Posted: Fri Nov 19, 2004 12:21 am Post subject: The enforcer
Israel's security service, for 21 years and was its chief interrogator from 1987 to 1993. He interrogated hundreds of Palestinian prisoners, including renowned militants such as Sheikh Yassin, the former leader of the Palestinian group Hamas, who was killed in an Israeli attack this year. He claims that intelligence gained in interrogation has been crucial to protecting Israel from terrorism. He tells Michael Bond that, given enough time, he could make almost anyone talk...
What cut you out to become an interrogator?
It was in my character. It was natural for me. Also I spoke Arabic very well.
What was it about your character?
Being an interrogator is 70 per cent character, 30 per cent learned. You have to know how to use intonation when you speak to a prisoner. You have to let him feel you are the boss, always. Not many interrogators can do that, because they don't have the self-assurance. I was born with that. You have to know instinctively the exact time when to shout, when to speak loudly, when to speak quietly, or when not to speak at all and just sit and look at him - for hours if necessary. These things are instinctive.
How good are you at Arabic and why is that important?
At school I learned Arabic better than other students, even the small nuances. I spoke it with my grandmother, with my parents. I can speak Arabic better than most Arabs. I learned the Egyptian, Lebanese and Jordanian dialects as well as Palestinian. This is very important because many Palestinians have worked all over the Arab world and they might speak, say, Egyptian Arabic better than they speak Palestinian. So when I'm interrogating someone who lived in Egypt they'll think I was actually there. They'll think I know everything about their world. Language is the key.
How does that help you in interrogation?
It's about making them think they cannot hide anything from you. If they live in a certain neighbourhood in Cairo, I will learn everything about that neighbourhood. I will know it like the back of my hand. I will learn the details, the houses, even the trees, everything about it. I will give the prisoner the feeling that I followed him there.
You have to learn everything about him and his background. You have to know about his family, his wife, his children, his friends, his neighbourhood, his city. You have to be better than him, wiser than him. If I interrogate Sheikh Yassin, I have to know about the Koran. If I interrogate a maths teacher, I have to know maths. If you feel your detainee is wiser than you and you cannot stand head to head then you must change interrogators. That has never happened with me.
How do people behave when they are interrogated for the first time?
Every detainee behaves differently. It depends whether he's from the city or the village, or a Bedouin from the desert. It depends whether he's educated or not. Prison is unimaginably different to normal life. People behave in unexpected ways. People who talk tough in public often submit in interrogation.
I once interrogated a Bedouin who said nothing at all for a few days. He was a very tough man. During one session I was playing with a stick, and this idea came to me: I said to him, do you realise there's a snake hidden in the stick? And suddenly he became very afraid. He said he'd tell me anything. This man was used to dealing with snakes in the open, but in a cell it was a different matter.
What's the first thing you do when faced with a new detainee?
It depends on the person. I have a thousand different systems for a thousand detainees. I always have to start alone in the room with him. Sometimes, to make a show, I get other, cooperative detainees to shout outside the door, and when he hears them yelling he gets fearful. Many detainees are young, between 18 and 24. It's their first time in jail and being interrogated, and most of them are likely to do what I tell them. Of course they won't talk about everything at the beginning. Sometimes I'll come in and give him a slap - but only with permission from higher authority.
What do you do when faced with someone who won't talk?
That is my speciality. I know how to do that. It has happened a lot.
How do you do it?
I have many systems. But I do it without using any kind of physical pressure.
Can you tell me about these systems?
No, I cannot.
Can you give me an example of when you've used them?
Once I interrogated a Palestinian man who belonged to Hamas and who I believed knew about the murder of two Israeli soldiers. I had interrogated him once before, when he had said nothing. This time he behaved differently. I looked in his eyes, at his hands, his legs, and he was reacting differently. I assembled my other interrogators, more than 20, in the room, and told them to remain silent. I told them, I am going to show you how to interrogate someone.
