Road Work: Among Tyrants, Heroes, Rogues, and Beasts

by Mark Bowden

  Finally Koubi set his trap. He announced to one of the men that his interrogation was over. The man’s associate, hooded, was seated in the hallway outside the room. “We are going to release you,” Koubi said. “We are pleased with your cooperation. But first you must do something for me. I am going to ask you a series of questions, just a formality, and I need you to answer ‘Yes’ in a loud, clear voice for the recorder.” Then, in a voice loud enough for the hooded man outside in the hall to hear, but soft enough so that he couldn’t make out exactly what was being said, Koubi read off a long list of questions, reviewing the prisoner’s name, age, marital status, date of capture, length of detainment, and so forth. These were regularly punctuated by the prisoner’s loud and cooperative “Yes.” The act was enough to convince the man in the hall that his friend had capitulated.

  Koubi dismissed the first man and brought in the second. “There’s no more need for me to question you,” Koubi said. “Your friend has confessed the whole thing.” He offered the second prisoner a cigarette and gave him a good meal. He told him that the information provided by his friend virtually ensured that they would both be in prison for the rest of their lives…unless, he said, the second prisoner could offer him something, anything, that would dispose the court to leniency in his case. Convinced that his friend had already betrayed them both, the second prisoner acted promptly to save himself. “If you want to save Israeli lives, go immediately,” he told Koubi. “My friends went with a car to Yeshiva Nehalim [a religious school]. They are going to kidnap a group of students…” The men were found in Erez, and the operation was foiled.

  There are other methods of keeping a prisoner confused and off balance, such as rapidly firing questions at him, cutting off his responses in mid-sentence, asking the same questions over and over in different order, and what the manual calls the “Silent” technique, in which the interrogator “says nothing to the source, but looks him squarely in the eye, preferably with a slight smile on his face.” The manual advises forcing the subject to break eye contact first. “The source will become nervous, begin to shift around in his chair, cross and recross his legs, and look away,” the manual says. “When the interrogator is ready to break silence, he may do so with some quite nonchalant questions such as ‘You planned this operation a long time, didn’t you? Was it your idea?’”

  Then there is “Alice in Wonderland.”

  The aim of the Alice in Wonderland or confusion technique is to confound the expectations and conditioned reactions of the interrogatee…The confusion technique is designed not only to obliterate the familiar but to replace it with the weird…Sometimes two or more questions are asked simultaneously. Pitch, tone, and volume of the interrogators’ voices are unrelated to the import of the questions. No pattern of questions and answers is permitted to develop, nor do the questions themselves relate logically to each other.

  If this technique is pursued patiently, the manual says, the subject will start to talk “just to stop the flow of babble which assails him.”

  Easily the most famous routine is “Good Cop/Bad Cop,” in which one interrogator becomes the captive’s persecutor and the other his friend. A lesser-known but equally effective technique is “Pride and Ego,” “Ego Up/Ego Down,” or (as the more pretentious Kubark Manual puts it) “Spinoza and Mortimer Snerd,” in which the “Ego Down” part involves repeatedly asking questions that the interrogator knows the subject cannot answer. The subject is continually berated or threatened (“How could you not know the answer to that?”) and accused of withholding, until, at long last, he is asked a simple question that he can answer. An American POW subjected to this technique has said, “I know it seems strange now, but I was positively grateful to them when they switched to a topic I knew something about.”

  CIA psychologists have tried to develop an underlying theory for interrogation—namely, that the coercive methods induce a gradual “regression” of personality. But the theory is not convincing. Interrogation simply backs a man into a corner. It forces difficult choices, and dangles illusory avenues of escape.

  A skillful interrogator knows which approach will best suit his subject; and just as he expertly applies stress, he continually opens up these avenues of escape or release. This means understanding what, at heart, is stopping a subject from cooperating. If it is ego, that calls for one method. If it is fear of reprisal or of getting into deeper trouble, another method might work best. For most captives a major incentive to keep quiet is simply pride. Their manhood is being tested, not just their loyalty and conviction. Allowing the subject to save face lowers the cost of capitulation, so an artful interrogator will offer persuasive rationales for giving in: others already have, or the information is already known. Drugs, if administered with the subject’s knowledge, are helpful in this regard. If a subject believes that a particular drug or “truth serum” renders him helpless, he is off the hook. He cannot be held accountable for giving in. A study cited in George Andrews’s book MKULTRA found that a placebo—a simple sugar pill—was as effective as an actual drug up to half of the time.

