Washington, D.C., March 2003
The long hunt to find KSM was over. It had lasted nearly a full decade. Intelligence officials declared his capture a lethal blow against Al Qaeda. Taking KSM out of service was a rare bit of good news in Washington, where the Bush administration had been heavily criticized for turning its attention away from Al Qaeda to the impending invasion of Iraq. Tenet flew to Pakistan to personally thank the informant, who claimed the reward money—by then raised to $25 million—and now lives with his family under protective custody somewhere in the United States. The CIA trumpeted one intercepted communiqué from Al Qaeda that said, “The loss of Khalid Sheik Mohammed was like the melting of an iceberg. We can never replace him.”3 Chairman of the House intelligence committee (and later CIA chief) Porter Goss likened KSM’s capture to the liberation of Paris in World War II. A new hunt would now begin: What did he know?
The race to exploit the information gleaned from computers and other gear captured with KSM began instantly, especially the effort to identify individuals who U.S. authorities believed might be poised to launch attacks in the United States. While KSM’s initial interrogators worked to pry information from the terrorist network’s operations leader, FBI agents in the United States and CIA operatives overseas ran down leads pulled from computers, computer disks, paper documents, cell phones, and other electronic paraphernalia seized in the raid.
Authorities said they believed the seized items could prove to be a breakthrough in that they could contain the names of Al Qaeda members, details of past and present terrorist plots, and the locations of “sleeper” cells in the United States and overseas. Much of it was loaded onto a jet and flown straight to Washington.
The good news was tempered by intelligence reports indicating that Mohammed had been coordinating and planning attacks in the weeks before his arrest. Some of them appeared ready to be launched.
“He was an active fellow,” a U.S. official said.
A U.S. intelligence memo dated February 26, 2003, immediately before his capture, had warned that Mohammed was overseeing an effort to have Al Qaeda sleeper cells in the United States attack suspension bridges, gas stations, and power plants in major cities, including New York.4
Asked if counterterrorism authorities believed that the plotters were somewhere in the United States, an official said, “We don’t know.”
Investigators thought they had a very brief time—days, not weeks—to exploit the information or risk losing the trails of those implicated. Within thirty-six hours of Mohammed’s capture, U.S. forensic experts had found “operational detail, names… including Al Qaeda operatives around the world, including here” in the United States in the documents and computers caught with KSM and Hawsawi. One key official in Washington exulted at their good fortune. He described the cache as “the mother lode of information that leads to the inner workings of Al Qaeda. How they work, where they work, who they are, what their financial structure is.”5
Officials at the National Security Agency listened attentively to their global array of electronic eavesdropping satellites, waiting for an expected flurry of e-mails and cell phone calls among Al Qaeda members. Other authorities watched for the movement of cell members seeking cover.
Frank Pellegrino, the FBI special agent who had invested nearly seven years in the search for KSM and his accomplices in the Manila bombing campaign, heard about Mohammed’s capture in a phone call Saturday afternoon from a friend at FBI headquarters. The news hadn’t broken yet. “Turn on the TV,” analyst Brian Antol told him. Pellegrino had been largely ignored in the post-9/11 search for KSM, and he felt both shame and anger about his marginalization: shame for not having caught KSM in time to prevent 9/11; anger for having so many roadblocks thrown in his way before the attacks and having been pushed aside after. Not a day had passed in which he hadn’t beaten himself up over that. “It was my case,” he’d say. “He was my guy.” He wasn’t the sort of man to display emotions in public, but it weighed on him; he hadn’t slept well in years. “Get your bags packed,” Antol told him. “They want you down here asap.”
