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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 visit. It was the Army’s version of the Air Force school in Spokane where Jessen and
Mitchell worked. “It was kind of surreal,” Morgan says. The Army had built a replica of a
prisoner-of-war camp—the kind you might find in North Korea or some distant corner of the old
Soviet Union. “I had a tour of the whole compound when nothing was running, so it was this
really foggy, gray morning. It reminded me of some war movie you’ve seen, showing up in this
concentration camp, but no one’s there.”
Morgan went on:
Each cycle of training always ended with a former POW talking to the class and saying, “This
happened to me. You spent three hours in a little tiny cage. I lived in one for four years.
Here’s how they tried to play tricks on me.”
Morgan was fascinated, but skeptical. He was interested in traumatic stress. SERE school was
a realistic simulation of what it meant to be captured and interrogated by the enemy, but it was
still just a simulation. At the end of the day, all the participants were still in North Carolina, and
they could still go and get a beer and watch a movie with their friends when they were done:
“They know they’re in a course and they know they’re in training. How could this possibly be
stressful?” he asked. The SERE instructors just smiled at that. “Then they invited me to come
and said I could monitor it for about a six-month period. So every month, for two weeks, I’d go,
and I was like a little anthropologist taking notes.”
He started with the interrogation phase of the training, taking blood and saliva samples from
the soldiers after they had been questioned. Here is how Morgan describes the results, in the
scientific journal Biological Psychiatry:
The realistic stress of the training laboratory produced rapid and profound changes in cortisol,
testosterone, and thyroid hormones. These alterations were of a magnitude that…[is]
comparable to those documented in individuals undergoing physical stressors such as major
surgery or actual combat.
This was a pretend interrogation. The sessions lasted half an hour. A number of the subjects
were Green Berets and Special Forces—the cream of the crop. And they were reacting as if they
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