Of course he was scared with 20 interrogators there. Then I did a few actions, without physical pressure. I showed him how I knew that he was involved. Suddenly he asked for a cigarette. When a Hamas terrorist asks for a cigarette during interrogation, you know he is going to admit something. I gave him one immediately, before he changed his mind. He asked for another. He smoked 10. Then he said, look I'm going to tell you things you don't know. He told me about all the leaders of Hamas, and about hundreds of others who were involved in Hamas that we didn't know about. He opened the way for us to get at Sheikh Yassin and other Hamas leaders who have been killed by our forces.
How physical are you allowed to get during interrogations, with permission?
Very low levels. It could be two slaps in one interrogation, or to shake him, but not very strongly, or to put a cover on his head to scare him. We have never insulted a person's religion or humiliated them. There is no torture in the security services.
What do you make of the torture and abuse that took place in Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq?
I don't want to judge the Americans. In Gaza we have one security person for every 1000 people. In Iraq they have one for every 100,000. They have no information or intelligence on their detainees. Information is the beginning of interrogation, and if there is none, if there is no language between you and the detainee, sometimes you will use more power. That I presume is what happened in Abu Ghraib.
Have those techniques ever been used in Israel?
Sometimes it has happened, but very seldom, and in these cases the interrogators were thrown out of the organisation. I have no need for those methods. I use only psychology, head to head.
But there have been many accusations.
I know. But these accusations come from detainees who heard screams and shouts coming from neighbouring cells and believed it was really happening, when it was just theatre. The yelling was from other detainees who were cooperating with us.
Did you ever have a detainee you couldn't break?
It has happened, but very seldom. I could count them on one hand.
Why were they so difficult?
They were very primitive people, not literate and not well educated.
Why does that make it harder?
Because I cannot use some of my systems. For example, I cannot show him written papers because he does not know how to read or write. They behave differently. I cannot speak about it. I cannot teach you all my tricks.
Tell me about Sheikh Yassin. How did you interrogate him?
I interrogated him twice, in 1984 and 1989. At the beginning he was totally silent. He didn't answer any questions. Then I said to him, I know you are a religious man, let's speak about religious knowledge. Now, to prepare for this interrogation I had learned the Koran almost by heart. I said to him, let's have a competition. I'll ask you a question about the Koran, and if I win I can ask you another about any subject and you have to answer. He was sure he would know it better than me. But I started asking complicated questions, and he didn't know the answers.
When you are in prison, you forget things. For example, I asked him to tell me the name of the only sura out of the 114 in the Koran that did not contain the letter mim. He didn't know. I asked him how many verses there were in the Baqarah sura, the longest in the Koran. He had forgotten. So I won, and I sat with him for hundreds of hours while he talked about the ideology of Hamas. He even told other detainees to cooperate with me, because he respected me. If he could he would have killed me, but he respected me.
How would you interrogate someone like Saddam Hussein?
The Americans asked me about him. I said I couldn't help them. I don't want to say I can break him, but I'm sure I can. I'm sure I can achieve better results with Saddam than the Americans have, because of my experience.
How would you do it?
He was a leader, he has a lot of experience. He was an interrogator himself, and he killed hundreds of people himself, so it would be very difficult to interrogate him. But there is a way. I have heard rumours that he hasn't said anything.
Did you ever feel sympathy for the people you interrogated because of what you put them through?
Sometimes you can be sitting before someone who is 24 years old and he looks like a nice man. Then he admits to you what he's done and you can change 180 degrees in what you feel about him. It has happened a lot. Sometimes when I'm interrogating someone I feel that I could kill him because of what he's done. But if you want to achieve a result you have to keep your cool.
The point is we are acting against terrorists. If I thought someone was innocent or knew nothing I would release them immediately.
Interrogation can leave people traumatised for years. Can you always justify it?
You can be sure that we never use physical or psychological methods that damage prisoners.
Do you think you could be broken if you were interrogated?
No. I would use the same methods I use when interrogating someone, only the opposite. I would give nothing away. Nothing.
