by Adrian Levy
“You say you are going to do something,” he mumbled, squinting at an American interrogator. Technically, Khalid was still in ISI custody, but a CIA agent was running the show—a man who would later be accused of punching the detainee in the head and stamping on his face.
“Maybe you can …” Khalid began.
The American cut him off: “I haven’t promised you anything.”
“Same thing, different night,” Khalid continued, popping the occasional line that revealed he was still compos mentis. “Maybe go to sleep until night, you come back the next night.” He nodded off midsentence: “I cannot make sure. You make sure …”
The American pointed to a clock on the wall. “It’s one twenty A.M.,” he said, addressing Khalid but looking at the ISI officer. “He said you would be talking by one twenty A.M. It’s now one twenty A.M.”
The interrogation team knew the Al Qaeda rule that anyone who got caught would say nothing for forty-eight hours to allow brothers outside to go underground. Time was up.
Khalid roused himself and looked at the ISI officer. Did he want to speak to the American alone, the ISI officer asked, keen to break the deadlock?
Khalid shook his head, surely thinking of all the disappearances. “Other people know about the matter … the word is already out, on BBC … CNN.”
The CIA officer pushed on, referring to an earlier conversation. “Somebody was talking—yesterday, actually,” he said, hoping to hoodwink Khalid into spilling.
The detainee’s head sank back down on the table next to an overflowing ashtray.
He was not ready to spill anything.
March 3, 2003, Kutkey Village, Martung Tehsil, Shangla
Maryam and Ibrahim were watching the news on Al Jazeera when the arrest photograph of Khalid Shaikh Mohammad flashed up on the screen. Maryam froze and grabbed Ibrahim’s arm. “It’s Hafeez,” she spluttered, referring to their recent houseguest.
She glanced at her husband, who was clearly in shock.
After a long silence, he spoke. “He was a great mujahid.” Then he rose and disappeared into the forbidden section of the house.
When Ibrahim returned, he told his wife that no one should go near the tall guest. Coming so soon after the laughable reports about Zarqawi and Al Qaeda’s links to Saddam Hussein, Osama was dumbfounded at the sudden loss of his real chief of external operations.
Ibrahim called his brother Abrar. Khalid had become exceptionally cautious in recent months. Someone in the movement must have betrayed him. Who was it—and would they be next? Khalid had recently visited this house, which placed all of them in jeopardy. They had to move out.
For the first time, there was no one the brothers could ask for advice. Khalid was detained; Dr. al-Zawahiri was impossible to reach directly in Waziristan, where he sheltered along with much of the Al Qaeda leadership; and messages to Saif al-Adel and his military committee in Iran took weeks to arrive.
Ibrahim could see danger everywhere. Khalid might well have been carrying Ibrahim’s and Abrar’s numbers or their e-mail addresses. He certainly had letters with him written in this house just a few days back by Osama. Khalid had said he would never be broken, but surely every man had his limit.
The next morning, they decided to shift Osama to their parents’ empty house in Suleman Talaab.95 The village lay on a floodplain, just south of Tanda Lake, a few miles outside Kohat, where Major Adil Qadoos had been picked up. It was not ideal, but it was safer than staying in Shangla, they reasoned. Ringed on one side by neat rice paddies and by honey-colored ridges on the other, there was nothing to draw the CIA or ISI to the house, and it was officially registered as be-chiragh (uninhabited).
Ibrahim, Abrar, and Osama set out in the early hours of March 4 and they drove through the gloom of the predawn Swat Valley in silence. They had told their wives nothing about their plans, only that the women should wait.
With the men gone, Amal, Maryam, and Bushra flew into a panic. Barricading the compound, they turned off all the lights, put the babies back to sleep, and waited. Maryam had overheard her husband talking. He and Abrar were jittery, suggesting a raid. Would the Americans come for them? As they sat waiting, Amal sought courage from her mother’s pocket Koran.
March 4, 2003, Detention Site Cobalt, Afghanistan
Shackled, blindfolded, and with a hood over his head, Khalid Shaikh Mohammad arrived at the Salt Pit.
