The Blind Sheikh

0:07The Record Friday, August twenty-fourth, two thousand one. The cable that Mary asked for goes out. Two names are added to a State Department watchlist called TIPOFF: Khalid al-Mihdhar and Nawaf al-Hazmi.

0:21The Record The Commission gives it one plain sentence: "Both Hazmi and Mihdhar were added to this watchlist on August 24."

0:29The Record Their names had been in CIA files since January two thousand, when the two men attended a meeting of al Qaeda operatives in Kuala Lumpur. Nineteen months. A watchlist stops people at the border. These two were already inside.

0:45The Record The machinery that was so slow in August two thousand one had been built, in part, by a case it had solved brilliantly, eight years before. That's where we're going.

1:00The Record From Will Sigmon Media. This is The Long Fuse. Episode five. The Blind Sheikh.

1:09The Record At the end of the last episode, the base had its founder and its organization chart. What it didn't have was a home.

1:19The Record By the fall of nineteen eighty-nine, the Commission says, bin Laden was famous enough among Islamic extremists that a Sudanese political leader, Hassan al-Turabi, urged him to move his whole organization to Sudan. But first, bin Laden went home, to Saudi Arabia.

1:37The Record In August nineteen ninety, Iraq invaded Kuwait. bin Laden proposed to the Saudi monarchy that he raise a force of mujahideen to take Kuwait back. He was turned down. The Saudis joined the American-led coalition instead, and agreed to let American forces be based in the Kingdom.

1:55The Record He and a number of clerics denounced it publicly. The government exiled the clerics, and took away bin Laden's passport. With help from a dissident member of the royal family, he got out, in April nineteen ninety-one, on the pretext of attending a religious gathering in Pakistan.

2:13The Record By nineteen ninety-four, the Saudi government would freeze his assets and revoke his citizenship. In the Commission's words, "He no longer had a country he could call his own."

2:24The Record He settled in Sudan. He built a highway from Khartoum to Port Sudan, on the Red Sea. He set up companies, bank accounts and charities across several continents. And according to the Commission, al Qaeda's finance officers used positions in those businesses to buy weapons, explosives and equipment.

2:46The Record In Khartoum, bin Laden kept talking about America. In early nineteen ninety-two, the Commission says, al Qaeda's leadership issued a fatwa calling for jihad against the Western, quote, "occupation" of Islamic lands, and specifically singling out American forces.

3:05The Record In the weeks that followed, the Report says, bin Laden gave an often-repeated lecture on the need to cut off "the head of the snake."

3:13The Record He was not yet the man at the top of everything. The Commission is careful here. He was, in its words, "just one among many diverse terrorist barons." His allies were fighting local wars: in Egypt, Algeria, Bosnia, Chechnya. What set him apart was his target. bin Laden, the Report says, concentrated on attacking the "far enemy" the United States.

3:39The Record And he ran businesses. Real ones. Years later, in a federal courtroom in Manhattan, one of his former employees described them under oath. His name is Jamal al-Fadl. You met him last episode. A prosecutor asked him about a company called the Khartoum Tannery.

3:58The Record Through the interpreter, he said: "We treat the skins of the cows, and then we export them abroad."

4:04The Record How had al Qaeda come to own part of a tannery? Al-Fadl said the Sudanese government owed them money, for a road. A highway, built by bin Laden's construction company. The prosecutor asked why the government paid them with a tannery.

4:19The Record "Because they don't have money."

4:21The Record Leather, roads, farms, trading companies. And behind them, the Commission says, al Qaeda men using those companies as cover for shopping trips, for weapons and equipment, from Europe to the Far East, as far as China, Malaysia, Ukraine and Belarus.

4:41The Record At the end of nineteen ninety-two, American troops went to Somalia, on a famine relief mission. Al Qaeda's leaders, the Commission says, formulated a fatwa demanding their eviction.

4:54The Record In December, bombs went off at two hotels in Aden, in Yemen, where American troops routinely stopped on the way to Somalia. Two people were killed. No Americans.

5:06The Record Then al Qaeda set up a cell in Nairobi, and used it to send weapons and trainers to the Somali warlords fighting American forces. Scores of trainers, the Report says, including most of the senior members of al Qaeda's military committee.

5:21The Record In October nineteen ninety-three, Somali militiamen shot down two American Black Hawk helicopters in Mogadishu. By early nineteen ninety-four, U.S. forces had withdrawn. The Commission does not say al Qaeda did it. It says the trainers "were later heard boasting" that their help led to the shootdown, and to the withdrawal.

5:43The Record A boast is not a fact. But it's the lesson they told each other: hit the Americans, and the Americans leave.

5:55The Record Meanwhile, in the United States. The Commission describes a spiritual guide to Egypt's two main militant Islamist groups: Sheikh Omar Abdel Rahman, called the Blind Sheikh. His preaching, the Report says, had inspired the assassination of Egypt's president, Anwar Sadat, in nineteen eighty-one.

6:16The Record In nineteen ninety he moved to the United States. He preached at mosques in New Jersey and Brooklyn. In speeches and writings, the Commission says, he "preached the message of Sayyid Qutb's Milestones." And it adds, "From his headquarters in Jersey City, he distributed messages calling for the murder of unbelievers."

6:40The Record "At 18 minutes after noon on February 26, 1993, a huge bomb went off beneath the two towers of the World Trade Center."

6:51The Record It was a truck bomb, left on level B-2 of the underground garage, with a timer. The men who left it drove away. It opened a hole seven stories up.

7:03The Record Six people died. More than a thousand were injured.

7:08The Record The man who planted it was named Ramzi Yousef. He fled to Pakistan that day. He said later that he had hoped to kill two hundred and fifty thousand people.

