When investigators sifted through the remains of the suicide’s car, they found shreds of a Canadian passport, which, with other clues, enabled them to identify the disintegrated bomber as one John Fawzan. Fawzan had been a member of Gamaa employed by an Islamic relief agency that was later found to have paid for the training of Ramzi Yousef’s Trade Center bombers. Fawzan was also a follower of Anwar Shaaban; he had lived outside Milan and frequented the mosque on Viale Jenner. DIGOS had investigated him in Operation Sphinx, but he had left Italy before they learned much about him. His suicide had been orchestrated by another Gamaa member from Milan, Hassan al-Sharif Mahmud Saad, a favorite of Anwar Shaaban. Like Shaaban, Saad traveled often between Italy and Bosnia. It was Saad’s Fiat Mirafiori that Fawzan had used, Saad having upgraded to a Mercedes from which he watched the bombing. Investigators also learned that the device Fawzan used to blow himself up was similar to ones with which Ramzi Yousef had meant to blow up airliners over the Pacific—another sign, perhaps, of the internationalization of the Milanese network.
After Fawzan’s bombing, Shaaban and Saad aspired to another attack, probably against NATO peacekeepers, who were arriving in Bosnia because the war was at last drawing to a close. NATO’s calls for the Islamic Brigade to disband, just when it was finding its fighting form, infuriated Shaaban, who would no longer be able to train terrorists in Bosnia with impunity. As NATO moved in, some of the Brigade’s fighters left for the next great holy war in Chechnya, while some, like Karim Atmani and Fateh Kamel, settled in Western countries and others, like Shaaban, stayed in Bosnia to continue the fight. Those who remained prepared a truck bomb, apparently for NATO, but it discharged prematurely outside the Brigade’s headquarters, and other plans were made to strike NATO. Before they could be realized, however, Shaaban and other high commanders of the Brigade made a fateful road trip in December of 1995. After passing through two Croat roadblocks without incident, they were stopped at a third, ordered out of their trucks, and machine-gunned into their reward. It was the last day of the war, and the decapitated Brigade collapsed. Some Islamists speculated that the United States or another Western power had urged the Croats to execute the Brigadiers in order to obviate the hassle of arrests and trials, but it was just as likely that the Croats had retaliated on their own for the Rijeka bombing.
Hassan Saad, the tactician of the bombing, was not among the executed. He remained at large until 2001, when the Bosnian government finally arrested him and extradited him to Egypt. He too was never seen again.
MAHMOUD ABDELKADER ES SAYED, familiarly Abu Saleh, arrived in Milan after, it seems, forging documents for al-Qaeda in Yemen, leading a cell of Jihad in Sudan, playing a supporting role in the slaughter of tourists at Luxor, and running guns in Syria for use against Israel. He once claimed the Syrian minister of defense helped him with the gun-running. (The minister, a man of culture, was the author of a book that explained how Jews used the blood of gentiles to make matzoh.) Abu Saleh was entrusted with expanding al-Qaeda’s operations in Milan. His entruster, by one account, was Ayman al-Zawahiri; by a different account, Abu Zabaydah, another al-Qaeda chief. On arriving in 1999, Abu Saleh asked the Italians’ protection from his native Egypt.
“I told them,” he said to a friend within hearing of an Italian bug, “that my three brothers were in prison, that my wife had had a road accident—an act of fate really, but I told them it was orchestrated by Egyptian intelligence.”
“That’s beautiful,” the friend said.
“The whole thing corresponded to their idea of persecution, and consequently I was granted asylum… . Now there is a law in Italy that requires asylum claims, even those that have already been approved, to be reviewed every three months to see if the initial conditions are still in place.”
“This is a form of terrorism,” his friend condoled.
“Of course it is terrorism. Italy is a terrorist country… . The intent of the government is to take advantage of the Muslims living in this country.”
In the three or four years between the departure of Anwar Shaaban and the arrival of Abu Saleh, Milan’s terrorists had thrived. Operation Sphinx had merely slowed, not stopped, them. New cells had formed, some of which were also broken up but were succeeded in turn by other cells, some of which the police broke up too, only to see them succeeded by others. The terrorists—Egyptians, Algerians, Moroccans, Tunisians—were replicable. They were also growing savvier.
