Jihad Joe (10 page)

“He was like a major league ballplayer that wound up playing in a minor-league stadium. He made everybody else around him better,” said Tom Corrigan, an NYPD detective who worked with FBI agents on New York's Joint Terrorism Task Force (JTTF), which had taken an interested in Rahman's circle after the Kahane killing.
⁶⁰

The energy generated by Rahman was building to a peak. Shalabi's killers were not sated; they desired more violence and were now plotting as a terrorist cell.

Goaded by Nosair, whom they had visited in prison, Salameh and Ayyad settled on the strategy of bombing Jewish targets in New York City. Alkaisi, a Palestinian American who had trained in explosives in Afghanistan, broke with the group after an argument over money. The remaining plotters now lacked expertise.
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The cell sought help from overseas, and in September 1992 Ramzi Yousef and Ahmad Ajaj flew into New York City from Peshawar, Pakistan.
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Yousef, a Pakistani, was an explosives genius who had refined his craft at Khaldan, an al Qaeda training camp in the vicinity of Khost, Afghanistan, and at the University of Dawa and Jihad in Pakistan. He spent several months shuttling between Khost and Peshawar, extending his own knowledge to others. Ajaj was one of his students.

At the camps, Yousef, Ajaj, and unknown accomplices had been discussing a plot to bomb the World Trade Center in New York. When Salameh's cell called for help, it was the perfect opportunity to make his scheme a reality.
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Investigators do not know exactly how the New York conspirators managed to secure Yousef's participation in the plot, but several of the New York plotters— including Salameh, Ayyad, and Egyptian immigrant Mahmud Abouhalima—had been trained by Ali Mohamed, al Qaeda's mole at Fort Bragg.
⁶⁴

Mohamed was in Afghanistan when the connection was made, training al Qaeda commanders in military tactics while working on his
Encyclopedia of Jihad
. For the flight to America, Ajaj had packed a collection of terrorist and military manuals in Arabic and English. The books were virtually identical to those Mohamed had given Nosair in New Jersey a few years earlier.
⁶⁵

Was Mohamed the link between the New York cell and Ramzi Yousef? The evidence is lacking, but the circumstantial case is intriguing.

“That would make more sense than anything I've heard before,” said Corrigan, the JTTF investigator, when asked whether Mohamed could have arranged for Yousef to join the cell. On the other hand, Andrew McCarthy, a federal prosecutor who investigated Ali Mohamed and convicted Omar Abdel Rahman, argues there is “not a shred of evidence” that Mohamed had any prior knowledge of the World Trade Center bombing. Without new evidence, the issue must remain in the realm of speculation.
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Yousef took command of Salameh's cell. The conspirators included Abouhalima, Ayyad, and Abdul Rahman Yasin, an American citizen of Iraqi descent born in Bloomington, Indiana, and raised in Iraq. He returned to the United States in 1992 to join family members living in New Jersey. Yasin had been living on welfare when he encountered Yousef, who was renting an apartment downstairs from him. Eyad Ismoil, a Jordanian in the United States on a visa, joined the plot late, as a driver.
⁶⁷

With Yousef's arrival, the plans rapidly moved into high gear. Under Yousef's expert supervision, the crew built a devastating and sophisticated truck bomb. Salameh rented the truck, and Ismoil drove it into position—a parking garage under the World Trade Center. Shortly after noon on February 26, 1993, Yousef used a cigarette lighter to ignite a simple fuse. It took twelve minutes to burn down.

The explosion left a crater one hundred feet wide, gouging a hole in the building several stories deep and several more high. The epicenter was the parking garage beneath the World Trade Center. Flames and fumes shot up through the building. People who weren't trapped soon poured out of the building,
panicstricken and covered in soot. More than a thousand people were injured, some seriously, with crushed limbs, fractured skulls, burns, and bleeding wounds. Six died almost instantly.

