The Spy Who Almost Stopped 9/11 | A US Military Interrogator on Getting Terrorists to Talk | 4

0:00Audible subscribers can listen to all episodes of The Spy Who ad-free right now. Join Audible today by downloading the Audible app.

0:11I'm Charlie Higson and this is The Spy Who, an Audible original. Thank you for joining us on our final episode of The Spy Who Almost Stocked 9-11. We've concluded our season on Ali Soufan, an agent active in the FBI's counter-terrorism division, who was at the centre of its investigations into al-Qaeda both before and after 9-11. Soufan became a vocal critic of the CIA, both of their coercive and violent interrogation tactic and their withholding of key intel from the FBI that could very well have prevented the most devastating act of terrorism in American history. Here with me now is someone who's worked up close with Mr.

0:58Soufan, Tony Camarino, a former combat veteran who spent 20 years in the US Air Force Reserve. Tony later became a special agent who conducted and supervised over 1 ,300 interrogations for a special operations task force in Iraq. He later worked alongside Ali Soufan at the Soufan Group, a global intelligence and security consultancy, and wrote all about his own criticisms of violent interrogation methods under the pen name Matthew Alexander in his book How to Break a Terrorist, the US interrogators who used brains, not brutality, to take down the deadliest man in Iraq. So let's welcome to the show Tony Camerino.

1:45So, Tony, I've got to say, in preparation for this interview, you, it's become clear to me that you've had this incredible life that's pulled you down all sorts of fascinating paths. You start off in the Air Force, then you become a special agent and then a writer. And then, of course, one of these paths led you to the man at the centre of our story, Ali Soufan. And we'll get on to that in a minute. But before we do, I'd love for you to tell me a little bit about the beginning of your journey here. I know you initially joined the Air Force Reserve in the early 90s as a helicopter pilot. What drew you to becoming an airman?

2:23Well, I joined actually the active duty Air Force straight out of college because I was on an ROTC scholarship. So I joined the Air Force in 92, 93 and went to pilot training in Texas. and my first assignment was flying KC-135 refueling tankers. I did that for a year, deployed to France during the war in Bosnia in 95. And then I switched to helicopters and then flew special ops helicopters for about three years. And then you switched gears to become a special agent for the Air Force Office of Special Investigations. So, I mean, how exactly was the offer to become a special agent presented to you?

3:13I mean, was it secretive at all or was it just an ordinary interview? It actually wasn't an offer. It was actually me asking because I was working as the executive assistant to the inspector general and I was reading all the OSI cases. And so I had been grounded from flying because of a tachycardia, a heart condition. and they told me to go find a new job. And so I was reading all these OSI cases and I was like, this is really interesting. The problem was that I was one year too old to enter OSI. I think you had to be a seven-year captain and I was an eight-year captain. So I went to the inspector general who was a four-star general at the time and I said, hey, I'd really like to switch over and do OSI.

4:00And he wrote me a recommendation and that's how I was able to transfer. Yeah, I mean, I guess a lot of our listeners aren't necessarily aware that the Air Force has its own sort of secret service, as it were. I mean, can you talk us through what exactly the Office of Special Investigations is and what your role in it as an agent was? The best way to think about it is it's like FBI for the military. Really, the only difference is jurisdiction. And OSI is made up of about 70 % active duty and I think 30 % civilian agents. So like NCIS and the Navy, there's a lot of civilian agents. And essentially we have two major missions.

4:45One is criminal investigations, felony level criminal investigations, and the other was counterintelligence, which sometimes is closer to counterterrorism, but in that realm. So you started as a helicopter pilot and then you became a special agent, which it seems a very different career path. I mean, which is the safer job? Special agents, by far the safer job. Right. Helicopter, not just helicopters, but special ops helicopters in particular, Air Force special ops helicopters, MH-53s when I was flying was quite hazardous job. And the crew members who do that job are just like courageous beyond belief because of the amount of risk.

