The Hunt for KSM

by Terry McDermott

  Scheuer’s intense focus on a threat that nearly everyone else at the CIA thought was a myth or a misplaced obsession quickly led to derision. One clear benefit of the new organization was that it provided a formal venue through which the FBI and the CIA could work together harmoniously, and some New York agents and prosecutors spent considerable time there. Garcia, the prosecutor, called it a model of the way the agencies ought to cooperate.1 Agency bigwigs tolerated Scheuer and his small band even though many thought they were off their rockers. The feeling was, “Hey, let them busy themselves chasing their little Islamic fanatics while we do the important work,” one top counterterrorism official said. Most of Scheuer’s analysts were women. Taking notice of this, someone at headquarters dubbed the group the Manson family. Like many nicknames, it had the effect of denigrating the abilities of those who bore it. It was a way to demonstrate their profound lack of importance, at least in the eyes of their detractors.

  The CIA as an institution was confident that Al Qaeda posed no threat to the U.S.2 As was the case at the FBI, working on the subject was seen as a dead-end choice for a career-minded agent. The only type of terrorism viewed as important was that sponsored by states such as Iran. (This explains in large part why, later, there was so much effort to tie 9/11 to a state sponsor; the belief was so deeply ingrained that the fact of the attack could not by itself dislodge it.) In fact, after the first Gulf War, the agency’s top priority in the region was to penetrate Saddam Hussein’s inner circle in Iraq. That didn’t occur, of course, but it succeeded in diverting resources and attention.

  The tug-of-war that had erupted when Scheuer left the Islamic Extremist Branch of the agency’s Directorate of Operations to start Alec Station kept KSM out of the station’s purview. At the time, the CIA didn’t think Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, if it thought of him at all, was associated with Al Qaeda. Scheuer wasn’t so sure, but he also wasn’t sure what belonging to Al Qaeda even meant, given the literal translation of the group’s name as “the base”—a base with which possibly dozens of other militant groups and freelancers could, to a wildly varying degree, join forces.

  Scheuer wanted to bring the KSM portfolio with him to Alec Station, but he was denied.

  In 1997, the CIA created a separate renditions branch to handle suspects who had been indicted and were thus susceptible to American arrest. Responsibility for KSM, indicted for the Manila Air plot, was transferred to the new branch. One would expect that assigning him to a team with explicit responsibility for him would have sharpened the focus, but it did not. A “branch” was the smallest unit on the CIA organization chart; it is typically a place where the most inexperienced agents are assigned, a place for new managers to get their first chance at a supervisory role. Thus the new branch in charge of a disregarded subject area was not a sign of high priority. Rather, the opposite, as dozens of low-level suspects were on the renditions list. Additionally, the new Renditions Branch was tiny and lacked any analytical capability. Its sole job was finding fugitives overseas. As a result, once the handoff of the KSM case was made, when information surfaced that was more critical for analysis than tracking, no CIA unit had the job of following up on it—or what it might mean.

  Alec Station, in contrast, because it was both analytical and operational, had a continuous stream of data coming in from around the world. Analysts are diviners. They sift through the flood of intelligence reporting flowing into the agency and make sense of it in a way that allows policy makers to “do something” about the problem under consideration. They then send this analysis back to those out in the field to help them understand how what they are seeing through their particular soda straw contributes to and is affected by the larger picture. The renditions group didn’t have this, so no proactive efforts emerged from it, and little if any analysis flowed to it. It was not much more than a line on an organization chart.

  Analysts get far less fanfare than the derring-do case officers that most people imagine as being the face of the CIA. There aren’t many movies made about a middle-aged woman PhD sitting in an office cubicle reading cable traffic. But in many ways, it is the analysts who do the important work of the CIA and the U.S. counterterrorism community at large, especially when the enemy is a shadowy, inchoate force like radical Islam.

