“Because with you it’s like pulling teeth,” he’d tell them.
For all the problems we had with Ansi, our friendship with his boss, General Qamish, made up for it. Qamish knew that Ansi wasn’t keen on helping us, so he tried to stay in Aden as much as possible to help us out himself. Almost every night we met with him. We grew fond of each other, and he would call John “Brother John” and me “Brother Ali.” Often while I was translating Qamish’s words for John, he would slap my thigh—a sign of friendship in Yemen.
Once when I noticed that Qamish’s personal bodyguards were using the small AK-74s used by Soviet Spetsnaz, I joked with him that they were using bin Laden’s jeffreys. (The guns were referred to in Yemen as jeffreys.) The al-Qaeda leader was known to carry a small AK-74 that he claimed to have taken from a Russian soldier he had killed in Afghanistan during the May 1987 Battle of Jaji. A few days later Qamish told me he had a gift for me in his office in Sanaa. It was a jeffrey. I was touched by the gesture and also found it ironic that while Ambassador Bodine wouldn’t allow us to carry weapons, claiming that the Yemenis objected, the head of Yemeni intelligence wanted to give me one. I was never able to take it back with me to the United States; the paperwork was too complicated.
I was traveling from Aden to Sanaa one day to meet with PSO officials, and the embassy gave me a diplomatic pouch to carry. Under the 1961 Vienna Convention on Diplomatic Relations, diplomatic bags, which contain articles for official government use, have immunity from search or seizure, as does their courier. We’d had problems in the past with pouches being searched, and to try to minimize such problems, I had told the Yemenis in advance that I would have one. I was convinced, of course, that some agency would insist upon a search.
After I was dropped off by colleagues at the airport, a PSO official in civilian clothes—I had seen him in the airport on various occasions before—came running toward me shouting, “Ali Soufan, Ali Soufan, come with me.” Oh, no, I thought, here we go. He told me to follow him, and I braced myself for drama as he led us to the VIP lounge. Sitting there to greet me was Qamish, with a big smile on his face. “You weren’t expecting me?” he asked, half rhetorically, and I shook my head. “I’m going to travel with you to make sure you have no problems.” The trip was the smoothest of all my time in Yemen. We spent the journey discussing our lives. He told me about his time in the military academy, and about his family.
Earning Qamish’s friendship didn’t result in his anticipating everything we might want. He only gave us what we asked for, and often we had to push hard for it. But unlike Ansi, when we were on to information, he didn’t try to cripple our investigation. And he was always friendly, even when saying no.
One evening, John, Naji, and I were in a car, discussing the problems we were having and how hard it was to get information from some Yemenis. Naji spoke English well, so there was no need for me to translate from Arabic for John. Naji told us: “You have to remember we Arabs are stubborn people—that’s why we’re hitting a rock. You’ll have to back down, because eventually things will work out.”
“You’re dealing with another Arab, and I’m also stubborn,” I replied with a smile, reminding him of my childhood in Lebanon.
“The Irish are even more stubborn than the Arabs,” John interjected, and told us a story about his clan in Ireland. The O’Neills were known for their strength and bravery. “Every year in their village there was a boat race to a giant stone in the middle of the local lake, and every year the O’Neill clan won. One year, another clan’s boat took the lead, and it looked as if they would win. My great-grandfather took his sword, cut off his own hand, and threw it at the rock so that he would touch it first. You two got anything that can match that?”
“We’re stubborn,” I said with a smile, “but we’re not crazy.”
As the weeks passed, our morning meetings became increasingly upbeat. The focus shifted from problems with the Yemenis or Ambassador Bodine to progress that was being made on various fronts. There was a sense that we were getting closer and closer to nailing those responsible. And then a new problem arose.
Before we arrived in Yemen, there had been some confusion about what information could be shared between intelligence and criminal investigators. In 1995, Attorney General Janet Reno had instituted new rules concerning the division between criminal and intelligence investigations, partly because of alleged problems with the use of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) in past investigations. FISA governs the conduct and use of surveillance and physical searches of foreign powers and their agents inside the United States.
