ACKNOWLEDGMENTS AND SOURCES
Our first thank you must go to those men and women who participated in the events described in this book and who agreed to tell us their stories. For a variety of reasons, some professional—i.e., their employers would not allow them to speak publicly—and others personal, many of the people who were interviewed for this book have asked that their identities be kept confidential. We have in some cases been able to persuade them otherwise, but the book contains numerous passages attributed to unidentified sources, and others with no attribution at all. In all cases, nonattributed material is the product of our original research. We have endeavored to ensure the accuracy of the anonymously sourced material. In most cases the sources have been identified in the notes by their official positions at the time of the events. In other instances there is no identification, again according to the wishes of the interviewees.
There is a broad and rich literature on the events of September 11, ranging from immediate, in-the-moment accounts of the attacks themselves to reflective accountings of the underlying causes and long-term effects. We owe a debt to the authors of these deep resources and have relied on their work to some extent; we have attempted to correct the record where they might have erred and to clarify conflicting accounts. That said, most of the material in the book is the product of our own reporting over what is now a full decade. The reporting included hundreds of interviews across those ten years. These interviews occurred around the globe, in more than twenty countries. For the first seven of those years, both of us were reporters for the Los Angeles Times, which published the original stories based on that reporting. We thank the Times. In particular, we thank our editor, Dean Baquet, for supporting extensive coverage of terrorism even before the attacks of September 11. We were, in those post-9/11 years, often assisted by colleagues at the newspaper and have relied here once again on their reporting. In particular, we thank Patrick McDonnell for his reporting in Kuwait and North Carolina, Sebastian Rotella for his reporting in Europe, and Dirk Laabs for his reporting in Germany and Afghanistan. Additionally, some of the original research was undertaken for an earlier book, Perfect Soldiers, and for a profile of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed published by The New Yorker magazine. Thanks to David Hirshey at HarperCollins and Nick Trautwein and David Remnick at The New Yorker.
Much of the reporting for this book occurred abroad, and we would not have achieved any success whatsoever without the assistance of a small army of journalists, translators, drivers, friends, and fixers. We thank them all, especially Yaqoub al-Mansour in Kuwait; Ashraf Fouad Makkar in Abu Dhabi; Aamir Latif, Syed Sajid Aziz, Shamim-ur-Rahman, and the late Syed Saleem Shahzad in Pakistan; Abdulla Fardan in Bahrain; Baradan Kuppusamy in Malaysia; and Sol Vanzi in the Philippines.
We have obtained and examined tens of thousands of pages of documents, and they inform a substantial portion of the book. The individual documents are cited in reference notes throughout the text. We have attempted where possible to verify the origin of these documents. Most are investigative records of government agencies, foreign and domestic, and as such are not always reliable and almost never definitive. We have tried to vet the documents as we were able. Some of the documents were originally collected by the 9/11 Commission and obtained by us through Freedom of Information Act requests. Others were gathered by less obvious means. One unexpected source has been WikiLeaks, the online publisher of thousands of leaked official documents. We thank WikiLeaks, especially for making available the documents detailing the histories of and allegations against hundreds of the prisoners held at Guantánamo Bay naval base at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba. These documents, known as Detainee Assessment Briefs, were compiled by Joint Task Force Guantánamo investigators and contain brief histories of the detainees’ lives and alleged activities. Like most investigative records, they contain many inaccuracies, and we have attempted to verify the information contained in them.
We have also relied on and thank the American Civil Liberties Union, Human Rights Watch, and other nongovernmental organizations that have compiled a great deal of information and documentation about the War on Terror.
Other journalists and researchers have graciously shared information. These include Christina Lamb of the Sunday Times of London, Ira Rosen of 60 Minutes, Adam Goldman of the Associated Press, Rohan Gunaratna, James Gordon Meek, John Berger, Bonnie Rollins, Maria Ressa, and Mark Danner. We thank them all. Three entrepreneurial enterprises, run largely by single individuals, have also collected and shared a great amount of information on 9/11. They are: Berger’s Intelwire.com, at http://intelwire.egoplex.com/2006_11_21_exclusives.html; Andy Worthington’s website, http://www.andyworthington.co.uk, at www.andyworthington.co.uk/category/2002-2011-the-complete-guantanamo-files-new/; and Paul Thompson’s 9/11 time line, hosted at History Commons’s website, http://www.historycommons.org/project.jsp?project=911_project. Berger and Worthington are both journalists, and their own research comprises much of the material on their sites. Thompson’s effort is crowd-sourced to a significant degree, and suffers from accuracy concerns because of it, but is nonetheless an astonishing effort at aggregation.
We thank our editor, John Parsley, and his assistant, William Boggess, at Little, Brown for their enthusiasm for the project. We thank our agent, Paul Bresnick, for his intelligence and verve.
Last but not least, we thank our families for their support and forbearance.
