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RECALLS LEWIS
SCHILIRO, a former head of the FBI’s New York field office, “He was as
cold as ice.” Today Ramzi Yousef is safely in prison, as are five of his
confederates from the failed 1993 attempt. But Yousef’s passion for
killing Americans is flourishing in a loose network of tiny Islamic
fundamentalist terror groups spread around the world. And the main suspect
in the worst foreign attack on the continental United States is the chief
impresario and financier of that network, Osama bin Laden, the gaunt,
bearded Saudi exile who in February 1998 declared all Americans to be
legitimate targets of jihad, or holy war. Bin Laden has nursed a fervent
hatred of the United States since its troops landed on Saudi soil to fight
the gulf war, and he has haunted the worst nightmares of U.S. security
officials for years. The scion of a wealthy Saudi magnate, he was linked
to the 1998 twin U.S. Embassy bombings in Africa and the explosion aboard
the USS Cole in Yemen last year. But until last Tuesday, bin Laden had not
succeeded in shedding blood on American soil.
By the end of America’s day of horror, U.S. intelligence officials
said, most people inside the federal government were almost certain—about
90 percent certain, the consensus had it—that bin Laden and his global
organization, Al Qaeda (The Base), were behind the attacks. One key
reason: shortly after the suicide attacks, a source with access to
intelligence told NEWSWEEK, U.S. intelligence picked up communications
among bin Laden associates relaying a message: “We’ve hit the
targets.” |
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On
Wednesday, the FBI detained several people whom they are now describing as
“material witnesses” in Boston and south Florida. Authorities also said
they had identified the two or three terrorists who hijacked each plane.
The suspects were said to have entered the country from all over the
world, and some had been living in the United States for up to a year.
Early leads suggest the team had domestic support networks rooted in the
Boston area, but some of the bombers may have come from Canada, which also
harbored the terrorist cell that planned the millennium bombing in Los
Angeles. A British intelligence source told NEWSWEEK that “two brothers,
working on United Arab Emirates passports, one |
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of them a trained pilot, have been placed at the Boston airport.”
Even so, investigators had only just begun to ferret out the full
dimensions of the plot. “We’re in Oklahoma mode now,” said one FBI
counterterrorism agent, referring to the frenzy of police work that
followed the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing. He added: “This is a rubble pile
that makes Oklahoma City look like a sandbox.” New FBI chief Robert
Mueller, on only his second week of work, conducted a 6 p.m. conference
call with special agents in charge of all the 56 field offices. He
announced that Washington would take control of the biggest investigation
in the agency’s history and appointed veteran deputy director Tom Pickard
to run it. FBI officials said they knew this probe was different from
anything else they’d ever done. “This is not going to be a classic
forensic investigation,” said the counterterrorism agent. “You’re not
looking for a traditional bomb ‘signature’ like the rear axle of the Ryder
truck. The bomb signature is a plane in the sky.” In other words, there
may be little forensic evidence to investigate.
SEARCHING FOR
LINKS
For the moment the link to
bin Laden and Ramzi Yousef appeared to be largely circumstantial.
Investigators believe that radical Egyptian organizations were directly
behind the suicide attacks. One, Al Gamaa al Islamiya, was run by Sheik
Omar Abdel-Rahman, the blind Muslim cleric who is serving a prison term in
Minnesota for allegedly conspiring with World Trade Center bombing
suspects to blow up other New York landmarks. Bin Laden recently has
turned complaints about Abdel-Rahman’s imprisonment and treatment by U.S.
authorities into a crusade, committing his followers to freeing the
religious leader. U.S. officials have identified Ayman al-Zawahiri, the
head of another Egyptian militant group that supports the sheik, as deputy
leader of Al Qaeda. Abdel-Rahman is kept in solitary confinement, and a
month ago U.S. authorities seized his radio. |
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Bush called
last Tuesday’s searing experience a demonstration of American fortitude.
In truth it was a stunning display of America’s vulnerability—now and well
into the future.
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The fast fingering of bin Laden also did not mask the fact that, like the
rest of the country, U.S. officials were in a state of shock over what may
go down as the most massive failure of military and intelligence readiness
in the nation’s history. Bush called last Tuesday’s searing experience a
demonstration of American fortitude. In truth it was a stunning display of
America’s vulnerability—now and well into the future. Always before, U.S.
experts tended to dismiss the idea that terrorists could combine both
suicidal fervor and technical skill and sophistication. The 1993 World
Trade Center attack, in which conspirators exploded a bomb-laden van in
the basement, was seen as just another ragged effort; afterward the
terrorists gave themselves away when one was stupid enough to try to get
his deposit back on the rental van. Similarly, when an Algerian terrorist
was arrested crossing the border from Canada just before Y2K, his obvious
nervousness gave him away to an alert Customs official.
