The Black Banners

by Soufan, Ali H.

  “Khallad?” I recognized the name from the conversation I had had months earlier with my source in Afghanistan, who had spoken of the one-legged al-Qaeda terrorist, and from reports of his mistaken arrest around the time of the Bayt Habra car thefts to finance Mihdhar’s escape. Rumor had it that, following Khallad’s arrest, bin Laden himself had written a letter to the Yemenis, addressed “To Whom It May Concern of the Brothers in Yemen,” asking for the “bin Attash son to be freed.” Khallad was not mentioned by name but the subject of the letter was clear. The letter reportedly went on to threaten the Yemenis with severe consequences if they didn’t release bin Laden’s errand boy.

  This letter has never been found, and its existence was never confirmed by the Yemenis. However, it would not have been surprising for bin Laden to have written and sent such a letter: the al-Qaeda leader at that stage was viewed in Yemen not as an international terrorist but rather more as a respected mujahid from the first Afghan war, and he was known, feared, and respected. Al-Bara, however, was still in a Yemeni jail, ostensibly for his involvement in the Bayt Habra car theft plot. My source in Afghanistan had told me that al-Bara and Khallad looked like each other, a fact confirmed by other al-Qaeda operatives I questioned: when I showed them pictures of al-Bara, at least one identified the man in the photo as “Khallad when he was younger,” and almost all were in agreement about the likeness.

  All this information from my source was classified, and I wasn’t permitted to tell Qamish that we knew about Khallad and al-Bara. I pulled John aside and told him what Qamish had said and asked for permission to reveal what I knew. John quickly got approval from Washington.

  We went back to Qamish. “My friend,” John said to him, “given that you said Nashiri doesn’t matter and that Khallad is the key person, we’d like to ask you for pictures of both Khallad and al-Bara. Al-Bara is still in your custody, right?”

  Qamish was surprised. “Yes, al-Bara is still in jail,” he replied matter-of-factly.

  “We understand you’ve had him in custody since the Bayt Habra incident. You also arrested Khallad around that time. I’d like their photos and files,” John continued.

  Qamish appeared unsure of how to respond. He had never mentioned al-Bara to us and was not expecting that we would know much, if anything, about him, let alone that the Yemenis had him in custody. John asked me to brief Qamish about Khallad and al-Bara, which I did. Qamish told us what they knew about the two men, giving us some new information.

  It was, of course, difficult to get information from him in this way, but the slow back-and-forth wasn’t unusual. No intelligence agency (even that of an ally) readily gives up information unless its officials know that the other party has much of it already, or knows something about it, or unless their officials believe that it is in their own interests to share it. In that case, they don’t want to be seen as being noncooperative. If an agency thinks that we don’t know much about a suspect or a subject, however, they’re less likely to give up what information they themselves have.

  The next time I met with Qamish, on November 22, he handed me an envelope. Inside, he told me, was a picture that Khallad had submitted when he had applied for a commercial license to open a shop in Sadah. (The business was a cover; Khallad planned to use the place to store explosives.) The name on the license was Tawfiq Muhammad Salih bin Rashid. “Over to you,” Qamish said with a smile.

  In the picture, Khallad looked to be in his early thirties, with a long face, a mustache, and black hair. He had a faraway look in his black eyes. When you are tracking someone, before you know what he looks like, you form an image of him in your mind. It’s always surprising when you see an actual picture. Khallad was not how I had imagined him.

  When I returned to the hotel that evening, I circulated Khallad’s picture within the U.S. intelligence community. A colleague at the FBI office in Islamabad showed it to my source in Afghanistan when he saw him a few days later, and the source confirmed that it was the same Khallad. All U.S. intelligence agencies received this confirmation.

  As for Khallad’s false arrest, we later learned that he had been picked up in a car belonging to a well-known Yemeni weapons and explosives dealer named Hadi Muhammad Salih al-Wirsh (known as Hadi Dilkum), from whom he had been buying matériel. The pickup occurred around the time of the Bayt Habra incident. After taking the car late at night, Khallad had stopped at a phone booth to make a call, and when he returned to the car he found himself surrounded by Yemeni domestic intelligence officers.

  When I asked about Hadi Dilkum, the Yemeni officials initially refused to acknowledge his existence and said that there was no one by that name for us to question. One of the few pieces of information we had been able to learn about Hadi Dilkum was that he had a close relationship with many influential Yemenis, and at the time I had to assume that this had spared him jail time. Later, we learned that the authorities had used him (and others like him) to supply the mujahideen with weapons for use against South Yemen during the civil war. After the North’s victory in the war, Dilkum had been unofficially allowed to operate freely in the country as long as his actions didn’t harm Yemeni interests.

  The circumstances of Khallad’s arrest and release were never made clear. The Yemenis were secretive about the episode, and I believe they were embarrassed as well. We learned from sources that when Khallad was brought in, the local Yemeni officials had accused him of being Hadi Dilkum. Based on this, some members of our team speculated that when the Yemenis arrested Khallad, they really intended to arrest Dilkum. It was Khallad’s bad luck to have been borrowing Dilkum’s car at that point. This explanation tallied with the account that Khallad, when released, took his explosives with him. They were in the trunk of his car, which the Yemeni intelligence officials apparently never searched.

