April 29, 2003. Undercover Pakistani domestic intelligence officers saw the truck they were waiting for pull into the arranged meeting spot. As it came to a standstill, one officer casually strolled over to the driver’s window and peered inside. The officers were posing as arms dealers for a domestic terrorism case they were investigating—Shiite mosques were being blown up in Karachi—and a source had arranged the introduction between them and the men seeking to buy explosives.
One of the undercover officers studied the truck’s occupants and shouted at the driver, “Why were you looking at my sister?”
“What are you talking about?” the driver asked. He laughed and replied, “We’re not looking at your sister.”
In a swift movement, the officer snatched the keys from the ignition. The driver, now agitated, continued to insist that he did not know what the officer was talking about. The man in the passenger seat smiled silently at his friend’s dilemma and then stepped out of the truck, whereupon the undercover officers watching noticed that he had only one leg.
The driver had also stepped out of the truck, and a fistfight ensued between him and the officer. A crowd gathered, and within seconds the driver and the undercover officer were separated and the driver and the passenger subdued. The crowd was made up entirely of undercover officers; the “why are you looking at my sister” routine was a ploy to get the two men out of the truck. It was a good move, as the driver had a perfume spray bottle with cyanide in it, which probably would have been used if he had realized that the encounter was a sting.
The driver and the one-legged passenger were taken to the police station, where they denied any connection to terrorism. They weren’t known to local officers as domestic terrorists or dealers. The driver, however, had in his possession a compact disc with a letter to Osama bin Laden and two images of the World Trade Center, with United Airlines Flight 175 crashing into the south tower. The police suspected an international link, and the case officer went to the FBI’s Most Wanted Terrorists website to see if a picture of either man appeared on it. As only indicted terrorists appeared on the site, the men were not found.
One officer, bluffing, said to the one-legged passenger, “So I see that you’re a very important guy?”
Without blinking, the one-legged Arab replied: “Whatever the Americans are paying you, bin Laden will double.”
The passenger identified himself as Khallad bin Attash, bin Laden’s key operative, and the driver was later identified as Ammar al-Baluchi, alias Ali Abdul Aziz Ali, KSM’s nephew who had assisted the 9/11 hijackers and had himself tried to get a U.S. visa a week before the attack, perhaps to assist as a hijacker.
In one of the men’s pockets was a letter from Saudi Arabian scholars to bin Laden, discussing al-Qaeda’s strategy against the United States. Khallad and Baluchi wanted to buy explosives to attack the U.S. Consulate in Karachi. The two terrorists were handed over to the CIA. Later, defenders of enhanced interrogation techniques claimed that it was through their use on KSM that Baluchi and Khallad were arrested, but this was yet another falsehood propagated: the arrests were by chance, and entirely due to a quick-witted police officer, who told me the story himself when I later visited Pakistan to investigate the case.
Khallad was never given to the FBI for questioning, despite the fact that we knew more about him than anyone else in the U.S. government—from our anonymous source in Afghanistan, from the USS Cole investigation, from his brothers, from the East African embassy bombings case, and from Abu Jandal, Hamdan, Bahlul, and other al-Qaeda operatives we had successfully interrogated. [31 words redacted]
[3 words redacted] with Nashiri, the mastermind of the USS Cole investigation. He had been captured in November 2002, and those of us involved in the USS Cole case, who knew all about him from the years we had spent in Yemen investigating the case and speaking to his operatives, weren’t given access to him. [1 word redacted] KSM, who was arrested in March 2003 and put into the enhanced interrogation program: an FBI colleague who knew more about KSM than anyone else wasn’t given access to him.
When I publicly commented on this years later, Philip Zelikow, executive director of the 9/11 Commission and a Bush administration official, publicly concurred with my assessment. The wrong people were questioning these top al-Qaeda operatives, with disastrous effects.
