Khalifa seemed the likeliest suspect to have played a major role. He had the organization and the money—and the bin Laden connection. Holding him until they could find more evidence was essential. But after four months in American custody, Khalifa suddenly dropped his opposition to deportation to Jordan. Did he fear talking about Manila? Had he cut a deal with Jordan? No one knew, but once he said he was willing to go back to Jordan to stand trial for murder, there was little argument to keep holding him for visa violations. White dispatched Pellegrino and Garcia to Jordan to see if they could work out some kind of deal, but even the Jordanians said it was a mistake to send Khalifa back to them. Pellegrino later lamented that Khalifa and the U.S. marshals acting as his escorts were transiting through JFK International at about the same time he and Garcia were landing on their way back. Khalifa was soon sent to Amman and, almost immediately, a key witness against him in the bombing case recanted. He was released and went home to Saudi Arabia, beyond the reach of American investigators. Although Pellegrino wondered about the larger issues, he was an FBI agent and the FBI’s method of approaching investigations was to let the evidence lead you. You go find information. Then you work with what you have and go get more. Time-consuming and exacting, certainly, but not brain surgery. Only when there is no more information to be found should you worry, and for now there was plenty of information still to be gotten, and plenty of places to go look for it. Much of what he had pointed toward Malaysia.
Islamabad, Pakistan, February 1995
Mohammed and Basit vanished off the screen again. No one knew exactly where either had gone.
Basit had fled through Asia, flying to Singapore the night of the fire, then on to Pakistan. Once again, however, he did not go to ground. He immediately started arranging another plot in Thailand. He recruited a young South African named Istaique Parker to help him smuggle bombs onto the cargo holds of airliners leaving Bangkok. Parker, wary, abandoned his assignment, telling Basit that security was too tight. They returned to Pakistan in early February. As ever, Basit was full of new ideas for targets and ways to get at them—embassy bombings, kidnappings, airplane attacks. Parker was scared to death. Basit had told Parker that Parker’s name was on the laptop left behind in Manila, and that he had no choice but to go all-in. The knowledge that he might be a suspect himself led Parker to turn on Basit. When he read in a magazine that the United States was offering $2 million for information leading to Basit’s arrest, the choice between going to jail or getting rich became clear. The next day, he called the U.S. embassy in Islamabad and told officers there he knew Basit and where he might be.
Parker made at least one visit to an embassy official who turned him away. It took some additional effort to persuade other officers at the embassy that he knew what he was talking about, but members of the State Department’s Diplomatic Security Service eventually listened and believed him. Cables flew around the globe.
Parker had called the embassy on February 3, a Friday. By Saturday, Ralph Horton, the lead FBI agent for much of Asia, had flown in from Bangkok to run the operation. FBI supervisors in New York and Washington, assuming Basit was about to be caught and knowing that the Pakistanis said they could have him, put together a plan to get Basit out of Pakistan that was so detailed it resembled a military operation. Permission was worked out on the ground in Islamabad, where there was a sense of urgency. The government, then headed by Benazir Bhutto, who believed she herself had once been a target of Basit and KSM, readily agreed to assist in the raid and hand him over.
The Americans planned to fly Basit out of Pakistan as quickly as possible. They readied a plane and lined up agents from the Bureau, the Diplomatic Security Service, the Port Authority, and other agencies to handle the rendition. The plane left New York on Sunday. Detective Matthew Besheer of the Port Authority’s intelligence unit was assigned to the contingent that would pick up Basit once the overseas flight landed at an air base north of New York City. Pellegrino, who was still leading the investigation in Manila, was told to get to Pakistan as soon as possible to accompany Basit on the flight home. He immediately went to the Pakistani embassy to get a visa. It was a Saturday. They said they could do nothing until Monday. He couldn’t believe the guy he was chasing in the Philippines was exactly where he had predicted he would be—at home in Pakistan—and that Pakistani officials were once again getting in the way.
