Architect Of Terror

By Bill Saporito and Tim McGirk

In some ways, he was al-Qaeda's Agent 007: suave, well educated, a trilingual globe-trotter who mixed easily in other cultures, who engaged women and intrigue with savoir faire and deadly expertise. Except that Khalid Shaikh Mohammed isn't fiction. He's all too real. Consider his resume of terror. He presumably helped kinsman Ramzi Yousef bomb the World Trade Center in 1993. He hatched plots, never carried out, to bring down U.S. airliners over the Pacific and to assassinate President Clinton and the Pope. He may well have masterminded--officials aren't sure yet--the deadly assault on the U.S.S. Cole off Yemen and the U.S. embassy bombings in East Africa. Accomplices told Pakistani police that Mohammed slashed the throat of Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl a year ago. And everyone agrees on his culpability for one other crime: directing the 9/11 attacks in New York City and Washington, the worst terrorist acts in history.

That record helped earn Mohammed the No. 3 position in al-Qaeda's murderous meritocracy. He rose to become its chief military planner--and perhaps the world's most dangerous terrorist operative--until Pakistani agents nabbed him at 2:30 a.m. Saturday at a house in Rawalpindi owned by a retired 75-year-old microbiologist. Unlike the wild shoot-out in Pakistan that preceded the capture in September of another al-Qaeda honcho, Ramzi Binalshibh, Mohammed's capture went quietly. Inside the rambling, two-story house, in a neighborhood inhabited by retired army generals, Pakistani Interior Ministry officials say they found Mohammed and another suspected al-Qaeda operative of Middle Eastern origin. The two were seized along with the scientist's son, an unemployed Pakistani man, Ahmed Afzal Qudoos. "We have finally apprehended Khalid Shaikh Mohammed," boasted Pakistani presidential spokesman Rashid Qureshi. "He is the kingpin of al-Qaeda." Sources tell TIME that agents had been led to his hideout through the earlier arrest of an Egyptian in Quetta who had been in contact with Mohammed. Neighbors, wary of the lone Arab who appeared in their working-class area, tipped off the police, hoping for a reward. Phone records led them to Rawalpindi, where investigators say Mohammed had been hiding for 10 days before his arrest.

That leaves al-Qaeda boss Osama bin Laden and his top lieutenant Ayman al-Zawahiri still at large, if not at liberty. Mohammed is a prize catch because he was still very much in business. With 200,000 U.S. and British troops stationed in the Persian Gulf ready to move on Iraq, authorities feared that he would activate sleeper cells in the gulf states or recruit fresh volunteers for suicide attacks against U.S. military targets. His network of agents in Kuwait (where he was born to a Pakistani father) and in Qatar--two key staging posts for the U.S. command--are still intact, intelligence experts say. "This is the planner, the key planner of 9/11 and probably al-Qaeda's most active planner right up until his capture," says a White House aide.

Besides taking one of the world's top terrorists out of action, the arrest could provide a valuable source. Other al-Qaeda detainees have given useful information, according to the FBI and the CIA. Two of those arrested--al-Qaeda financier Abu Zubaydah and the so-called 20th hijacker, Binalshibh--fingered Mohammed as an instrumental planner in the 9/11 attacks. They also told U.S. officials that Mohammed has been involved recently in planning spectacular attacks on the U.S. and its allies--which was one important factor that triggered the orange alert raised Feb. 7. The arrest was so important, CIA chief George Tenet awoke National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice at Camp David late Friday night to tell her the news. Rice called President Bush, who was also at Camp David, at 7 a.m. "This is fantastic," he responded. "You gotta understand how big this is," Bush effused to White House communications chief Dan Bartlett.

If bin Laden is the wrathful figurehead of al-Qaeda, Mohammed, 38, has been its ringmaster. Several of his captured cohort have described him as "the Brain." He had remained remarkably elusive, apparently by keeping in almost constant motion. Several times in the past six years--in cities like Karachi, Manila and Rio de Janeiro--Western intelligence agencies closed in, only to see him slip away. Fluent in Arabic, English and Urdu, Mohammed is known to have used 60 aliases. His identity was kept secret even from many of his al-Qaeda operatives.

Mohammed was committed to Islam from an early age. The son of a devout Pakistani living in Kuwait, he joined the Egypt-based Muslim Brotherhood as a young man. In 1983 he enrolled at Chowan College in Murfreesboro, N.C., studying engineering. He impressed his fellow Arab students there. "Khaled, he was so, so smart. He came to college with virtually no English. But he entered directly in advanced classes," Mohammed al-Bulooshi, a Kuwaiti who attended college with him, recently told the Financial Times. "He was a funny guy, telling jokes 24 hours straight ... I would never have thought in a million years that he could be involved in these terrorist things."