After Nashiri was arrested and bin Laden placed Khallad in charge of operations in the Arabian Peninsula, and before his arrest, Khallad was in contact with the al-Qaeda cell in Saudi Arabia. He gave them the order, from bin Laden, that operations in Saudi Arabia were approved. Previously, bin Laden had been reluctant to hit his homeland. Two weeks after Khallad’s arrest, on May 12, 2003, residential compounds in Riyadh were attacked, resulting in the death of thirty-five people, including nine Americans. More than 160 people were injured. The bombing was led by Mu’awiya al-Madani and [2 words redacted]. One of the [1 word redacted] al-Qaeda operatives arrested with Binalshibh and [6 words redacted] was involved in planning an attack [3 words redacted]. Those interrogating Khallad had two weeks to get that information from him—a real ticking time bomb scenario. A few months later, on November 8, a suicide truck bomb exploded at another compound in Saudi Arabia, resulting in the death of eighteen people. One hundred and twenty-two people were injured. Khallad most probably knew of the operatives in Saudi Arabia and may even have given them their orders.
The same was true of KSM, who after 9/11 headed al-Qaeda cells around the world. It’s highly unlikely that he didn’t know about cells in London, Madrid, and Bali. But he was put into the EIT program, and on March 11, 2004, al-Qaeda bombs exploded in Madrid’s train system, killing 191 people and injuring around 1,800; on July 7, 2005, al-Qaeda bombed London, killing 52 people and injuring more than 700; and on October 1, 2005, bombs in Bali killed 20 people and injured more than 100. All of these acts were perpetrated by cells that it’s virtually impossible for KSM not to have known about. For example, Mohammad Sidique Khan, the oldest of the four suicide bombers who blew himself up in London, reportedly trained in camps in Pakistan and Afghanistan while KSM was running operations, and with Jemaah Islamiah in Southeast Asia, another part of KSM’s fiefdom.
Approximately five months after KSM was arrested, the JW Marriott in Jakarta was hit, the operation funded by $100,000 KSM had given Hambali after the first Bali bombing as “a sign of congratulations.” Another $30,000 had been given to Hambali for further operations; he gave the money to Azahari Husin and Noordin Top for the bombing. But KSM’s interrogators never got this information.
Those [2 words redacted] in the FBI who had seen what had happened with Abu Zubaydah, Ibn al-Shaykh al-Liby, Qahtani, Ramzi Binalshibh, [1 word redacted], and others now had to sit on the sidelines as even more important al-Qaeda terrorists were put into a program that didn’t work and created faulty intelligence.
On May 14, 2004, I arrived in Yemen at 11:30 PM with Carlos Fernandez. We had come to help the Yemenis prosecute the Cole suspects. Stephen Gaudin and his wife, Casssandra, met us at the airport; they had married earlier that year and I had been unable to attend the wedding, so I was excited to finally meet Cassandra and give my congratulations in person. Steve wasn’t in the mood for well wishes, however. I saw that he was fuming.
“What’s wrong?” I asked.
“Did you see yesterday’s New York Times article?” There was anger in his voice. I hadn’t seen the article; I had been on a plane, I told him. He said that the CIA had publicly taken credit for our successes in getting information from Abu Zubaydah. “They actually connected the success with KSM and Padilla to the special treatment,” he said, making quotation marks in the air with his hands as he said special treatment.
The next day we met the ambassador, Edmund Hull, who said that he was happy we had come and that he hoped my special relationship with General Qamish would influence the Yemenis’ cooperation with the Cole detainees.
On March 19, 2005, the Doha Players theater in Qatar was blown up by a suicide bomber. A British citizen was killed, and fifteen people were injured. The operation was possibly conducted by the same cell we were warned about by one of the Yemenis arrested with Binalshibh and [1 word redacted]. A few hours after the attack, al-Jazeera’s website posted a picture of the bomber: someone we had been searching for since the East African embassy bombings. Two days before the bombing, al-Qaeda in Saudi Arabia had released a recording hinting at an attack. One of the leaders of the Saudi al-Qaeda cell at the time was [12 words redacted].
I walked into Pat D’Amuro’s office and showed him the picture of the bomber and asked, “What the hell are we doing here?” It was a rhetorical question. Pat was aware of all these issues, and he was as angry as I was. He had already announced that he was leaving the FBI and heading to a private consulting firm, headed by the former mayor of New York, Rudy Giuliani. I added, “Aren’t you glad you’re leaving? I wish I could leave, too, but I’ve got too many years left.” To retire from the FBI, you need at least twenty years of service and to be age fifty or over. I had been in the FBI less than ten years.
“Why don’t you come with me?” Pat asked. I thought he was joking, but then he kept asking, and after a series of discussions over several weeks, I accepted. It was one of the hardest decisions I’ve had to make in my life, but I realized that either I’d have a heart attack by the time I was forty or I’d have to leave.
