Al-Qaida plot against N.Y. subways uncovered
U.S. officials received intelligence that al-Qaida operatives had been 45 days away from releasing a deadly gas into the New York City’s subways when the plan was called off by Osama bin Laden’s deputy in 2003, according to a book excerpt released on Time magazine’s Web site.
According to the investigative report by Ron Suskind, an informant close to al-Qaida leaders told U.S. officials that Ayman al-Zawahri had canceled the plan in January 2003, despite the likelihood that the strike would have killed as many people as the Sept. 11 attacks.
The informant said the operatives had planned to use a small, easily concealed device to release hydrogen cyanide into multiple subway cars. U.S. officials had already discovered plans for the device on the hard drive of a computer of a Bahraini jihadist arrested in February 2003, and they had been able to construct a working model from the plans.
The easy-to-make device, called “the mubtakkar,” meaning “invention” in Arabic or “initiative” in Farsi, represented a breakthrough in weapons technology that “was the equivalent of splitting the atom,” Suskind writes in his book. All previous attempts to use the deadly gas, similar to that used in Holocaust-era gas chambers, in mass attacks had failed.
The FBI declined to confirm the details of Suskind’s account.
A New York Police Department spokesman said authorities had known of the planned attack. “We were aware of the plot and took appropriate precaution,” Paul Browne told The Associated Press.
According to the report, President Bush was shown a model of the weapon in March 2003 and ordered alerts sent through the U.S. government. When intelligence arrived that al-Zawahri had called off the attack, Bush worried that something worse was in the works, Suskind writes.
“What has been concluded for the most part is this: al-Qaida’s thinking is that a second-wave attack should be more destructive and more disruptive than 9/11,” Suskind told the magazine in an interview.
The excerpt of Suskind’s book, “The One Percent Doctrine,” appears in Time’s most recent issue. Suskind is a former Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter for The Wall Street Journal.