The Hunt for KSM

by Terry McDermott

  CIA director George Tenet years later described the agency’s view of bin Laden: “We saw him as a prominent financial backer of Islamic terrorist movements who was funding the paramilitary training of Arab religious militants operating in, or supporting fellow Muslims in, Bosnia, Egypt, Kashmir, Jordan, Tunisia, Algeria, and Yemen.”4

  He was widely regarded as a venture capitalist of terror, someone who listened to pitches and decided which to fund, largely from his share of the family fortune. The new bin Laden unit would be dedicated to the proposition that he was more than a financier.

  The station was to be led by Michael Scheuer, a career analyst who had become frustrated with the fact that all the reams and reams of analysis produced by his agency seldom seemed to lead to action. Every report simply generated another, and they were all neatly stacked on shelves, never to be looked at. Scheuer wasn’t a field agent. He had rarely been out of the country. But he was smart, imaginative, and scared to death. He had worked on the radical fundamentalist desk for years, and was convinced some very bad things were coming America’s way, especially from bin Laden.

  Scheuer was also uncompromisingly combative, a real son of a bitch by almost everyone’s account, even his own. If it weren’t for his obvious intelligence, his main skill might have seemed to be pissing people off. Years later, the CIA’s number three official, Jim Pavitt, had even encased a letter from Scheuer in Lucite and displayed it prominently on his desk. “Dear Jim,” the letter read. “I think you suck.” Pavitt liked to tell people that Scheuer was “the only person at this place who ever had the balls to talk to me like that. Seeing it every day keeps me grounded.”5

  Scheuer liked to say that he needed to talk that way for anyone in upper management to actually pay attention to him.

  For his part, Scheuer thought the agency—and Pavitt, for that matter—was mainly hampered by its stupidity. There were only a handful of people in the United States government outside of the New York JTTF’s counterterrorism squads who thought radical Islam represented a genuine threat to the country—Richard Clarke, the White House’s top counterterrorism adviser, and Scheuer chief among them. Both men had a difficult time getting anyone else to take them or their concerns seriously. In fact, as many thought the two were unhinged as treated them seriously. Terrorism was out of fashion.

  The CIA in many ways was crippled by its failures, just as the FBI was crippled by its successes. The FBI may have been moribund, caught up in its own history, unable to see beyond its walls to the larger world in which it was working. Local cops would often deride the Bureau, saying the only thing it was really any good at was catching bank robbers, although it wasn’t hard to find cops who questioned even that. The Bureau’s activities were aimed at handcuffing ordinary criminals, people who broke the law for profit or for personal pride. They had little experience with radical Islamic fundamentalists, who broke the law because they believed God wanted them to. As such, the Bureau’s habit of paying people to inform against their criminal colleagues just didn’t work.

  Whereas the FBI wanted to just keep repeating the things at which it had succeeded, the CIA was scared to death to do so. Its appetite for victory had been curbed by revelations of its past participation in coups and assassinations, and the agency’s resources had been cut back substantially. Stations were closed around the globe, agents dismissed, and the double agents they had recruited left out in the cold. “Risk” had become a dirty word. Field agents complained that bureaucratic kudzu had crawled through the place and strangled it from the top down.

  The bin Laden station was intended as a pilot project to break the stranglehold. It would be an actual CIA “station,” with case officers who actually did things, working just next door to the agency’s sprawling campus in Langley, Virginia. Nothing like that had even been contemplated before, and it created a lot of jealousy and sniping.

  Scheuer would start with a tiny staff—fewer than a dozen agents—but he wanted to bite off huge portions of the terrorist portfolio. He was to have responsibility, of course, for bin Laden, but he was also intrigued by Basit and what had happened in New York City and Manila. He wanted Mohammed and Khalifa under his purview as well. He was already looking hard at them in his current position at the CIA’s Islamic Extremist Branch. He warned his superiors that the analysts with the most experience covering KSM were going with him to the new organization; there would be no one left behind familiar with the case.

  Before transferring to the new organization, he formally proposed taking responsibility for both Mohammed and Khalifa, but was not given initial approval to do so. Afraid of what could happen—that is, afraid that KSM would somehow get lost in the bureaucratic clutter—he continued tracking Mohammed, even delaying the move to his new job for months.

