Did the C.I.A. stop an F.B.I. detec­tive from pre­vent­ing 9/11?

by Lawrence Wright

On Octo­ber 12, 2000, in the deep-water port of Aden, Yemen, the U.S.S. Cole, a guided-missile destroyer weigh­ing eighty-three hun­dred tons, was docked at a fuelling buoy. The Cole, which cost a bil­lion dol­lars to build, was one of the most “sur­viv­able” ships in the U.S. Navy, with sev­enty tons of armor, a hull that could with­stand an explo­sion of fifty-one thou­sand pounds per square inch, and stealth tech­nol­ogy designed to make the ship less vis­i­ble to radar. As the Cole filled its tank, a fibre­glass fish­ing boat con­tain­ing plas­tic explo­sives approached. Two men brought the skiff to a halt amid­ships, smiled and waved, then stood at atten­tion. The sym­bol­ism of this moment was exactly what Osama bin Laden, the leader of Al Qaeda, had hoped for when he approved a plan to attack an Amer­i­can naval ves­sel. “The destroyer rep­re­sented the West,” bin Laden said later. “The small boat rep­re­sented Muhammad.”

The shock wave from the blast shat­tered win­dows onshore. Two miles away, peo­ple thought there had been an earth­quake. The fire­ball that rose from the water­line swal­lowed a sailor who had leaned over the rail to see what the men in the skiff were up to. The blast opened a hole, forty feet by forty feet, in the port side of the ship, tear­ing apart sailors belowdecks who were wait­ing for lunch. Sev­en­teen of them per­ished, and thirty-nine were wounded. Sev­eral sailors swam through the blast hole to escape the flames. The great man-of-war looked like a gut­ted animal.

It was Al Qaeda’s sec­ond suc­cess­ful strike against Amer­i­can tar­gets. In August, 1998, oper­a­tives had bombed the United States Embassies in Kenya and Tan­za­nia simul­ta­ne­ously, killing two hun­dred and twenty-four peo­ple. Yet an impor­tant part of the Cole plot had failed: Fahd al-Quso, a mem­ber of A1 Qaeda’s sup­port team in Aden, was sup­posed to video­tape the blast for pro­pa­ganda pur­poses, but he slept through a morn­ing alarm and did not set up his cam­era in time. Quso was in a taxi at the moment of the explo­sion, and he imme­di­ately went into hiding.

Shortly after the attack, Ali Soufan, a twenty-nine-year-old Lebanese-American, was dri­ving across the Brook­lyn Bridge when he received a page from the New York office of the F.B.I., where he was employed as a spe­cial agent. He was told to report to work at once. At the time, Soufan was the only F.B.I. agent in the city who spoke Ara­bic, and one of only eight in the coun­try. He had joined the New York office in the fall of 1997, and his tal­ents were quickly spot­ted by John O’Neill, the head of the F.B.I.’s National Secu­rity Divi­sion, which is devoted to com­bat­ting ter­ror­ism. The fol­low­ing Feb­ru­ary, when bin Laden issued a fatwa declar­ing war on Amer­ica, Soufan wrote a tren­chant report on Islamic fun­da­men­tal­ism that O’Neill dis­trib­uted to his super­vi­sors. After the 1998 embassy bomb­ings, Soufan helped assem­ble the ini­tial evi­dence link­ing them to bin Laden. Soufan’s lan­guage skills, his relent­less­ness, and his roots in the Mid­dle East made him invalu­able in help­ing the F.B.I. under­stand Al Qaeda, an orga­ni­za­tion that few Amer­i­cans were even aware of before the embassy bomb­ings. O’Neill, who had joined the F.B.I. twenty-five years ear­lier, referred to the young agent as a “national trea­sure.” Despite Soufan’s youth and his rel­a­tively short tenure, 0’Neill placed him in charge of the Cole inves­ti­ga­tion. As it turned out, Soufan became America’s best chance to stop the attacks of Sep­tem­ber 11th.

Soufan speaks rapidly, and there is still a hint of Lebanon in his voice. He has an open face and an engag­ing smile, although there are cir­cles under his eyes from too many long nights. Soufan is a Mus­lim, but he doesn’t fol­low any par­tic­u­lar school of Islam; instead, he is drawn to mys­ti­cal thought, espe­cially that of Kahlil Gibran, the Lebanese– Amer­i­can poet. He told me that he has an inter­est in the Kab­balah, because “it appeared at a time when the polit­i­cal envi­ron­ment for the Jews was so harsh that they used this phi­los­o­phy to escape their anguish.” When he wants to relax, he watches reruns of “Seinfeld”-he’s seen every episode three or four times-or Bugs Bunny car­toons. One of his favorite writ­ers is Karen Arm­strong, whose biogra­phies of Muham­mad and the Bud­dha knit together his­tory and reli­gion in a way that makes sense to him.

