The Exile

by Adrian Levy

  The name Khalid Shaikh Mohammad was etched into Soufan’s memory, as he had studied the first World Trade Center bombing and Mokhtar was a code name they had been trying to crack for months now. But he had never considered them to be one and the same.

  Zubaydah revealed enticing details. Khalid/Mokhtar spoke English and at thirty-four was responsible for many of Al Qaeda’s operations outside of Afghanistan. In fact, Mokhtar had trained the 9/11 hijackers.

  Astonished, Soufan made his excuses to ring FBI headquarters. Mokhtar was Khalid Shaikh Mohammad—or KSM, as American investigators called him.

  Going back to the prisoner, Zubaydah described how, like himself, this man was also not a member of Al Qaeda but was working on a twin track. He was too vain to swear fealty to another man, was always on the lookout for an opportunity to create mayhem, and saw himself as a leader among sheep, always “the better person.” There were other juicy details. Although Mokhtar used a pocketful of cheap Nokias for innocuous communications and e-mails, he sent all operational messages via couriers. Nothing was left to the eavesdropped airways. Chief among these couriers was Abu Ahmad K, an old friend from his Kuwait City days.

  Soufan inhaled. That name again: the courier for whom Soufan now had a number.

  Still, Abu Zubaydah had not finished. There was one more messenger whom Osama and Mokhtar trusted equally—and he was called Hassan Ghul.21

  Ali Soufan’s humanity was paying off. Ghul, Mokhtar, and the Kuwaiti were coming into view.

  April 11, 2002, Karachi, Pakistan

  Mokhtar, aka Khalid Shaikh Mohammad, had so many plans in progress that they circled like planes. There were operations being plotted, others put on hold, and some running so slowly that he had virtually forgotten about them until, ping, they popped up when the media reported them.

  And then Khalid, as his close friends knew him, would remember and say: “That’s one of mine.”22

  In the absence of a real Al Qaeda shura, which was now scattered across several time zones, and of the military council, which was with Saif al-Adel charting the mountains between Pakistan and Afghanistan, there was only ravenous Khalid—and insecure Osama. The two men communicated with increasing ferocity by way of letters, carried great distances by couriers Hassan Ghul and Abu Ahmad al-Kuwaiti, that were increasingly filled with plots that were tested by no one, and that had no Koranic seal.

  Even after Osama had come so close to being caught in Karachi, Khalid—a jack-in-the-box with an unbounded ego—was courting a marooned emir who had won the world’s attention and wanted more fame, not to hide away. To remind the world of Osama’s existence, Khalid was more than happy to conduct brutal abductions and bombings of an increasingly haphazard nature in his name, each one destabilizing Al Qaeda even as it tried to find its feet after the fall of Afghanistan.

  On the Tunisian resort island of Djerba, newspapers reported that a natural gas truck collided into the ancient El Ghriba Synagogue, the fireball engulfing sixteen tourists who were burned to death, alongside three local residents, with thirty people seriously injured. Nizar Nawar, identifiable only by his dental records, was named as the driver. Although not much was written about him, Khalid Shaikh Mohammad recalled the name. Nizar had rung him moments before he had detonated a bomb, igniting the gas and immolating the sightseers inside the synagogue.

  “That’s one of mine,” Khalid had told Ramzi bin al-Shibh when he called him over to crow and to mull a controversial new idea.23 What was the point of infamy if there was no legacy?

  Khalid wanted to write his own story rather than see it surmised by others. What he had dreamed up was a three-part documentary that needed to be slick and independent enough to be transmitted by a major network, which discounted As Sahab, Al Qaeda’s rudimentary in-house production company. For maximum impact it should be aired on the first anniversary of 9/11, and he knew just who could make it: a keen young Egyptian correspondent named Yosri Fouda who worked for Al Jazeera.24

  April 2002, London

  Recently appointed as Al Jazeera’s bureau chief in London, Fouda was admiring the view from his office overlooking Thames House, the home of MI5, when a caller rang in.

  “Brother Yosri?”

  He did not recognize the voice.

  “I hope you are thinking of preparing something special for the first anniversary,” the caller suggested cryptically.25

  Fouda probed the matter, and the man offered to provide some exclusive and “top-secret” information about 9/11.

