How to Break a Terrorist: Insights from a U.S. Military Interrogator in the War on Terror An address given to the Los Angeles World Affairs Council On January 26, 2011 by Matthew Alexander Former United States Air Force Interrogator Let me start off by saying thank you, Troy [Senik] for coordinating this event, and thank you to Col. [Curtis] Mack for having me here, hosting me, and giving me the privilege of talking to all of you today. They say to always know your audience, so I d like to start off with a question, and that is: how many interrogators do we have in the audience? Okay I see a few. How many of you are married? Okay, that s the true number of interrogators. Have you ever asked, Honey, where did you put the remote? If so, then you ve done some interrogations. When I came back from Iraq I was walking through a Target store and went by the toy aisle. There was a young boy there pulling on his mother s sleeve. He had a toy and he said, Mom, can I have this toy? and she said, No. I watched him immediately walk over to his father and tug on his father s sleeve and said, Dad, mom said I can t have this toy but I know you love me more. This is an approach directly out of the army s field manual. It s called love of family. And that s when I realized we re all born natural interrogators. 1
I will start off also with a caveat I don t know all there is to know about interrogations. Interrogation is a profession just like any other profession. It s not static. It s growing. The methods improve. We get better at it. People study it. We apply science to it, and we try to improve those methods. Even in the U.S. we have a very long and rich history of the profession of interrogation and of interrogators who have contributed enormously to successes. In the Pacific Theatre in World War II, the European theatre in World War II and even the Brits a lot of people don t know this story ran an interrogation camp in England called Camp Zero-Two-Zero run by a guy named Colonel Tin Eye Stephens. That interrogation camp was largely responsible for the success of D-Day. They had turned captured Nazi spies into double agents and sent them back and effectively ran German intelligence and fooled Hitler about the location of the D-Day landing. And these successes continued in Vietnam where we had numerous successes from interrogations and turning prisoners of war into assets, and in the first Gulf War. I highly recommend a book by Eric Maddox, who was an interrogator in Iraq for the Army, who found Saddam Hussein. Then, of course, my team found Abu Musab Al Zarqawi, who was a higher priority than Osama bin Laden when we hunted him in 2006. I could tell you many success stories that American interrogators have achieved over the course of the war in Iraq and Afghanistan. Although I m not the most experienced interrogator, what I bring to the table is a different background. I was a criminal investigator for the Air Force, so I was trained in law enforcement interrogation techniques. Following that I became a military interrogator and I was taught by the Army how to interrogate. Combined with that, I also have a background I which I ve had the privilege 2
of working in over 30 countries. So, a lot of my expertise comes in the realm of culture. I want to give you two true stories of interrogations from Iraq to elaborate a few points. Let me paint a picture for you. I arrived in Iraq in March of 2006, exactly one month after the bombing of the Golden Dome Mosque. And if you remember, the bombing of the Golden Dome Mosque, which was orchestrated by Zarqawi, started the civil war a limited civil war, or at least the height of the violence in Iraq between Sunni and Shiites. Every day there were suicide bombings. Every day there were beheadings. The violence was approaching its peak. I was sent to Iraq to supplement the Army, to conduct interrogations for a special operations task force that had one mission. And that mission was to find and kill Abu Musab Al Zarqawi, the leader of al- Qaeda in Iraq, who was behind the violence. So I land there and early on while I m interrogating we get news of a farm house that s being used for foreign fighters who conducted the majority of suicide bombing attacks. We go and we raid that farm house. But just before the raid a truck leaves carrying four people. So we raid the farm house. There was a big fire fight. We end up having to bomb the house by air and then we tracked down this truck and we capture four insurgents in it. We bring them back to the prison and the first thing I noticed was that one of these four insurgents stands out from the others. Three of them obviously were just farmers, low level foot soldiers for al Qaeda. But the fourth guy was a guy named Tariq. When I sat down in front of Tariq in the interrogation booth he s wearing an orange jumpsuit the first thing I noticed about this guy is that he looked like he just walked out of a toney guy s salon. His beard is neatly trimmed. His hair is perfectly cut. Even his fingernails are manicured. He obviously wasn t your low level al- Qaeda foot soldier. 3
As I got to know Tariq in the coming days what I found out is that he had been a student at the University of Baghdad; studied engineering. And after our invasion something had happened to his father and he had to drop out of school and move back to his home in Sumara and take care of the family s farm. I suspected that whatever happened to his father after the removal of Saddam was perhaps the reason why he had joined al-qaeda. So in interrogating Tariq over the course of a number of days, he was more than happy to share his background information, but he won t give me any intelligence information that will allow me to go out and capture the next person on the ladder. So one day I decide I m going to change things up. I go to another interrogator who s interrogating one of those farmers he was caught with and asked that interrogator to have his detainee, this farmer, write a statement that said, Tariq is not responsible for our capture. That detainee gladly writes the statement, Tariq is not responsible for our capture. But then I take that statement and, with my interpreter, I trace it onto another piece of paper, but I leave out the word not. So I now have a statement that says, Tariq is responsible for our capture. I put that in my pocket and go into the interrogation booth with Tariq. I sit down and I say, Tariq, I have good news and bad news. The good news is, you re going to get released soon. Now, that s typically a very bad thing to say to a detainee because usually they ll shut up if they hear they might be released because they don t want to mess up their chances. I was willing to take a risk I had nothing to go on at this point. So I said, Tariq, that s the good news, but the bad news is your friends are blaming you for their capture. They re saying it s your fault. And as such, you re going to have to pay for the AK-47s that we confiscated. He kind of got this scowl on his face the first time I really saw him moved in any way emotionally. 4
