Ronnie Bucca was a fire marshal. By any traditional definition, terrorism wouldn’t have been even remotely close to his jurisdiction. But he had seen the 1993 World Trade Center bombing as an act of arson, and one that touched him personally. Now the four main conspirators and the bomb maker himself had been convicted. The blind Sheikh and the other members of his “jihad army” would be locked up for years. Any other investigator might have given up and moved on. But not Bucca. He was the firefighter who had fallen five stories and worked his way back to Rescue One.
As the spring of 1997 arrived, he continued to believe that the Trade Center was still a potential target. “He said, ‘They’re gonna come back and do it again,’ ” said Jacob L. Boesen, an analyst who worked with Ronnie at the Defense Intelligence Analysis Center at Bolling Air Force Base in Washington, D.C. “I said to him, ‘They did it once.’ But he said, ‘Some of those people have folded now into al Qaeda.’ ”1
Boesen, who wrote a study on al Qaeda for the National Conference on Homeland Security, said Bucca was a rare combination. “Ronnie’s military experience as an intelligence officer gave him an analytical role, and his experience as a Special Ops Green Beret gave him an operational perspective,” said Boesen.2 “[He] was the real deal. But he was frustrated because the Bureau was the lead player in New York when it came to terrorism and he couldn’t get anybody on the Task Force to listen.”
“Ronnie was tenacious,” said his brother Bobby, the NYPD cop. “He would just not let this thing go. Besides, with what he was seeing in the reserves, he knew there was more to this.”
By the spring of 1997, the FBI finally seemed to agree. John O’Neill, now running the Bureau’s National Security Division in New York, talked publicly about an ongoing Middle Eastern terror threat. “Almost every one of these groups has a presence in the United States today,” he told the A.P. “A lot of these groups have the capacity and the support infrastructure in the United States to attack us here if they choose to.3
By mid-July, the U.S. attorney for the Southern District seemed to acknowledge that the threat went beyond Ramzi Yousef and the blind Sheikh. A federal grand jury was convened to determine whether Osama bin Laden had been funneling money to them.4 The secret panel reportedly heard testimony that bin Laden had delivered money to groups in Detroit, Brooklyn, and New Jersey.
The FBI had learned about bin Laden’s direct ties to the Alkifah Center in Brooklyn a year earlier, when Jamal Ahmad al-Fadl turned government informer. The FBI had known about bin Laden’s links to Yousef’s Pamrapo Avenue bomb factory via phone records dating back to 1992, and his contributions to El Sayyid Nosair’s defense the year before that.
But the Feds were encouraged by another big “get” in May 1997, when Mandini al-Tayyib, another of bin Laden’s brothers-in-law, was seized by the Saudis. Reportedly the chief financial officer for al Qaeda, al-Tayyib agreed to talk in return for asylum.
By August the FBI had hopes of flipping another potential defector— Wadih El-Hage, the Lebanese Christian convert who had purchased weapons for Mahmud Abouhalima, come to New York at the time of Mustafa Shalabi’s murder, and visited El Sayyid Nosair at Riker’s Island. El-Hage had become personal secretary to bin Laden after his flight to Sudan.
In the late summer of 1997 he was living in Nairobi, Kenya, where a major al Qaeda cell was operating. The FBI confirmed the existence of the cell after a raid on El-Hage’s home resulted in the seizure of his computer. A letter was found on the hard drive written by one of Wadih’s house guests, Fazul Abdullah Mohammed Haroun. In so many words the letter described the clandestine cell as operating under the direction of “the Haj,” an alias for Osama bin Laden.5
While one JTTF agent searched his home with Kenyan police, other agents confronted El-Hage at Nairobi Airport. But instead of arresting the bin Laden confidant, the agents suggested he return to the U.S. Since he was a naturalized U.S. citizen, the agents hoped they might be able to turn him like al-Tayyib. But they underestimated Wadih’s commitment to his former boss, bin Laden.
In September, El-Hage left Kenya with his wife and seven kids. State-side, the Feds picked him up and put him in front of the grand jury. Just as Anticev and Napoli had tried to intimidate Abouhalima and Sattar in 1992 by bringing them down to 26 Federal Plaza, the FBI thought putting El-Hage in a grand jury room might induce him to cooperate. But instead of flipping, he just stonewalled, pleading ignorant to any knowledge of bin Laden or a Kenyan cell.
