[54 words redacted]
[38 words redacted]
[99 words redacted]
[132 words redacted]
[62 words redacted]
[25 words redacted]
[56 words redacted]
[94 words redacted]
[43 words redacted]
[146 words redacted]
[96 words redacted]
[59 words redacted]
[112 words redacted]
[13 words redacted]
Hambali told the Thai Special Branch about his brother, Rusman Gunawan, also known as Gun Gun, who was with a cell in Pakistan called al-Ghuraba: “the foreigners” in Arabic (they weren’t from Pakistan). On September 18, members of that cell—thirteen Malaysians and five Indonesians—were arrested. The thirteen Malaysians, aged between seventeen and twenty-five, were enrolled at Abu Bakr Islamic University and Madrasah Jamiat Dirasat, the latter a religious school controlled by Lashkar-e-Taiba. Investigations showed that many of them were products of Luqmanul Hakiem, a JI-run religious school in Ulu Tiram, closed down by the Malaysian authorities in early 2002.
Many of the students were trained in both religious studies and military and terrorist skills, and were being groomed to be the next generation of JI leaders. A few had traveled to Afghanistan for guerrilla training some months before 9/11 and had met bin Laden in Kandahar. As it turned out, the cell had not yet committed any acts and weren’t plotting anything; they were training and studying. In November the eighteen students were repatriated to their home countries.
On February 9, 2006, Fran Townsend, assistant to President George W. Bush for Homeland Security and Counterterrorism, previously in the Department of Justice, told reporters in a press briefing that after 9/11, KSM planned to launch a West Coast plot, aiming to hit the tallest building on that side of the United States. During a hearing at Guantanamo Bay in March 2007, KSM revealed that the intended target was the Library Tower in central Los Angeles. He had worked with Hambali and recruited four members for the cell, and he trained the leader in shoe-bombing techniques. Townsend stated: “The cell leader was arrested in February of 2002… at that point, the other members of the cell believed that the West Coast plot [had] been canceled, was not going forward.”
A May 23, 2007, White House “Fact Sheet” echoed that the plot was foiled in 2002: “In 2002, we broke up a plot by KSM to hijack an airplane and fly it into the tallest building on the West Coast.”
Advocates of the coercive interrogation methods authorized by the Bush administration later claimed that it was their use on KSM that prevented the West Coast attack. The problem with this argument is that KSM was arrested in March 2003, long after the plot had been derailed. KSM, practicing classic counterinterrogation techniques, told interrogators about that plot, leaving them to think he was cooperating, but in reality he was giving information that was outdated. The plot was over: the then cell leader had been captured, as Townsend noted.
In a declassified memo entitled “Detainee Reporting Pivotal for the War Against Al-Qai’da,” the CIA claimed that in March 2003 KSM gave information on Majid Khan, who in turn gave up information. “Based on that information, Zubair was captured in June 2003.” The memo then claims, “We used the information Zubair provided to track down and arrest Hambali.” To put it charitably, this is a loose interpretation of what happened.
The memo also tries to boost the importance of Gun Gun and the al-Ghuraba cell, stating: “Hambali admitted that some members of the [Pakistani] cell were eventually to be groomed for U.S. operations—at the behest of KSM—possibly as part of KSM’s plot to fly hijacked planes into the tallest building on the U.S. west coast.” This “eventually” and “possibly” was the best that analysts could conclude, despite 183 sessions of waterboarding, the coercive interrogation technique that simulates drowning. The reality is that the al-Ghuraba cell wasn’t involved, which is why the United States didn’t request the arrest of its members and they were sent to their home countries.
And while KSM was “confessing” to plots already thwarted, and those running the EIT program thought that this was important news, he didn’t tell them about plots that hadn’t yet happened but which he definitely knew about because of his position as al-Qaeda’s military commander, such as the cells working in Madrid, London, and Jakarta. Pleased with the success of the first Bali attack, in October 2002, KSM gave Hambali $100,000 as “a sign of congratulations” and another $30,000 for further operations. Hambali gave the money to Noordin Top and the bomb maker Azahari Husin to fund the bombing of the JW Marriott Hotel in Jakarta on August 5, 2003, approximately five months after KSM was arrested.
While Hambali’s capture cut off the remnants of the JI network from al-Qaeda central, operatives like Noordin Top now had acquired a taste for violence. With Azahari, Top went on to carry out three more terrorist attacks in Indonesia, including a second attack in Bali. Azahari was killed when Indonesian police raided his hideout in East Java in November 2005, and Noordin Top was tracked down to a safe house near the Indonesian royal city of Solo in Central Java, where he died in a hail of bullets on September 17, 2009. After that, the Indonesian police discovered a terrorist training camp in Aceh and rounded up several dozen more JI operatives and their new recruits.
Part 6
THE FIRST HIGH-VALUE DETAINEE
20. Abu Zubaydah
The FBI had been looking for Abu Zubaydah for a while. He was originally wanted for his connection both to Ahmed Ressam’s attempt to bomb Los Angeles International Airport on New Year’s Eve 1999 and to the millennium plot in Jordan. Abu Zubaydah’s name had come up with increasing frequency in intelligence reports after the millennium plot. While he was not a member of al-Qaeda, his role as external emir of Khaldan was of considerable importance. Senior al-Qaeda members, such as Khallad, regularly turned to Abu Zubaydah for help with passports and travel. In turn, al-Qaeda guaranteed Abu Zubaydah’s protection elsewhere in Afghanistan, and he often stayed in their guesthouses. He was one of the most important cogs in the shadowy network that we were struggling to disrupt.
[1 word redacted] emptied [1 word redacted] suitcase and packed a duffel bag. Ten minutes later [1 word redacted] was in a cab heading to LaGuardia Airport. In Washington, acting FBI deputy assistant director Charles Frahm met [1 word redacted] to drive [1 word redacted] to Dulles. With him was [2 words redacted], [1 word redacted] former colleague from the New York office, who had just been assigned to headquarters.
On the way to Dulles, Frahm, who at the time was seconded, or assigned, to the CIA, told [1 word redacted] that Abu Zubaydah had been captured the night before in a gunfight in Faisalabad, Pakistan. He had been tracked down after the FBI helped trace one of his calls to an apartment building after monitoring his
