The Hunt for KSM

by Terry McDermott

  When the two were in New York for an extended period, they made it a habit to get to the office at 6:30 in the morning, far earlier than anyone else. They were on Southeast Asia time. But they’d still be there when the others filed out for the night. They were both music fans, and Pellegrino had a boom box and stacks of CDs on his desk. They’d be sitting there at their desks, writing reports, bouncing up and down in their office chairs to the rhythm of whatever the stereo was blasting out into their headphones. Their tastes differed considerably—Pellegrino liked the popular, literate singer-songwriters of the day like Jewel and Alanis Morissette, while Besheer favored old soul groups like the Platters. But mainly they loved listening. In the early evenings, O’Neill would wander through the squad room, fresh off the cover of GQ, with slicked-back hair, shiny shoes, and silk socks, en route to the glamour life way, way uptown. He never said anything at times like that, but he cocked his head and looked at the two agents quizzically, as if he were a biologist trying to determine what species they were. Then he’d shake his head, smile grimly, and walk on through.

  O’Neill became an effective advocate for devoting Bureau attention and resources to Islamist fundamentalism. He argued loudly for investigations into radical jihadi networks—except this one. It was too expensive, he would tell people, and there was very little left to discover. The chief culprits were already behind bars, he argued. Plus, he thought Pellegrino was a cowboy, too used to doing things his own way. JTTF head Neil Herman had been a fierce protector of the two agents. When he left, O’Neill assigned a new supervisor to Pellegrino in what many in the Bureau thought was a conscious effort to rein him in. She was a tough and ornery woman who was a stickler for details and chain of command, which weren’t Pellegrino specialties. O’Neill and Pellegrino had screaming matches, at times in the office but also on the phone when Pellegrino was overseas. In one particularly heated exchange, Pellegrino accused O’Neill of leaking classified information about efforts to turn Wali Khan into a government informant—including placing his family in some form of witness protection—to a TV reporter friend of his. Pellegrino believed this compromised their efforts to catch KSM and the other outstanding Manila suspects. O’Neill was particularly galled whenever he found out Pellegrino was traveling overseas with assistant U.S. attorneys. O’Neill wanted to control his agents. He didn’t want the U.S. attorney’s office running his show, and he hated the fact that Pellegrino went to Mary Jo White and her prosecutors for support when he needed it.

  At every turn, however, Mary Jo White fought off O’Neill. He was outgunned, and he knew it. Once, in 1999, he was watching the breaking news of the Columbine High School massacre on TV and Pellegrino—always looking for a good opportunity to needle him—sidled up to O’Neill and told him he’d heard that White was angling to bring the Columbine case to New York—a joking reference to the U.S. attorney’s well-known proclivity for snatching high-profile cases. “Well, as you know, Frank,” O’Neill replied, “what Mary Jo wants, Mary Jo gets.” White, for the time being, at least, had the power on her side, and she triumphed in these little intramural battles. She liked her cowboys.

  White was so enamored of Pellegrino and Besheer, in fact, that she nominated them for the highest honor the Justice Department can give, the Exceptional Service Award, and on June 13, 1997, the two beaming agents, as well as prosecutors Michael Garcia and Dieter Snell, were personally congratulated by attorney general Janet Reno at a ceremony in Washington, and handed massive glass statuettes. Pellegrino even wore a suit for the occasion.

  Thanks in large part to that quartet of agents and prosecutors, the New York JTTF and U.S. attorney’s office had become the center of the U.S. government’s counterterrorism universe. But it was an unwieldy effort, rife with competing squads, units, and sections, often run by men with large egos, grand ambitions, and, at times, grudges. Some of the teams were tagged as counterterrorism, others foreign counterintelligence, and still others criminal—divisions that institutionally inhibited communication and cooperation. The squads didn’t always play well with each other, or, especially, with FBI headquarters, which significantly deepened an already growing rift between O’Neill and FBI director Louis Freeh’s inner circle. Neil Herman was one of the few who had been there at the creation of the JTTF in 1980. Every time there was a terrorism event, they’d form another squad and it became more unmanageable. “We started out as two squads and twenty people and when I left there were eight or nine squads and several hundred people. It became very convoluted,” he said. “You were all over the map.” As a result, Herman said, even within the FBI, “you were fighting different entities. But no one knew the big picture. That was the failing of the government.”

