Serial S04 - Ep. 4: The Honeymooners

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previously on serial and she said well aim al-halabi they're accusing you of very serious things as soon as i got to the door these two fbi guys were there can we ask you a couple questions they were accusing him of making anti-american statements and this that and the other and being a detainee sympathizer you think your allah is going to help you you think your quran is correct you know it's a bunch of garbage it's a ba-ba-ba.

And I'm listening to this and I'm translating it.

Senior Airman Ahmed Al-Halabe.

Al-Halabe worked as an Arabic translator at Guantanamo.

Trying to pass classified military secrets.

Violations of the Federal Espionage Act.

So far, three former workers at Guantanamo have been arrested and a probe of alleged espionage there.

From Ciro Productions and the New York Times, this is serial season four, Guantanamo, One Prison Camp Told Week by Week.

I'm Sarah Koenig.

This is part two of Ahmed Al-Halabi's story.

A neutral way to put it is that the government's investigation into a possible spy ring at Guantanamo came up empty.

Less neutral, but still factual, Ahmed Al-Halabi's criminal case was a fiasco, a shameful, and I admit, perversely entertaining example of what happens when suspicion suspicion swallows evidence.

But Achmed's case did not end after his sentencing.

He'd agreed, as part of his plea deal, to participate in a debriefing.

Once I heard what went on in that debrief, I can now confidently report back.

It's possibly even more bizarre than the case itself.

For a long time, the debrief was the one aspect of Achman's case that eluded me.

Unlike the court proceedings, there's no public documentation of what happened in the debrief.

There's no transcript of who said what, nothing.

I didn't even know what a debrief was, really.

It's not something I'd come across in a criminal case before.

So when I went to interview Ahmed, this was one of my all caps requests.

The debrief, please explain.

And what is a debriefing?

I don't really know what it is.

Well,

this is,

I think we asked for immunity, and we got immunity.

So anything you say in that debriefing can't, they can't come at you with that.

So anything that I, I could have, I could, you know, admit to anything, and I would not be prosecuted for anything.

And that's why they wanted me to be at ease and talk about this experience.

And basically, you know, what we thought was supposed to go for probably four to six weeks maximum

started dragging on.

So.

Wait, well, four to six weeks for what?

For the debriefing.

Of talking every day?

Yes.

Are you kidding me?

Wait, who is this for?

To what.

In my head, the mysterious debrief debrief lasted three or four days, maybe five at the outside.

There was a lot to cover.

But this, this was a whole production.

Ahmed told me every morning after breakfast, he reported to an apartment on Travis Air Force Base.

And all day, Monday through Friday, he talked.

It's like a full-time job talking.

It was a full-time job, yeah, talking, yeah.

Full-time job.

Yeah.

But they would let me go on Friday to go pray, so

Friday was a shorter day.

When I asked what the apartment apartment was like, Ahmed said it was normal, which I interpreted as gentlemen speak for generic, fake apartment furnishings.

He also said it was wired every which way for sound and video, which fed to various locations where people listened and watched in real time.

He knew one listening post was in an apartment just below them.

He wasn't sure where else, though he learned much later there was also one at the Pentagon.

So there was a whole apparatus that was set up.

And in one of the rooms, they set up the polygraph.

On day one, Ahmed met Mike and Jeff, two fresh interrogators who'd had no previous involvement with his case.

Mike was from the Air Force Office of Special Investigations, the OSI.

Jeff was from the FBI.

We got the main things out of the way immediately.

Like in the first few days, when you started talking about, you know, the espionage and, you know, what's going on, tell us, tell us everything.

No problem.

Whatever you say.

Like, even if you mishandled or gave anything information, no problem

so they're just like

safe space yeah

we just want to know the truth you're not gonna get in trouble we just need to know the truth yes and the point of it is

to know where their own investigation went wrong or what what are they trying to learn or

like as at at the time

I didn't really know.

I don't know exactly what was the objective, but I think it was to learn from you know, lessons learned on what went wrong with the case because it started so high and it ended so low.

Ahmed was working off the same premise as I was, that the government knew they'd made a hash of his case and now wanted to understand where it had gone wrong.

You don't often hear the military admitting its mistakes, but you figure they must know and care when they've screwed up.

So if Achman's spy case was a stand-in for the way we handled our suspicions about many of the prisoners at Guantanamo, and I believe it was.

Then, this debrief was a rare window into how we dealt with our mistakes.

That's why I was so curious about the debrief.

I wanted to know: once they were all out of the courtroom, once they'd settled into comfortable chairs and loosened their ties for an off-the-record, lawyer-free discussion in which everyone could be straight with each other, would the government finally see itself and Ahmed clearly?

What lesson would it learn?

But even a conversation like that, I still could not envision how it could sustain for weeks on end.

Were they just going over every aspect of your case, or did it branch out into like, tell me everything that happened from the moment you got to Guantanamo, or what happened?

