'Mastermind of 9/11' gets his day

Not long after he was rousted from his bed and seized in a predawn raid in Pakistan in March 2003, Khalid Shaikh Mohammed gave his captors two demands: He wanted a lawyer, and he wanted to be taken to New York. After a nearly seven-year odyssey that took him to secret Central Intelligence Agency jails in Europe and a U.S. military prison in Cuba, Mohammed is getting his wishes. He will be the most senior leader of Al-Qaida to date held to account for the mass murder of nearly 3,000 Americans, standing trial in Lower Manhattan while his boss, Osama bin Laden, continues to elude a worldwide dragnet.

By all accounts, what would be the biggest terrorism trial in U.S. history would provide Mohammed, a man of no small ego, a grand stage.

"The trial will be more than just a soapbox for him," said Jarret Brachman, author of "Global Jihadism" and a terrorism consultant to several government agencies. "It will be a chance for him to indict the entire system.

"I'm sure he's been waiting for this for a very long time," Brachman added.

"I know him well, and if he gets his way in federal court, it will be a circus," said Charles (Cully) Stimson, who was deputy assistant secretary of defense for detainee affairs in the Bush administration. "The court will have to rein in his speechifying and keep the focus on his criminal behavior."

The last time Mohammed had such a platform was at a military hearing at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, where he delivered an often rambling exposition on a number of topics, including U.S. history, citing Manifest Destiny and the Revolutionary War.

"Because war, for sure, there will be victims," he said through a translator, explaining that he had some remorse for the children killed on Sept. 11, 2001. "I said I'm not happy that 3,000 people had been killed in America. I feel sorry even. I don't like to kill children and the kids."

But he added: "This is why the language of any war in the world is killing. I mean the language of the war is victims."

The 9/11 Commission Report, discussing Mohammed's terrorist ambitions, called him a "self-cast star."

"I am the mastermind of 9/11, not Osama bin Laden," he said in one Guantanamo hearing. (His vanity has also surfaced. He once complained that a courtroom sketch artist had drawn his nose too big. The rendering of the proboscis was adjusted.)

Background suitable to the task

A Pakistani raised in Kuwait, Mohammed, 44, became important to Al-Qaida's mission in large part because of his background: He had an engineering degree from a U.S. university, spoke passable English and had a deeper understanding of the West than any of Bin Laden's other lieutenants.

As Pakistanis in Kuwait, his relatives would have been considered second-class citizens, but they had the means to send him to the United States for his education: Chowan College, a small Baptist school in rural North Carolina where many foreign students came to improve their English. He later transferred to North Carolina A&T in Greensboro, where he graduated with a degree in mechanical engineering in 1986.

Not long after graduation, he traveled to Pakistan and Afghanistan to join the mujahedeen fighters, who at the time were the beneficiaries of millions of dollars from the CIA in the fight against Soviet troops.

Mohammed's experience in Afghanistan gave him a first taste of the battle against the West that would come to consume his life.

Over the next decade, he plotted dozens of attacks against Western targets. At his military tribunal in 2007, Mohammed recited a litany of conspiracies he said he had had a hand in, including assassination plots against President Bill Clinton and Pope John Paul II, and the 1993 World Trade Center bombing.

But demonstrating his tendency toward grandiosity, he overstated his role in many of the attacks, most terrorism experts believe, although they do not dispute his central role in planning the Sept. 11 attacks.

It was not until the mid-1990s that U.S. counterterrorism experts began to understand Mohammed's significance to the cause of global jihad, after a thwarted plot to blow up 12 U.S. commercial aircraft in midair. The so-called Bojinka plot, hatched in a Manila apartment with his nephew, World Trade Center bomber Ramzi Yousef, was Mohammed's first inspiration for using aircraft as missiles against civilian targets, according to the 9/11 commission report and recently declassified CIA documents.

In 1996, Mohammed traveled to Afghanistan to sell Bin Laden on an idea: simultaneously hijacking 10 aircraft and flying them into high-profile civilian targets in the United States. He would be on the one plane not to crash, and after the plane landed, he would emerge and deliver a speech condemning U.S. policy toward Israel.

Bin Laden dismissed the idea as impractical, but three years later he changed his mind and summoned Mohammed to Kandahar to begin planning a scaled-down version of the plot; that became the Sept. 11 attacks.

Some terrorism experts said that Bin Laden and Mohammed had as much a rivalry as a partnership. For instance, Mohammed dismissed the training Bin Laden oversaw at Al-Qaida camps in Afghanistan, believing that climbing on jungle gyms and taking target practice with AK-47s was impractical. And like a rebellious employee, Mohammed bristled at being micromanaged by the Al-Qaida leader.

Yet the two men's personalities complemented each other.

"You need the charismatic dreamers like Bin Laden to make a movement successful," said Daniel Byman, a former intelligence analyst now at Georgetown University. "But you also need operators like Khalid Shaikh Mohammed who can actually get the job done."

Supposedly a wake-up call

The purpose of the Sept. 11 attacks, Mohammed told his captors years later, was to "wake the American people up." By hitting civilian targets, he said, he would shock the country into recognizing the impact of its government's actions abroad, including supporting Israel in its fight against Palestinian militants.

Mohammed jealously guarded the details of the plot, telling only Bin Laden, one of his advisers and a few of the senior hijackers. Even as he planned the attacks, he was determined to keep his independence from the Al-Qaida leader, and he later bragged to his CIA captors that he had disobeyed Bin Laden on several occasions.

Yet for all his professed wisdom about the United States, Mohammed later admitted that he had completely misjudged what the U.S. response to the Sept. 11 attacks would be. He did not expect the military campaign in Afghanistan, nor the relentless hunt for Al-Qaida leaders throughout South Asia and the Middle East.

He even misjudged his own fate. When he was captured in 2003 in Rawalpindi, Pakistan, he thought he would soon be traveling to New York City, where he would stand trial under his indictment for the 9/11 plot.

Instead, he was hooded and spirited out of Pakistan by CIA operatives, who took him to Afghanistan and eventually to a former Soviet military base in northern Poland.

Mohammed's initial defiance toward his captors set off an interrogation plan that would turn him into the central figure in the roiling debate about the CIA's interrogation methods. He was subjected 183 times to the near-drowning technique called waterboarding, treatment that Attorney General Eric Holder has called torture. But advocates of the CIA's methods, including former Vice President Dick Cheney, have said that the interrogation methods produced a trove of information that helped dismantle Al-Qaida and disrupt potential terrorism attacks.

Mohammed was moved to the military prison at Guantanamo Bay in September 2006. By then, he had grown a long beard and had begun dressing in traditional Arabic clothing, cultivating a pious image far different from his disheveled, befuddled appearance after his capture in 2003.

But his time in prison has been marked by moments of despair, according to officials familiar with his detention. Those moments include the time he was given photographs of his children, two of whom were captured with him but now live in Iran with his wife.

He has spent most of his time at Guantanamo Bay in prayer or reading in his cell. The routine has been broken only by visits to the gym, where he likes to jog in small circles, or conversations in the yard with the detainee in the adjoining space.

Mohammed has said that he is impatient to end the legal process.

"This is what I wish: to be a martyr for a long time," he said last year. "I will, God willing, have this."

The Washington Post contributed to this report.