The Looming Tower (30 page)

Then, on February
26, 1993,
a rented Ford Econoline van entered the World Trade Center’s massive basement parking garage. Inside the truck was Ramzi Yousef. It is unclear if bin Laden sent him, but he was a product of an al-Qaeda camp in Afghanistan, where he had learned his bomb-craft. He had come to America to oversee the construction of what the FBI later determined was the largest improvised explosive device the bureau had ever encountered. Yousef lit four twenty-foot-long fuses and fled to a vantage point just north of Canal Street, from which he expected to see the buildings fall.

Yousef was dark and slender, with one eye that wandered in its socket and burn marks on his face and hands—the result of accidental explosions. His real name was Abdul Basit Mahmoud Abdul Karim. The son of a Palestinian mother and a Pakistani father, he had grown up in Kuwait City, then studied electrical engineering in Wales. He had a wife and child and another on the way in Quetta, the capital of the Pakistani province of Baluchistan. He was not a particularly devout Muslim—he was motivated mainly by his devotion to the Palestinian cause and his hatred of Jews—but he was the first Islamist terrorist to attack the American homeland. More important, his dark and grandiose imagination was the cocoon in which the movement would transform itself. Until Yousef arrived in America, the Brooklyn cell had been experimenting with pipe bombs. It was Yousef’s ambition and skill that radically changed the nature of terror.

By placing the bomb in the southern corner of the garage, Yousef intended to topple one tower onto the other, bringing the entire complex down and killing what he hoped would be
250,000
people—a toll he thought equaled the pain the Palestinians had experienced because of America’s support of Israel. He had hoped to maximize the casualties by packing the device, made of ammonium nitrate and fuel oil, with sodium cyanide, or by making a dirty bomb with radioactive material smuggled out of the former Soviet Union, which would contaminate much of lower Manhattan.

The explosion blew through six stories of structural steel and cement, all the way down to the PATH train station below the garage and up to the Marriott ballroom above it. The shock was so great that tourists felt the ground shudder a mile away on Ellis Island. Six people were killed and
1,042
were injured, generating the greatest number of hospital casualties of any event in American history since the Civil War. The towers shook and swayed, but the mighty buildings did not fall. When Lewis Schiliro, the head of the FBI office in New York at the time, surveyed the two-hundred-foot-wide crater in the subterranean heart of the mighty complex, he was astonished. He told a structural engineer, “This building will stand forever.”

Yousef flew back to Pakistan, and soon after that, he moved to Manila. There he began concocting extraordinary schemes to blow up a dozen American airliners simultaneously, to assassinate Pope John Paul II and President Bill Clinton, and to crash a private plane into CIA headquarters. It is interesting to note, at this early date, the longing on the part of the Islamists to accomplish complex, highly symbolic attacks that were unlike anything ever achieved by any other terrorist group. Theater is always a feature of terror, and these were terrorists whose dramatic ambition was unrivaled. But Ramzi Yousef and the followers of the blind sheikh were not merely seeking attention for a cause; they were hoping to humiliate an enemy by killing as many people as possible. They had an eye on vulnerable economic targets that were bound to provoke a ferocious response, and they actually courted retaliation as a prod to other Muslims. One could not say, however, that they had a cogent political plan. Revenge for many varied injustices was their constant theme, even though most of the conspirators were enjoying freedoms and opportunities in America not accorded in their own counties. They had a network of willing conspirators who were inflamed and eager to strike. The only thing that the jihadi terrorists lacked to carry off a truly devastating attack on America was the organizational and technical skills employed by Ayman al-Zawahiri and al-Jihad.

A
MONTH AFTER THE
T
RADE CENTER BOMBING,
Zawahiri appeared on the speaker circuit in several California mosques. He came from Bern, Switzerland, where al-Jihad maintained a safe house. (Zawahiri’s uncle was a diplomat in Switzerland.) Although he entered the United States under his real name, Zawahiri was traveling under his nom de guerre, Dr. Abdul Mu’iz, posing as a representative of the Kuwaiti Red Crescent. He said he was raising money for Afghan children who had been injured by Soviet land mines from the time of jihad.

