INTRODUCTION

This is a story about the war in the shadows, of battles the public never sees—or, I should say, rarely sees. In the wake of the U.S. invasion of Iraq, the world has seen terrifying photos of Iraqi prisoners being mistreated by American soldiers. Countless articles and television segments have investigated the sick goings-on at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq, and possibly other similar activities elsewhere. This news hit painfully close to home. My fellow interrogators from Afghanistan shared my disgust and anger that our work, our units, and our corps had all been maligned. The soldiers and citizen soldiers with whom I served, and whose story is told in the following pages, felt bitterly betrayed by what appeared to be a small number of sadists operating without a shred of oversight. The scope of suspicion now seems to grow every day. Even our seemingly less controversial war against Al Qaeda and the Taliban has been drawn into the orbit of mistrust and allegation.

We interrogators who deployed in the fall of 2001 have always regarded ourselves as part of something unique. We were mobilized in direct response to the attacks on our country's capital and on one of its great cities. Ours was the first stage in what has become a dragnet of unprecedented proportions. Since the September 11 attacks, the United States has detained thousands of prisoners captured in Afghanistan and dozens of other countries around the world. CIA director George J. Tenet has called it a "worldwide rousting" of a terrorist network responsible for the deadliest attack ever on U.S. soil. The most senior Al Qaeda operatives captured have been taken to facilities whose locations have not been disclosed. Hundreds more have been sent for long-term detention at a specially built prison at the U.S. military base in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba. The war in Iraq added several facilities to this prison constellation, including the now infamous Abu Ghraib prison on the outskirts of Baghdad. But for most of those captured in the war on terrorism, the first stop was one of two U.S. prisons on the parched plains of Afghanistan. The interrogators with whom I served were the first people to greet them there.

The Facility at Kandahar was open for a relatively brief period, from the early weeks of the war in Afghanistan until the following spring. It was little more than a collection of tents and coiled razor wire laid out around a mud-walled field a short distance from the main terminal at Kandahar Airport, a terminal Americans had helped build decades before. There were fire hydrants and manhole covers around the place stamped with the words "San Francisco California Foundry." The second American prison, at Bagram Air Base, will probably be operational for years to come, as the United States continues to scoop up Afghans and Arabs and sift them for ties to terrorism. It's a squat, windowless warehouse, boarded up and ringed with barbed wire. From the outside, it would appear lifeless if it weren't for a steady plume of smoke from behind the building, where several times a day barrels of waste are dragged out to be burned. A sign with the spray-painted words NO ACCESS hangs over a nondescript entrance. Inside, we went face-to-face with the enemy in battles as grueling, dramatic, and important as any in the war on terrorism. These were battles of psychology and intellect, of will instead of weaponry.

Most of this work was performed not by the CIA or the FBI, but by a relatively small cadre of U.S. Army interrogators. Some were active-duty troops just a few years out of high school. Others, like me, were reservists called away from civilian careers as accountants, teachers, computer experts, and the like. Our training generally included boot camp, at least a year at the military's language academy in Monterey, California, and then several months studying interrogation techniques at the U.S. Army's intelligence school at Fort Huachuca, Arizona.

When the war in Afghanistan started, the army had just 510 interrogators, including 108 of us who spoke Arabic—a tiny number for a nation about to embark on a massive effort to dismantle Al Qaeda, set up a string of new bases around the Persian Gulf, and, within a year and a half, invade Iraq. The numbers reflected years of neglect of human intelligence, or HUMINT, as it's called in military and intelligence circles. When the Cold War ended in the early 1990s, there were cuts across many categories of military and intelligence spending, but they were particularly deep in HUMINT. Even the CIA's clandestine service was decimated. In the army, there was so much downsizing and consolidation that by 1997 more than 70 percent of its tactical HUMINT capability—soldiers ready for battlefield interrogation and counterintelligence work—had been either eliminated or moved into the reserves and the national guard. Reserve units like mine immediately felt the budget crunch.

The cuts came at a time when the terrorist threat to the United States was escalating. The basement bombing of the World Trade Center in 1993 was followed by the bombing of the Khobar Towers barracks in Saudi Arabia in 1996, the bombing of American embassies in East Africa in 1998, and the bombing of the USS Cole warship in Yemen in 2000. When hijacked airplanes struck the World Trade Center and the Pentagon in the fall of the following year, shortcomings in specialties like mine were dramatically evident.

