And the mastermind of 9 11, Khalid Sheikh mohammed. And these captured terrorists gave us information that allowed the cia to round up virtually all the key members of that network and dismantle them and stop the attack they had planned. And today we are honored to have with us the man who interrogated those hot value terrorists and got them to provide that information that saved, saved so Many American lives, thats james mitchell. In the 15 years since 9 11, no one has heard from ksm. Hes been isolated from the world first in cia custody, then at guantanamo bay. But dr. Mitchell has looked directly into the face of evil, and in doing so he came to understand the terrorist mind, what drives and motivates them better than almost anyone in america, because the terrorists told him what drives them and what they believe. And now for the first time, dr. Mitchell is sharing what ksm told him, including his opinions on u. S. Counterterrorism policy, the Bush Administrations response to 9 11, his plans for new attacks and why ksm believes that, ultimately, theyre going to prevail in their war against new york. Dr. Mitchells new book, enhanced interrogation, offers his first person account of the cias terrorist interrogation plan, his personal interaction with the men who executed the worst terror attack this history and people who would do it again gladly if they had the chance. This is the first time that dr. Mitchell, i believe, is speaking in public about this, and so were very honored that you chose to join us at aei. Thank you. Well, thanks for having me. The details of enhanced interrogation have been widely discussed and debated, and im sure we can get into some of those questions. But id like to focus primarily on what youve learned from these terrorists in talking to them. Just so people understand that the conversations youre describing werent happening while he was strapped to a waterboard. Oh, no. Do can you explain the difference between enhanced interrogation, debriefing and what you do in business. Walk us through that. Okay. These enhanced interrogations that i was part of really only dealt with about 14 of the top folks. I didnt have anything to do with the midlevel of lowlevel folks at all. And most of these interrogations took place over a period of time of about two weeks ksms took about three week weeks. And then after that, there was no enhanced interrogation for ksm. None at all. So our goal in doing enhanced interdivisions was to get interrogations was to get them to make some movement, to be willing to engage in questions instead of rocking and chanting and the other sorts of things they had previously been doing. And once they started doing that, we switched to social influence stuff because we know that the real way that you get the cooperation that you want is not by trying to coerce it out of em, its by getting them to provide the information in a way that they dont feel particularly pressured to do it. And we had to be very, very careful when we were doing enhanced interrogations not to ask leading questions. We werent interested in confessions, you know . I dont ever know, in fact, i dont know ive dealt with 13 or 14 of the worst ones who i ksm, zubaydah, alnasri, and none of them refused to identify what they had done. So it wasnt we werent looking for confessions, because confessions wont stop attacks. What stops attacks is actionable intelligence. And the way that you could get the actionable intelligence dealt with is by getting through these enhanced interrogations, get them working with you so that you can use social influence after that to get the information that you want. Because, so what we did was we moved very quickly to debriefing. And the way that worked is for the cia, interrogation was questioning a person who was deliberately trying to withhold information and was hostile about providing it. And it usually involved at least the possibility of some eits, although we didnt you might be authorized to do eits for 15 days, but we wouldnt do eits for 15 days. As soon as they started working with us, we moved away from it. And then after that we would gradually bring the subjects Matter Experts in because im not the guy to be asking the questions. The guy you want asking the question is the expert on whatever the question is that they have. So we would bring in, in one case, the person who wrote the president s prbs president s daily briefs, because he had questions that he wanted to ask. So wed bring in other people, and we would sit in there with them and help them without any kind of coercion at all to ask the questions that they were hoping to get. And then once the person was completely able to meaning the detainee was willing to engage with the debriefer, we got out of it, you know . We stepped back. We might still monitor, we might still go in in the beginning to see how things were doing, but you need your wmd experts asking about wmd. You know, Jim Mitchells not the guy to be making up intelligence requirements. Thats done by huge numbers of experts who are experts in the field. What i, what i think is almost irrelevant. They would give me briefings on who these people were, intensive briefings on what was expected before we did it. So we had interrogations which usually took about two weeks. And then the entire rest of the time they were with the cia they were never subjected to eits again. Never, all right . So ksm had three weeks of eits and then never again. Not even when they were trying to find out the location of bin ladin. Not even when they were trying to get information to identify the courier. And we knew he was lying to us. We did not use eits on him. If it wasnt an attack, jim wasnt interested in doing it. You know in and since i worked for them, they werent interested in doing it either. They dont want to beat people to find out where somebodys hiding, all right . So there were interrogations, which were short, then there were debriefings when you dealt specifically with intelligence requirements. Then there were variety of other meetings we had with the detainees. In my book i call them maintenance visits because thats what the cia called them, but we had great concerns about these guys once they started working with us getting sour because they were in isolation. So we would just stop by and play board games with them or go to the Basketball Court and play basketball, go the to the gym and lift