By Peter Finn and Kamran Khan
Washington Post Foreign Service
Sunday, March 9, 2003; Page A01

KARACHI, Pakistan -- On the eve of his capture last weekend, Khalid Sheik Mohammed, al Qaeda's deadliest operator, took a commercial flight from the Pakistani city of Quetta to Islamabad, the capital, according to Pakistani investigators. Even with the breath of his enemy on his neck, Mohammed couldn't tolerate an arduous trek by car. With signature audacity, he hopped a plane.

The self-described mastermind of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks was apparently convinced that the groomed man with a receding hairline pictured on FBI wanted posters bore no resemblance to the overweight, tangle-haired man he had become. But Mohammed had been under 24-hour surveillance for several days, according to Pakistani intelligence sources, and as he made the 430-mile flight to Islamabad, four agents of Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence agency sat elsewhere on the plane.

A circle was closing.

Five times between Sept. 10, 2002, and Feb. 13, Pakistani authorities, working with the CIA and the FBI, had come within a hair of Mohammed. His ability to vanish when the police were at his door had even drawn some grudging admiration from his pursuers.

"Khalid can disappear just about better than anybody," said a U.S intelligence official in an interview before his capture. "He just drops off the face of the Earth."

For years, Mohammed was a glimmer -- one name among many who flitted in the shadows as al Qaeda grew more and more lethal. But when he was finally captured on March 1 in the Pakistani city of Rawalpindi, rousted from bed at 3 a.m. with a hint of contempt still on his lips despite his disheveled appearance, Mohammed had become a quarry of inestimable importance.

Mohammed resided at the center of the al Qaeda web. From his longtime base in Karachi, a sprawling city of 14 million people, he made real the violent visions of a terrorist leadership that lay across the border in Afghanistan. The carnage visited on New York, Washington and Pennsylvania was directed by his then-invisible hand. After al Qaeda's leadership was killed or dispersed, Mohammed, although on the run, became the repository for the group's hopes for renewal and revenge.

Investigators have tied him to the murder of Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl, the bombings that killed more than 180 people in Bali, the fire-bombing of a synagogue in Tunisia and multiple failed conspiracies, including a dirty-bomb attack on an American city and the bombing of U.S. embassies in Southeast Asia. He also exploited old links with Pakistani extremist groups, which predate his late entry into al Qaeda in 1997, to spawn attacks on Westerners in Karachi, according to U.S. and Pakistani investigators.

Mohammed, who is now in U.S. custody at an undisclosed location, is believed to have knowledge of most current al Qaeda operations and of the cells it has scattered around the globe. His interrogation could lead to the arrest of al Qaeda operatives in Southeast Asia, the Persian Gulf, Europe and perhaps the United States. In short, it could break the back of al Qaeda.

The known shards of Mohammed's life never quite seemed to fit together. In North Carolina, where he attended college, he was reluctant to shake the hand of a woman. In the Philippines, while planning to kill the pope and blow American airliners out of the sky, he was a bon vivant who liked to wear tuxedos and flatter the ladies; he once rented a helicopter to impress a woman. Charming and funny among friends, he was elsewhere cold-blooded to the point of wielding the blade himself when Pearl was murdered, according to investigators.

The son of a mosque leader, Mohammed was born to expatriate Pakistani parents in 1965 in Fahaheel, a burgeoning beachfront enclave south of Kuwait City where many immigrants settled hoping to share in the emirate's oil boom. By some accounts, his father, Sheik Mohammed Ali, first worked as a trader, as did many fellow immigrants from Pakistan's Baluchistan province. But by the time Khalid was born, the youngest of four sons and one daughter, his father was a respected elder preacher in a ramshackle neighborhood of single-story dwellings.

As a teenager, Mohammed attended a strict Pakistani school for boys and, according to acquaintances, also became active in the Muslim Brotherhood, an influential and sometimes militant Islamic organization founded in Egypt in the 1920s. His oldest brother, Zahid Sheik, who attended Kuwait University in the 1980s, was a local leader of the brotherhood.