  An alternative explanation was that Hadi Dilkum had tipped them off that Khallad seemed to be up to no good. Hadi Dilkum may have been worried that an operation in Yemen using his explosives would get him in trouble with the authorities—hence the tip-off. This, we reasoned, would explain why the Yemenis didn’t want us questioning Hadi Dilkum.

  When we showed the picture of Nashiri from the East African embassy photo-book to the fishermen, besides confirming that he was Abdu, they told us about an incident that had occurred ten months earlier: on January 4, 2000, a group of local shabab (young men) went down, as usual, to the bay before daybreak. They described themselves as fishermen, and their daily routine was to hang out by the water in a fishing shack. There were five of them, aged between seventeen and the early twenties, and we nicknamed them the Beachboy Five.

  When they came down that morning, they spotted a boat with a top-of-the-line Yahama engine near the water. They waited to see if the owner of the engine would return to claim it. When no one came, they cautiously went over to the boat, each encouraging the other. The boat had a red carpet, and when they lifted up the carpet and the plywood below, they saw lots of compartments. They were confused to find what seemed to be extra batteries with wires hanging out. Below that were what they termed “bricks,” with Russian writing on them. The bricks had a hole through them, and a cord running through the hole. They thought, at first, that the bricks might be hashish, and that the boat belonged to smugglers, who often operated out of the area. They tried cutting into the bricks to see if they tasted like hashish. They didn’t, but they assumed, still, that they had found something of value.

  The first thing they wanted to take was the motor, which they knew was valuable. They estimated that it was worth five thousand dollars. The five young men weren’t big or strong—Yemenis are often quite small, by Western standards—and when they removed the motor they ended up dropping in into the water. Eventually they managed to get it to their shack. They then formed a chain and started removing the “bricks” from the boat, throwing them to each other and piling them in the shack. The young men never realized that the bricks were explosives, that the cord was a detonation cord, and that the batte
ries were detonation devices that had been disconnected.

  At daybreak, while the young men were still passing the bricks, a truck pulled up and three men ran out, one of whom they later identified as Abdu, the second as Musawa; the third went away and never reappeared, and they never learned his name. Abdu stepped forward; he was clearly the leader, and he had a look of horror on his face, presumably because the boys were happily tossing explosives. He asked them to put down the bricks, telling them that he owned the boat. They replied that they had found it abandoned and that it was theirs. He told them that it had gotten stuck in the water and that he was now collecting it, and he demanded that they give him the motor and the explosives back.

  They refused. They began negotiating with Abdu, whom they described as a savvy businessman. At one point the five huddled together and decided to try to drive a harder bargain. Abdu replied with fury: “I’m Za’im”—a term denoting a well-connected or important person—“don’t fool with me.” Intimidated, the young men conferred with one another again and soon reached a deal with Abdu.

  With the young men watching, Abdu and Musawa set about working to remove the boat from the water. First they brought in a front loader. They tried a few times to remove the boat with it but couldn’t. Frustrated, they gave up for the day. Before they left, however, they removed the boat’s steering wheel and throttle, along with wires that were to be used with the explosives. They carried off all of these items, as well as the motor and the explosives, and they returned the front loader. They told the young men that they’d be back to collect the boat.

  They returned the next day, Musawa having obtained a crane. Once they started using it, however, it got stuck in the sand ten meters from the boat. Abdu flagged a passing Yemeni military truck and told the driver that he would pay him to help them drag the crane out. The driver agreed, but after examining the crane, he said that his truck couldn’t take the weight. Still, he agreed to remain at the site to lend a hand. A decision was made to engage another front loader—to get the crane out of the sand. Eventually this was accomplished and the boat was lifted out of the water and put into the military truck. The convoy—the front loader, the crane, and the military truck holding the boat—then headed off.

  The five young men told us that they initially saw the boat as a reward from heaven for their having fasted through Ramadan. Laylat al-Qadr, or the Night of Destiny—when the Prophet Mohammad is said to have received the first and the last of his divine revelations—had been widely celebrated on January 3 that year. The young men believed that their apparent good fortune was a reward from heaven for their piety. The Yemeni intelligence officers in the room during the questioning couldn’t contain smirks and giggled under their breath.

  This was nine months before the Cole attack. It was clear al-Qaeda had been planning something else. What had we stumbled on, we wondered.

  As the Nashiri and Khallad leads were being followed, our team was following another lead after witnesses reported having seen a boat matching the description of the one used by the bombers being towed from the al-Burayqah neighborhood. We put out an alert, asking if any law enforcement personnel in the area had seen anything suspicious, and a policeman who directed traffic between al-Burayqah and another neighborhood, Kud al-Namer, came forward.

