by Andy Lamey
It is not hard to imagine the impression Hannachi and Kamel would have made on Ressam. As his thirtieth birthday drew closer, Ressam had no legal status in Canada, had no career prospects and was thousands of miles away from his family. The two older men, by contrast, were players, “important brothers” in the local Arab community. Ressam and a half-dozen of his Algerian accomplices, several of whom were also failed refugee claimants, gradually fell into the jihadists’ orbit. As an Italian prosecutor once said of an al-Qaeda network that formed in Milan, “These are people with a lot of problems. Adapting to this country is devastating to them. In radical religious activity they found rules, a structure. It’s not just religious, it’s psychological and personal.” The same process occurred with Ressam and his displaced criminal associates. By the summer of 1997, Ressam was asking Hannachi how he might make his own trip to Afghanistan and be inducted into a full-time terror career.
A major barrier to Ressam’s goal was his lack of a passport. Here, however, Ressam finally succeeded at something. Quebec had an unusual law at the time that allowed residents to obtain a passport by presenting only a baptismal certificate. Ressam obtained a blank certificate from a local parish, found out the name of the priest who ministered there in 1971—the birth year he would provide—and forged the priest’s signature. A few weeks later, he had a perfectly legal Canadian passport under a false name, Benni Norris, and was free to travel wherever he liked.
This was true even though Canadian intelligence knew about Ressam. After being warned about Fateh Kamel by European intelligence agencies, the Canadian Security Intelligence Service (CSIS) bugged the apartment Ressam shared with three other Algerian thieves-cum-jihadis. The eavesdropping operation was focused on Kamel and his “right hand,” a fellow Bosnia veteran named Said Atmani, who came to Canada in 1995 and later moved in with Ressam. Over the course of two years, CSIS recorded hundreds of conversations in which the residents of Ressam’s apartment and their visitors denounced the West and plotted its destruction. They would refer glowingly to the Armed Islamic Group, an Algerian terror organization known by its French initials, GIA. The CSIS agents eavesdropping on Ressam’s apartment used a similar acronym for Ressam and his crew. Only in was BOG, short for “Bunch of Guys.” Rather than a lair of cold-blooded terrorists, Ressam’s dumpy apartment struck the CSIS agents as the home of a group of bumbling amateurs. With the exception of Atmani, who had seen combat, the rest seemed marginal types, their big talk a way of covering up their obvious failures and inadequacies.
By the time Ressam left for Afghanistan in March of 1998, CSIS had overheard where he was going and why. They therefore put his name on a watch list that would prevent him from re-entering Canada. Some time afterwards CSIS also passed Ressam’s details on to American intelligence. But what CSIS had not been able to overhear was that Ressam had obtained a valid passport under a different name. So despite his presence on the watch list, he would be able to travel without attracting suspicion.
Up until his departure, Ressam had continued to report to Citizenship and Immigration Canada every month. But leaving the country meant he missed an appointment, triggering an Immigration warrant for his arrest. Ressam was also wanted by the Montreal police on some outstanding criminal charges, but neither type of warrant had much effect once Ressam arrived in Afghanistan. Over the course of nine months he received combat training at two al-Qaeda camps, covering everything from knives to rocket launchers, as well as instructions in bomb-making. By February of 1999 he was in Pakistan, from where he flew via Seoul and Los Angeles back to Canada. When he presented his passport to an Immigration officer at the Vancouver airport, the false name allowed him to breeze through.
After Ressam returned to Montreal a month later, acquaintances said that he was more confident. That was not the only change. Before his trip, CSIS had managed to record hundreds of Ressam’s conversations. After visiting Afghanistan, where he was taught to avoid detection, CSIS would never catch Ressam on tape again.
Ressam’s training marked a turning point. He was now a genuinely dangerous individual. In autumn of 1999 Ressam began to seriously work toward bombing the Los Angeles airport, which he had passed through on his way back from Afghanistan (and which was why it was chosen as a target).
