The Reluctant Spy Page 14

  “I need a glass of red wine,” he repeated.

  “He’s hallucinating,” the doctor said. I put his oxygen mask back in place, and they gave him another hit of Demerol. Sweet dreams.

  I could have used some of the stuff myself. I was approaching two full days without sleep, except for the few hours in the adjacent hospital room and the occasional fitful naps on the metal chair.

  A few hours later, Abu Zubaydah was awake, again indicating his interest in a chat. I walked over, moved his oxygen mask, and asked—in English—what I could do for him.

  “Please, brother, kill me.” He was crying lightly.

  “Kill you?”

  “Yes. Please, brother, kill me. Take the pillow, put it over my face, and kill me.”

  “No, my friend, nobody’s going to kill you. We want you to live. You’re very important to us. We worked hard to find you. And we have a lot of questions we want to ask you.”

  “Please, please kill me.” He was openly weeping now.

  “No, you got yourself into this situation, Abu Zubaydah. Now it’s our turn. We expect you to cooperate with us.” I put his mask back on, and he closed his eyes and went to sleep.

  Sometime later, we had one of our last conversations. Amir had joined me and was speaking Arabic to Abu Zubaydah, who at first responded only in English and then went mum.

  Then Mohammed, Khalid’s boss, showed up with a bunch of his superiors—five or six very senior security officials. Abu Zubaydah went nuts. “I am not a zoo animal,” he said, mustering as much outrage as a guy tied to a bed and struggling to stay alive could manage.

  “Please, take it easy,” I told him. “You’re a trophy for them. They want a look, and now it’s finished.”

  As they left, he beckoned me to his bedside and asked, “What is going to happen to me?” I thought we’d been through this, but maybe I hadn’t been clear enough.

  “Well, honestly, it’s up to you what happens to you. If I could give you some friendly advice, I’d urge you to cooperate.” At least I seemed to have his attention.

  “You’re at a crossroads right now, and you can make your life very difficult or very easy,” I said. “You may be going to prison, possibly for the rest of your life. But you don’t want it to be any harder than it already is. So, again, friendly advice: I urge you to cooperate.”

  “Oh, but I have nothing to say,” he insisted.

  “I submit that you have plenty to say, and you would be wise to share it with us.”

  “I’m going to die,” he said.

  “You’re going to get the best medical care the United States has to offer,” I told him. “You’re going to get the best doctors in the world.”

  I knew we’d do something for him, but I was unaware of exactly what it would be and when it would happen. Then Rick called to tell me that help was on the way. Later, I learned that the director of the CIA, George Tenet, had set in motion a process that would result in the top trauma surgeon from Johns Hopkins Hospital flying to Pakistan on an agency plane. The plane touched down a couple of hours later, and we wheeled Abu Zubaydah out to be loaded up and taken away. I’d played nursemaid to this guy on and off for nearly two days and wasn’t unhappy to see him go. It also didn’t bother me in the least that he seemed to be terrified. As we moved toward the plane, he grabbed my hand and wondered aloud, “What’s going to happen to me?” I think he thought we were going to kill him.

  “Just relax, there’s a doctor onboard and he’ll take care of you.” Then, he was on the plane. It was over.

  Well, not quite. There were still the dozens of people we’d seized to interrogate. Apparently, al-Qaeda had given them an official story to explain their presence in Pakistan. Sir, I came to Pakistan to study Arabic. A nice man in Abu Dhabi bought me a ticket and said I could study Arabic in Pakistan. My passport? Oh, when I arrived in Karachi, I wanted to give thanks to God, so I got into a taxi and told the driver to take me to the grand mosque. Unfortunately, I left my passport in the taxi, and the driver drove away.

  Dozens of guys, dozens of nearly identical yarns. Dozens of guys from Arabic-speaking countries coming to Pakistan, where Arabic isn’t spoken, to study their native language. A visit of thanksgiving to the grand mosque of Karachi, where there is no grand mosque. That was their story, and each and every one of them was sticking to it.

