The Hunt for KSM

by Terry McDermott

  They raided the second building as well, with much less incident.

  When the dust settled from the massive shootout at the Defence address, Borelli and Cudmore were taken to ISI headquarters in Karachi. They had put on their shalwar kameez before noticing that many of the ISI officers wore Western clothes, some of them jeans.

  “We don’t need to blend in; you do,” the Americans were told.

  The combined team of Pakistanis and Americans swept the houses. They went to the location of the first shootout and found the place badly damaged. They entered to find an unexploded grenade, IED components, and a large cache of documents, including passports. It was late, so they called it a night and hit the next location in the morning. By then, FBI and CIA agents were on the lookout for Mukhtar. They were looking for other Al Qaeda operatives, too, including Walid bin Attash. At the Tariq Road location, they had found a prosthetic leg they thought was his. They didn’t know if it was a spare, or if he’d left in such haste that he had abandoned it.

  The Americans processed the men who had been detained. They fingerprinted them and asked them to hold up a piece of cardboard with their names on it—the closest thing to a mug shot they could muster. Like Zubaydah before him, Ramzi bin al-Shibh was much bigger than the Americans had expected. He, too, had gained a lot of weight in his months of hiding in Pakistan.

  Most of the others were sullen, even angry. But bin al-Shibh had a smug look on his face. As Borelli took his picture, a CIA officer asked him if he had made a video—a reference to the martyrdom tapes made by Al Qaeda fighters that were being found regularly on raids, including one that was believed to have been his.

  Bin al-Shibh didn’t say anything. Then “he got this weird goofy smile,” one observer recalled. “A shit-eating grin, actually.”

  The Pakistani officers questioned the men caught at the various locations, including Rabbani. It was all very civilized. An ISI colonel served Rabbani tea as they talked. It was more like a chat; nothing like the rumored tales of ISI beatings of detainees. Rabbani described how he paid the bills, and was sort of an administrator. On further questioning, he said he was also watching KSM’s children. At one point, the kids were brought into the room. They were scared, but brightened up after being given Coca-Colas.

  “You have to help us out for the sake of the kids,” the ISI colonel said. Most of the questions focused on KSM’s whereabouts, and why it was that he wasn’t at any of the locations when the raids occurred. Rabbani didn’t know. Neither did his children, they said. KSM had vanished.

  The FBI men combed through the buildings. They found automatic weapons, grenades, ammunition. They found cell phones, address books, laptop hard drives, desktop computers. KSM was not there. They had apparently just missed him at the first house the previous raid—again possibly by just a matter of minutes or hours. They found a letter he had signed “Mukh,” for Mukhtar, advising a subordinate about a future attack on a pair of hotels.

  If you were on the ground and asked, you could collect an address for KSM from almost every person you talked to. He was here in Defence, in a mansion. It was an apartment in Sharifabad, a mud hut in the swamp flats of Korangi, in the Baluch colony of Lyari, in a third-floor walk-up in that Arab neighborhood full of money changers and bucket shops. A man who was arrested had a phone number for Mohammed that was traced to the other end of town, a middle-class preserve of single-family homes with clean modern lines, behind pale stucco walls.

  Suddenly, the man who had been nowhere for a decade was everywhere.

  CHAPTER 14

  Betrayal

  Karachi, Pakistan, Autumn 2002

  Everybody wanted to own the Ramzi bin al-Shibh capture. It was a huge score by nearly every measure—the numbers of people arrested, the cache of materials recovered, the cooperation between the Pakistanis and the Americans. There had been hundreds of previous raids, but none had yielded the young children of an Al Qaeda captain or passports for a large part of Osama bin Laden’s family.

  As much as everyone involved wanted some credit for its successes, no one wanted even a small piece of the Khalid Sheikh Mohammed escape. The Pakistanis, in particular, were confounded by Mohammed.

  “Karachi can never become a control center for Al Qaeda,” one high-ranking ISI officer said. “We have informers on every street. Our total concentration is on Karachi, followed by Lahore, Faisalabad, and Peshawar, Quetta. That vendor on the street? He can be working for us. We are covering every street, every nook and corner. Let me tell you, you people have the habit of overexaggerating the importance of these people. This KSM, I don’t care a hoot about him. Their mobility has been brought to zero. We have this highly sophisticated electronic gadgetry, we have the [National] Crisis Management Cell center, we have PISCES [the U.S.-originated Personal Identification Secure Comparison and Evaluation System]… and can tell anybody going in and out.”1 The obvious question, of course, was that if the ISI had Pakistan so well covered, how had KSM been allowed to build the Al Qaeda network there before September 11 in the first place—and then rebuild it once again afterward?

  Belief in their own infallibility was so deep that several top Pakistani military and intelligence officials maintained for months afterward that, in fact, KSM had been captured—or, if not captured, killed. There were news reports that he was lying in state in a morgue; one senior government official told a journalist that KSM’s “widow” had been returned to Egypt.

  Pakistan as a society was accustomed to dealing with imperfect information about almost everything. It was often supposed that much public discourse was intended to mislead or obscure. Analysts routinely assumed as a starting point that a piece of public information was untruthful and proceeded from there, trying to discern in what way it was a lie, why it was told, and what it meant. In this case, one conclusion that could be drawn was that although the authorities had nearly caught KSM, they now had no idea exactly where he was.

  KSM wasn’t, of course, dead or captured; once again, he had somehow gotten away. No matter how close the call—one Pakistani intelligence officer likened it to a Hollywood Western in which the good guys arrive to find the campfire coals still burning but their quarry gone—the raid was a failure in that sense. But every raid told KSM’s pursuers something, and this one had validated the broader notion that KSM had been in Karachi and that he had built a substantial infrastructure there.

  All the evidence that had pointed to the sprawling city—Yosri Fouda’s interview and the resulting satellite intercepts; raids on other safe houses, one of which yielded copies of several 9/11 hijackers’ passports; evidence from Ganczarski, Zubaydah, Padilla, and Guantánamo detainees—had been correct. Connections to every Al Qaeda plot ran through the city. The ISI’s claims notwithstanding, Karachi was a hub. In fact, Karachi was the hub.

  No one could say how Mohammed escaped. Some American agents believed the presence of the children at the house suggested he’d been tipped off and fled in haste. Why else would he leave the children there? But there were other indications that Mohammed had set up a system of care for the children so he could pop in for playtime with them whenever possible. A woman caretaker found with the children indicated she was hired by KSM to provide them with an education.

  KSM’s escape stoked already considerable U.S. fears that he was being protected by elements within the Pakistani police, military, and intelligence agencies. Such fellow travelers, Keenan and others surmised, had probably been harboring KSM—in Pakistan and elsewhere—even as the FBI had racheted up its efforts to find him. His wanted posters had been up all over the world for years, and he had been on dozens of watch lists. Yet he seemed to wander with ease, and without fear.

  In photos found at the house with his children, KSM was dressed in traditional Muslim tunic and kaffiyeh. He was shown with “at least one wife” and several more children besides the two sons. In many of them, the children were smiling, and KSM was, too.

  To those entrusted with finding him, KSM
remained a cipher. “We know less about him than any of the others,” a senior FBI official said at the time. “He was under everybody’s radar. We don’t know how he did it. We wish we knew.”

  One of the prizes in the bin al-Shibh raid was a large suitcase that contained a virtual road map of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed’s life, including bank records and his neatly framed diploma from North Carolina A&T. That piece of paper became another battle in the turf war between FBI and CIA agents, with the FBI wanting to keep it as evidence and accusing a senior CIA officer of putting it on the wall of his Karachi office as some sort of trophy or conversation piece. The disagreement spoke volumes about the rapidly deteriorating relationship between the two U.S. agencies after station chief Grenier’s departure, a time when the CIA increasingly tried to keep its raids and seizures away from Keenan. Her confrontations with the agency were growing ever more bitter.

