Enemies: A History of the FBI

by Tim Weiner

  “A NATIONAL TREASURE”

  The first Americans to question Abu Zubaydah were two of the FBI’s eight Arabic-speaking agents: Steve Gaudin, a veteran of the Nairobi bombing, and Ali Soufan, who had led the Cole investigation in Yemen. Soufan was thirty years old, a native of Lebanon with a master’s degree in international relations from Villanova University, and he had joined the FBI on something of a whim in 1997. He had won fame within the closed world of American counterterrorism for his knowledge as an investigator and his finesse as an interrogator. Major General Michael Dunleavy, the military commander at Guantánamo, where Soufan conducted interrogations and won confessions, called him “a national treasure.”

  Soufan approached the wounded prisoner at the black site with a soft voice and a storehouse of foreknowledge. “I asked him his name,” Soufan later testified. “He replied with his alias. I then asked him: ‘How about if I call you Hani?’ That was the name his mother nicknamed him as a child. He looked at me in shock, said okay, and we started talking.”

  Within the course of two days, the prisoner identified a photograph of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the planner of the al-Qaeda attacks. It was the FBI’s biggest breakthrough to date. “Before this,” Soufan testified, “we had no idea of KSM’s role in 9/11 or his importance in the al Qaeda leadership structure.”

  The CIA officer at the black site relayed the report to his headquarters. The CIA’s director, George Tenet, was unhappy to learn that the FBI was leading the questioning. He ordered a CIA counterterrorism team to take over in Thailand. “We were removed,” Soufan said. “Harsh techniques were introduced”—at first, stripping the prisoner of his clothes and depriving him of sleep for forty-eight hours at a time—and “Abu Zubaydah shut down and stopped talking.” Then the FBI took over again. The prisoner revealed that he had run logistics and travel for al-Qaeda and gave up information that led to the May 8 arrest of Jose Padilla, a Chicago street-gang hoodlum who had converted to Islam in prison, consorted with al-Qaeda in Pakistan and Afghanistan, and had dreams of setting off a radioactive dirty bomb in Washington.

  The CIA falsely claimed credit for the arrest and wrested back control of the interrogation. Its officers blasted the prisoner with noise, froze him with cold, and buried him in a mock coffin. Soufan and Gaudin protested. The CIA officers told them the techniques had been approved at the highest levels of the American government.

  Soufan said he contacted FBI headquarters to report that he was witnessing “borderline torture.” He refused to take part. The Bureau’s counterterrorism chief, Pasquale D’Amuro, pulled both agents from Thailand around the end of May. But he did not raise the issue with Mueller for at least two months. The director learned about it after the line had been crossed.

  On August 1, the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel granted the CIA’s request to begin water-boarding Abu Zubaydah. The technique, tantamount to torture, was designed to elicit confessions through the threat of imminent death by drowning. That same day John Yoo, now a deputy to Attorney General Ashcroft, advised the White House that the laws against torture did not apply to American interrogators. The president, the vice president, the secretary of defense, and the director of Central Intelligence approved.

  The FBI did not. “We don’t do that,” D’Amuro said to Mueller some weeks later. D’Amuro had overseen the investigation and prosecution of the East Africa embassy bombings. He knew that terrorists would talk to the FBI. He also believed that prisoners would say anything to stop the torture, and that their inventions would send the FBI chasing phantoms. And he was convinced that the secret torture would come out one way or another: FBI agents would have to testify about it in court. Their credibility, and criminal cases against terrorists, would be destroyed if they took part in torture, or condoned it. He wanted to be able to say the FBI’s hands were clean.

  Both men understood that they might someday face their own interrogation, under television lights in a chamber of Congress, or in a courtroom under oath.

  Mueller was caught again between the rule of law and the requisites of secrecy. He agreed with D’Amuro in principle. But he also kept his silence. He put nothing in writing. The argument about whether the FBI could countenance torture went on.

  The CIA water-boarded Abu Zubaydah eighty-three times in August and kept him awake for a week or more on end. It did not work. A great deal of what the CIA reported from the black site turned out to be false. The prisoner was not bin Laden’s chief of operations. He was not a terrorist mastermind. He had told the FBI everything he knew. He told the CIA things he did not know.

