Direct Action (13 page)

“Marriage isn’t a game, Reuven.”
“I’m not playing games. You love this woman, right?”
“Yes, I do.”
“So do the right thing. Don’t make trouble for her—marry her, Tom.” The Israeli’s face clouded over. “If I had it to do all over again, I’d marry Leah five years earlier than I did. That would have given us five more years, Tom. We had thirty-six years together. I can tell you now it wasn’t enough.”
“I’m sorry, Reuven.”
“Believe me, Tom, I am sorrier than you. So give your MJ a good time, buy her a ring, then put her on the plane home. No business, Tom. Not a hint of it. After she’s safely away, ecstatic with a diamond she can show all her colleagues—that’s when we do business. Then—I’ll arrange for you to debrief the scum who came here so they could kill women and children. Then we can start the hunt.”

¹²
Israeli term for Shin Bet.
¹³
S]]] R]]]], who formerly worked for PLO intelligence chief Abu Iyad as a PLO mole for an international broadcast network in Beirut in the 1980s, was recruited as a penetration agent by R]]]] B]]], a CIA case officer at Paris station, in 1988. When B]]] left Paris, R]]]] was handed over to a case officer who spoke neither Arabic nor French. Disillusioned by the new case officer’s lack of sophistication and street smarts, R]]]], over a period of a year, disengaged himself from all involvement with CIA. Currently, he is a successful Paris-based businessman whose associates have no idea about his intelligence background.

26 OCTOBER 2003
10:02
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SEVEN KILOMETERS NORTHWEST OF QADIMA

IT WAS THE SMELL, more than anything, that had made Tom uneasy; an ineffable but palpable mélange of disinfectant, urine, sweat, must, and fear. The result of this assault on his senses—and this took place even though Tom knew intellectually he was just a visitor here—was a huge and totally unexpected psychological tsunami. It sucked Tom into an emotional undertow that combined apprehension, anxiety, and, as much as he tried to fight against it, complete and utter heart-palpitating dread. He couldn’t help himself. Dread was... just in the air.

They’d left at nine. Reuven had taken the coast road. Just north of Udim, opposite a Toys “R” Us superstore that would have done justice to the Paramus Mall, he’d swerved off the highway, drove down the exit ramp, and continued north on a dusty track that ran parallel to the highway. Two kilometers on, he’d made a sharp turn onto a potholed, single-lane road bordered on both sides by denuded cotton fields. There would be only one interview today. Reuven told Tom that Heinrich Azouz, the Jerusalem bomber, had died of his wounds. But he’d pulled enough strings to get Tom granted permission to interrogate Dianne Lamb. It was a one-shot deal.

They’d driven due east, followed the browntop as it turned north then east again, crossed the tracks of the main Tel Aviv–Haifa rail line, and continued another three kilometers past brick factories, concrete plants, and quarries until they intersected a four-lane blacktop road so new that the center line hadn’t been painted yet. Tom caught glimpses, but he was focused on the work at hand.

Reuven turned north. Tom looked up. The highway was bordered by cypress groves. About three-quarters of a kilometer north of the intersection, Reuven turned onto an unmarked gravel road bulldozed into the wall of trees. He headed west, toward the sea. For the first half kilometer, the road ascended. Then it crested and dipped. As they descended, the tree line opened slightly and Tom saw an old British fort in the distance. It was a squat, square three-story affair built of thick Jerusalem stone, with crenellated watchtowers that looked like old-fashioned chess pieces at each corner.

Reuven pulled up at a rudimentary roadblock manned by half a dozen troops armed with M-16s. Tom glanced into the woods and was surprised to see four olive-drab Jeeps with pintle-mounted .50-caliber machine guns and three camouflaged APCs close at hand. He waited while Reuven palavered with the guards, then watched as a soldier pulled a twenty-foot length of tire spikes out of the way so they could proceed.

The heavy weapons had gotten Tom’s attention, and he scanned carefully as they drove the last half klik to the old fort. In the sixty seconds it took them to do so, he identified five layers of defensive countermeasures: raked cordons sanitaires, surveillance cameras, infrared sensors, K-9 teams, and razor wire. He wondered what he’d missed.

As they pulled onto the small parking lot Reuven turned to him, his face serious. “Listen carefully. This place does not exist. So far as I know, you’re the first foreigner ever allowed inside. Point of fact, Tom, I was surprised when they said yes. So treat what you see and hear here accordingly, okay?”

