NEWSWEEK: How do interrogations today differ from the World War II programs you studied? Steven Kleinman: There was a program at Fort Hunt … a really fascinating program, very thoughtful, very systematic approach to interrogating very senior German military officers, government officials, technical experts, people that they had captured overseas. They would often go through four, maybe five levels of screening before they finally met the standards that these people would call special interrogation. Not “special” the way it’s used today, but more in the sense of focused and a little bit more extended examination.
What were some of the techniques? What were the things that seemed particularly smart about what they were doing? First of all, the people they had interrogating were not 19-, 20-, 21-year-olds. These were people who came off the college campus as professors, as lawyers, successful business people. They had all traveled overseas, spoke flawless German, understood the culture, the history of the European continent, just some really bright people—not pure military folks, but people who had responded to the call. And they didn’t have doctrine per se; they developed it in a sense of how to interrogate. And then from the very beginning they realized they’re going to carefully screen these people so that they only focused on those who had really useful information—which is an important point today, because there are so many cases of mistaken identity. They’re bringing people in who may be insurgents or terrorists but they’re so low on the food chain, they have little, if anything, to offer. [During World War II], they focused on people, on sources, who did have information. And then they would really carefully study this individual, and decide based on their functional background … how to match him up with the individual interrogator. The standard was for every hour spent interrogating, the interrogator and his team would spend four to six hours in preparation. So they knew exactly what they wanted to do, and exactly how they were going to go about it. And they were reasonably patient. The “how” was presented to them in a series of lectures by a gentleman named Sanford Griffith, who had been an army interrogator in World War I and had worked in the advertising industry in the interwar years, studying psychology and marketing and persuasion. And so he delivered this incredible series of lectures.
What was his philosophy? No. 1, he said, you bait the hook to catch the fish, meaning you have to understand, really truly understand, what that POW is all about—what their interests are, what their hopes, their fears, their desires, their interests. And that in itself will help you find a way to build either a rapport with them or some kind of working relationship. Then technically, if you encounter resistance …then you deal with it. You just literally put it to sleep. If they have complaints, you address them; if they have—whatever it is, you either address it, or you make it appear that you are in the process of addressing it, and you go into great detail over and over and over again, even far past what they want to do, until they realize that that strategy is pretty much bankrupt.
I’m not sure I understand what you mean. What kind of resistance, and how would you address it? Well let’s say, for instance, all [somebody] wants to do is complain about their treatment. This is how I adapted it: somebody would complain about their treatment. And I would say, “OK, what do you mean?” And maybe they’d say they needed another blanket—and that’s really all they wanted to focus on. … I would go way past that, I would say, well OK, is that all? Is there something else? Are there too many people in your cell, is the food [OK]? We can’t offer you too much, but are you getting enough of this? And just go on and on and on until they’re finally almost embarrassed because they can’t think of anything more. And I find that’s a really effective way of exhausting a certain resistance posture, because the opposite just never works; if you just keep trying to ignore it, or—this is the common route for many young interrogators—“Wait a second, I’m the interrogator, I’ll be asking the questions.” If you’re an interrogator in a cell, or in an interrogation booth with a prisoner, and you have to remind the source that you’re the interrogator, you’ve already lost.
Maybe the answer to this question is obvious, but what is the advantage of having an understanding of their language and their culture, and perhaps having traveled the region, being a little older? I suppose some people might argue that you don’t need all that. You go in knowing what you want, and go after it. Without being too dismissive, anyone who would think that has clearly never conducted an interrogation. Without understanding their culture, their values, their history, the language, their affiliations, understanding how they interact with one another. … Let me give you a fundamental example. Let’s say there are two things you want to do. You either want to establish some sort of rapport with an individual, or you want to offend them, just to show that you’re the boss. I’m not a proponent of the latter, but let’s say that’s what you’re doing. If you don’t understand the culture, and can’t cross that cultural barrier, you’re probably going to fail on both accounts. Like, for instance, you immediately walk into some cultures, and you do things Western-style: you pat somebody on the back. Let’s say you’re dealing with a Muslim, and you pat them on the back with your left hand. Let’s say you’ve already established a rapport, and suddenly you just completely blow it by making a social faux pas of major proportions, because of your ignorance of the culture. Or [say you’re] trying to find out if somebody’s lying. Many, many years ago we were running operations, and there was a source from Asia that one of my colleagues was dealing with, and he said, “I know this guy is lying to me.” Well, how do you know? “He won’t look me in the eye.” The rest of us who had a lot more exposure to Asia all kind of looked at one another and said, “Tell us that again?” He just didn’t understand that that was actually a sign of respect.
