A Kidnapping in Milan: The CIA on Trial (16 page)

The CIA and Defense Department knew or would soon know that information obtained under torture was unreliable. A few years after the Vietnam War, the CIA instructed its officers, “Intense physical pain is quite likely to produce false confessions, fabricated to avoid additional punishment,” and the Army instructed its troops, “Use of torture is not only illegal but also it is a poor technique that yields unreliable results, may damage subsequent collection efforts, and can induce the source to say what he thinks the HUMINT [human intelligence] collector wants to hear.” The CIA and Defense Department also knew there were alternatives to torture. Sherwood Moran, a Marine Corps major, wrote a manual during the Second World War on how to establish “intellectual and spiritual” rapport with supposedly barbaric, unreachable enemies. The manual was based on Moran’s success convincing Japanese POWs to reveal their comrades’ positions and battle plans. It became a classic in interrogation circles.

The Phoenix program achieved no comparable success. Although its graduates tortured thousands and killed, by the CIA’s count, 20,587 (by the count of the South Vietnamese government, 40,994), a CIA commander in Vietnam told Alfred McCoy, “The truth is that never in the history of our work in Vietnam did we get one clear-cut, high-ranking Vietcong agent.” President Nixon rewarded the CIA officer who ran Phoenix, William Colby, with the directorship of the CIA.

The United States did not train just the Vietnamese in the American way of torture. It also trained police and soldiers of other countries of the Third World, particularly countries ruled by despots who took a hard line against Communism. If the despots also opposed lesser leftisms, so much the better. Only a few details about the trainings have become known. In Uruguay in the late 1960s a CIA officer was reported to have taught policemen how to electrocute prisoners by demonstrating on four beggars from the streets of Montevideo, all of whom were electrocuted to death. “The special horror of the course was its academic, almost clinical atmosphere,” one of the purported witnesses wrote. Another course, taught in Texas by the U.S. Army, was described by a Honduran sergeant: “They taught us psychological methods—to study the fears and weaknesses of a prisoner: make him stand up, don’t let him sleep, keep him naked and isolated, put rats and cockroaches in his cell, give him bad food, serve him dead animals, throw cold water on him, change the temperature.” The curriculum may have been implemented; a Marxist tortured in Honduras said she was given dead birds and rats for dinner, was kept standing for hours without sleep or the use of a toilet, and had freezing water thrown on her naked body at half-hour intervals.

One of the earliest recipients of the CIA’s training was Egypt. The trainers were former Nazi commanders from Germany who were recruited by the CIA not long after the Second World War, probably because the agency was then inexperienced in brutality and wanted men of expertise. One of the Nazis was SS Sturmbannführer (Storm-Trooper Leader) Alois Brunner, whom Adolf Eichmann described as one of his best men and who, during the war, trained Nazi field commanders to liquidate Jewish ghettos across Europe. By one estimate, Brunner personally ordered 128,000 Jews to death camps. Long afterward he said his great regret in life was not having murdered more Jews. Another of the CIA’s trainers in Egypt was SS Obersturmbannf
ü
hrer (Senior Storm-Trooper Leader) Otto Skorzeny, who rescued Benito Mussolini in 1943 after his capture by Partisans and who plotted the assassinations, all in vain, of Stalin, Churchill, Roosevelt, and Eisenhower. A Nazi publication once described Skorzeny as “Hitler’s favorite commando.” The Nazi trainers were supervised in Egypt by a CIA officer on long-term loan to the country’s de facto ruler (and eventual president) Nasser, but neither the number of Nazis nor the particulars of their curriculum are known. After they finished their work, some went to Tehran and trained Iran’s secret service, the Savak, whose savagery was impressive even by the debased standards of Third World dictatorships. Others may have trained security forces elsewhere. Alois Brunner settled, perhaps suggestively, in Syria, where Israel’s Mossad apparently tried to assassinate him by letter bomb, which, however, deprived him only of a few fingers and an eye.