What were they wanting to know?

They wanted to know every little thing about my life, like everything, not only Guantanamo.

Really?

Yeah, so from like

from the day that I remember, you know,

all kinds of memories I have, you know, from Syria, what did you do there?

You know,

brothers, sisters, all the the whole, like where I worked with friends, how did I come to the States?

People I met, you know,

Michigan and California and then Guantanamo and then online and then my wife and then

so I'm you're you're blowing my life my mind.

I don't understand this.

So so are they do you think

from the questions you're describing to me, it sounds like they're

they're suspecting you still might be a spy or someone who could become a spy or be disloyal to the United States.

Is that the sense you got, or no?

Like, why do they want to know every contact you've ever had, every person you've ever met, everything you've ever done?

Well, maybe that

I don't know if that was the intention, but we ended up talking about like every aspect of my life.

Like,

like, even

sexual orientations, even

any abuse,

that I see or experience or

literally like everything.

Okay.

To state the obvious here, I had fundamentally misunderstood the purpose of this debrief.

Apparently, so at Ahmed.

The polygraph equipment should have tipped us off.

This debrief would roll out like a three-act play.

showing how the procedural devolved into the personal and then, as you'll soon see, the nonsensical that's after the break

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All right.

So, from the questions Ahmed said they were asking, either the government still thought Ahmed might be a spy, or else maybe this was just a cover-your-ass operation?

Like they had to come up with some nugget of information to justify the government's exertions over the past year and a half.

Ahmed said he wasn't sure, but he did start to get a sense of what they were looking for.

He told me the detainee letters were a big subject with Jeff and Mike.

He remembered this one day, they went out to lunch.

They're sitting at a restaurant, and Jeff and Mike looked at him and said, okay, we're out of the room now, off the base, no mics, no cameras.

Just tell us.

Did you mistranslate?

You know, by taking shortcuts, greetings, instead of a whole paragraph of prayers.

This had come up during Ahmed's sentencing hearing.

At the 11th hour, prosecutors had called to the stand a fellow Guantanamo linguist whom Ahmed had trained to say that Ahmed had told him to be, quote, merciful to the brothers in his translations.

The example he gave was the word infidel.

The linguist said that Ahmed instructed him, use a softer word, non-believer.

Over lunch, Ahmed told Jeff and Mike, okay, yeah, I did sometimes do that.

Yeah, I choose maybe a softer word.

I use, you know, a different word that would convey the meaning, the meaning, without using these harsh words.

He said he wasn't doing it to surreptitiously help the detainees, though.

He was doing it, he said, because from the context of the letter, a word like infidel wasn't correct.

He was going for accuracy, he said.

efficiency.

They were happy that I was saying these things.

They were like, oh, this is great information.

So they were happy that I was like opening up and saying all these things about the way we translated

or the way I translated the letters.

They were excited because it seemed like you were finally confessing to something that you had done wrong?

Or was it more like, oh, now we're excited because now we understand

what you were actually doing?

No, I think they were happy that I confessed.

Yeah, so they were happy like, yeah, so this is the things that we want you to say on camera.

Oh, so now you go back So we're gonna go back and we're gonna ask you the same questions and you're gonna answer the same way

But it's gonna be on camera and we did that like oh, this is great So we went and we did the polygraph I think after that

This sounded unnerving to me, but for Ahmed

was a lot less painful than what he'd just been through He wasn't in jail.

He was still getting a paycheck from the Air Force because he hadn't yet formally separated from the service.

He was in the process of moving off base to his own apartment.

Jeff and Mike were friendly.

He didn't mind answering their questions.

And then this debrief took a detour that, well, just keep this phrase in mind, your tax dollars at work.

Remember how Ahmed was supposed to get married before this whole thing started?

Now he's a few weeks into the debrief and a year and a half late for his own wedding.

My fiancé arrives.

His fiancé, Rana, and her father fly in from Dubai for a visit.

Ahmed and Rana quickly married in the Solano County Courthouse across the street from where Ahmed had spent his first terrible night in jail after his arrest.

And, you know, I wanted to take her to like Lake Tahoe, and they came along to Lake Tahoe.

That is, his interrogators came along to Lake Tahoe.

Yeah, and, you know.

How many of them?

No, just two.

Ahmed said taking Rana and her dad to Tahoe was his idea, his reservation and everything.

But then Mike and Jeff were like, why don't you let us take care of it?

Your rooms at the embassy suites, they're on us.

And you know, Tahoe's so nice this time of year.

Why don't we just come along?

So off they all went to Lake Tahoe on an all-expenses paid by the government excursion.

You know, we spent three days in Lake Tahoe.

showing them snow because there's no snow in Dubai, right?

So it's like amazing.

So we enjoyed the time in a way and then.

And then even after Tahoe, they continued to spend quality time with mike and jeff you know i invited them to my apartment rena cooked some food for them you know so getting to know them on a personal level

again doesn't this sound odd nope ahmed told me strangely enough i wasn't bothered by it

Okay, but I still thought it was weird, and I thought it was weird that Ahmed didn't think it was weird.