After interviewing Michael Koubi, Michael Bond travelled to the Palestinian territories to meet someone he had interrogated. The woman, who does not want her name revealed, was arrested when she was in her 20s, while trying to smuggle sensitive photographs across the border. She was held in solitary confinement in Moskobiyya detention centre in Jerusalem, and interrogated over the course of a week
What happened when you were arrested?
They blindfolded me and put me in what I presume was a military jeep. They sat me on the floor. There were two female Israeli soldiers with me. They were stamping on me and cursing at me. They shouted at me and encouraged me to curse President Arafat, trying to provoke me. When we got to the prison they took me out of the jeep with the blindfold still on. They took it off only when I was inside. I had no idea where I was. I went straight to solitary confinement.
What was your cell like?
It was about the size of a mattress, with a hole for the toilet. There was no food or water. It had no window, just a small square hole in the ceiling. I used to know whether it was day or night through this. There was a red night light always on.
Where did they interrogate you?
They would come and fetch me from this cell and take me to a special interrogation cell. There was a desk, and chairs. He sat behind the desk. It was just a small room.
Could you describe the first time you met your interrogator?
He introduced himself. He said, I am Captain Koubi. I knew who he was. He was in charge of special services in the Ramallah area, where my village is. I knew he was special services, and that he had interrogated people in our village. So I assumed we were in Ramallah. He never told me I was in Jerusalem.
What did he say to you?
He asked me what my name was. Then he started telling me about people in my village. He drew a map of the town. He pointed to places on the map and said, this is so-and-so's house, this is someone else's house, this is the mayor's house. He made me feel he knew everything about the village. He said, don't hide anything, I know everything.
What did he want from you?
He wanted to know why I took the pictures, whom I took them for, who told me to take them out of the country. I was known in town for being very patriotic, though I was not in any faction.
We had a person living in our village who was in charge of the local faction of Yasser Arafat's Fatah movement. The Israelis hated him. People respected him, he had a very good reputation in the village. He was very old. Koubi told me that they had taken this man and were holding him. He showed me the map and pointed out where he lived.
He wanted to see if I had any kind of relationship with this man. He thought that maybe he had told me to take the pictures and carry them across the border. I said I respected and valued this leader but that I did not know him personally. I don't think I ever spoke to him directly.
How did Koubi question you?
When the Israelis interrogate you, they try to scare you. They try to overwhelm you. It works with some people because they have weak personalities. He asked me the same questions over and over. He wanted me to admit to something I hadn't done. He wanted information from me. He told me that he was going to make me start talking to myself.
Could you give me an example of the techniques he used?
The pictures they found on me when I was arrested were partly of my brother and my mother. Captain Koubi would bring in the pictures and show them to me and he'd say, take a good look at this picture of your mother. This is the last you are going to see of her. You are never going to see her again.
He was intelligent. He knew my father had died and that I was the only child in my family living with my mother, that the others were abroad. He knew how close my mother and I were. He was using this against me. He told me he was frightening my mother. He said, we have brought your mother, we have her in jail, and she is falling apart. He said, I don't know what you're doing to her, how can you upset her like this? It should be OK for someone to make 100 people cry, but you should never make your mother cry. He told me they went to her house and tore it up, and that my mother was there, and when they told her I was in prison she had fallen to the floor.
He was lying, of course, and I didn't believe him. He said she had said things, expressions that I knew she didn't know because she was a villager. Because of that I knew he was lying.
At this point Fadya stops, puts her hand to her face and shuts her eyes. She is quiet, and then she leaves the room and is comforted by a relative who has been sitting with her through the interview. After a while they return. She says she has recovered and wants to carry on. She never says what it was about the interrogation that is affecting her so profoundly, but it is clear that recalling it is causing her distress.
How did Koubi behave towards you?
The first time he interrogated me he was friendly. After that he became tougher. Once he hit me. You cannot really call it a beating, it was just a slap to my face. He would do other things. He would sit in a chair across the desk from me and put his feet up on the desk. The soles of his feet would be in my face so that I felt humiliated. His techniques were more psychological than physical.
He always started the sessions nicely, then slowly as I became more stubborn he became more nervous and tense. He would get angry. I remember once he smoked an entire packet of cigarettes.
