A Pretext for War (30 page)

Like a train wreck in slow motion, in February the CIA’s Kuala Lumpur station was reminded of the Al Qaeda trip to Bangkok by another matter and decided to query their station in that city. A month went by without a response. Then, on March 4, the CIA Bangkok station finally sent word back to Kuala Lumpur that Nawaf Alhazmi—they finally had obtained his full name—had departed for Los Angeles nearly two months earlier. Although the Thai intelligence service apparently gathered the information from flight manifests on the day of departure, they never bothered to pass it on—and worse, the CIA didn’t bother to ask for it until months later. The day after the Bangkok station transmitted the details to Kuala Lumpur, Alec Station was notified.

But once again CIA officials in Alec Station failed to pass on the critical information to either FBI investigators or the State Department’s watchlist office, even though it was now clear that at least one Al Qaeda member had flown to the United States following an important and secret terrorist summit meeting. Also, although there was no record of Almihdhar’s departure, it might have been assumed that since he and Alhazmi were traveling together, and both had visas for the United States, he was likely on the same plane—which he was—or had already flown to the United States separately. Finally, Thai intelligence also reported that Khallad bin Attash, the Al Qaeda paymaster and mastermind of the upcoming attack on the USS
Cole,
had departed for Karachi, Pakistan, on January 20, again without anyone being alerted.

“The folks in Alec just missed it, they missed the significance of it, they didn’t read it, they just missed it,” said the senior intelligence official. “It was an operational message, and our guys just missed it. Not only was it not told to the FBI, we didn’t internalize it, we didn’t understand what it meant, or didn’t take it on board. The long and the short of it is we missed it, so we missed another opportunity then to watchlist these guys. At the end of the day, we didn’t penetrate the plot, we just didn’t.”

After arriving in Los Angeles, Almihdhar and Alhazmi settled in San Diego. They moved into apartment 127 of the Parkwood Apartments, a townhouse complex near a busy commercial strip on Mount Ada Road in Clairmont. There they bought season passes to Sea World, dined on fast food, frequented strip clubs, and took flight lessons at nearby Montgomery Field. All under their real names. They also opened a $3,000 checking account at the Bank of America; obtained driver’s licenses, Social Security cards, and credit cards; and bought a 1988 Toyota Corolla for $3,000 and registered it—all with their real names. Alhazmi was even listed on page 13 of the 2000–2001 Pacific Bell White Pages: “ALHAZMI Nawaf M 6401 Mount Ada Rd. 858-279-5919.”

Eventually, they moved into a room rented to them by Abdussatter Shaikh, a local businessman—who also happened to be a part-time FBI informant. “He stayed at the home of a source of ours,” said an FBI counterterrorism official. “Had we known about them, we could have tasked our source. If we had been told about them, we would have followed them and said, hey, these guys are going to aviation school.” There could not have been a more ideal situation for putting the pieces of the 9/11 puzzle together—had anyone been looking for them.

But as additional members of the 9/11 team made their way into the United States during the spring and summer of 2001, the chief of Alec Station was still obsessed with his unproductive covert-action schemes. That spring he decided to spend a few days in Paris, bringing another briefcase packed with a quarter of a million dollars in cash to Ahmed Shah Massoud, who was also enjoying April in Paris. Back in Afghanistan, Alec Station still had not picked up even one piece of actionable intelligence or made a single penetration of bin Laden’s organization.

Other Americans, however, had—and with very little difficulty. On a number of occasions, they had even met personally with bin Laden and been told that he had multiple suicide missions planned for the United States.

Among those on the inside of Al Qaeda’s al Farooq terrorist camp were eight newly arrived native-born Americans in their twenties, including John Walker Lindh. Twenty years old, Walker Lindh grew up the middle of three children in the affluent northern California community of Marin County. Pale and wiry, with a boyish face hidden beneath a jet-black beard, his father worked as a government lawyer and his mother was a health-care aide.

