But afterward, an Army colonel came to Morgan and said, “I think I can solve your problem.” The colonel worked at a SERE school at Fort Bragg, North Carolina. He invited Morgan to come and visit. It was the Army’s version of the Air Force school in Spokane where Jessen and Mitchell worked. “It was kind of surreal,” Morgan says. The Army had built a replica of a prisoner-of-war camp—the kind you might find in North Korea or some distant corner of the old Soviet Union. “I had a tour of the whole compound when nothing was running, so it was this really foggy, gray morning. It reminded me of some war movie you’ve seen, showing up in this concentration camp, but no one’s there.”
Morgan went on:
Each cycle of training always ended with a former POW talking to the class and saying, “This happened to me. You spent three hours in a little tiny cage. I lived in one for four years. Here’s how they tried to play tricks on me.”
Morgan was fascinated, but skeptical. He was interested in traumatic stress. SERE school was a realistic simulation of what it meant to be captured and interrogated by the enemy, but it was still just a simulation. At the end of the day, all the participants were still in North Carolina, and they could still go and get a beer and watch a movie with their friends when they were done: “They know they’re in a course and they know they’re in training. How could this possibly be stressful?” he asked. The SERE instructors just smiled at that. “Then they invited me to come and said I could monitor it for about a six-month period. So every month, for two weeks, I’d go, and I was like a little anthropologist taking notes.”
He started with the interrogation phase of the training, taking blood and saliva samples from the soldiers after they had been questioned. Here is how Morgan describes the results, in the scientific journal Biological Psychiatry:
The realistic stress of the training laboratory produced rapid and profound changes in cortisol, testosterone, and thyroid hormones. These alterations were of a magnitude that…[is] comparable to those documented in individuals undergoing physical stressors such as major surgery or actual combat.
This was a pretend interrogation. The sessions lasted half an hour. A number of the subjects were Green Berets and Special Forces—the cream of the crop. And they were reacting as if they were in actual combat. Morgan watched in shock as one soldier after another broke down in tears. “I was amazed at that,” Morgan said. “It was hard for me to figure out.”
Well, I [had] thought, these are all really tough people—that it’ll be kind of like a game. And I hadn’t anticipated seeing people that distressed or crying. And it wasn’t because of a physical pressure. It’s not because somebody’s manhandling you.
These were soldiers—organized, disciplined, motivated—and Morgan realized that it was the uncertainty of their situation that was unsettling to them.
Many [of them had] always operated by, “I should know the rules of the book so I know what to do.” And I think much of the stress, as I got to know it over time, was largely driven by an internal sense of real alarm, like, “I don’t know what the right answer is.”
Then he decided to have the SERE students do what is called the Rey-Osterrieth Complex Figure drawing test. You’re given this:
First you have to copy it. Then the original is taken away and you have to draw it from memory. Most adults are pretty good at this task, and they use the same strategy: they start by drawing the outlines of the figure, then fill in the details. Children, on the other hand, use a piecemeal approach: they randomly do one chunk of the drawing, then move on to another bit. Before interrogations, the SERE students sailed through the test with flying colors. Being able to quickly memorize and reproduce a complex visual display, after all, is the kind of thing Green Beret and Special Operations soldiers are trained to do. Here’s a typical example of a Rey-Osterrieth figure drawn from memory by one of the soldiers before interrogation. These guys are good.
But just look at what the soldier drew fifteen minutes after interrogation:
In one version of the experiment, Morgan says, after stressful questioning, 80 percent of the sample would draw the figure piecemeal, “like a prepubescent kid, which means your prefrontal cortex has just shut down for the while.”
For anyone in the interrogation business, Morgan’s work was deeply troubling. The point of the interrogation was to get the subject to talk—to crack open the subject’s memory and access whatever was inside. But what if the process of securing compliance proved so stressful to the interviewee that it affected what he or she could actually remember? Morgan was watching adults turn into children.
“I had just been in the compound collecting spit from all the different students,” Morgan says, remembering one incident from early at his time at SERE:
And I went back out because they had now opened the gates, the family [members] are there. They all say hello. And I walked up to a couple of students: “So, it’s nice to see you when no longer under those conditions.”
And I remember some of them went, “When did you get here?” And I was like, “What do you mean, when did I get here? I actually collected spit from you twenty minutes ago. I had you fill out—”
“I don’t remember that.”
And I said, “And I saw you the other night when you were being interrogated.”
And they’re like, “No, got nothing.”
I looked at one of the instructors and I said, “That’s crazy.” And he said, “Happens all the time.” He goes, “They don’t even remember me, and I’m the guy who was yelling at them thirty minutes ago.”
Morgan was so astonished that he decided to run a quick field test. He put together the equivalent of a police lineup, filling it with instructors, officers, and a few stray outsiders.
“The physician for the unit had come back. He’d been on vacation.…I said, ‘You’re going in the lineup today.’ We put him in.”
