by Adrian Levy
January 2002, Karachi
Mokhtar was crabby and distracted. Despite the risks, Osama bin Laden had turned up in Karachi demanding to spend time with Amal and be updated about future projects. It had taken Herculean efforts to get him in and out of the Malir Town apartment for a brief conjugal visit and he was now holed up in another part of the city. Mokhtar had been embarrassed to inform him about the failure of his most recent projects. Several operations that new donors had funded in the wake of 9/11 had already fizzled. Most centered on the world’s tallest buildings, which were featured in an almanac Mokhtar kept at his home and in which he grandiosely crossed out those he had already targeted (the Twin Towers) and circled those he intended to destroy, including Canary Wharf in London.39 Fighters who witnessed him doing this said he treated the almanac as a to-do list. Ideas there were aplenty, but what was proving far harder was finding reliable operatives.
British recruit Richard Reid was one hopeful who Mokhtar had put into play with catastrophic results.
A loner, dropout, and Muslim convert from southeast London, Reid had come Al Qaeda’s way in 1999, redirected through Abu Zubaydah’s Peshawar portal, from which point he had been directed to Afghanistan. He had found no mission with Al Qaeda, as Saif al-Adel had judged him “not very bright.” Mokhtar saw it differently. He could see the potential of a bomb strapped to a British passport, and he summoned the Londoner to Karachi in early December 2001. Even though Reid, a six-foot-four, two-hundred-pound raddled-looking petty criminal with a ponytail, was an oddity, he was not what immigration officials were looking out for, Mokhtar argued. Neither was the other recruit for Plan A, as he code-named the operation. Saajid Badat, born to a Muslim British Indian family and educated at a Church of England primary and then a grammar school in Gloucester, was a high-scoring student—the least likely suspect in an irregular Al Qaeda plan.
Mokhtar asked his bombmaking team working in Karachi’s commercial district to make suitable devices. Al Qaeda’s chemist and chief explosives expert, an Egyptian jihadi called Abu Khabab al-Masri, did most of the work. Craft and experimentation went into scaling down the bombs so they could fit in the sole of a shoe without losing too much explosive power. Forensic analysis later confirmed that the detonator cord used in both bombs had come from the same batch: the cut mark on Badat’s cord exactly matched that on Reid’s.
Before they set out, and to underscore the importance of this Al Qaeda comeback attack, they were taken to a secret meeting with Osama bin Laden in Karachi. He hugged them both and wished them good luck.
The two stunned recruits had gone home to the United Kingdom with the bombs glued into their shoes and carrying instructions to book flights to the United States.40 At the last minute Badat, who faced a grilling from his parents about where he had been, confessed all and sent an e-mail to his handler pulling out. “You will have to tell Van Damme that he could be on his own,” he wrote, referring to Reid by his code name.
Just hours later, Reid contacted his handler from Paris to say that he had been prevented from boarding his connecting flight to the United States. Other passengers in the transit lounge had complained at his disheveled appearance. After being screened by French police, he finally boarded an American Airlines jet bound for Miami on December 22. Midair he had tried to ignite his device, only for passengers and flight attendants, who smelled smoke as he lit matches, to jump on him.
Now this botched operation was all over U.S. newspapers, cited as evidence that as a result of the American war, Al Qaeda was a spent force.
Saif sent urgent, angry messages. Why had Mokhtar trusted a man like Reid—a car thief of limited intellect—when Al Qaeda was already on a knife-edge? Why had he allowed Osama—currently the most wanted man in the world—to come to a city that was teeming with police and undercover intelligence operatives?
Mokhtar carried on regardless. During the few days he had spent with Osama, they had talked about another Planes Operation. This time Mokhtar suggested they enroll a team of British-Pakistani brothers into a flight school outside Karachi. On graduating, they would return to the United Kingdom with the intention of hijacking a British Airways jet departing from Heathrow, turning it around, and crashing it back into the airport.
Osama had given his approval. Fresh back from Iran, Ramzi bin al-Shibh was put in charge of recruiting the suicide team. Mokhtar gave him a bag of money and keys to a safe house in Gulshan-e-Iqbal and told him to wait for further instructions.
