How to Break a Terrorist (5 page)

Love is the ultimate weapon.

H
EY, MATTHEW,” CLIFF
says to me as I arrive the following morning.

“What’s up, Cliff?”

“Check out this video. We just got it from the SF guys.”

I walk over to Cliff’s desktop. Bobby’s already there. Cliff explains, “This was taken by one of the SF teams. They were hitting one of the safe houses Abu Ali gave up, right? Well, as they approached, they started taking fire.”

“What did they do?” I ask.

“Watch.”

Cliff starts the video. It shows a white, flat-roofed house with a white sedan parked nearby. It appears to be a tranquil daylight scene taken by someone on the ground less than a hundred yards from the house.

After twenty seconds of this, Bobby gets impatient. “Boring Cliff. Come on.”

Suddenly, the house disintegrates. Pieces of masonry fly in all directions. Smoke billows out and up, swallowing the white car. Secondary explosions follow, throwing more smoke and debris into the air. When it clears, the house is gone. Only a heap of burning rubble remains.

“Boring, eh?” Cliff says snidely. “The SF guys called in an air strike. Didn’t want to risk entering the house with possible suicide bombers inside.” He pulls out a bottle of nasal spray and uses it. “Sorry.” Like all new arrivals to our piece of Iraq, he’s contracted a sinus infection.

Bobby has an idea. “You know, Matthew, we can use this with Abu Ali.”

“What do you mean, like a Love of Comrade approach?”

“Yeah. What do you think?”

I shake my head. “I don’t think it’ll work. Very risky.”

Bobby shrugs. “He’s not talking now and he’s on his way out. Let’s just throw the dice and see if this opens him up.”

David, our senior interrogator, joins our group. “Matthew,” he says to me, “Why don’t you join me this afternoon in the monitor room to watch the other interrogations. You’ll be doing that a lot in the weeks ahead, so you might as well get used to it.”

I look at Bobby.

“Go ahead,” he says. “You can watch my handsome mug from that Hollywood room.”

“You sure?” I ask.

“Damn sure,” Bobby says.

“Come on, I’ll show you how to work the controls,” David says.

I look Bobby over before I follow David. Bobby looks exhausted. His eyes have dark circles and his shoulders are
slightly slumped. All week we’ve stayed long after our shifts have ended to write our reports. Bobby’s a stickler for details and always triple-checks to make sure the reports are in the proper format. I haven’t gotten back to my hooch before 3
A.M.
all week.

“Hey, have you gotten any sleep?” I ask. He picks up a Coke can and raises it as if he’s going to offer a toast. “Forty-eight hours straight!”

David leads me into the Hollywood room and explains how it works. On one wall are three rows of state-of-the-art flat-screen TVs. Below the flat-screens is a long desk with several electronic switchboxes that control the cameras and audio in each of the booths. On the back wall are four customized roof-high glass cases with stacks of electronic components. The whole room is a hack-job of wires and buttons, and it nearly requires a masters degree to operate. Big Brother
is
watching. It’s a great way for the senior ’gator to keep tabs on what techniques the other ’gators are using.

“Have a seat,” David offers. As elsewhere, the chairs here are worn and broken.

Bobby appears on one of the flat-screen displays. Abu Ali follows a few minutes later. I grab a set of headphones, flip a switch, and tune in. As I watch, I’m really taken by Bobby’s physical appearance. The vibrant Nebraskan I’ve gotten to know this week is gone. Instead, I see a young man who has pushed himself too far, worked too hard. It is a lesson we all learn. Back when I was a shiny 2nd Lieutenant, I didn’t know how to pace myself either. Now, in my mid-thirties, I’ve learned that this sort of deployment is not a sprint; it’s a marathon. You’ve got to apportion your energy for the entire race; otherwise you’ll crash and burn early.

Bobby’s on the brink. As he starts working with Abu Ali, he sounds testy and impatient.

“Abu Ali, we need to know who you work for,” Bobby begins.

Our detainee doesn’t answer. Bobby repeats the question only to get the same result.

“I thought you agreed to work with us?” Bobby asks angrily.

Abu Ali replies, “You Americans have lied from the beginning.”

