Dexter Filkins reports:

In early May, officials with the C.I.A. reached out to Ali Soufan, a former F.B.I. agent who served as a lead investigator in the months before the September 11th attacks, to say they had learned that Al Qaeda militants were plotting against him. The officials asked Soufan not to disclose many details, but, he told me, “The information was specific enough that they felt that they had to inform me.”

Two weeks later, Soufan, who lives in the New York area, became the target of a virulent campaign on social media. The campaign, amplified by trolls and bots, featured menacing statements. “Mr. Ali,” one Twitter user wrote, “Make yourself dead, beginning of the end.” Soufan brought the material to F.B.I. officials, who opened an investigation. Cybersecurity experts hired by Soufan traced at least part of the campaign to an official in the Saudi government. The campaign appeared to have involved some of the same people who had targeted Jamal Khashoggi, the Saudi dissident, Washington Post columnist, and Virginia resident who was murdered by Saudi intelligence agents in October, 2018.

Soufan is not without enemies. He has been a longtime antagonist of Al Qaeda. As an F.B.I. agent, he pursued the militants who attacked the American Embassies in Kenya and Tanzania and the U.S.S. Cole, in Yemen. He also investigated the ring of plotters who ultimately attacked the World Trade Center and the Pentagon in 2001. His efforts earned him the F.B.I. Director’s Award for Excellence, given each year to the Bureau’s outstanding agents. Soufan’s pursuit of the 9/11 plotters is depicted in the Hulu television series “The Looming Tower.” “He’s a national hero,” Bruce Riedel, a former C.I.A. analyst who is now a scholar at the Brookings Institution, told me.

Soufan has also earned the ire of the Saudi government. After leaving the Bureau, in 2005, he started the Soufan Group, a security-advisory firm in New York. His company runs a training academy for police and intelligence forces in Qatar, a neighbor and bitter rival of Saudi Arabia. Last January, when the Vice-President, Mike Pence, tweeted a message that blamed Iran for the 9/11 attacks, Soufan responded by pointing out that fifteen of the nineteen hijackers were from Saudi Arabia. The Saudi state has repeatedly disclaimed any responsibility for the attacks, but it has a long history of complicity with Al Qaeda. The families of the victims of the September 11th attacks are suing the Riyadh government for allegedly aiding the hijackers. [Continue reading…]