Border Arrest Stirs Fear of Terrorist Cells in U.S.

An Algerian man arrested crossing the Canadian border 15 months ago with a carload of explosives was part of a terrorist “sleeper cell” activated by Islamic militant Osama bin Laden, U.S. intelligence officials believe.

Although the destination of the 130 pounds of bomb-making material has not been determined, authorities contend it was part of a broad millennium-eve conspiracy to attack American targets in the U.S. and the Middle East.

Intelligence gathered since the arrest of Ahmed Ressam, 33, has revealed a worldwide network of such sleeper cells, according to senior counter-terrorism officials, who say the cells primarily are made up of Islamic extremists trained, financed and orchestrated by Bin Laden from his sanctuary in Afghanistan.

Richard A. Clarke, White House counter-terrorism advisor in the Clinton and current Bush administrations, said such groups are scattered in as many as 50 countries, including the U.S.

“One day they’re recruiting and raising money for the jihad [holy war], and the next day that same cell can become the group that works with the attackers” sent in by Bin Laden, Clarke said in one of several interviews over the last few months.

Intelligence officials also have found evidence that Bin Laden has activated local sleeper cells elsewhere, including in the 1998 attacks on two U.S. embassies in Africa that killed 224 people.

One senior intelligence official portrayed the U.S. as “the big bull’s eye” of international terrorist groups and said lengthy investigation of the Ressam case “demonstrates that there is a global network . . . that really wants to hit us where we live.”

American Muslim groups warn such claims border on paranoia that could make all citizens of Mideast descent targets of suspicion and hate.

Aslam Abdullah, vice chairman of the Muslim Public Affairs Council in Los Angeles, said the government and media are “overblowing an issue.”

“We will always have fringe elements within the community that will act as loners, as fanatics,” Abdullah said. “This is not to deny that terrorism exists, because it is there. But it should not be given a proportion more than is due.”

Ressam is scheduled for trial Monday in a heavily guarded federal courthouse in Los Angeles on charges of illegally transporting explosives across the border for purposes of committing a terrorist act. He has pleaded not guilty.

Defense lawyers have portrayed Ressam as an unwitting courier for terrorists and deny that he has links to Bin Laden.

But on Wednesday, an alleged co-conspirator named Abdelghani Meskini entered into a plea agreement in New York, in which he admitted playing a role in conspiring with Ressam to bomb millennium celebrations in the United States. And Meskini has agreed to cooperate with prosecutors.

Among suspected targets of the explosives intercepted here were sites in the Pacific Northwest and California--including Seattle’s Space Needle and major airports in the Los Angeles area.

A judge ordered the case moved from Seattle for security reasons and because cancellation of the city’s New Year’s Eve celebrations after Ressam’s arrest generated adverse publicity in the region.

Before his arrest at the ferry landing here Dec. 14, 1999, Ressam lived in Montreal for five years. He worked as a grocer and committed petty thefts. He unsuccessfully sought political asylum from the Canadian government, claiming he was tortured and falsely accused of terrorism in Algeria.

Law enforcement officials say Ressam was a member of a Montreal-based cell of the Armed Islamic Group, Algerians opposed to their country’s military regime. Later he was linked to militants operating in France.

Like others in the Montreal group, Ressam was under surveillance for a time. But he was not followed when he traveled to British Columbia, where authorities charge that he and a confederate assembled a batch of explosives in a Vancouver motel room. The resulting bomb could “easily take down a building,” prosecutors told a federal judge.

Ressam’s arrest in a routine check at the border alarmed U.S. counter-terrorism and intelligence officials, prompting sweeping reappraisals of the country’s vulnerability to terrorist attacks.

The accused bomb smuggler and his alleged co-conspirators are regarded as the model of an ominous new breed of terrorist that a senior National Security Council official acknowledged has authorities “screwed to the ceiling” in fear.

Unlike state-sponsored terrorists, the modern moujahedeen--or holy warriors--have a decentralized hierarchy and operate beyond the reach of traditional political and military sanctions. They have no permanent command center. Authority and funding are scattered.

They are bound more by religion than some political goal, and they slip from country to country using noms de guerre, forged travel documents and a network of safe houses.

