Regards, Ivan
Posted on 03/08/2003 3:49:38 PM PST by MadIvan
Nick Fielding and Christina Lamb reveal the chilling story of the murderous career and mysterious arrest of the man behind September 11
As the winter sun dips over the affluent tree-lined suburb of Westridge in Rawalpindi, the only sounds are the calls of a pair of green parakeets and the banging of a wooden door.
The neat grey and white villa at 18a Nisar Road is typical of the spacious two-storey houses, most of which are inhabited by army officers stationed in the garrison town. But at the end of a drive lined with carefully tended pot plants, the front door has been torn off the lock.
It was here that the Pakistani authorities say they captured one of the world’s most wanted men, the Al-Qaeda operations chief Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, sleeping in an upstairs room last weekend.
The substantial villa, the cage of budgerigars on the terrace, the army dog-training centre backing onto the property — all present an image of respectability. Indeed, it is the home of a Pakistani establishment family that denies harbouring Khalid.
There are suggestions that the bulky 38-year-old terrorist chief was really seized elsewhere weeks ago — his arrest kept secret while CIA men attempted to pump him for information that might lead them to their ultimate goal, Osama Bin Laden.
Whatever the truth, the man who organised the September 11 attacks in America is now under intense interrogation in the secret facilities that the CIA has installed at Bagram air base in Afghanistan.
Asked if Khalid was talking, one American official said last week: “Absolutely . . . it’s as good as it gets.”
But who is Khalid Sheikh Mohammed? Why is the arrest of the man known as KSM or “the Brain” so significant? The answers lie not just in his role in Al-Qaeda but in the life he has led as a member of a family permanently at war with the West. On occasions Khalid could behave more like a playboy than a religious fanatic; but terror was his birthright.
IT IS 1,500 miles from suburban Rawalpindi to the extravagant shopping malls of Kuwait City at the head of the Persian Gulf. This is where Khalid was born.
He was not, however, one of the rich Kuwaitis. His childhood home was in a down-at-heel suburb called Fuhayhil, near the terminals where giant supertankers load their cargoes.
With its poorly built housing and lack of amenities, Fuhayhil was one of several towns built by British oil companies in the 1950s to house the thousands of migrants who worked in the refineries and pipelines and in the service industries that grew up alongside them.
Many of the migrants were Palestinian refugees, but there was also a large number of Pakistanis — among them a man called Shaikh Mohammed Ali from Pakistan’s “wild west”, the province of Baluchistan.
Baluchis have for many years had a special relationship with the Arabs of the Gulf, who regard them as “cousins” and allow them to travel freely in the area without visas.
They are known for their hard work and loyalty — and for bravery and ferocity. They served with distinction in the British Army and later formed the backbone of the Sultan of Oman’s army.
When Shaikh Mohammed Ali arrived in the Gulf, Kuwait was beginning to boom. He set himself up as a merchant before taking up a position as a preacher at a small mosque in a shanty town on the edge of Fuhayhil. He married a local woman and in April 1965 Khalid Sheikh Mohammed was born, the second of four sons.
The family lived in a small house attached to the mosque and the children were brought up as strict Muslims. Khalid was an intelligent boy and although he came from the slums he was able to enjoy a modern Kuwaiti education. But there was also another vital strand in his upbringing: his Baluchi heritage, which combined violence with intense family loyalty and a commitment to a radical form of Islam that was savagely opposed to the Shi’ites of Iran.
He grew up alongside his elder sister’s son Abdul, who was only three years younger than him. Like Khalid, Abdul would emerge years later as one of the world’s most notorious terrorists.
More like cousins than uncle and nephew, the two boys walked the dusty streets of Fuhayhil, absorbing the Baluchi politics of their fathers and mixing with the Palestinians and other Arabs in the schools and souks. Khalid joined the Islamic Brotherhood at Kuwait University, a hotbed of Islamic militancy, and began preaching at his father’s mosque.
There was disenchantment with Kuwait: Khalid’s father lost his position in the mosque — and his adopted Kuwaiti nationality — after falling out with a powerful merchant family. Nonetheless, the Kuwaiti government gave Khalid a grant to study in America.
