At 18
minutes after noon on February 26, 1993, a huge bomb went off beneath the two
towers of the World Trade Center. This was not a suicide attack. The terrorists
parked a truck bomb with a timing device on Level B-2 of the underground garage,
then departed. The ensuing explosion opened a hole seven stories up. Six people
died. More than a thousand were injured. An FBI agent at the scene described the
relatively low number of fatalities as a miracle.
Photo
by Bureau of ATF 1993 Explosives Incident Report
President
Bill Clinton ordered his National Security Council to coordinate the response.
Government agencies swung into action to find the culprits. The Counterterrorist
Center located at the CIA combed its files and queried sources around the world.
The National Security Agency (NSA), the huge Defense Department signals
collection agency, ramped up its communications intercept network and searched
its databases for clues. The New York Field Office of the FBI took
control of the local investigation and, in the end, set a pattern for future
management of terrorist incidents.
Four
features of this episode have significance for the story of 9/11.
First,
the bombing signaled a new terrorist challenge, one whose rage and malice had no
limit. Ramzi Yousef, the Sunni extremist who planted the bomb, said later that
he had hoped to kill 250,000 people.
Second,
the FBI and the Justice Department did excellent work investigating the bombing.
Within days, the FBI identified a truck remnant as part of a Ryder rental van
reported stolen in Jersey City the day before the bombing.
Mohammed
Salameh, who had rented the truck and reported it stolen, kept calling the
rental office to get back his $400 deposit. The FBI arrested him there on March
4, 1993. In short order, the Bureau had several plotters in custody, including
Nidal Ayyad, an engineer who had acquired chemicals for the bomb, and Mahmoud
Abouhalima, who had helped mix the chemicals.
The FBI
identified another conspirator, Ahmad Ajaj, who had been arrested by immigration
authorities at John F. Kennedy International Airport in September 1992 and
charged with document fraud. His traveling companion was Ramzi Yousef, who had
also entered with fraudulent documents but claimed political asylum and was
admitted. It quickly became clear that Yousef had been a central player in the
attack. He had fled to Pakistan immediately after the bombing and would remain
at large for nearly two years.
The
arrests of Salameh, Abouhalima, and Ayyad led the FBI to the Farouq mosque in
Brooklyn, where a central figure was Sheikh Omar Abdel Rahman, an extremist
Sunni Muslim cleric who had moved to the United States from Egypt in 1990. In
speeches and writings, the sightless Rahman, often called the "Blind
Sheikh," preached the message of Sayyid Qutb's Milestones,
characterizing the United States as the oppressor of Muslims worldwide and
asserting that it was their religious duty to fight against God's enemies. An
FBI informant learned of a plan to bomb major New York landmarks, including the
Holland and Lincoln tunnels. Disrupting this "landmarks plot," the FBI
in June 1993 arrested Rahman and various confederates.
As a
result of the investigations and arrests, the U.S. Attorney for the Southern
District of New York prosecuted and convicted multiple individuals, including
Ajaj, Salameh, Ayyad, Abouhalima, the Blind Sheikh, and Ramzi Yousef, for crimes
related to the World Trade Center bombing and other plots.
An
unfortunate consequence of this superb investigative and prosecutorial effort
was that it created an impression that the law enforcement system was
well-equipped to cope with terrorism. Neither President Clinton, his principal
advisers, the Congress, nor the news media felt prompted, until later, to press
the question of whether the procedures that put the Blind Sheikh and Ramzi
Yousef behind bars would really protect Americans against the new virus of which
these individuals were just the first symptoms.
Third,
the successful use of the legal system to address the first World Trade Center
bombing had the side effect of obscuring the need to examine the character and
extent of the new threat facing the United States. The trials did not bring the
Bin Ladin network to the attention of the public and policymakers.
The FBI
assembled, and the U.S. Attorney's office put forward, some evidence showing
that the men in the dock were not the only plotters. Materials taken from Ajaj
indicated that the plot or plots were hatched at or near the Khaldan camp, a
terrorist training camp on the Afghanistan-Pakistan border. Ajaj had left Texas
in April 1992 to go there to learn how to construct bombs. He had met Ramzi
Yousef in Pakistan, where they discussed bombing targets in the United States
and assembled a "terrorist kit" that included bomb-making manuals,
operations guidance, videotapes advocating terrorist action against the United
States, and false identification documents.
