The Interrogators: Task Force 500 and America's Secret War Against Al Qaeda [Paperback]

Chris Mackey (Author), Greg Miller (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: May 12, 2005

An unprecedented look at the front line of the war against terror: the inside story of five American interrogators, thousands of prisoners, and the race for the truth. More than 3,000 prisoners in the war on terrorism have been captured, held, and interrogated in Afghanistan alone. But no one knows what transpired in those interactions between prisoner and interrogator--until now. In The Interrogators, Chris Mackey, the senior interrogator at Bagram Air Base and in Kandahar, where al-Qaeda and Taliban prisoners were first detained and questioned, lifts the curtain. Soldiers specially trained in the art of interrogation went face-to-face with the enemy. These mental and psychological battles were as grueling, dramatic, and important as any in the war on terrorism. We learn how, under Mackey's command, his small group of "soldier spies" engineered a breakthrough in interrogation strategy, rewriting techniques and tactics grounded in the Cold War. Mackey reveals the tricks of the trade, and we see how his team--four men and one woman--responded to the pressure and the prisoners. By the time Mackey's group was finished, virtually no prisoner went unbroken.

Product Details

• Paperback: 528 pages
• Publisher: Back Bay Books; First Edition, First Printing edition (May 12, 2005)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0316011533
• ISBN-13: 978-0316011532
• Product Dimensions: 5.5 x 1.2 x 8.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.1 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.4 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (8 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #734,680 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

9 of 10 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars informative and datailed, but very biased, December 26, 2005

By 

Kill Osama (NH) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Interrogators: Task Force 500 and America's Secret War Against Al Qaeda (Paperback)

The book does a very good job explaining what it is Army interrogators do and how they operated in Afghanistan. The term "intelligence" is thrown around a lot these days and it is very interesting to read about how this information is actually gathered from enemy combatants. If you are interested in reading about modern intel-gathering techniques applied in the war on terror, I would definitely recommend this book.

However, I only give it three stars because of its horribly biased point of view. The book chronicles the experience of one of the co-authors/Army interrogators, Chris Mackey. Throughout the book he takes shots at every other relevant organization involved in the War on Terror including Army Special Ops, the FBI, Marines and MPs, and the CIA (referred to in the book as OGA: Other Government Organization). You can tell that he sees US Army interrogators as the end-all, be-all of the intelligence gathering community in Afghanistan. He is especially critical of the CIA, although he admittedly had no concept of their facilities, operations, or abilities in Afghanistan during his time there. There are a couple instances described in his book where he and his MI colleagues intentionally get in the way of the CIA agents' work, which I found incredibly disconcerting, because it was that sort of thing that allowed 9/11 to go down to begin with!

If you can get past Mackey's ego and general disdain for anyone that doesn't wear an MI patch on their arm, then it is a pretty good read. It is definitely not a balanced or all-encompassing account though, so I would supplement your reading with a couple other selections. Ghost Wars by Steve Coll and First In by Gary Schroen are both excellent selections. Between these three books, any questions you had about the war in Afghanistan should be answered in more than enough detail.

6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Not what it says it is, but interesting anyway, June 11, 2006

By 

David W. Nicholas (Van Nuys, CA USA) - See all my reviews
(TOP 1000 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: The Interrogators: Task Force 500 and America's Secret War Against Al Qaeda (Paperback)

This is one of those books that is, on its face, deceptive about what it is and what it covers. The cover of the book shows what's apparently the shadow of a special forces operator, wearing a boonie hat and carrying a non-standard assault rifle, walking as part of a patrol. Because of this you might expect some combat in the narrative, some action or something, but there's only one real combat scene in the whole book, the author never fires his weapon, and the narrative of tbe book recounts activities that are only tangentally related to combat. The back of the book says it reads like a suspense novel, which I take issue with also: it's not boring, but it's not suspenseful either. Instead, it turns out to be rather intriguing.

Chris Mackey (a pseudonym) was in the Army reserves for most of the 90s, having joined the army at 17 and learned first German, then Arabic, and been trained as an interrogator. By the time of Operation Enduring Freedom (the campaign in Afghanistan) he was a Sergeant First Class in his unit, and a tax advisor in civilian life, working in London. He's recalled, and the plot takes off as the author and his comrades are transported to Kandahar, where they begin to interrogate various Afghans and Arabs who've been taken into custody, trying to figure out if they should be kept, kicked loose, or sent to Guantanamo for further interrogation.

