We never expected the detainees to tell us everything we wanted to know. We gained enormous insights from what they shared with us but also learned important information when we caught them in lies. If there was a detail they would go out of their way to protect even after having become enormously cooperative, it must have been something really big, and we took note. The best example is the way the information was put together that eventually led to finding and killing bin Ladin. Here is how that success was achieved.
It was the year 2005. My clearest recollection is of several of us huddled together near the cell of Abu Faraj al-Libbi, who had become the third-highest-ranking member of al-Qa’ida, replacing KSM as the chief of external operations after KSM’s capture. The conversation started in the hallway and quickly moved into a small conference room. Abu Faraj had denied that someone named Abu Ahmed al-Kuwaiti ever had delivered a message directly from Usama bin Ladin appointing him KSM’s replacement as al-Qa’ida’s number three. Furthermore, Abu Faraj adamantly insisted that he had never heard of anyone named Abu Ahmed. As far as he knew, there was no such man. It was an odd claim and stood out because other detainees had confirmed that Abu Ahmed was a protégé of KSM and a trusted assistant to Abu Faraj.
This was not the first time Abu Faraj had been asked about Abu Ahmed. The usually cooperative Abu Faraj had been asked several times in several different ways by various interrogators and debriefers and always gave the same answer. We were asking again, confronting him with what other detainees had said. But he remained adamant.
Abu Faraj’s denial was one of those times when the context of the lie revealed clues to the truth. With each denial CIA interrogators and analysts became more convinced that Abu Faraj was lying: Abu Ahmed was bin Ladin’s trusted courier. Abu Faraj’s protection of the courier’s identity meant that he was so important that if located, he might lead us to the man the CIA had been hunting since 9/11.
The fact that KSM also was lying about this man further underlined his importance. KSM’s lie was different, but it conveyed the same truth. KSM said there was an Abu Ahmed who was his protégé but claimed the man had quit al-Qa’ida in 2002. We suspected that KSM was lying because of what other detainees were telling us. Then KSM screwed up. He tried to warn other detainees secretly not to talk about the courier and in doing so betrayed Abu Ahmed’s importance and revealed the truth.
CIA interrogators and personnel at the black site had discovered the means KSM and the other detainees used to try to communicate secretly but had not shut it down because they wanted to monitor what was being passed between them. For security reasons, I cannot describe the method here, but when KSM used this method to order the other detainees not to talk about Abu Ahmed, it was like he was sending up a flare, marking the spot where the CIA should start the hunt for bin Ladin.
Of course, that was not what the Democratic staffers who prepared Feinstein’s flawed SSCI majority report would have you believe. They want people to think that the lies told by Abu Faraj and KSM provided no clue to the importance of Abu Ahmed, that CIA analysts, targets, debriefers, and interrogators didn’t recognize the importance of those lies.
The truth is that although Abu Ahmed’s name was in old CIA records as a possible bin Ladin associate, there was nothing to make him stand out from the thousands of other bin Ladin associates in that database until detainees in the CIA detention and interrogation program provided the critical tip-off. After that, several astute analysts searched old records, waded through false leads, and found a partial true name for Abu Ahmed.
Some argue from hindsight that the CIA should have been able to recognize the importance of Abu Ahmed among the thousands of others in the database. But that is like a critic of a big-city police department arguing that the importance of a criminal should be recognized because his name was on a list of thousands of known associates who had kissed the hand of some crime boss.
There was a very important detainee by the name of Ammar al-Baluchi who was KSM’s nephew and who helped the 9/11 hijackers get plane reservations, money, and hotel reservations. After enhanced interrogation he was the first to reveal al-Qa’ida’s closely guarded secret about Abu Ahmed carrying messages between bin Ladin in hiding and al-Qa’ida operational leaders in other parts of the Middle East. He said that KSM had told him that Abu Ahmed delivered letters for bin Ladin. When confronted, an otherwise cooperating KSM denied telling Ammar that. When Ammar was asked again, however, he insisted that KSM had told him about the courier and said that KSM was lying when he denied it. Both were questioned many times about this.
I was not involved in Ammar al-Baluchi’s enhanced interrogations, but Bruce was. Ammar already was answering questions when I sat in my first debriefing with him. The rough stuff was over, and we were using standard social influence techniques to get him to participate in debriefings with subject matter experts. He already had fingered Abu Ahmed as the courier by the time I arrived, and my part in his ongoing debriefings was to sit in and help the debriefers elicit his cooperation as he responded to follow-up questions about the courier and requests for other sorts of information.
