New Yorker Magazine

Sept. 13. 2010

 A REPORTER AT LARGE

THE MASTERMIND

Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and the making of 9/11.

BY TERRY MCDERMOTT

 

Since 2006, Khalid Sheikh Moham­med’s family has received one letter a year from him, sent from his cell at the Guantánamo Bay detention center. Ac­cording to rules established by the Amer­ican military, the correspondence must fit on a six-inch-by-six-inch portion of a pre-printed form, and its content is restricted to the familial and personal; all else is stricken by censors. Mohammed, the self-proclaimed architect of the 9/11 attacks against America, mostly sends good wishes to his wife and children, who are now living in southeastern Iran, and to other relatives. He makes repeated refer­ences to his Islamic faith and the benefi­cence of Allah and his prophet. In photo­graphs that accompanied one of the letters, Mohammed appeared shrunken from the man in the famous image taken the day of his capture: a thickset, wild-haired figure, half-dressed in his night­clothes. The image must have infuriated Mohammed, who is vain enough to have complained during a military-court hear­ing that a sketch artist had made his nose look too big. In the jailhouse photo­graphs, he is almost forty pounds lighter. He stares directly at the camera, cloaked in long white robes, with a headdress framing a small, still face and a long black-and-white beard. A copy of the Koran lies open in his right hand.

On June 25, 2009, Mohammed, writ­ing in English, made what could be read as a surprising plea for absolution: “All praise is due to Allah. I praise Him and seek His aid and His forgiveness and I seek refuge in Allah from our evil in our­selves and from our bad deeds.” Even if this were only a ritual expression of obei­sance, it would stand in contrast to his cus­tomarily belligerent behavior. In his few statements that have been made public - a 2002 interview with the Al Jazeera re­porter Yosri Fouda, pieces of the United States government’s interrogations of him, Red Cross prison interviews, and his ap­pearances before military tribunals Mohammed has been cold-bloodedly straightforward. He told Fouda that the Holy Tuesday planes operation, as Al Qaeda called the 9/11 assaults, was “de­signed to cause as many deaths as possible and havoc and to be a big slap for Amer­ica on American soil.” Testifying before a military tribunal in 2007, he likened him­self to George Washington and boasted that he planned “the 9/11 operation from A-to-Z.” Killing, he said, was simply part of his job: “War start from Adam when Cain he killed Abel until now. It’s never gonna stop killing of people.” In that ap­pearance, he boasted of murdering the American reporter Daniel Pearl: “I decap­itated with my blessed right hand the head of the American Jew, Daniel Pearl, in the city of Karachi, Pakistan. For those who would like to confirm, there are pictures of me on the Internet holding his head.”

Since June, 2002, when the F.B.I. first identified Mohammed as the “master­mind” of 9/11, he has become one of his­tory’s most famous criminals. Yet, unlike Osama bin Laden, he has remained es­sentially unknown. Efforts to uncover more than the outlines of his biography have produced sketchy and sometimes contradictory results. (These include my own, for my book “Perfect Soldiers,” pub­lished in 2005.) Even basic facts have been in doubt; there are, for example, at least three versions of his birth date. For almost the entire decade before he was captured, in early 2003, Mohammed was a fugitive, deliberately obscuring his tracks. Bin Laden, meanwhile, was host­ing television interviewers, giving speeches, and distributing videos and text versions of his proclamations to whoever would have them.

Insofar as we know Mohammed, we see him as a brilliant behind-the-scenes tactician and a resolute ideologue. As it turns out, he is earthy, slick in a way, but naïve, and seemingly motivated as much by pathology as by ideology. Fouda de­scribes Mohammed’s Arabic as crude and colloquial and his knowledge of Islamic texts as almost nonexistent. A journalist who observed Mohammed’s appearance at one of the Guantánamo hearings lik­ened his voluble performance to that of a Pakistani Jackie Mason. A college class­mate said that he was an eager participant in impromptu skits and plays. A man who knew him from a mosque in Doha talked about his quick wit and chatty, glad-handing style. He was an operator.

In at least one important way, though, his boasts are accurate. Mohammed, not Osama bin Laden, was the essential fig­ure in the 9/11 plot. The attacks were his idea, carried out under his direct com­mand. Mohammed has said that he went so far as to resist swearing allegiance to bin Laden and Al Qaeda until after the at­tacks, so that he could carry them out if Al Qaeda lost courage.

The United States intends to try Mo­hammed this year or next, in a venue and a jurisdiction yet to be determined. The specifics of the trial where it should be held, and whether it ought to be a military or a civil hearing have been the subject of intense debate. In the absence of bin Laden, it is hard to imagine a more spec­tacular legal proceeding; even without a location or a prosecutor, it has been called the trial of the century. Wherever Mo­hammed may be tried, he seems to have done much of the prosecution’s work for it, describing himself as a righteous, re­lentless executioner whose version of making war knows no bounds. But the process will be aimed at assessing guilt, not causes. It will not tell us much about who Mohammed is, or about the forces that shaped him, which are, to an alarm­ing extent, still at work in the places where he came of age.

Badawiya, the neighborhood where Khalid Sheikh Mohammed grew up, sits between the sand and the sea on the southernmost edge of Fahaheel, a suburb of Kuwait City. The neighbor­hood mosque overlooks a mile-wide field of rubble and weeds, a buffer against the Shuaiba petrochemical complex, whose flare stacks sputter and glow around the clock. Just a few miles to the west are Ahmadi, the administrative center of the Kuwait Oil Company, and the bountiful Burgan oil field, where the stores of oil that essentially created modern Kuwait were discovered, in 1938.

Mohammed’s parents moved to Ku­wait from Pakistan in the nineteen-fif­ties, at the beginning of the country’s oil boom. His father, his father’s brother, and their young families came together; the brothers, both religious men, had been recruited to head mosques. Mo­hammed’s father became the imam in Ahmadi. The mosque, like most build­ings from that era, was built of drab brown brick and today looks as if it could stand some freshening up. Its twin minarets rise above the Kuwait Oil Company corporate reservation (built by the British before the Kuwaitis na­tionalized the oil industry), a tidy plot of tree-lined streets and white-fenced worker cottages that seems to have been shipped in whole from a greener world.

Sheikh Mohammed and his wife, Halima, had four children when they arrived in Kuwait. Five more were born after their arrival; Khalid was the sec­ond-to-last child and the youngest of four boys. The family travelled on Pak­istani passports, but both Sheikh Mo­hammed and Halima were ethnic Bal­uchis, from a swath of hard, dry land across the Gulf of Oman from the Ara­bian Peninsula. Baluchistan, as it has been called for centuries, includes parts of contemporary Iran, Afghanistan, and Pakistan, but existed as an entity long before the boundaries of any of these modern states were drawn.

The oil money that drew Moham­med’s family transformed Kuwait. At its first formal census, in 1957, the country had a population of three hundred and six thousand. By 1985, it was nearly six times as large. The boom gave native Kuwaitis a lifelong assurance of comfort: guaranteed jobs, housing, medical care, education, and pensions. The foreign guest workers, known as bidoon mostly Palestinians, Egyptians, and South Asians were not eligible for the bene­fits, though they made up the majority of Kuwaiti residents. The Baluchis were bi­doon. For Mohammed’s family, this was a fundamental fact of life.

Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, accord­ing to the information he provided to the Red Cross, was born on April 14, 1965. His father, who was fifty-seven, died four years later, and his three brothers took over his schooling. Kha­lid was much younger than his oldest siblings and had nieces and nephews his own age. He and his nephews attended Fahaheel Secondary School, in a three-story brick building that accommodated as many as twelve hundred boys. (Girls attended separate female-only institu­tions and did not progress beyond sec­ondary school.)

Mohammed, like his brothers, was a superior student. “He was one of my smartest students in the science sec­tion,” Sheikh Ahmed Dabbous, a fam­ily friend and a teacher at the school, said. He was also rebellious; he told in­terrogators that he and his nephew Abdul Basit Abdul Karim (later inter­nationally known as Ramzi Yousef, the man behind the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center) once tore down the Kuwaiti flag from atop their school­house. The school had a diverse student body Kuwaitis, Palestinians, Egyp­tians, and Baluchis but the groups were not encouraged to mix. Sports clubs, for example, were formed for the exclusive membership of Kuwaitis.

Most of the teachers in the Kuwaiti public schools that Mohammed at­tended were Palestinians, who at the time made up the largest group of expa­triates in Kuwait. At one point, there were an estimated four hundred and fifty thousand Palestinians in Kuwait, threatening to outnumber the natives. Hawalli, the area of Kuwait City where many of them lived, was known locally as the West Bank. As in other Arab countries, the Palestinians predomi­nated in the ranks of engineers, physi­cians, and teachers. A United Nations program established after the formation of Israel to help resettle Palestinians in­cluded an ambitious educational com­ponent, and, by some measures, in the nineteen-seventies Palestinians were among the best-educated populations in the world. Kuwait also became a center of Palestinian political activism. Yasir Arafat worked there as a civil engineer, and Khaled Meshal, a founder of Hamas, graduated from Kuwait Uni­versity and taught school in Kuwait City. Fatah, the Movement for the Na­tional Liberation of Palestine, was founded in Kuwait, in the late nineteen-fifties. One of Mohammed’s co-con­spirators told investigators that Pales­tinians in Kuwait were considered forsaken people, suffering at the hands of Israel and the U.S.

In 1979, two events transformed the Muslim world: Shiite Islamists led by Ayatollah Khomeini overthrew the Shah of Iran and instituted an Islamic Republic; and the Soviet Union invaded Muslim Afghanistan and installed a puppet government. After the Soviet invasion, a call to jihad went out, and Muslim leaders were eager to ally them­selves with it. It provided an opportu­nity to show their commitment to Is­lamic action without much risk at home. The revolt in Iran provoked a more complicated response. In Kuwait, Shi­ites made up about a third of the popu­lation, and they saw Khomeini’s rise to power as a model for Islamic reform in their own country. The government, to show its commitment to a more Islamic Kuwait, turned to local Islamist groups. Of these, the one that had the greatest effect on Khalid Sheikh Mohammed was the Muslim Brotherhood.

The Brotherhood, founded in Egypt in the nineteen-twenties, denounced the iniquities of the modern world and called for a return to a strict interpreta­tion of Islam. The Kuwaiti government tolerated the Brotherhood, which by the nineteen-eighties was dominated by Palestinians, as a hedge against poten­tial threats from leftist groups; in one of the persistent oddities of political life in much of the Middle East, the Brother­hood was at times outlawed and yet still allowed to put up candidates for elec­tion. Daniel Byman, a former member of the 9/11 Commission who is now a professor at Georgetown University, says that this sort of ambivalence allows governments to maintain control of ex­tremist groups. “You keep everyone semi-illegal,” Byman says. “You always have an excuse to crack down. ‘Go ahead and run that school and hospital.’ Five years later you want to clip their wings? ‘Oh, you don’t have a permit? Too bad.’ ”

While some in Kuwait’s ruling élite worried about the persistence of rural, desert values in a modernizing, urbaniz­ing culture, Islamists were worried about the opposite, the secularization of the new Kuwait. The Brotherhood sought to change that with public rhet­oric and quiet, private recruitment. Its members monitored mosques, finding chances to proselytize. On weekends, they would hold meetings at tents set up in the desert, where students would gather to eat together, read books, per­form plays, and pray.

Mohammed’s older brother Zahed became a student leader of the Brother­hood at Kuwait University. When Mo­hammed was sixteen, he told American interrogators, he followed Zahed’s lead and began attending the Brotherhood’s desert camps. It was there that he be­came enamored of the idea of jihad and studied the ideology -anti-Western, anti-Semitic, anti-modern of Sayyid Qutb, the Brotherhood’s founder.

When Mohammed graduated from high school, the family decided that they could afford to send only one boy abroad; as bidoon, they did not qualify for the generous government scholar­ships. The older brothers chose Khalid, and he left home in 1984.

In the years since Mohammed left, his family appears to have scattered across the region. Most of them fled dur­ing Iraq’s occupation of Kuwait, in 1990. The only one who remained was a cousin of Mohammed’s, who is now the muez­zin, or prayer caller, at the Ahmadi mosque. An older brother, at least two sisters, and some cousins live in Iran, along with Mohammed’s wife and chil­dren. One of the children is mentally dis­abled and another is epileptic, according to a Pakistani cousin. Two of his chil­dren were captured by authorities in 2002 and held in custody for at least sev­eral months; they are now with the fam­ily. The family survives by selling handi­crafts, harvesting dates, and keeping a small herd of goats for their milk.

The Badawiya neighborhood that Mohammed knew as an adolescent no longer exists. Kuwait has gone on a re­markable building boom since Saddam Hussein’s regime, in neighboring Iraq, fell. Entire new towns are being erected in the desert. Residential subdivisions now line the highway south from Ku­wait City to Fahaheel. Even a few years ago, much of Fahaheel was a sad-sack collection of barbershops, two-table cafés, money changers, and secondhand electronics shops with galvanized-tin roofs. Now much of that old oil town has been razed and remade as a spar­kling Southern California suburb, with gated subdivisions, marinas, and shop­ping malls. Billboards that once an­nounced “Happiness in Islam” have been replaced by advertisements for KFC.

Even the bureaucratic records have vanished. During the occupation, the Iraqis destroyed or shipped back to Baghdad all the Kuwaiti government paperwork they could find educational, biographical, and residential re­cords included. The record of Moham­med’s upbringing was effectively deleted.

In January, 1984, Mohammed, travel­ling on a Pakistani passport, arrived in tiny, remote Murfreesboro, North Carolina, to attend Chowan College, a two-year school that was advertised abroad by Baptist missionaries. Mo­hammed had applied shortly after grad­uating from Fahaheel Secondary School, in 1983. He listed his brother Zahed as his father on the enrollment forms. His bill, $2,245 for the spring se­mester, was paid in full the day of ma­triculation, January 10. Murfreesboro population about two thousand, with no bars and a single pizza shop must have seemed intensely foreign. There were dusky rivers meandering through dense pine forests, cotton fields, and tobacco patches. Not a sand dune in sight.

Chowan did not require the Eng­lish-proficiency exam that was then widely mandated for international stu­dents, so foreign enrollees often spent only a semester or two there to im­proved their English a bit, then trans­ferred to four-year universities. By the nineteen-eighties, the foreign-student contingent was dominated by Middle Eastern men, about fifty of whom were enrolled each year. Mohammed, though he was Pakistani by heritage, spoke Ar­abic, and was integrated into the Arab group. Arab students who were there at the time said they were the butt of jokes and harassment, in the anti-Muslim era that followed the Iranian takeover of the U.S. Embassy in Tehran, in 1979. The local boys called them Abbie Dhabies, a play on Abu Dhabi, one of the states of the United Arab Emirates. The Arabs were required, along with all the other students, to attend a weekly Christian chapel service.

A group of Middle Easterner men lived in Parker Hall, a brick dormitory with views of Lake Vann, a small pond on campus. They often cooked, ate, and prayed together. They left their shoes in the dormitory corridor, an apparently ir­resistible target for locals, who some­times threw the shoes in the lake. Other students occasionally propped garbage pails filled with water against their doors, then knocked and ran away. When the young men answered, water flooded in.

Mohammed did well in the pre-en­gineering curriculum, taking classes in English and chemistry. After one se­mester, he left for North Carolina Ag­ricultural & Technical State University, in Greensboro, a historically black col­lege on the Piedmont plain, in the cen­tral part of the state, and began to study mechanical engineering. One of his nephews, Abdul Karim Abdul Karim, came to A. & T. at the same time. Mo­hammed, like other radical Muslims, developed a dislike for the U.S. in his time here. He told investigators that he had little contact with Americans in col­lege, but found them to be debauched and racist. He also said that he spent a brief time in prison for failing to pay bills. A classmate, Sami Zitawi, told me in 2003 that it wasn’t uncommon for one of the students to spend a night in the county jail, in Greensboro. He him­self was hauled there for failing to pay parking tickets.

Mohammed completed his college requirements in three years, and in De­cember, 1986, both he and his nephew Abdul Karim graduated with engineer­ing degrees. Mohammed returned home to Kuwait. His old high-school teacher, Sheikh Ahmed Dabbous, sought him out and found him radically changed. “When he goes there, he sees Americans don’t like Arabs and Islam,” Dabbous told me in 2003. When Dab­bous asked why, Mohammed told him, “Because of Israel. Most Americans hate Arabs because of this.” Dabbous said, “He’s a very normal boy before kind, generous, always the smiling kind. After he came back, he’s a different man. He’s very sad. He doesn’t speak. He just sits there.” He told Dabbous he was upset that Americans hated Islam. “I talked to him, to change his mind, to tell him this is just a few Americans,” Dabbous said. “He refused to speak to me about it again. He was set. When Khalid said this, I told him we must meet again. He said, ‘No, my ideas are very strong. Don’t talk with me again about this matter.’ ”

Throughout Mohammed’s teen-age years, Muslims everywhere were roused by the Afghan war against the Soviet Union. By the late eighties, the Afghan guerrillas known as mujahi­deen, with material support from the United States, the Arab nations, and China, had mastered the main act of any resistance: frustrating the enemy. Would-be fighters came from around the world to join the struggle.

Before Mohammed left for the U.S., his brother Zahed had started working for a Kuwaiti charity called Lajnat al-Dawa al-Islamia, the Committee for Is­lamic Appeal. In 1985, L.D.I. asked Zahed to move to Peshawar, Pakistan, to run war-relief operations in support of the Afghan resistance. L.D.I. was among the largest of more than a hun­dred and fifty aid organizations that set up offices in Peshawar. It had more than twelve hundred employees in Pakistan and Afghanistan and a four-million-dollar annual budget, which funded hospitals, clinics, and Koran-study cen­ters. Two brothers, Aref and Abed, had followed Zahed to Peshawar. Almost immediately after returning from America, Mohammed, unable to find work at home, went to join them.

When he arrived in Peshawar, in 1987, it was a place full of spies and ad­venture. The buccaneering Texas con­gressman Charlie Wilson periodically rolled through carrying American gifts, the latest of which Stinger missiles had just arrived. The fight against the Soviets had been going on for eight years, and the resistance was beginning to sense the prospect of victory. “The Afghans were ecstatic,” a Western dip­lomat who was stationed in Peshawar at the time said. “They thought they were really doing some stuff over there.”

As the head of an influential charity, Zahed was a figure of importance. He worked out of an office on Arbab Road, in University Town, the newest and most Westernized neighborhood in the city, and knew virtually everyone signif­icant in town: resistance leaders, their Arab funders, Pakistani spies, journal­ists.

Mohammed and his brother Abed went to work for Abdul Rasul Sayyaf, the leader of Ittihad el-Islami, one of the Afghan-refugee political parties headquartered in Peshawar. Abed worked at the Party’s newspaper, and Mohammed taught engineering at Sayyaf’s University of Dawa al-Jihad, situated about thirty miles east of Pe­shawar. (A little farther down the main road was the mosque and madrassa where many Taliban leaders were schooled.) Dawa al-Jihad was a rough but functioning college; as many as two thousand students came to learn engi­neering, medical technology, and literature, and also to train at jihadi camps that Sayyaf ran. Next to the school, separated by high mud walls, was the Jalozai refugee camp, home to more than a hundred and twenty thou­sand Afghans. Mohammed also worked there, helping to organize the delivery of supplies.

