AS SOON AS I arrived at our office in Pakistan, the guy I was replacing handed me the keys to a rental car and said, “It’s all yours.” He had been dispatched to Pakistan from his assignment in a Spanish-speaking country, but this was an abrupt handoff even from someone on temporary duty. No briefing on his cases, just adios, amigo, and good luck. On my first day, the deputy to Bob Grenier, our senior officer in Pakistan, said he wanted me to come up with a standard operating procedure for doing counterterrorist raids. I’d recently completed a course in advanced counterterrorism operations at one of the CIA’s training facilities in the States; now, Grenier’s deputy was giving me the opportunity to put what I’d learned into practice in a place reportedly teeming with al-Qaeda operatives and wannabes.
My plan called for raids that would begin at precisely 0200 hours. At 2 a.m., the streets of Pakistani cities were empty, and the bad guys, we figured, would probably be sleeping, too. Each team would include people from the CIA, the FBI, and the Pakistani military. We were in charge; the FBI was always supposed to secure evidence at the crime scene and the Paks were there for the obvious reason: This was their country, after all. We’d identify the house where the bad guys were and use battering rams to break down doors. The Pakistanis would go in first and separate the men from the women and children. Then we’d go in with the FBI.
When Grenier got word from headquarters that Abu Zubaydah was in Pakistan, probably in Faisalabad, I knew we’d need help and asked the Counterterrorist Center at headquarters to provide it. We did get some “special help,” but I cannot reveal the details because the information remains classified. My bright idea was to drive the streets of Faisalabad, hoping the special help would give us some clue to Abu Zubaydah’s whereabouts; then, if we got lucky, he’d show himself and, of course, we’d recognize him from the photos we had of him. Piece of cake: We spot him at the house he’s using, reconnoiter, raid the place at night while the bad guys are sleeping, break down the door, and grab him. Yeah, that’s how it’ll happen.
The fantasy of a CIA agent doesn’t stand a chance of prevailing against the guile of a ruthless adversary. My bright idea was ridiculous: Only once in the two weeks did we get an inkling of where Abu Zubaydah might be, but the lead wasn’t really actionable. He was very smart, moving around, covering his tracks in ways I can’t discuss here, sticking to no discernible pattern. We used some fairly sophisticated methods in an effort to nail down his location. But we kept coming up empty.
That’s when I told Grenier that we’d need more targeting help and a bigger team. I got Rick Romanski, the best in the business, and a group of CIA and FBI personnel large enough to get the job done.
AS I HAVE recounted, Rick used the reports we were receiving to narrow down the field of potential spots being used as safe houses by Abu Zubaydah to fourteen—all of them, it seemed, in Faisalabad or one other city. I’d never even heard of Faisalabad until I got to Pakistan, even though it’s a city of nine million people and promoted as the Birmingham of Pakistan because of its large textile industry.
I first went to Faisalabad with Amir, the Arab American agent who was part of our team, to buy a house for our people during the Abu Zubaydah operation. The city was quite a sight: Every structure seemed to be made of hardened mud or unpainted cinder or concrete block. There were no tall buildings, not one more than ten or fifteen stories. Signs of poverty were everywhere, including an odor of rotting garbage and fouled water that hit you like a punch in the face. People got around on overcrowded buses, motor scooters, trucks, donkeys and camels, and rickshaws—whatever was available. The place gave me one of those not-in-Kansas-anymore feelings: This was a very long way from home. I felt very small and very lonely.
But then, there is always something that brings America to you regardless of where you are in the world, something that demonstrates our country’s global reach. Amir and I were hungry, but we were worried about finding a decent place to eat. We turned a corner, first spotting an open garbage pit. But not one hundred feet away was a gleaming glass-and-steel structure with a logo we’d seen thousands of times. Saved by McDonald’s.
“I want a Quarter Pounder with cheese, large fries, and a Coke Light,” I told the counter guy. Coke Light is what they call Diet Coke over there.
“Oh, why don’t you try the Big Mac? It’s better than the Quarter Pounder with cheese.”
“No thanks, I want the Quarter Pounder with cheese.”
“Oh, sir, the Big Mac has a very special sauce,” the Pakistani said. “It will be to your liking.”
“No, I want the Quarter Pounder with cheese.”
“Well, sir, but the special sauce, it is homemade.” I was beginning to get a vision of this verbal ping-pong—my repeating the order and his defense of the special sauce—continuing long into the evening. “Buddy, just give me the Quarter Pounder with cheese.”
He sighed. “Sir, we only have Big Macs.”
