The Hunt for KSM

by Terry McDermott

  It was such a paltry sum that the investigators almost certainly would have ignored it if they had anything better to go on. They didn’t, so they recorded it and hoped someday it would make sense. Efforts to get information in Doha were fruitless. As they began constructing Basit’s personal history, they learned he had been raised in Kuwait, part of a large Baluchi extended family there. They eventually determined that “Khalid Shaykh in Doha” was Basit’s uncle on his mother’s side, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed.

  The investigators assumed Basit was in hiding somewhere, probably among friends and family in Pakistan, especially since he had called there often from the U.S. Pellegrino had a theory honed from his days chasing fugitives in Manhattan and Queens: “Everyone goes home. I don’t care if you’re a fugitive from Washington Heights, New York, or wherever, you want to go home and talk to Mom at some point,” he’d say. Pellegrino thought Basit would make his way back home, and eventually that’s where he went.

  He disappeared for a time into Baluchistan, the unruly desert region that straddles Iran and Pakistan, but he didn’t stay quiet for long. He was treated within the growing jihadi community as a kind of folk hero, a man-about-town in Quetta, the provincial capital of Baluchistan, as well as Peshawar and Karachi.

  Pellegrino and Parr flew to Islamabad, the Pakistani capital. The FBI abroad was in a uniquely helpless position. They had authority to pursue criminal cases wherever the cases took them, but they had no infrastructure to assist them. A few of the larger embassies had an FBI representative (known as the legal attaché, or legat) stationed there full-time. Most did not. Agents were reliant upon the goodwill of the resident CIA station chief, the ambassador, and local officials. Cooperation from all these sources varied greatly. Typically, the CIA chiefs and their case officers were agreeable to setting up meetings. The Pakistanis were another story.

  Pellegrino and Parr met with local security officials in an attempt to enlist their help tracking down Basit. They brought with them a series of phone numbers Basit had called from the United States. They wanted to know who the numbers belonged to. They assumed they were family and friends, but had no way to be sure. The security official in charge of the meeting took an uncommonly long time looking through their request. The whole while he was reading through it, he kept wagging his head no. He didn’t say anything, just shook his head over and over again. Pellegrino and Parr knew they were wasting time. Then the official finished examining the papers, looked up, and said, “We’ll help you.”

  He never did, of course, setting the tone for years of passive-aggressive behavior. The Pakistanis always said yes and then never helped, even when they were asked to procure the most mundane items, such as bank and phone records. U.S. investigators managed to get Pakistan to raid the home of Mohammed’s brother Zahed in an effort to find information on Basit and other coconspirators. But Pellegrino and Parr spent a month in Pakistan and left with not much more than they brought with them. They returned to New York with little on Basit and nothing on his mysterious uncle.

  Karachi, Pakistan, Summer 1993

  Basit’s boyhood friend Abdul Hakim Murad had recently returned from the U.S., where he had finally earned his commercial pilot’s license and was living in Karachi. He was having difficulty finding a job. He and Basit met up. Basit was in a talkative mood and went on at length about the need for good Muslims to give their lives, if needed, to the struggle.

  They talked about the enemies of Islam and potential targets: Benazir Bhutto, then the prime minister of Pakistan; nuclear power stations; a government official in Iran; the U.S. consulate there in Karachi; and a variety of other U.S. government buildings. There was an idea to assassinate President Clinton.

  Basit also took Murad around Karachi, introducing him to a small network of friends. They met with a man who said his name was Abdul Majid. He was a Saudi import-export businessman, he said. His real name was Ibrahim Muneer.

  That first meeting with Majid was at Majid’s Karachi apartment, near the roundabout in Sharifabad, a pleasant leafy area near one of the largest public parks in the sprawling city. Majid was very interested in learning everything he could about Murad’s pilot training: how long it took, how expensive it was, and who could qualify for it. Basit took Murad to meet Majid a second time. They had dinner at one of the barbecue places out in the Clifton district, by the sea. Again, Majid grilled Murad about the technical difficulties, or lack thereof, associated with flying.

