by Mark Fallon
Uh-oh, I thought. Untying those hands would be a fucking disaster. Little did I know how much of one.
CHAPTER 2
* * *
MIND GAMES
The federal government had a frantic air about it in the weeks and months just after 9/11. Just getting back to the States from London had been an odyssey: Heathrow to Italy, Italy to Spain, then to the Azores. I finally landed at Langley Air Force Base in Norfolk, Virginia, at three in the morning on September 20, and three hours later was on a commercial flight to Tampa International Airport. When we arrived, the airport looked nothing like the ones I was used to. Virtually everyone was in a uniform of some sort. The place looked more like a military base in a combat zone than a commercial airport in America.
From Tampa International I went to MacDill Air Force Base, which was even more on edge. The base is the nerve center for Central Command (CENTCOM), which oversees a huge swath of US military operations in a part of the world that suddenly had infested national nightmares. CENTCOM’s area of responsibility stretches from Egypt to Afghanistan, including Iran, Iraq, Jordan, Lebanon, Pakistan, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Syria, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, United Arab Emirates, Uzbekistan, and Yemen—a who’s who of terrorist enclaves. Special Operations Command (SOCOM), located just down the street on the base, exercises command and control over all US Special Operations forces worldwide, everything from Green Berets to Navy SEALs—the very people likely to be most active in the opening stages of whatever retribution was to follow.
My new mission, and pretty much the hard focus of everyone at MacDill, was to find the terrorists, locate their money, ID their friends, figure out what they were planning, and make sure that plan didn’t happen. I didn’t yet know what exact position I would end up with in this new war paradigm, but I knew it would involve criminal investigations, counterintelligence operations, and interrogations with an eye to bringing the bad guys to trial, and in the months ahead I worked as hard as I could to get ready for whatever came my way.
In the world I traveled in, urgency was the rule, not the exception. Something awful and unparalleled in American history had happened. If you weren’t in near-constant motion, you felt like a slacker, almost unpatriotic. In a way, I might have felt it more than most. While I had been checking into my comfortable London hotel on 9/11, my colleagues in the home office—at the Washington Navy Yard, about a mile and a half from the US Capitol and maybe twice that distance from the White House—had been picking up word that yet another terrorist-controlled airliner was heading toward their own backyard. Dick Cheney had been hustled off to a bunker-like corridor. My friends, like a lot of DC federal workers, scrambled wherever they could.
And we all continued to scramble in one way or another for months to follow. Once Al Qaeda claimed responsibility for 9/11—and that took less than four days—there was never any question about sending Special Ops forces into Afghanistan to hunt for bin Laden. Could Iraq be far behind? That war drum was beating too, long before the US-led coalition had invaded Iraq on March 20, 2003.
What I didn’t realize in this flurry of activity was that all our efforts to track, interrogate, and prosecute the bad guys were being radically undermined by a collaboration of distinguished academics and high-ranking government officials.
At a December 15–16, 2001, gathering far from MacDill—at a lavish home in Wynnewood, a patrician, close-in western suburb of Philadelphia—a group of well-regarded academics and government officials was preparing to fight fire with fire.
Attendees at the meeting included distinguished professors from the University of Washington, Wesleyan, Duke, Penn, the University of North Carolina, and elsewhere. Foreign academics were present too: Ariel Merari, director of the Political Violence Research Unit at Tel Aviv University in Israel; S. J. Rachman, an emeritus psychology professor at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver; and Emmanuel Sivan, professor of Islamic studies at Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Government attendees included XXXXXX XXXXX XXXXX XX the FBI’s Behavioral Science Unit; XXXXX XXXXX, XXXX XXXXX XXX the FBI’s Behavioral Analysis Unit East; XXXX XXXXXXXX XXXXX XX XXX XXXXXXXXXXX XXXXXXXXXX XXXXXXXX XX XXX XXXXX XXXXXXXX XXX XXXXXXXX XXXXXXX and James Mitchell, a CIA contract psychologist.
