by Steve Coll
Stan McChrystal, then on his way to lead Joint Special Operations Command, traveling in and out of Afghanistan, felt the C.I.A. had “a culture of insularity.” The attitude they projected was “Nobody should tell us what to do. We got it. We are special.” He thought the agency attracted strong talent but “they don’t have very good leadership.” There was no system for selecting and forging successful leaders over careers, as the military sought to do. Whether a C.I.A. station chief was an exemplary decision maker or a whacked-out freelancer seemed to McChrystal almost random, serendipitous, a matter of rotation schedules and internal politics. And the C.I.A. tended to regard military officers and units with barely disguised condescension. There were exceptions like Greg Vogle or Chris Wood, whom McChrystal latched on to as peers and collaborators, but in general, “They weren’t as good as they thought they were and we weren’t as bad as they thought,” he believed. The C.I.A.’s assessment, in turn, was that the Pentagon special operators were shooters and door crashers who lacked regional expertise and situational awareness. McChrystal made it his mission to fix the working relationship, but it was a project that turned out to be measured in years.19
Even as Ibrahim Haqqani talked cooperatively with the C.I.A. through one channel, a special unit in Kabul Station targeted him for arrest. The unit was made up of a mix of C.I.A. officers and Special Forces personnel and its operations were heavily compartmented—meaning knowledge of its existence and work was restricted to those judged to have a need to know, even within the C.I.A. The C.I.A. and Special Forces kept their own lists of high-level Al Qaeda and allied targets; somehow, Ibrahim made a list, even though he was meeting with Mike and other officers in Kabul and elsewhere. The Kabul station chief, a successor to Rich Blee, knew that Ibrahim had been targeted but did not share this with Mike or others. On May 4, 2003, the black operations unit “basically jumped the guy” and arrested Ibrahim. As a C.I.A. document put it later, the agency at higher levels “judged that he did not merit detention by the C.I.A.” Haqqani ended up in the custody of the National Directorate of Security and later U.S. military custody, according to the C.I.A. Haqqani told American interlocutors years later that he was tortured. His fate signaled the descent of American counterterrorism policy into black depths of systematic abuse.20
NINE
“His Rules Were Different Than Our Rules”
By the late spring of 2003 the Omega Teams of Special Forces, C.I.A. officers and contractors, eavesdroppers, and Afghan armed reconnaissance militias had settled in a string of mud-fort bases along the Afghan side of the border with Pakistan. The clandestine bases ran from Asadabad in the north to Shkin in the south. The C.I.A.’s private army—Counterterrorist Pursuit Teams, in agency jargon—numbered about seven thousand men, the agency told counterpart services. The forward bases also supported smaller Tactical Humint Teams, or THTs. They consisted of expatriate case officers and Afghan interpreters, often Tajiks and Hazaras whose ethnicity could strain relations with local Pashtuns. All of them could access the national language of Dari but the locals preferred Pashto, which the Tajik and Hazara interpreters did not always speak fluently. The basic task was to talk to locals on what were called “local civil action” trips. “Who wants to cooperate?” the teams would ask, as a participant described it. “Who wants to be a human source? Talk to the tribal elders. It was tough. They were very hesitant to talk with us.”
The priorities for collection were “Number One” (Bin Laden), “Number Two” (Zawahiri), or “A.Q.S.L.” (Al Qaeda Senior Leadership). Some of the deployed case officers had long experience in the Middle East, if little acquaintance with Pakistan and Afghanistan. Some were retirees in their sixties back on contract. Increasingly, the rotators included very inexperienced case officers fresh out of career training in Virginia. They typically paid their human agents about five hundred dollars a month to wander the border area and report back. The American officers referred to their agents by their national file number, or NFN, which concluded in a number, so that reporting sounded like “NFN37 has departed for Khost and NFN113 is expected from Quetta.” The more entrepreneurial Pashtun agents would take a salary from a C.I.A. case officer at Shkin, then walk to Gardez and link up with a D.I.A. Humint team for another thousand dollars. “They were wandering triple-dippers,” the participant said. The local agents typically did not have bicycles or motorcycles. They walked. “I’ll see you in a month,” they would tell a case officer. “It will take a week to walk to my house, two weeks to do the surveillance, and another week to walk back to you.”
