questioning the four prisoners we had rolled up in the Haddoushi raid. One of them in particular caught my attention. He was a former general in the Republican Guard and was well connected to the Haddoushi clan. He was definitely someone I wanted to spend some time with. But I had a problem. After the all-day Haddoushi roundup, Adam, the terp, was burned out. He needed a break and without a terp, I was useless.
Jeff had a solution. He told me to use Allen, who was still waiting around to go back to Baghdad after the accidental discharge incident. I tried to hide my reluctance. Aside from the fact that I just didn’t like the guy, I also knew that having an interrogator as an interpreter was asking for trouble. In an interrogation only one person can be in charge. When I worked with Jeff, he operated in a supervising role and the questions he asked were always in line with the direction I chose. With another interrogator, especially someone like Allen, the chances increased that the lines of authority would blur. The prisoner could take advantage of the situation.
To head off that possibility, I took Allen aside before we got started interrogating the captured general. I tried to explain the way I would be handling the questioning, based on the techniques I had learned over the past couple of weeks.
“I like to go into lots of detail,” I explained. “It may not seem important at first. And you may not know where I’m going. But just bear with me.”
“Sure thing,” he replied with a smirk.
The session started out smoothly enough. Allen translated the questions and answers without adding or omitting anything. The prisoner was doing a good job, too—a good job lying through his teeth about any connection he might have had with Little Saddam. I was patient, without letting on that I was aware of his deception. In every interrogation, I start with the assumption that I don’t know anything about the prisoner, that I have no idea what he might or might not be willing to discuss. So I just ask him about his life, the seemingly random details of his background. In my training, this was called building a timeline. The goal was to construct a chronological account of every aspect of his past: his family, his career, his finances, even his personal preferences. You were taught to either do it starting at the beginning and moving forward or picking up from the date of his capture and moving backward.
We were taught to build these timelines in sequence, but I didn’t like to do it that way. I would jump around, from one period to the next and from one subject to the other. I’d ask him what job he had in 1986, and then skip to the weddings he’d recently attended. I want to know the type of car he drove twenty years ago and what he had fed his dog six days ago. The point was to keep him from guessing where I was heading. That was the only way to stop him from getting there ahead of me. I’d be all over the map, scattering the individual timeline questions throughout the interrogation. It got very confusing—for the prisoner, for the terp and for almost anyone else who watched it unfold.
But it wasn’t confusing for me. I had learned to take every fragment of information I received and drop it into place on the appropriate timeline. If I found some area of discrepancy, a missed stitch in a web of lies, I’d store that away, too. I never asked a detainee to clarify a potential lie. I didn’t want him to suspect that I might have caught him in a deception. Confusion was my ally. As long as the prisoner couldn’t anticipate the next question, he wouldn’t be able to conceal what he didn’t want me to know. Then, when the time is right, I’d drop the hammer.
In some areas, I’m pretty inept. I’m not good at directions and frequently get lost as a result. I don’t handle tools very well, and couldn’t change a flat tire to save my life. But as an interrogator, I have the ability to remember everything a prisoner tells me, place it where it belongs, and create a mental picture. When that picture is complete, no matter how long it may take, I can see the lies standing out in sharp contrast.
Not every interrogator has that ability. Allen, for instance, started rolling his eyes impatiently after about three hours of my seemingly random questions. “You’re mixing this guy up,” he told me when we took a break. “You could have had a timeline two hours ago, but you keep jumping around. He can’t even remember what he told you to begin with.”
I looked him in the eye. “Don’t worry about it,” I said. “You’re doing a great job translating. Just keep it up.”
“No way,” he replied. “This is a waste of time. Get yourself another terp.”
I followed his advice and suspended the interrogation until Adam was rested. If this guy didn’t like the way I handled an interrogation, I must be doing something right.
A few days after Allen left Tikrit, the task force reeled in a big catch. His name was Rashid Abdullah and he was one of two top inner-circle bodyguards. He was a Marafiq, which meant he commanded the most elite Hamaya, those charged with personally protecting Saddam. Along with Rashid, the raid had rolled up two of his brothers and several of his sons and nephews.
“Listen, Eric,” Jack said, as the detainees were brought in for interrogation. “These guys are responsible for the deaths of a lot of our men. They’re bad dudes. Don’t let them talk their way out of here.”
This was another area where I differed from other interrogators. I really didn’t care how bad a prisoner was, or was supposed to be. Maybe they’d killed Americans, but they were soldiers and that was their job. Just like our job was to kill them. Did that make us bad guys?
As far as I was concerned it was my responsibility to look at the war and the men who fought it on both sides as objectively as I could. I couldn’t afford to be motivated by real emotion. I knew that when a soldier died, his family and friends would mourn for him better and longer than I ever could. I needed to focus all my attention on interrogating. I couldn’t afford to take what they may or may not have done personally.
The only thing that really did light my fuse was when a prisoner lied to me. That was preventing me from doing my job. I had zero patience for that.
My assignment in this case was to question one of Rashid’s captured brothers. The guy was totally relaxed and confident from the start. He seemed to be humoring me by answering my questions and for the time being I let him. I would have plenty of opportunity to run any number of intimidating approaches, including what interrogators call a “Fear Up Harsh,” when I’d inform a prisoner how much trouble he is in, at the top of my lungs. But there was no hurry. I wanted to see where he would take me on his own.
It wasn’t far. After three hours, all I’d gotten him to admit was that his brother actually was a Marafiq. He had used his influence to get a good education for his children, one of whom was a medical student. Aside from traveling to Baghdad a few times, Rashid had been living peacefully at home since the war began.
That didn’t add up. Rashid was an inner-circle bodyguard. His brother had insisted that he had been living unnoticed in Tikrit all this time. He’d even headed up an anti-graffiti effort in the neighborhood. How could that have happened? Wasn’t he truly one of “the bad guys”?
Although it hadn’t yielded any actionable intelligence, my interrogation of Rashid’s brother underscored a valuable lesson. The rules of the game had changed. In terms of the power structure, Iraq was a completely different place than it had been before the war. Rashid had been directly responsible for the security and safety of Saddam. It stood to reason that he would continue to serve that function now. Instead he was sitting at home like a respectable citizen, with no involvement in the insurgency. At least that’s what his brother claimed, and I believed him. All the details of his story checked out. But more important, it was clear that he wasn’t trying to get on my good side by telling me what I wanted to hear. Sometimes, in an interrogation room, honesty hits you like a brick and I had just been floored by his honesty.
What mattered now was not who had once been in charge. The regime had been turned upside down and there was a whole new cast of players. To catch them, it would no longer work simply to follow the old chain of command. It didn’t exist anymore. Instead I needed to listen to what the detainees and informants were telling me. Clues to piecing together the new power structure, what was happening in the street in real time, could only come from them.
There were bad guys out there for sure. We heard their incoming mortars and sniper fire every night. But maybe we didn’t really know who they were.
By early September I was interrogating on a continuous basis. My workday usually started at 1300 and continued until 0200 or later. I had a full range of detainees, usually those who were suspected of either having been involved in or were planning an attack on U.S. forces. But regardless of what they had been brought in for, the techniques I used, and the thinking behind them, were the same.
More often than not there was a lack of hard evidence to prove a prisoner was involved in the insurgency. For that reason, most of them didn’t believe that they were going to prison, just because they’d been arrested. It was my job to catch them in a lie if I could. That gave me leverage. If I could prove they were lying, they could be held