Did Rana think it was weird?

She did.

Without them, it would be better.

So

you feel something wrong with them.

They are from the government, you know.

They were nice guys, but I prefer to stay with Ahmed without them.

But

what we wanna do, I mean, we cannot do anything.

Was it kind of a honeymoon in a way?

Yes, it's kind of true, but

not a honeymoon with

my dad and Jeff and Mike.

Yeah, it's not

like a honeymoon, but it was a nice trip.

Rana knew they were being observed, she said, but the men were polite, helpful even.

When Rana and her dad arrived at the San Francisco airport, it was Mike and Jeff who met them, who ushered them through customs and immigration.

Almost as if Mike and Jeff were their hosts, rather than Ahmed, who waited in the car.

It was odd, but not bad.

Rana remembers cooking an elaborate dinner for them at the apartment, trying her best to show them that she and Ahmed were normal people.

She remembers Jeff telling her the food made him feel like he was in heaven.

They didn't show me that they are like investigators like that.

They show me like they are here to help us.

Ah,

yeah.

Yeah.

Ahmed said he knew he was being made to feel comfortable, so that he would trust Mike and Jeff and therefore would spill to Mike and Jeff.

But Ahmed is practical.

He'd agreed to this debrief.

His attitude was, I'm being handled.

I'm letting myself be handled, which so far I can handle.

You know, every day I would show up,

They go up to the door and they shake hands and sometimes, you know, we kiss on the cheeks and, you know, became this very, very friendly.

And I think they were asked to do this, and they did it because this is part of the culture, which is fine.

I liked it.

But as the discussions took longer, and we passed the six-weeks marks, and we're not finished yet,

you know, December, now we're in January.

Ronna and her father had left.

The world's strangest non-honeymoon was over.

Around this time, Ahmed says, the debriefing began to sour, in large part because of the polygraphs.

He found them terrifying.

He said the rough rhythm of the debrief was that they'd discuss one topic for a day or two or three, and then an Air Force polygrapher would hook him up to the machine and question him about that topic.

And if he passed, everyone was happy and they'd move on to the next topic.

But sometimes he didn't pass.

They would still accuse me of hiding things, and like, especially when I do the polygraph and they're like it's inconclusive I'm like well because you're putting so much pressure on me like it's it's like you know asking you have you ever done anything wrong in your life?

Well, how many things you can't just say no.

How many did you take?

I don't know.

Probably six, seven, eight.

I don't know.

There were a lot

Ahmed doesn't recall the actual questions during the polygraphs so much as the feeling of knowing he wasn't performing well and not knowing how to fix it.

He was also aware that people all over the place were listening to every word he said, which stressed him out even more.

He said the polygrapher and Mike and Jeff wanted him to admit he'd mistranslated letters or passed things to detainees, and he didn't think he'd done any of that.

Not like they were saying, anyway.

But his answers weren't enough.

It wasn't enough, for instance, for Ahmed to admit he'd use softer words in his translations.

They wanted me to say, okay, so we all mistranslated letters.

And they wanted me to implicate other people.

I've heard it so many times.

You've got immunity, man.

Come on, just don't worry about it.

We're not going to prosecute you for it.

Because I have immunity, but others don't.

So maybe they will go after

Emil or Samir or, you know.

So this is where it got really heated, you know?

Like, it gets intense, really, really intense.

They kept mentioning stuff that scared the shit out of him, he said.

That maybe some of the criminal charges against him that had been dismissed could resurface someday, or that he could be surveilled indefinitely.

He'd leave these sessions red-faced, unable to sleep, because he'd made them upset.

By the end of January, two and a half months after it started, Ahmed couldn't take it anymore.

It was painful and it became painful, right?

So I complained to my lawyers.

I'm like, you know, these people are putting a lot of pressure on me.

I'm already mentally drained.

I've been over a year and a half doing this.

And,

you know, I want this stopped.

One of the off the OSI agents, you know, he's got like really frustrated with something and he went and he punched the

the the the presentation board that we have right?

White white whiteboard, yeah.

So I was, you know, as I was complaining to my lawyer, I was like, you know,

he's frustrating, you know, sometimes voices raise, and, you know, he went and he punched like the wall.

I didn't mean the wall, right?

He punched the thing.

My lawyers, and they went and they wrote a really nasty complaint letter.

I got a hold of this letter, signed by Air Force Major Jamie Key, one of Ahmed's three attorneys.

He wrote, basically, enough.

We know what you're up to.

You're treating Ahmed like a Guantanamo detainee in an interrogation.

The rapport building, then the bullying.

The whole reason we negotiated the terms of this debrief was, quote, out of a concern that the interrogators would use the technique of befriending the subject and then alternately using friendly overtures and harsh treatment as a means of extorting, quote-unquote, cooperation from him.

