. “Who sent you?”

“Quds Forces.”

“Who in Quds Forces?”

He hesitated.

“Tell me!”

“Khalil
 
Mohagheghi.”

“Continue,” I ordered. There was no going back. I was about to peel him like an onion and nobody could stop me.

“To which unit does he belong?” I’d never heard his name before.