Laptop clues link Reid to al Qaeda

17 Jan, 2002 07:58 AM6 mins to read

DAVID USBORNE reports on what a looted computer has revealed.

NEW YORK - When a young man with unkempt hair sauntered into the British Consulate in Amsterdam last July and asked for a new passport, the staff wanted to know what happened to the old one.

He gave a fairly credible answer: it was ruined because he put it in the washing machine after drinking too much.

It might seem strange, though, that the same man obtained another replacement passport five months later, this time at the British Consulate in Brussels.

He gave no particular reason this time, except that the one he received in July had become ragged and was missing a few pages. He surrendered it, as was required, and walked off with the new one.

This eager traveller was Richard Reid, now a guest of the US justice system in Boston for allegedly trying to blow up an American Airlines jumbo jet heading from Paris to Miami on December 22.

He was flying with the mint-new British passport issued that same week in Brussels. In between time, he visited at least four countries - Israel, Egypt, Turkey and Pakistan.

All of this would be enough to cause red faces at the Foreign Office, but new information makes the affair more serious.

There is reason to believe Reid was far from a deranged loner with a grudge against America.

Instead, he might have been working for al Qaeda, the terror network of Osama bin Laden.

The evidence for this supposition - and it is yet to be proven- comes from the hard drives of two computers that used to belong to senior officers of al Qaeda and last month fell into the hands of two reporters for the Wall Street Journal in Kabul.

The drives gave the paper - and US investigators - a trove of new information about the al Qaeda network.

They contain more than 17,000 files all related to al Qaeda. Many are humdrum and dull, others are not.

The interesting files tend to be protected by sophisticated passwords or are encrypted, and the Journal is still trying to decode them. One file took five days to crack.

What they found was a report, written by an unidentified author, detailing the labours of someone working for "al-Qu'ida", travelling the globe scouting possible targets for terrorist attacks.

He considered the possibility of striking at the Israeli airline, El Al.

There are references to possible plans for attacks against American soldiers stationed near the US-Canada border.

The journalists also found that the travel schedule of the al Qaeda scout, identified in the report as Abdul Ra'uff, matched almost exactly what is known about the wanderings after July of Richard Reid, the accused shoe-bomber.

US intelligence officials, say the Journal, have already concluded that Ra'uff and Reid may well be the same man. Israeli officials are "positive" about it.

"This is very significant," commented Andrew Higgins, a co-author of a report on the case in the Journal.

"This may turn out to be the first conclusive proof we have that Reid was not a hapless drifter but rather an al Qaeda operative."

Reid is a British-Jamaican who converted to Islam while serving time in a British juvenile prison.

All this came about after Higgins and another Journal writer, Alan Cullison, found themselves with a broken laptop in Kabul last month.

Looking for a replacement, they eventually paid $US1100 ($2625) for a new laptop and a desktop computer that, as it turned out, had been looted from a building that was an al Qaeda office before Kabul fell to the Northern Alliance on December 7.

The extent to which the activities of Reid and Ra'uff match is compelling.

Both men - if they are not one - visited the same four countries in the same order last July.

Both acquired a new passport from the British Consulate in Amsterdam.

Both flew first to Israel, buying a ticket on El Al on the same date of departure. Both were grilled by Israeli agents before boarding. Both entered Egypt from Israel at the same border crossing.

Yesterday, the Foreign Office did not address the issue of Reid's real identity. But a spokeswoman defended the action of consulate staff in Brussels and Amsterdam in giving him new passports twice in such short order.

"You can have a new passport issued every day of the year if you like, so long as the old one is properly invalidated, which happened here," she said.

Consulate officials followed all normal procedures, she said. "They know what they are doing".

The report drawn from the computer drive and apparently written on August 19 explains that the putting-in-washing-machine-while-drunk excuse was part of a wider ruse by Ra'uff to disguise his faith by pretending to drink and smoke during a 10-day stay in Amsterdam .

"At the hotel he would take empty alcohol bottles from the street and put them into trash containers in his room," says the report.

The report's author, who apparently was fresh from debriefing Ra'uff, also describes his visit to the British Consulate.

"He said, 'I was drunk and washed my passport'."

He notes that Ra'uff put it in the washing machine as a means to wash away a Pakistan visa sticker that might have caused problems.

It is a trick that al Qaeda recommends to its operatives, so long as they do it only once.

The text also focuses on the journey Ra'uff made to Tel Aviv on an El Al plane.

At the gate, Israeli security personnel searched him, his shoes and his hat. Once on the plane, he was "seated in the last seat away from the pilot's cabin" and was under the "watchful eye" of the cabin crew.

Israeli officials have already confirmed that on his El Al flight, Reid was seated at the back of the plane.

The scout was enthusiastic about what he found in Israel.

He offered details on how to bomb public transport in Israel, including the Haifa railway station.

He noted that having a British passport was helpful, saying, that it was enough to stop anyone searching his bags travelling from Bethlehem to Jerusalem.

They could have contained explosives.

"It appears that brothers with European passports are able to move about in Israel with great freedom and can be treated as Israeli," the report says.

There are no direct references to the Twin Towers attack in New York.

But at one point, the report suggests that terrorists dress well when boarding aircraft and take seats in first or business class "to be near the pilot's cabin without arousing suspicion". Many of the hijackers involved in the September attacks in the US had first-class seats.

The scout did similar reconnaissance work in Egypt that apparently left his debriefer cold. The report says a second such trip to the country would have to be made.

It remains possible that the similarities between the movements of the man called Ra'uff and Reid are coincidental.

But that is hardly reassuring. "If not Reid, who is it?" Higgins asked. "That would mean there were two people out there with British passports that we didn't know about."

- INDEPENDENT

Story archives: