The Hunt for KSM

by Terry McDermott

  Keenan had been a stockbroker before joining the Bureau, and spent her early years working on financial crime. She played a key role in a big health care fraud case, and as a reward was offered the chance to join the New York field office’s Al Qaeda squad—not her first choice. The embassy bombings had just occurred, and she spent much of the next year deployed to Africa investigating the bombings. When she returned, she took a desk just across a partition from Frank Pellegrino and Matt Besheer—Frankie and Matty, as she called them.

  She was amazed by their dedication, the sheer amount of work they did, the hours they worked, their creativity overseas in gathering evidence and intelligence—the fact that they brooked no bullshit from anybody. She made their habits her own. Plus, she loved the work. It was a secret world almost never glimpsed by outsiders, alluring and important. Besheer was so impressed by her commitment he gave her a windup toy—the Energizer Bunny. Keenan was relentless. She was also an adrenaline junkie who jumped at assignments other agents, even on the JTTF, avoided. When a job opened in the Bureau’s two-person Pakistan office, she applied, having been there to work sources in the past and liking it. She was relatively young, unencumbered by family, and already traveling so much—why not live overseas? She got the pager text from Pat D’Amuro while heli-skiing in British Columbia—you got the job, if you want it. Pakistan was the center of radical Islam, right next door to the headquarters of bin Laden’s network. Where better to be?

  Keenan’s deployment to Pakistan was a cause for celebration for her colleagues at the New York JTTF; they saw it as a solidification of their place at the center of the U.S. counterterrorism universe. At the raucous going-away party they threw for her, an FBI sketch artist drew her a custom T-shirt that showed her running after the Energizer Bunny that Besheer had given her—which by then had become her nickname. Underneath the sketch, it said: JENNIFER, PLEASE SLOW DOWN. And the Jennifer on the T-shirt was wearing her own T-shirt, which had Osama bin Laden’s likeness on it, over which was a red circle with an X drawn through it.

  Within a few years of joining the JTTF squad, Keenan was one of its most valued and well-traveled members. She was named a team leader on the USS Cole investigation in Yemen. She was often the only female FBI agent on such assignments, and the rare supervisor among them. Keenan quickly developed a reputation as a spitfire—very bright, hard-charging, and argumentative to a fault. She was virtually fearless. “She never hesitated to be the first one in the door. Tough as nails. No problem pulling the gun out, kicking in a door, taking someone down,” said one colleague from numerous overseas assignments. “I would go in any dangerous situation with her. I trust her in the ghetto or in the boardroom. Her ability to grasp a situation, to say this is what we’re going to do, what we should do… She is probably the best FBI agent we’ve ever had.”

  Keenan had put in for the Pakistan job because her constant travel overseas meant that an actual posting to a foreign assignment would allow her to be “at home” more, a luxury that might give her a life outside of work. For Keenan, that meant running, so she joined the Islamabad chapter of the Hash House Harriers, a hard-core physical fitness group that describes itself as “a drinking group with a running problem.” She cherished the late Sunday afternoon runs, but because Pakistan was so dangerous, she and the others—many of them security types from various embassies—weren’t even allowed to know that day’s running trail until they were actually running it. It was the only time the self-described control freak ever allowed herself to be at the mercy of someone else’s planning schedule. The rare opportunity to get out into the open air made it worthwhile, even if she had to run in long pants, so as not to violate local cultural standards—and run without her Glock semiautomatic, so as not to be weighed down.

  After the runs, the Harriers would head to someone’s house in the diplomatic quarters, usually the Australians’ or the Brits’, and they would drink beer and laugh and tell stories into the night.

  Soon after 9/11, though, the weekend runs became infrequent. The deteriorating security situation made it harder and harder to run the risk. By the spring of 2002, Keenan’s running was restricted mostly to the treadmill at the embassy gym.

