The Midnight House jw-4

by Alex Berenson

  “This thing you’re living, I’m sorry for it. For you. But whoever did this, they’re still out there. You can help us. Help yourself.”

  “Please leave my house.”

  WELLS LEFT CALLAR’S HAUNTED castle behind. Ten minutes later he stopped at a Starbucks, ordered a large black coffee — he could never bring himself to say venti. He found a table in the corner and spent an hour poring over the police and FBI files on crazy Steve Callar, trying to figure out if Callar could have killed his wife. For whatever reason.

  But he couldn’t have. Not unless he’d figured out how to teleport the six hundred miles from Phoenix to San Diego. During his weekend in Arizona, he’d only been off shift once, between midnight and 8 a.m. on Sunday. The last flight from Phoenix to San Diego was at 9:55 p.m. Callar couldn’t possibly have made it.

  SO WELLS HEADED UP the 5, leaving San Diego behind and heading for Los Angeles and a red-eye back to Washington. But he made one stop along the way, at a bookstore in Anaheim, where he leafed through a shelf of histories about Germany and World War II, wondering what had provoked Jerry Williams to start reading about the Nazis.

  17

  STARE KIEJKUTY. JULY 2008

  When Kenneth Karp stepped into Mohammed Fariz’s cell, Mohammed sat in his usual position, rocking back and forth in the right rear corner. He closed his eyes as Karp slid the door shut.

  “Come on, dude,” Karp said. “You’re hurting my feelings.”

  Mohammed was the forgotten detainee, the second Pakistani arrested during the raid in Islamabad, the seventeen-year-old in the Batman T-shirt who’d shot Dwayne Maggs in the leg and made a fuss on the flight between Pakistan and Poland.

  In his month at the Midnight House, Mohammed had been difficult. Some days he read his Quran, prayed on a regular schedule, ate his meals without complaint. But others he spent mumbling to himself and squatting in a corner of his cell. Two days before he had refused his dinner, violating 673’s rules, which required detainees to eat every day.

  The Rangers called Karp to find out why.

  “It’s poison,” Mohammed said.

  “It’s the same as we eat,” Karp said. Which wasn’t exactly true. Mohammed and bin Zari got the leftovers from the base cafeteria. Breakfast was an overripe banana, hunks of bread, and a strange sugary jam. Lunch was toast and soup. Dinner was overcooked mystery meat with soggy rice or french fries that seemed to be made out of cardboard. And the portions were small, a deliberate effort to ensure that the prisoners were always slightly hungry.

  But even if the food wasn’t gourmet, Karp could promise it hadn’t been spiked. He wasn’t a fan of giving prisoners LSD or PCP. The effects were too uncertain. Some guys even enjoyed the trips.

  Karp picked up the blue plastic bowl that held Mohammed’s dinner, lifted a piece of meat to his mouth. Salty, leathery, tasteless, with bits of gristle that had a sandy texture. “Yummy,” he said, the meat still in his mouth. He choked it down. “See. It’s fine.”

  He handed the bowl to Mohammed, who tossed it against the wall.

  Under other circumstances, that misbehavior would have earned Mohammed a week in a punishment cell. But Karp and the rest of 673 were busy with bin Zari. Karp couldn’t deal with another problem.

  “Fine, Mohammed,” he said in Pashto. “You want to be hungry, your choice.” For two days, Mohammed went back to eating, and Karp thought he had learned his lesson. But now he was back in the corner.

  IN CIA JARGON, detainees like Mohammed were “dancers.” They weren’t the most openly resistant prisoners. But their unpredictable cycles of defiance and cooperation made them among the most difficult detainees.

  Some dancers were mentally unstable, unable to distinguish fantasy from reality. Others used the technique as a form of passive resistance, a way to incite their jailers. Openly angry prisoners invited brutal retaliation. By alternating—“dancing”—between resistance and compliance, a canny jihadi could slow an interrogation, giving himself time to resist.

