The Hunt for KSM

by Terry McDermott

  By the third night, the lack of a plan bothered Lormel enough that he sat up all night writing one. By the end of the first week, he had pitched his immediate supervisors on the idea that his section—which typically investigated white-collar crime—should grab the finance end of the plot, coordinate it, and chase it down from beginning to end. There had to be a money trail, he told them. He had no sooner pitched his idea than his secretary received a call from SIOC. The bosses wanted another investigator to chase the latest clue. Lormel stormed down to SIOC and told a supervisor there that he would take the lead himself. The supervisor, Don Kelly, said, Dennis, you’re the section chief, you don’t need to do this. We just need an agent to track it down.

  I’m going to handle this one; let me see the lead, Lormel said, extending his hand. There was some resistance. Kelly thought Lormel was busting his chops, which in a sense he was.

  Kelly handed it over and, as Lormel suspected, it was typical of the requests that were being made—some mope’s credit card charge to be tracked down. It was almost random. It confirmed for Lormel that there was no plan, just spasmodic reaction.

  At that moment, Mueller and Pickard came out into the foyer. Lormel went up to Pickard and said, This is a crazy way to handle this stuff. If it’s all one plot, it’s all related financially. We need to know where the money is coming from, where it’s going, and who’s behind it. We should treat all the financial questions as one investigation, pull it into our shop, and pursue it. Pickard agreed on the spot, and Lormel was suddenly the 9/11 money man.

  On the next conference call, Pickard announced that all the money stuff “has to go through Dennis.” At the time, all FBI field offices were issuing subpoenas on 9/11-related probes, often literally on the same targets. Lormel, a gruff, no-nonsense former accountant who had spent a career doing big, complicated cases, became a traffic cop of sorts, making sure leads were neither duplicated nor ignored.6

  Lormel immediately pulled together his entire staff of one hundred people and eventually supplemented them with another two hundred filched from wherever he could find them—including some of the Bureau’s youngest and most creative thinkers. They seized a huge, empty space on the fourth floor that was in the midst of a remodel, dropped phone and computer lines out of the ceiling, and hauled in furniture. It popped up as fast as one of those huge boiler-room operations, Lormel recalled, up and running almost overnight.

  Within a week, the financial effort began to pay off. The money trail led from the hijackers’ bank accounts back to the United Arab Emirates, where KSM had placed one of his nephews, Ali Abdul Aziz Ali, a year before the attacks. He later sent Mustafa al-Hawsawi to help Ali. The two had wired funds to the hijackers, as needed, from local exchange centers, which didn’t require much more than a name for identification. Lormel’s agents had no idea at the time, but the money trail had quickly led to the plot’s virtual doorstep, on the other side of which sat KSM.

  Washington, D.C., Autumn 2001

  The FBI’s computer system was almost worse than one could imagine, with virtually no networking capabilities among the fifty-six field offices scattered from coast to coast. Fax machines, diplomatic pouches, and the U.S. Postal Service were the principal means of moving information. Supervisors literally mailed packets of information on the nineteen hijackers to the JTTFs after the attacks. Many agents could not send or receive e-mail from their offices; they had to use private accounts. Louis Freeh, Mueller’s predecessor, boasted about using his computer every day—as a place to put all his Post-it notes; Bureau legend has it that he rarely, if ever, turned it on. He spent most of his time visiting field offices, he would say, not in his office writing memos. The FBI, in many ways the inventor of a sophisticated data-based approach to law enforcement, had slowly become crippled by its inability to access and distribute its own information in useful ways.

  It was—in this regard, at least—an organization spectacularly ill-equipped to wage war against a global and shadowy enemy that was better able to employ the technologies of a networked world. What the FBI did have, however, was an institutional knowledge of radical Islam gained from more than a decade of investigation, interrogation, examination, and trial of international terrorists. This history of success was the FBI’s best argument for a major role in the 9/11 investigation. Unfortunately for the Bureau, and with long-lasting impact on American legal culture, the White House of George Bush was not much interested in investigation. It wanted two things—revenge for the attacks and an ability to stop the next one.

