CIA Director George Tenet came to Morocco in February on a mission to secure the kingdom’s help in quelling any future terror attacks, Moroccan and Western officials say.
Tenet had scraps of information gleaned from suspects being held at Camp Delta at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, these officials said, and was pursuing tips about Al Qaeda operatives in Morocco and their possible plans for attacks.
He brought up his concerns in a meeting with King Mohammed VI and the country’s intelligence chief, and he was promised full cooperation, Moroccan officials said.
Within days, Moroccan intelligence agents were at Guantanamo Bay, helping question Moroccan prisoners and drawing a sketchy portrait of a mysterious senior Al Qaeda operative believed to be orchestrating a plot in Morocco.
The initial result of that unusual cooperation came last week. Moroccan authorities charged three Saudis and four Moroccans with plotting to use explosive-packed boats to attack U.S. and British ships in the Strait of Gibraltar.
The presumed plot resembled the October 2000 attack in Yemen on the destroyer Cole, and one Saudi whom the Federal Bureau of Investigation has implicated in that attack is a key suspect in Morocco, a senior Moroccan official said.
Questions have been raised in Morocco about the seriousness of the plot to attack ships. But the story of how pieces of the puzzle were assembled illustrates the painstaking way the United States and its allies are trying to counter continued threats from a splintered Al Qaeda.
Moroccans `worked hard’
Moroccan police and intelligence authorities, who provided details of the suspected plot and its breakup in interviews in recent days, have been eager to have their cooperation with the Americans publicized. “The Moroccans worked hard to help nail these guys,” said a Western diplomat in Rabat, the capital.
Morocco, the first Muslim country to condemn the Sept. 11 attacks, has escaped the terrorism that is around it. In nearby Tunisia, a bombing at an ancient synagogue killed 19 people in April, and neighboring Algeria has been engulfed in civil war since 1992.
Within days of the Tenet visit, which American and other Western officials corroborated, Moroccan intelligence agents went to Cuba to participate in the interrogation of the Moroccan prisoners and to try to flesh out the hints obtained by the Americans, local officials said.
Those first interrogations provided one clue, the first name of a Saudi who had recruited the Moroccans for Al Qaeda in the late 1990s, officials said. But over several days, they persuaded the prisoners to help compose a sketch of what the man known only as Zufer looked like.
They also discovered that he was married to a Moroccan woman and obtained crucial, though partial, information about his in-laws in Casablanca.
“We did not have much to go on and it took several weeks to identify this person,” said a senior Moroccan official involved in the investigation.
By the middle of March, however, the police identified the suspect as Zuher al-Tbaiti, a Saudi married to a Moroccan woman. He was placed under surveillance and his activities and phone calls were monitored 24 hours a day, Moroccan officials said.
Tbaiti maintained a low profile, police discovered. He had not registered with the police upon arrival in the country and paid cash for every purchase. He lived with his wife’s family in a quiet Casablanca neighborhood rather than in a hotel or guest house.
Tbaiti did not have a bank account, relying instead on money wired from Pakistan and elsewhere into the accounts of his wife’s relatives, the Moroccan officials said.
The Moroccan police monitored Tbaiti’s e-mail and telephone calls. They also obtained information about him from the Saudi intelligence service, the senior Moroccan official said.
It turned out that Tbaiti had spent a couple of years in Morocco in the late 1990s before going to Afghanistan for training at Al Qaeda camp, officials said.
He was in the Tora Bora region of Afghanistan last year when the United States began bombing it heavily in hopes of killing Osama bin Laden, officials said. Tbaiti’s first wife, also Moroccan, died in the bombing, the officials said.
Moroccan officials said the surveillance discovered two other Saudi veterans of Afghanistan who were plotting with Tbaiti. They were identified as Abdullah al-Ghamdi and Hilal al-Assiri, both, like Tbaiti, in their late 20s or early 30s.
Equally important, these officials said, the surveillance discovered that the team was receiving its instructions from a senior bin Laden lieutenant who was still in the tribal areas of Pakistan, near the Afghan border.
From telephone conversations and e-mail messages picked up by the authorities, the man was identified as Abu Bilal. The authorities suspect that he is another Saudi, Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri.
The FBI said in December that Nashiri was a senior Al Qaeda planner who was believed to have played a role in the attack on the Cole.
“Abu Bilal was the mastermind of the operation in Morocco,” said a senior Moroccan official.
Moulay Abdallah Alaoui Belghiti, the prosecutor of the Casablanca Court of Appeal, said Tbaiti was the ringleader of the local conspirators.
He said these men intended to load a small boat with explosives to attack an American or British warship in the Strait of Gibraltar off the northern coast of Morocco. The plan was similar to the attack that killed 17 American sailors on the Cole.
He also said the men planned attacks inside Morocco, including bombing buses and a cafe in Marrakech.
Arrest led to confessions
After their arrests earlier in June, Belghiti and other Moroccan officials said the three Saudis confessed to the plots. The officials said the men acknowledged that they were Al Qaeda members and said that they had slipped out of Afghanistan during the bombing of Tora Bora and made their way to Morocco on instructions from Abu Bilal.
It is unclear how advanced or serious the suspected plot was. Belghiti said the men had made explosives, something taught at Al Qaeda camps, but he acknowledged that the police had not discovered any explosives after the arrests.
Moussaif Bin Hammon, a lawyer for the three Saudis, denied that they had confessed and said that they had been tortured, though he said he saw no evidence of torture.
The lawyer said an Al Qaeda leader had telephoned one of the men recently and offered to pay for information about shipping in the Strait of Gibraltar and the nearby Mediterranean Sea, but he said the offer had been refused.
Hammon said his clients identified non-Moroccans among the people who questioned them, but he said they were not certain whether they were Americans.
A Moroccan official acknowledged that information obtained in the interrogations was being shared with the Central Intelligence Agency and the FBI, but he denied that Americans were participating in the questioning.
Moroccan officials said they arrested the Saudis after the men were instructed to go to Saudi Arabia for discussions about possible attacks.
When they arrived at the Casablanca airport, Moroccan police arrested them, the wives of two of the men and the sister of one wife. A fourth Moroccan was arrested later. Among their possessions were false passports and $10,000, Moroccan police and other officials said.
