by J. M. Berger
Uqdah maintained a roster of the names of U.S. servicemen who had converted to Islam during the Gulf War. His younger brother was one of them. The former marine helped Philips identify Muslim soldiers who were close to finishing their obligation to the U.S. armed forces—newly minted veterans who would form the core of the Bosnia training brigade.35
According to Philips, about a dozen soldiers were recruited through the end of 1992, including several Special Forces veterans. Tahir personally escorted the vets to Bosnia in two groups of five or six people at a time. The American trainers did not go unnoticed in Bosnia, although the secret of how they got there was known to only a few.36
The Americans set up shop outside of Tuzla, the third largest city in Bosnia and home to a retired airfield used during the communist era to train fighter pilots, one of the few usable airstrips remaining in the country. Most of the trainers apparently left after instructing a small group of mujahideen, but some stayed to fight.37
In the fall of 1992, Philips and Tahir were trying to gather a third group of American military veterans to make the journey, but Tahir had to drop out. His reasons are unknown, but the next stop on his journey is not. He showed up on the doorstep of Osama bin Laden.
Tahir was believed to be a member of al Qaeda. He had gone to Afghanistan originally under the aegis of Mustafa Shalabi and trained in an al Qaeda camp. He was soon promoted to be a trainer himself, instructing recruits in weapons and close-quarters combat, according to an al Qaeda informant. Bin Laden had sent him to Bosnia on a scouting mission.38 In New York, Tahir had been responsible for targeting African American Muslims on behalf of al Qaeda, in response to bin Laden’s strong interest in recruiting U.S. citizens.39
Sometime after Tahir left the Bosnia training project, he showed up in Sudan with his children in tow, according to the informant. He believed— correctly—that he was under investigation in the United States and that he could not safely return. He was promptly escorted into a meeting with Osama bin Laden and Abu Ubaidah al Banshiri, who was al Qaeda’s military commander at the time.
Tahir was rumored to have been involved in Al Qaeda’s first official terrorist attack, a hotel bombing in Aden, Yemen, in December 1992, not long after he left the Bosnia project. Al Qaeda subsequently sent him to Somalia, the informant said, in response to an American humanitarian mission that would go disastrously wrong, thanks in part to the terrorist group’s intervention (see chapter 6). Bilal Philips, interviewed in 2010, strongly disputed the informant’s claim that Tahir was a member of al Qaeda.
From what I understand, people who, I’ve heard, had links or whatever, there’s a mindset you know, an approach to life and the role of Muslims, and jihad, and this kind of thing. And I never heard Tahir speaking that way. So, I don’t believe so. Because, see, when you’re locked into that, you know, then it’s gonna come out in your conversation.
You know, you feel close to somebody, somebody you can trust, and we were fairly close. I mean, for that limited period of time. So, I think that if this was the idea, I think they were involved in recruiting people. So I would think that he would have tried to recruit me, if that were the case. And there was nothing, nothing of that nature at all. So I think that is really a red herring.40
Intelligence sources are sometimes weak, sometimes strong. The intelligence connecting Tahir to al Qaeda was strong. In 1996 U.S. prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald went to meet the aforementioned al Qaeda informant with a book full of photographs. The informant identified Tahir from one of the photographs and provided biographical details that matched information from other sources. A source familiar with the case confirmed that the man described in the debriefing was the same man who worked on the Bosnia project with Philips.41 In 2010 I developed a possible lead on Tahir’s whereabouts, but several efforts to reach him through intermediaries were unsuccessful.
Before he left the United States, Tahir handed the Bosnia project over to a trusted friend whom he had met during his time in Afghanistan: Abdullah Rashid, the mujahid from Brooklyn who had nearly lost his leg fighting the Soviets.
PASSING THE BATON
Rashid had been watching the developments in Bosnia with great interest. Afghanistan was being “squashed” by intra-Muslim warfare, in his opinion. Bosnia was the new front for Islam and a clear moral imperative, in his view.
