The past as prologue
Ramzi Yousef is in prison for plotting the 1993 World Trade Center bombing -- but we still don't know who he really is, who he might have been working with and what he could tell us about Sept. 11.
By Russ Baker
Oct. 29, 2001 | Sitting in his cell at the Supermax prison in Florence, Colo., the world's most secure institution, the lanky man with the large ears, prominent nose and dark, intense eyes must have experienced mixed feelings when he learned of the horrific events of Sept. 11. After all, Ramzi Ahmed Yousef was the man who first conceived the idea of toppling the twin towers of the World Trade Center -- and who almost succeeded, in an underground bomb attack in 1993.
William Gavin, who headed the FBI's office in New York during much of the investigation of that earlier twin towers bombing, has a unique perspective on the mind-set of the terrorists. He remembers, for example, a helicopter trip with Ramzi Yousef after the man had been apprehended. Passing the Trade Center, Gavin couldn't resist removing Yousef's blindfold, momentarily, to drive home the point that his plot had failed. The bomber responded coolly that his only mistake was not using enough explosives.
At 12:18 p.m. on Feb. 26, 1993, in a parking garage below the giant complex, Yousef personally detonated a 1,200-pound bomb that he himself had designed and built. His objective, he later told investigators, was to topple one 110-story building into the other. He hoped this might produce a staggering 250,000 fatalities. In fact, the blast killed just six people, including a pregnant woman, most of whom were eating lunch on the other side of a thick wall from the bomb-laden vehicle. Still, more than 1,000 were wounded, hundreds seriously.
The blast, the largest incident ever handled until then by the New York City fire department in its 128-year history, caused damage that spanned seven levels, six of them below ground, created a crater 200 feet long and sent nearly 2 million gallons of sewage water rushing into the car park. It damaged a commuter train station nearby, halting the train service and snarling traffic, knocked out television stations with transmitters on the roof and nearly caused the collapse of the Vista Hotel directly above. Yet once the structural foundations were restored, the buildings returned to life just one month after the blast, and the city went on much as before.
Today, in the wake of the exponentially more devastating Sept. 11 assault, the earlier bombing might seem a mere historical footnote. No direct links between the perpetrators of the two Trade Center attacks have been established. Yet Yousef's act was the ultimate example of past as prologue: It established what would not bring down the towers. And it proved that a small group of determined individuals were within reach of inflicting terrible punishment on the United States.
As investigators struggle to understand the conspiracy behind September's catastrophe, its forbear remains in many ways a mystery. Despite an intensive, globe-spanning investigation that would send six defendants to prison, an astonishingly large number of loose ends remain, including the question of whether Ramzi Yousef conceived the plot alone or with the help of others. A bullheaded man given to bursts of braggadocio, he remains silent about any sponsors. Not surprisingly, two of the names that have surfaced in speculation are Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden.
Furthermore, according to Neil Herman, a former senior FBI supervisory special agent in charge of the Joint Terrorist Task Force that investigated the bombing, "Ramzi Yousef himself remains a very shadowy figure. We were not able to establish [his] identity definitively." Nor were authorities able to clarify where Yousef had spent most of his life, the identities of his family members or how he had funded his extensive travels throughout the world prior to his apprehension -- much of it in first class seats.
Next page: He used more than a dozen aliases, got a British education and frequented bars and strip joints
