The Black Banners

by Soufan, Ali H.

  The first agent they called was me. After introducing themselves and asking some basic background questions, one of the investigators asked me: “So, Agent Soufan, why does the CIA hate you?” I was taken aback by the question, and paused as I debated how to answer it.

  “You must be talking to the wrong crowd down there. Hate is a big term,” I replied. “But to answer your question, I think you’d have to ask them.” The commission team started laughing.

  “Let’s move on and focus on al-Qaeda,” said one of the investigators, Douglas J. MacEachin, a thirty-year CIA veteran. “Here’s my question: if you want to look at al-Qaeda and understand what happened, where would you start?”

  “Nineteen seventy-nine is where I’d start,” I answered.

  Doug’s face lit up. “I must tell you,” he said, “I’m very pleased you said that. Everyone else we’ve spoken to answers by starting just before 9/11, or with the East African embassy bombings or the USS Cole. But in my opinion, you are right. Tell me, why 1979?”

  I explained to him what I had told John years earlier, explaining why 1979—with events like the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan and the Iranian revolution—was an important year.

  “That’s the best explanation we’ve heard, thank you,” one of the staffers said. “Why don’t you now take us through what has happened since 1979 and the cases you’ve been involved in investigating.”

  I talked them through a series of cases, including the East African embassy bombings, Operation Challenge, the thwarted millennium attacks in Jordan, and the USS Cole bombing. During this discussion, I sensed that the relationship between us was changing. While they had clearly been briefed negatively about me by some in the CIA, they saw I knew my material, and they were reevaluating me in their minds.

  I finished off by mentioning that, as part of the Cole investigation, we had asked the CIA about Khallad and other al-Qaeda operatives being in Malaysia, and that they had denied any knowledge of it. I also mentioned that the CIA had known in January that hijacker Khalid al-Mihdhar had a U.S. visa, and that they had known in March that he was in the United States—but that they hadn’t shared this information with the FBI until August 2001.

  “The CIA told us,” one investigator interjected, “that as they told the congressional Joint Inquiry, the FBI was told about Khallad being in Malaysia, and the FBI was told about Khalid al-Midhar and Hazmi being here.” (The Joint Inquiry into Intelligence Community Activities before and after the Terrorist Attacks of September 11, 2001, or JIICATAS911, was conducted by the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence and the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence between February 2002 and December 2002, and it was widely seen as a failure. This is why the nonpartisan 9/11 Commission was set up.)

  “That’s not true,” I replied, “and you can look through all the files we have to see that that information was never passed along. As you know, if information was passed along, it would be in these files. The government works electronically, and there’s a record of everything. In the USS Cole files you’ll see all the requests we made, and their responses saying they didn’t have any information.”

  “We want to see all the USS Cole files.”

  “Sure. We have lots of files. It could take days.”

  “That’s not a problem. We have lots of people to go through them.”

  I called in one of my FBI colleagues and asked that all the files for the USS Cole be brought to the investigators. We had files on every individual involved, every witness we had questioned, and every scene we had investigated. Included among the material were thick files with information we had sent to the CIA. A separate file contained information the CIA had passed to us, and that was very thin.

  As the files were being brought in, we took a break and I went to speak to Pat D’Amuro. He was with Joe Valiquette, the FBI’s spokesman. “How’s it going, Ali?” Pat asked.

  “The challenge I’m facing is that they are claiming the CIA gave us the information on Mihdhar and Khallad being in Malaysia.”

  “But they didn’t,” Pat replied.

  “Exactly, boss, and in the USS Cole files we’ve got all the documents proving that. What I want to know is whether it’s okay with the bureau that I point out to the investigators exactly where to look. Otherwise they’re just searching through hundreds of files.”

  “Absolutely, give them everything they want and need,” Pat replied.

