The Hunt for KSM

by Terry McDermott

  The agency had a clever piece of hardware called “the Magic Box” that could send out an electronic signal keyed to a particular telephone. If it found the phone within range, a ping would be sent back to the device. The agency had Zubaydah’s electronic signature from NSA. So for two weeks agents drove around Lahore and Faisalabad pinging for the phone, from two in the morning until dawn, when they thought Zubaydah was most likely to be using it. They made very little progress. The phone they were hunting appeared never to be in the same place two nights running.

  One of the agency’s top analysts was also TDY’d from Langley to help pinpoint Zubaydah’s location. The analyst, Deuce Martinez, was regarded as one of the best “targeters” the agency had. He had arrived for the latest of several stints, just in time for the morning shift after a marathon day of flying. Martinez was told who the target was, and how the intel they had received was so vague as to render it almost useless.

  Martinez went to work immediately. He put Zubaydah’s name in the center of an analytical report and then added lines radiating outward, representing NSA signals, ground intel, e-mails, and whatever else he could find—phone numbers of people Zubaydah had called or who had called him, and a second layer of calls made by and to the people he had talked to. He used a link-analysis computer program to build images of networks from the raw data. He drew his own crude reconstruction of the analysis on a huge piece of butcher paper pinned to a wall inside the CIA’s rooms in the Islamabad embassy. In a few weeks, Martinez had narrowed the range to fourteen distinct addresses that stood out as the most likely sites. Ten of the sites were in Faisalabad, four in Lahore.

  Unable to further identify the location and unwilling to wait and risk letting Zubaydah slip away—or, worse, letting him launch an attack—Kiriakou’s boss, the CIA Islamabad station chief, Bob Grenier, decided to hit the fourteen sites simultaneously. The mission was so large and expensive he had to get the okay from Langley before launching it. Permission was granted and a planeload of equipment, agents, and weapons was flown in. Three dozen American CIA and FBI agents were rounded up to take part, and one of each was paired with an officer from the ISI. It was an extraordinary number of people for a clandestine operation, but even with that they needed help. They persuaded their Pakistani counterparts to provide the rest of the manpower for their little army. The Pakistanis agreed. It was a huge undertaking with a greater chance of chaos and failure than success.

  With the local knowledge the Pakistanis provided, the Americans scouted the sites as well as they could. Two of the Lahore sites turned out to be bad matches—one was a kebab stand, the other an all-girls’ school. Many of the remaining sites were mud huts. Two of the Faisalabad prospects, however, were particularly interesting. One large house was curious because the shutters and windows were kept closed at all hours. Even in March, Faisalabad is hot and humid, and keeping everything shut up made no sense. Another property seemed odd because it appeared to be a vacant lot. How could phone calls be made from a vacant lot?3

  The Pakistanis assisting the Americans explained that in many large cities in their country, each physical property is assigned a telephone number. Whether it is occupied or not, wires are strung so that it can be activated quickly and cheaply when the time comes. One of the Pakistanis climbed the nearest pole and found that the wire assigned to the vacant lot had been spliced and a second line was run to the three-story house next door.

  “We got ’em,” one of the other agents told Kiriakou.

  On the night of the raids, the Pakistanis provided two big buses to take the strike teams from Islamabad to Lahore. At a safe house there, they were divided into site teams of four men each—one CIA agent, one FBI agent, and two Pakistanis. After everyone assembled in one room, Kiriakou climbed on a tabletop, and ordered everyone to synchronize watches—just like in the movies. The two Lahore teams transferred to small trucks and the rest took off for Faisalabad, another two hours down the road. The mission nearly ended right there. The highway to Faisalabad is a toll road and the lead car blew through the first tollbooth without paying. The Pakistani police chased it down and pulled it over. The whole caravan, including two buses full of guys in shalwar kameez bristling with weapons and communications gear, had to pull over and sit there and wait until the local cops were persuaded to let the lead car go.

