Al-Qaeda: Architect Of Terror

In some ways, he was al-Qaeda's Agent 007: suave, well educated, a trilingual globe-trotter who mixed easily in other cultures, who engaged women and intrigue with savoir faire and deadly expertise. Except that Khalid Shaikh Mohammed isn't fiction. He's all too real. Consider his resume of terror. He presumably helped kinsman Ramzi Yousef bomb the World Trade Center in 1993. He hatched plots, never carried out, to bring down U.S. airliners over the Pacific and to assassinate President Clinton and the Pope. He may well have masterminded--officials aren't sure yet--the deadly assault on the U.S.S. Cole off Yemen and the U.S. embassy bombings in East Africa. Accomplices told Pakistani police that Mohammed slashed the throat of Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl a year ago. And everyone agrees on his culpability for one other crime: directing the 9/11 attacks in New York City and Washington, the worst terrorist acts in history.

That record helped earn Mohammed the No. 3 position in al-Qaeda's murderous meritocracy. He rose to become its chief military planner--and perhaps the world's most dangerous terrorist operative--until Pakistani agents nabbed him at 2:30 a.m. Saturday at a house in Rawalpindi owned by a retired 75-year-old microbiologist. Unlike the wild shoot-out in Pakistan that preceded the capture in September of another al-Qaeda honcho, Ramzi Binalshibh, Mohammed's capture went quietly. Inside the rambling, two-story house, in a neighborhood inhabited by retired army generals, Pakistani Interior Ministry officials say they found Mohammed and another suspected al-Qaeda operative of Middle Eastern origin. The two were seized along with the scientist's son, an unemployed Pakistani man, Ahmed Afzal Qudoos. "We have finally apprehended Khalid Shaikh Mohammed," boasted Pakistani presidential spokesman Rashid Qureshi. "He is the kingpin of al-Qaeda." Sources tell TIME that agents had been led to his hideout through the earlier arrest of an Egyptian in Quetta who had been in contact with Mohammed. Neighbors, wary of the lone Arab who appeared in their working-class area, tipped off the police, hoping for a reward. Phone records led them to Rawalpindi, where investigators say Mohammed had been hiding for 10 days before his arrest.

That leaves al-Qaeda boss Osama bin Laden and his top lieutenant Ayman al-Zawahiri still at large, if not at liberty. Mohammed is a prize catch because he was still very much in business. With 200,000 U.S. and British troops stationed in the Persian Gulf ready to move on Iraq, authorities feared that he would activate sleeper cells in the gulf states or recruit fresh volunteers for suicide attacks against U.S. military targets. His network of agents in Kuwait (where he was born to a Pakistani father) and in Qatar--two key staging posts for the U.S. command--are still intact, intelligence experts say. "This is the planner, the key planner of 9/11 and probably al-Qaeda's most active planner right up until his capture," says a White House aide.