The Looming Tower - Lawrence Wright [205]
20
Revelations
THE FBI ORDERED ALI SOUFAN and the rest of the team in Yemen to evacuate immediately. The morning after 9/11, the CIA’s chief of station in Aden did them the favor of driving them to the airport in Sanaa. He was sitting in the lounge with them when he got a call on his cell phone. He told Soufan, “They want to talk to you.”
One of the FBI communications specialists unpacked the satellite phone and set up the dish so Soufan could make the call. When he spoke to Dina Corsi at headquarters, she told him to stay in Yemen. He was upset. He wanted to get back to New York to investigate the attack on America—right now! “This is about that—what happened yesterday,” she told him. “Quso is our only lead.”
She wouldn’t tell him any more. Soufan got his luggage off the plane, but he was puzzled. What did Quso, the sleeping cameraman in the Cole bombing, have to do with 9/11? Another investigator, Robert McFadden, and a couple of SWAT guys stayed with him for security.
The order from headquarters was to identify the hijackers “by any means necessary,” a directive Soufan had never seen before. When they returned to the embassy, a fax came over a secure line with photos of the suspects. Then the CIA chief drew Soufan aside and handed him a manila envelope. Inside were three surveillance photos and a complete report about the Malaysia meeting—the very material Soufan had been asking for, which the CIA had denied him until now. The wall had come down. When Soufan realized that the agency and some people in the bureau had known for more than a year and a half that two of the hijackers were in the country, he ran into the bathroom and retched.
One of the photos showed a man who looked like Quso. Soufan went to General Ghalib Qamish, director of the Political Security Office, and demanded to see the prisoner Quso again. “What does this have to do with the Cole?” Qamish wanted to know.
“I’m not talking about the Cole,” said Soufan. “Brother John is missing.” He started to say something else, but he choked up. General Qamish’s eyes also filled with tears. There was a long silence filled with the immense vacancy of O’Neill’s passing.
General Qamish said that the prisoner was in Aden and there was only one last flight that evening into the capital. He picked up the phone to his subordinates and began shouting into it, “I want Quso flown in here tonight!” The Americans could almost hear the heels clicking on the other end. Then the general called the airport and demanded to be patched through to the pilot. “You will not take off until my prisoner is aboard,” he ordered.
At midnight, Quso sat in the PSO office. He was in a petulant frame of mind. “Just because something happens in New York or Washington, you don’t need to talk to me,” he said. Soufan showed him three surveillance photos, which included the hijackers Mihdhar and Hazmi, but Quso denied that he was in any of the pictures.
The next day the CIA finally gave Soufan the fourth photo of the Malaysia meeting, which it had buried until now. Quso grudgingly identified the figure in the picture as Khallad, although Soufan already knew who he was. He was the mastermind of the Cole. The photo was the first link between al-Qaeda and 9/11.
Soufan interrogated Quso for three nights, then wrote reports and did research all day. On the fourth night, Soufan collapsed from exhaustion and was taken to the hospital. The next morning, however, he was back in the PSO office. Quso identified Marwan al-Shehhi, the pilot of United Airlines Flight 175, which crashed into the second tower. He had met Shehhi in a Kandahar guesthouse. He remembered that Shehhi had been ill during Ramadan, and that the emir of the guesthouse had taken care of him. The emir’s name was Abu Jandal. As it happened, Abu Jandal was also in Yemeni custody.
He was a large man for a Yemeni, powerful, with a dark full beard, although he had softened up after