They were helped by Khan’s carelessness. On his previous trip to Pakistan, he had let his U.S. visa lapse, and in trying to reestablish his residency he had been assisted by a young New Yorker, Saifullah Paracha’s son Uzair, and the Boston scientist Aafia Siddiqui. Siddiqui posed as Khan’s wife when she rented a post office box, an attempt to show that Khan was living in the United States. She gave Paracha a key to the box, and he began impersonating Khan, making phone calls to what was then the Immigration and Naturalization Service. Their attempted ruse was, until March of 2003, unknown to authorities. But it would soon give investigators a ready-made set of clues to follow.
At some point in the eighteen months after September 11, Cummings and others had begun to suspect that an apparently substantial number of operatives had been sent to the United States. Evidence came from virtually every significant arrest—Zubaydah and José Padilla both yielded information on plots that were aimed at the U.S., and as hundreds of men were captured in Afghanistan, or in Pakistan, their interrogations provided more information. It was almost always sketchy, but sometimes investigators got lucky.
That happened with the Khan case. Cummings’s agents were in place, and the wiretaps approved—by the White House, no less—half an hour before the takedown took place in Pakistan. Then they waited. The new FBI supervisor slept on the couch in his office, and awoke to an early-morning fax informing him that an interesting call had indeed been made and intercepted.
FBI agents had listened in on the telephone call between Khan’s father in Baltimore and a house in Columbus, Ohio, where three suspicious men lived. They soon determined that one of them was an Ohio truck driver named Iyman Faris, who had already come up on their radar screen but who seemed fairly innocuous. But now the FBI agents heard the elder Khan tell Faris that the money he had given him was strictly for business. It seemed an odd call.
One investigator described it: “That was one of those moments where you say, ‘What the hell are they talking about?’ We knew it was code, but not for what. But we knew that it was something bad. We knew that it connected two bad dudes, and we were thinking—this can’t be good.”11
The FBI agents, in part through the capture of KSM, realized that Faris had been part of a plot to surveil the Brooklyn Bridge dating back to 2002, that he had been to Afghan training camps—and that he was one of KSM’s sleeper agents in the United States, connected somehow to an Al Qaeda plot of unknown size, scope, means, and location. “The pucker factor was through the roof,” one law enforcement official said of that realization. “Everything that came out of KSM was on fire; we had to track it immediately.” And a fire hose of information was coming from KSM, at least from the computers, phones, and other gear caught with him. FBI agents, in the words of one of them, were going “batshit crazy” in their urgent effort to run down leads.12
The New York Joint Terrorism Task Force had known about Faris separately. Now suddenly they had a connection between Khan and Faris. And they already had one between Saifullah Paracha and Khan. They needed to find the younger Paracha, Uzair, and fast, so they raced to the home of his father’s American business partner, an Orthodox Jew who lived in Brooklyn. He had a home address for Uzair back at the office, he said, and he offered to go with the agents to get it. When they got there, around midnight, they found the young Pakistani in the back of the office, typing away on a laptop. They arrested him on material witness charges and hauled him away.
Then Saifullah’s name showed up in the KSM materials. Investigators interviewed him in Karachi and learned that he knew and did business with several Al Qaeda operatives. They learned, too, that he shipped goods to the United States all the time. Suddenly, it seemed they had evidence of a potential shipment of explosives into American harbors, especially Newark, where Paracha senior sent his exports for transport to his business in New York. In New York, JTTF officials had another oh-shit moment when they realized that Faris was the suspicious man who had taken surveillance photos in and around New York. Now they were connecting the dots to a terrorist conspiracy in which Faris could have already driven his eighteen-wheeler to the port, picked up a container with explosives, and taken it who knows were. It didn’t help that Faris’s tractor-trailer was registered under Kashmir Trucking, in what they read as a reference to the Pakistani jihadi groups waging war against India over Kashmir, and that they weren’t sure where he was.
With as much secrecy as can be mustered at one of the nation’s busiest ports, the JTTF started intercepting containers from Pakistan destined for Newark. After hours, they hauled the containers to a secluded high-security warehouse, unloaded them one by one, and inspected their contents. Then they reloaded them overnight so they could be shipped on their usual schedule with no one knowing the difference.
Of course, they had no idea what they were looking for, or whether it would explode on contact as they unloaded the containers.
