The
past as prologue
Ramzi
Yousef is in prison for plotting the 1993 World Trade Center bombing --
but we still don't know who he really is, who he might have been working
with and what he could tell us about Sept. 11.
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By Russ
Baker
Oct. 29,
2001 |
Sitting in his cell at
the Supermax prison in Florence, Colo., the world's most secure
institution, the lanky man with the large ears, prominent nose and dark,
intense eyes must have experienced mixed feelings when he learned of the
horrific events of Sept. 11. After all, Ramzi Ahmed Yousef was the man who
first conceived the idea of toppling the twin towers of the World Trade
Center -- and who almost succeeded, in an underground bomb attack in 1993.
William Gavin, who headed the FBI's office in New York during much of
the investigation of that earlier twin towers bombing, has a unique
perspective on the mind-set of the terrorists. He remembers, for example,
a helicopter trip with Ramzi Yousef after the man had been apprehended.
Passing the Trade Center, Gavin couldn't resist removing Yousef's
blindfold, momentarily, to drive home the point that his plot had failed.
The bomber responded coolly that his only mistake was not using enough
explosives.
At 12:18 p.m. on Feb. 26, 1993, in a parking garage below the giant
complex, Yousef personally detonated a 1,200-pound bomb that he himself
had designed and built. His objective, he later told investigators, was to
topple one 110-story building into the other. He hoped this might produce
a staggering 250,000 fatalities. In fact, the blast killed just six
people, including a pregnant woman, most of whom were eating lunch on the
other side of a thick wall from the bomb-laden vehicle. Still, more than
1,000 were wounded, hundreds seriously.
The blast, the largest incident ever handled until then by the New York
City fire department in its 128-year history, caused damage that spanned
seven levels, six of them below ground, created a crater 200 feet long and
sent nearly 2 million gallons of sewage water rushing into the car park.
It damaged a commuter train station nearby, halting the train service and
snarling traffic, knocked out television stations with transmitters on the
roof and nearly caused the collapse of the Vista Hotel directly above. Yet
once the structural foundations were restored, the buildings returned to
life just one month after the blast, and the city went on much as before.
Today, in the wake of the exponentially more devastating Sept. 11
assault, the earlier bombing might seem a mere historical footnote. No
direct links between the perpetrators of the two Trade Center attacks have
been established. Yet Yousef's act was the ultimate example of past as
prologue: It established what would not bring down the towers. And
it proved that a small group of determined individuals were within reach
of inflicting terrible punishment on the United States.
As investigators struggle to understand the conspiracy behind
September's catastrophe, its forbear remains in many ways a mystery.
Despite an intensive, globe-spanning investigation that would send six
defendants to prison, an astonishingly large number of loose ends remain,
including the question of whether Ramzi Yousef conceived the plot alone or
with the help of others. A bullheaded man given to bursts of braggadocio,
he remains silent about any sponsors. Not surprisingly, two of the names
that have surfaced in speculation are Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden.
Furthermore, according to Neil Herman, a former senior FBI supervisory
special agent in charge of the Joint Terrorist Task Force that
investigated the bombing, "Ramzi Yousef himself remains a very shadowy
figure. We were not able to establish [his] identity definitively." Nor
were authorities able to clarify where Yousef had spent most of his life,
the identities of his family members or how he had funded his extensive
travels throughout the world prior to his apprehension -- much of it in
first class seats.
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The man
convicted in the case used more than a dozen aliases. He had entered
the United States in 1992 on an Iraqi passport bearing the name of
Ramzi Yousef. He had no visa, and immediately asked for political
asylum, a formality that resulted in his being admitted on a
temporary basis. On New Year's Eve, when consular staff were
presumably otherwise occupied, he went to the Pakistani consulate,
and, with a photocopy of old passport records, secured a new one, in
the name of Abdul Basit. Basit turns out to have been born in 1968
in Kuwait of a Pakistani father and Palestinian mother.
For a variety of reasons, investigators settled on Basit as the
terrorist's true identity, although they were never absolutely sure.
