Tracing terror's roots
How the first World Trade Center plot sowed the seeds for 9/11
Yousef was different from the others. "He was clean cut; he drank; he used to party. He never took breaks to pray," says the FBI's Stern. In some ways, he was the prototype of the 9/11 bombers--he was westernized, used aliases and phone cards, and was educated abroad. "The others were trying to make a statement," says Corrigan. "He wanted to kill people."
On February 26, a month after Abdel-Rahman issued a global fatwa against the United States, the World Trade Center bomb exploded. "Nowhere in our wildest dreams," says Anticev, "from those amateurish pipe bombs to the magnitude of what Yousef was able to create, did we ever imagine they could do this." Adds Napoli, ruefully: "We didn't know how to complete the puzzle."
The task force linked the blast to Salameh, Ayyad, and Abouhalima after tracing the Ryder truck to Salameh. He had listed el-Gabrowny's Brooklyn address, which was Abouhalima's mail drop. Napoli paged Anticev and told him the news. "I almost started crying," says Anticev, "when I heard the address. I knew immediately it was Abouhalima." When Salameh returned to the rental office to claim his deposit, the feds arrested him.
Back in business. Soon after the bombing, Anticev got a phone call from Emad Salem, the former informant. "He gloated," says Anticev, "Oh, how he gloated. He tried to say, `You should have listened to me.' I had to say, `You were right.' " But Salem was also contrite about refusing to wear a wire. He offered to help again, this time, however, for more money. The FBI anted up. Two months later, Salem unearthed a plot hatched by Abdel-Rahman's translator and bodyguard, Siddig Siddig-Ali, to bomb New York tunnels, bridges, the United Nations, and the FBI's New York office. Abdel-Rahman, Siddig-Ali, Nosair, el-Gabrowny, and others were convicted of seditious conspiracy and other charges; Nosair was also convicted federally in the Kahane killing. Salem received more than $1 million and entered the federal witness protection program.
But Yousef wasn't done. After fleeing to Pakistan, he turned up in the Philippines a year later. A lucky break (a suspicious apartment fire) allowed police and the FBI to foil his plans to blow up at least 12 commercial jetliners over the Pacific. Investigators also uncovered plans by Yousef to assassinate President Clinton and the pope.
Here the ties to bin Laden become more intriguing. Intelligence reports, though admittedly vague, indicated that Yousef had once talked casually of wanting to fly a small plane into CIA headquarters. Yousef's uncle, Khalid Shaikh Mohammad, was in Manila at the same time as Yousef, according to Miller; Mohammad later became one of bin Laden's top financial advisers and helped plan the 9/11 attacks. Yousef would not enjoy the same freedom to operate as his uncle. In February 1995, a man Yousef was trying to recruit betrayed him to Pakistani authorities. He was arrested in an unpretentious guesthouse on the outskirts of Islamabad and brought back to New York.
The early work done by the task force and others would ultimately provide the government with the crucial building blocks for recognizing the new jihad movement in America and, ultimately, understanding al Qaeda. But two major events would distract the task force from the jihadists for years: the 1995 bombing of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City and the 1997 TWA Flight 800 disaster. The former turned the FBI's attention toward homegrown threats, and the latter consumed the FBI's New York office with a 17-month terrorism investigation of a crash that is now thought to have been caused by mechanical failure.
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