Exclusive: The CIA Chief of Interrogations Who Taught People to Torture
Charlie Wise, the CIA's first chief of interrogations, learned the wrong lessons from the agency's dirty wars in Latin America.
UPDATED
While researching The Ice Man, I wanted to understand how abusive interrogation techniques spread around the agency.
That led me to Charlie Wise.
Wise, who was chief of interrogations at the CIA in 2002-2003, used—and taught—torture. Not the “enhanced” techniques like waterboarding that were authorized by the Bush Justice Department. Those were cruel enough, but Wise employed the kind of joint-breaking torture techniques used in 16th century Italian prisons and in Vietnam POW camps, techniques that were never authorized in the CIA program.
His work in the CIA is still an official secret. But 20 years later, Wise’s name still holds a prominent place in the ongoing reckoning of the agency’s abuses in the war on terror. New information about his past continues to come to light. (The CIA did not respond to a request for comment.)
In the Senate’s monumental 2014 report on CIA interrogations, Wise is the unnamed “chief of interrogations” who ordered the “rectal re-hydration” of alleged 9/11 mastermind Khalid Shaikh Mohammed. Water was forced into KSM’s rectum at a black site in Afghanistan without a determination of medical need; it was done to show "total control over the detainee." Physicians for Human Rights called it “a sexual assault masquerading as a medical treatment.”
In the military court proceedings for the 9/11 defendants in Guantanamo Bay, Wise is known as “NX2.” Defense lawyers there say their clients are still traumatized by what NX2 did to them.
James Mitchell, the military psychologist who developed and helped run the enhanced interrogation program, called him “the New Sheriff.” As Mitchell recounted in his book Enhanced Interrogation, that was the first thing he heard Wise say when they met before Christmas 2002 at an agency black site in Poland.
“There is a new sheriff in town,” Wise told Mitchell. “I’m calling the shots now.”
According to Mitchell, Wise said he intended to “start all over from square one” using techniques he had learned in Latin America. Wise told Mitchell he had worked with the Contras in their battle against the Sandanista regime in Nicaragua in the 1980s.
Mitchell was in Poland for the interrogation of Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri, the suspected mastermind of the USS Cole bombing in 2000 that killed 17 US sailors.
Mitchell described how Wise and some of his trainees interrogated al-Nashiri in the Polish black site:
“The chief interrogator (Wise) stood al-Nashiri up and cinched his elbows together behind his back with a leather strap until they touched. Then the chief interrogator and one of the newly-minted interrogators started lifting al-Nashiri’s arms behind him, toward the ceiling. Al-Nashiri bent over and screamed.”
This was a Medieval torture known as the “strappado,” according to Darius Rejali, one the world’s leading experts on torture. The strappado’s most famous victim was Niccolo Machiavelli, the Italian philosopher known for his treatise on unscrupulous politicians, The Prince. In 1513, Machiavelli was suspected of conspiring against the ruling family of Florence, the Medicis, and was tortured in the Bargello prison.
The strappado had never been approved for use in the CIA program because it could lead to permanent body damage. A doctor who examined al-Nashiri in Guantanamo in 2012 found he was still suffering from injuries consistent with being suspended by his shoulders a decade earlier.
It was also eerily similar to the position that killed Manadel al-Jamadi, the Ice Man, in Abu Ghraib prison. Was there a connection, I wondered?
Born and raised in Oklahoma, Charlie Wise joined the Marine Corps after college. His superiors noted his “demanding personality.”
“He is a hard man to discourage,” reads one of his fitness reports, which I obtained under a Freedom of Information Act request.
“Lt. Wise is an intelligent, energetic, and personable officer,” states another.
Wise became the target intelligence officer for the 2nd Marine Division and was responsible for securing 200,000 classified files. He also went through Survival, Evasion, Resistance and Escape (SERE) school, which exposed him to the torture then being employed on Vietnam POWs. In 1975, he received an honorable discharge.