In 1984, aged 19, he travelled to Murfreesboro, North Carolina, where he enrolled at the Baptist Chowan College to study English. After one term he transferred to North Carolina Agricultural and Technical University at Greensboro — a largely black college that was alma mater of the civil rights campaigner Jesse Jackson — to study mechanical engineering.
His fellow students found him pleasant enough, noting his passing interest in acting but also his strict adherence to Islam. He was one of about 30 Muslims who graduated in 1986.
Khalid had no intention of returning to Kuwait or of taking up a career in engineering. Instead he made his way to Pakistan, where his older brother Zahid had a key role organising funds and support for the Islamic jihad in Afghanistan. Zahid rubbed shoulders with the Pakistani political and military establishment.
One by one, other members of their extended family, including Abdul, were drawn into the jihad. In the end Khalid, his two brothers, his brother-in-law, three nephews and a cousin were all engaged in jihadi activities of one sort or another. What gave rise to this extraordinary concentration of militancy within a single family? Part of it stemmed from their backgrounds as migrants. The Kuwaitis had made little secret of their contempt for “uncivilised” Baluchis. Khalid, it is said, felt very unsure about his nationality and ethnicity. Brought up with Arabs, he was not really one of the them. Nor was he any longer truly a Baluchi. From the earliest days he held deep grievances.
Part of the predisposition for violence also arose from what had been going on in Baluchistan while Khalid was a boy. Resentment at Pakistan’s Punjabi establishment, which the Baluchi tribes accused of stealing their oil and gas, had erupted into a revolt in 1971. It was ruthlessly suppressed by Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto’s government and up to 10,000 tribesmen died, many in air raids by the Pakistan air force. Thousands were forced into exile.
The Shah of Iran helped to suppress the revolt, sharpening the Baluchis’ hatred of Shi’ism. Khalid’s nephew Abdul joined the army of the companions of the prophet, a virulently anti-Shia organisation.
BY the late 1980s Khalid was well established in the jihadi movement, working for an Afghan warlord who was the first point of contact for wealthy Saudis who came to Afghanistan to fight. The Arabs learnt to trust the clever, Arabic-speaking Khalid, who quickly built up his contacts.
But he and Abdul had ambitions beyond Afghanistan. After the withdrawal of the Russians in 1989, the “Baluchi boys” sought new enemies — and found America. It had funded and armed the jihad, but by stationing its troops on holy Saudi soil in the Gulf war of 1990-91, it transformed itself into a target.
Nobody but a few Pakistani intelligent agents had heard of Khalid and his nephew when 1,200lb of fertiliser, petrol and hydrogen exploded in the underground car park of the World Trade Center in New York on Febuary 26, 1993.
This attack, which killed six people and injured more than 1,000, was the Baluchis’ spectacular debut in international terrorism. It was also the moment when Abdul gave himself a new name, which was soon flashing up on police computers around the world: Ramzi Yousef.
Ramzi became the public face of the terrorist duo, but the clever Khalid was the planner and schemer behind the operations. They executed a wave of attacks against a wide variety of targets. An attempt to kill Benazir Bhutto in July 1993, when she was Pakistan’s prime minister, ended in serious injury for Ramzi from a prematurely exploding bomb.
Undeterred, Ramzi, his father, his younger brother and other Baluchi kinsmen travelled to Mashad in eastern Iran in June 1994 to bomb the shrine of Imam Reza, one of the most holy for Shi’ite Muslims. The explosion brought down the prayer hall dome, killing 26 people and injured 200 others.
Neither Ramzi nor Khalid was yet a member of Al-Qaeda, which at this time was still little more than an idea nurtured by Bin Laden. But Bin Laden was aware of the efficient and highly organised Khalid and was slowly drawing him in.
Through his brother Zahid, Khalid was encouraged to carry out little “errands” on behalf of “Sheikh Abdullah”, as Bin Laden was universally known among the Afghan veterans.
One was to encourage the different Islamic factions in the Philippines to unite under Bin Laden’s banner and to try to establish a Muslim no-go area. Although Khalid took this job, his ambition was still to carry out a huge “spectacular” that would make his name. He took Ramzi with him to Manila, where they mixed jihad with pleasure.
