by Mark Fallon
“The task force they envision would put the FBI under army officers,” I said, looking around the table. “Everybody knows that would be a nonstarter for the Bureau. And a system that marginalizes the group with the most experience and intel dealing with Al Qaeda . . .” I paused. “From my perspective, it’s a mistake.”
The director’s conference room was silent. I assumed everyone was thinking the same things: How would it affect NCIS? The DOD? And, more important, what did it mean for what was now called the Global War on Terror? Would it hurt our chances of stopping the next attack?
Brant was still looking at me.
“They’re going to fail,” I said.
The director then went around the room with his eyes, giving each of his senior staff a chance to speak. No one said a thing.
“So you’re telling me,” he said, “that CID is going to take over jurisdiction from the FBI, and DOD is going to take over jurisdiction from the DOJ, to bring terrorists to justice, before some judicial process that has yet to be established?”
“Yes.”
“And you think they will fail?”
I nodded.
“Then you’d better go down and help them! Mark, you have as much experience as anyone investigating terrorists and running task forces. Help them figure it out.”
Then he walked off to call Donald Ryder, to get the ball rolling.
I showed up at CID offices the next morning and reported to Ryder. He smiled briefly when I walked in.
“Mark,” he said. “CID doesn’t have anyone with your type of meaningful experience investigating terrorists.”
“Yes, sir.”
“We’re going to rely on NCIS and OSI to assist with the task force investigations.”
“Glad to help.”
And that quickly, I was on loan to the army—to help set up the new Criminal Investigation Task Force—CITF, pronounced “Sit-if.” Technically, it was very similar to the work I’d been doing with NCIS, except CITF was under the army, the branch given the lead in these investigations. Instead of trying to jockey my way into the game with NCIS, CITF would be in charge of bringing terrorists to justice at Guantanamo. And we would be able to operate on a totally separate chain of command from Joint Task Force 160. They were in charge of the day-to-day world of running the detention center; CITF had a purely investigative role at Gitmo. Once I had set up the task force and someone was picked as deputy commander for CITF, the plan was that I’d return to my job at NCIS as the deputy assistant director.
After about a week on the job, I had another meeting with Ryder. I’d been pushing hard during those first days. Our job, as I saw it, was to get things done, not to wait for every small decision to travel up and down the chain of command, and I knew I had stepped on some toes and violated army customs while trying to push things forward. Was Ryder going to pull me back now? Hardly. In this follow-up meeting, he asked me to be brutally honest with him, and I had plenty to say. I laid out the cultural issues, structural issues, training issues, and operational issues we were facing.
“I need someone who can think outside the box on this one,” said Ryder.
“You need someone who can throw it away!” I said. “Redesign the task force from scratch. It’s got to be based on the mission, not some army force structure model.”
As I continued, Ryder listened and occasionally gave a slight tilt of his head. When I was done, he said, “I got it. Now will you stay? I’m not sure we can do this mission without you. Will you stay on as my deputy commander?”
This would be the assignment of a lifetime, but it didn’t feel right to take the position myself. I’d been detailed to Gen. Ryder to get the ball rolling, and I didn’t want anyone thinking I had been lobbying myself into the deputy commander’s slot. What to do? I couldn’t say yes, but I couldn’t turn it down outright.
“I work for Dave Brant,” I finally said. “I do what he tells me.”
Ryder got up from his conference table and told his secretary, “Get me Dave Brant, please.”
The general walked to his desk and picked up the phone. I strained to hear, but all I could pick up was Ryder’s soft-spoken confidence. There were bits and pieces about the “importance of the mission” and the “inherent challenges.” Ryder then extended the phone toward me and said, “He wants to talk to you.”
I grabbed the receiver. “You willing to stay?” asked Dave Brant.
“Absolutely.”
“Good luck.”
I handed the phone back to Ryder. After he thanked Brant, we returned to the conference table.
“My turn to brief you,” he said. “I’m not an investigator—my first real exposure to CID was as its commanding general. Day-to-day operations are going to be under your control.”
