Mastermind
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The blast threw cars against concrete pillars, smashed down through three concrete floors, and rained down cinder blocks onto the north tower’s heat pumps on level B5.18 It caused destruction in seven levels, six of them underground.
A crater opened in the basement of the World Trade Center, almost two hundred feet wide and sixty feet deep. The blast sliced open electrical cables, which became snakes hissing sparks and starting fires, while smashed pipes discharged sewage and filthy air-conditioner fluid. In the apocalyptic darkness, fires feasted on the carrion of smashed cars. The fire devoured the available oxygen, creating howling wind. Total damage and lost revenue would exceed $550 million.
Within minutes, the New York City Fire Department arrived. Trucks and crews kept coming all afternoon. Eventually, the fire department deployed some 750 vehicles and 40 percent of its on-duty personnel—the largest contingent ever, until September 11, 2001.
FBI assistant director James Fox established a command post in a nearby federal building. They would have to find out what happened and who did it. Had an electric transformer blown? Was it a bomb?
Within hours, Fox was visited by David Williams, the FBI’s senior bomb expert. He had conducted extensive tests on the soil in the crater. It was a bomb, he said.
Fox asked how he could be so sure.
“I have examined ten thousand bombings,” Williams said.
“That’s good enough for me,” said Fox.19
The FBI investigation was soon officially code-named “Tradebom.”
The World Trade Center bomb would turn out to be “the largest improvised explosive device the Bureau had ever encountered.”20
But who did it and why? All of the early guesses—a bank heist gone bad, a Serbian terrorist attack—proved wrong. Instead, the initial evidence didn’t make any sense.
The date of the bombing wasn’t the anniversary of any significant world event. While various groups had contacted the police or the press to take credit—including Ramzi Yousef, who claimed to represent the “Fifth Battalion” of an imaginary terrorist army—none seemed capable of an attack of this size. The bomb design didn’t fit the pattern of any established terrorist group.
Then the FBI got lucky. At the bottom of the bomb crater, investigators found a differential housing, a part that connects the two rear axles of a van. The metal housing was from the van that carried the bomb. And, incredibly, it had an intact vehicle identification number stamped on it, allowing the FBI to trace it to a Ryder leasing outfit in New Jersey.
Then the Bureau got another lucky break. An FBI special agent phoned the rental agency. The manager said the vehicle had been rented by an Arab guy, who had reported it stolen. The manager explained that the man had called repeatedly to get back his four-hundred-dollar deposit. When he called again, the manager switched over to the line with the FBI agent on it.
“It’s the Arab guy I told you about,” he explained.
“Invite him over,” suggested the FBI special agent.21 The agents raced over as the counter clerk asked the “Arab guy” to come in.
The “Arab guy” was arrested on the spot.
He turned out to be Mohammed Salameh, the wheelman for the bombers. He desperately needed the money to pay for his escape. The airline ticket that Ramzi Yousef had given him was for an infant’s plane fare. Without the money to upgrade the ticket, he would be trapped in the United States. That was what Ramzi Yousef wanted. His capture would be another helpful distraction.
Salameh’s phone records and storage unit keys (which he foolishly kept in his pocket) connected the rest of the dots. In days, the FBI had the bomb-making laboratory and leads on other members of the cell.
Ramzi Yousef was disciplined. Within eight hours of the blast, he was onboard a Pakistani Airlines flight to Islamabad. First class, of course. He didn’t stick around to gloat and soak up the media coverage—or get arrested.
His accomplices were less disciplined and soon caught. That might have been their main role all along. Indeed, they may have been chosen precisely because they’d done a poor job with the Kahane killing. Because most of the cell members were amateurs and easily rounded up, federal investigators did not spend a lot of time wondering whether the bombing was funded by a foreign power.
