On one raid, Mac’s cuffs mysteriously disappeared. There had been dozens of officers involved in the raid, and even more suspects. Some were shot, others wounded. It was pandemonium, and the cuffs were gone. The normally reserved Colonel Tariq screamed at his men repeatedly: “Who has the handcuffs?!!” His anger frightened even the Americans. “I thought he was gonna kill somebody,” one of them later recalled. Tariq declared that no one was allowed to leave the scene until the cuffs were found. Hours later, an ISI officer returned from chasing an Al Qaeda operative out into the neighborhood; he had the cuffs.
Relief washed over the faces of Tariq’s men. Tariq himself was overwhelmed. He carefully walked over to McHale, holding the cuffs in his cupped hands before him as if they were holy water. McHale gratefully took them, and then looked into his face. It was only then that McHale saw the tears in the little soldier’s eyes.
At times, McHale and others joked that carrying the handcuffs granted a person the same mystical power as carrying the Ark of the Covenant—invincibility. Then they began to wonder if it wasn’t in fact true. Maybe, they would tell each other, Donnie McIntyre was up there pulling strings, making sure they all got back home that night.
Karachi, Pakistan, January 2002
Karachi in the best of times is a difficult city. With its “no-go” zones, rampant organized crime, and seemingly perpetual sectarian wars, it has been a kidnapping and murder capital for years. Much as California localities post warnings on what to do in case of an earthquake, bulletin boards in public buildings in Karachi routinely display advice on what to do in case of an abduction.
It is a mark of Karachi’s cosmopolitanism that most of its millions of citizens carry on life as if this underworld does not exist. In that regard, it is in many ways no different from any other twenty-first-century metropolis—ungainly, exciting, raucous, difficult. There are hip clubs with DJs, cool new restaurants with enigmatic names, a burgeoning middle class. Kids ride bikes, markets hawk DVDs and digital cameras, the bright shiny silks of upscale ladies-about-town billow in the breeze. It is Pakistan’s most progressive city, former home to its first female prime minister, Benazir Bhutto, and thousands of women go about the city unescorted, unveiled, running errands, going to jobs, lunch dates, and prenatal classes. Graduates of its university engineering programs are prized in technology centers and other outposts of the new world economy.
Amid this frenzy, Daniel Pearl, the ambitious South Asia bureau chief of the Wall Street Journal, arrived in Karachi in January to pursue a story about the shoe bomber Richard Reid. An earlier news report by the Boston Globe had linked Reid to an underground jihadi network led by Sheikh Mubarak Ali Shah Gilani. Pearl wanted to pursue the Reid connections and the murky nexus between the Karachi militant groups and those who carried out the 9/11 plot.
Pearl at that point had likely never heard much about Khalid Sheikh Mohammed. Investigators had by then traced the 9/11 plot’s finances back through the Emirates to KSM, but few Americans had ever heard of him. Mohammed almost certainly had never heard of Pearl. But Pearl’s inquiries set off small vibrations within the Karachi underground. Word of Pearl soon reached a man named Ahmed Omar Saeed Sheikh, who had built a peculiar career as small-time criminal and large-scale terrorist. He had fought in Kashmir, hijacked airplanes, kidnapped for ransom, and graduated from the London School of Economics. He had deep-rooted relationships with the ISI, Pakistani sectarian groups, and, according to U.S. intelligence, Al Qaeda, especially in Karachi. The Justice Department for years had been seeking his extradition on murder charges, with FBI agents making in-person demands as recently as a few days before Pearl showed up in Karachi. Unbeknownst to Pearl, Sheikh was also—unwittingly—about to deliver a death sentence to the journalist.
Knowing that Pearl wanted to contact Gilani, Sheikh insinuated himself in between the two, contacting Pearl and identifying himself as someone who could arrange the interview. He lined up a crew of local jihadis drawn democratically from the stew of the city’s underworld. Pearl never had a chance. Thinking he was being taken to a rendezvous with Gilani, he was instead taken into captivity. Ransom demands ensued, complete with the usual videos of Pearl holding dated newspapers and confessing his sins as a Jew and a spy. The kidnappers failed to anticipate the media storm their escapade would ignite. Kidnapping was routine in Karachi. Kidnapping handsome American reporters with beautiful, young, pregnant wives was not. Caught in the fury, the kidnappers had no idea what to do.
Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, still engaged in the retreat from Afghanistan and busy with the several fronts on which he was advancing terror plots across the globe, didn’t need the added diversion of Pearl. KSM hadn’t initially even been aware of Pearl’s kidnapping. But once informed of Pearl’s plight and the growing uncertainty of what ought to be done, he interceded.
“Khalid Sheikh Mohammed got to know of the plot, which he had done nothing to serve,” a local police official said. “He got to know of it through the grapevine. And so he said, ‘This is a great, a chance to do a spectacular.’ So he basically bought Daniel Pearl from them.”12
The kidnappers, panicked that they had gotten in over their heads, had contacted Al Qaeda colleagues of KSM, offering Pearl to them. Al Qaeda offered $50,000 for him and, because it was in Karachi and Karachi was KSM’s territory, asked him to take possession of the prize.
Pearl was being held in a small cement-block building on an isolated property in the remote Karachi neighborhood of Ahsanabad. Sometime in the week following the kidnapping, Mohammed and two of his nephews, Ali Abdul Aziz Ali and Abdul Karim Abdul Karim—KSM’s college classmate in America—showed up at the safe house. They weren’t there long. They set up a video camera they had brought with them to capture the event. Mohammed also had brought his own knives.13 His nephews held Pearl down and Mohammed, quickly and with frightening efficiency, slit Pearl’s throat. The camera malfunctioned, and after yelling at the cameraman to get it up and running, he reenacted the event. This time he grabbed Pearl by the hair and cut clean through the bone to decapitate him, at the end grasping Pearl’s head and holding it aloft for the camera. Then he pushed down on the chest of the dead body, causing blood to spurt from the severed neck, to display for the camera the evidence that Pearl had been alive when the beheading took place. So vicious was the butchery that one of the guards started retching. KSM angrily ordered him out of the room.14 He then proceeded to carve Pearl’s body into pieces suitable for easy disposal, took his knives, and left with his nephews. One witness described it in police reports as ziba, the Muslim ritual of slaughter.
Mohammed had not sought out Pearl, hadn’t even known who he was until alerted by his Al Qaeda comrades to the already accomplished kidnapping. Once given the responsibility for the journalist, he was brutally efficient in disposing of the problem. Fortunately, he said later, Pearl presented him with an added propaganda bonus—he was Jewish.
Islamabad, Pakistan, January 2002
The Pearl murder occurred just as the American security forces, aided by Tom McHale and the persevering Jennifer Keenan, had begun developing workable relations with the Pakistanis, and even with one another. Pearl’s disappearance threw things into disarray. The kidnapping of a reporter from one of the largest and best American newspapers turned Washington’s priorities upside down.
The Newark field office of the FBI led the Pearl investigation because the newspaper’s headquarters was nearby, and it took the unusual step of setting up a command post right on the premises of the paper. It also deployed as many as a dozen agents to Pakistan from various FBI field offices. This was roughly double the average number of agents already in Pakistan devoted to investigating the September 11 attacks. The disparity was not lost on the FBI agents assigned to Islamabad; they were further aggravated when asked to send temporary duty personnel to Karachi to assist the Pearl investigation. McHale, who was from the New Jersey JTTF, was one of those they insisted spend his time in Karachi. He went briefly, and then re
fused to go back to Karachi, arguing that he could make more important contributions elsewhere. Keenan and Reimann in Islamabad backed him up. There were already more resources devoted to the Pearl case than to the entire rest of the country, they argued, and McHale was needed for other urgent matters. What more do you want?
Inevitably, however, the pull of the Pearl case was too powerful. It sucked up resources that could otherwise have been used for other cases. A church had been bombed in Islamabad, for example, causing multiple deaths, several of them Americans. People were pulled off that case to investigate Pearl. In addition, the FBI had never had a resident agent in Karachi, even though it is one of the biggest, most crime-plagued cities in the world, or even a working office with basic equipment. With the Pearl investigation, however, a brand-new computer suddenly appeared in the Bureau’s tiny part-time work space in the Karachi consulate.
