by Simon Reeve
Yousef, who was probably born in Kuwait to a Palestinian mother and Pakistani father, specialised in inventing bombs that can escape airport searches. He would convert a digital watch into a timing switch and use light-bulb filament to ignite cotton soaked in nitroglycerine explosive. An explosives genius who studied A-levels at the Oxford College of Further Education, he then moved to South Wales to study for a degree in computer-aided electronic engineering at what was then the West Glamorgan Institute of Higher Education, or ‘Wiggy’. When the police raided his flat in Manila they discovered a chemistry textbook from Swansea Library with passages on the manufacture of explosives highlighted.
Everything about the attack and investigation was astonishing. I had some money I’d saved from when I left the Sunday Times so I flew to the US. I met senior investigators and FBI ‘brick agents’, a term the FBI uses for the guys doing the legwork; tough, experienced people that are out on the streets literally pounding the ‘bricks’. They took me into bars and mosques in Brooklyn and Jersey City, meeting neighbours of the bombers and people who had prayed with them, and were pious and sometimes militant. I spent hours deep inside the Twin Towers, wandering around with guides so I could understand the layout of the area where the bomb had been placed. I sourced court reports and interview transcripts, and I met officials and agents from the Central Intelligence Agency, the Defense Intelligence Agency and the even more secret National Security Agency. I sat down with nervous, uptight spooks and never discovered their real names, let alone which ultra-secret agencies they really worked for. But on repeat trips to the States I also made contacts working on covert operations who were friendly and worldly, would happily hang out and share their time and a beer, and talk about their childhood growing up around the world with parents who were in the US military.
I was taken to gatherings in a bar near Washington DC that was like a second base of operations for intelligence specialists from different agencies who were studying the wider militant group that emerged at the time of the Tradebom investigation and had connections to the WTC attackers. We know it now, of course, as al Qaeda. They even told me they had a fax machine installed in the bar. I was vouched for by a respected analyst, but not everyone seemed to be aware I was writing a book. On more than one occasion I was mistaken for some sort of junior agent seconded from MI6.
‘This is all just between us, isn’t it, Simon?’ said my guy, looking meaningfully at me and tapping his nose.
I have never really talked about this period before, but I was moving in shadowy circles. Those at the sharp end felt they were encountering an emerging threat to global security. They were talking to me because they believed nobody in power in the US or Europe was taking the threat seriously.
It was Benazir Bhutto, the former Prime Minister of Pakistan, who first mentioned the name Osama bin Laden to me. We were having breakfast together in the restaurant of a small hotel in Kensington, just around the corner from the Royal Albert Hall. There were a pair of Italian honeymooners at the table opposite, some American tourists directly behind us, and Benazir was talking loudly. She said there were links between the 1993 WTC bombing and bin Laden, and she was adamant that bin Laden posed a huge threat to Pakistan, the West and the world. We were sitting at a small table, just the two of us. She kept stressing, and was one of the first to point out internationally, that Muslims were the first victims of terrorism. Then she moved on to tell me how Ramzi Yousef had tried to kill her with a bomb, and then later with a rifle. I was having trouble focusing on what she was saying, because Benazir had a huge blob of strawberry jam stuck to her upper lip. I tried to motion to her, but she was in full flow. I nodded towards and looked at her mouth, but she ignored me. I passed her a napkin. Finally she paused and flicked it into the cloth with a practised flourish. It was all very bizarre.
Bhutto told me that within two months of the 1993 explosion outside her home, Yousef developed a plan to assassinate her with a sniper’s rifle. ‘I was supposed to be addressing a public meeting in Karachi, and I got a report from one of my party people that according to police sources there was going to be an assassination attempt on me that night,’ she told me.
Bhutto still went along to the meeting, but by the time she arrived it was ‘complete chaos’. ‘There were people everywhere and armed men on the stage. In the midst of all this my mother also arrived. So I decided to go up, but the police were not coming to clear the stage. So I had a choice of leaving or taking the risk. So we took the risk and went up there, and it was absolute bedlam. I don’t know how I spoke on that stage, or how I got out unscathed, but I did.’ Only later did Bhutto learn the details of the botched assassination plan. ‘He was supposed to have shot me. He had gone and done a recce of the place and with his associates he had got on top of the building.’
However, a rifle that was supposed to be delivered to Yousef never arrived in time. ‘So in other words Ramzi Yousef would have shot me if he had got the weapon in time,’ said Bhutto. ‘As you can imagine, I was quite shocked by this.’
I met Bhutto several times to discuss the emerging threat from al Qaeda. Her second government had been abruptly dismissed by the Pakistani President amid allegations of widespread corruption and economic incompetence. She was travelling with courtiers and a retinue, like a monarch on the move, but we met alone at the same mid-range hotel where she stayed during frequent visits to London. She had a powerful, intimidating gaze. I thought of her as a cross between Margaret Thatcher and Princess Diana.
