500 Days

by Kurt Eichenwald

  Before Almalki could answer, the questions kept coming.

  “Have you dealt with bin Laden and al-Qaeda?”

  “Did you sell equipment to al-Qaeda and the Taliban?”

  “What kind of computers did you sell to them?”

  “I don’t sell computers!” Almalki shouted.

  For a moment the beatings stopped and his tormentors poured cold water on his legs and told him to stand. It was a Syrian torture technique, designed to keep the circulation going so that, no matter how long they whipped him, the pain wouldn’t subside.

  The torture resumed.

  “What is your role with al-Qaeda?”

  “Admit that you are bin Laden’s right-hand man!”

  “That makes no sense!” Almalki screamed. “Everyone knows that Zawahiri is bin Laden’s right-hand man!”

  “Fine,” one of the torturers responded. “Then you are his left-hand man.”

  • • •

  Almalki couldn’t bear up under the pain. Telling the truth wouldn’t stop these men. Neither would logic. There was only one option remaining. He would lie.

  “Yes!” he screamed. “I know bin Laden!”

  “From where?”

  “From years ago, when I worked with United Nations development projects in Pakistan and Afghanistan.”

  The beating stopped, and the Syrians spoke among themselves. Then they left the room.

  Minutes later, they returned. “You’re lying!” one of them screamed. “Bin Laden was in Sudan when you were in Pakistan and Afghanistan!”

  Almalki felt as if he was going crazy. Even lies didn’t work with his tormentors.

  “I never met bin Laden!” he cried. “I only said that to stop the torture!”

  The beatings resumed. They promised that they would shock him with electricity, tear off his nails, stuff him into a tire, whatever it took to force out the truth.

  After more than an hour, Almalki couldn’t speak anymore. He passed out and was dragged from the room. The torture was over for the day.

  The men took him downstairs and threw him into a small, filthy cell. It was number three, two cells down from where Ahmad El-Maati had been held months before.

  The cells around him were occupied by men who had been interrogated by the CIA and other Western intelligence agencies before being delivered to Syria. Two—one a teenager—had been with Abu Zubaydah the night of the raid in Pakistan. Another had been arrested in Pakistan and delivered to Syria on a CIA plane. The Americans had interrogated a third, a computer designer, before they transferred him to Damascus. And all of them had been tortured into confessing their membership in al-Qaeda.

  • • •

  The Syrians abused Almalki in increasingly cruel and painful ways. On one day, an interrogator merely asked him questions about twenty different Muslims living in Canada. Some Almalki knew, some he didn’t.

  The interrogator mentioned a man from Ottawa.

  At first, Almalki didn’t understand; his questioner’s pronunciation was all but unintelligible. But when he repeated himself, Almalki recognized the name. It was someone he had dined with at Mango’s Café a few months previously, followed by a trip to Future Shop to purchase printer ink.

  Yes, Almalki said. He knew that man.

  He knew Maher Arar.

  • • •

  Abu Zubaydah, the recently captured al-Qaeda operative, was still struggling to recover from his wounds. His infection had spread to one eye; soon, a doctor would have to remove it surgically. Zubaydah would be left wearing a patch.

  The two FBI agents, Soufan and Gaudin, exploited Zubaydah’s ordeal to their advantage. They maneuvered between an almost intimate attentiveness for his damaged condition to a show of seeming omniscience as they recounted information about al-Qaeda and Zubaydah himself.

  Over several days, Zubaydah spun out his worldview, infused with an ardor for socialism and hostility to the corporations spawned by capitalism. At one point he lost steam and glanced at Soufan.

  “Could you get me a Coca-Cola?” he asked.

  He was requesting a soft drink manufactured by one of the world’s largest corporations. Soufan flashed a smile. Zubaydah suddenly recognized the humor of his request. They broke out laughing.

