I called Matt Purdy at the Times from a pay phone, as I wasn’t sure if my mobile and home phones were being monitored. I told him what my source had said.
This changed things. My editors said that from now on I would be working on the story with a London-based colleague, Don Van Natta. I called el-Masri and asked for the phone number of his lawyer, Manfred Gnjidic. Gnjidic was a German of Croatian descent who had practiced immigration law and represented people accused of belonging to terrorist groups; he had been involved in other cases linked to the mosque in Neu-Ulm. He told me he’d sent letters to the Ministries of Interior and Justice, to the chief of staff of the chancellery, and to Chancellor Gerhard Schr?der and that he had filed a case against unknown individuals on el-Masri’s behalf. I filled Don in on everything I learned.
Don was very different from the reporter who had accompanied me to the first el-Masri interview. Big and bearish, he was a veteran investigative journalist, and he quickly understood the significance of what el-Masri had told me and analyzed it in light of other things he knew about U.S. antiterror tactics. Don was bighearted and good-natured, and he cared deeply about getting the story right. I learned a lot from working with him.
“Let’s meet him together and also let’s meet the authorities who are investigating the case,” Don said. “This is a big case, if true. And Souad, if you feel that something weird is going on with your phone or you feel people are watching you, let me know. You work for the New York Times. They can’t mess with us.”
I began to pay closer attention to my surroundings. I would scan the cars parked in front of our house and try to see who was in them. And when I left home each day, I glanced over my shoulder to see if anybody was following me. After the September 11 attacks, German authorities had become more vigilant about political and extremist activities on college campuses, and I knew they had informants at my university. I kept going to classes, but I didn’t share anything that was happening with my friends and professors. Don told me to make sure I didn’t leave my notes exposed in obvious places, so I started hiding my notebooks outside the apartment.
Some days later, Don flew in from London, and we took the train to Ulm to meet with el-Masri and his lawyer. El-Masri repeated the whole story. Don asked for more details about how he’d been kidnapped and tortured.
“I do believe him,” Don said when we got to our hotel that night. “The details he described about the torture and how the whole situation was handled are similar to other cases.”
At a hotel in Munich, we met with the prosecutor and police officials investigating the case. They said that based on the evidence they’d collected, they too believed el-Masri’s story.
“We’ve done some tests based on a sample of Mr. el-Masri’s hair,” a senior police official in Ulm told us. “The result shows that he must have been in a very stressful situation.” They were able to determine that el-Masri had undergone a rapid change in his diet consistent with a hunger strike and that he had been in a climate similar to Afghanistan’s.
The next day, I visited el-Masri at home. His wife, Aischa, and their children had returned to Germany to live with him, and I wanted to meet them. Aischa was twenty-nine and soft-spoken. She wore a black dress and a pale blue head scarf; their sons were dressed in matching outfits with elephants on them. When el-Masri left and didn’t return, she was deeply worried. Weeks passed with no word, so she went back to Lebanon to stay with relatives, thinking that he might have left her for another woman. Her children often asked, “Why are we here, Mom, and where is Daddy?” she told me, starting to cry. “From time to time, I called his friends in Germany and asked them if they heard anything from him or about him. But no one knew anything.”
Her husband had changed since his return, she said. “He is very nervous. Sometimes he wakes up in the middle of the night and screams.”
My intelligence sources had confirmed that el-Masri had been in touch with people like Reda Seyam, who were being watched. But el-Masri himself had not been involved in spreading jihadist propaganda, nor was he known to be a member of jihadist movements.
When I got home, I grabbed my copy of the 9/11 Commission report and started paging through it. After some searching, I found a paragraph that said that Ramzi bin al-Shibh and a future September 11 hijacker, Marwan al-Shehhi, had met a man named Khalid al-Masri on a train in Germany and that this al-Masri had talked to them about joining the jihad in Chechnya. Al-Masri later put them in touch with an Al Qaeda member in Germany, who told them to go to Afghanistan, where al-Shehhi and Ziad Jarrah, another core member of the Hamburg cell and a future hijacker, met Osama bin Laden and were recruited to commit the September 11 attacks.
El-Masri had told us that one of his interrogators in Afghanistan had accused him of being a senior Al Qaeda operative who was trained in Jalalabad, Afghanistan, and an associate of Atta and bin al-Shibh. “I denied everything,” el-Masri told us. “I kept saying, ‘No, no, no.’”
The names were spelled differently, but were Khalid al-Masri and Khaled el-Masri the same man, or were the Americans confusing the two? Gnjidic, el-Masri’s lawyer, believed the latter, and so, increasingly, did we. The similar names, combined with the mosque el-Masri had attended and some of the characters he had known, could have been enough to incriminate him. If so, it was a case of mistaken identity with terrifying consequences.
Our editors made it clear that a lot was at stake. “If anything in this article is wrong, you might not only lose your job, you might be burned forever,” a colleague told me. Don and I double-and triple-checked all our facts, a process that took weeks.
The day before the story was supposed to run, I spent hours in my room, going through all my notes, every single piece of paper. Is there a mistake anywhere? I asked myself. Is anything missing? For days, I’d been unable to eat; I was surviving on coffee.
Don sensed my nervousness. “It is what it is now, Souad. We worked for months on this. Have you told el-Masri that the story is running tomorrow?”
I hadn’t. I decided to go for a walk and call him from a pay phone. I walked fast, listening to my favorite ’80s pop songs on my iPod as I ran through the story in my head. “I just wanted to let you know that the story will run tomorrow,” I said when I reached him. “There might be some reactions. That’s why I’m calling.”
“Tomorrow?”
“Yes, tomorrow.” Silence. “Khaled?”
“Yes, I am here,” he said, and his voice sounded deeper. He was crying.
I stayed silent, too.
“Thank you, Souad, and thank your colleague Don. Thank you for believing me.”
“We just did our job.” I felt a wave of exhaustion wash over me.