Tracing terror's roots
How the first World Trade Center plot sowed the seeds for 9/11
The FBI did obtain a sealed grand jury indictment of bin Laden in 1998, but the distractions from the other investigations may have prevented it from uncovering still another plot launched years earlier. In 1994, bin Laden's secretary Wadi el-Hage--moved to Nairobi and created the Kenya cell that would set off two car bombs in 1998 outside the U.S. embassies in Nairobi, Kenya, and Dar es-Salaam, Tanzania, killing 224 people. Once again, it turned out that the task force had zeroed in on a key player from the old al-Kifah days but had been unable to figure out what he was up to in time. El-Hage had visited Nosair in prison and also acquired some weapons for Abouhalima after the Kahane murder. The FBI questioned el-Hage in Nairobi, and when he returned to the States in 1997, the bureau questioned him again and placed him under surveillance. But the Kenya cell replaced el-Hage and kept right on plotting.
El-Hage wasn't the only al-Kifah link to the embassy explosions. U.S. Army Sgt. Ali Mohamed did preliminary scouting for bombing locations for bin Laden as early as 1993; he visited with Nosair when he traveled to Brooklyn and Jersey City to meet with Abdel-Rahman. Mohamed provided Nosair and other al-Kifah members with Special Forces documents and paramilitary training, and he provided security for bin Laden's 1991 relocation from Afghanistan to Sudan.
Looking back, the task force's prescience about the Nosair group is both eerie and disturbing. "It's like writing a book chapter by chapter," says Kenneth Maxwell, a former supervisory FBI agent on the task force, "without knowing the ending." Task force members were devastated by 9/11. The FBI agents are especially stung by the new mantra of prevention; their investigation into al-Kifah is proof, they say, that prevention has always been their raison d'être. "To devote your life to this, and then to be told you dropped the ball . . ." says Anticev, his voice trailing away. On the day of the memorial service at ground zero, Anticev told his colleagues, "I can't go down there wearing my FBI JTTF T-shirt because the mother of a victim would say, `Where were you when they were planning these attacks?' " "We got no respect," says Thomas Donlon, FBI co-case agent on the trade center blast, "for the work we did." His partner Stern admits that counterterrorism work is unforgiving, the bottom line stark and simple. "You cannot make a mistake," says Stern. "You have to be 100 percent omnipotent and omnipresent. One day you're a hero; the next day, you're a zero."
Six degrees of separation
In the early 1990s, the al-Kifah Refugee Services Center in Brooklyn, N.Y., became a nexus of radical fundamentalism in the United States. A core group of al-Kifah members would form the first terrorist cell waging jihad on U.S. soil.
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Al-Kifah Refugee Services Center, Brooklyn, N.Y.
Osama bin Laden
NYC Landmarks Plot, June 24, 1993: Foiled
Ibrahim el-Gabrowny, obtained $20,000 from bin Laden for cousin Nosair's defense
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