Tom’s expression showed that he understood the gravity of what he was being told. “Got it, Reuven. And thank you.”
10:12
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. In a sterile, windowless interrogation room holding a metal desk and two metal chairs bolted to the concrete floor, he stripped down to his underwear and was given a set of utilitarian olive-drab coveralls and a pair of scuffed black leather boots that looked about half a size too small. He’d even had to hand over his watch, which along with his other personal belongings were sealed into a heavy brown envelope then taken away to be stored in a safe in the commandant’s office. The only thing he carried was the handkerchief he’d transferred from his trouser pocket.
When he’d asked why he couldn’t keep the watch, he was told the prisoners were allowed no sense of time. It was an integral part of the interrogation process. The cells were lit by artificial light, which could be regulated to disorient and throw their biometric schedules and thinking processes into chaos. Some “days” were eight hours in length; others might last thirty-six.
“We do not use physical abuse,” the officer in charge of his visit explained. He was a diminutive man who looked to be in his mid- to late sixties and who spoke to Tom in Kurdish-accented Arabic. The left arm of his olive-drab coveralls was folded neatly and attached by the cuff just below the epaulet. From what Tom could make out, the man’s whole left arm had been taken off at the shoulder.
The Israeli introduced himself as Salah and volunteered no further information as to his rank or position. When Tom asked how the prisoners were treated, Salah cocked his head defensively. “There are no stress positions, hooding, or coercion used here.”
“Why not? That’s how our detainees in Afghanistan and Iraq are being treated.”
“Of course.” Salah rubbed his pencil-thin mustache with the edge of his right hand. “They are effective techniques in the acquiring of actionable intelligence. Quick results for immediate needs. A slap in the face, a threat, the pit-of-stomach claustrophobia from being hooded sometimes works to jar loose information about an imminent operation. That’s fear, my friend. You can extract information by using fear—I believe you Americans teach a technique at Fort Huachuca called ‘fear up/fear down.’ But fear is short-lived. I prefer dread. Day-in, day-out, marrow-of-the-bone angst is what I want to produce. Our prisoners know we have a reputation for ruthlessness. It doesn’t matter whether that reputation is true or not. What matters is the psychological effect it has on them. Let me tell you something, my friend: dread works. Dread works very well.”
Tom remembered how he’d felt when they’d come through the gates. The unpleasant sensations that had been prodded by what he’d smelled. “Including sensory exploitation, right?”
A sly smile crossed Salah’s face. “How do you mean?”
“What I smelled when we came into the facility. It made me react viscerally.”
“Ah, le parfum pénitentiaire. It took us months to develop. What did you think?”
“I was impressed. It made me extremely... apprehensive.”
“You felt dread, correct?”
“Precisely.”
“That’s why it works. Look—I throw into a cell a man. He’s no hardliner, but let’s say he was standing close by when two Israeli reservists are attacked, beaten, then thrown out of the second-story window of a Palestinian Authority police station, then stomped to death by the crowd the Palestinian police have assembled below. There is video—a Western camera crew was rolling during the incident, so we have lots of faces but no names. This guy, we think he has names.”
“Why?”
“Because in the video he’s a part of the crowd. He looks like he knows the people around him—the same animals who tore our soldiers apart limb from limb and then turned to the camera to show off their bloody hands. Either they’re his neighbors or he’s a part of one of the murderers’ extended families. I have to fracture that clan loyalty and get him to name names before Arafat ships the scum with the blood on their hands out to Gaza or Egypt or Syria, where it’s harder for us to lay our hands on them. So Shabak noses around until they find him, scoop him up, and bring him to me. Not here. To another place. Things are abrupt, quick. He has no time to think or react. He’s yanked into a truck, and the next thing he knows he’s smelling what you smelled—and all of a sudden he is afraid. He is very, very afraid. Then he loses his clothes. He’s handed dirty, anonymous overalls that smell of someone else’s sweat and urine. He’s alone. He’s frightened. He’s been separated from his family, his village, all his friends. He’s pushed into a cell. A very spartan cell. Then I start the disorientation and, more important, the anticipation of dread. A few slaps in the face—whapwhap. A cuff or two on the back of the head—smack-smack. Then he’s left alone to wonder what’s coming next. Then I use heat. Followed by cold. Then sleep deprivation. During this time, he’s hooded for what he thinks is a day, maybe even two.”
“How does he know?”
“Because we designed the hoods so he can see just enough to know when the lights go on and when they go off. Because he can hear the other prisoners being served breakfast or dinner.” Salah’s eyes narrowed. “His senses tell him what’s what.”
