The Black Banners

now I know you’re at least being honest and respecting me, which is why I’m offering you some tea.”

I spent the next day and a half interviewing Bahlul. His story is very similar to many other Yemeni al-Qaeda members. Their families had lived and worked in Saudi Arabia until they were expelled in the aftermath of the first Gulf War due to Yemen’s support of Saddam Hussein’s invasion of Kuwait. We covered everything from his path to al-Qaeda—he, too, was inspired first by Abdullah Azzam—to specific roles he’d had. At one stage Bahlul had roomed with Mohammed Atta and Ziad Jarrah, two of the 9/11 hijackers. We spent time discussing the video he had produced celebrating the USS Cole bombing, which had led to his appointment as bin Laden’s personal propagandist. We went through the tape, looking at the different scenes, and he outlined where he had taken them from: bin Laden’s speeches, military training exercises at al-Farouq, scenes from Saudi Arabia, and the press conference at which bin Laden and others had expressed solidarity with the Blind Sheikh.

Bahlul’s roles were wide-ranging. He had researched and written speeches for bin Laden, set up the satellite that had allowed bin Laden to listen to the details being reported about the 9/11 attacks, and kept minutes of meetings held by al-Qaeda’s leaders.

When al-Qaeda members confessed their roles and gave us information, often it was because they were repentant, or wanted to pretend they were, in order to lessen their punishment. Bahlul was different in that he was not embarrassed about anything he had done for al-Qaeda, and he confessed with pride. He appeared convinced of my argument that if he truly believed in al-Qaeda’s aims, he shouldn’t lie and deny his involvement.

In a stomach-turning and appallingly cold manner, Bahlul detailed why al-Qaeda considered the World Trade Center a legitimate target. “The World Trade Center was the center of those who control the world economy and the World Bank, those who destroy other countries’ economies and even deny small farmers their lands, and those who prevent Islamic banks and financial institutions from flourishing because they want to control all capital.

“The World Trade Center was the center of globalism, and exemplified the American domination of the world and its people.” Bahlul went on to claim that anyone “who worked in it participated in crimes against politically and economically oppressed people all over the world.”

“But the world economy and market prices are not controlled by the innocent people who worked at the World Trade Center,” I countered.

He wouldn’t even acknowledge the death of innocent people on 9/11: “They were legitimate targets because they paid taxes and so are funding America’s wars against Muslims. We should kill Americans exactly as they kill us, an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth. We should keep killing them until every liter of blood they wasted from us is equaled by the liters of blood we waste from them.” It was his hope, he said, that America would kill him, as his death would anger bin Laden. And if he was killed by Christians and Jews, his reward would be even greater than that of a regular martyr.

Bin Laden was very interested in the effects of the 9/11 attacks. He had instructed Bahlul to conduct research pertaining to what experts were predicting would be the economic results of the attack.

At one point, Bahlul asked me to send the message to President Bush that America should invade Iraq and “finish his father’s unfinished job.” To convince me, he told me that Saddam Hussein was a bloodthirsty individual who killed his own people, and that the Arab world would support an American attack. Like other al-Qaeda members, Bahlul was a firm believer in the hadith that said that the eventual victory of Islam would come after the final battle of Armageddon. According to his belief, the invasion of Iraq would be an important stepping-stone to fulfillment of the prophecy.

We showed Bahlul many photographs of al-Qaeda members, and he identified them. When he saw a picture of Abu Zubaydah, he said that he remembered seeing him in Afghanistan and had heard a lot about him as early as 1990. When he had asked Abu Hafs if Abu Zubaydah was a member of al-Qaeda, Abu Hafs had said no.

Bahlul also provided times and dates for information we had recovered in Afghanistan. When I showed him a video that our analysts believed was filmed after 9/11, he corrected them: “That’s from before the attacks on New York.”

“Why do you say that?”

“Because Abu Hafs is in the film. After the attacks on New York and Washington, everyone else left Kandahar, but Abu Hafs stayed because he had a herniated disc and couldn’t move.”

