The Hunt for KSM

by Terry McDermott

  U.S. investigators had no hint of Mohammed’s deepening involvement with Al Qaeda, even in the summer of 2001. They wanted him for his association with the Manila Air plot; Pellegrino had tried twice to land KSM on the FBI’s most wanted list but failed, though he was on the separate State Department list with a $2 million reward. That would have brought additional international attention and resources to bear on the hunt for KSM. They tracked him—and Khalifa and others they hoped could lead to him—as they tracked bin Laden, but never put the two together.

  Not content with organizing this ambitious attack, Mohammed entered a frenzied period of plot design, recruitment, and dispatch. Several dozen recruits and associates stayed at his Karachi apartment or nearby safe houses at different times. One man was there for a two-week training course that ended the day before September 11. Recruits have described the instruction they received as simplistic—how to use the Yellow Pages, Internet chat rooms, and travel agencies. Mohammed would often spend several days getting to know them, assessing them and their viability and motivations, asking them questions about their lives and their beliefs. Those he deemed worthy were given a code to use in their e-mails in which each digit in a telephone number was converted so that the original digit and the coded one added up to ten; for example, Mohammed’s Karachi cell phone number, 92 300 922 388, became 18 700 188 722. He gave them simple word codes: a “wedding” was an explosion, “market” was Malaysia, “souk” was Singapore, “terminal” stood for Indonesia, and “hotel” for the Philippines. Thus, “planning a wedding at the hotel” might be planting a bomb in Manila. He used various e-mail accounts, including silver_crack@yahoo.com and gold_crack@yahoo.com. (His password was “hotmail.”)

  Mohammed refused to respond to e-mail that didn’t follow the proper codes. He taught his recruits how to manipulate their identity papers. He explained that while most visas were stamped into a passport, a Pakistani visa was printed on a separate piece of paper and could be removed from the original passport with an iron and reused. The dates on a visa could be removed using bleach. German automobile brake fluid, which is blue in color, was particularly good for this, he would tell his students. KSM also said that Algerian and African students in Islamabad were known for putting their passports up for sale on the black market. There were also well-known and friendly purveyors of passports right there in Karachi.4

  It wasn’t the quality of the instruction that was most noteworthy about KSM’s activities. It was the sheer scale of them. He oversaw the 9/11 plot. He was the conduit for the distribution of hundreds of thousands of dollars, much of it in cash, supporting various other plots around the world. He recruited and dispatched several men for a second wave of attacks against the United States. He ordered surveillance of security practices at U.S. Navy aircraft carriers. He prepared and funded men to go to Singapore to bomb commercial and government centers there. He was particularly eager to meet with men who carried Western passports. He dispatched an Australian, “Jihad Jack” Roche, to case bombing targets in his home country and a German, Christian Ganczarski, to blow up a synagogue in Tunisia. He sent Canadians to the U.S. He negotiated a deal for a prospective Al Qaeda program on Pakistani television. He sent José Padilla, the hapless American son of Puerto Rican immigrants, back to the United States to research the possibility of building a dirty bomb and blowing up apartment buildings after filling them with gas. He sent at least one other man to New York to find Jewish targets to strike, and to surveil Wall Street and other financial targets in Washington and New Jersey. He sent others to case nuclear plants, bridges, and buildings. He provided help to a man who wanted to plant bombs in Thailand. He asked one protégé to evaluate the Panama Canal as a potential target. He considered an attack on London’s Heathrow Airport. He helped an Indonesian colleague establish a bioweapons research program in Malaysia.

  The recruits were an odd lot, almost all idiosyncratic. The experience of Roche, the Australian recruit, was typical in that it showed how easy it was to gain access to KSM simply by showing up in Karachi with a trusted recommendation.