  Grenier and Keenan had trusted one another and built a relationship, albeit a guarded one. The CIA veteran appreciated the value of keeping the FBI in the loop and bringing a law enforcement agent on each raid team, if for no other reason than to gather evidence for possible prosecutions. His replacement, Vance,* had a far less inclusive view of the role the FBI should play in the war on terror. Keenan’s difficulties were exacerbated by the fact that Reimann’s replacement as FBI legal attaché in June of 2002, Chuck Riley, for the most part went along with the CIA’s plan. Riley operated from a position of some weakness, as he had virtually no counterterrorism background; his last post had been in Sacramento.

  The situation boiled over when Keenan pushed to travel from Islamabad to Karachi to participate in the interrogation of bin al-Shibh. When Vance refused, Keenan appealed to Washington and his decision was overturned. The veteran Al Qaeda expert was allowed to attend. But when Keenan got there, she was told to sit and be quiet while a CIA interrogator asked questions. Keenan fumed to headquarters that because the CIA was running the show, efforts to follow up on KSM’s bank records and other documents that could lead to him were ignored. That was especially frustrating given the treasures that agents found in Mohammed’s huge, tattered, taped-together suitcase. Besides the photos and bank statements, authorities found Al Qaeda operational records. “It was his life’s stuff,” said one agent on scene. “Anything that was important to him was in there.”

  One great value of the luggage was as evidence that KSM was in touch with bin Laden and his family, and on the move. He wasn’t fixed, but mobile. To transport and shelter the Al Qaeda exodus through Karachi, KSM had built a network of safe houses. One estimate put the number as high as fifty.2 That network now gave him a lifeline.

  As a blow to KSM’s ambitions, the capture of bin al-Shibh turned out to be insignificant. Bin al-Shibh was a key figure in the 9/11 plot, relaying instructions to the hijackers and passing their information back to Mohammed, but he was a functionary, not a mover in that plot or any other.

  What his pursuers didn’t know yet was that at the very time their hunt for him was at its most intense—and, in some respects, at its most promising—KSM was busier than ever plotting and orchestrating attacks in Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, the UK, and the United States.

  Far more damaging to the Al Qaeda cause than the bin al-Shibh capture was the October capture in the United Arab Emirates of Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri, who had been in many ways KSM’s equal in the immediate post-9/11 Al Qaeda organization. Nashiri played almost exactly the same role as KSM but within a more circumscribed geography—the Arabian Peninsula. He had overseen the 2000 attack on the USS Cole in Aden harbor in Yemen and a virtual carbon copy of it against the French commercial ship MV Limburg in the fall of 2002.3 Nashiri’s capture was yet another instance of an Al Qaeda operative tempting fate. He had used a satellite phone to communicate with the foot soldiers executing the Limburg attack. The phone was tracked by the U.S., and Nashiri was found and arrested by the Emiratis.4

  Nashiri had been in and out of Karachi frequently. He and KSM consulted and shared operatives with one another. His disappearance from the battlefield left KSM without much in the way of experienced colleagues upon whom he could rely. Instead, he found readily available supplies of younger Al Qaeda and Pakistani militant operatives to tap.

  So many plots were being uncovered that authorities didn’t know what to do. A secret Pakistani intelligence report described the time as one in which the ISI had helped disrupt Al Qaeda–affiliated terrorist plots so ambitious that it had “helped avert colossal damage to humanity not only in Pakistan but the world over.” One of the alleged networks of foreign nationals linked to KSM “was engaged in development and operationalization of Al Qaeda anthrax capability,” the Pakistani report said.5

