Intelligence

Breaking the Al-Qaeda code

Times Online - Sunday Times

Christina Lamb, Charleston
Terror database is secret weapon
SLEEPY Charleston, the South Carolina hometown of Rhett Butler in Gone with the Wind, seems an unlikely place to be on the front line of the global war on terror.

Yet on the third floor of a glass office building overlooking the Cooper river is a locked room that is straight out of a futuristic thriller.

Inside, a series of control panels with flashing lights and whirring hard drives comprise the master computer of the world’s largest free-standing database of intelligence on Islamic terrorism. It could hold the key to dismantling Al-Qaeda.

“It’s the best database on Islamic terrorism in the world,” said a senior counter-terrorism official at the FBI.

The database is the pivotal tool in what those involved say will be the biggest class action in history: a $1 trillion lawsuit on behalf of the families of 1,431 of the people killed on 9/11 and 1,325 of the injured.

More than 100 of the clients are British. Yet while investigators building up the database have received government help in 19 countries, from Afghanistan to Syria, they have had none in Britain, according to Ron Motley, the lawyer behind the action.

“We’ve had zero co-operation from the UK,” said Motley, who works from an enormous yacht named Themis after the Greek goddess of justice. “They just don’t want to help their own citizens.”

Among the millions of pages of documents collated elsewhere are the Jordanian intelligence records on Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, America’s most wanted man in Iraq; Bosnian intelligence files of the minutes of the meeting to form Al-Qaeda; German prosecution reports on the Hamburg cell that spawned many of the key players of the September 11 attacks; and Spanish documents that show links between 9/11 and the 2004 Madrid bombings.

There are also records from the Philippines on the failed 1995 Bojinka plot to blow up 12 American airliners over the Pacific, the forerunner of 9/11; Moroccan intelligence on the 2003 Casablanca bombings and Moroccan members of the Hamburg cell; Russian files on Chechnya; and the Swiss bank records of Osama Bin Laden.

I first got an idea of the scale of the operation last year when I ran into two Americans in the home of an Afghan warlord. The sunglasses and bulging briefcases made me think CIA. But it emerged that they were a retired FBI agent and a former special forces officer, working as investigators for Motley.

I was the first journalist to be granted access to the database. Down a series of oak-panelled corridors in Motley’s law office is a darkened room where two database managers sit at laptops in front of a large screen. They showed me how they have adapted a British computer program called Analysts’ Notebook — used by many law enforcement agencies — to find links between some of America’s most wanted terrorists, well known Islamic charities and famous banks.

We typed in “Abdelghani Mzoudi”, one of the Moroccans from the Hamburg cell who, the German authorities believe, was involved in logistics for 9/11. We added “account” and the computer flashed up six accounts. We followed payments to his Citibank account in Düsseldorf and found that his fellow Moroccan, Zakariya Essabar, was the source of one of the transactions. Soon there was a web of bank transactions on screen, linking the two men.

Mzoudi was acquitted last year by a German court that said there was a significant possibility he knew nothing of the plot. German prosecutors are appealing.

One of the database managers demonstrated their party-piece: how they discovered who was behind the Madrid bombings. Running the names of those arrested through their database, they found the same names in documents from the German prosecutors.

“The Spanish government was blaming it on Eta and we were able to show it was Al-Qaeda, because the same names had been lower league players in Hamburg,” he said.

Jack Cordray, a lawyer involved in the case, has visited prosecutors, magistrates and police chiefs all over the world. He spent weeks with Judge Baltasar Garzon, Spain’s most famous investigator, and got 40,000 pages of documents transferred to the US courts.

From Madrid he went to Bosnia, Germany, Russia and on and on, picking up court transcripts, seized documents, financial records and wiretap evidence.

Cordray was astonished by a lack of intelligence-sharing. “We found information in one country was not being passed to another so terrorists were easily able to move because evidence of their existence stopped at the border. Thus the members of the Hamburg cell could start all over again in Madrid because the Spanish government did not have the German records.”

New information is coming in all the time, particularly on the Madrid-Hamburg nexus. The investigation discovered that the July 2001 meetings in Spain of the 9/11 hijackers included individuals who took part in the Madrid bombings.

“We also discovered transfers from the Saudi ministry of interior directly to the Madrid cell,” said Cordray. “You are not telling me that money was for building mosques.”

This allegation of Saudi financial support is fundamental to the class action. The case is based on the argument that the 9/11 hijackers could not have carried out the attacks without generous — largely Saudi — backing. It rests on the premise that those who finance terrorist organisations are liable for the damage they cause.

The CIA estimates Al-Qaeda’s annual running costs at $30m (£16m), raised almost entirely through donations. Tracking down the donors has been given low priority by government agencies, but many involved in the war on terror believe it is only in stopping the financing that the fight can be won.

