A REPORTER AT LARGE

THE MASTERMIND

Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and the making of9111.

BY TERRY· McDERMOTT

'Since2006,Khalid Sheikh Mcham- tarytribunals-e-Mohammed has been scribes Mohammed's Arabic as crude and . med's familyhas periodically received cold-bloodedly straightforward. He told colloquial and his knowledge of Islamic letters from him, sent from his cell at the F ouda that the Holy Tuesday planes op- texts as almost nonexistent. A journalist GuantanamoBay detention center. Ac- eration, as Al Qgeda called the 9/11 as- who observed Mohammed's appearance cording to rules established by the Amer- saults, was "designed to cause as many at one of the Guantanamo hearings Iikican military, the correspondence must fit : deaths as possible and havoc and to be a ened his voluble performance.to that of a on a five-inch-by-six-inch portion of a big slap-for America on American soil." Pakistani Jackie Mason. Amllege classpre-printed form, and its content is re-·' Testifying before a military tribunal in mate said that he was an eager participant stricted to the familial andpersonal; all 2007, helikenedhimself to George Wash- in impromptu skits and plays. A man who else is stricken by censors. Mohammed; ington and boasted that he planned "the knew him from a mosque in Doha talked the self-proclaimed architect of the 9/11 9/11 operation from A -to- Z;" Killing, about his quick wit and chatty, gladattacks against America, mostly sends he said; was simply part of his job: 'War handing style. He was an operator.

good wishes to hiswife and.children, who start from Adam when Cain he killed In at least one important way, though, are novy living ins9utheastetn Iran, and Abel until now. It's never gonna stop kill- his boasts are accurate. Mohammed,not to other. relatives,.fIe. makes repeated ing of people." In that appearance, he Osama bin Laden, was the essential figure referencest6his.I~~amic f3th and the boasted of murdering the Wall Streetfour- in the 9/11 plot. The attacks were his idea, beneficenceofflli~and hfsprophet.In nal reporter Daniel Pearl: ''1 decapitated carried out under his direct-command, photographs that ~ccompanifdone of the with-myblessed right hand the head of. Mohammed has said that he went so letters, Mohammed appeareq shrunken the American Jew, Daniel Pearl, in the far as to resist swearing allegiance to bin from. the man inthefarnousimage taken city of Karachi, Pakistan. For those who Laden and Al·Qgeda until after the atthe day of his caPture: a thici<set, wild- would-like to confirm, there are pictures tacks, .so that-he-could continue pursuing haired figure,half-:8r'essed ill'his night- of.meon the Internet holding his head.'" them-if J\1 Qgeda'lost courage.

clothes. The image must have infuriated Since June, 2002, when U.S. officials The United.StatesIntends to try MoMoharnrr:ed, whpisvain enough to have first identified Mohammed as the "mas- hammed, in a venue and a jurisdiction compliinedaurkgafriilitary-c:purt hear- termind". of 9/11, he has become one . yet to be determined, The specifics of ingthat:aske,tcliartisthad drawn his nose of history's most famous criminals. Yet, the trial-where it, should be held, and too big. hlt,hejaiJhouse phot~graphs, he unlikeOsama.bin .Laden, he has re- whetherit oughttobe a military or a civil is almostforty pmlll~slighter.>I:Ie stares mained-essentially-unknown. Efforts to hearing-have been the subject ofintense directly.at the camera, cloaked in long' uncover more than the outlines of his bi- debate. In theabseneeofbin Laden, itis white robes, with aheaddress:frarning a ographyhave produced sketchy and hard to imagine a more spectacular:legal small, still face an:da, long black-and- sometimes contradictory results. (These proceeding; even without a location ora. white beard. A copy:of the Koran lies include my own, for my book "Perfect prosecutor, it has been called the trial of

open in his right hand.· Soldiers," published in 2005 .) Even basic the century. Wherever Mohammed may .

On June 25,2009 ,Mohammed, writ- facts have been in doubt; there are, for ex- be tried, he seems-to-have done much of ing in English, made-what could be read ample, at least three versions of his birth the prosecution's work-for it, describing as a surprising plea for absolution: "All date. For almost the entire decade before himself as a righteous, relentless exepraise is dueto Allah. I praise Him and he was captured, in early 2003, 'Moham- cutioner whose version of making war' seek His aid and His' forgiveness. and I med was a fugitive, deliberately obscuring knows no bounds. But the process will be seek refuge in Allah from our evil iri our- his tracks; Bin Laden, meanwhile, was aimed at assessing guilt, not causes. It will selves and from our bad deeds." Even if hosting television interviewers, giving not tell us much about who Mohammed this were only a ritual expression of obei- speeches, and distributing videos and text is, or about the forces that shaped him, sance, it would stand in contrast to his versions of his proclamations to whoever which are, to an alarming extent, still at ~

customarily belligerent behavior. In the would have them. work in the places where he came of age. ~

few statements of his that have been Insofar as we know Mohammed, we ~

made public-a 2002 interview with the see him as a brilliant behind-the-scenes B adawiya, the neighborhood where ~ Al J azeera reporter Y osri F ouda, pieces of tactician and a resolute ideologue. As it Khalid Sheikh Mohammed grew ~ the United States government's interro- turns out, he is earthyslick in a way, but up, sits between the sand and the sea on ~ gations of him, Red Cross prison inter- naive, and seemingly motivated as much the southernmost edge of Fahaheel, a ~ views, and his appearances before mili- by pathology as by ideology. Fouda de- suburb of Kuwait City. The neighbor- 8

38 THE NEW YOI\K:EI\, SEPTEMBER 13, 2010

Mohammed, photographed last year in Guantdnamo, where he has been detained since 2006 and still awaits trial.

semi-illegal," Byman says. "You always have an excuse to crack down. 'Go ahead and run that school and hospital.' Five'o/ears later you want to clip their wings? 'Oh, you don't have a permit? ''>.106 bad.' "

.. ,While some in the ruling elite worried about the persistence of rural values-what Kuwaitis call "desertification"-in a modernizing, urbanizing culture, Islamists were worried about the opposite, the secularization of the new Kuwait. The Brotherhood sought to change that with public rhetoric and quiet, private recruitment. Its members monitored mosques, finding chances to proselytize. On weekends, they would hold meetings at tents set up in the desert, where students would gather to eat together, read books, perform plays, and pray.

