Customer Reviews

The Interrogators: Inside the Secret War Against al Qaeda

5 star:		(15)
4 star:		(5)
3 star:		(4)
2 star:		(6)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

"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.

As an Army Military Intelligence officer, interrogator, and Iraq War veteran, THE INTERROGATORS is a must-read for anyone wanting to know what it was like literally facing terrorists and then breaking them down mentally to reveal their own secrets in an effort to save lives. Chris Mackey's detailed firsthand account of interrogations of Taliban fighters and Al Qaeda terrorists in Afghanistan during Operation Enduring Freedom is riveting. He sheds light on the shadowy world of Human Intelligence collection, formerly known as interrogation, and doesn't hesitate to go into detail of how interrogations are done, and how prisoners are broken to cooperate without even being touched, much less tortured. As one who knows firsthand how sensitive the tactics, techniques and procedures of interrogation are, I found it very surprising that the Pentagon approved so much of what is written in this book.

Mackey's scathing rebuke of the Abu Ghraib prison scandal in Iraq only highlights the morality of his position against using torture. Mackey explains why torture is counterproductive, and would not have been ordered by interrogators in Iraq, as has been revealed in recent Army investigations. Mackey brings the reader into the interrogation "booth" to face the terrorists, and shows how his small and overworked band of intelligence professionals spend countless hours attempting to twist their emotions inside and out, even to the brink of insanity and exhaustion, to get them to talk. Mackey deserves the gratitude of every freedom-loving person for his selfless sacrifice to face these monsters and make the world a little safer for the rest of us.

"Chris Mackey" is the pseudonym of a senior US Army Intelligence interrogator during the first year of the war in Afghanistan, He relates in great detail his own experiences in confronting captured Afghans and Arabs and trying to discover their true stories, innocent farmers and hardened terrorists alike. Mackey's own intelligence and strong moral sense stand out in his tale, asking hard questions of himself, his comrades, and his country. When we are faced with the certainty that some small number of American soldiers mistreated prisoners in Afghanistan and Iraq, it is important to realize, as Mackey shows, that this was not the standard that most of the interrogators operated by.

Chris Mackey provides us with an intimate day-to-day portrait of what went on in this particular battlefield of the war against terrorism, a battlefield that sometimes yielded small victories because of the skill and dedication of these soldiers enduring long hours and difficult conditions. And he gives us a picture of how men and women react to those conditions, some growing, some eroding. Most importantly, Mackey shines a light on to difficult questions of morality, not giving absolute answers, but forcing us to think about them in a new light. Anyone who wishes to understand the challenges facing us in this shadow world should read this book.

Chris MacKey and his editor Ed Wilcox have produced a fine work documenting the sacrifices of US soldiers whose arcane specialty has been much-maligned by the Abu Graib outrage. While they aren't Delta or the SEALS, MacKey's unit supported operators in numerous high-level operations that you won't read about elsewhere. I'm not sure who reviewed this at the Pentagon but I think they should have taken a closer look...

MacKey, a reserve soldier working happily in London, gets tagged to participate in a bare-bones prison camp operation in Kandahar and Bagram in the first months of the US campaign in Afghanistan. He struggles with Cold War interrogation philosophies, incompetent peers, subordinates with the sharp insight of youth - and not a lot of wisdom and self control, and the everpresent (and apparently completely incompetent) OGA (really another three letter Government Agency, but maybe it will fool you - it obviosuly didn't fool MacKey!)

One of my primary conclusions from this book is that our human intelligence efforts are in a world of hurt if the OGA is even half as incompetent as MacKey makes them out to be. Another is that the Army, in all its wisdom, still hasn't even come close to figuring out how to manage a war that must be executed in cultures that are completely foriegn to our own.

To the detractors on Amazon, you won't find a better description of military life in the field. It may not read like Marcinko, because it is real life, with malcontents, warped genius, and long, boring, and exhausting labor punctuated by the Big Green Machine's lunacy (thanks to the 101st Airborne - which apparently deployed its troops with no ammunition during a nightime assault on MacKey's fire base - duhhh!)