  The analysts do much more than help the operators assess the credibility of their sources by matching their contributions with the larger body of information and intelligence on hand. The good ones gather disparate strands of information, vet them, and put them together to form the pictures that the operators—and their managers—need to see. Barbara Sude, a career analyst who was one of the agency’s top thinkers on Al Qaeda, thought of it as trying to build a view of the forest from the descriptions of individual trees observed in the field. The best analysis provides not just a collation of information, but the context within which it ought to be viewed.

  What the analysts at Alec Station soon discovered was that if you were consciously looking for it, there was a torrent of information available on radical Islam. Sude described it as a fire hose, coming so hard and fast you could do little more than grab bits of it as it sped by.

  Because their efforts focused specifically on bin Laden’s organization, Sude and the other Al Qaeda analysts disregarded everything that didn’t pertain to it. They had to, or they would drown in information. If there was any intelligence at all being collected on Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, no one at the bin Laden station studied it.

  Manila, the Philippines, 1996–97

  Pellegrino and Besheer, having lost KSM’s trail, did what they could to pick up the pieces of their investigation after the first Basit trial. Generally, they went wherever those pieces told them to go. They didn’t have a grand theory of the case, just evidence that pointed in a lot of directions. They spent the end of 1996 and the first months of 1997 back in Southeast Asia.

  Troves of evidence had been uncovered both at the Josefa and at Wali Khan’s apartment. Since the last time the investigators had been there, before the trial, a great deal of effort had been spent trying to sort through the telephone records the Bojinka crew had unknowingly left behind. When they returned, Pellegrino and Besheer had an extensive list of addresses tied to telephone numbers, and they methodically set about tracking them down.

  This was not as simple as it might seem. As was common in the Third World, some of the phones turned out to be what could best be described as community assets. The phone itself might be paid for by a little old lady in a village north of Manila who didn’t have that much use for it and rented it out to neighbors. The phone would be left in a central location—her windowsill, perhaps—and anybody who wanted to could come use it for a small fee. Likewise, incoming calls would be announced by the age-old method of yelling the name of the intended recipient. The villages were small.

  The agents tried to track the whereabouts of the outstanding suspects and their acquaintances. KSM had disappeared, apparently into thin air, after fleeing Qatar, but another of the key players was about to reemerge. Mohammed Jamal Khalifa had been freed after his extradition to Jordan, murder charges against him having been dropped when a key witness recanted. He was allowed to go home to Saudi Arabia, where, as an exemplary organizer of charitable works, he received a gracious welcome. No mention was made that some of those works included funding kidnappings and murder in the southern Philippines, and Khalifa was able to live a normal life in Jeddah. He laid low for months, but soon enough, information surfaced in the intelligence community that he was about to resume his business travels.

  Pellegrino and Besheer discovered Khalifa’s plans and devised an ingenious approach. They consulted with their colleagues at the CIA on the feasibility of what they wanted to do. The FBI, when its agents go anywhere in the world, are fundamentally reliant upon the CIA for support. The Bureau had little in the way of a foreign infrastructure to speak of, and the CIA, even in a weakened state, essentially is an infrastructure. What if, they asked the agency, we knew whe
re Khalifa was going to be, down to the hotel room he would be staying in? What could we do to surveil him? The answer surprised them. If you know where he is, and if you know ahead of time where he’s going to be, we can provide you with the technology you need to essentially wire his location, listen in real time to everything he says, and tape it. Oh, and also get the numbers of any person he is dialing from his phone.

  Everything, they asked?

  Khalifa liked to travel in style, staying in large multiroom suites, which made it more of a challenge. Even so, they were told, if he farts in the bathroom, you’ll hear it.

  So Pellegrino and Besheer embarked on a global listening tour, approved by Main Justice as part of Mary Jo White’s negotiated compromise. Wherever Khalifa went, they followed. Or, actually, they preceded. They developed a way of knowing where he was going and would travel there ahead of him and rent the hotel rooms above and below his. The agency’s gear would be fitted to observe the room in between. Khalifa spent so much time in Kuala Lumpur that he had an apartment there, just a block from the American embassy. So Besheer rented one in the same building and spent weeks at a time there.

