The Hunt for KSM

by Terry McDermott

  Suddenly, the noise ceased and the air temporarily cleared. Kelley resumed his search for the command center. Ken Maxwell, the head of the JTTF, was there when he arrived.

  “Where’s Barry?” Maxwell asked.

  “He’s dead,” Kelley said. “He didn’t make it. He was behind me and then he wasn’t.”

  Then somebody said the North Tower was bound to fall, too. It was the first time Kelley realized the South Tower had come down. Kelley got on the phone to White, who was still back at her office.

  “Barry’s dead,” Kelley said.

  “No, he’s not,” White replied. “He’s on the other line and told me you were dead.”

  On the ground at the three impact sites—lower Manhattan, the Pentagon, and a farm field in southwestern Pennsylvania—no one quite knew what had happened or how to respond. Plunging into the rubble and hunting through the carnage for survivors provided an immediate plan of action. Beyond that, things got confusing.

  Virtually the entire FBI and Department of Justice was thrown into the 9/11 response. The Joint Terrorism Task Force’s offices at 26 Federal Plaza were just five blocks north of the World Trade Center, beyond the blast zone, but the building lost all electricity and telephone service. The JTTF, along with most of the New York field office, was forced to pack up and move north and west to the second floor of a parking garage in Manhattan’s Chelsea neighborhood, next to the Hudson River. They built makeshift temporary quarters there, living out of the trunks of their cars, and accommodated a huge influx of reinforcements from the New York police department and other agencies. Those who couldn’t fit into the garage were set up on a retired aircraft carrier, the USS Intrepid, which was docked upriver.

  Even before the strong evidence supporting it came to light, the immediate suspicion among almost everyone who knew anything about Al Qaeda was that Osama bin Laden’s group was behind the attacks. Some sensed it immediately. When George Tenet, director of the CIA, was given his first news of the onslaught while at a breakfast meeting at a Washington hotel, he wondered aloud if it was bin Laden. Richard Clarke, the White House counterterrorism coordinator, who had been ranting about bin Laden for years, immediately told top administration officials it was Al Qaeda. Farther down the food chain, Pellegrino and his former partner, Besheer, had much different reactions. Both thought it was the man they had been chasing since 1994, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed.

  In a way, it was surprising how few other people came to this same conclusion. With his nephew Abdul Basit Abdul Karim, Mohammed was known to have been involved in two different plots targeting Americans—the initial 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center and the foiled attempt to blow up a dozen American-flagged jumbo jets in 1995. Basit had been captured, had vowed to take down the towers again if he had the chance, had boasted of a network of associates who could do it, and had been tried and imprisoned. But Mohammed remained at large, an ever more ghostly figure with a phone book full of dangerous acquaintances. Mohammed had not shown in any way an intention to stop attacking. As Pellegrino said in his 9/11 call to Besheer, the September 11 attacks were a clever combination of the two prior attacks—using the World Trade Center as a target and airliners as weapons. Other targets had been added to the list, and the planes were hijacked, not blown up in flight, but the core similarities were unnerving.

  Of course, some other people had thought of Mohammed as a potential suspect, including Pasquale “Pat” D’Amuro, a top counterterrorism official in the FBI’s New York office who had been promoted to headquarters. There were a couple of early mentions of KSM having something to do with the attacks, but so strongly was the security apparatus wedded to its own beliefs that the thought quickly perished. Security officials had grown impatient with Pellegrino and Besheer over the years, suggesting that the hunt for KSM was an arcane endeavor that grew less important by the day. Some had tried to kill it. Others on the JTTF, even among the true believers, described Pellegrino as “that old guy working that old case,” a case that probably deserved to be put into a file and forgotten. Pellegrino was reduced for the most part to periodically sending out notices—including photographs and fingerprints—to U.S. embassies and FBI legal attachés around the world, reminding them that this man remained at large and dangerous. Nobody much cared.

