by Joby Warrick
11
“It would surpass anything al-Qaeda did”
On February 29, 2004, Dallah al-Khalayleh, the revered mother of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, died after a long battle with leukemia. Jordanian agents had been watching the house for weeks as she lay dying, and monitored the funeral service to see if the woman’s doting son would show up. He did not.
Zarqawi likewise stayed far away when, on April 6, a Jordanian court sentenced him to death in absentia for the murder of the American diplomat Laurence Foley. Instead, he prepared a gift, a reminder to the monarchy’s leaders that he had not forgotten about them. It would be, in Zarqawi’s mind, a gesture on an epic scale, greater than anything he had accomplished so far in Iraq. With one awesome blow, he would seek to eviscerate Jordan’s security establishment, paralyze the monarchy, and eclipse Osama bin Laden as the most audacious Islamist warrior of his time.
The man he selected for the mission was a Jordanian of Palestinian descent named Azmi al-Jayousi. A stocky thirty-five-year-old with thinning auburn hair and light, European features, Jayousi had been with Zarqawi since his Afghanistan days. He picked up explosives-making skills at the Jordanian’s Herat camp in western Afghanistan, at some point losing a finger for his troubles. When Zarqawi moved to the mountains of northern Iraq, Jayousi went to work at Ansar al-Islam’s chemical lab, tinkering with combinations of simple toxins and testing the results on dogs. Now Zarqawi sat down with him to sketch out a plan for a device that would draw on all of Jayousi’s talents: a massive bomb, powerful enough to level buildings, that would simultaneously release a large cloud of poison gas in the heart of the Jordanian capital. Similar to a radioactive “dirty bomb” that uses conventional explosives to spread radiation, this would be a true terror weapon, unleashing panic as invisible toxins wafted through the city. With a favorable wind, his “suicide chemical attack,” as his followers called it, could potentially kill thousands.
But first the bomb maker would have to find a way to get to his target. Jayousi, like Zarqawi himself, was well known to Jordan’s Mukhabarat, having been arrested and imprisoned for his links to radical causes in the 1990s. He might be recognized at the border, even with a fake passport. Zarqawi took no chances. With the help of his Syrian logistics chief, the polyglot dentist Abu al-Ghadiya, a scheme was devised for moving Jayousi and an accomplice across the Jordanian border inside a gasoline tanker truck. Ghadiya arranged for the terrorists to hide inside the fuel tank itself, in a compartment outfitted with breathing tubes so the stowaways would not be overwhelmed by fumes during the two-hour trip through customs and across the Syria-Jordan border. The men would bring no supplies with them other than an explosives recipe and thick wads of Jordanian dinars and euro notes, the first installment on a budget that eventually topped a quarter of a million dollars.
Once he was safely across the border, Jordanian friends whisked Jayousi to a safe house from which he could begin his preparations. Jayousi bought a used Opel, then went on a shopping spree. He assigned aides to rent warehouse space in three towns in northern Jordan, and purchased four other vehicles from different vendors. One was a Chevy Caprice, which, with its powerful V8 engine and Detroit-steel frame, contained sufficient muscle for punching through a security checkpoint. Then he bought three trucks, two of them to be converted into giant bombs, and a third to hold vats of chemicals. Finally, he put teams of helpers to work on a dozen different tasks, from welding reinforced bumpers onto the trucks to buying and stockpiling chemicals—pesticides, potassium cyanide, hydrogen peroxide, glycerin, acetone—in batches just small enough to avoid raising suspicion. The supplies, twenty tons in all, soon lined the walls of a small warehouse in the northern city of Irbid, in jugs and crates marked with orange warning labels. Among his workers were twelve who were slated to serve on the mission itself, with no expectation of ever returning home.
Jayousi oversaw the work like a malevolent maestro, steering his Opel from one warehouse to the next to avoid having to communicate over a telephone line that might be tapped. Between visits, he cruised through Amman to gather intelligence personally on potential targets: the Mukhabarat headquarters; the monarchy’s royal court complex with its palaces; the U.S. Embassy; the new Mecca Mall, with its five floors of shops and restaurants.
