In 1995, Philippine policewoman helped crack
terror cell
By Matthew Brzezinski SPECIAL
TO THE STAR
MANILA
It was already evening, here on the
other side of the international date line, when the first plane
struck the North Tower of the World Trade Center. Aida Fariscal had
gone to bed early on Sept. 11, only to be awakened by a frantic
colleague. "Quick," he instructed, "turn on your television."
The footage of the hijacked airliner bursting into flame made
Fariscal bolt upright. "Oh my God," she gasped. "Bojinka."
For the retired Philippine police officer, that word and the
nightmare scenario it evoked had receded into distant memory these
past six years. Sometimes weeks went by without her even thinking
about the terrorist plot she had foiled so long ago. But there it
was, after all this time, unfolding live on her television. "I
thought, at first," she tells me, "that I was having a bad dream, or
that I was watching a movie." But as the burning towers came
crashing down under their own weight, disbelief turned to anger. "I
still don't understand," she says, "how it could have been allowed
to happen."
We are having lunch in a busy Manila shopping centre, not far
from the Dona Josefa Apartments, where it all started, where she
and the CIA and the FBI first heard the words "Operation Bojinka."
Fariscal has insisted on a corner table, so she can keep an eye on
the other patrons and the shoppers beyond the restaurant's greasy
glass partition. Old habits, she explains, die hard, and, after a
life of fighting crime, she always takes precautions, especially now
that she is off the force, a widowed grandmother living on a pension
in a small one-bedroom apartment.
She seems bitter, and surprisingly fragile in her hoop
earrings and pink lipstick. She is bitter that the generals in the
Philippine high command hogged all the credit for Bojinka (which
means loud bang in Serbo-Croatian), while all she received was $700
(U.S.) and a trip to Taiwan. She is bitter that the Americans
apparently didn't take the foiled plot seriously enough. But most of
all, she is angry that, in the end, her hunch didn't save thousands
of lives. "I can't get those images," she says of the World Trade
Center wreckage, "out of my mind."
The call came in shortly after 11 on a Friday night back in
January, 1995: a routine fire alarm, some smoke spotted on the top
floor of a six-storey building just down the street from Manila
Police Station No. 9. Fariscal, the watch commander, peered out of
the precinct house window, but couldn't see any sign of a blaze on
Quirino Ave. Still, she dispatched Patrolman Ariel Fernandez to
check it out. "Nothing to worry about," he reported when he returned
a few minutes later. "Just some Pakistanis playing with
firecrackers."
Fariscal wasn't so sure. She hadn't earned her senior
inspector stripes by sitting down on the job, and had risen in the
male-dominated ranks of the Manila police force by trusting her
"female intuition." And her instinct that night told her something
was wrong.
"The Pope was coming to the Philippines, we were worried
about security, and on top of that we had just had a big typhoon,"
she recalls. The senior inspector decided to walk the 500 metres to
the Dona Josefa Apartments to see for herself. She barely had time
to change out of her civilian clothes, a flower-patterned dress and
sandals, and she didn't think she needed her gun. But just in case,
she ordered Patrolman Fernandez and another officer to tag along as
backup while she picked her way past the uprooted palm trees.
The Dona Josefa apartment building was a well-kept but not
luxurious residence, with an open lobby and an airy feel. It was
often used for short-term rentals by Middle Eastern tourists, who
came to Manila's neon-lit Malate nightclub district to get away from
the strict mores back home. It was also a block away from the papal
nunciature, where John Paul II would be staying.
"What's happening here, boss?" Fariscal asked the Dona Josefa
doorman in Tagalog, a native tongue of the Philippines. Two men, he
said, had fled their sixth-floor apartment, pulling on their pants
as they ran in the smoky corridor. "They told me everything was
under control; just some fireworks that accidentally went off."
Fariscal faced a quandary. She couldn't legally enter the
apartment without a search warrant, now that there was no longer an
imminent danger of fire. But she couldn't simply walk away, either.
She was stubborn that way. It was one reason why in 1977, after 17
years as a homemaker raising four children, she had decided to enrol
in the police academy. "Open it up," she instructed.
Suite 603 was a cluttered one-bedroom bachelor pad. The first
thing Fariscal noticed was four hot plates, still in their packing
crates. Bundles of cotton lay scattered around the room, soaked in
some sort of pungent beige solution, next to clear plastic
containers of various sizes and shapes bearing the stamp of German
and Pakistani chemical manufacturers. And loops of electrical
wiring: green, yellow, blue and red.