Mohammed's older brother Zahed became a student leader of the Brotherhood at Kuwait University. When .' Mohammed was sixteen, he told American interrogators, he followed Zahed's lead and began attending the Brother-

. hood's desert camps. It was there that he became enamored of the idea of jihad and studied the ideology-antiWestern, anti-Semitic, anti-modernof Sayyid Qprb, the Brotherhood's most influential theorist.

When Mohammed graduated from high school, the family decided that they could afford to send only one boy abroad; as bidoon, they did not qualify for the generous government scholarships. The older brothers chose Khalid, and he left horne in 1984.

In the years since Mohammed left, his family appears to have scattered across the region. Most of them fled during Iraq's occupation of Kuwait, in 1990. The only one who remained was a

. brother-in-law of Mohammed's, who is now the muezzin, or prayer caller, at the Ahmadi mosque. An older brother, at least two sisters, and some cousins live in Iran, along with Mohammed's wife and children. One of the children is mentally disabled and another is epileptic, according to a Pakistani cousin. Two of his sons were captured by Pakistani authorities in 2002 and subsequently held in American custody for at least several months; they are now with their mother. The family survives by selling handicrafts, harvesting

''Delivery. "

dates, and keeping a small herd of goats for milk.

. The Badawiya neighborhood that Mohammed knew as an adolescent no longer exists. Kuwait has gone on a remarkable building boom since Saddam Hussein'sregime fell, in neighboring Iraq. Entire new towns are being erected in the desert. Residential subdivisions now line the highway south from Kuwait City. Even a few years ago, much of Fahaheel was a sad-sack collection of barbershops, two-table cafes, money changers, and secondhand electronics shops with galvanized-tin roofs. Now much of that old oil town has been razed and remade as a sparkling Southern California suburb, with gated subdivisions, marinas, and shopping malls. Billboards that once announced "Happiness in Islam" have been replaced by advertisements for KFC.

Even the bureaucratic records have vanished. During the occupation, the Iraqis destroyed or shipped back to Baghdad all the Kuwaiti government

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paperwork they could find-e-educational, biographical, and residential documents included. The record of Mohammed's upbringing was effectively deleted.

InJanuary, 1984,Mohammed, travelling on a Pakistani passport, arrived in tiny, remote Murfreesboro, North Carolina, to attend Chowan College, a two-year school that was advertised abroad by Baptist missionaries. Mohammed listed his brother Zahed as his father on the enrollment forms. His bill, $2,245 for the spring semester, was paid in full the day of matriculation, January 10th. Murfreesboro-population about two thousand, with no bars and a single pizza shop-must have seemed intensely foreign. There were dusky rivers meandering through dense pine forests, cotton fields, and tobacco patches. Not a sand dune in sight.

Chowan did not require the Englishproficiency exam that was then widely mandated for international students, so

THE NEW YORKEfI., SEPTEMBEfI. 13, 2010 41

'1 think I may have accidentally packed you a rhinoceros. "

foreign enrollees often spent a semester or two there to improve their English, then transferred to four-year universities. By the nineteen-eighties, the foreignstudent contingent was dominated by Middle Eastern men, about fifty of whom were enrolled each year. Mohammed, though he was Pakistani by heritage, spoke Arabic, and was integrated into the Arab group. Arab students who were there at the time said they were the butt of jokes and harassment, in the antiMuslim era that followed the Iranian takeover of the US. Embassy in Tehran, in 1979. The local boys called them Abbie Dhabies, a play on Abu Dhabi, one of the states of the United Arab Emirates. They were required, along with all the other students, to attend a weekly Christian chapel service.

A group of Middle Eastern men lived in Parker Hall, a brick dormitory with views of Lake Vann, a small pond on campus. They often cooked, ate, and prayed together. They left their shoes in the dorrnitorycorridor, an apparently ir-

, resistible target for fellow-students, who sometimes threw the shoes in the lake. At other times, students propped garbage pails filled with water against their doors, then knocked and ran away.

42 THE NEW YOR.KER., SEPTEMBER. 13, 2010

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When the young men answered, water flooded in.

Mohammed did well in the preengineering curriculum, taking classes in English and chemistry. After one semester, he left for North Carolina Agricultural & Technical State University, in Greensboro, a historically black college on the Piedmont plain, in the central part of the state, and began to study mechanical engineering; one of his nephews came to A. & T. at the same time. Mohammed developed a dislike for the US. in his time here. He told investigators that he had little contact with Americans in college, but found them to be debauched and racist. He also said that he spent a brief time in prison for failing to pay bills. A classmate, Sarni Zitawi, told me in 2003 that it wasn't uncommon for one of the students to spend a night in the county jail, in Greensboro. He himself was hauled there for failing to pay parking tickets.

Mohammed completed his college requirements in three years, and in December, 1986, both he and his nephew graduated with engineering degrees. Mohammed returned home to Kuwait, where his old high-school teacher Sheikh Ahmed Dabbous sought him

out and found him radically changed. ''When he goes there, he sees Americans don't like Arabs and Islam," Dabbous told me in 2003. When Dabbous asked why, Mohammed told him, "Because of Israel. Most Americans hate Arabs because of this." Dabbous said, "He's a very normal boy before-kind, generous, always the smiling kind. After he came back, he's a different man. He's very sad. He doesn't speak. He just sits there." He told Dabbous he was upset that Americans hated Islam. "I talked to him, to change his mind, to tell him this is just a few Americans," Dabbous said. "He refused to speak to me about it again. He was set. When Khalid said this, I told him we must meet again. He said, 'No, my ideas are very strong. Don't talk with me again about this matter.'''

Throughout Mohammed's teen-age years, Muslims everywhere were roused by the Mghan war against the Soviet Union. By the late eighties, the Afghan guerrillas known as mujahideen, with material support from the United States, the Arab nations, and China, had mastered the main act of any resistance: frustrating the enemy. Would-be fighters came from around the world to join the struggle.

