Mastermind

by Richard Miniter

  When Stultz went to visit him in jail, he promised to change his ways. He told her that he’d had two dreams: in one, a mysterious man in a turban sits calmly in the desert, and in the other, a beautiful woman stands at the end of a dark passage. Behind her glows a “crystal, loving light.”2

  She bought his story. “Those two dreams made him change his way of life,” Stultz said.3

  When he was freed, Stultz helped Padilla get a job at a nearby Taco Bell, where he met Muhammed Javed, the restaurant’s night manager and cofounder of the Broward School of Islamic Studies. Both Stultz and Padilla converted to Islam and studied the Koran with Javed’s family. Eventually, they gravitated to a local mosque.

  Padilla seemed at peace. “He is the type of person where he needs a dominant thing to keep him from going astray,” Stultz said.4

  Two years after their January 1996 marriage, Padilla told Stultz that he wanted to move to the Middle East to deepen his study of Islam. Just prior to his departure, Padilla ran into Javed at the mosque. When Padilla told him that he was going to teach English in Egypt, Javed was surprised. “I was baffled, thinking ‘you yourself don’t speak proper English,’ but I said ‘okay Jose, more power to you.’ And then José disappeared from the scene.”5

  At first he called his wife regularly from Egypt, but then he met a man at a mosque who had a nineteen-year-old daughter. Over a few lukewarm Pepsis, her father agreed that she would be Padilla’s bride.

  Stultz begged Padilla not to marry the Egyptian girl. “He said I should go ahead with my life. I was sad. I was not going to get married again. There was a bond between us.”6 She filed for divorce.

  While on hajj (pilgrimage) to Mecca and Medina, Padilla met a Yemeni man who is described simply in Justice Department documents as “The Recruiter.”7

  The Recruiter paid for Padilla’s trip to Sana’a, Yemen’s modern capital. Eventually Padilla was introduced to a man whom Justice Department documents refer to as “The Sponsor,” who gave him a letter of introduction to terrorist training camps in Afghanistan.8 The Sponsor accompanied him and helped him fill out the “Mujahideen Data Form/New Applicant Form.” At the top of the form, a notice appears in Arabic:

  “Top Secret: In the Name of God, the Merciful, the Compassionate: Brother Mujahid, this form includes questions pertaining only to you. We request that you answer these questions clearly. We pledge to you that no one will have access except those officials who need to know.”9

  Padilla’s application was later “recovered by the FBI in Pakistan in a box containing a binder of over 100 such applications,” according to U.S. government reports.10 The form is similar to the ones that KSM had the September 11 hijackers fill out. On the form, Padilla called himself Abdullah al-Muhajir.11

  Padilla was sent to the Al Farooq training camp in Afghanistan in September 2000. There he learned to fire a number of automatic weapons, including the AK-47, the G-3, and the M-16. He also learned to work with explosives, including land mines, dynamite, and C-4. After three months of training, Padilla was dispatched as an armed guard to protect a Taliban outpost near Kabul.

  While still at the Al Farooq training camp, Padilla met Abu Hafs al-Masri, a legendary Egyptian-born Al Qaeda commander better known as Mohammed Atef.12 Atef seemed fascinated that Padilla was an American and asked him about his commitment to Islam. After a series of meetings with Atef, he advanced Padilla some money to visit his family in Egypt, with the understanding that he would come back to Afghanistan for further training and a new assignment.

  When he returned to Egypt, he discovered that his wife had given birth to a son named Hussein. Padilla was delighted, even if his American family was not.

  Padilla returned to Afghanistan in June 2001. He found Atef at a safe house in Kandahar. Atef had developed a plan to seal up apartments in the United States, flood them with natural gas, and then detonate them using an explosive timer. He selected Padilla for the operation. He quickly agreed.

  As Padilla continued his explosives-and-detonator training, he stayed in the same compound in Kandahar as Atef. There he watched the September 11 attacks on television. When, in November 2001, a drone aircraft fired a Hellfire missile at Atef’s house, killing the terror leader, Padilla helped dig out Atef’s body.

  On the run with other Al Qaeda operatives, Padilla needed to link up with KSM’s organization if he was going to carry out his apartment-bomb plot in America. Near the Pakistan border, Padilla met Abu Zubaydah, a key KSM lieutenant.

