Unjustifiable Means

by Mark Fallon

Because of CITF’s status as an investigative organization within the DOD, we could share our information with our international counterparts—something the CIA and FBI often either couldn’t or wouldn’t do. These relationships also allowed us to get some no-value detainees out of Gitmo and repatriated, even though that required going all the way up the chain of command and through multiple inter-agency reviews.

  In late January 2004, I attended a luncheon at the Washington, DC, residence of the Belgian ambassador. It is a huge building with a horseshoe driveway. As I pulled in, the attaché, Luc, approached me and told me to leave my government car in front of the embassy and waved me toward a tuxedoed server holding a tray of drinks. During lunch, the ambassador asked me what he needed to do to get two of our Belgian detainees back.

  “I’m just an investigator,” I explained, “not a policymaker. So I can’t speak for the Pentagon or the State Department. But I can definitely let the secretary of defense’s lawyers know you want your people back.”

  A little while later, the attaché, Luc, walked over to me and asked if he could borrow my keys to move the car.

  Back at CITF, I made some enquiries about the Belgians. Turned out we had no case on them, there was no intel value, and the Pentagon agreed we should release them back to Belgium.

  I called Luc. “Looks good. The ball is rolling to get your guys back home.”

  “Great,” said Luc. “Did you check your trunk?”

  Oh shit, I thought. What did he do?

  It turned out he’d put two cases of Belgian beer in the trunk. When I reported it to the Pentagon, they started joking that I had traded detainees for two cases of beer!

  • • •

  In February, as we were trying to stem the flow of detainees who didn’t belong at Guantanamo, we got word that the army was creating a new joint task force, JTF-170, to take over intel gathering. The exact wording of JTF-170’s mission was something like “global focal point for interrogation operations for all government agencies under Operation Enduring Freedom.” I wasn’t sure exactly what it meant—I don’t think anyone was—but as I interpreted it, CITF would continue to do criminal investigations even as we helped to collect intel that would enhance the new JTF-170’s total product. Meanwhile, the old task force, JTF-160, would remain in charge of detention activities, everything from facility management to feeding the detainees. How the actual lineup of responsibilities panned out would depend on who was picked to lead JTF-170, and here Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld seemed to have made a curious choice: Army Major General Michael Dunlavey.

  For one, Dunlavey was a reservist from Erie, Pennsylvania—not an active-duty officer. Second, Dunlavey had done his drilling in signal intelligence (SIGINT) at the NSA. SIGINT includes things such as analyzing intercepted cell phone calls. His training had very little to do with the human intelligence (HUMINT) collections we were doing at Guantanamo. Why exactly Rumsfeld personally selected him for the job, I don’t know; there were plenty of active duty officers with experience in HUMINT.

  It took only a week after Dunlavey arrived on base for the first signs of potential trouble to surface. The general introduced himself to one of my CITF members by pointing to the two stars on his collar.

  “I’m here now, and I’m in charge!” Dunlavey said.

  Of course, we all knew who he was. We were there to support him. But most of us were civilians with a different chain of command. We didn’t answer to Dunlavey. Like anyone wearing civvies—a polo shirt and khakis for me—we weren’t supposed to salute when Dunlavey or any other officer walked by. This was probably part of the problem. We would find out that he seemed to have an obsessive need for everyone to recognize his authority. Just one example: Because there are detainees at Gitmo, everyone covers up their name on their uniform to protect their identities. Dunlavey bucked that rule, covering his name but making sure the detainees could see his two stars—the only two stars on the base.

  He was also defensive about his lack of background in gathering human intelligence. “I was in ’Nam,” Dunlavey barked out of the side of his mouth. “I know how to do interrogations!”

  Uh-oh, I thought. I don’t remember much good coming out of those. They hadn’t gotten much intel or treated prisoners so well.

  We’d also received word through back channels at NSA that Dunlavey’s obsessions ran deeper than control issues. After a month of trips down to Gitmo, I was beginning to agree. The guy seemed a bit of a loon.

  Early on, someone at the base joked to him that he was number three on the Al Qaeda hit list. He apparently took it so seriously that he demanded NCIS provide a security detail for him and his wife—as if they needed any more precautions on a US naval base filled with servicemen on an island in the Caribbean. We gave him and his wife some body armor, telling Dunlavey, “Wear this if you’re really worried.”