Wise enrolled as a PhD student in the Study Group on International Terrorism at Oklahoma University, one of the first US academic institutions to study terrorism. The Study Group was headed by professor Stephen Sloan, who had developed a new way of teaching about terrorism with realistic simulations of terrorist events. “Charles was instrumental in the development of my simulation technique,” Sloan told me in an email. “He was an outstanding red team leader of the early simulations. His dedication to his country was impressive. I regret the loss of a real professional and patriot.”
His PhD thesis, written in 1980, was an examination of the impact of Palestinian terrorism on the Arab/Israeli conflict. As part of his research, he visited Israel and arranged an interview with Saad Haddad, commander of a Christian enclave in southern Lebanon. (Haddad would later go on to found the South Lebanon Army during the Lebanese Civil War.) In his thesis, he identified the growing phenomenon of “indiscriminate violence” that al Qaida would use to devastating effect. “Indiscriminate terrorism is often characterized as ‘mindless violence,’” Wise wrote. “However, the more mindless the violence, the more horrendous the act, the more indiscriminate the terrorism, the more publicity gained by the action.”
Wise’s academic study of terrorism and his real-world experience with the Marines must have intrigued the CIA. The agency put him to work as an interrogation trainer in the Latin American Division in the 1980s. At the time, CIA Director Bill Casey was pushing for an aggressive response to what he believed was Communist subversion in Central America.
Wise was involved in training and conducted interrogations in a CIA program known as “Human Resource Exploitation.”1 First exposed by reporters at The Baltimore Sun, the program taught interrogators in at least five Latin American countries to “create unpleasant or intolerable situations” using sleep deprivation, forced standing, isolation, threats and fear, and other tactics to destroy a subject’s ability to resist. The Human Resource Exploitation program was terminated in 1986 because of “allegations of human rights abuses in Latin America.”2
Even back then, Wise crossed the line. In 1984, the CIA Inspector General’s office investigated allegations of misconduct in interrogations and the death of one individual.3 The Inspector General recommended that Wise receive a verbal reprimand for “inappropriate use of interrogation techniques.”4
Just last month, a defense lawyer for one of the 9/11 defendants in Guantanamo revealed that Wise had played Russian Roulette with the subject of an interrogation.5
After 9/11, Wise was one of the few people left at the CIA who had any experience with interrogating detainees.
“We had no program so we had to build it from scratch,” Jim Cotsana tells me. “He was picked to come in and help start it.”
Cotsana is a retired 26-year CIA veteran and a former department chief in the Counterterrorism Center who became Wise’s boss. The Trump administration invoked the state secrets privilege to prevent Cotsana from answering questions about Wise and other matters in a federal lawsuit. But he was forthcoming in a phone conversation with me.
In the fall of 2002, Cotsana offered Wise the job of chief interrogator in the Rendition, Detention, and Interrogation (RDI) group inside the CIA’s Counterterrorist Center.
Some in the agency viewed Wise as a hero. According to Mitchell, Wise had persuaded the Afghan mujihadeen to sell Stinger missiles back to the US government after the Soviet Army left the country. An unnamed CIA debriefer assigned to temporary duty overseas heard about a different side of Wise. He was accused of doing “something” with a detainee. “There was lots of controversy around him,” the debriefer told the CIA Inspector General.
To rebuild the CIA’s interrogation program, Wise started with “materials and experiences from the previous agency program [redacted] which ended in 1986”—most likely a reference to Human Resource Exploitation program. He added elements from resistance training and cultural considerations and traveled to unnamed foreign countries “to obtain information about their respective interrogation programs for use in designing the Agency’s program.”6
“[Wise] explained that his philosophy was to strip the detainee of everything and then provide him small things (blankets, clothes, etc) as rewards when the detainee provided information,” the Inspector General’s office reported.7
Wise and another instructor designed the first training session for CIA interrogators in November 2002.8 The course—officially known as the “High-Value Target Interrogation and Exploitation Training Seminar”—was, as one observer put it, a “fiasco.”