The central figure of the gathering was Martin Seligman, the Robert A. Fox Leadership Professor of Psychology at the University of Pennsylvania. Although the meeting had been convened largely at the request of the CIA’s XXXX XXXXXXX, Seligman was its host and star attraction. The meeting was held at his house, a sprawling mansion that had once belonged to the great maestro Eugene Ormandy and now—according to Philadelphia magazine—featured a near-life-size portrait of Seligman himself over the mantelpiece.
Seligman could afford such luxuries. A former president of the American Psychological Association, he was generally credited with being the father of the highly popular field of Positive Psychology. He had already written best sellers on the subject, and would go on to write many more. Seligman’s website is rich with quotes on the subject, drawn from his 2002 mega–best seller Authentic Happiness. Many reflect the simple and optimistic style that has made him so popular: “Use your signature strengths and virtues in the service of something much larger than you are” and, “[Positive Psychology] takes you through the countryside of pleasure and gratification, up into the high country of strength and virtue, and finally to the peaks of lasting fulfillment: meaning and purpose.” Seligman had even crusaded on the subject to his own profession, using his 1998 inauguration as APA president to urge his colleagues to study what makes happy people happy.
His audience at the December 2001 meeting, though, hadn’t come to hear the host spout bromides about happiness. Their interest was in an earlier book, Seligman’s 1975 study titled “Helplessness: On Depression, Development, and Death.” While conducting psychological research on canines earlier in his career, Seligman had discovered that when dogs were indiscriminately given electric shocks they couldn’t avoid, they would fail to take action to prevent subsequent shocks even when an escape route was readily available. In effect, they “learned” helplessness.
To Seligman, this insight came with a huge upside. If people, like dogs, could learn helplessness, then they also could learn optimism as a pathway out of depression. (Thus, with many in-between steps, was born Positive Psychology.) Seligman’s audience, however, was interested in taking his research in the opposite direction: not as a pathway to positivism but as an entry point into a world where prisoners would have learned helplessness so well they would be unable to resist telling interrogators their darkest secrets.
In fact, Marty Seligman’s learned helplessness research married well with an older, deeper strain in the psychology of torture. Back in 1957, an air force social scientist named Albert D. Biderman had authored a study titled “Communist Attempts to Elicit False Confessions from Air Force Prisoners of War.” Based on interviews with air force personnel who had been held in North Korean POW camps, Biderman’s paper contained a chart of the types of physical and psychological conditions the North Koreans and their Chinese Communist mentors had created and imposed to weaken their captives’ ability to resist complying with the will of their abusers.
The study centered on how, through the manipulation of a prisoners’ environment and perceptions, both physical and mental, jailers could brainwash them. The North Korean prison-camp interrogators used isolation to deprive captives of social support and create a dependency on the interrogators for emotional support. The immediate predicament of the prisoners was totally under the control of their captors. The captors insisted on total compliance even for food, clothing, or social contact. In addition to isolation, total darkness (or, alternatively, constant bright lights), and restriction of movement were used to foster total helplessness. Biderman’s paper also described how American prisoners were tortured by making them stand “for exceedingly long periods” in “extremely cold” conditions.
The study’s accompanying “coerci
on chart” puts a finer point on the conditions prisoners were exposed to. The chart includes using humiliation and degradation to induce both mental and physical exhaustion and thus weaken the ability and will to resist complying with the abusers’ wishes. No question, the North Koreans—and their Chinese Communist instructors—were very successful at leveraging psychological torture to control their detainees and attain confessions. There was only one problem with this interrogation process: the confessions were all false. Psychologically breaking prisoners made them repeat whatever their interrogators wanted. In its purest form, breaking prisoners as Biderman described even made the prisoners believe what they said, but it was hardly a truth serum.I
Albert Biderman, it should be noted, considered such techniques, “abominable outrages. . . . Probably no other aspect of Communism reveals more thoroughly its disrespect for truth and individuals than its resort to these techniques.” But the CIA had historically kept a more open mind on the kind of practices Biderman described, and their ultimate efficacy in yielding actionable intelligence.
