The Egyptian’s cover story was uninspiring. He was forty years old. Fleeing Lebanon’s civil war in 1985, he had received asylum in Germany. He lived in the town of Neu-Ulm in Bavaria. He had four children. He was a car dealer. Asked about his reasons for entering Macedonia, the Egyptian concocted a sob story. He had fallen upon hard times, he said. Since losing his job a few months ago, he’d been unemployed. His family, broke and living in a single-room flat, was under intense pressure. There had been fireworks. Following an argument with his wife, he had fled the apartment and, on impulse, booked a bus ticket to Macedonia – where he’d heard the hotels were cheap. He was trying to get his head together.
To the immigration officer, it was a mundane story: exactly the kind of mundane story, in fact, that a terrorist might concoct to tug at the heartstrings of a gullible border official. It was highly unlikely that any of it was true. But then, who could tell? Perhaps even al-Qaeda masterminds had marital problems.
What made The Egyptian’s apprehension so impressive was that at the time of his arrest neither his identity nor his story were well known. They still aren’t. To this day, virtually nothing is known about him. The few details that have emerged, however, are distinctly sinister. They revolve around his relationship to a group of idealistic college students in Hamburg.
In the winter of 1998, three young men from Egypt, Yemen and the United Arab Emirates rented an apartment at Marienstrasse 54. Outwardly, they were quiet and law abiding; perfect tenants, in fact. Actually, they were plotting. Enraged at Russia’s mistreatment of Muslims in Chechnya, they had decided to travel there themselves, to fight. The only question was, how to go about it? They had little experience of this kind of thing: they were, after all, only students. Then, in November the following year, a chance encounter changed things.
Travelling on a German train, two of the students were approached by a stranger. The man had noticed their impressive-looking beards, deduced they were Muslim boys and decided to strike up a conversation. Almost immediately the talk turned to Chechnya. Engaged on their favourite topic, the two men told their new friend that they planned to go there and fight the Russians. The stranger commented that this was most commendable, and that he had a friend who might be able to offer them some advice. He gave them his phone number and told them that if they were interested he could arrange a meeting, then vanished.
When the students returned to Hamburg, they told their friends about the conversation, decided the offer seemed genuine and rang the stranger, who in turn passed on the telephone number of his contact, a Mauritanian businessman called Abu Musab. The friends soon found themselves travelling to Musab’s home in Duisberg where, without warning, the Mauritanian began to demolish their plans.
Fighting in Chechnya, he told them, was an extremely bad idea: not only had the Russians closed the borders, making access almost impossible, but, even if they did get through, they had no military experience. What did they hope to achieve? Musab suggested an alternative. If they really wanted to fight, they should fly to Karachi in Pakistan, then travel on to Quetta, where they should report to the office of the Taliban and ask for a friend of his, Umar al Masri.
Later that month, four students from Marienstrasse did just this and found themselves down a rabbit hole. In Quetta, they learned there was no such person as Umar al Masri. The name appeared to be some sort of a code. If the four students didn’t understand it at the time, however, their Taliban hosts did, ushering them across the border into Afghanistan and on to Kandahar, where they were introduced to the real goal of their journey: a tall, bearded individual known as the Sheikh.
By the time the four friends returned to Germany in the spring of 2000, the Chechnya trip had been shelved. They had bigger plans. Soon, the Marienstrasse apartment was humming with activity. German intelligence monitored it from time to time, but because the students’ records were clean there was no indication they might be a threat. None of their names rang alarm bells. That would change.
Ramzi Binalshibh would later be refused a US visa, but Marwan al Shehhi would make it into the country to fly United Airlines 175 into the south tower of the World Trade Center. Ziad Jarra would also make it through, to crash United Airlines 93 into a field in Pennsylvania. Mohammed Atta, who would lead the plot, started the attack, ramming American Airlines Flight 11 into the World Trade Center’s north tower.
And the man who had started the ball rolling, the stranger on the German train who had passed on his phone number and introduced them to the Mauritanian, was Khaled el Masri: ‘The Egyptian’.
