The Longest War

by Peter L. Bergen

  Another al-Qaeda plant was Ali Saleh Kahlah al-Marri, the citizen of Qatar who had arrived in the United States on September 10, 2001, on a student visa, ostensibly to study computer programming at Bradley University in Peoria, Illinois. Following 9/11, at least 1,200 mostly Muslim men were detained in a post–9/11 dragnet that caught almost no really threatening person except Marri, who was questioned a month after the attacks and again in December 2001. After Marri was questioned for the second time, the FBI searched his laptop and found that he had conducted extensive research on chemical weapons, including the manufacture of hydrogen cyanide. Investigators concluded that the highly technical information found on his computer “far exceeds the interest of a merely curious individual.” Marri had also stored on his computer the usual panoply of bin Laden lectures typical of an al-Qaeda acolyte. At the time of his arrest Marri had set up multiple fake credit card accounts. He was charged with credit card fraud and lying to federal investigators and was jailed.

  Two years later, Marri was named an enemy combatant by the Bush administration and was incarcerated in a Navy brig in Charleston, South Carolina, where he was then held in solitary confinement for almost six years. Khalid Sheikh Mohammed (KSM), who was captured in March 2003, appears to have been the source of some of the information that led the Bush administration to treat Marri as an enemy combatant. Marri had trained at al-Qaeda camps in Afghanistan beginning in 1998, and during the summer of 2001 he met with KSM and volunteered for some kind of operation in the States. Marri then traveled to Dubai, where he met Mustafa al-Hawsawi, the paymaster for much of the 9/11 operation, who gave him ten thousand dollars. Marri arrived in the States the day before the attacks on New York and Washington along with his wife and five kids, good cover that pegged him as a family man.

  In the following months Marri placed calls from payphones in the Peoria area to members of al-Qaeda, sometimes traveling as far as 150 miles from his home to elude detection. Ali Soufan, the Arabic-speaking FBI agent, remembers that Marri was placing calls to Hawsawi, the 9/11 paymaster: “He was using a payphone outside the motel where he was staying with his family to call Hawsawi. There is one person that called Hawsawi before; it was Mohammed Atta.” Having denied the charges against him for years, Marri finally entered a plea agreement in April 2009 in which he admitted his deep ties to al-Qaeda.

  Marri was not the only al-Qaeda foot soldier planning attacks on Americans in the wake of 9/11. The Ohio trucker Iyman Faris was born in Pakistani Kashmir in 1969. As a young man Faris had fought against the Soviets in Afghanistan and after a spell fighting in Bosnia he slipped into the States in 1994 where he promptly married an American, Geneva Bowling. Five years later, by now an American citizen, Faris divorced his wife. Around this time, on a trip to Pakistan he met with KSM, who recruited him to work for al-Qaeda.

  Always dreaming up the next terror spectacular, KSM tasked Faris with severing the cables on the Brooklyn Bridge, an idea he got from watching the movie Godzilla. Faris explored the idea of bringing down the bridge by cutting its suspension cables with an acetylene torch. In February 2003, Faris concluded that this harebrained scheme was not going to work and via a Baltimore contact told KSM “the weather is too hot,” unsubtle code for nixing the operation. He was detained on March 20, 2003, and for six weeks Faris’s arrest was kept secret, during which time he gave investigators a considerable amount of information about al-Qaeda (without any coercive measures being applied).

  While Reid, Marri, and Faris were genuine al-Qaeda recruits, many of the terrorism cases during the first Bush term did not amount to very much. A critical element of the Bush administration’s approach to the threat after 9/11 was that there were large numbers of al-Qaeda “sleeper cells” in the United States. The week after the attacks on New York and Washington, three North African Muslim men living in Detroit were arrested on suspicion of being such a cell. Attorney General John Ashcroft said the Detroit cell members were “suspected of having knowledge of the Sept. 11 attacks.” Much of the evidence against the men, however, had been supplied by a known con man facing a prison sentence who was hoping to cut a deal for himself.