  Years later, Herman said he had always been haunted by something. Basit had mentioned that he was part of a broader network. But by the late 1990s, that “network” had officially become a cold case. “Some people in higher positions than us didn’t think he was important,” Herman said of KSM.

  Herman and many of the other New York FBI counterterrorism veterans had retired or moved on to other things by then. Pellegrino and Besheer continued to travel—to more than thirty countries—but White’s protection became harder to sustain. O’Neill began riding Pellegrino ever harder, second-guessing him and even moving to have the FBI’s ethics police investigate him for what he claimed was an obscure procedural impropriety. Such investigations could derail a career even if no wrongdoing was ever found. Once again, White stepped in to protect Pellegrino.

  Pellegrino made a special effort to learn everything he could about KSM’s sprawling network of family and clan. He asked local governments, especially the Pakistanis, to assist in keeping tabs on family members who were suspected of helping KSM. He was sure that Mohammed would eventually turn to his family for more assistance, and when he did he would be vulnerable. But as had been the case in the past, Islamabad wasn’t eager to help.

  For nearly two years, Pellegrino and Besheer’s pursuit of KSM had been secret because of the decision to keep his indictment sealed. Its unsealing in January of 1998 finally allowed them to publicize his role in the various plots, and the State Department to issue a $2 million reward for him. The next month, however, bin Laden issued his fatwa declaring war on America.

  That August, simultaneous truck bombings shattered the U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania. By then, O’Neill’s obsession with bin Laden, or UBL, as the FBI called him, was complete. The way he saw it, bin Laden was the target and you were either with O’Neill in recognizing that or against him. That mind-set turned out to be dangerously myopic, not because of what O’Neill and the FBI were pursuing, but because of what they weren’t. As Herman recalls, “There was a whole network out there, and we knew it was out there but we didn’t know what it was… that it was that big and dangerous, or who besides UBL was in charge.”

  CHAPTER 9

  The Plot

  Kandahar, Afghanistan, Spring 1999

  By late 1998, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed’s interest in working with bin Laden was revived by the spectacular attacks on the two U.S. embassies in Africa, which had killed at least 224 people and injured hundreds more. He knew, finally, of the seriousness of bin Laden’s intentions. KSM had returned to eastern Afghanistan and was working for his old sponsor from the Soviet jihad, Abdul Rasul Sayyaf. How the CIA came by the knowledge is unclear, but the CIA was aware of KSM’s presence with Sayyaf, their old ally from the Soviet war, and prepared an internal report noting it.1 The FBI knew of the CIA report. No one apparently did anything.

  Bin Laden had probably been right about KSM’s plan to hijack airliners off both coasts at once. It was too complicated. He called KSM back to Kandahar in early 1999 to tell him he had thought more about the proposal and liked its basic premise—to use airliners as weapons against significant American targets. They agreed to slim the plan down, perhaps four or five planes in the United States, more in Southeast Asia if that could be arranged.2 Bin Laden asked Mohammed to joi
n his organization, to swear bay’at—an oath of loyalty. Mohammed demurred. He preferred to keep his independence in case bin Laden changed his mind and decided against pursuing his plan. In that case, Mohammed would find another sponsor and proceed apace.

  The essence of the plot was distinguished by its simplicity. It required pilots and teams of men able to overwhelm defenseless air crews. It required money and the ability to move it around the globe. And it required men willing to give their lives. As it happened, there were more than enough people willing to die.

  Upon approving the plan and pledging to fund it, bin Laden assigned four men to KSM—two Yemenis and two Saudis, all of whom were experienced jihadis. They were good men and would be the pilots, bin Laden said.

