Khalid Sheikh Mohammed The Brain

Each day for Khalid Sheikh Mohammed is like every other. It's hard for him to distinguish Monday from Tuesday. His life has regularity now, an intentional changelessness that stands in contrast to his years on the run. He has lost a lot of weight since he's been inside, and his interactions are limited to the same small group of Americans. By now, two years into his imprisonment, the man who devised the 9/11 attacks has to realize who holds the upper hand. His days of first-class travel are over. The Central Intelligence Agency now defines his life. The man known to investigators as KSM is one of 11 high-value detainees held in a secret location--possibly Al Jafr prison in Jordan's southern desert.

The prize catch in the war on terrorism, KSM quickly cooperated with his onetime foes and gave up the names of a dozen Al Qaeda operatives. The CIA had been granted dispensation to use such interrogation methods as simulated drowning, sleep deprivation and extreme temperatures, but these were unnecessary. KSM preferred to be questioned by Americans and not by Jordanians, Saudis or Egyptians--all known for their harsh interrogation methods. Of course, a man with such an ego would also be quick to explain his accomplishments to his captors.

In exchange for a consideration or small favor--a plate of dates, perhaps--KSM talks with his CIA questioners. His circle of contacts is kept small so that he relies on his captors and feels comfortable with them. Even the congressional 9/11 commission investigators were not permitted to speak with him, though they had access to a number of his interrogation reports. The time and duration of the questioning varies, to keep him from anticipating questions and preparing answers. He is awakened at the proper time each day so he can pray to Allah.

I've never met the man, but I've spoken with many who have--people who were closely involved with him inside and outside the international intelligence community. What follows comes from a variety of sources both public and private. Some information will be familiar to readers of The 9/11 Commission Report. Yet a great deal of it has never before been made public. As a counterterrorism analyst, I've had access to privileged information in preparing this article. This is the most comprehensive portrait to date of the most brilliant and cunning terrorist the world has ever seen.

Khalid Sheikh Mohammed's arrest on March 1, 2003 was a devastating blow to Al Qaeda. Because he was so expert at changing identities and so thorough in his security, his capture came as a surprise. Intelligence agencies have identified at least 50 aliases that KSM used. He had fraudulently obtained passports from Sudan, Saudi Arabia and Pakistan. For years he eluded international security, intelligence and law enforcement agencies. He traveled the world, organizing the most diverse terrorist network ever assembled. "No one," concludes The 9/11 Commission Report, "exemplifies the model of the terrorist entrepreneur more clearly than Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the principal architect of the 9/11 attacks."

As head of Al Qaeda's military and operations committees, he was the third-highest-ranking member, behind Osama bin Laden and Ayman al Zawahiri--both of whom are supposedly hiding in the lawless tribal lands of Pakistan. Al Qaeda became a notorious organization because of KSM. Without him it would never have been able to strike the U.S. mainland. Neither Mullah Omar, former Taliban leader of Afghanistan, nor Bin Laden could have planned and executed such an attack. (Contrary to press reports, Bin Laden has never traveled beyond the Arabian Peninsula, the Horn of Africa, the Balkans, Pakistan and Afghanistan.)

KSM is a postmodern terrorist--a man with multiple faces and identities--whose theology is subordinate to technology and whose pragmatism trumps his puritanism. Physically unimposing at five-foot-six, he nevertheless hatched an extraordinary range of terrorist schemes, from crashing fuel trucks into gas stations to poisoning reservoirs. He was the linchpin of Al Qaeda, its ringmaster, its organizational locus. He was involved in the bombing of the USS Cole and in financing the nightclub bombings in Bali. Known as al Nukt or Mukhtar (Arabic for "the Brain," an honorific Bin Laden bestowed on him), he is the only man connected with Al Qaeda whom intelligence sources have described as a genius, a terrorist genius.

Fluent in Arabic and Urdu, KSM also speaks flawless English. His facility with languages allowed him to be taken for an Asian, Arab or American Muslim. "If I didn't know who he was," one person who has met him told me, "I wouldn't have been able to guess his origins. He could pass easily for an Arab, a Pakistani or an Iranian."

KSM is an engineer, not a theologian. He used to watch TV news and listen to radio reports but didn't seem especially interested in religion or politics. "He never struck me as a man of Allah," I was told by one person who had met him before his capture. "He struck me more as a man of action." From the time he got up in the morning until he went to bed, he worked. His only pleasure was work. "He would sit in a corner with his mobile phones and text-message people," says a person who had seen him working. "He would handle three or four mobile phones at the same time."

