That is not to say that they told us everything they knew. But they provided good, actionable intelligence leads of incredible value. Each success seemed to lead to another. Often when a detainee learned that we had picked up one of his former colleagues, he assumed that the other person would be cooperating with us. We leveraged one against the other. We would go to a new arrival and say “KSM has told us all about you,” and provide a nugget from our files. That person, believing there was little left to hide, would provide new details, which we would take back to KSM.
For example, at about the same time that KSM was captured, we nabbed another al-Qa’ida operative by the name of Majid Khan in Pakistan. Khan was a onetime resident of Baltimore, Maryland, and, according to some accounts, had been training in Pakistan to learn how to blow up gas stations, poison water supplies, and even possibly attempt an assassination of Pakistani president Musharraf.
While being debriefed, KSM told us that he had used Majid Khan to deliver fifty thousand dollars to a major AQ operative in Southeast Asia, Riduan Isamuddin, who went by the nom de guerre Hambali.
Our officers confronted Khan with this information and he essentially confirmed KSM’s story, with a slight twist. He said he had passed the money on via a Malaysian man called Zubair, and he even remembered his phone number. Armed with that, we soon had Zubair in custody. His true name is Mohamad Farik Amin. Before long Zubair was cooperating, too, and he provided information that led to the capture of another top Hambali aide, by the name of Bashir bin Lap, who was also known as Lillie.
Lillie in turn provided the information that was used to capture Hambali in Thailand. Second perhaps only to KSM, Hambali was one of the most significant takedowns of al-Qa’ida leaders we were able to conduct. Hambali had worked with KSM in 1995 planning “Operation Bojinka,” a plot intended to simultaneously blow up a dozen airliners flying from Asia to the United States. Although that plot was narrowly thwarted, not all of Hambali’s efforts failed. In 2002 he was the mastermind behind the bombing of a nightclub in Bali in which almost two hundred people were killed.
Hambali was important for many reasons. He was a high-level al-Qa’ida operative but also a leader of the Jemaah Islamiyah terrorist group. At a time when much of the world was alert to the possibility of Arab terrorists, Hambali led a group of Asians who had a better chance of getting close to their targets without detection. We were very worried that if we focused too much on Arab terrorists we would be hammered by an al-Qa’ida affiliate with different ethnicity.
Once we had Hambali in custody, Agency officers went back to KSM and asked him to answer a hypothetical question: “If Hambali were no longer around, who was likely to take his place in Southeast Asia?” KSM said that was an easy one. If Hambali were not around, the slot almost certainly would be filled by Hambali’s brother, Rusman Gunawan, who went by the apt nickname Gun Gun.
Our debriefers chatted with Hambali about his background and family. Without knowing what he was doing, he inadvertently provided information that allowed us to track down his brother in Pakistan and to orchestrate moving Gun Gun into custody at a black site, too.
Gun Gun in turn told us about a seventeen-member Jemaah Islamiyah group, known as the Guraba cell, which was in Karachi preparing for future terrorist attacks. The members of the group were South Asians. At a time when the world was focused on looking for young Arab men, al-Qa’ida tried to change the face of terrorism. Soon the Guraba cell was also rolled up. We believe this group would have been used for a planned second-wave airline attack on the U.S. West Coast similar to the 9/11 attacks.
So if you have followed the tale above, you can clearly see that information we got from detainees, some of whom talked only after being subjected to enhanced interrogation techniques, provided huge dividends. Those critics who say, “These guys would tell you anything to get the harsh treatment to stop” fail to understand that any harsh treatment stopped long before the information was provided. Even more important, no matter what a detainee told us, we would not accept it on blind faith but checked it out in many different ways.
