The Hunt for KSM:

it's really great privilege and honor to introduce my friend and colleague in matters of al Qaeda Josh Meyer who was a longtime correspondent for the LA Times and shared in a couple of Pulitzers there now is the lecturer director of education outreach of the national financial security at Modell's Washington program Josh is going to talk about some of the highlights of his book which is an incredibly good read and it's called the hunt for KSM for people watching on c-span who want to go and buy it right now please and over to you Josh face Peter Peter and I actually go way back to I don't know if we met before 9/11 but we're two of the reporters who were writing about it I guess before it was fashionable I remember back then it was a whole different landscape it was a lot easier to talk to some people about this there were people that were very concerned about it maybe it was harder to talk to some other people but I remember that before 9/11 for instance I was only allowed to use one abu per story because my editors thought that thought that it would be too confusing it was actually hard to get some of the stories on the front page i remember doing one in the summer of 2001 about how al-qaeda had changed its focus and appeared to be intent on attacking inside the united states now instead of targets overseas and my editors who hopefully won't be listening to this didn't want to put it on the front page so i had to call the managing editor we finally got it on the front page and 9/11 happened ten eleven weeks later so ever since then I've been following al Qaeda and and and terrorism much as Peter has and starting in 2002 I got a tip we mentioned this in the prologue of the book that I was in a bar in New York City talking to a bunch of agents who were from the FBI Joint Terrorism Task Force there and in comes the pent bomb squad which was the the investigators for the actual 9/11 plot and so after talking for hours about everything but terrorism because they couldn't talk about the investigation I said you know give me a tip give me a something to go on a lead a name and one of them looked around and said sort of in a stage / Khalid Sheikh Mohammed I wrote it on a cocktail napkin and started making calls the next day and the reason I mention that is because you know writing about al-qaeda and Osama bin Laden Peters book I can't wait to read which is coming out I'm in Zawahiri all the others KSM to me always stood out as somebody that was much different than the others he just seemed much more politically oriented he just seemed to have a sense of humor he just seemed like he liked to have a good time he was just much more fascinating and while bin Laden and Zawahiri and many of the others stayed in their compound in Afghanistan KSM was the one who really was traveling around the world getting things done doing things and and it just really fascinated me because even I think it was almost exactly 18 months after 9/11 when he was finally brought to ground so you know I just started thinking in 2002 you know how did he get away with it for so long and what was he doing all that time and even more importantly who was who if anybody was chasing him and what were they doing to try to catch him before 9/11 so that was the genesis of the book and I teamed up with my co-writer at the LA Times Terry McDermott to do a very long profile of KSM back in 2002 we were fortunate enough back then this is before he was caught obviously - to speak to people who were involved in the chase to talk to ISI frontline officials and people at the top levels of the ISI the Pakistani intelligence service to try to get a sense of what was happening and and I've been following the case on and off ever since so to talk about the book you know some of the things that we touch on in the book are how officials at the FBI and the Department of Justice in the years before 9/11 actually undermined the protracted protracted global hunt for KSM in part because it was too expensive there was a group of very dedicated officers agents of the FBI of the Joint Terrorism Task Force in New York who literally chased KSM around the world starting in 1993 after they identified him as one of the finance years of the first World Trade Center attacks and that quickly led to Khalid Sheikh Mohammed who was the uncle of Abdul Basit al-karim otherwise known as Ramzi Yousef and they started chasing him then they followed him to the Philippines to Malaysia to to Qatar where they almost caught KSM in 1996 they kept chasing it but somehow or other in the late 90s he disappeared went into Afghanistan and and one of the big failures to connect the dots in the 9/11 attacks which I think we try to articulate in the book is how did they not make the connection that KSM was part of al-qaeda and and Ali su Phan I know was here speaking in this form and he was one of the people that that said we we had no idea that Khalid Sheikh Mohammed was part of al-qaeda until March or April of 2002 when they caught Abu Zubaydah in Pakistan and he almost by chance literally by chance identified him as Mukhtar who was a guy they were looking for but so we tried to go back and tell this as a story I mean I like Peter and others in the audience have read so many books on terrorism having covered it as a beat that the one thing we didn't want to do was voiced on the public another tome you know I don't want to discredit or criticize those they're very important books but we wanted to just tell a story about the hunter case and the people chasing him and and it wasn't an unintended consequence but it was through the investigation of that that we really were able to I think tell also the story of how 9/11 came to be and how people missed missed it and how they missed the attack and one of the ways they did that was the FBI people that were chasing KSM in the in the late 90s really got sideways with their bosses because they were focusing on what was seen to be a cold case an isolated case connected to some terrorist plots in Malaysia excuse me in Manila the Philippines in the mid-90s Bojinka was a plot to hijack or excuse me to blow up 12 airliners in midair as they were flying across the Atlantic to the United States to kill the Pope to kill President Clinton but you know by 1998 certainly the New York field office was focused on Osama bin Laden and al-qaeda so much that KSM sort of fell by the wayside and we also try to articulate at the book how the CIA too had a bin Laden station but they were not focused on KSM because he wasn't considered to be al Qaeda and the the rendition unit that was chasing KSM or was in charge of of his portfolio didn't have the analytical capabilities that the bin Laden station did so there's you know there's many reasons why KSM was never caught one of them is just that he himself is an extremely clever charismatic guy who had as many as 60 aliases and could travel with a network of support that he built I think one of the most important things that we talk about in the book is that km was instrumental in a lot of other things besides 9/11 he helped spearhead an underground railroad of sorts of al-qaeda people from Afghanistan back into Pakistan right after 9/11 it was his connections with the jihadi underworld in Pakistan that really helped al-qaeda regroup in Pakistan because you know as most of you in this audience knows you know bin Laden and many of his core inner circle are Saudis and Egyptians and it's very hard for them to operate in a place like Pakistan where people speak Urdu they're at the mercy of their hosts same as it was in Afghanistan and so KSM was really a link between them and the Pakistani underworld militant groups like Joshi Muhammad and lashkar-e-taiba and and that was how they were able to survive after 9/11 in fact it was after ksn was captured that they went to the tribal areas because you know in part because they just felt like the cities like Karachi were