Tuesday, November 26, 2002

How interrogation works.

Breaking down a suspected terrorist trained to defy U.S. interrogators is an art form that requires patience and a keen understanding of how to work the psyche of the person in custody, according to those who have worked in the field.

Brad Garrett, an FBI agent in the Washington field office, said he was able to glean information from Ramzi Yousef, convicted of the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center, by slowly getting him to trust that Garrett's word was good.

For example, before Yousef was brought back from Pakistan to stand trial in the United States, he asked Garrett to make sure that he had decent clothes to wear in front of the media in America. Before they left Islamabad, Garrett had Yousef outfitted with a suit, tie and shoes, which he wore the next day for his first appearance before reporters and cameras.

"The biggest key to interrogating is being utterly honest with them," Garrett said. "You don't make promises to them that you can't follow through with. If they ask you to do things that are reasonable, you do them."

Garrett also was involved in interrogating Aimal Khan Kasi, a Pakistani who gunned down two people and wounded three others outside the CIA's headquarters in Virginia Jan. 25, 1993. After 4 1/2 years on the run, Kasi finally was captured in Pakistan. Garrett was part of a team that tracked him down and brought him back to the United States to stand trial.

For the first 48 hours that Kasi was in custody, Garrett did not try to talk to him about the shootings. Instead, he dressed his wounds and talked to him about his transportation back to America. By the time they got on a plane for the United States, a certain comfort level had been attained, which made it easier to question him about the crime.

Kasi was executed by injection earlier this month in Virginia for the killings, which he said were a protest of U.S. policies toward Muslims. One of the few people Kasi invited to attend the execution was Garrett.

"I think he invited me because he wanted someone there who had been involved in his life for so many years," Garrett said. "I think he did trust me."

Part of his success at getting terrorists and other criminals to talk is listening without judgment, Garrett said: "It isn't my job to judge people. We are not all bad; we are not all good."

Despite the strides made by U.S. forces in obtaining hard data, such as the terrorist computer and telephone records discovered in Afghanistan, such information is more useful as a cross-check than as original source material, Amidror said.

"At the end, in terrorism, there is no substitute to interrogation of suspects," said Amidror, who is a visiting fellow at the Washington Institute. "The most important part of the information -- if not from the quantity point of view but from the quality point of view -- is in the heads of the leaders or the terrorists themselves."

As Bearden, the former CIA official, put it, "Even Adolf Hitler's dog wagged his tail at him."

Bearden said, "We like to demonize our enemies, but when you interrogate someone you can't forget that they have a father and mother, that they are a human being."

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