Information from AZ, KSM, and the others led to the capture of a large number of other al-Qa’ida operatives and the probable disruption of many potential plots. Skeptics often ask, “Exactly how many plots did you stop?” When we can’t give them a precise number they assume the number is low. But often when we learned of a particular AQ focus on a potential target, we would get word to the appropriate officials to beef up security at that location, making the area too hot for AQ operatives to function nearby. Can I tell you exactly how many plots were stopped? No. But I am confident that more than ten serious mass-casualty attacks were thwarted because of information received from detainees who had been subjected to enhanced interrogation, and it is much better to stop plots while they are in the planning stage than just before execution.
Just a few weeks after KSM’s capture, Iyman Faris, a Pakistani-American with a hazardous-materials truck-driving license who lived in Ohio, was arrested. KSM told us that he had dispatched Faris to survey suspension bridges, including the Brooklyn Bridge in New York City, with the intent of bringing them down. Given KSM’s training as an engineer and his past record of inventing simple ways to bring down office towers, I was not ready to dismiss his desires as impossible or even improbable.
In tribunal filings at Guantanamo Bay, the U.S. military reported that KSM had admitted playing a role in at least thirty-one terror plots around the world. Some, like the 9/11 attacks, had tragically succeeded. Others, like the December 2001 “shoe bomber” attack, had been narrowly averted. And still others, such as plans to attack the tallest building in Los Angeles, the Sears Tower in Chicago, and the Plaza Bank building in Seattle, had been in the works as a possible second wave following the September 11 atrocity and fortunately never took place. The plots were by no means limited to the U.S. KSM confirmed plans to attack London’s Heathrow Airport and Canary Wharf, NATO’s European headquarters in Belgium, and U.S. embassies and consulates in a variety of locations.
I cannot stress strongly enough that we did not take any of these claims at face value. The planned attacks on Heathrow and Canary Wharf, for example, were things we first heard about from Ramzi bin al-Shibh when the Pakistanis captured him on September 11, 2002. A little over six months later KSM, completely independently, verified what we had been told and provided deep detail about what could have been a devastating attack.
Here is a little-known and little-credited example of how, after he became compliant, KSM provided information that led to the unraveling of some other very dangerous plots.
In 2003 KSM told us that at some point in the late 1990s he had sent an al-Qa’ida operative who used the nom de guerre Issa al-Britani to Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, to “learn about jihad” in Southeast Asia from Hambali. KSM said that a couple of years later, bin Ladin sent al-Britani to the United States to scout out potential economic and what he deemed “Jewish” targets in and around New York City. We took the information very seriously but at the time did not have enough actionable information to immediately track down al-Britani. He certainly became an important target for us.
We passed on KSM’s information, not only to our British counterparts (based on the “al-Britani” nickname) but also to the 9/11 Commission. They included part of his story in their final report, which was published on July 22, 2004. So keep in mind, the commission is repeating reports about terrorists not yet in custody. These reports were furnished to us by KSM after he had been subjected to EITs.
Just three days after the 9/11 Commission report was released, the Pakistanis, working with the CIA, captured two terrorists. One was someone by the name of Ahmed Gailani, who was wanted in connection with the 1998 East African Embassy bombings. In addition to the individuals, we picked up one of their computers, which had on it highly detailed casing reports on economic institutions in New York and Washington, and these reports were signed “Issa al-Britani,” just as KSM had told us.
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br /> We passed on additional information that was picked up in Pakistan to the British and on August 3, 2004, they were able to arrest a British subject by the name of Dhiren Barot. It turned out Barot had a handful of aka’s, including Abu Musa al-Hindi, Abu Issa al-Hindi, and Issa al-Britani.
An Indian-born Muslim convert, Barot had moved to Britain as a small child. As a young man he had worked for an airline in London. During their investigation British police learned that Barot had traveled to Pakistan to undergo training at al-Qa’ida-related camps.
He was the author of a thirty-nine-page memo instructing fellow al-Qa’ida supporters on how to construct devastating explosives using everyday materials that could be obtained in hardware stores or pharmacies.
