The Hunt for KSM

by Terry McDermott

  All this and more was available to every Kuwaiti citizen. The majority of residents, however, were not citizens and never would be. Most migrant workers and their offspring were deemed unqualified. This created a caste system dividing those with citizenship, the native-born Kuwaitis, from the guest workers, known locally as bidoon—those without. The Baluch, no matter how long they stayed, were among the bidoon. This was a fundamental fact of life for the family of Mohammed Ali Doustin. They knew they would never belong. They didn’t even know how long they would be allowed to stay. On occasion, the government would notify a family to pack up and leave as soon as possible. It didn’t have to be clear why.

  Khalid Sheikh Mohammed was born on April 14, 1965. His father was already fifty-seven, and died just four years later. Khalid’s older brothers—Zahed, Aref, and Abed—directed his schooling. Education in the years of Khalid’s youth was serious business. Schoolboys wore white shirts and gray slacks, and the headmaster carried a bamboo cane to keep students in line. Khalid was much younger than his oldest siblings and had nieces and nephews his own age. He and his nephews all attended high school together at Fahaheel Secondary School, a three-story brick all-boys school that housed as many as twelve hundred students.

  Mohammed, like his brothers, was an excellent student and technically inclined. He was also rebellious. He and one of his nephews, Abdul Basit Abdul Karim, once climbed the flagpole atop their elementary schoolhouse and tore down the Kuwaiti flag.4 The girls attended separate female-only schools and did not progress beyond secondary school. “Khalid excelled, especially at science,” said Sheikh Ahmed Dabbous,5 a family friend and teacher at the school, which, like Fahaheel, had a diverse student body—Kuwaitis, Palestinians, Egyptians, and the Baluchi contingent. There were strict separations among the students. Each group tended to stay with its own. State-sponsored sports clubs, for example, were formed for the exclusive membership of native Kuwaitis.

  Most of the teachers at the public schools Mohammed attended were Palestinians, who flowed into the country following the 1967 war. They made up the largest group of expatriates in the years of Khalid’s childhood and adolescence. At one point there were an estimated 450,000 Palestinians in Kuwait, threatening to outnumber the natives. Hawalli, an area of Kuwait City, became known locally as the West Bank. A United Nations program established after the formation of Israel to help resettle Palestinians away from Palestine included an ambitious educational component; by some measures, Palestinians in the 1970s were among the best-educated populations in the world. As they did in other Arab countries, Palestinians in Kuwait predominated in the professional ranks of engineers, physicians, and teachers.

  Kuwait became a center of Palestinian political activism. Yasser Arafat worked there as a civil engineer. Khalid Mishal, a founder of Hamas, was graduated from Kuwait University and taught school in Kuwait City. Most of the political energies of the exiled Palestinians were directed toward Palestine and the formation of an armed resistance there (Fatah, the movement for the national liberation of Palestine, was founded in Kuwait in 1959), but just by weight of numbers Palestinians became a significant, although largely veiled, presence in Kuwait’s nascent domestic politics.

  Two epochal events roiled the Islamic world in 1979: Islamists overthrew the shah of Iran and instituted an Islamic republic; and the Soviet Union invaded Muslim Afghanistan and installed a puppet government. Muslim leaders worldwide, but especially in the Gulf, were eager to ally themselves with the call to jihad that followed the Soviet invasion. It provided an opportunity to show their commitment to Islamic action without much risk. But the Islamic revolt in Iran provoked a more complicated response. In Kuwait, Shiites made up about a third of the population, and they saw Ayatollah Khomeini’s rise to power as a model for Islamic reform at home. The government turned to local Sunni Islamists, such as the Muslim Brotherhood, as a show of their own commitment to a more Islamic Kuwait.

  The Brotherhood had begun in Egypt in the 1920s, lashing out at the iniquities of the modern world and calling for a return to a more literal interpretation of Islam. The Brotherhood spread throughout the Arab world, where it often formed the core of opposition to autocratic governments; its members frequently were treated as criminals.