  Keenan worked seven days a week, from dawn well past dusk, and she forged a wary bond with Grenier, the CIA station chief. They also shared a frustration with the Pakistani security agencies, which refused to do much to help them. FBI agents are not spies. They’re far closer to cops and they can’t do their jobs abroad without a minimum of cooperation from the host government. In Pakistan, Keenan wasn’t getting it. She submitted dozens of requests to the Pakistanis for information, guidance, records, assistance on even the most run-of-the-mill fugitives. They responded helpfully to almost none.

  Keenan occasionally took matters into her own hands. When it became apparent that Al Qaeda fighters routinely used a particular phone booth in Afghanistan, she asked the CIA to wire the location with sound and video. The CIA rejected the request out of hand. So Keenan did it on her own, producing a regular stream of intelligence.

  After 9/11—and after Armitage’s warning about the Stone Age—things changed. Keenan and Grenier were summoned to ISI headquarters along with the deputy CIA station chief and Chris Reimann, the FBI legal attaché. Reimann was Keenan’s boss, but given her long background in counterterrorism, he had deferred much of that portfolio to her.

  At the meeting, the high command of the ISI—technically a military intelligence agency—suddenly promised full cooperation with the Americans in their war against Al Qaeda. Keenan’s problem was that she really didn’t have anything she needed help with at the moment. The legal attachés don’t originate much work on their own. If someone in Washington wants to know about Mohammed Abdul Mohammed from Gulbai Colony in Sindh Province, the legats make the formal request in Islamabad. After the attacks, nobody in Washington knew what they wanted to know. Sometimes it seemed they didn’t even know their own names. Resources that might have been directed against Al Qaeda, resources that might have been devoted to hunting down those responsible for September 11, sat idle while Washington tried to determine what to do. So Keenan and Reimann began this new era of cooperation by recycling all the requests that hadn’t been acted upon for the last few years. Suddenly, it seemed, Islamabad knew quite a bit about the Mohammed Abdul Mohammeds of the world. Keenan called the requests from Washington screamers, a lot of noise and very little content.

  At that first meeting after 9/11, the Americans had been introduced to the man who would become their liaison. Colonel Tariq* was a seemingly mild-mannered army officer who, like other ISI officers, wore civilian clothes, usually a suit.

  Tariq was soft-spoken, very proper, and deliberate in speech. He spoke excellent English, and showed great patience toward his new American counterparts. What he lacked in stature—he was a wispy 5 feet 7 in his wingtips—he made up for in resolve.

  Oftentimes in those early months, Keenan and Grenier would arrange an urgent meeting with Tariq, who, once briefed, commonly responded: “You have handed me a grenade; what do you want me to do with it?”

  Keenan grew fond of Tariq, and the feeling seemed mutual. The two traveled frequently together, and Tariq helped to arrange raids. Even when it seemed odd that all the places they raided turned up empty, Keenan was sure it had little to do with Tariq, but perhaps everything to do with his superiors.

  For the most part, Keenan’s and Reimann’s efforts were tactical, not strategic: chasing one piece of information or one person after another. To a large extent, they knew they were just biding time, waiting for whatever would come next. They knew there would be an American military response, presumably a ferocious one. What that meant for Pakistan was unclear. Pakistanis once before, in 1979, had attacked the American embassy in fury. The FBI legats knew something was coming; they just didn’t know what. They quickly found out.

  Once the massive bombing raids started across the northern border in Afghanistan, the old requests were set a
side. Many of the militants fleeing Afghanistan were turned in to authorities, often for a bounty, and if they weren’t Pakistani, the authorities in Islamabad had little use for them. So they asked the Americans to take them off their hands. Most of those presented to the Americans were small fish, but were often dangerous enough to require doing something with them.

  Donald Borelli, an FBI agent specializing in weapons of mass destruction investigations out of the Dallas, Texas, field office, deployed to Islamabad in December. He was single and looking for adventure. He was thrown into Al Qaeda interdiction. Almost as soon as he arrived, the Pakistanis reported capturing a bunch of fighters at the border and were bringing them to Islamabad for processing. But the bus carrying the prisoners overturned, and everyone escaped. The Pakistanis flooded the area with troops and recaptured most of the men. Borelli rushed to Peshawar and worked his way through the captives, identifying, fingerprinting, and interviewing them. He then returned to Islamabad and the same cycle repeated itself—absent the bus crashes—over and over. At times the Islamabad FBI agents felt like they were being overrun with fugitives, but from them they began getting information on potential Al Qaeda targets.

