As Yousef and the Sheikh’s cohorts built the device, the blind cleric himself was becoming an embarrassment to another federal agency—the Immigration and Naturalization Service.
In April of 1991, the INS had approved the Sheikh’s application for permanent residence—this despite the fact that he’d slipped into the country with his name on a State Department Watch List and had since been linked in the media to Kahane’s killer and the death of Mustafa Shalabi. But now the fifty-five-year-old cleric, who feigned helplessness, was becoming a liability for the Clinton administration, which was counting on Egypt as a key ally in the Mideast peace process. A firebrand when he got behind the pulpit, Abdel Rahman openly called for the murder of Egyptian president Mubarak, advising his followers that “assassination for the sake of rendering Islam triumphant is legitimate.”1 The blind Sheikh was pushing his luck.
In June of 1992, with his welcome back in Egypt unlikely, and happy to use metropolitan New York as a staging ground for terror, the Sheikh boldly made an application for political asylum. In a true measure of his audacity, the application was filed at the very moment his disciple Nosair was exhorting Emad Salem to bomb a series of “Jewish locations” across the city.
The application backfired. By August, the Sheikh was stripped of the green card the INS had given him the year before. But deportation proceedings were protracted. The first INS hearing on his application for asylum was recessed in October and rescheduled for January 20, 1993. Now, after the first of the year, even as Yousef and his followers built their bomb, the Sheikh was waiting for the United States to grant him a permanent safe haven.
Despite the plot that was being carried out in secret by his cell members, the Sheikh’s own public profile was very high. On January 7, 1993, the New York Times ran a major profile on the cleric entitled “A Cry of Islamic Fury, Taped in Brooklyn for Cairo.”
Noting that the Sheikh’s sermons were regularly taped for distribution worldwide, the piece by Chris Hedges quoted an Egyptian official as wondering “why the U.S. authorities allowed [Sheikh Rahman] to enter the country” in the first place. At that point, according to the story, the FBI was “investigating the Sheikh for possible involvement in the slaying of Mustafa Shalabi…as well as the slaying of Rabbi Kahane.” As late as February 13, less than two weeks before the World Trade Center bombing, the FBI obtained a warrant under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA)2 and began tapping the blind Sheikh’s phone calls. The very granting of a FISA warrant suggested that the FBI had evidence Abdel Rahman and his associates were “a group engaged in international terrorism or activities in preparation thereof.”
Over the coming months the FBI recorded hours of Rahman’s conversations—sixty-three tapes in all before the surveillance was ended. But even though the Sheikh was in regular contact with Abouhalima and had met for dinner with Ramzi Yousef, the FBI later claimed to have no prior knowledge of the enormous bomb being built at 40 Pamrapo Avenue.
Again, the question is Why? Without its inside mole, Emad Salem, the FBI had lost a key asset. But given the intelligence he’d already generated and the depth of the file on the Sheikh’s cell going back to Calverton in 1989, the Bureau had ample opportunity to pick up on Salem’s warning and follow Abouhalima and Salameh. The big redheaded Egyptian and the diminutive Palestinian were interacting with Yousef daily. Properly surveilled, they could have led the FBI straight to the bomb.
There’s little question that by now the Bureau had probable cause for warrants to search their homes and wiretap their phones. Anticev and Napoli had the paramilitary training photos from Calverton showing Abouhalima and Salameh firing semiautomatic weapons. They had the boxes of evidence from Nosair’s house full of Top Secret manuals, bomb recipes, and maps of New York targets, including the Trade Center.
Abouhalima and Salameh had been seized in Nosair’s home at the very moment that evidence was collected. Beyond that, Anticev and Napoli had linked Abouhalima to Nosair via the killer’s multiple phone calls to Weber (the Red’s wife). They’d heard a neighbor describe the big Egyptian as a terrorist. They’d even obtained a warrant to search his apartment as far back as 1991. At that point Anticev and Napoli had probable cause; now they had even more compelling evidence that the two were tied into a bombing conspiracy.
Mohammed Salameh was Ibrahim El-Gabrowny’s cousin. El-Gabrowny had brought Salem into the plot to bomb “twelve Jewish locations.” He’d asked Salem to obtain detonators to set off “high-powered explosives.” Salameh was a disciple of the blind Sheikh. On the trip to Detroit, Abdel Rahman had asked Salem if he was capable of setting off explosives and killing the Egyptian president.
By February 1993 the Feds had enough probable cause to suspect the Sheikh that they began tapping his phone,3 but somehow they couldn’t pull it together to follow Abouhalima and Salameh. Salem had proven himself to be a reliable informant who would have certainly generated probable cause under the Rosario rules.
The reports to the asset file that Nancy Floyd had dutifully typed after each of Salem’s sessions with the Sheikh’s cohorts laid all this out. After being cut loose, he virtually begged the agents to follow Salameh and the Red.
