Mastermind

by Richard Miniter

  In July 2006, White House speechwriter Marc Thiessen, a nationalsecurity veteran who physically resembles the actor John Cusack, met with two CIA interrogators, one of whom had been KSM’s lead interrogator. Here is how those two officials explained to Thiessen the initial interrogation process: “Two-thirds of those brought into the CIA program did not require the use of any enhanced interrogation techniques whatsoever—what critics loosely call ‘torture.’ Just the experience of being brought into CIA custody—the ‘capture shock,’ the arrival at a sterile location, the isolation, the fact that they did not know where they were, and that no one else knew they were there—was enough to convince most of them to cooperate.”7

  For the roughly one-third who do not cooperate immediately, intelligence officers have learned that there are two key periods in which a detainee will usually break: the first forty-eight hours, during which his largely imaginary fears will prey on him, and the end of the fourteenth day, when sheer exhaustion sets in. A handful of detainees, like KSM, “demonstrated extraordinary resistance.”8 He apparently defied his interrogators for more than fourteen days.

  As a result, KSM was subjected to what the Bush administration described as “enhanced interrogation techniques,” eventually including waterboarding. Only two other Al Qaeda captives were waterboarded.

  Despite his “extraordinary resistance,” KSM began talking shortly after waterboarding. He had held out for less than a month.

  Once KSM began to talk honestly, all coercive (even psychological) techniques were withdrawn. In intelligence parlance, interrogation ended and debriefing started. Debriefing can provide useful information quickly. By the end of March 2006, KSM had “provided information on a plot to fly airplanes into London’s Heathrow Airport.”9

  Debriefing KSM would pay real dividends. In the end, the information gleaned from KSM helped stop several Al Qaeda plots. What follow are two examples, both of which will be new to readers.

  The Paris-Dakar Rally

  Under KSM’s direction, Al Qaeda, operating from bases in southern Algeria, plotted to kidnap drivers from the famous off-road race across the Sahara, from Dakar to Paris. The race, over more than four thousand unforgiving kilometers of deserts and mountains, is televised across Europe and the Middle East. It can take weeks to finish, and many two-man teams fail to make it. Engine fires, burst tires, and crashed vehicles are common. Trapped or stranded drivers would be heartbreakingly easy to take hostage.

  Hostages can be a lucrative business, as Al Qaeda’s experience in North Africa has taught them. European governments paid ransoms totaling some $18 million between 2002 and 2003. That sum enabled Al Qaeda to recruit, train, and equip an army of almost a thousand fighters.

  KSM’s information led to the deployment of a U.S. Navy SEAL team in “Operation Aztec Silence” and the capture of a key Al Qaeda leader. Eventually the leader of Al Qaeda’s North Africa affiliate, then known as the GSPC (Groupe Salafi pour la Predication et le Combat), was cornered in the boulder-strewn high country of Northern Chad. After a drama with an allied desert tribe and some covert payments, the Al Qaeda leader was turned over to a mixed unit of U.S. Special Forces.

  The racecourse was rerouted to avoid a region in Mali where Al Qaeda had tribal confederates waiting to seize hapless competitors.

  The Singapore Plot

  Encouraged by KSM, Al Qaeda’s East Asian affiliate planned an all-out war on American embassies in the Far East. Al Qaeda teams were within days of bombing the U.S. embassies in Kuala Lumpur and Singapore, as well as a nearby U.S. naval base.

  Again, information from KSM allowed investigators to thwart the plots in the nick of time.

  For almost a week, U.S. Ambassador Frank Lavin went about his daily routine, trying not to reveal to his staff, his children, or the outside world that he knew his life was in danger.10 If he did, the terrorists might flee before they could be arrested. When I met with him later, in his walled Singapore compound, Ambassador Lavin coolly told me that he had just been doing his duty. In fact, he’d been brave in a way few diplomats ever get credit for. He risked his life to ensure that Al Qaeda’s Singapore network was smashed—saving hundreds of lives in the bargain. The unraveling of the Singapore plots is a dramatic tale of the quiet surveillance of several cells followed by the lightning-fast arrests of nearly forty terrorists.

