500 Days (46 page)

Yosri Fouda checked into a modest hotel in Islamabad on April 17. A few weeks had passed since a mysterious man had invited the Al Jazeera reporter to Pakistan with hints that he could help create a news package marking the first anniversary of 9/11. But Fouda had made the journey on faith—he had no means of contacting the source and had no idea if the man would call again.

A shower, a meal, a book, a little television. Fouda did whatever he could to pass the time. After twelve hours with no word from his contact, he became bored, impatient, and increasingly doubtful that anything was going to come from this trip.

The hotel phone rang. It had to be his contact. No one else knew he was there. Fouda picked up the receiver.

“Thank God you have arrived safe,” a man said. “Take the night flight to Karachi.”

A dial tone. The man had hung up.

•  •  •  

On the two-hour flight the next day, Fouda’s nerves were frayed. His contact seemed tied to al-Qaeda. When he arrived, would there be a gang of fundamentalists lying in wait to kidnap him?

His plane landed at Quaid-e-Azam Airport. Fouda left the terminal, flagged down a cab, and told the driver to take him to the Karachi Marriott Hotel on Abdullah Haroon Road. As the taxi maneuvered through traffic, the anonymous source—whom Fouda had taken to calling Abu Bakr, the name of the prophet Muhammad’s father-in-law—called the cell phone again. Fouda told him that he was on his way to the Marriott.

“Ask the driver to take you to the Regent Plaza instead,” the man said.

Fouda gave the new destination and the driver changed course toward one of the city’s major boulevards, Shara-e-Faisal. The hotel resembled a white, multitiered wedding cake amid schools, shopping centers, and government buildings. Fouda checked in to Room 322 and stepped into a hot shower, only to hear a knock at the door. He dashed out to welcome . . . whoever it was.

The man came inside and greeted Fouda. About twenty minutes later, as they shared a meal, Fouda’s visitor mentioned almost casually that bin Laden was still alive and was a devoted viewer of Al Jazeera.

“How does he watch us now?” Fouda asked.

“Do not worry, Brother Yosri. Sheikh Osama, God protect him, is alive and well. Whatever he misses he gets on tape.”

The conversation turned to Al Jazeera programming and the fax that the man had sent to Fouda weeks before with a detailed proposal for a 9/11 anniversary news package. They were drinking tea when the al-Qaeda envoy ended the conversation.

“Do not worry, Brother Yosri,” he said. “You will, God willing, know everything tomorrow.”

•  •  •  

Following new instructions, Fouda slipped out the back door of the hotel, hailed a taxi, and made his way to another location. There, he stood by a staircase for several minutes until another stranger arrived.

“I have just given my mother-in-law a lift home,” the man said. “We can go now.”

Fouda was ushered into a car and driven to another part of town. His host parked, left the car, and walked to a phone booth. When he returned, another changeup—Fouda was to take a rickshaw to the next location. There, he was picked up by another automobile, then driven out of Karachi to a road where a third car waited.

A different man appeared. He blindfolded Fouda for the next leg of his circuitous journey.

•  •  •  

They arrived at the final stop. With his eyes still covered, Fouda was led into a building and up four flights of stairs. He heard a doorbell. Once he was inside the room, someone removed his blindfold.

“It is okay now,” a voice said. “You can open your eyes.”

Fouda blinked. A bearded man was standing two feet away from him. It was Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the mastermind of the 9/11 attacks.

Sheikh Mohammed led Fouda to another room. A second man was there waiting, and the reporter recognized him as Ramzi bin al-Shibh, a 9/11 conspirator who was a close friend of Atta, the ringleader of the hijackers. He, like Sheikh Mohammed, was one of the United States’ most wanted terrorists.

“Recognized us yet?” Sheikh Mohammed said.

The men sat down.

“They say you are terrorists,” Fouda blurted out.

Bin al-Shibh smiled, but said nothing.

“They are right,” Sheikh Mohammed replied. “We are terrorists.”

