A Kidnapping in Milan: The CIA on Trial (15 page)

The Italian system of torture, which became known as Roman law, eventually spread south to Sicily, north to Scandinavia, west to Spain, and east to Germany. The tortures that spread with it tended to be ones that did not kill accidentally and that could be adjusted quickly in response to a victim’s answers. A favorite of Italian torturers was the
strappado
, in which the accused was suspended by ropes in five stages, or degrees, of escalating pain. Hence our phrase for harsh questioning, “the third degree.” Thumbscrews and legscrews—hence “to put the screws to”—and the rack were popular elsewhere. Typically governments did not specify what kinds of tortures the torturers should use. Lawmakers thought, as one French bureaucrat was told in 1670 when he tried to standardize which tortures ought to be used across the country, that “the description that would be necessary would be indecent in an ordinance.” The belief remains today.

The torturers of the Middle Ages and Renaissance eventually found what the Romans had found: try though they would to restrict torture, it slipped its fetters. If it was alright to torture in the case of a heinous crime, why not in the case of less heinous ones? If a serf could be tortured, why not a landholder? If a defendant, why not a witness? If for trial, why not for punishment? As before, the class of torturables and the kinds of tortures expanded, and when Europeans settled around the world, they took their tortures with them. (Much of the world, of course, knew torture before Europeans arrived.) Thus in colonial America, Connecticut Quakers branded heretics with the letter H, and Virginians pierced the tongues of blasphemers with fired bodkins. Several of the eventual United States flogged criminals even into the twentieth century. Delaware, seized by a fit of reform in 1941, restricted the flogging of thieves to those who had stolen more than twenty-five dollars. In the 1970s, seized again, Dealware abolished the whipping post altogether.

During the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, several forces conspired to make torture less acceptable in Europe. One was the Enlightenment, which elevated the idea that all men had inherent rights, including the right to be free from cruelty. Another was a growing discomfort among nobles, who had not minded the torture of their inferiors but who began to see in torture a great harm to the nation when it came to be applied to their own caste. Still another was a decline in the number of people being condemned to death or maiming, which made it less essential to convict defendants with absolute certainty, which in turn made it less essential to torture evidence from them or witnesses. (Sentences of death and maiming tapered off largely because states started using condemned men to row their galleys and the condemned of both sexes to work their workhouses.) In this newly humane air, old arguments about the unreliability of tortured testimony drew a heartier breath, and great abolition movements arose. In 1754, Prussia’s Frederick the Great became the first sovereign to outlaw torture in all his lands, and most of the rest of Europe followed over the next several decades. Two Swiss cantons held out until 1851. In the West, torture as a matter of policy was dead. It was not forgotten, however. When the civilized world thought it useful, it would reappear.

IN THE
EARLY
frigidity of the Cold War, not long after the last of the Second World War’s fifty million dead had been buried, the United States began studying how best to extract information from its enemies. During the late war, America had resisted the temptation to torture, notwithstanding that Germany and Japan had tortured maniacally. But the fifty million dead seem to have eaten away at American forbearance, and the American elite had come to see in the Soviet Union the greatest threat yet to the nation and the democratic capitalism for which it stood. Dreadful means might be justified in pursuit of self-preservation. Little is known about the government’s earliest studies on interrogation, but it is certain the CIA and Department of Defense experimented with “unorthodox” methods on captured spies in Germany, Japan, and the Panama Canal Zone. Some of the captives are believed to have expired.

Since neither the CIA nor the Defense Department knew much about coercive interrogation, they also studied the work of more experienced coercers like the KGB, the Soviet secret police. The Americans learned that sometimes the KGB used the crudest of brutalities, as when they put inverted cups containing rats on the stomachs of victims, then heated the cups with flames, which drove the rats to flee the heat by chewing through their victims. (Orwell used a variant of this torture in the climax of
1984
.) But often the KGB deemed crudity unnecessary. There were subtler ways to break a person.