Mohammed and his brothers be­came part of the small community of foreigners in Peshawar, which included some of the most influential figures of radical Islam. Among them was Abdul­lah Azzam, the Palestinian who essen­tially created the notion of radical jihad, redefining what had been a personal struggle for righteousness as a fight against nonbelievers. Ayman al-Zawa­hiri, a founder of the Egypt-based group Islamic Jihad who was later the second-in-command of Al Qaeda, was also there, as was Osama bin Laden. Most of the men prayed at a small mosque called Saba-e-Leil on a dead-end alley off Arbab Road, not far from Zahed’s office. Mohammed married a Pakistani woman he met at Jalozai; Zahed is said to have married her sister.

The Soviet leadership began with­drawing troops in 1988, and by Febru­ary, 1989, the last soldier was gone. Be­fore the Soviets left, they installed a government led by Mohammed Na­jibullah, a former head of the secret po­lice. The mujahideen argued that the regime could be upended with a quick military victory, and they chose to attack Jalalabad, a garrison town situated just across the Khyber Pass from Peshawar. A small group of Arabs, including Mo­hammed’s brother Abed, wanted to lead their own attack, according to an ac­count of the battle later published by Azzam. They were dissuaded and in­stead fell in behind the Afghan ranks.

The attack, ill-conceived and poorly executed, turned into a two-month siege. Casualties were heavy. A group of the Arabs wandered into a minefield, setting off a series of explosions. Among the dead was Abed Sheikh Moham­med. Azzam wrote, “With the Eternal Ones did this emigrant rider pass on, accompanied by the hearts of all who knew him.” After the failed effort at Jalalabad, blame was passed around in every direction. Benazir Bhutto, the Pakistani Prime Minister, was said to have been especially fervent in her sup­port for the attack, and some in the Arab community faulted the Pakistani advisers; others faulted the Americans.

It was a period of deep disconsola­tion among Mohammed’s cohort. Late that year, Azzam, the heart of the Arab resistance, was killed, along with two of his sons, by a bomb on the way to Fri­day prayers. The murder was never solved, and conspiracy theories spread. The United States began withdrawing aid, and some mujahideen felt that they had been duped into serving America’s interests and then tossed aside. Resis­tance groups began fighting one an­other. The factions united for long enough to establish a new government, replacing Najibullah’s regime, but it did not last. Eventually, the Peshawar dip­lomat said, “the Prime Minister was shelling the capital.”

The frustrations were compounded by events elsewhere. In August, 1990, Iraq invaded Kuwait; by early the following year, an American-led counterattack had forced it to retreat. Many of the mujahi­deen experienced this as a further insult. Bin Laden, in particular, was infuriated, claiming that the Saudis, by allowing the U.S. to base its soldiers in the kingdom, were violating a dictate to keep infidels out of the “land of the two holy mosques.” Then, in October, the American govern­ment announced military and economic sanctions against Pakistan, which had just been revealed to have a nuclear-weapons program. Those who thought that the U.S. had abandoned their cause took this as further evidence.

Many of the original Arab mujahi­deen were gone, including bin Laden, who had gone home to Saudi Arabia in 1989, leaving behind a fledgling orga­nization to coordinate jihad activities: Al Qaeda. Zahed stopped working for L.D.I. and went to the United Arab Emirates. (He was deported from the U.A.E. in 1998 for his involvement with the Muslim Brotherhood, and moved to Bahrain, where he now works as an ex­ecutive at a large business conglomerate. When I found him there this spring, at a spacious house near the sea, with chil­dren’s toys and bicycles strewn around outside, he threatened to sue me for in­vading his privacy.) Mohammed, with the sponsorship of a member of the rul­ing family of Qatar, Abdullah bin Kha­lid al-Thani, moved his family to Doha, the capital. At a farmhouse outside of town, Thani provided what amounted to a hostel for former mujahideen. An American government official in the re­gion at the time recalled that Thani told him, “These people went out there and fought for their faith and now they’ve been abandoned by their countries and I feel sorry for them.”

Mohammed was given a job as an en­gineer in the water department of the tiny emirate’s public-works ministry. How much time he spent at his job is unclear, but it was apparent that he hadn’t quit the fight. He established a small fund-raising network, soliciting wealthy men around the Gulf, then bun­dling modest amounts of money perhaps a few hundred dollars at a time and shipping it on. Fund-raising for religious causes is ubiquitous in the Gulf; Mohammed simply adapted it to the cause of militant jihad. He was in and out of the country, the diplomat said, popping up in the U.A.E., Bahrain, Pak­istan, and, occasionally, Kuwait. Still, his name was almost never mentioned in broader counterterrorism discussions, and it wasn’t evident that he was any­thing more than a bit player. “We knew he was sort of in possession of money and sending it somewhere,” the Ameri­can official said.

Mohammed seems not to have made close friends. In years of re­porting, I did not find a single person from Kuwait or North Carolina who had had any continued contact with him. His most constant companion ap­pears to have been his nephew Abdul Basit Abdul Karim, his partner in tear­ing down the flag at their Kuwaiti high school. Physically, the two were near-opposites. Basit was tall, lanky, usually clean-shaven, and rakish. Mohammed was more than half a foot shorter, stout, bearded, and bespectacled. What they shared was a rough charm that they used to persuade others to go along with what must often have seemed outland­ish ambitions.

They had spent time together in Pe­shawar, where Basit had visited in 1988, on a break from studying electrical en­gineering in Wales. He returned in 1991 and trained at Khalden Camp, in Afghanistan, and taught courses in bomb-making, developing a reputation as a clever designer of explosive devices. The Arab mujahideen had argued about the future of their cause, debating whether it should be confined to Af­ghanistan until they prevailed there or broadened to confront corrupt Arab re­gimes elsewhere. Basit didn’t waste time on debates; he began making plans and proselytizing. One of his cousins later told investigators that during this period Basit inspired him to join the jihad be­yond Afghanistan. Basit and Moham­med both frequently appealed to rela­tives for logistical support. Two of Basit’s cousins and at least two of his brothers have been accused of working with Mohammed.

In 1991, Basit got in touch with Abdul Hakim Murad, a fellow-Baluchi and a boyhood friend from Kuwait, who was then in the U.S. training as a pilot. Basit told him that he wanted to attack Israel, but thought it too difficult. He would attack America instead. He asked Murad to suggest potential Jewish tar­gets in the United States, and Murad agreed to think about it. After Murad finished his training and returned to the Gulf, in 1992, Basit got in touch again and asked if he had identified a target.

“I told him the World Trade Cen­ter,” Murad later told investigators. “He asked me why, and I gave him the rea­sons. I asked him what he was going to do. He told me that he took training for six months in Afghanistan. I asked him what kind of training. So he told me, ‘Chocolate.’ I answered, ‘What do you mean by chocolate?’ He said, ‘Boom.’ And I immediately understood that he took training in explosives, and he told me it is time to go to the United States.”

Why the United States? Murad said, “I was working for my religion, because I feel that my Muslim brothers in Pal­estine are suffering. Muslims in Bosnia are suffering, everywhere they are suf­fering. And, if you check the reason for the suffering, you will find that the U.S. is the reason for this. If you ask anybody, even if you ask children, they will tell you that the U.S. is supporting Israel, and Israel is killing our Muslim broth­ers in Palestine. The United States is acting like a terrorist, but nobody can see that.”

In the fall of 1992, Basit, accompa­nied by a man he had recruited, bought a first-class ticket from Karachi to New York City. His passport identified him as an Iraqi named Ramzi Yousef. He had no entry visa; when questioned at immigration, he quickly admitted that the I.D. was fake. He asked for political asylum and eventually was freed on his own recognizance, to await a hearing.

Basit quickly made acquaintances through a mosque in Jersey City and re­cruited men to join him in a plan to bomb the World Trade Center. The at­tack was a ramshackle, small-scale af­fair. In just a few months, Basit de­signed and built a bomb that cost about three thousand dollars. Mohammed, still in the Gulf, conferred with him often by telephone and contributed six hundred and sixty dollars. He said later that he was inspired by the ease with which Basit operated in the United States. The bomb was stowed in a rented van and parked in the basement garage of the North Tower. Basit’s plan was that it would topple the North Tower into the South Tower, bringing them both to the ground.

The bomb exploded on February 26, 1993, and although it was insufficient to the intended task, it caused millions of dollars in damage and killed six people. Basit had come upon his own notion of jihad: not just a war against states but a non-stop, all-out war on all enemies, anywhere they could be reached.

After the bombing, Basit fled the United States again flying first class, on Pakistani International Air­lines out of J.F.K. and met up with Mohammed in Karachi, where Mo­hammed had an apartment. Karachi is a wild sprawl of a place, whose popula­tion, now estimated at eighteen million, is growing at a viral rate of five per cent a year. It’s ridden with crime of all kinds: organized, ordinary, sectarian. Murders are an everyday occurrence, and “What to Do in Case of Kidnap” notices are sometimes posted, like earthquake ad­vice in California, on public bulletin boards. Karachi, like the rest of Paki­stan, has been at war with itself for thirty years. During this time, jihadi groups, backed by the Pakistani state, have fought India in Kashmir. There has also been an ongoing Sunni-Shiite proxy war funded by Saudi Arabia and Iran. “Pakistan was the confrontation to see who was going to be the dominant force in the Muslim world,” an Ameri­can diplomat in the region at the time said. The lines of battle are drawn by whichever criminal gangs, mafias, or sectarian jihadists have the strong hand in a particular place at a particular mo­ment. One night, riding through the dusty, rutted alleys of the vast Lyari slum, I noticed young men idling on every block with what appeared to be AK-47s slung over their shoulders. I said that it was odd that so many police had been deployed here, and was in­formed that there were few police in Lyari. On another visit, I was made to lie on the floor of the car until we reached our destination.

Mohammed’s apartment was situ­ated in Sharfabad, a pleasant middle-class neighborhood near one of the city’s few large parks. When he and Basit met there, Mohammed was not yet thirty, and Basit was even younger. Both were entrepreneurial. Basit had thrown to­gether his New York crew in a matter of weeks. Mohammed travelled around the world, building contacts and a sys­tem of ad-hoc terror networks. Unlike most terrorists who preceded them, they lacked a focused ideology. They picked targets to suit the moment. Working together or singly, they attacked Shiites in Iran, Sunnis in Pakistan, and Ameri­cans and Jews wherever they happened to find them, carrying out a decade-long campaign of terror and murder that stopped only with their arrests. Manila was the first target.

They chose the Philippines because they thought that it would be a good base of operations. Labor was cheap. Radical Islamists, from the Abu Sayyaf group and the Moro Islamic Liberation Front, were close at hand. Members of both groups had trained in mujahideen camps during the Afghan jihad, and Basit and Mohammed had acquaintances among them.

Mohammed and Basit arrived in Ma­nila sometime in early 1994, but Mo­hammed was in and out of the country for months. When investigators recon­structed his movements, they were shocked to discover how widely he ranged South America, Africa, Eu­rope, other points in Asia. He and Basit were joined in Manila by a third man, Wali Khan Amin Shah, who had met Mohammed during the Afghan jihad. Shah befriended a local bar girl and they rented an apartment on Singalong Street. Basit stayed at the downscale Manor Hotel. Mohammed moved into Tiffany Mansions, a new, thirty-five-story condominium in the leafy Greenhills section of town. He rented a Toyota sedan and wore khakis and polo shirts. He left in the morning and came home at night, as if commuting to the office. He tipped well and ordered in hamburg­ers for dinner.

The three men met at the corner 7-Eleven, at shopping malls and hotel bars, and at karaoke clubs in the Ermita entertainment district. They paid local women to open cell-phone and bank ac­counts, telling the women that they were recuperating veterans of the Afghan war or, in Mohammed’s case, a Gulf busi­nessman. Basit had a girlfriend who sold perfume at a shopping mall. (Basit con­sidered himself something of a ladies’ man. At one of his trials, he asked the court stenographer on a date.) Later in the year, Shah and his girlfriend took a room in the Doña Josefa, a transient hotel not far from Ermita.

The Josefa’s chief recommendation was its location, facing President Quirino Avenue, a main artery connecting the old government and financial center of Ma­nila and the neighborhood where the Vatican ambassador to the Philippines lived. This provided a strategic advan­tage for Mohammed and Basit’s latest plan: to assassinate Pope John Paul II. (Basit and Mohammed did not appear to have any particular animus toward the Catholic Church; members of Abu Sayyaf suggested the Pope as a target.) The Pope had scheduled a weeklong visit to Manila for January, 1995, and would likely travel along President Quirino Avenue several times.

In late 1994, Shah moved out of the Josefa and Basit moved in. Using various aliases, he collected the materials to make bombs: nitroglycerine, citric and nitric acid, wire, cotton balls, watches. He and Mohammed discussed various ways to kill John Paul, including suicide bombers disguised as priests, remote-control bombs, and an aerial attack. They learned that President Bill Clinton was to visit in the same period, and dis­cussed ways to kill him, too. But Philip­pine authorities heard rumors of threats against the Pope and added security throughout the capital. Basit and Mo­hammed, worried that they couldn’t penetrate the heightened defenses, focused instead on another, more innova­tive attack.

In Karachi, Basit had introduced his pilot friend, Murad, to Mohammed giving Mohammed’s name as Abdul Magid and Mohammed had quizzed Murad about pilot training and flying aircraft. They met again, at Moham­med’s apartment, then at a Karachi res­taurant. Each time, Mohammed had in­terrogated Murad about flying. Out of those conversations, Mohammed and Basit devised a plan.

Basit thought that he could build electronically controlled bombs small enough to smuggle aboard airliners. The explosive would be formed by combining volatile liquids, which could be carried onto planes in small plastic bottles, such as those used for contact-lens solutions. For a timer, he would use Casio Data­bank watches, which had programmable alarms. Because the watches could be set as much as a year in advance, Basit’s men could place the bombs on board aircraft and set them to explode on a future flight.

The plan was to deposit the bombs on airliners bound for the United States. According to files found on Basit’s lap­top, he and Mohammed decided to have five men plant bombs on aircraft bound from Asia to the U.S. - a dozen jumbo jets in total, with at least three hundred people on each plane. They tested a small version of the device in a Manila movie theatre, and it worked, blowing up an empty seat. Not long afterward, they tried a slightly bigger one aboard a Phil­ippines Airlines flight from Manila to Tokyo, with a stop in the Philippine is­land of Cebu. Basit boarded the flight in Manila, set the timer, and planted the device beneath a seat. Then he got off the plane in Cebu. The bomb went off as scheduled on the next leg of the flight, killing a Japanese businessman and nearly downing the aircraft, which man­aged to land with a hole in its fuselage.

Basit and Mohammed began their final preparations. They brought Murad in from the Gulf. He was not particularly surprised to see Basit’s apartment full of bomb-making materials - “chocolate” - but was very surprised to see Moham­med, whom he knew as a Pakistani busi­nessman, at the Josefa. Mohammed wore gloves every time he visited, Murad told investigators, and no one but Basit knew his real name.

Still, the group lacked discipline. Just before New Year’s Day, Mohammed and Basit left Manila for a weekend, say­ing they were going scuba diving. Not long after Basit returned, he accidentally ignited a small chemical fire in the apart­ment, which led police to discover the bomb-making materials. It took two po­lice vans to haul the evidence away: cot­ton batting, Bibles, cassocks, pipes, chemicals, a small case of condoms, watches. Murad told investigators that he and Basit had slept until noon that day and gone shopping at a mall in the afternoon before returning to build bombs. Murad was arrested the night of the fire, Basit a month afterward in Pak­istan, and Shah later in Malaysia. The only one who got away was Khalid Sheikh Mohammed.

Mohammed and Basit were almost indiscriminately ambitious. In ad­dition to blowing up a dozen airliners and killing the Pope and the American President, their plots included assassina­tions in Pakistan and the Philippines, a bombing in Iran, and attacks on consul­ates in Pakistan and Thailand, among many others. In one of his Guantánamo statements, Mohammed listed thirty-one terror plots to which he was party. There doesn’t seem to have been much of a plan uniting them. Basit and Mo­hammed were not criminal masterminds in the conventional sense; they did not sit back and coolly plan attacks. They were interested in the killing, not the target. They murdered even in practice runs for their attacks. When Basit was captured, in February, 1995, he had a bunch of children’s toys stuffed with explosive ma­terials. When Mohammed was arrested in Pakistan, seven years later, he had nu­merous new plots in various stages of ex­ecution, despite having already pulled off the biggest terror attack in history.

After Basit’s capture, investigators figured out that Mohammed had been involved in the Manila Air plot, and that he had helped fund the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center. (There was a record of a wire transfer, the $660 Mo­hammed had contributed, into a bank account belonging to one of Basit’s co-conspirators.) He was secretly indicted in New York in early 1996, yet his name was never mentioned in either of Basit’s two lengthy trials. The government did not bring up his name, most likely be­cause it did not want to warn him that he was being pursued. Basit did not men­tion him, presumably to hide his iden­tity. All the while, Mohammed was liv­ing openly in Qatar, occasionally going to work as an engineer in the water de­partment, and travelling around the world.

The National Security Council staff in the Clinton White House wanted to pursue Mohammed. Early in 1996, a meeting, chaired by Samuel R. Berger, the deputy national-security adviser, was scheduled to determine how to go about it. The Administration had had successes with rendition, then a new process; the arrest of Basit was among them. At the meeting, attended by dep­uty secretaries of the various involved agencies, Berger proposed going in to Qatar with a small team of perhaps a couple of dozen people. The C.I.A. was noncommittal. The Pentagon objected vigorously; a force of hundreds, perhaps more, would be required to assure the safety of the team. Instead, the State Department tried to negotiate with the Qataris.

Qatar was experiencing a period of unrest, which culminated in a failed coup attempt in February, 1996, and the gov­ernment was uncooperative. The Qa­taris, the American official said, showed “a distinct reluctance to actually get in­volved in doing something that would . . . expose them to having violated their own rules and laws.”

It would have been difficult to pro­ceed without Qatar’s assent. “We could not have snatched him. That would not have been either politic or possible,” the official said. “There’s always the guy who’s seen too many movies, who wants to send a commando team into a lower-middle-class neighborhood in Doha to try to snatch him.” But, he said, “I don’t think anybody ever seriously considered that a possibility.”

Eventually, Louis Freeh, then the di­rector of the F.B.I., sent a letter to the Qatari government asking that Moham­med be arrested, and followed up by sending a small team to collect him. By the time the team arrived, Mohammed was gone; someone had apparently warned him that the Americans were coming.

There remains a significant dispute about how serious various arms of the American government were about find­ing Mohammed. But before August, 1998, when two U.S. embassies in East Africa were bombed, radical Islam as a global force was not perceived as an im­mediate threat to America. Even bin Laden was regarded by many as a rela­tively minor concern. There were very few people anywhere in the world who thought that Khalid Sheikh Moham­med was a significant player in anything. A high-ranking Pakistani intelligence officer told me that, in 2001, his was un­aware of Mohammed’s existence. In fact, for months after 9/11, the U.S. intelli­gence community did not know that Mohammed had been involved. Accord­ing to recently declassified documents, in 2007 Michael Hayden, then the director of the C.IA., told a Senate committee that before a detainee identified Mo­hammed as the planner of the attacks, he “did not even appear in our chart of key Al Qaeda members and associates.”

