Mastermind
Page 17
“How many people know about this so far?”
Fouda thought for a moment and said, “Only the people currently in the room.”
“Keep it quiet and take no chances,” Sheikh Hamad said. “If you need any special arrangements for your security, just let me know.”9
What happened next is shrouded in mystery and may never be known. It seems likely that the head of the Al Jazeera network briefed his cousin, the ruler of Qatar. Then, somehow, CIA director George Tenet was tipped off.
In the CIA’s Langley, Virginia, headquarters, Tenet took the elevator down to the secure conference room in the Counter-Terrorism Center, known inside the agency as the CTC. He walked in on its daily 5 P.M. meeting. He looked unusually excited. “I’m going first today,” he said. “What I have today will be the only thing we’re going to care about.”
Tenet felt the interest level in the room quietly climb.
“As you know,” Tenet said, “we’ve had our differences with our friend the emir [of Qatar]. But today he gave us an amazing gift.”
Tenet explained that Al Jazeera had an impending scoop that could lead the agency to Ramzi bin al-Shibh and perhaps even KSM himself.
Tenet smiled. “In other words, the fat fuck came through.”10
Gulshan e-Iqbal is one of Karachi’s wealthiest neighborhoods and one of its most Westernized. In the hours before sunup on September 11, 2002, armored police vehicles rolled past a darkened McDonald’s restaurant, a Toyota dealership, and a strip of Internet cafés and video stores, turned past the gates of one of the district’s three universities, and crept toward a block of luxurious apartment buildings. Bin al-Shibh was the target.
Riding along with the Pakistani police were a handful of FBI and CIA officers. As part of the deal struck between CIA director George Tenet and the emir of Qatar, the raid would have to occur before Al Jazeera’s September 11 anniversary special aired later that night. That way the network could credibly deny that it had tipped off the CIA.
Al Jazeera wasn’t solely responsible for pinpointing Ramzi bin al-Shibh. The terrorist himself played a supporting role. In 2001, nine out of ten calls intercepted between suspected European operatives and people in Pakistan funneled to a single city there, Peshawar. By 2001, almost 50 percent of those same calls were directed to Karachi. 11 With at least one careless satellite phone call, Ramzi bin al-Shibh gave himself away. Al Jazeera had given the CIA a clue: which Pakistani city to focus on. Bin al-Shibh’s call revealed what floor of what apartment building was his hideout.
First, the police ringed the villa, then a “breach team” burst into the apartment building lobby and arrested two men. As a larger police force surged into the building carrying automatic weapons, other men opened fire from the balcony overlooking the lobby. Some threw hand grenades. In the initial volley of shots, two terrorists were killed and six policemen wounded. Slowly, the police battled their way up the stairs to a fourth-floor apartment.
The police could get to the front door of the apartment, but no further. The automatic-weapons fire was just too fierce. So, over the next few hours, the police repeatedly launched tear-gas canisters inside.
Bin al-Shibh and two others were holed up in a windowless kitchen, apparently using water from the sink to soak cloths to protect their eyes and noses from the roiling clouds of gas.
Finally, using a bullhorn, a police officer ordered the men to surrender.
Someone shouted back, “Bastard!”
Then one of the men hiding in the kitchen charged forward and was instantly gunned down by the police.
In a burst of courage, the police charged the kitchen, seizing the two remaining terrorists. Throwing punches, bin al-Shibh tried to snatch one of their guns. As he was held down, he screamed in Arabic, “You’re going to hell.”12
Ramzi bin al-Shibh, the man originally slated to be the twentieth hijacker in the September 11 attacks, and KSM’s right-hand man, was in custody. With any luck, his interrogation would lead them to KSM himself.
It took almost seven months, but in March 2003, Pakistani police were in the Westridge district of Rawalpindi, 170 miles south of Pakistan’s crowded capital, about to make an even bigger capture than bin al-Shibh. The journey to this place had followed a serendipitous path.