The sort of techniques normally reserved for enemy prisoners.

It appears that this was, in fact, done.

This was not the mature discussion we bargained for, unquote.

Wrap it up.

Ahmed said Mike and Jeff confronted him about this scathing letter.

What is this?

What kind of, why are you complaining?

And did we do this?

You know, why are you saying this about us?

I'm like,

yeah, I mean, this is,

I want this to finish.

I mean, let's...

So they were like, hey, I thought we were friends.

Yeah, in a way.

Why are you complaining?

And we've got this scathing letter.

Nine days later, on February 6th, 2005, the debrief finally ended.

Ahmed was free to go.

Ahmed says no one from the government ever told him he was cleared of suspicion, that he had nothing to worry about.

So for quite a while afterwards, Ahmed did worry.

His military career was over.

He applied for jobs and he says he got very close a few times, but then suddenly the offers would vanish.

Rana's visa application seemed to have stalled.

People he thought were friends kept their distance.

He was pretty sure he was being monitored.

After about seven months, he gave up, left the country, moved to the UAE.

In 2015, he finally came back to Michigan, in time to repair his relationship with his father, whom he disobeyed all those years earlier by leaving home to join the military.

Sitting in Ahmed's office in a suburb of Detroit, he runs a nonprofit that helps refugees and other displaced people around the world.

He told me he was still in intermittent touch with Jeff from the FBI.

They were Facebook friends, which I took to mean friends in quotation marks.

I asked Ahmed if he thought Jeff would talk to me, and Ahmed sort of idly texted Jeff, and Jeff texted back, and suddenly

they were on the phone.

Oh my god, how are you?

Ahmed, how are you?

Hey, I'm good.

How's life?

You made my day.

Thank you for this.

Oh, my God.

How is...

This is not how a quote-unquote friend sounds when you call him.

This is how someone sounds when they've been waiting years to hear your voice.

Jeff shouted to his wife, Lori.

Oh my god, he called!

He called,

he's on the phone!

And this is definitely not how someone sounds if they think they're talking to a spy.

So, who did Jeff think he was talking to?

That's after the break.

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When I asked Jeff Reinick what I thought of as not exactly a throwaway question, but certainly a let's get started question.

How'd you end up on Ahmed's case?

He told me this story.

After 9-11, then FBI Director Robert Mueller was reorienting the Bureau to help fight terrorism.

And as part of that, Jeff had been called into his boss's office in Sacramento to discuss his own work, mostly investigating violent crimes against children and how he coordinated with local law enforcement.

And during that conversation,

he noted in me that I was

having emotional difficulty.

And he, out of nowhere, he asked me, you know,

are you okay?

And, you know, in my third years in the FBI, it was the first time anybody asked me that.

And

since I'd never been asked the question before, I wasn't sure.

I really wasn't prepared for it, I guess is the best way way to say it.

And

when he said that, it kind of opened up the door.

And I told him that I wasn't sure how I was

and that I was very concerned I hurt my family.

And so we started talking.

Jeff's got a strong chin and a robust mustache that he wears long.

Not a full Yosemite Sam, but headed that way.

And in fact, Jeff's had experience in Yosemite.

Among the murderers and serial killers he managed to get confessions from was a man who killed four women near Yosemite National Park in 1999.

Jeff had also solved some horrific sexual abuse cases.

He was known at the FBI for being a master interviewer.

He did it, he said, by empathizing, not only with victims of ghastly crimes, but also with perpetrators.

I like to think of myself as the Barbara Walters of the FBI, he told me.

Before we did this interview, Jeff wanted me to read the book he wrote about his career called In the Name of the Children.

In it, he writes about how he allowed himself to be vulnerable in his work, which brought him professional success, but personal anguish, how he'd clawed back from breakdowns and suicide attempts, how he'd felt alienated from his beloved wife and sons, how they suffered because of him.

When his boss had asked him, are you okay?

Jeff said he was 52, getting ready to retire.

Jeff told me his boss promised him, I will send you for whatever therapy you need.

And Jeff promised his boss, I won't get any more confessions, meaning I won't further tax my own psyche.

Before he retired, though, Jeff's boss pulled him back in for one more job.

An unusual favor.

Several months later, he came up to me and asked me, or pretty much told me he wanted me to do an interview at Travis Air Force Base with an airman, and that it regarded some duties he had at Guantanamo.

And I was to try and determine from the individual exactly what he had been involved in.

And that's it?

That's all they told you?

Pretty much, yeah.

I never got like a full briefing of the circumstances.

And that's okay, because my philosophy is that I should be able to talk to anybody and figure anything out.

So, what exactly was the government's goal here?

I confessed to Jeff Jeff what now felt like a dopey notion that, you know, at first I assumed you guys were trying to figure out where the government's criminal case against Ahmed Zagged off course, as in, how did we get this so wrong?

No.

No.

