CHAPTER ONE: The Terror Trail
(Part One of Two)
Crime/Corruption News
Source: The Sunday Herald [Scotland]
Published: 9/16/01 Author: Neil Mackay
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CHAPTER ONE: The Terror Trail
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The roots of the worst terrorist attack in history
THE evening had gone superbly well. Osama bin Laden bade farewell to his guests and retired to his room. February 22 1998 was a crisp, silent evening in Kandahar, and the desert surrounding the bombed-out town in southern Afghanistan was patrolled by small squads of Taliban fighters and a cadre of bin Laden's personal bodyguard.
The Saudi millionaire, then aged 41, sat at his desk, picked up his pen and began to draft the most important announcement of his life. The handful of paragraphs he wrote that night -- for dissemination among his own supporters and Islamic terrorist leaders sympathetic to his particular brand of militancy -- set in motion the train of events which were to climax with suicide dive bombers in America.
The four men bin Laden had earlier entertained -- with a meal of mutton stew, rice and nan bread, accompanied by black and green tea -- were no ordinary guests. They had travelled a long way to see him and spent days thrashing out the text now lying in front of him. Those men were Ayman al-Zawahiri, head of Islamic Jihad; Adbul Salam Mohamed from Bangladesh; Abou Yassir Ahmed Taha from Egypt's Al-Gama'a Al-Islamiya, representing all Islamist groups in north Africa, and Fadhi Errahmane Khalil, leader of the Pakistani movement, Ansar.
Between them they were responsible for some of the worst atrocities of the 1990s, including the 1997 massacre of 57 foreign tourists at Luxor. That night, they founded a new pan-Arab terrorist organisation with the clumsy but sinister name, the International Front for Jihad Against Jews and Crusaders. The document which ushered it into existence was in essence a fatwa from its de facto leader, bin Laden. In it he railed against the presence of the US and its allies in the Middle East. It read: 'The ruling to kill the Americans and their allies, civilians and military, is an individual duty for every Muslim who can do it in any country in which it is possible ... This is in accordance with the words of Almighty God.' On February 24, when the CIA passed a classified memo on this meeting to Senator Jon Kyl, then chairing Senate hearings into foreign terrorism, they were clear that this was a declaration of war. The touch-paper which would finally ignite in New York, had been lit.
Bringing the war to mainland America wasn't a new plan, but now, thanks to the Kandahar meeting, it had fresh impetus. Bin Laden had attempted to take out New York's twin towers in 1993, when his prot?g? Ramzi Yousef, the British-educated and Kuwaiti-born career terrorist, tried to topple the World Trade Centre with a massive car bomb.
He failed, but within a year he had infiltrated America with new teams of sleeper agents ready for one more big push. One of the members of Tuesday's four suicide teams, Walid Al Shehri, had been living in Daytona Beach in Florida since 1995. This suggests some sort of renewed attack on symbolic American buildings had been planned for at least six years.
But bin Laden had probably been training his men for Tuesday's atrocities for even longer. He bought a commercial jet and began recruiting his first pilots in the US in 1993. The plane had a range of around 1500 miles -- not far off the distance between Boston and Los Angeles -- and it was purchased in Arizona. One of bin Laden's main men in America then was Essan Al-Ridi, who worked as a flight instructor in Texas. He was contacted that year by Wadih El-Hage -- who was later jailed for his part in the 1998 bombings of US embassies in Africa which killed 244 people -- and asked to help buy jets.
The deal went through for about $250,000, and bin Laden offered Al-Ridi a job as a pilot. The plane was later flown out of the US to bin Laden's former base in Khartoum in Sudan. America aided bin Laden both by funding his Mujahidin forces that fought the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan and also by unwittingly giving flight training to the suicide pilots who attacked the Pentagon and the twin towers. This aircraft was used to transport the missiles from Pakistan which killed American special forces in Somalia. The plane was also bought at the 'bone yard' in Tucson, Arizona -- the local name for the storage unit at the Aerospace Maintenance and Regeneration Centre at the Davis-Monthan Air Force Base where retired aircraft are kept. The US military, therefore, sold the plane to bin Laden -- and it was the Pentagon which gave permission for the aircraft to leave the base.
Such slipshod intelligence by the US itself has plagued the American authorities in the wake of the attacks. Intelligence chiefs admit they just don't have enough 'humint' -- human intelligence, gathered by double agents -- on bin Laden's terrorist network, Al Qaida. They knew he was planning something, but they didn't know what. The CIA and the National Security Agency (NSA) were overly reliant on satellite tracking and high-tech surveillance rather than concentrating on getting agents inside bin Laden's group.
As Frank Cilluffo, a senior analyst at the US Centre for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, says: 'It's not easy to knock on bin Laden's cave and say we'd like to join. These are hard targets for Americans to infiltrate.' Instead of getting inside Al Qaida, the best the US did was store a voice-recording of bin Laden in the NSA vaults and trawl every communi cation by phone that was intercepted in Afghanistan for a match. Bin Laden knew exactly what the US was up to and simply got his underlings to do the ringing for him.
Electronic surveillance in the hours after the attack did, however, apparently pick up communications between terrorists linked to bin Laden claiming that 'targets had been hit'. But by then it was all too late. The head of the NSA, General Mike Hayden, has admitted that bin Laden 'has better technology' than the US. The Saudi terrorist is now using some of the most sophisticated encryption codes on earth to relay orders over the internet.
