Company Man: Thirty Years of Controversy and Crisis in the CIA (33 page)

To the CIA, that meant not only taking bin Laden’s key henchmen out of circulation, but getting them to talk.

The first task for the Agency, accordingly, was to figure out where to put these HVTs, if and when we captured them (at which point, in the strange, new post-9/11 alphabet-soup terminology, they would morph into high-value detainees—HVDs). Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld put down a marker early on to George Tenet: The DOD wouldn’t play the role of jailer for the CIA. No one was sure exactly why Rumsfeld felt that way—the DOD was busily turning the Guantánamo Bay Naval Base into a detention facility, after all—but Rumsfeld was obdurate and implacable.

The CTC told George, at one of the earliest “five o’clocks,” that this was just as well: For the big fish we’re after, we didn’t want them mixing with the Al Qaeda foot soldiers who were rapidly filling up Gitmo. They needed to be held somewhere where no one but we could get access to them, the CTC said, where no one but we knew where they were. And foreign governments couldn’t be relied on to hold them for us either, the CTC advised—who knew what might happen to them then? They could get killed, they could be let go. If we were going to get into this, the CTC recommended to George, the CIA needed absolute control over these HVDs.

And so, with George’s go-ahead, the Agency began casting about for its own incarceration site. I soon found myself sitting in George’s office, where terms like “deserted island” and “mystery ship” were being thrown around. Only in retrospect is it remarkable to me that such a fateful decision was made with so little hesitation. In those days, hesitation simply was not an option, not with some senior Al Qaeda operative about to fall into our lap any minute, and not with another attack on the homeland possibly just around the corner. Still, I do remember feeling a vague, inchoate sense of trepidation at the time. Jeez, I thought to myself, the CIA has never in my experience built and run a prison. Before long, another new term was thus introduced into the Agency dialogue: “black site.”

By early 2002, the first such black site was in place. Just in time, because its first guest was about to arrive.

I first heard the name Abu Zubaydah about six months before 9/11, when alarming intelligence reports were building toward a fever pitch about a possibly imminent Al Qaeda attack against U.S. targets somewhere in the world. One report identified him as planning suicide car-bomb attacks against U.S. military targets in Saudi Arabia. Another came from the FBI, based on its interrogation of Ahmed Ressam, the so-called millennium bomber, who had been arrested at the Canadian border in the closing days of 1999 as he tried to enter the United States in a car laden with nitroglycerine and explosive devices apparently intended to be used for an attack at Los Angeles International Airport. Ressam had told the FBI that this Zubaydah guy was somehow engaged in plans for a wave of attacks against major U.S. cities.

In the weeks after 9/11, his name seemed to pop up nearly every day at the five o’clock meeting, with shards of information about him turning up in all sorts of independent, separate source reporting. It was becoming apparent that Zubaydah was an essential, ubiquitous cog in the Al Qaeda logistical structure, especially when it came to organizing future attacks against the United States, smuggling Al Qaeda operatives across borders, procuring forged documents, and arranging safe haven for terrorist fugitives and trainees.

In those early days following 9/11, Zubaydah’s name was the one coming most consistently and urgently out of the mouths of all the CTC briefers at the five o’clock. The talk reminded me of
Where’s Waldo?
—he seemed to
be everywhere, and nowhere. Apart from bin Laden and al-Zawahiri, he was considered the biggest, and most elusive, fish out there at that time. I remember his photograph being passed around the table at one of those meetings and being struck not only by his boyish appearance but also by how ordinary and unprepossessing—almost nerdy—he looked. It caused me to recall the famous title of Hannah Arendt’s 1963 book on the trial of Adolph Eichmann:
The Banality of Evil
.

At the beginning of 2002, the CIA’s equivalent of an APB was sent to stations around the world. The order was to take Zubaydah alive, if at all possible—the intelligence specifically tying him to the 9/11 attacks may not have been there, but our CTC experts were convinced that if there were more attacks on the Al Qaeda agenda, Zubaydah was the guy who would know about them. And dead men can’t talk.