5:36I mean, everybody that I flew with and my friends that I still talk to just have so many, you know, close call stories there. Yeah. It's almost unbelievable how many times you kind of skirt death and get away with it. And now you mentioned you were sort of recommended by a senior officer to change that career path. What age would you have been then? I was 31 at that time. I actually came I actually graduated I was supposed to graduate the week of 9-11 I wanted to get on to talking about the 9-11 terrorist attacks um did that have a big impact on your job huge impact I was at our training academy at Andrews Air Force Base I remember there was a UPS driver I think who went by and stopped and said a plane just flew into the tower and our instructor was like that guy's crazy think he's smoking something and i turned him i said maybe we should just call in and check and then of course within 30 minutes the base was on lockdown and we were watching the news and we could look out from where we were and see smoke rising from the pentagon at that point and i was quite worried because i had a good friend that i'd known since all the way back in rtc who was working in the pentagon at that time and i was calling him trying to get a hold of him.

6:58And luckily his office was being renovated, so he'd been moved out during that point. Yeah, I mean, even in the UK as a civilian, I remember that sense of like, you know, what is going on? What is going to happen? Where is this going to go? I mean, for you being that closely involved, knowing people in the Pentagon, it must have been very extreme, those emotions. Yeah, and also I remember I went to New York City for the first time, I think, in 95. My father was from New York City. And my cousin took me to the top of the World Trade Centers. I remember very vividly standing at the top against the glass and looking down and being like, wow, this is amazing.

7:41How did man build this? This is incredible. And on a professional level, how did it affect what the OSI was doing? Well, at that time, I think we were all kind of in shock at first. But also, because I was just about to go into OSI, I think the thought going through my mind is, wow, what a time to be going in, because clearly the mission's going to change quite a bit. And it did change a lot. A lot of resources went from doing criminal investigations to counterintelligence and counterterrorism. Well, by the time 2006 rolls around, America's been at war with Iraq for three years following the terrorist attacks of September the 11th, 2001.

8:22and you're brought down, you're now a senior military interrogator and you arrive in Iraq. What are your first impressions of getting there? What sort of jumped out at you right away? Well, a few things, you know, jumped out at me. I talk about this quite a bit in my book. First of all, you know, I was a criminal investigator. I was trained to interrogate like a criminal investigator. But of course I did a counterintelligence mission. So, you know, I went through the Army interrogator course, which taught us how to do intelligence interrogations versus criminal investigations. But when I got to Iraq, some of my first impressions, one, were the speed with which interrogations would take place was very different than what we were used to doing.

9:12Normally when you're interviewing a criminal subject, you usually get one shot at them maybe one day to try to get a confession or to get – I shouldn't say a confession, to get the truth, to get information. When you're in an intelligence interrogation, you can interview somebody many, many times over many days or weeks. But the other general impression I had was about the lack of cultural knowledge in my unit specifically. And even though we did get some training at that, it was very superficial. And when I got to Iraq, some of my first interrogations that I was observing going into the room with, I just was observing interrogators violating all kinds of very common cultural norms that you would know if you were a tourist.

9:59And I thought... What sort of things? You know, like putting your feet up and pointing the soles of your feet at people or just not using courtesies, cursing in the same sentence that you're mentioning the Quran. Like things that you just, you wouldn't know, like anybody who's traveled in the Middle East, spent any time in the Middle East would know not to do. And at first I was like, oh, wow, is this like some type of deliberate strategy? Like is this part of a pride and ego down approach? And then I just came to realize, no, this is just willful ignorance because it isn't like the material isn't available to learn because we have one, we have interpreters sitting next to us who are experts on the culture.

10:44but it's some type of cultural problem within the unit. It's this common kind of prejudice against culture aspects or Muslims in the Middle East that's influencing the way people are questioning these detainees. And I saw that as a real problem that was affecting our ability to get information out of people. So what sort of information are you after at this point? What are your superiors wanting you to get? So our number one mission for our unit was to find and kill Abu Masab al-Sarqawi, the leader of al-Qaeda, now considered to be the father of ISIS, who at that point had been at large for over three years since the start of the Iraq war.

11:30He was our sole focus, really, and a big part of our mission ended up also being stopping suicide bombing attacks, which were happening at that point almost every day and unraveling the suicide bombing network. But Zarkawi was our main focus. So how would these, what do you call them, detainees, how would they have been found, selected, brought in? Who's doing that and how can you tell whether they're going to be able to give you any useful information? So the detainees, essentially we would interrogate detainees and get information that would result in targets being developed. And then there were special ops units that would go out and attack those targets and kill or capture the people and bring them back.

