by John Case
She kept Buckley’s picture in a silver frame on the dresser in her bedroom. It was there among pictures of her family: mom and dad, her sister, niece, and … Bill. Anyone who saw the picture would assume that the man in the frame was a relative, a husband, or a boyfriend. But the truth was, they’d never met. He was there on the dresser as a daily reminder, an object lesson in what not to do.
In the short time that she’d been chief of station in Kuala Lumpur, Andrea had given a lot of thought to Buckley. A patriot who built miniature dioramas of Revolutionary War battles, he’d spent much of his life abroad, moving from one flyblown Muslim capital to another, fighting a precocious and dirty war against what the Arabs were beginning to call “al-Qaeda” – The Base.
A grim and secretive man, he owned neither house nor apartment. Home was a suite in an executive hotel in downtown Washington.
And he was obviously his own worst enemy. Reading the reports, it was clear to Andrea that Buckley was as much a victim of his own hubris as he was of the terrorists who’d kidnapped him. His sense of immunity was as profound as it was mistaken. Living in the midst of an urban guerrilla war, in a city where mortar attacks were commonplace, Buckley chose to live in a penthouse. In West Beirut! To say it was the wrong side of town was to understate the matter.
Beirut was cleft in two by the Green Line, a bombed-out no-man’s-land that divided the city into East and West, Christian and Muslim. In East Beirut, people prayed to Jesus. In West Beirut, they prayed to Allah.
What was he thinking? Andrea wondered. A penthouse in West Beirut? He might as well have put up a tent on a firing range.
Andrea moved from one asana to another. With glacial grace, she performed the Sun Salutation, raising her face toward the Petronas Towers. Buckley! she thought. How macho! The most important spook in the Middle East didn’t even have a chase car to follow him to work.
In the end, his abduction took less than a minute. Buckley’s car, a beige Honda, was parked outside his apartment building on the Rue Tanoukhi. As he pulled away from the curb, a white Renault cut in front of him, blocking the way. Two men jumped from the Renault, waving guns and shouting. One of the kidnappers pulled Buckley from his car. Another grabbed his briefcase.
Pushed onto the floor of the Renault, the CIA man was covered with a blanket and told to keep his mouth shut. The Renault took off, turned a corner, and headed for the Corniche. Within minutes, it was stopped at a checkpoint run by an Islamic militia. Gunmen waved the gunmen on. From the checkpoint, it was a short drive to the slums. There, the chief of station was taken to a windowless basement, where he was blindfolded and chained to an eyebolt in the floor.
A report from an agent in Hezbollah stated that Buckley’s interrogation lasted months. The source reported that the American had been tortured with the help of a Palestinian doctor, who administered drugs and monitored the prisoner’s vital signs.
The interrogation was said to focus on CIA operations in Lebanon, including kidnappings and assassinations that the Agency had “outsourced” to allies in the Lebanese armed forces and Christian militias.
From there, the area of inquiry expanded to include Buckley’s earlier assignments. He’d worked in Egypt and Syria, and served on the CIA review board that evaluates agents in the Middle East. That in itself should have disqualified him from serving in the area, because once he was kidnapped, it ensured that the cover of every agent in the Middle East was blown.
They got him back in a coffin. Whether Buckley had been tortured to death or died of malignant neglect was uncertain. Neither was it known where he’d been kept during his long months of imprisonment or how often he’d been moved.
Andrea had read the accounts of other hostages who told of being moved from one dungeon to another in the cruelest of possible ways. Bound and gagged, the prisoners were wedged into boxes attached to the undersides of trucks. The only air available to them was a mixture of diesel fumes and dust.
Catch a cold, and you could be dead.
The only way to get through something like that was to zombie out. Andrea had trained for precisely that contingency. Like every other CIA officer sent to a danger post, she’d been subjected to mock interrogations at the Farm, the Agency’s training facility near Williamsburg, Virginia. As a part of that training, she’d been “encrated.” That’s what they called it when they stuffed you into a box and left you to think about it for a couple of hours. Or a couple of days.
