A Pretext for War (31 page)
Another person who spent a great deal of time in the converted Victorian row house was Zacarias Moussaoui, a French student who would later be linked to the September 11 attacks. Although it is not known whether the two were acquainted at the time—Moussaoui frequented the mosque from 1996 to 1997—both also were familiar faces at the Finsbury Park Mosque in North London. The mosque was known as a haven for fundamentalists, and its leading cleric was Abu Hamza, who had lost an eye and both hands—replaced by metal hooks—during anti-Soviet fighting in Afghanistan.
A central focus of the Brixton Mosque is the American-backed Israeli oppression of the Palestinians, and it was a cause that Reid became passionate about. His view was summed up by the mosque’s imam, Abdul Haqq Baker: “The U.S. and Israel are the enemy, and good Muslims must take up the battle against the enemy.” In 1999, Reid went to Pakistan supposedly for educational reasons, but, U.S. officials believe, in reality it was to attend one of Osama bin Laden’s guerrilla-training schools across the border in Afghanistan.
In early July 2001, shortly after bin Laden’s warning, Reid flew from Karachi, Pakistan, to Amsterdam, and on July 6 he applied for a new passport at the British consulate there. The document quickly issued to him was without any of the suspicious entry and exit stamps contained in his old passport.
On July 12, Reid went to Amsterdam’s airport and boarded an Israeli El Al flight for Tel Aviv. He said that because security did not check the insides of his shoes, he thought a suicide mission might be successful if a shoe bomb was used. Once he arrived in Tel Aviv, he traveled to a number of major cities, including Jerusalem, Haifa, and Bethlehem, looking for potential bombing sites. According to FBI reports, “His trip to Jerusalem further emboldened him to attempt an act against the West when he witnessed the many checkpoints and travel restrictions on Muslims.” Reid also became incensed during a visit to the Aqsa Mosque, the location of the Dome of the Rock. “It angered him to see ‘Jews with guns’ inside the mosque,” said an FBI report.
Ten days after he arrived, he crossed the land border by bus into Egypt, spent a week in Cairo, and then flew to Istanbul, Turkey, before returning to Karachi on August 7. From there he may have slipped into Afghanistan.
Following the trip, according to federal investigators, Reid “reported to an associate in Afghanistan that the reception area of the Tel Aviv train station would be a particularly good bombing target, especially on a Saturday night, because it could be entered without being searched and contained at least a hundred people at the arrival time of any given train.” This scouting trip was made at the same time that members of the 9/11 terrorist cells in the United States were also conducting test flights.
An Al Qaeda computer later found in Afghanistan contained an identical itinerary, complete with matching dates, as part of an Al Qaeda reconnaissance mission. But it was for a person by the name of Abdul Ra’uff, which was Reid’s nom de guerre from his days at the camp in Afghanistan. John Walker Lindh used the pseudonym Abdul Hamid at the camp.
Once back in Pakistan, or possibly Afghanistan, Al Qaeda associates began working on the sophisticated shoe bomb. First the soles of a pair of rugged ankle-high hiking shoes were sliced off with a knife. They were made with waffle-patterned cushioning cells to soften a person’s walk and improve traction. High explosives were then packed into the cells on the inside of the soles.
Detonating cord, containing a small quantity of high explosive and designed to expand the explosion throughout the packed cells to ensure complete detonation, was then laced through the shoes and an improvised detonator was filled with a quantity of a noncommercial explosive. Next a safety fuse containing black powder was connected to the detonator and made accessible through a small hole in the inner soles of the shoes. Finally, the soles were glued and tightly resewn back onto the shoes. Because the plastic explosives needed to be detonated to explode, Reid would be able to walk in the bomb-laden shoes without a problem.
Later, the decision was made to delay the shoe-bomb attack, possibly as part of a second wave of bombings, and the target was changed from Israel to the United States. “America is the problem,” Reid would later say, explaining the change. “Without America, there would be no Israel.” His motivation to become a suicide bomber for Al Qaeda, he would later admit, was primarily America’s support for Israel and its treatment of Muslims throughout the Middle East. When asked why he turned to violence, he said, “People tried peaceful methods for seventy years.” As Al Qaeda plotted another airline bombing during the summer of 2001, Alec Station had no clue.
