Abdullah bin Khalid al-Thani, then the minister for religious endowments and Islamic affairs. Sheikh Abdullah had underwritten one of KSM’s visits to Bosnia. Now he reportedly saw to it that the fugitive was protected from the long arm of American justice.
Backed up as they were by the authority of a grand jury indictment, U.S. officials hoped Qatar’s government would assist in getting KSM to America. An FBI team that flew to the region learned, however, that the quarry was gone. According to the Qatar police chief of the day—himself a member of the royal family—KSM had been tipped off to the danger, given temporary refuge at Sheikh Abdullah’s private estate, then assisted in flying out of the country.
There was anger at the FBI and the CIA, and at Bill Clinton’s White House, but no effective follow-up. In spite of the offer of a $5 million reward and an “Armed and Dangerous” lookout notice, KSM remained at large.
Half a decade on, the year before 9/11, U.S. analysts received intelligence on an al Qaeda terrorist named “Khalid al-Shaikh al-Balushi,” (Khalid al-Shaikh from Baluchistan). The possible connection was noted at the CIA—it was common practice to refer to operatives by land of origin—but not pursued.
Two months before 9/11, KSM felt safe enough to apply for a visa to enter the United States, using an alias but his own photograph. The visa was granted the same day—just weeks after the CIA had received a report that he was currently “recruiting persons to travel to the United States to engage in planning terrorist-related activity.”
“Based on our review,” the director of Congress’s Joint Inquiry concluded that U.S. intelligence had “known about this individual since 1995, but did not recognize his growing importance … there was little analytic focus given to him and coordination amongst the intelligence agencies was irregular at best.” An executive summary by the CIA inspector general, grudgingly made public only in 2007, conceded there had been multiple errors, including a “failure to produce any [word redacted] coverage of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed from 1997 to 2001.”
SO IT WAS that KSM continued to range free until long after 9/11. His terrorist career would end only in the early hours of March 1, 2003, when a joint team of Pakistani and American agents cornered him at a middle-class home in the Pakistani city of Rawalpindi. A photograph taken at the scene of the arrest showed the prisoner bleary-eyed and unshaven, wearing an undershirt. “Nothing like James Bond,” CIA director George Tenet noted, and saw to it that that was the image fed to the media.
Accounts differ as to how KSM had been tracked down. Suggestions have included betrayal by an al Qaeda comrade—there was by then a $25 million reward—an intercept by the National Security Agency of one of the terrorist’s rumored ten mobile phones, or information gleaned from a high-level prisoner.
The capture of KSM was “wonderful,” its importance “hard to overstate,” said President Bush’s press secretary. “This,” House Intelligence Committee cochair Porter Goss exalted, “is equal to the liberation of Paris in the Second World War.” “No person other than perhaps Osama bin Laden,” the CIA’s Tenet has said, “was more responsible for the attacks of 9/11 than KSM.”
Sources let it be known that U.S. authorities “began an urgent effort to disorient and ‘break’ Mohammed.” For the first two days in captivity, still in Pakistani custody, KSM had reportedly “crouched on the floor in a trance-like state, reciting verses from the Koran.” He started talking only later, in the hands of the CIA.
The story the 9/11 Commission gave to the public of how the 9/11 plot evolved depended heavily on the accounts provided by KSM—and some other captives—in response to interrogation. The notes in the Commission Report reference his responses to interrogation 211 times. What readers had no way of knowing, though, is that most if not all of those responses were extracted by using measures the Bush Justice Department defined—in the words of a legal opinion provided to the CIA—as “enhanced interrogation techniques.”
Vice President Cheney had hinted right after 9/11 at what was to come. The authorities, he said on
A year after 9/11, a senior Justice Department official asserted in a memo to White House counsel Alberto Gonzales that “certain acts may be cruel, inhuman, or degrading, but still not produce pain and suffering of the requisite intensity to fall within Section 2340A’s proscription against torture.”
The International Committee of the Red Cross, which monitors the Geneva and U.N. Conventions on the treatment of “prisoners of war,” long asked in vain for access to KSM and thirteen other detainees. When finally allowed to see them in 2006, the Red Cross reported that the prisoners had indeed been subjected to “torture.” Two years later, when its report was leaked, the public learned the details.
Between them, the detainees alleged ill treatment that included “suffocation by water”—better known as waterboarding; prolonged stress standing naked, arms chained above the head for days at a time, often with toilet access denied; beatings and kicking; use of a neck collar to bang the head and body against a wall; confinement in a coffinlike box; enforced nudity for periods up to months; deprivation of sleep by enforcing stress positions, repetitive loud noise or music, or applications of cold water; exposure to cold; threats to harm a detainee’s family; restriction of food; and—serious for Muslim men—forced shaving of the head and beard.
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In the event of being taken prisoner, a captured al Qaeda manual showed, operatives had been advised to “complain of mistreatment … insist on proving that torture was inflicted.” Though alert to false claims, however, the Red Cross was impressed by the consistency of the prisoners’ allegations. A then-secret CIA inspector general’s review, moreover, had acknowledged—even before the Red Cross reported—that “enhanced interrogation techniques” had indeed been used as described by the prisoners.
KSM told the Red Cross that his ill treatment had ranged right across the U.S. inventory of abuse. During his transfer around the planet, he said, “my eyes were covered with a cloth … a suppository was inserted into my rectum.… After arrival my clothes were cut off … photographs taken of me naked … made to stand on tiptoes for about two hours during questioning … the head interrogator (a man) and two female interrogators, plus about ten muscle guys wearing masks … a tube was inserted into my anus and water poured inside.… No toilet access was provided until four hours later.”
At some point, physical coercion was compounded by psychological terror. “If anything else happens in the United States,” KSM was allegedly told, “we’re going to kill your children.” KSM had some reason to fear this was true. His sons Yusuf and Abed, aged nine and seven, had been seized months before his own arrest. It has been claimed by another detainee that at some point even they were tormented—supposedly with insects—to scare the children into blabbing clues to their father’s whereabouts.
Transported to Poland—KSM thought it was Poland because of a label on a water bottle he saw—three interrogators of non-American extraction told KSM they had approval from Washington to give him “a hard time.” He would, they told him, be brought to the “verge of death and back again.”
Waterboarding.
“I would be strapped to a special bed, which could be rotated.… A cloth would be placed over my face. Cold water from a bottle that had been kept in a fridge was then poured onto the cloth by one of the guards so that I could not breathe.… I struggled in the panic of not being able to breathe.… The harshest period of the interrogation was just prior to the end of the first month.… The worst day … my head was banged against the wall so hard that it started to bleed.… Finally I was taken for a session of waterboarding. The torture on that day was finally stopped by the intervention of the doctor.”
The average time the CIA expected a subject to endure—before begging for relief and starting to talk—was fourteen seconds. KSM reportedly lasted as long as two to two and a half minutes before providing information. He was submitted to waterboarding 183 times.
