How to Break a Terrorist

By Scott Horton

Early in June 2006, I was in Amman, Jordan when word arrived that Abu Musab al-Zarqawi has been killed. He died when an American F-16 dropped two 500-pound bombs on the house where he was staying. Al-Zarqawi hailed from the Amman suburb of Zarqawi, and the news provoked a great deal of tension. In no time, public security officials in the Hashemite Kingdom were busily arranging an anti-al Zarqawi demonstration in downtown Amman, and anxiously keeping the lid on things. Back in the United States, however, the news was received with loud celebration. It was one of the increasingly rare good news days for an administration trapped in a very difficult position in Iraq.

The May issue of The Atlantic features Mark Bowden's engrossing account of how U.S. Forces in Iraq came by the information that enabled them to kill Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the Jordanian thug who morphed into the founder of al Qaeda in Mesopotamia. We are introduced to the interrogation team (they tag themselves as the “Gators”) of Task Force 145, a Special Operations Command unit charged with tracking down America's most wanted terrorists, and given a very good sense of how they went about their work.

The crux of Bowden's piece is a description of the techniques used by the Gators to secure the intelligence used in the end to track down and kill al-Zarqawi.

The interrogation methods employed by the Task Force were initially notorious. When the hunt started, in 2003, the unit was based at Camp Nama, at Baghdad International Airport, where abuse of detainees quickly became common. According to later press reports in The New York Times, The Washington Post, and other news outlets, tactics at Nama ranged from cruel and unusual to simply juvenile—one account described Task Force soldiers shooting detainees with paintballs. In early 2004, both the CIA and the FBI complained to military authorities about such practices. The spy agency then banned its personnel from working at Camp Nama. Interrogators at the facility were reportedly stripping prisoners naked and hosing them down in the cold, beating them, employing “stress positions,” and keeping them awake for long hours. But after the prisoner-abuse scandal at Abu Ghraib came to light in April 2004, the military cracked down on such practices. By March of last year, 34 Task Force members had been disciplined, and 11 were removed from the unit for mistreating detainees. Later last year, five Army Rangers working at the facility were convicted of punching and kicking prisoners.

The unit was renamed Task Force 145 in the summer of 2004 and was moved to Balad, where the new batch of gators began arriving the following year. According to those interviewed for this story, harsh treatment of detainees had ended. Physical abuse was outlawed, as were sensory deprivation and the withholding or altering of food as punishment. The backlash from Abu Ghraib had produced so many restrictions that gators were no longer permitted to work even a standard good cop/bad cop routine. The interrogation-room cameras were faithfully monitored, and gators who crossed the line would be interrupted in mid-session.

The quest for fresh intel came to rely on subtler methods. Gators worked with the battery of techniques outlined in an Army manual and taught at Fort Huachuca, such as “ego up,” which involved flattery; “ego down,” which meant denigrating a detainee; and various simple con games—tricking a detainee into believing you already knew something you did not, feeding him misinformation about friends or family members, and so forth. Deciding how to approach a detainee was more art than science. Talented gators wrote their own scripts for questioning, adopting whatever roles seemed most appropriate, and adjusting on the fly. They carefully avoided making offers they could not keep, but often dangled “promises” that were subtly incomplete—instead of offering to move a prisoner to a better cell, for instance, a gator might promise to “see the boss” about doing so. Sometimes the promise was kept. Fear, the most useful interrogation tool, was always present. The well-publicized abuses at Abu Ghraib and elsewhere put all detainees on edge, and assurances that the U.S. command had cracked down were not readily believed. The prospect of being shipped to the larger prison—notorious during the American occupation, and even more so during the Saddam era—was enough to persuade many subjects to talk. This was, perhaps, the only constructive thing to result from the Abu Ghraib scandal, which otherwise remains one of the biggest setbacks of the war.

This account rings true to me with one small quibble—the suggestion that the “good cop/bad cop” technique was out of bounds. It clearly wasn't. This canard was used by the administration as part of their plea for latitude. The “good cop/bad cop” technique was incorporated in Field Manual 34-52 (“Intelligence Interrogation”), and was always in the safe zone. And from my sources, its use in Iraq, Afghanistan and Guantánamo was never interdicted.

Bowden then comes to focus on a detainee code-named Abu Hadyr, who proved the ultimate goldmine.

“We both know what I want,” Doc said. “You have information you could trade. It is your only source of leverage right now. You don’t want to go to Abu Ghraib, and I can help you, but you have to give me something in trade. A guy as smart as you—you are the type of Sunni we can use to shape the future of Iraq.” If Abu Haydr would betray his organization, Doc implied, the Americans would make him a very big man indeed.

. . .

Doc pressed his advantage.

“You and I know the name of a person in your organization who you are very close to,” Doc said. “I need you to tell me that name so that I know I can trust you. Then we can begin negotiating.” In fact, the American had no particular person in mind. His best hope was that Abu Haydr might name a heretofore unknown mid-level insurrectionist.

Ever circumspect, Abu Haydr pondered his response even longer than usual.

At last he said, “Abu Ayyub al-Masri.”

This was the break-through moment.

Bowden's account made me think immediately of discussions I had with an FBI interrogator, who stressed that the key to success was not violence and intimidation, but developing a special rapport and winning the prisoner's confidence. The tools used here are all standard elements of the military interrogator's arsenal. All were well within legal and ethical bounds.

Back in 2003, Bowden gave us “The Dark Art of Interrogation,” a somber (if not distressing) essay on the use of torture and torture-light in the interrogation process. It remains one of the most important works in the torture library. This article is also a significant contribution—demonstrating in a very compelling way that the old techniques, skillfully deployed, can yield the needed results.