THE KGB knew a thing or two about how to make a person talk. After five or six weeks in its custody, most prisoners were rendered so disoriented and anxious and so lacking a sense of reality that they would likely submit to any of their interrogator’s demands.
Note this description of a typical broken KGB victim by the American neurologists Lawrence Hinkle and Harold Wolff, who studied the effects of brainwashing in the 1950s: “He allows himself to become dirty and dishevelled. He no longer bothers with the niceties of eating. He mixes it into a mush and stuffs it into his mouth like an animal. He goes through the prison routine automatically…He may soil himself. He weeps he mutters, he prays aloud in his cell.”
How do you reduce a man to such a state? In a highly controlled environment, it is easier than you might imagine. The KGB’s favourite tools were solitary confinement in a small, featureless cell, sleep deprivation, squalid living conditions, keeping the victim ignorant of where they were, repetitive questioning, and often physical torture. In the early 1970s, the British in Northern Ireland “improved” on this approach by placing prisoners in painful positions for 16 hours or more while making them wear hoods and heavy thermal boiler suits to remove environmental stimulation, and preventing them from sleeping for up to three days. The result: a broken, submissive prisoner after just a week.
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These methods are extreme (though still widely used) but their purpose is identical to that of any form of interrogation anywhere: to assert complete control over the victim and break down any will they might have to resist the interrogator’s demands. You don’t need torture to do this – though it helps, of course, and the boundary between torture and harsh interrogation is often hazy. Moreover, most of the psychological techniques that interrogators use are decades old, handed down from interrogator to interrogator and refined in some cases by experimental psychology, particularly from research on sensory deprivation and obedience to authority. They are tried and tested: you can find many of the approaches used today by US intelligence officers in Iraq, Afghanistan or Guantanamo Bay in the Kubark manual, the CIA’s interrogation bible, which was written in 1963.
They work mainly by making a person feel unsettled and vulnerable. For example, to unsettle you an interrogator might start off friendly, then without warning turn aggressive. He might ask you the same questions over and over, pulling you up at the slightest inconsistency. He might try to humiliate you to break down your sense of worth: for instance, if you are male, by having female guards mock you while you are undressing, a strategy used frequently at Guantanamo.
They might threaten your family, and make you feel you have responsibility for what happens to them, though in reality you have none. Iraqi interrogators under Saddam Hussein took this to extremes: to get a prisoner to talk they would torture their family in front of them, even children in front of their parents (żěè¶ĚĘÓƵ, 26 June, p 44).
An interrogator will often have very good information about you, about your family and where you live. Even if he doesn’t, he’ll make it seem that way, organising the information he has and presenting you with selected bits to give you the impression he knows everything and there’s no point in hiding what you know. Above all, the interrogator is in total control. He controls who you see and when you see them, what you eat and drink and when, when you go to the bathroom and how often. He will vary things so you never have a routine. Often you will not know what time of day or night it is.
When someone is physically tired, unsettled after days or weeks alone in a bare cell, and ignorant of where they are, a sense of powerlessness and anxiety sets in that can quickly turn to disorientation and make them more inclined to talk, confess to something they didn’t do (see “Confession”), or even turn informer. The more organised forms of interrogation and torture, such as those used by the KGB or the British in Northern Ireland, can result in complete psychological breakdown and total submission. The state of mind associated with this was described by Hinkle as a “brain syndrome”, a physiological condition involving impairment of brain function. In such a state, a person is capable of only simple activities, and as it progresses they may become restless, talkative and delirious. Ultimately they become totally confused and can even lapse into unconsciousness.
“He allows himself to become dirty. He weeps, he mutters, he prays aloud in his cell”
The ongoing effects on the victim are often profound. They can suffer depression, excessive anxiety and post-traumatic stress disorder, and sometimes full-blown psychosis – even if the interrogation was relatively mild, and even if it didn’t involve physical torture. The physical suffering is often easier to deal with because it gives the victim something to focus on. The real long-term damage is done by psychological manipulation: being under the interrogator’s complete control, never knowing what is happening, the disorientation, and the fearfulness that comes from feeling that however bad it gets there’s always the possibility of something worse.
The effects can last for years, even decades. I have seen people who were tortured 20 or 30 years previously and their symptoms were as fresh as if it had happened the day before. Often people do not appear to improve at all unless they seek treatment.
How do you treat people who have been through the trauma of interrogation? The key is to get them to think about what has happened to them and gradually work through it in enormous detail. Left to their own devices, victims normally try to avoid such thoughts, and then they avoid anything that triggers them. Because so many things can act as triggers – smells in particular – before long this avoidance has caused them to shift their whole life.
It is crucial to identify any dysfunctional thoughts caused by the trauma, especially those where the victim believes they had a real choice about the way they behaved during interrogation. Very often, people who have talked feel intensely guilty. I recently interviewed a former Sri Lankan prisoner who was sexually abused during his questioning. He told his interrogators everything, gave them everybody’s names. If he hadn’t given them information, he would have carried on being raped by several people day after day. Despite this, he feels an enormous sense of guilt.
This is not uncommon. Victims of interrogation often feel they had a choice, or even that they were partly responsible for what happened to them. In reality, they were powerless. The only ones who have choices during interrogation are the interrogators.