Mastermind

by Richard Miniter

  It was like a Hollywood pitch meeting, with KSM as the journeyman producer and bin Laden as the studio chieftain. KSM had ideas, many ideas, while bin Laden had oceans of money and a supporting cast of martyrs prepared to die, along with a technical staff of document forgers, money movers, communication encrypters, and so on.

  And pitch meetings are structurally adversarial and unequal. One man was the beggar, the other the chooser.

  Clearly, bin Laden had his doubts. Choosers always do. Sure, KSM was an “idea man.” But could he be a team player? Could the terror entrepreneur be a terror executive, working with bin Laden’s many committees and rules? After a few hours, bin Laden politely declined to back any of KSM’s plans but asked him to join Al Qaeda and move his family from the Baluch region of Iran to Kandahar, Afghanistan.11

  Now KSM had to make a choice. He had come to seek money and other aid to continue to act as a free agent, under bin Laden’s protection. Instead, he was invited to join the official roster and follow orders. That meant hierarchy and a loss of independence. Bin Laden didn’t want to be another of KSM’s financial sponsors. He wanted to be the boss. Was KSM willing to be a subordinate?

  After a respectful moment of silence, KSM turned bin Laden down, he later told the CIA.12 It would be years before he joined Al Qaeda and swore allegiance to bin Laden. Apparently he wasn’t ready to be managed, second-guessed, and made to ask permission. KSM knew there were other terror lords with money for an enterprising producer. He would travel and find another one. This is the only power a beggar has over a chooser—the ability to go to the competition.

  Within months of turning bin Laden down, KSM was spotted traveling to South America again,13 looking for money and men for his own operations.

  He also returned to Southeast Asia, seeking out his old friend Hambali: “He, too, was cool to KSM’s grand plans,” the 9/11 Commission Report notes.

  Next, KSM tried to link up with Ibn al-Khattab, who ran an Islamist terror group in Chechnya. Khattab was a Saudi-born militant who had disfigured his right hand while trying to detonate a homemade bomb in the Afghan war against the Soviets. He later fought in Bosnia, with the backing of Iranian intelligence, against the Orthodox Christian Serbs and Roman Catholic Croats. It appears that Khattab met KSM there.14 Shortly thereafter, Khattab decamped to Chechnya, where Muslim locals were fighting for autonomy from the Russians who had ruled that territory for almost two hundred years. Khattab’s Arab mujahideen fighters soon developed a reputation for both bravery and brutality.

  KSM made several attempts to reach Khattab overland by going through Iran and the central Asian republics, but the Russians had effectively sealed the borders and the airspace. KSM had to turn back.

  Striking out with Hambali in Southeast Asia and with Khattab in central Asia, KSM knew there was only one warlord left with the will and the wallet to help him realize his grand plans of large-scale destruction.

  Back in Karachi in 1997, after more than a year of wandering, KSM had sought out his old friend Mohammed Atef, who was in charge of Al Qaeda’s military wing. Atef agreed to set up another meeting with bin Laden. When the archterrorist renewed his offer to join Al Qaeda, KSM accepted. He later insisted that he did not swear an oath of allegiance, known as bayat, to bin Laden for many years, in order to keep the fig leaf of his vaunted independence.

  Initially, KSM was given no fixed duties. He was simply supposed to hang around and try to be useful. Bin Laden was essentially testing KSM; he wanted to see if the man who liked to lead could also serve.

  KSM began to seek out various Al Qaeda middle managers in 1997 and 1998, helping them fix their computers and advising them on press releases.15 Over time, KSM gravitated to Al Qaeda’s media outreach efforts, which were similar to the work he had done for Abdullah Azzam in the late 1980s.

  “In early 1998, he [bin Laden] sent a signed letter to an associate in Pakistan telling them to increase payments to selected journalists. He wanted to see an increase in coverage of his statements and activities, he told his correspondent.”16 KSM seems to have been in charge of distributing some of these payments.

  KSM had to learn to be patient, to continue to do what he undoubtedly saw as menial tasks, while bin Laden came to trust him.

