Chapter 10
Sammy the Terrorist
Many people think radical thoughts. Some join radical movements and agitate for radical change. But only a select few enter the world of radical violence. There is no shortage of guerrillas and insurgents in the world, but becoming a terrorist is something different. The rebel is just a soldier in an improvised uniform, using the traditional tactics of warfare to fight for whatever cause has inflamed his or her passions, be it territorial aspirations, ideology or the struggle for self-determination.
The terrorist, on the other hand, seeks by definition to terrorize. To be effective, the terrorist must become someone the very thought of whom strikes fear in others. The terrorist does this by committing violence that is so indiscriminate, so random, so horrific that its practitioners seem inhuman, as if they will stop at nothing to get what they want: slaughtering school children in Russia; detonating a suicide vest on a Jerusalem bus; blowing up Spaniards commuting to work on the morning train; beheading hostages with a sword and then distributing the videotape.
Mohammed Jabarah knew he was stepping across that line. When KSM told him to leave before Tuesday, Mohammed suspected something was up. He thought a “big operation” was scheduled for that day, although he told investigators later that he did not know where or when. He left Pakistan on Monday, September 10, 2001. In a hotel room in Hong Kong the next day, he watched the looped news footage of airplanes piercing the Twin Towers and New Yorkers fleeing through streets clouded with smoke and dust. When the photographs of the hijackers were shown, he recognized four of them as fellow Al Qaeda trainees he had met at a guesthouse in Kandahar that March. He watched the television, and he hesitated. He asked himself whether he could go through with it. Could he carry out this mission of death that had been assigned to him?
It was one of those times that everyone has to confront at some point—should I or shouldn’t I? But Mohammed’s answer was going to affect not only his own life, but also the lives of the hundreds of innocents he had been assigned to kill.
He could have pulled back right then.
It would have been easy enough. He had the wad of cash that KSM had given him. He could have used it to buy a plane ticket to Toronto, and that would have been the end of it. He would have been just another of the tens of thousands of idealistic young Muslims who made their way to Afghanistan to pay homage to bin Laden. Others before him had done just that, and decided after meeting bin Laden that he was just an egotistical fanatic trying to get his way—someone hardly worth the sacrifice of one’s life.
Except for his two weeks of combat at the Taliban front, Mohammed had not yet done any real harm. He could have flown back to Canada and left it all behind—admitted he had made a terrible mistake and moved on. He could have walked into the Canadian embassy and offered to tell everything he knew. He was only 19, and people might understand how the Al Qaeda recruiting machine had exploited him for so long and at such a young age. Had he turned back, there would have been little the authorities could have done. He had not broken any laws in Canada, at least not at the time.
But he didn’t do that.
Mohammed paused, but only long enough to make sure he was certain of what he was doing. He felt that since bin Laden had personally chosen him for this mission, out of all the men in Afghanistan, he could not pull out. How could he? He had made an oath before God to bin Laden. This was about a cause that was much bigger than Mohammed; who was he to disobey? Bin Laden and KSM had given him this assignment; he was serving Al Qaeda and God. He could not question that. After all, he was Mohammed Mansour bin Nazem Al-Aboussi, the descendent of the great Antara. Even Antara had his moments of hesitation, for instance, when he watched his victims bleeding to death on the battlefield, but he got over it when he heard the shouts of “Antara, on!” Mohammed became a terrorist knowingly and willingly. He crossed the line with his eyes wide open. And once you become a terrorist, there is no going back. Mohammed knew what he was doing. What he did not know was that he was already being hunted.
A few weeks after the Canadian Security Intelligence Service first heard about Mohammed and Abdul Rahman Jabarah and their extremist talk at the mosque, intelligence officers began seeking approval to make the brothers the targets of an intelligence investigation. CSIS is not a large agency; the ongoing challenge is to decide where its limited number of agents and analysts should focus their efforts. What should be the priorities for intelligence-gathering? The trick is to make sure the various operations going on at any one time are proportional to the threat. And the rule of thumb at CSIS was that investigations had to proceed incrementally, starting with the least intrusive methods and advancing from there as required.
No investigation can begin without what is called a targeting authority. Under the CSIS Act, before intelligence officers can begin working a case they must get approval from management. There are three levels of authority. Level 1 allows agents to conduct background checks on the target. They can verify databases, look for police records and consult with friendly foreign partners. A Level 2 investigation allows covert surveillance, interviews and consultations with human sources in the field. The more serious cases go to the Target Approval and Review Committee, or TARC. The TARC is chaired by the Director, and includes the Deputy Director of Operations, Assistant Director of Operations, the heads of the counter-intelligence, counter-proliferation and counter-terrorism branches, and representatives from the Department of Justice and the Deputy Minister. Submissions to TARC have to describe the purpose of the investigation and how the activities of the proposed targets are a threat to the security of Canada.
