Our investigation into the East African embassy bombings uncovered a lot of evidence connecting Fawwaz, Abdel Bary, and Eidarous to the attack. The satellite phone that bin Laden had used to communicate with the cell responsible for the attack, and with other al-Qaeda members around the world, had been purchased through Fawwaz for bin Laden, for example; and Fawwaz, of course, had been the original head of the Kenya cell before his transfer to London.
FBI agents were sent to London on thirty-day rotations to work with the British on the case, which Scotland Yard called Operation Challenge. John O’Neill also asked for all evidence to be sent to New York for me and the other agents in I-49 to analyze. Pat D’Amuro and John asked me to take the lead on evaluating the evidence and sending reports to London, as my knowledge of al-Qaeda, coupled with my fluency in Arabic, meant that the usual laborious process of waiting weeks for documents to be translated and then analyzed could be avoided.
On the computer in Fawwaz’s residence, we found a file entitled “The Message,” which had been created on July 31, 1996. It was an early version of bin Laden’s 1996 declaration of jihad, which Fawwaz had sent to media outlets on August 23, 1996. He had also sent a note to the media outlets vouching for the authenticity of the fatwa’s authorship.
His phone records revealed that on February 22, 1998, he had received calls from bin Laden’s satellite phone and had contacted the offices of the London-based paper al-Quds al-Arabi. The next day, a fatwa entitled “International Islamic Front for Jihad on the Jews and Crusaders,” calling for Muslims to kill Americans and signed by bin Laden and Zawahiri, had been published in al-Quds.
In a letter dated May 7, 1998, Abu Hafs, al-Qaeda’s number-two military leader, told Fawwaz about bin Laden’s support of a fatwa by the Ulema Union of Afghanistan, declaring jihad against the United States. In his letter Abu Hafs made recommendations to Fawwaz as to where the fatwa should be published. One week later, on May 14, Fawwaz had it published in al-Quds.
We also uncovered evidence highlighting the roles Abdel Bary and Eidarous played in the terrorist network, such as a copy of the August 6, 1998, threat from Zawahiri to retaliate for the arrests in Albania, which had been received by Abdel Bary before publication. There was correspondence between Eidarous and Zawahiri linking both of them to al-Qaeda. On October 29, 1997, for example, Eidarous had asked Zawahiri to call Abdel Bary’s cell phone. The next day, several calls to the same number had been made from bin Laden’s satellite phone.
There was a letter from June 1998, in which Zawahiri stated that Eidarous was the leader of EIJ in London, and a letter from July 1998, in which Abdel Bary affirmed his commitment to EIJ and accepted that he would follow orders. We understood that he had originally voiced unhappiness that Ediarous was coming to London and replacing him as head of the London cell.
In New York we focused on sorting the evidence and following up on leads that directed us elsewhere: to Albania, Sudan, Azerbaijan, and other places. We were never told about any deadlines on the British side, and we were under the impression that the British would continue to hold the men—as the evidence was so compelling—until we were ready to begin building a criminal case.
It was therefore a shock when Tom Lang told me that the members of the London cell were about to be released. The situation in London wasn’t being helped by the thirty-day rotation schedule. Agents spent much of their time getting up to speed on the investigation rather than moving the case forward.
But when the message came through that they were about to be released, we knew that we couldn’t allow that to happen: if they were released, they’d be on the first plane to Pakistan, and from there to Afghanistan, and it would be a long time before we’d see them again. Perhaps never.
The five of us in New York—Pat, Ken, Dan, Jack, and I—spent that night, the night of my birthday, in Pat’s office going through evidence. The operatives’ use of multiple aliases complicated the process of building the case, as we had to establish their identity each time. In the trunk of Eidarous’s car, which he seemed to have used as a sort of filing cabinet for EIJ material, we had found incriminating documents under the names Abbas and Daoud, which were clearly Abdel Bary and Eidarous, respectively. To prove this, we went through the group’s phone books and cross-referenced names, aliases, and numbers. One of Pat’s greatest skills is his memory, which is almost photographic. At one point we were missing a certain piece of linking evidence, and Pat remembered that the issue had come up in the trial of the Blind Sheikh. So he went to the evidence storage area of the Southern District and located a tape with the testimony we needed, thereby establishing the connection.
