Shadowland: The Dogs of War,
27 March 2003
By Christopher Dickey
Dogs
do not live happy lives in Iraq. Considered “unclean” by Muslims and rarely
kept as pets, most of those that you see are feral curs slinking through the
streets late at night. It’s normal practice for Iraqi soldiers to cull the
packs with machine-guns. But the commandos of Saddam’s Fedayeen, terrorist
shock troops organized in the mid-1990s, sometimes tear a dog limb from limb
and sink their teeth in its flesh. Repulsive brutality, after all, is a badge
of honor for these militias, and this particular rite of passage was proudly
captured on a government video.
“The Fedayeen are animals!” said a
young Iraqi woman who fled her country for Jordan a few months ago. “They are
trained to be like animals! Everybody is frightened of them.” And even though
there are only an estimated 20,000 to 25,000 of them, it would seem the
Fedayeen – meaning “those who sacrifice” -- are everywhere in Iraq, forcing others to put their lives on
the line in the face of the American invasion. “Saddam has succeeded in
establishing a strong structure that is loyal to him,” says Issam Chalabi, a
former Iraqi oil minister now in exile. “These fedayeen are not only fighting
the Americans, they are mainly against those who want to surrender or refuse to
fight.”
“No one will accept the Americans’ presence there. And if you say
anything about me, say this: I am against the war. I am against the
occupation.”
And yet, neither the frightened
young woman, nor Chalabi (who is no relation to a would-be exile leader with
the same last name), nor any of the other Iraqis or Arabs I’ve talked to since
the fighting began last week, believes that the Iraqis’ resistance to the
United States invasion is solely a matter of intimidation and fear. That plays
a part. The role of the Fedayeen is important. But the resistance to the United
States “is a matter of Iraqi patriotism,” says Chalabi. “No one will accept the
Americans’ presence there. And if you say anything about me, say this: I am
against the war. I am against the occupation.”
The fundamental miscalculation of
those administration officials and sympathetic pundits who promoted this war in
Iraq was to believe, as some exiles told them, that because the Iraqi people
hate Saddam, they would love their American “liberators.” “That’s where you
went wrong,” a Lebanese friend told me, summing up sentiments I’ve heard all
over the Arab world, “The Iraqis do hate Saddam – but they do not love
you.”
The greatest disappointment
concerns the largely Shia population of southern Iraq. There was a common
assumption that, given the chance, the brutally oppressed people there would
rise up against Saddam’s cronies and soldiers again just as they did in 1991
after the last gulf war. But what many of us forgot was the way in which the
people there remembered that uprising, when US troops stood by and let them be
massacred. It was thought in Washington that this time around, when the US was
suddenly serious about eliminating Saddam (as it obviously was not 12
years ago), Iraqis would seize the day, and even the government. Not at all.
Many who lost brothers, sons, wives, mothers in the savage reprisals of 1991 believe
the American offensive is a dozen years too late and tens of thousands of Iraqi
lives too short.
So those who are not actively
fighting against the US troops are happy to let them do the job of ousting the
dictator by themselves. “We will
accept the Americans to come liberate us from Saddam because,” says an
architect from Baghdad, “it’s easier afterwards to fight the Americans than to
fight Saddam. This is the way we feel. This is what ‘the silent majority’ are
thinking, if you want to know.”
The fear that’s at play is more
complex than a matter of Fedayeen seizing children to force fathers to fight,
as coalition briefing officers claim. Through 35 years, first as head of the
secret police and then as president, Saddam has programmed such terror into his
people that at this stage few would believe that he is dead if they weren’t
able to witness the event, see him killed, even dip their hands in his blood.
(Many of his predecessors, after all, met just such grisly ends, either dragged
through the streets or shown blown-away on live TV.) The Fedayeen, with their
savagery, only reinforce the almost supernatural terror already inflicted by
the dictator. Iraqis know he has staying power. They believe the Americans do
not.
But pride, as Chalabi suggests, is
what’s really essential to the resistance, and it infects the broader Arab and
Muslim view of the showdown. Since the fighting started, Saddam has tried to
turn the Iraqi battle into what his favorite role model, Josef Stalin, called
“The Great Patriotic War.” Add to this the tribal character of much of Iraqi
society. Saddam has armed almost everyone in the country, and now demands the
tribes defend their honor against the foreign invaders. Many have heeded the
call. “I don’t think there’s a single Iraqi family that has not suffered from
Saddam,” says a senior Jordanian official with close ties to the US
administration. “But they are fighting now for Iraq, for their dignity. They
don’t think the Americans are fighting for their dignity.”
