Out of the hospital, Ramzi Yousef was recovering in the Embassy Hotel in Karachi when KSM came to him with an idea so big that its success would finally make them not just jihadi famous but world famous. It would involve airplanes, bombs, and a trip to the strip clubs of Manila.
5
The Plot to Kill the Pope, the President, and Four Thousand Americans
With a massive encore to Ramzi Yousef’s New York Tradebom attack in mind, KSM flew into Manila International Airport on July 21, 1994. He handed the customs officer a Pakistani passport issued in Abu Dhabi. Interestingly, the passport featured his full legal name: Khalid Shaikh Mohammed Ali Dustin al-Balushi.1
KSM’s use of truthful documentation wouldn’t last. In the next few months, he would employ nearly a half-dozen aliases as he developed plots to kill President Clinton, Pope John Paul II, and nearly four thousand lesser-known people on eleven different commercial airplanes.
After scouting Manila’s traffic-choked neighborhoods, he selected one of the wealthiest. Known as Malate, it’s home to most of the capital’s high-end Western-style hotels and has a large, transient Arab population.2 It also has a seedy side, complete with go-go clubs and women for rent.3 There was something in Malate to appeal to every part of KSM’s expansive personality.
Meanwhile, with twenty-one different aliases of his own,4 Ramzi Yousef also arrived in the Philippines sometime in November 1994.
After Ramzi Yousef moved into KSM’s apartment in Malate, KSM began to build a cell to carry out his plan. Next, he reached out to Abdul Hakim Murad, who had finally gotten his commercial pilot certificate.
KSM, Ramzi Yousef, and Murad were fairly close. They had all grown up together in Kuwait and each of them had joined the youth wing of Kuwait’s Muslim Brotherhood.
Then their paths diverged. But for a few key decisions, Murad might have become an ordinary commercial airline pilot. He wasn’t a very good pilot, though. It was his fourth professional pilot’s school that finally gave him a passing mark. That school, the now-defunct Coastal Aviation, was in New Bern, North Carolina—roughly 190 miles from KSM’s alma mater in Greensboro. He accepted KSM’s paid invitations to visit him in Pakistan. Maintaining his relationship with KSM, a seemingly simple enough decision to stay in touch with a childhood friend, would change Murad’s life—and those of many other people.
Next, KSM recruited Wali Khan Amin Shah. Shah was, in a sense, already working for KSM. Like KSM, he was Baluch, though from the Afghanistan portion of Baluchistan. (KSM’s family hails from the Iranian and Pakistani parts of Baluchistan.) Shah was working at Konsojaya, a Malaysia-based business that KSM had started with Mohammed Jamal Khalifa, Osama bin Laden’s brother-in-law, and another man known as Hambali.5
Like the other plotters, Shah had many aliases,6 including Azmiri.7 That’s how he was known to his close friend Saif al-Adel, who later became a U.S. government witness in a number of terror cases. Al-Adel provided the federal government with its first inside look at Al Qaeda in the 1990s, although it would be years before intelligence analysts would fully understand his value. Al-Adel provided important context for the events in Manila and beyond, including Shah’s involvement in another KSM plot “to assassinate President Bill Clinton during a trip to Africa in 1998.” Shah was apparently involved with both of KSM’s plans to try to kill President Clinton, first in the Philippines and second in Africa.8
Now that KSM had the targets, the location, and the team, he needed money. Capital, as even terrorist-entrepreneurs know, makes everything else possible. He would need funds for plane tickets, hotels, and meals for his team, as well as for disguises, false documents, industrial chemicals, and so on.
KSM’s own connections to Saudi and Gulf Arab sheikhs could supply some of the money. KSM controlled an account at an Abu Dhabi bank that acted as a funnel for moving money from princes, plutocrats, and bogus charities to his terror projects.
KSM’s business partner in the Konsojaya Trading Company, Khalifa, also ran a humanitarian nonprofit called International Islamic Relief Organization. For KSM, the charity’s main purpose was to relieve him of budgetary constraints. Khalifa allowed KSM to spend fairly freely from its accounts.
