COLUMN ONE : Weaving a Wide Web of Terror : The plan, officials say, was to blow up 11 U.S. airliners in one day. The probe into the foiled plot points to the accused mastermind of the trade center blast and to a network of Muslim veterans of the Afghan War.

They called the project Bojinka, “the explosion.” The plan was devastating in its complexity and technical brilliance. If it had not been foiled, it might have been the worst terrorist attack in U.S. history.

Project Bojinka was a plan to blow up 11 U.S. airliners over the Pacific in a day of rage at the United States. According to investigators, it called for five Muslim terrorists to plant virtually undetectable bombs aboard the planes, all jumbo jets, in an intricately synchronized plan that had the bombers changing planes as many as four times in a day.

The U.S. government has accused Ramzi Ahmed Yousef, the Pakistani suspected of engineering the New York World Trade Center bombing, of being the mastermind behind the Bojinka plot. Yousef was captured in Pakistan in February and is awaiting trial in New York on charges of planning both attacks. If convicted, he will face the death penalty.

Also charged in the airliner plot is a 27-year-old Pakistani named Abdul Hakim Murad, who was arrested by police in an apartment here on Jan. 6. Police said they found pipe bombs, bomb-making manuals and a computer with details of the Bojinka plot squirreled away on its hard disk. Murad was extradited to New York.

Both men have pleaded not guilty.

While the 14-count federal indictment in New York accused the two of conspiring to “set fire to, damage, destroy, disable and wreck aircraft in the special aircraft jurisdiction of the United States,” the massive scope of the plan has never been disclosed.

The two were also accused in the Philippines of planning to assassinate Pope John Paul II while he visited the country in January. That plan is now believed to have been designed to confuse authorities and deflect attention from their plan to blow up the airplanes.

Philippine and Western intelligence experts said in interviews that the investigation into the Bojinka plot has also provided disturbing evidence of the existence of a worldwide network of terrorists who received weapons training and firebrand religious indoctrination during the decade-long international effort to defeat the Soviet Union in Afghanistan.

The international brigades of Afghan moujahedeen, or resistance fighters, were recruited throughout the Islamic world as part of a covert, $4-billion effort in the 1970s and ‘80s by the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency and Saudi Arabia to drive the Soviets from Afghanistan. Since the Soviet-installed government fell in 1992, many of the fighters have returned to their home countries as converts to radical Islam determined to overthrow secular regimes and attack the “Satan” United States for its support of Israel.

“We believe there is a worldwide organization of Muslims espousing extremism to pursue their religious and political ends,” said Alexander P. Aguirre, the Philippines’ undersecretary of the interior and a former police chief of Manila. He said no one had yet proved a link between the terrorists and a specific state sponsor.

A recent study by Jane’s Intelligence Review, a respected British publication with a wide circulation in the intelligence community, estimated that there are about 14,000 foreign veterans of the Afghan War. It said they have taken commanding roles in terrorist groups in Algeria, Egypt, Yemen, Jordan, the West Bank and as far afield as China and the Philippines.

“It’s like a veterans association of Afghanistan,” said one European expert on terrorism. “When the Afghan War ended, these people turned around and looked for a new cause. Jerusalem became a holy place in their eyes, and as a spinoff they vowed to fight secularism in their home states.”

*

Philippine officials acknowledge that the thwarting of Project Bojinka owed less to investigatory prowess than to an accident that occurred Jan. 6. They allege that Yousef and Murad were mixing bomb material in the sink of an apartment in Manila when the mixture suddenly began spewing clouds of smoke.

“It smelled like firecrackers everywhere,” recalled one employee of the Dona Josefa apartments. As firemen quickly extinguished the blaze, Yousef and Murad allegedly strolled through the lobby. Yousef, who had rented the sixth-floor apartment under the name of Naji Haddad, calmly chatted on a cellular telephone as he left the building, the employee said.

Philippine authorities said that much of what they know about events preceding the fire came from debriefing Murad. They said he waived his right to an attorney and spoke openly about the plot in an apparent effort to shift the main responsibility to Yousef.

Police say that Yousef and Murad hid in a karaoke bar not far from the apartment building until the firemen left and that Yousef asked Murad to return to the apartment to remove valuable documents and paraphernalia. But while Murad was packing up that night, police returned to the apartment armed with a search warrant.

According to Philippine authorities, they had been warned by overseas intelligence agencies that Muslim extremists were trying to get to the Philippines to assassinate the Pope, who was scheduled to arrive in mid-January, just a week after the fire. The Dona Josefa is only 200 yards from the Papal Nunciature, the Vatican’s embassy in Manila, where the Pope would be staying.

Police were horrified to find in the apartment Roman Catholic vestments tailored to match clothes worn by members of the Pope’s entourage, down to the papal buttons. They also found maps of the Pope’s public schedule in Manila and pipe bombs that were intended to be placed in the road in an effort to kill him.

