Abdelghani Meskini - 'The other man'

[Al-khiyal]

August 20, 2007 -- Abdelghani Meskini - credit card fraud his trade, illegal immigrant his status, fractured Algeria his birthplace - was deep in early-morning sleep on December 30, 1999. He heard nothing of the preparations outside his one-bedroom apartment over the Fair City Supermarket in Brooklyn, New York. There in the refrigerant dark, federal officers were arriving by the dozens. They closed streets for blocks. They stood ready to confine any early-rising neighbors to home.

"The first thing I hear is, 'FBI! FBI! FBI!' " Ghani Meskini would later recall. "Like a movie. I had no clothes on, only a shirt. When I put on my clothes I looked out the window. Thirty guys outside. All the guns are pointed at my window." They had rifles with laser sights. They seemed almost motionless. It was, he marveled, a war. He was, it seemed, the enemy.

Before he could think, his apartment door burst off its hinges, and in streamed men, barnacled with technology, wearing green fireproof jumpsuits and military helmets. They carried automatic pistols and ballistic shields. A voice said, "Face down on the floor." Another said, "Don't move or I'll shoot you in the head."

Stomach down, he shook. He had never been arrested. Nor had the cold of a gun been so near his brow. With his cheekbone pressed to the floor, his eyes fixed on the only view - the scuffed linoleum of his kitchen, on which black combat boots were walking and turning and stopping. The FBI was busy that night. In New York and Boston, eight other Algerians, all of them tied to Meskini by friendship or proximity, were also hauled away. These arrests were the result of an anxious, red-eyed investigation that had begun two weeks earlier, when another Algerian was arrested coming across the border in Port Angeles, Washington, with a car trunk full of homemade explosives. Now, less than 36 hours before the start of the new millennium, federal law enforcement officials believed they had deactivated a terrorist plot, possibly organized by Osama bin Laden, to blow up American landmarks in the name of Islam. The largest counterterrorism law enforcement operation ever conducted on U.S. soil - dubbed by officials "Borderbom" - had succeeded.

As New Year's midnight came and went peacefully, relieved officials gathered in the command post at FBI headquarters in Washington to toast one another with champagne. Later, FBI Director Louis Freeh would appear before a Senate subcommittee to boast of success and seek yet another increase in the bureau's counterterrorism budget, extolling Borderbom as "a case of tremendous significance" - "the template of how that is supposed to work."

More than a year later, with the Borderbom cases finally coming to trial, what's most striking about the government's investigation is what it still doesn't know: Who was behind the Borderbom plot? What were their targets? And what were their motives?

After that initial arrest in Port Angeles, the FBI questioned hundreds of Muslims from Los Angeles to Boston, wiretapped hundreds of conversations, and put hundreds of individuals under surveillance. As Michael E. Rolince, head of the international terrorism section for the FBI, put it, "Literally in that 20-day period we probably set records on the number of things we did and how quickly we did them."

Yet today officials concede they are no closer to tying the plot to bin Laden and an international terrorist network than they were on opening day. Twelve of the 15 people arrested during the millennial frenzy have either been released or are being held on charges that have nothing to do with terrorism. The man arrested at the border, Ahmed Ressam, was tried and convicted of terrorism last month in a Los Angeles federal court but has remained silent about his role and his possible partners, even though he faces the prospect of life imprisonment. An accused accomplice, Mokhtar Haouari, who has been extradited from Canada and is due to stand trial in a New York courtroom next month, has also refused to talk. Yet another Algerian, Abdelmajid Dahoumane, who allegedly accompanied Ressam across the border from Canada but managed to elude detection and capture, was recently picked up in Algeria. He, too, so far has had nothing to say.