Where did KSM get the funds for the 1993 World Trade Center attack? An analysis by RAND, the respected think tank that works closely with the CIA and the Defense Department, points out that amateur terrorists, by themselves, do not rule out the possibility of sponsorship by a foreign government or a foreign terrorist organization:This use of amateur terrorists as dupes or cut-outs to mask the involvement of a foreign patron or government could potentially benefit terrorist state sponsors by enabling them to more effectively conceal their involvement and thus avoid potential military retaliation or diplomatic and economic sanctions. The prospective state sponsors’ connection could be further obscured by the fact that much of the amateur terrorists’ equipment, resources, and even funding could be entirely self-generating.22
If it turned out that KSM had received money from the government of Iraq or Iran, then the World Trade Center bombing ceases to be a criminal matter. It becomes an act of war. So far, the only evidence of foreign-government involvement is nugatory and circumstantial. Is it significant that Ramzi Yousef entered on an Iraqi passport and used “the Iraqi” as his alias? Still, the question of KSM’s funding source is important, even today.
The head of the FBI investigation, James Fox, later told a former senior FBI official23 that he had been ordered by the Clinton Justice Department to restrict his investigation “to the water’s edge.” (Fox is now deceased.) The FBI official he spoke with said the Justice Department instructions meant that he should not pursue any leads that would lead to foreign governments or even foreign terror groups. President Clinton was not looking to go to war.
Over the next decade, the FBI realized it was facing a new kind of terror organization. Usually, terror outfits were highly structured and centrally organized and had repeatable patterns of attack. On background, one senior FBI official said he never believed in the loose or ad hoc structure of Islamist terror networks. He kept thinking there had to be an East German–style apparatus hidden from view. “But I lost these arguments because I had no hard evidence” showing a hierarchical structure.24
For whatever reason, the Tradebom perpetrators were considered simply a group of friends who worshipped at the same mosque.25 While Ramzi Yousef’s arrival was seen as a catalyst, the Bureau missed that he had been a field commander for a foreign mastermind.
The key question: “How did a Pakistani teen-ager [Ramzi Yousef] come to know a cleric from Egypt who had transplanted himself to New Jersey? One thread seems to link them: Afghanistan. . . . Both of [Blind Sheikh] Abdel Rahman’s sons fought in Afghanistan, as did Mahmud Abouhalima [the getaway car driver].”26 And both Ramzi Yousef and KSM were in Afghan training camps at the same time as Abdel Rahman’s two sons.
Bureaucratic rules made it hard for FBI special agents to investigate the growing Islamic network in their midst, on the American homeland. Department of Justice guidelines required agents to have clear evidence of a federal crime before an investigation could be opened. While FBI agents and New York federal prosecutors had plenty of suspicions about the Blind Sheikh, the “jihad office,” and several members of the 1993 World Trade Center plot before the bomb went off, they didn’t have legal authority to investigate. The disadvantage of treating terrorism as a law enforcement matter meant that, essentially, the FBI could investigate only after a bomb went off.
CIA director Jim Woolsey fumed. The agents in the FBI’s New York office were not sharing any information with the CIA. “It was frustrating,” Woolsey told me. “Nobody outside the prosecutorial team and maybe the FBI [New York office] had access” to information about the investigation into one of the largest terror attacks in American history.27 Woolsey was interested in the prospect of foreign authorship of the bombing.
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nbsp; The lack of coordination was no accident. To the FBI, the bombing was a crime. In criminal cases, any information that left the immediate prosecutorial team had to be shared with the defense attorneys and their clients. Imagine giving sensitive intelligence documents to the representatives of a global terrorist organization. (It’s a worthwhile concern, but easily fixed. Congress could pass a law saying that all federal agencies involved in intelligence collection are effectively part of the prosecution team. This would serve the public interest of giving the prosecutors the best information about terror links without hampering the legal defense of the accused.) Still, in 1993, the FBI was faithfully following Rule 6E of the Federal Rules of Criminal Procedure. “It is not that they [the FBI and CIA] don’t get along—it’s that they can’t share information by legal statute” in these kinds of cases, said Christopher Whitcomb, an FBI veteran who worked on the 1993 World Trade Center bombing investigation.28
Rule 6E also kept the CIA’s Counter-Terrorism Center from doing its job, which was to share information with every significant federal intelligence service. The Counter-Terrorism Center is the interagency team made up of CIA, FBI, Secret Service, and State Department officials who were supposed to cut through red tape to investigate the terror attacks. The CTC’s deputy director was an FBI official whose principal duty was to enable the would-be rival agencies to pool information. But the CTC was kept in the dark.