  It was an article of faith within the intelligence community that Mohammed and Basit were lone wolves running a more or less ad hoc enterprise. When Mohammed was finally added to the FBI’s most wanted list with a reward of $5 million that October, he was described as armed and dangerous and still wanted for the Manila Air plot. Bin Laden’s Al Qaeda, meanwhile, had blossomed into a full-blown threat. Since the devastating attacks on American embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, official opinion of bin Laden had undergone a full turnabout. Once dismissed as a poseur, his grandiose public pronouncements the rantings of a madman, bin Laden was transformed from terrorist financier to terrorist mastermind after the 224 deaths at the embassy attacks in Africa were tallied. He was sometimes described as a sort of evil genius. Much was made about the sophistication of those attacks, how they had been long in the planning and were synchronized. A follow-up attack in October of 2000 against a billion-dollar U.S. Navy warship, the USS Cole, in the harbor of the southern Yemeni city of Aden further heightened bin Laden’s reputation.

  Threat reporting during the months leading up to September 11 had been rife with references to bin Laden’s activities and likely vectors of attack. The stream of warnings, some referencing KSM directly, had been nearly nonstop. The president had been warned directly about bin Laden’s ambitions. But the system, aware of the danger but unprepared and unable to stop bin Laden, was fully prepared to blame him 100 percent. At the moment of his greatest triumph, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed was relegated to history’s round file.

  Hundreds attended the many funeral services for the fallen, including that of the Port Authority public safety director, Fred Morrone, who had henpecked Besheer about his overtime. Besheer couldn’t help but wonder if, in his last moments, Morrone thought about Besheer’s warning that “they” would be coming back to hit the World Trade Center again. The biggest turnout was for the funeral of John O’Neill. The toughest of agents, Besheer included, wept as eulogists praised O’Neill as the man who virtually single-handedly tried to take the fight to those who attacked on 9/11. The speakers all noted the irony of O’Neill dying in the very towers he had tried so hard to protect. They were unaware of another, perhaps even more tragic irony—that in his single-minded pursuit of Osama bin Laden and Al Qaeda, O’Neill had at least partially undermined the effort to find the man who had actually ordered the attacks.

  In New York, word had come down from on high to ramp up the JTTF—and fast. Dozens of agents were streaming into the makeshift headquarters along the Hudson, and most of them knew little about bin Laden—and less about Mohammed. Many knew nothing about terrorism at all, or knew only what they had read on various wanted posters. FBI director Robert Mueller III had given the order that every single lead had to be run to ground, no matter how unlikely its provenance or probability of value. So they were all thrown into the fight.

  Thousands of tips poured in, many of them eventually determined to be from competitors of Arab business owners, jilted lovers, or closet racists. It didn’t matter. Each had to be followed to the end. Nationwide, hundreds of Middle Eastern men were detained for “acting suspiciously.” If the tip was that somebody was buying chemicals to build a bomb and it turned out that the “suspect” was buying cleaning supplies for his swimming pool, somebody had to talk to the person who sold the supplies and to anybody who knew the buyer. The manpower demands were gargantuan, and exhausting.

  The focus was almost entirely on stopping the next attack. In the New York JTTF, this imperative was enshrined bureaucratically. An Al Qaeda squad was divided into two teams. International Terrorism One, IT-1, was designated Al Qaeda New, for new investigations, and IT-2 was designated Al Qaeda Old, for preexisting cases. But for so
me reason, IT-2 was stuck chasing all the bad leads and most of the others as well. Pellegrino was assigned to IT-2.

  “It was a madhouse,” said one of the supervisors on the JTTF. “It was like learning a new language, especially for the NYPD guys.”3 The cops couldn’t believe how much paperwork the FBI required—the FD-302 field reports; the ECs, or electronic communications; the LHMs, or letterhead memorandums needed to open a case—and how important it was to use specific forms for specific things, and how seriously the Bureau took it if you got it wrong.

  “Cops aren’t used to doing that. So it was a huge, huge learning curve for [the NYPD] guys. [The] NYPD would just have forms where you check in the box here or there so it was totally different,” the supervisor said. “And there was no orientation. [They] were just thrown into the deep end of the water, and at a time that was as unbelievable as you can imagine in terms of stress and pace and people being overworked and understaffed.”

