The
single most important piece of evidence pointing to Iraq is the passport on
which Yousef fled America. It was no ordinary passport.
On
November 9,1992, just after the final green light for the bombing had been
given, Yousef reported to Jersey City., police that he had lost his passport.
He claimed to be Abdul Basit Mahmud Abdul Karim, a Pakistani born and reared in
Kuwait. Then, between December 3 and December 27, Yousef made a number of calls
to Baluchistan. Several of them were conference calls to a few key numbers, a
geographical plotting of which suggests that they were related to Yousef's
probable escape route--through Pakistani and Iranian Baluchistan--across the
Arabian Sea to Oman, after which the "telephone trail" ends. After
Yousef s arrest, a National Security Council staffer confirmed to me that
Yousef had indeed fled from the United States through Baluchistan.
On
December 31, 1992, Yousef went to the Pakistani consulate in New York with
photocopies of Abdul Basit's current and previous passports. Consistent with
his story to police in Jersey City, he claimed to have lost his passport and
asked for a new one. The consulate suspected his non-original documentation
enough to deny him a new passport. But it did provide him a six-month, temporary
passport and told him to straighten things out when he returned
"home." This turned out to be good enough for the purpose at hand.
By
now it should be clear that the World Trade Center bomber's real name is
probably neither Ramzi Yousef nor Abdul Basit. After all, would someone
intending to blow up New York's tallest tower go to such trouble to get a
passport under his own name? Yousef was a man of many passports; he had three
on his person when he was arrested in Pakistan. Rather, it seems that Ramzi Yousef
risked going to the Pakistani consulate with such flimsy documents because he
wanted investigators to conclude that he was in fact Abdul Basit, and so would
stop trying to determine his real identity. And that is pretty much what
happened.
But
why Abdul Basit Karim? Here we come to one of the most intriguing and vital
aspects of the case. Because there really was an Abdul Basit Karim, a Pakistani
born in Kuwait, who later attended Swansea Institute, a technical school in
Wales. After graduating in 1989 with a two-year degree in computer-aided
electronic engineering, he returned to a job in Kuwait's planning ministry. As
Abdul Basit and his family were permanent residents of Kuwait, Kuwait's
Interior Ministry maintained files on them. But the files for Abdul Basit and
his parents in Kuwait's Interior Ministry have been tampered with. Key
documents from the Kuwaiti files on Abdul Basit and his parents are missing.
There should be copies of the front pages of the passports, including a
picture, a notation of height, and so forth, but that material is gone. There
is also information in the file that should not be there, especially a notation
stating that Abdul Basit and his family left Kuwait for Iraq on August 26,
1990, transiting to Iran at Salamchah (a crossing point near Basra) on their
way to Pakistani Baluchistan, where, according to the file, they now live.
Who
put that notation into Abdul Basit's file and why? Consider the circumstances
of the moment. The Kuwaiti government had ceased to exist, and Iraq was an
occupation authority; bent on establishing control over a hostile population
amid near-universal condemnation, as an American-led coalition threatened war.
The situation was chaotic as hundreds of thousands of people were fleeing for
their lives. While the citizens of Western countries were pawns in a high
stakes game, held hostage by Iraq, little attention was paid to the multitude
of Third World nationals bent on escape. It truly boggles the imagination to
believe that under such circumstances an Iraqi bureaucrat was sitting calmly in
Kuwait's Interior Ministry taking down the flight plans--including the
itinerary and final destination--of otherwise non-descript Baluchis fleeing
Kuwait. Rather, it looks as if Iraqi intelligence put that information into
Abdul Basit's file to make it appear that he left Kuwait rather than died
there, and that, like Ramzi Yousef, he too was Baluch.
Moreover,
Iraqi intelligence apparently switched fingerprint cards, removing the original
with Abdul Basit's fingerprints and replacing it with one bearing those of
Yousef. Fingerprints are decisive for investigators because no two people's
match. But the very fact that fingerprints are so decisive makes them the
perfect candidate for careful manipulation. Thus, after U.S. authorities
learned that Yousef had fled as Abdul Basit, they sent his fingerprints (taken
by the Immigration and Naturalization Service at JFF airport when he was
briefly detained for illegal entry) to Kuwait, asking if they matched those of
Abdul Basit. When the Kuwaitis said that they did, everyone assumed the
question settled--forgetting that Kuwait's files were not secure during the
Iraqi occupation.
