The Black Banners

by Soufan, Ali H.

  “You know, Abu Jandal,” I told him, ending the Braveheart conversation, “I know about the revolutionary tradition in Islam, and you’re clearly very well read in it. But did you know that America also has a revolutionary past?” He shook his head and leaned in. He was curious. He liked learning new things, especially on his favorite topics.

  “It’s true,” I continued. “We Americans understand revolutions. We had our own revolution. America used to be ruled by the British. But in 1776 Americans had enough of British cruelty and taxes, and under George Washington, who was then a general but later became the first American president, we revolted against the British and defeated them. Only then did America become a country.” Abu Jandal was fascinated and asked me questions about the American Revolution.

  He was now speaking directly to us, and Bob and I moved to the second stage of the interrogation: asking him more detailed questions about himself and al-Qaeda. While he continued answering our questions directly, he was still practicing the classic counterinterrogation technique of admitting to what he knew we knew and to things that were of no value, so as to appear cooperative.

  We needed to snap him out of this counterinterrogation technique. “We’re going to do something different now.” I reached into my briefcase and took out one of our al-Qaeda photo-books, placing it on the table and sliding it toward him. “This is filled with people you know,” I said. “I’d like you to confirm who you know.”

  “Sure,” Abu Jandal said. “I’ll take a look.” He picked up the book and began looking through it.

  While he appeared to earnestly study each photo—his eyebrows furrowed and his forehead wrinkled, a few seconds allotted to each—he kept shaking his head and said he knew almost none of the people. There were about sixty photos. By the end, he had only identified Osama bin Laden, Abu Hafs al-Masri, Ayman Zawahiri, and few other known operatives. Those were people he couldn’t deny knowing, given his admission that he had been Osama bin Laden’s bodyguard. Abu Hafs was, at the time of Abu Jandal’s service, bin Laden’s anointed successor.

  “That’s all you recognize?” I asked, deliberately adding surprise to my voice.

  “Yes, I don’t recognize anyone else, sorry,” he responded.

  “Are you sure?”

  “Yes,” he replied.

  “Please look again, my friend. Do you think I ask without knowing that you know many of these people? I’m confident you know more people. Look again.”

  “Okay, I’ll look again,” he said, again trying to show that he was cooperating, and maintaining the friendly relationship we had built.

  He looked slowly through the book, spending a few more seconds than before on each photo. “Sorry, there’s no one else I know.”

  “Are you sure?” I asked, eyebrows raised.

  “Yes.”

  “Well, for friendship’s sake, would you look one more time?”

  “Okay, for you I will,” he said with a smile.

  He looked at picture after picture, shaking his head after examining each one. As he got about halfway through, I laughed and turned to Bob. “See?”

  “What?” Abu Jandal asked somewhat nervously, trying to work out what was going on. He didn’t like being on the outside of a joke.

  “I knew you wouldn’t be straight with us,” I told him. “I told Bob you wouldn’t admit to knowing people.”

  “What do you mean?” Abu Jandal asked, his voice sounding a bit less confident than usual.

  “Come on,” I said, “take this picture.” I pointed to a photo on the page he had been looking at. “Are you claiming you don’t know al-Sharqi?” Sharqi was an al-Qaeda alias for Shehhi, the hijacker who Quso had told us had stayed in Abu Jandal’s guesthouse.

  Abu Jandal was silent, with a poker face. “Do you think I don’t know about your relationship with him?” I continued. “Remember Ramadan 1999, when he was sick in your guesthouse? And as his emir you cared for him and gave him soup and nursed him back to health?” Abu Jandal began to blush. “So do you really not know him?” I asked.

  “Yes, I do know him,” he admitted sheepishly. After a pause, as if calculating the situation, he added, “Sorry.” We didn’t mention anything about Shehhi being one of the 9/11 hijackers; and Shehhi’s name had not yet been released to the press as a suspected hijacker.

  “When I ask you a question, I most probably know the answer,” I told him. “I am just testing you to see if you are cooperating and being honest, as you claim you are. Now, if you don’t want to cooperate, just say so, but please don’t lie to me and waste my time by pretending that you don’t know these people.” Abu Jandal looked down, embarrassed. He had been caught lying, undermining not only his claims of cooperating but, more importantly in his book, of being a religious person—in Islam, as in other religions, lying is a sin. “Look,” I continued, “I thought you were an honest guy. Feeding someone soup is very personal. How do you think I know about it? I know about your relationships with many in this book. I didn’t fly all the way from America to interview you knowing nothing. You don’t know how many of your friends I have in my custody, or who worked for me, and how many have spoken about you. So please let’s not play games, and let’s go through this honestly.”

