John Conroy

What follows are brief profiles of two of the dozen torturers I interviewed in the course of working on my book (Unspeakable Acts, Ordinary People, to be published by Knopf in February, 2000). I chose these two in part because they were the most articulate. Both were well educated and reflective. They tortured in the field, not in closed interrogation rooms, and each admits to torturing a child. I will profile both men in greater detail at the conference.

Born in 1967, Simon was raised in the United States until he was nine years old. At that point, his family moved to Israel. His upbringing was upper middle class, his family stable. At the age of 18 he began his military service with the IDF, volunteering to serve in the paratroopers, and he was thereafter selected for an elite unit. He was about three months into his training when several Israeli soldiers were captured by guerrillas in the security zone in southern Lebanon. A massive rescue operation was immediately launched. Simon's unit was called away from their maneuvers in the desert, and within one hour they were on the road, headed north to Lebanon.

At that point, the unit was experienced in Lebanon and the occupied territories, but Simon was not. He never been in Lebanon and had had no contact with any Arabs in any of the occupied territories. Describing the trip north he told me, "I am exhilarated and excited because it is the real thing, and I am a little bit scared, but mostly I am just cold. It was freezing, and we had come up without our coats, we are just wearing shirts, and it is freezing. I have no idea what is going on. I know these people are missing, I know we are driving somewhere, but I don't know where I am. We are all basically clueless, and that is the way most soldiers are, they never know where they are and what is going on. It is only much later that you understand what was going on."

Simon and his fellow soldiers surrounded and entered a village. "All of a sudden I see these two really weird looking guys. They are not Israeli soldiers. They are wearing green uniforms, with long greasy hair and long beards. They look like thugs, they look like Mafioso types, and they have weird pistols and I think one of them had a knife, they are all goosed up. And we are very conservative, straightlaced soldiers, and these weirdos are walking through the street, walking with some guy who is obviously an Israeli. I figured they are Lebanese, they are SLA, and then my officer says to me and some other guys, 'Go with them.'"

Simon followed the two Lebanese and the Israeli into a house where they proceeded to rough up the occupants, a man, woman, and child. "They are talking to him in Arabic, and I don't understand. I am kind of embarrassed, because this is a house, but I am almost catatonic through this whole thing. You don't feel anything. I felt slight embarrassment because this was a house and there was this woman and the kid there."

One of the SLA men pulled a kitchen knife out of a drawer, made out as if it was contraband of some kind, and thereafter the man of the house was taken outside. "The man is 35, 40, and I am at this point where Arabs to me look all the same. He is brown. He is a little bit shriveled, like a guy would be who is working in the fields. But he is not a peasant. It was a nice house. And we walked through a couple alleys to a back street, and I am just standing there, no one really tells me what to do. I am there with another soldier or two."

"And all of a sudden I see this guy get down on his knees. And his face is up against the wall, and they have put something over his eyes. And they are yelling at him and they have a gun at his head. And I am there, I am guarding. And all of a sudden, I guess I think to myself, "What, are they going to kill him? Oh well." You know. I am not outraged, I am not shocked. I am just kind of a little bit uncomfortable, a little bit embarrassed. They could have killed him at that point and I would not have done anything. They could have shot him right there and I would have walked back to the guys and kept on going. I guess I assumed he was a bad guy, but I didn't really know. I didn't even think about it. I was maybe 5 feet away from them. I was along as the guard, as the muscle, while they did this.

"The whole thing took a couple of minutes. Then all of a sudden, and this I will never forget, I look down the street and there is a UN person there. He is obviously European and he has a blue hat on with big white UN on it, and he is standing ten feet away from me. He has his hands behind his back, he doesn't have a gun, he is just standing there and he is just looking. And at that moment I felt really ashamed. And then it ended. I don't remember how it ended, but seconds later he was up, he was gone, and the whole thing was over and I walked back."

The following day, Simon carried out a mock execution on a boy whom he recalls as being somewhere between 8 and 14 years old. The boy had been taken from a house after some shotgun shells were found in a drawer in his bedroom. The boy was blindfolded, put on the ground, and Simon put his knee on the boy's back and his gun to the boy's head. Simon thinks that a gun was fired into the ground close to the boy's head at that point, but he is no longer certain. After that, Simon and his comrades took the boy to a rooftop and held him over the precipice, the boy aware that if he was dropped, he would die.

"Throughout this whole incident he never said a word. His face was sealed. He wasn't crying. He wasn't whimpering, it was like he was just shut down. The fear I think was so great that he had just turned off. It was as if you couldn't get through to him. As far as he was concerned, he was dead, I guess. He was gone. He had been killed almost twice, once on the ground and once on the roof. And all of us around him, we have all our equipment and all our guns, and we must have been huge and frightening to this guy, and we are talking in a foreign language, and there are tanks around, and there are helicopters flying overhead, and soldiers are all over this village, this village is absolutely being ransacked by hundreds of soldiers."

The village was searched for three days. No resistance was offered. I asked whether standing guard over the mock execution on the first day had enabled him to torture the boy the following day. No, Simon said, he could have tortured the boy the first day. All it would have taken was an order from an officer. He told me that at that point he had no conception that there was such a thing as an illegal order or that Israeli law and international law applied to his actions. For him, whatever the officer said was law.

I interviewed him in January, 1991, he was about to turn 39. He was tall, 6'3", 220 pounds, athletic. He was married, he had no children, and he had worked as an insurance company executive in Johannesburg. An intelligent man who had given the trajectory of his life some thought. He had been raised in a very civilized boarding school and yet had come to torture both adults and children while serving as a sergeant in the Rhodesian army.

