93 – Cape Cod, Massachusetts
The Echo Team interrogators were finally producing results among the detainees at Camp Edwards. Few people could tolerate more than a week or two of high stress confinement. The detention cells were isolated from all outside contacts. The fluorescent ceiling lights were always on. The ceiling-mounted speakers were never silent, in fact, they were rarely at any volume less than that of a lawnmower. Music selections were at the option of each interrogator.
Other techniques included forcing a detainee to maintain what was referred to as a “stress position” for hours at a time, positions such as holding arms straight out from the body. A favorite was to have a detainee squat on the floor while his wrists and ankles were chained to a ring bolted between his feet, his own urine and excrement accumulating around him.
The Echo Team manual said that at Guantanamo detainees in that squatting position almost always agreed to cooperate within four or five days.
A permutation of Guantanamo techniques that did not prove especially effective at Camp Edwards, however, involved desecration of objects such as Torahs and the Israeli flag. Wrapping naked detainees in large Nazi flags in efforts to humiliate them turned out to be counter-productive when the detainees began referring to their interrogators as Nazis themselves.
Similarly, the Israelis did not seem as apprehensive when faced with sexual humiliation as had the Muslim detainees at Guantanamo. In fact, Israeli men, long used to serving in a sexually-integrated military, felt no humiliation at being forced to take orders from women interrogators, nor were they put off when female interrogators used sexually provocative comments and positions.
On the other hand, one technique that resulted in little success at Guantanamo proved initially successful now. Probably because the Muslim detainees were skeptical about trusting any non-Muslims, interrogators posing as their attorneys had obtained little information. However, real volunteer lawyers for Guantanamo detainees had to go to great lengths to win their clients’ trust. In contrast, the Israeli detainees readily confided in Americans who met privately with them and said they were hired by American Jewish organizations to represent them. Only after their “lawyers” produced no results for them did detainees become suspicious and realize the “lawyers” were actually interrogators.
Interrogation techniques had come a long way from the cruelties of the Spanish Inquisition, of course. The U.S. military had adopted what it called “non-coercive” questioning methods. The 1950s-era CIA KUBARK Counterintelligence Interrogation manual described this technique as “methods of interrogation that are not based upon the coercion of an unwilling subject through the employment of superior force originating outside himself. However, the non-coercive interrogation is not conducted without pressure. On the contrary, the goal is to generate maximum pressure, or at least as much as is needed to induce compliance. The difference is that the pressure is generated inside the interrogatee. His resistance is sapped, his urge to yield is fortified, until in the end he defeats himself.”
Non-coercive interrogations were first conducted by the North Koreans on American pilots. Col. Frank Schwable, the highest-ranking Marine captured in the conflict, was never beaten, never starved, never physically tortured. Nonetheless, he and thirty-five other American airmen signed confessions detailing an elaborate conspiracy to bomb civilian targets with bacteriological weapons. The U.S. military learned one lesson from the Korean experience: the goal of interrogation was to break the victim’s will to resist. The military ignored the other lesson from the Korean experience: a broken man will tell his interrogator whatever he believes the interrogator wants to hear, whether it is true or not. The Koreans, and their North Vietnamese successors, didn’t care whether the confessions they obtained were true. They sought propaganda rather than facts. The same was not true for the interrogators at Camp Echo.
Detainees eventually disclosed the identities of the Israel Defense Force teams on the two ships. To that extent, the interrogations were successful. Intense interrogations of those IDF personnel, however, produced little information of value. The soldiers said there was no central planning effort to place them on the ships. Each person said that he or she made their own way to the docks and boarded the ships with whatever weapons they’d managed to save from their military units.
More aggressive interrogation methods, including the revived use of waterboarding and electric shocks to men’s genitals and women’s nipples, were more productive and resulted in willing confessions, especially when interrogators focused their questions on information concerning Israel’s nuclear capabilities and weapons.
Detailed descriptions of vast hordes of nuclear devices, including mind boggling killing machines and vast stores of chemical and biological weapons were all disclosed after sufficiently lengthy applications of “aggressive” interrogation methods.
The success of such techniques encouraged their more widespread use among the Echo Team. Several detainee deaths resulted, but the bodies were disposed of quietly and no punishments ensued. That, too, sent a clear message to the interrogators that all limits on their methods were suspended for the duration. Results, and nothing but results, counted.
President Quaid received a daily briefing on the results of detainee interrogations. These briefings did nothing to calm his concerns about the still-undiscovered nuclear device. Instead, reports of stores of anthrax grenades and nerve gas agents in Israel’s arsenal created new nightmares for him.
President Quaid’s anger was vented on the agencies that were supposed to provide him with intelligence information. Much of the Israeli weapons of mass destruction arsenal, except for the previously-known nuclear weapons, was a complete surprise to the American military intelligence community. The President viewed this as one more in a series of similar intelligence mistakes, just as the CIA flubbed the existence of Iraqi WMDs.
This time, however, U.S. spies stood up to the criticism.
The descriptions of weapon systems that came from the Israeli detainees lacked the specifics that would have made them verifiable. When American experts on biological weapons reviewed the interrogation reports they became highly dubious of their veracity. Too many details were wrong. Nobody familiar with such chemical agents would have stored them, ready for use, in the 55-gallon steel drums detainees described. No, a military as sophisticated as Israel’s would have used only binary weapons in which two otherwise inert chemicals became deadly only when combined immediately before use.
Atomic machine gun bullets, anthrax spread by pressurized hair spray containers, laser machine guns all began to sound far too Buck Rogers to be believed. In the end, virtually all information that was squeezed from detainees after intense torture sessions was discarded as completely unreliable.
The government was left with its only credible information being what it knew almost from the beginning. Israel had smuggled some amount of U-235 into New England in a sailboat. Where that material was, who had the material, and whether it already formed the core of an operable bomb was all unknown.
President Quaid shared the effects of sleep deprivation with the Camp Echo detainees.