Some of the detail on the Philippines episode comes from the bar girls and dancers with whom uncle and nephew whiled away their nights—and whom they found useful. KSM bribed one of the girls to open a bank account and to purchase a sophisticated mobile phone. The account and the phone were in her name but for his use, ideal for shady financial transactions and unmonitored communication.
To Abdul Murad, the accomplice seized the night police raided the Manila bomb factory, KSM was “Abdul Majid”—one of his thirty-some aliases. Murad had met him once before in Pakistan, when Yousef was recovering from an injury incurred while handling explosives. Then, Yousef had told him “Majid” was a Saudi in the “electronics business.” His uncle was in fact Kuwaiti-born and in the terrorism business.
In Manila, as final preparations were made to down U.S. airliners, KSM came repeatedly to the bomb factory. With chemicals and electronic components scattered in plain sight, Murad was to say that Mohammed “must have known that something was planned.” “I was responsible,” KSM would one day tell a U.S. military tribunal, “for the planning and surveying needed to execute the Bojinka Operation.”
KSM was to tell the CIA that he thought of something else in Manila, a concept radically different from exploding bombs on airliners—the “idea of using planes as missiles.” One potential target he and Yousef considered at that time was the CIA headquarters in Virginia. Another was the World Trade Center.
What KSM had to say on that, an indication that flying planes into buildings was under discussion long, long before 9/11, is on its own merely interesting. What sparked lasting controversy, though, is the suggestion that U.S. authorities learned early on what the plotters had in mind—and dropped the ball.
A Philippines police document cites Yousef’s accomplice Murad as saying that they discussed a “plan to dive- crash a commercial aircraft at the CIA headquarters in Virginia.… What the subject has in his mind is that he will board any American commercial aircraft, pretending to be an ordinary passenger. Then he will hijack said aircraft, control its cockpit and dive it at the CIA headquarters.”
No suggestion there that the terrorists discussed targets other than the CIA. One of the Philippines police officers who interrogated Murad, however, has claimed otherwise. Colonel Rodolfo Mendoza told CNN that there was also talk of crashing a plane into the Pentagon. The Philippines presidential spokesman, Rigoberto Tiglao, went much further.
“The targets they listed,” he said in 2001, “were CIA headquarters, the Pentagon, TransAmerica [the TransAmerica Tower, in San Francisco], Sears [the Sears Tower, in Chicago], and the World Trade Center.”
Most credible, perhaps, is apparent corroboration from a source who does not cite Murad, whose statements were obtained under torture. Rafael Garcia, the Filipino computer analyst who examined Yousef’s computer, recalls having discovered notes of a plan that called for crashing airliners into “selected targets in the United States.” These included: “the CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia; the World Trade Center in New York; the Sears Tower in Chicago; the TransAmerica Tower in San Francisco; and the White House in Washington DC.”
The 9/11 Commission Report, which quoted none of these statements verbatim, consigned them to an obscure footnote and referred to them as mere “claims.” Its investigation, it stated, found no indication that such information “was written down or disseminated within the U.S. government.”
Congress’s Joint Inquiry Report, however, said the FBI and the CIA did learn what Murad had said about a plan to crash a plane into CIA headquarters. The FBI, the report stated, later “effectively forgot all about it … ignored this early warning sign that terrorists had begun planning to crash aircraft into symbols of American power.”
The Philippines National Police intelligence chief, Robert Delfin, said, “We shared that with the FBI. They may have mislooked [
Colonel Mendoza, who said he personally questioned Murad, insisted that he briefed the U.S. embassy on everything Murad told him. Another lead investigator on the Manila episode, police Colonel—later General—Avelino Razon, immediately called a press conference when news broke of 9/11. “We told the Americans about the plans to turn planes into flying bombs as far back as 1995,” he said. “Why didn’t they pay attention?”
Last word to Inspector Fariscal, the officer who discovered Ramzi Yousef’s bomb factory. “I still don’t understand,” she said after 9/11, “how it could have been allowed to happen.… The FBI knew all about Yousef’s plans.… They’d seen the files.… The CIA had access to everything, too.… This should never have been allowed to happen.”
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AFTER THE WORLD TRADE CENTER bombing of 1993, well before the Philippines police discovered the Manila bomb factory, the U.S. Defense Department convened a panel to report on how vulnerable the nation might be to terrorism. Presciently, the group discussed the possibility of an airliner being deliberately flown into a public building.
“Coming down the Potomac in Washington,” panelist Marvin Cetron recalled saying, “you could make a left turn at the Washington Monument and take out the White House, or you could make a right turn and take out the Pentagon.” “Targets such as the World Trade Center,” he wrote the following year, “not only provide the requisite casualties but, because of their symbolic nature, provide more bang for the buck. In order to maximize their odds for success, terrorist groups will likely consider mounting multiple, simultaneous operations with the aim of overtaxing a government’s ability to respond.”
That view did not appear in the published Defense Department report. “It was considered radical thinking,” said Douglas Menarchik, the retired Air Force colonel who ran the study, “a little too scary for the times.”
Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, who had plotted using planes as missiles to hit targets in the United States, was still at large, still plotting.
TWENTY-ONE
“YOU NEED THE CHARISMATIC DREAMERS LIKE BIN LADEN TO MAKE a movement successful,” a former intelligence analyst was to say. “But you also needed operators like Khalid Sheikh Mohammed who can actually get the job done.” KSM’s confederates dubbed him “Mukhtar”—an Arabic word to denote a leader, a man respected for his brain. The CIA came to consider him the “manager” of the September 11 plot.
He had been born in the mid-1960s in Kuwait, the son of immigrants from Baluchistan, a fiercely independent frontier region of Pakistan. His father was an imam, his mother a woman who got work preparing women’s bodies for burial. The driving force for KSM, though, was the cause of Palestine. Kuwait teemed with Palestinian exiles, and antipathy toward Israel early on became part of KSM’s makeup.
At eighteen, in 1983, Khalid traveled to the United States to study engineering at colleges in North Carolina. A fellow student remembered him as “so, so smart,” focused on getting his degree—though he took part enthusiastically in amateur theater projects. He also spent a lot of time at his prayers, and tended to reproach contemporaries who strayed from the Muslim diet.
KSM disliked the America he saw. The student body of one of the colleges he attended was largely black, and life in the South showed him the face of discrimination. He went back to the Middle East with a degree in mechanical engineering and memories of a country that he deemed “racist and debauched.”
Then, in 1987, he rallied to the fight to oust the Soviets from Afghanistan. At least one other brother, perhaps two—reports differ—were killed during the conflict. This was a family with a long-term commitment to jihad. At least half a dozen other relatives—KSM’s nephew the Trade Center bomber Yousef aside—have been linked to al Qaeda in the years that followed. Most now languish in prison.
In the early 1990s the cause of jihad took KSM across the world, twice to Bosnia, where tens of thousands of Muslims had been slaughtered as the former Yugoslavia collapsed into chaos, to Malaysia, Sudan, China, even Brazil. By late 1994, as he hatched terrorism with Yousef in the Philippines, KSM was nudging thirty. He was short, somewhat overweight, balding, and often—though not always—sported a beard. The beard changed shape from time to time, useful for a man who wanted to confuse pursuers.
Pursuers there were, once Yousef and his would-be bombers had been caught, but KSM made good his escape to the oil-rich Gulf state of Qatar. He found employment there, and powerful support in the shape of Sheikh
