Ramzi Yousef missed all of that. Right after the bombing, he had briefly paused to admire his largely unsuccessful handiwork from the opposite bank of the Hudson River, then headed to JFK airport for a first class seat to Karachi, Pakistan. Despite his precautions, Yousef's role as the mastermind of the operation emerged fairly quickly, aided by such clues as a pair of fingerprints on a chemical bottle in the storage unit and immigration documents left in the apartment.
While investigators worldwide searched for him, he began planning a new and spectacular reign of global terror. In 1994 he began spending a considerable amount of time in the Philippines, and some of his more ambitious schemes included assassinating President Clinton and Pope John Paul II during visits there. One plot that came perilously close to realization called for the simultaneous in-flight bombings of 11 U.S. jetliners en route home from Asia. The plot fell apart just two weeks short of fruition when Yousef, working with a friend and co-conspirator named Abdul Hakim Murad, inadvertently generated a fire while cooking up a batch of chemicals in a Manila apartment in January 1995. Murad was apprehended by the police when he went back to the apartment at Yousef's request to collect his laptop; Yousef, as he would do on numerous other occasions, left his friend in the lurch and fled the country. From Yousef's laptop, investigators discovered the extent of the plot, which -- had it worked -- might have resulted in 4,000 deaths and the paralysis of the airline industry. As it was, Yousef had already pulled off a couple of practice tests, one of which killed a Japanese man onboard a Philippine Airlines jet. (Murad, a commercial pilot who was convicted of his role in the bombing plot, had -- in a terrifying precursor of the events of this Sept. 11 -- also been planning to either crash a plane full of chemical weapons into the CIA headquarters or to fly overhead and douse the entire area with poison gas.)
While Yousef remained at large, U.S. investigators considered every trick in the book to apprehend him, including a so-called honeypot trap, taking advantage of his weakness for beautiful women. Meanwhile, the reward for information leading to his arrest was increased to $2 million; newspapers in Pakistan, the Philippines and other hot spots were blanketed with ads, and matchboxes were even printed up and dropped over parts of Pakistan and the Afghan border region.
When Yousef was finally caught, on Feb. 7, 1995, nearly two years after the blast, it came as a sort of anticlimax. He was betrayed by an associate, a South African Muslim living in Pakistan whom Yousef had worked hard to recruit. Pakistani soldiers and police and U.S. agents surrounded the Islamabad safe house where he had been staying, and Yousef, who had been lying on his bed, simply got up and answered a sharp knock at his door. He'd been apprehended on the brink of a new adventure: In his room was a suitcase containing toy cars packed with plastic explosives, and a letter threatening to kill the Philippine president and poison the water supply if his friend Murad was not released. The informant, who collected the $2 million reward, now lives in the United States with his wife and child, outside the confines of the government's Witness Protection Program but nevertheless armed with a new identity.
On the plane back to the U.S., Yousef inexplicably talked to investigators about his role in the Trade Center bombing. He even drew a diagram showing the van's positioning at the time of the explosion -- before reconsidering his confession and eating a piece of the drawing. Back in New York, under incredibly tight security, he got a double dose of American justice. In October 1996, he was found guilty of charges related to the airplane plot, which prosecutors had dubbed "48 hours of terror in the sky." In November of the following year, he was convicted for his role in the Trade Center bombing.
He insisted on representing himself at the first trial; he cut a sharp figure in a tailored, double-breasted suit, frequently turned on the charm and generally represented himself surprisingly well, even getting hostile witnesses to contradict themselves. During the second trial, over the Trade Center bombing, he let his lawyer do everything, and steadfastly maintained his innocence. First, he denied his earlier confessions, then, after being sentenced to 240 years in prison, declared: "I am a terrorist and am proud of it." He said that his goal was to change American policy in the Middle East; he accused the United States of killing innocent people, of mistreating Native Americans and other minorities and of itself inventing terrorism.
While Yousef lives out his days in Florence, Colo., in circumstances close to solitary confinement, many questions remain. William Gavin, who ran the New York FBI office during most of the TRADEBOM investigation, instinctively feels some bin Laden presence, spiritual or more direct, in both incidents, 1993 and 2001. Gavin notes that even though the 1993 bombing itself cost only about $20,000, that still seems like a lot for Ramzi himself to have contributed, and his extensive years on the run would have been expensive, too.
Bin Laden has said that he didn't have the pleasure of Yousef's acquaintance until after the Trade Center bomb went off. Even assuming that he is telling the truth on that front, it seems clear that Yousef received pre-Trade Center training and taught courses in a bin Laden camp, and that the Saudi shared common cause with the bomber on subsequent projects, including having Yousef train Philippine separatists and trying to draw him into the plot to kill Clinton. It's known that the bin Laden organization gave him shelter after he fled the U.S.; Yousef stayed at bin Laden's House of Martyrs hostel in the Pakistani frontier town of Peshawar and was living in a bin Laden safehouse in Islamabad when he was finally apprehended. In addition, one of Yousef's convicted co-defendants in the Manila airline plot, Wali Khan Amin Shah, had at one point been a top aide to bin Laden.
Laurie Mylroie, an academic expert on Iraq, has been beating her drum for a theory putting Saddam Hussein squarely behind the 1993 bombing. In her book "Study of Revenge: Saddam Hussein's Unfinished War With America," she lays out an elaborate scenario suggesting that Ramzi Yousef is not really Abdul Basit at all, but an Iraqi agent posing as Basit, who she believes is dead. Mylroie presents what she claims are discrepancies surrounding the only two pieces of evidence used to establish the man's identity: fingerprints and signature. Investigators maintain that Mylroie is misconstruing evidence, but she has her backers, including Adm. James Woolsey, who was the director of the CIA at the time of the bombing. Woolsey says that release of key documents from Basit's stay in England could clear up the identity issue and help resolve the matter. (British authorities have, to date, made no effort to clarify publicly exactly what information is in their files regarding Yousef's identity.)
Meanwhile, several former investigators who were intimately involved in the case point out that, unfortunately, no special skills or expertise were required in the 1993 bombing. Says one, "The sad thing is, nothing he did is that intricate. The explosives were relatively simply made, relatively inexpensive. It was a big bomb, but it didn't take tons of expertise. Most of it was common sense stuff. If you'd read Tom Clancy books you probably could do the same."
On May 26, 1995, a memorial fountain was dedicated to the six victims of the 1993 blast. At that ceremony, directly above the spot where the rental van exploded, Mayor Rudolph Giuliani uttered these words: "The memorial that we're dedicating today is a small reminder of the city's grief, and a tangible homage to those whose lives were cruelly snatched from them by a handful of cowards driven by the poison of hatred."
Like the lost traces of a previous civilization, that memorial fountain now lies beneath the rubble of last month's apocalypse. The suicidal perpetrators of Sept. 11, with a thousand times as many dead on their hands, cannot reveal what they know. But Ramzi Yousef sits in a jail cell, with all the time in the world to think about whether he has anything he wishes to say.
About the writer
Russ Baker is an investigative reporter whose work has appeared in the Village Voice, The Nation, and New York magazine.
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