Ever since its founding in the wake of World War II, the CIA had been looking for consistent results in prying loose secrets from America’s enemies. Experiments included giving massive doses of LSD to unsuspecting bar patrons, while agents observed behind a one-way mirror (a suicide ended that program), as well as sensory overload and sensory deprivation techniques. In 1963 the Agency even published a secret manual titled KUBARK Counterintelligence Interrogation, which borrowed directly from the interrogation techniques Biderman had compiled. The ultimate goal, according to the manual, was “establishing a sense of omnipotence . . . and omniscience of the captor.”
True, the CIA had never achieved the success in such endeavors that it credited to the North Koreans, or the Chinese or Soviets or Germans before them. The Gestapo’s Verschärfte Vernehmung, or “sharpened interrogation” program, had a particular allure because of its heavy reliance on the “scientific method.” Not only were prisoners beaten and subjected to severe cold and other rigors, but technicians methodically recorded the results in the pursuit of perfecting methods. But maybe an American scientific discovery, “learned helplessness,” would be the pathway drug all the Agency interrogators dreamed of.
• • •
Ostensibly, the meeting at Martin Seligman’s Wynnewood mansion was of a group called Academics on Patrol and was held to discuss the subject of “How to Win the Peace” in the wake of all that had been happening in the three months since 9/11. No transcript of the proceedings has ever emerged publicly, if indeed a transcript or recording was made, but Seligman did produce a summary document shortly after the meeting that contained “six policy recommendationsII aimed at winning a victory that will lastingly contain global terrorism.” None of the six recommendations dealt even indirectly with using “learned helplessness” to break the will of captives, and Seligman has said publicly many times that the subject of torture was never raised at the meeting.
Seligman has made the same assertion about a three-hour talk he gave four months later, in April 2002, at the navy’s SERE school in San Diego. SERE, pronounced “sear,” is an acronym for Survival, Evasion, Resistance, and Escape. The training was developed to help Special Forces and other military avoid being captured. Much of the training is similar to the pumped-up outdoorsmen skills Sylvester Stallone’s John Rambo used in First Blood: wilderness survival, building fires, navigating, emergency first aid, camouflage, and so on, but there’s also a segment about how to survive if you are caught, including resistance to interrogation. For verisimilitude, personnel who take SERE training are tortured to get a taste of what kind of treatment they might be subject to if captured by an enemy so brutal it doesn’t observe the Geneva Conventions on such matters.
Whatever Seligman’s intent, the inescapable facts are: A) his concept of learned helplessness became central to interrogation techniques used in the years just after 9/11, B) those techniques at the very least would freely violate the Geneva Conventions on torture, and C) the biggest evangelists for learned helplessness were in many cases alumni of either the Wynnewood meeting, Seligman’s SERE school talk, or—in the case of James Mitchell—both.
A psychologist well schooled in SERE resistance principles, Jim Mitchell had retired from the US Air Force the previous May and was working as a private contractor to the CIA at the time of the Wynnewood gathering. So inspired was Mitchell by Seligman’s presentation on learned helplessness that he almost immediately began collaborating with his friend, John “Bruce” Jessen, chief of psychology services for the Joint Personnel Recovery Agency (JPRA), which oversaw the SERE program.
With astonishing speed, Mitchell and Jessen coauthored two February 2002 documents. The first, “Recognizing and Developing Countermeasures to Al-Qa’ida Resistance to Interrogation Techniques: A Resistance Training Perspective,” drew heavily on established SERE protocols. The second, a military memo circulated by Jessen, took the next step. Titled “Prisoner Handling Recommendations,” it incorporated what both men had quickly absorbed about learned helplessness and what they already knew about SERE, and advanced specific interrogation protocols. (The memo remains classified today, a decade and a half after it was circulated to those with proper clearance.)