January 2002, Islamabad, Pakistan
Daniel Pearl, a reporter for the Wall Street Journal, had been working on a story in India when 9/11 happened, but he had flown to Pakistan the following day, accompanied by his pregnant wife, Mariane. Four months later he was on the trail of Sheikh Mubarak Ali Shah Gilani, a radical Karachi-based cleric who was rumored to have been seen with shoe-bomber Richard Reid when he visited Pakistan in December 2001. It was an allegation Pearl’s competitors had already tackled but to date no one had got an interview with the elusive Gilani.41
Through Pakistani contacts, Pearl met Khalid Khawaja, a veteran ISI officer who had never really retired, had worked with Osama during the 1980s, and knew Gilani. Khawaja was a key figure in the tangled network of ex-spooks who floated around the ISI, a khaki ball of wool of officers who had resigned their commission but could always be recalled to serve their nation. “I got hooked up with one of OBL’s buddies, who has been taking me around to see the people who are secretly pro-OBL,” Pearl explained in an e-mail to a friend.42 “I’m writing a story about how everybody here thinks the Jews did it [9/11]. Bound to piss everybody off, but I think people should know what people in other parts of the world REALLY think, and why. Right?”
Pearl asked Khawaja to help him get an interview with Sheikh Gilani, but Khawaja declined.43 He was worried by Pearl’s lack of experience working in the Pakistani jihad labyrinth. Besides, Pearl was an American and a Jew, and Gilani and his group were on a U.S. list of terrorist organizations.
As word about the reporter’s interest in Gilani spread through Islamist circles, others stepped forward to help, including freelance jihadi Omar Sheikh, a British-Pakistani with militant views and connections who had been educated at a private school in northeast London and attended the London School of Economics, during which time, on an aid trip to Bosnia, he had been radicalized.
Sheikh invited Pearl to a meeting at the Akbar International Hotel in Rawalpindi and offered to set him up with Gilani in Karachi. “I am sure you will gain a lot from the meeting. Do tell me all the details,” he wrote in a follow-up e-mail, using the address [email protected] (badmashi meaning “troublemaking” in Urdu). In truth, Sheikh had not contacted Gilani but had asked contacts in Karachi to lure Pearl into a trap.
Although Pearl had no reason to suspect Omar Sheikh, who used a pseudonym throughout their correspondence, his record as a dangerous fraudster and kidnapper was well documented. He had been arrested in Delhi in 1994 for luring Western backpackers into an abduction attempt by Jaish-e-Mohammed and was released, alongside Masood Azhar, the firebrand leader of Jaish, in 1999, in exchange for passengers on an Indian Airlines jet that was hijacked and brought down in Kandahar.
On January 21, Daniel and Mariane Pearl visited a sonogram clinic in Islamabad and discovered that their unborn child was a boy. They chose a name, Adam, and flew the same day to Karachi, a place Pearl had previously described to a friend as a “great city if we weren’t scared to go out of the hotel.”
On January 23, he went to the meet set up by Omar Sheikh—outside the Village Restaurant in downtown Karachi. Just before seven P.M., a red Suzuki Alto pulled up and the driver beckoned. Pearl got in, and they drove off at speed along Shah-e-Faisal Road toward the airport.
Pearl’s phone record showed that he took a call from someone at seven eleven P.M. that lasted four minutes, but when his local fixer rang him thirty minutes later, he did not answer.
The Wall Street Journal reporter had been kidnapped and was
on his way to a remote compound in Ahsanabad, far from the city center. “The guest is coming. Get ready,” was the message texted at eight P.M. to the welcoming party at the other end.
Stepping out of the car at the compound, Pearl was greeted by a man brandishing a pistol who marched him into a cinder-block outhouse. The only other buildings in the vicinity were a mosque and madrassa belonging to Sipah-e-Sahaba, a violent sectarian front raised by the ISI that was responsible for brutal attacks on Shias and adherents of other Islamic sects it regarded as heretical.
