The Exile

by Adrian Levy

  One day, as he emerged from a café, a man in civilian dress stopped him and asked to see his papers. “Police!” the officer barked. The Mauritanian demanded to speak to his superior, and as the man turned away to make a call, the Mauritanian tossed a bag filled with CDs and documents into a rubbish bin. Minutes later, a police car arrived, lights flashing. “We like to do things quietly,” said the officer. “But you want it all out in the open?”

  At the police station, a seemingly well-prepared investigator who spoke fluent Arabic quizzed the Mauritanian. Who had he been meeting? Where had he gone? Who did he represent? Who was he calling?

  When he said nothing, the investigator produced a ledger of all the places he had traveled to and the people he had called and met since arriving the previous December.

  “You are from Al Qaeda,” the officer said coldly, “and we will hand you over to the intelligence service. You will be given the death sentence as a terrorist and a spy. Or be given to the Americans.”

  The Mauritanian was shaken, but he stood his ground. He hoped the officer was bluffing. “I came legally to Iran and if you want proof—call my Iranian host,” he said, asking for a pen and scribbling down a telephone number. Would the man dial it? He prayed for his plan to work.

  The investigator dialed and handed the receiver to the Mauritanian.

  “I’ve been arrested,” he whispered into the handset to his Quds Force liaison officer, Ali.

  “I’ll call back,” Ali muttered, ending the call.98

  The next morning, the Mauritanian was released without explanation, although the police looked furious. When he reached home he discovered that his laptop, notebooks, and CDs had been taken.

  The phone rang. It was Ali. “You have two hours to pack. Then take a taxi to the tomb of Ayatollah Khameini.” At the huge green and white marble complex on the outskirts of the city, he should wait for further instructions. The Quds Force could no longer guarantee his safety and he had to move.

  The Mauritanian, his wife, and their children fled. Reaching the tomb, they spent the night out in the open, mingling with pilgrims. The next morning, he rang Ali, who told him to take another taxi south to the holy city of Qom, where Iran’s ayatollahs lived. “It is a pure Shia city without any single Sunni family since the dawn of history,” Ali explained, making it the best place in Iran for a Sunni Al Qaeda leader to hide.

  When the Mauritanian and his family arrived, he took his children shopping in the main bazaar. It was the first time they had been in an Arab market and they raced about excitedly. He gently chided them for spending too much money until he saw a leather-bound copy of Under the Shade of the Koran by Sayyid Qutb, Osama bin Laden’s inspiration. He had to buy it.

  Two days later, Ali called again with more instructions. “Pack. Move again. This time head north toward Karaj.” This was where Al Qaeda brothers had been imprisoned.

  At Karaj, he made another call to Ali, who told him to travel on to Ramsar, a small town on the Caspian Sea, and rent a tourist lodge.

  The children were delighted. They swam and paddled canoes. The Mauritanian twiddled his thumbs, becoming ever more stressed. He had no phone or Internet connection, so no way of sending messages back to Dr. Ayman al-Zawahiri or his deputy, Al Qaeda’s finance chief Sheikh Saeed al-Masri.

  He wondered what the brothers in Quetta would make of his silence.

  June 2002, Shiraz, Iran

  Saif al-Adel was unnerved by Iran’s maneuverings, but Khalid Shaikh Mohammad’s unauthorized activities disturbed him more. From his vantage point “in the exterior,” Al Qaeda looked like a disjointed and scattered movement with an absent emir, a group being taken advantage of by someone bent on committing wild acts.

  Khalid’s foolhardiness infuriated Saif. A private message he had entrusted to Khalid’s nephew Ammar al-Balochi, with instructions to deliver it to his family in Tehran, had ended up on the Internet. “It ends with greetings and kisses to my children,” complained Saif, adding that the whole world now knew their names. The interior world was Al Qaeda’s biggest secret. KSM was slapdash.

  On June 13, 2002, Saif wrote a letter.99 “My beloved brother,” he wrote to Khalid. “I love you in God, and Allah knows that I care for you.” They had known each other for “more than seven years” and he needed to say something important. “Stop all foreign actions, stop sending people into captivity, stop devising new operations.” Above all, “Stop rushing into action.” Many had already paid the price: Abu Zubaydah, Riyadh the Facilitator, and all those others recently “rendered” by the CIA to secret detention sites around the globe, a story that was just beginning to emerge. What was Khalid thinking when he had allowed Osama to go to Karachi at a time when much of the local network there was being rolled up?

