It was a crisp autumn morning, just over a year after 9/11, and the CIA agent Glenn Carle was in his office on the second floor of the agency’s headquarters in Langley, Virginia. He was wondering if he would ever be sent on assignment again after a series of mistakes, including leaving a briefcase of documents at a meeting with foreign spies.
To his surprise, the head of human resources for the directorate of operations poked his head around the door and asked if he could go TDY — temporary duty overseas — as his fluent French was required.
He was told to be ready the next day to travel abroad to help interrogate one of the few Al-Qaeda high-value targets who had been caught, a man described as a “very big prize” whose capture had been a coup for the agency. It was believed he could lead to Osama Bin Laden, the head of the terrorist organisation.
“This was the kind of opportunity every officer hoped for,” Carle said last week. "The whole point of signing up was to try to be at the pointy end of the spear, particularly at a time of national crisis.”
He was told that Captus, as he code-named the prisoner, had important information on Al-Qaeda. “I was to do ‘whatever was necessary’ to obtain it from him,” he said. In other words, he was to use “enhanced interrogation techniques”, from sleep deprivation — keeping him standing and in cold temperatures — to waterboarding. Carle was shocked.
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“We don’t do that sort of thing,” he said.
“We do now,” came the reply.
When he questioned the legality, he was shown the now notorious letter — “Do what you want; what the president says is legal is legal” — that had been drafted by John Yoo, a senior official in the Justice Department.
Carle was also concerned about the fact that the prisoner was being held in another country. “Suppose our partners do something to Captus that I consider unacceptable?” he asked.
“Well, then you just walk out of the room. Then you won’t have seen anything. You will not have been party to anything.”
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“What about the Geneva conventions?”
“Which flag do you serve?” came the tart reply.
On questioning the prisoner, Carle quickly concluded he was not even a member of Al-Qaeda. But the more he told his bosses they were wrong, the more they insisted he use stronger techniques.
I broke laws. I stole. I lied every day about almost everything: to my family, to my friends, to my colleagues, to everyone around me “It was the supreme challenge of my professional life, possibly my life,” he said. “I had to oppose the orders of an administration whose actions corrupted the flag I had sworn to serve.”
Now he has decided to tell his tale — the first account from an interrogator who had to carry out the orders of George W Bush’s administration. It has been a two-year battle to get his story out during which the CIA removed 40,000 words of a 100,000-word book, The Interrogator, that he has written.
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Last week, in what may be just a bureaucratic coincidence, Eric Holder, the US attorney general, announced he was closing inquiries into cases of alleged torture of 100 detainees by CIA agents.
To his friends and neighbours in suburban Maryland, Carle was a New England Yankee living in a white clapboard house; a former Ivy League athlete struggling against middle-aged spread and looking after a fragile wife and two children; a man who worked at the State Department and occasionally went on business trips.
In fact he had spent 23 years undercover. “I was a spy,” he now reveals. “I broke laws. I stole. I lied every day about almost everything: to my family, to my friends, to my colleagues, to everyone around me.”
In many ways Carle seems an unlikely spy. He is slightly pudgy in a pink shirt and cotton cargo trousers and is carrying a dog-eared copy of the works of Plato when we meet in the Maryland suburb of Bethesda.
True to his craft, however, he moves us on from our meeting place in a bookstore coffee bar and we walk up and down escalators and along the road, ending up among the blue fish tanks of a Thai restaurant.
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Carle grew up in the Boston suburb of Brookline and studied at Harvard before becoming a management trainee at a big bank. This “stereotypical Wasp” career was dissatisfying, and within a few months he left. “I thought: what is the most challenging thing conceivable, mentally, intellectually, emotionally, even physically? I know — I’ll be a spy.”
He found himself suited for what he calls “the grey life”. In Carle’s view a good spy “is an unusual combination of the most goody-two-shoes, upright, principled people who are then trained to subvert everyone else’s principles”.
His parents were horrified. “I quickly regretted having told my mum, who’s a highly educated woman ... For the longest time I couldn’t convince her that my colleagues weren’t going round murdering children.”
When he fell in love he had to tell the agency before the girl. She was British and working in Paris. “To the agency she was a very subversive, dangerous individual because she’s not an American, she’s a Yorkshire farmer’s daughter,” he says.
