Mastermind

by Richard Miniter

  • Interrogating captured Al Qaeda figures has become incredibly controversial on both sides of the Atlantic. Critics call it “torture.” Others object to holding terrorists without a trial, on constitutional and human-rights grounds. What does KSM’s interrogation and treatment tell us? If we look into the internal deliberations and CIA memos concerning KSM, what do we learn about the trade-off between “humane treatment” (however defined) and gleaning information that saves innocent lives?

  These questions are important because how terrorists are made, how Al Qaeda works on the inside, and the true nature of CIA interrogations—the three key issues in this book—are the three key issues driving U.S. foreign policy and how Western nations deal with terrorism. The answers to these questions determine how we confront terrorism now and how we eventually end it.

  In the course of my investigation, I interviewed current and former intelligence officers, investigators, and analysts in the United States, Europe, and the Arab world. I sought out eyewitnesses and others who knew him firsthand. I interviewed intelligence and military officials involved in hunting the mastermind.

  I also pored over government documents and court records in Europe and North America as well as every cataloged newspaper, magazine, and broadcast transcript available in English and many others available in translation. I examined captured and other records at the National Archives, in Washington, D.C. I traveled to the campuses of Chowan University and North Carolina Agricultural and Technical State University, the two places where KSM studied in America. In the college libraries, I examined the student newspapers and yearbooks of KSM’s years in North Carolina and tracked down his former professors and classmates.

  I did these things in hopes of taking the reader inside Al Qaeda’s inner circle and into the mind of the man who planned and supervised the deadliest terror attack in world history. My aim here is not to create sympathy but to establish a frank and sober understanding of the 9/11 mastermind. Ultimately, we have to understand what shapes and drives men like KSM or terrorism will go on forever.

  Richard Miniter

  Arlington, Virginia

  BOOK I

  ORIGINS

  1

  The Outsider

  The plot to kill nearly three thousand people on a sunny morning in New York began fifty years earlier on an equally sunny morning off the coast of Kuwait, on a small, rusty freighter poorly equipped for passengers.

  On board was a tall, wiry man with a black beard and a foreign turban. As he walked along the dock leading to the newly prosperous oil emirate, he began to make a series of commonplace choices that would set in motion a chain of events that would create one of the world’s most successful terrorist clans and trigger the deadliest attacks in American history on September 11, 2001.

  The city was Fahaheel. It had once been a fishing village where local men dived bare-chested for pearls. By 1950, most of the men were digging for a richer buried treasure: oil. An industrial skyline of derricks, pipes, and steel scaffolds overwhelmed the village, a visual metaphor for Fahaheel’s new and larger ambitions. At night, the sputtering torches of gas flares made it hard to see the stars.

  The bearded man was Mohammed Ali Dustin al-Balushi,1 and he had come from the highlands of Iran’s Baluchistan region to find work. He would later be known simply as Shaikh Mohammed.

  Very little is known and even less is certain about Shaikh Mohammed’s life. What we know has to be stitched together from the interrogations of his son Khalid Shaikh Mohammed and other members of his family, together with the recollections of neighbors and government officials. Official documents are largely nonexistent, as Kuwait did not issue birth and death certificates in the 1950s. Immigration documents from the period are also sparse. There is precisely one Arab-language newspaper account in which a member of Mohammed’s family discusses the family’s formative years.2

  Walking amid the boom of metal on metal in the towering steel skeleton of the oil industry, Shaikh Mohammed found rows of neat, prosperous brick houses. These were for British engineers and other Western professionals employed by the oil companies.3 For poor and poorly educated immigrants, housing and work were found far from the British-built town center. In the hot inland, in the southern reaches of Fahaheel in a neighborhood known as Badawiya, a shantytown of concrete block huts with corrugated metal roofs sprang up. It was home to a bewildering array of people from the economic and geographic margins of the Muslim world: Afghans, Baluch (like him), Palestinians, Pakistanis, Indians, and others from Pacific islands. Fleeing war and poverty, they had come to the burning desert of Kuwait for a better life.

