THE CIA AND TORTURE: On the Record, Part 1
[In January 1997, under the threat of a BALTIMORE SUN Freedom of Information Act lawsuit, the CIA released the "KUBARK Counterintelligence Interrogation" manual, its 1963 guidebook on Interrogation. The manual offers a documented view of the CIA's interrogation strategies-methods for inducing mental and physical agony.
Total isolation, sensory deprivation, body cavity searches, insufficient or inadequate food, denial of heat in bitter winter or air-conditioning in sweltering summer, and lack of sunlight are detailed in the CIA manual as particularly harsh measures. Is it coincidental that CIA methods of torture are replicated in many of our prisons, particularly in control unit supermaxes?
Such torture strategies also reflect a larger pattern of U.S. violence-from bombing other nations in response to "terrorism" or "non-compliance" to capital punishment, police brutality, and individual hate crimes. Both international and domestic savagery have become disturbingly prevalent-and acceptable-in our country.]
The release of a Central Intelligence Agency guidebook on interrogation arrives in the public domain at an espe-cially crucial juncture in the long-stand-ing debate over the agency's role and mission. This June 1963 document, titled "KUBARK Counterintelligence Interrogation" (KUBARK is a code-word referring to CIA), should be a key piece of evidence in assessing the agency's operations. The manual, which explored methods of extracting information from "resistant" sources and advised torture techniques that were not officially renounced until the mid-1980s, provides a fitting point from which to launch an investigation of the CIA's role in advancing the scientific basis for brutal questioning methods that it has promoted throughout the world.
These methods have recently come back to haunt the CIA, as a stream of media and official reports has exposed extensive agency assistance to foreign killers. In several countries where U.S. intelligence maintained working relationships with repressive security forces, victims and victimizers have reported how the United States, through the CIA, has promoted grave human rights abuses. In two of the more prominent recent cases-the CIA's involvement in Guatemala and Honduras-pressure from human rights groups and some members of Congress has compelled the agency to conduct internal reviews, submit its conduct to the scrutiny of outside investigators, and shed some notorious criminals from its payroll.
In Guatemala, a country that endured decades of dictatorship following the CIA's 1954 operation to overthrow the government of elected president Jacobo Arbenz Guzman, the agency employed until very recently military officers who were responsible for "serious human rights violations such as assassination, extrajudicial execution, torture, or kidnapping while they were [CIA] assets," according to a 1996 report by President Clinton's Intelligence Oversight Board. A March 1997 report by the Republican-controlled House Intelligence Committee confirmed the IOB's findings.
In March 1995, it was revealed that CIA Guatemalan assets were involved in the murders of American citizen Michael Devine and Efrain Bamaca Velasquez, a guerrilla leader married to an American woman, Jennifer Harbury. Fasts and vigils by Harbury and Sister Diana Ortiz, an American nun who was kidnapped, raped, and tortured by Guatemalan security forces in 1989, built interest in the issue and prompted White House assurances that the CIA's involvement in Guatemala would be closely examined and all relevant government documents on the subject made public. None of the materials released to date have identified "Alejandro," an American who, according to Ortiz, advised the Guatemalan military team who brutalized her.
The ordeal of Sister Ortiz, whose body bears the scars of 111 cigarette burns inflicted during her detention, was experienced by thousands of Guatemalans during the 1980s, when a massive program of political torture and murder gripped the country. The military and police agencies responsible received continual assistance from the CIA. In April 1995, investigative journalist Allan Nairn reported that the CIA "has systematic links to Guatemalan Army death squad operations that go far beyond the disclosures" of the previous month. According to current and former officials from the United States and Guatemala interviewed by Nairn, "CIA operatives work inside a Guatemalan Army unit [the G-2] that maintains a network of torture centers and has killed thousands of Guatemalan civilians," and "at least three of the recent G-2 chiefs have been paid by the CIA." A former U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency official in Guatemala told Nairn the involvement was so extensive that "it would be an embarrassing situation if you ever had a roll call of everybody in the Guatemalan Army who ever collected a CIA paycheck."
At least one government official has gone to bat against the CIA's conduct in Guatemala, despite the risks of doing so. In March of 1995, Richard Nuccio-then a White House aide-shared information with Congress regarding CIA ties to Guatemalan military officers implicated in the murders of Devine and Bamaca. In retaliation, the CIA successfully lobbied to have Nuccio's security clearance revoked, effectively destroying his eligibility for high government office. As the conflict came to a head, Nuccio said he was "being hounded out of government service by the CIA for telling Congress what it had a right to know."
