The Black Banners_ 9_11 and the War Against Al-Qaeda - Ali H. Soufan [47]
On August 10, three days after the bombing, Debbie Doran, an I-49 agent manning the phones in the FBI’s command post in Nairobi, took a call from someone who reported seeing a “suspicious Arab man with bandages on his hands and stitches on his forehead.” The caller then appeared to have second thoughts and signaled that he was going to hang up.
The FBI runs in Debbie’s blood: her father was a special agent in charge in New York. When she signed up for the bureau, she knew exactly the long hours it would entail, and she is willing to be consumed by important work. Debbie coaxed the caller to stay on the line by assuring him that anything he told her was confidential. It was clear to her from his voice—almost a whisper, with a distinct element of fear—that he worried that saying too much might put him in danger. Debbie spoke of the bombing and reminded him of his moral duty to find the killers of so many innocent people.
The caller told her where he had spotted the man and provided a description. An undercover team was dispatched. Among the agents were Stephen Gaudin and an NYPD detective named Wayne Parola. Stephen, newly assigned to the SWAT team in the New York office, had been with the U.S. Army Special Operations Forces. Though at the time he lacked in-depth knowledge of al-Qaeda, he had a remarkable talent for communicating with suspects, a function of his natural empathy and people skills. He would later put this gift to use in key interrogations. The assignment to Nairobi changed Stephen’s career path: he was to become a central member of the FBI’s al-Qaeda team. Wayne Parola was a member of the JTTF and brought a lot of experience. Italian, stocky, with a black beard, he walked the walk, talked the talk, and fit the role of an NYPD detective.
Wayne, Stephen, and the rest of the team staked out the location, and a man who matched the description given to Debbie soon appeared. The agents monitored him, waiting for an opportune moment to grab him. When the moment presented itself, they apprehended and subdued him. A search produced eight hundred-dollar bills. The man had no identification or documents.Unsure how serious his injuries were, the team took him to a hospital to be evaluated by a doctor.
John Anticev led the questioning at the hospital, conducted at the detainee’s bedside. John had been the case agent for Terrorstop, the 1993 New York City landmarks operation, and he was both an experienced interrogator and schooled in radical terrorism, a fact he soon impressed upon the patient-detainee.
“What’s your name?” John asked.
“My name is Khaled Saleem bin Rasheed,” the man replied. Asked where he was from and what he was doing in Nairobi, the man replied that he was from Yemen and that he was looking for business opportunities.
John didn’t challenge his story. Instead he asked him how he had been injured. Rasheed replied that he had been in the Cooperative Bank at the time of the bombing, and that he had been knocked down by the explosion. He had checked himself into the hospital, where he had gotten stitches and where his injuries had been bandaged.
John nodded and jotted down everything he said, in the meantime analyzing his words and studying his moves. He asked Rasheed if he was comfortable and whether he had had a chance to pray. Rasheed said that he had, and John went on to ask him a series of seemingly routine questions about his religious beliefs and his views on the United States, the Taliban, and related matters.
Rasheed settled into his bed and engaged John. He seemed to enjoy the discussion, welcoming the chance to “educate” John on these subjects.