The white room

THERE ARE incidents and stories that, try as you may to banish them, never leave the mind. One such incident was recorded by Frank Snepp, a CIA case officer, who spent more than four years in the Saigon station during that war.

ADVERTISEMENT

He was tasked with the interrogation of Nguyen Van Tai, a former North Vietnamese deputy minister of public security, who had come south in 1962 to take charge of the communist espionage and terrorist network in Saigon. He helped organize the attack on the American embassy in 1968, but two years later he was bagged in a South Vietnamese dragnet.

He knew a lot, and both the South Vietnamese and the Americans were interested in what he had to tell them. As for his eight months with the South Vietnamese, Snepp says only that he "had not been treated kindly." But they had failed to break him.

The Americans and their allies discovered that, like many Vietnamese, Tai had a horror of being cold. He believed that his blood vessels contracted. So they built him a separate cell and interrogation room, all to himself. Both were windowless, and painted white, totally white, with nothing but a chair, a table, a cot, and a hole in the floor for a toilet.

The cell and the interrogation chamber were then attached to heavy duty air conditioners so that the rooms could be kept frigid at all times. And there he remained in solitary confinement, year in and year out, without ever seeing the rising or the setting of the sun.

Tai was a tough nut to crack. The only time Snepp ever saw a fracture in his implacable facade was when Snepp mentioned Tai's family, whom he had not seen in 10 years. "I cannot think about my wife and children," Tai said. "The only way I can survive this is by putting all such hope aside. Then there are no illusions or disappointments."

Then, in 1973, the Paris peace talks arranged for a prisoner release, and Snepp briefed Tai. "If what you tell me is true," then this is the happiest day of my life," Tai said.

But it was not true, at least not for Tai. The South Vietnamese said that the prisoner exchange did not extend to spies like Tai because he had never admitted his true identity. Snepp never saw him again.

Snepp learned some two years later, however, that just before the communist tanks rolled into Saigon, a senior CIA official suggested that it would be useful if Tai were to disappear. He was, after all, a trained terrorist and could not be expected to be magnanimous in victory.

And so it was that Tai was taken out of the white room, where he had been in solitary confinement for four years, loaded on an airplane, and thrown out at 10,000 feet over the South China Sea.

I have ever since wondered how it felt, after being cold for so long, to emerge into the heat of that long ago Saigon April, only to be cold again as the plane climbed and climbed. Did he think he was finally going home, only to guess the truth when the door was opened over the ocean?

It must have been only a few days later that I rose over the roof tops of Saigon and flew out over the South China Sea, leaving behind the wreckage of 30 years of American policy as the North Vietnamese army prepared for its entry into Saigon in the morning.

Today I read of how the Bush administration lobbied Congress to scrap legislation that would have imposed tight restrictions on the use of extreme interrogation measures by intelligence officers, and I think that for all the horror and despair of the white room, today's internees are receiving worse treatment in Guantanamo Bay and in nameless cells in undisclosed countries.

I think of how the interrogators at Abu Ghraib sensed that sexual humiliation was a fear among Arab men as being cold was to Nguyen Van Tai, and how that fear was exploited, and of how it has been reported that prisoner abuse continues even after Abu Ghraib.

I have never believed that the white room, and others like it, helped our cause in Vietnam, nor do I believe that torture can win our struggle against Islamic extremism. I watched us lose one war, and if policies are not changed, I fear I am watching us lose another one now.

H.D.S. Greenway's column appears regularly in the Globe.