Hard Measures

by Jose A. Rodriguez, Jr.

  I am not able to describe what happened next in full detail, but here is a brief description—with some facts fuzzed up to protect lives.

  Our agent told us he had been invited to meet with a group of people, one of whom might be in contact with KSM. We staked out an internet café where the meeting was to take place. We didn’t know what the person we were targeting looked like. So a signal had been agreed upon. If the person who was believed to be in contact with KSM was among the group, our agent was told to put his hat on as he left the building. If the target was not among the group, he should walk out carrying his hat. It seemed like a simple plan. What we didn’t count on was that there would be a torrential downpour just as our agent was leaving the café. True to his training, he calmly strolled outside with hat in hand, getting drenched in the process. It was disappointing to learn that the KSM contact wasn’t there, but this kind of work requires great patience.

  When our agent left, however, we noticed that he got into a car with others from the group. It seemed too dangerous to follow them. Al-Qa’ida countersurveillance would almost certainly have picked up our team and have been alerted. So our officers let the agent disappear into the teeming suburbs and waited for news.

  They waited and waited. Finally, the CIA officers on the scene did what workers do everywhere at the end of a long day: They adjourned to happy hour. While enjoying a few drinks, one of the Agency officers got a text message from our agent, who said, “I can get you to KSM.” “Holy shit,” he said. They threw a bunch of money on the table and sprinted out of the place, demonstrating understandable enthusiasm but perhaps not the best of stealthy tradecraft.

  Agency officers rendezvoused with our agent, who told them he had a pretty good idea where KSM was staying in Rawalpindi, Pakistan’s third-largest city, with close to four million inhabitants. It practically abuts the nation’s capital, Islamabad, and is home to the headquarters of the Pakistani armed forces.

  Our officers rushed to the scene with thirty pieces of body armor.

  A joint Pakistani and American team stormed the home where KSM was staying shortly after midnight on March 1, 2003. KSM grabbed an AK-47. Unlike Saddam Hussein, Usama bin Ladin, and Muammar Qadhafi, who were cornered long after him, KSM managed to get off a few shots. He wounded a Pakistani officer before being captured.

  A CIA officer snapped the now-famous image of a disheveled KSM moments after the capture. As is so often the case, word of the operation leaked almost immediately. In the aftermath of the capture, several media outlets romanticized KSM’s role in al-Qa’ida, some even referring to him as the “James Bond” of al-Qa’ida. To counter that impression, the CIA released the iconic photo of KSM looking much more like John Belushi than Agent 007.

  The Pakistanis took KSM to a safe-house holding facility while the details of his ultimate disposition were worked out. We immediately began exploiting the mother lode of information that had been found in the home where he had been staying. The first few hours and days following a capture like this one are critical. The value of material found around a detainee diminishes as time passes and fellow al-Qa’ida members who were not captured have time to do damage control.

  In the immediate aftermath of KSM’s capture we learned that he had told people that he had met with Ayman al-Zawahiri, bin Ladin’s deputy, a few days before. If true, that meant Zawahiri was likely nearby. Even more enticing just before his capture, KSM flashed a note that he said had been given to him by bin Ladin himself. KSM told people he had been asked to get the note to one of bin Ladin’s sons telling him to stay off the internet. Much later KSM claimed that he was just bragging and had written the note himself. Our officers were not so sure. Back in early March 2003, the fact that KSM might have been in recent contact with UBL only heightened our desire to quickly get whatever information we could from him.

  We had CIA officers take turns sitting with KSM in the initial hours at the safe house. We were worried that left to the Pakistanis alone, he might make some miraculous escape, aided by officials who were more philosophically aligned with AQ’s goals than with those of the U.S.A.

  Getting our officers into the safe house without attracting attention was not an easy thing. One of our guys later told me of being put into the back of a pickup truck and told to lie down under a tarp so that he would not be seen by nearby guards. It occurred to him as he was being spirited toward the safe house that he was putting an awful lot of trust in his Pakistani colleagues. He could hear the driver shouting in Urdu, one of the principal languages of Pakistan, but he couldn’t make out what was being said. Eventually they got to the small building, a foul-smelling place with three guards, only one of whom seemed to have a weapon. That guard didn’t inspire much confidence either. He waved the weapon around recklessly, using it as a pointing tool and demonstrating none of the “muzzle security” that Americans like to see as a factor in promoting longevity.

  Our officers tried to start the interrogation process right then and there, but with scant success. They had six-hour shifts with our prize catch, who was not in a talkative mood. KSM elected to incessantly chant Koranic verses and ignore the questions from CIA officers. The Pakistanis had a presence in the room at times, too. Periodically, an officer would run into the room and shout, “Where is bin Ladin?” KSM would ignore him and he would leave.

  At one point a very large major took a shot at questioning, or more accurately screaming at, KSM. He sat on a small desk in the holding room, which immediately collapsed. KSM started laughing and said in Urdu, “That’s what you get for working with dogs.”

  It was clear he didn’t have much else he wanted to say. Finally, after trying to question him without success for a day, our people on the scene decided to let him earn a chance to go to sleep. Our officer made KSM stand up, which required some assistance. At five-foot-three and considerably overweight, to our guy, KSM felt “gooey” as he was helped to his feet.

