Saad called the two officers in. “What are they referring to?” he asked them.
“We invited Ali and the other FBI agent to an
Saad laughed. “Those guys,” he said, waving his hand dismissively, “when will they grow up?”
On November 30, 1999, the [1 word redacted] intercepted a phone call between Abu Hoshar and Abu Zubaydah during which Abu Zubaydah said, “The time for training is over.” There was no context. The Jordanians, understandably, didn’t want to take chances. They rounded up all the individuals we had been monitoring; sixteen were taken in, including Abu Hoshar. Deek and Abu Zubaydah were in Pakistan, and Hijazi was in Syria, so they were not among those detained.
The Jordanians interrogated the operatives and quickly gained confessions and some additional details of the plot. Hijazi’s younger brother and co-conspirator revealed the motto for the millennium attacks: “The season is coming, and bodies will pile up in sacks.” The information the operatives gave included the location of hideouts. The [1 word redacted] raided several, recovering detonators (including the walkie-talkies Hijazi had purchased in London), weapons, forged passports, and the CD version of Deek’s
Initially we couldn’t find any chemicals. The operatives were questioned further, and one explained where a trapdoor for the makeshift basement could be found. His directions led [1 word redacted] officers to the spot. When the hatch was opened, a terrible stench drifted up. A ladder was in place, and one of my [1 word redacted] friends was sent down it. He rushed back up a few seconds later and said that the basement was full of urns of chemicals. The acids were leaking and the floor was covered. The [1 word redacted] official started coughing and shouted, “I’ve been poisoned. I can’t breathe.”
He had indeed inhaled dangerous chemicals. Someone quickly brought him some milk and instructed him to drink it, telling him it would clear the poison from his system. After drinking the milk, and to the amusement of those present, he said he felt better.
After the arrest of the operatives in Jordan, and after the detainees had detailed Deek’s role in the plot, the Pakistani authorities agreed to arrest him. They raided his center and took him into custody. There he was blindfolded—with blackout goggles put over his eyes and duct tape wrapped around the goggles—making it impossible for him to see. The Pakistanis did not tell him what they would do with him.They contacted the [1 word redacted], which sent a military plane to Pakistan to pick him up. Once in Jordan, still with no one saying a word to him, and still blindfolded, he was taken to a [1 word redacted] jail and placed before a picture of King Abdullah II, who had assumed power ten months earlier, after the death of his father, King Hussein.
Only then were the goggles and duct tape removed. It took a few seconds for Deek’s eyes to adjust to the light. He focused on the picture in front of him. His face dropped. He knew that the game was up and that the plot had failed.
Another graduate of Abu Zubaydah’s Khaldan camp was Ahmed Ressam. A wily Algerian, he falsely claimed political asylum in Canada in 1994, using a fake passport and a story about persecution. He supported himself in Canada through crime and dealing in fake passports. While there he met a veteran of Khaldan who recommended that he head there for training.
Before he left for Khaldan in 1998, Ressam acquired a legitimate Canadian passport through a fixer who had stolen a blank baptism certificate from a church. Using the passport, he traveled easily to Pakistan and then to Afghanistan, where he went to Khaldan. There he received basic terrorism training and learned how to build explosives. He got to know Abu Zubaydah, who was impressed with Ressam’s ability to procure passports and quickly put him to work. Eventually Ressam returned to Canada, with the intention of planning an attack in the United States with other Algerians he had met at Khaldan. They spent time discussing and planning attacks, with Abu Zubaydah offering advice on launching them. Ressam returned to Canada fully expecting his fellow Algerians to follow him. When they couldn’t get the documents to enter the country, he decided to strike without them. He rented a Chrysler sedan, hid explosives in the spare tire, and drove to the car ferry at Victoria, Canada, which was to sail to Port Angeles, Washington. He intended his final destination to be Los Angeles International Airport, which he would bomb on the millennium.
On December 14, I was called into a secure room in the U.S. Embassy in Amman to receive a call from FBI headquarters. They told me that an Algerian named Ahmed Ressam had been arrested trying to bring explosives into the United States from Canada. They didn’t yet know exactly what he intended to do, but they suspected a millennium attack.
