Whatever happened, KSM never lacked the resolve to do more. His war was nowhere near done. Certainly no one on the ground in Karachi felt that it was. Other plans were in effect. KSM had been sending men and money out from Karachi into the world and just a month after bin al-Shibh’s capture one of those emissaries had sent an encouraging report back to the home office. On October 12, a man wearing a bomb in a backpack detonated it in a crowded nightclub in a beachside bar in Bali, Indonesia, killing 202 people and maiming dozens more. KSM had helped fund the attack nearly a year before, sending thousands in cash to his trusted Southeast Asian comrade Hambali. KSM had kept up other relationships with militants in Southeast Asia as well, for plots that included a second-wave attack on the West Coast of the United States.
The Bali attack was the most deadly since 9/11 and was yet one more indication that the threat was nowhere near eliminated. KSM rewarded Hambali by sending him couriers bearing a total of $130,000. The money was intended for use in Hambali’s next attacks, against the Marriott hotel in Jakarta, and included a bonus for the successful Bali massacre. The courier for a portion of the money was the young Pakistani American Majid Khan, whom KSM had earlier assigned to study the possibility of blowing up gas stations in the U.S.
Karachi remained in many ways a more dangerous place for his pursuers than for KSM. He could hide; they could not. American investigators there felt overwhelmed. They were so few and the place was so overwhelmingly large, chaotic, and dangerous. The average tenure of an FBI agent was measured in weeks or even days, not months. Even the most confident of agents wondered what they could do in such a short time. Few spoke Arabic; none spoke Urdu. They had no idea what Pakistan was like—its customs, history, or even the backgrounds of the people they were hunting. One agent favored the comfort of McDonald’s so much and so often that he earned the nickname Happy Meal. The TDY agents had no rapport with their Pakistani counterparts. Most didn’t even try. They were essentially bodies being offered up for raids, as if they were busting drug rings in South Central Los Angeles. They couldn’t carry guns or identify themselves as law enforcement. And while the Pakistanis were less than overly hospitable, the reception they got from “the sisters” at the CIA was often worse. These were impossible conditions, and a lot of the agents did not want to be there. One supervisor from Newark showed up one day, got wrapped into all the infighting and security concerns, and went home the next.
Many of those who stayed felt they could barely leave their hotels or the consulate without endangering themselves. Sometimes they didn’t have to go that far.
One night an FBI agent heard a knock on his hotel room door. A voice announced, “Room service,” which the man inside hadn’t ordered. He approached the door and looked through the peephole to see two men in the hall with no food tray in sight. He kept the door shut; investigators in Afghanistan later recovered a videotape showing an Al Qaeda exercise in which assassins posed as room-service waiters to gain access to hotel rooms and kill the inhabitants. The city felt like enemy territory for a reason—it was.
Both sides, the hunters and the hunted, went on about their business. KSM concentrated on operations far from his Karachi base—Indonesia, the United States, England. One new plot involved concealing chemical explosives in shipping containers manifested by one of Saifullah Paracha’s companies to contain children’s clothing, then loading them onto cargo ships and sailing them into busy American harbors. Another plan was a variant of 9/11. KSM envisioned hijacking several airliners and crashing them all into London’s Heathrow Airport, one of the world’s busiest. He placed a Karachi computer engineer, Muhammad Naeem Noor Khan, known as Abu Talha al-Pakistani, in charge of the plot.
The raids continued, too. In the end they would number in the hundreds throughout the country. In classic investigative fashion, whether the CIA would acknowledge their value or not, the raids contributed to solving the puzzle. Each raid produced one piece, maybe more, sometimes a lot more; as the pieces were assembled, an image of KSM’s broad and hidden network emerged. His reach sometimes astonished his pursuers.11 The effect was cumulative. Today’s raid often led to tomorrow’s. Whatever the value of any one raid, when taken in sum, as the FBI had argued from the beginning, they proved valuable. Investigators were beginning to see movement in the dark world of Karachi. Despite her dustups with the CIA, Keenan kept feeding passports, photos, and other documents into her FBI scanner and sending them home, and a massive “document exploitation” effort back in Washington was putting the puzzle pieces together.