  These are just two of the plots thwarted thanks to information obtained from KSM. Former intelligence officials tell me that there were other—perhaps many other—examples of terror strikes that were halted as a result of the covert questioning of the Al Qaeda mastermind. The full details of these plots have not yet been declassified.

  When weighing the merits of enhanced interrogation techniques, it is wise to consider the benefits as well as the costs.

  One of KSM’s main interrogators explained the value of the CIA’s program in blunt terms: “It is the reason we have not had another 9/11.”

  During both the interrogation and debriefing phases, KSM’s interlocutors were far less spontaneous than those on the TV show The Closer or even real-life policemen. Every interrogation and debriefing session was strictly governed by a written plan that required officials to receive approval for each procedure in advance and in writing. They were not allowed to make it up as they went along.

  There were many procedures put in place to prevent abuse. A board-certified doctor was on hand at all times to guard the detainee’s health and safety. In addition, a translator was usually present, providing another eyewitness. This made abuse even more unlikely.

  Nor were KSM’s CIA interrogators young or inexperienced. The median age of CIA interrogators is forty-three, and each has at least 280 hours of specialized training.11

  In addition, each interrogator suffers through each and every enhanced interrogation technique himself, including waterboarding. Interrogators are well aware of the discomfort they are inflicting because they have endured it themselves. This, too, acts as a natural check on abuse.

  Once a subject like KSM agrees to cooperate, interrogation ends and a new person enters the subject’s life—the debriefer. The debriefer is usually cordial, even friendly. He has studied the detainee’s dossier and those of his comrades. He knows what the detainee should know and expertly and patiently draws it out of him.

  One of KSM’s best debriefers is known as Deuce Martinez. He was no Grand Inquisitor, no sadist unleashed to terrify his charges. Mild-mannered and personally opposed to waterboarding, he wasn’t a tough guy from central casting. While he was a veteran CIA man, he was not one of the larger-than-life “operators” who worked with dangerous men in far-off places. He was an analyst. Until 9/11 he had never left the United States. In fact, he had rarely left the Washington area and then only to visit family. He joined the CIA because his father had worked there in the technical division. It seemed like a safe and interesting job.

  Nor was he initially a terrorism expert. Martinez spent his career in a largely unnoticed corner of the CIA, helping the agency fight narcotic flows from South America. Those who know him say that he knew little about Islam or Al Qaeda before the 9/11 attacks. He still doesn’t speak Arabic.

  Yet he had a gift for making terrorists talk. As a negotiator, a seducer, and an enforcer, he ruled the world inside what debriefers call “the room.” He did it largely through charm, intelligence, and self-discipline.

  Like sex, interrogation creates a kind of sustained intimacy that can lead to either betrayal or redemption. Clearly KSM enjoyed the parry and thrust. (He would tell the International Committee of the Red Cross in 2008, “I gave a lot of false information in order to satisfy what I believed the interrogators wished to hear.”) This is most likely double-talk or empty bravado. All of his statements were carefully checked. False statements meant the withdrawal of “privileges,” such as favorite foods.

  KSM’s words were compared against other evidence—captured documents, phone intercepts, the testimonies of other detainees—and against reason and
common sense.

  Truth was rewarded. Lies were not. Soon enough, KSM learned to either tell the truth or plead ignorance.

  Eventually the pair developed a surprising rapport. They had long, rambling talks comparing Islam with Roman Catholicism. KSM even wrote poetry extolling Martinez’s wife, whom he never met.

  “Can’t we get along?” KSM asked.

  “Isn’t it a little late for that?” Martinez said coolly.12

  To strike the right balance between lifesaving information and humane treatment, both sides of the political controversy over interrogation must first be honest enough to admit that there is a trade-off between these two goods. You cannot have both goods in equal measure. Make the detainee too comfortable and you learn nothing. Press the detainee too fiercely and the information may be worthless or nonexistent.

