Matthew Alexander is the pseudonym for the U.S. Air Force major who led the interrogation team that located and directed the hunt for the leader of Al Qaeda in Iraq, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi. His story was featured in Mark Bowden’s May 2007 cover story in Atlantic Monthly.

Alexander’s acclaimed book about those events, How to Break a Terrorist: The U.S. Interrogators Who Used Brains, Not Brutality, to Take Down the Deadliest Man in Iraq, written with John R. Bruning, was published by Free Press in December 2008.