Posted on 01/16/2002 10:42:32 AM PST by Alouette
By Alan Cullison and Andrew Higgins
THE WALL STREET JOURNAL
KABUL, Afghanistan, Jan. 16 — Less than a month before hijacked airplanes slammed into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, al Qaeda chieftains received a report spelling out “exceptionally good opportunities” for terrorism in Israel and Egypt. Among the suggested targets: tall buildings and planes.
THE REPORT, found on a computer used by Osama bin Laden’s lieutenants in the Afghan capital, details a target-scouting mission by an operative who flew from Amsterdam to Tel Aviv on El Al with a new British passport. After traveling around Israel, he went to Egypt by bus and then to Turkey and Pakistan by air.
The report calls the peripatetic operative “brother Abdul Ra’uff.” As it happens, his travels bear a striking similarity to those of Richard Reid, the airline passenger who allegedly tried to set off explosives hidden in his shoe during a trans-Atlantic flight on Dec. 22. Reid went to the same countries, in the same order, and also got a new passport in Amsterdam just before setting out on El Al.
U.S. intelligence officials, who have reviewed the computer files, believe that “Abdul Ra’uff’s” true identity “may well be” Reid, as one puts it. A senior Israeli intelligence official says Israel is “positive” Reid had been sent to Israel by al-Qaida to scope out possible targets.
IS IT COINCIDENCE?
Reid is now in a Massachusetts jail on a charge of interfering with a flight attendant. His court-appointed lawyer, Tamar Birckhead, says she is “not aware of any evidence” linking him to any terrorist group or individual.
Whether Reid was in fact the scout or the similarity between his activities and “Abdul Ra’uff’s” is simply coincidence, the computer file on the scouting mission provides a striking view inside al-Qaida’s workings. The lengthy report is among more than 1,750 text and video files on the hard drives of two computers that a looter offered for sale to a Kabul computer merchant. The looter said he got them from an office al-Qaida abandoned as its Taliban protectors were fleeing Kabul in mid-November. A Wall Street Journal reporter acquired them for $1,100.
Computer in Kabul holds chilling memos
A Dec. 31 Wall Street Journal article described some of these files, including some from 1999 that outlined al-Qaida efforts to build germ and chemical weapons. Other files were protected by passwords and encryption that were much harder to crack, but the Journal has now managed to access some of these as well, and has translated them from Arabic.
A LIST OF NAMES
They contain no clear reference to the Sept. 11 attack in New York and Washington. But the files provide new details about al-Qaida’s meticulous planning, its global roster of operatives and its security procedures in the period just before the attack. The contents include:
A file that names 170 al-Qaida members. A significant portion of the names, say U.S. officials who have examined the computer files, weren’t known to law-enforcement and security agencies that have long sought to identify bin Laden acolytes.
A report on a planned operation to “gather intelligence about American soldiers who frequent nightclubs” along the U.S.-Canada border and about Israeli diplomatic missions in Canada. It requests information on “obtaining preparatory devices for explosives from inside Canada.”
A primer on coding and encryption of documents. Other files outline procedures for transmitting messages via Pakistan.
A message to Taliban leader Mullah Mohamed Omar praising his government’s destruction last March of 1,500-year-old giant statues of Buddha. It urges that the next target be the United Nations, described as a puppet of the “five major criminals, the U.S., Russia, Britain, France and China.”
OMAR & BROTHERS
Many of the text documents are not only protected by passwords but also couched in elliptical, coded language. The Taliban regime, for example, is apparently referred to as Omar & Brothers Company. Bin Laden’s al-Qaida is the Abdullah Contracting Company.
The report of the target-spotting tour shows how members encoded their lives as well as their messages, wrapping even the mundane in subterfuge. It notes approvingly that “Abdul Ra’uff” took care to conceal his puritanical Islamic faith during a 10-day stay in the Netherlands. “At the hotel he would take empty alcohol bottles from the street and put them into trash containers in his room,” it says. He scavenged cigarette butts from adjacent rooms and dumped them in his own ashtray.
When asked by an airline security agent why he was visiting Amsterdam, he said he had come for the hashish.
Just before leaving Amsterdam for Israel, the operative obtained a replacement passport at the British consulate. The al-Qaida report says he had put his old one in a washing machine and removed a visa sticker for Pakistan, which he worried might set off alarms at security checks.
“He went to the consulate and met with an employee who asked what happened to the passport,” relates the report. “He said: ‘I was drunk and washed my passport.’ ” Four days later, he received a new passport. A day after that, he left for Tel Aviv on El Al, Israel’s national airline.
It’s one of the details pointing to Reid, even though whether he was, in fact, the scout remains uncertain. The British Foreign Office says Reid, of British-Jamaican heritage, received a new British passport in Amsterdam on July 6, just before he flew to Tel Aviv on El Al.