He was the all-American boy. “I remember playing football, basketball, soccer, catch, stuff like that,” recalled his childhood friend Andrew Cleverdon. Walker Lindh was musical, took easily to languages, and was very studious. At age twelve, he saw the movie
Malcolm X,
and became fascinated by its depiction of Saudi Arabia, Mecca, and the annual ritual of the hajj. In 1997, he converted from Catholicism to Islam, began using the name Sulayman al-Lindh, and joined a mosque in Mill Valley, California. A year later, on a quest to understand his new religion, he arrived in the Yemeni capital of Sana’a and began studying Arabic, the Koran, and Islam at Al-Iman University.

In October 2000, Walker Lindh left for Pakistan and enrolled in an Islamic fundamentalist school—a madrassa—in Bannu, a desert town close to the Afghan border. Located off an alleyway, behind dented, blue-painted metal doors, the small institution had about forty students. There, Lindh spent his days sitting rigid while reciting and memorizing the Koran. Near a book cupboard, headmaster Mohammed Iltimas Khan would sip cups of tea sweetened with buffalo milk; and in the courtyard boys chanted Koranic verses.

By April 2001, after about six months at the madrassah, Walker Lindh had become very sympathetic to the Muslim struggle around the world and decided to join the Islamic Jihad. The next month he left for Peshawar, about eighty miles from Bannu in Pakistan’s northwest. Using the nom de guerre Abdul Hamid, he met with recruiters for the Harkat-ul-Mujahideen (HUM) (“Movement of Holy Warriors”). One of Pakistan’s largest and most feared terrorist organizations, it is believed to be responsible for terrorist attacks and unsuccessful assassination attempts on the life of President Pervez Musharraf.

With little difficulty, after several days of interviews, he was sent to a training camp in Mansehra, a small town in the mountains of northern Pakistan, about ten miles from disputed Kashmir, where most of the fighting was taking place. Walker Lindh joined about four hundred other volunteers, mostly Pakistani, who were undergoing rugged training in the use of pistols, Kalashnikovs, explosives, and guerrilla tactics.

But it was in Afghanistan, not Kashmir, that Walker Lindh wanted to fight. “We train volunteers in the most basic skills they need in Afghanistan,” said one of Walker Lindh’s instructors in the HUM camp. “One doesn’t need advanced guerrilla training to go to Afghanistan, because the war there is not so difficult. The enemy is in front of you and you’re shooting at him. But war in Kashmir is the most difficult. You need advanced training to fight there. You face the enemy on all sides in Kashmir. . . . We sent him to our Peshawar office and they arranged his trip to Afghanistan.”

In late May 2001, Walker Lindh arrived in Kabul and made his way down to the Darul-Aman district in the southwest part of the city. Once a locus of power and prestige, by then it resembled a moonscape of giant craters, relics of endless shelling of the city during the battle for Kabul in the early 1990s.

Near the Kabul Museum, Walker Lindh entered the mujahideen recruitment center and presented his letter of introduction from the HUM. Then he told recruiters that he was an American and that he wanted to go to the front lines to fight. But because his Afghan-dialect language skills were deficient, he was rejected. His Arabic, however, was quite good, and he was advised to join with the Arabs of Al Qaeda and to go to one of their training camps.

Accepted into Al Qaeda, Walker Lindh was sent for several days to a bin Laden guesthouse in Kandahar. He was then put on a bus with about twenty other trainees, mostly from Saudi Arabia, and driven southwest through the flat desert plain toward the low, broken ridges of the Rod Para Mountains.

It took about an hour to cover the thirty miles to the remote town of Meivand, and then another hour was spent driving over unmarked sandy tracks that eventually disappeared altogether. Eventually the bus came to Al Qaeda’s al Farooq training camp, a massive facility consisting of more than fifty buildings, including a hospital, that sat on the floor of a hidden canyon. A large cave complex was used for storage and housing, and despite its remote location, the terrorist school had a running water supply and underground electrical wiring.

At the time Walker Lindh arrived, around the first of June, five other Americans were in their third week of training and two other Americans would arrive within days. Like Walker Lindh, they were all native-born U.S. citizens in their twenties who had grown up in a middle-class suburban environment near Buffalo, New York. One was a youth counselor, another had been voted the “friendliest” in his high school class and was a soccer team co-captain, and most were married with children. Unlike Walker Lindh, they were of Yemeni ancestry.

