The Threat

by Andrew G. McCabe

  In most interviews, all an agent has to do is demonstrate that talking to and working with the Bureau is a good idea—to convince a person that talking about bad things they’ve done is in their best interest, which often comes in the form of a reduced sentence. Some interviews become confrontational or hostile. That’s necessary every once in a while—but not all that often if you’ve properly sized up what’s important to someone in an initial conversation.

  Compared to the work of the Bureau, pure intelligence efforts by the CIA and the Defense Department relied more heavily on interrogation. To start the HIG, I learned a lot about how both agencies approached the job: their goals, their strengths and weaknesses. Their approach was intelligence driven. They did well on some of those things that—for instance, in the Zazi case—I had observed the Bureau doing poorly. Analysts were central to the process. Before intelligence case officers interrogated a detained terrorist, they conferred with analysts—experts in the subject matter. The analyst with the best knowledge of the terrorist group and the terrorist activity provided requirements. In the intelligence world, a “requirement” is a need for information, prompting a question to be asked. So this was the great strength of their approach: There was nothing vague or open-ended about it. Every question was shaped by intelligence and driven to expand intelligence. The weakness of their approach was its inflexibility. Interrogations proceeded down a checklist: What do you know of Osama bin Laden? Where is Osama bin Laden located? Who did you speak to last week about Osama bin Laden? If the person didn’t answer, he didn’t answer. That’s what the cable would report.

  Defense interrogations involved slightly more in the way of rapport building than CIA interrogations did, but only as defined and allowed by the Army Field Manual. Military interrogators cannot, for instance, give a person any food or drink unless the Field Manual approach explicitly allows offers of food and drink. And in order to employ that approach, senior ranks must approve the interrogator’s written plan in advance. The interrogation plan names the approaches to be used and explains precisely the ways in which they will be used.

  An FBI interview flies by the seat of its pants. This is its greatest strength and biggest weakness. We don’t do homework like the Agency. We don’t have the meticulous organizational skills of Defense. But FBI interrogators know how to read the subject. They know how to respond to the subject’s reactions to questions. They know how to borrow from and weave together various approaches. This guy looks hungry: I think I can warm him up a little bit if I give him a cup of coffee and let him smoke a cigarette.

  Three agencies, three approaches. A case study of an age-old conflict: flexibility versus organization. Everybody needs some of both. I hoped the HIG could come up with a synthesis that would improve on all three approaches.

  A Sweeping Portrait

  Setting up the HIG, I got a crash course in establishing a government program. The president had signed executive orders, but the presidential pen is not a magic wand. I had to figure out how to get a staff. How to find office space. How to make the space secure for working with classified material. DOD sent me an experienced interrogator to work with. I hopped the Metro to Rosslyn and together we made some scratch marks on a yellow legal pad. Riveting stuff, which I will spare you.

  On we limped, to Christmas. Family. Presents. Breakfast. Down to the basement for some exercise. Turned a TV on. Breaking news: Northwest Airlines Flight 253—“… the Underwear Bomber was taken into custody…”

  My first thought was, I am so glad to be out of counterterrorism. If I were in counterterrorism right now, I’d be on the way into the office, barking at the phone: Who is this guy, where is he from, who does he know, is there another on the way, what do we need to get out in front of here? But not today—I’m running the HIG, and I don’t even have interrogators on board yet.

  Cue the phone call—it was Art Cummings, asking, You got your team out there? I said, What team? Art said, Bullshit. This is the biggest thing that’s happened in ages, and the HIG should be a part of this.

  Fortunately, Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab was not ready to talk right away. On arrest, he went straight into surgery to treat serious burns of his groin, genitals, and legs. When he came out, he invoked his right to counsel. This gave me time to figure out what to do.