  “You said things to make them stop, and those things were actually untrue, is that correct?” he was asked five years later in a tribunal at Guantánamo.

  “Yes,” he replied. “They told me, ‘Sorry, we discover that you are not Number Three, not a partner, not even a fighter.’ ”

  The techniques of torture continued in Afghanistan and Cuba, and FBI agents again bore witness.

  In mid-September Soufan talked to an al-Qaeda prisoner named Ramzi Binalshibh, who was chained naked to the floor in a CIA black prison at the Bagram air base outside Kabul. He said he was starting to obtain “valuable actionable intelligence” before CIA officers ordered him to stop talking forty-five minutes later. On September 17, they flew their prisoner to a second black site in Morocco, then on to Poland; under extreme duress he described plots to crash airplanes into Heathrow Airport and Canary Wharf in London. He was also diagnosed as a schizophrenic.

  Soufan went on to Guantánamo, one among more than four hundred FBI agents who served at the navy base over the course of the next two years. Half of them would report abuses by interrogators.

  Among the prisoners Soufan questioned was an al-Qaeda operative named Mohammed al-Qahtani, captured by Pakistani forces as he fled Afghanistan. The FBI had identified him with fingerprints as the twentieth hijacker, the one who never made his flight: arriving in the United States at the Orlando Airport, speaking no English, without a return ticket, he had been detained by customs and immigration agents, fingerprinted, photographed, and deported back to Dubai shortly before the attacks.

  Soufan tried to get al-Qahtani to talk over the course of a month at Guantánamo, where the prisoner was placed in the navy brig, in a freezing cell where the lights burned through the night. But Soufan could not break him with words.

  Army officers demanded “a piece of al-Qahtani” and “told the FBI to step aside” in October. They questioned him for twenty-hour stretches, leashed him and made him perform dog tricks, stripped him naked and paraded him, froze him to the point of hypothermia, wrapped him from the neck up in duct tape, confronted him with snarling dogs, and ordered him to pray to an idol shrine.

  By October 22, 2002, FBI agents at Guantánamo had started a running file that they later labeled “War Crimes.”

  An e-mail from Cuba, which circulated at the top of the Counterterrorism Division in November, alerted top officials to what the agents were seeing and hearing. “Those who employ these techniques may be indicted, prosecuted, and possibly convicted,” Spike Bowman, the chief of the FBI’s national security law unit, advised his colleagues at headquarters. “We can’t control what the military is doing,” he wrote. “But we need to stand well clear of it, and we need to get as much information as possible to … Mueller as soon as possible.”

  No one got the information to Mueller.

  The FBI agents at Guantánamo continued to report what their counterparts were doing. The gist of their reports went from the lawyers at the FBI to the highest levels of the Justice Department. But Mueller’s closest aides shielded him from an increasingly fierce battle—“ongoing, longstanding, trench warfare,” in the words of Ashcroft’s chief of staff—at Justice, the CIA, the Pentagon, and the White House. The argument over interrogation, intelligence, torture, and the law went on for more than a year.

  Ali Soufan resolved it in his own way. He left the FBI in 2005—a rare event in America
n government, a resignation of conscience over a matter of honor.

  “NO ONE WAS MORE SHOCKED”

  Mueller was embroiled in another ferocious argument over the rule of law and the role of the FBI as the interrogation fight festered. Vice President Cheney had wanted to send the American military to a Muslim enclave in Lackawanna, a dead-end upstate New York town by the Canadian border. The troops were going to seize six suspected al-Qaeda supporters—all of them Americans—charge them as enemy combatants, and send them to Guantánamo forever.

  The fear was that the suspects in Lackawanna were ticking time bombs, a sleeper cell of secret al-Qaeda agents in America. All had family roots in Yemen. All had traveled to Afghanistan. But Mueller convinced the White House to let the FBI round them up rather than sending in the army.