At the Macedonian border post, The Egyptian’s interrogator was replaced by a young man in his thirties. He was not a border guard. He was an officer in the Macedonian security and counter-intelligence service, the UBK. His questions were more direct.
Specifically, he was interested in whether The Egyptian belonged to any Islamic organizations in Germany. Apparently he didn’t. What about mosques? Were there any mosques in Neu-Ulm? The Egyptian conceded that he occasionally visited the local mosque, that he prayed and fasted ‘sometimes’, but that he had no real contact with Islamic organizations in Germany. When the officer named a few radical German groups, The Egyptian admitted he had heard of them, but pointed out that they were quite famous: lots of people had. Perhaps to test his adherence to Islam, the man offered him a drink. It was New Year’s Eve. Would he like some champagne? The Egyptian said that he wouldn’t.
At 10 p.m., a group of plain-clothes officers carrying side arms led the suspect out of the office and walked him towards three vehicles, none of which carried licence plates. The three-car convoy took off in the direction of Skopje. It was late, cold and foggy and the road was deserted. When the motorcade reached a military checkpoint, the lead car turned on a blue flashing light; they all sailed through without incident.
In Skopje, the cars pulled up in front of a family-run tourist hotel, the Skopski Merak, just opposite the city zoo. The Egyptian was led out of the car by three officers, into the hotel and straight into the elevator. On the top floor he was ushered into a nondescript suite containing a double bed, a table and four chairs and an en suite bathroom with a Jacuzzi feature in the bath. Still unaware that his identity had been rumbled, at this point he thanked the men for the lift and bade them goodbye. The officers exchanged glances. One of them then locked the door from the inside.
‘We’re staying here,’ they told him. ‘With you.’
The Egyptian appeared taken aback. He wanted to sleep, he told his captors. He was tired. Fine, they said: go ahead – but they weren’t about to leave him alone.
‘Am I under arrest?’ he asked one of the officers.
The man shook his head. ‘Do you see any handcuffs?’
Then the men began to interrogate him again, more aggressively this time, in English. Who did he know in Neu-Ulm? What mosques did he visit? Who had he seen there? The officers interrupted each other, firing questions from different angles simultaneously in an attempt to confuse the al-Qaeda man.
In the meantime, the phone lines were buzzing.
News of the Macedonian intelligence service’s coup was passed on to the United States immediately via the CIA’s station in Skopje. A suspect had been apprehended, the Macedonians informed their allies, attempting to travel on a fake passport. When his name had been run through their databases, alarm bells had rung. They’d nabbed Khaled el Masri, ‘The Egyptian’. They were interrogating him right now.
Inside the Agency’s Langley headquarters, the news was greeted with jubilation. The chief of the al-Qaeda Unit especially was delighted: if this Khaled el Masri really was The Egyptian, one of the key links in the 9/11 plot had been broken.
‘We got him!’ she told her colleagues.
‘She briefed all of us on the case,’ recalls one Counter-Terrorism Center officer. ‘It was a big counter-terrorism capture.’
The Macedonians were instructed to keep The Egyptian in custody while the CIA worked out what to do next. As
it happened, the Agency had a few ideas. One, in particular, seemed suitable.
* * *
The programme had emerged a number of years earlier, the result of an offhand comment from President Bill Clinton. In the late 1990s, frustrated by the inability of the intelligence community to do anything about the threat of Bin Laden in Afghanistan, the President had voiced a suggestion to General Hugh Shelton, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.
‘You know,’ Clinton thought aloud, ‘it would scare the shit out of al-Qaeda if suddenly a bunch of black ninjas rappelled out of helicopters into the middle of their camp.’
Shelton had agreed. But the problem, as both men knew, lay in getting to al-Qaeda. Few of Afghanistan’s neighbours were likely to allow the US to station a squad of‘black ninjas’ intent on assassinating someone in their country. In the aftermath of al-Qaeda operations against US embassies in Africa in 1998, the President had repeatedly pushed for suggestions regarding a workable plan. Cruise missiles had proved ineffective; SPECTRE gunships were too violent. What else was there?
