Greg Miller, MA ’93, is a national security correspondent for the Los Angeles Times. Assigned to cover U.S. intelligence operations shortly after 9/11, Miller went to Afghanistan in early spring of 2002, where he persuaded the Army to allow him access to U.S. interrogators questioning captured Al Qaeda and Taliban prisoners—the only reporter given such access. Although never allowed to observe interrogations—he was always accompanied by a military chaperone, Miller says—he found the interrogators eager to share their stories and had a rare glimpse into intelligence-gathering methods and culture.
Miller wrote a story that became part of an L.A. Times series titled “The Untold War,” which won an Overseas Press Club award for 2002. He later collaborated with senior interrogator Chris Mackey (“Mackey” is a pseudonym he used for security reasons) to write a book, The Interrogators, published last summer by Little, Brown.
Although he was out of the military, Mackey had to get Army authorization for the material he provided for the book. Army officials spent months reviewing the manuscript, and requested a number of changes, mostly to protect the identities of soldiers, prisoners and military units. “They also asked that we refer to the CIA and other intelligence agencies by the generic moniker ‘other government agency,’" Miller recalls. Still, “for all the changes it sought, the Army did not censor the story.”
The Abu Ghraib scandal has given prisoner treatment new relevance. Miller says the Army has recently allowed some reporters in Iraq to watch interrogations at Abu Ghraib—via video feed, with no audio— as part of an effort to prove that abuses no longer occur.