ABOUT THE AUTHORS
Josh Meyer is the former chief terrorism reporter for the Los Angeles Times and has reported on international terrorism for more than a decade. His work, including contributions to the Times’s “Inside Al Qaeda” series, won numerous awards and was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize, and he has twice been part of teams at the newspaper that have won the Pulitzer Prize. Meyer is also a screenwriter and television producer who cocreated, wrote, and produced the network TV crime drama Level 9. He spent a total of twenty years at the Times, and currently is on the faculty of the Medill School of Journalism, where he is director of education and outreach for the groundbreaking Medill National Security Journalism Initiative, based in Washington, D.C.
Terry McDermott is the author of Perfect Soldiers (2005) and 101 Theory Drive (2010). His work has appeared in The New Yorker, The Wilson Quarterly, Columbia Journalism Review, the Los Angeles Times Magazine, and Pacific Magazine. McDermott has worked at eight newspapers, most recently at the Los Angeles Times, where he was a national correspondent for ten years.
Praise for Terry McDermott and Josh Meyer’s
The Hunt for KSM
“McDermott and Meyer have released the ultimate primer for those following the Sept. 11 trial. The Hunt for KSM was years in the making, and the book not only seeks to decode KSM just as he is about to return to center stage, but also introduces readers to three people in U.S. law enforcement who seemed to recognize the threat KSM presented before anyone else.”
—Dina Temple-Raston, Washington Post
“The Hunt for KSM is a flat-out thriller…. It lays out aspects of our factual contemporary world that are far more ambiguous, internecine, and dangerous than anything Hollywood dare contemplate.”
—Richard Rayner, Los Angeles Times
“Eye-opening investigative reporting and a concrete indictment of the continued bureaucratic boondoggle that is the War on Terror.”
—Eric Liebetrau, Boston Globe
“The two authors of The Hunt for KSM have reconstructed an almost decade-long clandestine manhunt in exacting detail, an undeniably impressive feat of sleuthing. Narrative velocity is not a problem either; from beginning to end, The Hunt for KSM moves along at the brisk pace of a good crime novel.”
—Jonathan Mahler, New York Times
“Drawing on unprecedented access to hundreds of sources, and investigative reporting across different continents, The Hunt for KSM provides a unique insight into the worlds of counterterrorism and espionage.”
—Huffington Post
“This masterful col
laboration is a combined biography of KSM and a law enforcement procedural… a remarkable book.”
—Steve Weinberg, Seattle Times
“The authors of this powerful book, both journalists, have given readers an inside look at the ultimate success that occurred after many failures in tracking down and capturing KSM…. Readers who enjoy espionage fiction will find that a true story can be a page-turner. It is also a fascinating look at the deep dysfunction within our intelligence agencies.”
—Charles Steven, Lincoln Journal Star
“The best single-volume resource on KSM.”
—Graeme Wood, The Daily
“The Hunt for KSM… is not just a page-turning spy thriller that masterfully reveals how the FBI and CIA failed to capture Mohammed at least a half-dozen times in the eight years leading up to 9/11, but it’s also a story about the investigative reporters’ own decade-long ‘hunt’ for intelligence about ‘one of the worst mass murderers in American history.’… A timely and groundbreaking new book…. The details are what makes The Hunt for KSM required reading.”
—Jason Leopold, Truthout
“Two dogged reporters show a bumbling American intelligence community unable to work together in the at times incompetent hunt for 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheik Mohammed.”
—Jimmy So, Daily Beast
“Superlative storytelling and crackling reportage define a pulse-pounding narrative tracing the capture of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed…. A surprising, sobering look at one of the deadliest terror networks in history, and the American spy agencies charged with bringing it down.”
—Kirkus Reviews
“A dramatic account of how the decade-long persistence and hard work of FBI and CIA investigators eventually succeeded in tracking and bringing KSM and his associates to justice… an important book.”
—Joshua Sinai, Washington Times
“On one level, McDermott and Meyer have given us a fact-filled inside account, in the voices of those on the job, of the failed decade-long American effort to find KSM before he could strike again. But there is a most important underlying message in this book—that the American intelligence community remains caught up in bureaucratic warfare and remains today incapable of working together… of sharing insights and information… even when all involved share the same goal. This, ultimately, is an account of an American tragedy.”
—Seymour M. Hersh, writer for The New Yorker
“The Hunt for KSM is an important book, detailing one of the most secretive and fractured investigations of our time. Fabulous reporting and great storytelling make it one of the best thrillers I’ve ever read. That it is all true and such a gripping story just makes the accomplishment of McDermott and Meyer even more astounding. I couldn’t put this one down and neither will you.”
—Michael Connelly
“This chilling inside account of America’s cat-and-mouse pursuit of perhaps the world’s most heinous terrorist reads like a real-life episode of the show 24. Political ineptitude has delayed KSM’s trial, keeping him hidden from the world. But now two intrepid reporters tell the story, unmasking not just a terrorist of historic dimensions, but also a country failing to adequately grapple with the challenge.”
—Jane Mayer, author of The Dark Side: The Inside Story of How the War on Terror Turned into a War on American Ideals
“Terry McDermott and Josh Meyer have written a completely authoritative account of the man who organized the 9/11 attacks and the often-bungled hunt to find him. The Hunt for KSM is a deeply reported page-turner about the race to find the man who was the Chief Operating Officer of Al-Qaeda.”