For years, the United States had been one of the main fund-raising destinations for Arab and Afghan mujahideen. Sheikh Abdullah Azzam blazed a trail through the mosques of Brooklyn, St. Louis, Kansas City, Seattle, Sacramento, Los Angeles, and San Diego—altogether there were thirty-three cities in America that opened branches of bin Laden and Azzam’s organization, the Services Bureau, in order to support the jihad. The war against the Soviet Union had also created an international network of charities, especially dense in the United States, which remained in operation after the Soviet Union broke into splinters and the Afghans turned against each other. Zawahiri hoped to tap this rich American vein for al-Jihad.

Zawahiri’s guide in the United States was a singular figure in the history of espionage, Ali Abdelsoud Mohammed. Six-foot-one, two hundred pounds, and exceptionally fit, Mohammed was a martial artist and a skilled linguist who spoke fluent English, French, and Hebrew in addition to his native Arabic. He was disciplined, clever, and gregarious, with a marked facility for making friends—the kind of man who was going to get to the top of any organization. He had been a major in the same unit of the Egyptian Army that produced Sadat’s assassin, Khaled Islambouli, and the government rightly suspected him of being an Islamic fundamentalist (he was already a member of al-Jihad). When the Egyptian Army cashiered him, Zawahiri gave him the daunting task of penetrating American intelligence.

In 1984 Mohammed boldly walked into the Cairo station of the CIA to offer his services. The officer who assessed him decided he was probably a plant by Egyptian intelligence; however, he cabled other stations and headquarters to see if there was any interest. The Frankfurt station, which hosted the Iranian office of the agency, responded, and soon Ali found himself in Hamburg as a novice intelligence man. He entered a mosque associated with Hezbollah and immediately told the Iranian cleric in charge that he was an American spy assigned to infiltrate the community. He didn’t realize that the agency had already penetrated the mosque; his declaration was immediately reported.

The CIA says that it terminated Mohammed, sent out cables labeling him highly untrustworthy, and placed him on the State Department watch list to prevent him from entering the United States. By that time, however, Mohammed was already in California on a visa-waiver program that was sponsored by the agency itself, one designed to shield valuable assets or those who have performed important services for the country. In order to stay in the United States, he would need to become a citizen, so he married a California woman, Linda Sanchez, a medical technician, whom he met on the transatlantic flight to the United States.

A year after Mohammed arrived, he returned to his military career, this time as an enlisted man in the U.S. Army. He managed to get stationed at the John F. Kennedy Special Warfare Center and School at Fort Bragg, North Carolina. Even though he was only a supply sergeant, Mohammed made a remarkable impression, gaining a special commendation from his commanding officer “for exceptional performance” and winning fitness awards in competition against some of the most highly trained soldiers in the world. His awed superiors found him “beyond reproach” and “consistently accomplished.”

Perhaps the secret to preserving his double identity was that he never disguised his beliefs. He began each morning with dawn prayers, followed by a long run while listening on his Walkman to the Quran, which he was trying to memorize. He cooked his own meals to make sure they followed Islamic dietary rules. In addition to his military duties, he was pursuing a doctorate in Islamic studies. The American army was so respectful of his views that it asked him to help teach a class on Middle East politics and culture and to make a series of videotapes explaining Islam to his fellow soldiers. According to Mohammed’s service records, he “prepared and executed over 40 country orientations for teams deploying to the Middle East.” Meantime, he was slipping maps and training manuals off base to downsize and copy at Kinko’s. He used these to write the multivolume terrorist training guide that became al-Qaeda’s playbook. On weekends he commuted to Brooklyn and Jersey City, where he trained Muslim militants in military tactics. Among them were members of al-Jihad, including el-Sayyid Nosair, a fellow Egyptian who would kill Rabbi Meir Kahane, the Jewish extremist, in 1990.

In 1988 Mohammed casually informed his superior officers that he was taking some leave time to go “kill Russians” in Afghanistan. When he came back, he showed off a couple of belt buckles he said he took from Soviet soldiers he killed in ambush. In fact, he had been training the first al-Qaeda volunteers in techniques of unconventional warfare, including kidnappings, assassinations, and hijacking planes, which he had learned from the American Special Forces.

