Mastermind

by Richard Miniter

  Once the recruits were approved by bin Laden, they were sent to KSM for evaluation and training. KSM had unique criteria for selecting the future hijackers. He did not necessarily want hardened jihadis who were well known to Pakistan’s intelligence services or its Western counterparts. Instead, he sought out young recruits “with clean records” in order “to avoid raising alerts during travel.”15 It was a shrewd move.

  KSM was recruiting two kinds of hijackers: “pilots” and “muscle.”

  Most of the muscle hijackers were veterans of the Afghan training camps and knew how to use automatic weapons and obey orders. Seven of the muscle hijackers had trained near Kandahar at the Al Farooq camp.16 Two other “muscle” hijackers had trained at Khaldan, the camp originally established by Abu Sayyaf.17

  All of the muscle hijackers were selected between the summer of 2000 and April 2001. Once selected, a recruit would be asked to swear to carry out an operation that would result in his own death and to obey the order of his emir and other commanders.

  Once the oath of obedience and martyrdom was done, KSM was put in charge of the recruit’s training. He usually asked them to tape a “martyrdom video” to be released after their deaths—this video was just one more means of exerting managerial control. If the recruit backed out, the video could be used to shame him or his family. Fear of shame can be an important motivator in the Arab world.

  Next, the hijackers needed visas to enter the United States. KSM gave them each two thousand dollars and sent them to their home countries to get new passports and then on to Saudi Arabia, where the State Department was running an experimental Visa Express program that made it much easier for Saudis to get U.S. visas. Usually, the Saudis would not even be interviewed by a U.S. consular officer, and the majority of the process was done by mail. The United States did not have a similar visa program with any other country. The 9/11 Commission Report dryly notes: “The majority of the Saudi muscle hijackers obtained U.S. visas in Jeddah or Riyadh [Saudi Arabia] between September and November of 2000.”18

  Another peculiarity of Al Qaeda’s tradecraft: it would order its operatives to report their passports lost or stolen and get genuine replacements from their country of origin. This way, it was believed, America or other target countries would have no way of knowing that an operative had visited Pakistan or Afghanistan—and, therefore, no reason to deny a U.S. visa. While this measure might work against Egypt or a similar country with limited use of computer databases, developed countries generally link travel records of old passports with travel records of new ones. The United States, for example, does not rely solely on the physical passport to track travelers.

  Nevertheless, the 9/11 Commission Report found: “Fourteen of the 19 hijackers, including nine Saudi muscle hijackers, obtained new passports. Some of these passports were then likely doctored by the Al Qaeda passport division in Kandahar, which would add or erase entry and exit stamps to create ‘false trails’ in the passports.”19

  Once they had their visas, they were ordered to report back to Afghanistan.

  In December 2000, Abu Turab al-Urduni began training ten muscle hijackers together as a group.20 This was to build unity and confidence among the members. They were not told what the operation was or even what it was called. “To prevent any leakage of information, they [the muscle hijackers] were not informed of many details,” KSM later told interrogators. “We told them that brother Abu Abdul Rahman [the codename for the lead hijacker, Mohammed Atta] would provide them with details at a later stage.”21

  The recruits lacked basic English-language skills and had no idea how to function in a Western society. KSM began to have doubts about the hijackers’ ability to operate in the United States. These concerns were well-founded: among the belongings left in a rental car by one of the muscle hijackers was a handwritten note in Arabic carefully explaining the differences between shampoo and conditioner. KSM showed them videos of Hollywood blockbusters with hijacking scenes to get them used to the idea of taking over an aircraft and dealing with troublesome passengers.22 KSM managed to buy an edition of the San Diego Pacific Bell Yellow Pages at a Karachi flea market and patiently showed the future hijackers how to use it.

  While training his team, KSM also began to test airline security measures—just as he had with the aborted Manila Air operation. He sent Tawfiq bin Attash on flights from Kuala Lumpur to Bangkok and then on to Hong Kong. Bin Attash was instructed to carry a box cutter in his shaving kit and to fly on U.S.-owned air carriers. While airport security officials opened his carry-on bag and even his dopp kit, they raised no alarms and did not take the blade away from him. When bin Attash safely returned to Karachi, KSM knew that he had spotted a significant hole in airline security: box cutters could be safely smuggled onto an aircraft.23

  Shortly thereafter, KSM ordered the muscle hijackers to train themselves with box cutters by butchering live sheep and camels. This was to get them used to the idea of using the box cutters as weapons and to overcome any aversion they might have to spilling blood.24

  The pilots were harder to recruit and required more training. It would take KSM almost two years to get four pilots. The pilots would cause KSM heartburn—and almost wreck the 9/11 plot at least a dozen times.