  I found out he had a pair of nickel-plated pistols flown down to Gitmo, even though he couldn’t carry them on the base. These were personal weapons, not issued by the military. Maybe he was posing with them in front of his mirror, pretending to be Patton? The NCIS agents assigned to the CITF took possession of the pistols “for safekeeping” and locked them in a weapons safe. He got his handguns back when his assignment at Gitmo was over.

  One night, as I was having drinks with a few other CITF people at the base’s tiki bar and enjoying the stunning view of the bay, Dunlavey pulled up with his car windows down and the Pointer Sisters song “I’m So Excited” blaring. Nothing against his music choice, but this was not the behavior anyone expected from a commanding general, especially one at the “global focal point for interrogations for all government agencies under Operation Enduring Freedom.”

  Taken bit by bit, Dunlavey’s actions might have seemed merely bizarre or silly, but he wasn’t just one of those annoying managers you want to avoid in the elevator. He was the commanding general at a military facility during an unpredictable global war. When people on the base started calling Dunlavey Cocoa Puffs—after the cereal’s ad line “I’m cuckoo for Cocoa Puffs”—you could tell discipline was at risk of breaking down. In fact, people were even making references to a movie where just that dynamic was taken to extremes. When Dunlavey was out of earshot, staff would ask, “Where are my strawberries?”—a joking reference to the mentally unstable Captain Queeg in The Caine Mutiny.

  • • •

  There were other, more substantial, areas of conflict between CITF and Dunlavey. We had just completed a major operation, in which a detainee provided critical and actionable intelligence on a location in Afghanistan. In exchange, he was allowed a phone call home to let his family know he was alive. The operation took months to pull together and was coordinated with multiple organizations, including the Defense Intelligence Agency, CIA, and the NSA. It was an excellent example of how all the intel groups at Gitmo—CITF, FBI, and JTF-170—could work together to produce actionable intelligence from a detainee. It was also a perfect example of rapport building and reciprocity.

  We were all damn proud of it—not just for the intel but as yet another vindication of our approach. Soon afterward, though, XXXXXX XXXXXXX XXX XX XXX XXXX XXXXXXXXXXX XX XXXXX, called me at my office in Fort Belvoir. “Dunlavey’s lost it!”

  Turns out, the commanding general was outraged that our highly successful effort hadn’t been directed and controlled entirely by JTF-170. The general was accusing XXXXXX, FBI supervisor XXXXX XXXXXXXX, and his own chief of staff, Donald Woolfolk, of conspiring against him. Dunlavey told XXXXXX that he was initiating an army 15-6 on him, a procedure used for noncriminal command-level investigations. There were three problems with that strategy. First, XXXXXX wasn’t in the army. Second, he didn’t work for JTF-170. Third, everyone knew it was a ridiculous claim.

  “Get him out of the sun,” I said to XXXXXX. “It’s baking his brain.” Then I notified my superiors. In the end, General Donald Ryder—the head of army CID—called Dunlavey directly.

  I waited until 5:30 PM th
e next day for the process to play out before calling over to Southern Command (SOUTHCOM), under whose aegis Gitmo fell. Brigadier General Ronald Burgess assured me that they had Dunlavey under control.

  “It’s bullshit,” said Burgess, referring to Dunlavey’s allegations. “It’s done.”

  Unfortunately, it wasn’t done. In fact, it was going to get a lot worse.

  • • •

  Not only was Camp X-Ray an uncomfortable spot for detainees, it was a horrible place for conducting interrogations. We had bribed the Seabees—the navy’s construction crew—into building us our interrogation rooms with two cases of beer. You get what you pay for: They were basically four-sided plywood boxes with doors and a few chairs inside. The real problem was not the comfort level but the lack of privacy.

  When you are conducting an interrogation, you don’t want the other detainees to see you coming and going with your most recent subject. Some people just didn’t talk (we called them “head hangers”). Even though we knew they weren’t going to say anything, we couldn’t let it be known that, by not talking, detainees could skip out on interrogations. We also didn’t want the other detainees to know who was talking to us. So we’d just sit in the room for three hours with the head hangers, asking them a question every thirty minutes or so.

