The Hunt for KSM

by Terry McDermott

  Zubaydah was encouragingly cooperative in the first round. Because both agents had studied and investigated Al Qaeda for years, they knew Zubaydah’s history, his hometown, his nicknames, his parents’ names—even his e-mail addresses. They used this information to test Zubaydah’s reliability. In fact, they told him that this was exactly what they were going to do. We’ll know when you’re lying, they said, so don’t waste our time.

  “If you’d rather not talk to us, say ‘I don’t have anything to say,’ but don’t lie to us,” Gaudin told him. Zubaydah lied right off the bat. Asked his name, he replied that he was Abdel Moneim Madbouly, a famous Egyptian film comedian of the black-and-white era. It was like saying he was Bob Hope, such an obvious lie that all three men—Soufan, Gaudin, and then Zubaydah—laughed out loud. When Soufan subsequently addressed him as Hani, his mother’s pet name for him, Zubaydah, taken aback, told them they didn’t need him to say his name, that they already knew who he was. Gaudin agreed, but told Zubaydah they had to hear it from him. “It’s a test. We’re testing you,” he said.

  Many FBI case agents keep what they call to-go bags close at hand for their active investigations. The bags contain all relevant information on a suspect so that all an agent has to do if he’s called out of town on a case is grab the bag and go. Gaudin ordinarily used a lawyer’s accordion file to hold documents in his to-go bag. But he didn’t have one for Zubaydah, and when he got the call to go to Thailand, he only had time to download the wanted posters of suspected terrorists from the FBI website. His Bureau laptop was broken, a common problem, so he loaded the posters onto his PDA, an awkward little handheld computer made by Hewlett-Packard called a Jornada. It was an obscure device, so much so that Gaudin’s colleagues teased him about buying the only one ever made. Zubaydah had been around Al Qaeda so long—since the early 1990s—that he was presumed to know everyone of significance in the organization. So one of the tests Gaudin and Soufan would use to assess Zubaydah’s reliability was his willingness and ability to identify faces on the wanted posters. Not all the wanted terrorists were Al Qaeda members, but enough of them were so that the test should prove useful.

  The world of radical Islam was hardly a unified front. It was fractious, disordered, with different organizations and different agendas that often competed with one another. Even individuals who seemed to have similar goals did not appear to be connected. Before 9/11, the most famous Islamist terrorist in the world was Ramzi Yousef, a nom de guerre for a Kuwaiti-born Pakistani named Abdul Basit Abdul Karim. Yousef had attempted to blow up the World Trade Center in 1993, killing six people, wounding scores of others, and causing hundreds of millions of dollars in damage. He had escaped New York the night of that attack and joined forces with his uncle, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, in Karachi, Pakistan’s commercial capital.

  After Yousef’s near-glorious success in New York, the two headed to the Philippines, where they hatched plans to assassinate the Roman Catholic pope and the American president, Bill Clinton, and blow up a dozen American-flagged jumbo jets in flight eastward over the Pacific. One Japanese man had been killed during a test run of their homemade explosives. Their plans were scuttled in January of 1995 by Yousef’s carelessness, which eventually led to his arrest. Mohammed, however, got away, and had been quietly pursued by a handful of counterterrorism agents ever since.

  Mohammed, whom the agents habitually referred to as KSM, traveled the world with aplomb, setting up terror cells in one place, negotiating to sell holy water from Mecca or buy frozen chicken parts in another. So far as the investigators knew, Yousef and KSM were their own bosses, belonging to no organization other than the fictional Liberation Army Yousef had created to take credit for the first World Trade Center attack. KSM had become an obsession to some among his pursuers, especially to the lead agent on the Philippine case, an idiosyncratic former CPA named Francis J. “Frank” Pellegrino. Pellegrino, an FBI agent out of New York, pursued KSM relentlessly to the four corners of the globe; he had come close to catching him more than once, but whenever he got near enough to touch him, his quarry vanished, like smoke on the wind.

