Taken to a remote hunting lodge in the Highlands – "a curious mix of military camp and university reading group" – she is taught how to send messages in code; to operate on enemy territory; to jump out of an aeroplane; to survive interrogation; and, most important of all, to kill.
The two trained pilots on how to survive interrogation at the hands of brutal captors - which meant their interrogation programme was, in effect, a recreation of these cruel tactics.
What the computer program has to be able to do is to survive interrogation by someone who knows that one of the other two participants in the conversation is a machine.
The bulk of the text is a series of "lessons" on the specifics of a successful terrorist strike: forged documents, safe houses, arms and ammunition, transportation, codes and ciphers, surviving interrogation.
Its headquarters has long been regarded by Iraqis as a way station, for those prisoners who have survived interrogations there, on the path to notorious prisons like Abu Ghraib, west of Baghdad, where many dissidents have endured long prison terms or have been executed.
It was Ms. Harman, whom the book portrays as gentle but fascinated with death, who started photographing detainees at Abu Ghraib, including one who didn't survive his interrogation.
Moreover, the computer program has to be able to survive such interrogation with a high degree of success over a repeated number of trials.
The psychologists, who train Army troops how to survive enemy interrogations, responded with a list of techniques including sensory deprivation, sleep disruption, stress positions, waterboarding and slapping.
Lee spent years underground, during which she was kidnapped, narrowly escaped being forced into a brothel and survived police interrogation by pretending to be Chinese.
Drewniak survived the interrogation and kept his position as press secretary, but Weinberg and Wisniewski believe that the newly released interviews raise questions about what he knew about the lane closures, when he knew it, and whom he told.
Inevitably, the human drama of the victims took over – the testimony of the two men who survived the interrogations, the witness statements of the relatives of the dead, the transfixing portraits of the regime's "enemies" (which run into their thousands) – all this wrestled for one's attention and won it effortlessly.