The refugee flow across the
Iraq-Jordan border tells an important part of the story. There is none. The
flow of traffic since the beginning of the war – more than 5,000 in the first
week of fighting -- has been
entirely eastward, into Iraq, as mostly
young day-laborers brave possible US air attacks on their to get back
home to their families.
“I don’t hate the Americans,” said
Mohamed Al-Alwani, 36, who was at the Iraqi embassy in Amman earlier this week
to get the necessary papers to return. “When anyone comes to Iraq as a guest,
we will receive him with flowers and dates and yogurt, and all the highest
hospitality. But when he comes as an invader we will fight with the last of our
blood.”
Another young man in the crowd at
the embassy, who didn’t give his name, spoke more ferociously. “The first day
of the war, Bush appeared on television playing with his dog,” he said. “We
will turn Bush into a dog.” In Iraq, everybody knows what that implies. And
many Iraqis – and not only the Fedayeen – mean it.
Gone With the WMD, 20 March
2003
Many people believe Saddam has weapons of mass destruction, but invading Iraq may increase the risks of proliferation, not diminish them.
By Christopher Dickey
“Fiddle-dee-dee.
War, war, war,” said an Iranian lady at a cocktail party in Paris earlier this
week. She was among friends from Algeria and Lebanon, France, Canada and the
United States – everybody sipping Champagne, nibbling crab canapés, talking
about the imminent storm in Iraq. And suddenly it struck her, she said, “this
is like the barbecue scene in ‘Gone With the Wind.’” We were all enjoying
ourselves, but all of us were haunted by a sense the world was about to change
forever. “Fiddle-dee-dee,” said the Persian Scarlett. “This war talk is
spoiling all the fun.” She shook her head and smiled with solemn regret.
This Scarlett and several of the
other guests that night had seen their worlds change before, in revolutions and
in civil wars, and they’d emerged sadder and wiser for the experience. We Americans feel something of the sort
when we think back on 11 September 2001. But with this new war, we may learn
that was only the beginning.
Experts in
high-tech slaughter will be accountable to no one, and looking to fatten their
bank accounts.
Consider this chilling little
passage in testimony by Director of Central Intelligence George Tenet before
the Senate Armed Services Committee last month: “With regard to proliferation,
sir, I will quickly summarize by saying we have entered a new world of
proliferation. In the vanguard of this new world, are knowledgeable non-state
purveyors of WMD materials and technology.” That is, the ultimate merchants of
death, who are “increasingly capable of providing technology and equipment that
previously could only be supplied by countries with established capabilities.
Demand creates the market.”
According to Roland Jacquard, a
respected French expert on terrorism who’ll publish a new book about the spread
of biological, chemical and nuclear weapons in May, the market makers have been
Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein, both of whom have offered enormous sums for
contraband components of mass
destruction over the last few years. “They’ve used drug traffickers, arms
merchants and all the parallel markets.” Since the breakup of the Soviet Union
in the early 1990s, most of the action has been in former components of the
Evil Empire. But as the technology and weapons have spread in secret, “this
market has escaped all controls, creating little proliferating states within
proliferating states,” says Jacquard. One country where that has happened
already is North Korea. Another is Iraq.
So
now the war has begun. Will it make us safer? More secure? Once Saddam Hussein
goes and the internal order of Iraq breaks down, “there is a significant danger
that some in the weapons complex will simply ‘privatize’ technology or systems
under their control,” warned a recent report by the Council of Foreign
Relations co-authored by former Secretary of State James Baker. These experts
in high-tech slaughter will be accountable to no one, and looking to fatten
their bank accounts.
Of
course the American forces will be hunting frantically for such men and women.
But in the fog of war and the aftermath of shock and awe, soldiers may have
even more trouble than the UN inspectors did tracking them down. As those who
escape put their expertise and their wares on the market, it’s hard to imagine
how any of us will ever feel completely safe again.