  Four days later, with Fouda having forgotten all about the call, an outline arrived by fax. It was certainly a tempting document: suggesting which sources to interview, locations to film, and questions to ask. One part of the film should focus on the life story of Mohamed Atta, the lead hijacker, the fax suggested. “If you are interested, we will provide you with addresses of people and locations,” someone had written at the bottom. But first Fouda would have to travel to Pakistan. He took a gamble and agreed.

  When he stepped off the plane at Quaid-e-Azam International Airport in Karachi, the remains of Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl had just been discovered in nearby Ahsanabad, with the BBC reporting: “Police sources said the head had been severed from the body, which had itself been dismembered.” Inside the cinder-block outhouse, buttons had been found that matched those on clothes Pearl had been wearing when he disappeared. Reading about it in a local newspaper, Fouda was extremely nervous by the time a monosyllabic driver greeted him, instructing him to get into a car with blacked-out windows.

  The driver took him to the Regent Plaza Hotel, where he was told to register and wait for a phone call. Instead, he received a visitor. The man, who did not introduce himself, entered Fouda’s room and took a shower before ordering room service.

  Fouda, bemused, waited politely until the man finished eating, before his curiosity got the better of him. Who he would be interviewing? Was it Osama, he asked, hopefully?

  “Sheikh Osama, God protect him, is alive and well,” the visitor said, adding that he was “an avid viewer of your channel.” That means he is living somewhere with electricity and a satellite connection, Fouda noted to himself.

  They sat up all night as if waiting for someone or something. No one came. The next morning, April 19, the visitor rose and told Fouda to stay in his room until five P.M. Then he should leave the hotel through a rear entrance and take a taxi. He scribbled down the address of a commercial block. “Wait by the stairs on the second floor.”

  Later that day, as Fouda stood in the shadows as instructed, he became increasingly paranoid. “I have thrown myself into the unknown with no clue whatsoever,” he told himself.

  After a few minutes, a Pakistani approached and addressed him: “I have just given my mother-in-law a lift home. We can go now.”

  It was the prearranged code and Fouda got into another stranger’s car, thinking of severed heads and shirt buttons.

  Someone slipped a blindfold over his face. He gasped. A hand grabbed his and squeezed it. Then the car stopped. A door opened. He was walked into a building and Fouda counted as he was led up four flights of stairs. He heard a doorbell ringing before he was led into an apartment.

  “It’s okay, you can take the blindfold off,” said a high-pitched voice, as a door closed behind him.

  Fouda found himself standing face-to-face with a short, hairy man with a huge protruding belly under his shalwar kameez. He led the reporter into a back room where a younger man in a keffiyah was sitting on the floor surrounded by laptops and mobile phones.

  “Recognize us yet?” the fat man joked, as his friend jumped up and shook Fouda’s hand warmly. “You will when intelligence dogs turn up at your door,” said the younger man, giving him a toothy grin.

  Fouda didn’t know what to say as the men introduced themselves as Khalid Shaikh Mohammad and Ramzi bin al-Shibh, two of the most wanted men in the world.

  He blurted out: “They say that you are terrorists.”

  “They
are right,” Khalid, aka Mokhtar, replied, smiling proudly. “We like to terrorize disbelievers. That is what we do for a living.”

  Khalid asked the journalist to place his right hand on a copy of the Koran and swear an oath. They would tell Fouda everything he wanted to know, and in return Fouda would not talk about how they communicated or where they met.

  “When they ask you what we now look like, you will say we have not changed at all since the photos they will show you were taken,” Khalid instructed.

  Fouda could wait no longer: “Did you do it?”

  Khalid smiled triumphantly: “I am the head of the Al Qaeda military committee,” he began, “and Ramzi is the coordinator of the Planes Operation. And yes, we did it.”

  Fouda was stunned. No one had yet claimed direct responsibility for 9/11. He needed to tape this conversation but as instructed he had left his electronic equipment behind in the hotel.

  Khalid asked to see Fouda’s passport. “Nice one,” he said, noting down the serial number of the Pakistani visa. Document forgers would find it useful to know the latest numbering system used by the High Commission in London. When Khalid spotted Fouda’s mobile phone he snatched it. He tore out the battery and SIM card, snapping: “Careless!”