  Then on August 7, 1998, Al Qaeda effectively declared war on the United States, and KSM saw his chance to make history.

  Prudence Bushnell, the U.S. ambassador to Kenya, had been annoying her superiors at State Department headquarters for more than fifteen months. She had sent numerous cables and memos begging for new security measures for the embassy building in downtown Nairobi. When visiting delegations of congressmen and senators would pass through Kenya’s sprawling capital, the ambassador would pull them aside and relate how unsafe she felt. She continued to believe that a terrorist strike against her embassy building was only a matter of time. In December 1997, she even wrote a personal note to U.S. Secretary of State Madeleine K. Albright.17

  The CIA was already gravely concerned about the security of U.S. embassies in East Africa. Working with Kenyan police in 1997, the CIA had interviewed Wadih el-Hage, an American citizen living in Kenya who had ties to Al Qaeda. In an August 1997 raid on el-Hage’s Kenyan house, investigators found computer disks and paper files describing African cells of Al Qaeda and outlining potential targets for attack. Two other major terrorist threats were also formally investigated by the State Department. When General Anthony C. Zinni, the commander of U.S. forces in the Central Command, which includes the Middle East and East Africa, offered to send his own team to review security at the embassy in Nairobi, the State Department turned him down. Instead, three months later, the State Department sent its own team to assess security at the embassy. That team recommended that a new chain-link fence be installed around the parking lot.18

  The State Department, despite the deadly 1983 attack on its embassy in Beirut by Islamist radicals and the 1979 takeover of its embassy in Tehran by Islamist radicals, did not see much of a threat to its embassies and personnel by Islamist radicals. In its 1998 budget request to Congress, it asked for security upgrades at only two embassies: Beijing and Berlin.

  Ambassador Bushnell was attending a budget meeting with Kenyan officials on August 7, 1998, when she heard several popping sounds, followed by a loud thud. Then the roar of a massive explosion filled the room.

  It threw her to the floor, where a wave of glass shards speared her. The ambassador and several Kenyan officials struggled their way down a narrow concrete stairway, crowded with smoke and people, with a metal banister “wet with blood.”19

  The blast shattered windows in every direction for three miles, raining down piranha-like chunks of glass that sliced into people on the crowded sidewalk below. As the acrid black smoke rose, survivors could see burning metal cars thrown into light poles and walls.

  The secretarial college across from the U.S. embassy collapsed into a pile of concrete dust and twisted metal. Rescuers, many plunging their bare hands into the hot debris, desperately tried to dig out those trapped inside.

  The rear of the embassy was an unsteady two-story mountain of jagged concrete chunks dangling from a twisted steel skeleton. Pipes sprayed water and sewage into a crater more than three feet deep.

  CIA and FBI investigators learned that Al Qaeda had been patiently assembling the plot since May 1998. The massive two-thousand-pound bombs were delivered on the back of a Toyota pickup. When the two bombers in the truck cab were turned away from the main entrance and sent, like all other deliverymen, to the embassy’s rear loading dock, they calmly followed instructions. When the uniformed Kenyan guard insisted that they had no notice of a scheduled delivery, one of the men threw a hand grenade at him. It exploded, while the second man in the truck opened fire with his pistol.

  One of the bombers, Mohammed Rashed Daoud al-Owhali, ran from the bomb-laden truck as his comrade flipped the dashboard switch to detonate. Wounded in the blast, he would later be arrested in his hospital bed in Nairob
i—lying alongside his victims.

  Nine minutes later, at the U.S. embassy at Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, security personnel slid open the metal gate for the scheduled arrival of the embassy’s official water truck. The guard noticed that the man behind the wheel wasn’t the usual driver, but waved him in anyway. Once inside the compound, the truck exploded.

  The two East African embassy bombs killed 212 Africans and a dozen American diplomats, while wounding upward of 4,500 Muslims who were simply standing on the wrong sidewalk at the wrong time. It was the largest terrorist strike in the history of East Africa.

  At the time of the embassy bombings, the State Department’s recommended chain-link fence had not yet been installed. It wouldn’t have made a difference.