sort of too inhospitable to them at that point so there's a lot of other IRC wrote something that's maybe eight pages but you don't want to hear all of this I think the best information comes out during questions but you know I think that a lot of the information in the book is character driven there's a guy Frank Pellegrino who was an FBI agent who I think when he thought that I was when I was writing a book about this I think that the people that I was focusing on in the FBI and also to a lesser degree the CIA thought that I was going to really drop the hammer on them and and really have this be a book that that criticized them sharply for what they did but in reporting it what we found was that the the small group of people that were chasing these guys from 93 on really in some ways were true American heroes in the sense that they were trying to do everything they could to catch them and they run ran into obstacles from within the FBI they ran into obstacles from the CIA certainly from the governments of Pakistan and Qatar who weren't very hospitable or helpful in their requests so there were a lot of reasons why they didn't catch them certainly mistakes were made leads weren't followed I know that these agents in particular have had many many sleepless nights because they wonder which questions they should have asked that they didn't or who they should have talked to so anyway I hope you read the book there's a lot of information in there that takes too long to explain now about the creative techniques they used they followed one guy Jamal Khalifa around literally for years in the mid 90s and and were able to get a hotel room above and one below his or an apartment complex and listen to him for years just to see what he was saying and I asked them well why were you following following Jamal Khalifa not KSM and they said well that's because we didn't know where KSM was I also said well Jamal Khalifa was Osama bin Laden's brother-in-law how do you not know then that that it's an al-qaeda operation or that KSM is part of al-qaeda and they have a very good answer for that which would take too long to explain but it's but it's in the book part of it is that you know back then there were a lot of different operations that sort of different characters and bin Laden was only one of them and so was his organization and I think that if there's one real takeaway from the book it would be that you know it's not a monolithic organization like al-qaeda that's really dangerous although certainly bin Laden you know was it was a force of nature and you know brought together all the groups that became al Qaeda and was responsible for a lot of plots but in many ways it's it's a guy like Khalid Sheikh Mohammed who can sort of come out of nowhere and he was the one who brought the plot to to Osama bin Laden bin Laden initially didn't think it was a good idea KSM was fairly persistent and then he kept in Independence from al-qaeda he didn't he refused to swear an oath of allegiance or buyout to to al-qaeda until after 9/11 I believe it was because he wanted the independence to do the plot his way and to bring it somewhere else if he thought that al-qaeda wasn't going to have the you know the backbone to do it I guess is the best way to put it so in many ways Khalid Sheikh Mohammed I don't think gets the credit that he deserves as you know the single most deadly terrorists of our times in terms of actually personally being responsible for executing attacks so I think that with that it's probably best to let's drill down a little bit on the question of Dom KSM sort of involvement in 9/11 versus bin Laden's because you say that bin Laden said it was not a good idea I think by that you mean I that the tactics that KSM was suggesting went exactly right but the Easter I mean bin Laden I think strategically wanted to an attack on the United States right right and I think that you know these two guys had very big egos and there's a lot of I think that there was a lot of sizing each other up I remember many people telling me that that KSM wasn't even sure that he wanted to work with bin Laden and that it was only after the embassy bombings in Africa in 1998 that he said you know you know I'm going to try this again and I think that that you know that we can work together but but I don't think if he in and I think KSM has even said this in Guantanamo I don't think he ever thought that he worked for bin Laden I think he worked with him and that they were sort of he was an independent contractor but yes bin Laden played some role in it I think Khalid Sheikh Mohammed initially wanted ten planes attacked in that and bin Laden said that you know it should be more manageable there are some parts in the book and also I wrote some stories at the LA Times about this work was one of the most read stories I wrote in terms of people passing it along was that KSM thought bin Laden was a really bad boss I think I might have made the reference to a Dilbert cartoon because bin Laden was meddling in certain things he wanted the plot moved up to the summer of 2001 and KSM said you know it's not ready yet and we want to wait until timber because his on the ground commander Mohammed Atta thought that we should wait old Congress is back in session and he wanted to move the plot up because Ariel Sharon was visiting DC at that time I think so yeah but but so there was a lot of pushing back and forth and and I think the the the bottom line is that Khalid Sheikh Mohammed thought that the plot just wasn't ready I mean and he was like any good manager was relying on his he was good at delegating responsibilities and at that case he just was relying on Mohammed Atta who was giving him instruction now yes free food I was able to find KSM a year before the CIA was about how did that happen and why did the CIA take so long to behind him relevee speaking and a sort of long Susskind as a story which I'd like you to get your take home which is that Joe strisu who's at work for Al Jazeera which is owned by the Qatari royal family and Susskind has a vivid story of the Emir of Qatar calling George Tenet to say you know by the way this guy is here well let's start with that is that story true I think it is in in many respects there's other things in that in that our book differs from tenets book in I'm I'll just leave it at that like but I think that we were able to get a broader picture by talking to a larger set of people than you know the CIA but we're just to drill down on that so the owner of Al Jazeera calls the CIA director to tell him I have a reporter of mine has done an interview with KSM and I'm giving you information about where he is that story is true it's the broad outlines of that are true I believe you know I had never I've never taught to us worry about that so well yo Sri says he doesn't know right my understanding is that it was done without his knowledge because Yahshua is a very of course there would be not only credibly dangerous for any right as there a reporter if that's the case and it would that be incredibly damaging to al-jazeera's reputation as an independent right right I think that the information was conveyed somehow it's not clear whether it was done in a meeting personal meeting but and I do know that's what I was starting to say is that Yasser II is a very ethical reporter and I don't think that he would do that but somehow or other the inform a was conveyed and that it ultimately got to the CIA but you raised a very important question which is how did you also refined Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and that's that's not what happened it was actually the other way around that Khalid Sheikh Mohammed sent out basically invited Yasser II to Karachi to meet with him and he was taken on a very circuitous route and all of a sudden he's you know opens the door and Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and Ramzi bin al-shibh are there and he spent