It would take the Italian government years to weigh Abu Omar’s petition, during which time he was free to move about. He settled in the town of Latina, south of Rome, where friends helped him find work of an unknown kind in the town’s mosque and where he began to preach, apparently as a lay imam. From time to time he visited cities in the North. Milan did not exactly enchant him, but its Muslim community was large, many of its members were fervent, and he knew the imam of one of the city’s largest mosques, a Gamaa man named Abu Imad, with whom he had been imprisoned in Egypt.
In the summer of 2000 he left Latina and settled in Milan. For an Islamist who had fled Egypt, worked for Islam in Peshawar, and been suspected of terrorism in Albania, it was not an innocuous time to go to Milan. Indeed, at that particular moment, Abu Omar could almost have settled in a training camp in Kandahar with less suspicion.
Chapter 3
The Enemy Within
IN FEBRUARY of 1993 a Pakistani-Kuwaiti named Ramzi Yousef, who had come to the United States on a plea of political asylum and was at large pending a hearing on his plea, blew up a Ryder truck filled with fertilizer under the north tower of the World Trade Center. He was driven by a loathing of American sponsorship of Israel on the one hand and the brutal semi-secular regimes of the Middle East on the other. He had hoped to topple the north tower into its twin and bring down both in a hail of death—an outcome that would have to wait eight years and other attackers—but he succeeded in killing six, injuring more than a thousand, and, unintentionally, impelling the police of Milan to take a closer look at the deranged Islam in their midst.
Yousef, it turned out, was a disciple of Omar Abdel-Rahman, known as the Blind Sheikh, who was perhaps the preeminent leader-in-exile of Gamaa. The Blind Sheikh had been expelled from Egypt for issuing fatwas condoning terrorism and had spent time among the mujahidin of Pakistan and the terrorists of Sudan. At one time he counted among his friends Ayman al-Zawahiri and Osama bin Laden. In 1990 he settled in the United States, notwithstanding that he was on the State Department’s terrorist watch list. “We must be terrorists,” he told a Brooklyn audience a few weeks before the Trade Center bombing. “We must terrorize the enemies of Islam to frighten them and disturb them and shake the earth under their feet.” While Yousef plotted to blow up the Trade Center, the Blind Sheikh conspired to blow up the headquarters of the United Nations and bridges and tunnels into Manhattan. He was arrested in 1993, tried in 1995, and elected by a dozen infidels to life membership in an institution of correction. Yousef had by then fled to Pakistan, from which he advanced a plot with his uncle, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the future evil genius of the September 11 attacks, to blow up several airliners over the Pacific Ocean. Instead, Yousef was caught in Islamabad and extradited to New York, where he too received the sentence of a lifetime.
The FBI’s investigation of Yousef and the Blind Sheikh turned up a tangle of connections between their cell in greater New York and fanatics abroad. Among the connections were phone calls to Milan. The calls would have been interesting in any case, but they were the more so because Yousef sometimes traveled on a falsified Italian passport. The men on the Milan end of the calls were parishioners of the Islamic Cultural Institute, which was the formal name of the mosque on Viale Jenner that Abu Omar would later frequent. The mosque had been founded only a few years before the Trade Center bombing, in 1988, by one Ibrahim Saad, a devotee of the Blind Sheikh and another Egyptian whose commitment to Gamaa had made him unwelcome at home. On coming to Italy, Saad had been frustrated that Milan, unlike other large cities in Europe, had no correspondingly large mosque and that its small mosques lacked the proper zeal. He got a stake from an Islamic businessman—an Eritrean named Idris Ahmed Nasreddin, who had become rich in Milan and Switzerland and whom the U.S. Treasury Department would later declare, for a time, a financier of terrorists—and opened the mosque in an old garage. Squeezed among low-rent tabaccherie on Viale Jenner, the garage was bland, modern, forgettable, and advertised by no sign. One passed through its iron gate and into another world, like entering a gay bar in Biloxi.