By the end of the night, we had finished putting together a complaint and sent it to London. It was filed, and the British agreed to hold Fawwaz, Abdel Bary, and Eidarous. Pat D’Amuro appointed me case agent for Operation Challenge and told me to head to London, with Ken Karas, to ensure that there were no more mistakes, and that we would win the upcoming legal battle to extradite the three men to the United States for trial.
Our time in London turned out to be an extended version of that all-nighter in the Southern District: Ken and I, working with Scotland Yard detectives, combed through thousands of documents, linking names, aliases, and terrorist activities in order to make the case against the three men. At first Ken struggled to find a barrister to represent us in court in England. Someone had been recommended, and she was the first candidate Ken approached. She told him: “I’m not going to embarrass myself by taking what clearly is a losing case.” That was a prevalent attitude, and he got told no a few more times until he secured someone.
The barrister we ended up with was a talented court performer, but he had no experience dealing with terrorist cases or al-Qaeda. We had to teach him about al-Qaeda and terrorism from scratch, and even had to coach him in how to pronounce operatives’ names. On our first day in court, after successfully pronouncing “Zawahiri,” he turned to Ken and me and gave us a big smile.
Up against us was a lawyer who had made a career of representing IRA terrorists and who was known for her hostility to the British authorities, earning herself the nickname “the wicked witch.” With the arrest of al-Qaeda and EIJ members, she had decided to take up their cause. One day during the trial, Ken and I walked through the court doors with a Scotland Yard detective at the same time as the defense lawyer, and Ken, being a gentleman, stepped aside and held open the door for her. “Haven’t you done enough damage?” she asked, glaring at him, before storming through. Ken and I looked at each other in shock, and the Scotland Yard detective said, shrugging, “See what we have to deal with.”
We won the case at the magistrate level. The defense then appealed the case to the Royal Court of Justice, where we won again. The defense then appealed to the House of Lords—the highest court in Britain—and we defeated them there, too. To many in the British government, the press, and academic circles, our victory came as a great surprise. They all apparently underestimated the evidence we had amassed.
To celebrate our victory in the House of Lords, Ken, Joe Hummel, and I went out to dinner with a bunch of guys from SO13: the head of the branch, Alan Fry; his deputy, John Bunn; and a few of their colleagues. Joe Hummel, a friend from I-40, is called Joey Hamas within the bureau because of the work he did cracking down on the Palestinian terrorist group.
Alan and John had invested time, resources, and personal capital in supporting us in our investigation and in the trial—and in convincing elements of the British government supportive of the Londonistan policy to back us. The Scotland Yard officials had been criticized in many quarters for wasting their time on a “failed” case—so it was a great vindication for them, and a testament to their skills, that we all won. We simply could not have done it without our British partners’ expertise, efforts, and support.
The night began at Shepherd’s, a restaurant frequented by Members of Parliament and owned by Michael Caine, who had just won a best supporting actor Oscar. We c
ontinued our celebration in John Bunn’s office. After months of hard work and virtually no sleep we felt we deserved it, and stayed till the early hours of the morning.
“Welcome back, Ali. Well done,” John O’Neill said to me a few days later. We had just sat down to dinner at Cité.
“Thanks, boss. It was tough, but it was worthwhile—obviously in terms of us winning the case, but also because of what I learned about al-Qaeda and its global network.”
“That’s very good,” John said. “Al-Qaeda is one of the greatest threats that we’ll face in the future—despite the fact that most in the U.S. government don’t, or won’t, recognize it yet. So I’m glad that you’re at least building up the skills that will be needed in the long fight ahead.”