  “Okay, okay,” Abu Jandal said.

  “Let’s start at the beginning of the book,” I replied. He went through and identified one al-Qaeda operative after another. We never let on that the only person we knew he knew for certain was Shehhi. He identified, as al-Qaeda members, seven of those who were later identified as 9/11 hijackers, including hijacker leader Mohammed Atta, whom he had met in the bin Laden compound in Kandahar, and whom he identified as Abu Abdul Rahman al-Masri. Abu Jandal said he thought he had met Nawaf al-Hazmi in bin Laden’s main Kabul guesthouse. He also recognized Salem al-Hazmi, whom he had seen on the front lines in Kabul. He went on to recount where he had seen Ahmed al-Ghamdi and Mohand al-Shehri. He gave us all the nationalities and al-Qaeda aliases of the hijackers, something we hadn’t known at the time.

  When shown a picture of Khalid al-Mihdhar, Abu Jandal recognized him by the alias Sinan al-Maki. “Now, Sinan,” Abu Jandal told us, “is married to the sister of Abu Jaffar al-Yemeni, who died in 1997. Abu Jaffar was the son of Ahmed al-Hada. Abu Jaffar was a good friend of mine, and he wanted me to marry one of his sisters, but she changed her mind.”

  Ahmed al-Hada was the Yemeni whose phone number was used as an al-Qaeda switchboard. “Is Hada a member of al-Qaeda?”

  “Yes, and he even fought on the front lines.”

  “What did you think of him?”

  “Sinan told me that Hada was known to be very cheap, and that his family in Saudi Arabia didn’t approve of him marrying into a lowly Yemeni family.”

  We continued the discussion along these lines, still not saying anything to Abu Jandal about the men being 9/11 hijackers. To him they were just people he had met in safe houses and training camps in Afghanistan and Pakistan, no different from the other al-Qaeda operatives he had identified. Abu Jandal was unaware that al-Qaeda was behind 9/11. The terrorists whose pictures we had shown him were also those involved in the USS Cole and East African embassy attacks, and he assumed that our questions were related to those incidents.

  But for us, this was the first time we had definite confirmation that seven of the suspected hijackers were in fact al-Qaeda members. We now knew for certain that al-Qaeda was behind 9/11.

  After he had finished identifying people, I closed the book and said, “Thank you for looking at this. Let’s switch to other topics.” We started talking about the operatives he had identified who were part of the 1998 East African embassy bombings.

  I asked Abu Jandal, “Where does Islam allow suicide bombers? Suicide is forbidden in the Quran.”

  “Generally that’s true,” he conceded, “but it’s different in war, which is what we’re in. These are our weapons against the missiles of the other side. And so it’s allowed.”

  “What about the wo
men and the children that your suicide bombers kill?” I countered. “Where does the Quran justify killing innocents?”

  “Like who?” he asked.

  “In the East Africa bombings,” I replied, “women and children were killed, and many of them were Muslims.”

  “In war there are casualties,” he countered. “If they were good Muslims then God will accept them as martyrs.”

  “Hold on,” I said. “I worked the East African bombing. I remember, for example, that we found the remains of a woman and her baby in a bus in front of the Nairobi embassy. Both were incinerated. The mother’s arms were wrapped around the baby, as if trying to protect it. Tell me, what crime did the baby commit? What’s the justification for killing that baby?”

  Abu Jandal had a ready reply: “The baby’s reward will come in heaven. Those deaths were a small sacrifice for the wound the bombing inflicted on our enemy and for the inspiration it gave to hundreds of others to become martyrs. Any innocent Muslims killed will be rewarded for their sacrifice in heaven.” A classic attempt to explain away the murder of innocent bystanders, often given by al-Qaeda’s alleged theologians.

  Abu Jandal then quoted bin Laden’s 1998 declaration of jihad and told us, “God chooses a contractor [referring to bin Laden] and high school students to defend his religion and launch jihad against his enemies.” This was the first time Abu Jandal had mentioned bin Laden launching attacks. “High school students” referred to the young age of al-Qaeda fighters.