It wasn’t only that we weren’t involved in investigations abroad; it was also clear that some high-level people at the CIA at the time were specifically targeting me—I was told that by more than a few FBI executives and CIA colleagues. Ever since I had been interviewed by the 9/11 Commission, I was a marked man. It didn’t help that I had objected to what later became known as enhanced interrogation techniques.
In a number of instances, the FBI wanted to send me abroad for an investigation, and the CIA tried to bar me from traveling. Pat responded to FBI headquarters, which had delivered the CIA request: “Since when does the FBI let others decide who we send on missions?” The director of the FBI agreed, and I went on the missions.
In June 2003 I assisted in the investigation of a case in the United States where a suspect was in contact with al-Qaeda in Saudi Arabia. I questioned the suspect with another FBI agent, Bob Herrmann. The suspect had a lawyer with him, and when we asked a question, he’d reply: “Don’t speak to me. Speak to my lawyer.”
I ignored him and told him why he was important to our investigation, why he should talk, and that his answers could save lives. He responded to that speech by repeating, “Talk to my lawyer.” To my surprise, the lawyer turned to his client and said: “Now, listen to me. Agent Soufan is saying very important things, and you had better listen to him, because cooperating is in your interest.” We got the information we needed.
Bob and I were nominated for the internal “intelligence award” after that operation ended successfully. When you’re nominated for the award by the FBI director, it’s usually a formality for the director of Central Intelligence to sign it, but apparently it never left the DCI’s desk.
“Before I leave,” I told Pat, as I accepted his offer, “I first have to finish the undercover operation that I’m running.” Some Americans were trying to join al-Qaeda, and, posing as Osama bin Laden’s personal representative in North America, I had infiltrated their group.
On the day I announced my resignation, David Johnston, a reporter from the New York Times, told me that a few days earlier he had talked to the director of the FBI during a gala in New York and asked him: “Where do you see the future of the FBI?” The director had pointed at me and said, “That is the future of the FBI.”
I was touched by his kind words, more valuable to me than any award. I told Johnston with a smile: “Then you only have yourself to blame. If you had told me that two days ago, maybe I would have stayed.”
March 4, 2004. “Do you have any questions?” I asked Tarik Shah, a martial arts expert and musician from the Bronx. Shah was under the impression that I was a personal representative of Osama bin Laden. He had been telling me of his desire to join al-Qaeda and kill infidels, and while outlining his credentials he had boasted that he was a master of hand-to-hand combat and knew how to rip someone’s throat out.
“I’m talking about damage to the inside, so they would drown on their own blood.”
“I can’t make a decision on whether to accept you and your friend into al-Qaeda now,” I told him. “I need to confer with my al-Qaeda superiors first. In the meantime, you should continue your training, and I will be in touch.”
“Shukran,” he said: thank you. I guessed he felt that speaking Arabic would demonstrate his commitment to the cause.
The fact that I was doing the undercover mission was strange: Shah’s case belonged to a different squad, and I was a supervisory special agent—which meant that I was running my own squad and had my own agents to oversee. But the squad handling Shah had asked me to help. They didn’t have anyone else available who knew enough about al-Qaeda or had sufficient training to fool Shah.
I spent weeks preparing for the mission, reviewing the case information, refreshing my knowledge of al-Qaeda and its recruitment process, and practicing what I would say in different scenarios. I started by researching everything known about Shah: his thoughts, ideas, and motivations. Next I determined where he fit into the operation, and then I worked on developing my cover story, down to the smallest details: I would need to answer with confidence and show no hesitation.
Undercover operations don’t allow room for mistakes. If the wannabe terrorists find out who you really are, odds are they’ll kill you. Not only are you a representative of the Western oppressor that they’ve been professing a desire to kill, but you’re now the obstacle between them and their jihad. If you’re lucky, you’ll escape alive, but the operation will have failed, and the chance to catch them incriminating themselves will be lost.
In December 2003 Shah had been arrested by the City of Yonkers police for petty larceny, and during a search of his vehicle the police found phone numbers belonging to Seifullah Chapman—a member of an extremist group in northern Virginia, the Virginia Jihad Network, who was convicted in March 2004 of providing material support to a Pakistani terrorist group—and a second individual, who was known to have trained in foreign terrorist camps. Shah had also made inquiries in mosques and religious stores in New York about joining al-Qaeda—and those questions eventually reached us as well.
