Mastermind

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Mastermind Page 11

by Richard Miniter


  “They wouldn’t be,” Ramzi Yousef replied, “if I had enough explosive.”12

  The “helicopter notes” were revealing:[On February 7–8, 1995] Abdul Basit Mahmoud Abdul Karim [also known as Ramzi Yousef], hereafter referred to as “Basit,” was interviewed aboard an aircraft en route from Islamabad, Pakistan, to the United States. Basit advised that he could fluently speak, read and understand the English language. He was advised of the official identities of the interviewing agents and was reminded that he was under arrest for offenses concerning the bombing of the World Trade Center (WTC) in New York City. He was, thereafter, advised of his constitutional rights by reading them and having them read to him. Due to Basit’s request, notes were not taken in his presence, but were summarized during breaks in the interview.

  [Concerning Yousef’s 1992 trip to New York prior to the World Trade Center bombing:] Upon entry at John F. Kennedy International Airport, in New York, Basit utilized an Iraqi passport in the name of Ramzi Ahmed Yousef. Basit explained that he had purchased the Iraqi passport for 100 U.S. dollars in Peshawar, Pakistan. He noted Peshawar is the easiest place to purchase Iraqi passports and further explained that these are genuine documents stolen by Iraqi rebels who raid passport offices in Northern Iraq. When presenting the Iraqi passport to U.S. Immigration Officials, Basit requested political asylum, and was processed and released.

  Basit advised that in the fall of 1994 [after the World Trade Center attack], he had learned through various press accounts that President Clinton would be traveling to Manila in November. Basit claimed that he traveled to Manila a few days prior to the President’s arrival. Once in Manila, Basit determined the President’s planned itinerary through reported press accounts. Basit related that he thereafter traveled to each of the sites which the President would visit, in order to survey them for opportunities to attempt an assassination. He noted that the level of security which he observed at each of these sites was very high. Basit advised that the assassination attempt on Clinton was never carried out, due to the observations of high security, and his lack of time needed to plan and organize such an attempt.

  The second option which Basit considered was a bombing attack of the Presidential motorcade while the motorcade was en route between sites in Manila. Basit indicated that he considered placing an improvised explosive device in a location along the motorcade route, designed to disable the lead car in the motorcade. He explained that by disabling the lead vehicle, the entire motorcade would be brought to a stop, enabling an explosive or poisonous gas attack on the Presidential limousine.

  He related that he had considered using the chemical agent phosgene in the attack on the limousine, and noted that he had the technical ability to readily manufacture that substance. According to Basit, the phosgene, in a liquid form, could be placed in a metal container, which could then be opened with a charge of explosive, rapidly dispensing the substance as gas.

  He related that his associates had [also] been interested in the Pope, but denied that the Pope was an assassination target. Basit attributed religious articles and photographs of the Pope, found in [his] apartment in Manila, to the general interest of his associates [in the Pope]. [This is almost certainly disinformation.]

  He spoke of an incident which occurred in his Manila apartment in early January 1995, which had been reported in the media as a fire. He related that he had been demonstrating the burning of a mixture of [chemicals] when smoke produced by the burning began to fill the apartment. He was then questioned as to certain materials found in the Manila apartment which appeared to refer to U.S. airline flights. He noted that, if the incident at the Manila apartment had not occurred, there would have been several airline bombings within two weeks of that time [known to federal prosecutors as the Manila Air plot].

  Basit asked the interviewing Agents whether the Agents knew how the person who had been arrested in the Philippines, and who had subsequently escaped, had effected the escape. In discussing [this] individual, Basit acknowledged that this individual was known as Wali [Khan Amin] Shah. Following Basit’s descriptions of Wali as strong and intelligent, Basit was questioned as to whether Basit had been acting under the direction of Wali Shah. Basit would not further elaborate on that issue.

  When questioned regarding a business card in the name of Mohammad Khalifa [bin Laden’s brother-in-law Jamal Khalifa], found in Basit’s apartment in the Philippines, Basit stated that he did not personally know Khalifa, but that Khalifa’s business card had been given to him by Wali Shah, as a contact in the event Basit needed aid. Basit acknowledged that he was familiar with the name Osama bin Laden, and knew him to be a relative of Khalifa’s, but would not further elaborate.13

  KSM would never see Ramzi Yousef again. Yousef was convicted for the World Trade Center bombing and sentenced to 240 years in the supermax maximum-security prison in Florence, Colorado.