The one common element, officials say, is the influence of Bin Laden and his al Qaeda organization, Arabic for “the Base.” The exiled Saudi Arabian financier declared in 1998 that it is “the individual duty for every Muslim” to kill Americans “in any country” and at any time.

“One thing we learned [from the Ressam case] is that there is an increasing vulnerability here, that there are people here [in the U.S.] that have connections to these groups,” said Samuel R. “Sandy” Berger, national security advisor for President Clinton.

Berger--echoing CIA Director George J. Tenet and others--said the possibility of Bin Laden activating other as yet unidentified cells for attacks “is at the center of the threats we face over the next few years.”

Court documents and interviews with law enforcement authorities, intelligence officials, current and former counter-terrorism experts, prosecutors and defense lawyers also disclosed that:

* Ressam’s arrest set off a frenzied international manhunt for suspected associates, coordinated out of the White House situation room. Despite those intensive efforts, key suspects slipped away and remain fugitives.

* The alleged Ressam conspiracy was just one of several millennium plots linked to Bin Laden, including unsuccessful plans to bomb tourist sites in Jordan and a U.S. warship, The Sullivans, in Yemen. A similar plot 10 months later, in October 2000, blew up the U.S. destroyer Cole in the port city of Aden, killing 17 U.S. seamen and two suicide bombers.

* The case raised significant concerns about whether Canada was adequately monitoring potential terrorists and whether the U.S.’ northern neighbor has become a haven for terrorist groups, giving them easy access to this country.

The Ressam investigation continues on the eve of trial; so far, four people have been indicted.

Ressam’s alleged accomplice in assembling the explosives, Abdelmajid Dahoumane, is among the fugitives still being sought.

Mokhtar Haouari, a Montreal-based Algerian indicted along with Meskini in New York, still faces charges that he conspired to aid and abet Ressam to “facilitate an act of international terrorism.”

Haouari and Meskini also have been accused of conspiring since October 1997 to support terrorists, including providing false identification and documents. Haouari, who pleaded not guilty, faces as long as 85 years in prison if convicted in a separate trial set for April 17.

At least five other suspected accomplices have been identified, including two who were detained in Mauritania and Ireland but then released. Investigators and intelligence analysts have followed leads to Europe and Africa but have been frustrated by dead ends, gaps in information and elusive suspects.

“There are a lot of holes out there,” one senior FBI official involved in the Seattle investigation said. Like many others, he spoke on condition of anonymity, citing the upcoming trials and ongoing investigations.

“It’s fair to say someone was pulling the strings here,” the official said. “What is the structure of the organization? What is the threat? Who’s pulling the strings? It’d be nice to know, for this trial and for later.”

First Contact in the Mist

A somber fog draped the last ferry arriving at Port Angeles from Victoria that mid-December evening in 1999. Passenger traffic was light. At the customs and immigration checkpoint, federal agents quickly processed 35 cars and their passengers. The last car, a steel-blue Chrysler 300M, eased up to U.S. Customs Inspector Diana Dean and stopped.

The driver presented documents identifying himself as Benni Antoine Norris of Montreal. The driver had already cleared one checkpoint, but Dean puzzled over his circuitous route from Vancouver--traveling hours out of his way to bypass a main border crossing at Blaine, Wash.

The veteran inspector became suspicious of something else: The driver’s hands were shaking and, despite the cold, he was sweating.

Dean asked the man to step out and open the car’s trunk. A moment later the driver bolted, sprinting toward town and the cover of evening shadows and the harbor mist.

Two customs agents gave chase. They lost him for a moment, then spotted him under a car. Again he raced away. Six blocks later, just outside the Wonderful House Chinese restaurant, the agents tackled the man.

Back at the checkpoint, Dean and her colleagues found 10 large bags of whitish powder in the spare tire well and two jars of a honey-like liquid packed in sawdust.

“We thought it was drugs,” recalled U.S. Customs Inspector Jerry Slaminski.

Instead, the trunk contained the volatile makings of one or more powerful bombs, and four homemade timing devices. The agents also found maps of Washington, Oregon and California, and another identification card indicating that Norris might be Mario Roig.

From the man’s pockets, the agents retrieved a tattered scrap of paper with three New York City phone numbers and a word: “Gani.”

Customs agents called the FBI. The alarming report from Port Angeles sent shock waves all the way to the White House.