Pellegrino welcomed Mohammed’s capture—and his summons to headquarters—as a chance for redemption. The FBI had played virtually no role in KSM’s capture. It was “the sister’s” big score. The Bureau felt sure, however, that once KSM was in custody its agents would have to be called in to help extract whatever information he had. The lobbying effort began even before KSM left Pakistan, and from on high. Pat D’Amuro, now the FBI’s number three, waged a forceful campaign to get Pellegrino in front of KSM before the coercive interrogations could be started, insisting that the KSM situation was different from that of the other high-value detainees because KSM had been indicted by a federal grand jury. Besides, D’Amuro argued—to George Tenet and to anyone who’d listen—nobody else knew KSM like “Frankie” Pellegrino did. “Our guys, by far, knew more than anyone about Al Qaeda and its organizational structure, its history, everything about it,” D’Amuro said. “You have to know what to ask them.”6 Pellegrino was at home in New York when he got the call from Antol, who had been working with Pellegrino since the days when they were hunting Abdul Basit. Pellegrino was so certain he would be deployed that he told his wife, Maeve, that he would see her and their young children when he could. It might be months, he said. “Do what you need to do,” she told him, knowing how much he wanted, and needed, another chance.
The next day, Sunday, Pellegrino, brimming with emotion, drove down to Washington, expecting to be escorted quickly to wherever the interrogation would take place. In some ways, this was a moment he had prepared for his entire career. He went to the J. Edgar Hoover Building early Monday morning and discovered that Andy Arena, the FBI official who had asked that Pellegrino be brought in, was suddenly gone, replaced by Art Cummings. Arena was moved out because he refused to go along with orders from the Bush White House to keep looking for an Al Qaeda–Saddam connection as a pretext for war when there wasn’t one. And Cummings, on his first day on the job, wasn’t able to send Pellegrino anywhere. The FBI, despite urgent pleas from executives like D’Amuro to let its agents “get in the box” with captured terrorists, was still shut out of the process. In part, this was a result of a choice the Bureau had made the previous summer.
FBI agents Ali Soufan and Steve Gaudin had described to their bosses the aggressive techniques that CIA contractors employed against Abu Zubaydah—techniques that would be further enhanced later; they weren’t yet simulating drownings. Soufan called the techniques he had witnessed borderline torture.7 In the summer of 2002, D’Amuro argued to director Robert Mueller that the Bureau should not get involved with this new program. Torture, he said, was ineffective: prisoners would sometimes admit to anything just to make the torture stop; it was shortsighted—how would any court of law, civilian or military, ever accept evidence obtained by torture?—and it was morally wrong. He also argued that it would taint any FBI agent who ever participated in it, effectively rendering him unable to do his job because his credibility would be challenged any time he testified in court—on any matter. In effect, D’Amuro was both the most aggressive advocate for the FBI taking charge of the interrogations and the one who was mostly responsible for his agents not taking part in the CIA-run program.
Mueller agreed, and ordered his agents not to participate so long as the CIA was using aggressive techniques. The idea that the CIA would suddenly succumb to the FBI’s wishes and let the Bureau run the KSM interrogation was never seriously considered. “We lost,” one FBI supervisor, Chuck Frahm, told a glum group of FBI agents after one particularly testy confrontation over KSM. Pellegrino was shut out once again. In the hallway at headquarters one afternoon soon after he arrived, Cummings asked him if he would sit down and write one hundred questions that the FBI could put forward so that KSM could be asked them by others. Pellegrino looked at Cummings and said: “Art, I don’t write questions. I ask questions.” Then he turned and walked away.
Vicinity o
f Rawalpindi, Pakistan, March 2003
Two days after his capture, KSM sat in a spartan interrogation room across a small table from a Pakistani security official, with an American off to the side. The prisoner was dressed in baggy white pants, a white shirt, and a vest, and his appearance had been cleaned up significantly from the infamous photo of his capture. He looked far smaller and less imposing. If he had been allowed to sleep in the time since then, it wasn’t apparent. A thick stubble of black whiskers covered his face. He rubbed his eyes constantly. He slumped dejectedly in the chair, a blanket around his shoulders; his head fell to one side and then the other as he fought sleep. Sometimes he gave in and just put his head on his shoulder and closed his eyes. At other times he put his two hands together, as if in prayer, and held them next to his ear as a cushion.
