The Black Banners_ 9_11 and the War Against Al-Qaeda - Ali H. Soufan [25]
About five seconds later the plane veered off the runway and crashed into the dune, which brought them to an abrupt halt. The impact jerked their heads forward, but their seat belts prevented their bodies from following. Ridi unbuckled his belt and jumped out of his seat. He switched off the hydraulic system and the plane’s electric system to try to avoid an explosion, and opened the door. As he was about to jump out, he saw that Nawawi, in a state of shock, had remained in his seat, belt still buckled. He rushed to release Nawawi’s seat belt and dragged him out of the plane.
Everyone in the airport was staring at them. “I’ve got to get out of here quick,” Ridi told Nawawi, who had started to come to his senses.
“It’s not our fault. Bin Laden won’t blame you,” Nawawi said.
“That’s not what I’m worried about. Khartoum is full of Egyptian intelligence tracking bin Laden and people working with him. Everyone knows this is bin Laden’s plane. It’s the only private plane in the airport. I don’t want Egyptian intelligence associating me with him. That will cause me a lot of problems.”
They reached a security guard on the runway. “Are you okay?” the guard asked the two men.
“I’m fine, but I need you to drop me at the terminal,” Ridi told him. The guard agreed to do so, and, leaving Nawawi to fend for himself, Ridi went straight from the terminal to the Hilton, packed his bags, and returned to the airport. He booked himself on the first flight out of Khartoum—it happened to be going to Addis Ababa—and from there caught a flight to Cairo.
That was the end of what was later nicknamed, by a few of us in the bureau, “Osama Air.”
On the surface it looked as if bin Laden was in fact engaged in legitimate business in Sudan. He established companies such as Ladin International, an investment company; Wadi al-Aqiq, a holding company; al-Hijra, a construction business; al-Themar al-Mubaraka, an agricultural company; Taba Investments, an investment company; Khartoum Tannery, a leather company; and Qudarat Transport Company, a transportation company, which all seemed to perform legitimate work. The construction company, for example, built a highway from Khartoum to Port Sudan. At the same time, operatives used the businesses as a means of traveling around the world to purchase weapons, explosives, and equipment and to aid foreign fighters. The businesses were the perfect cover to avoid attracting attention from intelligence services.
Bin Laden began to create a worldwide network for helping fellow jihadist groups, establishing an Islamic Army shura to coordinate efforts. On the council were representatives from, among other groups, the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group (LIFG) and EIJ, the latter represented by Zawahiri. Bin Laden sent funds, weapons, trainers, and fighters to the Moro Islamic Liberation Front (MILF) and the Abu Sayyaf Group, both in the Philippines, and Jemaah Islamiah, which was based in Indonesia but was spread across Southeast Asia. Trainers were sent to Kashmir and Tajikistan, and a guesthouse was opened in Yemen—a central point for the entire region. Simultaneously, al-Qaeda members were sent to these groups to learn from their experiences and to pick up skills. Al-Qaeda members even went to the Bekaa Valley, in Lebanon, where they received training from the Shiite group Hezbollah. While al-Qaeda is a radical Sunni group that views Shiites as heretics, for the purpose of learning terrorist tactics they were prepared to put their religious differences aside.
In late 1992, once the basic network was set up, bin Laden and other al-Qaeda leaders plotted where they might begin striking U.S. targets. They settled on the Horn of Africa. American troops were in Somalia as part of Operation Restore Hope—an international United Nations–sanctioned humanitarian and famine relief mission in the south of the country, which the United States had begun leading in December of 1992. Abu Hafs al-Masri was sent to Somalia to evaluate precisely what the