team. Wayne Parola was a member of the JTTF and brought a lot of experience. Italian, stocky, with a black beard, he walked the walk, talked the talk, and fit the role of an NYPD detective.
Wayne, Stephen, and the rest of the team staked out the location, and a man who matched the description given to Debbie soon appeared. The agents monitored him, waiting for an opportune moment to grab him. When the moment presented itself, they apprehended and subdued him. A search produced eight hundred-dollar bills. The man had no identification or documents.Unsure how serious his injuries were, the team took him to a hospital to be evaluated by a doctor.
John Anticev led the questioning at the hospital, conducted at the detainee’s bedside. John had been the case agent for Terrorstop, the 1993 New York City landmarks operation, and he was both an experienced interrogator and schooled in radical terrorism, a fact he soon impressed upon the patient-detainee.
“What’s your name?” John asked.
“My name is Khaled Saleem bin Rasheed,” the man replied. Asked where he was from and what he was doing in Nairobi, the man replied that he was from Yemen and that he was looking for business opportunities.
John didn’t challenge his story. Instead he asked him how he had been injured. Rasheed replied that he had been in the Cooperative Bank at the time of the bombing, and that he had been knocked down by the explosion. He had checked himself into the hospital, where he had gotten stitches and where his injuries had been bandaged.
John nodded and jotted down everything he said, in the meantime analyzing his words and studying his moves. He asked Rasheed if he was comfortable and whether he had had a chance to pray. Rasheed said that he had, and John went on to ask him a series of seemingly routine questions about his religious beliefs and his views on the United States, the Taliban, and related matters.
Rasheed settled into his bed and engaged John. He seemed to enjoy the discussion, welcoming the chance to “educate” John on these subjects. John steered the conversation to Abdullah Azzam and noticed that Rasheed gave a slight, seemingly involuntary smile upon hearing the name. It was clear that he was knowledgeable about the theology used as a basis for Islamist radicalism, and he, in turn, was impressed with John’s knowledge.
Rasheed had reached a point at which he was completely at ease. John was relaxed, calm, smiling, and polite. He gave Rasheed the impression that he respected him, and Rasheed clearly appreciated it—he smiled back and happily chatted.
As Rasheed was midway through a sentence, John interrupted him and in a swift movement placed a piece of paper and a pen in front of him, telling him sternly, “Write down the number you called after the bombing.”
Rasheed froze, bewildered by the change in John’s manner and tone. John repeated, “Write down the number!” The certainty with which he gave the command stunned Rasheed, who almost robotically wrote down a phone number. He then put down the pen and stared blankly at John. He was shaking. He had no idea how John knew he had called a number.
In fact, John didn’t know; but his hunch had paid off, and now the FBI team had in custody someone who not only had effectively admitted a role in the bombing but had supplied an important lead.
John asked a follow-up question about the number, but Rasheed wouldn’t say anything else.
As the interrogation was taking place, another team of agents was investigating Rasheed’s cover story. They went to the hospital where he claimed to have been treated following the bombing and to the airport to see if they could find his landing card or any other information. At the hospital, after questioning staff and doctors, they discovered that a janitor had found Rasheed’s belongings stashed on a windowsill above a toilet seat. Among the belongings were truck keys and bullets. They were sent to the FBI forensic team that was analyzing the remains of the truck used for the bombing. The keys were found to match the suicide truck’s locks.
The agents who had gone to the airport found a landing card under the name Khaled Saleem bin Rasheed. Following up on the landing card information took them to a villa in Nairobi that appeared to have been used by the bombers—residue from explosives was found throughout.
At the same time, we traced the telephone number Rasheed had written down to a man in Yemen named Ahmed al-Hada. By monitoring the number, we found that it appeared to be used as the main contact number for al-Qaeda in Yemen, and that calls placed from it went regularly to a satellite phone that U.S. authorities had already been monitoring because it belonged to Osama bin Laden. There were several calls from bin Laden’s satellite phone to the Hada switchboard and from Hada to Nairobi. The al-Qaeda link to the bombing was clear.