Parker had told the embassy officials he knew Basit was in Islamabad but didn’t know precisely where. He said Basit didn’t intend to stay there long, that he was preparing to go to Peshawar. For two days they looked but couldn’t find him. On Monday, Parker called again. Basit was still in town, he said, but intended to leave soon. If the Americans were going to get him, they couldn’t wait for all their people to be in their assigned spots. This was the time.
Pellegrino was still en route. He had finally gotten his visa on Monday, flown straight to Karachi, then run to catch a 7:00 p.m. flight to Islamabad. Karachi, a city of more than ten million people, had a small airport with the look and feel of a facility in a midsize American city—Des Moines, maybe. Walking through it, Pellegrino heard someone call his name. It was an FBI explosives expert named Wally Higgins in his trademark cowboy hat. With him was fingerprint man Jackie Bell. They were all part of the team that would formally identify Basit and bring him back. They thought they were in good shape timewise. The move on Basit wasn’t supposed to occur until the next day. But the Islamabad flight was delayed for two hours, then four, then more. The group ended up spending the whole night in the terminal. Pellegrino was dying.
Parker received information that Basit was going to spend the night at the Su-Casa guesthouse, then leave for Peshawar—the gateway to the autonomous tribal areas—in the morning, where they would be unlikely to capture him. Surveillance was put in place at the Su-Casa. They tracked Basit when he left the hostelry in the evening with a companion. The two spent an hour in a nearby market, and Basit returned to his room. The snatch team moved into position early Tuesday morning.
Parker, as previously agreed, visited Basit in his room in the morning. He left the Su-Casa immediately after, running his hands through his hair as he exited the building. This was the sign. The team moved in. They marched through the lobby and stormed the second-floor room, where Basit was taken by surprise. They identified him, then quickly bundled him out of the room, out of the house, and into a waiting car. He was taken immediately to the airport and was on his way out of Pakistan within the hour.2
At about the same time, Pellegrino and company finally took off on the short hop from Karachi. Bill Miller, a State Department Diplomatic Security Service agent stationed in Islamabad, was waiting for them on the ground when they landed. He’s already gone, he said. Pellegrino was crushed. He was the guy chasing Basit for two years. Basit was his guy and now others would get to interrogate him on the long flight home. There was nothing he could do. “I’m sorry, Frank,” Miller told him. “Do you want to have dinner instead with me and my wife?”
Except for his personal disappointment, it probably mattered little that Pellegrino missed the Basit flight back to the U.S. Secret Service agent Brian Parr, who had worked with Pellegrino at the beginning of the WTC investigation, and FBI special agent Chuck Stern, another veteran of the JTTF, approached Basit on the plane. After being read his Miranda rights, Basit readily waived them and consented to be interviewed. His only condition was that no notes be taken. He said he thought that if there was no record of the interview, he could safely deny it ever occurred.
“He was friendly. He seemed very relaxed and he seemed actually eager to talk to us,” Parr testified later.3
Parr and Stern agreed to the condition, although they fudged the rules by making extensive notes during breaks in the interrogation. Basit was surprisingly willing, even enthusiastic, to talk about his exploits. He confessed to both the airline bombing plot and the WTC attack, and provided a surprising amount of detail. At one point he sketched a diagram of wher
e in the World Trade Center basement he wanted to park the van holding the bomb. Parr took the diagram, but Basit asked for it back. He then tore off the portion of the paper on which the diagram was drawn, popped it in his mouth, and ate it.
The interview with Basit lasted six hours, on and off, as the plane flew back over Europe and the Atlantic. It landed at an airfield in Orange County, New York, just north of New York City. Basit was cuffed, shackled, and blindfolded, then loaded into one of the Port Authority’s choppers, a Sikorsky copiloted by a one-legged Vietnam vet, for the last portion of the trip into Manhattan, where he was to be jailed. Besheer, the Port Authority cop assigned to the JTTF, hopped aboard and they flew down the east side of Manhattan to avoid the fog coming off the Hudson River on the west side, then circled the tip of the island, coming up past the twin towers of the Trade Center. It was a cold, brilliantly clear winter’s night. The towers shimmered in the frigid air.
