'We've Hit The Targets'

At the time it seemed an empty boast, if a chilling one. On Feb. 7, 1995, Ramzi Yousef, considered the mastermind of the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, was being escorted in shackles back to New York City. The FBI had just seized Yousef in Pakistan, and agents felt they could crow a little. An FBI SWAT commando pulled up his captive's blindfold and nudged him as they flew in a helicopter over mid-Manhattan, pointing to the World Trade Center's lights glowing in the clear night. "Look down there," he told Yousef. "They're still standing." Yousef replied, "They wouldn't be if I had enough money and explosives." Recalls Lewis Schiliro, a former head of the FBI's New York field office, "He was as cold as ice." Today Ramzi Yousef is safely in prison, as are five of his confederates from the failed 1993 attempt. But Yousef's passion for killing Americans is flourishing in a loose network of tiny Islamic fundamentalist terror groups spread around the world. And the main suspect in the worst foreign attack on the continental United States is the chief impresario and financier of that network, Osama bin Laden, the gaunt, bearded Saudi exile who in February 1998 declared all Americans to be legitimate targets of jihad, or holy war. Bin Laden has nursed a fervent hatred of the United States since its troops landed on Saudi soil to fight the gulf war, and he has haunted the worst nightmares of U.S. security officials for years. The scion of a wealthy Saudi magnate, he was linked to the 1998 twin U.S. Embassy bombings in Africa and the explosion aboard the USS Cole in Yemen last year. But until last Tuesday, bin Laden had not succeeded in shedding blood on American soil.

By the end of America's day of horror, U.S. intelligence officials said, most people inside the federal government were almost certain--about 90 percent certain, the consensus had it--that bin Laden and his global organization, Al Qaeda (The Base), were behind the attacks. One key reason: shortly after the suicide attacks, a source with access to intelligence told NEWSWEEK, U.S. intelligence picked up communications among bin Laden associates relaying a message: "We've hit the targets."

On Wednesday, the FBI detained several people whom they are now describing as "material witnesses" in Boston and south Florida. Authorities also said they had identified the two or three terrorists who hijacked each plane. The suspects were said to have entered the country from all over the world, and some had been living in the United States for up to a year. Early leads suggest the team had domestic support networks rooted in the Boston area, but some of the bombers may have come from Canada, which also harbored the terrorist cell that planned the millennium bombing in Los Angeles. A British intelligence source told NEWSWEEK that "two brothers, working on United Arab Emirates passports, one of them a trained pilot, have been placed at the Boston airport." Even so, investigators had only just begun to ferret out the full dimensions of the plot. "We're in Oklahoma mode now," said one FBI counterterrorism agent, referring to the frenzy of police work that followed the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing. He added: "This is a rubble pile that makes Oklahoma City look like a sandbox." New FBI chief Robert Mueller, on only his second week of work, conducted a 6 p.m. conference call with special agents in charge of all the 56 field offices. He announced that Washington would take control of the biggest investigation in the agency's history and appointed veteran deputy director Tom Pickard to run it. FBI officials said they knew this probe was different from anything else they'd ever done. "This is not going to be a classic forensic investigation," said the counterterrorism agent. "You're not looking for a traditional bomb 'signature' like the rear axle of the Ryder truck. The bomb signature is a plane in the sky." In other words, there may be little forensic evidence to investigate.

For the moment the link to bin Laden and Ramzi Yousef appeared to be largely circumstantial. Investigators believe that radical Egyptian organizations were directly behind the suicide attacks. One, Al Gamaa al Islamiya, was run by Sheik Omar Abdel-Rahman, the blind Muslim cleric who is serving a prison term in Minnesota for allegedly conspiring with World Trade Center bombing suspects to blow up other New York landmarks. Bin Laden recently has turned complaints about Abdel-Rahman's imprisonment and treatment by U.S. authorities into a crusade, committing his followers to freeing the religious leader. U.S. officials have identified Ayman al-Zawahiri, the head of another Egyptian militant group that supports the sheik, as deputy leader of Al Qaeda. Abdel-Rahman is kept in solitary confinement, and a month ago U.S. authorities seized his radio.

The fast fingering of bin Laden also did not mask the fact that, like the rest of the country, U.S. officials were in a state of shock over what may go down as the most massive failure of military and intelligence readiness in the nation's history. Bush called last Tuesday's searing experience a demonstration of American fortitude. In truth it was a stunning display of America's vulnerability--now and well into the future. Always before, U.S. experts tended to dismiss the idea that terrorists could combine both suicidal fervor and technical skill and sophistication. The 1993 World Trade Center attack, in which conspirators exploded a bomb-laden van in the basement, was seen as just another ragged effort; afterward the terrorists gave themselves away when one was stupid enough to try to get his deposit back on the rental van. Similarly, when an Algerian terrorist was arrested crossing the border from Canada just before Y2K, his obvious nervousness gave him away to an alert Customs official.

By contrast, last Tuesday's coordinated assault on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon was as sophisticated a terror attack as U.S. investigators have seen. A chief mystery was how the culprits might have found four apparently trained pilots to fly suicide missions. One frightening prospect is that bin Laden is winning educated Arab elites to his cause, especially as the Palestinian intifada inflames the Arab world. The FBI has picked up previous hints of high-level help: in 1995 Abdul Hakim Murad, a Pakistani, was accused along with Yousef of a plot to bomb 11 U.S. airliners in a single "day of rage" against the United States. Murad, a commercial pilot, allegedly told investigators that he had been trained as a kamikaze pilot.