Читать книгу Decade of Fear - Michelle Shephard - Страница 7

“When the going gets weird, the weird turn pro.”

HUNTER S. THOMPSON

Somewhere at Sea: An Introduction

ELEVEN FLOORS ABOVE the churning Atlantic Ocean, with Fort Lauderdale long faded and the island of Grand Turk looming, former Central Intelligence Agency boss Porter Goss is justifying the waterboarding of self-professed 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed. He is using salted bar nuts as a prop.

We are on a mammoth Holland America cruise ship, sitting in a swanky bar called the Silk Den, which is serviced by solicitous Filipino wait staff who stand at ease with legs spread and hands clasped. Sitting to the right of the former spy chief is U.S. General Michael Hayden, the retired head of the American electronic eavesdropping agency, the National Security Agency, and Goss’s predecessor at the CIA. The New York Times once called Hayden the “thinking man’s spy.” Former U.S. president George W. Bush notes in his memoir: “Mike has a calming personality.”

To Goss’s left is Hayden’s wife Jeanine, who nods emphatically at each point made by the former spy bosses, sometimes adding comments, suggesting that perhaps she had been a domestic advisor of sorts. To her left stands Porter Goss’s forty-something-year-old son Chauncey, a mild-mannered fiscal policy consultant who acts as an awkward sentry for our group, appearing as though he will quickly extricate his father if the waiters, or my questions, become threatening.

Over the decade that I have covered terrorism and national security for the Toronto Star, dozens of moments have seemed so bizarre that I later wondered if I had somehow imagined them. This November 2010 evening aboard the “Spy Cruise” is one of those times.

Themed cruises are common enough. Mickey Mouse and Donald Duck have their sea legs. Fitness wannabes Cruise to Lose and gyrate to Richard Simmons before the buffet. Even Elvis impersonators can indulge their passion on the ocean (can you imagine the “Thank Yous” at the buffet line?). So why not mix terrorism and tourism?

Why not, asked Bart Bechtel as he created his SpyCruise® series after 9/11. SpySkipper Bart, as he likes to be called, is a true red-white-and-blue-bleeding patriot who worries that Americans may forget the horror of 9/11 and become complacent in their security fears. Bart was once a CIA operations officer, recruited when he was working in a California liquor store in the 1970s. “I thought, if I can sell a bottle of Jack Daniel’s, I can sure as hell sell America,” he told me on more than one occasion.

I had just returned home from my twenty-third trip to Guantanamo Bay when a friend sent me an email about cruising the western Caribbean. The idea of two former intelligence heavyweights trapped aboard a ship, not to mention the vaudevillian idea of cruising with spies, was too much to pass up.

On the ship of about a thousand passengers, there were only about a hundred of us “spy cruisers”—an eclectic mix of intelligence types, students, “consultants” (including one odd, raspy fellow who warned that if I wrote about him there would be “consequences,” even though I was just making small talk because I felt bad he was sitting alone), and some very sharp and genial retirees. We were given little pins with the U.S. Secret Service symbol embedded into an American flag.

During the days at sea, we sat in a stuffy third-floor conference room listening to terrorism talk, as coffee sloshed back and forth in our china cups from the unusually high swells. On breaks, we discussed the Patriot Act, the trouble with Iran and whether those discreet seasick-remedy patches behind our ears actually calmed the queasiness. In the evening “off-hours,” or at port stops, we were free to be tourists. It always seemed awkward running into the speakers. Stumbling upon Hayden on the Lido deck in his sandals and khaki shorts as he dined with his wife, while bikini-clad cruisers got drunk in a nearby hot tub, somehow felt voyeuristic.

Hayden and Goss were not thrilled that three reporters were on board, but they were generous with their time and had agreed to meet us in the Silk Den that evening. For most of the meeting my friend Colin Freeze, who covers national security for the Globe and Mail, was on the edge of his seat, leaning forward, with a big mischievous grin and his fingers constantly running through his curly blond hair as he talked. Colin was extremely knowledgeable about terrorism issues and had a thirst for security information that bordered on obsession. I liked to tease him that he was the Columbo of journalists, always getting the story, but only by asking questions that jockeyed in and out like a frustrated driver determined to parallel park.