Jayousi found that he could travel around Jordan without interference, and, with weeks to go before his mid-April deadline, he began to relax. A man with a notorious sweet tooth, he visited pastry shops to buy kanafeh, a cannoli-like tube of sweetened cheese in a pastry crust of long noodle threads. Then he began to contemplate a riskier outing: a visit to his old neighborhood to see his wife. The woman had no idea that her husband was in Jordan, but Jayousi, anxious as he was for a reunion, was savvy enough to know that any attempt to contact her would likely be noticed and reported to the Mukhabarat.
In the end, for the lonely Jayousi, love trumped prudence. One day in early April, he sent one of his deputies to watch the family’s house. When the lookout spotted Jayousi’s wife walking home from a visit with her parents, he drove his car next to her and introduced himself. The two spoke for a moment; then the woman disappeared into her house. When she emerged again, she had her bags and three children in tow.
Jayousi’s plans were coming into shape, and now he had his wife to help him while away the hours until everything was ready.
The target date for delivering Zarqawi’s mighty bomb was less than two weeks away.
—
The tripwires began firing off almost at once, starting in the outlying towns and far suburbs of the capital and pulsing through invisible networks that led to the Mukhabarat’s operations center. The agency’s sensors at first picked up odd puzzle pieces, such as the disappearance one day of the entire family of a well-known Zarqawi associate, the Palestinian called Jayousi. The jihadist himself had not been seen in Jordan in years. Had he smuggled his family to Iraq to join him?
A bigger clue landed on the desk of Abu Mutaz, the youthful counterterrorism officer who had tried to turn Zarqawi after he emerged from prison with the 1999 amnesty. Nearly five years later, Abu Mutaz was a captain with subordinates and responsibilities that extended to regional offices across the country. Now one of those offices, in Irbid, a city near the Syrian border, was picking up multiple reports about strangers with large amounts of cash and a highly specific shopping list: a small number of used but sturdy cars and trucks, and warehouse rentals located away from houses and pedestrian traffic.
Abu Mutaz pressed for details. The mysterious shoppers had behaved strangely enough to pique local interest, and since then, the suspicions had deepened. Routine queries about their identities ran into dead ends. In fact, it soon became clear that the buyers were not the real buyers.
“They’re using middlemen,” Abu Mutaz concluded. “We don’t know anything about who’s behind this.”
The Mukhabarat’s men picked up one of the intermediaries, a local car broker in his forties who had gotten into trouble for shady dealings in the past. Since his earlier scrapes with the law, he had gone straight and even become religious, though not a zealot. When the Mukhabarat came for him, he grew exceedingly nervous, quickly blurting everything he could remember about the men who had hired him to buy a Chevy Caprice.
“I didn’t even take a commission!” the broker protested.
But the names the broker supplied turned out to be fakes, and the phone numbers he had scribbled down no longer worked. Now the only firm leads the Mukhabarat had were descriptions: details about the vehicles—including the Chevy and a large yellow truck of German make—and vague accounts of the mysterious men who had bought them. Everything about the transactions, from registration papers to licenses plates, had been stolen or fabricated.
Meanwhile, more disturbing reports were landing on Abu Mutaz’s desk. Several hardware stores in the area had reported large cash purchases of certain chemicals closely tracked by the intelligence service because of their potential use in explosives. Alarmed, Abu Mut
az appealed to his supervisors. Soon agents throughout the country joined the now urgent search for the Caprice and the yellow truck.
“We had been patiently gathering information, until we heard about these chemical supplies,” he remembered afterward. “The amounts suggested that this was no longer a search for a few terrorists trying to make a weapon. This appeared to be a much bigger project.”
So far, the Mukhabarat’s leaders had seen no reason to bring American officials into the case. There had been no mention of specific targets, and no suggestion of involvement by al-Qaeda or Zarqawi in whatever was unfolding in Irbid. Practically speaking, there was little the CIA could offer. The skills essential for solving such a case were ones that the Jordanians already possessed, in abundance. In the gritty art of human intelligence-gathering, they were wired in a way that the Americans, for all their money and technical wizardry, were not. And Abu Mutaz was widely regarded as one of the best.
