He yelled, "Some plane just hit the Trade Center."
Yousef quickly looked up at the black-and-white TV above his head. Eyes wide at the site of the North Tower burning, he turned up the sound and heard the voice of an eyewitness: "I just saw the entire top part of the World Trade Center explode."
Yousef rocked back, amazed himself at the execution of his plan. He stared at the news footage of racing FDNY engines, terrified evacuees, and bodies dropping from the towers. Then, from the Battery, a camera captured United Airlines Flight 175 slamming into the South Tower.
Another onlooker described it as "a sickening sight." But Yousef, the master terrorist, saw it as the culmination of a dream and the end to some unfinished business. He dropped to the floor, bent over, and gave thanks. "Praise Allah the merciful and the just, the lord of the worlds. We thank you for delivering this message to the apostates."
Later that morning, Yousef's cell door swung open and a pair of FBI agents from the Colorado Springs office came in. They stood in the three-foot-wide anteroom between the solid steel cell door and the bars to the cell.
The convicted terrorist got up from his bed and approached the bars as the two agents presented Bureau IDs and identified themselves.
"Why do you come here?" he demanded.
One of the agents nodded to the TV behind Yousef, still tuned to CNN.
"Did you have anything to do with that?"
Yousef shot back: "How would I possibly know what was going on from in here? Besides, I am represented by counsel. You have no right to question me without my attorney present."
The two agents eyed each other. Now they were facing Yousef the lawyer, the man who had represented himself throughout the entire three months of the Manila airline bombing trial.
"I have nothing else to say to you," snapped Yousef. He turned up the sound on the TV and sat back down on his bed.
The agents withdrew, but within minutes the steel door swung back open and two Bureau of Prisons guards stormed in.
As one began to unlock Yousef's cell bars, the other one shouted, "Get up and face the wall." Yousef stared at him defiantly for a moment, but then the guard slammed a black box and a belly belt chain against the bars, so Yousef got up. Now, as he faced the wall, one guard came in and quickly put the belt around his waist. The other one bent down and snapped on ankle irons and a chain.
"What is this?" shouted Yousef. "What are you doing?"
"Changing cells," said one of the guards. He turned off the TV. The guards turned him around and shuffled him out of the cell, moving him down the corridor of "D" wing, past the cell of the infamous Unabomber, Ted Kaczynski. (For a time, this so-called bombers row had also housed convicted Oklahoma City bombers Timothy McVeigh and Terry Nichols.)
One of the guards unlocked the door to an empty cell and moved Yousef inside as he continued to rant.
When the guards had him locked behind the cell bars, they slammed closed the steel door and went back to Yousef's cell. There they began to toss it, searching around the mattress and on the shelf beside the bed, throwing Yousef's letters, papers and drawings into a plastic garbage bag. The units on the maximum-security "D" wing are supposed to be soundproof, but as the guards worked to clean out Yousef's cell, they could still hear him screaming down the corridor.
"Why are you doing this? Why would you think that I could have any knowledge of this thing that happened? I've been in this place locked down for years. Do you hear me?"
In fact, Yousef's knowledge of the plot was quite precise. He had designed it with his uncle and his best friend back in 1994. It had now been executed almost exactly as he intended. Only the details of the timing had been unknown to him.
Another thing Yousef couldn't possibly know was that across the country, earlier that morning, a woman who'd almost stopped him had watched the devastation firsthand. She had put all of this behind her years ago, or so she thought. But now the terror she'd been so close to preventing was back. For FBI special agent Nancy Floyd, an old wound had just been ripped open.
---
Nancy Floyd had come within weeks of breaking Yousef's bomb cell in the fall of 1992, but her investigation had been shut down by a Bureau superior in New York. Now, just before 9 a.m., as she drove west across the George Washington Bridge on her way to an off-site surveillance assignment, Agent Floyd heard a report on her car radio about an explosion at the Trade Center.
She hit the brakes. Dozens of cars in front of her skidded to a stop, and traffic on both sides of the bridge ground to a halt as the morning commuters heard the news and spilled out onto the bridge. It was still early in the attack, and the onlookers around her were speculating: "Are they sure it's a plane?"
"Maybe a gas leak?"
Standing there on the bridge, though, the 41-year-old special agent from Texas knew in her gut what it was: an attack by Middle Eastern terrorists -- and not just any attack, but one hatched in the brilliant but deadly mind of Ramzi Yousef.