Saad set himself up as imam, but his power was soon eclipsed by that of another exiled Egyptian loyal to the Blind Sheikh and Gamaa. He, Anwar Shaaban, was a naval engineer of middle age whose appearance suggested a withered cornstalk: widen the nose of Osama bin Laden, set glasses on it, and there was Shaaban. He had waged jihad in Afghanistan, then had come to Italy a political refugee, ungratefully. Western godlessness and materialism disgusted him, as did the slumbering, as he saw it, of Milan’s Muslims in the West’s downy bed. He preached a brimstone Islam.
Not long after Shaaban became imam, the Bosnian War erupted in the former Yugoslavia, just across the Adriatic from Italy. The advantage in the war lay with well-armed Serbia (sometimes aided by Croatia, sometimes opposed by it), which set to brutally cleansing itself of Bosnian grime. Europe and the United States stood aloof, as if the Serbs were only spring cleaning, and embargoed arms to all sides—an act neutral on its face but in truth punitive to the weaker Bosnians. Muslim nations tended to be less numb to the Serbs’ many atrocities (they did not mind the Bosnians’ so much), because half of Bosnians were Muslim and nearly all of the Serbs were Christian. Many Muslims called for a defense of their brothers and sisters in Bosnia and Herzegovina, and Islamists of more malignant temperament saw in that defense a chance to establish a terrorist beachhead in the West. Bosnia, they believed, could become Europe’s Afghanistan.
Shaaban was one of the earliest such visionaries. He had many allies in Europe, and together they began to marshal an army, first from the ex-mujahidin who had found sanctuary in Europe but soon from young men new to jihad. Shaaban’s congregation—predominantly young, male, and immigrant—made a fine recruiting ground. Many of his parishioners were barely literate in their own language, let alone the new one, were bewildered by the differences from their homeland, and were further isolated by the slights and sneers of Italians. They turned to Shaaban for all manner of spiritual and practical guidance: how to keep one’s faith among unbelievers, how to renew a visa, how to find a flat, how to import a bride. Their trust in him and their alienation from Italy made them receptive to his talk of holy war against the West and of the ennobling deprivations of battlefield camps. He enlisted many such men and began taking them to Bosnia and returning for more. His allies from other European cities did the same.
To pay for their travel, camp supplies, and arms, he raised money from rich Arabs in Europe and the Middle East and supplemented their donations by extorting halal butchers in Milan on threat of torching their shops. Some of the arms purchases were elaborate. According to one terrorist, Shaaban’s circle bought assault rifles, grenades, and missiles from traders in Russia (where weapons circulated freely after the fall of Communism), shipped the arms by sea to Italy, and forwarded them to Croatia and from there on to Bosnia. Swiss corporations owned by Arabs and Pakistanis oversaw the logistics, and Swiss banks handled the payments, some of which were also filtered through charities like the Lucerne-based Mother Teresa of Calcutta Center. (In Milan, Shaaban had his own charity, Il Paradiso, whose relief also tended to ordnance.) The chain of supply for the arms shipments was, however, deemed too complicated, and simpler ones were established.
The army that Shaaban and his colleagues assembled in Bosnia was known as the Islamic Brigade. Although Shaaban consulted on battlefield strategy, his chief role when in Bosnia seems to have been more inspirational than strategic. He was something like the high priest of the mujahidin, and troops were apparently moved by his antebellum harangues. In combat they proved fearless or nearly so, but their first assaults were debacles. Men whose dearest wish is to be martyred are not necessarily assets under fire. They are wont to charge fortified machine-gun positions without a preceding artillery bombardment or covering small-arms fire. Their efficacy is then hindered by being cut in half. It would take time for the commanders of the Islamic Brigade to convince their men to sell their lives dearly.
Martyrdom, however, was good for recruiting. Hardly had a martyr, if martyred spectacularly, departed for his seventy-two wives than tales of him spread across the Islamic world. (The hadith, contrary to common report, does not specify that the seventy-two are virgins.) As such tales multiplied, Shaaban began to draw men from not just Milan but across Italy, then from other European countries, then from throughout the Arab world. There is a story of an Egyptian peasant, one Mahmoud al-Saidi, who desired to make jihad in Bosnia and asked his village elders how he might do so. Go to Milan, they told him, and seek out Anwar Shaaban. So al-Saidi sold his only cow to pay the airfare.