Although Walker Lindh never met the other Americans during the seven-week course, he knew they all took part in training and instruction in the use of weapons. These included Kalashnikov rifles, 9mm handguns, M-16 automatic rifles, and rocket-propelled grenade launchers. In the evening, the recruits gathered at the camp mosque and listened to guest speakers. On various occasions, one of those would be Osama bin Laden. After the lecture, trainees would line up for a handshake and bin Laden would thank them for volunteering.

It is clear that Lindh was able to acquire information on bin Laden’s future plots. At one point in June, Walker Lindh was told by one of his instructors that “bin Laden had sent forth some fifty people to carry out twenty suicide terrorist operations against the United States and Israel.” Lindh told investigators that the first phase was originally planned to have “consisted of five attacks,” as opposed to the four that were actually carried out. He said a “close associate” of bin Laden told him “there should have been five planes used” on September 11, “the fifth targeting the White House.” The information confirmed the FBI’s theory that Ramzi Binalshibh was originally scheduled to be the pilot of a fifth attack, but this was thwarted when, after four tries, he still could not get a visa to enter the country.

Lindh also said he had heard that “fifteen more operations were pending.” Lindh was also approached by one of the instructors, who inquired if anyone would be interested in taking up jihad in either the United States or Israel. Lindh turned down the offer, saying he had come to Afghanistan to help the Taliban against the Northern Alliance.

Occasionally, bin Laden was accompanied by Ayman al-Zawahiri, leader of Egyptian Islamic Jihad, and during one visit to the camp he announced the merger of al-Zawahiri’s terrorist group and Al Qaeda. A number of the Americans from the Buffalo area were present at the announcement. One of them, twenty-eight-year-old Sahim Alwan, had a private meeting with bin Laden, who, sitting on pillows on the floor, asked him how American Muslims viewed suicide operations. “We don’t even think about it,” Alwan said. Bin Laden smiled, said Alwan.

Around the same time, bin Laden decided to put the United States and Israel on notice. On June 21, Bakr Atyani, a correspondent for the London-based Middle East Broadcasting Company, met at a predesignated spot and was placed in a car with blackened windows. He was driven to bin Laden’s desert compound outside Kandahar and brought into a mud-walled room. There, sitting on low cushions, surrounded by several men in beards and turbans, was Osama bin Laden.

Keeping to his agreement with Mullah Omar not to talk to the press, bin Laden greeted Atyani with pleasantries but did not say anything substantive. Instead, he simply smiled and nodded agreement as his top aides, including al-Zawahiri, issued a chilling warning. “The coming weeks will hold important surprises that will target American and Israeli interests in the world,” they told Atyani. The journalist later said, “I am 100 percent sure of this, and it was absolutely clear they had brought me there to hear this message.”

To reinforce his warning, bin Laden released an Al Qaeda–made videotape showing terrorist training exercises. Opening with shots of the USS
Cole
following its attack by suicide bombers eight months earlier, the tape went on to show scenes of soldiers shooting at a movie-screen image of former President Bill Clinton. On the tape, bin Laden declares: “To all the mujahideen, your brothers in Palestine are waiting for you, it’s time to penetrate America and Israel and hit them where it hurts most.” Bin Laden later met privately with one of the Americans training at his camp and asked him to take several copies of the tape and deliver them to addresses in Pakistan.

In view of the constant references to a dual attack in the United States and Israel, it is likely that the original plan called for simultaneous strikes against both countries. The plot may have involved blowing up an Israeli El Al airliner as well as the main Tel Aviv train station, killing hundreds of people.

Around the same time that members of the 9/11 team were flying coast to coast on test runs, and eight Americans were training at bin Laden’s al Farooq terrorist camp, British Al Qaeda member Richard Colvin Reid was looking for weaknesses in Israeli security. Born in 1973 in England’s rural Kent County, Reid was the son of a British Catholic mother and a Jamaican Protestant father.

After dipping in and out of petty crime during his teenage years, he ultimately wound up in the Blunda Jail, known for its rough company. During a three-and-a-half-year sentence, in which he began associating with a number of Pakistani inmates, Reid converted to Islam and was released in 1996. “He was eager to know Islam, to learn Arabic, to be an active member of this community,” said Abdul Haqq Baker, the imam of the Brixton Mosque, where Reid spent much of his time.