Prelude to Sept. 11: a plot foiled
Terrorists were stopped 6 years before in Philippines, but some say lessons weren't learned.
By Matthew Brzezinski
Special to The Washington Post
Sunday, January 6, 2002
It was already evening, here on the other side of the international date line, when the first plane struck the north tower of the World Trade Center. Aida Fariscal had gone to bed early on Sept. 11, only to be awakened by a frantic colleague. "Quick," he instructed, "turn on your television."
The footage of the hijacked airliner bursting into flame made Fariscal bolt upright. "Oh, my God," she gasped. "Bojinka."
For the retired Philippine police officer, that word and the nightmare scenario it evoked had receded into distant memory over six years. Sometimes weeks went by without her even thinking about the terrorist plot she had foiled so long ago. But there it was, after all this time, unfolding live on her television.
"I thought, at first," she says, "that I was having a bad dream." But as the burning towers came crashing down, disbelief turned to anger. "I still don't understand how it could have been allowed to happen."
We are having lunch at a chicken rotisserie in a busy Manila shopping center, not far from the Dona Josefa Apartments, where it all started, where she -- and the CIA and the FBI -- first heard the words "Operation Bojinka." As we speak, she seems bitter -- bitter that the generals in the Philippine high command hogged all the credit for Bojinka, while all she received was $700 and a free trip to Taiwan. She is bitter that the Americans apparently didn't take the foiled plot seriously enough.
Most of all, she is angry that, in the end, her hunch didn't save thousands of lives after all. "I can't get those images," she says of the World Trade Center wreckage, "out of my mind."
The beginning
The call came in shortly after 11 on a Friday night back in January 1995: some smoke spotted on the top floor of a six-story building just down the street from Manila Police Station No. 9. Fariscal, the watch commander, dispatched Patrolman Ariel Fernandez to check it out. "Nothing to worry about," he reported when he returned a few minutes later. "Just some Pakistanis playing with firecrackers."
Fariscal wasn't so sure. She hadn't earned her senior inspector stripes by sitting down on the job, and she had risen in the male-dominated ranks of the Manila police force by trusting her "female intuition." And her instincts told her something was wrong.
"The pope was coming to the Philippines, we were worried about security, and on top of that we had just had a big typhoon," she recalls. She decided to walk to the Dona Josefa Apartments to see for herself and ordered Fernandez and another officer to tag along as backup.
The Dona Josefa apartment building was often used for short-term rentals by Middle Eastern tourists, who came to Manila's neon-lit Malate nightclub district to get away from the strict mores back home. It was also a block away from where John Paul II would be staying.
"What's happening here, boss?" Fariscal asked the Dona Josefa doorman. Two men, he said, had fled their sixth-floor apartment, pulling on their pants as they ran in the smoky corridor. "They told me everything was under control, just some fireworks that accidentally went off."
Fariscal faced a quandary. She couldn't legally enter the apartment, Suite 603, without a search warrant now that there was no longer an imminent danger of fire. But she couldn't simply walk away, either. "Open it up," she instructed.
The first thing Fariscal noticed was four hot plates, still in their packing crates. Bundles of cotton lay scattered around the room, soaked in some sort of pungent beige solution, next to clear plastic containers bearing the stamps of German and Pakistani chemical manufacturers. And loops of electrical wiring: green, yellow, blue and red.
Just then, the phone rang, causing Fariscal to jump. "I'd just seen a movie with Sylvester Stallone where the telephone was booby-trapped," she recalls.
"Everybody out," she ordered. They scrambled back downstairs, where the doorman appeared to be in a high state of agitation. "That's one of them," he whispered. "He's coming back."
Fernandez grabbed the suspect. He said his name was Ahmed Saeed, that he was a commercial pilot and that he was just on his way to the precinct house to explain any misunderstanding over the firecracker smoke.
"There's the other one," interrupted the doorman, pointing to a thin, bearded individual standing outside. Fariscal set off in his direction. He was calmly talking on his cell phone, watching her. For a brief instant their eyes met. Fariscal had no idea she was looking at Ramzi Yousef, the man who had tried to bring down the World Trade Center in 1993.
The sound of gunfire froze Fariscal in her tracks. She whirled around in time to see Fernandez aiming his revolver at Saeed's fleeing back. As the officers gave chase, the fugitive suddenly lurched forward, sprawling on the pavement; he had tripped over the exposed roots of a tree toppled by the typhoon. Saeed was back in custody. But his accomplice had taken advantage of the confusion to melt into the gathering crowd of street peddlers and gawkers.