KSM would regularly break his routine, vary his schedule and change his plans, trusting no one with personal or organizational details. He communicated via couriers, using an array of identities. His secrecy kept intelligence agencies from recognizing his role in various 1990s terrorist operations. The U.S. government took months to recognize his full involvement in the 9/11 attacks. After his March 2002 arrest, Abu Zubaydah, Al Qaeda's operational director, told American interrogators of KSM's importance, but the Americans didn't fully believe Zubaydah until the arrest of Ramzi Binalshibh, the logistics coordinator of 9/11. Many Western intelligence agencies belittled KSM's significance. Nearly everyone underestimated his ability to plan and execute low-cost but effective operations.

Born Khalid al Sheikh Mohammed Ali Dustin al Blushi on April 14, 1965 in Ahmadi, Kuwait, KSM grew up in nearby Fahaheel, a grimy town between Kuwait City and the petrochemical complex near the supertanker port. Built by British oil companies in the 1950s, the town has more recently been inhabited by oil workers from Egypt and Pakistan. KSM's family came from Baluchistan, a desert region in southwestern Pakistan. Being born (continued on page 162)The Brain(continued from page 80) in Kuwait doesn't automatically confer citizenship (roughly half the people living there are not citizens), so KSM grew up in Fahaheel as a Pakistani citizen. His mother was an exceptionally devout woman, and her influence made him a committed Islamist. Before the first Gulf war, 70,000 to 80,000 Palestinians were living in Kuwait, most of them working in the oil industry. Their presence must have hardened the young KSM. He spoke at mosques as a teenager, often about the Palestinian cause. He later told his CIA interrogators he had joined the radical Muslim Brotherhood when he was 16.

KSM left Kuwait in 1982. Shortly after, on December 6 of that year, he was issued a passport at the Pakistani embassy in Kuwait City. With an education grant in hand from the Kuwaiti government, he went off to study in the United States, as many Arabs did.

School in America

In the spring of 1983 KSM enrolled at Chowan College, a small Baptist school in Murfreesboro, North Carolina. The school didn't require a certificate of English proficiency. It did, however, require its students to attend weekly Christian services, although it otherwise tried to accommodate the needs of Muslim pupils. KSM arrived at Chowan knowing little English but entered directly into advanced classes.

After a semester in Murfreesboro KSM transferred to North Carolina A&T State University in Greensboro, where he obtained his bachelor of science degree in mechanical engineering on December 18, 1986. At NCAT he was something of a class clown, an impressive physical comedian who could crack up a room of Muslim students simply by walking into it. Former schoolmates remember him as a cheerful guy who would reenact skits from Saturday Night Live. He was known to his fellow students as Blushi, for both his family home in Baluchistan and his resemblance to John Belushi. According to one classmate, "it was a nonstop comedy zone" around KSM. He wore a long beard and hung out at the local Burger King, where he and his fellow Muslim students ate Whoppers without meat because the beef was not slaughtered according to Islamic code. "He was religious," a Kuwaiti schoolmate later told The Baltimore Sun. "He was one of the ones we called the mullahs as sort of a joke, a nickname."

KSM maintains that his time in America was not an unhappy one. According to The 9/11 Commission Report, he told U.S. investigators that his "animus to the U.S. stemmed not from his experience there as a student but rather from his violent disagreement with U.S. foreign policy favoring Israel."

Mujahideen

In the 1980s the struggles of the mujahideen in Afghanistan against the Soviets attracted Islamic men from around the world. With the help of wealthy Saudis--as well as the covert military support of the CIA and Pakistani intelligence--volunteers went to fight the invaders. For these Islamists, Afghanistan was a defining place of jihad. KSM's brother Abid was killed in Afghanistan in 1989 while fighting the Soviets. Another brother, Aref, also died there.

It is no surprise, then, that after graduation KSM left the U.S. to go to Peshawar in northern Pakistan. There he met Bin Laden for the first time, as well as Sheikh Abdullah Azzam, who provided the ideological underpinnings for the later terrorist attacks. KSM's oldest brother, Zahid, who worked for an Islamic aid group, introduced him to Abdul Rasul Sayyaf, an Afghan warlord who had once been a professor of theology at Kabul University. Sayyaf headed the Islamic Union Party, and KSM served as his secretary. KSM helped run a group that hired Arabs to fight in Afghanistan. Legend has it he fought on the front against the Soviets for three months.

