Notwithstanding patriarchal explosions, first wife Najwa found a measure of contentment in Sudan. “My husband did not travel so much.… He had arrangements with high officials in the Sudanese government to build roads and factories.… Osama’s favorite undertaking was working the land, growing the best corn and the biggest sunflowers.… Nothing made my husband happier than showing off his huge sunflowers.”
Eighteen months later, in his first interview of substance with a Western journalist, bin Laden described himself as merely an “agriculturalist” and “construction engineer.” Using the bulldozers and other equipment he had once used to build roads for the mujahideen in Afghanistan, he said, he and his men had undertaken a major highway project for the benefit of the Sudanese people.
The reporter, the British Independent’s Robert Fisk, looked carefully at his interviewee. With his high cheekbones and narrowed eyes, resplendent in a gold-fringed robe, he thought bin Laden looked “every inch the mountain warrior of mujahideen legend.” Was there truth to the rumors, Fisk ventured, that he had brought his Arab veterans to the Sudan to train for future jihad? That, bin Laden said, was “the rubbish of the media.”
Bin Laden had not, however, forgotten jihad. Several hundred of his jihadis had indeed migrated to the Sudan. This was a place and a time for training—and hatching plots.
Bin Laden’s mentor, Azzam, had once called for worldwide war to recover all territory that had historically been part of Islam. “Jihad,” he had written, “will remain an individual obligation until all other lands that were Muslim are returned to us … before us lie Palestine, Bokhara [part of Uzbekistan], Lebanon, Chad, Eritrea, Somalia, the Philippines, Burma, Southern Yemen, Tashkent [also in Uzbekistan] and Andalusia [the region of southern Spain that the Arabs had ruled until the late fifteenth century].”
If bin Laden’s ambitions did not reach as far into a fantasy Islamic future as Azzam’s, they were grand nonetheless. The task of the young men who joined jihad, bin Laden was to say, was to struggle in “every place in which non-believers’ injustice is perpetrated against Muslims.” With his approval and often with his funding, terrorism in the cause of Islam was on the rise.
• • •
AT ALMOST EXACTLY the time bin Laden arrived in Sudan, another man began working with a Muslim separatist group in the Philippines. He told his contacts he was an “emissary from bin Laden,” acting on behalf of Blind Sheikh Omar Abdel Rahman—by then preaching jihad in the United States. He used many names, but the name by which the self-proclaimed “emissary” is known today is Ramzi Yousef.
Bin Laden was one day to claim he did not know Yousef. Yet the links were there. And soon, Yousef would lead the first attempt to bring down the World Trade Center.
TWENTY
HE WAS IN HIS MID-TWENTIES, LEAN, DIMINUTIVE. HE HAD DEGREES in chemistry and electrical engineering. At college in the United Kingdom, where he had studied, he was thought of as “hard-working, conscientious.” A senior FBI official would one day describe him as “poised, articulate, well-educated.” He spoke not only English but several other languages.
Ramzi Yousef was more political than he was fanatically religious. The Palestinian blood he claimed, he said, made him “Palestinian by choice,” and he believed America’s support for Israel gave all Muslims “the right to regard themselves as in a state of war with the U.S. government.”
It had been the anti-Soviet war in Afghanistan, however, that first brought Yousef to jihad. In the Afghan training camps, during a break from his studies in Britain, he learned about explosives—learned so well, some said, that he rapidly became an instructor. Fellow trainees dubbed him “the Chemist.”
Once America had become the enemy, Yousef’s talent made him a deadly adversary. In midsummer 1992, speaking in code on the phone with a like-thinking friend, he referred to his “chocolate training.” The friend did not at first understand so he said simply, “Boom!,” adding that he was going to work in the United States. The friend got the gist.
In New York two years earlier, Blind Sheikh Rahman had preached the need to “break and destroy the morale of the enemies of Allah.” It should be done, he said, by “exploding the structure of their civilized pillars … the touristic infrastructure which they are proud of, and their high buildings.” He and those around him, an FBI informant recalled, often talked of “targeting American symbols.”
