Tom remembered how he’d felt when they’d come through the gates. The unpleasant sensations that had been prodded by what he’d smelled. “Including sensory exploitation, right?”
A sly smile crossed Salah’s face. “How do you mean?”
“What I smelled when we came into the facility. It made me react viscerally.”
“Ah,le parfum pénitentiaire. It took us months to develop. What did you think?”
“I was impressed. It made me extremely…apprehensive.”
“You felt dread, correct?”
“Precisely.”
“That’s why it works. Look-I throw into a cell a man. He’s no hard-liner, but let’s say he was standing close by when two Israeli reservists are attacked, beaten, then thrown out of the second-story window of a Palestinian Authority police station, then stomped to death by the crowd the Palestinian police have assembled below. There is video-a Western camera crew was rolling during the incident, so we have lots of faces but no names. This guy, we think he has names.”
“Why?”
“Because in the video he’s a part of the crowd. He looks like he knows the people around him-the same animals who tore our soldiers apart limb from limb and then turned to the camera to show off their bloody hands. Either they’re his neighbors or he’s a part of one of the murderers’ extended families. I have to fracture that clan loyalty and get him to name names before Arafat ships the scum with the blood on their hands out to Gaza or Egypt or Syria, where it’s harder for us to lay our hands on them. So Shabak noses around until they find him, scoop him up, and bring him to me. Not here. To another place. Things are abrupt, quick. He has no time to think or react. He’s yanked into a truck, and the next thing he knows he’s smelling what you smelled-and all of a sudden he is afraid. He is very, very afraid. Then he loses his clothes. He’s handed dirty, anonymous over-alls that smell of someone else’s sweat and urine. He’s alone. He’s frightened. He’s been separated from his family, his village, all his friends. He’s pushed into a cell. A very spartan cell. Then I start the disorientation and, more important, the anticipation of dread. A few slaps in the face-whapwhap. A cuff or two on the back of the head-smack-smack. Then he’s left alone to wonder what’s coming next. Then I use heat. Followed by cold. Then sleep deprivation. During this time, he’s hooded for what he thinks is a day, maybe even two.”
“How does he know?”
“Because we designed the hoods so he can see just enough to know when the lights go on and when they go off. Because he can hear the other prisoners being served breakfast or dinner.” Salah’s eyes narrowed. “His senses tell him what’s what.”
“And how long are we really talking about?”
“Nine to thirteen hours tops. Sometimes much less.”
Tom pursed his lips. Impressive.
Salah continued. “He can hear things but not see anything. He hears someone being taken away. He hears screams-I mean serious. Like fingernails being pulled out, or hot irons burning flesh or electroshock. Sometime later-he has no idea how long-he hears the sound of a body being dragged down the corridor and thrown into the adjacent cell. If he listens very carefully, he can make out excruciating moans. It may all be role-playing or sound effects coming from a compact disc and a very sophisticated speaker system-sophisticated enough to make the walls of his cell rumble if we have to. But my target doesn’t know that. All he knows is what his buddies have told him and what he’s picked up on the street about how ruthless we are-and what he’s just gone through. Believe me, by the time I ask him the first question, he is already putty.”
“But what you’re talking aboutis ruthless.”
“Ruthless works, my friend. You have to be pragmatic. Flexible. You Americans forget you are at war. That’s because you think you are eight thousand miles from it, even though you’re not. We live in the middle of the battlefield, my friend.” Salah pulled a pack of Jordanian cigarettes from his pocket, shook one into his mouth, and lit it with a disposable lighter. “That’s how you get actionable intelligence. Stuff you use today, tomorrow, this week.”
“But you said you don’t use those techniques at Qadima.”
“Correct. Here we are interested in the long term. To learn how these people think and why. This woman you came to see-she is no terrorist. We know that. But we want to learn about the man she traveled with. We want to be able to give our security services information that will help them uncover developing capabilities, impending objectives, future trends. And so, we prefer psychological means-yes, we still use light, heat, and cold, sound or the absolute lack of it. But the key is long, intensive, almost psychoanalytic sessions.”
“But she’s British. What about the British consul? Didn’t he demand to see her?”
Salah put his right hand on the edge of the metal desk and exhaled smoke through his nose. “That is not my concern. When those in a position to grant the British consul permission to see this woman do so, she will be moved to another facility.” He swiveled toward Tom. “Our goals here are different. Time is of no concern. We want to extract information right down to the subconscious level. To understand what attracted these people to terrorism-to comprehend not only their motives, but get inside their psyches.”
“When you say long…”
The Israeli switched into French. “Twenty-two, twenty-three hours is common. I have seen interrogations that last more than thirty-two hours-almost a day and a half. And believe me, they are just as hard on the interrogator as they are on the subject.”
Tom followed suit, speaking French. “You don’t tag-team?”
“It doesn’t work if you switch boats in midstream. There has to be a real line of communication developed. Something akin to trust. Like I said, in many ways the process here resembles psychoanalysis. You get inside their heads. You take them back, get them almost fetal, and then bring them forward step-by-step.”
Tom understood Salah’s modus operandi. The agent recruitment process operated under many of the same precepts. The case officer controls the situation by creating and subsequently encouraging the kind of rapport in which the agent quickly becomes dependent on the case officer. Through the ability to read people, the force of personality, and the exploitation of vulnerabilities, the case officer creates a Potemkin Village relationship in which he or she becomes the agent’s best friend, surrogate parent, trusted confessor, and shrink. “Potemkin Village” because it is all an act. The case officer’s every emotion is feigned, every response choreographed in order to manipulate, steer, and influence the target in a certain prescribed direction. At the end of the process, which is called “getting close,” the target will trust the case officer more than he or she will trust their own husbands or wives, families, or the groups to which they belong.
Indeed, if the case officers are sophisticated enough, and flexible enough, and know enough about the culture, mores, and psychological quirks of the target, they can even run this mind game on individuals whose religious and political beliefs might at first appear to be impenetrable and unshakable. Like members of the Muslim Brotherhood or the Da’wa, for example. Tom had recruited members of both vehemently anti-Western Islamist factions as agents. It hadn’t been an overnight process. It had taken more than half a year in one case-that had been a false-flag recruitment-and a local access agent to act as an intermediary in the other. But he had pulled them off.
He looked at the one-armed man who flicked the cigarette from his lips and ground it out with the toe of his boot. This guy knew whereof he spoke.