Al-Qaeda (40 page)

There was, however, a postscript. Abu Bakar Ba’asir and several other more senior Indonesian Islamists returned to their homeland in 1998. Hambali appears to have remained active in Malaysia, maintaining and strengthening the network of activists he had built up. In January 2000, Yazid Sufaat, a 37-year-old former Malaysian army captain with an American degree in biochemistry, played host to two young Saudis, Khalid al-Midhar and Nawaf al-Hazmi, in his flat in Kuala Lumpur. The meeting may well have been arranged by Hambali.
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Sufaat also provided a young Frenchman called Zacarias Moussaoui, allegedly the ‘twentieth of the 11 September hijackers’, with a letter, identifying him as his company’s ‘marketing consultant’ for the USA, Britain and Europe. Moussaoui stayed with Sufaat while he inquired about flight schools in Malaysia. He found one but, because it was more than two hours from the capital and did not provide training on 747s, decided to try the USA instead. According to the FBI, Sufaat agreed to pay Moussaoui $2,500 a month during his stay in the USA, along with a lump sum of $35,000. Singaporean investigators also alleged that Sufaat had used his clinical pathology company, Green Laboratory Medicine, to obtain four tons of ammonium nitrate, the component for the explosive favoured in truck bombs, which was subsequently used in a series of attacks in the Philippines and Indonesia. According to the statement of Omar al-Faruq,
a Kuwaiti-born activist who was picked up in Java in June 2002, $70,000 to buy the explosives was transferred to Sufaat through a Saudi-based charity, al-Haramain, by Mohammed Atef.
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Hambali has also been linked to a series of church bombings in Indonesia on Christmas Eve 2000.
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So the operation in southeast Asia shows us a range of features that are typical of Islamic radical activity in this period: a minority tradition of ‘hard’ or ‘modernist’ Salafism that goes back to the mid 1940s at least and is embedded within a tolerant majority but has been enhanced by the war against the Soviets in Afghanistan and Gulf-funded propaganda; a self-forming cell with its own motivation, led by a senior activist with the contacts that allow access to key resources. As for the activists themselves, they come from exactly the sort of background – educated, economically frustrated, urban – that we have come to expect. One further point about militancy in Indonesia is worth making. The most violent and effective Islamic group in the region, in terms of the number of people killed, is Lashkar Jihad (LJ), an Indonesian militia whose formation in early 2000 was substantially helped by officers in the Indonesian security forces hoping to destabilize the new democratic government in Jakarta. Lashkar Jihad has waged a vicious campaign against Christians, killing several thousand in the east of the archipelago. The group has fought alongside official military units on a number of occasions. LJ’s leader, Jafar Umar Thalib, has denied having any links to bin Laden, although he admits meeting him in Afghanistan in 1987. At the time, he has told reporters, bin Laden struck him as a ‘jet-setter’ whose views were at odds with his own. Thalib has also claimed that bin Laden sent representatives to Indonesia to meet him in 1999. He claims they offered financial assistance in return for a degree of influence and authority over the group. Like the GIA, Thalib felt that the strings attached made the deal unattractive and he rejected it. Like Abu Sayyaf in the Philippines, Lashkar Jihad, which was formed in January 2000, was very much focused on a domestic agenda, confining its activities to Indonesia, aiming to eradicate internal domestic threats to Islam rather than launching offensive terrorist strikes.
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So, what can we say about ‘al-Qaeda’, its structure, organization, personnel and operations between 1998 and September 2001? As ever, it is easier to say what it is not. As has become clear over the preceding three chapters, the idea that al-Qaeda is a coherent hierarchical terrorist group, with a single leader, a broadly uniform ideology and an ability to conceive and execute projects globally through well-disciplined cadres, sleepers and activists spread around the world is misplaced. Saying what ‘al-Qaeda’ was during the period, and thus what it is now, is far more difficult.

