The Hunt for KSM

by Terry McDermott

  The Guantánamo letters were accompanied by identification forms in which the Red Cross asked that the correspondent provide basic biographical information. In the first of the letters, dated December 15, 2006, Mohammed dutifully filled in the details, writing out his full name and listing Guantánamo Bay as his place of residence. By 2009, he listed his residence as “Gitmo,” using the military nickname. In the space for his own name, he wrote “KSM,” adopting the intelligence community’s name for him. Mohammed had spent almost his entire life as an outsider forced to live under other people’s rules. When necessary, he had adapted. After six years in American custody, he seemed to have adapted again.

  On June 25, 2009, Mohammed, writing in English to his brother, made what could be read as a surprising plea for absolution: “All praise is due to Allah. I praise Him and seek His aid and His forgiveness and I seek refuge in Allah from our evil in ourselves and from our bad deeds.” Even if this were only a ritual expression of obeisance, it stood in contrast to his customarily belligerent behavior. Was he truly sorry? It appeared unlikely, given what he said during his court hearings.

  The high-value detainees at Guantánamo live in a maximum-security prison, Camp 7, which is off-limits to almost everyone. They are held in isolation for up to twenty-two hours a day; as military prosecutors put it in arguing against allowing defense attorneys to visit the camp, each prisoner “has available to him outdoor recreation, socialization with a recreation partner, the ability to exercise, access to library books twice a week, the privilege of watching movies, and may meet with his attorneys upon request should he so choose. If the accused takes advantage of all the privileges offered to him, he would have a minimum of two hours a day outside his cell.”

  In formal military hearings—his arraignment, a tribunal to assess his status, and another session to argue points of law—KSM proved to be a forceful and at times vexing presence. He is a captive, of course, but in some ways he has controlled the legal proceedings against him, organizing his fellow captives to act as a group and then putting himself in charge. In 2007, he told his Combatant Status Review Tribunal that he often lied when he was tortured during interrogations and told the truth at other times. He lied when he needed to, he said.17 He seemed almost gleeful about the prospect of American investigators chasing his lies around the world. In 2008, he wrote a memo to the judge, complaining about the incompetence of the military translators in court; he titled the memo “Better Translation.”

  He mocked the military courts, preached, instructed, or obstructed as the need arose. He apologized for killing children; it was an unavoidable consequence of waging war. He told his coconspirators to fall in line behind him and adopt a unified legal strategy. They did as he asked.

  He compared himself to George Washington leading a valiant and morally righteous rebellion, and then went on to explain: “The way of the war, you know, very well, any country waging war against their enemy the language of the war are killing. If man and woman they be together as a marriage that is up to the kids, children. But if you and me, two nations, will be together in war the others are victims. This is the way of the language… You know forty million people were killed in World War I. Ten million kill in World War. You know that two million four hundred thousand be killed in the Korean War. So this language of the war. Any people who, when Osama bin Laden say I’m waging war because such and such reason, now he declared it. But when you said I’m terrorist, I think it is deceiving peoples. Terrorists, enemy combatant. All these definitions as CIA you can make whatever you want…. So finally it’s your war but the problem is no definitions of many words. It would be widely definite that many people be oppressed. Because war, for sure, there will be victims.”18

  He chastised the government for its indiscriminate imprisonment of Afghan citizens who simply happened to be in Afghanistan when the United States invaded. “You have to be fair with people,” he said. “There are many, many people which they have never been part of the Taliban. Afghanistan there have been many people arrested, for example, people who have been arrested after October 2001 after make attack against Afghanistan many of them just arrive after they don’t what has happen.”

  In the Guantánamo hearing room, Mohammed and his four codefendants—Mustafa al-Hawsawi, Walid bin Attash, Ramzi bin al-Shibh, and Ali Abdul Aziz Ali—sat in separate rows at long tables, with Mohammed always in the front row. Seated with them were their translators, lawyers, and sometimes paralegals—as many as six people in a row. Mohammed did not always rely on a translator in court and fired his lawyers, so he was sometimes seated at his table with just one other person, a civilian lawyer who served as his personal representative but not his defense counsel.