The great might of the United States military has been on frequent display since the September 11 attacks, with stealth aircraft dropping precision-guided bombs, unmanned planes firing Hellfire missiles, columns of tanks racing across deserts, and Special Forces soldiers slithering up to unsuspecting targets. The technical wizardry of the nation's billion-dollar spying apparatus has been no less active. But one of the most crucial weapons in the war on terrorism may be the abilities of a relative handful of soldiers and spies trained in the dark art of getting enemy prisoners to talk.

The principal dangers America faces are no longer embodied by armies and weapons, but by individuals and intentions. These threats posed by terrorists can't always be detected by satellite or deciphered from interrupted communications. In this asymmetric war, sometimes the only hope for unearthing a plot may rest on our ability to unlock the secrets in an operative's mind. To succeed, interrogators have to know what they're doing. The wrong approach can squander a potentially valuable source—and, in the war on terror, one missed clue could result in unnecessary deaths. These were not nickel-and-dime stakes. We have seen how clues that might have prevented the September 11 hijackings may have been ignored. We know what happened and can count the cost.

Often the first task for interrogators is sorting out who's been caught, distinguishing the fighters from the farmers, the terrorists from the townspeople—to some, evil from good. Prisoners might be captured at gunpoint on the field of battle, rounded up in predawn raids on safe houses, or turned over by warlords or foreign intelligence services with agendas of their own. The intermittent release of prisoners from Guantánamo Bay underscores the extent to which this aspect of the mission is still a work in progress.

But the main objective of interrogation, as the army's field manual on the subject states, "is to obtain the maximum amount of usable information possible in the least amount of time." That imperative meant one thing before September 11, when our training still focused on large-scale conventional conflicts. It has taken on another meaning since then.

There are rules to this game. The Geneva Conventions try to be explicit. Article 3 forbids "violence to life and person, in particular murder of all kinds, mutilation, cruel treatment, and torture." It also bars "outrages upon personal dignity, in particular, humiliating and degrading treatment." The atrocious behavior of American troops in Iraq's Abu Ghraib prison is the most recent, and perhaps horrific, example of how things can go terribly wrong. I do not think I will ever understand how fellow soldiers could do what they did. It may also be impossible to grasp fully how destructive their actions were—to the reputation of the intelligence corps, to our country, and to a world hoping for better from those who wear the army's uniform. It doesn't matter that those accused so far are mainly MPs. All soldiers, and to a greater extent, intelligence soldiers, are tarnished, if only by our proximity.

The abuses at Abu Ghraib are unforgivable not just because they were cruel, but because they set us back. The more a prisoner hates America, the harder he will be to break. The more a population hates America, the less likely its citizens will be to lead us to a suspect. One of our biggest successes in Afghanistan came when a valuable prisoner decided to cooperate not because he had been abused (he had not been), but precisely because he realized he would not be tortured. He had heard so many horror stories that when he was treated decently, his prior worldview snapped, and suddenly we had an ally.

Al Qaeda trained tens of thousands of fighters at its camps in Afghanistan, and only a tiny fraction of them are pictured on Washington's most wanted lists. For every Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the September 11 mastermind captured in Pakistan last year, there are hundreds of lower-level Al Qaeda alumni who are all but anonymous. Some may be harmless, others not. If you're an interrogator, your job is to determine which is which and to get them to tell you what they know.

How far to go in that pursuit was a difficult enough question when an interrogator's fellow soldiers might be threatened, when the objective was to spare a troop from walking into a minefield a certain prisoner helped lay, or into an ambush another prisoner knew was planned. Of course, those possibilities were always in play for us in Afghanistan. But beyond those immediate concerns, what if a prisoner sitting across the table knew about some plot in the United States, some attack that might claim your sister or brother or parents? And even absent that possibility—after all, some of bin Laden's principal lieutenants knew nothing about September 11—what if a prisoner could provide a scrap of information that might lead to bin Laden or members of his inner circle? That was a real possibility. There were dozens of prisoners who had been close to bin Laden in the days and weeks before their own capture. How far should we go to get that information?