Soufan grew up in Lebanon dur­ing the calami­tous civil war, when cities were destroyed and ter­ror­ists were empow­ered by law­less­ness and chaos. His father was a jour­nal­ist in Beirut, and as a child Soufan helped out at the busi­ness mag­a­zine his father pro­duced, often car­ry­ing gal­leys to the printshop. In 1987, when Soufan was six­teen, the fam­ily moved to the United States. Sou fan’s most vivid ini­tial impres­sion of his adopted coun­try was that it was safe. “Also, it allowed me to dream,” he said.

Soufan lived in Penn­syl­va­nia, and he never suf­fered from prej­u­dice because he was a Mus­lim Arab. In high school, he won many aca­d­e­mic awards. He attended Mans­field Uni­ver­sity, in cen­tral Penn­syl­va­nia, where he was elected pres­i­dent of the stu­dent gov­ern­ment. In 1997, he received a master’s degree in inter­na­tional rela­tions from Vil­lanova Uni­ver­sity, out­side Philadel­phia. He ini­tially planned to con­tinue his stud­ies in a Ph.D. pro­gram. But he had devel­oped a fas­ci­na­tion with the U.S. Con­sti­tu­tion– in par­tic­u­lar, with its guar­an­tees of free­dom of speech, reli­gion, and assem­bly, and the right to a speedy trial. ‘Peo­ple who are born into this sys­tem may take it for granted,” he said. “You — don’t know how impor­tant these rights are if you haven’t lived in a coun­try where you can be arrested or killed and not even know why.” Like many nat­u­ral­ized cit­i­zens, Soufan felt indebted for the new life he had been given. Although he was poised for an aca­d­e­mic career, he decided-”almost as a joke,” he says-to send his resume to the F.B.I. He thought it was nearly incon­ceiv­able that the bureau would hire some­one with his back­ground. Yet in July, 1997, a let­ter arrived instruct­ing him to report to the F.B.I. Acad­emy, in Quan­tico, Vir­ginia, in two weeks.

Upon grad­u­a­tion, Soufan went to the New York bureau. He was soon assigned to the 1–40 squad, which con­cen­trated mainly on the Islamist para­mil­i­tary group Hamas, but, in 1998, on the day after the East African embassy bomb­ings, O’Neill drafted him into I-49, which had become the lead unit in the F.B.I.’s inves­ti­ga­tion of Al Qaeda.

O’Neill was one of a few top man­agers in the F.B.I. who rec­og­nized early the dan­ger that Al Qaeda posed to Amer­ica. His inten­sity was unyield­ing, and his man­ner was often abra­sive; he could be bru­tal not only to those under him but to supe­ri­ors who he felt were not fully com­mit­ted to an inves­ti­ga­tion. Soufan proved to be a tire­less ally, will­ing to work nights and hol­i­days. “0’Neill adored him, and Ah felt the same way,” Car­los Fer­nan­dez, an agent who knew both men well, observed. “They were equals, in many ways. If you say some­thing to All, hell remem­ber it, word for word, ten years from now. John was also great at remem­ber­ing names and con­nect­ing the dots. They could go on for hours, putting things together.” The fact that a novice like Soufan had direct access to O’Neill aroused some resent­ment among the other agents, but the bureau had nobody else with his skills and ded­i­ca­tion. “John and I often talked about the need to clone Ali,” Ken­neth Maxwell, an F.B.I. offi­cial who was then Soufan’s supe­rior, told me.

The after­noon of the Cole bomb­ing, Soufan and a few dozen other agents flew to Yemen to begin look­ing for evi­dence that could be used against A1 Qaeda in court. (A larger con­tin­gent, which included O’Neill, was held up in Ger­many for a week, wait­ing for per­mis­sion to enter the coun­try.) Yemen was a par­tic­u­larly dif­fi­cult place to start a ter­ror­ist inves­ti­ga­tion, as it was filled with act
ive Al Qaeda cells and with sym­pa­thiz­ers at very high lev­els of gov­ern­ment. On tele­vi­sion, Yemeni politi­cians called for jihad against Amer­ica. When the agents landed in Aden, the day after the attack, Soufan looked out at a detach­ment of the Yemen Spe­cial Forces, who wore yel­low uni­forms with old Russ­ian hel­mets; each sol­dier was aim­ing an AK-47 at the U.S. plane. A jit­tery, twelve-man hostage-rescue team, which had been sent along to pro­tect the F.B.I. agents, responded by bran­dish­ing their M4s and hand­guns. Soufan real­ized that every­one might die on the tar­mac if he didn’t do some­thing quickly. He opened the plane’s door. One Yemeni sol­dier was hold­ing a walkie-talkie. Soufan walked directly toward him, car­ry­ing a bot­tle of water as the guns fol­lowed him. It was a hun­dred and ten degrees outside.