By this time the authorities were closing in on the Bunch of Guys. Ressam’s former roommate Atmani was the first to go. Like Ressam he was a failed refugee claimant and a petty criminal. But after he was picked up in Ontario for credit card fraud, he made a much stronger impression on authorities than Ressam had. Firefights in Bosnia and Afghanistan had left him with bullet wounds across his torso and an open wound on his buttock that still required padding. Monthly reporting would clearly not do in his case, and Atmani was swiftly deported to Bosnia. Soon afterwards the BOG suffered an even bigger blow when their ringleader, Fateh Kamel, was arrested in Jordan and taken to France on terrorism charges. Ressam’s name came up during Kamel’s interrogation with French intelligence, and they pressured Canada to bring in Ressam next.
The Royal Canadian Mounted Police complied by raiding a Montreal apartment where Ressam was sleeping. Ressam, however, managed to escape down a back alley. Undeterred by his near arrest, he recruited an untrained fellow Algerian to fly with him to Vancouver, from where they would try to execute their Los Angeles plan before the millennium. By this point Ressam had built an entire identity around his fake passport, making it difficult if not impossible for the authorities to catch him.
Ressam and his rookie accomplice checked in to the 2400 Motel on the outskirts of Vancouver and asked for the bungalow farthest from the road. During their two-week stay, they struck the cleaning lady as a strange pair. They asked her to clean their cabin as infrequently as possible. When she came by they insisted she leave the clean sheets outside and forbade her from ever entering the rear bedroom. Their habit of leaving the windows open during November also seemed suspicious. Passersby could smell a strange chemical odour, like some overwhelming and toxic cologne.
Inside the bungalow, the two men were using notes Ressam had taken in Afghanistan to build a bomb. Their mixture of hexamine, citric acid and hydrogen peroxide could be set off by an accidental jolt, and the process they were using gave off toxic fumes, which the pair tried to ward off by sucking on lozenges. The splitting headaches the chemicals caused, though, were something they simply had to endure. Ressam was also suffering from malaria, caused by a mosquito bite in Afghanistan, and this sometimes made it difficult for him to get out of bed. As if that were not bad enough, he also spilled some chemicals on himself. After burning through his jeans, they left a scar on his thigh. Finally, after the two men decided that one person would attract less attention going over the border, Ressam’s accomplice returned to Montreal. It was now left to Ressam to travel by rental car and ferry into the United States.
Al-Qaeda had trained Ressam in bomb-making, but he had to sort out the logistics of his trip on his own. Here the old bumbling Ressam returned with a vengeance. His operation was premised on the strange idea that rather than drive into the United States and assemble his explosives there, it would be best to drive through customs with a bomb kit in the trunk of his car. A second problem was Ressam’s belief that he would attract less attention travelling alone: solo travellers receive more scrutiny from border guards than people in pairs. His decision to take a ferry has likewise been termed “a serious intelligence error,” insofar as ferry passengers receive more attention from customs than drivers at land crossings. Among other drawbacks, Ressam would have to go through two inspections rather than one.
The route Ressam took was a roundabout one that involved three separate ferries, one inside Canada, one across the border and one inside the United States. When he arrived at his second ferry terminal, on Vancouver Island, an American pre-inspection agent asked where he was going. Even though his circular itinerary was clearly impractical, Ressam told the agent that he was on a short business trip, a discrepancy that resulted
in his car being searched. After his trunk turned out to contain only some luggage with clothes, Ressam was waved on board, free to try his luck with the second inspection that would occur when he got off the ferry.
Here Ressam’s mistake was to hold back until he was the last car, not realizing this would only heighten suspicion. By the time he rolled up to the female customs agent waiting onshore, Ressam was sweating and fidgeting, causing her to wonder if he might be a drug smuggler. After she asked Ressam to step out of the car, two other agents went through his trunk. This time they unscrewed the fastener on the spare tire well and looked inside. “Hey, we’ve got something here,” one of them called out. Ressam took off, followed by border agents who captured him several blocks away. He has been in prison ever since.