The heart of the book recounts the author's experiences as primarily an administrator of this interrogation unit while it operated, first in Kandahar, later in Bagram. There's discussion of the tactics used during interrogation (including a list of "approaches" taught by the army's school on the subject) and of the evolution of their tactics and attitudes towards what was allowed during interrogations and what wasn't. As time goes on, the author's unit loosens its restrictions on the tactics that can be used to interrogate subjects, and their whole attitude towards what they're doing and who they're interrogating changes.

The author has several opinions which aren't likely to be completely popular. He considers the Other Government Agency (to all appearances the CIA) a bunch of incompetent fools, and thinks the FBI only marginally better. The techniques taught the interrogators at Fort Huachaca (where the army based itself when hunting Geronimo in the later 1800s) were some of them useless, or only of marginal value. The interrogators were trained to work on soldiers from the Soviet Army or one of its Warsaw Pact Allies, but events conspired to have them interrogating Taliban and Al Qaeda fighters who didn't wear uniforms, have rank, or react anything like European soldiers. As a result, the interrogators learned on the job, and got much better at what they were doing as they progressed. Of course, at the end of the book, they're all replaced by guys from a new unit, and the new commander refused to take any advice from the experienced soldiers, because he knew better. As a result, the author and his comrades saw what they had learned go to waste.

I enjoyed this book, and it dealt with a topic with which I'd never dealt with before, much. Interrogation of enemy prisoners is an esoteric art, and one which I think would merit further study, especially with regards to the Middle East and the sensibilities of the people there. It's an interesting book, anyway.

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars True Unsung Heroes, July 14, 2008

By 

Herbert L Calhoun "paulocal" (Falls Church, VA USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: The Interrogators: Task Force 500 and America's Secret War Against Al Qaeda (Paperback)

In addition to being an interesting read, this book is salutary in that it confirmed that the abuses of Abu Ghraib and the other archpelago of U.S run prisoner facilities, far from being useful to intelligence gathering and bringing more "heat" down on the likes of Al Qaeda terrorists, were damaging both to the long and short-term interests of the U.S. It also restored my faith in the professionalism of the average American soldier and intelligence operative, and confirmed that no right thinking operative would have been caught dead condoning such outlaw tactics.

As the author notes in the introduction:

"It may be impossible to grasp fully how destructive [these] actions were - to the reputation of the intelligence corps, to our country, and to the world hoping for better from those who wear the army's uniform."

Later in the book the author raises additional interesting points that make equal good sense: that the more prisoners hate America, the harder they are to break; and the more the populations where Al Qaeda hides out hate us, the less likely its citizens will be in helping to lead us to suspects. But almost equally as important, the book points out that the converse is also true: When the U.S. proves to be more civil than the terrorists indoctrination has led them to expect, the more quickly that indoctrination and their anti-U.S. worldviews break down. And of course once broken down -- whether through benign or hostile methods -- the more willing they will be to assist us.

This point was dramatically drilled home on page 426, when after being "broken," a prisoner responsible for helping to store and transport Ricin (an essential ingredient for chemical weapons) for possible use against the USA was asked why he decided to talk. His answer was that once he realized that hostile questioning was the worse the Americans were going to do, he decided it was time to reconsider which side he was on.

The author makes one other telling point in the book's summary: He disavows the commonly accepted notion that "monstering" does not work, because in fact it does work. As he notes in the epilogue to the book: It should not be used because, in addition to the reasons cited above, it is also wrong; violates international norms of civility; and undermines every value that America stands for.

One can gather from this, and from the subtext of the book that interrogating prisoners is as much a "seat-of-the-pants kind of art" as a science; and thus must of necessity evolve along with the nature of the conflict and the culture of the prisoners interrogated. Although trickery and deceit does often indeed work, the brutal and sadistic tricks popularized in the movies apparently do not, and often are never even tried by the professionals. In the end, the author likens the process to that of finding the correct pieces to put a big jigsaw puzzle together. The advantages almost always goes to the skilful interrogator, in that the prisoner, unlike his interrogator, has no way of knowing what slivers of information he might inadvertently "give up" will be valuable to putting the whole puzzle together.

It is equally true from the subtext of the book that in order for such information to be useful requires not only innovative tricks, developed on the fly, but seamless information processing up through a robust chain of the military and intelligence command. And while the 911 Commission Report demonstrated conclusively that what we have is far from ideal, this book shows in excruciating detail how incompetence at either end of that chain can hurt our efforts at catching and removing the terrorists threat. A litle too much description of scenery, but still a truly great read: Five stars