“You look thirsty,” Soufan said, in Ara­bic, to the offi­cer with the walkie-talkie. He handed him the bottle.

“Is it Amer­i­can water?” the offi­cer asked.

Soufan assured him that it was, adding that he had Amer­i­can water for the other sol­diers as well. The Yeme­nis con­sid­ered the water such a pre­cious com­mod­ity that some would not drink it. With this sim­ple act of friend­ship, the sol­diers low­ered their weapons.

Soufan divided the agents on the ground into four teams. The first three were respon­si­ble for foren­sics, intel­li­gence, and secu­rity, the last was devoted to exchang­ing infor­ma­tion with Yemeni author­i­ties. Just get­ting per­mis­sion from the Yemeni gov­ern­ment to go to the crime scene-the wounded war­ship in the Aden harbor-required lengthy nego­ti­a­tions with hos­tile offi­cials. Secu­rity was a great con­cern, con­sid­er­ing that auto­matic weapons were ubiq­ui­tous in the coun­try, espe­cially in rural areas, but Bar­bara Bod­ine, the Amer­i­can Ambas­sador, refused to allow the agents to carry heavy — arms. She was con­cerned about offend­ing the Yemeni authorities.

When Soufan and the inves­ti­ga­tors vis­ited the ship, clumps of flesh were strewn belowdecks, amid the tan­gled mass of wire and metal. F.B.I. divers, hop­ing to make DNA iden­ti­fi­ca­tions of the vic­tims and the bombers, net­ted body parts float­ing in the waters around the ship. Look­ing through the huge blast hole, Soufan could see the moun­tain­ous, ancient city of Aden, ris­ing above the curved har­bor like a clas­si­cal amp­ithe­atre. He fig­ured that, some­where in the city, a cam­era had been set up to record the explo­sion, since ter­ror­ists reg­u­larly doc­u­mented their work. Although the bombers were likely dead, a cam­era­man might still be at large.

When O’Neill finally arrived in Aden with the other agents, he was puz­zled, upon get­ting off the plane, ti see the Yemeni sol­diers salut­ing. “I told them you were a gen­eral,” Soufan explained to him.

Yemen is a status-conscious soci­ety, and, because Soufan had pro­moted O’Neill to “gen­eral,” his coun­ter­part was Gen­eral Ghalib Qamish, the head of Yemeni intel­li­gence. Every night, when the Yemeni author­i­ties did busi­ness, Soufan and 0’Neill spent hours push­ing for access to wit­nesses, evi­dence, and crime scenes. Ini­tially, the Yeme­nis told them that, since both of the bombers were dead, there was noth­ing to inves­ti­gate. But who gave them money? Soufan asked. Who pro­vided the explo­sives? The boat? He gen­tly prod­ded the Yeme­nis to help him.

A few days after the bomb­ing, the Yeme­nis brought in two known asso­ciates of bin Laden’s for ques­tion­ing. One was named Jamal Badawi; the other was Fahd al-Quso, the man who had failed to video­tape the Cole attack. Both men were Yemeni cit­i­zens. QUSO, who ran a guest­house in Aden for jihadis, had turned him­self in after fam­ily mem­bers were ques­tioned. He did not admit his role in the Cole plot, but he and Badawi con­fessed that they had recently trav­elled to Afghanistan, and had met there with a one-legged jihadi named Khal­lad. Badawi said that he had bought a boat for Khal­lad, who, he explained, had wanted to go into the fish­ing busi­ness. The Yeme­nis even­tu­ally deter­mined that this was the boat used in the Cole bombing.

When Soufan heard that Quso had men­tioned the name Khal­lad, he was star­tled: he had heard it from a source he had recruited a few years ear­lier, in Afghanistan. The source had told him that he had met a fighter in Kan­da­har with a metal leg who was one of bin Laden’s top lieu­tenants. When Soufan asked to speak to Quso and Badawi, the Yeme­nis told him that the men had sworn on a Koran that they were inno­cent of any crime. For them, that set­tled the matter.