Police first thought the Pope was the prime target; only after Murad was questioned and the disk on the apartment’s computer was decoded did details of the Bojinka plan emerge. Yousef eluded a police dragnet, and three days later the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration issued a warning to U.S. airlines operating in Asia to be on maximum alert for a new kind of bomb.

A notebook written in Arabic was among the items recovered from the apartment. “It was like a cookbook with step-by-step instructions on how to make various bombs,” said one Philippine official, adding that the FBI later found fingerprints on the notebook. They matched those of Yousef.

*

Philippine authorities say they have evidence that Yousef carried out a practice run for the Bojinka plot.

On Dec. 11, 1994, a bomb exploded aboard Philippine Airlines Flight 434 bound for Tokyo. The bomb killed a Japanese tourist seated near the explosive, which was taped under a seat in the economy section, and wounded 10 others. The plane made an emergency landing in Guam.

It was the first terrorist bombing of a jetliner in five years.

Shortly after the incident, authorities say, a man telephoned the Associated Press in Manila and claimed the attack was the work of the Abu Sayyaf group, a Muslim extremist organization that has been carrying out terrorist attacks in the southern Philippine province of Mindanao for five years.

Murad told investigators that a jubilant Yousef had made the call himself as part of a long-term cooperation arrangement between Yousef and Abu Sayyaf.

According to authorities’ reconstruction of the bombing, Yousef purchased a ticket at a Manila travel agency in the name of Amaldo Forlani, a name he borrowed from a computer database on Italian politicians. Yousef’s photo was identified by airline and travel agency personnel. The ticket was for a flight from Manila to the southern city of Cebu, where Yousef left the plane and returned to Manila, leaving the bomb under his seat for the second leg of the journey to Tokyo.

Well-Hidden Bomb

An engineering graduate of Britain’s Swansea University, Yousef had created a virtually undetectable bomb. From the bomb formula found in the computer and evidence provided by Murad, authorities deduced that Yousef had learned to make a stable, liquid form of nitroglycerin, the explosive component of TNT. Liquid bombs are the most difficult to manufacture because of the volatility of the chemicals.

Yousef, who reportedly wears contact lenses, concealed the nitroglycerin compound in a bottle normally used to hold saline solution for wetting lenses.

Murad told authorities that after the plane took off, Yousef locked himself in a restroom and mixed a highly explosive form of nitroglycerin. He assembled the bomb and later taped the package under the life preserver beneath his seat.

*

According to Murad, authorities said, the Philippine Airlines bomb provided the model for the Bojinka plan. Five terrorists, including Yousef and Murad, would fan out over Asia, targeting U.S. airlines that flew multi-stop routes.

For example, one man, code-named Obaid, would fly from Singapore to Hong Kong on United Airlines. He would plant the bomb on the plane and then exit in Hong Kong. But the plane would proceed to Los Angeles, with the explosion occurring in the middle of its 11-hour journey.

Obaid, meanwhile, would board another United flight arriving from the United States and bound for Singapore. He would repeat the process but set the timer for 24 hours. He would exit in Singapore and escape to Pakistan, while the bomb was carried back to Hong Kong and out over the Pacific.

In all, the five terrorists would place bombs aboard 11 U.S. planes and meet again later in Karachi, Pakistan.

Although only two of the five alleged plotters have been caught, the other three have been tentatively identified from photographs that were also found on the computer’s hard disk, in a file that had been erased. Yousef was apparently unaware that such files could be restored easily by authorities.

One of the accomplices has been positively identified as an Afghan named Wali Khan Amin Shah, who had been under surveillance in the Philippines as a possible terrorist. Police believe another of the suspects may have been Yousef’s brother. The fifth accomplice’s name has not been revealed.

“You have to be concerned knowing that there are these three guys out there, possibly with the materials for bombs and instructions for getting them aboard planes,” said a Western terrorism expert who asked to remain anonymous.

That is why, he said, all U.S. airlines are still imposing strict security precautions on flights leaving Asia, even though Yousef and Murad are in jail.

On Monday, the Philippine government acknowledged that it has been given a 90-day ultimatum by the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration to tighten security at Manila airport or face a U.S. landing prohibition on all aircraft that have traveled to Manila.

In Washington, spokesmen for the CIA and other U.S. government agencies refused to comment on the record. But one knowledgeable official said: “It’s true that these plans were under way, and it’s true that we learned about them before they could be put into action. As a result of what the U.S. government learned, the FAA put security measures into effect to protect U.S. airlines.”

*

With Murad’s help, more details about the life of the man known as Ramzi Yousef have come into focus. Like Murad, he is 27. He is an ethnic Baluchi whose family comes from the Pakistani province of Baluchistan, near the Iranian border.

