THE DARK SCIENCE OF INTERROGATION

HOW TO FIND OUT ANYTHING FROM ANYONE

In August 2003, six months after the U.S. invasion of Iraq and four months into the bloody insurgency that followed, Steve Kleinman, an Air Force lieutenant colonel, arrived in the country as part of a special operations task force based out of Baghdad International Airport. A lean man with an angular face and a faintly Californian cadence, Kleinman had been an intelligence officer for almost two decades. He had questioned high-level prisoners of war during the 1989 invasion of Panama and Iraqi generals during Operation Desert Storm, and he’d run the Air Force Combat Interrogation Course. At the Baghdad airport, however, he witnessed techniques he hadn’t seen in the field. In one of the plywood-walled interrogation rooms he saw a detainee slapped in the face each time he answered a question. Outside another room was a taped-up sheet of paper with the words “1 hour sleep, 3 hrs. awake, ½ hr. on knees, ½ sitting down, 1 hr. standing, ½ hr. knees” written on it. At the bottom it read, “Repeat.”

“This was a year before Abu Ghraib. It was going on in Iraq and Afghanistan, and of course at Guantanamo,” Kleinman says. “Sometimes I got to the point where I had to literally order them to stop. Even then there was surprising blowback. People thought I was coddling terrorists.” Kleinman didn’t think of himself as soft, though, just empirical. In his free time he was an avid consumer of behavioral science research papers, and over the years he’d experimented, in an ad hoc way, with the ideas he found there.

One afternoon a team of Army Rangers brought in a man in his late 30s suspected of selling weapons to the insurgents. By the time Kleinman heard about it, the man had been in custody for three days, enduring hooded stress positions and harsh interrogations, but maintaining a defiant equanimity. “He had these really dark, penetrating eyes. I remember it was almost disconcerting,” Kleinman says. He decided to take over the interrogation himself, and the two men, seated on folding chairs, spoke for three hours. The arms dealer had two young daughters, and he worried for their safety growing up in a violent city. Kleinman pretended that he, too, had two girls, and talked about his worries for them.

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