Soufan and O’Neill knew that Gen­eral Qamish rep­re­sented their best hope of gain­ing any coop­er­a­tion. He was a small, gaunt man whose face reminded Soufan of Gandhi’s. Despite the ten­sions between the two sides, Qamish had begun call­ing his Amer­i­can col­leagues Brother John and Brother Ali. One night, O’Neill and Soufan spent many hours ask­ing Qamish for pass­port pho­tographs of sus­pected plot­ters, espe­cially that of Khal­lad. He said repeat­edly that the F.B.I. was not needed on the case, but O’Neill and Soufan pointed out that the sooner they could inter­ro­gate sus­pects linked to the Cole bomb­ing the sooner they might obtain intel­li­gence that could destroy Al Qaeda. The fol­low­ing night, Qamish announced, “I have your pho­tos for you.” Soufan imme­di­ately sent Khallad’s photo to the C.I.A. He also faxed it to an F.B.I. agent in Islam­abad, Pak­istan; the agent showed it to Soufan’s source in Afghanistan, who iden­ti­fied the man as Khal­lad, the Al Qaeda lieu­tenant. This sug­gested strongly that Al Qaeda was behind the Cole attack.

Another break came that same evening, when a twelve-year-old boy named Hani went to the local police. He said that he had been fish­ing on a pier when the bombers placed their skiff in the water. One of the men had paid the boy a hun­dred Yemeni riyals—about sixty cents—to watch his Nis­san truck and boat trailer, but he never returned. When the police heard Hani’s story, they locked him in jail and arrested his father as well.

After repeated requests, the Amer­i­cans got per­mis­sion to inter­view the boy and to exam­ine the launch site. Hani was scared, but he pro­vided a descrip­tion of the bombers: one was heavy, and the other was “hand­some.” An Arabic-speaking naval inves­ti­ga­tor named Robert McFad­den offered the boy some candy. He then said that the bombers had invited him and his fam­ily to take a ride in the boat, which was white, with red car­pet­ing on the floor. When Soufan heard this, he deduced that the bombers had been try­ing to deter­mine how much weight the skiff could carry.

The aban­doned truck and trailer were still at the launch site. It was a major mis­take on the part of Al Qaeda not to have retrieved them. By check­ing reg­is­tra­tion records, inves­ti­ga­tors con­nected the truck and trailer to a house in a neigh­bor­hood of Aden called Burayqah. When Soufan went to the house, which was sur­rounded by a wall and a gate, he had an eerie feel­ing: this res­i­dence had a strik­ing resem­blance to the house in Nairobi where the bomb for the 1998 embassy attack had been made. Inside, in the mas­ter bed­room, there was a prayer rug ori­ented to the north, toward Mecca. The bath­room sink was full of body hair, the bombers had shaved and per­formed rit­ual ablu­tions before going to their deaths. Soufan’s men col­lected a razor and hair sam­ples, which might pro­vide the F.B.I. with the DNA evi­dence nec­es­sary to estab­lish the iden­tity of the killers. (So far, the inves­ti­ga­tors at the Cole site had found only a cou­ple of bone frag­ments that didn’t belong to Amer­i­can sailors.)

Inves­ti­ga­tors found that another house in Aden had been rented by the ter­ror­ists; it was reg­is­tered to “Abda Hus­sein Muham­mad.” The name was dimly famil­iar to Soufan. At one point dur­ing the Nairobi inves­ti­ga­tion, a wit­ness had men­tioned an Al Qaeda oper­a­tive named Nash­eri who had pro­posed attack­ing an Amer­i­can ves­sel in Aden. Soufan did some research and dis­cov­ered that Nasheri’s full name was Abdul Rahim Muham­mad Hus­sein Abda al-Nasheri. The mid­dle names were the same, just reversed. Soufan’s
hunch paid off when Amer­i­can agents dis­cov­ered a car in Aden that was reg­is­tered to Nash­eri. It was another strong link between A1 Qaeda and the Cole attack.

cou­ple of weeks after the bomb­ing, Yemeni author­i­ties placed Badawi A and Quso, the two Al Qaeda oper­a­tives, under arrest, appar­ently as a pre­cau­tion. Soufan con­tin­ued to press Gen­eral Qamish to let him inter­ro­gate the men directly, and finally, after sev­eral weeks, Qamish relented.

Soufan spent hours prepar­ing for the encoun­ters, with the goal of find­ing some com­mon ground with his sub­jects. Often, the bond cen­tered on reli­gion. “Ali was very spir­i­tual,” Car­los Fer­nan­dez recalled. “In Yemen, he was read­ing the Koran at night. He would talk to these guys about their beliefs. Some­times, he would actu­ally con­vince them that their under­stand­ing of Islam was all wrong.”

