In time Qahtani succumbed to this pressure, however it is defined, and dropped his falconry story and began describing his work with al Qaeda in detail. One of the many names he mentioned as part of bin Laden’s inner circle was this same Abu Ahmed al-Kuwaiti. He did not know the man’s real name, but said he was not only alive and well but had worked closely with Khalid Sheik Mohammed, al Qaeda’s Number Three, and had given Qahtani some preliminary computer instruction at an Internet café in Karachi, showing him how to communicate with the group’s leaders once he was in America. As Peter Bergen reported in his excellent account, Manhunt, Qahtani was taught to compose a letter on an e-mail account, and then store it as a draft instead of sending it. His colleagues, armed with a password to the same account, could then log in and retrieve the draft e-mail without it ever having been sent, presumably avoiding America’s watchful eye. Qahtani would also describe Ahmed the Kuwaiti as a “courier.”
So now the name had come up twice, from two different men in two different countries, separated by more than a year. No one was yet paying attention to it. Many of the early detainee interrogations were not widely distributed, even within the agency—the importance of the single, enormous database would rise only when the software to exploit it appeared in a few years. In the early years of the hunt, even with dozens of analysts working full time, even with President Bush’s list in the drawer of his desk in the Oval Office and his constant prods of “How are we doing?,” and even with the help of the computers, it was nearly impossible to keep up with the flood of tips and “Elvis sightings.” There was a $25 million reward offered by the State Department for information leading to bin Laden, and an additional $2 million put up by an airline trade association and the pilots union, so passing along a tip was like buying a lottery ticket: you can’t win if you don’t play. Tall, slender, olive-skinned Arab men were seen on every continent. The analysts did not have high expectations for any of these leads, but given the national priority assigned to the task, every single one had to be taken seriously. It was a powerful time suck.
In that context, a detail offered up under duress by Qahtani, one that would later prove key, was years away from being recognized as significant. Qahtani himself was not that big a deal. He was a foot soldier, one of thousands rounded up in Afghanistan as they fled across the border. All of them were questioned, and their answers were all swept into the growing database. Qahtani merited more attention than most, though. He was an Arab fighter, after all, and, unlike most detainees, he had been a member of al Qaeda. He had fought at Tora Bora and had tried to enter the United States shortly before the attacks, and if he had not been turned away he might have played a role in them himself. But he was still just muscle, a foot soldier. There was no reason to believe he could point out the location of Osama bin Laden. His mention of this Ahmed the Kuwaiti was noted. The supposed “courier” had helped prepare Qahtani for the 9/11 mission and apparently had worked closely with Khalid Sheik Mohammed, so he was potentially significant. But it was still just a fake name. Whoever the Kuwaiti was, by 2003 his pseudonym remained just another drop of intel in what was fast becoming an ocean of data.
Then Khalid Sheik Mohammed himself was arrested in Pakistan just a few months after Qahtani started talking. This dark, burly, hairy man was easily the most important al Qaeda figure ever apprehended—the terror group’s Number Three, its operations director and the primary architect of 9/11. His arrest stirred a great deal of excitement. Here was someone who could provide a map of the entire organization, possibly cough up the hideouts of bin Laden and al-Zawahiri, or at least lead them closer, and perhaps reveal ongoing plots before they matured into new incidents of mass murder. Khalid Sheik Mohammed got the full treatment. He was interrogated aggressively by both Pakistani and American forces. In between 183 waterboardings at a secret CIA interrogation center in Poland, he was asked about many, many names. One among the many was Ahmed the Kuwaiti. And in addition to the volumes of information Khalid Sheik Mohammed provided—some of it true, some of it false—he acknowledged that such a character existed, but said the man was unimportant and had retired from al Qaeda years earlier.
So it was not as if the teams of analysts at the CIA were now, in 2003, looking at this fellow called “the Kuwaiti” as an important lead. But having been thrice acknowledged, albeit thrice acknowledged under torture, the prospect of his being fiction—someone made up by a detainee spinning stories—became less likely. He existed, or had existed. He may have been dead but was probably still alive. He may even have been, or might be, a member of bin Laden’s inner circle—perhaps even a courier. Even so, the name wasn’t a real name, and it was one of a multitude. It was not yet a lead, because to know so little doesn’t lead or point anywhere.
The teams looking into the matter were smart, dedicated, and possessed the agency’s studied, nondescript style. They were members of a kind of university of analysis, working under the direction of Michael Morell. When the effort settled into a routine, there were more than twenty analysts, men and women. There were more women than usual for this kind of job, partly because the CIA had undertaken to achieve a better balance of gender, but also partly because women were considered especially good at this kind of patient detail work and had a reputation for being sensitive to subtleties that eluded many men—the same insight that had guided Scheuer’s staffing of ALEC Station. The teams tended to be on the youthful side of middle age, and the analysts had the look of people who commute to a job in a cubicle and spend long working hours before a computer screen or in meetings. They got a chuckle out of the depiction of CIA agents in books and movies—jumping from airplanes, leaping from rooftops, speeding through European capitals in sports cars under fire. They were mostly bookish sorts, but seemed less like academics than like accountants or junior business executives. Indeed, that’s probably what they would tell you they did for a living if you asked. Ego and eccentricity were suppressed, sublimated by the clandestine nature of the job.
The Elvis sightings had slowed and then pretty much stopped by 2004. Bin Laden seemed lost. The teams turned more attention to sorting through the accumulated data—sorting it, devising ways to improve how they attacked it. There was his family, his huge family, with a dizzying number of kin and in-laws, any one of whom might become a conduit for a message to his mother (bin Laden had always been very close to her, a point of potential weakness). As the head of al Qaeda, he was known to be sending and receiving messages constantly. People were supplying him with food, medicine, and information… what methods did he use? And those video and audio statements? Who in his inner circle was known to make such recordings? The recordings were scrutinized with great care. What kind of wallpaper is that behind him? What sort of plants are in the room? What is he wearing? Analysts were far more interested in the trappings of bin Laden’s statements than in anything he had to say. Why, if he was living in a cave in the wilds, were his robes so clean? There was a “media” team that focused on clues like that. And who delivered these offerings to Al Jazeera and other outlets? That was the job of the courier team. The agency got to where it could track the chain of couriers back to Number Three—it was Khalid Sheik Mohammed and then his replacement, a Libyan, Mustafa al-’Uzayti, who went by the nickname Abu Faraj al-Libi—but there the trail always went cold.
In January 2004, Kurdish police arrested Hassan Ghul, a known al Qaeda figure, trying to enter Iraq with money and bomb-making schematics. He was carrying a letter from bin Laden to Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the murderous leader of al Qaeda in Iraq, the local franchise that was just beginning its bloody campaign against Americans and the Iraqi citizenry. During Ghul’s interrogation the name Abu Ahmed al-Kuwaiti surfaced once more; Ghul described him as an important courier, one of the Sheik’s most trusted aides. There were now four mentions of this mystery man, who was looking more and more real. But who was he? What sort of person would he be? The most valuable sort in such a role, if bin Laden were hiding in Pakistan, would be someone fluent in both Pashto and Arabic. Did the Kuwaiti fit that profile? If so, how do you track a nickname?