The Hunt for KSM

by Terry McDermott

  In the past, Al Qaeda had more bountiful resources than any of the sectarian groups. Now the tables were turned. The local jihadis had the resources and Al Qaeda, in retreat, needed help—logistics networks, shelter, transit, foot soldiers. The locals and Al Qaeda made common cause. This posed a security risk for Al Qaeda, or somebody like Zubaydah, in that they had been much more selective in choosing partners in the past. Now they had little choice. On the run, they took help where they could find it. They were exposed.

  If determined, well-equipped people with huge technical resources are trying to find you, it doesn’t take much—just little wrinkles in the web—to give them clues. Once they have the clues, technology gives them a ruthless advantage. If the target remains active, engaged in activity, the advantage multiplies. This was especially so when Al Qaeda had moved from backward Afghanistan to teeming Pakistani cities brimming with telecommunications capabilities. So it was with Zubaydah. Had he simply gone to ground, or left the region entirely, he might never have been found. But he continued to plot attacks, to train and recruit, and to oversee an effort to get passports and other travel documentation for jihadis, something he had done his entire career.

  Once signals intelligence—telephone intercepts, mainly—indicated his general location, Zubaydah really had little chance. The overwhelming technical advantage the Americans held was inexorable. If raids on Lahore and Faisalabad in late March had not succeeded, the next ones, or the ones after that, likely would have.

  Capturing Zubaydah in March in Faisalabad—and more, keeping him alive long enough to be spirited away and interrogated—was a huge triumph for both the CIA and the FBI. And as soon as Zubaydah was gone, Grenier and Kiriakou turned their sights to the next targets, as did Keenan and her small band of FBI TDYers. While the CIA worked its intel sources and liaison relationship with Pakistan, the FBI agents did what they do best: they exploited evidence seized in previous raids. As soon as Zubaydah was in custody, in fact, the FBI agents took charge, scouring more than a dozen raid sites for evidence, and identifying and interrogating the other men captured that night. Before Zubaydah ever landed in Thailand, Keenan and the FBI were processing a huge collection of intelligence—cell phones, computers, notepads, day planners, Zubaydah’s voluminous personal diaries—and a cache of bomb-making materials and document forgery tools. They assessed each detainee to separate the Al Qaeda operatives from the unwitting facilitators. While some of the CIA irregulars—many of them flown in just for the raids—were stowing away their SWAT gear for the night after the raids, Keenan was overseeing the effort to photograph and fingerprint each detainee. She had her precious scanner working overtime to make copies of all the passports and other records. The CIA guys had a sound night’s sleep and breakfast while she was still making copies and interviewing and assessing the detainees. By the time she was done, the station had to arrange for a chartered plane to take all the evidence back to Washington, and the U.S. team in Pakistan had a bunch of fresh leads.

  It was in many ways a model for how the two agencies ought to work with one another. The CIA had collated bits of intelligence, made sense of it, and identified a specific set of targets, and the two agencies teamed up to attack them with their Pakistani hosts. They got their man and the FBI moved in and got its evidence. Nobody had to scream at anybody. There were some minor conflicts, of course—Kiriakou wanting to crack open the evidence seal to see who kept calling Zubaydah’s cell phone, for instance.

  The two U.S. agencies were hitting their stride, and the mosaic of Al Qaeda’s operations in Pakistan was beginning to take shape. Unfortunately, the frontline working relationship formed over the previous months wouldn’t last. Grenier and Kiriakou were pulled out of Islamabad soon after the Zubaydah capture. They were to be given a new target: Iraq. They left just as things were about to get really interesting.

  Karachi, Pakistan, Spring 2002

  Two weeks after Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl went missing, Pakistani police had identified Ahmed Omar Saeed Sheikh as the man who had ensnared him. On February 5, as they were closing in on him, Sheikh turned himself in to Ijaz Shah, a retired Intelligence Bureau official and former ISI operative. Sheikh had been a longtime ISI asset, cultivated for the Kashmir fight, and knew Shah from those days. Shah was also from the same village as Sheikh’s mother. For whatever reason, Sheikh, at his father’s urging, delivered himself to Shah and remained in ISI custody for a week before he was turned over to the police. U.S. investigators on the ground in Karachi had no idea. In fact, despite their increasingly forceful demands, they had to wait another month before they were allowed to interview Sheikh.

