relationship we had built.
He looked slowly through the book, spending a few more seconds than before on each photo. “Sorry, there’s no one else I know.”
“Are you sure?” I asked, eyebrows raised.
“Yes.”
“Well, for friendship’s sake, would you look one more time?”
“Okay, for you I will,” he said with a smile.
He looked at picture after picture, shaking his head after examining each one. As he got about halfway through, I laughed and turned to Bob. “See?”
“What?” Abu Jandal asked somewhat nervously, trying to work out what was going on. He didn’t like being on the outside of a joke.
“I knew you wouldn’t be straight with us,” I told him. “I told Bob you wouldn’t admit to knowing people.”
“What do you mean?” Abu Jandal asked, his voice sounding a bit less confident than usual.
“Come on,” I said, “take this picture.” I pointed to a photo on the page he had been looking at. “Are you claiming you don’t know al-Sharqi?” Sharqi was an al-Qaeda alias for Shehhi, the hijacker who Quso had told us had stayed in Abu Jandal’s guesthouse.
Abu Jandal was silent, with a poker face. “Do you think I don’t know about your relationship with him?” I continued. “Remember Ramadan 1999, when he was sick in your guesthouse? And as his emir you cared for him and gave him soup and nursed him back to health?” Abu Jandal began to blush. “So do you really not know him?” I asked.
“Yes, I do know him,” he admitted sheepishly. After a pause, as if calculating the situation, he added, “Sorry.” We didn’t mention anything about Shehhi being one of the 9/11 hijackers; and Shehhi’s name had not yet been released to the press as a suspected hijacker.
“When I ask you a question, I most probably know the answer,” I told him. “I am just testing you to see if you are cooperating and being honest, as you claim you are. Now, if you don’t want to cooperate, just say so, but please don’t lie to me and waste my time by pretending that you don’t know these people.” Abu Jandal looked down, embarrassed. He had been caught lying, undermining not only his claims of cooperating but, more importantly in his book, of being a religious person—in Islam, as in other religions, lying is a sin. “Look,” I continued, “I thought you were an honest guy. Feeding someone soup is very personal. How do you think I know about it? I know about your relationships with many in this book. I didn’t fly all the way from America to interview you knowing nothing. You don’t know how many of your friends I have in my custody, or who worked for me, and how many have spoken about you. So please let’s not play games, and let’s go through this honestly.”
“Okay, okay,” Abu Jandal said.
“Let’s start at the beginning of the book,” I replied. He went through and identified one al-Qaeda operative after another. We never let on that the only person we knew he knew for certain was Shehhi. He identified, as al- Qaeda members, seven of those who were later identified as 9/11 hijackers, including hijacker leader Mohammed Atta, whom he had met in the bin Laden compound in Kandahar, and whom he identified as Abu Abdul Rahman al- Masri. Abu Jandal said he thought he had met Nawaf al-Hazmi in bin Laden’s main Kabul guesthouse. He also recognized Salem al-Hazmi, whom he had seen on the front lines in Kabul. He went on to recount where he had seen Ahmed al-Ghamdi and Mohand al-Shehri. He gave us all the nationalities and al-Qaeda aliases of the hijackers, something we hadn’t known at the time.
When shown a picture of Khalid al-Mihdhar, Abu Jandal recognized him by the alias Sinan al-Maki. “Now, Sinan,” Abu Jandal told us, “is married to the sister of Abu Jaffar al-Yemeni, who died in 1997. Abu Jaffar was the son of Ahmed al-Hada. Abu Jaffar was a good friend of mine, and he wanted me to marry one of his sisters, but she changed her mind.”
Ahmed al-Hada was the Yemeni whose phone number was used as an al-Qaeda switchboard. “Is Hada a member of al-Qaeda?”
“Yes, and he even fought on the front lines.”
“What did you think of him?”
“Sinan told me that Hada was known to be very cheap, and that his family in Saudi Arabia didn’t approve of him marrying into a lowly Yemeni family.”
We continued the discussion along these lines, still not saying anything to Abu Jandal about the men being 9/11 hijackers. To him they were just people he had met in safe houses and training camps in Afghanistan and Pakistan, no different from the other al-Qaeda operatives he had identified. Abu Jandal was unaware that al-Qaeda was behind 9/11. The terrorists whose pictures we had shown him were also those involved in the USS
But for us, this was the first time we had definite confirmation that seven of the suspected hijackers were in fact al-Qaeda members. We now knew for certain that al-Qaeda was behind 9/11.
After he had finished identifying people, I closed the book and said, “Thank you for looking at this. Let’s switch to other topics.” We started talking about the operatives he had identified who were part of the 1998 East African embassy bombings.
I asked Abu Jandal, “Where does Islam allow suicide bombers? Suicide is forbidden in the Quran.”
“Generally that’s true,” he conceded, “but it’s different in war, which is what we’re in. These are our weapons against the missiles of the other side. And so it’s allowed.”
“What about the women and the children that your suicide bombers kill?” I countered. “Where does the Quran justify killing innocents?”
“Like who?” he asked.
“In the East Africa bombings,” I replied, “women and children were killed, and many of them were Muslims.”
“In war there are casualties,” he countered. “If they were good Muslims then God will accept them as martyrs.”
“Hold on,” I said. “I worked the East African bombing. I remember, for example, that we found the remains of a woman and her baby in a bus in front of the Nairobi embassy. Both were incinerated. The mother’s arms were wrapped around the baby, as if trying to protect it. Tell me, what crime did the baby commit? What’s the justification for killing that baby?”
Abu Jandal had a ready reply: “The baby’s reward will come in heaven. Those deaths were a small sacrifice for the wound the bombing inflicted on our enemy and for the inspiration it gave to hundreds of others to become martyrs. Any innocent Muslims killed will be rewarded for their sacrifice in heaven.” A classic attempt to explain away the murder of innocent bystanders, often given by al-Qaeda’s alleged theologians.
Abu Jandal then quoted bin Laden’s 1998 declaration of jihad and told us, “God chooses a contractor [referring to bin Laden] and high school students to defend his religion and launch jihad against his enemies.” This was the first time Abu Jandal had mentioned bin Laden launching attacks. “High school students” referred to the young age of al-Qaeda fighters.
“So this is why there are attacks like what happened recently in New York and Washington?” I asked, seizing on his comment.
“The reason for such attacks and the reason for your [pointing to us] presence here [pointing to the ground] is America’s foreign policies—your occupation of the Arabian Peninsula, the continuous blockade and attacks on Iraq, and the support of Israel in killing and occupying the land of the Palestinians.” He added, “For every action there is a reaction.”
“So were you guys behind the attacks last week?” I asked.
“I am not aware who did it,” he replied.
“I think you guys did it,” I said. Our voices were rising.
“No, this is just a plan for you to attack Afghanistan. And if you do, the mujahideen will rebel, and operations will happen in America itself.” He paused and then said: “The war has not started yet, but if we can hit more, we will.”
Coincidentally, Bob pointed out a Yemeni newspaper from that day, which had been lying on Mahmoud’s desk, with a headline reporting that two hundred Yemenis had been killed in the World Trade Center. (This figure
