Chapter Twelve

I HAVE SEEN men so scared they defecate themselves. I have seen men who are about to die get an erection. But I have only ever seen one man so terrified that he did both at the same time.

He was a prisoner at Khun Yuam, the CIA black prison hidden in the lawless jungle along the Thai–Burma border. As I mentioned, I went there as a young man because one of the guards had died in questionable circumstances and, given the nature of the dark arts that were practised within its walls and the high value of its prisoners, any unusual death had to be investigated. That was my job, as raw and inexperienced as I was.

The military guard who died – an American of Latvian descent known as Smokey Joe – was an unpleasant piece of work, the sort of guy who would break your arm then knock you down for not saluting. He had been found floating in a back eddy of a roaring river and, while somebody had gone to a lot of trouble to make it appear that he had fallen from a dilapidated rope footbridge, I wasn’t convinced.

I chose a CIA interrogator from the prison’s staff because he was about the same size as Smokey Joe and, without telling him why, asked him to accompany me to the bridge. A dozen of his colleagues and an even larger number of guards walked with us, everybody expecting me to explain my theory of exactly what might have happened. Instead, I had a long length of elasticized rope. Too worried about losing face in front of his colleagues, the CIA guy barely objected when I tied the rope around his ankle, secured the other end to a thick wooden beam and told him to jump.

Five times he either made the leap or we simulated someone pushing him, and we quickly established two things: it would have been impossible under those conditions for Smokey Joe to have left a smear of blood I had found on a boulder halfway down and – second – the interrogator didn’t have much stomach for makeshift bungee jumping.

The splash of blood meant that the guard would have had to be hurled off the footbridge like a javelin and, on account of his size, it would have taken two men. It wasn’t hard to narrow down the suspects – the bridge was only used by prison guards going to buy cheap booze at a smugglers’ camp on the nearby border or opium couriers avoiding military patrols on the highway. I opted for the opium couriers.

For several days I camped under a rocky overhang near the bridge with six Special Forces soldiers attached to the CIA. It was just before dusk on the fourth day when we heard someone coming – a tough guy with a fair bit of Montagnard tribesman in him by the look of his face. He was barefoot and shirtless, a long scar from what was probably a machete running across his ribs. Over his shoulder he had an old M16 assault rifle and a filthy Mickey Mouse backpack. Inside it, undoubtedly, were bricks of No. 2 opium wrapped in rags, starting their long journey on to the streets of America and Europe.

He was whistling an Elton John number through stained teeth when the Special Forces guys jumped him. ‘Crocodile Rock’ died in his throat, the M16 fell, he didn’t have time to get out his long-bladed machete and he stared at me with a mix of defiance and hatred. Two minutes of listening to his glib story about only rarely using the trail and being in Chiang Mai a week ago and I knew he was lying.

I decided to take him back to the cinder-block prison, where I thought a few days in the crushing heat of one of the solitary-confinement cells might make him more cooperative. The CIA guys, most of whom liked Smokey Joe because of his willingness to hit prisoners without being asked twice, had other ideas. They didn’t feel like wasting time by interviewing him or asking a young guy from The Division if they could take over the interrogation.

Deciding to use what their manuals coyly called ‘enhanced interrogation techniques’, they filled a large concrete bathtub in a corner of the prison hospital. Only when the water was almost at the top did a couple of guards drag in the courier – blindfolded, shackled hand and foot.

Almost immediately I wished I had told the agency guys it was my case and to get the hell back to their cages. Sure, you can convince yourself the rules of life are different when you’re working in the national interest, but this wasn’t even remotely connected to that. When I look back I think I was overawed or I just wanted to be part of the team – the psychology of the small group, as the experts call it. Whatever it was, to my shame, I said nothing.

Stripped to his threadbare underpants, eyes covered, the courier had no idea where he was or what was happening, so he was already close to panic as they lashed him face up to a long length of board and lifted it off the floor.

Four of them – obviously well-practised in the technique – carried it over the bathtub and tilted it backwards so that his head, all except his mouth and nose, were in the water. He tried to fight – to no avail – and it was clear from his gasping breath he thought that, any moment, he was going to be lowered another couple of inches and drowned.