  Traveling on Pakistani passports, he and his ethnic Baluchi wife, Halema,4 arrived with four children. Five more would be born in Kuwait, including Khalid Shaikh Mohammed.5

  Slowly, like other immigrants, Shaikh Mohammed built a life. Slaving as a laborer, he saved enough to become a merchant who sold food and sundries to oil workers. On Fridays, he would preach in the mosque.

  By the time his youngest son arrived, in April 1965,6 Shaikh Mohammed had carved out a measure of status and security. The “honorific ‘Shaikh’ was added to his name in recognition of his knowledge” of the Koran and his teaching abilities.7 By then the family was living in nearby Al Ahmadi, an immigrant town near Fahaheel, less than a thirty-minute bus ride from Kuwait City. Shaikh Mohammed had become a preacher at an Al Ahmadi mosque, and his family lived in a small home attached to the mosque.8

  They named their youngest boy Khalid Shaikh Mohammed. He was known to the family as simply “Khalid Shaikh.”

  But the family’s bright future soon darkened. Shaikh Mohammed got into a dispute with a powerful Kuwaiti merchant family and appears to have lost his Kuwaiti citizenship and his place at the mosque. Others dispute this account, contending that he was never a citizen and his mosque job was temporary. What is undisputed is that the Mohammed family was officially “bidoon”—legal residents of Kuwait but without the rights of citizenship. While roughly half of Kuwait’s population is ineligible for citizenship, it was an embittering second-class status. As a result, as young Khalid was undoubtedly later told, his father’s fight with a Kuwaiti sheikh was not evenly matched.

  Then, in 1969, before Khalid started school, his father died.9 The government of Kuwait has no record of the cause of his death or even the date. In those days, vital statistics on immigrants were not tracked by the Kuwaiti government.

  Shaikh Mohammed Ali Dustin al-Balushi, who had brought his heritage and his ideas from the distant mountains, was gone before he could bring his family back to respectability. If he had lived, Khalid’s painful early years may have been different.

  As a widow with no hope of government aid, Halema was left on her own to raise nine children in an unforgiving land. Halema survived by eking out a living washing female corpses for burial, traditionally a very low-status occupation.10

  Khalid Shaikh earned good grades in nearby government-sponsored Fahaheel Secondary School, a three-story brown-brick structure almost a city block long. He played on the streets with his best friend, Abdul Basit Mahmoud Abdul Karim, the son of KSM’s older sister, Hameda. Wiry, with jet-black hair, Abdul had one lazy eye that made it hard for him to read for a prolonged period. Though they were officially uncle and nephew, they were only three years apart and, by all accounts, inseparable. Abdul Basit would later become known to the world as Ramzi Yousef, the man behind the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center.11 (I will refer to him as Ramzi Yousef throughout, for clarity’s sake.)

  Family ties aside, KSM and Ramzi Yousef had a lot in common. Both had Baluchi fathers and grew up in strict Islamic homes.12 Both were poor and, initially, had no connections to call on. They had only the advantages of outsiders: their wits, their confidence, and their willingness to take risks.

  The role of Ramzi Yousef’s father, Mohammed Abdul Karim, as a shaper of Khalid’s thinking is hard to ignore and harder to quantify. He worked as a low-level engineer for Kuwait Airwa
ys. “According to those who knew him in Baluchistan he is not particularly religious or politically sophisticated. He is said to have only two passions—Baluchi nationalism and an abiding hatred of Islam’s minority Shiite sect,” writes Mary Anne Weaver, who traveled to Fahaheel before the September 11 attacks and found residents who had known Ramzi’s father. “In the early nineteen-eighties, [Ramzi’s father] was introduced to the puritanical Wahhabi school of Sunni Islam and to a fundamentalist group closely associated with it, known as the Salafis. Wahhabism is the dominant form of Islam in Saudi Arabia. According to the doctrine of the Salafis, Shiites are infidels. The most extreme members of the group believe that Shiites should not simply be shunned or converted; they should be killed.”13 These anti-Shiite convictions would later be converted into bombings.

