The Black Banners

later turned out to be a mistake.) I read the headline out loud—“Two Hundred Yemenis Die in New York Attack”— and showed Abu Jandal the newspaper.

“God help us,” Abu Jandal said, clearly shocked by the number of Yemenis killed.

“Is this justifiable?” I asked.

“No, it’s a horrible crime,” he replied.

“So what do you say to the families of these Yemenis killed in the World Trade Center on behalf of al- Qaeda?” I asked. “What type of Muslim would do this?”

“Bin Laden didn’t do this,” he countered. He waved his hand as if to dismiss my comment. “The sheikh is not crazy,” he added.

“I know al-Qaeda did this attack.” I was staring hard at him.

“How do you know?” he asked.

“Someone told me.”

“Who told you?”

“You did. You identified the hijackers of the planes as being al-Qaeda members.” As I completed the sentence, I placed on the table the photos of the seven hijackers he had identified, including Mohammed Atta, Khalid al-Mihdhar, and Marwan al-Shehhi. “These are the hijackers,” I said, pointing to them. “They killed the two hundred Yemenis.”

Abu Jandal slouched back in his chair as if he had been punched in the stomach. His face registered complete shock. After looking blankly ahead in disbelief, his head dropped and he rested it between his hands, with his elbows propped on his knees. He was silent.

About a minute later I repeated: “These are the hijackers. These are the men who murdered thousands of innocent people.”

“I don’t know,” he said, shaking his head. “Can I have five minutes, please?”

“Okay,” I said, and signaled to Bob that we should walk out. Yassir walked out with us.

“What just happened? Why did you walk out?” Yassir asked. “You had him.” He didn’t understand why we’d let the moment pass. “Why did you agree to give him five minutes?”

“Let him compose himself,” I said. “He knows he has just identified al-Qaeda as being behind the attacks. It’s a big admission. We need it to sink in to his mind, too. The moment isn’t lost. We’ve got him now.”

We walked back in two minutes later. Abu Jandal still had his head between his hands. “What do you think now?” I asked. He was quiet for a few moments, then looked up and stared directly at me.

“I think the sheikh went crazy. I know these guys. They are all bin Laden’s followers. We used to hang out together.” He shook his head and paused. “I don’t know what to say,” he continued. “This is not what I believe in. I will cooperate fully. What do you need?”

We started off by asking Abu Jandal to tell us everything he knew about the hijackers he had identified. True to his word, he cooperated fully. This was a different person from the Abu Jandal we had first met. He gave us details and valuable information. Among the terrorists he spoke about was Zacarias Moussaoui, who had been arrested on August 16, 2001, by the FBI for suspicious activities related to airplanes. In Abu Jandal’s estimation, Moussaoui was a simpleton.

After discussing the hijackers we turned to members of al-Qaeda’s leadership. Many of the names he supplied were new to us, as was a lot of the organizational structure. The U.S. government’s knowledge of al- Qaeda’s day-to-day operations was dated to when the group was in Sudan.

The 1998 East African embassy bombings had put al-Qaeda on the international terrorism map and had increased the group’s size and funding. This, and the move to Afghanistan, had changed the way it operated. (Neither Junior nor Kherchtou had moved back to Afghanistan with bin Laden.) Abu Jandal filled in the gaps and gave us a more complete picture of the enemy we were now facing.

He outlined the al-Qaeda shura council, and described the personal habits of Abu Mohammed al-Masri, Saif al-Adel, Abu Hafs al-Masri, Abu Hafs al-Mauritani, Sheikh Sa’eed al-Masri, Ayman al- Zawahiri, and Abu Assim al-Maghrebi, whose real name was Abdullah Tabarak. We knew that Abu Hafs al-Mauritani (a Mauritian, as his alias indicated) was the only person in al-Qaeda with religious training; he headed the theology, or fatwa, committee. Sheikh Sa’eed al-Masri, an Egyptian, had taken over the finances and administration of al- Qaeda from Madani al-Tayyib. Abu Assim al-Maghrebi was an old colleague of bin Laden’s who had fought with him against the Soviets and who had gone with him to Sudan; it was after the East African embassy bombings that bin Laden had asked him to head the bodyguard detachment.