Mohammed left active military service in 1989 and joined the U.S. Army Reserve. He and his wife settled in the Silicon Valley. He managed to hold a job as a security guard (for a defense contractor that was developing a triggering device for the Trident missile system) despite the fact that he sometimes disappeared for months, ostensibly to “buy rugs” in Pakistan and Afghanistan. Meanwhile, he continued his attempts to penetrate American intelligence. He had applied for a position as a translator at both the CIA and the FBI while in North Carolina.

Then in May 1993, an FBI agent in San Jose named John Zent approached Mohammed, inquiring about the trade in fake driver’s licenses. Still hoping to get recruited by American intelligence, Mohammed steered the conversation toward radical activities in a local mosque, and he told some eye-opening tales about fighting the Soviets in Afghanistan. Because of the military nature of these revelations, Zent contacted the Department of Defense, and a team of counterintelligence specialists from Fort Meade, Maryland, came to San Jose to talk to Mohammed. They spread out maps of Afghanistan on the floor of Zent’s office, and Mohammed indicated the mujahideen training camps. He mentioned the name of Osama bin Laden, who Mohammed said was preparing an army to knock off the Saudi regime. Mohammed also spoke about an organization, al-Qaeda, which was operating training camps in Sudan. He even admitted that he was providing the members instruction in hijacking and espionage. The interrogators apparently made nothing of these revelations. It would be three critical years before anyone else in American intelligence would hear of al-Qaeda.

Perhaps Mohammed was revealing these details because of some psychological need to elevate his importance. “He saw himself as a James Bond,” an FBI agent who later talked to him observed. But it is more likely that this highly directed operative was seeking to fulfill Zawahiri’s assignment of penetrating American intelligence. Al-Jihad and al-Qaeda were still separate entities in the spring of
1993,
and Zawahiri had not yet signed on to bin Laden’s campaign against America. Apparently Zawahiri was willing to sell out bin Laden in order to get access to American intelligence that would benefit his own organization.

If the FBI and the Department of Defense’s counterintelligence team had responded to Mohammed’s overture, they would have had a very dangerous, formidably skilled double agent on their hands. Mohammed openly revealed himself as a trusted member of bin Laden’s inner circle, but that meant nothing to investigators at the time. Agent Zent filed a report, which went to FBI headquarters and was forgotten. Later, when the bureau sought to retrieve the notes of the conversation with the counterintelligence specialists from Fort Meade to find out what else had been discussed, the Defense Department said they had been lost.

M
ONEY FOR AL-JIHAD
was always in short supply. Many of Zawahiri’s followers had families, and they all needed food and housing. A few had turned to theft and shakedowns to support themselves. Zawahiri strongly disapproved of this; when members of al-Jihad robbed a German military attaché in Yemen, he investigated the incident and expelled those responsible. But the money problem remained. He hoped to raise enough money in America to keep his organization alive.

Zawahiri had none of the blind sheikh’s charisma or fame, so when he appeared after evening prayers at the al-Nur Mosque in Santa Clara, presenting himself as “Dr. Abdul Mu’iz,” nobody knew who he actually was. Ali Mohammed introduced him to Dr. Ali Zaki, a gynecologist in San Jose, and asked him to accompany them on Dr. Mu’iz’s tour of the Silicon Valley. Zaki took Zawahiri to mosques in Sacramento and Stockton. The two doctors spent most of their time discussing medical problems that Zawahiri encountered in Afghanistan. “We talked about the injured children and the farmers who were missing limbs because of all the Russian mines,” Zaki recalled. “He was a well-balanced, highly educated physician.”

At one point, the two men had a tiff over what Zaki thought was Zawahiri’s narrow-minded view of Islam. Like most jihadis, Zawahiri followed the Salafist teachings of Ibn Tamiyyah, the thirteenth-century reformer who had sought to impose a literal interpretation of the Quran. Zaki told Zawahiri that he was leaving out the other two streams of Islam: the mystical, which was born in the writings of al-Harith al-Muhasibi, the founder of Sufism; and the rationalist school, which was reflected in the thought of the great sheikh of al-Azhar, Mohammed Abdu. “Your brand of Islam will never prevail in the West, because the best thing about the West is the freedom to choose,” Zaki said. “Here you see the mystical movement spreading like fire, and the Salafis didn’t even convert a single person to Islam!” Zawahiri was unmoved.