I had been introduced to Bhutto by the former head of the Pakistani equivalent of the FBI, who was one of her close aides and was also out of office and in exile. I met him successively in a cheap hotel in Swiss Cottage, in a curry restaurant on King Street in Hammersmith, and near his offices on the North Circular Road, where he said he was involved in the petroleum industry. I had been passed on to him by contacts in MI6, and he proved to be a mine of information, sharing extraordinary documents that detailed the scale and spread of the terrorist group we now know as al Qaeda. They included intelligence reports and Pakistani interrogation transcripts. The reports had been transcribed verbatim and could be tough even just to read. There would be a section of speech which would say something like:
[Interrogator] ‘Tell me the name of your handler.’
Silence.
‘The name of your handler.’
Silence.
Screams.
‘Your handler.’
More screams.
‘Tell me the name of your handler.’
I had an endless series of frightening and strange experiences, encounters and adventures working on that book. I was followed by the agents of at least two countries and almost certainly had my phone tapped. During my previous investigations I had been part of a team with the back-up of the Sunday Times. Writing the book, I was on my own and there was no one to call should things go pear-shaped.
On one occasion I needed to watch the house of a shady Lebanese businessman allegedly involved in supplying weapons to militants. I was getting a little carried away with the investigation, so I disguised myself as a vagrant and staked out the building. I even peed on my clothes in a misguided attempt to dissuade anyone from taking too much interest in what I was doing. It only encouraged the police to move me on.
Another time I decided I needed to attend a party in a country house outside London that a contact told me various dodgy spies and arms dealers would attend. He wangled me an invite, and for some reason a media friend said that to help me with my cover story they would put me on a list to have access to a convertible Aston Martin DB7 the company was lending out to writers. Then I borrowed an Ozwald Boateng suit from a friend of the fashion designer and set off for the party, feeling bizarrely confident I could pull off my act. I only made it a few streets from the flat. Every time I went around a corner the Aston Martin would lose power and then stall, the power steering would die, and I narrowly avoided crashing into several vehicles. I drove it slowly
back home, worried I had damaged an extremely expensive car. An engineer from Aston Martin arrived the next afternoon wearing a suit and carrying a laptop, lifted up a panel in the door sill, plugged in the computer, and ran a diagnostic check. It turned out the person who had the car before me was a motoring correspondent, and he had been driving it at ferocious speeds on tight tracks.
‘It has a learning computer that adapts to the driving style,’ said the engineer. ‘The guy before you was taking corners at 50 mph, so the computer adjusted the power to account for that. It should have been reset before you got the car. Very sorry.’
I drove over to see my mum and dad and took them out for a joyride. They were thrilled. But I never made it to the spies’ party.
I had some other near-disasters. I spent all of my savings, earnings and my advance researching the book. I found myself canoeing down a river in South-East Asia, looking for a supposed terror training camp. It seems crazy now. A twenty-something author with no back-up and no one to call, in a wooden canoe with a guide I did not know, trying to locate a terrorist training camp. Talk about overcoming my teenage fears. I was foolhardy, or at the very least naïve, and I had no concerns about where the research might lead or what dangers I might encounter. I never found the camp, but in several dark dreams I’ve since wondered what would have happened if I had. Can you imagine my canoe bumping up to the shore and some guy with a Kalashnikov springing from the shadows?
‘Oh hello, so sorry to bother you. My name’s Simon. I was really hoping we could have a long talk.’
At the time I really thought I would find them and that they would talk to me. I remember a deep feeling of failure when we finally had to turn the boat around.
Perhaps my most frightening experience at that time came when contacts in Pakistani intelligence put me in touch with a group of bin Laden’s supporters in northern Italy. Eventually they agreed to a clandestine meeting.
I travelled on my own. I still didn’t understand how dangerous al Qaeda really was, and anyway the money for my book barely covered phone calls, let alone security.
At an Islamic cultural centre I was ushered into a room with six men. I knew from my Pakistani contacts they were ‘Afghan Arabs’ – men who’d travelled from around the world to Afghanistan to fight the Soviets during the 1980s. When the war ended many went home quietly. The men I was with in Italy had gone to the Balkans, fighting the Serbs. They were warriors, and as tough as old boots. We drank coffee and talked through my interpreter, and everything was going fine. I asked them what they believed and what they were trying to achieve. They were radical, for sure, but they weren’t hostile.
Then two other men arrived. They had particularly bushy beards and a more hardcore air. The men in the room seemed surprised to see the new arrivals, and they were very surprised to see me, and immediately angry.
I had stepped into a very dangerous world. The mood in the room changed from being slightly threatening to something much darker. I knew that Egyptian and Italian intelligence, and to a lesser extent the CIA, was investigating the Afghan Arabs. They saw me as a threat. I was sitting down, along the back wall away from the door. A few others were sitting, but the two who arrived were among those standing above me, shouting at the others and pointing at me. I felt incredibly threatened. Even my interpreter, who was one of them, looked pale. I knew a few words of Arabic and could tell that not only were they furious about the fact I was there, but they were arguing about whether I should leave alive.
An American source and friend had only just been telling me a few weeks before about a time when he was briefly captured in Somalia and had to fight his way out with fists and bullets. ‘If you’re ever in real trouble, Simon, you’ll know it,’ he told me. ‘Then whatever you do, don’t do nothing.’