  They launched the attacks in the pitch-black two o’clock hour of March 28. The teams stormed the suspected hideouts without warnings of any sort, the Pakistanis going in first. CIA and FBI officials had set up a command post at a safe house in a central location in Faisalabad. They were waiting there in the dark when they began to hear the sounds of a gun battle coming from the direction of the house with the stolen telephone connection. Kiriakou and another CIA officer raced to the house, a pale peach three-story stucco home built behind high walls in the upper-middle-class Shahbaz Town district.

  The Pakistan Rangers had rammed through an outer gate and the ground-floor doors, making a racket and igniting a full-scale firefight. By the time Kiriakou arrived, at least one of the residents was already dead. Under attack, three men attempted to flee. They ran to the top floor of the house, then tried to escape by leaping from the house to the one next door. They were spotted from below, pursued, engaged, and shot. One man was dead by the time he hit the ground. Another was screaming in pain, alive but incapacitated. The third man was wounded in the groin, abdomen, and thigh, and was bleeding profusely. Kiriakou wasn’t certain, but thought there was an excellent chance the wounded man was Zubaydah. He called Martinez for advice on how to identify the man. Martinez suggested photographing his iris, but the man’s eyes were rolled back in his head. Martinez said to photograph his ear, the configuration of which is as unique to each individual as a fingerprint. Kiriakou took a cell-phone photo of the ear and e-mailed it immediately to Islamabad, where it was ID’d as probably belonging to Zubaydah.4

  One of the Pakistani officers, aggrieved at having one of his men shot, offered to administer justice to Zubaydah on the spot. Kiriakou was firm; he had to deliver the prisoner alive. He stopped the execution.

  The men in Zubaydah’s house never knew what hit them. At least ten were taken into custody. They had been living in the house for weeks. Beyond just hiding out there, Zubaydah had directed that classes in basic English and electronic bomb construction be conducted inside. He was also trying to arrange for new identity papers to be delivered to them. Among the cache of materials seized in the raid were telephones, stolen and forged passports from a dozen countries—including Somalia and Colombia—bomb-making manuals, military textbooks, diaries, videos, and cassette recordings. The materials were packed off to the embassy in Islamabad, scanned, photographed, and shipped back to Washington, D.C. The CIA team quickly bundled the wounded Zubaydah into the back end of a Toyota pickup, then raced to a local hospital, which was a mess—bugs entered freely from windows left open against the heat, geckos scrambled across the walls, the floor ran with blood and bodily fluids. Needles were cleaned by plunging them into a bar of soap prior to injection. The Americans deposited their dying prisoner on a bed and used a sheet to tie him to the frame, hoping to prevent any attempt at escape.

  In the midst of this chaos, a cell phone started ringing. Over and over again. It didn’t belong to any of the agents. The Americans soon realized it was Zubaydah’s phone, which was in a sealed evidence bag in the room. The FBI, seeking to secure all the evidence from what they regarded as a crime scene, had stowed the phone in the sealed bag to be shipped away with the rest of the materials gathered at the scene. There it remained. Kiriakou and another CIA agent were eager to see who was calling Zubaydah, but they could do nothing but listen as the phone rang unanswered inside its evidence bag.

  The incident was a stark illustration of a fundamental difference between the FBI and the CIA—a difference that was becoming ever more apparent as the two agencies jostled with each other on the front lines of the hunt for Al Qaeda in Pakistan. The FBI, given its
criminal investigation into the 9/11 attacks, was primarily concerned with the past, with what had happened, with the crime that had been committed. The CIA was interested in the future, what might happen tomorrow, or even today. The FBI wanted evidence; the CIA needed intelligence.

  Zubaydah’s condition was dire and his captors feared he would die before a definitive identification could be made, and before he could talk. So the Americans raced him by helicopter to a better hospital on a military base near Lahore, where he was stabilized. As soon as they deemed it practical to move him again, Zubaydah was hustled out to the Lahore airport in the dead of night. A CIA Gulfstream jet was waiting in a far corner of the airfield, and the agency wanted to get him out of the country as quickly as possible.

