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Posted on 10/28/2001 4:57:04 AM PST by Brandonmark

Pilot led a quiet life in Orlando
By CHUCK MURPHY
© St. Petersburg Times,
published October 28, 2001

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The small jet owned by Osama bin Laden was careening down the runway, out of control.

The pilot calmly recited the emergency procedures: First try the alternate brakes; try the hand brakes; kill the engines. But nothing worked.

Bin Laden was not aboard the plane during the test run that day when it slammed into a sandpile in Khartoum, Sudan, at 50 mph.

The pilot, Essam al Ridi, was not about to stick around and break the news of the cracked-up jet to bin Laden. He crawled out of the cockpit and ran.

As for the first officer on the plane that day? He was an Orlando high school graduate named Ihab Mohamed Ali, and he would hang around to become the first pilot who was also a member of the al-Qaida terrorist organization.

On Sept. 11, 2001, about eight years after that crash, Ali, 39, was in a New York City jail just 1 mile from the World Trade Center. He likely heard American Airlines Flight 11 slam into the north tower.

Was Ali intended to be at that plane's controls for al-Qaida?

Federal investigators may not know the answer to that -- and wouldn't say if they did. But court records in New York show that Ali was a member of al-Qaida when he trained at an Oklahoma flight school in 1993 -- years before Sept. 11 hijacker Mohamed Atta and others with al-Qaida ties followed Ali's footsteps to the Oklahoma school.

And while FBI agents have detained dozens of people in an effort to squeeze information about al-Qaida from members of the group and their associates, no one has been squeezed harder than Ali.

The American citizen, who was driving a cab in Orlando when he was picked up by the FBI in 1999, has now spent 30 months in jail for refusing to talk. He has been threatened by prosecutors with 30 years if he doesn't change his mind. In the wake of Sept. 11, the FBI is more desperate than ever to know what he knows.

Ali was, investigators charge, the terrorist among us. A man who, according to documents seized by the FBI, led a quiet, anonymous life in Central Florida while maintaining regular contact with the leaders of an organization portrayed in court records as alternating between bumbling and cunning, comical and deadly.

From Orlando to Sudan The two-bedroom ranch house with the fading red and cream paint and crooked screen door seems an unlikely cradle for international terrorism.

But the little house on Tulip Avenue south of Orlando is where Ihab Ali and his family moved shortly after arriving in Central Florida in 1979 from New York.

The public record on Ali is thin, but what is available shows that Ali and his family emigrated to America from Egypt in 1977 or 1978. After a brief stop in New York City, they chose Orlando.

Ali and at least two of his sisters were enrolled in Oak Ridge High School in April 1979. But while his sisters seem to have adjusted -- one even joined Oak Ridge's junior Air Force ROTC program -- Ihab Ali appears to have had nothing approaching a normal American high school career. He joined no clubs. He didn't even sit for a class photo.

"I don't even know my brother," his sister, Yusr, said through her husband.

Ali graduated from high school in 1981, and the practicing Muslim was becoming an adult at a time of great turbulence in the Muslim world. The Soviet Union had invaded Afghanistan, and the action was seen as an attack on all Muslims.

America, through the CIA, was backing the Afghan mujahedeen fighting the Soviets. American Muslims were being recruited to the fight through mosques and through rousing speeches given by visiting clerics from Afghanistan and Pakistan.

One of those speeches took place in Fort Worth, Texas, in late 1982 or early 1983.

Sheik Abdallah Azzam exhorted Muslim students that day to join the jihad in Afghanistan. It was their duty as Muslims, Azzam said, to help protect their Muslim brothers by fighting the communists.

Hundreds of young Muslims were so moved that they went straight to Pakistan, ready to fight.

At some point, Ali heard the call. One of his attorneys, Ashraf Nubani of Virginia, told CNN that in 1987, Ali went to work for the Muslim World League, an organization that is based in Saudi Arabia and that at the time was said to be providing aid to refugees in Pakistan who had fled the Afghan war. Bin Laden was also in Pakistan at the time.

Federal investigators say that shortly after the Soviets withdrew from Afghanistan, bin Laden was looking to keep his Muslim army together and formed al-Qaida. In 1990 or 1991, bin Laden moved the group to Sudan, where the government was offering logistical support. Ihab Ali, who had adopted the code name Nawawi, after a revered 13th century Muslim cleric, scholar and author from Syria, was there to help with the move, prosecutors claim.