  Strange as it may seem, the East African embassy bombings gave KSM some hope. The operation was large and ambitious. The two bombings occurred within nine minutes of each other, more than four hundred miles apart, thanks to careful planning. The death toll was satisfyingly large. Finally, the United States would realize it was at war.

  KSM began to lobby Mohammed Atef for yet another meeting with bin Laden. He wanted to talk to him again about what had become known inside Al Qaeda as the “planes operation.” The meeting was short and, apparently, not as memorable as its result. Sometime in the last few months of 1998,20 bin Laden gave his approval for what became the September 11 attacks.

  KSM was elated.21

  BOOK III

  THE PLANES OPERATION

  8

  September 11, 2001

  For KSM, the planes operation was essentially a management problem.

  KSM soon found he had to manage up as well as down. Bin Laden was a micromanager, and he liked to discuss every angle from different points of view, according to American intelligence officials who have evaluated reports from KSM’s interrogations.

  Mohammed Atef, the head of Al Qaeda’s military wing, and other members of the majlis—Al Qaeda’s senior management team, a kind of sounding board for bin Laden—were well accustomed to bin Laden’s long, roaming conversations. Often it seemed as if bin Laden couldn’t make a decision at all. At other times, the archterrorist would make a decision in seconds or minutes. Sometimes the most grave decisions (such as selecting key personnel) were made instantly, while less significant decisions would be talked about for days. The majlis as a body did not vote, and bin Laden was not bound to take their advice—even if they were unanimous. Bin Laden’s management theory seemed to come from his understanding of the practice of the Prophet and the four Rightly Guided Caliphs, who were known to overrule their councils.

  Bin Laden’s management style caused some friction with KSM, who was a talker and a brainstormer. Once a course of action was chosen, KSM made decisions—quickly, even compulsively. KSM preferred to fix a poor decision after the fact, where bin Laden preferred to avoid making a mistake in the first place.

  KSM would have to manage his interactions with bin Laden carefully, lest he offend him. And that, by itself, took discipline and work. KSM had more meetings with bin Laden than anyone else after 1998, according to French intelligence consultant Roland Jacquard. Jacquard said his assessment is based on a review of Al Qaeda documents collected by various branches of French intelligence.1

  Bin Laden was often critical of KSM’s ability to focus on one project at a time, even a project as massive as the future September 11 attacks. KSM proposed a number of other operations in 1998 and 1999. He sent Issa al-Britani, a British convert to Islam, to meet with Hambali in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, to explore the possibilities of terror attacks in the Far East.2 That meeting later produced plans by KSM to bomb churches in the Molucca Islands and attack nightclubs in the Hindu-majority island of Indonesia. In the first months of 2001, KSM sent Issa al-Britani to Manhattan to photograph and evaluate various Jewish targets.3 KSM also developed a plan to find a Saudi air force pilot to steal a fighter jet to strafe and bomb the Israeli resort city of Elat. “Bin Laden reportedly liked this proposal,” the 9/11 Commission Report notes, “but he instructed KSM to concentrate on the 9/11 operation first.”4

  KSM also had to work to get along with colleagues. While he was generally described as “an intelligent, efficient, and even-tempered manager” his coworkers often found his ambition excessive. Abu Zubaydah later hinted to interrogators that KSM often stole the ideas of others and represented them as his own.5

  The planes operation began as a series of long meetings. The plan continued to evolve. The original idea involved ten hijacked aircraft. Four would be driven into the tallest buildings in California and Washington State, while five others would be flown into the U.S. Capitol building, the Pentagon, and either the twin towers or the CIA and FBI headquarters buildings. The tenth plane would be piloted by KSM himself. He would kill all the adult males aboard and use the plane’s radio to contact American broadcast media. After landing the plane at an American airport, KSM would deliver a blistering speech attacking American support of Israel and Arab dictators. Then he would magnanimously release the women and children and fly off to freedom. Bin Laden found the plan too bizarre and complex and asked for a smaller, more realistic idea. This grandiose scheme, the 9/11 Commission Report notes, “gives a better glimpse of his [KSM’s] true ambitions. This is theater, a spectacle of destruction with KSM as the self-cast star—the superterrorist.”6

  Next came target selection. KSM met with Osama bin Laden and Mohammed Atef in bin Laden’s compound in Kandahar, Afghanistan. These three alone would choose the targets of the September 11 operations.