The TARC deals mostly with Level 3 investigations, the most intrusive kind. A Level 3 approval gives agents the authority to recruit and task human sources against a target. It also gives CSIS the option to ask the Federal Court of Canada for a warrant authorizing covert searches and the interception of communications. If such powers are sought, a case brief is drafted and goes to the legal desk, which prepares an affidavit. The affidavit goes to a review committee, then to the minister before being presented to the court. This entire process and all its paperwork are regularly audited by the Security Intelligence Review Committee, which reports to Parliament. In the year the investigation of the Jabarah brothers began, CSIS obtained 111 new warrants, and another 155 from previous years were either replaced or renewed.
The targeting approval process is “an essential feature of how we do business,” Jack Hooper, the CSIS Assistant Director, testified at an inquiry in 2004. “We are dealing for the most part with phenomena—whether they are related to proliferation issues or espionage or terrorism—that are highly internationalized. I think dealing with those threats begs a coherent response and certainly a coordinated national response for dealing with those threats. Our service is a highly centralized organization because it has to be, and TARC is simply an element of that centralization.” In 2001, agents prepared a submission seeking a Level 3 authority to investigate the Jabarah brothers. The TARC, which was then headed by Ward Elcock, the longtime CSIS director, gave its consent. CSIS was going to use its most intrusive techniques to try to figure out what Mohammed and Abdul Rahman were up to.
At about 1:30 p.m., on the afternoon of September 11, 2001, two Canadian intelligence officers, one male and one female, knocked on Mansour Jabarah’s door in St. Catharines. During their previous visits, the agents had been guarded, asking questions but never letting on what they suspected. They would say things like, “Maybe your sons went over to Afghanistan,” and Mansour would reply, “No way. If they are going to go somewhere, they are going to tell me first.” This time it was different. The agents were more direct. They started to talk more openly about their suspicions.
“We are searching for your sons,” Mansour recalls them saying. “Your sons [are] over in Afghanistan. They are living over there getting courses and camping with Osama bin Laden.”
“I did not know anything about this,” Mansour says he replied.
That night, someone set fire to the St. Catharines mosque.
CSIS agents knocked on a lot of doors in the days and weeks after 9/11. It was part of a “we’re watching you” campaign. Fears of a second wave of attacks in North America had security agencies on full alert. CSIS had more targets than it could control, so the agency decided to mount a diffusion campaign. Agents would knock on doors and let their targets know they shouldn’t try anything because they were being monitored. Some of the extremists scattered or left the country, spooked by the realization that CSIS was on to them. But some of them invited the agents into their homes and provided information. CSIS was not able to find the Jabarahs, and whenever agents went to the family house in St. Catharines, they got the same response: The boys are studying in Pakistan. The agency suspected they were still abroad with bin Laden, but they were concerned the brothers might return to Canada to put their terror skills to work, so they kept working on the file. Mansour grew tired of the CSIS agents and their questions. He thought the house was being watched. He felt harassed.
“Let’s go back to Kuwait,” he said.
It took Mohammed three days to get his passport stamped in Hong Kong. From there he flew three hours west to Kuala Lumpur International Airport, which was to be his operations base. Malaysia was never intended as an attack target for Al Qaeda. It was a source of money and recruits, and as a predominantly Muslim nation that had experience fighting terrorism but that did not see Al Qaeda as a particular threat, it was considered a safe place for Mohammed to do his work. The books for sale at the Sultan Ismail Petra Airport in the northern Malaysian city of Kota Bahru, near the restive Thai border, offer some insights into the Malaysian perspective: two dozen copies of The International Jew; another book about “the Zionist conspiracy” called The New International Jew; a whole selection of titles claiming the 9/11 attacks were the work of the CIA and Israel. (For some reason, these are positioned near a stack of Women’s Guide to Orgasm: Pathways to Pleasure.) I also find a copy of The Judgment of Islam on the Crimes of Salmon Rushdie. On the cover is a sketch of the author hanging from a noose. “It is the duty of Muslims to chase him all his life, and he will not remain out of our grasp forever . . . We can’t keep silent when we are insulted.” Then there is Jihad in the Qur’an, which details the religious justifications for taking up arms in defense of Islam.
A significant number of Malaysians have taken up arms for the jihadi cause. The border region where Malaysia meets Thailand is a lush land of palm trees, houses on stilts and songbirds in wooden cages, but it is also a perennial trouble spot. The militant groups Kumpalan Mujahedin Malaysia and Jemaah Islamiyah have used the region as a recruiting, training and operational base for many years. More recently, the border region has been the scene of a violent insurgency that seeks independence for southern Thailand’s Muslims. During my brief visit to the region in February 2005, a half-dozen bombs exploded. Assassins raced the streets clinging to the back of motor-scooters and opened fire as they passed police officers. Thai soldiers patrolled in armored vehicles and waited behind sandbags and concertina wire at checkpoints on the major roads. In the town of Rangae, the bloodstains from a bombing that morning were still drying at the side of the road. A wanted poster at the police headquarters offered rewards for the leading insurgents, some of them Thai and some Malaysian.