Then, suddenly, a new, promising lead about Zubaydah’s possible location in Pakistan appeared on the screen in February. The CTC sprang into action, with George Tenet cracking the whip every night. In the wee hours of March 28, 2002, owing to the CTC’s meticulous planning and a dose of good luck, the Agency hit the jackpot. A team of Pakistani commandos stormed into a house in Faisalabad, where they encountered both Zubaydah and a furious gunfight. In the process, Zubaydah was shot up badly, but taken into custody alive.

So now we had him. It was the best—actually the first—piece of good news coming the Agency’s way since 9/11, and I remember the atmosphere at the five o’clock the following day as one of quiet pride and satisfaction. The head of the CTC HVT Task Force, a fortyish, boyish-looking type with an unassuming and diffident manner, gave the group a step-by-step account of how the Zubaydah takedown unfolded. It was a dramatic story, which he told in a remarkably undramatic way. There was no macho posturing, no gloating. Not from him, nor, for that matter, from anyone else around the table. Almost immediately, the talk turned to the next priorities with Zubaydah: Keep him from dying, get him to our detention facility, and find out what he knew.

In the following days, Zubaydah’s physical condition, and what he was telling his CIA and FBI inquisitors at the CIA facility, became the headline item at the five o’clock. At first, the news was good on both fronts: He was out of medical danger, and he was talking. But the more he became convinced he was not going to die, the more confident, the more arrogant,
he was becoming. He kept talking, all right, but now Zubaydah, feeling his oats, took to taunting our people. He was proving to be a twisted, smug little creep, offering up little tidbits that were either old news or outright lies, all the while taking care to torment his questioners by making clear that lies were his specialty and that he knew far more about ongoing Al Qaeda plots than he was ever going to tell us.

The Agency shrinks, working with the CTC experts, were busily putting together a psychological profile of Zubaydah. This guy is a cold-blooded psychopath, they concluded. They told George at one of the five o’clock sessions in early March that the Agency needed to do something to change the equation with Zubaydah, shift the dynamics of the interrogation. The “Joe Friday” approach was never going to work. Come up with something, and come up with it fast, George instructed them. As they were dispatched, no one in the room, including me, had any inkling what they were going to come back with.

I found out about a week later, when a couple of our lawyers assigned to the CTC (our contingent there had tripled from three to nine since 9/11) came to my office with a couple of their clients. They told me about a different approach the CTC had just devised to deal with Zubaydah. It had a deceptively bland name: “Enhanced Interrogation Techniques,” or EITs for short. During my previous twenty-five years as an Agency lawyer, I had never heard of anything remotely like this.

Evidently aware of the distinct possibility that what they were proposing would scare the hell out of me, the CTC contingent prefaced their presentation with a number of assurances: The EITs they were proposing to employ on Zubaydah were not techniques the CTC had just dreamed up; with a couple of exceptions, the U.S. military has used them for years in training exercises (called SERE, for Survival, Evasion, Resistance, and Escape) on thousands of soldiers to prepare them in case they were captured and subjected to such methods by the enemy. Further, CTC analysts, psychologists, and a couple of outside consultants had carefully culled only those EITs from the SERE menu that they believed best suited, and most likely, to break Zubaydah’s resistance. Finally, the EITs would be judiciously applied, beginning with the ones that were least coercive, for a limited period of time, and would end as soon as Zubaydah demonstrated that he was no longer resisting and was ready to cooperate. They
had no interest, and no intent, to employ EITs any longer or any more harshly than was absolutely necessary. While I don’t remember them saying it exactly, their message was implicit: We want no part of torture.

I suppose I was somewhat reassured by all of that, although I still had no idea what they specifically had in mind. It must be something extraordinary, I thought, if the CTC thought it had to lay that sort of groundwork with me first. It was consistent with a trait I had seen in CIA clandestine service officers for as long as I had dealt with them: When they are about to ask you for permission to do something really hairy, they begin by taking pains to show that they have thought through the implications and are not just compulsive, crazy cowboys.