Thanks Chris, for a job well done in the field, and for a refreshing account of a part of Army life that many assume they understand but that few have experienced. By the way, I wish I had read this book before SERE - and I recommend that every SF soldier read it as soon as possible.

If you are a hard-core "military action" enthusiast who craves numbers, codes, in-depth descriptions of combat operations and perpetual dialogue about firearms, this isn't for you. If you are seeking advanced knowledge on interrogation tactics, this book probably isn't for you (although it is fairly detailed in this respect, from a rudimentary level). If you want stories about water-boarding hardened, high level Al Qaeda operatives by 3rd party "rendition" facilities, this ain't what you're looking for.

What this book is is an interesting and well-written read about one function of military intelligence. In this respect, the book is fairly important, as the particular area that's covered in this book (field processing, preliminary interrogation and initial value assessment) isn't covered in depth anywhere else.

This book is one mans perspective from one mans job from one operational area of one war. It's not a "manual" on interrogation, but it is a good read for the layperson who isn't planning on interrogating Bin Laden any time soon and looking for a book that will tell him how to do it.

If Moby Dick gets 5 stars, I give this book 3, but as a "book about how interrogations work in the field", it's probably more like 4 1/2 stars.

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

This book gives a lot of great insight into our military operations in Afghanistan and the challenges our troops face. These are guys, called back into active duty from the humdrum of every day life, who speak Arabic and Farsi with a Berlin's guide in one hand, going up against the most hardened prisoners in the world. They are stretched to the breaking point, exposed to the elements, working 16 hours a day, and learning on the fly how to interrogate in the strange new world of borderless conflicts and international jihad while juggling the latest spin on the geneva conventions.

The writing was crisp and the action flowed smoothly. I felt the CIA bashing was a little overboard at times (gee, there hasn't been any bad blood between the Pentagon and the CIA lately, has there???) but otherwise this was an objective and informative first hand glimpse into the early days of the war on terror.

There are certain details in this book which have been altered in order to protect order of battle, unit identities, and personnel and that is fine, I suppose, although anyone with any minimal effort could piece all of that together and it seems silly to go through the ruse of hiding it; however, that is not what bothered me about the book. What bothered me was that in the earlier chapters, where Mackey discusses his experience with the Defense Language Institute, his enlistment, and training, he is fairly inaccurate, at least based on my own direct experience being in similar programs at the time.

His timeline from enlistment to graduation far exceeds the number of weeks the courses he was taking at the time consumed. He asserts that at the time he did not enter the army because there would have been a six year commitment for 97E, which is the interrogation designator - this was not true at the time, although I will certainly defer and say that recruiters will say anything, so it is entirely possible he was told that. He asserts that during his time at the Defense Language Institute that spouses were allowed to take classes concurrently with soldiers - not at the DLI I went to - unless you were married to a spouse in the Army, in your class.

All of these items on the face of it are exceptionally trivial on the one hand, but sloppy to the point that it makes me really question the validity of the entire book. The same thing happened for me when reading an essay by Joan Didion in Politcal Fictions when in the first essay she describes waiting for an Alaska Airlines 757 to roll-up on the gate - Alaska Airlines doesn't own any 757's. It's the little and easily verifiable stuff that should be accurate - lending overall credibility to a work. It isn't here in the early stuff, so it is hard to take anything said seriously enough to believe we have been given incredible insight into the inner workings of the intel community.

With this said, there are many things that are noteworthy of concern for Americans and their safety. One thing repeatedly mentioned is the fact Mr. Mackey found himself finding co-operation and collaboration with his foreign intelligence peers from the UK and elsewhere. He found less of it from his American inter-agency peers and Army units supporting intel collection. Seems to be a rucrring theme that Americans don't understand the value of co-operation and that is why we went it alone, for the most part, in Iraq.

The other thing Mr. Mackey points out, and I really want to stress this to anyone reading who might be in a position to do something about this, is how poorly American intelligence is equipped in foreign language proficiency. As a graduate of the Defense Language Institute - one who graduated amongst the top of the class, no less - I can strongly assert that my skills upon leaving were not up to par for what is required the seriousness of the mission that requires incredible skill and dilligence.

