Ghost (26 page)

Of course, I never get the chance to grill the old man. Such things are just not done in the nice and tidy diplomatic circles he travels in now. He’s gone respectable—at least that’s the image he portrays. But at night at the Waldorf, his minions come to pay homage and curry favor. When they arrive, they dump cash into a garbage can sitting outside his suite’s door. By the time he leaves for home, his guests have filled and refilled that can many times. Where all that untraceable cash will go is anyone’s guess.

Through 1993 and ’94, we make great strides in our ability to protect our VIPs. We’ve developed skills to smell out terror operations, and we continue to work our HUMINT assets in the field. But for every step forward, it seems like the Washington bureaucracy forces us back two more.

A sea change has taken place over at the FBI. Louis Freeh took over the Bureau as its tenth director in 1993. Ever since, counterterrorism investigations have become freighted with huge political baggage. Turf wars between the FBI, the CIA, and the Department of Justice have soured relations across the board. Not only are the agencies not playing well together, but now the priorities have changed. Terrorism is seen less as a national security issue and more like a criminal one. It is a potentially disastrous shift, one that has divided the intelligence community and has segregated those who need information from the information they need. It is the worst catch-22 imaginable.

Let’s say you are debriefing a hostage or terrorist. The original notes are taken by the FBI lead case agent and stored as part of the Bureau’s ongoing criminal investigation. They end up secreted away in the appropriate investigative file. By law, the agents conducting the debriefing have to be identified for any future federal trial. This effectively ends any spook’s career. It outs them, reveals who they are, and ensures they will never be able to work clandestinely in the Dark World again. You can’t go overseas and play spook if people know your true identity.

Obviously, spooks are reluctant to be part of debriefings now. This seals off a huge source of HUMINT for us, though we may not have access to it anyway. The debriefing notes, and whatever intel is gleaned from them, is now rat-holed by the FBI. It is rarely disseminated to the other Dark World agencies. We’re not talking to one another anymore. Everyone’s protecting their turf, and I fear that we’ll miss an attack because the right information didn’t get to the right people in time.

As far as we’ve come, we still have many, many gaps. Here in the DSS office, which straddles the FBI-CIA-DIA-NSC-NSA turf wars, we’re playing the game without a full deck. It’s like hunting for buried treasure with vast pieces of the map missing.

One step forward, two steps back. The bureaucratic wars only grow worse. Meanwhile, out there in the Dark World, new threats loom.

thirty-two

THE WORLD’S MOST-WANTED MAN

Virginia Avenue

Ramzi Yousef has a two-million-dollar bounty on his head. That’s what the Rewards for Justice program has offered for information leading to his capture. The smell of that much cash has brought out the crazies again. For months, we’ve been dealing with walk-ins who’ve assured us that Yousef is working at a falafel stand in Algeria or driving a cab in Paris.

Even as we chase him, I spend months trying to glean additional details about his operations from every backdoor source I’ve got at the Agency and the Bureau. Is Ramzi Yousef an operative of Osama bin Laden’s? Is he working for al-Qaeda, or is bin Laden and his organization simply providing support and financial resources? Bin Laden’s family is one of the wealthiest in Saudi Arabia. As a result, al-Qaeda is one of the best-financed terror networks we’ve ever seen.

Al-Qaeda is composed of lots of loose-knit cells working toward common goals. The senior leaders are all Afghan war veterans, men who defeated the Soviet Union with our help, money, and weapons. Most of them are Arab volunteers who we helped get to Afghanistan in the eighties so they could join the mujahideen. Much of their technical know-how came from us. When the NYPD and FBI took down the sheikh’s New York cell, we discovered CIA-published bomb-making manuals and U.S. military handbooks. These men helped us win the Cold War, only to turn on us.

Exactly where Yousef fits in with bin Laden’s group remains fuzzy. There is obviously an ideological connection, since they’re both committed jihadists who seek the destruction of Israel. To do that, they believe the United States must be forced to sever its military and financial ties to the Jewish state. In this, they are not much different from Hezbollah or the PFLP–GC. But those terror groups look absolutely provincial compared to the vision and scope Yousef and al-Qaeda share.

Yousef thinks big. He doesn’t bother himself with penny-ante hijackings or bombings. He wants to score body blows against us. Even as he eludes us, he begins a new planning and targeting cycle. We get reports he’s in Pakistan preparing attacks against Americans there. Next, we receive credible intelligence that he’s been in Thailand and Southeast Asia. His operational security and caution keeps him one step ahead of us. He travels under false names with expertly forged passports. He is the ultimate Dark World ghost.