Top U.S. officials already knew that recent intelligence--possibly gathered from then still-secret arrests and confessions of Middle East terrorists--had warned of plots to attack millennium celebrations worldwide, including some in the U.S.

The Space Needle was the site of one such public celebration that would be televised around the world. About 50,000 revelers were expected.

By morning, federal agents knew that a Benni Antoine Norris of Montreal had reserved a room at the Best Western Loyal Inn near the Space Needle.

The FBI also determined that the mysterious driver wasn’t Norris or Roig. He was Ahmed Ressam.

Immediately a nationwide counter-terrorism operation was launched, manned by teams of federal agents organized in the aftermath of attacks on U.S. embassies in Africa and the 1993 World Trade Center bombing in New York.

In those early hours, authorities were spooked by what they didn’t know: Were the explosives intended for the Seattle millennium party--or another unknown West Coast target? Was the Chrysler the only vehicle on that ferry with the makings of a bomb in its trunk--or did other accomplices successfully enter the U.S. that night? Was there a coordinated plot, like the assaults on the embassies in Africa, to bomb multiple U.S. targets? If so, more trunks full of bombs could be cruising the interstate highway system anywhere in the country.

A Terrorist Hunt in the Dark

In Washington, D.C., the FBI’s command post--the Strategic Information and Operations Center--went on full-scale alert.

The CIA and National Security Agency put in play their surveillance satellites, spies and other weapons in the covert war against terrorism.

The ultra-secret federal Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court was alerted so that law enforcement authorities could get instant approval for phone taps and search warrants in the interest of national security.

U.S. diplomats invoked international mutual legal assistance treaties seeking investigative cooperation from Canada, France and other countries that might have information about Ressam or millennium terrorism plots.

In the White House basement, the “situation room” was activated. Berger convened a meeting of the most senior law enforcement, military and intelligence officials, known as the “Principals Committee,” so he could brief Clinton on the status of the embryonic investigation.

“We knew something was out there, but we were not sure where,” recalls one top-level intelligence official who was in attendance. “It was like we were in a dark room, trying to find the light switch.”

At first, the nationwide dragnet for suspicious figures and associates of Ressam was conducted in virtual secrecy. Its FBI code name: Operation Borderbom.

Wiretaps were ordered on the New York phone numbers found in Ressam’s pocket. Agents searched Ressam’s Montreal apartment. The early efforts identified Dahoumane as a possible accomplice; authorities found what they said is incriminating evidence--including a clipping of a Clinton anti-terrorism speech--in his apartment. Several other potential co-conspirators also were flagged.

Investigators determined that Ressam and Dahoumane may have shared a room at the 2400 Motel in Vancouver shortly before the arrest. Later, agents inspecting the room encountered a strong odor and other evidence, they reported, of a crude bomb-making factory.

The secrecy ended abruptly three days after Ressam’s arrest, when he was flown to Seattle for arraignment Dec. 17, 1999. Two weeks before New Year’s Eve, the nation was bombarded by news accounts of a bomb-smuggling case feared tied to the coming millennium celebrations.

Clinton asked all Americans to be on the lookout and to notify authorities “if they see anything suspicious.”

Washington, he assured the nation, was doing “everything in our power” to prevent terrorist attacks as the new year approached. “We’re taking extraordinary efforts in the government to act based on the incident out in the Pacific Northwest.”

Authorities questioned hundreds of potential suspects, holding many in Los Angeles, San Francisco, Houston, New York and Boston.

Near Seattle, agents detained Abdel Hakim Tizegha, 29, ostensibly for illegally reentering the United States from Canada. The real reason: He was picked up on one of the wiretaps talking to “Gani.”

Then, warnings came from intelligence sources that New York’s Times Square and the National Mall in Washington, D.C., might be terrorist targets. There was one report, taken seriously at the highest levels, of vans laden with explosives slipping across the Canadian border and heading south.

In the White House situation room, Berger and Clarke were meeting daily with the Principals Committee, analyzing intelligence cables and reports from domestic law enforcement agencies. And worrying about those mysterious vans.

Not far from the White House, a Middle Eastern man in a van attracted suspicion one night when he pulled up to a full-service pump at a gas station and started filling his own tank. The clerk called police, who alerted the FBI. Federal agents, rushing to investigate a man pumping his own gas at a full-service island, never found the van.