The macabre celebrity aspects of the case—the dashing reporter, his pregnant wife, the powerful publishing empire behind them—were too much. Rather than focusing on who caused September 11, many investigators were trying to figure out who killed a reporter who, many veteran investigators complained, had volunteered for his own death by not heeding warnings about the suspicious nature of the people he was dealing with.
Even without the Pearl case, the hunt for the origins of September 11 was suffering from contradictions in approach between the two agencies handling the investigation. The CIA seemed to bounce from one Langley-based directive to another—look for this person, then that—without a strong idea of where it all might be headed. Its agents were constantly searching for the magic bullet that would stop the next attack. If they didn’t find that bullet in one raid, they quickly set their sights on the next. Intel wasn’t something to be used to build a mosaic; if it didn’t catch someone important, forget about it. Whether right or wrong, that’s the way FBI agents saw it. The Bureau, on the other hand, wanted to wring as much evidence as it could get out of every opportunity, methodically gathering information so Keenan could scan it and send it back to Washington for forensic exploitation, safekeeping, and use in future prosecutions. They also hoped that the information they were collecting would eventually lead them to the next attack. Even when the two agencies were aiming for the same result, they had utterly different ways of getting there, and the friction it caused only got worse over time, not better.
At one point in the spring of 2002, the FBI obtained information that KSM’s nephew Ali Abdul Aziz Ali, the man who had wired hundreds of thousands of dollars to the hijackers in America, was operating out of Karachi. His role in Pearl’s murder had not yet been revealed. Keenan went to the CIA’s lead officer in Karachi and told him what she knew. This might be a huge opportunity, she said, to interrupt Al Qaeda’s financial supply lines and lead us to its commanders, including KSM, whom Zabaydah had recently identified.
The CIA supervisor wasn’t interested. He had never heard of Ali. Maybe you just don’t understand, Keenan said. We have two of the Bureau’s most knowledgeable agents on the 9/11 plot here temporarily from the U.S. They know this guy inside and out and they’re right here, right now. They want to brief you on Ali’s importance and what we know about where he might be. He was a key financial link in the whole plot, she said.
The CIA man was not swayed. “We hunt terrorists, not financiers,” he said, and ended the discussion.
CHAPTER 13
In Plain Sight
Islamabad, Pakistan, Spring 2002
By early 2002, the CIA station in Islamabad had gone through its huge growth phase. It was now one of the largest intelligence operations in the world. The carpenters were gone and the station was at work. Station chief Bob Grenier felt he finally had the team he needed in place. John Kiriakou, an experienced case officer and Arabic speaker, had arrived as a TDY to help run counterterrorism. Deuce Martinez, a superb analyst, arrived to provide Grenier with the kind of targeting expertise that had been lacking. The green badgers filled out the duty roster with a depth of experience and expertise Kiriakou had rarely seen. Some of the green badgers were pushing seventy, or had already broken through—it wasn’t polite to ask—but were revivified by the mission. One man had been in the CIA for forty years, long enough to have been involved in the Gulf of Tonkin incident. Kiriakou liked to say that the entire counterterrorism support staff wore the badges, and that he thought he learned more from the old folks in a few months than he had in his entire career.
The job that confronted the station was clear. In an odd reversal of historic roles, Pakistan had become the redoubt for Al Qaeda fighters fleeing Afghanistan. For decades—for as long as Pakistan had existed, actually—the situation had been the opposite. Afghanistan had given Pakistan a place for strategic retreat, a place to which it could withdraw and husband its forces against India. Regardless of whether that was ever true on the ground, Pakistan’s military strategists had made it a chief component of their war plans against India.
Now Pakistan had become the refuge for Osama bin Laden’s fighters fleeing the American assault. The retreat had been ongoing for months, and Grenier finally felt capable of dealing with its consequences. The exodus at times had been a flood, and the pace of work was killing. Some nights, the agents just crawled under their desks to sleep.
