Mastermind

by Richard Miniter

  Finally, the Pearl operation would burnish KSM’s image. It would show that the man known to his associates as “the fat man”9 was still capable of decisive action.

  Pearl’s next phone call was to Robert Baer,10 a former CIA case officer who had served in Lebanon and northern Iraq. Baer’s career had come to a sudden end, and he later emerged as a bestselling author and vocal critic of the agency. He is believed to be the first person to mention Khalid Shaikh Mohammed to Pearl and speculated that he was most likely the author of the September 11 attacks. He also told Pearl that from 1992 to 1996 KSM had a no-show job with the government of Qatar and that that government had hampered American efforts to arrest KSM there in 1996. Ever the diligent reporter, Pearl had called the foreign ministry of Qatar for information about KSM.

  By December 2001 Pearl was breaking a series of investigative articles about Pakistan’s intelligence service and its purported links to terrorist organizations. Pearl seemed most interested in a little-known “humanitarian organization” known as Ummah Tameer-e-Nau, which some analysts believe was involved in passing Pakistan’s nuclear secrets to Osama bin Laden.11

  As he continued to work the story, Pearl struck up a friendship with Hamid Mir, the only journalist to interview Osama bin Laden after the September 11 attacks. Mir agreed to share his contacts with the enterprising Wall Street Journal reporter.12

  Meanwhile, Ijaz put Pearl in touch with Khalid Khawaja, who was linked to Pakistan’s military intelligence agency, Osama bin Laden, and the Taliban.13 He joined the Pakistani air force as a pilot in 1971. In 1985 he was transferred to the ISI, where he was tasked with working with radical Muslim groups. He quickly developed relationships with Abdullah Azzam, Abdul Rasul Sayyaf, and Osama bin Laden. He cemented these ties by fighting alongside the jihadis against the Soviets in the battle of Jaji, in the White Mountains of Afghanistan, southeast of Tora Bora, in 1987.14 “Khawaja, in short, was a source to kill for and Danny charmed him,” Ijaz said.

  Khawaja told Ijaz that he found Pearl to be a “competent, straight-forward” journalist who didn’t ask “inappropriate questions.”15

  Ijaz thought that he had helped a reporter with a valuable story and didn’t know that his December 26, 2001, phone call with Pearl would be his last.16

  Pearl continued to give Pakistani officials headaches. Reporting from Bahawalpur, Pearl visited the headquarters of Jaish-e Mohammed, a terror group that the Pakistani government had told the U.S. government had been shut down. Pearl found that the Jaish-e-Mohammed offices were still open for business and that its bank accounts, far from frozen, were active. “If Danny hadn’t been on the ISI’s radar scope before,” Robert Sam Anson wrote in Vanity Fair, “he was now.”17

  Pearl was also investigating two other stories that were likely to complicate the relationship between the United States and Pakistan. One concerned Dawood Ibrahim, a figure connected to one of Pakistan’s mafias as well as several jihadi groups.18 The other, equally explosive story focused on Sheikh Mubarak (also known as Mubarak Ali Shah Gilani). Gilani, two of whose four wives are African American women, may be linked to efforts to indoctrinate black Americans, train them for jihad in camps in Pakistan, and return them to the United States to carry out bombings and other attacks.19

  At this point Pearl was most likely under active ISI surveillance, according to The Guardian, a British daily.20 Pearl was also pulling on a third thread: the alleged link between Richard Reid, the Britishborn “shoe bomber” who tried to down an aircraft over the Atlantic Ocean, and another Pakistan-based terror organization known as al-Fuqra, according to the Boston Globe.21

  The Globe story deepened Pearl’s interest in Gilani. Pearl believed that Gilani was connected to al-Fuqra and went to see his star source, Khalid Khawaja. Khawaja tried to talk him out of seeking an interview with Gilani. “Don’t try,” Khawaja said. “You will not be able to do it.”22

  But Pearl kept trying. Eventually Pearl was put in contact with Ahmed Omar Saeed Sheikh, who was operating under the alias Chaudrey Bashir.23 Pearl met Sheikh at the Akbar International Hotel in Rawalpindi, a city just south of Pakistan’s capital. “It was a great meeting, we ordered cold coffee and club sandwiches and had a great chitchat,” Sheikh said. “We had nothing personal against Daniel. Because of his hyperactivity, he caught our interest.”24

  The two men exchanged contact information, and Sheikh agreed to set up a meeting with Gilani.