The good news: Osama and Saddam won’t be pumping up the market much
longer. But somebody else probably will be. As Tenet told the Senate, “The
desire for nuclear weapons is on the upsurge. Additional countries may seek
nuclear weapons as it becomes clear their neighbors and regional rivals are
already doing so. The domino theory of the 21st century may well be nuclear.”
Or biological. Or chemical.
It’s
been less than a week since the crab canapés and Champagne. I’m in Jordan now,
looking to cross into Iraq with mineral water and crackers when the storm
clears. The world has changed. Gone with the WMD.
Chaos Theory, 13 March 2003
Saddam will fall, but
the chaos that follows in Iraq will defeat the designs of the United States
By Christopher Dickey
“Shock
and awe” is the phrase of the moment, along with “sweets and flowers.” They’re
the buzzwords, from the Pentagon and from an exiled Iraqi intellectual
respectively, that sum up the Bush administration’s vision of the coming war.
It’s supposed to be an ultra-high-tech blitzkrieg that takes out the core of
Saddam Hussein’s regime in a matter of days, followed by the ecstatic joy of
liberated Iraqis who shower the arriving Americans with bouquets and baklava.
And, personally, I think that’s just what’s going to happen – at first.
Skeptics will be silenced. Even Jacques Chirac will be shamed. But that’s not
all that’s going to happen. Because anarchy and atrocity are also a realistic
part of the scenario, and Saddam may well be depending on pure chaos as part of
his last-ditch strategy for salvation.
Why
is he passing out guns to every mustached thug from Mosul to the mouth of the
Shatt al-Arab? Does he think they’re going to crawl out of their cellars after
they’ve been shocked and awed and turn those guns on the American invaders? Few
Iraq-watchers among the Middle East’s intelligence services believe Saddam can
count on more than a few thousand of his diehard cousins, tribesmen and
genocidal accomplices to defend him. And he probably knows that. So what’s he
up to?
Iraqis will
pick up their guns and turn them on each other, pillaging and lynching,
settling scores and carrying out vendettas that were both encouraged and
bottled up through 35 years of sinister, manipulative totalitarian rule.
These analysts expect that once the
obsequious sweets and flowers have been dispensed to those awesome guys from
the 101st Airborne, Iraqis will pick up their guns and turn them on each other,
pillaging and lynching, settling scores and carrying out vendettas that were
both encouraged and bottled up through 35 years of sinister, manipulative
totalitarian rule. And that’s the point. As the dancing in the street gives way
to neck-tie parties, the satellite-TV spectacle could be grim indeed. Pressure
on Washington to stop what was already an unpopular war, to bring order at any
cost, or to get out, could be enormous. Perhaps Saddam, in his dreams, even
thinks the bad publicity will give him the room to survive in some sort of
rump-state Iraq.
History would encourage him to
think so. In Saddam’s lifetime the Middle East has seen many wars that started
with a bang, but ended with a whimper. Great plans go horribly wrong. Good
intentions lead to grotesque violence. Israel’s armed forces are state of the
art. Nobody blitzes better than the Tsahal. Yet Israel’s triumphant siege of
Beirut in 1982 was thwarted when its client forces massacred hundreds of old
men, women and children in Sabra and Shatila. Israel’s 1996 “Grapes of Wrath”
offensive in southern Lebanon was brought up short after its troops shelled a
United Nations refugee camp, killing 107 people, including 24 children, aged
three months to nine years, who were lining up for lunch. Such atrocities may
or may not be provoked by enemy forces. Inevitably some voices rationalize them
as unfortunate collateral damage, but they do have a way of ending offensives.
I don’t think there’s anything on
earth that can keep Saddam from going down once US forces go in, whatever his
delusions. But when the intramural bloodletting begins, anarchy could push the
United States back out of Iraq more effectively than any Saddam-organized
resistance. And that’s what many of Washington’s friends in the region both
fear, and expect.
It doesn’t help that the Bush
administration has been so shy about calculating the true costs of the coming
occupation, or that the civilians at the Pentagon publicly repudiated the Chief
of Staff of the Army’s estimate that hundreds of thousands of troops would be
required in Iraq for many years. Fortunately for those who actually do want to
be informed, a Council on Foreign Relations task force headed by former
under-Secretary of State Thomas
Pickering and former Defense Secretary James Schlesinger has just done the
number crunching for us. And the bottom line is daunting.
