Bob McCarty Writes

Yesterday, I published a story, Special Forces Units Ignore Memo, Save Lives, highlighting the fact that members of the Army’s elite Special Forces community chose to ignore a 2007 Department of Defense memo which designated the polygraph and its hand-held cousin, the Preliminary Credibility Assessment Screening System, as the “only approved credibility assessment technologies” in DoD.  At the same time, I reported, the SF operators opted to continue using the Computer Voice Stress Analyzer® despite the ban.  Why?

In the four stories below, I answer that question with the help of an SF operator — I call him “Joe” (not his real name) — who spoke with me on condition of anonymity, providing a glimpse into how effective troops can be with CVSA at their disposal:

‘THE BARN’

When SF operators brought detainees back from a target, Joe said, they brought them back to a place they called “The Barn.”

“It was an old building,” he said.  “It kind of looked like a barn.  It had a bunch of rooms that looked like stalls, I guess you would say.”

Joe said they put doors on the stalls to provide some privacy when they brought detainees to the facility.  Located in the Baghdad area, The Barn was in the same neighborhood as the facility housing the Iraqi Special Operations Forces (a.k.a., the Iraqi Commandos) and members of the U.S. Special Operations Forces from all branches of the military.

Something like a police station, Joe said, The Barn had a booking room, evidence room, holding cells and interview rooms.  He said they had to be very careful there, because “as the lawyers got involved in this deal and the more time went on, it was more like trying to convict somebody in court than it was to pull a terrorist off the street, or a bad buy off the street.”

Part of being “careful” involved providing medical treatment.

“The doc would check ‘em out, (because) they got banged up a little bit whenever we came to get ‘em,” he continued.  “They would address all their wounds and stuff like that.”

“We could hold ‘em there up to a couple of days before we had to make a decision on whether to transfer to our detainee facility, go to (Camp) Cropper, release to the Iraqis, so forth and so on. There were about five different ways we could go with them from that area.”

That was the first place they were using CVSA with detainees, he said, adding that they often had “truckloads of bad guys” coming in there and only two Counterintelligence or two Human Intelligence agents there to handle the load.

“When you’re trying to figure out how not to cut the bad guy loose and keep the good guy in custody, CVSA was an invaluable tool,” he continued, explaining that CVSA enabled them to answer questions such as, “Do we have the right guy sitting in this cell?”

“We would get their initial statement when we brought them in,” he said.  “Then we would come back a day or two later with the CVSA and vet that story.

“We weren’t determining guilt or innocence,” he continued.  “What we were determining was, ‘Does this guy need any further work or warrant any further effort on our part to try and extract any intelligence from him?’”

Though he was involved in bringing detainees in from target sites, military intelligence people would process detainees through, get their initial stories and do the shooter statements, Joe explained.

“I didn’t want to be involved with the processing of them, because I would run into them again later if they were to be developed into a source, then I would run them for further targeting.

“So I didn’t want them to know who I was.  I was just some dude with a mask that came to their house.  They didn’t have any clue who I was in case I had to meet them later in a different capacity.”

Upon detecting my interest in his stories of happenings at The Barn, Joe made a point of clearing up some of the lies circulating in the press about mistreatment of detainees by U.S. forces.

“The very first thing that they get after they come in and they get their photos — and, of course, we make sure that they’re absolutely clean for our own safety — (is) they go to their stalls, they’re given water, the Iraqi soldiers feed ‘em Iraqi food.

“They’re able to be escorted to the bathroom, they’re no longer blindfolded, the whole deal,” he said.

As for the rumors that inspection teams were not being allowed into the facility because detainees were being beaten there, Joe said it wasn’t inspected because it was a holding facility for further transfer and, as such, wasn’t subject to inspection.

The reason they were successful at getting information from detainees wasn’t because they tortured them, he said, it was because they did the opposite as a condition for using CVSA with success.

“I couldn’t even put a number to the man-hours CVSA has saved me,” Joe said.  “There’s no way to check or vet or verify any information in a country where every ID is fake, all the government systems are down, people who are enrolling in government systems aren’t enrolling under true names in case (someone) ever digs up their old names — you know, they’re trying to get a new start at life.

“There’s just no way to check anything over there other than some type of truth-verification system.”

‘THE INFILTRATOR’

On more than one occasion, CVSA played a direct role in saving American and Iraqi soldiers’ lives.  One such incident involved exposing an infiltrator within the ranks.

“We were getting ready to hit a target,” Joe said.  “It was a time-sensitive target.”

Joe explained that two Iraqi brothers were playing key roles in the operation.

One was with Joe and his men, he said, while the other was on target with the bad guys, reporting back as to their location and the exact time when a meeting was to take place and the “good guys” could go in and snatch up some key players on the other side.

While they were waiting, Joe said, a call came in, advising them that the meeting was going to take place in one hour.

“Everybody scrambles, and the only people that knew, up until this briefing, that this was even on the target deck and that these sources existed were Americans,” Joe explained.  “Once we briefed the target to the Iraqi leadership, they broke away and they went and briefed their guys.

From the time Joe’s team was notified, briefed the Iraqi leadership and released them so they could brief their own guys about the mission, he said, 40 minutes had transpired.

Then, another phone call came in from the brother working in the enemy camp, Joe said.  His message was urgent:  “Hey, man, they know you’re coming!  They’re hauling ass right now!  Somebody called ‘em and told them!”

“So we lock everybody down that had knowledge to that point,” he explained.  “When we locked everybody down that had knowledge to that point, you’ve gotta remember, it’s me and another guy that are getting ready to go and investigate this.

“So, we’re sitting there and they blow this,” Joe said.  “At this point, I go to find out who knows and the pool of individuals who could possibly tip the target was 96 individuals.