Just then, the phone rang, causing Fariscal to jump with
fright. "I'd just seen a movie with Sylvester Stallone where the
telephone was booby-trapped," she recalls now. "Everybody out," she
ordered. They scrambled back downstairs, where the doorman appeared
to be in a high state of agitation. "That's one of them," he
whispered. "He's coming back."
Patrolman Fernandez grabbed the suspect. He was young, in his
twenties, Fariscal guessed, and handsome in a rakish sort of way. He
said his name was Ahmed Saeed, that he was a commercial pilot, and
that he was just on his way to the precinct house to explain any
misunderstanding over the firecracker smoke.
"There's the other one," interrupted the doorman, pointing to
a thin, bearded individual standing outside. Fariscal set off in his
direction. He was calmly talking on his cell phone, smoking a pipe
and watching her. For a brief instant their eyes met. Fariscal had
no idea she was looking at Ramzi Yousef, the man who had tried to
bring down the World Trade Center in 1993.
The sound of gunfire froze Fariscal in her tracks. She had
been wounded a few years back when a bullet ripped through her left
arm and torso to lodge four centimetres from her spine, and the
memory left her skittish. But she whirled around just in time to see
Patrolman Fernandez aiming his service revolver at Saeed's fleeing
back. As the cops gave chase, the fugitive suddenly lurched forward,
sprawling on the pavement; he had tripped over the exposed roots of
a tree toppled by the typhoon. Saeed was back in custody. But his
accomplice had taken advantage of the confusion to melt into the
gathering crowd of street peddlers and gawkers.
Neither Fariscal nor the two officers
with her had any handcuffs, so they improvised with rope from a
clothesline and hauled Saeed to his feet. "I'll give you $2,000 to
let me go," he pleaded. Most Manila police officers don't make that
in a year. But Fariscal refused. Concerned that the suspect would
try to bolt again, she radioed the precinct for a squad car. As
usual, none was available. One of the cops tried to hail down a
passing "jeepney," the converted World War II-vintage U.S. Army
Jeeps pressed into service as cheap if not always reliable
public transportation in Manila. Finally, Fariscal commandeered a
minivan taxi and conscripted two burly pedestrians to help watch
Saeed during the short ride to the precinct station.
By now, Fariscal had an inkling she had stumbled onto
something big. She couldn't know, however, just how big her
discovery would turn out to be; that amid the clutter of the
chemicals and cotton at the Dona Josefa apartment, investigators
would unearth a plan that, with the benefit of hindsight, career CIA
officers today admit looks alarmingly like an early blueprint for
the Sept. 11 attack on America.
All Fariscal knew for the moment was that she had just nabbed
some sort of a terrorist and, in the Philippines, that could mean
anything.
At the precinct, Saeed signed a statement, in which he
proclaimed his innocence and claimed to be a simple tourist visiting
a friend in the chemicals import-export business. But, perhaps
sensing the game was up, he complained to Fariscal that there are
"two Satans that must be destroyed: the Pope and America."
The senior inspector had already surmised that the Pope was a
target of assassination, a suspicion borne out when she returned
with the bomb squad to Suite 603 at 2:30 a.m. and found a photograph
of the pontiff tucked into the corner of a bedside mirror, near a
new crucifix, rosary and Bible. There were street maps of Manila,
plotting the papal motorcade's route; two remote-control pipe bombs;
and a phone message from a tailor saying the cassock Saeed had
ordered was ready for a final fitting.
By 4 a.m. the situation was deemed serious enough that the
first generals had started showing up on the scene, and a judge was
soon rousted out of bed to sign a belated search warrant.
"It was obvious they had planned to dress someone up as a
priest, and smuggle the bomb past the Holy Father's security
detail," Fariscal recalls. But the sheer magnitude of the chemical
arsenal Fariscal found in Suite 603 also made it clear the
conspirators had other targets. The four new hot plates needed to
cook the concoctions indicated the extremists were gearing up for
mass production.
It took days for the bomb squad to draw up a complete
inventory of the apartment's contents, which included a cornucopia
of explosive ingredients sulphuric, picric and nitric acid, pure
glycerin, acetone, sodium trichlorate, nitrobenzoyl, ammonia, silver
nitrates, methanamine and ANFO binary explosive, among others.
Funnels, thermometers, graduated cylinders and beakers, mortars and
pestles, various electronic fusing systems, timers, circuit
breakers, batteries and a box of Rough Rider lubricated condoms
rounded out the home laboratory, which included chemistry reference
manuals and a recipe written in Arabic on how to build powerful
liquid bombs.
"The guys in the bomb squad had never seen an explosive like
this before," says Fariscal. Neither had many U.S. investigators.