  When Mohammed went to ground in the latter months of 1995, “once his trail went cold,” Scheuer moved to the new operation. And in the meantime, the man who would be replacing him complained that Scheuer was trying to take too much of the best work. Scheur appealed but lost.

  “So, typically, they chose the worst solution. They cut the baby in half,” Scheuer said. “I got Khalifa, he got KSM. And I don’t remember reading a single intel report from the field about where he was [after that], what he was up to, or who he was with.”6

  Federal Plaza, New York City, Autumn 1995

  Pellegrino’s hunt for information about KSM, which had been going on for almost two full years, was wearing other people out, especially since they didn’t think there’d be any huge payoff if they ever actually found the guy. International terrorism had fallen back off the radar of those who mattered in the Bureau and, more important, off the radar of those above them in Washington. The World Trade Center attack seemed aberrant, an isolated event without meaning beyond its immediate victims and circumstances. In an era of tightening budgets, and as vivid memories of the experience faded, it was not something to which a lot of resources would be devoted.

  The lack of fanfare—and any obvious career payoff—was also making it difficult to keep other investigators interested in the case. Pellegrino had already worn out another potential partner who was tired of all the travel. Lots of agents felt the same way, and a few passed on partnering up on such a grueling assignment. The FBI was a domestic agency, after all.

  Still, Pellegrino needed help. He wondered about this veteran Port Authority cop, Besheer, who had accompanied Yousef on the helicopter ride. Besheer had more or less assigned himself to the JTTF. He had come over to the Trade Center the day the North Tower had been bombed and never returned to his office. While terrorism seemed a backwater to many, to Besheer it was the most important work he could do. He was raised Catholic but he was also Arab American—half Lebanese, half Syrian—and felt he somehow owed his country this service. He even learned a few words of Arabic from his father, a tailor, and from his mother, a seamstress in the family’s tiny shop just a few dozen blocks from the Twin Towers.

  After years as a beat cop, he had been promoted to detective and in 1992 had been assigned to do a study on security at the World Trade Center. His report stated, presciently—but fruitlessly, it turned out—that the Trade Center garage was vulnerable to truck bombs. The report was largely ignored until the day of the attack. Besheer was sent over to the crime scene, and for the next year he did whatever was asked of him. Even with high security clearance, he ended up digging through stacks of parking tickets, any record that somebody wanted chased. It was pure grunt work. He did it all tirelessly and without complaint.

  Pellegrino appreciated Besheer’s attitude. He appreciated something else as well. Pellegrino had a mischievous sense of humor and a high-pitched cackle that erupted easily and often, so he took note when Besheer assumed the role of office cutup. Besheer played practical jokes on colleagues, in one case wiring a flashbulb so that it would go off when another agent opened his desk. He and Pellegrino put a piece of fish underneath another agent’s car’s backseat. The guy would show up at the offi
ce smelling like rotten fish and have no idea why. Given the stress and grimness of the job, Besheer’s antics were a welcome relief. They also bonded over being 5 foot 8, shorter than most agents.

  Pellegrino and Besheer had worked together the prior fall on an unrelated case—a shopping mall bomb plot in suburban New York—and had gotten on well. Pellegrino was impressed by Besheer’s experience as a beat cop and also by his fearlessness; by then the detective had been stabbed and assaulted and had suffered other indignities while working some of the toughest beats within Port Authority, like the squalid bus terminals. He was also drawn to “Matty” Besheer’s standing as a sort of outsider, not one of those out to win a popularity contest. He had taken to calling him Bash, in recognition of the fact that the tough Port Authority cop from Brooklyn always had a much more aggressive way of getting things done than FBI agents like Pellegrino were allowed to have. One morning, after participating in the prominent arrest of one of the first World Trade Center bombers, Besheer came to work to find a copy of the front page of a New York newspaper on his desk. The paper featured a photo of Besheer leading a handcuffed suspect on a perp walk to the detention facility. Besheer appears serious in the photo. A colleague who occasionally joshed with him about his allegedly divided loyalties, given his Arab American heritage, had attached a Post-it note saying, “Matt, why the long face? Was he a relation?”