  Training? Forget it. The new guys were given a computer log-on and told to get to work. Many had no idea where to even start. So some gravitated toward Pellegrino and the other task force veterans for guidance.

  In the relentless orthodoxy of the FBI—dark suit, white shirt, spit-shined shoes, dark tie—Pellegrino stood out. He was, the supervisor said, “the most un-FBI guy I’ve ever seen. He’d wear jeans and a sweatshirt. Short. Wild hair. Frank marches to his own drum.”

  Whatever he was doing to help out, Pellegrino knew that in the midst of the biggest criminal investigation in history he was being marginalized, as were many of the other old-timers. While the world moved in new and dramatic ways, he was left like a restless polar bear on an ice floe, watching the shore as he floated off into the distance.

  Pellegrino tutored the young cops on how to finesse the FBI’s paperwork-based culture, and told them who was who in the Al Qaeda firmament. He also showed them a way to behave. He was quiet, a listener, an absorber, so low-key that “he would sit in meetings for forty-five minutes and never open his mouth, even though he knew more than anyone else in the room,” the supervisor said—probably more than everybody else in the room combined.

  Except, that is, when some stupid supervisor tried to get between him and his investigation, and then computer keyboards went sailing against a wall.

  Washington, D.C., September 2001

  Mueller, a former San Francisco prosecutor, decided within the first week that the 9/11 investigation would be run out of FBI headquarters in Washington, D.C. That was only his second week on the job, having taken over on September 1. The New York office had been home to nearly every investigation into radical Islam that the FBI had ever undertaken, including all the bin Laden cases—the first Trade Center bombing, the Manila Air plot, the embassy bombings in Africa, the Cole. The New York office had the history, the expertise, the investigators, the institutional knowledge, and a well-oiled system in which FBI agents, federal prosecutors, and grand juries worked together to produce indictments and win convictions. It also had one of the most dramatic crime scenes in history at its doorstep—the smoking pile of concrete-and-steel rubble that had been the Twin Towers. Its leaders argued that the investigation belonged there. Mueller didn’t care. He wanted to be able to see what was happening on the investigation with his own eyes. Some thought it was because he blamed the New York squad for failing to stop the attacks, and because he thought there were too many cowboys there on the JTTF, people who didn’t like to follow protocol. And Mueller was big on protocol. He also wanted to centralize the organization of the FBI, to undo the traditional feudal structure under which every local office was its own little principality run more or less as the special agent in charge saw fit. Aside from the bureaucratic concerns about a structure like this, there was also the plain fact that international terrorism was hardly a problem unique to New York; the threat reporting was coming from all corners of the United States and the world. This was not an argument you have even the slightest hope of winning, Mueller said. I don’t care about the history. If those investigators are so valuable to the investigation, they can move, too. Bring ’em along. Many did. Half the New York office came to Washington, it seemed.

  Amid everything else going on, moving dozens of agents from New York to headquarters was not the most obvious way to ensure a smooth operation. But the task confronting all the security services overwhelmed whatever complaints were lodged against reorganization. There simply was not enough time to fight about it.

  David Kelley had no sooner scrambled out of the debris at the World Trade Center than he received a call from Washington. Attorney general John Ashcroft and Mueller wanted him there immediately. Within hours, he got another call from a top DOJ official. “Do you know about this guy in Minneapolis?” The “guy” was Zacarias Moussaoui, the French Moroccan man KSM had approved for flight training as part of a second wave of attacks. Moussaoui was the first strong link to KSM and his cadre of operatives already in the United States. As the FBI and CIA scrambled to figure out Moussaoui’s role, they never found a hint of KSM’s involvement. Nor did they suspect there were KSM agents other than Moussaoui already in the U.S.; as usual, the ghost had left few traces behind.