One way was to make a prisoner sit or stand without moving. This did not sound grueling, but, as Defense researchers reported, “Any fixed position which is maintained over a long period of time ultimately produces excruciating pain.” The researchers found that although some men could withstand the pain of forced standing, “sooner or later all men succumb to the circulatory failure it produces. After 18 to 24 hours of continuous standing, there is an accumulation of fluid in the tissues of the legs. . . . The ankles and feet of the prisoner swell to twice their normal circumference. The edema may rise up the legs as high as the middle of the thighs. The skin becomes tense and intensely painful. Large blisters develop, which break and exude water serum. The accumulation of the body fluid in the legs produces impairment of the circulation. The heart rate increases, and fainting may occur. Eventually there is renal shutdown, and urine production ceases. . . . [The victims] usually develop a delirious state, characterized by disorientation, fear, delusions, and visual hallucinations. . . . [This] is a form of physical torture, in spite of the fact that the prisoners and KGB officers alike do not ordinarily perceive it as such.” That an officer might not perceive it as such was a bonus: he was more likely to be willing to inflict a torture that he did not regard as one. The same was true for the willingness of a nation, as the United States would learn after 2001.

The KGB also broke prisoners by denying them sleep. A prisoner would be set to walking in circles, which would keep her awake the first day or two, but eventually she would fall asleep on her feet and would have to be beaten and kicked. In time, blows would fail to keep her awake, and her head would have to be thrust in a bucket of ice water. After some days, reality would recede from her. She might think her captives were her friends and wonder why they would not let her rest. She might have trouble recalling her job or address or the name of her brother or the fact that she was married. If she tried to spell her name or count to ten, she might fail. Her entire being would be reduced to a single desire: “to sleep, to sleep just a little, not to get up, to lie, to rest, to forget,” in the words of Israeli prime minister Menachem Begin, a victim of the KGB method. That moment was a good one to ask for a confession.

Seeing promise in such methods, the CIA commissioned its own experiments, one of the more important of which was conducted at Canada’s McGill University in 1957 and was disguised as a study to prevent accidents on highways and railroads. The McGill researchers paid twenty-two college students to lie on their backs for a week in featureless cubicles. To minimize visual stimuli, they were made to wear translucent goggles, and the lights were kept on day and night. To minimize auditory stimuli, the cubicles were soundproofed, a low white noise played continuously, and U-shaped pillows were curved around their heads. The pillows also denied the students the tactile stimulation of moving their heads against their mattresses, and a pair of thick gloves did the same for their hands. The consequences were swift. After only four hours, most of the volunteers could not hold a train of thought. After two or three days, in a few cases, the volunteers’ “very identity had begun to disintegrate.” The majority quit before the week was up, and all of them hallucinated. One heard a choir, another saw squirrels with bags slung over their shoulders marching in file, and another felt a small spaceship fire pellets at him. Later the CIA would conclude, “Extreme deprivation of sensory stimuli induces unbearable stress and anxiety and is a form of torture.”

Encouraged, McGill’s researchers devised other tests for the CIA but did away with volunteers who might quit mid-study. Over several years, more than one hundred psychiatric patients were either unwittingly or wittingly but unwillingly experimented on. The special research of D. Ewen Cameron, a past president of the American Psychiatric Association, was “depatterning.” To depattern a patient, Dr. Cameron drugged her into a coma, kept her comatose for up to three months, then revived her and gave her electroconvulsive shocks three times a day at charges up to forty times the norm for a month. After that, he strapped onto her head a football helmet equipped with speakers, through which he played a single, looped message—“My mother hates me” was one—up to half a million times over three weeks. His patients became psychotic. In another of Cameron’s experiments, captives were kept for up to five weeks in the sensory-deprivation cubes that had broken most of the student volunteers in a few days. Decades later, some of his victims were still “depatterned.” Two had a disorder that kept them from recognizing people’s faces. In the 1980s the U.S. government compensated the victims modestly, and the American Psychiatric Association claimed “deep regret” over the experiments, but the Canadian Psychiatric Association rejected calls for remorse and extolled McGill’s psychiatrists for a tradition of therapeutic excellence.

