al-Qaeda since 1991. Is this how you repay loyalty? Consider the health of my wife.” He stormed out of the office, fuming. Beyond the refusal to give him money, he also resented how Egyptians like Sa’eed al-Masri were running al-Qaeda. “I would have shot him if I had had a gun,” Kherchtou told friends when recounting the conversation. “All the money goes to Egyptians, and the rest of us they treat like second-class citizens.”
While Kherchtou remained on al-Qaeda’s payroll after that incident, continuing to run errands between Khartoum and Nairobi for bin Laden, he began to drift away from the organization. And when bin Laden announced, in 1996, that al-Qaeda was relocating to Afghanistan, Kherchtou didn’t follow him. Instead he sent his family back home to Morocco, telling al-Qaeda’s leaders that he wanted his children to get a decent education, and that there were no suitable schools in Afghanistan. He continued to work in Nairobi, but no longer saw the al-Qaeda leadership regularly and emotionally distanced himself from them.
“Ali, we’ve got a potentially important lead in understanding al-Qaeda,” Debbie Doran told me. It was a few weeks after the East African embassy bombings, and all our efforts were focused on tracking those responsible and deepening our understanding of the organization.
“What’s the lead?” I asked.
Debbie told me that her team had found a letter dated a few days before the bombing, signed by Mzungu, an alias Kherchtou used. They had also found that Kherchtou, like other al-Qaeda members, had been arrested by Kenyan authorities but then released from jail at the request of a Western intelligence agency—and that that intelligence agency had taken him out of the country.
“Was he involved in the bombing?” I asked Debbie.
“We don’t exactly know. He was in Nairobi at the time of the bombing, which makes it interesting. He interacted with the cell members.” After the Kenyans arrested him, the Western intelligence agency intervened— they had been working on using him as a source, and convinced the Kenyans to release him. The FBI nicknamed him Joe the Moroccan, a translation of one of his aliases, Yousef al-Maghrebi.
“They made a deal with Joe,” Debbie continued, “agreeing that they’d have him released so he could travel back to Khartoum. In exchange, he would meet with their intelligence operatives there and report on al-Qaeda’s activities. He agreed to the deal and returned to Khartoum, telling al-Qaeda members that he was released because he had convinced the Kenyans that he was a businessman with no connection to the terrorist plot. Once in Khartoum, he failed to make any contact with the Western intelligence agency.
“That’s where we come in,” Debbie concluded. “We need to go and find out about him, and then see if we can do a better job recruiting him. If he did live with the Nairobi cell members and was with al-Qaeda from the start, he could be an important source.”
I traveled with Debbie to the country whose intelligence agency had been working with Kherchtou, and at first the agency denied knowing anything about him. However, when we presented the evidence we had on their dealings with him, and explained that he could be an important source for us in tracking and prosecuting those responsible for the East African embassy bombings, they admitted that they had been trying to work with him. They agreed to turn over their files to us.
From the files we learned that they had been in contact with him directly after the embassy bombings and had learned about his connections to the al-Qaeda cell in Nairobi. The files contained a good deal of information on Kherchtou—on his background and some of his work for al-Qaeda. In addition, there was valuable personal information that I mentally noted would be useful when interviewing him, such as al-Qaeda’s refusal to give him money for his wife’s Cesarean.
Our next challenge was to work out how we could get hold of him, as Sudan was highly unlikely to agree to an extradition request, and any request we made was likely to tip Kherchtou off that we were looking for him. We discussed trying to apprehend him but ruled it out because it posed too many security risks, and, more importantly, because it reduced the likelihood that he would cooperate with us—which was our primary hope. Instead we contacted Direction de la Surveillance du Territoire (DST), the Moroccan intelligence service, which agreed to help. Moroccan immigration officials sent a message to Kherchtou in Khartoum that there was an issue with the immigration status of his children and that he should return home to resolve it. Thinking that he just had to deal with a routine bureaucratic problem, he flew to Morocco. Upon landing, he was picked up by the intelligence agency, which took him to a safe house in Rabat, the Moroccan capital, where we were waiting.