“Okay,” I said, bracing myself. “Describe everything you’d like to do. In the order you’d do them. In detail, and take your time.”

And so they began. One at a time, the proposed EITs were spelled out. The following is my best recollection of the way the CTC guys described them to me at that time. As I will describe later, there would be subsequent written documents prepared, describing them in more detail, and a couple of additional and relatively noncoercive EITs would be added as time went on (as, indeed, would a few of the harshest techniques listed below be dropped in time). But at the very beginning, on this day in my office in early April 2002, this is what I recall being told about the proposed EITs. It’s not easy to forget.

• Attention grasp
. The interrogator would grab Zubaydah by the collar with both hands, pulling him closer to the interrogator.

• Walling
. The interrogator would shove Zubaydah backward shoulder blades first, into a flexible false wall, which would be designed to produce a loud noise. Zubaydah would have a protective collar placed on him to protect against whiplash.

• Facial hold
. The interrogator, holding Zubaydah’s head immobile, would put one open palm on each side of his face, keeping fingertips away from Zubaydah’s eyes.

• Insult slap
. The interrogator would slap Zubaydah in the face, taking care to keep his fingers spread and to strike between the chin and the earlobe. The idea would be to startle/humiliate Zubaydah and disabuse him of the notion that he wouldn’t be physically hit.

• Cramped confinement
. The interrogator would put Zubaydah in a box—either a “big” one (allowing him to stand) for up to eighteen hours, or a “small” one (where he would have to curl up) for up to two hours. For the small box, the interrogator would have the option to place a harmless insect inside. (At this point, I couldn’t resist interjecting: “Why an insect?” The response: “Zubaydah hates bugs. It’ll be something harmless, but he won’t know that.” The bug gambit, apparently, was not something ever done by the U.S. military in its SERE training.)

• Wall standing
. The interrogator would have Zubaydah stand facing a wall from about four feet away, have him stretch his arms straight out in front of him, so that his fingers were touching the wall and could support his weight. He would be made to hold that position indefinitely, so as to induce discomfort or fatigue.

• Stress positions
. The interrogator would have Zubaydah either sit on the floor with his legs extended in front of him and his arms raised over his head, or kneel on the floor while leaning back at a 45-degree angle. Again, the intent would be to cause discomfort or fatigue.

• Sleep deprivation
. Self-explanatory. Zubaydah would be made to stay awake for up to eleven days at a time.

• Waterboarding
. The interrogator would strap Zubaydah to an inclined bench, with his feet slightly elevated. A cloth would be placed over his forehead and eyes, and water would be applied to the cloth in a controlled manner—for twenty to forty seconds from a height of twelve to twenty-four inches.

There was another technique so gruesome that the Justice Department later stopped short of approving it. After about an hour, the CTC was finished with its presentation. It wasn’t all just talk—the briefers supplemented their verbal descriptions with demonstrations (on each other) of some of the more relatively benign proposed EITs. I have to admit that I didn’t ask a lot of questions, mostly because a lot of what they were telling me was so alien to anything I had ever thought about before then that I was left largely speechless. Some of the techniques they described sounded like something out of a Three Stooges slapstick routine. Others sounded sadistic and terrifying.

After the briefers left, I took a long walk around the headquarters compound, smoking a cigar and trying to process what I had just heard and to figure out what the hell to do next. What I had to think about—bugs in boxes and simulated drowning—would have been unthinkable to me only an hour before. I had never before been confronted with a CIA proposal that even potentially transgressed the federal antitorture statute, but parts of what the CTC was contemplating certainly seemed at least close to whatever the legal line was. My first reaction was to tell the CTC, at a minimum, to forget waterboarding. It just seemed so frightening, like a plot line out of Edgar Allan Poe. Besides, I had been around the CIA long enough, had been through enough of its misadventures and controversies, to develop a gut instinct about what could get the Agency—and its people—into trouble down the road. And this had huge, unprecedented trouble written all over it.