America's intelligence failures also ran straight up against the new enemy that is extreme fundamentalism. While it might be possible to slip a Muslim intelligence officer into the ranks of Al Qaida, it is almost impossible to 'turn' an active Islamic terrorist. They are, after all, fighting for their faith, something most people are unlikely to betray easily. To add further to American woes, the US badly dropped the ball over a tip-off from the French intelligence service, the DST, which passed information to the FBI prior to last week's suicide attacks about a 31-year-old French-Algerian arrested in Boston a month ago carrying a false passport. The French told the Americans that the man, who was taking flying lessons in the US, had made frequent trips to Afghanistan and was linked to bin Laden. The FBI made no request for more information until 24 hours after the World Trade Centre tumbled to the ground. Even worse, an Iranian, know as Ali S, phoned the American authorities from a deportation cell in Germany to warn of an attack 'which would change the world'. The Justice Ministry has confirmed that the man called 'several times' but was ignored. A ministry spokesman, Frank Woesthoff, said the US secret service did not tell the ministry about the calls from Langenhagen jail until after the attacks. The 29-year-old was apparently dismissed as mentally unstable. Similar warnings also came from a Moroccan in a Brazilian jail.
By 1998, Florida-based Walid Al Shehri had graduated from Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University in Daytona Beach with a bachelor's degree in aeronautical science, the university's commercial pilot training degree. He also had a pilot's licence. Bin Laden's plan to train his men in America, where they would learn the tools of their trade, was by now well under way.
Around the same time, two men who would go on to be key co-conspirators with Al Shehri, Mohammad Atta and his cousin Marawan Alshehhi, were in Hamburg in Germany studying construction and electronics at the city's Technical University.
Atta, who was born in United Arab Emirates but carried a Saudi Arabian passport, was implicated in a 1986 bus bombing in Israel. The men's trip to Germany was the beginning of their education in terrorism. According to the German equivalent of MI5, the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution, there are more than 800 members of the fundamentalist Islamic group Hezbollah in the country, and at least 1000 Islamic extremists in Hamburg alone.
It is still unclear, says Robert Mueller, the director of the FBI, whether the suicide teams were directly under the control of Al Qaida or were members of another Islamic terror group that was working to fulfil the aims of bin Laden. Atta and Marawan lived in a quiet cobbled street called Marienstrasse. They were peaceable, spoke fluent German with scarcely a hint of an accent, and set up their own Islamic student society. It is a pattern, intelligence sources say, that has been repeated time and again across the world: extremists enter a Western country, usually on the pretext of seeking an education, and lay the foundations of a terrorist sleeper cell which can wait, sometimes almost indefinitely, to be activated.
In Germany more than 60,000 federal detectives have investigated if it is the European nerve-centre of bin Laden's network. The country's federal prosecutor, Kay Nehm, believes a terrorist group was quickly established in Hamburg to 'attack the United States in a spectacular way through the destruction of symbolic buildings'.
Last week's attacks on the US involved at least 50 terrorists, including 19 hijackers, most of whom have distinctive tribal names from Saudi Arabia. A few others appear to be Yemeni. Among them were seven pilots, most of whom trained in Florida. At least another 50 people are wanted for questioning. Two of the hijackers were in the US on visas, and the United Arab Emirates was the last known address of another. Speculation about the nationalities of these 'soldiers without frontiers' has ranged across the Middle East, from Saudi Arabia, Lebanon and Afghanistan. A few have been connected to the Egyptian Islamic Jihad. It is this, the FBI says, which connects the hijackers directly to bin Laden.
Three of the hijacked planes were taken over by cells of five terrorists and one by a cell of four. There was a support and logistics cell in Florida, where at least a dozen of the suspects lived, looking after details such as the acquisition of false documents, hiring cars, misappropriating the identities of innocent Arabs living in the US and preparing credible cover stories for the assassins. Other cells were strung out across the country, including one in New York which was apparently filming the attack on the World Trade Centre, and ones in Boston, Newark in New Jersey, and Washington. There are also thought to be cells operating in Arizona, California and Rhode Island. None of the cells knew precisely what the others were doing, but one command cell headed by the mission leader, thought to be part of Al Qaida's 055 brigade, was in full control of the plot. There may also have been a plan to hijack a fifth plane in either Texas, Atlanta or Richmond, according to FBI investigators who interviewed people linked to the suicide teams on the day of the attacks as the huge emergency response operation swung into action. In a coast to coast operation, the FBI detained two men -- Mohammed Azmath and Ayub Khan -- in Fort Worth, Texas. They had tried, on the day of the attacks, to fly from the east coast to Texas, but eventually travelled by train. During the journey they were found with box cutters similar to those used by the hijackers. A man, who tried to board a plane at Kennedy airport after showing a pilot's licence issued to his brother, was also arrested in New York by the Joint Terrorist Task Force.
At least two of the men named as hijackers were on an FBI 'watch list'. Information about them was received two weeks ago and the CIA asked the Immigration Service to stop them from entering the US. They were, however, already in America. When the FBI alerted its German equivalent, the BKA, to the fact that at least two of the World Trade Centre terrorists -- Atta and Alshehhi -- lived in Hamburg, eight flats were raided and two people detained -- a black-veiled Egyptian woman, who police say is not a suspect, and an airport worker, who was close to Atta and who was later released. But there was nothing, not a shred of evidence, to be gleaned from Atta and Marawan's former home. When they left Germany in May, they made sure the flat was stripped eradicating all clues. All that can be proved is Atta was a master of hiding the truth about himself. He is remembered as a student who wanted to promote 'harmony among the religions'. |
