To begin planning the most horrific act of terror ever contemplated, Ramzi Yousef called on the two men who were closest to him: his uncle Khalid Shaikh Mohammed and his lifelong friend from Kuwait Abdul Hakim Murad. With plans still in the early stages, intelligence sources say they met in Khalid Shaikh’s house in Karachi in July 1993.1 But evidence now suggests that the seeds of the plot were planted even earlier.
Murad, the handsome twenty-five-year-old son of an oil worker, was a native Baluchistani transplanted, like Yousef, to Kuwait. He first met Ramzi in the early 1980s at a mosque in Fuhayhil, the Persian Gulf town where they grew up. They’d lost touch for a time when Yousef went to study in England, but reunited in Pakistan after Yousef finished his bomb training in 1991.2 That same year, Murad got his single-engine private pilot’s license at the Emirates Flying School in Dubai. He was anxious to learn how to fly a multiengine commercial aircraft, and the best training in the world was in the United States. So on November 19, 1991, during Nosair’s trial in New York, he flew to Heathrow and on to Dulles Airport outside Washington, D.C. After staying with his brother in Virginia, Murad traveled to Bern Stages, Texas, near San Antonio, where he enrolled in the Alpha Tango Flying School. One of the instructors was Sudanese; the chief pilot was a Pakistani named Hamed Afzel.3
Murad trained at the school for three weeks with Saudi Nasir Al Mubarek, a fellow student from the Emirates, but the Texas school had a narrow runway and lacked approach aids at the time, so Murad and Mubarek bought a brown Hyundai and drove three days to the Rich-more Flying School in Schenectady, New York.
The training didn’t come cheap.
By January of 1992, Murad had run through the eleven thousand dollars he’d brought with him for flight lessons, so he went to an upstate bank and got a wire transfer for another nine thousand.4 But he couldn’t take the frigid cold near Albany, so after two months at Richmore he flew back to Alpha Tango, where he trained during March and April of 1992.
In the late spring of 1992, Murad went back to Richmore for more lessons. By May he’d switched to a third school, Coastal Aviation in New Bern, North Carolina, where he trained on a simulator and finally got his multiengine pilot’s certification on June 6. On another return trip to Richmore, Murad passed through Manhattan, where he did a visual inspection of the Trade Center. At Richmore he and Mubarak met another alumnus of the Emirates School. The three of them then drove cross-country to Red Bluff, California, three hours north of San Francisco, where Murad enrolled in the California Aeronautical Institute. Then, after paying thirteen hundred dollars for classes to get his inspection rating, the peripatetic Murad left without finishing the course.
On July 27 he flew to Bahrain in the Persian Gulf, then went back to stay with his uncle in Dubai. A month later he got a call from his old friend Ramzi, who told him that he’d just finished “chocolate training.”5 When Murad feigned that he didn’t understand, Yousef simply said, “Boom.” He told Murad he was going to New York to find “employment,” but by now both men knew what this meant.
A few weeks later, Yousef arrived at JFK to knock down the very Towers that Murad had surveilled for him earlier in the year. The terrorist pilot later boasted that he personally chose the Trade Center as Yousef’s target.
In the trail of evidence that leads to 9/11, there’s no indication that Murad began his flight training with the Trade Center in mind. The idea of taking down the 110-story buildings with fuel-laden airliners came to Yousef later, after the bomb he planted on the B-2 level failed to deliver the catastrophic results he intended.
But after fleeing New York, as he conceived the plan that would culminate on September 11, there’s little doubt that Yousef was inspired by his old friend’s American flight-school training. The flying schools were plentiful and full of innocent, well-intentioned Middle Eastern men that Osama bin Laden’s jihadis could hide among. All it took to qualify was an entry visa and enough cash to finance the tuition. While the FAA regulated the schools, no one screened the students. Once the plan was set in motion, Yousef’s “brothers” could train openly with little fear of detection.