In 1992, four years after Mikhail Gorbachev announced the withdrawal of Soviet troops from Afghanistan, KSM went to Bosnia to join the jihad there, again fighting the infidel. He worked for Egypatska Pomoc, an Egyptian aid group in Zenica, and in 1995 became one of its directors. His experience in Bosnia, where the West looked the other way while thousands of Muslims were killed, further radicalized him.

First Strike

On February 26, 1993 the World Trade Center in New York City was bombed. Ramzi Yousef--KSM's nephew, only three years younger than his uncle--had carried off a strike against an enemy target on American soil.

The World Trade Center bomb exploded at 12:17 P.M. in a van parked in an underground garage. Yousef had built his weapons from 1,200 pounds of chemicals, including urea nitrate and nitroglycerin. Six people were killed and more than 1,000 injured, yet the towers remained standing. Always one to learn from failure, KSM said the 1993 WTC bombing proved to him that bombs alone could not accomplish the spectacular devastation he had in mind.

The Philippines

KSM went to the Philippines on a Pakistani passport to meet with Yousef in August 1994, hoping to aid the Muslim insurgency on the southern islands. There they came up with a grandiose plan to strike the U.S. It was known as Oplan Bojinka--Serbo-Croatian for "explosion" (though KSM told CIA interrogators it was a nonsense word he had heard while fighting in Afghanistan).

The central concept of Oplan Bojinka was to blow up as many as 12 airliners simultaneously as they flew across the Pacific to the U.S., killing all the passengers. This was the germ for the 9/11 attacks and the beginning of the idea to use planes as weapons. KSM and Yousef planned to plant bombs under airplane seats and have the bombers leave the planes at stopovers. They studied plane routes from Taipei, Hong Kong, Bangkok and Seoul and planned schedules for coordinated explosions.

According to Filipino security sources, KSM and his nephew also decided to assassinate Pope John Paul II in the Philippines. They prepared to set off a pipe bomb near a stage where the pope would say Mass; KSM planned to have snipers fire at the fleeing crowd. He had similar ideas to kill Philippine president Fidel Ramos, as well as President Clinton on his 1994 visit to Manila.

On December 11, Yousef, on the advice of KSM, successfully planted a bomb (and tested Yousef's timer, made from a Casio watch) on Philippine Airlines flight 434 bound for Japan, killing one passenger, wounding 11 others and forcing the plane to make an emergency landing in Okinawa. According to Filipino intelligence sources, during this period KSM and his nephew went with two girlfriends to Puerto Galera, a beach resort south of Manila, where they took scuba lessons. KSM portrayed himself there as a rich Qatari businessman.

While in Manila he tried to impress a female dentist he was wooing by hiring a helicopter from the Airlink International Aviation School and calling her on his cell phone while flying over her clinic; he asked her to come out and wave. According to security reports, he hung out in nightclubs, karaoke bars and hotel bars, sometimes wearing a white tuxedo. But his role as bon vivant may simply have been a cover for his freelance bomb plotting.

In preparation for the execution of their Bojinka plan, KSM and Yousef cased airport security in 1994. They went on trial runs from Manila to Seoul and Manila to Hong Kong on flights that had onward legs to the U.S. KSM poured liquid explosives into bottles of contact lens solution and replaced the seals. He carried 13 on the flight to Seoul. To test their ability to clear security with a detonator, KSM taped a bolt to the arch of his foot and wore flashy clothing with metal accessories. He put on jewelry and carried condoms and what the Philippine police called "colorful magazines" to support his cover story that he was traveling in order to meet women. When searched, he was asked to undress. He removed his shoes but not his socks and got the bolt through security.

Once the plane landed, KSM was denied entry to South Korea because he didn't have a visa, so he was sent back to the Philippines. He later told CIA interrogators he realized he had accidentally left in his bag a copy of the Bojinka plan, which detailed all 12 targeted flights and the times the planes were to explode--but no one noticed.