12:14And then, of course, we would interrogate them again and then produce more targets. And so you're interviewing captured combatants? Yeah, at all levels. We would interrogate anybody from your foot soldier who dug a hole in the ground and buried a bomb for$50. to senior ranking members of al-Qaeda. In fact, myself or my team personally interrogated two guys who would later become the number two and three guys in ISIS. And so you quite quickly saw that these techniques that they had been using were not going to work, were ineffective and they were wrong. I mean, how vocal were you dissenting about the investigation tactics at that time?

12:59Well, early on, so within a few weeks of arriving, I went from being just an interrogator to leading a team, being in charge of one of two teams. And so I just told my team right away, like zero tolerance policy for any types of abuse or anything that violates UCMJ or Geneva Convention. So we're just not going to go that route. I also wanted them to focus on building rapport and getting to know individuals, doing interrogations with a little bit of knowledge of the culture and trying to understand the people you're interrogating versus just making assumptions or using stereotypes. And I had very good interrogators on my team.

13:42Some of them were very young, you know, 20, 21-year-old Army enlisted personnel. Some had never been outside the United States before. immense amount of talent, but it had to be, they needed to be led. They needed to be shown how to do interrogations, how to build rapport, how to take that and turn it into cooperation. And they had the ability to do it. They just needed to be given the example of how to do it. Some of the Army approaches were not very productive, like pride and ego down that people were kind of defaulting to. And we switched over to rapport building approaches. is the successes just started coming like very quickly.

14:21And we rolled over, I think there was seven major players in Al-Qaeda in a row that we rolled over and got to cooperate, including most of the members of this infamous group of five that we captured, who were the group that eventually led us to Zarqawi. And did you get much pushback at first from the military authorities or were you listened to straight away? I think at times I was laughed at. I remember one time suggesting that we use love of family approach on a senior al-Qaeda commander in the north and people literally laughed at me and said, when these guys joined al-Qaeda, they write off their families.

15:04They don't care about their families. They care about al-Qaeda. And I said, well, that kind of goes against my experience even just here in Iraq, but all experience. It's like nobody writes off their family just because they join a terrorist organization. In fact, a lot of them, that's why they join is because they think it's to protect their family or to earn money for their family or to defend their family. However misguided that might be, their beliefs, those motivations don't go away just because you decide to become a terrorist. and and then it turns out in that particular case it was love of family that broke the detainee when we got his son into our prison and he decided to cooperate and he provided us very good intelligence because of the love of family approach and so that resistance within a core group of people that was there was based on a lot of ignorance and stereotypes about about terrorism just like really misinformed about terrorists and why people become terrorists and the socio-economic factors involved and that was a real impediment to getting cooperation and when you're witness to an extreme kind of brutality and violence is it hard to to shake all that from your mind are there long-term effects or ramifications for some other kind of extreme things you had to contend with while you were there?

16:31Absolutely. I think so. I think you, I think most interrogators, they put it in a box and they seal that up and they just don't ever open it again. But it is kind of unbelievable when you come back after a while, you decompress. It can take many years. It could be a decade. I know for me, it was probably, it was probably more than 10 years after I got back when when I finally started to really think about and consider how much violence we had been exposed to in Iraq between all the propaganda videos oftentimes we were watching live feeds of the raids take place and watching you know death happened right live before your eyes and then of course I was embedded in a in a spec ops team up north for a month and went out on killer capture raids and you just every day you are seeing violence and living in the middle of it I mean even just for to interrogate oftentimes for instance let's say you go raid it they go raid a house and they're suicide bombers and they're shot and killed or they'll take pictures of them and those afterwards and those pictures will be given to the interrogator so so they can present them to the painee to identify people and so you're just seeing these images like every single day for months on end and you really come back and i think you kind of lock all that up and you try to act like it never happened uh but eventually I think it's good to kind of talk to someone about it and confront it and understand the level of violence that you're exposed to.

18:15And did your experiences in any way impact your feelings about America and the war on terror and the military? Yeah, it did. Absolutely. I think I've kind of a divided opinion. One is I did see a lot of people who did not live up to our principles. And I think they forgot what our principles were. And I saw that result in quite catastrophic effects for many Iraqis. At the same time, I saw a lot of people refuse to do things that were unethical and who kept to their principles. And I think that was quite remarkable. The place where probably for me, I think the greatest failure was a lot of people who I think otherwise would not have abandoned their principles did so because they weren't given the proper leadership and the proper example from the top to be able to say these are the standards.