  Bush told any and all who would listen that the United States was at war and new rules would apply. Vice President Dick Cheney went on national television and warned that the United States would no doubt have to venture onto the “dark side” in order to pursue and punish its enemies. Cheney, more than any other individual, was the architect of the new War on Terror. He made it clear that doubt and nuance had no role to play in this new world.7 The FBI’s customary ways of doing business were not a fit for what Cheney had in mind, and perhaps chiefly for that reason the Bureau lost its status as the preeminent antiterror agency.

  In the days immediately following the attacks, George Tenet and his deputies made a forceful case to the administration for allowing the CIA and its network of intelligence agents around the world, who could leverage the help of literally dozens of host countries where Al Qaeda was active, to lead the new war. Their argument: the hardest part wasn’t going to be killing the enemy but finding it—not just the terrorists but their logistics networks, financiers, and supporters and sympathizers. Bush even noted this in his special State of the Union address to an unsettled nation, saying the U.S. would go after those harboring Al Qaeda just as aggressively as it would pursue the terror network itself.

  By Friday, September 14, Tenet and Cofer Black, the chief of the Counterterrorist Center, had drawn up a comprehensive plan to take out Al Qaeda and its Taliban protectors in Afghanistan as the opening shot in a global intelligence-gathering, kill-or-capture campaign. Tenet, Black, and deputy director John McLaughlin briefed the president and his War Cabinet the next day at Camp David on their plan, which they titled “Destroying International Terrorism.”8 Black in particular could be a great salesman. He was a passionate, hyperpatriotic man, charismatic to friends, blustery to enemies. He had more than a few of both. He had also won bragging rights by squaring off against bin Laden when the two were in Sudan in 1994, and Black caught wind of—and thwarted—a plot by bin Laden to assassinate him. By the end of the weekend, Bush handed the “get bin Laden and Al Qaeda” portfolio to the CIA. Much of it was immediately delegated to Black. Most of the initial effort would focus on destroying Al Qaeda’s safe haven in Afghanistan, using the Northern Alliance and Pashtun leaders in the south to fight the Taliban.

  Dale Watson and his successor, Pat D’Amuro, would accompany Robert Mueller to the White House to argue that the Bureau needed to play a central role, but they never had much of a chance. The terrorists would be treated from then forward as enemies in wartime, not criminals. The long-term consequences of this—what do you do with them when the war is over?—were not well thought out, or really thought out at all. But few people were interested in long-term anything then.

  Mueller was new to the high councils of government and would probably not have been much of a match for the CIA’s Tenet in any case. Tenet was a creature of the bureaucracy and a master at finding its hidden levers. The FBI’s main advantage—that it had been the premier agency—was blunted by the fact that Mueller could hardly argue it had succeeded. The evidence of failure—nearly three thousand dead—was indisputable.

  The most obvious particular points of failure were much discussed almost immediately after September 11. One of them concerned a memo written in the Bureau’s Phoenix office concerning the number of Middle Eastern men training as pilots. The memo had been widely ignored. What could or should have been done about that at the time—mid-July of 2001—was less than clear. The 9/11 pilot
s had all concluded their training long before that and were in the final stages of preparations for the attacks. It was clear, however, that a piece of insightful, evidence-based analysis had been done on the ground, sent to headquarters, and quickly forgotten.

  There were other missed opportunities to learn about the 9/11 plot prior to its execution, and the Bureau bore responsibility for its share of these—notably in the case of Zacarias Moussaoui, who proved to be spectacularly ill-suited to any sort of stealthy operation. The opposite, in fact, was nearer the truth. He specialized in calling attention to himself.

  “Hello, Mrs. Matt,” he wrote in an e-mail, applying to Pan Am International Flight Academy. “I am Mrs. Zacarias! I contacted you today by phone. Basically, I need to know if you can help to achieve my ‘Goal’ my dream. I would like to fly in a ‘professional’ like manners one of the big airliners. I have to made my mind which of the following: Boeing 747, 757, 767, or 777 and or Airbus 300 (it will depend on the cost and which one is the easiest to learn).”9

  Once enrolled at the school’s Minneapolis branch, he behaved erratically from the first day, so much so that officials at the school called the FBI, who came, interviewed, and arrested him. Moussaoui had direct communications by telephone and e-mail with Ramzi bin al-Shibh, KSM’s top lieutenant in planning the attacks. The local FBI office in Minneapolis wanted to obtain a special national security search warrant to examine Moussaoui’s belongings, but FBI headquarters in Washington declared there was insufficient evidence even to make such a request. Noting that Minneapolis had suggested Moussaoui might be preparing to hijack a plane, HQ accused the local office of overreacting.