In early 1993, a bin Laden associate arranged for the purchase of the airplane Ali would later help crash in Khartoum. According to testimony before a federal jury this year in the trial of four al-Qaida members who bombed U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania in 1998, bin Laden wanted an airplane so he could relocate American-supplied Stinger antiaircraft missiles from his former base in Pakistan to al-Qaida's new base in Khartoum, Sudan's capital.

The $210,000 retired military trainer, similar to a Sabre 40 corporate jet, was just right, and it had a range long enough to get it from Pakistan to Sudan without stopping for fuel and being nabbed by customs inspectors in another country.

Following the crash on the Khartoum runway, Ali, who had received a commercial pilot's certificate from Airman Flight School in Norman, Okla., stayed in Khartoum for a time, then traveled to Nairobi, Kenya, in 1996, before returning to Khartoum and then moving back to Orlando. He was, prosecutors and witnesses say, a player in al-Qaida plotting.

"He is another person who lurks in the background," federal prosecutor Kenneth Karas said of Ali during closing arguments in the embassy bombing trial. "He is somebody who is an al-Qaida member, and he is somebody who ends up in Florida."

Al-Qaida, and Ali's role

On Aug. 7, 1998, al-Qaida members drove truck bombs into U.S. embassies in Nairobi, Kenya, and Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, killing 224 people and injuring more than 4,500.

FBI agents swarmed Africa, and the parts of their work that have become public in the trial of the first four defendants in those bombings provide a glimpse inside al-Qaida.

The picture that emerges is of a fragmented organization rife with petty jealousies and old-fashioned ethnic and racial conflicts. A group where Egyptian members are frequently at odds with Saudis and Libyans fight with the Sudanese. They steal from one another and argue over money and promotions within al-Qaida.

While unquestionably ruthless and well-financed, at times they also can be likened to the gang that couldn't shoot straight:

The truck they used to blow up the embassy in Nairobi nearly didn't make it, getting stuck in the sand outside the house where the bomb was made. The group had a tow truck on standby the day of the bombing just in case.

They may have succeeded in killing a lot of people in those embassy bombings, but just nine of the Nairobi victims were of the desired nationality: American. That's because the bomb-laden pickup truck stopped and was abandoned in the parking lot rather than backing up to the embassy -- a mistake considered a major failing for a suicide bomber, according to one of the men later convicted in the case.

Investigators think that the al-Qaida affiliates who bombed the USS Cole in Yemen had actually failed in an earlier attempt when their floating bomb sank because it was overloaded.

Ali's role in al-Qaida was unearthed just days into the embassy bombings investigation when FBI agents raided a California home where a former U.S. Army sergeant with ties to al-Qaida lived.

They found a letter in that home from Ali asking him to "give my best regards to your friend Osam. . . . Tell him -- Sam -- that I apologize that I couldn't finish what he requested of me due to some personal problems."

Other searches in California and Kenya found other ties between Ali and the bombing case.

Phone records show a series of calls placed in 1997 between a phone in the name of Ali's sister and an al-Qaida house in Nairobi where the bomb plots were managed.

A search by Kenyan agents after the Nairobi bombing found a letter written by bombing conspirator Wadih el Hage to Ali on Feb. 21, 1997. In the letter, el Hage says he has been on a business trip with Dr. Atef and that "he and his friends say hello to you." Federal authorities think that Dr. Atef is one of the aliases used by Muhammad Atef, head of al-Qaida's "military committee."

Ali sent a fax from an Orlando apartment to el Hage in Kenya on Feb. 26, 1997. In that fax, which has also been seized by investigators, Ali writes "in reply to the DR's request, please inform him that I am always ready to help out." The indictment in the embassy bombings case charges that that DR refers to bin Laden using one of his aliases, the director.

Ali was considered an unindicted co-conspirator in the bombings, and on May 18, 1999, federal agents picked him up at an apartment complex on Orlando's Lake Fredrica. Ali was served with a subpoena ordering him to appear before a grand jury investigating the case.

He was taken before the grand jury the next morning and asked seven questions. He answered that he knew bin Laden, but denied ever meeting him. He denied passing messages to bin Laden or receiving messages from him. And, when asked "Have you ever sent messages to other people about Osama bin Laden?" he said "no."

Prosecutors said he was lying. He refused to talk anymore.

He was held in jail for 16 months on a civil contempt charge for refusing to talk. He was finally charged with crimes -- contempt and perjury -- on Sept. 11, 2000, one year before the attacks.

A look back at Sept. 11

The events of Sept. 11 came as a shock partly because airliners were turned into missiles -- hijackers became pilots. But long before that day, the FBI had hints that al-Qaida had unique plans for using pilots in terror.