Khalifa largely escaped scrutiny by the authorities because his unusual transfers of money to charities and businesses were not technically crimes, at the time, in the Philippines. Khalifa’s second wife (of four) is the sister of Osama bin Laden. (Khalifa tried to distance himself publicly from bin Laden. “Bin Laden is one of my 22 brothersin-law, and I do not condone his terrorist activities,” Khalifa told a Philippine newspaper in 2000. He also denied ties to the attractive tourism secretary of the Philippines. “You better correct that, or my wives would kill me,” Khalifa said. His third and fourth wives are Filipinas who read the local papers.9)
Khalifa often supplied money for KSM’s operations, and KSM was often unhappy when the money was slow to come or insufficient. Philippine investigators later found a laptop that contained a letter from KSM to a man he referred to as “Brother Mohammed Alsiddiqi,” who is believed to be Khalifa. The letter is bitter but reveals a lot about their relationship. “We are facing a lot of problems because of you. Fear Allah, Mr. Siddiqi, there is a day of judgment. You will be asked if you are very busy with something more important, don’t give promises to other people. See you on the day of judgment.”
“Still waiting,” the letter was signed, “Khalid Shaikh, and Bojinka.”10
Bojinka was the code name of KSM’s operations in the Philippines.
Khalifa knew Ramzi Yousef as well, bringing him to the Philippines in 1991 so that Yousef could teach bomb-making techniques to members of Abu Sayyaf, the Philippine terror group named after Abdul Rasul Sayyaf, who ran the Afghan camps that trained many of the jihadis.11 Ramzi Yousef was disappointed because the Abu Sayyaf organization was more interested in guns than bombs and had launched a series of kidnappings for ransom that made no broader ideological points. He left, disgusted.
The pending terror operations would be credited by KSM to Abu Sayyaf, even though the group had nothing to do with any of the plots. Somebody had to get the credit.
KSM’s other partner in the Konsojaya front company, and its putative founder, was known by the name Hambali. The nickname is a play on words in Arabic and refers to the Hanbali school of Islamic jurisprudence, one of the four major Sunni schools of thought and considered to be the one that has changed the least since the seventh century. More formally, he is known as Riduan Isamuddin. He left his native village in Indonesia in 1985 to fight in Afghanistan, meeting KSM, bin Laden, and other key figures there. Hambali told family and friends that he had worked selling palm oil.
Hambali secretly married a Malaysian-Chinese woman named Noralwizah Lee Abdullah, whom he had met while visiting the school of an Al Qaeda affiliate. Both husband and wife were put on the board of Konsojaya.
KSM, who had known Hambali since their days in Afghanistan,12 gave him some 95,000 ringgit, or about $33,000, to set up terror cells in Southeast Asia.13
With Konsojaya as a front company, Khalifa’s bogus charity and his Abu Dhabi bank account, KSM was well stocked with money to carry out any attack he could dream up.
What he dreamed up was called Oplan Bojinka. In Serbo-Croatian, oplan means “operation,” and bojinka means “loud bang.”14 (KSM had learned a few words in Bosnia.) Bojinka would be launched from KSM’s new base in the Philippines. U.S. federal prosecutors would later refer to it as the Manila Air plot.
Interestingly, KSM had three different plots in mind, although each would evolve in the coming months. He assembled the money and men before he had a fixed idea about what exactly to do with them. This is how he liked to operate.
The first plot involved killing President Bill Clinton, most likely with a bomb. After studying the president’s planned route as reported in the local newspapers, KSM sent Ramzi Yousef to survey the ground. Even days before Clinton’s arrival, Ramzi Yousef noticed the presence of armed security and bomb-sniff
ing dogs. Plus, it appeared that an advance team of U.S. Secret Service was already on the scene and Philippine police were mobilized and aggressive. Ramzi Yousef advised against an attack, citing security and the lack of time to prepare.
KSM moved to option two: killing the pope. The plan was for Murad to pose as a priest, approach the pope, and, when the pontiff extended his hand, trigger a bomb tucked under his priestly garments. The murder would give Murad fame and martyrdom and send shock waves around the world. The cell had acquired a photograph of John Paul II, a Bible, and a crucifix. Murad had even seen a tailor about getting a cassock made.15 Only luck would save the pope.
The third and main plot was daring in a sinister sense: explode eleven jumbo jets over the Pacific nearly simultaneously, killing several thousand people. If it succeeded, it would be the largest terrorist attack in history. But first, KSM and Ramzi Yousef would need to solve a number of technical problems.
