From 2019: The U.S. military prison’s leadership considered Mohamedou Salahi to be its highest-value detainee. But his guard suspected otherwise.
In 1998, shortly after Al Qaeda detonated truck bombs outside the U.S. Embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, Salahi took a call from a phone number belonging to bin Laden.
Salahi was taken into custody when he was thirty years old, but he had already lived on four continents, and spoke fluent Arabic, French, and German. English was his fourth language. Since he had learned it in captivity, some of his earliest phrases were “I ain’t done nothing,” “cavity search,” “fuck this,” and “fuck that.” “My problem is that I had been picking the language from the ‘wrong’ people—namely, U.S.
In practice, many military-police officers killed time by watching movies and getting drunk at the Tiki Bar; they also took flights to Afghanistan, to pick up more detainees. But Wood spent his days in the base library, researching topics that Salahi had brought up in the cell. He devoured volumes on history, foreign affairs, politics, civil rights—“pretty much any type of book you could think of, other than, like, romance novels,” he said. “I was educating myself on the world.
The night terrors kept coming. Salahi was on a diet of Ensure nutrition shakes and antidepressants. One day, he complained to Wood that the interrogators were demanding information on events that he couldn’t possibly know about, because they had taken place while he was in custody. In the eighties, he and a younger cousin, a slender poet named Mahfouz Ould al-Walid, spent their evenings at a local café, where the owner showed videos of the Palestinian struggle and the jihad in Afghanistan, which the Soviet Union had invaded in 1979. In 1988, the Saudi ideologue Osama bin Laden announced the formation of Al Qaeda. Walid, who was thirteen, started reading bin Laden’s pamphlets.
Another two years passed before Salahi’s name caught the attention of Deddahi Ould Abdellahi, the head of Mauritania’s security-intelligence apparatus. In 1994, as the director of state security, he opened an investigation into Nouakchott’s jihadi scene. Several Mauritanians had travelled to battlefields in Afghanistan and Bosnia, and Mahfouz Walid had become an important figure in Al Qaeda; he now went by the nom de guerre Abu Hafs al-Mauritani.
Al Qaeda had by this time transformed into an international terrorist organization that was launching attacks in East Africa and the Middle East. The U.S. had fired cruise missiles at Al Qaeda-linked targets in Sudan and Afghanistan, and, in a bid to capture Abu Hafs, the C.I.A. had raided a hotel in Khartoum. One night in October, 1999, a friend of Salahi’s asked him to host three Muslims who were passing through Duisburg. Over dinner, they explained that they were heading east, for the jihad.
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