“If somebody could be called the mastermind in this plot, in my view it’s Ramzi Yousef,” says James Fox, who was then director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s New York office. The State Department is offering $2 million each for Yousef and another fugitive, Abdul Rahman Yasin. As long as they remain at large, it warns in posters, fliers, even on matchbooks, “more innocent lives could be at risk.” Yet as federal investigators have focused on convicting plotters they have in hand, not talking up those who got away, the fugitives’ stories have been left largely untold.
To learn more, Newsweek and ABC television’s “Day One” have pored through hundreds of pages of evidence, interviewed investigators and tracked down their contacts from the Baluch region of Iran to a prison in Colorado. The results show that even though four other people were convicted in the trade-center case earlier this year, and an additional 15 – including the blind Egyptian cleric Omar Abdel-Rahman – have been charged in related conspiracies, it was Yousef who moved the group to action and built the bomb.
In just six months, from the day he arrived in the United States on Sept. 1, 1992, until the moment he left – hours after the trade-center explosion on Feb. 26, 1993 – Yousef took a handful of impoverished Muslim fanatics in Jersey City, N.J., and turned their wildest fantasies of holy war into a bloody reality on American soil.
Where did this guy come from? Investigators now believe he was born in Kuwait to Pakistani parents. But as one of them says, “That’s just the current version.” The most credible ID he carried was an Iraqi passport in the name of Ramzi Ahmed Yousef, supposedly aged 25 in 1992. Yet his acquaintances thought he was older. Yousef spoke fluent Arabic, English and Urdu, tailoring his life story to his audience. He told a human-rights group he was an Iraqi-born victim of political persecution in postwar Kuwait. “A very nice guy, very credible – in retrospect a very good liar,” reported a paralegal who interviewed him.
Yousef turned up in the United States at a critical moment for Muslim zealots inspired by Sheik Omar’s bloodcurdling rhetoric. They constantly fulminated against America but they couldn’t manage to make any bombs that worked. The man they thought would help them, a former Egyptian Army officer named Emad Salem, never delivered. In fact, he was a government informant.
When the FBI pulled Salem off the case and turned its attention elsewhere in the summer of 1992, the plotters already were looking for a new expert. The phone bill for one of them, Mohammed Salameh, jumped from $128.41 in May to $1,401 in June as he touched base with contacts from Germany to Pakistan to Iraq, where his uncle is a military officer with the Palestine Liberation Organization. The net was cast so widely that many secret services could have learned of Salameh’s interests and any one of them – including Iraq’s – may have sent an agent to help. “Was this a plot looking for a group to carry it out, or a group looking for a plot?” says an administration official concerned with the investigation. “I’m not sure there’s a difference.” The result, in any case, was lethal.
Yousef certainly had the calm of a pro. In Pakistan he hooked up with a Palestinian named Ahmad Ajaj, and bought first-class tickets for the two of them to fly to New York. Ajaj, interviewed in prison this month, said he was first off the plane when they landed at Kennedy airport. He presented a stolen Swedish passport with his picture clumsily glued on. The immigration officer took “less than two minutes” to spot the fake, he said. In his baggage a trove of bomb-making manuals and videotapes were found. Ajaj made an angry scene.
Yousef followed, cool and collected. He was dressed in Afghan-style clothes (“puffed sleeves” and “harem pants,” one witness recalled). At first he presented a fake ID card from an Islamic center in Arizona. But when that was challenged he quickly produced his Iraqi passport and asked for political asylum.
Ajaj went straight to jail. Yousef went to Jersey City, joined up with Mohammed Salameh and set about building his bomb. Unlike the alienated immigrants he worked with, Yousef moved in American society with easy assurance, using automatic teller machines, conducting international conference calls. When his accomplices couldn’t persuade chemical and gas suppliers to sell them materials, Yousef bought them easily. For that job he claimed to be an Israeli Arab.
Meanwhile, he started preparing his escape. He convinced the Pakistani Consulate in New York that he had lost a valid passport, and got himself a new one under yet another alias. He booked his flight out of New York 13 days before the bombing, and when the job was done his ticket showed him heading for the wilds of Baluchistan along the Pakistan, Afghan and Iranian borders – a lawless, desolate region once described by American geologists as the closest thing on Earth to Mars.
Where did Yousef learn his skills? There are tantalizing hints of ties to Iraq: the passport, Salameh’s calls to Baghdad, Saddam Hussein’s history funding covert networks in Afghanistan and even Baluchistan, the dictator’s recent alliances with Islamic extremists. Certainly Saddam had the clearest motive for an attack – revenge – and the date of the bombing was, suggestively, the second anniversary of his defeat in Kuwait. “The logic is there,” says one counterterrorism official, “but – there’s no evidence.”
