500 Days: Secrets and Lies in the Terror Wars

by Kurt Eichenwald

  And indeed, Qahtani found the brig to be the most miserable place he had been detained. The windows were covered at all times. He never knew if it was night or day. He didn’t know when to pray. He didn’t know how to face Mecca.

  Though Qahtani’s confinement had become more onerous, Soufan stayed respectful. He was never aggressive. He would pray with him and offer him tea. Other than his admonition that Qahtani would crack sooner or later, Soufan never said anything that could even vaguely be interpreted as a threat.

  It worked. Qahtani began to open up.

  He revealed that he had a relative living in Chicago. The man, named Ali Saleh Kahlah al-Marri, had already been detained on a material witness warrant, but the statements from Qahtani convinced law enforcement that his relative was an al-Qaeda sleeper agent.

  Qahtani also disclosed that he had attended the Farouq training camps in Afghanistan, where he had been taught about tactics and weapons. He had sworn his allegiance to bin Laden in early 2001 and vowed that he would do whatever the al-Qaeda leader asked of him. Then he admitted that he had planned to join the other hijackers in the 9/11 strikes. He knew little about the operation, he said, and even less about other al-Qaeda plans.

  His denials struck Soufan and other FBI agents as credible—Qahtani had been recruited to serve as a “muscle” hijacker, responsible only for subduing the passengers. Bin Laden and al-Qaeda’s standard practice was to keep information about an attack compartmentalized, even from the participants; each was told only enough to do his job. Someone in Qahtani’s role would not have been informed of much.

  Soufan’s coups from his interrogations with Qahtani were another success for the FBI. Yet once again, intelligence officials bushed aside the accomplishment, certain that the al-Qaeda terrorist was tricking law enforcement. The military told the FBI to get out of the way—Qahtani knew more and just wasn’t telling. If they were going to learn anything, the military officers said, then they were going to have to get rough.

  • • •

  A group of FBI agents, postal inspectors, and state police approached a blue mailbox near the corner of Bank and Nassau Streets, across from Princeton University.

  Numerous cases of anthrax infection had months before turned up among New Jersey postal workers connected to a sorting center in Hamilton. Since that time, investigators had gathered more than six hundred samples from mailboxes and other locations where letters might have been held, sending them to the state health department in Trenton for testing. The Princeton mailbox had just come back positive for anthrax spores. Now the investigators knew where the anthrax killer had mailed the deadly letters.

  While agents and police went door-to-door along Nassau Street questioning shop owners, workers removed the mailbox. It was taken to an airport and airlifted to a laboratory for further testing.

  • • •

  Judge Doumar summoned lawyers in the Hamdi case to a hearing on August 13. After court was called to order, he brought out the two-page declaration from Michael Mobbs that the government had filed weeks before as the explanation for Hamdi’s continued detention.

  Doumar held up the document. “I’m going to be focusing exclusively in this hearing on the Mobbs declaration,” he said. “If I rely on this, then I must pick it apart.”

  He glared down at Gregory Garre, the assistant solicitor general appearing on behalf of the government. “If you gave me the information,” Doumar said, “then all of this could have been avoided.”

  The questions tumbled out. Who is this Mobbs person? What qualifies him to be a “special advisor”?

  “He’s an undersecretary of defense,” Garre replied, “and he’s substantially involved in detainee issues.”

  But Mobbs seemed to have no personal information about Hamdi. All the declaration said was that he had read documents and was familiar with circumstances in the case.

  “My secretary’s familiar with the Hamdi case,” Doumar said. “Should she decide? She’s my special advisor.”

  Mobbs also gave no indication about how long Hamdi would be detained, Doumar said. “How long does it take to question a man?” he asked. “A year? Two years? A lifetime?”

  Garre was unruffled. “We couldn’t answer that question now any better than we could eleven months after Pearl Harbor,” he said.

  The back-and-forth continued, with Doumar frequently complaining that Garre wasn’t giving him straight answers.

  “Can the military do anything they want with him, without a tribunal?” the judge asked.

  “The present detention is lawful,” Garre replied.