  A few things happened. As soon as Abdulmutallab was taken into custody, the Detroit field office identified his family in Nigeria. His father was a prominent banker. He had many brothers and sisters. Detroit sent an agent to Nigeria to connect with them. The agent was there to explain to the family how the U.S. justice system worked and how it would be to Abdulmutallab’s benefit for him to cooperate and talk—how cooperation could affect his sentence, where he served his time, and the conditions under which he served his time. He was dead-to-rights guilty of trying to destroy an airplane. But there were still ways cooperation could have a positive impact on his outcome. The agent was also there to listen. If we wanted Abdulmutallab to open up and share intelligence, we needed to know how to talk to him. We needed to know how he came to find himself on a Northwest Airlines flight with a bomb in his underwear. The agent convinced Abdulmutallab’s mother and uncle to come back to Detroit, to meet with Abdulmutallab in jail, and to try to help us convince him to cooperate.

  At the end of January, I sent a couple of people to Detroit. Not to take over the investigation, but to help the Detroit agents with their interviews the way I had helped Denver with Zazi. One of the people I sent was Joe Yungwirth, a former Special Forces officer and a former member of the FBI fly team—agents who deploy overseas when we need to put additional eyes and ears on the ground. If something big pops up for our legat in Abuja, for example, we’ll send a fly team guy out there to help. They are prepared to dig in and stay for a while—months at a time. Joe had a lot of experience with fast, deep learning. I also sent a few subject-matter experts up there, and a reports officer to help them get the paperwork out quickly. All of these people went on to play key roles in the HIG.

  It was a very low-key, low-visibility deployment. They helped design, and eventually became, the infrastructure for the conversation that the intelligence community wanted to have with Abdulmutallab. It turned out to be a very challenging interview.

  Abdulmutallab was, and probably is to this day, a reticent, closed-off, quiet man. He is very pious, with a black-and-white view of the world. Everything beyond the parameters of his religious beliefs is alien and condemned. Despite the severity of his burns, he never requested or accepted a single pain pill. He wore regular clothes, stayed in his cell, ate like everybody else, and would not outwardly acknowledge what had to be great physical suffering. He spoke to no one else in the facility. He kept completely to himself.

  At the heart of every good interrogation or interview is a relationship, one in which the interviewee begins to trust the interviewer and decides that talking is in his or her best interest. Here we had a young man who was isolated, injured, and profoundly devout. The Detroit agents, with assistance from our team, rightly concluded that Abdulmutallab’s family were in the best position to convince him that he could trust the FBI. The agents initiated the ultimate interrogation of Abdulmutallab by getting the family to convince him to talk to us.

  When he did start talking, he told us the story of how he became connected with Anwar al-Awlaki. From my first days in counterterrorism, I had been conscious of, and actively tracking, Awlaki. Born in America to Yemeni parents, Awlaki grew up to be a charismatic jihadi preacher and al-Qaeda recruiter. After 9/11, he fled from the U.S. to Yemen. By the time I came to counterterrorism, Awlaki was on his way to becoming the most effective popularizer of militant Islam in the English-speaking world. Budding terrorists hoarded Awlaki’s lectures on CDs. Awlaki was connected to my very first case at ITOS-1, just before Operation Overt. When the original, core al-Qaeda began to weaken, Awlaki became a leader of that group’s first and most dangerous offshoot, al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP). His lectures in
fluenced Najibullah Zazi. And he was a mentor to Nidal Malik Hasan, who killed thirteen and injured thirty-two more in a mass shooting at Fort Hood, Texas, one month before Abdulmutallab boarded the plane to Detroit.

  Abdulmutallab told us about traveling to Yemen’s Shabwah Province, where he was a guest in Awlaki’s house. He described how Awlaki introduced him to the foremost terrorist bomb maker in the world, a man named Ibrahim Hassan al-Asiri, who went on to create devices such as the printer-cartridge bomb years later. It was Asiri who taught Abdulmutallab how to handle, wear, and deploy the underwear bomb. Abdulmutallab provided granular information on terrorist operations, amounting to a sweeping portrait of al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula’s inner workings—a portrait that helped to guide U.S. intelligence operations for some time to come.