  In December, bin Laden named KSM the chief of all Al Qaeda external operations. This was significant in part for its acknowledgment that Nashiri had disappeared. KSM’s options may have been diminished by the capture of some of his senior cohorts, but if the expectations were that, having narrowly escaped capture once again, he would go dormant, those expectations were sadly, tragically dashed. What he still had available to him in addition to his personal network of militants was his trusted family and clan, and that was where he turned. He had used his nephew—his sister’s son Ali Abdul Aziz Ali—to arrange logistics for the 9/11 hijackers. Ali, also known as Ammar al-Baluchi, was as far from a battle-hardened jihadi as you could get. He was born in Kuwait, but left with his mother when she separated from his father.6 He was raised mainly in Iran. He was a teenager attending boarding school in Zahedan, a Baluch town on the Pakistani border, when his first cousin Abdul Basit Abdul Karim visited him to receive care for the eye he had injured while making a bomb.7 Ali spent time with Basit, aka Ramzi Yousef, during his convalescence, and for the first time was introduced to the concept of jihad. Basit was a charming and persuasive man, and his talks with the young Ali had a long-lasting effect.

  After completing high school, Ali moved to Karachi for training as a software engineer. There, he spent time with his uncle Khalid Sheikh Mohammed. He began to think about devoting himself to jihad. His father, a muezzin at a mosque in Kuwait, had other ideas, and directed him to find work in the United Arab Emirates, then the booming economic hot spot of the region. Ali took a job with the Modern Electronics Corporation in Dubai, but before moving there he told KSM that he wanted to join the jihad. He thought himself unfit for military training, but suggested he could work for KSM instead.

  Not long after he resettled in Dubai, his uncle took him up on his offer and asked him to facilitate transit for the 9/11 hijackers as they traveled from Pakistan to the United States. Over the next two years he did exactly that for almost all the hijackers. He apparently hadn’t anticipated how much of his time this would entail, and told KSM he needed help. KSM sent an Al Qaeda accountant, Mustafa al-Hawsawi, to assist him.8

  Ali returned to Karachi just before September 11, 2001. He worked side by side with his uncle after that, at first not doing much more than running errands. He grew into his role as a financial facilitator. Money to fund their operations arrived irregularly, always by courier and in cash, and often in large amounts. It was not unusual to have $100,000 on hand. Ali helped KSM find ways to store and retrieve the money, sometimes laying it off with cooperative businessmen then retrieving it when needed. One man, Saifullah Paracha, the wealthy founder and owner of a Karachi-based conglomerate that included a newspaper, television production studios, and a textile manufacturing business, held as much as $600,000 for months in shrink-wrapped stacks of American bills.9 KSM relied on his Baluch network as well. His core cell in Karachi included a pair of in-laws used as couriers and facilitators when the need arose, and another nephew, Abdul Basit Abdul Karim’s brother and KSM’s college classmate, Abdul Karim Abdul Karim, more familiarly known as Musaad Aruchi. Abdul Karim had assisted KSM and Basit as far back as the early 1990s, providing housing for Basit and his associates when they were preparing for the Manila Air plot.10 The two nephews had assisted KSM in the
murder of Danny Pearl and other activities in Karachi.

  What KSM gained in trustworthiness from using relatives he sometimes lost in efficacy. None was an experienced terror operative. They were fine handling money and logistics, but inexperienced otherwise. Ali had recently taken the initiative to begin planning an attack of his own. He and Hamza Zubayr, a veteran Al Qaeda operative and former instructor at the al-Farouq training camp near Kandahar, had begun developing a plan to attack the American consulate and hotels in Karachi when Zubayr was killed in the bin al-Shibh raid. KSM immediately put a halt to the planning.

  This was not retreat, however. He had other, more accomplished allies. Walid bin Attash, even minus the prosthetic leg he left behind in the September raid, was one of Al Qaeda’s most experienced and capable operatives and one of KSM’s most trusted allies. They had known one another since the Soviet jihad in the 1980s; he had been present when KSM’s brother Abed was killed. He and Abu Faraj al-Libi formed the veteran core of KSM’s Karachi operation. Bin Attash had commanded troops in battle to much praise, and Libi had worked directly with bin Laden, establishing and administering camps. Both had wide experience operating abroad, too, but neither could operate in Pakistan with the kind of ease that KSM did. They were Arabs, from Yemen and Libya respectively. They could neither converse with nor gain the trust of the powerful Pakistani sectarian groups that KSM and Al Qaeda now relied on to survive.