Enhanced Interrogation: Inside the Minds and Motives of the Islamic Terrorists Trying to Destroy America

Abstract

Human experimentation programs included the testing of LSD (lysergic acid diethylamide) and other drugs on witting and unwitting subjects, all in a poorly conceived and implemented effort to learn how best to interrogate defectors, detainees, and other players in the ongoing Cold War.1 One of those players was Yuri Nosenko, a KGB (Komitet Gosudarstuvenno Bezopasnosti, or Committee for State Security) officer who defected in the early 1960s. When CIA officials became concerned that some of his information did not quite add up, they responded by imprisoning him for nearly four years in a dedicated black site built on a secret base inside the United States.2 When he did not seemingly respond to traditional interrogation, agency officers, including doctors, set out to try to pressure and eventually break him psychologically.3 He was subjected to solitary confinement in poor conditions and other "coercive techniques" such as extended interrogations, sensory deprivation, and, possibly, mind-altering drugs-one or more of four drugs administered seventeen times.4 Nosenko was released in 1969 after the CIAs Office of Security determined he was a legitimate defector after all. (Remember that then CIA Director George Tenet reportedly briefed the president on a realistic, albeit short-lived, stream of threat reporting that al-Qaida may have gained access to a nuclear weapon and had smuggled it into the United States.6) One aspect of this overarching counterterrorism effort was a presidentially mandated Rendition, Detention, and Interrogation (RDI) covert action program.