19:16We don't violate these standards, these ethics, these principles, Geneva Conventions, UCMJ, the prohibition against torture, inhumane treatment. In any case, like zero exceptions. And the lack of that leadership when it trickles down to the field level can be quite devastating for, you know, now you have very young, immature people who are great soldiers, but it's their first time in combat. They're under a lot of stress. And without the proper leadership, inevitably they're going to cross lines if they don't have the correct supervision. And I always talk about our best successes. One of my favorite stories from Iraq was this guy that we captured accidentally who was a member of Al-Qaeda, but his own cell turned on him.

20:10They thought he was a mole for some reason working for us, and he wasn't. but they tortured him and we got the location of cell and we attacked it and we end up rescuing this guy and he came in and we treated his wounds and brought him in an interrogation booth and I had this whole list of questions I was prepared to ask him and interrogation approach I was going to run on him I didn't have to do anything he said as soon as we rescued him and treated his wounds and treated him humanely, he instantly realized he was on the wrong side, that we were the good guys and they were the bad guys. They're the ones who torture and we're the ones who didn't.

20:47And so he just started naming off every person, target, place that he knew. My pen literally ran out of ink. I was writing down so many targets. And I think that was just the most obvious case of the benefits of distinguishing yourself morally from your enemy on the battlefield.

21:12Show button here. Football season is finally back and PrizePix is bringing out their best offer yet. New users who sign up will get$150 in lineups if you win your first$5 lineup. That's right. If you win your first$5 lineup, you'll get$150 in lineups. On PrizePix, you simply pick two to six players, pick more or less on their stat projections, and submit your lineup. Then sweat it out as you watch your picks play out live. It's the best way to get more locked in on game day. Make all the picks you want this football season all in the same app. Also, PrizePix is going crazy with the deals to start the football season, giving users a new promo every day during Stack September.

21:54And now, PrizePix is available nationwide. So what are you Lock in for kickoff because everyone and everything is on PrizePix. What you on? Download the app today and use code WONDERY to get$150 instantly in lineups if you win your first$5 lineup. PrizePix, run your game. You stepped out for your morning jog, except it's not your usual morning jog. You started listening to an epic sci-fi book on Audible. 30 chapters later, you've accidentally run a half marathon. You lost track of how far you've run, somewhere just past the city limits. You can't stop. You have to find out what happens next. Then it's over.

22:33The universe seems bigger. You feel different. You feel like you have no idea where you are. Audible. Stories that speak to you.

22:50So, we're discussing extreme interrogation techniques, and of course a significant commonality between you and Ali Soufan is you're both practising the idea of non-violent or non-coercive measures to get information. Now, I'm guessing our listeners have an idea of how a coercive interrogation session can go, but can you walk us through your approach? I know there are a few things you're mindful of when interrogating someone. Rapport building, stroking their ego, know connecting through sympathy and compassion, as well as strategic presentations and cultural understandings. I mean, I wonder, would it be possible for you to briefly give us a real example of how you use these tactics while conducting these interrogations?

23:37Yeah, so everything starts really with getting to know somebody. I'll give you one example. There was a guy who came in that we captured who was involved in designing al-Qaeda websites. and he you know they would take the suicide bombing videos whatever and give him the raw footage and he would take them and transform them onto a website and put graphics on them and he was doing it because he had to drop out of college he had some relatives that were killed I believe and and also had no money had no job kind of had no future and they would pay him to do this and he would do it and I assigned a young interrogator to him Maria and she went in and she just she didn't talk about terrorism with him for the first couple sessions she just talked to him about music about culture about movies they smoke cigarettes and she just built great rapport with him and ultimately he just divulged everything that he was doing but he wouldn't give us the name of his boss and i was watching these interrogations and going well i think i know the way to convince him to go one level up is he needs to feel like he's going to get some type of, probably some type of, not exoneration, but some type of favoritism for cooperation, I think.