  U.S. officials found a videotape of a trip the “Detroit cell” had made to Disneyland and became convinced that it was a “casing tape” for a future terrorist attack. Prosecutors said that the Arabic narration on the tape described Disneyland as “a rising cemetery,” but the translator for the defense said the correct translation was, “What a lovely view!” Ron Hansen, a reporter for the Detroit News who covered the case, explained that the Disneyland video didn’t look like a terrorist casing tape: “I could never get past the fact that the tape looked just like a tourist tape. The Disneyland ride, for example, was a lengthy queue, people just making their way to the ride. The camera occasionally pans to look at the rocks on the wall, made to look like an Indiana Jones movie, and after several minutes the camera, it pans across and shows a trash can momentarily, and then continues off to look into the crowd. The [government] expert basically said that, by flashing on that trash can for a moment, the people who are part of this conspiracy to conduct these kinds of terrorist operations—they would understand what this is all about: how to locate a bomb in Disneyland in California.”

  The case became even more bizarre when officials also charged that the members of the Detroit sleeper cell were planning to attack a U.S. Air Force base in Turkey. Drawings of the base, discovered in a diary, were later determined to be the demented doodles of a Yemeni who variously believed he was Yemen’s minister of defense and Saudi Arabia’s president and who had committed suicide a year before any of the accused had arrived in Detroit. Eventually, the terrorism convictions of the three North African men were overturned.

  The Detroit case was emblematic of a number of the “terrorism” cases during the first Bush term, which often followed the trajectory of a tremendous initial trumpeting by the government only to collapse, or to be revealed as something less than earth-shattering, when the details emerged months later. Take Chaplain James Yee, the supposed al-Qaeda spy at Guantánamo who turned out to be cheating not on his country but on his wife. Or Brandon Mayfield, the unfortunate Oregon lawyer busted for his alleged role in the 2004 Madrid bombings. Mysterious Spanish documents found in Mayfield’s possession later turned out to be his son’s homework.

  An iconic image of the war against the Taliban was the interview of “American Taliban” John Walker Lindh by CNN after Lindh was captured in northern Afghanistan in December 2001. Lying on a stretcher, heavily bearded and caked in dirt, Lindh explained in a vaguely Middle Eastern accent, “I was in [Pakistan’s] North-West Frontier Province. The people there in general have a great love for the Taliban. So I started to read some of the literature of the scholars and my heart became attached.” That an American citizen would admit just months after the 9/11 attacks that his “heart had became attached” to the Taliban made him, needless to say, the object of a great deal of hostility in the United States; many Americans wanted Lindh to be tried for treason.

  Despite initial claims by Attorney General John Ashcroft that Lindh would be charged with conspiracy to kill Americans, the eventual plea agreement that the government reached with him was only that he had provided “services” to the Taliban contravening the 1999 Clinton executive order that had slapped sanctions on them. What services had Lindh provided to the Taliban? Himself, it turned out. Lindh had refused offers by al-Qaeda leaders to take part in operations against Americans and there was no proof that he was involved in any militant activity other than training at a Taliban camp, but that was enough to convict him of providing “services” to the Taliban.

  Lindh’s conviction on the charge that he had provided his own services to the Taliban set an important precedent for a number of cases in the “war on terror.” The same charge of providing their own services to a terrorist group would also be the undoing of a group of Yemeni-Americans living in upstate New York who traveled to Afghanistan on something of a jihad va
cation in 2001. A year later the group would be portrayed by the Bush administration with great fanfare as the first al-Qaeda sleeper cell discovered in the United States since 9/11.

  The group of six Yemeni-Americans making up the supposed cell lived in the small, decaying Rust Belt town of Lackawanna, New York, where they had grown up as American as Big Macs. One dated and married a high school cheerleader, and many of them played soccer on the high school team. But in 2000 they fell under the spell of Kamal Derwish, a charismatic, deeply religious, fellow Yemeni-American, who told them stirring tales of derring-do about his role in the early-1990s war between the Bosnian Muslims and Serbs. Over late-night bull sessions fueled by pizza, Derwish led the group of very ordinary men—telemarketers, delivery men, and car salesmen—in discussions about the plight of Muslims around the world; gradually they came to embrace a militant form of Islam.

