Table of Contents
To Lisa Merriam, a true friend
Introduction
From a cage in Guantnamo Bay, Khalid Shaikh Mohammed is on the verge of satisfying his lifes 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 couldnt be happier. He plainly relishes the CIAs description of him as one of historys most famous terrorists.
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. 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. 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 Reids 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 Londons Heathrow Airport (one of the worlds 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. 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 Qaedatrained terrorists. But both were captured before reaching their destinations, thanks to interrogations and phone taps.
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 Wall 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. 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 couldnt be sure that the beef met Islamic standards of purity. 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 tall
He isnt an impressive speaker in Arabic, either. One Al Jazeera reporter who interviewed him described KSMs Arabic as crude and colloquial,
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 gesturewriting love poems to the wife of his CIA interrogator or, during a break in planning the popes 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.
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. Dont think of these guys as strict Muslims. They are essentially seventeen-year-olds. Again, hardly the mark of a devout Muslim.
KSMs 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 himhe 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.
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.
He presents himself as an earnest idealist motivated by the torments of the globes 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. KSMs relatives, well connected in Pakistani terrorist circles, helped him meet the men who had founded Al Qaeda.
KSMs extended family is intricately intermarried and interconnected with extremism. Another nephew, KSMs 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 FBIs attention.
KSMs 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 clans former civilian-defense attorneys, Scott Fenstermaker, told me. And they are really good at it.