  Basit and Murad returned to Majid’s apartment in August, but Majid was out of town—in Saudi, tending to business, Basit said. Another man was there instead. Basit introduced Murad to Wali Khan Amin Shah, an Afghan veteran of the anti-Soviet jihad.

  By now, Basit had persuaded Murad to join the cause. Murad even came up with an idea of his own. He proposed packing an airplane full of explosives and dive-bombing it into the Pentagon or CIA headquarters. He, Abdul Hakim Murad, would pilot the aircraft to glory. Basit said it was certainly an idea worth considering. The two of them then moved to an open-air compound in a warehouse district in Lahore for several weeks. There, Basit taught Murad to build bombs. Making chocolate. In one practice session, a detonator exploded in Basit’s face. He lost partial sight in one eye and had to be taken back to Karachi and hospitalized. As Murad sat with Basit during his recuperation, Majid showed up and paid all the bills.

  Peshawar, Pakistan, Autumn 1993

  Not surprisingly, given Basit’s growing acclaim, Pellegrino and Parr eventually got a tip on his whereabouts. A source had a copy of a request for a set of forged identity papers. They were to be delivered to a shop in Peshawar. Pellegrino saw the documents and immediately recognized Basit from the accompanying photo. He rushed back to Pakistan.

  The FBI had no permanent presence in Pakistan at the time, and the legat, or legal attaché, responsible for Pakistan and the region worked out of Bangkok. The Bureau had to rely on others for everything. Pellegrino didn’t even have an office to work from while there. The legat flew in to help arrange surveillance of the Basit document exchange, but while Pellegrino was optimistic, the legat told him not to get his hopes too high.

  The surveillance was to be conducted by the Pakistanis, and the legat doubted it would go as planned. Pellegrino waited a week. Basit never showed up. He had been tipped off. He knew it was a trap.

  Pellegrino was disappointed, but accepted the missed opportunity as part of his learning curve. He met with the CIA station chief and the State Department security team in Islamabad, and they hammered out a plan to be carried out if Basit popped up again. Next time, nobody would know about an operation to get him except those whom Pellegrino wanted to know. What the FBI agent didn’t know was that Basit—and his uncle Khalid—were just getting started. He also didn’t know the full extent to which American authorities would find it impossible to actually do what they wanted to do in terms of getting to people like Basit in a place such as Pakistan.

  CHAPTER 4

  Bojinka

  Manila, the Philippines, 1994

  Mohammed and Basit were physical opposites. Basit was more than six feet tall, lean and lanky, usually clean-shaven. With a beak-like nose and half-blind right eye, he nonetheless achieved a sort of rakish handsomeness. Mohammed was half a foot shorter, stout, bearded, and usually bespectacled—a stolid Friar Tuck to Basit’s dashing Robin Hood. Their personalities were similar, however. What they shared most—in addition to their outsize ambitions—was a rough, happy-go-lucky charm that they used to persuade others to go along with what must often have seemed outlandish schemes. They were raconteurs, and had an affability about them that suggested they would make excellent dinner companions. They flirted with women and charmed men. They brought this same casual air to their plots, a kind of off-the-cuff, what-the-hell approach, as if blowing up buildings full of people were a perfectly normal thing to do.

  For men who were still very young—Mohammed not quite thirty and Basit three years younger than that—they were already men of t
he world. Both had left their small Kuwaiti hometown and gone off to strange new worlds for school. They were multilingual, fluent in Arabic, Urdu, Baluch, and English, and moved easily through a globalizing world. They put on different identities as though they were changes of shoes.

  Basit had invaded the world’s greatest metropolis, New York City, nearly knocked down two of its tallest buildings, and walked away without batting an eye. From his base in Doha, Mohammed traveled the world, ostensibly on business, but building a loose web of ad hoc terror associates. Unlike many terrorists who preceded them, they lacked a focused ideology. They had one foot in the world of the Middle East from their boyhood in Kuwait and the other in Asia from their ethnic roots in Iran and Pakistan. They picked targets to suit the moment. Manila was next.