  He had noticed, coming from the direction of al-Burayqah, a truck and trailer that matched the description. The boat being towed was bigger than the typical Yemeni craft—the equivalent of a limousine. Its size reduced the number of places the bombers could have purchased it within the country; it might have been purchased outside of Yemen. Based on information gained at the harbor, a team of FBI and Yemeni investigators headed to al-Burayqah. Known by locals as “little Kandahar,” the neighborhood is an al-Qaeda recruitment hub (we were to learn that the organization even maintained a safe house there), sending ranks of youths to the Taliban capital to fight. We handed out pictures of the suspects, and over a period of a few days investigators knocked on doors, stopped in shops and restaurants, and asked pedestrians if they had seen the truck or the men.

  Our involvement in the investigation occurred in fits and starts, with Ansi repeatedly coming up with reasons we couldn’t proceed on any given day. More and more locals told us that they had seen the boat, each one remarking on its size. A few construction workers remembered having seen the truck go over a speed bump and then stop; one of the passengers had hopped out to check that the trailer hadn’t become disconnected. They said that all the men were dressed in white. We were directed to a house that they had been seen entering and exiting. Its appearance gave me a chill across the back of my neck: it was eerily similar to the houses used by the bombers in the Kenyan and Tanzanian embassy bombings. A single-story detached white-brick villa, it was enclosed partly by wall and partly by fence; a gate controlled access. In the yard were engine parts, tools, and bomb-making materials.

  In the master bedroom we found a prayer mat facing north, and the bathroom sink had some body hair in it, indicating that the bombers had performed the pre-suicide bombing rituals, “purifying” themselves. We collected hair samples and a razor they had left behind, giving the evidence to our forensic team for testing.

  The Yemenis tracked down the landlord, who claimed not to know that the men were terrorists. According to the rental agreement, the lease had begun in the summer. It was made out to Abdullah Musawa. We showed the landlord the photo we had of Musawa, and he confirmed that it was the same man who had rented the house. He identified the two others seen at the harbor on the day of the bombing, Abdu and Khalid, as having been in the house.

  After more questioning, we learned that the men had also visited a local mechanic, whom we tracked down. He admitted to having worked on their boat, although he claimed that he didn’t know what they were planning on using it for. The men had come in with an engine problem, which he had fixed. Then they had asked him to build a fiberglass floor for the boat, creating a compartment between the actual bottom and the fiberglass. They explained that they needed it for storage—presumably of explosives.

  The USS Cole was towed out of Aden on October 29, 2000, on a Norwegian salvage ship, the Blue Marlin—to the strains of the “The Star-Spangled Banner” and Kid Rock’s “American Bad Ass” on a PA system. By that time we had what is known as the “intelligence case” that al-Qaeda was behind the attack. We had, in other words, enough evidence to remove any doubt among senior U.S. government officials, but it wouldn’t be enough to convict those responsible in a U.S. court of law. Our next step was to widen the search and get more evidence. It was possible, we reasoned, that the terrorists had been spotted elsewhere in the city. We sent investigators to other neighborhoods with photos and sketches of the suspects.

  The men had also been seen in the Tawahi neighborhood. Using regular police methods—knocking on doors, stopping pedestrians, and checking rental offices—we eventually located an apartment they had used, and the landlord from whom they had rented it. Abdullah Musawa had rented the apartment for four months, with the rent paid in advance. Neighbors said that there had been other men in the house, and that they had claimed to be fishermen and had kept to themselves.

  The apartment overlooked the harbor, a perfect location for the terrorists to watch boats coming and going and from which to record any attack, which al-Qaeda would then try to use in propaganda videos. The known local al-Qaeda member Fahd al-Quso was identified by neighbors as having been in the apartment, and the Yemenis said that they would try to track him down.

  Throughout this part of the investigation—in all three neighborhoods and at the harbor—Ansi watched us closely. At times he seemed to be encouraging witnesses not to talk to us; he would glower at them when they gave us information. Sometimes he would smirk when we didn’t get the information we needed. He also invented excuses for getting annoyed with us. When we moved from site to site, we plugged each of the locations into our GPS devices so that other team members could locate them (by and large, t
he country does not use a system of formal addresses). Ansi protested, telling us in all sincerity that the devices could be used for marking targets we planned to bomb. He informed other Yemeni officials of his suspicions.

  We explained to him how the GPS system worked and why it was useful. Curious, he asked if he could have a device. We ordered a box of top-quality GPS devices from Dubai for him and his team as a gift. Later he complained that they didn’t work: he didn’t understand that they needed to be programmed. When we left Aden, I noticed they that had been put back in their boxes. Similarly, when we dredged the sea floor below the Cole for evidence, Ansi didn’t understand what dredging was and claimed that we were trying to mess up their harbor. Everything to him was a conspiracy.

  Ansi’s attitude and lack of cooperation were annoying and time-consuming, and sometimes our frustration boiled over. Once, John and I were in a conference room in PSO headquarters in Aden speaking to Naji and Ansi about some leads we wanted to follow, and Ansi was being his usual difficult self. John stared hard into his eyes and said, “With you it’s like pulling teeth.” Ansi took a step back, shocked. His English was very basic, and he thought that John was threatening to pull out his teeth. I quickly explained the saying. John often made references to teeth, although I never knew why. When we had problems with other Yemeni officials, he would sometimes ask, his face a study in seriousness, “Are you a dentist?” Surprised by the question, they’d reply, “No, why do you ask?”