  This was a marked change from how the bureau approached the Joint Inquiry, where agents were told that the FBI leadership was just going to accept the “blame” for 9/11 in order not to upset anyone in the CIA and rock the boat. This decision outraged the agents who were on the front lines against al-Qaeda and who knew that the truth was very different. As I walked back into the room the commission investigators were using, I felt liberated.

  At one point during my discussions with the 9/11 Commission investigators, I was called into the office of my assistant special agent in charge, Amy Jo Lyons. “Ali, we’ve been getting complaints from the CIA about things you’re saying to the commission,” she said. It seemed that the investigators were going back and asking the CIA new questions based on the information I had given them. And the CIA had complained to FBI headquarters.

  “That’s okay with me,” I replied to Amy, “but if people in headquarters are unhappy with me telling the commission what really happened, they can tell me in writing not to cooperate, and I won’t cooperate.”

  “No, no,” Amy said, “I just want to know what’s happening here.”

  “It’s simple,” I told her. “The commission started asking questions about the Cole and 9/11, and I quickly realized they had been told a series of lies. With Pat’s approval I went through actual documents with them and showed them what really happened.”

  “If that’s the case,” Amy replied, “you didn’t do anything wrong. You did exactly what needed to be done.”

  When the 9/11 Commission published their findings, everything I said was confirmed by their investigation. On page 355 of the report, they list “Operational Opportunities.” Included in that summary list are:

  1. January 2000: the CIA does not watchlist Khalid al-Mihdhar or notify the FBI when it learned Mihdhar possessed a valid U.S. visa.

  2. January 2000: the CIA does not develop a transnational plan for tracking Mihdhar and his associates so that they could be followed to Bangkok and onward, including the United States.

  3. March 2000: the CIA does not watchlist Nawaf al-Hazmi or notify the FBI when it learned that he possessed a U.S. visa and had flown to Los Angeles on January 15, 2000.

  4. January 2001: the CIA does not inform the FBI that a source had identified Khallad, or Tawfiq bin Attash, a major figure in the October 2000 bombing of the USS Cole, as having attended the meeting in Kuala Lumpur with Khalid al-Mihdhar.

  5. May 2001: a CIA official does not notify the FBI about Mihdhar’s U.S. visa, Hazmi’s U.S. travel, or Khallad’s having attended the Kuala Lumpur meeting (identified when he reviewed all the relevant traffic because of the high level of threats).

  6. June 2001: FBI and CIA officials do not ensure that all relevant information regarding the Kuala Lumpur meeting was shared with the Cole investigators at the June 11 meeting.

  The CIA’s own inspector general’s report into 9/11 came to the same conclusions regarding CIA shortcomings and its failure to share intelligence. The report states: “Earlier watchlisting of Mihdhar could have prevented his reentry into the United States in July 2001. Informing the FBI and good operational follow-through by CIA and FBI might have resulted in surveillance of both al-Mihdhar and al-Hazmi. Surveillance, in turn, would have the potential to yield information on flight training, financing, and links to others who were complicit in the 9/11 attacks.” The report goes on to say: “That so many individuals failed to act in this case reflects a systematic breakdown.” The inspector general recommended that an “accountability board review the performance of the CTC chiefs.” (This ne
ver happened.)

  My discussions with the 9/11 Commission investigators resumed, and we started discussing the “source” in Afghanistan.

  “He’s an FBI source developed in Afghanistan before 9/11. We agreed to share him with the CIA. Our agreement with them on the source was that anything gained from the source—he was a criminal investigation source—had to be shared with us.”

  “And what happened?”

  “After 9/11 we learned that the CIA went behind our backs and showed the pictures of the Malaysia summit meeting—the pictures they wouldn’t share with us—to the source. They didn’t tell us that they had shown him the pictures, nor did they share with us what he told them about the pictures. He didn’t know that the CIA wasn’t sharing information with the FBI; nor was he told why these pictures were important. When the source was shown the pictures from Malaysia in January 2001, he told them he didn’t recognize who Mihdhar was, but he was 90 percent certain that the other person was Khallad.