PARALLEL LIVES
The travels of Richard Reid and those of "Abdul Ra'uff," an al-Qaida target scout featured in a report stored on a computer in Kabul, coincide in several ways.
| The travels of Richard Reid and those of "Abdul Ra'uff," an al-Qaida target scout featured in a report stored on a computer in Kabul, coincide in several ways. | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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Five months later, as Reid was preparing to board an American Airlines Paris-to-Miami flight, allegedly with explosives in a shoe, he repeated much the same procedure. He applied for a new passport at the British Embassy in Brussels. Several pages of the old one were torn out.
The computer report on the travels of the al-Qaida scout notes that “washing the passport is a practical way of ridding the passport of any Pakistani visas,” but it warns that doing this more than once could attract suspicion.
The unsigned report, protected by a complex password, was created on Aug. 19, according to the Kabul computer’s internal record. The Wall Street Journal commissioned an array of high-speed computers programmed to crack passwords. They took five days to access the file.
A key part of the scouting mission evidently was to scope out El Al’s security procedures. The report gives a detailed account of an uncomfortable encounter the operative had with Israeli security agents at Amsterdam airport. They “searched his shoes ... and also his hat,” it says, and grilled him repeatedly about his work, the purpose of his trip, the source of his money and his ticket.
To help prepare future operatives for flights on El Al, the report includes a verbatim transcript of 10 questions Israeli security agents asked. “Why do you want to go to Israel?” was one. The operative’s answer: to see the holy sites. “Have you ever traveled to the Middle East before?” His answer: No.
The unsigned account, apparently written by an al-Qaida operations manager who debriefed the scout, matches Reid’s own troubles with El Al security at Amsterdam airport. He, too, picked up his ticket to Tel Aviv on the day of departure, faced close scrutiny from suspicious security staff and had all his belongings, including his shoes, searched.
The onboard treatment of the operative and Reid, who converted to Islam in a British juvenile prison, also match. The al-Qaida report notes that its target scout was “seated in the last seat away from the pilots’ cabin” under the “watchful eye” of cabin crew. Two passengers sitting next to him were moved, and “a different man and woman were put into their seats.” Reid, an Israeli government official says, was given a seat at the rear of the aircraft near an armed El Al sky marshal.
Israeli officials say they lost track of Reid after he passed through immigration at Ben Gurion International Airport in July but caught up with him again when he crossed by bus into Egypt through Rafah, at the southern end of the Gaza strip. A senior Israeli intelligence official says Reid stayed 10 days in Israel.
“Abdul Ra’uff,” according to the account of his journey stored on the Kabul computer, spent the same amount of time in Israel before crossing by bus into Egypt through the same Rafah border point.
The report recounts in detail the al-Qaida scout’s travels inside Israel. After casing possible sites for attack in Tel Aviv, he continued his survey in Jerusalem, Haifa and Bethlehem, it says. The report then observes that it might be possible to “bring explosives from Bethlehem to Jerusalem” because soldiers at checkpoints, once shown the operative’s British passport, didn’t search his travel bag.
“It appears that brothers with European passports are able to move about in Israel with greater freedom and can be treated as Israelis,” says the report, in a 26-point summary. It repeatedly stresses the advantages of a European passport. It doesn’t mention any contacts with Hamas or other militant Palestinian groups.
Although focused on Israel, the August reconnaissance report foreshadowed some of the terrorist tradecraft used in the Sept. 11 attacks in New York and Washington. It recommended that terrorists dress smartly and sit in first or business class “to be near the pilots’ cabin without arousing suspicion.” Many of the Sept. 11 hijackers sat in business or first class.
PICTURES OF BUILDINGS
The account suggests that al-Qaida may have been considering a hijack attack in Israel: The scout photographed tall buildings in Tel Aviv, disguising his interest by mixing the shots with shots “of the beach and such.” On his flight into Tel Aviv, he noted details of the plane’s approach and of onboard security measures.
“Upon the aircraft’s approach to Tel Aviv, our brother did not see any movement near the pilot’s cabin because he was quite far away,” the report says. “Generally flight attendants are security and there are [security] people sitting among the passengers.” The report adds that “the aircraft remained above the city before descending to the airport for 3-4 minutes only. During these 3-4 minutes it is possible to see the city clearly.”
While hinting at terror attacks involving planes, the report deals largely with “opportunities” for conventional attacks: bombings and ambushes. On a visit to northern Israel, the operative cased out a kibbutz in Tiberias. He spent the night and was never searched.
In Jerusalem, he checked out security at the Wailing Wall and found it “quite minimal.” An attack there, notes the report, would have an “immensely strong” propaganda impact because of its proximity to sacred Islamic sites under Israeli control.
Public transport in Israel, says the report, offers “an exceptionally good opportunity” for bombings, “because our brother boarded with his bag more than once and was not subject to searches.” The report describes buses’ different colors and says which are used mostly by Jews. It lists security measures at various railway stations, noting that guards at the Haifa station were sometimes too busy to check everyone entering.
“If the striker is unable to enter the train station without being searched,” counsels the report, “it is then possible to strike the reception area because it can be entered without being searched and contains no less than 100 people.”
