56 – Cape Cod, Massachusetts
The detainees at Camp Edwards were sorted into categories. Families were moved to barracks buildings where they could remain together. Some even included a small kitchen. That portion of the base was called Camp Foxtrot. Older detainees, those 50 and above, had their own area, with unmarried men and women in separate buildings. They were in Camp Alpha. Residents of Camps Alpha and Foxtrot could visit one another and ate in a communal mess hall.
At the far side of Edwards, however, separated from Camps Alpha and Foxtrot by several hundred yards, was Camp Echo, named nostalgically by Base Commander Dancer after the Camp Echo at Guantanamo, where the least cooperative detainees were housed. The residents of Camp Echo were all between 18 and 50 years old, all potential members of the Israel Defense Forces. Camp Echo was surrounded by a wire fence, topped with coiled razor wire. A second identical fence stood a dozen yards outside the inner fence. The fences looked hastily erected, but impenetrable. Wooden guard towers stood at each corner.
The barracks at Camp Echo, too, showed their hasty and recent renovation. Plywood partitions were erected to create a series of separate rooms, each ten feet by eight feet, inside each building. All the windows were covered by plywood. The only air circulation was from vents high on the walls facing the common hallways. These vents were ducted to separate HVAC units outside each room so the temperature in each room could be controlled independently of all other rooms. The doors to each room, too, were solid. No light entered from the outside.
Outside light was not necessary, however, because each room had a single wire-covered fluorescent fixture mounted against the ceiling. There were no light switches in the rooms, no electrical outlets of any kind. The cell lights were never turned off, never during the day, never at night.
Each room had a loudspeaker mounted high on a wall. It had no controls, either. There were two plastic pails in each room, one held drinking water. The other was the toilet. A plastic pad served as a mattress. Detainees were issued plastic foam blankets that tore when twisted or stretched, designed to prevent suicides. The pads and blankets were collected every morning and handed back every evening.
Detainees saw only the inside of their cells and the inside of the interrogation rooms. When moved from one place to the other, they were shackled at wrists and ankles, blacked-out ski goggles covered their eyes, sound-deadening muffs covered their ears.
Maj. Dancer designed Camp Echo as a virtual replica of Guantanamo Bay. His only regret was that because he was limited to the existing facility and because of time constraints, the rooms were built from plywood rather than the steel shipping containers that were used at Guantanamo for Echo’s namesake. Oh well, Dancer thought when he first toured the camp, at least the lighting is the same. And the temperature controls, too, one of my favorites, take them from tropical to Arctic in minutes.
Keep them guessing, uncomfortable, with absolutely no control, that was a lesson learned at Guantanamo. Hot, then cold; light, then dark; silent, then loud. All out of their control. All under our control. Make them completely dependent on us, on their only ally, their interrogator.
Womb rooms, the soldiers manning the camp called them. Not cells, but womb rooms cut off from everything, everybody.
The most important building at Camp Echo was the JIF, the Joint Interrogation Facility. This building was constructed from cinderblocks, with sound-deadening vermiculite pellets poured down through the holes in the blocks. It, too, had no windows and it, too, was separated into a warren of separate, small rooms accessible only by a single door from the common hallway.
Nobody was housed in those rooms, however. They were the IU’s, the interrogation units. Each had a video camera mounted high on the wall.
Following the pattern created at the interrogation camp established at Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan and continued at Guantanamo Bay, the detainees at Camp Echo were nameless, identified in camp records only by numbers, bestowed on them sequentially in the order in which they were first processed. The Nazis used the same procedure at Auschwitz.
Camp Echo’s detainees were numbered 00001 to 00657. There was considerable discussion when the detainee database was first established as to how many digits the detainee numbers should have. Five digits provided for a maximum of 99,999 persons.
“If we need more numbers than that,” Maj. Dancer joked, “we’ll have bigger problems than reprogramming the database.”
He was to be proven correct.
The IU remained unused for the first week after the detainees arrived. One day, however, a De Havilland C-7A Caribou transport aircraft bearing no markings but painted in Army olive drab landed at Otis Air Base next to Camp Edwards. Twenty people walked down the stairway rolled up to the twin-engine aircraft, men and women, all dressed in casual civilian clothes, primarily jeans and T shirts. They were taken by truck to Camp Echo. They assembled in the mess hall, which was cleared of both detainees and the Massachusetts National Guards troops who staffed the camp.
Maj. Dancer gave a short speech welcoming the young men and women to Camp Edwards, being careful to casually drop a reference to his time at Guantanamo to let them know he’d paid his dues, as they were about to do.
The next person who stood in front of the group looked decidedly non-military. His hair was short enough, but his posture, his physique, the very way he walked and stood and carried himself showed he spent his days at a desk or, more likely, hunched over a computer. Besides, although he wore a suit and a tie, his shoes looked like they’d last been polished in whatever Chinese shoe factory made them. In contrast, the men and women to whom he spoke might have been wearing jeans or work pants, but their shoes shone.
“My name is Wilson Harrison,” the man said, standing in front of a table at one end of the mess hall with the twenty men and women casually draped around wooden chairs dragged from dining tables into a rough semi-circle in front of him.
“I am a First Assistant United States Attorney General. More importantly, I am temporary special legal assistant to the President.” He paused to collect himself, somewhat intimidated by the confidence and self-assurance the twenty people before him exuded. “The President of the United States, that is, the Commander in Chief.”
He paused. That was too heavy handed, he thought. My God, they know who the President is, back off. He continued.
“I am told, and I have reported to the President himself, that you were each hand-selected from the Military Intelligence Corps, that you are the cream of the crop from Huachuca.” He was referring to the Army Intelligence School at Fort Huachuca, Arizona, where all Army interrogators were trained.