Before Mohammed left for the US., his brother Zahed had started working for a Kuwaiti charity called Lajnat alDawa al- Islamia, the Committee for Islamic Appeal. In 1985, L.D.I. asked Zahed to move to Peshawar, Pakistan, to run war-relief operations in support of the Mghan resistance. L.D.I. was among the largest of more than a hundred and fifty aid organizations that set up offices in Peshawar. It had more than twelve hundred employees in Pakistan and Mghanistan and a fourmillion-dollar annual budget, which funded hospitals, clinics, and Koranstudy centers. Two brothers, Aref and Abed, had followed Zahed to Peshawar. Almost immediately after returning from America, Mohammed, unable to find work at home, went to join them.

When he arrived in Peshawar, in 1987, it was a place full of spies and adventure .. The buccaneering Texas congressman Charlie Wilson periodically rolled through carrying American gifts, the latest of which-Stinger roissiles-

"I told him the World Trade Center," Murad later told investigators. "He asked me-why, and I gave him the reasons. I asked him what he was going to do. He told me that he took training for six months in Mghanistan. I asked him what kind of training. So he told me, 'Chocolate.' I answered, What do you mean by chocolate?' He said, 'Boom.' And I immediately understood that he took training in explosives, and he told me it is time to go to the United States."

Why the United States? Murad said, "I was working for my religion, because I feel that my Muslim brothers in Palestine are suffering. Muslims in Bosnia are suffering, everywhere they are suffering. And, if you check the reason for the suffering, you will find that the U.S. is the reason for this. If you ask anybody, even if you ask children, they will tell you that the U.S. is supporting Israel, and Israel is killing our Muslim brothers in Palestine. The United States is acting like a terrorist, but nobody can see that."

In the fall of 1992, Basit, accompanied by a man he had recruited, bought a first-class ticket from Karachi to New York City. His passport identified him as an Iraqi named Ramzi Y ousef. He had no entry visa; when questioned at immigration, he admitted that the LD. was fake. He asked for political asylum and eventually was freed on his own recognizance, to await a hearing.

Basit quickly made acquaintances through a mosque in Jersey City and recruited men to join him in a plan to bomb the World Trade Center. The; attack was a ramshackle, smallsscale affair. In just a few monthsHiBa.s~t,.designed and built a . bomb thatreostabout three thousand.dollars. Mc:>hammed,:.sti1bin..lth:eJGu1f, conferrediwith l:rim;dftelThlb~lep'b.on.e and cdiIb;ibuted sixhlitnclteCldmffislJGty q.bllaisl He said later thatrhe;v.\@sd:rispiIeckbxlth.e ease with which Baailtmgp:eiaitte'1liiili.me United States. The bomb was stowed in a reared-van and parkecl:in"'the';Dasein~fi,t garage.of.the North Tower -. J3asit's plan wasnhat-itwouldtopple the North Tower into ,the South Tower, bringing them both to the ground. ";::', "1:;.'

The bomb exploded on Februa!¥?26, 1993, and although itwas insufficient to the intended task, it caused millions of dollars in damage and killed six people. Basit had come upon his own notion of

'1'112 1'eally glad I don't work on this 1/001'. "

jihad: not just a war .against states but a . non-stop, all-out viral' lOR! ~llfenemies, anywhere they could be reached,. urv i,\,j

'·+1

After the bombing, Basit fled the United States-again flying first class, on Pakistan International Airlines out of J.F.K.-and met up with Mohammed in Karachi, where Mohammed had an apartment. Karachi is a wild sprawl of a place, whose population, now estimated at eighteen rnillion, is growing at a viral rate of five.percent a year. It's ridden with crime ofall;klta.tlrn organized, ordinary, sectarian. MUl1cl'ers are an everyday occurrence, and 'What toJyO in Case of Kidnap" notices are sdmetirnes posted, like earthquake advice-in: California, on bulletin boards in gev.ernment buildings. Karachi, like the rest.of Pakistan, has been at war with itse1ffonthirtyyears; jihadi groups, backed by the Pakistani state, have fought against Indian control of Kashmir for decades, and Sunnis have fought Shiites in an ongoingproxy war funded by Saudi Arabia and Iran. "Pakistan was the confrontation to see who was going to be the dominant force in the Muslim world," an American diplomat in the region at the time said.

In Karachi, the lines of battle are

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drawn by whichever political party, criminal gang, or sectarian jihadist group has the strong hand ina particular place ~a;par.ticular moment. One night, riding·thlio.u,gh the dusty, rutted alleys of the vast"1Ity,am-i slum, I noticed young men idling on every block with what appeared to be AK-4 7 s slung over their shoulders. I said it was odd that so many police had been deployed here, and was informed that they were not police. On another visit, I was made to lie on the floor of the car until we reached our destination.

'J! Mohammed's apartment was situated in Sharfabad, a pleasant middleclass :mHghborhood near one of the city' s few largeiparks. When he and Basit met there, Mohammed was not yet thirty, and Basit was.even younger. Both were entrepreneurial, Basit had thrown together his NewYIork crew in a matter of weeks. Mohammed travelled around the world, building contacts and a system of ad-hoc terror networks. Unlike most terrorists who preceded them, they . lacked a focussed ideology. They picked . targets to suit the moment. Working together or singly, they plotted against Shiites in Iran, Sunnis in Pakistan, and Americans and Jews wherever they happened to find them, embarking on a

THE NEW YOR.K:ER., SEPTEMBEr\. 13, 2010 45

was infuriated, claiming that the Saudis, by allowing the U.S. to base its soldiers in the kingdom, were violating a dictate to keep infidels out of the "land of the two holy mosques." Then, in October, the American government announced military and economic sanctions against Pakistan, which had just been revealed to have a nuclear-weapons program. Those who thought that the U.S. had abandoned their cause took this as additional evidence.

Many of the original Arab mujahideen were gone, including bin Laden, who had gone home to Saudi Arabia in 1989, leaving behind a fledgling A1 Qgeda to coordinate jihad activities. Zahed stopped working for L.D.I. and went to the United Arab Emirates. (He was deported from the U.A.E. in 1998 for his involvement with the Muslim Brotherhood, and moved to Bahrain, where he now works as an executive at a large business conglomerate. When I found him there this spring, at a spacious house, with children's toys and bicycles strewn around outside, he threatened to sue me for invading his privacy.) Mohammed, with the sponsorship of a member of the ruling family of Qgtar, Abdullah bin Khalid al- Thani, moved

his family to Doha, the capital. At a farmhouse outside of town, Thani provided what amounted to a hostel for former mujahideen. An American government official in the region at the time recalled that Thani told him, "These people went out there and fought for their faith and now they've been abandoned by their countries and I feel sorry for them."