  Fouda could see his attention to detail, as well as his paranoia, and how Khalid’s temper could boil over. There would be no filming that night, Khalid ruled. Nervous, Fouda asked to go out onto the balcony for a cigarette. Khalid chided him for being weak-willed.

  When he came back inside, Khalid said: “Come on: let’s pray.”

  They prostrated themselves and when they were done Khalid patted the carpet beside him. “Now we sleep.”

  Lying between a snoring Khalid and al-Shibh, who was curled up like a child, Fouda stared at the ceiling, fretting about what would happen next.

  At dawn, a tapping on his shoulder woke him. “It’s time to pray,” whispered al-Shibh. Khalid joined them, drying his hairy, wet arms on the tail of his kameez.

  Shortly after breakfast an assistant arrived with a Sony MiniDV Handycam, a microphone, and five tapes, the same equipment they had used to document the decapitation of Daniel Pearl.

  Khalid yelled at the assistant to bring a brown shawl that he and al-Shibh pinned to the wall. Nothing in the apartment should be visible. Then he went out and returned wearing a similar wrap, covering his bulky body like a fly sheet. Eventually, having balanced the camera on a cardboard box, he sat down.

  “It is okay now,” he said, smoothing down the fabric. “We can begin.”

  Gone was the aggressive, overconfident, bullying Khalid, replaced by a man who was considered and quietly spoken, although tripping over his words as he tried to speak in classical Arabic. He was aping Osama, Fouda thought. But he was sweating profusely and several times they stopped so he could dry himself.

  He described the planning for 9/11 in so much detail that Fouda was certain that he truly was the architect.

  Next, al-Shibh sat down to be interviewed, announcing he would not need a disguise as “natural is better” and anyhow, they would doctor the tapes before giving them to Al Jazeera.

  Fouda hesitated. These tapes would be taken away from him when he flew back to London? “Al Jazeera can do this doctoring in the studio,” he tried, knowing he would probably never see them again.

  Khalid shook his head. “You guys usually use a mosaic and it can easily be decoded. We have our own production company, As Sahab, that will do a better job.”

  He went into another room and returned with a handful of CDs. “This is the beheading of Pearl the Zionist,” he said, handing one to Fouda. “You can use as much as you wish.”

  Fouda nodded dumbly.26

  By Sunday afternoon, they had spent almost forty-eight hours together, praying, eating, and discussing the ethics of mass murder. Fouda was mentally and physically exhausted. After he gathered up his things, al-Shibh hugged him deeply, and as he broke away Khalid handed him a statement about the Djerba synagogue attack. “That’s one of mine,” he said.

  At the door, an assistant tied a blindfold on Fouda. Khalid guided him down the stairs, talking all the way. “You know what?” he said. “You would make the perfect terrorist. I mean look at yourself! You are young, intelligent, highly educated, well organized, you speak good English, you live in London, and you are single. You remind me in a sense of brother Atta.”

  Fouda struggled to find any words, let alone the right ones, eventually blurting out: “One of Allah’s dearest blessings is that no human being can read the minds of their fellow human beings.”

  Fouda heard a car door open and he felt Khalid’s hand on his. “You are such a good man,” Khalid said. “God bless you and protect you.”

  April 2002, CIA Station, U.S. Embassy, Islamabad

  Robert Grenier was at a crossroads. Abu Zubaydah was being monopolized by the FBI, a rival agency, in another country. The ISI Clubhouse might as well not have existed, as all potent foreign suspects were shipped out before CIA’s Islamabad station had a chance to build any lines of inquiry, while local detainees went off to Pakistan’s jails, where they were housed in communal cells and colluded to create bogus leads or were kept away from the agency altogether. Permission to enter any prison had to go through General Javed Alam Khan, and these days the ISI chief was distracted by the new Karzai administration in Kabul that was perceived to lean toward New Delhi.

  But Grenier knew that the CIA was also to blame. More than six months had passed since 9/11 and his agency was still not geared up to the scale of the task at hand, having insufficient linguists, targeters, analysts, interrogators, or even counterterrorism experts to ask smart questions in the right languages.