24:56Which is a normal thing you do in any criminal investigation. I mean, we do that doing, you investigate drug dealers in the United States. If you catch a low level person, you'll offer them some type of limited amnesty in exchange for information. We do all the time criminal investigations. And so Maria and I did this approach called a boss introduction where I came in and act like the big boss who was visiting and I was going to give him a chance to provide information to put in a good word for him, which I can do. I can write a statement saying that he cooperated, which would help him in court.

25:28And ultimately, when we asked him to cooperate and name his boss, he looked at Maria and he just looked in her eyes and he saw a friend. He saw somebody who had listened to her, who had built rapport with him, who listened to the reasons why he joined al-Qaeda was empathetic to them. And it convinced him to cooperate. And he told me the name of his boss, Abu Ali, who turns out was sitting in the interrogation booth next to us, being interrogated, who was one of the members of the group of five, and turned out to be the head of all al-Qaeda communications in Iraq. And it was just this simple rapport building, developing trust understanding his motivations and having a little empathy for a situation while you can still condemn his acts that was able to turn him and get him to you know it led to this huge breakthrough because then we use that information to break Abu Ali and he revealed the names of the al-qaeda email accounts and passwords it was all from a little bit of empathy and a little bit of understanding and a little bit of rapport building.

26:36And do you think that coercive interrogation tactics ever work? I think it depends on how you define the term works. And I would say, no, they never work if you consider all the long-term ramifications. The number one I always bring up is when we use coercive techniques, torture, abuse of detainees, it is Al-Qaeda or any other terrorist group's number one recruiting tool because they're able to hold it up and show it to potential new members. Look, America says they're this one thing, but look at how they treat detainees. They're not. They're liars. And we saw that in Iraq after the photos of Abu Ghraib became public.

27:17Al-Qaeda recruiting shot through the roof. There was a huge increase in the number of foreign fighters and foreign fighters made up 90 % of all the suicide bombers. so we know that's true and you can look at ourselves and say that's true anytime America has become aware that its prisoners have been tortured or abused and detained in detention if you look at Vietnam or any other war of course it increased our morale and increased our recruitment and our willingness to fight so I think when you take factors like that into account you can definitively say that torture never works that in the long run it's always counterproductive And so they're still using that technique, the rapport-based technique?

27:58I haven't worked in that area now in a while, so I can't say. I mean, to the best of my knowledge, yes, we are using rapport-based techniques now is the standard. And was the standard pre-9-11. And was the standard for the large majority of interrogators post-9-11 too. You know, the Enhanced Interrogation Technique Program, I think it'd be wrong to say that all interrogators were using them, obviously. That's not true. They were more widespread than I think a lot of people think they were. It wasn't just Abu Ghraib and it wasn't just Guantanamo. They were being used in many different locations besides even just CIA black sites.

28:44And part of that was migration of people who had been to different places and had gone to different places and said, well, we used them here. Why can't we use them in another location? And so, but I think we can confidently say the large majority of interrogators rejected the use of enhanced interrogation techniques, never used them even when they were available to them. And on the topic of America's moral standing, I'm curious to know how much you think it's changed throughout the world between then and now. I really think Abu Ghraib was a huge event in the timeline of history for the reputation of the United States.

29:23I think the photos of Abu Ghraib made it very clear that what the United States was saying and what it was doing were two different things. and that comes from my experience in the interrogation booth and hearing it and overseeing or conducting 1300 interrogations and the and it wasn't just Abu Ghraib because also the abuses at Guantanamo had become known as well and and also in all these other places where Adanis had been abused, people talk, you know. It doesn't matter if you're in some remote station in a western province in Iraq and you abuse a detainee and then they go into general population, they're going to talk to their relatives, they're going to talk to other detainees, and word's going to get out.

30:11But I think those photos of Abu Ghraib were just symbolic of a greater rot that kind of happened post 9-11, in which the world was able to see that America was not living up to its principles.

30:29In 1969, when police tried to shut down a gay bar in New York City's Greenwich Village, they expected little resistance. Instead, patrons rose up in a series of demonstrations that would ignite a movement. Hi, I'm Lindsey Graham, the host of the podcast American History Tellers. We take you to the events, times, and people that shaped America and Americans, our values, our struggles, and our dreams. In our latest series, the police raid on the Stonewall Inn marked a turning point in the fight for LGBTQ rights. But activists had already been hard at work pushing for gay rights for decades, and their battle is still being fought today.