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I worked with the prosecution to prepare for the Bahlul trial, as I was to be the main witness. The only difficulty came from certain people within the CIA, who objected to the prosecution’s use of the phone book that had Bahlul’s fingerprints on it and contained the reference to the 9/11 summit meeting in Malaysia.

“You can’t use that in the trial. The fact that there was a Malaysian meeting is classified,” a CIA representative told one of the prosecutors.

“What do you mean?” the prosecutor asked. “The Malaysian meeting isn’t a secret. It’s in The 9/11 Commission Report.”

“Just because the commission revealed the information doesn’t mean it isn’t still classified.”

“But your former director, George Tenet, also references it in his book.”

“He’s not the director anymore.”

“But it had to be declassified for him to write about it.”

“You can’t use it.”

The prosecutors were shocked by how far the CIA would go to limit any public mention of the Malaysia meeting. There was no mention of it in the trial.

When I testified in Bahlul’s trial, he would nod as I spoke, as if confirming what I had said. At one point, when I told the court that Bahlul had told me that he had produced the video celebrating the Cole bombing, he nodded, as if saying: Yes, I said that to him.

Bahlul was sentenced to life imprisonment in November 2008.

In 2004, I was in a military jail in North Carolina, helping with the interrogation of an uncooperative detainee, when I received an urgent phone call from the director of the FBI: a team of specialized military interrogators in Gitmo reported a confession, from an al-Qaeda member named Tarek Mahmoud el-Sawah, exposing al-Qaeda as the group behind the series of anthrax attacks that had occurred over several weeks shortly after 9/11.

The Pentagon had already briefed Congress on el-Sawah’s confession. Congress asked the director to brief them on the anthrax investigation. A task force of very capable FBI agents, with high-level expertise in science, terrorism, and specialized investigations, was already working diligently on the case. No al-Qaeda links had been found. But due to the briefing to Congress, the director wanted to make sure that the intelligence was reliable, and he asked me to question el-Sawah. Not only had the military interrogators reported that he was the mastermind of al-Qaeda’s anthrax program, they also said he had designed al-Qaeda’s shoe bomb program.

I questioned el-Sawah, who was overweight and happiest when we’d bring him ice cream, and he was open about his al-Qaeda connections. He had fought in the original Afghan jihad and in Bosnia, where he had served as an explosives expert, and he knew senior al-Qaeda leaders from the period. He had decided to visit Afghanistan to see if, under the Taliban, it was a true Islamic state, as he had heard, because if it was, he would bring his family there to live. While there, he had visited old friends, among them Abu Hafs and Saif al-Adel. Abu Hafs had asked him to help train al-Qaeda operatives in explosives. “But you’ve got trainers,” el-Sawah had said.

“At Banshiri,” Abu Hafs replied, “we’re graduating more people to heaven than out of the class.” He explained that they had Yemeni trainers who really didn’t know what they were doing. One blew up an entire class of Chinese Uighurs who had joined al-Qaeda. El-Sawah agreed to help, and he received specialized explosives training, including instruction in building improvised explosive devices (IEDs) and remote detonation devices, from Abu Abdul Rahman al-Muhajir. He went on to receive advanced explosives/electronics training from Abu Tariq al-Tunisi, learning how to make timers for IEDs using Casio watches as remote detonators.

Then, from June 2001, he gave instruction in explosives and wrote a four-hundred-page bomb-making manual. After the United States invaded Afghanistan, el-Sawah fought with al-Qaeda against the United States in the Tora Bora region before being wounded and caught.

When I asked him about