Chance draws Bly into web of jihadists
Terror - Intelligence and intrigue cross paths in the planning and unraveling of an Oregon training camp Tuesday, October 04, 2005 LES ZAITZ The Oregonian http://www.oregonlive.com/news/oregonian/index.ssf?/base/front_page/11284233 21265600.xml <http://www.oregonlive.com/news/oregonian/index.ssf?/base/front_page/1128423 321265600.xml&coll=7> &coll=7 BLY -- Half a globe from here, British intelligence agents tracking international calls from a mosque had a mystery: Why would an Islamic militant in London be calling a phone number in Oregon's 541 area code? Intelligence work tracked the number to a scrubby ranch east of Bly -- the site of al-Qaida's only known attempt to set up a training camp in the United States. And it put this small town in the middle of one of the more curious episodes in the West's battle against terrorism. Six years after that first phone call, Haroon Rashid Aswat, 31, is scheduled to appear Thursday in a London courtroom in the next step of his extradition process on charges of being one of the al-Qaida operatives in on the Bly training camp. U.S. prosecutors hope to win a British magistrate's order that Aswat be turned over to the United States. Aswat's arrest is but part of an international effort to dismantle an al-Qaida recruiting operation run from the London mosque. But how did Bly figure in? How did a group of European jihadists settle on this obscure landscape of Oregon as a possible training site? Newly available information from court documents, police reports, and interviews with law enforcement sources and others shows that the terrorism ties emerged more by chance than planning. But for a sheep rancher's romance with an American convert to Muslim, Bly never would have made international news. Though the ranch never became a global terror threat, the effort to create the camp shows al-Qaida's willingness to encourage the jihadist dreams of local amateurs. And it all happened under the watchful scrutiny of British and U.S. intelligence agencies as agents monitored every phone call or visit to the ranch. But even then, their real target was the London militant, considered to be a top al-Qaida recruiter. Town refuses to decline Bly is about an hour's drive east of Klamath Falls on Oregon 140. The road passes through Dairy, up and over Bly Mountain and on through Beatty, passing huge patches of hayfields on the floor of the Upper Sprague River Valley. Two "coyotes" -- metal silhouettes -- bay at the sky on the "Welcome to Bly" sign. Across the road, a wire-topped mesh fence encloses the site of the town's sawmill, opened in 1931 and passed through a succession of owners until Weyerhaeuser closed it in 1980 and leveled the plant. As the highway pushes through Bly in a sweeping left-hand curve, it passes a U.S. Forest Service ranger station, a post office and a string of squat buildings for Bly's few businesses. The Star Theater, built in 1939, now houses a hardware-gift-feed store with 50-pound bags of hog feed resting on pallets where moviegoers used to sit. The owners aren't sure when the movie house closed, but there is a clue -- the dusty projectors still hold one reel of "Star Wars" from 1977. With a population of roughly 250, Bly isn't surrendering to the fate of many small timber towns. An industrious volunteer group charts Bly's future and tends to community needs, such as buying and maintaining a riding lawn mower to trim empty lots. Out here, Ivan Rule found a place to graze sheep in early 1997. Rule, then 56, and his companion, Esther Fisher, 80, left Washington state in the hunt for a more remote place to do their ranching. The pair bought the Wessel place -- more than 158 acres set up in an irregular patch. Two mobile homes that came with the place were set down in a draw that carried the seasonal Paradise Creek. Rule soon overran the Wessels' careful landscaping with sheep pens made of wooden skids. The highway streams past the property's northern edge. Curious motorists see only junipers and cheat grass. In August 1999, Fisher died and Rule invited a Seattle resident, Ayat Hakimah, then 46, to join him. She earlier had converted to Islam and adopted Muslim customs. She trained horses and sometimes rode in flowing Arab-style gowns. Change at the mosque As Rule managed his ranch, new faces took over a mosque in downtown Seattle. According to law enforcement sources, American converts to Islam assumed leadership of the Dar us Salaam mosque, crowding out immigrants who founded it. The new group advocated a militant version of Islam. They cleared drug dealers and pimps from around the mosque, drawing police attention for their sometimes rough tactics. The mosque's imam -- or religious leader -- was Semi Osman, a mechanic who had served in the U.S. Army. His spiritual role was part-time and unpaid. Osman came to the United States in 1988, paying for a short-term sham marriage to get the immigration papers necessary to stay in the country, according to court testimony. Osman married again in Washington, this time to a woman with an interest in horses. Through horse shows, Angelica Osman became acquainted with Hakimah, the sheep rancher's bride-to-be. The two women enlisted Osman to marry the couple in the fall of 1999. He performed a brief Islamic ceremony long distance by telephone. Soon afterward, Osman moved his family to the Bly ranch. He variously has explained the move as a desire for quiet, an interest in raising sheep in the Islamic tradition and a new way to practice Islam. Among the possessions he took was a .40-caliber semi-automatic Smith & Wesson pistol bought for him by a friend from the mosque, according to court documents. The family was on its way to Bly on Sept. 30, 1999, when Osman was stopped by the Oregon State Police on the freeway near Medford. His car lights weren't working, and he was cited. In the coming weeks, police cited him three more times for differing infractions. One traffic stop caught the immediate attention of the FBI, which had lost track of Osman. Settled on the Bly ranch, the Osmans joined community life. They enrolled their daughter Karima in third grade at Gearhart Elementary School. She rode the school bus with other ranch kids and responded with ease to her classmates' curiosity about her faith, evident from her Muslim hijab scarf. The family got a county library card, occasionally checking out books for the child from the small Bly branch. Osman also rented a box from among the 350 at the Bly post office. Sometime in October 1999, Osman