Colin had just called Hayden and Goss “doubting Thomases.” I wasn’t sure where he was going with that angle, but the fidgety Colin certainly had the former spy bosses’ rapt attention. Thomas, the most circumspect apostle, he explained, demanded to see Christ’s wounds before acknowledging that he had been crucified. Could Hayden and Goss still be denying that terrorism suspects were tortured in the Middle Eastern prisons where the CIA had sent them for interrogation (a controversial process known as “rendition”) when it was well documented that prisoners were whipped with cables, beaten, threatened with rape, or held in grave-like cells in those detention centres? Hayden seemed amused but told Colin he was Catholic and the comment was out of line. The CIA, he said emphatically, as Goss and Jeanine Hayden nodded, never encouraged, never acquiesced and never engaged in torture either directly, or with a nod or a wink.

That was when I raised the question of waterboarding KSM.

Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, KSM as he was widely known, was arguably the biggest al Qaeda fish captured by 2010. Junior in al Qaeda’s hierarchy only to Osama bin Laden and Egyptian doctor Ayman al-Zawahiri, KSM was fingered as the architect of the September 11, 2001, attacks. The Pentagon claimed he was also responsible for a variety of other plots, including the kidnapping and beheading of Wall Street Journal correspondent Daniel Pearl. KSM had been held at one of the CIA secret prisons overseas known as “black sites” before his transfer to Guantanamo Bay in 2006. He was an arrogant self-professed murderer and one of three “high-value detainees” who had been interrogated using the CIA’s post-9/11 “enhanced” technique of waterboarding, which means he was strapped on a gurney, his body inclined, his face covered with a cloth while his interrogators poured cold water up his nose for up to forty seconds. The purpose is to induce the sensation of drowning. KSM had undergone 183 waterboarding sessions.

In January 2009, newly elected U.S. president Barack Obama called waterboarding “torture.” Goss, a former CIA officer and Republican congressman from Florida who had been appointed head of the spy agency in 2004, called it “effective.”

“But 183 times?” I asked him. The number was not the point, but it made the scenario seem even more ludicrous.

This is how the bar nuts came into play.

“Do you know what 183 means?” Goss asked.

Out plopped an almond. “One.” A cashew. “Two.” Peanut. “Three.”

It looked so benign while cruising the Atlantic.

Waterboarding predated Goss’s two-year term at the CIA, but he was there in 2005 when the agency destroyed tapes recording its practice. A criminal investigation followed but the U.S. Justice Department did not lay any charges. The CIA said the tapes needed to be destroyed to protect the interrogators. Critics accused the agency of covering up illegal acts.

“Enhanced interrogation techniques” were not used during Hayden’s tenure either, and he closed the black sites and transferred the remaining detainees to Guantanamo in 2006. But Hayden said he was also weary of “self-righteous” criticism and second-guessing.

“I understand there are moral judgments to be made and honest men differ,” Hayden told me on another day, as passengers in tacky Hawaiian shirts strolled past. “What I’m saying, however, is that process resulted in valuable intelligence that made America and citizens of the West safe. So you don’t get to say, ‘I don’t want you doing it and it didn’t work anyway.’ The front half of that sentence is yours, as a human being, the back half of that sentence is based on fact, and the facts are it did work. So the sentence you get to say is, ‘Even though it may have worked, I don’t want you doing it.’ I understand that sentence. It’s a very noble sentence.”

When I later pressed Porter Goss on Hayden’s point, asking how journalists, who were paid to be doubting Thomases, could simply accept their assertions that “harsh interrogations” saved lives, that waterboarding provided actionable intelligence, or that renditions had worked in “Ninety-eight per cent of cases,” Goss looked exasperated.

“We are a clandestine intelligence service,” he said one afternoon as we sat on chaise longues. Then he leaned forward. “Clandestine intelligence. Clandestine intelligence. Clandestine intelligence. Clandestine intelligence. What about that is it that the media doesn’t get?”

The thing is, I do understand the intelligence idiom of “need-to-know” and accept that not everything can be made public. Sources need protection and some interrogation methods do also. And I understand that we rarely hear about successful intelligence operations. We almost always hear about the failures. I also respect the value of good intelligence and have met spies, cops and members of armed forces worldwide whom I greatly admire.

And I am not naive to the horrors of ruthless, radical organizations that do not respect any rule of law. A teenager had his limbs amputated because he wouldn’t join the cause; a thirteen-year-old girl was stoned to death on charges of adultery; and a beautiful pregnant woman from Toronto was widowed because al Qaeda decided to target the World Trade Center. Their names are Ismail, Asho and Cindy.

But I have also seen the power of al Qaeda propagandists and know where faulty intelligence can lead. I have interviewed many men whose reputations were destroyed by false claims of terrorism. Nothing, except perhaps being erroneously labelled a pedophile, is harder to shake. Bush wrote in his memoir that his “blood was boiling” on 9/11. “We were going to find out who did this, and kick their ass,” he wrote. But ass-kicking had consequences. Why did it seem that all too often efforts to make the world safer only made it more dangerous?

