and CIA officials.
When the discussion turned to whether I could prove everything I was saying, I told them, “Remember, an FBI agent always keeps his notes.” Locked in a secure safe in the FBI New York office are my handwritten notes of everything that happened with Abu Zubaydah [4 words redacted].
Part 7
SUCCESSES AND FAILURES
23. Guantanamo Bay
“I don’t know what they’ve done,” he replied, “but I’m sure they are good people.”
The Afghani knew nothing about al-Qaeda or 9/11, and even thought “New York” and “Washington” were the names of people. Our first challenge at Guantanamo was to distinguish al-Qaeda and Taliban members from those wrongfully rounded up.
I arrived at Gitmo in early February 2002. The United States had just begun bringing detainees captured in Afghanistan to the U.S. detention facility. Little was known about our new prisoners, and U.S. government agencies had sent their top investigators and interrogators to help the military question and sort them. Among those gathered at the base were Bob McFadden; Ed, the CIA officer with whom I later worked [3 words redacted]; and Andre Khoury and John Anticev.
We had all heard stories of how Northern Alliance fighters would drive in their trucks though Pashtun tribal areas in Afghanistan and offer villagers a ride. Many had never been in a car before and eagerly took the ride. The Northern Alliance fighters, who were mostly Tajiks and hated Pashtuns, would then drive to a nearby U.S. base and tell officials that their passengers were “Taliban/al-Qaeda,” and receive a reward of fifty dollars a head for their efforts.
Other detainees, however, were important figures in the al-Qaeda and Taliban networks. Early on, Andre, Ed, and I interrogated Abdul Aziz al-Matrafi, head of the Afghan offices of al-Wafa, an NGO listed as a terrorist- affiliated entity by the United States. We knew that he was viewed in the Islamic world (and that he viewed himself) as an important person, so we treated him with a great deal of respect in order to make him feel comfortable. We steadily established rapport with him, first discussing non–al-Qaeda-related matters, like his family. When we asked about his children, he started crying and told us that he missed his daughters. We then started prodding him to see if he had had any disagreements with bin Laden.
He soon told us that bin Laden had upset him, and many Saudi clerics, when he had declared that traveling to Afghanistan with one’s family was the Hijra of today, implying that anyone who didn’t make the pilgrimage wasn’t a proper Muslim. It was a clear insult to Matrafi’s backers in Saudi Arabia and to many sympathetic clerics who weren’t taking their families to Afghanistan.
Once Matrafi began listing his disagreements with bin Laden, we convinced him to cooperate with us, which he did, even telling us how his own supposedly humanitarian organization would purchase weapons for jihad. Matrafi was present at several key al-Qaeda meetings, including a lunch with bin Laden, Zawahiri, KSM, and the paraplegic Saudi mullah Khalid al-Harbi, who appeared with bin Laden in the infamous video praising the 9/11 attacks. (Found on November 9, 2001, the video was released by the Department of Defense on December 13.)
Many al-Qaeda sympathizers had traveled to Afghanistan shortly after 9/11, thinking that divine prophecies were being fulfilled and that it was the end of America. They quoted to each other apocalyptic hadith similar to the ones citing the black banners from Khurasan. Harbi is heard on bin Laden’s 9/11 video speaking about mujahideen everywhere flying to Afghanistan as part of a heavenly plan.
Al-Wafa sponsored Harbi’s trip, and he flew to Iran and from there was smuggled across the border into Afghanistan. Bin Laden, who considered Harbi a friend, held a lunch honoring him—the lunch attended by Matrafi. It was then, with KSM apparently videotaping, that bin Laden read his poem celebrating 9/11 and gave credit to Mokhtar, or KSM.
When fighters were picked up in Afghanistan after 9/11, they often had their real passports with them, as they were trying to flee the country; but their names meant little to us, as we primarily knew al-Qaeda members by their aliases. Our first challenge at Gitmo, therefore, was to match real names to aliases.
I looked through photos of detainees. One man of interest appeared to be Moroccan and in his forties, and fit Abu Jandal’s description of Abu Assim al-Maghrebi, who supervised bin Laden’s bodyguards. His name, according to the file, was Abdullah Tabarak, and the notes in the file said that he had been captured, with others, crossing the Afghani border into Pakistan. The whole group claimed that they were in Afghanistan to teach the Quran. Their cover story seemed suspicious. I began looking through the photos of the other group members to see if I recognized any of them as well. Ibrahim al-Qosi, a Sudanese, seemed to match a description I had been given by several al-Qaeda members, including L’Houssaine Kherchtou, Fahd al-Quso, and Abu Jandal, of Abu Khubaib al- Sudani, who had been with bin Laden from the start and served at one point as an accountant for al-Qaeda. He was also Abu Assim al-Maghrebi’s son-in-law.
I asked for copies of the photos of Tabarak and Qosi to be sent to Mike Anticev, John’s brother and a squad mate at I-49 in New York. They would be shown to Junior and L’Houssaine Kherchtou, the former al-Qaeda members who had become U.S. government cooperating witnesses. The message came back a day later from Mike that the witnesses had separately identified the men in the photos as Abu Assim and Abu Khubaib.
When the first detainees were brought to Gitmo, the base was split between two commanders: Maj. Gen. Michael E. Dunlavey, the commander of Joint Task Force 170, responsible for military interrogations; and Brig. Gen. Rick Baccus, the commander of Joint Task Force 160, responsible for running the base and guarding prisoners.
FBI agents at Gitmo operated under the auspices of the Defense Department’s Criminal Investigation Task Force (CITF), headed by Col. Brittain P. Mallow, from the army’s Criminal Investigation Command. (The latter is referred to as CID, an acronym formed from the original name of the unit, the Criminal Investigation Division.) Colonel Mallow’s deputy was Mark Fallon, from NCIS. CITF was charged with investigating the detainees and deciding who should be prosecuted, a separate function from the military interrogators, whose mandate was just to get intelligence.
I took the pictures of Tabarak and Qosi to General Dunlavey. He told me that while other groups of prisoners were violent and regularly fought with guards and caused trouble, Tabarak, Qosi, and the other detainees in their bloc were “model prisoners.” General Dunlavey asked, “What do you recommend doing?”
“First we need to take them out of their comfort zone,” I said, “and show them that we know who they are and that the game is up. We also need to isolate them from their support base. Tabarak is the most senior al- Qaeda guy we have caught since 9/11. He’s higher up than Abu Jandal. He’s important and should be an amazing source of intelligence, if we handle him correctly.”
General Dunlavey escorted Tabarak to the brig, at the time the only facility at Gitmo available to separate valuable detainees from the general population. One problem, however, was that the brig is located on the top of a hill in the middle of the island, and the cells had windows, enabling inmates to see where they were and who was coming and going. We were not allowed to tell detainees that they were being held in Cuba, though eventually they guessed (and later on they knew for certain, from Red Cross visits). We also didn’t want them to see who was coming and going, so the guards covered the windows.
Once Abu Assim was installed in the brig, I went to see him. “Abu Assim, As-Salamu Alaykum.”
“Wa Alaykum as-Salam.”
Speaking in Arabic, I got straight to the point. “I know who you are and I know your importance. The game is up.”
“You’ve got the wrong person,” he replied. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