I think it was a disgrace in the sight of humanity that these people was under the heading of ethnic cleansing, setting up rape camps, raping women and killing, killing children, and I looked at it in the same form of genocide that was going on with the Germans that killed the Jews, that people would kill the Africans that came here, before they came here and any other form of genocide, what happened in Afghanistan and everything else. So I thought it was my duty to try to do something as an individual.42
In August Rashid was offered an opportunity to act by Tahir. At first, Tahir tried to recruit Rashid into the program as a trainer himself. Rashid’s spirit was willing, but his injured leg was weak. Instead, they agreed, he could serve the cause by training others before they left U.S. soil.
When Tahir left the United States in late 1992, he asked Rashid to take over. In December he called Rashid and sent him to Washington, D.C., to meet Bilal Philips and receive further instructions.
When Rashid arrived in Washington, he was met by a U.S. Marine sergeant roughly matching Qaseem Uqdah’s description. Rashid would not reveal the man’s real name, but Philips confirmed that Uqdah was part of the project in a role similar to that described by Rashid. Uqdah refused to be interviewed for this book but did not deny his involvement in the program when given the opportunity (see details at the end of this chapter).43
As Rashid told the story, the two men drove to the embassy of Saudi Arabia, where they were searched twice before being escorted inside to meet with Philips and a Saudi prince. Philips did not recall this event and felt that it was unlikely to have happened, given the nature of the program, which he said had no official sanction.44
According to Rashid, he chatted with the prince for a while, then Philips entered the room and explained the project. After the meeting, Rashid visited the marine’s home. The soldier gave him army training manuals on combat, sniper techniques, and machine gunnery. The next day the marine showed Rashid around Fort Belvoir.
As Rashid described it, the marine’s role in the project was to obtain the names of U.S. soldiers who would be leaving the military soon and could be approached to go on the next mission to Bosnia, corresponding to the role Philips described for former marine Uqdah.45
Rashid returned to New York with an agenda and a promise of financing to come. He also had help from another former marine named Abu Ubaidah Yahya, whom Tahir had recommended.
But there were obstacles ahead.
Despite significant bureaucratic hurdles, the Joint Terrorism Task Force was by now actively circling the group of radicals who had gathered around Omar Abdel Rahman. And Rashid was at the center of the storm.
“The name of Abdul Rashid had come up to us, ‘Doctor’ Rashid,” recalled Tom Corrigan, an NYPD detective on the JTTF. “We went out to our sources, the people knew him, but we couldn’t get an address on him or a location or a phone number on him. He was kind of famous in the community because any time you mentioned that name, the first thing that came up was he’s a guy who fought overseas. He went overseas, he had been wounded overseas.”
On his return to New York, Rashid reached out to Garrett Wilson, an imposingly large veteran who worked as a Defense Department police officer by day and a security consultant and trainer by night. Unfortunately for Rashid, Wilson was also a government informant.
Wilson had become concerned about the paramilitary nature of the requests he was receiving from Black Muslim clients in New York and elsewhere. He started running his business contacts past the Naval Intelligence Service, which eventually loaned him out to the JTTF in New York.
The JTTF team had been trying to penetrate the intrigues whirling arou
nd the Al Kifah Center. Wilson arranged a meeting with Rashid in late December 1992—a watershed moment because Rashid left his home phone number on Wilson’s pager. With that number, the JTTF investigators discovered Rashid’s real name and his address, opening the door on new leads and enabling more aggressive surveillance.
Ubaidah and Rashid met with Wilson because they wanted to buy untraceable handguns and shotguns. They wanted training in how to neutralize guards, how to escape surveillance, rappelling, the construction of booby traps, and the use of chemical weapons. Rashid also asked for bomb detonators.
Although Ubaidah told Wilson that the training and the supplies were for Bosnia, Corrigan and other JTTF members were alarmed by the urban warfare element in Rashid’s requests and suspected that a campaign of domestic terrorism was in the works.
Many of the requests were, in fact, consistent with operations being staged in Bosnia, a real-life urban war zone. Rappelling, for instance, was prominently featured in propaganda videotapes produced in Bosnia, and there were reports of chemical weapons being used on the ground by both sides.