  KSM took the men to his apartment in Karachi, his main residence since fleeing Qatar, and gave them basic instructions in how to navigate in America. He gave them English-language phrase books, and showed them how to use Internet chat rooms and American telephone books he picked up in a Karachi flea market.

  The two Saudis, Nawaf al-Hazmi and Khalid al-Mihdhar, already had travel visas to the United States. They had thought to get them in case they were lucky enough to be chosen to attack the Americans. The Yemenis, Walid bin Attash, also known as Khallad, and Abu Bara al-Yemeni, applied but were denied U.S. visas. This became one of the recurrent difficulties in KSM’s plot—the ability to get willing men into the United States. The Americans didn’t ordinarily reject visa applicants because they thought they might be terrorists. In fact, they had a history of admitting known terrorists. But they did reject applicants who were regarded as potential economic migrants. This included almost everyone from Yemen.

  Just as KSM was learning of this potential difficulty, four young men from Hamburg, Germany, arrived at one of bin Laden’s Afghan camps. The men—an Egyptian, an Emirati, a Yemeni, and a Lebanese—were university students and had been in Germany for years. They had been eager to travel to Chechnya to fight on behalf of their beleaguered Muslim brothers there and had been told that the best way to Chechnya was through the Afghan camps.

  A key challenge for bin Laden’s organization over time had been the ability to sort out its varied volunteers. Some were nothing more than joyriders, kids looking for an adventure during a summer vacation. Others were troubled misfits who could find no other place to belong. These men from Germany, however, were nearly perfect Al Qaeda candidates. They already lived in the West. They had no criminal records and had done nothing to arouse suspicion. They spoke languages other than Arabic. They wanted nothing but to do right by God. They had not come to their decisions rashly. Indeed, they had spoken with one another about this for years: What should a man do? What is his responsibility as a good Muslim to those who suffer for their faith?

  They had answered those questions by presenting themselves for battle. They saw themselves as soldiers and were willing to fight. The men were quickly introduced to bin Laden and asked if they would volunteer for martyrdom missions. Would they be shahids? Would they die for their faith? To a man, they said yes.

  They must have seemed to bin Laden like gifts from Allah himself.

  They had conveniently arrived in Afghanistan at precisely the time Al Qaeda needed men who could train to become pilots. They would become pilots.

  They were given rudimentary physical training in the camps, then sent south to Mohammed in Karachi for his crash course on being American—an idea that any one of Mohammed’s college classmates would have laughed at uproariously. Mohammed passed his three years in America doing his very best to keep himself separate from Americans.

  The idea that using the Yellow Pages was a necessary American skill was curious, too, but Al Qaeda in many ways was a fundamentally unsophisticated organization. Its leaders knew little of the West and understood less. Their complaints about it were often ill conceived or recondite. No wonder American intelligence officials regarded the organization as more nuisance than threat. Its members must have seemed naive, which of course they were. They had a very simple idea and would cling to it no matter what. America was bad, and it would suffer just punishment. To a significant degree, Al Qaeda’s greatest strength was its simplicity—in ideas, in infrastructure, even in numbers. It was too small to threaten America.

  The men from Hamburg were more sophisticated than the usual recruits, but only just. They had been in the West for years, but had barely adapted. They, too, had held themselves apart.

  The four were dissimilar. The oldest, and the putative leader of the group, was the Egyptian, Mohammed el-Amir Atta, Amir to his friends. Atta was a finicky, dour man whose chief attributes were obedience and an extraordinary affinity for detail. He held a part-time job as a draftsman at an urban-planning firm in Hamburg, where he reproduced city plans precisely; his boss later described him as “a drawing slave.”3

  Ramzi bin al-Shibh, the Yemeni, was in personality nearly Atta’s opposite. Where Atta was the dutiful striver, bin al-Shibh was an affable layabout who rarely held a job for more than a few weeks and found university study not worth his effort. A friend in Hamburg said Atta was impossible to like, but bin al-Shibh had charm to spare. “Omar,” he said, using bin al-Shibh’s nickname, “was cool.”

