The Interrogators: Inside the Secret War Against al Qaeda [BARGAIN PRICE] (Hardcover)

~ Chris Mackey (Author), Greg Miller (Author) "Most students slipped quite naturally out of their school uniforms at Immaculate High School in Danbury, Connecticut, and into the country's better universities..." (more)
Key Phrases: senior echo, mobile interrogation team, piss pit, United States, Special Forces, Northern Alliance (more...)

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

This fascinating memoir reports from one of the most crucial and controversial fronts in the war on terror. The pseudonymous Mackey was an interrogator at military prisons in Afghanistan, tasked with sussing out the secrets of suspected Taliban and al-Qaeda members. He and journalist Miller take readers inside the prison cells and interrogation rooms, where interrogators choreograph elaborate mind games and fight epic battles of will with their often formidable captives. Their account's full of the engrossing lore and procedure of interrogation, the thrust and parry of baited queries and cagey half-truths, and the occasional dramatic breakthrough when a prisoner cracks. But it also reveals the squalor and drudgery of the prison camps, the exhaustion, bad temper and frequent ineptitude of the interrogators and the many lapses in the American intelligence effort, especially by the CIA, which Mackey regards as an arrogant, secretive and incompetent organization. Mackey deplores the Abu Ghraib abuses and insists that his unit never violated the Geneva Conventions. They flirted, he acknowledges, with stress positions and sleep deprivation, but this was nothing, he claims, beyond what army recruits and the interrogators themselves routinely endured; their main weapons seem to have been veiled threats to return Arab prisoners to their homelands, where they would face real torture. The book, which was vetted by the Pentagon, will not settle the questions surrounding American treatment of prisoners in Iraq and elsewhere. But it does give a vivid, gritty look at the pressures and compromises attendant on this unconventional war.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

Product Description

In a narrative that reads like a spy thriller, Chris Mackey takes us inside a small team of American military interrogators confronting an enemy unlike any other they had ever seen--in a war not of missiles and tanks, but of sleeper cells and suicide bombers. Mackey reveals how his team managed to crack some of the hardest cases they encountered, creating highly sophisticated ruses and elaborate trickery to bluff, worry, and confuse their opponents into yielding up precious information. He tells as well of mistakes made: blown interrogations, abuses against prisoners, and failures of American intelligence. THE INTERROGATORS is a riveting memoir that lifts the curtain for the first time on the hidden backstage of America’s war against terrorism. --This text refers to the Paperback edition.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 512 pages
• ISBN-10: 0316871125
• ASIN: B000F5FNTS
• Product Dimensions: 9.2 x 6.1 x 1.7 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.6 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 3.9 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (37 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #1,280,360 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

13 of 14 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Face to Face with al Qaeda, February 11, 2005

By	L. Kelly (Lakewood, CO) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

This review is from: The Interrogators: Inside the Secret War Against al Qaeda (Hardcover)

"The Interrogators" recounts author Chris Mackey's time spent as an interrogator at a U.S. Army prison facility in Afghanistan in the days right after 9/11. His job was to interview captured Arabs and try to determine which ones could give valuable intelligence information. What was really interesting to me, though, was the author's descriptions of the war in Afghanistan and the methods used to interrogate the prisoners. The beginning of the book describes the training that Mackey received in the Army's language school, and also touched on some of his training in interrogation methods.

While other Amazon reviewers have commented negatively on this book for its lack of military detail, I enjoyed this book for the fact it isn't full of military acronyms and jargon like several other books I've read written on the war on terror. To me, this book almost read like a fictional spy thriller. I can recommend this book to other concerned citizens who are interested in learning more about how the US gathered intelligence on the war on terror. I'm glad that I read it.

9 of 11 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars A Nice Start to the Story..., October 30, 2004

By	Patrick Devenny (New Jersey) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Interrogators: Inside the Secret War Against al Qaeda (Hardcover)

Most Americans, when they think of "interrogation", think of the extreme. They think of hanging people up by their thumbs, vicious beatings, and steel eyed thugs taking out their frustration in dimly lit concrete rooms. The truth is so much more complex, so much more psychological. A good example of this is the story of The Interrogators, the Army interrogation units that went to Afghanistan early in the war against the Taliban and Al-Qaeda. Told by one of their members, the story is exciting and also very insightful. One great thing the book offers is a never seen before look into the ins and outs of Army interrogation procedure. To anyone interested in these nuts and bolts, this is a magnificent read. Author Chris Mackey paints a picture of confusion, mismanagement, and stunning bravery on the part of the members of the armed services. Their prisoners, a motley mix of Muslim fighters from all over the world, proved to be a challenge for American soldiers unskilled in the art of interrogation in the midst of an insurgency.