Navy SEALs supported the THTs with direct raiding capability if a target could be identified. Increasingly the teams were drawn into local violence against the mukhalafeen, as they were referred to in Pashto, meaning “rivals” or “opposition.” It was a suitably vague term. There were too many violent groups to describe accurately under any one label. They included the Hizb-i-Islami led by Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, known as “H.I.G.,” in American jargon, pronounced like “pig,” as well as Haqqani commanders, Taliban veterans, timber smugglers, tribal rivals, and local boys enlisted to fight for a salary. The Omega bases contained bored SEALs and Deltas working out every day for weeks at a time with nothing to do, “begging for villages to raid,” as the participant put it. “They didn’t want to spend too much time confirming the targets.”1
It also became apparent that the very presence of forward-deployed Americans in the border bases provoked local attacks, almost reflexively. This was the case at Asadabad Firebase, which lay in a river basin in Kunar Province, a forbidding region of peaks and gorges stretching northwest from Jalalabad. Elements of the 82nd Airborne, a pair of Special Forces A-Teams, and a C.I.A. contingent shared a compound perhaps two hundred yards by two hundred yards. Its mud-brick walls were ten feet high and two feet thick. Kashmiri guerrillas had used the fort during the 1990s, to train to fight against India’s military. A dozen flat-roofed huts attached to the outer walls served as bunks, offices, storage depots, and detention centers. It was cold and muddy, a “Third World cesspool,” in the words of Brian Halstead, a noncommissioned Special Forces officer who served there. At irregular intervals—sometimes several times daily—someone out there among the woods-shrouded mukhalafeen shot off artillery rockets at the firebase. The valley was quiet but for birds and the rustle of pines, so the Americans could hear the crack of a rocket launch and then count the seconds before it exploded nearby. The attacks were unnerving but usually poorly aimed.2
Halstead was the Special Forces intelligence officer in charge of force protection in Kunar. Every time a rocket smashed into or near the base he analyzed the crater, examined radar to trace the location from where it had been fired, and plotted the patterns on a map. He also talked to locals for insight. He had been serving on Special Forces A-Teams for two decades around the world and knew by now that it was essential to spend “a lot of time and effort building personal relationships. Last thing you want to do is go out there and get in the middle of somebody’s tribal vendettas.”3
Asadabad Firebase’s principal local contact was Said Fazal Akbar, the governor of Kunar, who had been running a clothing store in Oakland on September 11. He served Hamid Karzai as a spokesman before the interim leader appointed him as his man in Asadabad. Akbar occupied the governor’s mansion and brought along his son Hyder, then eighteen, who had been raised in California and spoke fluent American-accented English. (He would soon attend Yale University.) Their outpost of the Karzai regime was barely more rooted in Kunar society than the firebase’s roving squads of bearded Americans.
At some point that spring, a C.I.A. colleague mentioned to Brian Halstead the name Abdul Wali as a suspected organizer of the rocketing they endured. The basis for this suspicion wasn’t clear, but if the grounds for suspicion were adequate, one of Halstead’s standard procedures was to try to “puck” the suspect, to conduct further questioning. “Puck” was an invented verb derived from “Person Under Control,�
� or PUC, a category of prisoner status under post-2001 Pentagon policy. To puck someone at a firebase was to incarcerate them for a limited number of days for intelligence interrogation, to determine if the individual should be released or transferred to the larger detention facility at Bagram Airfield. That spring, Asadabad Firebase informed Governor Akbar about Abdul Wali and the word went out to local villages that he was a wanted man.4
One mid-June afternoon, Abdul Wali appeared at Governor Akbar’s compound with his brother and some elders from his village. The governor’s son Hyder joined the meeting. Abdul Wali told them he was afraid that an informer had ratted him out to the Americans as part of a tribal feud. The governor assured him that if he was innocent the Akbars would provide zamanat about the Americans, a kind of guarantee or personal backing under Islamic law. All Abdul Wali had to do was go talk to the Americans, to straighten things out.