At its peak, the Islamic Brigade may have numbered five thousand men and was supported by tens of millions of dollars—by some accounts, hundreds of millions of dollars—that flowed through dozens of Islamic charities. Eventually the Brigadiers learned to fight. They won small battles, then larger ones, often with ugly consequences. After taking a village, they might smash the pews of its ancient church, burn its relics, and deface centuries-old murals by excising the head of a Madonna or modifying the genitalia of her Son. Worse might be in store for the villagers. When the Brigade took the Croat town of Miletici, with the loss of one of their fighters, they told their Croat captives that their dead comrade’s life had been worth those of four infidels. They selected four young men of the town, tortured them horrifically (the face of one was sliced off), and slit their throats. As the blood rushed from them, the executioners caught it in bowls and ladled it back over their heads. After another battle, at Podsijelovo, they tortured several Serbian fighters, then paired them off, armed them with knives, and ordered them to fight each other to the death. Those who refused or who became injured were decapitated with chainsaws or cleavers. Those who survived were made to kiss the severed heads, which the mujahidin nailed to trees. The Islamists evidently videotaped some of the sport at Podsijelovo; recordings of it were reported to have circulated among the faithful. A witness to another battle said that afterward the holy warriors and their wives took turns shooting two Serbian prisoners, then decapitated them and played soccer with the heads.
“They like to kill,” said a Bosnian soldier who fought with them. “Whenever they could kill with their knives, they would do so.”
Shaaban’s martial endeavors were not restricted to Bosnia. He also sent recruits to al-Qaeda’s training camps in Afghanistan. He showed them how to get visas to Pakistan on religious grounds, then arranged their travel, often by way of an intermediate point like Geneva or Zurich so as to cloud their point of origin. In Islamabad or Peshawar, al-Qaeda would take charge of them. One recruit Shaaban directed in this manner was L’Houssaine Kherchtou, a baker from Morocco who had come to Milan to make money, not war, but who was won over to jihad by Shaaban. Sent to Pakistan, Kherchtou was tutored by al-Qaeda in surveillance, electronics, and the use of rifles, anti-aircraft guns, mines, and explosives. Some of the lessons supposedly took place at bin Laden’s house in Peshawar. After a tour of duty in Afghanistan, al-Qaeda sent Kherchtou to Kenya and Sudan to become bin Laden’s personal pilot, but when al-Qaeda cut off his flying lessons and refused to pay for an operation for his wife, he defected. His testimony in a U.S. courtroom helped convict some of the al-Qaedans behind the bombings of U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania in 1998.
Shaaban also gave miscellaneous help to terrorists in Tunisia, Egypt, and the United States. One of those terrorists was Ramzi Yousef, who, it seemed, had spent time in Milan before bombing the World Trade Center and who may have received his false Italian passport from Shaaban or one of his lieutenants. This intercourse, along with the phone calls between Milan and the cell in New York, was among the earliest clues that all was not well behind the garage door on Viale Jenner.
THE POLICE of Italy were then, as today, the least encumbered in Western Europe when it came to tapping phones. They tapped about 100,000 a year, for a total of 1.5 million calls. The per capita rate, about 170 taps for every 100,000 people, was three times that of their nearest rival in Western Europe and orders of magnitude beyond the rate—1 for every 100,000 people—claimed by the United States. After the emergence of disturbing signs from Viale Jenner, the counterterrorists at Milan’s DIGOS tapped the phones of Shaaban and his acolytes. What they heard disturbed them, and they opened an investigation they called Sphinx. For more than a year, they listened and watched.
They learned that a cornerstone of Shaaban’s work was a document-forging enterprise that served terrorists across Europe and that may have created Yousef’s false passport. When fully realized, the enterprise was highly compartmentalized: one team acquired blank documents, another team doctored them, another delivered them to the newly minted man. Often the doctorers did not know the true name of the client or his mission, and the client did not know who had made his papers. Where possible, the forgers supplied complementary papers: a passport and a visa, a driver’s license and a residency permit. The best documents were stolen ones that had already been used and stamped and that the forgers altered only slightly—for example by inserting a new picture but leaving the name and other data untouched. If the client could pass for a European, say an olive-skinned Italian or Spaniard, he was given a European identity. If time and money permitted, he would test his new papers by traveling to an irrelevant country before going to his ultimate destination, which, if he were stopped, would not be discovered. Apparently the Milanese scribes were skillful, because their clients were not often stopped. The scribes’ work refreshed the meaning of the “fine Italian hand,” which term had arisen in the Quattrocento to compliment Florentine copyists of the Bible but which now applied to copyists guided by a superseding text.