  They soon began raids on these targets throughout the country. Most raids were led by a single CIA agent, an FBI agent if one was available (and when the CIA allowed it), and an ISI agent. Local police and army forces provided more manpower as needed. The Pakistani involvement was primarily at the point of attack. The U.S. provided almost all the intelligence, the Pakistanis the manpower, and the FBI the crime-scene exploitation—“bagging and tagging” the evidence. There was a raid almost every night.

  In a usual crime scene in the U.S., investigators might spend a full day or two combing a site for evidence. In Pakistan, the locations were called Sensitive Site Exploitations and the time spent was usually an hour or less. Agents sprinted through safe houses collecting computers, cell phones, passports, whatever they could grab. They’d haul everything back to Islamabad, record it, and ship it back to the United States.

  Keenan was meticulous about photographing and cataloging the evidence. The CIA never really understood this. They wanted to get whatever information they could, then move on to the next target. Keenan wanted to prepare for an eventual trial, and to build a database so she could begin to craft a mosaic out of all the disparate pieces of information.

  By January, the intel was flowing in—through detainees at Guantánamo, other human intelligence, and high-tech intercepts. Even so, difficulties persisted. At one raid, as was the protocol, the Pakistani security forces went inside while Keenan and other Americans, all dressed in local shalwar kameez, idled outside. The lead Pakistani investigator returned and told Keenan the man they were looking for was not present. She was suspicious. Are you sure? she asked. He was sure. This had become such a frequent scenario that Keenan was expecting it, and was prepared. She pulled out a digital camera and asked the Pakistani officer if he would go take a photograph of the man inside. The Pakistani did as asked and when he returned, she pulled a photo out of her pocket and lined it up side by side with the photo on the camera. It was a perfect match. The Pakistani, either furious at being deceived, embarrassed at being caught protecting a local suspect, or both, went back inside and berated the man, then cuffed him and dragged him outside.

  The next day Keenan ordered a bunch of digital cameras and ensured that they were taken on every raid. It was a breakthrough, one of several small victories that helped bring the Pakistani police into the fold. She also bought a scanner and began systematically cataloging every picture of every militant caught and every passport and document seized. This enabled her to begin building her database of bad guys—just as the FBI used to do with the Mafia. By late January, the Pakistanis and the Americans knew their roles and how to fulfill them. The raids became not just routine, but effective—as long as some elements of the all-powerful ISI were kept out of the loop. Their loyalties to the jihadis ran too deep.

  The Americans grew reluctant to even brief the Pakistanis ahead of the raids. They’d tell them in the most general possible terms where the raid would be and what was the target—a grocery or a warehouse or whatever.

  Grenier already knew that parts of Pakistan’s government had deep relationships with local jihadi groups, and he was finding out firsthand how these groups formed part of the infrastructure Al Qaeda fighters used to escape into Pakistan and beyond. He couldn’t tell if that infrastructure included the ISI or not, but there were indications that it did, and that made him wary.

  The American agents were summoned time after time to process the many fleeing fighters caught at the border and elsewhere. After initial vetting on the ground, the captives—often veteran fighters fleeing Afghanistan—were loaded onto military aircraft and flown back to Afghanistan, to Bagram Airfield, where a huge holding facility was built. In some cases, they were taken to Guantánamo Bay naval base, where the U.S. government had created a makeshift detention center. Pakistan was happy to have any Arabs caught in the web shipped off, but vehemently refused to arrest Pakistani citizens, even when the Americans identified them as Al Qaeda. They resisted, in part, because they were afraid the captured men would reveal their ties to the ISI. One real effect of this was that it hindered the hunt for those who had planned and led the September 11 attacks. The investigators didn’t know it yet, as the traditional thinking was that Al Qaeda comprised mostly Arabs, but at least some key players, including KSM and his family, were Pakistanis.

