The Hunt for KSM

by Terry McDermott

  Afterward, the prosecution team gathered in Mary Jo White’s office and celebrated what was at the time the Justice Department’s most momentous victory in an international terrorism case. It was made even more significant because at the outset, Main Justice, as headquarters is called, passed on the case after Murad’s arrest, given the difficulties and perceived lack of evidence. “They didn’t have the balls to do it; they weren’t prepared to go out as far on a limb as we were,” one central participant would later say.8 White and her New York prosecutors had wrested the case away from Eric Holder, who was then the U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia, even though his office was in charge of prosecuting all international cases at the time. She did so by promising the Justice Department that her team would be successful. “You better win,” she told the New York team of Pellegrino and Besheer, Garcia and Snell at the time.

  Now a smiling Besheer went to White to get her reaction. He was ecstatic, and relieved, given how much of their lives he and Pellegrino had put into the investigation and preparation for trial. “It’s a damn good thing you won,” she said, straight-faced, before breaking into a wide smile.

  That feeling of euphoric victory, however, was short-lived. With Murad, Basit, and Khan locked away, the momentum of the Manila investigation all but evaporated, and so did official FBI support for it. In part this was prompted by the horrific crash of TWA 800. Many, if not most, investigators initially suspected terrorism as the cause of the accident in which 230 people lost their lives. But it quickly became apparent to many of those on the JTTF and elsewhere that it was more likely a straightforward accident. The cause proved elusive, however, so the pressure to fully investigate it persisted. John O’Neill, head of counterterrorism at FBI headquarters, did not share the local investigative skepticism about a terrorist cause. He and others made the TWA probe a high priority and tried to siphon agents off other jobs to help.

  Neil Herman, head of the JTTF, fought to keep his team together and on track in their other investigations, including the unfinished business from Manila. His chief investigator on the crash concluded fairly quickly that there didn’t seem to be any criminal cause. The crash, nonetheless, remained a diversion and a drain on resources. Herman himself was redeployed to the TWA flight 800 probe against his wishes.9

  After the trial, Pellegrino and Besheer returned to their investigation, especially to the Philippines and Malaysia, once again sifting through all the evidence, looking for anything they might have missed. They ran down every phone number and every contact again, and found new leads on the ground. The Justice Department and FBI continued to cloak the investigation in secrecy, even though the publicity surrounding the hunt for KSM’s nephew—and the reward money—was what led to Basit’s arrest. They tracked Mohammed’s travels as well as they were able, then approached the governments of the countries to which he had gone to see what they might have on him. They did the same with Mohammed Jamal Khalifa, Mohammed Amein al-Sanani, and Ibrahim Muneer. They still didn’t have a solid idea how the conspirators all fit together, especially KSM. Prosecutor Mike Garcia later described the investigators’ plight: “We really thought we had him [in Qatar]. And after that we never had an idea of where he was.”10

  Tora Bora, Afghanistan, 1996

  Mohammed fled immediately after the escape in Doha to Pakistan. In many ways, Karachi, Pakistan’s sprawling commercial capital, had always been more his base of operations than had Doha. It amazed Pellegrino how many other places Mohammed was reported to have gone in the mid-1990s. Some seemed downright bizarre. He had flown to Brazil, for example, using one of his identified aliases, and headed for the lawless tri-border area adjacent to Argentina and Paraguay, which had become a sort of Star Wars bar for terrorists and organized crime syndicates. Why Brazil? In applying for his visa in Malaysia, Mohammed said he was investigating business opportunities. What business? As near as anyone could determine, he tried to negotiate a deal to buy frozen chicken parts. Chicken? What did that have to do with anything? Pellegrino just shrugged. It was like the palm oil in Malaysia—even terrorists have to eat.

  More important, the man Mohammed listed as his local contact in Brazil was the local leader of the al-Gama’a al-Islamiyya, a militant group based in Egypt. The man was later arrested as a suspect in a plot to bomb the American embassy in Brasilia.11 Pellegrino thought about going to Brazil and never went. Later, looking back on it, especially when it became clear that Al Qaeda was using such import-export businesses as a way of moving operatives internationally and laundering money, he concluded it was near the top of his list of regrets in terms of what he didn’t do to find KSM and bring him to justice.