The thousands of documents, letters, and pieces of communications that we had analyzed to build the case against the London cell had given me a deep understanding of how al-Qaeda and EIJ operated and of their internal dynamics. This would later prove to be an invaluable aid both in our investigations into the group and when conducting interviews and interrogations of its members.
We had learned that within EIJ there was opposition from members of the shura council to Zawahiri’s quest for EIJ to merge formally with al-Qaeda. Those members wanted EIJ to stick to its original aim of toppling the Egyptian regime, and not to take up bin Laden’s cause of global jihad. One member of the council, Hani al-Sibai, for example, wrote a letter to Zawahiri warning that if EIJ joined al-Qaeda and took bin Laden’s funding he would eventually control them. “He who owns my food owns my decisions,” Sibai wrote.
Our investigation had also uncovered leads pointing to EIJ and al-Qaeda operations in other countries. We had learned that the head of EIJ’s shura council was based in Yemen, and that there were cells in Italy, Albania, and Azerbaijan. (One letter we uncovered detailed an attempt by Eidarous to buy a farm in Azerbaijan, which was known to have a good weapons laboratory.) I had traveled to London thinking that there was one case to solve, but returned to New York with a host of new leads to follow up on.
During dinner John and I also discussed what it was like working with Scotland Yard. John knew the famous British law enforcement outfit well from the time he had spent in London. Like John, I returned from England with a favorable impression. I had bonded with the SO13 guys and had enjoyed working alongside them.
Often when we worked in foreign countries a challenge we faced was dealing with local officials whose methods of collecting evidence and conducting interrogations didn’t match our standards—which risked rendering evidence and confessions inadmissible in U.S. courts. Evidence needs to be logged as soon as it is recovered and a chain of custody maintained—that is, it must be established that the evidence has been in the custody of a trustworthy, identifiable person from the time of recovery, with a member of a law enforcement agency present. These individuals have to be prepared to testify in court—as such, they cannot be undercover agents—and it must be shown that there was no chance of the evidence’s having been tainted. The requirements are the same in the UK, so we faced no problems.
While we were in London I saw that Scotland Yard, with its focus on tracking, apprehending, and convicting terrorists, had problems with MI5, the British internal intelligence service. One day, after we had successfully wrapped up Operation Challenge, Joe Hummel arranged for Ken and me to brief MI5. Joe told us that they were especially interested in the al-Qaeda–EIJ network in the UK and how it connected with other cells around the world. SO13 officers accompanied us to MI5 headquarters, and we gave a thorough briefing. During the question-and-answer session that followed, an MI5 official told me: “What you’ve said about what’s going on the UK is very detailed. Much of it is new to us. How do you know about all of this?” His question and tone implied that he thought we were running our own operations in their backyard without coordinating with British authorities.
“Most of this information,” I said, “is from the great work that SO13 has been doing.”
The SO13 officers in the room couldn’t hide their smiles, and after we left they told us that all the intelligence from Operation Challenge had been given to MI5 but that they hadn’t even looked at it. They had assumed that, because it came from law enforcement, it wasn’t worth analyzing.
“That’s a problem between law enforcement and intelligence agencies across the world, to varying degrees,” John said after I’d described the exchange, “and I fear that it’s a growing problem here in the United States. I’ve been warning about it, but I’m not sure people are paying attention.”
“It’s a dangerous attitude,” I said. “Don’t they realize we’re all on the same side?”
John shook his head and said, “Some people don’t get it.”
A few months later I had a similar experience with the CIA after receiving a complaint from them that we hadn’t shared the intelligence on “al-Qaeda’s WMD [weapons of mass destruction] program.” We replied that all such information was contained in the Jamal al-Fadl and Operation Challenge files on the uranium fiasco, and that those files were in their possession. There was no real WMD program.
In 1999, a few weeks after I had returned from London, I was having lunch at my desk and Tom Lang, the I-49 supervisor, came and sat beside me. “Ali,” Tom said, “I need you to go to Albania. The CIA is running some operations there and they need your help, given your experience with al-Qaeda and EIJ’s European network.”