And I said, Tariq, I don t get it. You re like an eagle that s flying with chickens. He just scowled, and he spit on the floor and said, Chickens are stupid creatures. I said, That might be true, but chickens can write. And I pulled out the statement and I handed it to him. And he read that statement that said he was responsible for their capture, written by one of his comrades, and he immediately got furious. His face turned red. He spit again, and he said, This guy, Mahmoud, he s the reason we got captured because his brother owns the house that you destroyed with all the foreign fighters and his brother funnels the foreign fighters in from Syria and trains them to do suicide bombings. And this was the very information that I had been trying to get for the past three days. Now, why this did technique work? How did I did I get the cooperation out of Tariq in this very short period of time? It was a mix of techniques. The first was a technique out of the army s field manual called Pride and Ego Down. But instead of me insulting his pride, which would have ruined my rapportbuilding with him and my relationship of trust, I allowed one of his comrades to insult his pride. And he wanted to reverse that insult; to garner some respect. So, I used a technique from the army field manual and I combined that with a law enforcement technique. Now how many people in here watch Law & Order, NCIS, NYPD Blue I could name off a hundred top shows on TV? You have seen these techniques being displayed every night on television. And we can go down here to the Los Angeles Police Department grab a detective and he can give us 20 or 30 law enforcement techniques that he uses every day against kids who steal TVs out of Wal-Mart. They re also extremely effective against al Qaeda. The technique that I used is called prisoners dilemma. It s because two people who are involved in a crime don t know what the other person is 5
saying when they re being interrogated, and I use that to my advantage. And I also used deception I changed the statement which is something police detectives use all the time. The last thing I used was my knowledge of culture. You see, I knew that Tariq, being an egoist that I had assessed from his initial interrogations was also living in a culture that valued hierarchy. In an Arab culture that values hierarchy, somebody below someone else in an organization say in a cell should never insult the person who is the leader of the cell. And if they do, they should never put that in writing. This knowledge of culture allowed me to change my approach into one that would most effect Tariq and get an emotional response that would allow me to convince him to cooperate. That s what we have to do as interrogators. We have to advance our methods. We have to take what we know from law enforcement; what we know from military interrogations; what we know from culture and we have to combine it all to give ourselves the best possible chance for success. And there are other fields that we can borrow from. How many people here have ever bought a car at a dealership or a used car dealership? Let me first tell you a little joke we have in interrogator corps. Do you know the difference between an interrogator and a used car salesman? Interrogators have to abide by the Geneva Conventions. Now, if you ve ever bought a car at a dealership, did you ever get to that point in the negotiations at the very end where it kind of stalls you want some extra feature; you want a few hundred dollars more off the price and the salesman says, Wait a second. I don t have authority to do that. Let me call my boss. The boss comes in and says, All right, I ll do this one time for you. I use that same technique in Iraq very effectively. In fact, in my book, How to Break a Terrorist, I talk about how that technique, that salesmen use every day here, allowed us to untangle al Qaeda s communication and media relations. 6
I want to tell you another story and that story is about a man named Abu Bhadha who was captured in a farm house with four other high-ranking members of al-qaeda, and brought to our prison. To describe him, he was 60 years old; gray beard; kind of distinguished very kind of knowledgeable, well spoken and fluent, and very sure of himself. We knew he was an important man in al-qaeda because of the people he d been caught with they had been there actually preparing suicide bombers who we killed during the raid, who were about to go out on a mission. We brought them back and we had this little planning session about what interrogation technique we should use. Immediately some people started to say, The first thing we ve got to do is break down his ego. We have to put him below us the same way you do in basic training to a new recruit. We ll insult him, we ll yell at him, we ll take him off that high horse and we ll put him below us and then we ll force him to cooperate. I said, What about the approach love of family? Does he have any family members? And right away two of the people in the room kind of laughed and said, Ah, new guy, you haven t been here long enough. You don t understand the members of al-qaeda. When they join al-qaeda they write off their families. They swear by Osama bin Laden and after that they re brain washed. They don t care about their families. That didn t really jive with what I d learned about other interrogations or what I ve known about working in the Middle East, but I was kind of miffed. So I accepted their reasoning, with reluctance, and they went about interrogating him and they used these harsh techniques his pride and ego, his fears, threats, yelling in his face, these insults. And after three weeks they got nowhere. Then one day our operations officer was scanning through some old intelligence reports and he found a picture of Abu Bhadha as a 7
