The CIA noted how cooperative KSM was almost immediately.5 Others were not so certain, or were outright suspicious that he was being far too helpful from the outset. One senior intelligence operative said KSM turned the torture sessions into a contest. He had intuited that the interrogators, although they were willing to inflict great pain, behaved as if they had limits beyond which they wouldn’t go. He noticed that the waterboarding sessions never exceeded a certain length.6 So he simply steeled himself and counted the time off in his head—or, at times theatrically, by ticking off the seconds with his fingers.
KSM was always stripped of his clothing before the waterboarding began. On one occasion, a senior female CIA officer who helped supervise the interrogation program from her office at Langley flew in to witness a session, even though she wasn’t officially assigned to do so. KSM was irate that a woman would be in the room to view him in the nude. And he told his interrogators so. He glared at her for several minutes, and held out especially long that day. His interrogators said that even though he talked when he wanted to, KSM’s resistance to physical and psychological punishment was almost superhuman.7
KSM did not hide the fact that he was trying to game the torture protocols. He did it flamboyantly, being sure his interviewers knew what he was doing. “To him, it was a challenge, a competition with his interrogators and his competitors, and even in something as otherworldly as this, it became a game and competition to KSM, a way to master those who were trying to master him,” said one operative. When interrogators threatened to track down his female relatives and have them raped, he shrugged, saying, in effect, Really? Is that the best you can do?8
Mohammed ultimately confessed to more than three dozen plots and attacks around the world. Many of these were hardly fully formed. Some seemed like little more than teatime chatter. Most were aspirational. No one knew the aspiration business better than KSM, who had imagined hundreds of plots, most of which never got beyond the imagining.
KSM bragged later about sending American agents scurrying around the globe on the impossible task of trying to distinguish the truths from the half truths and the lies. “During the harshest period of my interrogation I gave a lot of false information in order to satisfy what I believed the interrogators wished to hear in order to make the ill treatment stop. I later told interrogators that their methods were stupid and counterproductive. I’m sure that the false information I was forced to invent in order to make the ill treatment stop wasted a lot of their time and led to several false red alerts being placed in the U.S.,” he told the Red Cross.9
This web hasn’t been untangled even now, but the range of his contacts around the globe was stunning. Investigators believe parts of it remain in place, waiting for another day. “He had us chasing the goddamn geese in Central Park because he said some of them had explosives stuffed up their ass,” Ali Soufan, the FBI counterterrorism agent, said. He was exaggerating, he conceded, but not by much. KSM’s claims of Al Qaeda’s nuclear and WMD capabilities had the CIA and the FBI especially spun up, but after frantic and intensive deployments around the world, it was determined that KSM was making up almost all of it.
What KSM said under interrogation was valuable; what he did not say might have been more so. Describing plots that were later discovered to have been in the planning and operational stages when KSM was captured, some of them supervised by direct lieutenants of his, Soufan said, “KSM had to know about the Madrid bombings [which occurred in March of 2004], about Al Qaeda cells throughout the world, and especially [about cells] in Europe, where there were many plots under way, including the ones in the UK. He didn’t ID the Madrid cells. He didn’t give up the London subway plot.”10 And he said nothing about the deadly terrorist attacks that some of his operatives would soon launch in the kingdom of Saudi Arabia, killing many Westerners, including some Americans, and shaking the foundations of the Saudi royal family. The intel from raids, intercepts, and interrogations was enough to prompt homeland security secretary Tom Ridge to issue an unusually broad warning soon after the Riyadh bombings. “The U.S. intelligence community,” he said, “believes that Al Qaeda has entered an operational period worldwide, and this may include terrorist attacks in the United States.”