Another terrorist, Hassan Ghul, provided additional insights that were vital to identifying Abu Ahmed as bin Ladin’s courier. Before enhanced interrogations, Ghul said that Abu Ahmed was one of three people who might have looked after bin Ladin’s needs and possibly passed messages from bin Ladin to the man who took over for KSM as al-Qa’ida’s chief of external operations, Abu Faraj al-Libbi.
After enhanced interrogations, Hassan Ghul told Bruce and others that Abu Ahmed definitely had passed a letter from bin Ladin to Abu Faraj in 2003 appointing him as KSM’s successor and that Abu Ahmed had disappeared from Karachi, Pakistan, in 2002, which was about the same time bin Ladin went into hiding and started communicating only through a courier. The information Ghul provided was more detailed, and he used fewer of what I call weasel words. Whereas before Ghul said things “might” have happened, after EITs he definitively described what had occurred, providing concrete details and the names of the terrorist operatives involved. Like Abu Zubaydah, after EITs he volunteered details beyond what one might have expected if he simply answered the questions as asked.
Then Abu Faraj repeatedly denied knowing Abu Ahmed, and the hunt was on.
After it became known that Abu Ahmed was bin Ladin’s courier, another piece of the puzzle was to identify his true name. Again, detainees subjected to enhanced interrogations helped confirm Abu Ahmed’s true identity.
The CIA had a partial true name for an Abu Ahmed in the database. However, the detainee who had provided the partial name had confused Abu Ahmed with his deceased brother and claimed that the Abu Ahmed he was referring to had died in 2001. Through signals intelligence, a clandestine source, and other detainees, the CIA figured out the detainee was mistaken and Abu Ahmed was probably alive.
The last detainee I interrogated using EITs, Abu Yasir al-Jaza’iri, also filled in an important part of the puzzle. Abu Yasir was the only detainee I interrogated who ever initially denied being who he was. During the neutral probe to assess if he was willing to cooperate without EITs, Abu Yasir acknowledged that that was his name but denied being the Abu Yasir who was of interest to the CIA.
When I entered the interrogation room, Abu Yasir was hooded, standing against the walling wall. In the corner of the room behind my left shoulder was a female debriefer. Although I had prebriefed her before the session, I had not worked an interrogation with her. I think it was her first time in an interrogation in which EITs might be used as opposed to debriefings with cooperative detainees. She was seated behind a large white plastic picnic table that was covered with loose papers. She looked nervous.
In our interrogation planning, we assessed that Abu Yasir’s resistance was likely to be brittle, meaning that he probably would capitulate with minimal pressure and start answering questions. Therefore, we wanted to have the subject matter expert in the room, ready to go when he started talking.
I slid the rolled-up towel along the top of Abu Yasir’s hooded head and around behind his neck the way we always did. I took my time adjusting my grip on the towel, following the same preinterrogation conditioning ritual Bruce and I used to start every interrogation before detainees were moved into debriefing mode.
I slowly took off his hood. He was taller than I was, lean and athletic.
“My friends tell me that you’re denying that you’re Abu Yasir al-Jaza’iri,” I said, tossing the hood on the floor behind me.
“I’m not him,” he said, but just as the final consonant in not left his mouth, I slapped him open-handed and with my fingers spread across his left cheek.
It startled him. Abu Yasir squealed and launched himself upward in a vertical leap and then collapsed on the floor at my feet. I caught him on the way down so that he didn’t hit his head. Simultaneously, the debriefer behind me screamed and fell out of her chair ass backward, knocking over the table and scattering papers all over the interrogation room. For a few minutes it was bedlam as she scrambled around the room like a squirrel caught inside a garage before she got her bearings and scampered to a far corner, distancing herself from the action, breathing hard, clutching the fabric of her pullover to her chest in one hand.
But there wasn’t much action to distance herself from. Abu Yasir was lying on the floor looking at her, his eyes wide, seemingly convinced that something really bad was going to happen because the “note-taking lady,” as he called her later, had screamed, fallen over, and scrambled away.
I helped him up and brushed the dust off his back and shoulders.
“Listen,” I said as I brushed him off. “I’m an old man. It’s disrespectful to lie to me, and you’re scaring the lady. Just look at her. I’m going to give you one more chance to clear up the confusion and then,” I said, adjusting the rolled-up towel for emphasis, “if you don’t, you’re not going to like what happens next.” I pulled him in toward me in an attention grasp.