But Yousef, whose real name appears to be Abdul Basit, grew up in the Persian Gulf oil sheikdom of Kuwait, where his father is believed to have been an engineer with Kuwaiti Airlines for many years. Before the Persian Gulf War, there were thousands of Pakistanis in Kuwait making a living as everything from taxi drivers to doctors.

Murad told authorities that he first met Yousef in Kuwait when they were teen-agers; Murad’s father was working in the emirate as an engineer for the Kuwait Petroleum Corp.

Kuwait in those days was a hotbed of Palestinian revolutionary activity. Thousands of Palestinians with Jordanian passports worked and studied there with the help of Kuwaiti government grants and scholarships aimed at helping people from the Israeli-occupied territories.

Both Yousef and Murad learned to speak Arabic with the distinctive Palestinian accent, and in their most formative years they inhaled the anti-U.S. rhetoric of the most radical Palestinian guerrilla movements.

According to Murad, the two lost track of each other when they both left to seek educations in Britain. Murad was determined to become an airline pilot and told authorities that he spent a year in the United States, studying at flight schools in San Antonio and in Schenectady, N.Y., and finally graduating from an aviation academy in North Carolina with a temporary commercial pilot’s license.

Murad said Yousef sought him out in New York City in 1992. Yousef talked to him about the need to strike against U.S. interests because of the aid the United States was giving Israel. Philippine authorities said Murad reported that Yousef asked him to survey New York City and find a target for a bomb that would produce maximum casualties.

They said Murad told them he suggested to Yousef one place where thousands of people congregate every day: the World Trade Center in New York’s financial district.

Murad said he left for Pakistan almost immediately but that four months later, in February, 1993, he was surprised to hear on the radio that terrorists had bombed the twin towers in lower Manhattan, killing six people and injuring 1,000 others.

4 Men Draw Sentences

Four men were convicted of planting the bomb at the World Trade Center and sentenced to 240 years each. A separate trial is under way in Manhattan in which an Egyptian cleric, Sheik Omar Abdel Rahman, and 10 others are charged with planning to blow up two tunnels linking New York and New Jersey, as well as the United Nations headquarters and the Manhattan headquarters of the FBI.

Federal prosecutors maintain that the bombing plots and the attack on the trade center are related.

How did a Pakistani teen-ager come to know a cleric from Egypt who had transplanted himself to New Jersey? One thread seems to link them: Afghanistan.

Authorities believe that Yousef trained alongside Arab moujahedeen in Peshawar, Pakistan, a region that borders Afghanistan.

Yousef’s uncle, Zahid Sheik, lived and worked in Peshawar for a Saudi-funded charity called Mercy International, which provided assistance to Afghan refugees.

Peshawar also was the base for an Egyptian radical named Mohammed Shawky Islambouli, the brother of the man who led the 1981 assassination of Egyptian President Anwar Sadat. Islambouli is a top commander of the Gamaa al Islamiya, or Islamic Group, and has been sentenced to death in absentia for trying to overthrow the government of Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak.

Abdel Rahman visited Islambouli in Peshawar in 1990 and is now considered the spiritual leader of Gamaa al Islamiya. Both of Abdel Rahman’s sons fought in Afghanistan, as did Mahmud Abouhalima, who allegedly helped plan the trade center attack.

*

The piecing together of Yousef’s career as a terrorist is still far from complete. Authorities are working with information that shows he traveled extensively around the world under a sheaf of different passports.

One lead has emerged from Kuwait, where Interior Minister Sheik Ali al Sabah al Salim al Sabah confirmed in a statement that Yousef was known as a collaborator with Iraqi forces after Iraqi President Saddam Hussein’s army invaded Kuwait in August, 1990.

While precise details of his involvement have not emerged, the connection was significant, according to Bruce Hoffman, a terrorism expert formerly with the RAND Corp. in Santa Monica and now teaching at the University of St. Andrews in Scotland.

“The Iraqi connection looms quite large,” Hoffman said. He noted that Yousef was carrying an Iraqi passport when he entered the United States in September, 1992, without a visa. He applied for political asylum and was allowed to stay while his case was considered.

After disappearing in Kuwait in 1991 before the allied forces recaptured the country, Yousef next is known to have appeared in the Philippines accompanied by a Libyan missionary named Mohaimen abu Bakr, the leader of the so-called Mullah Forces in Libya.

Edwin Angeles, a former leader of the Abu Sayyaf terrorist group in the southern Philippines, told The Times that Yousef asked Abu Sayyaf for help in getting details about the airports in Manila and Cebu.

Angeles, who surrendered in February and has been given amnesty in exchange for his assistance, said he met Yousef again in December, 1991, when Yousef arrived with Murad and Wali Khan Amin Shah and began providing training to Abu Sayyaf guerrillas at a remote spot in the southern Philippines. Yousef was introduced as “the chemist.” They stayed for three months.