The exchange of information between the Pakistanis and the Americans, between the CIA and everybody else, and between FBI headquarters and the New York JTTF was imperfect in almost every instance, but eventually, investigators arrested most of the known suspects—including Saifullah Paracha, whose partner lured him to Thailand at the FBI’s request under the pretense of meeting him to discuss concerns about his son. Faris was flipped by the FBI and spent weeks talking to jihadi associates from a safe house in Virginia while the tape recorders rolled. Khan was whisked off to an undisclosed location by the CIA, only to surface at Guantánamo with KSM and others in 2006, proclaiming his innocence all the way. It wasn’t clear what, exactly, the conspirators had been planning, and who else was out there. Siddiqui had disappeared into Pakistan, and there were indications of others involved in the scheme, but no proof—in part due to the CIA’s reluctance to share information, according to a senior supervisor who oversaw the operation. “We stopped something, but we don’t know what it was,” he said. “And we can’t be entirely sure we got it all.”13
CHAPTER 16
The Black Sites and Beyond
Bagram, Afghanistan, and Beyond, 2003–2006
KSM was flown to Bagram Airfield in Afghanistan for three additional days, after which he was again moved, this time to Poland. The Polish prison, near the town of Szymany in the country’s northeast, was located on a military air base, as were many of the CIA’s other secret prisons. KSM remained at the Polish site for approximately six months and moved to Romania. In total, he was held in at least five, and perhaps more, black sites before being deposited—along with all the other high-value detainees—in a newly constructed jail at Cuba’s Guantánamo Bay in September of 2006.
The black sites were spread across Asia, Europe, and Africa. Transporting prisoners among the sites on privately chartered Gulfstream jets cost tens of thousands—and sometimes hundreds of thousands—of dollars per trip, including fruit plates and $39 bottles of wine for the flight crew. The crews filed fraudulent flight plans to disguise their destinations and deliveries. The planes often stopped on three or more continents in a matter of days. Why there was so much movement is unclear.
What is clear is what happened within the prisons. The Central Intelligence Agency, under pressure from the Bush administration to produce immediate results, hired private contractors to extract information from its prisoners. The contractors sought and received approval to employ harsh interrogation measures drawn, at least in part, from manuals of torture. The manuals had been produced decades earlier as a means of instructing American troops on how to resist torture. The contractors turned that on its head, presenting a plan to use the manuals as instructions for what were euphemistically called enhanced interrogation techniques. The CIA, with explicit approval from the Bush White House and Department of Justice,1 adopted the plan and put it into operation.
The contractors were purported experts in psychology and not Al Qaeda; they often had little idea what sorts of questions to ask, or what to make of the answers, including whether they had any semblance of tr
uth to them. So the contractors frequently appealed to Langley for guidance. People with genuine expertise on Al Qaeda were seldom, if ever, consulted on lines of inquiry. There was, instead, a vague but constant push for information about coming attacks. In fact, three organizations with specific knowledge of KSM desperately pushed for inclusion in the process—the FBI, the 9/11 Commission, and a multiagency Criminal Investigation Task Force (CITF) overseen by the Department of Defense. Barred from actually interviewing him, all three organizations did take the additional step of composing lists of questions they thought KSM should be asked. None of them received much of a reply. “It was like sending questions out into the ether,” said a senior investigator from one of those organizations. Investigators in all three organizations felt that getting specific questions to KSM, and having him answer them, was not only key to uncovering the next attack but also to understanding the broad outlines of the sprawling terrorist network he had pieced together over the years, which they believed still had tentacles extending deep into the United States.
In the case of the FBI, the CIA’s indifference might be explained—if hardly excused—by the historic antagonism between the Bureau and the CIA. The lack of cooperation with the 9/11 Commission may have been a result of the fact that it was investigating potentially embarrassing lapses by all government agencies, including the CIA’s failure to catch KSM before the attacks; some of these mistakes had by then been identified by a separate congressional joint inquiry. The CITF, on the other hand, was brand-new and had been created specifically to gather evidence against those suspected of perpetrating 9/11. The evidence was intended for use in the very military tribunal system that the Bush administration had created through executive fiat.
Mark Fallon, for twenty years a special agent and supervisor with the Naval Criminal Investigative Service, was the deputy commander of the CITF. Almost from the time the first captives arrived at Guantánamo, Fallon and his group butted heads with the army’s Joint Task Force 170, which actually ran the prison and had overall authority for the prisoners. The dispute was a mirror image of the fight between the FBI and the CIA. Fallon and his people were veteran investigators with experience on numerous terrorism cases—the bombing of the USS Cole, the Khobar Towers attacks, and the Blind Sheikh case in New York, among others. Many of the Joint Task Force 170 interrogators, on the other hand, had never been in the same room with a terrorist before arriving at Guantánamo, and knew little of their history. The general in charge, for instance, gained most of his experience as a small-town family court judge in Pennsylvania.
It wasn’t long before Fallon had barred his investigators from working with Task Force 170 because of concerns that its interrogators were using coercive methods that he believed to be illegal and counterproductive. His complaints went up the chain of command and eventually curtailed the Joint Task Force 170 methods. But long before KSM was captured, Fallon had figured that the terrorist would eventually end up at Guantánamo, and had begun an investigation on him. When KSM was finally captured, Fallon sought to include his team in the interrogations. He was rebuffed.
By early 2002, the CITF efforts at Guantánamo were paying off, and threads of intelligence about KSM and his rise within Al Qaeda helped the larger counterterrorism community to connect the dots. The emerging picture showed KSM to be even more involved than investigators had believed; he was rebuilding Al Qaeda and launching new attacks. At one point soon after KSM was caught, Fallon and Colonel Britt Mallow, the commander of CITF, went to Langley for a meeting of the Near East Division of the CIA. Most of the CIA station chiefs from the Middle East were at the briefing, and Fallon was taken aback when he and Mallow were asked to tell the group what they knew about KSM. He had been asking the CIA the exact same question, with no success.