On the day of the embassy bombings, a Palestinian al-Qaeda operative named Mohamed Sadeek Odeh was arrested at the airport in Karachi. He had flown in from Kenya, and Pakistani authorities had noticed that the picture on his passport was fraudulent. He was questioned for several days before being rendered, on August 14, to Kenyan authorities and then transported —on the Pakistani prime minister’s plane—to Nairobi. Pat D’Amuro and a team assigned to meet Odeh and his handlers at the Nairobi airport found themselves faced with an unexpected dilemma: the prime minister’s plane didn’t have enough fuel to fly back to Pakistan.
Eventually the fuel tank was filled. A Kenyan official asked pointedly, “But who will pay?”
Pat spotted a CIA plane on the runway. “Bill it to them,” he deadpanned.
The next day, August 15, John Anticev and his team were given access to Odeh. They started off by advising him of his rights, as guided by the bureau and the Department of Justice, and Odeh signed the form, acknowledging that he understood its contents. He went on to admit his involvement in the plot, and he outlined his path to al- Qaeda. He had gone to high school in the Philippines and had become interested in jihad after watching videos and listening to tape recordings of lectures by Abdullah Azzam. In his final year of high school, Odeh needed a thousand dollars, which his father agreed to send him. Upon receiving the money, he asked a cleric whether he should use it to finish his studies or to travel to Afghanistan to join the mujahideen. The cleric told him to head to Afghanistan. There he attended the al-Farouq camp, near Khost, later joining al-Qaeda. He was trained in assassinations and learned how much explosive power was needed to bring down different types of buildings.
Once his training with al-Qaeda was complete, Odeh was sent to Somalia and then Kenya. His first assignment in Kenya was to set up a fishing business, whose proceeds were used to help finance the Nairobi cell. His second assignment was to work with explosives. Odeh explained to the interrogators that in late July 1998, Khalfan Khamis Mohamed, Mustafa Mohamed Fadhil, and other al-Qaeda members had gathered in Dar es Salaam to grind TNT to be used in the bombing. The two of them had met Fahid Mohammed Ally Msalam and Ahmed the German in House 213 in the Ilala district of the city to make final preparations. With the help of operative Ahmed Khalfan Ghailani, they had loaded boxes of TNT, cylinder tanks, batteries, detonators, fertilizer, and sandbags into the back of the truck to be used.
Odeh explained that on August 1, 1998, Saleh had told him that all members of al-Qaeda had to leave Kenya within five days. That same day, Ghailani checked into the Hilltop Hotel in Nairobi, and the following day, Odeh and Harun Fazul met with other al-Qaeda members there. At about the time this meeting was taking place, al-Qaeda members Sheikh Ahmed Salem Swedan and Mustafa Mohamed Fadhil, following instructions, left Nairobi on Pakistan International Airlines Flight 744, bound for Karachi via Dubai; and on August 3, Fahid Mohammed Ally Msalam purchased tickets for himself and Odeh on Pakistan International Airlines Flight 746, scheduled to depart on August 6.
Odeh joined other al-Qaeda members at the Hilltop Hotel, where they remained in touch with the team in Dar es Salaam. On August 5, in preparation for meeting bin Laden in Afghanistan following the next day’s flight to Karachi, Odeh shaved his beard and got new clothing. While accomplishing his shopping errands, he took a walk along Moi Avenue, near the U.S. Embassy. On August 6, Saleh and Ghailani left Nairobi for Karachi on Kenya Airways Flight 310, and Odeh (using a false name) and Msalam departed on Flight 746.
Among other details Odeh shared with the interrogators was the role Harun Fazul played in al-Qaeda, specifically his role in writing reports for the leadership. He wrote in code; if anything fell into the wrong hands, al- Qaeda’s plans would still be safeguarded. Odeh gave the questioners examples: “working” meant “jihad,” “potatoes” meant “hand grenades,” “papers” meant “bad documents,” and “goods” meant “fake documents.”
“Can you give an example of how these words would be used?” Anticev asked.
“If we say, ‘How were the goods from Yemen,’” Odeh replied, “it would mean ‘we need fake documents from Yemen.’” Odeh said that Harun’s reports were faxed to Pakistan and from there taken by courier to al-Qaeda’s leaders.
On August 27 John Anticev flew with Odeh from Kenya to Stewart Air Base, where an FBI team was waiting to collect him and continue questioning him. I was one of the members of that team. I stepped onto the plane and gave John a hug. “Welcome home,” I said. “Great work.” This was an understatement. John and the team in Kenya
