The Reluctant Spy (19 page)

Tom got approval, and then began the detailed operational planning necessary to bring something like this to a successful outcome.

Like the rest of the Americans in the country at that time, Tom had to get the approval of the Pakistani government before he could proceed. The Paks reminded him that it wasn't much of an embassy—really, just a guard and one guy who served as combination diplomat and press officer. Apparently, these two men opened up every day at 9 a.m., sat around, did nothing, then locked up at 5 p.m. and went home. The Paks had no problem with the plan to raid the embassy some night so long as they tagged along as security and, oh yes, so long as their American friends made copies of everything for them.

McHale's boss, the FBI legal attaché, requisitioned several vans from the U.S. Embassy motor pool, and his team set out one night for the two-hour-plus drive from Islamabad to Peshawar. The operation lasted from around 11 p.m. until 3 a.m. The team just drove up, broke down the door, and walked in; there was no alarm. The place was loaded with stuff, and they took absolutely everything—computers, files, cell phones, weapons, everything that wasn't bolted to the floor or the walls.

It really made the day for one person in particular. This old-timer had bum knees, made worse by one hundred pounds of excess weight and bad enough so that he slept on his office floor one night when they gave out on him. He was an inside man, not an operative, but he had always wanted at least one raid on the résumé in his mind. When he heard about plans for the raid, he pleaded for a chance to go. McHale was a pro; he also was a great guy with a soft spot for toilers. The Taliban embassy operation could have gone wrong, perhaps wildly so, but the odds of it, given what McHale and his teammates knew, seemed very long, especially since the Paks would be there to provide protection. Sure, Tom told his overweight colleague, you can be a part of this one. Needless to say, it made the guy's tour.

After it was over, Tom told his bosses that the operation had been a success—no problems, no issues, all players present and accounted for. The bosses, of course, extended their congratulations and wanted McHale to send up a flare if he and his guys found anything particularly interesting in the pilfered stash. They didn't expect much; neither did Tom. At that point, the Taliban government was history, with its leader, Mullah Omar, and his camp followers in hiding somewhere along the Afghanistan-Pakistan border. But the computer exploitation experts went to work on the hard drives, making copies for the Pakistanis as promised and for certain U.S. government agencies. The originals of everything went to the FBI because September 11 was still an open criminal investigation.

McHale himself found something interesting and provocative. A file of telephone bills from the Taliban embassy revealed dozens of calls to the United States—to Kansas City and suburban D.C., to New York and Ohio and California, to Michigan and Texas, all over the country. For ten days leading up to September 11, 2001, the Taliban made 168 calls to America. Then the calls stopped. The file, amazingly, was in English. And here's the thing: The calls ended on September 10, 2001, and started up again six days later, on September 16.

This certainly was a matter for the FBI, or so McHale felt. The FBI team in Pakistan was alerted and got copies of the phone bills; all the originals went to FBI headquarters in Washington. Again, the calls were from a hostile embassy to U.S. destinations; McHale expected the FBI to be all over these phone bills and the addresses in the United States that had received calls from the Taliban.

By midyear, McHale was back in the States, resuming his duties with the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey. One day, he asked around to see if anything had turned up from the raid on the Taliban embassy; he was particularly interested to know whether the FBI had got anywhere tracking down the recipients of those Taliban phone calls. All he learned was that the originals had arrived at FBI headquarters, per instructions.

Flash forward to spring 2004. The 2002 Taliban caper was still gnawing at McHale—a bit of unfinished business that he wanted tied up for his own peace of mind. This time, having probed here and asked questions there, he had it on good authority that the FBI's people had never even
opened
the boxes of materials gathered up at the Taliban embassy. That, of course, meant that they had never examined the phone logs. Later, ABC News reporter Rich Esposito wrote about the story. Apparently, the FBI never opened the boxes because they figured they didn't have the language capabilities to translate them from Pashto, Dari, Urdu, and the other languages of Afghanistan. Still later, Esposito reported, the message from the FBI was that the information was too old to mean much.

How's that? Too old to mean much? A file
in English
of calls made prior to September 11, 2001, to the United States? Resumed on September 16? From the embassy of the government that treated Osama bin Laden as an honored guest? Maybe they were worthless, but McHale, for one, seriously doubted it. In any event, how could the FBI know that without reading them? Especially the file in English.

One postscript: After the raid that night, the Paks had asked the
Americans what they wanted to do with the press guy cum diplomat. McHale and his people had no further interest in him, and neither did anyone else. For their part, the Pakistanis couldn't have cared less. But they thought they'd have some fun and shake up the Taliban guy a bit—arrest him, then release him later. So they showed up when the guy opened up at 9 a.m. He was openmouthed when he saw what McHale's marauders had done to his office. The Paks moved in, cuffed him, and told him he was under arrest. As they were leading him away, he turned and shouted back at the guard: “Tell my wife to sell the car!”

Another postscript: In 2007 I ran into an FBI friend of mine at a shopping mall in suburban Virginia. We had served together in Pakistan and had stayed only in sporadic touch, but I still thought the world of the guy. “Whatever happened to those boxes of Taliban documents?” I asked him. He replied that it was like a scene out of that
Indiana Jones
movie. The files were still in those boxes, in an FBI storage facility in Maryland. Human eyes would probably never see them again, he said. What a waste.