The Bojinka planes were supposed to be hijacked on January 21 and 22, 1995. But two weeks before that, while experimenting with explosives, Yousef had started a fire in the apartment the collaborators shared. Although fireworks were listed as the cause of the fire, the police were immediately suspicious. A detective who investigated the sixth-floor apartment found pipe bombs and maps of the pope's route from the Manila airport to the Vatican consulate (the pontiff was scheduled to pass beneath the apartment's windows). Police found a laptop that ultimately led to the discovery of Oplan Bojinka details. The Philippine National Police also discovered alternate plans to crash planes into the World Trade Center, the Pentagon, the White House, the John Hancock Tower in Boston, the Sears Tower in Chicago and the Transamerica building in San Francisco. Another plotter, Abdul Hakim Murad, was arrested when he tried to sneak back into the apartment to retrieve his computer.

KSM got away. His nephew Yousef fled to Pakistan, where he was arrested in February 1995 in Islamabad. The hard drive for the laptop was given to U.S. intelligence operatives, who used the contents to convict Yousef for his role in the WTC bombing. Were it not for flaws in Yousef's encryption program, the FBI would not have been able to access his computer.

Qatar

In 1992, at the invitation of Bin Khalid al Thani, the minister of religious affairs of Qatar, KSM moved to Doha, Qatar to work as a project engineer for the Ministry of Electricity and Water. He continued to be employed there until 1996, even though he spent much of his time traveling the world--including trips to the Philippines, India, Sudan, Yemen and Malaysia--supporting terrorism covertly.

By late 1996 Khalid Sheikh Mohammed surfaced in Brazil, where he again escaped the CIA. He had supposedly gone there to promote Konsojaya, a Malaysian company that secretly funded Muslim rebels in Southeast Asia. KSM stayed at the Tropicana, 50 yards from the Iguaçú Falls, where the triple borders of Argentina, Brazil and Paraguay meet.

In 1995 the U.S. government had begun to figure out the extent of KSM's involvement in terrorist activities; his photo had been found in Yousef's Toshiba laptop. The U.S. attorney secretly indicted KSM in January 1996 for the 1993 World Trade Center bombing. FBI director Louis Freeh met with Qatari officials about turning KSM over to the Americans, but no agreement was reached. The feds apparently considered launching a secret mission into Qatar to seize him but abandoned the plan because they feared it would cause trouble with neighboring Bahrain. By the time Qatari officials granted the FBI permission to take KSM from a Doha apartment in 1996, he had fled with a blank passport. It has been said that KSM was tipped off by a government official. KSM went to Afghanistan; one report has a member of the Qatari royal family giving him the passport. He appears to have lived clandestinely in Pakistan and Afghanistan, but by January 1997 he had settled with his family in the southern Pakistani port city of Karachi.

Al Qaeda

Perhaps because of differences in their character and background, KSM never had a close relationship with Bin Laden. For the most part KSM pursued his own projects. He met with Bin Laden in Tora Bora in mid-1996; it was the first time they had seen each other since 1989, when they were together in Afghanistan. Bin Laden agreed to see KSM because of the reputation of KSM's nephew, a graduate of Sada, an Al Qaeda training camp. During the meeting KSM told Bin Laden about his various plans (including one to train pilots to crash planes into American buildings), but Bin Laden listened without making any commitments.

He asked KSM to join Al Qaeda, but KSM preferred to keep his autonomy and declined. As further evidence of his independence, he continued to work in Afghanistan with his old mentor Abdul Rasul Sayyaf.

As discussed with Bin Laden, KSM's plan for an American airline operation involved hijacking 10 planes on the East and West coasts and flying them into the Library Tower in Los Angeles, the Space Needle in Seattle, undisclosed nuclear reactors, the World Trade Center, the Pentagon, the White House, CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia and FBI headquarters in Washington, D.C. KSM intended to be on the 10th plane and would make his appearance after the nine others had smashed into their targets. After killing all the male passengers, he would land the plane at an American airport and give a speech to the world media denouncing U.S. support of governments in the Philippines, Israel and the Arabian Peninsula. Then he would release the women and children. Bin Laden was lukewarm to this theatrical scheme.

The 1998 bombings of the American embassies in Nairobi and Dar es Salaam (which together killed more than 200 people) convinced KSM that Bin Laden was serious about attacking the U.S.--a previous point of contention between them. In March or April 1999 the pair met at the Al Matar complex near Kandahar, Afghanistan. Bin Laden approved the planes operation and, with Mohammad Atef, drew up a list of targets. KSM agreed to move to Kandahar to work directly with Al Qaeda and lead its media committee.

