Talking to Strangers

1. James Mitchell recalls the first time he saw the captive Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, or KSM, a senior Al Qaeda official. Mitchell is a trained psychologist whom the CIA recruited to aid in interrogations after 9/11. Over the next decade, Mitchell and his colleague, Jenson, would interview many terrorists, but KSM, whom Mitchell describes as “brilliant,” was by far “the biggest prize.” Had KSM not been captured, it’s likely that many subsequent attacks would have followed 9/11.

While KSM eventually disturbed his interrogators with lurid accounts of violence he had committed, he was not always so forthcoming. When he was first captured in March 2003, in fact, he refused to talk. Interrogators who tried to get KSM to open up by being friendly were unsuccessful. Later efforts to get through to KSM by forcing him into physically uncomfortable “stress” positions, too, failed.

When the CIA recruited Mitchell and Jessen to interrogate KSM, they employed highly controversial techniques called “enhanced interrogation techniques,” or EITs, which critics refer to as torture. Ethical ramifications aside, Gladwell argues that the interrogation of KSM is an apt example of “the most extreme version of the talking-to-strangers problem,” where the stranger is a terrorist who will do anything to withhold his secrets.  

2. Prior to their involvement with the CIA, Mitchell and Jessen worked as psychologists for the Air Force’s SERE (Survival, Evasion, Resistance, Escape) program, which trains military personnel in how to respond to being captured by enemy forces. The typical training exercise involved local police arriving unannounced and transporting soldiers to mock prisoner-of-war (POW) camps. There, they would be led through a series of trials meant to simulate the experience of being subjected to torture and interrogation.

Mitchell was in charge of designing the SERE program and sometimes had to participate in training procedures himself. One such procedure involved the interrogator threatening the captured subject’s colleague. According to Mitchell, men are more likely to fold in this situation, whereas women remain silent. When Mitchell was paired with a woman in this SERE exercise, she refused to talk, and Mitchell was placed in a fifty-five-gallon drum. The drum was sealed, placed in the ground, and covered in dirt. A hose attached to the drum emitted water that slowly filled the barrel. When Mitchell was removed an hour later, the water had risen to his nose. Mitchell notes that many trainees were placed in the barrel, which was then a part of SERE’s standard course.

3. The training exercises Mitchell and Jessen designed for SERE formed the basis of the CIA’s “Enhanced Interrogation” program. Asked to assemble a list of the most effective interrogation techniques, the men placed waterboarding, wailing, and sleep deprivation as the most effective measures for getting people to talk. Waterboarding is a technique where the detainee is placed on a hospital gurney that is tilted 45 degrees, with the detainee’s head lower than their body. A cloth is placed over the face, and water is poured into the mouth and nose, which mimics the sensation of drowning.

In their interrogations, Mitchell and Jessen strive for compliance—for detainees to volunteer information of their own volition. KSM was a complicated case, Mitchell recalls, since the severity of his crimes meant he would never leave prison and, thus, had no incentive to share information. It took three weeks of heightened interrogation techniques for KSM to break. However, this would only be the beginning of Mitchell and Jessen’s troubles with KSM. 

4. Gladwell shifts focus to a psychiatrist named Charles Morgan’s research on PTSD. Morgan was interested in learning why some veterans develop the illness and others do not. He went to a SERE school at Fort Bragg, North Carolina to conduct his research. As Morgan observed the trainees being interrogated, he was shocked to see them respond to their pretend interrogations as thought they were real. One man even broke down in tears. Morgan realized that what was so troubling to the soldiers “was the uncertainty of their situation.” Knowing this, Morgan instructed the soldiers to take the Rey-Osterrieth Complex Figure drawing test, which assesses participants’ ability to reproduce a particular image from memory. SERE students excelled at the test before their interrogations but failed afterward, which suggested that the trauma of the interrogation caused their prefrontal cortex to shut down. 

Morgan’s findings were troubling, since the purpose of interrogation was to get the subject to open up, not shut down. Another troubling finding was that post-interrogation SERE students had trouble with facial recognition. In one test, 20 out of 52 students misidentified the man who ran the training camp and ordered their punishments. After 9/11, Morgan began working for the CIA. He tried to impress upon his colleagues the significance of his findings, which suggested that information that detainees shared under stressful circumstances could be misleading and downright deceptive. When Morgan heard about Mitchell and Jessen’s methods, therefore, he was understandably concerned.

5. KSM’s first public confession occurred on March 10, 2007, during a hearing held at Guantánamo Bay. KSM confessed to serving as Operational Director for Sheikh Usama Bin Laden for the 9/11 operation. He continued in this manner, confessing to each Al Qaeda operation in which he’d been involved. The confession was a victory for Mitchell and Jessen. Yet, the question remained: just how much of KSM’s confession was actually true? As Morgan’s study of the cognitive effects of trauma in SERE students suggests, the torture to which KSM’s interrogators had subjected him could have compromised his ability to be objective and accurate. There didn’t seem to be a terrorist plot that KSM didn’t confess to, and officials suspected he was lying to exaggerate his status as an accomplished terrorist.   

Gladwell concludes the chapter with a meditation on the fragility of truth. Learning strangers’ secrets—and talking to strangers in a broader sense—is a complicated task that people must approach “with caution and humility.” Gladwell wonders how many of the conflicts he has covered thus far might have been avoided had the people involved heeded this advice.