The army's interrogation training focuses on sixteen basic "approaches" to making people talk. The manual is explicit on the subject of torture. "The use of force, mental torture, threats, insults, or exposure to unpleasant and inhumane treatment of any kind is prohibited by law and is neither authorized nor condoned by the U.S. government." Every interrogator learns that by rote. But the manual carefully tiptoes around what is allowed, saying the use of force should not be confused "with psychological ploys, verbal trickery, or other non-violent and non-coercive ruses used by the interrogator in questioning hesitant or uncooperative sources."

There is no ambiguity, and yet there is ambiguity. What is humane and what isn't? Certainly the disgusting abuse at Abu Ghraib was inhumane. It was also counterproductive: any experienced interrogator will tell you that degrading prisoners does nothing to help the collection of intelligence. But is keeping a prisoner from getting a good night's sleep inhumane? And if the interrogator himself has gotten even less sleep, does that change the equation? The Geneva Conventions are clear, but they cannot possibly offer specific answers for every situation. As readers will see, there were numerous times when our jobs and the Geneva Conventions collided. As readers will also see, we took those conventions very seriously. But, as we all know, every orchard offers up some bad apples. Those stories are here, too.

The early story of the war in Afghanistan was one of frustration and failure for us. Many Al Qaeda prisoners had been trained to resist, and our schoolhouse methods were woefully out-of-date. But by the end of the period covered in this book, our small group of "soldier spies" had engineered a breakthrough in interrogation strategy, rewriting techniques and tactics grounded in the Cold War. By the time of our departure from the baking, arid plains of Bagram, we could boast that virtually no prisoner went unbroken. And we didn't do it by pretending to wire a prisoner up or using the MPs to humiliate them.

Broken does not mean that we uncovered all that there was to know. In the movies, one key evil genius knows all and conveniently spills the pertinent information in a quick two-minute stretch. Real espionage doesn't work that way. Interrogators find tiny bits of the truth, fragments of information, slivers of data. We enter a vast desert, hundreds of miles across, in which a few thousand puzzle pieces have been scattered. We spend weeks on a single prisoner, to extract only a single piece—if that. We collect, and then we pass the pieces on, hoping that someone above us can assemble them. Of course, sometimes we did some assembling ourselves; by figuring out bigger pictures, we could better question the prisoners in our custody. We could only hope that those who got our information used it wisely.

Sometimes, we had our doubts. As readers will see, we were hampered again and again by a lack of cooperation between agencies. The civilian intelligence agencies almost never shared information with us; the FBI was willing but seldom had relevant information to share. We would often find the truth the hard way—by ourselves. But we would, and did, find it.

It has been claimed by many that the torture of Iraqi prisoners in Abu Ghraib was done in order to soften up the inmates for interrogation. There have also been reports that prisoners in Iraq and in Afghanistan may have died during interrogation sessions with CIA agents. As this book reveals, most American interrogators conducted themselves with honor and grace under pressure. The spy game is messy and brutal and unforgiving. But it is also necessary. Because civilian intelligence agencies with which we worked were sometimes less than cooperative, I can't claim to have detailed knowledge on all of their activities in the secret war against Al Qaeda. I do discuss some of the issues surrounding their approach to interrogation, and how it differed from ours. And I do think that what I have to say about other agencies, and the army itself, can help put into context the recent discussions about interrogators and prisoner treatment.

This is a true story, but one thing interrogation teaches you is that the truth is a slippery creature. This book is a collaborative effort that involved numerous people. My coauthor, Greg Miller, spent hundreds of hours interviewing the characters in the book, double-checking my memories, and adding details that I could not have known at the time. Our aim was to produce a complete and accurate account, and like any interrogator worth his salt, I knew that relying on a single eyewitness was a risky proposition. Because of the sensitive nature of the subject, certain details in this book had to be obscured. We have changed virtually all of the names of the interrogators and the prisoners to protect their safety. Disclosing the identity of a soldier who interrogated Al Qaeda prisoners or the name of a detainee who betrayed his cause would potentially put either in harm's way. In certain instances, we have changed the locations of events because saying where something happened would also expose individuals or operations. This applies in particular to a story about a young prisoner we call Hadi. The events in his life are exactly as described, but the setting of the story that brought him into our custody was altered. As a member of the Military Intelligence Corps, I was obligated to submit the manuscript of this book to the army for a security review. The purpose of the review was to determine whether the manuscript contained classified information. As part of that process, the army asked me to refrain from naming certain U.S. intelligence agencies, military units, classified documents, coalition partners, and intelligence collection platforms. In most cases, we simply refer to these subjects in more generic terms. We have altered the names of certain charities and other organizations, as well as the names or numeric designations of certain military units. Often, the specific entities or individuals will seem obvious. Though some material was removed and certain details obscured, the army did not censor my account of events, and the changes made at their behest did not materially alter the book. Finally, for security reasons, I cannot use my real name; Chris Mackey is a pseudonym.