The Middle East has seen many wars that started with a bang, but ended
with a whimper.
“The scale of American resources
that will be required could amount to some $20 billion per year for several
years,” says the task force’s report, “Iraq: The Day After.” “This figure
assumes a deployment of 75,000 troops for post-conflict peace stabilization (at
about $16.8 billion annually), as well as funding for humanitarian and
reconstruction assistance … . If the troop requirements are much larger than
75,000 – a genuine possibility – the funding requirement would be much
greater.” Indeed, those estimates are very conservative. NATO had to put 50,000
troops into Bosnia to stabilize it in1995, and eight years later there are
still 12,000 there. Bosnia’s population is fewer than 5 million.
“Iraq is not a small country,” one
spymaster in the region told me the other day. “There are 26 million people.
Many are trained, and they have the tools to fight. When the Americans see
there is a civil war, I don’t think they will put up with something worse than
Vietnam. The first thing they will do is say, ‘We finished our job.
Goodbye.’” Who will pick up the pieces? And the cost? The countries that warned
this war was a bad idea in the first place? After the first Gulf War, when Gen.
Norman Schwarzkopf explained why Saddam wasn’t taken out and Iraq occupied, one
of the reasons he gave is that the US would have had to bear the burden alone.
The rest of the coalition would have backed away. That’s already happened in
this war, and it hasn’t even begun.
If
the US doesn’t hang in there, at enormous cost and great risk, Iraq’s neighbors
will try to defend their clients within the country and carve it up in the
process. The Turks already are preparing to roll about 80,000 troops into
northern Iraq to keep the Kurds from declaring independence and protect the
Turkmen minority. That could lead to a face-off with Iran, not to mention
revolt by the Kurds. If Iran gets aggressive, the Saudis will feel threatened.
Very quickly, the chaos could spread north, south, east and west, with American
troops in the middle, or the Middle East in utter chaos – or both.
The good news is that Saddam will
be gone, and the weapons of mass destruction he had will have been eliminated …
except, perhaps, for those spirited away in the chaos by the private
entrepreneurs of terror. After the shock and awe, the sweets and flowers, the
anarchy and atrocity, Iraq could well be disarmed and dangerous.
Rumors of War, 6
March 2003
A proliferation of dubious "facts" and willful
blind spots about the approaching conflict in Iraq.
By Christopher Dickey
“What
doesn’t happen in a year happens in a day,” my proverb-prone mother-in-law
likes to say, and the phrase came to mind a couple of weekends ago when my wife
and I went to pick up a frozen soufflé at a Paris patisserie. As we waited in line,
one of the most senior European officials in the war on terror walked in to buy
a baguette. It takes weeks to get an appointment with this guy. I hadn’t seen
him since late last year. And now here he was. Amid the bustle of bourgeois
matrons buying éclairs and macarons,
we chatted in low tones about the threat of war and terror.
I
was especially interested, as most of us are, in the question of when the war
with Iraq is likely to begin. He’d need to know to prepare for counter-terror
responses, I thought. And he said, with absolute assurance, “March 3 or 4.” As
I write, it’s March 6. So much for that bit of information from this informed
source. Was my baguette-buying friend just plain wrong? Or had he been
misinformed? Was the date for war, if date there was, put off by diplomacy? Or
because of logistical snafus in the military?
If
you expect definitive answers to any of these questions, read no further.
Because the truth is that we're already deep in the fog of war.
If the continued uncertainty is
part of some psychological operation to shake up the inner circle of hardened
killers around Saddam Hussein, well, they're still looking pretty steady. These
thugs have been in a war of nerves all their lives. Many have survived
assassination attempts. Many have murdered rivals of the regime with their own
hands. We can expect Saddam and his cronies to hang tough until, well, until
they hang. But in the meantime a proliferation of dubious "facts" and
willful blind spots about the approaching conflict, has a corrosive effect on
international trust just when that's needed most.
There’s very little confidence the United States can or will hold Iraq
together once Saddam is gone. From chaos will spring inchoate terror.