  In a series of e-mails following the Rawalpindi meeting, Sheikh, still as “Bashir,” pretended to organize a sit-down with Gilani, who said he was looking forward to meeting Pearl. He told Pearl that a Gilani contact would meet him at the Village Garden Restaurant, next to the decrepit Metropole Hotel.25

  In the taxi en route to his fateful rendezvous, Pearl phoned his wife, Mariane. They had just learned that their unborn child was a boy. Both were very excited and planned to celebrate with friends later that evening. He said he would be back around 8 P.M.26

  Clearly, Pearl was worried about the meeting. He next sent a text to the man who’d first introduced him to “Bashir”: “Give me a quick reply. Is it safe to see Gilani?”27

  The sun was setting as Pearl’s taxi arrived outside the restaurant. The taxi driver saw Pearl shake hands with a young bearded man and climb into a white Toyota Corolla.28

  What Pearl didn’t know was that the young bearded man was actually Mansur Hasnain, who had been involved in the 1999 hijacking of India Airways Flight 814.29 Nor did he know that Hasnain’s hijacking had been undertaken to free Omar Sheikh from an Indian prison where he was serving time for kidnapping and killing. The trap, which had been carefully laid for the past several weeks, snapped shut. Pearl was now a prisoner.

  Within an hour, his wife realized something was wrong. A flurry of phone calls revealed that Pearl’s cell phone was off and that he had not called to check in with editors, as previously arranged.30

  Pakistani police opened an investigation, and they were soon joined by the FBI, which had more than a dozen special agents working inside Pakistan at the time.31

  Four worrisome days passed before CNN and Fox News received e-mails from a group calling itself the National Movement for the Restoration of Pakistani Sovereignty. The group’s name was a typical KSM touch: a fictitious group making outrageous demands, just as the imaginary “Fifth Battalion of the National Liberation Army” had taken credit for the 1993 World Trade Center bombing. Claiming that Pearl was a CIA spy, the missive demanded better treatment for prisoners held at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, or else Pearl would be killed.32 Ominously, attached to the e-mail were several photographs of Pearl. In one, he was holding up a newspaper showing the date, and in another there was gun at his head.

  The originating e-mail address also showed a trace of KSM’s bitter humor. It was from “KidnapperGuy@hotmail.com.”33

  Back in New York, the Wall Street Journal’s managing editor, Paul Steiger, had been reviewing reports from U.S. government agencies, the embassy of Pakistan, and the paper’s own team of reporters in South Asia. Steiger, working from the Journal’s temporary offices in midtown Manhattan, had to make a hard decision. Should he publicly call for Pearl’s release, or would doing so enrage the kidnappers and worsen Pearl’s situation?

  The demanding e-mail tipped the balance. Steiger decided to issue a public appeal. The open letter went through a number of drafts, with the last edit made by Steiger, an old-school newspaper editor.

  Now all he could do was wait to see if his words could do what, so far, the Pakistani police had failed to do: free Pearl.34

  Ijaz collapsed into a chair at my table in a midtown Manhattan steak house. He ordered a Diet Coke and seemed dejected. I asked him what was wrong. He told me he had phoned Steiger and other officials at the Wall Street Journal, offering to help. After all, he had helped set up Pearl’s fateful meeting, and his network of sources might be able to persuade the kidnappers to release the journalist. He didn’t like the Journal’s response. “They told me t
o stay out of it,” he explained, and told me he felt stung by their suspicion of him.

  Ijaz was not the only one frustrated that he could not influence Pearl’s fate. Though he had organized and carried out the journalist’s kidnapping, Omar Sheikh soon lost control of his operation to KSM.

