But he couldn’t have. Not unless he’d figured out how to teleport the six hundred miles from Phoenix to San Diego. During his weekend in Arizona, he’d only been off shift once, between midnight and 8 a.m. on Sunday. The last flight from Phoenix to San Diego was at 9:55 p.m. Callar couldn’t possibly have made it.
SO WELLS HEADED UP the 5, leaving San Diego behind and heading for Los Angeles and a red-eye back to Washington. But he made one stop along the way, at a bookstore in Anaheim, where he leafed through a shelf of histories about Germany and World War II, wondering what had provoked Jerry Williams to start reading about the Nazis.
17
When Kenneth Karp stepped into Mohammed Fariz’s cell, Mohammed sat in his usual position, rocking back and forth in the right rear corner. He closed his eyes as Karp slid the door shut.
“Come on, dude,” Karp said. “You’re hurting my feelings.”
Mohammed was the forgotten detainee, the second Pakistani arrested during the raid in Islamabad, the seventeen-year-old in the Batman T-shirt who’d shot Dwayne Maggs in the leg and made a fuss on the flight between Pakistan and Poland.
In his month at the Midnight House, Mohammed had been difficult. Some days he read his Quran, prayed on a regular schedule, ate his meals without complaint. But others he spent mumbling to himself and squatting in a corner of his cell. Two days before he had refused his dinner, violating 673’s rules, which required detainees to eat every day.
The Rangers called Karp to find out why.
“It’s poison,” Mohammed said.
“It’s the same as we eat,” Karp said. Which wasn’t exactly true. Mohammed and bin Zari got the leftovers from the base cafeteria. Breakfast was an overripe banana, hunks of bread, and a strange sugary jam. Lunch was toast and soup. Dinner was overcooked mystery meat with soggy rice or french fries that seemed to be made out of cardboard. And the portions were small, a deliberate effort to ensure that the prisoners were always slightly hungry.
But even if the food wasn’t gourmet, Karp could promise it hadn’t been spiked. He wasn’t a fan of giving prisoners LSD or PCP. The effects were too uncertain. Some guys even enjoyed the trips.
Karp picked up the blue plastic bowl that held Mohammed’s dinner, lifted a piece of meat to his mouth. Salty, leathery, tasteless, with bits of gristle that had a sandy texture. “Yummy,” he said, the meat still in his mouth. He choked it down. “See. It’s fine.”
He handed the bowl to Mohammed, who tossed it against the wall.
Under other circumstances, that misbehavior would have earned Mohammed a week in a punishment cell. But Karp and the rest of 673 were busy with bin Zari. Karp couldn’t deal with another problem.
“Fine, Mohammed,” he said in Pashto. “You want to be hungry, your choice.” For two days, Mohammed went back to eating, and Karp thought he had learned his lesson. But now he was back in the corner.
IN CIA JARGON, detainees like Mohammed were “dancers.” They weren’t the most openly resistant prisoners. But their unpredictable cycles of defiance and cooperation made them among the most difficult detainees.
Some dancers were mentally unstable, unable to distinguish fantasy from reality. Others used the technique as a form of passive resistance, a way to incite their jailers. Openly angry prisoners invited brutal retaliation. By alternating—“dancing”—between resistance and compliance, a canny jihadi could slow an interrogation, giving himself time to resist.
Within the agency, the most famous dancer was a Taliban commander who went by the single name Jadhouri. In 2006, a Ranger platoon in Afghanistan captured Jadhouri in anattack on a Talib-controlled village near the Pakistan border. The raid had been routine, except at the end, when Jadhouri ran out of a one-room hut, his hands raised in surrender. Seconds later, a grenade blew out the hut. When the Rangers checked inside, they found fragments of a laptop. Jadhouri had apparently taken the time to strap a grenade to the computer’s case before giving up. The Rangers did what they could to recover the laptop, but the explosion had launched it to computer heaven.
Jadhouri was sent to the prison at Bagram, the American air base north of Kabul, where the interrogators took over. For a week, he insisted that the Rangers were mistaken about the laptop. The grenade had blown up accidentally, he said. His questioners lost patience, threatened to send him to Guantánamo, doused him with buckets of cold water. Jadhouri stopped talking. In response, he was kept awake for sixty hours straight. Still, he refused to speak.
Then, on a December Sunday a week before Christmas, a lung-burning wind blowing off the Kush, Jadhouri produced a single piece of toilet paper that became known as the Square. On it he had drawn squiggles and crosses — representing streams and mountains — and written the names of three North-West Frontier villages. At its center, a small X, which Jadhouri claimed represented a hideout used by Osama bin Laden. Jadhouri said he was in regular touch with bin Laden’s bodyguards and that he had destroyed the laptop because it held messages from bin Laden.
The interrogators at Bagram viewed the Square skeptically. Stilclass="underline" bin Laden. And Jadhouri must have had some reason for blowing up the laptop.
Unfortunately, the Square itself was too small and badly drawn to be deciphered. Giving Jadhouri access to mapmaking software was unthinkable, so the interrogators made him redraw the map on a whiteboard. When Jadhouri pronounced himself finished, the whiteboard was photographed and the images uploaded to the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency, the Defense Department unit responsible for mapping the world.
Two days later, the NGIA’s verdict came back. The map was worse than useless. Intentionally or accidentally, Jadhouri’s version of the North-West Frontier included roads that didn’t exist and a river that seemed to be in Tajikistan. Even disregarding those errors, the target area covered four hundred square miles. Either Jadhouri had a terrible sense of direction or the map was entirely fictitious.
Against their better judgment, the interrogators took one more shot, bringing in an NGIA mapmaker who specialized in central Asian geography. After a day, the mapmaker reported back that the more questions Jadhouri answered, the vaguer the map became. Jadhouri spent two weeks in an isolation cell as punishment.
When he was released, he had a gift for his captors: another square, this one supposedly revealing bin Laden’s “true and correct” location. By then even the most humorless of the interrogators got the joke. Jadhouri was returned to the general prison population and encouraged to use toilet paper for its intended purpose. The mystery of the exploding laptop was never solved.
The legend of the Square quickly passed from Bagram to Guantánamo and the rest of the secret prisons the CIA had scattered around the globe. Along the way, it acquired flourishes meant to prove its ridiculousness. In one, Jadhouri had marked the Square in blood rather than ink. In another, the toilet paper was already partially used. And in a third, the fiction wasn’t discovered until two Special Operations teams had been put in the air for an attack on the hideout.
KARP DIDN’T FIND the stories funny. The interrogators in Bagram should never have believed such an obvious lie. Even worse, they’d failed to punish Jadhouri properly for embarrassing them. The test of wills between detainees and interrogators never ended. Whenever a prisoner won, even for a single day, his victory encouraged other detainees to resist. Isolating prisoners destroyed that dynamic, one reason that the Midnight House worked so well. Here, detainees couldn’t depend on a big group to sustain them.