“Okay,” [1 word redacted] told Samantha, “let’s try that.”
[1 word redacted] went back to the detention facility, on the outskirts of the city, and while [1 word redacted] waited for the [1 word redacted] guards to bring Binalshibh into the interrogation room, [1 word redacted] discovered that the CCTV system had no audio. It meant that [3 words redacted] could watch what was going on but not hear anything.
The [1 word redacted] brought Binalshibh into the room, pushed him onto the floor, and handcuffed him to the wall. He looked exactly like the picture [1 word redacted] had of him on the FBI’s Most Wanted Terrorists list, which was unusual, as terrorists rarely look exactly like the pictures [1 word redacted] have of them. Usually they’ve changed their appearance to disguise their identities, or they try to appear serious in pictures. The pictures of Abu Jandal, for example, show an unsmiling, tough-looking character, but in person he’s full of smiles, once engaged.
[1 word redacted] shuddered inwardly as he walked in, because here was someone directly culpable for 9/11. While [1 word redacted] had interrogated more important al-Qaeda members, Binalshibh was the first directly involved in coordinating the death of so many Americans. But to succeed with him, [1 word redacted] needed to remain collected and in control of the situation, so [1 word redacted] calmly asked the [1 word redacted] to undo his handcuffs.
After the guards stepped out, [1 word redacted] briefly introduced [1 word redacted] and told him: “[42 words redacted]”
[28 words redacted]
[10 words redacted]
Binalshibh had done an interview with al-Jazeera a few days earlier in which he proudly admitted his role in 9/11, providing a detailed account of the planning and execution phases of the plot. [45 words redacted]
[64 words redacted]
[4 words redacted]
[78 words redacted]
After he gave [1 word redacted] this information, [1 word redacted] took a break to brief [3 words redacted] and verify what Binalshibh had told [1 word redacted]. For the most part he was providing good information, but [3 words redacted] noticed minor discrepancies between what he was saying and evidence recovered by [1 word redacted] investigation. This meant that he was testing [1 word redacted] knowledge and practicing a classic counterinterrogation tactic.
On returning to the cell, [46 words redacted]
[7 words redacted]
[56 words redacted]
[47 words redacted]
[5 words redacted]
[37 words redacted]
[1 word redacted] continued our interrogation, and [1 word redacted] stepped out regularly and checked with [3 words redacted] to be sure that what Binalshibh was telling [1 word redacted] squared with what [1 word redacted] already knew. Not only were they able to tell [1 word redacted] whether or not he was telling the truth, but they were able to cite, without notes, evidence supporting their points, from faxes, timelines, and other information [1 word redacted] had. [1 word redacted] is a lawyer by training—he left law to follow his dream of being an FBI agent—and his training was evident. He paid close attention to detail. [1 word redacted] had similar skills, and [1 word redacted] was impressed with how the two of them could instantly catch Binalshibh in lies.
After forty-five minutes, the CIA officials told [1 word redacted] that our time was up, and they took Binalshibh away. [3 words redacted] called headquarters and reported the breakthrough [1 word redacted]’d had, and headquarters requested that [1 word redacted] write up the interview. As [3 words redacted] worked on that, [1 word redacted] prepared for the interrogation with the second HVT, [1 word redacted].
[1 word redacted] was naked when he was brought into the interrogation room, but he swaggered, with his chin held high; you might have thought he was dressed like a king and ruled the place. As an [1 word redacted] guard chained him to the wall, he sneered at [1 word redacted], spat on the floor to show his disgust, and uttered a series of insults.
[1 word redacted] ignored him, took off his chains, handed him a towel to cover himself, and sat down on the floor next to him. He looked away. [78 words redacted]
[41 words redacted]
[66 words redacted]
[26 words redacted]
[69 words redacted]
[62 words redacted]
[17 words redacted]
[27 words redacted]
[34 words redacted]
[62 words redacted]
[21 words redacted] knew that he had figured out who the person in the story was.