  Derwish eventually persuaded the six men that they should go to Afghanistan to see the Taliban in action and deepen their commitment to jihad by attending training camps there. Under the cover that they were traveling to Pakistan as part of Tablighi Jamaat, a generally apolitical missionary organization with a large following in the Muslim world, Derwish and his buddies traveled to Afghanistan in two groups during the spring and summer of 2001.

  At one of al-Qaeda’s Afghan training camps, the men trained on M-16 rifles, RPGs, and AK-47s. During their training bin Laden and Zawahiri appeared at the camp to announce the merger of their organizations. One of the Lackawanna group, Sahim Alwan, a twenty-nine-year-old father of three, was asked by bin Laden how Americans felt about suicide operations. Alwan did not give the al-Qaeda leader the answer he was looking for: “We don’t even think about it.” Realizing that he was in well over his head, Alwan faked an ankle injury and finagled his way out of the camp. Eventually almost all of the Yemeni-Americans returned home to Lackawanna. They kept their training in Afghanistan a secret, pushing it to the back of their minds, and if they recalled it at all they remembered the bad food, the uncomfortable rigors of life at the camp—four of them had washed out of their training early—and the depth of hatred for the United States among al-Qaeda’s recruits.

  It was their bad luck that in the spring of 2002 a handwritten, anonymous letter arrived at the FBI office in Buffalo, New York, charging that terrorists had come to Lackawanna “for recruiting the Yemenite youth.” When Sahim Alwan was asked by an FBI agent what he had done on his trip to Pakistan a year earlier, he lied and said he had gone only for religious instruction.

  The FBI’s investigation went into high gear during the summer of 2002 as the first anniversary of al-Qaeda’s assaults on Washington and New York fast approached. One of the Lackawanna group, Mukhtar al-Bakri, was then traveling in the Middle East. On July 18 Bakri sent a mystifying email message home to a buddy in Lackawanna, subject “Big Meal,” which was intercepted by the feds. The email said, “The next meal will be very huge. No one will be able to stand it.” Bakri’s friend wrote back, “Are you talking about a hamburger meal, or what?” The cryptic message about the “huge” meal was compounded by chatter picked up from Bakri that his “wedding” was fast approaching. As the word wedding was believed to be code for an impending al-Qaeda attack, this raised the Lackawanna investigation to a matter that President Bush was now being regularly briefed on.

  The decision was made to arrest Bakri, who was now in Bahrain. But the wedding was not a code; on the first anniversary of the 9/11 attacks Bakri was arrested in his marital chamber, pulled from the tender caresses of his just-married teen bride. He soon admitted attending the Afghan training camp and his five friends were swiftly detained in the United States.

  The Justice Department held a press conference to announce the disruption of an “al-Qaeda terrorist cell” and President Bush told journalists, “One by one, we’re hunting the killers down.” And in his January 2003 State of the Union address, Bush claimed that an al-Qaeda cell had been recently broken up in Buffalo, referring to the Lackawanna case. This was a reach. None of the Lackawanna Six was ever accused of planning an act of terrorism nor had they ever joined al-Qaeda. A New York Police Department report concluded, “There was never any evidence of any operational targeting or planning in the United States.” But the Lackawanna Six had certainly exercised very poor judgment to travel to an al-Qaeda training camp after the organization had already bombed the American embassies in Africa and the USS Cole.

  In the charged atmosphere of the first years after 9/11, it was obvious to the lawyers for the Lackawanna Six that the “material support” they had offered to al-Qaeda in the form of their own “services” was a charge that would stick, and there was always a possibility that the government could play the “enemy combatant” card against them, which would mean their clients could be held indefinitely without charge. Eventually all six took plea bargains and received prison terms of between seven and ten years.

