The Baluch comprise the majority in the southwestern province of Baluchistan, but the largest, densest concentration of Baluch in Pakistan is in Karachi’s Lyari district, a sprawling, overflowing enclave of well more than a million people where outsiders—including the police—seldom venture. Lyari is a warren of narrow, deeply rutted roads. It is in many ways a city within a city, with private armies substituting for municipal and state security forces. The Baluch are known for their colorful dress, especially women’s clothing, which is detailed with elaborate embroidery in vibrant colors. Jingle buses, the main means of travel between Baluchistan and Lyari, have similar dazzling decorative schemes. The buses and dresses, however, are among the few touches of brightness in Lyari. A haze of dust hangs overhead throughout the day, and at night turns the slum into a bleak netherworld ruled at gunpoint by sectarian and ethnic gangs, criminal bands, and drug dealers.
Much of KSM’s extended family was in Iran. But those who lived in Pakistan were mainly in Lyari.3 This provided a safe haven to which KSM could always retreat if the need arose. It was like fleeing to another country, but you could take a taxi across the border.
Much of Al Qaeda’s membership seemed panicked by the ferocity of the American response to September 11. Initially, KSM was concerned, too. He later told a U.S. interrogator that he rejoiced until the moment the towers fell down. “Shit,” he said. “We’ve awakened a sleeping bear…. I think we bit off more than we could chew. We had no idea what the cowboy [Bush] would do.”4
It didn’t take KSM long to recover his swagger. In some ways, it was as if he had lived his whole life to prepare for this moment. He arranged passage and shelter for those terrorists who would scatter across the Indian subcontinent, and often helped them through to the Middle East, Africa, Southeast Asia, and the Americas, where they were able to re-form Al Qaeda cells and launch attacks. The exodus was accomplished while the eyes of the world were trained on the region, looking for exactly this sort of activity. KSM seemed not to notice. He traveled freely, commuting to the Afghanistan border lands over and over in the months immediately after 9/11. At times he and Zubaydah would stay at the border and decide which lucky fighters would be most suitable for bringing back to Pakistan and which would have to return to the battle in Afghanistan.5 He detailed plans and directives. He dispensed cash by the hundreds of thousands of dollars. But KSM wasn’t relegating himself to logistics. He calmed jittery nerves and gave orders for training classes to be established, giving the Al Qaeda refugees something to do while they awaited transit. The instruction, however, was hardly innocuous.6 KSM wanted his fighters to be trained in assassinations and kidnappings so that they could mount such operations against Americans when they returned to their home countries.
KSM was popular among the Al Qaeda rank and file, who saw him as an effective leader. Coworkers described him as an intelligent, efficient, and even-tempered manager who approached his projects with a single-minded dedication that he expected his colleagues to share. Zubaydah, perhaps a bit jealous of KSM’s ascension after his own years of toiling for Al Qaeda, expressed more qualified admiration for KSM’s innate creativity, emphasizing instead his ability to incorporate the improvements suggested by others. Another top Al Qaeda commander, Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri, was similarly measured, alleging that although KSM floated many general ideas for attacks, he rarely conceived a specific operation himself. In any case, as one U.S. intelligence operative would later say, KSM was showing all the signs of a successful leader of a Fortune 500 company—leveraging the talents and skills of others, coordinating multiple projects, building key relationships, and getting things done.7
To carry out his plans, KSM still favored young men with Western passports or other connections that would make their transit simpler and safer. The difficulty of getting the hijackers into the United States had been a fresh reminder of the importance of these resources, if one were needed. Customs security, mainly aimed at blocking economic migrants, not terrorists, was virtually America’s sole defense against 9/11. In two years of trying, Mohammed had been able to get only the nineteen hijackers into the country to take part in the plot.
