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The CEO of al-Qaeda
By FARHAN BOKHARI, VICTORIA BURNETT, CHARLES CLOVER, MARK HUBAND and ROEL LANDINGIN
Financial Times (London)
FRONT PAGE - WEEKEND FT; Pg. 1
February 15, 2003, Saturday London Edition 1

From a suburb of Kuwait City to college in North Carolina to the alleys of Peshawar... the making of Khaled Sheikh Mohammed, man of 27 aliases, also known as... The CEO of al-Qaeda

"Khaled sympathised more with Iran in the lran-Iraq war, and made fun of Saddam Hussein in student plays. The fundamentalist students stood with Iran more than Iraq in the war, because they disagreed with Saddam,' said Mohammed al-Bulooshi.

Under a clear night sky a convoy of four-wheel-drive pick-ups snaked along the slopes past the mountain tribesmen. Over the years, they had grown used to the dust and noise from the many vehicles that supplied the complex maze of hilltop military camps.

Then the sky exploded.

From within the convoy orders were being yelled over the sound of the blasts higher up the hill. A man called Salem Ali was in charge. He ordered the drivers to move on, and they sped away. A few minutes later a second convoy raced by and was gone.

It was the night of August 20 1998. Six camps at Khowst, mountain hideout of the al-Qaeda terrorist organisation in eastern Afghanistan, had been reduced to rubble by scores of Tomahawk Cruise missiles launched from US navy ships off the coast of Pakistan. America was avenging the deaths of 224 people who died when the US embassies in Kenya and Tanzania were bombed by al-Qaeda two weeks earlier.

The two convoys disappeared into the night. The first, led by Salem Ali, was a decoy. Closely guarded within the second convoy was Osama bin Laden.

An Afghan tribal leader who recounted the events of that night said the name Salem Ali was frequently heard, but few knew to whom it belonged. But he concluded from the brief words exchanged on the night of the Cruise attack that Salem Ali's decoy was intended to save the al-Qaeda leader.

"Even before the attacks we would only hear big jeeps carrying men with dark glass coming by during the day Each tune they came, we heard that it was either Salem Au or another man, Fahd bin Abdullah bin Khalid, visiting the area. But nobody ever saw their faces in Afghanistan after 1998," the tribal leader said.

Now he is convinced that Fahd and Salem Ali were the same person.

Whoever this mysterious man might have been to Osama bin Laden in the mountains of Afghanistan, he has, over the past decade, been many different things to other people.

To a New York prosecutor, Salem All was one of the aliases listed in the indictment of those who drove a truck bomb into the underground car park of the World Trade Center in 1993.

To Catherine Brioso, a fun-loving girl in Manila, be was Abdel Majid, a Qatari who wore a white tuxedo and entertained lavishly at the Shangri-La and Manila Garden hotels. To Catherine's friend Arminda Costudio, he was the man introduced to her simply as a "Sheiki" from Saudi Arabia. To Abdel Hakim Murad, an Arab pilot, the Salem Ali be met in Karachi in July 1993 was also the Abdel Majid introduced to him as a Saudi businessman, and he was obsessed with aircraft.

To the Philippines authorities, the man known variously as Salem Ali, Fahd bin Abdullah bin Khalid, Abdel Majid, Ashraf Refaat Nabih Henin, Abdullah al-Fak'asi al-Ghamdior, had as many as 27 aliases.

He is, in fact, Khaled Sheikh Mohammed. He has a Dollars 25m reward on his head, and has admitted that he played a major role in the planning of the terrorist attacks in the US on September 11, 2001.

As intelligence services around the world began to track the web of terror responsible for those attacks, it started to become clear that Khaled Sheikh Mohammed had become al-Qaeda's operational mastermind. Still at large, clever and cautious, he is to this day, in the opinion of a leading US counter-terrorism official, the man who gives security services around the world their worst nightmares.

