The Hunt for KSM
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Wright, Lawrence. The Looming Tower: Al-Qaeda and the Road to 9/11. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2006.
Khalid Sheikh Mohammed attended this high school in Fahaheel, Kuwait. He was radicalized during his teen years, joining the Muslim Brotherhood. (Terry McDermott)
Mohammed’s father was imam of this mosque near the headquarters of the Kuwait Oil Company in Al-Ahmadi, Kuwait. (Terry McDermott)
Abdul Basit Abdul Karim, also known as Ramzi Yousef, designed a tiny bomb that could be smuggled disassembled onto an airplane and put together once on board. The design used a Casio watch as a timer. Basit and Mohammed planned to deposit twelve of the Casio bombs on a dozen U.S.-flagged jumbo jets and blow them all up on single day in 1995. (United States Government)
This is the room at the Doña Josefa, a transient hotel in Manila that Abdul Basit used as a bomb factory in 1994–95. A chemical fire he accidentally ignited in the room led to the disruption of his plot to blow up airliners. (United States Government)
The plans for the airliner plot were stored on this Toshiba laptop, recovered from the sixth-floor apartment where Abdul Basit lived in the Philippines. There were also clues on the laptop that helped investigators identify his uncle and coconspirator, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, known within law enforcement as KSM. (United States Government)
FBI special agent Frank Pellegrino (right), New York Port Authority detective Matthew Besheer (center), and Assistant U.S. Attorney Michael Garcia (left) were among those honored in 1997 by the Justice Department for their role in convicting KSM’s nephew Abdul Basit. (Matthew Besheer)
Wanted posters and matchbooks offering a $2 million reward for the capture of Ramzi Yousef, aka Abdul Basit, were distributed widely throughout Pakistan, where he was eventually captured in 1995. (United States Government)
The room KSM and Abdul Basit rented at the Doña Josefa faced a main thoroughfare where they believed Pope John Paul II would travel during a visit to Manila in 1995. The two plotted to kill both the pope and President Bill Clinton. (Terry McDermott)
An early photo of Abdul Basit. (United States Government)
Abdul Hakim Murad was a childhood friend of Abdul Basit who joined Basit and KSM for the airline bomb plot in Manila. (United States Government)
Wali Khan Amin Shah, an Afghan veteran of the anti-Soviet jihad and an old friend of Osama bin Laden, was convicted in 1996 for his role in the “Manila Air” plot to bomb a dozen American airliners. (United States Government)
Abdul Basit planned to turn these children’s dolls into bombs to be used against Western targets. He had several of the doll bombs with him when captured in 1995. (United States Government)
Abdul Basit remains imprisoned at a maximum-security federal penitentiary in Colorado, where he is serving two terms of 240 years each. He has been kept in solitary confinement almost the entire time he has been jailed. (United States Government)
KSM often posed as a Middle Eastern businessman when he traveled the world establishing terror cells. He sometimes wore Western business attire, sometimes flowing Arab robes. (United States Government)
KSM when he was younger. (United States Government)
KSM clean shaven. Mohammed altered his appearance and used different names and personas frequently. (United States Government)
This set of KSM fingerprints was taken in Doha, Qatar. KSM moved to Qatar after the end of the jihad against the Soviet Union. He worked as an engineer in a Ministry of Electricity and Water and used Doha as a staging area for many of his international travels over the years. He was nearly captured there in 1996 but slipped away while an FBI rendition team waited to take him into custody. (United States Government)
Ali Abdul Aziz Ali, also known as Ammar al-Baluchi, was just one of many of KSM’s relatives who assisted him. This photo was taken by the Red Cross at Guantánamo in 2009. (Courtesy Mohammed family)
An earlier photo of Ali Abdul Aziz Ali in Western clothes. (United States Government)
Mohammed Atta (second from right on the bottom row), the lead hijacker on September 11, 2001, earned an architecture degree from Cairo University. He’s shown here with classmates on a field trip in 1990 in Egypt. (Courtesy Mohammed Mokhtar el-Rafei)
FBI special agent Jennifer Keenan was assigned to Pakistan as the assistant legal attaché during the hunt for KSM. (Courtesy FBI)
KSM was held in Pakistani custody for three days after his capture in 2003. He was interrogated by both Pakistanis and Americans in those first few days. (CBS/60 Minutes)
The United States offered a $2 million reward for information leading to KSM’s capture in the late 1990s. The amount was raised to $25 million after 9/11. (United States Government)
KSM spent most of the years prior to 9/11 in Karachi; this is thought to be one of the apartments where he lived. (Terry McDermott)
KSM was captured along with Mustafa al-Hawsawi in this house in the sedate Westridge subdivision of Rawalpindi, Pakistan, in March 2003. Rawalpindi is the headquarters of the Pakistani military, near the capital of Islamabad, and many homeowners in the neighborhood were military officers. (Noveed Ahmed)
KSM’s first letter home to his family from prison in Guantánamo. (Terry McDermott)
Almost all of KSM’s letters home from Guantánamo are written in English. The letters contain mainly inquiries about the health of his family. (Terry McDermott)
This 2009 letter from Mohammed to his cousin could be read as a plea for absolution. (Terry McDermott)
KSM at Guantánamo in 2009. (Courtesy Mohammed family)
* To protect his identity, Colonel Tariq’s full name has not been used.
* Not his real name.
* The U.S. government uses different spellings of many Arabic names.
CONTENTS
Welcome
Dedication
Map
Preface
Chapter 1: Mukhtar
Chapter 2: Those Without
Chapter 3: Jihad
Chapter 4: Bojinka
Chapter 5: Making a Case
Chapter 6: Sorting It Out
Chapter 7: A Near Miss
Chapter 8: Thin Air
Chapter 9: The Plot
Chapter 10: September 11
Chapter 11: Panic
Chapter 12: KSM Ascendant
Chapter 13: In Plain Sight
Chapter 14: Betrayal
Chapter 15: In Captivity
Chapter 16: The Black Sites and Beyond
Acknowledgments and Sources
About the Authors
Praise for Terry McDermott and Josh Meyer’s The Hunt for KSM
Appendix: Verbatim Transcript of Combatant Status Review Tribunal Hearing for Khalid Sheikh Mohammed
Newsletters
Notes
Selected Bibliography
Photo Insert
Copyright
Copyright
Copyright © 2012 by Terry McDermott and Josh Meyer
C
over design by Keith Hayes. Cover photograph by AP Photo.
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ISBN 978-0-316-20273-2