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December 21 - December 23, 2020
I like to try homicide cases. And look what I’m doing.
obstructionist. Politics in the first sense—small-“p” politics—means the navigation of human relationships. Politics in that sense is the DNA of law enforcement.
Law enforcement manages the shape of society with respect to legal parameters of acceptable behavior—parameters set by the Constitution and defined by statutes. The second kind of politics—party politics—means the execution of partisan strategy for purely political advantage. That kind of politics should have no place in American law enforcement. The only circumstance that might effectively force law enforcement to be partisan, in the two-party American political system, would be if one party unambiguously ceased to respect the laws and the Constitution.
The first was to create an interagency group to conduct interrogations of high-value terrorist suspects—the CIA would be involved, and the Department of Defense; the FBI would run the group, and it would report to the National Security Council at the White House.
ban the use of enhanced interrogation techniques by any U.S. government entity. From now on, only techniques from the U.S. Army Field Manual and those used by federal law enforcement, which had been compiled to be in conformity with the Geneva Conventions, would be allowed. The president accepted both of these recommendations and asked Director Mueller to create the High-Value Detainee Interrogation Group.
the five main ways to approach a subject; the five main kinds of questions to ask; the many subcategories of both; and the permutations of ways to combine them. The terms, when listed one after another—Fear-Up, Fear-Down, Pride and Ego, Futility, We Know All, File and Dossier, Establish Your Identity, Repetition, Rapid Fire, Silent, Change of Scene—triggered a scatter of associations: goofy, clinical, ominous.
Moral certainty is rare.
It does a lot of interviews. Here is another difference between interviews and interrogation: Interviews take place in a longer-term context. Interviews help agents build relationships. Relationships nurture informants. The job is to create in someone’s mind a sense that you are worthy of trust. That you are competent. A professional. Doing the right thing. The challenge is demonstrating that your interests are in alignment—even if your ultimate goals are not the same. The agent who believes that he can take hardened criminals, show them the light of patriotism, and teach them the right way to
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all an agent has to do is demonstrate that talking to and working with the Bureau is a good idea—to convince a person that talking about bad things they’ve done is in their best interest, which often comes in the form of a reduced sentence. Some interviews become confrontational or hostile. That’s necessary every once in a while—but not all that often if you’ve properly sized up what’s important to someone in an initial conversation.
pure intelligence efforts by the CIA and the Defense Department relied more heavily on interrogation.
how both agencies approached the job: their goals, their strengths and weaknesses. Their approach was intelligence driven.
Analysts were central to the process.
What do you know of Osama bin Laden? Where is Osama bin Laden located? Who did you speak to last week about Osama bin Laden? If the person didn’t answer, he didn’t answer. That’s what the cable would report.
Defense interrogations involved slightly more in the way of rapport building than CIA interrogations did, but only as defined and allowed by the
An FBI interview flies by the seat of its pants. This is its greatest strength and biggest weakness.
But FBI interrogators know how to read the subject. They know how to respond to the subject’s reactions to questions. They know how to borrow from and weave together various approaches. This guy looks hungry: I think I can warm him up a little bit if I give him a cup of coffee and let him smoke a cigarette.
flexibility versus organization. Everybody needs some of both. I hoped the HIG could come up with a synthesis that would improve on all three approaches.
He is very pious, with a black-and-white view of the world. Everything beyond the parameters of his religious beliefs is alien and condemned.
And he was a mentor to Nidal Malik Hasan,
who killed thirteen and injured thirty-two more in a mass shooting at Fort Hood, Texas, one month before Abdulmutallab boarded the plane to Detroit.
The goal was to create an ongoing relationship with the suspect. Keeping the local case agent involved through the whole process ensured that someone in Detroit would be able to keep the conversation going.
Democrats, the HIG became a symbol of a better way forward, after the notorious episodes of prisoner abuse at Abu Ghraib, Bagram Air Base, and elsewhere.
HIG as a smarter, more efficient, more effective way of interrogating terrorist suspects.
For Republicans, the HIG was a sign of how far the country had fallen and proof that the U.S. had gone soft on terrorism. What were we doing sending FBI people in front of terrorists and reading them their rights? Ter...