Khaled Sheikh Mohammed was the fourth son of Sheikh Mohammed Ali, a respectable man who in the early 1950s brought his family from the barren Pakistani province of Baluchistan to the thriving oil emirate of Kuwait. After some years, Sheikh Mohammed Ali took Kuwaiti citizenship, friends of the family say, though this is denied by Kuwaiti authorities, who appear to be trying to erase the family from its records.

Sheikh Mohammed Ali became a prominent preacher at the al-Ahmadi mosque in a suburb of the Kuwaiti capital. But after becoming entangled in a land dispute with a powerful native Kuwaiti family, he appears to have been stripped of his Kuwaiti citizenship, although the details are sketchy, and the other family said to be involved denies the dispute took place. But by the time Sheikh Mohammed Ali's youngest son was born on April 24 1965, according to the passport with which he was issued in 1982, the family's business and other options were greatly curtailed as they were now labelled "bidoon": residents without citizenship.

Thus Khaled, called Khaled Sheikh by his family and school friends, grew up in an ever-more prosperous Kuwait now flush with oil revenues but he did so with growing awareness of the class difference between his family and the rest of Kuwaiti society.

In his teens, Khaled joined the lkhwan al-Muslimeen, the Muslim Brotherhood, which had been created in Egypt in 1928 and had an active branch in Kuwait. His membership of the Brotherhood, the largest international Islamist organisation, later gave him access to the upper echelons of the global Islamist movement.

On December 6 1982, he was issued with a Pakistani passport number 488555 by the Pakistan embassy in Kuwait, and, barely an adult, departed his bidoon homeland for the quaint though alien life of small-town America.

Customs records show that Murfreesboro, North Carolina had by the 1800s cornered a profitable trade in agriculture which linked New England and the West Indies.

The clinker-built, white-painted homes of the town mark the northern-most point of navigation on the Meherrin River, with Murfreesboro the deepest point the seagoing vessels plying the Albemarle Sound could reach into the fertile farmlands of southern Virginia and North Carolina. Tradition has bored deep into the identity of the prosperous town, which today boasts a famous watermelon festival and solid education proudly offered by its flagship centre of learning , the 155 year old Chowan College.

"In order for our students to start their long journey known as college out on the right foot," says the Chowan prospectus, "we promote community, experiential learning, leadership, and personal planning throughout orientation."

It was here, after a short visit to his ancestral home in Baluchistan where he spent some of his time riding a donkey across the desert, that Khaled Sheikh Mohammed arrived in 1983, apparently to study engineering. While the college has refrained from providing information about the man who has become their most infamous student, other Arab students from the time remember him well.

"We lived in one building, had breakfast, lunch and dinner together us and 30 Arab students," said Mohammed al-Bulooshi, a Kuwaiti advertising executive who attended college in the US with Khaled Sheikh and remembers most of his friends as being Palestinians. "We all became quite close." "Khaled, he was so, so smart. He came to college with virtually no English. But he entered directly in advanced classes. He was a funny guy, telling jokes 24 hours straight. He was focused. He wanted to get his degree and go home.

"He was so quiet, there was no indication that he was involved in (religious extremism). I would never have thought in a million years that he could be involved in these terrorist things especially such an event as September 11.

First of all, be was very smart, but be was not a strategic thinker."

He remembers that Khaled kept his distance from non-Arabs and non-Muslims at Chowan. "He didn't like American life, and he didn't talk with American students," said Mohammed al-Bulooshi. "He was conservative, but so was I. He wouldn't shake hands with women, but neither do I. His conservative attitude was something he brought with him from Kuwait, like me. Not something he learned in the US."

But there was another, emerging, more focused side to him, It appears to have been at least partly provoked by the agonising spectacle of the Iran-Iraq war, already well into the third of its eight bloody years by the time Khaled enrolled at Chowan. It split the Arab students of Chowan College just as it split the Islamic world. Even among Sunni Muslims, who dominate the Muslim and Arab worlds, the Islamic revolution in Shia, non-Arab Iran was seen as a model.