  The Kuwaiti government tolerated the Brotherhood, which by the 1980s was dominated locally by Palestinians, as a hedge against potential threats from nationalists on the left. The organization was, as in much of the Arab world, illegal, but nonetheless often stood candidates for elections. The ambivalence was common throughout the region; the risk embedded within it was that Islamists would not long be content to be used as a pawn against other government critics and would demand action of their own choosing.

  Mohammed’s oldest brother, Zahed, became a student leader of the Brotherhood at Kuwait University. Another brother, Abed, attended religious universities in Kuwait, then Qatar. Mohammed followed Zahed’s lead and began attending desert camps of the Brotherhood when he was sixteen.6 The camps were organized as one part recreation and one part proselytization. Speakers came from abroad to spread the word. It was there in the camps that Mohammed first heard the call to jihad. One particularly fiery orator was an Egyptian-educated Pashtun, Abdul Rasul Sayyaf, who called the young men in the camp to come to Afghanistan to join the holy war against the occupying Soviets.7

  While much of the ruling elite worried about the persistence of rural, desert values in a modernizing, urbanizing culture, the Islamists were worried about the opposite—the secularization of the new Kuwait. Fewer and fewer families attended mosque regularly. The Brotherhood saw itself as a bulwark against this steady decline. It recruited members quietly, often approaching them covertly in times of personal turmoil or trouble. Its members kept close eyes on local mosques to see who might be newly susceptible to the renewal of a religious lifestyle.

  Another key element of the Brotherhood’s ideology was a virulent anti-Semitism, which historically had not been a hallmark of Islamist thought. Sayyid Qutb, the Brotherhood’s founding theoretician, had preached a rigid, relentless campaign to blame the Jews for almost everything. That message was tailor-made for the crestfallen years that followed Israel’s repeated displays of military dominance over the Arabs. An earlier generation’s attempt to shape a secular, pan-Arab identity was swept away in the Jewish victories, and pious young men like Mohammed were particularly willing to embrace a vision of a religious future.

  When Mohammed graduated high school, Zahed was teaching at a local technical school. Zahed had planned on graduate school in the United States, but the family decided only one boy could afford to go abroad—as bidoon, they did not qualify for the generous government scholarships provided to native Kuwaitis. The older brothers chose to send Khalid to the west for further schooling. Mohammed’s old high school teacher Dabbous said Mohammed had made clear for years his desire to go abroad: “From the beginning of his studies it’s science. He wanted to go to America for this reason. He wanted to become a doctor [PhD] there.” The brothers chose Khalid. They traded their future for his.

  North Carolina, 1984

  Traveling on a Pakistani passport, Mohammed arrived in the winter of 1984 in tiny, remote Murfreesboro, North Carolina, to attend Chowan College, a two-year school virtually unknown in the United States but advertised abroad by the Baptist missionaries it graduated. For Mohammed, it must have been like landing on Mars. There were dusky rivers meandering through dense pine forests, cotton fields, and tobacco patches. Not a sand dune in sight.

  Mohammed told school administrators he had heard of the college from a friend in Kuwait. He applied to the school shortly after graduating from Fahaheel Secondary School in 1983. He listed his brother Zahed as his father on the enrollment forms. His bill—$2,245 for the spring semester—was paid in full on the day of his matriculation, January 10.8 Chowan had been founded in 1848 as a sort of finishing school for young Southern women. Later, under financial duress, it reduced its curriculum and became a two-yea
r junior college. Its leafy setting in isolated Murfreesboro—population about two thousand, with no bars and a single pizza shop—ensured that everyone remained on the straight and narrow.

  Chowan did not require the standard English proficiency exam then widely mandated for international students. Foreign enrollees often spent only a semester or two there, improved their English just enough, and transferred to four-year universities. Dominating the international contingent by the 1980s were Middle Eastern men, about fifty of whom were enrolled each year. Mohammed, although Pakistani by birth, spoke Arabic fluently and was integrated into the Arab contingent.