Mohammed disappeared from view for at least a year after he fled Qatar. He was based in Karachi, but officials in Brazil, Bosnia, the Philippines, Malay­sia, and Pakistan say that he travelled to their countries during this time, some­times more than once. Among the places he visited was Tora Bora, in the mountains of eastern Afghanistan, where he went in 1996 to meet with bin Laden and seek his sponsorship for a daring new plan. The two knew each other from their days in Peshawar, dur­ing the Afghan jihad, but according to Mohammed had not seen each other since 1989. Daniel Byman, the former 9/11 Commission member, said that Mohammed regarded the encounter as a meeting of equals. He had the cachet of being the uncle of Basit, who was re­garded as a hero within radical Islam. Mohammed’s own role in the Manila plot was not widely known, though. In­vestigators regarded him as subordinate to Basit, his role possibly limited to rais­ing money. This new plan would resolve any doubts about his importance. He told his interrogators that he didn’t want to join Al Qaeda, but merely sought re­sources to fund a spectacular attack against the United States. His visit was well timed. Bin Laden had just returned to Afghanistan, having been expelled from Sudan at America’s insistence. In the seven years since Al Qaeda began in Peshawar, he had greatly expanded the organization’s scope and ambition, and he was now preparing a fatwa that de­clared war against the United States.

Mohammed’s initial proposal was to hijack a single airplane and crash it, as Abdul Murad had first suggested, into C.I.A. headquarters. Bin Laden dis­missed this target as inconsequential. So Mohammed proposed hijacking ten air­liners, five from each coast of the United States. The plotters would crash nine of them, and Mohammed would trium­phantly land the tenth, disembark, and give a speech explaining what he had done and why. Bin Laden thought that the plan was too complicated. It was not until the spring of 1999 that he ap­proved a somewhat less ambitious pro­posal: the 9/11 plan.

The idea was distinguished largely by its simplicity. It required pilots, and teams of men able to overwhelm de­fenseless air crews. It required money and the ability to move it around the globe. And it required willing suicide bombers of whom, Mohammed has said, there was a surplus. By far the big­gest difficulty was finding volunteers who could legally enter the United States. In two years, Mohammed was able to insert just nineteen men into the plot.

The two principals Mohamed Atta, the lead pilot, and Ramzi bin al-Shibh, Atta’s roommate in Hamburg came to Mohammed almost by acci­dent. Neither had any known previous inclination toward terrorism. They were devout young men who had gone to Af­ghanistan as a first step in volunteering their efforts to the cause. They and two other Arab students from Hamburg happened to arrive in Afghanistan at precisely the time Al Qaeda needed men who could train to become pilots.

Atta was a finicky, dour man whose chief attributes were obedience and a capacity for detail. He held a part-time job as a draftsman for an urban-plan­ning firm in Hamburg, where he repro­duced city plans precisely; his boss de­scribed him as “a drawing slave.” Bin al-Shibh was an affable layabout who rarely held a job for more than a few weeks and found university study not worth his effort. A man who knew them both in Hamburg said later that he would happily have testified against Atta in a trial but never against bin al-Shibh. “Omar,” he said, using bin al-Shibh’s nickname, “was cool.” Atta went to the United States in June, 2000. Bin al-Shibh remained in Germany because he could not get a U.S. visa; the Amer­ican immigration system viewed him as a likely economic migrant.

Mohammed was a hands-off man­ager; he spent most of his time trying to recruit suitable volunteers, and, once he had done so, gave them instructions and expected them to perform. He dele­gated the details of the plot which flights, what day, the makeup of the hit teams to Atta, who communicated his decisions to bin al-Shibh, mainly through coded e-mail exchanges and Internet chat rooms. Bin al-Shibh then relayed the information to Mohammed. While the pilots were being trained, Mohammed continued searching for men to join them in the United States. Most of those he found were Saudis who, like the pilots, had gone to Af­ghanistan to volunteer, and carried pass­ports that allowed them easy access to the U.S.

Mohammed told investigators that bin Laden urged him several times to hurry up the attacks. He refused, waiting until the summer of 2001, when Atta told him the attack teams were set; in the meantime, he insulated the hijackers from bin Laden’s impatience. He also al­lowed Atta to overrule bin Laden’s choice of the White House as one of the targets Atta thought it was too difficult a target and substituted the Capitol.

During the planning of the attacks, Mohammed spent most of his time in Pakistan, remaining largely separate from the Al Qaeda leadership as he con­tinued to organize plots and local terror cells around the world. He recruited people he had known from the Afghan training camps to form small organiza­tions in their areas. U.S. investigators had no hint of Mohammed’s deepening involvement with Al Qaeda. They wanted him for his association with the Manila plot; that was cause enough to land him on the F.B.I.’s Most Wanted list, with a two-million-dollar reward. They tracked him, as they tracked bin Laden, but never put the two together.

Mohammed said that several dozen recruits and associates stayed at his Ka­rachi apartment. One man was there for a two-week training course that ended just before September 11th. Recruits have described the instruction they received as basic how to use the Yellow Pages, Internet chat rooms, and travel agencies. Mohammed taught them a code to use in their e-mails in which each digit in a telephone number was converted so that the original digit and the coded one added up to ten; for ex­ample, Mohammed’s Karachi cell-phone number, 92 300 922 388, became 18 700 188 722. He gave them simple word codes: a “wedding” was an explo­sion, “market” was Malaysia, “souk” was Singapore, “terminal” stood for Indone­sia, and “hotel” for the Philippines. Thus, “planning a wedding at the hotel” would be planting a bomb in Manila. He received notes at various e-mail ac­counts, including silver_crack@yahoo.com and gold_crack@yahoo.com. (His password was “hotmail.”) Mohammed refused to respond to e-mail that didn’t follow the proper codes.

In the summer of 2001, word began to leak out of Afghanistan that Mohammed or Mukhtar, “the chosen one,” as he was known within Al Qaeda was planning something big. As the former C.I.A. director George Tenet put it, according to the 9/11 Commission Report, “The system was blinking red.” But, up until the moment of the hijackings on 9/11, nothing ille­gal had occurred. That morning, nine­teen young Arab men boarded four commercial airliners in much the way tens of thousands of other men, women, and children did.

Al Qaeda had called its most impor­tant operatives back to Afghanistan, to protect them. In late August, Moham­med travelled to Afghanistan to inform bin Laden personally of the date of the attacks, then returned to Pakistan. Ac­cording to a memoir by the former Pak­istani President Pervez Musharraf, Mo­hammed watched news reports of the attacks at an Internet café in Karachi. When the first plane hit the first target, the World Trade Center, a celebration commenced. Bin al-Shibh, who, accord­ing to Musharraf, was with Mohammed, told Yosri Fouda that men in their com­pany shouted “God is great!” and wept with joy.

Though Mohammed stayed physi­cally separate from Al Qaeda’s leadership, he became the organization’s effective head of operations, with bin Laden acting primarily as financier. In the days immediately following the at­tacks, Mohammed, assuming that com­munications were being monitored, employed donkeys to carry messages in and out of Afghanistan. He used an A.T.M. card six times in Karachi, pre­sumably retrieving the hijack teams’ un­used money. Mohammed had made video and tape recordings of the attacks, and he began to distribute them. He was in telephone contact with men plot­ting to bomb a synagogue in Tunisia. When the United States launched its war in Afghanistan, Mohammed went to Tora Bora to direct the resettlement of scores of Al Qaeda members and their families. Then he returned to Ka­rachi and resumed his work.

It was in Karachi that Mohammed encountered Daniel Pearl, the Wall Street Journal reporter. Pearl, who was based in India, went to Karachi in Janu­ary, 2002, to research a story on Richard Reid, the “shoe bomber,” and his con­nections to Pakistani jihadi networks. Pearl arranged a meeting with someone he thought was a member of the net­works but was instead kidnapped, held for ransom, and killed. A video posted on the Internet showed Pearl’s severed head held by Mohammed’s hand, iden­tifiable by what a Filipino investigator once characterized as the “extra meat” on his ring finger.

Pakistani investigators now think that Mohammed had nothing to do with the initial kidnapping; that was the work of what one investigator called a “mish­mash” of local jihadis. Some of the ji­hadis came from the Kashmir struggle. Some, such as Omar Saeed Sheikh, who has been convicted of planning the kid­napping, were experienced both in Kash­mir and in kidnap-and-ransom opera­tions. Western media latched on to the story, and the kidnappers, who appar­ently did not anticipate the attention that the crime would attract, had no idea how to resolve the situation. This is where Mohammed is believed to have stepped in. “Khalid Sheikh Mohammed got to know of the plot, which he had done nothing to serve,” a senior Pakistani po­lice official said. “He got to know of it through the grapevine. And so he said, ‘This is great, a chance to do something spectacular.’ So he basically bought Dan­iel Pearl from them. He gave them fifty grand, bought Daniel Pearl, got a guy with a camera, and the rest is history.” As in the plot against the Pope, he had no personal grudge against Pearl; it just happened that he was a Jewish Ameri­can, and available to him.

In the spring of 2003, almost a full decade after Mohammed came to the notice of terrorism investigators, heavily armed Pakistani police crashed in on him in the middle of the night, in a walled compound in Rawalpindi, the home city of Pakistan’s military. His cap­ture likely owed something to the tech­nical capacities of American surveillance, but the big break came by the oldest of means: betrayal. The U.S. had offered a twenty-five-million-dollar reward for Mohammed’s capture, and a cousin tipped off authorities about his location. The man, an Iranian Baluchi, has been resettled with his money, presumably in the United States. “Even his family is his enemy now,” a Pakistani relative said of the cousin. “His father says, ‘If he re­turns, we will kill him.’ ”

It is an article of faith among Mo­hammed’s family members, several of whom have been arrested on suspicion of cooperating with him, that he has been falsely accused. “Just think about it,” the cousin said. “How can it be that such a big tower, merely by being hit by a plane, it gets demolished? At the very least, something has been placed at its founda­tion which would cause the collapse. This was a Jewish conspiracy.” Relatives have gone to court to reverse what they allege was Pakistan’s illegal extradition of Mohammed to American authorities, but his wife has asked them to stop their efforts. The cousin said she told him, “It’s in God’s hands.”

“We tend to think of jihad and Is­lamism and associate it with Afghan­istan. It’s really a Pakistan-based move­ment,” Daniel Byman, of Georgetown, said. “The focus is on Afghanistan, but all the things that make this movement hum are in Pakistan.”

Mohammed thrived in the chaos of Pakistan, and that chaos still exists. The melding of the various jihadi groups with Al Qaeda and the Taliban has resulted in an indecipherable mess. For example, one of the premier field commanders for Al Qaeda in Pakistan is Ilyas Kashmiri. In Kashmir, he was sponsored by the Pakistani government; now he is fight­ing it. In some sense, most of the terror­ists who have attacked the West in the name of Islam Mohammed, Basit, Richard Reid, Faisal Shahzad (the Times Square bomber), the 2005 Lon­don train bombers, Mir Aimal Kasi (the 1993 killings of C.I.A. personnel in Langley, Virginia)are sparks thrown off by the fires in Pakistan. Byman and others think that this has implications that haven’t been given due consider­ation in the current war in Afghanistan. If the foundations of the movement are in Pakistan, and if Mohammed was the driving force behind the 9/11 attacks, what does that say about the nature of Al Qaeda? Was it the sophisticated, global, corporate enterprise so often depicted? Or is it better represented by what has come to be called the “bunch of guys” theory, put forward most persua­sively by Marc Sageman, a forensic psy­chiatrist and former C.I.A. officer? Is it a small core of leaders guiding barely trained men who join and leave the cause for unpredictable reasons?

Bin Laden’s main contributions to 9/11 were money and volunteers. Al­most all the money was for living and travel expenses. This was not inconsequential, but terrorism is cheap. It doesn’t require huge numbers of people, elabo­rate infrastructure, or great technical skill. That is its advantage over the weap­ons and defenses of a modern, sophisticated state.

Mohammed’s letters home from Guantánamo are accompanied by identification forms, in which the Red Cross asks that the correspondent pro­vide basic biographical information. In the first of the letters, dated December 15, 2006, Mohammed dutifully filled in the details, writing out his full name and listing Guantánamo Bay as his place of residence. In the most recent letter, he listed his residence as “Gitmo,” using the military nickname for Guantánamo Bay. In the space for his own name, he used the initials by which he is universally known within the United States intelli­gence community, K.S.M. Mohammed, whose life has been marked by move­ment and adaptation, after seven years in American custody seems to have adapted. He has proved to be a forceful and at times vexing presence. He says that he lied when he was tortured during interrogations and told the truth at other times. He has seemed almost gleeful about the prospect of American investi­gators chasing his lies around the world.

The “high-value detainees” at Guan­tánamo live in a maximum-security prison, Camp 7, which is off limits to al­most everyone. They are held in isolation for up to twenty-two hours a day; as mil­itary prosecutors put it in arguing against allowing defense attorneys to visit the camp, each prisoner “has available to him outdoor recreation, socialization with a recreation partner, the ability to exercise, access to library books twice a week, the privilege of watching movies, and may meet with his attorneys upon request should he so choose. If the accused takes advantage of all the privileges offered to him, he would have a minimum of two hours a day outside his cell.”

In the hearing room, Mohammed and his four co-defendants sit in separate rows of tables, with Mohammed always in the front row. Seated with them are their translators, lawyers, and sometimes paralegals as many as six people in a row. Mohammed does not always rely on a translator in court and has fired his lawyers, so he is sometimes seated at his table with just one other person, a civil­ian lawyer who serves as his personal rep­resentative but not his defense counsel. (This didn’t stop Mohammed from writ­ing a critical memo to the judge, in 2008, titled “Better Translation.”)

His behavior in court has sometimes been bizarre. Once, he stood during the proceedings to sing Koranic verses aloud. After the judge repeatedly told him that he was out of order and had to stop, he suddenly blurted “O.K.” and quit, pro­voking laughter throughout the court­room. J. D. Gordon, a former spokesman for the Department of Defense who is now a senior fellow at the Center for Se­curity Policy, witnessed nearly all of Mo­hammed’s court appearances. “At times, it’s almost like theatre,” Gordon said. “He switches back and forth from very serious and devout to kind of a clown. I think he does that deliberately to draw people in, to charm them in some way, or to influ­ence them. It’s all calculated.”

His co-defendants nervously look to Mohammed for guidance. When he de­cided to defend himself, he attempted to have the others do the same. One, Mus­tafa Ahmed al-Hawsawi, chose to con­tinue with his attorney. Mohammed turned to Hawsawi and, according to Gordon, noted that his lawyer was in the American military, and then asked Haw­sawi if he was in the U.S. Army, too. Hawsawi appeared shaken.

When another defendant, Ramzi bin al-Shibh, initially refused to appear be­fore tribunals at all, it was not military prosecutors or lawyers who changed his mind but Mohammed. He organized what he called a Shura council to coordinate his defense with those of his fellow-accused. He dealt politely with his de­fense lawyers, although he is prone to giving lectures in court. According to the Times, he wrote poems to the wife of one of his interrogators. He has at times cap­tivated interrogators with what amount to master classes in the practice of con­temporary terrorism.

It’s likely that, whenever and wher­ever Khalid Sheikh Mohammed goes on trial, the answers he provides to the en­during questions about 9/11 will be deeply unsatisfying. His plots were scat­tered, frenetic, even feral; they had an al­most random quality. Mohammed, al­most certainly, will talk. He likes to talk. It is less certain that he will have any­thing to say. The mastermind of 9/11 seems to have had no overriding grand strategy, or, really, any strategy at all.

---

The Plot
How terrorists hatched a simple plan to use planes as bombs.

By TERRY McDERMOTT
Times Staff Writer

September 1, 2002


A decade ago, a cadre of freelance terrorists planned an improbable day of horror in which they would blow up a dozen U.S. airliners, killing, if the men were lucky and good, several thousand people. This plan was foiled and most of the men caught, but one key figure escaped, and the idea went with him. He was something of a ghost, eluding investigators for years, just beyond vision and reach, forever a step ahead. He fled to Afghanistan, where he became a key Al Qaeda agent.

He brought with him the idea of using airplanes as weapons. The leaders of Al Qaeda liked the idea and made it their own.

A small group of men spread across the globe was assigned the task, and last September they killed more than 3,000 people in New York and Pennsylvania and at the Pentagon. In the first weeks following the attacks, authorities loudly and frequently blamed Osama bin Laden and his organization, Al Qaeda. Since then, however, authorities have been reluctant to say much of anything about the details, in large part because they do not know them.

Enough is known, however, to describe how the plan to fly airplanes into buildings came into being, how it was elaborated upon and how it succeeded.

The story begins in Manila, Christmastime, 1994.

For most of a month, the men with the chemical burns and the misshapen fingers carted boxes and bottles through the terrazzo lobby of the Josefa, up six flights and down the hall to the shut door of Apartment 603, a furnished studio with kitchenette, dark parquet floors, off-white walls and a shuttered window overlooking President Quirino Avenue.

It was the window that worried the cops.

In normal years, Christmas in Manila is a prolonged celebration. That December, though, arrived in a meaner season. A typhoon had barreled through mid-month, ripping out trees and power lines and, for the authorities, sharpening the edge on an already anxious time.

Pope John Paul II had announced a five-day January visit. There were substantial fears within the country's intelligence community that increasingly violent Islamic activists would try to kill him.

The national police had just completed a 182-page catalog of terrorist activity throughout the island nation. It had been a horrible year: More than 50 incidents and 101 deaths, with Roman Catholic priests among the frequent targets. The terrorists were based on the southern island of Mindanao, but bombs had already exploded in Manila on Metro trains, at a Wendy's hamburger stand and a local movie theater. Another had blown a hole in an airliner.

The pope was a complication the cops didn't need. They increased surveillance and put local officials on high alert. That's where the window on the sixth floor of the Josefa came in. The apartment is but a quarter-mile from the Vatican ambassador's residence, where the pope would stay. The window looks directly down onto a busy street that the papal entourage would use.

The story has been told for years that on the night of Jan. 6, a week before the pope's arrival, the men in 603 accidentally started a fire in the kitchenette, and fled as it set off alarms. Firefighters and police rushed to the scene. They discovered the fire had subsided without assistance and prepared to call it a night until one suspicious police officer insisted on taking a look in the room. Inside, she found the place littered with beakers, funnels, cotton batting, cans of gasoline and a pair of king-size Welch's grape juice bottles filled with what turned out to be liquid nitroglycerin.

The truth about that night and the fire, officials say now, is a bit more complicated.

Manila is a sprawling mess of a metropolis, divided into districts called baranguays. Local politics operate like a turn-of-the-century American patronage machine: Each baranguay has a chief who delivers neighborhood complaints up the line and municipal favors down it. They keep their eyes open.

The Josefa is in the Malate baranguay. Apolinario Medenilla was the machine's man in Malate. He came around to have a look.

The Josefa is a drab, water-stained stucco, half-hotel, half-apartment house, with groaning air conditioners and a transient clientele. It rents rooms by the day, week or month. Next to it is a ragtag slum of tin-can squatter shacks, dusty pawnshops and two-stool cafes. Manila Bay is half a mile west, and cargo ship crewing agencies have offices in the slum, making it a place of constant movement.

The men in 603 had rented the room for a month and were so secretive they wouldn't let the maid in to change the sheets. It wasn't that they seemed averse to women, as some Muslim visitors were. They paid considerable attention to the city's salacious nightlife, coming and going at all hours, not always unaccompanied. And then there was the puzzle of all those boxes carted through the lobby. Manila is a tropical city, a steam room. Labor is cheap and people don't exert themselves if it can be avoided. Hauling heavy cartons is not typical tourist behavior. Medenilla passed the information on to police, who shared his suspicions.

Government officials now say police, worried about the pope's imminent arrival, started the fire that set off the alarm at the Josefa. When it sounded, the occupants ran out, the cops walked in and looked around. They then left and hunted down a search warrant. Even at that, according to police records, they had to ask 11 judges before they found one who would sign it.