“My clothes were cut off me, the bag and blindfold were removed, and photographs were taken of me naked,” he later recalled.96 After he had been examined by doctors, his hands were chained to a bar suspended from the ceiling in accordance with OMS recommendations. Later, he was moved into a larger room, where three interrogators—a man and two women—began firing questions at him. Ten masked guards took turns punching him in the chest or stomach whenever he refused to cooperate.
Keeping him somewhere between alive and dead seemed to be the goal. Each action was designed to addle, offend, or dislocate. When Khalid stopped drinking, they flipped him around and pumped fluids into him anally. If Khalid needed exercise, he was stripped and made to parade with fellow naked inmates. If anyone complained, all of them were doused in icy water.
One of those who nodded to Khalid was Dr. Ghairat Baheer, Hekmatyar’s son-in-law and still a ghost captive. “The cold and the humiliation of relieving yourself naked in front of the other prisoners was far worse than the interrogation,” Dr. Baheer said, recalling that he only exchanged glances with Khalid, as talking was prohibited.97 The worst experience was squatting together naked and knee-to-knee over the toilets, where the skin-rubbing, muscle-tensing proximity and the rising smell conspired to depress them all.
Dr. Baheer recalled that prisoner Khalid quickly disappeared. Three days in and strapped into a high chair by his wrists and ankles and tilted backward, he was rendered on a Gulfstream with tail number N379P. He slept for the first time in five days. He deduced the location of his new detention facility by examining the label on a water bottle and noticing the manufacturer’s web address ended in “.po.” Site Blue was in Poland, the same location where Abu Zubaydah was being held.
Here at Stare Kiejkuty, Khalid was taken to the “verge of death and back again.” When he was uncooperative, he was put against a wall and punched and slapped in the body, head, and face. “A thin flexible plastic collar was placed around my neck so that it could be held at the two ends by a guard who would use it to slam me repeatedly against the wall,” he later told the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC), the same treatment as described by Abu Zubaydah.98
After a CIA-employed doctor fixed a clip to his finger so they could measure his vital signs, the waterboarding began. Khalid remembered being told that the guards would “take me to breaking point” but not beyond. “I struggled in the panic of not being able to breathe,” he said. If the doctor intervened, Khalid was given a brief respite in his cell. Photographs had been pinned up of his missing sons, Yusuf and Abed, making it clear they were still in CIA detention, and he was informed that they were now being held in the United States. A former military policeman stationed at Guantánamo Bay detention facility would later claim that there was a secret section of the base called Camp Iguana that was used to house children, some of whom were as “young as twelve and eight.”99
While the CIA refused to say where Khalid’s sons were, a spokesman acknowledged that they were important to him. “The promise of their release and their return to Pakistan may be the psychological lever we need to break him.”100 During at least one interrogation, CIA interrogators pushed that lever to the maximum when they told Khalid: “If anything else happens in the United States, ‘We’re going to kill your children.’ ”101 The interrogators also ignored his multiple requests to know whether his wife had given birth to a boy or a girl.102
But however hard he was worked, some things could not be shaken out of Khalid. When asked about the letter to Hamzah bin Laden and how he had it in his possession, he laid a false trail, ta
lking about an Al Qaeda courier he identified as “Abu Khalid,” who was also known as “Abu Ahmad al-Balochi.”
When the interrogators suggested that this courier was actually Abu Ahmad al-Kuwaiti, Khalid deftly distracted them. Yes, someone called the Kuwaiti had helped move families from Afghanistan to Pakistan after the Tora Bora operation, but this man “was a minor figure who was more interested in earning money than serving Al Qaeda.” Now that he thought about it, al-Kuwaiti had married and retired in 2002. Laminating truth with deceit was Khalid’s specialty.
Asked again about Abu Ahmad, Khalid, pretending not to hear, said that Abu Ahmad al-Balochi had skipped to Iran. Referring back to al-Kuwaiti, he recalled that that man had worked with Abu Zubaydah in Peshawar prior to 9/11, but he said he did not know him well as he had only met him three or four times. Anyhow, the man was now retired. Each suggestion had to be tested and explored by the CIA. Privately the agency worried that KSM “only ADMITS details when he knows we know them from someone else.” Other than that it was obfuscation.103
The orders came back to intensify the waterboarding. On one occasion Khalid’s belly became so distended that when an interrogator pressed against him, water gushed out of his mouth. “The worst day was when I was beaten for about half an hour,” he recalled. “My head was banged so hard against the wall it started to bleed. Cold water was poured over it. This was then repeated with the other interrogators. Finally I was then taken for a session of waterboarding.”104
During his first month at Detention Site Blue, Khalid was kept naked and given solid food only twice. When he complied, he was force-fed Ensure, a nutrition shake, as a reward.105 When he was difficult, they administered it anally.