Chasing Ramzi Yousef highlights the divisions we have here at home. In the eighties, when it was just Gleason, Mullen, and me, we had almost a free hand to do whatever we thought needed to be done. Those days are over. The nineties have seen an ever-increasing bureaucratization of counterterrorism operations. We have layers upon layers to deal with, turf wars to maneuver around or through, and our own internal issues within the State Department that frequently tie our hands. Our own diplomats tend to dislike DSS agents, a sentiment we reciprocate. They consider us alarmist right-wingers at best, John Wayne–style rogues at worst. In return, we call the careerists in the floors above the big blue door the Bow Ties, or Mandarins and Black Dragons. The Black Dragons are the senior diplomats whose career ambitions frequently clash with our own efforts to protect them overseas. These interoffice conflicts have simmered for years. At times, open warfare breaks out. When that happens, everyone loses, especially the American people.

The bureaucracy once cost us a legitimate shot at Ramzi Yousef. One day in 1994, a walk-in shows up at the U.S. Embassy in Pakistan. He’s heard about the two million dollars we’re offering for Ramzi Yousef and tells our Islamabad agents he can lead them to the master terrorist. To offer proof of his knowledge, he produces a recent photo of Yousef that he has taken. Our men check the walk-in’s story. He’s on the level, and Ramzi Yousef is indeed in Islamabad. To catch him, all we need to do is take down the safe house he’s using. But to do that, our guys on the front line need to get permission.

Dutifully, the RSO, Art Murrell, reports the tip up the chain of command. His report gets routed to over two dozen agencies, from the FBI and CIA to the FAA, the Department of Interior, and even the Department of Transportation. By the time it gets passed around, hundreds of eyes have seen the report. Authorities in Pakistan are notified, which is one of those diplomatic protocols the Mandarins love so much. Unfortunately, in the Dark World, such niceties usually blow operations and sometimes get people killed.

When our guys kick in Yousef ’s door, they find his safe house empty, a tea kettle brewing on his stove. He’s been tipped off. Too many people in Washington and Pakistan seem to know about the pending op and a leak occurs somewhere.

Yousef slips through our grasp and vanishes into the Dark World. We’re left searching for clues but cannot get back on his trail.

As for our informant, nobody hears from him again. There is no mercy. In our business mistakes cost lives.

Back to square one. For weeks, we don’t get a reliable lead. Then one morning, as I reach the office in my new white Jeep Wrangler, my cell phone rings. There’s been an airliner hit in Southeast Asia. I rush through the big blue door and read through the flash cables originating out of Tokyo and Manila.

On December 12, 1994, Philippines Air Flight 434 was en route between Cebu City and Tokyo when a bomb exploded under the seat of a twenty-four-year-old Japanese businessman. Haruki Ikegami’s body absorbed the bulk of the blast, which split him almost in half from his crotch to his head. Though damaged, the plane stayed airworthy, allowing the pilots to execute an emergency landing on Okinawa.

Some of our sources suggest Yousef engineered the bomb and planted it aboard the airliner when it was flying from Manila to Cebu City. Others blame various radical Filipino terror groups.

A check of the passenger manifest reveals that an Italian businessman named Armaldo Forlani sat in Ikegami’s seat during the Manila to Cebu City flight. He has vanished, and as far as we can tell, no such person by that name ever existed.

I’m not sure what this means. We sit down with our brain trust and discuss the possibilities. If this is Ramzi Yousef, why did he plant such a small bomb? Did he miscalculate its force? What was the possible motivation? The flight had nothing to do with the United States, and Yousef has never advocated attacks on either the Philippines or Japan—at least none that we have picked up anyway.

Perhaps the device itself offers up a clue. The terrorist placed the bomb inside some sort of a plastic container, then stuffed it inside the life jacket under seat 26K. As far as we can determine, the bomb maker used liquid nitroglycerin. If that is true, it would have been invisible to current airline security procedures.

I’m mulling this over while chewing on a PowerBar when an epiphany strikes.

Flight 434 was a test run.

Yousef thinks big. He’s also an engineer by training. That means he’s methodical, deliberate, and process-oriented. If anything, the target profiles the New York cell worked up reveal a keen attention to detail.

What if Yousef is running experiments? What if he is testing our security systems? If he is, there’s a massive attack coming, and we don’t even have it on our radar screen.

The days pass. We use every asset we have in every corner of the world to search for the golden nugget that may bring Yousef ’s intentions into focus. There’s nothing, nothing but the crackpots and greedy money hounds who will say anything in hopes of a buck.

