Zazi came in with his attorney. The initial interview went on for many hours. We broke for dinner. Ordered pizza. The case agent did the interview. I sat in on some of it. I also observed it from another room. The interview took place across three days. In the in-between times, the case agent and I would talk.
Interviews raise all kinds of questions about technique. What should you show someone during an interview, if you want to confront them? You ask the suspect if he’s done something, he denies it, and you have a document, like a transcript of an intercept, in which he admits having done it. Do you want to place that document in front of him or not? That can be a very powerful thing to do in an interview. But it can also compromise the case, because the suspect then knows what surveillance you have. In a national-security case, the question of disclosure is even more complicated, because the document you want to use—or the information contained in that document—could be classified. If it is, you can’t use that document or that information before having conversations with headquarters and with lawyers, and perhaps going through a process of declassification, which is also complicated. The way that you proceed, laying bricks of an argument in the right order and direction to build a proper legal justification, determines whether the results of that interview will be effective and useful or not. Zazi made categorical denials in his interviews that we were later able to punch through, and he made statements that were absolutely devastating to him.
The Denver field office did a great job on High Rise. They stepped up, as Mike Heimbach would have said. The case agent’s interview with Zazi pulled enough information that, combined with other evidence, he could write a solid complaint. Zazi was charged, presented for arraignment, and taken into custody before I left. Ultimately he pleaded guilty to conspiracy to use a weapon of mass destruction, conspiracy to commit murder in a foreign country, and providing material support to a terrorist organization. After his conviction, while incarcerated at the Metropolitan Detention Center, in Brooklyn, Zazi cooperated with the government. He testified about his terrorist experiences. Someday, when the government decides it is time, he will be sentenced for his crimes. Meanwhile, his associates were also brought to justice. Zarein Ahmedzay pleaded guilty and is cooperating. Adis Medunjanin was convicted at trial of multiple terrorist offenses and was sentenced to life in prison. For me, those two weeks in Colorado opened a wide window onto a set of problems that, at the time, I had no idea I would work on practically every waking moment for the next two years.
‘You Know What I Like to Do?’
Those next two years started at the Denver airport. My phone rang as I was about to board my flight home. The call was from Art Cummings’s office. Cummings and the director wanted to see me right away, that afternoon, after I landed in D.C.
I first met Art Cummings during Operation Overt. Art had been serving as the special agent in charge for counterterrorism at the Washington field office. We had heard that the director had pulled him out of there and thrown him back to counterterrorism at headquarters to keep an eye on us. I remember feeling as if this were Mueller’s way of saying he didn’t entirely trust what we were doing.
The notion that Cummings would be a force to hold us back was quickly dispelled. He was a former Navy SEAL. He spoke Mandarin fluently. He had started in the Bureau as a field agent in L.A. doing crack cases in Compton in the 1980s. The first thing that hit me about Cummings was his eyes. They are blue, but it’s not the color that counts. It’s the way the eyes move, the way they lock on to you, the way they look through you as you talk. Without saying anything at all, Cummings seemed to be saying, Oh yeah? You think so? That’s what you got? If you gave him a good idea, he responded with a better one. If you gave him a great idea, he wanted more of them.
The entire time he worked with us at LX-1, Art lived on a friend’s boat, which was docked in a marina in Annapolis. His family lived in Richmond, where his sons were in school; and rather than moving them all to D.C., he decided to sleep on this boat. It was no luxury craft. It had a bench that served as a seat during the day and as Art’s bed at night. It did not have heating or air-conditioning, or a galley or bathroom. Art bathed and dressed every morning in the public restroom of the marina. At night, on his way home, he bought a tuna sandwich and ate on the boat. His austere existence added to Art’s mystique.
As soon as he joined the team at LX-1, Art set his sights on the CIA. He was convinced that the agency, for whatever reason, was not sharing with us all the knowledge about Overt that it was getting from the Brits. Were there any U.S.-based plotters? Were any associates of UK suspects living in the country? He demanded a seat at the agency’s secure video teleconferences with the Brits. I accompanied him as his plus-one. After the TV went dark, Art would sometimes accuse the senior CIA officer in the room of holding back. He would demand to know why we hadn’t heard some of this stuff until now. It was a level of confrontation I had never seen before.
Upon arriving in Washington after receiving my summons at the Denver airport, I made my way to Art’s office and asked him what was up. He said, It’s that hig thing. Hig thing? I didn’t know what he was talking about. Hig! he repeated—and then it clicked. HIG must be an acronym, since half the words out of an agent’s mouth are acronyms. He went on: HIG—the High-Value Detainee Interrogation Group. A new interagency effort. We’re going to revamp the way we do interrogations and interviews of terrorism suspects.
Then we were off to the director’s office—which meant, in the first instance, presenting ourselves to Wanda Siford, Mueller’s secretary, assistant, and Praetorian Guard. She had spent much of her adult life serving directors in the FBI. Wanda was the FBI, or at least some hard-shelled part of it. Competence personified—dressed and coiffed with enormous dignity and professionalism—she sat behind a high desk in the inner reception area of the director’s suite. I knew Wanda as an older woman, at the end of a long and esteemed career. She embraced her role as the director’s protector and commanded the respect, and fear, of the highest ranks of the organization.