Abu Jandal explained how and when the operatives and the leadership held meetings. “Abu Hafs and some of the others would regularly meet with bin Laden. But when they all met, the brothers would joke, ‘Al-Shiba [the old men] are meeting, may God help us.’ Because they knew it meant a big operation was coming.” Abu Jandal grinned at the memory.

“Then there’s the military committee, headed by Abu Hafs al-Masri,” Abu Jandal continued. “He also heads the special operations committee, in which Saif al-Adel is involved, and Saif, too, is a senior member of al-Qaeda. He heads the security committee.”

“Is this Abu Hafs?” I asked, showing a picture.

“Yes.” After Abu Jandal had identified Abu Hafs, he laughed.

“What’s funny?”

“I’m just remembering the story of when, during the battle of Jaji, Abu Hafs killed a Russian soldier, and then called up bin Laden while standing on the soldier and told him, ‘I’ve got a Russian officer under my shoe.’”

When we showed him a picture of Saif al-Adel, Abu Jandal said, “It’s out of date.”

“Why?”

“Well, Saif has a scar under his right eye from when a bullet ricocheted and hit him.”

“Do you like him?”

“Members from the Arabian Peninsula don’t usually like his rough manner,” Abu Jandal replied with a grin.

We showed him a series of pictures and he identified everyone he knew in the movement, though often he knew them only by their aliases. “This is Yaqoub al-Dusari, who assists Abu Hafs in the military committee,” he told us, studying one picture. We knew the person in the photograph as Fazul Abdullah Mohammed, alias Harun Fazul, from the East African embassy bombings.

“What are the other committees?” Bob asked.

“The public relations committee is headed by Abu Hussein al-Masri and Abu Annas al-Yemeni,” he said. (Ayman Zawahiri had taken over the committee sometime after Abu Jandal was put in jail.) “And the finance committee is headed by Sheikh Sa’eed al-Masri, who is director of funds, and al-Fateh al-Masri, emir of salaries. Finally, there is the theology committee, headed by Abu Hafs al-Mauritani. That is the senior leadership.” Abu Hussein al-Masri was a son-in-law of Zawahiri’s; Abu Annas al-Yemeni was Ali al-Bahlul, the operative who had created the al-Qaeda propaganda video following the Cole attack.

Below those people, Abu Jandal explained that there were key operatives like Khallad, whose job was to help and motivate the operatives carrying out the attacks. Khallad didn’t plan, but he was assigned tasks outside Afghanistan, such as distributing money, providing fake passports, giving instructions to operatives from bin Laden, and relaying their replies. Abu Jandal seemed to admire him.

“Although Khallad is young, his influence is very notable,” Abu Jandal told us. Khallad was in his twenties. Abu Jandal’s only criticism of him—and this was echoed by other al-Qaeda members we interrogated—was his neglect of his younger brothers, Omayer and al-Bara, after the death of their elder brother, Muhannad. Abu Jandal told us that at one point he had confronted Khallad because Omayer was living with takfiris. Takfiris’ enemies are the near enemy, the governments of their own countries; they don’t believe in the global enemy that al-Qaeda believes in. While al-Qaeda adopts some takfir ideology, it isn’t overwhelmingly takfiri; and takfiris disliked bin Laden because he took their operatives and distracted them from the near enemy to his global jihad. “You’re not acting like Muhannad would have,” Abu Jandal had lectured Khallad, which had prompted Khallad to set his brother straight.

These stories about al-Qaeda members were useful both in helping us to understand the personalities of the people we were up against and in terms of future interrogations. We could show suspects that we were intimately