  At breaks, and after interrogation sessions, Joe would call to tell me what had happened. At the same time, interrogators were disseminating the results to reports officers—not just handing off their notes but carefully walking them through them, so that no one would get hung up on illegible handwriting or unfamiliar terms. Within the intelligence community, we disseminated this information as broadly as we could, to show other agencies the potential of an expert-assisted interrogation. The FBI has a reputation for not sharing information in a timely fashion. I wanted to change that reputation. Every gesture like this—every mechanical refinement of workflow—would help convince another person or two in the intelligence community that this collaboration was a good idea.

  And to persuade the field offices that this was not a land grab, I made sure Joe worked closely with the local case agent, the Detroit agent who had gone to Nigeria. Because the goal was not just to suck the intelligence out of Abdulmutallab and leave him there. The goal was to create an ongoing relationship with the suspect. Keeping the local case agent involved through the whole process ensured that someone in Detroit would be able to keep the conversation going.

  Soft on Terrorism?

  Is terrorism a crime or an act of war? Should terrorists be tried in the justice system or handled by the military? Because Abdulmutallab was a direct agent of AQAP, and because he exercised his right to remain silent for some time after being given his Miranda warning, this case—and involvement in this case by some of us who later made up the HIG—immediately became an easy way for both Republicans and Democrats to express their views on the U.S. government’s appropriate response to terrorism.

  For Democrats, the HIG became a symbol of a better way forward, after the notorious episodes of prisoner abuse at Abu Ghraib, Bagram Air Base, and elsewhere. They saw the HIG as a smarter, more efficient, more effective way of interrogating terrorist suspects. For Republicans, the HIG was a sign of how far the country had fallen and proof that the U.S. had gone soft on terrorism. What were we doing sending FBI people in front of terrorists and reading them their rights? Terrorists don’t have rights. They deserve whatever they get.

  When I went to the Hill to brief members of Congress and testify before committees, that was the conversation I became a part of. A conversation with no middle ground. I went to the Hill to brief or testify about the HIG more than fifteen times during my first year on the job. These were my initial experiences testifying before Congress, and the first few times I went, members of Congress wanted to hear about Abdulmutallab.

  Republicans would ask, Isn’t it true you didn’t even get in front of him for weeks before he lawyered up, and he didn’t want to talk to you? And you lost all that time, and you didn’t get much of anything out of him? I would answer, Yes, true, he wasn’t questioned the night he was arrested, but we did convince him to cooperate, and we collected significant intelligence. They did not want to hear that. They were not willing to acknowledge what we learned. They could only see the case as an example of a single effect of Obama’s new policy, an effect they viewed like this: Now a terrorist could get arrested and be treated like a criminal defendant—be allowed to tell the federal government, Screw you, I don’t want to talk.

  Democratic congressman Adam Schiff, a former U.S. attorney from California—and now the chairman of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence—was one of the few members of Congress who asked to have a real conversation with me, one on one, about interrogation. He said, I’m really interested in this concept of the HIG, tell me about it. He wanted to know what works, what doesn’t, how he could help. Was he doing that because he had been told to support the president’s agenda? Or was he legitimately interested in finding a mode of interrogation that was guided by the Constitution and the rule of law? I got the sense that he was legitimately interested in national security. I was looking for friends. I took them where I found them.

  The pitch of rhetoric around the interrogation of terrorist suspects—and about the HIG—rose higher through 2010 and into 2011, as the House flipped and the Tea Party moved Republicans even further to the right. I was constantly appearing on the Hill and elsewhere around town, arguing that a constitutionally consistent approach to interrogation works. Sometimes you’ll get a guy who decides not to talk, and in this country we have to respect that. Most suspects who decide not to talk on the day they’re arrested do talk eventually. And rapport building—the relationship-building process of getting to know suspects, breaking down their defenses positively, building trust—gets you higher-quality, better intelligence than scaring the hell out of them or beating them into telling you anything you want to hear to make the beating stop. That’s my position. Always has been and always will be. I’m not throwing a rock at anybody who’s done interrogations differently. But my experience has been that law-enforcement interview techniques produce great volumes of valuable intelligence.

