Talking to the Enemy: Faith, Brotherhood, and the (Un)Making of Terrorists (28 page)

Fearing an imminent attack and widespread panic, authorities cranked up their manhunt. They nabbed the Rabbit at his butcher shop. Having learned that the Kid would come by for some meat, agents told the Rabbit to put a transmitter in the bag with the food. They tracked the Kid to the subway but lost him when he threw away the bag. But through a telephone relay they caught one of the plotters’ calls and staked out a second-story apartment on Calle Carmen Martín Gaite in the Madrid suburb of Leganes, where several of the plotters were hiding out.

In the middle of the night, Cartagena was hauled out from his home in southwest Spain and driven to Madrid. At around three
P.M
., police surrounded the redbrick apartment block in the unremarkable commuter community of Leganes. Abdelmajid Bouchar, a young Moroccan immigrant who became involved in the plot, but who was still unknown to authorities, was taking out the group’s garbage when he heard a radio transmitter, saw a policewoman ringing apartment bells at the entrance to the building, and spotted her associates. He called out to his friends just before he bolted. (He managed to escape and flee the country but was caught some months later on a false passport in Eastern Europe and accused of planting bombs on the trains.)

Voices from the apartment cried out, “Allahu Akbar!” and machine-gun fire raked the street. Spain’s elite Grupo Especial de Operaciones moved in to clear nearby apartments, backed by tanks and helicopters. Cartagena was told to go up to the apartment where the plotters were holed up and try to get them to surrender “or at least count them.”

“Go to hell,” Cartagena said he told the police, even if they separate him from his family and deport him, as he claimed they had threatened to do. In the early evening, the Chinaman called his mother in Morocco to say good-bye, she heard an explosion, and the phone went dead.

The force of the explosion propelled the body fragments of the Tunisian, the Chinaman, and his four buddies from Mezuak through the back wall into the swimming pool below. It would take several months to finally complete DNA analysis of a skull fragment from the seventh suicide. It belonged to Allekama Lamari, a known Algerian hothead.
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ORGANIZED ANARCHY

In hindsight, the failure of Spanish police and intelligence authorities is mind-boggling. The narcotics police were on to the Chinaman, or at least to a number of his aliases, but completely ignored the multiple clues indicating his association with jihad and with the explosives deal. The police who were trying to set up a sting for the explosives weren’t at all interested in the drugs, which would have led them to the Chinaman. Cartagena’s pointed warning to the police that the Tunisian just might try something spectacular for jihad was simply ignored, perhaps because Cartagena himself told them that the Tunisian had no obvious practical know-how or means for the job, but also because they just didn’t want to be bothered.

There are numerous examples of the inability of the authorities to keep track of information they already had. For example, in early January 2004, the Chinaman cracked up his new BMW 530D in a multicar collision. The Madrid traffic police checked his false Belgian passport, issued in the name of Yousef Ben Saleh, the same passport and car that Madrid traffic police had checked the month before, when they had ordered the nervous owner to open his glove compartment, containing knives, a billy club, and jihadi literature. It was also the passport that Madrid traffic police checked when they ticketed the Chinaman for speeding in a Toyota Corolla with license number 9231 DCW on February 29, 2004, the day he brought a shipment of dynamite from Asturias to Madrid. And during the night of March 4, 2004, police brought in the Little Gypsy for driving the same Toyota Corolla without a license and into an accident. (Emilio Trashorras, who had sent El Gitanillo from Asturias to Madrid to pick up the Toyota, was furious that the boy had instead driven off with it to Toledo to visit an uncle.)

Starting in February 2003, Spain’s antiterror brigade had “kept under surveillance a group of radical Islamists which … later comprised the ‘commando’ unit that perpetrated the March 11 attacks.”
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But the surveillance team was dissolved in February 2004 for “lack of means” and absorbed in other security services. This and other bureaucratic missteps are appalling, given the wide reporting and awareness of intelligence failures in the lead-up to 9/11.