Was there any use in this World War II program of what are now called coercive forms of interrogation? Absolutely not. That [would] only stiffen someone’s resolve. You immediately create an adversarial relationship and they’re going to fight tooth and nail to resist. Interrogators and people who manage interrogation programs need to understand the whole concept of the laws of war. At some point even this war will come to an end, and nations will have to live together and trade together and live side by side. So you have certain standards of what you will or will not do so that you don’t have these lingering animosities. When you treat people in a coercive fashion, they’re going to remember that. Just think about how many Americans still remember, 60 years later, how the Japanese treated allied POWs during World War II.
But maybe you’re comparing apples and oranges? In WWII we were dealing with one kind of enemy, maybe less resolved, less extreme ideologically, less willing to die for the cause. Can you really pry open Islamic militants by being friendly and establishing a rapport? I think it’s important to remember the depths of Nazi fanaticism during World War II. … The interrogators had to keep the Nazis they brought over separate, because if any of them thought others were collaborating, they would do whatever they could to kill them. They would try to influence them at every stretch. Their allegiance was absolute. Which is why when I read this, I thought: what a perfect parallel to what we’re experiencing now. The allegiance to Osama bin Laden is not unlike the allegiance to Adolf Hitler at the time. And the Nazi military forces were well known for saying they would rather die before capture, that death would be glorious in the service of the Reich. There are some very striking parallels. Ultimately, though, once people are in the interrogation room, so much of what happens is counterintuitive. How people act in other circumstances, how they respond in their daily life is really no indicator of how they’ll respond in that room. Because No. 1, from the moment of capture they’re cut off from all the information that’s available to the average adult. They don’t know what’s going on in the outside world other than what the interrogator shares with them. It’s almost like a parallel universe where the rules are provided by the interrogator.
You mentioned establishing a rapport. How do you leverage that rapport for information? One of the challenges for the interrogators is to be able to literally have a certain degree of empathy, sympathetic common sense. You don’t fall in love with these people. You realize you’re not there as some sort of humanitarian effort. But if you’re unwilling and unable to let some of these people touch you in a way, you won’t be effective. Some of these people we were interrogating when I was in Iraq were brought up under Saddam always looking over their shoulders. Maybe their family members had been tortured by Saddam’s regime, all sorts of horrible things that you and I have never experienced. You have to let that kind of touch you—at least to the point where you can understand why this person acts as they do. What is it that they might want? How can you relate to them in a way that will make them feel comfortable talking to you?
In your time in Iraq, how often would you see interrogators showing that kind of empathy? I’ve dealt with a lot of interrogators who are so closed off, they’ll even joke about the plight of the guys they’re interrogating. I had a guy who told me he was tortured and the other interrogators would joke about it.
How do you explain why interrogators aren’t taught these things? The psychology of interrogation, the cultural element, what is it that makes it work—that has never really been studied. So we realized we need to try to encourage a movement towards professionalizing interrogations to a level of other “collection” disciplines. Human intelligence for many years has been the bastard stepchild of intelligence. It takes a second seat to all the other collection measures. But then, within human intelligence, interrogation holds the lowest rung on the totem pole. So they’ve assigned the mission literally to young men and women with just a couple of years of life experience after high school. … I don’t mean to disparage these young interrogators. They mean well and they’re doing the best they can. But can you imagine being 23 years old with a high-school diploma and a language you’ve been taught at the Defense Language Institute and you’ve never really been out of the United States and now you’re encountering somebody who holds graduate degrees from U.S. universities, is comfortable moving across cultures, fluent in several languages including English? They’ve seen and done so much that if it comes to a battle of wits with the young interrogator, the outcome is almost pre-ordained. Interrogation is, I call it, a competitive exchange of information where each side has information the other one wants and they kind of use it almost as bargaining chips. Certainly the detainee has information the interrogator wants. But people also forget that the interrogator has information the detainee wants: “When am I going home? What are you going to do with me? Where is my family? Where are my colleagues? What’s going to happen tomorrow?”
