The CIA’s secret rendition of Mohamedou Ould Slahi to Jordan began after he voluntarily went to a Mauritanian police station for questioning in November 2001. On November 28, a CIA plane transported him to a prison in Amman, where Jordanian intelligence services interrogated him for seven and a half months. The transfer moved him across borders without his family’s knowledge and concealed his location even from those who thought they were supporting him in custody.

Background and renewed detention

After twelve years studying, living, and working abroad, primarily in Germany and briefly in Canada, Mohamedou Ould Slahi returned to Mauritania in January 2000. On the journey home, he was detained first by Senegalese police and then by Mauritanian authorities, and questioned by American FBI agents about the Millennium Plot targeting Los Angeles International Airport. Authorities concluded there was no basis to believe he had been involved and released him on February 19, 2000. He returned to family life and work as an electrical engineer in Nouakchott.

The questioning resumed after the September 11 attacks. On September 29, 2001, Mauritanian authorities detained him for two weeks, and FBI agents again asked about the Millennium Plot. He was released once more; Mauritanian authorities publicly affirmed his innocence. The sequence matters to the later transfer: the stated focus of the earlier inquiries was the Millennium Plot, rather than an allegation that he had planned the September 11 attacks.

On November 20, Mauritanian police came to his home and asked him to accompany them for further questioning. He complied voluntarily, drove his own car to the police station, and told his mother not to worry because he expected to return soon. Instead, he disappeared from his family’s view. Eight days later, the CIA flight carried him from Mauritania to Jordan.

Secret transfer and interrogation in Jordan

The transfer was part of a route through several countries in which American authorities directed or participated in detention and questioning. In Jordan, Mohamedou was held and interrogated by Jordanian intelligence services for seven and a half months. In his 2005 account to an Administrative Review Board, he said that the Jordanian questioning concerned his alleged part in the Millennium Plot and that investigators there were especially concerned with it. That retrospective account is consistent with the focus of the earlier FBI questioning, although it does not by itself establish what information Jordanian authorities obtained or what the CIA concluded from the interrogation.

The concealment had a concrete cost for his family. For almost a year, they were led to believe he remained in Mauritanian custody. His oldest brother, Hamoud Ould Slahi, regularly visited a security prison to bring clean clothes and money for Mohamedou’s meals. In reality, the CIA had already transferred him to Jordan; after months there, he would be taken to Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan and then to Guantánamo. The Mauritanian prison officials accepted the family’s money while saying nothing about his absence.

The family learned where he was only after his youngest brother, Yahdih Ould Slahi, read a report in Der Spiegel on October 28, 2002, saying Mohamedou had been held for months at the U.S. prison camp in Guantánamo. The revelation redirected the family’s anger toward local officials who had assured them that Mohamedou was in their custody and safe. His relatives had been maintaining what they understood to be his detention in Mauritania while he was, in fact, thousands of miles away.

What the record establishes

The account of the transfer appears within a wider record assembled from the manuscript, declassified government documents, public reporting, and official investigations. The editor describes the notes accompanying censored passages as reasoned possibilities grounded in context and public information, not as a reconstruction of classified text. That distinction is important for this episode: the published record supports the route, the period of Jordanian interrogation, and the family’s mistaken understanding, but does not make every hidden decision or communication around the transfer visible.

Later accounts also clarify the limited public evidence linking the Jordan detention to the allegations against Mohamedou. By the time the CIA returned him from Amman, Ahmed Ressam had testified in terrorism trials and provided names to the U.S. government and other governments. Judge James Robertson later observed that Ressam’s statements notably failed to implicate Mohamedou. A Marine prosecutor assigned to Mohamedou’s Guantánamo case, Stuart Couch, said that the CIA showed him no intelligence reports of its own about the earlier period in its custody. These later observations do not disclose everything that happened in Jordan; they underscore how little of the interrogation record was available to those who later considered the case.

Consequences and significance

On July 19, 2002, another CIA rendition plane retrieved Mohamedou from Amman and took him to Bagram Air Base. His transfer to Jordan was thus an early stage in a longer sequence of concealed detention, moving him from a Mauritanian police station into a foreign prison and onward into U.S. military custody. The family’s continued deliveries of clothing and meal money in Nouakchott made the distance between the apparent and actual detention especially stark: the authorities’ silence kept his relatives acting on a false account of where he was.

The episode also exposes a gap between repeated questioning and publicly established evidence. Mauritanian authorities had released him after the earlier inquiries and publicly affirmed his innocence in September 2001; in Jordan, the reported focus remained the Millennium Plot. The transfer nonetheless took him out of view and into months of interrogation. In the book’s larger account, this is the point at which a return home, interrupted by police questioning, becomes a secret international detention route whose locations and custody arrangements his family cannot verify.