Perhaps to compensate for gross incompetence in tracking participants in the plot who were already known and under surveillance, Spanish authorities as well as the press insisted that the ability of the plotters to operate under the radar was clear evidence of a carefully staged plot by some Terror Central Organization, be it ETA (the favorite hypothesis of those close to rightist political circles) or Al Qaeda (the favorite hypothesis of those close to leftist political circles). Both sides stressed that the plot involved the complex coordination of dozens of participants. In fact, the plotters and the plot fell under the radar screen for precisely the opposite reason: because it was so anarchic, fluid, and improbable. Political scientists and organizational theories refer to this kind of structure as “organized anarchy,”
⁵
with the following four properties:

      FUZZY PREFERENCES

• The network operates on the basis of ill-defined and inconsistent preferences; it discovers preference through action more than it acts on the basis of preferences. Members participate without sharing consistent goals, and decisions reflect goal ambiguity and capricious decision making.
  

      TINKERED TECHNOLOGY

• Although the network manages to survive and carry through operations, its own processes and means are not understood by its membership. It operates on the basis of trial-and-error learning, the residue of learning from accidents or past experiences, and pragmatic inventions of necessity.
  

      FLUID STRUCTURE THAT VARIES OVER TIME

• Participants vary in the amount of effort devoted to different domains, and their involvement varies from one time to another time. As a result, the boundaries of the network are changing and uncertain.
  

      EMBEDDED IN LARGER SOCIAL NETWORKS RATHER THAN ISOLATED FROM THEM

• This makes it imperative to compare who opts for violence versus who doesn’t within these larger networks. But police and intelligence authorities, as well as much of the press, are usually only concerned with the people directly implicated in a plot or crime and care little for understanding the wider social history and environment of their path to violence. Concentrating only on the perpetrators teaches you very little about the processes and paths of radicalization to extreme violence.
  

The Madrid plot was incubated by a hodgepodge of childhood friends, teenage buddies, neighborhood pals, prison cellmates, siblings, cousins, and lovers. These weren’t careful, well-trained commandos. They were almost laughably incompetent, though tragically only a bit less so than Spanish law enforcement and intelligence. They got lucky, and hundreds of people were killed and wounded. If the trains had been on time, many more would have died. Fortunately, in this case, Spanish trains didn’t run to a German clock.

A BIG BANG FOR FEW BUCKS

Madrid was the second most expensive jihadi terrorist attack so far this century. It cost from 52,000 to 54,000 euros (about $50,000 at the time). It was almost entirely a local operation, self-financed by work wages, collections, and mostly the Chinaman’s drug activities (32,000 to 45,000 euros).
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Although authorities were told of the drugs-for-dynamite exchange, both from informers on the drug side and informers on the dynamite side, they could not fathom that the evolutionary landscape of jihad had changed.

Today, in 2010, Spanish police and intelligence tell a different story: Jihadi networks in Spain, and in much of Europe, are very much intertwined with petty criminal networks: drug trafficking, stolen cars, credit-card fraud, and the like. This wedding of jihadi and criminal networks was not inevitable or even desirable from the jihadi side (on principle, many jihadis still shun potentially lucrative relations with common criminals). To a significant extent, the joining of jihadis and criminals was a shotgun wedding, with U.S. counterterrorism being the unwitting father of the bride holding the gun. Here’s why:

To most quickly understand how 9/11 happened and to find and neutralize its planners, U.S. investigators realized early on that they had to “follow the money.” September 11 was a relatively complicated affair, involving many months of planning across three or four continents. It cost money, somewhere in the range of $400,000 to $500,000.
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Although this is a trivial amount compared to the estimated trillion or so dollars that the short-term reaction to 9/11 cost, it was enough to have left a traceable financial trail. Almost immediately, the United States compelled the world’s major financial institutions to monitor money transfers that could be potentially linked to terrorist financing and to freeze the accounts of any organization—charitable or otherwise—that appeared to be involved in such transfers.

