I was the only FBI agent continuously working in Amman on the millennium threat, as the other agents rotated in and out of the country—usually for two weeks at a time. We worked from the U.S. Embassy and shared space with the [1 word redacted]. Before I arrived I had been warned about the [4 words redacted], whom I will call Fred. He had been a translator at the FBI New York office and had applied to be an agent but had been rejected, after which he had joined the CIA. He was said to have held a grudge against all FBI agents after that.
My problems with him started within the first couple of days, after Pat D’Amuro received a phone call from FBI headquarters saying that my reporting of intelligence and Fred’s reporting of the same events didn’t match up. This meant that Washington didn’t know whose information to trust. The further problem was that American citizens were involved, and if intelligence didn’t match, we would have difficulty prosecuting the case.
An investigation was done and the Jordanians were consulted, and all concerned were advised that my reporting was correct and Fred’s was faulty. Fred’s basic failure was that he had a tendency to jump to conclusions without facts. For example, in one memo he reported that the group that had been identified within Jordan was training with the Lebanese terrorist group Hezbollah, which he also took to mean that the Jordanian group was linked to Iran as well, as Iran is Hezbollah’s main sponsor. In my reporting I made no mention of Hezbollah and said only that the Jordanians were linked to Palestinian terrorist groups. Fred drew this faulty conclusion because the Jordanian group had trained in the Bekaa Valley: he knew that Hezbollah operated in the Bekaa Valley, so that was his “proof” of Hezbollah’s involvement. Because of his flawed analysis, a total of twelve [2 words redacted]—intelligence reports—had to be withdrawn. If portions of a cable are shown to be inaccurate, the entire cable is viewed as unreliable and suspect. The presumption is that one can’t trust the accuracy of the person writing it; therefore, it’s rendered useless. Happily, the problems with the [1 word redacted] did not impair our working relationship with the GID, which carried over into the personal. Our partners regularly took us to dinner and even family events. We enjoyed each other’s company and appreciated being able to share skills and impart different insights.
Months after we had left Jordan, Saad and his team came to visit us in New York. John O’Neill and Pat D’Amuro rolled out the red carpet. The operatives who had worked with us in the field honored me by having dinner at my place, a small one-bedroom apartment. It was the evening of the NFL Super Bowl, and it was snowing. My partner Steve Bongardt; Mark Rossini, the FBI agent detailed to the CIA’s Counterterrorism Center; Fred; and assistant U.S. attorney Pat Fitzgerald all attended. We ate and joked for hours, and it was a night to remember.
During the Jordanian investigation, the GID gave the [2 words redacted] chief of operations, Alvin—later the CTC’s Sunni extremists chief—a box of evidence to go through. Alvin took it into his office, dumped it in the corner, and never looked through it. Nor did he tell me or my FBI colleagues about it. The division of labor in this instance was that Saad had delegated the task to Alvin, trusting him to go through the box carefully.
A few days later I was chatting with Alvin in his office and noticed the box in the corner. “What’s in there?” I asked.
“Oh, it’s nothing,” he said. “The Jordanians gave us junk to look through.” His view was that if it was important, the Jordanians wouldn’t have just passed it along to us.
“Let me take a look,” I said, and started going through it. It was far from being junk. “Alvin, this is important stuff here,” I told him, pulling out one piece as an example. It was a map, with a few locations marked on a route from Israel to Jordan.
Alvin and I returned the evidence to Saad so that his officers could start following the leads. It was winter in Amman, and when we walked into Saad’s office he was sitting behind his desk at GID headquarters smoking Mu‘assel out of a hookah, the picture of an Ottoman overlord. “You really look like a pasha,” I said.
“Ali, come here, come here and give me a hug,” he said, beaming.
The CIA became uncomfortable with the relationship we had built with the Jordanians. One day Saad took Pat D’Amuro to a family celebration. The next day, the [1 word redacted] voiced his disapproval to Pat. He was furious that Saad had invited Pat without him. Another evening, two GID officers invited us to an iftar, a breaking of the fast during Ramadan; [7 words redacted]. Apparently Fred complained to Alvin, who, without checking with us first on the circumstances, and believing whatever Fred had told him, passed a complaint to one of Saad’s deputies: “Your guys”—he named the two GID officers—“are dealing with the FBI without authorization.” The deputy reported the complaint to Saad.