“When do I need to leave?”
“In a few hours.”
“Thank God I’m single. I’ll go pack my things.”
The East African embassy bombings had sharpened the U.S. government’s focus on Albania. Given the warning message from Zawahiri’s group that had appeared in al-Hayat the day before the bombing, we had thought, at first, that the bombings might have some links to Albania. Separate intelligence reports came in on possible plots against U.S. interests in Albania, so the renewed focus was maintained. Suspected EIJ members in Albania were put under surveillance. One day the head of the EIJ cell in Albania, Ashraf, was spotted carrying a letter. Guessing that it contained intelligence, the Albanian security services made a move to try to arrest him. He attempted to flee, throwing his letter into the bushes. He was stopped and the letter was retrieved. It was addressed to Eidarous, in his position as head of EIJ in London, and congratulated him on the group’s “weddings.” The term was used by al-Qaeda and EIJ to describe suicide bombers—believed to be in heaven, marrying virgins. The letter went on to state that preparations were under way for “our own weddings here.” Security at all U.S. institutions in Albania was stepped up, [1 word redacted] the [1 word redacted] and FBI intensified our monitoring and investigating.
There was no direct flight from New York to Albania, so I took what was then the best option: flying Austrian Airlines from New York to Vienna and from there to Tirana, the Albanian capital. The airport in Tirana was primitive: just a house and a basic runway that was really only suitable for landing in good weather. The captain warned, as we took off from Vienna, “If the weather is bad we won’t be able to land in Tirana, but the good news is that the weather is clear . . . for now.”
“When you land in Tirana, stay next to the plane,” Tom Lang had told me in a briefing before I’d left New York. “Whatever you do, don’t go anywhere and don’t give your passport to anyone. Just wait by the plane. The CIA guys will pick you up.”
While everyone else from the flight filed into the house next to the runaway that served as the baggage and customs hall, I stayed next to the plane. “Excuse me, sir, you need to head into the customs hall,” a stewardess told me. “It’s okay,” I said, “I’m waiting for someone here.” Shrugging, she walked off. A few Albanians security officials approached me. They wore civilians clothes but carried weapons and walkie-talkies.
“Please go into the customs area,” one of the officials said to me. “You can’t stand here.”
“I’m sorry, but I’ve been told to wait he
re.”
“Who are you?”
“I’m waiting for someone to pick me up from [2 words redacted].” (I didn’t mention which [1 word redacted].) They conferred with each other in Albanian, took another look at me, and walked off. For the next ten minutes I stood there, waiting, my only companion a stray dog that had wandered over to stare at me.
Then, seemingly from nowhere, I spotted two 4x4 vehicles speeding down the runway, heading toward me. The vehicles came to an abrupt stop right next to me, and a door was flung open. Several men were inside each 4x4. From the vehicle closest to me, an American voice shouted, “Jump in.”
I wasn’t just going to jump into any car in Albania, so I looked in and asked, “Who are you?”
I noticed that the 4x4s were American-made, typically the kind the U.S. government uses; and the men inside looked like Americans. “We’re the people you’re waiting for,” one of the men replied, “and if you’re Ali Soufan, we’re here to pick you up.”
“That works for me,” I said, and climbed in.
“Do I need to do anything about Customs?” I asked as the car started moving.
“Not here,” the man replied with a grin. “Welcome to Albania.”
“The entire area is pretty much a ghost town,” a CIA colleague told me, as he drove me through the part of Tirana where diplomatic missions used to be based. “Entire compounds have been evacuated. No one wants to be here now,” he continued. “But then again, it’s not like people would want to be here anyway.”
“So, how bad is it?” I asked.
“Not as bad as it was then, of course,” he said, referring to the early 1990s and the Balkan war, “but you still have remnants of groups up to no good, and the Iranians are doing their part to keep this area unstable. For ten dollars you can easily buy a used AK-47.”
The Black Banners Page 13