"The particularly evil genius of this device was that it was
virtually undetectable by airport security measures," says Vincent
Cannistraro, the former head of the CIA's counter-terrorism centre.
But what were the targets? And who were the conspirators? A
clue to the identity of the suspects emerged when Fariscal found
dozens of passports in different names hidden in a wall divider.
Saeed, apparently, had many aliases, including Abdul Hakim, student,
age 26, Pakistani passport No. C665334, issued in Kuwait. His real
name, investigators would eventually discover, was Abdul Hakim
Murad. According to transcripts from his interrogation, he was the
Pakistani-born son of a crane operator for a Kuwait petroleum
company. He had graduated from high school in Al-Jery, Kuwait,
before attending the Emirates Flying School in Dubai and moving on
to flight schools in Texas, Upstate New York and North Carolina,
where after completing the required 275 hours of flight time, he
received a commercial pilot's licence from Coastal Aviation Inc. on
June 8, 1992.
Philippine investigators called in their U.S. counterparts
for help. According to U.S. and Philippine officials, both the CIA
Manila station chief and the resident FBI legal attachι were
notified. A team of intelligence agents flew in from Washington.
Murad, as Fariscal now thought of Saeed,
was a suspect in the 1993 World Trade Center bombing. So, it turned
out, was his accomplice at the Dona Josefa Apartments, the thin,
bearded man who had given Fariscal the slip. He had registered under
the name Najy Awaita Haddad, purporting to be a Moroccan national.
But the United States already had a thick file on him, and that was
just one of his 21 known aliases. Sometimes he passed himself off as
Paul Vijay, or Adam Sali or even Dr. Richard Smith. He was in fact
Ramzi Ahmed Yousef, mastermind of the 1993 World Trade Center
bombing, a fugitive with a $2 million bounty placed on his head by
the U.S. government.
Fingerprints lifted at the apartment helped give Yousef away;
a life spent assembling bombs had left his fingers burnt and
distinctively deformed from mishaps mixing tricky chemical
concoctions. He had learned his deadly skills, Philippine officials
said, in Afghanistan, at a training camp for Osama bin Laden's
followers, and in turn had taught Murad the art of bomb making in
Lahore, Pakistan.
But Murad had not learned his lessons well, for it was his
mistake that set off the fire in the kitchen sink that alerted
Manila police. In his haste to flee Suite 603, Yousef left behind
many clues. Some, like contact lens solution and a receipt from a
pharmacy, seemed innocuous. But others would give the FBI and the
CIA a chilling preview of what the terrorists had in store for the
United States.
The most damning information was gleaned from Yousef's
computer, and four accompanying diskettes. The data were encrypted
and in Arabic, but Philippine technicians eventually deciphered the
code and translated the texts. One of Yousef's translated documents
stamped SECRET by Philippine intelligence spells out the
terrorist cell's broad objectives. "All people who support the U.S.
government are our targets in our future plans and that is because
all those people are responsible for their government's actions and
they support the U.S. foreign policy and are satisfied with it," it
declared.
"We will hit all U.S. nuclear targets," the manifesto
continued. "If the U.S. government keeps supporting Israel, then we
will continue to carry out operations inside and outside the United
States to include ..." Here the text terminates ominously.
Already, intelligence officials had gleaned a treasure-trove
of information on the inner workings of bin Laden's terrorist
network. Cell members did not appear to even know one another's real
names. Duties were divided and none of the conspirators stayed in
the same place for any length of time. But there were still more
frightening revelations to come.
Another file found on Yousef's computer consisted of a
printout of U.S. airline schedules, which initially baffled
investigators. The file, named Bojinka, listed the travel
itineraries of 11 long-haul flights between Asia and the United
States, mostly on United and American airlines. All the flights had
several legs, and were grouped under five headings bearing code
names of accomplices such as Zyed, Majbos or Obaid. Each accomplice
would leave the bombs on the first leg of the flight, and then
eventually return to locations like Lahore, Pakistan. Obaid, for
instance, would fly from Singapore to Hong Kong on United Flight 80,
which continued as United Flight 806 to San Francisco. Under the
flight plan, Yousef had written: "SETTING: 9:30 PM to 10:30 PM.
TIMER: 23HR. BOJINKA: 20:30-21:30 NRT Date 5."
Zyed, on the other hand, would take Northwest Airlines Flight
30 from Manila to Seoul, with continued service to Los Angeles.
"SETTING: 8:30-9:00. TIMER: 10HR. BOJINKA: 19:30-20:00 NRT Date 4,"
the accompanying instruction read.
