Turning his attention to the United States, he said we “hold you responsible for all of the killings and evictions of the Muslims and the violation of the sanctities, carried out by your Zionist brothers in Lebanon; you openly supplied them with arms and finance. More than 600,000 Iraqi children have died due to lack of food and medicine and as a result of the unjustifiable aggression [sanctions] imposed on Iraq and its nation. The children of Iraq are our children. You, the USA, together with the Saudi regime, are responsible for the shedding of the blood of these innocent children.”
With his new terror chief in mind, bin Laden sent out a dangerous and explicit warning: Unless the United States changes its anti-Muslim policies within the Middle East, his organization will begin carrying out terrorist actions within the United States, similar to the earlier attack on the World Trade Center. “I say if the American government is serious about avoiding the explosions inside the U.S.,” said bin Laden, “then let it stop provoking the feelings of 1,250 million Muslims. Those hundreds of thousands who have been killed or displaced in Iraq, Palestine, Lebanon, do have brothers and relatives. They would make of Ramzi Yousef a symbol and a teacher. The U.S. will drive them to transfer the battle into the United States. Everything is made possible to protect the blood of the American citizen while the bloodshed of Muslims is allowed in every place. With this kind of behavior, the U.S. government is hurting itself, hurting Muslims and hurting the American people.”
It was an articulately delivered warning—halt your war on the Muslim people or we will launch a war on your people. And it will be America’s own actions that will provide him with his troops “to transfer the battle into the United States.” In this war, bin Laden said, civilians are fair game. “Regarding the American people, they are not exonerated from responsibility, because they chose this government and voted for it despite their knowledge of its crimes in Palestine, Lebanon, Iraq and in other places.” Finally, when asked what his future plans were, bin Laden gave an ominous answer: “You’ll see them and hear about them in the media, God willing.”
The wake-up alarm went off six months later. On August 7, 1998, the concussion of a mighty truck bomb blew out a high wall of windows in the American embassy in Nairobi, Kenya. Twinkling shards of glass, like ice crystals in a sudden winter storm, rained death and mutilation on innocent passersby below. The rear half of the embassy was torn away like the back of a cardboard cereal box, and another three-story building, the Ufundi Cooperative House, home to a secretarial school, was gutted. Dismembered body parts in small crimson puddles covered the area, broken bodies hung from rebar and cement on exposed upper floors of the embassy, and another fifteen people who happened to be in a passing bus were incinerated in their seats.
At almost the same moment, four hundred miles to the south in the Tanzanian capital of Dar es Salaam, a bomb planted in a gasoline tanker exploded near the entrance of the American embassy, destroying the front of the building and bringing further death and injury.
“The war has just begun,” said bin Laden.
In a little-publicized interview in Arabic, bin Laden explained the reason for targeting America’s embassies in East Africa. “The Nairobi embassy was actually six embassies combined in one,” he said. “The brutal U.S. invasion of Somalia kicked off from there. Some 13,000 from among our brothers, women, and sons in Somalia were killed. . . . For the past few decades, plots have been hatched to partition Sudan from there. These plots are hatched in Nairobi. As is widely known, the U.S. embassy in Nairobi is the agency that is doing this. The greatest CIA center in eastern Africa is located at this embassy. Thanks to God’s grace to Muslims, the blow was successful and great. They deserved it. It made them taste what we tasted during the massacres committed in Sabra, Shatila [Lebanon], Dar Yasin [Palestine], Qana, Hebron [Israel], and elsewhere.”
Despite the fact that the NSA was able to monitor bin Laden’s satellite phone, the agency was never able to pick up any clues to the plot. Yet the phone was used by bin Laden and his top lieutenants to help orchestrate the bombings.
In October 1997, Ibrahim Eidarous, currently awaiting extradition from England as part of the embassy bombing conspiracy, sent word from London to Afghanistan asking Ayaman Al Zawahiri, bin Laden’s right-hand man, to call 956375892. This was a mobile phone in London belonging to yet another alleged embassy bombing co-conspirator, Abden Bary, who is also awaiting extradition from London. The following day, the satellite phone was used to make several calls to that phone number in London. According to intelligence officials, bin Laden also used the phone for nonsensitive calls, such as to his mother.