As strange as it might seem, “walk-ins” usually get very little respect inside the CIA. A typical walk-in is a foreign national who enters a U.S. embassy and asks to speak to someone in intelligence. His first few meetings are usually with consular-affairs officers or other State Department employees, who are simply screening him.
Typically the walk-in is treated with suspicion, not welcomed like a savior. He is asked to repeat his story several times, and any contradictions, or seeming contradictions, are immediately pounced on and pointed out to him. Once embassy personnel are persuaded that he is not a nut, a spy, or a foreign intelligence officer who is simply trying to identify who the CIA personnel inside the embassy actually are, he might be introduced to someone inside the American intelligence bureaucracy. Or, likely as not, he will be shown the door. The history of Cold War intelligence and counterintelligence is littered with examples of bona fide Soviet intelligence defectors being turned away.
But in late February 2003, at one of the CIA’s largest overseas stations, in Islamabad, a young walk-in cleared all of the embassy interviews. He turned out to be a midlevel Al Qaeda official who was interested in betraying his comrades in exchange for a sizable financial reward. He reeled off a list of names of various Al Qaeda officials whom he had dined or traveled with—and the names checked out. What caught the attention of the intelligence officer interviewing him was the walk-in’s claim that he had recently met KSM and expected to see the mastermind again at dinner that night.
That was different. People who volunteered to become American intelligence sources rarely promised quick results. They often hoped to string the Americans along to collect what benefits they could.
The walk-in was given a phone number to call if he happened to meet KSM. When the walk-in exited the embassy, one intelligence officer looked at the other and arched his eyebrow. Would anything come of this?
They would soon see.
At roughly 10 P.M. on March 1, in Rawalpindi, Pakistan, the walk-in rose from the dinner table and went to the bathroom. Closing the door behind him, he furiously typed out a text message to the number he had been given earlier that day: “I am with KSM.”
Then, around midnight, he phoned the contact number. He claimed he had been sitting beside KSM at dinner for several hours and then joined the mastermind in a car that had dropped him off in a well-heeled enclave of Rawalpindi.
An American intelligence agent picked him up and asked the walk-in to lead him to the address where KSM had been dropped off earlier. That was a problem. He didn’t know the address. The two men would spend the next frustrating hours snaking through Rawalpindi’s better neighborhoods, looking for any buildings that the walk-in might have seen in his earlier trip with KSM. It was well after 2 A.M. when the walk-in spotted an apartment tower. “That’s it,” he said.13
Within the hour, a band of Pakistani police pulled up at 18A Nisan Road. They were outside the two-story town house of Dr. Abdul Qadeer Khan, a prominent microbiologist. The doctor’s elderly wife was a local leader of Pakistan’s largest Islamic political party. They were wealthy and politically wired; fortunately for the police, they were also out of town at a wedding in Lahore.
At 3:30 A.M., a flood of more than twenty police officers roared through the front door. Family members were pushed against the walls and held at gunpoint as other officers searched the adjoining rooms.
In one room, snoring on a mattress on a floor, they found a short, fat man in a long, loose white shirt. Hands grabbed his arms and pulled him into the light. There, dazed,14 Khalid Shaikh Mohammed glared back at them. He said nothing. With his hair still askew, they snapped his picture—an embarrassing image that would soon make its way around the world.
The September 11 mastermind had been captured without a shot being fired.
Subsequently, the Pakistani authorities arrested Khan’s uncle, Pakistani army major Adil Quddus Khan.15 KSM, it seemed, had good, high-ranking contacts inside Pakistan’s military and political establishments.
It was past midnight in northern Virginia. CIA counterterrorism chief John McLaughlin was trying to sleep when the phone rang.
“Son of a bitch—we got him!” It was Tenet.