The funding for the plot would come directly from bin Laden, via his brother-in-law Mohammed Jamal Khalifa, who would set up a front company in Malaysia to channel the financing. Yousef’s uncle Khalid Shaikh Mohammed would be the conduit for the money; Murad would supply the operational expertise and help arrange flight school training for other jihadis. Bin Laden’s close friend Wali Khan Amin Shah would handle logistics. But it would take months, perhaps years, to field pilots in sufficient numbers who were willing to commandeer the cockpits of commercial jets and undertake suicide missions for Allah. At this point in 1993, as Yousef met with Murad and Khalid Shaikh Mohammed in Karachi, al Qaeda didn’t yet have the bench strength to mount such a plan. So in the interim, Yousef conceived a plan to commit mass murder aboard commercial aircraft that would be easier to implement.
From his days spent training with the “brothers” from Bosnia, he chose a name for the operation: Bojinka. It was Serbo-Croatian for “big noise.”
Pushing for Sammy the Bull’s Deal
On August 25, 1993, the other shoe dropped. After holding him for weeks on the immigration charges, U.S. Attorney Mary Jo White indicted Sheikh Rahman and eleven others, including Siddig Siddig Ali and El Sayyid Nosair, alleging that they were engaged in a plot to wage “a war of urban terrorism against the United States.”6
For the first time since 1989, the Feds seemed to get it. The indictment reached back to the Calverton training sessions, up through Nosair’s murder of Kahane and the Trade Center bombing itself, tying the Sheikh and his cell to a “seditious conspiracy” that had been in the making for years.
With the help of Nancy Floyd’s recruit Emad Salem, the Feds had redeemed themselves. By including murder charges against Nosair for the rabbi’s death, they even made up for the NYPD’s misguided conclusion that he’d acted alone. The twenty-count indictment was based on a Civil War–era statute aimed at stopping plots to overthrow the government. Yousef was still at large, but four of his cohorts were in custody, and White wasted little time bringing them to trial.
The lead-off case in the government’s war on terror would be the first World Trade Center bombing trial. In early October, little more than seven months after the blast, proceedings got under way in U.S. District Court against Mohammed Salameh and Mahmud Abouhalima, along with Rutgers grad Nidal Ayyad, who had helped obtain the chemicals, and Mohammed Ajaj, the Palestinian who’d arrived at JFK with Yousef and a suitcase full of bomb manuals.
In his opening statement, Assistant U.S. Attorney J. Gilmore Childers painted a chilling portrait of the workaday life inside the Towers that was shattered at the moment of the blast.
“It was lunchtime,” he said, describing how visitors filled the elevators, secretaries cleaned up their desks, and maintenance workers sat down to eat. “All of these people [were] unaware that one minute later at 12:18 p.m. their lives would change forever…. February 26, 1993,would become a day that would mark, for all time, the single most destructive act of terrorism ever committed here in the United States. From that point forward, Americans knew that ‘this can happen to me, here in the United States.’ ”7
Later, Abouhalima’s lawyer Hassen Ibn Abdellah ridiculed the prosecutor.
“He plays on your patriotism,” he told the jury. “He plays on your emotions, but the Government’s case is based on cosmetics.” Standing behind his big red-haired client, Hassen said, “Mahmud Abouhalima is asking you for nothing but fairness.”
What the jury didn’t know was that, months earlier, the Red had asked the Feds for much more. In May, while between attorneys, the mercurial Abouhalima, who had spilled his guts to the Egyptians under torture, put out a feeler to prosecutors from his cell in the Metropolitan Correctional Center (MCC), the federal jail in Lower Manhattan. He was willing to talk plea.8
Childers had visited him, along with his cocounsel, Assistant U.S. Attorney Henry DePippo. Abouhalima demanded a deal like the one the Feds had brokered with Sammy “the Bull” Gravano, the Gambino capo who served up his boss, John Gotti. In return for his testimony, Gravano was rewarded with hundreds of thousands of dollars and a drastically reduced sentence.
Abouhalima, who had been Yousef’s chief facilitator in the bombing, now wanted an even bigger deal—not just a fortune in cash, but his sentence cut to time served, plus U.S. citizenship for his German wife and their four kids, who were facing deportation.