  Mohammed and Basit arrived in the Philippines in the summer of 1994, Basit in July and Mohammed in early August.1 They lived in neighboring hotels in Quezon City, the largest single city in Metropolitan Manila, as the capital region is called. Basit used numerous aliases, the most common being Adam Ali. Mohammed called himself Salem Ali, although he registered as Khalid Mohammad Mohammad at Sir William’s Hotel and stated his residence as Doha, Qatar. Basit started a relationship with Aminda Custodio, a dancer he met at the hotel bar, and the two of them moved to the nearby Tiffany condominiums in the Greenhills neighborhood. Mohammed was a frequent visitor.

  They were joined in Manila by a third man, Basit’s friend Wali Khan Amin Shah, the Afghan mujahideen whom Mohammed had known since the Soviet war. Khan, too, befriended a local bar girl and they moved in together.

  The three men met at the corner 7-Eleven, at shopping malls and hotel bars, and at karaoke clubs in the Ermita district and the EDSA entertainment complex. Basit dated a girl who sold perfume at a big mall. Mohammed chatted up her sister. The men discovered a dental clinic staffed almost entirely by attractive female dentists and suddenly discovered the joys of getting their teeth cleaned. They paid princely sums to local women to open cell phone and bank accounts, telling them that they were recuperating veterans of the Soviet war in Afghanistan. It was an easy enough sale—Khan was missing three fingers on one hand and Basit was half blinded and scarred from his bombing accidents. Mohammed sold himself as a Gulf businessman, variously from Saudi Arabia or Qatar. He exported plywood, he said.

  Mohammed and Basit used the Tiffany condo as their lab, experimenting with chemical mixtures for the miniature bombs Basit was designing. When Basit moved out and left the country in mid-September, Mohammed moved in. Mohammed drove a rented Toyota sedan and wore khakis and polo shirts. He tipped well and ordered in hamburgers for dinner.

  The two men had developed a workable idea for an airplane bomb before Basit left, and Mohammed ran a test to see if they could get all the ingredients of the bomb onto an aircraft. He planned to fly from Manila to Seoul, South Korea. The key ingredient in the prospective airplane bomb was nitromethane, which was inexpensive and readily available in the Philippines. Mohammed emptied the contents of fourteen contact lens solution bottles, taking care not to break the plastic seals on the bottles. He then refilled them with the nitro. He carried thirteen of the bottles in his carry-on bag on his flight to Seoul. Basit had previously carried a single bottle on a flight from Hong Kong to Taipei.

  To test his ability to clear airport security while carrying a metal detonator, Mohammed carried a small metal bolt. He taped the bolt beneath the arch of his foot, then covered his foot with a sock. He wore clothing with metal buttons and jewelry to confuse the scanners, then placed condoms conspicuously in his bag to support the cover story that his main purpose in traveling to the Philippines had been to meet women. He did not have a visa for Korea, but planned to claim that the Korean embassy in Manila had told him that a visa was unnecessary. He set off alarms at the security scanner and was asked to undress. This included his shoes, but not his socks, and he was passed through. He realized later that he had left a detailed plan for the attacks in his carry-on bag; it contained all twelve of the targeted flights as well as the time the bombs were intended to explode. Security officials didn’t notice the plan, but did ask why he was carrying so much contact lens solution.2

  I found a great sale in Manila, he said.

  He raised other suspicions, too, by having purchased his ticket only one day beforehand. He explained that his visa was about to expire and that he had to leave the Philippines and travel to another country to renew it. The customs officers accepted the explanation and allowed Mohammed to fly to Seoul.

  When he landed at Kimpo, Seoul’s international airport, he was prevented from entering the country because he had no visa. He was held at the airport for ten hours, but again, no one searched him, and he was put on a plane back to Manila. As soon as he reached Manila he flushed his fake identity papers down the toilet in an airport restroom, then caught the next flight to Karachi, where he reconnoitered with Basit. Satisfied that all the preparations were proceeding according to plan, Basit returned to Manila while Mohammed hopped a flight to Doha to visit his family.

