The Hunt for KSM

by Terry McDermott

  Zubaydah’s connections to the militants provided the kind of logistical backbone Al Qaeda needed—networks of safe houses on the Pakistan side and ways of moving people and money. This is the meat and potatoes of terrorism operations—logistics, Grenier said. He liked to quote the military dictum that amateurs discuss strategy but professionals discuss logistics.

  Washington, D.C., Spring and Summer 2001

  Just before the July Fourth weekend, Ressam, the Algerian terrorist, calmly walked into a New York federal courtroom and for the first time described publicly what he knew about the Al Qaeda camps and the group’s global network. He had been convicted a few months before, decided to cooperate, and produced a flood of alarming intelligence—on Al Qaeda, yes, but also on Abu Zubaydah.

  In his testimony, Ressam said that on his way back from the Al Qaeda camps, Zubaydah had asked him for a bunch of blank Canadian passports, presumably so that he could sneak Al Qaeda operatives into the United States for attacks. In Washington, authorities realized that Zubaydah had gone “operational,” and was involved in more than just directing the Jordanian end of the millennium plot.

  Soon after General Pervez Musharraf became president of Pakistan in June of 2001, U.S. ambassador William Milam told him the United States urgently needed his help in locating and capturing Zubaydah. This sort of meeting with Pakistani security officials became common. So did the result, which was no action whatsoever. Grenier, who attended some of the meetings, said the pleas to Musharraf hit the wall behind him after going in one ear and out the other.

  By that summer, Ressam’s information had not only pushed Zubaydah to the top of the list of most wanted terrorists but it caused top intelligence officials to sound a “red alert” about impending Al Qaeda attacks, possibly in the United States. Barbara Sude, the Al Qaeda analyst at the CIA, drew up a classified memo for President George W. Bush entitled “Bin Laden Determined to Strike in U.S.”

  The memo, known as a PDB, or President’s Daily Brief, was personally delivered to President Bush at his Texas ranch on August 6, 2001, and it specifically mentioned that the millennium plotting in Canada in 1999 may have been part of bin Laden’s first serious attempt to launch a terrorist strike within the borders of the United States. Until then, Al Qaeda had only struck overseas. It noted that Ressam had said that as early as 1998, Zubaydah was planning his own attack in the United States. And it said that FBI information since that time indicated patterns of suspicious activity in this country consistent with preparations for hijackings or other types of attacks, including recent surveillance of federal buildings in New York.

  At the time, the FBI was conducting approximately seventy full-field investigations throughout the U.S. that were considered Al Qaeda–related, the PDB said. It added: “Clandestine, foreign government, and media reports indicate bin Laden since 1997 has wanted to conduct terrorist attacks in the U.S. Bin Laden implied in U.S. television interviews in 1997 and 1998 that his followers would follow the example of World Trade Center bomber Ramzi Yousef and ‘bring the fighting to America’…. After U.S. missile strikes on his base in Afghanistan in 1998, bin Laden told followers he wanted to retaliate in Washington.”8

  It also warned that Al Qaeda members—“including some who are U.S. citizens—have resided in or traveled to the U.S. for years, and the group apparently maintains a support structure that could aid attacks.”

  CIA director George Tenet later described the mood within the intelligence community in these months leading up to September 11 as nearing hysteria. Clues of an impending attack at times appeared to be everywhere. There was, he said, unfortunately little information specific enough to act upon. But there was specific information. In September 2000, a source had reported that someone named Khalid al-Shaykh al-Ballushi was a key lieutenant in Al Queda. Al-Ballushi means “from Baluchistan,” KSM’s homeland. Recognizing the possible significance, the CIA’s bin Laden unit sought more information but dropped the matter. Then, in April, the CIA began analyzing intel that an associate of Abu Zubaydah named Mukhtar was planning terrorist activities. In June, a CIA report said that a man named Khaled was actively recruiting operatives to travel to the United States, where colleagues were waiting to help carry out attacks for bin Laden. Analysts at CIA headquarters presumed from the details of the reporting that this person was KSM, In July, the same source was shown a series of photographs and identified Khalid Sheikh Mohammed as Khaled. In August, the CIA learned that KSM’s nickname was Mukhtar.9

