Tracing terror's roots
How the first World Trade Center plot sowed the seeds for 9/11
It's been 10 years now, but for New York police detective Tom Corrigan and his colleagues, the memories are still chilling. On a snowy afternoon, terror came home to America. The date was Feb. 26, 1993. A powerful fertilizer bomb exploded in the parking garage of the World Trade Center. Six people died. More than a thousand were injured. Rescue workers evacuated more than 50,000 workers from the city's financial district. That night, Corrigan found himself standing at the edge of the enormous blast crater. "I remember being cold," says Corrigan. "It was pitch black, all those sirens from the car alarms, streams of water pouring all over the place--my shoes were sopping wet. It was like The Poseidon Adventure."
Corrigan and his partners in the FBI-NYPD Joint Terrorism Task Force moved with stunning speed. Within nine days, task force members arrested a Palestinian man, Mohammed Salameh, and uncovered the identities of his accomplices, Mahmoud Abouhalima and Nidal Ayyad. Both were captured just weeks later. The mastermind of the attack, a slender young fanatic named Ramzi Yousef, fled to Pakistan, but the cops quickly unraveled the plot. A key reason: They had been pursuing these men for years. Time and again, however, they were a half step slow and a split second too late. In lengthy interviews earlier this month with U.S. News, several key task-force investigators reflected on what remains a bittersweet chapter in their professional lives. "We were so aggressive," says FBI supervisory special agent John Anticev. "Yet there is an overwhelming sense of disappointment. We just missed it."
If the story sounds familiar, it's no accident. The post-mortems on the 1993 World Trade Center bombing revealed many of the same missteps that preceded the September 11 attacks. It wasn't that the cops and the feds hadn't gathered lots of information; they had plenty. But putting it all together was another story, just as it was in the days before the twin towers were attacked. In both cases, convincing superiors of the urgency of their information was also no easy task. "We were saying, `These people are violent,' " Corrigan recalls, "and [supervisors] were yawning."
There was also a host of missed clues and lost opportunities: Boxes of evidence were misplaced, cops released murder suspects, a key FBI informant was fired, a crucial surveillance was shut down. The moment was lost. The consequences would prove enormous. Over the course of the next decade, the core group of Islamic radicals and associates the task force had deemed so dangerous would strike repeatedly. Significant players were arrested, but their cohorts were involved in virtually every major terrorist act against the United States, including the 9/11 attacks.
The story of the first attack on the World Trade Center begins five years before the bomb in the yellow Ryder rental truck blew up in the garage. In 1988, the FBI-NYPD task force got a tip that men associated with the al-Kifah Refugee Services Center in Brooklyn, N.Y., were participating in paramilitary training with militant black Muslims at shooting ranges, in hopes of going to Afghanistan to fight the Russian occupation force there. The men were responding, in part, to previous exhortations by al-Kifah founder Abdullah Azzam, whom authorities now identify as Osama bin Laden's former spiritual adviser. Surveillance photos developed by the task force confirmed the allegations. "We also found," the FBI's Anticev says, "that some of them were looking to purchase a lot of ammunition."
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