The same month Yousef spoke of a mission to America involving explosives, the Blind Sheikh made a phone call to Pakistan. Within weeks, arriving on September 1, the Chemist and an accomplice flew First Class from Karachi to New York’s Kennedy Airport.
The mission almost failed before it began, when the accomplice was stopped by Immigration. He was found to be carrying a false Swedish passport, a Saudi passport that had been altered, Jordanian and British passports, instructions on document forgery, rubber stamps for altering the seal on Saudi passports—and what turned out to be bomb-making instructions. Yousef also raised suspicions. In addition to an Iraqi passport, which turned out to be phony, he was carrying ID in the name of his traveling companion.
The companion was detained and would later be jailed. Yousef, who requested asylum on the grounds that he was fleeing persecution in Iraq, was admitted to the country pending a hearing. He headed at once, investigators later came to believe, for the Al Khifa center in Brooklyn, a focal point for Arabs bound for and returning from Afghanistan. A contact there took him, at least once, to see Blind Sheikh Rahman, the man who had called for exploding America’s “high buildings.”
Over the months that followed, in various apartments in Jersey City—just across the Hudson River from his target—Yousef the Chemist did the work he had come to do. He and accomplices acquired what he needed: 1,000 pounds of urea, 105 gallons of nitric acid, 60 gallons of sulfuric acid, three tanks of compressed hydrogen. At the apartment where the chemicals were mixed, walls became stained, metal items corroded.
By February 25, 1993, all was ready. Yousef and two accomplices loaded the bomb, packed in four large cardboard boxes, into a rented Econoline van. The cylinders of hydrogen, along with containers of nitroglycerine, blasting caps, and fuses, were laid alongside them.
Just after noon the following day, the bombers parked the van in a garage beneath the North Tower of the World Trade Center. Yousef lit the fuses with a cigarette lighter, closed the doors, and made his escape in a waiting car.
The bomb exploded just before 12:18 P.M. At 1,200 pounds, the FBI would rate it “the largest by weight and by damage of any improvised explosive device that we’ve seen since the inception of forensic explosive identification”—more than sixty years earlier.
A mile away, people thought there had been an earthquake. Beneath the ground—the Trade Center reached seven stories below the surface—the bomb opened a crater four stories deep. Burning cars hung from ruined parking levels “like Christmas tree ornaments.” The explosion devastated an underground train station.
Above the explosion point, the blast rocketed upward, cut power, stopped elevators in mid-journey. One elevator, crammed with schoolchildren, was stranded for five hours. Smoke rose as high as the 82nd floor, and thousands of people rushed for the stairwells. Some crowded around windows as if planning to jump—eerily prefiguring the fatal plunges of almost a decade later.
Miraculously, for all the damage, only six people were killed—even though some hundred thousand people worked in or visited the Trade Center complex on an average weekday. More than a thousand were injured, however, sending more people to the hospital—it is said—than any event on the American mainland since the Civil War.
“If they had found the exact architectural Achilles’ heel,” an FBI explosives specialist said of the tower that was hit, “or if the bomb had been a little bit bigger—not much more, 500 lbs. more—I think it would have brought her down.” Yousef would later tell investigators he had wanted to bring the North Tower crashing down on its twin, killing—he hoped—the quarter
of a million people he imagined used the complex each day.
He had arranged for a communiqué to be mailed to the press in the name of the “Liberation Army,” saying that the attack had been carried out in response to “the American political, economical, and military support to Israel.… The American people are responsible for the actions of their government.”
When Yousef learned that the bombing had only partially succeeded, he phoned an accomplice to dictate a new ending to the communiqué. It read: “Our calculations were not very accurate this time. However, we promise you that the next time it will be very precise and the World Trade Center will continue to be one [of] our targets.”
Yousef apparently phoned in the amendment from a First Class lounge at Kennedy Airport. An hour or so later he was gone, safe aboard an airliner bound for Pakistan.
Thanks to brilliant forensic work, most of the accomplices Yousef left behind were swiftly tracked down and jailed. The bomber himself, though identified, remained at large to plot new mayhem. By January 1995, he was back in the Philippines, with a dual focus. He intended a bombing during the visit to the Pacific region by Pope John Paul II, and—most fiendish and complex of all—a series of bombings of American airliners.