The
problem is not limited to the United States. Sources close to the French
intelligence services, for instance, say they have no doubt whatsoever that
Saddam Hussein pursued an aggressive program to acquire weapons of mass
destruction in the four years after United Nations inspectors were withdrawn in
1998. They’re sure he’s got hidden weapons now. But you wouldn’t know that from
the way French diplomacy tried to weaken the impact of sanctions in years past,
and continues undermining the hard line the UN took last fall with the passage
of Security Council Resolution 1441.
The Americans, however, get credit
for the most egregious smokescreens. Secretary of State Colin Powell’s Power Point
presentation before the Security Council a month ago is an especially sore
point with European and Arab intelligence services. The intent was to tie
Saddam Hussein to current terrorist activities, and thus bolster the case for
war. But much of what Powell presented was deemed an exaggeration by friendly
European and Arab intelligence analysts (and privately by some US officials).
“It was garbage,” said one. “The thinnest thing I’ve ever seen,” said another.
Yes, a sometime Al-Qaeda operative
named Abu Musaab al-Zarqawi got medical treatment in Baghdad last spring, but
under an assumed name, according to several sources. And yes he allegedly
dispatched and funded the assassins of USAID official Laurence Foley in Amman
in October. But Zarqawi’s network operated from Iran and northern Iraq (out of
Saddam’s control), and his agents traveled to Jordan through Syria.
“Fortunately,” said Mr. Baguette,
“the technical cooperation with the CIA – even the cooperation with France – is
still excellent.” But there are stories that US officials who deal with
day-to-day coordination of counter-terror activities apologized to their
European counterparts for the way Powell’s presentation clouded the
intelligence needed for an effective war on terrorism: that is, against Osama
bin Laden and his acolytes.
Indeed, in the counter-terror
community there’s widespread recognition that the public push for war in Iraq
is directly at odds with the secret war against terrorism, and the successes of
late have come not because of Washington’s saber rattling, but in spite of it.
Certainly the arrest of key Al Qaeda planner Khaled Shaikh Mohammed last week
in Pakistan was a master stroke in a country almost unanimously hostile to US
war plans. Soon, Osama himself may be in custody. (“What doesn’t happen in a
year, happens in a day.”) Yet counter-terror officials are more worried than
ever about a new wave of terror.
Once the fighting in Iraq begins,
warns an Arab intelligence analyst with close ties to the CIA, “everybody will
see everything on the spot and as it happens.” TV images of civilians killed in
Iraq, inevitably, will run side by side with those of Israel’s tanks rolling
through Palestinian refugee camps. “There will be a sense of hate, of a grudge,
throughout the region,” says the analyst. Moreover, there’s very little
confidence the United States can or will hold Iraq together once Saddam is
gone. From chaos will spring inchoate terror. “There will be hundreds of
organizations—the Islamic Front for This, Mohammed’s Army of That,” says the
same official. “They will be one of Iraq’s main exports.”
So when will that war against Iraq
actually begin? In the minds of many people in the trenches of the war on
terror, never would be too soon.
Mail Call, 27 February 2003
A letter from the Alphabet Bomber and insights into Lone
Wolf terrorists
By Christopher Dickey
I
got a letter from the Alphabet Bomber the other day. It looked like the
usual correspondence from paranoid
schizophrenics, who tend to write in block letters and fatten the envelopes
with copies of documents “proving” whatever delusional fantasy drives them.
And, yes, there’s always the risk there will be a little talcum powder or
something more sinister inside. The still-at-large anthrax terrorist wrote in
block letters, too. But I figured this envelope was okay. The return address
was Pelican Bay State Prison, California’s super-maximum-security facility near
the Oregon border. Whatever else this guy was up to, he wasn’t making chemical
or biological weapons. At least, not anymore.
So
I opened it. There were indeed copies of several papers, and scrawled on the
back: “DEAR MR.
DICKEY: YOU COULD ASCEND TO WORLD PROMINENCE BY BEING THE FIRST WHO UNDERSTOOD
THIS LETTER. M. KURBEGOVICH.”
Typical.