  When he was arraigned at Guantánamo in June of 2008, he asked that he be allowed to represent himself. The judge, Marine Colonel Ralph Kohlmann, asked KSM if he was certain he wanted to dismiss his attorneys, and whether he knew the proceedings could lead to his execution. Mohammed replied: “Yes. That is what I wish. I wish to be martyred. I will, God willing, have this by you.”

  His behavior in court has sometimes been bizarre. Once, he stood during the proceedings to sing Qur’anic verses aloud. After the judge repeatedly told him that he was out of order and had to stop, he suddenly shrugged, and in his disconcertingly high-pitched voice blurted, “Okay,” and quit, provoking laughter throughout the courtroom. Commander Jeffrey D. Gordon, a former spokesman for the Department of Defense, witnessed nearly all Mohammed’s court appearances. “At times, it’s almost like theater,” Gordon said. “He switches back and forth from very serious and devout to kind of a clown. I think he does that deliberately to draw people in, to charm them in some way, or to influence them. It’s all calculated.”

  At his arraignment, his codefendants nervously looked to Mohammed for guidance. When he decided to defend himself, he attempted to have the others do the same. One, Hawsawi, chose to continue with his attorney. Mohammed turned to Hawsawi sternly and, according to Gordon, noted that his lawyer was in the American military, and then asked Hawsawi: “What, are you in the American army now?” Hawsawi appeared shaken and reversed his decision.

  When another defendant, Ramzi bin al-Shibh, initially refused to appear before tribunals at all, it was not military prosecutors or lawyers who changed his mind but Mohammed. KSM organized what he called a Shura Council to coordinate his defense with those of his fellow accused. He dealt politely with his defense lawyers and was prone to giving lectures in court.

  Mohammed seemed generally unbothered by prison life. He prayed and exercised19 and at times appeared to be the most powerful person in the remote prison.

  Washington, D.C., November 2009

  Eighteen months later, after years of secret imprisonment, after the clean teams spent almost another year reinvestigating the crimes of 9/11, and after more months of further internal deliberations, Attorney General Holder announced with much fanfare that the Obama administration would dismiss the military court charges and, following the rule of law, would try KSM, Hawsawi, bin Attash, Ali, and bin al-Shibh in civilian federal court in the Southern District of New York, in the shadow of where the World Trade Center once stood.

  “For over two hundred years our nation has relied on a faithful adherence to the rule of law to bring criminals to justice and to provide accountability to victims. Once again we will ask our legal system in two venues to rise to that challenge. I am confident that it will answer the call with fairness and with justice,” Holder said.

  The decision was lauded by civil libertarians and lambasted by some politicians of both parties who said it would be impossible to secure the trial site and that New York would become a terrorist target. They had perhaps forgotten that the World Trade Center already had been attacked twice. Terrorists—including the embassy bombers, KSM’s nephew, and two others on the Bojinka plot, which KSM helped mastermind—had previously been tried and convicted in lower Manhattan without incident.

  To the FBI, br
inging KSM back to New York was a restoration to the world as they thought it should be: first, somebody does something bad. Then we find them. Gather evidence. Indict and try them. Justice is served.

  Matt Besheer, still a restless cop in a small Florida town haunted by the what-ifs of a decade earlier, missed a phone call from his old partner, Frank Pellegrino, after Holder made the announcement. Pellegrino’s message went to Besheer’s voice mail. In the years since then, Besheer has played the message over and over. Pellegrino, typically the stoic, had feelings he couldn’t quite control that day. He was a man whose entire professional identity had been nearly undone by 9/11. Usually, he arrested guys; he didn’t let them move on to commit other crimes. Except this once. Now maybe, finally, he could get some semblance of reconciliation, of peace.

