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[17] AHMED KHALFAN GHAILANI Ahmed Khalfan Ghailani left Dar es Salaam for Nairobi on August 1, 1998. He checked into the Hilltop Hotel, where he stayed until August 6, when he joined the exodus of al Qaeda operatives. He departed on Kenya Airways flight 310, along with Abdullah Ahmed Abdullah, a leading organizer, for Karachi. From there, he crossed into Afghanistan and made his way to bin Laden’s base at the al Farouq training camp. For the next six years, he was lost in the murky terrorist underground. Ghailani was identified as an accomplice by K. K. Mohamed. Specifically, he was accused of purchasing, along with Sheikh Ahmed Salim Swedan, the Nissan Atlas that the suicide bomber drove into the embassy in Dar, and of obtaining TNT, detonators, fertilizer, and gas cylinders, and using these materials to help assemble the bomb. He was also alleged to have participated in reconnaissance missions against the target and of obtaining a cell phone that enabled the conspirators in Tanzania to communicate with their counterparts in Kenya.1 In 2001, he was indicted in the Southern District of New York on 286 charges—224 of which were for murder—related to his involvement in al Qaeda’s East Africa plot. While at the al Farouq camp, he received weapons training and became adept at forging documents. He admitted having met bin Laden and Khalid Sheikh Mohamed. He even lived with one of K. S. M.’s relatives for a time in Pakistan. But, he specified, he never pledged bayat. Bin Laden personally requested his services as a bodyguard. He also cooked for the emir, saying of his fellow guards, “Most of them didn’t like to cook.”2 In March 2001, Ghailani moved into a safe house in Monrovia, Liberia, along with Harun, to run an al Qaeda diamond-trading operation. Within just a couple of months they ran afoul of their superiors when stories of their spending on women and alcohol started to spread. According to a British newspaper, the Observer, al Qaeda made as much as $20 million trading diamonds.3 After 9/11, 168 Al Qaeda Declares War U.S. Special Forces reportedly mustered in neighboring Guinea for an operation to snatch them, but it was called off because their identities could not be confirmed.4 If Ghailani is to be believed, they must have been on to the wrong man, because he claims to have been in Afghanistan on 9/11 and to have narrowly escaped American bombardments of al Qaeda bases on two occasions. Soon after the U.S. ground war began, he said, he retreated to Pakistan. In June 2004, while trawling through the dense masses of e-mail, web chatter, and other electronic exchanges that flow across the Internet like plankton in the sea, U.S. intelligence homed in on one Musaad Aruchi, a nephew of K. S. M. and cousin of Ramzi Yousef, the first World Trade Center bomber. Aruchi was identified as a hub for exchanges between jihadis. He was traced to Karachi, where Pakistani intelligence arrested him on June 12. Three “unpleasant” days later, he was turned over to the CIA and taken to one of its black prisons.5 Aruchi’s computer, which authorities seized, contained photos of various landmark sites in the United States, as well as an important cache of phone numbers and e-mail addresses. Analyzing the information, investigators became interested in a twenty-five-year-old technical wizard named Muhammed Naeem Noor Khan, who had attended an al Qaeda camp in 1998. The CIA and NSA directed intense electronic surveillance against Khan, collecting every e-mail and IP address that touched his network.6 On July 13, he was taken into custody in Lahore. Pakistani and American interrogators forced him to send urgent e-mails to his contacts around the globe in an effort to flush them out. Dozens were located as responses came in to Khan’s computer.7 Among them, Ghailani. Under intensive interrogation by the ISI, Khan provided details about Ghailani ’s whereabouts in the city of Gujrat.8 When Pakistani police came for him on July 25, he didn’t come quietly. It took a fierce gun battle at his apartment that lasted anywhere between eight and sixteen hours, depending on which news outlet you believe, before Ghailani surrendered. With him were thirteen others, including his Uzbek wife, his daughter, and four other children. Among Ghailani’s possessions were a pair of laptops, on...

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