One senior investigator said KSM kept to himself the most important things he knew—the locations of Osama bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahiri and the ways in which they might have been found, notably the courier system by which they communicated. This last part was especially important because so many of the couriers were Kuwaitis and Baluchis who had been part of KSM’s own personal network, and whom he had relied on himself. He obviously knew something of Zawahiri’s whereabouts, having met with him the day before his own capture. He probably knew, too, how to find bin Laden. He denied this, then when tortured, said he did indeed know bin Laden’s whereabouts. Then he would make up a story: “Where is he? I don’t know. Then he torture me. Then I said, ‘Yes, he is in this area.’ ”11
Despite repeated questioning on the point, KSM explicitly denied knowledge of the Kuwaiti-Pakistani courier who eventually led the CIA to bin Laden in Abbottabad, Pakistan. He was so strenuous in his denials that some believed KSM was protecting the courier because of his operational significance. They were right. It was later learned from other detainees that the courier had been, in fact, a protégé of KSM’s for years.
The CIA boasted from the start about its handling of KSM, saying its “enhanced” interrogation methods had not only saved lives but led to the arrests of countless terrorists. In the fall of 2003, agency officials were planning to give a presentation at FBI headquarters, in the massive Bonaparte Auditorium, about their successes with KSM. It was billed as an educational opportunity for the Bureau’s agents and brass to hear all about how the agency had figured out KSM, and how it had gotten him to open up. By that time, Pellegrino and most others at the FBI believed that KSM was feeding the contractors one falsehood after another, in part to protect active plots and plotters. The FBI agents who had been trying to track him knew that KSM knew the location of most, if not all, of the members of Al Qaeda’s leadership council and covert cells around the world—and that he hadn’t given them up. Unbeknownst to them, the CIA had acknowledged as much in a top-secret internal report months earlier, in April of 2003, entitled “Khalid Shaykh Muhammed’s Threat Reporting—Precious Truths, Surrounded by a Bodyguard of Lies.” It concluded that protecting operatives in the United States appeared to be a “major part” of KSM’s resistance efforts.12 Worse, it indicated that the interrogators often didn’t know enough to confront KSM over what appeared to be blatant falsehoods. In response to questions about U.S. zip codes found in his notebooks, for instance, KSM said he was planning to use them to open new e-mail accounts. Pellegrino ended up attending the CIA briefing, and watched as CIA officials went on and on about their techniques and their purported successes. He sat through about half of it, then got up and walked out. He kept going until he reached the bar at Harry’s, a few blocks away.
In some respects, the capture of KSM and then of his lieutenants was the beginning of the end for Al Qaeda, at least in Pakistan. Without his relationships with the Pakistani militant groups and command of Urdu, the mostly Arab fighters felt uneasy and vulnerable. So they moved north into the far more remote tribal areas, where they received protection but also found it hard to do recruiting, training, and plotting. It severed Al Qaeda’s ties to much of its network.
Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, September 2007
When the coercive interrogation regime was finally revealed to the world, the question of what to actually do with KSM and other high-value detainees—how to exact justice from them—was posed publicly for the first time. It had, of course, been percolating for years at the highest levels of the Bush administration, provoking heated battles. Top officials in the Justice Department and even Condoleezza Rice, the national security advisor, had repeatedly instigated discussions about what the ultimate plan was, and had asked how these men would f
inally be disposed of. Justice feared that the military, which had ultimate control over Guantánamo, wasn’t sufficiently experienced to run the court system it had established.
Top Justice officials offered to send prosecutors to the detention camp, but the offers were ignored—willfully, it seemed to some—by Donald Rumsfeld, the secretary of defense.
“The people running the process at Guantánamo had no real trial experience,” one senior Justice Department official said at the time.13 “My proposal was, why not get DOJ prosecutors who know how to try big cases like Moussaoui—we have a bunch in New York and eastern district of Virginia—why don’t you use them? They never took us up on it…. You can’t understate the emasculation of Condi Rice in all of this, especially by Cheney, which freed up Rumsfeld to ignore her as well. I sat in a bunch of meetings where Condi wanted to move the process along, and Rumsfeld wanted no part of it, he wouldn’t even attend the meetings. He did not want to engage in Gitmo…. I saw her break down in tears over Rumsfeld’s disrespect for her. At a meeting over Gitmo, he stood up and said, ‘I have another meeting.’ She said, ‘Sit down.’
“ ‘This meeting is over,’ he said, and walked out.
“Then Tenet stood up and said, ‘This is bullshit. I’m leaving.’
“Rice told Tenet to sit down and he turned and walked out, too.”