  FBI special agent Ty Fairman, from the Newark field office, finally got a chance to talk with Sheikh at a local police lockup on March 10. By then, the hunt for Pearl had lost its urgency, as they knew that he was dead. The FBI agents were now working a homicide investigation, and Fairman fed Sheikh and the Pakistani police tea and cookies as a way of easing the tension. Sheikh started out by questioning why Fairman, an African American, was working on behalf of a racist colonial power like the United States. The two debated black history and militancy and Fairman developed a rapport with Sheikh. In later meetings, Sheikh talked in some detail about the kidnapping and why he had done it. He was proud of what he done, he said, and would do it again. But he insisted that killing Pearl was never part of his plan. Once the Pakistani media published speculation that Pearl was Jewish, Sheikh said he lost control of the situation. This was a significant admission coming from Sheikh, an imperious and egotistical man. In veiled language, he told Fairman that the only reason Pearl was killed was that someone extremely high in the Al Qaeda–jihadi hierarchy had ordered it. Otherwise, he said, they would have had to consult him, given his status within the powerful Harkat-ul-Mujahideen militant group. He didn’t know who had made the decision, but someone he described as “the fat man” moved in and took control.2

  Despite their best efforts to get details, the FBI agents couldn’t ascertain who the fat man was. Two weeks earlier, they had gotten the videotape of Pearl’s brutal decapitation through a shadowy intermediary. Agents and forensic experts had been poring over it for clues. They went through the video frame by frame, stopping at some points to take high-resolution still photos of the hand holding the knife and grasping Pearl’s head by the hair because they afforded them a good view of the veins on the back of the hand—a way of identifying possible suspects and eliminating others.

  After each raid, they would photograph suspects’ hands in the same positions as the still photos and compare them. When they did so with Sheikh, it seemed as though he might be telling the truth, Fairman thought. At least, it appeared that neither Sheikh nor the others who had been taken into custody had wielded the knife. Maybe he was telling the truth about the fat man, too. Fairman was struck by something else in the video. It was so graphic that even the most veteran FBI agents could barely watch. But viewing it over and over, he noticed that at one point, the killer wielding the knife expertly put two fingers to Pearl’s freshly slit carotid artery and then took them off, to show that the blood was pumping out—proof that the journalist was still alive, even if unconscious. After letting the blood spurt out for a short while, the killer, with a few forceful and precise cuts, cleanly severed the head and quickly snatched it up and brought it closer to the video camera. “Whoever did this was a professional,” he said in describing Pearl’s slaying to other Americans working the case. “He was slaughtered like an animal.”

  Fairman sent a memo off to Washington asking that the FBI and CIA both report back to the investigation team as soon as possible and let them know whether any senior Al Qaeda operatives had grown up on farms or had other experience slaughtering or butchering animals.

  But the mystery remained: Who was the fat man? Whoever it was, the tape showed no trace of his face, only his hand holding Pearl’s head aloft for the camera—and for the propaganda videos of it that were already beginning to ci
rculate.

  Sheikh never identified KSM as the actual killer, but he did give the FBI and their CIA and Pakistani counterparts another crumb. Whoever the fat man was, he wasn’t someone holed up in some faraway lair. He was, Sheikh suggested, a prominent and well-respected man in both jihadi and Al Qaeda circles in Karachi.

  Investigators had no idea it was happening, but their two urgent investigations in Pakistan—into 9/11 and the Pearl slaying—were becoming one. As Sheikh’s accomplices were found, arrested, and interrogated, they filled in further pieces of the puzzle. The fat man was addressed by those who knew him as Mukhtar, some said. He and his two accomplices who showed up to kill Pearl were generally described as Arabs, but one of those arrested for being at the scene said they might have been Baluch or even Makrani—descendants of African slaves. Ironically, despite the controversy surrounding the deployment of so many agents to investigate a single kidnapping, all the attention paid to Pearl and his abductors would have given the American authorities their first glimpse of KSM had they known what they were seeing. They didn’t, of course. KSM remained on the streets of Karachi, hidden in plain sight.