  Pellegrino and Besheer tracked Mohammed, belatedly, to Singapore, Malaysia, China, and back to the Philippines. KSM went to Chechnya, hoping to introduce himself to Ibn al-Khattab, the leader of Muslim rebels there, but was unable to arrange a meeting. The point of his ceaseless traveling was twofold: he raised money through his private business, mainly arranging import-export deals, whether for chicken parts or circuit boards; he also recruited men to his cause and established a network of allies. He often posed as a wealthy sheikh. He was something of a hustler, a charming, easygoing guy who met associates in fancy hotels and bars.

  One trip no one knew about until much later was Mohammed’s visit to Afghanistan sometime late in 1996. Osama bin Laden had just returned there to live, having been effectively driven from Sudan by the constant pressure the U.S. government was exerting on the Sudanese.

  When he’d been in Malaysia he’d met again with Hambali. He was ever more impressed with the orderly, steady way Hambali and his partners were building their regional terrorist organization. What they lacked, Mohammed thought, was a solid jihad program. They were doing everything right, but they weren’t at war. He invited Hambali to join him in a trip to Afghanistan to meet bin Laden.

  Bin Laden’s reputation among jihadis had grown since the end of the campaign in Afghanistan. He had spoken out publicly against the corrupt “apostate” regimes that held power throughout the Arab world. In Sudan, he had begun building an infrastructure through which Islamist resistance could be organized and focused. More and more, he seemed the vehicle through which so many grievances could be addressed. Maybe it was possible to rebuild a Muslim caliphate after all.

  Mohammed persuaded Hambali to come meet bin Laden. Bin Laden was impressed, and Hambali stayed on in Afghanistan for a time, doing some work for Al Qaeda’s media apparatus. Mohammed and Hambali were worldly men who had traveled and seen much. They could lend their experience to bin Laden’s efforts.

  Mohammed had another reason for coming to Afghanistan: the idea he and Yousef had about attacking America from above was viable, he thought; all he lacked to carry it out were the significant resources necessary to fund it. Bin Laden had resources, Mohammed had ideas. Mohammed wanted to marry them.12

  Mohammed had tried to see bin Laden in Sudan the year before. He had met with bin Laden’s military commander, Mohammed Atef, but hadn’t seen the exiled Saudi financier. After they both arrived in the Afghanistan-Pakistan region at approximately the same time—Mohammed fleeing the Americans in Qatar, bin Laden fleeing them in Sudan—a meeting was set up at bin Laden’s compound in Tora Bora.

  The two knew each other from their days in Peshawar during the Soviet war. Mohammed regarded the meeting as one of equals. He had the cachet of being the uncle of Basit, who was regarded as a hero within radical Islam. Investigators thought less highly of Mohammed, regarding him as subordinate to Basit, possibly limited to raising money. This new plan would resolve any doubts about his importance. He told bin Laden he didn’t want to join Al Qaeda—in fact, he refused to do so—and merely sought resources to fund a spectacular attack against the United States. Mohammed explained to bin Laden the plan he and Yousef had concocted, then told him how it might be modified. Basit, the bomb maker extraordinaire, was behind bars, probably forever, and Mohammed needed to either replace him or find some w
ay around the need for the bombs. Murad had provided the answer with his idea to crash-land an aircraft full of explosives into CIA headquarters or some other high-value target—a nuclear reactor, maybe. If you did this, you needn’t go through the precise and exacting process of building Basit’s bombs. You didn’t need bombs at all. Murad’s idea essentially converted the airplanes into missiles. Bin Laden dismissed this as inconsequential.

