A Pretext for War (18 page)
While Khalid Shaikh was entertaining the ladies in his white tuxedo at the Shangri-La Hotel in Makati, and advising Abu Sayyaf on guerrilla tactics, Yousef was building his bomb factory in Room 603 of the Dona Josefa Apartments. A neat but plain building with an open lobby, it catered mostly to short-term rentals by Middle Eastern tourists. From his top-floor window, Yousef had a view of the busy General Quirino Avenue that leads down to the shimmering waves of the South China Sea, and Manila Bay with its bobbing cargo ships waiting to unload.
A few blocks away was a nightspot, the Unplugged Acoustics bar, which had an eye-catching feature—an airplane mounted on the roof in such a way that it was made to look as if it had crashed. More important, the apartment was only a block away from the papal nunciature, which was to play host to Pope John Paul II during his visit, and plans were for the pontiff’s motorcade to travel down General Quirino Avenue, right under their window.
In early January 1995, only a few weeks before the Pope was to arrive, Yousef’s one-bedroom flat resembled a chemical lab in a B-grade Frankenstein flick. Sitting on unpacked crates of hot plates were odd-shaped vessels, open and sealed, bearing stamps from Pakistani and German chemical companies. Containing unpronounceable liquids—sodium trichlorate, nitrobenzoyl, methanamine—they gave off a variety of pungent odors and fumes. Also nearby were bundles of cotton and loops of red, yellow, green, and blue electrical wire. Several remote-control brass pipe bombs lay around like discarded toys.
Tucked into the corner of a bedside mirror, above a new crucifix, rosary, and a Bible, was a picture of the pope. Below was a box of Rough Rider lubricated condoms. There were beakers and thermometers, funnels and circuit breakers. Maps of Manila were scattered about, some with lines in red ink tracing the papal motorcade’s route. A Pakistani passport, No. C665334, issued in Kuwait, sat on a table near a piece of paper with a phone message from a tailor: The priest’s cassock that had been ordered was ready for a final fitting. In the kitchen were recipes from Hell: “Put 0.5 g of sodium hydroxide with 30 ml of warm water. Add to them 3 g of picric acid . . . very slowly add sulfuric acid to the liquid until its color is changed to orange, then to brown.”
The passport belonged to Abdul Hakim Murad, a boyhood friend of Yousef’s from Kuwait. Yousef had taught Murad the art of bomb-making in Lahore, Pakistan, and now his understudy was his terrorist helper in Manila. Only a small portion of the bomb-making ingredients, however, was intended for the pope. Just enough to outfit a suicide bomber dressed up as a priest, who would make his way to the vicinity of the pontiff and detonate the charge. But the papal assassination was intended as little more than an opening act, and diversionary tactic, for the main show, which was the reason for most of the explosives.
While Yousef was studying electrical engineering in Wales, Murad was in the United States attending flying schools in Texas, upstate New York, and North Carolina. On June 8, 1992, he received his commercial pilot’s license from North Carolina’s Coastal Aviation Inc. after completing 275 hours of flight time. Now he, Yousef, and Khalid Shaikh were planning a complex, highly coordinated series of bombings on nearly a dozen American airliners flying across the Pacific to U.S. airports. Its code name was Bojinka, “loud bang” in Serbo-Croatian. It was to take place about a week after the planned assassination of the pope during his visit to Manila from January 12 to 16, 1995.
On December 11, 1994, Yousef went to Ninoy Aquino International Airport near Manila to try out his newly developed air bomb. That evening, he boarded Philippine Airlines Flight 434 bound for Tokyo, with a stopover at the Philippine resort town of Cebu. A Boeing 747-200 jumbo jet, the plane carried 273 passengers and a crew of 20. To get past security, he had removed the liquid from a small bottle of contact lens solution and replaced it with cotton balls soaked in extremely explosive nitroglycerine. He had also modified the Casio digital watch he was wearing to work as a timing device. He did this by attaching electronic components to the alarm in the small space underneath the watch’s calculator. All that was visible was a tiny plug. Tiny nine-volt batteries he had taken out of children’s toys were hidden in the heels of his shoes.