At a September 2000 meeting with FBI agents, a Moroccan man named L'Houssaine Kherchtou had a fantastic story to tell.

Kherchtou said that in 1993 he had been sent to flight school by one of Osama bin Laden's top lieutenants from al-Qaida's military committee. His mission, as Kherchtou understood it, was to learn to fly so he could operate crop dusters caring for al-Qaida's crops in Sudan. One day, he was told, he would become a pilot for al-Qaida.

But Kherchtou learned that al-Qaida had other plans.

Kherchtou told federal prosecutors he was asked to get a visa to fly for al-Qaida to Saudi Arabia. After he got the visa, Kherchtou walked in on a meeting between an Egyptian affiliate of al-Qaida and Ihab Ali. That meeting, in 1993 or 1994, was described for a federal judge on Feb. 21 this year during the embassy bombings trial.

"He observed an Egyptian person who was not a pilot debriefing a friend of his, Ihab Ali, about how air traffic control works and what people say over the air traffic control system," said Assistant U.S. Attorney Patrick Fitzgerald. "And it was his belief that there might have been a plan to send a pilot to Saudi Arabia or someone familiar with that to monitor the air traffic communications so they could possibly attack an airplane perhaps belonging to an Egyptian president or something in Saudi Arabia."

Kherchtou's story of al-Qaida's plans to use pilots to attack an airplane, chilling as it is, is just a small part of what FBI agents and federal prosecutors in New York knew long before Sept. 11 about bin Laden's desire to train and use pilots:

Prosecutors knew that Kherchtou had been sent to flight school in Kenya, paid for by al-Qaida. They also knew that Ali was sent to Airman Flight School in Norman, Okla., and that bin Laden had used Essam al Ridi, who was not an al-Qaida member, as a conduit to purchase and deliver his jet from Dallas.

Just two weeks before Sept. 11, agents were back at Airman Flight School. This time, they were interested in the records of Zacarias Moussaoui, a Moroccan who had taken classes at Airman in 2001, then been arrested after classes at another school in Minnesota after he seemed more interested in learning how to fly a commercial jet than in learning how to make it take off or land. He had overstayed his visa and French authorities had tipped the FBI that he might have terrorist ties.

But even with all that information scattered among different federal offices, it didn't add up until after Sept. 11.

It was only after that date that prosecutors learned that two other al-Qaida members had been to Norman, Okla. In June, 2000, hijackers Mohamed Atta and Marwan Al-Shehhi visited Airman Flight School and said they wanted to become pilots. They chose to enroll in a Florida flight school instead.

Suzanne Spaulding, executive director of a congressional task force called the National Commission on Terrorism, told the Washington Post that investigators clearly failed to communicate with one another.

"In hindsight, we can see how all these things (flight school connections) might be relevant and important." But, she said, "it is harder on a day-to-day basis. There is no question that technology could help sort information."

Testifying has its rewards

There are signs that Ali's resolve might now be weakening. Court records indicate that Ali's lawyers seemed to reach an understanding with the government in March. Since that time, all documents in the case have been filed under seal.

Ali's New York lawyer, Richard Jasper of Manhattan, refused to discuss the case, but said no trial date has been set. He won't say whether that indicates that Ali is now cooperating.

If he does, he'll join a very small group of al-Qaida insiders who have agreed to testify for the government. Some of those who have talked still technically face sentences of up to life in prison, but have already been rewarded by the government.

For example, one of the government's most important witnesses in the embassy bombing trial was a man named Jamal Ahmed Mohamed Al-Fadl. He acknowledged on the stand that he stole $110,000 from bin Laden, that he had lied repeatedly to U.S. investigators before deciding to cooperate and that he was a willing participant in dozens of al-Qaida plots.

Today, he and his family members have been moved to the United States where they were placed in the witness protection program. Total bill to taxpayers for his care and feeding: $794,000 through February.

Meanwhile, in Orlando, those who thought they knew Ali, scratch their heads at his infamy. He had few friends, but prayed regularly in Central Florida mosques and gave no hint of what was going on in his secret life.

"He drove a cab, so he prayed at one time at most of the mosques here. He would just stop for (daily) prayers at whichever mosque was closest," said Muhammad Musri, imam, or spiritual leader, of the Islamic Society of Central Florida. "But he was never social. I have talked to many people and nobody seemed to know who the guy was.

"It is easy for one of these people to live for years in a place like Orlando and be anonymous. But it is quite a shock."

-- Times researcher Caryn Baird contributed to this report.

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