two days with them interviewing them and that just goes to show to me a couple of things one you know how egotistical Khalid Sheikh Mohammed is but also how brazen he wasn't in Karachi I mean we talked to somebody who was familiar with that incident who said that KSM literally walked the reporter down the stairs of the flat and out onto the street when he left and you know one thing that I will always remember that a senior isi person told me back in 2002 was that that the ISI has Pakistan so well covered that you can't smoke a cigarette on any street corner in Pakistan without us knowing what brand it is and I always remember that because if that's the case then why couldn't you find these guys which raises a lot of questions I think that's overstating eyes--eyes capabilities yeah but um not that they don't have capabilities but ya took CIA ten years to find bin Laden wrote and they have some capabilities - yeah Frank Pellegrino is the KSM case agent who's sort of the one of the key characters in the book right tell us a little bit about him and tell us also I mean here is the one of the leading experts on KSM who wasn't allowed to speak to how the Sheikh Mohammed for many many many years even though he was in American custody how did that happen noble worthy and was that a good idea yeah that's a great question you know I think that that he was one of the most compelling figures for me and this whole thing I mean he's almost a figure of Shakespearean tragedy type proportions he was a very idiosyncratic agent who had been an accountant decided to join the bureau got his law degree in his early years and then was one of the guys who was asked to help out on the first world trade center investigation and because he was fairly new he got a sign to follow a guy named Rasheed who you know they didn't think was important at the time but he turned out to be ramzi yousef and so he started following KSM in 93 but to sort of fast forward to get to the point you know Frank is a very very good agent he's a very dogged agent he everybody always described him to me as saying well you got to talk to Frank you know and I'd say well you know describe him for me and they said well he's he's about his uh Neff bi age and as you can get and everybody who said that I would say well why is that and they said well you just have to know Frank but but you know he bucked Authority he actually got in a lot of yelling matches as we say in the book with John O'Neil the guy who's essentially lionized and and made almost into a hero for his single-handed pursuit of bin Laden but you know as we say that his tunneled isn't on bin Laden and al Qaeda in the late 90s made it very hard for Frank Pellegrino and his partner to to pursue their investigation into Khalid Sheikh Mohammed all that time because he wasn't considered to be al Qaeda but after 9/11 Frank was in Malaysia at the time and we have seen where he's talking to his former partner and they knew immediately that they that it was an al Qaeda attack they said and he wanted to join in the hunt he was doing some counterterrorism work then but he wasn't allowed to pursue to join in this specific investigation into Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and even more frustratingly after Kasem was caught he tells his wife you know they're going to really need me he was summoned to headquarters in Washington and drives down there and and they didn't use him in the interrogation of KSM they also didn't use him in some of the efforts to mine the information that KSM had I mean we have a scene where he's in the basement of the FBI building weeks after Khalid Sheikh Mohammed is caught and he's going through you know xeroxed you know pieces of paper of pocket litter what they found in KS M's pockets and emails and so forth and another agent says you know Frank what are you doing here you should be out on the front lines you know interrogating this guy but I think that that speaks politics IRA fide I mean he wasn't allowed to interrogate KSM because the FBI wouldn't allow any FBI oh right yeah well just get into that I mean that speaks to the larger problem which was that the FBI and the CIA were worse at such you know odds with each other that the FBI effectively took itself out of the interrogation regime because they didn't think that you know there's the story has been very well told but you know they thought that they were using methods that were bordering on torture as always Suppan said and so the FBI wouldn't let its agents allow allowed into these interrogations but also I think the CIA went out of their way to try to do it themselves anyway so that there was a lot of tension in conflict between the two agencies so the FBI to a large degree didn't play a role in any of the interrogations of these guys and you know I think that you know there were people at the highest levels of the FBI that were saying this is crazy this guy here literally logged four hundred thousand miles you know building in and a criminal indictment against KSM he's in has an encyclopedic knowledge of him you need to let him in the room with KSM when he's being interrogated it never happened it it happened finally in 2007 after KSM and the others were brought to guantanamo and because of some adverse court opinions and other information the Bush administration said well we really need to do something here we're probably going to have to build some sort of case against them so they sent in these FBI these clean teams FBI agents and criminal investigative task force agents to essentially rebuild the cases and I think that that's very important because that's one of the building blocks if not the building block for the case that's going to be going forward now in Guantanamo Frank and other agents were able to to interview KSM and hum Bali and and others down in Guantanamo and there are some great scenes if I may say so in the book about how Frank finally gets to face off against his nemesis Khalid Sheikh Mohammed in 2007 and you know obviously he's got a lot of strong feelings for Mohammed but he started by being very friendly and open because as the traditional FBI way of building a rapport with your target you know you want to be nice to them so they can talk to you and so Pellegrino explained to KSM you know I was the guy who was chasing you in Pakistan and I was the guy chasing you in Qatar and in the Philippines and and Khalid Sheikh Mohammed looks at him and he says ah so you were the one and he even told Pellegrino that when they almost caught him and cut her in two in 1996 that that KSM even knew which hotel Pellegrino was staying and so he relayed to somebody when he left that interview that it was sort of chills going down his spine that he sort of felt like he had been the hunted instead of the hunter so to what extent you're right with the book and his peregrina is still in the bureau Frank is still in the birria I would say that well there were times when I actually said to certain people at the FBI do you really want the front page of the first page of the book to say this is the book the FBI didn't want you to read because part of it is institutional bureaucratic inertia some of its institutional resistance to talking to the press but I would I would not say that the the bureau was overly forthcoming in talking to us about it in the end we were able to get and also I think part of it is they were very very concerned that the people involved in the investigation you know not compromised anything that could impact the prosecution in Guantanamo or in the civilian quarter these guys I would only add and I don't mean actually I do mean to speak cryptically that you'd have to read the book to see who we ultimately talk to and I think we were successful in getting this story how useful was WikiLeaks for you and building up the story of KSM and post 9/11 because it seems that that there was a lot of material in there about KSM his network