I Am Pilgrim(126)

Stripped to his threadbare underpants, eyes covered, the courier had no idea where he was or what was happening, so he was already close to panic as they lashed him face up to a long length of board and lifted it off the floor.

Four of them – obviously well-practised in the technique – carried it over the bathtub and tilted it backwards so that his head, all except his mouth and nose, were in the water. He tried to fight – to no avail – and it was clear from his gasping breath he thought that, any moment, he was going to be lowered another couple of inches and drowned.

Two more of the interrogators took up a position on either side of his struggling body. One slapped a towel over the prisoner’s mouth and nose and, once it was firmly in place, the other swamped it with water from a large bucket.

The water took a moment to soak through the fabric then went straight down the courier’s inclined throat. The water in his windpipe combined with the sensation of a wave hitting his face convinced him he had been plunged underwater and was drowning. The gag reflex, uncontrollable, kicked in as he fought to stop the water entering his lungs …

The water kept coming. The sense of drowning erupted into even greater terror and the gagging became a rolling sequence of spasms. They went on and on until he got an erection, clearly visible through his underpants, and then defecated in the water.

Men laughed, but I stared at him – I felt ashamed and dishonoured, experiencing every spasm as if it were me that was strapped helpless to the board. Some people say that compassion is the purest form of love because it neither expects nor demands anything in return. I don’t know if what I felt that day for a Thai drug runner was compassion, but I can say for certain I had never seen terror like it. All I could think of was that he was probably a better man than most – my parched mouth, panicking heartbeat and sweat-drenched body told me I couldn’t have stood it for half as long as he had. I felt sick.

The agents stopped. They took the towel off his face, left him blindfolded and asked if he wanted to talk. Too distraught to form any words, fighting for every breath, his spastic hands trying to tear at the restraints, he said nothing. The senior CIA guy told his men to put the towel back on and keep going.

That’s when I found my voice.

‘Stop now, or you’ll all be on a charge,’ I said, trying to make it sound as cold and ruthless as possible. They looked at me, eyeing me up. I had no choice then – I either had to win or be emasculated for whatever remained of my career.

‘I can make it a Critical Incident Investigation if you like. You wanna try explaining what this guy has got to do with national security? Kramer, you want to go first?’

After a moment that seemed to last a year the senior guy – Kramer – told them to put the towel away and take off the blindfold. The drug courier looked up at me, this tough guy with machete scars who probably thought he had no problem handling pain, and it was pathetic to see how thankful he was. ‘You ready to tell us what happened?’ I asked him.

He nodded, but he couldn’t stop his hands from shaking – they had broken him, that was for sure. Years later, when the CIA water-boarded Khalid Sheikh Mohammed – al-Qaeda’s military commander – he set a new world record by withstanding it for two and a half minutes. The courier had lasted twenty-nine seconds, which was about average.

Once he had been released from the board and was slumped on the floor, he told us he had been on the bridge with two brothers. They ran the high-country opium lab where the drugs originated and were the ones who had decided to turn Smokey Joe into a human javelin. The courier said he had never laid a hand on the man, and I had the feeling he was telling the truth.

He explained that the guard had developed a nice little earner shaking down the drug couriers as they crossed the river gorge: he’d turned the dilapidated footbridge into Thailand’s first toll road. Initially he had been satisfied to unwrap the raw No. 2 and take a line of shavings off the brick – clipping the ticket, so to speak. He would then trade the shavings with the smugglers for booze, which he would sell at the prison. Of course, he got greedy and the shavings became massive offcuts – so large that the two brothers finally decided that a toll road wasn’t in northern Thailand’s best economic interest.

We had found our answer and, while there would be no Critical Incident Report, we all had to submit our own version of the case to our superiors. I’m sure the CIA’s account said they had only used reasonable force, while mine, of course, said the opposite. That would have been an end to it – who in the intelligence community would have cared about a Thai drug courier? – except there would have been one section of the CIA’s report I couldn’t dispute.