The Exile

by Adrian Levy

  Ibrahim spread the message through the villages. The Saeed brothers had changed their ways. Happily married, they were enjoying a new start in Shangla. Family, children, and making a living from their small farm was all that mattered now.

  But the small house was fit to burst. And then Amal announced to Osama that she was pregnant. She tried to hide it for as long as she could, wearing loose clothes and concealing her morning sickness as fatigue. When Maryam inevitably found out, confirming her suspicions that Amal spent her nights with the Sheikh, Ibrahim panicked.

  Maryam’s meddling had to be dealt with and he needed to cater to Amal’s medical needs. But he was not from the area and did not know which midwife or clinic could be trusted to keep quiet about an Arab patient in these days of roundups. Ibrahim resorted to a ruse he had used once before. He and Maryam would accompany Amal to the hospital and tell doctors that she was deaf and mute. Unless there were serious complications, she would discharge herself immediately after the birth and if they had to register the child, they would record its father as Abu Abdullah.

  When the baby arrived in early January 2003 without any problems, everyone in the house rejoiced, especially Osama, who chewed a date and placed the softened pulp against his new daughter’s lips, naming her Aasia, meaning “hope.”

  But there was no sense of hope for Ibrahim; Osama advised him that more people were coming. He should prepare for important visitors. They would celebrate an aqeeqah—an Islamic tradition of making a sacrifice to honor the birth of a child—and then conduct a high-level meeting. Aasia’s birth hair would be shaved and weighed, with the equivalent weight in silver gifted to a local mosque. An aqeeqah. Another risky visit. Elaborate gifts. Ibrahim was outraged. How could the Sheikh arrange a baby shower in a time of war? he complained to Maryam. From where would the money come?

  He demanded to know who the guests were, but all Osama said was that they would bring new identity documents for Ibrahim and Abrar, who were to become Tariq and Arshad Khan, two Pashtun brothers from Charsadda, east of Peshawar.

  In the second week of January 2003, Khalid Shaikh Mohammad arrived at the small house in Kutkey, alongside his pregnant wife and several other children. It was the first time he and Osama had seen one another since Karachi.

  February 5, 2003, United Nations Security Council, New York City

  America was finally ready to take on Saddam Hussein. In his blue suit and liverwurst tie, U.S. secretary of state Colin Powell looked tense and nervous as he prepared to present Washington’s case that the Iraqi dictator was in breach of Security Council resolutions and that war was the only viable option.

  The Security Council remained deeply divided, so the speech Powell was about to deliver, which had been finessed right up until the last moment, needed to quash dissent and also accelerate the process. The Bush administration needed backing from a “coalition of the willing”: nations that would join the hunt for Al Qaeda in Iraq—and for weapons of mass destruction (WMDs).

  Powell needed to stanch the ambivalence that had so far met Washington’s call to arms. He wanted to prove that he was in the business of delivering incontrovertible facts. “My colleagues,” he said gravely, setting the tone, “every statement I make today is backed up by sources, solid sources. These are not assertions. What we’re giving you are facts and conclusions based on solid intelligence.”

  After running through a seemingly impressive body of evidence to show that Iraq did in fact possess WMDs, Powell introduced Abu Musab al-Zarqawi and his suspicious activities in the Khurmal hills, transforming him into a tool to make the crucial Al Qaeda–Saddam connection. “What I want to bring to your attention today,” Powell declared, “is the potentially much more sinister nexus between Iraq and the Al Qaeda terrorist network, a nexus that combines classic terrorist organizations and modern methods of murder … Iraq today harbors a deadly terrorist network headed by Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, an associated collaborator of Osama bin Laden and his Al Qaeda lieutenants.”75

  Powell went on to highlight intelligence that firmly placed Zarqawi in Saddam’s pay. There was no mention of other known facts such as that Zarqawi’s real backers in Iraq were Ansar ul-Islam, a group opposed to Saddam Hussein’s regime, or that the WMD production facility was little more than a shack and had been established by Ansar long before Zarqawi arrived.76

  Iraq was playing everyone, Powell warned. “After we swept Al Qaeda from Afghanistan, some of its members accepted this safe haven [in Iraq]. They remain there today. Iraqi officials protest that they are not aware of the whereabouts of Zarqawi or of any of his associates. Again, these protests are not credible.”

