WASHINGTON — The killing of Osama bin Laden in May 2011 was hailed by current and former CIA officials as the crowning justification for the use of harsh interrogation tactics. High-value detainees, when subjected to those methods, provided intelligence that the officials said helped lead the spy agency to a mysterious courier and, ultimately, to the terrorist leader himself.
The Senate Intelligence Committee report released Tuesday upends that version of history, providing an alternate case study that revives questions about the agency’s account. The report asserts that the benefits of harsh interrogation techniques were exaggerated.
“A review of CIA records found that the initial intelligence obtained, as well as the information the CIA identified as the most critical — or the most valuable — on Abu Ahmad al-Kuwaiti, was not related to the use of the CIA’s enhanced interrogation techniques,” investigators concluded.
The role the CIA detention and interrogation program played in the hunt for bin Laden is one of the most pivotal questions in assessing the effectiveness of the agency’s response to 9/11. The Senate report notes that even in the weeks before the raid in Abbottabad, Pakistan, the CIA’s Office of Public Affairs had prepared “agreed-upon language” to be released that would stress “the critical nature of the detainee reporting in identifying bin Laden’s courier.”
Almost from the start of the search for bin Laden, the CIA was focused on the al-Qaeda leader’s inner circle. The Senate report found that the agency made quick progress, obtaining a phone number associated with al-Kuwaiti as soon as Jan. 1, 2002, allowing the CIA to begin storing his calls. The following year, the CIA had obtained an e-mail address thought to be associated with al-Kuwaiti.
A stream of information about the courier began trickling into the agency. The CIA learned in 2002 from detainees held by other countries that the courier was close to bin Laden and Khalid Sheik Mohammed, the self-admitted mastermind of the Sept. 11 attacks.
That year, the CIA received information on the courier’s family that the agency later would cite as pivotal in identifying al-Kuwaiti, according to the Senate report.
The agency “received significant corroborative reporting on al-Kuwaiti’s age, physical appearance and family from detainees in the custody of foreign governments and the U.S. military,” the report says.
Despite the seemingly valuable intelligence, the CIA did not yet understand that al-Kuwaiti was a key player who could lead them to bin Laden.
In March 2003, working with Pakistan, the CIA captured Mohammed and found an e-mail associated with the courier on his laptop. Within days, Mohammed was taken to the CIA’s secret prison in Poland and interrogated.
Mohammed was waterboarded 183 times and exposed to other harsh interrogation techniques. When asked about a bin Laden courier named “Abu Ahmed,” Mohammed dissembled, providing his interrogators with a false name. Mohammed repeatedly played down the courier’s significance in al-Qaeda.
Still, Mohammed did confirm to interrogators that the courier had worked with a terrorist suspect named Hassan Ghul. It was Ghul, detained in early 2004, who told the CIA about the importance of the courier — but he did so before he was subjected to harsh questioning, the Senate report says.
“He sang like a tweetie bird,” a CIA officer told the agency’s inspector general. “He opened up right away and was cooperative from the outset.”
According to the report, Ghul said that bin Laden’s “security apparatus would be minimal, and that the group likely lived in a house with a family somewhere in Pakistan.”
Ghul speculated that “Abu Ahmed likely handled” all of bin Laden’s needs, “including moving messages” to Abu Faraj al-Libi, another top bin Laden lieutenant.
Soon Ghul was moved to the CIA prison in Romania to face harsh questioning. During and after “the use of the CIA’s enhanced interrogation techniques, Ghul provided no other information of substance on al-Kuwaiti,” the Senate report found. Nor, the Senate said, did al-Libi.
When the CIA went back to Mohammed in 2005 to press him on al-Kuwaiti, Mohammed insisted al-Kuwaiti was not a courier.
It would take another seven years before the CIA was confident enough about al-Kuwaiti’s ties to bin Laden to launch the raid in Abbottabad.