As a result of giving the World Trade Center bombers a civilian trial, which made it difficult for the prosecution team to share or receive evidence from the intelligence community, both the CIA and the FBI overlooked the links between Ramzi Yousef, Osama bin Laden, and Khalid Shaikh Mohammed for years.
As the FBI investigation continued and the press coverage grew, Ramzi Yousef became a star.
Strangely, KSM stayed in the shadows, not emerging to take credit for one of Islamist terror’s most spectacular attacks. Given his welldeveloped desire for attention, it is strange that KSM did not publicly take credit for the World Trade Center bombing until after his 2003 capture.
Bin Laden later told Western reporters that he hadn’t met Ramzi Yousef before the 1993 bombing. “Ramzi Yousef, after the World Trade Center bombing, became a well-known Muslim personality, and all Muslims know him. Unfortunately, I did not know him before the incident,” bin Laden told ABC News in 1998.29 That certainly confirms Ramzi Yousef’s rock-star status among jihadis.
Bin Laden’s claim that he didn’t know Ramzi Yousef (and by extension didn’t know KSM) tells us something interesting about how careers were developed inside the terror network. After training, you were supposed to develop your own ideas, network to find your own funding, and lead your own team to implement your plan. If you succeeded big enough or often enough, you would win a place in the management of Al Qaeda. From that perch, you could take part in even larger attacks and have a role in shaping the next generation.
The entrepreneurial nature of midlevel players—the self-starters of terror who fund, recruit, and execute on their own—functioned as a kind of sorting process for Al Qaeda while creating intense competition that spurred innovative new lines of attack, like the 1993 World Trade Center bombing. KSM’s time as a terror entrepreneur schooled him to become a terror mastermind in the next decade.
Was bin Laden telling the truth? It is impossible to know. While Ramzi Yousef and KSM were in Afghanistan for at least two years prior to the World Trade Center bombing and knew many people (including Sheikh Sayyaf, Jamal Khalifa, Omar Abdel Rahman, and Abdurajak Janjalani) who knew bin Laden well, it is possible he had not actually met them. It is also possible that bin Laden hadn’t heard of either of them. How many rock stars can name all of their roadies? Before the 1993 bombing, KSM and Yousef were decidedly seen as small-timers.
Besides, bin Laden may have had good reason to dissemble. His ABC interview occurred a few weeks after the August 7, 1998, bombings of two U.S. embassies in East Africa, killing 224 people (including twelve American diplomats). He may have wanted to keep the focus on his most current attack. Of course, bin Laden’s published war doctrine specifically allows for taqqiya, or lying to advance the Muslim cause.
Both KSM and Ramzi Yousef had stayed at Pakistani safe houses paid for by bin Laden’s network, even though neither was yet a member of Al Qaeda in the years after the World Trade Center bombing. Additionally, KSM seems to have received some money from funders of Al Qaeda for the World Trade Center bombing.30
All rock stars with a double-platinum hit have the same problem: What do we do for an encore? After his triumphant return from New York, Ramzi Yousef “brainstormed” with KSM about novel ways to strike Manhattan again.31 KSM wanted to hurt the United States economically, and that meant again striking its commercial capital.32
Then Yousef reminded him about their mutual childhood friend Abdul Hakim Murad.
Murad, after attending four different flight schools in the United States, finally had a temporary commercial pilot’s license. (Many of the schools that Murad attended would later be used by the 9/11 hijackers. KSM never seemed to overlook any useful tidbit.)
Murad was back in Kuwait, looking for work, Yousef explained.
“Send for him,” KSM said.
Lured by the (wholly imaginary) potential of a pilot’s job with Pakistan’s national air carrier and a free airplane ticket, Murad quickly agreed to come.