The plot against the Pope proved Yousef’s undoing. The plot to bring down U.S. airliners—little understood at the time—was a turning point on the road to 9/11.
ON THE NIGHT of Friday, January 6, 1995, in Manila, smoke was reported billowing out of an apartment building just a block from the papal nunciature, where Pope John Paul would be staying. A patrolman reported that there was nothing to worry about—“Just some Pakistanis,” he said, “playing with firecrackers.”
Unconvinced, senior police inspector Aida Fariscal decided to take a look for herself. Told that the smoke had come from Suite 603 in the apartment building, and that its two tenants had fled during the initial panic, she asked to see inside. The apartment turned out to be crammed with chemicals in plastic containers, cotton soaked in acrid-smelling fluid, funnels, thermometers, fusing systems, electrical wiring, and explosives instructions in Arabic.
As Fariscal and the officers with her stared at their find, the doorman told them that one of the missing tenants had come back to retrieve something that had been left behind. He spotted the police and started running, but was caught and hauled back to headquarters. The man, who claimed he was “Ahmed Saeed,” an innocent tourist, was handed over to agents at a military installation. They were not gentle with him.
According to reporting by two distinguished Filipino reporters, he was tortured over a period of more than two months. “Agents hit him with a chair and a long piece of wood, forced water into his mouth, and crushed lighted cigarettes into his private parts. They dragged him on the floor, from one corner of the interrogation room to the other.… They threatened to rape him.… His ribs were almost [all] broken.”
A partial transcript of one taped session with the prisoner runs as follows:
INTERROGATOR: What will the bomb be made of?
PRISONER: That will be nitroglycerine … 5 milliliters of glycerine, 15 of nitrate, and 22.5 of sulphuric acid …
INTERROGATOR: What are your plans?
PRISONER: We are planning, I’m planning to explode this airplane. I have planning of of—just, I can’t breathe, I can’t breathe …
INTERROGATOR: What is your plan in America?
PRISONER: Killing the people there. Teach them …
INTERROGATOR: What do you do in … going to Singapore?
PRISONER: I’ll put the bomb in the United Air …
The captive’s real name was Abdul Murad, and he was the associate in whom Ramzi Yousef had confided before flying to New York to bomb the Trade Center. Torture notwithstanding, the evidence in Manila linked him firmly to the more recent terrorist activity. Extradited to the United States, in the hands of FBI agents, Murad told a cohesive story.
Yousef had told him the previous year, in Pakistan, of wanting “to blow up unnamed American airliners by placing explosives aboard the aircraft.” Training sessions followed, with Murad making notes of formulas and instructions. Then, in December, Yousef had summoned him to the Philippines. They worked on methods of disguise—removal of the obligatory jihadi beard, L’Oréal dye to color the hair, and blue contact lenses—to look “more European.”
They bought Casio watches for use as timing devices to trigger the airliner bombs. Yousef ran live experiments, the first time with a small device planted under a seat in a local movie theater. It worked perfectly, without causing serious injury—because the seat was unoccupied at the time. The second test, however, proved lethal.
In early December, posing as an Italian, Yousef boarded a Philippine Air flight bound for Tokyo with 273 passengers. He had with him one of the modified Casio watches, liquid explosive in a contact lens solution bottle, and minute batteries hidden in the heels of his shoes. He assembled the device in flight, concealed it under the seat cushion of Seat 26K, then left the plane at a scheduled stopover.
Two hours later, the bomb went off in mid-flight. Though it killed the unfortunate passenger in 26K and crippled the aircraft’s controls, the plane landed safely thanks to the skill of its pilots. The operation had proved to Yousef, however, that his devices could work. He now prepared another bomb, intended for an American airplane.
Murad was to plant the bomb this time. He would avoid suspicion by using two carry-on bags, one to smuggle the liquid on board, the second for components. The detonator was to be concealed inside a Parker pen, the bomb placed in a restroom near the cockpit. Murad would escape by leaving the plane at a stopover, as had Yousef previously. The pair expected to “cause the destruction of the plane and the death of everyone on board.”
