by Adrian Levy
Coached by Mitchell, the team would work on Zubaydah for as long as it took for him to develop a sense of “learned helplessness,” a procedure based on research conducted in the 1960s and that Mitchell had studied carefully. Experiments back then had shown that when dogs realized they could do nothing to avoid small electric shocks, they would become listless and simply whine, enduring the shocks even after being given a chance to escape.35
At home, on the shelves of Mitchell’s personal library, books on psychology jostled for space with Islamic texts and he had a particularly personal reason for studying the mindset of violent Islamist extremists. Back in 1995, a close friend from Spokane, a psychiatrist and fellow extreme sports enthusiast called Donald Hutchings, had been kidnapped in Kashmir along with five other Westerners by an offshoot of the Pakistani terror group Harkat-ul-Ansar. One of the hostages was beheaded and one escaped, but Hutchings and three others were never seen again.36
Soufan was unconvinced by Mitchell’s pitch and questioned the senior CTC official who had accompanied him from Washington. But it was useless. The program and Mitchell had backing at the highest level.
“Washington feels that Abu Zubaydah knows much more than he’s telling you,” the CTC official told Soufan, explaining that Langley was convinced Zubaydah was still hiding intimate knowledge about future attacks on the United States.37 The CTC also believed Zubaydah to be a senior Al Qaeda lieutenant and confidant of Osama bin Laden, and it wanted him to admit to having played a critical role in planning the 9/11 attacks.38 “[Mitchell] here has a method that will get that information quickly,” said the CTC official.39
“What is this method?” Soufan asked Mitchell directly, pointing out that he had already obtained crucial intelligence from Zubaydah on couriers, Mokhtar, and Al Qaeda’s military council just by talking to him.
Mitchell launched into a prepared speech about taking away privileges, including clothes, food, and his chair. Zubaydah would come to see his interrogator as “a god” who controlled his suffering. “Pretty quickly you’ll see Abu Zubaydah buckle and become compliant,” Mitchell assured.40
Soufan needed to do only one further thing: inform Zubaydah that Mitchell’s “boss,” the senior CTC official, was taking over, and that this person would determine whether he lived or died. “After that you will never see him again,” said Mitchell.41
Soufan was upset and angry. “These things won’t work on people committed to dying for a cause,” he insisted. “They expect to be sodomized and to have family members raped in front of them!”42 Would taking away Zubaydah’s chair make him more cooperative?
This was science, Mitchell condescended. “He will fold quickly.”
But Zubaydah had already folded, Soufan countered. Had Mitchell ever questioned an Islamic terrorist before?
“No,” he replied.43
“Have you ever conducted any interrogations?”
“No.”
Soufan was furious that someone he regarded as having no field experience was pulling rank on him.44 Mitchell later defended his level of expertise, saying: “In survival school, you have to understand the various interrogation approaches. Oddly enough, if you spend years and years and years watching people try to lie and tell the truth under various circumstances where coercion exists, you get some sense of what people are like when they’re lying or telling the truth.”45
Soufan contacted a senior: “Is this a joke?”
He fired off a cable to FBI headquarters. “I have spent an un-calculable amount of hours at [Zubaydah’s] bedside assisting with medical help, holding his hand and comforting him through various medical procedures, even assisting him in going [to] the bathroom … We have built tremendous report [sic] … with AZ and now that we are on the eve of ‘regular’ interviews to get threat information, we have been ‘written out.’ ”46
An unequivocal message came back from New York: Dr. Mitchell had full authorization from Jose Rodriguez. The psychologist would later say: “I’m just a guy who got asked to do something for his country by people at the highest level of government, and I did the best that I could.”47
Soufan was also told that the president had recently signed an executive order that excluded Al Qaeda or Taliban detainees from protection under Common Article 3 of the Geneva Conventions, which prohibited “mutilation, cruel treatment and torture.” The CTC had free rein to do whatever was deemed necessary to get Zubaydah to confess what it believed him to be guilty of.48
On April 13, 2002, the “new interrogation program” started while Zubaydah was still in the hospital.49 Briefed by the CTC psychological team, a CIA interrogator sat by Zubaydah’s bed and quietly advised that he should cooperate and inform them of “a most important secret that [they] needed to know”: when were the next Al Qaeda attacks planned for and was the U.S. mainland a target?50
Zubaydah, who was more focused on the pain in his stomach and his seeping wounds, nodded but said nothing.
