Investigators later found several large bottles containing hydrogen peroxide concentrated to between 20 and 40 percent—concentrations suitable for turning the liquids into effective bombs—that one of the conspirators had dumped in a London park. The plotters were planning to bring the liquid explosives onto the flights they had targeted disguised as soft drinks, together with other innocuous-looking items such as disposable cameras—the flashes of which could act as triggers—and assemble their bombs on the planes. At the East London apartment that served as the plotters’ bomb factory, police found traces of HMTD, a high explosive made from concentrated hydrogen peroxide.
During the trial of the men accused in the planes plot, the prosecution argued that some fifteen hundred passengers would have died if all seven of the targeted planes had been brought down. The plot seemed designed to “celebrate” the upcoming fifth anniversary of 9/11 by once again targeting commercial aviation, a particular obsession of al-Qaeda, and most of the victims of the attacks would have been Americans, Britons, and Canadians. Three years after the aborted attack, Ali and two of his co-conspirators were found guilty of planning to blow up the transatlantic airliners. Some of the key evidence against them was emails they had exchanged with their handler in Pakistan, Rashid Rauf. A British citizen who has worked closely with al-Qaeda, Rauf ordered them “to get a move on” with their operation in an email he had sent them on July 25, 2006. Those emails were intercepted by spy agencies, and Rauf’s arrest in Pakistan at the behest of American officials on August 9 quickly triggered the arrest of his jihadist buddies in London. When Rauf was arrested in Pakistan he was found to be in possession of twenty-nine bottles of hydrogen peroxide.
The planes plot case resulted in the immediate ban of all carry-on liquids and gels, and rules were later put in place to limit the quantities of these items that travelers could bring on planes to prevent liquid-based bombs from being carried onto future flights. The plot also revealed a new generation of al-Qaeda leaders hitherto little understood by Western intelligence agencies, says Bruce Riedel, a three-decade veteran of the CIA: “When the August 2006 plot was uncovered, and the threads led back to Pakistan, we’d never heard of any of these people. This was a whole group of people, clearly important, clearly tied to bin Laden. … And then we started learning about Rashid Rauf, and it was like, ‘Huh? Who are these people?’”
The U.K.-based planes plot did not stand alone: four years earlier an al-Qaeda affiliate in Kenya almost succeeded in bringing down an Israeli passenger jet with a surface-to-air missile, while in 2003 a plane belonging to the DHL courier service was struck by a missile as it took off from Baghdad airport. The same year militants cased Riyadh airport and were planning to attack British Airways flights into Saudi Arabia. And if the Nigerian Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab had brought down the Northwest Airlines flight over Detroit on Christmas Day of 2009, it would have been al-Qaeda’s most successful attack on an American target since it destroyed the World Trade Center towers and a wing of the Pentagon.
After the 9/11 attacks, al-Qaeda and its affiliated groups increasingly attacked economic and business targets. The shift in tactics was in part a response to the fact that the traditional pre-9/11 targets, such as American embassies, warships, and military bases, were now better defended, while so-called soft economic targets were both ubiquitous and easier to hit. The suicide attacks in Istanbul in November 2003—directed at a British consulate, two synagogues, and the local headquarters of the HSBC bank—were indicative of this trend. The plotters initially planned to attack Incirlik Air Base, a facility in western Turkey used by American troops, but concluded that the tight security at the base made the assault too difficult. The plotters transferred their efforts to the bank, consulate, and synagogues because they were relatively undefended targets. Al-Qaeda provided tens of thousands of dollars to the conspirators, and the leaders of the Turkish cell met with bin Laden in Kandahar around a week after the 9/11 attacks.
Al-Qaeda had also learned an important lesson from its attacks on New York and Washington: disrupting Western economies and, by extension, the global economy was useful for its wider jihad. In a videotape released in October 2004, bin Laden pointed out that for al-Qaeda’s $500,000 investment in the 9/11 attacks, the United States economy sustained a $500 billion loss. Bin Laden crowed over al-Qaeda’s investment: “Every dollar al-Qaeda invested defeated a million dollars.”