  They spent months in Malaysia and Madagascar and points in between. They traveled and recorded hundreds of hours of Mohammed Jamal Khalifa’s life. They called it Oreoing, with Khalifa being the creamy center between their two rooms full of recording equipment. They tracked others, too, who had been connected to the Manila Air plot—anyone they thought could lead them to the ghost that KSM had become.

  Besheer, the more fastidious of the two, became the overseer of the gear and hence of the recordings. He and Pellegrino would use more than a dozen separate pieces of recording equipment—a few pen registers to decipher the phone numbers Khalifa dialed, and several old-fashioned cassette recorders to pick up audio in each room. All the gear belonged to the CIA, but the FBI flew in a sound guy to make sure it all worked. As strapped for funds as the CIA was, it had access to much more ready cash than did the FBI. If they needed a piece of recording gear, the agency could provide it quickly, or would dip into its cash supply and give Besheer the money to buy it, and more for apartments and even furniture on long stakeouts.

  Besheer carefully logged and curated all the tapes, always making a copy for local law enforcement, not only for the sake of good relations but also so that it could potentially be used in a prosecution. Then he’d hand-carry the tapes back to New York, sign them over as evidence to the people who were supposed to pass them along for translation, and then… nothing. The tapes languished for months, and even years, without anyone listening to them. The Bureau was critically short of Arabic speakers—the language on most of the recordings—but these delays beggared explanation. What was the point of spending this amount of time and money, then not seeing what you’ve found? It was inexplicable. Pellegrino—as the FBI agent of the two—complained to management, vociferously and on numerous occasions, but nothing he and Besheer said or did could speed the translation.

  When bits and pieces did get translated, Khalifa was revealed as an exceptionally careful man. If someone he was talking to would begin to refer to something he didn’t want addressed on the call, Khalifa would say, “Leh, leh, leh.” No, no, no. Then he’d guide the conversation back inside more careful bounds.

  Besheer almost felt he was babysitting Khalifa. Whenever Khalifa was in the hotel, Besheer was in his room. He wouldn’t leave to eat a meal, and only when Khalifa was gone would he race out onto the street to grab a bowl of noodles, then run back to the room. More than once, he made soup with hot water and ketchup packets.

  Besheer was a careful traveler, and detail oriented to the point of obsessive compulsion. His bags were always packed to go, and he routinely got to the airport two hours before boarding. Pellegrino was the opposite. Besheer would be in the lounge at 8:30 a.m. waiting for a flight scheduled to leave JFK at 10:00. An FBI rule held that any flight of more than fourteen hours would be flown business class, and most of their trips passed the test. Besheer would board early, stow his luggage, then nod appreciatively when the flight attendant served him his customary glass of tomato juice with a dollop of blue cheese. The business-class travel was one of the few perks afforded them, and Besheer luxuriated in it.

  Then he’d sip his juice, nibble at his cheese, and monitor his watch for Pellegrino’s arrival. Invariably, at 9:59, the seat next to him would still be empty. Then, just as the door to the plane was closing, Pellegrino would come barreling on board in a commotion, everything shoved in a big duffel, with clothes sticking out around the zipper. He’d fight to cram it in the overhead, then flop down next to the tidy Besheer. Pellegrino, soaking wet from perspiration, would be dressed in jeans, sneakers, and a T-shirt. He’d look at Besheer and his tomato juice and cheese and chuckle, then say, Hey, Bash. How you doing?

  Once they got to wherever they were going, Besheer would quickly ensure that the recording equipment was functioning as required. He did his own laundry in the room, washing his clothes in the bathroom sink and hanging them next to the air conditioner duct to dry. Pellegrino would drop by the room, all sweaty from the gym, and plop straight down on Besheer’s carefully arranged bed. Besheer was so particular about his bedding and operational security that he wouldn’t let the maids change his linens. He did it himself. Pellegrino, of course, knew this and yet there he’d lie. He would grin and say, Hey, Bash. How you doing?

