The Longest War (40 page)

But even al-Qaeda’s “doves” understood that they should call those primitive devices “weapons of mass destruction” to create fear, knowing the psychological warfare advantage that seeming to possess WMD had against the West. In fact, ironically it was Western preoccupations with the danger posed by biological and chemical weapons that piqued al-Qaeda’s interest in them in the first place. On an al-Qaeda computer, recovered after the fall of the Taliban, Ayman
al-Zawahiri wrote to Mohammed Atef
on April 15, 1999, saying, “Despite their extreme danger, we only became aware of [chemical
and biological weapons] when the enemy drew our attention to them by repeatedly expressing concerns that they can be produced simply with easily available materials.”

In the late 1990s al-Qaeda set up a secret WMD program innocuously code-named the “Yoghurt project” and earmarked a piddling
$2,000–$4,000
as the budget for it. Bin Laden remained convinced that more conventional types of assaults on the United States would likely be more effective than crude WMD attacks, but he kept those doubts largely to himself. The Egyptian, Abu Walid al-Masri, recalled that bin Laden “
refused to voice
publicly his rejection of the idea, probably because of his extreme politeness with those around him.”

Despite the private doubts of its leader, al-Qaeda had long been in the market for nuclear or radioactive materials, as was revealed by the New York trial of the four men implicated in the attacks on the U.S. embassies in Africa in 1998. At the trial, Jamal al-Fadl, an al-Qaeda member who had lived in Sudan in the mid-1990s and who later defected from the group, explained that he had witnessed al-Qaeda’s attempts to acquire uranium.
Fadl said
that members of al-Qaeda based in Khartoum were prepared to pay up to $1.5 million for a consignment of uranium and that he once saw a cylinder purporting to contain uranium that al-Qaeda members were contemplating buying. However, the deal seemed to have never gone through and, in any event, even if it did the sale of the “uranium” was one of the many times that al-Qaeda was scammed in its search for nuclear materials.

Bin Laden’s skepticism about WMD was not unfounded. Before 9/11 Taliban authorities had
stockpiled a considerable quantity
of radioactive materials seized or purchased from smugglers traveling from the Central Asian countries of the former Soviet Union. Mullah Khaksar, the Taliban deputy interior minister, recalled that some of his colleagues in Kandahar were even trafficking in capsules of “uranium” that they would sometimes stuff in a sock. Mullah Khaksar
advised the Taliban leader
Mullah Omar that the uranium trade was likely a scam, telling him, “Don’t spend money on this stuff. I don’t think it’s real.”

After the fall of the Taliban, American officials discovered an
underground facility near Kandahar airport
where uranium 238 was stored; it is used in nuclear processing but cannot be used in nuclear weapons (which require highly enriched uranium 235). Uranium 238 might, however, have been considered by the militants to be useful to make a radiological weapon.

Based on an analysis of the fatalities caused by an accident involving radioactive materials in Brazil in 1987, analysts writing for the U.S. National Defense University concluded that “
some forms
of radiological attack could kill tens or hundreds of people and sicken hundreds or thousands.” And the risk of a dirty bomb attack has grown rapidly in past years.
In 1996
there were only some thirty incidents involving nuclear or radioactive smuggling, but in 2006 there were over 140.

Emblematic of the dangerous trade in radioactive materials suitable for a dirty bomb that were shipped out of the former Soviet Union was the truck loaded with some twenty tons of scrap metal that approached the busy Gisht-Kuprik border crossing on Uzbekistan’s border with Kazakhstan on March 30, 2000. When Uzbek border guards stopped the truck, their radiation detectors—issued to them two years earlier courtesy of U.S. Customs—went off, showing levels of radiation
one hundred times above normal levels
. When they checked the truck, under a pile of scrap metal the guards found ten lead-lined containers, the source of the radiation.

According to U.S. Customs officials who followed the case, inside the containers were likely spent fuel rods from a nuclear reactor. Even more worrisome, the truck driver gave the Uzbek border guards paperwork for his cargo showing that the final destination for the shipment was Quetta in Pakistan, a city that is just across the Afghan border from Kandahar, which was then the headquarters of both al-Qaeda and the Taliban. According to the truck driver’s shipping manifest, the firm that was supposed to receive the shipment in Quetta was listed as Ahmadjan Haji Mohamed, roughly the local equivalent of John Smith and quite likely a fictitious entity.