“Sometimes, it’s good to be lucky,” McLaughlin said.16
Then national security adviser Condoleezza Rice told President Bush that KSM was in custody. Bush was excited, saying, “That’s fantastic!”17
BOOK V
INTERROGATING KSM
12
KSM and Obama: The Mastermind’s Last Laugh
KSM’s life is redacted, blacked out, deleted from his March 2003 capture in Rawalpindi to his September 2006 arrival in Guantánamo. Blindfolded, chained, and drugged, he was never told where he was, nor was he allowed to see any clocks or calendars. All we can say with confidence is that he vanished into a series of “special-access facilities” jointly run by the CIA and foreign intelligence services, most likely near Bangkok, Amman, and Warsaw.
While we do not know where he was in this forty-one-month period, incredibly, we have a pretty good idea what he was thinking. KSM was trained to turn the tables on his interrogators and the mastermind diligently followed his training.
Fortunately, American intelligence officials had a copy of KSM’s playbook.
On a high plateau about two hours east of Kandahar, U.S. Special Forces teams walked carefully amid the ruins of Al Qaeda’s training camp.
At one time, hundreds of terror trainees had come through this ramshackle collection of low buildings to learn how to make bombs and poison gases. Bin Laden triumphantly visited the camp several times a month, John Walker Lindh (the so-called American Taliban) told his CIA interrogators.1 Many Al Qaeda videos were shot here, showing terrorists scrambling through obstacle courses and firing automatic weapons. Now, in mid-February 2002, the camp was bombed and emptied. It looked more like a garbage dump, with pits and piles of debris. The relentless desert wind scattered the burnt embers of its remains.
After securing the perimeter and checking for explosive booby traps, the special forces teams spread out to sift the piles of charred wood and shattered glass. They were looking for maps, code books, computer hard drives—anything that might reveal Al Qaeda’s future plans or capabilities.
In one mound they found a seam of muddy, wet papers written in Arabic and other languages. They didn’t stop to examine them and stuffed the entire collection into black garbage bags.
The bags were flown to Bagram Air Base, outside of Kabul. There they were handed to the U.S. Army document-exploitation team, known in military circles as DOCEX.
Receiving garbage bags full of dirty, wet captured documents was routine for DOCEX. The team dumped a bag on the table and began sorting through the filthy papers.
Working conditions were hard. DOCEX labored in a long rectangular tent, whose frame would whine in the heavy wind. Sometimes a fuse would blow and the space heaters would go cold. But morale was high. Everyone considered their job to be war-winning work. And today they would be right.
A U.S. Army interrogator at Bagram at the time, who calls himself Chris Mackey, described what happened next:“Hey, look at this thing,” one [DOCEX] team member said.
It was a stack of paper, about sixty pages, with two binder holes on one side. It had coffee stains and was rippled from moisture. Big chunks of it were handwritten, but it had clearly been photocopied. The top page had a rather surprisingly elaborate Al Qaeda symbol on it and the ubiquitous “in the name of Allah.” Beneath that script was a handwritten note in Arabic:
“Brothers, this is the book about prisoners.”
At first everyone thought it was a book about what Al Qaeda would do to their prisoners. But as we thumbed through it we realized that it was the Al Qaeda guide for resisting interrogation if they were taken prisoner.
All hell broke loose when the command realized what had been found. Interrogations stopped, and anybody who could read Arabic was thrown into translating the manual. We spread it over every flat surface in the ICE [compound] and had the whole thing translated by the next day.
It was unbelievable. Here, laid out in neat Arabic print, was every tactic we interrogators had encountered in Afghanistan: the passive resistance, the blatant lies, the cognitive fog that shrouded every name or meaningful landmark in a prisoner’s travels.
The book taught captives never to give away “another brother’s name” and advised them to use cunyas [aliases]. Prisoners were told to confuse their interrogators by using the Islamic calendar. It taught them to remain silent for a few days, then tell stories out of sequence, dribbling out erroneous information “in circles.”
There was an entire section on the West. It showed a remarkable understanding of the American system. Hold out on providing any information for at least twenty-four hours, it said, to give “brothers” enough time to adjust their plans. The Americans “will not harm you physically,” the manual said, but “they must be tempted into doing so. And if they do strike a brother, you must complain to the authorities immediately.” It added that the baiting of Americans should be sufficient to result in an attack that leaves “evidence.” You could end the career of an interrogator, maybe even prompt an international outcry, if you could show the Red Cross a bruise or scar.
