How to Break a Terrorist Read online

  I struggle to sit up. The chair has me in a comfy grip. If I’m about to be grilled, this is the last chair I want to be in. I finally have to sit forward, back rigid, to find a position that doesn’t make me look like an overrelaxed flake.

  “Look,” Roger says, “We’re happy to have you here.”

  “Glad to be here.”

  “Okay, let’s get started. David, do you want to go first?”

  “Sure,” he says. He has dark rings under both eyes.

  “Tell me, what countries border Iraq?” David asks.

  “Turkey to the north. Iran to the east, Saudi Arabia and Kuwait to the south, Jordan and Syria to the west.” I answer. My mind races. Did I miss anything between Syria and Turkey?

  “Okay. What’s the difference between Shia and Sunni?”

  That’s an easy one. “It goes back to the schism in Islam caused by the death of Muhammad. Sunnis believe that the legitimate successor was Muhammad’s closest disciple, Abu Bakr. Shia believe the succession should have been passed through his cousin Ali, who was also his daughter Fatima’s husband. The Shia lost, and Abu Bakr retained leadership until he died.”

  David, thinking I’m finished, starts to ask something else. Before he can, I continue, “When Abu Bakr died, the Shia tried to recapture the leadership of Islam, but Ali’s son Hussein was murdered outside Karbala, and the Sunnis have held the balance of power ever since.”

  “What the fuck makes you think you can do this job?” It is the sergeant major.

  “I’m a criminal investigator and I interrogated on the criminal side. Plus I’ve worked with Saudis so I understand the culture.”

  He doesn’t look mollified. “You’re a major, right?” he almost sneers when he says my rank.

  “Yes.”

  “Around here, there is no rank. We are on a first-name basis. If some young sergeant ends up giving you orders, are you going to have a hard fucking time with that?”

  “I never confuse competence with rank,” I reply.

  “Fuckin’ A,” the sergeant major says.

  The man in the far corner steps up to the plate. “I’m Doctor Brady. I want to know if you consider yourself bright enough for this job. You’re going to be interrogating Al Qaida leaders and men much older than you. What makes you think you can outsmart them?”

  “I don’t have to outsmart them,” I say. “We’ll have to outsmart them. I know there’ll be a team of analysts supporting me.”

  We’ve come full circle. Roger takes the stage and asks, “If you saw somebody, say an interpreter, threatening a detainee, what would you do?”

  “I’d make him stop.”

  “What if you only suspect he’s threatening the detainee in Arabic and it’s helping your interrogation?”

  “I’d pull him aside and ask him what’s going on. If he didn’t stop, I’d bring it up with you.”

  “How do you feel about waterboarding, or other enhanced interrogation techniques?”

  Ah, the heart of the matter. Ever since Abu Ghraib everyone in the interrogation business has been on edge. Careers are at stake. Jail time is at stake.

  “I’m opposed to enhanced techniques. They’re against Geneva Conventions and, ultimately, they do more harm than good. Besides we don’t need them.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “A good interrogator can get the information he needs in more subtle ways,” I reply.

  “Okay,” Roger says dismissively, “Wait outside. We need to talk.”

  Ten minutes later, I’m called back in. Roger smiles and shakes my hand. “Welcome aboard. Get ready because everything will come at you fast. Rule number one: we have a no-tolerance policy for violations of Geneva Conventions. You’ll sit in on three interrogations to see how we do things, then you’ll be on your own.”

  David adds, “By the way, do you have any leadership experience?”

  “That’s pretty much what I do,” I reply.

  “Good,” Roger says. “In three weeks, we’re going to need a new senior interrogator. You’re it.”

  Laughter erupts around the room. Apparently, this is a job nobody wants. Looking at David, I think I can understand why.

  “It means longer hours,” David tells me.

  “Whatever it takes.”

  “Good. We’re about to have our twenty-three hundred meeting. Come with us and learn. Then grab some sleep. You’ll start first thing in the morning.”