  This was cast after the attacks as a sign of the FBI’s general suffocation by process, a too-rigid adherence on too-strict procedures. The FBI could, and did, argue that those procedures had resulted in dozens of terrorist convictions. The argument held little water now. The Bureau by general consensus had failed to protect the nation. Mueller himself was apologetic, to a degree that many of his subordinates—especially the career folk—felt went too far.

  An oddity in this was that the CIA was a full partner, perhaps the senior partner, in the failure. It had at least one indisputable opportunity to learn about the September 11 plot before it was executed—the curious case of Khalid al-Mihdhar and Nawaf al-Hazmi, whom the CIA had followed to Malaysia in early 2000. The agency knew the two Saudis were associates of bin Laden; the agency also knew both men had entry visas to the United States. While it lost surveillance of the pair in Southeast Asia, the agency within a couple of months had determined that both men had flown from Bangkok to Los Angeles, where they disappeared from official sight. The agency, which had as a matter of routine kept the FBI and the rest of government aware of the future hijackers’ movement to Malaysia, for some reason failed to alert the rest of government, notably the FBI, that they might be in the country. In at least one instance, they actively withheld information. Pellegrino, the FBI’s KSM case agent, happened to be in Thailand in early 2000. When abroad he routinely met with local CIA agents. In Bangkok, a CIA officer showed him photos of the two Saudis and asked Pellegrino if he recognized them, which he did not. When Pellegrino asked who they were, the CIA man was vague: just something we’re working on, he said.

  The pair of Saudis had flown to Los Angeles in mid-January, then had moved to San Diego, where Hazmi remained for most of a year. Mihdhar grew bored in California and lonesome for his family, leading him to return to Yemen for several months and enter the United States yet again in July of 2001. The CIA hadn’t asked that he be placed on a terrorist watch list until August 23, a month after he had returned and just weeks before 9/11. There was no intelligence failure more obvious or inexplicable than this. Two known Al Qaeda operatives with direct links to Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and Osama bin Laden were essentially hidden from the rest of the government.

  The CIA was no better prepared for the new post-9/11 world than anyone else, but one crucial distinction favored the agency over the FBI. The FBI, looking at the smoldering ruins in New York, the hole in the earth in a Pennsylvania farm field, and the skid trench outside the Pentagon, reflexively asked: What happened? They would almost certainly do an astonishing job of re-creating the history. To which the rest of government would say, So what? The CIA was far better at looking past the disaster that had occurred and asking the defining question of the period: What next?

  Knowing which direction to look did not give the agency special insight. Everything, said one top official, was “seat of the pants.” Plots such as the one that had just been executed had simply not been discussed at the highest level of the CIA. “It was just not done,” an agency executive said. “I was on Tenet’s top staff for a year before nine eleven and no one talked about this kind of thing, an airline attack.”10

  There had, of course, been plenty of warning about something. Here, for example, are the titles of a series of reports from the CIA to the rest of the government that were written before the attacks, and were prepared in large part by Barbara Sude and the rest of the Al Qaeda analysts:

  “Sunni Terrorist Threat Growing” (February 6, 2001)

  “Bin Ladin [sic] Planning Multiple Operations” (April 20, 2001)

  “Bin Ladin Public Profile May Presage Attack” (May 3, 2001)

  “Terrorist Groups Said Cooperating on US Hostage Plot” (May 23, 2001)

  “Bin Ladin Network’s Plans Advancing” (May 26, 2001)

  “Bin Ladin Attacks May Be Imminent” (June 23, 2001)

  “Bin Ladin and Associates Making Near-Term Threats” (June 25, 2001)

  “Bin Ladin Planning High-Profile Attacks” (June 30, 2001)

  “Bin Ladin Threats Are Real” (June 30, 2001)