“I had to inform work before her that I wanted to marry her, as they had to do a background investigation of her. The rule is I must submit my letter of resignation and the agency will either accept it or reject it, depending on the results.”
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He decided, much as he loved his job, that if the CIA said he had to resign to propose, he would. “You give so much up in this life, so much, I wouldn’t give that up.”
It took six months to be given the all-clear. He then took Sally to a romantic restaurant. “It was clear we were having a very important evening and I knew she was anticipating the obvious conclusion of this, which was a proposal,” he says.
“But I had to propose this way. I said: Sally, there’s something very important I want to ask you but you have to listen to me first and I don’t want you to say anything because you will need to think. She’s thinking: he’s going to say he’s gay, or has a small penis, or who knows?”
He told her: “I’m not really what you think I am. You know me as a diplomat but I’m not, I’m actually a spy. I work for the Central Intelligence Agency and I do different things.”
“She was literally speechless,” he recalls.
He told her: “I’m going to ask you to spend your life with me but it’s not a normal question. It means only you and I will be together for the rest of our lives. We can’t talk about what I do, we’ll always be separated in some way from people we know and it can be really hard. I will disappear and you won’t know where I am and I won’t be using the same name and won’t tell you what I’ve done — and it will be like that for 30 years.”
His first overseas posting was to Costa Rica in the 1980s as part of the effort secretly to arm the Nicaraguan contras. Most of the people he was working for were indicted in the Iran-contra scandal that besmirched the Reagan administration.
He turned down an assignment to the war in Bosnia in late 1995 because it would have meant leaving his wife alone with their baby son and two-year-old daughter.
In the four years before the attack on the twin towers in 2001, he was head of the agency’s Afghanistan team working out of the United Nations and knew far more about Bin Laden than most agents. But his career and personal life faltered. His wife had health problems and, as he juggled home and work, he made mistakes.
One night after working till 3am, he forgot to spin the dial on the combination lock of his safe. Then he left a briefcase of operational notes at a meeting of foreign intelligence officers. He was moved to non-operational work at Langley, trapped there even after 9/11.
“I was devastated that I was not playing as active a role in our work hunting Bin Laden as I would have wished,” he says.
So when he was given the unexpected opportunity of helping an interrogation in October 2002, he called his wife and told her it was an important assignment for his career — and his country.
The couple had known several of the 9/11 victims. Carle knew John O’Neill, the former FBI director for New York, who was crushed at the base of the first World Trade Center tower. Sally knew two young women caterers incinerated in the top-floor Windows on the World restaurant.
He told his family he was going to Paris. His daughter, then eight, gave him a note saying: “Daddies are a good thing to have. They love you.”
It was: you will do whatever it takes, do you understand? It was: be aggressive, pressure him . . . By late 2002 the CIA had established a series of “black sites” outside US jurisdiction in countries in the Middle East and eastern Europe where torture was common practice. Morocco was one of the most notorious and it was here that the CIA had taken Captus.
Although Carle did not name him in his book or identify him to me, I have established that Captus is Haji Pacha Wazir, the owner of a network of agencies for hawala — the traditional method of informal money transfer — in Karachi and across the Middle East. He had been kidnapped off the streets of Dubai, and the CIA was cock-a-hoop. To the agency he was the top Al-Qaeda financier — Bin Laden’s banker.
Captus was about 45, with a heavy paunch. He was not how Carle had pictured a terrorist. “I found him unremarkable, normal looking with the gut of a sedentary man,” he says.
“I wanted to get in Captus’s head and convince and lead him to co-operate,” he says. Through an interpreter he told him: “We can do anything we want ... No one knows what has happened to you. You have just disappeared; 3,000 of my countrymen are dead in part because of you.” But Pacha kept insisting: “I know nothing.” Within a week the CIA agent became convinced he was telling the truth.
This was not what Carle’s bosses at Langley wanted to hear. Under pressure from an administration that was receiving thousands of reports of potential terrorist threats, the agency was desperate to deliver Bin Laden, whom Bush had demanded “alive or dead”. What it saw as Pacha’s intransigence was exactly why enhanced interrogation techniques were needed.
“They never said hit him on the side of the head or stand him upside down or hang him from his ankles,” says Carle. “It never was that. It was: you will do whatever it takes, do you understand? It was: be aggressive, pressure him . . .