  I follow David, Roger, the sergeant major, and the doc down the hall to a briefing room. Here the entire interrogation unit is gathered. As we walk in, David says to me, “We’ve got interrogators and analysts here. The analysts brief us before every interrogation. They tell us what they want to get from each detainee. Got it?”

  “Sure.”

  “It’ll be your job to get the stuff they need. How you do it will be up to you.”

  David goes to sit at the head table, and I find a seat next to Mike and my group of agents at the back of the room. In the front of the room is a rectangular table with the interrogation unit’s leadership—the commander, the senior interrogator, the senior analyst, the doc, the admin guy, and the operations officer. The ops officer is a short stocky guy with a neatly trimmed beard named Randy who looks like Rob Thomas, the floppy-haired lead singer of Matchbox Twenty. He runs the meeting. Each of the interrogators and analysts take turns discussing the detainees as their faces appear on a large flat-screen television in front of us. Randy lays out the priorities for the next shift, then talks about what’s been discovered from the previous one. Toward the end of the meeting, a colonel walks into the room.

  Someone next to us says, “That’s the task force commander. Veteran of the Battle of Mogadishu, which Black Hawk Down was based on.”

  He’s charismatic enough to have played himself in the movie. He has short black hair and an athletic build and he walks with a casual confidence. His voice is low and deliberate. It’s obvious that he is a man of few words.

  “Ladies and gentlemen,” he begins. “I’m proud of what you’ve accomplished so far. I see how hard you work and I know you will achieve success. Right now, though, we need to pick up the pace.”

  He pauses. The colonel is a natural orator. “You have the toughest job in the country.”

  It strikes me that we don’t know what our new job is, besides interrogating detainees and getting information.

  The colonel reveals it. “For you new guys, here’s a rundown. Last month, Al Qaida blew up the Golden Dome Mosque in Samarra. This was a Shia shrine—one of their holiest. To a Catholic it’d be like blowing up the Sistine Chapel.”

  He lets that sink in. “The destruction of the Golden Dome Mosque has prompted a surge in sectarian violence. Al Qaida’s leader here in Iraq, Abu Musab al Zarqawi, has made it his mission to spark a civil war between Sunni and Shia. From now on, you have only one objective: find Zarqawi and kill him before he can do that. Everyone is counting on you.”

  He turns and strides out of the room.

  We’ve just joined the hunt for the most wanted man in Iraq.

  One

  THE ’GATOR PIT

  DAY 4

  MY ALARM RINGS at 0930. I’ve been in a nearcoma after the crazed pace of the past three days, and only the alarm’s persistence forces me awake. A few eyeblinks, a long stretch, and I sit up on the edge of my cot. The air conditioner has been rattling all night long, leaving the trailer nice and chilly. Outside, I’m sure the temperature has already broken a hundred and ten.

  On my feet, I yawn. We run on a strange schedule here, and it’ll take a few more days before I’m used to it. Eleven in the morning to midnight is the nominal shift, but the truth is, to get all the work done we need to get in an hour early and stay two or three hours late. There are no days off.

  I grab my shaving kit and head for the shower trailers. The moment my flip-flops hit the sand out in front of my hooch, the heat assails me. The air is still and hot, a jarring transition from the arctic climate of the
trailer. This is worse than Saudi and worse than the hottest day I spent while stationed in Arizona. I think of Lawrence of Arabia crossing the Empty Quarter. I don’t know how the ground-pounders do it.

  I’ve just started the long walk to the shower trailers when thunder splits the silence. The ground quakes. My hooch rattles behind me. The din swells as I watch a pair of F-16 fighter jets streak past a few hundred meters away.

  My trailer sits near the runway and directly below the aircraft traffic pattern. The helicopter parking ramp is a football field away and closer than that is a shooting range. I hear rounds clipping off in my sleep. But none of this can match the CRAM, the antimortar gun. When the insurgents launch mortars, the CRAM launches a barrage of lead to intercept them. It’s the loudest, fastest machine gun on earth and it’s fifty feet from my trailer. No one sleeps through it.

  Throttles open, the F-16s nose up and race for altitude as they tuck away their landing gear. Their thunder recedes, and for a moment the silence of the morning returns. Before I’ve taken another step for the shower trailer, I get buzzed by a quartet of Blackhawk helicopters. They nestle down on the ramp across from my hooch and cut their engines in unison.