Khalid quickly became known there as a womaniser and a sharp dresser and often passed himself off as a Gulf sheikh to impress the women he met. On one occasion he told a woman dentist he had met that he would fly a helicopter over her house. A few weeks later, as the helicopter hovered above, he called her on his mobile and told her to step outside, before waving to her from the cockpit.
He and Ramzi also took time out to take a scuba diving course and would regularly be seen by the swimming pools at Manila’s smarter hotels. But at night they were planning to blow up American aircraft.
The two men organised at least three bomb attacks in Metro Manila before setting off a bomb on a Philippines Air jet bound for Japan on December 11, 1994. It was, investigators said, a miracle that the plane was not destroyed.
This was a test run for a much bigger operation that Khalid called Oplan Bojinka. This had several components: an attempt to kill the Pope during a visit to the Philippines; bomb attacks against the US embassy in Manila and other targets; and, most spectacularly, a plan to blow up a dozen America-bound passenger jets as they flew across the Pacific.
Khalid was also now developing plans to fly aircraft into prominent American landmarks, including the CIA headquarters at Langley, Virginia, the World Trade Center and the Sears Tower in Chicago. His terrorist partnership with Ramzi was about to collapse, however.
A bomb exploded while being assembled in Ramzi’s Manila apartment in early January 1995, setting it on fire. Police found a laptop containing details of the duo’s plans. Ramzi fled to Pakistan, where he was captured with incriminating documents on him and extradited to the United States. (He is now serving 240 years in Colorado’s subterranean prison.) Khalid avoided police attention and travelled to the Gulf, where he lived openly as a civil servant in Qatar. The FBI knew he was there and high-level discussions took place in Washington over how to arrest him. The Qataris prevaricated and by the time permission was granted he had disappeared off the FBI radar screens.
It was a decisive moment. He had developed an almost incredible terrorist plan, but he was now on his own. He decided to throw in his lot with Bin Laden.
With almost unlimited funds from Al-Qaeda and new networks centred on the web of training camps set up in Afghanistan, he was determined to carry out his grand scheme against America. Now it was personal.
KHALID became a member of Bin Laden’s military committee. By February 1998, when Bin Laden and the Egyptian Islamic Jihad leader Ayman al-Zawahiri announced the formation of the International Front for Jihad against Jews and Crusaders, Khalid was chairman of the committee.
From then on he played a role in almost every international attack carried out by Al-Qaeda, including the simultaneous US embassy bombings in east Africa in August 1998, the attempted sinking of the USS Cole in Aden harbour in October 2000 and the co-ordinated bombings in 20 locations in Indonesia on Christmas Eve, 2000.
Khalid was in his element. Helped by his fluency in Urdu, Pashto, Farsi and Arabic, he is thought to have used more than 30 different aliases to escape detection.
He convinced the leadership that he could carry out simultaneous aircraft attacks in America. His proposal was audacious. It required four teams of “martyrs” who were willing to die for their religion, money to finance their training, a high level of security to keep the operation secret and a degree of planning and co-ordination that would have severely tested a special forces staff.
Working closely with another Ramzi — this time a Yemeni terrorist called Ramzi Binalshibh — Khalid selected the pilots and kept closely in touch with them through a series of meetings in Germany, Indonesia and Spain.
He had little time for the remaining, mainly Saudi, hijackers. In interviews given to the Al-Jazeera journalist Yosri Fouda last year, he contemptuously called them the “muscle” — expendable young men who were willing to kill and die in the name of their religion.
Perhaps Khalid’s greatest achievement in his 15-year career as an organiser of terror has been to keep his role secret. Initial intelligence reports mentioned him only as an “Al-Qaeda operative”, well below such figures as Zawahiri and Muhammad Atef, the former Egyptian policeman who was usually regarded as the organisation’s military chief.
Some reports even quoted US intelligence officials as describing him as the “Forrest Gump” of Al-Qaeda, giving the impression of a less than worldly nerd incapable of organising anything.
Things began to change with the arrest in Pakistan early last year of Abu Zubaydah, Al-Qaeda’s operations chief. Within weeks a $25m reward was put on Khalid’s head.
By June 2002, intelligence analysts were telling closed sessions of the US joint intelligence committee that they had picked up conversations between Khalid and the hijackers’ leader Mohammed Atta in the months leading up to September 11. Most of the reports had not been analysed or translated, however.