  The FBI, as usual, had other ideas. Jennifer Keenan, a senior FBI agent in Islamabad, got a call at three in the morning that Zubaydah was en route to the airport and on his way out of the country. She had previously received instructions that she had to make sure the FBI had a good set of fingerprints from Zubaydah before he was shipped off to wherever the CIA planned to take him. Urgently, she called a couple of other agents and they raced off to the airport. They arrived barely in time. They met the antique 1950s ambulance carrying Zubaydah on the tarmac just as he was about to be transferred to the Gulfstream.

  Reading reports on an investigative target, even dozens of them over years, is not the same as actually meeting the target in the flesh. The few photos obtained over the years by the U.S. government had shown Zubaydah as being wiry, even frail, and very bookish. To the agents’ astonishment, he was a big, buff man, strong as an ox, with wild hair. His impressive strength was probably the main reason he survived his injuries. Keenan’s two agents were big, too, and when they tried to get a set of prints from him on the tarmac, he resisted, consciously or not. As they wrestled with Zubaydah, the pilot of the plane stormed down the stairs, demanding to know what the hell was going on.

  Kiriakou, who was trying to help the FBI agents, said they were trying to print the suspect.

  “Who the fuck wants him fingerprinted?!” the pilot screamed.

  Kiriakou’s response was equally forceful: “The director of the FBI!”

  After they finally got the prints, the burly FBI agents stepped aside so the CIA could take custody. Two agency officers, both far smaller than the FBI men, eased Zubaydah out of the ambulance and put him on an old-fashioned litter to lift him up the rickety stairway and onto the plane. They dropped the litter, and Zubaydah fell face-first onto the ground. Blood spit everywhere, and he writhed in agony on the asphalt.

  The FBI agents grabbed the litter back and hauled Zubaydah onto it and up the steps. As they were about to reach the top, the man on the lower end lost his balance, probably slipping on the blood, and staggered. His end of the stretcher tipped down with him and Zubaydah was about to flip off one side and fall twenty feet straight onto the tarmac below.

  That fall almost certainly would have killed him, and with it the government’s best chance yet—by far—to ascertain Al Qaeda’s plots and plans. The FBI agent at the head of the litter was a well-muscled man named Ty Fairman. He single-handedly held the litter aloft and kept Zubaydah on top of it until his partner regained balance and grabbed his end.

  Zubaydah was finally loaded on board. Within a minute or two, he was flying out of Pakistan.

  Udorn Royal Thai Air Force Base, Thailand, April 2002

  The jet carrying Zubaydah eventually landed at an air base outside the city of Udon Thani in northeastern Thailand. Udorn, as the airfield was commonly known, had a long history with the CIA, having been the jungle-bound home base to the agency’s Air America during the Vietnam War. A secure interrogation facility was hastily improvised there. This new facility—one of the first of what would come to be called the black sites—had been arranged by the CIA and its Thai counterparts. It was in most regards perfect—remote, yet with easy access to the world’s airways; patrolled by friendly eyes ready to look away when asked.

  Caring for and interrogating prisoners were not roles the CIA usually performed, or for which it was especially well equipped. The CIA gathered intelligence, not prisoners. In most cases, the Americans with the most expertise in the histories and handling of radical Islamists were members of the FBI, which had been investigating and preparing prosecutions of Islamist terrorists since the first bombing of the World Trade Center in 1993. But in a secret “Memorandum of Notification,” the Bush administration had granted the CIA the lead role in handling Al Qaeda captives.5

  Winning the job away from the FBI had been an important bureaucratic victory for CIA director George Tenet, a master of Washington infighting. From very early in the War on Terror, Tenet sought to place his agency in control of the flow of information, and won for himself the ability to mold and disburse it as he saw fit. One of the FBI’s top counterterrorism officials, Pasquale D’Amuro, the scrappy former leader of the New York field office’s international terrorism operation, fought pitched battles in the Oval Office to protect the FBI’s role in the response to 9/11, but lost. His new boss, FBI director Robert S. Mueller III, was in no position to help him. September 11 was Mueller’s eighth official day on the job, and he—and the FBI itself—had no saviors in the upper reaches of the Bush White House. Worse, the FBI had been the nation’s principal counterterrorism force before September 11, and was seen, in the eyes of many within the relatively new Bush administration, as having failed to protect the United States against Al Qaeda. New circumstances demanded new methods, and the CIA put itself forward.