7:17The Record The investigation that followed was, by the Commission's account, excellent. Within days, the FBI identified a piece of wreckage as part of a Ryder rental van, reported stolen in Jersey City the day before the bombing.

7:36The Record The man who'd rented it, Mohammed Salameh, kept calling the rental office to get back his four-hundred-dollar deposit. The FBI arrested him there on March fourth.

7:46The Record Other arrests followed. They led to the Blind Sheikh's mosque. An informant learned of a plan to bomb New York landmarks, including the Holland and Lincoln tunnels. In June nineteen ninety-three, the FBI arrested the Blind Sheikh and others. Over the next years, federal prosecutors in Manhattan convicted the bombers, the Blind Sheikh, and eventually Ramzi Yousef himself.

8:11The Record And here the Commission makes a point that runs through this whole story. The success, it says, "created an impression that the law enforcement system was well-equipped to cope with terrorism." The trials "did not bring the Bin Ladin network to the attention of the public and policymakers." And the image that stuck "was not of clever Yousef but of stupid Salameh going back again and again to reclaim his $400 truck rental deposit."

8:42The Record There's one more thing al-Fadl told the jury about Khartoum, and the Commission found it serious enough to put in its report.

8:50The Record Around the end of nineteen ninety-three, he said, a senior al Qaeda man called him with an assignment. Someone in Khartoum claimed to have uranium. Al-Fadl's job was to find out if it was real.

9:04The Record The seller, as the Commission describes him, was a Sudanese military officer who had served in a previous government's cabinet. Through middlemen, a price came back. One and a half million dollars. In the Report's words, that "did not deter Bin Ladin."

9:22The Record Al-Fadl said he went to a meeting in a jeep, to a town north of Khartoum, with one of bin Laden's men. The al Qaeda side wanted to know the quality, and which country made it. According to the Commission, they were shown "a cylinder about 3 feet long, and one thought he could pronounce it genuine."

9:41The Record Al-Fadl testified that afterward he was told he'd done a great job, handed ten thousand dollars, and told not to tell anyone.

9:50The Record Al Qaeda, the Commission says, apparently bought the cylinder, "then discovered it to be bogus."

9:57The Record It failed. But the Report doesn't treat it as a joke. It quotes one of the al Qaeda representatives explaining the mission. "it's easy to kill more people with uranium."

10:11The Record Behind Yousef was someone the investigation barely touched. Yousef's uncle: Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the engineer from the last episode, by then working for Qatar's Ministry of Electricity and Water.

10:25The Record In the fall of nineteen ninety-two, while Yousef was building the bomb, the two spoke by phone many times. On November third, nineteen ninety-two, KSM wired six hundred and sixty dollars from Qatar to the bank account of one of Yousef's co-conspirators. The Commission's verdict on that: he "does not appear to have contributed any more substantially to this operation."

10:48The Record But the bombing changed him. By his own later account, Yousef's notoriety inspired him to plan attacks on the United States. In nineteen ninety-four, he went with Yousef to Manila. In an apartment there, the two planned what became known as the Manila air plot, or Bojinka: bombs on twelve American jumbo jets over the Pacific, within two days.

11:12The Record The plot came apart in January nineteen ninety-five, when Philippine authorities discovered Yousef's bomb-making operation in Manila. On February seventh, nineteen ninety-five, Yousef was arrested in Islamabad, after an accomplice turned him in.

11:27The Record By then, the uncle was back at his government job in Qatar.

11:56The Record In January nineteen ninety-six, federal prosecutors indicted him. The Commission says an official in Qatar "probably warned him about it." He fled. And in the Report's words, he "stayed at large to play a central part in the 9/11 attacks."

11:57The Record By the mid-nineties, Sudan was turning into a doubtful haven, as the Commission puts it. International pressure hurt Sudan's currency. bin Laden's companies ran short of money. He cut spending, and appointed a new financial manager, whom his followers, the Report says, saw as miserly.

12:12The Record And money is how al Qaeda lost Jamal al-Fadl. On the stand, the prosecutor asked him directly whether he had stolen money from bin Laden.

12:22The Record He said yes. About a hundred and ten thousand dollars, skimmed from deals selling goods like sugar to local companies.

12:30The Record The Commission records his grievance in one line: he resented a salary of five hundred dollars a month, while some of the Egyptians in al Qaeda were paid twelve hundred. In court, he put it like this:

12:43The Record "We talk about that a lot and there is no one listen, and it come a time I feel I have to do something for myself."

12:50The Record He paid back, he said, between twenty-five and thirty thousand. Not the rest. And he left.

12:58The Record In nineteen ninety-six, sometime between May and July by his account, he walked into an American embassy in a country he didn't name in court, and stood in the visa line. When his turn came, he testified, he was asked if he wanted a visa. "No, I don't want visa, but I have some information for your government."

13:18The Record The Commission calls what he became "a star informant for the United States." He told the Americans about the base, its oath, its businesses, its plans. Five years later, he'd tell a jury.

13:33The Record bin Laden's own time in Sudan was ending too. In June nineteen ninety-five, men sheltered in Sudan tried to assassinate Egypt's president, Hosni Mubarak, in Ethiopia. In November, a car bomb in Riyadh killed five Americans and two officials from India. In April nineteen ninety-six, the UN sanctioned Khartoum.

13:55The Record On May nineteenth, nineteen ninety-six, bin Laden left Sudan. In the Commission's words, "significantly weakened, despite his ambitions and organizational skills." He went back to Afghanistan.

14:08The Record August twenty-fourth, two thousand one. Two names on a watchlist. Inside the country, the search was Jane's. She began drafting the request that would send FBI agents in New York looking for Khalid al-Mihdhar.

14:27The Record Next time: the year bin Laden declared war on America, out loud, and almost nobody listened. But first, August twenty-eighth. Fourteen days.