  Later in the year, Khan and his girlfriend took a room in the Doña Josefa Apartments, a transient hotel not far from Ermita. The Josefa was a part of a world that is largely invisible to most people. Its plain, gray, water-stained stucco was perched at the end of a large squatters’ encampment full of makeshift barbershops and two-stool cafes. The impermanence of its population made it the ideal environment for men who came and went and explained little.

  The Josefa’s other recommendation was its location facing President Quirino Avenue, a main artery connecting the old government and financial center of Manila and the neighborhood where the Vatican ambassador to the Philippines lived. This provided a tactical advantage for Mohammed and Basit’s latest plan: to assassinate Pope John Paul II.

  The pope had scheduled a visit to the Philippines for the second week in January of 1995. While in the city, the pope intended to stay at the papal nuncio’s residence, less than a half mile from the Josefa. Conveniently, his motorcade would have to pass the Josefa along President Quirino Avenue numerous times during his visit.

  The papal visit would be a huge event for the island nation. A former Spanish colony, it was the most Catholic country in Asia and hadn’t hosted a pope for fifteen years. The Filipino practice of Catholicism was often deeply romantic, even sentimental. At Easter, for example, many villages sponsored elaborate passion plays, re-creations of Christ’s suffering and death. In one town, the dramas had become so extensive that by the 1990s young men had themselves nailed to crosses as part of the festivities. Catholicism was serious business in the country, and a papal visit was to be cherished.

  Only in the south of the nation did Catholicism not hold sway. The populace was Muslim in the southernmost dozen or so of the country’s seven thousand islands, which marked the eastern edge of the great Islamic expansion during the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. The unique religious practice of the southern provinces was recognized by the national government, which bestowed autonomous region status there. But special status wasn’t enough for everyone. Some in the south had gone to Afghanistan during the Soviet jihad and brought the revolution, and expertise in warfare, home with them. Some wanted their own country and were willing to kill to get it. Islamist insurgents had been battling the Philippines government for a decade.

  The largest of many bands of rebels were the Moro Islamic Liberation Front and the Abu Sayyaf Group. Both groups had formed connections to the wider web of jihadis exported across the globe by the Afghan camps. The camps were like a factory’s conveyor belt, a Clinton administration official once said; would-be terrorists kept tumbling out of it. Abu Sayyaf alone, fed by a rabid anti-Catholicism, had grown from its founding ten members to more than five hundred in five years. Authorities counted more than one hundred terror attacks in the same period.3

  Mohammed and Basit chose the Philippines as a base of operations for practical reasons. Labor, rent, and food were all cheap. The radica
l Islamists of Abu Sayyaf and Moro (the Tagalog word for “Moor”) were close at hand. Members of both groups had trained in mujahideen camps during the Afghan jihad, and Basit and Mohammed had acquaintances among them. Basit and Khan had even been asked to help train some of them and had spent time in the southern islands. In some ways, they could not have chosen a better city to set up shop. Manila was especially cheap, and its built-in networks could be relied upon to help with logistics.

  In other ways, they could not have chosen worse. The carnage from the previous Islamist attacks—hundreds of deaths, bombings of drive-in restaurants and railroad cars, kidnappings by the score—had focused official attention on Islamic extremism in a way that was unlike almost anywhere else on earth. Radical Islam wasn’t theoretical here. Thousands of police and intelligence agents throughout the country were hard at work trying to penetrate and stop the groups. They were ever alert to potential threats. Key suspects throughout the country were under constant surveillance. Philippine police wiretapped every phone that was feasible to wiretap, within the law or not. In the months before the pope’s visit, precautions were increased still more.

  Basit and Mohammed did not appear to have any particular animus toward the Catholic Church. Members of Abu Sayyaf had suggested the pope as a target to Basit. Basit agreed, but decided to leave Abu Sayyaf out of the actual operation; he said he’d be happy to give the locals all the credit afterward.