In January, acting on a tip that KSM would be there, they raided a house in the Karachi suburbs. Again, he was not there. They moved on.
Investigators found traces of KSM all over the country.12 In the thick of the hunt, a senior ISI official marveled to a reporter that he was coming to know the two sides of KSM: the one shown in pictures seized in Karachi, in which he is happily playing with his two young sons, and the other, in which KSM—even while on a dead run—was aggressively directing Al Qaeda terrorist cells. “Despite being so much in danger, he has not gone into hibernation,” the official said in an interview at ISI headquarters in November of 2002. “He is trying to protect what they have. He would like to consolidate first and then rebuild on the same edifice. And he is doing that. He remains active.”
That official and other Pakistanis showed a grudging admiration for KSM, marveling at his uncanny ability to stay one step ahead of unprecedented dragnets. So much so, in fact, that U.S. authorities continued to question their resolve, especially within the parts of the ISI that were responsible for handling the militant sectarian groups with which KSM was aligned.
“The way he is managing their affairs, the way he is controlling things, he is not an ordinary man,” the Pakistani intelligence official said. “He is very sharp and brave—an unusual combination.”13
In February of 2003, after U.S. authorities picked up a suspicious intercept, a team crashed on a house in Quetta, the capital of Pakistan’s Baluchistan province. Pakistani agents had grown suspicious of the house after tracking Al Qaeda operatives there from the nearby border with Iran. Again, they seemed to narrowly miss KSM, but the raid had its rewards. Mohammed Omar Abdel-Rahman, one of the sons of a bin Laden spiritual adviser known as the Blind Sheikh and himself a senior member in Al Qaeda, was captured along with another trove of documents, disks, and information. All of which was welcome, but agents had to wonder how many times KSM could get lucky. Or whether he was being tipped off. Were they getting closer, or would he at some point disappear forever? The FBI had come close to catching him way back in 1996, but once they missed, they never got another chance. The agency needed to get lucky.
Rawalpindi, Pakistan, Spring 2003
KSM was far more careful than most of his comrades about operational security. He seldom risked exposing himself. Others wired money on his behalf. He used cutouts for critical communications. Others sent and received e-mails for him. He seldom wrote anything down, believing that important information was better delivered face-to-face. When he did write, the language was allusive.14 Other operatives succumbed to the allure of the quick and easy sat-phone call. Just one call, just this one time. Then they were targeted, caught, and taken off the field of battle.
One group of Arab fighters had been captured on the run because they kept going outside the house they were hiding in to smoke cigarettes.15 They couldn’t help themselves. They wanted smoke breaks and took them, often outside. Neighbors eventually became suspicious, a team was dispatched, and they were taken away. KSM was irate. He lost not just the fighters but their safe house and several others, as well as the man who arranged them.
As time went on and more and more of his associates were captured, KSM relied even less on modern communications. “These guys were lying low. They were not using electronics. They were not being detected by electronic eavesdropping,” an ISI officer said.16 KSM instead sent trusted personal couriers. Others could cast their fates into the eth
er, where electronic detectives roamed. He stayed down on the ground, in the very human muck that was Pakistan. So in the end it was almost inevitable that it was a human who would betray him.
For more than a year, the CIA had been cultivating an asset who had contacted the agency out of the blue. The man was a longtime acquaintance of KSM’s. Mohammed’s family thought they might have met as far back as the anti-Soviet jihad in Afghanistan. He was from Iranian Baluchistan, as was KSM’s family. They might have been distantly related, perhaps not, but were fellow Baluch—an extremely strong tie—in any case.17
The agency was patient in cultivating the walk-in, whom we’ll refer to here as Baluchi. He spoke Dari, a dialect of Farsi, the principal language of Iran. The CIA had very few Farsi speakers accomplished enough to communicate with Baluchi. His initial handler was an Iranian American agent who was posted elsewhere overseas and flew to Pakistan whenever Baluchi or he wanted to meet. He was vetted over many months, and had passed polygraph tests. He seemed to be the real thing, maybe even capable of doing what he offered—delivering KSM.