  A familiarity with the tenets of the Saudi school of Ibn Wahhab and the Salafis (Osama bin Laden is one) would later be a major advantage to an intelligent, ambitious boy who wanted to join the global jihad. Many Sunni terror groups share a Salafi viewpoint and, in the 1980s and 1990s, financing from Saudi sheikhs.

  Together, Khalid and Ramzi took risks. One day, a teenage Khalid and Ramzi decided to rip down the Kuwaiti flag from their own Fahaheel Secondary School, a symbolic act of defiance. In those stricter days, they risked expulsion and the future their education could give them. But they did it anyway.14 The flag and the school were symbols of the authority that they yearned to defy. (Like rebellion, terrorism begins as romantic defiance, with human costs only as an exclamation point. Later, the exclamation points become the point.) Apparently it was Khalid’s idea, and he had Ramzi scramble up the pole.15 It was part of a pattern that would repeat in ever larger challenges to authority.

  KSM’s hold over his nephew Ramzi Yousef was total and complete. If anything, the relationship had intensified over the years. Al Jazeera reporter Yosri Fouda, who met KSM in 2002, describes the mastermind’s relationship with Ramzi Yousef: “All along, Khalid was developing his ideas, knowing that his young nephew would be willing to take almost any risk to carry out his relative’s requests.”16

  Why would KSM risk his future on a school prank? What were the ideas and events shaping him in the 1970s? These seemingly simple questions are hard to answer.

  CIA and other interrogators rarely, if ever, asked KSM and other “high-value detainees” about their pasts, as Governor Thomas Kean, chairman of the 9/11 Commission, lamented.17 Instead, interrogators were more interested in future attacks and organizational capabilities. Very little about KSM’s childhood development was collected, and virtually nothing has been released to the public. In addition, KSM, when he was free, said very little about his formative years. His contemporaries were similarly circumspect. What we have is a bare set of facts and inferences that can be cautiously drawn from them.

  With those limits in mind, three forces doubtlessly had a powerful shaping effect on KSM: his Baluch identity and ties to the Palestinian cause, his membership in the Muslim Brotherhood, and the events of 1979 that transfixed and transformed the Arab world. In that year, Ayatollah Khomeini seized power in Iran, the hostages were taken at the Grand Mosque in Mecca, and the Soviets invaded Afghanistan. To get an idea of KSM’s intellectual development, we will examine each in turn.

  Baluchistan

  Following Friday night prayers, his relatives and older brothers would usually dine around a low table. Talk would often shift to world events. Young Khalid listened as his in-laws and older brothers talked of their lives and their native land of Baluchistan, which sprawls over three modern-day countries: Iran, Pakistan, and Afghanistan. Ramzi’s father, Mohammed, was obsessed with the Baluchi cause and would move to the Pakistani portion of Baluchistan in 1986.18

  Baluchistan is also the name of one of Pakistan’s four provinces; it is the largest (44 percent of the total landmass) and least populated (less than 5 percent of the population of 132 million). And it is the poorest.19 Home to more than seventy tribes, many of which are mutually antagonistic,20 the province’s three main tribes—the Marris, the Bugtis, and the Mengals—have a long history of violence against Pakistan’s central government, especially its natural gas pipelines.21

  For much of the 1970s, during Khalid’s childhood years, Baluchistan’s armed revolt against Pakistan’s central government made news across the Muslim world. The revolt was debated for years afterward, like a kaleidoscope that never got new stones but was constantly turned into fascinating new combinations.

  Khalid’s homeland of Baluchistan never really wanted to be part of Pakistan. Instead, many Baluch longed for a reunification of their traditional lands, which had been divided by Britain’s nineteenth-century imperial officials. Yet British maps did not change Baluchi hearts. Many tribal leaders wanted independence from Britain, India, and, later, the new nation of Pakistan. The British government promised Mir Ahmed Yar Khan, Baluchistan’s principal ruler in the 1940s, that his people would be able to choose between total independence or union with India or Pakistan. In 1947, during Pakistan’s messy birth, the Khan declared Baluchistan’s independence. The Khan believed that restoring independence was part of his princely agreements with the British Empire over the past century and that it was broadly in line with the will of his people. Pakistan’s central government saw it differently, threatening to send its army against the Khan. Realizing the full might of the Pakistani army, and after a long period of deliberation, the Khan surrendered. Baluchistan’s independence had lasted a bittersweet 225 days.22