To understand the secret war against Al Qaeda, one absolutely must understand what went on in the cages, in the booths, and in the prisons. One must understand not only who was being questioned but also who was doing the questioning. We were in a desperate race, hoping to foil another 9/11. Every interrogation held the promise of saving lives if we did it well, and costing lives if we did not. Right now, as you read this, interrogators are trying to find yet another piece of the puzzle before it is too late. This is our story.

As always, it happened at night. A cargo plane touched down in darkness, its lights doused to avoid attack, and lumbered across the rutted runway toward what had once been the passenger terminal of the Kandahar airport. Its rear ramp lowered, revealing a ragged train of enemy fighters in bare feet and rags, emerging like aliens in the red-hued light of the cargo hold. Their heads were covered in burlap sacks, but their breath was still visible in the frigid air. Some were wounded, others had relieved themselves, and all stank. They were bound together in long chains. As they were spirited down the ramp, if one were to stumble, he would pull the others down with him.

On the tarmac, MPs swarmed in from all sides, shining flashlights in the prisoners' concealed faces and screaming a stream of commands and obscenities audible even over the roar of the plane as it pulled away and made its escape into the Afghanistan sky. They led the prisoners toward a barbed-wire enclosure that only the U.S. Army could call a "reception area." Unlike the rest of the cantonment, it was illuminated by stanchions of lights that gave it the feel of a high school football stadium. It was accessed through a long, rickety door made of sheet metal and topped with concertina wire. The prisoners ambled through under the gaze of MPs in towers above, who kept their weapons at the ready.

With a mighty thud the prisoners were hurled, one by one, into a three-sided sandbag "pin-down." Rubber-gloved MPs armed with surgical scissors made them lie on their stomachs and began cutting away the rags. At the first snip of the scissors, the prisoners howled and wailed and struggled to roll over, fearing there could only be one purpose for being held facedown and stripped. The screaming stirred the line of prisoners still waiting in the reception area to states of supreme agitation.

The pin-down was the entry point to an abattoir-like tent tunnel through which the prisoners would pass as they were processed into U.S. custody. This is where it began.

Once they had gone through a quick intelligence screening, the prisoners were examined by a doctor. He scanned the prisoners' torsos, arms, and legs, moving a gloved hand quickly across their skin, searching for scars and fresh wounds that might need dressing. He checked their mouths with a gloved finger, and searched their eyes with a flashlight, looking for any sign of disease. Then an MP would shout one of the few phrases he had mastered in Arabic: "Wa' all'an lill act el emptihan!"—"And now for the ass inspection!" One MP would put his knee into the back of one of the prisoners' knees while the other put his hand on the prisoner's neck and pushed it down until the prisoner was properly positioned. The doctor's probe always prompted new shrieks from prisoners convinced they were about to be raped.

From there the prisoners were forced down on a dusty, stained mat at the end of the tent, always good for another round of wailing, but usually a bit more restrained, the facedown routine having been established. The MPs would remove the shackles and coat the prisoners with lice powder. At about this point the prisoners would be photographed and fingerprinted by FBI agents trying vainly to match the frequently misspelled or made-up names of new arrivals to terrorist watch lists.

Then the MPs would start pulling prison garb over their heads and limbs. Struggling, each MP looked like a parent dressing a two-year-old. They'd yank on thermal underwear, then pull the prisoners' hands and feet through holes in light blue jumpsuits that sat piled in the corner of the tent. There was another pile of rubber shoes, like the kind you might buy out of some airline catalog for gardening. The MPs would stand each prisoner up in his ill-fitting outfit and scrawl a number across his chest in black marker—the prisoner's new identity. An MP at the end of the tent gave each prisoner two giant blankets and a second pair of long johns. Then the bag went back on the prisoner's head and he was taken to the main prison compound. Half the time, the prisoner would wet himself again within minutes, soiling his fresh, clean outfit and inducing the whole process to start again from the beginning.