Thus al-Qaeda’s leaders now believed (naively) they could bleed the West dry, prompting the group to launch multiple attacks on the oil business. Al-Qaeda’s affiliate in Yemen launched an attack on the French oil tanker the Limburg on October 6, 2002, as it steamed off the Yemeni coast. An explosives-laden dinghy rammed the tanker and detonated. The vessel caught on fire and one crewman was killed. In Yanbu, Saudi Arabia, al-Qaeda’s Saudi Arabian affiliate attacked the offices of a contractor for ExxonMobil on May 1, 2004, killing six Westerners. Four weeks later, in Al Khobar, Saudi Arabia, al-Qaeda attacked the office buildings and residential compounds of Western oil firms. Twenty-two were killed. On December 16, 2004, bin Laden drew attention to al-Qaeda’s operations in Saudi Arabia and the need to target oil interests, saying in an audio recording, “One of the most important reasons that led our enemies to control our land is the theft of our oil. … Be active and prevent them from reaching the oil, and mount your operations accordingly.” In February 2006, al-Qaeda in Saudi Arabia unsuccessfully attacked the Abqaiq facility, perhaps the most important oil production facility in the world, through which approximately 10 percent of the world’s oil supply flows.
Al-Qaeda and affiliated terrorist groups also targeted companies with distinctive Western brand names. In 2003, suicide attackers bombed the J. W. Marriott hotel in Jakarta and attacked it again six years later, simultaneously also attacking the Ritz Carlton hotel in the Indonesian capital. Similarly, a Marriott was bombed in Islamabad in 2008. In 2002 a group of eleven French defense contractors were killed as they left a Sheraton hotel in Karachi, which was heavily damaged. In October 2004, in Taba, Egyptian jihadists attacked a Hilton hotel. In Amman, Jordan, in November 2005, Al-Qaeda in Iraq attacked three hotels with well-known American names—the Grand Hyatt, Radisson, and Days Inn. And five-star hotels that catered to Westerners in the Muslim world were a perennial target for jihadists: the Taj and Oberoi in Mumbai in 2008, the Serena in Kabul the same year, and the Pearl Continental in Peshawar in 2009.
Attacking Jewish and Israeli targets was an al-Qaeda strategy that only emerged strongly after 9/11. Despite bin Laden’s declaration in February 1998 that he was creating the “World Islamic Front against the Crusaders and the Jews,” al-Qaeda only started attacking Israeli or Jewish targets in early 2002. Al-Qaeda and affiliated and like-minded groups then directed a campaign against such targets, killing journalist Daniel Pearl in Karachi, bombing synagogues and Jewish centers in Tunisia, Morocco, Turkey, and India, and attacking an Israeli-owned hotel in Mombasa, Kenya.
Seven years after 9/11, influenced by al-Qaeda, the Taliban began planning seriously to attack targets in the West. According to Spanish prosecutors, the leader of the Pakistani Taliban, Baitullah Mehsud, dispatched suicide bombers to Barcelona in January 2008. A Pakistani Taliban spokesman confirmed this eight months later in a videotaped interview in which he said that those suicide bombers “were under pledge to Baitullah Meshud” and were sent because of the Spanish military presence in Afghanistan.
Two years later, Faisal Shahzad, a Pakistani-American who had once worked as a finanical analyst at the Elizabeth Arden cosmetics company in Stamford, Connecticut, traveled to Pakistan where he received bomb-making training from the Taliban. Armed with that training, Shahzad returned to Connecticut, where he purchased an SUV, placed a bomb in it and detonated it in Times Square on May 1, 2010 when the sidewalks were thick with tourists and theatergoers. The bomb, which was designed to act as a fuel-air explosive, luckily was a dud and Shahzad was arrested two days later as he tried to leave JFK Airport for Dubai.
The extent of the cooperation between the Pakistani Taliban and al-Qaeda could be seen in the suicide bombing that killed seven CIA officers and contractors in the American base at Khost in eastern Afghanistan on December 30, 2009. The suicide bomber, Humam Khalil Abu-Mulal al-Balawi, a Jordanian doctor, was a double agent: information he had earlier provided to the CIA was used to target militants in Pakistan. Two months after Balawi’s suicide attack, al-Qaeda’s video production arm released a lengthy interview with him in which he laid out how he planned to attack the group of Agency officials using a bomb made from C-4. Mustafa Abu al-Yazid, the number three in al-Qaeda, praised the suicide attack targeting the CIA officers, saying it was “to avenge our good martyrs” and listing several militant leaders felled by U.S. drone strikes, while the chief of the Pakistani Taliban, Hakimullah Mehsud, appeared alongside Balawi in a prerecorded video saying the attack was revenge for the drone strike that had killed Hakimullah’s ruthless predecessor, Baitullah Mehsud, six months earlier.