“Do you see this?” the police heard an instructor of sorts lecture his terrorist pupils in Milan. He was holding up a mobile phone. “This was created by an enemy of God. You can’t imagine how many operations this has made fail and how many arrests it has caused… . It’s nice. You can use it to communicate. It’s fast. But it causes you huge problems. They created it, and they know how to intercept it.”
Increasingly the terrorists avoided phones, and when they had to use them they tended to divulge little and to prefer either pay phones or mobile phones that they could discard after a few calls. Sometimes they communicated via e-mail or instant-messaging Web sites in short, coded phrases. To minimize the number of times their e-mails bounced from server to server (each bounce giving eavesdropping agencies a chance to intercept them), a terrorist might save a message in the draft folder of an online e-mail account, which terrorists elsewhere would check. After reading the drafts, they would delete them, then save their own drafts of reply. The system was an advance on the traditional dead drop, in which spies left messages for one another in the hollows of trees or niches of buildings. If the terrorists needed to speak in person, the smarter ones took a walk in a wide park or sat on the back of a bus with a roaring engine. On the sidewalk, they stopped abruptly to let potential tails pass them by or dropped scraps of paper while hidden comrades watched to see if anyone picked them up. If a meeting was in progress at a safe house, a lookout might loiter among the hangabouts in a kebab shop or pace the street hawking cheap umbrellas. To indicate to meeting-goers that a building was not under surveillance, a towel might be hung out a window or a shade half drawn. Some of the terrorists had learned their tradecraft, as spies call their techniques, from jihad manuals, while others had learned in the training camps of Afghanistan or Bosnia or from veterans of those camps. Austere experience had also taught veterans to reduce life to what was strictly necessary for the cause. Their apartments often had neither chairs nor tables, they slept on prayer mats or bare mattresses, they did not dress their walls or equip their kitchens, and they had no books, save the book. They were the heirs of Sparta not Athens.
Their work continued and extended Shaaban’s. They falsified documents, recruited and sent warriors to training camps, and laundered millions of euros. In the home of one abettor of terrorism, police found €200,000 in cash. The terrorists of Milan did not seem primarily interested in attacking Italy or even Western Europe, but there were exceptions. A young Tunisian later told police that the leaders of his cell had him scout half a dozen potential targets in Italy. One was a U.S. military barracks in Mondragone, near Naples, which he watched for two weeks to learn how a truck with explosives might be driven inside. He was also ordered to assess whether it would be better to attack a particular Carabinieri station in Milan or the city’s police headquarters. To study the former, he picked a fight with the doorman of a nearby building, then called the Carabinieri emergency number and asked for help. The Carabinieri took him to their station to make a statement, which gave him the chance to see how cars were admitted to the central courtyard, where floor upon floor of offices stood exposed. He decided that although the target was tempting, the turn into the courtyard was too tight for a car bomber to get up enough speed to ram his way in. The police headquarters, on the other hand, sat on a street well suited for bombing. On another assignment, he was sent to a disco to see if he could enter with a loaded backpack. He could. Another time, he and a friend were assigned to deposit three suitcases, each filled with sixty or so pounds of electronics and camouflage clothing, at
the baggage check of Milan’s central train station. When the bags aroused no suspicion, the leader of their cell mused aloud about which days and hours the station would be most crowded and estimated that fifteen checked bags could do the work of a truckful of explosives. The cell also discussed murdering Italian politicians and talk-show hosts and flying planes into the Italian Senate or landmarks in Milan.
Other terrorists in Milan had their hands in plots elsewhere in Europe, including a plot that was led by a German cell to bomb the Strasbourg Christmas market in 2000. The terrorists in Milan plotted a similar attack for Italy but were arrested before they could carry it out. Still other Milanese terrorists seem to have played a supporting (but unclear) role in the Madrid train bombings of 2004.