—Peter Bergen, author of The Longest War: The Enduring Conflict between America and Al-Qaeda
“I couldn’t put this book down, a tick-tock thriller about catching 9/11’s mastermind. In exquisite detail it tells a story of incompetence and failure, and ultimately brilliance and redemption. It shows how we failed, and how we finally succeeded after relearning the nuts and bolts of classic espionage.”
—Robert Baer, bestselling author of See No Evil and Sleeping with the Devil
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APPENDIX
Verbatim Transcript of Combatant Status Review Tribunal Hearing for Khalid Sheikh Mohammed
Opening
REPORTER: On the record.
RECORDER: All rise.
RRESIDENT: Remain seated and come to order. Go ahead, Recorder.
RECORDER: This Tribunal is being conducted at 13:28 March 10, 2007 on board U.S. Naval Base Guantánamo Bay, Cuba. The following personnel are present:
Captain ______ [names of all officials redacted by Department of Defense], United States Navy, President
Lieutenant Colonel ______, United States Air Force, Member
Lieutenant Colonel ______, United States Marine Corps, Member
Lieutenant Colonel ______, United States Air Force, Member
Lieutenant Colonel ______, United States Air Force, Personal Representative
Language Analysis ______
Gunnery Sergeant ______, United States Marine Corps, Reporter
Lieutenant Colonel ______, United States Army, Recorder
Captain ______ is the Judge Advocate member of the Tribunal.
Oath Session 1
RECORDER: All rise.
RRESIDENT: The Recorder will be sworn. Do you, Lieutenant Colonel ______, solemnly swear that you will faithfully perform the duties as Recorder assigned in this Tribunal so help you God?
RECORDER: I do.
RRESIDENT: The Reporter will now be sworn. The Recorder will administer the oath.
RECORDER: Do you, Gunnery Sergeant ______, swear or affirm that you will faithfully discharge your duties as Reporter assigned in this Tribunal so help you God?
REPORTER: I do.
RRESIDENT: The Translator will be sworn.
RECORDER: Do you swear or affirm that you will faithfully perform the duties of Translator in the case now in hearing so help you God?
TRANSLATOR: I do.
RRESIDENT: We will take a brief recess now in order to bring Detainee into the room. Recorder note the date and time.
RECORDER: The time is 1:30 pm hours on 10 March 2007. This Tribunal is now in recess. [The Tribunal recessed at 1330, 10 March 2007. The members withdrew from the hearing room.]
Convening Authority
RECORDER: All rise. [The Tribunal reconvened and the members entered the room at 1334, 10 March 2007.]
RRESIDENT: This hearing will come to order. Please be seated.
PRESIDENT: Before we begin, Khalid Sheikh Muhammad, I understand you speak and understand English. Is that correct?
DETAINEE: [Detainee nods his head in affirmative.]
RRESIDENT: All right. Are you comfortable in continuing in English or would you like everything translated in Arabic?
DETAINEE: Everything in English but if I have a problem the linguist will help me.
RRESIDENT: We will proceed in English. If you indicate to me that you would like something translated we will go ahead and do that. All right?
RRESIDENT: This Tribunal is convened by order of the Director, Combatant Status Review Tribunals under the provisions of his Order 22 February 2007.
RRESIDENT: This Tribunal will determine whether Khalid Sheikh Muhammad meets the criteria to be designated as an enemy combatant against the United States or its coalition partners or otherwise meets the criteria to be designated as an enemy combatant.
Oath Session 2
RRESIDENT: The members of this tribunal shall now be sworn. All rise.
RECORDER: Do you swear or affirm that you will faithfully perform your duties as a member of this Tribunal; that you will impartially examine and inquire into the matter now before you acco
rding to your conscience, and the laws and regulations provided; that you will make such findings of fact and conclusions as are supported by the evidence presented; that in determining those facts, you will use your professional knowledge, best judgment, and common sense; and that you will make such findings as are appropriate according to the best of your understanding of the rules, regulations, and laws governing this proceeding, and guided by your concept of justice so help you God?
TRIBUNAL: I do.
PRESIDENT: The Recorder will now administer the oath to the Personal Representative.
RECORDER: Do you swear or affirm that you will faithfully perform the duties of Personal Representative in this Tribunal so help you God?
PPERSONAL REPRESENTATIVE: I do.
RRESIDENT: Please be seated.
RRESIDENT: The Recorder, Reporter, and Translator have previously been sworn.
Explanation of Proceedings
RRESIDENT: Khalid Sheikh Muhammad, you are hereby advised that the following applies during this hearing:
RRESIDENT: You may be present at all open sessions of the Tribunal. However, if you become disorderly, you will be removed from the hearing, and the Tribunal will continue to hear evidence in your absence.
RRESIDENT: You may not be compelled to testify at this Tribunal. However, you may testify if you wish to do so. Your testimony can be under oath or unsworn.
RRESIDENT: You may have the assistance of a Personal Representative at the hearing. Your assigned Personal Representative is present.
RRESIDENT: You may present evidence to this Tribunal, including the testimony of witnesses who are reasonably available and whose testimony is relevant to this hearing. You may question witnesses testifying at the Tribunal.
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