  “So this is why there are attacks like what happened recently in New York and Washington?” I asked, seizing on his comment.

  “The reason for such attacks and the reason for your [pointing to us] presence here [pointing to the ground] is America’s foreign policies—your occupation of the Arabian Peninsula, the continuous blockade and attacks on Iraq, and the support of Israel in killing and occupying the land of the Palestinians.” He added, “For every action there is a reaction.”

  “So were you guys behind the attacks last week?” I asked.

  “I am not aware who did it,” he replied.

  “I think you guys did it,” I said. Our voices were rising.

  “No, this is just a plan for you to attack Afghanistan. And if you do, the mujahideen will rebel, and operations will happen in America itself.” He paused and then said: “The war has not started yet, but if we can hit more, we will.”

  Coincidentally, Bob pointed out a Yemeni newspaper from that day, which had been lying on Mahmoud’s desk, with a headline reporting that two hundred Yemenis had been killed in the World Trade Center. (This figure later turned out to be a mistake.) I read the headline out loud—“Two Hundred Yemenis Die in New York Attack”—and showed Abu Jandal the newspaper.

  “God help us,” Abu Jandal said, clearly shocked by the number of Yemenis killed.

  “Is this justifiable?” I asked.

  “No, it’s a horrible crime,” he replied.

  “So what do you say to the families of these Yemenis killed in the World Trade Center on behalf of al-Qaeda?” I asked. “What type of Muslim would do this?”

  “Bin Laden didn’t do this,” he countered. He waved his hand as if to dismiss my comment. “The sheikh is not crazy,” he added.

  “I know al-Qaeda did this attack.” I was staring hard at him.

  “How do you know?” he asked.

  “Someone told me.”

  “Who told you?”

  “You did. You identified the hijackers of the planes as being al-Qaeda members.” As I completed the sentence, I placed on the table the photos of the seven hijackers he had identified, including Mohammed Atta, Khalid al-Mihdhar, and Marwan al-Shehhi. “These are the hijackers,” I said, pointing to them. “They killed the two hundred Yemenis.”

  Abu Jandal slouched back in his chair as if he had been punched in the stomach. His face registered complete shock. After looking blankly ahead in disbelief, his head dropped and he rested it between his hands, with his elbows propped on his knees. He was silent.

  About a minute later I repeated: “These are the hijackers. These are the men who murdered thousands of innocent people.”

  “I don’t know,” he said, shaking his head. “Can I have five minutes, please?”

  “Okay,” I said, and signaled to Bob that we should walk out. Yassir walked out with us.

  “What just happened? Why did you walk out?” Yassir asked. “You had him.” He didn’t understand why we’d let the moment pass. “Why did you agree to give him five minutes?”

  “Let him compose himself,” I said. “He knows he has just identified al-Qaeda as being behind the attacks. It’s a big admission. We need it to sink in to his mind, too. The moment isn’t lost. We’ve got him now.”

  We walked back in two minutes later. Abu Jandal still had his head between his hands. “What do you think now?” I asked. He was quiet for a few moments, then looked up and stared directly at me.

  “I think the sheikh went crazy. I know these guys. They are all bin Laden’s followers. We used to hang out together.” He shook his head and paused. “I don’t know what to say,” he continued. “This is not what I believe in. I will cooperate fully. What do you need?”

  We started off by asking Abu Jandal to tell us everything he knew about the hijackers he had identified. True to his word, he cooperated fully. This was a different person from the Abu Jandal we had first met. He gave us details and valuable information. Among the terrorists he spoke about was Zacarias Moussaoui, who had been arrested on August 16, 2001, by the FBI for suspicious activities related to airplanes. In Abu Jandal’s estimation, Moussaoui was a simpleton.

  After discussing the hijackers we turned to members of al-Qaeda’s leadership. Many of the names he supplied were new to us, as was a lot of the organizational structure. The U.S. government’s knowledge of al-Qaeda’s day-to-day operations was dated to when the group was in Sudan.

  The 1998 East African embassy bombings had put al-Qaeda on the international terrorism map and had increased the group’s size and funding. This, and the move to Afghanistan, had changed the way it operated. (Neither Junior nor Kherchtou had moved back to Afghanistan with bin Laden.) Abu Jandal filled in the gaps and gave us a more complete picture of the enemy we were now facing.