Only with the publication of Yosri Fouda’s interview with Khalid and Ramzi Binalshibh in The Sunday Times last September, to mark the first anniversary of 9/11, did the world learn for the first time of Khalid’s role as the mastermind of the attacks.
The arrest of Binalshibh three days later was the beginning of the endgame. Khalid escaped and there were suspicions that he was being protected by sympathisers in the Pakistani armed forces, but the intelligence agencies were closing in.
Britain’s Secret Intelligence Service (SIS) was following every move with apprehension. It had by now identified Khalid as the most extremely anti-British individual among Al-Qaeda’s leadership — perhaps due to a sense of historic injustice over Britain’s former role in Kuwait — and feared an attack on British targets in Asia. There was specific concern about BA and Qantas nightly flights out of Singapore’s Changi airport. The SIS co-operated with the intelligence services of Singapore, Malaysia and Australia and, without any public announcement, security was tightened around Singapore. Singapore’s fighter aircraft and naval vessels mounted frequent patrols. Khalid had to be caught.
The breakthrough came with the capture of Khalid’s deputy, Abu Haraj, in Lahore last December. Swiftly the search moved to Khalid’s tribal heartland, Baluchistan, and its capital, Quetta.
This dusty town should have been a haven for him. It is only six hours’ drive from Kandahar, spiritual heartland of the Taliban, where Bin Laden once had a lavish home protected by 3,000-4,000 Al-Qaeda members.
Kandahar was the last place from which the Taliban retreated in December 2001 and many of them fled to Baluchistan. Always one of the most conservative parts of Pakistan, Quetta has since become a hotbed of fundamentalism. Several former Taliban ministers now live there openly, including Mullah Turabi, who was justice minister.
Every Thursday and Friday there are large gatherings of Taliban with their trademark silky black turbans and heavily kohl-rimmed eyes at the Muslim Speeches Cassette Shop.
“It is almost impossible for us to operate in Quetta,” said an FBI agent. “Our people all stay in safe houses and hardly leave.”
Nevertheless, Khalid’s luck was running out. According to Sheikh Rashid Ahmed, Pakistan’s information minister, close surveillance was kept last month on a group of Iranians and “two Arabs” crossing into Baluchistan along drug smuggling routes. They were tracked down to a house in the middle-class Quetta neighbourhood of Wahdat Colony.
When agents descended on Valentine’s Day, Khalid escaped yet again — but they caught another member of the Al-Qaeda inner circle, Asad Abdul-ul-Rehman, the son of a blind Egyptian cleric who is serving a life sentence in the United States for his part in the 1993 World Trade Center plot.
A close aide of Bin Laden, Abdul-ul-Rehman had been involved in the fighting against the Americans in Tora Bora in December 2001. Like Bin Laden he had slipped across the border into the tribal areas of Pakistan.
According to Pakistani officials, he gave the vital clue that enabled a satellite or mobile phone call to be intercepted — and from this American intelligence located Khalid.
It now seems that the Americans knew Khalid’s whereabouts for at least a week, following him from Quetta to Rawalpindi, before tipping off the Pakistani authorities to move in and seize him.
The end was undramatic. Unlike the gun battle at the scene of Binalshibh’s arrest, Khalid put up no resistance. Material seized in the raid, including computers, telephones and diaries, was sealed and sent to Washington for analysis.
For two days Khalid remained in Pakistani custody, interrogated by agents of the ISI, the military intelligence service — whose attitude to Al-Qaeda and the Taliban has long ranged from the supportive to the ambiguous. Suspicious that he had already sold out to the Americans, they initially accused him of being a double agent.
A man arrested with Khalid was not identified at first. The Americans were delighted when they finally named him as Mustafa Ahmed al-Hawsawi, a Saudi thought to have arranged the financing for September 11. He is said to have used bank accounts under different names in Florida and the United Arab Emirates to transfer $500,000 to Atta and Binalshibh.
One American official suggested that al-Hawsawi’s arrest might ultimately prove more valuable than Khalid’s. “He has the key to the whole financial network of Al-Qaeda,” he said. “There must be some very worried sheikhs.”