  For the FBI agents, each new scrap of information they pulled from Zubaydah was proof that their approach was working. To the uninformed, Zubaydah would seem to have no reason to say anything. No one was hurting him or even threatening him. He could clam up or spin lies with no prospect of unpleasant consequences. Yet he was talking and telling the truth. That didn’t surprise the agents—not only were these interrogation techniques found in study after study to be the most effective, but they had perfected them in the course of interviewing more al-Qaeda members than anyone else in government. They were the professionals.

  Then the amateurs arrived.

  • • •

  A team of CIA officers, psychologists, and support staff arrived in Thailand on an agency plane. Zubaydah was still in the hospital recovering from his injuries, which would delay the implementation of the new arrivals’ aggressive interrogation plan.

  Soufan and Gaudin met with senior members of the group at a nearby hotel and briefed them on their progress. Soufan took an instant dislike to one member of the CIA team—Jim Mitchell, the retired SERE instructor who was now a consultant to the CIA on interrogation issues. Mitchell was never one to listen and learn; instead, he spoke frequently in a tone of absolute arrogance that Soufan found grating.

  There wasn’t much he could do about it, though. At the beginning, their boss had told Soufan and Gaudin that the CIA was in charge. The two agents had no choice but to relinquish responsibility for the interrogation.

  • • •

  The cell had no bunk and no blankets. Zubaydah, still weak from his wounds, had been stripped naked. The air-conditioning had been turned up; he shivered and at times turned a bluish hue. He was alone; no one spoke to him.

  The cell door opened and a CIA officer stepped inside. He stood motionless for a few seconds, staring at Zubaydah.

  “Tell me what I want to know,” the interrogator said. He turned and left the cell without saying another word.

  Rather than opening up, Zubaydah shut down. The harsh tactics were backfiring. For days, the FBI agents had been sending cables to Washington chock-full of revelations. Now nothing.

  So the CIA stepped up its offensive. Mitchell, in consultation with the Counterterrorist Center at the CIA, added sleep deprivation, bombarding Zubaydah’s cell with loud hard rock and funk music, including songs by the Red Hot Chili Peppers. As planned, the noise kept Zubaydah awake for twenty-four to forty-eight hours at a time. Yet he remained silent.

  Hoping to break the logjam, Mitchell spoke directly to Zubaydah. But unlike the CIA officers, he never showed his face, instead hiding behind a mask. Still, Zubaydah refused to speak. After days of failure, the CIA team invited the FBI agents back in hopes that they could overcome Zubaydah’s resistance.

  Soufan was horrified at what he saw. Why was Zubaydah naked and freezing? The agent turned the heat back up and covered Zubaydah with a towel. Out of Zubaydah’s earshot, Mitchell fumed, saying that Soufan was undermining his efforts.

  “Have you ever interrogated anyone?” Soufan snapped.

  “No, but it doesn’t matter,” Mitchell shot back. “Science is science. This is a behavioral issue.”

  That’s absurd, Soufan replied. The FBI techniques had been proved effective over and over again.

  Mitchell rolled his eyes. “Look, I’m a psychologist,” he said dismissively. “I know how the human mind works.”

  Amazing. Somehow, this contractor had convinced himself that, even with no real knowledge or experience, he was more qualified to conduct interrogations than anyone else there. He almost seemed to be saying that the professionals were working at a disadvantage by having actual knowledge. No matter—the CIA team had invited Soufan and Gaudin back in, and they were go
ing to conduct their interviews the way that worked.

  The agents sat with Zubaydah and spoke kindly to him. It took time to regain his trust, but finally, the relationship was restored and Zubaydah started talking again. He told the agents that he had heard about an Islamist with a Latino name who had plans to use a “dirty bomb” that would spread radiation over a small area inside the United States. Sheikh Mohammed had instructed the man to get a new passport in Jordan, then head to America for the attack.

  The agents contacted the American embassy in Amman and asked officials to search their records for a Hispanic man who had recently applied for a passport. The name José Padilla turned up. The embassy sent the photo on file back to Thailand, and Soufan showed it to Zubaydah.

