Posted on 01/17/2002 1:01:33 AM PST by Neanderthal
You might think it strange, however, that the same man was able to get yet another replacement passport five months later, but this time at the British consulate in Brussels. He gave no particular reason this time, except that the one he had received in July had become ragged and was missing a few pages. He surrendered it, as required, and took the new one away with him.
This eager traveller was Richard Reid, 28, who is now in Boston as a guest of the US justice system, for allegedly trying to blow up an American Airlines passenger jet bound for Miami from Paris on 22 December. He was flying with the British passport issued the same week in Brussels. In between, he is known to have visited Israel, Egypt, Turkey and Pakistan.
All of this, you might imagine, would be enough to cause red faces at the Foreign Office. But the affair becomes significantly more serious when you consider information coming to light that suggests Mr Reid, far from a deranged loner with a grudge against America, may well have been working for al-Qa'ida, the terror network of Osama bin Laden.
The evidence for this supposition, which has yet to be proved, comes from the hard drives of two computers that used to belong to senior figures of al-Qa'ida, which fell into the hands of two reporters for The Wall Street Journal who were in Kabul late last month. The drives have provided the paper – and US investigators – with a trove of new information about the inner machinations of the terrorist group.
The drives contain more than 17,000 files. Though all of them are related to al-Qa'ida in some way, many are humdrum and dull. Others are not. The interesting files tend to be protected by sophisticated passwords or are encrypted, and the Journal is still working to decode them. One file, in particular, took five days to crack, using several computers. The reporters gained access to it on Sunday.
What they found was a report, written by an unidentified author, detailing the recent labours of someone working for al-Qa'ida, who was travelling the globe scouting out possible targets for terrorist attacks. He had attempted in particular to consider the possibility of striking at the Israeli airline, El Al. There are also references to possible plans for attacks against US soldiers stationed near the Canada border.
The journalists also noted that the travel schedule of the al-Qa'ida scout, who is identified as Abdul Ra'uff, matched almost exactly what we know of the wanderings of Richard Reid, the accused "shoe bomber", since July. American intelligence officials, the newspaper said, have already decided that Abdul Ra'uff and Mr Reid "may well be" the same man. Israeli officials are "positive" this is true.
"This is very significant," said Andrew Higgins, a one of the authors of the Journal report and a former long-time foreign correspondent of The Independent. "This may turn out to be the first conclusive proof we have that Reid was not a hapless drifter but rather an al-Qa'ida operative," he said. Mr Reid is a British-Jamaican who converted to Islam while he was serving time in a British young offenders' institution.
Mr Higgins and another Journal writer, Alan Cullison, found themselves in Kabul with a broken lap-top computer last month. They needed to buy a replacement. What they eventually bought for $1,100 (about £800) was a new laptop and a desktop computer that, as it turned out, had been looted from a building in the city that had been an al-Qa'ida office before it fell to the Northern Alliance on 7 December.
The extent to which the activities of Richard Reid and Abdul Ra'uff match is compelling. Both men – if they are not one – visited the same four countries in the same order in July. Both of them acquired a new passport from the British consulate in Amsterdam. Both of them flew first to Israel, buying ticket on an El Al flight on the date of departure. Both were grilled by Israeli agents before boarding. Both entered Egypt from Israel at the same border crossing.
The Foreign Office did not address the issue of Mr Reid's real identity last night. But a spokeswoman defended the action of the consulate staff in Brussels and Amsterdam in giving him new passports twice in such short order. "You can have a new passport issued every day of the year if you like, so as the old one is properly invalidated, which happened here," she said, emphasising that all normal procedures had been followed by officials at the office. "They know what they are doing," she said.
The report drawn from the computer drive and apparently written on 19 August explains that the excuse about having put the passport in the washing machine was part of a wider ruse by Abdul Ra'uff to disguise his religion during his 10-day stay in Amsterdam by pretending to drink and smoke. "At the hotel he would take empty alcohol bottles from the street and put them into trash containers in his room," the computer report notes.
The report's author, who apparently was fresh from debriefing Abdul Ra'uff, also describes his visit to the British consulate. "He said, 'I was drunk and washed my passport.'" The author notes that Abdul Ra'uff had indeed put his passport in the washing machine, as a means of washing away a Pakistani visa sticker that might have caused problems on his travels. This is a trick that al-Qa'ida recommends to its operatives, as long as they do it just once.
The text also focuses on the journey Abdul Ra'uff subsequently made to Tel Aviv on an El Al jet. At the gate, Israeli security personnel searched him, his shoes and his hat. Once on board, he was "seated in the last seat away from the pilot's cabin" and was under the "watchful eye" of the cabin crew. Israeli officials have already confirmed that on his El Al flight, Mr Reid was also seated in the back of the plane.
The scout was enthusiastic about what he found in Israel. He offered details on how to bomb public transport, including the railway station in Haifa, in the north. He also noted that having a British passport was particularly helpful, saying, for example, that it had been enough to stop anyone searching his bags when he travelled from Bethlehem to Jerusalem.
The computer reports says: "It appears that brothers with European passports are able to move about in Israel with great freedom and can be treated as Israeli." There are no direct references to the World Trade Centre and Pentagon attacks of 11 September. But at one point, the report suggests that terrorists dress well when boarding aircraft and take seats in first or business class "to be near the pilot's cabin without arousing suspicion". Many of the hijackers involved in the September suicide attacks had first-class seats.
Abdul Ra'uff, whoever he ever he was, left Israel and did similar reconnaissance work in Egypt that apparently left his debriefer unimpressed. The report says a second trip to the country would have to be made.
It remains possible that the similarities between the movements of the man called Abdul Ra'uff and Mr Reid are coincidental. But that is hardly reassuring. "If not Reid, who is it?" Mr Higgins asked last night. "That would mean there were two people out there with British passports we didn't know about."
How they cracked the terrorists' code
Getting to the heart of the documents contained in the al-Qa'ida computer bought by chance by the Wall Street Journal's reporter in Kabul meant cracking the encryption of Microsoft's Windows 2000 operating system installed on the machine, which had been used to protect the data.
That is not a trivial task. Microsoft will only say that if you lose the password that controls entry to a Windows 2000 system, your best option is to remember it or simply to wipe the machine and start again. And its Encrypting File System (EFS), which had been used to encode the files, is just as strong.
But the files were too valuable for that. Instead, the team embarked on the task of breaking through the encryption, which jumbles the contents of the files so that even someone reading the individual bytes of data stored on the actual hard disk (rather than trying to access them through the operating system, which had locked them out) would simply find rubbish.
Cracking the encryption meant finding the digital "key" that had previously been used to unlock it. That was not stored in any readable file on the machine, for it was itself encrypted. >p> The only way to reproduce it was to generate the key from first principles: by trying various combinations of random bits and trying to decrypt the file with them, and seeing if it produced sense or gibberish.
Luckily, the PC had a version of Windows 2000 with an "export-quality" key only 40-bits long, rather than the "US" quality, which being 128-bits long would have been billions of times harder to crack.
Even so, it took the equivalent of a set of supercomputers running for five days, 24 hours a day, to find the key. But find it they did.
The irony that the terrorists used a product made by one of the US's biggest corporations to protect plans it was making against it may not be lost on an administration that recently relaxed rules on the export of "strong" encryption. Tighter controls may follow.
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