  All of this information was duly recorded and filed away, unacted upon. Any attempts to follow up on it went nowhere. Again, the intelligence community, alarmed though it was, had a nearly laser focus on bin Laden. KSM? The CIA collected information stating that he had plans to attack the United States, but didn’t connect the obvious dots. When FBI case agent Pellegrino saw the reports, he was concerned. Was it KSM in full view? He urgently sent off electronic inquiries. No one ever replied, and Pellegrino let the matter drop. The intelligence community was so fixed on Al Qaeda as the threat, it failed to recognize the danger KSM posed.

  Sude would later confirm that the bin Laden unit at CIA hadn’t given KSM any thought for years.10 The CIA’s own post-9/11 investigators found that while the agency’s counterterrorism analysts considered KSM to be a high-priority target for apprehension and rendition, it did not recognize the significance of intelligence received from credible sources in 2000 and 2001 that portrayed him as a senior Al Qaeda lieutenant, and that the agency “thus missed important indicators of terrorist planning.”

  Even then, with the 9/11 attacks looming, KSM was already looking ahead to the next battles in his war. That summer, he was busy laying the foundations for a second wave of attacks. He approved further payments to Zacarias Moussaoui for flight training and he sent a Qatari computer expert, Ali Saleh Kahlah al-Marri, to Illinois with instructions to lay low, conduct surveillance, and await further instructions while attending Bradley University in Peoria. He did the same with others, most notably the team of nineteen hijackers in the 9/11 plot, who were putting the finishing touches on his grand plan.

  CHAPTER 10

  September 11

  Pakistan, Summer 2001

  One Sunday morning, the U.S. ambassador to Pakistan, William Milam, was enjoying breakfast at the embassy club with a State Department security official when he noted a number of unfamiliar faces. “Those are all Grenier’s people,” Milam’s dining companion observed. “He runs the place.”

  “No,” Milam spat back. “I run the place.”

  By July, Milam was off to his next assignment.

  With support from George Tenet, Bob Grenier had readied the CIA’s Pakistan station, and Langley ramped up deployment of officers and analysts to Islamabad, which it called tag-teaming. So many temporarily deployed agency operatives were there that it appeared the agency was taking over the massive embassy.

  “The system,” Tenet said, “was blinking red.”1 It continued to blink furiously right up to the morning nineteen young Arab men boarded four westbound transcontinental commercial airliners.

  Al Qaeda had called its most important operatives back to Afghanistan to protect them. In August, Ramzi bin al-Shibh sent a courier to Karachi to tell KSM that Atta had chosen September 11 as the date for the attacks. Later in the month, Mohammed traveled to Afghanistan to inform bin Laden personally of the date, then returned to Pakistan. Mohammed and bin al-Shibh watched news reports of the attacks at an Internet café in Karachi.2 When the first plane hit the first target, the World Trade Center, a celebration commenced. Men shouted, “God is great!” and wept with joy.3

  Port Charlotte, Florida, September 11, 2001

  On the morning of 9/11, Besheer, now a health nut and patrol officer for the Punta Gorda police department, had just finished his early morning walk across the bridge between Port Charlotte and Punta Gorda, made a cup of coffee, and gone to his computer room. His wife, Barbara, called out to him to come watch the TV. A plane had just hit
the World Trade Center, she said, apparently a commuter plane.

  His stomach sank at the mere mention of a plane and the Trade Center in the same sentence. He got up from the computer and walked slowly into the living room. When he saw the smoke pouring out of the North Tower, he knew immediately what had happened. After he watched the second plane come careening in minutes later, he turned, walked to his bedroom, and started packing. His raid jackets—the familiar law enforcement outerwear worn on hazardous assignments—had been hanging neatly in his closet since he left the Port Authority the prior year. He laid them out on the bed. His wife walked in and asked what he thought he was doing.

