The Black Banners_ 9_11 and the War Against Al-Qaeda - Ali H. Soufan [54]
“I see. So we have to have them arrested again based on new evidence, and use that for the extradition case?”
“As long as they remain in jail, I don’t care how you manage it. But those guys are dangerous and can’t be released.”
It was an open secret that anyone who wanted to reach bin Laden could do so by going through Fawwaz. When Peter Bergen and Peter Arnett interviewed bin Laden for CNN in 1997—his first interview with a Western media outlet—they went through Fawwaz. Documents that we later found in Fawwaz’s office described the process of bringing the two journalists to meet bin Laden. They were taken to Afghanistan by an associate of Fawwaz’s, Abu Musab al-Suri, a Syrian known among jihadists as a prolific writer and strategist; his real name is Mustafa Setmariam. In Afghanistan, Abu Musab handed them over to Saif al-Adel, a member of al-Qaeda’s military committee, who ran a series of “security checks,” including scanning them with a handheld metal detector to check if they were carrying weapons or had any tracking devices. Abu Musab’s notes report that the scanner didn’t work but that Saif al-Adel thought it was important to make the CNN crew think it did. Saif al-Adel, bin Laden, and other al-Qaeda members later joked with each other about having fooled Bergen and Arnett.
The notes record that on this trip Abu Musab asked bin Laden for details about certain operations and that bin Laden was not forthcoming. “I can’t share this with you,” he said, “as you are in the enemy’s belly.” Later Abu Musab left Europe and returned to Afghanistan.
When John Miller interviewed bin Laden in 1998—almost two months before the East African embassy bombings—he, too, first traveled to London to meet Fawwaz, who, with an associate, assisted the ABC team in traveling to Islamabad and from there to Afghanistan, where bin Laden awaited them. It was also from Fawwaz’s London office that bin Laden had sent missives denouncing the Saudi royal family for having allowed U.S. troops into the Arabian Peninsula. Bin Laden’s vitriolic statements targeted Sheikh bin Baz (Abd al-Aziz bin Baz), the official head of all Saudi clerics. Bin Laden denounced bin Baz’s 1990 fatwa, which specified that foreign troops should be permitted in the kingdom.
On August 6, 1998, the Saudi-owned pan-Arab daily al-Hayat, which is distributed around the world, published a message from EIJ and Zawahiri: “We wish to inform the Americans that their message has been received, and we are preparing our answer, with the help of God, in the only language they will understand.” The following day, the East African embassies were blown up.
Zawahiri was referring to a raid a month earlier, in Albania, during which Albanian authorities, aided by the United States, had arrested members of an EIJ cell. The raid was conducted following intelligence reports that the cell was planning an attack on U.S. interests in Albania. The operatives were handed over to the Egyptian authorities, as they were wanted in Egypt for their involvement in a series of terrorist attacks, and tried along with others captured elsewhere. (Still others—such as Eidarous and Abdel Bary—were tried in absentia.) The case was named Returnees from Albania, given the country of origin of a large number of the detainees.
Albania had become a favorable location for EIJ and other Egyptian Islamist terrorists, as the chaos following the fall of the communist regime—and, subsequently, the Balkan war that had begun in 1991—created perfect conditions for their operations. Because of the disorder in the country, many legitimate Islamic organizations and NGOs opened offices to help the local population, and EIJ operatives could pretend to