In early March 1993, while searching the New Jersey offices of Allied Signal, a scientific research company, FBI agents and New York City police attached to the Joint Terrorism Task Force (JTTF) seized a computer hard-drive belonging to Nidal Ayyad. A week earlier, Ayyad and his confederates had bombed the World Trade Center.
Rutgers-educated with a chemical-engineering degree, the ostensibly Americanized Ayyad was widely regarded as an unlikely terrorist. JTTF agents knew better. In 1993, they were not so much discovering as rediscovering the Kuwaiti-born Palestinian. They’d first encountered him four years earlier among a fanatical group of young Muslim men engaged in paramilitary training at a remote shooting range in Calverton, Long Island. The 1989 investigation, unfortunately, was dropped.
The group was a budding jihadist militia — a “battalion of Islam” as Omar Abdel Rahman, the notorious “Blind Sheikh,” liked to put it. As the battalion’s inspirational leader, Abdel Rahman taught that the happenstance of being vastly out-numbered and under-armed was no justification for refraining from the duty of jihad. “The individual work, and the jihad done by the individuals whether separately or in groups, is work Islam has approved,” he explained. There wasn’t time to develop a larger force. “If we said, ‘Let us wait til the establishment of an Islamic army,’ then we have eliminated jihad, then jihad does not exist.” The solemn duty to render Islam triumphant would go unfulfilled.
No, the battles would have to be carried out by embedded jihadist cells. “Power is in the guerrilla warfare,” the cleric told them. “There is power in city battles.” Shiite Hezbollah had already proved it in 1983 by killing 241 United States marines who were on a peace-keeping mission in Lebanon. Thus, Abdel Rahman brayed to a throng of supporters at a 1990 rally in Denmark, “If Muslim battalions were to do five or six operations to the Americans in surprise attacks like the one that was done against them in Lebanon, the Americans would have exited [the Persian Gulf] and gathered their armies and gone back . . . to their country.”
The Blind Sheikh’s sentiments were far from unknown to the JTTF. And the men being monitored in Calverton in 1989 were just the type of battalion Abdel Rahman had in mind. They were already planning terrorist operations against the United States. Like Ayyad, several of the men who made the weekend training trips — men like Mohammed Salameh, Mahmud Abouhalima, and Sayyid Nosair — would carry out radical Islam’s declaration of war against the United States by striking the Twin Towers in 1993. And in so doing, they would take pains to foreshadow the cataclysmic attack to come on September 11, 2001.
That adumbral warning was right there on the hard-drive agents grabbed at Allied Signal. It was framed in a claim-of-responsibility letter which, unlike the first one mailed by the bombers to the
New York Times, had been left unsent, interrupted by Ayyad’s arrest:
We are, the Liberation Army fifth battalion, again.
Unfortunately, our calculations were not very accurate this time.
However, we promise you that next time it will be very precise and World Trade Center will continue to be one our [sic] targets unless our [space] demands have been met.
Ayyad’s monstrously rueful damage assessment was spot on: Belying the apocalyptic scene at Ground Zero, the battalion had failed. It was an absolute miracle, one that has been overlooked ever since. But the mass-murder that didn’t happen proved more consequential than any other terror-related development in the tumultuous 1990s.
THE MIRACLE
It had been the intention of the World Trade Center bombers to annihilate tens of thousands of Americans, in addition to rendering the world’s most significant financial district uninhabitable. Detonation was consciously timed for maximum carnage: high noon on a Friday, when as many as 120,000 business professionals, laborers, diners, tourists, and area residents typically swarmed the Twin Towers and their immediate Wall Street environs.
Not content with their sophisticated, powerfully combustible urea-nitrate mixture, the jihadists also laced the compound with deadly sodium cyanide and attempted to boost the explosion with hydrogen tanks. The aim was a horror virtually unimaginable back then (though it is, today, an omnipresent fear): wide dispersal of a lethal, aerated chemical, killing the thousands too distant to be obliterated by the sheer force of the blast.
The battalion, however, miscalculated. They’d hoped to place the bomb close enough to primary support structures that one tower, in its decimation, might topple into the second. The van, though, had been parked many yards away from the ideal location. True, the aftermath resembled the ninth ring of hell, but the devastation was orders of magnitude less than it could have been. Added to this good fortune, the hydrogen tanks had been destroyed upon detonation, adding nothing but shards to the impact. And another break: the cyanide failed to vaporize — simply burning away like the rest of the bomb components.