In late February 1997, Nuccio resigned to work as a congressional aide. In a letter to President Clinton announcing his decision to quit, Nuccio wrote that the CIA has employed agents guilty of "systematic human rights violations," and warned that "if you do not take decisive steps to bring the agency under control, far graver damage will result to our democracy than the denial of a clearance to one individual."
Nuccio was not the only job casualty of the CIA's Guatemala controversy. In early March of 1997, the Washington Post reported that as a result of the outcry over the CIA's involvement with Guatemalan rights abusers, the agency conducted an "agent scrub"-a purge of foreign informants on the CIA payroll with criminal backgrounds. Since 1994, about 100 informants have been dropped for human rights problems. A disproportionately high number-about 50-were involved in the CIA's operations in Latin America.
In the early 1980s, the CIA played an instrumental role in setting up a Honduran military intelligence unit, Battalion 316, that wreaked havoc on the human rights front. In a June 1995 investigative series, Baltimore Sun reporters Gary Cohn and Ginger Thompson described in detail how the CIA, in concert with Argentine military experts fresh from a decade of "dirty war" against dissidents in their country, instructed Battalion 316 in intelligence matters, including surveillance and interrogation. Cohn and Thompson uncovered close CIA ties to the Honduran officers who maintained secret prisons, directed torture sessions, and commanded death squads that killed hundreds of suspected "subversives," including many union and student leaders.
The Sun series is heavily documented, drawing on scores of interviews with former U.S. officials and members and survivors of Battalion 316. Cohn and Thompson also tracked the U.S. government paper trail on assistance to the unit, and discovered that secret CIA manuals were consulted in training the Hondurans in advanced methods of interrogation. In May of 1994, the Sun filed a Freedom of Information Act request with the CIA seeking release of the documents.
More than two years later, when the Sun threatened legal action, the CIA released the manuals. One of the documents, titled "Human Resources Exploitation Manual-1983," summarized CIA interrogation training given to military personnel from several Latin American countries and repeated many of the psychological torture strategies outlined in the 1963 manual.
Reading the disturbing methods detailed in the manuals, it's easy to see why the CIA preferred that the documents remain classified. While most of the 1963 manual is now available to the public, significant portions were censored by the CIA prior to release. For example, 8 of the 42 bibliographical entries are completely deleted, as are 4 of the 50 items on the "Interrogator's Check List." On several pages, discussion of the CIA's policy on the use of forcible detention (which the agency has no legal authority for) are deleted (see pp. 6-8, 43-45, 86). The CIA's public affairs staff also refused my request to provide translations of the numerous code-words used in the document, making it difficult to discern the full meaning of passages containing them.
Despite these omissions, "KUBARK Counterintelligence Interrogation" contains new details on several secret CIA endeavors, including the agency's mind control research. Like the recent media reports on the CIA's ties to murderous security forces, the manual fills significant gaps in the history of U.S. foreign policy. As no previously released document has done, this manual places the CIA's hostile interrogation strategies on the record.
The Coercion
Continuum
The methods outlined in the interrogation manual indicate that the CIA has given considerable thought to designing optimal means of making people talk. The tactics stretch across the full continuum of coercion, from mild mind games to harrowing tortures. The ideal interrogation described in the manual is methodical, comprehensive, and meticulously planned. It is broken down into distinct phases, tailored to the personality of the subject, and conducted by a sizable squad of specialists-including an interviewer for thorough screening of the subject, a polygraph operator to check for lies, an audio technician to man the tape recorder in the "listening post," and, in extreme cases, an expert hypnotist or a doctor to administer drugs.
The manual divides the tactics into two categories: coercive and non-coercive. Before describing the gentler tactics, the manual reminds the CIA interrogator that "the non-coercive interrogation is not conducted without pressure. On the contrary, the goal is to generate maximum pressure, or at least as much as is needed to induce compliance. The difference is that the pressure is generated inside the interrogatee. His resistance is sapped, his urge to yield is fortified, until in the end he defeats himself" (p. 52).
Interrogators should recognize that even before questioning begins, many subjects will be in a jarred, vulnerable state, the manual states. "Interrogation, as both situation and process, does itself exert significant internal pressure upon the interrogatee as long as he is not permitted to accustom himself to it" (p. 40). The pressures of arrest, detention, and questioning set the stage for "rapid exploitation of the moment of shock" by the interrogator (p. 66).
The frightened subject can be manipulated with any one of an assortment of tricks, the manual advises, such as the time-tested "good cop, bad cop" routine. Deception can prove especially useful, as when interrogators produce forged confessions and edited tape recordings to make the subject think his associates have already spilled the beans, thereby removing a key reason to withhold information (p. 70).
