The Black Banners

by Soufan, Ali H.

  At that stage we were finished investigating the crime scenes, and the leads we were following had been taken as far as they could. We were waiting to see what happened with two Yemeni interrogations then under way: of Badawi and Quso. Quso, whose alias was Abu Hathayfah al-Adani, had turned himself in after some of his family members were questioned. Aden PSO head Hussein Ansi, our old nemesis, initially told us that Badawi and Quso had sworn on the Quran that they were innocent. Ansi had told us that he planned to let them go. General Qamish had overruled him and ordered the men to be subjected to further questioning. The Yemenis were to question the two men alone; our agents would not be allowed to join the interrogations, as David Kelley’s painstaking negotiation of the interrogation agreement, though by now nearing its final stages, was as yet—unbelievably—not finalized. That soon changed.

  While I was in the United States, I received an urgent call from Kelley. “Ali, you need to get to Yemen right away,” he said. “We’ve finally signed the agreement with the Yemenis allowing us to interrogate Badawi, but there’s no one who can interrogate him.”

  “What about Bob and George?” I asked, “They’re both first-class interrogators and are capable of handling the interrogation.”

  “They can’t,” Kelley replied. “The Yemenis gave their own interrogation reports to our team, and Bob, George, and everyone else read it.” I understood the problem: a person reading the existing interrogation report would not know how the Yemenis had conducted their sessions—whether they had used reliable methods or had obtained information by torturing the detainee, for example. But the information would be in their minds, affecting their questions and their judgment, and thus any information gained would be potentially tainted and unreliable. It’s a risk we were not prepared to take, as it could jeopardize the prosecutions. “You’re the only team member who hasn’t read the report,” Kelley added.

  “Okay,” I said, “I’ll leave as soon as possible.”

  “Whatever you do,” he added, “don’t read anything about Badawi from the Yemenis before you interrogate him.”

  I caught a flight the next day to Aden.

  My main partner for the Badawi interrogation was an NCIS agent, Ken Reuwer. He and I prepared extensively for the interrogation, studying everything we knew about al-Qaeda, especially anyplace Badawi may have visited or information concerning any al-Qaeda operative he may have interacted with. All this was standard preparation—you can’t pause during an interrogation and ask suspects to repeat names and places, or be unaware of basic information. If you do that, they’ll realize they’re giving you information you don’t know. At best they’ll simply slow down, but their train of thought will be ruined.

  You have to convince the detainee that you know all about him, and that any lie will be easily uncovered. To do this you plan the interrogation around what you know. You prepare different hypothetical situations to predict what the suspect might say and where the evidence can lead, thereby lessening the chances of the suspect’s taking you by surprise.

  The interrogation room in Aden was oddly shaped. It was divided into two; a wall with a window-shaped gap was in the middle. Interrogators sat on one side of the wall and suspects on the other, and we spoke through the gap.

  Badawi was plump, with a potbelly and a round face, dark eyes, black hair, and a full black beard. I read him the Arabic version of the Miranda warning, which he said he understood, and he waived his right to remain silent. He said that he had nothing to hide.

  He was initially uncooperative, however. While he admitted to training with al-Qaeda in Afghanistan and purchasing a boat, he claimed that he thought it was for business and commerce and denied any knowledge of the attack. We could see that his “admission” followed the standard al-Qaeda counterinterrogation process, a method we were familiar with from the Manchester Manual. The manual advised al-Qaeda operatives to admit things they knew the interrogator knew, giving the impression that they were cooperating, while withholding the real truth and any new information.

  I asked Badawi about Khallad and Nashiri. He admitted to knowing them, and as he was pretending to cooperate, he gave me more information on them—details that he thought were unimportant. But often these small, “unimportant” details that suspects give are very useful to us, as they were in this instance. Badawi told us that Nashiri and Khallad were intimate with bin Laden. “Is Osama bin Laden involved in the Cole?” I finally asked him.

