Intelligence Officers Read Between the Enemy Lines

When she arrived in Afghanistan in December, Marie, 21, had never interrogated a prisoner. The only indication that she might have some aptitude for it, she said, was her success in extracting secrets from her sisters while growing up in Michigan.

“I always found out what I was getting for Christmas,” she said.

Many of the Al Qaeda and Taliban prisoners held here are Muslim extremists reluctant to make eye contact with a woman, let alone sell out their cause to one. Yet Marie, an Army interrogator, has loosened the tongues of dozens of detainees, including a senior Al Qaeda operative. Her approach, like Marie herself, is both disarming and icily direct.

“The hardest thing I’ve had to do is be nice to these people,” she said.

“You go in there, bring them coffee, trying to make them think you’re their friend. They’re not my friend. Most of the people we talk to are really the enemy. To convince them that the best possible thing they can do is tell us the truth--it’s a little piece of revenge.”

The machinery of war clamors continuously here at America’s forward base in Afghanistan, as armored vehicles and Chinook helicopters rumble and explosions echo off the surrounding hills. But Marie is part of another operation at Bagram that goes about its business in virtual silence.

In a boarded-up warehouse ringed with barbed wire, she and other U.S. interrogators seek to pry information from captured Al Qaeda and Taliban operatives.

In air-conditioned tents stocked with scanners, laptops and digital cameras, crews of linguists and analysts comb through materials taken from Al Qaeda caves and safe houses. Among the more than 20,000 documents recovered are lists of Al Qaeda leaders killed in battle, detailed diaries from terrorist training camps and long-winded letters to Arab leaders from Osama bin Laden.

As military operations go, interrogating prisoners and poring over documents are generally not the stuff of which heroes are made. But the war on terrorism is unlike any other war in its dependence on intelligence, and the interrogators and “document exploitation” teams in Afghanistan occupy a crucial front. Sometimes derided by their combat peers as “intel weenies,” the interrogation unit at Bagram recently commissioned T-shirts with a message of uncharacteristic bravado.

“The greatest battle,” the shirts read, “is the battle of wits.”

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Operations That Are Cloaked in Secrecy

The battle of wits is among the most carefully cloaked aspects of the war. Those involved generally aren’t allowed to tell even their families what they do. Most of those interviewed for this story--in Afghanistan, Kuwait and the United States--asked that their full names not be disclosed. No access was granted to prisoners, and officials discussed only in general terms the information gleaned from interrogations.

The significance of their painstaking work has been demonstrated several times since Sept. 11, as kernels of information collected in Afghanistan have enabled authorities around the world to shut down terrorist cells and disrupt plots.

In one of the most striking examples, authorities in Singapore said that in December they broke up an Al Qaeda cell planning to bomb a shuttle bus carrying U.S. military personnel. Officials said details of the plot came from interrogations of a prisoner in Afghanistan and from handwritten notes picked out of the rubble of an Al Qaeda leader’s house.

More recently, U.S. officials have detained an American citizen accused of plotting to detonate a radioactive bomb on U.S. soil. The tip was said to have come from Abu Zubeida, a top Al Qaeda operative captured in Pakistan. But defense officials said some of the details about the “dirty bomb” scheme also came from documents found in Afghanistan.

The intelligence job in Afghanistan has come under some criticism. When U.S. helicopters were ambushed at the outset of Operation Anaconda in March and eight soldiers died, Pentagon officials whispered that intelligence had let them down.

The job is also incomplete.

“We haven’t found Osama bin Laden yet, and I’d be lying if I said that wasn’t a low,” said Maj. David Carstens, 35, the operational leader of the Army’s interrogation and document teams in Afghanistan. “Sometimes you can go through all sorts of interrogations, all sorts of documents, and the information just isn’t there.”

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Similarities Between Military, Civilian Roles

Though the CIA and FBI have captured most of the intelligence headlines, good and bad, in the war on terrorism, much of the heavy lifting in Afghanistan is being done by an unlikely collection of troops and civilians.

Marie, who asked to be identified only by her middle name, attended college briefly before joining the Army and hopes to become a schoolteacher.

Many of her colleagues are reservists. The head of the army interrogation team at Bagram, Chris, is a 30-year-old reserve sergeant plucked last winter from his civilian job as a corporate tax specialist in the London office of the accounting firm KPMG. Another interrogator, Ed, was until recently a public relations consultant at Fleischman-Hillard in New York.

