“I’m waiting for someone to pick me up from [2 words redacted].” (I didn’t mention which [1 word redacted].) They conferred with each other in Albanian, took another look at me, and walked off. For the next ten minutes I stood there, waiting, my only companion a stray dog that had wandered over to stare at me.
Then, seemingly from nowhere, I spotted two 4x4 vehicles speeding down the runway, heading toward me. The vehicles came to an abrupt stop right next to me, and a door was flung open. Several men were inside each 4x4. From the vehicle closest to me, an American voice shouted, “Jump in.”
I wasn’t just going to jump into any car in Albania, so I looked in and asked, “Who are you?”
I noticed that the 4x4s were American-made, typically the kind the U.S. government uses; and the men inside looked like Americans. “We’re the people you’re waiting for,” one of the men replied, “and if you’re Ali Soufan, we’re here to pick you up.”
“That works for me,” I said, and climbed in.
“Do I need to do anything about Customs?” I asked as the car started moving.
“Not here,” the man replied with a grin. “Welcome to Albania.”
“The entire area is pretty much a ghost town,” a CIA colleague told me, as he drove me through the part of Tirana where diplomatic missions used to be based. “Entire compounds have been evacuated. No one wants to be here now,” he continued. “But then again, it’s not like people would want to be here anyway.”
“So, how bad is it?” I asked.
“Not as bad as it was then, of course,” he said, referring to the early 1990s and the Balkan war, “but you still have remnants of groups up to no good, and the Iranians are doing their part to keep this area unstable. For ten dollars you can easily buy a used AK-47.”
“From what I’ve heard, there’s also a problem with Russian and criminal gangs?”
“The Russian mafia is especially influential, and other criminal gangs are trying to take advantage of the lawlessness here.”
The U.S. Embassy in Albania was closed following the uncovering of a plot by EIJ to bomb the building, and all nonessential personnel had been sent back to the United States. The embassy was deserted except for the U.S. ambassador, security personnel, and a few other officials. The CIA [1 word redacted] had moved to a remote covert location. We checked in with them, and the chief [3 words redacted] briefed me on the operations the organization was running and the missions they needed my support on.
“Who else is here besides you working on this?” I asked.
“There’s only a few of us [2 words redacted] here, so we’re spread pretty thin. We get others in to help, but they’re in for short stints, so we lack the continuity I would ideally want.”
At a local hotel, all of us had rooms on the same floor, and I went upstairs around midnight, exhausted from traveling. I fell asleep as soon as my head hit the pillow. At around 3:00 AM I was awakened by gunfire. I recognized the sound of AK-47s being fired and rolled off the bed, grabbing my gun from my bedside table. I crouched on the floor, trying to get a sense of where the gunfire was coming from.
I opened my door and went into the corridor. Other U.S. personnel had already gathered. “What’s going on?” I asked no one in particular.
“Don’t worry,” an officer told me. From his tone I guessed that he had been in the country for a while. “The presidential palace is not far from here, and often at night stray dogs run in packs on the grounds there. The guards fire rounds from their machine guns to scare the dogs off. Go get some sleep.”
I spent the next few weeks working with the [1 word redacted] CIA officers on identifying terrorists, gathering intelligence, and disrupting threats. The [1 word redacted] and his men treated me like one of their team, and we developed a good relationship. It helped that we were a small group, which encourages closeness. Operating under a threat also brings people together. We knew Iranian agents were monitoring us, as were al- Qaeda and EIJ members—all of whom had reason not to want us in the country. We always had to be vigilant and rely on each other for backup.
Sometimes the best of precautions were frustrated by the fact that we were in Albania, which was very backward in those years. One evening I went out to eat with two CIA officers, both temporarily assigned [4 words redacted]. When we returned to our car, it wouldn’t start. The battery had died.
It was late, the electricity had been cut off, and the neighborhood was deserted—we had been the only patrons in the restaurant. We had no choice but to push the car to try to restart it. One guy sat behind the wheel, and the other guy and I pushed the car.
“Ahh,” the guy with me yelled, and then I didn’t see him anymore.
I shouted his name and heard a muffled response: “I’m down here.” He had fallen into an uncovered manhole in the road. Realizing it was nothing serious, we started laughing, and helped him out of the hole. We could not stop laughing. Finally we were able to restart the car, and hours later we got back to the hotel, exhausted and covered in dirt but happy to have arrived safely.
[141 words redacted]
As a result, the prosecutors declined to bring cases against a few of the EIJ operatives, including Hani al- Sibai. As of this writing, Sibai is still living freely as a political refugee in London, where he runs an Islamic organization. The Egyptians, however, using the evidence we collected, convicted him in absentia of being a member of EIJ’s
There were also several EIJ members who were able to escape from the country and thereby from the investigation into the East African embassy bombings. For instance, we discovered that an operative who used the alias Abdul Rahman al-Masri and who had connections to Yemen had found his way to Italy, where he was staying with Sibai’s brother-in-law in Turin. Because of the alias, we thought at first that he might be the bomb maker Abu Abdul Rahman al-Muhajir, and that he had helped build the bombs detonated in 1998. We knew that Muhajir used a fake Yemeni passport and was Egyptian.
I traveled to Italy, along with other FBI agents and assistant U.S. attorney Pat Fitzgerald, to determine if Muhajir and Abdul Rahman al-Masri were indeed the same person. We were assisted in Turin by members of the Italian Division of General Investigations and Special Operations, or Divisione Investigazioni Generali e Operazioni Speciali (DIGOS). The team was headed by Giuseppe Petronzi, from the counterterrorism department. The Turin police arrested the individual; however, upon questioning we found that he wasn’t Muhajir but another EIJ operative from Albania (with the same alias). We found weapons and wigs where he was staying, along with correspondence between him and Hani al-Sibai in which Sibai, working from London, had tried to arrange fake passports. While we hadn’t found Muhajir, we had broken up an EIJ plot in Italy.
The challenge in working with the Italians was one of language. Although much later in the process we worked with Massimo De Benedittis, a DIGOS officer who was fluent in English (and whose nickname was “Kaiser”—all Italian officers in the division had what they called “war names”), when we first arrived not a single officer spoke English fluently, and none of us spoke Italian. The FBI representative who spoke Italian, and who would normally have handled the assignment, was out of the country on personal matters. We communicated through an interpreter who spoke Italian and Arabic. She translated from Italian to Arabic, and I then translated from Arabic to English for my colleagues.
During one conversation, in broken English, Petronzi kept referring to “Louis.”
“What do you mean?” I asked.
“Louis, Louis,” he said, pointing at the suspect. The suspect wasn’t named Louis, so I thought perhaps there was someone else involved whom we didn’t know about. If not that, I jokingly speculated, he might be talking about Louis Freeh, the director the FBI.
Eventually, through the translator, I discovered that he wasn’t saying the name Louis but
While we were tracing leads and striving to disrupt possible threats by al-Qaeda, other agents and analysts from I-49 were also tracking terrorists connected to the East African embassy bombings. Their efforts uncovered Nazih Abdul Hamed al-Ruqai’i—the real name of Anas al-Liby, the Libyan al-Qaeda member who had cased the Nairobi embassy with Ali Mohamed. He was found to be residing in Manchester, England.
John O’Neill assembled a team to accompany him to the UK. We were met in London by SO13 detectives, and together we boarded a train to Manchester. There we were met by local police detectives assigned to assist us, and John asked me to brief the team on Liby. “Anas al-Liby is a senior al-Qaeda operative,” I told them. “He’s a
