Al-Qaeda by Jason Burke

Author:Jason Burke
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Publisher: Penguin Books Ltd
Published: 2007-06-08T21:00:00+00:00

13

The Millennium Plot

It was 6pm on 14 December 1999 and the last car, a rented Chrysler 300, had just driven off the Coho ferry from Victoria, British Columbia, Canada and drawn up at the customs checkpoint at Port Angeles, Washington, United States of America. As Diana Dean, an American customs official, questioned the driver, a young Algerian who gave his name as Benni Norris, she noticed that he was sweating despite the chill and that his hands were shaking. When Dean and her colleagues opened the boot of the car they found out why. Where the spare wheel should have been were four timing devices, 118 pounds of urea crystals, 14 pounds of sulphate powder and 48 ounces of nitroglycerine. The driver’s real name was Ahmed Ressam, he was 33 and he was on his way to plant a bomb in Los Angeles International airport.1

Following Ressam’s arrest, thousands of FBI agents were assigned to the ‘Borderbom’ investigation. With less than two weeks until the Millennium, with millions worldwide planning to attend events that would be easy targets for terrorists, the pressure to roll up any broader network linked to Ressam was huge. In fact, Ressam was not the first arrest to be made of conspirators in the so-called ‘Millennium plot’, a series of attacks linked to ‘al-Qaeda’ and bin Laden timed to coincide with the end of 1999. On 30 November, police and paramilitary security forces in Amman, Jordan had raided several addresses around the city and on its outskirts and arrested sixteen people who, officials said, had hoped to machine-gun tourists at biblical sites in the Middle East and to blow up a huge hotel in central Amman full of Jewish and American tourists and pilgrims. Ressam himself had hoped, evidence indicated, to kill hundreds with a large bomb on the crowded concourse of Los Angeles airport. Later it would become clear that other attacks too had been planned by Islamic militants around the world to coincide with the end of 1999. One, an attempted attack on the USS The Sullivans on 3 January off the coast of the Yemen, failed when the bombers loaded the speedboat they hoped to ram into the ship with so many explosives that it sank.

The details of the ‘Millennium plot’ show, as American investigators said at the time, ‘the modern face of global Islamic terrorism and how it functions’.2 In their conception, planning and execution the attacks were very different from the bombings of the eastern African embassies. The attacks in Nairobi and Dar es Salaam were directly organized by bin Laden’s close aides using a small number of long-term associates of the group and teams of specialists flown in for the occasion. The ‘hands-on’ involvement of men like Mohammed Atef in Afghanistan and the careful grooming of key individuals like al-Owhali were made necessary by the lack of an operational structure on the ground in east Africa and by the lack of trained volunteers. But the Millennium attacks in Jordan and California reveal a different, and far more dangerous, pattern of operation.

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