Whatever the method of discovery, the police hit an intelligence gold mine.

The evidence filled three police vans. There were priests' robes and collars, Bibles, crucifixes and maps of the pope's prospective travels; chemistry textbooks and chemicals--acids and nitrates by the gallon, one finished pipe bomb and another waiting to be packed; there were a dozen passports and as many Casio watches, apparently to be used as timers; soldering irons, switches and loops of electrical wire.

The men in 603 were professional terrorists. They had stocked a bomb factory and left behind evidence they intended to use it.

One of them, a Pakistani named Ramzi Yousef, was among the most wanted men on Earth--the key suspect in the 1993 truck bombing of the World Trade Center in New York. They had come to Manila with enough new plans to make New York seem like a warm-up act. The plans were left behind on a Toshiba laptop. They included a plot to assassinate the pope and another audacious scheme to board a dozen American jumbo jets, place homemade bombs aboard them and blow them up over the Pacific. Yet another plan on the computer called for the terrorists to dive-bomb an airplane into CIA headquarters.

Through a combination of luck and international cooperation, the two men in 603 and an accomplice were captured within a year. Interrogations revealed there were still more plans and more men, men who have yet to be found. An investigator described the cell as part of "a strong network, continuously hatching plots." One of the unfound men, Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, was a particular mystery. Nobody was quite certain who he was. Even his name was suspect. There are now more than a dozen aliases attributed to him.

It turned out he had been living in Manila for most of a year. He told people he was a Saudi businessman. He stayed in a fancy apartment in a nicer part of town, across the street from the country's future president. He drove his own car. He took diving lessons. He patronized go-go bars and karaoke clubs and held meetings at plush hotels. He tipped well. He was flashy--once renting a helicopter just to impress a girlfriend by hovering over her office, calling on his cell phone and telling her to wave.

Still, police had little idea what his connection to the bombers might be.

Then came Sept. 11 and one of the most intensive police and intelligence investigations in history. In the course of it, apparitions of Mohammed kept emerging from the mists of information. By this summer, American investigators had concluded Mohammed was a principal planner of the September attacks. The idea to kill thousands of Americans last fall by turning airliners into bombs might well have been his.

Filipino investigators came to a similar conclusion. The idea to kill thousands of Americans by blowing up airplanes in 1995 was probably Mohammed's as well, and Sept. 11 its fulfillment.

Much had happened between the two plots. What the investigator had said about the Manila cell could easily be applied to all of Osama bin Laden's Al Qaeda in the intervening years: Foremost, it was a network continuously hatching plots.

Whatever Al Qaeda's circumstances, successes or lack thereof, one thing that never changed was that the plots just kept coming: ships in Yemen, embassies in Africa, an airport in Los Angeles, a cathedral in France, a subway in Singapore. As the plots multiplied, Khalid Mohammed kept reappearing.

Over the years, many of the plots seemed ill-conceived ideas pursued by ill-equipped or unprepared men. Ramzi Yousef, convicted of the first attack on the World Trade Center and the plot to blow up airliners, complained to investigators that if he'd had enough money, he'd have toppled the trade center towers back in 1993.

It took time, but by the autumn of 2001, money was no longer a problem. Khalid Mohammed and his cohorts eliminated that and every other obstacle. Rather than rely on casual collections of hapless men patching together whatever foolhardy scheme they lit upon, they drew new men from three continents into their plot--diverse men, including an architect, an aerospace engineer, a patent medicine salesman, a computer programmer, sons of the Saudi middle class and an itinerant Yemeni who lived for two years in a cramped government barracks so uninviting authorities called it a container.

The organization was patient. While the men from around the globe were assembled and prepared, it went on doing what it otherwise did--churning out ideas for new and imaginative ways to kill.

By the time they were done, the old idea, the one with the airplanes, turned out to be the best--or worst--of them all.



Fighters Without a War



Al Qaeda was born in the course of a 10-year resistance to the Soviet Union's 1979 invasion of Afghanistan. The war against the Soviets became a worldwide rallying cry of radical Islam and, more, a forum for action. Tens of thousands of young men from throughout Islam answered the call to arms. The war's end presented a predicament: What would these so-called Afghan Arabs do now?

Fundamentalist Islam is viewed as a threat in much of the Muslim world. Many moujahedeen came home to inhospitable regimes. One of them later described the group as lost, without purpose "except to carry out the jihad."

One such man and his wife arrived at a compound of migrant quarters in tiny Kampung Sungai Manggis, south of Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, in early April 1991. He was short, stout, bearded and wearing a skullcap; she, even shorter, and completely covered in dark dress and full veil. The couple were strangers to Mior Mohamad Yuhana, the man who owned the migrant shacks, but they came recommended by a local man, and Mior thought they looked kindly.

The visitor said his name was Hambali, he was Indonesian and was moving to Malaysia so that he might practice Islam more freely. Mior told him he didn't care about that. Stay out of trouble, pay the rent and we'll be fine, he said. He led them to a tiny wooden shack, about the size of a one-car garage, with weathered siding, bare concrete floors and a single lightbulb inside.

Hambali grew up in the volcanic highlands of west Java and attended an Islamic boarding school and university. He answered the call to jihad and spent three years fighting in Afghanistan.

Hambali and his wife arrived in Sungai Manggis with the clothes they wore and a single bag each.

"They cooked and ate, slept on the floor," Mior said.

Sungai Manggis is just minutes from the western Malaysian coast, and from there an hour by boat across the Strait of Malacca to Indonesia. It is a well-traveled path for poor Indonesians, who come for work. But Sungai Manggis is not a place to get rich.

The area is blanketed with overgrown rubber plantations, abandoned when the fickle world market moved on. The landscape is green and tangled, the earth a deep orange clay that clings as dust in the morning and mud after the heavy midday rains. The hills are empty as yet of the Western-style subdivisions of the capital, but the bulldozers are coming. The area is being pulled into the sprawling compass of Kuala Lumpur.

Roadside stands are piled high with mangoes, pineapple, durian and--an indication of the oncoming march of the suburbs--sacks of used golf balls.

Hambali did odd jobs and soon began showing up outside the gold-domed mosque on the southern edge of the nearby market town of Banting, selling kebabs out of a tri-shaw cart. His wife, joined by her mother, was seldom seen beyond the rented shack.

Hambali switched from kebabs to patent medicines and began traveling, on business, he said, disappearing for weeks at a time. At home, he received what became a steady stream of visitors, Mior said. They spoke English and Arabic and sometimes carried Duty Free shopping bags. The men were "in their late 20s or early 30s. They looked tough. I remembered thinking at that time they would make good footballers," Mior said.

Hambali prospered. Soon, he was driving a red Proton hatchback and juggling calls on a pair of cell phones. Many of those calls, investigators later determined, were made to a man who had recently arrived in Manila, Osama bin Laden's brother-in-law.

Joining the Jihad

When the Soviets left Afghanistan, the country descended into gruesome civil war. With shifting alliances of tribes, warlords and religious sects, a network of camps, schools and supply routes that Bin Laden had helped establish along the Pakistani border was busier than ever.

Ramzi Yousef was one of the mujahedeen who returned to the region. Yousef was born and raised in Kuwait, where his parents were among thousands of Pakistanis drawn to the oil-rich kingdom. Yousef had first come to the camps on a break from college in Wales in 1988. He returned in 1991, after receiving an associate degree in electrical engineering. He later told investigators he spent six months training in the camps. He was so adept at bomb-making that he was known to trainees as "the chemist."

After his training, Yousef began recruiting the motley crew with which he would attack the United States.

Yousef later told investigators his principal goal was the liberation of Palestine, a political rather than religious motive. A boyhood friend, Abdul Hakim Murad, said that what Yousef really wanted to do was kill a lot of Jews. He didn't care how or where.

Yousef arrived in New York in the fall of 1992 wearing a three-colored silk suit and carrying an Iraqi passport with no entry visa. He claimed to be seeking political asylum. He was given two options--arrest or deportation. He chose arrest and was then immediately released on his own recognizance because, an INS agent later testified, "There was a lack of detention space."

Yousef moved into a Jersey City, N.J., apartment and started scouting targets. He spent time driving around Brooklyn because he had been told Jews lived there. Murad, according to transcripts of police interrogations, had earlier suggested to Yousef that many Jews worked at the World Trade Center and that maybe he should consider the site as a target.

Five months later, a bomb Yousef built for $3,000 blew up in the basement of the trade center's north tower, killing six, injuring about 1,000 and causing $300 million in damage. It was less than Yousef intended. He wanted the bomb to topple the north tower onto the south and release a cyanide cloud into the complex's ventilation system.

Collaborators were arrested and Yousef's role discovered. An international manhunt followed, with a reward of $2 million for his capture. Yousef disappeared for a time into the lawless western Pakistani province of Baluchistan, where he had relatives. He soon reemerged as a man about town in Peshawar and Karachi, a kind of folk hero much sought after among people who wanted to blow things up.

His boyhood friend Murad was living in Karachi. He had recently returned from the U.S., where he had earned a commercial pilot's license. Yousef came to see him. He talked, Murad said, about the need for good Muslims to give their lives, if needed, to the struggle. They talked about potential targets: Benazir Bhutto, then the prime minister of Pakistan; nuclear power stations; a government official in Iran; the U.S. Consulate there in Karachi and a variety of other U.S. government buildings. There was a plan to assassinate President Clinton.

"If you ask anybody," Murad said later, "even if you ask children, they will tell you that the U.S. is supporting Israel and Israel is killing our Muslim brothers in Palestine."

Murad proposed packing an airplane full of explosives and dive-bombing into the Pentagon or CIA headquarters. Yousef said it was worth considering.

He took Murad to meet a man interested in such things. He said his name was Abdul Magid. He was a Saudi import-export businessman, he said.

His real name, police later determined, was Khalid Shaikh Mohammed. He wasn't Saudi, but like Yousef a Baluchi, born and raised by expatriates in Kuwait. He is thought to be Yousef's uncle.

Foreign workers flooded the Gulf states in the 1970s and '80s. The oil economy couldn't have functioned without them, but they were not encouraged to think of it as home. In Kuwait, they are referred to as bidoon, translated as "without," as in without citizenship.

Like Yousef, Mohammed had gone abroad to study engineering. He enrolled at a two-year college in North Carolina in 1984. After college, he came home to Pakistan and joined what appears to have been the family business--jihad. A Kuwaiti newspaper has reported that he went to work as secretary to an Afghan warlord. It is likely his older brother Zayed arranged the job.

Zayed was a Pakistani representative of Mercy International, a Saudi-funded relief organization. The Kuwaiti government this summer said Zayed was a full-fledged member of Al Qaeda.

Murad said his first meeting with Magid/Mohammed was at Mohammed's Karachi apartment. He said Mohammed was very interested in learning everything he could about pilot training: how long it took, how expensive it was and who could qualify for it.

Yousef took Murad to see Mohammed a second time. Again, Murad said, Mohammed talked almost exclusively about flying.

By now, Yousef had persuaded Murad to join the cause. The two of them moved to an open-air compound where Yousef taught Murad to build bombs. Making chocolate, Yousef called it. In one practice session, a detonator exploded in Yousef's face. Yousef lost partial sight in one eye, Murad said.

As Yousef recuperated, Mohammed showed up out of nowhere, Murad said, to pay the bills.

Eluding Capture

Khalid Mohammed, Yousef and a third plotter, Wali Shah Khan, arrived in the Philippines in early 1994. Khan had stopped en route in Kuala Lumpur, where he and Hambali, the Indonesia patent medicine salesman, incorporated an export company called Konsojaya. Its real purpose, police say now, was to serve as a financial conduit for the plotters.

In Manila, the trio acted like anything but Islamic terrorists. All had local girlfriends. They hung out at karaoke bars and strip clubs.

Yousef and Mohammed, just weeks before they intended to blow up the pope, went on holiday to a coastal resort, where they took scuba-diving lessons.

Yousef's friend Murad joined them just before Christmas. The plans for the airplane plot--which they code-named Bojinka, Serbo-Croatian for explosion--called for men to board flights in Asia that had intermediate stops before heading across the Pacific. They would plant Yousef's bombs on the planes, disembark at the intermediate stop and do the same thing on another flight. The bombs' timers would be set so that all the bombs would go off more or less simultaneously.

Yousef did a trial run Dec. 9, planting a small version of his bomb on a Philippine Airlines flight to Tokyo. It exploded, killing one man. It would have caused the plane to crash if not for what were described as heroic efforts by the pilot.

That was the end of it, though. Police intelligence and fears for the pope's safety led to the fire alarm and discovery of the bomb factory.

Murad was caught that night when Yousef sent him back to the apartment to get Yousef's Toshiba laptop. Yousef walked off into the night. He made his way via Thailand to Pakistan. He was betrayed there by a man he tried to recruit and captured in a raid by U.S. agents and Pakistani security forces at a small hotel in Islamabad.

When Khan was arrested seven months later, just one of the known Manila plotters remained at large--Khalid Shaikh Mohammed.

Authorities think now he stayed for some days, perhaps weeks, in Manila, then made his way to Doha, Qatar, where he apparently enjoyed the patronage of a high-ranking member of the government.

One of Mohammed's brothers had attended university in Doha in the 1980s and became a much respected teacher. He reformed a network of social clubs that had previously been disreputable and made them a key feature in Doha's social and religious life. Many people there still speak fondly of the brother, and this apparently helped Mohammed settle quickly into Qatar society.

Mohammed was a kind of happy networker, said Khaled Mahmoud, an acquaintance.

"He knew your name the second time you met him and remembered things about you from previous conversations," Mahmoud said.

Mahmoud recalls running into Mohammed at the mosque. They chatted for perhaps 30 minutes, during which they were repeatedly interrupted by people coming up to say hello to the short, slightly plump, slightly balding young Mohammed.

Mohammed is said to have been funny and charming, an image that fits with the evidence of him as Manila raconteur. His very public lifestyle caught up with him in 1996. U.S. investigators identified him as their Manila suspect, and FBI Director Louis J. Freeh sent a letter to the Qatar government asking for permission to send a team after Mohammed. The government agreed and the team moved in, according to Robert Baer, a retired CIA officer. Baer said his account of the attempted capture was given to him later by the head of Qatar's national police, who told him he was ordered by a member of the Qatar ruling family to provide Mohammed and four other men with blank passports. The police chief said the other men included top Bin Laden aides Ayman Zawahiri and Mohammed Atif.

By the time the FBI team arrived, Mohammed and the others were gone.

American officials decline to speak about the escape, except to say that cooperation between Qatar and the U.S. is excellent now.

U.S. officials think Mohammed moved to Afghanistan, where he went to work for Al Qaeda.

In discussions of terrorism at the time, Bin Laden's name was mentioned in passing, if at all. That was about to change.

In late 1995, a National Guard post in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, had been bombed, and five Americans were killed.

The U.S. had begun to suspect that Bin Laden was training and dispatching terrorists from his base in Sudan. When they pressured the Sudanese to expel him, there were not many places he could go. Of these, Afghanistan was the most likely.

In May 1996, Bin Laden and an entourage of 150 men, women and children arrived by C-130 transport plane in Kandahar.

In June, a fuel truck exploded at a U.S. Marine barracks in Dhahran, Saudi Arabia, killing 19.

Bin Laden did not claim responsibility for the attacks, but he conspicuously praised them.

In August, Bin Laden issued from his new home in the Afghan mountains a declaration of war against the United States.

Taliban leaders welcomed Bin Laden. He repaid the favor by furnishing them fighters and money. The moujahedeen training camps were rejuvenated by Bin Laden's presence.

In 1998, Bin Laden issued a second declaration of war against the U.S. and announced a merger of his Al Qaeda with organizations from Pakistan, Egypt and across Africa. The merger brought experienced fighters and strategists under Bin Laden's banner.

The new organization declared: "To kill Americans and their allies, both civil and military, is an individual duty of every Muslim who is able, in any country where this is possible."

It was a call for a new generation of jihadists.

A Place of Comfort and Hate

On a typically gray, damp day in Hamburg, when steel-hard winds blow down from the Baltic and the city grows dark and the evening cool turns cold, the thing that is noticed first when men come out of the weather into Al Quds mosque is the warmth they bring with them. A hand is clasped; bearded cheeks brush one against another; shoulders are squeezed; smiles, soft words and quiet laughter are shared.

Al Quds occupies a warren of sparsely decorated rooms upstairs from a downscale gym. It sits in a poorer quarter of Germany's richest city, on a hard, seamy street just east of Hauptbahnhof, the city's main rail station. The location, amid but removed from the drug dealers and hookers on Steindamm Street below, is perfect: Rent is cheap and the train station makes Al Quds accessible from all points on the Hamburg map.

The men come to evening prayer from across the city and from across the Arab world. Hamburg has a sizable Muslim population, about 5% of its almost 2 million people, and mosques are spread throughout the city to serve them. The overwhelming majority are Turks, but Al Quds is not a Turkish mosque.

There is within Islam, as they say, only one God and God is great, but any religion that requires its faithful to pray five times a day can expect them to exercise some discretion in determining where and with whom those prayers are said. Mosques, like churches in Christendom, segregate themselves by ethnicity, economics and scriptural interpretation. The version presented at Al Quds is Arab, dispossessed and harsh, which fit exactly the world view of certain Muslims in the 1990s.

"The Jews and Crusaders must have their throats slit," is the way one Al Quds preacher put it. This was for most of the decade not an unusual formulation.

A match had been struck in Afghanistan, and Islam was aflame. Al Quds was distinctive in Hamburg but no different from thousands of other mosques around the world--from San Diego to Jakarta to London--where a new radical Islam was nursed to a fire, and the fire fed.

There are two smaller, mostly Arab mosques very near Al Quds, and members of what later came to be called the Hamburg terrorist cell sometimes worshiped at those as well. But investigators think it was within Al Quds' plain rooms that a group of like-minded young men found one another and, for many of them, a calling.

The group was small--investigators think fewer than 20 people. It produced three of the Sept. 11 pilots--Mohamed Atta, Marwan Al-Shehhi and Ziad Samir Jarrah. Two other men apparently wanted to join them--Ramzi bin al-Shibh and Zakariya Essabar, both of whom were denied U.S. visas. When the pilots left for the United States, Bin al-Shibh became the key contact--and a conduit for money--back in Germany. Essabar, Bin al-Shibh and a roommate of Atta, Said Bahaji, all fled Germany before the attacks and remain fugitives.

The men of the Hamburg cell came from different backgrounds and countries but in ways were strikingly similar. Many were physically slight, men the size of boys; most were from the fringes of whatever society they came from and whatever schools they attended. All but one enrolled in college and many did not fit well into German life. Several had never before expressed much interest in religion or politics.

The men came to Germany at different times and to different cities over five years, beginning in the summer of 1992 when Atta, then 24, arrived from Egypt. He eventually enrolled at the Technical University of Hamburg-Harburg, studying urban planning.

Atta lived as a strict Muslim from the time of his arrival in Hamburg. He fasted during Ramadan and observed dietary prohibitions carefully. He prayed five times a day. He visited mosques when his schedule permitted; otherwise, he prayed wherever he was--at home, school or work.

During his first years in Hamburg, Atta gave no sign of being anything other than an exceptionally disciplined student. He went to class, did his work and prayed. A roommate took him to a movie once. Atta hated it and they never went again. He made few friends. He generally ate alone and, his roommates said, not with any joy.

"I remember," a roommate said, "sitting down at the table and Mohamed sighing, 'This is boring. Eating is boring.' He said it wasn't just that he wanted different food, it was just the act of eating."

He was an oddly self-contained man, the roommate said, "reluctant to any pleasure."