  Roche was a drifter who left his home in England at the age of seventeen and ping-ponged from the UK to Germany to Australia, working as a taxi driver and laborer. He became an Australian citizen in 1978. In the 1990s he became good friends with a pair of Indonesian brothers who recruited him into Jemaah Islamiyah and eventually sent him to Malaysia to meet Hambali. Hambali recommended he go to Afghanistan to receive training. He flew to Karachi in 2000, and within two days of landing was introduced to KSM by the name everyone called him, Mukhtar. After a few days, Mukhtar had an associate hand-deliver Roche to “the Sheikh” in Afghanistan along with a handwritten note vouching for him. The sheikh turned out to be bin Laden, and Roche joined him and some other fighters for lunch. After a brief period of training in explosives, he was sent back to Karachi and spent several more days with Mohammed, who wanted him to return to Australia and recruit more Caucasians to join Al Qaeda.5

  Mukhtar was an engaging fellow, Roche thought, easy to be around. Roche had no idea who he was, although Mukhtar did tell him at one point that he routinely handled hundreds of thousands of dollars that had been earmarked for various plots. His familiarity with large sums of money, however, did not deter Mohammed from personally dropping by Roche’s hotel in his chauffeured taxi and arguing for a refund of a few dollars on Roche’s behalf. As Roche watched in amazement, Mohammed spent twenty minutes arguing with the manager, murmuring under his breath in English that he was doing it on principle. Roche didn’t get the refund, and Mohammed ushered him back to the cab—and to a hotel he deemed more suitable.

  Once back in Australia, Roche went online and checked the State Department’s Most Wanted website for bin Laden. He was shocked to find that six of the men he had met on his trip were on it, including KSM. At that point, he decided he was in over his head and started to back away slowly. He said that he kept in touch with Mohammed by e-mail out of fear.

  Roche began to make repeated efforts to inform authorities of what he knew. He first tried the American embassy. When that went nowhere, he tried several times to call the Australian Security Intelligence Organization. Agents there eventually listened to his story, they would later confirm at Roche’s trial on terrorism charges, but did nothing about it.

  By then, KSM was well into planning the 9/11 attacks. He had already arranged a meeting of some of its key participants just hundreds of miles away, in Malaysia.

  Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, January 2000

  The first active steps to execute Mohammed’s plot nearly caused its immediate end. Late in 1999, the CIA learned that an operative they had identified as an Al Qaeda member and experienced jihadi, Khalid al-Mihdhar, planned to travel from Yemen to Kuala Lumpur for a meeting. They had intercepted a phone call to a known Al Qaeda switchboard in Sana’a, Yemen. Mihdhar and another man, someone named Nawaf, were mentioned in the call. The CIA tracked Mihdhar as he traveled, managing to get a copy of his passport as he transited through Dubai. They noted that he had a valid visa for the United States. They were also able to determine that Nawaf was Nawaf al-Hazmi, another experienced fighter.

  They arranged for continued surveillance once the pair arrived in Malaysia. The movement of the two veteran jihadis attracted enough notice that CIA director George Tenet was briefed on it. The U.S. intelligence community was still on heightened alert for turn-of-the-millennium attacks, so Mihdhar and Hazmi, two of bin Laden’s hand-selected pilots for KSM’s plot, were going to Malaysia mainly because they did not want to enter the U.S. directly from the Middle East. They would also meet with the other two pilots, Walid bin Attash and Abu Bara al-Yemeni, who were going to be in Southeast Asia to surveil security on regional airlines. The Yemenis were assigned to take part in the Asian portion of the plot.

  At the CIA’s request, Malaysian domestic security picked up the trails of the two men, tracking them to a local hotel and subsequently to a condominium complex in the town of Bandar Sunga
i Long, outside the city. They stayed at a condo owned by one of Hambali’s recruits, a Malaysian who had graduated from an American university and had come home to help Hambali develop chemical weapons.

  Malaysian security tracked the men and provided photos to the CIA. The men stayed in Kuala Lumpur for nearly a week. On January 8, bin Attash, Mihdhar, and Hazmi departed Malaysia for Bangkok, although the security services lost track of them and did not determine what they did in Thailand until later. Two other Al Qaeda operatives met bin Attash in Bangkok and handed him more than $30,000, much of which he passed on to Hazmi and Mihdhar. On January 15, the two Saudis, traveling under their own names, flew undetected from Bangkok to Los Angeles.