“We got into a level of minutiae of detail not seen [before] in the White House,” acknowledged a senior intelligence official who took part in those vigils. “It was rather stressful.”

Airports around the country intensified security checks, ordering Christmas packages unwrapped and delaying thousands of passengers. Hundreds of extra border agents were rushed to entry stations spanning the continent. Thousands of investigators from an alphabet soup of federal agencies chased down leads from the shreds of evidence and flimsy clues.

French authorities added to investigative tensions when they said Ressam and some of his Montreal associates were members of the “Roubaix gang,” a group of Algerian extremists accused of deadly bombings, armed robberies and other attacks in Paris during the 1990s.

Ressam and other reputed members of the gang, then living in Montreal, had trained in Bin Laden’s terrorist camps in Afghanistan, according to intelligence sources and court documents.

Authorities traced a phone number found in Ressam’s pocket the evening of his arrest to a “transit house” in Pakistan for Algerian cell members heading into the training camps. And they learned that in March 1998, Ressam had entered Afghanistan for advanced terrorist training in explosives and didn’t return to Canada until almost a year later, intelligence officials said.

Many of those same Algerians are on trial in Paris, including Ressam in absentia, accused of terrorist activities.

Jean-Louis Bruguiere, the leading French terrorism prosecutor, said the group was part of a “spider web” of jihad cells supporting Bin Laden’s war on Western interests. He called them “a new breed” of terrorists so effectively compartmentalized and secretive that even the terrorists themselves don’t know all those involved in their operations.

Meeting a Very Important Brother

In New York, the FBI wiretaps on “Gani’s” phones paid off. His real name was Abdelghani Meskini. And he did a lot of talking over monitored phone lines. In one conversation, he said that he and his Algerian associates would rise up and “punish America.”

On Christmas Day 1999, agents listened as Meskini told someone in Algeria that he, Ressam and others were part of a well-organized group. Meskini said he went to Seattle to meet Ressam--who was supposed to leave the Chrysler in a Seattle parking lot, keys in the ignition, and “walk away from it.”

The plot was devised, he boasted, so that each person involved would know the tasks of only two others, to limit exposure.

The FBI still was listening when Meskini was alerted that Ressam had been arrested. “Change your phone number, beeper and cell phone. Throw them away,” the caller ordered. “A lot of things are going on. Leave the place. Leave everything.”

Meskini tore up a Seattle plane ticket and some bank ATM slips, tossing them into a trash bin. Federal agents secretly recovered the evidence.

In Brooklyn, at dawn Dec. 30, 16 FBI SWAT operatives tiptoed up two narrow flights of stairs to Meskini’s apartment. A battering ram knocked down the door. He was handcuffed, shackled and driven to FBI headquarters for questioning. “What’s your name?” he was asked as the sedan wheeled away.

Meskini hesitated. Treasury Agent Sal Emilio, the driver, exploded: “Don’t make it hard! You don’t know how hard we can make it,” simultaneously glaring back at the prisoner and steering through morning traffic.

Meskini was read his rights. Already weak from fasting as an observant Muslim during the Ramadan holy days, he was then interrogated for 11 hours in a 10-by-10 room, one wrist handcuffed to a bar on the wall.

“You’re the ‘big fish,’ and you’re going away for 25 years,” agents told him. Finally Meskini conceded that an old schoolmate from Algeria gave him his orders. He named Mokhtar Haouari.

Meskini told federal agents that he had approached Haouari about becoming a martyr for the cause. Haouari told him to go to Seattle and meet a man named Abu Reda, a “very important brother” with contacts in London and Afghanistan.

According to Meskini, his assignment was to deliver cash to Reda, to assist him as a translator and guide, and to drive him around to “meet with people” as far away as Chicago.

It turned out that Reda was Ressam. And Meskini, traveling to Seattle under the alias Eduardo Rocha, returned to Brooklyn unaware that “Reda” had been arrested.

As the Meskini interrogation continued, FBI agents fanned out across seven states in a last-ditch effort to head off a feared millennium attack.

Using telephone logs seized in the case, they targeted more than 40 people with ties to Ressam--in California, New York, Massachusetts, Tennessee, Texas and Washington. Ultimately, six people were detained for further questioning.