  While the CIA bulked up its local forces with recent retirees called back to service—so-called green badgers, named for the color of the identity badges they were given—the FBI supplemented its staff with temporary assignments from its permanent force. Other agencies that were part of some of the bigger JTTFs in the States did the same. Tom McHale, a grizzled Port Authority detective assigned to the Newark JTTF, was one of the guys who arrived in Islamabad in mid-January and stayed for two months.

  McHale was lucky to be alive. He had been severely injured while helping to rescue victims of the first World Trade Center attack, searing his lungs so badly he was hospitalized for three weeks. He happened to be just blocks from the Trade Center again in 2001 when the attacks occurred. He plunged inside once more to help rescue the injured, was himself severely injured again, but persevered. A former steelworker, he had spent many weeks working nights on the pile, helping cut through the wreckage to look for bodies, before reporting for a day’s work on the JTTF.

  Thirty-seven of his friends and colleagues in the Port Authority died in the Trade Center attacks. One of them, Donald McIntyre, perished trying to rescue others from inside the towers. The only son of a New York City cop, the much-decorated McIntyre was last seen on the thirty-second floor of the South Tower, climbing, hoping to find his cousin’s husband, a stockbroker. McIntyre was just thirty-nine. He had been stocking up on time off so he could take paternity leave in December, when he and his wife were expecting their third child. His handcuffs, with MAC theatrically engraved on them, had been found in the smoking rubble. When McHale heard about the cuffs, he asked if he could take them with him to Pakistan. McIntyre’s wife was honored to oblige—as long, she said, as he put the cuffs to work.

  He did more than that. McHale arrived in Islamabad just as the raids were being ramped up. The Americans and the Pakistanis had not yet quite figured out what to think of one another. McHale was a big, bluff man, an emotional, powerful presence with a Marine buzz cut and a mischievous grin. He came to embrace Pakistan enthusiastically, careening around in an ill-fitting shalwar and guzzling the strong instant coffee they fondly called paste. He had told the Pakistanis about Mac and the new baby girl he never got to see, and said that whatever else happened in a raid, he wanted to come in and slap Mac’s cuffs on the worst of the bad guys. He showed them photos of McIntyre’s newborn, Lauren. “You could see it in their eyes—the compassion, the respect, the anger,” one of the American investigators said of the Pakistanis. �
�Once I showed them the photos, it was like they knew Mac, too. After that, it was personal.”

  Soon, the Pakistanis wanted to touch the handcuffs for luck. And after a while, they began to regard them as a talisman. They would gather just before a raid and, in unison, place their hands on the cuffs in a circle, like members of a basketball team touching hands before the opening jump. “This is for Mac,” they would say. Then they would raise their weapons and kick the door in. These were different security officials from the ones the FBI and CIA had grown to mistrust. Most of them belonged to a different part of the ISI, the one charged with protecting domestic security. Even so, the protocol for raids had been for the Pakistanis to go in first and for the Americans to wait outside to be summoned, sometimes hours later. Some Americans suspected the Pakistanis wanted to vet the people inside, to make sure none of them were linked to the ISI’s “external operations” division, which handled the militant groups. After McHale arrived, the Pakistanis began to insist that he and the handcuffs lead the charge. It marked a significant improvement—not only in American-Pakistani relations but in the Americans’ ability to really see what was behind all those closed doors.

  On a broader level, relationships between the Americans and Pakistanis remained strained, neither side completely trusting the other. But Keenan, too, helped build camaraderie over time, in some ways unexpectedly. The Pakistanis admired her bravery and indefatigability, and her willingness to go on even the most dangerous of raids. But she also had a secret weapon. The men respected Keenan, but when their wives found out about this American woman running around Pakistan taking down criminals, they insisted on meeting her. After that, the men never dared come home if they couldn’t assure their wives that “Miss Jenny” was safe.

  McHale, known as Mr. Tom to the Pakistanis, became nearly inseparable from Colonel Tariq. A decorated war hero, Tariq was said by one of the Americans to be absolutely fearless as a raid leader, possessing “the biggest set of balls in Pakistan.” He and McHale developed complete trust in one another.