weights, watch a movie with hem. You wouldnt think that listening to what people say on tv about what we did. But, in fact, we did a lot of that. And ksm is one of those guys, hes like yoda. He likes to sit there and talk. So you might go play basketball with one, but you wouldnt do that with ksm. He wants to tell you things. And he had two kinds of things that he did. He had a dry erase board, and he looed to lecture. And so he would we would go and listen to him lecture so hed have something to do when he wasnt servicing intelligence requirements, and occasionally something useful came out of that. The other thing he liked to do when we came around and said how you going things, hed like to sit and talk to you about whatever was on his mind. And he thought he was a sufi. I guess he still thinks hes a sufi, and so hed like to tell you about his religion. And what i do in my book is i take all of the things theyve told me over the six, seven, eight years, whatever it was from the beginning, and i bring them all together in one place and talk about it in one setting. But those things that i write about in the book, those things that i write about in the book are not one session where we sit down and we have somebody on a water with board asking them to water board asking them to tell us about their religion. That wouldnt have worked, and thats not what we did. So eits took people to a state of resistance to cooperation primarily. Well, not they never fully cooperated, or did they . I mean, they always had secrets that they were going to protect. There was nothing that we could have done to ksm to get him to tell us bin ladens location. But he told us, inadvertently by lying tell that story. Because theres been a lot of story who have said cia Interrogation Program had nothing to do with the operation to get bin laden, they lied to you, they resisted, they misled you, you got nothing of value, it was actually other means that got us to bin laden. Right. Tell that it is true that ksm lied to us. Whats not true is that we didnt know what that meant. It is true that abdul farage lied to us, but it isnt true that we didnt know what that meant. Ksms nephew, after eits were done, all right, were now in the debriefing stage, the tells us that, well, you know, ksm told me that ahmedal kuwaiti delivered a letter to farage appointing him the chief of external operations. So now were interested, right . Because if he delivered a letter from ubl to farage, we believe that they dont know where he is because in 2002 ubl went underground. There was just a few people. But here weve got a guy whos saying there was a courier using his abu name who delivered a letter from ubl to farage. So we go to ksm, and ksm says, no, no, no, no. That guy used to work for me, hes a protege of mine, hes an associate of mine, but he retired in 2000. He doesnt know what hes talking about. We go back to his neff i few, and he said nephew, and he says, hes lying i dont know what that little guys doing, but hes lying to you. So we think, wonder why ksms lying . Could this guy be important . What most people dont know is we had, they had established a secret way to communicate with each other, the detainees had. So ksm cold get messages could get messages out to the troops. What he didnt know was that we knew it, and we left it there because we wanted to say what he was saying to the dub we wanted to know what he was saying to the troops. So we asked him about alkuwaiti, and he said, you know, hes quit. Then he puts in a secret mentioner whatever you do, dont tell them about the courier. So what we are thinking is, that guy has to be important. Because here is a relatively cooperative guy who some people would say probably experienced the worst that you could experience in terms of eit who was willing to risk going back to that to protect the identity of this one corier. Courier. So originally they god abu farage, the guy who got the letter, and he said, i never heard of that guy. I dont even know who youre talking about. There was never a guy like that. But we had been asking all of these other detainees about him. And so we had hassan ghoul, for example [inaudible] a facilitator that worked with ksm, high level, you know . Okay. He goes there could be two, three, maybe more people working with bin laden, you know, hes disappeared, hes got a small group of people. It could be him, it could be him. After ei ts its him, he does this, he moves letter, he moves people, he works for him. It made it clear that this other stuff was just a smoke screen and that this was the case. Also we had a detainee who said, well, one of bin ladens wives not his youngest one who bin laden had with him one of bin ladens wives gave farage a letter to deliver to bin laden. So youve got to be thinking, i wouldnt be giving him a letter delivered by my wife if i didnt have some sense that he could actually get to her. And so all these little clues kind of fell into place. And then the brilliant men and women at the cia who are analysts and targetters were able to put it together. There was a partialtrue name for the courier that was already in the database out there. But we didnt know how important that was or how to find him. But i interrogated the shortest interrogation that ever tooking place, less than ten minutes, a guy by the name of abu whereaser, and after that when he moved to almost immediately into debriefing, he said guy that youre interested has a peach impediment. Speech impediment. When he talks, he talks in arabic and pashtun. The agency was then able, through means, to find out where that guy who spoke hike that lived. Like that lived. And then the question is, how do we because we knew he was living, wed been told he was likely to be living with bin laden, staying with bin laden. Because, essentially, he had no outside contact. And so then what they did was try to figure out whether or not bin laden was staying with this guy. And thats the process that happened. So it wasnt the case that, you know, somebodys hands were taped to a Steering Wheel and somebodys cutting their fingers off with it was hard work that was done on the part of the cia analysts to piece together this matrix of stuff, some of the actionable intelligence. Some of the actionable intelligence becomes actionable only when its placed in the greater context of what you know from everybody. Senator mccain and other people say we already had