Mohammed was given a position as an engineer in the water department of the tiny emirate's public-works ministry. How much time he spent at his job is unclear, but it was apparent that he hadn't quit the fight. He established a small fund-raising network, soliciting wealthy men around the Gulf, then bundling modest amounts of moneyperhaps a few hundred dollars at a time-and shipping it on. Fund-raising for religious causes is ubiquitous in the Gulf; Mohammed simply adapted it to the cause of militant jihad. He was in and out of the country, the American official said, popping up in the u.A.E., Bahrain, Pakistan, and, occasionally, Kuwait. Still, his name was almost never mentioned in broader counterterrorism discussions, and it wasn't evident that he was anything more than a bit player.

'T d like someone who combines the best attributes of my first and third wives. "

'We knew he was sort of in possession of money and sending it somewhere," the official said.

Mohammed seems not to have made close friends as a young man. In years of reporting, I did not find a single person from Kuwait or North Carolina who had had any continued contact with him. His most constant companion appears to have been his nephew Abdul Basit Abdul Karim, his partner in tearing down the flag at their school in Kuwait. Physically, the two were near-opposites. Basit was tall, lanky, usually clean-shaven, and rakish. Mohammed was more than half a foot shorter, stout, bearded, and bespectacled. What they shared was a rough charm that they used to persuade others to go along with what must often have seemed outlandish schemes.

They had spent time together in Peshawar, where Basit had visited in 1988, on a break from studying electrical engineering in Wales. He returned in 1991 and trained at Khalden Camp, in Mghanistan; he also taught courses in bomb-making, developing a reputation as a clever designer of explosive devices. The Arab mujahideen had argued about the future of their cause, debating whether it should be confined to Mghanistan until they prevailed there or broadened to confront corrupt Arab regimes elsewhere. Basit didn't waste time on debates; he began making plans and proselytizing. One of his cousins later told investigators that during this period Basit inspired him to join the jihad beyond Mghanistan. Basit and Mohammed both frequently appealed to relatives for logistical support. Two of Basit's cousins and at least two of his brothers have been accused of working with Mohammed.

In 1991, Basit got in touch with Abdul Hakim Murad, a fellow- Baluchi and a boyhood friend from Kuwait, who was then in the U.S., training as a pilot. Basit told him that he wanted to attack Israel, but thought it too difficult. He would attack America instead. He asked Murad to suggest potential Jewish targets in the United States, and Murad agreed to think about it. After Murad finished his training and returned to the Gulf, in 1992, Basit got in touch again and asked ifhe had identified a target.

had just arrived. The fight against the Soviets had been going on for eight years, and the resistance was beginning to sense the prospect of victory. "The Mghans were ecstatic," a Western diplomat who was stationed in Peshawar at the time said. "They thought they were really doing some stuff over there."

As the head of an influential charity, Zahed was a figure of importance. He worked out of an office on Arbab Road, in University Town, the newest and most Westernized neighborhood in the city, and knew. virtually everyone significant in town: resistance leaders, their Arab funders, Pakistani spies, journalists.

Mohammed and his brother Abed went to work for Abdul Rasul Sayyaf, the leader ofIttihad e- Islami, one of the Mghan-refugee political parties headquartered in Peshawar. Abed worked at the Party's newspaper, and Mohammed taught engineering at Sayyaf's University of Dawa al-Jihad, situated about thirty miles east of Peshawar. (A little farther down the main road was the mosque and madras sa where many Taliban leaders were schooled.) Dawa alJihad was a rough but functioning college; as many as two thousand students came to learn engineering, medical

. technology, and literature, and also to train at jihadi camps that Sayyaf ran. Next to the school, separated by high mud walls, was the Jalozai refugee camp, horne to more than a hundred

. and twenty thousand Afghans. Mohammed also worked there, helping to organize the delivery of supplies.

Mohammed and his brothers became part of the small community of foreigners in Peshawar, which included some of the most influential figures of militant Islam. Among them was Abdullah Azzam, the Palestinian who essentially created the notion of radical jihad, redefining what had been a personal struggle for righteousness as a fight against infidels. Ayman al-Zawahiri, a founder of the Egypt-based group Islamic Jihad, who later became the second-in-command of A1 Qgeda, was also there, as was Osama bin Laden. Most of the men prayed at a small mosque called Saba-e-Leil, on a deadend alley off Arbab Road, not far from Zahed's office. Mohammed married a Pakistani woman he met at J alozai;

Zahed is said to have married her sister.

The Soviet leadership began withdrawing troops in 1988, and by February, 1989, the last soldier was gone. Before the Soviets left, they installed a government led by Mohammed Najibullah, a former head of the secret police. The mujahideen argued that the regime could be upended with a quick military victory, and they chose to attack J alalabad, a garrison town situated just across the Khyber Pass from Peshawar. A small group of Arabs, including Mohammed's brother Abed, wanted to lead their own attack, according to an account of the battle later published by Azzam. They were dissuaded, and instead fell in behind the Mghan ranks.

The attack, ill-conceived and poorly executed, turned into a two-month siege. Casualties were heavy. A group of the Arabs wandered into a minefield, setting off a series of explosions. Among the dead was Abed Sheikh Mohammed. Azzam wrote, 'With the Eternal Ones did this emigrant rider pass on, accompanied by the hearts of all who knew him." After the failed effort at J alalabad, blame was passed around in

every direction. Some in the Arab community faulted the Pakistani advisers who had pushed the attack; others faulted the Americans.

It was a period of deep disconsolation aniong Mohammed's cohort. Late that year, Azzam, the heart of the Arab resistance, was killed, along with two of his sons, by a bomb on the way to Friday prayers. The murder was never solved, and conspiracy theories spread. The United States began withdrawing aid, and some mujahideen felt that they had been duped into serving America's interests and then tossed aside. Resistance groups began fighting one another. The factions united long enough to establish a new government, replacing Najibullah's regime, but the internecine fighting soon began again. Eventually, the Peshawar diplomat said, "the Prime Minister was shelling

the capital."· .

