The Hunt for KSM

by Terry McDermott

Would-be fighters were drawn from around the globe. Among those who answered Azzam’s call was Osama bin Laden, scion of a wealthy Saudi Arabian family. Almost immediately upon returning from America to Kuwait, unable to find work, Mohammed set out to join his brothers.

  Armies have always had camp followers. They’ve changed over time from improbable parades of jugglers and peddlers to the contemporary brigades of missionaries and refugee-resettlement workers. In Peshawar, the headquarters of the resistance, more than 150 relief organizations set up offices during the war. There were so many charities wanting to work in the region that three separate coordinating councils were required to sort out their good deeds.

  Before he left Kuwait, Zahed Sheikh Mohammed had gone to work for a Kuwaiti charity called Lajnat Al-Da’wa al Islamia, or the Committee for Islamic Appeal. LDI was one of the largest charitable organizations in the Middle East. In 1985, two years after he joined the organization, LDI’s leaders asked Zahed to move to Pakistan to run their war-relief operations. He was already well established and respected by the time Khalid arrived.

  LDI was one of the largest agencies in the region. It had more than twelve hundred employees in Pakistan and Afghanistan and a $4 million annual budget. It operated hospitals, clinics, and twenty-two Qur’anic study centers.13 As head of a large, well-endowed, and influential charity, Zahed became a figure of importance. He worked out of an office on Arbat Road in Peshawar’s University Town, the newest and most Westernized neighborhood in the city, and knew virtually everyone of importance there—Afghan resistance leaders, Arab donors, Pakistani spies, even journalists.

  Some charities were suspected of being little more than fronts for laundering jihadi money, but LDI was never accused of wrongdoing. Zahed was strict about not mixing relief work with the resistance. Zahed, the eldest of the brothers, was the most moderate among them. Abed was the most zealously militant, and Khalid followed his lead. LDI spent millions of dollars on schools and clinics and the promotion of the Kuwaiti brand of Islam. Other Arab charities did the same, and their religious schools flourished not just in Peshawar but throughout Pakistan and in areas of Afghanistan controlled by the resistance.

  When Mohammed arrived in Peshawar, in 1987, it was a place full of spies, intrigue, and high adventure. The Americans, Russians, Saudis, even the Chinese had scores of agents on the ground. The buccaneering Texas congressman Charlie Wilson periodically rolled through carrying American gifts, the latest of which—Stinger missiles—had just arrived. The fight against the Soviets had been going on for eight years, and the resistance was beginning to sense the prospect of victory. “The Afghans were ecstatic,” a Western diplomat who was stationed in Peshawar at the time said. “They thought they were really doing some stuff over there.”14

  Mohammed trained at the Sada camp organized by Azzam. Like most of the Arab camps, Sada spent as much time on ideological rhetoric as battlefield technique. Azzam was a mesmerizing speaker and Mohammed was taken with his message on the necessity of jihad. He would quote passages from Azzam’s teachings even decades later.

  After he finished the camp training, Mohammed went to work at al-Bunyan al-Marsus, the newspaper published by Abdul Rasul Sayyaf’s Ittihad-i-Islami, the Islamic Union, one of the Afghan-refugee political parties headquartered in Peshawar. Mohammed’s brother Abed was already working at the newspaper when Mohammed began. If Zahed and Aref were older and calmer and Zahed, in particular, was a stabilizing influence, Abed was the most fiery Baluch brother. He had undergone formal religious training in the Gulf emirate Qatar, and was widely respected for his knowledge.

  Among dozens of competing potential beneficiaries, seven political parties had been designated by the United States and Saudi Arabia as worthy recipients of the hundreds of millions of dollars they poured into the war against the Soviets. Sayyaf’s Islamic Union was at the head of the pack. Sayyaf had been jailed in Kabul and arrived in Peshawar later than most of the other insurgent leaders. This turned out to be an advantage, as the other parties had become bogged down in their own competitions for funds and recruits. Sayyaf was untainted by these rivalries and became a favorite of the CIA.