Minutes later, United Airlines Flight 175 roared across the river from New Jersey. For a moment it looked as if the 175 was pointed toward the Statue of Liberty in New York Harbor; then it turned to the left, and slammed into the upper floors of the South Tower.
Back in 1992, through Emad Salem, an Egyptian informant she'd recruited, Nancy Floyd had come so close to the men around Yousef that she could almost smell them. By then, Ramzi Yousef was hard at work at an apartment in Jersey City, building the 1,500-pound urea-nitrate-fuel oil device he would soon plant on the B-2 level beneath the two towers.
Now Nancy watched those towers as they burned, knowing that, though he'd been in federal lockup since 1995, this was somehow the fulfilment of Yousef's plan. For Agent Floyd it was a vindication, but she took little comfort in the thought.
Her attempt to expose the first Trade Center plot had almost ended her career. Only now, years later, had she begun to recover. She'd put in for a transfer to a small FBI regional office in the far west; her request had been granted, and now Nancy was only 18 days away from leaving New York.
Long ago she'd tried to bury thoughts of Yousef and the 1993 bombing, but now she couldn't stop thinking about him -- especially after a call she'd received that past August from her old informant Salem. He'd been in the Federal Witness Protection Program ever since testifying against the cell around Yousef and Sheik Abdel Rahman. Largely on Salem's word, the blind sheik had been convicted of a plot to blow up a series of New York landmarks, including the tunnels leading into Manhattan and the very bridge Nancy Floyd was now standing on.
But years before, Floyd had been prohibited by the Bureau from taking Salem's calls, or ever discussing the details of the original bombing with him.
Then, a few weeks before 9/11, she was working an FBI undercover assignment when Salem sent word that he wanted to talk to her. They never connected. So she never heard what he wanted to say.
Now, as she stood watching the towers burn, Nancy Floyd felt a cold throb at the base of her spine. Could Emad have been calling to warn me about this? she wondered. She would never know. Only in the summer of 2002, months after the attacks, did Nancy Floyd become aware that another investigator had been on a parallel course.
---
Ronnie Bucca
Along with the word tragedy, Sept. 11 was the day the word hero took on new meaning. For the Fire Department of New York, the statistics were numbing: 343 members of service lost their lives; 90 firefighters in the Department's Special Operations Command were wiped out; Rescue One, the pre-eminent heavy rescue company in the world, lost 11 men in a house of 25. Sept. 11 was a day full of terrible ironies, but one of the cruelest involved a man who was already a bona fide legend in the FDNY 15 years before he raced up the stairs of the South Tower to his death.
Ronnie Bucca was a 47-year-old fire marshal with the FDNY's Bureau of Fire Investigation. A veteran firefighter himself, Bucca had investigated the original WTC bombing in 1993 -- and had come away convinced that the perpetrators would return to finish the job.
Over the next six years, as he educated himself on Islamic fundamentalism, Bucca found himself continually frustrated by the FBI's inability to appreciate the bin Laden threat or share the intel. Despite the fact that he had a top secret security clearance as a warrant officer in a high-level army reserve intelligence unit, Bucca was repeatedly frozen out by members of the NYPD-FBI Joint Terrorist Task Force, one of the key Bureau units hunting Yousef. His frustration reached a fever pitch in 1999, after he uncovered startling evidence that an Egyptian with direct ties to the blind Sheik was actually working inside FDNY headquarters.
Now, astonishingly, on that morning, as Nancy Floyd watched from the George Washington Bridge, Ronnie Bucca was on the 78th floor of the South Tower with a hose in his hand, trying to beat back the flames.
The general consensus in the intelligence community is that the man who became famous as Yousef was born Abdul Basit Mahmud Abdul Karim in Kuwait. His father, an engineer named Mohammed Abdul Karim, had emigrated to Fuhayhil, a Kuwaiti oil-boom town where young Yousef/Basit came of age.
In 1989, he earned a diploma in electronics from the West Glomorgan Institute of Higher Learning in South Wales. At the three-year technical college, he specialized in computer-aided electronics. Yousef was in Kuwait visiting family and friends in August 1990 when Saddam Hussein's tanks rolled in and took the country.
His Iraqi connections would be the subject of debate among intelligence analysts for years to come. But sometime after the invasion, the 23-year-old took off for the University of Dawa and Jihad, an al-Qaida training school located at the Jalozai refugee camp, 48 km east of Peshawar in northwest Pakistan.