In the inter­ro­ga­tion of Badawi, Soufan learned that the skiff had been pur­chased in Saudi Ara­bia. Soufan ques­tioned Quso over the course of sev­eral days. Quso was small, wiry, and inso­lent, with a wispy beard that he kept tug­ging on. Before Soufan could even begin, a local intel­li­gence offi­cial came into the room and kissed Quso on both cheeks—a shock­ing sig­nal that the secu­rity ser­vices were sym­pa­thetic to the jihadis. McFad­den, who par­tic­i­pated in the inter­ro­ga­tions, recalled that Soufan was not intim­i­dated. He said, “Ali was a nat­ural inter­viewer, and he was able to dis­lodge Quso from his cir­cle of com­fort.” Even­tu­ally, Quso began to open up. He had been in Afghanistan, and boasted that he had fought beside bin Laden. He said that bin Laden had inspired him with his speeches about expelling the infi­dels from the Ara­bian peninsula-in par­tic­u­lar, Amer­i­can troops sta­tioned in Saudi Arabia.

Soufan asked if Quso ever planned to get mar­ried. A shy, embar­rassed smile appeared. “Well, then, help your­self out,” Soufan urged him. “Tell me something.”

Finally, Quso admit­ted that he was sup­posed to film the bomb­ing but had over­slept. (The Yeme­nis later found a video cam­era at his sister’s house.) He also said that sev­eral months before the Cole attack he and one of the bombers had deliv­ered thirty-six thou­sand dol­lars to Khal­lad, the one-legged Al Qaeda lieu­tenant, in Bangkok. The money, Quso added, was meant only to buy Khal­lad a new prosthesis.

Soufan was sus­pi­cious of this expla­na­tion. Why had Al Qaeda sent money out of Yemen just before the Cole bomb­ing took place? Money always flowed toward an oper­a­tion, not away from it. He won­dered if Al Qaeda had a big­ger plot under way.

The C.I.A. had offi­cials in Yemen to col­lect intel­li­gence about Al Qaeda, and Soufan asked them if they knew any­thing about a new oper­a­tion, per­haps in South­east Asia. They pro­fessed to be as puz­zled as he was. In Novem­ber, 2000, a month after the Cole bomb­ing, Soufan sent the agency the first of sev­eral offi­cial queries. On Soufan’s behalf, the direc­tor of the F.B.I. sent a let­ter to the direc­tor of the C.I.A., for­mally ask­ing for infor­ma­tion about Khal­lad, and whether there might have been an A1 Qaeda meet­ing some­where in South­east Asia before the bomb­ing. The agency said that it had noth­ing. Soufan trusted this response; he thought that he had a good work­ing rela­tion­ship with the agency.

Quso had told Soufan that when he and the Cole bomber went to Bangkok to meet Khal­lad they had stayed in the Wash­ing­ton Hotel. F.B.I. agents went through phone records to ver­ify his story. They found calls between the hotel and Quso’s house, in Yemen. They also noticed that there were calls to both daces 1 from a pay phone in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. In April, 2001, Soufan sent another offi­cial tele­type to the C.I.A., along with the pass­port photo of Khal­lad. He asked whether the tele­phone num­bers had any sig­nif­i­cance, and whether there was any con­nec­tion between the num­bers and Khal­lad. The C.I.A. said that it could not help him.

In fact, the C.I.A. knew a lot about Khal­lad and his ties to Al Qaeda. The F.B.I. and the C.I.A. have long quar­relled over bureau­cratic turf, and their man­dates place them at odds. The ulti­mate goal of the bureau in gath­er­ing intel­li­gence is to gain con­vic­tions for crimes; for the agency, intel­li­gence itself is the object. If the agency had responded can­didly to Soufan’s requests, it would have revealed its knowl­edge of an A1 Qaeda cell that was already form­ing inside the United States. But the agency kept this intel­li­gence to itself.