Carried False Passport

Yousef arrived in the United States on Sept. 1, 1992. On the same flight was another Afghan War veteran named Ahmad Mohammad Ajaj, who carried a false Pakistani passport and bomb-making manuals subsequently used by the trade center bombers. He was later convicted in the bombing.

Yousef is accused by the government of recruiting the men responsible for the attack and helping to build the bomb, a crude device made from fertilizer and fuel oil, packed into a rented van.

Yousef is believed to have remained in New York until the night of the World Trade Center attack on Feb. 26, 1993, when he boarded a Pakistan International Airlines flight using what may have been his genuine Pakistani passport, issued in the name of Abdul Basit. After Yousef’s arrest in February, Pakistani Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto alleged that Yousef was wounded in September, 1993, when a bomb he was making exploded during an attempt to assassinate her in Karachi.

While Pakistani police have expressed doubt about whether there was an assassination attempt, they have confirmed that Yousef was treated at two Karachi hospitals for what he told doctors was the explosion of a butane cigarette lighter. They now believe he was practicing with the liquid bomb at a building just miles from Bhutto’s family home in Karachi.

In 1994, Yousef returned to the Philippines by boat from Malaysia and resumed training Abu Sayyaf guerrillas on the island of Basilan in the Sulu Sea, according to Angeles, the former Abu Sayyaf leader. In December, Yousef rented the apartment in Manila for $500 a month and called Murad in Pakistan, offering to pay his expenses for a visit to Manila. Murad told authorities that he was jobless when Yousef called. He arrived the day after Christmas.

Just as he had allegedly abandoned his colleagues in New York, Yousef fled Manila using a fake passport after the apartment raid and went to Bangkok, Thailand.

He then flew to Islamabad, where he was captured by Pakistani police after they received a tip from a South African Muslim named Istiaque Parker, who knew Yousef and was staying across the street from his guest house.

Times staff writer John-Thor Dahlburg in New Delhi contributed to this report.

(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX / INFOGRAPHIC)

A Day of Destruction Foiled

The terrorists called it Project Bojinka. It was a plan to blow up 11 airliners over the Pacific, using five operatives in a day of rage at the United States. Details of the plan--never carried out--were contained on the hard disk of a computer found in an apartment in the Philippines last January, where U.S. and Philippine authorities say Ramzi Ahmed Yousef, who is now awaiting trial in New York, made the materials for the bombs.

Flights where bombs were to blow, numbered accoring to the terrorist who was to plant the bombs (see below).

5 BOMBERS’ CODE NAMES AND THEIR INTENDED RESPONSIBILITIES

1. Mirqas: Plants a bomb on United flight from Manila to Seoul. The plane continues toward San Francisco from Seoul, but would explode in midair. Mirqas plants a second bomb on Delta flight Seoul to Taipei. It would explode on the continuation of the flight to Bangkok. Mirqas leaves the plane in Taipei and flies to Singapore, then home to Karachi.

2. Markoa: Plants a bomb on Northwest flight from Manila to Tokyo. The plane continues toward Chicago but would explode over the Pacific. Markoa, meanwhile, boards a Northwest flight from Tokyo to Hong Kong and plants a bomb that is set to explode a day later over the Pacific on the way to New York. Markoa, who got off in Hong Kong, flies to Singapore and then home to Pakistan.

3. Obaid: Plants a bomb on United flight from Singapore to Hong Kong. The bomb is set to go off in the middle of the flight’s continuation to Los Angeles. Obaid, meanwhile, boards United flight from Hong Kong to Singapore. He plants a bomb that is set to go off on the return leg to Hong Kong. Obaid flies directly from Singapore to Pakistan.

4. Majbos: Flies from Taipei to Tokyo on United and plants a bomb that is set to go off as the plane heads to Los Angeles. Flies from Tokyo to Hong Kong and places a bomb aboard another United flight that is set to go off 24 hours later as the plane flies from Tokyo to New York.

5. Zyed: Flies from Bangkok to Tokyo on a United flight and places a bomb set to explode over the Pacific as the flight nears Los Angeles. Flies to Taipei via Seoul and places a bomb on a second United flight. He then flies back to Bangkok on a United flight and places a third bomb. He escapes to Karachi, while the second and third planes are set to explode on their way back to the United States.

1. Seoul to San Francisco

1. Taipei to Bangkok

2. Tokyo to Chicago

2. Hong Kong to New York

3. Hong Kong to L.A.

3. Singapore to Hong Kong

4. Tokyo to L.A.

4. Tokyo to New York

5. Tokyo to L.A.

5. Taipei to U.S.

5. Bangkok to U.S.