by Leonardo Salvaggio. The Italian original version is available here.
Although the most well-known name among the planners of 9/11 is that of Osama bin Laden, the true organizer of the attacks was the Pakistani terrorist Khalid Sheikh Mohammed (often referred to by the acronym KSM).
Khalid Sheikh Mohammed was born in Pakistan in the region of Baluchistan on April 14, 1965, but spent his early years in Kuwait, where at the age of sixteen he joined the Muslim Brotherhood. After completing high school in 1983, he moved to the United States, enrolling at Chowan College in North Carolina. After just one semester, he transferred to North Carolina Agricultural and Technical State University, where he graduated in mechanical engineering in 1986.
After finishing his studies, he returned to Pakistan for the first time and there he joined the Afghan mujahideen in their resistance against the Soviet invasion. Between 1988 and 1992, he also worked with a non-governmental organization supported by the Afghan guerrilla leader Abd al-Rasul Sayyaf, which operated in Pakistan and Afghanistan, raising funds to support the Afghan resistance. In 1992, he fought in Bosnia before returning to Qatar, where he worked as an engineer for the Ministry of Electricity and Water.
In 1993, the terrorist Ramzi Yousef, KSM’s nephew who was only two years younger, was the perpetrator of the first bombing of the World Trade Center in New York. From that point, U.S. forces turned their attention to both KSM and his nephew. The attack carried out by his nephew gave KSM the idea of striking the U.S. with another terrorist attack, driven by American support for the state of Israel. In 1994, KSM moved for a few months to the Philippines with Ramzi Yousef, where they planned the attack known as “
Bojinka” (which involved the simultaneous explosion of several airplanes in different parts of the world). The plot failed when one of their collaborators, the Pakistani terrorist Murad, accidentally detonated a bomb while assembling it. At the time of Murad's arrest, KSM had already fled to Qatar and from there moved to Afghanistan.
In 1996, KSM presented his
original plan to bin Laden for what would later become the 9/11 attacks. The initial proposal involved hijacking ten planes to crash them into nine targets on both U.S. coasts. The last plane, piloted by KSM himself, would land at an unspecified airport where he would summon the media to address the American government in a worldwide broadcast. This plan would have placed KSM as the central figure in the operation. Bin Laden rejected it due to its evident complexity (and perhaps because he did not want to be overshadowed by KSM), and the plan was renegotiated over the following years, eventually leading to the final version.
During this time, bin Laden proposed to KSM that he formally join al-Qaeda, but KSM rejected the offer and never accepted it. Nonetheless, KSM moved to Kandahar to plan the attacks with the leadership of al-Qaeda, including bin Laden.
After the 9/11 attacks, in 2002, a video showing the beheading of CNN journalist Daniel Pearl was released, and the FBI believes that the killer, whose face is not shown, was actually KSM. That same year, the terrorist Abu Zubaydah was captured in Pakistan, and during interrogations, he confirmed the important role KSM played in planning the attacks. KSM himself later confirmed this in an interview with journalists Yosri Fouda and Nick Fielding, which was published in the book
Masterminds of Terror.
KSM was captured in 2003 while he was sleeping, and for the first three years, he was detained in various prisons across Europe. The terrorist was interrogated and tortured, providing partial and sometimes completely false information. For example, he gave useful information about the whereabouts of Hambali (another planner of 9/11), but he said nothing about the hiding places of Osama bin Laden or al-Zawahiri. He also fabricated claims that al-Qaeda possessed nuclear weapons, a completely invented allegation.
Since 2006, he has been held at Guantanamo, and his trial began in 2021.
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