It was a stunning act of terrorism and mass murder but less than Yousef had desired. His plan was that the explosion would topple one of the towers onto the other, killing thousands.
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Ajaj, who had traveled to the United States with Yousef, was already in prison on immigration charges. Salameh was arrested when he tried to recover the deposit on the rental truck used in the attack. Ayyad was next. Yousef, Yasin, and Abouhalima fled the country. Abouhalima was soon captured in Egypt and returned to the United States for trial. Yousef would remain free for two years before being captured in Pakistan. Yasin was detained in Iraq for years. His current whereabouts are unknown. Except for Yasin, everyone in the cell was eventually convicted for the bombing, and all are in prison today.
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Investigators knew that Salameh and Ayyad were followers of Omar Abdel Rahman, and they began to increase their scrutiny of the blind sheikh's other followers. What they found was a second wave in the making, an even more ambitious plan to wreak havoc on New York, camouflaged by the jihadists' new cause: the genocidal war raging in Bosnia.

When he was in high school, Dennis Philips fronted a rock band emulating Jimi Hendrix.

Philips was Jamaican by birth, but his Protestant parents had moved to Canada when he was very young, and that was the culture he knew. Caught up in the turmoil of the sixties, Philips dropped out of college and began to travel through America, bouncing around the drug scene and toying with communism and Black Nationalism, before converting to Islam in the early 1970s and taking on the name Bilal.

He had encountered Islam several times in his travels, but the book that won him over was
Islam, the Misunderstood Religion
, penned by the younger brother of Muslim Brotherhood ideologue Sayyid Qutb. Muhammad Qutb served a crucial role in widening the appeal of his brother's ideas by massaging them into a less overtly incendiary form.
¹

In his quest to understand his new religion better, Philips went to study Islam at the University of Medina in Saudi Arabia and afterward earned a master's in Islamic theology in Riyadh. He began to write and teach about Islam, viewing every engagement as
dawah
—an opportunity to call his students to Islam.
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In 1992 U.S. forces deployed to Saudi Arabia to defend the country against Saddam Hussein, whose army had seized neighboring Kuwait and was menacing Islam's heartland.

The Saudi government saw an opportunity in the deployment. In an open field next to the main U.S. encampment, an impromptu bazaar had sprung up. The
Saudi military requested permission from the U.S. military to set up a “Cultural Information Tent” on the site so that the troops could learn more about Saudi culture.
³

Although Saudi officials assured U.S. commanders that the program was a simple introduction to Arab culture, it was in reality an epic-scale evangelical effort.
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Leading this revival was Bilal Philips, now a member of the Saudi Air Force's religion brigade. As Philips recalled it, the intent of the program was simply to provide information about Islam.

In the course of time, a number of people after listening decided to accept Islam, and that number started to increase and increase 'til we were averaging something around twenty converts per day. And, uh, the tent quickly became to be known amongst the chaplains as the Conversion Tent. Although this was not specifically our intention, was not necessarily to convert them but to convey information.

But it just so happened that the number of those who were interested or those who had come and got information, either they had previously investigated something about Islam and, you know, this further information just completed what they were looking for and this convinced or they came and were open-minded enough, they heard this and felt this is what they believed or something closer or made more sense to them or whatever.
⁵

That was how Philips remembered the program in 2010 during an interview with the author. In 2003 he had told a somewhat different story to an Arabic-language newspaper based in London.

[A Saudi official] had a strong urge to convert U.S. soldiers into Islam. But, he did not speak English well. So he sought my help in Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and Bahrain. Since that date, I began giving religious lectures to U.S. soldiers on Islam.
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Philips helped assemble a team that spoke English fluently. The Camp for Cultural Information operated twenty-four hours a day for nearly six months, with imams living on-site and working a rotating schedule.