  More than half of Congress disagreed, because law-enforcement techniques were not in their political playbook. Mike Rogers, a Republican from Michigan, became chair of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence in January of 2011. He said one of his first priorities as chair was to get rid of the HIG. Rogers was hard to deal with in part because he had once been an FBI agent. He spent about five years in the Chicago field office, where he worked on organized crime—enough time to give him some dog-with-bone opinions.

  What I learned, in my appearances on the Hill, was that the goal of every trip up there was survival. There was no convincing anyone of anything. Everyone walks into the room with predrafted talking points and questions. Success is coming out with a sound bite that will advance an agenda. A congressional hearing is not fact-finding. It’s theater. As the witness, you have one goal: Get out alive.

  ‘Fine! Done!’

  When I wasn’t battling my way through the Capitol building, I was in LX-1 building teams. Teams were organized by target. The HIG charter designated two kinds of targets for our deployments, predesignated and pop-up.

  Predesignated targets were the highest of the high-value people. If Osama bin Laden or Anwar al-Awlaki ended up in detention, the HIG would deploy predesignated teams on those people. To create that list of targets, we sent out a survey to the agencies and had knowledgeable people rate each terrorist on a few different scales, such as operational value or intelligence value. We then submitted the list of the top twenty-four to the National Security Council for approval.

  Pop-up targets were more common. Anyone anywhere in the intelligence community could nominate a target for a pop-up HIG deployment. Abdulmutallab was a pop-up. Nobody knew who he was before he got on that plane, but then he became the most important person for anyone to talk to. Any person captured who knew a lot about Awlaki, Asiri, or al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula would be a prime pop-up candidate.

  Each team had interrogators, analysts, and reports officers. The FBI and the Defense Department provided a lot of these resources. The CIA always provided the fewest. The CIA is the smallest of the intelligence services and is very careful, to the point of reticence, about assigning people and spending money.

  We were constantly poring over intelligence traffic to pick up informati
on about high-value targets who had been detained. The Agency held back on this kind of information, too. One notable early failure for the HIG was missing the chance to interrogate a high-level terrorist leader who had been captured and held by Pakistani forces in early 2010. The CIA was allowed to question him, but (as Newsweek reported at the time) the HIG was not. On the Hill, members of Congress grilled me about this lapse: If the HIG is so good, why did you miss this guy? To expose all the details of interagency tension would have been a mistake. Frustrated as I was with my reluctant CIA partners, calling them to account in front of Congress would only have made things worse.

  Art Cummings and Director Mueller wanted frequent updates from me about relations with the Agency. I tried and tried to make it work, and finally had to tell them I couldn’t. Mueller said, Okay, I’m coming in. He set up a meeting at Langley with the CIA director, Leon Panetta, and a few of us went and joined them. The seventh-floor conference room was gorgeous: hardwood paneling, a forty-acre table, bottles of water and little mats in front of every chair. And in the middle of the table sat a bowl of fresh raspberries. I had never seen a fresh raspberry in a government office before. Had not known such things could exist in such places. We had no fresh raspberries in the Hoover building. I really wanted to eat one, but I did not eat one. I opened the bottle of water next to my place mat—heard the little whoosh, felt the rush of air on the edges of my fingers. It was fizzy water. These guys knew how to live.

  The Agency team came in, including Panetta, whom I’d never met before. He whipped off his suit coat, threw it on a chair, looked sideways at Mueller, and said, Get the hell over here, you son of a bitch! The back-slapping, the questions: How’s that golf game? Do you still suck? How’s Ann? How’s Sylvia? Mueller took his own jacket off, put it on the back of his chair. We all sat down.