Various schemes were hatched to enable the United States to monitor al-Qaeda with a view to eliminating its leaders, assembled under the codename Afghan Eyes. One plan was to mount a vast telescope on top of a mountain near Bin Laden’s training camps, but this was deemed impractical: in any event, the idea was superseded by technological advances, the most promising of which was the development of the Predator Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV). Piloted by remote control and capable of circling over a potential target for hours on end, the Predator enabled operators to monitor events on the ground in real-time.
In June 2000, a plan to launch Predators out of neighbouring Uzbekistan was approved. By July, testing was complete and on 7 September a Predator flew over Afghanistan for the first time, capturing images of a tall Arab in white robes surrounded by a security detail at Tarnak Farm, a known al-Qaeda training camp. A second sighting three weeks later led CIA analysts to conclude that the man was none other than Bin Laden himself. Those involved with the programme were hopeful: once the Predator was armed with missiles, it would offer a real opportunity to get rid of the al-Qaeda leader without risking the lives of US personnel.
Then the operation hit a bureaucratic wall. The CIA and the Department of Defense could not agree on who should foot the bill. Predators cost $3 million each. What would happen if one was shot down or crashed? Then there was the issue of who, exactly, should pull the trigger on the Predator if it happened to stumble on Bin Laden again. Was the Air Force allowed to take out a terrorist in cold blood during peacetime? The CIA wasn’t. The only person who did have the authority to make this kind of decision was the President, but by the time news reached his desk it would almost certainly be too late: either the Predator would have run out of fuel or its target would have left.
With the US intelligence community unable to resolve these issues, the Afghan Predator was grounded after just fifteen flights.
Those involved in the hunt for al-Qaeda were extremely frustrated. Why was the United States having such a hard time bringing terrorists to justice? The CIA could see these guys, but was apparently powerless to act. How long was it necessary to wait before someone would actually do something? Out of this frustration emerged a rather different programme: maybe they couldn’t extradite these guys and they couldn’t kill them, but what if they simply snatched them, then flew them around the world and dumped them in court to face justice? Black ninjas or no, Clinton had been right: it would scare the shit out of al-Qaeda. Rendition to Justice – the kidnapping and transportation of terrorists across international borders – was born.
Actually, something similar had been in operation for more than a decade. In 1986, Ronald Reagan had signed National Security Directive 207, launching a secret programme that enabled the CIA to snatch terror suspects from nations either unable or unwilling to extradite them. George Bush Snr had reauthorized the programme in 1993. So had Clinton in 1995. Three years later, following his ‘black ninjas’ remark, the President signed Directive 62, detailing further instructions on ‘apprehension, extradition, rendition and prosecution’.
In the context of preventing future attacks, rendition not only made sense, it worked. Ramzi Yousef the al-Qaeda operative who had bombed the World Trade Center in 1993, was taken from Pakistan to the United States where he was prosecuted; Carlos the Jackal was taken from Sudan to France, where he was convicted. To the CIA’s Michael Scheuer, who ran the programme for four years, Clinton’s 1995 decision had been a no-brainer: it was just an extension of a decision that had already been made.
‘The rendition operations they did before us,’ he says, ‘were basically extradition that was done by force.’
During the period before 9/11, the CIA conducted more than eighty renditions. Half of all targets were al-Qaeda members.
‘These renditions have shattered terrorist cells and networks,’ Director of Central Intelligence George Tenet announced in February 2000, ‘thwarted terrorist plans and in some cases even prevented terrorist attacks from occurring.’
Post-9/11, the operation changed. After 11 September, the occasional snatching of terror suspects was not enough. On 15 September, in a War Cabinet meeting at Camp David, Tenet presented President Bush with a draft Memorandum of Notification demanding more powers for the CIA. The DCI requested ‘exceptional’ authority to target al-Qaeda worldwide; covert operations, including rendition and the use of deadly force could be deployed without Presidential approval. Essentially, the draft memorandum was a rewriting of Reagan’s 1986 Directive, but it went a great deal further: according to Tenet, he was requesting ‘as many authorities as CIA had ever had’.