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They could only see the case as an example of a single effect of Obama’s new policy, an effect they viewed like this: Now a terrorist could get arrested and be treated like a criminal defendant—
allowed to tell the federal government, Screw you, I don’t want to talk. Democratic congressman Adam
constitutionally consistent approach to interrogation works. Sometimes you’ll get a guy who decides not to talk, and in this country we have to respect that. Most suspects who decide not to talk on the day they’re arrested do talk eventually. And rapport building—the relationship-building process of getting to know suspects, breaking down their defenses positively, building trust—gets you higher-quality, better intelligence than scaring the hell out of them or beating them into telling you anything you want to hear to make the beating stop.
goal of every trip up there was survival. There was no convincing anyone of anything. Everyone walks into the room with predrafted talking points and questions.
agenda. A congressional hearing is not fact-finding. It’s theater. As the witness, you have one goal: Get out alive.
Pop-up targets were more common. Anyone anywhere in the intelligence community could nominate a target for a pop-up HIG deployment.
Each team had interrogators, analysts, and reports officers. The FBI and the Defense Department provided a lot of these resources. The CIA always provided the fewest.
CIA is the smallest of the intelligence services and is very careful, to the point of reticence, about assigning people and spending money.
We all want the same thing. Sometimes we don’t all agree on how to get where we’re going, but if we just sit down and talk, we can figure it out.
Abdulmutallab, in his interrogation, had “tried to reconstruct the layout of a training camp, Mr. Awlaki’s house and many other Qaeda buildings. His descriptions were so precise that it is likely they have helped shape targeting decisions in the American drone campaign in Yemen.”
some traditional hot-button national-security issues, such as the use of torture (he was for it), the prosecution of foreign terrorists in regular criminal courts rather than by military tribunals (he was against it), and the future of the detention facility at Guantánamo (he wanted to keep it open and put more people in it).
this was like being dragged back into a part of your past that you did not wish to revisit.
After eight years of finding ways to hold, interrogate, and prosecute terrorists that did not involve sending them to Cuba—eight years of doing these things successfully, with a track record that “enhanced” methods have not matched—we found ourselves having these conversations all over again.
And arguing once again that torture, in addition to being wrong, was not necessary—and not even helpful—to the project of collecting the best, most reliable intelligence from subjects.
maximum-security federal prisons—from which no one has ever escaped—without the possibility of parole was a pretty reliable way to keep terrorists from harming anyone. All the facts were on our side, but I got the di...
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would grab the arms on his chair and prop himself up a bit higher in his seat. His face would redden. His voice would rise.
so-called problems he believed Defense created for Justice were in fact an example of how the system was supposed to work: a prime example of two very different departments, with different powers and different techniques, collaborating on their shared mission.
everyone understood that such collaboration was no longer valued by the federal government’s most powerful decision makers.
Analysts also took the raw intelligence in select 302s from all the FBI’s operational divisions—primarily the criminal, counterterrorism, and counterintelligence divisions—and turned it into the finished intelligence of briefings. An “operational” division is one that is responsible for some piece of the FBI’s investigative work. “Finished” intelligence means that it has been contextualized, rewritten, and presented in a way that can be understood by informed readers whose government positions—in departments such as State, Treasury, Homeland Security, and Justice; and, most critically, in
the White House—require them to make decisions about how the government should act on the briefing’s information.
Every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday morning, the Bureau’s director and members of his senior team briefed the attorney general, the deputy attorney general, the National Security Division folks, and some other Department of Justice staff members.
presentation of intelligence called the President’s Daily Brief. If intelligence is information for decision makers, the President’s Daily Brief is the information that the intelligence community believes the ultimate decision maker must have. It covers a wide—literally, global—range of subject matter, from migration patterns to weapons sales to economic intelligence.
assembled in the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, and to the extent that the FBI is involved in preparation of the PDB, the work chiefly concerns terrorist threats and counterterrorism work—
highly classified stuff. You need a whole suite of security clearances and read-ins to different compartmented pr...
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the President’s Daily Brief gets all the relevant people focused on the same targets at the same time, especially when crises are breaking. The PDB also organizes the fire-hose blast of information these people require so that they can do their jobs more broadly. For Bureau officials who read it, the PDB shows how our cases fit into the wider world of national-security threats and the government’s other priority issues and concerns.
everybody from the FBI would sit on one side of the table and everybody from Justice would sit on the other side, like in a strategic-arms-negotiating meeting or a summit with a foreign leader.