  “What restraints are there?” Doumar shot back.

  “The detainee has asked to speak to diplomats from Saudi Arabia.”

  “Can I beg you to answer my question,” Doumar snapped. “If the military sat him down in boiling oil, would that be lawful?”

  “I don’t think anyone’s suggested that,” Garre replied.

  • • •

  Three days later, Doumar issued his ruling, and given his comments at the hearing, the decision was not a surprise: The Mobbs declaration, he said, was inadequate to justify the continued detention of Hamdi.

  “There is nothing to indicate why he is treated differently than all the other captured Taliban,” Doumar wrote. “There is no reason given for Hamdi to be in military confinement, incommunicado for over four months and being held some eight to ten months without any charges of any kind.”

  It was obvious that prosecutors were not contemplating criminal charges, and if Hamdi was going to continue to be held, an effort had to be made to present the court with the reasons for that decision.

  “We must protect the freedoms of even those who hate us and that we may find objectionable,” he wrote. “The warlords of Afghanistan may have been in the business of pillage and plunder. We cannot descend to their standards without debasing ourselves.”

  The ruling was uncompromising. There was no doubt that the administration was headed back to the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals.

  • • •

  The meeting at the Justice Department had been eye-opening for Pasquale D’Amuro, the FBI’s assistant director for counterterrorism. Weeks before, he had heard the dismay in Soufan’s voice as he recounted the abusive methods being used by the CIA against Abu Zubaydah. D’Amuro had brought up the matter with Mueller, the bureau director, and the two had agreed that agents should not participate in any CIA questioning sessions that distressed them.

  Still, D’Amuro thought the FBI could play a helpful role in the interrogation of high-value detainees like Zubaydah. He made an appointment with Michael Chertoff, head of the criminal division, to discuss it.

  They met in Chertoff’s office and were joined by Alice Fisher, his deputy. D’Amuro laid out his case, saying that FBI participation in the interrogations would be of enormous value, particularly since its agents were so familiar with the most prominent detainees from earlier investigations.

  That wasn’t going to work, Chertoff declared. The CIA’s interrogation tactics had gone far beyond anything FBI agents did, and the Office of Legal Counsel at the Justice Department had sanctioned it.

  “The CIA got a legal opinion from OLC that they could legally use waterboarding, throw people into walls, confine them in boxes,” Chertoff said.

  As he ran down the list, D’Amuro listened in shock. These methods weren’t just immoral—they were stupid. The FBI’s rapport-building techniques had been successful time and again. Harsh tactics didn’t work, and even if they did, the detainees came from a part of the world that employed brutal torture. The CIA was using a less effective option, he thought, and one that was less horrific than the detainees would have expected.

  Chertoff assured D’Amuro that this was not some rogue operation. The idea had been approved all the way up the line at the Justice Department—John Ashcroft himself had been involved from the start and had given his stamp of approval to the OLC findings.

  After the meeting, D’
Amuro returned to FBI headquarters on Pennsylvania Avenue and tracked down Mueller to report what he had heard. Bureau agents, he said, could not be part of these abusive interrogations.

  “We don’t do that,” D’Amuro said.

  What was happening was not going to stay secret. Eventually, D’Amuro said, Congress was sure to investigate.

  “Someday,” he said, “people are going to be sitting in front of green felt tables having to testify about all of this.”

  • • •

  The National Security Council meeting had just broken up and officials were heading out the door. The group had been discussing possible al-Qaeda connections to Saddam Hussein, but the evidence was thin gruel. A couple of detainees had given statements about such links, but Tenet kept brushing them off as imaginary. Still, some officials thought he was wrong.

  Hadley, the deputy national security advisor, accompanied Wolfowitz out the door. The two were still discussing the intelligence on al-Qaeda and Iraq as they reached the staircase.

  “Paul,” Hadley said, “it’s just not there.”

  Wolfowitz tightened his lips. “We’ll find it,” he said with certainty in his voice. “It’s got to be there.”

  • • •

  Over at the Pentagon, Ben Bonk was incredulous. “This isn’t true,” he told a group of Defense Department officials. Iraq was not behind al-Qaeda.