So the Feds let him go.
The Blown Chance in East Africa
El-Hage returned to Arlington, Texas, where he began operating a tire shop in a middle-class neighborhood and bided his time.
Wadih El-Hage was another direct link between bin Laden and the Brooklyn Alkifah Center. In fact, he’d been dispatched from Arizona to run it on the eve of Shalabi’s murder. But the Feds would wait another year after his release before charging him.6* Despite the computer letter from Fazul, the sense in the U.S. attorney’s office in Manhattan was that the Kenyan cell had been broken. El-Hage was mounting tires in Texas, and Abu al-Banshiri, al Qaeda’s chief military officer and director of East African ops, had died in a ferry accident on Lake Victoria the year before.
What the New York Feds didn’t realize was that al-Banshiri’s job was soon taken over by Khalid Shaikh Mohammed.7 In another extraordinary missed opportunity, the Feds failed to follow up on a reference in Fazul’s computer letter to a group of “partisans” in Mombassa and the expected arrival of “engineers” in Nairobi. Plans were afoot at that moment for two catastrophic bombings that would devastate the U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania. But the Feds missed the signals.†
Incredibly, once Wadih El-Hage had been chased out of Africa by the JTTF, the CIA pulled its wiretaps out of his home, and the cell’s deadly plans began to move forward. Later the Kenyan embassy got another “walk-in” who warned of a bombing plot. But the informant, Mustafa Mahmud Said Ahmed, had sounded similar warnings at other African embassies in the past, and none had panned out. As far as the Feds were concerned, he was a snitch with a history of crying wolf. Ahmed was given a polygraph, and when he reportedly failed, his warnings were dismissed.
Now, in August of 1997, al Qaeda operatives were back in New York, moving ahead to perfect the plot Ramzi Yousef had designed back in 1994.
On August 31, Ghasoub al-Abrash Ghalyoun, a heavyset Syrian, walked into the lobby of the South Tower of the World Trade Center with a small group of men. One of them was carrying an infant. Ghalyoun pulled out a video camera and began shooting.
“We are at the Twin Towers of Manhattan,” one of the men said in Arabic on the tape. “This is the inside of one of the Twins.”8
The group took an elevator to the observation deck on the South Tower’s 110th floor. The camera panned across to the TV and radio antennas on the North Tower and zoomed in and out, focusing on the Tower’s outer wall on the south side.
Later Ghalyoun was videotaped sitting in the outdoor plaza at the foot of the Trade Center, with his arm around a life-size sculpture of a businessman that sat at the foot of the Towers. On the same U.S. trip, Ghalyoun and his party took video of the Sears Tower in Chicago and the Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco.
But this was no ordinary group of foreign tourists. As it turned out, Ghalyoun was a member of the radical al Qaeda–linked Muslim Brotherhood. His videotapes were later seized by Spanish authorities after his arrest in Madrid in April 2002 and described by a judge as possible surveillance tapes for the 9/11 attacks.
“If you wanted to use one word, I would say they were ‘target tapes,’ ” said Gustavo Aristegui, former chief of staff of the Spanish national police.9 Evidence developed by intelligence officials later discovered that Spain was a staging area used by Mohammed Atta in the months before September 11. In what looked like a chilling reconnaissance for 9/11, the tape showed the camera zooming past the Towers up the Hudson along the flight paths of TWA Flight 11, which Atta later piloted, and United Flight 195, which sliced into the South Tower minutes later.
The sculpture Ghalyoun sat next to, ironically, was one of the few pieces in the Trade Center Plaza that remained undamaged after the Towers collapsed.*
After the tapes were seized in April 2002, the Syrian was released, then rearrested in March 2003 when new evidence against him emerged. According to a statement by Spanish authorities, he taped “installations and monuments…which may have been terrorist objectives of al Qaeda.”10 Officials said they suspected that Ghalyoun had passed copies of the tapes to a man believed to be a courier for Osama bin Laden.
