The Prisoner of Guantanamo by Dan Fesperman Page A

dawn, undetected by the campus police.
    Falk and Whitaker got lucky with their arrangements. At first they had shared a bedroom in Villa Mar, with two men from the Defense Intelligence Agency in a room down the hall. But when the roof leaked during the one and only downpour since their posting, the two of them were reassigned to a two-bedroom detached house that had just come open on Iguana Terrace, well off the beaten path. Their neighbors to either side were Navy families stationed at the base, with a pleasure boat in one driveway and a trampoline in the other.
    Pam came to Gitmo the week after Falk. She arrived on a Thursday, and by Sunday night she had already been invited to a pool party, a beach bonfire, a movie at the outdoor theater, and an afternoon of sailing.
    Professionally the reception was cooler. She was fluent in Arabic, but had only recently completed interrogation training. The resident males were skeptical. A
female
interrogating Muslim men? And not just any Muslims, but ones stitched from Islam’s toughest fabric—acid-washed in vats of fifteenth-century thinking, then wrung dry by combat and the rigid isolation of Camp Delta. They’d laugh this gal from Oklahoma out of the room. Or worse, spit a great gob of pious anger onto her unholy and uncovered face.
    It had already happened to other women, and when Pam’s first subjects immediately lived up to this billing the knowing crowd from Langley, the Bureau, and the Pentagon nodded smugly. The accepted theory was that she was yet another ham-handed Washington stab at “social engineering.”
    Then a funny thing happened. One or two of the Arabs, then three or four, then a dozen—a veritable groundswell—began to open up to Pam’s questions in ways they hadn’t for the men’s. In a calm and patient manner that endured and then asserted, she gradually morphed into their mothers, their sisters, their daughters, or even—from a respectful distance, and only in the minds of the subjects—their lovers. Out spilled thoughts and articulations that the grizzled old fighters had given up for dead. One of them fell so head over heels for her that he began spinning grandiose yarns that even the most gullible analysts were not prepared to believe. He had to be pried from her custody, sulking and lovelorn.
    Not only was Pam accepted into the intelligence tribe, but her success enabled her to avoid recruitment into one of General Trabert’s more infamous experiments—an attempt to get information from the detainees by sexually humiliating them. One of Pam’s shapelier but less fortunate roommates ended up stripping to her bra and panties in one such attempt. The vamping backfired, of course. The subjects only retreated deeper into anger and silence. The interrogator didn’t fare so well, either. She locked herself into a restroom for an hour, sobbing in shame.
    Falk and Pam first met one morning inside the wire. He had already noticed her the night before at the Tiki Bar, but she had been accompanied by at least five surrounding males, and from his vantage point a few tables away she had seemed more than able to meet their challenge, parrying advances with wit and poise, so he had kept his distance. Besides, he didn’t like taking a number to wait his turn.
    They came face-to-face the next morning at the holding cage. Falk had an 11 a.m. appointment to interrogate a young Arab of indeterminate citizenship, possibly Saudi. Pam also wanted a session with the fellow but wasn’t scheduled on his dance card until the following day. The pecking order on these conflicts was well established. Civilian interrogators such as Falk almost always got priority over their military counterparts. More to the point, Falk had reserved the slot. But instead of getting territorial he calmly let Pam state her case, which turned out to be pretty compelling: Another detainee had just offered her team a lead on this