  “I’m not going to tell you that bin Laden was involved so you can write in the paper that Badawi said bin Laden was involved.”

  “Do you think we’re waiting for you to tell us that?”

  After that, Badawi tried downplaying Khallad’s role, claiming that Khallad wasn’t in Yemen and had just introduced him to Nashiri via a letter of introduction.

  We pretended to “accept” whatever Badawi told us, trying to draw out some more details that might help us. Badawi at one point mentioned that Nashiri had him help purchase a truck to pick up a boat. Later we found the dealership at which the sale had been made and searched the records of the transaction. An ID had been submitted by the buyer: it featured a picture of Nashiri over the name Sa’eed al-Mansouri. Thus we learned another alias that Nashiri used.

  When I was asking Badawi questions, Ken sat silently next to me, as he didn’t speak Arabic. But whenever he thought of something I should ask Badawi, he would write a note on a sticky pad and pass it to me. Badawi did not know what the notes were for, and I saw him repeatedly glancing at them. He seemed unnerved by them. I guessed it confused him why Ken never opened his mouth and just passed notes.

  “I see you looking at these notes,” I said. “You’re wondering what’s written on this paper?” I held up one of the notes, with the blank side facing him.

  “No, no,” Badawi replied, his face turning red like a schoolboy caught cheating. “No, I wasn’t.” He paused and then continued, “It’s your business, I don’t care.” He tried to look disinterested, but his eyes kept darting back to the notes.

  “Well,” I continued, “I’ll tell you anyway. My friend here is like a human polygraph machine. He’s an expert in human behavior. And every time you lie, he passes me a note telling me that you’re lying.” Ken had no idea what I was saying and just stared at Badawi, unsmiling, as before. This only seemed to unnerve Badawi even more.

  From then on, whenever Badawi was going to lie, he would either move away from the window and attempt to maneuver himself into an angle that would prevent Ken from seeing him, or he would look to see whether Ken was reacting. Instantly we knew he was lying. Badawi himself became a human polygraph machine.

  “What passport did you use to travel to Afghanistan?” I asked Badawi.

  “My passport,” he replied.

  “In your name?”

  “Yes, in my name.”

  “Which name?”

  “Jamal.”

  “Jamal what?”

  Puzzled, he asked, “What do you mean?”

  “Is it Jamal al-Badawi, or is it one of the other names you use? Is it the name you used to travel to Bosnia?” Here I was guessing, but almost everyone we questioned had a second (fraudulent) Yemeni passport.

  Badawi hesitated. I looked at Ken, and Badawi fidgeted. “Look, I’ve got a copy in our other office of the passport in the other name you use. Do you want me to get it?” I asked.

  “No, no, it’s Jamal al-Tali.”

  I had been bluffing, knowing that al-Qaeda terrorists like Badawi like to think they’re outwitting you. They don’t want to be caught lying. It’s both a game to them—one they want to win—and a question of honor, as they don’t like being called liars. As self-proclaimed religious Muslims, it’s embarrassing for them to be caught lying.

  The PSO interrogator present told me during a break that he was shocked that Badawi had admitted to using the name. Now we had an admission of one of his aliases, and we put out a search to see where the passport had been used. We found that a pager had
been bought under the name, and we questioned Badawi about it. He admitted that it was for the attack: he would be paged when the attack was about to be under way so that he could record it, using a videotape provided by Nashiri for the purpose.

  Bit by bit, we teased out details about the operation from Badawi. Throughout, he tried minimizing his own role. He consistently told us that it was Nashiri who had both provided the videotape and instructed him to buy the pager. He had passed both duties on to Quso, who became his deputy for the operation; he had trained Quso in how to use the video and the pager. Quso had not recorded the attack, however, Badawai claimed, because he had overslept.

  Al-Qaeda members commonly had the same problems with timelines that Yemenis did. Part of the reason is cultural: in the West we are trained to think in a linear manner, and we learn that the truth can be arrived at by following a series of logical steps. Al-Qaeda members, however, are greatly influenced by conspiracy theories, and they suspend their critical thinking. Rather than logic, they have a culture based on relationships and impressions, and there is considerable willingness, on their part, to accept conspiracy theories to explain certain events. Bin Laden capitalized on this by reiterating long-standing assertions that America, Israel, and the West were trying to subjugate the Arab and Muslim world and destroy the Islamic faith.

  Concomitant with pledging bayat to their leader, and in preparation for the possibility of capture by Western intelligence, al-Qaeda operatives are trained to come up with a false narrative that follows linear thinking; but they find it hard to stick to lies when questioned in minute detail. A key part of successful interrogations is to ask detailed questions related to time and whereabouts. Such questions are easy for a detainee to answer if he is telling the truth, but if he is lying, it is hard for him to keep the story straight. Often Badawi would not lie completely but give a partial lie. By zeroing in on the details, we could see where he was lying. I would point it out, he would correct himself, and slowly we’d get the full picture.

  Going through events in great detail eventually trips up most liars. At times it felt, as John put it more than once, like pulling teeth. We would ask a series of questions and trap Badawi in a lie. When he was caught or felt that he was about to be caught, he would change his story slightly, inserting more of the truth. He also got angry sometimes when he was caught in a lie, and then he would spill more information. The process required patience; interrogators can’t show frustration. That would only encourage the detainee to hold out, thinking the interrogator would soon give up. Instead you have to show you’re not in a rush, and are prepared to spend as long as it takes. Persistence is of paramount importance. A mistake some people make is giving an interrogation a fixed time slot. Doing so only alerts the suspect to the fact that all he needs to do is outlast you.

  One day of interest was January 3, when the five young fishermen had reported finding the boat on the beach. It seemed to us that al-Qaeda had been planning a second attack, but that something had gone wrong. We checked with the U.S. Navy to determine what ships had been in the area at the time and found that on the night of January 3, the USS The Sullivans, a guided-missile destroyer, had been scheduled to be there. It was named after five brothers who had died when their ship, the USS Juneau, was sunk in November 1942 by the Japanese. This was the greatest military loss that any one family had suffered during World War II in any single action.

  We guessed that Badawi must have known about a planned attack because he had been helping Nashiri. Eventually he admitted that there were two separate plots. Based on the January 3, 2000, timing, we concluded that the initial plan was to attack the USS The Sullivans. That plan had failed, and the plotters had turned their full attention to the USS Cole.

  Badawi eventually pieced together for us his history with al-Qaeda, his friendship with Khallad, and his role in the Cole bombing. He also named operatives and training camps, and provided a lot of other detailed information on al-Qaeda. His confession was enough to warrant a full conviction for his role as a co-conspirator in the death of the seventeen U.S. sailors.

  12

  * * *

  “What Is al-Qaeda Doing in Malaysia?”

  Having gotten Badawi’s confession, next came that of his deputy, Quso. Bob McFadden hadn’t been able to interview Badawi, because he’d seen the Yemeni interrogators’ report of their questioning of him; this was problematic, as they hadn’t followed U.S. legal procedures. That hadn’t happened with Quso, so Bob joined me in the interrogation room.

  Quso laughed and joked with his guards as he walked into the interrogation room. He looked healthy and well rested. He was a small, lanky young man, with a long, narrow face and a scraggly beard he liked to tug on. As soon as he sat down, Ansi, the head of the PSO in Aden, walked into the interrogation room, glanced at us, and then kissed Quso on each cheek, whispering what seemed to be words of encouragement in his ear. Quso turned to us, smiled, and folded his hands.

  “Hello,” I said to Quso in Arabic, but before I could continue he interrupted me.

  “I’m not going to speak to you,” he said, waving his hand dismissively. “I’m waiting for the interrogator.”

  He apparently thought I was a translator and didn’t realize that I was an FBI agent. “Well, you’ll be waiting a long time, then,” I told him. “I’m the interrogator. I’m with the FBI.” He had a look of disbelief on his face, so I showed him my FBI credentials.

  “Now that we’ve got that sorted out, let me introduce myself,” I said. Bob introduced himself and we read the Miranda warning. Quso wouldn’t sign a declaration, but he nodded and verbally waived his rights. A reluctance to sign a document was common among al-Qaeda members, as some couldn’t read so weren’t sure what they were signing. Others feared that, once they signed a document, a confession would be added—something they apparently had been warned about.

  I learned this later from questioning al-Bara, Khallad’s younger brother, who had been locked up by the Yemenis since the Bayt Habra plot to free Mihdhar. He refused to sign the Miranda warning but was prepared to verbally waive his rights, so I asked him, “Why don’t you guys sign this?”

  “So you don’t add anything,” he replied.

  He explained that in the Arabic version of the Miranda warning, there is a big space between the end of the words and the signature line. He (and other al-Qaeda members, evidently) worried that a “confession” would be added above their signature.

  “How about if you cross out the white so that nothing can be added?” I asked. He was happy with that, and with a pen squiggled throughout the white space and then signed the paper.

  We started off the interrogation by telling Quso that we knew all about his role in the attack on the Cole and that it would be best if he cooperated. He responded angrily, thumping the table and denying any knowledge of it. While our job with Quso should have been relatively easy because Badawi had confessed to both their roles, Quso made it clear that it would not be a smooth process. At times he accused me of being an Israeli intelligence agent. “I don’t think you’re really a Muslim. You’re Mossad,” he said.

  We worked on connecting with Quso on a personal level, speaking about his desire to one day get married. I expressed sympathy regarding his single status, which seemed to bother him, and said I hoped that one day he would find a suitable bride. I told him that his life was still ahead of him, and that if he gave us information that we needed, there was more of a chance that he would have a future.

  Quso had an inflated view of his own intelligence. From the outset he seemed convinced that he could outwit us, and at first he denied any knowledge of the attack. But like Badawi, Quso couldn’t keep his timeline straight, as he, too, had a problem with linear thinking. Over the course of the interrogation he repeatedly switched his story when we caught him out.

  His initial focus, after admitting a little, was to minimize the culpability of Badawi and himself. He said that he had supported the attack in theory but had not
been a part of it, and asked sarcastically if expressing opinions was a crime under American law. Midway through the interrogation he switched to claiming that he and Badawi had attempted to alert the Yemeni authorities. Of course, no record of this attempt was ever found. Quso next tried claiming that he and Badawi had never intended to record the bombings, and that Badawi had told him “to go late.” Then he said he had overslept. He also first claimed that he had never asked Badawi who was behind the attack, because “it was a big operation and my culpability was possible, so I did not ask.” Later, he admitted he knew what he was meant to record.

  We also played the two against each other. We told Quso that Badawi had told us all about his role, and Quso in turn told us that Badawi had told him that the operation would involve a boat laden with explosives ramming a U.S. warship. He had agreed to help after Badawi had told him that the attack would be against a ship that “zealously attacked Muslims” and that the warship was on its way to Iraq to kill innocent citizens. Badawi added that America was an enemy of Islam, which was why the attack was permitted.

  Switching to religion, I asked him about the concept of Ahed al-Aman—which promises security and protection for non-Muslims by Muslims. As the Yemeni authorities welcomed the United States to Aden, Ahed al-Aman should apply. Quso countered that the “sheikh overruled that” because of the “evil America does.”

  “Who is the sheikh?” I asked.

  “You know who,” he replied. “It’s bin Laden.”

  We used our knowledge of al-Qaeda to wear down Quso and impress upon him that we understood the inner workings of the organization and the extent of his involvement. After repeatedly getting caught in lies, he began to suspect that I had infiltrated the organization: nothing else could explain my intimacy with its practices. His conviction was so thoroughgoing that at one point he exclaimed, “I saw you in Afghanistan!” Later, he told me, “I saw you in Kandahar.”