The Hunt for KSM

by Terry McDermott

  Washington, D.C., Spring 2002

  Every May, Washington, D.C., hosts a celebration and appreciation of law enforcement personnel from across the country. It’s called National Police Week and generally serves as an excellent excuse for a lot of people to get really drunk. There are some dinners and official receptions, but National Police Week is nothing fancy.

  As thanks for their assistance in the new war on terror, U.S. counterterrorism officials arranged for a few law enforcement agents from several countries to attend the 2002 festivities. Emotions ran particularly high. The large number of police, fire, and rescue people killed on September 11 was fresh on everyone’s minds. A huge tent—three blocks long—containing a makeshift bar made out of blue-painted plywood was set up at the corner of H and Second Streets. Several Pakistanis were among the foreigners invited. They included Tom McHale’s running mates, Colonel Tariq and another ISI colonel he only knew as Mr. K. Mr. K. always wore Texas cowboy boots.

  McHale went to Washington to escort them around and make sure they received what he regarded as appropriate thanks. They visited the White House and the CIA out in Langley and even got the red-carpet treatment up in New York from McHale’s Port Authority, including a helicopter ride around Manhattan, where the Twin Towers used to be. The Pakistanis aroused some suspicious stares. Who are these foreigners in suits, people asked McHale. It got worse when he said what country they were from. McHale assured everyone that the two men held a special place of honor in the annals of U.S. counterterrorism efforts. The Pakistanis were given a police escort to the massive tent, where thousands of law enforcement officials were gathered.

  Knowing that both men were devout Muslims, McHale explained to them, “Over here, we salute our dead by drinking beers and whiskey.” McHale was a bit embarrassed by what his guests would think of all the rowdiness, but he wasn’t going to let that stop him from drinking. He was a cop—one who had just spent a few harrowing months kicking down doors in Pakistan. How else do you honor your dead?

  When another cop toasted one of the departed, Colonel Tariq and Mr. K. nodded and said nothing. Then one of the colonels grabbed a Budweiser off the plywood and raised it aloft. “To Mr. Mac,” he said.

  The Americans roared their reply. “To Mac!”

  There were toasts all night, to the many cops who had fallen and to those who had not. And the two Pakistanis raised a drink for every one of them. They got stewed.

  McHale later arranged for the Pakistanis to be there when McIntyre’s handcuffs were returned to his widow, Jeannine, at the National Law Enforcement Officers Memorial, where the names of fallen police are inscribed on a wall.

  Then he decided to go one step further. McHale gave the cuffs to Colonel Tariq and Mr. K. They, in turn, gave them to Jeannine. The one thing all the U.S. agents who fought alongside him in Pakistan said about Colonel Tariq was that he was about as sentimental as General George Patton. But with Jeannine, the two men gently took her hands, bent and kissed them, then thanked her for giving them the honor of using her late husband’s handcuffs. It was only when they raised their heads that McHale could see the tears once again pooling in Tariq’s eyes.

  Washington, D.C., Spring 2002

  In early June, FBI director Robert Mueller confirmed that KSM was the mastermind behind 9/11. Since then, details about KSM had completely saturated the media. His face was everywhere, and so were descriptions of—and speculations about—his exploits. Overnight, a man who had been virtually invisible to all but the small army of security officials chasing him had become public enemy number one to some and a folk hero to others, especially in Pakistan. Ramzi bin al-Shibh became a lesser sensation as KSM’s trusty sidekick and intermediary with the hijackers. Within a few weeks, information from the Zubaydah capture had been processed and fed into the U.S. intelligence-gathering machine. The information was the most important thus far gathered against Al Qaeda.

  More information was coming in from a frenzied effort to review every mention of “Mukhtar” that had been collected and intercepted over the past decade. This effort was for some uncomfortable in that it revealed how much information the intelligence community, especially the CIA, had collected on KSM over time without realizing its significance.

  Zubaydah himself was still talking, too. He described plots against the Brooklyn Bridge and other New York landmarks. His claims about Padilla and his dirty bomb plot, and KSM’s connections to it, took on a life of their own, even though Zubaydah portrayed the American operative—correctly, it turns out—as a bumbler. Suddenly agents around the United States and around the world were looking for some kind of catastrophe without really knowing anything more than that.

