Dimensions: 6'' x 9'' 340 pages AEI Press  (Washington) Publication Date: January 2001 Hardcover ISBN: 0844741698 Price: $ 24.95 Add to Cart   Examination Copies

January 2001
Study of Revenge: The First World Trade Center Attack and Saddam Hussein's War against America (Revised Edition)
By Laurie Mylroie

In Study of Revenge, Laurie Mylroie engages the reader in a gripping examination of the evidence from the first World Trade Center attack in 1993. In the process, she uncovers links between the bombing and the Iraqi leadership and reveals a terrifying tale of America left exposed and vulnerable following the mishandling of what had been the most ambitious terrorist attack ever attempted on U.S. soil. In his foreword to the revised edition, former CIA director R. James Woolsey explains the relevance of Mylroie's work to the events of September 11, 2001.

In May 1994, the first group of conspirators convicted for the February 1993 World Trade Center bombing was sentenced. The defendants' goal--according to Judge Kevin Duffy--was to topple the north tower onto the south tower amid a cloud of cyanide gas that would engulf those trapped in the north tower. "That's clearly what you intended," the judge said. "If that had happened, we would have been dealing with tens of thousands of deaths."

The World Trade Center bombing of February 26, 1993, was--until September 11, 2001--the most ambitious terrorist attack ever attempted on U.S. soil. Had the plot gone as planned, it would have produced death and destruction on an unprecedented scale.

After that bombing, its mastermind, known as Ramzi Yousef, escaped. Less than two years later, in January 1995, he was in Manila, plotting again, this time preparing to bomb twelve U.S. commercial aircraft over the Pacific in two stunning days of rage. But while mixing chemicals for his bombs, Yousef started a fire and was forced to flee, leaving behind a computer that contained information leading to his arrest a month later.

Most Americans familiar with the 1993 World Trade Center bombing and the attempted bombing of the United Nations and other targets in New York a few months later initially believed that these incidents were the results of a low-level conspiracy led by the radical Islamic Egyptian cleric Shaykh Omar Abdul Rahman. Much later, after the legal proceedings were completed, the bombing conspiracies were attributed to Osama bin Ladin.

In fact, the 1993 Trade Center bombing had its origins in an FBI undercover operation initiated by an informant whom the FBI dropped as the plot got underway. Others stepped in and transformed and continued the conspiracy that culminated in that attack. Subsequently, the FBI reconciled with its informant and initiated another undercover operation, this time carrying it through to its end. That operation culminated in the arrests on June 24, 1993, of a second set of conspirators, as they mixed the material with which they planned to bomb the United Nations, New York's federal building, and two tunnels.

The basic charge against Shaykh Omar in those bombing plots was "seditious conspiracy." That is, his inflammatory rhetoric inspired some of those who participated in the Trade Cnter bombing and some of those who participated in the second bombing plot. But he was not the operational director of the bombing conspiracies. So who was? Study of Revenge answers that question.

A New Theory of Terrorism?

Ramzi Yousef's terrorism, as well as the second New York bombing conspiracy in 1993, are significant for their appallingly lethal intent. They are also important because they gave rise to the theory of "loose networks"--the idea that major acts of terrorism, formerly thought to be carried out largely by terrorist states or well-known terrorist organizations, such as the Irish Republican Army, Hamas, and Hizbollah, are now largely carried out by elusive, amorphous groups.

That situation poses a particular problem for authorities. Such networks are difficult to penetrate before they commit their terrorism, and there is no real address for retaliation afterward. That is an exceptionally serious danger.

Previously, when major acts of terrorism were thought to be the work of states and well-known terrorist organizations, authorities had a fairly short list of suspects after an attack. There was a reasonable chance that those behind the attack would be discovered. But given the widespread belief that a new form of terrorism, represented by loose networks, now exists, that is no longer the case.

Accepting this new explanation for terrorism means accepting that it is now harder or even impossible to predict or prevent attacks. It is therefore extremely important to ask whether the new understanding of terrorism is justified. And it would seem not. New York law enforcement, particularly the FBI's office in New York, suspected that Iraq, rather than a loose network, was behind the World Trade Center bombing. Indeed, it is possible through a very careful examination of both the transcripts of the terrorism trials in New York and the evidence presented in those trials to show that Iraq was in fact behind the bombing and that Ramzi Yousef is an Iraqi intelligence agent. Moreover, Iraq's demonstrable sponsorship of Yousef's terrorism raises questions about subsequent terrorist bombings that were also attributed to loose networks of Muslim extremists.