After telling Ryder how proud and honored I was to be placed in this position, he gave one last piece of guidance: “Take care of your people.”
On the way out the door I said, “I’m going to have to break some china.”
Ryder smiled and said, “Got it.”
• • •
Even with the CITF lead role, I couldn’t do everything my way. I wanted to set up our headquarters in a space in Crystal City, Virginia. There were a bunch of spaces there that were already outfitted as Sensitive Compartmented Information Facilities (SCIF) where we could receive and discuss highly classified information. But “the army way” won out. We moved into a converted motor pool warehouse on an army base in Fort Belvoir. It was basically a giant white shed. When I first walked into the shed, I could see a bunch of dead pigeons sprawled in the back on the concrete slab floor. I had a huge budget, though, and in less than two months we had totally SCIF-ed out the building. Now you couldn’t enter the shed without going through a door with tumbler locks and another with a palm scanner.
We also did a total overhaul on the CITF structure, designing it to be less focused on staff and rank and more focused on results. I wanted experienced operators in key positions, not staff officers arranged in a bureaucratic hierarchy. And damned if I hadn’t gotten them: our team built counterintelligence and counterterrorism experience into the very heart of the operation. I couldn’t have been more proud of them, or more certain we would play a key role in preventing future attacks and ultimately helping to capture top Al Qaeda and bring them and other detainees to justice before military commissions.
To make sure everyone working at Gitmo was versed in Middle Eastern culture, mind-set, society, and interrogation protocols, I sent a ruddy-faced Arabic speaker, Bob McFadden, and Mike Gelles down to Guantanamo. I had known Bob since his first day on the job at the NCIS office in Philadelphia, where I was his first boss, and I had known Mike since his NCIS agent training. We all had worked together ever since.
Not only had Bob been extensively tutored in Arabic, but he’d also lived in the Middle East. Rapport building came easily to him. Mike, the NCIS chief psychologist, was different; he was an intense guy—on the surface almost Bob’s opposite. It was hard to imagine Gelles as a psychologist treating patients, as he’d just as soon tell someone to “shut the fuck up” than pass them a box of tissues. But Gelles was sent down to Gitmo to explain the patience required when talking with associative thinkers, something he was very good at. Gelles trained our interrogators that Arabs tend to be associative thinkers. They may move from idea to idea, unlike Westerners, who are more likely to think in a sequential, goal-oriented, linear manner.
For example, say a subject named Omar mentions his Uncle Ahmed. The interrogator wants to know specifics: How old is Ahmed? Where does he live? Is he a devout Muslim? Does he have any links to Al Qaeda? Meanwhile, Omar starts talking about how “Uncle Ahmed used to like to give us dates under this fig tree behind his house.”
It’s easy for Westerners to view this as deception: Why isn’t he answering the question? But it’s not necessarily. The subject is talking about something that associates with his uncle. When dealing with an associative thinker, an interrogator ne
eds to be more of a sponge and a collector. If Omar is talking, don’t cut it off. It might not be the response to your immediate query, but it could be the answer to a question you don’t yet know.
The flip side of this is that suspects who are actually linked to Al Qaeda may have received training that tried to weld linear thinking—say, a linear cover story—on minds that are trained to be associative. When suspects try to repeat these cover stories, they often come off as very rote and mechanistic. It would be like learning a Bruce Springsteen song on guitar and then being asked to play it backward. For associative thinkers, these awkward responses can be more indicative of deception than seemingly wandering stories.
Bob McFadden talked to our CITF team about Al Qaeda hierarchy and doing Al Qaeda interrogations from his years investigating and handling sources in the Middle East. All the people we sent down to Gitmo had prior interview and interrogation training; most were highly experienced. But to make sure they were ready for this challenge, we developed an investigative training program consisting of programs such as “The Middle Eastern Mindset,” “al-Qaeda/Taliban,” “al-Qaeda Life Cycle,” “the al-Qaeda Training Manual,” “Psychological Impact of Captivity,” “Indicators for Potential Violence,” “Interviewing, Elicitation, Interview and Interrogation Strategies,” “Special Areas of Investigative Interest,” and “the Consultation Model.”