[13 words redacted]
[58 words redacted]
[52 words redacted]
[2 words redacted] had been in jail in Yemen since the [2 words redacted] incident. Even after the other al-Qaeda members arrested for the car thefts were freed, he had been held as a bargaining chip because of the family’s importance to bin Laden. [1 word redacted] hadn’t seen [2 words redacted] in many years.
[82 words redacted]
[56 words redacted]
[26 words redacted]
[52 words redacted]
[57 words redacted]
[109 words redacted]
[25 words redacted]
[27 words redacted]
[48 words redacted]
[8 words redacted]
[36 words redacted]
[5 words redacted]
[57 words redacted]
[1 word redacted] time with [1 word redacted] was up, and the [1 word redacted] guards took him away.
[1 word redacted] told [3 words redacted] what [1 word redacted] had told [1 word redacted], and [1 word redacted] wrote up the information and disseminated it through CIA channels. [1 word redacted] also called FBI headquarters on a secure phone and let them know what had happened.
“That’s the exact definition of actionable intelligence,” said Pat D’Amuro, [1 word redacted] boss. “If we act on it now, we should be able to stop the plot. And given your clear, undeniable success, they should give you more access to him and change their minds about rendition. I’m going to make sure everyone here is told the good news. Great work.”
[1 word redacted] were in a jubilant mood: [1 word redacted] had gained actionable intelligence with each of the high-value targets, demonstrating that there was no need to fly them to foreign countries to be tortured. [1 word redacted] waited in the office for instructions on how to proceed, with little doubt in [1 word redacted] mind [1 word redacted]’d be given access to the two of them again shortly.
About an hour after he spoke to headquarters, the CIA deputy chief of station stormed into our office. “Who the hell told the FBI HQ that these guys are cooperating?” he yelled at [1 word redacted].
“We did,” [1 word redacted] told him, “or, rather, we reported the facts of what happened in the interrogations. And there is clear, actionable intelligence. They cooperated, there’s plenty of evidence of that.”
“Don’t you understand that nobody can stop these guys from being sent to ———?” He mentioned the names of the still-classified countries.
“That doesn’t make sense. We got clear, actionable intelligence. There is no need to send them elsewhere. You’re making a big mistake by doing that.”
“This is bigger than you,” he yelled. “This is an order coming from the White House. There is nothing you or the FBI can do. You can’t stop this rendition.” He almost spat out those words, acting as if he viewed [1 word redacted] with complete disgust, and stormed back out.
[1 word redacted] reported the conversation to FBI headquarters, including the “this is bigger than you” line, which indicated that decisions had been made at the very top of the U.S. government.
First [1 word redacted] were told to stay put, as senior FBI officials tried to negotiate with the CIA and the White House to see if they’d at least agree to delay the rendition so [1 word redacted] could talk to both detainees a bit longer. [1 word redacted] were told about ongoing plots—ticking time bombs—and they were prepared to tell [1 word redacted] mo
re. Information from them could lead [1 word redacted] to bin Laden. [1 word redacted] had established rapport with the detainees; it made no sense not to give [1 word redacted] access, at least for another couple of hours. Headquarters warned the White House that how they dealt with Binalshibh, especially now, would affect whether [1 word redacted]’d be able to prosecute him down the line.
The message came back: the decision had been made to fly them to the designated countries. They could have told [1 word redacted] bin Laden’s whereabouts and still been deemed uncooperative.
A few hours later [1 word redacted] received a phone call from headquarters. A frustrated Pat said that [1 word redacted] had lost the battle, and that the decision had been made exactly as the CIA deputy chief of base had told [1 word redacted]: they were denying that Binalshubh and [1 word redacted] had cooperated with [1 word redacted], and said [1 word redacted] were told lies.
[29 words redacted]
“The [1 word redacted] decision was made before you got to them,” a colleague later told [1 word redacted]. “The only reason they let you in for forty-five minutes was to cover their ass down the road. They didn’t expect you to have any success in so little time, so they thought they’d give you access, and then, when asked, they’d say they had tried everything, even giving one of the FBI’s top interrogators access, but the terrorists were not cooperating. But you messed up their plans, so they had to deny that you got intelligence.”