KSM told his American interrogators that he joined Al Qaeda in late 1998 or early 1999. Bin Laden wanted to rush the planes operation and suggested that KSM launch an attack while Ariel Sharon visited the Temple Mount in Jerusalem on September 28, 2000. According to information released in The 9/11 Commission Report, KSM said it couldn't be done, that the plan wasn't in place. When Sharon announced a visit to the White House during the summer of 2001, Bin Laden again wanted the planes to attack, but KSM said they weren't ready.

Training for Holy Tuesday

In early 1999 Bin Laden selected four operatives (Khalid al Mihdhar, Nawaf al Hazmi, Tawfiq bin Attash and Abu Bara al Yemeni) for the 9/11 hijackings. They were taken to an Al Qaeda camp in Afghanistan, where they were trained in close-quarters combat. Then they went to Karachi, where KSM instructed them in Western culture and travel--his North Carolina experience came in handy. He taught the four from Western aviation magazines and San Diego and Long Beach phone books he had found in a Karachi flea market. To familiarize them with the jets they would crash, he used flight-simulator software and showed Hollywood hijacking movies. (Before showing the videos to his suicide trainees, he edited them to cover up the female characters.)

Most of the terrorists had little idea how to operate in Western society and in an urban environment. They knew nothing about how to go through an airport or how to greet a Customs officer. To allay the suspicions of airport and Customs officials, KSM showed his charges how to shave, dress in Western clothes and wear gold chains and cologne. All these effects were designed to make the hijackers appear wealthy and cosmopolitan, not fundamentalist, and thus avoid scrutiny. The hijackers eventually cased flights on their own, taking box cutters on the planes and watching.

KSM developed code words for Al Qaeda. White meat, for example, meant an American. Wedding meant an attack. Giorgio Armani meant black powder. Hugo Boss meant ammonium nitrate. He coded phone numbers with a simple reversal: Nine became one, eight became two and so on. He also invented an electronic letter box to send e-mail without exposing it to surveillance. He would use a Yahoo or Hotmail account, write a note in the draft file and send the account name and password to the person with whom he wished to communicate. His correspondent could log on to the account and read (and delete) the letter in draft form.

He knew how to obtain false passports through forgery, by alteration or by false pretense. He knew where to purchase a forged passport in Thailand for $5,000 or a legitimate one in Islamabad from African students. He knew how to alter Pakistani visas with a steam iron, bleach and a German brake fluid that matched the ink. But that was not his most essential ability.

KSM was well regarded by the Al Qaeda rank and file, among whom he was known as an even-tempered and intelligent man. As he demonstrated to his CIA interrogators, he was a people person. He would smile, laugh and joke, trying to win the heart even of an opponent. He could get along with anyone. "He's the sort of person who can acquire your trust easily," said one man I spoke with who had spent time with him. "He was talented at it. He easily found his way in a crowd of people because he was charming. He always gave the impression he was understanding, yet he would always have things his way."

His most unusual skill, however, was in persuading people to commit suicide on his behalf. KSM controlled what he referred to as Al Qaeda's "department of martyrs." The most difficult job in any terrorist operation is finding the right person for the task. KSM was a good judge of talent, but he found it easier to attract suicide bombers than to enlist operational planners. "We have many volunteers," he told a reporter for Aljazeera about his suicide bombers.

Even during the approach of 9/11--Holy Tuesday in Al Qaeda terminology--KSM was thinking about his next attack. He wanted non-Arab participants and females, because neither would draw undue attention from counterterrorist organizations. He succeeded in recruiting Australian Jack Roche, who was later convicted of plotting to bomb the Israeli embassy in Canberra. Aafia Siddiqui, an MIT graduate who lived in Boston, was KSM's archetypal female agent. She worked as a courier, flying back and forth between the U.S. and Pakistan. Considering her expertise in neuroscience and biology, the intelligence community fears she may help plan a chemical or biological attack on the U.S.

KSM was determined to strike a second time, a forceful follow-up to 9/11. This next attack would also be spectacular, a blow to additional targets in the U.S., and would have profound psychological impact. Toward that end, in early 2001 he sent Issa al Britani, a young British convert and senior member of Al Qaeda, to case various targets in the U.S. Al Britani shot five hours of videotape of the New York Stock Exchange, the Citigroup building in New York, the Prudential building in Newark, New Jersey and the World Bank and International Monetary Fund in Washington, D.C. He noted the buildings' structures and security details, traffic outside the targets and the places most vulnerable to trucks carrying fuel.