What this was, Jeff said, was a damage assessment, pure and simple.

Making sure that if there was any further threat, anything else that could be determined from talking to Ahmed that would make things safer, that was our goal.

What had Ahmed done?

With whom had he he done it?

Had sensitive or classified information leaked beyond the government's control and possibly into enemy hands?

Notable fact about Jeff, he was not a national security guy.

He'd worked two investigations like that early in his career, but that's it.

But Jeff would be working with Mike from the OSI, the Office of Special Investigations, which is like the Air Force's detective agency.

Jeff said he thought Mike did have some counter-terror experience.

He couldn't remember for sure.

I haven't been able to talk to Mike.

He hasn't responded to us.

In any case, before the debrief began, Jeff explained to the OSI folks how he typically works.

And I explained to them that

my way of doing interviews is to learn about people, to understand who they are, where they come from, and to see an emotional window, so to speak, or an emotional door.

I believe that with the exception of psychopaths, everybody has an emotional door.

And they told me they didn't agree with that philosophy, but that I'd be going in anyway.

And so they did not agree with that philosophy.

No, they did not agree with what I said was the way I did my interviews.

And the person who was talking to me, he said to me, Hey, you know, Arabs don't have feelings and they don't know how to feel and blah, blah, blah.

You know,

I don't feel that that person had any,

I don't, I didn't accept what he told me.

From what Jeff had gleaned about Ahmed from the Air Force contingent, he said he expected him to be this, quote, hardened Islamic terrorist-leaning guy who helped the terrorists do their thing.

But when Jeff finally met him in that wired-up apartment, he said Ahmed seemed more like a little boy.

He was scared.

He was very scared.

But

I looked at Ahmed and I believed that that was a person that Mike and I could talk to.

Ahmed didn't appear to be an inscrutable, emotionless psycho, the Air Force's wisdom about Arabs nonwithstanding.

Jeff said he sat back that first day while Mike took the lead.

This was an Air Force case, and Mike knew more about it than he did.

But by day two, Jeff began asking about Ahmed's background, his family.

He could tell Syria meant a lot to Ahmed.

I could see something in him, he said, so I went after it.

Ahmed told him about a terrible car accident in which his cousin had been killed back in Damascus, How it had made him feel to see his cousin's body prepared for burial.

Jeff and Mike felt like they were getting somewhere.

And it was good.

We could see that Ahmed was hurting.

Hurting, apparently, was a good thing, which threw me a little.

I kept trying to catch up to what Jeff was telling me about his method.

And then the next morning, when we came in and we got ready to start up, Ahmed emotionally told us that he was thinking about taking his own life.

Oh my God.

Wait, that was on day

three?

Yes.

Oh, no.

I am not proud of it, Sarah.

And as I'm sitting here telling you this, it hurts.

And because I've had two other people take their lives because of my interviews.

And

so Mike was surprised.

I was shocked.

And the Air Force guys realized that Ahmed had emotion.

And so after that revelation,

I'm sorry, Jeff, just to say, though, did he say

why?

I meant why Ahmed was talking suicide.

Our goal in the interview was to determine why,

what happened inside of him to cause him to want to think about doing something so against his beliefs and religion.

And that's how.

I pry into people.

That's how I learn about them.

And I know that the Air Force treated me quite differently after that.

And I know there's a lot of people that look on that as a sense of, oh, wow, that's really good.

But I don't feel real good about it.

But in a way, what did you guys do, though?

Like, how did you handle that?

When we took a break after he said that to us, we both expressed our concern to each other about Ahmed.

And we both agreed that we were going to try and rehabilitate him back to the point where he wanted to live.

It felt like Jeff was talking about one thing, the effectiveness of his approach, warts and all, while I was stuck on what sounded to me like a crisis.

If your interview subject talks about suicide, crisis, no?

But from the sounds of it, no one called Paw's game.

Instead, Jeff was saying that he and Mike put their therapist hats on top of their interrogator hats and forged ahead.

It sounded not only nutty to me, but dangerous.

Jeff had to be misremembering.

When I asked Ahmed about this later, he says it did happen.

He did feel hopeless.

The case, his life's off track, now all this questioning.

He remembers saying something like, I want this whole thing to end.

I'm sick of this life.

But he says he never would have done it.

The only part he disputed was that he remembers it happening a little later on.

In any case, Ahmed told me Jeff called him twice to check on him that night, which he appreciated and also found annoying.

Then came the visit from Ahmed's fiancé, Rana, and her father.

The Air Force brought Ahmed's fiancée and her father out.

Why?

Well,

two reasons, Jeff explained.

Sometimes a change of scenery or a change of company can shake information loose.

Maybe they'd pick up on something they'd missed before.

Second, therapy.

Jeff said they were hoping the visit would make Ahmed feel better.

So Jeff and Mike smoothed the arrival at San Francisco airport for Rana and her father.