For a “smoking gun,” investigators say they need Yousef himself, or at least Yasin. Born in the United States and eligible for an American passport, he also came from Iraq to Jersey City late in the summer of ‘92. He seemed to be a minor accomplice, charged with mixing chemicals. The FBI actually arrested Yasin in March 1993 – then let him go when he turned informant. They’ve been trying to get him back ever since. But there’s no question about Yasin’s whereabouts. A reporter for Newsweek and ABC saw him in Baghdad last week. His neighbors say he’s working for the Iraqi government. If so, like Yousef, he may be well beyond the long arm of American law.
title: “America S Most Wanted” ShowToc: true date: “2023-01-29” author: “Amber Ryan”
In his new book, ominously titled “The Enemy at Home,” D’Souza takes pains to insist that “I am not accusing anyone of treason or even of anti-Americanism.” He’s merely identifying people who, blinded by hatred of President Bush, actively work to promote the interests of the jihad–by inflating a few tawdry pranks at Abu Ghraib into allegations of torture, for example, or spreading defeatism about America’s success in Iraq. So it’s not as if he’s the second coming of Joseph McCarthy, although he happens to believe McCarthy was by and large right. He’s just keeping a list.
But this is only half of D’Souza’s indictment of “the Left.” It’s not just that they’re working on behalf of bin Laden–they are also, paradoxically, responsible for bin Laden’s hatred of America in the first place, by attempting to foist their decadent moral values on the rest of the world. D’Souza cites the long self-justifying statement bin Laden released in 2002, but ignores the entire first half of it, which deals with the Arabs’ geopolitical and economic grievances, and skips to his denunciation of America as “the worst civilization in the history of mankind,” sunk into “fornication, homosexuality, intoxicants [and] gambling.” To D’Souza, this is a trenchant cultural critique; the road to 9/11 begins with reruns of “Baywatch,” raining down their suggestive filth on the conservative, patriarchal societies of Islam.
In short, D’Souza believes that bin Laden, although his tactics were deplorable, was expressing a legitimate case against America, that notorious fount of pornography, homosexuality and women’s liberation. “What traditional cultures … consider deviant and disgusting,” he writes, “many liberals consider progressive and liberating.” Illustrating the cultural obtuseness of the left, D’Souza quotes New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof’s identification of “gender equality in the developing world” as “the central moral challenge of this century.” That sounds a lot less fatuous when you realize that Kristof was writing about a Pakistani woman who was sentenced by a tribal court to be gang-raped as punishment for an alleged offense by her brother. D’Souza’s admiration for traditional customs doesn’t go that far, but apparently neither does he think it’s any of America’s business to interfere with this time-honored practice. Of course those tribesmen are going to resent those liberal busy-bodies! Hillary Clinton comes off even worse; D’Souza accuses her of trying to legalize prostitution in the rest of the world, a ridiculous charge stemming from an arcane 2000 debate over the wording of a treaty to outlaw the sexual-slavery trade.
There’s a “domestic insurgency” afoot, D’Souza warns, that’s “at least as dangerous” as bin Laden’s operatives. Here are some of the names on his list:
The Congressional Left Sen. Hillary Clinton; Sen. Ted Kennedy; Rep. Nancy Pelosi, Speaker of the House; Rep. Charles Rangel; former representative Cynthia McKinney; Rep. Barney Frank
The Intellectual Left Noam Chomsky, professor of linguistics at MIT; Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates; author Thomas Frank (“What’s the Matter With Kansas”); Robert Reich, former secretary of Labor; Harvard Law School professor Laurence Tribe; author Garry Wills
The Hollywood Left Martin Sheen; Barbra Streisand; Tim Robbins; Susan Sarandon; Sean Penn; Harry Belafonte; Spike Lee; RosieO’Donnell; Cameron Diaz; Sharon Stone
The Activist Left Howard Dean; Michael Moore; philanthropist George Soros; Cindy Sheehan; Paul Begala; Jim Wallis, preacher and activist; blogger Markos Moulitsas (Daily Kos)
The Foreign-Policy Left Jimmy Carter; Gore Vidal, novelist; journalists Seymour Hersh (The New Yorker), Jonathan Schell (The Nation) and Bob Herbert (The New York Times)
The Cultural Left Norman Mailer, Salman Rushdie and Toni Morrison, novelists; journalists Frank Rich and Maureen Dowd (The New York Times); playwright Eve Ensler (“The Vagina Monologues”); authors Barbara Ehrenreich (“Nickel and Dimed”) and Karen Armstrong (“A History of God”)