  The tape is scratchy. It is Pellegrino in rare, exposed form:

  “Hey, Bash,” it begins, Pellegrino using the term of affection he coined for Besheer long ago.

  “Hey, Bash, I sent you an e-mail. It looks like they’re bringing KSM back to New York where he should be, my friend.” Pellegrino pauses; there is a brief silence, then a deep sigh, as if he is fighting to keep his composure. “I’m in Australia right now, and I’m a little overwhelmed at the whole thing. That’s where the savage belongs, and where he’ll get his time in court.”

  “Oh, man,” he says, pausing for an even longer stretch. “Hopefully I can get to sleep one day. Just send me an e-mail and I’ll see you when I get back to the States. It’s two a.m. here. I was thinking about you, brother. I love you, man.”

  Washington, D.C., April 2011

  The decision on what to do with KSM and his coconspirators continued to plague the Obama administration and Congress. Politicians from both parties proclaimed loudly that it was impossible to bring a trial like this not just to New York but to anywhere in the United States. Former FBI director Louis Freeh suggested that Guantánamo be designated a satellite courtroom of the federal court. But no one had a solution that worked, or was politically palatable. Bills were introduced in Congress specifically to deal with the problems created by the unprecedented legal apparatus built up around the case, including a new law that would allow someone who pleads guilty in a military courtroom to be put to death. Many also objected to trying the case in Manhattan on principle, they said, because the terrorists didn’t deserve the protections of American tradition and law. Others thought the trials would cost too much, or that the city simply could not be defended in the event of a trial, or that a trial, even if it were possible, would allow KSM a platform from which to distribute his propaganda. It was an odd consequence of the workings of justice that this little man—on occasion more Jackie Mason than Svengali—could by his mere presence upend the weight of Western jurisprudence. It was nonetheless a consequence that was broadly cited, if not necessarily believed.

  Pellegrino and Besheer—and the FBI as a whole—didn’t get to rejoice at the prospect of justice being served for long. The Congress, with votes from both Democrats and Republicans, banned the Obama administration from spending any money to transport prisoners from Guantánamo to the continental United States. The decision left Holder and Obama little choice. After more months of delay, Holder yielded. Outraged at the lack of support from the White House and Democrats in Congress, he was forced to reverse his decision. Military charges would be brought once again against KSM and his fellow defendants in preparation for a trial before a military court in Guantánamo. (Or perhaps not. In late 2011, President Obama signed into law legislation that would allow indefinite detention without trial of terror suspects.) Remarkably, KSM, the most prized captive in the War on Terror, had been in American custody for eight years and the American judicial system had not yet determined how to deal with him.

  Events in the world beyond Washington continued apace. Publicly, CIA director Leon Panetta declared Al Qaeda all but vanquished as a fighting force. American drones and fighters kept picking off remnants of the group and killing them with startling efficiency. Al Qaeda seemed incapable of launching any kind of significant new attack on American soil, a continuing reminder of KSM’s importance.

  Privately, Panetta had dramatically escalated the hunt for bin Laden, focusing on the couriers that KSM and other detainees had been protecting. Then, in May of 2011, bin Laden was caught and killed by American commandos. He had been living and operating right under the noses of Pakistan’s military establishment. After years of gradual accretion of evidence, then months of surveillance on the ground and from far above, teams of navy SEALs stormed a single-family compound in the city of Abbottabad in northern Pakistan and shot bin Laden dead. They then hauled his body onto a helicopter and flew themselves to safety and bin Laden to his end—a burial in the Arabian Sea.