Just as KSM had told us, Barot had traveled to the U.S. in 2000 and had done extensive surveillance of places like the Prudential Building in New Jersey, the New York Stock Exchange and Citigroup in New York, and the International Monetary Fund headquarters in Washington. British authorities were able to seize more than fifty compact discs with the targeting data he had assembled. CIA officers who reviewed the material were stunned at the sophistication and completeness of the casing he had conducted. It was so professionally done that one officer told me it looked as if it had been conducted by a highly skilled Western intelligence operative.
Peter Clarke, deputy assistant commissioner of the Metropolitan Police Counterterrorism Command, was quoted in the Guardian newspaper as saying: “By his own admission Barot wanted to commit mass murder on both sides of the Atlantic. He was the leader of the plot. If he had succeeded, hundreds if not thousands could have died.”
In addition to the information about plots against financial institutions, Barot’s holdings included information about planning to use limousines packed with explosives in attacks in the U.K. and the U.S. He had studied the work of the Oklahoma City bombers and, given the chance, might have emulated that devastating attack. The materials found with Barot also showed that he had a desire to blow up a London Tube train while it passed under the Thames River. His hope was to cause a rupture to the train tunnel, killing passengers both from the explosion and from drowning. Some observers thought that his plans were fanciful. Eleven months after Barot was captured, on July 7, 2005, al-Qa’ida did strike the London transit system, killing fifty-two people and injuring more than seven hundred. Barot was convicted of conspiracy to commit murder and was sentenced to life imprisonment in 2006. His sentence was later reduced by British courts to thirty years.
Each time we uncovered evidence of a viable al-Qa’ida plot, even if we were confident we had preempted it, it gave us cause for concern. One of the hallmarks of al-Qa’ida is that they always return to failed plots and try, try again.
The most obvious example, of course, was the World Trade Center, which was attacked in 1993 and again in 2001. But there were others. Al-Qa’ida tried to blow up a U.S. Navy guided-missile destroyer, USS The Sullivans, in Aden in January 2000. That attempt went awry but they were back in October of that same year with a tragically successful attack on the USS Cole. So when we learned of potentially disrupted plans to attack buildings in Los Angeles or Chicago, or of a desire to use dirty bombs in New York or Washington, or plans to bring down suspension bridges crossing the Hudson or East rivers, we never had the luxury of thinking, “Well, that threat is over.”
Success after success was being racked up. Often the news of some major al-Qa’ida operative’s being arrested or killed would leak or be announced only hours after the event itself. Quite a few of the people taken down were described as the “number-three” person in al-Qa’ida. This resulted in a good deal of skepticism on the part of outside observers. “How many ‘number threes’ do these guys have?” we’d be asked. In truth, it is often difficult to ascribe an exact pecking order position to people within groups like al-Qa’ida, but in fact we did have enormous success in taking out senior operational leaders.
I understood the frustration expressed by some who wanted to know: “Why are you always getting number three when we’d much rather see you get number one (UBL) and number two (Ayman al-Zawahiri)?” There was a reason, however, why the longevity of number threes was so low. Guys like bin Ladin and Zawahiri were the highest-ranking executives in the worldwide organization known as al-Qa’ida. They set broad strategy but could afford to lie low. By definition, number threes, the COOs of the organization, had to be out there operating. They had to be moving around, using cell phones and radios, maintaining contact with other members and actively trying to foment more plots. As they raised their heads above the foxholes, we picked them off one by one.
I created quite a controversy in May 2011 when, in rare public comments, I told a Time magazine correspondent that information that came from KSM and another senior al-Qa’ida detainee, Abu Faraj al-Libi, eventually led to the location of bin Ladin’s compound and the operation that resulted in UBL’s death. My comment (to use former vice president Cheney’s phrase) caused heads to explode around Washington. People who had a stake in denigrating the impact and effectiveness of the EITs rushed out to counter my statement.
Time quoted National Security Council spokesman Tommy Vietor as saying: “There is no way that information obtained by [EITs] was the decisive intelligence that led us directly to bin Ladin. It took years of collection and analysis from many different sources to develop the case that enabled us to identify this compound and reach a judgment that bin Ladin was likely to be living there.”
