Skip to comments.

Posted on 09/29/2001 5:19:18 PM PDT by Pokey78

In the red-brick Hamburg offices of the German federal police service, a tree is growing. Day by day, it gets a little larger. New branches appear; leaves are continually sprouting. This is no ordinary tree. It is the tree of terror; the network of interconnecting elements that lies at the very heart of the world's largest manhunt.

Sketched out as a diagram for the benefit of the 400 or more detectives and FBI agents who are working for the command centre of what has become known as Taskforce USA, it draws together all the leads from across Germany connected to the terrorist network that launched itself on New York in such devastating fashion almost three weeks ago.

Its branches spread out from Hamburg, where at least three of the New York hijackers are known to have studied, reaching out into other cities: to Frankfurt, to Munich, to Kiel and out into Europe and beyond. Wherever fresh evidence emerges of a possible new link, a name is added to the network. So far, about 20 people appear on its branches.

Increasingly, detectives believe that this German network was at the very hub of the attacks on New York and Washington.

To this end, the FBI has doubled the number of agents working in Germany, tacitly acknowledging that it is here, rather than in America, that the best leads have developed.

"If you look at the German investigation, how many searches they have done, how many interviews, it is impressive," said one American close to the hunt. "They are using enormous manpower reserves. There is no grass growing under anyone here . . . we have been working day and night".

It is a story echoed not just in Washington, where the FBI continues to sift through more than 200,000 possible leads, but right across Europe. In Spain, six arrests have been made and a cell of terrorist activists smashed. In Belgium, investigations continue into a possible truck bomb attack against Nato headquarters, planned as a follow-up to the New York attack.

In Britain, a 27-year-old Algerian trainee pilot, Lotfi Raissi, arrested on September 21, is facing extradition charges for allegedly helping the hijackers as they learnt to fly.

The more that is learnt about each individual, each new cell, the more worrying the global overview becomes. The evidence is pointing not simply to one tight-knit core of activists, bent on a single act of destruction, but to a much broader web of accomplices, sympathisers and terrorists, spread out across America, Europe and the Middle East. Understanding how they all link together - in the much broader network that investigators believe stems from Osama Bin Laden himself - is a daunting task.

But until and unless that can be achieved, America and its coalition partners cannot truly understand either how their enemy operates, or more significantly, what can be done to attack it in the long-term war against terrorism.

EVERY morning, just before 8am, a queue starts to form outside President George W Bush's office at the White House. First in as the door opens is George Tenet, the CIA director, followed by Bob Mueller, the lean boss of the FBI and his own chief, the chubby-faced attorney-general, John Ashcroft.

The three men charged with hunting down whoever planned the September 11 attack on the World Trade Center and Pentagon are looking tired. Deep bags are etched under their eyes after nearly three weeks of ceaseless work, and though determination keeps the adrenaline flowing, the daily presidential briefing is becoming a strain.

A week ago the FBI chief could confidently tell Bush that hundreds of arrests had been made, financial links uncovered and that computer disks and e-mail traffic were being monitored to trace the hijackers' support network and link it directly to Bin Laden.

Bush, in turn, was able to reassure wavering governments, such as Pakistan, that he would soon have the proof against Bin Laden necessary to justify a retaliatory strike. His military strategy - not to mention his credibility among the American public - hinges on the strength of the investigation.

But it would appear that though the FBI operation has breadth, with more than 7,000 agents working a scattergun operation across the States, it is distinctly lacking in depth.

Most of those on the FBI's much-vaunted "watch list" turned out to be people with Arab-sounding names who trained at the same flying schools as the hijackers, or individuals arrested in routine round-ups, who have now been released, or charged with comparatively minor immigration offences or traffic violations.

Of 480 people who have been arrested or detained during the first 18 days of the investigation, only one charge relating directly to the hijacking has resulted: a man who assisted some of the 19 terrorists to secure identification papers in Virginia.

As a result, American progress on the most comprehensive criminal investigation in history is slowing to a crawl. The sense of frustration is palpable in Washington. Early last week, Colin Powell, the secretary of state, promised that America would soon make its case against Bin Laden known; other government officials have quietly played down that prospect.

Instead, the FBI has been left to clarify or update existing information on the 19 hijackers in the hope that the images and details might jog a potential witness's memory in what has been called a "national neighbourhood watch" initiative.

It is hardly the great breakthrough that Bush and his public had been hoping for. But officials insist that progress is being made. "We are past the first phase and we are beginning to sharpen and focus the investigation," one justice official told The Washington Post. "You don't get smoking guns in a case like this. The key is going to be in the details, in putting together the pieces, and we've gone a long way to doing that".