One unintended consequence of the successful implementation of this new financial regime was to force would-be terrorists to rely on local, low-cost, underground, and informal methods of financing. In addition, the elimination of Al Qaeda’s training facilities in Afghanistan and the disruption of its networks for supplying expertise in logistics, bomb making, and so forth, meant that jihadis would have to find new means for executing terrorist operations. Petty criminal networks just happened to step into both of these niches: They had the informal financial wherewithal and the hands-on expertise in logistics (transport, safe houses, access to weapons) that the jihadis needed. Finally, as counterterrorism efforts continued to focus on Al Qaeda and the major jihadi organizations and operatives, many of whom continued to balk at dealing with mundane criminals, a newer wave of would-be jihadis was emerging. These were less ideological, less educated, less skilled, and so more socially compatible with petty criminals. Although lack of economic opportunity often reliably leads to criminality, it turns out that some youth who have turned to crime for lack of better opportunities really don’t want to be criminals after all. Given half a chance to take up a moral cause, they can be even more altruistically prone than others are to give up their lives for their comrades and a cause.

WHERE IS AL QAEDA?

So where, indeed, is Al Qaeda? It’s more up in the air than on the ground.

As in Madrid, most jihad-inspired acts of terror today are not well-planned engineering feats of military precision under clear command and control. They are opportunistic on unforeseen and contingent events: the effects of the U.S. counterterrorism financial regime in moving jihad into underground haunts shared with petty criminals; the Tunisian bonding with the Chinaman on the latter’s rebound from prison; the Chinaman knowing someone who happened to know someone who happened to have been in prison with two guys who could get dynamite; having friends from the old neighborhood as confidants to bring along; police incompetence.

The weakly interlocking series of loose and flat networks of friends and family from the mosques, the neighborhoods, work, prison, and so forth gives the illusion of a deviously well structured chain whose links were carefully designed to operate as semi-autonomous cells. There was, however, no Intelligent Designer. How comes it that a plot involving nearly forty people was able to go on for months right under the noses of Spanish authorities, especially when many of the participants were known to Spanish police or intelligence and even in contact with them? The irony of it all is that if the plotters had real organization and sophisticated knowledge, they probably would have been caught before the bombings. The plot was so scattered, improbable, and whimsical that even a competent police watch wouldn’t have had a light job of picking it up.

Under uncertain or constantly changing conditions, relatively fluid and flat networks that are self-organizing, decentralized, and overlapping—like terrorist or drug networks,
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financial or black arms markets,
⁹
or information webs of the Google or Wikipedia kind
¹⁰
—tend to outperform relatively rigid, centralized, and hierarchical competitors. Hierarchies are structured so that the bottom layers (workers) perform day-to-day tasks and the upper layers (management) plan for the long term.
¹¹
But in a rapidly changing world, large management structures set up for long-term maintenance of their organization’s position in a predictable world often cannot compete with smaller, self-motivated, and self-correcting systems that can more readily innovate and respond when opportunities or challenges arise.

In the case of terrorist networks, the heightened burden of surviving and maintaining security under sustained attack from law enforcement and counterterrorism might be expected to put a fatal brake on efficiency and innovation. But the interlocking relations of trust and familiarity inherent in the organic bonds of friendship, kinship, and neighborhood make these networks highly resilient to local failures and to predatory attacks from the outside. Of course, criminal gangs like the Mafia and the Latin American drug cartels also have these sorts of resilient networks. Terrorist networks, though, have something more: commitment to a moral cause, which allows for greater sacrifice than is usually possible with typical reward structures based on material incentives. In the jihad, even petty criminals come to transcend any usual motives for gain. They see a way of becoming part of something grand rather than small, and willingly give up their lives for a greater cause. No criminal enterprise compares.