Christmas comes and goes. I sleepwalk through time with my precious family, lost in thought at what might be lurking on the horizon. My wife deserves better. So does my four-year-old-son, Jimmy. And as I hold him before he goes to sleep on Christmas night, I wish I could be a more attentive father for him. But right now, my life belongs to my job. The DSS isn’t a career, it is a monastic order. There’s never enough room for anything or anyone else.

Twelve-hour days stretch to fourteen and sometimes sixteen. When I come home, I try to shut the stress off, but the STU-III right on my nightstand serves as a constant reminder that
something
horrible is sure to happen. I get to the point that I take the regular family phone and place it on my pillow, set to vibrate. My pager and cell phone are never out of reach. I’ve become a prisoner to modern communication technology.

New Year’s comes and goes without another hint of Yousef ’s whereabouts. My guys work every angle, drill every source. We learn that bin Laden has compartmentalized al-Qaeda’s organizational structure to the point that multiple cells simultaneously develop attack plans. What we face is not a terrorist dragon growing in Afghanistan, but a hydra. We can take out one cell, but others are already plotting. Still others are ready to execute. How does one fight such a decentralized enemy? Even if we kill bin Laden, his minions already have their marching orders.

We’re going to get hit again. I can’t see how we won’t, unless a miracle happens that lets us roll up every operational cell. That would be a veritable magic bullet. In the real world, they just don’t exist.

thirty-three

DEADLY EQUATION

Time plus opportunity equals casualties. That is the equation we face right now. The more time we give to Yousef, the more opportunity he has to launch another attack. Frankly, with all the assets marshaled against him out there in the Dark World, I’m surprised he hasn’t gone into hiding. Instead, he’s demonstrated supreme aggressiveness. We strongly suspect that he executed the attack on Flight 434. To do that at a time when almost any other terrorist would have gone to ground is the signature of someone either totally confident in his own abilities, or a man who is flat-out reckless. Given his past, he doesn’t seem like the reckless type. He’s got a calculating and logical mind. At some point in his life, he also became a committed jihadist. He received a degree in electrical engineering from a university in the United Kingdom, and before he left the legitimate world for the life of an international terrorist, he worked for the Kuwaiti government as a communications engineer.

We’re dealing with a formidable intellect. Fortunately, he tends to surround himself with Luddites whose brainpower leaves much to be desired. That became obvious in ’93 when one of his compatriots in the WTC strike returned to the Ryder rental office and tried to recover the four-hundred-dollar deposit he’d put down on the vehicle. A smart operative doesn’t make such an amateurish mistake. Yousef ’s relatively new at the Dark World game. He’s good at it, but if we get lucky, he’ll make a mistake, and then we’ll have him.

We get lucky—almost. In early January, I arrive at work to find my little world behind the big blue door has been thrown into utter chaos.

“What’s going on?” I ask Stick Stewart as I come in.

“Fred, the Philippine police almost caught Yousef this morning.”

A flare of excitement and relief surges through me. Then I realize Stick said
almost.

“Tell me.”

“He was living in an apartment in Manila. It caught fire last night. The cops and fire brigade showed up. When they got inside the place, they discovered a bomb factory. While they were going through it, one of Yousef ’s boys came back, apparently to take stuff out of the apartment.”

“Who is it?”

“Nobody we know. Calls himself Ahmed Saeed. Not his real name. The Philippine police have him now at a military base outside Manila. They’re sweating him, but he’s not talking yet.”

That won’t be pleasant. The Filipinos are not known to be kind during interrogations. Their signature techniques include burning a detainee’s scrotum with lit cigarettes.

“Have the Filipinos sent us a list of what they recovered from the apartment?” I ask.

Stick nods and hands me a flash cable from our embassy in Manila. “Here’s their preliminary list. There’s still more to come. They’ve got a bomb squad inventorying everything right now. You’re not going to believe it.”

I sit down at my desk and look at the list. It reads like the contents of a college chemistry lab gone terrorist. Bottles of nitroglycerin were stacked among jugs of sulfuric acid, sodium trichlorate, ammonia, gasoline, silver nitrate, and nitrobenzol. They weren’t building pipe bombs with all this stuff, that’s for sure.

Sodium trichlorate? Isn’t that the stuff used in World War I gas shells? Were they planning to use chemical weapons in their next attack?

The list continues. Beakers and kettles and all sorts of other scientific equipment had been set up inside this apartment. Stick is right. The Philippine authorities stumbled onto a bomb factory. And the amount of each chemical recovered—sometimes in the gallons—says to me that they were either going to build the mother of all improvised explosive devices, or Yousef was planning to produce a lot of smaller ones.

Yousef and his fellow conspirators fled their apartment as the authorities arrived. In their haste to get away, Yousef made a huge mistake. He left his laptop in the apartment. The files are encrypted, but that won’t keep the Filipinos, or us, from getting into them. It is only a matter of time.