The family's Pakistani roots meant they were shut out of Kuwaiti citizenship. There wasn't much of a future in Kuwait for an ambitious foreign boy. He was determined to get out. In December 1982, the 17-year-old Mohammed obtained a Pakistani passport. Within a year, he had been accepted by a college in the United States.

Mohammed, characteristically, left a faint impression during the three years he spent pursuing an engineering degree at two North Carolina campuses in the mid-1980s; even the FBI's "Most Wanted" photographs barely stirred recollections among his former professors.

In January 1984, he joined the ranks of international students streaming to Chowan College, a tiny Baptist school tucked in a remote corner of northeastern North Carolina. Struggling to boost enrollment, the school had begun aggressively recruiting foreign students in the 1970s, promoting its small size, safe environment and absence of the standard English proficiency requirements.

By the mid-'80s, international students accounted for nearly 30 percent of Chowan students. They were so much a part of campus life that Mohammed drew scant notice.

Garth D. Faile, chairman of the science department, taught him chemistry. With prodding from a dog-eared grade book, Faile recalled him as "a B-type student." "To me, he wasn't unusually radical," Faile said. "I didn't notice anything different about him."

After one semester, Mohammed transferred to North Carolina Agricultural and Technical State University in Greensboro, where he earned a bachelor of science in mechanical engineering in December 1986.

Fellow students knew him as a reserved, religious conservative, affable in company but guarded in his political beliefs. Although there had been some baiting of foreigners on campus, especially after the 1979 Iranian revolution, it was less frequent by the time Mohammed arrived, former students said. "We were treated, as students, with respect," said Sami Zitawi, 42, a Kuwaiti native and former classmate of Mohammed's who lives in Greensboro. "If there is any reason for hatred, it is not from that experience."

The 1980s were the years of the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan, and the idea that jihad against the infidel invader was a duty swept through the consciousness of many young Muslim men. Volunteers from all over the Muslim world streamed to Peshawar, a Pakistani city close to the Afghan border that served as a staging area for the Islamic resistance. Other foes of the Soviet Union were there too -- including the CIA, which teamed with the Pakistani government to outfit and fund the Islamic guerrillas known as mujaheddin.

Much of Mohammed's family heard the call. His eldest brother, Zahid, was regional manager for a Kuwaiti charity, the Committee for Islamic Appeal, based in Peshawar. Two other brothers, Abed and Aref, volunteered to fight the Soviets and both would die. His sister's son, Ramzi Yousef, visited in 1988 from college in Britain, and returned permanently in 1991. Mohammed was inevitably drawn to the struggle and took a job teaching at a school founded by an Afghan warlord called the University of Dawa al Jihad, translated as Convert and Struggle.

After the Soviets withdrew from Afghanistan in 1989 and the country imploded into civil war, the undercurrent of hostility toward the West that had coursed beneath the CIA-mujaheddin alliance began to bubble up. The Persian Gulf War of 1991 and the presence of U.S. troops in Saudi Arabia unleashed suppressed hatred of the United States among people like bin Laden.

And out of Peshawar came the vanguard of a movement that would eventually bring into existence something called al Qaeda. Yousef, Mohammed's nephew, was among its first unaligned adherents. In 1992, Sheik Omar Abdel Rahman, a radical Egyptian cleric now in prison in the United States, recruited Yousef because he wished to topple the "civilized pillars" -- the twin towers of the World Trade Center. Mohammed transferred some money to Yousef while his nephew was in the United States carrying out the 1993 bombing, but Mohammed was not integral to the operation and would remain subordinate to Yousef, according to FBI officials who have profiled the pair.

Yousef escaped from New York and in 1994 he was back in Pakistan introducing Mohammed to associates who noted Mohammed's interest in aviation, according to the interrogation in the Philippines of a captured associate of the two. By then, Yousef and Mohammed were living in Karachi. Adopting a Saudi name, Munir Madni, Mohammed set up Mohammed Trading. The company imported holy water from Mecca to generate funds that were distributed to a Sunni Muslim organization allegedly responsible for the killing of at least 2,000 Shiite Muslims in Pakistan since 1994, Pakistani police and intelligence officials said.