As Basit, he had apparently traveled from Kuwait to Britain in the
late '80s for an education -- specifically, English language courses
at Oxford and a degree in electronic engineering at a modest
institute in South Wales. He seems to have educated himself in basic
bomb-making skills while in the U.K., and then to have traveled to
bin Laden-sponsored Afghan rebel camps. (One prominent critic of the
case -- an Iraq expert -- disputes this entire scenario, arguing
that the paperwork establishing Yousef as Basit appears to have been
appropriated from a different person altogether.)
Whoever he is, the man is certainly no typical Jihadist. During
his years on the run, Yousef's lifestyle bore little resemblance to
that of a religious fanatic. He frequented bars, strip joints and
karaoke clubs, flirted relentlessly with women, including married
women, and bedded plenty along his trail. Instead of religion,
Yousef's motivation appears to be purely political.
This much is certain: The man known as Ramzi Yousef came to the
United States for the express purpose of killing as many people as
possible. On his arrival on Sept. 1, 1992, he went directly to meet
Mahmud Abouhalima, an old friend who'd seen action in the Afghan war
against the Soviets (and who had been implicated but acquitted in
the assassination of Meir Kahane). Abouhalima was now working as a
chauffeur for Sheikh Omar Abdel-Rahman, a blind radical cleric in
Jersey City, N.J., directly across the Hudson River from New York.
Jersey City was home to a large, multinational Islamic community
that included many recent arrivals, including some radical
fundamentalists. Yousef assembled a small crew of conspirators who
in short order rented a storage facility, obtained the components
for a bomb and began mixing and testing the deadly chemical brew.
Yousef was no suicide bomber; he had prepared an elaborate exit
strategy, calling abroad to places he would visit on the run, and
obtaining the replacement Pakistani passport.
On Feb. 26, 1993, the conspirators assembled a convoy consisting
of a rented yellow freight van and two cars. They drove from Jersey
City to the underground garage of the World Trade Center, and parked
next to a wall containing crucial building supports for the north
tower. Inside the van, Yousef lit four 20-foot-long fuses, each
timed to burn down in 12 minutes. Then he got into one of the
accompanying cars and drove toward an exit. He had a moment of panic
when he found his path blocked by another van, but the other driver
soon returned, and Yousef was on his way well before the bomb (which
he'd topped off with bottled hydrogen for maximum force) went off.
The ferocious explosion came perilously close to puncturing the
foundation walls that kept sea water from flooding into the
basements, an act that might well have rendered the structures
permanently uninhabitable.
In the aftermath, FBI officials working on the case (code-named
TRADEBOM) began sifting theories of authorship, ranging from
Colombian drug cartels to Serbian terrorists. Almost immediately,
though, through a combination of skill and luck, investigators
located a piece of the van's chassis in the vast wreckage. A vehicle
serial number quickly led them to a rental office in New Jersey. The
conspirators, knowing that failure to return a rental van would draw
attention, had reported the vehicle stolen the day before. When one
of Yousef's associates, Mohammad A. Salameh, a Jordanian of
Palestinian parentage, went to the rental office to claim his $400
deposit, a platoon of agents were ready to grab him.
Salameh, who had helped assemble and build the bomb, was carrying
identification that led investigators quickly to the apartment he'd
shared with Yousef, and to a bank account. Relying in large part on
records of telephone calls made from the apartment, they rapidly
built a database of suspects. Another investigative front opened
when the suspicious managers of the storage facility unlocked the
rental unit, and found the makings of a bomb factory. Two other
conspirators wee quickly rounded up. Mahmud Abouhalima, the huge,
reddish-haired veteran of the Afghan wars whom Yousef had met in
training camps on the Pakistani frontier, was captured in his native
Egypt and extradited.
Yousef had disappeared, but within seven months of the bombing,
the four co-conspirators went on trial. Prosecutors introduced a
mind-numbing array of circumstantial evidence (the trial transcript
was almost 10,000 pages). At their sentencing in May 1994, the judge
gave 240-year sentences to the lot and dispatched them to a
high-security penitentiary in Pennsylvania.
It was during this period that the FBI learned the danger of too
quickly dismissing informants with crazy-sounding stories. For some
time before the Trade Center bombing, an ex-Egyptian army officer
named Emad Salem, who worked for the FBI, had been worried about
loose talk he was hearing in a makeshift mosque upstairs from a toy
store in Jersey City. The mosque was run by the blind cleric named
Sheik Omar Abdel-Rahman, who had fled Egypt where he faced charges
of plotting to overthrow that country's president. Having entered
the United States despite being on a terrorist watch list, he
routinely inflamed his immigrant flock with incitements to "kill the
enemies of God." Salem reported to the FBI conversations he had
heard about bombings and assassinations. But the Bureau, thinking
that he was exaggerating to justify his weekly $500 salary, and
suspicious that he was working for Egyptian intelligence, fired him.