Inside, more men with guns confronted Pearl. They ordered him to change into a cheap tracksuit and hand over his possessions. “What’s going on?” he asked nervously, according to witness statements taken later by the police. “Is this security?” When one of the guards replied that Sheikh Gilani had made the arrangements, Pearl calmed down and complied. Sheikh Gilani later denied any role in the kidnapping of Daniel Pearl.44
By the following morning, still with no sign of Gilani turning up, Pearl was getting jittery again. “Let me call someone or let me go,” he told his captors. “I don’t want to talk to [Gilani] anymore.”45
One of the guards slapped him. “You are in our custody. Shut up and sit there. If you talk, we will kill you.” Photos of Pearl were taken and sent from an e-mail address, [email protected], with a message that he would be released only if “all Pakistanis being illegally detained by the FBI” were also released or given access to lawyers.
Pearl tried to run for it. He clambered up a six-foot boundary wall, shouting, “Help me!” But he was pulled back down and beaten.
However, Omar Sheikh, who was controlling proceedings on the phone from Islamabad, now began to lose control of his own conspiracy. On January 28, a remorseful member of the kidnappers’ circle drafted an e-mail saying that Pearl was a journalist, not a CIA spy, and would be released.
Just before it was dispatched, Omar Sheikh had the kidnappers send another note to say that they had just learned that Pearl was in fact a Mossad agent. “We will execute him within 24 hours unless amreeka [fulfills] our demands,” the e-mail declared.
Omar Sheikh was getting cold feet. The chances of winning in a climate of heightened security post 9/11 were minimal, he would later say. He did not want to go back to jail. But rather than release Pearl, he put the word out that he was willing to hand him over to another gang.
The message eventually reached Shahikot, the rugged Afghan valley south of Gardez, where Saif al-Adel and his Al Qaeda fighters were holed up. Delighted that an American hostage was up for grabs, Saif broke with security protocol to call Mokhtar in Karachi. “Listen, he’s been kidnapped,” he told Mokhtar, not using Pearl’s name. “Those people don’t know what to do with him. They want to know if we want him.” Pearl’s capture was a “gift from God.”
Citing the slaughter at Panjwai Bridge, Al Qaeda’s military chief told Mokhtar to take the prisoner and “do something.” This was the chance Saif had been looking for to put the catastrophe of the shoe-bomb plot behind them. “We should make sure it’s an Al Qaeda thing,” Saif stressed.46
Mokhtar agreed. “It’s good propaganda and the guy is Jewish. Anyhow, if I get caught I want to make sure I get the death penalty.”47 Worried Mokhtar was planning something brutal, Saif made him promise not to do anything too terrible with the hostage.
Next, Mokhtar called Omar Sheikh, who passed on the address where Daniel Pearl was being held. Accompanied by two nephews, Mokhtar reached the Ahsanabad compound in the last days of January, carrying plastic shopping bags containing a video camera, two knives, and a meat cleaver. There, cadres from a local branch of Lashkar-e-Jhangvi (Army of Jhangvi), another violent Islamist sectarian faction often used by the ISI, were waiting. Lashkar-e-Jhangvi had no compunction about killing people it saw as heretics. The guards should allow “the Arabs” to do whatever they wanted, the leader told them.
Mokhtar’s younger nephew set up the camera, and Pearl was given a script to read.48 Afterward, Mokhtar tied Pearl’s hands behind his back, wrapped a blindfold around his eyes, and forced him down and onto his side. Two Pakistani guards sat on Pearl’s legs and hips as Mokhtar produced the knives, grabbing Pearl by the hair and slashing at his neck. When one of the Pakistanis began to wretch, Mokhtar bellowed at him to “leave the room,” as he continued to cut.
However, there was a problem. “Stop!” Mokhtar’s nephew had forgotten to load a tape into the camera.
Mokhtar looked up in disbelief and screamed at him to get it working, as he tore Pearl’s head clean off the body, going against Saif al-Adel’s request that he should not behead Pearl.
Once the camera was running properly, Mokhtar pressed down on the corpse so that blood pumped out of the throat, showing the kill was recent. He held the severed head in the air and recited a Koranic prayer, before dismembering the body. They buried the pieces in a corner of the compound, washed the floor of the hut, and then prayed, prostrating themselves on the ground where Pearl had just been butchered.
Mokhtar then returned to his apartment, where Amal and his wife had left out his dinner on the table.
