This guy...was crazy. He is crazy
- He had come into the country to attack
the United States on our own ground.
[on the radio]: There's been an explosion
at the World Trade Center parking lot.
- It left a huge 200 foot wide crater...
It's been obliterated.
- This is the mastermind. Mr. Nobody.
Somebody was living in that apartment.
- This is basically a bomb factory.
He had created a micro-bomb.
- Every effort has to be made right now
to figure out this plot.
He left New York the night of the bomb.
- He wants to assassinate the Pope and he wants to kill
a quarter of a million people.
He's going to come back and he's going to keep coming back
- They told me to grab my team. We're going to get him.
[narrator]: In the FBI, we make a lot of headlines.
Drug busts, mob stings.
Terrorist takedowns.
[people shouting]
We understand why people want to tell stories about us.
[director]: Mark it. - Freeze!
- FBI.
- FBI! [man in the distance]: Action!
[narrator]: But they don't know the half of it.
What really goes down?
We save that for each other,
when we're talking agent to agent.
This is FBI. True.
- February 26, 1993.
Where were you when you heard there was an explosion
at the World Trade Center?
[narrator]: Kristy Kottis is a 24-year veteran of the FB.
Kottis was the supervisor of the FBI's threat response
squad, overseeing the bureau's response to terrorism threats in New York City.
- I was down at 26 Federal Plaza, in New York.
[narrator]: Frank Pellegrino has used his expertise
in accounting and law to handle counter-espionage
and terrorism cases at home and abroad.
- So and the FBI office at 26 Federal Plaza
is only about four blocks from the World Trade Center.
It's very close.
- Very close. People actually heard a rumble.
[explosion in the distance]
and then it came on the news pretty quick
that something happened down at the Trade Center.
It was chaos down there.
[woman]: Watch out, watch out!
[radio]: There's been an explosion at the exit ramp
to the World Trade Center parking lot.
There was a tremendous explosion.
[woman on the radio]: I actually saw the walls shaking.
It sounded like a bomb, or a bang, or something, like...
or a pop, I can't really explain it.
- It was chaos, because you didn't know whether the fire
was below you, or above you.
[man 1]: Where is the smoke?
[man 2]: It got thicker as you went down.
[woman]: Makes it appear that something in the basement
happened because the people that seem to be harmed
were on the lower levels.
- It's a lot of smoke, you can't breathe, you can't breathe!
[journalist]: You can't breathe? - No!
- The reports initially were that it was a transformer
that had blown up, and that sounded reasonable.
- This explosion in a sub-basement, B-2,
in the middle of the building, and destroyed multiple floors
[narrator]: Charlie Rasner is n expert in explosives
and hostage rescue and a recipient
of the FBI's shield of bravery.
- That left a huge 200 foot wide crater.
- Wow. - And it's been obliterated.
[strong explosion]
[firefighter]: Something blew. Something big blew.
I've never seen anything like it in my life.
You know, there was thousands of injuries,
and there was also seven deaths.
[narrator]: David Kelley has prosecuted organized crime
and terrorism cases and served as U.S. attorney
for the Southern District of New York.
- The victims were essentially maintenance and service
providers in the building who were, you know,
having their lunch break, and they were all killed
by the explosion.
These were six employees, one of whom was pregnant
with the seventh victim.
[man]: John di Giovanni, Robert Kirkpatrick, Steve Napp,
William Macko, Wilfredo Marcato, and Monica Smith,
who was seven months pregnant at the time.
[officer]: We're working with a massive explosion
that the police department and federal authorities
are investigating what they think it might be.
[water flooding]
- This was 1993.
I mean, you wouldn't think that it was anything other than
a bad accident that happened.
- But, you look at the cars, the vehicles in the garage,
you know, are they mangled? Are they flipped? Are they pushed?
It's obvious, you know, that...it's a bomb.
[riveting music]
- There's a bit of a pit in your stomach.
- Now that we know it's a bomb, our number one goal
is to find the mastermind who built it.
When you have a bomb, you have to have a container.
In this case, because of the size of the bomb,
the size of the crater, you had to have a big one.
So, a truck.
So you look for the most mangled piece of a truck in the vicinity.