More than three years after KSM’s capture, there remained no clear answers. Eventually, military prosecutors decided they needed DOJ help to reinvestigate the cases against KSM and other high-value detainees because everything that came from the CIA black sites, or even from leads that came from there, was poisonous.
The decision set off a vigorous shoving match between the Pentagon’s Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) and the FBI, both of which wanted to run the new interviews. “You had all these DOD guys frothing at the mouth, saying, ‘CIA didn’t get shit out of them, but we will.’ ” There was a lot of head-butting to see who could have access to them,” said a military lawyer familiar with the confrontations, which began immediately after KSM and the other high-value detainees landed on the island. “They figured, an hour with KSM and they’d find out where bin Laden is before dark.”14
The DIA was held off while military prosecutors, the Justice Department, and the National Security Council staff worked out a compromise by which the FBI and the Criminal Investigation Task Force would share responsibility to reinterview all those who had been subjected to the “enhanced interrogation techniques,” to build clean cases against them. They were asked, in effect, to reinvestigate the attacks, to remove the poisonous fruit from the tree, and to obtain confessions from men like KSM, who had endured all sorts of physical and psychological punishment. Some, like Ramzi bin al-Shibh, were prescribed strong psychotropic medications out of a belief that they had been driven at least partially crazy. No one knew if this would ever satisfy a court of law—“it was a crapshoot,” one prosecutor said—but many viewed it as their only chance.
The clean teams sent down to Guantánamo interviewed dozens of the detainees. In an attempt to make the detainees comfortable and cooperative, they were catered to. One asked for steak and eggs, and an FBI agent from the New York JTTF cooked it for him. Another wanted a latte, and the head of the prosecution team drove all the way across Guantánamo to the base Starbucks to buy it. Many of the detainees talked uninhibitedly. KSM was especially loquacious, apparently relishing the human contact and the rapt attention. He also knew who held the power. When asked after one interview session if he would be ready to go at 8:00 a.m. the next day, he said he’d prefer to sleep in. “Let’s start at ten,” he said.15
For most within the FBI, this was a chance for bureaucratic revenge. For Frank Pellegrino, it was far more than that. Being assigned to the clean team was a chance for redemption, a chance to at last absolve or mitigate the guilt and feelings of responsibility he had long carried.
In 2007, thirteen years after undertaking his pursuit of the elusive terrorist mastermind, Pellegrino was told he would finally get his chance to sit face-to-face across a table from KSM. He studied his voluminous case files. In a way, he didn’t need to. Pellegrino was known for his encyclopedic knowledge of KSM, and it was all in his head. But he also needed to gain access to all the more recent files that had been compiled on KSM in order to get him to talk about what he had done after Pellegrino lost track of him—including the planning of 9/11.
On a sunny and bright afternoon in early 2007, Pellegrino met KSM across a gray metal government-issue table in a makeshift cell in Guantánamo. Pellegrino, now forty-six, was accompanied by Brian Antol, the analyst from FBI headquarters who had worked on the case nearly as long as Pellegrino, and by two agents from the CITF. Guantánamo was buzzing. Everyone had heard the stories by then of how the agent had chased the terrorist around the globe only to be kept out of the hunt for him after 9/11. They crowded into the small room housing the closed-circuit TVs so they could watch, expecting no one knew quite what. There was no great confrontation. It was in a strange way like a meeting of old combatants, soldiers from opposing sides meeting long after the war. When Pellegrino entered, he offered his hand, and KSM shook it. Pellegrino had prepared a lengthy opening, things he needed to say, in which he told the accused terrorist about why he was there, what he hoped to accomplish, and who he was. I was the guy who found out about your wiring money to New York for the first World Trade Center attack, he told him, and who was following you in Pakistan, and then in Manila. And I was the guy who went to Qatar to catch you, and who looked for you in the years after that, he said.
“Ah, so you’re the one,” KSM responded.
KSM told him that he had known when Pellegrino had arrived in Qatar to arrest him, and had also known the name of the hotel where he was staying. KSM thought that was funny; Pellegrino laughed, but after the session told a colleague that it had sent chills down his spine, as if he had suddenly realized that he had been the one who was being hunted.