After takeoff, Yousef went to the rest room and snapped a small fusing system, made of lightbulb filaments and the two nine-volt batteries, into the plug on the back of his watch. Then he wrapped the watch around the device and set the timer for four hours. Returning to his seat, 26K—a window seat off the right wing near the center fuel tank—he hid the bomb in the life jacket pouch underneath his seat cushion. When the plane landed at Mactan-Cebu International Airport, Yousef was one of the forty-six passengers who deplaned.
A short while later, when the plane took off for Tokyo, Yousef was not aboard. Instead, seat 26K was now occupied by a Japanese industrial sewing machine maker, Haruki Ikegami, twenty-four, who was returning home from a business meeting in Cebu. At 11:43
P.M.
, about two hours into the flight, the alarm on the watch triggered the lightbulb filaments, which ignited the nitroglycerine-soaked cotton. The resulting blast nearly tore Haruki Ikegami in two, killing him instantly. At the time, the plane was over Minami Daito Island, 960 miles southwest of Tokyo. Ten others were wounded, and a hole ripped in the floorboard severed the aileron control cables that run the length of the aircraft and control the wing flaps. Despite severely crippled steering systems, the pilot was able to turn the plane around and land safely in Okinawa.
Although Flight 434 was not blown out of the sky, the bomb worked perfectly and encouraged Yousef and Murad, who began filling fourteen more contact lens solution bottles with nitroglycerine. The same technique would be used on the eleven American aircraft targeted over a two-day period, January 21–22. The bombers would come from the twenty or so people who made up Yousef’s highly compartmentalized Manila cell.
But on January 7, 1995, as Yousef and Murad were cooking their deadly brew, a fire broke out in their apartment and Murad was captured and subjected to a lengthy, and torturous, interrogation. In addition to details on Bojinka, the techniques Murad described included an astonishing preview of what would take place in September 2001, just six years later.
According to a Filipino police report dating from 1995, “Murad’s idea is that he will board any American commercial aircraft pretending to be an ordinary passenger, then he will hijack said aircraft, control its cockpit and dive it at the CIA headquarters. There will be no bomb or any explosive that he will use in its execution. It is a suicidal mission that he is very much willing to execute.” Filipino authorities later told the Associated Press that they had shared the information immediately with FBI agents in Manila in 1995. “We shared that with the FBI,” said Robert Delfin, Chief of Intelligence command for the Philippine National Police. “They may have mislooked [
sic
] and didn’t appreciate the info coming from the Philippine police.”
As with the World Trade Center bombing, Murad admitted that the airborne terrorism directed at America was a result of its support for Israel. “What do you mean by Liberation Army?” asked the interrogator. It was the same name Yousef had given the cell that had bombed the World Trade Center in New York one year earlier. Said Murad, “We shall liberate all the Muslims from the United States, from Israel.” When asked whether he would die for his cause, Murad unhesitatingly said he would. “Yes,” he said, “yes.” He later added, “All my thinking was . . . that I should fight the Americans. I should do something to show them that we are . . . we could stay in their face.”
Investigators in the Philippines also recovered Yousef’s laptop computer and were able to read many of his messages. Among them was one outlining the purpose of the terrorism:
If the U.S. government keeps supporting Israel . . . then we will continue to carry out operations inside and outside the United States. . . . All people who support the U.S. government are our targets in our future plans, and that is because all those people are responsible for their government’s actions and they support the U.S. foreign policy and are satisfied with it.
Thus, by early 1995, terrorists had attempted to bring down the World Trade Center, were planning to blow up airliners, and were exploring the possibility of turning passenger planes into weapons of mass destruction and crashing them into American buildings. It was clear that the United States had become a target and would be at great risk in the future. It was equally clear that the reason for the attacks was the country’s support for Israel and its occupation and treatment of the Palestinians.
In the late 1970s, Osama bin Laden had been a student and disciple of Abdullah Azzam, a Palestinian who, along with his family, had been forced out of his country by Israel in 1967, and who went on to become a professor at King Abdul Aziz University in Jedda, Saudi Arabia. Azzam not only taught Islamic law but also preached Islamic jihad against Israel for its actions against the Palestinians, a topic that resonated with bin Laden. When Azzam went to Peshawar, Pakistan, to help in the Afghan war against the Russians, bin Laden followed. “When the invasion of Afghanistan started,” said bin Laden, “I was enraged and went there at once—I arrived within days, before the end of 1979.’’
