The Hunt for KSM

by Terry McDermott

  On Christmas Eve in 1995, Pellegrino was about to get on a plane and go to Bosnia in search of KSM. Local law enforcement there had indicated that they knew who KSM was and where he was living. But before Pellegrino could leave, he was told that Mohammed had already gone away, slipping again through his and the FBI’s hands.

  Mohammed wasn’t long gone from Malaysia when Pellegrino and Besheer rolled into Kuala Lumpur, seeking to enlist the help of the Malaysian security services in their hunt for Wali Khan. Too much of the evidence they had found in Manila pointed to Malaysia as Khan’s logical hiding place. We don’t know where he is or who’s hiding him, they thought, but we think he’s here.

  The initial meetings with the Malaysians were formal, and the locals weren’t very forthcoming. Besheer and Pellegrino spent weeks in town, however, investigating Konsojaya and other Kuala Lumpur connections to the plot. Besheer put his formidable relationship and networking skills to work, developing teasing alliances with, among others, Dato Yousef, a top official in the Royal Malaysian Police Special Branch. Soon enough they found themselves making toasts in a Chinese restaurant called the Cheers Palace. Besheer had grown a short ponytail and Yousef started calling him Yanni after the Greek American singer. Anything for you, Yanni, Yousef said. Let me know where he is and Khan will be dead in half an hour.

  “No! We need him alive!” Besheer told him. “We need to take him with us!”

  Pellegrino and Besheer left the problem to the Malaysians and went first to Okinawa, where the Japanese had stored the remains of the Philippine Airlines flight Basit had bombed in his trial run. Parts of the plane had to be disassembled, examined, tagged as evidence, and shipped to New York to be used as exhibits in a trial. Besheer took control of the operation. His attention to detail was perfectly suited to the task. Pellegrino went on to Manila.

  Within weeks, the Malaysians came through. They had located Khan in the northwestern part of the country, on a small island called Langkawi, thanks in large part to some business cards found back at the Josefa. They transmitted the information to the regional FBI office in Thailand. Horton, the FBI legal attaché in Bangkok, then passed the word to Pellegrino and Besheer.

  Pellegrino was alarmed because Khan hadn’t yet been indicted in the United States, and there was a real possibility of him being caught and released—and disappearing forever. He asked Horton to get the Malaysians to hold off on any action for a couple of weeks. He raced back to the U.S., testified to the grand jury, and the indictment soon followed. Then he got on a plane and flew back to Malaysia.

  Everybody in the New York office knew what had happened when Pellegrino went to take Basit into custody in Pakistan—how his flights kept getting delayed and he had ended up missing the rendition plane by perhaps thirty minutes. So on his way out the door in New York, he got a hearty send-off in the form of a chorus of friendly catcalls. Don’t miss the flight, Frank! Don’t miss the flight!

  The Malaysians were happy to turn Khan over to the Americans, but, as was often the case, they didn’t want it known they were cooperating. So a Boeing 707 with all its markings obscured was flown into Kuala Lumpur for the pickup, with the top FBI counterterrorism official in New York, Thomas Pickard, aboard. Pellegrino and Besheer met in Kuala Lumpur, then flew to Langkawi. Once there, they had to sit on the tarmac in the getaway plane for six hours, sweating in the Malaysian heat, waiting for Khan to be delivered.

  Finally, a van rolled up with Khan aboard. He was brought onto the 707 and they were preparing to taxi out and take off. But Besheer, ever the relationship builder, had brought a load of swag—FBI and JTTF baseball caps, vests, shirts—for the local cops, and word somehow got out that he had them on board. Before they departed, Besheer cracked open his stash and began handing it out. The local police descended on the plane, looking for their share of the booty. Within minutes, every Malaysian cop in sight was careening around the airport with an FBI cap on. Stealthy, indeed.

  On the flight home, the plane had to refuel in order to make it all the way to New York. The protocol was that an accused person being brought back to the United States would be tried in the jurisdiction in which he first landed. So the normal refueling options—Guam, Hawaii, and Alaska—were ruled out because the New Yorkers did not want to lose jurisdiction. It was known within the JTTF as the Mary Jo White rule: our jurisdiction or bust. Not even JFK would do, as that was in the Eastern District. This necessitated in-air refueling, a ridiculously expensive option but one that was on occasion employed.

  The KC-135 Stratotankers used to do the refueling always came up in pairs, in case something happened to the first plane. Besheer wholeheartedly loved everything about flying. Pellegrino hated it just as much. So Besheer would go up front to the cockpit to watch the refueling while Pellegrino buried his head somewhere in the rear.

  On the flight from Kuala Lumpur, the first planned refueling was over Guam. It was a brilliant blue-sky day, and Besheer was in the cockpit watching. As the tanker came in for the hookup, a massive black thunderhead appeared out of nowhere, completely obscuring all visual contact with the tanker. The pilot of the 707 had to break off. They were flying blind in the cloud and didn’t know exactly where the tanker was, so the pilot put the 707 into a steep dive to get out of the vicinity of the other plane as quickly as possible. There was never any real danger to the passengers, but the dive caused all sorts of commotion on board.

