Chilling ‘Chatter’ of Jihad

They knew the police were spying on them, but they needed to talk. So the members of the Al Qaeda cell often met in a car. They thought the police were unlikely to bug the car.

They were wrong.

The Citroen sedan rolled over trolley tracks and under viaducts on the graffiti-smeared outskirts of Milan. It cruised past old trattorias and new Islamic butcher shops, past wavy-haired Italians on motorcycles and hooded immigrant women lugging groceries.

At the wheel was the top Al Qaeda operative in Italy, Abdelkader Mahmoud Es Sayed, whose car served as a headquarters, a refuge, a kind of confessional for aspiring holy warriors.

“Sheik, if someone wants to go fight, why don’t you let him?” a tormented 31-year-old Tunisian named Adel ben Soltane asked while riding in the Citroen on Dec. 7, 2000, according to transcripts of intercepts by Italian police.

“The important thing is that you dream about it,” Es Sayed answered paternally. “When the moment comes, you never know if you’ll be a martyr in Algeria, Tunisia, America or in Central Asia. You won’t know.”

“I want to eliminate these pigs, these swine,” Ben Soltane said. He told Es Sayed that he despised everything about Italy: “I hate the people, I hate the documents .... I want to go anywhere else.”

In countless hours of wiretaps over two years, members of the Milan cell schemed, threatened and told war stories, their voices full of hate and despair. Many were extremists from North African countries who fled to Italy to escape prosecution. But they were alienated in their adopted land as well; they sounded like men who felt permanently and dangerously adrift.

The law enforcement slang for such intercepted conversations is “chatter,” a term that has become widely used in U.S. media and public discussion of terrorism. The main significance of chatter has been in detecting future attacks, reconstructing past ones and mapping Al Qaeda’s far-flung networks.

There has been great scrutiny of scraps of dialogue intercepted around the world before the Sept. 11 attacks, comments that now seem portentous, possible missed signs. Italian and U.S. agents, for instance, are investigating a fugitive Yemeni who visited the suspects in Italy in August 2000 and talked about plans for a big attack involving airplanes and airports, indicating he may have had knowledge of the Sept. 11 plot.

But chatter also helps investigators understand the motives and personalities of Islamic extremists. Although Al Qaeda has been hurt by an international crackdown, the events of the last year have left an angry new generation of extremists eager for action, according to law enforcement experts in Italy, France and elsewhere.

“The young men are agitated,” an Italian investigator said. “They want to go out and do something. The imams have to calm them down.”

The reality of Al Qaeda is elusive because of the organization’s stealth and anarchic culture. More than court testimony or confessions, the chatter on wiretaps comes close to capturing the truth.

Of course, barriers of culture and language still interfere. Defendants in Milan have complained about the quality of official interpreters. In an Al Qaeda case in Madrid, defense lawyers accused police of mistaking innocent references to buying fruit and vegetables as code words for terrorist activities.

The Milan transcripts contain a fly-on-the-wall account of the daily life of these men, building on wiretaps of the Citroen, phones, apartments and a mosque. The documents became public in court cases; some suspects have been convicted, others are on trial, and at least one is presumed dead.

The suspects spent much of their time discussing fraudulent documents, devoting such energy and secrecy to the deals that at first police thought they were talking about explosives. The intercepts also recorded strategy sessions, furtive trips, and monologues praising Osama bin Laden and radical clerics.

The young men saw themselves as warrior-monks assailed by the temptations of a prosperous, fun-loving society.

The way other men might watch pornography, they sat in a seedy apartment chortling at videos of moujahedeen slaughtering Russian soldiers in the snows of Chechnya.

“Look, look how they cut his throat,” a suspect named Khaled exclaimed, according to the transcript of an intercept March 22, 2001, in an apartment in suburban Gallarate.

“Why’s the other one alive?” a man named Farid said as gunfire from the television echoed in the background.

“Now they are getting ready to burn,” Khaled said. He started reminiscing about his own combat experiences in Chechnya.

“When the order from the emir came, it was beautiful,” he recalled, “because first we studied the structure and then, with the plastic [explosive], boom! ... And right afterward the building collapsed and then dust.... And then a fire started, and this way the enemies of God were buried and burned.”

Turning back to the video, Farid marveled: “This cassette is really scary.... You can see the [Russian] commandos realize they are having their throats cut by real soldiers.... The best commandos in the world would tremble if they saw this.”

The voices caught on tape seem alternately vicious, philosophical and lonely. Their talk was essential to keeping up morale, according to prosecutor Stefano Dambruoso.

“These are people with a lot of problems,” Dambruoso said. “Adapting to this country is devastating to them. In radical religious activity they found rules, a structure. It’s not just religious, it’s psychological and personal. The talk helps them stay fanaticized, to maintain their mind and never relent. Because in Europe, it would be easy to get out. To get a job, form a family, live normally. But they are angry at life in general.”

The anger trapped them in a doomed existence, although they had alternatives, judging from another exchange in the Citroen.

“You don’t like this nice life? You want to die?” Es Sayed asked Ben Soltane.

“Listen, sheik, if I liked this life, I would go to my cousin who is in Germany and wants to marry me,” Ben Soltane answered. “In five years, I would have a German passport and live in peace.”

The Milan cell was one of Al Qaeda’s busiest logistics operations in Europe before Sept. 11. A Tunisian-dominated network used Milan as a hub for recruits traveling via Iran to training camps in Afghanistan. With connections to cells in Britain, Germany, Belgium, Spain and France, the Milan cell provided services to terrorists passing through.