  Generally speaking, Saudis were the biggest head hangers. They looked down at the Afghanis and Egyptians, and some refused to talk to us at all. But a Saudi national who arrived in mid-February was different. Identified as prisoner 063, he claimed he was involved in falconry and had simply gotten caught up when the ground operations began in Afghanistan. It was probably a cover story, but despite cries from JTF-170 that we needed to toughen up on him, we had faith in our rapport-based interrogation techniques, so we let him talk and talk until we had enough little bits and pieces to build a mosaic. Our task force and the FBI shared a large squad bay where we did link analysis by hand on huge sheets of paper taped to the walls. Link analysis tracks connections between nodes, and the more we looked into 063’s connections, the more we realized he was one of our most valuable intel assets. Unfortunately, his potentially high value would also attract the manic attention of General Dunlavey.

  XXXXXXXX XXXXX XXXXXXXXXXXX XXXXXXX XX XXXX XXXXXXXX XXXXXXXXXXX X XXXXXXXX XXX XXX XXXX XXXXXX XXXX XX XXXXXXXXXXX XX XXXXXXX XX XXXXXX XX XXXXX XXXXX XXXXX XXXXXXXX XXX XXXXXXXXX XXXXXXXXX XX XXXX XX XXX XXXXX XXXXXXXXXXXXX XXXXXXXXXXX XXXXX XXX XXXXXX XXXXXX XX XXX XX XXXXXX XXXXXXX XX XXXXXX XXXXXX XXX XXXX XXXXXX XXXX XX XXX XXXXXXX XXX XXXXXXXXXXX XXXXX XXXX XXXX XXXX XXXXXXXXXX XXXX XXX XXXX XXXXXXXX XXX XXXXXXXXXX XX XXXXX X XXX XXXX

  As we kept pressing, we found that al-Qahtani also fit into another line of inquiry. The INS had been doing an analysis of likely flight patterns consistent with those of other 9/11 hijackers. Al-Qahtani fit the profile, although he was hardly the only one who did.

  XXXX XXXXXXX XXXXX XX XXXXXXXXXXX XXXX XXX XXX XXX XXX XXX XXXX XXXXXXXX XXX XXXX XX XXX XXXX XXXXXXXXXXX XXXXXXX XXXXX XXXXX XX XXX XXXXXXX XXXXXXX XXX XXXX XXXXX XXXX XX XXX XXXXX XXXXX XX XXXXXX XXX XXXX XXX XXXX XXX XXXXX XXXX XX XXX XXXXXXX XX XXXXXXX XX XXX XXXX XXXX XXXXXXXXXX XXX XXXXX XXXXXXXXXX. Atta was almost certainly there to pick him up. Once al-Qahtani was detained and then deported, Atta left.

  That was when the whole picture came together. The 9/11 attacks were carried out by nineteen men, but a growing body of evidence was suggesting there were supposed to be twenty. On three of the four flights that were hijacked, there were four “musclemen” who controlled the crew and one pilot. The fourth plane only had three musclemen, and it was also the only one that didn’t hit its target. En route to a target in Washington, DC, it crashed into the ground in Shanksville, Pennsylvania, after the passengers revolted. We had likely found the twentieth 9/11 hijacker—the only living operative of the largest terror attack on US soil.

  There was pressure on all sides to produce intel. Everybody wanted to know where bin Laden was or any information that might be used to thwart future attacks. The White House was also trying to justify an invasion of Iraq; they wanted info about Al Qaeda in Iraq—which, at the time, didn’t exist—and where the fictitious Iraqi weapons of mass destruction were located. Even if he wasn’t part of bin Laden’s inner circle, al-Qahtani looked more promising than most of the dirt farmers at Gitmo. He could be very valuable in understanding how the attacks happened if we built up a rapport with him and developed him properly. But al-Qahtani had also caught the eye of Dunlavey, whose new JTF-170 was practicing a completely different art.

  • • •

  While CITF was packed with career federal agents, intelligence analysts, PhDs and lawyers, experts who had been doing this sort of thing for a living, the army used very junior staff, usually reservists in their early twenties, most of whom had never been in an interrogation room with a bad guy before.

  I once asked one of the JTF-170 interrogators if he’d interviewed someone before. “Oh, yeah,” he said, and pointed to his partner, whom he had role-played with during their training together at the army intelligence school in Fort Huachuca, Arizona. These were dedicated reservists, but it wasn’t fair to expect them to go get information out of a suspected terrorist, someone who is purported to be the “worst of the worst.”