Fariscal and the two officers with her hauled Saeed to his feet. She radioed the precinct for a squad car. As usual, none was available. So she commandeered a minivan taxi and conscripted two burly pedestrians to help watch Saeed during the short ride to the precinct station.
By now, Fariscal had an inkling that she had stumbled onto something big. She couldn't know, however, just how big her discovery would turn out to be; that amid the clutter of the chemicals and cotton in the apartment, investigators would unearth a plan that, with the benefit of hindsight, career CIA officers today admit looks alarmingly like an early blueprint for the Sept. 11 attack on America.
At the precinct, Saeed signed a handwritten statement in which he claimed to be a simple tourist visiting a friend in the chemical import-export business. But, perhaps sensing that the game was up, he complained to Fariscal that there are "two Satans that must be destroyed: the pope and America."
She had already surmised that Pope John Paul II was a target of assassination, a suspicion that was borne out when she returned with the bomb squad to Suite 603 at 2:30 a.m. There were street maps of Manila, plotting the papal motorcade's route; two remote-control brass pipe bombs; and a phone message from a tailor saying the cassock Saeed had ordered was ready for a final fitting.
"It was obvious they had planned to dress someone up as a priest and smuggle the bomb past the Holy Father's security detail," Fariscal says. But the magnitude of the chemical arsenal she found in Suite 603 also made it clear that the conspirators had other, possibly even more ambitious, targets. The four new hot plates needed to cook the concoctions made it clear the men were gearing up for mass production.
It took days for the bomb squad to draw up a complete inventory of the apartment's contents, which included a cornucopia of explosive ingredients: sulfuric, picric and nitric acid, pure glycerin, acetone, sodium trichlorate, nitrobenzoyl, ammonia, silver nitrates, methanamine and ANFO binary explosive, among others. Funnels, thermometers, graduated cylinders and beakers, mortars and pestles, various electronic fusing systems, timers, circuit breakers and batteries rounded out the home laboratory, which included chemistry reference manuals and a recipe written in Arabic on how to build powerful liquid bombs.
In the cupboard under the apartment's kitchen sink, technicians found a bomb with a Casio wristwatch timer.
"The guys in the bomb squad had never seen an explosive like this before," says Fariscal. Neither had many U.S. investigators. "The particularly evil genius of this device was that it was virtually undetectable by airport security measures," says Vincent Cannistraro, the former head of the CIA's counterterrorism center.
A terror connection
But what were the targets? And who were the conspirators? A clue to the identity of the suspects emerged when Fariscal found dozens of passports in different names hidden in a wall divider. Saeed had many aliases; his real name, investigators would discover, was Abdul Hakim Murad. According to transcripts from his interrogation, he was the Pakistani-born son of a crane operator for a Kuwait petroleum company. He had graduated from high school in Al-Jery, Kuwait, before attending the Emirates Flying School in Dubai and moving on to flight schools in Texas, New York and North Carolina, where, after completing the required 275 hours of flight time, he received a commercial pilot's license from Coastal Aviation Inc. on June 8, 1992.
Philippine investigators called in their American counterparts for help. Both the CIA Manila station chief and the resident FBI legal attaché were notified. A team of intelligence agents flew in from Washington.
Murad, as Fariscal now thought of Saeed, was a suspect in the 1993 World Trade Center bombing. So, it turned out, was his accomplice at the Dona Josefa Apartments, the thin, bearded man who had given Fariscal the slip. He had registered under the name Najy Awaita Haddad, purporting to be a Moroccan national. But the United States already had a thick file on him, and that was just one of his 21 known aliases. He was in fact Ramzi Ahmed Yousef, mastermind of the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, a fugitive with a $2 million bounty placed on his head by the U.S. government.
Fingerprints lifted at the apartment helped give Yousef away; a life spent assembling bombs had left his fingers burnt and distinctively deformed from mishaps. He had learned his deadly skills, Philippine officials said, in Afghanistan, at a training camp for Osama bin Laden's followers, and in turn had taught Murad the art of bomb-making in Lahore, Pakistan.
Apparently, Murad had not learned his lessons well, for it was his mistake that set off the fire in the kitchen sink that alerted Manila police. In his haste to flee Suite 603, Yousef had left behind many clues. Some would give the FBI and the CIA a chilling preview of what the terrorists had in store for the United States.
