Word: zubaydah
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...Like most of the Sept. 11 hijackers, Zubaydah grew up in a comfortable middle-class home. His real name is Zayn al-Abidin Mohammed Husayn, and he was born into a Palestinian family living in Riyadh. In his teens, he was lured into Islamic extremism through the Palestinian cause. At 18, he surfaced in Gaza as a member of the Islamic Jihad. In the mid-1990s, he moved to Afghanistan, where his zeal and efficiency earned him a place in al-Qaeda's inner circle. Fastidious by nature, he was more a logistician than a fighter. Bin Laden trusted...
...Zubaydah's fingerprints appear on most of al-Qaeda's terrorist plots?some successful, most not?during the past few years. While bin Laden and his No. 2, the Egyptian physician Ayman al-Zawahiri, hid out in Afghanistan, Zubaydah was one of al-Qaeda's most traveled leaders, employing at least 37 aliases in extensive trips to Asia and Africa, according to U.S. investigators. (There have been reports that al-Zawahiri was spotted in eastern Afghanistan last month.) Zubaydah was implicated in the 1998 U.S. embassy bombings in East Africa; soon after, he rose to become al-Qaeda's chief...
...After the U.S. started bombing Afghanistan, on Oct. 7, Zubaydah slipped across the border. Washington investigators say the U.S. and its allies were using all existing intelligence assets to look for him in the region, especially in Pakistan. Initially, U.S. mistrust of Pakistani intelligence agencies slowed the search. But it was the Pakistanis who provided the first big break...
...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...
...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...