Al-Qaeda's nuke plot:
Facts and failures By Michael
Scheuer
Last week's issue of Time magazine
has caused a spike in US and Western worries over
al-Qaeda's intentions and ability to use weapons
of mass destruction (WMD) against the United
States. Prompting the concern is Time's excerpt of
journalist Ron Suskind's new book, The One
Percent Doctrine, which describes al-Qaeda's
apparently successful development of a portable
device that can be used to disperse cyanide gas.
The gas kills upon inhalation, and Suskind
claims that a cyanide-gas attack on New York
City's subway system was within 45 days of
occurring when al-Qaeda's deputy commander, Ayman
al-Zawahiri, called off the attack. Media coverage
of the book excerpt so far has focused on how many
casualties such an attack might
have caused - first estimates are in the September
11, 2001, range of 3,000 dead - and whether or not the
dispersal device would have actually worked. [1]
Suskind's book will provide grist for the
media mill and WMD experts for weeks, but the more
important issue to consider is why Zawahiri
decided to call off the attack. Suskind's sources
suggest that Zawahiri decided that the subway
operation was not a sufficient follow-up to the
September 11 attacks. [2] This judgment seems to
be on very solid ground. Since declaring war on
the United States in 1996, Osama bin Laden has
repeatedly underscored his preferred method of
operation.
Al-Qaeda, he says, will
incrementally increase the pain that its attacks
cause the United States until it forces Washington
to change its policies toward Israel and the
Muslim world. While the graphing of al-Qaeda
attacks since 1996 would not display a straight
ascending line, the clear trend of the line would
be upward; each attack has indeed been more
destructive to US citizens and material interests
than the last.
If 3,000 Americans killed
by chemical weapons in the New York subway system
were not enough for al-Qaeda, what sort of attack
did Zawahiri - and, implicitly, Osama bin Laden
and his shura council - decide to wait for
patiently? The answer, unfortunately for
Americans, may well be the detonation of a nuclear
weapon of some sort. While there is no definitive
evidence that al-Qaeda has such a device, the
group has had a specialized unit - staffed by
scientists and engineers - that has sought one
since at least 1992, and events over the past year
suggest that such a possibility remains current.
Nuclear knowledge continues to
proliferate In the mid-1970s, the US
Congress's Office of Technology Assessment found
that "a small group of people, none of whom have
ever had access to nuclear material, could
possibly design and build a crude nuclear device".
[3] Media reporting and scholarly writings since
the 1970s have reinforced this finding, and just
in the past year the full-range of proliferation
activities of Pakistani nuclear scientist Abdul
Qadeer Khan has come to light. Some reports
suggest that Khan and/or some of his senior
engineers have met with senior al-Qaeda leaders.
[4] In addition, the availability of unemployed
nuclear-weapons-related scientists and engineers
has increased exponentially since the 1991 fall of
the Soviet Union and the destruction of the Iraqi
state in 2003. Indeed, some Iraqi WMD scientists
were released from custody by US authorities last
year when no charges could be brought against
them. [5]
Al-Qaeda's supporters, too, have
played a hand in the proliferation of nuclear
knowledge by mounting a website on the Al-Firdaws
Forum dedicated to providing detailed instructions
on how to make nuclear "dirty and biological
bombs". First appearing on the Internet last
October, the site had 57,000 views just one month
later, and a physics professor at the Imperial
College in London said after studying the site
that it was "more like a proper instruction
manual" than the other more generic sites he had
reviewed. [6]
When asked by Congress in
February 2005 whether he could assure Americans
that no nuclear weapons were available to
terrorists, then-director of central intelligence
Porter Goss replied, "No, I can't make that
assurance. I can't account for some of the [Former
Soviet Union's (FSU) nuclear] materials, so I
can't make the assurance about its whereabouts."
That spring, the US National Intelligence Council
also categorically assessed that "undetected
smuggling [of nuclear materials] has occurred, and
we are concerned about the total amount of
material that could have been diverted or stolen
[from the FSU] in the last 13 years". A former
Soviet military officer said that "small tactical
nuclear loads" had been found missing from the
Soviet army's inventory in the 1990s [7]. Bin
Laden himself has made clear that al-Qaeda has
been shopping in the FSU's nuclear arms bazaar.
"It is a fact," bin Laden wrote to Mullah Omar on
June 5, 2002, "that the [FSU's] Islamic Republics
region is rich with significant scientific
experiences in conventional and non-conventional
military industries, which have a great role in
the future jihad against the enemies of Islam"
[8].