  Most of them were polite and well behaved, but we had one guy, a ferocious-looking Libyan with a multicolored beard, who meant to make trouble. His attitude was amusing to me. The Chechens had a reputation for being the toughest and most fearsome fighters in al-Qaeda. The Saudis were ideological purists. But the Libyans were generally cowards.

  This Libyan responded to every question with “Fuck you” in Arabic. Then, when he was in a lower-level holding area with other prisoners, he started to chant “Death to America.” The others picked it up, their collective Arabic voices making a real racket and beginning to carry outside the confines of our safe house. An FBI agent came upstairs, concerned that we had the makings of a situation that could spin out of control. I went down and told the Libyan to stop. Instead, he turned up the volume. He was flexicuffed behind the back, sitting on the floor with his feet crossed and shackled at the ankles. I put an arm under one of his arms and yanked him up hard—so hard that a prosthetic lower leg just popped off at the knee, still shackled to his other leg.

  We were starting to load up these guys in a paddy wagon to turn them over to the Pakistanis. I dragged the Libyan to the truck and pushed him in. “If you don’t shut your fucking mouth right now,” I said to him in Arabic, “I’m going to take that leg and I’m going to beat you to death with it.”

  That did it. “Sir, I’m sorry, sorry to cause trouble for you,” he said with tears in his eyes. “I’ve done nothing wrong. I am an alcoholic, I am a drug addict, I am a smuggler, but I am not a terrorist.”

  “Just be quiet and do what you’re told, and everything will be fine,” I said, closing the paddy wagon door.

  I confessed my proximate sin to Jennifer Keenan, a tough FBI agent and one of my favorite people. Jennifer shrugged and suggested that I keep it to myself. But I couldn’t; I had violated the rules and needed to report myself—perhaps it was an overreaction to my experience in Athens.

  My second priest was Bob Grenier, the head of our office in Pakistan.

  “Bob, I assaulted a prisoner,” I told him over the phone.

  “Oh, God, what happened?”

  I told him about the chanting and my threat to beat him to death if it didn’t stop.

  “When did you assault him?” Grenier was still puzzling out the circumstances.

  “Well, I grabbed him and pulled him up.”

  “Yeah, but you didn’t hit him?”

  “No, I didn’t hit him. But I made physical contact with him.”

  “John, what are you doing? We’re not reporting this. You’re just asking for trouble if you put this in writing. If you do put it in writing, I’m not going to send it.” As the boss, he had to clear all cables to headquarters. “Just take it easy and forget about it.”

  I WAS IN Pakistan for another two or three weeks, and it wasn’t bad duty. We got high fives all around from everyone in the office for a job well done. Sure, we made some mistakes. We could have managed our logistics better. We busted one site that turned out to be a legitimate business run by a lovely old gent in his seventies who spoke perfect English. He and his two sons were hauled off for interrogation like everyone else, mainly because the information we had indicated that members of al-Qaeda had used his telephone. They had, but he knew nothing about their affiliation or objectives.

  “I live in a very poor neighborhood,” he told his interrogators. “When someone comes to the door needing to make a call, they ask and, of course, I allow them to use my phone.” Our Pakistani friends checked out the story and found that he was telling the truth, and we had no reason to doubt them. It was an honest mistake, for which I apologized profusely on behalf of t
he U.S. government. The elderly man accepted with a kind smile, even before we fixed his door, bought new shoes for him and his sons, and made a financial contribution to his business for the trouble and embarrassment we may have caused. The next day, he appeared on Pakistani television, saying that the Americans had been very respectful, just doing their jobs, and that there were no hard feelings over what had been a simple misunderstanding.

  On balance, however, our operation was a huge success. We captured dozens of bad guys, including one of al-Qaeda’s topmost leaders. We worked well with the police and military of a nation whose help we wanted and needed. And we disrupted a bomb plot that would have killed men, women, and a lot of children.

  Now it was time to go home. Katherine and I had planned a weeklong holiday in Santa Fe when I got back. But just as I was preparing to leave, I got an order to report immediately to another country, another front in the war on terrorism. Santa Fe would have to wait. I called Katherine, who still worked as an analyst for the agency, prepared to apologize and promise to make it up to her.

  “Hey, don’t kill me, but I just got this cable,” I said.