“But it doesn’t have to be that way,” I said as I gently pushed him back against the walling wall. “So please, let’s not do this. If we do, I’m going to get tired of bouncing you off this wall, and then those other guys you see peeking through the door will come in and…”
“I am Abu Yasir al-Jaza’iri,” he said, breathing hard, speaking rapidly. “I have been lying to you.” It was the shortest application of EITs I had ever been involved in.
In his follow-up interrogations and debriefing he told us that Abu Ahmed had a speech impediment and spoke in a mixture of Arabic and Pashtu that made it sound like he was mixing up the two languages as he spoke. Knowing about this speech pattern helped the CIA assess that he was living in the compound with bin Ladin in Abbottabad, Pakistan.
Other detainees in CIA custody filled in pieces of the puzzle, advancing the CIA’s understanding of Abu Ahmed, and provided insight into bin Ladin’s security practices and information about family members with whom he was likely to be living.
Walid Bin Attash, a one-legged al-Qa’ida operative who was captured in spring 2003, told us that after fleeing Afghanistan, bin Ladin refused to meet face-to-face with anyone, including senior al-Qa’ida members. Detainees told us that bin Ladin stayed inside, seldom relocated, and depended on a small group of locals to do chores, run errands, and carry messages. They said he was protected by a small guard force to avoid attracting attention.
Contrary to what some may believe, KSM was never questioned about bin Ladin’s location while being waterboarded. Waterboarding was restricted to inquiries about impending attacks, not the location of a terrorist still on the run.
When questioned after EITs had been discontinued, KSM speculated that bin Ladin’s youngest wife was probably with him, and a detainee named Sharif al-Masri said another of bin Ladin’s wives had passed a letter intended for her husband to Abu Faraj. The pieces of the puzzle of bin Ladin’s location were coming together.
The CIA describes the information about bin Ladin’s courier obtained from detainees in their custody this way:
Information from detainees in CIA custody on Abu Ahmad’s involvement in delivering messages from Bin Ladin beginning in mid-2002 fundamentally changed our assessment of his potential importance to our hunt for Bin Ladin. That information prompted us to question other detainees on his role and identify and review previous reporting. CIA combined this information with reporting from detainees [redacted] signals intelligence, and reporting from clandestine sources to build a profile of Abu Ahmad’s experiences, family, and characteristics that allowed us to eventually determine his true name and location.
The current CIA leadership now says that it is impossible in hindsight to know if they could have obtained the same information from the detainees who provided it without the use of enhanced interrogation or whether they would have eventually acquired other intelligence that would have allowed them to hunt down and kill bin Ladin. Perhaps they have to say that to placate their political masters on the House and Senate oversight committees.
I am under no such obligation. I spent thousands of hours with those detainees and can say with confidence that in my opinion they never would have given up the information that eventually led to bin Ladin without enhanced measures.
Feinstein and her staffers can spin it any way they want to, but they were not there; I was. They can—and do—claim that the pieces of the puzzle provided by detainees in the CIA detention and interrogation program were not necessary and contributed nothing to finding and killing bin Ladin. But in doing so, they reveal something: they are woefully ignorant about how intelligence actually is collected and analyzed or they are deliberately misleading themselves and the American people.
KSM and Abu Faraj al-Libbi weren’t foot soldiers. They were hardened al-Qa’ida operatives. They were senior al-Qa’ida leaders skilled at resisting if they chose to and highly committed to protecting the secret of bin Ladin’s location. KSM had been exposed to EITs and didn’t capitulate. Abu Faraj al-Libbi was willing to endure them, if necessary, to protect bin Ladin. Expecting the two of them to capitulate and give up bin Ladin because someone built rapport with them would be like expecting one of our great generals, say, General Patton, to give away the secret of D-Day because the Germans were nice to him. I can’t picture it.
It is possible that there is nothing anyone could have done to get KSM and Faraj al-Libbi to admit that Abu Ahmed was bin Ladin’s courier. Fortunately, other detainees who had been exposed to EITs provided the tip-off, and so they didn’t have to. By lying, KSM and Faraj al-Libbi corroborated what those detainees said and highlighted how important Abu Ahmed was. Detainees from the interrogation program put the CIA on the trail to finding and killing bin Ladin. Of this I have no doubt.