Now it was under fire from the secularist Arab Saddam Hussein, who the west backed as a bulwark against that model.

In 1984 Khaled Sheikh moved to the North Carolina Agricultural & Technical State University in Greensboro to study mechanical engineering. Having been one of the sites of courageous anti-segregation protest in the l960's the college awards an annual human rights medal to individuals who have "endeavoured to correct social injustice and have significantly contributed to the betterment of the world". In 1986 be graduated with a Bachelor's degree in mechanical engineering. His old college friend Mohammed al-Bulooshi believes Khaled returned to Kuwait to look for work, but there is no evidence in Kuwait's immigration records. It appears that, while in Greensboro, be had developed his own ideas for the "betterment of the world" and the time had come for him to put them into action.

Even as Khaled Sheikh and other Arabs had wrestled with the contradictions thrown up by the Iran-Iraq war, there was a less ideologically compromising conflict under way that inflamed the passion of every Islamist and left no doubt in their minds about whose side they were on. In this case the front line was in the mountains of the Hindu Kush, where the seven warlords of the Afghan mujahideen confronted the Soviet forces that in 1979 had marched across the border to prop up Afghanistan's weak and unpopular Marxist government.

Khaled Sheikh's first involvement in the Afghan jihad had begun at Chowan College with donations of second-hand clothes.

"Every Muslim student at that time gathered donations for the Afghans used clothes, T-shirts, that kind of stuff. We both did the same," said Mohammed al-Bulooshi, who met the then largely unknown Osama bin Laden when he visited the Arab Students Association in the US in 1983. By the time Khaled Sheikh left America, his brothers, Zahid, Abed and Aref, had already heeded the call for Arabs to join the Afghan jihad. Abed and Aref were later to die for the cause.

Six months after his graduation Khaled Sheikh followed his brothers and made his way to the north-western Pakistani city of Peshawar. There, from a small shop among the alleys of the frontier town, the fiery Palestinian-Jordanian preacher Abdullah Azzam ran the Services Office of the Mujahideen, which organised the recruitment of Arabs in the Middle East and their passage across the tribal areas of Pakistan, through the treacherous canyons of the Khyber Pass and on to the battlefields of Afghanistan. The wealthy Osama bin Laden paid for the holy warriors who took discounted flights on Saudi Arabian airlines to take up their place alongside the Afghan Mujahideen in the jihad against the Soviet Infidel. For five years, Khaled Sheikh Mohammed devoted himself to this cause and exulted in the victory that came with the withdrawal of the Soviet troops in 1989, and the eventual collapse of the superpower.

On February 26 1993, a Ford Econoline truck hired from Ryder Truck Rental descended the slope into the underground parking lot of the New York World Trade Center. At 12:17 a 1,2001b bomb inside the truck ripped through the building. It killed six people, injured thousands and introduced America to Islamic terror.

Several weeks later, a Pakistan airforce C-lao military transport aeroplane landed at a desert airstrip close to Quetta, the main city of Pakistan's south-eastern province of Baluchistan.

A joint team comprising two US Diplomatic Security Service personnel and several officers from the Pakistani Federal Investigation Agency slipped off the aeroplane and made their way to an address in the city. They surrounded a house and broke in. It was the home of Ramzi Ahmed Yousef, the man the US had by then identified as the mastermind of the World Trade Center bombing and whose face had already appeared on tin FBI's Ten Most Wanted List". But, apparently tipped off, Yousef had disappeared only hours before. A haul of documents found at the house in Quetta led investigators to Peshawar. This tirm they were looking for Ramzi Yousef's uncle, Zahid al-Sheikh, brother of Yousef's mother and of none other than Khaled Sheikh Mohammed. But Zahid, as his younger brother would do again and again, had apparently melted away.