The Exile Read online

  He owned at least three mobile phones on which he texted furiously day and night. Important messages were sent in code by e-mail or downloaded onto encrypted USB drives and hand-delivered by couriers. The most active of them was Hassan Ghul, a large, overweight Pakistani who kept open the communication channels between Mokhtar; financier Sheikh Saeed, who was still holed up in Quetta; and Abu Zubaydah in Barmal.

  With Al Qaeda’s shura split, Mokhtar had formed a new one of his own. A man who had rejected Al Qaeda, and who the outfit had sidelined for being too pathological, was now running the show.

  Mokhtar’s shura consisted of his nephew Ammar al-Balochi, his Yemeni assistant Silver, and another hood from Yemen who the CIA, when they picked up on his trail, would nickname “Riyadh the Facilitator.” Riyadh was an Al Qaeda stalwart and had proven himself to Osama by recruiting the Sheikh’s bodyguards in Sana’a, Yemen, before becoming Mokhtar’s bagman, often carrying around hundreds of thousands of dollars in a brown plastic briefcase. Mustafa Ahmad al-Hawsawi, who had managed finances for the Planes Operation, was deputed to make a record of Al Qaeda’s depleted infrastructure on his laptop, one file entitled “Asra” listing dead or injured fighters, while “Caravan 1” and “Caravan 2” detailed those still in flight and capable of being posted to new operations.

  The most time-consuming duty was maintaining a pool of apartments for the ever-growing number of Arabs arriving in Karachi. Thanks to 9/11, money was flowing into Al Qaeda from supporters based all over the Gulf and beyond, and Mokhtar now controlled the cash. Most of the safe houses were rented out in the names of Mokhtar’s uncles, cousins, and nephews. Although he had grown up in Kuwait, Mokhtar’s family was deeply embedded in Karachi as both his parents had been born there. A circle of relatives was used to vet potential safe houses in some of the most desirable districts. Besides the Tariq Road lodging, where the hijackers had gathered, and where Mokhtar had watched the 9/11 attacks take place, there were bolt-holes dotted around Gulshan-e-Iqbal, a large middle-class district; one close to Karachi University; and another along the road from the city’s old drive-in cinema. There were also places in upmarket Clifton, where Pakistan’s leaders past and present had residences, and yet farther east, at Malir Town, where Mokhtar’s wife and children lived.

  All of these comings and goings required oversight, so Mokhtar also employed a network of informers, small-time pickup artists, lowly paid police constables, security guards, and shopkeepers. The one thing these factotums had in common was membership in the Pakistani militant groups—Jaish-e-Mohammed and Lashkar-e-Taiba—which meant they were disciplined and also known to the Pakistani intelligence establishment.

  Saudi-Burmese brothers Abdul and Ahmed Rabbani, two former alcoholics who ran Tariq Road, managed this army. Mokhtar had inherited the short-statured Rabbanis from Abu Hafs the Commander in the early days of the Planes Operation. Paying them a paltry two hundred rupees a day to drive him around Karachi, he had bought their loyalty by arranging for one of their sisters to marry his burly Pakistani courier Hassan Ghul. By the time the Planes Operation came together, Mokhtar had felt confident enough about the brothers (and their sobriety) to assign the hijackers to their care.

  Indebted, the brothers vetted cooks, gardeners, cleaners, sweepers, and guards. At Mokhtar’s request, they rented a house at the end of Faisal Street near the Karachi airport. No families stayed here. All there was inside was a phone line hooked up to the Internet and a workroom used for research, counterfeiting documents, and collating news for the rest of the Karachi shura.

  The most important of Mokhtar’s Karachi guests were Saad bin Laden and his young family, who had arrived with former media man Abu Ahmad al-Kuwaiti and were awaiting news about possible sanctuary in Iran.

  Mokhtar was delighted to have Osama’s family entrusted to him, a precious cargo requiring special treatment—especially autistic Saad, who could not be left alone for fear he would blab something compromising about his father. Mokhtar had called on the Rabbani brothers to put them up.28

  Saad and his young family were initially placed in one of the smarter guesthouses in Gulshan-e-Iqbal, where Mokhtar visited almost daily, coaching Osama’s third son on what he would need to say when he was taken to meet important guests coming from the Gulf. Always smiling and joking, Saad, who Mokhtar dressed in a Sindhi skullcap and baggy shalwar kameez, was an unlikely emissary for a global jihad movement but somehow Mokhtar had to transform him into a simulacrum of his father. He was a bona fide bin Laden, which was what Mokhtar needed to persuade new donors to release money to him.