“You’re interrogating him. Why are you holding out on us?” he asked them. “Are you thinking two steps ahead? Given what you’re doing to him, enhanced interrogations, waterboarding… we need direct access, because you can’t try him, and we’re gonna inherit him…. We want direct access now, not just for intel but also so that we can participate in this process and keep open the possibility of gathering evidence and trying him later.”2
The meeting turned into a heated argument, and eventually Fallon and Mallow left unceremoniously—and empty-handed. They joked about being thrown out of the CIA, but their concern was serious. It didn’t seem as though anyone had a plan, or even a thought, about what to do with the detainees in the long term. That was especially the case with KSM, whose trial, if there was ever going to be one, was supposed to be the centerpiece of the entire military commission effort.
The FBI continued to express similar concerns, and so did the 9/11 Commission, especially the team headed by Dieter Snell, the former federal prosecutor in New York who had chased KSM through South and Southeast Asia as part of the Manila Air and World Trade Center investigations. His team had been reading the transcripts from the interrogations of KSM and noticed gaping holes in what was being asked—and what was being answered. It was clear that KSM was lying, and that his interrogators were simply accepting his claims and moving on to the next question on the latest list sent to them from Langley. The appointed leaders of the 9/11 Commission went to the White House and stressed the urgency of having their investigators and other knowledgeable authorities interrogating KSM, but their requests also were denied.
No one was as frustrated as Pellegrino. Late one afternoon, agent Stephen Gaudin, his former colleague on the New York JTTF, was walking through the basement of FBI headquarters and noticed Pellegrino hunched over a desk looking at photocopies of e-mails and pocket litter.
“Frank, I don’t understand. What are you doing here?” Gaudin asked him.
Pellegrino looked ashen, and embarrassed. The veteran agent had finally been given a role in the FBI’s involvement in the KSM case. But instead of being in a room with KSM trying to pry out information about pending attacks and the others in his network, he was going through documents that many others had already been through, double-checking to see what they might have missed.
When Pellegrino didn’t respond, Gaudin again said, “Frank, I don’t understand.”
There was a long, strained silence as the two old friends just looked at each other. Pellegrino didn’t know what to say. So he didn’t say anything.
In the course of his three-year tour of the black sites, KSM was subjected to an escalating series of coercive methods, culminating in seven and one-half days of sleep deprivation and 183 instances of waterboarding. He was hog-tied, stripped naked, photographed, hooded, beaten, kicked, suffocated, exposed to extreme cold and noise, denied food and sleep, sedated with anal suppositories, placed in diapers, and hung by his wrists until they bled.3
KSM spoke voluminously during these years. The torture and interrogations produced more information than investigators could competently track down. Much, if not most, of the information was bad—made up, KSM would later say, so the torture would stop. From the outset, in fact, the written reports of his interrogations that were sent back to Langley contained a warning at the top that the detainee had a history of lies and fabrications. KSM talked about Al Qaeda’s nuclear and chemical war ambitions, about how he built his network. He gave what amounted to lectures on how to conduct terrorism. He wrote letters to President Bush and CIA director George Tenet and poems to the wife of one of his interrogators.
He admitted almost everything, or so his interrogators thought, giving up information that led directly to an impressive series of arrests—including that of Mohamad Farik Amin, one of Hambali’s Malaysian operatives; Hambali himself; Hambali’s brother, Rusman “Gun Gun” Gunawan; and Ahmed Khalfan Ghailani, an African Al Qaeda facilitator and forgery expert involved in the 1998 U.S. embassy bombings in Kenya and Tanzania. The hunt for KSM associates played out around the world, often in secret. Exploiting information found on KSM and gleaned from his initial confessions, authorities moved particularly quickly in Sout
heast Asia to shut down KSM’s network there. After his capture, Hambali was told that seventeen of his operatives had also been captured; he admitted under interrogation that they were being groomed at KSM’s behest for attacks inside the United States, probably again using airplanes as weapons against skyscrapers. During questioning, KSM also provided details of other plots. He described the design of planned attacks on buildings inside the United States and how operatives were directed to carry them out. In some cases, he instructed his operatives, Padilla among them, to ensure that the explosives went off at a point that was high enough to prevent the people trapped above from escaping out the windows. KSM also detailed the Heathrow airplane plot and the operative assigned to it, Naeem Noor Khan.4 It has been presumed that he gave information on these men because he believed the information would not be new to his captors. Khan, for example, had worked on the Heathrow plot with Ramzi bin al-Shibh, who had been in American custody since September 2002. In all, KSM and other al Qaeda detainees helped the CIA identify at least eighty-six individuals whom the terror organization deemed “suitable for Western operations.” Most of them remained at large. Of even more concern was whether KSM was giving up the small fish in an effort to protect the bigger ones, including bin Laden himself.
The Hunt for KSM Page 28