  “Is this the guy?” Soufan asked.

  Zubaydah nodded. Padilla was the terrorist.

  This breakthrough did nothing to persuade the CIA to change course. With Zubaydah no longer resistant to talking, Mitchell proclaimed, he could now be induced to spill more information under aggressive questioning.

  The CIA took over. And again, Zubaydah went silent. Increasingly frustrated, the intelligence agents issued a murder threat.

  “If one child dies in America and I find out you knew something about it,” one of the CIA officers shouted at Zubaydah, “I will personally cut your mother’s throat!”

  The Yoo memo had specifically forbidden interrogators from telling a detainee that either he or another person would be killed. But a later review by CIA lawyers declared that the threat that Zubaydah’s mother would be killed was lawful. Grammatically, the sentence began with the subordinate conjunction if. That meant it was conditional. And that, the lawyers declared, was fine.

  • • •

  The sequence never varied. The FBI used relationship building and Zubaydah talked. The CIA stepped back in with its harsh methods, and he stopped. Then the agency officers brought back the FBI and the cycle repeated itself.

  None of this meant that rough questioning techniques didn’t work, Mitchell told the agency officers. They just needed to be more aggressive.

  • • •

  Days later, John Rizzo, the acting general counsel at the CIA, telephoned Bellinger, the NSC legal advisor.

  The agency had captured Abu Zubaydah, Rizzo explained, and was interrogating him overseas. They had already been using some severe tactics in questioning him, but nothing had worked. A psychological consultant was urging the interrogators to step up the intensity of the interrogations by using some rougher techniques, including waterboarding. But the CIA officers feared that if they followed the recommendations of the consultant, Jim Mitchell, they might face criminal charges.

  The agency, Rizzo said, wanted the Justice Department to issue a formal decision that it would decline to prosecute any CIA interrogators for violating antitorture statutes in their questioning of Zubaydah.

  Bellinger promised to set up a meeting with the Justice Department. The CIA could make its case directly to officials there.

  • • •

  That Saturday, John Yoo was shopping when he received a call on his cell phone from the Justice Department Command Center. The official on the line told him that a meeting had been scheduled for 11:00 A.M. that day in Bellinger’s office. The man offered no details before clicking off the line.

  Yoo drove to the Eisenhower Executive Office Building across from the White House and headed upstairs. Bellinger was already there, along with a few men Yoo did not recognize.

  “We have a problem,” Bellinger said. He nodded toward the other men in the room. “They’ll tell you about it.”

  They were from the CIA. One of the men introduced himself only by a first name, which may or may not have been his real one. He was an average-looking guy, dressed in a blue button-down shirt without a tie.

  They needed Yoo’s input, the official said. The agency had captured Abu Zubaydah, the operational planner for al-Qaeda, and CIA officers had been questioning him.

  “He’s resistant to interrogation,” he said.

  Resistant? “What do you mean?” Yoo asked.

  “For everything we do, he already has a countermove ready,” the official said. “It’s like playing a grand master in chess. He’s the most difficult person I’ve ever encountered.”

  Zubaydah would talk sometimes, the official said, but never gave away anything worthwhile. And everyone at the agency knew this man had a treasure trove of knowledge about al-Qaeda. He was someone who could unquestionably help the United States deter terrorist attacks.

  “If we can break him,” the official said, “it will be the greatest achievement in my career at the CIA.”

  “Isn’t there some kind of truth serum?” Yoo asked.

  “No, we don’t have one. We’ve never had one. People seem to think the Russians had one, but we don’t know if that’s for real.”

  Okay. No truth serum. That’s just the movies.

  “We may want to use more aggressive interrogation methods,” the official said. “And we need to know what’s legal and what’s not legal.”

  Yoo looked at Bellinger. “Who’s allowed to know about this? Who can we consult with? I mean, obviously, I can’t give you an opinion off the top of my head. I’m pretty sure this is a complicated issue.”

