Ramzi Yousef, his uncle, and Wali Khan Amin Shah spent New Year’s at Puerto Galera, a resort across from Batangas on the southern Philippine island of Luzon. Shah was a certified PADI scuba diver, but there was a more sinister purpose to their trip. Over the New Year’s holiday, tourists at the nearby Coral Beach Resort in Matabungkay noticed a series of Pakistanis and other Arabs involved in what looked like some kind of regimented training.1 The group, which also included Palestinians and Egyptians, was called into formation early each morning and afternoon.
Their leader, described as “slightly built” with “hollow cheekbones,” had introduced himself to the tourists as a Pakistani. He used a whistle to control the other trainees, who interspersed physical training sessions with prayers. The group identified themselves to other tourists as “students.” They passed out Islamic literature from the International Relations and Information Center, an NGO tied to Osama bin Laden’s brother-in-law Mohammed Jamal Khalifa, who was being held by the Feds in San Francisco at that very moment.
The Philippine National Police had been monitoring Islamic cells on the southern island for months. In a January 6 memo, the PNP made the link between the group in Matabungkay and Khalifa, who was al Qaeda’s key Asian financier.
“The group’s real intention and objective in Matabungkay is a cause for concern,” said the memo, “especially considering the coming visit of the Pope.”2 When the group left, PNP investigators found a burned Gideon Bible in their cottage. But at this point in the first week of 1995, neither the PNP nor the FBI had any idea that Ramzi Yousef was back in Manila.
The break in the case didn’t come from the investigative work of the Bureau or America’s other four premier intelligence agencies. It came as the result of a simple mistake by Ramzi Yousef and the instinct of a local Manila policewoman who followed up on it.
On the night of Friday, January 6, Yousef and Murad were hard at work in Room 603 of the Dona Josefa Apartments. Stripped to their underwear, they had several Casio timers finished and more under construction. Strewn about the kitchen area were fuse wires, snap connectors, incandescent bulbs, and SCRs. There was a tool kit containing jeweler’s screwdrivers, wire cutters, and a small drill. Nearby there were books on detonators, explosives, and booby traps.
The apartment was a makeshift laboratory of chemicals in bottles and boxes and the equipment to mix them with: thermometers, beakers, graduated cylinders, and a mortar and pestle. Amid the chemicals were two mysterious juice bottles (Mott’s and Welch’s) filled with volatile liquids. Off to the side was Yousef’s Toshiba laptop, which contained fake IDs, threat letters, requests for wire transfers, and the entire blueprint of the Bojinka plot.
In the kitchen–living room, Yousef had stored the components of the pipe bombs he would plant along the path of the pope’s motorcade. He’d marked the parade route on a map. At one point the “Popemobile” would pass right beneath his sixth-floor window. With a powerful enough remote, he might be able to blow the bombs from inside the Dona Josefa without even risking exposure. That would allow him to view the carnage firsthand—a luxury he’d been denied in New York.
Since Yousef had declared the room off limits to the Dona Josefa cleaning crew, no one outside the bomber’s cell would have seen any of this—but for a mixing error made by the master bomber himself. At approximately 10:30 p.m. on Friday, January 6, Yousef stood at the kitchen sink showing Murad how to burn a mixture of potassium chlorate and sodium chlorate.3 Then, as soon as he added sugar to the mixture, the compound ignited, erupting in clouds of dense gray smoke. The two bombers gasped for breath. Yousef yelled for Murad to open the windows. Choking, Murad rushed across the room, but the smoke continued to billow up from the sink.
Now, in Room 601, tenant Ray Mandaluyo smelled smoke. He opened his door and saw the two Pakistanis rush out of Room 603, pulling on their pants and carrying their shoes. Mandaluyo called the front desk, and security guard Roman Mariano ran outside the building with receptionist Mina Senario. They looked up and saw “dirty white” smoke pouring out of the windows of Room 603. Mariano yelled to Senario in their native Tagalog: “Call the fire department.” He then raced upstairs and accosted Murad and Yousef.