  The hunt for bin Laden had sprung from the hunt for KSM. The CIA was led to bin Laden’s compound by a man whose movements, telephone calls, and e-mails they had been tracking for months. His name was Sheikh Abu Ahmed al-Kuwaiti, an ethnic Pakistani who, like KSM, was raised in Kuwait and came to Pakistan originally to fight in the jihad against the Soviet Union in Afghanistan. His name first surfaced when he was identified by captured Al Qaeda fighters as one of bin Laden’s security guards. One of those fighters said al-Kuwaiti had died in the bombing barrage at Tora Bora. This seemed unremarkable at the time, but became a curiosity when others identified al-Kuwaiti as a man who worked closely with KSM—first in the Al Qaeda media house operated by KSM in Kandahar and later in Karachi—and then with KSM’s successor, Abu Faraj al-Libi, more than a year after Tora Bora. Al-Kuwaiti was well known within Al Qaeda as a senior facilitator, courier, and subordinate of Mohammed. When Hambali and his wife left Kandahar for Karachi in November of 2001, they stayed at Abu Ahmed al-Kuwaiti’s guesthouse for two weeks.

  The CIA had realized soon after bin Laden escaped from Tora Bora that he had become invisible electronically. He had ceased to communicate by any means that could be intercepted by American satellites and other electronic equipment. He was in hiding. If he was to communicate at all with his followers, it would have to be by human couriers. So they had begun to look for who that might be. Al-Kuwaiti’s name arose in the course of this search.20 He was one of many courier candidates.

  Then, in 2004, a man named Hassan Ghul was captured in Iraq. Under interrogation, he described al-Kuwaiti as a messenger for bin Laden, further intensifying the interest in him.21 It took an additional three years to determine who al-Kuwaiti actually was and another two to locate him in Pakistan, then two more years to confirm the information and follow al-Kuwaiti to bin Laden.22 KSM was asked about him repeatedly, but he gave the CIA nothing.

  In a way, bin Laden’s death, though celebrated, was inconsequential. He had been a remote, distant figure for years, so remote it was often rumored that he was already dead. His number two, Ayman al-Zawahiri, was seen as more of a propagandist than an operational force, and had been further marginalized during his own years of isolation.

  By contrast, even years after his capture, KSM remained a threat. He couldn’t be tried, some argued, lest whatever words he spoke during the trial would somehow incite others to attack. The network of cells he had painstakingly established was still out there—in Pakistan, of course, but also Southeast Asia, the Middle East, and possibly in the United States. Of particular concern to U.S. authorities were KSM’s handpicked protégés, many of them computer experts who had spent years in the United States or Europe and were thought to be planning new attacks. There was also the very real fact of the attacks still being attempted. The 2009 attempt by Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab to hide a bomb in his underwear and blow up both himself and the airplane he was traveling on was a near replica of the KSM-directed odyssey of shoe bomber Richard Reid. The 2010 attempt to place a bomb in the cargo hold of a flight bound for the United States was eerily similar to ideas described by KSM and his nephew Abdul Basit Abdul Karim back in 1994.

  Then there were the attacks that investigators thought were yet t
o come. KSM had dispatched no one knew how many agents from Karachi to hide in the West. Some were never known by their names. At least one of his protégés, Adnan el-Shukrijumah, had become famous years earlier for his invisibility and cunning. He was in many ways like KSM, with one foot in Arab culture and another in Asia. Shukrijumah was alleged to have been selected as José Padilla’s partner in blowing up apartment buildings. They had, Padilla said, a falling-out, and Shukrijumah was then assigned by KSM to study targets throughout North and Central America. Several detainees identified him to be the most likely candidate to lead the next Al Qaeda attack against the United States. All this made him a target of investigators, none of whom have found a shred of evidence that would tell them where he is or what he might want to do.

  Through his aura of invincibility, through ghosts such as Shukrijumah, KSM has retained his power, his ability to strike fear into the hearts of potential victims, which is the first goal of all terrorism. Caged within one of the highest-security prisons ever built—a prison within a prison within a military base on a remote island—he endured, through his network, his legacy, through ideas he had already given to others, as a threat. KSM, years after he was last able to issue a single order, remained, in some real sense, in command.