The Looming Tower - Lawrence Wright [101]
Yousef was dark and slender, with one eye that wandered in its socket and burn marks on his face and hands—the result of accidental explosions. His real name was Abdul Basit Mahmoud Abdul Karim. The son of a Palestinian mother and a Pakistani father, he had grown up in Kuwait City, then studied electrical engineering in Wales. He had a wife and child and another on the way in Quetta, the capital of the Pakistani province of Baluchistan. He was not a particularly devout Muslim—he was motivated mainly by his devotion to the Palestinian cause and his hatred of Jews—but he was the first Islamist terrorist to attack the American homeland. More important, his dark and grandiose imagination was the cocoon in which the movement would transform itself. Until Yousef arrived in America, the Brooklyn cell had been experimenting with pipe bombs. It was Yousef’s ambition and skill that radically changed the nature of terror.
By placing the bomb in the southern corner of the garage, Yousef intended to topple one tower onto the other, bringing the entire complex down and killing what he hoped would be 250,000 people—a toll he thought equaled the pain the Palestinians had experienced because of America’s support of Israel. He had hoped to maximize the casualties by packing the device, made of ammonium nitrate and fuel oil, with sodium cyanide, or by making a dirty bomb with radioactive material smuggled out of the former Soviet Union, which would contaminate much of lower Manhattan.
The explosion blew through six stories of structural steel and cement, all the way down to the PATH train station below the garage and up to the Marriott ballroom above it. The shock was so great that tourists felt the ground shudder a mile away on Ellis Island. Six people were killed and 1,042 were injured, generating the greatest number of hospital casualties of any event in American history since the Civil War. The towers shook and swayed, but the mighty buildings did not fall. When Lewis Schiliro, the head of the FBI office in New York at the time, surveyed the two-hundred-foot-wide crater in the subterranean heart of the mighty complex, he was astonished. He told a structural engineer, “This building will stand forever.”
Yousef flew back to Pakistan, and soon after that, he moved to Manila. There he began concocting extraordinary schemes to blow up a dozen American airliners simultaneously, to assassinate Pope John Paul II and President Bill Clinton, and to crash a private plane into CIA headquarters. It is interesting to note, at this early date, the longing on the part of the Islamists to accomplish complex, highly symbolic attacks that were unlike anything ever achieved by any other terrorist group. Theater is always a feature of terror, and these were terrorists whose dramatic ambition was unrivaled. But Ramzi Yousef and the followers of the blind sheikh were not merely seeking attention for a cause; they were hoping to humiliate an enemy by killing as many people as possible. They had an eye on vulnerable economic targets that were bound to provoke a ferocious response, and they actually courted retaliation as a prod to other Muslims. One could not say, however, that they had a cogent political plan. Revenge for many varied injustices was their constant theme, even though most of the conspirators were enjoying freedoms and opportunities in America not accorded in their own counties. They had a network of willing conspirators who were inflamed and eager to strike. The only thing that the jihadi terrorists lacked to carry off a truly devastating attack on America was the organizational