The Black Banners_ 9_11 and the War Against Al-Qaeda - Ali H. Soufan [243]
Nashiri ordered the Limburg cell to assassinate the U.S. ambassador, Edmund Hull, in retaliation. After the Limburg attack the cell had gone into hiding, but once Nashiri ordered them to start planning a new attack, they reemerged and we were able to find and arrest them. They had mapped out the routes the ambassador took and were planning to fire missiles at his armored vehicle. We found the safe house they had rented and the weapons they had intended to use.
With operatives from both cells in custody, we worked with the Yemeni authorities to prosecute them. Yemeni prosecutor Saeed al-Aql was committed to justice and faced defense lawyers who tried promoting conspiracy theories, including the idea that al-Qaeda doesn’t exist and that the plots were American fabrications. The detainees, meanwhile, sang songs in the courtroom praising bin Laden and al-Qaeda.
On the first day in court, the suspects spat on the floor in front of us as they walked in. I told a colleague to go up to them, collect their spit on pieces of paper, and say to them: “Thanks, now we have your DNA.” He did, and they never spat in court again while we were there.
Qassim al-Rimi, one of Furqan’s junior operatives, shouted at Aql as he read the charges, “I am going to break your legs.”
“What did you say?” Aql replied. “You think someone like you can threaten me?” That same evening, a hand grenade was thrown at Aql’s house when he was out. Thankfully, his wife and children were unharmed.
There were two trials, one for the Cole suspects and the second for all the other plots. Each of the trials was a success; the detainees were given a mixture of death sentences, life imprisonment, and long-term prison sentences. They remained in jail until February 3, 2006, when a group of twenty-three prisoners escaped by digging a tunnel to the women’s bathroom of a mosque some 140 meters away. Among the escapees were Furqan and Qassim al-Rimi, once a low-level member of the Nashiri cell (at the time of this writing, he is one of the main leaders of al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula), and operatives convicted years earlier for their roles in the USS Cole bombing.
A few months after the members of the Yemeni cells were prosecuted, I received a phone call from a friend at the CTC. “Ali, this is important,” he said. “What’s your STU number?” STU stands for secure telephone unit. I gave it to him and he told me, “I’m going to fax you something.”
It was a memo from the [3 words redacted] to CTC headquarters, reporting that Ambassador Hull had suggested that I go to Yemen to help with the investigation of USS Cole subjects who had escaped from prison in April 2003. (Ten al-Qaeda members, including Jamal al-Badawi, had escaped. They were caught the following year.) Hull had made the recommendation based upon my close relationship with General Qamish and other senior Yemeni officials. The [1 word redacted] registered his disagreement, asking the ambassador to change his request. The Yemenis didn’t like me, the [1 word redacted] claimed, because I had “demanded access to people in al-Mukalla.” I had never been to al-Mukalla and knew that the [1 word redacted], the same person who had blocked us from breaking up the Limburg plot, was making up lies about me.
I gave the memo to my FBI superiors, who demanded an apology from the CIA and a retraction. No official apology came, and instead a CIA official went to the FBI representative at the CTC and said, “We made a mistake.”
PART 8
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FINAL MISSIONS
26
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Leaving the FBI
April 29, 2003. Undercover Pakistani domestic intelligence officers saw the truck they were waiting for pull into the arranged meeting spot. As it came to a standstill, one officer casually strolled over to the driver’s window and peered inside. The officers were posing as arms dealers for a domestic terrorism case they were investigating—Shiite mosques were