Until the end of the 1990s, nearly all of Milan’s Islamic terrorists worshipped at the mosque on Viale Jenner, and several of them worked there. In time, the mosque’s imam, secretary, librarian, cook, barber, and janitor would all be arrested on charges of terrorism. Notwithstanding such taints, membership at the mosque multiplied, eventually to two or three thousand. At noon prayers on Friday, the holiest day of the Islamic week, supplicants spilled out of the old garage and onto the sidewalk on prayer mats in orderly rows of seven across. Shoeless, bent on hand and knee, they made a cordillera stretching the better part of a block toward Mecca—a human topography of Islam. Not all of the parishioners dreamed of heroically murdering receptionists in their office towers and five-year-olds in their kindergartens, but many sympathized with the terrorists among them, and others were indifferent. Thus Abu Imad, the head imam, could ask at one gathering without fear of giving offense, “Is it alright to kill a person who prays and fasts but who agrees with the ideas of secular, democratic, and Communist people?” One of his guests could declare, with equal inoffensiveness, “Between us and the unbelievers there is hatred. The enmity and hatred will reign between us and them forever, until they believe in Allah alone.”
The mosque on Viale Jenner so prospered that in the late 1990s Milan’s radicals founded a second large mosque. It stood on the southern edge of Milan, on Via Quaranta, geographically distant from but architecturally and ideologically of a piece with with the mosque on Viale Jenner. Its superstructure was a disused factory, its piety bellicose. The formal name of the new mosque was the Islamic Community in Italy, but as this was similar to the formal name of Viale Jenner (the Institute for Islamic Culture), the mosques were usually identified simply as “Via Quaranta” or “Viale Jenner”—bad luck for the memories of Bernardo Quaranta, excavator of Pompeii and Herculaneum, and Edward Jenner, inventor of the smallpox vaccine. Via Quaranta, investigators would soon learn, was meant to supplement rather than supplant Viale Jenner’s terrorism.
It was at Via Quaranta that al-Qaeda’s Abu Saleh set up shop, quickly establishing himself as one of the mosque’s leaders. Of his work, he told a disciple, “If the brothers want to hide, we hide them. If the brothers want documents, we take care of their documents. If the brothers want to move, we move them. If they need a weapon, you give them a weapon.” He seemed a good recruiter, able to inspire young men but wise enough to test and restrain them. He clearly knew the waste of money and time and the risk to security of sending to jihad either a tenderfoot who might have a change of heart or an enthusiast whose indiscipline might wreck an operation.
“I am curious about one thing,” he said to one recruit who wanted to martyr himself immediately. “Don’t you like this good life? Do you want to die?”
“Listen, sheikh,” the young man said, “if I liked this life, I would have gone to my cousin who is waiting for me in Germany and wants to marry me. In five years I would have the German passport and I would live in peace.”
“If God wills it,” Abu Saleh responded, “I am the first person to wish you to die a martyr,” but, he explained, there were many unglorious tasks before a glorious martyrdom, and he told the story of a man in an Afghan training camp whose cadre was ordered to wash their feet each night because blisters hinder jihad. Not all of the warriors obeyed, but this man did because he had jihad in his heart and he never neglected even the smallest tasks. He became a martyr. “You may be ready to eat the stones of the desert,” Abu Saleh told his recruit, “but you must know the meaning of it”—the meaning, that is, of the sacrifice jihad demanded.
The eternal dilemma of the counterterrorist is when to arrest: Spring now, and he may get five terrorists, but five others may flee. Wait till later, and he may get all ten, or he may get an obliterated train with human limbs scattered over the countryside. The police of Milan believed Abu Saleh posed no immediate risk, so they watched and listened to see where he would lead.
In August of 2000 he drove to the Bologna airport and picked up a Yemeni named Abdulsalam Ali Abdulrahman al-Hilal. By title, Abdulrahman was an officer in Yemen’s Political Security Organization, which was roughly equivalent to the FBI, but his more important office was carrying water for al-Qaeda. He and Abu Saleh had worked together in Yemen forging documents, and they had once teamed up to entrap an al-Qaeda defector. (Abu Saleh had secretly videotaped the defector telling Abdulrahman, who was acting in his state capacity, the hiding places of al-Qaedans in Yemen. Abdulrahman then alerted the al-Qaedans, who fled. Later al-Qaeda tried, unsuccessfully, to lure the defector to his death.) When Abu Saleh picked up Abdulrahman in Bologna, it was in a car DIGOS had bugged.