What are the lessons of the Ahmed Ressam affair? How we answer this question depends on which period we have in mind—before or after his transformation into a terrorist. In regard to the pre-terrorist Ressam, he spent two years passing through Canada’s refugee determination system before he became the responsibility of Citizenship and Immigration Canada, which carried out deportations. The amount of time it took to officially reject his refugee claim is a reminder that refugee systems, like legal systems, often grind slowly. During the same period Ressam was in Canada, for example, it took Western European countries an average of three years to decide refugee claims. The handling of the pre-terrorist Ressam is a reflection of the bureaucratic nature of most asylum systems, of which Canada’s is no exception.
Being bureaucratic is one thing. But failing to deport Ressam after he left the refugee system was a serious breakdown. With an under-resourced Immigration Department, violent types like Atmani took priority, and a petty hoodlum like Ressam could all too easily fall through the cracks. Yet even if Canada had adequately funded deportations, it is unlikely that Ressam would have made a swift exit. Undemocratic regimes like the one that ran Algeria in the 1990s sometimes refuse to take in nationals who have committed crimes abroad. They can stonewall deportations through various means, such as demanding proof that the person in question is in fact a citizen. As the proof often involves documents that only the same regime can provide, the possibility arises for a country to drag out a deportation. According to Elinor Caplan, Canada’s minister of immigration at the time of Ressam’s arrest, this happened with Ressam. “Bottom line, we couldn’t get travel documents,” she said in 2001. “We have a number of countries [where] it takes a lot of time to get travel documents unless the information and identity documents are clear.”
In 1997, a third factor emerged that prevented Ressam’s deportation. In March of that year, Canada placed a moratorium on deportations to Algeria. The moratorium, which was later adopted by Germany, the United Kingdom and other countries, was invoked after violence in the Algerian civil war reached a new level of horror. As Amnesty International noted in 1997, “This year alone Algerians have been slain in their thousands with unspeakable brutality—decapitated, mutilated and burned alive in their homes … We can think of no other country where human rights violations are so extreme.” Amnesty pointed to a massacre in Ressam’s hometown of Bou Ismail, where a family of twelve were murdered with the seeming approval of local authorities.
In their different ways, then, Immigration officials in Canada and Algeria were both responsible for the failure to deport Ressam the petty criminal before the moratorium took effect. Ressam’s transformation from common criminal to bomber, however, confirms the adage that terrorists are made, not born. And if there is one institution implicated in Ressam’s metamorphosis, it is the Canadian passport office. Having a passport in a false name is what allowed Ressam to travel to Afghanistan for terrorist training. Having a passport is what allowed him to sail through customs at Los Angeles airport and re-enter Canada, even though CSIS had given his name to Federal Bureau of Investigation and despite his presence on the Canadian no-entry list. And having a passport, finally, is what allowed Ressam to live under a new identity after warrants were issued for his arrest.
Ressam was able to obtain a legal travel document because of the lax procedure that allowed Quebec residents to obtain passports with no more than a baptismal certificate. “This is the kind of thing we would see all the time from Third World countries,” Peter Showler says, referring to documents presented to him during refugee hearings. “There’s no standardized state-issued document: all you’ve got is this little wrinkled piece of paper, all written in ink, signed by the parish priest.” When Quebec law was changed in October of 2001 to make passport requirements more stringent, it was an appropriate response to the major institutional shortcoming that had allowed Ressam the terrorist to operate.
Ressam did not receive terrorist training until the spring of 1998, two years after his final brush with the refugee system. It is therefore a gross distortion to portray his case as one in which an extremist used the refugee system to try to execute a terror plot. Such a false view is potentially damaging, as it risks spreading hysteria about refugee applicants being terrorists. A false understanding might also divert attention away from the institutional failures that did enable Ressam’s journey into terror. Whether we are concerned with protecting refugees or with preventing national security risks, therefore, we should hope to see the facts of Ressam’s case correctly recorded and the right lessons carefully drawn.