“What is going on?” demanded the guard. “Is there a fire or something?”
Yousef laughed and quickly placated him. “We’re very sorry. No fire. We were just mixing salt and powder for firecrackers. Just celebrating the late New Year. It’s nothing.”4
Fifteen minutes later a fire truck pulled up down below on President Quirino Boulevard. Firefighters ran upstairs, but by the time they got to Room 603 the smoke had dissipated. One of them got a call on a fire department radio and responded, “Negative. Negative. No fire.” So they took up and withdrew. But by now Mina Senario, the receptionist, had already called the police.
Although the Malate station was minutes away by car, it wasn’t until 11:30 p.m., almost an hour later, that rookie PNP patrol officer Aerial Fernandez arrived. Right away, Yousef hit him with the firecracker story. The gullible young cop eyed the two smiling Pakistanis and decided to believe them. “I’m just doing my job,” he said.
“We understand,” said Yousef, grinning. Fernandez never bothered to look in the room. He stared at them for another moment, then took off.
Yousef and Murad couldn’t believe their luck. The crisis was over. Murad went in to Room 603 to clean up, and Yousef walked down to smoke a pipe by the front door of the building. In a few minutes he would go back upstairs. They would finish building the devices, and when the plot was executed they would produce a death toll a thousand times greater than what he’d accomplished in New York.
And that’s the way it might have gone. But as midnight approached, Yousef was about to be undone by a middle-aged female police captain.
“Too Big for Just Firecrackers”
Aida Bantay Fariscal had spent her career bucking the odds. More than two decades before, her husband, policeman Gregorio Fariscal, had been killed in the line of duty. Jobless and a thirty-year-old mother of four, Aida, who had once worked as a fingerprint aide for the Philippine National Bureau of Investigation, put in her application to the PNP.5 After struggling through the police academy as a full-time mother, she was sworn in as an officer in 1972. For the next ten years she broke a number of cases involving carjackings, robberies, and assaults. In 1982 she was instrumental in helping to crack an organized crime syndicate, and by 1990 Aida Fariscal was named one of the “Ten Outstanding Policemen” in Manila.
At 12:40 a.m. on the morning of January 7, Fariscal was working as night duty officer in the Western District’s Malate station when Patrolman Fernandez walked back in. Fariscal, who’d sent him earlier to investigate smoke at the Dona Josefa, wanted to know why he’d taken so long. “More than an hour,” she said. “What happened?”6
The young cop gave his simple report. “There’s no fire, Mom,” replied Fernandez, using the maternal term of respect reserved for older women in the Philippines. “Just these guys from Pakistan playing with firecrackers.”
Pakistanis. Fariscal’s eyes narrowed. She got up from the front desk and walked to a bulletin board, where a memo had been posted that day. Titled “Operation Holiness,” the memo warned all PNP officers to be alert during the pope’s upcoming visit. The day before, Fariscal’s commanding officer had met with high-level PNP brass worried about the pontiff’s security.
It was now the middle of the night. Fariscal had spent all day in a series of meetings at the PNP’s National Capital Regional Command. She was tired. The smoke was gone. There’d been no other complaints. Another dozen middle-aged cops might have let it go. But like all accomplished police officers, Aida was driven by instinct. That very day at Camp Crame she’d heard some “background noise” about Middle Eastern men drawing attention down in Batangas over New Year’s, something about burning a Bible. She eyed a picture of the pontiff on a poster announcing his January 12 visit. Then she looked over at Patrolman Fernandez.
“Round up Sergeant Tizon,” she said. “We are going back to take a look.”