  Not long after getting the first news out of Manila, Pellegrino asked Besheer to step out of the office for a minute. The task force quarters were wide open, a bullpen, and it was hard to have any privacy there. Out in the narrow hallway, Pellegrino leaned against one wall. Besheer leaned against the other. If you cared to look, there was a gorgeous view of the city out the window at the end of the narrow corridor.

  Pellegrino told Besheer they had an international target they needed to chase. Did Besheer want to go along? It would require huge amounts of time on the road, maybe in uncomfortable circumstances.

  Absolutely, Besheer immediately said. Count me in.

  Shouldn’t you check with your bosses at Port Authority? Pellegrino asked.

  Count me in, Besheer said.

  It was a leap of faith, as Besheer actually did need permission. But he had watched Pellegrino at work over the previous two years, and in a squad room mostly full of good, but not necessarily the most ambitious, guys he stood out. Besheer thought the JTTF generally had a robust collection of talent, not all of it being put to the best use. Pellegrino was the real deal, he thought. Everybody by and large wore what might as well have been FBI-issued dark suits. Their desks were perpetually clean. Pellegrino’s desk was a mess. By outward appearances, so was he. He looked rumpled. His hair was long, at least by FBI standards. He wore T-shirts and jeans and comfortable shoes made for walking the streets for hours. He was always busy, always late, always in a hurry. Sometimes he’d forget things, as if there were too much in his head to find it all on command.

  Besheer, ten years Pellegrino’s senior, saw a younger version of himself, a striver, a dirt dog, a relentless son of a bitch. “You could see that look in his eyes, that nothing would stop him,” Besheer said.

  Besheer eagerly signed up for the hunt. If this guy is going, he thought, I’ll be happy to go with him. Maybe even protect him; free him up to do his free-association analytical work.

  They first had to pitch Herman, the supervisor. And when some within the FBI and DOJ balked at promoting Besheer because of his “lowly” Port Authority background, Pellegrino appealed to Mary Jo White, who, as the U.S. attorney for the Southern District, was the JTTF’s de facto overseer. White could be intimidating when she chose to be, despite her diminutive size. It helped that she was personal friends with FBI director Louis Freeh and attorney general Janet Reno.

  Pellegrino pitched her on the importance of continuing the investigation. First, they needed to find Wali Khan, he said. We can make a case against him for the movie theater bomb, if nothing else. White “got” terrorism, and said sure—bring Besheer aboard and go for it. But she reminded Pellegrino they hadn’t yet gotten enough evidence from Manila to indict Khan. “Make time, make grand jury time, and indict him,” she said. “And then get your ass to the Philippines and find some goddamn evidence.”

  Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, 1995

  Mohammed, meanwhile, was apparently not concerned about being tracked by anyone. He kept up what had become a peripatetic lifestyle, traveling the globe. He sometimes used fake papers in his travels—they were widely available for a pittance. In Pakistan in particular, a cottage industry in identity papers had developed during the anti-Soviet war to serve mujahideen who preferred to have the paper record of their participation in the jihad obscured. Like much else that was initiated during the war—the training camps, the calls to jihad, the intermingling of the Pakistani intelligence establishment with various jihadi groups, the ISI’s involvement in the opium trade—the document industry continued unabated long after the war had ended. Mohammed took advantage of this when needed. He used more than two dozen aliases.

  In the summer, Mohammed traveled to Malaysia from Qatar, via Sudan and Yemen, to meet with Khan, who had settled in Malaysia after escaping from the Philippines. On the same trip he met with Hambali and Hambali’s colleagues in their regional militant organization, Jemaah Islamiyah.

  Building JI was a remarkable achievement accomplished in very little time. Hambali and his Chinese wife, Noralwizah Lee Abdullah, had moved in 1991 from his native Indonesia into a tiny wooden shack in a migrant quarter of a small village, Sungai Manggis, south of Kuala Lumpur. Sungai Manggis was just minutes from the western Malaysian coast, and from there an hour by boat across the Strait of Malacca to Indonesia. It was a well-traveled path for poor Indonesians who came to Malaysia for work.

