The Black Banners_ 9_11 and the War Against Al-Qaeda - Ali H. Soufan [178]
We recovered al-Qaeda propaganda material praising Jdey for the attack, but there was no indication that he or any other suspects were on the plane; and all passengers were accounted for. In addition, after a lengthy and thorough investigation, the National Transportation Safety Board ruled that the crash was caused by the first officer’s overuse of rudder controls.
In one of the boxes directed to DocEx, I found a handwritten note. The writing was later identified as Khallad’s; the note was addressed to someone called Mokhtar (who we later learned was KSM). Khallad described some surveillance he had done for the 9/11 plot. [38 words redacted]
Also in the boxes were hundreds of applications and contact sheets filled out by recruits who had just arrived in Afghanistan. On the forms, the new recruits listed their sponsors (those who had recommended them to al-Qaeda), expertise, specialties, and personal data and aliases. Listed with the personal data was the name of the person who should be notified if anything happened to them.
One of the applications was Abu Abdullah al-Muhajir’s. He listed his expertise as carpentry. His alias didn’t mean anything to us until [1 word redacted] interrogated Abu Zubaydah, who informed [1 word redacted] that Abu Abdullah al-Muhajir was actually an American named Jose Padilla.
I also came across a short letter from an operative indicating that he was going on a mission in Yemen. It was signed Furqan al-Tajiki. The alias al-Tajiki usually would indicate that the operative was from Tajikistan. However, I recognized this alias as belonging to one of the al-Qaeda operatives who had been arrested in the Bayt Habra car theft incident. Furqan’s real name was Fawaz al-Rabeiee, and he was a Yemeni national born in Saudi Arabia. “If Furqan did head to Yemen from Afghanistan,” I told Pat, “he most probably reconnected with his old friends from Bayt Habra, and my guess is that they’ll all be planning an operation together.”
On February 11, 2002, the FBI added Furqan’s name, along with those of sixteen others connected to the car thefts, to the Seeking Information list. Those of us involved in the Cole investigation pointed out that several of those terrorists were still locked up in Yemen, so on February 14, six of the names were removed.
The others were considered dangerous threats, and there were indications that a major operation was planned for Yemen, the site of al-Qaeda’s big attack prior to 9/11, the October 12, 2000, bombing of the USS Cole. A fusion team comprised of U.S. officials from many different agencies (except the CIA, which didn’t want to take part) was put together and sent to Yemen, under the leadership of Marine colonel Scott Duke. Stephen Gaudin was the FBI’s permanent representative on the fusion team and he was joined by a Washington field office agent, who was working on other, related investigations. Bob McFadden and I reconnected with General Qamish, the head of Yemeni intelligence, with whom I had developed a good relationship during the Cole investigation. Colonel Yassir and Major Mahmoud, the two Yemeni intelligence officers who had sat in on our interrogation of Abu Jandal, were to work alongside us.
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Black Magic
December 14, 2001. Singapore’s famed domestic intelligence service, the Internal Security Department, better known by its initials, ISD, briefed an American security liaison officer on a plot by the pan-Asian terrorist group Jemaah Islamiah to attack the U.S., Israeli, British, and Australian embassies in Singapore. The ISD was just then thwarting the operation, and the liaison officer told the ISD about the casing and martyrdom videos found in the rubble of Abu Hafs’s home and sifted through during the DocEx investigation. It had been determined that the Singapore sites being cased in the video were locations usually frequented