  And he was not happy about it.

  “Basically it was like a hostile takeover because he [Omar Sheikh] was upset. His mood started to change when he spoke about this ‘umbrella group’ [Al Qaeda as led by KSM],” said Ty Fairman, the FBI special agent who interviewed Omar Sheikh in Pakistan. “He was a little upset that his authority was superseded.”35

  Omar Sheikh spoke in detail about the way authority usually works in Al Qaeda and other Pakistan-based terror operations. Essentially, the authority of the person who originated and commanded the mission was absolute. Even higher-ranking members of the terror group that authorized the operation could not overrule the commander, Omar Sheikh explained to his FBI interrogator. Sheikh said that the “fat man is the only one who could supersede his authority.”36

  The “fat man” was the code name for KSM.

  As the deadline for the $2 million ransom demand to the U.S. embassy came and went, a car rolled through the gates of the property where Pearl was being held. From the car emerged Saud Memon, the wealthy garment manufacturer who owned the property, and three Arabic-speaking men. One was KSM.37

  When they entered the house, it was clear that the short, fat man was in charge. KSM told all but one of Pearl’s captors to leave. The only guard permitted to stay was Fatal Karim, an employee of Memon.38 Karim’s account is the sole reliable eyewitness testimony we have of what happened next.

  KSM began to speak to Pearl in a language that Karim did not know. It was not English, but it might have been French.39

  Anger spread across Pearl’s face, and he began arguing with KSM in the same language.40

  One of the Arabic-speaking men turned on the video camera as KSM, still off camera, began asking Pearl questions in English. Pearl tried desperately to win his captors’ sympathy. Calmly answering their questions, he talked about his Jewish upbringing and expressed sympathy for the detainees held at the American facility at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba. He seemed unaware that death was seconds away.41

  At a prearranged signal, Karim and one of the Arabic-speaking men rushed Pearl, forcing his shoulders to the floor. One of the Arab men blindfolded him, while Karim held down his legs.42

  The five-foot-four KSM charged Pearl, landing on top of Pearl, who was more than six feet tall. As Pearl squirmed and struggled, KSM rode his chest, then sawed into his throat. Pearl screamed and writhed, but KSM kept relentlessly slicing away.

  When Pearl was dead and nearly decapitated, KSM was angry to discover that the “brother” in charge of videotaping the execution had accidentally hit the pause button. The camera had not recorded the full slaughter of Pearl. KSM and his band grimly put Pearl’s head back on his body and reenacted the whole gruesome scene again for the benefit of the videotape.43

  Triumphantly, KSM held Pearl’s head up before the camera.

  Omar Sheikh turned himself in to a former Pakistani general on February 5 and was in turn handed over to a team of Pakistani police and American investigators on February 12,44 timed to coincide with President Musharraf’s visit to the United States.45

  On the day he turned himself in, Sheikh phoned the man who he believed was holding Pearl captive. He used a prearranged code phrase for Pearl’s release: “Shift the patient to the doctor.”

  The man on the other end of the line used a code in return: “Dad has expired. We have done the scan and completed the X-rays and postmortem.”46

  Omar Sheikh understood that to mean that Pearl had been videotaped, killed, and buried.

  Hamid Mir, the Pakistani journalist who had befriended Pearl, had good sources inside the interrogation room who heard Sheikh’s confession.

  During interrogations, Omar told the members of a joint team of American and Pakistan officials that he was an ISI agent who had been operating from Lahore since his December 1999 release from prison in India.