In lieu of a CV, there was a
concise, straightforward 1985 “record of deportable alien.” It described
Muharem Kurbegovic [sic] as tall, blond, blue-eyed and originally from
Sarajevo, having immigrated to the United States in 1967: “Subject gained
notoriety as the ‘Alphabet Bomber’ in 1974 by firebombing the houses of a judge
and two police commissioners, firebombing one of the commissioner’s car[sic],
burning down two Marina Del Rey apartment buildings and bombing the Pan Am
Terminal of Los Angeles International Airport, killing three people and
injuring eight.” Convicted in 1980 on “25 counts of Murder, Arson, Illegal Use
of Explosives and related charges. Sentenced to life in prison, the subject has
whiled away the hours in San Quentin [where he then was] by mailing death
treats against U.S. presidents and other U.S. and foreign officials.”
The
Alphabet Bomber was a terrorist ahead of his time. Other lone extremists
looking for lunatic vengeance, apocalyptic glory, will carry on the work.
Kurbegovich, as he now spells his
name, was in fact more dangerous than the Unabomber of the 1990s, and a great
deal more frightening than the laconic prose of the immigration report would
suggest. Just last Thursday, as The Washington Post reported, the FBI warned
its field offices to be on the lookout for “lone extremists” who “represent an
ongoing terrorist threat in the United States.” Kurbegovich, now pushing 60,
could be the poster boy for the kind
of malevolent lunatic the Feds have in mind. At the time he was arrested in
August 1974, this one-man horror show had acquired almost all the components he
needed to make sarin nerve gas.
Kurbegovich, an engineer who worked
for aerospace industries and pretended to be a deaf mute to evade the Vietnam-era
draft, was a denizen of public libraries in that pre-Internet age. From them he
pulled together what were then just-declassified cookbooks for weapons of mass
destruction. A quarter century before Osama bin Laden’s training camps taught
holy warriors how to generate poisonous cyanide gas near the air conditioning
intakes of high-rise buildings, Kurbegovich bought 25 pounds of potassium
cyanide and nitric acid to do just that. He hid it so effectively in his Los
Angeles apartment that the police didn’t find the chemical stockpile until he
told them about it – more than two years after his arrest.
Yet what made Kurbegovich’s reign
of terror in the summer of 1974 so intense and, for a few weeks, so successful
was his ability to integrate conventional bombs and the threat of chemical
weapons into a strategy that today’s US military would call “information
warfare.” He even had a grim sense of humor that played to the media. His first
chemical attack was by postcard. On July 7, 1974, he left a tape cassette in a
planter at the Los Angeles Times claiming he put nerve gas on tiny lead disks hidden under the
11-cent stamps on postcards and mailed them on June 15 to all nine Supreme
Court justices of the United States. As he explained on the tape, “Each postcard
shows the Palm Springs home of entertainer Bob Hope and reads as follows: ‘It
is justices of your greatness that made this nation so great. Respectfully, Bob
Hope.’” As it turned out, nine such postcards had indeed been intercepted at
the Palm Springs post office on June 16, where the canceling machines had
broken the tiny vials under the stamps. The foreman thought they were toy caps.
Kurbegovich admitted a few weeks
later, in another threatening tape, that the postcards were a hoax and the
liquid in the vials innocuous. But he knew it was the idea that sowed terror as
much as the reality. “A reasonable man will pause to think if someone points a
gun at him,” he said, “whether the gun is loaded or empty.” Thus on a much more
horrendous scale Osama bin Laden and his acolytes, having carried out the 9-11
attacks, and having let it be known they are looking to acquire radiological,
biological and chemical weapons, can keep the whole world on edge with much
less potent technologies. So, too, for Saddam, who wants to sustain the
horrific threat of his weapons of mass destruction whether he has the devices
or not.
Kurbegovich was “a terrorist ahead
of his time,” writes Jeffrey Simon in the Monterey Institute’s 2002 volume on
“Toxic Terror,” which is the most thorough analytical account I’ve seen. Though
Kurbegovich had no organization and no outside support, he claimed to be Isak
Rasim, military commander of a group he called Aliens of America. He was dubbed
“The Alphabet Bomber” after he dropped off an audio tape at a CBS affiliate in
the aftermath of the gory LAX attack. “The first bomb was marked with the
letter A, which stands for airport,” he said. “The second bomb will be
associated with the letter L, etc., until our name has been written on the face
of this nation in blood.” After a grim panic seized the city, he sent a warning
about the next device, planted in a Greyhound bus station, in a locker. Thus:
L. When it was found and
eventually defused, it was the most powerful explosive device the bomb squad had
ever handled. “He had credibility,” the state prosecutor told Simon later. “He
had the city of L.A. in fear.”