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By contrast, last Tuesday’s
coordinated assault on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon was as
sophisticated a terror attack as U.S. investigators have seen. A chief
mystery was how the culprits might have found four apparently trained
pilots to fly suicide missions. One frightening prospect is that bin Laden
is winning educated Arab elites to his cause, especially as the
Palestinian intifada inflames the Arab world. The FBI has picked up
previous hints of high-level help: in 1995 Abdul Hakim Murad, a Pakistani,
was accused along with Yousef of a plot to bomb 11 U.S. airliners in a
single “day of rage” against the United States. Murad, a commercial pilot,
allegedly told investigators that he had been trained as a kamikaze pilot. |
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WAS THERE
HELP?
Just as scary, the new
attacks also suggested that the terrorists had an extensive domestic
support network—confederates on the ground who helped them gather
intelligence on the targets and possibly provided shelter and logistical
support.
Could the bombers have been
stopped? NEWSWEEK has learned that while U.S. intelligence received no
specific warning, the state of alert had been high during the past two
weeks, and a particularly urgent warning may have been received the night
before the attacks, causing some top Pentagon brass to cancel a trip. Why
that same information was not available to the 266 people who died aboard
the four hijacked commercial aircraft may become a hot topic on the Hill.
In testimony to the Intelligence Committee earlier this year, CIA Director
George Tenet said bin Laden posed the most immediate terrorist threat to
Americans around the world and was capable of “multiple attacks with
little or no warning.” “There is a giant accountability issue starting
today,” says former Afghanistan CIA station chief Milt Bearden, “and in
the midst of legitimate accountability there will be a lot of
scapegoating. They’re going to start looking for the modern-day equivalent
of General Short and Admiral Kimmel [the armed-forces commanders at Pearl
Harbor], and they’re going to find them.”
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The deeper problem for counterterrorism experts is that bin
Laden’s network is so diffuse and diverse—a patchwork of renegade
Algerian, Palestinian, Egyptian and other cells—and that foreign
governments, including friendly ones, move slowly to crack down on people
they know are his supporters. Only last February, a few weeks before
Tenet’s testimony, a NEWSWEEK reporter sat down in a London coffee shop
with Yasser el-Sirri, one of bin Laden’s alleged associates. El-Sirri
cheerfully boasted that the Egyptian government had sentenced him to death
for crimes of terrorism. Attempts to snatch or kill bin Laden have been
frustrated by the difficulty of getting precise information on where he is
in the mountains of Afghanistan, not to mention a U.S. presidential order
barring assassination. Though U.S. intelligence had wiretaps on bin
Laden’s key lieutenants before the Kenya and Tanzania embassy bombings,
they were unable to pick up enough information to prevent them. |
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TESTING U.S.
INTELLIGENCE
Some
counterterrorism operatives now speculate that intelligence picked up by
U.S. agencies about possible terrorist attacks on Americans last June may
actually have been leaked by operatives associated with bin Laden. Now it
appears the terrorists “may have been testing where and how we picked up
information—and what were the things we missed,” says a U.S. investigator
based in the Persian Gulf. “They saw where we reacted, and presumably also
where we didn’t react.” Were they casing American airports to see if extra
precautions went into effect? “They not only know how to plan, but they
know how to test,” said this source, “and they know, obviously, where the
gaps are.” |
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Among the worst of those gaps is the ramshackle state of
security checks at U.S. airports. The ability of unknown bombers to
exploit these soft spots—and to do it so jarringly, ripping a hole in the
heart of America’s financial and military power—could itself have serious
consequences. For it demonstrates that it can be done again. In fact,
terrorism experts say that for years their worst fear has been that a
suicide bomber would hit inside U.S. borders. “If someone really wants to
kill himself in order to blow up a building here, there is no level of
sustainable security in this country that could prevent it,” says one
official. “We just aren’t equipped to handle it. It is beyond us
psychologically. And the citizens of this country are not willing to
tolerate the lack of freedom that this level of security would
mean.” |
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That could now change, as part of a tectonic shift in America’s
sense of vulnerability. “This shows that you can have mass-destruction
terrorism without weapons of mass destruction,” says Gideon Rose, a terror
expert at the Council on Foreign Relations. And that even a missile
defense won’t help. “We’re going to have to enact laws that some people
from the far left and the far right won’t like,” adds a senior
intelligence source. He points to Britain’s sweeping new law that, as he
puts it, extends the draconian security measures—including surveillance
and holding people on mere suspicion—already used in troubled Northern
Ireland. He adds: “We have to understand that national security will have
to take some precedence over what we have seen as the right to
privacy.”
Sen. Jon Kyl, a member of the
Intelligence Committee, says he’s been pushing for years for more
intelligence money and less red tape—and for dropping concerns about
recruiting human-rights violators as infiltrators into terror groups. “My
first reaction was that my knees were weak,” he said. “But frankly, my
second reaction was that all of the things we’ve been saying we have to
do—maybe through this disaster they’ll get more attention.” No doubt they
will.
With Mark Hosenball, Daniel Klaidman and Donatella Lorch in Washington
and Peg Tyre, Christopher Dickey and Andrew Nagorski in New York
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© 2002 Newsweek, Inc.
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