Why should Iraq be behind repeated incidents of terrorism? Because the United States and Baghdad are still effectively at war. Saddam has far greater cause than any other party to attack the United States. That is not to say that other states pose no threat; some have committed acts of terrorism against America in the past and may do so in the future. Nevertheless, in each of the cases discussed in this book, the evidence points toward Iraq as the force behind the attacks.

The Chinese Wall

The question of who was behind Ramzi Yousef was never properly investigated, partly because of a peculiar division that existed in America between the Justice Department and the national security bureaucracies. This problem was only addressed in the fall of 2001, in the new antiterrorism legislation, which rectified a bureaucratic failing that had dogged the U.S. investigation into major terrorist attacks.

A "Chinese Wall" had separated the justice department and the national security agencies; one was not supposed to interfere with the work of the other. Above all, the national security bureaucracies were not supposed to interfere with the work of the Justice Department, because that could be considered obstruction of justice.

But what happens when a terrorist act falls within the jurisdiction of both spheres? Terrorism, when committed by individuals, is a crime. Terrorism supported by states is also war. What happens when a state commits an act of terrorism in America? Is that a criminal matter or a national security issue?

The primary business of the Justice Department is to conduct trials--to prosecute and convict individuals. Typically, once an arrest was made, the Justice Department declared the matter sub judice and denied information to the national security bureaucracies, whose responsibility it was to determine whether any act of terrorism had state sponsorship. In effect, the Justice Department placed a higher priority on the prosecution and conviction of individuals--with all the rights to a fair trial guaranteed by the American legal system--above our country's national security interest in determining who might have been behind the terrorists. Indeed, under previous bureaucratic procedures--prevailing until very recently--the question of state sponsorship may well have been relegated to such a distant second place that it was never addressed at all.

Indeed, that is essentially what happened in the investigation into Ramzi Yousef's terrorism. The national security bureaucracies never received the results of the FBI investigation; hence, they could not make an independent inquiry into whether Yousef's terrorism was state-sponsored.

This fundamental problem became evident to the author during an unusual meeting she had in January 1995 with the federal prosecutors who led the New York bombing conspiracy trials. The New York district attorney's office arranged the meeting, and it included Andrew McCarthy, the lead prosecutor in the conspiracy trial of Shaykh Omar, et al., and Gil Childers, lead prosecutor in the first World Trade Center bombing trial. When Mylroie explained to them why it seemed that Iraq was behind the bombing and that Ramzi Yousef was almost certainly an Iraqi intelligence agent, they replied, "You may be right. But we prosecute individuals. We don't do state sponsorship."

"Then who 'does' state sponsorship?" she asked.

"Washington," they replied.

"Who in Washington?" she responded.

They said nothing. The room was silent.

A Dangerous Precedent

The answer, it turns out, is that Washington did not address the question of state sponsorship, or at least it did not do so properly. The Justice Department was the only arm of the government with both the evidence, produced by the FBI in the course of its investigation, and the intelligence, provided by the national security agencies in the course of their worldwide inquiries. The FBI's National Security Division was formally responsible for investigating the question of state sponsorship. But the FBI is primarily a domestic law enforcement agency. It is questionable whether it alone had the Middle East expertise to carry out the investigation of state sponsorship in the Trade Center bombing. Yet the FBI would not share its information with the national security agencies, which did possess the requisite foreign area expertise. The FBI unilaterally decided that there was "no evidence" of state sponsorship in the Trade Center bombing. When those agencies asked to see the evidence so they could check for themselves, the FBI replied, "No, this is a criminal matter. We're handling it."

A perilous precedent was set, first in the government's handling of the Trade Center bombing, and then in the second New York bombing conspiracy, for which Shaykh Omar and others were charged. In each instance, the government did not address the question of state sponsorship but instead focused almost entirely on prosecuting individuals. That policy, however, was an invitation to states sponsoring terrorism, an invitation for them to commit terrorism in such a way as to leave behind some relatively minor figures to be arrested, tried, and convicted. And this policy, quite arguably, led directly to the events of September 11.

After September 11, the question before America is whether the fundamental mistake in handling terrorism that arose over the past eight years--neglecting the role of states--will be corrected or whether established bureaucratic impulses will prevail. If the latter occurs, then we can expect more terrible acts of terrorism on the scale of September 11 or worse.