Students were taught a technique to “enhance…the pain threshold” which could cause “permanent physical damage,” according to a report by the Senate Armed Services Committee.9 The technique isn’t identified in the Senate report but a CIA Inspector General’s report revealed that Wise “enhanced” an approved kneeling stress position by placing a broomstick behind the detainee’s knees.
“That would be totally inappropriate to do to anybody, whether it's an American or a foreign detainee,” an instructor with the Joint Personnel Recovery Agency who attended the training told Senate investigators. “We would not do something that would cause permanent physical damage.”
In a Lotus note quoted in a report by the CIA Inspector General, Wise defended his use of the broomstick in a note to headquarters:
“The thing with the broom handle is a part of the stress position that is used in SERE training. [redacted] it was a round broom handle, less than an inch in diameter, that was used to keep the detainee from rolling from his knee to the floor. It was not used to cause him pain and in no way harmed him. It is interesting that we can condone waterboarding a detainee 70 plus times and threatening his family but I have no leeway with the most benign position.”
Cotsana agreed, saying it was done to help detainees.
But that was not how American POWs in North Vietnam viewed it. They called it “kneeling torture.” George “Bud” Day, an Air Force pilot who received the Congressional Medal of Honor, experienced it after he was shot down in 1967 over Vietnam. Day called it most painful technique that could possibly be applied. “The best comparison is that of driving a long nail under the kneecap,” Day wrote in his memoir, Return With Honor. “If you have any doubts about this, try kneeling on a broomstick with your hands in the air for 15 to 20 minutes.”
At the end of Wise’s 2002 pilot interrogator training course, seven students were deemed “trained and qualified” interrogators. They needed 20 hours of supervised interrogation with detainees in order to become “certified” to conduct interrogations on their own.10
Certification for some trainees took place in a secret CIA prison known at the “Salt Pit”—a former brick factory north of Kabul. Wise told the CIA Inspector General’s office that the Salt Pit was good for interrogations “because it was the closest thing he has seen to a dungeon.” In its darkened cells, blindfolded men hung from the ceiling, handcuffed to bars over their hands in CIA-approved “standing sleep deprivation.”
Wise had his students practice “enhanced” techniques in the Salt Pit on KSM’s nephew, Ammar al-Baluchi, who was captured in mid-2003.
One night, four trainees, all dressed in black, lined up to practice a technique known as “walling.” Al-Baluchi stood naked before them, a 141-pound computer technician weak from lack of food and sleep deprivation. The back of al-Baluchi’s heels touched a hollow plywood wall. A rolled-up towel was wrapped around his neck. One by one, the trainees grabbed the ends of the towel and slammed al-Baluchi against the wall.
“Imagine asking a question, pausing for a response,” another instructor explained to the CIA Inspector General. “If the response is not good, then boom, boom, boom, boom, boom against the wall.” There was no set time limit for a walling session, but one trainee said that a typical session lasted up to two hours. It was tiring work. The trainees took turns because fatigue set in.11
Al-Baluchi believed that he was being beaten. “As my head was being hit each time, I would see sparks of light in my eyes,” he wrote in a note submitted as evidence in the military commissions in Guantanamo. “As the intensity of these sparks were increasing as a result of repeated hitting, all of a sudden felt a strong jolt of electricity in my head then I couldn't see anything. Everything went dark and I passed out.”
He later admitted that the things he was saying while interrogators threw him against the wall were made up, according to a report by the CIA’s Inspector General.
Who were these students that Wise trained? Was one of them, I wondered, the same interrogator who questioned Manadel al-Jamadi in Abu Ghraib?
The answer to that question is classified.
At CIA headquarters, Wise swiftly became a liability.
“Charlie, how do I say this without sounding derogatory, he never followed the rules,” Cotsana says. “He kind of went off the reservation.”
Cotsana tells me he had stressed to Wise, as he did with all interrogators, that he had to stay within the guidelines approved by the Bush Justice Department. “I didn’t give a damn it if it was a guy on the lowest end of the totem pole,” Cotsana says he told Wise. “You can only use the approved techniques.”
