Mastermind Read online

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Dedication

  Introduction

  BOOK I - ORIGINS

  Chapter 1 - The Outsider

  Chapter 2 - Campus Radical

  Chapter 3 - Searching for War

  BOOK II - A TERRORIST CAREER

  Chapter 4 - Tradebom

  Chapter 5 - The Plot to Kill the Pope, the President, and Four Thousand Americans

  Chapter 6 - Losing Ramzi

  Chapter 7 - Meeting bin Laden

  BOOK III - THE PLANES OPERATION

  Chapter 8 - September 11, 2001

  BOOK IV - HUNTING KSM

  Chapter 9 - The Daniel Pearl Murder

  Chapter 10 - Explosions in Paradise

  Chapter 11 - “Recognize Us Yet?”

  BOOK V - INTERROGATING KSM

  Chapter 12 - KSM and Obama: The Mastermind’s Last Laugh

  Chapter 13 - Aftermath

  Acknowledgements

  A Note on Sources and Methods

  List of Aliases Used by KSM

  Time Line

  Notes

  Bibliography

  Index

  About the Author

  SENTINEL

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  First published in 2011 by Sentinel,

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  Copyright © Richard Miniter, 2011

  All rights reserved

  Photograph credits

  Insert page 1 (top): AP Photo/File

  1 (bottom): AP Photo/www.muslm.net

  2 (top): AP Photo/B. K. Bangash

  2 (bottom): AP Photo/Janet Hamlin/Pool

  3 (top): Jeffrey Markowitz/Sygma/Corbis

  3 (bottom), 7 (bottom), 8 (bottom): Federal Bureau of Investigation

  4 (top and bottom), 7 (top): Thomson Reuters

  5 (top): Getty Images News

  5 (middle and bottom): Courtesy of the author

  6 (top and middle): Time & Life Images/Robert Nickelsberg/Getty Images

  6 (bottom): AFP/Jay Directo/Getty Images

  8 (top): Rewards for Justice Program, United States Department of State

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Miniter, Richard.

  Mastermind : the many faces of the 9/11 architect, Khalid Shailk Mohammed / Richard Miniter.

  p. cm.

  Includes bibliographical references and index.

  eISBN : 978-1-101-47570-6

  1. Mohammed, Khalid Shaikh, 1965- 2. Terrorists. 3. September 11 Terrorist Attacks, 2001. I. Title.

  HV6430.M64M56 2011

  363.325092—dc22

  [B]

  2010047777

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  To Lisa Merriam, a true friend

  Introduction

  From a cage in Guantánamo Bay, Khalid Shaikh Mohammed is on the verge of satisfying his life’s biggest ambitions: to be a world-famous performer and to die a martyr. The man that prosecutors and the press call “the 9/11 mastermind” couldn’t be happier. He plainly relishes the CIA’s description of him as “one of history’s most famous terrorists.”1

  That America, the enemy he swore to destroy, is giving him a global stage and a way to a jihadi death is either an irony or a gift from Allah.

  The first time he had a stage in America, Khalid was a student doing college comedy skits in North Carolina for The Friday Tonight Show, with an informal Muslim group that met near his college campus.2 His performances were biting and, former classmates say, very funny. One former student called him “the king of comedy.”3 Another told me “he loves the attention.”4 By all accounts he is going to enjoy every moment of a public trial. It may be his last chance to perform before a large audience.

  KSM, as he is universally known in intelligence circles, has put himself at the center of every major Al Qaeda plot for the past fifteen years, leading U.S. intelligence officials to call him “the Forrest Gump of al Qaeda.”5 Indeed, KSM was involved with so many major terror plots that some knowledgeable observers, like noted Pakistani journalist Rahimullah Yusufzai, wonder if he is exaggerating his role.6 In fact, the opposite may be true. Intelligence analysts say the “9/11 mastermind” is still being tied to more plots, including ones that will be made public for the first time in this book.

  He admitted to planning the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center (killing six), the bombing of two nightclubs in Bali (killing 202), Richard Reid’s “shoe bomber” plot (which would have killed hundreds aboard a Miami-bound flight), the September 11 attacks (killing nearly three thousand), and plots to bomb London’s Heathrow Airport (one of the world’s busiest), the Big Ben clock tower, and the Empire State Building (where more than a thousand people work). He also confessed to schemes to kill office workers in skyscrapers in Los Angeles, Seattle, and Chicago.7 He even planned to bomb the Panama Canal, which would have devastated world shipping and strangled the U.S. economy. KSM was an endless fountain of plans to bomb, murder, and maim.

  Nor did KSM ever cease trying to hit targets inside the United States. After the September 11 attacks, he twice tried to infiltrate the American mainland with Al Qaeda–trained terrorists. But both were captured before reaching their destinations, thanks to interrogations and phone taps.8

  When not engaged in large-scale killings, KSM focused on individual murders. He plotted to assassinate President Bill Clinton and twice tried to kill Pope John Paul II. Several prime ministers of Pakistan narrowly escaped his bombs.