He did other things. Once he told me to go into the interrogation room, and he left me waiting there for three or four hours. No one came. Throughout this time I was afraid to move. I had heard about how they abuse women in jail or take abusive pictures of them. I sat with my arms and legs crossed for fear I was being filmed.
Were you frightened during all this?
I gave him no emotion. I wasn't afraid to begin with. If you show you are afraid they take you over. I became stronger. I acted as if an animal was sitting across from me. I didn't believe he was a human being. I said to myself, if you have the mental strength to come through this you'll see these people are nothing. They are just liars.
They think that when they do these things to you they are going to make you afraid or stop loving your country. On the contrary, in jail you learn more things. I always had strong patriotic feelings, I used to hide boys in my house who were in trouble with the Israelis. After my time in jail those feelings were even stronger.
What did you think would happen to you?
They told me they were not going to send me back to my town. I thought, whatever will happen will happen. If I'm going to stay in prison so be it.
How do you think the Israelis knew so much about you?
I later discovered that Koubi had gone to the mayor in my village and asked him about me. The mayor had no idea I was in prison. He thought I was abroad. Koubi asked him what he knew about me and what I did in the village. He replied, this girl lost her father very young, she lives alone with her mother, she is a pre-school teacher. She is a very good girl and very well respected and honourable. Then Koubi told him, no, she is very strong-willed.
What happened when you were released?
The day before I was released Koubi was threatening me, telling me again that I was going to start talking to myself, telling me he was going to put me in a room full of men. He started insulting my honour. So I had no idea I was going to be let out.
The next morning they released me from my cell into a waiting area. There were two other women in the waiting area. It was strange, because during the time in solitary confinement I did not cry once, but when I saw those two women I just broke down and started crying. The older woman said, let her cry, she needs to cry. I was assuming at that stage that the Israelis were sending me to administrative detention. I still didn't know I was going to be released. I asked the women where I was. They said I was in the Moskobiyya detention centre in Jerusalem. I had no idea I was in Jerusalem. I was relieved. I thanked God that I was in Jerusalem.
What was it like when you got home?
When I was released it was the middle of the night and I had to find my way through west Jerusalem, which I didn't know, back to Ramallah and my village. I eventually found a taxi driver in east Jerusalem who offered to take me to stay with his wife in Ramallah because it was so late. I refused because I was thinking about what Captain Koubi had said about him going to my mother's house and tearing it up and hurting my mother. I needed to see that everything was OK.
How was your mother?
She was fine. She had been told only that day that I had been detained. She had thought I was abroad visiting my brother. I knew then that Koubi had been telling me lies about tearing up the house and hurting my mother.
I crawled into the bed next to her. I was hugging and kissing her. My mother said she was worried about my reputation. She was worried that people in the community would be talking about how I had been in jail. There was a big social stigma about women being in jail.
How did the whole experience affect you?
All my efforts were concentrated on trying to forget about it. At the time it was socially very difficult. I didn't tell anybody, I didn't talk about it. Nobody knew what really happened to me. I tried very hard to forget.
Did you manage to forget?
I managed to put it in the past. But recently I began talking to psychologists from the Treatment and Rehabilitation Centre for Victims of Torture in Ramallah and it all started coming back. It's only recently I have been able to talk about it. My children have only just learned that I was in jail. It is very exhausting for me to talk about it.
Do you feel it is something you still need to resolve?
Again Fadya stops for a moment and puts her hand to her head. She does not answer the question, but she indicates she wants to carry on.
What would you say to Koubi if you saw him again?
I'd probably spit on him. I have no respect for him, I hate him. He looks like a nice man, he is quite good-looking. He even carried a Palestinian key ring. But look at what he said about my mother being in the next room. He is a liar.
You cannot post new topics in this forum You cannot reply to topics in this forum You cannot edit your posts in this forum You cannot delete your posts in this forum You cannot vote in polls in this forum
Forum FAQ
Search
Usergroups
Favorites
Profile
Log in