  On May 20, vice president Dick Cheney warned it was “not a matter of if, but when” Al Qaeda would attack the United States. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld said well-trained Al Qaeda operatives were hiding out in the U.S., and looking to use weapons of mass destruction. Tom Ridge, the new homeland security secretary, and FBI director Mueller both said more suicide bombings were inevitable. Domestic intelligence bulletins were issued sometimes twice or even three times a day about Al Qaeda operatives targeting U.S. banks, rail and transit systems, apartment buildings, financial complexes, and landmarks.

  When the New York police department found out about the alleged plots, the city went on red alert. On June 10, 2002, reporters were summoned to Justice Department headquarters in Washington for an urgent matter, and watched on a big screen as Attorney General John Ashcroft, interrupting high-level meetings in Moscow, spoke gravely about how the authorities had uncovered an unfolding plot by Padilla, “a known terrorist who was exploring a plan to build and explode a radiological dispersion device, or ‘dirty bomb,’ in the United States.”

  The FBI was panicking. In a secret bulletin that same day, FBI headquarters issued an urgent call to field offices for information on the activities of KSM and his nephew Abdul Karim while they were students in the U.S. in the 1980s, information that had been readily available for years. The bulletin underscored how the Bureau’s inability to process, analyze, and share information it had already compiled had left giant gaps in what it knew about the man it was now hunting with unprecedented urgency.

  Zubaydah’s identification of Mohammed as a key orchestrator of the September 11 attacks had been corroborated in significant ways, although some senior officials said they were still trying to understand Mohammed’s role. “He’s one of the people believed to be behind it. It may be a stretch to say he’s the mastermind,” one U.S. intelligence official said. “It’s not clear at this point what role he played.”7

  One thing everyone agreed on was that KSM was now at or near the top of the list, and raids in and around Karachi looking for him that spring and early summer became a regular occurrence. Pellegrino flew to Pakistan twice for raids, but they proved inconsequential and he returned to the U.S. The increased American presence provoked a response from the militant groups that were increasingly merged with Al Qaeda. On the morning of June 14, 2002, a suicide bomber drove a creaky old truck to the U.S. consulate in Karachi, parked it, and detonated a powerful fertilizer bomb. At least twelve people were killed and dozens more injured, all of them Pakistanis. The bombing, and other attacks, brought even more U.S. agents, CIA and FBI alike, to Karachi.

  Karachi, Pakistan, Spring 2002

  KSM wasn’t going to stay in the shadows for much longer. The day after sending José Padilla and Binyam Mohamed off to bomb apartment buildings in the United States, Mohammed and Ramzi bin al-Shibh received another visitor. His name was Yosri Fouda, a reporter for Al Jazeera, the Qatar-based pan-Arab television network that had quickly established itself as the most essential news source in the Arab world.

  Fouda, based in London, was one of its stars. Early in April he had received a call asking what he had planned for his program, Top Secret, on the first anniversary of the September 11 attacks. The caller asked for a fax number and four days later a proposal for a three-part ser
ies on the attacks came across the machine—a proposal that supposedly had the full cooperation of Al Qaeda.8 That evening Fouda received another call, inviting him to come to Islamabad for an important interview. The caller didn’t say with whom.

  On little more than a hunch that this could amount to something, Fouda flew to Islamabad. Half a day after his arrival, the same voice called again and asked him to fly to Karachi. Again he did as instructed. Over the course of another day, with more calls and blindfolded taxi rides, Fouda was finally delivered to a fourth-floor apartment in Karachi. Khalid Sheikh Mohammed opened the door.

  “Recognize us yet?” KSM asked him. With that, Fouda said later, Mohammed announced himself as the head of Al Qaeda’s military committee and the leader of the 9/11 attacks. He freely admitted what he had done, even boasted that 9/11 had been his idea.

