Living just south of town on State Highway 67, Ramzi Yousef was one of Florence’s involuntary residents. His address was, and will be for some time, Box 6000, United States Penitentiary Administrative Maximum Facility (ADX), Florence, Colorado 81226. Otherwise known as the Alcatraz of the Rockies, the two-story, rectangular ADX is America’s toughest prison—a “supermax.”
By September 11, 2001, Yousef’s world had shrunk to exactly eight feet by ten feet by twelve feet. That Tuesday was a day virtually identical to all others. Twenty-three hours of it was spent double-locked in a cement box behind a steel door and barred grate in the most secure wing of the most secure prison in America. Like the walls and the floor, the bed, desk, and stool were also made of poured concrete. His window, four inches wide, looked out on his small concrete recreation yard, which he could use one hour a day—but without any other human contact except for the watching guards. His sink had buttons instead of taps so the parts could not be disassembled and used as weapons or for suicide, and his toilet had an automatic shut-off valve to prevent him from stopping it up and flooding the cell. Among his four hundred neighbors were Unabomber Ted Kaczynski, Oklahoma bomber Terry Nichols, and, until he was executed, Nichols’s coconspirator, Timothy McVeigh. Reed thin, with a bony physique, wavy raven-dark hair, and determined brown eyes, Yousef was in the sixth year of a 240-year sentence.
Nearly a decade earlier, Yousef, who speaks perfect English with a British accent, boarded a plane from Pakistan to New York’s JFK Airport. The purpose of his visit was to exact revenge for America’s financial and military backing of Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians. Left behind in Pakistan was the mastermind of the plot, Yousef’s uncle, Khalid Shaikh Mohammed. A cunning engineer, Khalid Shaikh had studied higher mathematics and jet propulsion amid long-leaf pines and antebellum mansions in Greensboro, North Carolina.
Khalid Shaikh had arrived in the United States in 1984 and first spent a semester at nearby Chowan College, a 155-year-old Baptist school in Murfreesboro with clinker-built, white-painted homes on the Meherrin River. “Khalid, he was so, so smart,” recalled a fellow classmate who later became an advertising executive in Kuwait. “He came to college with virtually no English. But he entered directly in advanced classes. He was a funny guy, telling jokes twenty-four hours straight. He was focused. He wanted to get his degree and go home. He was so quiet, there was no indication that he was involved in [religious extremism].”
Following his semester at Chowan, which he used mostly to improve his English, Khalid transferred to North Carolina A&T in Greensboro, where he studied engineering, taking courses in the basics of power plants, combustion reactions, and jet engines.
Khalid Shaikh graduated from North Carolina A&T on December 18, 1986, having completed the requirements for his bachelor’s degree in mechanical engineering in just two and a half years. Of the twenty-eight others receiving similar ME degrees, almost one-third came from the Middle East. Rather than return to Kuwait, Khalid chose to join his older brother, Zahed, in Peshawar, Pakistan.
At the time, Peshawar was the front door to the Soviet-Afghan war, and thousands of Arabs from around the Middle East were flooding into the city before heading across the Khyber Pass into Afghanistan to help expel the Russians. Like many places that become crossroads for a war, Peshawar bubbled with intrigue and danger. As cash and weapons flowed in and out, smuggling became a booming business, and covert-action specialists competed with revolutionaries for recruits. It was into such an atmosphere that Khalid Shaikh Mohammed emerged as he stepped off his flight from Greensboro and took a whiff of war.
Soon after arriving, he obtained a job as an assistant to Abdul Rasool Sayyaf, one of the leading Afghan warlords and a former Kabul University professor. His brother, Zahed, had several years earlier begun making a name for himself running large charities—organizations raising money for a variety of causes, from combat arms to child welfare—in Peshawar. Coordinating many of these charities was Sheik Abdullah Azzam.
Born near Jenin, in Palestine, Azzam had been among the tens of thousands of Palestinians forced out of the West Bank during the Israeli occupation of 1967. In 1966, he received a bachelor’s degree in Islamic law from Damascus University. But a year later, the Israeli capture of the West Bank turned his village into little more than a military camp. Bitter with hatred at the occupiers with their tanks and troops, Azzam joined Yasser Arafat’s PLO movement in southern Jordan. In 1973, he earned his doctorate in Islamic jurisprudence from Al-Azhar University in Cairo.