  “We were not told this. This shows that the CIA knew the significance of Malaysia, Khallad, and Mihdhar but actively went out of their way to withhold the information from us. It’s not a case of just not passing on information. This is information the FBI representative working with the source should have been told about. It was a legal requirement. Instead we were deliberately kept out of the loop.”

  “We were told by the CIA’s Counterterrorism Center that they shared all their information with the FBI from the source and that nothing was hidden,” a commission member responded.

  I paused and, thinking out loud, asked, “Did you check all the regular cables?”

  “Yes.”

  “Did you check operational traffic?”

  “That must be it,” Doug said, smiling broadly. At first only he understood the point I was making, and he received puzzled looks from other staffers. But then he explained it to them.

  Operational traffic refers to cables sent during an operation. The officer will list procedures, leaving a record in case something goes wrong or something needs to be referred to. Because these cables are strictly procedural and not related to intelligence, they would not be sent to the FBI. If someone wanted to hide something from the FBI, that’s where he would put it. Because Doug had worked for the CIA, he knew what operational cables were, while other members of the team might not have.

  After investigating the episode, the 9/11 Commission found that this intelligence was indeed hidden in operational traffic.

  When an FBI colleague from New York, Frank Pellegrino, briefed the commission after me, a staffer commented about investigators being “unable to connect the dots.”

  “What dots?” Frank angrily replied. “There are no dots to connect! It was all there, written in front of them.”

  Later I was asked by the 9/11 Commission to travel to Washington with Dan Coleman, Debbie Doran, and a few senior FBI officials to deliver a briefing about al-Qaeda to the full commission. The CIA was represented by some analysts, and the meeting was chaired by the executive director of the commission, Philip Zelikow.

  Doug MacEachin, the former CIA official who had become a supporter of mine after our meeting in New York, told me beforehand to give the same briefing I had given them, which I did. The CIA analysts then gave a presentation about the structure of al-Qaeda.

  “Is that accurate?” a commission team member asked me.

  “No, unfortunately, there is a series of errors in what they think is the structure of al-Qaeda.”

  “For example?”

  “Well, they said that Khalid Sheikh Mohammed runs al-Qaeda’s media committee. This is under the control of Ayman Zawahiri. KSM runs the media office, a cover for their operational planning unit.”

  “Can you support your claim?”

  “Yes. We found some documents in Afghanistan explaining the structure.”

  “What else?”

  “Then there’s what they said about Khallad,” I replied. “They said Khallad has never been to the United States. Debbie can tell you that’s false.”

  “Yes,” Debbie interjected, “we found that Salah bin Saeed bin Yousef—this is the alias Khallad traveled under—was listed as having traveled to LAX during the millennium.”

  “We have Khallad in our custody,” a CIA analyst said, [11 words redacted]

  “You may be right, but if he wasn’t there, why is his alias on the flight manifest?”

  These are a few of the points we raised, among many others. Some are classified; others I simply cannot recall after all these years. As we walked out of the room at the conclusion of the meeting, one commission staffer came up to us and said: “I have a feeling that between the three of you, you forget more things than they will ever know.”

  Years later, on April 23, 2009, Philip Zelikow commented, in a piece on foreignpolicy.com: “I met and interviewed Soufan in the course of my work at the 9/11 Commission, while he was still doing important work at the FBI. . . . My fellow staffers and I considered Soufan to be credible. Indeed, Soufan is fluent in Arabic, and he seemed to us to be one of the more impressive intelligence agents—from any agency—that we encountered in our work.”

  Until Debbie, Dan, myself, and other agents briefed the commission, senior FBI managers in Washington didn’t understand the situation. Part of the problem was that the FBI leadership had changed in August 2001. There was a new director, Robert Mueller, with a new senior team, and very few of them had been involved with the significant terrorist cases of the preceding years.