Since the evening of September 11, 2001, standing amid the remains of the World Trade Center, I have been envious of those who see issues of national security as black and white. As a journalist, lucky enough to have extensively travelled seeking answers, I have the curse, and blessing, of seeing the world in shades of grey.

As it was for many, 9/11 was the first time I had tried to understand how world events could puncture our own bubble of security. As a twenty-nine-year-old crime reporter for the Toronto Star I knew more at the time about the Bloods and Crips than Osama bin Laden. On September 10 I had written about a sixteen-year-old gun-toting purse-snatcher and questioned why his elderly victim had not come forward.

Everyone has his or her own 9/11 story. Some missed one of the four hijacked flights and would spend their lives wondering why a traffic jam or last-minute emergency allowed them to be spared. Some watched the towers fall and would never be the same again. People remember exactly where they were and how they found out, the event seared in memory like that of the first moon landing, or the assassinations of Martin Luther King Jr. or John F. Kennedy. A friend of mine in Toronto said she ran to her children’s school and brought them home to keep them close.

After the first plane hit, I grabbed my passport and called our assignment editor, offering to go to Manhattan. Running from my downtown Toronto apartment, I hailed a cab to Pearson International Airport, slapped five full-fare Air Canada tickets to LaGuardia on my Visa for the colleagues I thought would follow, dashed from counter to counter as airline after airline shut down, and begged bar owners to turn on the TV so I could see what was happening (they said they couldn’t, citing airport policy). Eventually I ran outside to take a taxi back to the Star; joined two reporters waiting impatiently for me; drove to a border crossing, just getting through before it shut; and arrived in Manhattan, where I was stopped by a frazzled cop who believed in the lovely constitutionally enshrined right to freedom of the press and nodded at our cheaply laminated Star credentials. We raced into the city on an emergency road marked by flares, dumped the car, jogged the more than fifty blocks from our hotel down to Ground Zero, and some twelve hours after that first plane hit, finally stopped at the feet of a firefighter slumped on the sidewalk, who, after hours of searching the gruesome, twisted metal wreckage known as “the pile,” could not move or speak.

Pulverized pieces of the World Trade Center still fell from the sky. A dusty film coated my arms and filled my lungs. For a few minutes, I stood with Star reporters Bill Schiller and Dale Brazao, just looking at the backlit facade of the towers, trying to remember exactly how they had once stood.

The paper blizzard was haunting. At St. Paul’s Chapel on Broadway at Fulton Street, where George Washington had worshipped following his inauguration, the snow-like drift was almost knee-deep. Somehow, the church’s 235-year-old bricks had absorbed the impact of the crumbling towers, but the gravestones in the adjacent cemetery were cracked and covered white with bills, business cards, charred unfinished reports and letters: the contents of thousands of filing cabinets and desktops now blanketing New York. All of it work people had laboured over, or had kept them awake at night, or had caused panic in the morning, and now it was just the debris of the dead.

For a couple of weeks after the attacks, I was one of hundreds of journalists who tried to make sense of the tragedy by telling stories of the dead, the living, the heroes and the villains. Relatives of the missing would press pictures into my hands, their eyes red and puffy, hoping that this young Canadian reporter could help them find their husband, child, lover, sister, mother, uncle, friend, still alive, perhaps with amnesia, somewhere recovering in hospital, or trapped in a pocket of air under the rubble. The struggle each day was not to find a story but to decide which to tell. I carried tissues or napkins with me because people cried openly.

At night, I would walk in a daze back to 6th Avenue and West 44th Street, to the Algonquin Hotel, where seven decades earlier a club of great writers and actors, including the acerbic Dorothy Parker (who famously said, “I don’t care what’s written about me so long as it isn’t true”), met for boozy lunches. I would say goodnight to Matilda, a snotty Persian cat who lolled on the front counter and would accept my pats with cool detachment. After filing my stories, I’d call my husband, Jim Rankin, a photojournalist at the Star, who had been dispatched to Boston, where two of the flights originated. We had left so suddenly it wasn’t until hours after we’d both got on the road that we remembered our poor new kitten—and I called my sister to see if she could look after him. Eventually, I’d crawl into bed sometime after midnight or one or two or three, and turn on ny1, sometimes crying as I watched the footage before falling asleep with the TV on.

There were a few voices preaching about the horrors of American foreign policy and a smattering of joyful rallies around the world celebrating that the great U. S. of A. was finally feeling their pain. But generally there was unprecedented international support. If not empathy, at least there was sympathy, or perhaps just fear about what would happen now that the United States had been brought to her knees.

