In the interview with ABC News’s Brian Ross in December 2007 that made him the first CIA officer to confirm the agency’s torture program, John Kiriakou described a phase of Abu Zubaydah’s detention that has been far less discussed than the interrogation itself. Asked what the prisoner’s value was once he had given up everything he knew about live operations, Kiriakou said the relationship changed character entirely: he became a person the CIA could think out loud in front of.
Bouncing ideas off a detainee
The method Kiriakou described was conversational and hypothetical. Officers would put a proposition to Abu Zubaydah — that a man had been arrested in some European capital, and that the Europeans believed he had been preparing a particular kind of operation — and ask whether that was the sort of thing the man would do. [1] The answers ran both ways. Sometimes Abu Zubaydah would confirm it, saying the man was the perfect person for the job, or that his speciality was bomb-making, or weapons, or false documents. Sometimes he would reject it outright, saying the man had no experience in that area at all and that the CIA should be looking at somebody else instead. [2]
Kiriakou summed the arrangement up as having somebody to bounce ideas off, and confirmed that the agency used him that way a great deal. [3] Asked whether Abu Zubaydah was by then completely cooperative, he said yes — while adding that the prisoner still hated the United States, and that this was consistent rather than contradictory: in Abu Zubaydah’s own framing, it was nothing personal, he was a Muslim and a Palestinian dedicated to the end of Israel, the United States stood on Israel’s side, and there was a war on. [3]
A source that checked out
Asked whether Abu Zubaydah had ever been caught in a lie, Kiriakou said no. Asked about exaggeration, he again said no, and explained why he was confident of it: everything the prisoner said was run down, and there were other sources available to corroborate what he reported — which, he noted, is one of the standard ways of vetting anyone an officer is talking to. To the best of his recollection, Abu Zubaydah never led them down the wrong path. [4]
Kiriakou was also asked whether other tricks of the trade had been used to get the prisoner talking in the first place, and said there had been none, because the alternatives all take a great deal of time and time was the one thing the agency did not have: officers were afraid another major attack was coming, possibly on American soil, and felt they needed to get to the bottom of what he knew quickly enough to disrupt it. [5]