The airline plot required a bomb small enough to bring aboard a plane in carry-on luggage. Ramzi Yousef came up with a unique liquid-nitroglycerin design.
KSM and Ramzi Yousef tested their unique nitroglycerin bomb four times. For the first test, Ramzi Yousef put a bomb in the janitor’s closet of a busy shopping mall in Cebu City. The bomb exploded on time and no one was hurt. Now they knew the bomb design worked.
The second test involved a bigger, more powerful version. Team member Shah was told to put the bomb under a seat in the Greenbelt Theater, a movie house in a Manila shopping mall, on December 1, 1994. Again, no deaths, but this time almost a dozen people were injured.16
Now sure of the bomb design, KSM began devising ways to get it on an airplane. Ramzi Yousef’s brainstorm was to carry the components onto the plane and assemble the bomb in its tiny bathroom.
The hard part was getting nitroglycerin onto an airplane. Would airport security stop them? KSM had to prove to himself that he could get Ramzi Yousef’s bomb onto an airplane. He carefully poured nitromethane into fourteen bottles of cleaning fluid for contact lenses. He packed thirteen bottles into his carry-on and gave one to Ramzi Yousef to bring onto a different flight. KSM flew from Manila to Seoul, South Korea, while Ramzi Yousef flew from Hong Kong to Taipei. They were not discovered and easily returned to Manila.17
Next, KSM had to test whether he could get the timer and the battery aboard a plane. The timer was a ten-dollar plastic Casio wristwatch. But a battery would be needed to send a strong enough electrical charge to detonate the bomb. The battery was the only metallic component of the bomb. KSM and Ramzi Yousef puzzled over how to get it through airport security and X-ray machines. Finally, he thought of hiding the battery in the hollowed-out heels of his shoes, which fall below the area the airport scanners cover. This is the same loophole the “shoe bomber,” Richard Reid, used a decade later and why you now have to remove your shoes to go through airport security.
KSM came up with another clever test of the security system. KSM taped a small metal bolt to the arch of his foot, then covered it with a sock and shoe. “As expected, the metal detectors went off when KSM passed through it and he was asked to take off his shoes, but the police did not insist that he take off his socks,” CNN’s Maria Ressa notes.18 He wasn’t sent back through the metal detector. KSM had found another weakness in the airport security system.
Now a final test: Could they get the bomb components onto a plane, assemble them, arm the bomb timer, safely escape, and have the bomb explode? This time, KSM sent Ramzi Yousef on Philippine Airlines Flight 434 from Manila to Tokyo, which made a scheduled stop at the Philippine island of Cebu.
Once the seat-belt light was turned off, Ramzi Yousef rose and went to the lavatory. As planned, he combined the chemicals and made the bomb. He set the Casio watch timer for 11:43.19
Carefully, he packed the bomb into a brown sandwich bag and took it back to his seat. He was cautious to avoid bumping into anyone. The bomb might have exploded in his hands. He moved the life vest aside and secured the bomb under the seat. When the plane landed at Cebu City, he got off.
On the flight’s final leg to Tokyo, a Japanese engineer, Haruki Ikegami, took Ramzi Yousef’s seat.
Halfway through the flight, the tiny alarm rang, triggering a thunderous explosion. It cut in half the luckless Japanese engineer and smashed a hole in the thin skin of the airplane.
The man behind him, Yukihiko Usui, awoke howling in pain. The blast had seared his legs like a blowtorch. Nine other passengers were injured.
After forty harrowing minutes, the pilot made an emergency touchdown at Naha Airport on Okinawa.20 As the plane came to a stop, the passengers spontaneously cheered.
Meanwhile, on Cebu, Ramzi Yousef calmly phoned the Associated Press office in Manila and claimed the bombing was the work of the Abu Sayyaf terror group.
Philippine investigators later found that the seat occupied by the hapless Japanese engineer had been previously used by “Amaldo Forlani.” It was a name Ramzi Yousef had chosen from a list of Italian politicians.21
Now that they had a working bomb design and a sure method to get it past airport security, KSM began to think big. Why hit one plane when a team could strike almost a dozen simultaneously?