KSM was relaxed, chatty. Pellegrino felt immediately that he knew KSM because of his eerie similarities to his nephew Abdul Basit Abdul Karim, whom the FBI agent had gotten to know well during his trial in New York. Pellegrino thought KSM might be the kind of guy you could sit down and have a beer with, if he hadn’t been one of the worst mass murderers in American history.
Mohammed by then had a long, mostly gray beard. He had lost forty pounds and looked like nothing so much as a little old man. That first day, he wore a full-length white dishdasha for the interview, but normally wore the standard-issue prison jumpsuit. He was led into the room by guards and chained by the ankle to a metal clamp on the floor; his hands were free. They sat on opposing sides of the table, sometimes for as long as eight hours a day, for four days.
A government official who observed the interviews said everyone outside the room was amazed at how amiable the men were on the surface. They both cracked jokes, in part to ease the palpable tension. KSM talked freely from the outset, more so than many other detainees did.
Early on, KSM asked who had won the election. Thinking he must be referring to the 2004 presidential race, Pellegrino said that Bush had won. KSM said, Oh, no. I know that. I was asking about last fall’s congressional elections. When told that the Democrats had won, he said, “Oh, that’s very good for us.” He apparently thought the Democrats would be more lenient.
By the time Pellegrino got “in the box” with him, KSM had been under near-constant interrogation for four years. He eventually tired of still more questions and told Pellegrino so. “I’ve already talked about that, Frank,” he would say. Pellegrino persisted. Even given the fact that he found KSM a likable presence, he despised everything about the man and wanted finally to deliver him to justice. He pressed on; he changed the subject to the good old days in Manila, which nobody had ever cared enough to ask questions about. Almost like old friends at a high school reunion, they talked about Basit and Wali Khan and the fun times back in the Philippines—the bar girls, the karaoke j
oints, the good-looking dentists. Over the course of several days, mixed in with the nostalgia, Pellegrino coaxed new confessions from KSM that he hoped would one day form the basis for a trial in the old Sovereign District of New York.
There were a few dozen FBI and CITF agents swarming over the base conducting similar interviews with other inmates, all trying to make good on what they long maintained was their special ability to build rapport and coax secrets out of people without them even knowing it. The CIA didn’t give up its turf easily. The agency kept agents in place at Guantánamo, and they appeared to be watching over everything, even the conversations between reporters and defense lawyers at the on-base restaurant and watering hole, O’Kelly’s Irish Pub. At times they bumped other investigators from their chartered flights off the island and even parked a big yacht in Guantánamo Bay for its own agents. And after each day’s questioning, the FBI and CITF agents trooped dutifully up a hill to the CIA compound to give a full briefing on that day’s events. And the CIA officers would tell them what was permissible for them to use and what was, for security reasons, not permissible.
That ritual of constant observation and questioning of KSM had gone on for years as President Bush, then President Obama and his attorney general, Eric H. Holder Jr., deliberated about what kind of justice, if any, KSM would ultimately face.
Beginning in late 2006, Mohammed was allowed to write letters to his relatives. The letters and replies were delivered by the Red Cross. According to rules established by the American military, the correspondence had to fit on a six-by-six-inch portion of a preprinted form, and its content was restricted to the familial and personal; all else was stricken by censors. Mohammed mostly sent good wishes to his wife and children in southeastern Iran, and to other relatives.16 He made repeated references to his Islamic faith and the beneficence of Allah and the Prophet. In photographs that accompanied one of the letters, Mohammed appeared shrunken from the man in the famous image taken the day of his capture. That image must have infuriated Mohammed, who was vain enough to have complained during a military court hearing that a sketch artist had made his nose look too big. In the jailhouse photographs, he looks frail but radiant. He stares directly at the camera, cloaked in long white robes, a headdress framing his small, still face, long beard, and piercing dark eyes. In one photo, a copy of the Koran lies open in his right hand. His ego was so large that military prosecutors contemplated charging all the 9/11 coconspirators except KSM with crimes that could bring the death penalty, “just to see how pissed off he would get,” said one.
The Hunt for KSM Page 29