  The plot to blow up the airliners wasn’t regarded as an Al Qaeda operation, and there was no information suggesting Yousef and Mohammed were Al Qaeda affiliates. As bin Laden rose in prominence, the FBI team chasing KSM began to feel as though everyone had forgotten that he, too, wanted to kill Americans—thousands of them at once. KSM was secretly indicted in the U.S. in 1996, thanks in large part to the overseas gumshoe work of Pellegrino and a partner. When the indictment was unsealed at a high-profile news conference following Basit’s sentencing two years later, virtually no one noticed, much less publicized it. By then, if your target wasn’t Al Qaeda, it didn’t matter. Beyond Pellegrino and a handful of other agents, no one spent much time worrying about KSM or even thinking about him. In the year prior to September 11, as hints and clues of a major attack accumulated, the Manila case receded even further into bureaucratic backwaters.

  Al Qaeda grew to dwarf all other terrorist targets. Its activities dominated threat reporting within the intelligence community, especially after its bombings of the two U.S. embassies in Africa in 1998 and the American warship USS Cole in Yemen in 2000. In the final months before the 9/11 strikes, the intel channels hummed with reports that Al Qaeda was planning something spectacular.

  Even the president was briefed on the looming threat. One mysterious name was persistently associated with these Al Qaeda plans—Mukhtar, which in Arabic can mean “the head,” “the brain,” or “the chosen one.” No one knew who, exactly, Mukhtar was, but some of the intel had him trying to send sleeper agents into the United States. The name took on near-mythic proportions after 9/11, when bin Laden himself, in a video, praised Mukhtar as the mastermind of the attacks. Pointing to a position off-camera, bin Laden thanked him profusely. Even after the tape was recovered in the rubble in Afghanistan, the best forensic experts in Washington could find no trace of Mukhtar or his identity on it. When Soufan first saw that video, he thought to himself: “Who the hell is Mukhtar? We need to find him.”

  Although Al Qaeda had been a high-priority intelligence target for half a dozen years, American knowledge of the organization was surprisingly sketchy. Most of the prior investigative efforts had been focused solely on Osama bin Laden and a few members of his inner circle, including second-in-command Ayman al-Zawahiri and Saif al-Adel, a suspected operations chieftain. These men had been targets of an entire special unit within the CIA. But beyond them, U.S. understanding of Al Qaeda was riddled with holes. Who belonged? How many were they? Dozens, hundreds, thousands? And where the hell were they? What was the organization’s command structure? Who did its bidding? What were its ultimate intentions?

  In ideal circumstances, Gaudin and Soufan would try to extract exactly this sort of information from Zubaydah; they would build a better understanding through patient, careful questioning. The situation at Udorn was far from ideal. They needed Zubaydah to tell them where and when the next attack was going to occur. The CIA continued to have doubts about Zubaydah’s identity. They took his fingerprints and pressed the FBI agents for further corroboration. Gaudin and Soufan were already certain. They recognized him from Bureau photographs. Zubaydah was bigger than they expected. He could have played tackle for a college football team, Gaudin thought. But there was no doubt in their minds it was he.

  Zubaydah’s physical condition fluctuated a great deal during the first thirty-six hours at Udorn. At times, he seemed about to slip away. The doctors would rush in to resuscitate him, doing whatever they could to keep him alive. During one such effort Soufan and Gaudin stayed in the room while doctors worked to bring him back from the brink. By this point they had begun to establish a connection with Zubaydah. While the medical team worked on him, Soufan held ice cubes to his lips, murmuring to him in Arabic, trying to comfort him. Zubaydah, flat on his back, defecated all over the gurney and himself. Gaudin grabbed clean towels and wiped him clean. Don’t wo
rry, they told him, these are good doctors and they are going to take care of you.

  Shortly thereafter, Zubaydah was moved to a nearby hospital. Soufan and Gaudin went with him. On Zubaydah’s request, Gaudin stayed at his side and held his hand while their prized detainee went through a number of magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) tests, which involve the patient being inserted into a large, claustrophobia-inducing cylinder. Zubaydah was scared. Gaudin reassured him. Once Zubaydah was stabilized again, the agents resumed their interrogation, testing his willingness to cooperate by asking him to identify photographs from Gaudin’s PDA. They told him that they would scroll through the photos and wanted Zubaydah to respond only when they showed him a photo of Saif al-Adel or Abdullah Ahmed Abdullah, both of whom were wanted for their suspected roles in the African embassy bombings of 1998. If he was willing to talk about those men, they reasoned, he was probably willing to talk about anything.

  Gaudin gave Soufan the PDA with what he thought was a photo of Abdullah, but he had accidentally called up a photo of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed.