Among the doctors’ recommendations: shoving detainees into a wall, grabbing and slapping them, placing them in cramped and dark confinement boxes with or without insects to exploit any potential phobias (David Lean’s 1957 film The Bridge on the River Kwai comes to mind, for those old enough to remember it), prolonged standing, stress positions, sleep deprivation, and waterboarding to produce the sensation of drowning and suffocation—i.e., torture.
As subsequent investigations would show, neither Mitchell nor Jessen had any legitimate interrogation experience. Mitchell’s SERE training involved resisting illegal interrogation tactics, not conducting successful legal ones. And neither had more than a superficial understanding of the Middle East or Al Qaeda. What they did have, though, was an eerie sense of timing, and in the post-9/11 chaos, that was enough to make both of them rich.
Almost immediately after the joint-authored documents, Jessen retired from the military, joined the private sector, and began doing contract work, with Mitchell, for the CIA. Eventually, the two psychologists formed a company they called Mitchell Jessen & Associates. The “associates” came to include two prominent ex-CIA officials. The first, XXXX XXXXXXX, had helped arrange the December 2001 meeting at Seligman’s house and had held a high-ranking position at the CIA’s Research and Analysis Branch. The second was psychologist XXXX XXXXXXXXX, who quit the CIA to join Mitchell and Jessen. After leaving, she maintained close contacts at the highest levels of the CIA, including one of the agency’s senior lawyers—and her husbandXXXXXXXXX XXXXXXX.
A rising tide lifts all ships, and a $181 million consulting contract with the CIA assured everyone at Mitchell Jessen & Associates would be floating high. Yet another beneficiary of Mitchell and Jessen’s great success was Joseph Matarazzo, an Oregon psychologist who, like Seligman, had previously served as president of the American Psychological Association. Matarazzo owned 1 percent of Mitchell and Jessen’s company. Then in his late eighties, Matarazzo was still consulting occasionally on professional issues and delivered an opinion that sleep deprivation—one of the interrogation methods Mitchell and Jessen were promoting—did not necessarily amount to torture.
Mitchell and Jessen hadn’t invented anything new. They simply took the interrogation practices Albert Biderman had charted in the mid-1950s, married them with what Martin Seligman had uncovered while randomly shocking dogs in the 1970s, and called the hybrid enhanced interrogation techniques—EITs for short. The “enhanced” part of that was learned helplessness. Together, the two psychologists and their all-star ex-CIA team took EITs on the road, seeking converts to the theory that learned helplessness created a baseline condition that would ultimately result in the acquisition of accurate and reliable information.
I didn’t find out about the actual meeting at Marty Seligman’s house until years later, but I was embedded deeply enough in the counterterrorism community that I began picking up vibes even before Mitchell and Jessen published their February 2002 paper about learned helplessness and how experiments that had involved torturing dogs were somehow going to usher in a whole new era of hyper-effective interrogation. I remember worrying at the time that any interrogation approach that stressed harsh methods might play to the emotional strain that so many of us had been under since 9/11. Revenge in one form or another was on nearly everyone’s mind. I also remember thinking that, like so many other counterintelligence fads, this too would pass.
For starters, we had shown time and again at the NCIS that building a relationship with detainees ultimately yielded far more useful intelligence than slapping them around the interrogation room, or worse. The more you beat up on people, the harder they work to figure out what you want to hear. In essence, interrogators are instructing them on the truth they must admit to stop the pain—the false confessions that Albert Biderman studied so intently. Our approach went in the exact opposite direction: detainees end up telling their interrogators the truth because they have earned the right to know it. Judge for yourself which method is likely to produce a “truth” that is really true.
What’s more, I was close to a top-notch CIA operational psychologist, XX XXXXX XXXXXXX, who was a strong advocate of rapport-based interrogating and would be sure to resist any movement toward the sort of brutality learned helplessness implied, especially when practiced on human beings. And XXXXXXX wasn’t alone at the CIA in favoring our approach.