  He outlined the al-Qaeda shura council, and described the personal habits of Abu Mohammed al-Masri, Saif al-Adel, Abu Hafs al-Masri, Abu Hafs al-Mauritani, Sheikh Sa’eed al-Masri, Ayman al-Zawahiri, and Abu Assim al-Maghrebi, whose real name was Abdullah Tabarak. We knew that Abu Hafs al-Mauritani (a Mauritian, as his alias indicated) was the only person in al-Qaeda with religious training; he headed the theology, or fatwa, committee. Sheikh Sa’eed al-Masri, an Egyptian, had taken over the finances and administration of al-Qaeda from Madani al-Tayyib. Abu Assim al-Maghrebi was an old colleague of bin Laden’s who had fought with him against the Soviets and who had gone with him to Sudan; it was after the East African embassy bombings that bin Laden had asked him to head the bodyguard detachment.

  Abu Jandal explained how and when the operatives and the leadership held meetings. “Abu Hafs and some of the others would regularly meet with bin Laden. But when they all met, the brothers would joke, ‘Al-Shiba [the old men] are meeting, may God help us.’ Because they knew it meant a big operation was coming.” Abu Jandal grinned at the memory.

  “Then there’s the military committee, headed by Abu Hafs al-Masri,” Abu Jandal continued. “He also heads the special operations committee, in which Saif al-Adel is involved, and Saif, too, is a senior member of al-Qaeda. He heads the security committee.”

  “Is this Abu Hafs?” I asked, showing a picture.

  “Yes.” After Abu Jandal had identified Abu Hafs, he laughed.

  “What’s funny?”

  “I’m just remembering the story of when, during the battle of Jaji, Abu Hafs killed a Russian soldier, and then called up bin Laden while standing on the soldier and told him, ‘I’ve got a Russian officer under my shoe.’”

&nb
sp; When we showed him a picture of Saif al-Adel, Abu Jandal said, “It’s out of date.”

  “Why?”

  “Well, Saif has a scar under his right eye from when a bullet ricocheted and hit him.”

  “Do you like him?”

  “Members from the Arabian Peninsula don’t usually like his rough manner,” Abu Jandal replied with a grin.

  We showed him a series of pictures and he identified everyone he knew in the movement, though often he knew them only by their aliases. “This is Yaqoub al-Dusari, who assists Abu Hafs in the military committee,” he told us, studying one picture. We knew the person in the photograph as Fazul Abdullah Mohammed, alias Harun Fazul, from the East African embassy bombings.

  “What are the other committees?” Bob asked.

  “The public relations committee is headed by Abu Hussein al-Masri and Abu Annas al-Yemeni,” he said. (Ayman Zawahiri had taken over the committee sometime after Abu Jandal was put in jail.) “And the finance committee is headed by Sheikh Sa’eed al-Masri, who is director of funds, and al-Fateh al-Masri, emir of salaries. Finally, there is the theology committee, headed by Abu Hafs al-Mauritani. That is the senior leadership.” Abu Hussein al-Masri was a son-in-law of Zawahiri’s; Abu Annas al-Yemeni was Ali al-Bahlul, the operative who had created the al-Qaeda propaganda video following the Cole attack.

  Below those people, Abu Jandal explained that there were key operatives like Khallad, whose job was to help and motivate the operatives carrying out the attacks. Khallad didn’t plan, but he was assigned tasks outside Afghanistan, such as distributing money, providing fake passports, giving instructions to operatives from bin Laden, and relaying their replies. Abu Jandal seemed to admire him.

  “Although Khallad is young, his influence is very notable,” Abu Jandal told us. Khallad was in his twenties. Abu Jandal’s only criticism of him—and this was echoed by other al-Qaeda members we interrogated—was his neglect of his younger brothers, Omayer and al-Bara, after the death of their elder brother, Muhannad. Abu Jandal told us that at one point he had confronted Khallad because Omayer was living with takfiris. Takfiris’ enemies are the near enemy, the governments of their own countries; they don’t believe in the global enemy that al-Qaeda believes in. While al-Qaeda adopts some takfir ideology, it isn’t overwhelmingly takfiri; and takfiris disliked bin Laden because he took their operatives and distracted them from the near enemy to his global jihad. “You’re not acting like Muhannad would have,” Abu Jandal had lectured Khallad, which had prompted Khallad to set his brother straight.