  But, in the beginning, all seemed to go smoothly. KSM found four students from Hamburg, Germany, who seemed to make ideal pilots for the planes operation: Mohammed Atta, Ramzi bin al-Shibh, Marwan al-Shehhi, and Ziad al-Jarrah.25 One of them would eventually be replaced.

  From the start, Mohammed Atta, a middle-class Egyptian studying urban planning, stood out, as Lawrence Wright notes: “His black eyes were alert and intelligent but betrayed little emotion. ‘I had a difficult time seeing the difference between his iris and his pupil, which in itself gave him the appearance of being very, very scary,’ one of his female colleagues recalled. ‘He had an unusual habit of, when he’d ask a question, and then he was listening to your response, he pressed his lips together.’ ”26

  Atta was selected as the overall group leader.

  KSM told the four Hamburg men that they should distance themselves from known Islamic extremists in Germany and adopt a more Western-style appearance. Atta shaved his beard and avoided the radical mosques he had previously frequented. Ziad al-Jarrah also shaved his beard and, according to his girlfriend, “acted much more the way he had when she first met him.”27 Meanwhile, Marwan al-Shehhi went to the United Arab Emirates for his own long-delayed wedding feast. A friend said it was good to see al-Shehhi “acting like his old self again.”28

  By March 2000, three of the four pilots received visas to travel to the United States. Ramzi bin al-Shibh’s visa application was rejected. A new pilot would have to be found—and fast.

  Once they were in the United States, KSM had limited ability to manage his team. He could only await reports from the field. The reports were full of problems.

  Most of the problems came from Khalid al-Mihdhar and Nawaf al-Hazmi. They had fought in Bosnia, Afghanistan, and Chechnya but couldn’t figure out how to get an apartment in Los Angeles. Flying in from Bangkok, the pair could barely find their way out of LAX.

  KSM gave the two operatives special permission to contact members of the American Muslim community, starting with the King Fahd mosque in Culver City, California. The mosque is named after a Saudi king and receives substantial funding from the Saudis.

  The mosque contact soon went sour when a mosque-goer talked his landlord into allowing al-Mihdhar to assume his lease. Al-Mihdhar put down a $650 deposit and signed a lease. A few weeks later, al-Mihdhar suddenly demanded a refund of his deposit, saying he found the apartment unacceptable. The landlord refused, and that, he remembers, set al-Mihdhar to “ranting and raving” as if he were “psychotic.”29

  Over the next twenty months, they would have several avoidable run-ins in two states, get publicly drunk in Las Vegas casinos with half-naked dancers, and blurt out secret information to American Muslims they had met only hours before.
/>
  The 9/11 Commission later documented ten “operational opportunities” that might have stopped the attacks on New York and Washington; eight of those ten opportunities concerned al-Mihdhar and al-Hazmi.30

  When al-Mihdhar learned from his wife, back in Yemen, that she had given birth to their first child, he couldn’t stay in Southern California any longer. He flew to Yemen on June 9, 2000.

  When he learned that al-Mihdhar had stranded his partner and flown back to Yemen, KSM was inconsolably angry. He thought the planes operation was compromised and would have to be shut down. His masterpiece was ruined by incompetence.

  Bin Laden insisted that the plan go ahead. At the very least, KSM insisted, al-Mihdhar should be dropped because he had broken operational security and endangered the objective and the other participants.

  Bin Laden overruled him, and al-Mihdhar stayed.31 Ultimately, he would be on board Flight 77 when it crashed into the Pentagon.

  By September 2000, Mohammed Atta and Marwan al-Shehhi had enrolled in Jones Aviation, in Sarasota, Florida. There they were also the source of many problems. A Jones instructor later told the FBI that “the two were aggressive, rude,” and sometimes even fought with him to take over the controls during their training flights.32

  After both Atta and al-Shehhi failed an instruments exam, they left Jones Aviation in disgust. They returned to Huffman Aviation, another pilot training institute where they had earlier tried to pass their pilots’ exams. But their angry and aggressive conduct marked them out—compromising the secrecy of the plot.