“Could they have followed these guys? Absolutely,” said Frank Gonzalez, the agent who spent twenty-one years with the U.S. Postal Inspection Service.4 “The FBI unit in charge of domestic terrorism could have proceeded the same way they conduct an organized crime investigation. You ID the main players, find out through surveillance who their associates are, and you go out and find them. On the basis of Emad Salem’s word alone, they could have gotten Title III warrants for pen registers and traps to trace their phone calls.5 They could have then verified their addresses and sat on them, then followed people like Abouhalima to see where he went.”
Eluding the Group That “Got Gotti”
As 1992 turned into 1993, the New York FBI couldn’t seem to find either Mahmud Abouhalima or Mohammed Salameh.
Why not? In the days after the bombing, Anticev would say simply, “You can’t monitor somebody twenty-four hours a day.”6 But of course the Bureau could do just that. In fact, if there was ever an FBI office equipped for round-the-clock surveillance, it was New York. By 1993 it was being run by James Kallstrom, the special agent in charge who had built his legendary reputation in the Bureau by setting up the FBI’s Special Operations Group.7
The New York SOG was the elite black bag unit that “got Gotti.” After three failed attempts to convict the mob boss, the SOG installed listening devices in the apartment of a woman who lived above the Teflon Don’s social club. The tapes of Gotti’s clandestine conversations with his capos helped put him away.
As journalist Ron Kessler noted in the first of two extraordinary FBI studies,8 Kallstrom’s agents would “conduct surveillance in criminal cases, install wiretapping devices, break into homes and offices to install bugs, bypass alarm systems, place tracking devices on cars, break into computers, wire undercover agents for sound, command suspects’ answering machines to play back messages, and pilot surveillance planes.”9 It was the kind of cloak-and-dagger capability that had cemented the Bureau’s crime-fighting reputation.
Back in 1989, suspecting “international terrorism,” it was this same New York SOG that had committed a half dozen agents and five vehicles on four Sundays in a row to follow Abouhalima, Salameh, Nosair, and Ayyad as they trained with automatic weapons at Calverton. Now it was three and a half years later, and the evidence of an international conspiracy to bomb New York was mounting. The question is, why couldn’t the FBI use a similar detail to track down Abouhalima and Salameh once more? Either of those cell members would have led the FBI straight to Ramzi Yousef, a man who made John Gotti look like a Disney character.
Now, at that very moment, he was across the river in Jersey City building a device designed to killed thousands. Given the go-ahead by FBI supervisors in New York, why couldn’t the SOG locate him? It wasn’t as if Yousef were invisible. In fact, in the months before the bombing, he’d had multiple contacts with police.*
In November 1992, Yousef actually paid a visit to a Jersey City police station. Using the named Abdul Basit, he filed a report of a lost passport. He later showed up at the Pakistani consulate in Manhattan and applied for a new passport under the Basit name.
Yousef also made regular trips to locker 4334 at the Space Station, where the chemicals were stored, and the telephonic trail he left was riddled with clues. He was repeatedly seen by witnesses using a pay phone outside the Pamrapo Avenue apartment.10 He made more than eighteen thousand dollars worth of phone calls from the bomb factory to contacts in the Middle East, Pakistan, Turkey, and Yugoslavia.11 Further, if the Feds had installed a trap to monitor Abouhalima’s calls, they would have discovered at least eight from Pamrapo Avenue12 and four on February 3, 1993, from the Trade Center itself.
Ramzi Yousef was so bold during this period that he even allowed himself to be captured by an ATM camera withdrawing funds while he made a phone call using another person’s phone card.13 In one of the comic ironies of this story, after Yousef’s flight to Pakistan following the bombing, his parents were reportedly harassed by phone company representatives seeking to collect on the exorbitant phone bills that he owed. Once the name Yousef surfaced in the press alongside his original name, Abdul Basit, the dunning notices went out. The phone company managed to locate Yousef’s parents. Why couldn’t the FBI?14
In December, Yousef went so far as to contact his first-class JFK travel mate Ajaj, who was serving an eight-month sentence at Otisville federal prison in upstate New York. Using his phone privileges from lockup, Ajaj called a phone number registered to Big Five Hamburgers in Mesquite, Texas. A coconspirator there used Southwestern Bell’s three-way calling feature to patch Ajaj through to the man he called “Rashed” at the Pamrapo Avenue apartment. In a series of conversations Yousef openly discussed a way to retrieve the bomb-making manuals seized when Ajaj was arrested.
The two of them used code words, calling the bomb plot “the study” and the bombing manuals “the university papers.” But the secrecy was hardly necessary. The calls were taped by the prison, but apparently not reviewed until much later.