  Within the agency, the most famous dancer was a Taliban commander who went by the single name Jadhouri. In 2006, a Ranger platoon in Afghanistan captured Jadhouri in anattack on a Talib-controlled village near the Pakistan border. The raid had been routine, except at the end, when Jadhouri ran out of a one-room hut, his hands raised in surrender. Seconds later, a grenade blew out the hut. When the Rangers checked inside, they found fragments of a laptop. Jadhouri had apparently taken the time to strap a grenade to the computer’s case before giving up. The Rangers did what they could to recover the laptop, but the explosion had launched it to computer heaven.

  Jadhouri was sent to the prison at Bagram, the American air base north of Kabul, where the interrogators took over. For a week, he insisted that the Rangers were mistaken about the laptop. The grenade had blown up accidentally, he said. His questioners lost patience, threatened to send him to Guantánamo, doused him with buckets of cold water. Jadhouri stopped talking. In response, he was kept awake for sixty hours straight. Still, he refused to speak.

  Then, on a December Sunday a week before Christmas, a lung-burning wind blowing off the Kush, Jadhouri produced a single piece of toilet paper that became known as the Square. On it he had drawn squiggles and crosses — representing streams and mountains — and written the names of three North-West Frontier villages. At its center, a small X, which Jadhouri claimed represented a hideout used by Osama bin Laden. Jadhouri said he was in regular touch with bin Laden’s bodyguards and that he had destroyed the laptop because it held messages from bin Laden.

  The interrogators at Bagram viewed the Square skeptically. Still: bin Laden. And Jadhouri must have had some reason for blowing up the laptop.

  Unfortunately, the Square itself was too small and badly drawn to be deciphered. Giving Jadhouri access to mapmaking software was unthinkable, so the interrogators made him redraw the map on a whiteboard. When Jadhouri pronounced himself finished, the whiteboard was photographed and the images uploaded to the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency, the Defense Department unit responsible for mapping the world.

  Two days later, the NGIA’s verdict came back. The map was worse than useless. Intentionally or accidentally, Jadhouri’s version of the North-West Frontier included roads that didn’t exist and a river that seemed to be in Tajikistan. Even disregarding those errors, the target area covered four hundred square miles. Either Jadhouri had a terrible sense of direction or the map was entirely fictitious.

  Against their better judgment, the interrogators took one more shot, bringing in an NGIA mapmaker who specialized in central Asian geography. After a day, the mapmaker reported back that the more questions Jadhouri answered, the vaguer the map became. Jadhouri spent two weeks in an isolation cell as punishment.

  When he was released, he had a gift for his captors: another square, this one supposedly revealing bin Laden’s “true and correct” location. By then even the most humorless of the interrogators got the joke. Jadhouri was returned to the general prison population and encouraged to use toilet paper for its intended purpose. The mystery of the exploding laptop was never solved.

  The legend of the Square quickly passed from Bagram to Guantánamo and the rest of the secret prisons the CIA had scattered around the globe. Along the way, it acquired flourishes meant to prove its ridiculousness. In one, Jadhouri had marked the Square in blood rather than ink. In another, the toilet paper was already partially used. And in a third, the fiction wasn’t discovered until two Special Operations teams had been put in the air for an attack on the hideout.

  KARP DIDN’T FIND the stories funny. The interrogators in Bagram should never have believed such an obvious lie. Even worse, they’d failed to punish Jadhouri properly for embarrassing them. The test of wills between detainees and interrogators never ended. Whenever a prisoner won, even for a single day, his victory encouraged other detainees to resist. Isolating prisoners destroyed that dynamic, one reason that the Midnight House worked so well. Here, detainees couldn’t de
pend on a big group to sustain them.

  For interrogations to succeed, detainees had to feel — not just understand but feel—that they were beaten, Karp thought. They had to wake up every day knowing that their captors controlled every choice they made. Only then would they tell the truth.

  In the years immediately after 9/11, Karp’s view had been standard at the agency and the Pentagon. But now Langley and the army had — officially, anyway — backed away from using force or coercion on detainees. At Guantánamo, the FBI’s hands-off model was the default. The Feds argued that rough tactics were illegal, made prosecutions impossible, and didn’t work anyway. Ill treatment made detainees more resistant, not less. The way to get information was to build relationships with prisoners and reward them for help.

