WASHINGTON — After secret interrogations, the CIA transferred to American military custody a high-level Al Qaeda figure who helped Osama bin Laden escape from Afghanistan in 2001, the Pentagon announced today.

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Mohammad Rahim was detained last summer, the CIA Director, General Michael Hayden, said, but the intelligence official didn’t reveal where or by whom. The CIA turned Mr. Rahim over to the military earlier this week in what General Hayden said was the first such transfer from his agency’s interrogation program since April 2007.

Mr. Rahim is now being held at the American military prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, General Hayden said.

“Rahim’s detention in the summer of 2007 was a blow to more than one terrorist network,” General Hayden told agency employees in a memo. “He gave aid to Al Qaeda, the Taliban and other anti-coalition militants.”

Since early in the global war on terrorism following the September 11, 2001 attacks by Al Qaeda, the CIA has held captured suspects in secret prisons and interrogated them. Rahim became the 16th so-called “high-value” suspect handed over to the military by the CIA and held at Guantanamo.

Although American officials refused to say where Mr. Rahim was captured, an August 2 story in Pakistan’s The Nation said he was one of two Al Qaeda and Taliban aides picked up by authorities. Mr. Rahim was arrested in Lahore a few days before publication of the article, the report said.

“Rahim is a tough, seasoned jihadist,” General Hayden said. “His combat experience, which dates back to the 1980s, includes plots against U.S. and Afghan targets.”

Mr. Rahim is a close associate of Mr. bin Laden and has ties to Al Qaeda organizations throughout the Middle East, according to a Defense Department spokesman, Bryan Whitman. Officials said Mr. Rahim helped arrange the Al Qaeda hideout at Tora Bora — a mountain area full of warrens used by bin Laden during the 2001 American invasion of Afghanistan.

He assisted Al Qaeda’s escape from the area during the American operation to try to catch the Al Qaeda leader, officials said.

“In 2001, as the terrorist haven in Afghanistan was collapsing, Rahim helped prepare Tora Bora as a hideout,” General Hayden said. “When Al Qaeda had to flee from there, Rahim was part of that operation, too.”

Officials allege that he sought chemicals for one attack on American forces in Afghanistan, and tried to recruit individuals with access to American military facilities there.

“While that record alone would justify Rahim’s capture, it does not fully describe his place in the terrorist infrastructure,” General Hayden said. “Proficient in several languages and familiar with the border areas of Afghanistan and Pakistan, he was also an extremist facilitator and courier with high-level contacts.”

Mr. Rahim is perhaps best known in counterterror circles as a personal facilitator and translator for Mr. bin Laden and other Al Qaeda leaders, General Hayden said.

General Hayden said the most powerful tool against terror suspects “is good intelligence work, including cultivation of the partnerships overseas that were so critical to ending the terrorist career of Mohammad Rahim.”