He soon realized the real purpose for his summons. KSM quizzed him extensively about how pilots are trained, how difficult it is to fly a plane, how much fuel they carry, and so on.33
Why not use jets loaded with fuel and passengers and fly them into skyscrapers? This would increase the death toll by killing people both on the planes and in the buildings. Murad insisted, according to the 9/11 Commission Report, that the idea came from him, in 1993. But it didn’t matter. The idea was KSM’s now.
Meanwhile, Ramzi Yousef had been busy. Following his escape from New York in 1993, Yousef was involved in a series of bomb plots across Asia. In the spring, he had been in Bangkok as part of an ill-fated effort to blow up the Israeli embassy.34
Later, he journeyed deep inside Iran. Near Mashad, an Iranian border crossroads that had been welcoming caravans since the days of Marco Polo, there is an ancient shrine to the Prophet Mohammed’s grandson, Reza. It is a sacred site in Shia Islam and has long been a place for pilgrimage. Ramzi Yousef and his family (including KSM) are Sunnis. Ramzi Yousef, with his father, Abdul Karim, and his brother, Abdul Muneim, bombed it.35 Revering the Prophet’s grandson was, for them, “idol worship,” something forbidden in their understanding of Islam.
Naturally, Ramzi Yousef made the bomb. Blasting that piece of history into dust was the start of a trend among Salafi Muslim terror groups: a concerted war against the historical relics of other faiths. The Taliban later blasted the ancient Buddha statues near Bamiyan, Afghanistan.
Again, in the Bamiyan case, the real targets were Shia Muslims, in that they made their livelihood off of the trickle of backpackers and tourists who came to see the giant Buddhas.
Before KSM could make any further plans, Ramzi Yousef began to work on a plot developed by his father: killing the future prime minister of Pakistan.
Benazir Bhutto was campaigning to be prime minister of Pakistan in September 1993. (Her father was the prime minister who had cracked down on Baluchistan in the 1970s.) Her opponent was then prime minister Nawaz Sharif. Sharif had been elected in October 1990 with money and grassroots support supplied by Osama bin Laden, according to former Pakistani intelligence official Khalid Khawaja.36 Sharif had narrowly defeated Bhutto in 1990. And now it seemed as if Bhutto would win this election.
The connections between KSM’s clan and the Pakistani prime minister are indisputable. When Pakistani investigators raided the house of Zahid Shaikh Mohammed, KSM’s older brother, they found several photographs of Zahid and KSM with top advisers to Prime Minister Sharif.37 Pictures of bin Laden were also found. Other photos showed Zahid with the prime minister
himself.
The raid also appears to be the first time that KSM came to the attention of Pakistani authorities and provides evidence of his early links to bin Laden and top-level Pakistani political figures.
But the raid did nothing to stop the plot to kill the prime minister’s more liberal rival.
Ramzi Yousef had designed a trademark nitroglycerin bomb to kill Bhutto—and clear the field for Sharif’s reelection as prime minister. Yousef asked his old friend Abdul Hakim Murad to drive while Yousef kept the bomb at his feet in the passenger side of the vehicle. As they approached the high walls of Bhutto’s private home, a police patrol stopped them. After getting past the police, Yousef picked up the bomb to examine it. It exploded in his hands.
He was so badly injured that Murad took him to the Aga Khan Hospital, according to then information secretary Husain Haqqani.38
Yousef told hospital workers that he’d been injured when a butane lighter exploded in his hand. It seems unlikely that the hospital staff bought his story, but they treated him nevertheless.
KSM later visited Yousef in the hospital and appears to have played a role in funding the attack on the prime minister.39 (The Pakistani government would not learn about the September 1993 attempted attack on Bhutto until March 1995, when the arrests of six men produced confessions.40)
“I want you to know that we have now found out that Mr. Ramzi (Ahmed) Yousef was sent here in Karachi in 1993 to assassinate me,” Bhutto told the Reuters news agency.41 She said that Yousef had rented an apartment near her home.42
As it happened, Bhutto survived and was elected prime minister in 1993. Explaining both her appeal to the electorate and the threat she posed to the jihadis, Bhutto would say, “As a moderate, progressive, democratically elected woman prime minister of Pakistan, I am a threat to the fundamentalist zealots on multiple levels.”43