  KSM and other members of Ramzi Yousef’s family soon got their revenge.

  Exactly one month later, in Karachi, an unmarked white Toyota van from the U.S. consulate stopped at a red light. A taxi swerved alongside. Four masked men swarmed the trapped vehicle, spraying it with bullets. Two of the three American diplomats inside bled to death, and the third was severely wounded. Pakistani investigators would count seventy-six rounds of 7.62 mm ammunition that had sliced through the vehicle. They linked the gunmen to the SSP, a terror group in which Ramzi’s father is a prominent leader.14 The gunmen drove off in the stolen taxi. Clearly the shooting was retaliation for Yousef’s arrest.

  KSM knew he had to be careful. Ramzi Yousef had always promised him that he would never give authorities his name. But banking on that promise was risky. Besides, another cell member or stray computer file could give him away.

  That interview after Ramzi Yousef’s arrest was reckless. Bold, and even funny, but reckless. What if some curious intelligence analyst had decided to plug his name into one of their voluminous databases?

  After Ramzi Yousef’s capture, KSM went to Khartoum, Sudan, an intelligence official told me.15 Most likely he was trying to meet bin Laden or one of his lieutenants there. We will never know.

  The Sudanese intelligence agency, known as the Mukhabarat, knocked on his hotel door. He was told, politely, to move on. Sudan already had enough trouble from Western governments with its emerging reputation as a rest stop for terrorists. It didn’t need any more wanted men in its capital city. He was given a few weeks to find a safe haven—outside of Sudan.

  Sudanese intelligence later told a Cairo-based FBI legal attaché about KSM’s visit to their country.16 More important, Sudanese intelligence revealed the terrorist’s next destination: Qatar.

  By now the FBI knew who KSM was: one of the financiers of the 1993 World Trade Center bombing. The special agents did not know how important KSM was. He was just a name on an indictment.

  CIA operations officer Melissa Boyle Mahle had been hunting KSM for months when a source tipped her off that he was living in Doha, the modern capital of Qatar.

  KSM apparently had the use of an apartment owned by the then minister of religious affairs, Abdullah bin Khalid al-Thani. The minister had funded KSM’s terror operations for years through a variety of Islamic charities, including Human Appeal International.17

  Mahle was excited. Ramzi Yousef’s trial was only months away. KSM “would be useful for the prosecution—plus there were lots of loose ends that needed to be tied,” Mahle writes. Including stopping future terrorist attacks.

  As Mahle prepared to capture KSM, the CIA and the FBI went to war with each other. “When the FBI was briefed, the Legat based in Rome moved in and tried to take over the operation without concern for CIA equities on the ground or Qatari political tendencies,” writes Mahle.

  The FBI official wanted a normal criminal investigation with all of the intergovernmental formalities that followed. The problem? Qatar’s government could not publicly support an arrest without alienating political factions inside the country. “I was concerned th
at because of sympathies for Islamic extremists, Muhammad [KSM] would be warned off by Qatari officials and would flee. I cautioned strongly against the direct approach, instead proposing a snatch operation, luring Muhammad out of Qatar and interdicting him as he traveled. The FBI would still get their man. But the FBI was in a hurry, wanted to control the case and wanted to do it the ‘FBI way.’ It was pure vinegar and water when it came to the FBI special agent and me, with disastrous results,” Mahle said.18

  By October 1995, KSM was seemingly cornered. The CIA and the FBI had tracked him to an apartment building in Qatar. The special agents had even confirmed his presence by using an undisclosed “surveillance technology” and provided the government of Qatar with his street address and an apartment number, Clinton’s counterterrorism coordinator, Richard Clarke, told me.19

  The FBI agents were told to wait in a hotel until the extradition paperwork was complete.

  FBI director Louis Freeh repeatedly phoned the head of state security in Qatar. But it seemed that Qatar’s government was stalling.