“I don’t think they ever listened in on Ajaj until it was too late,” said Frank Gonzalez. “Here’s this guy calling interstate to a burger joint in Texas from jail and getting through to Ramzi while he’s building the bomb and the Bureau never knew. Amazing.”15 It was another key lead that was missed.
But the next lead the Feds blew was even more astounding. On December 22, 1992, a judge in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of New York ruled that the government had to return all of Ajaj’s belongings seized at JFK—including his bomb manuals. That victory resulted in a three-way call from Ajaj to Yousef via Texas on December 29. Yousef asked that the manuals be sent to him at Pamrapo Avenue.
After initially agreeing, Ajaj began to worry that the shipment might threaten Yousef’s “business…which would be a pity.” So the documents remained with the government.16 Among the materials being held by the Feds was a letter of introduction to the Khalden al Qaeda training camp in Afghanistan, where Ajaj had reportedly met Yousef.17 But even more important, one of the bomb manuals contained words written in Arabic, which the government had mistakenly translated as “The Basic Rule.” Later, terrorism expert Stephen Emerson concluded that the translation should have been “The Base,” a literal translation of “al Qaeda.”18 Here was evidence, seized by the INS and held by the Feds in 1992, that the man Ramzi Yousef had entered the United States with was linked directly to Osama bin Laden’s terror network.
“Had the Government correctly translated the material,” Emerson said, “it might have understood that the men who blew up the World Trade Center and Mr. Bin Laden’s group were linked.”
“One would think,” said a lawyer with knowledge of the investigation, “that the FBI’s Terrorist Task Force, which had been warned by its own informant of a bombing conspiracy, might monitor a federal proceeding where bomb manuals were at issue.”19 This was another enormous dot missed—and as the days passed in January and Yousef constructed the bomb, there would be more.
Escape to New Jersey
On January 21, a traffic accident gave the Feds yet another chance to interdict the plot. Driving Yousef in his Chevy Nova on the way to a meeting with Abouhalima, Salameh lost control of the car and hit the curb with such force that he was thrown to the pavement. The car was totaled, and Yousef, pinned inside, was given a neck brace. He was taken to Rahway Hospital in New Jersey where he was strapped down on a board for ten hours.20 The bomb maker actually gave his name as Ramzi Yousef, the same name he’d used at JFK when he was granted an asylum hearing.
Yousef had been given a hearing date of December 8, 1992. It was now seven weeks later. Having failed to show up for the proceeding, he was technically now in the country illegally. The bomb maker could have been arrested on the spot by INS agents. But he was so confident the Feds wouldn’t find him that he actually used his bogus phone card to order chemicals via the hospital phone.
In mid-February, Nidal Ayyad took a day off from work, rented an Oldsmobile, and made a reconnaissance trip to the World Trade Center with Mohammed Salameh.21
He left the car in the Twin Towers’ garage and sketched the floor plan, noticing that the Port Authority vans that serviced the Trade Center were yellow.
Then, incredibly, as Salameh drove back to Jersey, he was sideswiped by another car and questioned by police for forty-five minutes.* The Palestinian, who had failed his driving test four times, was ultimately released, but the accident was the last straw for Yousef. Concerned about Salameh’s driving skills, the bomb maker reached out for a new wheelman. He put in a call in to Eyad Ismoil, a lifelong friend now living in Dallas. Ismoil, a Jordanian who had studied in Kansas, showed up twelve days later. He later gave interrogators the preposterous story that he believed the van he’d been called to New York to drive was to be loaded with shampoo.22
On February 24, with the bomb in the final stages of construction, Ayyad rented a red Chevy Corsica and drove Salameh to DIB Leasing, a Ryder rental dealership on Kennedy Boulevard in Jersey City. Salameh put down a four-hundred-dollar cash deposit and rented a ten-foot yellow panel van for fifty-nine dollars a day. The address he gave the Ryder clerk was 57 Prospect Park Southwest, Apt. 4C, Brooklyn, New York. It was the former residence of convicted shooter El Sayyid Nosair, currently occupied by his cousin Ibrahim El-Gabrowny.*
El-Gabrowny was the same man who had coaxed Salem into the first bombing conspiracy; the man who had personally obtained a reported twenty thousand dollars from Osama bin Laden for Nosair’s defense. He was also one of the Egyptians the FBI had subpoenaed and released on September 15. How much of a stretch would it have been for Anticev and Napoli to make those connections and find Salameh—especially if they’d been monitoring El-Gabrowny’s visits to Attica?
As it turned out, Mohammed Salameh had accompanied his cousin El-Gabrowny to see Nosair less than two weeks before he picked up the Ryder van.23
Afterward, Abdel Rahman Yasin, the Iraqi who earlier shared an apartment with Salameh at Kensington Avenue—gave the Palestinian driving lessons. With Yousef’s plot nearing completion, you couldn’t be too careful. Yasin, a City College student, was the only native-born U.S. citizen in the bombing plot.
