Mauritanian State Security Service

The Mauritanian State Security Service, called the DSE in Mohamedou Ould Slahi’s manuscript, is identified as Mauritania’s intelligence service. Its place in the account is defined less by a full institutional portrait than by its appearances in Slahi’s repeated encounters with Mauritanian authorities: the service is named in connection with questioning, while arrests and other interrogations involved additional state bodies and, at times, U.S. agents. The redacted record makes both the reach of these operations and the limits of what can be established central to understanding the organization’s role.

Identity and Institutional Boundaries

An editorial note explains that Slahi uses DSE as an abbreviation for the Directeur de la Sûreté de l’État, the director of Mauritania’s intelligence service. That identification distinguishes the DSE from the Sûreté Nationale, which another note describes as Mauritania’s national police force, headed by the country’s top law-enforcement official. The distinction matters: the manuscript and its notes refer to multiple institutions, and the available evidence does not justify treating the intelligence service and national police as interchangeable.

The surviving passages do not provide an organizational chart, a comprehensive account of the service’s procedures, or a complete chain of command. Instead, its institutional character emerges through specific episodes and editorial identifications. The DSE appears within a wider apparatus in which police, intelligence officials, and foreign investigators could all figure in detention and questioning, but the sources do not establish that every action attributed broadly to Mauritanian authorities was carried out by the DSE itself.

Questioning and Arrests in Mauritania

The manuscript’s account of the period after the September 11 attacks places the DSE among the authorities already scrutinizing Slahi. He says that the service had called him in and interrogated him twice during the two and a half weeks following the attacks. During a subsequent encounter, he was brought to a room he recognized from an earlier detention. When an inspector stepped away, Slahi used the opportunity to make a brief call, told the person on the other end that he had been arrested, and erased the phone book on his mobile phone before handing the device over. The episode conveys the immediate consequences of renewed questioning while also showing how little confidence Slahi had that ordinary business contacts would remain outside investigators’ suspicions.

An accompanying account describes the arrest as the outcome of pressure from the United States: the Federal Bureau of Investigation sought the U.S. president’s intervention, and the Mauritanian president directed police forces to arrest Slahi. This description presents the operation as cooperation across governments, but it does not by itself specify which Mauritanian agency issued or executed each order. The DSE’s documented questioning and the police role in the arrest should therefore be kept distinct rather than collapsed into a single institutional action.

The evidence also places Slahi’s questioning in a longer sequence. Between two arrests in Mauritania, he lived and worked in computer and electronics jobs; both arrests, the editor notes, included questioning by Federal Bureau of Investigation agents. In early 2000, an American team of two FBI agents and a Justice Department representative questioned him near the end of his detention, according to his later testimony. The evidence supports a pattern of Mauritanian detention and U.S. participation, but it does not establish that the DSE itself conducted those FBI interrogations.

Records, Redactions, and What Can Be Established

The DSE’s visibility depends partly on editorial work around a censored manuscript. The editor describes the annotations as a record of close reading across blacked-out passages, using context within the manuscript and publicly available material, including declassified government documents, reporting, and official investigations. The notes identify the DSE and clarify its institutional title, but they do not claim to restore the original redacted wording or disclose classified information. Their conclusions are presented as informed interpretations, not confirmation by someone with access to the unredacted manuscript.

That distinction is especially important for reconstructing responsibility. A declassified judicial timeline records Slahi’s early-2000 movements and questioning, but portions naming authorities remain redacted. Separate editorial notes identify the likely American interrogators near the end of his Mauritanian detention by reference to Slahi’s testimony and contemporary reporting. These materials help locate the DSE within the account, yet they do not erase uncertainty about which officials knew what, which agency acted at each stage, or how decisions passed between institutions.

Significance in the Narrative

The DSE’s appearances connect domestic surveillance and detention in Mauritania to a wider system of U.S.-influenced counterterrorism activity. The narrative moves between Slahi’s ordinary employment, repeated summonses, and renewed arrest, making the shift from daily life to state scrutiny visible through concrete events rather than through a general institutional description. The service’s role is consequential, but the surviving evidence also resists a simple account in which one agency alone controls every stage.

Redaction shapes that account as much as disclosure does. The organization can be named and its intelligence-service status clarified, while details of particular operations and lines of authority remain obscured. The result is a partial institutional portrait: enough to show the DSE’s place in Slahi’s encounters with Mauritanian authorities, but not enough to treat every inference about its conduct as established fact.