  We could do it on a broader scale, Mohammed said. Flying airplanes is not that difficult. Even Murad had gotten a license. We could train pilots in the United States, then when they were ready, simultaneously hijack as many as ten planes from the East and West Coasts of the United States and fire them all into buildings on the ground. Then, Mohammed said, I would land a final airplane in the middle of the United States and walk out onto the tarmac and explain to the Americans why this terrible thing had happened and what they ought to do to prevent it from happening in the future. Bin Laden was noncommittal. He told KSM he appreciated the ideas and would give the matter due consideration.

  CHAPTER 8

  Thin Air

  Langley, Virginia, 1997

  It is almost axiomatic in the affairs of democratic governments that there is always too much or too little of everything. There is seldom just the right amount. The pendulum of public opinion can be wildly destabilizing, and the Central Intelligence Agency was not immune from this. In the heyday of the Cold War, when the continued existence of the nation seemed threatened, the CIA was the country’s first line of defense. And offense, too. Instigating coups and assassinations of heads of state became almost routine. Almost nothing was too wild to try. You want a lethal exploding cigar, we’ll whip one up in the shop. But, as ever, after the agency’s excesses were revealed under the bright lights of congressional hearings, the pendulum swung sharply in the other direction. Throughout the 1980s and 1990s, round after round of budget cuts were felt most sharply in the agency’s operations abroad. Spying is a very expensive business. Training can take years. Missions can take decades. Without the money to cover it, the CIA retreated from the world. More than its swagger went missing.

  Assets—spies, in ordinary language—were dropped wholesale. Embassy staffs were slashed. Field stations were closed entirely. Recruiting of a new generation of case officers virtually halted. Lest it be found to violate someone’s sensibilities, the agency developed a deep aversion to risk and to assignments without clear expectations of success. If something seemed hard to do, it was often not done; or, more than likely, not even attempted.

  This was the situation as the world was becoming dimly aware of a rising new problem—international Islamist terrorism.

  Even if the agency had wanted to, it would not have been able to use many of the tools it had used so successfully in the past. They were suddenly outmoded, or ill-suited to the task, because success was no longer a matter of who had the best technology. Paying Soviets to spy against the Soviet Union and a system that the potential asset probably hated to begin with was one matter. Paying Muslims to spy against coreligionists who shared the belief that they were fighting a holy war on behalf of God and their people was another. Every once in a while, as in the case with Istaique Parker, the man who turned in Basit, money could still be part of the motive. But Parker’s real inducement was fear. He thought Basit was going to kill him.

  Then there was the plain fact that these new enemies lived in very harsh and uncomfortable places where nobody spoke a familiar language. Within the agency, they called it the diarrhea syndrome: few wanted to be assigned to a portfolio that was not only dangerous but unhealthy. As a result, the CIA’s collection capability withered, and the agency came to rely much too heavily on what’s called liaison intelligence—that is, not intelligence you unearth and vet yourself, but intelligence given to you by the often sketchy security agencies of other governments.

  One rationale for relying on the information of others was its cost-effectiveness. The United States, through its various foreign and military aid packages, was already paying for cooperation from recipient governments. There was no reason not to expect a return in the form of intelligence. An irony no one wanted to contemplate was the real chance that this technique could be not only ineffective but more expensive as well. It costs much more to support a corrupt government than it does to buy a spy. And here’s the biggest problem: this intelligence can mask hidden agendas. The agencies providing it might actually be rooting for or helping the other side.

  That was especially the case in South Asia, and it made it nearly impossible for the CIA to get a handle on who was behind the new radical jihadi movement. Afghanistan, which had quickly become the headquarters of this new threat, didn’t even have a liaison intelligence service to cooperate with. In Pakistan, where much of the jihadi infrastructure was maintained, the host liaison agency was the ISI, which was—and had been for a long time—allied with many of the same jihadi groups that the U.S. wanted to penetrate.

  Complicating matters still more was the resentment the Pakistanis and Afghans felt toward what they regarded as the American abandonment of their cause after the Soviet withdrawal from Afghanistan. Once the last tank had rolled out, the CIA and the rest of the American government vanished, almost overnight, and so did U.S. funding. Worse, Washington hit Pakistan soon afterward with crippling sanctions for an illicit nuclear program that it had known about—and tacitly approved of—for years. Not only did the U.S. betray them, the Pakistanis felt, but its abandonment gave the jihadis a safe haven in which to train, organize, and practice using the weapons that America had given them.