Now, in the final stages of bomb construction, Yousef decided that he needed compressed hydrogen to increase the bomb’s blast radius. But the chemical, considered a signature of Mideast terror bombers, couldn’t be located. Then, on the morning of February 25, Ayyad called from his company, Allied Signal, to tell Yousef that he’d found a company that would sell them four tanks. They were delivered to the Space Station storage facility and loaded into the yellow Ryder van, which had an Alabama license plate: XA70668. Present for the delivery was Mahmud Abouhalima, who was driving his blue Lincoln.
For weeks now, the big cabdriver had acted as Yousef’s chief expeditor in the plot. He’d ferried chemicals back and forth from the Pamrapo Avenue bomb factory in the trunk of his Lincoln and purchased the black powder Yousef used to wrap into slow-burning fuses. It’s difficult to see how the redheaded Egyptian could have slipped off the FBI’s radar screen. In fact, as late as December 1992, Emad Salem called Anticev to tell them that Abouhalima had left a message on his phone machine.* So the FBI knew he was around. Still, for all its high-tech surveillance capabilities, the New York office couldn’t find him.
Until now, the reason was a mystery. Then, in an interview for this book, Detective Lou Napoli offered an unsettling explanation: The FBI couldn’t locate Abouhalima, he said, because he’d gone to New Jersey.
“Abouhalima beat feet on us,” said Napoli. “We were trying to locate him, but he went to Jersey. Salameh was in Jersey. You’ve got to remember there are boundaries. The Hudson River separates New York and New Jersey. To work on Abouhalima and Salameh I would have had to work through [the FBI office in] Newark. The Task Force is a New York terror task force. Our boundaries are New York.”24
But a veteran FBI agent who worked in the New York office disagreed. “What Napoli said would be totally false,” said the source. “I worked numerous cases [out of the New York office] where the subjects lived in New Jersey. The idea that they couldn’t have followed Abouhalima across state lines or needed to get permission is ridiculous.”25
So if it wasn’t a question of jurisdiction, and the FBI had the technical know-how to mount surveillance, how did they blow it?
“There were supervisors in the New York office who came from this arrogant point of view that nobody was ever going to attack the United States,” said the FBI source.26 “To them these Muslims were not a threat. They were a Bedouin people running around the desert with no education. We were the big bad USA, smart and intelligent, and they weren’t.”
Julian Stackhouse, an agent in the New York office at the time, suggested that some share of responsibility must rest with Carson Dunbar. As the ASAC who approved the deployment of surveillance resources for the Special Operations Group, it was Dunbar’s job to sanction the monitoring of suspects like Abouhalima and Salameh.27
It’s unclear whether the ASAC formally rejected any requests to track the two men, but a Bureau source said it was unlikely that Dunbar would have approved such a surveillance. “Mr. Dunbar didn’t believe anything Salem said, so why would he give his approval to go after these two on his [Salem’s] recommendation?”28
Carson Dunbar himself openly rejected that assertion. “In all the areas in which we could use technical surveillance, we did,” he said in an interview for this book. “There was never a time that I disapproved any type of surveillance that was in question.”29
But according to The Cell, the book by John Miller, Michael Stone, and Chris Mitchell, Dunbar was also responsible for terminating another key FBI probe that had sprung from the Calverton shooting sessions.30 This second investigation, also ongoing during the fall of 1992, would have put agents within striking distance of other blind Sheikh cohorts who were engaged in paramilitary training sessions and gunrunning. One of the trainees under surveillance was Mohammed Abouhalima, brother of the Red. Another was Siddig Siddig Ali, a Sudanese national.31
Ali, who later became a government witness, admitted that he and Abouhalima’s brother had gone to Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, for a series of clandestine sessions designed to teach them assassination techniques. At one such meeting they had even exploded a test bomb on behalf of the Yousef cell. A parallel team of FBI agents from the New York JTTF had been tracking these cell members prior to the Harrisburg sessions, but in January of 1993, just weeks before the Trade Center blast—reportedly out of a concern that this second probe was sapping FBI manpower—Carson Dunbar shut it down as well.
It was another dot lost on the chart.
At 10:00 P.M. on the night of February 25, Mohammed Salameh called the Jersey City police from a phone near a Pathmark supermarket on Route 440 and told them the Ryder van had been stolen. In his third direct encounter with police in a month, Salameh was taken by the cops to the local station, where he filled out a stolen vehicle report to serve as a cover story when the van was blown.
Now, just before midnight, having eluded the FBI, Ismoil, Salameh, and Abouhalima loaded the elements of the bomb into the van for the trip into Manhattan. Yousef’s first date with Ground Zero was just hours away.*