9/11 Special: Part 1 - The origins of the plot
Where were you on 9/11?
After returning from school, I had barely dropped my bag when I received a perturbed call from my friend Andy, telling me to turn on CNN immediately. On live TV, I watched the Twin Towers collapse and New York, the centre of the world, transform into an apocalyptic ash cloud. Pushing the limits of my imagination, I can’t think of anything that could be more dramatic than what happened on that day.
This year marks the 20th anniversary of the attacks. In remembrance of an event that transformed the world and the 2977 people who lost their lives, I’m writing a multipart series called The Four Planes about the jigsaw puzzle of events that led to four hijacked planes never reaching their intended destinations. Building on a piece I wrote in May about Osama bin Laden, this series aims to explore the characters involved, their motivations, the planning and the details of what happened on each of the four planes on that Tuesday morning in September.
Contrary to what many believe, bin Laden was not the mastermind behind 9/11. The plot was conceived by a man named Khalid Sheik Mohammed (KSM), who also drew his inspiration from elsewhere. Today’s edition serves as the background and explores the origins of the 9/11 plot - a story many years in the making.
The defeat of the Soviet Union in Afghanistan in 1989 sparked a feverish enthusiasm for Islamic fundamentalism amongst jihadis, who believed that they had witnessed the power of Allah on the battlefield. But as the war ended, it left many warriors without a cause, and in search of a new one. One of them was Abdul Basit Abdul Karim.
Basit was born in Kuwait in 1968, the son of Pakistani and Palestinian parents. After studying electrical engineering in the United Kingdom, he spent time in jihadi training camps in Pakistan, close to the border of Afghanistan. Here he developed an expertise in bombs and became known by his fellow trainees as “the Chemist”.
1992 marked the starting point of his terrorist ambitions, and without affiliation to an organisation or a state, Basit became a uniquely independent “freelance terrorist”. His initial plans were directed at Israel, but he opted for the United States (US) instead, believing it to be an easier target. To assist in identifying potential Jewish targets in the US, he contacted an old friend, Abdul Hakim Murad, who was studying at flight schools in the US at the time. Murad questioned his old friend about his motivations for the attack, to which Basit responded:
“I was working for my religion because I feel that my Muslim brothers in Palestine are suffering. Muslims in Bosnia are suffering, everywhere they are suffering. And if you check the reason for the suffering, you will find that the U.S. is the reason for this. If you ask anybody, even if you ask children, they will tell you that the U.S. is supporting Israel and Israel is killing our Muslim brothers in Palestine. The United States is acting like a terrorist, but nobody can see that. I mean supporting Israel by money and by weapons, that is considered also a kind of terrorist.”
Murad suggested the World Trade Center Complex (WTC) in New York City as he believed it to be a place where many Jewish people worked.
Murad’s suggestion was enough to convince Basit of his target.
Entering the US
Basit bought two one way first-class tickets from Pakistan to JFK International Airport, arriving on 1 September 1992. Joining him was Ahmad Mohammed Ajaj, a Palestinian man Basit had met in Pakistan.
Ajaj was stopped at customs using a poorly forged Swedish passport Basit had given him. Adding to his troubles, officials found that his suitcases contained limited clothing and were filled with military manuals, explosive recipes and other forms of false identification. Ajaj was arrested on the spot and spent a few months in prison. Basit, however, was travelling light (Ajaj carried most of his baggage) under the name Ramzi Ahmed Yousef using a more decently forged Iraqi passport, but without a US entry visa. After claiming political asylum, swearing he faced serious danger if returned to Iraq, he was briefly detained but allowed entry into the country.
Once in the US, Yousef (as Basit was now known) quickly connected with other activists from mosques around the city and recruited four men to help him execute his plan. His ambitions were grand. He planned to bomb the North Tower of the WTC in the hopes that it would collapse onto the South Tower. According to his estimation, this would kill 250 000 people.
The bomb
The 26th of February 1993 was a cold winter’s morning in New York. On that Friday, about 40 000 people were in the towers, including a group of kindergartners on a field trip. That morning, Yousef and his band of terrorists drove a rented Ryder van loaded with a basic fertiliser bomb weighing more than 500kg into the basement of the WTC complex and escaped.
The bomb exploded at 12h18, creating a crater a few floors deep. Six people were killed by the blast, including a highly pregnant Monica Rodriguez Smith - it was her last day at work before going on maternity leave. More than 1000 people were injured, mostly due to smoke inhalation. Due to power outages, people were also trapped in elevators high in the sky for hours, including the group of kindergartners.
Yousef took a first-class flight out of the country the night of the explosion, leaving his crew to fend for themselves. The FBI were quick to discover parts of the van in the wreckage that they could trace back to the rental agency. There they were able to apprehend one of the attackers who (desperate for cash) had repeatedly visited the agency to reclaim the $400 deposit for the van he had reported as stolen. The arrest pointed investigators to Yousef, prompting a global manhunt.