A date had been picked, a flight chosen—United Airlines Flight 2 from Hong Kong to Los Angeles on January 14. Then on January 6, the plan fell apart—with the telltale smoke emanating from the conspirators’ apartment, the police search that followed, and Murad’s arrest. It was to retrieve Yousef’s laptop computer that Murad had risked trying to return to the apartment. Now the police had it.
A file on the laptop revealed that the plot called for the bombing of not only United Flight 2 but of eleven other American airliners. A number of terrorists, identified on the laptop by pseudonyms, were to transport and plant the devices. Flights targeted included seven operated by United, three by Northwest, and one by Delta. Under the headings “TIMER” and “SETTING,” Yousef had meticulously listed at precisely what time one of his Casio watches was to detonate each individual bomb.
The airlines were alerted, flights diverted and grounded, on orders direct from the Clinton White House. In the sort of security scare not to be seen again until after the Millennium, passengers in the Pacific region were searched, all liquids confiscated, for weeks to come.
Catastrophe had been averted thanks only to Inspector Fariscal’s insistence on entering the apartment that served as Yousef’s bomb factory. Had the plot succeeded, as many as four thousand people could have died—more than the total that were to be lost on 9/11.
The computer file on the plot bore a code name that at first meant nothing to investigators—“BOJINKA.” It appears to be a Serbo-Croatian or Croatian word meaning “loud bang,” “big bang”—or just “boom.” “Boom,” the word Yousef had used two and a half years earlier, in plain English, as verbal code for his coming attack on New York’s World Trade Center.
Exactly a month after the discoveries in Manila, the bomber was finally betrayed and arrested in Pakistan. Extradited to the United States, thanks to a cooperative Prime Minister Bhutto, he faced trial twice—once for the airliner plot, once for the 1993 Trade Center bombing. Found guilty in both cases, Yousef was sentenced to a theoretical 240 years in jail.
“I am a terrorist and I’m proud of it,” he had declared in court. “I support terrorism so long as it is against the United States government and against Israel.” In 1995, on the final stage o
f his return from Pakistan, a helicopter was used to bring Yousef, shackled and blindfolded, to the Correctional Center in Lower Manhattan. As the helicopter approached the Twin Towers, an FBI agent pulled up the blindfold and pointed. “See,” he said. “You didn’t get them after all.” The prisoner responded with a look and a curt “Not yet.”
When the towers were finally destroyed, on 9/11, Yousef would prostrate himself in his prison cell and give praise to Allah. He had all along accepted responsibility for the 1993 bombing, but on one point he remained evasive. Was he or was he not the mastermind behind the operation? He would say only that Muslim leaders had inspired his work. Which Muslim leaders? He would not say.
AS LATE AS 2004, a former CIA deputy director of intelligence—by then a senior staff member of the 9/11 Commission—would say there was “substantial uncertainty” as to whether Osama bin Laden and his organization had a role in either the Trade Center bombing or the plot to blow up U.S. airliners over the Pacific.
Available information suggests there was in fact a link to bin Laden. Yousef had learned about explosives in bin Laden–funded camps near the Afghan border. In 1991, when he reached the Philippines, he told separatists he was bin Laden’s “emissary.” The separatist with whom he had most contact was funded by bin Laden, had been close to bin Laden during the anti-Soviet conflict. The accomplice who tried to enter the United States with Yousef—but was refused admission—had carried a bomb manual headed “Al Qaeda,” the name for the then-obscure entity headed by bin Laden.
Yousef made a huge number of long-distance calls while preparing to bomb the Trade Center. Checks on the calls after the attack reportedly indicated a link to bin Laden. During Yousef’s stays in Peshawar, over several years, he stayed at the Beit Ashuhada [House of the Martyrs], which bin Laden funded. One of the operatives Yousef used in the Philippines was an Afghanistan veteran whom bin Laden has recalled as a “good friend,” a man who had “fought from the same trenches” with him.