THE AFTERMATH OF 9/11
left the intelligence agencies scrambling. We couldn't know on September 10, 2001, that we'd go to war in Afghanistan less than a month later. And we couldn't anticipate a war in Iraq that would begin on March 19, 2003. As a consequence, we were forced to improvise in one important area: the handling of prisoners. We had rules for the treatment of prisoners under the Geneva Conventions and the U.S. Uniform Code of Military Justice, although neither was invoked in the early months after 9/11. But we didn't fathom that we would capture hundreds and hundreds of enemy combatants—men who were not part of a recognized and uniformed army at war—and face the challenges associated with their interrogation. After 9/11, we were in a different war, the long war against terrorism, and there was no modus operandi in place for the treatment of captured bad guys, especially bad guys in large numbers.

That didn't mean we were operating with no guidance at all. When I got to Pakistan in late January 2002, and we started to interrogate people, our marching orders were fairly straightforward: We knew that we weren't allowed to hit anyone, to threaten anyone, to torture. To the best of my knowledge, we didn't violate those strictures, although some of us came close on various occasions. What became clear fairly soon was that it would be very difficult to get useful information from this new breed of enemy, these true believers in a radical cause for whom death meant religious martyrdom and a one-way ticket to paradise.

Still, violating even a terrorist's human rights and, potentially, the Geneva Conventions by resorting to torture is no small thing. And harsh methods, as torture is euphemistically known, aren't nearly as effective as their advocates maintain because most people will confess to almost anything, truthful or not, just to make the pain stop. You get information, to be sure, but its veracity is another matter. In practice, more empathetic psychological means, wimpy as that may sound, can yield much better results.

In the early part of 2002, as we were scooping up enemy combatants by the dozens, we were especially eager to find out where these guys had come from, how they had traveled to Pakistan, and what they intended to do there. Headquarters, interested in plugging holes, wanted us to figure out what routes these people had taken over or through the Hindu Kush—the mountains along the Afghanistan-Pakistan border. We had some success getting such information. But most of the time, we didn't get much more. It seemed that every detainee had that standard story about coming to study Arabic, although it is not the language of Pakistan, and losing his passport on the way to the grand mosque. Perhaps 30 to 40 percent of these people acknowledged that they had received training in al-Qaeda's Afghanistan camps, but to a man they insisted they were not members of al-Qaeda. Right, as if al-Qaeda issues membership cards.

For most of them, when we asked if they had ever seen bin Laden, they would say “Sure. I saw him at a wedding reception in 2000, but I never spoke to him and I didn't know anything about September 11.”

So it went. Every once in a while, however, an enemy combatant would startle us with his candor. We had a Jordanian, for example, who freely admitted that he had been in Kandahar, Afghanistan's second largest city and the Taliban capital, on September 11. Our interrogation went like this:

“What did the people do when they heard that the United States had been attacked?”

“They danced in the streets and they jumped up and down and sang songs,” he said.

“What were you doing in Kandahar?”

“I was working at an orphanage.”

“Did you have contact with bin Laden?”

“Yes, I did.”

“What kind of contact?”

“I went to the home where he was living and I pledged allegiance to him.”

That struck us as an important admission from someone who hadn't been coerced in any way, and it prompted me to ask him why he was answering all of our questions.

“I'm your prisoner. I know I'm not getting out. It's not going to do me any good not to answer these kinds of questions. But I would like for you to listen to one thing I have to say.”

During the interview, I was working with Tom McHale, the New York Port Authority officer. In addition, there were a couple of Pakistanis present.

“Okay, you've answered all my questions, and I don't have any others right now.” I glanced quizzically at McHale, and he said he didn't have any follow-ups at the moment either. “Please tell us what you have to say.”

“I would like to invite you into the embrace of Islam.”

“You want us to become Muslims?”

“Yes,” the Jordanian said, “it's the only way to save your souls. I would like for you to become Muslims and I will be your sponsor into Islam.”

“Well, thank you,” I said. “I respect your being honest with me. But I'm happy with my religion.”

He smiled slightly and nodded. Then he extended his hands,
cuffed in front of him at the wrists, to shake our hands. That was it: The Pakistanis took him back to jail and we never saw him again. The episode reinforced for me and for Tom that tough-guy, in-your-face techniques with these particular prisoners might not yield nearly as much as earnest, direct conversation.

AS WE KNOW
now, various arms of the executive branch of our government—the National Security Council, the White House, and the Justice Department's Office of Legal Counsel in particular—were wrestling with a central question: Given the assumption of significantly altered circumstances, was a new set of rules needed for the interrogation of stateless terrorists who had declared war on the United States and had already demonstrated a willingness to kill on a large scale? Other terrorist groups had expressed their enmity for the United States, but none had struck so successfully at the symbols of American power, and none had killed so many people. What's more, the attacks on the Twin Towers in New York and the Pentagon in Washington were only the beginning, bin Laden and his al-Qaeda propagandists insisted. There were many signs, recovered documents, and even some physical evidence indicating bin Laden's interest in acquiring weapons of mass destruction. If successful, would he actually use such weapons? The bet was that he would. In that event, did the old ground rules for interrogation make any sense when, say, harsher treatment of a terrorist might yield information that could prevent the death of thousands or even millions of Americans?

Abu Zubaydah's capture was something of a wake-up call because he was belligerent at the beginning and wouldn't cooperate a bit. Eventually, that would change, after we handed him off to the group that flew him from Pakistan to another overseas location.