Jihad Joe_ Americans Who Go to War in the Name of Islam - J. M. Berger [41]
“Siddig Ali was buoyed by the fact that a successful plot had taken place, but the competitor aspect of his nature was that he wanted to outdo the other guys,” recalled former FBI agent Chris Voss, who also served on the JTTF. “And he felt bad that he had been left out, so he wanted to create a plot that was bigger and better, he had to outdo them.”
In order to upstage the World Trade Center plotters, Siddig Ali had decided to kill thousands of New Yorkers in a single “Day of Terror.” All he had to do was avoid getting caught.
THE FINAL ACT
While Siddig was narrowing his focus to the home front, Abdullah Rashid was becoming more and more international.
A typical day at the Third World Relief Agency involved people going in and out of the offices with bags full of cash. At one point, aides to Bosnian president Izetbegovic began to worry that their boss was gay, after he locked himself in an apartment for days on end with Fatih El Hassanein, the charity’s titular head. They voiced their concerns to Bosnia’s ambassador to the UK, Muhammad Filipovic, who reassured them. “Don’t worry about that,” he said. “They are counting the money.”53
Bilal Philips summoned Rashid to Austria to meet with El Hassanein’s brother, Sukarno, the number-three man at TWRA, under Hasan Cengic.
Rashid was a typical customer: he left with a lot of cash. He went back to New York with $20,000: $10,000 in his pocket and another $10,000 hidden in his pants, in order to evade the need for a Customs declaration. He made more trips, and so did Abu Ubaidah. Eventually the two brought back between $80,000 and $100,000 in cash for Project Bosnia.54
On another occasion, Rashid attempted to travel to Bosnia himself. He was assisted in this task by an American Muslim he had met through Tahir. They made it as far as Zagreb but were turned away at the border.55
Although Project Bosnia was still nominally focused on Bosnia, Siddig’s Day of Terror was increasingly the fixation of Rashid’s battalion of trainees. Siddig broached the idea of bombing the tunnels to selected members of the Pennsylvania team—and to Rashid.
There is some ambiguity about Rashid’s response to Siddig’s overtures. In conversations taped by the FBI, he seemed to equivocate about hitting American targets. During a May 30, 1993, conversation in which Siddig was asking for detonators and other supplies, Rashid replied,
If it’s not used for jihad, akie [brother], so I got, I got blockbusters and mortar rockets and a few others. Your doing it, it has to be for jihad, akie. It has to be used for the widows and children (unintelligible words) and in Zagreb and Bosnia and stuff like that.
This exchange took place a few short weeks before the Day of Terror arrests. Later, Rashid specified that he was going to talk to “the head man from Project Bosnia”—Bilal Philips—about getting money, but that Philips was interested only in jihad outside of America.
When pressed by Siddig, Rashid agreed to obtain the detonators, but there is no clear evidence that he followed up with action. Rashid’s lawyer, interviewed in 2008, said Rashid was “bullshitting” Siddig in the hopes that this plan, like so many before it, would simply fall by the wayside.56
“[Rashid’s] passion was jihad, but overseas,” recalled Tom Corrigan. “And even in his phone conversations with people, if there were events that occurred over in Bosnia that he was very upset about, he would get almost weepy. He’d get very angry with what was going on over there.”57
Yet it’s also quite clear from the transcript of the conversation that Rashid understood that Siddig was talking about setting off bombs in New York as an act of jihad. Rashid’s objections to the plan were pretty mild in comparison to the magnitude of the crime Siddig was planning, and, needless to say, he didn’t alert the police about a mass homicide