  And, of course, mistreating prisoners offends America’s moral sense of itself. Habituating government officials to police-state tactics ultimately threatens the civil liberties of us all. A careful balance must be struck.

  Inside a secret facility near the Szymany airport, outside of Warsaw, Poland, the CIA maintained a small “black site” interrogation center known as “the room.”

  In “the room,” the CIA used a carefully calibrated series of punishments, ranging from open-fingered face smacks to humiliating belly slaps to “walling,” which involves throwing a prisoner against a false, collapsible wall. When the wall moves back six inches or so and makes a loud noise, the detainee imagines he has been substantially harmed. Each of these punishments had to be approved in writing at least twenty-four hours before they could be administered.

  With KSM, the CIA started with air conditioning. For a man used to the warm, wet air of the near tropics, the cold, dry blast was a torment. But he still wouldn’t talk.

  Harder measures would be needed. The CIA gradually moved up a staircase of increasingly adversarial measures, such as “walling.”

  Before the end of March 2003, KSM had been waterboarded. Critics make much of the fact that he was waterboarded 188 times. In reality, he was doused with water that many times, all within a single session. While defenders of enhanced interrogation techniques say that military personnel are waterboarded in escape-and-evasion training schools, rarely, if ever, are American soldiers and sailors doused more than a dozen times, let alone 188.

  Still, waterboarding is not lethal and leaves no physical injuries. It is merely uncomfortable, perhaps enough so to compel conversation. And to a proud man like KSM, it would be humiliating.

  Is it torture?

  Not unless you torture the commonsense meaning of the word torture. What sets torture apart from mere harsh treatment is a permanent change in the subject’s well-being: dismemberment, branding, broken bones, and so on. Every modern or medieval practice that is universally understood to be torture has this element of permanence. Waterboarding, walling, and other “enhanced” measures do not. Therefore, KSM was not tortured.

  If every unpleasant or even psychologically painful experience visited on a prisoner is said to be torture, then the term “torture” loses its moral force. It becomes harder to call out regimes that gouge out eyes or electrify genitals. After all, everything is torture.

  Torture, like pornography, is too often defined by the passions of partisans. For some, torture is any act or omission that makes a detainee uncomfortable. A delayed meal or a homophobe’s contact with a gay soldier would qualify. Humans have long realized that making other people tell the truth requires some degree of discomfort. Suspects in big-city police stations are routinely made to feel uncomfortable. So mere discomfort alone cannot be the defining element that makes an action torture—it would include too many everyday things that are plainly not torture, but merely unhappy situations.

  Again, for torture to have any meaning at all, it has to mean an irreversible, permanent, and negative change in a person’s well-being.

  Indeed, it seemed that critics of President Bush’s interrogation policy hoped to short-circuit a debate over striking the proper balance between lifesaving information and humane treatment by deploying the word torture. Instead of two opposing views about how to balance two competing goods, we are left with one side calling itself “anti-torture” and labeling the other side “pro-torture.”

  In an effort to address its critics’ concerns, the Bush administration devised an absurd system that is as dangerous for the interrogator as for the detainee. Let’s examine it in detail.

  Ask any CIA interrogator and he will tell you that there are two worlds: the world inside “the room” and the world outside.

  Inside the room, interrogators duel with terrorists. It is a duel with at least one loser. If the interrogator gains the upper hand and the terrorist betrays his cause and his comrades, hundreds of innocent lives will be spared. If the terrorist is skillful—and many, like KSM, are trained to be—he can evade and extend, giving his compatriots valuable time to carry out their lethal missions. Hundreds could die.

  As a duelist, the interrogator is at risk, too. If he loses his temper or his sense, he could cross some invisible line and break the law. The law is very complex, and designed to protect the prisoner more than the interrogator. In less than a minute, the interrogator could commit an act that might cost him his house, his pension, his reputation, and his freedom. Democracies imprison lawbreakers just as they do terrorists. “It is a dangerous game,” a former U.S. Army interrogator told me. “I think it is even riskier for the asker than the asked.”