Wanda looked at us, picked up the phone, and called Mueller. She hung up and swept her hand to the left, signaling that we were to proceed. We passed through the conference room and entered the director’s office. The space had been built for J. Edgar Hoover, though he died before he could move into it. The office is not opulent and does not occupy a corner. It looks across Pennsylvania Avenue to the Justice Department. Congress has set a limit on the amount of money that presidential appointees are allowed to spend on office furniture, and the limit is low—five thousand dollars per appointee during the duration of an appointment. For an FBI director, that’s ten years, the period fixed in order to keep the appointment as much above politics as possible. FBI directors never do much decorating. But the office has a sense of grandeur nonetheless. These walls have seen seven FBI directors work with eight presidents and fourteen attorneys general. They have witnessed moments of triumph, such as the capture of Ramzi Yousef, one of the perpetrators of the 1993 attack on the World Trade Center, and moments of anger and disgust, as when the Bureau reckoned with the treason of agent Robert Hanssen. Since the Hoover building’s dedication in 1975, thirty-nine FBI agents have died in the line of duty, and from this office the first calls went out to spouses and families.
Mueller sat behind his desk. He started by asking me questions about the Zazi case. Then he turned to the matter at hand. He asked, What’s your plan next?
I said I was looking forward to continuing what I was doing. He said, Uh-huh, okay. And then he said, Well, there is this other thing that’s come up. President Obama has asked the FBI to take responsibility for building and running a new group, to be called the HIG. He explained the basics. It was an effort to professionalize how the government conducted interrogations of high-value terrorist suspects detained overseas. He described it as an effort to get away from the abuses that had occurred at Abu Ghraib and in other controversial CIA programs. He said, The new president wants to d
o things differently. There’s been a study about this, and a recommendation that came about as a result, and we’ve been asked to take charge. And we’re going to do it. And you’re going to do it. You’re going to build it.
I had not been aware of this study. I didn’t know what the recommendations were. This was not something I had much experience with.
Mueller said, Don’t worry about that. You can read all that. CIA and the Department of Defense will be your partners, but they’re not going to like it. There are things they don’t want to do that they are going to have to do. You will be the director. Your job is to make this work. That is the whole of your job description. If you start knocking heads with the Agency and with DOD, and you can’t get them to agree, then get them to agree. And when you absolutely can’t get them to agree, I don’t want you to fight with them. Come to me, and I will fight those fights for you. Because your job is to build it and make it work.
After all this, Mueller asked, Is there anything else you would like to tell me? I thought I saw an opening and tried to take it. I said, Sir, I’ll do whatever you want me to do. But if you’re asking my preference, what I would like to do is work counterterrorism. Mueller looked at me, cocked his head slightly to one side, and said, You know what I like to do?
No, sir, I said.
I like to try homicide cases. And look what I’m doing.
Developing Rapport
In Accra, Ghana, at 6 A.M. on Christmas Eve 2009, the young man checked out of the Tops Hotel and went to the airport, where he did not speak to another soul. He flew to Lagos and on to Amsterdam, and then boarded Northwest Airlines Flight 253 to Detroit. En route, he watched the video map, waiting for the plane to cross into U.S. airspace, because his teacher had instructed him, “Wait until you are in the U.S., then bring the plane down.” When the airplane was over the U.S., the young man went into the restroom. He brushed his teeth. He put on perfume. He prayed. He returned to his seat and covered his lap and legs with a pillow and blanket. He reached inside his clothing and depressed the plunger to activate the bomb inside his pants. The bomb in his pants made a hissing sound and then a loud pop, as if a bottle had been uncorked—and apparently that was all. The young man thought his bomb had failed. He started thinking that he would have to wear the failed bomb in his pants as he passed through immigration before throwing it away in the men’s room. Then his skin began to burn. He tried to take off his pants and underwear. The bomb and his clothes and his skin were on fire now. There was dark smoke rising from his body. There were flames. Seeing the fire, he thought maybe he had not failed. Maybe the bomb would explode, bring down the plane, and kill all the passengers, and his martyrdom mission would be complete.
I had seen a lot. I had never seen 302s like these: reports on the case of Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab—the so-called Underwear Bomber, who was being held in Michigan after his failed attempt, on Christmas Day 2009, to blow up that Northwest Airlines flight. Here was an al-Qaeda terrorist who—after a long, carefully planned process of patiently executed interviews—was divulging every detail of his radicalization and the planning of his attack. Every detail, right down to the architecture of the compound in Yemen where he trained. I read every page, every sentence, the Detroit field office pushed into the system. Read with rooting interest, though I’d already heard a lot of it. The case of the Underwear Bomber was the first deployment of elements of what would become the High-Value Detainee Interrogation Group that Mueller had assigned me to run.
At the HIG, I was in some ways more removed than I had been from the action—I never went to Detroit, never left my vault at LX-1. I was also more in charge of what was happening. I influenced the response to this case in ways known only to a small inner circle, while at the same time managing how our work would eventually be seen by the world beyond that group. Running the HIG, I crossed over to the dark side. Crossed into the realm of law enforcement where politics exerts decisive influence on outcomes in ways no honest person would deny.