And that was why she did yoga exercises every morning. It wasn’t so much the stretching as the breathing. After years of practice, she found that she could lower her resting heartbeat to fewer than thirty beats a minute. Any lower, and she’d have been hibernating or dead. Which was more or less what you wanted to be if you woke up in a box.
A quavering beep floated up from the watch on her wrist, reminding her that it was time to get going. She had an appointment at the regional interrogation center that morning, and she didn’t want to be late. A man was being tortured on her behalf. The least she could do was watch.
Eleven
AS THE EMBASSY’S Mercedes wound its way through the hills outside the city, Andrea sat in the backseat, crossing and uncrossing her legs, reading a report. The report was four days old, and this was the third time she’d gone over it.
In the front seat, Marine sergeant Nilthon Alvarado adjusted the rearview mirror, ostensibly to see if they were being followed, in fact to admire the chief of station’s legs.
The report was from the MSB, the Special Branch of the Royal Malaysia Police. It concerned a CIA-MSB operation targeting a thug named Nik Awad, who was known to be a liaison between the Kumpulan Militan Malaysia (KMM) and Jemaah Islamiyah (JI). These were terrorist networks hell-bent on making Malaysia part of an Islamic republic whose borders would stretch from northern Thailand to the farthest island in the Philippines. The CIA’s interest was parochial. Awad was thought to be planning an attack on the American military base in Sumatra.
Recently, telephone surveillance had generated an interesting lead. In a call from Berlin, Awad was asked to facilitate the visit of “a friend from Beirut.” The friend was identified only as “Aamm Hakim,” and Awad was to meet him at Subang Airport.
Since Awad was going to be detained anyway, the Special Branch decided to wait for the friend’s arrival. A day or two would make no difference, and Subang Airport was as good a place as any to take Awad down. When the time came, plainclothes MSB officers fell in step behind Awad as he waded into the crowd in the Arrivals terminal. When he exchanged abrazos with a man coming out of Customs, they swooped.
Which is when it got interesting. “Aamm Hakim” was traveling on a Syrian passport issued to a man named “Badr Faris.” The passport appeared to be valid, and Mr. Faris was not on any of the lookout lists. From an intelligence standpoint, he was cherry. And having just entered the country, he’d done nothing wrong, so there were no real grounds for holding him. Not even under the Internal Security Act.
Special Branch was disappointed. With hopes of netting a big fish, instead, they had a businessman who claimed to be looking for a site on which to build a condom factory. They were skeptical, but there was nothing they could do. The man’s political views were unknown, and he didn’t seem particularly religious. On the contrary, “Faris” was a clean-shaven businessman who obviously enjoyed himself. His suitcase contained a bottle of Jack Daniel’s, a photomagazine called Beaver Hunt, and a business card for an erotic massage and escort service in Beirut.
As to the call from Berlin, Faris claimed he knew nothing about it. “A friend in Beirut offered to put me in touch with Mr. Awad. Said he could be helpful. I thought, okay, why not? I assumed my friend placed the call himself, but … apparently not. As to who he called in Berlin, I have no idea. I’ve never been there.”
So how had Awad recognized him?
Oh, you know how it is … I was looking for him, he was looking for me. We saw each other looking around …
Andrea look
ed up from the report. So why did they call him “Aamm Hakim”? she wondered. “Aamm” was an Arab honorific, referring to an uncle on the paternal side. If Faris was the uncle, who was the nephew? Was it the guy in Berlin who’d placed the call? Or was it Awad himself? It had to be one or the other, and yet, according to Faris, he didn’t know either of them. Obviously, Faris was lying.
Andrea’s eyes returned to the report.
After an hour of questioning, the MSB agents were about to let Faris go, when one of the detectives noticed something about his shirt collar. “What is that?” he asked, reaching for the collar.
All hell broke loose. Coming out of his chair, Faris drop-kicked the detective in the balls, and bolted for the door. That was as far as he got. One cop dragged him to the floor, while another pinned him by the arms. He had something in his hand that he wouldn’t let go of – until the detective with the sore balls stomped on his elbow, snapping the ulna.
A pill rolled onto the linoleum and, suddenly, it was clear that Mr. Faris was no ordinary businessman.
