THE COMPLEAT INTERROGATOR

Here are some of the talents and traits of character that a good interrogator must have:

• General knowledge of all the other disciplines of CI

• Experience in analysis of file material • A working knowledge of psychology

• Understanding of himself and control of his own emotions

• Some acting ability, with an actor’s sense of timing • Patience

The person who enjoys hurting is a lousy interrogator in even the most human situation. But the humane person who shrinks from manipulating his or her subject is also a lousy interrogator.

Think of interrogation as a kind of judo. Judo works on the principle that you turn your opponent’s strength against her. She charges at you, and you use her momentum to flip her on her ear. But you have to know what her strengths are, or you can’t do it. And you have to know how to make her charge.

The interrogator, like a priest or a doctor, must have a tal- ent for empathy, a personal need to communicate with other people, a concern for what makes other people tick even when he is putting maximum emotional pressure on them. His anger, his indignation, his disgust toward his prisoner must always be tempered by the kind of attitude a doctor has toward a patient; he may hate that patient, but he knows how the patient got to be hateful, and he keeps his own hatred off to one side.

Conversely, if he finds the prisoner likeable, he must put his friendly feeling aside. Especially if the prisoner happens to be of the opposite gender and winsome. The number of interroga- tors who have been bamboozled since the dawn of history by the body language and appealing manner of pretty prisoners is, to be precise, 43,123,465; in the time it has taken to write this sentence, that number has increased by 314.

Incidentally, though we seem to be assuming here that all interrogators are men, the same rules apply to women. Women interrogators are a minority, but those who get into the trade are usually very good, probably because they often have a back- ground in case analysis and detection in which no nonsense is permitted yet have the talent for establishing rapport that men call feminine intuition.

PRESSURE

We said that physical pain is not relevant in interrogation. Anx- iety, humiliation, loneliness, and pride are another story.

When the Chinese in Korea, and the North Vietnamese a few years later, wanted to brainwash a prisoner, they did not use

pain. They used discomfort, hunger, and humiliation, combined with one of the worst tortures of all: solitude. When, after a few weeks alone in a cramped cell, you are hungry and have no toilet paper, no toothbrush, no way to fight the lice and fleas, no sense of how much time has passed, no blanket against the night chill, and nobody to talk to, you are putty in the hands of the first person who says “Good morning. How are you feeling? I need your help.”

Not you, you say? Try it some time. You will acquire knowl- edge about that basic trick of the CI officer’s trade called inter- rogation. This is knowledge that a CI officer must have to do her job. Why? There are two reasons: She has to prepare people (and herself ) to withstand interrogation, and she has to use her knowledge in effectively doing her own interrogations.

Not all interrogations are in prisons, you say? Wrong. Psycho-

logically, all persons being interrogated are prisoners, or else it is

not an interrogation but an interview or a debriefing.

Your first job, and one that continues throughout every case, is to get on top of all pertinent investigative material and, as the case progresses, to review it continually along with the informa- tion and misinformation you are getting by interrogation. Your files should be your main weapon against your subject. With them you know what you know, and your subject does not know what you know. As interrogation proceeds and the patterns get complicated, the subject usually forgets what he has said and often begins to contradict himself. This process of confusion can be helped along by the interrogator’s planting false ideas of what is in his files.

During the Cold War, the Soviet-dominated intelligence services sometimes mechanized this process by forcing their prisoners to write statements again and again, which were then compared for discrepancies that were used in interrogation as pressure devices.

Your second job is to arrange things so that your subject feels he is a prisoner. The husband in the cartoon coming home from Pressure

+o

a night on the town is, psychologically, the prisoner of his irate wife. He has no place to go and he has to answer up. If he walks out or tells her to go to hell or gives her a good thrashing, she has failed as an interrogator, at least momentarily. The next morning may find him back at the doorstep (back in prison) and repentant, in which case she is on the way to succeeding.

This means you must interrogate on your own turf. If you have to work on your subject’s turf, take charge of it. Put a guard on the door; have an assistant come in and out with a visible notebook or tape recorder; move the furniture around so that you have the most comfortable chair; give yourself room to walk around, but keep the subject sitting.

You’ll think of other tricks to fit your immediate situation. Use them to make your subject feel isolated, cut off from his or her normal environment, alone with only you to talk to. Re- member that every normal person is conditioned from child- hood to want to converse. That need to talk and have somebody respond, and to respond to somebody else is built into what we call human nature.

Your third job in an interrogation is to make your prisoner act on his or her urge to talk to you, if only to lie. Remember, you are being paid to be lied to. So your problem is to figure out what makes your subject tick. Examples:

• Pride: Is she proud of her work? Then get her to

correct your misconceptions about it. Let her teach you, lecture you, sneer at you for your ignorance, but keep her talking.

• Shame: Is he ashamed of something he has done?

Then show him gently how he can expiate his shame without losing your respect. Let him indulge his shame and his self-pity, but keep him talking.

• Fear #1: Is she frightened of reprisals from

to protect her. (Do not brag that your service can always protect her; it probably isn’t true, and anyway you may need her anxiety later as a tool against her.) When she has become your partner in planning her own protection (and conspiring against her former friends), she will feel obligated to be your partner in everything else.

• Fear #2: Is he afraid of you and what you may do

to him? Then get him to help you with your job; explain that you do not want to punish him, you only want information, and he must help you avoid having to punish him. Threats must be implied, not stated. Explain that you must, reluctantly, enforce the “rules of the game.”