Both noted that their civilian and military jobs are not entirely dissimilar. In interrogation work, Ed said, “everything that you say matters. How the room is set up matters. That’s the same in public relations. Everything is a rehearsed event.”

Many military intelligence soldiers were gifted students who entered the armed services to pay for college. Others went to college briefly but didn’t finish.

After enlisting, they were singled out for special training because they posted top scores on military entrance exams or had already mastered multiple languages.

Interrogators begin learning the art of unlocking an enemy’s secrets at Ft. Huachuca, Ariz. Recruits are taught dozens of techniques, ranging from displays of violent temper designed to heighten a detainee’s anxiety to gentle approaches--questions about personal life and other comfortable subjects--meant to soothe a prisoner on the verge of panic.

They also become experts at reading body language and facial expression--tics hard-wired into human nature that tend to transcend culture. Looking up and to the left while answering a question, for instance, is a sign of “visual construction,” Chris said, an evasive gesture that usually means the speaker is about to fabricate a scene.

Torture is neither taught nor tolerated, U.S. officials insist. Interrogators at Bagram said they never engage in physical coercion.

Some take great pride in the mental gamesmanship of their craft.

Chris keeps his desk stocked with copies of a book, “The Interrogator,” that is practically required reading for his team. It is the story of Hans Scharff, the master German interrogator who during World War II coaxed secrets from countless American pilots while barely raising his voice.

Interrogators don’t deny using tactics designed to unnerve or disorient. They summon prisoners for questioning in the middle of the night and play on their anxieties about where they might be sent next. Most detainees would rather take their chances with Americans than be turned over to the wobbly Afghan government or repatriated to countries with few qualms about physical punishment.

The interrogation sequence itself can be unsettling.

Prisoners are shorn of their hair, outfitted in prison jumpsuits and kept isolated. They are led to the interview “booths” with hoods over their heads and with military police clutching their arms.

Wearing leg irons and with hands cuffed behind their backs, they sit down at the edge of a table, waiting for the interrogator and, in most cases, translator to enter the booth. Armed MPs guard the entrance to the room.

The opening moments of the interview are carefully scripted, usually unproductive, and yet unfailingly intense for both sides. One interrogator likened the adrenaline surge that accompanies entering the booth to the rush football players feel at kickoff.

The psychological profiling of prisoners begins the moment they are captured. Soldiers at the scene scribble down everything they observe onto sticky “capture tags” that are slapped onto prisoners’ backs.

“We’ll know who in the group [captured] was assuming the leadership role, who was the most scared,” Chris said. “Was a certain prisoner eager to surrender, or was he captured after spending every round of ammunition in a last-ditch fight?”

Soldiers take note of which detainee was closest to a radio or phone, because radio operators tend to have access to high-level information.

Interrogators also pore over a prisoner’s belongings for any glimpse into what he holds dear. Did he have a picture of family in his pocket? Was he carrying cigarettes, prayer beads or a worn page from the Koran? Such items can be withheld or bestowed depending on a detainee’s willingness to cooperate.

Interrogators spend hours rehearsing their approach, weaving in questions drawn from a list of “priority intelligence requirements” that tend to center on the obvious: the whereabouts of Bin Laden and Taliban leader Mullah Mohammed Omar, immediate threats to U.S. forces, and Al Qaeda’s plans and capabilities around the world.

One subject that interrogators broach very carefully with detainees is Sept. 11.

“I’ve shown pictures of the World Trade Center,” Ed said. “I don’t use it to argue. I just introduce it as a prop. Sometimes that image can convey why we’re here and how personal and serious this is to us. But it’s not always wise to remind these men of wider ideological disputes. Some of them were glad about those towers.”

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Small-Scale Mission Expanded Rapidly

It wasn’t until mid-December, more than two months after the launch of U.S. airstrikes, that a military intelligence outpost began to take shape in Afghanistan on a cold airstrip in Kandahar, the birthplace of the Taliban.

Some of the troops arrived Christmas Day, just in time for midnight Mass in a frigid terminal whose windows had been blown out by the vibrations of U.S. bombs.

The Army’s 202nd Military Intelligence Battalion--whose motto is “Collect and exploit”--had packed light when it left Ft. Gordon, Ga., for what was supposed to be a small-scale mission. Its job quickly mushroomed as the Taliban collapsed and U.S.-led Afghan forces rolled across the country.

As Al Qaeda and Taliban forces fled, they left behind stashes of documents and other pieces of evidence that U.S. troops--then mainly directing the efforts of the anti-Taliban Northern Alliance--weren’t in position to collect.