The most damning information was gleaned from Yousef's notebook computer and four diskettes. One of Yousef's documents spells out the terrorist cell's broad objectives. "All people who support the U.S. government are our targets in our future plans," it declared.
"We will hit all U.S. nuclear targets," the manifesto continued. "If the U.S. government keeps supporting Israel, then we will continue to carry out operations inside and outside the United States to include -- " here the text terminates ominously.
Already, intelligence officials had gleaned an almost unparalleled treasure trove of information on the inner workings of bin Laden's international terrorist network. Cell members did not appear to even know one another's real names. Duties were divided and compartmentalized, and none of the conspirators stayed in the same place for any length of time. But there were still more frightening revelations to come.
Another file on Yousef's computer consisted of a printout of U.S. airline schedules. The file, named Bojinka (which is pronounced Bo-GIN-ka and means "loud bang" in Serbo-Croatian), listed the travel itineraries of 11 long-haul flights between Asia and the United States, mostly on United and American airlines. All the flights were grouped under five headings bearing code names of accomplices such as Zyed, Majbos or Obaid. Each accomplice would leave the bombs on the first leg of the flight and then eventually return to locations such as Lahore. Obaid, for instance, would fly from Singapore to Hong Kong on United Flight 80, which continued as United Flight 806 to San Francisco. Under the flight plan, Yousef had written: "SETTING:9:30 PMc to 10:30 PM.,TIMER:23HR. BOJINKA: 20:30-21:30 NRTcDate 5."
The use of the word "TIMER" concerned investigators, who by then had made the connection between the dozens of Casio wristwatches found in Suite 603 and one discovered a few weeks earlier on a Philippine Airlines flight from Cebu, Philippines, to Tokyo. The watch had served to detonate a blast that ripped through the Boeing 747, killing a Japanese passenger and forcing the plane to make an emergency landing.
Philippine intelligence put the screws to Murad. Yousef, he confessed, had been responsible for the Philippine airliner blast, which was actually a dry run to test the terrorists' new generation of nitroglycerin explosive, known as a Mark II bomb. Yousef had deposited his device -- lethal liquid concealed in a contact lens solution bottle with cotton-ball stabilizing agents and a harmless-looking wristwatch wrapped around it -- under seat 27F on the Manila-to-Cebu leg of the flight to Tokyo. He had gotten off in Cebu after setting the watch's timer for four hours later.
The same plan, code-named Operation Bojinka, was to be repeated on the 11 American commercial jetliners, with the timing devices synchronized to go off as the planes reached midocean. U.S. federal prosecutors later estimated that 4,000 passengers would have died had the plot been successful.
The enormity of Bojinka frightened U.S. officials. "We had never seen anything that complicated or ambitious before," recalls Cannistraro, the former CIA counterterrorism head.
But Philippine and U.S. intelligence officials said the Bojinka operation called for a second, perhaps even more ambitious phase. All those years in flight school, Murad confessed, had been in preparation for a suicide mission. He was to buy, rent or steal -- that part of the plan had not been worked out -- a small plane, fill it with explosives and crash it into CIA headquarters.
There were secondary targets the terrorist cell wanted hit: Congress, the White House, the Pentagon and possibly some skyscrapers. The only problem, Murad said, was that they needed more trained pilots to carry out the plot.
'The FBI knew'
"It's so chilling," says Fariscal. "Those kamikaze pilots trained in America, just like Murad. . . . The FBI knew all about Yousef's plans. They'd seen the files, been inside 603. The CIA had access to everything, too.
"This should have never, ever been allowed to happen," she says angrily of the Sept. 11 attacks. "All those poor people dead."
In her outrage at the biggest U.S. intelligence failure since Pearl Harbor, Fariscal is not alone in the Manila law enforcement community. Gen. Avelino Razon, one of the lead investigators in the Bojinka case, was so shocked at what he saw Sept. 11 that he convened a hasty news conference. "We told the Americans about the plans to turn planes into flying bombs as far back as 1995," he told reporters. "Why didn't they pay attention?"
(Razon's candid remarks earned him an official rebuke from President Gloria Macapagal Arroyo, who has been anxious not to embarrass Washington, the Philippines' staunchest ally and patron. "I'm sorry," Razon says now. "I would like to talk to you, and there is much to say. But the president has forbidden me to speak publicly on the subject of Bojinka.")