  Sayyaf was a rarity among Afghans, who tended to view Arabs as odd and their interpretation of Islam as impractical. Sayyaf had been educated at Al-Azhar University in Cairo, had spent considerable time in Saudi Arabia, and spoke fluent Arabic. Like Zahed and Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, he was a member of the Muslim Brotherhood and had, in fact, spoken at one of the desert camps Khalid attended as a boy. He was not much of a military man—he’d been a university lecturer before the Soviet invasion—but he was a phenomenal fund-raiser. “Sayyaf had fully internalized the Saudi conservative Islamic message,” said Alan Eastham, principal officer in the U.S. consulate in Peshawar in the mid-1980s. “He could give a stem-winder, too. A good fund-raiser, a guy who could go to Saudi Arabia and come back with a pot full of money.”15

  In addition to his work at the party newspaper, Mohammed taught engineering at Sayyaf’s university, Dawa’a al-Jihad, which means “convert and struggle.” Dawa’a al-Jihad was a rough but functioning college; as many as two thousand students came to learn engineering, medical technology, and literature, and also to train at the neighboring jihadi camps that Sayyaf ran.

  The campus had student dormitories, athletic fields, a library, and laboratories, all connected by eucalyptus-lined walkways. It was located about thirty miles southeast of Peshawar, just down the road from the mosque and madrassa where many Taliban leaders were schooled. Twenty-foot-high mud walls separated it from the sprawling Jalozai refugee camp, home to more than two hundred thousand Afghans who had fled a decade of war at home. With Sayyaf’s financial support, Mohammed established a curriculum to educate the refugees and prepare them for war against the Russians.

  Sayyaf attracted men from all over the Muslim world. Mohammed made lasting acquaintance with several Southeast Asians at Sayyaf’s camps, including an Indonesian known by the nom de guerre Hambali, who would remain an associate for the next fifteen years.

  While he was in Peshawar, Mohammed married one of his cousins—the daughter of a maternal aunt. The Baluchi brothers were a part of the small, semipermanent community of foreigners around Peshawar; these included Azzam, Egyptian Islamic Jihad founder Ayman al-Zawahiri, and bin Laden. Many of the more well-off Arabs bought houses in Hayatabad or University Town, the most modern and expensive neighborhoods in Peshawar. Bin Laden and his large family of wives and children lived in a big new house in Hayatabad. Mohammed lived at the refugee camp.

  Most of the Peshawar Arabs prayed at the small Saba-e-Leil mosque, behind a stucco arch inlaid with pink marble on a dead-end alley off Arbat Road, not far from both Sayyaf’s and Zahed’s offices. Parts of Peshawar came to look like an Arab town, and this was a bustling little neighborhood, with bakeries, water-buffalo butchers, tailors, and travel agents for booking passages home. There were Arabic newspapers and magazines published locally. Men wore kaffiyehs and their wives were fully covered in Wahhabi black. Tailor shops were kept busy sewing the latest Eid fashions. They lived in many ways a normal life. Khalid even took graduate-level classes by correspondence, earning a master’s degree in Islamic culture.16 The brothers blended in with their Arab colleagues. They wore red-and-white checked head scarves and looked more Arab than Pakistani. Zahed and Khalid, both short, stout, and heavy-bearded, looked enough alike that, despite Zahed being eight years older, some people could not tell them apart.

  Many of those who came to fight the holy war never got far beyond the city. “Saudi, Gulf families would send their kids to Afghanistan in the summer for some school project,” Eastham said. “They’d send them through a training camp, give them a weapon, and send them into Afghanistan. They worried to death about it, didn’t want them to get killed. These were the donors’ kids. You had to accept them. It drove the Afghans crazy because the Arabs had an air of superiority about them, an arrogance.” They were largely regarded by the various Afghan armies
as a nuisance, to be tolerated in exchange for the petrodollars that followed them.

  Bin Laden’s family owned one of the largest construction firms in the world, and under his direction, the Arab jihadis spent enormous energy constructing camps and hideouts in the mountainous terrain across the border in Afghanistan. For a time, Mohammed worked as a hydraulic engineer for a Japanese company named Maruzen. The company sent him to Japan to learn its management system. When Mohammed returned to Afghanistan, he maintained and repaired hydraulic drills used in the construction of defensive positions—trenches and caves—in the mountains.17

  By this time, Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev had already decided to end the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan, which was a failure in almost every regard. The Soviet army did not control the country in any genuine way and could not suppress the insurgency. The war was draining the Soviet treasury and was extremely unpopular among the citizenry. It had become the Soviet Vietnam.