Intelligence officials were aghast as Al Qaeda safe houses and caves were picked over by journalists and by Afghan scavengers recognizing an opportunity to gather materials for which U.S. intelligence operatives might pay top dollar.

“People were saying, ‘What the heck is Geraldo doing holding up documents?’ ” recalled Col. Daniel Baker, a senior Army intelligence commander who oversees aspects of the operation from a command post in Kuwait. “We had to wade through civilians holding papers saying, ‘Five dollar! Five dollar! Five dollar!’ ”

Officials acknowledge that they may never recover many important documents but believe that they amassed a considerable archive on Al Qaeda after the U.S. troop presence grew.

U.S. forces were also hampered by a severe shortage of linguists who could make sense of the mountains of documents and help interrogate the growing number of prisoners. The Army, which tracks the language abilities of its 1 million soldiers and reservists, could find only one fluent in Pashto.

Even companies hired to help find translators struggled to locate people fluent in Dari, Pashto and Urdu. Titan Systems Corp., a San Diego defense contractor, spent fruitless weeks poring over resumes on Internet job sites until a 29-year-old manager at the company posted a message on several Yahoo message boards frequented by expatriate Afghans.

“My name is Scott,” the message began. “Our company is looking for linguists who are willing to go to Afghanistan to support U.S. military operations.”

Soon Titan was fielding as many as 75 applications a day, many from native Afghans whose families had fled the country when the Soviets invaded in 1979 and were eager to revisit their homeland under escort of the U.S. military.

Among those hired are a partner in a San Diego pharmaceuticals company, a software engineer from Texas and an accountant who was once a commander in the anti-Soviet moujahedeen.

All those chosen are U.S. citizens screened by the Pentagon to handle classified material. They are paid $6,000 to $8,000 a month, triple the amount made by the soldiers they work alongside. At Bagram, documents continue to arrive by the bushel, often simply stuffed in trash bags after getting a quick once-over by the soldiers who found them. Defense Intelligence Agency teams sort through the incoming piles, tagging them according to where and when they were found, and scanning them into a classified computer system called Harmony that is accessible to every branch of the U.S. intelligence community.

Transmitted electronically across the Atlantic, the digitized documents are scrutinized at a center in northern Virginia, where the DIA and CIA have 50 translators and analysts working two shifts a day.

The materials--which include not only documents but also videotapes, discs and computer hard drives--are ultimately boxed and shipped to a secret Washington facility.

“The vast majority of it is low-grade junk,” said Capt. Mike Kuhn, who oversees the document exploitation operation at the DIA in Washington. “But we have also had some very significant finds.”

Several officials said the most valuable discovery was a small library found at a terrorist training camp in Afghanistan called Tarnak Farms showing Al Qaeda’s interest in chemical weapons.

Other discoveries included a training camp diary, described by one official as “the graduate notes of a terrorist,” that spans hundreds of pages and describes in detail Al Qaeda lessons in such skills as digging mortar positions, attaching car bombs and arranging minefields.

During Operation Anaconda, U.S. forces found what Carstens called a “book of dead,” listing senior Taliban and Al Qaeda fighters killed in action since the beginning of the war.

“It was almost like they were running mortuary affairs,” keeping logs so families could be notified and burial arrangements made, Carstens said. “It gave us good insight into how their command structure was faring.”

The United States has also collected dozens of letters written by Al Qaeda leaders to officials and religious leaders around the world. Many were requests for favors, arms and money, helping the United States determine where Al Qaeda found international support. Officials wouldn’t elaborate except to say that some material has implicated Iran, which CIA Director George J. Tenet this year accused of interference in Afghanistan.

Although none of the recovered material has pointed authorities to the hiding places of Bin Laden or Omar, Carstens said, numerous documents bear their signatures.

Among them is a vitriolic, 44-page letter that Bin Laden wrote to Saudi Arabia’s King Fahd in 1995. The missive provides a glimpse into Bin Laden’s mind a year after he’d been stripped of his Saudi citizenship and a year before the CIA set up a special unit to track him.

Bin Laden expresses disgust with Fahd’s links to the West. “There is nothing more symbolic of your foreign policy,” he writes, “than your ties to the interests of the Western crusaders and infidel systems.”

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Processing People as Well as Papers

Bagram is the initial stop for prisoners as well as documents. Its detention center, and another at a U.S. base at Kandahar, is designed to hold prisoners for a few months at most.