With all due respect, Mr. Vietor doesn’t understand how the EIT program worked. I never said that the EITs were the immediate cause, or that they instantly led us to UBL. But without the EITs we might never have started on the long march that eventually allowed CIA analysts to come to the conclusion that UBL was probably holed up in Abbottabad. Here is how that journey began.
An al-Qa’ida operative was captured in 2004. He was quickly turned over to the CIA. He had computer discs with him that showed that he was relaying information between al-Qa’ida and Abu Musab Zarqawi, AQ’s terrorist leader in Iraq who was responsible for a large number of bombings, beheadings, and other attacks. Zarqawi worked hard to provoke sectarian violence between Iraqi Shia and Sunni communities, with the goal of spreading general chaos in that war-ravaged country. So having this operative in our custody was of great interest.
We moved him to a black site and began the effort to find out what other information he might have that we could exploit. Initially, he played the role of a tough mujahideen and refused to cooperate. We then received permission to use some (but not all) of the EIT procedures on him. Before long he became compliant and started to provide some excellent information. As with all the al-Qa’ida operatives, we asked him about the organization’s leadership and how they were continuing to function. He told us that bin Ladin conducted business by using a trusted courier with whom he was in contact only sporadically. He said that the Sheikh (as bin Ladin was referred to by his subordinates) stayed completely away from telephones, radios, or the internet in an effort to frustrate American attempts to find him. And frustrated we were.
We pressed him on who this courier was and he said all he knew was a pseudonym: “Abu Ahmed al-Kuwaiti.” This was a critical bit of information about the identity of the man who would eventually lead us to bin Ladin.
The news was remarkable for a number of reasons. He provided a very promising lead that might provide a path to UBL but he also gave us an insight into the way al-Qa’ida was being run. You can’t effectively run any organization, be it a business or a terrorist group, when the senior management communicates with subordinates only several times a year. We gained the impression that UBL was functioning more like a chairman of the board than a CEO.
Armed with the information from this detainee, as we always did, we tried to verify it by asking other senior detainees about what we had just learned. It is important to keep in mind that the most knowledgeable and hardened AQ leaders never told us everything they knew
. They tried to shield their most important secrets, but nevertheless, once they were compliant, started (sometimes inadvertently) to fill in the blanks. One of our debriefers had asked a senior detainee who had recently become compliant, “What is your biggest fear?” Without hesitation he answered, “I fear that I might accidentally tell you something that leads you to the Sheikh.”
So Agency officers went to KSM and asked him, “What can you tell us about Abu Ahmed al-Kuwaiti?” KSM’s eyes grew wide and he backed up into his cell. He said no words but spoke volumes with his actions. We later asked Abu Faraj al-Libi, one of those famous short-term al-Qa’ida “number threes,” who was captured in May 2005, about the courier. Al-Libi admitted that a courier like the one we described was the person who had informed him that he had been elevated to the status of AQ’s operational leader. That kind of information and assignment isn’t entrusted to a run-of-the-mill runner. We figured a courier empowered to deliver the news that someone had been anointed “number three” had to be well wired with “number one.” Al-Libi vehemently denied, however, that he had ever met a courier named al-Kuwaiti. His denial was so vociferous that it was obvious to us that he was trying to hide something very important.
Now critics will tell you: “See, EITs didn’t work. Otherwise KSM and Abu Faraj al-Libi would have given the CIA the true name of the courier when you asked them about it.” But such critics fail to understand how the program worked. Without EITs, AQ operatives would have had little incentive to tell us anything. With them, they told us much, but not everything we wanted to know. We didn’t twist their arms (literally or figuratively) every time we had a new question. But we watched them and learned much. Sometimes what they didn’t say, and the accompanying body language, gave us critical clues.
By now we were pretty convinced that this mysterious courier by the name of Abu Ahmed al-Kuwaiti could be the key to unlock the mystery we most wanted to solve: Where is bin Ladin?
Hard Measures Page 10