While Ressam had cleared the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) preinspection station in Victoria—his passport was a legitimate Canadian one, so there were no red flags—it was his suspicious activity on the other end that prompted the attention of an astute customs official. Rather than getting off the ferry with his Chrysler when it was his turn, Ressam waited for every one of the other drivers to get their vehicles off first. Apparently he thought that the last car off would receive less attention. The customs officer noticed not only this but the fact that Ressam seemed nervous, and he referred him to an official for a secondary inspection.
When the agent at the secondary inspection began to pat Ressam down—a standard procedure—he panicked and tried to run away. He was quickly stopped, and his car was searched. At first, the customs staff thought that he was connected to drug smuggling, but once the timing devices were found they realized that there was a bigger issue, and the FBI was called in to take over.
I shared this information with the Jordanians. It seemed, from our inquiries, that Ressam might possibly be connected to the other millennium bombers—all or most had trained at Khaldan. Ressam’s apprehension underscored the importance of Abu Zubaydah’s camp and provided a warning that terrorists were plotting to strike not only Jordan but elsewhere.
Having learned that Deek and Abu Zubaydah worked closely with the UK-based operative Mozzam Begg to raise funds, we passed this information on to our friends in SO13 and MI5. The British authorities were already aware of Begg’s activities and his connections to suspected terrorists in Pakistan and Afghanistan.
I worked in both Jordan and the UK during this period. One morning in 2000, while I was in England working with SO13 on a separate investigation, a clearly surprised Alan Fry and John Bunn told me that MI5 and SO12 (the intelligence counterpart to SO13) had raided al-Ansar, a bookstore operated by Begg, and Begg’s home in Birmingham. They had arrested him. Because SO13 hadn’t spent time building a case against him, however, after a preliminary interview he was released—and, like Liby in Manchester, escaped the country. We only caught Begg years later in Pakistan, after 9/11.
Bassam Kanj was born in Lebanon in 1965. In 1984 he moved to the United States and married an American woman, becoming a naturalized U.S. citizen. He then followed a path that was becoming familiar to us: fighting the Soviets in Afghanistan, he returned to the United States when the war ended and in subsequent years regularly traveled back to Afghanistan to train at Khaldan.
It was under Abu Zubaydah that he picked up the alias Abu A’isha and met Raed Hijazi, Khalil Deek, and others with U.S. citizenship who frequented the master terrorist facilitator’s camp. In 1995 Kanj moved to Boston and started driving a cab for the same company as Hijazi. The two were good friends. They had roomed together before Kanj was married and continued to share quarters when Kanj’s wife was away. In 1998 Kanj left the United States and went to Lebanon, where he joined a radical group that called itself Takfir wal-Hijra.
On New Year’s Eve 1999, Kanj led a group of around 150 Sunni terrorists to the Dinnieh mountain region in northern Lebanon. The group was predominantly Palestinians and Syrians; Kanj had met many of them in training camps in Afghanistan. Their stated aim was to impose Sharia law in Lebanon.
They first ambushed an army unit in the village of Assoun, killing a few soldiers and kidnapping a commanding officer. When the Lebanese army sent in troops, the terrorists went on a rampage and for four days battled the troops, killing anyone who got in their way. The slaughter did nothing to further the terrorists’ singleminded devotion to their goal of imposing Sharia law. Another in the millennium series of plots was disrupted.
With Abu Hoshar, Deek, and the others in custody in Amman—and the group’s explosive materials confiscated—we had successfully thwarted the plot in Jordan. Those who were jailed provided significant information about the terrorist network. The only loose ends we knew about were Hijazi, who was still on the run —when we rounded up the suspects, he had been traveling back from Pakistan, and was somewhere in Syria, and so he never returned to Jordan—and Abu Zubaydah, who was somewhere in Afghanistan or Pakistan.
Until the millennium dawned, however, we obviously wouldn’t know for certain whether we had apprehended