  When the CIA successfully cultivated sources in these liaison intelligence agencies, including Pakistan’s, the information gathered was often innocuous or just plain wrong. Hundreds of millions of dollars were spent on these relationships, and on handing out weapons and cold hard cash, and no one had much to show for it. Countries such as Jordan received millions of dollars and produced a stream of useless reports, yet somehow didn’t discover terrorist exploits (such as the millennium plot against the United States, being devised on the doorstep of the king’s palace, which would use the turn of the millennium as an occasion for a terrorist attack) until they were nearly under way. In Pakistan, things were far worse, as the ISI’s ties to militant groups made them in some cases almost indistinguishable from each other.

  These failings were broadly recognized within the CIA, but there were few alternatives. Even in a country like France, with eight million Muslims among its population of forty million, the agency had only a handful of operatives. Its cadre of what were known as core collectors—case officers and reports officers—had dwindled. The network of people who ran logistics and finance for overseas operations—those who rented safe houses, bought property, established cover stories—they were largely gone, too.

  On a fundamental level, the United States lacked situational awareness of this particular enemy and its positions and plans. It had almost no ability to know what the hell was going on. The result was that the CIA was essentially flying blind in South Asia from the early 1990s on, at the time when Al Qaeda, and KSM, were plotting, planning, and expanding around the world. This also allowed KSM to continue to travel widely, to become a sort of Johnny Appleseed of terrorism, without anybody in the CIA catching on—except for a very select and controversial few.

  Tysons Corner, Virginia, 1997

  By 1997, Mike Scheuer had his new group up and running inside a nondescript office building in Tysons Corner, Virginia, a Washington, D.C., suburb. On the organization chart, their little outfit was called the Bin Laden Issue Station, a name that seemed cumbersome to everyone involved, not to mention pretentious. After all, they were only a dozen people working out of a suburban office park. So, more commonly, the group was referred to as the Alec Station, named after Scheuer’s young son. The name was chosen more out of protest than anything. Scheuer was tired of waiting for the bureaucracy to finally finish its ridiculously elaborate process of findi
ng an appropriate formal name. When they first set up operations, and sent their first communications cable out to the rest of the agency, they realized they had to put something in the standard FROM field on the message. Use “Alec,” Scheuer had said. The Alec Station. He and his wife had just completed the process of adopting their son. And so a name was made.

  Alec Station was the only operational station ever established near the agency’s sprawling campus headquarters in Langley. Other stations were in the countries they covered—China, Russia, Yemen. Being operational meant that Alec Station was supposed to combine analysis with action. Case officers worked as if they were in a CIA station in Islamabad or Beijing, where people went out and did things. Virtually all the rest of the thousands of CIA employees in Virginia spent their time as consumers of intelligence, reading reports coming in from elsewhere. By whatever method, Alec Station was supposed to generate its own reports, to create its own intelligence.

  When Scheuer had taken the helm, bin Laden was not deemed an important target. In fact, the inauguration of a station dedicated to him was almost an accident. A decision had been made to create a virtual station as an experiment to see if such a bureaucratic structure could work. Scheuer suggested it concentrate on bin Laden, mainly because he seemed interesting, not dangerous.

  Soon enough, however, the data Alec Station’s analysts gathered persuaded them that bin Laden had been vastly underestimated. He was, they concluded, a significant enemy bent on doing great damage to the United States. Exactly no one wanted to hear this. Bin Laden issued his first fatwa against the United States in 1996, telling Muslims everywhere that it was their duty to kill Americans. It was more vague than his follow-up fatwa in 1998, which decreed that “the ruling to kill the Americans and their allies—civilians and military—is an individual duty for every Muslim who can do it in any country in which it is possible to do it.” For Scheuer, it was a call to arms nevertheless.