Saad called the two officers in. “What are they referring to?” he asked them.
“We invited Ali and the other FBI agent to an iftar with us,” the senior officer replied. “Apparently the [1 word redacted] thought we should have asked their permission first.”
Saad laughed. “Those guys,” he said, waving his hand dismissively, “when will they grow up?”
On November 30, 1999, the [1 word redacted] intercepted a phone call between Abu Hoshar and Abu Zubaydah during which Abu Zubaydah said, “The time for training is over.” There was no context. The Jordanians, understandably, didn’t want to take chances. They rounded up all the individuals we had been monitoring; sixteen were taken in, including Abu Hoshar. Deek and Abu Zubaydah were in Pakistan, and Hijazi was in Syria, so they were not among those detained.
The Jordanians interrogated the operatives and quickly gained confessions and some additional details of the plot. Hijazi’s younger brother and co-conspirator revealed the motto for the millennium attacks: “The season is coming, and bodies will pile up in sacks.” The information the operatives gave included the location of hideouts. The [1 word redacted] raided several, recovering detonators (including the walkie-talkies Hijazi had purchased in London), weapons, forged passports, and the CD version of Deek’s Encyclopedia of Jihad.
Initially we couldn’t find any chemicals. The operatives were questioned further, and one explained where a trapdoor for the makeshift basement could be found. His directions led [1 word redacted] officers to the spot. When the hatch was opened, a terrible stench drifted up. A ladder was in place, and one of my [1 word redacted] friends was sent down it. He rushed back up a few seconds later and said that the basement was full of urns of chemicals. The acids were leaking and the floor was covered. The [1 word redacted] official started coughing and shouted, “I’ve been poisoned. I can’t breathe.”
He had indeed inhaled dangerous chemicals. Someone quickly brought him some milk and instructed him to drink it, telling him it would clear the poison from his system. After drinking the milk, and to the amusement of those present, he said he felt better.
After the arrest of the operatives in Jordan, and after the detainees had detailed Deek’s role in the plot, the Pakistani authorities agreed to arrest him. They raided his center and took him into custody. There he was blindfolded—with blackout goggles put over his eyes and duct tape wrapped around the goggles—making it impossible for him to see. The Pakistanis did not tell him what they would do with him.They contacted the [1 word redacted], which sent a military plane to Pakistan to pick him up. Once in Jordan, still with no one saying a word to him, and still blindfolded, he was taken to a [1 word redacted] jail and placed before a picture of King Abdullah II, who had assumed power ten months earlier, after the death of his father, King Hussein.
Only then were the goggles and duct tape removed. It took a few seconds for Deek’s eyes to adjust to the light. He focused on the picture in front of him. His face dropped. He knew that the game was up and that the plot had failed.
Another graduate of Abu Zubaydah’s Khaldan camp was Ahmed Ressam. A wily Algerian, he falsely claimed political asylum in Canada in 1994, using a fake passport and a story about persecution. He support
ed himself in Canada through crime and dealing in fake passports. While there he met a veteran of Khaldan who recommended that he head there for training.
Before he left for Khaldan in 1998, Ressam acquired a legitimate Canadian passport through a fixer who had stolen a blank baptism certificate from a church. Using the passport, he traveled easily to Pakistan and then to Afghanistan, where he went to Khaldan. There he received basic terrorism training and learned how to build explosives. He got to know Abu Zubaydah, who was impressed with Ressam’s ability to procure passports and quickly put him to work. Eventually Ressam returned to Canada, with the intention of planning an attack in the United States with other Algerians he had met at Khaldan. They spent time discussing and planning attacks, with Abu Zubaydah offering advice on launching them. Ressam returned to Canada fully expecting his fellow Algerians to follow him. When they couldn’t get the documents to enter the country, he decided to strike without them. He rented a Chrysler sedan, hid explosives in the spare tire, and drove to the car ferry at Victoria, Canada, which was to sail to Port Angeles, Washington. He intended his final destination to be Los Angeles International Airport, which he would bomb on the millennium.
