Mitchell: You’re not screaming at the guy. Literally, you’re pouring the water, and you’re saying to him in a not-quite-conversational tone, but not an aggressive tone, “It doesn’t have to be this way. We want information to stop operations inside the United States. We know you don’t have all of it, but we know you have some of it.…” I’m saying it to him as it’s happening, “It doesn’t have to be this way. This is your choice.”
MG: How do you know—in general, with EITs—how do you know when you’ve gone as far as you need to go?
Mitchell: They start talking to you.
Talking meant specifics—details, names, facts.
Mitchell: You’d give him a picture and say, “Who’s this guy?” He’d say, “Well, this guy is this guy, but you know, the guy in the back, that guy in the back is this guy, and this is where he’s at…” and you know—so he would go beyond the question.
Mitchell and Jessen focused on compliance. They wanted their subjects to talk and volunteer information and answer questions. And from the beginning with KSM, they were convinced they would need every technique in their arsenal to get him to talk. He wasn’t a foot soldier on the fringes of Al Qaeda, someone ambivalent about his participation in terrorist acts. Foot soldiers are easy. They have little to say—and little to lose by saying it. They’ll cooperate with their interrogators because they realize it is their best chance of winning their freedom.
But KSM knew he wasn’t seeing daylight again, ever. He had no incentive to cooperate. Mitchell knew all the psychological interrogation techniques used by the people who didn’t believe in enhanced interrogation, and he thought they would work just fine on what he called “common terrorists that you catch on the battlefield, like the everyday jihadists that were fighting Americans.” But not on “the hard-core guys.”
And KSM was a hard-core guy. Mitchell and Jessen could use only walling and sleep deprivation to get him to talk because, incredibly, waterboarding did not work on him. Somehow KSM was able to open his sinuses, and the water that flowed into his nose would simply flow out his mouth. No one understood how he did it. Mitchell calls it a magic trick. After a few sessions, KSM grasped the cadence of the pours. He would mock the room by counting down the remaining seconds on his fingers—then making a slashing gesture with his hand when it was over. Once, in the middle of a session, Mitchell and Jessen ducked out of the room to confer with a colleague; when they came back inside, KSM was snoring. “He was asleep,” Mitchell said, laughing at the memory. “I know I’m laughing at this potentially horrific image that people have, but there is a piece of this…” He shook his head in wonderment. “I’d never heard of it,” he said. “I’m telling you, when the CIA was doing due diligence, they called JPRA.” JPRA is a Pentagon agency that monitors the various SERE programs run by the service branches. They had a file on waterboarding. “The person they talked to there said it’s 100 percent effective on our students. We have never had anyone not capitulate.”
Mitchell and Jessen gave KSM the full treatment for three weeks. Finally, he stopped resisting. But KSM’s hard-won compliance didn’t mean his case was now open-and-shut. In fact, the difficulties were just beginning.
4.
A few years before 9/11, a psychiatrist named Charles Morgan was at a military neuroscience conference. He was researching post-traumatic stress syndrome, trying to understand why some veterans suffer from PTSD and why others, who go through exactly the same experiences, emerge unscathed. Morgan was talking to his colleagues about how hard it was to study the question, because what you really wanted to do was to identify a group of people before they had a traumatic experience and track their reactions in real time. But how could you do that? There was no war going on at the time, and it wasn’t as though he could arrange for all his research subjects to simultaneously get robbed at gunpoint, or suffer some devastating loss. Morgan jokes that the best idea he could come up with was to study couples on the eve of their wedding day.
But afterward, an Army colonel came to Morgan and said, “I think I can solve your problem.” The colonel worked at a SERE school at Fort Bragg, North Carolina. He invited Morgan to come and