  What Zubaydah remembered most vividly about José Padilla was his impatience to carry out a major bombing. He said he was tired of waiting.

  Meeting with Abu Zubaydah in Faisalabad, Pakistan, he told the Al Qaeda leader about his “plan.”13 He wanted to detonate an atomic bomb inside America. (Zubaydah later told his CIA interrogators that Padilla’s plan was harebrained; he said he had gotten the plans for the nuclear device from a Web site.)

  While Zubaydah might have eventually used Padilla for one of his own operations, he realized that Padilla was fixated on his own plan and was too impatient.

  Zubaydah was skeptical, but he gave Padilla a letter of introduction to KSM and some money for travel to KSM’s hideout. Zubaydah, in his note to KSM, suggested modifying Padilla’s plan to make use of Al Qaeda’s store of radioactive hospital waste. It could be used to make a “dirty bomb,” a conventional explosive that disperses radioactive material—contaminating an area for years.

  Padilla arrived in Karachi in mid–March 2002.

  He was led to a safe house in Karachi by Ammar al-Baluchi. There he met KSM, who was as rotund and cocky as ever. As Al Qaeda’s number three, he was now the chooser and Padilla the beggar. KSM thought the dirty bomb idea “too complicated,” and he wanted to “resurrect the apartment building operation originally discussed with Atef.”14

  This plot would involve selecting “as many as three high rise apartment buildings, which had natural gas supplied to the floors. They would rent two apartments in each building, seal all the openings, turn on the gas, and set timers to detonate the buildings at a later time.”15

  At first KSM wanted Padilla to detonate as many as twenty buildings at once, but even Padilla thought that was impractical.

  They also discussed target cities. While KSM favored hitting New York City again, Florida, Washington, D.C., and the American Southwest were also discussed.

  After a lengthy celebratory dinner, Padilla was sent on his way, and perhaps the most unusual terrorist plot in American history was set in motion.

  In the wake of the September 11 attacks, the CIA was desperate for “bodies” to work against Al Qaeda. Along with dozens of others, Deuce Martinez was drafted into the worldwide anti-terror effort. (Deuce is a nickname, and since his full name has not been made public, I won’t reveal it here.) Martinez, a CIA career man like his father, had spent the past decade tracking the movements of money and men linked to the South American drug cartels. He didn’t speak Arabic or know much about Islam. To his dismay, he was sent to Pakistan to join the hunt for “high-value targets.” It was his first trip outside of the United States.

  The CIA’s new command center in Islamabad was not much to look at. In the basement of the U.S. embassy building, office supplies had been cleared out and folding tables had been set up. Phone lines and power cords were duct-taped to the floor and the concrete-block walls. Phone calls were often interrupted by the loud rush of toilet water sluicing through the pipes overhead.

  As veteran CIA operators looked on with increasing puzzlement, Martinez patiently filled one of the basement walls with a chart listing phone numbers and connecting lines. Every time a phone called one of the phones the CIA was monitoring, it was tracked, too—and added to Martinez’s chart. It grew to billboard size and looked like a bizarre spider’s web.

  After a few weeks, Martinez said, “I think I know where Abu Zubaydah is.”

  Zubaydah was one of KSM’s key deputies. If he could be captured, he would be the highest-r
anking Al Qaeda official to fall into the CIA’s grasp and potentially a fountain of information about future plots.

  Pakistani Special Forces and CIA special-activity officers swarmed a large house on Canal Road in Faisalabad, Pakistan, known as Shabaz Cottage. It was a charmless, gray, three-story structure ringed with high walls and crowned with barbed wire and electrical lines.16

  Elsewhere in Faisalabad and Lahore, other teams of Pakistani police and American intelligence officials were prepared to pounce. But Shabaz Cottage was the main event.

  Pakistani police, using armored vehicles and patrol cars, quietly surrounded the target building. By 3 A.M. the police commander had ordered his men “to capture the suspects alive at all costs.”17 The ISI passed out photocopied drawings of Abu Zubaydah, the prime target. Only weeks before, he was freely meeting with KSM and Padilla. Now he was cornered.

  No one thought capturing him would be easy. He and his associates were expected to be armed with machine guns and bombs.