KSM studied the flight schedules of all aircraft leaving East Asia for the United States. These would carry the most fuel and passengers. In the Official Airline Guide, he found at least eleven flights that would make a stop before crossing the Pacific Ocean. The stop was crucial; it allowed a terrorist to switch planes and deposit a second bomb on another flight, and then get off when the second plane made its scheduled stop before crossing the Pacific.
Here’s how KSM wanted Oplan Bojinka to work: five men, eleven planes. Four men would get on two planes, leaving bombs on each. A fifth man, most likely KSM himself, would get on three planes and set three bombs. All the terrorists would be safely en route to Pakistan when the timers beeped.
While planning a series of bombings designed to create an Islamic superstate, KSM and Ramzi Yousef enjoyed a playboy life in the Philippines, at odds with Islamic law. They hung out nearly every night at strip clubs, where Arminda Costudio, a waitress, remembers KSM’s “chubby” fingers and fat wads of cash.
Another favorite haunt was an alcohol-serving karaoke bar on A. Mabini Street in Manila. They enjoyed music and alcohol while watching the overhead television screen. Bin Laden would not have approved. KSM didn’t care. He had his own financing and made his own rules.
Then an accident brought the party to a sudden end. While Ramzi Yousef was teaching Murad to make the nitroglycerin bombs in the kitchen of their shared apartment, the mixture started to smoke. Instinctively, Murad put the chemicals in the sink and turned the water on. The water accelerated the chemical fire.22
Panicked, Yousef and Murad ran out of the apartment, down the steps, and through the lobby. They holed up in a karaoke bar,23 considering their options. The fire and police departments would almost certainly be called. When the authorities entered Apartment 603, they would find passports under various aliases, large piles of cash (mostly in U.S. dollars), bottles and beakers full of chemicals, and a laptop that detailed their future plans. Someone had to grab the incriminating evidence before the authorities did. Also, they needed cash to finance their escape.
But they couldn’t decide who should take the risk and go. After an hour, they decided to go together. When they arrived, they found Philippine Police Captain Aida Fariscal and a uniformed policeman in the lobby.
A hotel clerk spotted Murad and pointed him out to the police. Murad ran, but a policeman tackled him. As he squirmed, he was cuffed. Murad was taken to a special facility used by Philippine intelligence, in Camp Crame, Quezon City.24 He was interrogated for days.
Ramzi Yousef ran. Bounding through the crowds, he quickly lost the police. With advice and money from KSM, he left Manila quickly, disappearing into a series of safe houses and hotel suites across Asia.
While Ramzi Yousef was lucky to get away, so was the pope. The fir
e in the bomb-makers’ apartment was roughly five hundred feet from the residence where the pope would be staying during his official visit. The resulting police investigation foiled the plot against the pontiff.25
Strangely, KSM stayed put. Boldly, he decided he was safe. He had cleverly insulated himself from any risk by moving out of the Dona Josefa apartments before Murad and Shah arrived. They knew that Ramzi Yousef was getting money and direction from elsewhere, but they only had a hazy idea of KSM’s involvement, if any.
KSM was not immediately a suspect, and, he believed, Murad and Shah would not talk about him to their interrogators. You can’t talk about what you don’t know, KSM thought.
Plus, KSM was confident that investigators would not find any usable physical evidence linking him to the plots. He had worn gloves in every visit to Ramzi’s apartment, something that his comrades thought strange in Manila’s oppressive humidity. That meant that his fingerprints literally wouldn’t be there.
He failed to realize how quickly his comrades would crack.
Murad started talking after being held for less than forty-eight hours. “Murad said Ramzi Yousef sought him out in New York City in 1992 . . . [and] asked him to survey New York City and find a target for a bomb that would produce maximum casualties. They said Murad told them he suggested to Ramzi Yousef one place where thousands of people congregate every day: the World Trade Center in New York’s financial district. Murad said he left for Pakistan almost immediately but that four months later, in February, 1993, he was surprised to hear . . . that terrorists had bombed the twin towers.”26
A Philippine tactical interrogation report, written by Senior Inspector Eugenio H. Roxas on September 9, 1995, has Murad describing how the bombs were made and who was to put which bomb on which plane. He also detailed a plot of KSM’s to bomb the New York City subway and told the police that he was to call the U.S. embassy in Oman and to claim credit in the name of the Fifth Battalion, the same fake terror group that Ramzi Yousef had named in the 1993 World Trade Center bombing.
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