And then they, I think, I don't even remember where they were staying or whatever, but one of the activities was for Mike and I to take Ahmed, his fiancé, and her father

up to see Lake Tahoe.

Well, not just Mike and Jeff.

And I invited my wife, Lori, with me.

So she came with us.

But the thing, I mean, it was a wonder, it was a wonderful time.

That's crazy.

So you have Akved, his fiancée, her dad, and then you and your wife and Mike from the Air Force.

And that's like your six, that's your group of six for dinner?

Yes.

Yes.

It's crazy.

And is everyone just like pretending everything's normal?

Like, I don't.

Well, how are you interacting?

Well,

we interacted like people going out for dinner together.

And for Mike and I, though, I will say,

we were trying to assess the father-in-law.

We were trying to assess if there was anything that would take place outside what we considered to be a normal relationship.

And the bottom line is, I got to tell you, what I was most afraid of, what I was most concerned of, and what I feel bad about today

is that there was such a generalized prejudice against people from the Middle East and Arabs that Ahmed's fiancé was wearing, you know, the burqa and all that stuff.

No, I'm not wearing a burqa.

I'm wearing just hijab.

A burqa covers your whole body and face.

The hijab is a headscarf.

Continue.

And I'm thinking, oh my gosh, someone's going to shoot all of us because

they're going to think we're all from the Middle East.

They're going to kill us.

But luckily, everybody, you know, looked and leered or whatever, but nothing bad happened.

And it was a wonderful evening.

We went out, we had a wonderful dinner.

They learned nothing from the family visit.

Well, they learned Rana was a good cook.

Jeff still talks about that meal she made them, but that's of minimal national security interest.

And especially after Ahmed's breakdown, the Air Force brass was expecting big things out of Ahmed, Jeff said.

Jeff and Mike had a problem, though.

Their sessions with Ahmed pretty sluggish in the confession department.

Mike and I are constantly asking each other, what are we missing?

Because we're not hearing what we think we should be hearing.

And that was

we didn't hear anything about him treason or espionage or, you know, what was he doing to have gotten himself in this situation?

And so we started exploring with Ahmed, you know, what did he do?

And he wasn't hitting on anything.

No indication Ahmed was a spy or knew any spies.

So they started hooking Ahmed up more and more to the polygraph machine, which Jeff said can be a useful tool.

But in Ahmed's case, the polygraphs were doing more harm than good.

It seemed to Jeff as if the less they got out of Ahmed, the more leeway the military gave to the polygrapher.

And this polygrapher seemed to have a bee in his bonnet, wanting a certain result from Ahmed, berating him, which not only meant the reading was going to be crap anyway, but also they could see Ahmed faltering.

Every time he came back from one, Jeff said he'd be in a state.

Which Mike and I both understood.

And Mike was really good at finding some ways to get Ahmed to feel better.

But as soon as he started feeling better, they yanked him in for a polygraph again.

And what ended up happening, Sarah, is that in a period of about two weeks, Ahmed was polygraphed like seven times.

Jeff said all the polygraphs infuriated him and Mike, too.

They were having big fights about it behind the scenes with the Air Force.

But Jeff says they could not persuade the Air Force to quit with the frigging polygraphs.

In Jeff's memory, the debrief died a natural death, just kind of wound to a close.

He remembers an emotional goodbye from Ahmed.

What he did not remember was the sharp letter from Ahmed's attorney, accusing them of manipulation and intimidation.

When I read it to him, he was taken aback.

I mean, Jesus, we spent a whole day moving him.

He got hot about it.

We weren't just interviewing him.

The attorney doesn't mention what we spent a whole day moving him.

It was exhausting.

We took care of him wherever he went.

We took him up to Tahoe.

I mean, we weren't up in Tahoe, beating him up and questioning him.

Yeah, I mean, to be, I understand

you're annoyed by this.

I just don't want it to get exaggerated.

No one is alleging that anyone laid a hand on Ahmed.

Right.

They're just saying you guys are being aggressive and you're, and like, we got your stuff.

Right.

And you're describing behavior towards him that was

not only aggressive, but intimidating and belittling.

And

I can tell you, that never happened with us, and I never saw it on the part of Mike.

I'll tell you very honestly, it upsets me.

Jeff was taking this personally, which seemed a little absurd to me.

He was Ahmed's interrogator, at least from Ahmed's perspective.

From Jeff's perspective, they were interviewing Ahmed, not interrogating.

And furthermore, he and Mike were were the reasonable heads prevailing.

They were sticking up for Ahmed.

They were the ones telling the Air Force there was nothing to see here, pushing back against the hardliners, gunning for never-ending polygraphs.

Plus, they liked Ahmed.

And Ahmed liked them back, for crying out loud they were still in contact all these years.

After a few minutes of cranking himself up, Jeff cranked himself back down.

The lawyers must have meant the polygraphers were using harsh techniques, he said, not him and Mike.

That made more sense.