On Tuesday the pair were flown to the American air base at Bagram, the old Soviet facility 30 miles north of Kabul. “We got what we wanted out of him, then no longer needed him,” said the Pakistan information minister.
Prisoners at the Bagram detention centre are thought to be locked up in shipping containers where “they have no idea if it is night or day”. A favourite method is to use sleep deprivation where they are kept in bright light round the clock, a so-called “stress and duress” technique. There have also been unconfirmed reports of truth drugs.
Bagram is the site of the Americans’ top secret Harmony computer, into which every shred of data about Al-Qaeda is entered. Hidden inside an old aircraft hangar, it is said to have been working non-stop over the past few days analysing all the new material from Khalid.
Chilling details have begun to emerge about Khalid’s alleged activities since 9/11. He is reported to have commanded Richard Reid, the shoe-bomber now serving life in an American prison for attempting to blow up a US aircraft over the Atlantic. Jose Padilla, who was arrested in Chicago last June on suspicion of planning a “dirty bomb” attack, is said to have been another of his protégés. Attacks on an Israeli aircraft and a hotel in Kenya last October were planned by him, according to reports.
Witnesses in Pakistan are also reported to have confessed that Khalid personally killed Daniel Pearl, the Wall Street Journal reporter who was kidnapped in Karachi last year. Two of the men who held him down while his throat was cut were said to be Baluchi or mixed Baluchi-Yemenis. It was the Baluchi Boys all over again. With or without al-Qaeda, Khalid would carry on his own private jihad.
For the past week American officials have been racing against the clock to get from Khalid information that could foil a new terror attack and lead to the arrests of Al-Qaeda leaders before they can escape.
The most important lead garnered so far is that both Bin Laden and his deputy, al-Zawahiri, are still alive and in Afghanistan. Officials say Khalid last met Bin Laden inside Afghanistan in November. Letters recovered when he was arrested apparently suggest that Bin Laden is in the Helmand valley in southwestern Afghanistan, an area famed for its opium poppies. Pakistani interrogators claimed that some of the letters were in Bin Laden’s writing.
“KSM has given a location for Bin Laden that is enough for us to start working on,” said one official last week. “With satellites and spy-planes one recent location might well be enough.”
Was Bin Laden also about to be reeled in? There were reports in Pakistan on Friday that two of Bin Laden’s sons had been seized in Baluchistan; but these were promptly dimissed in Washington.
Khalid has revealed that al-Zawahiri, who is widely believed to be the real brains behind Al-Qaeda, recently returned from somewhere in the Middle East to Afghanistan and has been staying in the border area near Quetta, between Chaman and Spinboldak.
Thousands of leaflets bearing al-Zawahiri’s photograph behind bars were dropped from helicopters in the area on Tuesday, offering a $25m reward for his capture under the heading “Killer being hunted” written in Arabic and Pashto.
Not everyone is convinced that Khalid’s arrest is such a big blow to Al-Qaeda. Hamid Mir, one of the few journalists to have interviewed Bin Laden on several occasions, disputed the claims of officials that Khalid will lead them to Bin Laden and al-Zawahiri.
“The Americans still don’t know anything about how Al-Qaeda works,” he said. “They don’t trust anybody and that’s why KSM cannot provide any vital lead.
“I think this arrest will become very controversial,” he predicted, suggesting that Khalid had been co-operating with the Americans for some time. All the same George Tenet, the CIA director, made an unreported visit to Pakistan last week to congratulate President Musharraf personally on the operation to capture Khalid.
What does seem certain is that whether or not Bin Laden is found or Al-Qaeda ceases to exist, Khalid’s fellow Baluchis will continue his war. Their blood feuds run deep. FBI officials believe that Khalid’s two nephews — brothers of Ramzi Yousef — and another cousin are already planning actions in America and Europe.
Several of Khalid’s attacks were to avenge the incarceration of Ramzi Yousef. What can we expect now in revenge for the arrest of Khalid himself?
Regards, Ivan
There are reports of raids today in this region...
Such a lovely family.
Such comments referred to the way in which Gump popped up in every major historical event, and not to his mental capacity. They tend to support rather than weaken the notion that catching KSM was a major blow to Al-Qaeda. These reporters are idiots.
-ccm
Bump to finish reading later ...
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