The 205 defendants accused of financing Al-Qaeda include some of the biggest banks in the Middle East, wealthy Saudi individuals and corporations and several leading Islamic charities.

Motley alleges that members of the Saudi royal family contributed millions in protection money to Al-Qaeda after the Khobar Towers bombing in Dharan in 1996, in which 19 American airmen died, a charge the House of Saud denies.

He also asserts that, contrary to their claims, the Bin Laden family continued to support Osama after he was declared a terrorist and one of his brothers, Yeslam, had a joint bank account with him until 1997. Yeslam has denied having any contact with Osama in the past 20 years.

Given that the Saudi kingdom is an important US ally, Motley’s charges are an embarrassment to Washington. But as those involved in the war on terror belatedly realise the importance of following the money trail, more and more officials are coming to Charleston.

Motley says he has spent $18m of his own money sending investigators round the globe, more than the $15m allocated to the 9/11 Commission into the attacks. He can afford it: his firm made more than $2 billion in a class action against the tobacco industry that was initally regarded as unwinnable and eventually immortalised in the Hollywood film, The Insider.

Motley took on the 9/11 case after he was approached by Deena Burnett, whose husband Thomas was on United flight 93, which crashed in Pennsylvania after passengers attacked the hijackers. She wanted answers that she did not believe the government would find.

On the basis of what he has discovered so far, Motley argues that the World Trade Center attacks were not only preventable, as the 9/11 Commission suggested, but also entirely predictable.

He said: “I had never researched the foreseeability of someone hijacking an aeroplane and becoming a suicide bomber with the passengers as unwitting victims, but now it’s clear to me that there was a huge amount of evidence that should have forewarned the airlines and the government. I’ve got stacks of information of prior incidents.

“In 1994 the Algerian Islamic group, GIA, hijacked an Air France plane on Christmas Eve in Algiers and forced it to land in Marseilles, where it was refuelled far beyond necessity as it was only 170 miles from Paris. While refuelling was going on, the French intelligence got information that the intention was to fly the plane into the Eiffel Tower and detonate it, so police stormed the plane. It was Christmas Eve, when Parisians gather around the tower, and they would have killed thousands.

“There are literally 40 or 50 prior incidents of people hijacking planes with the intent of committing suicide.”

It emerged last week that the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) received repeated warnings in the months before 9/11 about Al-Qaeda’s desire to attack airlines. A previously undisclosed report by the 9/11 Commission revealed the FAA had warned that if a terrorist wanted to hijack a plane to commit suicide “in a spectacular explosion”, he would probably do so on American soil.

The case brought by bereaved families against the alleged financiers of 9/11 suffered a blow a year ago when a district court in Washington ruled that allegations against Saudi officials were not enough to warrant removing their sovereign immunity. In a further setback last month, a New York judge dismissed claims against a number of Saudi individuals and banks.

If a trial finally goes ahead, one of the key witnesses will be Niaz Khan, a British Pakistani whose story was reported by The Sunday Times last year. A waiter whose gambling debts led him to be sucked into Al-Qaeda, Khan was sent to hijacking school in Pakistan and then to America, where he was apparently intended to be part of the 9/11 attacks. He turned himself in to the FBI in April 2000 but was released after questioning and returned to Britain, where he remains a free man.

“Niaz is extremely important to the case,” said Motley. “It will give a jury the opportunity to hear from a person who came to the US to take part in a hijacking and turned himself in. The failure of the British authorities to act on him when he was handed over is inexplicable.”

If what he is doing seems like privatisation of intelligence gathering, Motley is defensive. “I’m not in the CIA business, I’m in the business of winning my case,” he said. “We’ve given the US government access to everything we’ve had that we believe is important to national security.”

Defending the recruitment of former military officers and government agents, he said: “They have access to people who won’t talk to the US government because they are former Taliban and frightened of ending up in Guantanamo. And sometimes we just outbid the US government in getting people to sell things such as hard drives.”

If that involves paying large sums to Taliban members, it seems Motley has no qualms. In this way, he acquired a rare list of senior Taliban officials complete with photographs, as well as the imprints of credit cards used by a top Al-Qaeda member.

His information-hunting has been so successful that the law firm’s library, the base of a small army of researchers, is packed with boxes of more than 1m pages of documents that await translation and inputting.

Help may be on the way, however. The FBI has now set up a department on terrorist financing. Anxious to get access to Motley’s treasure trove of documents, a branch of the US government might start to partly fund the database, enabling some of the boxes in the library finally to be opened.

February 13, 2005 at 11:41 AM in Al Qaeda | Permalink | Top of page | Blog Home