Using men already at home in the West eliminated this problem. KSM sent Mohammed Jabarah, a Kuwaiti-born Canadian citizen, to Singapore to study attacks against Western embassies there. He sent Roche, the British-born citizen of Australia, to Australia; he was working closely with Christian Ganczarski, a German national, to launch an attack against a synagogue in Tunisia. Adnan el-Shukrijumah, a Saudi-born Florida resident, and Dhiren Barot, a British citizen of Indian descent, were tasked with casing potential U.S. targets, including Wall Street and the Panama Canal.
KSM was especially fond of those who, like him, had what seemed to be dual cultural identities, with one foot in the Arab world and the other in Asia. He also valued those with his own ability to speak both Arabic and Urdu. That was important, because top Al Qaeda leaders were invariably Arab, but the frontline soldiers, middle-rank officers, and support networks for Al Qaeda were more likely to be South Asian. If they had a grounding in the West, especially in America or the UK, even better. One example was Shukrijumah, who grew up in Saudi Arabia, then Trinidad, then South Florida. Another was Barot, an India-born, London-reared veteran of the Kashmir insurgency who went to terror camps in Pakistan before KSM sent him to Southeast Asia for more training. When he was ready, KSM dispatched him to the United States to surveil targets and help plot attacks. With a group of coconspirators, all Britons of Pakistani origin, Barot plotted to bomb the New York Stock Exchange, the International Monetary Fund headquarters, and the World Bank, among other targets. Authorities later disclosed that Barot had planned to use limousines packed with explosives and radioactive “dirty” bombs for the attacks.
What was extraordinary about KSM’s plans, apart from the sheer volume of them at a time when he could have been lying low, was the degree of personal attention he devoted to the recruits he designated to execute them. He was able, somehow, to shield them from the biggest counterterrorism dragnet in history—and not just in Pakistan but in those other countries to which he had sent operatives and support cells. Unlike the 9/11 plot, in which he used intermediaries, or cutouts, to disburse funds and communicate with the pilots and hijackers, he personally directed many of these smaller plots. Jabarah spent an entire week in KSM’s Karachi apartment before being sent to Southeast Asia.8 KSM shepherded Roche back and forth between safe houses in KSM’s traditional mode of travel: a Karachi taxi with a personal driver.
He usually introduced himself as Mukhtar, and in at least one instance asked that he be addressed in e-mail communications as Mukh. He so endeared himself to a young Pakistani American, Majid Khan, that Khan referred to him familiarly as Chacha—“uncle” in Urdu.
He was low-key, easygoing, with a sense of humor, self-deprecating and cracking jokes. KSM didn’t mind boasting a bit—“big-noting himself,” as Roche put it.9 The two had enjoyed several dinners together at nice Karachi cafés after daytime meetings in which KSM was assessing him to see if he was fit and trustworthy for jihad. KSM deemed that he was, and sent him and a chaperone off to Afghanistan with a note to give to “the sheikh” when he got there. He never told Roche that the sheikh was actually bin Laden, who received him warmly once he read the short handwritten scrawl from KSM.
KSM also told Roche he controlled all the Al Qaeda cash that came through Pakistan, saying that at one point he had received a suitcase stuffed with $400,000. This appears not to have been a fanciful boast. Some months later he gave $500,000 to a Pakistani businessman, ostensibly as an investment but more likely as a means of storing the money safely.10 Unlike Osama bin Laden, who hinted repeatedly about something major about to happen in the months prior to 9/11, KSM gave no sign to those around him of huge plans afoot and in fact spent considerable time and energy trying to get bin Laden to shut up. KSM confided to associates that he was pulling his hair out in frustration over bin Laden’s inept meddling. As b
in Laden boasted at the training camps of something big about to happen, KSM simply told a couple of his recruits that they needed to depart Pakistan before 9/11 without ever mentioning why, and summoned others back to the fold.
He was similarly cool after the attacks. He took on the added responsibility of engineering the underground railroad out of Afghanistan, evacuating not only key operatives but their families and providing them with financial support. He oversaw specially trained groups of document forgers and travel facilitators who churned out the documents needed to stay safely in Pakistan, or to travel through so they could help rebuild the network elsewhere. He went about his main business much as he had before. This meant mainly one thing—more plots.