Baluchi was paid regularly and provided useful information from time to time. The money was delivered to him in cash during his meetings with his handler. Fewer than a handful of the agency’s burgeoning Pakistan staff were allowed to know the man’s identity, or his purpose. The case was being run directly out of Langley under what were referred to as “restricted handling” rules, which mainly meant limited exposure on a strict need-to-know basis. When his case officer left the agency in 2002, his new handler—we’ll call him Gino—also flew into the country just to meet with him. The Islamabad station residents were responsible for arranging safe houses for the meetings and sometimes for delivering money—thousands of dollars in bills in a paper bag—but they were not invited in to meet him. One agent caught a glimpse of him through a crack in the door at a safe house, sitting on a bed. He looked short and somewhat frail, much like virtually every other Baluch of his age and economic stature.
Baluchi sought to reconnect with KSM in person for months. The agency devised a plan to lure KSM to him; the bait was information that agents fed to Baluchi, who in turn passed it on to KSM. Finally, in late February of 2003, KSM agreed to meet Baluchi in Rawalpindi, a military garrison town southwest of the capital, Islamabad. He didn’t tell Baluchi the precise location, but said it would be that night, February 28. The CIA readied an attack team, made up primarily of its own agents and select members of the ISI who were not told whom they were going after.18 The FBI was not invited. The Americans still didn’t know where or if the meeting would occur, and they didn’t tell the Pakistanis the name of the target.
Marty Martin, the voluble head of the agency’s Sunni Extremist Group within the Counterterrorist Center, couldn’t contain himself at the 5:00 p.m. meeting of the executive staff gathered around George Tenet’s conference table on Friday. “Boss,” he said to Tenet. “Where are you going to be this weekend? Stay in touch. I just might get some good news.”19
Aside from information about bin Laden himself, there could be no bigger news. KSM had risen dramatically in the agency’s estimation from the days when—except for assigning a single agent in the minuscule Renditions Branch to the task—they couldn’t really be bothered to track his whereabouts. Since then, so much effort had been spent with so little result that a potential breakthrough had begun to seem far-fetched.
KSM had been on the road with his nephew Aziz Ali and had met with Al Qaeda’s number two, Ayman al-Zawahiri, the day before, near Peshawar.20 He arrived at the Rawalpindi safe house, a private residence, by car at about 9:00 p.m.21 The home, a large, comfortable, single-family residence at 18A Nisar Road in the Westridge district of Rawalpindi, one of its nicer areas, was owned by a prominent local couple. The husband was a scientist; the wife, Mahlaqa Khanum, was a politically active supporter of the Jamaat-e-Islami, Pakistan’s largest religious political party and one that had suspicious ties to Pakistani militant groups and even Al Qaeda. The couple claimed utter innocence later, but Mustafa al-Hawsawi, the Al Qaeda accountant, had been in the house since January.22 Baluchi was brought to the house not long after KSM arrived. They talked for more than an hour. KSM, who was vigilant about the use of cell phones, for some reason allowed Baluchi to bring his phone into the house. Sometime later in the evening, Baluchi went into the bathroom and quietly texted his agency handlers: “I am with KSM.”
Not long afterward, Baluchi left the house and, once he was by himself, contacted the CIA agents again. This time, he knew how to bring them back to the home. After taking them there, Baluchi was quickly bundled off to the Islamabad airport by CIA officials, who put him on a plane. He was in the air and on his way out of the country before KSM even knew he was in danger.
The attack team took up positions outside 18A Nisar Road. By this point, the Americans and Pakistanis had cooperated on scores of similar raids, several of which were aimed at capturing KSM. This was, in that respect, just another day at the office. The team waited outside in the dark until it felt certain that KSM, a night owl, would be asleep.