  Within days of Saad’s arrival, several potential funders were flown into Karachi and put up at the high-end Hotel Mehran close to the exclusive Sind Club. They included two Saudis who between them were promising to donate $1 million if Mokhtar could prove he had access to Osama’s inner circle.

  The first meetings went badly. While Mokhtar glad-handed his guests, Saad told rude stories about his wife. Only now did the 9/11 mastermind begin to appreciate how difficult it was going to be to wield the bin Ladens. He assigned his nephew Ammar and Riyadh the Facilitator to assist. Their first job was to take charge of the bin Laden family passports, which Saad had left scattered about the apartment for the servants to see; Ammar locked them away in a cash box and handed the key to Mokhtar.29

  While Saad was squeezed into his new role, Mokhtar asked his female relatives to keep an eye on Saad’s wife, Wafa, and her young son, Osama. An ethnic Yemeni who had been born in Sudan, where her mujahid father had served Al Qaeda, Wafa had been promised to Saad at the age of sixteen in 1998, having already spent most of her childhood as part of the extended Al Qaeda family. Now she was locked up with her son in a small apartment, hidden away from Karachi’s nosy residents, and she was deeply unhappy.

  Mokhtar’s wife and sisters were loud, overbearing women who brought along hordes of screaming children and slopped bowls of homemade biryani over the carpet. Wafa, who only spoke Arabic, could not even communicate her displeasure.

  What she wanted was Saad and news about her father, who had disappeared during the battle for Tora Bora. The more depressed Wafa became, the more it upset Saad. Childlike, he did everything he could to get out of Mokhtar’s meetings and run home, rolling about on the floor with his gurgling son, guffawing to Jim Carrey movies, eating Domino’s pizza, and petulantly refusing to leave again.

  Next to arrive in Karachi was another difficult case: Osama’s teenage bride, Amal, who came with her baby daughter. Mokhtar put them with Wafa for a week, but Saad quickly grew jealous of Amal, and the women began to make demands, and so Amal and the baby were moved out to Mokhtar’s apartment in Malir Town. Close to a park, and within walking distance of a well-loved bakery, Amal realized the apartment was the same one where she had stayed in June 2000 during her first few days in Pakistan.30 Fresh from Yemen, she had been handed over to a large, gruff Balochi woman whose job had been to prepare her for marriage to Osama.

  This minder was still there, and Amal now realized she was Mokhtar’s wife. The woman told of how she had grown up in a refugee camp in Peshawar, where her head had been filled with stories of jihad. Mokhtar, a man Amal knew only as “Hafeez,” was her cousin, she said, and since marrying him, she had traveled the world.

  There was another new companion for Amal: a Pashtun teenager, Maryam, who also lived in the apartment, having recently married Mokhtar’s friend, courier Abu Ahmad al-Kuwaiti—although Maryam always referred to him by his real name, Ibrahim Saeed Ahmad.31 With nothing to do but perform housework and watch Urdu television channels that neither girl understood, Amal and Maryam began teaching each other their languages, with Maryam explaining that she came from Shangla, a beautiful valley in Pakistan’s North-West Frontier, a place she had not seen since her marriage.

  Maryam had just turned fourteen and was already pregnant. Amal noticed that she appeared to know very little about her husband other than that he had been born in Kuwait, where his father had prayed in a
mosque where Mokhtar’s father was the imam. Her father, a laborer, had also traveled to Kuwait to find work and first got talking to Mokhtar’s father one day after Friday prayers. Mokhtar’s father had eventually put the two families together, but in the few months she had been married to Ibrahim, Maryam had barely seen him. She complained to Amal that he spent most of his time away on “business trips” or holed up with Mokhtar, who she knew as “Hafeez.”

  They sat on the floor in the living room, surrounded by flunkies, laptops, and mobile phones. Amal and Maryam overheard talk about Ibrahim’s eight brothers, two of whom had died fighting in Afghanistan. They were perplexed by the steady stream of visitors to the house who addressed Hafeez as Mokhtar and Ibrahim as Abu Ahmad. But Maryam dared not ask her husband any questions: he was twice her age and carried a gun, and he had beaten her on several occasions already.

