Page 106 - Malcolm Gladwell - Talking to Strangers

CHAPTER NINE

KSM: What Happens When
the Stranger Is a Terrorist?

1.

“My first thought was that he looked like a troll,” James Mitchell remembers. “He was angry, he
was belligerent, he was glaring at me. I’m doing a neutral probe, so I’m talking to him basically like
I’m talking to you. I took the hood off and I said, ‘What would you like me to call you?’”
The man answered in accented English, “Call me Mukhtar. Mukhtar means the brain. I was the
emir of the 9/11 attacks.”
It was March 2003, in a CIA black site somewhere “on the other side of the world,” Mitchell
said. Mukhtar was Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, or KSM, as he was otherwise known—one of the
most senior Al Qaeda officials ever captured. He was naked, hands and feet shackled, yet defiant.
“They had shaved his head by that point and shaved his beard,” Mitchell said. “But he just was
the hairiest person I’d ever seen in my life, and little, real little. He had a huge, like Vietnamese pot-
bellied pig belly. I thought—this guy killed all those Americans?”
Mitchell has a runner’s build, tall and slender, with longish white hair parted in the middle and a
neatly trimmed beard. He speaks with a mild Southern accent. “I look like some guy’s uncle,” is
how he describes himself, which is perhaps overly self-deprecating. He gives off a sense of
unshakable self-confidence, as if he always gets a good night’s sleep, no matter what he did to
anyone that day, or what anyone did to him.
Mitchell is a psychologist by training. After 9/11, he and a colleague, Bruce Jessen, were brought
in by the CIA because of their special skills in “high stakes” interrogation. Jessen is bigger than
Mitchell, quieter, with a cropped military haircut. Mitchell says he looks like “an older
[Jean-]Claude van Damme.” Jessen does not speak publicly. If you hunt around online, you can find
portions of a videotaped deposition he and Mitchell once gave in a lawsuit arising from their
interrogation practices. Mitchell is unruffled, discursive, almost contemptuous of the proceedings.
Jessen is terse and guarded: “We were soldiers doing what we were instructed to do.”
Their first assignment, after the towers fell, was to help interrogate Abu Zubaydah, one of the
first high-level Al Qaeda operatives to be captured. They would go on to personally question many
other “high value” suspected terrorists over eight years in a variety of black sites around the world.
Of them all, KSM was the biggest prize.
“He just struck me as being brilliant,” Mitchell recalled. During their sessions, Mitchell would
ask him a question, and KSM would answer: “That’s not the question I would ask. You’ll get an
answer and you’ll find it useful and you’ll think that’s all you need. But really the question I would
ask is this question.” Mitchell says he would then ask KSM’s question of KSM himself, “and he
would give a much more detailed, much more global answer.” KSM would hold forth on the tactics
of terrorist engagement, on his strategic vision, on the goals of jihad. Had he not been captured,
KSM had all manner of follow-ups to 9/11 planned. “His descriptions of the low-tech, lone-wolf
attacks were horrifying,” Mitchell said. “The fact that he sits around and thinks about economy of
scale when it comes to killing people…” He shook his head.
“He completely creeped me out when he was talking about Daniel Pearl. That was the most…I