The tapes seemed to corroborate what Abdul Hakim Murad had told Colonel Mendoza—that the Trade Center and Sears Tower were among the future targets of the airliner hijacking plot. Jack Cloonan, a former FBI agent working as a consultant to ABC News, described Ghalyoun’s tapes as “bone chilling.”
Similar surveillance photos had been taken by al Qaeda operatives three to four years before the bombings of the East African embassies in 1998.
“You have a four-year lapse between the surveillance and the actual attack,” said Cloonan, who noted that the August 1997 tapes by Ghalyoun followed a similar timetable. Cloonan, who was working in the summer of 1997 on the Bureau’s bin Laden squad, didn’t see the Trade Center tape until just before ABC aired it in March 2003.
“When I first looked at it, I almost wanted to weep,” he said.
Ironically, at the very moment the tape was made, Ramzi Yousef was sitting in a courtroom five blocks away as the second trial began for his first attack on the Trade Center. The Feds may have captured him, but preparations for his second attack were well under way.
The Apostle of Evil
Ronnie Bucca worked a series of double-shift “mutuals” so he could attend the trial as often as possible. He had made an additional attempt to get through to the JTTF detective, but got the cold shoulder again. He hoped that he might pick up some intelligence in the testimony that would help him assemble the pieces of the Yousef puzzle. Lately he had seen classified DIA link charts showing a direct connection between Yousef and Osama bin Laden. The Saudi billionaire was also connected in the chart to Sheikh Rahman through Wadih El-Hage and Egyptian Mahmud Abouhalima, and there was a straight line linking Yousef through bin Laden to something called “al Qaeda.”
World Trade Center Bombing/New York Landmarks Bomb Plot:
Internal Group Structure and International Linkages
A declassified version of the chart from 8/10/98 shows a direct line from Ramzi Yousef in the lower third of the center box to Osama bin Laden and on to al Qaeda (at right).
Since Ronnie didn’t have access to the JTTF or any FBI files, he was piecing the “mosaic” together on his own. He still believed that the forces around Yousef would continue to target New York—a suspicion only bolstered at one point in the trial when Yousef’s unpublished warning from Nidal Ayyad’s computer finally came to light: “We promise you that next time it will be very precise and the Trade Center will be one of our targets.” It was an ominous warning. Maybe now the Feds would take the threat seriously, Ronnie thought. But there was little coverage of the warning at the time, and its contents didn’t surface again in the media until after September 11.11
On August 5, 1997, Bucca sat in the back of the courtroom again as Assistant U.S. Attorney Lev Dassin told the jurors that Yousef was part of a “self-proclaimed army of terrorists.” Pointing at the bomb maker, Dassin declared, “this man ordered and mixed the chemicals to make the bomb.”
But the very composition of the urea nitrate–fuel oil device became a major issue at the trial, following revelations in April of serious problems at the FBI’s lab. Evidence in both the World Trade Center and Oklahoma City bombing cases was called into question after the Justice Department’s own inspector general issued a report that found “extremely serious and significant problems” at the lab.12 In the case of Yousef’s device, the report concluded that an FBI analyst had identified the explosive “based not on science but on speculation.”
This led to some extraordinary testimony in which Yousef—having blown the first trial by representing himself—now deferred to defense attorney Roy Kulcsar. At one point, an executive for the World Trade Center was asked to specify the precise number of toilets and urinals in each tower. When he said there were more than three thousand in each building, the defense argued that the bomb had ruptured sewer lines, spilling thousands of gallons of urine waste into the crater at the B-4 level. Since the Bureau’s controversial lab had determined that “urea”— also a component found in human excrement—was an additive in the bomb, Yousef alleged that the building’s waste might have skewed the results.13 It was the kind of desperate argument that Yousef was left with.
An ominous point in the proceedings came when Secret Service Agent Brian Parr described Yousef’s confession to him aboard the 707 on the trip back to the States. The bomb maker had related how, just minutes after the 1993 blast, he’d watched the smoldering towers from New Jersey and was disappointed that his original plan to “shear the support beams” hadn’t worked.14
In his closing argument, Assistant U.S. Attorney David Kelly drew a frightening picture of Yousef. “When you put all the evidence together,” he said, “there is only one picture that’s painted—that Yousef is a cold-blooded terrorist. He came into this country with a plan to blow people up. He ordered the chemicals from City Chemical. He mixed the chemicals at 40 Pamrapo. He constantly coordinated over the phone with his coconspirators who were renting the van and the Space Station. He was in the van when it was driven into the Trade Center. He detonated the bomb. He ran away. He confessed. He’s guilty.”