  “Regrettably my brother, if you look back, you will find that you are the person solely responsible for all this,” Saif wrote. In sidelining the shura, Khalid had undertaken a mission—9/11—that had lost Al Qaeda its refuge and support. Now he was driving the movement into the dirt.

  Saif pointed out the source of Khalid’s recklessness. “[Sheikh Osama] pushes you relentlessly and without consideration as if he has not heard the news and as if he does not comprehend the events,” he wrote. “It is his absolute habit that he will not abandon. If someone opposes him, he immediately puts forward another person to render an opinion in his support.” In favoring people like Khalid over the Mauritanian, Osama had irreparably damaged Al Qaeda.

  Saif suspected that in Kunar Province, Osama was recklessly dreaming again. The 9/11 attacks had made him, but he needed more. Although he had agreed that Dr. Ayman al-Zawahiri would run day-to-day affairs, he and Khalid came up with ever-wilder plots: smashing hijacked planes into Big Ben, Canary Wharf, and Heathrow Airport in London; blowing up nightclubs and hotels in Bali, Bangkok, and Mombasa; targeting gas stations, skyscrapers, and suspension bridges across the United States. Everyone had noticed that “there is a new hand that is managing affairs and driving forcefully,” Saif continued. “Every time it falters, it gets up and rushes again, without understanding or awareness.”100

  Many of the operations led by Khalid, like Richard Reid’s failed shoe-bombing, had provoked ridicule. If Khalid did not stop, Al Qaeda would “become a story and an example of people who do not learn,” Saif warned.

  Khalid’s cavalier attitude to security was also costing lives. The Pakistani security forces had recently raided the factory where the shoe-bombs had been put together and several brothers had been shot dead. But rather than closing down the operation, Khalid had simply shifted to another address.

  Saif got to the point. He asked Khalid to resign and hand his duties to others. Pakistan and southern Afghanistan would be handed to a Libyan brother called Abu Faraj al-Libi and northern Afghanistan to Abdul Hadi al-Iraqi, one of Zarqawi’s deputies. Saif would write to Osama to get his rubber stamp. He hoped that Khalid would abide by his wishes “so as to preserve the organization, its families, its cadres, and its money until we meet.”101

  July 2002, Karachi

  The man who delivered Saif’s slap-down was a young, wispy-bearded Libyan brother called Atiyah Abd al-Rahman who was responsible for maintaining communications between Iran and Pakistan. He had joined Al Qaeda as a teenager and trained under Saif. Loyal and ambitious, he had first come to the leadership’s attention when he lived at the bachelors’ dorm at Tarnak Qila in the late 1990s. Since 9/11, Atiyah, whose kunya meant “gift,” had acted as a crucial go-between with Zarqawi and Al Qaeda Central.

  There is no surviving record of Khalid Shaikh Mohammad’s reply or even evidence he wrote one; but soon after receiving Saif’s letter he informed Amal bin Laden, who had spent months shuttling between Karachi safe houses, to pack up and leave Karachi.

  It was her seventh move in as many months, but she was resigned to living out of a suitcase. This time she and her nine-month-old daughter, Safiyah, were taking a flight and heading north to Peshawar, accompanied by Maryam and her
husband, Ibrahim, the courier working under the kunya Abu Ahmad al-Kuwaiti.

  If anyone tried to speak to Amal at the airport or during the flight, she was to pretend to be goongi (deaf and mute). Ibrahim carried fake Pakistani identity cards for everyone and removed the batteries and SIM cards from his phones. Knowing that no Pakistani official would ever dare to question a covered woman, Ibrahim told Amal and Maryam to dress in dowdy shalwar kameez and wrap dupattas around their faces.