He’s retrenched, retreated back into his shell of bitterness. Coaxing him out at this point is going to be tough, if not impossible.

Bobby works hard to get him talking, but Abu Ali barely responds to his questions. In some cases, he doesn’t answer at all.

“Abu Ali, help us save lives. You said you’d join us.”

Silence.

“We’re trying to help you.”

No response.

Bobby slams his hand down on his notebook and in a fit of frustration shouts, “Is that all you’re going to do? Fuckin’ sit there? You’re not going to say anything? How’s that going to help Iraq? How’s that going to help your
son
?”

“I gave you the houses.”

“Yes, and I thought that you would join us.”

“I can’t.”

Bobby looks ready to blow his stack. Instead, he says, “You know what, Abu Ali? I’m gonna show you a video.”

Abu Ali has been staring at the floor through most of this. Now he glances up. I see he’s curious.

“Yeah. That’s right. It’ll show you what the future of Iraq holds if we can’t work together.”

Bobby flips open his laptop and places it on the single table in the room. He puts in a CD, and the image appears on the large flat-screen TV on the wall in front of them.

“Watch this,” Bobby says. He presses a button, and the video rolls.

My camera is looking from above the flat-screen TV down at Abu Ali’s face. For the first twenty seconds, his face is a mask. It shows no emotion at all. Suddenly, he bends over double, as if someone has just kicked him in the stomach. He’s facing the floor, and I can see spatters on the concrete. Tears. He’s sobbing.

Bobby shuts the video off, closes the laptop, and says, “That’s what happens to people who support suicide bombers.” He turns and sees Abu Ali’s condition. “What’s the matter?”

Abu Ali says nothing. He sobs silently. After a minute, he sits back up in his chair. His cheeks are slick with tears; his eyes are haunted and full of loathing. Gone is the mask. The transformation startles Bobby.

“Abu Ali? What is it?”

No response. The two sit in silence. The tears keep pouring down Abu Ali’s face. A minute passes. Then two. I notice Abu Ali isn’t looking at Bobby at all anymore. He sets his gaze on the floor and doesn’t budge it.

“Abu Ali, talk to me,” Bobby says.

Finally, in a broken voice, Abu Ali says, “That was my friend’s house.”

I feel a stab of compassion for him. Bobby seems to as well. We made him watch his own friend’s death—one that
he orchestrated by giving us the safe house’s location in the first place.

Bobby tries to rally. “Abu Ali, you don’t know that your friend was there.”

“He was there.”

“How can you know that?”

“He owns the white car. When it is parked there, he is home.”

He bends over again, clutching his hands to his face. A despairing moan escapes him.

Bobby plays his last card. “This doesn’t have to happen, Abu Ali. If you tell us who you work for and who else is in your network, we can go and pick them up like we did with you and Zaydan. They won’t have to die like this. You can save the rest of them. Work with me.”

Abu Ali sits up straight and wipes the final tears from his eyes.

“Never.”

It is futile. I can see by Abu Ali’s expression that he’s done. Bobby senses it, too, and pleads with him. Abu Ali won’t even look at him. He doesn’t utter another word.

I pull off the headphones and head for the ’gator pit. My stomach churns. We should not have done this to Abu Ali, but Bobby didn’t know the significance of the video. Abu Ali is doomed, and now, in the days before he hangs, he will live with the knowledge that he betrayed his friend.

I have to remind myself that he is the enemy. He blessed suicide bombers, men who kill women and children in crowded markets in order to further engulf Iraq in this chaos and violence. Yet I cannot help but feel sorry for him. His life is over, ruined by the decisions he’s made ever since the
Badr Corps came knocking at his door. And although I don’t sympathize with his tactics, I can understand his desire to defend himself and his family.

Bobby and I meet by our desks.

“Oh my God,” he says as he sees me. “Did you see that?”

“Yeah. Sometimes when you roll the dice, you lose big.”

“I feel like shit.”

“No, don’t worry about it. Who would have thought he would give up a house that his friend still lived in?”

Bobby agrees with me, but I see in his face that he’s hit the wall.

“You need to get some sleep.”

He nods absently. “He shut down. He won’t give anyone anything else.”

“Well,” I say, “at least we still have the other house.”