On December 16, 2003, we sent an informant whom I will call Saeed (a former convict and Black Panther) to befriend Shah under the guise of seeking bass lessons. Saeed succeeded, and as their friendship grew, Shah enlisted Saeed’s help in finding a location for a martial arts studio where he could “teach the brothers… knives and stars and stuff like that” so that they could carry out terrorist activities. Shah also told Saeed of a network he had of others who also wanted to help al-Qaeda.
In January 2004 Saeed told Shah that he had “important news”: he was in contact with an al-Qaeda recruiter from the Middle East who was interested in someone who could train a small group of fighters in hand-to-hand combat and martial arts. The brother’s name was Ali, he was originally from Canada, and he was in fact bin Laden’s personal representative in North America.
Shah said that he was interested and added that he had a close associate, Rafiq Sabir (also known as “the Doctor”), a Columbia University–trained emergency room doctor, living in Boca Raton, Florida, who would be interested in participating as well. He told Saeed to present himself and Sabir to Ali as a “package”—between the two of them, they could provide al-Qaeda with both martial arts services and medical services.
Saeed said he’d pass on the message and later told Shah that the recruiter was willing to meet Shah alone, and that the meeting would take place in Plattsburgh, in upstate New York, near the Canadian border. He warned Shah that Ali was part of a cell involved in jihad and was very security conscious.
On March 3, 2004, Shah and Saeed took a train from New York’s Penn Station to Plattsburgh, and I met them the following day. Shah tried to impress me by telling me about his training in jujitsu and knife and stick fighting, and he said that he was “blessed” to have studied with a mujahid who had fought in Malaysia in 1969. He also showed me his prayer beads, which he said could be used as a weapon to strangle someone.
I told Shah that his application was promising, as many brothers had been arrested in Afghanistan and were in Guantánamo, and we needed new trainers. Shah then made the case for accepting Sabir as well, who he said was a “very, very, very close friend”; they had known each other for more than twenty years. He said Sabir used to be a student in one of his martial arts classes, and that he had “got the spirit.” I told him I’d check with the brothers in light of his recommendation.
An undercover mission requires emotional and psychological preparation, as you are pretending to be someone you aren’t. You experience competing emotions as you develop a relationship with the targets—they trust you, and you become their “friend.” You see their good side as well as the evil side. At the same time, you are using what they say to lock them in jail. You do it, of course, to protect the public from the death and destruction such people want to inflict.
With Shah, as my cover story was that I was a recruiter for bin Laden, I was reversing the usual scenario and playing this situation as if he had to work to gain my trust. It would have been unusual for bin Laden’s personal representative to need to impress a wannabe al-Qaeda member, and the plan worked. He tried hard to establish his credentials with me, and it was clear that my presence made him nervous, as he felt he was mixing with an important terrorist.
On March 11, Saeed met Shah in his apartment in New York to deliver the message that I wished to meet “Doctor Rafiq” in Florida. On April 1, I met Shah in Orlando, Florida. Shah apologized and said that Sabir had had to leave the country for a family emergency. (He would be back, Shah said, on April 12.) I told Shah that I had spoken to the brothers about him, and that I had vouched for him. In light of his recommending Sabir, it was an acceptable risk for me to meet his friend. As Shah and I drove to a hotel where he was staying, because I wasn’t familiar with the area, I accidentally missed the exit, so I took the next one and backtracked. Shah smiled at me and said, “I know what you’re doing: You’re trying to ensure we aren’t followed.”
“I have to do what’s necessary,” I replied. (The surveillance team later told me that they were worried about what was happening, and were debating whether to intervene but decided to hold off.) We arrived at his hotel and took a walk, and as we passed a little girl who was on her father’s shoulders—she must have been less than two years old—she smiled at Shah and he smiled back. “She likes you,” I said.
“Yes,” he replied with a smile, and then he paused, and his expression turned serious, and he added, “but if needed, I could slit her throat.”
I asked Shah to make a martial arts demonstration video for al-Qaeda and to prepare a syllabus. He said he wanted to train in camps in Afghanistan to learn about “chemical stuff” and how to use “explosives and firearms.” He also said that he had trained many brothers who had gone to Afghanistan, including the individual whose number was found in his car and was known by authorities to have gone there.