Religious authorization to use
nuclear weapons Since May 2003, al-Qaeda's
intention to use nuclear weapons against the
United States has had religious sanction. In that
month, a respected Salafi Saudi cleric named
Sheikh Nasir Bin Hamd al-Fahd concluded that the
use of nuclear weapons in the United States was
theologically justified on the basis of
reciprocity.
"Anyone who considers
American aggression against Muslims and their
lands during the last decades," Fahd wrote, "will
conclude that striking her [with nuclear weapons]
is permissible merely on the rule of treating as
one has been treated. Some brothers have totaled
the number of Muslims killed directly or
indirectly and come up with a figure of nearly 10
million."
More recently, the respected
cleric and spiritual leader of Indonesia's Jemaah
Islamiya, Sheikh Abu Bakar Ba'asyir - who was
freed from prison recently - said Muslims must
embrace nuclear weapons "if necessary" because "in
places like London and New York there must be
other calculations [than conventional attacks]. In
battle it is best to cause as many casualties as
possible." [9]
With the necessary nuclear
knowledge and materials available, and with
religious approval in hand, Suskind's book also
suggests that al-Qaeda still possesses the
discipline and command-and-control capabilities
that would be required to stage a sophisticated,
September 11-type attack that included the use of
WMD. The New York subway operation was scheduled
for spring 2003, at a time when many Western
authorities were asserting that bin Laden and
Zawahiri were completely isolated and cut off from
their fighters stationed outside South Asia.
Suskind, however, describes how on January
2003 the operation's commander - Yusef al-Ayeri,
then head of al-Qaeda on the Arabian Peninsula -
easily traveled from Saudi Arabia to Zawahiri's
location, where Zawahiri listened to the
description of the proposed attack and decided
that it should be canceled. Ayeri then returned to
Saudi Arabia and ordered the operation terminated.
Suskind's book also shows that the al-Qaeda
fighters tasked with executing the subway
operation beat US immigration and border controls
and easily entered New York City from North Africa
in the autumn of 2002, more than a year after the
September 11 attacks.
All told, Suskind's
book appears to present a gripping account of a
viable WMD attack that was canceled by Zawahiri.
More important, however, the book suggests that
several judgments about al-Qaeda that are now
accepted in the United States and the West as
common wisdom - such as al-Qaeda's inability to
stage large, complicated attacks in the United
States; that bin Laden and Zawahiri are isolated
and cannot exercise command and control over
al-Qaeda; and that US border security is greatly
improved since September 11 - need to be
re-examined and debated.
Notes 1. "Al-Qaeda cell
planned to attack subway with poison gas, says new
book", Time, June 18; Mark Thompson, "Interview:
And then what happened?" Time, July 18; Al Baker,
"US feared cyanide attack on New York subway", New
York Times, June 18. 2. Ibid. 3. Quoted in
Kevin O'Neill, "The nuclear terrorist threat",
Institute for Science and International Security,
August 1997. 4. "Paks Khan and Mehmood met
Osama - Report", Press Trust of India, April 3,
2005; Saul Hudson, "US wants full breakup of Khan
nuclear network", Reuters, March 17, 2005; Syed
Mohammad Amin Shah, "Jihad, nuclear program, and
democracy", Islam, May 21, 2003. 5. Stephen
Farrell, "Saddam's scientists freed as US house of
cards starts to tumble", Times Online, December
20, 2005. 6. Uri Mahnaimi and Tom Walker,
"Al-Qaeda woos recruits with nuclear bomb
website", Times Online, November 6, 2005. 7.
David Morgan, "Senate examining intelligence on
nuclear terror", Reuters, February 18, 2005; "US
intelligence council concludes that theft of
Russian nuclear material 'has occurred'",
Agence-France Presse, February 23, 2005; "Nuclear
devices disappeared from 14th Army inventory in
1990s", Nezavisimaya Moldova, April 25,
2005. 8. Osama bin Laden to Mullah Omar, June
5, 2002, US Military Academy Counterterrorism
Center Website, Document AFGP-2002-600321. 9.
Nasir Bin Hamd al-Fahd, "A Treatise on the Legal
Status of Using Weapons of Mass Destruction
Against Infidels", May 2003; Samantha Maiden,
"Embrace N-weapons: Bashir", The Australian,
October 4, 2005.
Michael Scheuer
served in the US Central Intelligence Agency for
22 years before resigning in 2004. He served as
the chief of the bin Laden unit at the
Counterterrorism Center from 1996 to 1999. He is
the once-anonymous author of Imperial Hubris:
Why the West is Losing the War on Terror
and Through Our Enemies' Eyes: Osama bin
Laden, Radical Islam, and the Future of America.