  The ties between the Iraqi government and Al Qaeda went back decades, he insisted.77 “Going back to the early and mid-nineteen nineties, when bin Laden was based in Sudan, an Al Qaeda source tells us that Saddam and bin Laden reached an understanding that Al Qaeda would no longer support activities against Baghdad,” Powell claimed.78

  Inside a reinforced room at the CIA’s Counterterrorism Center that the analysts called “the vault,” the team tasked with compiling evidence to connect Zarqawi and Al Qaeda to Saddam Hussein watched Powell mount his case with a growing sense of disbelief.79 In a paper they had submitted the previous June entitled “Iraq and Al Qaeda: Interpreting a Murky Relationship” they had explicitly reported no evidence of Zarqawi having any connection to Saddam Hussein, concluding that Zarqawi was not a member of Al Qaeda, would not have known about 9/11 in advance, and so neither did Saddam Hussein. As a result of this paper, the CTC team had been called to an urgent meeting with Vice President Cheney and his chief of staff, Scooter Libby, who made it clear that Cheney was looking for another conclusion. “It was intense,” recalled Nada Bakos, a young CTC targeting officer who attended and had been on the Zarqawi case for more than a year.

  Now, as Powell talked and she desperately flipped through a draft of the speech that she thought the CTC had agreed with senior White House officials, she felt the panic rising in her throat. “When he got to our portion, it went off our script fairly quickly, and we were looking around at each other, saying: ‘Where’s he at? Where’s he at?’ ” Bakos continued: “We were very, very, very careful about describing the relationship as we saw it, and it seemed to overinflate and not reflect our analysis … I don’t know how it was changed or by who.”

  Despite these private misgivings, a New York Times editorial stated the next day that President Bush’s decision to dispatch Powell showed a wise concern with winning international opinion. The paper congratulated the secretary of state for ditching the “apocalyptic invocations of a struggle of good and evil” to focus “on shaping a sober, factual case against Mr. Hussein’s regime.” And it rounded off: “It may not have produced a ‘smoking gun,’ but it left little question that Mr. Hussein had tried hard to conceal one.”80

  As far as Bakos and many other CTC colleagues saw it, the Powell speech, in which Zarqawi’s name had been mentioned twenty-one times, was a disaster and had catapulted him from being a low-level jihadist who Osama bin Laden did not trust or like into one of the world’s most dangerous men. “I can’t even imagine what this did for Zarqawi’s ego,” recalled Bakos. “Here he is; his name is spoken at the UN. Now he’s showing bin Laden and Al Qaeda who he really is, right?” Rather than going after a real threat coming from Al Qaeda in Iran, Powell had created a monster.

  Bakos and her CTC colleagues suspected that recruits and funding would soon be flowing toward Zarqawi from everywhere, and back home in the dusty, working-class Zarqa suburb of Hai Masoom, where Zarqawi had grown up, within hours of the speech he was crowned a hero. As his name appeared spray-painted on walls around the city, a steady stream of volunteers and well-wishers gathered at his innocuous concrete house set back from the street with its rusty white painted iron gate.81

  February 28, 2003, 5 P.M., CIA Headquarters, Langley, Virginia

  Three weeks after the Powell speech and with recriminations still flying back and
forth, Marty Martin, the unpredictable chief of the Counterterrorism Center’s Sunni Extremist Group, bowled excitedly into the conference room. “Boss?” George Tenet was running the daily meeting of the executive staff. “Where are you going to be this weekend?”82

  Tenet regarded him quizzically. Martin had had a lengthy clandestine career, but he had a way of rewriting the world in his own image that would later lead some colleagues to describe him as the “Jack Bauer of the bayou.”83 Maybe that was the trick of surviving for so many years inside the rabbit warren of Islamism.

  An asset code-named X had surfaced, Martin said.

  Tenet waited, accustomed to the way Martin drip-fed his stories.

  “And he is on his way to meet Khalid Shaikh Mohammad.”

  Tenet puckered his lips.

  “Stay in touch,” Martin added, deliberately underselling his product. “I just might get some good news.”