  Nevertheless, guerrilla and terrorist attacks against Pakistani soldiers and installations continued for years. Sometimes the battles were large, involving hundreds of armed men on both sides. The Baluch fought pitched battles in 1958, 1964, and 1965.23 Ambushes and shootings have continued in a steady trickle ever since. In turn, Pakistan was a brutal foe, repeatedly breaking promises of amnesty and executing tribesmen who had surrendered.24

  In the 1970s, as in so many places in the wider world, the situation in Baluchistan worsened. In 1973, under a new constitution, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto came in as prime minister of Pakistan. Noting that Baluchistan had not elected a single member of his party to the national parliament he was also suspicious of its new nationalist-Marxist local leader, Nawab Khair Bakhsh Marri, elected to run the provincial government in 1970. Bhutto also opposed Baluchistan’s calls for more autonomy in the federal system and its bid for a more equitable distribution of the natural gas revenues generated from its lands. He dismissed Baluchistan’s provincial government (as allowed in the national constitution) and sent in the army.

  Bhutto soon won over foreign allies. Fearful of the Baluch living in the southeastern corner of his country, the Shah of Iran joined Bhutto’s war. He dispatched American-made Huey-Cobra gunships, manned by Iranian pilots and gunners, to attack Baluchi strongholds in Pakistan.25

  Though both the national government and the Baluchi rebels were Muslim, Pakistan’s identity was avowedly Islamic. The Baluch, at the time, were not known for their religiosity. Yet the war soon became a kind of jihad for both sides.

  Pakistan’s central government considered Islam inseparable from its politics and its identity. The country was founded expressly as a Muslim state, is officially known as the Islamic Republic of Pakistan, and its capital city is Islamabad. Both its 1962 and 1973 constitutions instituted an official government body, the Council of Islamic Ideology, to “ensure all laws were in keeping with the tenets of Islam.”26

  But Islam alone turned out to be a poor glue for holding the new nation together. Tribal and regional identities proved stronger than religious ties. Muslim-majority East Pakistan split off from West Pakistan in 1971, forming Bangladesh. In 1973, fearing that the Baluch wanted to reduce the size of Pakistan even further, the prime minister sent the army to occupy the restive province. Claims of a shared religion did little to mollify the Baluch.

  By 1977, the Baluch were defeated and had resigned themselves to Pakistani rule—for now.

  Throug
hout his life, KSM’s actions and statements showed a great hatred of the Pakistani state. He made several attempts to kill Pakistan’s prime ministers. And he clung firmly to his Baluchi identity—even using it [al-Baluchi] in many of his aliases. No matter how Islamic Pakistan might be, it could never make up for its treatment of Baluchistan in KSM’s eyes.

  KSM’s Baluchi identity was hardly trendy. In 1970s Kuwait, few of Khalid’s neighbors were awed by the Baluchi mystique. Instead, the Baluch were seen as a cheap, disposable people who came from afar to mop hotel floors, tighten bolts on oil pipelines, haul rubble from construction sites, and, as Khalid’s father did, sell or preach to the other hardworking immigrants. The storied history of the Baluch contrasted with their present, humble reality as a defeated and dispersed people.

  Money was not the only, or even the main, divider. Cultural and racial differences made the Baluch a distinct and distrusted minority. While Islam is officially universalist and egalitarian, in practice in Kuwait at the time, the Baluch were often made to feel inferior. As always, the discrimination was sharply felt by the minorities who spent most of their time around the cultural majority—boys like Khalid. Kuwaiti officials who’ve spoken to me—on a not-for-attribution basis given the political sensitivity of the topic—often say the feeling of discrimination existed more in the minds of the newcomers than in the mouths of the Arabs. Still, no one disputed that the feelings of cultural superiority and inferiority were real.