Back in Pakistan
Yousef was disappointed when he heard reports of the estimates of death and damage caused by the blast. The impact was smaller than he expected. But despite a relatively amateurish effort, Yousef had shown that it was possible to strike at the heart of the “enemy”, and upon returning to Pakistan, Yousef was a folk hero. The attack left Yousef flush with ideas, thirsting for more.
One of the people who had been particularly impressed by Yousef’s efforts was his uncle, Khalid Sheik Mohammed (KSM), who contributed financially to the ‘93 attack. KSM saw the attack as a model for future attacks and was impressed with the publicity it had received. Yousef also met up with his old friend Murad (the pilot) who was back in Pakistan and who, after some convincing from Yousef, embraced the idea of planning more attacks. The men toiled with several ideas, and it was Murad who proposed crashing a small plane full of explosives into the Pentagon. KSM was intrigued by the idea and asked Murad everything there was to know about flying. KSM himself was interested in doing flight training in the US.
Following the ‘93 bomb, Yousef was involved in several other plots, including an attempt to assassinate the Pakistani prime ministerial candidate, Benazir Bhutto. The plot had to be abandoned when the detonator exploded in Yousef’s face, leaving him heavily scarred and partially blinded in one eye.
But this didn’t deter the career terrorist, and he was soon on to his next operation.
The trio of Yousef, Murad and KSM travelled to the Philippines in 1994 where they met former mujahideen who they knew from the Soviet war in Afghanistan. Here they plotted to assassinate Pope John Paul II and Bill Clinton, who were both due to visit the Philippines. But due to complexity, they ditched both plans.
During his time in the Philippines, Yousef tinkered his bomb-making skills, working on a bomb that could be easily disassembled and reassembled to elude stringent security. It used a Casio watch as a timer that potentially made it possible to assemble a bomb in a plane’s lavatory and detonate it hours or even days later. On 1 December 1994, Yousef tested a prototype of this bomb in a cinema in Manila. Although no one was injured, the bomb worked perfectly.
With the plans to assassinate Bill Clinton abandoned, Yousef, KSM and Murad devised a new plan to attack the US. This time they set their sights on trans-Pacific commercial airlines. Perfect targets as they contained many people, and a small bomb could have a big impact. Using flight timetables, they developed a plan for five men to plant bombs on 12 planes in a single day with the hopes of killing 5000 passengers. They called the plan: Project Bojinka.
In preparation, Yousef took a practice attempt on December 8 1994, when he flew on a Philippine Airlines flight from Manila to Tokyo with a connection in Cebu. He managed to assemble the bomb in the lavatory and attached it beneath his seat before exiting the plane in Cebu. One hour later, the bomb exploded, killing one passenger, but with miraculous skill, the pilot managed to keep the plane from crashing. However, the mission was a success because Yousef knew that with a bigger and well-placed bomb, a plane would most certainly crash.
Yousef and his bomber crew moved into an apartment in the Josefa building in Manila, using it as a bomb-making lab. For weeks, they’d sleep most of the day and spend the evenings making bombs. But on 6 January 1994, their plot was foiled when a mishap in the apartment set off fire alarms that prompted an inspection from the police, who were stupified by what they found in the apartment.
Murad was arrested in Manila, but Yousef was once again able to flee to Pakistan. However, it was not long before he too was apprehended in Pakistan on 7 February 1995 and extradited to the US.
Upon his return to the US, Yousef was flown via helicopter above Manhattan. An FBI agent taunted him during the trip whilst pointing at the WTC: “Look down there. They’re still standing”.
“They wouldn’t be if I had enough money and explosives”, Yousef responded.
KSM made it out of Manila and remained on the run - the only one of the trio to evade the FBI (for the time being). He eventually made his way back to Afghanistan somewhere in 1996 where he met up with an old acquaintance named Osama bin Laden. At this encounter, KSM, for the first time, shared with bin Laden a new terrorist plot he had hatched. The idea was a mixture of Yousef’s ‘93 WTC bombing, attacking several commercial airlines simultaneously as planned for Bojinka and using the planes as bombs as originally conceived by Murad. After some convincing, bin Laden committed to supporting the plot.
Although KSM’s ambitious plot would require a lot of cash, financing was something bin Laden could easily arrange. It also required sophisticated martyrs, cosmopolitan enough to evade suspicion in the US and with the technical proficiency to fly planes. Finding the perfect soldiers to execute the attack would be a tougher challenge though.
Tune in next week as the story travels to Germany to look into the lives of the men who would end up becoming the foot soldiers of 9/11.
Sources:
I compiled this story from multiple sources, but I relied mostly on these. If you’d like to read more about 9/11, they are all highly recommended.
Perfect Soldiers: The 9/11 Hijackers: Who They Were, Why They Did It by Terry McDermott
The Looming Tower: Al Qaeda's Road to 9/11 by Lawrence Wright
Fall and Rise: The Story of 9/11 by Mitchell Zuckoff
The National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States (2004)
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