  Amal, who had grown accustomed to her strange, isolated existence, walked through Karachi’s thronged airport feeling frightened and exposed. She spent the flight feeding Safiyah. Maryam, who sat beside her carrying her baby daughter, Rehma, wondered why her silent husband had deliberately changed his appearance by shaving off his beard and cutting short his long hair.102

  All Ibrahim had told them was that they were going to Peshawar to “fix a problem with Amal’s passport.” The visa she had entered Pakistan on in June 2000 had long run out, but the women did not understand the sudden urgency. When they exited the airport, a private minibus with curtained windows pulled up. Amal watched as Pakistan’s vibrant North-West Frontier Province flashed by: painted jinga trucks, traffic policemen in white gloves, fruit markets, smartly turned-out schoolchildren, and green minarets.103 Passing orange and honey sellers, Maryam whispered in broken Arabic: “We’re not going to Peshawar.” She was sure they were heading to Swat.

  Beyond Dargai, a garrison town that housed a major Pakistani military base, and before the road began to climb, the party stopped off briefly at a roadside hotel to use the toilet. When they got back into the minibus, two new passengers were seated inside: a policeman and a tall, pale, bearded man with a scarf wrapped around his face, his long legs stretched out between the seats.

  Ibrahim greeted the tall man deferentially. Maryam, who was exhausted, fell asleep. Amal felt the hitchhiker’s liquid brown eyes burrowing into the back of her neck.

  The road climbed to Malakand Fort, a British colonial outpost where Winston Churchill had once spent the night. Ahead, lush green terraces and fruit orchards unfurled, sliced in half by the aquamarine Swat River and overlooked by the distant snow-covered peaks of the White Mountains. The left side of the valley was sparsely inhabited, but the right side was dotted with bazaars, empty tourist hotels, and ski resorts built during the 1980s. At the next town, Chakdara, the minibus crossed the bridge and took a complicated series of hairpin bends, following the left bank of the river to avoid Mingora, the bustling capital of Swat.

  Maryam woke up. Seeing they were heading north she became frightened. This was a deeply conservative and religious area ruled by firebrand maulvis (clerics), where village women stayed at home and every boy above the age of ten carried a weapon. For a few nights they lodged in a house overlooking a tributary of the Swat River, with Ibrahim and the strangers ensconced in another room.

  When they set off again, it was to cross back to the right bank of the valley at Khwazakhela. Maryam knew the way from here. They were heading toward Shangla, where she had grown up. At nightfall, they slipped into Martung, her home tehsil (district), and finally pulled up in the tiny hamlet of Kutkey.

  The low-slung redbrick house where Maryam’s parents lived was closed up. Her father, Naeemuddin, was away working in Kuwait and her mother had gone to visit.

  After the gate shut behind them, the women and babies got out. Amal took in her new surroundings: terraced hills all around and with a river bubbling down in the valley bottom. There were no neighbors to speak of, but she noted with relief that the house had electricity.

  As the silent passenger emerged from the minibus, Maryam looked away but not before she had noticed his height—several inches taller than most Swat natives. He went inside, followed by the guard and Ibrahim, who beckoned to Amal.

  Follow, he urged.

  Amal tensed. Excited and a little scared, she followed her husband into the house.

  September 10, 2002, Karachi

  A new round of ISI raids unfolded and led to an address in the upmarket Gulshan-e-Iqbal district. Hiding behind their vehicles, the police prayed the tip-off was right. They had mobilized everyone. The ISI and their U.S. counterparts were there, as well as the Sindh Rangers, drawn by a claim that this was the home of Hassan Ghul, Khalid Shaikh Mohammad’s main courier.104

  “In!” the Rangers screamed, lifting a door off its hinges.

  At first no one they grabbed would talk. Then, a driver who had nothing to gain broke down and revealed that his boss was Ahmed Rabbani, one of the two Saudi-Burmese brothers who were in Khalid Shaikh Mohammad’s shura. They were not here but at another property on Tariq Road, close to Dunkin’ Donuts.

  The convoy moved out.

  “In!” a Ranger shouted at the new location.

  Rabbani’s brother, Abdul, was inside with a sixteen-year-old boy who they later identified as the younger brother of Khalid Shaikh Mohammad’s bagman, Silver. When police recovered a prosthetic limb, too, they realized they had just missed Silver himself and they radioed the perimeter to look out for a man hobbling on crutches.

  There was no sign of Khalid. But in a bedroom, the FBI discovered a box of SEGA game consoles filled with explosives and twenty sealed envelopes containing the bin Laden family’s Saudi passports. The ISI wondered if this proved that Osama’s family was still in Pakistan, as it was unlikely they could have left the country without their documents.

