Word: yousef
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...Agent 007: suave, well educated, a trilingual globe-trotter who mixed easily in other cultures, who engaged women and intrigue with savoir faire and deadly expertise. Except that Khalid Shaikh Mohammed isn't fiction. He's all too real. Consider his resume of terror. He presumably helped kinsman Ramzi Yousef bomb the World Trade Center in 1993. He hatched plots, never carried out, to bring down U.S. airliners over the Pacific and to assassinate President Clinton and the Pope. He may well have masterminded--officials aren't sure yet--the deadly assault on the U.S.S. Cole off Yemen...
...first appeared on U.S. intelligence-agency screens after the first World Trade Center attack in 1993. Hours before a truck bomb in a basement parking lot went off, Yousef flew to Pakistan, then made his way to Manila, where he hooked up with Mohammed. The bombing is not thought to have been sponsored by al-Qaeda, but investigators believe al-Qaeda leaders were so impressed by Yousef's enterprise that they resolved to support his future endeavors. The conduit, it's believed, was bin Laden's brother-in-law Muhammad Jamal Khalifa, who then headed the Philippines office...
Mohammed never fit the image of a wild-eyed or even devout jihadi. With his easy smile and placid eyes, he had a reputation as a charmer and a ladies' man. When Yousef and Mohammed weren't plotting destruction together in Manila, they were partying, say Philippine intelligence agents. Mohammed took up with a bar girl he met at the Cotton Candy Club. Later he hired a helicopter and pilot to impress a female dentist he was courting. Yousef and Mohammed took their girlfriends scuba diving at beach resorts, but Mohammed remained an enigma even to the women he dated...
Mohammed's plans were exposed by accident. While experimenting with explosives in January 1995, Yousef set fire to his Manila apartment and fled. Police found evidence linking him to Mohammed. Other plotters arrested in Asia named Mohammed as their ringleader. But by then he had escaped to Doha, Qatar. In 1996 he was indicted in absentia in a New York federal court for the airline-bombing plot. But when the U.S. notified Qatar that he was a wanted man, Mohammed was tipped off and fled the emirate, according to Washington intelligence sources. As for Yousef, he was captured in Pakistan...
Mohammed's name would not surface again until after he helped complete the job Yousef bragged to the FBI about doing: toppling the World Trade Center towers. (Intelligence officials still can't fill that five-year gap in his dossier.) Last year in Karachi, he and Binalshibh gave an interview to an al-Jazeera TV reporter in which they spoke proudly of carrying out what they called "the martyrdom operation inside America." On camera, they provided details of the attack, disclosing coded e-mails that had referred to the Twin Towers as "the Faculty of Town Planning." They also displayed...