In the hour between Fernandez’s first visit and Fariscal’s return, Murad had called Yousef on his cell phone. After the near-miss with the cop, Yousef wanted to regroup. He told his coconspirator to meet him at the 7-Eleven on nearby M. Adriatico Street. Then he paged Wali Khan Amin Shah. The three of them linked there and moved to a location where they could talk in private, a karaoke bar around the corner on Mabini Street.7
At the bar Yousef told Murad to give Shah his passports. He ordered Shah to give Murad $2,000 in cash in case he needed traveling money. Shah counted out twenty $100 American Express checks. Yousef then told Murad to go back to Room 603 and retrieve his Toshiba laptop. The hard drive was encrypted, but it contained all the details of the Bojinka plan: plane schedules, bomb recipes, bank account numbers, their IDs—everything. Once Murad got it back, they’d lay low for a day to make sure the heat was off, then get back on track.
The three men parted as they always did, by invoking the name of Allah.
Back at the Dona Josefa, the three cops pulled up in Fernandez’s small car. Aida Fariscal asked Mariano for the keys to Room 603. When she went upstairs and opened the door, the smell inside was still acrid. She looked around and saw the jars of chemicals, the timers, and the colored wires, but as she moved into the bedroom Aida saw something that literally caused the hair to stand up on her head.8
“My heart started pulsating very hard,” said Aida. “I felt feverish.” There, on the bureau, she found Bibles, rosaries, hair dye, and contact lenses. The bed was covered with cotton that had been treated with some kind of chemical. Slipped into the frame of a mirror was a picture of John Paul II.
Suddenly, the phone rang.
Aida remembered the recent Sylvester Stallone movie The Specialist, where a bomb was set off by remote control via telephone. The phone rang again but she wouldn’t answer. She told Sergeant Tizon and Patrolman Fernandez to go to the lobby. They would wait for the room’s mysterious occupants to come back.
Downstairs, moments later, she phoned the PNP’s Bomb Disposal Unit. Then, as soon as she’d hung up, Mariano, the security guard, ran in with news: Murad had just pulled up in a taxi.
Instead of having her men surround him, Fariscal, dressed in plain-clothes, walked up to the terrorist nonchalantly.
“Good evening, sir,” she said. “I am the superior of the young officer you had met.” She flashed her shield and nodded to Fernandez. “We are just waiting for you so that you’ll drop by our police station to explain what happened inside your room.”
Murad swallowed hard and forced a smile.9 “Oh, yes, ma’am,” he said. “That is why I came back, because I am going to your station.” It was an obvious lie. Murad had no expectation that the cops would return; he was merely trying to ingratiate himself with them, playing for time until he could make his escape.
“Are you willing to go with us now?” asked Fariscal.
“Yes,” said Murad. “To explain what happened.”
At that point, Fariscal read Murad the PNP version of the Miranda warning. “Sir, you have the right to remain silent….”
He was effectively being placed under arrest, but Aida wanted to keep things as low-key as possible. The patrolman and the sergeant got on either side of him and they started walking him out of the building, when, suddenly, Murad bolted. He took off down the sidewalk running.
Fernandez drew his gun, dropped into a double-handed Weaver stance, and fired a shot. The bullet zinged past the terrorist’s ear, but Murad kept on going. Then, about ten yards down the sidewalk, he tripped over the root of a coconut tree that had recently been exposed by a typhoon.
“It was a miracle,” said Aida. “First the fire, then the root of this tree, as if God had put it right in the man’s path.”
Murad went sprawling, and the three cops surrounded him. Tizon, the sergeant, grabbed him by the scruff of the neck and pulled him up, forcing him against the side of the building.
“We’ll shoot you if you move,” said Fernandez. Murad, who now seemed genuinely worried, turned to the officer in charge.
“Please,” he said to Aida, “if you help me get out from this mess, I will pay you. I have two thousand dollars U.S. in travelers checks in my sock. American Express.”
He started to bend down toward his ankle, but Sergeant Tizon held him firm.
“Hmmmm,” Fariscal said to the terrorist. “Two thousand dollars is two years’ pay for most in this country. I think maybe it is too big a bribe for just firecrackers.” She nodded to the other cops. “Put the cuffs on him.”