  The two operatives were not ideal choices to send to the U.S. They spoke little English and had no experience living outside the Middle East. The only English they knew was what KSM had taught them—unhelpful phrases such as “Get down,” “Don’t move,” “Stay in your seat,” and “If anyone moves I’ll kill you.” But the CIA neglected to mention to the FBI that two known Al Qaeda operatives might have arrived in the U.S.

  The FBI was hardly blameless in the Mihdhar-Hazmi affair. Not long after the men came to California, they moved south to San Diego, and for a time rented a room in the house of an FBI informant, who didn’t think to report the fact that two young Arabs had arrived in the U.S. with no apparent plans other than to learn how to fly airplanes.

  New York City, Spring 2000

  Pellegrino and Besheer, by now known as Batman and Robin to some within the JTTF, had spent the better part of two years chasing Mohammed Jamal Khalifa around the globe, recording his every utterance. The work-to-information yield ratio was exceedingly small. They pursued others in the Manila network as well, but again the results were less than exciting.

  KSM was by far the hardest to track. New signs of him were very faint, and the investigators tried to be creative. By this point, they had assembled a broad mosaic of his family and associates. They tried to use information as bait in hopes of luring him out of hiding. They monitored his known networks to see if he responded. If he did, they never knew it.

  The work was frustrating in the extreme, and was not made any easier by the reception they continued to get when they returned home to New York. Pellegrino continued to face opposition and questions, and Besheer had a tough time dealing with his bosses at the Port Authority, who—unlike the FBI—had never had an officer spend this long on a single case.

  Besheer’s superiors hassled him more and more about overtime, even though he was required by his union to file it. Finally, he couldn’t take it anymore.

  When he and Pellegrino had returned from an exceedingly long trip—they had gone literally around the world—late the previous year, Besheer was asked to meet with his boss.

  You’re kind of high on overtime for the year, his boss said to him.

  Besheer tried to explain what he was doing and why—its importance, especially given Port Authority’s responsibility for the World Trade Center.

  The boss shrugged and said, Still, you’re kind of high.

  Besheer decided on the spot that was it. He would retire. He was out the door. He was busting his butt for what he regarded as a higher cause, and everyone—his union, his employers—was second-guessing him.

  He immediately drove over to 26 Federal Plaza and told Pellegrino, who was devastated. He was nearly speechless. “You can’t,” Pellegrino said. “We still have to catch KSM.” They made one final trip together in January and February, but Besheer stuck to his decision. In his round of farewells, before retiring on February 25 and driving to Florida the next morning, Besheer reminded everyone what was at stake in the work he and Pellegrino had been doing. They’ll come back, he said of the people they had been chasing. They’ll come back and try to finish the job.

  Islamabad, Pakistan, 2000

  As KSM plotted and planned from his base in Karachi, he wasn’t even on the radar screen of the CIA station in Pakistan, which had been rendered largely ineffectual due to a bitter feud between Washington and Pakistan that had been intensifying for more than a decade.

  The Islamabad government, particularly its military and its all-powerful ISI spy agency, hated the United States—vehemently. Many of its top military and intelligence officials had searing memories of how they had spent most of the 1980s working alongside the CIA, covertly training and equipping the mujahideen who had come from far and wide to fight the occupying Soviet army in Afghanistan.

  Washington left Pakistan twisting in the wind when it abruptly withdrew after the Soviet pullout. With no money or military assistance to help Pakistan continue what Washington had started, the proud Pakistani military had to watch as its U.S.-made F-16 fighter planes began falling from the sky due to lack of upkeep. Washington, one ISI officer said, “uses us like condoms and then throws us away.”6

  By the time the CIA’s new Islamabad station chief, a hotshot named Robert Grenier, arrived in 1999, most CIA operatives in the country left their bunkers in the embassy only infrequently, mostly because they were operating in a hostile country where their intelligence-gathering efforts depended on a host government that was not inclined to provide assistance. Gathering intel in Afghanistan was actually easier, even though the country was controlled by the Taliban, which was a gracious host to Al Qaeda.