  Koubi layered his deception so thick that his subjects never knew exactly when their interrogation ended. After questioning, captives usually spent time in a regular prison. The Israelis had bugged the prison with a system that was disguised well enough to appear hidden but not well enough to avoid discovery. In this way prisoners were led to believe that only certain parts of the prison were bugged. In fact, all of the prison was bugged. Conversations between prisoners could be overheard anywhere, and were closely monitored. They were an invaluable source of intelligence. Prisoners who could hold out through the most intense interrogation often let their guard down later when talking to comrades in jail.

  To help such inadvertent confessions along, Koubi had yet another card to play. Whenever an interrogated subject was released to the general prison, after weeks of often grueling questioning, he was received with open arms by fellow Palestinians who befriended him and congratulated him for having endured interrogation. He was treated like a hero. He was fed, nursed, even celebrated. What he didn’t know was that his happy new comrades were working for Koubi.

  Koubi calls them “birdies.” They were Palestinians who, offered an incentive such as an opportunity to settle with their families in another country, had agreed to cooperate with Shabak. Some days or weeks after welcoming the new prisoner into their ranks, easing his transition into the prison, they would begin to ask questions. They would debrief the prisoner on his interrogation sessions. They would say, “It is very important for those on the outside to know what you told the Israelis and what you didn’t tell them. Tell us, and we will get the information to those on the outside who need to know.” Even prisoners who had managed to keep important secrets from Koubi spilled them to their birdies.

  “The amazing thing is that by now the existence of the birdies is well-known,” Koubi says, “and yet the system still works. People come out of interrogation, go into the regular prison, and then tell their darkest secrets. I don’t know why it still works, but it does.”

  BIG DADDY UPTOWN

  Most professional interrogators work without the latitude given the CIA, the FBI, or the military in the war on terror. A policeman’s subjects all have to be read their Miranda rights, and cops who physically threaten or abuse suspects—at least nowadays—may find themselves in jail. Jerry Giorgio, the legendary NYPD interrogator, has operated within these rules for nearly forty years. He may not know all the names of the CIA and military techniques, but he has probably seen most of them at work. Known as “Big Daddy Uptown,” Giorgio now works for the New York County district attorney in a cramped office in Lower Manhattan that he shares with two others. He is a big man with a big voice, thinning gray hair, a broad belly, and wide, searching greenish-brown eyes. He is considered a wizard by his former colleagues in the NYPD. “All of us of a certain generation came out of the Jerry Giorgio school of interrogation,” says John Bourges, a recently retir
ed Manhattan homicide detective.

  “Everybody knows the Good Cop/Bad Cop routine, right?” Giorgio says. “Well, I’m always the Good Cop. I don’t work with a Bad Cop, either. Don’t need it. You want to know the truth? The truth is—and this is important—everybody down deep wants to tell his or her story. It’s true. No matter how damaging it is to them, no matter how important it is for them to keep quiet, they want to tell their story. If they feel guilty, they want to get it off their chests. If they feel justified in what they did, they want to explain themselves. I tell them, ‘Hey, I know what you did and I can prove it. Now what are you going to do about it? If you show remorse, if you help me out, I’ll go to bat for you.’ I tell them that. And if you give them half a reason to do it, they’ll tell you everything.”

  The most important thing is to get them talking. The toughest suspects are those who clam up and demand a lawyer right at the start. Giorgio believes that once he gets a suspect talking, the stream of words will eventually flow right to the truth. One murderer gave him three voluntary statements in a single day, each one signed, each one different, each one slightly closer to the truth.