and karate a lot of the NEM we have to have to be careful about this um there was those documents are a really valuable trove of information some of that stuff can be obtained elsewhere through talking to people and and things but but no it was 40 it is that those documents had been released I think I think that they really helped show a picture of what was going on at the time part of it I think was just you know if if you the hard part is getting all the different sides of a story you know that the CIA version the FBI burrs and the Pakistani version and I can tell you and you I'm sure you know this as well or better than I do that especially when you're talking about something that happened in Pakistan there's usually 15 different versions of what happened including the capture of KSM I think well final question what happened with the capture of KSM how did that happen how did that go down without giving away too much of the book you know I think part of it is a success story of the CIA I think by by by that time the FBI and the CIA were so much in conflict with each other that they were virtually not working together in fact if you talk to the FBI they'll say that they played no role in the final capture of KSM on this issue or just writ large at the time well basically there were there were a few people a lot of this as personality-driven there were there was a CIA station chief and again this is in the book a CIA station chief in Pakistan robert grenier and an FBI assistant legal attache who got along very well and they they worked well together but once those two left and then the Huntford case and was really heating up it's sort of unfortunate because they happen at the same time in the summer of 2002 the relationship really degraded to the point where the FBI believes that the CIA wasn't even looking in the right places or talking to people like KS M's nephew or looking for KS M's nephew in a way that would have led to KS m back then but in terms of the final capture of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed I think part of it is that they developed an informant who was very helpful in being able to be inserted into KS M's inner circle and he led them to them but it's as with everything else it's a lot more complicated than that we go into some detail in the book about how they were using you know tracking the sort of NSA type listening devices KSM was using a particular kind of cell phone chip that I think he thought was secure but it turns out that it was the Swiss yes that's was so fun ships that yeah why why did they think these was secure because the way they were purchased was in bulk and you don't have to like give your name to it so it's you know I think km was a fanatic about operational security and that's one of the reasons he was able to stay on the lam for so long but I think that they thought that if there was no way you could trace the actual purchase of the chip back to somebody that if you only used it sparingly you would be able to to you know avoid capture I remember Joe Surrey Fuda for instance I think he said that what as soon as he came in to meet with KSM and and Ramzi bin al-shibh that that they took the battery out of his cell phone and the SIM card and so forth so I believe that it was just a good detective work and I think the Swiss and the Germans and others helped on that so you had an informant you had some you know electronic eavesdropping I think the Pakistanis helped to a degree so it was a combination of figures but in the end and I think this is where our book difference from the tenets George Tenet book I think tenet says that KSM grabbed a rifle and started shooting and everybody that I've taught to at least the version of events that we came to believe is true is that km was just captured in his sleep what and that's one of the reasons why he looks so groggy in that photo I thought that was like the one really great piece of public diplomacy that the United States has ever dominate the perp photo yeah yeah but I mean you know that photo actually was causing me a lot of hurt on earth heartburns the word but you know you there was a lot of as with again everything else that happens in Pakistan you know we'd spend in an ordinate amount of time tracking down whether KSM was actually captured somewhere else and then brought to that house you know because you know what did you conclude well I mean he was captured and what I think he was captured where were the official version says he was but you know Christina lamb who's a very good reporter did a great story back then about how she was taken through that house by the guy's mother Abdullah kudos and and she said there's no wall in this house that looks like the wall behind the one where he was you know photographed so you know how could he been captured here and I think what as we say in the book the photo was taken later when he was in the safe house when they didn't you know they wanted to sort of muss up his appearance and take a photo of him that was less flattering than some of the other ones so you know I think it's you know robert muller the FBI director once said about 9/11 he said you know this is one of those things where we're probably going to be finding out important pieces of information thirty years from now I mean it's just you you know you think you know the whole story and it's going to take a really long time to find out everything so I don't think we answered all the questions but I think we answered the basic ones so I mean I'm still very curious as to how Khalid Sheikh Mohammed was able to operate in Karachi starting in I think 1990 or maybe 1991 certainly through 93 and then go back and forth from Karachi to wherever he was going without you know anybody finding out where he was crazy so throw it open to questions you have a question please identify yourself and wait for the microphone stop at the rear and back is John Mueller from Ohio State in the k2 incident you talked a bit about the the plot on Clinton and the Pope where besides 9/11 could you give some sketch of what terrorism was carried out by KSM or any of them did they reach fruition and were they successful hmm that's a very good question you know I think even if even in the paper two days ago the subdued but odd case who was the the other shoe bomber with Richard Reid he just testified in court in New York and was talking about how he and Richard Reid were working directly for Khalid Sheikh Mohammed up right know in terms of he was involved in an extraordinary number of plots he was very creative a lot of them and I hate to keep referring to it but you know we go into great detail in the book about which plots worked which didn't but also about his mindset I mean he was literally like coming up with plots all the time you know and some would work some wouldn't I think one of his biggest I hate to use the word contribution because that's positive but one of the most important things he did was help set up terrorism cells you know here and there I mean he was instrumental in helping Jamaa ously Mia in in Southeast Asia come into the al-qaeda fold or at least have a nexus with them I mean I think he helped finance the Bali bombings he certainly had a direct role in the Djerba Tunisia bombings in which I think 20 people were killed it was a synagogue off the coast of Tunisia I think that there was a lot of information we had that he was directly or some of his lieutenants were involved involved in the Saudi Arabia bombings in 2003 where I think Peter and I had a nice lunch one day in a one of the Royal Family's big dining halls we were both there after they remember the attacks and at that time we didn't know we just knew was al-qaida but later it I mean just in the reporting of this book we came to realize that I think it was munch urge about Jabara one of the the names run together but that some of the people that had been working for KSM were involved in those