Jihad Joe_ Americans Who Go to War in the Name of Islam - J. M. Berger [40]
“He gets his training, he goes to Bosnia, I mean he relies on Allah and see, Allah may improve it for the Muslims through them,” Siddig said on a surveillance tape. “He who will be a martyr, thank Allah the Lord of the universe and he who stays alive, he still will be trained!”49
Rashid’s top trainer, Abu Ubaidah, ran some of the sessions. Rashid himself was often absent, although he had arranged the location and outfitted the participants with guns and other military supplies.
Unbeknownst to Siddig and his friends, others were in attendance for the camp’s inaugural session: a five-man FBI surveillance team tracking the group. The surveillance was short-lived, terminated due to a lack of support from headquarters—an unfortunate decision.50 On a subsequent trip, Siddig carried out a little “experiment” for a friend named Mahmud Abouhalima—a key player in the World Trade Center bombing, which was still in the planning stages.
Although Siddig and Abouhalima moved in many of the same circles, they were pursuing their projects independently. In early 1993 Abouhalima asked Siddig for a favor: would he test-explode a bomb design Abouhalima was working on? After consulting with Rashid, Siddig agreed to conduct the experiment, and some of the Pennsylvania trainees may have detonated the test bomb in January 1993.51
The bomb’s design came from Ramzi Yousef. While the JTTF was working on the visible fringes of the New York jihad operation, Yousef, Abouhalima, and at least five other coconspirators were quietly planning a terrorist attack that would shake the nation.
When Yousef’s bomb went off on February 26, 1993, it had a dramatic effect on the Project Bosnia jihadists. Siddig and Abouhalima were friends, if not partners. Both men were devoted to Sayyid Nosair, and both were egged on in their ambitions during visits with Nosair in prison. Rashid also knew both Abouhalima and Nosair from the Calverton training in 1989.
After the Trade Center bombing, Abouhalima turned to Siddig for help getting away. When he explained what he had done, Siddig hugged him and exclaimed, “God is greatest and thanks to God. God is greatest, my God, my God, my God, God is greatest.”
Siddig gave Abouhalima letters of introduction to friends overseas who would help him hide and drove him to the airport for his flight out of the country. All of this assistance was for nothing; Abouhalima was arrested in Egypt a few weeks later.
After Abouhalima left, Siddig was emboldened to put his own plans into action. For months, he had been talking with Nosair about possible terrorist plots that he could execute, sometimes using Bosnia as a pretext and other times citing more abstracted Islamic rationalizations.
Among the plans that were discussed and discarded, there was the bombing of a dozen “Jewish” locations in New York and the kidnapping of Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger (whose policies Nosair and Siddig obscurely blamed for the troubles in Bosnia). Siddig consulted Omar Abdel Rahman at various stages in these discussions. The blind sheikh was not troubled by the idea of a terrorist campaign but suggested that he hit military, rather than civilian, targets.52
“Siddig was like a one-man jihad machine,” recalled the JTTF’s Corrigan. “He’d be driving a taxi cab, and he would think about, here’s an airport, if a plane came in here, you’d be able to shoot it. This is a building that has an open front in order to meet.”
In late 1992 and early 1993, Siddig began to finalize his list of targets and select a team, which included Abdullah Rashid, some of the Pennsylvania trainees, and various other people he knew, including Victor Alvarez, a Latino American who had converted to Islam after dabbling in Santeria, as well as three Sudanese immigrants who had not yet attained citizenship.
The scope of the plan was staggering. Siddig and his team would drive cars and trucks laden with bombs