It is not certain when Atta started going to Al Quds, but a friend recalls meeting him there soon after the mosque opened in 1993. He went to mosque daily and sometimes returned to his room in the evening with Arab friends.

Foreign undergraduates must demonstrate German language competence before being admitted to university. When the other members of the cell began to arrive in Germany in 1994, they all enrolled in language programs, most of them in smaller cities around Germany.

When Said Bahaji came to Hamburg at the beginning of 1995, it was a homecoming of sorts. His Moroccan father and German mother met and married in Germany, and Bahaji was born there in 1975. The family moved to Morocco when he was 9. He came back for college.

He enrolled in the electrical engineering program at the technical university in 1996. He lived at a student home and spent weekends with his aunt Barbara Arens, a graphic designer with whom Bahaji shared an affinity for computers. He called her his "high-tech aunt." He had been secular, she said, until introduced to radical Islam by fellow students. Arens eventually kicked him out of the house.

Ramzi bin al-Shibh came to Germany not as a student, but, using the name Ramzi Omar, by claiming to be a political refugee from Sudan.

No one knows exactly when he arrived in the country. He made an asylum claim in 1995, which was denied; he appealed and was assigned to what the Germans call a container camp north of Hamburg. The camp in the little town of Kummerfeld is a single building about the size and shape of a ship container. The container is divided into three sleeping rooms, one bathroom and one kitchen. It's cramped, drafty and unpleasant. Container residents were paid a modest monthly stipend. They were encouraged but not required to find work. Typically for Germany's modern bureaucracy, as long as they showed up for weekly roll calls, they were free to come and go as they pleased.

Bin al-Shibh's asylum appeal was eventually denied. The judge in the case said he doubted Bin al-Shibh was even Sudanese, much less fleeing persecution. The judge was right. Bin al-Shibh was born in Yemen, in the mountain valley region of Hadramaut, the ancestral home of Osama bin Laden.

The dismissal of the claim had little effect. Bin al-Shibh had already returned to Yemen, then, using his real name, he received a German visa and reentered the country legally.

Marwan al-Shehhi came from a small town north of Dubai in the United Arab Emirates. His father was a Muslim cleric, and the son has been described as an especially devout Muslim. He enrolled in a language institute in Bonn in February 1996. He boarded with a local family. He took language classes for more than two years before he demonstrated sufficient competence to enroll in university.

He didn't move permanently to Hamburg until 1999.

This seems to some investigators quite late for someone who would play such a key role in the plot. Al-Shehhi had spent several months in 1998 in Hamburg, trying to pass his language exams. Presumably, had he passed in Hamburg in 1998, he would have stayed. He didn't, however, and had to move back to Bonn.

Just after Al-Shehhi left, a Pakistani student named Atif bin Mansour arrived in Hamburg. Early the next year, Mansour, whose name has never been released by German authorities, was Atta's co-applicant for a room for a new Islamic study group at the technical university. Mansour was a pilot on leave from the Pakistani Air Force. This in itself is intriguing--a Pakistani pilot? Investigators acknowledge they haven't figured out Mansour's role in the plot, if any. The German Federal Bureau of Criminal Investigations said he remains "a very interesting figure."

Mansour's brother, also in the Pakistani armed forces, was killed in battle that spring of 1999. Mansour rushed home to be with his family and never came back. Not long after, Al-Shehhi returned to Hamburg. It is as if they replaced one another.

Ziad Samir Jarrah came from a well-known and secular family in Lebanon. He moved to Greifswald, in the former East Germany, in the spring of 1996 to begin college. Almost immediately, Jarrah met a medical student, a woman named Aysel Senguen, and within the year they were living together and plotting their escape from Greifswald.

Jarrah moved to Hamburg in 1997, enrolling in the aeronautical engineering department at the University of Applied Sciences. The summer after he started classes, he worked in the paint shop of the Volkswagen factory in Wolfsburg. He was there at the same time, apparently on the same shift, as a young Moroccan student, Zakariya Essabar, who, that fall, also moved to Hamburg and enrolled at Applied Sciences.

The Big Man

Bernhard Falk, vice president of the German investigative agency, said the recruiting of men to join the jihad seldom occurred in the open. It was "in the backrooms, in closed circles. Only there, they preach hate and anti-Western sermons, and say what they really think. And there, the radicals try to convince certain people to go to Afghanistan."

There were notable exceptions to this. One man everyone within Al Quds knew was a big, beefy, bearded middle-aged fellow named Mohammed Haydar Zammar. He was an auto mechanic who had been unemployed for years. He, his wife and six children survived on welfare payments.

Zammar's bluster matched his size. In almost any discussion, his was the loudest voice and most radical view. He was well-known in many of the city's mosques as an advocate of jihad; though he spoke of serious things, he was not always regarded seriously.

The president of the neighboring Muhadjirin mosque said Zammar was "like a little boy" who talked too much.

Even Zammar's brother said, "His tongue was his problem."

Zammar was familiar to authorities too, because of his boisterousness and because he was apparently an acquaintance of a man arrested as a suspected Al Qaeda agent in 1998, charged with complicity in the bombing of two U.S. embassies in Africa.

In part because of Zammar's outspokenness, authorities tend to discount his role in the Sept. 11 plot. They concluded no one would entrust information to a braggart like him. It is clear, though, that Zammar knew the men in the Hamburg cell, in particular Said Bahaji. In part because of the acquaintance, German police in 1998 performed what they describe as limited surveillance on Bahaji.

Bahaji at the time was living with Atta and Bin al-Shibh. Nothing came of the surveillance and it was discontinued.

In Germany in the 1990s, the threat of terrorism of any sort seemed distant. The last real threats had come from the political left, in the Red Army Faction, successor to the 1970s Baader-Meinhof gang. But that threat ended years before. The class struggle was history.

The only thing young Germans, Generation Golf, as they were called, shared with the Maoists was an affinity for black turtlenecks. Rather than rejecting the status quo, they wanted what their parents had and worried they might not be able to get it. Germany might have been the safest place in Europe to establish an Al Qaeda cell.

One measure of the seriousness with which Germany viewed the threat of terrorism from within its fast-growing Muslim population is the distribution of counter-terrorism resources. In Hamburg, authorities had one man assigned part-time to monitor radical Islam. That's half a man to watch 80,000 people.

Law enforcement authorities say they viewed men such as Zammar as individuals, not connected to any formal networks.

"We only knew them as radical Muslims. This is not a crime," one investigator said. "They might have had contact with followers of Osama bin Laden. This is also not a crime."

There were, however, fundamentalist recruiting networks. In some instances, these networks overlapped with--and took advantage of--a missionary sect of Muslims called the Tabligh.

The Tabligh proselytizes throughout the world. It professes to be peaceful, but intelligence services throughout the Mideast say the group was hijacked by organizations, such as Al Qaeda, to recruit moujahedeen.

Zammar was a Tabligh, according to his brother. He had traveled to Pakistan at the group's invitation some years ago and joined, he said.

Since Zammar no longer worked, religion became almost a full-time job. To recruit people for jihad was not unusual, or illegal. For more than a decade, thousands of men throughout Western Europe went to Afghanistan, Bosnia or Chechnya to fight or, more usually, as a sort of baptism to the broad goals of radical Islam. It became, within that world, an almost hip thing to do.

That was part of the ingenuity of the Sept. 11 plot. Much of it could be put into place without crimes being committed. Those would come later.

The Soft Man

German law enforcement officials think the recruitment of the Hamburg cell probably didn't take place until 1998. The officials claim, without describing it, to have one solid piece of evidence from that period that indicates Atta played an unspecified lead role.

These officials describe the most likely recruitment process as being less formal than has generally been reported. They think there might have been several steps in the process: first, a soft, mainly religious recruitment, drawing the men into a deeper commitment to their religion; second, an urging or outright invitation to go to Afghanistan to see what it was like; third, at the camps, a harder recruitment for those, perhaps few, deemed worthy of joining Al Qaeda; and finally, a selection process for specific missions.

They think Zammar would have contributed to the second stage, acting as a sort of travel agent for people who wanted to go to Afghanistan.

A principal candidate for the first-stage recruiter is a Hamburg postal worker named Mohammed bin Nasser Belfas.

He was born in Indonesia and spent part of his childhood in Yemen. He went to university in Cairo. Belfas came to Germany on a six-month tourist visa in 1972. He stayed 13 years before he was discovered and jailed. When he was released, the Germans tried to deport him. But there was no place to deport him to. He was stateless. The Germans relented and allowed him to stay. He was granted citizenship in 2000.

Belfas works the night shift at a suburban postal facility. He is almost constantly in the company of young men. He is quite well-known among Muslims. Friends say he is a lay missionary who has made it his task--one called it a mission--to unite the various ethnicities and sects of Muslims in Germany. He speaks German, Arabic, Indonesian and English.

He travels the country, paying particular attention to college towns, where he will speak to any group no matter how small. He is, in every sense, a recruiter, whether he knows it or not.

For several years, Belfas has conducted regular study meetings at his apartment. Mohamed Atta and Marwan Al-Shehhi were regular members of the study group. Atta, one attendee said, acted almost as Belfas' deputy.

Once, said Volker Harum Bruhn, a member of the group, they watched a CNN newscast on suicide bombers in Israel. Part of the program told the story of a bomber who set off his charge prematurely, injuring only himself. He was rushed to an Israeli hospital unconscious. He awoke on the operating table, looked up and said: "Is this heaven?"

The doctor asked whether the bomber thought there were Jews in heaven.

The bomber replied, "No."

"Then," the doctor said, "I guess you're not in heaven."

This cracked everybody up, Bruhn said, even Atta, who didn't laugh much.

Joined Together

Atta left Hamburg over the winter holiday, as he usually did, in 1997. This time, he didn't return for three months. He told his roommate he had been on a pilgrimage to Mecca. He had been to Mecca 18 months earlier and it would be unlikely for a student--even one so devout--to go twice so quickly or stay so long.

It was the biggest gap in his schedule since he had come to Hamburg and the first opportunity he would have had to go to camps in Afghanistan.

After he returned in the spring of 1998, almost everything the core members of the group did, they did with others in the group. That spring, Bin al-Shibh left the container camp and lived for a time with Belfas. That summer, Atta, Bin al-Shibh, Al-Shehhi and Belfas worked in a computer warehouse together, packing boxes. Authorities say they don't know quite what to make of this. The man who owns the company said he hired students when he had extra work. It is normal summer work for students, but Belfas? Even the man who owned the company thought it odd that a middle-aged night postal worker would spend his days in a computer warehouse.

Atta left the student house at the end of summer. He and a group of men--nobody knows how many--moved for a couple months into a project flat on a cold stretch of road on an island in the Elbe River. They had no furniture, only mattresses. Neighbors said they were out of the house all day and they talked long into most nights.

In the winter, Atta, Bin al-Shibh and Bahaji moved into a neat, newly refurbished three-bedroom apartment at Marienstrasse 54, near the university.

Some investigators theorize the men in the Hamburg cell might have been recruited by Al Qaeda scouts in the smaller German towns where many lived, then sent to Hamburg. As possible evidence of this, they cite the fact that several of the cities where the hijackers lived--even small towns such as Greifswald and Muenster--had well-known radical preachers.

The biggest argument against the "sending theory" is that it assumes there was some sort of control center in Hamburg, operating for many years, and authorities have no evidence of this. German officials, in fact, think the planning and control for Sept. 11 occurred almost entirely in Afghanistan.

The simplest explanation of the movement of the members of the Hamburg cell is that it was completely natural. Most Arab students--not just those who become terrorists--leave the smaller college towns after they pass language tests and most of them head for Berlin, Hamburg or Frankfurt. These are the largest cities in Germany and the cities with the largest Islamic populations.

However they arrived, by the end of 1998, all of the men in the Hamburg cell except Al-Shehhi were in Hamburg and ready.

Mohammed's Plan

Given his taste for the high life and pretty girls, Khalid Shaikh Mohammed can't have enjoyed Afghanistan much under the puritanical Taliban. He seems to have gotten away often.

European intelligence experts say in 1996 and '97 he spent time in the Czech Republic capital of Prague, a key crossroads then for questionable men and dirty money.

American intelligence officials say he was in Germany in 1999. The Americans speculate that Mohammed was there to meet with the Hamburg cell.

He is thought to have made repeated visits to Southeast Asia--Malaysia and the Philippines. Once, in 1999, Philippine intelligence officials say, the FBI tipped them Mohammed was back to visit an old girlfriend. He vanished before agents arrived to arrest him.

American officials have told Italian authorities they suspect Mohammed was in Rome for as long as three weeks in 2000. Others say he played a central role that year in organizing the bombing of the U.S. destroyer Cole in Yemen.

Finally, this summer--even after Sept. 11--a report circulated in Manila that Mohammed was back in town to see a girlfriend yet again. Police found only a rumor and no man to back it up.

It is uncertain when Mohammed first proposed the Sept. 11 airliner attacks on the United States, but captured Al Qaeda officers have told interrogators it was in fact Mohammed's idea, according to a U.S. intelligence official. American officials think Mohammed brought the airliner idea to the Al Qaeda hierarchy, which approved it and gave Mohammed and perhaps another Bin Laden lieutenant, Abu Zubeida, who ran the training camps, responsibility to manage it.

Mohammed wouldn't need bombs this time. The airplanes would become the bombs. What he would need instead were pilots. Zubeida's camps would be a good place to find them.

This operation was different from previous Al Qaeda plots: It was of a grander scale, more ambitious and expensive. It seems to have been more closely controlled. The men seem to have been more carefully chosen, more cosmopolitan and technically proficient.

German investigators think the men were already committed to Al Qaeda by the time of Mohammed's 1999 visit to Germany, although Atta for one seemed to retain doubts.

Throughout 1999, Atta regularly attended Belfas' Islamic study group. After one of these meetings, Atta asked to see Volker Harum Bruhn privately. At that meeting, Bruhn said Atta warned him strongly to stay away from Islamic extremists, to follow the Koran strictly but to live a careful life.

Later in the year, after Atta finally received his master's degree in October, he went home to Cairo one last time. While there, according to his aunt, he asked his mother, who was ill, whether he could remain in Egypt permanently, to begin a career and care for her.

She insisted he continue his education, to go on to a doctoral program in the United States. He did, of course, go to the United States, but the next step in his education was in Afghanistan.

Officials with the German federal police say they have uncovered airline data that indicate Atta, Al-Shehhi and Jarrah--three Sept. 11 pilots--and Bin al-Shibh, who applied for flight school but was never able to get a U.S. visa, all flew to Pakistan in November. They went from there to an Al Qaeda training camp near Kandahar.

Al-Shehhi, who was paid a $2,000-per-month stipend from the United Arab Emirates Army the entire time he was in Germany, withdrew $6,000 from his bank account to pay for the tickets. They flew separately, with at least some of them using aliases through Istanbul to Karachi. The timing of the meeting suggests this could have been when they committed to the mission and were told it would involve learning to fly airplanes.

Building a Terror Business

Khalid Shaikh Mohammed wasn't the only one who got away after the failed Manila bomb plot. Hambali, the Indonesian businessman, didn't just elude capture; he eluded detection. Authorities didn't even know he was involved.

He remained in his little hut along Manggis River Village Road and, security officials now say, began constructing a regional network. Two other Indonesian fundamentalists lived in the village for much of the same time Hambali did. Together, the three embarked on a long, patient recruiting process. The other men preached frequently at mosques. Hambali spoke only to small groups in private.

One follower later told police what was most impressive about Hambali was "his quiet and humble manners." He made a regular circuit of small prayer groups; he raised money and insisted that jihad was the answer. Malaysian police say they have since arrested several men whom Hambali sent to Afghanistan for training; several bombing plots have been attributed to his network.

At the time, no one paid any attention.

One of Hambali's disciples was Yazid Sufaat, a former Malaysian army captain and Cal State Sacramento graduate. Sufaat and his wife, also a Sacramento alumnus, had prospered after their return to Kuala Lumpur. She owned a computer services firm; he did drug testing for the government.

They lived with their young children in a small row house in a middle-class Kuala Lumpur suburb. It is not lavish; the house has the decaying look of many things in the tropics, where time, heat and humidity conquer all. But the couple were able to buy a weekend getaway at a new condominium complex in the hills out of town. The development advertises "city living, country style." With its Jack Nicklaus-designed golf course, sports clubs, foot reflexology and postpartum slimming classes, the development could be in Orange County.

One notable difference was that Sufaat frequently lent the condo to Afghan war veterans who came to town to get artificial limbs. It probably didn't seem all that unusual then, in early January 2000, when a small group of Arabs, one missing a leg, showed up at the condominium.

The one-legged man was Tawfiq bin Atash, for many years a personal aide to Osama bin Laden. With him were two men who would become Sept. 11 hijackers: Khalid Almihdhar and Nawaf Alhazmi. At least two other men attended, one of whom has been identified, tentatively, as Ramzi bin al-Shibh from Hamburg.

The men were followed at the request of the CIA. The Americans had intercepted a telephone call to Yemen in which Almihdhar detailed arrangements for the trip. The Americans didn't know Almihdhar, but they knew the number he called was used as a dispatch center for Al Qaeda. Bin Laden had called it dozens of times over a period of years in the late 1990s, according to court records.

The CIA asked the Malaysians to monitor the Kuala Lumpur meeting. The Malaysians photographed the men going in and out of the condo.

It was not until much later that CIA analysts figured out who the men in the photos were. Atash was determined to have been one of the coordinators of the October 2000 attack in Yemen on the destroyer Cole. Yemeni authorities say Almihdhar also helped prepare the attack.

Bin al-Shibh has not been positively identified from the photographs. German police, however, say they have credit card receipts that indicate Bin al-Shibh was in Malaysia at the same time.

Sufaat, who has been arrested, told Malaysian officials he allowed the condo to be used at Hambali's request and had no idea who the men were. He said he does not know whether Hambali attended the meeting but said Hambali has his own key to the condo.

Investigators do not know who else the men might have met while in Kuala Lumpur. They do know that Malaysia was a frequent haunt of one of Hambali's old business partners, Khalid Shaikh Mohammed. It would have made sense for him to be there, but no one knows whether he was.

The meeting occurred in early January 2000, just after a series of planned Al Qaeda millennium attacks failed. Intelligence officials believe the men met to discuss new attacks: the Cole and, given the timing, Sept. 11.

On Jan. 8, the men left Kuala Lumpur.

On Jan. 15, Almihdhar and Alhazmi arrived in Los Angeles.

On Jan. 18, in the United Arab Emirates, Marwan Al-Shehhi, using a brand-new passport, became the first of the Hamburg cell to apply for and receive a U.S. visa.

In March, Mohamed Atta began e-mailing 31 flight schools in the United States.

In May, Atta, also using a new passport, received his U.S. visa.

By the end of June, Al-Shehhi, Atta and Jarrah were all in the United States, looking for flight schools.

R&R in San Diego

It's not clear when Omar Al-Bayoumi arrived in San Diego, who he was, whom he worked for, why he came or why he left. What is clear is that he had more to do with two men who later ended up aboard American Airlines Flight 77 on Sept. 11 than anyone else in town.

Al-Bayoumi appears to have arrived in San Diego in 1995. He lived with his wife and four children at a suburban apartment complex. He told people he was a student of international business, but it seemed unlikely because he was already 40 years old and he never went to school. He didn't work, either. He explained that by telling some people he received a monthly stipend from his former employer, an aviation company in his native Saudi Arabia, and telling others he had a Saudi government scholarship.

