For service members, being captured and interrogated by the enemy is a nightmare scenario no matter how you slice it. But resisting an interrogation is possible.
For some — particularly special operations forces and aviators who fly well behind enemy lines — there’s a good enough chance that they’d be picked up by bad guys that the military trains them to deal with evasion and potential capture.
Part of that training is on how to resist divulging critical information during an intensive interrogation. For special operations troops in particular, that’s incredibly important since often they are briefed on highly classified intelligence and information that could prove critical to the enemy.
The secretive Special Air Service of the British military trains its soldiers to resist interrogation as long as they can.
And the number one piece of advice is to be “the grey man.”
“I try to be the grey man. Not too aggressive and not too submissive,” says a former SAS operator. “You want to stay mentally alert but let him think he’s on top of you.”
Always exaggerate your injuries and try to appear in pain, fatigued and weak, experts say.
Typically the initial interrogation is rough and relatively unprofessional, and it’s used to decide whether or not the captive is worth shipping off to a more professional interrogator. The bottom line, if you’re alive, they want to keep you that way.
In the video below, a former SAS commando explains how he was trained to deal with capture.
He describes how he learned to endure stress positions, and ultimately get the best of his questioners.
“A lot of people imagine that they’re going to be tortured all the time,” one former British instructor says. “That is not true. … If you control the mind, that is when you have him.”
See more in this amazing video on how the SAS is trained to resist interrogation.