  The murderer was Carlos Martinez, a hulking former football player who in May of 1992 killed his girlfriend, Cheryl Maria Wright, and dumped her body in New York, right at the Coliseum overlook off the Henry Hudson Parkway. Since many young female murder victims are killed by their boyfriends, Giorgio started looking for Wright’s. Martinez phoned Giorgio when he heard that the detective wanted to ask him some questions. Giorgio had pictures of Wright with Martinez, and in all the pictures the young beau had a giant head of Jheri curls. But he showed up in Giorgio’s office bald. The detective was immediately more suspicious; a man who worries that somebody might have seen him commit a crime generally tries to alter his appearance.

  Here is how Giorgio summarizes what turned out to be a very long and fruitful conversation:

  “I was at home last night,” Martinez said. “She did call me.”

  “Really, why?”

  “She wanted me to pick her up. I told her, ‘I’m watching the Mets game; I can’t pick you up.’”

  That was it. Giorgio acted very pleased with this statement, thanked Martinez, wrote it up, and asked the young man to sign it. Martinez did.

  Then Giorgio stared at the statement and gave Martinez a quizzical look.

  “You know, Carlos, something about this statement doesn’t look right to me. You two had been going out for, what? Seven years? She calls you and asks you to pick her up at night where she’s just gotten off work. It’s not a safe neighborhood, and you tell her no? You mean a ball game on TV was more important to you?”

  The question was cunning. The detective knew that Martinez was trying to make a good impression; he definitely didn’t want to leave Giorgio with any unresolved issues to play in his mind. So it concerned him that his first statement didn’t sound right. Giorgio’s question also touched Martinez’s sense of chivalry, an important quality for many Hispanic men. It wouldn’t do to be seen as ungentlemanly. Here was a young woman who had just been brutally killed. How would it look to her family and friends if he admitted that she had called and asked him for a ride and he had left her to her fate—for a ball game on TV? The question also subtly suggested an out: The neighborhood wasn’t safe. People got hurt or killed in that neighborhood all the time. Maybe Martinez could admit that he had seen Cheryl on the night of the murder without directly implicating himself. No one ever accused the former footballer of being especially bright. He rose to Giorgio’s bait immediately.

  He said, “Jerry, let me tell you what really happened.” (“Note,” Giorgio says proudly, “already I’m Jerry!”) Martinez now said that he had left his place to pick Wright up after work, but they had gotten into an argument. “She got mad at me and told me she didn’t need a ride, so I waited until she got on the bus, and then I left.” (“Look, now he’s the picture of chivalry!” Giorgio says happily.)

  “Let me take that down,” Giorgio said, again acting pleased with the statement. He wrote it out neatly and asked Martinez to look it over and sign it. Martinez did.

  Again Giorgio squinted at the paper. “You know, Carlos, something is still not right here. Cheryl was a strikingly beautiful girl. People who saw her remembered her. She’s taken that bus home from work many nights, and people on that bus know who she is. And you know what? Nobody who rode that bus saw her on it last night.”

  (This was, in Giorgio’s words, “pure bullshit.” He hadn’t talked to anybody who rode that bus. “Sometimes you have to just take a chance,” he says.)

  Again Martinez looked troubled. He had not allayed the detective’s suspicions. So he tried again. “Okay, okay,” he said. “This is really it. Let me tell you what really happened. Cheryl called, and I left to pick her up, but I ran into a friend of mine—I can’t tell you his name—and we picked her up together. Then Cheryl and I got in this argument, a big fight. My friend got fed up. So we drove away, up Broadway to 181st Street, and stopped at the McDonald’s there. He pulled out a gun, my friend, and he told me to get out of the car. ‘Wait here,’ he told me. ‘I’m going to get rid of your problem.’ Then he left. I waited. Then he came back. He said he had gotten rid of my problem.”

  Giorgio nodded happily and started to write up statement No. 3. He acted troubled over the fact that Martinez refused to name the friend, and the young man quickly coughed up a name. Giorgio’s lieutenant, who had been watching the session through a one-way mirror, immediately got to work tracking down Martinez’s friend. By the time the third statement had been written up, signed, and nestled neatly on top of the other two, Giorgio had a new problem to pose to Martinez: it seemed that his friend was in South Carolina, and had been for some time.

  “We never did get to finish the fourth statement,” Giorgio says.

  “Martinez’s family had hired a lawyer, and he called the station forbidding us to further question his client.” It was, of course, too late.