[1 word redacted] don’t believe this theory, and [1 word redacted] believe that Samantha, who had enabled [1 word redacted] to conduct the interrogations, was a good CIA officer. When [1 word redacted] worked at different locations, [1 word redacted] came across some top CIA officials who were professional and talented and did the right thing. [1 word redacted] believe Samantha fit into this category, and that she tried to do the right thing but ultimately failed because the steamroller was more powerful than anyone in the field.
Headquarters instructed [3 words redacted] to [1 word redacted] Binalshibh [2 words redacted] to see if they could get access to him again. [3 words redacted] were told to return to Yemen to work with the fusion cell on disrupting the plot that [1 word redacted] had told [1 word redacted] about. The problem for us was that, after 9/11, the CIA had control of operations the FBI conducted overseas. According to Langley, the threat of an oil tanker explosion didn’t exist: in their eyes, [1 word redacted] had told lies.
25
* * *
The Crystal Ball Memo
October 6, 2002. “Hello?” I said, answering the phone in my hotel room in Sanaa.
“Switch on your TV.” Col. Scott Duke, the marine in charge of the fusion cell in Yemen, was on the other end of the line. His voice was raised, and I could hear anger and emotion in his tone.
“What’s wrong?”
“They did it,” he replied. “An oil tanker is on fire off the coast of al-Mukalla. We could have stopped it if only they’d listened to us. If only they had listened to us . . .” I switched on the television and watched smoke billowing from an oil tanker at sea. Below the shot was a caption: “Breaking News: Explosion on Oil Tanker off the Coast of Yemen.”
We ended the call and I switched off the television and stared out the window for a few minutes. There is no way to describe the feeling of knowing you could have stopped a terrorist attack if only your government had supported you. It was that terrible feeling again.
Hours later my phone rang. This time it was Andy Arena, the senior FBI official who had refused to link Saddam Hussein and al-Qaeda. “Ali,” he said with panic in his voice, “I need to confirm something. How widely did [1 word redacted] distribute [1 word redacted] memo warning of an attack off the coast of Yemen?”
“It was distributed across all U.S. government agencies through the DoD channels,” I replied.
“I just got off the phone with Pat D’Amuro,” Andy said. “He’s sickened that the attack went ahead exactly as [1 word redacted] had predicted in the memo, right down to an oil tanker off the coast of al-Mukalla—sickened that the warning wasn’t listened to. He wanted to confirm that the memo had been widely distributed.”
The memo had been put together with the help of the joint military and fusion cell. In a meeting with representatives from all U.S. agencies in Yemen, as well as the U.S. ambassador, Edmund Hull, Colonel Duke had asked for permission to intervene to stop the plot. The CIA [3 words redacted] had opposed [1 word redacted] analysis.
One crew member was killed in the October 6 attack on the Limburg, a 332 x 58-meter oil tanker flying under a French flag off the coast of al-Mukalla. Twelve others were injured, and some 90,000 barrels of oil leaked into the Gulf of Aden.
After the phone calls with Duke and Andy, I went with Bob to the U.S. Embassy for a meeting in Ambassador Hull’s office. Members of the fusion cell, State Department officials, and the CIA [1 word redacted] were gathered. I noticed that the [1 word redacted] looked agitated as I walked into the meeting with Stephen Gaudin, who at the time served as a permanent detailee to the fusion cell.
“I just returned from a meeting with Yemeni officials,” the ambassador said, “and they told us that they believe the attack was an accident and not a terrorist attack.” We were told that at the moment we had to go along with the Yemenis’ verdict on the issue, and we were not to write reports saying it was a terrorist attack.
“On what basis are they saying that it’s an accident?” Stephen asked.
“They looked into it. That’s their position.”
Stephen and I left the meeting with Colonel Duke, who muttered, “Accident my ass” on the way out.