“You have not been told why you’ve been brought here, although I suspect you have a good idea, right?” He was met with grins and nods.
“Here is what you don’t know.” He reached into his briefcase and dropped a handful of gold-colored objects on the table behind him, stepping aside so they could be seen.
“These are Israel Defense Forces dog tags. They were found on the bottom of Boston Harbor, directly underneath where the two ships on which the detainees of this facility were anchored. Somebody from those two ships fired rocket propelled grenades at two United States Coast Guard vessels, sinking both vessels and killing ten people, ten American military personnel.
“We believe that the people who did this wore these dog tags and that they threw them overboard before fleeing from the ships, along with all the other people held elsewhere at this camp. We’ve separated all the men, and women, of military age. They are held in this portion of the camp, which we’ve called Camp Echo.” He noticed smiles on several faces and knowing nods on others.
“Echo” was military slang for an interrogator. Each person in the room was an “echo” and they understood that this part of the camp was built for their use.
“Your job is to determine which of the several hundred detainees at Camp Echo belongs to these dog tags. The President, at my suggestion ...” No, he thought, too heavy again. “The President has determined that every detainee of this Camp is an enemy combatant. Now, some of them may hold dual U.S.-Israeli citizenship. That doesn’t matter.”
Maj. Dancer interrupted. He knew how to address soldiers. Obviously, this lawyer had no idea about motivating troops. “He means that it don’t mean shit if somebody was borne in the U.S. of A. We treat ‘em all the same. Nobody gets special treatment, that is, unless they earn it. Got that?”
He was met with smiles and a few raised fists, plus a few scattered shouted HU-AHHHS.
Harrison nodded, pleased to have some assistance. He continued.
“These detainees, these foreign military personnel are the first soldiers of any other nation to kill American military personnel on American soil, well, technically, on American waters, since the British burned the White House in the War of 1812. The President views this conduct as an act of war, even though the country these people are from no longer technically exists.”
He held the dog tags in front of his chest, jingling them so they made a tinkling sound.
“Your job is to identify these people, these murderers. Once that is done, they will be given hearings and, if you do your jobs properly, will be found guilty.”
Again Maj. Dancer interrupted.
“And shot. Nobody kills American soldiers and lives to brag about it. Right?”
This time every man and woman in the room rose to his and her feet, fists pumped in the air, chants of USA, USA broke out around the room. When they returned to their seats, Harrison spoke again, this time to Maj. Dancer.
“There’s more. Major, the doors and windows are sealed, correct? The perimeter of this building is patrolled? There is nobody outside the building who can hear what we say, correct?”
“Absolutely, Mr. Harrison. Just as I was ordered to do. This building is tight. What gets said here stays here. And every soldier in this room knows that, knows that damn abso-fucking-lutely. Am I correct?”
This time he was met with stern, serious expressions and a roomful of yes sirs.
Harrison turned to the soldiers again.
“You have to do more than identify the people who wore these dog tags,” he said, now speaking quietly and seriously. “Once you find them, you must, and I emphasize the word must, meaning that you have no choice, you must find out everything they know about another Israeli soldier, this man.” He held up the photograph of Chaim Levi, enlarged to fill the page.
“His name is Chaim Levi. He is a lieutenant in the Israeli Navy. He has made his way into this country. We don’t know exactly where he is although the FBI has determined how he entered this country. It was on a boat, a sailboat that he sailed from somewhere in the Middle East all the way across the ocean to this country, to New England, probably to Maine.
“We don’t know who was on this boat with him. Most likely other military personnel were with him, probably a highly-trained team. We don’t know that but it only makes sense. We also don’t know for certain that this Lt. Levi was coordinating with the military personnel on those freighters, the ones who are among the detainees in this camp. But that, too, only makes sense. Two units from the same country’s military are infiltrated into this country at roughly the same time in roughly the same area, both by sea. It only makes sense they are working together.
“The people on the freighters had military weapons with them and didn’t hesitate to use them.” Harrison paused again, looking around the room. Every face was staring at him. There was no talking among the young people as there was when he began. They know how serious this is, he thought. He continued speaking.
“What I am about to tell you is known by only a few people. It will not go beyond you. The consequences of your breeching the confidential nature of this information are serious.”
“Meaning, you tell anybody squat and your ass will fry in the sizzle seat at Leavenworth,” Maj. Dancer barked. “And I’ll press the button to fry you myself. Is that understood?”
Shouts of twenty yes-sirs rang out. Dancer turned toward Harrison and said, “Go ahead, tell them the rest. Tell me the rest, nobody else has.”
“The President has reason to believe that this Lt. Levi smuggled into this country military weapons,” Harrison said. “The president has reason to believe that among those weapons was a quantity of uranium-235. That is a substance, ladies and gentlemen, that has only one use. That use is to construct atomic bombs.
“Now we don’t know much more than that. We don’t know how much U-235 he had. We don’t even know whether it was in a functional bomb or just the material itself. We don’t know much of anything except that this Lt. Levi sailed a boat containing some U-235 and removed that material somewhere along the Maine coast.
“You are going to wring every bit of information about that material and about this Lt. Levi from every person being held in this camp. The security of this nation depends on your skill in doing this job.” Harrison felt he’d motivated these young people. He followed Dancer’s example. As uncharacteristic as any show of emotion was for the attorney, he thought it worth a try. He held both hands high in the air and in a loud voice he shouted, “Are any of you going to let your President down in this job?”
He was right. He had them.
Shouts of “Hoo-ahhh, hoo-ahhh, USA, USA” filled the room.