The scene would sometimes go on for hours, as prisoner after prisoner was led through the in-processing tent. By the end, chunks of earth would be missing from the tent entrance, as MPs scooped up urine-soaked sections of dirt with spades and tossed them out of the way. Soiled latex gloves littered the floor around the doctor's station. The clothes that marines cut off the prisoners in the pin-down were collected in a pile and burned in a barrel.

On a night like this, three months after the United States began dropping bombs on Afghanistan, a marine knocked politely on the pole of a tent not far from the reception area. Poking his head inside the flap, he said, to no one in particular, "Sir, a transport has arrived with prisoners."

Inside, a dimly lit assemblage of army interrogators, analysts, and counterintelligence agents barely stirred. Each was a bundle of military and nonmilitary winter clothing, looking like a collection of suburban, white gangsta rappers. We were still new to the mission, numbed by the cold, and not particularly eager to move. Some were clicking away at laptops, trying to catch up on the endless reports their work required. But as the senior interrogator glanced around the tent considering whom to select for the night's assignment, the clicking—and any other activity that might draw attention—stopped.

The marine said the incoming prisoners were Arabs, but there weren't many Arabic speakers left in the tent. The others were already in interrogations. The "senior E," as the lead interrogator was known, picked a three-man team. One spoke Russian, one Spanish, and the other Arabic. They quickly packed laptops, dictionaries, files, and forms needed for in-processing. As reports editor, I wasn't supposed to leave my post in front of my laptop. But I spoke Arabic and was always eager for any action that might pull me away from a job that mainly entailed combing through our interrogation reports for format errors. I decided to tag along. The stars were so bright that we left our red-lensed flashlights in our cargo pockets as we walked toward the reception area, whose smoldering waste barrels and makeshift shelters gave it the silhouette of a Calcutta ghetto.

The pin-down area was like a theater in miniature, and already, off-duty MPs who had no particular business in the reception area were gathering for what qualified in Kandahar as a diversion. MPs new to the garrison pressed against one another, crowding in to see a live version of the nocturnal, badge-versus-bad guy confrontations they grew up watching on reality television shows like Cops. Indeed, nearly all who witnessed the drama in the pin-down couldn't help but sing or hum the show's reggae theme song: "Bad boys, bad boys, Whatcha gonna do? Whatcha gonna do when they come for you?"

I thought the Oz-like spectacle in the adjoining tent was more intriguing. Inside, an imperious, Lebanese-born chief warrant officer—who had mysterious above-the-law status in the interrogation unit—functioned as a one-man screening team. He had been a translator for Gen. Norman Schwarzkopf in the Persian Gulf War and was sent by Central Command to "assist" in the handling of prisoners in Afghanistan. He had a thick cap of white hair, a huge push-broom mustache, the eyebrows of a Russian party chairman, and a voice like a cannon. Prisoners before him sometimes collapsed with fright, falling limp to the ground until they were hoisted up again by two MPs.

Like a temperamental diva, Chief Shami often had to be coaxed into taking the stage. But he was a master at his task. His job was to make an instant assessment of a prisoner's intelligence value, an inexact art in which he relied to a large extent on his own gut instincts. He examined their "pocket litter"—papers found in prisoners' pockets at the time of capture and bagged for the screener's use—and paid close attention to their accents, their countenance. He also bombarded prisoners with a barrage of questions designed to provoke as much as to elicit practical intelligence.

"When was the last time you saw Osama bin Laden?" he would boom, always first in English to test the prisoners' language abilities. "Never," or "You're crazy," was the inevitable reply, usually in Arabic or Pashtu. "When was the last time you saw Mullah Omar?" And so on.

As I watched this particular night's performance, I heard something odd outside in the pin-down. A prisoner was being searched before his turn in front of the Chief, making the usual noisy protest. His pleas were guttural in tone, but weren't in Arabic or Pashtu. I moved toward the door of the tent, over to the pin-down, and saw the aged frame of a prisoner whom I correctly assessed to be speaking German. He was older, perhaps in his fifties, slightly wounded in the side and one hand, and trembling to the point of convulsions from the terrible cold.