Bill Gavin, an old FBI hand, unmasked Basit just as they came upon the towers.
They’re still standing, he said.
Basit replied: They wouldn’t be if I had had more money.
Hearing this, Besheer could barely contain himself. He’d been one of the first responders at the ’93 Trade Center attacks and had been injured in them. Isn’t this his stop? he muttered. Let’s open the doors and let him out.
Cape Town, South Africa, April 1995
Istaique Parker, the young South African who turned Basit in, was eager to accept the $2 million reward for his assistance, but he declined an offer to go into the federal witness protection program. Give me the money, he said, and I’ll take care of myself. The U.S. policy for paying out rewards required that the money be delivered in person, receipt acknowledged. The JTTF asked Besheer to hand-carry the money.
Parker, who had been secretly spirited into South Africa under heavy guard, wanted the money in small U.S. bills. The cash constituted a considerable pile. Besheer packed it in two large duffel bags, skated past security at Newark, and hauled the bags to Cape Town, where Parker was living.
Besheer and a representative from the State Department agreed to meet Parker downtown. Besheer opened the duffels and asked Parker to count the cash.
That’s okay, Mr. Matthew, Parker said. I trust you.
Besheer told him it wasn’t a matter of trust. These are the rules I have to follow. You have to count it all.
You learn something new every day, it’s said. Before he had gone to South Africa, Besheer had no idea how long it might take to count $2 million. He and the other Americans didn’t want Parker to lose count, so they watched in silence. It took four hours.
CHAPTER 6
Sorting It Out
Manila, the Philippines, April 1995
Two months after Basit was brought back to New York, the Filipino police transferred Murad to American custody. The Filipinos had held Murad since the night of his arrest, January 6, but hadn’t allowed the Americans access to him. The isolation of Murad and the escape of Wali Khan Amin Shah from Filipino custody had raised questions about the local investigation.
Under harsh interrogation, Murad had told the Filipino investigators almost everything he knew. Pellegrino was in the country much of that time, but he wasn’t convinced he would ever get to talk to Murad. He thought the Filipinos might release him. By the time Pellegrino loaded him onto an aircraft bound for New York in April, Murad must have thought he had already given away every secret he ever had. So he told them all again to Pellegrino and another FBI agent, Tom Donlon, on their flight across the Pacific.1
He admitted the plan to bomb airliners. He described his own recruitment. He said Basit had attacked the World Trade Center. He said Basit’s Liberation Army was just him and Basit. He told the agents about future ideas for attacks against nuclear plants and the CIA headquarters. He identified possible sources of funds for the operation. In short, he described plans for the most ambitious attacks against the United States since Pearl Harbor. During the course of this, Murad also validated the FBI’s basic plan for interrogations: have agents who know what they are talking about asking informed questions of subjects they have treated respectfully. But he said little about Khalid Sheikh Mohammed. Pellegrino believed that was because Murad had at best only a vague notion of who he was.
With Basit and Murad in custody, the FBI was still trying to build a picture of the overall plot. Investigators had identified and captured what looked like half of the main group. Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, Wali Khan, and Ibrahim Muneer were still at large. There was evidence of a larger group centered around Mohammed Jamal Khalifa, his aides, and acquaintances. The Filipinos were even more convinced that was where the real story lay, and so, to a degree, was Pellegrino. While tapping Khalifa’s phones in recent years, the Filipinos saw a network of contacts spreading across the Philippines through Southeast Asia and into Saudi Arabia and other Gulf locations where deep-pocket donors lived. Khalifa used his businesses and the local office of the Saudi-based IIRO to disguise funds he donated to local Islamists. The FBI agents were looking at leads heading off in a thousand different directions, but Malaysia in particular continued to look like a center of activity.
