Ali Soufan
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Ali Soufan is a former special agent of the Federal Bureau of Investigation. He led the interrogation of Abu Zubaydah after the detainee’s March 2002 capture by a Central Intelligence Agency team in Pakistan. Soufan’s rapport‑building approach, relying on modest comforts such as coffee and fruit, contrasted sharply with the later CIA‑directed use of enhanced interrogation techniques and produced intelligence that reshaped the United States’ understanding of al‑Qaeda’s operational structure.

Early FBI lead and rapport‑building interrogation

In the early months of Abu Zubaydah’s detention,before the CIA assumed primacy and deployed enhanced interrogation techniques,the FBI retained lead responsibility for the case, arguing that the September 11 attacks remained an open criminal investigation in which the Bureau, not the CIA, held primacy, a claim of jurisdiction the FBI maintained even inside the CIA's own secret prison. It was on that basis that the FBI assigned Soufan, an ethnic Egyptian Kiriakou calls "a great guy" and a skilled interrogator, to the case. Soufan applied standard FBI interrogation craft developed since the 1945,46 Nuremberg trials, emphasizing rapport‑building, repeated low‑stakes engagement, and small rewards such as a cup of coffee, an orange, and permission to write a letter to the detainee’s mother.

Abu Zubaydah gave Soufan the silent treatment for weeks before beginning to talk. Soufan’s method relied on minimal material incentives. "having been given nothing more than a piece of fruit, a cup of tea, a cigarette, and a piece of paper and a pen to write to his mother, [Abu Zubaydah] just opened up and gave Ali everything that he asked for." The inventory varies slightly between tellings, a piece of fruit here, an orange elsewhere, and in a 2026 account "some dates", but the structure does not, and Kiriakou uses it there as the whole of the prosecution case against the enhanced interrogation programme: "the only actionable intelligence that was ever collected was collected by the FBI."

Intelligence breakthroughs and the identification of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed

The intelligence obtained included an al‑Qaeda organizational wiring diagram below the level of Osama bin Laden and Ayman al‑Zawahiri,information the CIA had not previously possessed,as well as a general modus operandi for planning attacks. Working from hypothetical scenarios posed by Soufan, Abu Zubaydah named specific operatives, locations, and resources, providing allied foreign intelligence services with actionable leads.

Soufan asked Abu Zubaydah how an al‑Qaeda operation in a specific city,Düsseldorf,would be assembled. Abu Zubaydah described, by name and phone number, the local al‑Qaeda member, the cousin with weapons access, the email contact, and the explosives supplier the cousin met at a coffee shop. The information was conveyed to the German intelligence service, leading to the dismantling of the German cell.

The second, more historically consequential disclosure was the unmasking of "Mukhtar",the pseudonym under which the CIA had since 1996 attributed planning of the Bojinka plot but to whom no name had been attached. Per Kiriakou’s account of Soufan’s recollection:

> Abu Zubaydah laughed at us and said, 'You don't know who Mukhtar is.' And Ali said, 'No.' And Abu Zubaydah said, 'His name is Khalid Sheikh Mohammed.' That's the first time we ever heard that name. We didn't have any documents in any files that were about any guy named Khalid Sheikh Mohammed. But that was the very first time we were able to piece it all together.

Most significantly, Abu Zubaydah identified the true name of the figure known to the CIA only by the alias Mukhtar,a man Kiriakou described as extremely dangerous and responsible for planning the Bojinka plot. The revelation that Mukhtar was Khalid Sheikh Mohammed provided the CIA with a critical link to the mastermind of the September 11 attacks.

Before the capture: the Cole bombing and the Malaysia meeting

Kiriakou describes Soufan, prior to Abu Zubaydah's capture, as the right-hand man of FBI counterterrorism chief John O'Neill, working the USS Cole bombing investigation in Yemen at the time of the September 11 attacks. When Soufan was shown CIA material after 9/11, he realized that a "Malaysia meeting" the CIA had been tracking connected both the Cole bombing and the 9/11 plot, and that the CIA had known about the connection and not told the FBI.

The FBI's reliance on Soufan also exposed a structural weakness Kiriakou says both agencies shared: a severe shortage of Arabic speakers. The Bureau treated its linguists as second-class citizens, capping non-agent translators at the GS-12 pay grade no matter their value, even as Soufan was interrogating the most important high-value detainee the United States had captured to that point. Kiriakou says this pay disparity, in which agents with no Arabic could out-rank the interrogator producing the intelligence, is why Soufan eventually left the FBI to start his own firm.

Transfer of primacy and CIA‑directed enhanced interrogation

On August 1, 2002, George Tenet requested and received from President George W. Bush a transfer of primacy in the Abu Zubaydah case from the FBI to the CIA. Robert Mueller, anticipating what would follow, withdrew not only FBI personnel from the secret site but also from the country in which the site was located. Within twelve hours the CIA began torturing Abu Zubaydah; he went silent and remained silent until the FBI later resumed primacy after agency techniques had failed to produce intelligence.