  KSM is proud of his central role in the kidnapping and murder of Wal
l Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl, who innocently wanted to get “both sides” of the Al Qaeda story. KSM boasted: “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.”9 His tone of voice revealed more than his words; he was boasting while playing to an audience of jihadis worldwide.

  KSM likes to present himself as a strictly observant Muslim, but he picks and chooses which Islamic laws to follow. In college in North Carolina, he would go to Burger King and order hamburgers without the meat, telling his classmates that he couldn’t be sure that the beef met Islamic standards of purity.10 While in U.S. custody, he has grown a long traditional beard and is often seen in flowing robes, handling prayer beads. Yet in the Philippines, he plotted terror attacks over tropical cocktails beneath brass poles of swinging teenage strippers, against a backdrop of pounding rock music. Murder, instrumental music, public nudity, and alcohol consumption are all forbidden by Islamic law.

  At times in college and afterward he refused to be photographed because images of living things were “un-Islamic.” Later he spent weeks getting a video of himself onto Al Jazeera (see chapter 11) and hours posing for a Red Cross photographer in prison (see photo section).

  In the most famous photograph taken at his capture, KSM seems like a bear of a man. That photo shows a bulky man with a carpet of chest hair and intense, dark eyes. In fact, he is more of a chimp than a bear. He is five feet four inches tall11 and speaks with an accent that one American official at Guantánamo Bay likened to that of Apu, the Indian owner of the Kwik-E-Mart on The Simpsons.12

  He isn’t an impressive speaker in Arabic, either. One Al Jazeera reporter who interviewed him described KSM’s Arabic as “crude and colloquial,”13 and another, who watched his testimony at Guantánamo, said he was like “a Pakistani Jackie Mason.”14

  The diminutive terrorist displays a Napoleonic urge to dominate other people, a trait that some interrogators and guards find humorous.

  KSM poses as a romantic, but only when the mood suits him. He adores the grand gesture—writing love poems to the wife of his CIA interrogator or, during a break in planning the pope’s assassination, buzzing with a rented helicopter the dental clinic where a Catholic Filipina girlfriend worked. KSM (and his nephew Ramzi Yousef) smiled down at her, while slowly unfurling a banner reading I LOVE YOU.15

  Still, his romanticism had limits. A laptop seized by Philippine police features audio recordings of him mocking the whores he had rented. He was also an avid consumer of porn. “The vast majority of the captured hard drives of terrorists,” said former CIA case officer Marc Sageman, “is taken up with porn. Don’t think of these guys as strict Muslims. They are essentially seventeen-year-olds.”16 Again, hardly the mark of a devout Muslim.

  KSM’s life is built on a highly disciplined secrecy, but he is, at heart, a publicity hound. During the many terror operations he supervised, he instructed cell leaders never to phone or e-mail him—he would contact them, using prepaid cell phones or coin-operated pay phones, which are harder to track. He wanted to be mysterious, even to his coconspirators. Many of his comrades in terror never knew his real name. He used more than two dozen aliases.17 “He behaves like an intelligence officer,” said Colonel Rodolfo Mendoza, who ran the intelligence section of the Philippines National Police while KSM was there. “He appears and disappears. He is very, very clever.”18

  Yet he wanted the world to know his name. In one of the early versions of the 9/11 plot, in November 1998, he wanted to personally land one of the hijacked planes, release the women and children, and hold a press conference. An incredulous Osama bin Laden vetoed this idea.19

  He presents himself as an earnest idealist motivated by the torments of the globe’s Muslims, but in fact he simply went into the family business. His father was a preacher of radical Islam at the dinner table and in the mosque. His three older brothers (Zahid, Abed, and Aref) plunged into the secret world of armed Islam, blazing the way for bookish young Khalid. When he did become an active terrorist, he was soon joined by his nephew Ramzi Yousef (the leader of the cell that bombed the World Trade Center in 1993), two other nephews, and a brother-in-law. KSM’s relatives, well connected in Pakistani terrorist circles, helped him meet the men who had founded Al Qaeda.

  KSM’s extended family is intricately intermarried and interconnected with extremism. Another nephew,20 whose mother is one of KSM’s two sisters, is Ammar al-Baluchi, who helped KSM coordinate the 9/11 attacks and the Richard Reid shoe bomb plot. Ammar’s sister is KSM cousins Ramzi Yousef’s wife.21 Ramzi Yousef’s father (and KSM’s brother), Mohammed Abdul Karim, is one of the leaders of Sipah-e-Sahaba Pakistan, a terror group based in Pakistan that targets Shia Muslims and others. Two of KSM’s nephews (brothers of Ramzi Yousef), Abdul Muneim and Abdul Karim, are also linked to terror attacks.22 KSM’s sister-in-law Aafia Siddiqui, an MIT-trained neuroscientist, was later charged with the attempted murder of a U.S. soldier and was linked to a plot to bomb gas stations in Baltimore. She was allegedly casing targets for KSM when she attracted the FBI’s attention.

