The Looming Tower (49 page)

Talks continued intermittently, however. When bin Laden issued his fatwa against America in
1998,
Iraqi intelligence officials flew to Afghanistan to discuss with Zawahiri the possibility of relocating al-Qaeda to Iraq. Bin Laden’s relations with the Taliban were strained at the time, and several senior members of al-Qaeda were in favor of seeking a new haven. Bin Laden opposed this notion, since he didn’t want to be indebted to the Iraqi tyrant.

In September
1999,
Zawahiri went to Baghdad again with a false passport to attend the Ninth Islamic People’s Congress, an international consortium of clerics and activists under the sponsorship of the Iraqi government. Coincidentally, a Jordanian jihadi named Abu Musab al-Zarqawi arrived in Baghdad at about the same time. Zarqawi was not a member of al-Qaeda, but he ran a training camp in Herat, Afghanistan. He saw himself as a competitor to bin Laden, but he had close ties to al-Jihad. Iraqi intelligence may have assisted Zawahiri and Zarqawi in setting up a terror organization of Kurdish fundamentalists called Ansar al-Islam, which was inspired by Iran’s sponsorship of Hezbollah.
^*
(Zarqawi would later become the leader of the al-Qaeda insurgency against the American forces following the invasion of Iraq in 2003.)

O’N
EILL WAS PARTICULARLY CONCERNED THAT,
as the millennium approached, al-Qaeda would seize the moment to dramatize its war with America. He was certain that Islamic terrorists had established a beachhead in America. This view was very much different from the one that the leadership of the bureau endorsed. Director Freeh repeatedly stressed in White House meetings that al-Qaeda posed no domestic threat. Bin Laden did not even make the FBI’s Most Wanted list until June 1999.

O’Neill had come to feel that there was a pace to the al-Qaeda attacks, and he told friends, “We’re due.” That feeling was very much on him in the second half of 1999. He knew how much timing and symbols meant to bin Laden, and the millennium presented an unparalleled opportunity for theatrical effect. O’Neill thought the target would be some essential piece of the infrastructure: the drinking water, the electrical grid, perhaps the transportation system. The intelligence to support that hypothesis was frustratingly absent, however.

In December, Jordanian authorities arrested sixteen suspected terrorists believed to be planning to blow up a Radisson Hotel in Amman and a number of tourist sites frequented by Westerners. One of the plotters was Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, although he was not captured. The Jordanians also discovered a six-volume al-Qaeda training manual on CD-ROM. The Jordanian cell included several Arab Americans.

The CIA warned of multiple attacks inside the United States but provided few details. With the FAA, the Border Patrol, the National Guard, the Secret Service, and every sheriff’s office and police department in the country on high alert, there was still no actual sign of any forthcoming attack. The fears of a terrorist strike were wrapped up in the general Y2K hysteria—the widespread concern about the possible failure of most computers to accommodate the millennial change in the calendar, leading to a collapse of the technological world.

Then on December
14,
a border guard in Port Angeles, Washington, stopped an Algerian man, Ahmed Ressam, whose obvious anxiety aroused her suspicion. She asked him to step out of the car. Another guard opened his trunk and said, “Hey, we’ve got something here.” A customs officer grabbed the back of Ressam’s coat and guided him to the trunk of the car. Inside were four timers, more than a hundred pounds of urea, and fourteen pounds of sulfate—the makings of an Oklahoma City–type bomb.

Ressam bolted, leaving his coat in the hands of the customs officer. The guards gave chase and caught him four blocks away trying to break into a car stopped at a traffic light.

It developed that Ressam’s target was Los Angeles International Airport. For all the precautions that had been taken, if that one border guard had not been sufficiently curious about Ressam’s nervousness, the millennium might have gotten started with a major catastrophe. But luck chose a different venue.