America’s aversion to torture was presented as a symbol of American weakness. The West didn’t have the stomach for such things, the book said, “because they are not warriors.” Throughout, the tone is condescending. “Brothers, they will not understand our reasons [for fighting], and you must contrive to exploit their ignorance.”2
In short, the Al Qaeda training manual taught its operators how to use American interrogation rules, designed to safeguard detainees, as a weapon to attack their interrogators.
One weapon detainees were taught to use was the false allegation of mistreatment. Here is one example: A detainee, held for killing, burning, and hanging four American contractors from a bridge in Iraq, inflicted a superficial wound on himself. It was enough to start the criminal courts-martial of the four members of the SEAL team that had apprehended him. Each of the SEALs was eventually acquitted.3
Another example: Sergeant Alan J. Driver was subject to courtmartial for allegedly beating a senior Al Qaeda figure on the buttocks with an empty plastic water bottle. No marks were left. Sergeant Driver was eventually acquitted.4
Not all alleged abusers have been acquitted. Other U.S. servicemen have been sentenced to years of detention in military prisons for comparatively minor mistreatment of detainees. Even those who have been acquitted have had to spend money and months defending themselves—an agonizing experience when one is simply trying to serve one’s country. Wielding false accusations works even when it doesn’t kill a military career. An accusation alone is a permanent blemish on a military record.
As an interrogator in Afghanistan, Mackey has seen prisoners use every technique mentioned by the Al Qaeda manual:The most infuriating thing about the Al Qaeda manual was that its core diagnosis was dead-on: the Americans would keep you in a cage eating halal MREs and giving you showers a couple of times a week. But when it came down to it, you could lie to them, refuse to talk, switch your story from one session to the next, and there wasn’t anything they could do about it. In the long run, that was our strength. But at the time, it felt like a weakness.5
The Al Qaeda manual correctly predicted that prisoners of the Americans would be well treated. But it didn’t matter. To KSM and other Al Qaeda members, detention and trial would constitute the climax of their careers—a chance to fight one on one with bona fide representatives of the Great Satan.
Far from being passive victims caught in the machinery of their American interro
gators, Al Qaeda detainees see themselves as warriors and the interrogation process as simply another field of battle. Lying about physical abuse or torture is simply one weapon. Claiming a Koran has been abused or a prayer interrupted is another kind of weapon. Indeed, the whole panoply of prisoner protections, once properly scrutinized, is an armory for any creative detainee. And no Al Qaeda captive has been more creative than the 9/11 mastermind himself.
Since his capture, KSM has carried on his one-man war against American interlocutors. We can cautiously assemble some shards of information to get a sense of that war.
KSM’s captivity and his war against his captors can be divided into two phases: his detention at a series of “black sites,” from March 2003 to September 2006, and his years in Guantánamo, from September 2006 onward.
In the first phase, KSM was essentially alone with his captors. He saw no other detainees and had no third-party allies, such as ACLU lawyers or Red Cross officials. He had no access to media, even indirectly. KSM was utterly dependent on the CIA and other U.S. government officials. His war was private, and, as we shall see, that without outside help it was short-lived.
Later, in the second phase of his captivity, at a U.S. Navy facility in Guantánamo Bay, his war became public as he used the Red Cross, human-rights lawyers, mainstream journalists, and members of both major American political parties as his unwitting allies. Even President Obama and Attorney General Holder played starring roles. With the encouragement of these allies, KSM’s war was public and endless.
Regarding the first phase of KSM’s captivity, intelligence officials make a distinction between “interrogation” and “debriefing.”6
Interrogation is the period in which a subject’s resistance to revealing information is eliminated and he begins to talk freely and truthfully. The interrogation period can last minutes, weeks, or, in extreme cases, months. Research and experience have taught intelligence officials the world over that eventually everyone “breaks” and decides to talk.