Anatomy Of A Raid

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The foreigners, as one officer put it, were "hard nuts to crack"; the Pakistanis less so. At the nearby town of Kohat, the group was turned over to the FBI for interrogation. "All we did was facilitate things for the Americans," says an intelligence officer in Peshawar. Money seemed to work better than any arm twisting. "The local contacts for al-Qaeda were caught, and financial inducements were made to them," explains a Pakistani military officer.

Using "extremely sensitive methods"--FBI-speak for telephone intercepts and locator devices--Pakistani and American investigators zeroed in on at least two houses in Faisalabad where calls were being made to suspicious phone numbers in Afghanistan. The investigators staked out the house in Faisal Town and found that it had been rented through a local go-between by Middle Easterners posing as cotton merchants. Ideally, the agents would have "sat on" Zubaydah, monitoring his contacts and e-mails for as long as possible to unlock his secret plots and pick up clues about bin Laden.

But the FBI was worried about leaks from within the Pakistani government. (Only President Pervez Musharraf, the Punjab governor and the top-echelon military intelligence men knew of the impending raid, according to a senior Islamabad official.) And the longer the surveillance dragged on, the more likely the watchers were to be spotted by Zubaydah's team. So they struck.

In the end, more than 50 al-Qaeda suspects were caught in night raids around Faisalabad and Lahore on March 28. More arrests were to come. In Peshawar five Sudanese training at a flying club were detained, and FBI agents pored over the school's alumni roster, looking for known al-Qaeda operatives. Last Monday police in Lahore arrested an additional 16 al-Qaeda suspects. Many of the Arabs and Afghans caught in the Faisalabad raid have been flown out of the country, according to Pakistani authorities, probably to Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, where the U.S. is interrogating captured Taliban and al-Qaeda members. The wounded Zubaydah was rushed by ambulance to Lahore, then flown to a hospital in southwestern Pakistan--probably to either Dalbandin or Jacobabad, two military bases used by the U.S. "For now," says a Pakistani source, "Abu Zubaydah's keeping mum. He's not admitting to anything." His underlings, also in U.S. custody, may be more willing to talk.

--With reporting by Massimo Calabresi, Elaine Shannon, Mark Thompson and Adam Zagorin/Washington, Bruce Crumley/Paris, Syed Talat Hussain/Islamabad and Rahimullah Yusufzai/Peshawar

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