The Midnight House

But even if the food wasn’t gourmet, Karp could promise it hadn’t been spiked. He wasn’t a fan of giving prisoners LSD or PCP. The effects were too uncertain. Some guys even enjoyed the trips.

Karp picked up the blue plastic bowl that held Mohammed’s dinner, lifted a piece of meat to his mouth. Salty, leathery, tasteless, with bits of gristle that had a sandy texture. “Yummy,” he said, the meat still in his mouth. He choked it down. “See. It’s fine.”

He handed the bowl to Mohammed, who tossed it against the wall.

Under other circumstances, that misbehavior would have earned Mohammed a week in a punishment cell. But Karp and the rest of 673 were busy with bin Zari. Karp couldn’t deal with another problem.

“Fine, Mohammed,” he said in Pashto. “You want to be hungry, your choice.” For two days, Mohammed went back to eating, and Karp thought he had learned his lesson. But now he was back in the corner.

IN CIA JARGON, detainees like Mohammed were “dancers.” They weren’t the most openly resistant prisoners. But their unpredictable cycles of defiance and cooperation made them among the most difficult detainees.

Some dancers were mentally unstable, unable to distinguish fantasy from reality. Others used the technique as a form of passive resistance, a way to incite their jailers. Openly angry prisoners invited brutal retaliation. By alternating—“dancing”—between resistance and compliance, a canny jihadi could slow an interrogation, giving himself time to resist.

Within the agency, the most famous dancer was a Taliban commander who went by the single name Jadhouri. In 2006, a Ranger platoon in Afghanistan captured Jadhouri in anattack on a Talib-controlled village near the Pakistan border. The raid had been routine, except at the end, when Jadhouri ran out of a one-room hut, his hands raised in surrender. Seconds later, a grenade blew out the hut. When the Rangers checked inside, they found fragments of a laptop. Jadhouri had apparently taken the time to strap a grenade to the computer’s case before giving up. The Rangers did what they could to recover the laptop, but the explosion had launched it to computer heaven.

Jadhouri was sent to the prison at Bagram, the American air base north of Kabul, where the interrogators took over. For a week, he insisted that the Rangers were mistaken about the laptop. The grenade had blown up accidentally, he said. His questioners lost patience, threatened to send him to Guantanamo, doused him with buckets of cold water. Jadhouri stopped talking. In response, he was kept awake for sixty hours straight. Still, he refused to speak.

Then, on a December Sunday a week before Christmas, a lung-burning wind blowing off the Kush, Jadhouri produced a single piece of toilet paper that became known as the Square. On it he had drawn squiggles and crosses — representing streams and mountains — and written the names of three North-West Frontier villages. At its center, a small X, which Jadhouri claimed represented a hideout used by Osama bin Laden. Jadhouri said he was in regular touch with bin Laden’s bodyguards and that he had destroyed the laptop because it held messages from bin Laden.

The interrogators at Bagram viewed the Square skeptically. Still: bin Laden. And Jadhouri must have had some reason for blowing up the laptop.

Unfortunately, the Square itself was too small and badly drawn to be deciphered. Giving Jadhouri access to mapmaking software was unthinkable, so the interrogators made him redraw the map on a whiteboard. When Jadhouri pronounced himself finished, the whiteboard was photographed and the images uploaded to the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency, the Defense Department unit responsible for mapping the world.

Two days later, the NGIA’s verdict came back. The map was worse than useless. Intentionally or accidentally, Jadhouri’s version of the North-West Frontier included roads that didn’t exist and a river that seemed to be in Tajikistan. Even disregarding those errors, the target area covered four hundred square miles. Either Jadhouri had a terrible sense of direction or the map was entirely fictitious.

Against their better judgment, the interrogators took one more shot, bringing in an NGIA mapmaker who specialized in central Asian geography. After a day, the mapmaker reported back that the more questions Jadhouri answered, the vaguer the map became. Jadhouri spent two weeks in an isolation cell as punishment.