plots so I think that there were tremendous amount of them the plot against the Pope and and against President Clinton it's hard to tell how close to fruition they were I do know that when they when they searched the room where they were plotting all of this which caught fire serendipity serendipitously for law enforcement they found papal robes and other things that indicated that they were at least trying to get close it was also they had picked an apartment that was on the route that the motorcade would go through so I mean they were certainly fairly what's the word eager to try to do this so George what what do you assess KSM motivations to be you know I think that that's one of the most fascinating things about the upcoming trial if and when it happens is is how eager KSM is to tell the world what his motivations are and I think that that's one reason in the book we have the transcript verbatim transcript at the back of his very long soliloquy at Guantanamo in 2008 is you know me he was much more political than bin Laden I mean I know you literally wrote the book on bin Laden and I think but political in that sort of secular right nationally Israeli anti-zionist yeah I was going to say I mean bin Laden had political issues too but I think that KSM is a much more secular guy I think he is not what you would call a radical fire-breathing fundamentalist I mean when he was in the Philippines there's a lot of stories that he would hang out in karaoke bars and what do you think those are accurate well I was just going to get to that it's hard to tell if he was using that as part of his cover or whether he really enjoyed himself I mean I talked to one one person who said that all the times he was in in the Philippines he drank buckler beer which is a non-alcoholic beer but whatever he was he was enthusiastically pursuing that persona and one of the most fascinating things that we got was that one of the ways they tracked km to Qatar was that he really liked one of the bar girls in the Philippines and so he would send her letters and cards and things and he sent her a Christmas card I think it was one year and so the two FBI agents Frank Pellegrino and his buddy who is a Port Authority detective Matthew Bashir they'd go back and forth and do a lot of dogged police work and they would talk to the bar girls and their families and and one day they were talking to a mother of one of the bar trolls and she said well you know I have some some letters from you know to my daughter and one of them a couple of them were from Khalid Sheikh Mohammed one was a card and the return address was whited out and so they they sent it to an FBI lab and sure enough the return address was the Ministry of water and electricity I believe in Qatar so that's one of the ways they found him so you know he liked you know he liked women and up to certainly pursue that kind of thing so but it's you know I think it's it's part of what a complex character he is when they caught Ramzi bin al-shibh or bin che ba however you pronounce it in 2002 they found a suitcase with a lot of you know Khalid Sheikh Mohammed's belongings in it and and they found photos in there of him playing with his kids that seemed to be very recent so all the while he's you know this tear first mastermind he did try to make time to you know have playtime with his children and I mean I think he's sort of a ball of contradictions I don't know if that answered your question he wrote told everybody you know the nearest point at which you know maybe if KSM had been found rested in gutter maybe 9/11 would have turned out very differently so what happened there well I personally believe that 9/11 wouldn't have never happened if if if KSM had been caught there I mean clearly al-qaeda would have had other plots and attacks but but you know this was chaos Ames baby this was his plot that came out of the attacks or the plots excuse me the plots in Manila and you know there was good work by the FBI of the CIA that led them to Khalid Sheikh Mohammed he was working for the Ministry of Water and electricity and Qatar that one of the members of the royal family in Qatar had sort of a I don't know if it's a guaranteed employment program but he had brought a lot of the Mujahideen over to Qatar and let them hang out on a farm just because he thought that they were you know an important service to the Islamic world KSM was one of them but he clearly was using his job as a bureaucrat there as a cover and was travelling around the world and so the FBI very much wanted to get him when they were there we have a letter from FBI director Louis Freeh at the time who was emailing the Qatar government excuse me I'm writing the qatar government and saying you have a very very dangerous terrorist there we want to come in and get him and we need your cooperation and so as we say in the book there was a lot of back-and-forth it went up to the deputies meeting of the National Security Council and ultimately instead of doing a snatch-and-grab or even pushing him out or finding they were trying to find a way to get him to fly out of the country so they could grab him in another country in another country that they were working on that but but ultimately the the government US government decided to go through the front door and ask the Qatar government for permission to get him and and a lot of people warned them that that wasn't a good idea and it turns out that it wasn't that while Frank Pellegrino and some other agents were on the ground in Pakistan excuse me in Qatar trying to get KSM he slipped out the back door and he was tipped off yeah yeah gentlemen back here yeah hi Adams a ger in the project and government oversight excuse me we've got a book coming out in the very near future by Jose Rodriguez talking about the utility of various interrogation techniques mr. Rodriguez was the associated with the CIA Tara Gatien of detainees including I believed Khalid Sheikh Muhammad that he was personally there um what do we know about the interrogation of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed the but what do we know about the interrogation if anything or what are the indications where did it take place did it save many lives and warned us about future attacks or what was the utility of that exercise I would say that our book there will diven I haven't read his book although I do love the title hard measures but I would say there are book differs significantly than his on that we did focus primarily on the hunt but we do go into some detail about Khalid Sheikh Mohammed's time in custody and I think that if you talk to some of the people that were involved in this there's a feeling that that he was very practiced in the art of counterintelligence and counterintelligence and you know that he was very good at knowing the limits of waterboarding and other tactics and that he provided them with a tremendous amount of disinformation I mean I think he provided them with a lot of information but if you really look at it the attacks that followed shortly after that the the the attacks in Saudi Arabia were in May 2003 which is right after he was captured you had other attacks that followed shortly that or after that and even in the years after that that were linked to people that worked closely with KSM so you'd have to think that he knew about those attacks and and and if he did say anything about him nobody's told me that and it certainly didn't lead to them stopping those plots it also didn't lead to the capture of bin Laden or or Ayman Zawahiri as number two we weren't the first to report this but we were able to confirm that that KSM did meet with sow a hurry the day before he was captured so he clearly knew where bin Laden is now he reward I think perhaps most importantly the courier that ultimately led to bin Laden al Kuwaiti his full name escapes me now was one of the guys that was working very closely with KSM back then I'll had to read