The Uzbek border guards did not have the authority to impound the truck but only to send it back across the border to Kazakhstan, where it promptly disappeared. It is quite likely that this shipment of highly radioactive material was destined for militants in Afghanistan, as Pakistan already had its own nuclear program and so would have had little need of spent fuel rods or other similar radioactive materials.

Bin Laden and Zawahiri’s portrayal of al-Qaeda’s nuclear capabilities in their post-9/11 statements to the Pakistani journalist Hamid Mir was psychological warfare against the West and not based in any reality; there is not a shred of evidence that their quest for nukes ever got beyond the talking stage. And the whole notion of “missing” Russian nuclear suitcase bombs floating
around for sale on the black market that Zawahiri mentioned to Hamid Mir is a Hollywood construct greeted with great skepticism by nuclear proliferation experts.

In 2002 the former UN weapons inspector David Albright examined all the available evidence about al-Qaeda’s nuclear research program and concluded it was
virtually impossible
for al-Qaeda to have acquired any type of nuclear weapon, while
U.S. government analysts
also came to the same conclusion. There is, however, evidence that the group was experimenting with
crude chemical weapons
, was exploring the use of biological weapons such as botulinum, salmonella, and anthrax, and also made multiple attempts to acquire radioactive materials suitable for a dirty bomb.

After the group moved from Sudan to Afghanistan in 1996, al-Qaeda members ramped up their WMD program, experimenting on dogs with some kind of chemical, possibly cyanide gas. An
al-Qaeda videotape from this period
shows a small white dog tied up inside a glass cage. A milky gas slowly filters into the cage. An Arabic-speaking man with an Egyptian accent says: “Start counting the time.” Nervous, the dog starts barking and then moaning. After flailing about for some minutes, it succumbs to the poisonous gas and stops moving. This experiment almost certainly occurred at the Darunta training camp near the eastern Afghan city of Jalalabad, conducted by the Egyptian WMD experimenter Abu Khabab. The dogs that were used in these experiments were puppies from the litters of dogs kept by one of the al-Qaeda leader’s sons, Omar bin Laden, an animal lover. He pleaded with his father to stop the puppies from being killed for the chemical weapons tests, but his pleas
were ignored
.

In the late 1990s, Abu Khabab set up the terrorist group’s WMD research program. One of the fruits of this program was al-Qaeda’s
seven-thousand-page
Encyclopedia of Jihad
, which was made available on CD in 1999 and devoted a chapter to how to develop chemical and biological weapons. This work has had wide distribution in jihadist circles.

Abu Khabab, by training a
chemical engineer
, taught
hundreds of militants
how to deploy poisons such as ricin and cyanide gas, and he singled out Uzbekistan, a country on Afghanistan’s northern border that was formerly part of the Soviet Union, as a possible source of chemical weapons. In an order he wrote on April 2, 2001, Abu Khabab directed, “
Obtain the liquid
and non-liquid chemicals as soon as possible from Uzbekistan because we need them. Take all necessary precautions to ensure the correct delivery of the materials
and the lives of our men. Try and recruit Uzbek army individuals who are experienced in this field. Procure necessary face-masks, protective clothing and protective footwear.”

Disturbingly, al-Qaeda has been able to recruit
American-educated scientists
such as Aafia Siddiqui, who has a degree in biology from MIT and a Ph.D. in neuroscience from Brandeis. When the slight Pakistani-American mother of three in her mid-thirties was arrested in eastern Afghanistan in 2008, authorities maintain she was carrying documents about the manufacture of chemical, biological, and radiological weapons and descriptions of various New York City landmarks. Another
al-Qaeda recruit with an American science degree
is Yazid Sufaat, a graduate in biochemistry of California Polytechnic State University who set up Green Laboratory Medicine Company in Kandahar in 2001 to acquire anthrax and other biological weapons. But Sufaat was never able to buy the right strain of anthrax suitable for a weapon and was arrested in Malaysia three months after 9/11. Similarly, Abdur Rauf, a
biologist working for the Pakistani government
, traveled around Europe on behalf of Ayman al-Zawahiri in the late 1990s looking for anthrax suitable for weaponization. In a letter recovered in Afghanistan in December 2001, Rauf explained to Zawahiri that he was unable to acquire “pathogenic” anthrax, that is, the lethal strain of the agent.

