Jihad Joe (13 page)

Among the plans that were discussed and discarded, there was the bombing of a dozen “Jewish” locations in New York and the kidnapping of Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger (whose policies Nosair and Siddig obscurely blamed for the troubles in Bosnia). Siddig consulted Omar Abdel Rahman at various stages in these discussions. The blind sheikh was not troubled by the idea of a terrorist campaign but suggested that he hit military, rather than civilian, targets.
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“Siddig was like a one-man jihad machine,” recalled the JTTF's Corrigan. “He'd be driving a taxi cab, and he would think about, here's an airport, if a plane came in here, you'd be able to shoot it. This is a building that has an open front in order to meet.”

In late 1992 and early 1993, Siddig began to finalize his list of targets and select a team, which included Abdullah Rashid, some of the Pennsylvania trainees, and various other people he knew, including Victor Alvarez, a Latino American who had converted to Islam after dabbling in Santeria, as well as three Sudanese immigrants who had not yet attained citizenship.

The scope of the plan was staggering. Siddig and his team would drive cars and trucks laden with bombs into the Lincoln and Holland tunnels, set the detonators on timers, then flee. There would be other simultaneous attacks—car bombings in underground parking garages below the United Nations and the FBI's New York field office.

“Siddig Ali was buoyed by the fact that a successful plot had taken place, but the competitor aspect of his nature was that he wanted to outdo the other guys,” recalled former FBI agent Chris Voss, who also served on the JTTF. “And he felt bad that he had been left out, so he wanted to create a plot that was bigger and better, he had to outdo them.”

In order to upstage the World Trade Center plotters, Siddig Ali had decided to kill thousands of New Yorkers in a single “Day of Terror.” All he had to do was avoid getting caught.

While Siddig was narrowing his focus to the home front, Abdullah Rashid was becoming more and more international.

A typical day at the Third World Relief Agency involved people going in and out of the offices with bags full of cash. At one point, aides to Bosnian president Izetbegovic began to worry that their boss was gay, after he locked himself in an apartment for days on end with Fatih El Hassanein, the charity's titular head. They voiced their concerns to Bosnia's ambassador to the UK, Muhammad Filipovic, who reassured them. “Don't worry about that,” he said. “They are counting the money.”
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Bilal Philips summoned Rashid to Austria to meet with El Hassanein's brother, Sukarno, the number-three man at TWRA, under Hasan Cengic.

Rashid was a typical customer: he left with a lot of cash. He went back to New York with $20,000: $10,000 in his pocket and another $10,000 hidden in his pants, in order to evade the need for a Customs declaration. He made more trips,
and so did Abu Ubaidah. Eventually the two brought back between $80,000 and $100,000 in cash for Project Bosnia.
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On another occasion, Rashid attempted to travel to Bosnia himself. He was assisted in this task by an American Muslim he had met through Tahir. They made it as far as Zagreb but were turned away at the border.
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Although Project Bosnia was still nominally focused on Bosnia, Siddig's Day of Terror was increasingly the fixation of Rashid's battalion of trainees. Siddig broached the idea of bombing the tunnels to selected members of the Pennsylvania team—and to Rashid.

There is some ambiguity about Rashid's response to Siddig's overtures. In conversations taped by the FBI, he seemed to equivocate about hitting American targets. During a May 30, 1993, conversation in which Siddig was asking for detonators and other supplies, Rashid replied,

If it's not used for jihad,
akie
[brother], so I got, I got blockbusters and mortar rockets and a few others. Your doing it, it has to be for jihad,
akie
. It has to be used for the widows and children (unintelligible words) and in Zagreb and Bosnia and stuff like that.

This exchange took place a few short weeks before the Day of Terror arrests. Later, Rashid specified that he was going to talk to “the head man from Project Bosnia”—Bilal Philips—about getting money, but that Philips was interested only in jihad outside of America.