NSA would not have another opportunity. Following a U.S. cruise missile attack on one of his training camps, bin Laden never used the phone again. Although he certainly knew all along that the phone could be monitored, until then he may not have realized that it could also act as a homing device for cruise missiles.
Anger at Israel and America for their perceived anti-Muslim policies, as bin Laden predicted, penetrated deep inside Muslim communities all over the world—including within the thin plaster walls of a four-story apartment building at 54 Marienstrasse in Hamburg, Germany. The boxy, modern structure was located in the Harburg section of the waterfront city, a cosmopolitan area of briefcase-clutching middle managers and Portuguese bakeries selling warm, sugarcoated malassada and custard pies. One of the residents, occupying a three-bedroom, first-floor apartment, was Mohamed Atta. In 1999, he graduated with high honors and a degree in civil engineering and urban planning from the nearby Technical University of Hamburg–Harburg.
Atta’s flat resembled something a college debating society or a war council might use. A small circle of Arab friends from different countries and with different degrees of religious commitment would gather regularly and discuss the growing threats facing Muslims around the world. Always at the top of the list was the Israeli-American axis. Among the group was Ziad Jarrah, a student who grew up in war-torn Lebanon and graduated from school in Beirut days before Israel renewed its bombing campaign of the city. As Operation Grapes of Wrath once again brought fear and misery to his friends and relatives in Lebanon, Jarrah left for college in Germany barely a week ahead of the first bombs.
Already fluent in Arabic, English, and French, Jarrah enrolled in a German-language course at the University of Greifswald, near the Baltic Sea. In 1997, he transferred to the University of Applied Science in Hamburg, where he studied aircraft engineering. Almost every week, he would drive to the German industrial city of Bochum to spend the weekend with his girlfriend, a medical student, where his name was next to hers on the mailbox of her small dormitory room. An above-average student for two years at the university, by 1999 he had begun spending more and more time in Bochum and also in the Harburg section of Hamburg, hanging out at 54 Marienstrasse.
Atta met a number of his friends, including Jarrah, at the Al Quds mosque in downtown Hamburg. A worn three-story building on Steindamm Street near the main train station, it was sandwiched between a bodybuilding parlor and a Turkish coffee shop. While many Muslims kept their rage against Israel and the United States unseen and sealed up inside, like a shaken soda bottle with a tight cap, others found a welcome outlet in the fire-spewn rhetoric echoing from a few local mosques and in small clusters of friends. Finally, they could pry off the cap, vent their anger—for some built up over decades—and find supportive voices offering agreement, reinforcement, and even divine salvation.
“The Jews and crusaders must have their throats slit,” said Al Quds’s Imam Mohammed al Fizazi in a videotaped sermon around that time. It was in this mosque that Mohamed Atta signed his last will and testament shortly after Israel’s Grapes of Wrath bombing campaign against Lebanon began. Many believed that Israel and America had long before declared war on them—Grapes of Wrath and the massacre at Qana being only the latest outrage. For some, it was time to sign up and join the jihad to defend their families, their countries, their religion. To them, Osama bin Laden was a hero, someone who dedicated his life and his fortune to helping push the Russians out of Muslim Afghanistan—a solitary moment of glory in an era of constant encroachments by the West. Bin Laden was their General George Patton, with a walking cane instead of a riding crop.
One of Atta’s roommates at 54 Marienstrasse was a slight, round-faced immigrant, Ramzi Binalshibh. On September 22, 1995, he stepped off a ship in Hamburg with one suitcase and a plea for political asylum, claiming illegal detention and torture in his native Sudan. In fact, he was born on May 1, 1972, in San’a, the capital of Yemen, and he grew up in the sandswept village of Amad in the eastern Yemeni province of Hadramaut.
A sweltering, remote land sandwiched between the turquoise Arabian Sea and the rolling sand-waves of the Ar-Ruba’ al-Khali desert, it is also where Osama bin Laden’s father spent his youth. Ironically, nearby is the celebrated city of Shibam. It is known as “the Manhattan of the desert.” Its five hundred five- to seven-story ancient buildings are considered the first skyscrapers in the world. Half a millennium old, they are crammed into an area of perhaps only five hundred square meters. Once the capital of Hadramaut, and now a town of about 7,000, the age-old skyscrapers are made of mud bricks and wooden superstructures on stone foundations.