  In the FBI model, a dishonest detainee was subject to steady questioning that made him layer lie upon lie on his answers. Eventually, his story collapsed of its own weight. At that point, the agents demanded the truth, and the detainee — knowing that he’d been beaten — gave in. The technique was a classic investigative strategy that detectives in the United States had used for generations.

  To which Karp could only say, What planet are you on? He had never seen a prisoner who minded being caught in a lie. Arabs and Afghans, especially, loved to tell tales. Catch them lying, break down their stories, and they apologized, smiled, and started all over again.

  And only a few detainees could be bribed, in Karp’s experience. Most jihadis sneered at offers of books, or better food, or extra time to exercise. Nor were they frightened by the threat that they’d spend their lives in prison, especially not at Guantánamo, where they lived among fellow Muslims. No, they needed to know they would be punished for lying, or refusing to talk. They needed to feel fear. They needed to be broken. Then they would tell the truth. Sometimes.

  Anyone who thought that the FBI’s tactics would work against jihadis needed to look at American prisons, which were filled with criminals who had accepted long jail terms instead of testifying against friends or relatives in return for shorter sentences. Stop snitching. Hell, Barry Bonds’s trainer had gone to jail instead of admitting what he knew about Bonds’s steroid use. And the guy had won. Eventually, the Feds had let him out. Which was fine, as far as Karp was concerned. Steroid use wasn’t a capital crime.

  But if the trainer kept his mouth shut for no better reason than to protect Barry Bonds, nobody should be surprised when religious fanatics weren’t helpful to their interrogators. When Karp pointed out these inconvenient facts to his counterparts at the FBI, and asked, “So, what do we do with the seventy percent of the jihadis who flat-out refuse to talk?” their answer was, “We lock ’em up and keep working.”

  That argument had carried the day, more or less. Coercive interrogations had once been discussed at the highest levels of the Pentagon, Langley, and the White House. No longer. The secret charter that 673 had received from the President said only that the members of the unit couldn’t be prosecuted. The charter said nothing about why such an exemption might be necessary. The people in charge still wanted the information that 673 could provide, but they no longer wanted to know how 673 was getting it. Karp understood. September 11 had faded. Most Americans had forgotten Osama bin Laden existed.

  But the threat hadn’t changed, Karp thought. Just because Al Qaeda hadn’t pulled off an attack on American soil since 2001 didn’t mean it had stopped trying. And Pakistan was more volatile than ever. If it fell to an Islamist coup, Al Qaeda would have a nuclear bomb within its grasp. Karp sometimes thought that his mission was to make himself the most hated man in America, because he’d be hated only as long as the threat seemed unreal.

  So, Karp counted himself lucky to be at the Midnight House, where he could operate the way he needed to. The top guys at the agency, the army, they knew the truth. Even if they would no longer admit it. They knew the United States needed one prison where its interrogators wouldn’t have lawyers or the Red Cross watching them.

  KARP STEPPED close to Mohammed, stood over him.

  “Mohammed.”

  “Who are you?” Mohammed said in Pashto. “Why do you bother me?”

  Karp picked him up, shoved him against the rough wall of the cell. Mohammed’s muscles twitched, and Karp wished the kid would fight him a little, come back to earth. But he didn’t. His black eyes were dull, his breath bitter, as though something inside him was rotting. He had left Poland, gone somewhere Karp couldn’t reach.

  “You know who I am,” Karp said. “What’s my name? Look at me. Tell me my name.”

  “You say your name is Jim. But I know that’s not your name.”

  Indeed, Karp used “Jim” as his alias with detainees.

  “Why do you say that?”

  “The others, they tell me.”

  Karp controlled his surprise. No one else in 673 spoke Pashto. And no one should have told Mohammed about the aliases, anyway, though most prisoners guessed.

  “Who? ”

  “The ones that come when you go. They talk to me. They tell me you stand up too straight.”

  “Stand too straight? What are you talking about?”

  Karp let him go. Mohammed slumped down the wall. When he reached the floor, he raised his head, locked eyes with Karp. He seemed to be back in the cell, at least temporarily.

  “Are you a dancer?”Karp said.

  Mohammed shook his head.

