New Infos on 911-"Financial Mastermind" KSM

Al Qaeda in America: The Enemy Within

By Evan Thomas

June 23 issue
Newsweek

It was the seizure of Khalid Shaikh Mohammed in March that allowed the Feds to really begin to connect the dots. KSM is a fanatical and committed terrorist who has spent years planning the mass murder of Americans. Long before 9-11, he had planned (along with his nephew Ramzi Yousef, a plotter in the 1993 World Trade Center bombing) a fantastic exercise called Project Bojinka (Serbo-Croatian for "big bang") to blow up a dozen airliners over the Pacific Ocean.

KSM's more recent pet proj-ect has been to disrupt the American economy by attacking its infrastructure. He wanted to destroy key transportation nodes-bridges, planes, trains and fuel supplies.

Indeed, KSM was planning to time some of these attacks, possibly against gas stations in New York and Washington, to coincide with the 9-11 attacks, but Osama bin Laden himself vetoed the idea, according to intelligence reports obtained by NEWSWEEK. Bin Laden was apparently worried about maintaining operational security for the spectacular hijackings. After 9-11, KSM revived the plans to attack a series of gas stations. According to Justice Department documents describing KSM's interrogation, he "tasked" a former resident of Baltimore named Majid Khan to "move forward" on Khan's plan to destroy several U.S. gas stations by "simultaneously detonating explosives in the stations' underground storage tanks." KSM was intimately involved in the details. When Khan reported that the storage tanks were unprotected and easy to attack, KSM wanted to be sure that explosive charges would cause a massive eruption of flame and destruction.

Khan-a "confessed AQ [al Qaeda] member" who was apparently captured in Pakistan, according to intelligence sources-traveled at least briefly to the United States, where he tried unsuccessfully to seek asylum. His family members, intelligence documents say, are longtime Baltimore residents and own gas stations in that city (a detail NEWSWEEK was able to confirm). KSM told interrogators that he and Khan discussed a plan to use a Karachi-based import-export business to smuggle explosives into the United States.

Khan looked for more help from people who might escape the notice of investigators. KSM told interrogators that a woman named Aafia Siddiqui, a U.S. visa holder who has lived in the United States for a decade, rented a post-office box to help Khan establish his U.S. identity. Siddiqui was supposed to support "other AQ operatives as they entered the United States," according to the Feds' description of the plot. Siddiqui's estranged husband, identified by informed sources as Mohammad Amjan Khan, had purchased body armor, night-vision goggles and a variety of military manuals to send to Pakistan. He apparently returned these items after being interviewed by the FBI. Both Siddiqui and Khan were described as "medical professionals." Siddiqui fled to Pakistan, where she was reportedly arrested.

KSM told his interrogators that he wanted "two or three African-American Muslim converts" to carry out his operation to blow up the gas stations. Majid Khan told the FBI that he had seen "two African Americans (identified as such by their American accents) during a 2000 meeting in Pakistan with KSM and other AQ operatives."

KSM had more diabolical plans for another of Khan's American relatives, a commercial truckdriver named Iyman Faris (a.k.a. Mohammad Rauf). The truckdriver is a naturalized U.S. citizen, a longtime resident of Columbus, Ohio. His ex-wife told friends that in hindsight she finds it disturbing that her husband, a devout Muslim, had long expressed an interest in learning how to fly. He spent hours, she said, reading magazines about ultralight aircraft, gliders with small engines that can be piloted almost anywhere. The order to study ultralight aircraft came directly from KSM, according to intelligence documents.

The Qaeda operations chief told interrogators that he had a specific assignment for the truckdriver. He wanted Faris to case the Brooklyn Bridge. KSM also instructed Faris to obtain "gas cutters" (presumably, metal-cutting torches) that could be used to cut the Brooklyn Bridge's suspension wires. And more: the truckdriver was assigned to obtain "torque tools" to bend railroad tracks, the better to send a passenger train hurtling off the rails. And still more: Faris recommended driving a small truck with explosives beneath a commercial airliner as it sat on the tarmac. A licensed truckdriver, he said, could easily penetrate airport security.