By February, Grenier thought he could transition from defense to offense. Rather than reacting to a flood of refugees, he was ready to start hunting.
His first target would be Abu Zubaydah. Zubaydah had been an enigmatic figure to terrorist watchers for a decade. Unlike other presumed high commanders in Al Qaeda, he never appeared with bin Laden in the videos distributed to the Western press. He didn’t seem to spend much time with bin Laden at all. But he was always there on the periphery. There was hardly a terror plot in the 1990s to which his name had not been attached. Zubaydah had jumped up the U.S. list of most wanted suspects because of his role in the millennium plots at the turn of the century; the plots had been broken up in the United States and Jordan, but they revealed Zubaydah’s ambitions.
Al Qaeda had sometimes seemed as though it were not just the face of radical Islam but radical Islam itself. This had never been true. It was one of many groups of similar ideology. Bin Laden obviously knew this. In fact, Al Qaeda itself began as an amalgam of many militant groups with which bin Laden had formed alliances. It differed mainly in its public profile and its resources. Bin Laden was wealthy from his family’s business fortune, and he had always been a terrific fund-raiser. As a result, his group had simply been more prosperous and better able to fund its goals, and bin Laden became a unifying force, in part through his reputation as a leader. He cemented his position by merging Al Qaeda with al-Zawahiri’s Egyptian militant organization.
Zubaydah had never formally joined bin Laden. In some ways, he saw himself not as a subordinate but an equal, someone in the same line of business—and someone who had a far broader network of contacts. He had for years run his own training camp, Khalden, just across the Pakistani border in Afghanistan. He had also acted as a gatekeeper for the Islamist cause in general, and for the war camps that were training many other jihadis in addition to those in Al Qaeda—including Chechens, Uzbeks, and Algerians. New recruits were often directed his way when they first arrived in theater to join the jihad. Some recruits he sent on to other camps, to other groups; some he sought to keep under his control at Khalden. Some of those who trained at his camp later sought his support for their proposed plots. Some of these he nurtured; others he sent on their way.
Because Zubaydah was a gatekeeper to Afghanistan and because Khalden was so near the border, he had been a presence in Pakistan—in Peshawar, especially—for years. Much more than bin Laden, he had developed lines of communication through the Pakistani jihadi networks. He was virtually unknown to the broader public, but for all these reasons he had been an intelligence target even longer than bin Laden. As recently as the summer of 2001, American security services had sent out warnings about Zubaydah’s act
ivities. “[R]eporting has indicated that Al Qaeda operatives, including Abu Zubaida, have been involved in operational planning in several different geographic locations…. Also in early March, Abu Zubaida engaged in apparent operational preparation with colleagues in Europe and Saudi Arabia. In particular, he planned and facilitated the production of photographs of operatives to be used in high quality European passports…. One limiting factor which seems to be evident is funding. Intelligence suggests that preparation is slowed by lack of available funding to support the operations[s].”1
Given this history, Zubaydah was an obvious focus for Grenier, and the reason why he and the ambassador had gone straight to Musharraf with their concerns about him before 9/11. When coalition troops found the bombed-out home of bin Laden’s longtime military commander, Mohammed Atef, in Kandahar in November of 2001, they unearthed still more evidence pointing to Zubaydah’s importance. Zubaydah surfaced again when Grenier started receiving intelligence about Al Qaeda fighters infiltrating Pakistan. Faisalabad, in the province of Punjab, was the source of many of the reports. Punjab was rife with Kashmiri jihadi groups that had begun to broaden their focus. The influx of Al Qaeda fighters fleeing Afghanistan led to an explosive cross-pollination with native Pakistani sectarian groups, and Lashkar-e-Taiba, Jaish-e-Mohammed, and Harkat-ul-Mujahideen in particular were ambitious and ready to make alliances.
Men with prior relationships to the sectarian groups, most notably Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and Zubaydah, were best positioned to take advantage of this. Grenier knew little about Mohammed. Not many people beyond a small squad of FBI agents in New York did. Zubaydah became their target.
The Hunt for KSM Page 22