  Inevitably, the duel is seen differently outside “the room.” Outside, politicians, the press, and the public debate a serious philosophical question, with enormous real-life repercussions, in safety and in ignorance. They don’t have to live with the consequences of their ideas. The interrogators do.

  It is also important to remember what a determined killer KSM is.

  Aside from perhaps Osama bin Laden, Khalid Shaikh Mohammed is the most dangerous man of our generation. He was involved in virtually every major terrorist attack against the Western world, from the 1993 World Trade Center bombing to the September 11 attacks. He personally sawed Daniel Pearl’s head off and swung it in the air triumphantly. He planned and plotted to kill the Pope and President Clinton and took part in schemes to murder ambassadors and detonate passenger planes over two oceans.

  KSM single-handedly increased the lethality of Al Qaeda. From the moment he joined the organization, in 1996 (without swearing an oath of allegiance or bayat to bin Laden for several years), Al Qaeda went from killing dozens to murdering hundreds, then thousands, of people at a time.

  Consider the pre-KSM era. Al Qaeda’s first attack on Americans, in December 1992, targeted hundreds of U.S. servicemen living in two hotels in Yemen. While the bombs went off, no American military personnel were harmed. Two people died, including one Austrian tourist.13 Al Qaeda’s next attack was in Somalia, in an incident that Americans know as “Black Hawk Down.” Al Qaeda–trained rocket-launcher teams and mortar crews—combined with Somali militiamen—cut down eighteen American soldiers.14 The 1995 attack on the Saudi Arabian National Guard headquarters, in Riyadh, slew seven, including several American military trainers.15 The 1996 truck bombing of a U.S. Air Force barracks in Dhahran, Saudi Arabia, killed twenty-three Americans.16

  Now consider the KSM period. The two U.S. embassy bombings in 1998 murdered 224 people, including twelve American diplomats. 17 The 2000 “millennium plots” were thwarted before anyone inside the United States was killed; also prevented was the imminent attack on pilgrims at the Jordan River, near where Christ was baptized by John the Baptist. The millennium attacks would have killed thousands if they had succeeded.18 The attack on the USS Cole, an American warship refueling in Yemen’s Aden harbor, killed seventeen Americans.19 The September 11 attacks slew nearly three thousand. 20 The Bali bombing in 2002 erased 202 lives.21 The Madrid train bombings killed almost the same number.22

  Next, consider Al Qaeda’s post-KSM period.
There have been no successful attacks on American soil since 2001 and no major attacks on American embassies or military installations since 2004. The handful of attacks that have occurred against American consulates or buildings owned by American corporations have been largely limited to Iraq and Pakistan. The death tolls in those attacks have reverted to the pre-KSM pattern of killing tens, not hundreds, at a time. While Al Qaeda continues to attempt aircraft attacks and bombings inside America, these have been thwarted, partly with the help of KSM’s interrogations and partly by taking KSM out of the Al Qaeda decision-making process. The London train bombings on July 7, 2005, took more than fifty lives, not hundreds or thousands.23 And let’s not forget the stopped plots to explode aircraft over the Atlantic, the attempt to ignite the underwear bomb on a U.S.-bound flight, and the botched truck bombing of New York’s Times Square. If KSM were still in command, these murderous efforts might have succeeded.

  While Al Qaeda may someday succeed again in inflicting mass casualties, in the absence of KSM, it has yet to do so.

  Clearly Al Qaeda’s ability to kill large numbers in a single blow depends on the quality of its management. Without KSM, the organization is far less deadly, at least so far.

  Those who contend that Al Qaeda’s managers are easily replaced should carefully consider the rise and the fall in the death tolls following KSM’s recruitment and his capture. No wonder Congressman Porter Goss, then-chairman of the House Intelligence Committee and later director of the CIA, said of the capture: “This is a very huge event. This is the equivalent of the liberation of Paris during World War II.”24