  Amal wanted to guide her friend but thought better of it. She had been repeatedly told not to speak about her own marriage or any of the things she observed about operational security. Instead, she talked about missing her family in Yemen. When the subject of her husband came up, she would say: “He has gone abroad. I have no idea when we will see each other again.”32 When Osama’s picture appeared on the television she tried not to react.

  The arrivals continued. Osama’s overtly religious Saudi wives Khairiah and Seham and their children were next. The Iran plan was progressing more slowly than expected and Mokhtar was happy to ingratiate himself by stepping into the breach. Each family unit was kept separate, Khairiah and her son Hamzah staying together in an apartment in Clifton, while Seham, her unmarried children (Khalid, Miriam, and Sumaiya), and Najwa’s children (Iman and Ladin) were sent to addresses in Gulshan-e-Iqbal.

  Najwa’s married daughter Fatima and Seham’s married daughter Khadija remained in Quetta, lodging with the families of Dr. Ayman al-Zawahiri and the deceased Abu Hafs the Commander as Khadija’s mujahid husband was on active Al Qaeda duties near the border, while Fatima’s husband was still missing.

  Out of all of Osama’s children, Hamzah found it hardest to settle in Karachi, and he agitated for news of his father whenever he got together with his half brother Saad. Although he was only thirteen, Hamzah was savvy and knew that Saad was incapable of keeping anything secret. Sometimes snippets of information he had overheard from Mokhtar slipped out—of how a cleverly thought-out plan had sent America off in the wrong direction and how their father was now holed up in a remote Afghan valley. What no one told Saad was that Mokhtar was in direct contact with Osama, through Abu Ahmad al-Kuwaiti, who was shuttling weekly between Karachi and Kunar Province in Afghanistan, carrying secret letters—and that Osama was contemplating coming to Karachi himself.

  Occasionally, courier al-Kuwaiti brought welcome news about others, too. Saif al-Adel was in Afghanistan preparing to face off against the recently formed International Security Assistance Force (ISAF). Another group of brothers was thriving in Shakai under the protection of the wayward Pashtun mujahid Nek Muhammad Wazir.33

  Mokhtar and al-Kuwaiti talked about these updates in whispers while Amal and Maryam listened in from next door.

  January 2002, Tehran, Iran

  After a night in Zahidan, Agent Ali from the Ansar ul-Mahdi Corps had informed the Mauritanian that he had been invited to present his case in the Iranian capital. As they took their seats on an internal flight, the Arab visitor felt embarrassed. He was still wearing the creased shalwar kameez he had put on before leaving Quetta and other passengers in their suit jackets and buttoned-up shirts eyed him suspiciously.

  At Mehrabad International Airport, Ali whisked him through an official channel and into a waiting Mercedes. As they were driven through the city’s wide avenues, Ali pointed out tourist attractions and famous Shia mosques. The Mauritanian nodded respectfully as he silently contemplated how far he had come in a few short weeks from the carcass of Kandahar airport.

  They arrived at a smart apartment with a gas fire, a servant, and a kitchen stacked with Arab, Turkish, and French tea (with a different teapot for each preparation). The Mauritanian felt guilty, thinking of those he had left behind, especially his own family.34

  That afternoon, senior officials informed him that the highest authority—meaning General Qassem Suleimani—had approved Al Qaeda’s safe haven. The Mauritanian wasn’t sure whether it was appropriate, but he handed over a suitcase full of money, which was accepted without comment as Ali announced they were going shopping.35 “If you’re going to live here, you will need some Iranian clothes,” he said, insisting on paying from his own pocket.

  That night, as they shared dinner, the Mauritanian decided to test their new relationship by asking for a favor. He needed to update “the brothers in Pakistan” about General Qassem Suleimani’s momentous decision, he said. If this were some kind of charade, Ali would surely dismiss the request.

  Ali agreed and escorted his guest to the Central Post Office, arranging for him to call Quetta. “All individuals and families who wish to travel to Iran will be welcomed,” the Mauritanian reported in a short conversation with Sheikh Saeed, who informed him in code that Zarqawi and Ramzi bin al-Shibh had also reached Iran. Things were going more smoothly than he could ever have imagined.36

  By the time he and Ali returned to Zahidan to supervise arrangements, something was preying on the Mauritanian’s mind. What would happen when the Iranians found out that other Al Qaeda brothers had entered the country without having sought permission? To protect himself, he told Ali that several had slipped in, helped by Al Qaeda supporters in Zahidan.