Two days later, with Zubaydah still not speaking, a “pre-move message” was delivered according to Mitchell’s advice, informing him that “time is running out.”51 Zubaydah was then sedated, discharged from the hospital, and moved back to his old cell in the jungle camp. He woke up four hours later.
“I found myself chained to this steel bed in this white room,” he wrote in his diary, a record that Mitchell later said he allowed Zubaydah to write in detention so they would know what the detainee was thinking.52 Most of the entries were undated and some are hard to understand, but the diary, which was later confiscated from Zubaydah and classified, gives a frightening insight into the brutality of the new interrogation program.53
Though he was desperate for sleep, cold water was repeatedly thrown over him to keep him awake. Shivering, he tried to take in his new surroundings. “There was nobody, nothing, except for the three walls that reflected the light as if they were lights … At the end of the panel of bars there was a metal door mostly made of metal bars as well … So I am in a prison and not in a hospital.”
Eventually, he met his new jailers. “I saw a black object,” he recalled. “The black object turned out to be a man all dressed in black. Even his face, his nose and his mouth were all covered.” His eyes were covered with what looked like diving goggles. “And yet too these were black.” Each time Zubaydah closed his eyes to sleep, the man in black threw cold water on him.
Once Zubaydah had been softened up, the interrogators filed into the room and questioned him about his Al Qaeda links.
Zubaydah recalled repeating the same words over and over: “I’m not from Al Qaeda, I’m not from Al Qaeda.”54
One of the interrogators responded: “Don’t go there.” The words would ring in Zubaydah’s ears after they came to be repeated thousands of times over.
More interrogators and guards filled up the cell. Unlike Mitchell, who had spent twenty years in the military, they were mostly newly employed contractors or inexperienced agency operatives, who were no longer “individuals who [Zubaydah] could attempt to establish a relationship or dialogue with.”55
Someone shouted another question about Al Qaeda.
“I am not from Al Qaeda …”56
“Don’t go there.”
One black-clad guard produced handcuffs and leg shackles, while another switched on a “noise generator,” filling the cell with ear-shattering sounds, another method designed to amplify Zubaydah’s “sense of hopelessness.”57
Next, they cut off his clothes and shaved his head, leaving clumps of hair lying on the floor where they would soon get mixed up with his urine and excrement. “They sat me on a plastic chair totally naked and they chained me very tight,” Zubaydah wrote later. “I don’t know how long I was chained to the chair. It felt like one and a half months.”58
The chair became his world. “As to urinating I would do it on the first chair in a special can. However the chains were so tight to the chair to the point that many times I found myself urinating all over myself and on the bandage
s that were still wrapped around my left wounded thigh.”59
Whatever happened, according to the program, he wasn’t to sleep. “I was deprived … for a long period of time; I don’t even know for how long: maybe two or three weeks or even more and it felt like an eternity to the point that I found myself falling asleep despite the water being thrown at me by the guard who found himself with no choice but to strongly and constantly shake me in order to keep me awake.”60
Soufan watched horrified, wondering how, when a nation’s expectations were invested in them, departmental rivalry between the CIA and FBI as well as a vengeful hardening of views inside the Bush White House were resulting in their best lead since 9/11 being subjected to an unproven, brutal, and likely illegal set of procedures. “We could only imagine what Abu Zubaydah was going through,” he recalled.61
A doctor was sent for. “He gave me the injection and I woke up from the pain,” recalled Zubaydah. “He examined me and then he started making signals to them without saying anything as if he was trying to tell them: ‘he needs to sleep, otherwise he would go crazy.’ ”
Briefly, Zubaydah was allowed to fall asleep on the chair. “My chained hands were hanging,” he recalled. “I laid my chest on my thigh and slept. My hanging arms became like a cushion for my head. Sometimes the pain would wake me up, other times I would wake up from the cold but most of the time I would wake up because I was hungry.”62
Then came more noise. “Boum! Boum! Boum! … then zen, then zzzz, then wezzzz.”