“I come from a gen­er­a­tion of F.B.I. agents who have always worked closely with the C.I.A.,” Soufan told me. At the time he joined the bureau, law enforce­ment had become inter­na­tion­al­ized. In the nineteen-nineties, his men­tor, O’Neill, had estab­lished close rela­tions with for­eign police ser­vices, an approach that some­times encroached on the C.I.A.’s ter­ri­tory. In 1999, 0’Neill sent Soufan and his super­vi­sor, Pasquale D’Amuro, to Jor­dan, where author­i­ties had dis­cov­ered that jihadis linked to A1 Qaeda were plot­ting to bomb tourist sites and hotels. Infor­ma­tion that the Jor­da­ni­ans shared with Soufan made him real­ize that the intel­li­gence that the C .LA. was report­ing was deeply flawed. His analy­sis forced local C.I.A. rep­re­sen­ta­tives to with­draw twelve cables that they had sent to agency head­quar­ters. On the floor of the C.I.A.’s sta­tion in Amman, Soufan dis­cov­ered a box of evi­dence that had been given to the agency by Jor­dan­ian intel­li­gence. Such evi­dence is what the F.B.I. needs in order to mount pros­e­cu­tions, and no one had exam­ined the box’s con­tents or turned it over to the bureau. In the box, Soufan found a map of the pro­posed bomb sites, which proved cru­cial in the pros­e­cu­tions of twenty-eight plot­ters in Jor­dan, twenty-two of whom were con­victed. Soufan’s suc­cess embar­rassed the C.I.A., deep­en­ing the rift between the two insti­tu­tions. “The C.I.A. peo­ple couldn’t stand the fact that Ali’s opin­ion and analy­sis were cor­rect,” an F.B .I. coun­tert­er­ror­ism offi­cial who worked with Soufan told me. “He was an Ara­bic speaker and an F.B.I. agent on the ground who was run­ning cir­cles around them.”

Nev­er­the­less, the C.I.A. rec­og­nized Soufan’s abil­i­ties and repeat­edly tried to recruit him. “Come over to the Dark Side,” an agency oper­a­tive once said to him. “You know you’re inter­ested.” Soufan said that he just laughed.

Indeed, some of the C.I.A.’s best infor­ma­tion about Al Qaeda came from the F.B.I. In 1998, F.B.I. inves­ti­ga­tors found an essen­tial clue—a phone num­ber in Yemen that func­tioned as a vir­tual switch­board for the ter­ror net­work. The bombers in East Africa called that num­ber before and after the attacks; so did Osama bin Laden. The num­ber belonged to a jihadi named Ahmed al-Hada. By comb­ing through the records of all the calls made to and from that num­ber, F.B.I. inves­ti­ga­tors con­structed a map of Al Qaeda’s global orga­ni­za­tion. The phone line was mon­i­tored as soon as it was dis­cov­ered. But the C.I.A., as the pri­mary orga­ni­za­tion for gath­er­ing for­eign intel­li­gence, had juris­dic­tion over con­ver­sa­tions on the Hada phone, and did not pro­vide the F.B .I, with the infor­ma­tion it was get­ting about Al Qaeda’s plans.

A con­ver­sa­tion on the Hada phone at the end of 1999 men­tioned a forth­com­ing meet­ing of Al Qaeda oper­a­tives in Malaysia. The C.I.A. learned the name of one par­tic­i­pant, Khaled al-Mihdhar, and the first name of another: Nawaf. Both men were Saudi cit­i­zens. The C.I.A. did not pass this intel­li­gence to the F.B.I.

How­ever, the C.I.A. did share the infor­ma­tion with Saudi author­i­ties, who told the agency that Mihd­har and a man named Nawaf al-Hazmi were mem­bers of Al Qaeda. Based on this intel­li­gence, the C.I.A. broke into a hotel room in Dubai where Mihd­har was stay­ing, en route to Malaysia. The oper­a­tives pho­to­copied Mihdhar’s pass­port and faxed it to Alec Sta­tion, the C.I.A. unit devoted to track­ing bin Laden. Inside the pass­port was the crit­i­cal infor­ma­tion that Mihd­har had a U.S. visa. The agency did not alert the F.B.I. or the State Depart­ment so that Mihdhar’s
name could be put on a ter­ror watch list, which would have pre­vented him from enter­ing the US.

The C.I.A. asked Malaysian author­i­ties to pro­vide sur­veil­lance of the meet­ing in Kuala Lumpur, which took place on Jan­u­ary 5,2000, at a con­do­minium over­look­ing a golf course designed by Jack Nick­laus. The condo was owned by a Malaysian busi­ness­man who had ties to Al Qaeda. The pay phone that Soufan had queried the agency about was directly in front of the condo. Khal­lad used it to place calls to Quso in Yemen. Although the C.I.A. later denied that it knew any­thing about the phone, the num­ber was recorded in the Malaysians’ sur­veil­lance log, which was given to the agency.