  Bonk, the former deputy chief at the CIA’s Counterterrorist Center, had been moved out of the unit months before and assigned instead to deal with Iraq. And it seemed every day he was fighting the same battle, trying to persuade officials outside the CIA—particularly at the Pentagon—that Saddam was not al-Qaeda’s secret puppeteer.

  In fact, the evidence more strongly supported the opposite conclusion. Bin Laden had raged against Saddam since the early 1990s. The Iraqi dictator ran a secular ship, and bin Laden was committed to the creation of an Islamic caliphate. Sure, they both hated America, but so did the North Koreans, and no one was suggesting that Kim Jong Il was chummy with bin Laden.

  But there were those—like Wolfowitz and Feith and Cheney—who didn’t want to hear all that. To Bonk, it seemed they believed that the failure to find evidence of a malign partnership didn’t mean there wasn’t any. It was the kind of logic that could be used to argue that Saddam was conspiring with Harry Potter—after all, there might be proof out there somewhere that could verify the notion, even if it hadn’t been found.

  To Bonk’s mind, the true believers at the Pentagon were grasping at straws, like a supposed meeting in Prague between Mohammed Atta and a senior Iraqi official. That information had come from Czech intelligence; the CIA had dug into it and concluded it wasn’t true.

  That revelation didn’t faze the Pentagon, where officials criticized the intelligence agency for failing to see the whole picture. So it was on this day that Feith and some of his Defense Department colleagues visited the CIA to make their case to Tenet and his top aides. As Bonk and his team listened, their reaction was the same—their visitors were serving warmed-over tidbits that proved nothing.

  Something definitive had to be assembled, Bonk decided, a report that laid out all of the government’s intelligence about Iraq and al-Qaeda, establishing once and for all who was right. He told Tenet that he and his group would get to work on a comprehensive paper right away. It would take them a few weeks to finish, he said.

  • • •

  After almost a month of harsh treatment, Zubaydah said he was willing to answer any questions.

  “Brothers who are captured and interrogated are permitted by Allah to provide information when they believe they have reached the limit of their ability to withhold it in the face of psychological and physical hardships,” he explained to his CIA captors.

  And so, Zubaydah talked. He filled in gaps in the agency’s knowledge about al-Qaeda’s organizational structure, its key members, and its method of operation. He discussed the role played by the group’s Shura Council, which he described as al-Qaeda’s governing body, ranking just below bin Laden in seniority. He discussed Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri, a planner of the Cole attack who was known inside the organization as an egomaniac. The CIA officers asked if he knew of any links between al-Qaeda and Saddam Hussein—a question that had been relayed from Washington. No, he replied. He didn’t.

  What about other al-Qaeda members? Who could most likely pass for a Westerner, maybe lead an attack on the United States or Europe?

  “Ja’far al-Tayyar,” Zubaydah replied. Ja’far the Pilot—an al-Qaeda nom de guerre. But Zubaydah didn’t know his real name.

  Who was he?

  “From what I heard, he was the other Mohammed Atta,” Zubaydah said. “He was told to deliver an American Hiroshima.”

  • • •

  Not much of this was new—Zubaydah had already provided a lot of the same information to FBI agents. They had heard of Ja’far and had opened a file on him, unknowingly under one of his aliases. They had also already learned some of the al-Qaeda operational information. While Zubaydah’s disclosures to the CIA were somewhat more detailed, the agency had been interrogating him for almost two months; using the relationship approach, the FBI had obtained important admissions from Zubaydah in a matter of days. Years later, a report by the CIA inspector general would say that Zubaydah might well have given up the same information without any harsh interrogation.

  But the words used by Zubaydah about Ja’far—the other Mohammed Atta, an American Hiroshima—grabbed renewed attention in Washington. Throughout the administration, the press was on to answer three questions: Who was Ja’far the Pilot? Where was he? And was he planning to strike America?