As this prisoner was brought before the Chief, naked but for the burlap sack on his head, the master attacked in English and then in Arabic. But the German came first in every attempt the prisoner made to respond. The Chief turned redder and redder, convinced the prisoner was being evasive, pretending not to understand Arabic. As the Chief bore in, the prisoner began to cry beneath his sack. He shook so violently that the MPs struggled to keep his torso straight. They suspended him from his armpits, but he dropped his head and pulled his knees up toward his abdomen, curling into a suspended, fetal ball. After watching this pathetic display awhile, I did something few dared, and interrupted the Chief. Summoning my deepest, most authoritative voice, I said, "Woher kommst du?"

The prisoner's legs uncurled and skimmed the ground. He whimpered: "Aus Hamburg."

How interesting.

Perturbed at having the stage stolen, the Chief dismissed the prisoner, sending him forth into the abattoir. I followed the prisoner to the doctor's station and tried to explain what was about to happen. The prisoner assured me he had nothing hidden in his orifices. "Routine," I replied in German, and the examination commenced. After the prisoner's wounds were dressed, he was dusted with anti-lice powder and washed perfunctorily under the arms, between his legs, and on his backside. The FBI agents rolled out his fingerprints and removed his burlap bag for a picture. The flash caught him off guard and he blinked repeatedly. Off guard, I thought, if only prisoners could be kept that way. Finally, the prisoner was given two thick blankets, a wool watch cap, long underwear that was too small, and rubber shoes that were too big. As he was dressed, the MPs dragged a thick marker across the front and back of his wrinkled, baby blue jumpsuit, assigning him his new identity: Prisoner 140.

Prisoner 140 was shackled with bright chrome leg and wrist irons. As he stood unhooded in front of me, he got his first long, hard look at an American soldier. He seemed terrified. Fear is often an interrogator's best ally, but it doesn't have a long shelf life.

Prisoner 140 was taken to the main holding area, a giant, mud-walled field that had once, before the droughts, been a lush apple orchard. Inside were eight large tents, each with its sides permanently rolled up, and ringed by three coils of concertina wire. There were twenty prisoners in each tent, all of them clumped in piles of blankets, and all evenly spaced by the vigilant guards.

Back in the interrogators' control tent, I couldn't push the curious prisoner out of my mind. In the abattoir, 140 said he had come to Afghanistan "to lead a more pure Islamic life," a quote so ubiquitous among the prisoners that interrogators had actually begun to believe it, as yet unaware of the global network conveying radical Muslims from Europe to Afghanistan. My German was better than my Arabic, and I saw 140 as a chance to conduct an interrogation without letting language limit my selection of interrogation tools.

I asked the MPs to bring 140 to the JIF, the joint interrogation facility, a set of six small, round canvas tents surrounded by a wall of barbed wire. It had been an hour since 140 had entered the main holding area, and it took the MPs about ten minutes to fetch him. As he was ushered into one of the canvas interrogation booths, 140 suddenly looked remarkably well composed, sturdier than I had thought. The harrowing trip through the screening tunnel had already begun to wear off.

Prisoner 140 was ordered to sit down on a metal folding chair. As the MP peeled his wool cap from over his eyes, 140 barely glanced at the giant guard standing beside him with a homemade walking stick that might double as a truncheon. Instead, he offered a polite bow, effected while still seated, with a flat hand pressed against his chest. Speaking in German, I opened the conversation with a tone that was authoritative, measured, and clear. I wished to convey competence and hopefully an unsettling capacity for forensic analysis. In the opening stages of an interrogation, it's important to remain neutral in order to preserve as many options as possible. It's also important to open by focusing on rather mundane material. Pressing for meaningful information too early only exposes your intelligence gaps.

"Where did you enter Pakistan?" I began.

"Through Lahore."

"Why did you enter Pakistan through Lahore?"

"It was where my tickets took me."

"Who told the airline representative that your arrival city should be Lahore?"

"Me."

"Why did you want to go to Lahore?"

"I was told to."

Already the questioning of 140 was settling into a dismayingly unproductive and familiar pattern. I pressed on.

"By whom were you told to go through Lahore?"

"By the Imam at my mosque."

"Why did the Imam at the mosque tell you to enter Pakistan through Lahore?"

"There was a hotel there that catered to immigrants."

"What was the name of the hotel?"

"I don't remember."

"Describe the look of the hotel."

"It was big."

"When you say the hotel was big, exactly how big was the hotel?"

"Very big."