The author was hardly a well honed special forces or CIA interrogation expert. He was a member of the army reserve who had completed instruction at Army interrogation school and also learned Arabic. He went to school in the late 1980's, in a time when the U.S. Army was preparing to take on a massive Red Army invasion of Europe. The instruction was totally different from what Mackey would be faced with in Afghanistan. Still, this, to me, was the best part of the book. For those of us not fortunate enough to have attended intelligence school, this is the next best thing. The methods, the rules and the many intricate characteristics in breaking the will of a man makes for fascinating reading. What people do wrong, what they do write, it is such a fine line that one is surprised that anyone passes the school. Mackey adds an appendix section that makes for great reading concerning the 16 standard tacts taken by interrogation units in the field.

Mackey was in Great Britain when the towers were hit. I was touched by his recollection of the friendliness shown to him by his English neighbors. Anyway, he and his unit are quickly tapped to go to Afghanistan in order to process the dozens of new captives brought in by the blitzkrieg like assault on Taliban Afghanistan. The initial effort to get them there and task them was unwieldy and scattered at best. The area around Khandahar airport was still rife with fighters of all stripes, so the atmosphere was relatively tenuous. You feel for Mackey and his men, as the living conditions for the soldiers are rustic at best. The climate of Afghanistan was hardly forgiving, giving the whole experience an added sense of hardship. Slowly though, even under the most egregious of conditions, the process of moving the prisoners and effectively interrogating them begins to form in an orderly manner. Still, the fact that Americans were not allowed to physically do anything to their prisoners was a constant drawback. It is interesting to see how abhorrent physical abuse is to US Army military intelligence, you might as well shoot the prisoners. Eventually though, the Army began to take steps that danced around the line between physical abuse and discomfort. It was really fascinating to read the different opinions on the actual effectiveness of these methods, too often simplified in more popular media.

While The Interrogators is an interest study of military intelligence of late, I felt like I was reading the first, and the least detailed book that would be released on the subject. The book has some good stories and even better insight, but it still felt hopelessly thin at many points throughout. Still if you want a better understanding of what military intelligence people have done of late, this is probably as good as place as any.

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars a truthful look at early interrogation in Afghanistan, January 19, 2007

By	Joe Sherry (Minnesota) - See all my reviews (TOP 500 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)

This review is from: The Interrogators: Inside the Secret War Against al Qaeda (Hardcover)

The Interrogators by Chris Mackey and Greg Miller is a first person account of Army interrogators just after September 11. The book is written from Army Reserve Sergeant Mackey's perspective and through his eyes we learn about some of the training interrogators go through and then their experience in Afghanistan. Mackey discusses the various interrogation methods used by the Army and how strictly they stayed to the Geneva Conventions even though President Bush declared the Conventions did not apply.

Mackey served his year in Afghanistan from the start of that war and he notes in the book what was not permissible when they began the war was acceptable when his war ended and he notes in the epilogue how he views the slippery slope from the mild forms of interrogation his unit engaged in could become Abu Grahib years later. The methods Mackey viewed as the last resort became the starting point for the interrogators who came after.

The Interrogators is not simply a narrative of Mackey's career. It focuses as much or more so on the other interrogators in the unit and the men and women Mackey led in interrogation. He discusses technique and what sort of resistance they faced from prisoners and how advanced some of the resistance techniques were.

This is an engrossing book and at times I wondered if he should be sharing all of this, but I imagine most of the reading public will not be interrogated by the Army and even knowing the game that is being run does not make one immune to it.

Either way, The Interrogators is an excellent book about Army interrogation and while it cannot dispel the image of the brutal interrogation tactics Iraq has been known for, it does show a different side of interrogation...not a kinder, softer side, but one which has respect for the law and for the Geneva Conventions. It also shows the stress and the exhaustion interrogators put themselves through.

Worth reading?

Absolutely.

-Joe Sherry