  New York City, Winter 1997

  As they spent more and more time overseas, Pellegrino and Besheer grew further estranged from the home office. They felt they were making progress on the investigation, but were under constant pressure from New York. What the hell were they doing out there, anyway? Why was it taking so long?

  One day, while the two were walking down a street in Manila, where there is no such thing as a comfortable walk—the noise, the humidity, the heat, conspire against comfort—Pellegrino got a call on his cell phone from a supervisor in New York with questions about what they were up to. Pellegrino didn’t care much for the suits. The conversation went on for a while and Besheer started to wonder what was up. Pellegrino’s voice began to rise and pretty soon he was red faced, sputtering and shouting. Then he stopped midcall and without a word tossed the phone out into the stream of traffic. New York was quickly silenced under the treads of an oncoming truck. There was some comfort on a Manila street after all. Later, asked what in particular had gotten him so upset, Pellegrino couldn’t even remember, as it seemed so many of the calls from headquarters were the same.

  When they returned to New York, they were inevitably treated as wayward. They were often greeted in the New York office with shrugs and pointed questions about their investigation, as if they were choosing to spend all their time away because they wanted to, not because they felt they had to. “How’s the latest boondoggle going?” one agent asked Pellegrino one day as they stood side by side at the urinals. He considered answering for a second, but then walked away. If even his colleagues on the JTTF didn’t get it, what was the use in trying to explain?

  Above all, there was the expense. Besheer was still beholden to the Port Authority the whole time he was on the JTTF, and even though the FBI was paying his way for the most part, his superiors always questioned him—and within a year or two of his teaming up with Pellegrino, they began requiring prior approval of his travels and detailed time sheets upon his return. He only recorded a small fraction of what he and Pellegrino worked, and still, he got questions. What’s more, he couldn’t answer many of them, as their investigations were classified, and the “need to know” didn’t extend to the Port Authority. He filed one expense report for more than $100,000. He had so much on his government-issued American Express card that Amex canceled it. Besheer was overseas and no one had bothered to pay the bill.

  Higher-ups in Washington and New York periodically repeated their efforts to undermine or even derail the investigation, or to shift the duo to other matters that seemed more pressing. Pellegrino probably didn
’t help matters by going to the New York JTTF office in a Mighty Ducks T-shirt, or, in winter, in a sweatshirt. Besheer at least looked like an agent. Or would have if he had gotten rid of the Yanni ponytail.

  John O’Neill, a dapper, ambitious, and charming agent who became head of the FBI’s Washington-based Counterterrorism Division the week Basit was captured, was transferred to New York at the beginning of 1997 and placed in charge of all counterterrorism investigations there, including Manila Air. No one knew quite what to expect. He had lobbied at various points to shut down the investigation, or at least to undermine it, deeming it nonessential. By then, O’Neill was focused on Osama bin Laden. The trial of Basit was completed. It didn’t seem to O’Neill that there was a lot left to investigate.

  If O’Neill was an enemy of the investigation, his transfer proved the adage that you should hold your friends close and your enemies closer. When confronted—and Pellegrino confronted him often—he gave him and Besheer almost everything they asked for in terms of support, even though he seemed perplexed by the two road warriors. O’Neill made his reputation—some would say his career—by networking ceaselessly, holding court with international counterterrorism officials whom he hosted at his beloved Elaine’s restaurant on Manhattan’s Upper East Side. He was in many ways a throwback to the dashing G-man prototype of an earlier era. He dressed impeccably in hand-tailored suits and expensive silk ties. A few of his agents tried to copy his style and became part of his entourage.

  Pellegrino and Besheer were not among them. They worked ridiculous hours. It quickly became apparent that when they returned from overseas trips, they had no hope of sleeping. So they would shower and meet back at the office at 1:00 or 2:00 in the morning. Besheer stopped at the all-night coffee stand outside the office so often that the Pakistani who owned the cart would get the order ready as he walked up—four twenty-ounce black coffees, two for Besheer and two for Pellegrino. A couple of hours later, he’d go back for four refills.