The guns and the detonators were a different matter. Corrigan’s sense of urgency was merited. Just how much would soon become clear.
TRAINING THE TRAINERS
Rashid returned from the Washington, D.C., meeting with new energy and a packed schedule, but his efforts to replicate Tahir’s program ran into trouble. Although he had received several leads on veterans who might be able to serve as trainers, he wasn’t able to close the deal and put together a team.
Rashid called Philips with a counterproposal—he would train nonveteran Muslim volunteers in the United States, then send the trainees along to Bosnia. Philips agreed and provided him with money to get started. “It was left for him to handle,” Philips said.46
That may not have been the wisest decision. Rashid’s first step was to open a martial arts dojo in a windowless, decrepit Brooklyn studio. With more enthusiasm than pragmatism, he lined the walls with exotic weapons: crossbows, ninja throwing stars, swords, blowguns, and nunchucks.
Out of sight, behind the flashy toys, he stockpiled rifle and shotgun ammunition and equipment for detonating explosives—but no guns or assembled bombs. He also kept a library of military manuals, including those that the marine had provided in Washington.
The search for recruits began. Siddig Ali was a skinny, fired-up Sudanese immigrant who worked as a translator for Omar Abdel Rahman. In late 1992 Siddig had been tapped to give a speech about jihad to area Muslims. After the speech, he was approached by Saffet Catovic, an American citizen of Bosnian descent with ties to Hasan Cengic. Through Catovic, Siddig was introduced to another Bosnian, who brought him to meet Rashid.47
With Siddig’s help, Rashid organized a training camp in rural Pennsylvania, where recruits from New York and Philadelphia practiced for several weekends in the frigid winter air. The group was a mix of immigrants and Americans, and they trained in martial arts, rappelling, and light weapons, including grenades and assault rifles. There were about forty members to start, which Rashid and Siddig winnowed down to ten men sufficiently fit and competent to go to Bosnia.
Although Rashid was the nominal head of the program, most of the trainees answered to Siddig Ali and also had individual allegiances to Omar Abdel Rahman—which is not to say that the sheikh was particularly pleased about the program.
Rahman grumbled to one of the trainees that he didn’t trust Siddig’s religion or his money. Unhappy about being upstaged by Rashid’s wealthy Saudi patrons, Rahman encouraged his followers to stay away from the program, without success. He also expressed skepticism that Siddig—or anyone else—was actually going to Bosnia.48
Rahman’s suspicions on the last point were well founded. Although Siddig talked about Bosnia obsessively, he was planning to take action closer to home.
Regardless, thanks to Rashid’s influence, the training was intensely focused on Bosnia at every turn. Lectures discussed the challenges of warfare on Bosnian terrain and what the trainers imagined might be useful skills over there. In one exercise, the trainees practiced storming a “Serbian” power plant, using a local facility.
“He gets his training, he goes to Bosnia, I mean he relies on Allah and see, Allah may improve it for the Muslims through them,” Siddig said on a surveillance tape. “He who will be a martyr, thank Allah the Lord of the universe and he who stays alive, he still will be trained!”49
Rashid’s top trainer, Abu Ubaidah, ran some of the sessions. Rashid himself was often absent, although he had arranged the location and outfitted the participants with guns and other military supplies.
Unbeknownst to Siddig and his friends, others were in attendance for the camp’s inaugural session: a five-man FBI surveillance team tracking the group. The surveillance was short-lived, terminated due to a lack of support from headquarters—an unfortunate decision.50 On a subsequent trip, Siddig carried out a little “experiment” for a friend named Mahmud Abouhalima—a key player in the World Trade Center bombing, which was still in the planning stages.
Although Siddig and Abouhalima moved in many of the same circles, they were pursuing their projects independently. In early 1993 Abouhalima asked Siddig for a favor: would he test-explode a bomb design Abouhalima was working on? After consulting with Rashid, Siddig agreed to conduct the experiment, and some of the Pennsylvania trainees may have detonated the test bomb in January 1993.51
The bomb’s design came from Ramzi Yousef. While the JTTF was working on the visible fringes of the New York jihad operation, Yousef, Abouhalima, and at least five other coconspirators were quietly planning a terrorist attack that would shake the nation.