At the time of the Kuala Lumpur meet­ing, Spe­cial Branch, the Malaysian secret ser­vice, pho­tographed about a dozen Al Qaeda asso­ciates out­side the condo and vis­it­ing nearby Inter­net cafés. These pic­tures were turned over to the C.I.A. The meet­ing was not wire­tapped; had it been, the agency might have uncov­ered the plots that cul­mi­nated in the bomb­ing of the Cole and the Sep­tem­ber 11, 2001, attacks. On Jan­u­ary 8th, Spe­cial Branch noti­fied the C.I.A. that three of the men who had been at the meeting—Mihdhar, Hazmi, and Khallad—were trav­el­ling together to Bangkok. There Khal­lad met with Quso and one of the sui­cide bombers of the Cole. Quso gave Khal­lad the thirty-six thou­sand dol­lars, which was most likely used to buy tick­ets to Los Ange­les for Mihd­har and Hazmi and pro­vide them with liv­ing expenses in the U.S. Both men ended up on planes involved in the Sep­tem­ber 11th attacks.

In March, the C.I.A. learned that Hazmi had flown to Los Ange­les two months ear­lier, on Jan­u­ary 15th. Had the agency checked the flight man­i­fest, it would have noticed that Mihd­har was trav­el­ling with him. Once again, the agency neglected to inform the F.B.I. or the state Depart­ment that at least one Al Qaeda oper­a­tive was in the country.

Although the C.I.A. was legally bound to share this kind of infor­ma­tion with the bureau, it was pro­tec­tive of sen­si­tive intel­li­gence. The agency some­times feared that F.B.I. pros­e­cu­tions result­ing from such intel­li­gence might com­pro­mise its rela­tion­ships with for­eign ser­vices, although there were safe­guards to pro­tect con­fi­den­tial infor­ma­tion. The C.I.A. was par­tic­u­larly wary of O’Neill, who demanded con­trol of any case that touched on an F.B.I. inves­ti­ga­tion. Many C.I.A. offi­cials dis­liked him and feared that he could not be trusted with sen­si­tive intel­li­gence. “O’Neill was duplic­i­tous,” Michael Scheuer, the offi­cial who founded Alec Sta­tion but has now left the C.I.A., told me. “He had no con­cerns out­side of mak­ing the bureau look good.” Sev­eral of O’Neill’s sub­or­di­nates sug­gested that the C.I.A. hid the infor­ma­tion out of per­sonal ani­mos­ity. “They hated John,” the F.B.I. coun­tert­er­ror­ism offi­cial assigned to Alec Sta­tion told me. “They knew that John would have marched in there and taken con­trol of that case.”

The C.I.A. may also have been pro­tect­ing an over­seas oper­a­tion and was afraid that the F.B.I. would expose it. More­over, Mihd­har and Hazmi could have seemed like attrac­tive recruit­ment possibilities—the C.I.A. was des­per­ate for a source inside Al Qaeda, hav­ing failed to pen­e­trate the inner cir­cle or even to place some­one in the train­ing camps, even though they were largely open to any­one who showed up. How­ever, once Mihd­har and Hazmi entered the United States they were the province of the F.B.I. The C.I.A. has no legal author­ity to oper­ate inside the country.

In the end, the C.I.A.’s fail­ure to inform the F.B.I. may be best explained by the fact that the agency was drown­ing in a flood of threats and warn­ings, and sim­ply did not see the piv­otal impor­tance of this intel­li­gence. What­ever the rea­son for the C.I.A.’s lapse, many F.B.I. inves­ti­ga­tors remain furi­ous that they were not informed of the pres­ence of Al Qaeda oper­a­tives inside Amer­ica. Mihd­har and Hazmi arrived twenty months before Sep­tem­ber 11th. Ken­neth Maxwell, Soufan’s for­mer super­vi­sor, told me, “Two Al Qaeda guys liv­ing in California—are you kid­ding me? We would have been on them like white on snow: phys­i­cal sur­veil­lance, elec­tronic sur­veil­lance, a spe­cial unit devoted entirely to them.” Of course, the F.B.I. had other oppor­tu­ni­ties to pre­vent Sep­tem­ber 11th. In July, 2001, an F.B.I. agent in Phoenix sug­gested inter­view­ing Arabs enrolled in Amer­i­can flight schools; a month later, the bureau’s Min­nesota office requested per­mis­sion to aggres­sively inves­ti­gate Zacarias Mous­saoui, who later con­fessed to being an Al Qaeda asso­ciate. Both pro­pos­als were rejected by F.B.I. super­vi­sors. But Mihd­har and Hazmi were directly involved in the Sep­tem­ber 11th con­spir­acy. Because of their con­nec­tion to bin Laden, who had a fed­eral indict­ment against him, the F.B.I. had all the author­ity it needed to use every inves­tiga­tive tech­nique to pen­e­trate and dis­rupt the Al Qaeda cell. Instead, the hijack­ers were free to develop their plot until it was too late to stop them.