  Gorbachev began removing troops in 1988. By February of 1989, the last Soviet soldier marched in retreat across the Friendship Bridge over the Amu Darya. The Afghans had once again repelled an empire. But the war didn’t stop, or even slow much. The Afghans, victorious against the foreign invader, did as they had so often done in the past—they turned on one another.

  The Soviets left behind a government led by a former head of the secret police, Mohammed Najibullah. Sayyaf, among others, argued that the government could be upended with a quick and convincing military victory. The resistance, including Sayyaf’s Islamic Union and eight other Peshawar-based Afghan political armies, chose to attack Jalalabad, a government garrison town not far from the resistance’s own headquarters across the border in Pakistan.

  One long-standing debate among the Afghan Arabs had been what role they should play vis-à-vis the Afghan resistance armies. Some of the Arabs wanted to form separate combat brigades, to make their own fight. Azzam argued that the Arabs were there to serve the Afghans and should fight at their behest. The debate resurfaced during preparations for the Jalalabad attack. A small group of Arabs, including Mohammed’s brother Abed, wanted to lead its own attack. They were dissuaded and instead fell in behind the Afghan ranks. It didn’t matter. The attack was ill-conceived and poorly executed—a real goat fuck, as one Western analyst described it.

  Casualties were heavy in what turned out to be a two-month siege. Even fighting from the rear, the Arabs fell victim to the Jalalabad defenses. A group of them wandered into a minefield. One misstep triggered a lethal series of explosions. Among the dead was Abed Sheikh Mohammed.

  In a normal life lived in a normal time, a man like Abed—a religious scholar by training; a pious, devout man by every description; a man who was idolized in Qatar for work he had done educating wayward young men—would never have been near a battlefield. His death was felt with a special sense of loss. Zahed and Khalid were crushed. “With the Eternal Ones,” Azzam wrote in a eulogy, “did this emigrant rider pass on, accompanied by the hearts of all who knew him.” Khalid and one of his wife’s brothers did what they could to establish a legacy for Abed, getting financial support from Sayyaf for a school Abed had been trying to get off the ground—a coup, since when the Soviets left Afghanistan, the rivers of cash the U.S. and the Saudis had poured into the resistance trickled to an end as well. Many among the jihadis blamed these erstwhile sponsors for the ignominious loss at Jalalabad and the wasted lives, including Abed’s, that went with it.

  Full-scale internecine war broke out after the failed attack. The various elements of the Afghan resistance attacked not just the forces of the government, but one another. It was a period of deep disconsolation among the foreign fighters in Peshawar. They argued among themselves.

  Azzam, the creator of jihad, and bin Laden, its moneyman, had a serious falling out over strategy. The two had cooperated to open the Office of Services to coordinate recruitment and planning. Bin Laden, however, had taken sides with Egyptian jihadis, who wanted to use money that had been raised for the Afghan fight to fund activities at home in Egypt. Azzam gave a lecture in which he declared that the use of the money for anything beyond Afghanistan would be unlawful. Bin Laden left the organization soon after. Then, a mere month later, Azzam, the heart of the Arab jihadi resistance, and two of his sons were killed by a roadside bomb on Arbat Road en route to Friday prayers at the mosque. Some blamed Afghan leaders or, later, bin Laden. Others blamed the American intelligence services. The murder was never solved.

  The Americans were also accused of actively opposing the establishment of an Islamic government in Kabul. Some among the mujahideen felt they had been duped into serving America’s interests and then tossed aside. Ahmed Shah Ahmedzai, a Sayyaf deputy, said that when the Americans left, they didn’t even say, “Bye-bye, Afghans.”18

  The repercussions of the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait in August of 1990 were experienced by some in the resistance as a further insult. The counterattack, led by American forces, infuriated bin Laden, who felt that the Saudis, by allowing the U.S. to base its soldiers in the kingdom, violated a sacred dictate to keep infidels out of the holy land. He confronted the royals, offering to use his own holy army to protect the kingdom. One man who attended the meeting at which bin Laden made his offer said bin Laden produced a sixty-page document outlining his plans.19 He said he had twenty thousand men ready to fight and another forty thousand in reserve. He told a prince in attendance that he would do this to serve Allah, not the king. The family, flabbergasted at his naiveté and insulted by his disdain, declined the offer.

