The Looming Tower - Lawrence Wright [171]
1. Heretics (the Mubaraks of the world)
2. Shiites
3. America
4. Israel
The diversity of enemies would always plague al-Qaeda, especially as new actors with different priorities came upon the stage.
Graduates of the second phase could choose to attend the guerrilla warfare school, which also lasted forty-five days. There were specialty camps in hijacking and espionage, and a ten-day course in assassination. One al-Qaeda trainee recorded in his diary that he had learned “shooting the personality and his guard from a motorcycle” on one day and “shooting at two targets in a car from above, front and back” on the next. Another camp specialized in making bombs, and still another, called the Kamikaze Camp, was reserved for suicide bombers, who wore special white or gray clothes and lived alone, speaking to no one.
There was a well-supplied library of military books, including Revolt, the autobiography of the Israeli terrorist and eventual prime minister Menachem Begin. Another book, on the establishment of the U.S. Marines Rapid Deployment Force, included a scenario in which a tanker carrying liquefied natural gas would be blown up in the Straits of Hormuz at the mouth of the Persian Gulf, leading to a massive rise in the price of oil. The trainees were captivated by this notion and spent considerable time planning how to pull off such a maneuver. At night they would often watch Hollywood thrillers, looking for tips. The movies of Arnold Schwarzenegger were particular favorites.
Zawahiri was particularly keen on the use of biological and chemical warfare. He noted that “the destructive power of these weapons is no less than nuclear weapons.” He established a program, code-named Zabadi—“curdled milk”—to explore the use of unconventional techniques for mass murder, and he pored over medical journals to research various poisons. “Despite their extreme danger, we only became aware of them when the enemy drew our attention to them by repeatedly expressing concern that they can be produced simply,” he wrote. One of his men, named Abu Khabab, set up a laboratory near Jalalabad, where he experimented on dogs with homemade nerve gas and videotaped their agonizing deaths. It often took them more than five hours to die. Abu Khabab explained to his trainees that humans were much more susceptible, not having as powerful antibodies as the dogs. Zawahiri set up another laboratory near Kandahar, where a Malaysian businessman, Yazid Sufaat, spent months attempting to cultivate biological weapons, particularly anthrax. Sufaat had a degree in chemistry and laboratory science from California State University in Sacramento.
Bin Laden was cool at first to the use of biological or chemical weapons, but he found himself at odds with Abu Hafs, who led the hawks in the al-Qaeda debate about the ethics and consequences of using such indiscriminate agents. Would they be used in Muslim lands? Would civilians be targeted? The doves argued that the use of any weapon of mass destruction would turn the sympathy of the world against the Muslim cause and provoke a massive American response against Afghanistan. Bin Laden clearly preferred nuclear bombs over the alternatives, but that posed additional moral considerations. The hawks pointed out that the Americans had already used the nuclear bomb twice, in Japan, and they were currently using bombs in Iraq that contained depleted uranium. If the United States decided to use nuclear weapons again, who would protect the Muslims? The UN? The Arab rulers? It was up to al-Qaeda