by Max Marbut
Staff Writer
Drew Berquist prefaced his remarks Monday to the Rotary Club of Jacksonville by pointing out, “I know you’re probably going to have some questions, but realize there are a fair amount of your questions I won’t be able to answer.”
Berquist made that comment because he has a job that’s decidedly out of the ordinary. He’s a consultant who works under contract to the U.S. Department of Defense specializing in interrogating suspected terrorists on their own turf in Afghanistan.
“I’m not actually a public speaker and in my line of work we like to stay more in the dark areas,” he added, then described his experiences on the front lines in the global war on terrorism and how he got there.
While he attended The Bolles School, he played football and then went to the University of Michigan on an athletic scholarship. Berquist said an injury ended his football career and that changed his life.
“After I was injured I realized I had to pay attention to school, not just football,” he said.
He returned home to Jacksonville and enrolled at the University of North Florida, where he was drawn to the International Affairs program and that led to an interest in the intelligence field.
Berquist also discovered he has a flair for foreign languages and after graduating from college, he moved to the Washington, D.C. area for training at the Department of Defense and the State Department.
“I think my football training made me more aggressive and that got me on the fast track in operations,” said Berquist. “For four years I worked mostly for the Department of Defense but I have worked with all the major intelligence agencies.”
He then described his assignments as, “Special operations, doing different things in different locations.”
Berquist has since left federal service and now works for what he described as “a small private contractor” but he said his job as an interrogator really hasn’t changed that much.
In terms of his impressions of Afghanistan and its people, Berquist said, “It’s more complex than people think. Afghanistan is a country of conflict with a history of violence. After the British, then came the Soviets and now the Americans. It’s hard for the people to know which side to take after years of having other nations dictate how they do things.
“We’ll pay people to work for us then the next day they might be trying to kill us. Then they’ll work for us again – if they have good information. Sometimes it seems they wake up every morning and decide who to work for that day.”
He said he spends three months out of the country for every month he spends at home and his work environment is a polar opposite from the United States.
“Afghanistan has a very tribal culture based on ethnicity which creates challenges every day for the U.S. intelligence and counter-terrorism effort. There have been blood feuds going on between families for generations. It’s a very difficult place to live.
“You can get in an SUV in Kabul (Afghanistan’s capital) and drive a few miles out of town and it’s like you’re in Biblical times. Sometimes I feel like I’m in National Geographic magazine. It’s a hard game. I wake up every morning expecting a surprise,” said Berquist.
As challenging and as conflicted as the country and its people are, Berquist said all hope is not lost for Afghanistan. While everyone has at least a cousin with ties to some terrorist organization or another, “I feel there is a lot of pride in Afghanistan. The people really want to make it a better place to live.”
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