- And one of the items that was found still had the VIN number on it.
[suspenseful music]
We ran the VIN number. It was a Ryder van
rented out of Jersey City.
When agents went out to speak to Ryder about it,
they found out a person named Mohammed Salameh rented the van.
And they found out that Salameh had called in to
the Ryder office saying that the van was stolen
and that he wanted a refund of his deposit.
- What? Were you like: "Oh, my God"?
- Well, we had Ryder call him back, making a point for him
to come down and get his money.
- I remember thinking: "there's no f'ing way this guy's coming back."
We had the place surrounded with agents and detectives
and task force members. - Basically an arrest team,
a surveillance team and sounds like an undercover team?
- Yes.
We actually had agents and detectives inside Ryder,
behind the desk.
So, down the road, they see someone approaching.
And it's Salameh.
- The guy's coming back to get his $400 deposit.
- This guy's nuts.
Why would you rent the van in your real name
and then go back for the deposit after you blew the van up?
- But he went anyway. - He went anyway.
A bunch of agents grabbed him, threw him in a van.
- What was his face? Was he shocked?
- I don't think we got a good look at his face
because they got him in that van pretty quickly.
He was back in Manhattan within minutes.
They took him to 26 Fed for processing.
He gets fingerprinted.
- Is he cooperating at this point?
- Cooperating no. But we try to find out who else
he is connected to or what calls he makes.
Does he make calls overseas?
Uh, is there anybody else in the States
we should be looking at?
- And then we get the call from the storage facility.
- Right. - The storage facility
was interesting because it was a big piece.
[Frank]: See, weeks before the explosion
at the World Trade Center, staff at a storage facility
in Jersey City noticed that there were a lot of suspicious-looking guys
coming and going at one of their lockers.
A lot of guys, bringing all kinds of stuff in.
Staff thought it was weird, but you know, it's 1993,
nobody's thinking about terrorism, so they weren't alarmed or anything.
- When Salameh's picture gets put all over the news...
- The guy who ran the storage facility said:
"Oh, I recognize that guy",
and you know: "let me make a phone call."
The storage facility call came in, and obviously we go there
- We send out bomb techs, ERT. They open it up.
They see... - Chemicals and other stuff
that was being stored there.
- The storage facility employees tell us the fact that people
came in with a van, the fact that they loaded,
the fact that they had hydrogen tanks delivered.
And in fact, the storage facility employee comes out
and says: "hey, wait a second, you can't put those hydrogen
tanks in the storage facility, they'll blow up!"
- Charlie, when you hear about the ingredients,
what does that conjure in your mind as a bomb tech?
- This is basically a bomb factory.
And it sounds like they were trying to make an ANFO bomb,
initially, ammonium nitrate fuel oil, but it didn't pan out
so they went with this urea nitrate.
- And that was boosted by hydrogen.
- Yeah. Boosters really make a big difference
in the, uh, explosive train.
The better the boosters, the larger the explosion,
more devastation.
It was the biggest bomb that we had had to date
since we started keeping records back in the 1920s.
- Wow.
[Frank]: At the storage facility, everything is checked
for fingerprints, and there were hits coming up.
[David]: Salameh's fingerprint was found on a yellow-page book,
and the page in the Yellow Pages was for rental vans.
- So, Salameh rented the truck?
- We certainly knew he was one of the people involved.
But we just didn't think that he would be the one to be
directing everybody on how to do such a thing.
- You know, you look at him and like: "I'm not sure he's the mastermind," but who was?
- He's still in the wind. [Franck]: Still in the wind.
We did find other latent prints that were unidentified,
that we weren't able to match.
- So that's a lead. - Yeah.
I mean, you're running the prints now against everything.
We searched every database, but we came up with nothing.
- So we've got fingerprints that belong to Mr. Nobody. Unidentified.
Agents working on Salameh's apartment did find
a letter in the apartment addressed to someone
about an asylum claim that he made when he entered
the country. Ramzi Yousef.
[riveting music]
So we went to the, uh, lawyer
who was working the asylum claim.
Fortunately, when Ramzi came in, because he was filing
an asylum claim, he was photographed,
and his fingerprints were taken for immigration purposes.