Next to Yousef, the Red took the prize for audacity.
But Childers didn’t blink. Despite the forensic evidence tying the CVIN to Salameh and the Ryder rental, his case was largely circumstantial. He’d never be able to introduce Abouhalima’s tortured confession from Egypt, and the brains behind the bombing conspiracy was not in the courtroom: Ramzi Yousef was still a fugitive.
Reportedly, the Feds considered some kind of deal. But when Judge Kevin Duffy, a salty twenty-one-year veteran of the bench, got word that the prosecutors were considering a “proffer” from Abouhalima without defense counsel present, he shut the negotiations down.
Now at trial, jury members covered their eyes as autopsy photos of Monica Smith and the other blast victims were introduced. One female juror wept.9 But Childers and DePippo were dogged by the fact that they were trying only the second string. Yousef’s name didn’t even come up until more than a month into the trial, when an INS inspector identified the bomb manuals found in Ajaj’s luggage.10
As the weeks passed, the media began to question how the full truth behind the bombings could ever come out. After all, the chief architect, Yousef, was missing—not to mention one of his main coconspirators, Abdel Rahman Yasin, the Iraqi who had talked the FBI into letting him walk. At this point the press was still referring to Yousef mistakenly as “an Iraqi,” based on his request for political asylum on entry.11
The argument that the Yousef cell had gotten its marching orders from Baghdad was later espoused by Laurie Mylroie, a scholar at the
Washington Institute for the Near East, whose main supporter in the theory was the dismissed head of the FBI’s New York office, James Fox.12 But JTTF investigators like Special Agent John Anticev and Detective Lou Napoli knew better. Except for Yasin’s involvement, virtually all the evidence pointed to a conspiracy crafted largely by Egyptian immigrants in the circle around Sheikh Omar Abdel Rahman. In fact, the U.S. attorney had said as much in the indictment of the blind Sheikh and his crew.
U.S. v. Mohammed Salameh et al. was the first step in establishing the line of terror that commenced with the Calverton shooting sessions in1989. But by early December, in the second month of the trial, the government was dealt an extraordinary setback.
The Conspirators’ Calling Card
Willie Hernandez Moosh, an attendant at a Shell station in Jersey City, was key to Childers’s strategy of proving that Abouhalima and Salameh were part of the convoy of vehicles accompanying the Ryder van in the early morning hours before the bombing.
Reportedly, Yousef had pulled up to a pump in the yellow Ford Econoline van, with Abouhalima behind him driving his dark blue Lincoln. Salameh was said to have parked the red Corsica at another pump. Because New Jersey had a law forbidding gas station self-service, Willie Moosh came out of his Plexiglas cubicle and was reportedly told by Yousef to “fill it up.”13
After his arrest, the bomb maker would tell his interrogators that the gas station incident never occurred—that the Ryder van had been driven directly to Brooklyn late in the night before the bombing.14 But now at trial the Feds were expecting a big payday.
The testimony of the attendant who worked the midnight-to-eight shift would tie the defendants to the master bomber still at large. As Childers took him through the events of February 26, Hernandez described the three-car convoy in great detail. According to his testimony, two of the men he saw near the gas pumps could easily have been Salameh or Abouhalima.
Then it came time for the crucial courtroom ID—the dramatic moment that becomes the climax of so many movie trials. Zeroing in on Abouhalima, Childers asked, “Do you see that man now in this courtroom?” Moosh came down from the stand and glanced briefly at the defense table, where the big, redheaded terrorist sat. But then, apparently disoriented, he turned toward the jury. Moosh walked toward the press section and eyeballed the reporters covering the trial. Then he came back and gestured toward one of the jurors, a man with reddish hair.15
“It was a person like that one,” Moosh said, amid gasps from the gallery.
“The record should reflect that the witness is pointing to Juror No. 6,” said Judge Duffy. Childers eyed the jury and smiled, but rather than cutting his losses he decided to brass it out. He asked Moosh to identify Salameh, who had become infamous for his Ryder van rental dispute.
