“… is if they were waterboarded other times. As part of their training,” Andrew said. “Once they adjusted to it, their trainer could condition them to control their eyes.”
“But the panic’s overwhelming. No one would agree to be waterboarded repeatedly.”
“Unless they welcome death.”
The stark words made the guard cock his head, threatened by Andrew’s logic.
Apparently the other guards reacted the same way. Confused, they released him. Feeling blood flow into his arms, Andrew stepped forward. “All these prisoners want is to die for their cause and go to paradise. They’re not afraid of death. They welcome it. How can waterboarding make them panic?”
A long moment passed. Mr. Able lowered his gaze toward the water and scum on the floor. “Report whatever the hell you want.”
“I will in a moment.” Andrew turned toward the other guards. “Who stuck the pistol into my back?”
The man on the right said, “I did. No hard feelings.”
“Wrong.” Andrew rammed the palm of his hand against the man’s face and shattered his nose.
Four days later, shortly after five p.m. eastern standard time, Andrew received a radio message that five men with backpacks containing smallpox-dispersal cans had been arrested as they attempted to enter various sections of the New York City subway system. A weight seemed to fall from his chest. For the first time in a long while, he breathed freely. After the confidence with which he’d confronted Mr. Able, he’d begun to be troubled by doubts. So many lives depended on his skills. Given the sophistication of the prisoners, he’d been worried that, for once, he might have been fooled.
He was in Afghanistan now, conducting another sensory-assault interrogation. As before, the person usually in charge resented his intrusion and complained that he could get results much faster than Andrew did.
Andrew ignored him.
But on the eve of the third day of the interrogation, when Andrew was sure that his prisoner would soon lose all his psychological defenses and reveal what Andrew needed to know, he was again reminded of his father. He sat before the computer on his desk, watching the image of the prisoner, and he recalled that his father had sometimes been asked to go to the Agency’s training facility at Camp Peary, Virginia, where he taught operatives to extend the limits of their perceptions.
“It’s like most things. It involves practice,” his father had explained to Andrew. “For old times’ sake, I made my students read The Ambassadors. I tried to distract them with blaring music. I inserted conversations behind the music. A layer at a time. After a while, the students learned to be more aware, to perceive many things at once.”
As Andrew studied the computer screen and pushed buttons that flashed the blinding lights in the prisoner’s cell while at the same time causing a siren to wail, he thought about the lesson that his father had said he took from that Henry James novel.
“Lambert Strether becomes increasingly aware as the novel progresses,” Andrew’s father had told him. “Eventually, Strether notices all sorts of things that he normally would have missed. Undertones in conversations. Overtones in the way someone looks at someone else. All the details in the way people dress and what those details say about them. He becomes a master of consciousness. The sentences dramatize that point. They get longer and more complicated as the novel progresses, as if matching Strether’s growing mind. I get the sense that James hoped those complicated sentences would make the reader’s mind develop as Strether’s does. But this is the novel’s point, Andrew. Never forget this, especially if you enter the intelligence profession, as I hope you will. For all his awareness, Strether loses. In the end, he’s outwitted. His confidence in his awareness destroys him. The day you become most sure of something, that’s the day you need to start doubting it. The essence of the intelligence profession is that you can never be aware enough, never be conscious enough, because your opponent is determined to be even more aware.”
Andrew kept watching the computer screen and the agony of his prisoner as lights flashed and sirens wailed. Abruptly, he pressed buttons that turned off the lights and the siren. He wanted to create ten minutes of peace, ten minutes in which the prisoner would be unable to relax, dreading the further assault on his senses. It was a hell that the prisoner would soon do anything to end.
Except, Andrew thought.
The day you become most sure of something, that’s the day you need to start doubting it. His father’s words echoed in Andrew’s memory as he thought about his conviction that the only sure method of interrogation was his own. But was it possible that…
A threatening idea wormed into Andrew’s imagination. An operative could be trained to add one perception onto another and then another until he or she could monitor multiple conversations while reading a book and listening to brassy music.
Then why couldn’t an operative of a different sort be trained to endure deepening cold, throbbing lights, and wailing sirens for three and a half days without sleep? The first time would be agony, but the agony of the second time would perhaps be less because it was familiar. The third time would be a learning experience, testing methods of self-hypnotism to make the onslaught less painful.
Watching the prisoner’s supposed anguish, Andrew felt empty. Could an enemy become that sophisticated? If they learned NLP in order to defeat it, if they practiced being water-boarded in order to control their reactions to it, why couldn’t they educate themselves in other methods of interrogation in order to defeat those? Any group whose members blew themselves up or infected themselves with smallpox to destroy their enemies and thus attain paradise was capable of anything.
Andrew pressed buttons on his computer keyboard and caused the strobe lights and siren to resume in the prisoner’s cold cell. Imagining the blare, he watched the sleepless prisoner scream.
Or was the prisoner only pretending to have reached the limit of his endurance? Andrew had the troubling sense that the man on the screen was reacting predictably, almost on schedule, as if the prisoner had been trained to know what to anticipate and was behaving the way an interrogator would expect.
But how can I be sure? Andrew wondered. How much further do I need to push him in order to be confident he isn’t faking? Four and a half days? Five? Longer? Can anyone survive that and remain sane?
Andrew recalled his father telling him about one of the most dramatic interrogations in American espionage. During the 1960s, a Soviet defector came to Washington and told the CIA that he knew about numerous Soviet moles in the U.S. intelligence system. His accusations resulted in investigations that came close to immobilizing the Agency.
Soon afterward, a second Soviet defector came to Washington and accused the first defector of being a double agent sent by the Soviets to paralyze the Agency by making false accusations about moles within it. In turn, the first defector claimed that the second defector was the true double agent and had been sent to discredit him.
These conflicting accusations finally brought American intelligence operations to a standstill. To break the stasis, the second defector, who’d been promised money, a new identity, and a consulting position with the Agency, was taken to a secret confinement facility where he was interrogated periodically for the next five years. Most of that time was spent in solitary confinement in a small cell with a narrow cot and a single lightbulb in the ceiling. He was given nothing to read. He couldn’t speak to anyone. He was allowed to bathe only once a week. Except for the passage of the seasons, he had no idea what day or week, month or year it was. He tried making a calendar, using threads from a blanket, but each time he completed one, his guards destroyed it. His boarded window prevented him from ever breathing fresh air. In summer, his room felt like a sweatbox. For five hundred and sixty-two days of those five years, he was questioned intensely, sometimes around the clock. But despite his prolonged ordeal, he never recanted his accusation, nor did the first defector, even though their stories were mutually contradictory and one of them must have been lying. Nobody ever learned the truth.