  Besheer hadn’t known it, but Pellegrino was in the lavatory when the breakaway occurred. The dive was so steep it caused a momentary weightlessness on the plane. Pellegrino suddenly was floating through the lavatory, his pants around his ankles. When the plane stabilized and he came out, he was a horrible color of green. He looked at Besheer and glared. I fucking hate flying, he said. Besheer burst out laughing. Later, they found out their boss’s boss, Pickard, had thrown up all over the back of the plane.

  Manila, the Philippines, Winter 1995

  On the flight and in subsequent interrogations, Khan had been less forthcoming than Basit and Murad had been. He lied diligently throughout the interview on board the flight. Pellegrino, ever the well-trained FBI man, thought that the lies could be useful in and of themselves, and took careful note of them; maybe he could use the lies against him in court. It was this sort of thought process that differentiated FBI agents from perhaps anyone else who has ever investigated international terrorism—they were driven almost to the exclusion of all other motives by the need to make cases.

  After they delivered Khan in New York, Pellegrino returned to Manila and Besheer went back to Okinawa, where he meticulously identified, tagged, and stowed in a shipping container every relevant piece of the Philippine Airlines plane that they might use as evidence in a trial. He had it all sent off to the U.S., making sure to have a fellow agent at JFK personally deliver it to the evidence vault, so the chain of custody couldn’t be questioned by even the most persistent defense attorney.

  Pellegrino and Besheer then tracked down every witness and piece of evidence they could identify. Besheer had never spent much time abroad and was sometimes dumbfounded by the way life was lived outside the United States. Manila was a palace of wonders for him, and he demanded that, in their few hours of downtime on such trips, they race around so he could take tourist photos of local Catholic churches and other attractions. The pictures would later come in handy at trial, to show juries what it was like “over there.” One night, they were at the house of one of the bar girls Basit had befriended. They were in a sitting room right off the kitchen interviewing her mother when Besheer’s eye was caught by movement on the drain board next to the kitchen sink. He saw rats scampering across the counter. He turned back to look at Pellegrino, who was sitting next to the mother on the couch. Just then, two huge cockroaches appeared atop the back of the couch, just behind Pellegrino’s head. Besheer jumped up instinctively. Pellegrino did, too, without even knowing why. They finished the interview standing up.

  They interviewed hotel clerks, chem
ists, movie theater ticket takers, and naked go-go dancers. Pellegrino visited the dental clinic with the pretty dentists and traded an FBI pin for the X-rays and dental records of one of the suspects. They spent hours in photo-processing shops, going through boxes of negatives, looking for photos of KSM and the others. The dancers were generally more impressive than the clerks. And often more helpful. They ended up making many trips to see the girls, who often lived out on the squalid periphery of the metropolis, usually with their families. Besheer, always the detail man of the two, found that by bringing a large tub or two of ice cream—a luxury the girls couldn’t afford—they would get their questions answered more easily, and at greater length. They usually brought mango, because it was their own favorite flavor—and they would end up stumbling out at the end of the interviews with a stomachful of sugar and cream.

  While Besheer brought the treats, Pellegrino brought a kind of guileless charm. He could get anyone to talk in part because he seemed such an unthreatening, fundamentally decent guy. He fought with his bosses, but he was every source’s best buddy. People liked him and they told him things.

  One afternoon, a family member mentioned that one of the girls had received letters from Khalid Sheikh Mohammed—not love letters, exactly, but more of the flirty “how-you-doing?” variety. In one of them, he told the woman he was a Catholic priest. Later, she got a Christmas card from him. Whatever the content of the letters, their real value lay in the envelopes, one of which Mohammed apparently had filched from his ministry office in Doha. It had a return address printed on it. Mohammed had taken care to obscure the address with Wite-Out, but removing it was a simple matter for the FBI lab techs once Pellegrino and Besheer bagged and tagged the envelope and sent it to Quantico.

  Persistence is often undervalued. It isn’t usually the brilliance of insight, or great courage or persuasiveness, that ends up making or breaking a case. It’s the value of keeping at it. It hadn’t been easy or heroic. It had taken months of pounding the pavement in some of Manila’s seedier slums, often without a real reason to do so. But with the finding of a single envelope with an obscured return address, Pellegrino and Besheer finally had a fix on Mohammed.

  CHAPTER 7

  A Near Miss

  Doha, Qatar, December 1995

  One thing Basit, Murad, and Khan had in common was how little they had to say about Khalid Sheikh Mohammed. His name, aliases, and fingerprints were scattered through the evidence being accumulated, but he remained at best a blurry figure. By the middle of 1995, Pellegrino and Besheer knew who he was, but they generally didn’t know where he was until he wasn’t there anymore. They also suspected he was a significant player, given all the evidence found in searches in Manila, but they didn’t know how culpable he was, or for what. Their first thought was to track him down and interview him.

  Then Mohammed’s name started appearing in strange places. The Italians arrested some people and his phone number was in one of their phone books. Someone was picked up in Canada and his number was in that phone book, too. “This guy knows too many people,” Pellegrino thought. “Too many bad people.” Mary Jo White agreed. So Pellegrino and Mike Garcia, one of two lead assistant U.S. attorneys on the Manila Air plot, decided not to pursue an interview for fear of alerting him to their interest. They thought instead about ways to arrest him.