The good thing about covering 9/11 was that you could do something when others felt helpless. It also provided the comfortable detachment so many journalists relish—writing about reality to avoid it. But in those first frenzied weeks I was just a scribe, recording what people told me, trying to put in words the heartache, or how a sickening metallic stench hung over Battery Park, or what it sounded like when Manhattan didn’t sound like Manhattan. The roar of patrolling F-16s echoed off the skyscrapers, which now looked like looming towers of death. I covered funerals and wrote obituaries before relatives acknowledged their loved ones were gone. All the while the dead watched us, hundreds of eyes looking out from walls and lampposts and restaurant windows and anywhere there was space to plaster the “Have You Seen” posters. It really was no different from the crime stories I had written for most of my career, only on a massive scale.

For the next decade, I went in search of the hows and whys, trying to define terrorism and understand its roots. In Yemen, Osama bin Laden’s former bodyguard explained why he admired one of the world’s most reviled men. In Syria, guards standing outside the notorious Far Falestine prison denied that it was a jail, let alone a place where people were tortured. Interviewing elusive Islamists on the un terrorist list in Mogadishu and Karachi helped me understand just how differently each region viewed the world. It took more than twenty visits to Guantanamo Bay to discover that the world’s most famous detention centre was almost indescribable.

Sometimes I didn’t need to go far. In Toronto, eighteen young men and teenagers were arrested for plotting to blow up financial and government buildings a ten-minute walk from my newsroom. I drank many cups of coffee with the police mole in the case, trying to understand why someone who hadn’t reached puberty before 9/11 would a few years later vow to blow himself up. Comedian Jon Stewart said what many were thinking the night of the dramatic June 2006 Toronto arrests: “You hate Canada? That’s like saying, ‘I hate toast.’”

During my ten years of putting pieces of the national security puzzle together I was never posted to a particular region and always returned to my home in Toronto. Nor was I a war reporter embedded in Iraq or Afghanistan. The benefit I got from the exotic and varied travel—and my return to the Western cities, politicians and public who would often determine the fate of those countries in turmoil—was a global view of terrorism and security. It helped me experience the great divide. It became easy during my travels to see all the disastrous missteps. It was harder to look ahead and see the way forward.

In the media we jump from story to story, from one crisis to the next—If it bleeds, it leads—with brief commercial breaks for philandering politicians, crack-addicted celebrities and a sporting event or two. Trying to understand the aftermath of 9/11 was different. It was a big, ugly, complicated, misunderstood, politically and financially motivated, sometimes humorous, sometimes sexy, sometimes dull, often devastating story.

On this night aboard the Spy Cruise, somewhere in the middle of the Atlantic, I left the Silk Den with that sinking feeling I often had after talking with people in positions of authority, where the underlying, unspoken message was, We know more than you, so just trust us. There is little doubt Porter Goss and General Michael Hayden knew much more about terrorism than I did, but I learned quickly in this beat that the greater the position of authority, the higher the level of skepticism I should have.

I retreated to my eighth-floor windowless “state cabin,” which was neither stately nor the size of a cabin. I couldn’t tell if it was the swelling ocean that caused the hangers in my closet to clang from side to side as I tried to sleep, or if my head was spinning from the evening’s conversation. Either way, I just felt woozy.

Six months after the cruise, Osama bin Laden was killed in Pakistan. So many hard lessons had been learned in the ten years since 9/11 and yet the immediate debate in the wake of his death felt like a step back in time. “Well, that didn’t take long,” journalist Jane Mayer wrote in the New Yorker on May 2, 2011. “It may have taken nearly a decade to find and kill Osama bin Laden, bit it took less than twenty-four hours for torture apologists to claim credit for his downfall.” Enhanced interrogation techniques were once again at the forefront of the news. Former Bush administration officials claimed waterboarding was the reason al Qaeda’s leader had finally been exterminated. I replayed the cruise conversations and still couldn’t help but wonder. KSM was waterboarded in 2003 and bin Laden was killed eight years later. I thought of what had happened in those eight years. Even if KSM had provided a nugget of intelligence (which was later largely discounted) is that what Goss and others called “effective”?

The problem with the national security beat is that the more you know, the more you wonder. All I have been certain about is that “the war on terror” was a ridiculous name for a war in the first place.

This is not a memoir or an exhaustive analysis, but a ten-year trip through the national security grey zone, which ends where it began—at Ground Zero. It is a glimpse at a decade of terror inflicted by both individuals and the state. It is an introduction to the people I met who instilled that terror, and to the victims they left in their wake.