If Ahmed said Mike hit a whiteboard, it must have been because Mike was frustrated about the polygraphs, not because he was angry at Ahmed.

Jeff knows they parted on good terms.

When he left us, he was ready to pick up.

He went back to the UAE.

He did what he had to do.

He's right back here.

He's got a good job.

I mean, in a way, I look at Mike and I as preparing him for life after this event.

I asked five experienced military attorneys, does this all sound as bananas to you as it does to me?

The talking for nearly three months, all the polygraphs, the hanging out, the Tahoe?

And mostly they said, yeah, rather bananas, especially the Tahoe part.

They said things like, highly irregular, and I've never heard of one this long, and I've never heard of anything like this, and I can't even.

One of the attorneys had a federal terrorism case that involved a pretty long debrief.

All the attorneys agreed, actually, that, yeah, debriefs in terrorism cases, that's not uncommon.

This is my best guess.

The Air Force approached Achman's debrief as if they were trying to wring information out of a terrorist or a guy who might know terrorists and roped in an FBI agent known not for his counter-terror expertise since he had none, but for his Barbara Walters' ability to get people to confess.

The rub, though, was that Achman had nothing to tell.

So that in the end, they were breaking down, and in Jeff's version, building back up, a young airman for no reason at all.

I had one last thing to clear up with Jeff.

What did he think Ahmed had actually done?

Clearly, Jeff had been pissed about the polygraphs, thought the whole thing dragged on too long.

All those weeks, sitting in the same room, talking about the same thing, scraping after non-existent information.

I figured Jeff thought the whole case against Ahmed was bogus.

On the other hand, he kept saying things like his actions or the situation Ahmed had gotten himself into.

What was he talking about?

What did he think the situation was?

In my opinion,

the concern that was generated about Ahmed

was actually a byproduct of what I believed was illicit behavior by James Yee.

We learned things about him.

And I believe.

Jeff talked a lot about Captain James Yee, the Army chaplain who was part of that circle of friends who hung out together and prayed together at Guantanamo.

He and Ahmed had worked together on the prison blocks.

Captain Yee had also been accused of spying, though his charges had been dropped.

But Jeff was somehow certain that James Yee was up to something.

He threw out allegations about James Yee that I won't repeat because I don't believe there are facts to support them.

But Jeff was an investigator who often dealt with predator personalities.

And so that was the lens he applied to Ahmed's story.

He said Yee took advantage of Ahmed's naivete.

He put his faith in a person who was using him.

Because I know it wasn't just Ahmed that was involved in this group.

And the one thing they all had in common was Yi.

Jeff acknowledged he had never spoken to Yi, didn't know the ins and outs of Yi's case, but he insisted, from what he could tell, Yi was to blame for what happened to Ahmed.

Which confused me in a couple of ways.

First, because I don't know of any evidence, either public or secret, showing that James Yi had done anything subversive at Guantanamo.

And second, Jeff seemed to be saying Ahmed and others had done something wrong.

But can I ask you, like, I think I'm a little still

confused, sort of baseline confused.

What was your understanding of what he did do?

Like what he actually did do?

What I believed he had done was compromise the mission of the United States and the Air Force by assisting the Guantanamo detainees in communications to help their cause.

Huh.

That's not my understanding.

That's all I knew.

But that's what did come out.

But that's not true.

Like, that's not what he pled guilty to.

What did he plead guilty to?

I don't even know.

I realize Jeff's job wasn't to retry Ahmed's criminal case.

That wasn't his mission.

But still, how could he properly evaluate what Ahmed was telling him in that debrief if he didn't have any context for what had come before?

If he didn't know anything about Guantanamo even.

I gave him a quick rundown of Ahmed's case, all the puffed-up charges of espionage and aiding the enemy, how they looked and looked for evidence of spying and never found any.

How the case boiled down to a plea, to mishandling classified documents because of two photos and the handful of of unauthorized papers Ahmed said he took as mementos.

Jeff had a story in his head, though, a psychological explanation for why Ahmed got in trouble.

He told me Ahmed admitted passing messages among detainees.

The example he remembered was that Ahmed had informed a father and son housed in different parts of the prison that the other one was there at Guantanamo and was okay.

He also said he thought Ahmed had maybe called a detainee's relatives in the Middle East.

It's one of the things that I think we got out.

It's my personal opinion.

So Mike might disagree with me, other people might disagree with me, but I do specifically remember Ahmed telling us that when he was going into Guantanamo and he heard these cries for family, it affected him.

And after what you're telling me, it sounded like he did have the ability to alert families that loved ones were alive.

Jeff believes Ahmed's motive for this was compassion, not collusion.

Ahmed was trying to bring comfort to detainees' families, but that in doing so, Ahmed had unknowingly helped others with their anti-American plot.

I'm not saying it was right, and I don't agree with it, but I also believe, as I've said, I think Ahmed is somewhat naive.

I think he's a good person, and to hear someone crying, he's going to try and help them.