“Okay, a Big Mac will be fine. Don’t forget the special sauce.” It wasn’t our only McDonald’s encounter of the night. We made our way back to the other Pakistani city, but we got lost in the tangle of streets leading from our hotel to the safe house we had purchased a few days earlier. We managed to find the hotel and a McDonald’s only two blocks away. Why McDonald’s? There was yet another McDonald’s quite close to the location of our safe house. Think of these last two as McDonald’s numbers two and three of what had become a very long evening. We figured the manager of McDonald’s number two could give us directions to McDonald’s number three, after which we could crawl on all fours, if necessary, to the safe house. But the manager was new to the city. Instead of verbal guidance, he gave us a map—sort of. In fact, it was the children’s menu with a cartoon map on the back, with pink stars designating all the McDonald’s locations in the area. He gave us a couple of clues and we were on our way.
An hour later, we were back at McDonald’s number two, begging the manager for more help. He pointed us in the right direction again and Amir took the wheel with a suggestion for his colleague riding shotgun: Write down every turn we make so we can distinguish later the hits from the misses. There were no signs anywhere, so I was reduced to writing down directions worthy of Inspector Clouseau.
“Make a right at the traffic cop, the one standing on a raised platform with the Pepsi sign on it.”
“Approach the big banyan tree and take a left.”
“Go straight past the orphanage.”
Finally, we got to McDonald’s number three. From there, you could see the safe house, which we marked with a GPS before retracing our steps and doing it all over to ensure that our great success wasn’t a fluke. It wasn’t, but we both felt chastened and embarrassed by the experience. Your tax dollars at work, good citizens. If we bring this level of tradecraft to the operation to capture Abu Zubaydah, we may wind up the laughingstock of global intelligence, as the guys who blew the takedown of one of Osama bin Laden’s top terrorists.
AS I SAID earlier, the Pakistani police and military people were strong players, especially Khalid. Actually, Khalid’s ostensible boss in this operation was Mohammed, who was viewed by his men as a weak and uninterested dandy and who made clear to one and all that he wasn’t happy with this particular assignment.
I met Mohammed once, as a courtesy, and dealt with Khalid on everything else. We were under pressure from headquarters not to reveal the name of our target to Khalid and his top people. The higher-ups were understandably concerned about a leak, and even Khalid himself wasn’t absolutely sure at first that he could assemble enough trustworthy people to lead the Pakistani units on fourteen different raids. He ended up bringing in a kind of super SWAT team whose men dressed all in black, including a T-shirt with the outline of a 9 mm handgun on the front. With that, Khalid certified that his leadership team was leakproof.
Even then, we got blowback from headquarters, telling us not to share Abu Zubaydah’s name with our Pakistani colleagues. Bob Grenier got very angry, which can be fairly intimidating because he’s so good at maintaining his cool. “This is ridiculous,” he said, when he learned that headquarters wanted us to stiff the Pakistanis. “These guys are prepared to shed blood for us. And it’s the ultimate disrespect to tell them there’s a dangerous guy and we want you to help us catch him but, by the way, we don’t trust you enough to even tell you who it is. How insulting is that?” With Grenier’s support, we told Khalid and his top officers that we had Abu Zubaydah in the crosshairs, or soon would.
We wanted to do a drive-around before our D-Day just to acquaint ourselves with our fourteen target sites. These were the houses Rick had pared down from the mosaic of numbers on his butcher paper. Most of these locations were one-or two-room mud huts with thatched or corrugated-tin roofs. But just as we were starting, I got a call from Rick, who was at our office in another city monitoring the operation.
A friendly intelligence service had just called, he said. “They got a walk-in this morning who said that a big group of Arabs from Afghanistan was hiding in a big distinctively painted house in Faisalabad.”
“Can we talk to him?”
“No, they refuse,” Rick said. “They say they’ll pass along any relevant information. But no face-to-face. They’re not budging.”
Well, at least we’d be on the lookout for a big house with an interesting paint job. And sure enough, there it was, just outside the University of Faisalabad campus—site Y, the biggest house of the ones on Rick’s butcher paper.
“I can tell you right now that there are bad things going on in that house,” said the guy Khalid had assigned to us. “Look, it’s the only house in the neighborhood with all the shutters closed.” The house was clearly inhabited because there were outside lights on and cars in the driveway. “It’s so hot,” Khalid’s subordinate said. “Nobody would close their shutters in this kind of weather.”
“Well,” I said, “we’ll need a bigger team on that one.”