The repeated use of the word "TIMER" concerned investigators,
who by then had made the connection between the dozens of Casio
wristwatches found in Suite 603 and one discovered a few weeks
earlier on a Philippine Airlines flight from the Philippine town of
Cebu to Tokyo's Narita International Airport. The watch had served
to detonate a blast that ripped through the Boeing 747, killing a
Japanese passenger and forcing the plane to make an emergency
landing.
Philippine intelligence put the screws to Murad. In Camp
Crame, a military installation on the outskirts of Manila, he was
subjected for 67 days to what Philippine intelligence reports
delicately refer to as TI, or tactical interrogation. By the time he
was handed over to the Americans, interrogators had extracted
everything they thought they needed to know.
Yousef, Murad confessed, had indeed been responsible for the
blast aboard the Philippine airliner, which was actually a dry run
to test the terrorists' new generation of nitroglycerin explosive,
known as a "Mark II" bomb. Yousef had deposited his device lethal
liquid concealed in a contact lens solution bottle with cotton-ball
stabilizing agents and a harmless-looking wristwatch wrapped around
it under seat 27F on the Manila-to-Cebu leg of the flight to
Tokyo. He had gotten off in Cebu after setting the watch's timer for
four hours later. The same plan was to be repeated on the 11 U.S.
commercial jetliners. U.S. federal prosecutors later estimated that
4,000 passengers would have died had the plot been successful.
The enormity of Bojinka also frightened
U.S. officials. "We had never seen anything that complicated or
ambitious before. It was unparalleled," recalls Cannistraro, the
former CIA counter-terrorism head.
But, Philippine and U.S intelligence officials said, the
Bojinka operation called for a second, perhaps even more ambitious
phase, as interrogators discovered when they pressed Murad about his
pilot's licence. All those years in flight school, he confessed, had
been in preparation for a suicide mission. He was to buy, rent, or
steal a small plane, fill it with explosives and crash it into CIA
headquarters.
There were secondary targets the terrorists wanted hit: U.S.
Congress, the White House, the Pentagon and possibly some
skyscrapers. The only problem, Murad complained, was that they
needed more trained pilots to carry out the plot.
"It's so chilling," says Fariscal. "Those kamikaze pilots
trained in America, just like Murad.
"The FBI knew all about Yousef's plans," she says. "They'd
seen the files, been inside 603. The CIA had access to everything,
too. Look," she adds, fishing in a plastic shopping bag for one of
her most prized possessions, a laminated certificate of merit
bearing the seal of the CIA. "Awarded to Senior Inspector Aida D.
Fariscal," it reads. "In recognition of your personal outstanding
efforts and co-operation."
"This should have never, ever been allowed to happen," she
repeats angrily. "All those poor people dead."
In her outrage at the biggest U.S. intelligence failure since
Pearl Harbor, Fariscal is not alone in the Manila law enforcement
community. Gen. Avelino "Sonny" Razon, one of the lead investigators
in the Bojinka case, was so shocked at what he saw on Sept. 11 that
he jumped on a plane in Cebu, where he was now police chief, and
flew to Manila to convene a hasty press conference. "We told the
Americans about the plans to turn planes into flying bombs as far
back as 1995," he complained to reporters. "Why didn't they pay
attention?"
U.S. officials counter that they did pay attention. FBI
spokesperson John E. Collingwood denies that the bureau had advance
knowledge of a plot to turn airliners into flying bombs. "The FBI
had no warnings about any hijack plots. There was a widely
publicized 1995 conspiracy in Manila to remotely blow up 11 U.S.
airliners over the Pacific," Collingwood said in a letter to the
Washington Post in October, "but that was disrupted. And, as is the
practice, what was learned in that investigation was widely
disseminated, even internationally, and thoroughly analyzed by
multiple agencies. It does not connect to the current case."
Not everyone in the U.S. intelligence community, however, is
of the same mind. "There certainly were enough precursors that
should have led analysts to suspect that the U.S could come under
domestic attack," says Cannistraro, a 27-year intelligence veteran
who ran the CIA's counter-terrorism division until 1990. "There's no
question about it. We knew about the pilots and suicide plots. Just
didn't put two and two together."
That failure to connect the dots lies at the heart of the
intelligence breakdown, says Cannistraro.
"It's the imagination that failed us," says a former senior
CIA agent, "not the system." He dismissed the connection to Bojinka
as a "hindsight is cheap" theory.
Yet it is precisely the responsibility of the agency's
thousands of planners and analysts to dream up what may appear as
crazy scenarios in order to find ways to thwart them. And it is
unclear what became of the information gleaned from Operation
Bojinka.