As a camera videotaped8 from above, KSM was wobbly. His interrogators, polite as they were, nonetheless persisted in asking him questions. KSM spoke fractured English in short, guttural sentences, at times only a word here or there. His legs twitched incessantly; he would lift his heels and then slam them down again and again. He swayed from side to side, too, then rocked back and forth, and leaned forward with his elbows on his knees. He was passive, bowing his head often, crossing his arms to the degree that his handcuffs would allow. An ashtray full of cigarette butts was on the table, and so was a notebook and a bulky, old-fashioned clock. KSM covered his face with his hands wearily.
“You say you are going to do something. Maybe you can…” he said to the American. KSM was in Pakistani custody and had been since his capture, but the Pakistanis had allowed a CIA officer to participate in the questioning.
The American interrupted him. “I haven’t promised you anything,” he said.
It was a polite conversation, conducted in quiet, even hushed, tones. KSM had told his captors that Al Qaeda had a code that all must obey: if you get caught, do not talk for forty-eight hours, to give the brothers time to go deep underground and destroy any trail that might lead to them. He appeared to be waiting for that time to pass, and his interrogators, it seemed, were doing nothing to force him talk.
“Same thing, different night. Maybe go to sleep until night, you come back the next night,” KSM said. “I cannot make sure you make sure…” He nodded off in midsentence again.
The American laughed quietly. “I cannot make sure you make sure?” he said, mockingly repeating KSM’s exhausted gibberish. The American pointed to the clock on the table.
“It’s one twenty,” he said. He pointed at the Pakistani officer. “He said you would be talking by one twenty. It’s now one twenty.”
KSM, his head getting even more wobbly, quickly stole a glance down at the clock. “Yes,” he said softly, almost inaudibly, looking downward. Then he leaned forward, his elbows back on his knees as he tried to focus his attention on his questioners. He looked across the table at them, almost expectantly, waiting for the questions to start. The American’s hand moved to a notepad on the table, and he pointed to a word that had been written on it. He asked KSM what it meant.
KSM again tried to focus and squirmed in his chair, adjusting the blanket draped around his shoulders. He said nothing.
“Do you want to talk to him [the American] alone?” the Pakistani interrogator asked. KSM shook his head no, cockily, almost defiantly. After a long pause, KSM said, “Other people know about the matter…. The word is out already, on BBC… CNN.”
His interrogators saw this as a sign that KSM was rationalizing that it was okay now for him to talk. Whether he would actually give up anything of importance was another matter.
“Somebody was talking—yesterday, actually—about Hazem,” the American said. And there the grainy footage went dark.
KSM was held in Pakistani custody for three days. He was then transferred to U.S. control and taken on a three-year tour of the secret prisons the CIA had established in Asia, Africa, and eastern Europe, most of it blindfolded. Dark side, indeed.
The agency ceded its interrogation program to outside contractors who had reverse engineered a torture resistance program developed by the army decades earlier. The contractors knew little about interrogation. They also knew so little about Al Qaeda and KSM that they wouldn’t have known what to do if their prized captives had suddenly agreed to tell them all about the workings of Al Qaeda and its ongoing operations. The man who, by any measure, knew the most about KSM, Pellegrino, was not allowed to go anywhere near him. Pellegrino spent most of his time in Washington, spinning his wheels or commiserating with other agents at Harry’s Pub, down the street from headquarters. Then he drove home to New York and went back to his other casework.
As was often the case, the materials captured with KSM were of more immediate importance than anything they were going to get quickly from him. In particular, the laptop computer and portable hard drives contained a wealth of data. The Qadoos family claimed that the raiders took a desktop computer that belonged to the children in the house. The laptop belonged to Hawsawi, who seemed to be a paymaster. His computer contained bank ledgers, scores of phone numbers and safe house addresses, and the identity of a web of financiers and couriers. There was so much financial information that when Alice Fisher, the deputy assistant attorney general overseeing counterterrorism, saw Dennis Lormel in the foyer outside SIOC, she nearly hugged the FBI chief money tracker. “You’re going to be the happiest guy in the whole place,” she said. At least one of the portable drives appeared to be KSM’s. And it contained something that confirmed the worst fears of the U.S. counterterrorism community: a list of contacts for people KSM had deployed, or was planning to deploy, abroad. It was a road map to many of his sleeper cells, dozens of them, including some who may have been in the United States for years.9
Washington, D.C., March 2003
On the morning of March 5, Art Cummings wasn’t yet midway through his first week in his new job as head of the FBI’s International Terrorism Operations Section I. Dale Watson, who as an assistant director had been head of all FBI counterterrorism on 9/11, knew Cummings and called him on the afternoon of the attacks to tell him that he was being transferred, effective immediately. Cummings, a gung-ho ex–navy SEAL with a penchant for handkerchiefed suits and wingtips, arrived at HQ that night and never left. He was just eighteen months removed from working in a Virginia field office. Now all of a sudden he was coordinating Al Qaeda investigations worldwide.