Since then, Andrea had visited the interrogation center on two occasions. Each time, she sat outside Room 11, listening through headphones to what the Malaysians called a “disciplinary interrogation.” If she had a question, she would ask it of Jim Banerjee, MSB’s liaison to the Agency, and Banerjee would put the question to the interrogators in the room. In this way, Andrea could truthfully say that she had not participated in Mr. Faris’s questioning (or “so-called torture”).
By then, “Faris” was more subdued than he’d been at the airport. No more shouts of “God is great!” Instead, there was a lot of heavy breathing, punctuated by questions posed in a voice that was alternately angry and cajoling. The answers came with a quaver, sometimes followed by a crackle of electricity as Mr. Faris’s inquisitors lit him up with a stun gun.
So far, they’d learned almost nothing. However, the fingerprint check had come back positive. The detainee’s real name was Hakim Abdul-Bakr Mussawi. Special Branch files identified Mussawi as a fifty-four-year-old Egyptian who’d been expelled from the Muslim Brotherhood twenty years earlier for excessive militance. Since then, he had been implicated in the activities of the KMM, Jemaah Islamiyah, and the Baalbek-based Coalition of the Oppressed of the Earth. There were warrants for him in his homeland and five other countries. Both the Ministry of the Interior in Oman and the FBI were offering rewards.
But if Andrea had anything to say about the matter, it would be a while before they’d learn about Hakim. There was no point in making a splash – it would just send Hakim’s friends packing. Better to keep him under wraps. Maybe she could leverage him.
The interrogation center was a complex of modern buildings about twenty miles from Kuala Lumpur. Built with U.S. funds in the aftermath of 9/11, it lay at the end of a two-lane access road, behind a juggernaut of concrete barriers and electrified fences topped with concertina wire.
Banerjee was waiting for her at the registration desk on the mezzanine. He was a tall, ethnic Indian with a pockmarked face and a razor scar under his chin, where a thief had tried to kill him. Andrea had met him in the States two years earlier, when he’d attended an antiterrorist training module at the Farm. A Special Branch lieutenant in his early thirties, Banerjee liked to skydive on weekends, jumping out of the plane with his pet python, Roosevelt, draped over his shoulders.
He handed Andrea a visitor’s pass. “You signing in?”
She answered with a Mona Lisa smile and a little shake of her head.
Banerjee shrugged, and swiped his pass through a slot in one of the turnstiles. “After you.”
“What about Dr. Najib?”
“He’s waiting for us,” Banerjee told her.
“Good. There’s something I’d like to try.”
“And you need a doctor for it?”
Andrea shrugged. “It’s just a precaution. I don’t want to kill the guy.” She paused. “How is he, anyway?”
Banerjee rolled his eyes. “Same as yesterday. I think he’s still in capture shock.”
The interrogation rooms were in the subbasement. Stepping into the elevator, Banerjee pressed the button for B-2. As the doors closed, Muzak played quietly from a speaker above their heads … We all live in a yellow submarine …
“I meant to ask …” Andrea said. “Have you talked to the FBI?”
“Not yet.”
Andrea was pleased. “So they aren’t in the picture.”
“Well, they know about Awad. We’re sending them dailies of his interviews. But I don’t think anyone’s said anything about Faris.”
“Faris?”
“That’s the name on his passport,” Banerjee told her.
“I know, but – What about the fingerprints?”
“Oh, that! Yeah, that’s … that’s a real contradiction. We’re looking into it.”
Andrea gave him her searchlight smile. “So …”
“So, he’s just another detainee. For now, anyway.”
Her smile became even wider. Banerjee thought she had the whitest and most even teeth he’d ever seen. “How long can you keep it like that?”
The lieutenant looked doubtful. “Not long.”
“Well …”
They both knew that the longer Hakim Mussawi remained in Malaysian custody, the more they would get out of him. While the CIA and the military had taken off the gloves after 9/11, they’d put them back on more recently. For a while, torture had been defined in terms of “organ failure.” No organ failure, no torture. Then Abu Ghraib hit the fan and suddenly, hostile interrogation techniques required legal reviews and special permissions that were not granted often enough – to Andrea’s way of thinking.
