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However, he did call Bilal Philips. As Philips told the story, Rashid called him and said the trainees were talking about doing jihad in the United States. (Philips blamed an FBI informant, Emad Salem, for inciting the group to violence, but this claim is not supported by surveillance tapes and testimony about the case.) As Philips recalled the conversation:

When, uh, Doc [short for Doctor Rashid] heard about it, you know, he was quite upset. He wanted to stop it, told them, “Don’t do it, this is not good,” and so on so on. And Doc called me up, and told me about it and I told him, “Yes, definitely, you know, disband this group and get them out of there. Let them go to some other country or whatever.”

You know, I said, send them anywhere there is some other conflict or where Muslims are suffering, if they wanted to go and do something, this is where they should do it, in the areas of conflict not in, you know, in the United States. It was just totally inappropriate. It becomes, some kind of, you know, terrorism really, you know, unleashing violence against civilian population. It’s not acceptable.58

One front in particular looked promising: the Philippines. In May, Philips and Rashid flew to the Philippines, where Muslim separatists were fighting the government in the south of the country. There, they met with Mohammed Jamal Khalifa, a Saudi businessman and a volunteer with the Muslim World League. Khalifa was also the brother-in-law of Osama bin Laden, and U.S. intelligence later believed he was an al Qaeda financier with connections to Ramzi Yousef.

Philips assumed that Khalifa could use his connections to businesses and Muslim relief efforts in the south to arrange an introduction with the separatists. According to both Philips and Rashid, the meeting didn’t take place. The visit was intended to give Rashid a feel for the location, and a subsequent trip was planned to advance the project.59

In one respect, at least, the trip was a smashing success. Rashid was enamored of the separatists and thought that the spirit of jihad was alive and well in Mindanao. It didn’t hurt that he had met a young Filipino woman whom he began to court as a second wife (to the great annoyance of the wife he already had in Brooklyn).

When Rashid returned to the States, he waxed on about the trip and the worthiness of the separatists’ cause. After hearing Rashid’s stories, Siddig Ali was moved. He would indeed be interested in relocating his jihad to the Philippines— just as soon as he was finished with his jihad against New York.60

In June Siddig finalized the list of targets and began to purchase components for his bombs. Financing came from Mohammed Saleh, a Hamas associate, and not from the Project Bosnia bankroll (although the team’s members had been trained on TWRA’s dime). Siddig told his coconspirators that they would all escape to the Philippines after the bombs went off.

The team rented a safe house in Queens so that they could start to build the bombs—at which point the plan fell apart.

The JTTF had been watching Siddig and Rashid for months, but after the World Trade Center bombing, the Justice Department decided Corrigan and his team deserved the resources they had been asking for all along. The surveillance was stepped up dramatically, and the investigators were given permission to reactivate Emad Salem, a strong informant whom the FBI had unwisely fired the year before. Salem taped nearly every conversation he had with Siddig. He joined the conspiracy and was given the job of finding a safe house—which the FBI then wired for video.61

On June 14 Rashid, Siddig, and Salem met to discuss their plans. Rashid was asked about his perennially delayed efforts to obtain detonators and other supplies Siddig needed to complete his preparations. Rashid assured them that he was working on it and then said he was leaving for the Philippines at the end of the week. On hearing this, the authorities decided to move in.62

On the evening of June 24, they burst into the safe house and arrested eight people inside, including