  By July 2001, KSM had run into another problem with the “pilots.” This time it was Ziad al-Jarrah. He had made hundreds of phone calls to his German girlfriend, Senguen Ayzel, and had diverted from returning from an overseas trip to see her in 2000. Earlier in 2001, she had come to stay with him for ten days. He was deeply in love with her and started talking about backing out of the plot. Meanwhile, al-Jarrah was arguing with Atta. Senguen bought him a one-way ticket to Dusseldorf. When he arrived in Germany on July 25, Ramzi bin al-Shibh met him at the airport. Al-Jarrah refused to talk to him and insisted on seeing his girlfriend as soon as possible. A few days later, bin al-Shibh and al-Jarrah met again, and this time he was talked into completing the mission.33

  KSM must have been tearing his hair out.

  Atta used an Internet chat room to communicate with bin al-Shibh. Atta, pretending to be a student visiting America, wrote to “Jenny” in German.

  Sometime on September 6, 2001, Atta called Ramzi bin al-Shibh in Germany. The date Atta had chosen was passed along in a coded message that bin al-Shibh later recalled: “A friend of mine gave me a puzzle I am unable to solve, and I want you to help me out.”

  Still, the “couple” used a code. The World Trade Center was “the faculty of town planning,” the Pentagon was “the faculty of fine arts,” and the Capitol building was “the faculty of law.”34

  Bin al-Shibh said to him, “Is this time for puzzles, Mohammed?”

  “Yes, I know,” Atta said, “but you are my friend and no one else but you can help me.”

  A moment of silence filled the international phone line.

  “Two sticks, a dash, and a cake with a stick down. What is it?”

  Bin al-Shibh asked, “You wake me up to tell me this puzzle?!”

  Bin al-Shibh quickly translated the code. The two sticks? The number 11. The dash? A dash. The cake with a stick down? The number 9. “11-9” is the way Europeans would write September 11.

  He passed the message on to KSM, who in turn told bin Laden.35

  In Afghanistan, the 9/11 attacks began at 3:48 in the afternoon.

  The training camps and safe houses were on high alert. The buzz among the “brothers” meant that a major operation was unfolding, but only bin Laden, bin al-Shibh, and KSM knew what to expect.

  By four, they were crowded around the television set, which was replaying reports that a plane had struck a World Trade Center tower. The brothers shouted, “Allahu akbar!” and were deliriously happy, according to bin al-Shibh. The Al Qaeda members thought only one plane was involved.

  We said to them: “Wait, wait,” bin al-Shibh told his interrogators. “Suddenly our brother Marwan [the pilot] was violently ramming the plane into the Trade Center in an unbelievable manner! We were watching live and praying: ‘God . . . aim . . . aim . . . aim . . .’”36

  BOOK IV

  HUNTING KSM

  9

  The Daniel Pearl Murder

  Four months after the September 11 attacks, KSM was living in luxury in an air-conditioned house in the Baluch section of Karachi. He had grown fat on American fast food, favoring buckets of the Colonel’s Kentucky Fried Chicken.1 He spent his days playing with his two small sons (then seven and nine years old) and planning elaborate atrocities.

  In the front room of his Karachi house, over tea and small cakes, he met with a stream of Al Qaeda operatives. He discussed plots to bomb the Panama Canal, kidnap famous drivers from the Paris-Dakar road rally, and kill sun worshippers at Israel’s Red Sea resorts. KSM’s ideal terror target had high symbolic or strategic value and a large death toll that would trigger a tsunami of media attention.

  In February 2002, he began work on what he thought would be his masterpiece. In a plot never before reported in the United States, KSM schemed to kill tens of thousands of spectators packed into stadiums during the World Cup soccer games hosted by Japan and South Korea in 2002. The attack was to be in retaliation for the handful of Japan Self-Defense Forces members who went to Iraq to rebuild schools and hospitals. Later that year, he would spend three months in Japan, studying targets and trying to put together a network to make and plant the bombs.2 But eventually he would give up, when he couldn’t find enough Muslims in Japan to work with.

