THE FOREVER PRISONER The Full and Searing Account of the C.I.A.’s Most Controversial Covert Program
In the wee hours of March 28, 2002, a joint team of F.B.I. and C.I.A. officers, accompanied by the Pakistani police, raided a house in the city of Faisalabad. The suspects inside tried to flee, and in the ensuing melee the C.I.A.’s main target, a clean-shaven Palestinian with wild corkscrew hair, was shot and badly wounded. He was known as Abu Zubaydah, and President George W. Bush soon announced his capture as one of the first big victories in the nascent War on Terror. He was said to be No. 3 in Al Qaeda, a financier and planner of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks. Still bleeding, he was hustled off to one of the C.I.A.’s secret so-called black sites for interrogation.
Eventually, investigators would discover that Abu Zubaydah had never been a member of Al Qaeda, never fought American forces and never had advance knowledge of any Qaeda attacks. By that time, the horrific torture inflicted on him had already become the template for later C.I.A. interrogations, even though it yielded no significant intelligence. When the Senate Intelligence Committee released its damning report on the C.I.A.’s post-9/11 torture program in 2014, Abu Zubaydah’s appalling mistreatment and the lies told about him were front and center.
Abu Zubaydah is often cited in the vast library of books written about the 9/11 attacks and their legacy, from self-justifying C.I.A. memoirs to angry critiques of the Bush administration. Yet he remains a mysterious figure, because — amazingly — he is still being held incommunicado, in deference to a promise made by the Bush administration to the C.I.A. in 2002. Although he has never been charged with a crime, he sits in a cell in the American prison in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, his body and mind permanently scarred.
“The Forever Prisoner” is a comprehensive and at times excruciatingly detailed narrative about Abu Zubaydah and the people who ordered and oversaw his interrogation. The authors managed the extraordinary feat of communicating with him through a “circuitous route” that they don’t describe, presumably because it violated the rules of his confinement. They also spoke at length with the military psychologists who tried on Abu Zubaydah the C.I.A.’s “enhanced interrogation techniques” — a revolting euphemism for beatings, sleep deprivation, near-drownings and other forms of torture.
The broad outlines of this story are now depressingly familiar. The Bush administration, under immense pressure after the Sept. 11 attacks, gave the C.I.A. lead authority to capture and detain terrorism suspects; “the gloves are off” became a mantra. The agency had never run a prison or done interrogations, so it began shopping around. “They had already decided they wanted to hurt people, and they were looking for psychologists willing to approve it,” according to one researcher who was consulted early on.
The C.I.A. found their man in James Mitchell, who with his partner, Bruce Jessen, had spent decades teaching American service members how to behave after being captured by the enemy, in a program called Survival, Evasion, Resistance and Escape, or SERE. Mitchell and Jessen had done only mock interrogations, and they knew nothing about the Middle East. But they agreed to reverse-engineer their survival-training courses, with the goal of frightening terror suspects into a state of “learned helplessness” that would encourage them to reveal all their secrets. The C.I.A. was still assembling its interrogation plans when Abu Zubaydah was captured, so the first people to speak to him were two F.B.I. agents, one of them a Lebanese-born man named Ali Soufan, who was fluent in Arabic. They quickly built a rapport with the badly wounded Abu Zubaydah, helping to care for him and eliciting some very valuable information, including the identity of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the mastermind of the 9/11 attacks. When George Tenet, who was then the C.I.A. director, found out the F.B.I. was asking the questions, he was furious. Mitchell and the rest of the C.I.A. team were sent to Thailand to take over.
Cathy Scott-Clark and Adrian Levy — who have published several previous books on similar themes — interweave the stories of captive and interrogator, showing how fatally unprepared they were to understand each other. It wasn’t just that most of what the Americans knew about Abu Zubaydah was wrong. Mitchell’s SERE training led him to interpret everything his prisoner said as a sign of devious and calculated resistance. “What do you want to know?” Abu Zubaydah said pleadingly after the first session. The interrogators weren’t listening. They insisted on believing he was hiding the key to the imagined “second wave” of terrorist attacks. They chained him up, threw him against walls and ultimately waterboarded him 83 times. Many people, inside and outside the C.I.A., saw this disaster for what it was. They were all overruled.
“The Forever Prisoner” is impressively thorough, but at times it wallows in the details rather than mastering them. We get a little lost in the acronym-rich language of the bureaucrats, and the repeated accounts of waterboarding and other horrors, vivid at first, become numbing after a while. The book’s most powerful and original passages are about Abu Zubaydah himself. Far from a single-minded zealot like Osama bin Laden, Abu Zubaydah was a troubled, divided man who had spent years in India and the United States, where he had many girlfriends and was passionate about music. After moving to Afghanistan to join the jihad, he fell in love with and married a Swedish woman, in a story that appears not to have been written about previously.
In the end, Mitchell and Jessen come off less as the villains of this story than as fellow victims. They behaved badly, but they did so under enormous pressures, in the sincere belief that they were helping to avert terrorist attacks. The people who bear responsibility for the C.I.A.’s reckless mistakes were those who hired them, and those who set the tone: George W. Bush and his deputies.