  Others in the loop were more skeptical. Small, undernourished, and resembling a subsistence farmer, Asset X was an Iranian Balochi whose uncle was a well-known cleric in London. He maintained that his family, whose origins lay in Zahidan, was intertwined with KSM’s, making him a distant relative.

  But up until now things had not gone smoothly in his career as a CIA source.

  When Asset X had first come forward in the spring of 2001, no one in Washington was giving much attention to Islamist terrorists. After 9/11, an urgent review of all CIA sources had led to a Farsi-speaking CIA case officer being assigned to Asset X. After KSM was named among the FBI’s twenty-two Most Wanted Terrorists, accused of masterminding the failed Bojinka plot, the CIA officer was authorized to make small payments that were hand-delivered to Asset X in paper envelopes. However, Asset X proved to be greedy and when one expense claim was refused for being falsified, he had taken offense and cut off all contact.

  The CIA would not see Asset X again for nine months, during which time the agency learned through Special Agent Ali Soufan that Khalid Shaikh Mohammad was the architect of 9/11.

  As they hastily tried to rebuild relations with Asset X, his handler was reassigned, leaving before he could fully explain the importance of his source to his successor. The arrangements with Asset X were on the verge of being terminated again—as he cost too much—until an overheard conversation at the CIA station in Islamabad brought him back into focus. Assigned a new case officer, Asset X was made a lucrative offer. “Look, Brother,” his new handler said, “there are twenty-five million frigging reasons why you need to find Khalid,” meaning that getting KSM would inevitably lead to Osama, on whose head was placed a $25 million bounty. Having agreed to give the operation one last shot, the agency had to fashion the right bait. Estimating that the raids all over Pakistan had made Al Qaeda feel the pinch, they plumped for hard cash. Asset X was told to float an offer by KSM of $3 million donated from friends in the Gulf and London. He wanted to hand over the money personally and Khalid agreed to meet him, as he desperately needed the cash.84 Getting the real culprit behind 9/11 could not have come at a better time for the CIA, which was still reeling from the implications of the Powell speech.

  February 28, 2003, 10 P.M., 18A Nisar Road, Westridge, Rawalpindi, Pakistan

  The text message was brief: “I M W KSM.” It was sent from a villa in a well-to-do suburb of Rawalpindi, the army cantonment twinned with Islamabad. Asset X was texting from the bathroom, while Khalid Shaikh Mohammad held forth in the lounge.

  The house, located in a district dense with soldiers and spies, was a five-minute drive from the Pakistan Army’s general headquarters (GHQ) and belonged to a well-respected scientist and his wife, who was politically active in the women’s wing of Jamaat-e-Islami, Pakistan’s largest religious political party and one that was frequently accused of having links to militant groups.

  The householders were out at a wedding, but Khalid, who had been on the road for days returning from seeing Osama in Shangla and Dr. al-Zawahiri in Shakai, had dropped in at the invitation of Adil Qadoos, the scientist’s son, who was a major in the Pakistan Army.

  This was the kind of nexus that had come to antagonize the CIA and that many in the Islamabad station had become convinced the White House was blind to as it ramped up for a war in Iraq. A wanted terrorist, sheltering in a property whose residents’ papers melded religion, politics, and the Pakistan Army: was there a more potent symbol for how the nuclear-armed Islamic Republic was playing all sides?

  Exhausted by juggling his pregnant wife’s demands with multiple new terrorist plots, Khalid had broken two of his golden rules in coming to Westridge. This was not the first time he had stayed in the house. And Asset X had not been searched, enabling him to enter with a cell phone in his pocket.

  After midnight, the CIA and ISI converged on the villa, although the Pakistanis had not been informed of the identity of their target. They waited in the dark for Asset X to leave and to be certain that Khalid, who was a night owl, had fallen asleep.

