On Jan. 3, 2000, as the world was still feeling its way into the new millennium, senior al-Qaeda figures held a clandestine three-day meeting in Kuala Lumpur. Their aim was simple -- to ensure that the start of the next thousand years would be dominated by a wave of violence so grotesque, so far-reaching, that it would determine the course of history for centuries to come.
It was in an anonymous hotel room in the Malaysian capital that US intelligence officials believe al-Qaeda agreed on the final plan to turn airliners into guided missiles and fly them into several of the US' most famous buildings.
And it was also in Kuala Lumpur that a British man named Esa al-Britani in documents filed in the Southern District Court of New York, also known as Dhiren Barot, made an appearance -- one that would eventually result in his arrest for plotting an unprecedented terror campaign on both sides of the Atlantic.
Last week Barot was imprisoned for 40 years by Woolwich Crown Court. His sentence was handed down two days before the head of MI5 (British counter-intelligence), Eliza Manningham-Buller, warned there were now more than 1,600 individuals in Britain who share Barot's murderous obsession and are active in at least 30 plots.
These plots, Manningham-Buller said, "often have links back to al-Qaeda in Pakistan and through those links al-Qaeda gives guidance and training to its largely British foot soldiers here on an extensive and growing scale."
As the Barot case has shown, the plots can span the world -- forged in one place, approved in another, executed in the UK. That we know something of the links between the al-Qaeda high command and Barot can be attributed in part to an early intelligence success. That the trail goes so far back reveals the planning sophistication of al-Qaeda and the length of time it works on possible "spectaculars," terror attacks that will grab the world by the throat.
Understanding the Malaysian connection is essential to understanding al-Qaeda. Malaysian intelligence monitored the Kuala Lumpur conference at the request of the CIA, which had learned that it was happening after intercepting communications from an al-Qaeda cell in Yemen. But none of the covert observers appreciated the significance of the gathering until it was too late.
Only after the twin towers had fallen did it emerge that two of the Sept. 11 terrorists -- Khalid Almihdhar and Nawaf Alhazmi -- had been at the meeting, which took place in the hotel room of Yazid Sufaat, a businessman who would spend the best part of 2001 in a laboratory near Kandahar airport attempting to cultivate anthrax for al-Qaeda.
Also attending, according to the US government's official narrative of the Sept. 11 terror plot, was Riduan Isamuddin, better known as "Hambali," the leader of the Asian terrorist organization Jemaah Islamiyah, which is loosely affiliated with al-Qaeda. Ramzi Binalshibh, a close acquaintance of Mohammed Atta, the ringleader of the Sept. 11 atrocities and the man often described as the 20th member of the plot, was also present.
Barot, who appears in the Sept. 11 narrative under one of his aliases, al-Britani, is not believed to have been present at the main meeting. But he traveled to Kuala Lumpur with Tawfiq bin Attash, a former bodyguard of Osama bin Laden, who was present. Barot also reportedly held meetings with Hambali shortly afterwards.
Born to Hindu parents who moved to Britain via Kenya from India, Barot, a Muslim convert, had been dispatched to Kuala Lumpur by Khalid Sheikh Mohammed -- the chief architect of Sept. 11. How Barot met Sheikh Mohammed is unclear, but it is likely that they met several years earlier in Afghanistan. According to the Sept. 11 report, Barot, who had fought with the mujahidin in Kashmir, served as an instructor at an Afghan training camp in 1998.
Barot provided Hambali with the addresses of two people -- one in the US and one in South Africa -- whom he could contact if he needed help. The CIA believes the US address may have been passed on to the Sept. 11 plotters, Almihdhar and Alhazmi, who established a base on the west coast of the US shortly after the Kuala Lumpur conference.
Details of the Malaysian meeting became apparent only after Sheikh Mohammed, a Kuwaiti with a mechanical engineering degree from Carolina Agricultural and Technical State University, was seized in Rawalpindi on March 1, 2003, by Pakistani intelligence agents. Hambali was later picked up in Thailand on Aug. 11, 2003. Both are now in Guantanamo Bay, where they have been interrogated. Sheikh Mohammed has allegedly been subjected to "water-boarding," a form of torture in which detainees have water poured down their throats triggering a gag reflex which makes them fear they are drowning.
According to notes made during his interrogations and detailed in the Sept. 11 narrative, Sheikh Mohammed said bin Laden personally ordered him to dispatch Barot to the US to "case potential economic and `Jewish' targets in New York." If this is true, it suggests bin Laden has played a key part in allocating targets for British terrorists.
