I Was Told to Come Alone

by Souad Mekhennet

  El-Masri’s connection with the Multikulturhaus and Seyam were my first clues as to why the CIA might have taken him. Seyam, a German of Egyptian descent, had been radicalized while living in Neu-Ulm as a young man. Later, he had spent time in Indonesia, and the U.S. intelligence services believed he was linked to the terrorist bombings in Bali in 2002. He is now believed to have become a high-ranking figure in the Islamic State.

  I knew it sounded crazy, but the more I thought about it, the more I felt that el-Masri was telling the truth. There was something about the way he told the story, and how traumatized he seemed, that stuck with me. I called Matt Purdy again and convinced him to let me dig into the story in my spare time. “Okay, keep me posted,” he said. “But remember these are very tough accusations. You’ll need a lot of proof.”

  I understood that a story in the New York Times would be seen as a direct attack against the CIA and its practices in the so-called War on Terror, but it wasn’t the first story we’d heard about the CIA’s extraordinary rendition program, which secretly extradited terror suspects from one foreign country to another “outside of the legal process.” Since September 11, this clandestine practice had become widespread, with “snatches” of more than one hundred alleged terrorists, who were transported for interrogation to prisons in other countries and to U.S.-run secret facilities in Afghanistan, Poland, Thailand, Guantánamo Bay, Romania, and Lithuania. Among the kidnap victims was Maher Arar, a Canadian born in Syria who was suspected of being an Al Qaeda operative. Arar said that after he was detained in New York in 2002, the United States had sent him to Syria, where he was held for ten months and tortured. Another detainee, an Australian national named Mamdouh Habib, claimed in a federal lawsuit that he was shipped to Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, after enduring six months of torture in an Egyptian prison. Human rights organizations estimated that dozens of “high value” detainees were being held in secret locations, known as black sites, all over the world.

  I went over my notes from the interview again. The next day, I began calling sources in the German security services. Officially, people said they had never heard anything like el-Masri’s story. “Have you started believing in fairy tales?” one official asked me. I wondered how many days I should give myself to find out whether el-Masri was telling the truth.

  My next best hope were the sources I called the “pay-phone” people, because I called them only from old-fashioned phone booths to make sure no one was listening. Later, I would use old Nokia phones I bought in a shop near a German train station for the same purpose. The shopkeeper there knew how to get unregistered SIM cards, which I used to call sources who I suspected were being monitored. Most of these sources were officials I’d gotten to know during and after my time in Iraq, from Germany, the United States, and various countries in the Middle East and North Africa, people who had access to sensitive information.

  I went to a pay phone in my neighborhood and reached out to a senior German security official. He had given me an “emergency number” that wasn’t his regular cell.

  “Is this a good time?” I asked.

  “I can’t talk very long, but I was expecting your call.”

  I told him that I needed his guidance and described el-Masri’s case, without giving his name or many details. “I need to know, could this story be true, or am I wasting my time? I appreciate any help you can give me. Also, why did you say you had been expecting my call?”

  “No, I don’t think you are wasting your time,” he answered calmly. “You are on the right track. This is a big thing.”

  I pushed the receiver closer to my ear, so as not to miss a word.

  “The answer to your second question: the German authorities were officially informed around the same day this man made his call to you.”

  “What authorities? And how did they know he called me?”

  “It means either one or both of you were watched. You might want to check with the minister of the interior, but there were others informed as well. I have to go.”

  I hung up. My head was spinning. I was still looking for a motive, but now at least I knew I was on to something. My next call was to the spokesperson at the Ministry of the Interior. “No comment” was all he would tell me.

  I called Matt Purdy at the Times from a pay phone, as I wasn’t sure if my mobile and home phones were being monitored. I told him what my source had said.

