Chapter Eight

The Dead Pool

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One cannot follow the trail of Abu Zubaydah’s life without noticing that it is littered with bodies of dead men. Many of these dead are individuals who could have proved inconvenient for the CIA, which is keen to conceal the role it had played for so many years in nurturing the programs that had produced Mujahedeen fighters—fighters who had first fought the Soviets, but then turned their attention elsewhere. Many of these dead could have also provided information that might have exonerated Abu Zubaydah, or at least clarified the areas where he was or was not culpable. Instead, these men are dead.

The man who was the head trainer at the Khaldan training camp—the same man whom Abu Zubaydah refers to in his diaries as his best friend—Ibn al-Shaykh Al Libi, was captured in Afghanistan in November 2001, not long after the beginning of the US invasion. After being captured, he was interrogated by both the American and Egyptian forces. Al Libi gave false information under torture to Egyptian interrogators. (The CIA now acknowledges this.) Nevertheless, that information was cited by the Bush administration in the months preceding the 2003 invasion of Iraq as evidence of an explicit connection between Saddam Hussein and Al Qaeda. In 2006, the United States transferred Al Libi from where he had been imprisoned in Afghanistan to new quarters in Libya. On May 19, 2009, the Libyan government reported that he had committed suicide by hanging himself in his cell. Human Rights Watch, which had previously sent two representatives to visit Al Libi, called for an investigation into the circumstances of his death. Several news outlets including the New York Times have alleged that Al Libi did not commit suicide, but was in fact murdered.

Three weeks after Al Libi’s death, the US government reported that one of the men who had been with Abu Zubaydah during his capture, Ali Abdullah Ahmed, had died by hanging in his cell in Guantanamo on June 9, 2006. It was—hideously—the beginning of a trend. As of the time of this writing, all sixteen persons who were captured in the house with Abu Zubaydah and put into custody are confirmed dead.

Khalil Al-Deek—the associate of Abu Zubaydah who was captured and released by the Jordanian government for suspected involvement in one of the millennium bomb plots—was confirmed killed in April 2005. None of the details surrounding his death have ever been made public.

Carefully studying Abu Zubaydah’s Guantanamo Bay Detainee Assessment Report (released by WikiLeaks) reveals that virtually all of Abu Zubaydah’s known associates are also dead. The remarkable thing may not be that so many of them are no longer alive, but that Abu Zubaydah, somehow, is. The Guantanamo Bay Detainee Assessment Report is a classified document, but the function for which it exists is to account for why Abu Zubaydah is being held in US custody. According to that document, he is not accused of being a member of Al Qaeda. There is no evidence of such membership. And anyone who could have vouched for his membership has suffered an unnatural death.

Many of the corpses figuratively surrounding Abu Zubaydah are those of men of low birth and no particular status. But a few come from the highest echelons of power. Two of the dead are Saudi princes, and one was a Pakistani air marshal. After his capture, when CIA interrogators felt they were not getting actionable intelligence from Abu Zubaydah, they formulated a plan to get him to talk. They had him flown to a CIA black site in Afghanistan, but told him he was temporally being put into Saudi military custody for questioning by the Kingdom. In reality, he would be questioned by two Arab-American Green Berets disguised as Saudi soldiers. The interrogators believed Abu Zubaydah would be more likely to provide useful information in this scenario. Yet the plan backfired almost entirely.

Instead of being frightened, Abu Zubaydah was relieved and genuinely happy. He told the soldiers he knew three Saudi officials, and knew their cell phone numbers, and if the soldiers only would call them they’d order his release. The soldiers wrote down these numbers turned them over to the CIA. Shockingly, the phone numbers were in fact correct. One belonged to Ahmed bin Salman bin Abdul Aziz, a nephew of the Saudi King Fahd. A prominent man, he spent much of his time in the United States, and owned War Emblem—the horse that won the 2002 Kentucky Derby. Another number belonged to Chief Prince Turki Al-Faisal Bin Abdul Aziz. He was the man who had forged the agreement with Osama bin Laden in 1991 to fund Al Qaeda training inside Sayyaf’s camps. The third number belonged to the Pakistani air marshal Mushaf Ali Mir. He had close ties to Pakistani’s Inter-Service Intelligence (ISI). US intelligence had long suspected that members of ISI had provided Al Qaeda with arms, supplies, and intelligence information.

After these names and numbers had been verified by the CIA, the agency shared that information with Saudi intelligence. Then all three men died.

On July 22, 2002, Prince Salman bin Abdul Aziz died of an apparent heart attack at age forty-three. A week later, Prince Turki Al-Faisal Bin Abdul Aziz was killed in a car crash. Then on February 20, 2003, Air Marshal Mushaf Ali Mir died in a plane crash while flying in clear weather.

How organic these accidents may have been is something not completely known.

And while the revelation of these subjects showed that Abu Zubaydah would disclose useful information under the correct circumstances, the US government seems not to have noticed. For reasons yet to be revealed, they chose to take another approach.