  The agent shrugged it off. “This method may serve us well,” Ali said, remarking that it distanced Tehran from Al Qaeda’s actions.

  A short while later, when Ali casually asked for names of those wishing to come next, the Mauritanian felt a twinge of anxiety. “Some brothers did not fully trust Iran, and I was not able to inform about their arrival until I had consulted them,” he recalled. When Ali left, the Mauritanian secretly purchased a mobile phone to call Sheikh Saeed.

  Ali returned later. He was grinning. He had news. “You,” he said, laughing, “are dead.”

  The Mauritanian looked dumbfounded. Ali showed him a newspaper report listing Al Qaeda leaders the Pentagon claimed to have either captured or killed. Near the top was Mahfouz Ibn El Waleed, supposedly killed in an airstrike on January 7.

  As Ali’s laughter subsided, the Mauritanian realized that the Iranians knew who he was. The Dr. Abdullah story had fooled no one and was simply being used as a fig leaf by the Iranians to cover up the secret Quds Force deal with Al Qaeda. He thought of his family, who would read these stories about his death and believe them. Ali saw his concern. “You cannot tell them. Everyone must think you are dead. Believe me, this will work in our favor,” he said.37

  As soon as Ali left, the Mauritanian fetched his secret phone to call Sheikh Saeed again. The financier told him not to fret but to play the news for what it was worth. They would get a message to his wife and children in Karachi. But the rest of the family back in Mauritania—a country that enjoyed full diplomatic relations with the United States—could not know.

  Days later, Ali arrived in a darker mood. “Give me the addresses where the senior Al Qaeda brothers are staying,” he demanded. “Someone has been making unauthorized phone calls to Pakistan from this city and from other places in Iran,” Ali barked. “The intelligence ministry in Tehran is fuming.”

  The Mauritanian swallowed hard. Everyone was afraid of the Ministry of Intelligence and Security (MOIS), the most powerful ministry in Iran, whose shadowy agents were known as “the Unknown Soldiers of the Imam.” On a par with the Quds Force in terms of influence and power, the security ministry was supposed to supervise all covert operations, and the Quds Force was supposed to share all information it collected with them. But General Suleimani had a habit of going his own way, which angered the security minister, Ali Younsei, enormously.38 The Mauritanian was now stuck in the middle of their row.


  Security agents had either overheard his conversations with Sheikh Saeed, or Ramzi bin al-Shibh, Zarqawi, or Zarqawi’s fighters holed up in Sunni enclaves along the eastern border had been careless. “Whoever has done this, I am sorry,” he replied, unable to look Ali in the eye.

  Thinking on his feet, he continued: “I cannot take you to these locations, where other brothers are hiding, as this will jeopardize their hosts.”

  Ali’s face soured. Because of Al Qaeda’s duplicity, the Quds Force was now under pressure from the security ministry to hand over everyone, he said. “I can find your people without you. All it will take is a matter of hours,” he snapped.

  The Mauritanian took this as a threat. “Everyone who entered did so in the way I described earlier,” he replied, reminding Ali of his suggestion that Al Qaeda take advantage of the Zahidan smuggling ring, as it gave the Quds Force plausible deniability. “If you want to look for people then go ahead, but I’m not going to help you.”

  Ali stormed out to confer with a superior. He returned within the hour, angrier still, shouting and demanding answers, names, and numbers.

  “Your behavior is unacceptable,” the Mauritanian said, trying to embarrass him. “We left our countries in the first place because we did not want to accept humiliation and insults.”

  Ali stormed out of the room again. “Stay here,” he shouted over his shoulder.

  Despite the risks of being overheard, the Mauritanian activated his secret phone again. Where was Abu Zubaydah when he needed help? No answer. He called Quetta, desperate for advice. Getting a local cell phone number for Ramzi bin al-Shibh from one of Sheikh Saeed’s assistants, he took a significant risk by calling him directly. “Look, Iran is not safe.”

  Al-Shibh took a taxi to the border, where he boarded a bus back to Quetta. In the city he spread the news. Iran was a trap. General Qassem Suleimani had agreed to assist Al Qaeda without informing the Reformist government of President Mohammad Khatami. Now that government officials had found out, the Al Qaeda refugees were caught in the middle of a dangerous political tussle. The message was carried to Peshawar, while al-Shibh traveled on to Karachi to meet his boss.