The team waited until past 2:00 a.m., then the Pakistanis broke through the gate, through the front doors, and charged through the house, herding the family into a back bedroom. They found KSM sound asleep. They encountered only minimal resistance. KSM, groggy from an apparent dose of sleeping pills, offered to pay his Pakistani attackers to let him go free. When that failed to move them, he asked them if they’d like to cross over and join his team. “Why are you doing this for the Americans?” he asked. “If it’s money, we’ll give you what you want.”23 That didn’t work, either. KSM, al-Hawsawi, and the owners’ adult son, Ahmed Qadoos, were taken into custody and spirited away.
Later, the legend of KSM’s capture would grow. There were tales of how he boldly wrestled with his pursuers, grabbed a Pakistani security agent’s rifle, and shot one of the Pakistanis in the foot before finally being subdued. It was said that when the authorities burst in he yelled, “Don’t shoot, there are women and children here.”
But the reality of it is that, in the end, KSM was caught completely unawares, and in his pajamas.
Marty Martin woke George Tenet with a phone call in the middle of the night. Tenet was at Camp David for weekend meetings with President Bush and his senior advisers. There was enough of a ruckus raised during the attack that neighbors were awakened, and the local media swarmed to the scene the next morning. The Pakistani government was forced to respond and acknowledge that three men had been taken into custody; one of them seemed to be a high-ranking Al Qaeda officer. By noon, the Pakistani press was reporting that KSM had been captured. The accounts varied wildly, but the fact of Mohammed’s capture was central to them all. Many ran photographs of KSM taken from wanted posters. Several of the photos showed him as a handsome, rugged young man. One pictured him in a Western coat and tie.
Back at Langley, Martin saw these early press accounts and was distressed at the accompanying photos. “Boss,” he said to Tenet. “This ain’t right. The media are making this bum look like a hero.”24 He asked Tenet for approval to release a somewhat less flattering photograph. Tenet agreed. A member of the CIA team had taken photos of KSM right after his capture, including one in which he looks into the camera, with his eyebrows raised nearly to his hairline. Still, Martin thought, that initial photo did not make KSM look sufficiently unattractive. Martin asked if there were any other photos available. The agent messed up KSM’s hair and then took another photo. The result was the famous image of KSM—thickset, glowering, wild-haired, half dressed in his nightshirt—his first introduction to most of the rest of the world.
CHAPTER 15
In Captivity
Rawalpindi, Pakistan, March 2003
As was often the case, confusion reigned supreme in Pakistan after KSM’s capture. Islamabad government ministers gave interviews saying the raid was a Pakistani operation through and through. Some said they had been following KSM for months. One official
said that KSM had flown into town the day of the capture, and that one or two ISI officers were on the airplane with him. Another said that KSM had been taken to the local police station, where a case had been opened against him. Some officials said Pakistan would not hand over any Pakistani prisoner in its custody to the United States or any other country, while others denied that KSM was even Pakistani. Kuwait also insisted he was not a Kuwaiti. The ISI, for what was apparently the first time in its history, staged a media briefing at which a grainy videotape, purportedly of the raid, was played. It was so obviously a staged reconstruction that some within the roomful of reporters burst out laughing.
Far less humorous were the questions that began to swirl almost immediately around the KSM takedown. The house where the arrest occurred belonged to the Qadoos family. Ahmed Qadoos’s parents were away for the evening at a wedding when the raid took place. Ahmed, his wife, and his two children were at home. The family insisted that they never saw any strangers in the house and that they thought Ahmed had been kidnapped. But the authorities insisted he was arrested there, along with KSM and Hawsawi. The next day Ahmed’s parents were put in the odd situation of affirming in public that their son couldn’t be a terrorist because he was a simpleton. His mother produced a doctor’s certificate attesting to that fact. A neighbor, an army colonel, agreed. “He’s a goof, simple in the head,” he said.1 Ahmed spent most of his time playing with his beloved caged parrots and staring at the dogs in the Pakistani army training center right next door. Pakistan’s army headquarters, in fact, was less than a mile away, and the community was essentially closed to anyone but the military. Ahmed’s parents did not mention that their other son, Adil, an army major who was arrested in Kohat the next day on suspicion of connections to Al Qaeda, might have been using the house to provide safe harbor to one of the world’s most wanted men whenever he came to Rawalpindi.2
The Hunt for KSM Page 26