The Middle East Broadcasting Company report of bin Laden’s warning and the accompanying video hit Tenet and Alec Station like a thunderclap. They knew that shortly before the embassy bombings he had allowed in a reporter from ABC News and offered a similar warning. Despite all the time and money they had spent on FD/Trodpint and the other covert operations, they never picked up a clue. And without ever having penetrated bin Laden’s organization, they had nowhere to go.
Had they simply followed the path taken by Walker Lindh or the other Americans at that moment in bin Laden’s training camp, they would have known that his plan involved multiple suicide operations within the United States and Israel. But Tenet would later claim that such a penetration was too hard for the CIA.
Within hours of the news report, and for much of the summer, CIA and NSA warning alerts began flashing as the “chatter”—phone calls and e-mails throughout the Middle East and elsewhere—filled with talk of jihad and attacks. “Unbelievable news coming in weeks,” said one intercept. “Big event—there will be a very, very, very, very big uproar,” said another. “There will be attacks in the near future,” said a third.
Much of the chatter was no doubt generated by comments made by energized and excited people long anti-American. Others may have been part of a deliberate disinformation program to throw the U.S. intelligence community off guard. With so many alerts, no one would be able to tell which was real and which was not.
At the State Department, a “Worldwide Caution” was issued regarding the risk of terrorist attack and specifically mentioned groups linked with bin Laden and Al Qaeda; U.S. military forces throughout the Persian Gulf were placed on a heightened state of alert; a Marine Corps contingent in Jordan cut short its training session and returned to its ships; the U.S. Fifth Fleet sent its ships out to sea from ports in Bahrain.
It was clear that Alec Station and the rest of the intelligence community assumed that the attack was going to take place overseas. Nevertheless, on July 5, as the hostile chatter grew following bin Laden’s warning, White House counterterrorism coordinator Richard Clarke met in the Situation Room with top domestic law-enforcement officials from the FBI, Federal Aviation Administration, the Customs Service, the Immigration and Naturalization Service, and other agencies. But without any intelligence as to when and where an attack might take place, all that was done was the issuance of several new security advisories, including an FAA warning concerning the risk of aircraft hijackings conducted to free terrorists locked in American prisons.
Five days later, on July 10, the CIA’s Counterterrorism Center prepared a briefing paper and issued it to senior Bush administration officials. It apparently made no mention of Bakr Atyani’s Middle East Broadcasting Company report and instead, using Atyani’s exact language, tried to make it sound as though the information came from its own intelligence activities. “Based on a review of all-source reporting over the last five months,” it said, “we believe that [bin Laden] will launch a significant terrorist attack against U.S. and/or Israeli interests in the coming weeks.” It was old open-source news made to sound like a brilliant piece of intelligence work.
As the number of warnings and alerts continued to grow throughout the summer, Counterterrorism Center boss Cofer Black sounded the terrorism alarm. Addressing a counterterrorism conference, he seemed resigned to the fact that there was nothing anyone could do about it. By then he began realizing that this time it might actually be the big one—an attack within the United States. But he had no intelligence. None. “We are going to be struck soon,” he said. “Many Americans are going to die, and it could be in the U.S.” Yet no precautions were ever taken within the United States, only overseas.
On August 6, the growing concern over a possible Al Qaeda attack on U.S. soil reached the highest level. On that date, President George W. Bush read in his President’s Daily Brief (PDB) a two-page CIA report entitled: “Bin Laden Determined to Strike in US.” It was clear that time was getting short. The PDB warned that the FBI had intelligence indicating that terrorists might be preparing for an airline hijacking in the United States and might be targeting a building in lower Manhattan.
The report also warned that a group of bin Laden supporters was in the United States planning attacks with explosives and that bin Laden was determined to “retaliate in Washington” for the United States’ 1998 missile attack on his facilities in Afghanistan. According to the PDB:
Clandestine, foreign government, and media reports indicate Bin Laden since 1997 has wanted to conduct terrorist attacks in the US. Bin Laden implied in US television interviews in 1997 and 1998 that his followers would follow the example of World Trade Center bomber Ramzi Yousef and “bring the fighting to America.”