About 170 people are in custody at the two facilities. Thousands of others have been released or turned over to the Afghan government. And 460 have been sent to the U.S. Navy base in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, for in-depth questioning by the CIA and FBI.

At Bagram, the only visible evidence that prisoners are present is a steady plume of smoke from metal drums in which detainees’ waste is incinerated.

Inside the low-slung detention building, there are six interrogation booths, cells for holding prisoners, a lounge for interrogators and military police, and a large open room lined with maps, marker boards and laptop computers that is the nerve center for the operation.

At a workstation in the middle of the room, Chris manages a team of dozens of interrogators and analysts. Like a baseball manager, a big part of his job is filling out the lineup.

He ranks incoming prisoners by how much they are presumed to know and assigns interrogators based partly on their effectiveness in the booth, but also on how their personalities match up with that of the prisoners.

Marie, who has sandy blond hair and stands about 5 feet tall, “couldn’t scare somebody,” Chris said. “She wouldn’t be called upon to increase someone’s anxiety, and she can’t talk to fanatics who won’t talk to women.”

But Marie “thinks with a logic that is unstoppable and has an instinct for what is important,” Chris said. And she is frequently assigned to handle high-level prisoners partly because she is the last person they expect to confront.

“It is extremely unsettling [for detainees] to find themselves sitting across from what looks like a 19-year-old,” Chris said. “They’re expecting someone my age, and they’re probably expecting to get roughed up.”

In March, Marie gained the notice of top Pentagon officials in Washington, including Army Secretary Thomas E. White, for her work with one of the top Al Qaeda officials in custody.

Officials declined to identify the prisoner except to say that he is a high-ranking operative who has been singled out by Atty. Gen. John Ashcroft as a wanted terrorist but whose capture has not been disclosed.

Over a period of weeks, the prisoner became very attached to Marie, enamored of their frequent conversations, and agitated when sessions were skipped. Military officials said he is gay and saw Marie as a nonthreatening presence, telling her that he had known few people in his life whom he could trust but that he felt he could trust her and wouldn’t disappoint her.

Initially, authorities didn’t recognize the prisoner as a significant operative. He blended in with the group he was captured with. Their stories raised little suspicion.

If anything, Marie said, “it started to seem like he was overly excited to help us.” Desperate to prove that he was cooperative, he talked of his admiration for what the U.S. was accomplishing in Afghanistan, and even tattled on the insignificant offenses of other detainees.

His eagerness made Marie so nervous that she began rereading his file and transcripts of their conversations, looking for holes in his story. She didn’t find any.

Then, new information from other sources made it clear that this prisoner had another identity, and a much larger Al Qaeda role, that he hadn’t disclosed.

Marie was crestfallen.

“He had fooled me,” she said. “I was pretty upset I’d overlooked something as large as this was. I felt like I’d just lost my whole life savings.”

Instead of confronting him, Marie laid a psychological trap. During their next session, she tossed out the detainee’s secret identity casually, as if she had simply overheard a new name. “How do you pronounce this?” she asked. “Am I saying it right?”

The detainee began sweating. “You’re saying it right,” he replied. “But that’s not me.” Until that moment, the prisoner had not explicitly lied. Seizing on this, Marie began to prey on his guilt.

She brought him letters from other interrogators lamenting his duplicity. She staged a shouting match with him and had two burly MPs poke into the interrogation booth and shake their heads in disgust.

A prisoner who had spent much of his energy trying to impress his American captors suddenly saw his standing with them--and, implicitly, his fate--sliding into uncertainty.

Within days, he confessed, admitting not only his identity, but also plots he and others had been training and planning for. Officials declined to elaborate, except to say that he was an Al Qaeda operative who had made direct threats against the United States, and ultimately provided information concerning other members of the terrorist network in the United States.

Not every interrogation ends in success. Al Qaeda taught members to resist interrogation and confuse captors. But most prisoners, interrogators say, are confused, scared and motivated mainly by self-interest.

Indeed, Marie said most of the 70 or so prisoners she has interrogated have been cooperative and even exhibited signs of gaining new respect for her gender.

“True, some have had their choice of words for me,” she said. “But when they realize that where they travel next depends on the opinion of a woman, not only does that put them in their place, it scares the bejesus out of them.”

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ABOUT THIS SERIES

This is part of an occasional series chronicling untold stories from the war in Afghanistan. To read previous stories in the series please go to www.latimes.com/untoldwar.