George W. Bush was delighted. ‘Great job!’ he told him.
Two days later, he signed the document, handing the Agency ‘the broadest and most lethal authority in its history’. Tenet went back to his office and wrote a memorandum to CIA staff. ‘There can be no bureaucratic impediments to success,’ he wrote. ‘The rules have changed.’
One of the first programmes to benefit was Rendition. ‘The Agency had a programme that was at that point six years old and very successful,’ says Scheuer, ‘so the President asked us at that point to step that up.’
The programme was indeed stepped up. It was also revised. Immediately after 9/11, ‘bureaucratic impediments to success’ were excised: ‘Rendition’ became ‘Extraordinary Rendition’. As The Egyptian was about to discover, there was an important difference.
In the Skopski Merak, a revolving team of nine UBK officers monitored The Egyptian twenty-four hours a day. When he slept, they watched; when he used the lavatory, they watched. After three days of this treatment, the al-Qaeda man became belligerent, demanding to speak to someone from the German embassy, a lawyer, his wife, anybody. When the officers refused, he attempted to escape. Two of the intelligence officers grabbed their pistol holsters. The third drew his weapon and pointed it at the suspect’s face.
‘Call the German embassy!’ The Egyptian shouted. ‘I’m a German citizen!’
The intelligence officer recognized a stalling tactic when he heard one. It wasn’t going to work. ‘They don’t want to talk to you,’ he said.
A week into The Egyptian’s incarceration, a new, more senior, character appeared. Middle-aged and portly in stature, he came with an assistant in tow. He appeared to be playing the good cop, asking the prisoner if he was being well treated and if the food was OK: if it wasn’t, he said, he could arrange a take-out from any restaurant in Skopje. The Egyptian told him that his treatment had been perfectly adequate, but that he wanted to go home.
Perfectly understandable, the officer agreed: he wanted the situation to end, too. Unfortunately, that was quite impossible. Intelligence regarding the al-Qaeda man was mounting. His passport was a fake. Witnesses had reported seeing him in Jalalabad, Afghanistan. One of them was being debriefed by Macedonian intelligence at this very moment. The best thing to do, the intelligence officer advise
d, was to concede that the game was up. A deal might be possible.
For the first time, The Egyptian became curious: ‘What kind of a deal?’
The officer told him that if he signed a document confessing to belonging to al-Qaeda he would be transferred back to Germany. When the prisoner became belligerent and refused, he shrugged his shoulders and left.
A couple of days later, the assistant returned. Things didn’t look good, he warned The Egyptian. UBK knew that he was a member of al-Qaeda. He was wanted by the governments of both Germany and Egypt. The assistant showed him a long list of accusations. The only option was to confess. When The Egyptian shook his head, the assistant told him that the matter was now out of the hands of the Macedonian intelligence service. It had been passed to the country’s president, who would decide what would become of him.
Macedonian officials knew that in such situations al-Qaeda operatives were instructed to exert pressure on their captors. Having been held in the Skopski Merak for thirteen days, The Egyptian went on hunger strike. The suspect appeared to have stamina, eating and drinking nothing for a week. Not that this bothered the Macedonians: clearly the strike was a gesture. Besides, they knew something he didn’t. They were about to get rid of their troublesome guest.
On 23 January 2004, after ten days without food, The Egyptian was told that he had won. He would be transferred back to Germany. At around 8 p.m., he was instructed to stand up and a video camera was produced. He was told to address the camera, to state his full name and to testify that he had been well treated during his time in Macedonia. After that, he would be transferred to the airport.
The Egyptian was taken downstairs and marched through the hotel lobby, where a number of plain-clothes intelligence officers were loitering. A white minivan and a black jeep were outside, engines running: his ride to the airport. Then suddenly, the situation took an unexpected turn. As the al-Qaeda man walked from the lobby into the open air, he was grabbed from behind. Two men pulled his arms behind his back. A third handcuffed and blindfolded him. He was stuffed into the back of the jeep.
A History of the World Since 9/11 Page 22