The Ghost

which it might have been put.
    Water boarding? I had never heard of it. It sounded harmless enough, a kind of healthy outdoor sport, a cross between windsurfing and white-water rafting. I looked it up on a website.
    Water boarding consists of tightly binding a prisoner to an inclined board in such a manner that the victim’s feet are higher than the head and all movement is impossible. Cloth or cellophane is then used to cover the prisoner’s face, onto which the interrogator pours a continuous stream of water. Although some of the liquid may enter the victim’s lungs, it is the psychological sensation of being under water that makes water boarding so effective. A gag reflex is triggered, the prisoner literally feels himself to be drowning, and almost instantly begs to be released. CIA officers who have been subjected to water boarding as part of their training have lasted an average of fourteen seconds before caving in. Al Qaeda’s toughest prisoner, and alleged mastermind of the 9/11 bombings, Khalid Sheik Mohammed, won the admiration of his CIA interrogators when he was able to last two and a half minutes before begging to confess.
    Water boarding can cause severe pain and damage to the lungs, brain damage due to oxygen deprivation, limb breakage and dislocation due to struggling against restraints, and long-term psychological trauma. In 1947, a Japanese officer was convicted of using water boarding on a US citizen and sentenced to fifteen years hard labor for a war crime. According to an investigation by ABC News, the CIA was authorized to begin using water boarding in mid-March 2002, and recruited a cadre of fourteen interrogators trained in the technique.
    There was an illustration, from Pol Pot’s Cambodia, of a man bound by his wrists and ankles to a sloping table, lying on his back, upside down. His head was in a sack. His face was being saturated by a man holding a watering can. In another photograph, a Viet-cong suspect, pinioned to the ground, was being given similar treatment by three GIs using water from a drinking bottle. The soldier pouring the water was grinning. The man sitting on the prisoner’s chest had a cigarette held casually between the second and third fingers of his right hand.
    I sat back in my chair and thought of various things. I thought, especially, of Emmett’s comment about McAra’s death—that drowning wasn’t painless but agonizing. It had struck me at the time as an odd thing for a professor to say. Flexing my fingers, like a concert pianist preparing to play a challenging final movement, I typed a fresh request into the search engine: “Paul Emmett” + “CIA.”
    Immediately, the screen filled with results, all of them, at first sight, dross: articles and book reviews by Emmett that happened to mention the CIA; articles by others about the CIA that also contained references to Emmett; articles about the Arcadia Institution in which the words “CIA” and “Emmett” had featured. I must have gone through thirty or forty in all, until I came to one which sounded promising.
    The CIA in Academia
    The Central Intelligence Agency is now using several hundred American academics… Paul Emmett …www.spooks-on-campus.org/Church/listK1897a/html -11k
    The web page was headed “Who Did Frank Have in Mind???” and started with a quote from Senator Frank Church’s Select Committee report on the CIA, published in 1976:
    The Central Intelligence Agency is now using several hundred American academics (“academics” includes administrators, faculty members, and graduate students engaged in teaching), who in addition to providing leads and, on occasion, making introductions for intelligence purposes, occasionally write books and other material to be used for propaganda purposes abroad. Beyond these, an additional few score are used in an unwitting manner for minor activities.
    Beneath it, in alphabetical order, was a hyperlinked list of about twenty names, among them Emmett’s, and when I clicked on it, I felt as though I had fallen through a trapdoor.
    Yale graduate Paul Emmett was reported by CIA whistleblower Frank Molinari to have joined the Agency as an officer in either 1969 or 1970, where he was assigned to the Foreign Resources Division of the Directorate of Operations. (Source: Inside the Agency , Amsterdam, 1977)
    “Oh no,” I said quietly. “No, no. That can’t be right.”
    I must have stared at the screen for a full minute, until a sudden crash of breaking