There, with 55 other young jihadis from around the world, Yousef took a six-month course, specializing in explosives. He learned how to make slow-burning fuses using gunpowder rolled into cotton, on linen coated with an insulating layer of pitch. He studied the use of electrical switches, discovering that given the proper accelerant, the spark from a simple nine-volt battery would be sufficient to detonate a device of tremendous killing power.
By one account, the gangly young Yousef sat in the back of a tent in the Jalozai camp as an instructor lectured in Arabic on how to build an effective improvised explosive device from an egg timer, some lamp cord and an open can of gasoline.
"You must be careful how you set the timer," the instructor said, splitting the ends of the lamp cord and twisting it around the poles of the small device.
He stripped the other ends into a pig's tail and taped them across the mouth of the gas can. "When the timer rings, it will send a charge along the wire, which will short, causing a spark to ignite the gas vapours." But he took care to admonish them: "These timers are unreliable. Always set them ahead. Five minutes can mean three." He asked for a volunteer.
Without hesitating, Yousef jumped up. He strutted like a young fighting gamecock toward the device. The instructor told him to get behind the sandbags, remove the pairs, reconnect them, and reset the timer.
Yousef nodded, cold as ice. He quickly examined the live divide then deftly removed the pairs. He reconnected them -- then reset the timer for one minute. The timer ticked away. But instead of running, Yousef walked slowly back around the sandbags. When the gas tank suddenly blew, Yousef was knocked to the ground.
Raging, the instructor ran up to him.
"Murtadd!" he said. "Fool! You might have been killed."
But Yousef eyed him defiantly. "Let the man who lacks the courage to do this for Allah go live with the women."
The instructor winced, then smiled at Yousef's reckless bravery. The other students surrounded him. They fired AK-47s into the air in a blizzard of lead. Abdul Basit savoured the triumph, and the legend of Ramzi Yousef was born.
---
The irony was that Yousef acquired his bomb-building knowledge under the tutelage of men who were funded in part by Uncle Sam. In intelligence circles, they call it blowback, a deadly unintended consequence of a covert op. In this case, Yousef learned his deadly skills from men who, for years, had been supported and sponsored by the CIA.
In the late 1980s the Central Intelligence Agency funnelled billions in arms and munitions to the Afghan mujahedin rebels in their war against the invading Soviets. The U.S. price tag for the covert aid reportedly reached $3 billion. Journalist Mary Anne Weaver noted that the Soviet invasion, begun in 1979, was a kind of Spanish Civil War for Islamics. As many as 25,000 young jihadis like Yousef poured in from around the globe to fight and train in guerrilla tactics.
Though they were all later dubbed "Afghan Arabs," there were blue-eyed Chechens, black South Africans and Filipinos training along with Kurds, Yemenis, Uzbekis and Saudis. They studied bomb making, hijacking and other covert ops. The difference was that the veterans of the anti-fascist campaign in the 1930s, like Hemingway, went to Paris to write books, while the Afghan War jihadis decided to focus their attention on the West and blow things up.
During this period, intelligence officials believe that Yousef first hooked up with three men who would one day carve their names in the history of Islamic terror. Abdurajak Janjalani was a Libyan-trained Filipino whose nom de guerre was Abu Sayyaf. Mahmud Abouhalima was a 6-foot-2 red-headed Egyptian who did two tours in Afghanistan. Known as "the Red," Abouhalima was a disciple of Sheikh Omar Abdel Rahman, leader of the al Gamm'a Islamiya (IG), one of the most virulent Egyptian terror groups.
These Afghan connections would prove crucial to Yousef as his career advanced. Abouhalima would become one of his key operatives as he built the original World Trade Center bomb in 1992. Sheikh Rahman would be at the heart of Yousef's bombing cell, based in Jersey City. Later, the Abu Sayyaf terror group, named for Janjalani, would provide Yousef with the infrastructure he needed when he plotted the 9/11 attacks in Manila in 1995.
But the bomb maker's chief sponsor over the years -- the man who funded and guided him -- was the 17th son of a Saudi construction billionaire named Osama bin Laden. Beginning in the early 1990s, Yousef emerged as the point man for bin Laden's worldwide terror network. Al-Qaida, meaning "the base," sprang directly from a string of refugee centres set up as fundraising conduits for the mujahedin rebels.