  Zubaydah suddenly squeezed Gaudin’s arm. Gaudin became agitated, thinking Zubaydah was claiming that the photo of KSM was Abdullah. He stopped the session. He told Zubaydah to quit wasting his time. After all we’ve been through in the last two days, after all we have done for you, he said, don’t you dare lie to me.

  Zubaydah replied: “No, I’m not lying to you. That’s Mukhtar.”

  Soufan, standing out of line of vision of the photo, was puzzled. Gaudin, still aggravated, said: “I know exactly who this is. This is Ramzi’s uncle, the plot against the pope, the plot against the Philippine airline.” He rattled off a bunch of information on Mohammed from the Manila Air plot, then said, “I don’t want to talk about him. He’s not important to me. What’s important to me is this test, if you’re going to be truthful to me. I’m here to talk about Abdullah. Don’t talk to me about this guy anymore.”

  They resumed the slide show, but Zubaydah interrupted again. “How did you know about Mukhtar?” he asked.

  Gaudin finally realized then that Zubaydah must know KSM, which made no sense. Zubaydah was Al Qaeda; KSM was Abdul Basit’s uncle, a freelancer. He brought KSM’s photo back up on the PDA and told Zubaydah with feigned frustration, okay, say whatever it is you wanted to say about the man in the photograph.

  “That’s Mukhtar,” Zubaydah said. “How did you know that Mukhtar was the mastermind of September eleventh?”

  Gaudin was so stunned he nearly fainted. Zubaydah had asked how the Americans had known that KSM was one of the most wanted men on the planet, the mysterious Mukhtar. Of course, they had no idea, but Gaudin gamely told him they knew everything: “We told you we already know the answers. When we ask you questions, we already know the answer.”

  He congratulated Zubaydah. “See, this is what we’re talking about, this is being honest with us. Thank you for being honest.” Gaudin was worried he wouldn’t be able to maintain his calm in front of Zubaydah any longer and, gathering his resolve, calmly told him he needed to take a bathroom break. He and Soufan went out of the room. Once outside, Gaudin could barely contain himself.

  “That’s Frank’s guy,” he told Soufan, referring the Manila case agent, Pellegrino. “Frank’s guy is the mastermind of nine eleven.”

  The pair were stunned. They didn’t quite understand how they had done it, but both knew they had uncovered a huge piece of information. They had to tell Pellegrino, their bosses, the world. Gaudin told the lead CIA agent at the site they needed to send cables immediately to their respective headquarters, telling them Zubaydah had produced the single most important piece of the September 11 puzzle to date—that Frank’s guy was the mastermind of 9/11.

  The CIA man stared blankly at them and said, “Who the hell is Frank?”

  The FBI and CIA—so often on parallel tracks that never converged—had been chasing Al Qaeda, the 9/11 plotters, KSM, and Mukhtar without the slightest hint that they were all connected.

  When Gaudin finally reached Pellegrino in New York, he told him as best he was able over an unsecured international connection what had transpired. Pellegrino was speechless. The last name he wanted to hear in connection with 9/11 was KSM, Pellegrino said later. “You want to crawl under your desk. I would have preferred any other name in the world.”

  When Soufan reached Kenny Maxwell, a supervisor on the counterterrorism squad in New York, and told him that “Frank’s guy” had planned 9/11, the supervisor’s immediate response was that it was another suspect in the Manila Air plot, Mohammed Jamal Khalifa.

  No, Soufan said. KSM.

  “Shit,” Maxwell said. “He’s not even Al Qaeda.”

  It didn’t take long for it to dawn on the counterterrorism squad members—and, soon, others in the FBI, the CIA, and the White House—that the identity of the mastermind of the worst terrorist attacks in history had been right there in front of them all along.

  The alert went out—aggressively, urgently, quietly. The very public hunt for bin Laden and company continued to dominate the headlines, and preoccupy the U.S. military. But the U.S. arsenal of tracking satellites was spun up and retasked toward a new target. The FBI and the CIA mobilized, and the entire weight of the U.S. war on terrorism was shifted toward an effort to find a man whose last known location was somewhere deep in the underworld of Karachi, Pakistan, enmeshed in a web of jihadis and the intelligence officers who protected them. It would soon become the largest secret manhunt in history, a guns-drawn chase through the streets of some of the world’s most dangerous places. But it would be nearly another year—a year full of attacks and plots in the U.S. and everywhere else—before KSM was finally run to ground.