So we ran the prints against those latent prints
that were unidentified from all the bomb-making material
that was in the storage place. At this point we were able to
confirm that they were the same fingerprints.
[narrator]: But when agents question Mohammed Salameh's
associates about Yousef, they hear yet another unfamiliar name.
- This other person had come into the country recently.
And everybody was referring to him as "Rashid."
I don't think they really knew who he was.
They have nicknames that they give each other, and he was "Rashid."
- What are they saying that this guy is doing?
Like, why is he important?
- Rashid was the one who was leading the charge.
That knew how to mix the chemicals and knew how to create the bomb.
But they had told the interviewers that Rashid
had gone to the Pakistani consulate to get
a new passport before the bombing.
So we went to the consulate, spoke to the consul general.
We asked if he could see who came into the embassy
for maybe a two-week period before the bombing
and applied for a new Pakistani passport.
So he actually left for a little while,
he came back with a document, but not Ramzi Yousef.
Not that name.
- What was the name?
- Abdel Basset Mahmoud Abdul Karim.
And he actually had a picture.
A different picture, much younger picture,
clean shaven of the person we knew as Ramzi Yosef
from the immigration record.
So now we know, Ramzi Yousef is Rashid.
- Bingo. - This is the mastermind.
This is our guy. - Right.
So then we were able to take his real name,
and we ran that through departure records and the airlines.
- Yeah. And we actually found out
that Ramzi Yousef left New York the night of the bombing.
[plane engines]
- Yousef had come into the country to, attack
the interests of the United States on our own ground.
How can we make sure he's not going to go do something else
equally as bad or worse?
He was put on the ten most wanted list.
The motors are running and we've got to go find this guy.
So, there was a sense of urgency there.
How can we get our hands on him, and quick?
- Where do we think Yousef is now?
- Yousef's plane ticket was to Quetta.
Which is right near the border with Afghanistan.
So we still weren't, you know, sure, was he still in Pakistan?
And then, I came into the office on a Monday
and there was a teletype that came from the Philippines.
[narrator]: The pope's visit to the Philippines
draws millions to the streets of the capital.
As police prepare for the even, an emergency call
puts them on high alert.
There is a fire or smoke condition that draws
the authorities to this apartment that's right on the Pope's route.
- The fire department came, and they found some chemicals
and a lot of bomb-making materials in this apartment.
Somebody had left all kinds of stuff.
- And ultimately, there are things connecting Ramzi Yousef to that apartment.
You know, there's some identification material
and so forth. The thing was to get boots on the ground
and sort through this thing.
- Ramzi might still be in the area.
- Right.
We met with the Philippine National Police.
They allow us to view the information that they took.
There was a computer, other documents, two fake ID cards
that actually had photographs of Ramzi Yousef.
And a chemical dictionary.
Somebody had fingered through that quite a bit.
And we got Yousef's prints off a lot of the stuff.
So now, now we know Yousef is fully engaged in this.
I mean, there's all kinds of bomb-making material.
Including Casio watches that they were going to change up
a little bit and use as timers for bombs.
It's scary because it just made you realize that Yousef
is going to come back and he's going to keep coming back.
[narrator]: In fact, Ramzi Yousef is already back in action.
- The Japanese police got in touch with the Philippines
and us, about the PAL 434 bomb.
[narrator]: The Philippine authorities tell the FBI
that four weeks prior to the Manila apartment fire,
Philippine Airlines flight 434, en route from Cebu to Tokyo,
suffered a powerful and fatal explosion, in the middle of its passenger cabin.
- The plane made an emergency landing.
[suspenseful music]
One...Mr. Ikegami was killed in that event,
and 10 people were injured.
The Japanese police were able to determine that the item
used for that bomb to ignite was a Casio watch.
- So then, the Japanese police said: "well, wait a second,
in the Manila apartment, they had Casio watches.
We had a Casio watch here.
- Ramzi had created a micro-bomb.
The way that he used the Casio watch was to attach
microfilament wires, to a bottle full of nitroglycerin,
which he had stabilized using wool and cotton.
He had as a power source, two nine-volt batteries.
The plan was when they took it onto the plane, it was not a bomb.
It was parts of a bomb.
But he had them secreted in various areas, even, of his body.