Al-Bayoumi almost always carried a video camera and taped everything. He spent a lot of time at the Islamic Center of San Diego, which is the hub of the city's multiethnic Muslim population. He paid particular attention to newcomers and could be counted on to help them find housing and get settled.

In late 1999, he brought to town two young Saudi students and asked people to help them settle in. They hardly spoke English and would need help getting Social Security cards, driver's licenses and bank accounts.

The two men Al-Bayoumi brought to San Diego were Almihdhar and Alhazmi.

Alhazmi later told a friend he and Almihdhar met Al-Bayoumi at a Los Angeles restaurant, when Al-Bayoumi overheard them speaking Arabic and introduced himself. Al-Bayoumi learned they were new to the area and offered to drive them to San Diego and help them get settled.

They took him up on the offer, Alhazmi said. Al-Bayoumi brought them to the Parkwood Apartments, got them a room and even paid the rent for the first couple of months.

He threw them a welcome party. Al-Bayoumi told people they were in San Diego to learn English, although, like him, no one can remember either of them ever going to a single class. Alhazmi spent a lot of time at the San Diego State library, surfing the Web.

Alhazmi signed a six-month lease. And despite the fact that Al-Bayoumi paid the first two months' rent, they complained that they couldn't afford the place. They moved out, taking a room in the house of a retired professor. In the spring, Alhazmi told a friend he was having $5,000 wired to him from Saudi Arabia, but he had no account. He asked whether the money could be sent to the friend's account. The friend agreed, but when the money arrived it was from the United Arab Emirates, not Saudi Arabia, and the sender was identified only as Ali.

The money was intended for flight lessons, which both Alhazmi and Almihdhar said they wanted to take. Another friend took them to Montgomery Field, north of San Diego, and arranged for them to start lessons. They took one and quit.

"The first day they came in here, they said they want to fly Boeings," recalled Fereidoun "Fred" Sorbi, the instructor. "We said you have to start slower. You can't just jump right into Boeings."

Acquaintances said the pair seemed to regard their time in California almost as R&R. Alhazmi had season passes to Sea World and the San Diego Zoo. They bought a Toyota sedan and liked to make the run up to Las Vegas. In town, they hung out at Cheetah's, a nude bar near the Islamic Center.

The center itself is hardly a haven for radical Islam. It is multiethnic and promotes assimilation. All the signs in the building are in English. In 2000, a group of men showed up and passed out literature praising Bin Laden. Center officials confiscated the leaflets and told the men to leave and not come back.

Almihdhar left San Diego in June 2000. Alhazmi stayed until December. He took a job for a few weeks, washing cars at a Texaco station. The station was owned by two Palestinians and was a hangout for Arab men, who sat outside at a picnic table, talking and drinking coffee. Alhazmi hung out with them even when he wasn't working. He talked often, friends said, about Muslims being treated unfairly around the world.

He did not tell his San Diego friends that he had left Saudi Arabia three years earlier to go to Chechnya to fight, which is what his family says now.

In December, another young Saudi arrived. Alhazmi introduced him as Hani. The man was apparently Hani Hanjour, a Saudi who had spent most of three years in Arizona in the late 1990s, training at various flight schools. He was by every account a horrible flight student, but eventually in 1999 managed to obtain a commercial license, after which he returned to Saudi Arabia. Now back in the U.S., he and Alhazmi went off to fly airplanes in Arizona.

On the Move

The core of men involved in the Sept. 11 attacks did an enormous amount of traveling. Much of 2000 and 2001 is a blur of movement. They put thousands of miles on rental cars. They spent thousands of dollars on plane tickets.

Atta and Al-Shehhi each made at least two separate transatlantic trips. Ziad Samir Jarrah arrived in the U.S. for flight training in late June 2000. In the next 13 months, he left the country five times.

On Oct. 20, 2000, one of the odder trips occurred. Mohammed Belfas, Atta's Hamburg mentor, accompanied Agus Budiman, a young architecture student he had known for years, from Germany to the United States.

Belfas later said he simply wanted to see the United States. He and Budiman flew to Washington, D.C. Budiman--like Belfas, an Indonesian--had been coming to the United States for years. He had family in the Washington suburbs, and even had a Virginia driver's license, and now wanted to move permanently to the U.S.

While here, Belfas occasionally accompanied Budiman to his job as a driver for Take-Out Taxi restaurant delivery service.

Belfas offered to help drive the delivery car if Budiman would help him get a U.S. driver's license. Budiman told Belfas he didn't need an American license. Belfas insisted, saying he wanted the license as a souvenir.

On Nov. 4, Belfas and Budiman made the first of two trips to the Department of Motor Vehicles office in downtown Arlington, Va. On the first trip, Belfas received a Virginia identification card after he and Budiman swore that Belfas lived in Arlington. When they went back two days later, they got his driver's license, using the ID card as proof of residence.

That's all there was to it. Belfas had his souvenir, if that's what it was. Within the week, he returned to Germany.

In the summer of 2001, as they too neared the ends of their stay in the U.S., seven of the 19 hijackers visited the same office to get IDs or driver's licenses in exactly the same way. They didn't need Budiman. They paid other men to sign on their behalf.

They used the IDs to make purchasing airline tickets and boarding planes simpler.

The Saudis

Of all the hijackers, Khalid Almihdhar is the one who seems to have the broadest contacts with Al Qaeda. He appears to be the son-in-law of a well-known Yemeni Al Qaeda figure and is believed to have had a role in the Cole bombing.

Almihdhar left the U.S. in the summer of 2000 and did not return until July 4, 2001, by which time 12 other young Saudi men and one from the United Arab Emirates had arrived at various locations on the East Coast.

Less is known about these late-arriving men, in part because Saudi Arabia has barred most reporters from the country. For months after the attacks, the Saudi government denied even that the men were Saudi citizens.

Most of the men were from the southwestern provinces of Saudi Arabia. Most were from relatively well-off but not wealthy families. Two-thirds of them told their families they were leaving to join the jihad. Several mentioned wanting to fight in Chechnya. Several left with friends or relatives.

It is not known who recruited them for the Sept. 11 plot, but those who went for training in the Afghan camps could easily have been recruited there. Almihdhar's absence from the U.S. for the entire time during which they were presumably recruited suggests he might have played some role in recruiting them.

In one sense, it isn't surprising that so many Saudis would be among the attackers: It is easier for Saudis to get American visas.

From the beginning, too, Saudis were the largest national group among the Afghan Arabs. Bin Laden obviously is Saudi and so were many of the financial backers of the moujahedeen and, later, the Taliban.

The relief groups and charities that have been among the most prominent supporters of the Taliban and have been implicated in various Al Qaeda plots are either based in Saudi Arabia or derive much of their support from there.

Khalid Shaikh Mohammed's brother ran one such agency.

A Meeting on the Coast

Two months before he made history, Atta made one last overseas trip. On July 8, he flew from Miami to Madrid. The next day, Atta rented a silver Hyundai and set off for Tarragona, an eight-hour drive. It was his second trip to Spain that year. This time, he spent 11 days. For most of that time, Atta's former roommate Ramzi bin al-Shibh was also in Spain, in the same region.

Bin al-Shibh checked into the Hotel Monica in Cambrils. Atta stayed in a hotel in Tarragona 15 minutes away.

The next day, Bin al-Shibh checked out without breakfast and disappeared for five days. Atta too largely dropped off the screen. Most investigators suspect the two came not to meet just one another, but also with someone else--an operational commander such as Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, or a courier relaying instructions. Perhaps, some suspect, this was when the final details of the plot were set--the date of the attack, maybe, or who would go on which airplanes. A meeting could have taken place in a safe house provided by a local network.

This theory is consistent with the length of time they stayed and with their disappearance for the bulk of it. But in Spain, as elsewhere, despite months of investigation, the plotters left more unknowns than answers.

Another theory is the meeting concerned finding a replacement pilot for Bin al-Shibh, who despite four applications was unable to get a U.S. visa. The replacement, according to this theory, was Zacarias Moussaoui, a muscular, angry French Moroccan veteran of the Afghan camps and Chechnya.

Moussaoui is the only man charged by the United States with involvement in the Sept. 11 plot. The logic of the U.S. indictment of Moussaoui is that because Bin al-Shibh could not get into the United States, the hijackers were one man short of the four teams of five designated to commandeer the planes; Bin al-Shibh brought in Moussaoui as a late replacement, prosecutors allege.

On July 10, the day after Atta and Bin al-Shibh arrived in Spain, Moussaoui paid the Pan Am International Flight Academy in Minnesota for a flight simulator course, according to the indictment. He was still in Norman, Okla., where he had washed out of a course earlier in the year. He made another payment to the Minnesota school July 11.

Bin al-Shibh returned to Hamburg on July 20. On July 29 and Aug. 2, Moussaoui made several calls to a number in Dusseldorf, Germany. Bin al-Shibh received wire payments totaling $15,000 from the suspected 9/11 paymaster in United Arab Emirates on July 30 and 31 in Hamburg, then wired $14,000 to Moussaoui on Aug. 1 and Aug. 3.

A week later, Moussaoui left Oklahoma for Minnesota, where he paid approximately $6,300 in cash to the Pan Am International Flight Academy on Aug. 10 and started his course. He quickly attracted suspicion, resulting in his arrest on Aug. 17. Some investigators suspect his arrest set the attacks in motion, perhaps prematurely.

Final Flights

Not long after Atta returned to the United States from Spain, he made a quick trip to Las Vegas, his second of the summer. He stayed, as usual, in a cheap motel off the Strip. At least two other hijackers were in town at the same time--Alhazmi and Hanjour.

Like much else about the plot, no one knows whether they met, or if they did, why. Alhazmi and Hanjour by that point were living in New Jersey. Atta had bought his Madrid air ticket the previous month near the same New Jersey town where Hanjour and Alhazmi were living. They could easily have met in New Jersey. Las Vegas wasn't convenient. So why go there a month before the attacks?

It could well be they were in Las Vegas to meet someone else, just as in Spain. Las Vegas certainly seems like Khalid Shaikh Mohammed's kind of town.

The next month, in effect, the last month, has been well-documented. The Saudis were integrated with the Hamburg cell. They moved in varying combinations up and down the East Coast. They worked out at gyms and reserved and purchased air tickets.

In Europe, the remaining members of the Hamburg cell were making preparations as well. Three months before Sept. 11, Said Bahaji told his employers at the computer company he would be quitting his job in the fall. He had accepted an internship in Pakistan, he told them, and would be moving. His employers say he was an exceptional worker. They were sorry to see him go.

He told his family the same thing. His aunt Barbara Arens heard about the internship, and she says now that she didn't believe a word of it. She says she even went to the police before Sept. 11 to try to get them to do something. Like what, they asked.

Bahaji left Hamburg on Sept. 4, flew to Karachi via Istanbul and disappeared. German agents later determined two other passengers on the same flight stayed in the same room with Bahaji at the Embassy Hotel in Karachi. They were traveling with false identification papers. Zakariya Essabar disappeared from Hamburg at the same time. Investigators think he might have been one of the men with Bahaji. They don't know who the third man might have been.

Ramzi bin al-Shibh returned to Spain on Sept. 5, flying from Dusseldorf. He stayed at a private home in the Madrid area, investigators say. He did not use his return ticket to Germany and is presumed to have made his way to Afghanistan.

All the while, it was later determined, FBI agents were trying unsuccessfully to get a look at Zacarias Moussaoui's computer. Other agents were searching for Alhazmi and Almihdhar after having been belatedly notified by the CIA that the two men were known to have associated with terrorist suspects.

There was in the intelligence community a general air of concern, verging on panic, that something very bad was about to happen. The signs were there. The intelligence machine produced enormous amounts of information and people were beginning to make sense of it. Electronic intercepts, telephone chatter, warnings from foreign services, internal memos--everything pointed in one direction. There was something out there.

In retrospect, the information makes the Sept. 11 attacks seem inevitable. Unfortunately, retrospective analysis is useful in understanding the past, not changing it, or even guaranteeing the future will be different. For now, one thing has not changed whatsoever:

U.S. agents have been chasing the specter of Khalid Shaikh Mohammed since 1994. They've come close to catching him at least twice, but every time he managed to slip away, to stay a step ahead of his pursuers.

This spring, with the Afghan war fought and resolutely won, with many key Al Qaeda operatives dead or captured, with the organization flushed from its hide-outs, on the run and in some disarray, a truck bomb exploded outside a synagogue in Tunisia, killing 19 people. Al Qaeda?

Before the attack, one of the bombers called a cell phone belonging, it is thought, to Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, who some believe has assumed a more central role in the organization and who, whatever his role, remains, still, a step ahead.











The Plots and Designs of Al Qaeda's Engineer
Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, the man believed to be behind 9/11, hides in plain sight -- and narrowly escapes capture in Pakistan.
By Terry McDermott, Josh Meyer and Patrick J. McDonnell
Times Staff Writers

December 22, 2002

KARACHI, Pakistan -- Senior Pakistani and American intelligence officials say the operational commander of Al Qaeda, the man believed to have planned the Sept. 11 attacks on the United States, narrowly avoided capture during a raid in which authorities took his two young sons into custody.

It was one of at least half a dozen missed opportunities over eight years to seize Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, who is described by intelligence analysts on three continents as the man most responsible for Al Qaeda's continuing terrorist attacks.

Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence agency has had Mohammed's two sons, ages 7 and 9, in custody since September. One senior American investigator said authorities believe that they might have come "within moments" of capturing Mohammed in the raid at a Karachi apartment.

In family photos seized at the apartment, Mohammed is pictured playing with the boys.

Pakistani intelligence officials said that in recent months they have seen persistent evidence that Mohammed -- even on the run -- has been aggressively directing Al Qaeda terrorist cells.

"Despite being so much in danger, he has not gone into hibernation," one senior Pakistani official said. "He is trying to protect what they have. He would like to consolidate first and then rebuild on the same edifice. And he is doing that. He remains active."

Mohammed has been linked to attacks against the United States as far back as 1993, but his importance in the Al Qaeda structure became clear only after Sept. 11 last year, U.S. officials say. Now, some officials say, stopping Mohammed is as important as capturing Osama bin Laden is, perhaps even more so.

Mohammed, believed to be 37, has traveled the world as one of the chief managers of the Al Qaeda network, using Egyptian, Qatari, Saudi, British and Kuwaiti identities. He is said to speak Arabic with a Kuwaiti accent and to be fluent in Urdu, the principal language of Pakistan, and English, acquired in part as he studied for his mechanical engineering degree at a university in North Carolina.

Although born in Kuwait, he is a Pakistani national whose family is from Baluchistan, an area that straddles Pakistan's borders with Iran and Afghanistan. He has used more than three dozen aliases, including one -- Mukhtar al Baluchi -- that honors this tribal heritage.

Mohammed has been operating out of Karachi on and off for a decade. He communicates with Al Qaeda cells around the world by courier, e-mail, coded telephone conversations and shortwave radio; German intelligence agents say that when he has been forced to retreat to rural hide-outs he sends his messages by donkey.

Even during the U.S. bombing campaign against Al Qaeda in Afghanistan late last year, Mohammed continued to plan, staff and direct new terrorist attacks, according to intelligence documents made available to The Times. The documents detail Mohammed's orchestration of a bombing campaign in Southeast Asia.

Mohammed the Pakistani, as the Asian bombers knew him, housed a young Canadian recruit for weeks in his Karachi apartment, personally instructing him on communication protocols -- e-mail passwords, telephone codes. He then sent him off to coordinate and finance the bomb squads. With just a few days' notice, Mohammed was able to deliver $50,000 to the recruit to pay for bomb-making materials. The money was delivered in packs of $100 bills at a shopping mall in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, according to the intelligence documents.

That plot was foiled, but Mohammed's intimate involvement in it underscores his leadership in building regional terrorist networks. One network linked to Al Qaeda is allegedly behind the October bombing in Bali, Indonesia, in which nearly 200 people died.

It is the same role that American investigators believe he played not just in Asia but also around the world: If Bin Laden has been the architect of Al Qaeda, Mohammed has been its engineer. Al Qaeda members in custody have told their interrogators that Mohammed had operational cells in place in the United States after the Sept. 11 attacks and that he was the principal proponent within Al Qaeda of developing radioactive "dirty bombs," according to European intelligence officers.

The FBI acknowledges that it underestimated Mohammed's significance for years, a senior agency official said. "He was under everybody's radar. We don't know how he did it. We wish we knew.... He's the guy nobody ever heard of. The others had egos. He didn't."

Mohammed's persistence has earned the grudging admiration of some investigators, who marvel at his uncanny ability to stay one step ahead of unprecedented dragnets. In Pakistan, where the FBI believes Mohammed is still hiding, those attempts have involved a small army of agents from the military, police and multiple countries and intelligence agencies.

"The way he is managing their affairs, the way he is controlling things, he is not an ordinary man," said one top Pakistani intelligence official. "He is very sharp and brave -- an unusual combination."

Sometimes Mohammed's escapes have been abetted by the caution of his pursuers. In one instance, in 1996, U.S. intelligence had determined that Mohammed was in Doha, Qatar. Some American officials wanted to organize what they call a "snatch and grab," essentially a commando raid, to seize him.

"Good intel had placed him in Qatar. This was, 'Oh my God! This bastard is in Doha -- let's get him," said one person involved in the investigation.

This plan was defeated when high-level managers complained during a White House meeting that it was too risky and might result in American deaths, according to two people involved in the decision. They said this failure to act decisively characterized the U.S. government's lack of a serious approach to terrorism before the Sept. 11 attacks.

"Look at what has happened in the last six years -- you would have to assume that he played a role in everything from that point on. We absolutely believe that," said Neil Herman, a former top FBI counter-terrorism officer. "He is right there. He is a common denominator. If he had been caught in 1996, who knows what could have been prevented."

Pakistani and American officials say catching Mohammed now could turn the tide in the war on terrorism. The senior Pakistani intelligence official said: "If you catch Khalid Shaikh at this point, you will break the backbone of the entire network."

Almost every Al Qaeda suspect whom the Pakistanis have arrested since last year has had some connection to Mohammed, authorities say. Many of those arrested have no links to one another, but they all know Mohammed.

Even those investigators who have been most involved in the hunt for Mohammed say they know very little about him. In the small, closed world of international counter-terrorism, he has become a mythic figure -- a ghost in the machine -- whose vague presence lurks behind innumerable plots but never comes completely into view.



Kuwait: Oil Town

Khalid Shaikh Mohammed was born in 1965, according to records, and reared in Fahaheel, a busy oil settlement south of Kuwait City, on the road to Saudi Arabia. The town was historically part of a sleepy agricultural zone on the edge of an oasis, a traditional site of palm and vegetable cultivation. Older Kuwaitis recall driving the route from Kuwait City through miles of desert, with the occasional vehicle, camel and Bedouin tent as the only landmarks.

That changed with the explosive growth of the petroleum business. By the late 1950s, Fahaheel boomed with a jaunty, cosmopolitan rhythm all its own. Palestinians, Lebanese, Syrians, Egyptians, Jordanians -- even the British and Americans -- were drawn here by the oil. Almost none of them were able to become Kuwaiti citizens, no matter how long they stayed, creating an enduring anxiety among many of the overseas workers. Even now, a majority of Kuwait's 2 million people are noncitizens.

Mohammed attended high school at a three-story, 1960s-style brick all-boys school that housed as many as 1,200 students. Fahaheel teachers and alumni said they recall him as a studious youth who concentrated on science. School was, and is, a serious thing in Kuwait: Schoolboys wear white shirts and gray slacks and the headmaster walks around with a bamboo cane, to be used on obstreperous students.