Ressam was not really an al-Qaeda operative, although he had learned to build bombs in one of bin Laden’s camps in Afghanistan. He was a freelance terrorist sailing under al-Qaeda colors, the sort that would proliferate after 9/11. A thief with little religious training, he could be called a harbinger. Trained and empowered by al-Qaeda, he formed his own ad hoc cell in Montreal. He had called Afghanistan before the attack to inquire if bin Laden would like to take credit for the act, but he never heard back.

John O’Neill was certain that Ressam had confederates in the United States. Who were they? Where were they? He felt that there was a ticking clock, counting down to New Year’s, when an al-Qaeda attack would be most noticeable.

In Ressam’s pocket litter, Washington State authorities found a slip of paper with a name, Ghani, on it, as well as several telephone numbers. One of them had a 318 area code, but when Jack Cloonan called it, a child in Monroe, Louisiana, answered. Cloonan looked again at the number. Perhaps it could be a 718 area code instead, he decided. When he checked, he found that the number belonged to Abdul Ghani Meskini, an Algerian who lived in Brooklyn.

O’Neill oversaw the stakeout of Meskini’s residence from the FBI’s Brooklyn command post. A wiretap picked up a call that Meskini made to Algeria in which he spoke about Ressam and another suspected terrorist in Montreal. On December
30,
O’Neill arrested Meskini on conspiracy charges and a number of other suspected terrorists on immigration violations. Eventually, both Meskini and Ressam would become cooperating witnesses for the government.

On that frigid New Year’s Eve, O’Neill stood with two million people in Times Square. At midnight he spoke to Clarke in the White House to let him know he was standing under the giant ball while the bells tolled the new millennium. “If they’re gonna do anything in New York, they’re gonna do it here,” he told Clarke. “So I’m here.”

A
FTER THE MILLENNIUM ROUNDUP,
O’Neill concluded that al-Qaeda had sleeper cells buried in America. The links between the Canadian and the Jordanian cells all led back to the United States; and yet, even after the attacks on the American embassies and the attempt to bomb the Los Angeles airport, the bureau hierarchy continued to view al-Qaeda as a distant and manageable threat. Dale Watson, the assistant director of the Counterterrorism Division, was an exception. O’Neill and Watson met with Dick Clarke over the next few months to create a strategic plan called the Millennium After-Action Review, which specified a number of policy changes designed to root out al-Qaeda cells. They included increasing the number of Joint Terrorism Task Force groups around the country, assigning more agents from the Internal Revenue Service and the Immigration and Naturalization Service to monitor the flow of money and personnel, and creating a streamlined process for analyzing information obtained from wiretaps. But such changes were not sufficient to overcome the bureaucratic lassitude that fell upon Washington after the millennium passed.

T
HE
N
IGHT OF
P
OWER,
near the end of the fasting month of Ramadan, commemorates the date that the Prophet Mohammed began to receive the word of God in a cave on Mount Hira. On that auspicious date, January
3,
in
2000,
five men broke their fast in Aden, Yemen, then walked down to the shore. They saw the oddest thing: a fiberglass fishing skiff swamped in the surf. Their eyes fell on the new 225-horsepower Yamaha outboard motor. The men talked about this apparition and decided that it was a gift from heaven. Since they were in a state of ritual purity, they believed they were being rewarded for their devotion, and so they proceeded to strip the boat of whatever they could find, beginning with the six-hundred-pound motor, which was worth more than $
10,000.
When they disconnected the massive motor it plunged into the salt water. They had to roll it to shore, and by then it was ruined.

Then one of the men opened the hatch. It was stacked with strange bricks. He thought they must be hashish, but there were wires running between them and a battery. The man pulled one of the bricks loose and smelled it. It had a strange oily odor, not at all like hashish. The men decided that the bricks must be valuable, whatever they were, so they formed a line from the boat to the shore and began tossing the bricks to each other.

Suddenly, a couple of al-Qaeda operatives in a small SUV drove up and demanded to know what the men were doing with their boat. When the operatives saw the Yemeni men throwing the bricks they backed away in alarm.