Their raw material—the blank or stolen documents—generally came from abroad. One of their sources was a Serbian gang that burgled city halls in Belgium, which tended to be lightly guarded on weekends and which held hundreds of blank passports, driver’s licenses, and official stamps. The Serbs sold the passports for between $700 and $2,300 apiece, and often they passed through several buyers before reaching Milan. Other documents came from purse-snatchers and hotel burglars, notably in Madrid, Toronto, and Cairo, and still others from officials in Yemen, Algeria, and Albania who sympathized with the terrorists or were persuaded to sympathy by a small consideration. Because no international authority kept a list of stolen passports, terrorists who needed to move across borders undetected could remake themselves again and again. After 2001, investigators would find terrorists who had changed their identities seventy times.
“Sphinx” is ancient Greek for “to strangle”—the sphinxes of Egypt may have been given their name for the way lionesses attack the throats of their prey—and in June of 1995 the investigators of Operation Sphinx moved to strangle the flow of documents and men through Shaaban’s network with raids on six dozen premises across northern Italy. Ten Egyptians and a Palestinian were arrested, and more arrests followed, though not of Shaaban, who was in Bosnia at the time. At the mosque on Viale Jenner, the police found forgers’ tools and documents in the process of being falsified: a Pakistani visa, employee ID cards for a Saudi “relief” commission in Bosnia, and, under a writing pad on Shaaban’s desk, a doctored Danish passport for a Moroccan terrorist named Karim Said Atmani. In all, Sphinx yielded more than a hundred false documents.
Atmani’s bogus passport was illustrative of the reach of Shaaban’s network. Atmani was an Afghan War veteran and member of the Groupe Islamique Armé, which terrorized Algeria for roughly the same reasons Gamaa and Jihad terrorized Egypt. (The GIA’s attacks were so indiscriminate that even Osama bin Laden recommended the group restrain itself, lest it tarnish the image of jihad.) In Italy, Atmani helped Shaaban shepherd his lambs from Milan to the Bosnian War, and he was himself a fighter in the Islamic Brigade. Afterward he conspired with GIA terrorists in France, some of whom robbed armored trucks to fund their terrorism, and others of whom carried out fatal attacks in 1995 and 1996 in the Paris Métro and elsewhere. He t
hen stowed away to Canada on a Liberian-flagged cargo ship and with other exiles in Montreal dreamed up terror attacks, like the bombing of a Jewish neighborhood and the release of chemical poisons into the city’s Metro. Though unrealized, the schemes were not all fantasies. Atmani’s roommate was Ahmed Ressam, the would-be Millennium Bomber, who was caught while crossing the Canadian–American border on his way to attack Los Angeles International Airport in 1999. Atmani was also caught trying to cross the border, in his case at Niagara Falls some months earlier. He had been using a falsified Canadian passport. Canada, however, merely deported him to Bosnia, where, like other Islamic Brigadiers, he had been given citizenship for his service in the war.
Before his deportation, Atmani shared power in the Montreal cell with another GIA commander, Fateh Kamel, an Algerian naturalized by Canada in 1993. Kamel had trained in al-Qaeda’s camps in Afghanistan, and from Montreal he jetted to at least a dozen cities in Europe to raise men and money for the Bosnian cause. He also served as a sometime commander of the Islamic Brigade. After the war, he worked with the same GIA terrorists in France with whom Atmani worked. One of his jobs was to supply them with false identity papers, some of which he may have gotten from his friend Anwar Shaaban. After the GIA’s attacks on the Paris Métro in 1995, Kamel shuttled between Paris and Milan to stimulate more slaughter. Unfortunately for him, his visits to Italy overlapped with the investigations of DIGOS, whose agents listened as he ordered bombs to be built.
A Kidnapping in Milan: The CIA on Trial Page 6