The training was intense, but the message behind it was simple: to succeed as an interrogator, you have to understand where the person you are interviewing is coming from—what his culture is like, what works and does not work with someone whose entire life experience might be radically different from your own. What could be more basic than that?
There were two other key factors stressed with our people. First was the need to ensure they didn’t get emotionally overwhelmed or carried away. The heat of the moment, the memory of what had happened on 9/11—all of this could boil over in a hurry. But we had studied how Nazi war criminals were brought to justice at the Nuremburg trials after World War II for inhumane treatment of prisoners. Simply being a soldier following orders is no excuse for committing crimes. If there was evidence of any abuse of detainees, they needed to immediately report it, both because it was the right thing to do and because eventually it would come out in the open anyway.
“There are no secrets,” I told every member of my team. “Only delayed disclosures.”
CHAPTER 5
* * *
DIRT FARMERS
Camp X-Ray had been a fairly crude detention center when it was put together in the mid-1990s to house disruptive and criminal refugees. It was way off in the far corner of the camp, almost in Cuba. When the camp was reactivated on January 11, 2002, the Australian David Hicks became one of the first residents. John Walker Lindh never joined him there; Lindh was instead transported to the USS Bataan and then back to the States for trial. Our CITF people did debrief him on several occasions and found him to be quite helpful in mapping his travels through Afghanistan and describing the people he met along the way. In fact, we kept the map he drew for us, with his hand-written notes, on the wall in our CITF conference room.
David Hicks had plenty of company, though, even without Lindh. In the first six months after Camp X-Ray reopened, roughly one hundred new detainees arrived each month, nearly all from Afghanistan. All of them were housed in blocks of outdoor mesh cages made out of fencing material. They looked like dog pens, but the military wouldn’t even allow their working dogs to be kept in un-air-conditioned pens like that. Each cage had two buckets, one for drinking water, the other a toilet. There were about a dozen such blocks, surrounded by multiple chain-link fences with weeds growing under them and concertina wire playing across the top. Plywood guard stations with American flags nailed to the side stood watch. It was sort of like a high-security, low-rent zoo. By February 2002 it was also getting overcrowded. We asked for better facilities but were told to “hang tight” because Gitmo was just a temporary holding site.
When Bob McFadden first arrived at the camp, he walked past the guard station into Camp X-Ray, then paused for a second to take it all in before saying, “This is a bizarre scene.”
I’d been down to Gitmo on and off since it opened, so I served as Bob’s tour guide, warning him to avoid the camp’s eccentric characters. One poor guy nicknamed Wild Bill would chuck his shit or piss at you if you got too close. Another guy we nicknamed Waffle Butt because he pressed his bare ass up against the mesh any time someone got near.
None of that threw Bob for a loop. He’d been inside plenty of other nasty places, but as soon as the detainees realized Bob spoke Arabic, they began yelling at him: “Please, please, Mister, Mister! There’s been a mistake! There was a mix-up.”
Bob talked to some of them a bit, and as he did so, I could see his face getting more and more troubled. Finally, he grabbed a list of detainees, scanned the names, looked at the mass of prisoners in front of him, and shouted out, “What the fuck? Who are these guys? None of them are Arabs!”
The detainee list was full of Afghan and Pakistani names such as Iqbal, Khan, and Ahmadzia. Whoever they were, they weren’t part of the core Al Qaeda network—the Egyptians, Saudis, and other Arabs we’d been tracking for years.