"When I say to tell me 'exactly' in any case referring to anything, I mean for you to describe in detail the dimensions or features of the object or place."

"Okay."

"Exactly how big was the hotel in which you stayed on the instructions of the Imam?"

"Very, very big."

For hours this nonsense continued. Prisoner 140 claimed he couldn't remember the name of the hotel, the names of friends in his native Algeria, the name of his landlady in Hamburg, or even the name of his Imam at the mosque. It was incredible, and it was infuriating, but it was virtually all that we had encountered since the first batch of interrogators had stepped off their transport plane into the cold air three weeks earlier. When prisoners were questioned, everyone's name had been "lost" to fragile memory. There were no identifying features, no addresses, no telephone numbers. In the recesses of our minds where logic ruled, we knew it was impossible for so many prisoners to have forgotten so much. But we were confounded by the utter directness of the lies. It wasn't a kind of cocktail party fib, easily seen through, easily peeled away. It was the mindless refutation of the obvious. And forbidden from punishing anyone for noncooperation, we couldn't do a damned thing about it. We could only gaze back in disbelief and do our best to follow the school mantra: interrogators feign emotions, we never betray them.

"Who were you to meet at the hotel?"

"A man."

"Who told you to meet a man at the hotel?"

"The Imam."

"What was the name of the man you met at the hotel in Lahore on the advice of the Imam?"

"I don't remember."

"How were you to know the man at the hotel whom you met on the advice of the Imam?"

"I don't know."

"Describe the man you met at the hotel on the advice of the Imam."

"He was a man."

On and on, the session dragged through the night. Here and there, Prisoner 140 disclosed some details of his life. He said he was a petty thief who had spent time in a German prison before coming to Afghanistan to build a new life. He had stayed in a house in Jalalabad. He wanted to pursue a purer Islamic existence, away from the temptations of the West. He had been told he would be able to find a Muslim bride. Alas, Afghanistan wasn't the Islamic paradise others had made it out to be, and 140 had wanted to go home almost as soon as he had arrived. But he couldn't get out.

The story was nearly identical to every other prisoner's. Nobody came to wage jihad. And certainly nobody came to join Al Qaeda. Everyone's motives were pure, if utterly implausible. I knew this as well as anybody. I had seen the pattern in dozens of other interrogators' reports I had edited and sent along since the war started. But sitting in front of one of these wretched prisoners, and watching the night waste away, had a way of eroding one's incredulity. Against my instinct, I began almost to want the man's tale to be true. It would be easier if it were.

An hour later, I noticed I was no longer squinting at my notebook. A ray of light from the morning's sunrise had found the open seam in the tent. I had spent more than six hours with 140. We were both fatigued and frozen. The night had been a waste, and I, a senior sergeant in the unit, was risking a rebuke from the leadership for squandering so much time. I closed out the session, told the guard to return the prisoner to the cages, and stood up to leave.

As I gathered my belongings, I noticed a scrap of paper on the table with the word "owner" scribbled on it. I had written the note to myself while 140 was pattering on about some other subject. It was a reminder to ask 140 who had owned the house where he'd stayed in Jalalabad.

The prisoner had already stood up from the metal chair, had had his cap pulled down over his eyes by the MP, and was being led away. I stepped around the table, pulled up the rim of the prisoner's cap, and asked, "Who owns the house in Jalalabad?"

Without any hesitation, Prisoner 140 replied, "Al-Jezari."

Then 140 raised his head with a jerk that might have been caused by an electric shock. The prisoner had yielded a name. He had slipped. It was a tiny slip, to be sure, but it was, for me, the first evidence that the code of silence in Afghanistan could be broken.

Perhaps it was the exhaustion of the all-night interrogation. Maybe it was because the prisoner, being led away from the booth, had let his guard down. Or the fact that I, in a slip of my own, had posed the question in Arabic rather than German, the language in which we had been speaking all night. Whatever it was, it had caused a momentary short in the elaborate, evasive circuitry of Prisoner 140's mind.

In time, 140 would provide critical intelligence about the Hamburg Al Qaeda cell, betray many other enemy fighters, and expose a never-before-understood connection between Al Qaeda and Islamic groups across North Africa. All of that lay ahead. But for now, all that mattered was that 140 had cracked. And if he did, others might too.

Copyright © 2004 by Chris Mackey and Greg Miller