When Yousef’s bomb went off on February 26, 1993, it had a dramatic effect on the Project Bosnia jihadists. Siddig and Abouhalima were friends, if not partners. Both men were devoted to Sayyid Nosair, and both were egged on in their ambitions during visits with Nosair in prison. Rashid also knew both Abouhalima and Nosair from the Calverton training in 1989.
After the Trade Center bombing, Abouhalima turned to Siddig for help getting away. When he explained what he had done, Siddig hugged him and exclaimed, “God is greatest and thanks to God. God is greatest, my God, my God, my God, God is greatest.”
Siddig gave Abouhalima letters of introduction to friends overseas who would help him hide and drove him to the airport for his flight out of the country. All of this assistance was for nothing; Abouhalima was arrested in Egypt a few weeks later.
After Abouhalima left, Siddig was emboldened to put his own plans into action. For months, he had been talking with Nosair about possible terrorist plots that he could execute, sometimes using Bosnia as a pretext and other times citing more abstracted Islamic rationalizations.
Among the plans that were discussed and discarded, there was the bombing of a dozen “Jewish” locations in New York and the kidnapping of Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger (whose policies Nosair and Siddig obscurely blamed for the troubles in Bosnia). Siddig consulted Omar Abdel Rahman at various stages in these discussions. The blind sheikh was not troubled by the idea of a terrorist campaign but suggested that he hit military, rather than civilian, targets.52
“Siddig was like a one-man jihad machine,” recalled the JTTF’s Corrigan. “He’d be driving a taxi cab, and he would think about, here’s an airport, if a plane came in here, you’d be able to shoot it. This is a building that has an open front in order to meet.”
In late 1992 and early 1993, Siddig began to finalize his list of targets and select a team, which included Abdullah Rashid, some of the Pennsylvania trainees, and various other people he knew, including Victor Alvarez, a Latino American who had converted to Islam after dabbling in Santeria, as well as three Sudanese immigrants who had not yet attained citizenship.
The scope of the plan was staggering. Siddig and his team would drive cars and trucks laden with bombs into the Lincoln and Holland tunnels, set the detonators on timers, then flee. There would be other simultane
ous attacks—car bombings in underground parking garages below the United Nations and the FBI’s New York field office.
“Siddig Ali was buoyed by the fact that a successful plot had taken place, but the competitor aspect of his nature was that he wanted to outdo the other guys,” recalled former FBI agent Chris Voss, who also served on the JTTF. “And he felt bad that he had been left out, so he wanted to create a plot that was bigger and better, he had to outdo them.”
In order to upstage the World Trade Center plotters, Siddig Ali had decided to kill thousands of New Yorkers in a single “Day of Terror.” All he had to do was avoid getting caught.
THE FINAL ACT
While Siddig was narrowing his focus to the home front, Abdullah Rashid was becoming more and more international.
A typical day at the Third World Relief Agency involved people going in and out of the offices with bags full of cash. At one point, aides to Bosnian president Izetbegovic began to worry that their boss was gay, after he locked himself in an apartment for days on end with Fatih El Hassanein, the charity’s titular head. They voiced their concerns to Bosnia’s ambassador to the UK, Muhammad Filipovic, who reassured them. “Don’t worry about that,” he said. “They are counting the money.”53
Bilal Philips summoned Rashid to Austria to meet with El Hassanein’s brother, Sukarno, the number-three man at TWRA, under Hasan Cengic.
Rashid was a typical customer: he left with a lot of cash. He went back to New York with $20,000: $10,000 in his pocket and another $10,000 hidden in his pants, in order to evade the need for a Customs declaration. He made more trips, and so did Abu Ubaidah. Eventually the two brought back between $80,000 and $100,000 in cash for Project Bosnia.54