  CHAPTER 2

  Those Without

  Kuwait, 1960s–1980s

  Badawiya, the neighborhood where Khalid Sheikh Mohammed grew up, sat between the sand and the sea on the southernmost edge of Fahaheel, an oil boom town south of Kuwait City. The neighborhood mosque overlooked a mile-wide field of rubble and weeds, a buffer zone between the neighborhood and the great Shuaiba petrochemical complex and Persian Gulf port. The refinery flare stacks sputtered and glowed around the clock. Al-Ahmadi, headquarters of the Kuwait Oil Company, and the bountiful Burgan oil field—the foundations of modern Kuwait—were just a few miles to the west.

  Before oil was discovered at Burgan in 1938, Fahaheel was little more than an obscure date palm oasis on the road to Saudi Arabia. Older Kuwaitis recall driving the route south from the capital through miles of blank sand, the occasional car, camel, or Bedouin tent the only sights along the way. Burgan Field was unusual for its vast volume—Kuwait is fifth in the world in known oil reserves, and fully half its production has come from this one place—and its ease of access. In places, the oil simply bubbled to the surface on its own.

  Mohammed’s parents arrived from Pakistan on the leading edge of Kuwait’s boom years. His father, Sheikh Mohammed Ali Doustin Baluchi; his father’s brother, Ali Mohammed; and their young families came together in 1956.1 Both brothers were religious men and had been recruited to head mosques. Sheikh Mohammed became imam of a drab brown brick mosque in Al-Ahmadi, the administrative center of the Kuwaiti oil industry. The twin minarets of the mosque stood in stark contrast to the Kuwait Oil Company corporate reservation, which surrounded it. The reservation was designed and built by the British and had the look and well-ordered feel of a small military installation. The gridded, tree-lined streets, flower-bedded roundabouts, and white-fenced worker cottages seemed to have been dropped in whole from another, greener world.

  Sheikh Mohammed and his wife, Halima, had four children when they arrived in Kuwait. Five more were born after; Khalid second to last. The families traveled on Pakistani passports, but this was as much a matter of convenience as identity. Both Sheikh Mohammed and Halima were ethnic Baluch, from a swath of hard, dry land across the Gulf of Oman from the Arabian peninsula. Baluchistan, as it is known, includes parts of contemporary Iran, Afghanistan, and
Pakistan, but existed as an entity in its own right long before the boundaries of any of these modern states were drawn. Sheikh Mohammed and Halima were both born in Karachi, Pakistan’s burgeoning commercial capital, but grew up in Sarbaz in Iranian Baluchistan, a couple of hours from the current Pakistan border. Mohammed’s Pakistani passport was issued by the consulate in Basra, Iraq.2

  Baluchistan is one of the oldest inhabited places on earth and its history is one of fierce resistance to whatever would-be ruler was on hand at the moment. Next-door-neighbor Persia, the great power of the ancient world, was held at bay for a thousand years; Alexander the Great suffered his greatest defeat there, and the Arab rulers who swept over the region in the century after Muhammad’s death were told by their military strategists to forgo Baluchistan, for “if you send a small Army, it will be defeated, if you send a large Army, they will die of thirst and hunger.”3

  The oil money that drew Mohammed and his family didn’t merely enrich Kuwait; it transformed the country utterly. At its first formal census, in 1957, Kuwait had a population of 206,000. In slightly more than two decades, it had grown six times larger and has nearly doubled again since. The growth came almost entirely from abroad. Palestinians and Egyptians arrived by the hundreds of thousands and largely took over the businesses of bureaucracy, civil affairs, and education. Americans and Brits came, in smaller numbers, to run the new oil and banking enterprises. South Asians—Pakistanis and Indians, initially; Filipinos, Sri Lankans, and Bangladeshis later—formed the workforce in the oil fields and refineries and, later, in a vibrant service economy.

  The boom made native Kuwaitis among the wealthiest and most cosseted people on earth. Their traditional Bedouin birthright had been a share of their fathers’ camels; the post-boom Kuwaiti citizen enjoyed guaranteed state employment, or a stipend if he were jobless or privately employed; marriage bonuses; free mortgages, medical care, and education from childhood through university; and guaranteed income at retirement.