In short, when probing the origin of the 9/11 attacks, all roads lead back to Afghanistan and Peshawar in the final days of the Soviet invasion.
But as the two jetliners hit the World Trade Center towers almost two years ago, three strangers knew exactly what had happened. FBI agent Nancy Floyd, FDNY Fire Marshal Ronnie Bucca and Ramzi Yousef, the bomb-making terrorist an American judge once called "an apostle of evil," had been on a collision course for years -- soldiers on opposing sides in a terror war raging since the late 1980s. In the new best-seller 1000 Years For Revenge, Peter Lance reports the untold story of how the FBI failed to prevent the 9/11 attacks. The title of the book is taken from an old expression in the Baluchistan no man's land of Pakistan, Yousef's homeland: "If it takes me 10 centuries to kill my enemy, I will wait a thousand years for revenge."
In the last part of an exclusive three-part series of excerpts in The Toronto Sun, Lance reveals how a terrorist worked in the Fire Department of New York in the 1990s and how the threat of another 9/11 continues to this day.
---
Among Sheik Rahman's devoted followers at the Brooklyn mosque was a quiet, unassuming accountant named Ahmed Amin Refai. Born in Alexandria, Egypt, Refai had emigrated to the United States in 1970. For the past 16 years he had worked in the Capital Budget Unit of the New York City Fire Department -- or hardly worked, according to Kay Woods, an assistant FDNY commissioner who was Refai's boss at the time.
"Ahmed really had the time of his life," said Woods. "He would come in late. He would call in sick. He would take long lunches. He would make phone calls to Egypt. He literally fell asleep at his desk sometimes."
After Sheik Rahman arrived, Refai would spend hours at the Al Farooq and Abu Bakr mosques, not far from FDNY headquarters in Brooklyn.
For the most part, Refai kept his head down and acted like a nondescript city bureaucrat. His tenure remained uneventful until one day in the early 1990s when Woods decided to empty out a series of filing cabinets left over from an FDNY unit that had once used the office.
"There were these old beat-up green cabinets," said Woods, "full of files that a former FDNY fire captain had reviewed." The file cabinets were loaded with architectural drawings and the plans of various city buildings. To accommodate the discarded files, Woods brought in two dumpsters. She was just coming back from lunch one day when she found Ahmed Refai rifling through them. Along with the blueprints, there were pen-and-ink drawings and some architectural renderings. Woods asked what Refai was doing. He smiled and turned to face her.
"Oh, I was just going to keep those. Do you mind if I keep some?"
"No," she told the immigrant Egyptian. "They're going out in the garbage. Keep whatever you want. Why? What are you gonna do with them?"
Refai just smiled and gathered up the files that he wanted. Among them were detailed drawings and blueprints of the bridges and tunnels around Manhattan and the eight-square-block Port Authority complex between West and Liberty Sts.: The World Trade Center.
---
Less than an hour after his capture in Pakistan in 1995, Ramzi Yousef seemed compelled to regale the agents with his accomplishments. When asked his name, he gave his latest persona, "Ali Baloch," then added: "I have many."
It was a relatively brief interview. Secret Service Agent Brian Parr and FBI Agent Chuck Stern were on their way to Islamabad aboard a government 707 jet to effect Yousef's transfer to New York. Airborne, they would question him for hours.
But at this point, the bomb maker, dressed in a mustard-coloured jumpsuit, seemed to be as preoccupied with his appearance as his custody status. He asked the agents if he could get a suit coat, dress shirt, tie, trousers, socks and dress shoes on the off chance that he might be exposed to the press.
Ramzi Yousef was one terrorist who kept his own clippings.
He had been a fugitive for almost two years. As al-Qaida's chief bomb maker and operational point man, he was in possession of an extraordinary number of secrets. Yet now, in the course of this first interrogation, Yousef seemed almost casual in his willingness to talk.
"I masterminded the explosion (at the Trade Center)," he boasted, alleging the bomb cost him $20,000 to build. He admitted he'd been wired money by some "friends" in Pakistan, but said nothing more about his sponsors.
As to his motivation, Yousef insisted he was primarily driven to attack America because of U.S. support for Israel.
That issue becomes important when determining who was truly behind him -- Iraq, as many analysts alleged, or Osama bin Laden.