  When the reservists were called up, they first got shipped off to Fort Huachuca, where they learned the techniques described in the Army Field Manual—FM 34-52, “Intelligence Interrogation”—a program that wasn’t grounded in any science and was mostly ineffective. More to the point for our immediate purposes, the techniques were definitely not designed to deal with a non-Western culture.I

  While our CITF guys might be on the floor drinking tea and talking about soccer with a detainee to gain his confidence, the JTF-170 guys would be walking into a room with a shopping list of priority intelligence requirements. Some walked in with an exaggerated swagger. One guy even wore a full cowboy outfit into the interrogation session, including a vest and chaps.

  But once they got to the table and tried to stare down a detainee, the JTF-170 guys didn’t have much left. The JTF-170 interrogators would sit down with the list of twenty questions their superior had developed. Asking the questions was the plan, and the interrogators were going to follow out their orders. The results might be something like this:

  JTF-170 Interrogator: Do you know Abu Zubaydah?

  Translator: Do you know Abu Zubaydah?

  Detainee: No.

  Translator: No.

  Interrogator: Where did you first meet Abu Zubaydah?

  Translator: Where did you first meet Abu Zubaydah?

  Detainee: I already told you, I don’t know Abu Zubaydah.

  Translator: I already told you, I don’t know Abu Zubaydah.

  Interrogator: How many people were there when you met Abu Zubaydah?

  Translator: How many people were there when you met Abu Zubaydah?

  Detainee: Are you translating this properly? Did you not tell him that I don’t know Abu Zubaydah?

  And so on for twenty questions. The detainees got frustrated. The translators got frustrated, and maybe even sympathetic to the detainees. But the interrogators continued doggedly down the whole list. They needed answers because those were the requirements. Finally, a detainee would put his head down and shut up. Out of ideas, the interrogators would leave the room and check in with their supervisors. They’d develop a new interrogation plan and start again. It was a completely wooden command-and-control process that didn’t give the interrogators half a chance to succeed. The JTF-170 would inevitably conclude that their techniques were not working because the detainees had some sort of training to resist interrogation. It always seemed to work when they role-played interrogations with each other.

  We wanted to try to help these guys on JTF-170. If they were successful, it could only benefit us. We normally ran interrogations with one FBI guy and one CITF guy in a room at a time. But we decided we’d do “tiger teams” and include the JTF-170 team interrogators as well. Unfortunately
, their training was so different it proved an impossible fit. The army interrogators, basically conscripts, would walk into a room for the first time thinking the detainee was just waiting to be cracked open and they were the next Jack Bauer. But week after week, they got nothing useful. The detainees also got sick of the pointless questioning. Instead of answering the questions, they would start to chant and pray. Attempting to reassert control, the interrogators would duct tape their mouths—further guaranteeing they wouldn’t get any information—and so it would go.

  Unfortunately, JTF-170 had a very attractive excuse for their interrogation failures. In 2000 a computer file had been found during a raid on the house of a suspected terrorist in Manchester, England. On the file was a manual that reportedly laid out how terrorists should wage war. The Pentagon claimed it was an Al Qaeda manual for training its members. Among the tactics discussed (in what became known as the Manchester Document) were details on what treatment to expect if captured—as well as advice on resisting and lying to captors. When detainees at Guantanamo refused to cooperate, interrogators with JTF-170 were quick to blame “classic Manchester resistance tactics!” The interrogators’ inability to extract intel was not viewed as evidence that they needed to recalibrate their approach. Instead, it was taken as proof that the detainees were both Al Qaeda and trained to resist these methods of intel exploitation.

  It was these same reputed Manchester Document tactics that inspired psychologists James Mitchell and Bruce Jessen, the CIA contractors, to write their paper on countermeasures to Al Qaeda resistance. For Mitchell and Jessen, the Manchester Document’s training could be overcome by using the exploitative SERE training techniques to break down subjects. This paper led directly to the development of the CIA’s enhanced interrogation techniques. At Guantanamo, the leadership at JTF-170 was drawing similar conclusions: they didn’t need to get smarter; they needed to get tougher.

  * * *

  I. To its credit, though, the FM 34-52 interrogation protocols were at least humane and rapport-based. Witness this sample: