The Black Banners

by Soufan, Ali H.

  The [3 words redacted] Khallad’s travels: [3 words redacted] he had attempted to fly to Singapore but had been rejected because he hadn’t had a visa. He had returned to the Kuala Lumpur condominium and then had traveled to Bangkok. The [3 words redacted] that Khallad had been using a fraudulent Yemeni passport, under the name Sa’eed bin Saleh.

  [6 words redacted] given to the CIA by the Malaysians in January 2000. None of it had been passed to us, despite our specifically having asked about Khallad and the phone number and its relevance to the Cole investigation and to national security. I later found out that the three photos [3 words redacted] that the [1 word redacted] gave me were the three photos shown, with no explanation, to Steve and my Cole colleagues at the June 11, 2001, meeting in New York. The Cole team had asked about the photos—who the people were, why they were taken, and so on—but [1 word redacted], the CIA official present, said nothing.

  Also in the file [3 words redacted] that Khallad had flown first class to Bangkok with Khalid al-Mihdhar and Nawaf al-Hazmi. We soon would learn that they were listed as passengers on American Airlines Flight 77, which had hit the Pentagon. Based upon the chronology in the report, it was clear that the day after Quso and Nibras had met Khallad and given him the $36,000, Mihdhar and Hazmi had bought first-class tickets to the United States. Was that $36,000 used to buy their tickets? And had the rest of the money been intended for their use in the United States? My gut told me yes.

  My hands started shaking. I didn’t know what to think. “They just sent these reports,” the [1 word redacted] said, seeing my reaction. I walked out of the room, sprinted down the corridor to the bathroom, and fell to the floor next to a stall. There I threw up.

  I sat on the floor for a few minutes, although it felt like hours. What I had just seen went through my mind again and again. The same thought kept looping back: “If they had all this information since January 2000, why the hell didn’t they pass it on?” My whole body was shaking.

  I heard one of the SWAT agents asking, “Ali, are you okay?” He had seen me run to the bathroom and had followed me in.

  “I am fine.”

  I got myself to the sink, washed out my mouth, and splashed some water on my face. I covered my face with a paper towel for a few moments. I was still trying to process the fact that the information I had requested about major al-Qaeda operatives, information the CIA had claimed they knew nothing about, had been in the agency’s hands since January 2000.

  The SWAT agent asked, “What’s wrong, bud? What the hell did he tell you?”

  “They knew, they knew.”

  Another agent came in to check what was happening, and I told him what had just happened and why we had been ordered to stay in Yemen. We hugged and walked out.

  I went back down the corridor to the [4 words redacted] office to get the file. “Ali?” he asked as I walked in. I looked him squarely in the face and saw that he was blushing and looked flustered. He clearly understood the significance of what the agency had not passed on.

  I didn’t have time to play the blame game. New York and Washington were still burning, colleagues of ours were missing, and we all had to focus on catching those responsible. “Is there anything else you haven’t passed along?” I asked.

  He didn’t say anything, and I walked out, file in hand.

  I went to the room where Tom Donlon, Bob McFadden, and Steve Corbett were working and dropped the file on the table. “The [1 word redacted] just gave this to me,” I said.

  Bob looked up and saw the anger on my face. He didn’t say anything, just took the file. Bob knew me well enough to know that something was very wrong. He looked through the contents and then turned to me in outrage. “I can’t believe this.” Those were his only words.

  Tom and Steve’s faces also dropped once they looked through the file; it was too much for any of us to take. “Now they want us to question Quso,” Bob said, his voice rising in anger. “They should have given this to us eight months ago.”

  FBI special agent Andre Khoury had been stationed elsewhere in the Middle East when the planes hit the twin towers. He was reassigned to join us in Yemen, and after he arrived and saw the file, he wanted to confront the [1 word redacted]. I held Andre back.

  “They knew! Why didn’t they tell us?!” Andre said.

  “You’re right,” I said, “and I’m just as angry. Believe me. But now is not the time to ask these questions. One day someone will ask the questions and find out, but right now we have to focus on the task at hand.”

  In New York, a few hours after the attacks, Steve Bongardt and Kenny Maxwell joined a conference call with people in FBI headquarters in Washington, DC, including Dina Corsi and an FBI supervisor named Rod Middleton. Kenny asked if there were any names of suspected hijackers. Dina replied that they had some, and she began reading out names. The first few names didn’t mean anything, but when Dina read the name “Khalid al-Mihdhar,” Steve interrupted her.

  “Khalid al-Mihdhar. Did you say Khalid al-Mihdhar?” he asked, his voice rising. “The same one you told us about? He’s on the list?”

  “Steve, we did everything by the book,” Middleton interjected.

  “I hope that makes you feel better,” Steve replied. “Tens of thousands are dead.” Kenny hit the mute button on the phone and said to Steve: “Now is not the time for this. There will be a time, but not now.”

  A few days later, once regular communication with New York was established, Steve called me in Yemen and repeated the conversation. “I hope they’re fucking happy that they did everything by the book.”

  Over the next few days, weeks, and months, information about what else the CIA had known before 9/11 and hadn’t told the FBI kept trickling out. In late 1999 the NSA had told the CIA that they had learned, from monitoring Ahmed al-Hada’s number, that several al-Qaeda members had made plans to travel to Kuala Lumpur in early January 2000. They knew them by the names “Nawaf,” “Khalid,” and “Salem.” Khalid had been identified by the CIA as Khalid al-Mihdhar, Hada’s son-in-law, and they had tracked him arriving in Kuala Lumpur on January 5, 2000.

  After we had uncovered Hada’s switchboard during the 1998 investigation into the embassy bombings, we had made an operating agreement with the CIA under which they would monitor the number and share all intelligence with us. They hadn’t done that.

  We also learned that en route to Kuala Lumpur, Mihdhar had stopped off in Dubai. [16 words redacted] In his passport he had a multi-entry U.S. visa. The CIA had passed this information on to foreign intelligence agencies but had not told the FBI, the Immigration and Naturalization Service, or the State Department.

  Because no U.S. agency had been told, Mihdhar’s name had not been put on a terrorist watchlist. As a consequence, he had not been stopped from entering the United States, or even questioned. In March 2000 the CIA had learned that Nawaf al-Hazmi had also flown to Los Angeles International Airport on January 15, but, again they hadn’t told us, the State Department, or INS.

  In June 2000 Mihdhar had left California and had gone back to Yemen to visit his family following the birth of a daughter. He had then traveled to Saudi Arabia and Afghanistan before traveling again to Mecca in June 2001. He had returned to the United States on July 4, 2001. But because the CIA had not informed us, no one stopped him from entering.

  It was on June 13, two days after the June 11 meeting in which [1 word redacted], the CIA supervisor, had refused to answer any questions from Steve and the Cole team about Mihdhar, that he was issued a new visa.

  While they were in the United States, both Mihdhar and Hazmi had used their real names to get driver’s licenses and to open bank accounts. Hazmi had even registered his car and was listed in the San Diego phone book. He had used his debit card to buy tickets for American Airlines Flight 77 for himself and his brother, Salem.

  It was not until August 23, 2001, that the FBI, Customs, and the State Department were told that Mihdhar was in the United States.

  Qamish, who
was with his chief of staff, Nabil Sanabani, came straight up to me and gave me a hug. In his eyes there was a look of genuine concern and sadness. “It’s terrible news,” he said, after releasing me. “Is everyone okay?” He was referring to the many Americans he had met as part of the Cole investigation.

  I shook my head. His question made me choke up, and it took me a few seconds to pull myself together. “John—” My throat swelled up. “Brother John is missing,” I finished, “as are other colleagues.” Qamish’s face now registered unmistakable grief.

  We updated him on the news from New York and Washington. At the time, reports were that more than fifty thousand people had been killed, and we thought that that number included many of our colleagues who were in the vicinity, and with whom we had lost contact. As we spoke, emotion overcame us each one by one. Nabil handed us tissues to wipe our tears.

  “How can we help, Brother Ali?” Qamish asked me after we had finished briefing him.

  “We need to speak to Quso,” I said. “I believe that he has information on the attacks, and I need to interview him.”

  “I’ll get him for you,” Qamish replied immediately.

  He picked up the phone and called the PSO office in Aden and was patched through to Ansi, whom we knew well from the Cole investigation.

  “Put Quso on the next plane to Sanaa,” Qamish told Ansi. “Ali needs to interview him.”

  An argument ensued, and Qamish’s voice rose, his tone turning angry. “I don’t care. The plane can’t leave without him. You listen to me—”

  When he had finished, Qamish turned to me and said, “Don’t worry, I’ll make sure Quso is brought here.” It wasn’t a surprise to us that Ansi was trying to stop us from interviewing Quso. He had made his sympathies clear during the Cole investigation.

  Qamish next called the airport and issued an order to a PSO official based there. “Go find the pilot of the last plane from Aden to Sanaa and have him call me immediately.” A few minutes later Qamish’s phone rang. The PSO official at the airport had the pilot on the line.

  “I have a prisoner that I want on your plane,” Qamish told the pilot. “Don’t leave without him. If he’s late, the plane must wait.”

  It was clear Qamish thought that Ansi might deliberately bring Quso to the airport late so he would miss the plane. He was right—Ansi did bring Quso late. To Ansi’s surprise, the plane was waiting.

  During the late evening of September 12, Bob and I went to a PSO facility to meet Quso. He was brought straight from the airport, and as soon as he saw us waiting for him he started yelling. “What is this? So if anything happens in New York or Washington you blame me?”

  “Hold on,” I said. “How did you know we were going to ask you about that?” Quso was silent. My question caught him off-guard. “I was actually just going to ask you about the Cole, but since you bring it up, what do you know?” Quso slumped down in his chair.

  We read Quso the Miranda warning; he waived his rights, and then we started questioning him. “So what do you know about what happened?”

  “I don’t know anything.”

  “Okay,” I told him, “but you do know about al-Qaeda, right?”

  “Yes, we’ve been through that.”

  “Okay, so we’ll return to the Cole.”

  I asked Quso a series of questions about his having delivered the money to Khallad in Bangkok. I showed him the three pictures I had been given by the [1 word redacted], one of which was of Khalid al-Mihdhar, taken in Malaysia. Quso didn’t identify him as Mihdhar but said he thought he looked like Khallad.

  It took a lot of self-control for us to remain calm while questioning Quso. The $36,000 he had delivered to Khallad from Yemen had in all likelihood been used for the 9/11 attack, probably paying for tickets for two of the hijackers, Hazmi and Mihdhar. We had only just learned from the CIA that they knew that the two had been with Khallad in Bangkok, and from there had flown to Los Angeles. Next we showed Quso pictures of al-Qaeda operatives and asked him to identify those he knew. Some of the analysts in Washington were convinced that Quso was in the photos, though Bob and I, who had spent many hours with him, knew it wasn’t the case. Nonetheless, the analysts requested that we get Quso to identify himself. After going over the photos, we dwelled on the individual they thought was Quso. He noticed and told us, “I know what you’re thinking. It’s not me. It looks like me, but it’s not me.” Included were pictures of the men we suspected of being the hijackers, although we didn’t tell him the significance of those photos. Quso identified numerous al-Qaeda members but didn’t recognize any of the suspected hijackers’ photos except one. “That’s Marwan al-Shehhi,” he said. Shehhi had been on United Airlines Flight 175. We suspected that Shehhi was a hijacker, but at this stage we had no proof. Quso helped provide proof by identifying him as an al-Qaeda member.

  “Okay,” I said nonchalantly, “how do you know him?”

  “I once stayed at the same guesthouse as him in Afghanistan.”

  “And?”

  “It was during Ramadan, and Shehhi had apparently had some kind of stomach operation to help him lose weight, so really it was dangerous for him to fast, but he decided to fast anyway. As a result he got very sick, and the emir of the guesthouse had to look after him.”

  “Anything else happen with him?”