He did, in fact, smuggle nine-volt batteries
in the heels of his shoes. - Yeah.
The gun cotton was, you know, in the dress of a doll.
And he wore the watch on his wrist.
- He could assemble it in the aircraft, probably a lavatory.
And it was tiny, and he could plant it anywhere on a plane.
He got on in Manila.
He got off in Cebu, and then it blew up in the air.
[ominous music]
[explosion]
Because his plan wasn't just to kill one passenger,
it was to disrupt the jet fuel tank below it,
where the seat was, because it did blow a hole,
a gaping hole, underneath Mr. Ikegami's seat.
[suspenseful music]
He had plans that showed where the fuel tanks were located,
and what seats were over those.
Thankfully, that plane, the seats had been reconfigured
and the jet fuel tank was not underneath that seat on that particular flight.
Because if it had ruptured the fuel tanks underneath,
they would have no doubt blown that plane up.
- Wow. - What's even more chilling
is the information about all the flights.
- All the diagrams and the information,
to my understanding, is in the laptop.
They want to bomb 11 more planes.
- They were targeting airliners going to the United States from Southeast Asia.
Now you're really worried.
- A plot to set off bombs on all these airliners,
killing thousands of people, to say it was chilling is an understatement.
- Every effort has to be made right now to find Yousef.
We got a call from Pakistan.
A source said that Ramzi was in Islamabad.
[upbeat mysterious music]
[narrator]: The source is a University of Islamabad student named Ishtiaque Parker.
Ramzi Yousef has been trying to enlist Parker as a bomber.
- He kind of went along with it, I think, out of fear at first,
but Yosef was asking him to do things that he did not want
to do, including, you know, travel to Bangkok
and put some bombs on cargo planes.
And it wasn't something that I think ideologically
he had any thought ever of being involved in anything like that.
The source said: "I've had enough of this."
And he told the authorities in Pakistan.
We also in this apartment at this location.
I was a team leader.
They told me to grab my team.
Report to Dulles, there'll be a private plane...
We're going to get him.
This was dark, when we landed.
- So we have an individual.
- He's in the apartment. - The Pakistani authorities
spoke to the source and said, you know, we want you
to go in and if he's in the apartment, come out of
the apartment, run your hand through your hair,
and then we'll know that, that he's in there.
[narrator]: Assault teams watch as parker exits the building,
and raises an arm, to run his hand through his hair.
- At that point, the Pakistani authorities went in and cleared
the apartment and grabbed Yousef.
- Pakistani intelligence had him.
And they said, as soon as it's daybreak,
they're going to give him to you.
There's one guy standing there, a Pakistani ISI official.
He's all happy.
- Yeah. And there's this bag of bones
in terrible-looking clothing, filthy, with a bag over
his head, a burlap bag-potato sack or whatever and
some shackles from, like, the 1850s. - Oh wow!
- He had leg irons the whole deal.
And, uh, he says: "here's your package, sir.
Thank you very much."
When we took him on the plane, We had a medic, we had the medic
to inspect, make sure it was no broken bones or damage.
We got the bag off his head, took the shackles off.
I took a brand new orange jumpsuit out of a bag.
Gave it to him to, you know, put on.
I ask you if you need anything, he said:
"I want to be able to, when we land, get cleaned up,
shape around a suit so I can meet the media
and give them my story.
I want to tell them why we are doing what we're doing.
I said: "what are you doing? Why did you do this?
- Yeah. - And he looked at me
and he said: "Because you help
the Jews and we hate the Jews, and so we hate you"
That was his whole key, his whole beef with
the United States and why he wanted to kill a quarter of a million people.
That was his reasoning.
This guy was crazy. He is crazy.
We landed in New York.
We turn him over to the New York SWAT guys who are waiting.
They grab him, put him on a helicopter.
He has a bag on his head.
They did a flyover of the city of New York,
pulled the mask off,
just to show him that he had failed.
The towers were still standing.
[screeching music]
He had no regard for human life.
And he believed in this crazy cause of his.
So thank God that the FBI did such tremendous work and all
the other agencies that worked together on the task force.
A life of hell in a little hole is what he ended up with.
He got his punishment.
Subtitling: difuze