Abu Mutaz hailed from tiny Tafilah, a three-thousand-year-old East Bank town where ancestral roots matter more than schooling or wealth. He used his good grades and tribal connections as a ticket to an overseas education in Qatar, where he had studied journalism and envisioned a career in newspapers or television. Instead, he was offered an entry-level post in the Mukhabarat after scoring high on an entrance exam. His writing skills quickly earned him a spot drafting reports for the director on counterterrorism cases. But Abu Mutaz was a natural as a field intelligence officer, showing real talent for recruiting informants among the jihadists. Though not especially religious himself, he had an open, authentic manner that made people trust him. “For every person, there’s a key that will get you inside—you just have to find it,” he often said.
But cracking an Islamist almost always required a second key: a way to penetrate a religious code designed to keep outsiders away. Abu Mutaz knew the Koran as well as almost any jihadi, and sometimes he sat for hours with a single detainee, matching him, verse for verse, in endless theological debates. More than once during these sessions, he would excuse himself for a few hours on the pretense of attending prayers at the local mosque. Instead, he would skip across town to fortify himself with a beer or two at a hotel bar.
The job also required extraordinary patience, a quality with which Abu Mutaz was naturally gifted. Once, he worked for four months to win over a single jihadist, a young radical who showed promise as a potential informant. The youth appeared to be a fence straddler: he had trained as a militant in Afghanistan, yet he remained attached to his family and secular life in Jordan. Abu Mutaz decided to pressure the young man through his parents, so he staked out the neighborhood to learn all he could about the man’s mother, including the stores she visited. He found the woman’s favorite grocery store and then began cultivating a friendship with the shop owner. One morning, he arrived at the shop with a basket of squabs—domestic pigeons, a delicacy in Jordan—and asked the grocer to host a special luncheon, inviting the jihadist, his mother, and Abu Mutaz himself as guests. As lunch was ending, the Mukhabarat agent took the mother aside and asked for help in keeping her obviously bright, talented son from ending up in the spy agency’s prisons. The two became friends, and the son, ever dutiful, became one of Abu Mutaz’s best informants.
Now Abu Mutaz called in every chip and leaned on every neighborhood gossip on the payroll to come up with something concrete about what he had come to fear was a major terrorist plot. The entire Mukhabarat, with its plodding, low-tech efficiency, was now engaged in the search. Word spread through tribal networks and village councils that the agency’s men were desperately seeking information to head off a possible attack.
The big break came from a walk-in, an Irbid businessman who showed up at the local police precinct with a possible tip. The man had heard about the Mukhabarat’s search, and wondered if his newest tenants might be somehow linked. He had recently rented a garage and warehouse on the main Irbid-Amman highway to strangers who paid in cash and were oddly vague about their plans. No customers ever came around, and the renters were oddly secretive, covering up the road-fronting windows and erecting a fence around the property at their own expense. Once, during a visit to his property, the man had managed a quick peek through a gap in the window coverings.
“There is a large truck inside,” the man told police.
Police swooped into the warehouse, surprising a small handful of workers, who gave up without a struggle. In an interior storage room, lined up like stacks of paint cans, were barrels of chemical precursors, enough, the Mukhabarat’s men figured, to level a large swath of central Amman. Sacks of cumin seed—an explosives enhancer—lay in another corner. And in the garage, as promised, was a truck: a yellow German-made MAN, matching precisely the description of the vehicle on the Mukhabarat’s search list. The workers had just finished welding to the front of the truck a frame of hardened steel, the same kind of barrier buster used by Iraqi insurgents to drive truck bombs deep into a targeted building before detonating. The delivery system for Zarqawi’s bomb was fully operational.
Other raids followed in quick succession. At separate locations a few miles from the warehouse, investigators found other vehicles, as well as Jayousi’s laboratory. For the latter, the bomb maker had picked a rural site next to a livestock ranch, where no neighbor would likely notice if odors escaped from the mixing of chemicals.