young man and it turns out that he d been using a false name. He wasn t who we thought he was. We already knew that he was the leader of all the forces in Northern Iraq for al-qaeda. So, they took that information and ran it into a data base and lo and behold they find out that Abu Bhadha s son is in a Shia prison in southern Iraq. We called down to that prison. We had the son released. We fly him up to our prison, and we put him into the interrogation booth, face-to-face with his father; blindfolded. We pull off their blindfolds and Abu Bhadha breaks down in tears as soon as he sees his son. He says, You did this for me? You got my son out of prison. How can I help you? And he started becoming one of our most cooperative sources of information helping us to unravel al-qaeda. The technique that worked was love of family straight out of the army field manual. It was a technique that I found to be, probably, the most successful technique in Iraq. One of the things that we did after 9/11 is we kind of tied one of our own hands behind our back in interrogations because we accepted stereotypes about our enemies that weren t true. Sun Tzu said, Know thy self, know thy enemy, a thousand battles, a thousand victories. We failed to know our enemy. We accepted the stereotype that everybody who joins al-qaeda is a brainwashed unrecoverable die hard jihadist. The truth is that people have a lot of reasons to join al-qaeda. And when we figure out those reasons and we take the time to figure out why they join al-qaeda we can figure out how to get them back out. One of the most repugnant statements that I ve seen came from a trial of a soldier who was accused of abusing detainees in Iraq. It was from a senior interrogator. His captain had written him and said, We have to start getting the information; we have guys dying. This was at the beginning of the 8
insurgency in Iraq. The senior interrogator wrote back to the captain in an email and said, If we want to get information we have to use violence, because these people grew up in a culture of violence and that s all they understand. That type of stereotyping was what doomed us to failure in many early interrogations and this has been written about in a book called The Interrogators by Chris Macky and numerous other interrogators. It s to ignore a basic tenet in Islam that we can use to our advantage and that tenet is compassion something that all major religions share. The first line of the Koran is, Praise be to Allah the most compassionate, the most merciful. which is also the first line of every chapter. And compassion is one of the tenets of Islam: giving alms to the poor. This we can use to our advantage because it s a commonality within our culture, and when we bring out the compassion in interrogations when we reach out to that type of humanity that still remains even in people who conduct barbarous and horrible acts we have a better chance for success. I can tell that we would capture people who had just cut people s heads off with a machete, and we would bring them into the interrogation booth and sit in front of them and somehow we would have to reach deep inside of ourselves to separate our emotions and instead to do our professional duty which is to find the humanity that remains in that person and to bring it out to convince them to cooperate with us. Now, it would have been easy just to say, These guys just committed these horrible acts let s write them off. Let s be brutal. Let s treat them the same way they treated their victims. But for me, I like a good challenge. So I thought it was more challenging to say, How can I turn this person back? How can I take someone who is lost, who s gone over to this cult called al- Qaeda, and bring them back to our side and salvage their humanity and bring them in to being a great source of information. 9
Al-Qaeda is not a religion; they re not Muslims. They re a cult a cult of violence, and their very despicable acts are pretty evident that this is not a religion. But I m not naive in thinking that we can kill our way out of this conflict. Killing or capturing terrorists will never end our conflict with al- Qaeda, I guarantee that. And I doubt in our lifetime that we ll ever see zero members of al-qaeda. But what I can say is that the solution to al-qaeda is to win the war of recruitment. We have to address those populations of disenchanted Muslims who decide to join al-qaeda and convince them not to. To do that, we have to orient our national security policies on those things, social and economic, that help us to stop recruitment. That s not to say that we don t have to use military and law enforcement options to stop terrorist attacks. We do. But our overall goal is not to stop terrorist attacks. It s to stop people from becoming terrorists. Sometimes when I give speeches people come up to me afterwards and say, Matthew, thank you for serving on the frontlines of the war. I tell them, I m not on the frontlines of the war. I m on the backline of the war. By the time you get to somebody like me who has to interrogate to get information to stop a terrorist attack, you ve already lost half the battle. Somebody has already joined al-qaeda intending to attack us. The frontline of the war is to stop that recruitment. It comes from tolerance. It comes from education. It comes from lifting people out of poverty. The last thing I want to say is that American interrogators have served well this country in World War II; through Vietnam; in the first Gulf War and through the current wars. We have a distinct advantage in this conflict and it s the American brain. It s American culture. It s a culture that values intellect, ingenuity, compassion, perseverance and those are the things that 10
the same way they make us great Americans will make us great interrogators. Thank you. www.lawac.org Speeches are edited for readability and grammar, not content. The views expressed herein are not endorsed by the Council. The Los Angeles World Affairs Council is a non-profit, non-partisan organization that pays neither honoraria nor expenses to its speakers. 11