Nasser’s relationship with the CIA was complicated, largely because he entertained alliances with both the Soviet Union and the United States. In the early going, in addition to training his security forces, the CIA helped him build and run a radio station, gave him several million dollars, and promised more aid to come. When the White House did not follow through on the aid, Nasser took $3 million of the CIA’s original grant and built a latticework minaret as tall as the Washington Monument, a height meant to insult. The CIA dubbed it “Nasser’s prick” and planted explosives at its base to (as it were) blow it, but the Egyptians discovered the charges. The Egyptian name for the tower was “Roosevelt’s erection,” in honor of CIA officer Kermit Roosevelt, grandson of Teddy. Nasser’s relations with the West reached their nadir in 1956, when he nationalized the Suez Canal and the dispossessed British proposed to assassinate him. President Eisenhower vetoed the proposal in favor of a campaign of subversion, but the CIA did not handle it deftly. For example, its officers carelessly exposed a newspaper publisher, Mustafa Amin, whom they were paying to print pro-American articles, and Nasser had him imprisoned and tortured. Later there was a détente between the United States and Nasser, and in the last years of his rule the CIA tipped him to a plot by military officers to overthrow him. The purge he undertook was so remorseless that even some CIA officials were alarmed.

The relationship between Egypt and the United States became more stable after Anwar Sadat succeeded Nasser, rejected his socialism, and, eventually, made peace with Israel. Billions of American dollars and other assistance flowed to Cairo in consequence and made Egypt the second-largest recipient of U.S. foreign aid. (Israel was first.) For a time America’s embassy in Cairo was its largest in the world. Included in the aid was more training for Egypt’s military and security services. In the 1990s, when Gamaa began killing by the dozen, the CIA tutored President Mubarak’s special forces in the hunting of terrorists, although the program eventually had to be canceled because, as U.S. ambassador Edward Walker said, “Too many people . . . died while fleeing. It got to be a little too obvious.”

When Bill Clinton decided to start extraordinarily rendering suspected terrorists, it was, therefore, natural—indeed almost inevitable—that he turned to Mubarak to receive many of the victims. In addition to the longstanding ties between the United States and Egypt, many of the world’s most troublesome terrorists were Egyptian, and Mubarak had long demanded their repatriation by the countries that had given them refuge. He seems to have been only too pleased to open his dungeons to America. The CIA would later say that before September 11, 2001, it extraordinarily rendered about seventy men. It did not say to which countries, but Egypt almost certainly received the largest number. There could have been little doubt about how the victims were treated. “If you want a serious interrogation,” said Robert Baer, who for years was a CIA officer in the Middle East, “you send a prisoner to Jordan. If you want them to be tortured, you send them to Syria. If you want someone to disappear—never to see them again—you send them to Egypt.” It was understood that an Egyptian disappearance would be preceded by torture.

A wrinkle in sending men to such places was that it was illegal under American law, the law being the United Nations Convention Against Torture, which Clinton had signed in 1994 after years of stalling by Presidents Reagan and Bush the elder. The law read, in pertinent part, “It shall be the policy of the United States not to expel, extradite, or otherwise effect the involuntary return of any person to a country in which there are substantial grounds for believing the person would be in danger of being subjected to torture, regardless of whether the person is physically present in the United States.” After September 11, as Bush the younger rendered men by the hundred, rendition’s apologists argued that the extraordinary enemy justified extraordinary measures. But this was a canard the Convention Against Torture had foreseen. “No exceptional circumstances whatsoever,” the law read, “whether a state of war or a threat of war, internal political instability, or any other public emergency may be invoked as a justification of torture or other cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment.” The United States, however, was in a cruel, inhuman, and degrading mood.

THE STOREHOUSES
of men—the keeps, the camps, the slammers, the gulags—have in common spareness, which is economical for the storers and a further punishment for the stored. In Egypt a typical cell reserved for political prisoners is a concrete box furnished with a reed mat or a grain sack or a piece of cardboard to lie on and a vile blanket that has been soiled with the blood and sputum of prior inmates. The latrine, if there is one, will be little more than a reeking hole in the floor, and if there is a window, it is likely to be miniscule, set too high to see out, and admissive more of pests than of light. The door will be of steel or thick wood and will have a sliding slot through which food can be inserted and commands barked. A ventilation duct, if it exists, will not do its job, and the air will be fetid and mildewy. There is sometimes water on the floor, in which case the dankness in the air may approach that of a recently used shower. In some cells, puddles survive for years from the drip of a pipe ten feet overhead. Its plip—plip—plip—plip—plip can derange. Sometimes moisture covers the entire surface of the floor in a thin film, and then the walls will crawl with mold and other spores, the prisoner’s bedding will be damp, and there will be no place he can touch, including his own person, that is not clammy. Prisoners have been punished by being held temporarily—days or weeks—in cool water up to their shins. In the South Pacific, where the water is 85 degrees, sailors cast overboard have become hypothermic and died in a few days. Just so, a man may die in the Egyptian desert from standing in what amounts to a wading pool. Other prisoners have been put in sealed cells into which water is poured through a pipe. When the water reaches a man’s chest, he will be likely to sign whatever confession is put before him.