FBI spokesman John Collingwood denies that the bureau had advance knowledge of a plot to turn airliners into bombs. "The FBI had no warnings about any hijack plots. There was a widely publicized 1995 conspiracy in Manila to remotely blow up 11 U.S. airliners over the Pacific," Collingwood said in a letter to the editor of The Washington Post in October, "but that was disrupted. And, as is the practice, what was learned in that investigation was widely disseminated, even internationally, and thoroughly analyzed by multiple agencies. It does not connect to the current case."
Not everyone in the American intelligence community, however, is of the same mind. "There certainly were enough precursors that should have led analysts to suspect that the U.S. could come under domestic attack," says Cannistraro. "There's no question about it. We knew about the pilots and suicide plots. Just didn't put two and two together."
That failure to connect the dots -- or, at the very least, to monitor Middle Eastern students at U.S. flight schools -- lies at the heart of the intelligence breakdown, Cannistraro says.
To be fair, it's a big leap from stealing a Cessna to commandeering a Boeing 767. "It's the imagination that failed us," says a former senior CIA agent, "not the system." He dismissed the connection to Bojinka as a "hindsight is cheap" theory.
Yet it is precisely the responsibility of the agency's thousands of planners and analysts to dream up what might appear as crazy scenarios in order to find ways to thwart them. And it is unclear what became of the information gleaned from Operation Bojinka.
"We didn't file it and forget about it," a CIA spokeswoman says. Indeed, shortly after Yousef's liquid bombs were discovered, the Federal Aviation Administration did begin installing "sniffer" devices, which can detect explosive chemicals, at major airports throughout America. But beyond that, there is no evidence of any other clear response to the information gleaned from the foiled plot.
"Under interrogation, Murad told us several things that should have been of interest to analysts on the deterrence side," recalls retired Gen. Renato De Villa, who was Philippines defense minister at the time of the raid on Suite 603. First, the extremists saw the 1993 World Trade Center bombing as a failure and still considered the twin towers a viable target. And more important, the cell seemed to be growing frustrated with explosives. They were too expensive and too unstable, and could give them away.
Though nothing in Murad's confession gave investigators any warning of hijackings, somewhere along the line, his brothers in arms from al Qaeda did make the intellectual leap from explosives to jet fuel and box cutters.
One reason U.S. counterterrorism officials may not have been able to outwit the terrorists, critics charged, is the entire intelligence community has become too reliant on technology rather than human resources. "Where the system breaks down," says a former staff member of President Clinton's National Security Council, "is not at the hunting and gathering stage" -- the ability to electronically intercept information.
"Where the rubber hits the pavement is with the analysts. They are a bunch of 24-year-old recent grads from Middlebury or Dartmouth . . . who have never been to Pakistan or Afghanistan, don't speak any of the relevant languages and seem more knowledgeable about the bar scene in Georgetown. . . . I'm not surprised they missed it."
With the benefit of hindsight, Murad's confession sounds almost prophetic, and as U.S. investigators backtrack, piecing together bits of the puzzle left behind by the hijackers, the specter of Bojinka looms large.
As in the case of the Sept. 11 attacks, authorities in Manila following Suite 603's money trail found that the deeper they dug, the closer they came to Osama bin Laden. The critical clue was in Ramzi Yousef's computer. A list of cell phone numbers on its hard drive led authorities to stake out another apartment in Manila. There they caught a third conspirator in Yousef's cell, an Afghan named Wali Khan Amin Shah.
Shah was Bojinka's finance officer. To launder money, Shah used bank accounts belonging to his live-in Filipino girlfriend and a number of other Manila women. Most of the transfers were small.
Under interrogation, Shah admitted that most of the funds were channeled to Adam Sali, an alias used by Yousef, through a Philippine bank account belonging to Omar Abu Omar, a Syrian working at a local Islamic organization known as the International Relations and Information Center -- run by Mohammed Jalal Khalifa, bin Laden's brother-in-law.
Shah's and Murad's confessions led to Yousef's arrest in Pakistan, and the three were extradited to New York to stand trial. All three were sentenced to life in prison at a maximum-security facility in Colorado, and Bojinka was filed in the "win" column, even as Mohamed Atta and his fellow Sept. 11 hijackers were hatching plans to enroll in flight schools around the country.
Matthew Brzezinski is the author of "Casino Moscow: A Tale of Greed and Adventure on Capitalism's Wildest Frontier." |