Joe said they decided to lock down all 96 potential turncoats in the conference room at the theater.  Working without sleep during the next 48 hours, they CVSA’d every one of them, asking if they had attended the briefing or made any unauthorized phone calls.

“At the end of that, we had three people that couldn’t clear the charts,” Joe said, “It was the lieutenant colonel, the sergeant major and his driver.

The only reason the driver was snared, Joe said, was because of the rule that, once the target is called, nobody’s supposed to have a cell phone.

“The colonel told the sergeant major to call the people on the target…and let him know that we were coming,” Joe explained.  “The sergeant major told the driver to go get his phone and bring it to him.  The driver didn’t know what he was using it for.

“Basically, we took a 96-man suspect pool, narrowed it down to three individuals, and then confirmed that it was, that the results of the CVSA were correct by breaking those guys in interrogation afterward.”

AMMO THIEVES

CVSA proved its value another time after U.S. forces began suspecting there was an ammunition theft ring operating at the school where members of the Iraqi Special Operations Forces trained to become operators as members of the 36th Commandos.

After Americans recovered some of their own ammunition at target sites (i.e., locations where they had engaged the enemy), investigators began looking at the school’s 24 Iraqi instructors.

“I went down there, and I brought every instructor in, and we CVSA’d them,” Joe said.  “One-hundred percent accurate, I had the ringleader and all eight guys that were stealing ammunition nailed from the first interview.

“That focused my efforts down to those nine individuals and let the other dudes go that didn’t have anything to do with it, didn’t know what was going on.

“After the CVSA results, we went down and searched their barracks and, in all of their rooms, we found ammunition — stowed up in the ceilings, in their drawers, wrapped up in socks.  All kinds of stuff.  I mean, they had ammo everywhere in those nine rooms.

“We searched all the other rooms, and we had one guy that had some ammunition, but we think he kept it for personal use, that he was just trying to have some extra ammo to take to the house.  He wasn’t selling it and didn’t know that those guys were.”

During the investigation, Joe learned exactly how nine of the school’s 24 instructors had been stealing ammunition from the school.

“They would have each one of the candidates each day that were coming through the course hand them one stripper clip of ammunition — of 5.56 or a half a box of 9mm or some .762 or whatever it was,” he said, adding that the instructors would then take the ammunition — and its packaging which nobody tracked — back to their rooms for repackaging.

The subordinate instructors, Joe explained, would sell their ammo for 50 percent value to the head instructor, and the head guy would repackage it and sell it for full value on the black market.  Then they would all get a return on their money.

THIRD-COUNTRY NATIONALS (TCNs)

Another proven use for CVSA is in screening third-country nationals (TCNs) applying for employment on U.S. military installations, Joe said.  His initial use of CVSA for that purpose took place in Qatar and Kuwait.

“We were able to pick up the numbers screened by over 300 percent in a day by using the CVSA, (because) we actually had viable information that we could look at and check as to whether or not they were telling the truth,” he explained.

When screening people outside of the United States, he said, “We don’t have access to NCIC (and) Department of Motor Vehicle records; we don’t have access to school and college records and really no way to check these guys out.”

What did SF operators do prior to having CVSA when it came to screening TCNs who, by definition, are already out of the countries of origin — Kuwait, Nepal, Thailand, etc?  Joe described what would happen during the pre-CVSA era if he thought a guy was a bad guy and took time to write an inquiry containing questions — “Does this guy have any criminal record?  Any criminal history?” — and send it to their country’s embassy in Iraq.

“This guy’s already out of (his) country, working somewhere else, and sending all the money he makes back to his country, to improve their economy,” he said.  “Is their embassy actually going to send us a thing saying, ‘Yeah, he’s a criminal.  Send him back.’?  I’m thinking, ‘No.’

“We never got a hit the entire time when we were sending these things out, and I was thinking, ‘This is ridiculous!’” Joe said.

“They are not going to tell us that this guy is skimping on his child support or he used to be a thief or whatever the deal is.  They’ve already got him out of the country, and he’s sending every dollar he makes back to his family and improving the economy of his own country.  Why in the hell would they tell us that so we could send him back?”

Asked how many times he sent them out?

“Thousands,” Joe said.

“I’ll tell you this:  My TCN list when I was in Kuwait was over 15,000 TCNs working on the nine base camps in Kuwait.

“We screened five days a week from 8 o’clock in the morning to 5 o’clock in the afternoon.  We had two covering agents that did that and two covering agents that ran the country to all nine base camps, taking care of that stuff there.”

During the year he was there, Joe said, he and his colleagues didn’t even finish screening the Army and Air Force Exchange Service employees, not to mention the security guys, the septic truck drivers, all this stuff.

Suspecting TCNs were “robbing us blind” at U.S. bases in the region, Joe said he set up a five-day search at the exit to Camp Arab John in Kuwait and was able to recover more than $1.2 million worth of stolen property — “drugs, alcohol and all kinds of stuff.”

Prior to that, he said, commanders were always asking him, “Who screened this guy?” after someone was caught stealing.

He would reply, saying, “Hey look, man, you’re telling me to screen the guy, then you don’t give me any way to check the information that he tells me, but then you want me to sign off, sayin’ he’s an okay guy and let him come to work on the base.  You’ve gotta give me a tool to help me with this.”
CVSA became that tool — the “perfect match,” he added.

“If they don’t clear the chart, then we continue to interview and, if we can’t get them through the process of a little longer interview and we can’t get ‘em to clear the chart, then we just deny them employment.  It’s just that easy, because there’s a question of doubt there.”

To read previous BMW posts about the polygraph-CVSA controversy, click here.

UPDATE 12/12/10 at 3:56 p.m. Central: Call me paranoid, but…