Further studies taught the CIA and Defense Department about other simple but devastating methods of breaking prisoners. Solitary confinement, for example, could cause damage to a prisoner’s brain “much like that which occurs if he is beaten, starved, or deprived of sleep.” Disturbing a prisoner’s sense of time—retarding and advancing clocks, serving meals at odd hours, shutting out daylight—could also madden a man. Researchers for the Defense Department concluded, “Isolation, anxiety, fatigue, lack of sleep, uncomfortable temperatures, and chronic hunger . . . lead to serious disturbances of many bodily processes; there is no reason to differentiate them from any other form of torture.”

The CIA theorized that the onset of such disturbances might be hastened by drugs like LSD, amphetamines, and heroin, and in the 1950s and 1960s its scientists tested the theory on prisoners of war in Korea, partygoers in New York (whose drinks were spiked), johns in San Francisco (drugged by whores in the CIA’s pay), convicts in Kentucky (kept on LSD “trips” for eleven weeks), and on its own scientists. One of the scientists, Frank Olson, suffered a nervous breakdown after his encounter with an LSD-spiked cocktail and subsequently hurtled through a window on the tenth floor of a New York hotel. The coroner said Olson committed suicide, but the family’s pathologist said he had suffered a blunt-force trauma to his head before crashing through the window. The family believed Olson was murdered because he had soured on the mind-control program. Ultimately, however, the CIA decided that mind-control drugs were unpredictable and usually unnecessary. Simpler methods worked best.

Those methods worked all the better if begun early—if possible, from the moment the victim was captured. He should be taken, the CIA concluded, at a time “when his mental and physical resistance is at its lowest” and in a manner that caused him “the maximum amount of mental discomfort.” Complete surprise and a show of overwhelming force were ideal. These precepts probably explained the jarring shout from the man in the van on Via Guerzoni, followed immediately by the terrifying boom of the rear door ripping open, followed in turn by the adamantine grip on Abu Omar, the swift heaving of him into the hold, and the slamming shut of the door. Succeeding acts, the CIA decided, should further disorient the victim and erode his capacity to resist. An immediate beating would do. So would hooding, which was better than blindfolding, because a hood made a person feel more cut off from the world. Stripping and dressing him in something unfamiliar and ill-fitting were good too. “It is very important,” the CIA concluded, “that the arresting party behave in such a manner as to impress the subject with their efficiency,” which convinced a captive of his impotence. Decades before the CIA carried out its first rendition, it had the science of seizing a man pat.

ALTHOUGH CIA
OFFICIALS
knew crudity was not needed to break a captive, they did not foreswear it. As throughout history, once one accepted the use of torture, it was hard to limit its forms. The CIA’s Phoenix program during the Vietnam War was a vast application of crudity, a “pump and dump—pumping suspects for information by torture and then dumping the bodies,” as Alfred McCoy wrote in his indispensable
A Question of Torture
. The pumpers and dumpers were U.S. and South Vietnamese soldiers whom the CIA trained in interrogation. Some of the trainees went on to coil wires around their victims’ testicles or stick wires into their vaginas, then send high-voltage current through them. Other interrogators shoved dowels into victims’ ears and when their answers proved unsatisfactory tapped the dowels by degrees until they penetrated deep into their brains. It was an agonizing death. Other interrogators, more patient, simply starved prisoners until they talked or died. In another CIA program in Vietnam, a neurosurgeon implanted electrodes in the brains of three POWs and transmitted radio signals to them in hope of stirring them to violence, but the subjects only vomited and shat themselves. Their utility spent, they were shot by Green Berets and their bodies burned. In another experiment, CIA psychiatrists tried to induce Vietcong prisoners to talk by giving them twelve electroconvulsive treatments in a single day. None divulged any secrets, so every day thereafter they were convulsed eight or nine times. One prisoner died after a week, and the rest died over the next few weeks. None talked. Victims of other tortures talked, but unhelpfully, like the man who confessed to being a CIA spy, a hermaphrodite, a Buddhist monk, a Catholic bishop, and the son of the king of Cambodia. He was in fact a mere schoolteacher. Interrogators in the South Vietnamese Army had a slogan: “If they aren’t Vietcong, beat them until they are. If they are Vietcong, beat them until they aren’t.” It was a good prescription for revenge but not for intelligence.