  After tracking down his wife, also an assistant U.S. attorney, and ensuring she was safe, Kelley was taken to an FBI car and driven through the night to FBI headquarters, which was about to be inundated with agents from around the country. He showered, changed suits, and was told he would be briefing the nation’s two top law enforcement officials shortly after sunrise about a subject that had consumed him for years. During the prior five years, Kelley had been out of the country looking for Al Qaeda as much as he was in. Finally, Ashcroft and Mueller would hear what he had learned.

  Kelley didn’t mention it in that briefing or others that followed because it was just a random thought, but he had been a supervising prosecutor in New York when the World Trade Center and Manila cases were tried. Although KSM’s name had purposely been kept out of the public part of the trials, Kelley was well aware of him.

  “Where the hell has that guy been?” Kelley asked himself.

  Few others were giving much thought to KSM. On October 2, the State Department sent out a classified memo to all U.S. embassies, instructing them to brief world leaders on what the U.S. knew about the attacks, and Al Qaeda. The top-secret briefing memo cited the most up-to-date, sensitive, and classified intelligence, including some from a highly placed Al Qaeda informant.4

  It listed several key figures involved in the 9/11 attacks, but KSM’s name was notably absent—despite several references to the Bojinka plot and to the first World Trade Center bombing. That omission was all the more noticeable to some because the memo specifically implicated Al Qaeda in both of those plots.

  For his part, Pellegrino kept his suspicions about KSM’s possible 9/11 role to himself and sent out another round of messages to embassies around the world, asking them to be on the lookout for KSM. It had become a matter of routine, but this time, Pellegrino was hoping that with all the attention on 9/11 and Al Qaeda, something—anything—might shake loose on what had now become a cold case.

  The secret State Department memo said that the United States was mobilizing as never before to counter Al Qaeda and its global network. “Many of these groups support each other and are supported by states,” it read. “Given the extensive nature of this network, the United States has a multi-phase, long-term strategy. We will need cooperation and assistance from around the world, possibly for years to come. As President Bush has said, we are embarking on a lengthy campaign that will combine diplomacy, financial measures, military action, intelligence, and other instruments of power and influence. We want to starve terrorists of funding, and we want to deprive them of refuge.”

  FBI leadership noted that the memo—the first known blueprint for what would become the Bush-Cheney doctrine in the War on Terror—said nothing about the FBI, even though PENTTBOM already had become the biggest criminal investigation in the Bureau’s
history. At FBI headquarters, halfway between the White House and the Capitol on Pennsylvania Avenue, agents were arriving from around the country and were squeezed in wherever they could find space. Some were set up in the basement, next to the loading dock and the print shop. They slept at their desks, on couches, or doubled and tripled up at nearby apartment complexes.

  The investigation was run out of the FBI’s Strategic Information and Operations Center (SIOC, pronounced sigh-ock). The multimillion-dollar, 40,000-square-foot complex was made up of offices, suites, computer hubs, and secure video conference rooms that were all connected by gleaming white corridors on the fifth floor of headquarters. By the time the second plane hit the World Trade Center, Dale Watson, the Bureau’s assistant director for counterterrorism, was already in the command center conducting a briefing. Mueller placed Pickard, the deputy FBI director, and D’Amuro in charge of the investigation and Watson directly under them. The top executives of the Bureau began meeting at the center twice a day.5

  As happens in many organizations, the briefings were dreaded by those not involved for the simple reason that every unanswered question raised during the course of the meetings would be sent downstream as soon as the briefing concluded, often prefaced by the words “The director wants…”

  Sometimes they went downstream based only on what people thought the director wanted.

  This drove operations people crazy. Dennis Lormel, chief of the Bureau’s financial crimes section, knew there had to be a money trail that led from the crash sites back to the 9/11 plot’s organizers. He also knew that despite his best efforts and frequent complaints, the Bureau still didn’t have a comprehensive way to pursue that trail. He watched with growing irritation as his investigators were picked off one by one to chase whatever new lead had just come in or whatever question had just been asked. It was exactly the kind of approach the Bureau had taken to tracking terror financing before the attacks. There was no comprehensive, strategic plan.