  “Planning for Bin Ladin Attacks Continues, Despite Delays” (July 2, 2001)

  “Bin Ladin Plans Delayed but Not Abandoned” (July 13, 2001)

  “One Bin Ladin Operation Delayed, Others Ongoing” (July 25, 2001)

  “Bin Ladin Determined to Strike in US” (August 6, 2001)

  The reports, as Tenet described them later, were maddeningly short on detail, on actionable intelligence.11 The simple fact was that after the attacks the warnings were easy to see. Before the attacks, hardly anyone had their eyes open. Those few scattered through the government who did were largely dismissed as cranks. There was enough blame to go around; virtually every agency that had a function in protecting the country was due its share. Not wanting to make the same mistake again—that is, not wanting to wait for specific details that might never come and be blamed after the fact for not finding them—the government now regarded everything as high priority. Raw intelligence was coming into Langley and likely as not the next morning was deposited on the president’s desk in the form of a PDB. The FBI, seeing how business was to be done in this new era, did the same. If a tip seemed at all feasible, it was passed up the line. There were literally tens of thousands of them. There was little time and little thought given to analyzing them. When direction was needed, gut reactions won the day, most days.

  CHAPTER 12

  KSM Ascendant

  Pakistan, Autumn and Winter 2001

  The U.S. military response to the attacks was launched on October 7, 2001. It was swift and devastating, unseating the Taliban government in Afghanistan by Thanksgiving. Al Qaeda, without a sponsor, was dislodged and on the run. When the United States declined to deploy enough troops to block their exit, bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahiri escaped through the snowy passes of Tora Bora into Pakistan. Others weren’t so lucky. Mohammed Atef, the military commander of Al Qaeda, was killed in Kandahar—under bombardment from American air forces—in mid-November. Atef had been among bin Laden’s most influential aides, and his death left a huge void in Al Qaeda’s leadership. Khalid Sheikh Mohammed filled it.1

  Mohammed had been rising in the Al Qaeda hierarchy even before 9/11. Although he refrained from pledging an oath to bin Laden after bin Laden agreed to the 9/11 plan, he assumed an ever-
larger role in the organization. He had begun by assisting with media and computer operations; then, even while running the 9/11 plot, was formally named head of the media committee. After 9/11, with Atef dead and the organization on the brink of disintegration, Mohammed took charge of bringing some order to the retreat from Afghanistan. He convened a meeting of Al Qaeda leadership in December in Zormat, in eastern Afghanistan, to bring some order to the retreat. He and Zubaydah and other bin Laden lieutenants decided their fighters should retreat less haphazardly; they decided who should go where and when. Even before the attacks, KSM had helped organize a collection of safe houses in Karachi and elsewhere in Pakistan, many of them operated by jihadi groups like Lashkar-e-Jhangvi, Harkat-ul-Mujahideen, Jaish-e-Mohammed, Sipah-e-Sahaba Pakistan, and Lashkar-e-Taiba, with whom KSM had had relations for years. He wanted Al Qaeda to be ready for the U.S. response.

  The militant groups were a classic Pakistani creation. Most originated in the 1980s with full support and funding from the Pakistan spy agency, the ISI, as frontline resistance to India in the disputed territory of Kashmir. Dozens of different groups were supported by the ISI as they morphed and splintered over the years, and ISI officers established their training regimens and sat on councils to plan strategy and attacks.2 KSM had been living in Karachi off and on since 1992 and had developed connections throughout this underground, immersing himself in the jihadi world of Pakistan and cultivating relationships among its many branches. It is almost impossible to overstate the importance of such groups throughout Pakistan. Within Pakistan’s urban areas they are nearly omnipresent, and in some cities they control entire districts. After 9/11, the groups were indispensable in helping KSM evacuate key operational Al Qaeda members from Afghanistan into Pakistan and helping them regroup, in part by providing money, logistics, safe havens, and a ready army of trustworthy foot soldiers. Those connections and his ties with a network of ethnic Baluch, including his family, formed the basis of KSM’s ability to operate throughout the country. The Baluchs numbered about six million within Pakistan, with millions more across the borders in Iran and Afghanistan.