  This changed things. My editors said that from now on I would be working on the story with a London-based colleague, Don Van Natta. I called el-Masri and asked for the phone number of his lawyer, Manfred Gnjidic. Gnjidic was a German of Croatian descent who had practiced immigration law and represented people accused of belonging to terrorist groups; he had been involved in other cases linked to the mosque in Neu-Ulm. He told me he’d sent letters to the Ministries of Interior and Justice, to the chief of staff of the chancellery, and to Chancellor Gerhard Schröder and that he had filed a case against unknown individuals on el-Masri’s behalf. I filled Don in on everything I learned.

  Don was very different from the reporter who had accompanied me to the first el-Masri interview. Big and bearish, he was a veteran investigative journalist, and he quickly understood the significance of what el-Masri had told me and analyzed it in light of other things he knew about U.S. antiterror tactics. Don was bighearted and good-natured, and he cared deeply about getting the story right. I learned a lot from working with him.

  “Let’s meet him together and also let’s meet the authorities who are investigating the case,” Don said. “This is a big case, if true. And Souad, if you feel that something weird is going on with your phone or you feel people are watching you, let me know. You work for the New York Times. They can’t mess with us.”

  I began to pay closer attention to my surroundings. I would scan the cars parked in front of our house and try to see who was in them. And when I left home each day, I glanced over my shoulder to see if anybody was following me. After the September 11 attacks, German authorities had become more vigilant about political and extremist activities on college campuses, and I knew they had informants at my university. I kept going to classes, but I didn’t share anything that was happening with my friends and professors. Don told me to make sure I didn’t leave my notes exposed in obvious places, so I started hiding my notebooks outside the apartment.

  Some days later, Don flew in from London, and we took the train to Ulm to meet with el-Masri and his lawyer. El-Masri repeated the whole story. Don asked for more details about how he’d been kidnapped and tortured.

  “I do believe him,” Don said when we got to our hotel that night. “The details he described about the torture and how the whole situation was handled are similar to other cases.”

  At a hotel in Munich, we met with the prosecutor and police officials investigating the case. They said that based on the evidence they’d collected, they too believed el-Masri’s story.

  “We’ve done some tests based on a sample of Mr. el-Masri’s hair,” a senior police official in Ulm told us. “The result shows that he must have been in a very stressful situation.” They were able to determine that el-Masri had undergone a rapid change in his diet consistent with a hunger strike and that he had been in a climate similar to Afghanistan’s.

  The next day, I visited el-Masri at home. His wife, Aischa, and their children had returned to Germany to live with him, and I wanted to meet them. Aischa was twenty-nine and soft-spoken. She wore a black dress and a pale blue head scarf; their sons were dressed in matching outfits with elephants on them. When el-Masri left and didn’t return, she was deeply worried. Weeks passed with no word, so she went back to Lebanon to stay with relatives, thinking that he might have left her for another woman. Her children often asked, “Why are we here, Mom, and where is Daddy?” she told me, starting to cry. “From time to time, I called his friends in Germany and asked them if they heard anything from him or about him. But no one knew anything.”

  Her husband had changed since his
return, she said. “He is very nervous. Sometimes he wakes up in the middle of the night and screams.”

  My intelligence sources had confirmed that el-Masri had been in touch with people like Reda Seyam, who were being watched. But el-Masri himself had not been involved in spreading jihadist propaganda, nor was he known to be a member of jihadist movements.

  When I got home, I grabbed my copy of the 9/11 Commission report and started paging through it. After some searching, I found a paragraph that said that Ramzi bin al-Shibh and a future September 11 hijacker, Marwan al-Shehhi, had met a man named Khalid al-Masri on a train in Germany and that this al-Masri had talked to them about joining the jihad in Chechnya. Al-Masri later put them in touch with an Al Qaeda member in Germany, who told them to go to Afghanistan, where al-Shehhi and Ziad Jarrah, another core member of the Hamburg cell and a future hijacker, met Osama bin Laden and were recruited to commit the September 11 attacks.