The frustrations were compounded by events elsewhere. In August, 1990, Iraq invaded Kuwait; by early the following year, an American-led counterattack had forced it to retreat. Many of the mujahideen experienced this as a further insult. Bin Laden, in particular,

decade-long campaign of terror and murder that stopped only with their arrests. Manila was the first target.

They chose the Philippines because they thought that it would be a good base of operations. Labor was cheap. Radical Islamists, from the Abu Sayyaf group and the Moro Islamic Liberation Front, were close at hand. Members of both groups had trained in mujahideen camps during the Afghan jihad, and Basit and Mohammed had acquaintances among them.

The two men arrived in Manila sometime in early 1994, but Mohammed was in and out of the country for months. When investigators reconstructed his movements, they were shocked to discover how widely he ranged-South America, Africa, Europe, other points in Asia. He and Basit were joined in Manila by a third man, Wali Khan Amin Shah, who had met Mohammed during the Mghan jihad. Shah befriended a local bar girl and they rented an apartment on Singalong Street. Basit stayed at the downscale Manor Hotel. Mohammed moved into Tiffany Mansions, a new, thirty-five-story condominium in the leafy Greenhills section of town. He rented a Toyota sedan and wore khakis and polo shirts. He left in the morning and came home at night, as if commuting to the office. He tipped well and ordered in hamburgers for dinner.

The three men met at the corner 7-Eleven, at shopping malls and hotel bars, and at karaoke clubs in the Ermita entertainment district. They paid local women to open cell-phone and bank accounts, telling the women that they were recuperating veterans of the Mghan war or, in Mohammed's case, a visiting businessman. Basit had a girlfriend who sold perfume at a shopping mall. (He considered himself something of a ladies' man. At one of his trials, he asked the court stenographer on a date.) Later in the year, Shah and his girlfriend took a room in the Dona J osefa, a transient hotel not far from Ermita.

The J osefa' s chief recommendation was its location, facing President Quirino Avenue, a main artery connecting the center of Manila with the neighborhood where the Vatican ambassador to the Philippines lived. This provided a strategic advantage for Mohammed and Basit's latest plan: to assassinate Pope John

46 THE NEW YORKER, SEPTEMBER 13, 2010

L

Paul II. Basit and Mohammed did not appear to have any particular animus toward the Catholic Church; members of Abu Sayyaf suggested the Pope as a target. He had a weeklong visit to Manila scheduled for January, 1995, and would likely travel along President Quirino Avenue several times.

In late 1994, Shah moved out of the J osefa and Basit moved in. Using various aliases, he collected the materials to make bombs: nitroglycerine, citric and nitric acid, wire, cotton balls, watches. He and Mohammed discussed various ways to kill John Paul, including suicide bombers disguised as priests, remotecontrol bombs, and an aerial attack. They learned that President Bill Clinton was to visit in the same period, and discussed ways to kill him, too. But Philippine authorities heard rumors of threats against the Pope and added security throughout the capital. Basit and Mohammed, worried that they couldn't penetrate the heightened defenses, focussed instead on another, more innovativeattack.

In Karachi, Basit had introduced his . pilot friend, Murad, to Mohammedgiving Mohammed's name as Abdul Majid-and Mohammed had quizzed him about pilot training and flying aircraft. They met again, at Mohammed's apartment, then at a Karachi restaurant. Each time, Mohammed interrogated Murad about flying. Murad, the licensed pilot, at one point suggested to Basit dive-bombing a plane into C.I.A. headquarters.

.Out of those conversations, Mohammed and Basit devised a plan. Basit thought that he could build electronically controlled bombs small enough to smuggle aboard airliners. The explosive would be formed by combining volatile liquids; which could be carried onto planes in small plastic bottles, such as those used for contact-lens solutions. For timers; he

. would use Casio Databank watches, which had programmable alarms. Because the watches could be set as much as a year in advance, Basit's men could place the bombs on board aircraft and set them to explode on a future flight.

The plan was to deposit the bombs on airliners bound for the United States. According to files found on Basit's laptop, he and Mohammed decided to have :five men plant bombs on aircraft bound

from Asia to the US.-a dozen jumbo jets in total, with at least three hundred people on each plane. They tested a small version of the device in a Manila movie theatre, and it worked, blowing up an empty seat. Not long afterward, they tried a slightly bigger one aboard a Philippine Airlines flight from Manila to Tokyo, with a stop on the Philippine island ofCebu. Basit boarded the flight in Manila, set the timer, and planted the device beneath a seat. Then he got off the plane in Cebu. The bomb went off as scheduled on the next leg of the flight, killing a Japanese businessman and nearly downing the aircraft, which managed to land with a hole in its fuselage.

Basit and Mohammed began their final preparations. They brought Murad in from the Gulf He was not particularly surprised to see Basit's apartment full of bomb-making materials-"chocolate"but was very surprised to see Mohammed, whom he knew as a Pakistani businessman, at the Josefa. Mohammed wore gloves every time he visited, Murad told investigators, and no one but Basit knew his real name.

Still, the group lacked discipline. Just before New Year's Day, Mohammed and Basit left Manila for a weekend, saying they were going scuba diving. Not long afterBasit returned, he accidentally ignited a small chemical fire in the apartment, which led police to discover the bomb-making materials. It took two police vans to haul the evidence away: cotton batting, Bibles, cassocks, pipes, chemicals, a small case of condoms, watches. Murad told investigators that he and Basit had slept until noon that day and gone shopping at a mall in the afternoon before returning to build bombs. Murad was arrested the night of the fire, Basit a month afterward in Pakistan, and Shah later in Malaysia. The only one who got,away was Khalid Sheikh. Mohammed.

Mohammed and Basitwere almost indiscriminately ambitious. In addition to blowing up a dozen airliners and killing the Pope and the American President, their plots included assassinations in Pakistan and the Philippines, a bombing in Iran, and attacks on consulates in Pakistan and Thailand, among many others. In one of his Cuantanamo statements, Mohammed listed

thirty-one terror plots to which he was party. There doesn't seem to have been much of a plan uniting them. Basit and Mohammed were not criminal masterminds in the conventional sense; they did not sit back and coolly plan attacks. Instead, they reeled from plot to plot as if

. they were more interested in action-any action-than in its import. They murdered even in the course of practicing for their attacks. When Basit was captured, in February, 1995, he had a bunch of children's toys stuffed with explosive materials. When Mohammed was arrested in Pakistan, eight years later, he had numerous new plots in various stages of execution, despite having already pulled off the biggest terror attack in history.