Shah said he had wanted to start a martial arts school in New York just for Muslims, but that it wouldn’t be permitted, as it would be viewed as discriminatory. What he planned to do instead was to create a “social club,” because then “I can use the highest level of discrimination.”
Before we parted, we discussed using a code to communicate in the future.
I had series of phone calls and e-mail exchanges with Shah. The members of the squad running the operation wrote the e-mails, as I was busy running my own squad, but they showed me each one before it was sent. The e-mails contained questions about Sabir, and Shah wrote that he was concerned about how “open” the e-mails were and worried about the security risk. I told him not to worry.
Over the period of my undercover work, Shah continued working toward helping al-Qaeda and found possible training centers for al-Qaeda terrorists in the United States, including a warehouse in Long Island, New York. He also traveled to Phoenix, Arizona, to scout for possible recruits there, and came up with a list of people he had met across the country who were sympathetic to the cause.
On March 20, 2005, I called Shah on a cell phone using a Yemeni country code. He answered thinking it was Sabir—now in the Middle East—and was surprised to hear my voice. He didn’t know that I, too, was in the Middle East. I told him I was traveling, and in our agreed-upon code we spoke about the syllabus and the video. The handbook was almost complete, he said, and he was still working on the video. He assured me that he was still interested in our “business” proposal—code for his joining al-Qaeda.
On May 1, 2005, Sabir returned to the United States and stayed at a new apartment Shah had in the Bronx. I told Shah that I would return to the United States and would meet them both, which I did, on May 20, at Shah’s mother’s apartment, also in the Bronx.
With both of them present, Shah again attested to Sabir’s value, and told me that the two of them had been kicked out of a mosque in the Bronx, where Sabir was an assistant imam, after Sabir brought in Shah to teach urban warfare. I said I was “impressed” with what he had told me about Sabir and trusted his recommendation. “Sheikh Osama considers doctors our number-one resource,” I told Sabir. I said that we were ready for him and Shah to join the terrorist group.
I instructed them to continue their preparations. Shah still had not finished making his martial arts video for al-Qaeda to use. I warned him to wear a ski mask while on camera, in case the video “God forbid, falls into somebody’s hands.” I told them that before they were accepted as al-Qaeda members, they needed to pledge bayat to bin Laden. They readily agreed, Shah telling me, “We have been waiting for this for a long time.”
They fell to their knees, took my hands, and repeated after me: “God’s pledge is upon me and so is his covenant to commit myself to the orders of the guardians of the agreement, for the misfortune and for the prosperity. And to be a loyalist to the path of jihad, and to my brothers, until God’s word is exalted. And to be protective of the secrecy of the oath and to the directives of Al-Qaeda.” They embraced me, completing the al-Qaeda initiation process. They had taken the same oath as Mohammed Atta and the other 9/11 hijackers. I was now looking at two members of al-Qaeda.
Leaving the Bronx, I returned to the office, took off the wire I was wearing, and handed in my badge. That was my last day at work. I was leaving the FBI and heading into the private sector. At a farewell party that night, friends and colleagues wished me good luck.
“It’s a big loss for us that you’re leaving,” my close friend and confidant Carlos Fernandez said.
“Well, the oath I took to defend the United States from enemies foreign and domestic doesn’t end with a paycheck,” I told him. “I’ll still be doing my part, just from a different angle.”
That was a Friday. The next day, Shah was arrested. In the interrogation booth, the agent questioning him asked, “Do you know someone called Ali?”
“No, I don’t.”
“You haven’t met someone called Ali a number of times?”
“No.”
“He looks like—” The agent went on to describe me.
“No, I don’t know him,” Shah said.
The agent realized that Shah truly believed I was a member of al-Qaeda and was trying to protect my identity. “Maybe you’ll recognize him if I show you a picture,” the agent said, and showed Shah an official FBI photo of me.
“Oh,” Shah replied, and, realizing the game was up, he confessed to everything.
Shah and most of his group pled guilty, but Sabir didn’t, so two years later, in 2007, I testified in court. That was the first time I had appeared before reporters—there had been many stories in the media full of speculation about who the undercover agent had been, and all of them had gotten it wrong.
We had done everything for the mission by the book, and the defense did little other than ask me to read the transcripts of my exchanges with Shah and Sabir.
Sabir was convicted.