  KSM’s clan is dedicated to terrorism the way some families are devoted to winemaking or movie production. “The family specializes in killing,” one of the KSM clan’s former civilian-defense attorneys, Scott Fenstermaker, told me. “And they are really good at it.”23

  America and its allies have become really good at disrupting KSM family plots and capturing most of the clan. KSM and his nephew Ammar al-Baluchi are currently in U.S. custody and may well be sentenced to death. His brothers Abed and Aref died in Afghanistan. Ramzi Yousef is in the supermax federal prison in Colorado, where he is scheduled for outdoor exercise at the same time as the Unabomber.24 (We can only wonder about their conversations.) Many of KSM’s other relatives are either in custody or actively being hunted by the world’s intelligence services.

  The KSM family’s hatred of America and its allies is based not on ignorance but on personal knowledge. KSM and many of his extended family were educated in America or have traveled widely in the West. As we will see in chapter 2, KSM even had some run-ins with the police in North Carolina. He later bragged to his CIA interrogator that he’d been radicalized in the United States. A CIA report concludes that KSM’s time in North Carolina “almost certainly helped propel him on his path to become a terrorist.”25

  But, as we shall see, the real story is far more complicated. While he was radicalized before he arrived in America, the Americans he met only confirmed his ideological prejudices. He mostly met Americans in adverse circumstances, after he had injured them in a car accident or, because of his limited English, failed to do his part in college lab work. Unsurprisingly, he didn’t find these Americans to be very friendly. He explained their behavior as “racist” or “anti-Arab,” while refusing to acknowledge his own role in the encounters. Nor did he seek out Americans to befriend. He kept to himself and his clique while blaming the world for his exclusion—speeding him on his way to terrorism. According to a CIA report once marked TOP SECRET, “his contacts with Americans, while minimal, confirmed his view that the United States was a debauched and racist country.”26 America’s failure to follow Muslim (Sharia) laws and its support for Israel and various Arab autocrats (including the Saudis) were his main complaints. KSM is akin to Brutus in George Bernard Shaw’s play Julius Caesar who insists that the laws of his tribe are the laws of nature.27

  The laws of his tribe—the jihadi network he has served for more than half his life—are also dictating the script of his last act, his courtroom performances. He is playing a role. Al Qaeda manuals found in Afghanistan instruct “the brothers” that if they are captured by American or Western European forces, they are to vocally and repeatedly demand a public trial for propaganda and martyrdom purposes. He is dutifully, even joyfully, following orders.

  In the course of researching and writing this book, I have o
ften been asked “Why?” The families of September 11 victims were concerned that I was going to lionize KSM. Turning down an interview with me in Paris, Daniel Pearl’s widow pointedly asked, “What in your right mind makes you think I would want to do this?”28 Some members of the intelligence community thought I was going to portray him as “superhuman,” while critics of the Bush administration feared I was going to render him as an evil genius who single-handedly justifies the war on terror. KSM is a kind of Rorschach blot whom others fear you will see differently than they do.

  For this reason, I feel compelled to address why I wrote this book. It is an attempt to answer three important and interrelated questions:• Since the 1970s, the Western world has been plagued by hijackings, assassinations, kidnappings, bombings, and mass murders of civilians. What unites all these atrocities is an ideology that goes by many names, including “radical Islam.” (Perhaps the best name for a global terrorist movement, borrowing from intelligence reports on the Indian subcontinent, is “jihadi,” someone who uses mass murder to terrify civilians into submission to bring about their dark, coercive utopia.) Most of the perpetrators (known as jihadis) are well educated and hail from intact, middle-class families. Why do they do it? Why do promising young Muslims, many of whom are educated in North America or Western Europe, become remorseless killers of people who wish them no harm? To shrink that question down to manageable size: What made Khalid Shaikh Mohammed into an eager planner of mass murder?

  • Al Qaeda is an organization of people devoted to killing other humans. It is distinct from an army, which in democracies exists to defend civilians. Al Qaeda seeks to kill noncombatants (in passenger planes, train terminals, office buildings, or at beachside resorts). Its members routinely kill prisoners, often after they have tortured or dismembered them. No Western army routinely does these things—indeed, their officers and enlisted soldiers are punished for far smaller transgressions of the laws of war. As different as Al Qaeda is, we must understand its inner workings if we are to combat it. What does KSM’s dogged rise inside that terror network tell us about the internal workings of Al Qaeda?