In my introduction, I defined several different al-Qaedas. We have seen all of these al-Qaedas over the last three chapters. There has been the hardcore, to my mind the only entity that warrants the label of ‘al-Qaeda’, even if they do not use it. In 2001, this was almost exclusively based in Afghanistan. Then there were men like Hambali, Abu Doha in London, Abu Abdullah al-Shami in Jordan and northern Iraq and al-Nashiri in the Yemen. All were long-term associates of bin Laden, al-Zawahiri and others, who accepted missions from them or acted as intermediaries and recruiters for others. They were ‘associate members of al-Qaeda’. Along with people like Beghal, Ressam, Abu Hoshar, Khalim and others they acted as links between the ‘al-Qaeda hardcore’ and the rest of the vast, amorphous movement of modern radical Islam, with its myriad cells, domestic groups, ‘groupuscules’ and splinters, joining the ‘network of networks’ to the hardcore itself. Sometimes these networks were happy to be brought under bin Laden’s umbrella. Often they had no interest in surrendering an element of their autonomy in return for access to funds or training, however much either was needed. Frequently other figures, such as Abu Qutada in London or ibn Khattab, the Jordanian–Saudi militant leader in Chechnya, or indeed the Pakistani or Indonesian government, were able to provide what was needed, whether it was fatwas, weapons or funds, without recourse to bin Laden and his close associates.

One thing that quickly becomes apparent, however, is the willing participation of those that bin Laden managed to co-opt. This mirrors the eagerness of volunteers, like al-Owhali, who overcame significant obstacles to make their way to the training camps where they remained for considerable periods, without compulsion. What is particularly
striking is how, particularly when it came to terrorist attacks, it was more often al-Qaeda that was approached with ideas or plans for an attack than groups or individuals approached by al-Qaeda. Indeed, by the end of 2001, volunteers requesting martyrdom operations were being ticked off by senior aides of bin Laden if they did not come up with their own ideas for attacks. When Zuhair Hilal Mohammed al-Tubaiti, a Saudi who had made his way to the training camps in 2000, asked Ahmed al-Moula al-Billal, a member of the ‘al-Qaeda hardcore’, to be allowed to participate in an operation in which he would die, he was told, fairly abruptly, to go away and formulate a plan and submit it for approval like everyone else.
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Al-Tubaiti, and the men he recruited himself in Morocco and brought to the camps, are part of the third group of people who are so often lumped in under the label of ‘al-Qaeda’, those who are part of the huge groundswell of anger and resentment throughout the Islamic world which leads thousands of young men to set out in search of their own personal ‘lesser’ jihads each day.

Such men, as I have stressed a number of times, cannot be considered ‘al-Qaeda’. Something that can be labelled ‘al-Qaeda’ did exist between 1996 and 2001. It was composed of a small number of experienced militants who were able to access resources of a scale and with an ease that was hitherto unknown in Islamic militancy, largely by virtue of their position in Afghanistan and the sympathy of so many wealthy, and not so wealthy, Muslims across the Islamic world, though particularly in the Gulf. This ‘al-Qaeda’ acted, as the name suggests, like a wealthy university disbursing research grants and assisting with facilities such as libraries or with teaching that can allow the ambitions of its pupils, particularly those star students who have attracted the attention of the chancellor or the senior lecturers, to be fulfilled. It is the Holy War Foundation. Another model is venture capitalism. Individuals or small groups (companies) would approach the chief executive and board (bin Laden, Atef,
et al
.) with ideas that they believed were worth support. Of hundreds of such proposals, only a few were chosen. Some received a significant investment, others were merely given a small amount of cash. The firm’s bank of experts were on hand to assist, sometimes travelling to do so. Other experts
were stationed overseas, encouraging local businesses and picking ones that looked capable of turning a profit. A third model, familiar to anyone in the world of media, is of al-Qaeda as a newspaper or TV production or publishing house. Bin Laden and his associates acted as commissioning editors of films, books or newspaper articles. Freelancers approached them with ideas that were sometimes funded and resourced but often rejected. Occasionally, old ideas were rehashed or the editor’s own ideas were given to people whose own ideas had been rejected. Equally often, the approaches of the university, venture capitalist or commissioning editor were rejected as inappropriate, unwelcome or simply unnecessary. This is a complex and varied picture. There are, of course, hundreds of different universities, venture capitalists and TV production companies. Some have higher profiles than others and their reputations or media images may not accurately reflect the extent of the work they do. This picture may be less seductive than the image of the James Bond villain fomenting global mayhem from his secret headquarters, but it does have the virtue of being accurate.

15
11 September

At 7.58am on 11 September 2001, United Airlines Flight UA175, a Boeing 767, left Logan International Airport, Boston, Massachusetts, bound for Los Angeles, California. On board were 61 passengers, 11 crew and 26,000 gallons of kerosene fuel. Shortly after take-off, five of the passengers, armed with simple box-cutter knives and led by a young Emirati called Marwan al-Shehhi, took control of the aircraft. A minute later, another 767, American Airlines Flight AA11, followed UA175 along Logan’s runway. It too was bound for Los Angeles. AA11 carried 81 passengers and 11 crew and was hijacked, 14 minutes into the flight, by five men led by an Egyptian called Mohammed Atta.

