MARCH 29, 2002
IT HAD BEEN A particularly late night, but I had a spring in my step as I strode across the sun-dappled lobby of a luxury hotel in Islamabad. I found my delegation, several members of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence and their wives, sitting in the breakfast room. This was not the sort of meeting I would normally hold, and certainly not the normal venue for it. I had held my formal briefing for the legislators the previous afternoon, but had promised to stop by before their planned departure that morning to update them regarding a certain ongoing matter. They looked up as I ambled over to their table. I held the suspense for a bit longer as I settled into a chair and greeted them confidently. I looked about for some coffee. “I have good news,” I said finally. “We’ve captured Abu Zubayda.”
Zayn al-Abidin Muhammad Husayn, aka Abu Zubayda, had been an obsession for me for two and a half years. For months even before the February night in 2000 when former Ambassador Bill Milam and I met with President Musharraf to seek his help in capturing the man, I had watched with growing frustration as this master terrorist logistician traveled repeatedly through Pakistan to and from al-Qa’ida’s Afghan training camps. He maintained a sort of underground railroad, facilitating the movement of young Muslim men to and from their courses of instruction in the dark arts, providing them with tickets, guidance, lodging, and assistance with their travel documents. We couldn’t generate information precise or immediate enough to force the government of Pakistan to capture him on his jaunts through their country. And in spite of President Musharraf’s assurances and my own importunings, General Mahmud of the ISI would not help us.
All that changed at the precipice of 9/11, but in the months thereafter Zubayda went to ground. In February 2002, reliable reporting placed him in Waziristan, in the Pakistani Tribal Areas. By that time, hundreds of foreign fighters were fleeing Afghanistan, trying to make their way through Pakistan, which they now considered hostile territory, into Iran, from where they hoped to return to the Arab countries most of them had come from. We presumed Zubayda was arranging travel or safehaven for fugitive Arab fighters in the Tribal Areas, but could not be sure, and our sources did not want to look for him there. Zubayda was a professional, and highly suspicious. If our agents were to search for him without a transparently good reason for doing so, they would immediately fall under sustained, and perhaps lethal, suspicion.
In early March, we had clear indications that Abu Zubayda was somewhere in Faisalabad, in the “settled areas” of Pakistan, and that a significant number of his fleeing Afghan Arab fighters were with him. This initially came as a surprise. Faisalabad had never been on our screen, but on examination it proved to be a likely place for our quarry to hide. A gritty, sprawling industrial town in northeast Punjab Province, it was the third largest metropolis in Pakistan, after Karachi and Lahore, though with nowhere near the prominence or social cachet. Located at a major road and rail junction about 75 miles west-southwest of Lahore, it was an easy place to travel quietly to or from, a perfect place to get lost in.
Our targeting system went into overdrive, and we began generating multiple sites for General Imran and his operators—many more than we would be able to handle at one time, even if only a portion of the suspected targets proved viable. Until then, we had done a maximum of two or three raids on a given night, but since we couldn’t pin Abu Zubayda to any particular one of the targeted locations, we determined that we would have to hit every identified site simultaneously, in hopes that Zubayda might be in one of them. Manpower would of course be no problem for the Pakistanis, but we would not have nearly enough Americans—CIA or FBI—to go around; both had to be present at each target location. We deployed a number of our officers to Faisalabad, with a senior visiting ethnic-Arab CIA case officer in charge—a first-rate fellow dubbed “Detroit” by the FBI—to work with the Pakistanis under Dave’s supervision and set the raid plan. I went to work getting us more resources.
The one source of readily deployable people, not otherwise productively occupied, that I knew of was the Incident Response Team (IRT) in CTC. This unit had a long and undistinguished pedigree. It had been created with much fanfare back in the 1980s, given a dedicated aircraft, highly skilled operational and technical officers, and the most sophisticated gadgetry available at the time. The idea was that any time there was a terrorist incident anywhere in the world, such as a plane hijacking or hostage taking, the IRT would be sent in to provide advice, guidance, and technical assistance to the host government. It was a wonderful idea, with a small wrinkle: No country would have it. Any time there is a terrorist incident, the government of the concerned country wants to demonstrate that it is competent to deal with it. Inviting foreigners to handle a high-profile situation is a political impossibility, and bringing in such a team surreptitiously, directly under the glare of world media, would be unfeasible. Add to that the fact that many governments will want to have the flexibility to deal with such incidents in their own way—perhaps to include paying ransom or striking some other deal the United States is likely to disapprove of—and you begin to understand why the Incident Response Team may not have been such a good idea after all. As the years of inaction mounted, the team became something of a refuge for misfits and problem children.
I got a bad feeling when I held a video conference with the unit’s chief. I made clear that I was only looking for people who could passively observe detentions and make copies of any materials seized: all the muscle would be provided by the Pakistanis. The IRT, bristling with guns and pent-up testosterone, was looking for validation and a larger role. They would prove problematic, but I’d gotten the bodies I needed.