But the interrogators were getting nowhere. A CIA cable warned: “KSM’s pattern of behavior over the past three months, trying to control his environment, lying and then admitting things only when pressed that others have been caught and have likely admitted the plot, is a cause for concern.”
FBI special agent Ali Soufan had predicted as much, pointing to his experience with Abu Zubaydah. They had all visualized and even rehearsed for this moment, and in KSM’s case his limits, and his strategy, remained an unknown.
He started tossing out real names, identifying lower-level supporters, whose arrest and detention he anticipated would be even more complicated and time-consuming, while revealing little of the inner workings of Al Qaeda. One of the first he sacrificed was a woman: the new wife of his nephew Ammar al-Balochi. A talented young Pakistani neuroscientist from Karachi, her name was Aafia Siddiqui and she had volunteered to assist Al Qaeda in America, where she lived. To lock her in, as Osama had done with his own family, Aafia had been secretly married into Khalid’s family a few months earlier.
A well-educated and highly intelligent woman, Aafia spoke English with an American accent and had won a scholarship to study biology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), where she wrote an essay called “How Intercultural Attitudes Help Shape a Multinational World.” After graduation, she had enrolled at Brandeis University near Boston for a Ph.D. in neurocognitive science. She married a young Pakistani doctor, who worked in Boston and with whom she had two children.106
After 9/11, when Aafia’s husband complained of religious and racial discrimination and worried about his wife’s increasing extremism, they had returned to Karachi, where they divorced. After giving birth to their third child at a Karachi hospital, she began moving in Khalid’s circle, working on a plot to smuggle explosives into America inside containers transporting secondhand clothes. In early 2003, she agreed to marry Ammar al-Balochi to advance the plot.
Within days of Khalid giving up Aafia’s name, the FBI issued a global “wanted for questioning” alert that portrayed her as a “courier” and “financial fixer” for Al Qaeda. On March 30, they traced her to Karachi, where she was staying with her mother. She fled the house in a taxi, intending to catch a flight to Islamabad, where her uncle lived; but she vanished on her way to the airport, along with her three children.107
At first, Pakistan’s interior ministry confirmed that a woman had been taken into custody on terrorism charges. Then it and the FBI issued denials. Later, Pakistani officials contended that Al Qaeda had grabbed Aafia and spirited her away.
In the vacuum, all that was left was a photo of a veiled Muslim mother of three, her youngest son only four months old. The caption most often used when the photo was printed in Arabic newspapers indicated that she was “imprisoned in a CIA secret detention site.” The Indian media ran another iteration: “Forced to work incognito for the ISI.”
Both stories deepened mistrust in the Bush administration’s self-proclaimed war on terror, just as Khalid had intended.
March 2003, Evin Prison, Tehran, Iran
The Mauritanian had been locked up in a cell for three months. After he’d been arrested in Karaj on Christmas Day 2002 and driven through the night across the snow-clad Alborz Mountains, his vehicle had drawn up at the huge, locked iron gates of Evin Prison in Tehran, Iran’s most notorious prison.108
He recalled quaking as he took in the bleak landscape: guard towers and high walls topped by security cameras and dense coils of electrified barbed wire. Once inside, he had been both relieved and frustrated to see that there were many familiar faces. Once again, Iran had betrayed Al Qaeda.
As a large group of brothers lined up in front of him in the courtyard, exchanging their clothes for prison uniforms bearing the blue logo of the Iranian Ministry of Justice, the guards left them alone just long enough for him to tell them to say that he was “Dr. Abdullah, a visiting Sunni scholar.” It was one thing for the Quds Force to know his real identity, but not the Reformists or their allies in the intelligence ministry.
