Necessary Roughness

I finished The Interrogators: Task Force 500 and America’s Secret War Against Al Qaeda by Chris Mackey and Greg Miller after several days.

Mackey (not his real name) is an interrogator for the U.S. Army Reserve. He details his basic interrogator training in the Reserves, and he is shipped to Afghanistan. He also documents his rise through ranks and duties, first as an “echo” at Kandahar up to running the interrogation camp at Bagram. The book ends with the conclusion of his tour of duty, a “where are they now” of his fellow interrogators, and a brief description of the 16 methods of interrogation used by interrogators that come close to, but don’t step over, the Geneva conventions.

The author is quick to denounce what happened at Abu Ghraib, Iraq. He admits to understanding how it could have happened, but it was clear to him that people broke the rules. Under interrogation rules, direct harm is not to come to prisoners, and they are not to be threatened directly. Prisoners are only to be disciplined if they attack the interrogator. In the gray area of threats, some styles like “we can release you back to your own country’s authorities” can be permitted at times. The author offers a strong psychological drain, balancing prisoner treatment against the necessity of information extraction to protect troops and citizens at home. Generally speaking, they couldn’t treat the prisoners any harder than they treated themselves (with exception of shackles and prison cells.

Mackey documents some of his more memorable detainees, and the interrogation sequences used to get their cooperation. He admits he wasn’t the best interrogator in the group; there was a two-person group that had their research so complete, they were assigned to the harder cases. There were also female interrogators which were used on younger captives. The Army generally released anyone under 17, with a few exceptions such as a father-and-son team, and they never interrogated women. They did get some Al Qaeda in the region. These were the hardest to break, since Al Qaeda had already known that U.S. interrogators would not kill or maim. Prisoners were trained with multiple stories to try to confuse interrogators.

There is some humor in the beginning as interrogators learn their craft. Mackey paints himself as generally a stand-up guy who obeyed the spirit of the rules as well as the letter. The tales about individual prisoners play themselves out as short detective stories. There are success stories and blown interrogations. There are times when the CIA’s own personnel don’t help the cause, either by taking prisoners too early or not offering information they had already gathered.

This is a long journal, at 483 pages. The book is well written, a credit to Greg Miller. I noted that he twice described what “desert daisies” were, but I didn’t detect any other writing irregularities. I enjoyed this look behind the scenes, and I would recommend the book to history and espionage buffs.