  While he calmly received visitors in his Karachi house, most of Al Qaeda’s senior leadership were on the run in the unforgiving mountains of Afghanistan. KSM didn’t share bin Laden’s savage asceticism, and therefore he didn’t share his suffering at Tora Bora in December 2001. Many Al Qaeda leaders had died in the constant aerial bombardment of their subterranean bunkers, while bin Laden narrowly escaped with his life. Dr. Ayman al-Zawahiri, Al Qaeda’s number two, had lost his wife in the foolish showdown with American and allied forces. KSM hadn’t even lost a night’s sleep.

  Nevertheless, his star continued to rise. When a predator drone aircraft killed Mohammed Atef in November 2001, KSM was promoted to the number-three position in Al Qaeda and given the title “chief of external operations.”

  With this new role came new responsibilities. With President Pervez Musharraf leaving on February 12 for his first-ever visit to the United States,3 KSM would have to bring the Daniel Pearl situation to a swift conclusion. The Wall Street Journal reporter had been held captive for nearly a month—now it was time for action.

  Daniel Pearl joined the Wall Street Journal in 1990 and quickly developed a reputation for careful articles that refused to accept the official line on foreign affairs.4 He was especially effective at challenging the U.S. government’s version of events when it concerned Muslims. Tariq Ali, a Pakistani journalist, praised Pearl’s questioning U.S. policy in Kosovo—where Muslims were fighting Orthodox Christian Serbs—and to Pearl’s clear-eyed account of President Clinton’s cruise-missile strike on an “aspirin factory” in Khartoum, Sudan. The president had claimed the facility was used to make biological weapons. Pearl’s reporting showed otherwise.5

  The September 11 attacks had forced the Wall Street Journal from its flagship offices across the street from Ground Zero and driven Pearl to investigate the miasma of Pakistani politics. He quickly came to believe that Pakistan’s intelligence services, military, and mafias were interconnected with Islamist terror groups, including the Taliban, Al Qaeda, and a welter of smaller terrorist groups that carried out attacks inside India. The deeper he dug, the more he discovered, and the closer he came to the fateful trip to Karachi.

  Pearl’s tragic jo
urney began the day after the September 11 attacks,6 with a phone call to Mansoor Ijaz, who ran a New York–based global investment fund that specialized in energy production and exotic technologies with military applications. Ijaz’s father, a nuclear scientist who worked in a classified federal laboratory in Virginia, had trained the people who built Pakistan’s atomic bomb. On his deathbed, Ijaz’s father begged him to “save my country.”7 He meant Pakistan.

  Ijaz initially set up schools in the countryside, but he soon realized that the real threat to Pakistan was not rural ignorance but urban indoctrination. Radical groups, with a dizzying array of acronyms, had sprung up to promote jihad against India, Israel, the United States, and other infidel governments. Naively, Ijaz met with many of their leaders in the hopes of talking them out of terrorism. He believed that his special standing as a Muslim American gave him a unique opportunity to build a bridge with extremists. It didn’t work. But Ijaz developed a broad network of contacts among jihadi groups. So Daniel Pearl had good reason to phone Ijaz.

  At first, the financier didn’t want to help. “I thought it would be too dangerous for a Jewish reporter,” Ijaz told me.

  Daniel Pearl made a tempting target. Kidnapping a reporter from a major American newspaper would generate a tremendous amount of publicity and would be a strike against the “Jewish business interests” that KSM believed controlled American politics—meeting two of KSM’s criteria for authorizing terror operations.

  Seizing Pearl would have other geopolitical benefits. Inside Pakistan, it would send a signal to President Musharraf that jihadis would punish him if he cooperated too closely with the Americans. It would embarrass Pakistan at a key moment in the country’s war on terror. Within Pakistan’s military and intelligence superstructure—particularly the internal intelligence organization, the ISI—the kidnapping would boost the morale of Al Qaeda’s secret sympathizers. On the heels of losses in Tora Bora, the Pearl operation would let the world know Al Qaeda was alive and active. The kidnappers would also have a helpfully chilling effect on Western journalists. By silencing one over-inquisitive journalist, perhaps KSM could silence them all. (Interestingly, both the kidnappers and President Musharraf used the same adjective to describe Pearl: “over-intrusive.”8 While Pakistan has a handful of brave investigative journalists, most members of the press are in one way or another controlled by the government. Terrorist groups including Al Qaeda have been known to make payments to journalists as well. As a result, news articles that carefully document the shadowy connections between Pakistan’s intelligence service, its military, and its mafias and assorted terror groups are not welcomed, but feared and punished.)