The Alphabet Bomber was caught, at
last, because his targets were too personal. His apocalyptic terrorism had
grown out of a private vendetta against a judge and commissioners he blamed for
preventing him from opening a hall for “taxi dancers,” where women were paid to
slow-dance with lonely men like him. He’d been caught in a lewd situation in
one such hall, and that compromised his chances to start his business, even
threatened his chances of becoming an American citizen. So the central demands
of his terrorist campaign were an end to immigration and naturalization laws,
and any laws about sex. CIA voice analysis of a his tapes pinpointed Kurbegovich’s
Yugoslav origins. Court records of the cases handled by his first targets – the
judge and the police commissioners --
triangulated his identity. He was tailed for a while, then picked up
after dropping off yet another threatening tape in the bathroom of a family
restaurant.
Now, almost 30 years later, having
spent just about half his life in mental institutions and high security
prisons, he sends me this envelope. Why me? He doesn’t explain. Perhaps because
he spends a lot of time reading thrillers and one I published in 1997,
“Innocent Blood,” was about a
blond, blue-eyed terrorist of Bosnian descent name Kurtovic who tries to bring
the apocalypse to American shores. But I suspect the real reason is that from
Block 8, cell 115 in Pelican Bay, Muharem Kurbegovic wants a piece of the
terrorist action in the post-Osama world. He’s the one who wants to “ascend to
world prominence.” Last year he filed a writ in the Superior Court of
California claiming “he has been a member of the Al-Qaida terrorist organization
since 1963,” when Bin Laden was barely in elementary school. But all
Kurbegovich can do now is send threats in block letters. It’s other lone
extremists looking for lunatic vengeance, apocalyptic glory, who will carry on
the work. And they remain a danger to us all.
-------------------------------------------------------
Evil Genius (The first Shadowland column, 19 February 2003)
By Christopher Dickey
“Box
cutters.” When talk of terrorist nukes and germs and chemicals gets absolutely
out of control, I repeat those two words to myself: “box cutters.” They’re a
reminder that the greatest weapon of mass destruction used by Al Qaeda so far
had nothing to do with fissile material from renegade Russians or toxic spores
from Iraq. It relied entirely on much more dangerous binary components:
imagination and tradecraft. If you mix those together effectively, you can use
box cutters to turn four airliners into enormous flying bombs and hit the
world’s only superpower on its home turf.
Fortunately for all of us, you have to be a genius (yes, an evil genius) to get that mix of conception and execution just right. And while Al Qaeda has a few brilliant minds, its ranks are full of dim-witted losers with thousand-mile stares. “Happily, these geniuses, themselves, they don’t take the lead,” an Arab intelligence chief told me a few weeks ago. “They send out the imbeciles.”
Fortunately for all of us, you have to be a genius (yes, an evil genius) to get that mix of conception and execution just right. And while Al Qaeda has a few brilliant minds, its ranks are full of dim-witted losers with thousand-mile stares. “Happily, these geniuses, themselves, they don’t take the lead,” an Arab intelligence chief told me a few weeks ago. “They send out the imbeciles.”
While Al
Qaeda has a few brilliant minds, its ranks are full of dim-witted losers with
thousand-mile stares.
The classic case of an operation that failed because the plan was too grand and the challenges of execution too complicated was the fifth attack scheduled on Sept. 11, 2001. That’s right: as if the destruction of the Twin Towers and the Pentagon and a fourth potential target in the Washington D.C. area was not enough, there was supposed to be another attack half a world away in the Strait of Hormuz at the entrance to the Persian Gulf. It was supposed to show the true global reach of Al Qaeda.
As
described by foreign officials who work closely with the Central Intelligence
Agency, the aim was to sink a US warship with everyone aboard, and the scenario
was every bit as grand and complicated as something out of an old James Bond
movie. Through a front company, Al Qaeda actually bought a 400,000-ton
freighter equipped with a heavy-duty crane. It also bought several small
speedboats from a manufacturer in the United Arab Emirates. The plan was to
carry the smaller craft on the mother ship, fill them with explosives, lower
them into the water and send them on their way toward the warship as, in
effect, suicide torpedoes. If those failed – and they would have been
vulnerable to defensive fire if the ship’s crew was alert – the freighter
itself was filled with explosives, making it the biggest conventional bomb ever
built. It wouldn’t have to ram the warship to sink it, just explode nearby.