  Intelligence chiefs in Langley were thinking the same. Revelations about the CIA’s failure to follow up on multiple warnings about Al Qaeda’s intentions before 9/11 had been compounded by the fact that Zubaydah’s explosive intelligence—identifying Mokhtar and exposing the courier network—had been elicited by the FBI after the CIA had concluded he was not the right man.

  Final confirmation of Zubaydah’s identity had come a few days after he was transferred to Thailand, putting the FBI firmly in the driving seat. The Bureau tasked a special agent in Portland to take saliva samples from Abu Zubaydah’s younger brother, Hesham. When his DNA matched that of his brother in Thailand, Hesham was accused of being part of an Al Qaeda sleeper cell and placed into solitary confinement, charged with violating the conditions of his student visa, as removal proceedings were initiated to expel him from the United States.

  “The [FBI] was really, really mad,” Hesham remembered. “They said, ‘You lied to us. We showed you the pictures and you said it’s not your brother. You’re hiding something.’ I was like, ‘I’m not hiding anything. I’d not seen the guy for years.’ ”27

  While the FBI bore down on the unfortunate Hesham, President Bush confirmed the news that his brother had been caught, telling a Republican gathering in Greenwich, Connecticut, that the United States had captured “one of the top operatives plotting and planning death and destruction on the United States.” Abu Zubaydah was now “not plotting and planning anymore. He’s where he belongs.”28

  Behind the scenes, Zubaydah’s case was debated at several White House meetings attended by Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice, and Attorney General John Ashcroft.29 A decision was made to put him back into CIA custody and to radically alter the nature of his interrogation. Jose Rodriguez, the chief of staff at the CTC, would supervise this covert program.

  A memo signed by Bush shortly after 9/11 had already given the CIA the power to secretly imprison and interrogate war on terror detainees outside the protection of the Geneva Conventions. For now, the Bush White House was advised, Zubaydah could continue be legally held at the undeclared CIA “black site” in Thailand while a full interrogation plan was devised.

  CIA director George Tenet needed to take back control of the 9/11 investigati
on and stop Al Qaeda before it committed any more atrocities, and Rodriguez believed he had found the means to do it.30

  Tenet was happy for Rodriguez to take the lead as he was also under significant pressure from the Bush administration to find links between Al Qaeda and the Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein. A plan was already forming, mooted by Vice President Dick Cheney and backed by Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, to use the 9/11 tragedy as a pretext to finish off some old business in Iraq.31

  April 10, 2002, Detention Site Green, Thailand

  A cable arrived for Ali Soufan. “CTC Legal” had recommended that “a psychologist working on contract in the CIA’s Office of Technical Services (OTS)” be dispatched to Thailand along with a new team to “provide real-time recommendations to overcome Abu Zubaydah’s resistance to interrogation.”32

  Soufan was pleased. Handling Zubaydah alone was exhausting, and he knew one of the CIA operatives slated to join him, as they had worked together on a previous investigation into Al Qaeda’s bombing of the USS Cole.

  However, when the new team arrived, Soufan instinctively disliked the contracted psychologist. Dr. James Mitchell, a veteran of the U.S. Air Force’s Survival, Evasion, Resistance and Escape (SERE) program, based at Fairchild Air Force Base in Spokane, Washington, was well known and well regarded in the U.S. military. He had retired a month before 9/11 but after the attacks had volunteered his services to the CIA.

  Accustomed to being listened to, Mitchell informed Soufan that Al Qaeda commanders had been specially trained in resistance techniques using stolen U.S. Special Forces manuals and that the CIA had decided only a program focused on tailor-made countermeasures would get someone of Zubaydah’s seniority to tell the truth.33 Mitchell had been contracted to come up with these measures, based on his SERE training.34

  After his earlier success with Zubaydah, Soufan was irked at being lectured. But Mitchell came with the full authorization of CTC chief of staff Jose Rodriguez: a point emphasized by the fact that a senior CTC official now accompanied him. Zubaydah was to be discharged from the hospital and returned to the jungle camp, Soufan was informed. After that, the new CIA interrogation team would have exclusive access to him.