Zubaydah felt crushed by sound waves. “I felt my brain was going up and down, left and right … The song would last 5 to 10 minutes and was played again and again non stop to the point that on the first day I became afraid to reach the moment when the song would end, for the end sounded like a screaming. I started trying to distract my mind in order to avoid feeling the end of the song coming and I finally found myself screaming along with it.”63
He was barbered again. “They kept shaving my head and my face with an electrical razor and they did it in such a quick and violent manner,” recalled Zubaydah, whose hands and nails became totally black from the buildup of dirt. He began vomiting and a nurse was sent in. “I couldn’t cover my genitals in an appropriate manner.”
“Why are you naked?” she asked.
“Ask them,” he replied.
She said: “I’ll see what I can do.”
Perhaps she complained or was part of the pageant, he could not decide, but the guards returned and clothed him.
“Praise God, I am finally able to cover my genitals,” he thought just as another, or was it the same guard who resembled a frogman, rushed in and smothered his face in a rough hood covered in vomit. “Someone started screaming loudly and shoving me violently and started violently and quickly cutting my clothes. I felt at that moment he was cutting my skin.” He was shaved again, “like you shave a sheep and not a human being.”
Zubaydah was naked again, covered in his own hair and vomit, and “unable to control my urination.”64
After several sessions Ali Soufan confronted Mitchell.65 He and other members of the on-site CIA team were becoming worried about the “science” that lay behind Mitchell’s methods. Several, along with Soufan, wrote confidential e-mails to their superiors in the United States, requesting an intervention.
After much debate at headquarters level, Soufan was given temporary permission to reengage with the detainee on April 17, while the CTC reassessed its position. “I poured a cup of tea and walked back into Zubaydah’s cell.”
Zubaydah spluttered: “Hello, Ali.”66
At the end of April 2002, despite mounting protests from Soufan, he was pulled out of the interrogation room again while CIA headquarters introduced the most coercive of new interrogation strategies proposed and supported by Mitchell.67 They included sensory deprivation and involved “a single-minded, consistent, totally focused questioning of current threat information.” The procedures had the full backing of Jose Rodriguez and were supervised on the ground by a senior CTC official.
First, the interrogators removed Zubaydah’s hood and produced his jihad address book. “You’re a liar and you have ways of getting in touch with these people,” someone hissed.68
Zubaydah laughed hysterically. Recalling this moment in his diary, he wrote: “If it were not for God’s protection, I could have officially declared myself psychotic.”
Next, they chained him down and questioned him around the clock: two teams who took turns at resting while he was kept permanently awake. One man in particular terrified Zubaydah. “I saw a man wearing black clothes, but he was also wearing a military jacket,” he wrote. “His face was uncovered. He had no mask or big glasses, like the other guards usually had.” It was Mitchell.69
In Islamabad, the ISI’s foreign intelligence liaison boss General Javed Alam Khan was furious. Not only had high-profile prisoners his men had helped capture in Pakistan vanished into another country’s intelligence-gathering program, but the CIA’s Robert Grenier, irritated by the length of time it took to gain approvals for operations, had gone over his head and asked the ISI chief General Ehsan ul-Haq for permission to speak directly to ISI field agents without a chaperone. The general had agreed.
This undermined Khan’s authority and set a dangerous precedent, he told his director general. “It was a strategic mistake,” he recalled. “We just gave the Americans the signal they could just run around Pakistan willy-nilly, talking to whoever they wanted.”70
It had not escaped Khan’s attention that newly trained CIA operatives and contractors were converging on the Islamic Republic in ever-larger numbers—many of them without any accreditation, leaving the ISI with little grasp of who was who, where they went, and what they were up to. They were taking photos of sensitive locations, intercepting ISI phones, and reading his e-mail traffic.