But Wise resented the approved techniques that James Mitchell had brought to the CIA. In contrast to Mitchell, whose experience was limited to training US troops to resist interrogation if captured, Wise told the Inspector General he had experience interrogating “real people.”
What’s more, Mitchell was an outsider, a contractor. Wise was a veteran CIA officer and he believed he knew what the agency wanted. The approved techniques, which some CIA operators viewed as “sissified,”12 would not get the job done. “Headquarters is only interested in results,” Mitchell says Wise told him. “They are not interested in how we get them.”13 (Mitchell says that wasn’t true in his experience.)
Wise had been admonished in the winter of 2002 to stop using the broomstick after James Mitchell reported him using it on al-Nashiri in the Polish black site. Mitchell saw him do it again during a training class in the spring of 2003. “It’s not your fucking course,” Wise told him.14 Mitchell reported him again. Cotsana told Wise to knock it off. But Wise did it again in July. Bruce Jessen, a military psychologist who worked closely with Mitchell, reported him once more.15
Finally, Cotsana decided he had had enough. He told Wise to get on the next flight home. His time as chief of interrogations was over. “I just couldn’t afford to have him out there anyone,” Cotsana says.
“This infraction, coupled with a previous unauthorized variation of measures by [Wise] and during a period of intense scrutiny by Headquarters and policymakers, mandated [Wise] be recalled and removed from the program,” Cotsana wrote.16
Wise left the CIA in September 2003. Two weeks later, he was dead.
“He was a pain in the ass,” Jose Rodriguez, former head of the CIA Counterterrorism Center, told the authors of The Forever Prisoner.17 “He got so angry he retired, went home and was having breakfast with his kids when he had a massive heart attack.”
In death, Wise became the perfect fall guy. The CIA has since acknowledged that mistakes were made in the early days of its interrogation program that were quickly fixed, once detected. 18 “Did we make mistakes? You bet,” Cotsana tells me. “But we reported them up the chain.”
One of those mistakes was the decision to put Charlie Wise in charge of interrogations.
Editor’s note: This story has been updated with a photo and details from Charlie Wise’s military record and a description of his PhD thesis.
US Senate, Select Committee on Intelligence, Report of the Committee Study of the CIA’s Detention and Interrogation Program, December 9, 2014. (Hereafter Senate interrogation report)
CIA, Office of Inspector General, [Redacted] Counterterrorism Detention and Interrogation Activities (September 2001-October 2003)
ibid.
Senate interrogation report.
US v Al-Nashiri II, Testimony of Bruce Jessen, April 12, 2023, (PM session) ref no 23451
CIA, Office of Inspector General, Report of investigation into treatment of Ammar al-Baluchi, Undated.
Senate interogation report, p. 19.
Senate interrogation report; CIA OIG, Investigation into treatment of Ammar al-Baluchi.
Senate Armed Services Committee, Inquiry into the Treatment of Detainees in U.S. Custody, November 20, 2008.
US v KSM etal, Testimony of James Mitchell, January 22, 2020 (AM session); Central Intelligence Agency, Inspector General, Counterterrorism Detention and Interrogation Activities (September 2001-October 2003), May 7, 2004.
CIA OIG, Investigation into treatment of al-Baluchi.
Senate interrogation report, p. 65.
US v KSM, Testimony of James Mitchell, January 22, 2020 (PM Session)
ibid.
James Mitchell, Enhanced Interrogations, The Crown Publishing Group, p. 129. Kindle edition; Cathy Scott-Clark & Adrian Levy, The Forever Prisoner, Atlantic Monthly Press, 2022; Interview with Jim Cotsana.
CIA OIG, Investigation into treatment of Ammar al-Baluchi.
Scott-Clark & Adrian Levy, The Forever Prisoner.
See CIA Comments on the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence Report on the Rendition, Detention, and Interrogation Program, December 2014.
Exclusive: The CIA Chief of Interrogations Who Taught People to Torture
Why is the torturer named "Wise?" He's stupid!