Assessment and legacy

"It's like a kick in my gut to have to compliment the FBI. But if there's one thing that the FBI is really good at, it's interrogations. They've been doing interrogations effectively since the Nuremberg trials in '45 and '46. These guys know what they're doing."

Soufan’s interrogation of Abu Zubaydah is described as among the most productive intelligence operations known, with the results attributed entirely to his relationship‑based approach. The intelligence gathered reshaped the United States’ understanding of al‑Qaeda’s hierarchy, operational planning, and the identity of its senior leadership.

Rapport versus torture

John Kiriakou, who says he hates the FBI but that no one interrogates better, credits Ali Soufan, an Arabic-fluent FBI agent, with getting Abu Zubaydah to open up through rapport: coffee, an orange, a cigarette, paper to write his parents. After the CIA's torture drove Abu Zubaydah silent, Kiriakou says it took Soufan more than a month to get him talking again.

The contrast Kiriakou draws

Kiriakou uses Soufan as the standing counter-example to the enhanced interrogation programme. Torture, he says, almost always produces information, but not necessarily truthful or useful information, and it forces escalation to a higher level of coercion the next time; psychological technique and relationship-building get further faster, and that is not a close call.

After Abu Zubaydah recovered from his gunshot wounds at the secret prison he was interrogated by Soufan, whom Kiriakou calls a master of interrogations. Soufan treated him with respect, a cup of tea, an orange, later a sheet of paper and a pen to write to his parents, and built rapport to the point where Abu Zubaydah trusted him and volunteered actionable intelligence that saved American lives. "That's the way to do it." Whatever the FBI may be criticised for, Kiriakou's judgement is that interrogation is the one thing it is genuinely good at.

Identifying Mukhtar

Kiriakou's standing example of what rapport produced is the unmasking of Mukhtar. The name had first surfaced in the mid-1990s in connection with the Bojinka plot, a scheme by a then-unheard-of group called al-Qaeda to hijack six Boeing 747s leaving Manila and crash them into the sea, and for years the agency knew only that "there was this bad man out there named Mukhtar."

It was Abu Zubaydah who said that Mukhtar was Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, a name the agency had never heard before, and which turned out to belong to the mastermind of the September 11 attacks. Kiriakou attributes it squarely to method: Soufan "was able to draw that information out of Abu Zubaydah by treating him with respect and by engaging him in a conversation."

He is blunt about the comparison. Soufan was doing "a masterful job at rapport building", "believe me, it kills me to compliment the FBI, but they were actually quite good", and he "was the only one who was able to get the results. Torture or no torture."

Soufan reported what he had seen to the inspector general on returning to FBI headquarters, calling it a war crime, and was told the programme had been approved at higher levels. He testified about it, Kiriakou believes to the Senate Armed Services Committee in 2008, and though the CIA forced heavy redactions, "much of it made its way into the public record."

Why the FBI was removed

Kiriakou attributes the handover to institutional jealousy rather than performance. The FBI had the lead because the September 11 attacks were still an open criminal investigation and because the Bureau was "highly skilled in these kinds of interrogations", work he dates back to "the Nuremberg trials in 1946." The CIA, "because it was so angry and upset" at being second, sent George Tenet to George W. Bush to insist on primacy.

Kiriakou's verdict on what followed is unqualified: "President Bush made a terrible mistake and agreed to pull out Ali Soufan and the rest of the FBI contingent and to allow the CIA to take over. The FBI didn't believe in torture, and the CIA did. They brought in the torturers."

The Düsseldorf example

Asked what the al-Qaeda wiring diagram actually amounted to, Kiriakou answers with the question Soufan put to Abu Zubaydah: "If you were going to do an operation in Düsseldorf, how would you do that?"

> "And Abu Zubaydah responded that, 'Well, there's this guy Muhammad and he's at this address and Muhammad is good at organization and he has a friend Ahmed and here's Ahmed's phone number and Ahmed has access to weapons and there's another guy Abdurrahman. He's Ahmed's cousin. He has access to explosives.' So then we could call the Germans and say, 'Listen, you have a problem in Düsseldorf and here's the information.' And they could wrap up that cell."

The value of it, he says, was not confirmation but leads: "we didn't know that these cells existed. We suspected that they did, but we didn't have definitive information, and especially lead information, as to how to locate and capture them." The rapport that produced it took about six weeks and consisted, in his description, of nothing more technical than "a normal human-to-human conversation."

See also

- Abu Zubaydah
- Bojinka plot
- Enhanced interrogation techniques
- George Tenet