“If you want to work with me, this is the job,” Es Sayed told his underlings. “If the brothers want to hide, we hide them. If the brothers want documents, we take care of their documents .... If they need a gun, you give them a gun.”

Es Sayed, the central figure in the Milan investigation, fled Italy for Afghanistan with police on his tail in July of last year. He comes across in the transcripts as smooth, manipulative and enigmatic.

The younger Tunisian suspects clearly revered Es Sayed, an Egyptian in his late 30s. A veteran of Islamic movements in Egypt, Es Sayed was an imam, or prayer leader, an expert document forger and trusted associate of Ayman Zawahiri, the Egyptian right-hand man of Bin Laden, and other senior figures in Al Qaeda, according to court documents.

Es Sayed liked to reminisce about the time he met Bin Laden. He preached patience to his restless acolytes. During the conversation Dec. 7, he told them a parable.

“You say you want to be a martyr,” he said. “Even if you die at this moment, you will be a martyr.... Once I met a brother, he was Egyptian.... He didn’t go out to fight or do attacks. When the groups came back and he noticed that the brothers were tired, he would help them take off their shoes and wash their feet. He came and helped me take off my shoes and wash my feet.... One day at dawn, we got word that he had been discovered and killed. You see, he was a martyr. The jihad has changed. Today, everybody does the jihad. One way or another.”

Despite a conviction on terrorism charges in Egypt, Es Sayed was granted political refugee status by the Italian government in 1997, causing speculation that he had secret ties to an intelligence service that helped him gain refuge.

Es Sayed’s deputy in Milan was Essid Sami ben Khemais, a Tunisian who ran a small maintenance firm as a cover. Ben Khemais was convicted here in February along with three confederates and sentenced to five years in prison for document fraud, criminal association with intent to obtain arms and explosives and immigration-related charges. Ben Soltane and two others were convicted in a later trial.

Defense attorneys have insisted that the suspects are not terrorists but low-level criminals and radical wannabes.

It seems hard, however, to explain away the detailed evidence. The intercepts and surveillance revealed contact between the Milan cell and top Al Qaeda figures in Europe and Afghanistan. The suspects talked about attacks, training camps, fake documents and other activities that sound very much like terrorism.

The wiretaps helped connect the group to specific plots, such as an aborted attack on a cathedral in France in December 2000. But police have not yet deciphered other sinister but vague references, such as an exchange during which Es Sayed told Ben Soltane: “Don’t forget the project of the Jew.”

To which Ben Soltane answered, according to the transcript: “I told you that I’m ready for anything: If you want me to bring him to you in a box [translator’s note: dead], I’ll bring him to you in a box.” [Es Sayed can be heard laughing.]

Sometimes it is difficult to separate menacing bluster from bona fide conspiracy, especially when conversations are in code. Es Sayed changed phones or phone numbers 30 times in about six months to further thwart surveillance, authorities say.

Although fully aware of the risks, the suspects kept talking. A visiting Libyan brandished a portable phone as he warned his friends that technology had been the downfall of a cell in Frankfurt, Germany, according to a transcript from the Gallarate apartment March 10, 2001.

“You see this?” the Libyan said. “This was created by an enemy of God. This has blown many operations and has caused more arrests than you can imagine. Why do you think the brothers in Germany got arrested? With this. When they were talking, the others were listening.... It’s nice, you can communicate. It’s fast, but it causes big problems. They made it, and they know how to intercept it.”

Prophetic words. Anti-terrorist investigators were adept at planting interception devices, even rigging a video camera in a flowerpot outside a mosque on Viale Jenner in Milan. The extremists eventually found the camera, but despite their suspicions, they did not find the microphones concealed inside the mosque.

“There’s a spy in the mosque,” muttered a suspect named Yassine in the Citroen. “There are two possibilities. Either there are spy microphones inside to listen, or there are, and this is for sure, informants who bring them the information ... and I’ll bet it’s full of cameras.”

The audiotapes recorded in the mosque posed a challenge to police interpreters, who had to distinguish among multiple simultaneous conversations.

Other voices appeared only briefly in the intercepts but became important as the investigation advanced in cooperation with U.S. law enforcement. An arrest in Afghanistan bolstered the case pending against Abdelhalim Remadna, an alleged recruiter who worked at the Islamic Cultural Center adjacent to the mosque.

Prosecutors accuse Remadna of arranging sojourns by extremists in a training camp in Afghanistan. The recruits in Italy allegedly included Mohamed Aouzar, a skinny 21-year-old Moroccan who glowers behind oversized black glasses in his mug shot.

The two men can be heard in a series of short, urgent phone conversations as Aouzar prepared for his trip with two older men in late June 2001, according to the transcript. Aouzar sounded breathless and apologetic as he called the mosque to say he was running late and asked his companions not to leave without him.

“Look, we are going to be late, very, very,” he exclaimed. “He has to wait there for me!”

“Fine, fine,” Remadna responded.

“Make him wait,” Aouzar said.

The young Moroccan made it to Afghanistan. He survived a ferocious battle in a prison outside Mazar-i-Sharif and was captured by U.S.-led troops in December, according to authorities.

Es Sayed was not so lucky. Authorities say the Egyptian was killed in combat in Afghanistan last winter. Remadna and two other suspects are on trial in Milan.

And Aouzar and seven others from Italy are now prisoners at the U.S. base in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba--a place far from home where they can find solace in talk.