Mohammed's oldest brother, Zahed Shaikh, attended Kuwait University in the 1980s and was a leader of the Muslim Brotherhood -- a militant pan-Arab organization that functioned as an underground opposition throughout the region. A man who knew the family said a group called the Islamic Assn. of Palestinian Students was also formed on campus then; one of its leaders went on to become head of the political bureau of the militant Islamic group Hamas. This was the initial politicization of Mohammed, the friend said.

Much of the Middle East, following the devastating Arab loss to Israel in the 1967 war and the death of Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser -- failed champion of the drive for a secular and united Arab world -- embarked on a gradual but inexorable turn toward religion, leading up to the Islamic Revolution in Iran. Analysts say it seemed that the secular path had been exposed as lacking, and religion was an alternative source of identity and regional esteem.

"It was like a huge vacuum, and nobody was able to fill this vacuum better than the rising Islamists," said Shafeeq Ghabra, a political scientist in Kuwait.

The Kuwaiti government acknowledges that Mohammed was born in Kuwait, but that is about as far as the authorities will go in admitting any relationship with him.

"Just because he lived in Kuwait, or may have been more here, doesn't mean that this man is a Kuwaiti," Foreign Ministry Undersecretary Khalid al Jarallah said recently. "He is definitely not a Kuwaiti."

The Pakistani government also seeks to disown Mohammed, even though his first known passport was issued by Pakistan.

"Why do the Kuwaitis want to shift the blame to us?" said Muhammad Khalid, head of chancery at the Pakistani Embassy in Kuwait City.

Although much remains murky about Mohammed's background, it seems clear that his parents came from Baluchistan, which encompasses great swaths of southwestern Pakistan, southern Iran and Afghanistan. As avid coastal traders, the Baluchis have an extended history throughout the Gulf. Generations ago, area sheiks brought in fearsome Baluchi tribesmen to serve as palace guards.

Mohammed's parents had religious callings, according to local press reports. His father, Shaikh Mohammed Ali Doustin Baluchi, who died decades ago, according to Mohammed's acquaintances, has been described as a former imam, or preacher, at a mosque in the sprawling Ahmadi municipality. Mohammed's mother, Halema, was said to have worked cleaning women's bodies for burial. This is considered a prestigious job in Islam, however ill-paid.

Mohammed is one of at least five siblings -- four boys and a girl. The brothers' names -- Khalid (meaning man of eternal life); Zahed (pious); Abed (worshiper) and Aref (knowledgeable) -- reflect the family's religious orientation.

What little is known about the sister includes one compelling piece of information: She is thought to be the mother of Abdul Karim Basit, better known as Ramzi Ahmed Yousef, the man convicted of masterminding the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center in New York.



Chowan College: Abbie Dahbies

Mohammed's first extended encounter with the West occurred at Chowan College, a tiny Baptist school nestled among the cotton farms, tobacco patches and thick forests of eastern North Carolina, just south of the Virginia line.

The school was founded in 1848 as a refuge of learning for proper Southern women. Later, it became a two-year junior college, a place where young adults could gain an academic foothold. Its entry standards were liberal, but its values were bedrock and its leafy setting in isolated Murfreesboro, with no bars and a single pizza shop, pretty much ensured that everyone remained on the straight and narrow. Generations of small-town ministers, teachers and other community mainstays passed through Chowan's colonnaded facade.

After World War II, the school's missionary alumni began referring students from overseas. Dominating the international contingent by the 1980s were Middle Eastern men.

Chowan did not require the standardized English proficiency exam then widely mandated for international students, a fact that spread through the global academic network. Foreign enrollees often spent a semester or two at Chowan, improved their English and then transferred to four-year universities.

Mohammed applied to Chowan as a Pakistani citizen shortly after graduating from Fahaheel Secondary in 1983, according to college records. He told school administrators that he had heard of the college from a friend in Kuwait. His bill -- $2,245 for the spring semester -- was paid in full the day of matriculation, Jan. 10, 1984. He told fellow students that his father was dead and that his brothers picked up the tab.

"He took his studies seriously and was a very good Muslim," said Badawi Hindieh, a Palestinian from Fahaheel who attended Chowan at the same time.

Acquaintances knew him as Khalid Shaikh, a name that stuck in people's minds. Mohammed, acquaintances said, was culturally integrated into Arab and Kuwaiti society and could have passed as a Kuwaiti Arab.

"Khalid Shaikh spoke very good Arabic, like a Kuwaiti, but introduced himself as a Pakistani," Hindieh said. "We knew he was Baluchi."

Later in life, as Mohammed used multiple identities and moved from the Gulf to Afghanistan, the West and beyond, this ability to immerse in varying cultures would serve him well.

By 1984, about 50 of the 650 or so male students at Chowan were Middle Easterners, including a sizable contingent from Fahaheel and elsewhere in Kuwait. The local boys had a name for them: "Abbie Dahbies."

The Arab students were frequent recipients of anti-Iranian epithets in the years after the 1979 takeover of the U.S. Embassy in Tehran. The foreigners were sometimes viewed as cliquish.

"They seemed to be praying all the time," recalled John Franklin Timberlake, a 1984 Chowan graduate, now a police officer in Murfreesboro. "Just chanting, like. We never understood a word of it. Sometimes we'd come home late on a weekend night, maybe after we'd had a few beers, and they'd still be praying."

At Chowan, Mohammed embarked on a pre-engineering curriculum -- popular among the foreigners.

"He was a good student -- a bit better than a B-type student," Garth D. Faile, chairman of the science department, said in an interview this fall.

Mohammed, like every student, was required to attend a once-a-week chapel service based on Christian doctrine.

One large bloc of Middle Easterners lived in Parker Hall, a brick tower overlooking the campus' Lake Vann, a restful crescent of water frequented by migrating birds and couples holding hands.

Groups of Arab students would gather in a fifth-floor dorm room and follow a kind of ritual: boil a chicken, share it with rice among all present, pray and commence intense discussions, before praying anew.

In the Middle Eastern tradition, they would leave their shoes in the corridor. Some U.S. students could not resist the temptation: The footwear sometimes ended up in the lake. Another prank involved filling 55-gallon garbage containers with water and propping the vessels against the doors of the "Abbie Dahbies," knocking and running away. When the door opened, water flooded the room.

The hijinks did not appear to discourage the visitors, many of whom remained in the States and completed their degrees. Years later, one alumnus interviewed at his office in Kuwait City recalled his time at Chowan with great affection, remembering in particular the becalmed lake -- an extravagance for Arabs reared in parched latitudes.

"In a place like Chowan, some students became more insular -- speaking only to Arab students, while others tried to mix with the Americans," he recalled. "I tried to mix, but others did it differently."

Mohammed completed his semester at Chowan and moved on.



Greensboro: The Mullahs

In summer 1984, Mohammed enrolled as an engineering major at North Carolina Agricultural & Technical State University in Greensboro, a historically black college on the Piedmont plain in the central part of the state.

On Feb. 1, 1960, students at A&T -- whose most famous graduate is Jesse Jackson -- staged the first lunch-counter sit-in at a downtown Greensboro Woolworth's, a galvanizing action that spread throughout the South.

College abroad was a rite of passage for legions of Middle Eastern students -- overwhelmingly men. Typically, this was their initial long-term exposure to Western life. Some left appalled at what they witnessed. Others ate it up.

"We were all excited about going to the States," said Khalil A. Abdullah, a 1987 A&T graduate. "In high school we had seen all the movies, heard the music. We wondered so much about it."

In Greensboro, Mohammed was part of the large Middle Eastern bloc in the university's expansive engineering department -- a natural major for Kuwaitis and others from oil-producing nations. By all accounts, there were three distinct student groups at the school: African Americans (by far the largest group), white Americans and Middle Easterners.

"It wasn't like there was tension or anything, but that's just the way it was," said Winfred S. Kenner, who studied mechanical engineering at the sprawling, tree-lined campus east of downtown.

The Middle Easterners tended to live off campus in anonymous complexes like the Yorktown and the Colonial, seldom ate in the cafeteria and skipped organized events. While "Aggies" trundled off in merry droves to Saturday football games, the foreign students arranged soccer matches in the park. They socialized mainly with one another.

"It was the college life: We used to get together three, four times a week, watch the games, chat, drink, you know," said Sami Zitawi, a Kuwaiti native who recalled large get-togethers of Arabs on Friday, the Muslim holy day. "We used to go to the farmers, buy a lamb or a goat. Butcher it with a knife.... Every Friday night someone would have a big dinner: 15, 20, 25 students."

Political discussions inevitably occurred. The year before Mohammed's arrival, students in Greensboro marched in protest of the 1982 massacres of Palestinians at refugee camps in Lebanon -- though the Arab visitors learned to mute their criticisms.

The Middle Eastern students were far from a monolith. Differences in politics, culture and, especially, in the practice of Islam tore at regional solidarity.

"Basically, what you saw was a micro-society of our home," explained Mahmood Zubaid, a Kuwaiti architectural engineer. "Everybody fit in where they felt most comfortable."

A social barrier separated the elite scholarship boys like Zubaid and students like Mohammed, the Baluchi, and the Palestinians, reliant on their families or smaller grants for tuition and living expenses. But religion was the real dividing line.

Wherever large concentrations of Middle Eastern students gathered on Western campuses, graduates say, groups of religious conservatives sprung up. These self-appointed moral overseers endeavored to ensure adherence to Koranic values and avoidance of wine, women, drugs and other vices. They grew beards as religious statements and prayed five times a day, typically in makeshift mosques in apartments or university-provided centers. And they actively recruited fellow students.

"We called them the mullahs," recalled Waleed M. Qimlass, a 1980s A&T graduate who now directs environmental affairs for Kuwait City. "Basically, the students at Greensboro were divided into the mullahs and the non-mullahs."

At A&T, several Arab graduates say, Mohammed was among the mullahs. Even back at Chowan, one student recalled, Mohammed had reproached him for eating pork.

There was plenty at A&T for Mohammed and other true believers to be distressed about. Some Arab students drank, flirted and frequented clubs -- indulging in hedonistic pursuits absent back home. A few motored about the expansive campus in Porsches and Mercedeses.

The party crowd attempted to keep their indiscretions private, fearing that word might get back to their families. But the mullahs took notice and exercised pressure both intense and subtle.

Islamists at Greensboro and other U.S. universities made a point of seeking out newly arrived Arab students at airports. Qimlass recalled how three "guys with beards" intercepted him and a friend as the two Kuwaitis waited for their luggage at the airport in Tulsa, Okla., where Qimlass studied before transferring to A&T. The trio immediately ushered the two arriving Kuwaiti students to a kind of rooming house that doubled as a mosque, reproaching a fatigued Qimlass when he lighted up a cigarette.

If they missed new arrivals at the airport, the bearded ones would seek them out on campus. Their advances were sometimes rejected but often welcomed among vulnerable newcomers who were homesick and out of place.

"Your first day in Greensboro, you didn't know anybody, maybe your English is not so good, and they met you at the airport and helped you get started," Zubaid said.

One former Kuwaiti student wasn't so thrilled: He would place a bottle of Johnnie Walker on his table whenever the mullahs came by, like a cross proffered to Dracula.

The disproportionate influence of religious students overseas has long troubled Arab capitals. The region's mostly autocratic rulers aren't keen to subsidize the training of would-be ayatollahs who would return and espouse revolt. Nor did the prospect of religious indoctrination abroad thrill secular parents seeking to broaden their children's horizons.

"Pre-Sept. 11, I knew many mothers here who worried about their children going to America and coming back very radical in their thinking as Islamists," said Ghabra, the political scientist at Kuwait University.

The Kuwaiti government would disperse U.S.-based scholarship students if fears emerged that any kind of religious-political cabal was gaining traction, according to several former students. The precise reason remains unexplained but, in the late 1980s, the steady stream of Kuwaitis attending North Carolina Agricultural & Technical State University dwindled. Few Arab students attend the school today.

In the aftermath of Sept. 11, the religious recruitment inevitably takes on a sinister slant. Yet former A&T students stress that the Muslim evangelizing there was largely spiritual and cultural, common enough throughout the Islamic world, where communal prayer is encouraged.

Students who recall Mohammed invariably describe a studious and private devotee of the library and Allah, but friendly enough in a casual way and capable of a laugh.

"All anyone knows about him is that he was in the mosque all the time," said Faisal Munifi, who studied mechanical engineering at the same time.

"He very much kept to himself," said Zitawi, now a gas station owner in the Greensboro area. "We'd see each other at the Burger King for coffee or lunch. That was our hangout.... He was always polite. He wasn't a funny guy, but when he's talking to you, you feel like he's smiling. He wasn't rude or anything."

Nor did Mohammed spout anti-Western or anti-American rhetoric. "Something must have happened later that caused that feeling," said Hindieh, who knew Mohammed at both Chowan and Greensboro. "I never remember him saying anything like that."

There is an unmistakable similarity between descriptions of Mohammed and the later accounts of the men, like Mohamed Atta, he sent to attack the United States: all Western-educated scions of middle-class Arab families; dedicated young men from discerning backgrounds who came to embrace a volatile creed of religion, politics and resentment.

By the end of 1986, after just 2 1/2 years, Mohammed had completed his work. He graduated Dec. 18, one of 28 mechanical engineering graduates, almost a third of them Middle Easterners. As at Chowan, there is no photo of him in the yearbook.

None of almost a dozen faculty members in the department from that era recalled Mohammed. For most of his classmates and teachers, the future terrorist mastermind with a $25-million price on his head did not cast a long shadow, if any at all.



Peshawar: The Call

Jihad, Abdullah Azzam wrote, is the way of everlasting glory, and the only way to get there is behind the barrel of a gun. "Jihad and the rifle alone: no negotiations, no conferences and no dialogues," he said.

Azzam, more than any man, created the modern notion of a Muslim's duty to wage war against all comers in order to reestablish the reign of Islam on Earth. It is a duty, he said, that commands all Muslims to its banner.

Azzam was born in the West Bank in 1941, land later occupied by Israel. He answered his first call to battle with the Palestinian resistance there, which he criticized because it was, he said, mere politics insufficiently rooted in Islam.

He departed for Cairo and an academic career, then left that when the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan in 1979. He was among the first of the Afghan Arabs to arrive in Peshawar, Pakistan, in an upland basin ringed by hills that rise into mountains north and west en route to the Khyber Pass and Afghanistan.

Peshawar, capital of Pakistan's unruly Northwest Frontier Province, has for centuries been an international crossroads for traders, warriors and rough statesmen. In the 1980s, Azzam made it the capital of the Afghan resistance and the destination for tens of thousands of Muslims who joined the holy war.

Saudi Arabia's national airline offered special jihad fares. Arab governments sent emissaries and opened offices for dozens of state-sponsored charities to assist the fighters.

For a decade, parts of Peshawar were transformed into a sort of Little Mecca.

"It was a bustling Arab town -- Arab restaurants, bazaars, bakeries. During the jihad there were Arab newspapers and magazines published here. There were men in kaffiyeh, women fully covered in black," said Rahimullah Yusufzai, a Pakistani journalist who became a leading chronicler of the Afghan wars.

It was, said Gen. Hamid Gul, who formerly headed Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence, "the first international brigade of the modern time."

Among those who answered Azzam's call was a former student, Osama bin Laden. Azzam's intellectual fervor and Bin Laden's bank book combined in an organization that eventually became Al Qaeda.

The Saudi government sent dozens of missionaries and millions of dollars. The United States funneled arms and more millions through Peshawar.

Gun violence had been a way of life and death in the region long before the Soviet war. As one Pushtun saying puts it: A man's jewelry is his gun. But there had never been anything on this scale before.

Pakistani intelligence, the ISI, was installed as executor of American and Saudi interests. The service created a new logistics operation just to distribute the flood of armaments. Convoys of 10-ton trucks filled with rifles, machine guns, grenade launchers and antiaircraft missiles were sent out daily on the cross-country trip from the docks in Karachi to Peshawar and the Afghan interior beyond.

"The original jihadis started in old Peshawar with very little money, in the pre-Saudi, pre-CIA days," Yusufzai said. "Later, they all rented places in University Town, the most expensive neighborhood in Peshawar."

The Arab neighborhoods in University Town were, oddly, the most westernized in the city. Old Peshawar is a crooked tangle of alleys and bazaars rich with the smells, smoke and people of Central Asia. A thick haze of exhaust, dust and brick kiln smoke lies over it.

University Town is clean and rectangular, laid out on a grid filled with walled compounds of big three-story stucco houses that would be at home in Orange County. The new villas were filled by the Arabs and an even larger militia of camp followers. Armies used to be trailed by merchants of flesh and other entertainments; modern armies, even ragtag agglomerations like the moujahedeen, are as likely to be followed by a social worker as a streetwalker. The Afghan wars, because of the international nature of their combatants and finances, were the apotheosis of this.

The biggest industry in Peshawar in the '80s and '90s, after the arms trade, was good works. More than 150 charities, development and refugee care organizations opened offices.

There was plenty to do. Afghanistan at the time of the Russian invasion had a population of 15 million. Over a decade, that would shrink by almost half. Many fled through the mountain passes to Pakistan.

One of the largest aid agencies was a Kuwaiti charity called Lajnat al Dawa al Islamia, the Committee for Islamic Appeal. The charity at one point had more than 1,000 employees in Pakistan and was spending $4 million a year in the region. Its regional manager was Zahed Shaikh -- Khalid Shaikh Mohammed's older brother.

As head of one of the largest charities in town, Zahed became a figure of importance. He knew local diplomats, the Afghan warlords; when Pakistani politicians came to town, he shared the dais with them.

After college in North Carolina, Khalid, according to Kuwaiti authorities, never returned home. Instead, he joined his big brother in Peshawar. Another brother, Abed, a schoolteacher, left his job in the Gulf emirate of Qatar and came east too. A man who knew all three said Zahed, the eldest, was the coolest head of the trio; Abed was more militant and Khalid tended to follow him.

At the center of the Afghan resistance movement in Peshawar was Pushtun warlord Abdul Rasul Sayyaf, who had been a junior lecturer at Kabul University and was known as the Professor. He had been schooled in Cairo and spoke fluent Arabic. He became the favored recipient of money from the Saudi and American governments.

The money funded his army, a political party, a newspaper, a huge refugee camp and a college called the University of Dawa al Jihad, which means Convert and Struggle.

The university became known as a place you could learn darker trades than mathematics -- bomb-making, for example. A student once described it to U.S. journalist Mary Anne Weaver as an Islamic Sandhurst, likening it to the famous British military academy. For a time, the college also had as many as 1,000 students studying engineering, medical technology and literature.

The abandoned school sits behind high mud walls amid the sprawling Jalozai refugee camp, which today has more than 200,000 residents and is less an encampment than a city. Pakistanis marvel at the ingenuity of the Afghans, who have built a thriving local economy that includes the manufacture of pottery, textile and latticed wooden roofs that are exported back to Afghanistan where timber to make such things is scarce. There's even a carwash.

By 1989, Mohammed had gone to work at Sayyaf's university, a friend said. He taught there and worked weekends at the refugee camp. The three Baluchi brothers became part of the small, semi-permanent Arab community that included Azzam, Islamic Jihad founder Ayman Zawahiri and Bin Laden, who came and went with his wives and children in his own airplane. Most of the Arabs in town worshiped at a small mosque on a dead-end alley called Arbat Road, across the street from Zahed's office.

It was a different world then, said one man who was part of the scene. Everyone had the same goal: to oust the Soviets. Everyone knew one another, prayed and socialized together, and even went to the jihad training camps together.