There are some differences between intelligence and criminal investigations: in a criminal investigation, in order to listen in on someone’s conversation, you first need probable cause and a judge’s approval. For intelligence gathering, you need reasonable suspicion, a much lower bar. Attorney General Reno’s guidelines were meant to ensure that criminal investigators and prosecutors were not taking advantage of lax rules on the intelligence side to obtain information for their cases. But the rules never were designed to prevent FBI agents from cooperating when they were working on the criminal and intelligence sides—definitely not when the efforts were part of the same case. Yet that is how the guidelines came to be interpreted, despite objections from field agents.
When Steve Bongardt, the on-the-scene liaison with the CIA, initially asked the CIA for information, he was told, absurdly, that they would give it to him but that he couldn’t share it with the rest of us. The CIA team said that they couldn’t share intelligence with criminal agents. Steve refused to not pass on information. “What use is it,” he asked, “to have information and not share it with the agents on the ground who need it to apprehend the terrorists?” The CIA said that if he was going to pass it on, they wouldn’t share the intelligence.
For an investigation to proceed effectively, and for the United States to meet its national security goals and arrive at a successful outcome, the two sides need to work in tandem. After John O’Neill arrived on the ground, we briefed him on this “new issue” between criminal and intelligence that Steve and our team were facing. John made an agreement with a senior CIA official, Hank Crumpton, to let the CIA attend all our meetings, and vice versa. The agreement worked well initially. In the evenings we would meet with the CIA officers and analysts and update them on information we had gained during the day, and they, in turn, gave us the intelligence connected to our case.
While we were working with Hank and the CTC officials in Aden, Steve Bongardt moved to Sanaa to liaise with the embassy and the appropriate Yemeni agencies. Soon he began reporting problems with the [3 words redacted], which was withholding intelligence-related material. Absurdly, this included material we had shared with them in Aden, expecting them, in turn, to share it with Steve in Sanaa. We began to suspect something was afoot.
Part of the problem was that Steve was dealing with the [5 words redacted] Sanaa, whose rank within the agency was lower than Hank’s, and lower, too, than the members of the CTC team he had been dealing with in Aden. Because the Sanaa [1 word redacted] was further down the CIA chain of command, the CTC team in Aden bypassed their own man, instead sending information straight to CIA headquarters. To complicate matters, the [1 word redacted] fell under the agency’s Near East division rather than strictly under CTC jurisdiction.The state of affairs understandably left the [1 word redacted] upset, and he took it out on Steve and the FBI, claiming we wouldn’t give him information. And when we later moved to Sanaa, we no longer dealt with Hank and the CTC—they had left the country—but only with the [1 word redacted], from whom we got minimal information: apparently he was exacting his revenge. Information sharing began to be a one-way street. We didn’t retaliate; that would have been doubly absurd—punishing not the CIA but our country by making us less safe.
The idea of not sharing information with us because we were on the criminal side was nonsense. The FBI is also an intelligence agency. It deals with sensitive intelligenc
e on a daily basis. The bureau respects and is fully aware of the differences between intelligence and law enforcement. We had been building cases against terrorist networks, foreign intelligence networks, and state sponsors of terrorism, and had never incurred any violations. The CIA had worked with us on many of these cases without dispute.
The claim that criminal agents could have no access to intelligence reports was a false reading of the FISA rules, especially as FISA rules don’t necessarily apply to intelligence gained overseas. The 9/11 Commission found that the guidelines had been misinterpreted, and not only by the CIA; many in FBI headquarters had done so, too, much to our frustration. This error was identified by the 9/11 Commission as one factor in the failure to stop the attacks on New York and Washington. The commission found that the procedures governing information sharing between intelligence and criminal sides “were almost immediately misunderstood and misapplied.” It also found that the Office of Intelligence Policy and Review (OIPR), the FBI leadership, and the United States Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FICA) built barriers, discouraging information sharing. At the time, we tried explaining that the rules were being misread, but to no avail.