  “I remember he had arrived in Afghanistan with a friend whose alias was Abas, but he was killed during a training exercise. Apparently he didn’t realize the gun he was using had real bullets in it, and he shot himself.” Quso laughed to himself.

  “And in the guesthouse where you met Shehhi,” I asked, “who was the emir?” Although I of course knew the answer, I wanted him to say the name for the benefit of the PSO officials present.

  “Abu Jandal,” he replied.

  I asked Quso a couple more questions about other people, because I didn’t want him to know the significance of what he had just told me, and then I suggested to the Yemenis that we all take a break.

  From our anonymous source in Afghanistan we knew Abu Jandal’s importance to bin Laden. We also knew that the Yemenis had him in custody. They had refused to give us access to him in the Cole investigation because they had said we had no evidence that he had anything to do with the attack on the destroyer. But now we had Quso linking him to one of the 9/11 hijackers.

  “We need to talk to Abu Jandal,” I told one of the Yemeni intelligence officers in the room. “Quickly!”

  While we waited for Abu Jandal, we continued questioning Quso and in total spent about four days talking to him, going through all his interactions with other al-Qaeda members. We questioned him during the night and spent the days preparing for the next interview. At one point I collapsed from exhaustion and was taken to the emergency room, but as soon as I was revived I checked myself out and returned to work.

  We took breaks from the interrogation to write up the information we had gained and file it with Washington. When we informed headquarters that we had shown Quso the three pictures and that he had misidentified the picture of Mihdhar as being Khallad, they told us that the CIA had just come up with a [1 word redacted] picture.

  “What [1 word redacted] picture?” I asked in frustration. “Look, how many pictures are there?”

  “As far as the CIA told us, that’s it. There are only [1 word redacted] pictures, but we are still pushing. We’ll let you know.”

  Headquarters sent us the [1 word redacted] picture—it was of Khallad, talking in a phone booth. The Malaysian [2 words redacted] had listed, in its [1 word redacted], the phone number assigned to the booth. It was the number that we had explicitly asked the CIA if they had recognized, to which they had replied no. Quso positively identified the man in the [1 word redacted] photo as Khallad.

  This [1 word redacted] picture had been in the CIA’s possession when Steve Bongardt and the Cole team had been shown the [1 word redacted] three pictures on June 11, 2001. If it had been shown to the Cole team, Steve and the other agents at
the meeting would have identified the man in the picture as Khallad. We knew exactly what Khallad looked like from the Cole investigation. And if we had learned that the CIA had had a picture of Khallad in June 2001, and had been monitoring him, we would have gone straight to headquarters saying that the CIA had lied about not knowing about Khallad, and we would have demanded that they hand over the information.

  If that had happened, at a minimum, Khalid al-Mihdhar would not have been allowed to just walk into the United States on July 4, 2001, and Nawaf al-Hazmi, Atta’s deputy, would have been arrested. At a minimum.

  What really upset Bob and me now was that it was only Quso’s misidentification of Mihdhar as possibly Khallad that had caused the CIA to share the [1 word redacted] photo. Even now, after 9/11, they weren’t properly sharing information with us. We wondered if there were other photographs from the Malaysia meeting that were still being kept from us.

  August 2003. “Watch it, Ali, they seem to want your head,” Kevin Cruise said, walking up to my desk. He’d just finished meeting investigators from the 9/11 Commission.

  “What do you mean?” I asked.

  “They’re asking a lot of questions about you. It seems our friends at Langley have been talking about you. Just be careful when you see them tomorrow.” It was clear that the CIA officials behind the withholding of information pre-9/11 were nervous about what I would say and were trying to discredit me. It was unfortunate that this was how they were spending their time: rather than addressing mistakes and working out how to ensure that errors weren’t repeated, they wanted to cover it up and fight the FBI instead.

  “Thanks, Kevin, will do.”

  The National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States was set up in late 2002 by an act of Congress, with the mandate “to prepare a full and complete account of the circumstances surrounding the September 11, 2001, attacks.” When the investigators arrived in New York, they spoke first to senior FBI officials like Kevin Cruise, who was one of two supervisors overseeing the 9/11 investigations. The next day they spoke to field agents.