  El-Masri had told us that one of his interrogators in Afghanistan had accused him of being a senior Al Qaeda operative who was trained in Jalalabad, Afghanistan, and an associate of Atta and bin al-Shibh. “I denied everything,” el-Masri told us. “I kept saying, ‘No, no, no.’”

  The names were spelled differently, but were Khalid al-Masri and Khaled el-Masri the same man, or were the Americans confusing the two? Gnjidic, el-Masri’s lawyer, believed the latter, and so, increasingly, did we. The similar names, combined with the mosque el-Masri had attended and some of the characters he had known, could have been enough to incriminate him. If so, it was a case of mistaken identity with terrifying consequences.

  Our editors made it clear that a lot was at stake. “If anything in this article is wrong, you might not only lose your job, you might be burned forever,” a colleague told me. Don and I double- and triple-checked all our facts, a process that took weeks.

  The day before the story was supposed to run, I spent hours in my room, going through all my notes, every single piece of paper. Is there a mistake anywhere? I asked myself. Is anything missing? For days, I’d been unable to eat; I was surviving on coffee.

  Don sensed my nervousness. “It is what it is now, Souad. We worked for months on this. Have you told el-Masri that the story is running tomorrow?”

  I hadn’t. I decided to go for a walk and call him from a pay phone. I walked fast, listening to my favorite ’80s pop songs on my iPod as I ran through the story in my head. “I just wanted to let you know that the story will run tomorrow,” I said when I reached him. “There might be some reactions. That’s why I’m calling.”

  “Tomorrow?”

  “Yes, tomorrow.” Silence. “Khaled?”

  “Yes, I am here,” he said, and his voice sounded deeper. He was crying.

  I stayed silent, too.

  “Thank you, Souad, and thank your colleague Don. Thank you for believing me.”

  “We just did our job.” I felt a wave of exhaustion wash over me.

  On my way home, I thought about how el-Masri, after all that had happened to him, was able to distinguish between Americans. He had thanked Don. He had never shown any hatred against Americans in all the times I’d talked to him.

  When I saw the story online, I read every word. We wrote several follow-up stories, one of which focused on what German authorities knew about the case and when. One of our Times colleagues had sources in Macedonia who told him that at least one member of Germany’s external intelligence service, the BND, knew about el-Masri’s arrest immediately after it happened. This midlevel intelligence officer said that a stranger approached him in a government cafeteria in Macedonia in January 2004 and told him that a German citizen had been arrested in Skopje and handed over to the Americans. This was nearly a year before our story ran.

  When Don and I confronted German authorities with our findings, a spokesperson for Foreign Minister Joschka Fischer warned us that if we printed this information, there would be consequences. We printed it anyway. It was not until June 2006 that the Germans publicly admitted that they had mishandled el-Masri’s case.

  A year and a half after Don and I broke the el-Masri story, el-Masri and Gnjidic called and asked for a meeting. I took a train to Ulm and met them at a restaurant not far from the lawyer’s office. El-Masri was surprisingly upbeat. “I would never have thought that the world would listen to me and that people even in the United States would be interested in my case,” he said with a smile. He added that he had received many messages of sympathy from people in the United States who had been touched by his story, but so far he had received neither an apology nor any real explanation from the U.S. and German governments. He seemed very bitter about it. “I don’t understand. How can they call themselves countries with rule of law and human rights when they kidnap and torture people like this?”

  I told him that many journalists had written about his case, including a team of New York Times reporters who uncovered flight data indicating that a jet operated by a CIA-linked shell company had flown from Skopje to Baghdad to Kabul on January 24, 2004, the day after el-Masri’s passport was stamped showing his departure from Macedonia. Coverage like that might eventually help get him the answers he craved, I told him.

  “There is something we wanted to discuss with you,” Gnjidic said. “There is another prisoner who had been in jail with Khaled, and who got out. He was in touch with him just recently.” The man, Laid Saidi, was back in his native country, Algeria.

  “How did he get your phone number?” I asked el-Masri.