Konsojaya, the trading company Khan had been instrumental in establishing in Kuala Lumpur in 1994, had interesting connections—enough to raise significant and immediate suspicion. Khalifa had called its offices repeatedly. One of the other founding directors, Mohammed Amein al-Sanani, was an officer in other charities connected to Khalifa. Al-Sanani and Khan had multiple connections, as did Khan and Khalifa’s number two, Ahmad al-Hamwi. Even with Yousef in custody, it seemed to Pellegrino he had missed as much as he understood. Who were these people, and how could they afford to do what they were doing? Pellegrino wasn’t convinced Konsojaya was anything but what it seemed—a trading company. Basit and Mohammed weren’t rich; they didn’t seem to have huge sources of funds. Money was tight enough to make them worry about cash transfers into their bank account of as little as $2,000. You gotta eat even when you’re blowing things up, Pellegrino thought.
Basit’s concerns over money gave the FBI one hot lead. Soon after arriving at the federal lockup in Manhattan, he called “Khalid” at the water ministry in Qatar, and when there was no answer, he left a voice mail saying he needed $2,000 for his commissary account.2
The records seized in the investigation revealed a constant stream of air travel and hotel rentals. Where did the money come from? Pellegrino’s team’s principal task in the next year was to ensure they had gathered the evidence and witnesses needed to prosecute Basit and Murad. But they also wanted to track these plots down to their ultimate beginnings, and figure out who else involved in them really mattered, and what they were up to.
Langley, Virginia, 1995
Pellegrino wasn’t alone in his lack of understanding. Radical Islam was beginning to be recognized more broadly as an emerging problem that had to be investigated, understood, and countered. The CIA had only grudgingly ceded to the FBI its lead role in terror investigations abroad as well as at home, a status that had been formalized by a presidential order signed in June of 1995, essentially defining terrorism as a crime.3 Presidential Decision Directive 39 made the FBI the chief counterterrorism organization, and because the FBI was the FBI, that meant perpetrators were to be hunted down and evidence was to be assiduously collected and presented to grand juries. Indictments and trials would follow. The CIA was chagrined, but lent its assistance to tracking down suspects and smoothing the way with the authorities in host countries. The agency’s contacts with foreign security services were much more extensive than the FBI’s, and the agency had used those contacts to bring two of Basit’s accomplices in the World Trade Center attack back for trial. In fact, the CIA routinely complained that information sharing was a one-way street, the same criticism the FBI would level in the opposite direction a decade later.
The CIA’s central problem with the FBI’s approach was that it was reactive. Events would occur—a bomb,
a shooting, a kidnapping—and crimes would be alleged and suspects sought. This was fine as far as it went, but it did nothing to actually stop terrorism from happening. The agency had established groups to study and track the problem, notably the Counterterrorist Center, established in 1986 (the name was changed to the Counterterrorism Center in 2002). But the CTC had evolved into more of an analytical unit with a variety of branches studying different potential terrorist threats. In 1996, the agency made another attempt at creating a more proactive organization. It was formally called the Bin Laden Issue Station and was modeled on the agency’s overseas stations in that it would combine intelligence gathering with operations. It was the first and only CIA station ever created to dedicate its efforts to one man. The station, located in a northern Virginia office park as a way of creating physical separation between it and CIA headquarters, would treat bin Laden as if he were a country.
Osama bin Laden was hardly a complete mystery. The youngest of many sons of a wealthy Saudi industrialist, he’d been known as a leader of the Afghan Arabs in Afghanistan in the 1980s. Since then he had been viewed primarily as a kind of terrorist tourist, someone who dabbled in terror financing. Concern began to increase when he was kicked out of Saudi Arabia and moved to Sudan in 1991. There, he had built an economic base, controlling much of the nation’s agricultural sector, and installed the underpinnings of a terror organization. He established military training camps in the desert and was believed to have formed an alliance with Egyptian jihad groups bent on overthrowing Hosni Mubarak.
The Hunt for KSM Page 9