No one wanted his or her name on a piece of paper saying yes, it was okay to beat the crap out of a prisoner, or, if the spirit moved you, to immerse him in a tub of lye. It could screw up your whole career path.
After the recreational torture at Abu Ghraib was exposed, new protocols went into effect. It was still okay to torture people, but you couldn’t actually hurt them. You could terrorize them, but you couldn’t flay them.
Discomfort, even “intense discomfort,” was okay, but only for a while. Prisoners might be placed in stress positions, but there were limits. Only one hour at a time, and no more than four hours in a day.
This would not break a hard man. Better, then, to humiliate him, or bring him to tears by threats to a loved one. That took time, though, and if you were in a hurry, you wanted an ally like Malaysia, which had yet to ratify the Optional Protocol to the United Nations Convention Against Torture. If the MSB wanted to play by the old rules, sliding splinters of glass and bamboo under the fingernails of the people they detained, that was an internal matter. So long as Andrea didn’t enter the room or ask a direct question, the CIA could take the position that it had nothing to do with the interrogation.
The funny thing, Andrea reflected, was all the crap about whether torture actually worked. Senator McCain insisted that it didn’t, but Andrea could show him a lot of Vietnamese video that gave the lie to that. In her experience, torture worked a treat. Liberals denied it, but that was because they didn’t want to deal with it.
If torture didn’t work, why did the Agency fight so hard to be exempted from prohibitions of the practice? If torture was ineffective, why was it so widely practiced? The fact was, if you tore someone’s fingernails out, that person would probably answer your questions – and truthfully, too, so long as the person was led to believe that things would go harder if the information was found to be false.
Of course, there were limits. Torture stopped working when the person being questioned ran out of secrets. At that point, the subject would begin to make things up to avoid further punishment. But a skilled interrogator would usually know when that point was reached. It was the point at which the subject agreed that, yes, he’d shot John F. Kennedy and set fire to the Reichstag.
“After you …” Banerjee stepped aside as the elevator doo
rs slid open. They entered a vestibule at the end of a long, wide corridor. Fluorescent lights, tiled walls. In some ways, the center resembled a hospital, except that people went in healthy and came out sick – if they came out at all.
A security officer looked up from behind a gray metal desk.
“I’ll sign,” Banerjee said.
The guard handed him a pen. Banerjee scribbled in the Visitor’s Log, checked his watch, and noted the time. Under “Detainee,” he printed the name “Faris.”
The guard glanced at the book, then jerked his head toward the corridor. “Number Eleven,” he said. “I’ll tell Dr. Najib.” He picked up the phone and dialed an extension.
Banerjee led the way. Ahead of them, a man in camouflage fatigues was trying to maneuver a wheelchair through the doorway to one of the rooms. Banerjee gave him a hand with the door, and Andrea saw that it was a woman in the chair, and that she was cuffed to the frame. Her chin was on her chest, and she seemed to be praying.
Then the door closed, and they continued walking toward Room 11. Andrea was struck by how wide the corridor was, as wide almost as the ones in Langley. And like the corridors at home, this one had a color-coded stripe running horizontally along one wall, all the way down to the end. It was a yellow stripe, about six inches wide, but its purpose was the same as the ones at headquarters. Basically, they let people know at a glance if you were somewhere you didn’t belong. Red pass, yellow stripe – you wouldn’t get far.
Arriving at the door to Room 11, Andrea hesitated. Once she entered the room, she was crossing a line. She would no longer be an observer, but a participant.
It’s worth it, she thought.
Still, she hesitated. The room would stink. Places like this always did. Fear and anger soured the sweat of everyone in the room. And if it got rough, there would be other smells as well. Reaching into her handbag, Andrea removed a small jar of Vicks VapoRub. Unscrewing the cap, she dipped a pinky into the grease, then dabbed a bit at each of her nostrils. It was a trick she’d learned in college, working part-time on the weekends at the city morgue. As always, the mentholated scent delivered a rush of half-remembered sensations. For an instant, she was ten again, lying in bed with a cold, the humidifier puffing away at her bedside.