French judge stands as America's secret ally

0 Comments | Insight on the News, April 29, 2002 | by Kenneth R. Timmerman

A raid conducted at the end of March by U.S. and Pakistani law-enforcement officials in the city of Faisal-abad, Pakistan, netted a top lieutenant to Osama bin Laden named Abu Zubaydah. He is believed to know virtually every secret worth knowing about the organizational structure of the al-Qaeda terrorist network.

According to a Pakistani official who announced the successful raid, Abu Zubaydah was wounded in the groin and the thigh while trying to escape from a house he was occupying with seven or eight Arab men that was owned by the local head of Lashkar-I Taiba, a Muslim extremist group banned since Sept. 11 by Pakistan's president, Gen. Pervez Musharraf. U.S. officials took custody of Abu Zubaydah on Easter Sunday and are holding him in an undisclosed location for medical treatment and interrogation.

The capture of the 29-year-old Palestinian, who was born in Saudi Arabia as Zeineddin Muhammed Hussein Abu Zubaydah, could mark a turning point in the U.S. investigation of the al-Qaeda network. According to French counterterrorism judge Jean-Louis Bruguiere, whom I interviewed in Paris twice following the Sept. 11 attacks, Abu Zubaydah was the gatekeeper of the al-Qaeda network. He was one of the few bin Laden aides who knew the entire length and breadth of a network that Bruguiere said spanned the globe "like a spider's web."

At a safe house in Peshawar, close to the Khyber Pass, Abu Zubaydah interviewed prospective recruits for bin Laden's terrorist network arriving via a "ratline" from North Africa, the Middle East, the United States and Europe from 1996 onward. According to the French judge, Abu Zubaydah's job was to unmask potential infiltrators and then to steer those who passed the "loyalty test" to one of the 20-odd Afghan camps bin Laden inherited from Afghan warlord Gulbadin Hekmatiar, who took refuge in Iran after the Taliban seized power in Kabul.

After six months of military and terrorism training, the successful recruits came back through Peshawar, where many of them met again with Abu Zubaydah to receive new identities: stolen passports from Britain and freshly minted travel documents from Canada, Belgium, Bosnia and other countries where bin Laden had established clandestine terrorist cells.

At times, Abu Zubaydah would recruit "graduates" of his camps to procure fresh travel documents for other terrorists. Learning these identities would give U.S. law enforcement the type of edge they previously lacked in tracking down the hundreds of bin Laden operatives still believed to be living and working in the United States.

But there also is an immediate, operational savor to Abu Zubaydah's capture: He is believed to have become the top planner of al-Qaeda terrorist operations since the death of bin Laden deputy Muhammad Atef during a U.S. air strike in Afghanistan last November. U.S. officials have said they believe Abu Zubaydah actively was plotting a wave of fresh terrorist attacks against America when he was captured. Some of those attacks now can be thwarted.

A court in Jordan sentenced this al-Qaeda leader to death in absentia for his role in plotting an attack on U.S. and Israeli tourists in December 1999. He also stands accused of plots to blow up the U.S. embassies in Sarajevo, Bosnia, and in Paris. Though not named in any unsealed U.S. indictment, he could face a wide variety of conspiracy charges, including murder, for his role in the Sept. 11 attacks.

Of course, Abu Zubaydah always can refuse to talk. But U.S. interrogators at Camp X-Ray in Cuba, or elsewhere, will be guided in their efforts to break down his resistance by the extraordinary knowledge of the French judge who has tracked al-Qaeda around the globe for the last seven years.

Judge Bruguiere already has helped the U.S. Department of Justice in several active terrorism investigations since Sept. 11, including the prosecution of a French-born Moroccan named Zacarias Moussaoui, indicted as a coconspirator in the Sept. 11 hijackings. In 1999, Bruguiere twice requested that Canadian authorities arrest a bin Laden operative named Ahmed Ressam, who passed through Abu Zubaydah's safe house en route to a bin Laden camp for training.

Ressam eventually was arrested by chance when an alert U.S. Customs officer caught him attempting to enter the United States at Port Angeles, Wash., in December 1999 while transporting explosives intended for an attack on Los Angeles International Airport (see "Canadian Border Open to Terrorists" Dec. 17, 2001).

Bruguiere's knowledge of the bin Laden web and his careful interrogation techniques once again could prove invaluable to the United States. In previous cases, the French judge has enticed confessions and hard intelligence from detainees by overwhelming them with the extent of his knowledge of their activities, which he had pieced together from phone records, wiretaps, field intelligence and confessions gleaned from the interrogation of more than 300 al-Qaeda terrorists.

Bruguiere is America's secret ally in the war against terror -- one who has stayed out of the limelight here, but whose expertise, stubbornness and political courage have become legendary to insiders. He is one of the unsung heroes in the war against terror and, yes, he is French.