invited friends from the Seattle mosque to come sample his country living. Guns and horses Twice, Seattle Muslims took up Osman on his offer. Law enforcement sources say visitors later told them they anticipated a chance to try the cowboy lifestyle. Visitors later told investigators they rode horses and shot up targets with weaponry brought in from Seattle that included a replica of the Russian AK-47 assault rifle. One visitor, James Ujaama, saw more than horses and a target tree. He saw an ideal location for a terrorist training camp. Ujaama had spent much of the previous five years in London, becoming a follower of a radical Islamic cleric named Abu Hamza al-Masri. The cleric was suspected of using the Finsbury Park mosque in London as a recruiting depot for trainees for al-Qaida camps. He was public in his condemnation of Western powers, particularly the United States. He was of keen interest to Western intelligence services. On Ujaama's return in 1999 to Seattle, he bragged to members of the Seattle mosque that he was associated with al-Masri, urging others to swear allegiance -- bayaat -- to the hook-handed imam. Law enforcement sources said Ujaama -- who now is cooperating with investigators -- was eager to curry favor with al-Masri. He thought it would please al-Masri to have an American training camp. Without telling those at the Seattle mosque, Ujaama called al-Masri sometime in October 1999 to pitch the idea of the camp. Law enforcement sources said Ujaama was convincing, describing a ready-to-go boot camp for jihadists. Al-Masri accepted the plan, and promised both the money and helpers Ujaama requested. Days later, Ujaama followed up with a fax to al-Masri, sending it Oct. 25, 1999, from a Kinko's just off Interstate 405 south of Seattle. He outlined how the camp could be promoted, compared it to Afghanistan and urged al-Masri to move to Oregon to lead the camp. The day after Thanksgiving 1999, according to court documents, two of al-Masri's trusted aides arrived in New York on an Air India flight. Law enforcement sources said they were Aswat, a veteran al-Qaida camp trainer who later told of serving on bin Laden's security detail, and Oussama Kassir, identified by intelligence sources as an al-Qaida camp trainer who claimed to be an assassin for Osama bin Laden. They brought money, and a CD containing information on bombs, poisons and training, according to federal indictments. The two men traveled across country by bus, stopping overnight at a Chicago mosque before arriving in Seattle. Soon they were on their way to Bly and disappointment. Rule, his wife and the sheep were gone by early December, and it's unclear who besides the Osmans greeted the foreigners. The two operatives found no semblance of a training camp. Instead, they found Rule's empty sheep pens and mobile homes cluttered with garbage. After little more than two weeks, the operatives abandoned the ranch to the Osmans. Patrols pay off British and U.S. intelligence agents already were deciphering what was going on at Bly. A British intelligence agent called the Klamath County sheriff's department sometime in November 1999, seeking help regarding a telephone call made from al-Masri's mosque in London to the Bly ranch. British agents wanted to know what was in Bly. The Klamath County agency provided information about the town and the ranch, and investigated more on its own. Over two days, Detective John Dougherty prowled the roads in the area, taking photos of the ranch perimeter but never finding a vantage point to see down into the draw. He flew over the ranch, but the pilot didn't want to get too low because of the uncertain circumstances. The sheriff's department offered the photos to the FBI. Agents seemed surprised the sheriff's department knew anything about the ranch, leaving sheriff's officials with the impression the FBI knew what was going on. Patrol Officer Morrie Smith of the Klamath Falls Police Department knew none of that when he stopped Osman just before 6 a.m. on Dec. 13, 1999, in downtown Klamath Falls. Osman was calm and polite, but Smith noted what he thought were unusual motions by two other men in the car. The man in front suddenly shielded with his arms a black briefcase that had been sitting in his lap. In the back seat, a man scooted closer to a child in the rear, draping his arm around her. All three men were dressed in military fatigues and long coats. Osman explained that they had been visiting family in Bly and that he was taking the two passengers to the Greyhound depot for a trip to San Francisco. He said they were guests from London and didn't speak English well. Back at his patrol car, Smith ran Osman through national police databases to check for arrest warrants. None showed up, so he cited Osman and sent him on his way. Within hours of that traffic stop, Smith was being quizzed by an FBI agent from Medford. Smith's database check on Osman tripped an FBI watch for Osman, and the agent wanted to know in detail about the stop. During the questioning, the agent showed the patrolman a photo showing four or five men talking as they walked down a cobblestone street. Smith immediately pointed to two of the men as the passengers in Osman's car that morning. The agent told Smith the FBI had been tracking the two men, who were highly trained and probably wouldn't have hesitated to kill Smith if he had asked the wrong questions. The incident prompted the sheriff's department to issue an "officer safety alert" to local agencies, urging caution in dealing with Osman. The alert made no reference to terrorism. Osman, apparently unaware of the heightened interest, remained at the Bly ranch. He asked for leniency on the ticket he got from Smith, writing to the court that his car no longer ran and that he was unemployed. By February 2000, the Osmans had taken their daughter out of the Gearhart school and returned to Seattle. Two years later, Osman was in FBI handcuffs as the unraveling of the Bly plot began in earnest. Les Zaitz: 503-221-8181; [EMAIL PROTECTED] C2005 The Oregonian All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed. FAIR USE NOTICE: All original content and/or articles and graphics in this message are copyrighted, unless specifically noted otherwise. All rights to these copyrighted items are reserved. Articles and graphics have been placed within for educational and discussion purposes only, in compliance with "Fair Use" criteria established in Section 107 of the Copyright Act of 1976. 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