Arkangel by Will Neal

The facility is located several hundred miles north of the nearest urban habitation and roughly two days’ hike from the nearest civilian road. It stands at the centre of a mountain range and from the ground it is hidden by a dense body of trees. The grey angular roof of the building is designed to cast a shadow on the surroundings so that in satellite images it may be easily mistaken for an outcrop or low-rising peak. There is snowfall eighty days a year and with the updraft of warm winds against the slopes there are regular storms. Avalanches are common and warnings are stapled every few hundred feet to the razor-topped chain fence that marks the perimeter. 

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Detainee S was brought to the site at an undisclosed time on an undisclosed date sometime in the spring of 2004. He arrived via helicopter transport in the company of two secret service operatives and an official from the bureau referred to in the documents as Mr W. He was shackled and his head remained covered with a black hood for the duration of the journey. After being brought through the snow he claims, from the echo of his feet on the floor, he was taken into a lobby or large room. It was warm and the detainee’s foot restraints were removed during processing.

After approximately fifty minutes, during which he was strip-searched and his hood was replaced with a narrow blindfold, S was walked down a long corridor and taken into an elevator by the two operatives. They descended for around ninety seconds until they stopped and the doors were opened and S was led a few feet further before being turned right and guided into a chair. His blindfold was removed and he was given a glass of water and a cup of black coffee with two sugars at his own request. The operatives, one black of short build with light brown eyes and cropped hair and the other white of taller build with blue eyes and a fade, left the room and the detainee claims to have then been alone for several hours. The room was windowless and otherwise bare save for the table and the chair S was sitting in. When he appeared to show signs of falling asleep he was joined again by Mr W and a female interrogator in her mid-thirties of south-Asian appearance.

The information he was provided with is as follows. The woman communicated to S that he was being detained at a black-site and as such that neither his capture nor his detention were a matter of official record, and the likelihood of their being discovered by accident was extremely slim given the site’s location and the discreteness of his seizure. She then explained that in the room adjacent to theirs the bureau were holding Detainee R (who is understood at this point to have been known to S and also severely implicated in the case, although in what capacity exactly remains unclear). S recalls that the interrogator was at great pains to emphasise that he and R were being held under the same conditions and that the authorised directive was that they have exactly the same options made available to them.

The interrogator explained that in the event S should choose to cooperate and provide the bureau with verifiable facts substantiating R’s involvement in the case, he would not only be permitted to walk free but would be returned home courtesy of the bureau and have a full accounting for his absence made to his employer and any other concerned parties. On the other hand, the interrogator went on, the same offer had been presented to R, and should R sooner provide her with incriminating information regarding S’s involvement then S would be transferred to a maximum security prison to serve a full sentence, with access to legal counsel and the right to course of appeal. S was then left alone, at which time he says it dawned on him that there was indeed a third possibility: in the event that he and R were each to accuse one another, their mutual accusation would be likely to result in their indefinite detention until such a time as evidence were uncovered in support of one claim over the other.

S theorised that if there was, as things stood, sufficient evidence to verify one claim over the other, neither he nor R would be undergoing interrogation for the simple reason that either he or R would have been concretely implicated, and knowing that mutual accusation would at the very least imply intimate knowledge of criminal activity on part of the accusing party and therefore some degree of complicity, he further understood that in the event of their mutual accusation the incentive for the bureau to find evidence exonerating either one of them would be significantly diminished, the both of them looking guilty of at least something, and so in case of this outcome the indefinite detention threatened by the interrogator was likely to be longer, rather than shorter.

A final course of action, he then acknowledged, would have been to take a chance on the consequences of a mutual refusal to cooperate, but this would in any case have required trust on S’s part that R had not only grasped the situation and but also chosen to act in the same way. S insists the first few interviews left him in a state of acute emotional distress and it was only after many days, sleep deprived and without food, that he eventually agreed to provide the interrogator with the requested information, redacted in the documents. Neither the interrogator nor Mr W were willing to affirm or deny to S whether R was really on the other side of the wall, or even in custody at the time, though S insists his continued incarceration can only affirm that R capitulated as he himself did. After these initial sessions S claims never to have seen this particular female interrogator again.

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The dimensions of S’s cell are six feet by five feet by eight feet. His bunk occupies almost half of one side of the room, a thin polyester mattress on top of a hollow box in which he is permitted to store personal items. Primarily food saved from the canteen, writing utensils and a spare change of sheets delivered every fortnight. In the far corner from the door there is a steel toilet and sink and no mirror. S is told that canteen visits occur promptly at seven in the morning and at one in the afternoon and at seven at night. Without a watch or clock in the mess hall he is unable to confirm this. The food consists of vegetable stews and staples such as rice or potatoes or tortillas or beans as well as fruit and vitamin d supplements. All cutlery is plastic, the same shade of blue as the trays to aid detection in the pockets of detainees’ overalls which are themselves yellow, and each utensil must be accounted for by detainees at the end of every meal. Interaction between detainees is strictly prohibited.