Torture through excesses of plumbing is cruelly ironic, because plumbing in its normal form is deficient in Egyptian prisons. If the cell has a sink, it may yield no water or may yield it for only a few minutes a day. The water is apt to be filthy, although it can be improved by filtering through a rag, even though the rag, like everything else in the prison, will be dirty. When prisoners drink, the water may cramp and convulse them, and sometimes it will bring diarrhea that can last months. Cell toilets are apt to clog, and shit and piss can back up into the cell. Warders know the power of shit in annihilating their wards. They may put a man in a cell with no toilet and keep him there a month, so that he is forced to defecate and urinate on the floor. Or they may put him in a cell with shit piled so high in a corner that when he has to add to it, he will barely be able to squat over the pile and breathing will be revolting at any time. Or they may strip him naked and throw him sprawling into a cell whose floor is covered inches deep in excrement and urine.

That a cell is indoors does not imply protection from weather. In the Egyptian summer, the temperature inside a cell may rise to 125 degrees, and in winter it can drop below freezing. If a prisoner has no mat, he must choose in the winter between putting his blanket under him to lessen the cold of the frozen concrete or putting it over him to guard against the frozen air. Either way, one half of him will freeze, and he will pass the night shifting his blanket from one side to the other. He may keep his face warm by wrapping his underwear about his head.

In any weather a penitentiary night is long. It often begins in late afternoon or early evening, when the lights are shut off, and lasts until well past dawn—sixteen hours of darkness or near darkness passed in a silence enforced by cudgel.

In Egypt a man who is walled off from other men is not walled off from life. The lower orders of fauna find their way into cells. Flies, gnats, and mosquitoes mock the swats of confined men and attack with a sandstorm’s persistence. Their victim may find partial sanctuary under a blanket, but the blanket is usually so thin that the insects can bite through, and in the Nilotic summer, to be under a blanket may be so stifling that the cure is worse than the cancer. Cockroaches are not put off by blankets and will crawl over a prisoner almost as boldly by light as by dark. After Sadat became president, he took a pickax to a prison where he had once been held, and at each blow of his ax, hundreds of cockroaches poured out of the sodden bricks. He built new prisons that he said would be humane, but the cockroaches overran them too—a metaphor for the Egyptian polity.

Smaller visitors come to the inmate too. One is the mite
Sarcoptes scabiei
, which favors crevices—the valleys between fingers and toes, the crooks of elbows, the cracks of buttocks, the flaps of genitals. With his large family, he burrows under the skin and pushes up little ridges, which turn to pustules that ooze, burst, and release bacteria. His victims develop a savage urge to scratch, but if they do, they will spread the bacteria, which will cause their skin to redden and swell and may bring fever. If they are otherwise weakened, as Egyptian prisoners tend to be, the fever might kill them. Lice scourge similarly, dropping their miniscule eggs across hirsute hills and dales and sometimes bringing typhus, another killer. Such pests are hard to eliminate without medicine and cleanliness, both of which are in short supply in an Egyptian cell. Everything humane is in short supply in an Egyptian cell. Only inhumanity is excessive.

ABU OMAR
was awakened by a guard turning a key in the lock of his cell door. He guessed he had slept a few hours. The guard blindfolded him, warned him not to speak, and led him down a hallway to a bathroom, where, standing behind him, he took off Abu Omar’s blindfold and said he was not to turn around until the door was closed behind him. After he had used the toilet, he was to knock on the door and turn his back to it, and the guard would come in and blindfold him again. Abu Omar did as told and was returned to his cell and his blindfold was removed. Later he was given food, which he ate without interest.