After US missile strikes on his base in Afghanistan in 1998, Bin Laden told followers he wanted to retaliate in Washington, according to a [foreign intelligence] service.
An Egyptian Islamic Jihad (EIJ) operative told an [agent of a foreign intelligence] service at the same time that Bin Laden was planning to exploit the operative’s access to the US to mount a terrorist strike.
The millennium plotting in Canada in 1999 may have been part of Bin Laden’s first serious attempt to implement a terrorist strike in the US. Convicted plotter Ahmed Ressam has told the FBI that he conceived the idea to attack Los Angeles International Airport himself, but that Bin Laden lieutenant Abu Zubaydah encouraged him and helped facilitate the operation. Ressam also said that in 1998 Abu Zubaydah was planning his own US attack.
Ressam says Bin Laden was aware of the Los Angeles operation.
Although Bin Laden has not succeeded, his attacks against the US Embassies in Kenya and Tanzania in 1998 demonstrate that he prepares operations years in advance and is not deterred by setbacks. Bin Laden associates surveilled our Embassies in Nairobi and Dar es Salaam as early as 1993, and some members of the Nairobi cell planning the bombings were arrested and deported in 1997.
Al-Qa’ida members—including some who are US citizens—have resided in or traveled to the US for years, and the group apparently maintains a support structure that could aid attacks. Two al-Qa’ida members found guilty in the conspiracy to bomb our Embassies in East Africa were US citizens, and a senior EIJ member lived in California in the mid-1990s.
A clandestine source said in 1998 that a Bin Laden cell in New York was recruiting Muslim-American youth for attacks.
We have not been able to corroborate some of the more sensational threat reporting, such as that from a . . . [redacted portion] . . . service in 1998 saying that Bin Laden wanted to hijack a US aircraft to gain the release of “Blind Shaykh” ‘Umar ‘Abd al-Rahman and other US-held extremists.
Nevertheless, FBI information since that time indicates patterns of suspicious activity in this country consistent with preparations for hijackings or other types of attacks, including recent surveillance of federal buildings in New York.
The FBI is conducting approximately 70 full field investigations throughout the US that it considers Bin Laden-related. CIA and the FBI are investigating a call to our Embassy in the UAE in May saying that a group of Bin Laden supporters was in the US planning attacks with explosives.
But Bush had just begun a month-long vacation at his ranch in Crawford, Texas, and the report seemed to have made little impression on him. He pressed no alarm bells and the most important topic on his agenda seemed to be his golf game. The next day, he was playing golf at the Ridgewood Country Club in Waco, Texas, when he ran into a group of reporters. “No mulligans, except on the first tee,” he said as the reporters laughed. “That’s just to loosen up. You see, most people get to hit practice balls, but as you know, I’m walking out here, I’m fixing to go hit. Tight back, older guy—I hit the speed limit on July 6th.”
In late summer, 2001, an FBI agent assigned to Alec Station decided to take a second look at the file of cables and images generated in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, during the month of January 2000. To his astonishment, he discovered photographs of two suspected Al Qaeda men, Almihdhar and Alhazmi, and the fact that they had been issued multi-entry visas and that they had probably already entered.
Thus on August 23, 2001, one year and eight months after NSA snatched the first piece of the puzzle from the safe house in Yemen, the names of Khalid Almihdhar and Nawaf Alhazmi were finally submitted to the State Department. But there seemed little alarm at the highest levels of government.
That same day, Bush took a trip to Crawford Elementary School, where the children peppered him with questions. During the session, he spoke of his afternoon schedule. He had a meeting with his national security advisor, Condoleezza Rice, followed by a call to the president of Argentina, lunch with the first lady, a visit with the family pets, a call to his personnel office, and a tree lesson. “We’ve got a horticulturist coming out from Texas A&M to help us identify the hardwood trees on our beautiful place,” he said.