But Yousef had much grander ambitions than sectarian murder: transnational terrorism under the rubric of what he called the Liberation Army. Yousef, according to the interrogation of Abdul Hakim Murad, one of his accomplices, was "dreaming that someday the Liberation Army will become an independent and structured organization."

The mystique that now surrounds Mohammed overshadows Yousef, a smart and capable terrorist and Mohammed's superior in 1995. Investigators admired the sophistication of Yousef's bomb-making, and the investigation of the 1995 plot in the Philippines to kill Pope John Paul II revealed that he also envisioned using planes as missiles and spoke of hiding explosives in shoes, a technique employed by British al Qaeda loyalist Richard Reid in his unsuccessful attempt to bring down an American airliner over the Atlantic in December 2001.

The Manila plot was foiled when the apartment in which the conspirators lived caught fire. But the principals slipped away, and Mohammed, who called himself Abdul Majid or Abu Salem or Salem Ali in Manila, was barely noticed. So little attention did Mohammed warrant that when Yousef was arrested at a guesthouse in Islamabad in February 1995, Mohammed was in the room next door, unnoticed, Pakistani officials said. Yousef is now serving a life sentence in the United States.

"There were so many unasked questions at the time because we didn't know the importance of Mohammed," said Col. Rudolfo Mendoza, who led the Philippine investigation. "I am not alone in making the mistake. My friends from the American Embassy made the mistake also."

Yousef's female acquaintances in Manila told police they had the impression Mohammed was a "sheik from Saudi," Mendoza said. They described him as "refined in manner" and intelligent. Yousef and Mohammed frequented nightclubs and karaoke bars in Malate and in Quezon City, in metro Manila. "Though he womanized and spent time at dive resorts, there is no evidence that he drank alcohol," said Zachary Abuza, an expert on terrorism in Southeast Asia who teaches at Simmons College in Boston. "I think we have to look at some of his 'playboy' lifestyle as part of his cover."

After Yousef's capture in Islamabad, Mohammed fled to Qatar in 1996. The FBI soon learned of his presence there, and the Clinton administration sought to arrange an operation to arrest Mohammed and fly him to prison in the United States. When the CIA reported that it did not have the necessary officers or agents in Qatar, a Pentagon plan involving U.S. Special Forces was put before a meeting of the National Security Council's Deputies Committee, a panel of officials just below Cabinet rank, according to former officials involved in the discussions.

At the time, however, Bahrain and Qatar had been feuding over disputed islands in the Persian Gulf.

Because the Pentagon plan involved sending a small attack force by helicopter from Bahrain into Qatar, administration officials feared the Qataris might mistake the U.S operation for a Bahraini attack. Officials decided that the risk of triggering a war between the two countries -- and of scuttling an important defense basing agreement being negotiated with Qatar -- was too great, the former officials said.

As a result, the administration asked Qatar's foreign minister to have Mohammed turned over to the United States. According to former officials of the U.S. and Qatari governments, the foreign minister informed Interior Minister Abdullah bin Khalida Thani, a member of the Qatari royal family and an Islamic fundamentalist who allowed Mohammed and a group of Arabs traveling with him to stay at his large farm outside Doha.

Thani, sources said, tipped off Mohammed and his group and helped them flee. The FBI and U.S. diplomats protested, but they lost their chance to get Mohammed.

In 1997, Mohammed swore allegiance to bin Laden and al Qaeda, according to U.S. investigators. He already had ties to the group. An organization run by bin Laden's brother-in-law, Mohammed Jamal Khalifa, was one of the primary funding mechanisms for the 1995 plot to kill the pope.