Two more of the interrogators took up a position on either side of his struggling body. One slapped a towel over the prisoner’s mouth and nose and, once it was firmly in place, the other swamped it with water from a large bucket.

The water took a moment to soak through the fabric then went straight down the courier’s inclined throat. The water in his windpipe combined with the sensation of a wave hitting his face convinced him he had been plunged underwater and was drowning. The gag reflex, uncontrollable, kicked in as he fought to stop the water entering his lungs …

The water kept coming. The sense of drowning erupted into even greater terror and the gagging became a rolling sequence of spasms. They went on and on until he got an erection, clearly visible through his underpants, and then defecated in the water.

Men laughed, but I stared at him – I felt ashamed and dishonoured, experiencing every spasm as if it were me that was strapped helpless to the board. Some people say that compassion is the purest form of love because it neither expects nor demands anything in return. I don’t know if what I felt that day for a Thai drug runner was compassion, but I can say for certain I had never seen terror like it. All I could think of was that he was probably a better man than most – my parched mouth, panicking heartbeat and sweat-drenched body told me I couldn’t have stood it for half as long as he had. I felt sick.

The agents stopped. They took the towel off his face, left him blindfolded and asked if he wanted to talk. Too distraught to form any words, fighting for every breath, his spastic hands trying to tear at the restraints, he said nothing. The senior CIA guy told his men to put the towel back on and keep going.

That’s when I found my voice.

‘Stop now, or you’ll all be on a charge, ’ I said, trying to make it sound as cold and ruthless as possible. They looked at me, eyeing me up. I had no choice then – I either had to win or be emasculated for whatever remained of my career.

‘I can make it a Critical Incident Investigation if you like. You wanna try explaining what this guy has got to do with national security? Kramer, you want to go first? ’

After a moment that seemed to last a year the senior guy – Kramer – told them to put the towel away and take off the blindfold. The drug courier looked up at me, this tough guy with machete scars who probably thought he had no problem handling pain, and it was pathetic to see how thankful he was. ‘You ready to tell us what happened? ’ I asked him.

He nodded, but he couldn’t stop his hands from shaking – they had broken him, that was for sure. Years later, when the CIA water-boarded Khalid Sheikh Mohammed – al-Qaeda’s military commander – he set a new world record by withstanding it for two and a half minutes. The courier had lasted twenty-nine seconds, which was about average.

Once he had been released from the board and was slumped on the floor, he told us he had been on the bridge with two brothers. They ran the high-country opium lab where the drugs originated and were the ones who had decided to turn Smokey Joe into a human javelin. The courier said he had never laid a hand on the man, and I had the feeling he was telling the truth.

He explained that the guard had developed a nice little earner shaking down the drug couriers as they crossed the river gorge: he’d turned the dilapidated footbridge into Thailand’s first toll road. Initially he had been satisfied to unwrap the raw No. 2 and take a line of shavings off the brick – clipping the ticket, so to speak. He would then trade the shavings with the smugglers for booze, which he would sell at the prison. Of course, he got greedy and the shavings became massive offcuts – so large that the two brothers finally decided that a toll road wasn’t in northern Thailand’s best economic interest.

We had found our answer and, while there would be no Critical Incident Report, we all had to submit our own version of the case to our superiors. I’m sure the CIA’s account said they had only used reasonable force, while mine, of course, said the opposite. That would have been an end to it – who in the intelligence community would have cared about a Thai drug courier? – except there would have been one section of the CIA’s report I couldn’t dispute.

Kramer would have recounted that he saw fear on my face, that it appeared I had felt so much for the man being interrogated that my body was rigid and drenched in sweat. He might even have questioned my courage and whether I was suitable for front-line service. In his own way, he was probably saying that my weight was my heart.

It was that report which Whisperer would have read when he called up my file from the archives. I have had many years to consider my own weaknesses, and I have to say that what Whisperer told me as I was leaving was probably right – for me, there was no point in suffering. End it quick.

I looked out of the window and saw the broad sweep of the Bosporus and the domes of Istanbul’s magnificent mosques. The wheels hit and held on the runway. I was in Turkey.