Now, despite all the publicity Salameh had enjoyed as the hapless accomplice, Moosh pointed toward a second jury member, this one a man with dark hair and a close-cropped beard.
“It was a person like this,” Moosh said, speaking Spanish through an interpreter. “Indicating Juror No. 5,” said Judge Duffy, and the Feds’ star witness was excused.
Ajaj’s lawyer called the testimony “devastating,” but Childers, known as a lawyer who was cool under pressure, quipped, “I don’t think it’s devastating unless I plan to indict Juror No. 6.”16
Still, as the trial entered the first weeks of 1994, the case against Abouhalima, in particular, looked thin. No witness (beyond Moosh) could put him with the other conspirators, and there was seemingly no other direct evidence connecting him to the bomb factory. The Feds were paying the price for their failure to follow Emad Salem’s advice and tail the Red.
The best forensic evidence they had was a pair of Abouhalima’s work boots, with a quarter-sized sulfuric acid stain on the big toe.17
Ironically, it would be an analysis of phone records—which the FBI had failed to do up front—that tied the Red to the plot. Records showed that eight calls from the phone registered in the name of Mahmud’s German wife had been made to the Pamrapo Avenue apartment as Yousef built the device. Then there were those four calls in February charged to Abouhalima’s phone and made from the Trade Center itself.18
In his summation to the jury, AUSA Henry DePippo called the Red’s phone record “the conspirators’ calling card.” “That card links them to the conspiracy,” said the prosecutor, shouting now: “He’s caught.”19
What went unsaid was that the investigators in the FBI’s Joint Terrorist Task Force could easily have traced the same calls in the weeks before the bombing. Even if, as Napoli said, Abouhalima had “beat feet” to New Jersey, the phone records would have given the FBI a road map of the conspiracy.
By March 4, though, none of that mattered. As the clerk read off the verdicts, the jury foreman pronounced the word Guilty thirty-eight times.
Suddenly the four defendants, who’d sat like choirboys for five months, erupted with hate. “Allah is great,” Salameh cried out. Ajaj’s brother screamed obscenities at the jury from the back of the courtroom. “You are fucking liars! Liars!” Judge Duffy gaveled down and ordered them ejected, but as he was dragged off Salameh pounded on the table, yelling, “Cheap people. Cheap government!” He lunged toward the bench as the U.S. marshals pulled him away. Then Ajaj began a chilling chant that echoed through the courtroom: “Il-ya! Il-ya Islam!” Islam will be victorious. It seemed more a threat than a prediction.
Once again, U.S. Attorney Mary Jo White had a victory. “This verdict,” she said, “should send a clear and unmistakable message that we will not tolerate terrorism in this country.”20
In preparation for the sentencing, Judge Duffy finally gave Eddie Smith a chance to find his own justice. In heart-rending testimony, he described the moment he knew that his wife, Monica, was gone.
“I had lost my wife, my best friend, my idol and my son,” said Smith. “We would never get the opportunity to hold baby Eddie in our arms. We would never get to hear Eddie say his first word.”21
The four defendants, wearing headsets for the translation, listened indifferently. At one point, Salameh reportedly stuck his finger in his nose and wiped it on his pants. But Eddie pressed on, looking up at the bench.
“Judge Duffy, we ask that you remember [that] the crimes committed just a few blocks away from this courtroom were not abstractions. We who have buried our dead, without a chance to lay a comforting hand on their heads, ask that you remember [that] this bombing was an act of multiple murder.”
Finally he turned to the four bombers, who refused to look at him, and recited the names of those dead. As they echoed through the courtroom like tiny bomb blasts, he ended with: “Monica Rodriquez Smith, daughter, wife, expectant mother, best friend, born 1958, died February 26, 1993. Our son, Edward, died February 26, 1993, never born, except in our hearts.”
For a moment the courtroom was still. Then the defendants had their turn. Mohammed Ajaj stood up and went on for three hours about the history of Zionism. The others voiced petty complaints. Only Ajaj called the bombing a “horrible” crime.