  The leadership of the FBI didn’t know that we had been requesting information and that the CIA hadn’t shared it; and they just wanted to move on and start fresh. President George W. Bush had told the FBI and the CIA that he wanted everyone to get along. Again, the implication was that the FBI should just take the criticism and blame for 9/11.

  But those of us who knew the truth stated exactly what had happened when we were asked about events under oath before the 9/11 Commission. And when senior FBI officials heard about our performance before the commission, they were surprised. At one point I was asked to brief John Pistole, one of Director Mueller’s chief deputies, prior to his testifying publicly before the 9/11 Commission, but at the last minute the briefing was canceled, as the leadership didn’t want to cause problems for the CIA.

  Later, when John Miller, the former ABC journalist who had interviewed bin Laden in 1998, was appointed assistant director of the FBI’s Office of Public Affairs, he understood the need to correct the narrative. When Lawrence Wright asked for access to people, John told the director: “We need to do this for history. It isn’t about CIA or FBI. We need to tell the American people the truth about an important era.” The director agreed, and the bureau gave Larry access. He then wrote the best-seller The Looming Tower, and he later profiled me in the New Yorker. Between his book and the 9/11 Commission, the truth began to come out.

  Those in the CIA who were responsible for not passing on information did their best to ensure that the truth didn’t come out. With approval from the bureau, around the same time we spoke to Wright, Joe Valiquette arranged for Dan Coleman and me to brief a senior journalist from one of the major newspapers. After he spoke to us in New York, he went to the CIA with a bunch of questions.

  “What you were told by the FBI is completely false,” a CIA official told him. The journalist asked to see evidence, whereupon the CIA official pointed to a stack of documents, describing the files as consisting of “information disproving everything the FBI said, but it’s all classified, so I can’t show it to you.” The journalist decided to tone down the story. Wright was told the same thing, and veiled threats were made (with reference to his daughter). But he’s a courageous reporter who could read through bluffs, and he had done enough research to be confident in what the truth was, and he wouldn’t be pressured by threats. He wrote his book, and won the Pulitzer Prize for it.

  After The 9/11 Commission Report was published and everything I had told the journalist was v
erified, the journalist contacted Joe Valiquette, told him what the CIA had said, and apologized for not running with the truth. “I was duped. I trusted them,” the journalist told Joe.

  What really upset a few people on the seventh floor of Langley—the executive floor—was that the 9/11 Commission flatly contradicted the CIA’s claims about sharing intelligence. The commission showed the American people that if information had been shared, 9/11 might have been prevented.

  The most damning passage in The 9/11 Commission Report is found on page 267: “DCI Tenet and Cofer Black testified before Congress’s Joint Inquiry into 9/11 that the FBI had access to this identification [of Khallad in Kuala Lumpur] from the beginning. But drawing on an extensive record, including documents that were not available to the CIA personnel who drafted that testimony, we conclude this was not the case.”

  In a footnote to that line, one of the sources is “Al. S.” Those in the CIA who had not shared the intelligence knew that this referred to “Ali Soufan,” and they hated me for it.

  16

  * * *

  The Father of Death

  September 17, 2001. It was dark outside as Bob and I walked into the interrogation room at PSO headquarters in Sanaa. We had agreed with the Yemenis that it was safest to conduct our interrogations at night. Under cover of darkness there was less of a chance that we would be spotted traveling to and from the prison.

  The security threat was greater than ever before, as the new suspect we were about to interrogate, Nasser Ahmad Nasser al-Bahri—widely known as Abu Jandal—was Osama bin Laden’s former personal bodyguard. Al-Qaeda and its supporters certainly didn’t want him talking to us. He was a potential treasure trove of information on the enemy that had just six days earlier murdered so many Americans. The final tally was not yet known, as bodies were still being recovered, but among the dead were friends like my former boss John O’Neill. At the very least, Abu Jandal knew Marwan al-Shehhi, one of the suspected hijackers of United Airlines Flight 175.