When pressed by Siddig, Rashid agreed to obtain the detonators, but there is no clear evidence that he followed up with action. Rashid's lawyer, interviewed in 2008, said Rashid was “bullshitting” Siddig in the hopes that this plan, like so many before it, would simply fall by the wayside.
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“[Rashid's] passion was jihad, but overseas,” recalled Tom Corrigan. “And even in his phone conversations with people, if there were events that occurred over in Bosnia that he was very upset about, he would get almost weepy. He'd get very angry with what was going on over there.”
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Yet it's also quite clear from the transcript of the conversation that Rashid understood that Siddig was talking about setting off bombs in New York as an act of jihad. Rashid's objections to the plan were pretty mild in comparison to the
magnitude of the crime Siddig was planning, and, needless to say, he didn't alert the police about a mass homicide in the making.

However, he did call Bilal Philips. As Philips told the story, Rashid called him and said the trainees were talking about doing jihad in the United States. (Philips blamed an FBI informant, Emad Salem, for inciting the group to violence, but this claim is not supported by surveillance tapes and testimony about the case.) As Philips recalled the conversation:

When, uh, Doc [short for Doctor Rashid] heard about it, you know, he was quite upset. He wanted to stop it, told them, “Don't do it, this is not good,” and so on so on. And Doc called me up, and told me about it and I told him, “Yes, definitely, you know, disband this group and get them out of there. Let them go to some other country or whatever.”

You know, I said, send them anywhere there is some other conflict or where Muslims are suffering, if they wanted to go and do something, this is where they should do it, in the areas of conflict not in, you know, in the United States. It was just totally inappropriate. It becomes, some kind of, you know, terrorism really, you know, unleashing violence against civilian population. It's not acceptable.
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One front in particular looked promising: the Philippines. In May, Philips and Rashid flew to the Philippines, where Muslim separatists were fighting the government in the south of the country. There, they met with Mohammed Jamal Khalifa, a Saudi businessman and a volunteer with the Muslim World League. Khalifa was also the brother-in-law of Osama bin Laden, and U.S. intelligence later believed he was an al Qaeda financier with connections to Ramzi Yousef.

Philips assumed that Khalifa could use his connections to businesses and Muslim relief efforts in the south to arrange an introduction with the separatists. According to both Philips and Rashid, the meeting didn't take place. The visit was intended to give Rashid a feel for the location, and a subsequent trip was planned to advance the project.
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In one respect, at least, the trip was a smashing success. Rashid was enamored of the separatists and thought that the spirit of jihad was alive and well in Mindanao. It didn't hurt that he had met a young Filipino woman whom he began
to court as a second wife (to the great annoyance of the wife he already had in Brooklyn).

When Rashid returned to the States, he waxed on about the trip and the worthiness of the separatists' cause. After hearing Rashid's stories, Siddig Ali was moved. He would indeed be interested in relocating his jihad to the Philippines— just as soon as he was finished with his jihad against New York.
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In June Siddig finalized the list of targets and began to purchase components for his bombs. Financing came from Mohammed Saleh, a Hamas associate, and not from the Project Bosnia bankroll (although the team's members had been trained on TWRA's dime). Siddig told his coconspirators that they would all escape to the Philippines after the bombs went off.

The team rented a safe house in Queens so that they could start to build the bombs—at which point the plan fell apart.

The JTTF had been watching Siddig and Rashid for months, but after the World Trade Center bombing, the Justice Department decided Corrigan and his team deserved the resources they had been asking for all along. The surveillance was stepped up dramatically, and the investigators were given permission to reactivate Emad Salem, a strong informant whom the FBI had unwisely fired the year before. Salem taped nearly every conversation he had with Siddig. He joined the conspiracy and was given the job of finding a safe house—which the FBI then wired for video.
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On June 14 Rashid, Siddig, and Salem met to discuss their plans. Rashid was asked about his perennially delayed efforts to obtain detonators and other supplies Siddig needed to complete his preparations. Rashid assured them that he was working on it and then said he was leaving for the Philippines at the end of the week. On hearing this, the authorities decided to move in.
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On the evening of June 24, they burst into the safe house and arrested eight people inside, including Siddig, in the act of building their bombs.