  KSM’s arrest and transfer to an American prison should have been a legal formality that took only a few days. Qatar has a longstanding extradition treaty with the United States. But weeks went by. The Qatari authorities insisted on processing the formal extradition request as slowly as legally possible, one FBI agent personally involved in the case told me.20

  Finally, the FBI agents received a valid extradition order. They raced over to KSM’s apartment. It was empty. Indeed, it had been thoroughly cleaned. There wasn’t even any dust.

  How had he gotten away? Qatar’s minister of religious affairs had tipped off KSM and provided him and a traveling companion with false passports, according to Robert Baer, a former CIA official.21 Baer, who at the time was a CIA case officer working in the region, said that Hamid bin Jassim bin Hamad, a disgruntled member of the Kingdom of Qatar’s ruling family, had told him about the arrangement.

  “Because of an FBI-CIA sandbox fight,” the CIA’s Mahle writes, “Khalid Shaykh Muhammad escaped capture in 1996, leaving him footloose and fancy free to revamp his disrupted airplane-hijacking plan into the September 11 plot.”22

  He soon went to Afghanistan, looking for Osama bin Laden.

  7

  Meeting bin Laden

  Mary Jo White, the diminutive, tough federal prosecutor for the Southern District of New York, smiled into her telephone.

  On the other end of the phone was a federal prosecutor who had walked outside a Manhattan federal courthouse to call her. A grand jury, meeting in secret, had indicted Khalid Shaikh Mohammed for the “Manila Air plot.”1

  The indictment was a close-run thing. “There wasn’t a lot of evidence” against KSM, she told me.2 Just a few stray references on Ramzi Yousef’s captured laptop computer and a few recollections of Abdul Hakim Murad and Wali Khan Amin Shah.

  But White wasn’t going to take any chances. Her prosecutorial philosophy was simple: “I knew these were very dangerous people. We had to cast a broad net” in order to save lives.3

  The indictment was “sealed,” or kept secret, so that it wouldn’t tip KSM off that the United States was hunting him.

  Capturing KSM was not made much easier by the secret indictment.

  The music was loud at Bandido restaurant4 in central Manila. KSM was back in the Philippines, once again posing as a Saudi businessman.

  Philippine National Police and a small FBI team had set up a mobile command center to catch KSM a few blocks away. Just as they were beginning their surveillance, KSM stood up and backed away from his table.5 Before the dragnet could encircle the restaurant, KSM bolted through a back door.

  The Philippine police spread out in a broad search pattern. But the mastermind was gone.

  Had he spotted an FBI officer? Or did he have a sixth sense? All that is certain is that another chance to capture KSM was gone. The ghost had walked through walls and vanished.

  For the first time in his terrorist career, KSM had to run. His home base in Doha had been raided by the FBI, and he knew it wasn’t wise to return to Qatar. Pakistan would be risky, too. Ramzi Yousef had been captured there, and KSM’s older brother Zahid had said that his house had been searched by Pakistani police. KSM didn’t know what the Americans knew about his plot to murder President Clinton, kill Pope John Paul II, or explode eleven commercial airliners over the Pacific Ocean, but he did know that three of his coconspirators had been arrested and could be talking.

  He would have to turn to people he knew and trusted, people from the jihadi underworld. KSM’s movements over the next year are hard to track due to his restless search for a safe haven. It appears that he visited people he knew from his Afghan days in Yemen, Malaysia, and Brazil.6

  Brazilian and Argentine intelligence services deny that KSM ever visited Brazil’s remote town of Foz do Iguaçu, which is the site of South America’s largest waterfall and where the borders of Argentina, Paraguay, and Brazil come together. The so-called Tri-Border Region is a sparsely populated, humid jungle, dotted with private estates. It makes an ideal place to hide. The region is home to some thirty thousand people of Arab descent. On the far side of the bridge linking Brazil to Paraguay, the gold dome of a mosque flashes in the sun. The Brazilian magazine Veja claimed to have a twenty-eight-minute video of KSM’s visit, but has so far refused to make it public or offer it to American intelligence officials.7

  Using one of his more than fifty aliases, KSM returned to Karachi. There he saw his brother and his nephews, including Ammar al-Baluchi and Abdul Karim Mahmood Abdul Karim, who had attended North Carolina A&T with him. Both were rising stars in the Al Qaeda constellation.