  The Arab students were the butt of jokes and harassment in the anti-Muslim era that followed the 1979 Iranian takeover of the U.S. embassy in Tehran. The local boys razzed them, calling them Abbie Dahbies, a play on Abu Dhabi.

  Some American students found the foreigners impenetrable. “They seemed to be praying all the time,” said John Franklin Timberlake, a 1984 Chowan graduate who became a police officer in Murfreesboro. “Just chanting, like. We never understood a word of it. Sometimes we’d come home late on a weekend night, maybe after we’d had a few beers, and they’d still be praying.”9 The foreign students, regardless of religious affiliation or inclination, were required along with everyone else to attend a weekly Christian chapel service.

  A group of the Middle Easterners lived in Parker Hall, a brick tower overlooking Lake Vann, a small pond on campus. They often cooked, ate, and prayed together. As was their custom, they left their shoes in the corridor, an apparently irresistible target for locals, who sometimes moved the shoes from the hallway to the lake. Other students occasionally propped big garbage pails filled with water against the doors of the “Abbie Dahbies,” then knocked and ran away. When the young men answered the door, water flooded the room.

  Mohammed did well in the pre-engineering curriculum he took for the sole semester he was there. He left in the spring for North Carolina Agricultural and Technical State University in Greensboro, a historically black college on the Piedmont plain in the central part of the state. Unlike gentrified Chowan, A&T was located in a large, growing, fractious city and had an activist past. Jesse Jackson was a graduate, and on February 1, 1960, students at A&T staged the first Civil Rights–era lunch-counter sit-in at a downtown Woolworth. By the time Mohammed arrived, African Americans still made up the majority of students, but there were good-size blocs of white Southerners and Middle Easterners.

  For most of the Middle Easterners, this was their initial exposure to Western life. They were excited to see the movies, hear the music they had dreamed of at home. Once they arrived, some were appalled at what they witnessed. Others were thrilled. Like college students almost everywhere, they loved the party life. The better-off among them drove their new Porsche roadsters and Mercedes coupes to and from campus. Like many other religious Muslims, Mohammed developed a dislike for the U.S. in his time here and a disdain for many of his fellow Muslims.

  One of Mohammed’s nephews, Abdul Karim Abdul Karim (Abdul Basit’s brother), had left Kuwait the year before Mohammed and spent two semesters in Oklahoma. He transferred to A&T with Mohammed and majored in industrial engineering. Mohammed was in the mechanical engineering program. The men lived a couple of miles off campus in bland apartment complexes with names like the Yorktown and the Colonial. They shared cars and accumulated parking tickets in large numbers, one friend said. They seldom mingled outside their groups and tended to skip organized events. In the fall, when football dominated the Aggie social calendar, the foreign students arranged soccer matches in the park.

  Some of the American students were resentful of the Middle Easterners, feeling they knew English well enough to do the work in lab classes but didn’t carry their fair share.

  “It was the college life: we used to get together three, four times a week, watch the games, chat, drink, you know,” said Sami Zitawi, a Kuwaiti native who recalled large get-togethers on Friday, the Muslim holy day. “We used to go to the farmers, buy a lamb or a goat. Butcher it with a knife…. Every Friday night someone would have a big dinner: fifteen, twenty, twenty-five students.” The butchering, he said, was often comically inept. The men sometimes organized variety shows—skits and small plays in which Mohammed was an active participant.10

  While the Middle Eastern students seemed monolithic to the Americans, there were deep divisions within their ranks. “Basically, what you saw was a microsociety of our home,” said Mahmood Zubaid, a Kuwaiti architectural engineer. “Everybody fit in where they felt most comfortable…. There were Kuwaitis, Palestinians, Jordanians. About two hundred to three hundred people in total, but they tended to associate with just their own group…. We hung around only with Kuwaitis. The community we were in, out of the two hundred or three hundred, was actually only about twenty people.”

  Even within the Kuwaiti group there were deep divisions in politics, culture, status (the native Kuwaitis were on full government scholarships, while the Palestinians and Baluch paid their own way), and especially religion. At the other extreme was a strong core of religious conservatives who tried to act as moral police.