And in the same period al-Qaeda’s influence was extending well beyond the Afghanistan-Pakistan theater as the terrorist organization added new “franchises” around the Muslim world. In September 2006, the Algerian Salafist Group for Preaching and Combat’s leader, Abu Musab Abdul Wadud, explained that al-Qaeda “is the only organization qualified to gather together the mujahideen.” Subsequently taking the name “Al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb,” the group conducted a range of operations: bombing the United Nations building in Algiers, attacking the Israeli embassy in Mauritania, and murdering French and British hostages.
Al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb joined the already well-established franchises of Al-Qaeda in Iraq and Al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, which comprised many hundreds of militants in Saudi Arabia and Yemen. In 2009 al-Qaeda extended its influence in the Horn of Africa when the Somali militant group Al Shabab announced that it was joining bin Laden’s group. Indicative of bin Laden’s continuing importance to militant jihadists around the world is that when these groups announced they were joining al-Qaeda they pledged an oath of allegiance not to al-Qaeda but to bin Laden himself.
Al-Qaeda Central also retained some control over its affiliate in Saudi Arabia, according to a senior Saudi law enforcement official: “There is evidence that al-Qaeda in Afghanistan/Pakistan is communicating with al-Qaeda in the Kingdom.” Al-Qaeda in Saudi Arabia took a beating after the group made the strategic error of killing scores of Saudi civilians in a campaign of violence that began with multiple bombings in the kingdom in May 2003. According to the Saudi official, the green light for that campaign came from Saif al-Adel, al-Qaeda’s military commander, who was then living under some form of house arrest in Iran. Saudi forces subsequently killed more than 150 militants and imprisoned thousands more, but “Al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula” continued to retain some capabilities years later, as was demonstrated on August 28, 2009, by its assassination attempt against the top Saudi counterterrorism official, Prince Mohammed bin Nayef, who was lucky to survive.
The Mumbai attacks of 2008 showed that al-Qaeda’s ideas about attacking Western and Jewish targets had also spread to Pakistani militant groups like Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT), which had previously focused only on Indian targets. Over a three-day period in late November 2008, LeT carried out multiple attacks in Mumbai on five-star hotels housing Westerners and a Jewish-American community center.
Undoubtedly, one of al-Qaeda’s key successes after 9/11 was spreading its ideas widely. Bin Laden has observed that 90 percent of his battle is conducted in the media and al-Qaeda understands that what the Pentagon terms IO (information operations) are vital to its continued viability. Al-Qaeda’s media production arm Al Sahab’s first major production debuted on the Internet in the summer of 2001, signaling a major anti-American attack was in the works. Subsequently it significantly increased its output; in 2007, Al Sahab released more audio- and videotapes than any year of its six-year history, nearly one hundred.
These tapes were increasingly complex productions with subtitles in languages such as English, animation effects, and studio settings. As Sahab’s growing sophisticated and regular output was evidence that al-Qaeda had recovered to a degree that it was capable of managing a relatively advanced propaganda operation. Al-Qaeda the organization also evolved after 9/11 into an ideology of “bin Ladenism,” which reached a vast global audience as a result of the wide dissemination of bin Laden’s multiple statements. The Internet created a multiplier effect for his ideas. After 9/11, on constantly moving websites with names such as Alneda.com and mujahidoon.net, al-Qaeda disseminated its propaganda. Now it was no longer necessary to go to Afghanistan to sit at the feet of al-Qaeda’s leaders. Signing up for the jihad was just a click of a mouse away.
