The Black Banners_ 9_11 and the War Against Al-Qaeda - Ali H. Soufan [5]
This is true in anything from deciding how to interrogate a suspect—whether to torture him or to outwit him to get information—to dealing with rogue states: do we simply resort to force, or do we first try to understand their thought processes and internal divisions and try to manipulate them? It’s the difference between acting out of fear and acting out of knowledge.
Our greatest successes against al-Qaeda have come when we understood how they recruited, brainwashed, and operated, and used our knowledge to outwit and defeat them. Our failures have come when we instead let ourselves be guided by ignorance, fear, and brutality. These failures explain why the approximately four hundred terrorists who were members of al-Qaeda on 9/11 have been able to last in a war against the greatest power on earth longer than the combined duration of the First and Second World Wars.
This book tells the story of America’s successes and failures in the war against al-Qaeda—from the origins of the organization right through to the death of Osama bin Laden on May 2, 2011 (May 1 in the United States)—with the aim of teaching people the nature of our enemy and how it can be defeated. I was fortunate to work alongside many heroes from the FBI, the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), the NCIS, and other military agencies, and to work under great FBI leaders, such as Directors Robert Mueller and Louis Freeh, who understood the threat and what needed to be done. The successes in this book are theirs.
Note to Readers
The story is told firsthand through what I saw and learned, and wherever possible I have used dialogue to allow readers to experience situations as they happened. These exchanges are as I remember them, or as colleagues and terrorists recounted them to me. Other conversations are drawn directly from official transcripts, wires, and unedited court documents. I am grateful to my former colleagues who took the time to look through the manuscript and verify what they read. Naturally, with the passage of time it’s difficult to remember conversations precisely word for word, and I trust that the reader will appreciate this when reading the conversations, and will understand that any errors are, of course, my own.
The reader should also be aware that this book was subjected to self-censorship to protect sources, methods, and classified material. It also went through the official government prepublication approval process. I have assigned certain CIA officers and government figures names other than their own; the practice will be obvious to the reader because anyone whose identity is thus obscured is referred to by a single first name only.
The aim of the book is to teach people how to understand al-Qaeda and how we can defeat them in the future, and any offense to specific individuals is unintended.
In on-site signage and much official government documentation, “Guantánamo” is unaccented when the word appears as part of the name of the American naval base and detention facility, but since the name of the bay itself is accented, and because that is the spelling recognized by readers and preferred by most mainstream publications, I have used it throughout.
PART 1
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THE EARLY YEARS
1
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The Fatwa and the Bet
Winter 1998. “So, Ali, now let me ask you a personal question.” I was having dinner with John O’Neill, my boss and the FBI special agent in charge of the National Security Division in the FBI’s New York office. We were at Kennedy’s, on West Fifty-seventh Street in midtown Manhattan, sitting at a table by the fireplace. It was John’s favorite spot in the restaurant, especially when the weather was cold, as it was that evening.
John and I had spent the previous few hours discussing a memo I had written on a figure then little-known outside government circles, Osama bin Laden, who had just issued