  Secrecy was paramount, Bellinger cautioned. Yoo could inform Ashcroft and whatever colleagues in his office were needed to conduct the legal analysis. But no one else.

  “Can we consult with the State Department?” Yoo asked. The top experts on the laws of war worked there.

  Bellinger shook his head. “Access to this program is extremely restricted,” he said. “The State Department shouldn’t be informed.”

  • • •

  Condoleezza Rice walked briskly into the White House Situation Room and took a seat at the head of the conference table. Other officials straggled in over the next few minutes.

  “All right, let’s get started,” Rice said after everyone found a seat.

  She nodded toward Tenet. “George believes that we need to do some things in the interrogations of terrorists to help gather information,” she said. She turned the floor over to him.

  “We are facing a very dedicated adversary, and they have been trained on how to resist our interrogation techniques,” he said. “Now we have intelligence about specific possible threats that are potentially coming, and some of the people we’ve captured have knowledge of these threats.”

  The types of people being targeted for murder by al-Qaeda were across the board, from schoolchildren to shoppers—all innocent, all in danger.

  “The interrogations we’ve been conducting up to this point have not been sufficient to get the al-Qaeda members in our custody to give up the information they have about these threats,” Tenet continued. “And so, some of our experts in interrogation have put together a series of new techniques that they think might be more effective.”

  Rizzo, the CIA lawyer, explained that he had already appealed to the Justice Department for a formal statement declining to prosecute agency officers who conducted harsh questioning. But no such assurance had been provided.

  The interrogators were already taking risks with some of the less controversial techniques—forced nudity, slaps, exposure to cold, sleep deprivation—without legal clearance. But their most important capture, Abu Zubaydah, was still resisting. He had obviously gone through the training contained in the Manchester Manual, the CIA officials concluded. The officers needed greater leeway to wring information out of him.

  There were a series of techniques that had been recommended by the agency’s psychological consultant, Tenet said. He passed around a document that contained a list of them—confining an interrogation subject in small boxes, taking advantage of his fears, forcing him to stand in uncomfortable positions for hours, extending the length of time he was deprived of sleep. The most aggressive, Tenet said, was a technique called waterboarding.

  “Do we really need to do this?” Gonzales
asked.

  “Under the right circumstances to get the right information, yes,” Tenet said.

  • • •

  As the discussion continued, Gonzales decided to let Bush know that the CIA had come in with an important request. But he had already concluded that the president shouldn’t be told much else.

  Gonzales reached the Oval Office and stood in the doorway. Bush was working at his desk.

  “Mr. President,” Gonzales said.

  “Fredo!” Bush replied, using his nickname for the White House counsel.

  Gonzales stepped into the room and sat down in a chair next to the president’s desk. He explained that Bush’s top aides were meeting downstairs in the Situation Room.

  “Tenet is saying that the CIA needs to adopt some new interrogation techniques for al-Qaeda terrorists,” he explained. “There are some threats the agency knows about, and he thinks this is the best way to get the information.”

  “Well, what are we talking about?” Bush asked.

  “Mr. President, I think for your own protection you don’t need to know the details of what’s going on here,” Gonzales replied.

  Bush paused, then gave a nod of understanding.

  “All right,” he said. “Just make sure that these things are lawful.”

  • • •

  Downstairs, the conversation had turned to the legality of the CIA’s requests. The Office of Legal Counsel, Ashcroft said, was already working on that analysis.

  “All right, John,” Rice said. “But I’d like you to review their work personally.”

  • • •

  Yoo reached a preliminary finding that certain of the CIA’s proposed tactics, such as confinement, were lawful. The analysis of others, like waterboarding, was going to take more time.

  • • •

  Two dark wooden boxes were placed in a room at the secret prison where Zubaydah was confined. One looked something like a coffin; the other was much smaller.

  Soufan saw the larger box and was horrified. His mind raced with questions and fears. Was the CIA planning to bury Zubaydah alive? He immediately confronted the agency interrogators.