Many of the tactics labeled "non-coercive" are nonetheless cruel, such as the "Alice in Wonderland" method detailed on p.76. The aim of the technique "is to confound the expectations and conditioned reactions of the interrogatee"; it is "designed not only to obliterate the familiar but to replace it with the weird." For the subject barraged with "double-talk questions" and "illogical" statements, all sensible points of reference begin to blur: "[A]s the process continues, day after day if necessary, the subject begins to try to make sense of the situation, which becomes mentally intolerable. Now he is likely to make significant admissions, or even to pour out his whole story, just to stop the flow of babble which assails him."
Confusion is presented as a reliable weapon for the interrogator. "The capacity for resistance is diminished by disorientation," the manual notes, suggesting that "the subject may be left alone for days; and he may be returned to his cell, allowed to sleep for five minutes, and brought back to an interrogation which is conducted as though eight hours had intervened." The effect will be to "disrupt the source's sense of chronological order" (pp. 49-50). As the subject tries to retain a grip on reality, "thwarting his attempts to do so is likely to drive him deeper and deeper into himself, until he is no longer able to control his responses in adult fashion" (p. 77).
This orchestrated regression is the objective of the more severe methods in the manual. Recommended for use on "resistant sources," the coercive tactics focus a psychological attack with the goal of driving the subject into a childlike mental state:
." . . these techniques . . . are in essence methods of inducing regression of the personality to whatever earlier and weaker level is required for the dissolution of resistance and the inculcation of dependence. . . . As the interrogatee slips back from maturity toward a more infantile state, his learned or structured personality traits fall away in a reversed chronological order, so that the characteristics most recently acquired-which are also the characteristics drawn upon by the interrogatee in his own defense-are the first to go. As Gill and Brenman have pointed out, regression is basically a loss of autonomy (p. 41)."
Among the methods listed for fostering the "calculated regression of the interrogatee" are solitary confinement, sensory-deprivation, and the use of threats, pain, drugs, and even hypnosis, which is thought to have unique attributes:
"Under favorable circumstances it should be possible to administer a silent drug to a resistant source, persuade him as the drug takes effect that he is slipping into a hypnotic trance, place him under actual hypnosis as consciousness is returning, shift his frame of reference so that his reasons for resistance become reasons for cooperating, interrogate him, and conclude the session by implanting the suggestion that when he emerges from trance he will not remember anything about what has happened (p. 98)."
There are hints in the manual about what lies at the harshest end of the CIA's coercion continuum. On p. 8, the manual refers to CIA policy on authorizing the most brutal tactics mentioned, stating that "prior Headquarters approval at the KUDOVE level must be obtained for the interrogation of any source against his will and under any of the following circumstances:
1. If bodily harm is to be inflicted.
2. If medical, chemical, or electrical methods or materials are to be used to induce acquiescence. 3. [deleted]." This deletion caused National Public Radio commentator Daniel Schorr to remark: "Can you imagine what kind of horror that was, to have the CIA excise it even now?"
The most spectacular case on record of the CIA's use of the manual's methods is that of KGB defector Yuri Nosenko, whom the agency kept in solitary confinement for three and a half years beginning in 1964. The manual counsels that Soviet defectors "are often RIS [Russian Intelligence Service] agents" sent to mislead the United States (pp. 16, 43). The infamous CIA counterintelligence chief James Jesus Angleton, whose suspicions resulted in Nosenko's detention and interrogation, believed the former KGB man was just such a plant. As a result of Angleton's paranoia, the CIA would force the would-be defector to prove his sincerity by withstanding years in a torturous environment.
Attempting to force a confession from Nosenko, the CIA imprisoned him in a specially built isolation cell at Camp Perry, the agency's secret base near Williamsburg, Virginia. There Nosenko's guards denied him reading material, human contact, privacy (his cell was constantly monitored), sufficient food, and for extended periods, heat, air conditioning, and sunlight. Nosenko's movements were limited to those he could conduct in a 10 x l0-foot space. His attempts to build playthings out of napkins, matches and pieces of lint were quickly frustrated by the CIA men, who would allow no such diversions. Nosenko's discomfort and boredom were interrupted only by abusive interrogations, which were often accompanied by body cavity searches and exhaustive polygraph sessions. He reports that he was given drugs on a number of occasions-including what he believes was LSD. As this manual attests, by the mid-1960s the use of drugs and other means of manipulating the minds of interrogatees had been fully explored by the CIA.
No "plausible deniability" this time. It's all on the record. For anyone probing the dark history of the CIA, the "KUBARK Counterintelligence Interrogation" manual is a must-read. This verbatim transcript is available only through ParaScope.
ParaScope
http://www.parascope.com/
1430 Willamette #329, Eugene, OR 97401/ (541)686-5771 Email:EASTERISLE@aol.com