Then he pointed over at Yousef sitting quietly in a dark blue suit next to Ismoil. “The last time that these two people were sitting next to each other, before they came to this courtroom[,] was that day they were sitting next to each other in the van.
“Visualize them driving that van down the subgrades of the Trade Center, driving to their appointed spot next to the Tower. Picture them getting in the back of that van and lighting a fuse, crawling out, hopping in their car and running away, and, moments later, the bomb blew up. The only message that they sent out that day was that these two people are cold-blooded killers.”15
It took the jury three days to make their decision. In contrast to the outburst at the end of the first Trade Center trial, the formal career of the world’s greatest bomb maker ended quietly. With each count of “guilty,” Yousef stared straight ahead in silence.
Outside court, Olga Mercado, widow of Wilfredo, the last victim found in the debris of Trade Center blast, said she only wished Yousef and Ismoil had been subject to the death penalty. Speaking in Spanish, translated by her daughter, Mrs. Mercado said she prayed that the two defendants would get life at hard labor. “So they can sweat,” she said. “So they can feel some of the pain that the families of the victims feel.”16
Monica Smith’s husband, Eddie, said he felt a sense of great relief at the verdicts, “especially the one guy, Ramzi.” Speaking from his new home in California, he promised to come back to New York for the sentencing.
The Bloody IG and the Sheikh
Yousef’s second conviction was another triumph for the Feds, but if any investigators in the JTTF thought the war was over, they were wrong. Four days after the verdicts, six assassins surrounded a group of tourists at the famed archaeological site in Luxor, Egypt. They began stabbing and shooting them systematically in one of the bloodiest terror attacks in Mideast memory.
Before it was over, sixty-two people, including four Egyptian policemen, lay dead. The killers wiped out three generations of one British family, including Karina Turner, her mother, and her five-year-old daughter.17 As they left, the attackers scattered leaflets; one of them was later found stuffed into the slit torso of one of the victims.*
The leaflets called for the release of Sheikh Omar Abdel Rahman.
The attack was the work of al Gamma’a Islamiya, the Islamic Group the Sheikh had run for years. In his al Hayat interview, Yousef had declared that the IG was directly affiliated with his “Liberation Army,” and documents sent to the Feds by Colonel Mendoza showed a direct link between the IG and Osama bin Laden. By 1997 the IG was being run by another Egyptian named Refa’I Taha Musa.18
After the Sheikh was sentenced in 1996, the IG had warned of retaliations. The U.S. State Department later designated it a foreign terrorist organization. Now came the Luxor massacre, four days after the second verdict against Yousef.
The question is, did the FBI recognize the significance of the link?
Detective Lou Napoli and FBI Special Agent John Anticev had been aware of El Sayyid Nosair’s affiliation with the IG as far back as 1991. In the Day of Terror trial, the New York Feds had tied the blind Sheikh directly to Ramzi Yousef, whose Trade Center bombing was another attack by Abdel Rahman’s “jihad army.” The bloody Luxor massacre was just the latest signal to the Feds that Islamic radicals associated with this same group were continuing to murder civilians.
But what they didn’t know at the time, and didn’t connect the dots on until years later, was that one of the Egyptians whom they’d missed in the Day of Terror indictment was continuing to operate in New York— allegedly passing information between the blind Sheikh in prison and the murderous IG.
