Educing Information: Interrogation - National Intelligence University

States faced the original Axis Powers: Germany, Italy, and Japan. Given the vast
number of U.S. citizens who could trace their roots back to Europe, there was
a degree of familiarity — cultural and linguistic — with the European enemies.
Imperial Japan was an entirely different story. Few U.S. citizens at the time
had traveled to Japan or possessed even a superficial understanding of such a
dramatically different culture. Similarly, other than a small number of former
missionaries, businessmen, and first-generation Japanese immigrants (Issei), most
people perceived the Japanese language as essentially impenetrable. In essence,
the challenge in 1941 was not unlike that facing America in the early stages of a
new century, where an understanding of Islamic culture and the Arabic language
is as rare as understanding of Japan’s in the 1940s. Cultural-linguistic barriers to
success were skillfully surmounted through education, innovative thinking, and an
efficient exploitation of an overlooked (and widely shunned) resource: the Nisei,
or second-generation Japanese Americans. 646 Cultural intelligence (although not
referred to as such at the time) proved a critical factor, a point Ulrich Straus
eloquently illustrated in The Anguish of Surrender:
In the first years of [World War II], American interrogators found
that some [Japanese] POWs remained entirely uncooperative,
sullen, and arrogant, but that even they often came around to
talking more freely when the interrogators had enough time to
spend with them. Almost invariably, POWs reacted favorably
to the good medical treatment and ample food they received.
Americans realized that interrogating an enemy with such totally
different cultural background had to be learned through trial
and error. Preconceptions had to be abandoned along the way
for new ideas that showed greater promise. 647 (Italics added)
Cultural Context: Knowing the Enemy
Sun Tzu is perhaps best known for his aphorism on preparing for conflict: “If
you know the enemy and know yourself, you need not fear the result of a hundred
battles.” 648 Too often, it seems, such timeless concepts are forgotten upon entering
the breach…and the cost can be staggering. As revelations of the events that
had transpired at Abu Ghraib reached the public, many U.S. citizens could not
grasp the Arab world’s seemingly disproportionate emotional response to these
actions — especially the mistreatment of prisoners in a manner that carried sexual
overtones. Cultural values and traditions play no small role in determining the
646
In February 1942, pursuant to President Roosevelt’s Executive Order 9006, 120,000 U.S.
citizens of Japanese ancestry were moved to internment camps for the duration of World War II. A
small number of the thousands of Nisei volunteers for military service during the war were selected
for acceptance into the demanding U.S. Army and U.S. Navy language programs. Graduates were
subsequently assigned intelligence duties involving translation and interpretation, including support
to interrogation operations within the United States and at deployed locations throughout the
Pacific Theater.
647
Ulrich Straus, The Anguish of Surrender: Japanese POWs of World War II (Seattle, WA:
University of Washington Press, 2003), 131-32.
648
Sun Tzu, The Art of War (New York: Delacorte Press, 1983), ed. James Clavell, 2.
245