  At least, however, investigators had begun to look at Karachi as a place of interest. KSM had lived there for most of a decade without anyone apparently noticing. For much of that time he had lived in the same apartment,3 even though, thanks to a U.S. indictment, he was theoretically the subject of a worldwide manhunt. There was little indication that the Pakistanis had ever looked for KSM at the request of the Americans, or that Washington had ever made a formal request forcefully enough for it to be acted upon. The FBI’s KSM case agent, Pellegrino, had continued to make numerous trips to Karachi, but especially before 9/11, cooperation there was virtually nonexistent.

  Another faint arrow pointing at Karachi was uncovered in April. On the morning of April 11, Christian Ganczarski, the young Polish-German Muslim convert, placed a cell phone call from Duisburg in southern Germany to a number in Karachi. The call lasted nearly a minute, yet no words were exchanged. It was a signal. Moments before, Ganczarski, a protégé of KSM, had given the final go-ahead to a young Tunisian to drive a truck fitted with a propane bomb into a synagogue on an island off the Tunisian coast. He was letting KSM know the plan was under way. Twenty-one people died in the attack.

  Ganczarski had been conspiring with KSM since at least 2000, when he was an occupant of the same guesthouse where KSM hosted Jack Roche, the Australian jihadi. It was Ganczarski whom KSM had asked to shepherd Roche through the mountain passes to bin Laden’s camp, and who handed “the sheikh” the note saying that Roche had KSM’s seal of approval. By the spring of 2002, Ganczarski had been under surveillance by German authorities for some time. The silent call was monitored in real time, and two weeks later, after Ganczarski had been arrested, police found a log of phone numbers, one of which was the number he had called the morning of the attack. The number was registered to a SIM card manufactured by the company Swisscom.4 Swiss authorities investigated and determined that a large number of previously identified Al Qaeda suspects had been using SIMs from the same manufacturer.

  Once again, they didn’t know it, but authorities—in this case, the Germans and Swiss—had, in a sense, caught KSM in the act.

  Udorn Royal Thai Air Force Base, Thailand, April 2002

  By mid-April, Abu Zubaydah had been in Thailand undergoing intermittent interrogation for more than a week. He had revealed that KSM and Mukhtar were one and the same, and that KSM had been the mastermind behind the September 11 attacks. The initial reaction was bafflement—KSM isn’t even Al Qaeda, right?

  But once that connection was made—KSM was Mukhtar, the man bin Laden himself praised as the 9/11 mastermind—the puzzle pieces fell into place. Soon enough, KSM’s role seemed so obvious and the 9/11 plot so similar to the Manila Air plot that people wondered how it had remained hidden for so long. Almost overnight, the number of people looking for KSM went from one man to almost the whole damned government. It seemed the only person not then looking for KSM was Pellegrino, who, after a cursory consultation, was sent off to follow other, less pressing, leads.

  As Zubaydah’s health gradually improved, he grew more and more coy with his interrogators. And his interrogators had a falling-out among themselves. Steve Gaudin and Ali Soufan, the two young FBI agents who had elicited KSM’s identity from Zubaydah, were quickly demoted from their initial role as the principal interrogators. Once Tenet learned that the information about KSM had been delivered not to agency personnel but to FBI agents—he was furious, given the president’s personal vow that the CIA was the lead agency taking the fight to Al Qaeda—the agency rushed a team of its own interrogators to Thailand. Upon arrival, team members told Gaudin and Soufan that they would take over. They didn’t seem particularly interested in KSM. In fact, they said they thought the KSM information could well be a feint by Zubaydah, something to throw them off the trail. It was a legitimate concern. This happened all the time in interrogations—a prisoner would give up something little or false to conceal the thing that needed concealing.