On December 14, I was called into a secure room in the U.S. Embassy in Amman to receive a call from FBI headquarters. They told me that an Algerian named Ahmed Ressam had been arrested trying to bring explosives into the United States from Canada. They didn’t yet know exactly what he intended to do, but they suspected a millennium attack.
While Ressam had cleared the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) preinspection station in Victoria—his passport was a legitimate Canadian one, so there were no red flags—it was his suspicious activity on the other end that prompted the attention of an astute customs official. Rather than getting off the ferry with his Chrysler when it was his turn, Ressam waited for every one of the other drivers to get their vehicles off first. Apparently he thought that the last car off would receive less attention. The customs officer noticed not only this but the fact that Ressam seemed nervous, and he referred him to an official for a secondary inspection.
When the agent at the secondary inspection began to pat Ressam down—a standard procedure—he panicked and tried to run away. He was quickly stopped, and his car was searched. At first, the customs staff thought that he was connected to drug smuggling, but once the timing devices were found they realized that there was a bigger issue, and the FBI was called in to take over.
I shared this information with the Jordanians. It seemed, from our inquiries, that Ressam might possibly be connected to the other millennium bombers—all or most had trained at Khaldan. Ressam’s apprehension underscored the importance of Abu Zubaydah’s camp and provided a warning that terrorists were plotting to strike not only Jordan but elsewhere.
Having learned that Deek and Abu Zubaydah worked closely with the UK-based operative Mozzam Begg to raise funds, we passed this information on to our friends in SO13 and MI5. The British authorities were already aware of Begg’s activities and his connections to suspected terrorists in Pakistan and Afghanistan.
I worked in both Jordan and the UK during this period. One morning in 2000, while I was in England working with SO13 on a separate investigation, a clearly surprised Alan Fry and John Bunn told me that MI5 and SO12 (the intelligence counterpart to SO13) had raided al-Ansar, a bookstore operated by Begg, and Begg’s home in Birmingham. They had arrested him. Because SO13 hadn’t spent time building a case against him, however, after a preliminary interview he was released—and, like Liby in Manchester, escaped the country. We only caught Begg years later in Pakistan, after 9/11.
Bassam Kanj was born in Lebanon in 1965. In 1984 he moved to the United States and married an American woman, becoming a naturalized U.S. citizen. He then followed a path that was becoming familiar to us: fighting the Soviets in Afghanistan, he returned to the United States when the war ended and in subsequent years regularly traveled back to Afghanistan to train at Khaldan.
It was under Abu Zubaydah that he picked up the alias Abu A’isha and met Raed Hijazi, Khalil Deek, and others with U.S. citizenship who frequented the master terrorist facilitator’s camp. In 1995 Kanj moved to Boston and started driving a cab for the same company as Hijazi. The two were good friends. They had roomed together before Kanj was married and continued to share quarters when Kanj’s wife was away. In 1998 Kanj left the United States and went to Lebanon, where he joined a radical group that called itself Takfir wal-Hijra.
On New Year’s Eve 1999, Kanj led a group of around 150 Sunni terrorists to the Dinnieh mountain region in northern Lebanon. The group was predominantly Palestinians and Syrians; Kanj had met many of them in training camps in Afghanistan. Their stated aim was to impose Sharia law in Lebanon.
They first ambushed an army unit in the village of Assoun, killing a few soldiers and kidnapping a commanding officer. When the Lebanese army sent in troops, the terrorists went on a rampage and for four days battled the troops, killing anyone who got in their way. The slaughter did nothing to further the terrorists’ singleminded devotion to their goal of imposing Sharia law. Another in the millennium series of plots was disrupted.
With Abu Hoshar, Deek, and the others in custody in Amman—and the group’s explosive materials confiscated—we had successfully thwarted the plot in Jordan. Those who were jailed provided significant information about the terrorist network. The only loose ends we knew about were Hijazi, who was still on the run—when we rounded up the suspects, he had been traveling back from Pakistan, and was somewhere in Syria, and so he never returned to Jordan—and Abu Zubaydah, who was somewhere in Afghanistan or Pakistan.