Others are more sceptical. As one New York prosecutor admitted: "In terms of evidence, they are clutching at straws. The main guys, the hijackers, are all dead, and whatever evidence they collect on anyone behind the attacks is probably going to be pretty thin. The terrorists were very professional."

ONE OF the reasons why there is such a scarcity of hard evidence in America is that it seems the strategic planning of the attack was carried out in Germany: rapidly emerging as the centre of a Europe-wide network of Islamic organisations engaged in terror.

After it was discovered that Mohammed Atta, who piloted the first plane to hit the World Trade Center, had used an Islamic "student group" at Hamburg-Harburg Technical University as a cover for terrorist activities, an FBI team immediately flew out to assist local detectives. German intelligence is also working closely with the FSB, the KGB's successor, exchanging information about "black lists" of Islamic fundamentalists who have fought in Chechnya.

As a result of their inquiries, German investigators now believe Atta was already planning an atrocity when he began his studies in Germany in 1992. He reportedly contacted Mamoun Darkazanli, a Syrian, whose bank accounts were frozen by the previous Bush administration for contacts to terrorist organisations. Darkazanli is believed to have had control over a bank account in the name of a Bin Laden financial chief.

Atta was apparently frequently seen in banks, withdrawing large sums of money. It was also he who tried to buy a crop-duster from a US Department of Agriculture office in Florida last year, sparking off last week's fears of a possible plan to spray chemical weapons from the air.

Atta seems to have travelled almost continually from his base in Hamburg. In the summer of 1998 he and two of the other hijackers, Ziad al-Jarrah and Marwan al-Shehhi, "lost" their passports all at the same time. German investigators believe they were lost intentionally to get rid of suspicious visas from Iraq or Afghanistan. It would be impossible to get into the United States with such stamps.

In July, Atta spent 10 days in Spain and allegedly met six Algerians, all members of the Algerian Salafista Group for Preaching and Combat (GSPC - see panel). The GSPC is a breakaway from the notorious Armed Islamic Group (GIA).

Last week, all six were arrested in countrywide raids. Among the evidence seized were videos of terrorist attacks. One, believed to have taken place in Algeria, shows the ambush of three army vehicles. In the first shot the lead vehicle is blown into the air. Later shots show four soldiers with their throats cut, one still showing signs of life. The videos were to be played to sympathisers as part of a recruitment drive. A diary belonging to one of those arrested indicated his ambition to be a suicide bomber; it also contained sketches of British and Irish flags.

The Spanish arrests followed a formal request by a Belgian judge examining the case of Nizar Trabelsi, a Tunisian former footballer. Trabelsi was arrested with a machinegun, ammunition and plans for an attack on the US embassy in Paris. Bomb-making equipment, including 220lbs of sulphur and 13 gallons of acetone, was subsequently discovered in The Nile, a local restaurant.

Police now believe the centrepiece of a series of European attacks was a plan to drive a truck laden with explosives into the Nato headquarters in Brussels later this year, in a suicide attack similar to one that killed 241 marines at a barracks in Beirut in 1983. In July, another man connected to the planned Paris attack was arrested in Dubai. Djamel Begal, 35, a Frenchman, had spent a year in Afghanistan undergoing military training and religious indoctrination. His beard and unkempt appearance were testimony to the time he had spent living outdoors.

Begal was travelling on false documents and was detained at Dubai airport. To the amazement of the United Arab Emirate authorities and the officials from the French embassy who were called, Begal began to "sing". In Afghanistan he had trained at a camp run by Abu Zubayda, a lieutenant of Bin Laden. He was also a linchpin in five cells in Europe of an organisation called Tafkir wal Hijra (Anathema and Exile), a group founded in 1991 in Pakistan by Algerian veterans of the Afghan-Soviet war.

Begal's accomplices were planning bomb attacks on religious and political targets, including the American embassy in Paris. They were still waiting for the signal to unleash havoc in Europe when Bin Laden's other disciples crashed passenger aircraft into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.

It was Begal's information, hastened by the developments in America, that led to Europe-wide arrests last week.

SO where does Britain feature in all this? It is now known that 10 of the 19 US hijackers passed through the country in transit from Dubai between April and June this year. A more significant lead, though, came with the arrest of the Algerian pilot Lotfi Raissi. FBI agents seeking his extradition have confirmed that he is a key suspect in the attacks. A lawyer representing the Americans told an extradition hearing in London that Raissi flew with his wife to Las Vegas in June, then flew on to Arizona with the pilot of the plane that later crashed into the Pentagon. "We say he was there to ensure the pilots were capable and trained for this purpose," said the lawyer.