  KSM later discussed the targeting meeting with his CIA interrogators. The CIA reports of the discussion were provided to the 9/11 Commission investigators, who summarized the discussion vividly:Bin Laden imagined that America—as a political entity—could actually be destroyed. “America is a great power possessed of tremendous military might and a wide-ranging economy,” he later conceded, “but all this is built upon an unstable foundation which can be targeted, with special attention to its obvious weak spots. If it is hit in one hundredth of those spots, God willing, it will stumble, wither away and relinquish world leadership.” Inevitably, he believed, the confederation of states that made up America would dissolve.7

  In short, bin Laden believed the United States to be as weak as most Arab dictatorships and concluded that its federal structure was similar to that of the United Arab Emirates.

  Although he had traveled to Stockholm and London as a boy, bin Laden had no real sense of the deep structure of Western society. He didn’t realize that in a crisis, in an instant, people organize themselves like heroes, rescuing the wounded and confronting the dangers. He simply couldn’t anticipate the bravery of New York firemen or the passengers on United Flight 93. His only experience with authority was the kind that is consciously pushed down, not the kind that spontaneously wells up.

  Bin Laden was clear that he wanted to strike the White House, the U.S. Capitol building, and the Pentagon. He wanted to destroy the centers of America’s political and military power. (The White House was later taken off the list “for navigation reasons,” KSM told Al Jazeera.8)

  KSM wanted to nominate what he thought was the locus of America’s capitalist power: the World Trade Center.

  He wanted to try the old target again. Perhaps he had Ramzi Yousef in mind. Rohan Gunaratna, a Singapore-based Al Qaeda expert, theorizes that KSM had developed a “losing and learning doctrine” in which Al Qaeda would return to favored targets.9

  Bin Laden tentatively agreed.

  Then came recruitment.

  Selecting “martyrs” is a tricky business. The two most important qualities that KSM was looking for were a willingness of the recruit to die for the cause, and “patience.” Operatives were generally “not pressured to martyr themselves,” he said.10 It wasn’t necessary. There were many who wanted to die. Patience was vital because planning and prepositioning operatives for such a complex attack “could take years.”11 Many recruits were too despe
rate for action to wait. They would simply join another Pakistan-based Islamist outfit and martyr themselves in India, Israel, or the Far East.

  Typically, terror groups plan and execute bombings in a matter of weeks. Many Al Qaeda “field operations” are performed this quickly. But operations run by headquarters (such as the 1998 embassy bombings) can take years. As a result, patience is prized. Mohammed Rashed Daoud al-Owhali, the would-be suicide bomber who ran from the bomb-laden truck in Nairobi and was captured in a hospital bed after the 1998 embassy bombings, testified that he had been forced at an Al Qaeda training camp to chant for hours: “I will be patient until patience is worn out from patience.”12

  Al Qaeda actually had a questionnaire for new recruits. The questions included: What brought you to Afghanistan? How did you travel here? How did you hear about us? What attracted you to the cause? What is your educational background? Where have you worked before?13

  The application served multiple purposes, including detecting the potential spies (a persistent Al Qaeda fear) and spotting recruits with special skills, such as knowledge of engineering or English.

  Those willing to be martyrs were first interviewed by Al Qaeda military commander Mohammed Atef.14

  In turn, he would then pass on his recommendations to KSM.

  Bin Laden played an active role. According to KSM, bin Laden delivered lectures at the training camps and later met with the recruits in small groups. Bin Laden, KSM told his interrogators, could screen people “in about ten minutes.” Most of the 9/11 hijackers were initially approved this rapidly. If he spotted someone whom he thought outstanding, bin Laden would ask him to visit Tarnak Farms, the archterrorist’s Afghan compound, outside Kandahar. There, over tea and dates, bin Laden would question the recruit more closely.