Peters book to see if yeah I believe he was one of km's protegees I know so I think that all of that information certainly case M had in his his head and everything that I understand about it you know whether it's you know being privy to what was in the the cables that were coming back about the interrogations and and people that were involved in it was that he did not give up that kind of information so so I don't know how successful it was we contrast what you've just said with the latter phase that began in 2007 when they brought in Frank Pellegrino to do the clean team cleanup to produce evidence that might be useful in a legal prosecution right conducted by this country of course by then all the attacks and the listen to that that that you had described had already happened so that wasn't going to be stopped but what about the clean team exercise I mean he stopped obfuscating to some extent at that point as far as we know or what happened then well you know whether they got and again like in terms of operational intelligence and and whether you can use it to stop plots I mean I think that like talking to somebody in 2007 after they've been in custody for since 2003 I think it's it's negligible what you're going to get from them I think at that point they were just trying to build a case against him but I think one of the things that's most important which we appoint we tried to make in the book that I think is is frequently ignored or is that it's not just a type of interrogation measures methods you're using it's who's doing the interrogating I mean what what would never seem to make sense to me and I know Ollie's sue fun and a lot of other FBI agents have been screaming about this for years is even if the the CIA brought in these contract interrogators to do these interrogations they had absolutely no background knowledge of al-qaeda or who the players were and you know when the FBI interrogate somebody they know everybody who's in your network who you're you know what your backstory is how the various parts work together and you need that information so that when somebody gives you an answer you can tell if they're lying or not or you can tell them what question to ask and so what they think is that even if the waterboarding and the other methods that they were using on KSM worked they wouldn't they didn't know what questions to ask and you know yeah Hertz who found describes that as they tell me what I want to know right a school of interrogation right and you know I heard from a lot of people that they would just come in and they would repeat the same question over and over and that it was actually like well you know what we want yeah and you be like no actually I don't so to me that and as we say in the book there were three different organizations that were desperately trying they were reading that cables coming back when KSM was being interrogated and they were let they were saying either he's making this stuff up or you're not asking the right questions and that was the 9/11 Commission which by then was already investigating this who had some very smart and and you know experienced people on that it was the criminal investigative task force at Guantanamo who was reading the traffic and saying you know you got to ask him this and for some reason now I'm forgetting what the third one was it was either the FBI or whatever but these three you know entities were saying look you know he's not you're not getting the right information out of him you need to you need to ask better questions and and the people that I spoke to said that they weren't getting that that those that even after that they weren't getting the right information out of him so David is be high David is be you've just said something which I found rather disturbing a guy like Khalid Sheikh Mohammed can come out of nowhere now bin Laden's dead and manx of al-qaeda have been decimated by the Predators ah but I know the subcontinent is full of lots of smart entrepreneurial guys and groups with their right with their roots they have through Bombay and the times we're bombing showing a transnational reach uh where is the next truck coming is someone like KSM likely to come up one of these groups and how can we identify or prevent such a threat that's a great question David I think one of the most intriguing people that I I've focused on since I think 2006 and at the time I didn't even know this was one of km's protegees it's a guy named Adnan el sugar Juma and I didn't even know this at the time but but you know KSM really liked people that he thought could function in three worlds the Arab world the South Asia world and the Western world like you know and sugar Juma like KSM spoke Urdu he spoke Arabic and he spoke English and he you know spent time in the United States and I think that if an American citizen yeah so I think that he I think people like that I figured if he's a citizen or he's in national yeah I mean he's I'm pretty liter acidity because he grew up in the Bronx in Florida yeah but but he was born in Saudi Arabia too so that's right I forget my own reporting on that I spent like three weeks in Miami writing about him back in 2006 but but I think that you know a there's a lot of people that are right still out there that they worry about that we're either trained by people like Khalid Sheikh Mohammed or others but you don't need training like that you can just sort of come out of nowhere on your own or from the internet I think that the Mumbai attacks for instance are extremely disconcerting about that I do think that somebody like Khalid Sheikh Mohammed doesn't come along all that often thankfully you know somebody who's got the sort of you know sort of obsession with attacking the United States and in very creative and new ways but I think that it is scary because I don't know if you I don't know if you know they could be from al-qaida in the Arabian Peninsula or it could be somebody like Nidal Hasan and you know in Texas who just gets radicalized on the internet isn't there a big difference now I mean there was 16 people on the no-fly list on 9/11 now the 21,000 we've got TSA DHS all these Joint Terrorism Task Forces there's a huge amount of intellectual financial effort and put it trying to sort of yeah look at this question I mean we had KSM presumably in well they did take a while even after 9/11 to find him but I had yeah it seems implausible that there would be somebody who had a big network that wasn't sort of on the radar of some American yeah well I think that a al Qaeda would like to call these spectacular z' I think it's harder to do one of those now certainly in the United States but you can also do a lot of damage as an individual doing some kind of attack I mean I remember after right after 9/11 I get a call from somebody saying that if you took out a chlorine tank in the United States with a rocket-propelled grenade you could kill you know a lot of people sort of like a Bhopal disaster in India and the interesting thing is this never happened right and I remember thinking do I even want to write that story because I don't want to give people a good idea and I remember saying I'm going to think about in more than I've just told an ordinance of 700,000 c-span ok right no but that but the Wall Street Journal did that story like the very next day back in 2002 so I was like well I don't have to worry about that ethical issue no I'm stating from my name's DeYoung I just wonder you know the FBI CIA they search everywhere even people are innocent and so they were address or maybe century of quantum of a while they take people's resources away why can they stop all those Arcada or case and their activities right from the beginning and is there anything FBI or CIA they try to hide all these stuff and how do they really hate American or any any country they want to fight against and the house louia did do they know where they are kadar planned as Osama bin