  “Here’s the deal, Mukhtar,” he said. “I know you speak English” (KSM graduated from college in North Carolina in 1986). “I want you to politely ask me to let you go to sleep. Do that and I will let you.” The idea was to demonstrate to KSM that he was no longer in control. KSM stood there mute for twenty minutes. Finally he mumbled something in Urdu. Our officer said, “You have to ask in English.” More silence. About five minutes later KSM mumbled something else. “What was that?” he was asked. A weak voice said: “May I sleep?” The CIA officer shouted, “What? What did you say?” KSM wearily but more loudly said, “May I sleep?” “Yes, yes you can,” he was told by the CIA officer, who was in desperate need of rest himself.

  After a night’s sleep our officers tried once again to get KSM to talk. While he gave up pretending to speak only Urdu, he didn’t give up much else. When it came time for the officer who had granted KSM permission to sleep the night before to have another turn watching the portly prisoner, Mohammed surprised him by asking: “Will you be nice to me?” It was not exactly what he had expected to hear. “What do you mean?” he asked. “Are you going to yell at me?” KSM asked. “If I yelled at you last night, it was because I was frustrated,” the Agency officer replied. KSM held out his beefy paw and shook the officer’s hand.

  KSM started to engage a little. Like other AQ officials, he would talk a bit about past deeds but would say nothing about future plans. He was asked about the location of bin Ladin and Zawahiri and how al-Qa’ida communicated with them. KSM remained silent. He was asked what operations the group was planning. KSM looked directly in the eyes of his inquisitor and simply said: “Soon you will know.” It so happened that the officer in the cell with him had previously worked trying to find out who had brutally murdered Wall Street Journal reporter Danny Pearl. Since a document relating to Pearl had previously been found at the home where KSM was staying, our officer asked Mohammed to tell him about his involvement in the reporter’s death. KSM wagged his finger at the American, paused, and then cryptically said: “Not now.”

  Wi
thin a few days we were able to spirit KSM out of Pakistan and take him to a black site. There the process began with him, just as it had with other recent senior detainees, to try to get him to voluntarily share the information we knew he had. From material found at the location of his capture we had indications that he had had recent contact with bin Ladin and Zawahiri. From other detainees we knew that he was instrumental in coming up with the plans that led to 9/11. And from his own words when we asked what al-Qa’ida planned next we had his haunting words: “Soon you will know.” With all that, we couldn’t idly sit by and wait for a chance to bond with our detainee or for him to see the error of his ways and open up to us. So, after he refused to cooperate, the EITs were methodically implemented one by one in an effort to stave off another horrific attack on the United States or one of our allies.

  Some detainees agreed to cooperate after little more than a stern look. Others took a bit more convincing but would become compliant after a relatively small dose of EITs. And then there was KSM. Agency officers in charge of his detention described him as “pure evil.” He was very strong-minded and gave every sign of having had considerable training in how to resist interrogation. Even the most severe technique, waterboarding, which was employed on him and only two other detainees, did not produce immediate results. KSM seemed to have figured out that we weren’t going to push things too far. While strapped down on a gurney and as water was being applied, he used his fingers to tick off the seconds. What eventually brought KSM to the compliant stage was more sleep deprivation. Finally, when he reached his limit, he decided that continued resistance was unwise and he began to cooperate. That doesn’t mean that he told us everything he knew. And it doesn’t mean that he told us what we wanted most. But he did begin to open up and fill in many, many blanks in our knowledge of al-Qa’ida.

  As with the others, once KSM reached the compliant stage, the EITs stopped. We moved from the “interrogation” phase to the “debriefing” mode. Agency officers on scene had long before figured out that KSM had an enormous ego, and they played on it to our advantage. He enjoyed thinking of himself as a professor. He leaped at the chance to show off his knowledge.

  The information he provided was enormously helpful in understanding our foe and finding ways to thwart their plans. It is important to stress that we never took anything he said on faith but always vetted it in every way possible. Many of those listening were in fact among the most knowledgeable people on the planet about the organization and membership of al-Qa’ida and could spot it when KSM might be trying to lead them astray or shade the truth.

  The information that came from KSM, like that from Abu Zubaydah before him, was a treasure trove. A study by NBC News in 2008 showed that 441 of the 1,700 footnotes in the 9/11 Commission’s final report came from senior al-Qa’ida detainee interrogation. The percentage of information that came from them in Chapters 5, 6, and 7 of the report, the portions dealing directly with the 9/11 plot, were well over 50 percent from the interrogations.

  The windfall reported in the intelligence reports coming out of KSM’s interrogation was so dramatic that FBI officials petitioned the CIA to get back into the interrogation program, which they had abandoned during the early days at the first black site. At the time they said they didn’t want to be party to enhanced interrogation. Now they wanted back in. Agency leadership said no. In part we were afraid that FBI special agents would only disrupt the program. But another factor was that the location of the new sites was not known to them and we didn’t want to expand the circle of witting officials for fear that knowledge of the sites would leak and their effectiveness would be compromised if not ended.