Later in the day, we get an update. Yousef was about to launch an assassination attempt on the pope. His Holiness is scheduled to visit Manila in the middle of the month. The Philippine police found detailed maps of his motorcade routes around the city. After the police arrested Saeed, he let slip that he was after the two satans—the United States and the pope.

Ramzi Yousef plotted to kill the pope. Is there a bigger symbol than that in the Christian world? Yousef could have sparked a religious war.

What if this is just the tip of the iceberg? From what I read in the colonel’s transcripts, hitting multiple targets at once is an operational objective of these new jihadists. Al-Qaeda’s so compartmentalized that Yousef himself might not even know that he’s a cog in a larger operation. Are other cells working elsewhere in the world to hit key Catholic leaders, such as bishops and cardinals? There’s no way to know, but we need to warn the Vatican.

After the assassination attempt on Pope John Paul II in the 1980s, the Vatican asked the DSS to station an agent there. For years, our service has helped the Vatican plan and execute security procedures for the pope through our agent on the spot.

We warn the American cardinals as well. For now, that’s all we can do.

Another update comes in. The laptop’s security has been broken. The hard drive is full of airline flight numbers and schedules. There are references to attacks on U.S. nuclear installations. There are also operational plans. The big one is called “Oplan Bojinka.”

The attack on the pope is simply meant to be a diversion. In less than a week, Yousef ’s cell plans to use the chaos a successful assassination would cause to sow liquid time bombs on no fewer than eleven airliners heading to the United States from points across Southeast Asia. Each bomb would be stashed under seats inside life vests—the exact MO in the Flight 434 incident. Using digital Casio watches as detonators, all eleven bombs were supposed to go off simultaneously.

Thousands would have perished, and the damage inflicted on air travel and the airline companies would have been incalculable.

Flight 434 was a test run after all.

We get the word out quickly that we’re dealing with a mega-threat, the likes of which America has never faced before. What Yousef ’s trying to do is nothing short of total war. In case Bojinka is already in autopilot mode, our DSS agents in the field take up stations from Singapore to Tokyo to oversee security procedures and assess potential threats. At the same time, we dispatch one of our agents to Manila. We need to have additional men on the ground out there, supporting the Filipinos.

Where did Yousef go? He fled the apartment building and has not been seen since. Despite his mistake, he still managed to elude the authorities. If his past behavior is any indication, he’ll roost somewhere else and immediately begin to plot other attacks. We’re racing our intelligence capabilities against his ability to gather operatives and build his bombs. I’m not sure we can win this race.

The days pass. More information emerges from the Philippines. Yousef ’s group actually set off a small bomb in a mall in Cebu City. The description of the attack sounds like another dry run.

The Filipinos get some additional details on the plot to kill the pope. Again, Yousef ’s planning was brutally simple and elegant. He’d build an improvised explosive device and strap it to a suicide bomber dressed as a priest. Yousef knew such a disguise would probably get their suicide bomber close enough to the pope to kill him.

Saeed has not broken yet. The Filipinos are probably beating him raw right now, but he’s holding out. He’s loyal to Yousef.

That isn’t surprising. Everything we know about him suggests he possesses remarkable personal magnetism. People gravitate to him. He’s a natural leader who has no trouble recruiting foot soldiers when he needs them.

More news flows in over the succeeding days. Yousef ’s fingerprints are lifted from the apartment, confirming he was there. The police who responded to the scene also saw him on the street. Had Saeed not tried to escape, they might have grabbed Yousef. But in their haste to run down Saeed, they lost their situational awareness and Yousef bolted into the night.

A thorough list of everything found in the apartment includes a full accounting of the twelve fake passports found hidden in a wall divider, as well as a comprehensive inventory of all the chemical agents the bomb squad unearthed.

We’ve flown in more help from other Washington agencies. The Filipinos have stumbled across a mint of intelligence information. They need backup, and we need to get into that computer and find out what else resides inside it and the four floppy disks found with it. If the pope was stage I and the airliners were stage II, where does an attack on our nuclear assets come into play? And who is Saeed? What’s his role? We need answers, fast.

Discussing the current situation in the office on Virginia Avenue, we conclude that Yousef must know that Operation Bojinka has been overtaken by events, mainly due to the seizure of his laptop. Would he try to execute Bojinka anyway? Doubtful. He’s far too smart and cautious to do that. That said, if his past MO holds true, he won’t quit, he’ll just adapt. This can only mean one thing: He’s out there, far out of reach, planning something new. And right now, he’s winning the race.