But Mohammed was being radicalized, first by the Iran-Iraq war--he backed fundamentalist Iran against the secular Iraqis--and then by the mujahedin resistance to the Soviet invasion in Afghanistan. He finished his engineering degree at the North Carolina Agricultural and Technical State University in Greensboro, graduating in 1986. He later followed older brother Zahed to Peshawar, where he trained volunteers during the Afghan war against the Soviets. There he met bin Laden.

He first appeared on U.S. intelligence-agency screens after the first World Trade Center attack in 1993. Hours before a truck bomb in a basement parking lot went off, Yousef flew to Pakistan, then made his way to Manila, where he hooked up with Mohammed. The bombing is not thought to have been sponsored by al-Qaeda, but investigators believe al-Qaeda leaders were so impressed by Yousef's enterprise that they resolved to support his future endeavors. The conduit, it's believed, was bin Laden's brother-in-law Muhammad Jamal Khalifa, who then headed the Philippines office of the Islamic Charitable Organization and was supposedly channeling funds to terrorist groups in Asia. According to Philippine intelligence officials, Mohammed and Yousef plotted assassination attempts against the Pope and President Clinton, as well as a scheme to hide bombs on 12 U.S. airline flights over the Pacific. They also planned an attack on CIA headquarters., using a hijacked commercial jetliner, a strategic prototype for the 9/11 strikes.

Mohammed never fit the image of a wild-eyed or even devout jihadi. With his easy smile and placid eyes, he had a reputation as a charmer and a ladies' man. When Yousef and Mohammed weren't plotting destruction together in Manila, they were partying, say Philippine intelligence agents. Mohammed took up with a bar girl he met at the Cotton Candy Club. Later he hired a helicopter and pilot to impress a female dentist he was courting. Yousef and Mohammed took their girlfriends scuba diving at beach resorts, but Mohammed remained an enigma even to the women he dated. None suspected that Mohammed, who passed himself off as a Saudi plywood exporter, was the leader of a radical Islamic cell.

Mohammed's plans were exposed by accident. While experimenting with explosives in January 1995, Yousef set fire to his Manila apartment and fled. Police found evidence linking him to Mohammed. Other plotters arrested in Asia named Mohammed as their ringleader. But by then he had escaped to Doha, Qatar. In 1996 he was indicted in absentia in a New York federal court for the airline-bombing plot. But when the U.S. notified Qatar that he was a wanted man, Mohammed was tipped off and fled the emirate, according to Washington intelligence sources. As for Yousef, he was captured in Pakistan in 1995 and convicted of carrying out the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center. He is now serving life plus 240 years in a U.S. prison.

Mohammed's name would not surface again until after he helped complete the job Yousef bragged to the FBI about doing: toppling the World Trade Center towers. (Intelligence officials still can't fill that five-year gap in his dossier.) Last year in Karachi, he and Binalshibh gave an interview to an al-Jazeera TV reporter in which they spoke proudly of carrying out what they called "the martyrdom operation inside America." On camera, they provided details of the attack, disclosing coded e-mails that had referred to the Twin Towers as "the Faculty of Town Planning." They also displayed a suitcase full of souvenirs, such as handwritten notes to the hijackers, CD-ROM flight simulators and aviation charts of America's East Coast. Since Oct. 11, 2001, there has been a $25 million price on his head. Police officials aren't saying whether anyone is claiming the money.

Nor are they saying where they took Mohammed after his arrest. He is likely to end up in VIP detention, kept in isolation, like Zubaydah and Binalshibh. Mohammed faces a conga line of interrogators: U.S. military officials, the CIA, the FBI. And even if Mohammed never talks, anything found on discs, on his cell phone or in his pockets that indicates names or locations of other al-Qaeda operatives could help in finding the lower-level terrorists who look to him for command and control. Working up and down his lines of communication might prevent any attacks he was overseeing. "Clearly, he's someone who can take you back through a number of past attacks and resolve all those questions that so many of us have--about the original Trade Center bombing, to the present, to future attacks," says a senior U.S. official. They might even ask him where bin Laden is.

--With reporting by Simon Elegant/Singapore, Ghulam Hasnain/Rawalpindi, Elaine Shannon/Washington and Nelly Sindayen/Manila, with other bureaus

With reporting by Simon Elegant/Singapore, Ghulam Hasnain/Rawalpindi, Elaine Shannon/Washington and Nelly Sindayen/Manila, with other bureaus