  The phone number everyone had was the same—his Qatar phone. Coupled with the return address from the Manila letters, there was little doubt that Mohammed was spending some amount of time in Qatar. Qatar is a small place, just a thumb of land slightly larger than Connecticut jutting off the eastern edge of Saudi Arabia into the Persian Gulf. Its capital, Doha, was not the type of sprawling metropolis where you would go to hide out. Everybody knew everybody there, unless you were someone who performed contract labor—one of the tens of thousands of Bengalis, Filipinos, and Nepalese who dominated the market for physical work. So knowing that Mohammed, or KSM, as his American pursuers had begun calling him, was in Doha made finding him fairly simple. He was, in fact, found.

  The FBI didn’t have a legat in Doha, or anywhere in the Gulf, for that matter, and ran its entire Middle East operation out of Rome. It alerted intel officials and later that year, 1995, the CIA moved an agency asset—an informant—to Doha. The man was chosen because he wouldn’t raise suspicions, having traveled widely as a Middle Eastern businessman. The asset struck up a relationship with Mohammed. He “would have tea with him and coffee… they would have dinner. We knew the apartment he lived in, we knew his job and schedule, who he worked for,” said a CIA official with direct knowledge of the investigation.1 Mohammed lived openly, working as an engineer in the Ministry of Electricity and Water. That is, when he was in town and showed up at the ministry. He continued to travel the world, raising money and constructing his international terrorist network, and was often gone for weeks at a time.

  Once they identified where he was, and that he appeared to be continuing to plot against the U.S., Pellegrino and Besheer scrambled to put together a case to bring before a grand jury in hopes of getting an indictment. The CIA obtained a fingerprint from a glass in Doha that matched the one on the dictionary from the Manila apartment. If there was one moment when they knew they had enough, besides the print match, it was when they finally obtained photos of KSM and got the Filipino girls to identify him as the man mixing chemicals with Basit in Manila. They needed to move fast before KSM vanished again.

  Pellegrino’s boss, Neil Herman, testified before a grand jury while Pellegrino and Besheer were still overseas. KSM was indicted in January of 1996. It was sealed so that Mohammed would not know he was being pursued. A dossier on who KSM was and why it might be a good idea to take him out of circulation was prepared for President Clinton. It included the FBI’s belief that KSM and the others had worked on a plot to assassinate Clinton himself, figuring that wouldn’t hurt efforts to get his attention and support—which would be needed to execute the kind of extraordinary judicial rendition of KSM they had in mind. The question then became how to do it.

  It was a rule of thumb in foreign affairs for American officials to do what they could to avoid embarrassing other governments. In many places, the most embarrassing thing a government could do was to be seen cooperating with America. This was the case in Qatar, which, like almost every country in the region, had a considerable conservative Islamist element within the population. In Qatar, that element was more than well represented within the government, too.

  The Qatari government did not want to give its internal opponents any leverage. A Clinton National Security Council official described it as “a distinct reluctance to actually get involved in doing something that would… expose them to having violated their own rules and laws.”

  The head of state, Sheikh Hamad bin Khalifa al-Thani, had earlier in the year overthrown his father’s government and begun an ambitious modernization campaign. This included liberalizing the political structure and—most shocking of all—the media. Al Jazeera, the pan-Arab television network Qatar launched in 1996, was the prime example of this, but there were many others. To some members of the emir’s own family as well as neighboring governments, it felt like too much—way too much—modernization. The Saudis, the overwhelming power of the region, were particularly agitated.

  The National Security Council staff in the Clinton White House wanted to do a “snatch and grab” and trundle Mohammed back to New York to face trial, as it had with Basit. The administration had had several other successes with such renditions, still a relatively new process, and wanted to send a team to get KSM. The NSC asked for recommendations, and a deputies’ meeting was called in late 1995 at the White House to discuss the feasibility of such an operation. There are basically two sorts of meetings called at the White House that involve the entire national security apparatus: principals’ meetings, involving the president, cabinet officers, and agency heads; and so-called deputies’ meetings, at which the same agencies and departments are represented by
the second or third in command—the deputies—who tend to be far better informed about details than their bosses. These meetings are usually where the real work gets done.

  The deputies’ meetings also tend to be more freewheeling, and in this one, Sandy Berger, the deputy national security advisor to President Clinton, asked for proposals on how they could get KSM. The CIA said it didn’t really have the assets in place. The Department of Defense, trying to avoid another Black Hawk Down type of debacle, presented plans for what almost amounted to an invasion. Both were ways of saying no without saying no. Those who favored the rendition had imagined going in covertly with a team of perhaps twenty-five people. That was nowhere near the Pentagon’s estimation of its needs. “We were off by orders of magnitude,” said Jamie Gorelick, the Department of Justice’s representative at the meeting.2

  The State Department said it didn’t want to do anything to upset the delicate politics of Qatar, another way of saying no without having to say the word. This argument seemed shallow to those pushing for a snatch.