There is a gym with a treadmill which detainees are permitted to use for a half hour every five days. They are escorted to and from the gym by the guards and no more than seven detainees are permitted to exercise at the same time. Independent reviews of the available material suggest that by taking seven am and pm as the earliest and latest available exercise slots, reducing this by three hours for meals each day and then multiplying the remaining available half-hour periods by seven for the number of detainees exercising at any given time and then again by five for the period between any given detainee’s allotted exercise times, the population at the Arkangel facility may be in the region of six hundred and thirty.  

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It was twelve years before S had any contact with the outside world and even then only after the organisation had been lobbying for access through both official and unofficial channels for the better part of three years. He has since told us in written communications passed through the prison administration – subject, again, to significant redactions which are, in some cases, multi-page – that he had “given up all hope of ever being released.” The organisation’s involvement in S’s case began as the result of a whistleblowing operation from within the facility involving a senior official from within the administration whose ongoing anonymity was the sole condition of their cooperation with us. The organisation is similarly unable to affirm or deny whether the individual in question is still employed at the facility. At this time however we are able to confirm that because the individual is/was employed solely in the administrative department at the site and is/was not therefore authorised to access the lower levels, they do/did not witness first-hand any of the practices for which the site has achieved notoriety.

There has been no indication to date in the unredacted sections of S’s correspondence of the particular methods of interrogation and disciplinary action applied to S in the years between 2004 and 2016, although accounts from two former detainees at Arkangel indicate that they are fairly uniform. If these testimonies are to be believed and no particularised methods were introduced as part of the attempt to extract information specifically from S, it is safe to assume that at various points throughout his incarceration he may have been subjected to the following: extremes of temperature resulting in hyper- and hypothermia; cramped confinement over a period of several hours in spaces as small as to within six inches of the detainee’s measurements; stress positions involving the back, neck, limbs or orientation of the detainee’s body, particularly so as to exacerbate existing medical conditions such as sciatic nerve pain or a susceptibility to migraines; waterboarding and overfeeding; prolonged noise (including abrasive or repetitive music) of up to 90 decibels, or playback loops of voicemails from loved ones retrieved from mobile phones taken from detainees upon capture; sexual molestation and humiliation, with an emphasis on specific activities considered shameful within the cultural framework of the detainee’s religion or place of origin.

Often detainees will be subjected to the above in a state of nudity or, most commonly, excessive sleep deprivation resulting in auditory and visual hallucinations. It is understood that Mr W personally attends every interrogation and disciplinary action at the facility. He is not understood to participate in interrogation or disciplinary action himself – this being conducted by specifically appointed staff of whom there is no official record and who have earnt appellations among the incarcerated population ranging from the sinister (‘Master Death’) to the irreverent (‘Daisy Dogfucker’) – or even interact directly with the subjects, although one former detainee claims to have heard him engage in social niceties in the form of a ‘bless you’ after another detainee sneezed during cell inspection. 

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Petition for writ of habeas corpus on behalf of Detainee S was formally submitted by the organisation to the bureau on New Year’s Day 2017. At some point in the following few months it was marked as received and logged into the bureau’s system, after which it underwent what we were told is the standard waiting period of six months before review and approval as an application. The original document was then returned to the organisation for failure to include two executives as co-signatories despite the fact that examination by an external forensic consultancy suggested the boxes requiring signatures at the bottom of the document had been added at a date sometime significantly after it was first submitted. The document was then re-submitted with the appended signatures and eventually approved at review after the six month waiting period. By this time it was mid-March 2018.

Although we received notification that S’s request had undergone initial consideration, first by the bureau’s judicial complaints department and shortly thereafter by a high-court judge – as is protocol – it was another several months and only after repeatedly disregarded demands for an update on the progress of the case that we were informed that it had fallen into something of an irregular and apparently unforeseeable loophole: the judicial complaints department had indeed submitted the document to the office of the high court judge for approval, and the office of the high court judge had indeed approved the document and motioned that the case should be scheduled for hearing, only it was then discovered that the document had not been correctly formalised by the judicial complaints department as an ‘application’ per se and had instead been submitted in the original (i.e. unformalised) format of a ‘petition’, and because petitions are the jurisdiction of the judicial complaints department and applications that of the office of the high court judge, in order for the judge’s review and subsequent approval of the claim for hearing to be legally permissible the document would therefore have to be returned to be formalised as an application by the judicial complaints department, the problem being that the judicial complaints department can only, in case of a writ of habeas corpus, formalise petitions as applications if the petition is submitted by bona fide representatives of the incarcerated persons and not any other party, such as the office of the high court judge, in this case under the professed rationale of preserving the impartiality of the courts, to which it must be added that under judicial complaints department rules a new claim cannot be opened by external legal representatives in relation to a present case until a currently active claim has been settled.

