The Eleventh Day_ The History and Legacy of 9_11 - Anthony Summers [110]
By his own admission, he was the planner and organizer of many attacks—including 9/11. U.S. investigators have long since dubbed him, simply, KSM.
The information on Ramzi Yousef’s computer implicated KSM in the Manila conspiracies and started the hunt for him. Investigators hurried to Zahid’s home in Pakistan, to find photographs of bin Laden but no sign of either Mohammed brother. Clues proliferated, however, and much later—in captivity—he would fill in missing parts of the jigsaw.
Some of the many phone calls Yousef had made from New York, while planning the 1993 Trade Center bombing, had been to KSM. They had discussed procedures for mixing explosives on the calls, and the older man helped at least once by wiring his nephew money.
In Manila in 1994, KSM was at very least Yousef’s senior accomplice, perhaps the plot’s driving force. While Yousef found modest lodgings, KSM took a condominium at Tiffany Mansions, a rather grand address in an affluent part of town. Perhaps as part of their cover, perhaps by inclination, neither man lived the kind of life required of Islamic fundamentalists.
Some of the detail on the Philippines episode comes from the bar girls and dancers with whom uncle and nephew whiled away their nights—and whom they found useful. KSM bribed one of the girls to open a bank account and to purchase a sophisticated mobile phone. The account and the phone were in her name but for his use, ideal for shady financial transactions and unmonitored communication.
To Abdul Murad, the accomplice seized the night police raided the Manila bomb factory, KSM was “Abdul Majid”—one of his thirty-some aliases. Murad had met him once before in Pakistan, when Yousef was recovering from an injury incurred while handling explosives. Then, Yousef had told him “Majid” was a Saudi in the “electronics business.” His uncle was in fact Kuwaiti-born and in the terrorism business.
In Manila, as final preparations were made to down U.S. airliners, KSM came repeatedly to the bomb factory. With chemicals and electronic components scattered in plain sight, Murad was to say that Mohammed “must have known that something was planned.” “I was responsible,” KSM would one day tell a U.S. military tribunal, “for the planning and surveying needed to execute the Bojinka Operation.”
KSM was to tell the CIA that he thought of something else in Manila, a concept radically different from exploding bombs on airliners—the “idea of using planes as missiles.” One potential target he and Yousef considered at that time was the CIA headquarters in Virginia. Another was the World Trade Center.
What KSM had to say on that, an indication that flying planes into buildings was under discussion long, long before 9/11, is on its own merely interesting. What sparked lasting controversy, though, is the suggestion that U.S. authorities learned early on what the plotters had in mind—and dropped the ball.
A Philippines police document cites Yousef’s accomplice Murad as saying that they discussed a “plan to dive-crash a commercial aircraft at the CIA headquarters in Virginia.… What the subject has in his mind is that he will board any American commercial aircraft, pretending to be an ordinary passenger. Then he will hijack said aircraft, control its cockpit and dive it at the CIA headquarters.”
No suggestion there that the terrorists discussed targets other than the CIA. One of the Philippines police officers who interrogated Murad, however, has claimed otherwise. Colonel Rodolfo Mendoza told CNN that there was also talk of crashing a plane into the Pentagon. The Philippines presidential spokesman, Rigoberto Tiglao, went much further.
“The targets they listed,” he said in 2001, “were CIA headquarters, the Pentagon, TransAmerica [the TransAmerica Tower, in San Francisco], Sears [the Sears Tower, in Chicago], and the World Trade Center.”
Most credible, perhaps, is apparent corroboration