  CAPTAIN CRUNCH VERSUS THE TREE HUGGERS

  On a spring morning in the offices of Amnesty International, in Washington, D.C., Alistair Hodgett and Alexandra Arriaga were briefing me on their organization’s noble efforts to combat torture wherever in the world it is found. They are bright, pleasant, smart, committed, attractive young people, filled with righteous purpose. Decent people everywhere agree on this: torture is evil and indefensible.

  But is it always?

  I showed the two an article I had torn from that day’s New York Times, which described the controversy over a tragic kidnapping case in Frankfurt, Germany. On September 27 of last year a Frankfurt law student kidnapped an eleven-year-old boy named Jakob von Metzler, whose smiling face appeared in a box alongside the story. The kidnapper had covered Jakob’s mouth and nose with duct tape, wrapped the boy in plastic, and hidden him in a wooded area near a lake. The police captured the suspect when he tried to pick up ransom money, but the suspect wouldn’t reveal where he had left the boy, who the police thought might still be alive. So the deputy police chief of Frankfurt, Wolfgang Daschner, told his subordinates to threaten the suspect with torture. According to the suspect, he was told that a “specialist” was being flown in who would “inflict pain on me of the sort I had never experienced.” The suspect promptly told the police where he’d hidden Jakob, who, sadly, was found dead. The newspaper said that Daschner was under fire from Amnesty International, among other groups, for threatening torture.

  “Under these circumstances,” I asked, “do you honestly think it was wrong to even threaten torture?”

  Hodgett and Arriaga squirmed in their chairs. “We recognize that there are difficult situations,” said Arriaga, who is the group’s director of government relations. “But we are opposed to torture under any and all circumstances, and threatening torture is inflicting mental pain. So we would be against it.”

  Few moral imperatives make such sense on a large scale but break down so dramatically in the parti
cular. A way of sorting this one out is to consider two clashing sensibilities: the warrior and the civilian.

  The civilian sensibility prizes above all else the rule of law. Whatever the difficulties posed by a particular situation, such as trying to find poor Jakob von Metzler before he suffocated, it sees abusive government power as a greater danger to society. Allowing an exception in one case (saving Jakob) would open the door to a greater evil.

  The warrior sensibility requires doing what must be done to complete a mission. By definition, war exists because civil means have failed. What counts is winning, and preserving one’s own troops. To a field commander in a combat zone, the life of an uncooperative enemy captive weighs very lightly against the lives of his own men. There are very few who, faced with a reluctant captive, would not in certain circumstances reach for the alligator clips, or something else.

  “It isn’t about getting mad, or payback,” says Bill Cowan, the Vietnam interrogator. “It’s strictly business. Torturing people doesn’t fit my moral compass at all. But I don’t think there’s much of a gray area. Either the guy has information you need or not. Either it’s vital or it’s not. You know which guys you need to twist.”

  The official statements by President Bush and William Haynes reaffirming the U.S. government’s opposition to torture have been applauded by human-rights groups—but again, the language in them is carefully chosen. What does the Bush administration mean by “torture”? Does it really share the activists’ all-inclusive definition of the word? In his letter to the director of Human Rights Watch, Haynes used the term “enemy combatants” to describe those in custody. Calling detainees “prisoners of war” would entitle them to the protections of the Geneva Convention, which prohibits the “physical or mental torture” of POWs, and “any other form of coercion,” even to the extent of “unpleasant or disadvantageous treatment of any kind.” (In the contemptuous words of one military man, they “prohibit everything except three square meals, a warm bed, and access to a Harvard education.”) Detainees who are American citizens have the advantage of constitutional protections against being held without charges, and have the right to legal counsel. They would also be protected from the worst abuses by the Eighth Amendment, which prohibits “cruel and unusual punishment.” The one detainee at Guantánamo who was discovered to have been born in the United States has been transferred to a different facility, and legal battles rage over his status. But if the rest of the thousands of detainees are neither POWs (even though the bulk of them were captured during the fighting in Afghanistan) nor American citizens, they are fair game. They are protected only by this country’s international promises—which are, in effect, unenforceable.