When he was released, he had a gift for his captors: another square, this one supposedly revealing bin Laden’s “true and correct” location. By then even the most humorless of the interrogators got the joke. Jadhouri was returned to the general prison population and encouraged to use toilet paper for its intended purpose. The mystery of the exploding laptop was never solved.

The legend of the Square quickly passed from Bagram to Guantanamo and the rest of the secret prisons the CIA had scattered around the globe. Along the way, it acquired flourishes meant to prove its ridiculousness. In one, Jadhouri had marked the Square in blood rather than ink. In another, the toilet paper was already partially used. And in a third, the fiction wasn’t discovered until two Special Operations teams had been put in the air for an attack on the hideout.

KARP DIDN’T FIND the stories funny. The interrogators in Bagram should never have believed such an obvious lie. Even worse, they’d failed to punish Jadhouri properly for embarrassing them. The test of wills between detainees and interrogators never ended. Whenever a prisoner won, even for a single day, his victory encouraged other detainees to resist. Isolating prisoners destroyed that dynamic, one reason that the Midnight House worked so well. Here, detainees couldn’t depend on a big group to sustain them.

For interrogations to succeed, detainees had to feel — not just understand but feel—that they were beaten, Karp thought. They had to wake up every day knowing that their captors controlled every choice they made. Only then would they tell the truth.

In the years immediately after 9/11, Karp’s view had been standard at the agency and the Pentagon. But now Langley and the army had — officially, anyway — backed away from using force or coercion on detainees. At Guantanamo, the FBI’s hands-off model was the default. The Feds argued that rough tactics were illegal, made prosecutions impossible, and didn’t work anyway. Ill treatment made detainees more resistant, not less. The way to get information was to build relationships with prisoners and reward them for help.

In the FBI model, a dishonest detainee was subject to steady questioning that made him layer lie upon lie on his answers. Eventually, his story collapsed of its own weight. At that point, the agents demanded the truth, and the detainee — knowing that he’d been beaten — gave in. The technique was a classic investigative strategy that detectives in the United States had used for generations.

To which Karp could only say, What planet are you on? He had never seen a prisoner who minded being caught in a lie. Arabs and Afghans, especially, loved to tell tales. Catch them lying, break down their stories, and they apologized, smiled, and started all over again.

And only a few detainees could be bribed, in Karp’s experience. Most jihadis sneered at offers of books, or better food, or extra time to exercise. Nor were they frightened by the threat that they’d spend their lives in prison, especially not at Guantanamo, where they lived among fellow Muslims. No, they needed to know they would be punished for lying, or refusing to talk. They needed to feel fear. They needed to be broken. Then they would tell the truth. Sometimes.

Anyone who thought that the FBI’s tactics would work against jihadis needed to look at American prisons, which were filled with criminals who had accepted long jail terms instead of testifying against friends or relatives in return for shorter sentences. Stop snitching. Hell, Barry Bonds’s trainer had gone to jail instead of admitting what he knew about Bonds’s steroid use. And the guy had won. Eventually, the Feds had let him out. Which was fine, as far as Karp was concerned. Steroid use wasn’t a capital crime.

But if the trainer kept his mouth shut for no better reason than to protect Barry Bonds, nobody should be surprised when religious fanatics weren’t helpful to their interrogators. When Karp pointed out these inconvenient facts to his counterparts at the FBI, and asked, “So, what do we do with the seventy percent of the jihadis who flat-out refuse to talk?” their answer was, “We lock ’em up and keep working.”

That argument had carried the day, more or less. Coercive interrogations had once been discussed at the highest levels of the Pentagon, Langley, and the White House. No longer. The secret charter that 673 had received from the President said only that the members of the unit couldn’t be prosecuted. The charter said nothing about why such an exemption might be necessary. The people in charge still wanted the information that 673 could provide, but they no longer wanted to know how 673 was getting it. Karp understood. September 11 had faded. Most Americans had forgotten Osama bin Laden existed.