  Cowering behind a wardrobe, the intelligence agents found two young boys who gave their names as Yusuf al-Khalid, aged nine, and Abed al-Khalid, aged seven. A group of women found hiding in another room explained that they were the children’s nannies and the boys were the sons of Khalid Shaikh Mohammad. The raiding party was astonished.105

  Khalid and his wife were always busy and came and went often, the women explained, leaving their children behind. Questioned about his present whereabouts they gave another address: 63C, Fifteenth Commercial Street, Defense Housing Authority Phase (DHA) II Extension: an apartment block in the heart of a neighborhood of textile factories and machine shops.

  Early on the morning of September 11, 2002, a year to the day since the Planes Operation, ISI agents and Rangers poured into DHA, observed by the FBI and CIA. After dawn, the caretaker of 63C was picked up coming back from morning prayers and under duress admitted that two adjoining top-floor apartments were “filled with Arabs.”

  By seven A.M., the area was locked down.

  “In!” screamed the Rangers.

  At nine thirty A.M., paramilitaries and intelligence agents stormed the building. A mechanic working several streets away heard a blast. “It sounded like a bomb had gone off.”106 Halfway up the stairs, the ISI crashed into two men running down, who they wrestled to the floor before dragging them out of the building, blindfolded and with their hands tied behind their backs.

  Minutes later, gunshots rang out. A male voice could be heard shouting up above: “Allahu Akhbar!” Ranger snipers fired down from adjoining rooftops, and police shot up from the pavement. Tear-gas canisters skittled across the street. Flash-bangs were hurled inside as a coughing, spluttering woman emerged from the fug in a red shalwar kameez, carrying an unconscious child.

  By midday, several Arabs lay dead in the stairwell and five Rangers had broken through onto the top floor. Three men were still alive, and as the Rangers closed in, the sounds of gunfire bounced around the lanes below.

  “Surrender!” the Rangers screamed.

  A voice shouted back in English: “Bastards, fucking bastards.”

  “One down,” a Ranger radioed down. “Now just two left, in the kitchen.”

  The Arabs started hurling pots and pans. The Rangers, bedded in behind a sofa, lobbed in a grenade, forcing their quarry into the hall, where the men held kitchen knives against their own throats, muttering prayers.

  One lunged for a gun. As the Rangers piled on top of him, he shouted: “You’re going to hell!” Pulled up on his feet, the prisoner was taken to the window
. “Got one alive!”

  Police started shooting in the air in celebration as the blindfolded and cuffed prisoner was led out of the block. They all gathered around for a photograph as someone with a mug-shot chart noticed his buckteeth and screamed his name. “Ramzi bin al-Shibh! We got him!” Later claims in the Pakistani press that this was a staged encounter and that al-Shibh had been caught earlier by the ISI and subjected to several days of illegal interrogation were quickly dismissed as irrelevant.

  However, there was no sign of Khalid Shaikh Mohammad.

  September 12, 2002, Doha, Qatar

  Yosri Fouda was asleep at his hotel when a night editor called. “Please come. People have been ringing in, saying you have turned in Ramzi bin al-Shibh.”

  Fouda was horrified. The second part of his documentary, The Road to 11 September, had aired on Al Jazeera on September 10, and although he had never gotten back the tapes of his interview with Khalid Shaikh Mohammad, the program had featured audio recordings of al-Shibh’s admission that they were the masterminds of 9/11.107 The Arabic-language press was pointing a finger, accusing Fouda of betraying al-Shibh and hinting that he was a pro-American turncoat—a dangerous suggestion that was likely to inspire someone to take a shot at him. He also faced accusations from some Western media outlets of having tipped off Khalid, enabling him to escape from the DHA raid.

  After news broke that both Rabbani brothers had been captured, online death threats against Fouda started.

  The desperate journalist needed to send out a clear message that he was not guilty. Suspecting that Khalid would be watching Al Jazeera, he appeared on air and deliberately lied about the timing and locations of their meetings earlier in the year.

  The following morning, a statement appeared on jihad.net: “To put an end to speculations and rumors, Al Qaeda’s media office would like to assure everyone that neither Al Jazeera channel nor Mr. Yosri Fouda had anything to do with the recent events in Karachi.”