EARLY APRIL,
2006

F
OR THE PAST
two weeks we’ve spun our wheels. What little intel we’ve gleaned from the detainees has yielded nothing that brings us closer to Zarqawi. The pressure mounts in tandem with the chaos on the street. Zarqawi’s momentum is growing as the suicide bombings increase, as well as the retaliatory attacks, and all-out civil war seems imminent. We need to find a way to climb Al Qaida’s chain of command.

There’s more at play amongst the ’gators than the need to get the job done. I’ve sat with David in the Hollywood room, monitoring interrogations. It doesn’t take long to discover we have a deep division amongst us. There is the old guard, who were at Guantánamo and did previous tours in Afghanistan and Iraq. They believe in the fear-and-control
methods but now they’re being forced to play by the rules. Then there is my group and a few other ’gators who are starting to embrace our new methods.

One morning, I arrive at the ’gator pit early. The night-shift ’gators are still busy typing up their reports, and most of the desks are still occupied.

I spot Ann pecking away at a keyboard. I sit down next to her. She looks up from her flat-screen monitor and smiles.

“How’d it go last night?” I ask.

“Frustrating. I’ve got this operations guy I know has to be important, but I can’t get through to him. He’s done a lot of really bad things, and he’s resigned to his fate.”

“Inshallah.”

“Yeah. Exactly.”

“Have you shown him any sympathy?”

Ann shakes her head, “Not really. What do you have in mind?”

Lenny, a night-shift ’gator from New York City, overhears this and guffaws. “Fucking muj. Just show him who’s boss.”

I turn to look at him. Lenny’s an old-schooler, a veteran ’gator who got pulled out of Guantánamo and sent here, a fate that has left him thoroughly pissed off.

“What do you mean?” I ask him. Ann doesn’t look at him, just sets her jaw and looks grim.

“Well look, these muj won’t give you nothin’ unless you
take charge. Take the muj I’ve got right now. He’ll come around, believe me. Once he gets it through his thick skull that he’s going to hang.”

I’m annoyed. One thing we were taught back at Fort Huachuca was never to use derogatory terms to describe our detainees. Dehumanizing them is the first step down the slippery slope to torture. It also exposes Lenny’s ignorance; not all of the detainees here are true mujahideen.

I decide to ignore him. I turn back to Ann. “Your detainee is a Sunni, right?”

“Aren’t they all?”

“Yeah. And most of them have been terrorized by Shia militias like the Badr Corps and Mahdi Army. At least most of the ones I’ve met so far have been. If you show sympathy towards him because of this, maybe he’ll open up.”

Lenny guffaws again. “Sympathy won’t work. Control 101 is the first lesson in interrogation. They’re the enemy for Christ’s sake.”

I go to my desk to retrieve a binder. I hand it to Ann. “Look, I’ve put together some information about the Shia militias. It may be worth a shot.”

Ann takes the binder and thanks me. Lenny looks disgusted. I hear him mutter, “Sympathy for a haji. Right.”

The old ways die hard.

Later that morning, David asks me to sit with him in the Hollywood room and observe the afternoon’s interrogations. Steve and Tom are slated to question a detainee we think is the highest-level Al Qaida operative in our system. Steve’s a devotee of the new techniques, one of our group who went through training at Fort Huachuca with me. Tom is a father of four with a gray beard who gives the impression
that he is a decade older than his thirty six years. Tom is old-school. He understands control and dominance but in the past has seemed more open to the new ideas than some of the other veteran ’gators.

This should be an interesting match. I put on a set of headphones and tune in as the detainee enters the interrogation booth. The prisoner, like Zaydan, is an imam who preaches at a Baghdad mosque. He’s fat and sloppy with wide eyes and a bushy gray beard. He looks like he’s led the good life while convincing others to die in suicide attacks.

Steve starts off with him by establishing rapport. They discuss the imam’s mosque, his background, and his family. It seems routine enough at first. Then Tom orders the imam to his feet. He puts the detainee against a wall. Steve approaches and stands right next to him. Tom stands face-to-face with him. For a moment I get anxious. Is this going to get out of hand?