KSM sent Richard Reid, a British convert to Islam, and Saajid Badat to Europe with shoes lined with explosives, the idea in Reid’s case being to ignite the explosives aboard a transatlantic flight on Christmas Day of 2001 and blow the airliner and its passengers apart. He sent José Padilla, the Puerto Rican convert from Florida, to Chicago with the idea of causing natural gas explosions in high-rise apartment buildings. He persuaded Majid Khan, the young man from Baltimore, to blow himself up at his own wedding thinking that Pakistani president Pervez Musharraf would attend. The wedding never occurred, but KSM later outfitted Khan with a suicide vest and sent him to a mosque where Musharraf was anticipated. Khan attended prayers at the mosque, but Musharraf never appeared.11 When Khan proved reliable by not fleeing, KSM tasked him with returning to the United States and studying the idea of blowing up gas stations. When KSM heard that that could possibly ignite massive gas tanks and underground fuel lines, it became one of his favored plots, especially for the heartland of the United States. After an introduction by Khan, KSM sent Iyman Faris, an Ohio truck driver, to New York to examine the possibility of cutting the cables on the Brooklyn Bridge and derailing passenger trains. He had other sleepers in the United States, too, including Uzair Paracha in New York City and Aafia Siddiqui, a Pakistani woman in Boston who had science degrees from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Brandeis University.
KSM directed the truck-bombing of a synagogue on the island of Djerba, Tunisia, Al Qaeda’s first successful effort after 9/11. Twenty-one people died. Most of them were German tourists; that got the German government after him.
He directed bombers in a failed attempt to hit the U.S. consulate in Karachi. They followed with a successful attack on the Sheraton hotel across the street. KSM later subcontracted an attack against French engineers who were staying at another nearby American chain hotel, the Marriott, that killed twenty-two. With each attack, the international posse pursuing KSM grew, nation by nation.
New recruits came to Mohammed through various routes. Some were sent from elsewhere around the globe by old comrades like Hambali, the head of Jemaah Islamiyah in Southeast Asia. Others were recommended by friends in the Karachi underground. Still others were Al Qaeda recruits who had been singled out at the camps as potential agents and sent to KSM for both vetting and training. Keeping track of all this required a constant stream of communications, both within Pakistan and beyond. For that, KSM juggled as many as a dozen devices, burning through cell phones, satellite phones, and, especially, SIM cards at a manic pace, always paranoid about operational security.
Communications is a point of vulnerability for contemporary terrorists. Unless they’re lone wolves who intend to stay that way, they occasionally have to leave their local lairs and cross the electronic borders into a high-tech frontier that is rigorously patrolled by Western spies and satellites and interception equipment. Technology both enabled these terrorists and exposed them. They were always safest in the no-tech world of nitrate truck bombs and switchblade knives, but their horizons were necessarily limited in that realm. If they wanted to take their plans out into the broader world, to Europe or America or anywhere beyond the neighborhood, they could. But with every step they took into this new, modern digital age, they risked detection.
KSM knew this and took care to minimize his risks. When, immediately after 9/11, the situation was most treacherous, he at times eschewed modern communication systems entirely and sent coded messages into Afghanistan by donkey. When the situation demanded he use telephones, he hid behind the anonymity of prepaid phone cards that could be bought in bulk without identification. Each SIM could be used for whatever brief period he desired, then discarded. In this way, KSM thought, he could prevent sophisticated tracking satellites from finding any pattern to focus on. Every week, every day, even every call could be made under the identity of a new SIM. He instructed recruits to follow his security protocols exactly. In some cases he instructed followers to make a draft of an e-mail, then he’d access the same account and review it in the drafts folder, assuming that if it wasn’t sent, it would be safer. When he was forced to talk to someone by telephone or to use instant messaging, he employed codes that were so elaborate that his subordinates sometimes had no idea what he was talking about.