After Basit's capture, investigators figured out that Mohammed had been involved in the Manila plot, and that he had helped fund the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center. (There was a record of a wire transfer, the six hundred. and sixty dollars that Mohammed had contributed, into a bank. account belonging to one of Basit's co-conspirators.) He was secretly indicted in N ew York in early 1996, yet his name never came up in either of Basit's two lengthy trials. The government, which presumably did not want to warn Mohammed that he was being pursued, did not mention him, and neither did Basit. All the while, Mohammed was living openly in Qgtar, occasionally going to work as an engineer in the water department, and travelling around the world.

The National Security Council staff in the Clinton White House wanted to pursue Mohammed. Early in 1996, a meeting, chaired by Samuel R. Berger, the deputy national-security adviser, was scheduled to determine how to go about it. The Administration had had successes with rendition, which was then a new process; the arrest of Basit was among them. At the meeting, attended by deputy secretaries of the various agencies involved, Berger proposed going in to Qgtar with a small team of perhaps a couple of dozen people. The C.LA. was noncommittal. The Pentagon objected vigorously; a force of hundreds, perhaps more, would be required to assure the safety of the team. Instead, the State Department tried to negotiate with the Qgtaris,

Qetar was experiencing a period of

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unrest, which culminated in a failed coup attempt in February, 1996, and the government was uncooperative. The Qgtaris, the American official said, showed "a distinct reluctance to actually get involved in doing something that would ... expose them to having violated their own rules and laws." It would have been difficult to proceed without Qatar's assent. "We could not have snatched him. That would not have been either politic or possible," the official said. "There's always the guy who's seen too many movies, who wants to send a commando team into a lower-middleclass neighborhood in Doha to try to snatch him." But, he said, "I don't think anybody ever seriously considered that a possibility."

Louis Freeh, the director of the F.B.I., sent a letter to the Qgtari government asking that Mohammed be arrested, and followed up by sending a small team to collect him. By the time the team arrived, Mohammed was gone; someone had apparently warned him that the Americans were coming.

There was a significant dispute among various arms of the American government about who was responsible for the failure to capture Mohammed. But before August, 1998, when two U.S. embassies in East Africa were bombed, radical Islam as a global force

48 THE NEW YORK:EI\, SEPTEMBEI\ 13, 2010

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was not perceived as an immediate threat to America. Even bin Laden was regarded by many as a relatively minor concern, and there were very few people anywhere in the world who thought that Khalid Sheikh Mohammed was a significant player in anything. A highranking Pakistani intelligence officer told me that in 2001 his agency was unaware of Mohammed's existence. For months after the attacks of 9/11, the U.S. intelligence community did not know that Mohammed had been involved. According to recently declassified documents, Michael Hayden, the director of the C.I.A., told a Senate committee that, before a detainee identified Mohammed as the planner of the attacks in the spring of 2002, he "did not even appear in our chart of key AI Qgeda members and associates."

Mohammed disappeared from view for at least a year after he fled Qgtar, in 1996. He was based in Karachi, but officials in Brazil, Bosnia, the Philippines, and Malaysia say that he travelled to their countries during this time, sometimes more than once. Among the places he visited was Tora Bora, in the mountains of eastern Mghanistan, where he went to meet with bin Laden and seek his sponsorship for a daring new plan. The two knew each other from their days

in Peshawar, during the Mghan jihad, but according to Mohammed had not seen each other since 1989. Daniel Byman, the former 9/11 Commission staff member, said that Mohammed regarded the encounter as a meeting of equals. He had the cachet of being the uncle of Basit, who was regarded as a hero within radical Islam. Mohammed's own role in the Manila plot was not widely known, though. Investigators regarded him as subordinate to Basit, his role possibly limited to raising money. This new plan would resolve any doubts about his importance. He didn't want to join AI Qgeda, he later told his interrogators, but merely sought resources to fund a spectacular attack against the United States. His visit was well timed. Bin Laden had just returned to Mghanistan, having been expelled from Sudan at America's insistence. In the seven years since AI Qgeda began, in Peshawar, he had greatly expanded the organization's scope and ambition, and he was now preparing a fatwa to declare war against the United States.

Mohammed's initial proposal was to hijack a single airplane and crash it, as Abdul Murad had suggested, into C.I.A. headquarters. Bin Laden dismissed this target as inconsequential. So Mohammed proposed hijacking ten airliners in the United States, some on each coast. The plotters would crash nine of them, and Mohammed would triumphantly land the tenth, disembark, and give a speech explaining what he had done and why. Bin Laden thought that the plan was too complicated. It was not until late 1999 that he approved a somewhat less ambitious proposal: the 9/11 plan.

The idea was distinguished largely by its simplicity. It required pilots, and teams of men able to overwhelm defenseless air crews. It required money and the ability to move it around the globe. And it required willing suicide bombers-of whom, Mohammed has said, there was a surplus. By far the biggest difficulty was finding volunteers who could legally enter the United States. In two years, Mohammed was able to insert just nineteen men into the plot.

The two principals-Mohamed Atta, the lead pilot, and Ramzi bin alShibh, Atta's roommate in Hamburgcame to Mohammed almost by acci-

dent. Neither had any known previous inclination toward terrorism. Theywere devout young men who had gone to Afghanistan as a first step in volunteering their efforts to the cause. They and two other Arab students from Hamburg happened to arrive in Afghanistan at precisely the time AI Qgeda needed men who could train to become pilots.

Atta was a finicky, dour man whose chief attributes were obedience and a capacity for detail. He held a part-time job as a draftsman for.an urban-planning firm in Hamburg, Wh.ere he reproduced city plans so precisely rhat his boss described him as "a.drawing slave." Bin al-Shibh was an affab1e,fayabout .who

. rarely held a job for IIl.orie:-thania:few weeks' and found university.study not worth his effort. A man who.knew them both in Hamburg said laser that he would happily have testified against Atta in a trial but neverragainst bin al-Shibh, "Omar," he said, using bin al-Shibh's nickname, "was cool" Atta went to theUnited States in June, 2000. Bin al-Shibh remained in Germany, because he could not get a U.S. visa; the American immigration system viewed him as a likely economic migrant.