While it is certainly the case that al-Qaeda and other jihadist groups have used the Web quite adeptly for propaganda and recruitment, there is no evidence that any terrorist attack anywhere has been successfully operationalized or coordinated mainly through the Internet. It is also worth recalling that the most lethal terrorist attack in history was directed from Afghanistan under the Taliban, a country with—forget the Internet—almost no phone system and little electricity. Watching jihadist videos on the Internet may help to radicalize young men, but screening a beheading video in your pj’s doesn’t turn you into a successful terrorist or insurgent. Nor do bomb-making recipes on the Internet teach people how to kill or how to build effective bombs. That is achieved by learning on the job in a war zone or at a jihadi training camp. Indeed, the countries with the highest levels of jihadist terrorist activity in the world, such as Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Iraq, all have tiny percentages of Internet users; no more than 2 percent of their populations use the Web.
If terrorism conducted through the Internet is an overblown fear, there are two tactics that al-Qaeda could easily employ in the next few years that would have significant detrimental effects on U.S. interests. Neither has been successfully used by the group before, but both are well within the organization’s capability; unlike the threat of al-Qaeda detonating a nuclear device, they do not represent Chicken Little scenarios. The first such tactic is the use of a surface-to-air missile or bomb to bring down a commercial jetliner. Al-Qaeda has already tried such an attack, against the Israeli passenger jet in Kenya in 2002. That attempt almost succeeded, as did the abortive plot to bring down the Northwest flight over Detroit with a bomb seven years later.
The second scenario is the detonation of a radiological bomb, most likely in a European or Asian city, which would cause widespread panic, leading many to believe that terrorists had “gone nuclear,” even though a radiological “dirty bomb” is nothing like a nuclear device, only dispersing radioactive material rather than setting off an atomic explosion. A dirty-bomb attack in a Western or Asian city would kill relatively few people but it would engender panic and likely damage global investor confidence. The quest for such a device and other exotic weapons has preoccupied al-Qaeda for two decades.
Chapter 13
Al-Qaeda’s Quixotic Quest for Weapons of Mass Destruction
Acquiring nuclear and chemical weapons is a religious duty.
—Osama bin Laden in 1999
The single biggest threat to U.S. security, both short-term, medium-term, and long-term, would be the possibility of a terrorist organization obtaining a nuclear weapon.
—President Barack Obama, April 2010
Two months after 9/11, Osama bin Laden for the first time claimed publicly to possess some kind of nuclear capability. On the morning of November 8, 2001, the Saudi militant was eating a hearty meal of meat and olives as Hamid Mir, the Pakistani journalist, interviewed him in a house in Kabul. Mir remembers that bin Laden was in a jocular frame of mind, although what he had to say was anything but a laughing matter. Mir asked bin Laden to comment on reports that he had tried to acquire nuclear and chemical weapons, to which the al-Qaeda leader replied: “I wish to declare that if America used chemical or nuclear weapons aga
inst us, then we may retort with chemical and nuclear weapons. We have the weapons as deterrent.” Mir asked, “Where did you get these weapons from?” Bin Laden responded coyly: “Go to the next question.”
After the interview was finished, Mir followed up this exchange over tea with bin Laden’s deputy, Dr. Ayman al-Zawahiri. “I asked this question to Dr. al-Zawahiri: that it is difficult to believe that you have nuclear weapons. So he said, ‘Mr. Hamid Mir, it is not difficult. If you have thirty million dollars, you can have these kind of nuclear suitcase bombs from the black market of Central Asia (in the former Soviet Union).’”
These claims by al-Qaeda’s leaders about the group’s nuclear weapons capabilities had come after a long quest by the terror organization to learn about atomic weapons and acquire nuclear materials. Sensing the inadequacy of his own knowledge about nuclear weapons, Abu Khabab al-Masri, the terror group’s in-house weapons of mass destruction researcher, in a pre-9/11 memo to his al-Qaeda bosses asked if it was possible to get more information about atomic weaponry “from our Pakistani friends who have great experience in this sphere.”
For that information al-Qaeda’s leaders turned to Dr. Sultan Bashiruddin Mahmood, a recently retired senior Pakistani nuclear scientist in his early sixties whose bushy beard advertised his deep attachment to the Taliban. After studying nuclear engineering in Britain in the 1960s, Mahmood had spent nearly four decades working in the heart of Pakistan’s nuclear program and helped to develop the Kahuta facility near Islamabad that produced enriched uranium for nuclear devices, although he was never directly involved in the production of nuclear weaponry.
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