None of these plots ever came off. Faris has disappeared. No one was home when NEWSWEEK knocked on the door of his apartment in a run-down section of Columbus last week. But as recently as last month, public records show, he paid a $200 fine and got his driver's license restored after being arrested for speeding in Delaware County. (His license recently expired, say Ohio state officials; he has not tried to renew it.)

Qaeda operatives seem to be dangerous drivers. Faris was busted for speeding in 1996 and for "failure to control his vehicle" in 1997, when he flipped his vehicle on a highway exit ramp, local officials say. An arrest for drunken driving marred the otherwise clean record of another suspected sleeper agent whose story is a chilling example of Al Qaeda's foothold in the American heartland.

During his interrogation, KSM identified a man named Ali S. Al-Marri as "the point of contact for AQ operatives arriving in the US for September 11 follow-on operations." KSM described Al-Marri as "the perfect sleeper agent because he has studied in the United States, had no criminal record, and had a family with whom he could travel." Actually, Al-Marri had been charged with driving under the influence in Peoria, Ill., in 1990. The Qatari national had returned to the United States on Sept. 10, 2001, to pick up a graduate degree in computer information systems from Peoria's Bradley University. He was accused by the FBI of phoning an alleged Qaeda operative in the United Arab Emirates, Qaeda paymaster Mustafa Ahmed al-Hawsawi, and lying about it that same December. Al-Marri's apartment was filled with Islamic jihadist materials. His computer included bookmarked Web sites for hazardous chemicals, computer hacking and fake IDs, according to court documents. Bookmarks in an almanac marked entries for dams, reservoirs and railroads. U.S. officials were outraged when the Saudi Embassy helped Al-Marri's wife obtain a passport to leave the United States in November (U.S. officials say she was still under subpoena; Saudi lawyers disagree). Al-Marri, who pleaded not guilty to charges of lying to investigators and credit-card fraud, is in prison in Peoria, awaiting trial.

Intelligence records obtained by NEWSWEEK list other Qaeda operatives who may be hiding out somewhere in America. "KSM has identified Adnan el Shukri Jumah, a Saudi born permanent US resident alien as an operative with standing permission to attack targets in the United States that had been previously approved by Usama bin Laden," reads one entry in a Homeland Security document. "El Shukri Jumah lived in the US for six years and received an associate's degree from a Florida college. He reportedly surveilled targets in New York, as well as the Panama Canal." Osama's made man has apparently vanished.

Intelligence officials say, however, that they are in some ways more worried about lone wolves who have only distant ties to Al Qaeda. "My concern is what we're seeing in the Gaza Strip and the West Bank," one top official told NEWSWEEK-the solo fanatic suicide bomber, or, in intelligence parlance, a "non-aligned mujahedin." These are the lost souls who wandered through Al Qaeda's Afghan training camps during the '90s and have gone on to create their own cells. They may pose a more imminent threat than the kind of top-of-the-line, well-trained operatives who carried out the complex, almost balletic 9-11 hijack plan.

Canada seems to be a haven for these folk. In late May, Canadian authorities finally moved to expel a pizza-parlor operator and Moroccan refugee named Adil Charkaoui under newly enacted provisions of an antiterrorist law. Charkaoui, who admits he traveled to Pakistan for "religious training," has long been tied to Ahmed Ressam, the alleged terrorist who was arrested as he entered the United States from Canada at the time of the 2000 Millennium celebrations. In his car were the makings of a bomb, which, he later confessed, was intended for an attack on the Los Angeles airport. Charkaoui, a martial-arts expert, has also been linked to the 9-11 plotters as well as to a plot to blow up an Air France jetliner..."

All trademarks and copyrights on this page are owned by their respective companies.

printed from New Infos on 911-"Financial Mastermind" KSM on 2004-03-08 10:58:12