What was Pakistan getting out of this collaboration, Khan asked General ul-Haq, pointing to their experience with Abu Zubaydah, who his men had not got to interrogate? Would Pakistan ever have anything to show for all this assistance?
The next time Grenier met Khan, he was cold. “You can run me on a polygraph and you won’t get a blip,” he said. “I can tell lies. It’s part of my job.”71
At the end of April, Khan was out, reassigned back into the regular army as a corps commander. And he let rip about the spy agency. About 90 percent of ISI staff were military officers, but since top-scoring graduates always went into operations or training, the spy directorate received third-rate recruits. “Garbage in garbage out,” he thundered from his new position in Mangla, in Pakistan-held Kashmir. The First Strike Corps, which General Pervez Musharraf had once commanded, had the most fearsome reputation in the army. “Its only job is to attack,” said Khan, who was delighted to forget about Osama bin Laden and get back to fighting Pakistan’s real enemy: India.
Two months later, at the end of a three-year assignment, Robert Grenier left Pakistan for America’s coming war, reassigned to be the CIA’s mission manager in Iraq.72 The hunt for Osama would now be left in the hands of relative newcomers.
March 2002, Iran
The Al Qaeda exodus to Iran was at its height, with the Pakistani portal firmly shut and General Qassem Suleimani’s open-door policy having been rejuvenated by President Bush’s Axis of Evil speech. Quds Force agents had set up a refugee camp in the no-man’s-land just beyond the Iranian border with Afghanistan. Most of the families that arrived in buses and beaten-up taxis, on foot, or by pony were connected in one way or another to Al Qaeda. Taliban guards barred foreign aid workers, reporters, and any other unwanted visitors, while every few days a group of smartly dressed officials came to the camp from the Iranian side to select those it was willing to assist.73 The lucky ones were escorted in small groups to Tehran.
There they were put up at the white monolith of the four-star Howeyzeh Hotel on Taleqani Street, just down from General Suleimani’s headquarters in the former U.S. embassy. To maintain family modesty
, husbands and unmarried brothers stayed across the road at the Amir Hotel. Compared to where they had come from, the hotels felt like holiday camps.74 At the Howeyzeh, there was room service, a ladies-only gym, movies, and a swimming pool for the children. In the Amir, former fighters sat down together in comfort for the first time since 9/11. At both hotels, the Quds Force set up information points where advice was offered on getting home. For those without papers, the Quds Force drew up special “passports” that would represent the Arabs as Iraqi Shia refugees from the Iran-Iraq War. They escorted them onto flights, some choosing to relocate to Muslim majority states in Southeast Asia, including Indonesia and Malaysia. The agents were always careful to take the false identity documents back with them to cover Tehran’s tracks.75
However, the most high-ranking Al Qaeda brothers stayed separately, their numbers swelled by those who took more secretive routes in, assisted by Saif al-Adel’s Jordanian protégé, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi. Working with Gulbuddin Hekmatyar’s forces, he had set up a reception point in the desert outside the Iranian city of Mashhad. Seeking out like-minded mujahideen and mercantile criminals, he established connections with local militias running illegal smuggling routes on either side of the official border at Islam Qala.
Zarqawi brought over men so senior the Quds Force could not be trusted with them, among them Saif al-Adel, who traveled under the pseudonym Ibrahim.76 His friend, fellow Egyptian and Al Qaeda shura member Abu Mohammed al-Masri, a former professional soccer player who had helped coordinate the 1998 U.S. embassy attacks, arrived with papers that identified him as Daoud Shirizi. A third member of their group was Abu Musab al-Suri, the redheaded tactician who had joined Osama bin Laden in Tora Bora in 1996 and argued against the 9/11 attack during Al Qaeda’s last shura meeting. Al-Suri was still furious with Osama for bringing about the downfall of the Taliban and squandering Al Qaeda’s refuge, leaving them with a “meager” future, as he saw it, which they would have to spend as fugitives, dodging the international dragnet and constantly “moving between safe houses and hideouts.”77