background image
Ladin reportedly instructed him to case the Port of Aden, on the southern
coast, instead.
30
The eventual result was an attempted attack on the USS The
Sullivans in January 2000 and the successful attack, in October 2000, on the
USS Cole.
Nashiri's success brought him instant status within al Qaeda. He later was
recognized as the chief of al Qaeda operations in and around the Arabian
Peninsula. While Nashiri continued to consult Bin Ladin on the planning of
subsequent terrorist projects, he retained discretion in selecting operatives and
devising attacks. In the two years between the Cole bombing and Nashiri's cap-
ture, he would supervise several more proposed operations for al Qaeda.The
October 6, 2002, bombing of the French tanker Limburg in the Gulf of Aden
also was Nashiri's handiwork. Although Bin Ladin urged Nashiri to continue
plotting strikes against U.S. interests in the Persian Gulf, Nashiri maintains that
he actually delayed one of these projects because of security concerns.
31
Those
concerns, it seems, were well placed, as Nashiri's November 2002 capture in
the United Arab Emirates finally ended his career as a terrorist.
5.2 THE "PLANES OPERATION"
According to KSM, he started to think about attacking the United States after
Yousef returned to Pakistan following the 1993 World Trade Center bombing.
Like Yousef, KSM reasoned he could best influence U.S. policy by targeting the
country's economy. KSM and Yousef reportedly brainstormed together about
what drove the U.S. economy. New York, which KSM considered the eco-
nomic capital of the United States, therefore became the primary target. For
similar reasons, California also became a target for KSM.
32
KSM claims that the earlier bombing of the World Trade Center taught him
that bombs and explosives could be problematic, and that he needed to grad-
uate to a more novel form of attack. He maintains that he and Yousef began
thinking about using aircraft as weapons while working on the Manila
air/Bojinka plot, and speculated about striking the World Trade Center and
CIA headquarters as early as 1995.
33
Certainly KSM was not alone in contemplating new kinds of terrorist oper-
ations.A study reportedly conducted by Atef, while he and Bin Ladin were still
in Sudan, concluded that traditional terrorist hijacking operations did not fit
the needs of al Qaeda, because such hijackings were used to negotiate the
release of prisoners rather than to inflict mass casualties. The study is said to
have considered the feasibility of hijacking planes and blowing them up in
flight, paralleling the Bojinka concept. Such a study, if it actually existed, yields
significant insight into the thinking of al Qaeda's leaders: (1) they rejected
hijackings aimed at gaining the release of imprisoned comrades as too com-
plex, because al Qaeda had no friendly countries in which to land a plane and
AL QAEDA AIMS AT THE AMERICAN HOMELAND
153
Final 5-7.5pp 7/17/04 11:46 AM Page 153