  Besheer, despite his powerful physique, was gentle by nature and habit. Now, however, he grabbed his wife’s arms, fiercely. He shook her and wailed, “I told you they were coming back!” Besheer had a long record of warning people that the same group of terrorists who attacked the Trade Center the first time would come back and finish the job, reminding them of what Basit had said that night as his helicopter passed the Twin Towers. He said it at his retirement dinner from the Port Authority in 2000 and numerous times before and after. He told his Port Authority bosses when he abruptly retired, after they once again asked him what the hell he was doing over there on the Joint Terrorism Task Force, racking up so much overtime to chase ghosts around the world.

  Still holding his wife, Besheer sank to his knees. Then his cell phone rang. It was Pellegrino, calling from Malaysia, where he had gone to meet a potential informant as part of his continuing hunt for the Manila Air coconspirators. Pellegrino had high hopes for the meeting, which was supposed to take place the day before, but the informant never showed. He had first called his wife in New York, but couldn’t reach her. He was not usually an emotional man, but he sounded distraught. He was yelling into the phone:

  “Bash, look what they’ve done! Look what they’ve done to us! They did the building and the plane all in one!”

  They both knew exactly who “they” was. Khalid Sheikh Mohammed was the first name Pellegrino thought of when he saw the news.

  Besheer sat on his bed and cried. He couldn’t stop. Once he did, he finished packing his clothes, stocked a cooler full of snacks and juice, gathered his suitcase and his raid jackets, threw them in the backseat of his car, and headed north at high speed. He got pulled over for speeding even before he got out of Florida. When the state trooper looked inside the car and saw the raid jackets, he pulled back and looked at Besheer. “Godspeed,” he said, and waved him on.

  Besheer drove without resting, and first went to the Port Authority offices in New Jersey to officially reenlist. Then he went to “the hole,” where the towers had stood. He found his former colleagues from the Port Authority and JTTF and immediately went to work with them. For several days, working out of their makeshift command center on the Hudson River, they clawed through the rubble and wreckage, looking for clues, for evidence amid the bodies, the bonded stationery, the computer consoles, everything the giant towers had contained and pulverized on their way down. He tried to rejoin Port Authority formally, but red tape in a time of crisis got in his way. Then, within a few weeks, the FBI bureaucracy also put its foot down. A supervisor—a former colleague—told him he couldn’t stay because he no longer had the security clearance necessary to work with the JTTF.

  As he turned and walked away, he saw crowds of people, hundreds, standing near the ad hoc command post. They waved signs that read GOD BLESS YOU and YOU’RE OUR HEROES. They held out to the workers whatever food they could scrounge from their own kitchens. One woman offered Besheer half a package of Ritz crackers sealed with a twist tie and two bottles of water. It was all she had to give.

  CHAPTER 11

  Panic

  On Board, September 11, 2001

  The investigation into the September 11 attacks had begun while the hijacked airliners were still in the air. When the muscle hijackers on the four planes took control of the aircraft, they did so with a suddenness and violence that shocked the flight crews. Using small utility knives as weapons, they stormed past stunned flight attendants and invaded the cockpits. They subdued the pilots by whatever means they needed, in some cases slicing their throats and dragging their bodies back out into the main cabins, then clearing the way for the single pilot in each group to take over the flight. The flight attendants could do little to stop or even slow the hijackers, who, on average, were not large men, but who had the elements of surprise, months of weight lifting, and determination to their advantage.

  The flight attendants in several instances did what they could to fight back. This mainly meant making telephone calls to the ground, reporting what was happening, and identifying the hijackers by their seat numbers. Matching the numbers to the names on flight manifests, airline workers on the ground in at least a few cases identified the hijackers before the planes even crashed. It was too late and too little, of course, to spare the passengers, crews, or the people going to work in the buildings that would be the targets of the airliner missiles. But it gave investigators on the ground enough information to begin their search. In the case of United 93, the aircraft that crashed in Pennsylvania, information from the alert attendants lent frightening specificity to the origin of the attackers. Khalid al-Mihdhar and Nawaf al-Hazmi, the two Saudis who had slipped past the CIA on their initial entry into the United States the year before, and Hazmi’s brother, Salem, were named on the manifests.1

  All three were known as Al Qaeda recruits. Thus were Osama bin Laden and Al Qaeda identified as the likely originators of the attacks long before the sun set on September 11.