In short, in order for the case to progress, we are reliant on the judge being able to review and approve a petition formalised as an application by the judicial complaints department while the judicial complaints department is unable to accept from the office of the high court judge a petition in order that it be formalised as an application. This is the state of affairs as they stand as of our latest contact with the relevant authorities. In the interest of full disclosure it should be added that to date none of the current nor any past members of the organisation have met S face to face or spoken at any length with him over the phone. Subsequently, the exact nature of the charges and, regrettably, the actual identity of the detainee known as S, remain unknown. 

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In what was perhaps, on reflection, an accidental and unexceptionally uncommon slip in a censorship regime otherwise  unsurpassed in its rigor and excessiveness, often to the point of complete and utter absurdity (we have letters from other detainees so heavily redacted as to read only ‘dear so and so’ and ‘sincerely’), we did recently receive correspondence from S detailing what might be justly described as an escape attempt. The detainee informed us that at the centre of the ceiling in his cell there is a halogen light fixed behind a dome-shaped plastic casing. By some strange coincidence, the overspill from the light in the gap between the edge of the dome and the ceiling is exactly the same shade of blue as the ink from the commissary pens against the grey of the concrete.

Over a period of presumably some weeks, shortly after discovering his request had entered bureaucratic purgatory, S spent his nights carving and deepening the groove around the light with the blunt end of a pen and afterwards colouring it in, eventually replacing the last material with similarly ink-stained paper once the groove became deep enough to cast a discernible ring of shadow around the fixture. Gently testing the strength of the fixture, S was able to plot down to the very evening it would give way and thus prepare himself in advance, even if his resources were so scarce as to have little more to take with him than two oranges and a folded pile of eight tortillas, along with his bedding to guard against the cold above should he make it to the surface.

Breaking through as early as possible in the evening without alerting the guard stationed just around the corner from his cell, S entered the hole in the ceiling to discover a crawl space of approximately two by three feet, leading off indefinitely into the darkness in either direction. Holding a pocket torch between his teeth (the details of how this came to be in the detainee’s possession remain unclear, suggesting they may have been included in a previous, redacted correspondence), S entered the crawl space and, attaching his possessions to his feet by wrapping them in a sheet and then fastening this to his ankle with his shoelaces, preceded to follow what he described as a trajectory curving steadily toward the right. The panelling above him was hot and in places scolded S, leading him to believe it may have been a ventilation shaft, a part of the facility’s wider heating system.

By the detainee's own estimation he may have been crawling for three and a half days before the authorities were able to locate and retrieve him by using power tools to cut through the ceiling, notably only on a seventh or eighth attempt and after the subject had become too exhausted to vacate their site of entry in time, prior to which he describes the state of affairs as having been “essentially just whack-a-mole.” Judging from blueprints of the facility leaked to us by the anonymous internal source, we theorise that the crawl space S found himself in generally corresponds with the floor plan of the lower levels, itself comprised of three spiral structures containing two largely concentric curved corridors that lead inward on one side toward a central point of convergence that then opens out onto the opposing side as it winds back round, the space between the corridors evidently comprised of the cells themselves and other rooms built for related purposes (e.g. showers, the gym and canteen, interrogation chambers), the natural course of each path eventually leading back toward large reservation between the three spiral structures in the centre of which is located a small observation booth and an elevator – itself the only apparent point of access to the surface, as the plans exclude any mention of the ventilation system referred to in S’s letter – and where each of the paths then carry naturally over toward the opposing entrance to the next corridor and into the next spiral structure, and so on ad infinitum.

S, however, insists that this cannot be the case, instead having become possessed of the idea that the layout of the building itself alters according to any unauthorised attempt to pass through, at every turn redirecting the detainee back toward the pursuing authorities, shifting and reconfiguring itself perhaps – analogy permitting – not unlike a polymorphic computer virus, or Rubik’s cube with tiles of shifting colour. In the darkness, he claims, you can hear it move. 

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Will Neal is a South London born writer and investigative journalist based in Sarajevo.

Twitter: @willneal93