  Ramzi bin al-Shibh, who was also in the apartment, pronounced himself KSM’s deputy. What KSM told Fouda was chilling, including the revelation that when he had begun his planning two and a half years before September 11, the first targets Mohammed had considered were nuclear facilities. “[We] decided against it for fear it would go out of control,” Fouda, in a newspaper article at the time, quoted Mohammed as saying. “You do not need to know more than that at this stage, and anyway it was eventually decided to leave out nuclear targets—for now.”9 When Fouda was preparing to leave after forty-eight hours, during which the men’s roles—and egos—were confirmed, KSM walked him down the stairs and out onto the street to bid him farewell. The journalist was taken aback by KSM’s nonchalance. He seemed utterly unconcerned to be outside and exposed.

  Weeks later, Fouda flew to Doha to brief his editors on what he had been up to. Once his editors heard about KSM and bin al-Shibh, they insisted he tell the Al Jazeera chairman, a relative of the Qatari emir, what he had experienced. Everyone was sworn to secrecy, and they planned a two-part program for September. The station’s chairman, Sheikh Hamad bin Thamer al-Thani, unbeknownst to Fouda, soon afterward called the emir and briefed him on what Fouda had found. The emir, Sheikh Hamad bin Khalifa al-Thani, in turn called his old friend George Tenet, director of the CIA.

  Tenet was effusive when he walked into his regular 5:00 p.m. meeting the next day and giddily described to his top command how his personal friend the emir of Qatar, with whom he had had many differences, had given the CIA “an amazing gift.” He said that Al Jazeera had the general location of the building where Mohammed was hiding, and that they knew who else was there and what KSM and Ramzi had discussed with Fouda. Fouda had told his bosses that he had a good idea of where the apartment was in Karachi, and even what floor he had been on, Tenet said. “In other words, the fat fuck came through,” Tenet said.10 After all that hunting, the best intel that the CIA had to date was something that a reporter had given his bosses, who had shared it with the director of the CIA.

  The net was drawing tighter.

  Karachi, Pakistan, Autumn 2002

  Everything the Americans could rustle up pointed to Karachi. Ganczarski, Zubaydah, Padilla, and Fouda—every source and bit of information said Khalid Sheikh Mohammed was operating out of the capital of Pakistan’s Wild West. Back at Langley, the newly formed “KSM targeting team” had assembled a massive file on him that included all the disparate dots that the U.S. government had previously failed to connect. By then, a congressional joint inquiry was already cataloging those failures. Once the Pakistani security services started looking in earnest, they found the same thing. Almost every Al Qaeda suspect they picked up in the last year had some connection to Mohammed. Some had provided even more information about his role in the slaying of Danny Pearl. Many of those arrested had no links to one another, but they all knew Mohammed.

  From their experience with the Pearl investigation, the Americans knew Karachi was a much tougher target than almost anywhere else in Pakistan, perhaps the world. Especially after the Pearl murder, it seemed a woolly, scary place to do business. Agents routinely felt they needed to run what they called surveillance detection routes, SDRs, when they went to and from their living quarters.

  Raids, even when they were able to mount them, didn’t seem to produce much. Karachi was terribly overbuilt. Much of the construction industry was controlled by the military, and much of the military’s money was illicit.11 It couldn’t just sit around; it had to be put to use. It built buildings whether the market existed for them or not. So even a city that was growing an average of 5 percent a year had a perpetually high rate of vacant buildings. It made Karachi an easy place to hide. You could slip in and out of empty places—a new one every day if you wanted; you could rent them for almost nothing. A series of raids in the spring and summer of 2002 had found a lot of empty flats.

  The investigators worked from clues gleaned on previous raids, and from tips. They had gotten plenty. Many of them were amorphous, but finally one came in that seemed promising. Pakistani intelligence got the call. There was nothing vague about it. Someone had actually seen KSM. The caller had an address.

  Investigators mounted a raid with the usual array of personnel—a small team comprising one agent each from the CIA, the FBI, and the ISI, with a few Pakistani security officials thrown in for good measure. There had been no information about likely armed resistance from the house, so the Pakistanis simply rang the bell. It was early evening. Khalid Sheikh Mohammed answered the door. Or, rather, someone who was an absolute double for Mohammed except for the fact that he was half a foot shorter than the 5-feet-6-inch KSM.