Both ’gators suddenly launch a barrage of questions at him. They pummel him with rapid-fire, unconnected questions that force his mind to jump from one place to another in a split second.

“Who do you work for?”

“What’s your wife’s name again?”

“Do you want me to help you?”

“Where do you live?”

“What mosque do you preach at?”

“Who do you work for?”

“How many sons do you have?”

“Do you want to be my friend?”

“Where did you meet besides the mosque?”

The imam goes from confident and slightly smug to des
perately confused. He tries to answer the questions as they come, but he can’t keep up. He stumbles over his answers, mixes things up, and grows even more anxious and uneasy. His voice kicks up an octave as he tries to respond. Tom and Steve have pushed him well outside his comfort zone.

As the staccato questions continue, he starts tripping over his lies. This approach can be very effective. My group has been trained to search out what motivates a detainee, then use that motivation to our advantage. That takes time, rapport, and a measure of trust between ’gator and detainee. The approach Tom and Steve are using works in a different way. Instead of using a ruse, the direct questioning at this pace prevents the detainee from thinking through his lies. As they go over the same territory again and again, discrepancies start to appear.

The imam begins to crumble. Steve and Tom home in on those areas where he trips up, battering away at him with more questions. By the end of the interrogation, the imam reveals that his mosque recruited for Al Qaida. He gives up the location of several more safe houses where suicide bombers meet and prepare for their missions. He also tells them that he raised money for Al Qaida. It’s no secret that the religious wing of Al Qaida Iraq plays a major role in funding the insurgency.

By the end of the interrogation, both David and I are impressed by the way Steve and Tom work together. They blend the old-school techniques and the new ones to powerful effect. Though they don’t get the imam to give up his boss, they do get a lot of useful information out of him.

Next we watch an interrogation that Mary’s running by herself. The difference is stark. She sits down with her de
tainee but makes no attempt to build rapport with him. Instead, she shows signs of contempt for the prisoner and uses control techniques to demonstrate that she’s in charge. Then she rattles off the questions her partnered analyst wants answers to, but the detainee reveals nothing. When she finishes the list, she ends the interrogation. I’m puzzled; I can’t figure out what she’s doing. One thing is clear, though, she has never been exposed to the new techniques.

Late that afternoon, Bobby conducts a solo interrogation. He’s clearly one of us. He throws all sorts of curveballs at his detainee, running multiple approaches mixed every now and then with a clever ruse. Seeing him work impresses me all over again. If he can learn to pace himself, he’ll be one of the best ’gators in the business.

Before I leave that night, Randy takes me aside. “Listen, we’re still watching the safe house outside Abu Ghraib that Abu Ali and Zaydan gave up. That was good stuff you got.”

“Thanks.”

“If you get results, you’ll change minds around here. Do you understand?”

“Yes.”

“You don’t have much time.”

When I get back to my hooch some time after three in the morning, I fall asleep repeating those words.

I get back to the ’gator pit at about 10
A.M.
, an hour before the night shift ends. Once again, I find Ann typing away at her computer. Lenny sits a few tables away, cursing at something.

“Hey, thanks for that suggestion,” Ann says to me. “He opened up a little bit. It got him talking. Before, I couldn’t get a thing out of him.”

“A little sympathy goes a long way.”

Lenny overhears this and grumbles, “I don’t see why you waste your time with that stuff.”

Ann doesn’t rise to the bait. Neither do I.

There’s an awkward silence until Bobby bounds up to me.

“Hey, you gotta check something out,” he says.

“What?”

“The SF guys captured this shit last night. Unbelievable.”

I follow Bobby to his computer. For a moment, the screen is blank. Then the video opens with a bound man on his knees in a dirt field. Two Sunni insurgents stand on either side of him behind black masks. Their prisoner, who can’t be more than twenty-four, looks like an academic. He wears glasses, is clean shaven, and is distressingly calm. As I watch, I want to scream at him to run. Something very bad is about to happen.

One of the insurgents steps to the camera. He utters a few words as he unsheathes a long, wicked-looking knife. Behind him, the prisoner still appears calm, as if this, too, is God’s will.