  Zubaydah, born into a Palestinian family living in Saudi Arabia’s scorching capital, spent his life as a terrorist. Starting in the Gaza Strip at eighteen, working for Egyptian Islamic Jihad, he gravitated to Afghanistan in the 1990s, where eventually bin Laden put him in charge of a network of martyrs’ safe houses along the Afghanistan-Pakistan border. There he sifted and selected the recruits to go to the training camps bin Laden had taken over from Abdul Rasul Sayyaf. Later, he ran a training camp near Jalalabad, Afghanistan. By 1998 he was a rival to KSM and deeply involved in the planning of the August 7, 1998, embassy bombings. He was also linked to the “millennium plots,” which included Ahmed Ressam’s attempt to explode the control tower at Los Angeles International Airport and gun down Christians at the place on the Jordan River where John the Baptist baptized Jesus.

  By 2001 Zubaydah was working for KSM and was charged with supervising plots to blow up U.S. embassies in Paris and Sarajevo. Posing as a cotton buyer, he was using his house in Faisalabad to gather the jihadi diaspora that had fled Afghanistan and redirect them to Al Qaeda safe havens and staging areas.18

  With rubber-handled clippers, police cut the electric lines running atop the cottage walls. Several policemen scaled the walls and silently surprised the guards. Running across the walled compound, two policemen slowly opened the creaking front gates.

  The police swarmed in, breaking down the front door. As it broke open, four Arab men grabbed piles of money and passports and ran up the central staircase. The police ran after them. On the roof, one of the fugitives made a spectacular jump, some twenty-four feet, and tumbled onto the roof of a neighboring building.

  Four Pakistani police were waiting on the roof for him. Zubaydah was furious, saying in English, “You’re not Muslims!” “Of course we are,” an officer said. Zubaydah shot back, “Well, you’re American Muslims.”19

  Back on the ground, police had all four Arabs in custody. As they were herded to a police van, one of Zubaydah’s comrades tried to wrestle away a policeman’s AK-47. Bullets sprayed wildly. Three officers were wounded, while another one of Zubaydah’s companions was shot and another killed. In the confusion, Zubaydah was shot in the leg, stomach, and testicles.

  At a local hospital, CIA official John Kiriakou was told by the doctor in charge of Zubaydah that he would probably not live.

  Zubaydah was bleeding and dying, and his Pakistani doctors could only stabilize him for a while, not save his life.

  The CIA was now in the strange position of fighting to save the life of one of the men who had helped kill some three thousand Americans. If Zubaydah died now—and, in his condition, he easily could—more Americans would die in the future. Somewhere, locked in Zubaydah’s now anesthetized brain, lay the looming plots against America and her allies and the locations of Al Qaeda’s top leaders, including KSM and bin Laden.

  The CIA station chief made a secure call to agency headquarters in Langley, Virginia. Zubaydah could die. The Pakistanis might not have the skill or the will to save America’s first major Al Qaeda capture.

  Out in the Baltimore suburbs, a phone rang in the middle of the night. A highly recommended surgeon from Johns Hopkins Medical Center answered. Would he be willing to fly to Pakistan to save a life? A military plane was waiting, and a car would pick him up within the hour.

  Only after he arrived in Pakistan was the surgeon told who his extraordinary patient was.

  After hours of surgery, the doctor walked out to meet the nervous CIA officials. The operation was a success. Zubaydah would live.

  In weeks, Zubaydah was healthy enough for interrogation. CIA officials were hoping for a “river” of information to flow from him. Instead, they got a trickle.

  The CIA’s “best interrogators were just breaking their lance against the guy,” one told me.

  Kiriakou was one of the first to question Zubaydah, in a secret prison near Bangkok. He hit a brick wall.

  Then orders came from Langley: waterboard him. After thirty-five seconds, Zubaydah crumpled. “It was like flipping a switch,” Kiriakou said.

  While Zubaydah began to talk—letting the CIA learn for the first time of KSM’s key leadership role in the September 11 attacks—controversy erupted. FBI special agents, as well as some CIA officers (including Kiriakou), questioned the use of waterboarding.

  A fissure opened in the intelligence community. The divide over the use of “enhanced interrogation techniques” (such as waterboarding) was not along partisan lines, but generally by agency and function.