Abdul Wali was frightened. He said he had heard rumors of torture at the American base, “everything from beating and sleep deprivation to disembowelment.”
“That’s nonsense,” Governor Akbar assured his guest. “I know the Americans. I’ve been there myself. The Americans don’t do things like that.”
But Abdul Wali was still afraid to go to the base. Finally, the governor said, “My son is here from America. He’s schooled in English and he’ll go and escort you to the base and he’ll be your translator.”
That satisfied him. They drove to Asadabad Firebase in a pickup truck. On the way, Abdul Wali was shaking a little. Hyder tried to tell him to calm down.5
The Americans received them in an interview room near the gate. Brian Halstead opened the questioning calmly and took notes. Were you ever involved with the Taliban? Were you involved with Al Qaeda? Were you involved with H.I.G.? Abdul Wali answered no. Then Halstead asked if he had recently been to Pakistan. Abdul Wali admitted that he had, to settle some debts, but he couldn’t remember how long he had stayed or what dates he had traveled.
Hyder Akbar thought this apparent forgetfulness reflected local understandings of time. Visiting his father in Kunar reminded him of a time travel movie he saw advertised as a kid in California where one of the characters in the film declares, “My father is stuck in the fourteenth century—I have to go get him back.” When Hyder came to Kunar he felt he was “going to visit my dad in the fourteenth century.” One of the time warp’s characteristics was that nobody kept calendars or made specific appointments. “People don’t know how old they are. They don’t keep track of time.” Yet he could tell in the interview room that Abdul Wali’s vagueness about his trip to Pakistan was raising suspicion among some of his interrogators.6
David Passaro was one of two C.I.A. personnel in the room. He was a former policeman, twice divorced, who looked like an out-of-shape Sylvester Stallone, Hyder thought. He was a C.I.A. contractor, not a career officer. About 85 percent of the C.I.A. personnel who conducted interrogations after 2001 were contractors. Interrogation had never been a skill taught at “the Farm,” the C.I.A.’s career training academy. David Passaro’s boss, the Asadabad chief of base, went by the cover name Steven Jones. He was a career officer who, like Passaro, was a former police officer. The two C.I.A. men joined the questioning of Abdul Wali, but Jones seemed to become bored after ten or fifteen minutes and left, according to Hyder Akbar.7
Passaro became aggressive. He leaned into Abdul Wali, stared at him menacingly, spoke in a contemptuous tone, and threatened him. “If you are lying to me, you—your whole family, your kids—they could all get hurt from this.” Hyder Akbar became upset and stopped translating. Another interpreter took over. Passaro only became angrier. Finally he announced that Abdul Wali would be pucked.
Passaro asked his prisoner, “Is there anything you want to give to your family” before you are taken away? Abdul Wali stuttered that there was nothing. He was almost in a state of shock, Hyder thought, because it sounded as if Passaro was saying, “We’re taking you out back and shooting you.”
Hyder was sickened. He had just finished high school. He was an American citizen who had returned to help the war-broken country of his family’s origins, yet here he was watching an American-led version of “what the Soviets did in Afghanistan.”
As Hyder departed, he put his hand on Abdul Wali’s shoulder to reassure him. “Just tell the truth,” he advised. “Just tell the truth.”8
Soldiers handcuffed the prisoner, placed an empty sandbag over his head, and led him to a detention cell, where he was shackled to the floor. Enlisted soldiers guarded Abdul Wali on four-hour shifts. That night David Passaro turned up at the cell while the soldier Matthew Johnson was on duty. Passaro announced that Abdul Wali was a C.I.A. prisoner and that he would be handling the interrogation. He warned Johnson that his techniques might be harsher than what military guards were used to seeing. “His rules were different than our rules” was the way Johnson would remember Passaro’s explanation. “He didn’t fall under the Geneva Convention, as we did. . . . His only rule was not to cause permanent injury.”9
Passaro entered an adjoining cell, “got a chair, made a lot of racket in there, broke a chair apart, came out and said he was ready to go into the room with Abdul Wali.”
