The man giving this account identified himself as a Karachi businessman. He was registered under the name Khalid Shaikh. It was, American authorities eventually came to believe, Mohammed, hiding in plain sight. Mohammed's caution -- he used three aliases on the Manila plot alone -- had paid off. He was still an unknown. That was about to end.
Yousef never gave up any valuable information. But investigators had recovered his laptop computer in Manila and a treasure trove of leads. The computer files included a letter seeking money for the plots. It was addressed to a potential donor, one who the letter-writer apparently felt was shirking his duty.
"Fear Allah, Mr. Siddiqui, there is a day of judgment," the letter said.
It was signed Khalid Shaikh.
"We knew there was another person involved ... but he was very mysterious and we didn't know who he was," said Herman, who led the FBI investigation of the Manila plot. "He basically eluded us."
The evidence they did have led investigators back to Peshawar and the circle of friends and acquaintances there. Zahed Shaikh -- Mohammed's brother -- was scrutinized, and although there was never a formal accusation lodged against him, he disappeared from Peshawar.
Investigators say Mohammed spent the next year building and maintaining a fund-raising network in the Persian Gulf.
"Throughout the region, there was this classic sort of money collector -- the guy who was hanging out at the mosque, checking out the scene, basically casing the mark, who would invariably be some old guy with lots of money. A religious guy, probably. The collector would come up alongside him, make his pitch very persistently and the mark would write him a check," said one American official, who worked in the Gulf throughout the 1990s.
"Khalid Shaikh Mohammed was a collector, a guy who would collect the money from the street collectors.... A guy in the Philippines would call a guy in Dubai who would call Khalid Shaikh Mohammed. It would be a chain of telephone calls, and Khalid would send the money."
American understanding of Islamic terrorism then was still inchoate. Even Bin Laden was seen as just another guy with bad ideas and a lot of money. Al Qaeda was barely on the screen. Potential state-sponsored terrorism was deemed more dangerous, so more attention was given to Iran, which had become the chief international proponent of Islamist goals.