  As he talked his way through his situation—and people who knew him during his North Carolina days say that he liked to think by talking aloud—he began to realize that he could no longer operate on his own. His team of nephews and childhood friends from Kuwait had been arrested—including Ramzi Yousef, Abdul Hakim Murad, and Wali Amin Shah—or had drifted back to well-established terror networks that offered regular pay, housing, health care for pregnant wives and young mothers, and other benefits. KSM and his contemporaries were married, sometimes to multiple wives, and were responsible for their growing families. KSM himself had a wife and two sons. It was time to grow up and get something approaching a normal job, albeit one inside an Islamic terror network.

  Part of him sensed that he needed to join or at least come under the protective umbrella of a large, well-funded terrorist organization in a secure location. Osama bin Laden was the obvious choice.

  Still, KSM was torn. He had been a solo operator—a “terror entrepreneur” in the words of the 9/11 Commission—for almost ten years. That independence was hard to give up.

  Very little is known about KSM’s first substantive meeting with Osama bin Laden. It most likely occurred in 1995 in Tora Bora.8 Tora Bora was a string of crude bunkers and warehouses hewn out of the dirt and rock of Afghanistan’s White Mountains, using construction equipment that bin Laden had brought there in 1987. Bin Laden made his tea from a creek that ran nearby; the water was always cold, even in midsummer. Here, around a campfire at night or under a canvas awning by day, bin Laden liked to talk to new recruits about Islam and their commitment to jihad.

  The Tora Bora meeting was the first time he had seen bin Laden since 1989, KSM later told his CIA interrogators.9

  The two men certainly knew of each other, but how well is hard to say. Bin Laden knew that KSM was an uncle of Ramzi Yousef, whose 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center was seen in Al Qaeda circles as daring and bold. The two men also knew a good number of the same people, but they were hardly comfortable with each other.

  Still, KSM got a measure of respect for the years he spent working and networking in jihadi circles. KSM had been an assistant to Abdul Rasul Sayyaf, a religious leader whom bin Laden liked and respected. KSM had also worked for Abdullah Azzam, bin Laden’s mentor until his death in 1989. But bin Laden must have killed Azzam.
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  In Azzam’s last moments, he was driving to jummah prayers on a Friday afternoon in Peshawar, Pakistan, with his father and his brother. He passed by a gas station, where there was a bomb hidden in the rubble of the road. Azzam’s car disappeared in a flash of light and thunder. Its burning chassis left almost no human remains. Snaking away from the wreckage was a well-hidden detonation cord that disappeared into a sewer crawl space. The killer had watched for Azzam’s car and triggered the explosion. Then he’d calmly crawled away.

  At the time of his death, Azzam and bin Laden were arguing about the direction of the jihadi movement. Azzam wanted to consolidate their gains in Afghanistan and form a perfect Islamic state there. Bin Laden wanted to use the global network that the two men had established in the 1980s to drive unbelievers out of Muslim lands and even retake the lands in Europe and Asia that the Arabs had lost in the Middle Ages. Many suspect that bin Laden himself was behind Azzam’s car’s bombing. He is certainly the one who most benefited from Azzam’s disappearance from the scene.

  Differing views on Azzam were not the only thing that set KSM and bin Laden apart. The meeting must have been awkward, as the men could hardly have been more different. Lawrence Wright sums up the differences this way:Except for their hatred of America, Khaled Sheikh [sic] Mohammed and Osama bin Laden had almost nothing in common. Mohammed was short and squat; pious but poorly trained in religion; an actor and a cutup; a drinker and a womanizer. Whereas bin Laden was provincial and hated travel, especially in the West, Mohammed was a globetrotter fluent in several languages, including English.10

  KSM, perhaps prodded by bin Laden’s quiet questions, had no doubt told him about his exploits in the Philippines and elsewhere. Certainly KSM’s plots seemed innovative and ambitious. . . .

  After the small talk, KSM presented a battery of outrageous ideas to bin Laden: another plan to kill the pope, this time in Africa; a plan to hijack planes and fly them into buildings on America’s two most populous coasts; plans for London, Paris, Singapore, Hong Kong, and on and on.

 

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