“And how long are we really talking about?”
“Nine to thirteen hours tops. Sometimes much less.”
Tom pursed his lips. Impressive.
Salah continued. “He can hear things but not see anything. He hears someone being taken away. He hears screams—I mean serious. Like fingernails being pulled out, or hot irons burning flesh or electroshock. Sometime later—he has no idea how long—he hears the sound of a body being dragged down the corridor and thrown into the adjacent cell. If he listens very carefully, he can make out excruciating moans. It may all be roleplaying or sound effects coming from a compact disc and a very sophisticated speaker system—sophisticated enough to make the walls of his cell rumble if we have to. But my target doesn’t know that. All he knows is what his buddies have told him and what he’s picked up on the street about how ruthless we are—and what he’s just gone through. Believe me, by the time I ask him the first question, he is already putty.”
“But what you’re talking about is ruthless.”
“Ruthless works, my friend. You have to be pragmatic. Flexible. You Americans forget you are at war. That’s because you think you are eight thousand miles from it, even though you’re not. We live in the middle of the battlefield, my friend.” Salah pulled a pack of Jordanian cigarettes from his pocket, shook one into his mouth, and lit it with a disposable lighter. “That’s how you get actionable intelligence. Stuff you use today, tomorrow, this week.”
“But you said you don’t use those techniques at Qadima.”
“Correct. Here we are interested in the long term. To learn how these people think and why. This woman you came to see—she is no terrorist. We know that. But we want to learn about the man she traveled with. We want to be able to give our security services information that will help them uncover developing capabilities, impending objectives, future trends. And so, we prefer psychological means—yes, we still use light, heat, and cold, sound or the absolute lack of it. But the key is long, intensive, almost psychoanalytic sessions.”
“But she’s British. What about the British consul? Didn’t he demand to see her?”
Salah put his right hand on the edge of the metal desk and exhaled smoke through his nose. “That is not my concern. When those in a position to grant the British consul permission to see this woman do so, she will be moved to another facility.” He swiveled toward Tom. “Our goals here are different. Time is of no concern. We want to extract information right down to the subconscious level. To understand what attracted these people to terrorism—to comprehend not only their motives, but get inside their psyches.”
“When you say long...”
The Israeli switched into French. “Twenty-two, twenty-three hours is common. I have seen interrogations that last more than thirty-two hours— almost a day and a half. And believe me, they are just as hard on the interrogator as they are on the subject.”
Tom followed suit, speaking French. “You don’t tag-team?”
“It doesn’t work if you switch boats in midstream. There has to be a real line of communication developed. Something akin to trust. Like I said, in many ways the process here resembles psychoanalysis. You get inside their heads. You take them back, get them almost fetal, and then bring them forward step-by-step.”
Tom understood Salah’s modus operandi. The agent recruitment process operated under many of the same precepts. The case officer controls the situation by creating and subsequently encouraging the kind of rapport in which the agent quickly becomes dependent on the case officer. Through the ability to read people, the force of personality, and the exploitation of vulnerabilities, the case officer creates a Potemkin Village relationship in which he or she becomes the agent’s best friend, surrogate parent, trusted confessor, and shrink. “Potemkin Village” because it is all an act. The case officer’s every emotion is feigned, every response choreographed in order to manipulate, steer, and influence the target in a certain prescribed direction. At the end of the process, which is called “getting close,” the target will trust the case officer more than he or she will trust their own husbands or wives, families, or the groups to which they belong.
Indeed, if the case officers are sophisticated enough, and flexible enough, and know enough about the culture, mores, and psychological quirks of the target, they can even run this mind game on individuals whose religious and political beliefs might at first appear to be impenetrable and unshakable. Like members of the Muslim Brotherhood or the Da’wa, for example. Tom had recruited members of both vehemently antiWestern Islamist factions as agents. It hadn’t been an overnight process. It had taken more than half a year in one case—that had been a false-flag recruitment—and a local access agent to act as an intermediary in the other. But he had pulled them off.
He looked at the one-armed man who flicked the cigarette from his lips and ground it out with the toe of his boot. This guy knew whereof he spoke.
“Why was I allowed to come here?”