  Bin Laden began attacking the U.S. and Saudi governments in speeches, saying there was no difference between the Soviets and the Americans—they were all infidels and would all be swept away in the coming Islamic tide.

  While bin Laden turned his attention elsewhere, Afghanistan deteriorated into full-on civil war, and men kept coming to fight in it. Among them was Abdul Basit Abdul Karim, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed’s younger nephew and comrade in the removal of the Kuwaiti flag from their elementary school back in Kuwait. Basit had gone abroad to Wales to study electrical engineering, and in 1988 came to Peshawar on break from school. He returned in 1991 and developed a reputation as a clever designer of explosive devices. Across the border from Peshawar, he trained at Khalden, the first and biggest of the guerrilla warfare camps, and taught courses in bomb making.

  Many of the original Afghan Arabs had already left the region, more or less for good. Khalid and Zahed were still in Peshawar, but the glory had gone out of the fight. Everything seemed changed for the worse. Azzam and Abed were dead. Disillusionment and resentment at the American and Saudi abandonment of the rebel cause were prevalent. One friend of the Baluch brothers said: “In 1991–92, their whereabouts, their meetings, their thoughts, it became more secret. The hatred for Americans—it was among every Arab who came to Afghanistan…. They all thought America had imposed its rule by vetoing Islamic rule in Afghanistan through its agents in Pakistan.”20

  Doha, Qatar, 1992

  In 1992, Zahed Sheikh Mohammed left for a business opportunity in the United Arab Emirates. With both brothers gone—Abed for good—and the anti-Russian jihad complete, Khalid went through a restless period. He tried to move on to the next holy war, this one in Bosnia, moving there for a brief period and contributing to the cause, mainly by organizing donations—but he didn’t stay long. He returned to Peshawar briefly before he was invited to move to Doha, Qatar.

  Abdullah bin Khalid al-Thani, a member of the ruling family and a minister in the government, arranged a job for Mohammed as a project engineer in the Ministry of Electricity and Water. As an expression of his faith, Abdullah bin Khalid provided what amounted to a retreat for former jihadis. “A lot of these guys had what were basically gentlemen’s truck farms. It was a hobby,” a Western official who was stationed in Doha at the time said. “Grow cabbages, raise ducks. An expensive hobby, since the government would give you water for residential use, but not for agriculture; you had to pa
y for your own…. The house was always overstaffed, a lot of unemployed Afghan Arabs. These guys would stay for a while; some of them they tended to get a little plumper. There were always these guys hanging around, and maybe a couple of Kalashnikovs in the corner.”21

  Perhaps influenced by the large circle of acquaintances his late brother, Abed, had built there, Mohammed accepted the position and moved his family to Doha in 1993. How much he worked at the job is uncertain. What is clear is that he hadn’t quit the fight. Mohammed established a small fund-raising operation there, recruiting men throughout the Gulf to hunt for individual donors, often finding them among the older, wealthier men at local mosques. Mohammed’s recruits would wait for them to emerge from the mosques after prayers before cornering them for small donations. This was a common practice throughout the region, officially frowned upon but allowed. The system worked because the corner men were able to use the Muslim custom of tithing as leverage against their marks. Mohammed would periodically make the rounds, collecting the money from his growing network of operators.

  Mohammed was an adept and relentless networker with a gift for small talk and instant familiarity. A friend recalls running into him once on a street outside a mosque in Doha. While they talked, a constant stream of people kept coming up to Mohammed to say hello, shake his hand, exchange warm good wishes. Mohammed seemed to know them all and had a kind word, or maybe a joke, for each. He couldn’t have been more charming.22

  It is hard to hide in a place like Doha, one of the world’s smallest capitals. Security officials there were aware of Mohammed’s activities and allowed him to continue. “We knew he was sort of in possession of money and sending it somewhere,” a U.S. official said. It was never clear whether Mohammed was part of any larger organization; whether there were lines of authority through which he reported or if he was a sole proprietor. His sort of small-time, informal fund-raising, usually involving donations in the hundreds, not thousands, of dollars, was ubiquitous for religious causes throughout the Gulf. Mohammed simply adapted it to a new cause—jihad, in its many guises. Mohammed flew in and out of Doha, popping up in the UAE, Bahrain, Pakistan, and occasionally Kuwait. His name was almost never mentioned in broader counterterrorism discussions, and it wasn’t evident that he was anything more than a bit player.