  During interrogations, Omar reportedly named two officers of Pakistan Army’s Special Services Group—Subedar Mohammad Saleem and Subedar Abdul Hafeez—as his trainers in the use of guns, rocket launchers, grenades and other explosives. Omar is said to have volunteered to describe his role in the explosion outside the Jammu & Kashmir state assembly building in October 2001, the attack on Indian Parliament in December 2001 and the January 2002 American Centre hit in Calcutta.... [T]he FBI investigators stationed in Pakistan just exposed the continued level of interaction between the ISI and Omar before and after the Pearl kidnapping. Alarmed at the interrogation results, the ISI highups had to intervene to obstruct these investigations. In fact, in the beginning of March 2002, the Karachi police bosses were ordered to stop Omar’s interrogations.47

  The videotape of Pearl’s grisly murder was soon offered for sale to Karachi-based journalists. Shortly thereafter it appeared on a jihadi Web site. The ISP address indicated that it had been uploaded from an office in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia.48

  Mariane Pearl made many calls to Internet providers to keep the video off the Internet. American broadcast networks, which the following year would spend hours showing still photographs and videos from the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq, declined to air the gruesome moments of KSM’s murder of Daniel Pearl.

  Pakistani president Musharraf later wrote of Pearl’s life and death: “War correspondents share something with soldiers: when they opt for this profession, they know the dangers.”49 He did not sound very sympathetic.

  For years during his rise in Al Qaeda, KSM had been known as “the Brain,” or, in Arabic, Mukhtar. He was the originator of ambitious plans, including the September 11 attacks. But until the Pearl murder, he had never been personally involved in killing. The “fat man” had shown that he wasn’t weak, lazy, or spoiled by luxury. “The Brain,” too, had a bloody right hand.

  Certainly he was proud of killing the defenseless Pearl even years later. He boasted at his 2007 Guantánamo Bay status hearing: “I decapitated with my blessed right hand the head of the American Jew, Daniel Pearl, in the city of Karachi, Pakistan. For those who would like to confirm, there are pictures of me on the Internet holding his head.”50

  10

  Explosions in Paradise

  Little more than a month after killing Daniel Pearl, KSM was at dinner with another American, a man we now know as José Padilla.

  Around the table was a perfect rogues’ gallery of Al Qaeda leaders: Ammar al-Baluchi, a nephew and lieutenant of KSM, and Ramzi bin al-Shibh, another key KSM lieutenant. Both of these men had worked with KSM on the September 11 attacks, and now they were having a celebratory dinner with Padilla to plot their next attack against the American heartland.

  After the lamb and rice and tea, KSM pulled out a wad of American dollars. With his fat fingers he counted out five thousand dollars and passed the pile to Padilla. Later, Ammar al-Baluchi gave him another ten thousand dollars in cash and a GSM cell phone to stay in contact with KSM’s lieutenants in Pakistan. “Al-Baluchi instructed Padilla to leave on his mission through Bangladesh,” according to U.S. Department of Justice reports.1

  KSM thought that Padilla, as a U.S. citizen, would be able to easily slip into the United States and carry out a plot to kill hundreds of Americans living in apartment towers in New York or Washington, D.C. KSM likely did not know Padilla’s bizarre life story—or how it would compromise his mission.

  José Padilla was born in Brooklyn into a Pentecostal Christian family. By the time the family moved to Chicago, the innocent boy had become a street thug. While drinking at the age of fourteen, he and an older friend decided to rob a pair of Mexican immigrants. The immigrants fought back, and Padilla’s older friend stabbed one of them to death. Padilla kicked the victim in the head as he lay dying. The two young thieves got nine dollars and a cheap watch. Ultimately, Padill
a received a five-year sentence in juvenile detention. If Padilla didn’t have a violent temper, his victim might have survived the mugging, and he might not have spent his high school years behind bars.

  Shortly after his release, at age nineteen, he got his girlfriend pregnant and soon abandoned her to raise their son, Joshua, on her own. He fled to south Florida, where he met Cherie Maria Stultz, a Jamaican immigrant working at a Burger King. Improbably, she fell in love with him.

  Padilla still had a problem with anger. On a Broward County, Florida, highway, he cut off another car, and when the man honked his horn, Padilla brandished his revolver. When the outraged driver followed Padilla, Padilla fired a single shot in the air. Padilla was charged with three felonies and sent to Broward County Jail. While in custody, Padilla’s anger got the better of him again, and he assaulted a uniformed guard.