By now, between interrogations and scraps of recipe notes from the laboratory, Abu Mutaz knew with near precision what the plotters intended. This was to be a suicide bombing like none other: a “dirty chemical bomb” that blended conventional explosives and poisons, creating a toxic cloud that would kill as it settled over the capital. The epicenter was to be the Mukhabarat’s own headquarters, with the main detonation to take place at a fueling station for the spy agency’s vehicles, not far from where Abu Mutaz worked.
“By the time we found them they were nearly ready,” Abu Mutaz recalled afterward. “The plan was to start with an attack on the main gate, using RPGs and small arms to kill the guards. Then the main truck—the MAN—would destroy the fuel station, followed by the other trucks carrying explosives and poison chemicals in layers. After the explosion the place would become so toxic that not even the ambulances would be able to enter. It would surpass anything al-Qaeda did, anywhere in the world.”
But there was still a missing piece: the bomb maker had not been found.
Jayousi had been careful. Few in the Irbid cell knew his real identity, and none of them knew where he was staying. He used only prepaid calling cards and switched mobile phones every few days to thwart any effort to track his movement. When the raids began, he disappeared into a safe house in Marka, a Palestinian enclave outside Amman, apparently intending to wait out the Mukhabarat before fleeing or trying again. But by now the Jordanians had a name—a familiar one, at that—along with a photograph they could broadcast on state-run television. They also possessed what turned out to be a critical piece of intelligence: Jayousi’s wife and children were with him. Precisely how they traced the family to the Marka hideout—an errant phone call, perhaps, or a relative’s indiscretion?—is unclear. But as night fell on Monday, April 17, 2004, commando teams moved into position around the apartment building with high confidence that the bomb maker was inside.
At 2:10 a.m. on April 18, a dozen soldiers crouched with guns drawn as an officer banged loudly at the door.
“Police!” the lead officer shouted.
The reply was a burst of submachine-gun fire through the door, showering the hallway with bullets and splinters. One of the soldiers fell, wounded in the shoulder. The others blasted their way into the apartment. They shot and killed the first defender, and then raced through darkened rooms looking for others.
They found Jayousi huddled in a bedroom with his wife and children. The man who specialized in designing bombs capable of killing large numbers of innocents made no move in his own defense, clinging instead to the wife he had brought along, at great risk. Even as the police
moved in, he insisted on keeping his family close, bunking his kids amid boxes of C-4 military explosives and the fuses and detonators that were to have been the final ingredients in Zarqawi’s history-making bomb.
Later that morning, Abu Haytham, the intelligence captain who had been the last to meet with Zarqawi before his flight to Pakistan in 1999, peered into an interrogation room to see another face from his past. The suspect sat in his chair, alone now, his hair matted and his eyes puffy from a lack of sleep. But it was the same Jayousi he remembered from years before, clean-shaven and a little stouter, this time facing accusations that all but guaranteed that he’d never again live with his wife as a free man.
Abu Haytham walked into the cell with a small tray and sat down. The bomb maker looked up briefly, but his expression registered only exhaustion and defeat. This would be easy.
The captain slid the tray across the table, putting the honey-drenched cheese pastries directly under Jayousi’s nose.
“Have a kanafeh,” he said.
—
Two days later, Abu Mutaz sat next to Jayousi as the bomb maker retold his story, this time with video cameras rolling. Throughout the capital, Jordanians were waking up to news reports about the disrupted terrorist plot, which, according to official estimates, carried the potential for killing up to eighty thousand people in central Amman. But Jayousi, answering questions from a Mukhabarat officer, spoke in the flat monotone of a mechanic explaining a transmission overhaul. He described the stealthy border crossing, the financing, the faking of documents, the hiring of welders, and the crafting of special canisters designed to hold corrosive toxins. Then he talked about the attack itself:
The men in the Caprice would have RPG weapons, and their task was to strike the obstacles and kill the guards. Then the big MAN truck would break through. There was a bumper installed on the truck to allow it to remove any barrier. It was even designed to go through a wall and continue until it came to the center of the General Intelligence. I think the administration of the General Intelligence was in the center. That’s where the truck would explode.