He kicked the cell door open and hurled in a two-by-four, striking Abdul Wali. He slammed the prisoner’s head against the wall and shoved him onto the floor face-first, all while the prisoner was shackled, cuffed, and still had a bag over his head. Passaro hoisted Abdul Wali into a stress position, squatting with arms out, and questioned him. Dissatisfied, Passaro hit him, kicked him, and knocked him back onto the floor. “If you don’t give the answers I want,” Passaro said, “it’s going to get worse.”10
—
David Passaro’s belief that he operated by special C.I.A. rules traced back to an initially ad hoc, confused response inside the Counterterrorist Center after September 11 to the problem of prisoner detention and interrogation. President Bush’s covert action Memorandum of Notification six days after the attacks gave the C.I.A. authority to kill terrorists, as well as to detain and question them. The agency was poorly prepared to run prisons. On September 27, C.I.A. headquarters cabled stations worldwide that any future agency prison would be designed to meet “U.S. POW Standards.” Official C.I.A. policy at the time held that all direct interrogations carried out by agency personnel should follow the U.S. Army Field Manual standards, which prohibited physical abuse. After initial discussions about detention planning that fall, as the Afghan war sped forward, Cofer Black wrote C.I.A director Tenet that having the Pentagon take charge of all detention facilities would be the “best option.” If the C.I.A. maintained its own prisons, Black warned, “Captured terrorists may be held days, months or years [and] the likelihood of exposure will grow over time.” Eventual press exposure of the operation “could inflame public opinion against a host government and the U.S.” He urged Tenet to persuade Rumsfeld to take responsibility.11
As Al Qaeda prisoners fled Afghanistan after Tora Bora and fell into Pakistani custody, the question of whether the C.I.A. should adopt an independent detention program became more urgent. The agency had a dark history in this field, as career officers in C.T.C. and on the Seventh Floor well knew. During the Cold War, the agency had produced the KUBARK Counterintelligence Interrogation Manual, which provided for the use of techniques such as sensory deprivation, “threats and fear, debility, pain . . . and hypnosis.” The agency brutally interrogated a Soviet defector, Yuri Nosenko, between 1964 and 1967, believing that he was an impostor. During the 1980s, some of those techniques found their way into the C.I.A.’s Human Resource Exploitation Training Manual, which was shared with liaison services in Latin America. During the 1990s, the agency had reversed policy to align with the Army’s compliance with the Geneva Conventions. (One reason the military favored humane treatment of prisoners was the probability that its own uniformed personnel would be captured; the Pentagon had sought before 2001 to prom
ote positive reciprocity.) Yet the Counterterrorist Center nonetheless managed a covert program that involved its officers, at least indirectly, with the torture of terrorism suspects, right up until September 11.
This was the counterterrorism practice known as “rendition” or “extraordinary rendition.” If an Egyptian radical with ties to violence was arrested in Albania, the C.I.A. might take possession of the prisoner secretly and fly him on a private jet to Cairo to hand the suspect over to Egyptian authorities. American presidents since Ronald Reagan had approved the practice. The program allowed the Counterterrorist Center to work with allied intelligence and police services to keep terrorist suspects in custody when there was not sufficient evidence to bring the suspects to the United States to face American criminal charges.
Several of the countries that partnered with the C.I.A. in this way—Egypt, Jordan, and Syria, among them—had documented records of extensive human rights abuses against prisoners. As a practical matter, in those countries, it was common knowledge that the secret police routinely and often grotesquely tortured prisoners, including Islamist radicals. Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International, and even the State Department had published libraries of documentary evidence. To evade this stain, the C.I.A. officially required governments receiving suspects under the rendition program to promise not to abuse them. But few involved were naïve enough to think this was anything but a face-saving exchange of paper for the sake of lawyers and Congress.12