The Black Banners_ 9_11 and the War Against Al-Qaeda - Ali H. Soufan [240]
The message came back: the decision had been made to fly them to the designated countries. They could have told [1 word redacted] bin Laden’s whereabouts and still been deemed uncooperative.
A few hours later [1 word redacted] received a phone call from headquarters. A frustrated Pat said that [1 word redacted] had lost the battle, and that the decision had been made exactly as the CIA deputy chief of base had told [1 word redacted]: they were denying that Binalshubh and [1 word redacted] had cooperated with [1 word redacted], and said [1 word redacted] were told lies.
[29 words redacted]
“The [1 word redacted] decision was made before you got to them,” a colleague later told [1 word redacted]. “The only reason they let you in for forty-five minutes was to cover their ass down the road. They didn’t expect you to have any success in so little time, so they thought they’d give you access, and then, when asked, they’d say they had tried everything, even giving one of the FBI’s top interrogators access, but the terrorists were not cooperating. But you messed up their plans, so they had to deny that you got intelligence.”
[1 word redacted] don’t believe this theory, and [1 word redacted] believe that Samantha, who had enabled [1 word redacted] to conduct the interrogations, was a good CIA officer. When [1 word redacted] worked at different locations, [1 word redacted] came across some top CIA officials who were professional and talented and did the right thing. [1 word redacted] believe Samantha fit into this category, and that she tried to do the right thing but ultimately failed because the steamroller was more powerful than anyone in the field.
Headquarters instructed [3 words redacted] to [1 word redacted] Binalshibh [2 words redacted] to see if they could get access to him again. [3 words redacted] were told to return to Yemen to work with the fusion cell on disrupting the plot that [1 word redacted] had told [1 word redacted] about. The problem for us was that, after 9/11, the CIA had control of operations the FBI conducted overseas. According to Langley, the threat of an oil tanker explosion didn’t exist: in their eyes, [1 word redacted] had told lies.
25
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The Crystal Ball Memo
October 6, 2002. “Hello?” I said, answering the phone in my hotel room in Sanaa.
“Switch on your TV.” Col. Scott Duke, the marine in charge of the fusion cell in Yemen, was on the other end of the line. His voice was raised, and I could hear anger and emotion in his tone.
“What’s wrong?”
“They did it,” he replied. “An oil tanker is on fire off the coast of al-Mukalla. We could have stopped it if only they’d listened to us. If only they had listened to us . . .” I switched on the television and watched smoke billowing from an oil tanker at sea. Below the shot was a caption: “Breaking News: Explosion on Oil Tanker off the Coast of Yemen.”
We ended the call and I switched off the television and stared out the window for a few minutes. There is no way to describe the feeling of knowing you could have stopped a terrorist attack if only your government had supported you. It was that terrible feeling again.
Hours later my phone rang. This time it was Andy Arena, the senior FBI official who had refused to link Saddam Hussein and al-Qaeda. “Ali,” he said with panic in his voice, “I need to confirm something. How widely did [1 word redacted] distribute [1 word redacted] memo warning of an attack off the coast of Yemen?”
“It was distributed across all U.S. government agencies through the DoD channels,” I replied.
“I just got off the phone with Pat D’Amuro,” Andy said. “He’s sickened that the attack went ahead exactly as [1 word redacted] had predicted in the memo, right down to an oil tanker