  FBI special agents feared that such techniques would taint any evidence needed for trial and likely cause that evidence to be thrown out by a federal judge, ruining any case against terrorist leaders. They were law enforcement men, long habituated to think in terms of trials and convictions.

  Ali H. Soufan, an FBI special agent from 1997 to 2005, also interrogated Abu Zubaydah—without using waterboarding or any other special measures. Through Soufan’s coaxing, Zubaydah revealed KSM’s role in the September 11 attacks. Soufan soon became a vocal critic, pointing out that in two thirds of cases, no coercion was used or needed. We need smarter interrogators, he said, not meaner ones.

  CIA officials, who were given the lead by President Bush in stopping attacks, were generally less concerned with making cases than saving lives. And, they pointed out, Soufan got Zubaydah to talk after waterboarding, not before.

  Finally, a senior official asked Martinez to give it a try. “You found him,” he said. “Now you make him talk.”

  For the first time in his career, Martinez was not an analyst solving a complicated puzzle. He was sitting across a small table from a killer. Somehow he would have to persuade this stranger to betray his cause and his comrades—before the next bomb went off.

  His number-one question: Where is KSM?

  After some time, Martinez seemed to make progress. Zubaydah said, “The code name for that chief was Mukhtar.”20

  Mukhtar. That word had appeared on numerous National Security Agency intercepts, including ones linked to the September 11 attacks. It means “the Brain” in Arabic. But who was Mukhtar?

  There were hundreds of mentions of Mukhtar in millions of phone calls, texts, and e-mails intercepted by the NSA and other federal agencies. Now each of them would have to be found and studied. Simply monitoring a phone in Yemen—used by the bombers of the U.S. warship the USS Cole—had yielded more than 260,000 phone numbers around the world. Perhaps Mukhtar was a more important player than the American intelligence community had realized.

  Zubaydah eventually revealed that Mukhtar’s real name was Khalid Shaikh Mohammed.21

  Meanwhile, the CIA document-exploitation teams examined Zubaydah’s laptop and other computer equipment. Those, too, gave up their secrets. 22

  Zubaydah’s interrogation led to a change in outlook inside the American government. For the first time, intelligence officials knew who planned and directed the September 11 attacks. Now all they had to do was find the missing mastermind. “The Br
ain” was out there somewhere.

  After meeting with KSM, Niser bin Muhammed Nasr Nawar, a twenty-four-year-old Tunisian man, agreed to go home to die. KSM had renamed Nawar—Nizar Seif Eddin al-Tunisi, or Tunisia’s Sword of the Faith—in anticipation of his “great victory.”23 When Nawar returned to Tunisia, he recruited his uncle to join the plot. Together, they welded a gas tank into the bed of an Iveco pickup truck, pressurized the tank, and patiently filled it with propane gas. By ten o’clock on the morning of April 11, 2002, Nawar was wending his way along winding roads on the Tunisian island of Djerba. His target: the oldest synagogue in Africa.

  As he drove toward his death, Nawar phoned a Muslim convert he had met in the training camps of Afghanistan, Christian Ganczarski. “Don’t forget me in your prayers,” he said. “Don’t forget.”24 Ganczarski had dined with bin Laden and knew the members of the Hamburg-based September 11 cell.

  That call was intercepted by Germany’s version of the FBI, the Bundeskriminalamt.

  Nawar’s next call was to KSM. He explained to KSM how he had spent the twenty thousand dollars that KSM had given him. German and French intelligence were able to trace this call to Karachi, Pakistan, French counterterrorism judge Jean-Louis Bruguière told me. Bruguière prosecuted the case against Nawar’s accomplices.

  German intelligence has released a fragment of that conversation.

  “I am the saber,” said Nawar, referring to his new identity.

  “What do you need?” asked KSM.

  “Only the blessing of Allah,” said Nawar.

  KSM directed him to go ahead, wishing him good luck.

  At about 10:20 A.M., a busload of German tourists pulled into the open-air parking lot beside the Djerba synagogue. As the Germans filed in, they passed another bus, this one packed with French tourists, also on their way into the historic synagogue.

  Paul Sauvage, a French tourist, slowly climbed the steps of the main entrance of the synagogue. Because of his age and disability, he told his wife and two children to run ahead. They did. He slowly began to take off his shoes and placed a kippa on the crown of his head.