I mean politics in two senses—one functional and necessary, the other toxic and obstructionist. Politics in the first sense—small-“p” politics—means the navigation of human relationships. Politics in that sense is the DNA of law enforcement. Law enforcement manages the shape of society with respect to legal parameters of acceptable behavior—parameters set by the Constitution and defined by statutes. The second kind of politics—party politics—means the execution of partisan strategy for purely political advantage. That kind of politics should have no place in American law enforcement. The only circumstance that might effectively force law enforcement to be partisan, in the two-party American political system, would be if one party unambiguously ceased to respect the laws and the Constitution.
At the HIG, I saw the first kind of politics operate in law enforcement at the highest levels. I began to know, and to some degree exercise, the inherently strange and fine-grained phenomenon of power. I also saw the second kind of politics encroach upon law enforcement—saw partisanship intensify to the point where it seemed almost to threaten the constitutional and legal system.
The HIG was born in a whirlwind, and at the center of the whirlwind stood a prison, Camp X-Ray, at the U.S. military detention facility at Guantánamo Bay. Campaigning for president in 2008, Barack Obama had promised to close Guantánamo. His Republican opponents wanted Guantánamo kept open. This was a disagreement about many things, but centrally it was a disagreement about the best way to get intelligence from suspected terrorists.
Obama believed the War on Terror had led the U.S. in the wrong direction. Like many Democrats (and many others), he believed the use of “enhanced” interrogation techniques, such as waterboarding, amounted to outright torture and had compromised our values as a nation. He also believed that forms of interrogation that fell short of “enhanced” were ultimately more effective. Many Republicans, but by no means all, saw the War on Terror from a different angle. They believed all terrorist suspects, including U.S. citizens, should be treated as enemy combatants—with no rights or constitutional protections. They believed the military and the intelligence agencies should use whatever interrogation methods they thought would get results. The ends justified the means.
Three days after Obama’s inauguration, he signed Executive Order 13491—“Ensuring Lawful Interrogations”—which established a task force to evaluate the federal government’s interrogation and detainee-transfer policies. The next document he signed, Executive Order 13492, ordered the closure of the detention facilities at Guantánamo Bay. The first policy documents of the new administration, these orders became choice targets for Obama’s political opponents. Most congressional Republicans would not have cared if the executive orders had been blank, or filled with Holy Scripture. As Obama’s first forays into counterterrorism policy, these orders were bound to be condemned for political advantage.
In August 2009, the presidential task force recommended two interrogation reforms. The first was to create an interagency group to conduct interrogations of high-value terrorist suspects—the CIA would be involved, and the Department of Defense; the FBI would run the group, and it would report to the National Security Council at the White House. The second was to ban the use of enhanced interrogation techniques by any U.S. government entity. From now on, only techniques from the U.S. Army Field Manual and those used by federal law enforcement, which had been compiled to be in conformity with the Geneva Conventions, would be allowed. The president accepted both of these recommendations and asked Director Mueller to create the High-Value Detainee Interrogation Group.
At the beginning, the only things I knew about the group were that it was supposed to exist; that it would be a three-way effort by the FBI, CIA, and Defense Department; and that whatever was not in the Army Field Manual would be off-limits. I read the Field Manual. I read the manual’s breakdown of interrogation phases and its definitions and taxonomies of each: the five main ways to approach a subject; the five main kinds of questions to ask; the m
any subcategories of both; and the permutations of ways to combine them. The terms, when listed one after another—Fear-Up, Fear-Down, Pride and Ego, Futility, We Know All, File and Dossier, Establish Your Identity, Repetition, Rapid Fire, Silent, Change of Scene—triggered a scatter of associations: goofy, clinical, ominous. But “Developing Rapport,” the foundation of all approaches and modes of questioning in the Field Manual, was already second nature to me, from all the interviews I’d done over the years.
Flashback to Quantico. A classroom. The teacher was John Hess. Hess was old—he had been around, it seemed, since J. Edgar Hoover was a kid. He had served for much of his career as an agent in Montpelier, Vermont—not an al-Qaeda hotbed. The course I took with him was called Interview and Interrogation.
In class, somebody asked, What’s the difference between an interview and an interrogation? Hess answered, When you are convinced of someone’s guilt to a moral certainty, it’s an interrogation. I remember thinking, How am I going to know when that happens? And that was his point, I think. Moral certainty is rare.
When I became an agent, I learned that the FBI does very little interrogation. It does a lot of interviews. Here is another difference between interviews and interrogation: Interviews take place in a longer-term context. Interviews help agents build relationships. Relationships nurture informants. The job is to create in someone’s mind a sense that you are worthy of trust. That you are competent. A professional. Doing the right thing. The challenge is demonstrating that your interests are in alignment—even if your ultimate goals are not the same. The agent who believes that he can take hardened criminals, show them the light of patriotism, and teach them the right way to live is the agent you will find in the back booth at O’Malley’s nodding for another shot at 4:58 P.M.
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