You mentioned that interrogators also have something to learn from the advertising industry. What would that be? There’s a book called “Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion,” by Dr. [Robert] Cialdini. The marketing industry has used this extensively. He’s identified approximately six principles of persuasion, such things as scarcity—things that are suddenly unavailable to us, we have more interest in attaining. Likeability—how difficult it is to say no to someone you really like. Reciprocity—you give me something and there’s something hardwired in our brain that makes me want to give you something back. It’s just fascinating how you can apply those to interrogations. They’re persuasive and they’re cross-cultural in most cases. The authority principle, you see on commercials—where they have someone who appears to be a doctor talking about some kind of pharmaceutical. Whether he’s a doctor or not, people respond. I use the same thing in terms of information dominance. I present myself as knowing even more about a topic than my source does, which make him more likely to comply with my questions ‘cause they have the sense that this authority figure knows more.
What about deception? Is there room for deception in the interrogation room? In a word, yes. All war is based on deception. If I want to establish a rapport with someone—what I call an operational accord, where we find some reason to work together—I find it [so] much easier if someone is a husband and father of three children, for example, that I tell him I have that same family experience, whether I do or I don’t. In the military setting, I may adjust my rank so that I’m closer to his. I used stories a lot during Desert Storm. I had a very, very recalcitrant Republican Guard officer during Desert Storm and I used a number of different ruses with him. He was from Basra in southern Iraq. I knew he was from there, and I told him that the United Nations, in an effort to prevent future invasions, has awarded Basra to Kuwait. I added that I’m sure Kuwaiti soldiers would treat Iraqi civilians much better than the Iraqi soldiers treated Kuwaiti civilians. He was devastated.
I think some people might say that when you rule out any coercive techniques, you really ignore the experience of some countries—Britain and Israel for example—that have had to deal with insurgencies for a very long time. How would you respond to that? In terms of the British experience in Northern Ireland, one of the lessons actually learned was that coercion was ineffective, even just pressure was ineffective. Now with the Israelis, it’s a different story. They have their way and there’s a long history out there. But I would say that if it’s so successful, why is the conflict still going on decades later? They get information but it never seems to be information that makes the difference. And here’s the other part: interrogation does not happen in a void. It has ramifications. In Baghdad in 2003, I was briefing a one-star general about why I thought we needed to avoid coercion techniques. And I told him that if we start using coercion, unless we keep those people in prison for the remainder of their lives, we’re going to suffer a decimal shift. When Iraqis learn people had been abused, those who supported the occupation will shift to neutral, those who had been neutral will shift to supporting the insurgency and those who supported the insurgency will become insurgents. We all like to be right, but in this case I wish I had been wrong. Abu Ghraib has probably been the most effective recruiting campaign that the insurgency and even Al Qaeda at large had ever experienced.
How did the general respond? Well, fortunately, he said it makes all the sense in the world to him.
Then how is it not common knowledge that coercion will always be counterintuitive? In America, just about everyone has seen an interrogation on television and in movies and they think they understand it. It seems so simple and it’s wrapped up in a 30-minute episode. And that, honestly, has influenced sometimes some very senior policymakers in that they think they get it, they understand it. They don’t take that same position with something like signals intelligence or imagery intelligence. … The debate about the use of coercion is always the moral and legal elements of it and even those who are against it seem to accept as a given that it shouldn’t be used but obviously it would work. There’s no science behind that. There’s no evidence it works. It’s purely anecdotal.
What about the ticking-bomb scenario, which the Israelis cite as justification for more aggressive interrogations? The ticking-bomb scenario is a logic failure. You’re assuming that you can use coercion to get information about where a nuclear device might be in New York, when most of the evidence suggests that information obtained through coercion is suspect. I can’t comment on how effective the Israelis have or have not been. But here’s the other part of it: if using coercive methods to get information from people was a guaranteed method, they’re still suffering from many, many attacks. Interrogation is a means of getting some useful information, but there are times it’s just not going to make a difference. And if after spending $40 billion on intelligence in this country it all comes down to torturing a single individual, isn’t there something wrong with the system? Just like our really sophisticated signal intelligence or imagery intelligence can get defeated, people have to realize that interrogation is not going to work every time. You move on to the next guy and try again.