Mohammed was a hands-off manager; he spent most of his time trying to recruit suitable volunteers and, once he had done so, gave them instructions and expected them to perform. He delegated the details of the plot-which flights, what dayrthe.makeup of the hit teams-to Atta; who.communicared his decisions to Mohammed through bin al-Shibh, mainly using.coded e-mail exchanges and Internet chat rooms. While the pilots were being trained, Mohammed continued searching for men to join them iIi the V nited States. Most of those he found were Saudis who, like the pilots, had gone to Afghanistan to volunteer, and carried passports that allowed them easy access to the V.S.

Mohammed told investigators that bin Laden urged him several times to hurry up the attacks. He refused, waiting until the summer of 2001, when Atta told him the attack teams were set; in the meantime, he insulated the hijackers from bin Laden's impatience. He also allowed Atta to overrule bin Laden's choice of the White House as one of the targets-Atta thought it was too difficult-and substituted the Capitol.

During the planning of the attacks, Mohammed spent most of his time in Pakistan, and continued to organize plots and local terror cells around the world. [He recruited people he had known from the Afghan training camps to form small organizations in their areas. U.S. investigators had no hint of Mohammed's deepening involvement with Al Qgeda, They wanted him for his association with the Manila plot; that was enough to land him on the F.B.L's Most Wanted list, with a twomillion-dollar reward. They tracked him, as they tracked bin Laden, but never put the two together.

Mohammed said that several dozen recruits and associates stayed at his Karachi apartment. One man was there for a two-week training course that ended just before September 11th. Recruits have described the instruction they received as basic-how to use the Yellow Pages, Internet chat rooms, and travel agencies. Mohammed taught them a code to use in their e-mails in which each digit in a telephone number was converted so that the original digit and the coded one added up to ten; for example, Mohammed's Karachi cellphone number, 92300 922388, became

18 700 188 722. He gave them simple word codes: a "wedding" was an explo-

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Singapore, "terminal" stood for Indonesia, and "hotel" for the Philippines. Thus, "planning a wedding at the hotel" would be planting a bomb in Manila. He received notes at various e-mail accounts, including silver_crack@yahoo. com and gold_crack@yahoo.com. (His password was "hotmail.") Mohammed refused to respond to e-mail that didn't follow the proper codes.

In the summer of 2001, word began to leak out of Afghanistan that.Mohammed-or Mukhtar, the "chosen one," as he was known within Al Qgeda+-wae planning something big. As the former C.LA. director George Tenet put it, according to the 9/11 Comrnission Report, "The system was bliriking red." But, up until the moment of the hijackings, nothing illegal had occurred. That morning, nineteen young Arab men boarded four commercial airliners in much the same way tens of thousands of other men, women, and children did.

Al Qgeda had called its most important operatives back to Afghanistan, to protect them. In late August, Mohammed travelled to Afghanistan to inform

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bin Laden personally of the date of the attacks, then returned to Pakistan. According to a memoir by the former Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf, Mohammed watched news reports of the attacks at an Internet cafe in Karachi. "When the first plane hit the first target, the World Trade Center, a celebration commenced. Bin al-Shibh, who, according to Musharraf, was with Mohammed, told Y osri Fouda that men in their company shouted "God is great!" and wept with joy.

Though Mohammed stayed physically separate from Al Qaeda's leadership, he became the organization's effective head of operations. In the days immediately following the attacks, Mohammed, assuming that communications were being monitored, employed donkeys to carry messages in and out of Mghanistan. He used an A.T.M. card six times in Karachi, presumably retrieving the hijack teams' unused money. Mohammed had made video and. tape recordings of the coverage of the attacks, and he began to distribute them. He was in telephone contact with men plotting to bomb a synagogue in Tunisia. When the United States launched its war in Afghanistan, Mohammed went to Tora Bora to direct the resettlement of scores of Al Qgeda members and their families. Then he returned to Karachi and resumed his work.

It was in Karachi that Mohammed encountered Daniel Pearl, the Wall Street Journal reporter. Pearl, who was based in India, went to Karachi in January, 2002, to research a story on Richard Reid, the "shoe bomber," and his connections to Pakistani jihadi networks. Pearl arranged to meet with someone he thought was a member of the networks. The meeting didn't take place; instead, he was kidnapped, held for ransom, and killed. A video posted on the Internet showed Pearl's severed head held by what some believe is Mohammed's hand, recognizable by the "extra meat" on his ring finger, as a Filipino investigator once put it.

There remains a debate about whether Mohammed in fact committed the killing. Pakistani investigators now think that he did, though he had nothing to do with the initial kidnapping; that was the work of what one investigator called a "mishmash" of local jihadis. Some of

50 THE NEW YORKER, 5EPTEMBER 13, 2010

them came from the Kashmir struggle. Some, such as Omar Saeed Sheikh, who has been convicted of planning the kidnapping, were experienced both in Kashmir and in kidnap-and-ransom operations. Western media latched on to the story, and the kidnappers, who apparently did not anticipate the attention that the crime would attract, had no idea how to resolve the situation. This is where Mohammed is believed to have stepped in. "Khalid Sheikh Mohammed got to know of the plot, which he had done nothing to serve," a senior Pakistani police official said. "He got to know of it through the grapevine. And so he said, 'This is great, a chance to do something spectacular.' So he basically bought Daniel Pearl from them. He gave them fifty grand, bought Daniel Pearl, got a guywith a camera, and the rest is history." The killing was wanton and opportunistic; Pearl just happened to be available to him.

In the spring of 2003, almost a full decade after Mohammed came to the notice of terrorism investigators, heavily armed Pakistani police crashed in on him in the middle of the night, in a walled compound in Rawalpindi, the home city of Pakistan's military. His capture likely owed something to the technical capacities of American surveillance, but the big break came by the oldest of means: betrayal. The U.S. had offered a twenty-five-million-dollar reward for Mohammed's capture, and a cousin tipped off authorities about his location. The man, an Iranian Baluchi, has been resettled with his money, presumably in the United States. "Even his family is his enemy now;' a Pakistani relative said of the cousin. "His father says, 'Ifhe returns, we will kill him.' "

It is an article of faith among Mohammed's family members, several of whom have been arrested on suspicion of cooperating with him, that he has been falsely accused. 'Just think about it," the cousin said. "How can it be that such a

big tower, merely by being hit by a plane, it gets demolished? At the very least, something has been placed at its foundation which would cause the collapse. This was a Jewish conspiracy." Relatives have gone to court to reverse what they allege was Pakistan's illegal extradition of Mohammed to American authorities, but his wife has asked them to stop their efforts. The cousin said she told him, "It's in God's hands."