  “You know what I’m asking, Mohammed?”

  “No.”

  “A dancer, that’s someone who says whatever comes into his mind, doesn’t tell me the truth.”

  “I tell the truth, sir. Always.”

  “What’s my name?”

  “Ishmael.”

  “Ishmael.”

  “You’re a prophet. Like me.”

  “You’re right,” Karp said. “I’m a prophet. And I predict pain for you, you keep this up.” He reached for Mohammed—

  “JIM.”

  Karp turned to see Rachel Callar outside the cell.

  “I need to talk to you.”

  Karp seemed about to argue but instead turned and walked out, locking the cell. She led him into the empty unlocked cell next to Mohammed’s.

  “Doctor,” Karp said. “To what do I owe the pleasure?”

  “You need to be careful with him.”

  “How’s that again?”

  “He’s in trouble, Ken. He’s got an axis-one disorder, and it’s getting worse.”

  As she’d expected, Karp had no idea what she meant, though she knew he would sooner submit to a night in the punishment box than admit his ignorance.

  “Axis one. Schizophrenia, major depression with psychotic symptoms. Severe mental illness. The way he sits in the corner, talking to himself. The way he won’t take care of himself. He’s coming unglued.”

  “How would you know? You don’t speak Pashto.”

  “I’ve picked up a little, the last year. Anyway, it’s obvious.”

  “He could be faking.”

  “He’s not smart enough.”

  “I’ve seen more of these guys than you.”

  “And I’ve seen more schizophrenics than you.”

  “Congratulations.”

  Callar shook her head. Blowing up at Karp wouldn’t serve her. Doctors in general and psychiatrists in particular were supposed to stay serene. I’ve seen everything, and nothing fazes me. She’d mastered the drill in residency. She’d even kept her cool in the emergency room one Thanksgiving night when a drunk sat up in his cot and projectile-vomited a mix of liquor-store rum and soup-kitchen turkey in her face.

  But now she wished she felt as calm as she looked. This relentless antagonism, not just from Karp but from Terreri and Jack Fisher, was grinding her down. Last night she’d dreamed that she stood atop an endless tightrope, nothing below her, not a net or flat ground or even a canyon, nothing but a black void. Nothing to do but keep walking. And then she fell.

  She hadn’t had that dream since medical school.


  “Ken. Let’s just talk it out. Mohammed hasn’t given us anything.”

  “Not yet.”

  “And when you talk to him, he doesn’t make a lot of sense.”

  “Sometimes.”

  “And odds are he doesn’t have much for us. Given his age, given his probable role in the bombing—”

  “We won’t know unless we ask.”

  “This place is incredibly stressful for him. He knows he can be punished at any time. He has no control over his sleep, his eating—”

  “It’s called prison.”

  “Even if you’re mentally healthy, prison is difficult. And that’s if you know how long you’re in, where you are. I don’t know whether it’s genetic or whether he had some serious trauma as an adolescent, but he’s in no shape for this place.”

  “Serious trauma as an adolescent.” Karp actually laughed. “Like every other kid in Pakistan. Doc-tor”—Karp made the word sound ridiculous—“this kid shot one of our guys. He’s a terrorist.”

  “I’m not saying he’s not.”

  “Good. Then let me do my job. You have an objection, talk to the colonel.”

  And Karp walked out.

  A flush rose in Callar’s cheeks. She tilted her head, looked at the chipped concrete ceiling, and counted seconds until her emotions vanished and she turned clear as a plate-glass window. Steve had been right. She shouldn’t have taken the job. But she couldn’t let it beat her, couldn’t let them beat her. She couldn’t fail. Not again.

  KARP LOOKED INTO Mohammed’s cell. The kid lay on his cot, his eyes closed, his chest barely moving. Karp reached for the cell door and then hesitated. The truth was that the shrink was half right. Mohammed didn’t belong here. Not because he was crazy, whatever nonsense he was sputtering.

  “Axis one, my ass,” Karp mumbled in Callar’s direction. Trying to assert her authority with this psychiatric mumbo jumbo. Of course Mohammed was stressed out and paranoid. He was supposed to be. He was here for an interrogation, not spa treatment.