That morning, his deputy—a CIA officer temporarily deployed to the FBI—burst into his office with news that the agency was about to bust Majid Khan in Pakistan. Khan, the son of a Baltimore businessman, had made several trips back and forth to Pakistan in the previous three years and had come to the attention of the FBI. He was suspected of being connected to Al Qaeda and KSM, but the details were murky.
Khan was a burly young man whose family came to the U.S., to Baltimore, just in time for him to attend Owings Mills High School. Khan was a normal kid who listened to hip-hop and played video games. Like many other KSM acolytes, he was computer-savvy, volunteering to teach computer classes at the Islamic Society of Baltimore. He began to take more of an interest in religion and attended secret prayer meetings at the society. On a trip home to Pakistan, after spending time with an uncle who was a religious fundamentalist, he became further radicalized. Both the uncle and a cousin were members of Al Qaeda, and in early 2002, they introduced the young man to KSM, and he became quite attached.10 Mohammed was fascinated with the possibilities of using the impressionable young man, who spoke excellent English. After learning that his father owned a gas station, KSM began thinking of ways they could blow it up. He sent Khan off to be trained in the construction of explosive timing devices. KSM further tasked Khan to conduct research on poisoning U.S. water reservoirs.
None of this, obviously, was known to the FBI, who saw Khan as a young man who was perhaps a bit too fascinated with Pakistan. In the post-9/11 era, the Bureau nonetheless had invested substantial investigative resources trying to figur
e Khan out. They had pieced together his network of friends and family in the United States. The CIA wasn’t good about sharing information, so it gave little explanation about why the arrest was occurring then and even less about what it had on Khan. Presumably, Khan’s name had turned up in KSM’s electronic pocket litter.
Whatever the case, Cummings knew an opportunity when he saw one. More important, he saw a potential missed opportunity.
“Holy shit!” Cummings said. “How and when are they going to do it?”
“They’re going to do it quick,” the deputy said.
“How much time do I have?” Cummings asked.
Cummings needed to get agents in position to surveil Khan’s network of acquaintances in the U.S., to see how they reacted to news of his arrest. If Cummings got lucky, some of them would betray themselves by their actions. But that kind of surveillance effort takes a tremendous amount of time—not just to get the people in place but also to get the legal approvals needed to use electronic devices to augment the human “net” being placed over the suspects.
“I’m just not in a position to do that,” Cummings told his deputy. “I need some time.” The deputy placed a call to Langley, then reported back to Cummings that they could only delay the takedown by so much.
“You have four hours,” the CIA agent told Cummings.
This set off a mad scramble. Cummings went into overdrive, issuing orders to his team of lieutenants, to supervisors in the FBI’s Baltimore field office, and calling Justice Department legal officials to see about getting expedited wiretap warrants.
In the time Cummings had been at headquarters, he had become known for his mantra: the FBI was no longer a law enforcement agency but an intelligence-gathering operation, one in which agents watched terror suspects like hawks, following them for days, weeks, months, even years before taking them down—if they ever did—so they could understand the entire universe of bad guys in their purview. Terror suspects were no longer persons to be handcuffed. They were “collection platforms” to be exploited as much as possible—as long as agents could guarantee they didn’t lose sight of them. With Khan, Cummings and his agents were operating virtually in the dark. Cummings’s biggest fear was that “we didn’t know what we didn’t know.” In other words, they didn’t even know who—or what, exactly—they were looking for.
The Hunt for KSM Page 27