On the afternoon of March 28, 2002, Dave laid out the plan for the visiting senators. After ground investigations led by the ISI, we had winnowed the number of targets in Faisalabad to fourteen. We had identified another three related locations well outside town. All would be hit simultaneously. I rated the chances of capturing Abu Zubayda at fifty-fifty. We had also identified another “safe” location quite some distance from Faisalabad to which we thought Abu Zubayda might flee if we missed him in the first wave. We would allow for reasonable travel time, and then hit that one, too.
The raids were to be launched late that night. Two hours beforehand, I got a call from “Detroit.” The ISI had detected a “squirter”: one of the militants had left a target villa under surveillance, and boarded a train south. Surely we should not have him arrested right away, Detroit advised. He might alert others with a cell phone. Should we just let him go?
“No,” I said. “For all we know, it might be Abu Zubayda.” We had not told the ISI about our main target. “Have the Pakistanis break off surveillance so as to avoid alerting him. They can relay a full description ahead and have him picked up at a scheduled stop after the start of the raids.” I lost all track of this fellow in the subsequent excitement; I have no idea if he was ever picked up.
At most locations, the raids went smoothly. Dozens of foreign militants were captured. The teams at at least two locations claimed initially to have captured Zubayda, based on identification from outdated photographs, but just as quickly concluded they were in error. There was firing at one location not far from the safehouse in Faisalabad where our officers were staged. A militant had attempted to escape across the roof of the villa in which he was trapped, but was shot several times in the thigh and lower abdomen by a member of the Punjab Rangers, a paramilitary force pressed into service by the ISI. Badly wounded and bleeding profusely, the man was dumped onto the rear bed of a police pickup truck. Dave Falco, a visiting FBI special agent, took a look at him. The man in the truck appeared quite different from the one in the photograph. He was considerably heavier, and had no facial hair. “It’s him,” Dave said.
Chris Reimann, the legal attaché, rushed to the scene. He shook his head. “I don’t think so,” he said, but Falco was adamant. They took a picture at the scene, which was sent by sat link to CIA Headquarters. Within a few minutes, after some technical analysis, CTC returned its assessment: an over 85 percent likelihood that this was, in fact, Abu Zubayda. That was encouraging, but in the meantime the wounded captive was bleeding to death. He had to be gotten to a hospital. A Pakistani police driver leapt behind the wheel of the truck. It wouldn’t start. A mixed group of Pakistanis and Americans pushed to jump-start it; finally, the engine caught with a lurch, and the truck raced off, with several other vehicles following.
Detroit reached me in my office. I directed that there was to be an American with Abu Zubayda every minute, 24/7, until we could get him out of the country. I didn’t relish the thought of trying to explain how we had let him escape if he went missing. Detroit set up a round-the-clock watch at the hospital. All the IRT members, notably, declined to participate. The raids over, they were eager to return to a safer locale. Soon, Detroit was back on the phone. He was with Zubayda.
“There’s firing outside the hospital,” he said. He hadn’t seen anything penetrate the building, but feared they might be under attack. Dave, my deputy, immediately phoned Imran. The general called back ten minutes later, laughing.
“It’s just celebratory firing,” he said. “There’s a wedding in the neighborhood.”
I arrived home at three in the morning. Four hours later, I was driving myself in an armored SUV to a breakfast appointment in town.
As is now well known, Abu Zubayda survived his wounds. After a day and a half in that hospital in Faisalabad, he was sufficiently stable to be moved by helicopter to a hospital in Lahore. A day later, he was loaded aboard a CIA plane and taken to a third country where he was treated, and then interrogated. He was the first senior member of al-Qa’ida to be captured. It was his apprehension which triggered—one might say forced—CIA back into the business of interrogation, after a hiatus of many years.
There remains much confusion about what Abu Zubayda represented. Some say that we erred in considering him a senior leader. I don’t think they understand the way we perceived him. After tracking the man for two and a half years, I did not believe he was a senior leader; he was merely a senior, and a very important one. The distinction is significant. If al-Qa’ida were an army, Abu Zubayda would certainly not be a commander, or even an executive officer. He was more like a sergeant major. He wasn’t hatching plots and giving orders: he was the guy who got things done. I did not expect that he would know the time or place of the next attack; in fact, I would have been surprised if he did know such things. I had little doubt, however, that he would know the names, the aliases, the phone numbers, the points of contact that would enable us to find and capture the operatives who would be involved in those future attacks.
That was what we, the entire U.S. government, and indeed the American people most feared in those days: the next attack. CIA was supposed to make sure it didn’t happen. Given the importance of what we were sure was in Abu Zubayda’s head, extracting it was not a responsibility we could delegate to someone else. We would have to do it ourselves, and quickly. This was the thinking and the unbearable pressure which led us, starting with Abu Zubayda and continuing with the even more important captures made subsequently, down the road that led to CIA “black sites” and coercive interrogation techniques. I couldn’t know it in 2002, but it would someday fall to me to deal with that legacy.