  As a result, the CIA station in Islamabad was often seen as a backwater deployment, a career derailer, and job opportunities there had few takers. Besides the horrible working conditions and long hours, there was little recognition in Washington that Pakistan was an area of strategic interest, even within counterterrorism, so the chance to use the posting as a way of advancing was virtually nonexistent. The Cold War was long over, the clandestine war against the Soviets in Afghanistan was done, and the agency was fixated on other threats, including Hamas, Hezbollah, and Iraq. Most careerists stayed away from counterterrorism posts altogether, even with the overtime, hardship pay, and other financial benefits they provided.

  That began to change in 1998, with the two embassy bombings in Africa and bin Laden’s second and more vehement public declaration of war against the United States, but that did little to improve Islamabad as an attractive posting.

  Few, if any, places outside the embassy club served alcohol, and there was little in the way of an expat scene there in which agency operatives could mingle, much less work the room and troll for agents, the CIA term for foreign spies or assets who could be mined for intelligence. The joke was that if you got sent to Islamabad, there was nothing for you to do and nothing to spend your money on, so you socked it away for when you got home. One female case officer bought so many Oriental rugs there that she would later open a carpet store in Washington State.

  Despite its size (it would become one of the CIA’s largest stations) and strategic importance, Grenier found that the operational tempo of the Pakistan station was slow. Grenier was a rising star in the agency—short, wiry, and athletic, with an unflappable demeanor. He was noted within the corridors of Langley for being a dapper dresser who had a proven record of deftly handling the most difficult assignments, but also one who was unafraid of taking on the most dangerous ones as well. And Islamabad was just that, given CIA director George Tenet’s decree that the United States was now on war footing with Al Qaeda.

  Soon after Grenier got to Islamabad, it became one of the most productive CIA stations in the world, as measured by the number of reports generated. Grenier presided over a significant expansion of the station, engineered almost entirely to fight the growing threat posed by Al Qaeda, lodged in neighboring Afghanistan. And while bin Laden was virtually untouchable in his fortress at Tarnak Farms, near Kandahar, Grenier soon became fixated on an elusive Al Qaeda operative who had spent years working both sides of the border, virtually with impunity, as one of Al Qaeda’s chief logistics chieftains.7 He was known as Abu Zubaydah.

  Zubaydah, whose real name is Zayn al-Abidin Muhammad Husayn, was born in Saudi Arabi
a in March of 1971. He considered himself a militant Palestinian because some of his teenage years were spent on the West Bank, where he joined in demonstrations against Israel. He moved to Afghanistan in 1991 to join the fight and a year or so later was nearly killed when a mortar shell left shrapnel in his head, causing major trauma and severe memory loss. By the mid-1990s, he had recovered and assumed a key role as a facilitator of foreign fighters into and out of the guerrilla camps—not just for Al Qaeda but for numerous other militant groups from around the world. One of the camps he served, Khalden, was the major Al Qaeda training ground.

  The U.S. government was doing whatever it could to gather intelligence on Zubaydah. Grenier told new arrivals at the station that getting him was his—and now their—top terrorism priority.

  In late 1999, authorities in Jordan had disrupted a sprawling millennium plot and told the United States that Zubaydah was implicated in the plans to attack U.S. and other Western interests at holy sites in Jordan. On December 14, Ahmed Ressam, an Al Qaeda–trained Algerian militant from Montreal, was arrested in Washington State with a car trunk full of explosives as he drove off the ferry from Canada. Over time, FBI agents wheedled out of Ressam that Zubaydah was not only his facilitator into and out of the Al Qaeda camps but that Zubaydah had encouraged him to blow up U.S. targets and had even facilitated his mission with money and other assistance.

  Over the next year, Grenier and others gathered ominous intel suggesting that Zubaydah was living—and plotting—openly in Peshawar. One reason that Zubaydah became an obsession for Grenier was that he wasn’t just a member of Al Qaeda but also served as an intermediary between the terror network in Afghanistan and its operations in Pakistan. There, it teamed up with Pakistani militants, including Lashkar-e-Taiba and other groups with deep connections to the ISI. Zubaydah knew these groups well.