In the end, Judge Duffy, a tough Irishman from the Bronx who had presided over the Pizza Connection Mafia trial, delivered a series of sentences that dwarfed those in any proceeding against the mob. Calculating the number of years the victims might have lived, he sentenced each of Yousef’s cell members to 240 years behind bars.
Just the Beginning
For a short time, there was a sense of peace and satisfaction in Lower Manhattan. But the verdicts left many more questions unanswered. Who was truly behind the Trade Center bombing and who funded it? In his summation, DePippo had finally acknowledged that fugitive Ramzi Yousef was the “evil genius” who built the bomb. But were these men part of a ragtag crew, as the FBI suggested early on, or something much bigger?
“You don’t have answers to all those questions,” admitted U.S. Attorney White, whose Southern District office was now gearing up for round two: the Day of Terror trial against the Sheikh and company.
Special Agent Nancy Floyd was never called as a witness at the first proceeding; nor was Emad Salem, the man who had infiltrated the cell, interacting with Salameh and Abouhalima way back in 1991. The FBI’s handling of that initial investigation was something the Justice Department would just as soon forget.
By October, news stories had begun to break about Salem’s bootleg tapes. Questions were being asked about how much warning the Feds might have had about the blast. And the larger question persisted: Just how broad and deep was this conspiracy? The phone records introduced at trial proved that Yousef had help with Ajaj from a third party in Texas. The bank records showed transfers of tens of thousand of dollars from banks in Germany and the Middle East. Ajaj alone raised questions with his itinerary. He had traveled from Houston to Pakistan to the United Arab Emirates and back to Pakistan before arriving on that first-class flight with Yousef. Among his possessions seized at JFK, Ajaj had a letter of introduction to a mysterious training camp near the Pakistan-Afghan border and that book with the words that—if properly translated—might have been recognized as al Qaeda.
Despite the progress they’d made in convicting the four conspirators, at this point there’s little evidence that the Feds grasped the bigger picture—that New York had become the flashpoint for a new global jihad, driven by radical Egyptians aligned with Osama bin Laden; that the blind Sheikh himself was their pope, and that the Trade Center bombing wasn’t the end of their campaign but the beginning. All of this would be established in years to come, but for now the real power behind Ramzi Yousef remained a mystery.
Just hours after the verdict, Muslim militants in Cairo warned that the trial outcome would ignite a wave of bloody revenge attacks against Americans.
“The Islamic Group (IG) will find any American here in Egypt that it can get its hands on to hunt in retaliation,” said a leader of the group.22
Detective Lou Napoli had known for years that El Sayyid Nosair was an IG member. By now the Feds knew that Sheikh Rahman was the group’s leader. But he was in custody, and investigators seemed convinced that the terror cell was being contained.
The Yousef hunt was priority number one in the Bureau’s New York office, but few investigators seemed to pay much attention to the warning letter typed on Ayyad’s computer—the promise that “next time… the Trade Center will be one of our targets,” or the threat that hordes of “suicidal soldiers” were ready to do the cell’s bidding.
Also overlooked was a conversation that Abouhalima had with his cell mate, Theodore Williams, while he was awaiting trial in the MCC. Williams, a onetime henchman of the late heroin czar Leroy Nicky Barnes, was convicted of beating a man to death with a bat. Yet he was shocked at Abouhalima’s apparent lack of remorse for helping to set a bomb that potentially could have killed thousands. In an idle moment, he asked the Red, “How did you and five guys expect to blow up the whole thing?”23
Abouhalima eyed him, then replied: “It’s not us. It’s three hundred men across the country who would do anything to hurt the United States.” Now, if there were hundreds of committed jihadi in America, how many thousands were there worldwide? As they spoke, Ramzi Yousef would soon be on his way to the Philippines to make good on that hidden warning the Feds had found on Nidal Ayyad’s computer.
“…our calculations were not very accurate this time,” the warning said. “However we promise you that next time it will be very precise.”