Laden to repackage then they hide out I don't know why they can no find out that instead of why all these years a war okay well I think they why couldn't they find out that these guys were planning the attacks I mean I think that that's there's a lot of ink that's been spilled on that and I think that's but that's one of the reasons we wanted to write the book I think that's why Peter wrote the longest war I mean I think that history is you know the history of this hasn't been is not finished I think that the 9/11 Commission did a great report but that was in 2004 and and I think that the people that wrote that will be the first to admit that that that they didn't have access to certain documents and certain officials and that the history changes so I think we're still trying to find that out but I think you know I think that people like Khalid Sheikh Mohammed fell through the cracks and that some of the problems that were in place back then are still there now what happens with ksmo may 5th at Guantanamo and will you be involved in covering any of that yeah I'm hoping to we you know there's 60 spots down there for journalists and I think that there's 800 people that are applying or so forth on so but yes I certainly plan to to follow it whether I'm there in in spirit or and they're always cooking it up at full need they're in for media you know I've talked to some people recently that have said that you know you know that we need as much transparency for this trial as we can I mean this is our Nuremberg trial and this is our way to sort of have a fitting end to the 9/11 era and really put in the public record you know what happened I think that you know because the government really has never done that where they've done a formal sort of document dump of everything they know about 9/11 and I think that the American public is waiting for that and deserves that I was at the only time for 20 years and one of the cases I covered was OJ Simpson and what I like to tell people is if you could have a if that was the trial of the century last century and you could have every minute of it televised I mean there's there are some complications about televising this trial with all the national security issues but you could do it on a delay and have a mechanism in place so that you give the public a view of what happened in the trial and and what happened in 9/11 in a way that doesn't compromise national security I mean I'd love to see that I don't think it's going to have should it should the trial have happened in in the Southern District of New York where the crimes happened well as a reporter I try to be objective about that but okay that you've just written a book so right let's you a question yes I do that's true somebody told me I've been promoted but no I think so I mean I was there in the of 2001 when the embassy bombings trials were taking place I'm actually I just wrote an op-ed piece which is I forgot how torturous it is to to get an op-ed piece published but the op-ed piece says it goes into detail about how when I was there in 2001 watching the embassy bombings trial you know they brought in witnesses from from Nairobi and you know you know from the two sides where the embassies were attacked they brought in the victims families they brought in tons of witnesses they introduced mountains of information and there were people in the courtroom to point to them and say you know from the witness stand and say those are the guys that I saw at the site and and I think at the end of that you really had a sense that justice was done and I'm never going to get that into follow up on that was any national security information to any national security information come out of the trial that was not supposed to you know I mean as you know and what were the sentences the people involved I think it was like two hundred and forty years each Rock something like that and you know you really had a you know and you you got to hear from the terrorists themselves about why they did it but you know I think some people are afraid that if KSM is going to use the trial to sort of I hate to use the term hijack the trial but that he's gonna that he's going to use the Dalton like tell people why he yeah why he did it inadvertent but you know but I don't know if that's a bad thing having the American public hear what he's saying I think that the people are smart enough people are smart enough to know how self-serving it is and and you know like you I think that by keeping him and we say this in the book that by hiding him for so long and refusing to bring him out into the light you almost give him much more of what he wants which is like a mythical persona and and I personally think that now that I'm allowed to give my opinion that the absolute worst thing you can do is is execute these guys because that they will then become the martyrs that they're trying to to become what's really interesting though and I've never we always say that but I don't think it's true you know but it's Ben Laden a big martyr right now I mean he essentially a nor a judicial execution by the US Navy SEALs it hasn't happened I can't think of a single the only martyr for the movement I can think of his shaykh Rahman ya who's a bit but when it's when it's one of these people who are more on the fighting side robbery on the religious side they don't seem to live on as martyrs yeah well I mean I think that there are some people who will look at bin Laden's death as sort of a cause for you know continuing the jihad I mean I would ask most people if you know what's up with ramzi yousef and I think that you know he he's been locked away in the prison in in you know Supermax in Colorado for for so long that I think he's just disappeared from the public consciousness you know anything better being buried alive yeah somebody told me that they went to visit Ramsey and Supermax and said hey Frank Pellegrino says hello and and he was like hey tell Frank I said hi so uh you know because you know you know these agents spend so much time with them in court and elsewhere that they you know they really got to know them and I think that's important that you know your enemy not just keep them you know at a 30,000 foot distance other questions this gentleman over here just a detail do you know if it's true that he was waterboarded 140 times and and if it is true how could he survive such a such a treatment well I think the official number is 183 hundred and that had happened over a period of a month which if you do the math that's but you know one thing that I don't think the public really is aware of is what what does that mean I mean like if you're lying down and they pour water on you like four times in one session is that for water boards or is that one water board but I think the bottom line is is that and we have a scene in the book about this about how KSM is like ticking off his fingers as they're waterboarding him because he knows it's going to stop at like a certain point I mean I think that that's a good thing that the United States whatever you think of waterboarding was that they were applying the techniques so carefully that somebody like KSM could could know that they could only take it to a certain point was that like after the hundred and eighty second time or I think maybe the third you have time or so but you know I mean if you waterboard somebody any more than 20 or 30 times or I think they're probably going to maybe they're going to get a sense that you know that they're not going to die at the end of it you know but who knows I mean I I was not there in the room but you know I you know it's a very controversial tactic personally I think that one of the most debilitating tactics that you can use against people sleep deprivation I don't know anybody who's like not been allowed to sleep for three days but you know I saw some video of KSM being interrogated after two or three days after he was captured and