Osama bin Laden
It's quite possible that Yousef gave up the details of the Trade Center bomb to divert the feds' attention from his more ambitious "third plot," to hijack airliners and use them as missiles. But without realizing it, Yousef was giving the agents clues about his true patron. In repeated public announcements and fatwas over the next five years, Osama bin Laden denounced what he called the "Zionist-Crusaders." His closest Egyptian cohorts had suffered humiliating defeats by the Israelis in 1973 and 1967. Yousef's own mother was Palestinian; he later told a reporter that his grandmother had a home in Haifa that was denied him.
Those who believed that Saddam Hussein had sent Yousef to America pointed to the fact that the bombing happened on Feb. 26, 1993, the second anniversary of the Kuwait liberation, and that Yousef had entered JFK airport six months earlier on an Iraqi passport.
The issue of Yousef's sponsorship wasn't a major focus of the interrogation. Bits and pieces of the story surfaced at different points as the bomb maker responded to the agents' questions. Without even intending to, though, Yousef revealed evidence that should have signalled to the FBI his true backers: Osama bin Laden and Sheik Omar Abdel Rahman.
For example, Yousef revealed that the date of the WTC bombing was capricious. He struck when he did, he insisted, because the rent was coming due on the bomb factory in Jersey City and the cell had run out of money. The Iraqi passport, he explained, was a cheap $100 item he'd picked up in Peshawar, where they were plentiful because of the number of Iraqi rebels who had raided passport offices in northern Iraq. As to the theory that he'd hijacked a Kuwaiti's identity with the help of Saddam's intelligence agents, Yousef said that he'd actually worked in the Kuwaiti ministry of planning, but was forced to flee the country when Iraqi troops invaded in August 1990.
He also confessed to the agents that he was "interested" in Sheik Rahman, who had just gone on trial in New York for the Day of Terror plot. Yousef said he'd requested an audience with the cleric and he'd had dinner with the blind sheik at his Jersey City apartment.
But potential ties between Abdel Rahman and Saddam Hussein were unlikely: In 1991 the sheik had been booed off the pulpit of the Al Farooq Mosque in Brooklyn for a blistering speech attacking the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait. Saddam was just the sort of Arab leader fundamentalists like Rahman and bin Laden abhorred. Their mutual mentor, Sayyid Qutb, had railed against pan-Arabists. Secular Islamists like Saddam Hussein ranked third on their enemies list, behind Jews and Christians. As the sheik and bin Laden saw it, rulers like Saddam, who permitted Western dress and the consumption of alcohol, had created what Qutb called a "schizophrenia" among Muslims.
Still, the myth that Yousef and al-Qaida got their marching orders from Iraq would persist right up through the capture of Baghdad in April 2003.
It was after dark Eastern time when the 707 touched down at Stewart Airport in Orange County, N.Y. Yousef was transferred to a Sikorsky helicopter for the trip south to the Metropolitan Correctional Center in Lower Manhattan. While the chopper approached the heliport, Yousef gave FBI agents a chilling warning of what was to come. As the Sikorsky descended past the gleaming 110-storey skyscrapers, one of the agents lifted Yousef's blindfold and gestured toward the twin towers. "See," he said. "You didn't get them after all." Yousef eyed him, then fidgeted in his heavy cuffs and snapped back: "Not yet."
EPILOGUE
Much of the history of modern terrorism was written by Ramzi Yousef. But on April 4, 2003, in a sweeping 186-page opinion, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit turned down his appeal of his bombing convictions. Ruling on 43 separate issues, the court acknowledged some error at the trial level, but effectively denied all the terrorist's claims.
Yousef's attorney, Bernie Kleinman, has filed a notice of appeal and will seek a writ of certiorari from the U.S. Supreme Court. But for now, the Special Administrative Measure that has kept Yousef in restricted solitary confinement remains in place. Every day, the deadliest terrorist in captivity sits in a stark underground concrete cell in the Supermax prison in Colorado. Since 9/11 he has been allowed no television, no radio and no reading material of any kind that would give him a hint of events in the outside world.
Yet Yousef still casts a long shadow over the United States. On May 16, 2003, in a chilling reminder of his "third plot," The New York Times reported that his uncle, Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, had confessed to interrogators that "landmarks in New York and Washington, previously selected by Mr. bin Laden, remain on al-Qaida's target list." Included on that list was the Sears Tower in Chicago, which Yousef had marked for demolition as early as 1994.