With only 24 hours before the new year, the FBI still didn’t know anything more about potential targets than it did the night Ressam was arrested. Thousands of agents worked around the clock. Seattle had canceled its New Year’s party, but New York still expected a million people in Times Square to watch the ball drop at midnight. Other cities across the nation also had big events planned.

Leaders of the terrorist hunt held their breath--until the new year arrived without a feared blast.

More Plots; More Links

Information developed since that time, most notably by officials in Jordan, underscored the belief that the Seattle plot was part of a much wider terrorism scheme. Some of the 13 arrested in Amman confessed that their plan was orchestrated by al Qaeda. They also linked al Qaeda to planned assaults on the U.S. West Coast and against The Sullivans in the port of Aden.

A former Bin Laden aide who defected also has told U.S. investigators that al Qaeda operates a global network of such sleeper cells.

Nonetheless, U.S. officials acknowledge they were surprised by the Ressam arrest.

“We had no reason to believe these . . . Algerians who were engaged in petty crimes were a sleeper cell,” Clarke said. “[But] we know now they’d become, essentially, an al Qaeda cell.”

So far, Ressam’s clearest link to Bin Laden appears to be Mohambedou Ould Slahi, 31, a mid-level operative who traveled to Montreal from Germany late in 1999, according to U.S. and Canadian intelligence.

Officials noted that Slahi was greeted with unusual deference and referred to as “sheik.”

“His arrival [in Montreal] signified the beginning of something which we believe was the activation of . . . an attack cell,” Clarke said.

A year after seizing the Chrysler with the bomb material in its trunk, federal authorities still have not determined what the target was and who else was involved.

Efforts to apprehend Dahoumane, suspected of helping Ressam assemble the explosives, have failed. Last spring, the U.S. State Department posted a $5-million reward for his capture. The same bounty is offered for Bin Laden.

Slahi also has eluded questioning after being detained briefly by Mauritanian authorities at the FBI’s request.

Discovery of the bomb material led governments on both sides of the border to improve security and counter-terrorism operations. Canada allocated $1.5 billion and Clinton ordered federal agencies to devise a comprehensive counter-terrorism plan for the border.

“We didn’t think much of terrorism until Dec. 14,” says Seattle FBI chief Charles Mandigo. “A lot of cities right now are probably where we were last year. They probably have their own Ressams somewhere.”

The FBI expanded its counter-terrorism operations, nearly doubling the number of multi-agency Joint Terrorism Task Forces it operates in U.S. cities--from 16 in 1998 to 29. There are “more on the way,” says one congressional intelligence official, because significant terrorist threats have been found in other cities.

Last month, CIA Director Tenet testified before Congress that Bin Laden’s network poses the most “immediate and serious threat” to the nation’s security.

Tenet cited the embassy bombings in Africa and the “millennium plots last year” as evidence that Bin Laden “is continuing to place emphasis on developing surrogates to carry out attacks in an effort to avoid detection, blame and retaliation.”

Islamic groups are sensitive to such emphasis on the terrorist threat from Muslim extremists.

Abdullah of the Muslim Public Affairs Council noted, for example, that the arrest and subsequent conviction of Timothy J. McVeigh in the Oklahoma City bombing did not prompt a similar backlash against white American males.

The Ressam trial is expected to last at least three weeks. Prosecutors have said they may call as many as 100 witnesses. One of them probably will be Meskini.

One of Ressam’s public defenders, Michael Filipovic, has said the government has failed to prove its case that there was a conspiracy and that the diminutive Algerian even knew what was in the trunk of the rental car.

“There was no [terrorist] act that took place, no bomb going off,” Filipovic said.

Prosecutors contend that a credit card issued to Ressam, alias Benni Norris, was used to buy materials to make the timing devices, that Ressam’s fingerprints were found on the devices recovered from the car and that Ressam has marks from chemical burns on his legs.

Back at the remote border crossing here, federal agents credit the sharp wits of a colleague and good fortune with preventing a bomb from reaching whatever was its intended target.

Noted Customs Inspector Slaminski, who was at the ferry landing that night: “I shudder to think what would have happened” if the Chrysler had been waved through.

(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX / INFOGRAPHIC)

The Characters, the Connections

Authorities say a millenium plot to bomb the United States is linked to Osama bin Laden in Afghanistan.

*

Times staff writer William C. Rempel contributed to this story.