  Even though in their eyes, KSM remained one of the most evil persons in the world, CIA officers at the black site established a strange symbiotic relationship with him and an oddly cordial rapport. KSM told one of our most senior women debriefers that he much preferred dealing with CIA women; he found them better prepared and less judgmental. He told the male debriefers something different, telling one that he was glad to see that the CIA wasn’t entirely run by women.

  At the end of one debriefing session, the CIA officer who was questioning KSM got up to leave. He called her back and said, “There is something else you should know.” He proceeded to tell her how he had personally decapitated Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl in early 2002. KSM spoke of the atrocity in a matter-of-fact tone. He provided considerable detail to back up his claim and clearly was not at all remorseful.

  The report of his confession rocketed back to Washington. There were many of us who were prepared to believe any evil deed was well within KSM’s capacity. Some had had suspicions about his involvement ever since documents found in Pakistan seemed to connect him to the murder. Others thought, however, that it might just be a ploy. One of KSM’s frequently stated goals was to be put on trial in New York. Shortly after he was captured he told Agency officers that he would talk only after he got to New York and met with his lawyer. It seemed to us that he was looking for a platform from which he could spout his hatred for all things American, and a trial would certainly present that opportunity. (It strikes me as more than a little ironic that several years later Attorney General Eric Holder almost granted KSM his wish.)

  Back at CIA headquarters, analysts scrutinized once again the grisly videotape of Pearl’s murder. Although the face of the person wielding the knife was covered, the person’s hand, shown as he killed the reporter, did resemble KSM’s. Closer examination of the video was required to study Pearl’s executioner. Analysts in Washington asked that close-up photos of KSM’s hand and arm be taken while he was holding a sack with a bowling ball in it to simulate the severed head held in the gruesome video. Those photos compared to the actual video showed that KSM was not lying to us. In a confession he later submitted for a potential tribunal in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, KSM wrote: “I decapitated with blessed right hand the head of the American Jew, Daniel Pearl, in the city of Karachi, Pakistan,” adding, “For those who would like to confirm, there are pictures of me on the internet holding his head.”

  One debriefer later told me that she viewed KSM as the al-Qa’ida Hannibal Lecter. And yet, as odd as it sounds, he had a playful side, too. On several occasions he wrote letters to register complaints about his living conditions. In one, he wrote as if he were writing to his congressman. In another he penned a letter of complaint to the electric company objecting to the chilliness in his cell. This was well after the short period of less than two weeks when he was subjected to EITs. “Unless you are trying to manipulate me,” he wrote, “could you turn up the heat a bit?” He also wrote notes complaining that a guard had allegedly taken a bite out of an apple on his food tray. Just another example of our brutal treatment, I guess.

  Although he could appear gregarious at times, we knew that he had been quite standoffish when he attended college in Greensboro, North Carolina. When asked why, he said it was because the United States had too many homosexuals and he didn’t want to associate with them.

  Despite the popular misconception that Agency officers treated KSM cruelly during the three-plus years he was in our custody, the harsh treatment, which I believe to have been “necessary roughness,” lasted for only days. Later, CIA officers engaged with him on a familiar basis and actually joined KSM in his cell on occasion to watch movies—complete with popcorn. To avoid inflaming any sensitivities, movies shared with detainees were carefully selected and usually PG-rated at most.

  But no one was taken in by his moments of normalcy. At one point he was told that if he provided some vital additional information we would facilitate communication between him and his two children. “I don’t care,” he said, “they are in Allah’s hands.”

  KSM enjoyed lecturing CIA officers, individually and in groups. At one point he announced that he would like to give a lecture on “The History of the World.” Our folks were game and went to hear him expound on that ambitious topic. A few months later he reported that he was rea
dy to continue and build on his earlier presentation. He had one requirement, however. Only those officers who had sat through the prerequisite first session (History of the World 101, so to speak) should be invited to attend the 201 session.

  One of our senior CTC officers spent some time at the black site and established what seemed to have been a good relationship with KSM, getting some very valuable information from him. His contact with KSM came long after the “difficult period” (as the detainees called it) when EITs were employed. When it was time for this officer to return to headquarters, he dropped by KSM’s cell to say good-bye. Mohammed surprised him by saying: “Have a safe trip.” Sensing that what he had just said might be taken as a sign of humanity, KSM quickly added: “It is not that I wish you well. But if I ever get out of here, I want to personally be the one to kill you.”

  Beyond his hope for being brought to trial in New York, KSM also speculated that he might be given the opportunity to testify before Congress someday. One CIA officer who heard that aspiration told him, “You don’t understand our government very well.”

  In many respects the CIA officer was right, but at least two of our people at the black site told me that KSM made an observation to them that would later prove eerily accurate. Talking about his interrogation and that of his colleagues, he said: “You know, someday your government is going to turn on you.”

  Chapter 5

  TAKING PRISONERS

  Once KSM became compliant and started cooperating with his debriefers, which was within a month of his capture, he became the gift that kept on giving. KSM and the other senior detainees in our custody provided a wealth of information. Of all the other tools in the U.S. intelligence arsenal, none provided the quantity or quality of critical information that we got from this handful of al-Qa’ida operatives.