After the bombing in the underground garage, though,
investigators had a chance to examine the computer of one suspect,
Nidal Ayyad, who along with several other co-conspirators frequented
the same mosque. On the computer was a letter written on behalf of
an unknown terrorist group, warning that it had 150 suicide bombers
standing by to "execute our missions against military and civilian
targets in and out of the United States." Horrified bureau officials
quickly reinstated Salem, who went on to set up a sting operation
that resulted in the convictions of the Sheikh and 10 of his
followers for preparing another vast terror operation, one that
included bombing major tunnels and bridges and the United Nations
building.
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Ramzi
Yousef missed all of that. Right after the bombing, he had
briefly paused to admire his largely unsuccessful handiwork
from the opposite bank of the Hudson River, then headed to JFK
airport for a first class seat to Karachi, Pakistan. Despite
his precautions, Yousef's role as the mastermind of the
operation emerged fairly quickly, aided by such clues as a
pair of fingerprints on a chemical bottle in the storage unit
and immigration documents left in the apartment.
While investigators worldwide searched for him, he began
planning a new and spectacular reign of global terror. In 1994
he began spending a considerable amount of time in the
Philippines, and some of his more ambitious schemes included
assassinating President Clinton and Pope John Paul II during
visits there. One plot that came perilously close to
realization called for the simultaneous in-flight bombings of
11 U.S. jetliners en route home from Asia. The plot fell apart
just two weeks short of fruition when Yousef, working with a
friend and co-conspirator named Abdul Hakim Murad,
inadvertently generated a fire while cooking up a batch of
chemicals in a Manila apartment in January 1995. Murad was
apprehended by the police when he went back to the apartment
at Yousef's request to collect his laptop; Yousef, as he would
do on numerous other occasions, left his friend in the lurch
and fled the country. From Yousef's laptop, investigators
discovered the extent of the plot, which -- had it worked --
might have resulted in 4,000 deaths and the paralysis of the
airline industry. As it was, Yousef had already pulled off a
couple of practice tests, one of which killed a Japanese man
onboard a Philippine Airlines jet. (Murad, a commercial pilot
who was convicted of his role in the bombing plot, had -- in a
terrifying precursor of the events of this Sept. 11 -- also
been planning to either crash a plane full of chemical weapons
into the CIA headquarters or to fly overhead and douse the
entire area with poison gas.)
While Yousef remained at large, U.S. investigators
considered every trick in the book to apprehend him, including
a so-called honeypot trap, taking advantage of his weakness
for beautiful women. Meanwhile, the reward for information
leading to his arrest was increased to $2 million; newspapers
in Pakistan, the Philippines and other hot spots were
blanketed with ads, and matchboxes were even printed up and
dropped over parts of Pakistan and the Afghan border region.
When Yousef was finally caught, on Feb. 7, 1995, nearly two
years after the blast, it came as a sort of anticlimax. He was
betrayed by an associate, a South African Muslim living in
Pakistan whom Yousef had worked hard to recruit. Pakistani
soldiers and police and U.S. agents surrounded the Islamabad
safe house where he had been staying, and Yousef, who had been
lying on his bed, simply got up and answered a sharp knock at
his door. He'd been apprehended on the brink of a new
adventure: In his room was a suitcase containing toy cars
packed with plastic explosives, and a letter threatening to
kill the Philippine president and poison the water supply if
his friend Murad was not released. The informant, who
collected the $2 million reward, now lives in the United
States with his wife and child, outside the confines of the
government's Witness Protection Program but nevertheless armed
with a new identity.
On the plane back to the U.S., Yousef inexplicably talked
to investigators about his role in the Trade Center bombing.
He even drew a diagram showing the van's positioning at the
time of the explosion -- before reconsidering his confession
and eating a piece of the drawing. Back in New York, under
incredibly tight security, he got a double dose of American
justice. In October 1996, he was found guilty of charges
related to the airplane plot, which prosecutors had dubbed "48
hours of terror in the sky." In November of the following
year, he was convicted for his role in the Trade Center
bombing.