Then it was on to site X, the empty lot I mentioned earlier that turned out to have an overhead phone line that snaked to the adjacent house where we found Abu Zubaydah on D-Day.
Back at the hotel in the other city where we had a safe house, we continued to meet with our group of CIA and FBI agents flown in for this special occasion. Unfortunately, some of the CIA guys weren’t up to the task. We called them “glory hounds,” and they were guys who couldn’t cut it in the agency’s clandestine service, but who had volunteered to go anywhere in the world where they were needed for temporary assignments. Many of them had something to prove: Mostly it was that they were wrongly kicked out, or had wrongly flunked out, of the Farm but that they were crucial to important operations around the world. One of them was particularly offensive to a Pakistani security guard standing watch in the hotel. One night, the guard tried to stop this guy while he was moving an unmarked pallet of weapons upstairs. There was a brief, but ugly, exchange of insults, and I had to jump in.
I intervened as quickly as I could.
“Wait a minute, pal, we don’t talk like that to these people,” I told our guy. Then I turned to the hotel cop.
“Sir, I’m sorry for my friend. I apologize for his language and behavior. But we’re authorized. Everything’s okay.”
“I have to look in the crate,” he said.
“No, you can’t,” I said. “Really, we have permission. You can talk to the general manager of the hotel about all of this. Please talk to him.”
I knew he wasn’t about to talk to the general manager; that would be taking on responsibility well beyond his station. He stepped aside, and we brought the crated weapons upstairs. Later, we’d transfer them to the safe houses.
Our disguises, such as they were, included shalwar kameez—the traditional, loose-fitting pants and tunic top—and the bushy beards we grew, or tried to grow. I have a dark complexion and a heavy beard; by D-Day, no one gave me a second look. My running mate Amir, an Arab American, had light skin and a scraggly beard. You wouldn’t even know he was a Muslim. But he ended up looking reasonably authentic, too, perhaps a bit like a Taliban fighter.
On D-Day, our team gathered in the living room of the safe house at 9 p.m., or 2100 hours on the twenty-four-hour military clock we were using. A few days earlier, we’d brought in a half-dozen translators, so we had several Americans, including Amir and me, who spoke Arabic. I climbed atop a coffee table to brief everyone. “Okay, guys, I don’t mean to be melodramatic,” I said, “but we’re going to have to synchronize our watches.” In fact, it was melodramatic and, under the circumstances, absolutely necessary. Our drill required a strict timetable. The teams needed to be on-site at 0150 hours. At 0200 hours, they were to break down the doors, separate the women and children from the men, flexicuff all the men behind their backs, and grab all the computers, cell phones, and anything else that raised an eyebrow. By 0220 hours, they had to be out the door and headed back to the safe house. We knew we’d make a lot of noise, which put a premium on fast and professional execution. All but two of the teams got in a bus and headed off to Faisalabad, where the vast majority of sites were located.
Later that night, at site X, we had to sort out the chaos that attended the takedown. The bad guys included two Syrians and one Palestinian—Abu Zubaydah. All three of them had moved from the third floor to the roof when they first heard the battering rams hit the doors, and all three had been shot trying to jump to the roof of the house next door. One Syrian was dead when he hit the ground. The other was screaming from a bullet wound to the femur. Abu Zubaydah had three wounds and was unconscious and bleeding profusely.
When we got to the third floor, we discovered what this little group of terrorists was planning. The wounded Syrian was apparently Abu Zubaydah’s bomb maker, and he was plying his murderous trade. Bomb components were arrayed across a table; a soldering iron was still hot. On an adjacent table was a map locating the British School in Lahore. These killers had selected a target—teachers and children, including a lot of American children. It made me sick to my stomach.
My orders were to take all prisoners alive if possible. One Syrian was dead. Nine others, who were never allowed up to the third floor and didn’t even know the identity of its star attraction, were captured and turned over to our guys for interrogation in one of our safe houses. My top priority, under the circumstances, was getting Abu Zubaydah and the wounded Syrian to a hospital immediately. But the senior Pakistani security guy with us had other ideas. Abu Zubaydah apparently had killed one of his men and he wanted revenge. “We will fuck with him,” he seethed. “Then he’s going to die.”
Not a chance, I said. “Look, I’m going to get fucked if he dies before we get him to a hospital. Those are my orders. This is non-negotiable.”
It was now 0230, and we had to move quickly. We heaved Abu Zubaydah into the back of a Toyota minitruck and followed the Pakistanis to a Faisalabad hospital. In a sense, my workday was just beginning.