Islamabad, Pakistan, September 2001
The United States and Pakistan, two countries that had barely tolerated one another before September 11, were forced into a shotgun marriage by the attacks. Soon, CIA director George Tenet and his boss, the president, began trumpeting Pakistan’s newfound spirit of cooperation. Circumstances on the ground were much different—and much tougher and testier.
For more than a year before the September 11 attacks, Islamabad station chief Bob Grenier had been busy trying to engineer a split between Taliban leaders and Al Qaeda, secretly traveling to remote locations to meet with the leaders of potential splinter factions and exploiting the differences between the often backward local tribal elders and bin Laden and his often arrogant group of Arab guerrillas. The effort ultimately failed.
Grenier had been operating for more than a year with virtually no assistance from the Pakistani security services and quite probably a good amount of subterfuge from them, though he couldn’t prove it. After 9/11, changes were promised. Those changes might have been prompted by deputy secretary of state Richard Armitage, who two days after 9/11 arranged a meeting with Pakistani ambassador Maleeha Lodhi and General Mahmood Ahmed, the ISI chief, who happened to be visiting Washington. Armitage’s message was brief and blunt: give us your fullest cooperation or we will bomb Pakistan back to the Stone Age. Washington also lifted the crippling economic sanctions against Pakistan. Billions in potential aid were let loose even as Pakistan’s military, its powerful Inter-Services Intelligence apparatus, and nuclear weapons custodians were linked closely to religious fundamentalists, the Taliban, and Al Qaeda. In return, besides supporting U.S. military operations and blocking the borders, Washington expected Pakistan to fully support U.S. intelligence-gathering efforts in the region. That never happened.
Musharraf made some gestures; for example, he fired Ahmed, who had been a symbol of recalcitrance. But from the CIA’s vantage point, that and other pro-U.S. gestures by Musharraf only made things worse on the ground. The ISI and the Pakistani army were furious with Musharraf for sacking Ahmed, who had been a longtime supporter of the Taliban and Pakistani jihadi groups. They resented the influx of suspiciously athletic U.S. embassy officials, who, it turned out, were part of a massive CIA surge.
The expansion came at a time when the State Department was ordering a drawdown in its embassy staff that left many offices vacant. An army of carpenters descended on the empty space and remodeled it for the growing CIA presence. By the time the buildup was complete, Grenier had more than a hundred people working out of the Islamabad station and from bases in Karachi, Lahore, Peshawar, and elsewhere. The FBI, on the other hand—even after 9/11—seldom had more than six agents in the country, and only two of those were full-time. The others rotated in and out on temporary assignments, often just for one or two weeks. At more than $8,000 per round-trip business-class ticket, it was a curious way to staff a war. Few, if any, of the agents stayed long enough to actually know what they were doing.
The
CIA agents, analysts, and case officers came by the chartered planeful. Other jets arrived carrying multimillion-dollar loads of high-tech gear—heavy weapons and handguns, battering rams to knock down the doors of suspected Al Qaeda safe houses, night-vision goggles, and eavesdropping equipment so sophisticated that most of the officers didn’t even know what it was. The first task for this new army was to deal with the flight of Al Qaeda fighters out of Afghanistan.
When Jennifer Keenan, the assistant legal attaché for Pakistan—one of the two full-time FBI staff—first arrived in Islamabad in July 2001, she brought with her a massive book of photographs. It was a scrapbook of a kind, but a very particular kind. It contained photographs of every Al Qaeda figure, every radical Islamist she could get her hands on. She had been a member of the FBI’s Joint Terrorism Task Force in New York and intended when she received the assignment to Pakistan to continue that work. The book was the pride and joy of the New York JTTF and had been started years earlier by veterans like NYPD detective Louis Napoli. Many of the old hands on the task force had considered her their goddaughter and were protective of her until they realized she didn’t need it. Keenan could outrun, outwork, outperform, and probably out-bench-press any of them, even with her wiry 5-feet-3-inch frame.
The Hunt for KSM Page 20