He insisted on representing himself at the first trial; he
cut a sharp figure in a tailored, double-breasted suit,
frequently turned on the charm and generally represented
himself surprisingly well, even getting hostile witnesses to
contradict themselves. During the second trial, over the Trade
Center bombing, he let his lawyer do everything, and
steadfastly maintained his innocence. First, he denied his
earlier confessions, then, after being sentenced to 240 years
in prison, declared: "I am a terrorist and am proud of it." He
said that his goal was to change American policy in the Middle
East; he accused the United States of killing innocent people,
of mistreating Native Americans and other minorities and of
itself inventing terrorism.
While Yousef lives out his days in Florence, Colo., in
circumstances close to solitary confinement, many questions
remain. William Gavin, who ran the New York FBI office during
most of the TRADEBOM investigation, instinctively feels some
bin Laden presence, spiritual or more direct, in both
incidents, 1993 and 2001. Gavin notes that even though the
1993 bombing itself cost only about $20,000, that still seems
like a lot for Ramzi himself to have contributed, and his
extensive years on the run would have been expensive, too.
Bin Laden has said that he didn't have the pleasure of
Yousef's acquaintance until after the Trade Center bomb went
off. Even assuming that he is telling the truth on that front,
it seems clear that Yousef received pre-Trade Center training
and taught courses in a bin Laden camp, and that the Saudi
shared common cause with the bomber on subsequent projects,
including having Yousef train Philippine separatists and
trying to draw him into the plot to kill Clinton. It's known
that the bin Laden organization gave him shelter after he fled
the U.S.; Yousef stayed at bin Laden's House of Martyrs hostel
in the Pakistani frontier town of Peshawar and was living in a
bin Laden safehouse in Islamabad when he was finally
apprehended. In addition, one of Yousef's convicted
co-defendants in the Manila airline plot, Wali Khan Amin Shah,
had at one point been a top aide to bin Laden.
Laurie Mylroie, an academic expert on Iraq, has been
beating her drum for a theory putting Saddam Hussein squarely
behind the 1993 bombing. In her book "Study of Revenge: Saddam
Hussein's Unfinished War With America," she lays out an
elaborate scenario suggesting that Ramzi Yousef is not really
Abdul Basit at all, but an Iraqi agent posing as Basit, who
she believes is dead. Mylroie presents what she claims are
discrepancies surrounding the only two pieces of evidence used
to establish the man's identity: fingerprints and signature.
Investigators maintain that Mylroie is misconstruing evidence,
but she has her backers, including Adm. James Woolsey, who was
the director of the CIA at the time of the bombing. Woolsey
says that release of key documents from Basit's stay in
England could clear up the identity issue and help resolve the
matter. (British authorities have, to date, made no effort to
clarify publicly exactly what information is in their files
regarding Yousef's identity.)
Meanwhile, several former investigators who were intimately
involved in the case point out that, unfortunately, no special
skills or expertise were required in the 1993 bombing. Says
one, "The sad thing is, nothing he did is that intricate. The
explosives were relatively simply made, relatively
inexpensive. It was a big bomb, but it didn't take tons of
expertise. Most of it was common sense stuff. If you'd read
Tom Clancy books you probably could do the same."
On May 26, 1995, a memorial fountain was dedicated to the
six victims of the 1993 blast. At that ceremony, directly
above the spot where the rental van exploded, Mayor Rudolph
Giuliani uttered these words: "The memorial that we're
dedicating today is a small reminder of the city's grief, and
a tangible homage to those whose lives were cruelly snatched
from them by a handful of cowards driven by the poison of
hatred."
Like the lost traces of a previous civilization, that
memorial fountain now lies beneath the rubble of last month's
apocalypse. The suicidal perpetrators of Sept. 11, with a
thousand times as many dead on their hands, cannot reveal what
they know. But Ramzi Yousef sits in a jail cell, with all the
time in the world to think about whether he has anything he
wishes to say.
salon.com
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About the writer
Russ Baker is an investigative reporter whose work has
appeared in the Village Voice, The Nation, and New York
magazine. |
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