But Tizon and Fernandez had left the station quickly, forgetting to bring handcuffs. So Mariano, the security guard, pulled the drawstring from his windbreaker, and they tied Murad’s hands behind his back.10
Across the street, Ramzi Yousef was watching all this from the shadows. When Murad hadn’t called him back to tell him he had the Toshiba, Ramzi became concerned. He’d taken a cab back, only to find his friend in the hands of the police.
Yousef wanted to leap across the concrete barrier dividing Quirino Boulevard and free Murad. But there were too many cops. How many, he didn’t know. He looked up at Room 603 on the top left corner of the Dona Josefa. The light was on. Could there be more cops inside? He had to go back for the laptop. Maybe he could slip up the fire stairs, as he’d done the day of the PAL bombing. Yousef started to cross the street. He walked west toward Adriatico Street, thinking he’d double back around the building. But just then, he heard a siren. The PNP bomb squad was pulling up out front. When they went through the apartment, they would find his prints everywhere.
He’d left them in the storage locker in Jersey City and the Pamrapo Avenue apartment. He wondered how long it would take for the Philippine dogs to realize that Naji Haddad, the Moroccan in Room 603, was really Rashed, the fugitive with $2 million on his head.
As the bomb techs left their truck, Yousef ducked back in the shadows. He walked west to Roxas Boulevard and hailed a cab.
“The airport,” he told the driver, and sank down in the backseat, crestfallen. He would have to call his uncle and tell him. It had been a stupid accident. Now the pope plot was blown, and so was Bojinka.
But there would be other chances to place his Casio bombs, other opportunities to hunt down the apostolate pope. What troubled Yousef the most at that moment was the effect this would have on his third plot. Murad had been ready to take an airliner and fly it into the Trade Center. Others were training to hit other U.S. targets, but Yousef couldn’t be certain how long it would take them to get proficient in the cockpits of big commercial jets.
Besides, he didn’t know these men the way he knew his old friend Abdul Hakim. Now, with Murad arrested, Yousef would have to postpone his revenge.
The fire, and the loss of his laptop, would set him back months, and it made him angry. As soon as he was in a safe location, he would send a letter from the Liberation Army. He would warn the Philippine dogs that if they didn’t release Murad he would kill their president and poison the water in Manila. After that he would gas them. This was war, and as far as he was concerned Abdul Hakim Murad was a hostage.
Yousef prayed that no matter what the cops did to Murad, he wouldn’t give up the third mission—that he would die like a martyr, as he’d pledged, before revealing the details of their intended return to New York.
Hours later, using a passport in the name of Adam Qasim, Yousef paid $848 in cash for a first-class ticket on a Cathay Pacific flight from Manila to Hong Kong and on to Singapore.11 He was so desperate to get out of town that he agreed to be wait listed.
The tension was even greater now than it had been that night in the PIA first-class lounge at Kennedy. After all, the pope was coming to this heavily Catholic country, and the cops had just stumbled onto a bomb factory created in part to kill him. It was a good thing this had broken so early on a Saturday morning. Soon the dogs would fan out across Manila and lock down the airports. He had to get out or they would be on him.
Yousef tried to stay calm as the passengers with boarding passes made their way onto the plane. He looked around to see how many others might be competing for the standby seats. When they finally announced, “Mr. Qasim,” Yousef almost didn’t hear it, he was so tired. He’d used so many names and lived so many lives for the jihad. The gate attendant called out the name one more time. “IS THERE A MR. QASIM HERE?” Suddenly, Yousef snapped to. “Yes. I’m here.” He rushed up to the gate attendant and grabbed his boarding pass. Then he caught himself, exhaled, and walked slowly but deliberately onto the plane.
Back at the Dona Josefa, Room 603 filled up with PNP generals backslapping and congratulating themselves on breaking this plot. The holy pope would be safe.
Soon, like Nancy Floyd, Aida Fariscal would be pushed into the background as her superiors took credit for the success. But as they eyed the chemicals and the cassocks and the picture of the pontiff, none of them knew at that moment what this meant. They had no idea that this was the bomb factory of Ramzi Yousef, the most wanted man on earth—and that now, once again, he had vanished.