even then he was he couldn't keep his head up I mean and he was just mumbling gibberish and I mean it's very he went up for seven six and a half days straight I think yeah well the CIA has some formula that you're allowed to be up for like eleven days or something that they have people that are being paid a lot of money to figure out that it's 11 days not 12 days or I forget the exact number but but there is a number that you're only you're supposed to stop right there and give them a pillow I guess and let them go to sleep what was your Terry McDonough your co-author and your own assessment and the extent to which the Pakistanis helped with the arrest or capture of KSM with immediate with the hunt for him or the finals the final very final step you know that you know having been in Pakistan in 2002 I know that just to take a step back I think that one of the things about writing a book that's different than writing news stories is that if you the more you report something the more the black and white issues become grey and and you know there's a lot of nuances and complications and one thing that we found is that you cannot say that the Pakistan government was was working in league with the militant groups and that even though there are elements within the ISI certainly that are liaisons to these groups and in a sense helped create and train and fund them with our help back when we were fighting the Soviets or you know in the when the Soviets invaded Afghanistan I think what we found was that there were a core of very dedicated Pakistanis who we're working really hard to work with the United States to catch these guys I mean we have a couple of what I think are some of the best scenes in the book where this Port Authority cop died in the night and then 9/11 and they brought his handcuffs with his they were engraved with his name Mac on them and they brought them to Pakistan at his widows a request and she said use these on the bad guys and some of the Pakistanis really came to look at those handcuffs as sort of a talisman of good good luck and they knew that the guy had a daughter who was born after he died and so it became personal to them that they were helping find the people who did this and I think that so there are scenes like that were there you know there were a lot of people that were trying very hard I mean there's one Colonel who we talk about in the book who was extremely instrumental in working with the Americans to catch these guys and they even brought him back to the United States and brought him to police week where the cops like spent a couple days getting really drunk and he working for the Intelligence Bureau or is on it was working for the I mean the ISI has different branches I mean they have they have a certain branch that deals with the external threat in the internal threat as you know and there is one branch that's essentially dedicated to being the handlers of some of the sectarian groups but these guys were the sort of the local authority is sort of like the local police version of it I guess you know who were who were much more they were they're in a different section of the eye so your assessment just to summarize is that the Pakistanis were quite helpful in the chaos that matter some of them were but you know and we there's many instances in the book where even the this one colonel tarik for instance would work very closely with the FBI for instance and but whenever they would go to a scene for a raid it would be empty so you know the question was you know even if Colonel Tariq was helping when he telegraphed to other people that he was working with that we're going to do this you know were other people more effective at being unhelpful than he was at being helpful so it's complicated I guess the best way to put it other questions while we've stumped everybody this room IMT is just very quickly uh in 2006 or so I mean Africa and got captured I spoke to some police officials who said that KSM was instrumental in training members of jungle are the Pakistani version which were also responsible in the early 2000s for attacks on the co-commander blah blah Indian in Karachi so at what point did the Pakistani authorities figure out that KSM was responsible for those attacks did it come out much later after he was captured and the second question is this is all conjecture but did case him actually orchestrate the wedding of his nephew Tavia Siddiqui or not did he orchestrate the wedding or officiate an well I mean officiate or did he was either one who told his nephew to marry off here was off via the one was did he ask off your to marry his nephew how did it is anything in your book that says something about that you know those are the john doula thing was something where there was a lot of blind alleys that we that I mean the way teri and I split it up was I dealt with or maybe I shouldn't say that but I dealt with the law enforcement in the intelligence teri dealt with a lot of the KSM and his family so but I also was looked into the John della thing and it's just such a mer and also like jamaat-e-islami the political party in Pakistan and whether they have a network of safe houses that have helped al-qaeda and whether they they're sort of the front organization for the ISI people that are you know working with the militant groups the Dola thing to be honest is one of the things that I was never able to really penetrate but I would love to talk to you about that afterwards because I think that there's a lot there you know there's also - John - all the organizations right there's one in Pakistan and Iran and the obvious Siddiqui wedding who is obvious adichie obvious Siddiqui is a I forget the exact term a neuroscientist who became somehow became connected to al-qaeda she was living in Boston for a long period of time she was on the FBI's radar screen one summer they went to visit her and then like by the next summer she was helping and we go into some detail in the book about this she was helping Majid Khan and other people that were in Kas MS network of sort of American sleeper agents set up a beachhead in the United States through which they can mount attacks and so she appears to have been very helpful to al-qaeda at least in the United States she also you know as you know allegedly married KS M's nephew amar all Bellucci but you know I think that the you know even the people that I know that were in charge of investigating a lot of the stuff I don't think they really know a lot of the answers to that I had never heard in that case I might have had officiated at their wedding but I do know that he was very closely connected to to all of those people you know we we have in the book we have that Majid Khan who is now the guy who was going to be testifying against KSM or one of the guys in Guantanamo who spent a lot of time in Maryland that he called KSM Chachi which is uncle you know and that he was very close and you know there's some information that we couldn't fit in the book about how much time and effort KSM spent in sort of grooming people i came in and and radicalizing them and urging them to sort of come over to the jihadi side so I don't know if that's a very good answer but but I think that clearly KSM was in that sort of really you know the obvious Siddiqui new case and certainly knew was his nephew whether the marriage was a arranged marriage or something to help her once she joined the al-qaeda fold I don't know but maybe you do so we can talk great any other questions I think we'll wrap it up then thank you very much for coming Thank You Josh for a very really enticing presentation where there are books here and Josh will sign them

Channel: New America

Views: 39,441

Rating: 4.5625 out of 5

Keywords: KSM, National, Security, Terrorism, Al-Qaeda, Pakistan, Afghanistan, 911, 9-11, investigative, journalism, Osama, Bin, Laden

Id: AAs7jVTSpwE

Length: 65min 13sec (3913 seconds)

Published: Thu Apr 26 2012