  “We’re looking for Khalid Sheikh Mohammed,” Jennifer Keenan said. They were met with silence. “You look just like him,” she continued. “Can we check your ID?”

  The man’s ID was checked, and the team went on its way.

  In August, the FBI caught a break when it questioned a brother-in-law of KSM, Abdul Samad Din Muhammad, who had been arrested and questioned in the United Arab Emirates in November of 2001 and extradited to Pakistan in 2002. Muhammad told FBI agents that Ali Abdul Aziz Ali was in constant contact with his uncle KSM. He also said Ali received a constant stream of Arab visitors from Pakistan at the airport and that Ali had suddenly bolted from the UAE a day or two before the September 11 attacks. He didn’t have his belongings together, but insisted on leaving. When Muhammad asked Ali why he was in such a rush to leave, he didn’t get a satisfactory answer.12 Keenan was now certain that the way to get to KSM was through his nephew.

  More raids initially yielded nothing, but in early September, the Pakistani police got lucky. Neighbors had pointed out that there was an awful lot of traffic through a house in the Gulshan-e-Iqbal neighborhood. Police nabbed a man leaving the house on his way to pay utility bills. Agents of the ISI investigated and detained the man, a Saudi native, who said he managed the house. His name was Mohammed Ahmad Rabbani. Rabbani’s driver proved to be quite talkative. He said Rabbani and his brother managed several similar guesthouses, all of which had a constant stream of guests. He helpfully gave police the addresses of the houses.

  One of the houses was nearby, on Tariq Road. Authorities raided it and found the brother there, along with two other men, two women, and three children. They also found twenty carefully wrapped passports and almost two dozen SEGA game consoles that had been modified for use as detonators for explosives. The passports were for members of Osama bin Laden’s family. The police interrogated the children to determine if they were bin Laden’s. One of the women was a caretaker, and one child was hers. Two of the children were brothers. The other woman was a nanny to the brothers, and the man was her companion. The two boys, ages seven and nine, were named Omar and Abdullah. No, they said, their father’s name was not bin Laden; it was Khalid Sheikh Mohammed. The women were caretakers and nannies. They couldn’t say where Mohammed was, but they knew there were large parties of Arab men at guesthouses in the Defence Housing Authority, a generally upscale part of the city. The intelligence agents also learned that the men staying in the house were well armed, and cautious. Rabban
i had rented out the house two months earlier. The men had come one by one over a period of two weeks and had taken precautions to avoid detection. Once inside, they hadn’t left for a month, while food, weapons, and supplies were brought to them.

  The ISI retreated for the day. They contacted the Americans and organized for operations the next morning. They moved in overnight with a large assemblage of ISI, local Sindh police, and Pakistani Army Rangers for backup. The American embassy in Islamabad had gotten a call at about 8:00 a.m. that morning about a possible big fish in Karachi. The new FBI legal attaché, Chuck Riley, dispatched Don Borelli, the WMD expert from Dallas, and another agent TDY’d from Kansas City, Dave Cudmore. “Grab an overnight bag, head to Karachi, and haul ass,” Riley told them. It took until 2:00 p.m. to get there.

  When they got to Karachi, the two agents were told to sit tight. The Pakistanis babysat the house through the night.

  The immediate neighborhood was just beyond the nicer sections of Defence; it was a commercial-industrial tract full of five- and six-story buildings, most with low-rent light-industry tenants: textile plants, zipper and button factories, and small machine shops. The streets were paved but the buildings were separated by bare dirt; they were shuttered in the front with metal roll-up doors. The streets were empty and dark.

  After dawn, they stopped the caretaker coming back from morning prayers. He told them that the entire top floor, the fourth, was filled with Arabs. They’d been there for two months, he said, and overpaid on the rent. The soldiers moved in at sunrise and all hell broke loose. Hundreds of rounds, hours of shooting and grenade throwing, and two dead men later, the authorities secured the building. They searched room by room, and in a storage space under a stairwell they found the man who just weeks before had declared himself the coordinator of the September 11 attacks, Ramzi bin al-Shibh. He and another man held knives to their own throats, threatening to silence themselves before they could ever be made to talk. But Pakistani agents jumped them, and wrestled them down.