In spring 2000 Bin Laden had canceled the West Coast component of the planes operation, believing it too hard to coordinate. The plot was scaled back to four planes on the East Coast. In summer 2001 KSM returned to Bin Laden with a plan to recruit a Saudi air force pilot to commandeer a fighter plane and attack the Israeli city of Eilat, but Bin Laden wanted to stick to the planes operation. A month before 9/11 KSM applied for a visa at the Australian High Commission in Islamabad, using a known alias. The visa was granted when no one checked the alias on a database.

KSM's activities attracted attention, but intelligence officials were unable to put them together. In June 2001 a CIA report indicated that a man named Khaled was recruiting people to travel outside Afghanistan for possible terrorist activities. Officers at CIA headquarters suspected that this Khaled might be KSM.

The planes operation was about to come to fruition. As chairman of the media committee, KSM supervised the filming of martyrdom videos, or video wills, for the 9/11 hijackers. Then, in code, he authorized the four hijacking teams to attack. Mohammad Atta's last phone call to KSM, on September 10, 2001, was monitored by the National Security Agency but wasn't translated until after the attacks. That call sealed the fate of thousands of people. In typically brazen fashion KSM had wanted to be in America for the attacks--he applied for a visa to come here for 9/11, but his application was denied. "The attacks were designed," he told a reporter for Aljazeera in 2002, "to cause as many deaths as possible and havoc and to be a big slap for America on American soil."

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After 9/11, money was never a problem. Whenever KSM met operatives, he was able to fund them--he got a lot of financial support from Saudi Arabia. KSM continued to plot. He was involved in Richard Colvin Reid's foiled shoe bombing on American Airlines flight 63 from Paris to Miami in December 2001. On April 11, 2002 a suicide bomber in Djerba, Tunisia telephoned KSM three hours before he detonated a truck bomb outside a synagogue and killed 21 people. KSM also planned to use truck bombs to destroy the Australian and British high commissions and the U.S. and Israeli embassies in Singapore in December 2001 and plotted to blow up the Brooklyn Bridge in 2003. (Movies set in New York, including Godzilla, were used for research purposes.)

Part of his post-9/11 scheme was to strike London's Heathrow Airport, using planes hijacked from Eastern Europe. Another plan was foiled on August 3, 2004 when Al Britani, who was involved in the plot, was arrested in London. Even in the heightened-security environment after 9/11, KSM, convinced of his brilliance, still thought he could mount a spectacular operation. He believed in preoperational surveillance. He maintained that any target, even highly protected ones, could be attacked. The enemies of Allah plot and plan, he said, but Allah is the best of planners. KSM advocated multiyear planning in a long-cycle operation. He felt if he invested in the preattack phases, almost any plot could succeed.

In addition to planning the Heathrow scheme, KSM devised the gas limo project, which showed his typical ingenuity. It involved setting off improvised explosive devices and dirty bombs in London. KSM was considering strontium 90, californium 252 and cesium 137 as radioactive agents to be used with a conventional bomb. He planned to obtain these elements from smoke alarms, using 100 alarms to make each bomb.

Daniel Pearl

One intriguing allegation involves Daniel Pearl, a reporter with The Wall Street Journal who was kidnapped in Pakistan on January 23, 2002 while researching a story. Pearl was murdered after two men pinned him to the floor of a Karachi apartment. KSM, we are told, wielded the knife that cut off Pearl's head, while another man videotaped. But the cameraman missed the murder, which had to be repeated for the video. Pearl's throat was cut in halal fashion. One person who watched the tape said it was not clear that KSM held the knife: "You couldn't tell from the videotape whether it was actually KSM who was holding the knife or even whether he was there." But others insist KSM was the killer.

He typically didn't bloody his hands--KSM had others do his dirty work. But he may have had a motive with Pearl, who according to some reports could have been pursuing an article about him. "He had previously seemed to be more of a strategic person who looked at things from above, trying to figure out how to manipulate, rather than a hands-on kind of person concerned with details," says one journalist who followed the case closely. "But you can't exclude the possibility that he would develop a certain interest in killing if he had been told Pearl was after him personally." Or perhaps KSM killed Pearl because he wanted to set an example for Al Qaeda with his ruthlessness.