Another good potential target, the unnamed writer adds, is Tel Aviv railway station on a Saturday night: It’s full of military people arriving or departing after the end of the Jewish sabbath.
A TOUR OF EGYPT
Egypt, too, was scrutinized for attack possibilities. The operative took a bus through the town of Ismailia on his way to Cairo. “Before Ismailia,” the report says, “there is a good place to bomb the bus because there is a wooded area and there is a side road that is covered by trees.” In general, though, the author of the computer report is dissatisfied with the operative’s work in Egypt. “There is not a lot of information from this trip and a [new] trip ... is absolutely necessary.”
After Egypt, the report says, the operative flew to Turkey. After an unsuccessful attempt to go to Iran, he flew to Karachi, Pakistan.
It isn’t known whether Reid tried to enter Iran, a nation that has sometimes been used by al-Qaida as a conduit for travel into neighboring Afghanistan. Prisoners interrogated in Afghanistan by U.S. forces say they saw Reid at an al-Qaida training camp in Afghanistan. U.S. officials don’t consider their identifications conclusive, however.
• Bin Laden: Alleged targets, operations, and colleagues
The report says a follow-up trip will refine planning for future bomb attacks. On the next trip, it says, the agent, preferably a European, should carry “an article that would imitate a container to be carried during an actual operation.”
The report also calls for more study of security aboard El Al. On the next trip, it says, “the brother has to enter the lavatory of the aircraft and see the extent of security staff’s attention.” And it suggests that future scouting missions look into renting an apartment in Tel Aviv, to see whether Israeli agencies “pay attention to the presence of a European tourist.”
A separate, undated document stored on the Kabul desktop computer outlines a planned scouting trip to the U.S.-Canada border, by someone it calls Abu Bakr al-Albani. A summary of his tasks includes scoping out nightclubs frequented by U.S. servicemen.
It lays out code words. The phrase “I visited my teacher,” for example, will mean “I entered America.” The memo says the operative assigned to the mission has been given $1,500 and a ticket “to return to us after four months, God willing.”
AN UNNAMED ‘PROJECT’
Other files suggest that al-Qaida had grand plans afoot by late last spring. A flurry of jittery and sometimes tetchy memos stored on a computer in May seem to reflect a feverish mood among al-Qaida chiefs in Kabul and operatives abroad. There was heated discussion of an unnamed “project” that proponents said could bring an end to a period of lethargy and internal squabbling within the organization. A memo dated last May 2, apparently using coded language, says the success of this project “may well be a way out of the bottleneck and transfer our activities to the stage of multinationals and [bring] joint profit.”
The memo is drafted under an alias used by Ayman al-Zawahri, a former Egyptian surgeon who is considered bin Laden’s senior strategist. It is addressed to Abu Mohammed al-Masri, an alias used by Abdullah Ahmed Abdullah, an Egyptian who U.S. authorities say was involved in the U.S. Embassy bombings in Kenya and Tanzania in 1998 and the killing of American soldiers in Somalia five years earlier.
“Brothers, the competition has escalated. We cannot stand idly by as observers,” reads another Zawahri memo. “We cannot wait. Events are happening quickly.”
In an undated note, a writer using a common alias for bin Laden makes his own pitch to Abdullah. “We all support this project and believe that it will provide a way out,” he writes.
Others weren’t so gung-ho. An unsigned note rails against “unprofitable” ventures and blindly following the direction of the “contractor” — a frequent alias for bin Laden.
Correspondence stored on the computer dropped off sharply after Sept. 11. Among a handful of text files is the draft of an open message to the American people, stored on Oct. 3. It says the U.S. government was itself to blame for the Sept. 11 attacks because of its pro-Israel policies, and it calls on ordinary Americans to be the “ax to break all these chains.”
The draft, written in Arabic, is unfinished. In late October, as U.S. bombing in Afghanistan intensified and anti-Taliban forces closed in on Kabul, users of the desktop computer wrote messages — only to delete them promptly. The hard drive contains at least a half-dozen such ghost documents. A short memo that survived asks that money be deposited to a bank account, apparently outside Afghanistan, “due to the difficulties in making withdrawals in this region.”
The last retrievable document on the hard drive is a rambling denunciation of the U.S. Apocalyptic in tone and in places barely coherent, it was stored on the computer Nov. 10, three days before Taliban troops fled the Afghan capital and the Northern Alliance moved in, killing some Arabs left in the city. In apparent fury at the failure of Muslims to rally against the West, the tract fumes that “weapons used against you exist in your home, to entertain you, and to amuse your sons.” America, says the tract, has a “strong plan — total domination of peoples’ lives.”
Chris Cooper, Dan Bilefsky, Jonathan Karp and Dan Michaels contributed to this article.
WOW!!!
Yikes is right!
Just goes to show there's some redeeming qualities in all people.
Gosh, do we thank them or fight???
Stay well - stay safe - Stay armed - Yorktown
Then again, maybe not. The Taliban outlawed dancing and it may be AGAINST his religion. LOL
Islam is a religion of peace.
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