Hours passed. The men prayed, drank tea, chatted, but there was none of the bare-knuckled back-and-forth that resembled an interview with a journalist. This was just a time for the three men to grow comfortable with each other. The only useful information that Fouda garnered so far was the realization that bin al-Shibh had written the fax he had received in London. Finally, at almost ten o’clock at night, Fouda ventured into his first real question.

He looked Sheikh Mohammed in the eye. “Did you do it?” he asked.

“No filming today,” Sheikh Mohammed replied without a hint that he had heard the question. “And you do not have to worry about a camera or a cameraman for tomorrow. We will provide everything.”

Bin al-Shibh broke in. “You will be going straight from here to your flight whenever we are done.”

Fouda resigned himself to learning nothing of value that day. But then Sheikh Mohammed stared him in the face, his shoulders erect and his chin up.

“I am the head of the al-Qaeda military committee,” he announced. “And yes, we did it.”

•  •  •  

The hearing for Zacarias Moussaoui on the morning of April 22 was supposed to be a routine judicial housecleaning. His lawyers, led by Frank Dunham, had filed motions with the Federal District Court in Alexandria seeking to improve the conditions of their client’s imprisonment while he awaited trial. There was no excitement among reporters packing the gallery; it wasn’t likely they would get a story out of such a dry proceeding.

At ten o’clock, Judge Leonie Brinkema mounted the bench and the clerk
called the case. Moussaoui, clad in a green prison jumpsuit, was led in by the marshals through a side door.

“Will counsel please state their appearance for the record,” the clerk said.

The prosecution spoke first. “Good morning, your honor. Rob Spencer, Ken Karas, and Dave Novak for the United States.”

Dunham stood. “Good morning, your honor. Frank Dunham, the federal public defender, Jerry Zerkin, and Ed MacMahon—”

Moussaoui raised his arm, one finger to the sky. “Ma’am,” he called. “No, I am sorry to note, they are not my lawyers.”

A jolt raced through the courtroom. Apparently, this wouldn’t be a routine day after all.

“Mr. Moussaoui,” Brinkema said, “Go up to the lectern, please.”

Moussaoui stood and walked forward. “Thank you.”

Brinkema cautioned him that the prosecutors could use anything he said in court against him. Moussaoui said that he understood.

“Just speak up loudly, Mr. Moussaoui,” Brinkema said. “Go ahead.”

There was a pause. All eyes were fixed on Moussaoui, and he seemed to be enjoying the attention.

“In the name of Allah,” he began, “I, Zacarias Moussaoui, today the twenty-second of April 2002, after being prevented for a long time to mount an effective defense by overly restrictive and oppressive condition of confinement, take the control of my defense.”

He was firing his lawyers, Moussaoui said, and would represent himself at trial. They worked for the government and were part of a conspiracy against him.

“Greed, fame, and vanity is their motivation,” Moussaoui said in a calm but forceful voice. “Their game is deception. Their slogan is no scruple.”

He began reciting portions of the Koran, then listed countries that he said should be under the control of Muslims.

“I pray to Allah, the powerful, for the return of the Islamic Emirates of Afghanistan and the destruction of the United States of America,” he said. “America, I’m ready to fight in your Don King fight, even both hands tied behind the back in court.”

He was just getting started. In a rambling fifty-minute monologue, he inveighed again against his lawyers, quoted more passages from the Koran, and explained his reasons for wanting to represent himself with the help of a Muslim lawyer.

“All right,” Brinkema said when Moussaoui finished. “Let me first advise you that you have the absolute right under our law to be your own attorney. You already know that. But you do not have the right to pick and choose the lawyer you want appointed to you.”

Before they went any further, she said, she wanted to hear from his attorneys.

Moussaoui shook his head. “I do not want you to refer to them as my attorney,” he said. “They are not my attorney.”

“I understand.”

Moreover, Moussaoui said, he did not want them to reveal anything about his legal strategy.

“These men will not,” Brinkema said. “They’re experienced attorneys.”