“Hi, L’Houssaine. How are you?” I asked in Arabic. “Are you comfortable?”
“Yes,” he replied, staring at me with a puzzled expression. I guessed that he was trying to work out who I was, where we were, and what was going on.
“You speak English, right?” I asked.
“A little,” he replied in English.
“Well,” I said, switching to English, “let’s speak in English, but when it’s easier we can speak in Arabic.”
“Okay.”
“Let me introduce myself,” I continued. “My name is Ali Soufan and I’m with the FBI. With me are my colleagues from the U.S. government, led by our boss, John O’Neill. The others here are Jack Cloonan and Pat Fitzgerald.”
He looked at me in surprise. He didn’t think that here in Morocco he’d be in the hands of the United States. The safe house was in a rural area about thirty minutes’ drive from Rabat. The scenery was beautiful, as was the house itself. The food was fresh and of the highest quality, and there was plenty to drink, creating a relaxed atmosphere. None of it made sense to him.
At first we just chatted with Kherchtou about himself, his family, and other harmless topics that he was comfortable talking about. He answered politely but was clearly nervous about being with Americans and suspicious of us. After a half-hour of small talk, I turned to him and said: “Now, look, L’Houssaine. We know all about you and your history with al-Qaeda. It is in your interest to cooperate fully with us. If you do, we in turn will treat you well.” He didn’t say anything. I continued: “Now we know al-Qaeda didn’t treat you like you deserved to be treated.” Kherchtou straightened up and looked directly at me. “You know what I’m referring to, don’t you?” I asked. He shook his head slowly.
“Remember when your wife needed a Cesarean section, and she was forced to beg on the streets of Khartoum for the money? Remember how angry you were when al-Qaeda refused to give you the five hundred dollars needed for that operation? That’s how al-Qaeda treats one of its most loyal members?” He again shook his head, and there was a pained expression on his face.
“That’s not the way you treat anyone who is in need of charity,” I continued. “We both know it’s not the way a good Muslim would treat a neighbor, let alone a devoted colleague. What’s clear to me is that al-Qaeda has no respect for you. It doesn’t care about you or the health of your wife, and you don’t owe them anything.”
A few tears rolled down Kherchtou’s face. “You’re right,” he said, wiping away the tears. There was some anger in his eyes, too. “There was no excuse for that,” he told me, and he began to talk about the outrage he felt at the time. “They couldn’t spare five hundred dollars for my wife after everything I’d done!”
“They broke their covenant to you,” I said, “and they showed you their true nature.”
I stopped speaking, letting what I’d said sink in. We were all silent for about a minute. I then asked, “Would you like some tea?” He nodded. I poured some into a cup for him. He took a sip and placed his cup back on the table.
“Now, L’Houssaine, here’s your choice,” I said. “You can cooperate with us, work with us, and we will treat you well. You see how respectfully we’ve treated you so far; that’s what we’re like. Or you can refuse to cooperate, in which case you’ll spend your life in jail. I know what you’re going to choose. I believe by the time you’ve finished with us you’ll be singing like a canary.”
The conversation was in Arabic, and the Moroccan intelligence agents in the room, who followed every word, couldn’t believe what I had said. They told me afterward that they were shocked that I had spoken to him so directly and had made such a bold prediction. Years after this encounter, a fellow FBI agent, Andre Khoury, was serving in the FBI Legat (the legal attache office within the U.S. Embassy) in Rabat. Local intelligence agents asked him, “Do you know Ali Soufan? Did you hear about the time he told L’Houssaine Kherchtou that he’d end up ‘singing like a canary’?”
Andre laughed when he told me the story a few years later.
John spent time bonding with Moroccan officials to ensure we got their continued cooperation. One evening we went out to dinner with the heads of DST, and John raised his glass and declared: “A long time ago the king of