  She cut me off, with a smile in her voice. “Yes, I know, I saw it. Do what you have to do. But you owe me that vacation when you get back.”

  I did, and I made good on it, too.

  12

  ABU ZUBAYDAH WAS captured on March 28, 2002; at that point, I had been in Pakistan less than three months. Our operations were directed at al-Qaeda, but other American organizations were in the country as well, with other potential targets in mind. Indeed, by the time I got to Pakistan in late January 2002, counterterrorism officers of other government agencies in the United States, including some state and local types, had already begun to arrive. One of them was Tom McHale, a longtime detective with the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey. Tom was a cop’s cop, a highly decorated guy who was in the parking garage of the World Trade Center in 1993 when the bomb went off in the first attempt to take down those buildings. He survived but spent weeks in the hospital and two years in rehabilitation; to this day, his lungs have not fully recovered from the toxic gas emitted by the bomb. On September 11, 2001, he was at the World Trade Center again; this time, thirty-seven of his colleagues died.

  When McHale was tapped for an assignment in Pakistan, on loan to the FBI, he took it personally. The widow of Port Authority police officer Donald McIntyre, killed in the attacks, lent McHale Donnie’s handcuffs. Tom used them anytime he captured a bad guy. “This is for September eleventh,” he’d say to his prisoner, and he meant it. Tom had a great attitude, all positive, all can-do. In fact, once he got approval for an operation, he ran it with the kind of skill and professionalism that should make all Americans proud.

  It began, as I understand from others who participated in the operation, one day in late February or early March 2002. Tom and a couple of colleagues were in Peshawar when they saw a run-down, small office building and one of them said: “You know, that’s the Taliban embassy.” It was there, rather than in Islamabad, the Pakistani capital, probably because Peshawar is on the Afghanistan-Pakistan border and because it would be less conspicuous. During the Taliban reign, only three countries recognized Afghanistan—Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates. “Every day they go and open that embassy,” Tom told his buddies. “I feel like those bastards are rubbing our noses in it.” But McHale wasn’t just grousing. He and his colleagues came up with a hell of an idea: “You know what we ought to do? We ought to go in there some night and we ought to steal everything they have.”

  Tom got approval, and then began the detailed operational planning necessary to bring something like this to a successful outcome.

  Like the rest of the Americans in the country at that time, Tom had to get the approval of the Pakistani government before he could proceed. The Paks reminded him that it wasn’t much of an embassy—really, just a guard and one guy who served as combination diplomat and press officer. Apparently, these two men opened up every day at 9 a.m., sat around, did nothing, then locked up at 5 p.m. and went home. The Paks had no problem with the plan to raid the embassy some night so long as they tagged along as security and, oh yes, so long as their American friends made copies of everything for them.

  McHale’s boss, the FBI legal attaché, requisitioned several vans from the U.S. Embassy motor pool, and his team set out one night for the two-hour-plus drive from Islamabad to Peshawar. The operation lasted from around 11 p.m. until 3 a.m. The team just drove up, broke down the door, and walked in; there was no alarm. The place was loaded with stuff, and they took absolutely everything—computers, files, cell phones, weapons, everything that wasn’t bolted to the floor or the walls.

  It really made the day for one person in particular. This old-timer had bum knees, made worse by one hundred pounds of excess weight and bad enough so that he slept on his office floor one night when they gave out on him. He was an inside man, not an operative, but he had always wanted at least one raid on the résumé in his mind. When he heard about plans for the raid, he pleaded for a chance to go. McHale was a pro; he also was a great guy with a soft spot for toilers. The Taliban embassy operation could have gone wrong, perhaps wildly so, but the odds of it, given what McHale and his teammates knew, seemed very long, especially since the Paks would be there to provide protection. Sure, Tom told his overweight colleague, you can be a part of this one. Needless to say, it made the guy’s tour.

  After it was over, Tom told his bosses that the operation had been a success—no problems, no issues, all players present and accounted for. The bosses, of course, extended their congratulations and wanted McHale to send up a flare if he and his guys found anything particularly interesting in the pilfered stash. They didn’t expect much; neither did Tom. At that point, the Taliban government was history, with its leader, Mullah Omar, and his camp followers in hiding somewhere along the Afghanistan-Pakistan border. But the computer exploitation experts went to work on the hard drives, making copies for the Pakistanis as promised and for certain U.S. government agencies. The originals of everything went to the FBI because September 11 was still an open criminal investigation.