Capture

KSM was not one to hide in a cave. He liked to be on the front lines. But after Ramzi Binalshibh was arrested in Karachi on September 11, 2002, the noose began to tighten. KSM had been in Binalshibh's house when it was raided, but he escaped, leaving behind his two young sons, Yusif al Khalid, nine, and Abed al Khalia, seven, who were found in a bedroom and taken into custody by Pakistani security. It is not uncommon in Pakistan for intelligence agents to arrest their quarry's family members. One terrorist reportedly turned himself in because his 90-year-old grandfather was being held in jail. "In the Middle East," says one man familiar with interrogations, "they will bring a suspect's mother to the police station and undress her in front of him."

The search moved to Quetta, the capital city of Baluchistan, KSM's home province. Plenty of former Taliban were in Quetta, which made it hard for the FBI to get anywhere. Pakistani intelligence agents tracked KSM to a house in a middle-class neighborhood, which they raided on February 14, 2003. They seized KSM's computer, getting valuable addresses, e-mails and phone numbers, but once again he had escaped. Instead, Pakistani police caught one of the sons of Sheikh Omar Abdel Rahman, the blind Egyptian cleric convicted in 1995 for trying to blow up the World Trade Center. The son admitted he had recently stayed with KSM in Quetta. KSM's phone calls were intercepted by American communications experts, who helped the Pakistanis trace him. The National Security Agency used its Echelon surveillance system to monitor more than 10 of KSM's cell phones and triangulate his position with satellites. Intelligence operatives knew KSM's whereabouts for a week before they followed him from Quetta to Rawalpindi.

The night before his capture KSM took a 430-mile commercial flight from Quetta to Islamabad. He thought he was well enough disguised to risk the airport, but he was under surveillance by the Directorate of Inter-Services Intelligence (the Pakistani intelligence service), which had agents on his flight.

It all came crashing down on Saturday, March 1, 2003. One phone number found on KSM's hard drive in Quetta belonged to the son of a microbiologist who owned a house in Rawalpindi, a crowded military garrison city adjacent to Islamabad, the Pakistani capital. The supposed safe house, a gray-and-white two-story home at 18A Nisar Road in the middle-class Westridge neighborhood, was just two miles from the residence of the Pakistani president, General Pervez Musharraf. When he was arrested the FBI found a laminated code sheet in his pocket. Agents also took his laptop, compact discs, audiotapes, mobile phones and notebooks--none of them encoded.

KSM was surprised to be captured, because he usually adhered to strict security principles. "When you are on the run for such a long time," said one observer, "you tend to take a few things for granted." Next to the bed where KSM slept was a photo of him with his arms around his two sons.

His appearance had changed--he no longer had a beard and had gained weight--but his fingerprints confirmed his identity. For three days he was questioned by officers of ISI's Counter-Terrorism Cell. On March 4 the Pakistanis turned him over to U.S. intelligence. Once he was in American custody, his two sons were reportedly transferred to a facility in the U.S., though American officials deny any children are in custody here or abroad.

Life behind bars

This is Mukhtar's life now and for the foreseeable future. Perhaps when the CIA has gotten all the information it can from him, KSM will be brought before a secret trial or military tribunal that will remand him to the Supermax federal prison in Florence, Colorado, where his nephew Yousef is serving life plus 240 years. Until then captivity will continue to dictate his life.

By dint of his continual challenge to security assumptions, KSM has altered our way of life. Without him there would be no Transportation Security Administration, no truck barricades in front of office buildings. We would not remove our shoes in Logan or O'Hare airports. If we didn't remember that KSM is a mass murderer, we might admire his logistical aptitude and organizational creativity. Because of that creativity and imagination, as well as his Western education, he had extraordinary insight into how the world operates. This made him extremely dangerous.

His removal has severely hampered Al Qaeda, which has lost its most important operations man. KSM's strategic mind was unrivaled. His ability to conceptualize and conduct operations made him the most important terrorist of our time. A former KSM deputy, Abu Faraj al Liby, is reportedly Al Qaeda's new operational head, but he lacks KSM's familiarity with the West.

The United States is much safer with KSM behind bars, but his imprisonment doesn't mark the end of Al Qaeda. The terrorist network will find it difficult to launch a large-scale international attack like that of 9/11, though its current decentralized structure of Islamist groups allows for attacks such as last year's Madrid train bombing. Bin Laden and Ayman al Zawahiri remain at large, but their value to the jihad is mostly symbolic. It is now clear that Khalid Sheikh Mohammed's arrest will alter the future of Islamic terrorism, just as his operations have transformed American history.