"We didn't file it and forget about it," a CIA spokeswoman
insists. Indeed, shortly after Yousef's liquid bombs were
discovered, the Federal Aviation Administration did begin installing
"sniffer" devices, which can detect explosive chemicals, at major
airports throughout the United States. But beyond that, there is no
evidence of any other clear response by the intelligence community
to the information gleaned from the foiled plot in the Philippines.
The terrorists, on the other hand, appear to have drawn a
number of invaluable conclusions from their 1995 setback. "Under
interrogation Murad told us several things that should have been of
interest to analysts on the deterrence side," recalls retired Gen.
Renato De Villa, who served as Philippines defence minister at the
time of the raid on Suite 603. First, the extremists saw the 1993
World Trade Center bombing as a failure and still considered the
twin towers a viable target. And more importantly, the cell seemed
to be growing frustrated with explosives. They were too expensive,
unstable and could give them away.
Though nothing in Murad's confession gave investigators any
warning of hijackings, somewhere along the line, his brothers at
arms in bin Laden's Al Qaeda network did make the leap from
explosives to jet fuel and box cutters.
One reason U.S counter-terrorism officials may not have been
able to outwit the terrorists, critics charged, is because the
entire intelligence community has become too reliant on technology
rather than human resources. "Where the system breaks down," says a
former staff member of the National Security Council who regularly
attended briefings on bin Laden, "is not at the hunting and
gathering stage" the ability to electronically intercept
information. "We are probably tapped into every hotel room in
Pakistan. We can listen in to just about every phone call in
Afghanistan," explains the former NSC staffer. "Where the rubber
hits the pavement is with the analysts. They are a bunch of
24-year-old recent grads from Middlebury or Dartmouth who have never
been to Pakistan or Afghanistan, don't speak any of the relevant
languages, and seem more knowledgeable about the bar scene in
Georgetown. They just don't compare to the Soviet specialists we
used to have. I'm not surprised they missed it."
With the benefit of hindsight, Murad's confession today
sounds almost prophetic, and as U.S investigators backtrack, piecing
together bits of the puzzle left behind by the hijackers, the
spectre of Bojinka looms large. As in the case of the Sept. 11
attacks, authorities in Manila following Suite 603's money trail
found the deeper they dug, the closer they came to bin Laden. The
critical clue was in Ramzi Yousef's computer. A list of cell phone
numbers on its hard drive led authorities to stake out another
apartment in Manila, this one on Singalong St. There they
apprehended a third conspirator in Yousef's terrorist cell, a stocky
Afghan by the name of Wali Khan Amin Shah.
Like Yousef, Shah carried many passports under various
aliases Norwegian, Saudi, Afghan and four Pakistani, all filled
with travel visas and entry stamps from Europe, the Middle East and
Asia. Shah also had mangled hands, and was missing two fingers. Both
his legs were heavily scarred with shrapnel, and he had a large
surgical scar on his stomach.
Shah turned out to be Bojinka's unlikely finance officer. To
launder incoming funds, Shah used bank accounts belonging to his
live-in Filipino girlfriend and a number of other Manila women, one
of whom was an employee at a Kentucky Fried Chicken outlet, and
others who were described as bar hostesses. Most of the transfers
were surprisingly small $500 or $1,000 handed over at a Wendy's or
a karaoke bar late at night. Under "tactical interrogation" at Camp
Crame, Shah admitted that most of the funds were channelled to Adam
Sali, an alias used by Ramzi Yousef, through a Philippine bank
account belonging to Omar Abu Omar, a Syrian-born man working at a
local Islamic organization known as the International Relations and
Information Centre run by one Mohammed Jalal Khalifa, bin Laden's
brother-in-law.
Shah's and Murad's confessions led to Yousef's arrest in
Pakistan, and the three suspects were extradited to New York to
stand trial. All three were sentenced to life in prison at a
maximum-security facility in Colorado, and Bojinka was filed in the
"win" column, even as Mohamed Atta and fellow Sept. 11 hijackers
were hatching plans to enrol in flight schools around the United
States. That no one seemed to notice the connection, says
Cannistraro, is the great failure.
In 1998, on the eve of the fifth anniversary of the first
World Trade Center bombing, Dale Watson, the FBI's top expert on
international terror, reported to a Senate Judiciary subcommittee
that "although we should not allow ourselves to be lulled into a
false sense of security ... I believe it is important to note that
in the five years since the Trade Center bombing, no significant act
of foreign-directed terrorism has occurred on American soil."
Three years later, Sept. 11, 2001, the suicide attacks
coincided almost to the day, with another fifth anniversary: the
1996 conviction, in a Manhattan court, of Bojinka's original
plotters.
Matthew Brzezinski is the author of Casino Moscow.
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