U.S. identifies new Qaeda No. 2
Philip Shenon and James Risen The New York Times Thursday, February 14, 2002
Palestinian may be planning attacks
WASHINGTON An elusive 30-year-old Palestinian who travels the world using false passports and multiple aliases has emerged as the new chief of operations for Al Qaeda and is now believed to be organizing remnants of the terrorist network to carry out attacks against the United States, U.S. officials said.
The Palestinian, Abu Zubaydah, has been linked directly to the planning of the Sept. 11 strikes in the United States. He has also been tied to plans for a wave of terror attacks in Europe that were supposed to take place last year, including a plot to blow up the U.S. Embassy in Sarajevo, the Bosnian capital, sometime after Sept. 11.
While the European attacks were thwarted by the arrest of several of the plotters, U.S. investigators said they were convinced that Zubaydah was now trying to activate so-called sleeper cells of Al Qaeda for new strikes on the United States and its allies.
Investigators say that Zubaydah is especially dangerous and that they are particularly eager to apprehend him because he is one of the few Qaeda leaders believed to know the identities of the thousands of terrorist recruits who passed through the network's training camps in Afghanistan. They are now back in their home countries, or elsewhere, awaiting instructions.
"He's as dangerous as anyone we are looking for, including bin Laden," said a senior law enforcement official. "But it's scary how little we know."
U.S. law enforcement and intelligence officials say they are convinced that Zubaydah has taken over the post of Al Qaeda's chief of military operations from Mohammed Atef, who is believed to have been killed in a U.S. bombing raid in Afghanistan in November. Atef, a Egyptian, was the highest-ranking Al Qaeda leader reported to have died as a result of the U.S. military action in Afghanistan.
Zubaydah has been one of bin Laden's top lieutenants since the late 1990s, and U.S. intelligence agencies believe that he was at bin Laden's side in Afghanistan in the first weeks after Sept. 11. His whereabouts today are unknown, although Bush administration officials say there is fragmentary evidence that he escaped to Pakistan.
U.S. officials said it would have been far easier for Zubaydah to escape capture after Sept. 11 than for other Qaeda leaders, given his careful efforts over the years to elude cameras and cover up details about his identity. Although U.S. intelligence agencies are reported to have recent photographs of the man they believe is Zubaydah, the photos have never been made public.
Described by U.S. officials as tall and slender with a fairly light complexion, Zubaydah is believed to have often changed his appearance in recent years. Able to speak some English, he has used a string of false names and phony travel documents to board international flights and pass through customs and immigration control posts in a number of countries.
He has eluded capture even as he has been one of the only top Qaeda officials to travel widely outside Afghanistan and Pakistan to work with the group's cells around the world.
His activities have been so difficult to track over the years that the Justice Department has never identified Zubaydah in any of the public indictments or arrest warrants issued for other Qaeda leaders.
Because there are no public charges and because intelligence agencies have not released a photo, Zubaydah was the only top Qaeda leader left off the "Most Wanted Terrorist" list issued by the FBI in October. "How do we tell people to search for him if we can't tell them what he looks like?" said an American investigator.
Pakistan would be familiar territory to Zubaydah, whose full name is believed to be Zayn al Abidin Mohammed Husayn Abu Zubaydah.
For several years in the 1990s, he lived and worked in the northern Pakistani city of Peshawar, operating from a Qaeda compound known as the House of Martyrs. His job was to screen the thousands of young recruits who volunteered to be trained in Qaeda's terrorist training camps in neighboring Afghanistan. He was also in charge of running at least one of the camps, known as the Khalden camp, U.S. officials said.
Even more important, however, was his role in briefing the prospective terrorists as they passed back through Pakistan after finishing their training in Afghanistan.
It was Zubaydah, U.S. officials said, who gave them their assignments to Qaeda cells around the world. As coordinator of external networks for the group, he probably knows the identity and assignments of virtually all of Al Qaeda's operatives outside of Afghanistan, U.S. officials say.
"He has played a very significant role in the recruitment, training and travel of new Al Qaeda operatives for several years," a U.S. official said.
Zubaydah first came to the attention of U.S. counterterrorism experts as a major Qaeda figure after they received reports that he had coordinated the so-called millennium plots to attack the Los Angeles International Airport and tourist sites in Jordan in December 1999. Those plots were foiled, and he has since been sentenced to death in absentia in Jordan.
Despite the bungling of the Millennium plots, U.S. officials soon realized that Zubaydah had risen to become a member of a triumvirate of senior aides who surrounded bin Laden, handling many of Al Qaeda's most sensitive tasks.
Prior to Sept. 11, only Atef and Ayman Zawahiri, a doctor from Egypt and bin Laden's chief deputy and mentor on terrorism, appeared to outrank Zubaydah.
U.S. law enforcement officials say they are certain that Zubaydah has been entrusted with the job of organizing new terrorist strikes, noting that since Sept. 11, they have uncovered new evidence tying him to plans for a pair of terrorist strikes in Europe last year. One targeted the U.S. Embassy in Paris; the other, the U.S. Embassy in Bosnia.
His satellite phone number in Afghanistan was found in the memory of a cell phone used by a man described as the ringleader of the Bosnian plot. Zubaydah was tied to the planned attack in Paris through the confession of one of the plotters there, officials said. |