Thus the miracle: Only seven lives were lost in the attack. No one then, or since, has had a good explanation for why. Hundreds of people were injured, mainly due to smoke inhalation during their frantic flight down scores of narrow staircases — harrowing, but a coup compared to being gassed, as the jihadists planned. It makes no sense, however, that the death toll was not geometrically higher given the time of day, the lethal combination of bursting pipes and shredded power lines, as well as wintry weather that shuttered indoors many who would otherwise have been out for lunch or a leisurely stroll. All loss of life to terror is an outrage, but with tens of thousands of people in and around the complex at zero-hour, that there were only seven deaths surely qualifies as a suspension of nature’s laws.
Every silver lining, though, has its dark cloud.
The miracle kept America’s guard down. As shocking as the World Trade Center bombing was to the national psyche, the finite casualties and relatively modest damage (estimated at less than a billion dollars, comparative chump change) proved crucial to our perception of, and response to, the radical Islam. Ayyad’s letter conjured visions of a next time, but what consumes human beings is this time. The strike haughtily announced the global jihad with a dagger aimed at the Western economy’s beating heart. Fright aside, though, the dagger was a pin-prick. Declaration of war or not, without wartime casualty levels there would be no hue and cry for a wartime response or a new type of enforcement paradigm.
Had the carnage been of 9/11 dimensions, there would unquestionably have been a searching inquiry into who had attacked the United States, who had abetted the attack, and how the nation should respond. Instead, the wheels of rote reaction began to spin. From the get-go, the attack was regarded as a crime, investigated as a crime, and prosecuted as a crime.
CATHARSIS ON STAGE
The modest death toll helped bring another foible of human nature into play. Unlike 9/11, the 1993 World Trade Center bombing was not a suicide attack. The terrorists hoped to live to fight another day. They did, but some of them, of course, were captured. When the public is roused, what it most wants is catharsis. Its sense of justice demands that the guilty be identified, seen openly, and called to account. The legal system is our default center-stage for such dramas.
By contrast, the 9/11 hijackers self-immolated. That, however, did not mean Americans would be denied their catharsis. The focus simply shifted from the culpable parties who had committed the atrocity to the politically useful public officials who “allowed” it to happen, and who were ceremonially flayed by sundry blue-ribbon investigations. That these officials were exponentially less culpable mattered little in our public drama. With the jihadists off to Allah’s promised orgiastic paradise, someone had to take the heat.
Admittedly, our operating assumptions about radical Islam’s intentions and capabilities called for less wariness before the 1993 World Trade Center bombing than after. The performance of law enforcement and the intelligence community, however, was at least as abysmal, if not worse, in the run-up to that attack than in the years just prior to 9/11. Why is the earlier event remembered as a government triumph but the latter as a failure of such monumental proportions that a wholesale restructuring of the intelligence community was warranted? Very simply, because the 1993 bombing, unlike 9/11, featured captured defendants. Core participants were available to satisfy our craving for a public accounting.
This fact-of-life had a variety of negative ramifications. First, with minimal fatalities and a bullet-dodging perception that things could have been much worse, the public was content to let events unfold and information trickle out through the long and winding road of court proceedings. The quick arrests of five suspects a week after the bombing provided both a comforting image of law enforcement efficiency and some worthy objects for the public’s wrath. The arrests of another fourteen terrorists just four months later, under circumstances where a frightful plot to bomb other New York City landmarks was snuffed out before it could become a serious threat, underscored the sense that the threat was well-contained — a perception bolstered by the subsequent arrest of the Blind Sheikh, suggesting that the blight’s catalyst had been neutralized.
Unaware that there had been abundant reason for government to foresee radical Islam’s bursting on the American scene, satisfied that the problem was now under control, the public — and a media dependably less curious with a Democratic administration in the White House — did not rise up in that shopworn mantra of scandal: what did you know and when did you know it?
Second, law enforcement is a very effective propaganda tool in the hands of policy makers who don’t see the need, or lack the will, to adopt more controversial, preemptive approaches to national-security challenges. The criminal justice process presents limitless opportunities to choreograph the illusion of progress.
A successful non-suicide terrorist attack will typically feature an immediate post-event press conference to assure the public that an alphabet soup of enforcement bureaucracies is on red-alert, scouring the earth for clues. Soon afterward follows the press conference to announce that arrests have been made. Then, court appearances present the accused terrorists and publicize the charges as well as some of the ghastly supporting evidence.
Within a few weeks, there will be an indictment with additional charges, attendant press releases, and, perhaps, another bells-and-whistles press conference — or even two, one by the district U.S. attorney and one by the Attorney General in Washington. Hard on that follows the arraignment, another closely scrutinized public appearance of the accused. Subsequently, a flurry of activity precedes the much-anticipated trial: motion practice, voluminous discovery, pretrial hearings, perhaps superseding indictments.
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