  Special Forces (SF) guys are returning from a mission spawned by the intelligence we’ve elicited. We have a vested interest in being accurate because their lives are at stake every time they climb aboard those choppers. Besides, the SF guys get very unhappy if we send them down a dry hole, or into a trap.

  A pair of helicopters skim past next. The soldiers ride into battle sideways, legs dangling over the skids, ready to cut loose and jump off the moment the helicopter hits sand.

  Just as I reach the shower trailer, the warning siren sounds. As it wails, two, three…finally four bombs fall in the distance. Eighty-two-millimeter mortars, the insurgents’ morning greeting, land somewhere on the base far from me. After three days we’re already accustomed to this ritual. We don’t even bother to head for the shelters anymore.

  I shower and shave and get dressed for the day. Interrogators wear civilian clothes. Our detainees don’t need to know our rank or branch of the military. Besides, it fosters an egalitarian atmosphere in our office, which is known as the ’gator pit.

  Most of the ’gators have grown beards, and I’ve already joined in the fun. Between the beards and the civilian clothes, we look more like a Berkeley-based think tank than an elite military unit on a critical mission.

  The first three days have been a whirlwind, and the learning curve is steep. We read thick three-ring binders full of policies and procedures; then we’re given the latest intelligence briefings. The star of the briefings is our target, Abu Musab al Zarqawi, the leader of Al Qaida in Iraq.

  Born in Jordan, Zarqawi started life as a common street thug who served time in a Jordanian jail for sexual assault before he found Islam. While in prison, he embraced fundamentalism. Once released, he traveled to Afghanistan, where he joined Osama bin Laden in the jihad against the Soviet Union.

  When that war ended, he returned to Jordan and planned terrorist acts to bring down the government. When his operations failed and the authorities closed in on him, he fled to Afghanistan in 2001 and rejoined bin Laden, though his relationship with the master terrorist seems to have been tenuous. Osama reportedly thought Zarqawi little more than an uneducated stooge.

  Before the American invasion, Zarqawi moved to northern Iraq to develop a new terrorist network called Tawhid al Jihad. He established strong ties all over Sunni Iraq, which proved pivotal for Al Qaida after the American attack in 2003. Thanks to this preparation, Zarqawi’s group was able to launch lethal and attention-grabbing attacks starting in the summer of 2003. He bombed the United Nations headquarters in Baghdad’s Green Zone. His minions also bombed the Jordanian Embassy and three Western hotels in Amman, Jordan.

  His group became the masters of suicide bombings. Instead of targeting Americans or other Coalition military personnel, Zarqawi’s true believers went after helpless Shia civilians. They blew up market places. Suicide bombers detonated themselves inside cafés or other crowded everyday targets.

  Why kill innocent Muslim civilians? Zarqawi had a plan. He wanted to exploit the centuries-old division between Shia and Sunni to create a civil war inside Iraq. Such a conflict could only bog down American troops and ensnare the United States in a protracted conflict. His plan worked brilliantly.

  His successes gained him the respect of bin Laden, and he swore bayat (allegiance) to Al Qaida and became Al Qaida’s chief for Mesopotamia.

  During one of our briefings, we are shown a video of Al Qaida terrorists dressed in black standing in front of a seated Nicholas Berg, the American contractor who was kidnapped in Iraq.

  A terrorist wearing a black mask slices Berg’s throat with a knife. Berg dies horribly. The terrorists seem unfazed. Our briefer tells us the man with the knife is Abu Musab al Zarqawi himself. Not only does he order people to commit acts of carnage; he has the blood of innocents on his own hands.

  If we can find Zarqawi and capture or kill him, our intelligence community believes we can stop the suicide bombings. Stop the suicide bombings and the Sunni-on-Shia civil war will end. We can stabilize Iraq and save countless innocent lives if only we can stop Zarqawi and his organization.

  At the end of our briefings, we are told that Zarqawi is now a higher priority than Osama bin Laden himself.

