A High-Stakes Game With Top Al Qaeda ‘Informant’

The drumbeat of threatening reports over the last week--terrorists planning to detonate radioactive “dirty bombs” or attack the U.S. financial system--has been all the more alarming because of their source: the captured operational commander of the Al Qaeda network, who is now being interrogated by U.S. authorities.

On Wednesday, the FBI announced yet another warning, that terrorists affiliated with Osama bin Laden may try to attack American shopping centers and malls. Like the other alerts, authorities say, the information was provided by Abu Zubeida, the nom de guerre of Bin Laden’s top aide, who was taken into custody in Pakistan last month.

But why is Zubeida--a man apparently willing to die for his cause--talking to his captors at all, much less providing them with important information about the group’s plans and operations?

And why are U.S. officials, normally so tight-lipped about their terrorism interrogations, spreading the word about his apparent confessions?

The answers, those close to the matter suggest, lie in the elaborate psychological and tactical struggle underway between American interrogators and their most valuable witness in the war on terrorism.

It is a multilevel effort that involves not just what Zubeida and his captors are saying to each other, but the impression that they are trying to create among those outside the interrogation room--both in the terrorism community and in the nations where the U.S. campaign against terror is being fought.

U.S. officials recognize that Zubeida may be deliberately trying to confuse and mislead them, mixing false leads with others in a way that leaves them unable to determine the truth. But they concede that they have no alternative than to take what he is saying extremely seriously, and to act on it immediately and aggressively.

Zubeida is trained in the art of misinformation. His interrogators are trained to foil such techniques.

“When you get someone that plugged in to Al Qaeda’s inner workings, you have to listen,” one Bush administration official said. “This is the E.F. Hutton of the interrogation process; you have to pay attention.

“Can you trust him? Trust is the wrong word,” the official said. “Can you dismiss it? Absolutely not.”

Interrogators Play Their Own Games

U.S. officials apparently are also engaging in their own manipulation, using the Zubeida reports to, in the words of one FBI agent, “tickle the wires.”

That involves leaking Zubeida’s statements in the hope that they create a buzz among his Al Qaeda followers around the world. They would then communicate among themselves in person or by phone and e-mail--and hopefully provide more leads in the ongoing terrorism investigation.

“If it seems choreographed, it probably was,” the FBI agent said of the sudden burst of official disclosures about what Zubeida is saying. “You insert some information into a criminal investigation and see what happens.”

The technique is just one move in a chess game similar to those the U.S. played for decades with Soviet spies during the Cold War and with organized crime figures at home.

It is now being adapted to a new high-stakes struggle with international terrorists. But even those U.S. officials involved in such interrogations over the years concede that they have never encountered subjects quite like Zubeida and his cohorts. All the old tricks simply don’t work anymore, they say.

‘A Different Kind of Human Being’

“This is a different kind of criminal, a different kind of mentality, a different kind of human being than we have dealt with in domestic crime or in the Cold War era,” said John Martin, a former senior Justice Department official who oversaw espionage and terrorism investigations.

“At least there you knew what buttons to push to get their cooperation: the opportunity for freedom and a better life, safety for their families. But those things don’t work with these people,” Martin said.

Little is known about the interrogation sessions with Zubeida, held at an undisclosed location by military, intelligence and law enforcement officials. The interrogators are familiar with Al Qaeda terrorist training manuals, which advise operatives to reveal nothing other than disinformation.

The interrogators are actively trying to corroborate what they have learned from Zubeida by checking it against existing intelligence and statements from other prisoners--including a top Zubeida subordinate, Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi, who is also believed to be talking.

Several U.S. officials echoed Martin’s assessment that the old ways of interrogation are lost on Islamic terrorists, such as Zubeida, who crave martyrdom. They say Zubeida apparently knows that U.S. law prohibits the use of torture, but they note that other measures are being applied, including sleep deprivation and psychological manipulation.

But virtually no one believes that Zubeida is cooperating for any reason other than to toy with his interrogators, and perhaps to send them in one direction while his co-conspirators continue plans to attack somewhere else.

And that has put U.S. officials in a bind, they concede.

The newest warning, about attacks on shopping malls, was based on “unsubstantiated and nonspecific information” provided by Zubeida, federal law enforcement officials said Wednesday.

The FBI’s 56 field offices were alerted but only out of an abundance of caution.

Authorities also said they had been picking up nonspecific threats to banks for years but felt obligated to alert the financial community on Friday about the potential for attacks even though Zubeida’s information was, again, uncorroborated and not specific.

They said Bin Laden’s quest for “dirty bombs” that would spew radiation and cause panic within a large radius has been so well publicized that Zubeida theoretically could be telling his interrogators about things he read over the Internet before his March 28 capture.

“You can’t believe a word this guy says. He is clearly an enemy of the country and he is going to provide disinformation, send us down the wrong path and cause us to burn untold resources,” said Robert Blitzer, former head of the FBI’s counterterrorism division. “But I understand where the bureau is coming from. He is a top Al Qaeda member and if we sit on [the information] and don’t do anything and something happens, the world will be on top of us for it. They are damned if they do and damned if they don’t.”

Debate Over Whether to Release Information

But Blitzer added that authorities are also turning the tables on Zubeida by spreading the word that he is talking to them. Blitzer used the same technique himself, he said, with suspects in the first World Trade Center terrorist attack in 1993.

“We really agonized over going public with these things,” Blitzer said. “But . . . if something was planned, maybe the bad guys would see that law enforcement was on top of it and think ‘maybe we should try something else.’ ”

Still, some oppose the notion of publicizing what terrorists are telling authorities. And they caution that if Zubeida did provide any specific information, authorities would be foolish to discuss it.

“If we keep in mind the goals of the terrorists--to disrupt and destroy our way of life, our economy, to make us blink, to keep us in a panic--they win,” said Sen. Richard C. Shelby (R-Ala.), vice chairman of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence.

“So I believe that if we learn things from interrogating a known terrorist, we ought to keep it to ourselves,” Shelby said.