• • •
While Bob was standing in the middle of Camp X-Ray’s overcrowded holding pens, US helicopters were flying over Afghanistan making sure they would stay full. The primary goal of invading Afghanistan in the fall of 2001 was capturing bin Laden and his inner circle. That hadn’t happened, of course. By January 2002, bin Laden was almost certainly already in Pakistan, where he would be captured almost a decade later, DOA: dead on arrival. But our military hadn’t given up on the chase, only broadened it: Helicopters were still dropping flyers offering bounties for capture of members of the Taliban or Al Qaeda. One read (translated into English):
Get wealth and power beyond your dreams. . . . You can receive millions of dollars helping the anti-Taliban forces catch al-Qaida and Taliban murderers. This is enough money to take care of your family, your village, your tribe for the rest of your life. Pay for livestock and doctors and school books and housing for all your people.
They may not have been totally accurate, but the flyers were effective. Most of the people who ended up at Gitmo were picked up by the Northern Alliance or other groups that didn’t necessarily have any interest in the global war on terror, aside from picking up a $5,000 per head bounty. The result was an explosion of human trafficking in the Hindu Kush mountains. The Northern Alliance would jam so many detainees into Conex shipping containers that they started to die of suffocation. Not wanting to lose their bounties, the captors sprayed the tops of the boxes with machine guns to open ventilation holes. A lot of these prisoners were actually looking forward to being handed over to the Americans, figuring it would be pretty obvious they weren’t Al Qaeda. Instead, they ended up on Caribbean vacations—minus the resorts, lazy afternoons by the pool, and rum cocktails.
But beyond the bounty-driven roundup of detainees who had the misfortune of running into Northern Alliance troops, the vetting process for determining who might be a terrorist was simply nonfunctional. Mere possession of a rifle or visiting a guesthouse where Al Qaeda operatives were thought to have stayed could be interpreted as someone aiding and abetting the enemy. Even people known to have been conscripted into the Taliban at gunpoint and who then surrendered to the US alliance were seen as security threats. But it got even more ridiculous. Because some terrorists had used an internationally popular model of Casio digital wristwatch as a timer for bombs, wearing one of these watches became suspect. (True, bin Laden had been photographed wearing one, but NCIS director Dave Brant also sported one.) And not just suspect: there were actually detainees held at Gitmo because they had been wearing a Casio watch.
This was not what I signed up for. When I was setting up the task force, I was promised “the worst of the worst.” There were to be a limited number of detainees, and they wou
ld all be targets for prosecution or high-value intel exploitation. But in our initial assessment interviews with detainees, it became clear that Bob was right. We’d ended up with a bunch of guys warlords had turned in for a bounty with no evidence they had any value. We called them dirt farmers—lots and lots of dirt farmers.
• • •
By mid-February, the makeshift Guantanamo prison was reaching maximum capacity with these low-value detainees. They didn’t belong there, they were taking up space, and they were making our job a helluva lot more difficult. We couldn’t keep up with the influx. Everyone from Rumsfeld down knew we needed to release some of them. The Pentagon even sent a contingent of lawyers to meet with a CENTCOM deputy commander, Michael “Rifle” DeLong, and ask him to slow or stop the flow of no-value prisoners into Guantanamo. DeLong was a hard-nosed three-star marine corps general I had worked with in Italy, and he was used to getting his way.
“We’re warfighters,” DeLong said. “We don’t have the luxury of detaining prisoners forward.” Becoming a jailor, he told his visitors, was an impediment to his military mission. Instead, DeLong informed the lawyers there were even more prisoners in the pipeline.
His sentiment was somewhat understandable because, while detaining suspects was a small part of his mission, the big bounties being paid for prisoners was compromising larger concerns. But his problem was quickly becoming our problem too. When we became the primary destination for DeLong’s teeming hundreds, what had been designed as a secretive intel-gathering location became a holding pen. Except people—and animals—get released from holding pens regularly. Gitmo wasn’t designed for quick turnaround—it took a lot of paperwork and a blessing from all the way up the chain of command. The JTF-160 commander, a no-nonsense marine named Michael Lehnert, was unimpressed. “It takes an army captain to send someone to Gitmo,” he said, “and the President of the United States to get them out.”