Victory over the Soviets, who withdrew in 1989, should have been the crowning achievement of the jihad. But the various Afghan factions, deprived of a common enemy, began fighting one another. American support disappeared with the end of the Soviet campaign. Many felt that the U.S. actively opposed the establishment of an Islamic government in Kabul after the Soviet withdrawal. This was, to some, the cruelest cut of all.

Azzam, the heart of the Arab jihadi resistance, and two young sons were murdered by a bomb on the street outside the mosque in 1989. That same spring, Khalid's brother, Abed, also was killed by a bomb.

The political and religious climate changed in Peshawar, and resentment of the American abandonment festered. Bin Laden replaced Azzam as head of the Arab moujahedeen and began preaching hatred against the U.S.

Then came the 1990 Iraqi invasion of Kuwait and the American-led counterattack, which deepened divisions in the Arab world. Bin Laden, for one, was furious that the Saudi royal family allowed the U.S. to base its soldiers in the kingdom, violating what he felt was a Koranic dictate to keep infidels out of the holy land.

Most of the moujahedeen who had gathered in Pakistan went home, warriors without a war. Those who stayed changed perceptibly. Khalid Shaikh Mohammed and his circle changed with the times, one friend said.

"In 1991-92, their whereabouts, their meetings, their thoughts, it became more secret," he said. "The hatred for Americans -- it was among every Arab who came to Afghanistan."



Karachi: The Next War

Peshawar in the jihad years was said to have more spies, secret agents and freelance schemers per capita than any city in the world. Conversations dripped intrigue and purpose. Among the plotters was Khalid Shaikh Mohammed's nephew, Ramzi Yousef.

Like Khalid, Yousef had left Fahaheel and Kuwait for college -- in his case, to study electrical engineering in Wales. He first visited Peshawar on a summer break in 1988 and then returned in 1991. He would become the first of the next-generation jihadis to carry the fight beyond Afghanistan.

It has never been clear who, if anyone, recruited Yousef, but at some point over the next year he began to make plans to attack. He asked a boyhood friend who was studying at flight schools in the U.S. to suggest potential targets. The friend suggested the World Trade Center, and by the fall of 1992 Yousef was in New York, assembling a team to bomb the twin towers.

American investigators say that Mohammed in late 1992 wired several hundred dollars to Yousef, so he knew at least where Yousef was; investigators believe that he also knew what Yousef was doing.

Mohammed moved his base of operations to Karachi, the metropolis of Pakistan's southern seaboard, with direct flights throughout the Gulf, to Europe, to Southeast Asia, to Africa and the Americas. It is Pakistan's most cosmopolitan city, if also its most violent.

In 1995 alone, there were 1,742 slayings, most of them the result of sectarian political rivalries that made parts of the city the exclusive property of one political party or another. These districts are called "no-go areas"; even police have abandoned any pretext of controlling what goes on within them.

Mohammed lived off and on in Karachi, using the city as a base from which to travel the globe. He began using the first of dozens of aliases, often posing as a Gulf businessman. At various times he told people that he was a holy-water salesman, an electronics importer and a Saudi oil sheik.

When Yousef returned to Pakistan in 1993 after the first World Trade Center bombing, he and Mohammed began assembling a team to broaden the battleground. By 1994, both men were spending months at a time in the Philippines and Malaysia, meeting like-minded men.

The events they planned were, in what would become a Mohammed signature, perversely spectacular: They would assassinate the pope, perhaps the American president, and in a stunning finale would blow up a dozen American airliners over the Pacific.

The plans were thwarted when bomb-making chemicals were ignited in a Manila apartment, leading to the discovery of their plots and the eventual arrest of fellow plotters. Yousef fled, just as he had after the first World Trade Center bombing, back to Pakistan. Mohammed had been careful; none of the other plotters even knew his name. It would be months before authorities figured out who he was and many years and thousands of deaths before they realized his significance.



Qatar: Slipping Away

Yousef wasn't so careful. Some of the other plotters had known him for years; one told police that Yousef was the same man who had planned the Trade Center bombing. A worldwide manhunt ensued and within months Yousef's whereabouts were betrayed. American and Pakistani agents stormed a hotel room in Islamabad, the Pakistani capital, in February 1995 and hauled Yousef away, kicking and screaming. At least that's what another guest told a reporter.

"It was like a hurricane, a big panic," the guest said. "He was shouting: 'Why are you taking me? I am innocent! Show me papers if you are going to arrest me! Who are you?' No one listened to him. They took him without his shoes. His eyes were blindfolded, his head was covered, his arms and legs were tied."

The man giving this account identified himself as a Karachi businessman. He was registered under the name Khalid Shaikh. It was, American authorities eventually came to believe, Mohammed, hiding in plain sight.

Mohammed's caution -- he used three aliases on the Manila plot alone -- had paid off. He was still an unknown. That was about to end.

Yousef never gave up any valuable information. But investigators had recovered his laptop computer in Manila and a treasure trove of leads. The computer files included a letter seeking money for the plots. It was addressed to a potential donor, one who the letter-writer apparently felt was shirking his duty.

"Fear Allah, Mr. Siddiqui, there is a day of judgment," the letter said.

It was signed Khalid Shaikh.

"We knew there was another person involved ... but he was very mysterious and we didn't know who he was," said Herman, who led the FBI investigation of the Manila plot. "He basically eluded us."

The evidence they did have led investigators back to Peshawar and the circle of friends and acquaintances there. Zahed Shaikh -- Mohammed's brother -- was scrutinized, and although there was never a formal accusation lodged against him, he disappeared from Peshawar.

Investigators say Mohammed spent the next year building and maintaining a fund-raising network in the Persian Gulf.

"Throughout the region, there was this classic sort of money collector -- the guy who was hanging out at the mosque, checking out the scene, basically casing the mark, who would invariably be some old guy with lots of money. A religious guy, probably. The collector would come up alongside him, make his pitch very persistently and the mark would write him a check," said one American official, who worked in the Gulf throughout the 1990s.

"Khalid Shaikh Mohammed was a collector, a guy who would collect the money from the street collectors.... A guy in the Philippines would call a guy in Dubai who would call Khalid Shaikh Mohammed. It would be a chain of telephone calls, and Khalid would send the money."

American understanding of Islamic terrorism then was still inchoate. Even Bin Laden was seen as just another guy with bad ideas and a lot of money. Al Qaeda was barely on the screen. Potential state-sponsored terrorism was deemed more dangerous, so more attention was given to Iran, which had become the chief international proponent of Islamist goals.

Mohammed lived openly in the Gulf. "He wasn't even using an alias," said one official. American agents tracked him to Italy, Egypt, Singapore, Jordan, Thailand, the Philippines and Qatar. In Qatar, American officials say, he stayed as the guest of a member of the country's ruling family, Abdullah ibn Khalid al Thani, who was then the country's minister of religious affairs.

"Abdullah ibn Khalid had a farm outside" Doha, said one American official. "A lot of these guys had what were basically gentlemen's truck farms. It was a hobby. Grow cabbages, raise ducks. So he has this farm and he always had a lot of people around, the house was always overstaffed, a lot of unemployed Afghan Arabs.... There were always these guys hanging around and maybe a couple of Kalashnikovs in the corner."

American intelligence figured out that one of the guys on the farm was Mohammed. About the same time, a grand jury in New York indicted Mohammed for the Manila airliner plot and a debate occurred on what, exactly, to do about it.

FBI Director Louis J. Freeh met with Qatari officials seeking permission to arrest him. One FBI official said months passed without approval, even though Qatar acknowledged that Mohammed, whom agents had begun referring to as KSM, was there. At one point, according to documents obtained by The Times, Qatar told the U.S. that it feared Mohammed was constructing an explosive device. They also said he possessed more than 20 different passports; still, they delayed granting the U.S. permission to arrest him.

Some officials strongly felt that the U.S. should act as quickly and with as much force as necessary to capture Mohammed. Others were more wary. A meeting was called in Washington in early 1996. Caution prevailed.

"That D.C. meeting ... struck me as one of the great lessons in politics," said one person who attended the meeting. "Here was this opportunity to get this bad guy, and we didn't do it. The Qatar government had no interest in screwing up its fragile relationship with us. If we had gone in and nabbed this guy, or just cut his head off, the Qatari government would not have complained a bit.

"Everyone around the table for their own reasons refused to go after someone who fundamentally threatened American interests.... The FBI can't go anywhere overseas without the CIA providing the intel, the [Department of Defense] providing the logistics and military muscle in the event we have to shoot our way in. And none of that happened."

Another person at the meeting said the real obstacle was the Pentagon, which feared another "Black Hawk Down" debacle similar to the one in Somalia in 1993 and insisted that a raid would require hundreds, if not thousands, of troops.

In the end, rather than sending a kidnapping squad, Freeh sent a letter to Qatar's government. By the time permission was granted and American agents went to Doha, Mohammed was gone.

"We reached out to every one of our friends out there to try and get him," recalls one senior Justice Department official. "But he just kind of slipped off the screen."



Afghanistan: Regrouping

Being on the run did not mean that Mohammed was out of commission.

He left Qatar about the same time Bin Laden was making common cause with the newly emergent Taliban in Afghanistan, who in exchange for his assistance gave him a secure base from which to operate.

A pair of attacks in Saudi Arabia marked the beginning of a new jihad, Bin Laden told British journalist Robert Fisk in 1996. He began expanding the reach of Al Qaeda across the world. Investigators now suspect that Mohammed was the key man in that effort.

While Bin Laden and the men previously identified as his main deputies -- Zawahiri, Mohammed Atef and Abu Zubeida -- spent the bulk of their time in Afghanistan and Pakistan consolidating and rebuilding their training camps, Mohammed traveled the globe, searching out allies and recruits, and assembling what now seems like an omnipresent worldwide network.

"He was building a terrorism business. He was one of the key lieutenants in the entire Al Qaeda structure," said the FBI's Herman.

Investigators suspect that Mohammed developed direct personal relationships with several of the men who became Al Qaeda's top regional operatives.

His trail wound through Europe, Africa, the Gulf, Southeast Asia and even South America, according to investigators in Malaysia where Mohammed, traveling under an Egyptian passport, obtained a Brazilian visa.

At times, said one senior U.S. counter-terrorism official, Mohammed would travel to other countries to personally establish terrorist cells and provide them with plans for attack, money, manpower and logistical support. Other times, he would operate at a higher level, overseeing senior Al Qaeda commanders who led the attacks.

The official said Mohammed is believed to have been actively involved in the bombing of two U.S. embassies in Africa that killed 224 people in 1998, the bombing of the Cole in the Yemeni port of Aden in 2000, which killed 17 sailors and nearly sank the $1-billion U.S. warship, and many other attacks.

"There is a clear operational link between him and the execution of most, if not all, of the Al Qaeda plots over the past five years," the official said.

American investigators acknowledge that this evaluation of Mohammed as a central figure in Al Qaeda is largely retrospective. It wasn't until after Sept. 11 that his larger role became apparent.

"He popped up post 9/11 and then, looking back, we saw that he was the Zelig of Al Qaeda, involved in a lot of other things," one investigator said.



Sept. 11

One of the hallmarks of Al Qaeda is its breadth, the dispersion of its resources. So, for example, parts of the network could be preparing to attack American warships in Yemen, others to bomb civilian targets in Europe and Asia, even as the larger organization was already planning Sept. 11.

In an interview with Al Jazeera television, recorded in May this year, Mohammed described himself as the head of Al Qaeda's military committee. He said that "about 2 1/2years prior to the holy raids on Washington and New York, the military committee held a meeting during which we decided to start planning for a martyrdom operation inside America."

That would date the inception of the plot to early 1999. Later that same year, the men who would execute it were chosen, he said. German intelligence agencies believe that Mohammed first came into contact with these men when they visited Al Qaeda camps in Afghanistan.

Several of the men were students in Hamburg, Germany, part of a small group of devout Muslims who were growing increasingly restive over the plight of the Islamic world.

They were largely middle class, some well educated, not dispossessed in any apparent way. One was an urban planner and architect, one an aeronautical engineering student and one a prospective marine engineering student. Mohammed, a mechanical engineering graduate, chose other engineers for Al Qaeda's riskiest undertaking. They were, like him, devout but at home in the West, adept at languages and technically inclined.

The rest of the hijacking crews were made up of two veteran Al Qaeda operatives, a replacement pilot and a group of young Gulf Arab volunteers, chosen from what Mohammed described as "a big excess of brothers who were filled with desire for martyrdom," whose job was mainly to effect the physical takeover of the airliners.

As Sept. 11 approached, intelligence agents in the West were nearly beside themselves with anxiety. They knew something was going to happen, but they couldn't figure out what. Mohammed was already moving on. He spent the weeks before Sept. 11 instructing a new Canadian recruit on communications protocols. He was sending the recruit to Southeast Asia to coordinate a bombing campaign in the Philippines and Singapore. The only acknowledgment that something big was afoot was his suggestion that the recruit should probably leave Pakistan before Sept. 11.

It is that sort of unrelenting focus that makes Mohammed such a feared figure among those who pursue him. He simply does not stop.

In the months after Sept. 11, investigators think that Mohammed was moving back and forth between Pakistan and Afghanistan. One Afghan general, Ziaudeen Deldar, said intelligence reports indicate that "Khalid the Baluchi" was among hundreds of Al Qaeda fighters who escaped on foot to Pakistan from a camp near Shahi Kot in southeastern Afghanistan last spring when American forces launched Operation Anaconda -- an attempt, they said, to finish off Al Qaeda.

Instead, the Americans faced considerably more resistance than anticipated and backed off. The grasp of the anaconda relaxed and the prey, including Mohammed, slipped away. Weeks later, Al Qaeda operatives blew up a truck outside a synagogue in Tunisia, killing 19 people. In the days leading up to the attack, investigators say, one of the bombers was in frequent telephone contact with a man in Karachi -- Mohammed.

Mohammed was accompanied at the Al Jazeera interview by Ramzi Binalshibh, another Hamburg man who had wanted to become one of the suicide pilots but who tried and failed four times to obtain a U.S. visa. Binalshibh instead became Mohammed's field coordinator for the plot.

It's noteworthy that in the interview, Mohammed let Binalshibh do most of the talking. Even in granting an interview, the purpose of which ostensibly was to reveal, he exposed almost nothing.



Karachi: Behind Walls

Karachi is a reasonably modern, at times almost ordinary, place. Kids on bikes pass by on their way to school. Boys and girls giggle in one another's presence and listen to music that offends their parents' ears. Young hipsters scout the latest boutiques and restaurants with cool, enigmatic one-word names. Okra is one of the latest.

The city is by many measures a mess. It hasn't had a comprehensive development plan since the 1920s, the air is foul, but cars are smaller and traffic manageable. Important people ride Toyota Corollas to work, some with chauffeurs and bodyguards.

It has some of the vanity and swagger of cities accustomed to dominating their surroundings. It is in love with the myth of itself as a place of danger and deception.

So maybe it is not surprising how many people here can tell you where Khalid Shaikh Mohammed is, would be or has recently been. For a ghost, he has made many appearances. You can, in a couple of weeks, collect half a dozen addresses and a great many more stories.

The stories start in the Defense Housing Society, a large, newer group of neighborhoods between the old city center and the sea. It was at a Defense apartment building that a big shootout occurred in September. Defense -- it's named for its developer, army officers -- contains many of the finer districts in the city. Benazir Bhutto, the former prime minister, lives in one of them, a leafy area of big homes and older-model Mercedeses.

The shootout was just beyond the better neighborhoods, in a commercial-industrial tract full of five- and six-story buildings, most with low-rent light industrial tenants: textile plants, zipper and button factories and small machine shops. The streets are paved, but the buildings are separated by bare dirt and are shuttered in the front with metal roll-up doors. The night before, when police arrived, the streets were empty and dark.

Nothing happened that night. The police or, rather, the authorities -- there were more intelligence agents and army special forces than there were cops -- waited. This is the sort of thing that spawns rumors. Why did they wait? The simplest explanation, the one authorities give, is of course not trusted, but it is the one that makes sense. They waited because they didn't know what else to do. They didn't know what or who to expect and waited to see.

People would like to believe the opposite: that authorities knew everything and waited because that would confuse things afterward; that they waited to give the people they had come to get time to escape; that they waited because this is Karachi and nobody knows why they waited.

This is what happens in a place where everything has been secret for so long. And it is one of the reasons Karachi is such a great place to hide: Who couldn't hide in a place where everything is hidden?

Khalid Shaikh Mohammed first came here to live and do business a decade ago, assembling money and people for plots that would occur everywhere in the world but here. An early co-conspirator said he first met Mohammed in an Arab neighborhood full of money changers and bucket shops. A man who was captured in another plot had a phone number for Mohammed that was traced to the other end of town, a middle-class preserve of single-family homes of clean modern lines behind pale stucco walls.

The walls, actually, are the one thing many of the neighborhoods have in common. Karachi is a city of walls.

Another address is in the neighborhood where Ramzi Yousef's in-laws lived, a cramped, dense place where the food stalls are full of root vegetables and the women wear the richly embroidered dresses favored by Baluchis. At least 10% of Karachi's 12 million people are from Baluchistan, the next province to the northwest, and there is a constant traffic to and from the rural precincts, and from there to Iran and Afghanistan. It's where Mohammed's people came from.

A man claimed that he met Mohammed and his family across the marsh flats in the mud huts of another neighborhood this past spring. Mohammed was posing as a spiritual advisor, a holy man on the run from Arab agents who didn't like his brand of Islam. The story seemed preposterous, but police acknowledge that they received a tip from another source and searched the same neighborhood extensively.

The part about there being a family turned out to have some basis. The police and the agents and the army all gathered for the big shootout in Defense because of the family. Earlier that day, acting on a tip, the police raided an apartment a couple of miles away. Pakistini authorities say they had information, based on utility records, that a senior Al Qaeda leader might be there. Instead, they found three children, two women and a man.

One of the women was a caretaker, and one child was hers. The other woman was a "foster mother" of sorts to the other two children, and the man her companion. The two boys, ages 7 and 9, were named Omar and Abdullah. Pakistani and American officials believe that their father is Khalid Shaikh Mohammed.

American authorities say the house contained photographs of Mohammed with the children; there was also evidence of another woman, thought to be Mohammed's wife. It seemed a happy, playful group, a senior FBI investigator said. Some thought that they might have missed Mohammed by mere minutes, so when the people they captured told them about a group of Arabs living at another address in Defense, the authorities called up reserves and hurried across town.

"Our officers moved immediately," said a senior Pakistani official. "No, we didn't know that he was there. But from the interviews and surveillance we knew there was something big going on. The number of people there, the weapons, the intelligence we gathered. "

After morning prayers, they found the caretaker, who told them that the entire top floor was filled with Arabs. They'd been there for two months, he said, and overpaid on the rent. The authorities went in, and all hell broke loose. They were fired on immediately, the Pakistani official said. "Then it was a free-for-all. We fired at the windowpanes, put in tear gas and stormed them."

Hundreds of rounds and two dead men later, the authorities secured the building. They searched room by room and in a storage space under a stairwell found the would-be Sept. 11 pilot Ramzi Binalshibh.

Afterward, and still, Karachi was thick with rumor. Mohammed was dead, was captured, was there and got away, was there and was allowed to get away.

The police are about the only ones who claim not to know how near they were to catching him that morning. They think that they were close, but they don't really know. They are, as they've been for a decade, still looking and they're not quite sure who it is they're trying to find.

They're hesitant to talk about it much, but intelligence officers acknowledge that they have interrogated Khalid Shaikh Mohammed's two young sons. Not surprisingly, the boys haven't had much to say. Not even his children know much about the man who engineered Sept. 11.