Malaysia became a base of Islamic extremism in the mid- 1980s. When the Suharto regime in Indonesia cracked down against Darul Islam, or House of Islam, a group that advocated armed struggle to impose Islamic law, some of its members fled across the Malacca Straits to Malaysia. There, they relaunched their organization as Jemaah Islamiyah (JI) and began a recruiting drive throughout the region. When one of the JI leaders, Abdullah Sungkar, ventured off to Afghanistan to fight in the anti-Soviet jihad, he laid the foundations for his group’s longstanding close relations with Al Qaeda. Upon Sungkar’s death in 1999, Abu Bakar Bashir assumed the role of the group’s ideological leader, and over the next two years JI began preparing for terrorist attacks intended to create a pan-Islamic state encompassing Malaysia, Singapore, Indonesia, Brunei, Cambodia, the southern Philippines and southern Thailand. The first major JI attacks were the December 2000 bombings of churches in Indonesia, followed by a train bombing in Manila. There are an estimated 5,000 members of JI, several hundred of whom are said to be “operationally oriented.”
When Mohammed Jabarah arrived in Kuala Lumpur, he checked his email and found a message from KSM. It said that if the Southeast Asia operation seemed like it was going to take a long time, Jabarah should consider returning to Pakistan for the time being. Jabarah seriously thought about leaving. He even went to the Pakistan embassy to get a visa, but it was denied on a technicality. The embassy would not grant him a visa unless he had a Malaysian work permit in his passport, which he did not have. The visa request was forwarded to Islamabad for consideration, but in the end it was refused. Jabarah decided to stay in Malaysia and push ahead with the operation.
For his mission, Jabarah needed a code name. It was too dangerous to use his real name, and everybody in Al Qaeda had at least a couple of aliases. Mohammed’s Al Qaeda name was Abu Hafs, but he needed something less likely to attract attention (Abu Hafs was also the Al Qaeda name of bin Laden’s military chief Mohammed Atef). He needed something that would make him sound like a Western tourist. Code names “should not be odd in comparison with other names used around him,” says the jihadi training manual, adding, “A brother should not have more than one name in the area where he lives.”
Mohammed chose the name “Sammy.”
He might have just picked it randomly. Or maybe he chose it because it was a Westernized version of the name of his leader: Osama.
Jabarah called the number that Hambali had given him in Karachi. Azzam answered and Mohammed identified himself using the code name “Mohammed Ibrahim.” They met at the office of Azzam’s home security business. It was about the size of a two-bedroom apartment. Azzam’s real name was Zulkifli Marzuki. He looked to be about thirty-five. He was a Malaysian with a wife and a job installing home alarms and locks. He was a terrorist in the security business. Like the other members of Southeast Asia’s underground jihadi movement, he understood the security advantages of communicating by email. His address, jonathan1000us@yahoo.com, gave no hints as to his identity.
Jabarah told Azzam he had been sent by “Mohammed the Pakistani” and asked how much money would be needed to blow up the American and Israeli embassies in Manila. Azzam told him the local cell already had $10,000 to $15,000 that they were willing to “donate to the cause,” as well as four tons of ammonium nitrate and 300 kilograms of TNT. Jabarah told Azzam he wanted to meet Faiz Bafana and Fathur Rohman Al-Ghozi. Bafana was a Malaysian businessman and contractor who had a civil engineering degree and was a leading figure in the JI’s regional shura council. Al-Ghozi was an Indonesian explosives expert better known as Mike the Bombmaker, who had trained in Afghanistan and was a member of the Moro Islamic Liberation Front in the Philippines. He had already killed 22 people when he bombed a Light Railway Train in Manila in 2000. But Azzam told Jabarah that neither man was in town. Bafana was away on a “business trip” and Mike was “in the Philippines training with the rebels.”
When Bafana returned to Malaysia, he met with Jabarah. Mohammed explained that he needed to go to Manila to get things going. Bafana told Mohammed to take along Ahmed Sahagi, who was to be one of the suicide bombers. (Sahagi had spent September 11, 2001, with KSM, and had told Jabarah that the plane downed in Pennsylvania was headed for the White House.) Bafana said he would contact Mike, who would contact them by email once they arrived.
They left right away.
They checked into the Horizon Hotel in Makati, and a few days later Mike emailed Jabarah with a phone number to call. They got together at the hotel. Mike’s Arabic was fluent, and he knew his craft, having been trained in Afghanistan in 1995 by the infamous Abu Khabbab. According to Mike’s calculations, the 300 kilos of TNT already amassed was not enough for the job. He estimated that four tons of explosives were required. He needed more time and more money.
There was another problem. Mike felt that the American embassy in Manila was set so far back from the road that it was going to be difficult to hit. To prove his point, he took Jabarah to have a look. He was right. It was a fortress. The Israeli embassy was also a difficult target because it was located in an office tower. There was a very real risk the operation would cause no significant damage. Mike wanted to go to Malaysia to confer with the others about the plot. Jabarah and Ahmed spent ten days in Manila and then returned to Kuala Lumpur separately to avoid suspicion.
When he reached Kuala Lumpur, Jabarah told Azzam to arrange a meeting with Bafana and Mike. Jabarah waited. Finally, he got an email from Azzam saying that Mike was back in Malaysia. They met and discussed the situation in Malay, occasionally translating for Mohammed. In the end, they were unanimous. The targets in Manila were no good. Jabarah and Mike, they decided, would go to Singapore to come up with a new plan of attack.