Ahmed Abdel Sattar—the Staten Island postal worker who’d discovered Anticev’s home address and feasted on lamb after the Nosair trial— was well known to the Feds. He had been subpoenaed in September1992. Anticev himself had warned Sattar that the FBI was going to get the terrorists around Nosair as sure as they got Gotti. Emad Salem had alerted the FBI to Sattar in 1993. And on the day of the Sheikh’s sentencing in 1996, Sattar had declared to the press that “the man will never be silenced.” Yet for reasons unknown, the FBI gave him a pass.*
As Christmas approached, the Feds were savoring their second Yousef victory and looking forward to his sentencing. On January 8, 1998, Judge Kevin Duffy was in rare form as he stared at Yousef for the last time. “Our system of justice has not often seen the type of horrendous crimes for which you stand convicted,” said Duffy, who then quoted from the Koran. “Your God is not Allah,” he said, bearing down on Yousef, who stood before the bench.
Duffy then hit Yousef with 240 years in prison, matching the sentence he’d given the first four Trade Center defendants. But he made the rare recommendation that the bomb maker serve every day of it in solitary confinement.
“The evil” that Yousef espoused, he said, needed to be “quarantined.” Leaning forward on the bench, Duffy confronted the terrorist directly:
“You, Ramzi Yousef[,] came to this country pretending to be an Islamic fundamentalist, but you care little or nothing for Islam or the faith of the Muslims. You adored not Allah, but the evil that you yourself have become. And I must say that as an apostle of evil, you have been most effective.”
Still, the Mozart of Terror was defiant to the end.
“The Government in its summations and opening statements said that I was a terrorist,” Yousef responded. “Yes I am a terrorist and I am proud of it. And I support terrorism so long as it was against the United States Government and against Israel, because you are more than terrorists….You are butchers, liars and hypocrites.”19
Then Yousef, in what he knew to be his last public appearance, went out of his way to spew an additional measure of venom. His target this time wasn’t the government in Washington or Tel Aviv but Baghdad.
Noting that Saddam had killed thousands of his own Kurdish citizens with chemical weapons, Yousef went on to declare that he “is killing [innocent Iraqi citizens] because he is a dictator.”20 For a man accused by many of being an agent of Iraq, it was a curious way to bring down the public curtain on his career.
That night, when Ronnie Bucca got home, Eve made a special dinner for him to celebrate. But after they went to bed, Bucca, who usually got along on a few hours’ sleep, tossed and turned. Then, late in the night, he woke up suddenly. He was sweating.21
“Hey, Ron. Are you okay?” asked Eve, switching on a bedside light.
Ronnie held his hand out. It was trembling. He closed it into a fist and tried to calm himself. After years of rushing into burning buildings he’d had his share of bad dreams, but somehow to Eve this seemed worse.
“Tell me about it,” she said. Ronnie looked at her. He shook his head and started to go back to sleep, but she pressed him. “Come on, tell me.”
“I saw this fire,” he said. “Like I usually see. Only this time, I couldn’t knock it down. It wouldn’t go out. Then I saw something sparkle. A dagger with jewels like from Ali Baba.” He shook his head like he was losing the image, so Eve pressed him.
“What else?”
“There was this sound….It started slow, in the background. Then it was like a heartbeat. I could see the heart, and pretty soon it turned into the earth. It was beating like it was alive, and then this knife just stabbed at it.” Ronnie winced at the thought. “This beating heart was the world and this dagger just cut right through.”
He looked at his wife, who put her arms around him. “Ronnie, you’ve done everything that you can. You have got to let this go. You’re the balanced one, remember?”
“I can’t help what I know, Eve.”
“But it’s over now, right? You said Yousef was the one—the big piece.”
Ronnie nodded, then turned toward her. “What if it’s bigger than him?”
Eve moved closer. “Ronnie, no matter how many fires you put out, there’s always another one. All you can do is keep your family close and do your job the best way you can.”
Ronnie stared at her, wanting to believe it, but a feeling kept gnawing at him that there was more to this.
The next morning, when he picked up the New York Times, he knew he was right. On the inside jump page of the story that covered Yousef’s sentencing, there was a reference to something the U.S. attorney had done after the proceedings in court.
Mary Jo White had formally unsealed an indictment naming someone called Khalid Shaikh Mohammed as Yousef’s coconspirator. The price on his head was $2 million.22
Ronnie thought he knew most of the players around Yousef, but not this guy. And now the Feds had tagged him with the same bounty that had brought Yousef down. That meant he was a heavyweight. The story said he might even be related to the bomb maker.
Christ, thought Ronnie, there’s another one out there.