IT makes a chilling picture. The mastermind behind the September 11 attacks has told interrogators that he and his terrorist nephew leafed through almanacs of US skyscrapers when planning the operation. Sears Tower in Chicago and Library Tower in Los Angeles â which was "blown up" in the film Independence Day â were both potential targets, according to transcripts of interrogations of al-Qa'ida operations chief Khalid Shaikh Mohammed. "We were looking for symbols of economic might," he told his captors.
He recounted sitting looking at the books with Ramzi Yusuf, his nephew by marriage, who was the man behind the first World Trade Centre bombing in 1993. In that attack Yusuf succeeded only in ripping a crater into the foundations with a van bomb. "We knew from that experience that explosives could be problematic," Khalid said, "so we started thinking about using planes."
When he was captured last March in the house of a microbiologist in Rawalpindi, Pakistan, the paunchy 37-year-old was unshaven and wearing a baggy vest. He looked more like a down-and-out than one of the most dangerous men in the world. The interrogation reports make clear, however, that he was not only the chief planner for September 11 but also introduced Osama bin Laden to Hambali, the Indonesian militant accused of orchestrating the Bali bombing 13 months later. To date, Khalid is the most senior al-Qa'ida member to have been caught. Until now there has been no word of where he is being held or what, if anything, he is saying.
| Then what's the source for this? Mental emanations? |
Although the interrogation transcripts are prefaced with the warning that "the detainee has been known to withhold information or deliberately mislead", it is clear that he is talking â and that the September 11 conspiracy was much more extensive than has previously been revealed. The confessions reveal planning for the atrocity started much earlier than anyone had realised and was intended to be even more devastating. "The original plan was for a two-pronged attack with five targets on the east coast of America and five on the west coast," he told interrogators. "We talked about hitting California as it was America's richest state and bin Laden had talked about economic targets."
Bin Laden, who like Khalid had studied engineering, vetoed simultaneous coast-to-coast attacks, arguing that "it would be too difficult to synchronise". Khalid switched to two waves: hitting the east coast first and following up with a second attack. "Osama had said the second wave should focus on the west coast," he said. Zacarias Moussaoui, a French-Moroccan who had lived in London, was sent to the Pan Am international flight school in Minnesota to train for the west coast attack, according to Khalid. His instructor alerted the FBI, however, after the Moroccan showed no interest in landing planes â only in steering them. He was arrested in August 2001. Until now it had been widely believed that Moussaoui was meant to have been the 20th hijacker on September 11. The revelation by Khalid that he was part of a "second wave" is lent weight by the FBI's recent arrest of two other men who were allegedly part of the west coast conspiracy. Despite the setbacks, Khalid described the September 11 attack as "far more successful than we had ever imagined".
Khalid, whose family came from Pakistan, was born in 1965 in Kuwait City, where his father was a preacher. He joined the Muslim Brotherhood as a teenager and went to the US to study engineering in North Carolina. At that time the Afghan jihad against the Russians was in full flow. After graduating, Khalid headed for one of bin Laden's guesthouses in the Pakistani frontier town of Peshawar. He has told interrogators it was there that he first met Hambali. In 1992 Khalid moved south to Karachi. Posing as a businessman importing holy water from Mecca, he acted as a fundraiser and intermediary between young militants and wealthy sponsors in the Gulf. Yusuf's attempt to blow up the World Trade Centre inspired him to conceive his own operations. The first was a plot to blow up 12 American airliners over the Pacific. Both Yusuf and Hambali were involved. It failed after their Manila bomb factory caught fire. The men fled to Pakistan where Yusuf was arrested.
Undeterred, Khalid decided to start working on something "far more spectacular" for which he "hoped to persuade bin Laden to give him money and operatives". He also decided to introduce Hambali to bin Laden. Khalid told interrogators: "I was impressed by JI's ability to operate regionally and by Hambali's connections with the Malaysian government. He told me that his group had a training camp in The Philippines and a madrasah (religious teaching) program in Malaysia on the border with Singapore. "In 1996 I invited Hambali to Afghanistan to meet Osama. He spent three or four days with him and it was agreed that al-Qa'ida and Hambali's organisation would work together on 'targets of mutual interest'." Hambali, who had been operating on a shoestring, was provided with a new car, mobile phones and computers. Bin Laden was apparently impressed by Khalid's networking and ideas and made him head of al-Qa'ida's military committee. From then on he was a key planner in almost every attack, including the simultaneous bombings of the US embassies in Kenya and Tanzania in 1988. Bin Laden dubbed him The Brain.