Then Morgan gave his instructions to the soldiers: “We’re really interested in the person who ran the camp and ordered all your punishments. If they’re there, please indicate who they are. If they’re not, just say, ‘Not here.’” He wanted them to identify the commandant—the man in charge.
“Out of the fifty-two students, twenty of them picked this doctor.…And he goes, ‘But I wasn’t here! I was in Hawaii!’”2
If one of the soldiers had gotten it wrong, it would have been understandable. People make mistakes. So would two misidentifications, or even three. But twenty got it wrong. In any court of law, the hapless physician would end up behind bars.
After 9/11, Morgan went to work for the CIA. There he tried to impress upon his colleagues the significance of his findings. The agency had spies and confidential sources around the world. They had information gathered from people they had captured or coerced into cooperating. These sources were people who often spoke with great confidence. Some were highly trusted. Some gave information that was considered very credible. But Morgan’s point was that if the information they were sharing had been obtained under stress—if they had just been through some nightmare in Iraq or Afghanistan or Syria—what they said might be inaccurate or misleading, and the sources wouldn’t know it. They would say, It’s the doctor! I know it was the doctor, even though the doctor was a thousand miles away. “I said to the other analysts, ‘You know, the implication of this is really alarming.’”
So what did Charles Morgan think when he heard what Mitchell and Jessen were up to with KSM in their faraway black site?
I told people—this was before I was at the CIA, and I told people while I was there—“Trying to get information out of someone you are sleep-depriving is sort of like trying to get a better signal out of a radio that you are smashing with a sledgehammer.…It makes no sense to me at all.”
5.
KSM made his first public confession on the afternoon of March 10, 2007, just over four years after he was captured by the CIA in Islamabad, Pakistan. The occasion was a tribunal hearing held at the U.S. Naval Base in Guantánamo
Bay, Cuba. There were eight people present in addition to KSM—a “personal representative” assigned to the prisoner, a linguist, and officers from each of the four branches of the U.S. military service.
KSM was asked if he understood the nature of the proceedings. He said he did. A description of the charges against him was read out loud. Through his representative, he made a few small corrections: “My name is misspelled in the Summary of Evidence. It should be S-h-a-i-k-h or S-h-e-i-k-h, but not S-h-a-y-k-h, as it is in the subject line.” He asked for a translation of a verse from the Koran. A few more matters of administration were discussed. Then KSM’s personal representative read his confession:
I hereby admit and affirm without duress to the following:
I swore Bay’aat [i.e., allegiance] to Sheikh Usama Bin Laden to conduct Jihad…
I was the Operational Director for Sheikh Usama Bin Laden for the organizing, planning, follow-up, and execution of the 9/11 Operation.…
I was directly in charge, after the death of Sheikh Abu Hafs Al-Masri Subhi Abu Sittah, of managing and following up on the Cell for the Production of Biological Weapons, such as anthrax and others, and following up on Dirty Bomb Operations on American soil.
Then he listed every single Al Qaeda operation for which he had been, in his words, either “a responsible participant, principal planner, trainer, financier (via the Military Council Treasury), executor, and/or a personal participant.” There were thirty-one items in that list: the Sears Tower in Chicago, Heathrow Airport, Big Ben in London, countless U.S. and Israeli embassies, assassination attempts on Bill Clinton and Pope John Paul II, and on and on, in horrifying detail. Here, for example, are items 25 to 27:
25. I was responsible for surveillance needed to hit nuclear power plants that generate electricity in several U.S. states.
26. I was responsible for planning, surveying, and financing to hit NATO Headquarters in Europe.
27. I was responsible for the planning and surveying needed to execute the Bojinka Operation, which was designed to down twelve American airplanes full of passengers. I personally monitored a round-trip, Manila-to-Seoul, Pan Am flight.
The statement ended. The judge turned to KSM: “Before you proceed, Khalid Sheikh Muhammad, the statement that was just read by the Personal Representative, were those your words?” KSM said they were, then launched into a long, impassioned explanation of his actions. He was simply a warrior, he said, engaged in combat, no different from any other soldier:
War start from Adam when Cain he killed Abel until now. It’s never gonna stop killing of people. This is the way of the language. American start the Revolutionary War then they starts the Mexican then Spanish War then World War One, World War Two. You read the history. You know never stopping war. This is life.
KSM’s extraordinary confession was a triumph for Mitchell and Jessen. The man who had come to them in 2003, angry and defiant, was now willingly laying his past bare.
But KSM’s cooperation left a crucial question unanswered: was what he said true? Once someone has been subjected to that kind of stress, they are in Charles Morgan territory. Was KSM confessing to all those crimes just to get Mitchell and Jessen to stop? By some accounts, Mitchell and Jessen had disrupted and denied KSM’s sleep for a week. After all that abuse, did KSM know what his real memories were anymore? In his book Why Torture Doesn’t Work, neuroscientist Shane O’Mara writes that extended sleep deprivation “might induce some form of surface compliance”—but only at the cost of “long-term structural remodeling of the brain systems that support the very functions that the interrogator wishes to have access to.”