In Yemen, the secu­rity sit­u­a­tion dete­ri­o­rated rapidly. Soufan and the other F.B.I. agents were quar­tered at the Aden Hotel, crammed in with other U.S. mil­i­tary and gov­ern­ment employ­ees, includ­ing Marine guards, and bil­leted three and four to a room; sev­eral dozen slept on bedrolls in the hotel ball­room. Gun­fire erupted out­side the hotel so fre­quently that the agents slept in their clothes, with their weapons at their sides. Agents learned from a mechanic in Aden that, after the bomb­ing, some men brought to his shop a truck sim­i­lar to the one used by the bombers; the men wanted to have metal plates installed in such a way that they could direct the force of an explo­sion. Cer­tainly, the most tempt­ing tar­get for such a bomb would be the Aden Hotel. It wasn’t clear that the Yemeni gov­ern­ment troops who were guard­ing the hotel with machine-gun nests would truly pro­tect the Amer­i­cans. “We were pris­on­ers,” an agent recalled.

One night, shots were fired on the street while O’Neill was run­ning a meet­ing inside the hotel. The marines and the hostage-rescue team adopted defen­sive posi­tions. Soufan ven­tured out, unarmed, to talk to the Yemeni troops.

“Hey, Ali!” O’Neill called out. “Be care­ful!” He raced down the steps of the hotel to make sure Soufan was wear­ing his flak jacket. Frus­tra­tion, stress, and dan­ger, along with the enforced inti­macy of their sit­u­a­tion, had brought the two men even closer. O’Neill had begun to describe Soufan as his “secret weapon.” Speak­ing to the Yeme­nis, he called him sim­ply “my son.”

Snipers cov­ered Soufan as he approached a Yemeni offi­cer, who assured him that every­thing was O.K.

“If every­thing is O.K., why are there no cars on the street?” Soufan asked.

The offi­cer said that there must be a wed­ding nearby. Soufan looked around and saw that the hotel was sur­rounded by a large num­ber of men in tra­di­tional dress-some in Jeeps, all car­ry­ing guns. They were civil­ians, not sol­diers. They could be intel­li­gence offi­cers, or a tribal group bent on revenge. In either case, they eas­ily out­num­bered the Amer­i­cans. Soufan was reminded of the 1993 upris­ing in Soma­lia, which ended with eigh­teen Amer­i­can sol­diers dead, and one of the bod­ies being dragged through the streets of Mogadishu. The hotel backed up to the har­bor, and the Amer­i­cans were essen­tially trapped.

After Soufan went inside and offered his assess­ment of the sit­u­a­tion, O’Neill ordered the marines to deploy two armored vehi­cles to block the street in front of the hotel. The night passed with­out fur­ther inci­dent, but the next day O’Neill moved the inves­ti­ga­tors to the U.S.S. Duluth, sta­tioned ten miles away, in the Bay of Aden. That proved to be a dan­ger­ous mis­take. The next morn­ing, when O’Neill and Soufan were fly­ing back to town, their heli­copter sud­denly lurched into vio­lent eva­sive maneu­vers. The pilot 1 reported that an SA-7 mis­sile had locked in on them. O’Neill decided to send most of the inves­ti­ga­tors home; those who remained returned to the deserted hotel. />
Just before Thanks­giv­ing, the F.B.I. pulled O’Neill out of Yemen, appar­ently as a con­ces­sion to Ambas­sador Bod­ine, who felt that the F.B.I. pres­ence was strain­ing diplo­matic rela­tions between Amer­ica and Yemen. Soufan stayed on, but the threats in Aden became so acute that he and the other agents moved to the Amer­i­can Embassy in Sanaa, Yemen’s cap­i­tal. The inves­ti­ga­tion was los­ing its momentum.

In the spring of 2001, Tom Wilshire, a C.I.A. liai­son at F.B.I. head­quar­ters, in Wash­ing­ton, was study­ing the rela­tion­ship between Khaled al-Mihdhar, the Saudi Al Qaeda oper­a­tive, and Khal­lad, the one-legged jihadi. Because of the sim­i­lar­ity of the names, the C.I.A. had thought that they might be the same per­son, but, thanks in part to AL Soufan’s inves­ti­ga­tions in Yemen, the agency now knew that they were not, and that Khal­lad had orches­trated the Cole attack. “O.K. This is impor­tant,” Wilshire said of Khal­lad, in an e-mail to his super­vi­sors at the C.I.A. Coun­tert­er­ror­ist Cen­ter. “This is a major-league killer.” Wilshire alr