  When they arrived, Hambali and his wife carried a single bag each. They cooked, ate, and slept on the floor. Five years later, Hambali commanded a network. He did it by sheer hard work. He started out doing odd jobs in the village. Soon, he began showing up outside the gold-domed mosque on the southern edge of the nearby market town of Banting, selling kebabs out of a trishaw.

  Hambali switched from kebabs to patent medicines and began traveling—on business, he said—disappearing for weeks at a time. At home, he received what became a steady stream of visitors. They spoke English and Arabic and sometimes carried shopping bags from duty-free shops.

  Hambali prospered. Soon he was driving a red Proton hatchback and juggling calls on a pair of cell phones. Many of those calls, investigators later determined, were made to Mohammed Jamal Khalifa in Manila.

  Hambali had eluded detection altogether when the Manila Air plot unraveled. He had remained in his little hut along Manggis River Village Road, an unlikely place from which to command anything, about as far off the beaten path of world affairs as one could get. Yet Hambali sat in his tiny Malaysian village and meticulously planned, then patiently built, Jemaah Islamiyah into an extraordinarily disciplined network. It had more structure than anything bin Laden ever attempted, with strict geographic sectors that covered all of Southeast Asia, an organizational chart in each of the sectors, and command tables delineating clear lines of authority and responsibility up and down. Unlike Arab terror organizations, which tended to be haphazard and ad hoc, Jemaah Islamiyah was strictly regimented. Its regional commanders held regular meetings and assessed monthly taxes on members.

  Hambali gathered money and men. He recruited a diverse group—small-time traders, artisans, and factory workers, but also engineers, businessmen, middle managers, and university lecturers. They found Hambali a man of tremendous, if quiet, charisma. “He was such an unassuming person,” said Mohamad Sobri, a former soldier in the Malaysian army who became one of Hambali’s followers.7

  Hambali made a regular circuit of small prayer groups to promote a goal—uniting Southeast Asia’s Muslims into a single, powerful Islamic force. With nearly three hundred million Muslims throughout the region, it would be by far the biggest Isla
mic nation on earth. At the end of every session, followers passed a hat around the room and put in whatever small amounts of money they could spare. Hambali’s network had also helped Basit, who was at the time among the most wanted men on earth, enter the Philippines surreptitiously by the well-worn smuggling route through the southern islands. The back door, they called it.

  As was often the case, Mohammed met with Hambali not to serve some specific purpose but rather to build and maintain his own evolving network. Why he thought he needed connections to a terror network in Southeast Asia was known only to him.

  As often as he traveled under an alias, Mohammed traveled freely under his own name. In the fall he moved back to Bosnia to work for an NGO, the Egyptian Humanitarian Relief Agency, in support of Bosnian Muslims in their war against the Serbs. Not only did Mohammed travel under his own name, he registered with the government as Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, an engineer. The Sarajevo police department and state security service had his address, 11 Bjelave Street, in downtown Sarajevo. It was even mentioned in the report of a state security agency that worked closely with U.S. authorities.8 If KSM was hiding, he was strangely conspicuous about it.

  The CIA was crawling all over these NGOs because so many of them were used as fronts to shovel millions of dollars to mujahideen organizations. Some of those funds even came from the U.S. government, which was anxious to stop the war and the campaign of “ethnic cleansing” against Muslims. A contemporaneous CIA report named the organization that Mohammed worked for as one affiliated with international terror.9 The report alleged that high-ranking government officials in Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, and Pakistan were bankrolling the terror fronts. The Pakistani ISI was said to be training some of them. Once again, the Americans were looking right at Mohammed, but it was as if he wore a cloak of invisibility. He was there, they were examining the very organization he was working with, but they did not see him or ignored him if they did. Investigators later came to suspect that Mohammed helped build a bomb that was used to blow up a police station in neighboring Croatia. At the time, KSM wasn’t thinking much about charitable giving. “Most, if not all, of this travel appears to have been related to his abiding interest in carrying out terrorist operations,” the 9/11 Commission would later say about KSM’s travels and activities during this time, some of it funded by Abdullah bin Khalid al-Thani, the member of the Qatari ruling family who invited him to stay in Qatar and arranged for his government job.10 In retrospect, it seems clear that Mohammed was assembling bits and pieces of a new kind of international organization—one that was ad hoc almost by definition but one in which the individual pieces would be available to him upon request.