“The end goal theoretically is to ‘psychologically dislocate’ the individual, and by doing so you make him malleable and susceptible to manipulation and willing to share secrets that he would otherwise not share. That’s the theory. How do you accomplish this? There are the physical measures and psychological measures.”
Carle was convinced that physical techniques did not work. “The CIA’s own training manual stated: ‘In general, direct physical brutality creates only resentment, hostility and further defiance’.” He refused to engage in the physical measures, but “we weren’t in direct control as it was our liaison hosts who held the guy”.
Every so often Pacha would be sent “into the desert” for a few days. On his return Carle found him subdued: “There were no signs of anything I could see ... Does that mean they just locked him a room and left him alone for two days? I don’t know.”
The Moroccans refused to tell him. “They wouldn’t answer and they made it clear we couldn’t press. As important as this guy was to my life and in my operation, he was just one operation in the relationship between two entire intelligence services and two countries. So we queried to the extent we could but we never knew. We just said: that’s fine — nothing bad.”
Frustrated at the lack of progress, headquarters told Carle that it wanted to send Captus to Hotel California, the most notorious black site. The name was from an Eagles song that warns: “You can check out any time you like but you can never leave.” Carle was horrified, but his protests fell on deaf ears.
It was 2am when the “ghost plane” landed at Rabat airport to take them. It “appeared out of the sky, very low, very close ... I had not seen or heard anything until the very last seconds before it landed”, Carle recalls.
“Doors opened. Men emerged and fanned out in bustling, silent, efficient activity around the plane. They were intimidating. A lone black ninja figure came out last. He wore a balaclava covering his entire face except for his eyes. His jumpsuit was blousoned inside heavy boots and he carried an M4 [assulat rifle].”
To Carle’s surprise the ninja turned out to be a woman who up close was “petite and fine boned”. She told him she was running the rendition.
Hooded and shackled, Captus was taken onto the plane. The flight was silent the whole way. When Carle walked to the back of the plane he found Captus motionless. A Council of Europe investigation into renditions asserts that in some cases tranquillizers were forcibly inserted into the rectum.
They landed at what was known as Point Zero — Kabul, epicentre of the war on terror. Hotel California was on the outskirts of the city, east of the airport. It was reached by driving through apocalyptic ruins with minefields all around.”
Dimly lit with bare bulbs, the base bustled with local staff and agents and was littered with radios, cables, laptops, overstuffed filing cabinets and half-drunk styrofoam coffee cups. The only relaxation was to drink at the Jihadi Bar, a room where country music played and a picture of Bin Laden decorated the till.
When Carle next saw Captus he was in a cell measuring 10ft by 6½ft with a heavy steel door. It was freezing cold but he had only a small blanket. When he said what had happened to him, Carle apologised. The CIA has redacted an entire chapter of details from his book. All he can tell me is “he looked appalling”.
Physical abuse was only part of it. “The psychological methods were the standard environment at Hotel California,” says Carle. “The noise, extremes of temperature, sleep deprivation, time distortions, continuous white light or darkness, the diet, stripping, hooding, isolation. All used to disorient and psychologically dislocate.”
There was no hope of establishing any kind of rapport with Captus, who began lying about who he knew. “The whole operation had become sordid. Almost everything we were doing to him was wrong.” But rather than admit its mistake, Langley had his mentally handicapped brother arrested in Germany and interrogated.
In December 2002, three months after he had first met Captus, Carle was moved on. He spent his last night in Afghanistan writing the bluntest cables of his career, urging that both men be freed and denouncing the regime at Hotel California. His station chief did not send them.
He thought of complaining to the CIA inspector-general but “I was just one officer on a really important operation which was one of hundreds in the entire national security establishment of the US in what it perceives to be wars. What can one individual do that accomplishes anything?”
Haji Pacha Wazir remained in US custody in Afghanistan for eight years, one of the so-called “ghost” detainees. He was released last year after a lawsuit against the US government. He lives near Jalalabad.
Why, only now that he has retired, has Carle chosen to tell his tale? “I’m one of the few people who has first-hand involvement and experience of what we have done to ourselves and how we harmed our own values,” he says. “I’m not making amends. Maybe I’ll be destroyed for this because there are hostile parties already trying to discredit me. You kill the messenger — we all have clay feet and they will say he’s a malcontent, he’s a failure, he’s on the make. But I really felt obliged to write this.”