The knife-wielding insurgent steps away from the camera, goes behind the prisoner, and pushes him forward. With his arms bound, the academic falls face-first into the dirt. The insurgent reaches down, grabs a mass of his hair, then jerks it upward. His head flies up out of the dirt, and now he’s suspended by his hair, neck stretched, dull eyes on the cameraman. He’s still calm, but now I see fear in his eyes.

The insurgent cuts his throat from ear to ear. Blood spurts
from his severed arteries in quick pulses. The dirt before him turns crimson. He’ll bleed out and die on camera. I pray that it is quick.

But the insurgent isn’t done. He brings the knife down again, but this time, instead of slashing, he hacks. The dying man gurgles and coughs. The insurgent saws away at the neck. Blood pours. It is a ghastly sight.

The academic’s head flops and lolls. His body spasms. His fingers and arms twitch. The insurgent starts hacking harder, and I see bone through the gore. The insurgent, unable to sever his victim’s head, grows frustrated. He slashes, then tugs again, and the head tears partly away from the ruined neck. Still, he can’t get it free.

The second insurgent walks over and takes the knife. He swings the blade down and with a few strokes precise to the neck, he cuts the head free. The body lies twitching in a growing pool of blood as he holds up his trophy. The cameraman zooms in on the second insurgent’s face. His eyes show through the peepholes of his black hood. They are triumphant.

The file ends.

“Goddamn,” Bobby says in a voice full of vitriol.

I have no words for it.

I am not a stranger to gore and horror. Back in the States, one of my first cases as a criminal investigator turned out to be about as awful as they come. Two airmen accidentally hit and killed a bicyclist near my base in Tucson. The cyclist’s head went through the windshield and landed on the seat between the two airmen. When I arrived on the scene, one of the airmen had fled, crying “My life is over.” We tracked the runaway airman back to his apartment, where we discov
ered he’d swallowed a shotgun barrel and pulled the trigger. We found bits of his skull in adjoining rooms…and his intact brain in the bathtub.

“Matthew?”

Bobby’s looking at me with earnest concern.

“I’m all right,” I say.

My mind is replaying the scene we’ve just watched.

“Good. There’s one more, and you ain’t seen nothing yet.”

I’m rooted in place. Bobby clicks on another file. The media player reveals another macabre scene. This time, the camera pans down along a line of about thirty prisoners, bound with their hands behind their backs. They’re all men and boys, ranging in age from teens to senior citizens. All of them look utterly despondent. They sit quietly, resigned to their fate. Behind them, four insurgents pace back and forth. They’re Sunni. One of them produces a pistol.

I want to yell at the prisoners to run.

None of the prisoners moves. The pistol cracks. A prisoner falls over, blood gushing from the exit wound in his forehead. The insurgent steps to another prisoner and pulls the trigger. He is slow, deliberate, ritualistic. A side step, the pistol comes down until the barrel hovers inches from the back of the next victim’s head. He gives each one a few seconds of sheer terror as they wait for the bullet to end their lives. Then the pistol bucks, the report reaches the camera’s microphone. The prisoner flops into the dirt.

The insurgent runs out of bullets. Still the remaining prisoners don’t move. Another insurgent hands him a second pistol. He uses it to finish the job. By the time he reaches the last prisoner, the field is heaped with bleeding corpses.

The file ends and Bobby whispers, “Un-fucking-believable. How can you help but hate these people?”

I have no answer to that.

“Ever seen anything like that?”

“Never,” I manage.

In my air force career, I’ve been to almost every continent and seen my share of trauma and tragedy. In South America, during a medical deployment, I watched a desperate mother bring a child to our doctors for treatment. I saw the child, bundled in blankets, laboring to breathe. She was only a few months old, and somehow she’d contracted a flesh-eating bacteria. It was too late to treat it. There was nothing we could do. I had to tell the mother that her child was going to die. I’ll never forget watching her leave, sobbing as she carried her dying child on her chest.

Those are things that never leave a man. I have tried to live a life of balance, relying on logic and intelligence when confronted with overwhelming emotion. It is how I got by as a criminal investigator, especially when I had an abuse case involving children. But nothing in my career has prepared me for these two scenes Bobby has shared with me.

Treat them with sympathy.

He hacked the helpless academic’s head off with a knife.