  Investigators also caught a huge break. Mohammed Atta, the pilot of the first plane to strike the World Trade Center, had on the day before the attacks driven from Boston, where he intended to depart on his suicide mission the next day, to Portland, Maine. He and another hijacker, Abdul Aziz al-Omari, had eaten that evening at a Pizza Hut, visited a Walmart store, and spent the night in a Comfort Inn in Portland. They very nearly missed their commuter flight back to Boston the next morning, arriving at the airport just fifteen minutes before their plane was due to take off.2 But they made it, flew down to Boston, and transferred without incident to their American Airlines flight. Atta’s luggage, however, didn’t make the transfer. He had checked two bags. Neither was loaded onto American Airlines 11.

  The bags were discovered later that day at Boston’s Logan International Airport. Atta had left a record of virtually his entire life in them. Included were his last will and testament, his college diploma, and transcripts from both Cairo University, where he obtained his undergraduate degree, and Technical University of Hamburg-Harburg, where he did his graduate work. The hijackers also left rental cars littered with paperwork and fingerprints in three different airport parking garages.

  With the identification of Mihdhar and the Hazmi brothers, and with the caches of information in Atta’s luggage and the cars, investigators were handed the identity of both the plot’s sponsor—bin Laden—and its chief executioners, Atta and his fellow pilots. Within hours, administration officials were searching for potential bombing targets in Afghanistan and directions to Atta’s apartment in Hamburg, Germany.

  Investigators were deployed immediately, combing hotel rooms and apartments for evidence and trying to find anyone who had come into contact with the hijackers. The web widened with astonishing speed, quickly jumping from the United States to Germany and then to the United Arab Emirates, Pakistan, and Afghanistan.

  New York City, September 2011

  In the immediate aftermath of the attacks, the panic was everywhere, and overwhelming.

  David Kelley, one of the supervisory assistant U.S. attorneys most involved in prosecution of terrorism cases, was in his Manhattan office when Mohammed Atta steered flight 11 into the North Tower. His window in Federal Plaza looked north, so he saw nothing, but he heard a huge bang. Then he saw what looked like confetti floating through the air. He was about to call the police to see what t
he hell had happened when U.S. attorney Mary Jo White, his boss, called him.

  White’s office looked south and she had seen the plane hit the building,

  “A plane hit the Trade Center; go with Barry [Mawn], he’s waiting for you,” she said. It was a routine reaction. Any time anything happened, White wanted her prosecutors right there in the middle of it. Kelley, similarly, had been rushed to investigate the attack on the USS Cole. He arrived, he liked to say, before the smoke cleared.

  Kelley ran out of the building, passing his wife as she was going to work. He joined up with Mawn—the head of the FBI’s New York field office—and a New York fire department officer, Joe Dunn, and they ran toward the Trade Center. Other law enforcement officials reacted exactly the same way. In the few minutes it took the three to travel five blocks, others had beat them to the spot. The three men arrived at the site and immediately started coordinating an investigative response. Then the second plane hit the South Tower. No one knew what was going on. Kelley was told to go to three different places. Finally, they were directed to a temporary command post on West Street. They took off again, running past dozens of body parts on the ground. Kelley passed one leg on the pavement—an entire leg, hip to foot, clothed in a kind of harem pant. It was exactly the sort of garment worn by Basit, the original World Trade Center bomber, when he first entered the United States.

  “We need to preserve this as evidence,” he told Mawn. They stopped and bent over to examine the leg. “We need to tag this,” Kelley said.

  “I’m not touching that fucking thing,” Mawn answered.

  Kelley started to argue that, no, we have to tag it, or we’ll get someone else to tag it, when the South Tower collapsed. He had no idea that was what had happened, but the noise was overwhelming. They all started running. Kelley was an athlete, exceptionally fit. Mawn was not. The air filled with debris. They ran through it as far as they could. Kelley felt he was about to suffocate. He stopped, exhausted. He looked behind him; Mawn was nowhere to be seen.