  Months of agonizing investigation would pass before officials learned that Ja’far was a naturalized American citizen, a longtime resident of Fort Lauderdale, a former student at Broward Community College, and one of al-Qaeda’s most dangerous terrorists. But by the time the FBI raided his family home, Ja’far the Pilot was in the wind.

  • • •

  At a Tuscan restaurant just off Piazza Risorgimento in Milan, Robert Lady, the local CIA station chief, was enjoying dinner with a law enforcement official from the Carabinieri, Italy’s national gendarmerie. Lady had befriended the officer, Luciano Pironi, earlier that year and the two often met for a beer or a quick meal. On this day, their wives were both on holiday, so the two men had decided to have a leisurely get-together at one of the better eateries in the area.

  But the two weren’t just sharing pleasantries—business was being conducted. About ten months had passed since Bush had persuaded Prime Minister Berlusconi to allow American intelligence operatives to snatch up a suspected terrorist in Italy and spirit him out of the country. Now, in August, planning for the operation was finally under way. There was a man named Abu Omar who was living in Milan, Lady said, an Egyptian cleric who was both influential and extremely dangerous.

  “I received a tip that he’s planning to hijack a school bus from the American School, over by the opera house,” Lady said.

  The bus would be carrying children anywhere from the ages of five to eighteen. They would be Americans, Brits, and an array of other nationalities. The plan was diabolical—a suicide bomber would board the bus and detonate his explosives, or the children would be forced off the vehicle into a fusillade of machine-gun bullets. Either way, this was a plot that had to be stopped.

  Pironi had told Lady long before that he wanted to move from the Carabinieri to Italy’s primary intelligence group, Servizio per le Informazioni e la Sicurezza Militare. This planned snatch was going to be a big operation, the CIA officer said. Maybe Pironi could play a role in it. That, Lady said, would certainly give him a leg up in switching jobs.

  The idea sounded great. Make sure to give him updates on how he could help, Pironi said.

  • • •

  The usual medley of cars and bicycles clogged a retail district in Serang, Indonesia, on the afternoon of August 22. Despite the crowds, business was slow at the
Toko Elita Indah jewelry store.

  It wasn’t the merchandise that kept customers away—sometimes, it was the owners. They were Chinese Christians, a group that made up less than 1 percent of an overwhelmingly Muslim population that reviled outsiders as contaminants to their ethnic and religious purity. Such intolerance put the businesses and safety of all Chinese Christians at risk, particularly from extremists who believed that killing such infidels, much less robbing them, was sanctioned by the Koran. One local Muslim leader had proclaimed as much, telling his followers that if Islamists could take the lives of nonbelievers, surely they could take their property.

  The Islamist threat appeared that day. Three armed extremists wearing ski masks stormed the jewelry store, waving their pistols at the family members who were working behind the counter.

  “Gold!” one of the robbers shouted.

  The men grabbed whatever they could. Terrified, Vini Khian, the owner’s eighteen-year-old daughter, screamed; one of the assailants shot her in the abdomen. Seconds later, the bandits ran out of the store carrying five and a half pounds of gold and $500 in cash.

  The owner phoned an ambulance and then the Serang police. The girl was rushed to the hospital and survived. The two officers who arrived at the store shrugged off the heist as a standard-fare snatch-and-grab. The thieves knew what they were doing; gold and cash were impossible to trace. For months, the crime lay in limbo.

  It was only later, amid piles of rubble and hundreds of dead bodies, that the authorities would realize that this seemingly inconsequential robbery had been orchestrated to help finance what would be the largest terrorist attack since 9/11.

  • • •

  Four hundred miles away, three men sat in a darkened car outside of a Surakarta gas station near the Klewer Market in Central Java.

  At the wheel was Amrozi bin Nurhasyim, a member of the Southeast Asian offshoot of al-Qaeda called Jemaah Islamiyah. Beside him sat Imam Samudra, an operations planner for the terrorist group. Two other terrorists—one an expert in bomb making, the other in electronics—hunched in the backseat. The four had joined up that night to celebrate the success of the jewelry store robbery by their brothers-in-arms in Serang, who had grabbed enough loot to pay a good part of the cost for their ambitious bombing plot.