  Ziad Jarrah was the most worldly of the four, having grown up in cosmopolitan Beirut. He attended Christian schools and enjoyed the Beiruti birthright of good times. He had been in Hamburg for less time, having spent his first year in Germany in Greifswald, a small town in the east. He was also different in that he was in a serious relationship with a woman, a German citizen of Turkish descent.

  Marwan al-Shehhi was from Ras al-Khaimah, one of the least wealthy of the United Arab Emirates. He had the deepest Islamic education of the four. His father had been the muezzin for the local mosque and Shehhi was often his companion at the prayer call, sometimes his substitute. He had a ready, easy, relaxed knowledge of his religion. Martyrdom seemed not a burden to him, but a glorious end.

  When the men were sent to Mohammed in Karachi for introductions and a basic outline of the plot, he told them they were to become pilots. He introduced them to flight simulation games and software. They then left for the return trip to Germany, although Shehhi had become ill and returned briefly to the Emirates. Once back in Hamburg, they began searching for flight schools and quickly determined that those in the United States were the cheapest. They applied to the schools and requested the visas that would allow them to attend. All were routinely granted the visas except for bin al-Shibh, who, like his fellow Yemenis, was rejected for economic reasons.

  Bin al-Shibh applied repeatedly for a visa, but eventually acknowledged it wasn’t going to happen. Instead, KSM designated him to be his the go-between—the cutout—with the hijackers. This insulated Mohammed from both the bother and security risk of direct communications. The other three men went to Florida in the summer of 2000. Bin al-Shibh returned to Germany.

  Mohammed split his time between Karachi and Afghanistan. He delegated decisions on the details of the plot—which flights, what day, the makeup of the hit teams—to Atta, who communicated his decisions to bin al-Shibh, mainly through coded e-mail exchanges and Internet chat rooms. Bin al-Shibh then relayed the information to Mohammed. While the pilots were being trained, Mohammed continued searching for men to join them in the United States. By far the biggest difficulty was finding volunteers who could legally enter the United States. In two years of searching, which went on almost to the very end, Mohammed was able to insert just nineteen men into the plot. He recruited more than a dozen others. Some backed out, others couldn’t get visas. One man, Mohammed al-Qahtani, made it all the way to the customs gate at Orlando International Airport. Mohammed Atta waited outside the terminal for Qahtani to come out, but Qahtani was rebuffed largely because he had no return ticket and did not carry what was deemed enough cash to survive for long in the United States. He also provided no good answer as to whom he was meeting, and a suspicious immigration official sent him back to Saudi Ara
bia on the first available flight. KSM himself obtained a visa using another name, but there is no record he ever tried to use it. He ordered his nephew Ali Abdul Aziz Ali to apply as well, but his application was declined. Most of those who were able to successfully join the plot were Saudis who, like the pilots, had gone to Afghanistan to volunteer and who carried passports that allowed them easy access to the U.S.

  Bin Laden urged Mohammed several times during the plot’s preparation to hurry the attacks. Mohammed would not be rushed. He regarded bin Laden as meddlesome and not particularly thoughtful. He blamed bin Laden for some of the choices the Al Qaeda leader had made in selecting the hijackers and wanted to boot at least one of them, Mihdhar, off the attack altogether.

  Mohammed waited until the summer of 2001, when Atta told him the attack teams were set; in the meantime, he insulated the hijackers from bin Laden’s impatience. He also allowed Atta to overrule bin Laden’s choice of the White House as the fourth target. Atta thought it too small and difficult to hit; he substituted the Capitol building, leaving the final list as the twin towers of the World Trade Center, the Pentagon, and the Capitol. KSM approved Atta’s decision to push back the plot even further, so that the fourth plane would hit the Capitol dome after lawmakers had returned from their summer recess.

  During the planning phase, Mohammed spent most of his time in Pakistan, remaining largely separate from the Al Qaeda leadership as he continued to organize other plots and local terror cells around the world. He recruited people he had known from the Afghan training camps to form small organizations in their areas.