Even after he left Yemen, right up till 9/11, Steve Bongardt was furiously battling “the wall,” as it came to be known. Often he would demand of people who were refusing him access to intelligence: “Show me where this is written that we can’t have access to intelligence.” They couldn’t, but they would insist it was the law. It was a widespread misconception that no one at the top ever refuted. These problems—the problems identified by the 9/11 Commission—started in Yemen. Day by day it got worse. At one point I got the Pink Floyd CD The Wall. And whenever an issue came up and we were told we couldn’t have information because we were on the criminal side, we would play it.
When I returned from Yemen I met with a delegation from the Department of Justice, led by Fran Townsend, to discuss intelligence-sharing problems. The meeting was convened in my supervisor Pat D’Amuro’s conference room. “Imagine an instance where one agent on a squad is handling intelligence,” I said to the delegates, “and another is handling the criminal investigation. It’s likely that one agent would have half of the plot, and the other would have the other half. And yet they won’t be allowed to piece it together. Imagine if someone wants to bomb the World Trade Center and our agents are unable to connect the dots since one half isn’t allowed to tell the other half what it knows.”
I said this not because I thought there was an attack coming, but because until 9/11, the previous major terrorist attack in the United States had been the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center. The delegates were sympathetic and understood our problem, but in government it is very difficult to change anything, and nothing happened.
11
* * *
The Human Polygraph Machine
Witnesses who had seen Nashiri and the other al-Qaeda operatives around the Tawahi apartment told us that they had observed some of the suspects visiting a mechanic in the area. We tracked him down, and he confirmed the visits. He told us that the suspects had carried AK-47s and that they had brought in a white Dyna pickup truck and asked for a steel plate to be added to one of its sides.
Terrorists add steel plates to trucks that are to be used as conveyances for bombs; the plates help to direct the explosion toward the target. The trucks used in the East African embassy bombings, for example, were modified this way (they were Dyna trucks, too). We started investigating the truck in question in this case and found the dealership that had sold it. The truck had been purchased by Jamal al-Badawi—the second time that Badawi’s name had appeared.
The Yemenis searched for the truck but were unable to find it. This meant, most likely, that it was still available, fitted for a possible suicide attack. Sources told us that Yemeni extremists were becoming increasingly agitated by the U.S. presence in the country, and the U.S. National Security Agency had picked up chatter traffic (the term used for intelligence collected using technical means to eavesdrop and intercept e-mail) about an immiment attack. With every American in Aden packed into a single hotel, it was clear where the most effective strike would be. We heightened all our security, strengthening the hotel perimeter protection; and the Yemenis blocked off one side of the street with cement blocks.
John, Kevin Donovan, and I were having a meeting one evening in October in the command post when we heard shooting outside. When we realized that we weren’t being shot at, we edged toward the side of the windows to see if we could make out what was going on. A minute later Bob Hickey, the on-the-ground commander of the FBI hostage rescue team that was responsible for protecting us, rushed into our room and said that he was going to send some of his team outside to check what was going on.
“Hold on,” I said. “If there is a problem outside, non–Arabic-speaking HRT guys are unlikely to help the situation but may find themselves new targets. Let me go out. I have a better chance of blending in with the Yemenis.” Bob agreed that that made sense, handed me a bulletproof vest, and said he was coming with me.
Before we left, HRT snipers took positions on the roof to cover us. Bob carried a radio to keep in touch with them. As a security precaution, we decided to take the stairs down; if anything happened, we didn’t want to be trapped in an elevator. As we started down, John called out to me, with a hint of nervousness in his voice, “Ali, be careful.” It was unlike John to publicly show anxiety.