“You are here because Reuven Ayalon vouches for you, and because Reuven has a lot of friends.” He gave Tom a sidelong glance. “I was against it at first. It breaks the rhythm, and we’re almost finished with her. But I was finally convinced that in the long term your visit will bear valuable fruit for us as well as you.”
“Thank you.”
“Don’t be so quick to thank. Besides, Reuven or no Reuven, you are here because I was told you are able to ask questions exactly the way we do—in Arabic or French that doesn’t sound as if it’s being spoken by a Yankee Doodle dandy.”
The words came out “Yenki Duudul dendi.” The Israeli looked at Tom, his face serious. “You speak even your French with a slight Tunisian accent. There is no hint of American in your speech.”
“Is that important?”
Salah shook another cigarette out, put it to his lips, and replaced the pack in his pocket. “It is critical. It is important for some of the detainees to believe they have been shipped somewhere that is not Israel. And so there is no Hebrew spoken anywhere in this facility. No English either. Arabic, French, and sometimes Farsi, Russian, or German.”
“Isn’t that skirting the ethical edge?”
“Ethical? It’s not ethical to murder civilians, my friend. I told you: I am against torture. I am against abuse. But I’ve already been condemned to fight with one sleeve pinned to my shoulder, my friend. I’m not willing to tie my only good hand behind my back, too.” Salah withdrew a greenish bandanna from his coveralls, blew his nose loudly, then stuffed the handkerchief back in his back pocket. “So, we can—and we do without apology—hold detainees in solitary confinement for years if we feel it is necessary. Just like the French, incidentally. In fact, a major factor in our high success rate is the complete isolation in which these terrorists are kept. You Americans tend to coddle prisoners—even terrorists. You cave in to human rights organizations. You allow lawyers, family visits, and other amenities. I cannot believe what I saw when I visited high-security facilities in the United States some years ago. Cable television. Gyms. Libraries. It was like sending your criminals to college.”
“That was a civilian prison.”
“But your so-called white supremacists were incarcerated there alongside rapists and bank robbers. You treat your own terrorists as if they were burglars or carjackers.” Salah’s hand made a dismissive gesture. “Terrorists are not criminals. They are enemy combatants, and they deserve no coddling. You Americans often ignore the realities. That kind of fuzzy thinking pervades your abilities, especially in this kind of total war.” He exhaled smoke through his nose. “Jihad, they call it. All-out effort, remember? Sometimes I think you Americans forget that when you deal with enemy combatants.”
“That’s not what I hear about the ones being held in Afghanistan and Guantánamo.”
“For you, Iraq and Afghanistan are the exceptions to the rule, believe me.” Salah pulled on the collar of his sterile coveralls. “Besides, you Americans have very few trained interrogators.” His black eyes flashed in Tom’s direction. “You had to send more than fifty of your paramilitary people here just after the Kandahar and Baghram facilities were established in Afghanistan because your CIA didn’t have any qualified personnel. Any. Unbelievable. So we had to teach them the basics, believe me. But it didn’t matter, because they all lacked Arabic, not to mention Pashto, or Urdu, or Uzbek. A friend of mine at AMAN
¹⁴
told me when the 9/11 attacks occurred, there were less than a hundred Arabic-speaking interrogators in your entire army—and perhaps another hundred and fifty in the reserves. And CIA? It was a joke. At the military interrogation center in Kandahar, not a single CIA officer had sufficient Arabic, Pashto, Urdu, or Farsi to do proper interrogations. And yet the most critical element is the ability to speak in the detainee’s native tongue and understand his culture. You cannot do the job using an interpreter.”
Well, Salah was right about that. The 4627 Company had more Top Secret–cleared four-plus Uzbek speakers than CIA did these days. In fact, in the spring of 2002, CIA had approached 4627 to recruit, vet, and hire language-capable interrogators for Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq. Langley was offering $2,500 a day plus expenses for ninety-day deployments, and they wanted a minimum of a dozen people. The math was great: 4627’s profit on two ninety-day cycles would be $3.2 million—and Langley wanted a minimum of six ninety-day cycles. But Tony Wyman turned the Agency down cold. It was a slippery slope, he said. One bad apple—one case of prisoner abuse in the newspapers—and the firm’s credibility worldwide would be jeopardized. Let some other contractor take the money and run. And yet Tom understood the need. It often took Americans weeks to accomplish what trained native speakers could do in a matter of days because the Americans too often had to rely on interpreters—linguists, they were euphemistically called by the Pentagon. It was like trying to play the old kids’ game of telephone. Tom knew it was impossible to recruit an agent using an interpreter. So why the hell did the numbskulls at DOD and Langley believe it would be productive to interrogate hard-core al-Qa’ida militants—Wahabists who were willing to die for their beliefs—that way? It made no sense at all.