  But when the man thought to be Abu Zubaydah, the first big fish to be netted after September 11, arrived in Thailand in early April, the CIA interrogators were nowhere to be found. Lacking its own expertise, the agency had chosen to use teams of outside contractors to conduct prisoner interrogations of so-called high-value detainees. The Zubaydah interrogation team was still waiting to be dispatched. Some in the CIA had not thus far been persuaded that the wounded man was really their target.

  The mystery man nonetheless lay dying. So the initial interrogation—auspiciously, it turns out—fell to two of the FBI agents who happened to know the most about Al Qaeda: Ali Soufan, a brash young agent who was one of its only native Arabic speakers, and a former officer from the army’s 82nd Airborne Division who also spoke some Arabic, Stephen Gaudin. Both were veterans of the New York JTTF and highly regarded interrogators, but—even given that—had been uncertain what their jobs would be at Udorn. They had been told in no uncertain terms that their role in Zubaydah’s debriefing would be subordinate to the CIA’s. They would do what was asked. The orders they were given before being dispatched were firm: “You will help the CIA. If they want you to, you provide questions. If they want you to do guard duty, you’re gonna do guard duty, you’re just gonna do… whatever [they ask you to].”6 They would be “second chair” to the CIA.

  The two were the only agents from the Bureau on the charter flight to Thailand. There were others on board who did not appear to be from the CIA or any other intelligence agency. Gaudin and Soufan had no idea who these people were. The plane landed in Thailand ahead of Zubaydah’s flight from Pakistan. When Zubaydah arrived and was wheeled into the crude interrogation facility, the agents realized the other occupants of their plane had been medical personnel. One of the men who ultimately attended to him was a top-notch surgeon from Johns Hopkins who was there as a favor to a top CIA official. Zubaydah was in dire condition. The medical staff went to work.

  Although the CIA interrogation team had yet to arrive, the agency personnel who had set up the site were there. Once the prisoner’s condition had stabilized enough, the CIA officer in charge turned to Gaudin and Soufan and said, “Aren’t you guys going to get in there and start talking to him?” The fear—dread, really—that prevailed then was that the attacks of 9/11 were simply a precursor to whatever would follow. The FBI men asked where the CIA interrogators were and were told it didn’t matter—time was short
and they needed to find out as quickly as possible if this was Zubaydah and, if so, what he knew. “You two guys are it,” the CIA man said. “There’s nobody else here to do the interview.”

  The FBI had perfected and practiced its own style of interrogation over decades. It required agents to accomplish two main tasks—persuade the person being interrogated that the agents genuinely cared for him, and persuade the prisoner that the agents already knew the answers to most questions they asked; lying was futile. As basic as this approach seems, it had held up amazingly well over time. It worked. Soufan and Gaudin were highly regarded practitioners. Gaudin in particular became a star at the FBI for getting one of the 1998 Africa embassy bombers to confess.

  Almost all FBI interviews have one overarching purpose. The Bureau is a law enforcement agency whose primary focus is gathering evidence to take to trial. Agents aren’t single-minded, however. They say they know the value of information, and have often used the threat of a long prison sentence to get it. Interrogating suspects about a larger universe of coconspirators is a technique that the FBI has used to bring down entire Mafia crime families, for example, despite those organizations’ code of silence.

  Agents typically start an interview by pulling out their badges, telling the suspect who they are, reading him his Miranda rights, and asking the suspect if he wants to talk. This circumstance was different. All anybody wanted to know from Zubaydah was how to stop the next attack. It sometimes seemed that was all anybody in government wanted to know, period. Because Zubaydah was still in mortal danger from his wounds, the interviews had to be brief and to the point. Then the agents would have to give up the room to the medical team, often for hours, before the prisoner was able to resume. They would alternate in that fashion for days.