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Commission senior adviser Ernest May thought the CIA’s summaries of the results of interrogations “incomplete and poorly written.” “We never,” he wrote later, “had full confidence in the interrogation reports as historical sources.” Former Commission counsel John Farmer warns that, even now, “reliance on KSM’s version of events must be considered carefully.”

The issue was and remains a huge problem, a blemish on the historical record. As the Report was being assembled, the Commission attempted to resolve the concern by inserting a paragraph or two on a page deep in the text—a health warning to the American public about the product of the CIA interrogations.

“Assessing the truth of statements by these witnesses,” it read, “is challenging.… We have evaluated their statements carefully and have attempted to corroborate them with documents and statements of others.”

THERE IS, however, a measure of considerable consolation. Long before they were caught, KSM and a fellow operative freely volunteered much the same version of events to an Arab television journalist. The scoop of a lifetime had come to Yosri Fouda, former BBC journalist and at the time star reporter for the satellite channel Al Jazeera—the way scoops are supposed to come, in a mysterious phone call to his London office.

Seven months after the 9/11 attacks, Fouda found himself listening to an anonymous male voice on the telephone proposing “something special for the first anniversary … exclusive stuff.” Then, four days later, came a fax offering to provide him with “addresses of people” for a proposed documentary. Then another phone call, asking him to fly to Pakistan. Fouda did so, without confiding even in his boss.

After a harrowing process, an internal flight to Karachi, a change of hotels, a journey by car and rickshaw, then—in another car, blindfolded, the final leg—the reporter was ushered into a fourth floor apartment. The blindfold removed, Fouda found himself looking into the eyes of the fugitive who was being hunted more feverishly than anyone in the world except Osama bin Laden.

KSM and Ramzi Binalshibh, a key accomplice, told Fouda their story—the story, at any rate, as they wanted to tell it—over a period of forty-eight hours. “I am the head of the al Qaeda military committee,” KSM said that first night, “and Ramzi is the coordinator of the Holy Tuesday operation. And yes, we did it.”

After prayers together the following morning, the two men shared their version of the preparation and execution of 9/11. Their accounts largely match the version subsequently extracted from KSM by the CIA. Binalshibh pulled from an old suitcase dozens of mementos of the operation: information on Boeing airplanes, a navigation map of the American East Coast, illustrations on “How to perform sudden maneuvers”—a page covered in notations made, Binalshibh said, by the hijackers’ leader, Mohamed Atta.

The interview over, blindfolded again, reporter Fouda was taken back to the airport. He had—and has—no doubt that the men he had met at the safe house in Karachi were who they said they were, that what they told him was credible. The three-page account of Fouda’s work in the London Sunday Times, and his TV documentary, The Road to 11 September, on the Al Jazeera network, caused a sensation on the first anniversary of the attacks.

Unaccountably, 9/11 Commission staff failed to interview Fouda and mentioned his breakthrough interview only in an obscure footnote. It was included, however, in evidence presented during the military tribunal proceedings at Guantánamo. Two distinguished award-winning reporters, The Wall Street Journal’s Ron Suskind and CNN contributor Peter Bergen, who both interviewed Yosri Fouda, found his reporting of the Karachi encounter authentic and compelling.

During the reporter’s meeting with KSM and Binalshibh, a mysterious visitor had arrived, a man who could not be named. He was, Fouda was told, “a close companion of Sheikh Abu Abdullah, God protect him.”

“Abu Abdullah” was one of the