Rashid wasn't at the safe house, but he was arrested at his home the same night. His wife, Alia, was out of town when it came down. She returned to New York and visited Rashid in prison. On the ride back, she found herself in a car with Siddig Ali's wife, Shema. It was the first time the two had met.

“My husband told me if anything happened, there's a righteous brother out there, you know, call him,” said Shema.

“What's the brother's name?” Alia asked.

“Rashid.”

“Well,” Alia replied, “the righteous brother's in jail, so how can you call him?”

A number of people escaped prosecution, for various reasons. Bilal Philips had left the country but was named by prosecutors as an unindicted coconspirator (for which he blames Emad Salem). Today he lives in Qatar, where he works in Islamic education. Some years after the events in New York, he gave his view about the United States during a 2003 interview:

The United States considers any serious Islamic action as contrary to its cultural principles. I am one of those who believe that the clash of civilizations is a reality. So I say that western culture led by the United States is enemy of Islam, as it seeks to oblige the Islamic culture to accept its secular system.
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In a 2010 interview with the author, he did not back down from this view, although he phrased the premise in slightly softer terms:

[The] secular outlook on life, is completely, completely opposite to the
shariah
perspective, where everything is looked at from the perspective of God and the law of God. [ … ] So that obviously is a foundational clash. It's a clash of concepts. I'm not necessarily saying it has to be a military clash, but it's a clash of concepts, right? And then the issue of democracy, you know, where the fundamental concept of human beings making laws for the whole society, in all aspects, [is] again in conflict with the
shariah
perspective, where that is the role of God.
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One person who slipped through the cracks was former marine gunnery sergeant Qaseem Uqdah, the head of the Muslim Military Members organization, who provided Philips and al Qaeda member Tahir with information about Muslim soldiers who could be recruited for the Bosnia project.

During his trial Rashid used a false name when testifying about “the marine sergeant,” and JTTF investigators never learned the marine's name. The CIA had spotted Rashid and Philips together. After sneaking a look at documents carried by Philips on an international trip, they pegged him as someone who had an interest in infiltrating the U.S. military, but Uqdah never came to their attention.
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Uqdah was subsequently hired by Abdurrahman Alamoudi's American Muslim Council (AMC) to head outreach to Muslims in the military, an operation that later spun off into its own organization, the American Muslim Armed Forces and Veterans Affairs Council (AMAFVAC).

In his capacity with AMC and later with AMAFVAC, Uqdah was responsible for selecting, training, and certifying Muslim chaplains for the U.S. military. The chaplaincy program was created in large part thanks to Philips's success in converting soldiers during the Gulf War. Uqdah continues to be involved with the certification of Muslim military chaplains to this day.
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I began trying to reach Uqdah for comment on the Bosnia program in May 2009. I followed up with periodic e-mails through 2010 describing the general nature of my questions and my contacts with Rashid and Philips. While writing this book, I also began trying to reach him by phone. Calls to his office were met with a busy signal; calls to his cell phone went directly to voicemail; calls to his home went unanswered.

Finally, in November 2010, I placed a call to Uqdah from a Washington, D.C., phone number, which I had not provided to him in my e-mails. This time, I got through.

We spoke for about ten minutes. Uqdah informed me he had received my previous messages and that he was dealing with serious health issues. He said he was focused on his family and his health and would not comment on anything for the book or clarify his role in the Bosnia recruitment program.

“Whatever you're going to print, you're going to print,” he said. “As long as it's the truth, we're good.” He refused to answer any question that related to the program or his actions.

Aside from its obvious ambition, there are a number of interesting features in the Day of Terror plot and its relation to the war in Bosnia. Without the Bosnian cause to draw the participants together, the plot would likely have failed to gain critical mass. And although I was unable to find evidence that the Third World Relief Agency funded the bombing plot directly, it did finance the activities that brought most of the conspirators together.