George was raised in the bush in Rhodesia. His mother, a nurse who had been emigrated from Ireland, was Catholic, but not practicing because she married a divorced man. George was baptized a Methodist but claimed to have no specific religious upbringing.

His parents divorced at early age -- he thinks he was 4 or 5 years old. He was sent to a British style boarding school at age 6 and most of his school vacations were thereafter spent with his father. His father was a gold miner, that is he would buy the rights to a mine that had already been worked out by a large company. He would extract the last bits of gold with a smaller work crew of 20 to 25 black laborers, using methods that large companies did not find cost efficient.

Thus George's first six years were spent mostly in mining camps. He grew up playing with black children, speaking their language, which he says he spoke better than English until he was sent to a boarding school at age 6. "I was happier at school than at home," he told me. "We fought a lot....My parents and I weren't very close, so we didn't see much of each other."

He thinks his training as a torturer began at that boarding school, which he says was modeled on the British system and afflicted with a colonial mentality. He also pointed to the hazing rites, upperclassmen mistreating those who had to serve them, as instrumental in his later transformation into a torturer. He said it was not uncommon for minor electric shock to be applied to underclassmen, age 13 and 14.

George was a good student. He did O levels and A levels in school and won an engineering scholarship to university for designing and building a rotary engine for a science fair. He studied engineering for about a year and a half and then dropped out and joined the army.

"I joined the army," he told me, "partly because having dropped out of study, I was liable for call up, and I didn't know what I was doing, I didn't have anything in particular to do." George said the pay was decent, there was a certain glamor to being a soldier, and as this was 1972 and the war was just starting, there were not many casualties as yet. Rhodesian society was soon to be isolated internationally, and George told me he bought into all the propaganda. "Everyone was against us," George recalled, "everyone was an idiot, and we were the last bastion of civilization against the communist threat....I wanted to be an officer with a sword."

After about six months with an infantry unit he was admitted to the officer training course. He described in great detail the escape and evasion course he participated in. The officer recruits were assigned to play guerrillas, and they were pursued by regular army units. George and his team were given little food and they were chased for six days while they carried out various tasks designed to exhaust them, like carrying ammunition boxes filled with sand up steep slopes. If they were caught they were given a beating and released, as the chase was supposed to last for six days. On that sixth day they were captured, handcuffed, hooded, and driven to a prison where they were put in a room that had been flooded so that there were about ten inches of cold water on the floor. They were not allowed to talk or to touch a wall or each other. The room was completely dark. Every half hour the light was switched on and two soldiers came in with hoses and sprayed them with cold water. This occurred throughout the night.

In the morning they were taken out one at a time and were made to kneel on rough concrete, concrete that had small stones protruding from the surface. They knelt there for about an hour, the hoods and handcuffs still on. If at that point they refused to provide information, someone put a hose to the top of the hood, so the water poured down the front of the man's face.

"The water flows down over the sack on your face, so you can almost breathe, you can still sort of drag a breath for a while, but you eventually start blacking out, because you are not getting enough oxygen. When you try and breathe, the bag goes into your mouth and your nose and you can suck a bit of air through it, but not enough to keep you going. So it is a slow sort of process, and the feeling of asphyxiation, of drowning, builds up slowly, so it hits you quite hard. But I think the main thing about the water treatment is the psychological fear, which in my case, I can remember being scared, and I knew it was an exercise, I mean deep down inside I knew it was an exercise, but for some guy who doesn't know if he is going to be killed or shot or whatever, the fear must be tremendous. So I tend to think that in terms of the torture, what you are doing there is more a psychological torture more than a physical one."

George told me that his own fear escalated when he heard the toughest recruit of the course break down sobbing, saying he would tell his tormentors anything they wanted to know. George also heard calls for a doctor when another recruit stopped breathing, and he told me that a recruit had died of a heart attack on the course a couple of years earlier.

"I couldn't say in any honesty that I had the same sort of fear a genuine prisoner has who is taken in the bush and given the water treatment, nor could I say that we were subject to the water treatment to the same degree as someone like that, you know someone taken in the bush could get drowned."

Of eighteen men on the course, only six managed to maintain their resistance, George among them. He believes he was able to hold out because he was in excellent physical condition when he started the course and because he has a large nose, which he thinks made it easier to survive the water treatment.

After that training, George eventually was deployed as a tracker, tracking guerrillas who came over the border. His unit was mounted on horseback, the guerrillas were generally on foot. When the tracks led into a kraal, a small village in the bush, it would be impossible to separate the guerrillas' tracks from the local residents', and in that situation, George would pull a young man from the crowd and ask where the guerrillas had gone. If the man pled ignorance, George might pull a dynamo from his pack, attach alligator clips to the man's ears, and turn the crank.

As years passed and the war escalated, the trackers often found themselves in villages populated only by women, children, and old men. The usual suspects -- young males -- would all be away with the guerrillas. In that instance, George would find the village elder. The most efficient method of questioning, he says, was not to torture the elder, but the elder's grandson. It did not work so well with a grand-daughter, he told me. Once the grandson was in hand, George would order a soldier to hold the child by the ankles and lower his head into a bucket of water. The boy would be brought up for air just before he drowned and would be set on the ground, where he would spew water, writhe in pain, and weep from fear. The process would be repeated until the old man talked.

"Beating people up, physically assaulting people, that happened fairly irregularly," George told me. "Because that sort of thing requires anger, or a particular sort of mentality that could take someone and cold-bloodedly beat him to a pulp, and we didn't operate on anger or sadism or anything like that. And this is probably more horrific. It became a function. It became a part of the job. It became standard operating procedure."