  The investigation had fused the powers of the FBI, the CIA, and the National Security Agency. They came together in a flash on a remote road in Yemen on November 3, 2002, when a Predator drone aircraft armed with a Hellfire missile destroyed a pickup truck carrying two wanted terrorists among its passengers. One was a member of al-Qaeda implicated in the bombing of the Cole; he had been traced by a combination of Soufan’s investigation, NSA data mining, and CIA surveillance. Another was Kamal Derwish, who had lived in Lackawanna, consorted with the arrested suspects, and counseled them to go to Afghanistan. He was the subject of a sealed indictment in the case. His sentence was final: the first American targeted and killed by Americans in the war on terror.

  As President Bush made the case for a wider war against Iraq in his State of the Union address on January 28, 2003, he called the six men in Lackawanna an al-Qaeda cell. The FBI would conclude that this was not true. No evidence ever surfaced that they had planned an attack. They were not sleeper agents. They were malleable young men who meekly cooperated with the government. They drew relatively light sentences of seven years. Three of them entered the federal witness protection program and testified on behalf of the United States at Guantánamo tribunals.

  The case set off an intense debate at headquarters that went on after the suspects pleaded guilty. If the FBI had been thinking like an intelligence service, it could have worked with one or more of the Lackawanna suspects to penetrate al-Qaeda in Afghanistan. Should the Bureau have recruited them as spies instead of arresting them?

  Mueller had no way to resolve such questions. The Bureau still had no capacity to use intelligence as a weapon of national security. It was consumed by reacting to the events of the day, the hour, and the minute. It could not see over the horizon. It was hard for Mueller and his deputies to see beyond the edges of their own desks. Mueller was trying to double the number of counterterrorism agents and intelligence analysts at the FBI, but the machinery ground with unbearable inertia.

  By the time the United States started the war against Iraq on March 19, 2003, Mueller and his new counterterrorism director, Larry Medford, the third man to hold the post in fourteen months, were being battered with hundreds of daily threat reports flowing out of the Middle East. They were blindsided by breakdowns in Mueller’s carefully cultivated arrangements with the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court over the FBI’s role in the secret Stellar Wind program. The White House had just ordered the Bureau to investigate the threat posed by tens of thousands of Iraqis living in the United States. The congressional 9/11 Commission was about to hold its first public hearings, and it seemed certain that the director would be called to account for the FBI’s failures, past and present. The pressures of the endlessly ringing telephones and the demands to stop the next attack and the wartime mentality commanded by the president were shattering for some agents. On April 29, after being awakened by a call at 4:30 A.M., the chief of the Counterterrorism Division’s Iran unit took his life with his own gun.

  On May 1, President Bush declared that major combat operations in Iraq were over and America’s mission had been accomplished. Mueller thought he might have a moment to breathe and think. He made a decision intended, in his words, at “transforming the Bureau into an intelligence agency.”

  Mueller created an Office of Intelligence at the FBI out of thin air and hired the chief of signals intelligence at the National Security Agency as its director. She was the most powerful woman in the American intelligence community. Almost no one at the FBI had ever heard of her.

  Maureen Baginski was a career NSA officer who had started out as a Russian analyst and risen to command authority. At the turn of the century, when the NSA found itself unable to keep pace with the explosion of encrypted information on the Internet, and the agency’s supercomputers sputtered and crashed, General Hayden had put Baginski in charge of fixing things. Her SIGINT directorate was the biggest single component of the United States espionage establishment; she commanded a budget that rivaled the FBI’s $4 billion and a workforce bigger than the FBI’s nearly eleven thousand agents. She also had run Stellar Wind since its inception.

  Mueller made her his right hand. She would be by his side at every crucial meeting. He gave her an office down the hall from his and told her to go to work. But at the start she had no staff and no money; it took her a year to assemble a staff of fifty, the size of a large marine platoon. And in that time she won little support from the field. She pushed her message out to the special agents in charge across America: they were now part of a twenty-first-century intelligence service. Every field office was to create and run its own intelligence group and report to headquarters on the threats they faced. They were dubious.