In a city of twenty-three million people, through which organized-crime bosses channeled an estimated $2 billion every year to the religious mafia and their political masters, police chief Mir Zubair Mahmood was a rare bird in that he was widely regarded as incorruptible. And that was why he was going nowhere. So the story went in Karachi.49
However, while Mir Zubair despised dishonesty of every kind, and was suspicious of the machinations of Pakistan’s deep state, he was not above inflicting physical pain. On recidivists and the intransigent, Mir used a bamboo cane on the soles of the feet, which left fewer marks and adhered to Koranic instruction on permitted punishments. With Pearl reported missing, and Osama still sheltering in a Mokhtar safe house, Mir’s search teams fanned out across the city.
They traced the e-mailed ransom notes to a bungling computer programmer who had forgotten to erase photos of Pearl as hostage from his hard drive. Under interrogation, and now accused of a kidnapping, he named Omar Sheikh as the instigator, saying he had been told: “This is a big job and you are going to be part of it.” Within hours, police raided addresses all over Karachi, arresting Omar Sheikh’s relatives and rounding up low-level militants. However, even in a city this vast, the seventh largest in the world, networks intermingled, and on February 7, in a joint ISI–CIA operation, Mokhtar’s hood Riyadh the Facilitator was caught up in the web, along with seventeen others.
Recovered from Riyadh’s house were two life jackets containing traces of explosives. Riyadh was so keen to distance himself from the Pearl disappearance that he told the truth about what he really did.
He explained how he had helped more than one hundred Arab fighters escape from Pakistan. He said it had cost him $500,000 and the man who provided the cash was a Pakistani-Balochi brother called Mokhtar. This Mokhtar was dependent on several couriers, the most important of all being a man known as Abu Ahmad al-Kuwaiti, who had once worked in Al Qaeda’s media office and was now married to a young girl from Swat. The CIA had stumbled across treasure on Al Qaeda, even if it could not find Daniel Pearl.
Robert Grenier, the CIA station chief, reviewed Riyadh’s file. His information linked Mokhtar to Osama bin Laden via a courier, al-Kuwaiti. Did it also put Mokhtar in the frame for Pearl’s kidnapping? he wondered.50
When the news of Riyadh’s capture reached the logistics chief Abu Zubaydah, who had left the border and was now ensconced in a Lashkar-e-Taiba guesthouse in Lahore, he was fearful. “I need to be more cautious,” he told his diary. “This news made our situation shakey.”51 With huge rewards being offered, he was anxious about being betrayed by “the Pakistani brothers” on whom he relied. Osama, who as far as he knew had been to Karachi more than once, was at risk and so was he. “Some of them know me, I mean some Pakistanis whom I deal with in the smuggling of the brothers, and exchanging money in order to free the brothers from their captor
s.”52
February 2002, Islamabad
Although the mystery of Daniel Pearl’s whereabouts persisted, Robert Grenier felt as if the tide was turning on Al Qaeda. The business end of the CIA operation inside Pakistan was revving up, too. With the help of General Javed Alam Khan, his opposite number in the ISI, he had opened up “the Clubhouse,” an off-the-grid holding facility in the middle of Islamabad, located on Nizamuddin Road in G-6, a smart sector close to the ISI headquarters at Aabpara and thronged with ISI safe houses. As a result of intelligence recovered in the Pearl raids, they were now inundated with prisoners.
Hidden behind high walls and tall, dense shrubbery, the Clubhouse was surrounded by the homes of expats and diplomats and staffed by plainclothes interrogators who worked around the clock. Several small rooms on the ground floor had been converted into interrogation suites, with security cameras and secret recording devices, while upstairs were bedrooms where the interrogators could rest.53
Grenier and his deputy, a case officer known as Dave, watched as suspects were brought in, hooded and manacled. Those with the most interesting stories were taken to Chaklala, the Pakistan Air Force base next to Islamabad airport, where they were strip-searched; put in orange jumpsuits, goggles, and earphones; and shackled and loaded onto military transports bound for U.S. detention facilities at Bagram or Kandahar. The only indication of something serious and secretive at the Nizamuddin address was the number of SUVs with diplomatic plates and Pakistani government–issue white Toyota Corollas turning up day and night.
Grenier had plenty of resources to call on, with material developed inside Pakistan augmented by files dispatched from the specialist Counterterrorism Center (CTC) in Langley. There, targeters were trying desperately to match tips from agents and assets to technical data coming from satellite intercepts, mobile phone masts, drone footage, and information provided by other intelligences services.