And I think that's what he did.

It sounded to me like Jeff and maybe Mike too had been working off a false premise the entire time, that Ahmed had participated in something very bad.

I ran all this by Ahmed, who was somewhat mystified by Jeff's take.

Ahmed said he did once tell a father that his son was in another camp over.

He said the father and son had been in neighboring cells and the son was moved and the dad didn't know where he'd gone.

But Ahmed said that wasn't a big deal.

Detainees were constantly being moved and had their own ways of communicating.

Word of who was where tended to get around without anyone's help.

Probably the only reason he'd have mentioned it to Mike and Jeff, he said, was because these guys were Syrian, and that stuck out to Ahmed, to see Syrians locked up in Guantanamo.

And yeah, Ahmed did find the whole place sad and sometimes disturbing, he said, but not in a way that moved him to action.

His motivation at Guantanamo, he said, was to finish his deployment, get married, and go live his life.

The idea that he'd have passed messages, either verbally or say inside library books or letters, much less called anyone's relatives back in the Middle East, he said, is preposterous.

Of course, Ahmed could have told Jeff things he didn't tell me and didn't tell his attorneys and didn't tell the judge.

I doubt it, but it's possible.

To be fair to Jeff, I was grilling him on the details of Ahmed's case nearly two decades later.

Maybe he was conflating different threads of conversation.

hindsight nodding them into a tapestry that satisfied his twin convictions.

That Achman's a good guy and that Ahmed unwittingly threatened the security of the United States.

Here's what I do know.

This belief that Ahmed did something disloyal, or even ideological, persists among the government officials involved in Ahmed's case.

The prosecutor Brian Wheeler, the Air Force investigator I spoke to on background, Jeff too, though his analysis is most generous.

They all still believe, in one way or another, Ahmed did something to aid the enemy at Guantanamo, probably with Chaplin Yi.

In other words, the military and the government learned nothing from this case.

Nothing about espionage or terrorism, and nothing about themselves.

Ahmed doesn't have sweeping systemic criticisms about what happened to him.

He believes his case was overblown, unfair, shot through with prejudice.

But he also believes both he and the government were trapped inside a loop.

It was more theoretical at the end than anything else.

Well,

trying to find connection between me and something, you know, like I've seen in one of the documents like

a huge chart of my name and like

many other names connected to this guy knows this guy and this guy is from Damascus and this guy goes to this mosque and that guy from there who's a bad guy knows this guy who knows this guy and who knows goes to the same mosques.

You know?

A link chart.

Yeah, so they've got this weird link chart that's like, where the heck did this come from?

You know, how did you even make this?

You know, it's, it doesn't even make sense to any sane person.

You know, it's not about like,

well, they're idiots or they're vindictive.

I think...

I think there's a new category of

where you can put all of this in.

You know, it's a new category of fear compiled with

saving the face and phobia.

You know, it's just a combination of a whole bunch of things.

Ackman says he saw that same combination of things operating inside Guantanamo.

The prisoners would complain to him.

You know, they tell you, I'm telling my interrogators all of the story, the same story, every time, every meeting.

And he just doesn't believe it.

Why?

Because

they have read something else or they have heard something else or they want to see if they can break that person.

I don't think that they learned

their way

even until today, even with the people are there now.

I'm not sure if they were found guilty or not, you know.

A lot of these people were just just sent back to their country without being charged with anything

and

they lost just 10 or 20 years of their lives being a guantanamo with the stigma that's going to stick to them.

And they didn't have a chance to fight for it, to fight for their rights.

Ahmed told me he thought about that when he was in jail, awaiting his trial, that the detainees had it much worse than he did.

Because at least I had a legal system, he said.

I could fight for my rights.

So if you don't have a legal system handy, how are you supposed to fight your way out of Guantanamo?

That's next time.

Serial is produced by Jessica Weisberg, Dana Chibis, and me.

Our editor is Julie Snyder.

Additional reporting by Cora Currier and Amir Kafaji.

Fact-checking by Ben Phelan and Jessica Suriano.

Music supervision, sound design, and mixing by Phoebe Wang.

Original score by Sophia Dele-Alessandri.

Editing help from Ellen Weiss, Jen Guerra, and Ira Glass.

Our contributing editors are Carol Rosenberg and Rosina Ali.

Additional production from Daniel Guimet, Katie Mingle, and Emma Grillo.

Our standards editors are Susan Wesling and Aisha Khan.

Legal review from Alamin Sumar.

The art for our show comes from Pablo Del Can and Max Guter.

Supervising producer for Serial Productions is Inde Chubu.

Our executive assistant is Mac Miller.

Sam Dolnick is deputy managing editor of the New York Times.

Thanks to Janelle Pfeiffer, Kelly Doe, Anisha Mooney, Kimitsai, Victoria Kim, Ashka Gami, Jennifer Hershey, Lulu Hale, and Bess Rattray.