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“What [1 word redacted] picture?” I asked in frustration. “Look, how many pictures are there?”

“As far as the CIA told us, that’s it. There are only [1 word redacted] pictures, but we are still pushing. We’ll let you know.”

Headquarters sent us the [1 word redacted] picture—it was of Khallad, talking in a phone booth. The Malaysian [2 words redacted] had listed, in its [1 word redacted], the phone number assigned to the booth. It was the number that we had explicitly asked the CIA if they had recognized, to which they had replied no. Quso positively identified the man in the [1 word redacted] photo as Khallad.

This [1 word redacted] picture had been in the CIA’s possession when Steve Bongardt and the Cole team had been shown the [1 word redacted] three pictures on June 11, 2001. If it had been shown to the Cole team, Steve and the other agents at the meeting would have identified the man in the picture as Khallad. We knew exactly what Khallad looked like from the Cole investigation. And if we had learned that the CIA had had a picture of Khallad in June 2001, and had been monitoring him, we would have gone straight to headquarters saying that the CIA had lied about not knowing about Khallad, and we would have demanded that they hand over the information.

If that had happened, at a minimum, Khalid al-Mihdhar would not have been allowed to just walk into the United States on July 4, 2001, and Nawaf al-Hazmi, Atta’s deputy, would have been arrested. At a minimum.

What really upset Bob and me now was that it was only Quso’s misidentification of Mihdhar as possibly Khallad that had caused the CIA to share the [1 word redacted] photo. Even now, after 9/11, they weren’t properly sharing information with us. We wondered if there were other photographs from the Malaysia meeting that were still being kept from us.

August 2003. “Watch it, Ali, they seem to want your head,” Kevin Cruise said, walking up to my desk. He’d just finished meeting investigators from the 9/11 Commission.

“What do you mean?” I asked.

“They’re asking a lot of questions about you. It seems our friends at Langley have been talking about you. Just be careful when you see them tomorrow.” It was clear that the CIA officials behind the withholding of information pre-9/11 were nervous about what I would say and were trying to discredit me. It was unfortunate that this was how they were spending their time: rather than addressing mistakes and working out how to ensure that errors weren’t repeated, they wanted to cover it up and fight the FBI instead.

“Thanks, Kevin, will do.”

The National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States was set up in late 2002 by an act of Congress, with the mandate “to prepare a full and complete account of the circumstances surrounding the September 11, 2001, attacks.” When the investigators arrived in New York, they spoke first to senior FBI officials like Kevin Cruise, who was one of two supervisors overseeing the 9/11 investigations. The next day they spoke to field agents.

The first agent they called was me. After introducing themselves and asking some basic background questions, one of the investigators asked me: “So, Agent Soufan, why does the CIA hate you?” I was taken aback by the question, and paused as I debated how to answer it.

“You must be talking to the wrong crowd down there. Hate is a big term,” I replied. “But to answer your question, I think you’d have to ask them.” The commission team started laughing.

“Let’s move on and focus on al-Qaeda,” said one of the investigators, Douglas J. MacEachin, a thirty-year CIA veteran. “Here’s my question: if you want to look at al-Qaeda and understand what happened, where would you start?”

“Nineteen seventy-nine is where I’d start,” I answered.

Doug’s face lit up. “I must tell you,” he said, “I’m very pleased you said that. Everyone else we’ve spoken to answers by starting just before 9/11, or with the East African embassy bombings or the USS Cole. But in my opinion, you are right. Tell me, why 1979?”

I explained to him what I had told John years