“At first we prepared the soldiers mentally,” Philips said in the 2003 interview. One of the team's members “with experience in broadcasting and American psychology” addressed groups of 200 to 250 soldiers at a time, preparing the ground.
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The team also arranged for soldiers to visit Saudi families and witness group prayers in Saudi mosques. Some were even taken to see government-sanctioned beheadings (part of the Saudi criminal system). All of this activity was made possible by a standing order from one of the U.S. base's commanders that allowed Muslim soldiers—including the newly converted—to take a four-day pass to visit Mecca through the program. Expenses were covered by the Saudi government.
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During one of these field trips, Philips ran into an African American Muslim named Tahir who “just happened” to be in Mecca performing the Umrah, a lesser pilgrimage to the Grand Mosque. Tahir was a Vietnam veteran who later fought alongside jihadists in Afghanistan and had a natural affinity for his fellows in the military.
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Tahir joined the Saudi camp and helped preach about Islam to the soldiers.

The program was a resounding success. By Philips's account, the team converted about three thousand U.S. soldiers to Islam, collecting names and addresses of converts and steering them toward Islamic centers back in the United States.
¹⁰
Other sources pegged the number at sixteen hundred.
¹¹
It was an impressive tally either way.

In 1992 Philips was asked to deploy his U.S. military contacts for an “off the books” mission on behalf of Muslims in Bosnia who had become embroiled in a civil war.

I was approached by a couple of military people and asked if I knew of any of the troops that had accepted Islam, gone back to the States and had left the American military, you know, who might be willing to go to Bosnia to help train the Bosnians. What they said they were looking for was something like an A-Team of specialists who would then go and train them to help them in resisting the Serbian slaughter.
¹²

That request marked the start of a program that would soon spiral out of control, embroiling U.S. military veterans in a jihadist circle with links to al Qaeda and
to a stunningly ambitious homegrown plot to kill thousands of innocent victims in New York City.

Bosnia-Herzegovina had a long and storied relationship with Islam, going back to its conquest by the Ottoman Empire in the fifteenth century. The official religion of the empire was Sunni Islam, which was broadly adopted, but Bosnian Jews and Christians were permitted to maintain their practices, resulting in a cosmopolitan mix of religions that worked successfully for centuries.

After the fall of the Ottomans, religion and ethnicity became hot issues. A Bosnian Serb, motivated by ethnic nationalism, fired the shot that started World War I. As part of Nazi-occupied Yugoslavia during World War II, Croatian Catholics and Bosnian Muslims took part in the extermination of Jews and Romany populations.

After World War II, Yugoslavia was united in large part by force of will—a cult of personality built around Communist strongman Josip Broz Tito, who suppressed religious expression and raised a generation of secular Slavs for whom the word “Muslim” was mainly an ethnic identifier.

The Muslims of Yugoslavia became perhaps the world's most secular. They drank—a lot. They smoked—a lot. They gambled, ate pork, neglected prayers, and charged interest at their banks. Men's faces were clean shaven, and women's clothes were low cut.

For more than three decades, Tito's iron grip held Yugoslavia together. His death in 1980 was the start of a long and agonizing collapse. In 1991 Croatia and Slovenia peeled away from Yugoslavia, while Serbia and Montenegro maintained most of the infrastructure of the former state under a new flag.

All of these machinations left Bosnia with a mixed population that rapidly and violently separated along “ethnic” lines, even though members of the three main groups—Croats, Serbs, and Muslims—had intermarried, spoke the same language, and looked alike.

There were a few who had kept the Islamic flame alive despite severe state repression. After Tito's fall, longtime Islamic activist Alija Izetbegovic took over the presidency of Bosnia on behalf of the Muslim-controlled Party of Democratic Action (SDA in the Bosnian language) after the country's first multiparty election in 1990.

Izetbegovic hadn't won the election. The actual winner was a charismatic businessman named Fikret Abdic whose appeal cut across ethnic lines. Abdic declined to take the presidency as the result of political machinations that have never been disclosed. Izetbegovic—perceived by many Western leaders as a moderate and secular Muslim—later commissioned a fatwa against Abdic, declaring him an infidel and offering the rewards of martyrdom to anyone who was killed fighting his supporters.
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Izetbegovic's personal beliefs are unclear—he was a cipher to his closest associates, as well as to international intelligence agencies—but his actions soon demonstrated that he had no problem wrapping himself in Islam if it provided some benefit.