  McHale himself found something interesting and provocative. A file of telephone bills from the Taliban embassy revealed dozens of calls to the United States—to Kansas City and suburban D.C., to New York and Ohio and California, to Michigan and Texas, all over the country. For ten days leading up to September 11, 2001, the Taliban made 168 calls to America. Then the calls stopped. The file, amazingly, was in English. And here’s the thing: The calls ended on September 10, 2001, and started up again six days later, on September 16.

  This certainly was a matter for the FBI, or so McHale felt. The FBI team in Pakistan was alerted and got copies of the phone bills; all the originals went to FBI headquarters in Washington. Again, the calls were from a hostile embassy to U.S. destinations; McHale expected the FBI to be all over these phone bills and the addresses in the United States that had received calls from the Taliban.

  By midyear, McHale was back in the States, resuming his duties with the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey. One day, he asked around to see if anything had turned up from the raid on the Taliban embassy; he was particularly interested to know whether the FBI had got anywhere tracking down the recipients of those Taliban phone calls. All he learned was that the originals had arrived at FBI headquarters, per instructions.

  Flash forward to spring 2004. The 2002 Taliban caper was still gnawing at McHale—a bit of unfinished business that he wanted tied up for his own peace of mind. This time, having probed here and asked questions there, he had it on good authority that the FBI’s people had never even opened the boxes of materials gathered up at the Taliban embassy. That, of course, meant that they had never examined the phone logs. Later, ABC News reporter Rich Esposito wrote about the story. Apparently, the FBI never opened the boxes because they figured they didn’t have the language capabilities to translate them from Pasht
o, Dari, Urdu, and the other languages of Afghanistan. Still later, Esposito reported, the message from the FBI was that the information was too old to mean much.

  How’s that? Too old to mean much? A file in English of calls made prior to September 11, 2001, to the United States? Resumed on September 16? From the embassy of the government that treated Osama bin Laden as an honored guest? Maybe they were worthless, but McHale, for one, seriously doubted it. In any event, how could the FBI know that without reading them? Especially the file in English.

  One postscript: After the raid that night, the Paks had asked the Americans what they wanted to do with the press guy cum diplomat. McHale and his people had no further interest in him, and neither did anyone else. For their part, the Pakistanis couldn’t have cared less. But they thought they’d have some fun and shake up the Taliban guy a bit—arrest him, then release him later. So they showed up when the guy opened up at 9 a.m. He was openmouthed when he saw what McHale’s marauders had done to his office. The Paks moved in, cuffed him, and told him he was under arrest. As they were leading him away, he turned and shouted back at the guard: “Tell my wife to sell the car!”

  Another postscript: In 2007 I ran into an FBI friend of mine at a shopping mall in suburban Virginia. We had served together in Pakistan and had stayed only in sporadic touch, but I still thought the world of the guy. “Whatever happened to those boxes of Taliban documents?” I asked him. He replied that it was like a scene out of that Indiana Jones movie. The files were still in those boxes, in an FBI storage facility in Maryland. Human eyes would probably never see them again, he said. What a waste.

  13

  THE AFTERMATH OF 9/11 left the intelligence agencies scrambling. We couldn’t know on September 10, 2001, that we’d go to war in Afghanistan less than a month later. And we couldn’t anticipate a war in Iraq that would begin on March 19, 2003. As a consequence, we were forced to improvise in one important area: the handling of prisoners. We had rules for the treatment of prisoners under the Geneva Conventions and the U.S. Uniform Code of Military Justice, although neither was invoked in the early months after 9/11. But we didn’t fathom that we would capture hundreds and hundreds of enemy combatants—men who were not part of a recognized and uniformed army at war—and face the challenges associated with their interrogation. After 9/11, we were in a different war, the long war against terrorism, and there was no modus operandi in place for the treatment of captured bad guys, especially bad guys in large numbers.