May 19, 2004
THE COMMANDER
Officers Say U.S. Colonel at Abu Ghraib Prison Felt Intense Pressure to Get Inmates to Talk
By DOUGLAS JEHL
WASHINGTON, May 18 — As he took charge of interrogations at Abu Ghraib prison last September, Col. Thomas M. Pappas was under enormous pressure from his superiors to extract more information from prisoners there, according to senior Army officers.
"He likened it to a root canal without novocaine," a senior officer who knows Colonel Pappas said of his meetings with his superiors in Baghdad. Often, the officer said, Colonel Pappas would emerge from discussions with two of them, Maj. Gen. Barbara Fast and Lt. Gen. Ricardo S. Sanchez, without a word, but "clutching his face as if in pain."
Colonel Pappas, commander of the 205th Intelligence Brigade, relocated his headquarters from Camp Victory, near the Baghdad airport, to Abu Ghraib just days after a visit to Iraq last fall by another high-ranking Army officer, Maj. Gen. Geoffrey D. Miller. General Miller encouraged the Army colonel to have his unit work more closely with military police to set the conditions for interrogations.
By the end of September, Colonel Pappas had asserted control of Tier 1 of the prison`s "hard site," used for interrogation of Iraqi prisoners, which he maintained until February, when he and his brigade were transferred to Germany at the end of their yearlong tour. After Nov. 19, by order of General Sanchez, Colonel Pappas and his brigade took command of all of Abu Ghraib prison, taking over authority from the 800th Military Police Brigade.
Now Colonel Pappas, who in sworn testimony to a senior Army investigator acknowledged that his subordinates directed military police officers to strip Iraqi prisoners naked and to shackle them, is the highest-ranking officer on active duty known to be under investigation for the abuses committed at Abu Ghraib prison.
From his current post in Wiesbaden, Germany, he has declined all interview requests, but people who know him well described him as a smart, quiet, studious officer who was intent throughout his command on pleasing his superiors.
Less than a year ago, Colonel Pappas, then 44 and newly promoted, graduated from a one-year master`s course at the Naval War College in Newport, R.I., where he impressed professors as thoughtful, articulate and well-grounded.
In heading to Iraq to take charge of the 205th Intelligence Brigade, he was embarking on the most important assignment of a 22-year career.
"He was excited; he had been promoted, and he knew that the new challenges that he was taking on were important," said Prof. Jeffrey H. Norwitz, who taught Colonel Pappas in a three-month seminar on making national security decisions and described him as a superb student who appeared headed for the Army`s highest ranks.
On Tuesday, however, the colonel`s younger brother, John, said that he had called from Germany recently to say that he and his wife, Becky, were "maintaining" in the middle of the storm.
"They`re just waiting for all the stuff to be finalized, and then whatever happens, happens," John Pappas, of Middletown, N.J., said.
He said he found it hard to believe his brother could have been involved in the worst of the abuses.
"It doesn`t seem to me that he would throw away his career to do something like that," he said. "I don`t see him as giving an order to sodomize a prisoner. If he had gotten directives or orders that they could strip someone down or something, maybe."
Colonel Pappas was born in Washington in 1959, and grew up on a quiet, leafy street in Belford, N.J., about two miles west of Sandy Hook. His father, Thomas A. Pappas, was a systems analyst at Bell Labs, John Pappas said, and the young Tom Pappas was a Boy Scout who took an early interest in camping and military affairs, a former neighbor said.
"The whole family would take camping trips, and Thomas, as far as I know, was always one to stay out of trouble," said Mary Beth Hall, who still lives in Belford, two doors down from the ranch-style house where the Pappas family lived for 30 years. "He was just a good kid."
A photograph of the young Thomas Pappas in the Rutgers yearbook of 1981, when he graduated with degrees in political science and English, shows a thin man with dark, penetrating eyes in a coat and tie. After graduation, he was commissioned a second lieutenant in the Army.
He climbed the Army ranks as an intelligence officer, with posts in South Korea, Europe and the United States, including stints at Fort Meade, Md., as commander of a unit that serves under the National Security Agency, and, in Fort Huachuca, Ariz., headquarters of the Army Intelligence School, from 2001 to 2003, where he served as a senior officer involved in planning and designing the future of the Army intelligence corps.
A former senior Army intelligence officer described Colonel Pappas as highly regarded, "with a reputation for professional competence and for being a straight shooter."
There is no indication that Colonel Pappas, whose expertise was in strategic and tactical intelligence, ever worked or was trained as a military interrogator, Army officials said. An Army officer who served with him at Abu Ghraib said that as far as interrogations at the Iraq prison were concerned, "he seemed to be learning on the fly."
During his year at the Naval War College, which serves as a prestigious finishing school for promising officers, Colonel Pappas was the highest-ranking officer in the seminar taught by Professor Norwitz. In that role, he was a leader as well as a student in the class of about 18, the professor said.
"Flat out, Tom was probably my best student in the seminar," Professor Norwitz said. "Here at the War College people say it`s very hard to fail and very hard to get an A. That`s true. In my seminar, Tom was an A-plus student."
In Iraq, as the new commander of the 205th Brigade, Colonel Pappas first set up his headquarters at Camp Victory, which was also the site of the home and office of General Sanchez and his staff.
But in September, at General Miller`s encouragement, he moved to Abu Ghraib, and by the end of that month, by several accounts, his military intelligence unit had effectively taken control of Tier 1 from the 800th Military Police Brigade. The brigade was commanded by Brig. Gen. Janis Karpinski, an Army Reserve officer, although military police from that unit remained as guards.
It was in that part of Abu Ghraib that the acts of sexual humiliation and other abuse are reported to have taken place in a period that began after early October, as the anti-American insurgency was mounting.
To date, seven members of the 372nd Military Police Company have been charged in that affair. But a report completed in February by Maj. Gen. Antonio M. Taguba identified Colonel Pappas and three others, two of them civilians, as having been "directly or indirectly responsible" for the actions.
"I know that they were absolutely pressuring him to get more out of the intelligence teams," a senior Army officer said of Colonel Pappas`s superiors, including Generals Sanchez, Fast and Miller. "Tom was really really smart, but he was very much — I don`t know if the right word is in awe or intimidated. But it was mostly them telling him what he was going to do."
John Holl contributed reporting from Belford, N.J., for this article.
Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company