  On my first day, David teams me up with a veteran ’gator named Mary. She’s a short haired Asian-American woman in her late twenties who used to work for nonprofits. Now she’s a contract interrogator for the Department of Defense. She teaches me the administrative side of the house, such as report formats and how to sign out detainees, and I sit through six interrogations with her.

  The interrogation booth is nothing more than a bare six-by-six room with plywood walls, plastic chairs, and a table. There’s a high-definition flat-screen TV on one wall that is hooked up to a laptop on the table with all the latest maps and imagery of Iraq. We use those to mark targets whenever the detainee gives one up.

  What I learn from Mary during those first six interrogations matches what we were taught at the schoolhouse, the name we use to describe our six-week interrogation training course at Fort Huachuca, Arizona. Because everyone in my group of interrogators has been a criminal investigator, we went through a fire-hose version of the five-month interrogation school.

  Mary runs the approved approaches based on fear and control, as we were taught. An approach is ’gator-speak for a tactic contrived to convince a detainee to offer information. There are a dozen of them in the army manual that we used for training. For instance, “Love of Family” is an approach where an interrogator tries to get a detainee to cooperate out of love for his family and a desire to return to them. Mary runs the approaches adeptly, but none of her detainees provides useful information.

  The techniques I’ve observed so far are quite different from what we used in criminal interrogations back home in the States. When I worked as a criminal interrogator, we focused on methods based on understanding and cooperation, not control.

  Today, my fourth day in country, I will be assigned to a new partner named Bobby.

  More choppers come and go as I hike the half-mile red-sand trail to our hangar-turned-office. A C-130 roars by, followed a few minutes later by a beefy-looking C-17 jet transport. My new home is on the edge of the Middle Eastern O’Hare International.

  At 1015, I step into the ’gator pit. The central hub for our operation, it is a big bull-pen office area filled with long tables, desks, chairs, and computers. The tables are scuffed and most of the chairs are broken. A layer of powdery dust covers everything and gives the place the look of an office at the end of the world.

  I share a long table with Doc Brady. On my first day here, I noticed that somehow he’d scored the best chair in the house. Today, his leather high-back is missing, replaced by a rusted and bent metal folding chair. I sit down next to it and notice the whiteboard at
the front of the ’gator pit. It lists all the assignments for the day, but every morning somebody puts up a little witticism about our operations officer, Randy. Randy is an ex–Special Forces officer turned intelligence guru who is titanium-tough and has devoted the last three years of his life to chasing Zarqawi.

  The whiteboard reads: When Randy wants vegetables, he eats a vegetarian.

  As I’m chuckling over this, Doc Brady arrives. He looks down at his new chair, and his bald head turns a surprising shade of crimson.

  “Matthew,” he says through taut lips, “where did my chair go?”

  “It was missing when I got here, Doc,” I reply.

  I’ve already learned that he appreciates formalities and does not have much of a sense of humor. This makes him the butt of many jokes.

  Annoyed, he heads off in search of his chair.

  “Matthew,” I hear a voice behind me.

  When I turn around, I see Bobby. “Remember something, okay? Good chairs are currency around here. Like good cigarettes.”

  He chuckles and nods over at the doctor’s chair.

  Bobby is in his early twenties, an enlisted man in the army and a corn-fed boy from Nebraska.

  He extends his arm and gives me a firm handshake.

  “Glad to be working with you,” he says.

  “I’m here to learn,” I reply.

  “Well, I think we’ll be learning from each other. When we get in the booth, don’t be afraid to ask questions, okay?”

  “Great.” This is encouraging.

  “Hey, did I hear you used to fly helicopters?” Bobby asks.

  “Yeah. MH-53s. Pave Lows.”

  “I flew King Airs back home before I joined the army.”

  This is getting better. We’re two aviators working together. I’m starting to get my hopes up.

  “When I was flying King Airs…” Bobby starts.

  Our operations officer interrupts him.

  “Eleven hundred, people, let’s go.”

  Meeting time. We shuffle toward the conference room. As we go, Bobby leans into me, “We’ll talk more later.”