Former high-ranking CIA officer Robert Baer read the confession and concluded that KSM was “making things up.” One of the targets he listed was the Plaza Bank building in downtown Seattle. But Plaza Bank wasn’t founded as a company until years after KSM’s arrest. Another longtime CIA veteran, Bruce Reidel, argued that the very thing that made it hard to get KSM to cooperate in the first place—the fact that he was never getting out of prison—is also what made his claims suspect. “He has nothing else in life but to be remembered as a famous terrorist,” Reidel said. “He wants to promote his own importance. It’s been a problem since he was captured.” If he was going to spend the rest of his days in a prison cell, why not make a play for the history books? KSM’s confession went on and on:
9. I was responsible for planning, training, surveying, and financing for the Operation to bomb and destroy the Panama Canal.
10. I was responsible for surveying and financing for the assassination of several former American Presidents, including President Carter.
Was there anything KSM did not claim credit for?
None of these critics questioned the need to interrogate KSM. The fact that strangers are hard to understand doesn’t mean we shouldn’t try. Ponzi schemers and pedophiles can’t be allowed to roam free. The Italian police had a responsibility to understand Amanda Knox. And why did Neville Chamberlain make such an effort to meet Hitler? Because with the threat of world war looming, trying to make peace with your enemy is essential.
But the harder we work at getting strangers to reveal themselves, the more elusive they become. Chamberlain would have been better off never meeting Hitler at all. He should have stayed home and read Mein Kampf. The police in the Sandusky case searched high and low for his victims for two years. What did their efforts yield? Not clarity, but confusion: stories that changed; allegations that surfaced and then disappeared; victims who were bringing their own children to meet Sandusky one minute, then accusing him of terrible crimes the next.
James Mitchell was in the same position. The CIA had reason to believe that Al Qaeda was planning a second round of attacks after 9/11, possibly involving nuclear weapons. He had to get KSM to talk. But the harder he worked to get KSM to talk, the more he compromised the quality of their communication. He could deprive KSM of sleep for a week, at the end of which KSM was confessing to every crime under the sun. But did KSM really want to blow up the Panama Canal?
Whatever it is we are trying to find out about the strangers in our midst is not robust. The “truth” about Amanda Knox or Jerry Sandusky or KSM is not some hard and shiny object that can be extracted if only we dig deep enough and look hard enough. The thing we want to learn about a stranger is fragile. If we tread carelessly, it will crumple under our feet. And from that follows a second cautionary note: we need to accept that the search to understand a stranger has real limits. We will never know the whole truth. We have to be satisfied with something short of that. The right way to talk to strangers is with caution and humility. How many of the crises and controversies I have described would have been prevented had we taken those lessons to heart?
We are now close to returning to the events of that day in Prairie View, Texas, when Brian Encinia pulled over Sandra Bland. But before we do, we have one last thing to consider—the strangely overlooked phenomenon of coupling.
1 There was plenty of experience with waterboarding at the Navy SERE school, however. There, the training philosophy was a little different. “The Navy’s view was that people go into that situation expecting that they can hold out, that they can be cocky. When that happens to you [not holding out], you’re devastated and you don’t bounce back,” Mitchell said. “So, part of what they try to do in the Navy school is show people that you really will capitulate at some point. But your job as an American soldier is to resist to the best of your ability.” The Navy wanted to show their trainees how bad things could get. The Air Force felt their trainees were better off not knowing that.
2 In another, larger study, Morgan found that 77 out of 114 soldiers falsely identified their interrogators in a photo lineup—and this was 24 hours after interrogation! When these soldiers were asked how confident they were in their responses, there was no relationship between confidence and accuracy.
Part Five
Coupling
Chapter Ten
Sylvia Plath
> 1.
In the fall of 1962, the American poet Sylvia Plath left her cottage in the English countryside for London. She needed a fresh start. Her husband, Ted Hughes, had abandoned her for another woman, leaving her alone with their two small children. She found an apartment in London’s Primrose Hill neighborhood—the top two floors of a townhouse. “I am writing from London, so happy I can hardly speak,” she told her mother. “And guess what, it is W.B. Yeats’ house. With a blue plaque over the door saying he lived there!”
At Primrose Hill she would write in the early-morning hours while her children slept. Her productivity was extraordinary. In December she finished a poetry collection, and her publisher told her it should win the Pulitzer Prize. She was on her way to becoming one of the most celebrated young poets in the world—a reputation that would only grow in the coming years.
But in late December, a deadly cold settled on England. It was one of the most bitter winters in 300 years. The snow began falling and would not stop. People skated on the Thames. Water pipes froze solid. There were power outages and labor strikes. Plath had struggled with depression all her life, and the darkness returned. Her friend, literary critic Alfred Alvarez, came to see her on Christmas Eve. “She seemed different,” he remembered in his memoir The Savage God:
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