Returning to Jedda, Saudi Arabia, to complete his studies, bin Laden spent a great deal of time raising money and recruiting volunteers for Azzam’s Office of Services, which was on a worldwide mujahideen recruitment drive. In 1982, a year after his graduation, he decided to commit himself full-time to the struggle and arranged to ship into Afghanistan scores of construction vehicles from Saudi Arabia. “We transported heavy equipment from [Saudi Arabia], estimated at hundreds of tons altogether, that included bulldozers, loaders, dump trucks, and equipment for digging trenches. When we saw the brutality of the Russians bombing mujahideen positions . . . we dug a good number of huge tunnels and built in them some storage places, and in some others we built a hospital. We also dug some roads.” On rare occasions bin Laden would visit the front lines, but his prime contribution was organizing Saudi volunteers.
In 1984, working with Azzam, he established a sort of indoctrination center to help prepare mujahideen on their way to battle and to direct them to the various units at the front. To house the facility, which they called Beit-al-Ansar, “the House of the Faithful,” they rented a house outside Peshawar in University Town. Located amid sweet-smelling bougainvillea on a quiet backstreet known as Syed Jalaluddin Afghani Road, it became a crossroads for Arabs throughout the region looking for adventure and jihad. Once checked in, they would join bin Laden in simple meals and sleep on thin wooden pallets stretched across the floor.
By 1986, bin Laden was itching to get more heavily involved in the actual fighting, and he began building his own guerrilla-training facilities inside Afghanistan, eventually establishing six camps. The graduates—Arab mujahideen, some with Syrian and Egyptian military experience—then became part of bin Laden’s private military unit and launched their own battles against the Russians. As Arabs around the Middle East heard of his Beit-al-Ansar house and camps, more began joining him in the fight. In an effort to keep track of the mujahideen as they transited from Beit-al-Ansar to camp, to the front, then back to Beit-al-Ansar, bin Laden set up a tracking system he called “The Base”—“Al Qaeda” in Arabic—a term that later came to connote his terrorist enterprise.
In 1989, as the Afghan war was winding down, Azzam was killed in Peshawar by a car bomb and bin Laden moved back to Saudi Arabia. Soon Saddam Hussein began making his move against Kuwait and bin Laden asked Saudi King Fahad to support him in his effort to resurrect his mujahideen army to fight Iraq’s forces. When he was turned down and the Americans were allowed to set up bases in Saudi Arabia instead, bin Laden was outraged. Like his mentor Azzam, he had a burning desire to see not only Palestine, but all Muslim lands, freed of Western occupation. As his relations with the royal family quickly deteriorated, his house was searched and he was forbidden to leave the country. But he eventually managed to escape to Pakistan and then Afghanistan, where he again joined up with many of his former mujahideen.
With the war over, the various Afghan parties began to squabble and factionalism broke out, leaving bin Laden frustrated. In late 1991, only months after arriving, he decided to leave. Now running out of places to go, he rented a private jet, loaded up a number of his close associates, and flew to Sudan, where he was welcomed as a special guest and spent most of his time assisting the government in road construction. The pressure from the Saudi government continued, however; his assets were frozen, and in 1994 they withdrew his citizenship, an act made all the more bitter because they widely publicized the action. Pressure also came from the American government to expel bin Laden, and in the spring of 1996 he again began making preparations to return to Afghanistan.
About the same time, beginning on April 11, 1996, a series of shock waves rumbled through the Muslim world as a result of Israel’s massive bombardment of Beirut and southern Lebanon, which Israel had by then been occupying for fourteen years. Known as “Operation Grapes of Wrath,” it was the first time Israel had attacked Beirut since Ariel Sharon’s ill-fated 1982 invasion of Lebanon. According to Israeli writer Israel Shahak, the real purpose of the attack was to capture as much Lebanese territory as possible.
“It is quite obvious,” wrote Shahak, “that the first and most important Israeli aim to be established in the ‘Grapes of Wrath’ is to establish its sovereignty over Lebanon—to be exercised in a comparable manner to its control over the Gaza Strip.”