Steven Kleinman
Steven Kleinman is a career military intelligence officer and a recognized expert in the fields of human intelligence, strategic interrogation, special operations, and special survival training.
He has been widely recognized as one of the most effective and prolific interrogators in the Department of Defense. Kleinman served as an interrogator, the chief of a joint interrogation team, and as a senior advisor on interrogation to a special operations task force during Operations Just Cause, Desert Shield/Storm, and Iraqi Freedom, respectively. He was formerly the Director of the Air Force Combat Interrogation Course.
Kleinman also served as the Director of Intelligence at the Personnel Recovery Academy, a unit of the Joint Personnel Recovery Agency that serves as Department of Defense agency responsible for overseeing Survival, Evasion, Resistance, and Escape (SERE) training for U.S. military personnel.
In 2003, he was chosen to lead a contingent of interrogation and resistance to interrogation advisors to assist a task force involved in the questioning of Iraqi insurgents. What he did not know until his arrival in country was that he would be witnessing the systematic employment of a coercive interrogation strategy that formerly had only been used in the SERE program to train U.S. military personnel to resist interrogation. These methods had been routinely used by Soviet and Chinese interrogators during the Cold War to compel prisoners to produce propaganda. A Senate Armed Services report released in 2008 cited then Lieutenant Colonel Kleinman as the only officer who took action to stop the use of these techniques.