  “We communicated with each other through the cell walls,” he replied. “We memorized each other’s names and phone numbers, so in case one got out, he would call the other’s family.”

  Speaking to a man who had been in the same prison as el-Masri could shed more light on the whole renditions practice, I thought. I didn’t know if Saidi had been involved in terrorism, but he might be able to tell me more about the prisons used for such renditions. I also thought that if there were ever a trial in the el-Masri case, Saidi might be called as a witness.

  I excused myself and called my editors, who said that if Saidi would speak to us, I should travel to Algeria and meet with him. I went back into the restaurant. “Would he be willing to speak to me?” I asked the lawyer and el-Masri.

  “Yes, that’s why we called you. He actually asked if he could speak to you,” Gnjidic answered.

  I handed my phone across the table to el-Masri. “Please call him now and let him know I will come, I hope by mid–next week at the latest if the visas come through fast.”

  El-Masri took out his wallet, which was filled with ID cards and scraps of paper. He unfolded a piece of blue paper, laid it on the table, and dialed the number with one hand. “Salam, it’s me, Khaled,” he said. He asked if he could put me on the line, then handed over the phone.

  Saidi said he would meet with me, but his voice sounded a bit tentative. “My lawyer has to be there as well, please,” he said.

  I told him that I would get in touch with him once I got a visa.

  “Please don’t come without the permission of the Algerian authorities,” he said, with a note of fear in his voice. “I don’t want to get in trouble. My family and I have been through a lot. Please.”

  I reassured him that I would come only with a valid journalist’s visa and that I would contact his lawyer and make every effort to see that no harm would come to him.

  “Please forgive me,” he said, “but I have been in hell in the last few years, and I can’t go through it again.”

  After we said good-bye, I asked el-Masri how he knew this was the same man with whom he’d been in prison.

  “I know him from his voice,” he said. “I recognized his voice from the first time we spoke on the phone after his release.”

  A short time later, I flew to Algiers and met Saidi’s lawyer, Mostefa Bouchachi, for coffee. He told me that his client was nervous and traumatized. “He has endured torture, and whenever he speaks about it, it’s as if he’s reliving it.”
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br />   A Times colleague from the Paris bureau, Craig Smith, met me in Algiers, and together we went to speak to Saidi at Bouchachi’s law office. When I got there, the former prisoner was seated in a corner and wearing a long white tunic and a white skullcap. His right hand covered his left, and he looked shyly at us. As I explained our interest in his case and that we’d found him through el-Masri, he glanced often at his lawyer. When I was finished, he asked Bouchachi how he should proceed.

  “You must be honest in what you tell them,” Bouchachi said. “Nothing will help you more now than telling the truth.”

  Saidi took a deep breath. He told us he’d left Algeria in the early 1990s, when the country was in the midst of a civil war. He went to Yemen to study, moved to Kenya, and in early 1997 to Tanzania, where he began working for the al-Haramain Foundation, the charity suspected of funneling money to Al Qaeda. Saidi eventually became the head of the foundation’s branch in the city of Tanga.

  I knew from the research I’d done that U.S. and European security services had long been interested in the financial activities of members of the foundation and their connections to terrorist plots. Some suspected that the foundation had financed the bombings of the U.S. embassies in Tanzania and Kenya in 1998. The September 11 attacks raised further suspicions among U.S. and Saudi security authorities that the foundation had been infiltrated by people with links to terrorist groups and that some money had been diverted to them.

  “Have you ever been involved with any members of terrorist organizations?” I asked Saidi. “I’m speaking about Al Qaeda, the Taliban, or others.” I mentioned these groups by name because I knew that people with backgrounds like Saidi’s sometimes didn’t see Al Qaeda or the Taliban as terrorist organizations but as “freedom fighters.”

  “No. I never had anything to do with such groups.”

  “Was there anything you did that was against the law when you lived in Tanzania?”

  Saidi looked at me and then at his lawyer.