  Baginski almost instantly became known to the men of the FBI as the Vision Lady. She reported back to Mueller that it would take years to realize the transformation. They were in a marathon, she said, not a race for the swift or the short-winded.

  Mueller also moved to create a full-scale FBI field office in Baghdad. Before the war began, he had signed an order establishing the FBI’s role in Iraq as an intelligence mission intended to capture enemy leaders, exploit secret documents, and to uncover potential threats to the United States. The original plan was to send seventy agents at a time. More than 1,500 FBI agents, analysts, and evidence technicians would wind up working in Iraq.

  At first, life was good. The city was secure in May and June. Thousands of Iraqi intelligence files were stacked in American command posts. The FBI’s special agent in charge, serving on a three-month rotation, held rank equivalent to that of a three-star general. He had a desk in the bath house by the swimming pool at Saddam Hussein’s presidential palace, in the Green Zone held by American forces.

  Within weeks, the mission took a bad turn. The FBI was ordered to work with the interim interior minister of Iraq to rebuild law enforcement in the nation. The minister was Bernard Kerik, the New York police commissioner at the time of the 9/11 attacks and a long-standing friend to the Bureau. Money was no object for him. Bricks of shrink-wrapped hundred-dollar bills were available for everything from informant networks to computer systems.

  But Kerik left Baghdad after ninety days, on September 2, 2003, mission unaccomplished. The only things he left behind were 50,000 Glock pistols in a warehouse. Bush named him the new leader of the Department of Homeland Security; an FBI investigation derailed the nomination and led to Kerik’s indictment and imprisonment for fraud.

  The FBI’s training of the Iraqi police was interrupted by a series of immediate emergencies. Car bombs were going off everywhere. The FBI combed through the wreckage of the Jordanian embassy and the United Nations headquarters and the Red Cross in Baghdad. The American military had to call on the Bureau to collect evidence from a growing number of crime scenes—suicide attacks, roadside bombs, and sniper assaults on military checkpoints and police stations—as its control of the occupied city began to slip.

  Days after Kerik departed, the FBI’s agents were assigned to interrogate prisoners at Abu Ghraib, the biggest prison in Baghdad. They took thousands of fingerprints and conducted hundreds of interviews in the last three months of 2003. Agents were eager to find detainees w
ho had served as Iraqi intelligence officers or had traveled to the United States. But they were loath to work inside the chaotic main building at Abu Ghraib, preferring to talk to detainees in tents or trailers. Nor did they work at night, when the compound was mortared by insurgents. So they started to hear the rumors of the torture and the deaths inside the prison only in November and December 2003. Not until January 21, 2004, did they learn firsthand from an army captain that there were videotapes of beatings and rapes. A senior FBI agent in Baghdad, Edward Lueckenhoff, relayed the news to headquarters. It was the first time anyone in Washington had heard about the evidence that would surface more than three months later, tarnishing the honor of the United States around the world.

  Three of Mueller’s senior counterterrorism aides weighed the report and decided to do nothing. It was out of their jurisdiction and above their pay grades. They did not want to wreck the FBI’s relationships with the military and the CIA in Iraq. Something more important was about to happen. The FBI was about to get the first crack at High Value Detainee Number One.

  Saddam Hussein and George Piro sat down for the first of their twenty-five conversations inside the razor-wired walls of Camp Cropper, the American military’s brightly lit prison at the edge of Baghdad International Airport, shortly after 7:00 A.M. on February 7, 2004.

  Piro had started his career at the FBI looking for al-Qaeda in Phoenix, Arizona, five years before. He was now one among a dozen native Arabic-speakers at the Bureau, and on his second tour in Baghdad. He had been born and raised in Beirut, and his voice had a distinctive Lebanese lilt that Saddam liked. They were soon on a first-name basis.

  Piro was born around the time that Saddam first took power in Iraq. He was thirty-four years old, a tall, thin man with a bright-eyed intensity. He had been a police officer in Turlock, California, a town one hundred miles east of San Francisco, a home for decades to a community of Assyrian Christians from the Middle East. His parents had moved there in 1982, when he was twelve, to escape the war tearing through Beirut.