the name of the guy, we got it from somebody who wasnt in the program, and we would have gotten this information without eits and without this program anyway. Yeah. The problem with that is when you roll up a detainee in the beginning, they would say tell us everyone that you think usama bin laden knows, and they would run off a hundred names. And theres nothing about a single name that highlights their importance. So its like picking up a phonebook and saying to call somebodys name in the phonebook, we should have known hes the guy that was going to rob the gas station. Thats just not the way it works. You need something, some cue to take you to that piece of information, to highlight that guys importance. And another thing, unless im confusing this its clear in my book, but unless im confusing it up here on the stage, the guy who gave them his name thought he was dead. Right . They thought he was dead. And it was the smart, clever work by the cia analysts who was able to determine that, no, this guy us confusing him with his brother or Something Like that, and the guy he actually identified was still alive. So in hindsight, its easy to its like doing one of those little labyrinth puzzles, you know, backwards. In hindsight, its easy to put because you know where theyre at, you know where the cues are. But the people who put this thing together not the interrogators, but analysts who put this thing together were brilliant. To be able to get back into that intelligence database and hunt hard and piece together this matrix that led to him was amazing. The analogy, mike hayden, former cia director, uses is its like putting together a puzzle with tens of thousands of pieces, but you dont are the picture you dont have the picture on cover of the box. And the detainees provided the picture on the cover of the box. Is that a fair the only two detainees were denying that alkuwaiti was probably ubls cure yore were courier were ksm and farage. So most of us nobodys heard from ksm since the 9 11 attacks. Most weve seen of him weve never seen an interview with him the most weve seen is that disheveled picture of him after he was picked up. That was his actual capture photo. What was ksm like . Well, in the book i call him a devil and a diva. You know, in the beginning he was belligerent, you know . He was really belligerent. He i did heres what you need to know about ksm. Ksm, for two or three days, was held in pakistan, and he was questioned or tried to be debriefed by cia officers. And in a standard, noncoercive like you would debrief an asset, right . And they tried tea and respectful conversation. One of them dressed up in pakistani dress and spoke, you know, perfect and so, and that guy, ksm described to me later, was a clown. And most of the time, i dont believe he was, but ksm thought he was. Most of the time ksm rocked and prayed and quoted the quran and acted belligerently. And thats the lesson here for today. Ill interrupt this thought. Some people are saying you can get more out of these highlevel detainees with food and a little bit of drink, but that didnt work with ksm. He wasnt he told me im not going to give up my god. Im not going to turn on my god for a handful of dates, you know . What are you thinking . Because thats when he was describing the other person. Then after that he went to a place that in science reports you call cobalt, and he was treated badly there. Then he came to us. But in each case, he had an opportunity before eits to answer the question with no coercion at all, just provide some information with no coercion. So i did the way it works with us, me and dr. Jesup, is we would do something we called a neutral assessment in the beginning. And that was i would just come in and talk to you and say this is the kind of information we want. So with ksm i said we need information to stop operations. We know you dont have all of it, but we think you have some of it. We have reasons to suspect you have people on the ground in the United States, we have reason to suspect that you have other operations in the works. He looked at me and told me, you might hear from me when i get to washington d. C. Midnight cowboy, george bush and talk the my lawyer. And i said, well, thats not going to happen, you know . I asked several different ways, and then he looked at me and says, soon you will know. Im asking him about these other guys. Soon you will know. And then i go into this in great detail in the book because i dont want to waste your time going into it now. But basically, i had this little spiel that we used which is id say in every mans life there are moments of opportunity. There are times when the decision you make forever changes your future. And you cant go back. I want to be sure that you understand that this is one of those times. You have until i walk out of this room to work with us. We know you dont know everything. We know that there are people out there that are doing things in your name, and you may not know precisely where they are, but you know something. And were interested in that something. And so the next time you see one of us, things will get rougher. But before that happens, youre going to be given the opportunity to answer this question. And so we asked him the question. And then the next time he comes out before eits start, they asked him that question. I mean, just asked him that question. Its called a bridging question, and the whole point of the thing is to give him a chance to think about it. Does that answer that sure. So once he went through, he was belligerent and resistant, and then once he went to a state of cooperation, what was he like . Convincingly charming. He reminded me of yoda. It was like visiting a sufi master, you know . Everybody thinks hes pure evil, and he is pure evil. But what i used to tell the folks who would come after eits were over, right . I would tell them sometimes you rub the devils belly, sometimes you poke him in the eye. Were in the bellyrubbing stage with ksm. We wont be doing any eyepoking. People would come in and think they needed to be perry mason or that they needed to be some kind of tough debriefer or almost an interrogator. None of that was necessary unless you got sideways with him. If you got sideways with him, heaven help you, you know . Because he i havent seen this much raw brain power in one place since the last time i sat in his cell with just him. He is probably the bri