The big challenge was to attack Americans on their own soil. Initially Khalid proposed leasing a charter plane, filling it with explosives and crashing it into the CIA headquarters. But the plan expanded. Bin Laden pointed out that on a visit to the US in 1982 he had been to the Empire State Building in New York and was astonished by how unprotected such key landmarks were. A committee, known as the shura, was formed comprising bin Laden, Khalid and four others. It met at what was known as the war room in bin Laden's camp outside Jalalabad in Afghanistan. The plan for a two-pronged attack was formed. "We had scores of volunteers to die for Allah but the problem was finding those familiar with the West who could blend in as well as get US visas," Khalid told his interrogators. Two Yemenis and two Saudi pilots, Nawaf al-Hazmi and Khalid al-Midhar, were selected and given commando training in Afghanistan. "All four operatives only knew that they had volunteered for a martyrdom operation involving planes," Khalid said.
In 1999 the two Yemenis were refused US visas; but a few months later four jihad recruits from Hamburg arrived in Quetta, Pakistan. Led by Mohammed Atta, an Egyptian, they had originally planned to go to Chechnya to fight the Russians, but a former mujaheddin in Germany had given them an introduction to bin Laden. After meeting the al-Qa'ida leader in Kandahar, they delivered the baia, the oath of allegiance required to gain access to his inner circle, and were invited to his Ramadan feast. He told them that they had been selected for a top-secret mission and promised that they would enter paradise as martyrs. They were instructed to go home and destroy their passports so their trip to Pakistan would be undetected. They were then to shave off their beards, go to the US and obtain pilot's licences. Khalid told interrogators he had provided them with a special training manual which included information on how to find flight schools and study timetables. Three of the four were granted US visas and travelled to the US. The fourth, Ramzi Binalshibh, failed and returned to Afghanistan, where he communicated with them through internet chat rooms.
In the spring of 2000, after a planning meeting in Kuala Lumpur, bin Laden scaled back the plan from two-prong to two-wave because they had been unable to get enough potential pilots into the US. Moussaoui succeeded in entering the US, but the order went out for potential recruits who were not Arab, Khalid told his captors. A date was set for the first-wave attack, codenamed Porsche 911, and a message went around the world for followers to return to Afghanistan by September 10. The messages were intercepted by several Western intelligence agencies but none apparently realised their significance. When the suicide planes struck on September 11, al-Qa'ida seems to have been taken by surprise â both by the success of the attacks and by the US reaction. "Afterwards we never got time to catch our breath, we were immediately on the run," Khalid said.
He said the war on terrorism and the US bombing of Afghanistan completely disrupted their communications network. Operatives could no longer use satellite phones and had to rely on couriers, although they still used internet chat rooms. "Before September 11 we could dispatch operatives with the expectation of follow-up contact but after October 7 (when the bombing started) that changed 180 degrees. There was no longer a war room or shura and operatives had more autonomy." He told interrogators that he remained in Pakistan for 10 days after September 11, then went to Afghanistan to find bin Laden: "I went to Jalalabad, Tora Bora, looking for him and then eventually met him in Kabul."
The al-Qa'ida leader instructed him to continue operations â with Britain as the next target. "It was at this time we discussed the Heathrow operation," Khalid said. "Osama declared (British Prime Minister Tony) Blair our principal enemy and London a target." He arranged for operatives to be sent from Pakistan and Afghanistan to London, where surveillance of Heathrow airport and the surrounding areas began. However, he claimed, the operation never got beyond the planning stages. "There was a lot of confusion," he said. "I would say my performance at that time was sloppy."
One priority was to get Hambali out of Afghanistan. In November 2001, Khalid arranged for him to go to Karachi. There he gave him $US20,000 and a false Indonesian passport with which he could travel to Sri Lanka and on to Thailand, from where he would help to organise the Bali nightclub bombing the following year. They kept in touch through Hambali's younger brother, who was in Karachi.
The net was closing in around Khalid. Another shura member, Abu Zubayda, was arrested in Faisalabad in March 2002. Six months later Binalshibh was seized in a Karachi apartment he shared with Khalid. Khalid escaped, but his flight came to an end in the early hours of March 2 last year in Rawalpindi. Questioned for two days by Pakistan's military intelligence, who say he did nothing but pray repeatedly, he was flown blindfolded to Bagram, the US base in the mountains above Kabul. It is not clear how long he was held there, nor what methods were used to make him talk. Afghans freed from Bagram claim to have been subjected to sleep deprivation and extremes of hot and cold. There have also been reports of truth drugs.
"More giggle juice, Khalid?"
"Yersh, shank yew!" |
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