Later, American investigators would learn that the fiberglass skiff was to have been used in a suicide attack on an American destroyer, USS
The Sullivans,
that was refueling in Aden harbor. The al-Qaeda operatives who had overloaded the boat with C-4 explosives had removed the flotation devices from the craft, which caused it to sink in the soft sand as soon as it slid off the trailer. They eventually were able to retrieve the boat using a marine crane, and soon it would be ready for another operation.

18

Boom

T
HE MEN WHO CAME TO TRAIN
in Afghanistan in the 1990s were not impoverished social failures. As a group, they mirrored the “model young Egyptians” who formed the terrorist groups that Saad Eddin Ibrahim had studied in the early eighties. Most of the prospective al-Qaeda recruits were from the middle or upper class, nearly all of them from intact families. They were largely college-educated, with a strong bias toward the natural sciences and engineering. Few of them were products of religious schools; indeed, many had trained in Europe or the United States and spoke as many as five or six languages. They did not show signs of mental disorders. Many were not even very religious when they joined the jihad.

Their histories were more complicated and diverse than those of their predecessors who fought the Soviets. The previous generation had included many middle-class professionals—doctors, teachers, accountants, imams—who had traveled to Afghanistan with their families. The new jihadis were more likely to be young, single men, but there were also criminals among them whose skills in forgery, credit card fraud, and drug trafficking would prove to be useful. The former group had been predominantly from Saudi Arabia and Egypt; many of the new recruits spilled out of Europe and Algeria. There were practically none from Sudan, India, Turkey, Bangladesh, or even Afghanistan or Pakistan. In the jihad against the Soviets, some Shia Muslims had participated; there had even been a Shia camp in bin Laden’s outpost of Maasada. This new group of jihadis was entirely Sunni. Their immediate goal was to prepare themselves for combat in Bosnia or Chechnya and then to return to their own homelands and establish Islamist governments. Between ten and twenty thousand trainees passed through the Afghan camps from 1996 until they were destroyed in 2001.

The recruits were interviewed about their background and special skills. The information gathered was useful in determining what kinds of assignments they would be given; for instance, Hani Hanjour, a young Saudi, noted that he had studied flying in the United States. He would become a part of the 9/11 plot.

In addition to the strenuous physical training the new recruits endured, they were also indoctrinated with the al-Qaeda worldview. The class notes of some of the trainees spelled out the utopian goals of the organization:

1.
Establishing the rule of God on Earth.

2.
Attaining martyrdom in the cause of God.

3.
Purification of the ranks of Islam from the elements of depravity.

These three precisely stated goals would frame al-Qaeda’s appeal and its limitations. They beckoned to idealists who did not stop to ask what God’s rule would look like in the hands of men whose only political aim was to purify the religion. Death, the personal goal, was still the main attraction for many of the recruits.

They studied past operations, both the successful ones, such as the embassy bombings, and the unsuccessful, like the attempt on Mubarak’s life. Their text was a 180-page manual,
Military Studies in the Jihad Against the Tyrants,
which included chapters on counterfeiting, weapons training, security, and espionage. “The confrontation that we are calling for with the apostate regimes does not know Socratic debates…Platonic ideals…nor Aristotelian diplomacy,” the manual begins. “But it does know the dialogue of bullets, the ideals of assassination, bombing and destruction, and the diplomacy of the cannon and machine gun.”

There were three main stages in the training. The raw recruits spent a period of fifteen days in boot camp, where they were pushed to total exhaustion, with only a couple of hours of sleep some nights. During the second phase, lasting forty-five days, the recruits received basic military training in map reading, trenching, celestial navigation, and the use of an extraordinary variety of weapons, including light machine guns, Claymore mines, mortars, shoulder-fired rockets, and anti-aircraft missiles. The targets were always Americans, either U.S. soldiers or vehicles, but there were other “enemies of Islam,” according to the handwritten notes of a student in an al-Qaeda ideology class:

1.
Heretics (the Mubaraks of the world)

2.
Shiites

3.
America

4.
Israel

The diversity of enemies would always plague al-Qaeda, especially as new actors with different priorities came upon the stage.