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“Yes, we’ve been through that.”

“Okay, so we’ll return to the Cole.”

I asked Quso a series of questions about his having delivered the money to Khallad in Bangkok. I showed him the three pictures I had been given by the [1 word redacted], one of which was of Khalid al-Mihdhar, taken in Malaysia. Quso didn’t identify him as Mihdhar but said he thought he looked like Khallad.

It took a lot of self-control for us to remain calm while questioning Quso. The $36,000 he had delivered to Khallad from Yemen had in all likelihood been used for the 9/11 attack, probably paying for tickets for two of the hijackers, Hazmi and Mihdhar. We had only just learned from the CIA that they knew that the two had been with Khallad in Bangkok, and from there had flown to Los Angeles. Next we showed Quso pictures of al-Qaeda operatives and asked him to identify those he knew. Some of the analysts in Washington were convinced that Quso was in the photos, though Bob and I, who had spent many hours with him, knew it wasn’t the case. Nonetheless, the analysts requested that we get Quso to identify himself. After going over the photos, we dwelled on the individual they thought was Quso. He noticed and told us, “I know what you’re thinking. It’s not me. It looks like me, but it’s not me.” Included were pictures of the men we suspected of being the hijackers, although we didn’t tell him the significance of those photos. Quso identified numerous al-Qaeda members but didn’t recognize any of the suspected hijackers’ photos except one. “That’s Marwan al-Shehhi,” he said. Shehhi had been on United Airlines Flight 175. We suspected that Shehhi was a hijacker, but at this stage we had no proof. Quso helped provide proof by identifying him as an al-Qaeda member.

“Okay,” I said nonchalantly, “how do you know him?”

“I once stayed at the same guesthouse as him in Afghanistan.”

“And?”

“It was during Ramadan, and Shehhi had apparently had some kind of stomach operation to help him lose weight, so really it was dangerous for him to fast, but he decided to fast anyway. As a result he got very sick, and the emir of the guesthouse had to look after him.”

“Anything else happen with him?”

“I remember he had arrived in Afghanistan with a friend whose alias was Abas, but he was killed during a training exercise. Apparently he didn’t realize the gun he was using had real bullets in it, and he shot himself.” Quso laughed to himself.

“And in the guesthouse where you met Shehhi,” I asked, “who was the emir?” Although I of course knew the answer, I wanted him to say the name for the benefit of the PSO officials present.

“Abu Jandal,” he replied.

I asked Quso a couple more questions about other people, because I didn’t want him to know the significance of what he had just told me, and then I suggested to the Yemenis that we all take a break.

From our anonymous source in Afghanistan we knew Abu Jandal’s importance to bin Laden. We also knew that the Yemenis had him in custody. They had refused to give us access to him in the Cole investigation because they had said we had no evidence that he had anything to do with the attack on the destroyer. But now we had Quso linking him to one of the 9/11 hijackers.

“We need to talk to Abu Jandal,” I told one of the Yemeni intelligence officers in the room. “Quickly!”

While we waited for Abu Jandal, we continued questioning Quso and in total spent about four days talking to him, going through all his interactions with other al-Qaeda members. We questioned him during the night and spent the days preparing for the next interview. At one point I collapsed from exhaustion and was taken to the emergency room, but as soon as I was revived I checked myself out and returned to work.

We took breaks from the interrogation to write up the information we had gained and file it with Washington. When we informed headquarters that we had shown Quso the three pictures and that he had misidentified the picture of Mihdhar as being Khallad, they told us that the CIA had just come up with a [1 word redacted]