Whilst basic training and schooling in my specialty took nearly 22 months to complete, upon arriving at my unit, I was dismayed at how there was virtually no up-keep on our skills or insistence that work be performed in our native language. They were far more interested in making us assist the people at the motor pool to collect oil samples and change tires, ie marching up and down the square. As a young and relatively dumb young man at the time, I knew it was a problem, but did not grasp the implications of such folly. The stakes are too high for this not to be addressed.

The reasons for this vary, but I think you can go back to a theme in the book, the Iraq war, and our actions in general - Americans don't co-operate and don't see the value of learning about the world around them. Just look at the foreign language programs we provide to our children in school - what? You don't have one either? All joking aside, the general effort put towards language learning does not occur until much later in life, when your ability to learn and how you learn is much different than if the emphasis was placed at a much earlier age. More distressing though is that for most, if it is required at all, it is a mere 1 semester elective.

It should be read for those with an avid interest, but its style leaves much to be desired.

I think we should have read this book in the seventies in order to avoid the mistakes in our "dirty war". As we know, some Latin America's countries based the doctrine of counterinsurgency in French Doctrine used in Indochina and Argelia. This doctrine is described in some books, such us Modern Warfare written by Col (Fr) Roger Trinquier. He justified in some ways the use of torture in order to obtain information. When Latin America's armies adopted this doctrine, they didn't give the necessary time to see the effects of it. The interrogation under torture could have obtained information; however, the strategic effects in the long term of the torture were disastrous for the legitimacy of the struggle against communism. Moreover, the torture is immoral and is a crime. Thirty years after the war, torturers and the soldiers, who fought the enemy inside the law, were both equally accused for violation of Human Rights.

After this comments, I'd like to continue with the book, Part one is focused in the training of interrogators in the US Army and the British Army. The differences are, in my point of view very important. The main difference is, meanwhile the US Army is trained to fight against a conventional enemy, the British prepare their people to both conventional and unconventional enemies. This part finished with the terrorist attack of 11/ 9 and the built up of the force to fight in Afghanistan.

In Part II we can read about the first operations of TF 500 at Kandahar. Here is described how the interrogation is developed. This part shows us about the ICE (the interrogation control element), the duties of the interrogators and the reports. Three things I've found remarkable in this part. The first thing is how to break deception techniques. The second is about the screening, its purpose and its differences and relations with the interrogation process and its value to select prisoners by their will to collaborate and their information. And finally, the most interesting thing is about the body language and how to use it to know if the prisoner is telling the truth.

The Part III is about the TF 500 in Bagram. Here the authors explain us how to use the mobile interrogation team to support SF and how we can develop an interrogation plan. One of the best chapters is "How far to go". It suggest us the principle of "you must not handle a POW worst than you handle our own troops, however, you should not give POW advantages against our interrogators". Other useful tools to improve the interrogation process is the use of snitches and rumors or PSYOPS.

The Part IV is about the relief of the interrogators and the newcomers' lack of understanding of the techniques learnt by the TF 500.

The appendix is a very good brief of the approach techniques.

The book was written with humor and is very easy to read. It doesn't have too much acronyms. In my point of view, the most important lesson after I've read this book is that the interrogation is an intelligence duel more than a physical one. Moreover, any physical punishment in the interrogation is not only immoral, is a way to admit the lack of skills of the interrogator.

You should read this book. Provides a very good "day in the life" view into US military interrogations and provides a look at some of the techniques used by the US military to extract information from detainees. It also showcases the careful planning and preparation work that goes on behind the scenes in collecting human intelligence. One of the many other items touched on in this book that I found intriguing was the US military relationship with US "Other Government Agencies" (i.e. CIA) and how painfully disconnected "OGA"s efforts were with Military Intelligence early on in OEF. I recommend this book to anyone that wants a clearer understanding of US military interrogation techniques in the early days of Operation Enduring Freedom and the self imposed limits placed on interrogation techniques by Military Intelligence.