The Eleventh Day_ The History and Legacy of 9_11 - Anthony Summers [105]
Bin Laden had not, however, forgotten jihad. Several hundred of his jihadis had indeed migrated to the Sudan. This was a place and a time for training—and hatching plots.
Bin Laden’s mentor, Azzam, had once called for worldwide war to recover all territory that had historically been part of Islam. “Jihad,” he had written, “will remain an individual obligation until all other lands that were Muslim are returned to us … before us lie Palestine, Bokhara [part of Uzbekistan], Lebanon, Chad, Eritrea, Somalia, the Philippines, Burma, Southern Yemen, Tashkent [also in Uzbekistan] and Andalusia [the region of southern Spain that the Arabs had ruled until the late fifteenth century].”
If bin Laden’s ambitions did not reach as far into a fantasy Islamic future as Azzam’s, they were grand nonetheless. The task of the young men who joined jihad, bin Laden was to say, was to struggle in “every place in which non-believers’ injustice is perpetrated against Muslims.” With his approval and often with his funding, terrorism in the cause of Islam was on the rise.
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AT ALMOST EXACTLY the time bin Laden arrived in Sudan, another man began working with a Muslim separatist group in the Philippines. He told his contacts he was an “emissary from bin Laden,” acting on behalf of Blind Sheikh Omar Abdel Rahman—by then preaching jihad in the United States. He used many names, but the name by which the self-proclaimed “emissary” is known today is Ramzi Yousef.
Bin Laden was one day to claim he did not know Yousef. Yet the links were there. And soon, Yousef would lead the first attempt to bring down the World Trade Center.
TWENTY
HE WAS IN HIS MID-TWENTIES, LEAN, DIMINUTIVE. HE HAD DEGREES in chemistry and electrical engineering. At college in the United Kingdom, where he had studied, he was thought of as “hard-working, conscientious.” A senior FBI official would one day describe him as “poised, articulate, well-educated.” He spoke not only English but several other languages.
Ramzi Yousef was more political than he was fanatically religious. The Palestinian blood he claimed, he said, made him “Palestinian by choice,” and he believed America’s support for Israel gave all Muslims “the right to regard themselves as in a state of war with the U.S. government.”
It had been the anti-Soviet war in Afghanistan, however, that first brought Yousef to jihad. In the Afghan training camps, during a break from his studies in Britain, he learned about explosives—learned so well, some said, that he rapidly became an instructor. Fellow trainees dubbed him “the Chemist.”
Once America had become the enemy, Yousef’s talent made him a deadly adversary. In midsummer 1992, speaking in code on the phone with a like-thinking friend, he referred to his “chocolate training.” The friend did not at first understand so he said simply, “Boom!,” adding that he was going to work in the United States. The friend got the gist.
In New York two years earlier, Blind Sheikh Rahman had preached the need to “break and destroy the morale of the enemies of Allah.” It should be done, he said, by “exploding the structure of their civilized pillars … the touristic infrastructure which they are proud of, and their high buildings.” He and those around him, an FBI informant recalled, often talked of “targeting American symbols.”
The same month Yousef spoke of a mission to America involving explosives, the Blind Sheikh made a phone call to Pakistan. Within weeks, arriving on September 1, the Chemist and an accomplice flew First Class from Karachi to New York’s Kennedy Airport.
The mission almost failed before it began, when the accomplice was stopped by Immigration. He was found to be carrying a false Swedish passport, a Saudi