Ali Soufan is a U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation special agent. He was the lead interrogator of Abu Zubaydah following the detainee’s March 2002 capture by a Central Intelligence Agency team led by John Kiriakou in Pakistan.[1][2]
The respectful-interrogation case
In the early months of Abu Zubaydah’s detention — before the CIA’s later assumption of primacy and the parallel deployment of enhanced interrogation techniques — Soufan was assigned to the case under the rationale that the September 11 attacks remained an open criminal investigation, in which the FBI rather than the CIA had primacy. Soufan operated using standard Bureau interrogation craft developed since the 1945–46 Nuremberg trials: rapport-building, repeated low-stakes engagement, small rewards (a cup of coffee, an orange, permission to write a letter to the detainee’s mother).[1][2]
Abu Zubaydah gave Soufan the silent treatment for weeks. He then began to talk.
The al-Qaeda cell-structure intelligence
The first of two operationally consequential disclosures: Soufan asked Abu Zubaydah how an al-Qaeda operation in a specific city — Dusseldorf — 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; the German cell was dismantled.[3][4]
The Khalid Sheikh Mohammed identity reveal
The second and 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.[5][6]
Termination by CIA primacy
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. FBI Director Robert Mueller — per Kiriakou, anticipating what would follow — withdrew not only FBI personnel from the secret site but FBI personnel from the country in which the secret site was located. Within twelve hours the CIA began torturing Abu Zubaydah; Abu Zubaydah went silent and remained silent until the FBI later resumed primacy after agency techniques had failed to produce intelligence.[6][7][8]
Kiriakou’s assessment
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.[1]