Mohammed's fluency in Arabic, English and Urdu, as well as his technical education, made him a major asset. Although he had been indicted in the United States in 1996 for the Manila plot, and despite the attempt to nab him in Qatar, he remained a little-known figure to U.S. authorities.

"To be honest, it wasn't until recently that any of us even realized he was part of al Qaeda," a U.S. intelligence official said in an interview last year. "The big problem nailing him down is that the informants that we relied on, especially before 9/11, were mujaheddin. They'd been in Afghanistan, in Sudan, back in Afghanistan. Khalid was never a part of any of that."

What role, if any, he played in the 1998 U.S. Embassy bombings in Africa and the attack on the USS Cole in Yemen in 2000 remains the subject of debate. But because of his experience in the country, the United States was Mohammed's primary focus, according to investigators.

In an interview with al-Jazeera television, broadcast on the first anniversary of the Sept. 11 attacks, Mohammed said planning for them began in 1999. "The attacks were designed to cause as many deaths as possible and havoc, and to be a big slap for America on American soil," Mohammed said.

Over two years, mostly from Karachi, he orchestrated the attacks. With plans and operatives in place, Mohammed, in the weeks before Sept. 11, had moved on, planning new atrocities.

In July 2001, a Canadian citizen, Mohammed Mansour Jabarah, met with bin Laden, who sent him to Karachi to meet Mohammed. For two weeks, according to a Canadian intelligence report, Mohammed gave Jabarah "advice on how to prepare himself for [al Qaeda] missions."

In early September, Jabarah was given $10,000 for expenses and warned to leave Pakistan before Sept. 11. He was to act as a liaison between al Qaeda and Southeast Asian Islamic militants for a planned bombing campaign against U.S. and Israeli interests in the Philippines and Singapore, according to the Canadian report. The plot was broken up, but in the coming months Mohammed, moving between Karachi and Quetta, furiously tried to orchestrate further attacks.

In April 2002, for instance, he took a call from the driver of a truck three hours before it blew up outside a synagogue in Tunisia, killing 19 people, according to German intelligence sources. He met with Jose Padilla, now in U.S. custody, about setting off a dirty bomb in the United States. And he killed Daniel Pearl, some Pakistani investigators believe.

Mohammed was nearly captured on Sept. 10, 2002, when Ramzi Binalshibh, a key member of al Qaeda's Hamburg cell, was picked up, and again the next day when two of Mohammed's young sons were arrested at an apartment following a shoot-out. "Even when we caught Ramzi Binalshibh in Karachi on Sept. 10, we had actually gone to capture Khalid Sheik Mohammed," said a Pakistani intelligence official, who said that a subsequent raid in Karachi on Sept. 11, 2002, was also aimed at Mohammed.

Four months after Binalshibh's arrest, U.S. and Pakistani officials received information that Mohammed and some other al Qaeda suspects were hiding in a residence owned by a senior leader of Pakistan's most organized religious party, Jamaat-e-Islami, on the outskirts of Karachi. When Pakistani and U.S. officials raided that house, on Jan. 10 this year, they captured two al Qaeda suspects, but Mohammed didn't show up for a scheduled visit. "It was a big frustration," said a Pakistani official. "We were almost certain of getting him."

Ten days later, Pakistani and U.S. intelligence agents raided an apartment near Karachi's main shopping district and arrested two Jordanian citizens who had been in contact with Mohammed. He eluded investigators again.

Mohammed narrowly escaped arrest one last time on Feb. 13 in Quetta. A raid on a two-story house in the downtown section of the city netted the son of Abdel Rahman, the Egyptian cleric.

Although they missed Mohammed, U.S. communications specialists soon traced him to another part of the city.

On Mohammed's flight to Islamabad on Feb. 28, four Pakistani intelligence officers were also on board, intelligence sources said. It was the endgame.

Finn reported from Berlin. Staff writers Susan Schmidt, Dan Eggen and Steve Coll in Washington, Liz Clarke in Greensboro and Richard Leiby in Kuwait, and correspondent Ellen Nakashima in Manila contributed to this report.