The lobby was empty, and we ran through it and opened the hotel’s front door slowly. The street was eerily silent. There were no cars around and the roads appeared blocked off. The silence was only broken by an ambulance going by, although it didn’t have its siren on.
We saw a group of Yemeni security agents standing at the end of the street. They were not wearing uniforms but traditional Yemeni dress, and they were carrying AK-47s. They noticed us seconds after we spotted them, and started walking toward us. Right behind them was a car, moving at their pace. Driving it was a Yemeni whom I recognized as the former chief of police in Aden.
They came to a stop right in front of us. “What’s going on?” I asked the driver.
“Nothing,” he replied.
“What was the shooting we heard?”
“Nothing. There was just a wedding, and people were shooting in celebration.”
“Why did you close the streets?”
“Don’t worry.”
“The ambulance?”
“Don’t worry,” he said again, and drove off.
We reported the incident to headquarters. It was the tipping point for them, and they decided to evacuate everyone from the hotel. Everyone, “no exceptions,” we were told, had to leave. We packed all our gear, equipment, and weapons into trucks, and we went to the pier, where a team of marines were stationed. They had a small base there to monitor who boarded and left the Cole. Loading our stuff in boats, we headed out to the USS Duluth, a navy ship not far from the harbor.
Her captain and officers were waiting on deck to greet us. They were very hospitable; officers bunked together so that we would have rooms to sleep in. The plan was to stay on the Duluth for a couple of days while we monitored what was happening on shore. The Duluth moved constantly: since the attack on the USS Cole, no U.S. ships were permitted to remain stationary in the vicinity of Aden. We had to keep moving our satellite to keep in contact with FBI headquarters and took turns, day and night, positioning it.
Ambassador Bodine was annoyed when she learned that we had evacuated the Mövenpick. She felt it was an unnecessary insult to the Yemenis. It implied, in her view, that we thought that the Yemenis were unable to protect us adequately. That was true, of course. The bombing of the Cole, along with the fact that there was a truck suited for a suicide bombing loose on the streets of Aden, was evidence of that. Not to her, however.
She registered a complaint through the State Department against John, whom she blamed for “unnecessarily” ordering the evacuation. Because of her comp
laints, Kevin Donovan, myself, and some other officials were called to the bridge of the Duluth to speak to senior officials in headquarters about John’s performance. Once the purpose of the call became clear to me, I got very frustrated. “Look,” I told them, “we’re working here nonstop day and night. Our lives are being threatened and yet we’re making important progress. John is doing a great job. What we need here from you is support, not criticism.”
One of the senior FBI officials responded apologetically: “We just needed to have this conversation because the State Department is complaining.”
A couple of days went by, and we decided that a few of us would head back to shore to check the situation, as we didn’t want the investigation to come to a complete halt. John, Kevin, and I, along with Bob Hickey and a few members of his hostage rescue team, were selected to return to the hotel. We climbed down a rope ladder to a waiting boat and began sailing back to Aden. As we approached the harbor, the HRT guys scanned the shoreline and hills for threats. They noticed a couple of men with binoculars on top of a rugged hill watching us as we pulled in. On shore, we asked the Yemenis if the men on the hill were security officials. They didn’t know anything about them.
The hotel was empty and silent. Previously the corridors had been filled with U.S. officials moving to and from meetings, and a constant buzz of activity was heard; now very few people were around. We found one room with military officials from CENTCOM. We didn’t know if they had stayed or come back.
We spoke to Yemeni officials and evaluated the security situation on the ground. While we planned to return to the Duluth that evening, we were worried about the men we had spotted watching us with binoculars, as they could be al-Qaeda operatives planning to strike. We consulted Department of Defense officials, who said that it would not be safe to head back to the Duluth in a boat. Instead they said that a helicopter would be sent from the USS Tarawa, the command ship of the three-vessel amphibious readiness group of which the Duluth was a part, and that it would take us to the Duluth.
The Black Banners Page 24