“I am studying airplanes,” Abdulrahman announced on getting in the car.
“Which airline?” Abu Saleh said.
“If God wishes, I hope next time I will bring you a window or a piece of an airplane.” They laughed. “I flew Alitalia. There is no security—Sanaa’s airport is more secure than Rome’s.”
“And what of Operation Jihadia?”
“In the future, listen to the news and remember these words: above the head.”
“You make me dream,” Abu Saleh said. “I dream of building an Islamic state.”
“If God wishes it, we will, because the government of Yemen is weak. Sooner or later we will dominate it. But the big blow will come from another country—one of those blows that can never be forgotten… . Our focus is only on the air… . You will find it a good plan, but don’t get specific—otherwise you’ll dig your grave… . It is a terrifying thing and will move from south to north, from east to west. He who created this plan is a madman but also a genius. It will strike everyone dumb. You know the verse: ‘He who touches Islam or believes himself mighty before Islam must be struck down.’ ”
“They are dogs. Every one of them will burn.”
“We marry the Americans”—terrorists often called an attack a wedding—“so that they will study the Quran. They think they are lions, the power of the world, but we will hit them, and afterward they will know love.”
“I know brothers who have gone to America with the trick of mail-order-bride magazines”—that is, by marrying American women who had run ads seeking husbands. They laughed again.
Abdulrahman said, “We can fight any power using candles and airplanes. They will not be able to stop us even with their most powerful weapons. We must hit them. And keep your head up… . Remember: the danger in the airports.”
“Rain,” Abu Saleh said cryptically. “Rain.”
“Oh yes, there are big clouds in the sky. In that country, the fire is already lit and awaits only the wind.”
“Jihad is already high.”
“If it happens, every newspaper in the world will write of it.”
This was thirteen months before September 11, 2001. At the time, several of the hijackers were already in the United States—the fire lit, awaiting only the wind. But neither DIGOS nor the FBI, which eventually received a copy of the conversation, fully understood what it was hearing. The idea that airplanes themselves would be used as weapons was then abstruse, although it was becoming less so. Some months later, Egypt warned Western states that Osama bin Laden might try to crash an airplane filled with explosives into the G8 summ
it in Genoa, in July of 2001. The Italians erected anti-aircraft batteries, but Genoa, of course, was not bin Laden’s target. Even had DIGOS and the FBI understood what they were hearing, they probably could have done little since Abdulrahman did not say what the targets were or when they would be struck.
The Italian police heard nothing more about the plan until February of 2001, when a Tunisian apprenticed to Abu Saleh asked, apparently in reference to falsified documents, “Will these work for the brothers who are going to America?”
“Don’t ever repeat those words, not even joking!” Abu Saleh rebuked him. “If you have to talk about these things, wherever we may be, come up and talk in my ear, because these are very important things. You must know … that this plan is very, very secret, as if you were protecting the security of the state.”
On September 4, 2001—so DIGOS would learn later—a computer at Via Quaranta downloaded a photograph of the Twin Towers from the Internet. It was an unlikely coincidence. The photo was soon deleted, but after September 11, DIGOS raided Via Quaranta and recovered it. Other computers at Via Quaranta also held deleted photos, mostly of political leaders (Yasser Arafat and George W. Bush were two) and of pornographic tableaux. Some of the photos appeared to have been altered steganographically—steganography being the art of hiding messages in another medium so that observers do not know they are there. A steganographer might change the color of every hundredth pixel in a digital photo, with each color corresponding to a letter of the alphabet. No one looking at the picture would notice the changes, but the right software would reveal their coded message. (The idea was an old one: In antiquity, Herodotus reported, rulers shaved the heads of slaves, tattooed messages on their scalps, and, after their hair had grown back, sent them across enemy lands to allies, who shaved them again and read the correspondence. Afterward, as in modern steganography, the files could be deleted.) DIGOS’s recovery of the deleted photos was only partial, however, and the investigators could not say what messages they might have contained.
A Kidnapping in Milan: The CIA on Trial Page 8