According to these officials, most of the crew on the Al Qaeda freighter didn’t
even know what was going on. Some were from Pakistan, others from India. A few
were Christians.
The
head of this operation was Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri, who played a key
operational role putting together the bombings of the US embassies in Kenya and
Tanzania in 1998 and blowing an enormous hole in the side of the American
destroyer USS Cole in Aden harbor in 2000, killing 17 American sailors.
“Nashiri does his job very patiently,” says an Arab intelligence officer with
intimate knowledge of the case. “Nairobi was three years in the planning.”
By
one account, Nashiri had trouble getting the enormous quantity of explosives
needed for the Hormuz plot. But this intelligence officer says no: “It was all
to do with the timing and the moving of the elements. The problem was security
procedures.” The more grandiose a plan, the more people who are involved, the
greater the chance it will be compromised and some or all of the plotters
caught. Nashiri knew he was already being hunted by the CIA. Jordan’s
intelligence service had been tracking him since 1997. Rather than risk giving
away the whole game – possibly the whole 9-11 plot -- the operation was called
off.
Even
after Al Qaeda’s Afghan base was broken up by the US invasion in 2001, Nashiri
– also known as Mullah Bilal – kept plotting sea-borne operations, training
frogmen for underwater demolition and pilots for small kamikaze aircraft. A
group of Saudis was dispatched to Morocco to prepare the logistics for an
attack on US warships in the Strait of Gibraltar. Their mission was to rent a
safe house and acquire Zodiac rubberized speedboats to use in a hit similar to
the one against the Cole. But a tip from one of the Moroccans held at
Guantanamo in early 2002 led to the arrest of the plotters by the Moroccan
security services.
Nashiri
tried to change his strategy. Like other Al Qaeda planners, he scaled back the
grand plans and focused on what he thought would be easier targets: attacks on
American compounds in the northwest of Saudi Arabia and in Jeddah. But those
plots were foiled. Too many people knew about him. Too many of the Arab
services, as well as the Americans, were on his trail.
Late
last year, Nashiri was spotted in Yemen, but the Yemenis didn’t arrest him. He
went to Dubai and was picked up there. Ever since, Nashiri has been in one of
the secret CIA interrogation centers outside the United States, beyond the
reach of American law or mercy. According to intelligence sources familiar with
his dossier, he’s been quite talkative. By combining what Nashiri has told them
with details from other captured masterminds like Abu Zubaidah, Abu Zubayr and
Anas al-Liby (none of whose whereabouts are a matter of public record) the CIA
can cross-check information, spot inconsistencies, and expand its web of
coverage.
So
we’re all a lot safer? Yes, in fact.
Safer. But not safe.
“The
elements who worked with Nashiri, they have the same expertise,” says the
counter-terror chief of a friendly country. “When Nashiri was arrested they
became more determined than ever to take his place.” They are also more
determined than ever to get
weapons of mass destruction. The acquisition is very risky from an
operational point of view. The terrorists have to go outside their closed and
secure networks if they want nukes, plutonium or sophisticated chemical and
biological weapons, and that exposes them to capture. But there’s this great
advantage: Once you’ve got the Bomb or its bio-chem equivalent, you don’t have
to be a genius to use it. You just have to be evil.
POSTSCRIPT: From the NYT
Guantanamo Docket:
“Abd al Rahim al Nashiri is a 48-year-old citizen of Saudi Arabia.
He is one of 16 high-value
detainees. As of January 2010, the Guantánamo
Review Task Force had recommended him for prosecution. As of Oct.
29, 2013, he has been held at
Guantánamo for seven years one months. He has been charged with war
crimes.
“In February 2008, Central Intelligence Agency director Gen.
Michael V. Hayden confirmed publicly that waterboarding was used on three Qaeda
prisoners, Abu Zubaydah, Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri and Khalid Shaikh Mohammed.”
The document on this site confirms the outlines of the plot
to blow up a ship that I wrote about in the column, but does not confirm that, at one
point, the idea was to stage that explosion at the same time as the attacks on the United
States.
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