The Black Banners_ 9_11 and the War Against Al-Qaeda - Ali H. Soufan [154]
“We were told by the CIA’s Counterterrorism Center that they shared all their information with the FBI from the source and that nothing was hidden,” a commission member responded.
I paused and, thinking out loud, asked, “Did you check all the regular cables?”
“Yes.”
“Did you check operational traffic?”
“That must be it,” Doug said, smiling broadly. At first only he understood the point I was making, and he received puzzled looks from other staffers. But then he explained it to them.
Operational traffic refers to cables sent during an operation. The officer will list procedures, leaving a record in case something goes wrong or something needs to be referred to. Because these cables are strictly procedural and not related to intelligence, they would not be sent to the FBI. If someone wanted to hide something from the FBI, that’s where he would put it. Because Doug had worked for the CIA, he knew what operational cables were, while other members of the team might not have.
After investigating the episode, the 9/11 Commission found that this intelligence was indeed hidden in operational traffic.
When an FBI colleague from New York, Frank Pellegrino, briefed the commission after me, a staffer commented about investigators being “unable to connect the dots.”
“What dots?” Frank angrily replied. “There are no dots to connect! It was all there, written in front of them.”
Later I was asked by the 9/11 Commission to travel to Washington with Dan Coleman, Debbie Doran, and a few senior FBI officials to deliver a briefing about al-Qaeda to the full commission. The CIA was represented by some analysts, and the meeting was chaired by the executive director of the commission, Philip Zelikow.
Doug MacEachin, the former CIA official who had become a supporter of mine after our meeting in New York, told me beforehand to give the same briefing I had given them, which I did. The CIA analysts then gave a presentation about the structure of al-Qaeda.
“Is that accurate?” a commission team member asked me.
“No, unfortunately, there is a series of errors in what they think is the structure of al-Qaeda.”
“For example?”
“Well, they said that Khalid Sheikh Mohammed runs al-Qaeda’s media committee. This is under the control of Ayman Zawahiri. KSM runs the media office, a cover for their operational planning unit.”
“Can you support your claim?”
“Yes. We found some documents in Afghanistan explaining the structure.”
“What else?”
“Then there’s what they said about Khallad,” I replied. “They said Khallad has never been to the United States. Debbie can tell you that’s false.”
“Yes,” Debbie interjected, “we found that Salah bin Saeed bin Yousef—this is the alias Khallad traveled under—was listed as having traveled to LAX during the millennium.”
“We have Khallad in our custody,” a CIA analyst said, [11 words redacted]
“You may be right, but if he wasn’t there, why is his alias on the flight manifest?”
These are a few of the points we raised, among many others. Some are classified; others I simply cannot recall after all these years. As we walked out of the room at the conclusion of the meeting, one commission staffer came up to us and said: “I have a feeling that between the three of you, you forget more things than they will ever know.”
Years later, on April 23, 2009, Philip Zelikow commented, in a piece on foreignpolicy.com: “I met and interviewed Soufan in the course of my work at the 9/11 Commission, while he was still doing important work at the FBI. . . . My fellow staffers and I considered Soufan to be credible. Indeed, Soufan is fluent in Arabic, and he seemed to us to be one of the more impressive intelligence agents—from any agency—that we encountered in our work.”
Until Debbie, Dan, myself, and