Mitchell and Jessen gave KSM the full treatment for three weeks. Finally, he stopped resisting. But KSM’s hard-won compliance didn’t mean his case was now open-and-shut. In fact, the difficulties were just beginning.
4.
A few years before 9/11, a psychiatrist named Charles Morgan was at a military neuroscience conference. He was researching post-traumatic stress syndrome, trying to understand why some veterans suffer from PTSD and why others, who go through exactly the same experiences, emerge unscathed. Morgan was talking to his colleagues about how hard it was to study the question, because what you really wanted to do was to identify a group of people before they had a traumatic experience and track their reactions in real time. But how could you do that? There was no war going on at the time, and it wasn’t as though he could arrange for all his research subjects to simultaneously get robbed at gunpoint, or suffer some devastating loss. Morgan jokes that the best idea he could come up with was to study couples on the eve of their wedding day.
But afterward, an Army colonel came to Morgan and said, “I think I can solve your problem.” The colonel worked at a SERE school at Fort Bragg, North Carolina. He invited Morgan to come and visit. It was the Army’s version of the Air Force school in Spokane where Jessen and Mitchell worked. “It was kind of surreal,” Morgan says. The Army had built a replica of a prisoner-of-war camp—the kind you might find in North Korea or some distant corner of the old Soviet Union. “I had a tour of the whole compound when nothing was running, so it was this really foggy, gray morning. It reminded me of some war movie you’ve seen, showing up in this concentration camp, but no one’s there.”
Morgan went on:
Each cycle of training always ended with a former POW talking to the class and saying, “This happened to me. You spent three hours in a little tiny cage. I lived in one for four years. Here’s how they tried to play tricks on me.”
Morgan was fascinated, but skeptical. He was interested in traumatic stress. SERE school was a realistic simulation of what it meant to be captured and interrogated by the enemy, but it was still just a simulation. At the end of the day, all the participants were still in North Carolina, and they could still go and get a beer and watch a movie with their friends when they were done: “They know they’re in a course and they know they’re in training. How could this possibly be stressful?” he asked. The SERE instructors just smiled at that. “Then they invited me to come and said I could monitor it for about a six-month period. So every month, for two weeks, I’d go, and I was like a little anthropologist taking notes.”
He started with the interrogation phase of the training, taking blood and saliva samples from the soldiers after they had been questioned. Here is how Morgan describes the results, in the scientific journal Biological Psychiatry:
The realistic stress of the training laboratory produced rapid and profound changes in cortisol, testosterone, and thyroid hormones. These alterations were of a magnitude that…[is] comparable to those documented in individuals undergoing physical stressors such as major surgery or actual combat.
This was a pretend interrogation. The sessions lasted half an hour. A number of the subjects were Green Berets and Special Forces—the cream of the crop. And they were reacting as if they were in actual combat. Morgan watched in shock as one soldier after another broke down in tears. “I was amazed at that,” Morgan said. “It was hard for me to figure out.”
Well, I [had] thought, these are all really tough people—that it’ll be kind of like a game. And I hadn’t anticipated seeing people that distressed or crying. And it wasn’t because of a physical pressure. It’s not because somebody’s manhandling you.
These were soldiers—organized, disciplined, motivated—and Morgan realized that it was the uncertainty of their situation that was unsettling to them.
Many [of them had] always operated by, “I should know the rules of the book so I know what to do.” And I think much of the stress, as I got to know it over time, was largely driven by an internal sense of real alarm, like, “I don’t know what the right answer is.”
Then he decided to have the SERE students do what is called the Rey-Osterrieth Complex Figure drawing test. You’re given this:
First you have to copy it. Then the original is taken away and you have to draw it from memory. Most adults are pretty good at this task, and they use the same strategy: they start by drawing the outlines of the figure, then fill in the details. Children, on the other hand, use a piecemeal approach: they randomly do one chunk of the drawing, then move on to another bit. Before interrogations, the SERE students sailed through the test with flying colors. Being able to quickly memorize and reproduce a complex visual display, after all, is the kind of thing Green Beret and Special Operations soldiers are trained to do. Here’s a typical example of a Rey-Osterrieth figure drawn from memory by one of the soldiers before interrogation. These guys are good.
But just look at what the soldier drew fifteen minutes after interrogation:
In one version of the experiment, Morgan says, after stressful questioning, 80 percent of the sample would draw the figure piecemeal, “like a prepubescent kid, which means your prefrontal cortex has just shut down for the while.”
For anyone in the interrogation business, Morgan’s work was deeply troubling. The point of the interrogation was to get the subject to talk—to crack open the subject’s memory and access whatever was inside. But what if the process of securing compliance proved so stressful to the interviewee that it affected what he or she could actually remember? Morgan was watching adults turn into children.
“I had just been in the compound collecting spit from all the different students,” Morgan says, remembering one incident from early at his time at SERE:
And I went back out because they had now opened the gates, the family [members] are there. They all say hello. And I walked up to a couple of students: “So, it’s nice to see you when no longer under those conditions.”
And I remember some of them went, “When did you get here?” And I was like, “What do you mean, when did I get here? I actually collected spit from you twenty minutes ago. I had you fill out—”
“I don’t remember that.”
And I said, “And I saw you the other night when you were being interrogated.”
And they’re like, “No, got nothing.”
I looked at one of the instructors and I said, “That’s crazy.” And he said, “Happens all the time.” He goes, “They don’t even remember me, and I’m the guy who was yelling at them thirty minutes ago.”
Morgan was so astonished that he decided to run a quick field test. He put together the equivalent of a police lineup, filling it with instructors, officers, and a few stray outsiders.
“The physician for the unit had come back. He’d been on vacation.…I said, ‘You’re going in the lineup today.’ We put him in.”
Then Morgan gave his instructions to the soldiers: “We’re really interested in the person who ran the camp and ordered all your punishments. If they’re there, please indicate who they are. If they’re not, just say, ‘Not here.’” He wanted them to identify the commandant—the man in charge.