More determined than ever to bring a violent end to the Israeli occupation of his lost Palestine, he also believed that the fight should be based on Islamic principles and laws. Thus, rather than return to Jordan, he instead accepted a teaching position in Jedda, Saudi Arabia, at the King Abdul Aziz University. Among the students who heard Azzam’s emotional plea for an Islamic war against Israel and its American benefactors was the wealthy son of a Saudi construction magnate, Osama bin Laden.
With the outbreak of the Afghan revolt against the Soviet invasion, Azzam saw his opportunity to rejoin the fight, and in 1979 he quickly exchanged the classroom for the battlefield. Moving to Peshawar, a frontier town in northwest Pakistan, he set up his Office of Services in a small shop among the city’s winding alleyways. The Office of Services was a sort of recruitment center and central clearinghouse for Arab volunteers—mujahideen—seeking to join the battle. Osama bin Laden, then twenty-two, followed his mentor to Peshawar and bankrolled the organization with his millions in family inheritance.
It was through these connections that Khalid Shaikh and his brother Zahed got to know Azzam, bin Laden, and Ayman Zawahiri, a top associate of bin Laden. Later, he would also be joined by another close relative, his nephew Ramzi Yousef, who had left Kuwait to study electrical engineering in Wales. Yousef made his first trip to Peshawar in 1988 during a summer break from Swansea Institute of Higher Education, where he was studying computer-aided electrical engineering. Then he returned the summer following graduation to train and offer instruction in explosives at the Sadda training camp for mujahideen. Controlled by Abdul Rasool Sayyaf, it was located in the wild Khumram Agency (agency was the bureaucratic term for the buffer zone between Pakistan and Afghanistan, which was managed by local Pashtun tribesmen) near the border town of Parachinar.
On September 1, 1992, Khalid Shaikh Mohammed’s nephew, Ramzi Yousef, stepped off a Pakistan International Airlines jet from Peshawar, Pakistan, at New York’s JFK Airport. Yousef, whose mother was Palestinian, would call himself “Pakistani by nationality” but “Palestinian by choice.” His goal was to punish the United States for its support of Israel. “Since the U.S. government every year sends military and financial aid worth hundreds of millions of dollars to Israel,” he said, “all Muslims have the right to regard themselves in a state of war with the U.S. government.”
Arriving in New York without a visa, Yousef told immigration inspectors that he was requesting asylum. After being fingerprinted, he was released but ordered to show up for a later hearing. From the airport he apparently took a taxi to the East Village of Manhattan, where he met with Mahmoud Abouhalima. A graduate of one of Osama bin Laden’s training camps, Abouhalima was also a former associate of El Sayyid Nosair, who was acquitted of charges he killed Rabbi Meir Kahane, the head of the Jewish Defense League, an anti-Arab terrorist group. (Nosair was convicted on lesser charges in the Kahane case.) Abouhalima introduced Yousef to other former associates of Nosair, and then Yousef moved in with Nosair’s top supporter, Mohammed Salameh.
Shortly after his arrival in New York, Yousef was told of the group’s plot to set off bombs at a dozen locations in New York associated with Israel. Yousef, however, instead suggested a much more ambitious target, one he and his uncle, Khalid Shaikh, had likely been planning for a long time: to bring down the soaring towers of the World Trade Center, the ultimate symbol of America’s worldwide financial muscle.
Six months later, a yellow Ford Econoline Ryder rental van was driven down the sloping ramp into the World Trade Center garage and parked in a space next to a concrete wall on the B-2 level. Packed inside the 295 cubic feet of space behind the driver’s seat was twelve hundred pounds of high explosive—a witch’s brew of nitroglycerine, urea pellets, sulfuric acid, aluminum azide, magnesium azide, and bottled hydrogen. Attached to the bomb were four fuses, each twenty feet long and covered with surgical tubing to help prevent escaping smoke. Once lit, the fuses burned at the rate of one inch per two-and-a-half seconds. At 12:17
P.M.
on February 26, 1993, the fuses reached the explosives, generating a massive blast consisting of more than 154,000 pounds of pressure per square inch. In that instant, the violent conflict between Israel and the Palestinians finally arrived in downtown Manhattan.