  The fun-loving Arabs called them the mullahs. Mohammed was a mullah. There was plenty at A&T for Mohammed and other true believers to be distressed about. Some of the Arab students, like many Americans, treated college life as one long, barely interrupted party. Some had fancy cars and pretty American girlfriends. They went to the clubs; they drank and smoked whatever was available. One Kuwaiti student so resented the efforts at moral policing he would place a bottle of Johnnie Walker scotch on his table whenever the mullahs came by. The party boys tried not to call attention to themselves, but the mullahs noticed. They monitored airports for the arrival of new students and tried to bring them to their side of the battle.

  Arab governments monitored relations among their overseas students and would disperse students if they determined any kind of fundamentalist cell was forming. “We had a lot of our students coming back from the U.S. radicalized,” said one high-ranking Arab official. “I’m not talking about religious guys going to the U.S. and coming back as fundamentalists. I’m talking about cool guys,” he said.11

  Mohammed was religious, studious, and private, but friendly and capable of a laugh. He had little contact with Americans, and when he did found them to be debauched and racist.12 He also had a hard time following their traffic laws. He crashed his nephew’s Oldsmobile into a car driven by locals, was found guilty of causing the wreck, and later ordered to pay damages. He lost his right to drive, ignored the order, and ended up spending a few hours in the county jail, a hulking concrete structure that takes up most of a block a mile west of campus in downtown Greensboro.

  At the end of 1986, after just three years, Mohammed and his nephew Abdul Karim were graduated from A&T. Almost a third of the mechanical engineering graduates were Middle Easterners. As at Chowan, there was no photo of him in the yearbook. Unlike some of his classmates, who saw their time in Carolina as a high point in their lives, Mohammed was embittered and eager to leave America.

  His old high school teacher, Sheikh Ahmed Dabbous, sought him out shortly after he returned home to Kuwait. He found a changed, dour, disenchanted young man.

  “When he goes there, he sees most Americans don’t like Arabs and Islam,” said Dabbous.

  “ ‘Because of Israel,’ he says. ‘Most Americans hate Arabs because of this.’ He’s a very normal boy before. Kind, generous, always the smiling kind. After he came back, he’s a different man. He’s very sad. He doesn’t speak. He just sits there.

  “I talked to him, to change his mind, to tell him this is just a few Americans. He refused to speak to me about it again. He was set…. When Khalid said this, I told him we must meet again.

  “He said, ‘No, my ideas are very strong. Don’t talk with me again about this.’ ”

  Peshawar, Pakistan, 1989

  Peshawar sits on a delta of tableland that narrows as it backs up against the
Hindu Kush mountain range in northwest Pakistan. The landscape is harsh, with little arable land. The possibilities for a hard life are great; those for livelihood, meek, now that the Silk Road on which it sits has long since ceased to be a commercial thoroughfare. The local Pashtun population has for generations dodged invaders, traders, and missionaries. The Pashtuns are a tough, wily bunch who have survived—even thrived—for centuries by being able to bend with whatever winds blow through, but they are always careful to take care of their own. Guns are regarded as a man’s jewelry and, along with gold and women, are said to be one of the three things for which a Pashtun man will fight. Given the region’s history and the prevalence of weaponry within it, that list seems abbreviated. Over time, there have been few periods of calm.

  In the 1980s, Peshawar became the rear-echelon headquarters for the Afghan resistance against the Soviet Union’s occupying army. While Mohammed was away in America, at college, his brothers—Zahed, Aref, and Abed—moved to Peshawar to support the jihad against the Soviets. By the time of Mohammed’s graduation, the pattern of the war had been set. The smaller, nimbler Afghan guerrilla groups had mastered the main act of any resistance—frustrating the enemy—and the war had devolved into a holding action. It had also become a clarion call across the Muslim world. Abdullah Azzam, a Jordanian scholar, had moved to Peshawar years before and almost single-handedly created the modern notion of jihad. Only from the barrel of a rifle, he said, should jihad proceed.