CIA uncensors memoir of FBI agent who protested torture

WASHINGTON — After a group of al-Qaida suspects was captured in September 2002, the CIA flew Ali Soufan, an experienced FBI counterterrorism agent, to Afghanistan to help interrogate them. But when he arrived, CIA officials abruptly sent word to keep him from the two most significant new detainees.

Soufan had made enemies for opposing the CIA’s abusive interrogation of its first prized prisoner, Abu Zubaydah. He eventually won permission to question the two detainees after all, but when he sought to tell the world about those sessions in his 2011 memoir, the CIA censored much of his account as classified.

Nine years later, and after a lawsuit, the CIA has relented. W.W. Norton will republish his book next month under the revised title “The Black Banners (Declassified): How Torture Derailed the War on Terror After 9/11.” Its restored sections add new details to the history of the early post-Sept. 11 fight against al-Qaida.

The lesson of the release, Soufan said in an interview, is “if you fight for the truth hard enough, eventually you will win.”

The CIA declined to comment.

In the interim, some of what Soufan sought to discuss has become public, including in the 2014 declassification of a lengthy summary of a landmark Senate study about CIA torture. But his book adds richer details about how FBI interrogators manipulated detainees into divulging information — using rapport-building tactics, he says — and offers a preview of how Soufan might testify in the delayed military commission case at

Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, against five men accused of conspiring in the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.

Ramzi Binalshibh, a defendant in the Sept. 11 case, was one of the two detainees Soufan was eventually permitted to question in September 2002 — for 45 minutes. After that, the CIA whisked the prisoner to a “black site” prison, where its torture of him rendered his subsequent statements inadmissible as evidence.

Defense lawyers may try to suppress what Binalshibh told Soufan, too, as contaminated by Binalshibh’s detention in CIA custody. As

Soufan tells it, he persuaded the prisoner to talk without inflicting abuse by leading him to believe that Soufan already knew everything anyway and it was in his interest to cooperate. He “gave me lots of information about the planning for 9/11,” such as describing interactions with the operation’s planner, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, Soufan wrote.

Soufan also interrogated a younger brother of Walid Bin Attash, who is charged in the Sept. 11 case with Mohammed and Binalshibh. The younger Bin Attash, a teenager at the time who is given a pseudonym in the book, had been captured with Binalshibh and was brought to Soufan naked.

Soufan gave him a towel to cover himself and then revealed that he had earlier interrogated yet another of his brothers in Yemen, for whom he had arranged a phone call with their mother. The detainee went from arrogant and hostile to sobbing on Soufan’s shoulder.

Shown a copy of the restored memoir, Daniel Jones, who led the research of millions of pages of CIA files for the Senate study, said that version aligned with the agency’s own contemporaneous records.