The Interrogator – a CIA Agent’s True Story

Glenn Carle

Scribe Publications (2011)

Glenn Carle’s book charts his 23-year career as a CIA officer, especially in the period just before and after 9/11. He describes thoroughly the paranoia that reached a fever pitch in the top administration of the U.S. and what it meant to the lower level CIA spooks.

Carle had some experience already as a spook in a war zone, with the Contra – Sandinista operations in Nicaragua and in Costa Rica. On his second posting he served a period seeing to CIA interests after the Bosnian conflict. He turned down a longer slot in Bosnia because he had a wife and children back home. His time meanwhile was mostly spent getting to know the internal CIA routines, the slow plodding work of information gathering and verification.

His first major case solo was while he was working in the Counter Terrorism Group. He was assigned the interrogation of an al-Qa’ida (his spelling) suspect. In the peculiar parlance of the CIA. “suspect” was a word that pretty much meant “guilty” so it was changed to “detainee”. . Even “interrogation” was later softened to the more innocent-sounding “interview”. So the prisoner, as an HVT (“high value target”) coded as CAPTUS, was “rendered” (kidnapped) from a Middle East country, and “interviewed”. All nice and harmless and neutral-sounding.

Carle operated under the methods laid down in the KUBARK manual, the standard CIA work on interviewing a detainee. The CIA did not, as laid down in the manual, torture its prisoners. Unfortunately the host country’s security forces had no qualms and the CIA officer was warned that there were times when he would simply have to stand up and leave the room. Torture was disguised by calling it “EIT” – Enhanced Interrogation Techniques – and so far it had always been done by the host nation. See no evil.

KUBARK, however, was being overridden by Bush’s Presidential directive to track down bin Laden at any cost and by any means. This was carefully left undefined but torture was now clearly on the menu. Carle was expected to comply. When he queried the new instructions he was simply asked “Which flag do you serve?”

This question became increasingly relevant as Carle began to wonder if CAPTUS was really the important al-Qa’ida agent he was made out to be. The CIA attitude however became increasingly strident, echoing that of the President and his yes-men like Cheney and Rumsfeld. A detainee who said he didn’t know the answer to a question just needed more pressure.

Carle’s belief was that “Torture is simple, crude, obtuse and immoral and does not work. It is patently stupid, an offence to any understanding of how a mind works.”

With some questions still unanswered by CAPTUS (the possibility that he didn’t have the answers was not considered) the order came through to move him to “Hotel California”, a.harsh regime prison (probably in Afghanistan) where Enhanced Interrogation Techniques (read: Torture) would soon bring out the wanted information. Carle was transferred with him. Here he found some of the beginnings of physical torture – cold rooms, minimal space, verbal abuse, loud background noise, all designed to disorient the detainee who had no idea where he now was. The book contains an extensive list of the techniques used. While individually they do not comprise torture, cumulatively that was the effect. Carle was becoming more and more convinced that CAPTUS was at best a low level al-Qa’ida operative, not the terrorist leader that the higher-ups were convinced he was. Just before Carle left Hotel California to go on leave he wrote a series of cables rubbishing the belief that CAPTUS was an al-Qa’ida operative and recommending his release along with some other detainees whose cases Carle had worked on. This was a career-threatening move because all the higher-ups wanted so desperately to believe that CAPTUS’ rendering was a major blow to the terrorists. There could be no admission that they were wrong. The cables simply disappeared.

Carle pinpoints the source of the problem quite credibly. After 9/11 the intelligence community was blamed for its failure to predict and negate such an attack. After this all terrorist reports, no matter how minor, were fed to the bureaucrats who saw the flood of information and assumed the U.S. was now under heavy attack. This became the standard mantra of Government and the “War on Terror” began. With so much information supporting this policy, the occasional negative information was simply disregarded. Although the field men knew better their superiors kept supporting this view. So we had weapons of mass destruction and a Global Terrorist linkup. There was a desperate drive to support these theories. Al-Qa’ida was really a minor organisation but was given undue prominence and supporting evidence was actively sought. Its footprints could be found anywhere if you looked carefully and interpreted the evidence correctly. CAPTUS was just one example of this.

The GWT was used as an excuse for torture (despite America being a signatory to anti-torture conventions), kidnapping and atrocities like indefinite detention in Guantanamo Bay. The abuses were carefully wrapped in legal interpretations.

Much of the book has been redacted (erased) by the CIA’s Publications Review Board but there is sufficient information left in to demonstrate how many field staff felt about the issues. Hopefully the book will awaken some feelings of guilt among the U.S. population, who were ultimately responsible for the election of the people in power.

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