Until the millennium dawned, however, we obviously wouldn’t know for certain whether we had apprehended everyone. I stayed in Jordan, and on New Year’s Eve I went with Stephen Gaudin (then rotating in the country) to Abdin Circle, the main square in Amman: the Jordanian equivalent of Times Square. We told the New York FBI office we’d update them on what did or didn’t occur.
As the clock struck midnight, we heard small explosions and saw people running in every direction. We ran behind a parked car to take cover. What had we missed?
I asked people in Arabic what was happening. It turned out that a stage holding fireworks had collapsed, sending them shooting into the crowd. Stephen and I looked at each other with relief and started laughing.
I called the New York FBI office from my phone and was put through to John O’Neill in the JTTF command center in New York. “Jordan’s okay. Everything is good,” I told him.
“Happy New Year,” he said. “You guys did a great job.”
I put my cell phone back in my jacket and turned around to speak to Stephen, who had been standing next to me, but he wasn’t there. Then I saw him in the distance at an ATM. Like everyone, he had been reading stories of accounts getting messed up at the millennium—switching from 1999 to 2000 was said to be hard for bank computers—so he wanted to check that his money was safe.
He withdrew some cash, saw that his account was untouched, and walked back to me smiling and waving his Jordanian banknotes.
PART 3
* * *
USS COLE
8
* * *
A Naval Destroyer in Yemen?
The terrorists sitting in Bayt Habra, a safe house in Sanaa, nodded in agreement. They wouldn’t ask bin Laden for his approval of their operation. It was a tough decision for them, but they felt that it was the right one. While they revered their emir, they knew that the al-Qaeda leader felt a close personal connection to Yemen: his father had been born there, and one of his wives was a Yemeni. The operatives doubted that he could bless an operation against the Yemeni government. But they had to act; their friend Abul al-Hasan al-Mihdhar would soon be executed. On May 5 he had been sentenced to death in a Yemeni court. What they had in mind was no less than Mihdhar’s rescue from jail. To fund the operation, they planned a series of car thefts. It was May 1999.
On December 28
, 1998, Mihdhar’s group, the Islamic Army of Aden-Abyan, had kidnapped sixteen Western hostages (twelve Britons, two Americans, and two Australians) who were touring Yemen. The group had announced that they would release the hostages only if the Yemeni government released nine Islamists being held in jail and if international sanctions on Iraq were lifted. The Yemeni government had refused to accept their demands and had launched a rescue operation the next day.
When the kidnappers saw Yemeni soldiers approaching, they took cover behind the hostages and started firing at the soldiers. During an intense firefight, two kidnappers and four hostages—three Britons and one Australian—were killed. The Yemenis arrested the remaining kidnappers and rounded up any members of the group they could find. Mihdhar himself was captured and brought before a judge, who sentenced him to death. His friends and fellow terrorists in Yemen, among them many al-Qaeda members, resolved to rescue him—they just wouldn’t tell bin Laden.
To fund the rescue operation, Mihdhar’s supporters had come up with the car theft plan. They would steal and then sell cars from an American rental company in Yemen. With the proceeds, they would buy weapons and vehicles. Before they got very far, the Yemeni authorities learned of the plot and made numerous arrests. The Yemeni Criminal Investigative Division (CID) raided the al-Qaeda safe house in Sanaa after learning that al-Qaeda members were involved.
One of the al-Qaeda terrorists staying in the safe house at the time of the raid was Abu Jandal. He had recently returned to Yemen to get married—at least that’s what he’d told bin Laden. He confided to friends that finding a bride wasn’t the only reason he had left Afghanistan. He was unhappy with bin Laden’s pledging bayat to Mullah Omar, the leader of the Taliban, and with bin Laden’s endorsement of the honorific bestowed upon Mullah Omar in 1996 following the Cloak of the Prophet spectacle: Amir al-Mu’minin. Abu Jandal felt that al-Qaeda’s aligning itself with the Taliban was a distraction from the organization’s broader goals. It was not what he had signed up for.
The Black Banners Page 17