Pakistan
also maintains files on those of its citizens permanently resident abroad, at
the embassy in the country in which they live. On August 9, Baghdad ordered all
embassies in Iraq's "nineteenth province" to close. Most did,
including the Pakistani embassy. The files on Abdul Basit and his family that
should be in the Pakistani embassy in Kuwait are missing. The Pakistani
government now has no record of the family.
What
does all this suggest? To me it suggests that Abdul Basit and his family were
in Kuwait when Iraq invaded in August 1990; that they probably died then; and
that Iraqi intelligence then tampered with their files to create an alternative
identity for Ramzi Yousef. Clearly, only Iraq could reasonably have: 1) known
of, or caused, the death of Abdul Basit and his family; 2) tampered with
Kuwait's Interior Ministry files, above all switching the fingerprint cards;
and 3) filched the files on Abdul Basit and his family from the Pakistani
embassy in Kuwait.
Of
course, the best way to verify or falsify this would be to check with people
who knew Abdul Basit before August 1990. To this end, Brad White, a former
Senate Judiciary Committee investigator and CBS newsman, contacted an overseas
source he knew in the United Kingdom who had looked into the matter. Two people
had a good memory of Abdul Basit but, shown photos of Yousef, were unable to make
a positive identification. They both felt that while there was some similarity
in looks, it was not the same person. "Our feeling is that Ramzi Yousef is
probably not Basit", White was told.[13]
Logic
and circumstance also suggest the same conclusion. Is it likely to be mere
coincidence, after all, that during Iraq's occupation of Kuwait key documents
were removed from Abdul Basit's and his parents files, while the same files
were filched in their entirety from the Pakistani embassy? Moreover, Abdul Basit
had no criminal record in Britain, nor did he or his parents have any security
record in Kuwait. The first concrete knowledge we have of Ramzi Yousef/Abdul
Basit comes in early 1991, around the end of the Gulf war when he showed up in
the Philippines seeking contact with a Muslim group there. Introduced as
"the chemist", he proposed to collaborate in
bombing
conspiracies. Now, how did a young man who had led a seemingly normal life up
until August 1990 suddenly become a world class terrorist six months after Iraq
invaded his country of residence? Where did he get such sophisticated
explosives training in just six months? (The real Abdul Basit's degree,
remember, was in electronic engineering, not chemistry, which Swansea Institute
does not even teach.)
And
where are Abdul Basit's parents? They never returned to Kuwait after its
liberation, nor have they appeared anywhere else. Did they too take up a life
of crime after decades of abiding by the law?
Ramzi
Yousef's arrest has made it easy enough to resolve a key question and perhaps
produce important evidence implicating Iraq in the World Trade Center bombing:
Is "Ramzi Yousef" really Abdul Basit or not? Let those who remember
Abdul Basit from before August 1990 meet Yousef in person and tell us. It sounds
simple and logical, but strangely, the Justice Department has shown no interest
in arranging such a meeting. Moreover, it has decided to try, the bomber as
Ramzi Yousef even though no one, including Yousef by now, maintains that that
is his real name. If the government believes that Yousef is really Abdul Basit,
why doesn't it try him as Abdul Basit? Why is the Justice Department
uninterested even in definitively determining his identity, even though doing
so might help get to the bottom of the matter. I recently asked a Justice
Department official, who maintains his confident view that Yousef is indeed
Abdul Basit, "Why don't you bring the people who knew Abdul Basit to the
prison to meet Yousef, so they can say for sure if they are the same?"
"But you", I was told, "are interested in an intelligence
question." Earlier I had been told, "It does not matter what we call
him. We just try a body."
And
so back we come to the high wall. As before, those who have the information
about Ramzi Yousef and his bombing conspiracies are not concerned with the
question of state sponsorship, or at least consider it secondary to their
trials; while those who are concerned with state sponsorship are denied the
information that they need to investigate the question properly.