Al-Qaeda’s inability to acquire lethal strains of anthrax or to “weaponize” anthrax should not be surprising. The anthrax attacks in the United States in the fall of 2001 targeting several politicians and journalists caused considerable panic but only killed five people. The author of that attack, Bruce E. Ivins, was one of the leading biological weapons researchers in the United States. Even this brilliant scientist
could only weaponize anthrax
to the point that it killed a handful of people. Imagine then how difficult it would be for the average terrorist, or even the above-average terrorist, to replicate Ivins’s efforts. (
Gary Ackerman
, an American scholar of the use of WMD by terrorists, points out, however, that Ivins, who mailed out a number of anthrax-laced letters, could have infected far more people if he had put the anthrax spores in a salt shaker, gone to the top of a building and sprinkled the spores on passersby. Of course, this also would have quickly led to Ivins’s arrest.)

If al-Qaeda’s research into WMD was strictly an amateur affair, its plots to use these types of weapons have wavered between the ineffectual and the plain nutty. Take the 2003 “ricin” case in the United Kingdom, which was widely advertised as a serious WMD plot and ended up amounting to nothing.
In the months before the invasion of Iraq, media in the United States and Great Britain were awash in stories about a group of men arrested in London who possessed highly toxic ricin to be used in future terrorist attacks. Not only that, but those arrested were reported to be “associates” of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, whom the Bush administration was then presenting as the key link between al-Qaeda and Saddam Hussein. This supposed confluence of WMD, al-Qaeda, and Saddam was, of course, a useful building block of the case for war against the Iraqi dictator. On January 16, 2003, two months before the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq,
CNN reported this story
under the headline “Ricin Suspects Linked to al-Qaeda.” And three weeks later, when Secretary of State Colin Powell
gave his speech
at the United Nations laying out the American case for war against Iraq, he put up a slide that linked the “UK poison cell” to Zarqawi.

But two years later
, at the trial of the men accused of the ricin plot, a government scientist testified that the men never had ricin in their possession, a charge that had been triggered by a false positive on a test. The men were cleared of the poison conspiracy except for an Algerian named Kamal Bourgass, who was convicted of conspiring to commit a public nuisance by using poisons or explosives.

A similar nonevent was the widely trumpeted plan by the al-Qaeda recruit Dhiren Barot to build a dirty bomb to be detonated either in the United Kingdom or the United States after 9/11. Barot wrote a letter to the leaders of al-Qaeda proposing that he would mine the small amount of radioactive material known as americium that can be found in ordinary smoke detectors and use it to build a radiological device. In his presentation document to al-Qaeda, Barot said that the americium from around ten thousand smoke detectors would be needed to make the bomb effective and that once the device was detonated the subsequent radioactive cloud “
has the potential
to affect around 500 people.” Barot estimated that buying the ten thousand smoke detectors necessary to make the bomb would cost more than one hundred thousand dollars. Neither Barot nor anyone in al-Qaeda ever implemented any part of this harebrained scheme, which Michael Sheehan, who was in charge of counterrorism for the New York Police Department at the time of Barot’s 2004 arrest, describes as “
comical
.” Indeed, of the 172 cases of individuals charged or convicted of a jihadist terrorist crime in the United States between 9/11 and the fall of 2010, none involved chemical, biological, radiological, or nuclear weapons.

The only post-9/11 cases where al-Qaeda or any of its affiliates actually
used
any kind of WMD was in Iraq, where al-Qaeda’s Iraqi affiliate laced more than a dozen of its bombs with the chemical chlorine in 2007. Those attacks
sickened hundreds of Iraqis
but the victims who died in these assaults did so largely from the blast of the bombs, not because of inhaling chlorine. Al-Qaeda stopped using chlorine in its bombs in Iraq in mid-2007 in part because the insurgents never figured out how to make the chlorine attacks especially deadly, and the bombmakers were captured or killed.

Charles Faddis, who headed up the CIA’s operations against the Iraqis who were building the chlorine bombs, recalls “
there was a lot of effort
to secure the chlorine, to get a hold of the tanks, to track these guys down, to kill them or capture them. Meanwhile the attacks are not being particularly successful. … The people are dying in the blast, but fortunately nobody is dying from chlorine.”