I worked with the prosecution to prepare for the Bahlul trial, as I was to be the main witness. The only difficulty came from certain people within the CIA, who objected to the prosecution’s use of the phone book that had Bahlul’s fingerprints on it and contained the reference to the 9/11 summit meeting in Malaysia.

“You can’t use that in the trial. The fact that there was a Malaysian meeting is classified,” a CIA representative told one of the prosecutors.

“What do you mean?” the prosecutor asked. “The Malaysian meeting isn’t a secret. It’s in The 9/11 Commission Report.”

“Just because the commission revealed the information doesn’t mean it isn’t still classified.”

“But your former director, George Tenet, also references it in his book.”

“He’s not the director anymore.”

“But it had to be declassified for him to write about it.”

“You can’t use it.”

The prosecutors were shocked by how far the CIA would go to limit any public mention of the Malaysia meeting. There was no mention of it in the trial.

When I testified in Bahlul’s trial, he would nod as I spoke, as if confirming what I had said. At one point, when I told the court that Bahlul had told me that he had produced the video celebrating the Cole bombing, he nodded, as if saying: Yes, I said that to him.

Bahlul was sentenced to life imprisonment in November 2008.

In 2004, I was in a military jail in North Carolina, helping with the interrogation of an uncooperative detainee, when I received an urgent phone call from the director of the FBI: a team of specialized military interrogators in Gitmo reported a confession, from an al-Qaeda member named Tarek Mahmoud el-Sawah, exposing al-Qaeda as the group behind the series of anthrax attacks that had occurred over several weeks shortly after 9/11.

The Pentagon had already briefed Congress on el-Sawah’s confession. Congress asked the director to brief them on the anthrax investigation. A task force of very capable FBI agents, with high-level expertise in science, terrorism, and specialized investigations, was already working diligently on the case. No al-Qaeda links had been found. But due to the briefing to Congress, the director wanted to make sure that the intelligence was reliable, and he asked me to question el-Sawah. Not only had the military interrogators reported that he was the mastermind of al-Qaeda’s anthrax program, they also said he had designed al-Qaeda’s shoe bomb program.

I questioned el-Sawah, who was overweight and happiest when we’d bring him ice cream, and he was open about his al-Qaeda connections. He had fought in the original Afghan jihad and in Bosnia, where he had served as an explosives expert, and he knew senior al-Qaeda leaders from the period. He had decided to visit Afghanistan to see if, under the Taliban, it was a true Islamic state, as he had heard, because if it was, he would bring his family there to live. While there, he had visited old friends, among them Abu Hafs and Saif al-Adel. Abu Hafs had asked him to help train al-Qaeda operatives in explosives. “But you’ve got trainers,” el-Sawah had said.

“At Banshiri,” Abu Hafs replied, “we’re graduating more people to heaven than out of the class.” He explained that they had Yemeni trainers who really didn’t know what they were doing. One blew up an entire class of Chinese Uighurs who had joined al-Qaeda. El-Sawah agreed to help, and he received specialized explosives training, including instruction in building improvised explosive devices (IEDs) and remote detonation devices, from Abu Abdul Rahman al-Muhajir. He went on to receive advanced explosives/electronics training from Abu Tariq al- Tunisi, learning how to make timers for IEDs using Casio watches as remote detonators.

Then, from June 2001, he gave instruction in explosives and wrote a four-hundred-page bomb-making manual. After the United States invaded Afghanistan, el-Sawah fought with al-Qaeda against the United States in the Tora Bora region before being wounded and caught.

When I asked him about al-Qaeda’s anthrax program, he didn’t even understand the question. We were speaking in Arabic, and he didn’t know what the word anthrax was in Arabic. When I questioned him further, trying to work out where the military interrogators had got their information from, I learned that he had told them that once, when he was having lunch in Kandahar with Abu Hafs and Saif al-Adel, the two had asked him if he remembered a mutual friend who had a degree in chemistry and whom they had known in Egypt. El-Sawah said that he remembered the expert, and Saif al-Adel asked if he was still in contact with him; el- Sawah said he wasn’t.