A thousand things were going through my mind: could I get to the door? Could I leap out of the window? What the hell was I doing there? I was the most scared I had ever been. One of the men was so angry his spittle was flying everywhere. I suddenly felt very stupid and very small. I was playing a dangerous game with very serious men.
I tensed in case I had to rush for the window, while the arguing continued. It lasted for a few minutes but somehow I kept my cool, then things calmed down, my translator found his voice and hospitality prevailed over militancy. The bearded two left with half the group. I tried to sip coffee and appear normal, but my body was shaking. My interpreter was also shaking and we just wanted to get out. I knew I had come face-to-face with the most radical of zealots. It chilled me. I flew home and had nightmares for weeks.
Ramzi Yousef was finally captured in Islamabad in February 1995. Pakistani special forces and the FBI caught him preparing another atrocity: several remote-controlled toy cars packed with explosives. On his flight to New York the next day he told JTTF agents he had wanted to topple one of the Twin Towers into the other, and had deliberately built the bomb to try and shear the support columns holding up the towers. He had also considered a poison-gas attack on the complex, but claimed he had ruled it out because it would have been ‘too expensive’.
In American eyes at the time, Yousef had a legitimate claim to the title of most dangerous man in the world. He was sentenced to 240 years in jail and imprisoned as if he was a virus. He is still the most secure prisoner on the most secure wing of Supermax in Colorado, the most secure prison in the world.
Yousef and bin Laden became the focus of my book, titled The New Jackals: Ramzi Yousef, Osama bin Laden and the Future of Terrorism, which came out several years before the attacks of 9/11. It has the dubious distinction of being the first book in the world on bin Laden and al Qaeda. My conclusion was that Yousef and bin Laden were a new breed of terrorist, men who had no moral restrictions on mass killing.
I quoted a former director of the FBI’s Investigations Division, who said: ‘In the past, we were fighting terrorists with an organisational structure and some attainable goal like land or the release of political prisoners. But the new breed are more difficult and hazardous. They want nothing less than the overthrow of the West, and since that’s not going to happen, they just want to punish – the more casualties the better.’
It was a debatable comment: by the time the book came out bin Laden had revealed some of his goals, saying publicly he was attacking the West because the US and Europe supported regimes in the Middle East. But my overall point was that we were entering a new age of apocalyptic terrorism. That was my conclusion.
I had worked on the book for years, risked my life and put my all into writing it. You can imagine how disappointed I was when I felt it sank like a stone.
CHAPTER NINE
Grief
The New Jackals came out in 1998 and hardly anyone read it. My parents went around bookshops moving it from the dusty shelves at the back of stores and placing it at the front. Not only had I said Ramzi Yousef was the first of a new breed of terrorist, but I'd added that many more were being prepared in terrorist training schools dotted around Afghanistan and Pakistan. Nobody was interested.
There was a review of the book in the Sunday Times, my old paper, which said I’d clearly had ample access to Western intelligence sources, but that I was scaremongering, and that my ‘apocalyptic vision’ was wrong. It was written by an older expert on the Middle East, who in my view had no idea of how the world had changed, but it was published in my old newspaper, and I felt a sense of betrayal. Even now I remember where I was when my friend Maurice called to warn me and read the review to me.
What could I do? Step by step. I carried on.
While I had been researching The New Jackals, I had also been working on other projects to make sure I could pay my rent. I conducted an investigation for Time magazine into how the Swiss put Jews into labour camps during the Second World War. That caused a stink, and Swiss newspapers paid an infamous private investigator to steal the contents of my bins in an attempt to find some dirt on me. I also worked with my old mentor Peter Hounam at a new investigative publ
ishing company he founded, writing, editing or rewriting a handful of books on such light-hearted topics as biological warfare, organised crime and nuclear smuggling. Peter secured a leaked copy of the Chancellor of the Exchequer’s budget speech, some details of which were published in the press, and he won the What the Papers Say Scoop of the Year. I was only peripherally involved, but I was questioned by a senior officer from Scotland Yard. To get me to reveal the source of the leak the officer tried to use the fact I had signed the Official Secrets Act years previously when I worked for the government for less than one day. I suggested in somewhat impolite terms that I would love to see him try.
More importantly during those years I was reconciled with James, my younger brother, who had moved into my rented flat after my friends Julie and Elspeth moved out to live with partners. James and I had a sometimes tricky relationship after I left school, and I had seen little of him. Helping him to move boxes into the flat, then cooking meals together and sharing tales and a space, was completely wonderful. He’s two years younger than me and I have always adored and admired him more than he realises. There was nobody I wanted to have closer. His first job had been whitewashing the infinity board in the local photographic studio and he was building a career as a photographer after starting at the bottom just like me. He didn’t get a degree in photography or media studies; he just threw himself in at the deep end and learned on the job. Enthusiasm and ability meant he began to climb the ladder, and he went on to work as an assistant to some of the world’s greatest photographers, and later became an award-winning photographer in his own right. Living together felt like we were placing pieces back into our own emotional jigsaw, rebuilding the people we would have been without the traumas of our childhood. Or at least that’s what we decided together after we’d had a couple of drinks.