Raissi lived quietly with his wife in a £100,000 flat in Colnbrook, Berkshire, and was undergoing training for a British commercial licence at Heathrow. Police spent two days searching his flat and took away a number of items, including flight manuals.

Key pages were missing from his logbooks. The court also heard there was video footage showing Raissi with the Pentagon pilot. Raissi is also wanted in America for obtaining a pilot's licence dishonestly because he did not declare a previous conviction for theft. Raissi protests his innocence and his extradition will be keenly fought: he could face the death penalty.

While the legal battles get under way, Scotland Yard is busy concentrating on possible "follow-up" attacks either by the Bin Laden organisation or by copycat terrorists. Security sources talk about the emergence of a new breed of "unaffiliated mujaheddin organisation" in which an individual or a small group could launch a deadly operation, without needing to draw on the resources of a group like Bin Laden's.

Such individuals may well be living in this country and it is quite possible they could be galvanised into action by any retaliatory military strike by American and British forces in Afghanistan. Others, with affiliations to terror cells in mainland Europe, have existed in Britain as "sleepers" without raising the suspicions of the police or MI5.

ONE such man was Zacarias Moussaoui, a 33-year-old Frenchman who once lived in Brixton, south London. Moussaoui is now thought to hold the key, not just to the European terror network but to the support and command structure behind the New York attack.

Moussaoui is in jail in America, arrested a month before the New York attacks after instructors at a flying school became suspicious of his strange behaviour. He wanted to learn how to steer a big jet in the air, not how to take off and land.

The school said he was difficult and intense. "I swore I'd never fly with him again," said Azim Sumar, his instructor. "He was stubborn, he wouldn't listen." Moussaoui would press the controls too hard in what Sumar calls a "death grip".

In a new development, German investigators said a telephone call was intercepted between Moussaoui and another terrorist suspect who shared an apartment with Mohammed Atta. The call was made by Moussaoui while he was at the Oklahoma flight school between February and May and is the first substantial evidence linking him to the group that carried out the attacks. The revelation will increase fears that Britain is being used as an international haven by terrorists.

Over the summer, French intelligence officials confirmed to their US counterparts that Moussaoui was on a list of people suspected to have links with extremist Islamic groups but Moussaoui resolutely refused to talk and the FBI could not work out what he was up to. They now believe he was to have been the "20th man", the hijacker who would have completed four five-man teams aboard the hijacked jets.

All the other hijackers are now dead; Moussaoui may be the only living witness to the planning of the atrocity. Intriguingly, Moussaoui seems to have been converted to an extreme form of Islam during his time in London. His mother called it "a real brainwashing".

Police are still hunting Moussaoui's girlfriend, a north African woman in her thirties, who is said by security sources to have played a "pivotal role". She left the Brixton flat she shared with Moussaoui several months ago and has not been seen since.

Moussaoui moved to London in 1992, after taking a master's degree in international commerce. He quickly became disillusioned with the city. He had little money, but found support through members of a mosque. His family, though of Moroccan descent, were not practising Muslims. On Moussaoui's infrequent visits home, they began to notice a change.

"He started to say things I found very shocking. He started to introduce religious elements into his conversation," says his brother Abd-Samad. "He defended mass murders in Algeria and said it was legitimate to murder civilians and to excommunicate an entire people if they were not following a pure form of Islam."

Abd-Samad says his brother never admitted being a member of a group or movement. but it was clear that he had become part of a branch of Islam that condoned violence: "He said intellectuals were corrupt and that theological science was dangerous."

Such is the pattern of the new breed of terrorist. Atta, ringleader of the US attacks, was also a university graduate whose family find it hard to comprehend that their devoutly religious boy could have turned to terror. They are not alone. Many who knew the hijackers and members of the terror cells uncovered in Europe have been asking themselves what it can be that drives these men to hatred. Last week, we came a little closer to finding an answer.

In America, a letter that had been found in three locations associated with the New York and Washington terrorists gave a chilling insight, not just into the practical preparations for the US attacks (clean clothes and shoes were not to be overlooked), but the religious zeal that drove them. Knowing they were about to die, they were advised by the letter to fast and pray. "The time of fun and waste has gone," it told them. "The time of judgment has arrived . . ."

For the British-linked suspects Moussaoui and Raissi, and others in the global web of terror, that judgment may now come before the criminal courts.

Insight reporting team: London: Jon Ungoed-Thomas, Nicholas Hellen, David Leppard, Senay Boztas, Margarette Driscoll, Rory Callinan. Washington: Stephen Grey. New York: Eliza Griswold. Brussels: Nicholas Rufford. Narbonne: Wayne Bodkin. Hamburg: John Goetz

Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.