  At two thirty A.M., Pakistani police and ISI went in through the doors and windows. The police cuffed Qadoos’s brother, who was at home, and escorted his wife and their children outside. Khalid had taken sleeping pills and the ISI had trouble waking him. When he realized what was happening, he immediately offered a deal. “Why are you doing this for the Americans?” he asked an officer. “We’ll give you what you want.”85

  In another room, the search team hauled up a cowering figure. His papers showed he was a Saudi national who would shortly be identified as Mustafa Ahmad al-Hawsawi, Khalid’s 9/11 financier. In his briefcase, the CIA found a nineteen-page phone directory of Al Qaeda facilitators, and on his laptop were several letters and details of wire payments to the 9/11 hijackers. Seemingly small details homed in on later would come to mean the most in the hunt for bin Laden, including an e-mail address for Abu Ahmad al-Kuwaiti, a man whose real name still eluded them but whose kunya had been identified by Riyadh the Facilitator and confirmed by Abu Zubaydah, whose address book contained a phone number for him.

  The next day, the ISI raided an army billet in Kohat cantonment and took away Major Adil Qadoos of the Forty-fifth Signals Regiment.86

  March 1, 2003

  Two hours after Khalid’s capture, the chief of interrogations at the Salt Pit sent an e-mail to headquarters: “Subject: Let’s roll with the new guy.”87

  The chief asked for permission to use the new OMS-approved Enhanced Interrogation Techniques that had already been deployed on Abu Zubaydah and Ramzi bin al-Shibh.88 He also checked that he could use rectal rehydration in order to “assert total control over the detainee.”89

  Shortly after, Marty Martin called the ISI safe house in Rawalpindi where Khalid was being held. The first media reports of the extraordinary raid were already out and he was buzzing. But news channels were using the old FBI picture of Khalid neatly barbered and suited, looking like a Kuwaiti plutocrat.

  “Boss, this ain’t right,” Martin complained to George Tenet, seeking his approval to make a change before calling the Pakistan spies. “The media are making this bum look like a hero.” The ISI interrogators in Rawalpindi must have something better. With his hair still mussed up from sleep and wearing only his undergarments, Khalid was snapped by the ISI looking doped-up, hirsute, and bedraggled.

  Back in Washington, KSM’s detention was greeted with applause, Porter Goss, the chairman of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, declaring it a war-winning moment—comparing it to the liberation of Paris in 1944.90 All talk of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi was temporarily forgotten.

  Observing the first phase of the interrogation inside the Rawalpindi safe house was Brigadier Asad Munir, the ISI’s Peshawar station chief. Munir was hard to handle and had a vicious bite. A man whose tight, open-neck shirts, slicked-back hair, and chain-smoking gave him the appearance of a pool-hall hustler, Munir had been on Khalid Shaikh Mohammad’s trail for months.

  He had tracked him to the Amin Hotel in Peshawar and intercepted calls that suggested he was
using addresses in Quetta. But Khalid always flitted before any raid. In a joint operation with the ISI in Islamabad, Munir had also pursued Khalid’s couriers, eavesdropping on their calls and watching as they delivered messages at dead-drops on the outskirts of Kohat. That town felt especially important to Munir—as was one particular phone number whose user traveled to Kohat and then down to Rawalpindi, only for the ISI to lose him.91

  Now that Khalid had been found in affluent Westridge, Munir felt he should have been in on the raid. All he could do was go through the recovered documents from Hawsawi’s laptop, which included three letters from Osama.92 For him, the standout was a letter to his son Hamzah that had almost certainly been given to Khalid during his visit to Kutkey. The Peshawar station chief did not have long to make copies of the data, as everything recovered from Westridge was shipped back to Washington, where one official described it as the “mother lode of information that leads to the inner workings of Al Qaeda.”93 That trove included a list of people Khalid was running—assets, agents, couriers, and fighters, including those he intended to deploy abroad—and constituted a roadmap of sleeper cells, some of which had been in the United States, the United Kingdom, or mainland Europe for years, but no connections to Saddam Hussein or Iraq.

  While the interrogation continued in Rawalpindi, Munir wondered how the CIA had finally got to the finish line. That had not been explained. But Asset X was rarefied intelligence and he had no idea that George Tenet was on his way to Pakistan to personally thank the informer and usher him into a witness protection program with a huge reward.

  March 3, 1:20 A.M., ISI Safe House, Rawalpindi

  Khalid Shaikh Mohammad had not slept for forty-eight hours. A videotape shot from above showed him sitting at a table in the interrogation room, swaying from side to side like a drunk.94