Posted on 09/04/2002 5:33:09 PM PDT by glorygirl
Flush with cash and sharply dressed, Abdul Majid didn't much look like an Islamic terrorist.
In the mid-'90s, hanging out in Manila with his sidekick, Abdul Basit, Majid was regarded by the locals as a somewhat smarmy playboy who worked hard to impress women. Infatuated with a young dentist, he called her from a cell phone one day and told to her look in the sky. When she did, she saw Majid, waving from the cockpit of a hovering helicopter.
It wasn't until much later that police, after interrogating his former girlfriends, would conclude that fun-loving Majid was actually Khaled Shaikh Mohammad, a radical jihadist on a mission to destroy America. His "friend" Basit was in fact his nephew -- Ramzi Yousef -- then wanted for his part in planning deadly attacks on the United States.
Together, U.S. officials say, the two men may have plotted the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, and drew up an even more ambitious plan to blow up commercial airliners. Ramzi Yousef was arrested before the plot could be carried out, and is now serving a life sentence in a U.S. prison.
But Khaled Shaikh Mohammad eluded capture and disappeared. In the years that followed, Mohammad's plans grew more sophisticated: Intelligence officials now believe that he was a principal architect of the Sept. 11 attacks.
A year after the terrorist strikes, Osama bin Laden is still the man the United States most wants to find -- dead or alive, as President Bush has said. And as he debates whether to take the war to Iraq, the president also faces unfinished business with al-Qaida.
Officials who have spent months trying to unravel the plot are worried about key figures in the 9/11 conspiracy who got away. Khaled Shaikh Mohammad and at least three other men whom investigators have identified as planners and financiers of the attacks are in hiding -- where they may be mapping future strikes.
Intelligence and law-enforcement officials are in constant disagreement over how dangerous al-Qaida actually is today. Some believe the massive U.S. retaliation has all but destroyed the group's ability to carry out well-coordinated attacks like Sept. 11.
"The training camps have been eliminated; the structure has been pretty well disrupted," Dale Watson, the FBI's retiring chief of counterintelligence, said.
Internally, the FBI estimates that al-Qaida's hard-core membership has dwindled to 200 worldwide.
"Are they capable of pulling off a simultaneous big-event attack again? The most obvious answer is no," Watson said.
But the FBI has been wrong in the past about what terrorists are going to do. No one is counseling complacency.
As many as 5,000 training-camp recruits are still active, according to some estimates.
"The danger is very real," says an unnamed CIA official. "September 11 demonstrated to us that you don't need a large number of people or a huge infrastructure to do a lot of damage. There are still a lot of people out there who can do real harm."
Khaled Shaikh Mohammad is one of the most dangerous.
Intelligence officials still aren't sure why the 37-year-old ethnic Pakistani chose terrorism as his calling. As a young man, he traveled widely and sources say he even studied at two small U.S. colleges. But by the early '90s, he was already helping to plan large-scale attacks. The most audacious plot -- code-named "Bojinka," Serbo-Croatian for "explosion" -- envisioned Mohammad and Yousef's blowing 12 commercial airliners out of the sky on a single day.
The plan was ruined when Yousef's collaborators accidentally blew up the Manila apartment where they were mixing explosives. But the Bojinka plot may have first given Mohammad the idea of using airliners as weapons.
In the aftermath of the Manila explosion, one captured Bojinka conspirator named Abdul Hakim Murad told interrogators that he and Yousef discussed hijacking a commercial airplane and crashing it into CIA headquarters.
According to a 1995 Philippine police report, "There will be no bomb or explosives ... It is simply a suicide mission."
Agents didn't realize quite how important Mohammad was in planning the Sept. 11 attacks until April, when they captured Abu Zubaydah, the suspected al-Qaida operations chief. Inside Zubaydah's safe house, they discovered a large cache of information about the plot, and sources say Zubaydah himself confirmed to investigators that Mohammad was one of the key 9/11 conspirators.
Officials also say information in Zubaydah's files has allowed them to obtain search warrants against nearly 100 suspected al-Qaida operatives in the United States.
Investigators are still trying to figure out how and when Mohammad hooked up with bin Laden. His connections to the 9/11 plot's other leaders are also hazy -- though his travels took him to places where conspirators were living.
In 1999, intelligence reports indicate, Mohammad paid several visits to Hamburg -- a key base of operations in the years and months before September 11. (German officials say they have no proof he was there.) Several of the terrorists, including lead hijacker Mohamed Atta, lived together in a suburban apartment.
Atta's housemates included some of the men authorities are now urgently trying to capture. One, Said Bahaji, acted as the cell's computer geek.
Sources suspect Bahaji exchanged encrypted messages with al-Qaida higher-ups in Afghanistan. Another roommate, a Yemeni radical named Ramzi Mohammad Abdullah Binalshibh, was a leader of the Hamburg cell.
In November 1999, he went to Afghanistan with three of the future hijackers for training. German authorities now say there is evidence that members of the Hamburg cell were already planning the suicide strike on the United States as early as October 1999.
Last week, German prosecutors charged Mounir El Motassadeq, a 28-year-old Moroccan, with helping to plan and finance the operation.
Investigators say there is strong evidence that Binalshibh was originally supposed to have been the 20th hijacker. But the State Department repeatedly turned him down for a U.S. visa to attend a Florida flight school. Instead, he became a fixer back in Hamburg. U.S. intelligence sources said that he had played a significant role in an earlier bin Laden attack, the 2000 bombing of the USS Cole in Yemen.
For years authorities have scoured the globe looking for the one-legged al-Qaida operative alleged to be the architect of the Cole strike: Tawfiq bin Attash, aka "Khallad." Some investigators now suspect Binalshibh and Khallad met at a terrorist summit in Malaysia 10 months earlier.
One of the fugitives in the Sept. 11 plot remains almost a total mystery. Mustafa Ahmad Adin Al-Husawi, allegedly the mission's chief financier, sent thousands of dollars to hijackers in the months before the attacks. But intelligence sources admit they know little about his true identity -- or even if Al-Husawi is his real name.
Authorities believe he is a Saudi, and a deputy to bin Laden's Egyptian moneyman, Sayyid Shaikh Al-Sharif. In the week before Sept. 11, several of the hijackers sent unused money back to Al-Husawi. The day of the attacks, he flew to Pakistan and vanished.
Intelligence sources suspect some of the missing conspirators might still be hiding in Afghan caves, or along the lawless Pakistan border -- if they weren't killed in the U.S. bombing raids. Investigators have reason to believe that at least one of the men, Khaled Shaikh Mohammad, is not only alive, but hard at work. U.S. officials say they have evidence linking Mohammad to the April bombing of a Tunisian synagogue, which killed 21 people.
The suicide bomber phoned Mohammad just three hours before detonating himself. A senior official says that U.S. intelligence believes Mohammad had a powerful collaborator in planning the strike: Saad bin Laden, one of Osama's sons. Whether or not Osama bin Laden is alive or dead, Khaled Shaikh Mohammad is already working to secure a place in the family business. What the Pentagon brass has called the "long shadow war" has only just begun.
Newsweek staff writers Steve Tuttle, Michael Isikoffin and Stefan Theil contributed to this report.
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