After working as an interrogator for a U.S. military contractor in Iraq, Eric Fair took a job as an analyst for the National Security Agency. When he went to the NSA, Fair was reckoning with the torture of Iraqi prisoners, torture he had witnessed and in which he had participated. Fair would go on to write a memoir detailing his experiences in Iraq; the book, Consequence, was published last month to strong notices, including not one but two positive reviews in the New York Times. But Fair actually wrote about his time as an interrogator more than a decade earlier in an internal NSA publication. One of the publication’s editors asked him to contribute a piece about “how my experience as an interrogator influences my work at the NSA,” as he put it in Consequence. Fair submitted an article in which “I question the efficacy of certain intelligence-gathering techniques and wonder whether, for the sake of morality, it might be best to sacrifice some level of tactical knowledge.” “I was asked rewrite this section. I cut it completely. Instead, I wrote about how my experience in the interrogation booths had familiarized me with the overall intelligence cycle.” Fair’s article for the NSA publication is among the files provided by former agency contractor Edward Snowden. It appeared in SIDtoday, a newsletter for the NSA’s Signals Intelligence Directorate, or SID, and is being released by The Intercept. (Read Part 1 and Part 2.)

In the essay, dated March 2005, Fair examines the relationship between human intelligence, or HUMINT, which can be derived from interrogations, and signals intelligence, or SIGINT, which comes from electronic communications. Fair’s article is titled “From SIGINT to HUMINT to SIGINT (through HUMINT): How a SIGINTer became an interrogator in Iraq, and what he learned as a result.” The article describes his deployment to Iraq in 2003 and 2004, when he worked as a contractor at Abu Ghraib and at a base in Fallujah. In his previous intelligence work, he had “been limited to gathering only the information a target would reveal in conversation, searching for clues and hints,” he wrote. In Iraq, he was “excited” by “the opportunity to get to know these targets, ask them questions about their personal lives, gain a better understanding of who they were.” But Fair soon became overwhelmed by the number of prisoners being brought in, and “as the numbers grew, so too did the ominous feeling that things were going downhill.” Fair wrote that “detainees were scared and apprehensive, and it was all I could do to get them talking about basic biographical information let alone their knowledge of the insurgency. When the success stories would come, it was often because the detainee was tired and worn out from his ordeal and hoped to gain something by providing information.” Back in the United States at the NSA, he was assigned to a team that sorted through interrogation reports from Iraq to develop leads for signals tracking. Most of the rest of the article consists of platitudes about making SIGINT and HUMINT “work more effectively together.” The can-do tone of the SIDtoday article belies the true nature of the prisoners’ “ordeals,” which Fair would soon make public. In 2007, he published the first of many public articles about the brutality with which he and other U.S. personnel treated Iraqis. Abu Ghraib, he insisted, was not “an isolated incident in an otherwise well-run detention system.” In Consequence, he recounts the daily work of manipulating and mistreating prisoners even as he became disillusioned with the idea that such interrogations produced any intelligence of value. He writes about shoving detainees into walls and throwing chairs, seeing men naked in freezing temperatures and subjecting them to sleep deprivation. He sees detainees being struck by other interrogators. He describes a technique known as the “Palestinian chair,” rumored to have been taught to U.S. forces by Israeli interrogators. Fair describes the torture of one Iraqi detainee in the chair in excruciating detail. “His hands are tied to his ankles. The chair forces him to lean forward in a crouch, forcing all of his weight onto his thighs. … He is blindfolded. His head has collapsed into his chest. He wheezes and gasps for air. There is a pool of urine at his feet.”

A U.S. Marine guards a prisoner detained at a base in Saqliwiyah, Iraq, Aug. 3, 2005. Photo: Scott Olson/Getty Images