“Like they said the USS Cole was an accident?” I replied.
“This cover-up won’t work,” Duke said.
“The truth will come out soon. The direction of the explosions, residue, witnesses—exactly like the Cole. You can’t hide for long the fact that it was a terrorist attack,” I said.
For three days the official position was that it was not a terrorist attack. We could not call it one, nor could we refer to the memo [1 word redacted] had written before the attack, predicting it.
But on the third day a team from the Naval Criminal Investigative Service began testing the boat and found residue of TNT and other explosives. After an examination of the blast area, it was clear that the tanker had been attacked, and NCIS reported it up their chain of command. The director of the FBI assigned an FBI bomb team to investigate as well.
We investigated the attack with the Yemenis and found that what had happened conformed precisely to the information [1 word redacted] had given [1 word redacted]: two al-Qaeda suicide bombers, one of them [2 words redacted], whom [1 word redacted] had mentioned to [1 word redacted] by name, pulled up alongside the Limburg and detonated the explosives in their dinghy.
The memo [1 word redacted] had written became known in government circles as the “crystal ball memo,” because it was so utterly and unanswerably accurate.
The joint military-FBI fusion cell had worked out that there were two separate cells operating in Yemen: one sent by Nashiri specifically to attack the Limburg; and a local group, run by Abu Ali al-Harithi, the post-9/11 bin Laden appointee to Yemen. Harithi’s cell included Furqan al-Tajiki. Prevented from breaking up the Limburg cell, we had begun to focus on tracking the other operatives.
We learned that the local al-Qaeda cell had come up with a plan to target foreign embassies in Sanaa and planned to hit the U.S., British, German, French, and Cuban embassies. The Cuban Embassy was a target because of the detention of operatives at Guantánamo Bay. Apparently the al-Qaeda leadership wasn’t aware that the facility is owned and operated by the United States and has nothing to do with the Cuban government.
The local cell’s attack was to take place on August 13, 2002. Having cased the embassies, operatives had decided to hit the British and German with car bombs; the French and Cubans with explosives left nearby; and the U.S. with a missile, as it was deemed too well protected to
be attacked with car bombs or bags of explosives. Three days before the operation, explosives expert Salman al-Taezi was adding to the missile’s capacity and asked Walid Ashibi, the chief operative for the Yemen cells, to hold it while he did some rewiring. Ashibi trudged across the carpeted room. As soon as he touched the missile, the static energy that had accumulated from his traverse of the carpet caused the missile to light, and it shot right through Taezi, killing him instantly. The ignition also sent a huge shock though Ashibi, and he ran out of the apartment screaming and collapsed in the hallway. He died moments later.
Furqan and his brother, another operative, had both been resting next door. When they heard the explosion, they ran barefoot out of the building and down the street, screaming hysterically. That was the end of the planned al-Qaeda attack on the embassies.
But Furqan and the other members of the cell were still operational in Yemen.
We worked closely with our friends Colonel Yassir and Major Mahmoud, the two Yemeni PSO officials, to track down the local cell. Furqan often hid in the home of Abu Saif, Nibras’s uncle. The Yemenis raided the home of Abu Saif, who was killed in a gun battle resisting arrest. In his house was evidence related to al-Qaeda and the local cell. We also found the suicide will that Nibras had left.
After the static energy fiasco, Furqan and his brother Abu Bakr (another local operative) had visited Abu al-Shahid al-Sanani, one of the Limburg operatives, and had told him that Harithi wanted to hit a helicopter belonging to an oil company. This was not an operation approved by Nashiri, but since the request had come from Harithi, Sanani gave Furqan help, in the form of cash, an operative for casing, and someone to train the group in weapons. Furqan rented a house in Sanaa and stocked up on weapons and ammunition, including a missile launcher. The plan was that Furqan would fire a missile at the helicopter, and another operative would shoot at it with an AK-47. Other operatives were assigned to drive the two getaway cars and videotape the operation.
The Black Banners Page 53
