Mission: Black List #1

In 2003, Staff Sgt. Maddox was an army interrogation specialist on his first field assignment in Iraq gathering information on “bad guys.” The unexpectedly rapid collapse of Saddam Hussein’s regime made that category a broad one. Sent to Tikrit, Saddam’s home town, Maddox found no system for screening detainees to identify priority targets. That began to change with one of Saddam’s bodyguards, Maddox’s first serious interrogation and the first step to Saddam’s capture. With freelance writer Seay (coauthor, Hello Charlie ) providing the polish, Maddox takes readers through an intense multilevel series of question-and-answer games that led slowly, with many false starts and sidetracks, to Saddam’s hideout. Maddox makes no secret of his mistakes: losing his temper, failing to control interrogations, seeking information rather than cultivating insight. “We weren’t in the United States and my job wasn’t to hand down justice,” he writes. His account is a welcome corrective to lurid accounts of interrogation techniques, frequently secondhand. The capture of Saddam Hussein, like all good intelligence work, was 5% insight and 95% patience. Brutality, Maddox makes clear, was not merely counterproductive but unnecessary. 8 pages of color photos. (Dec. 13)