  The ringleader of the group, Kamal Derwish, had fled to Yemen, although his escape would prove short-lived. On November 3, 2002, Derwish was incinerated in a CIA drone strike on the car he was riding in across the Yemeni desert, along with one of the USS Cole conspirators. He was the first American citizen to be killed in a U.S. drone strike.

  Many jihadist terrorism cases during the first Bush term had no real connection to al-Qaeda at all but simply involved Americans inspired by bin Laden’s ideas. Some involved feckless wannabes, such as the Portland Six, a group of mostly African-American converts to Islam from Oregon who tried to join the Taliban or al-Qaeda immediately after 9/11. They were not subtle. Only two weeks after the attacks on New York and Washington, members of the group—several sporting Taliban-style turbans and long robes—were spotted shooting off automatic weapons at a gravel pit in the Portland area. It’s hard to imagine a performance more likely to garner the attention of the feds. The group then traveled to China in 2002 in a vain bid to cross from there into Afghanistan, but were detained by Chinese officials and arrested after their return to the States. None of them had gotten within a thousand miles of Afghanistan.

  During the summer of 2004, as Bush campaigned for a second term, the outlines of what seemed to be another wave of serious al-Qaeda attacks on the East Coast appeared, this one linked to an al-Qaeda operative, Dhiren Barot. Barot, a British convert from Hinduism to Islam, was, like many converts, more zealous than most of his coreligionists and had volunteered at age twenty to fight against the Indian army in Kashmir and later worked in Taliban-controlled Afghanistan in the late 1990s as an instructor at a military training camp.

  U.S. investigators believe that bin Laden tasked Barot to conduct surveillance of financial and Jewish targets in New York and Washington. Barot then applied to a college in New York, which gave him some plausible cover for casing financial targets on the East Coast between August of 2000 and April of 2001. Those targets included the New York Stock Exchange, the Citigroup building, and the International Monetary Fund and World Bank in Washington. Barot’s casing notes were quite detailed, running to eighteen dense pages about the structure of the buildings; the locations of toilets where bombs might be assembled; and the likely sources of shrapnel that could amplify the effects of a bomb blast. Barot then sent his casing documents on to al-Qaeda Central in Pakistan.

  Those casing notes were discovered in an al-Qaeda safe house in Pakistan during the summer of 2004. The discovery of the documents caused something close to panic in Washington. Frances Fragos Townsend, Bush’s top counterterrorism adviser, recalls being briefed by the acting CIA director, John McLaughlin, someone not given to hyperbole: “I’ll never forget McLaughlin saying to me, he had looked at these casing reports, and said to me, they were as good if not better than anything he had ever seen done, including from the most senior CIA case officers. We realized that they had clearly been in these buildings, and they clearly had the intention to do it, and the buildings were vulnerable, and so there was a scramble then, before any of this became public, to talk to the folks in th
e financial sector, particularly the folks in the buildings that had been cased. We had enough to know to be very concerned about it, and not enough to know if the plot was still active.”

  But a careful reading of the casing notes showed that they were “little more than a graduate school report on some famous buildings,” in the words of Michael Sheehan, who was then in charge of counterterrorism for the New York Police Department (NYPD). And, most importantly, the reconnaissance of the financial landmarks had all taken place before 9/11. Sheehan remembers that he and David Cohen, the head of intelligence at NYPD and a three-decade veteran of the CIA, examined the casing documents carefully. “We’re like, ‘Holy shit, this is the real deal.’ Then we went back and reread it, and the more I looked at it, the more I looked at Cohen and said, ‘Wait a second. This sounds really ominous. But this could be done by any jackass having a cup of coffee at a Starbucks across from the Citigroup building, and on the Internet’…. Within an hour after reading it, I knew this was one guy, educated, who did a pre-9/11 reconnaissance of these buildings, and the information was five years old.”

  That did not stop Secretary of Homeland Security Tom Ridge from going public with specific warnings about the four landmark buildings in Washington, New York, and New Jersey. Sheehan was “flabbergasted,” as not only were the warnings completely unnecessary but Barot wasn’t yet in custody and surely would flee the United Kingdom where he was then living. But Barot did not flee and was arrested by British police two days later.