Yousef
was captured in Pakistan following the discovery by police in the Philippines in
January 1995 of the Manila air plot, which envisioned placing bombs on board a
dozen trans-Pacific airliners and setting them off simultaneously. Khalid Sheikh
Mohammed-Yousef's uncle, then located in Qatar-was a fellow plotter of Yousef's
in the Manila air plot and had also wired him some money prior to the Trade
Center bombing. The U.S. Attorney obtained an indictment against KSM in January
1996, but an official in the government of Qatar probably warned him about it.
Khalid Sheikh Mohammed evaded capture (and stayed at large to play a central
part in the 9/11 attacks).
Invesigators
going through the rubble following the bombing of the World Trade Center
The law
enforcement process is concerned with proving the guilt of persons apprehended
and charged. Investigators and prosecutors could not present all the evidence of
possible involvement of individuals other than those charged, although they
continued to pursue such investigations, planning or hoping for later
prosecutions. The process was meant, by its nature, to mark for the public the
events as finished-case solved, justice done. It was not designed to ask if the
events might be harbingers of worse to come. Nor did it allow for aggregating
and analyzing facts to see if they could provide clues to terrorist tactics more
generally-methods of entry and finance, and mode of operation inside the United
States.
Fourth,
although the bombing heightened awareness of a new terrorist danger, successful
prosecutions contributed to widespread underestimation of the threat. The
government's attorneys stressed the seriousness of the crimes, and put forward
evidence of Yousef's technical ingenuity. Yet the public image that persisted
was not of clever Yousef but of stupid Salameh going back again and again to
reclaim his $400 truck rental deposit.
First
Strike: Global Terror in America
The
epicenter was the parking
garage beneath the World TradeCenter,
where a massive eruption carved out a nearly 100-foot crater several
stories deep and several more high. Six people were killed almost
instantly. Smoke and flames began filling the wound and streaming upward
into the building. Those who weren't trapped were soon pouring out of
the building - many panic-stricken and covered in soot. More than a
thousand people were hurt in some way, some badly, with crushed limbs.
It was
Friday, February 26, 1993, and Middle Eastern terrorism had arrived on
American soil - with a bang.
As a small band of
terrorists scurried away from the scene unnoticed, the FBI
and its partners on the New York Joint Terrorism Task Force began
staffing up a command center
and preparing to send in a team to investigate. Their instincts told
them that this was terrorism - they'd been tracking Islamic
fundamentalists in the city for months and, they'd later learn, were
tantalizingly close to encountering the planners of this attack. But
hunches weren't enough; what was needed was definitive proof.
They'd
have it soon enough. The massive investigation that
followed - led by the task force, with some 700 FBI
agents worldwide ultimately joining in - quickly uncovered a key bit of
evidence. In the rubble investigators uncovered a vehicle identification
number on a piece of wreckage that seemed suspiciously obliterated. A
search of our crime records returned a match: the number belonged to a
rented van reported stolen the day before the attack. An Islamic
fundamentalist named Mohammad Salameh had rented the vehicle, we learned,
and on March 4, an FBI SWAT
team arrested him as he tried in vain to get his $400 deposit back.
One clue led
to another and we soon had in custody three more suspects - Nidal Ayyad,
Mahmoud Abouhalima, and Ahmed Ajaj. We'd also found the apartment where
the bomb was built and a storage locker containing dangerous chemicals,
including enough cyanide gas to wipe out a town. All four men were tried,
convicted, and sentenced to life.
The
shockwave from the attack continued to reverberate.
Following the unfolding connections, the task force soon uncovered a
second terrorist plot to bomb a series of New York landmarks
simultaneously, including the U.N. building, the Holland and Lincoln
Tunnels, and the federal plaza where our office in New York is housed. On
June 24, 1994, FBI agents
stormed a warehouse in Queens and caught several members of a terrorist
cell in the act of assembling bombs.
The
plotters. Yasin is still wanted for his
alleged role in the attack.
Meanwhile, the mastermind of
the World TradeCenterbombing was still on the
run - and up to no good. We'd learned his name - Ramzi Yousef - within
weeks after the attack and discovered he was planning more attacks,
including the simultaneous bombing
of a dozen U.S. international flights. Yousef was captured in Pakistan
in February 1995, returned to America, and convicted along with the van
driver, Eyad Ismoil. A seventh plotter, Abdul
Yasin, remains at large.
We
later learned from Yousef that his TradeCenter plot was far more
sinister. He wanted the bomb to topple one tower, with the
collapsing debris knocking down the second. The attack turned out to be
something of a deadly dress rehearsal for 9/11; with the help of
Yousef's uncle Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, al Qaeda would later return to
realize Yousef's nightmarish vision.