The fourth among six brothers, Binalshibh graduated from a secular high school with honors and won a scholarship to study economics and political science in Germany. But the death of his father when he was sixteen required him to change his plans, and he instead took courses in English and went to work for a private commercial bank in Yemen. “He maintained a simple life in Yemen, with our mother, who took care of the family since our father died,” said his brother, Ahmed Binalshibh.
Another member of Atta’s small circle of friends was Marwan al-Shehhi, who arrived in Germany on April 28, 1996, shortly after Jarrah. Born on May 9, 1978, in Ras al-Khaimah, part of the oil-rich United Arab Emirates, he had a scholarship and received a generous monthly allowance from home. After taking some German prep courses in Bonn, he switched to the Technical University of Hamburg–Harburg, where Atta was attending. Also attending the school, studying for a degree in electrical engineering, was Said Bahaji, who became another of Atta’s roommates. He was born in Germany’s Lower Saxony in 1975 and moved to Morocco, the birthplace of his father, in 1984. After high school, he moved back to Germany in 1995 and enrolled in college.
By the end of the summer of 1999, the group was convinced that it was time to put a period at the end of the long discussions and turn instead to action. A critical player in that decision was Mohammed Haydar Zammar, a three-hundred-pound tanklike figure who spent much of his time sounding the battle cry of war to anyone who would listen. “We cannot just sit and do nothing,” he exclaimed, blasting the actions of the United States and Israel against the Palestinians and other Muslims. A battle-hardened veteran of the wars in Afghanistan and Bosnia, in 1996—the year of Israel’s Grapes of Wrath campaign and the Qana massacre—he flew to Afghanistan and pledged his allegiance to Al Qaeda.
“The group’s discussions became increasingly virulent,” said Kay Nehm, Germany’s lead federal prosecutor. “The members’ hatred focused on ‘world Jewry’ and the United States of America. To defeat these was seen as the central objective of the jihad.” The prosecutor added, “By October 1999 at the latest, the members of the group under Atta’s leadership had decided to participate in a jihad through a terrorist attack on America and kill as many people as possible.”
On October 9, 1999, the group gathered at the Al Quds mosque to celebrate the wedding of Atta’s roommate, Said Bahaji. It was an unusually festive occasion with a great deal of laughter. Tables were covered with lamb, baked plums, eggs, almonds, unleavened bread, small round Moroccan sweet cakes, and pitchers of lemonade. Ramzi Binalshibh was sitting cross-legged on the floor when he apologized for interrupting. Then he made a short tribute to his close assembled friends. After denouncing the United States and Israel, he said, “The goal of every Muslim is to free the Islamic lands of every oppressor and tyrant! . . . And when these tyrants attack you, you will become a wave of fire and blood!” A short while later, Marwan al-Shehhi led the guests as they joined in an old Arab fighting song: “We will be filled with glowing enthusiasm,” they sang, “and we will crush the thrones of the oppressors!”
It was as if they were heading off to war, and by then they secretly knew they were. Encouraged by Mohammed Haydar Zammar, the Al Qaeda recruiter, the four friends had secretly submitted their application to attend one of bin Laden’s training camps and then volunteered to fight in Chechnya. Although they considered the Israeli-American aggression in the Middle East to be the greatest threat, the principal military effort being waged by the latter-day mujahideen was against the Russians in the breakaway former Soviet republic. At the time, the idea was simply to go off and earn their jihad stripes and then see where life took them.
When he joined forces with bin Laden in 1996, three years earlier, Khalid Shaikh Mohammed had suggested bringing the war to America through the use of a spectacular form of aviation terrorism—suicide pilots who would crash planes into government buildings. At first he mentioned crashing a plane into the CIA headquarters just across the Potomac River from Washington. But bin Laden had his sights set considerably higher. “Why do you use an ax when you can use a bulldozer?” he said. After a discussion about hijacking five passenger jets on each coast, the two settled on a total of four planes, a much more manageable number—and bin Laden had four pilot candidates in mind. They were tough, dedicated, and willing to die for the cause. Two were from Saudi Arabia, Khalid Almihdhar and Nawaf Alhazmi, both hardened veterans from the bloody fighting in Chechnya and Bosnia. Two others were from Yemen.