Blindfolded, he was led away to a tiny cell with a floor that looked like it had been trampled by thousands of feet over the years. There was a prayer rug, a metal toilet and basin, and a gas fire. As the days dragged by, the Mauritanian felt as if he was falling into an abyss. His human interactions consisted of food trays slid under his door, and the monotony was punctuated only by the call to prayer, which was broadcast along Evin’s humid corridors. By the time he was photographed on the fourth day, he had lost all sense of time. “I did not try to arrange my messy hair, nor arrange my untidy clothes. Nor did the photographer seem keen on anything like that.”
“Name?”
“Dr. Abdullah,” he replied hoarsely.
Taken back to his cell, the Mauritanian prayed and prayed. “I found myself face-to-face with the Koran, as if I was reading it for the first time,” he said. He was overwhelmed by a “haunting concern for my family and the fear of what is waiting for me at the opening of the investigation file.”109
He had not prepared for this moment, and he wondered how others coped. He created a small routine to distract himself: jogging on the spot for an hour a day, tidying his cell each morning. He watched the ants harvest crumbs from his food tray, envying how happy and satisfied they looked. He explored his new world, examining every inch, identifying small bumps on the walls and minute cracks in the tile, probing every space and texture with his fingertips, discovering tiny messages scraped into the plaster by previous occupants under the bed. Some had written prayers, others had composed letters to lost lovers and absent family members.
Others had scored the bed or the walls to record just how many months they had been locked inside this hutch. The Mauritanian could not bear to count them. They seemed to run into eons.
The Quds Force was not coming to save him this time, he told himself. “Oh God, do not let me suffer,” he prayed.
After a week, the Mauritanian heard movement in the next-door cell. He tapped on the water pipe of his basin, which went into the wall: pik, pik, pik.
His new neighbor tapped back: pik, pik, pik.
They began to exchange messages by whispering down the pipes. The Mauritanian knew this man. He was an Egyptian Al Qaeda explosives expert who had worked on t
he bombs that destroyed the U.S. embassies in Nairobi and Dar-es-Salaam in 1998. He was one of twenty-two named on the FBI’s Most Wanted Terrorist list, and he had a $5 million price tag on his head.110
“Mujahideen brothers are being arrested all over Iran,” the newcomer said. “Nowhere is safe.”
“Anything from Sheikh Osama?” the Mauritanian asked.
“Nothing,” replied his neighbor.
Pik, pik, pik.
The Mauritanian leaned in.
“More new arrivals,” the man whispered as voices came down the corridor.
Pik, pik, pik.
“Twenty-three members of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi’s group.”111
They had been rounded up at the Amir Hotel on the eve of their departure for Khurmal. Among them was Zarqawi’s second-in-command and brother-in-law, Khalid al-Aruri, and his childhood friend, Iyad al-Toubasi, the former ladies’ hairdresser from Zarqa. Their capture was an unexpected bonus for the Reformist government but a disaster for the Quds Force, which up until this point had been actively helping Zarqawi’s fighters reach Kurdish-held Iraq. Many who had already passed through the Amir Hotel had reached Baghdad, according to British intelligence, and were awaiting reinforcements.112 Zarqawi had been ranging all over the region, using real Iranian passports made out in the names of Ibrahim Kasimi Ridah and Abdal Rahman Hasan al-Tahihi and communicating with a Swiss satellite phone and two Iranian cell phones provided by the Quds Force.113 The Mauritanian sensed that the Quds Force could not afford to let these newly captured Zarqawi fighters fester for long in Evin.
He heard nothing more for a few days.
Pik, pik, pik.
“Yes?”
“I have news.”
“Tell me! Don’t make me wait.”
“Zarqawi is here!”
During a trip back into Iran to update Saif al-Adel and other shura members about his activities in Iraq, Zarqawi had been caught, putting Al Qaeda’s Iraq war plans on hold. Intelligence officials had found at least nine passports and identity cards on him, showing him variously as a citizen of Lebanon, Iran, Palestine, and Yemen. His recent radius of activity was said to cover Iraq, Iran, Syria, Jordan, Turkey, the Pankisi Valley in Georgia, and the northern Caucasus.114 He had been so emboldened by his assistance from the Quds Force that he had even found time to slip back to Zarqa, where his two wives and children were now living.