  Instead, the CIA team said, we are after one piece of information—when is the next attack? The team allowed the FBI men one more meeting alone with Zubaydah, but its purpose was to hand off the interrogation to “their boss,” the CIA, because under the new rules of engagement, Zubaydah needed to see his future in one person’s eyes.5 Once they had done this, Gaudin and Soufan watched as the new team took over and, true to its word, repeatedly asked Zubaydah to tell them what was next. This was, FBI agents said later, more a difference of method than a difference in the desired result. Of course everybody wanted to know about the next attack. But the FBI way was more conversational, one built on decades of success in building rapport with the most hardened of criminals. Get your arms around the conspiracy and you’ll stop whatever it is that they are conspiring to do. Once Gaudin and Soufan had KSM identified as the mastermind, they would begin to draw out more information—Where is KSM now? Who works with him? What’s his phone number? Whom might he use for an attack in, say, Indonesia? They would use those answers to achieve the same purpose. They would seek to find KSM and stop the next attack that way. It might have worked. Pat D’Amuro, their former boss in New York, who by then headed all counterterrorism for the FBI, made that argument at the highest levels of the Bush administration until he was blue in the face, but no one outside of the FBI agreed. They never got a chance to ask the right questions. The FBI, essentially, was written out of the script. The script was one that called for pursuit of that single overwhelming question and, to get the answer, far more harsh treatment than American investigators had used in the past—treatment that seemed to many to be beyond what American or international law allowed, and likely to produce fiction rather than fact.

  As the interrogation continued, the CIA organized what amounted to a schedule of questioning with varying methods and interviewers. Gaudin and Soufan were part of this new regime, sometimes together and sometimes individually, or partnered with a CIA agent. In some of those talks, Zubaydah described KSM’s rising role within Al Qaeda, ratcheting up the level of angst among his U.S. pursuers even further.

  One day, before the CIA had intervened, Gaudin and Soufan asked Zubaydah to tell them just one thing that might help stop another bombing. To their surprise, he told them about José Padilla and Binyam Mohamed, the two men Zubaydah said he had sent to KSM so that he could give them missions in America.

  Zubaydah had first met the two men when they were fleeing Afghanistan in early 2001. They accompanied him through a circuit of safe houses in Pakistan, winding up in Faisalabad and telling Zubaydah about their idea to set off a dirty bomb in the United States.6 Zubaydah thought the plan too difficult to execute, but finally sent them off to Karachi with a letter introducing them to KSM. They left Faisalabad just a day, perhaps mere hours, before the American raids.

  In Karachi, they worked through Ali Abdul Aziz Ali, KSM’s nephew, seeking a meeting. When t
hey made their pitch, KSM told them he agreed with Zubaydah—the plan was too complicated. Couldn’t they instead adopt a plan first proposed to them in Afghanistan—use natural gas from appliances to blow up apartment buildings? Ali and KSM gave the pair $15,000, e-mail codes, and a cell phone, and sent them on their way.

  Zubaydah didn’t know, or recall, Padilla’s real name, just that he was a “South American” who used a Muslim name. A mad search through customs and passport records in Pakistan and back in Washington produced an identity and a photograph to go with the story. Zubaydah confirmed the photo was Padilla.

  This was exactly the kind of ticking-bomb scenario the Cheney doctrine was created to address: a plot, a dirty bomb, millions at risk. Except that, in a lot of ways, it was a bomb that had never ticked. There was no bomb—and no plot, really. It was, as investigators would say later, aspirational. For a time, there wasn’t even a suspect. Padilla turned out to be a terrorist with other priorities. Following a send-off dinner in Karachi with KSM, Ali, and Ramzi bin al-Shibh, he had left, purportedly for the United States but actually for Egypt, where he stayed a month, visiting his wife.

  Unaware that he was being sought, he finally departed for the States in May, leaving much of the money he had been given in Karachi with his wife and two young sons in Egypt. He was tracked all the way. When he arrived at O’Hare International Airport in Chicago, FBI agents met him at the gate, arrested him on a material witness warrant, and took him back on the next commercial flight to New York. They were in the process of debriefing him there and offering him a possible plea agreement in exchange for information on what attacks might be coming when the Department of Defense, on orders from the Bush White House, took Padilla in the middle of the night from a federal lockup in New York and put him in a military brig, designating him an enemy combatant. Once again, the FBI was blocked from interrogating an Al Qaeda suspect who might have led them to KSM and, potentially, to his network of operatives around the world.