"We tend to think of jihad and Is~

larnism and associate itwith Afghanistan. It's really a Pakistan-based movement," Daniel Byman, of Georgetown, said. "The fo~s is on Mghanistan, but all the things that make this movement hum are in Pakistan."

Mohammed thrived in the chaos of Pakistan, and that chaos still exists. The melding of the various jihadi groups with Al Qgeda and the Taliban has resulted in an indecipherable mess. For example, one of the premier field commanders for Al Qgeda in Pakistan is Ilyas Kashmiri. In Kashmir, he was sponsored by the Pakistani government; now he is fighting it. In some sense, most of the terrorists who have attacked the West in the name of Islam-Mohammed, Basit, Richard Reid, F aisal Shahzad (the Times Square bomber), the 2005 London train bombers, Mir Aimal Kasi (who shot C.LA. personnel in Langley, Virginia, in 1993 )-are sparks thrown off by the fires in Pakistan. Byman and others think that this has implications that haven't been given due consideration in the current war in Mghanistan. If the foundations of the movement are in Pakistan, and if Mohammed was the driving force behind the 9/11 attacks, what does that say about the nature of Al Qgeda? Was it-is it-the sophisticated, global, corporate enterprise so often depicted? Or is it better represented by the "bunch of guys" theory, put forward most persuasively by Marc Sageman, a forensic psychiatrist and former C.LA. officer? Is it a small core of leaders guiding barely trained men who join and leave the cause for unpredictable reasons?

Bin Laden's main contributions to 9/11 were money and volunteers. Almost all the money was for living and travel expenses. This was not inconsequential, but terrorism is cheap. It doesn't require huge numbers of people, elabo-

rate infrastructure, or great technical skill. That is its advantage over the weapons and defenses of a modern, sophisticated state.

Mohammed's letters home from Guantanamo are accompanied by identification forms, in which the Red Cross asks that the correspondent provide basic biographical information. In the first of the letters, dated December 15, 2006, Mohammed dutifully filled in the details, writing out his full name and listing Guantanamo Bay as his place of residence. In the most recent letter, he listed his residence as "GTMO," approximating the military nickname for Guantanamo Bay. In the space for his own name, he used the initials bywhich he is universally known within the United States intelligence community, "KSM." Mohammed, whose life has been marked by movement and adaptation, after seven years in American custody seems to have adapted. He has proved to be a forceful and, at times, vexing presence. His case has been problematic almost since he was captured. A 2004 C.I.A. Inspector General's report, since partially declassified, confirmed that Mohammed was subjected to waterboarding and various other forms of what the government called "enhanced interrogation techniques." Interrogators also threatened to kill his two young sons if there were any further attacks in the U.S. He says that he lied when he was tortured and told the truth on other occasions. He has seemed almost gleeful about the prospect of American investigators chasing his lies around the world.

The "high-value detainees" at Guantanamo live in a maximum-security prison, Camp 7, which is offlimits to almost everyone. They are held in isolation for up to twenty-two hours a day, as military prosecutors put it in arguing against allowing defense attorneys to visit the camp, each prisoner "has available to him outdoor recreation, socialization with a recreation partner, the ability to exercise, access to library books twice a week, the privilege of watching movies, and may meet with his attorneys upon request should he so choose. If the accused takes advantage of all the privileges offered to him, he would have a minimum of two hours a day outside his cell."

In the hearing room, Mohammed

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andhisfour co-defendants sit at tables in separate rows, with Mohammed always in the front. Seated with them are their translators, lawyers, and sometimes paralegals-as many as six people in. a row, Mohammed does not always rely on a translator in court and has fired his lawyers, so he is sometimes seated at his table with just one other person, a civilian lawyer who serves as his personal representative but not his defense counsel. (This didn't stop Mohammed from writing a critical memo to the judge, in 2008, titled "Better Translation.")

His behavior in court has sometimes been bizarre. Once, he stood during the proceedings to chant Koranic verses aloud. After the judge repeatedly told him that he was out of order and had to stop, he blurtedXl.K," and quit, provoking laughter throughout the courtroom. J. D. Gordon, aformer spokesman for the Department of Defense who is now a senior fellow at the Center for Security Policy, witnessed nearly all of Mohammed's court appearances. "At times, it's almost like theatre," Gordon said. "He switches back and forth from very serious. and devout to-kind of a clown. I think he does that deliberately to draw people in, to charm them in some way, or to in:B.uence them. It's all calculated."

His co-defendants nervously look to Mohammed for guidance. When he decided to defend himself, he attempted to

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have the others do the same. One, Mustafa Ahmed al-Hawsawi, chose to continue with his attorney. Mohammed turned to Hawsawi and, according to Gordon, noted that his lawyer was in the American military, and then asked Hawsawi if he was in the U.S. Army, t00'. Hawsawi appeared shaken. . i

When another defendant, Rarnzi bin al-Shibh, initially refused to appear before tribunals at all, it was not military prosecutors or lawyers who changed his mind but Mohammed. He organized what he called a Shura council to coordinate his defense with those ofhis fellowaccused. He dealt politely with his defense lawyers, although he is prone to giving lectures in court. According to the Times, he wrote poems to the wife of one of his interrogators.iRe has at times cap-

. tivated interrogators with what amount to master classes in the _practice of contemporary terrorism.

It's likely that, whenever and wherever Khalid Sheikh Mohammed goes on trial, the answers he provides to the enduring questions about 9/11 will 'be deeply unsatisfying. His plots were scattered, frenetic, even feral; they had an almost random quality. Mohammed, almost certainly, will talk. He likes to talk. It is less certain that he will have anything to say. The masterrnind.oL9/11 seems to have had no grand strategy, or, really, any strategy at all. • .. "

THE NEW YOR.K.ER., SEPTEMBER. 13, 2010 51