On my way home, I thought about how el-Masri, after all that had happened to him, was able to distinguish between Americans. He had thanked Don. He had never shown any hatred against Americans in all the times I’d talked to him.
When I saw the story online, I read every word. We wrote several follow-up stories, one of which focused on what German authorities knew about the case and when. One of our Times colleagues had sources in Macedonia who told him that at least one member of Germany’s external intelligence service, the BND, knew about el-Masri’s arrest immediately after it happened. This midlevel intelligence officer said that a stranger approached him in a government cafeteria in Macedonia in January 2004 and told him that a German citizen had been arrested in Skopje and handed over to the Americans. This was nearly a year before our story ran.
When Don and I confronted German authorities with our findings, a spokesperson for Foreign Minister Joschka Fischer warned us that if we printed this information, there would be consequences. We printed it anyway. It was not until June 2006 that the Germans publicly admitted that they had mishandled el-Masri’s case.
A year and a half after Don and I broke the el-Masri story, el-Masri and Gnjidic called and asked for a meeting. I took a train to Ulm and met them at a restaurant not far from the lawyer’s office. El-Masri was surprisingly upbeat. “I would never have thought that the world would listen to me and that people even in the United States would be interested in my case,” he said with a smile. He added that he had received many messages of sympathy from people in the United States who had been touched by his story, but so far he had received neither an apology nor any real explanation from the U.S. and German governments. He seemed very bitter about it. “I don’t understand. How can they call themselves countries with rule of law and human rights when they kidnap and torture people like this?”
I told him that many journalists had written about his case, including a team of New York Times reporters who uncovered flight data indicating that a jet operated by a CIA-linked shell company had flown from Skopje to Baghdad to Kabul on January 24, 2004, the day after el-Masri’s passport was stamped showing his departure from Macedonia. Coverage like that might eventually help get him the answers he craved, I told him.
“There is something we wanted to discuss with you,” Gnjidic said. “There is another prisoner who had been in jail with Khaled, and who got out. He was in touch with him just recently.” The man, Laid Saidi, was back in his native country, Algeria.
“How did he get your phone number?” I asked el-Masri.
“We communicated with each other through the cell walls,” he replied. “We memorized each other’s names and phone numbers, so in case one got out, he would call the other’s family.”
Speaking to a man who had been in the same prison as el-Masri could shed more light on the whole renditions practice, I thought. I didn’t know if Saidi had been involved in terrorism, but he might be able to tell me more about the prisons used for such renditions. I also thought that if there were ever a trial in the el-Masri case, Saidi might be called as a witness.
I excused myself and called my editors, who said that if Saidi would speak to us, I should travel to Algeria and meet with him. I went back into the restaurant. “Would he be willing to speak to me?” I asked the lawyer and el-Masri.
“Yes, that’s why we called you. He actually asked if he could speak to you,” Gnjidic answered.
I handed my phone across the table to el-Masri. “Please call him now and let him know I will come, I hope by mid–next week at the latest if the visas come through fast.”
El-Masri took out his wallet, which was filled with ID cards and scraps of paper. He unfolded a piece of blue paper, laid it on the table, and dialed the number with one hand. “Salam, it’s me, Khaled,” he said. He asked if he could put me on the line, then handed over the phone.
Saidi said he would meet with me, but his voice sounded a bit tentative. “My lawyer has to be there as well, please,” he said.
I told him that I would get in touch with him once I got a visa.
“Please don’t come without the permission of the Algerian authorities,” he said, with a note of fear in his voice. “I don’t want to get in trouble. My family and I have been through a lot. Please.”
I reassured him that I would come only with a valid journalist’s visa and that I would contact his lawyer and make every effort to see that no harm would come to him.
“Please forgive me,” he said, “but I have been in hell in the last few years, and I can’t go through it again.”
After we said good-bye, I asked el-Masri how he knew this was the same man with whom he’d been in prison.
“I know him from his voice,” he said. “I recognized his voice from the first time we spoke on the phone after his release.”
A short time later, I flew to Algiers and met Saidi’s lawyer, Mostefa Bouchachi, for coffee. He told me that his client was nervous and traumatized. “He has endured torture, and whenever he speaks about it, it’s as if he’s reliving it.”
A Times colleague from the Paris bureau, Craig Smith, met me in Algiers, and together we went to speak to Saidi at Bouchachi’s law office. When I got there, the former prisoner was seated in a corner and wearing a long white tunic and a white skullcap. His right hand covered his left, and he looked shyly at us. As I explained our interest in his case and that we’d found him through el-Masri, he glanced often at his lawyer. When I was finished, he asked Bouchachi how he should proceed.
“You must be honest in what you tell them,” Bouchachi said. “Nothing will help you more now than telling the truth.”
Saidi took a deep breath. He told us he’d left Algeria in the early 1990s, when the country was in the midst of a civil war. He went to Yemen to study, moved to Kenya, and in early 1997 to Tanzania, where he began working for the al-Haramain Foundation, the charity suspected of funneling money to Al Qaeda. Saidi eventually became the head of the foundation’s branch in the city of Tanga.
I knew from the research I’d done that U.S. and European security services had long been interested in the financial activities of members of the foundation and their connections to terrorist plots. Some suspected that the foundation had financed the bombings of the U.S. embassies in Tanzania and Kenya in 1998. The September 11 attacks raised further suspicions among U.S. and Saudi security authorities that the foundation had been infiltrated by people with links to terrorist groups and that some money had been diverted to them.
“Have you ever been involved with any members of terrorist organizations?” I asked Saidi. “I’m speaking about Al Qaeda, the Taliban, or others.” I mentioned these groups by name because I knew that people with backgrounds like Saidi’s sometimes didn’t see Al Qaeda or the Taliban as terrorist organizations but as “freedom fighters.”
“No. I never had anything to do with such groups.”
“Was there anything you did that was against the law when you lived in Tanzania?”