Read Online The Midnight House by Alex Berenson - Free Book Online Page B

shirt, and a crisp red tie.
    “Running for something? ” Wells said.
    “You’re going to want to shave that beard now that you’re back in civilization, John.”
    Despite his distrust of Duto, Wells found himself strangely relieved that the man was still in charge. At least they didn’t have to pretend to be friendly. “And this is Tonka,” Wells said.
    “She trained any better than you? ”
    “I wouldn’t say so.”
    “Too bad. Can we start, or you have any other pets I need to meet?”
    They sat. Tonka sighed and lay down at Wells’s feet.
    “Ellis got a little bit of this earlier, so I’ll start with you,” Duto said. “Ever heard of Task Force 673? ”
    Wells shook his head.
    “Joint army-agency group. Interrogated terrorists, high-value detainees.”
    “I didn’t know we and the army ever did that together.”
    “Everybody’s fighting the same war.”
    “What Vinny means is that Rumsfeld kept pushing into our turf, and creating these teams was the only way to protect it,” Shafer said.
    “Anyway, starting in 2004, we had a bunch of these squads. They went through various permutations, different names and squad numbers.”
    “Translation: we and the army kept wiping them out and reconstituting them to make it harder for Amnesty or Congress or anyone to follow the thread,” Shafer interrupted. “I wish I could answer your questions, Senator, but Task Force 85 doesn’t even exist.”
    “Do you want to explain, or should I? ” Duto said.
    “You go ahead.”
    “Thank you, Ellis. In late ’05, when the Abu Ghraib blowback was really bad, we eliminated all the black squads. But then at the beginning of ’07 we put one more together. Six-seven-three. The final iteration. Ten guys. Seven army, three agency. It ran out of Poland, a barracks on a Polish base there.”
    “Okay,” Wells said, picturing the setup: the concrete building at the edge of the base, the one everyone pretended didn’t exist. Planes landing late at night, guards shuffling prisoners in and out.
    “The army picked the commander. A colonel with a lot of experience in interrogations. Martin Terreri. And because of all the pressure we were under from the Red Cross and everybody else, we saved 673 for the toughest guys. This was not for routine cases.”
    “Because of the tactics they were allowed to use.”
    “In general, the way it worked, detainees came to 673 one of two ways. Some were in the system already—say, in Iraq—and somebody decided that they needed more pressure. The others, they were sent direct after capture.”
    “Ghosts,” Shafer said. A ghost prisoner was a detainee whose existence the United States refused to confirm to outsiders, like lawyers or wives or Red Cross monitors.
    “But not entirely. They were all in the system,” Duto said. “Legally, they had to be.”
    “Got it,” Wells said. “Who oversaw Terreri? ”
    “Nobody, really,” Duto said. “Six-seven-three, they were kind of ghosts themselves. Theoretically, Terreri reported to the deputy commander of Centcom”—Central Command, which oversaw all army operations in the Middle East and central Asia. “At the time, that was Gene Sanchez.”
    “Isn’t Sanchez a lieutenant general? A colonel reporting to a three-star?”
    “That was intentional. Sanchez wasn’t keeping a close eye on 673. It wasn’t on his org chart. The point was to let these guys do what they needed to do. In reality, the intel got chimneyed straight to the Pentagon.”
    Chimneying—sometimes called stovepiping—meant moving raw intelligence straight to senior leaders instead of sending it through the normal analysis at Langley and the Pentagon. In theory, chimneying saved important information from being lost inside the vortex of the CIA and gave decision makers the chance to judge it for themselves.
    “So, short version of the story, this 673 was a black squad with a straight line to the Pentagon,” Wells said.
    “Pretty much.”
    “They report to you