Hours later, the thick spiraling clouds of black and gray smoke pouring out of the World Trade Center were still visible as Ramzi Yousef rode to Kennedy Airport. In his pocket was a ticket on a Pakistan International Airlines flight to Karachi, and from there to Quetta, Pakistan, on the Afghanistan border. The fact that both towers remained standing, however, was a disappointment, one he planned to correct sometime in the future.
The next day, one of the members of the cell called the New York
Daily News
“tips line” and claimed responsibility for the bombing on behalf of the “Liberation Army,” which was the name Yousef gave to his terrorist group. “We conducted the explosion at the World Trade Center. You will get our demands by mail. This is the Liberation Army.” The letter containing the demands was sent to
The New York Times
. It said that the World Trade Center was bombed in retaliation for American support for Israel and demanded changes in American foreign policy in the Middle East. If the demands were not met, the letter warned, more terrorist “missions” would be carried out against military and civilian targets in America and abroad. It also warned that future attacks could be carried out by “suicidal soldiers,” a clear escalation in tactics.
Specifically, the letter declared:
OUR DEMANDS ARE:
1—Stop all military, economical, and political aid to Israel.
2—All diplomatic relations with Israel must stop.
3—Not to interfere with any of the Middle East countries interior affairs.
If our demands are not met, all of our functional groups in the army will continue to execute our missions against the military and civilian targets in and out the United States. For your own information, our army has more than hundred and fifty suicidal soldiers ready to go ahead. The terrorism that Israel practices (which is supported by America) must be faced with a similar one. The dictatorship and terrorism (also supported by America) that some countries are practicing against their own people must also be faced with terrorism.
The American people must know, that their civilians who got killed are not better than those who are getting killed by the American weapons and support.
The American people are responsible for the actions of their government and they must question all of the crimes that their government is committing against other people. Or they—Americans—will be the targets of our operations that could diminish them.
LIBERATION ARMY
FIFTH
BATTALION
The CIA and FBI had no doubts about the authenticity of the message. This was because they found a second “Liberation Army” letter, never sent, on a computer disk seized from the office of one of the cell members in New Jersey. Although the letter had been deleted, computer experts were able to recover it. This second letter made it very clear that they were planning to return to finish what they had started at the World Trade Center.
Unfortunately, our calculations were not very accurate this time. . . . However, we promise you that next time it will be very precise, and the World Trade Center will continue to be one of our targets in the U.S., unless our demands are met.
On September 11, 2001, shortly before seven, a late-model Volvo pulled up to a sidewalk in front of the headquarters for the National Security Agency at Fort Meade, Maryland, and a husky Air Force officer stepped out. Walking up a few cement stairs at Ops 2 Building, he pulled open a glass door, slipped his blue security badge into a reader, and pushed through the steel turnstile. Lt. Gen. Michael V. Hayden, the unpretentious director of the largest intelligence agency on earth, had arrived for work. “I drive myself or my son or wife will drop me off if they need the car,” he says, “and more often than not they will drop me off.” Bypassing his small private elevator, Hayden smiled, said “good morning,” and crowded in with the other early-morning arrivals in one of the large employee elevators.
Up on the eighth floor, he walked to the end of the hallway and entered the executive suite containing the offices of the director, deputy director, and executive director. Once referred to as “Mahogany Row,” the shiny wood was long gone. Instead, past the receptionist, the walls are covered with framed pictures of NSA’s largest listening posts. Among them is Menwith Hill Station in central England, with its dozens of eavesdropping antennas hidden under radomes that look like giant Ping-Pong balls. Hayden took a left through an unmarked wooden door and entered his corner office.
By early September 2001, the National Security Agency had become not only the world’s biggest spy organization but also the most sophisticated, pervasive, and secret. Since its birth on November 4, 1952, the singular objective of the NSA, responsible for worldwide electronic surveillance and code breaking, was to prevent a surprise attack. To that end, the agency had spent most of its existence—and its budget—focused on one target: the Soviet Union and its satellite states. For nearly half a century, the agency fought a secret war to break the defiant Russian cipher system and to eavesdrop on that nation’s most secret communications. But by the early 1990s, the Evil Empire had died, a friendly Russia had taken its place, and the earth suddenly shifted underneath it. Decades of training and billions of dollars’ worth of equipment were now out of date. No one knew where the next crisis would take place, or who the new enemies were. All Air Force Lt. Gen. Hayden, now Director of NSA, really knew for sure was that his agency was quickly becoming obsolete and he was running out of time to fix the problems.