But proof of the links connecting bin Laden, Barot, Hambali and Sheikh Mohammed reinforces the image of al-Qaeda as a highly connected, hierarchical organization whose operatives are linked across time zones. For just the briefest, most precious few weeks, British intelligence was able to eavesdrop on this subterranean world, allowing counter-terrorism agents to join the invisible dots connecting al-Qaeda's web.
On Aug. 8, 2004, Democratic Senator Charles Schumer sent two letters. The first was to Frances Fragos Townsend, domestic security adviser to US President George W. Bush; the second was to Condoleezza Rice, then Bush's national security adviser.
The letters were identical: "Last Sunday one or more senior American officials leaked details of the capture of Muhammad Naeem Noor Khan, the 25-year-old al-Qaeda computer engineer, to the news media. Mr Khan had been providing invaluable information to our allies, because he continued to maintain contact with al-Qaeda operatives even after his capture by our allies. According to several media reports, British and Pakistani intelligence officials are furious that the administration unmasked Khan and named other captured terrorist suspects."
Khan was seized in Lahore by Pakistani intelligence on July 13, 2004, although crucially the event went unreported at the time. The intelligence that lay behind his arrest has never been revealed. But it seems inevitable that he was exposed at least partly on the basis of the information obtained from Sheikh Mohammed under the latter's interrogation at Guantanamo.
A spokesman for the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, the agency that oversees the US intelligence community, declined to comment on the matter.
However, two months ago the department publicly disclosed that information provided by Guantanamo detainees had been instrumental in thwarting terrorist plans, including two plots in Britain.
The department said that one of these plots "involved attacking urban targets in the United Kingdom with explosive devices."
According to the department, "some of the key leads to these plotters came from detainees."
Khan's seizure was a breakthrough for British intelligence. On Khan's computer were files carrying detailed surveillance of several financial buildings in New York, New Jersey and Washington. The details were so alarming that on July 26 the US authorities decided to increase their country's terrorism threat level to orange, the second highest level.
But Khan's real importance lay in the fact that, following his arrest, he cooperated with Pakistani intelligence, continuing his e-mail contact with a cadre of al-Qaeda operatives which included a 34-year-old former airline ticket salesman living in Britain -- Dhiren Barot. The furtive correspondence from Khan's computer was passed on to both US and British intelligence, allowing the agencies to construct a vital picture of al-Qaeda's operations leading up to Aug. 2.
What happened next is hotly disputed, but Khan's name filtered through to the US press. There are claims that the US government deliberately leaked news of his arrest to score public relations points in the war on terror. Some say the information emerged by accident as reporters sought details as to why the US threat level had been raised in July.
There are others who point a finger at the Pakistani intelligence community, suggesting that it wanted to deflect claims that it was soft on al-Qaeda. Whatever the truth, as Schumer observed, Khan's usefulness was extinguished once his name had been carried in news reports.
Britain's then home secretary David Blunkett was furious.
"There is a difference between alerting the public to a specific threat and alarming people unnecessarily by passing on information indiscriminately," he said.
The Observer has been told by a senior anti-terrorism source that the Khan leak forced MI5 to swoop on Barot and others far earlier than it had wanted. On Aug. 3, the day after Khan's name had entered the media domain and six days after they had temporarily lost trace of him, police arrested Barot as he was having a haircut at a barbershop in northwest London. It was an ignominious end for a man who at the time was judged by MI5 to be the second most dangerous al-Qaeda activist in Britain after the imprisoned radical cleric, Abu Qatada.
Last week the terrifying scale of Barot's plans to wreak carnage in the UK and the US were made public. The court heard how Barot had drawn up a 39-page document that he presented to al-Qaeda leaders in 2004 which detailed plans to pack limousines with propane gas cylinders and drive them into underground car parks beneath financial targets, including the headquarters of the International Monetary Fund and the New York Stock Exchange in Manhattan -- the same targets that were found on Khan's computer.
The court also heard how Barot proposed the construction of a low-tech form of "dirty bomb" that, while unlikely to kill anyone, would cause widespread panic. In addition there were plans to set off explosions on the Tube and the Heathrow Express.
Barot's capture and prosecution has been portrayed as a success in the "war on terror," one that will give the British authorities succor as they await the trials of nearly 100 alleged terrorists in the new year.
But the case also masks a serious intelligence failure, the true ramifications of which may never be known. By failing to prevent news of Khan's arrest leaking out -- an event which triggered Barot's arrest -- the intelligence services lost a key means of infiltrating al-Qaeda.
Worse, it is likely that they were forced to take action against suspects before they had joined all the dots. These include the links between Barot and Mohammed Siddique Khan, the leader of the four-man terror cell behind the July 7 bombings in London.
These links raise a troubling question: If the intelligence services had been able to monitor Barot and others for longer, would their chances of unearthing the July 7 plot have increased?
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