“Yeah, yeah, I believe that they’re experienced.” Moussaoui smirked. “They’re experienced in deception.”

•  •  •  

Brinkema ruled that Moussaoui could represent himself, pending a psychiatric evaluation. But, she said, in the event that he proved unable to handle the job, Dunham and the other lawyers would remain in court as standby counsel.

Outside the courtroom, reporters surrounded Dunham. Moussaoui’s position was understandable, he said. “If somebody thrusts a lawyer on you that you didn’t pick, it’s hard for you to trust them, especially in a case like this.”

•  •  •  

In the White House, disbelief, once again, was engulfed by more disbelief. The Moussaoui case was supposed to follow a simple script: indictment, trial, conviction, sentence—the only question had been whether the prosecutors would succeed in persuading the court to impose a death sentence.

But now this man was out there, babbling away in front of the national press corps, speaking in Arabic, quoting the Koran. Was he sending coded messages? Why didn’t the judge put a stop to this dangerous charade?

The Moussaoui case, administration lawyers fretted, was turning into a circus. And the first day of the trial hadn’t even been held.

•  •  •  

Shortly before 4:00
P.M.
on May 3, Saudi Arabian Airlines flight SV667 banked northwest, beginning its final approach into Damascus International Airport. On board the plane, Abdullah Almalki glanced out of a window at the lush greenery below of the Ghouta, a belt of farmland on the outskirts of Damascus that Syrians revered as near paradise. The area had special meaning to Almalki;
his family owned land there, and he affectionately remembered playing with his brothers as a child amid its fruit trees and orchards.

He had not seen Syria since he moved to Canada as a teenager fifteen years before and was returning now after hearing some bad news. A few days earlier, he had received word that his grandmother had fallen ill and that several members of the family, including Almalki’s parents, had flown to Damascus to be at her bedside. He had promised to join them as soon as he could.

As he watched his homeland rush by beneath the plane, Almalki could not have known that a noose was tightening. Canadian officials had been investigating him on suspicion of terrorist activities. Records from their inquiry had been sent to the CIA, which in turn passed them to Syrian intelligence. Since then, the Syrians had tortured Ahmad El-Maati until he confessed to having met Almalki and Maher Arar at an al-Qaeda training camp in Afghanistan. The allegation was false, but given in desperation. El-Maati had buckled to stop the torture.

Now, in the airport below, Syrian intelligence officials waited. Shortly before, the Americans had informed them that Almalki was on his way to Damascus. They were ready to pounce on him as soon as he arrived.

•  •  •  

Crowds of well-dressed travelers packed every square foot of the terminal at the Damascus International Airport. The crush of people was so large that some of them had to hold their luggage on their heads.

As Almalki made his way off the plane and waded inside, he saw a well-dressed woman holding a sign with his name on it. He approached her and introduced himself.

“Okay,” the woman said. “I’m here to take you to your mother.”

She escorted Almalki through the run-down terminal, leading him to the VIP lounge. His mother was there, along with a cousin he had never met before. After hugs and introductions, Almalki took a sip of his mother’s lemonade while waiting for someone to bring him a glass of his own.

Immigration officials arrived at the lounge doorway. By policy, none of them were allowed into the room; instead they stood at the entry, and asked the staff to summon Almalki over so that they could speak with him.

Almalki thought nothing of the request and headed to the door. They had some questions for him, one of the officials said, adding that they needed to make sure he was allowed in the VIP room.

The questions were standard fare for Syria.
What’s your name? What’s your date
of birth? What’s your father’s full name? What’s your grandfather’s name?
Probably, Almalki figured, they just wanted to make sure he was who he claimed to be.

The questioning ended. “Please come with us,” one of the officials said.

Almalki told his mother he would be right back. Some immigration issue needed to be cleared up, that was all. His cousin said he would accompany him. The two men walked out of the lounge, with Almalki leaving his bag and laptop behind. No need to bring them along, he thought, since he would be back in a few minutes.