At 8.20am, American Airlines AA77, a Boeing 757, took off from Dulles International airport, outside Washington, DC. It too was heading to Los Angeles. AA77 carried 58 passengers and six crew. At 8.50am, the last routine radio contact with the plane was made. Four minutes later, the aircraft began an unauthorized turn to the south and, shortly afterwards, radar contact was lost. At 8.42 United Airlines UA93 took off from Newark. Another 757, it was heading for San Francisco with a crew of seven and 37 passengers.

AA11 crashed into the North Tower of New York’s World Trade Center at 8.35am. Half an hour later, watched live by tens of millions of television viewers, UA175 hit the South Tower. At 9.39am, AA77 crashed into the western side of the Pentagon. Finally, UA93, after a struggle between the passengers and the men who hijacked it, crashed into a muddy field near Stoney Creek Township, Pennsylvania at 10.03am, killing everyone on board.
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Before the end of the day, around 3,000 people would have been killed.
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An enormous amount has been written about the 11 September attack. The mechanics of the plot have been examined in infinitesimal detail. The tragic events themselves have been analysed from every conceivable angle. Currently, we are far too close to them to place them in any kind of context, and they remain, for most commentators, unprecedented and unique.

But, though in many ways that assessment is justified, it disguises an important truth. Though the damage done and the reaction they provoked were unlike anything previously seen, in terms of their ambition, the complexity of their execution and their spectacular nature, the 11 September attacks were not so much a radical break with previous developments as a summation of them.

Mainland America had been a target for Islamic militants for some time. In 1993, Ramzi Yousef had attempted to demolish the World Trade Center, and a group led by Sheikh Abdel Omar Rahman had planned attacks on a series of other high-profile targets in New York. Late in 1998, Abu Doha, the London-based Algerian activist, had received the al-Qaeda leadership’s backing for Ahmed Ressam’s scheme for an attack on airports or similar targets on the American west coast. Indeed, an attempt by bin Laden and others within the broader Islamic militant movement to execute a spectacular attack on a symbolic target in the heartland of America had been recognized as an inevitability by counter-terrorist experts for several years. In the years immediately following the end of the war in Afghanistan most radical activists, including those close to bin Laden, had considered the various Middle Eastern regimes in their respective home countries as their primary target. Throughout the mid 1990s, America, whose support was seen as crucial to the continued existence of those regimes, began to be seen as a target in itself. By the end of the decade, the USA was perceived by many extremists as the primary evil. The American intelligence community was well aware of this.
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The increasing ambition and scale of ‘al-Qaeda’ attacks from 1998 onwards is also clear. And any analyst could be fairly confident that, given the utter failure of bin Laden and his associates, after several years of campaigning, to radicalize and mobilize more than a very small minority of the world’s 1.2 billion Muslims, any coming strike would be
spectacular, carefully designed to appeal to and exploit the capability and sensitivity of modern media.

Nor were the means used in the attack novel. Though by 2001 no one had yet successfully executed an attack using planes as offensive weapons, such a tactic had often been discussed by Islamic militants. In 1994, Ramzi Yousef and an accomplice had the idea of hijacking a plane and flying it into the CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia. In the same year, the GIA tried to force the pilots of the Air France jet they had hijacked in Algiers to fly into the Eiffel Tower. In 1996, American intelligence officers received information that a group associated with Sheikh Abdel Omar Rahman was planning to fly a plane from Afghanistan to the USA and crash it into the White House and that an Iranian group was planning to hijack a Japanese plane over Israel and force it to crash into Tel Aviv. Information about similar plans was received by US intelligence agencies throughout 1998 and 1999. They ranged from a Turkish group’s scheme to plunge a plane into Kemal Ataturk’s tomb during a government ceremony to an Afghan-based Egyptian group who hoped to launch a kamikaze-style attack on the Egyptian presidential palace in a hang-glider packed with explosives. Individuals more closely associated with bin Laden are also thought to have planned similar operations.
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Even radical ideologues dreamt of such attacks. In a fatwa published in the summer of 2001, Ahmed Abdallah al-Ali, a leading Kuwaiti Wahhabi cleric, discussed the legality of the death of a ‘mujahed’ who died ‘while crashing an aircraft into an important city’.
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