Unfortunately, one of the primary lessons of Ressam’s case is how easily the truth can be replaced by a legend. The real Ahmed Ressam has long since disappeared and been replaced by a destructive myth, one in which the passport office features only intermittently, if at all, in Ressam’s transformation. The revisionism began at the time of Ressam’s capture, when conflicting reports appeared in Canadian newspapers. Among the most significant was a story on the front page of the National Post under the headline “Algeria Considered Suspect a Terrorist: Despite Admission, Canada Did Not Deport Ressam.”
According to the Post, Ressam had been a terrorist from the moment he landed in Canada: “[Ressam] admitted to Canadian immigration authorities more than five years ago that he had been arrested in Algeria on suspicion he was an Islamic terrorist … Despite the admission in his refugee form, it appears Mr. Ressam, described by U.S. authorities as a serious terrorist threat, was not under police investigation.”
The Post took at face value the false story of persecution Ressam had included in his old asylum application. That application contained the following sentence: “To them [the Algerian government], I was but an Islamist terrorist, even though I had no ties to the Islamist movement.” Re-examined five years after it was submitted, Ressam’s asylum sheet seemed to show that he had a connection to Islamism when he first landed in Montreal. It is not hard to see why such a connection would have seemed plausible in the aftermath of Ressam’s bombing attempt. And yet the Post’s version of events was based on dubious assumptions no one thought to check. One was that terrorism allegations made by the Algerian government, a perpetrator of major human rights violations, did not require corroboration. The other assumption was that a real terrorist trying to sneak through the refugee system would not keep his membership in an extremist group a secret, but advertise it upon arrival.
When Ressam had written in his refugee application that he was suspected of selling weapons in Algeria, he had been making up a story. Now that story was taken as fact. Ressam’s terrorist career was effectively backdated. It was this revised image of Ressam that would define subsequent retellings of his story. Certainly such was the case eight days after Ressam’s capture when the Globe and Mail editorialized against Canada’s becoming a staging ground for terrorists. “The wisdom of allowing people with fake passports into the country to make refugee claims is at best dubious,” the Globe argued, proposing a policy change many other commentators would echo.
Shortly thereafter, the U.S. Congress held hearings to determine what factors had allowed Ressam to operate. David Harris, a former CSIS official turned Ottawa consultant, travel
led to Washington to offer testimony. “Absurd refugee laws,” Harris told the committee, “commonly see ostensible applicants disappearing underground in Canada and the U.S.” Harris seemed unaware that Ressam had been reporting to Immigration before he acquired a passport, or that Harris’s own former agency had been monitoring Ressam during the same period.
Eight months after Harris’s testimony, September 11 happened. The backdated version of Ahmed Ressam was suddenly everywhere. The Canadian Broadcasting Corporation aired a documentary about Ressam, “Trail of a Terrorist,” that took it for granted that he arrived in Canada as a terrorist. It also introduced a new twist. Narrator Terence McKenna noted that Ressam’s asylum application had been turned down, yet he still referred to Ressam as an “Algerian refugee,” confusingly (and contradictorily) suggesting that Ressam’s claim was bona fide or had been accepted. The Canadian Press would express a similar idea in a more straightforward way when it flatly declared, “Ressam was accepted in Canada as a refugee.”
It was the original myth, the one that backdated Ressam’s involvement in terror, that would have the most legs. In October 2001 the Public Broadcasting Service rebroadcast “Trail of a Terrorist” in the United States. An extensive website accompanied the program under the title “Is Canada a Safe Haven for Terrorists?” Politicians, security analysts and low-immigration advocates were asked about the mythical Ressam’s arrival in Canada. An exchange with Texas congressman Lamar Smith was typical:
When Ahmed Ressam came to Canada, he claimed refugee status, and he admitted apparently that he had been in jail in Algeria and had been convicted of weapons offenses and accused of terrorism. Nothing apparently happened. What should have happened?