Which leaves Ghani Meskini, a bulky man in his early thirties who speaks a fast, flawed English. For months law enforcement officials portrayed him in court filings and interviews as Ressam's highest-ranking American accomplice. Meskini, they repeatedly said, was a fundamentalist Muslim seeking jihad who had trained in camps in Afghanistan as part of an international millennial plot to bomb Americans from the Space Needle in Seattle to a tourist hotel in Jordan.

But some of the darkest allegations the government made about Meskini turned out to be untrue. He was not Afghan-trained, he had never been to a terrorist camp, and if he was an Islamic fundamentalist he was one who drank Michelob, loved Hollywood movies and dated women found in dance clubs. The slim basis for the charge that he conspired to give material support to terrorism - his 11-hour statement to the FBI and his own wiretapped conversations - is marred by flawed translations and outright invention, such as allegations that he had visited Islamic scholars in Brooklyn or that he expressed the desire to "punish America," which an independent translation shows Meskini did not say or imply.

In March Meskini became the sole suspect to concede his guilt, cooperate with the authorities and agree to give evidence against his alleged co-conspirators. Meskini has already testified for the prosecution in the Ressam trial, and he is expected to do so against Haouari as well. In return, he hopes to receive a prison sentence that would be limited to the time he has already spent in detention this past year, plus a green card and a new identity that would allow him live and work in the United States.....

[Al-khiyal]

At times it seemed Ghani Meskini's biggest problem was that he didn't know enough to be of real use to the government as a witness. The more involved he was, the more information he would have to trade and the better the deal he could cut. By the same token, the less he knew, the more danger he faced. If he proved innocent of terrorism, he could be released from prison only to face deportation to Algeria, where security forces might well see him in another light - as a suspected terrorist who got away.

Meskini concedes the irony of his predicament. "I'm no angel," he declares. "But terrorism? No way. You know that movie 'The Man Who Knew Too Much'? I'm the man who knew too little."

Today, he remains at the Metropolitan Correctional Center, where federal detainees are held in Manhattan. For 18 months the center has been his home, his only outfit a wrinkled brown jumpsuit, his only visitor a reporter seeking to get to the bottom of his tangled tale. For the past 10 months, we've met on the average of once a month in a crowded visitors room full of inmates, their lipsticked women and Sunday-dressed children in their weekly visiting hour. The room is metal, brick and plastic, the boomeranging noise of reunion often deafening. The men sit in cheap patio chairs, all wearing lace-free Keds, designed to be useless for escape, murder or suicide. It's like looking at grizzlies wearing ballet slippers. "I've learned more in here in one year than all my years outside," he once told me.

As terrorism has moved to the center of national security concerns, it is often portrayed in almost comic-book terms as a war of medieval Muslims in Afghan caves versus the enlightened high-tech crusaders of the FBI. But Ghani Meskini's story shows the real world of a terrorism investigation is a frayed drama populated by imperfect beings with contradictory motives, pasts and hopes. In Borderbom, lives were altered and civil liberties protections were damaged, to achieve a result that is far more ambiguous than the FBI has publicly acknowledged.

Borderbom began on December 14, 1999, at the thinly staffed Blackball ferry terminal in Port Angeles, with the last passenger on the last afternoon ferry from Canada. He was a small man in a too-big coat, driving a mid-size Chrysler with Canadian plates. U.S. Customs Inspector Diana Dean, epaulets on her uniformed shoulders, stood between him and the United States. For 20 years she had made a career of taking a man's measure in not many minutes. "I noticed," she remembered, "he was acting in a strange and nervous manner."

He had reason. In the trunk, under a mat in the spare tire well, Dean and her fellow inspectors would find two glass jars and 14 plastic pouches of homemade explosives. As they patted down their quarry for weapons, he ran out of his overcoat, leaving one agent holding its wool sleeves and two others huffing behind. The escapee tried to hijack a woman's car at an intersection but was knocked off his feet when she hit the gas, giving his pursuers time to move in for the tackle.

Captured, he said next to nothing. His passport was a fraud, his credit cards stolen. He gave one name, then another. He lied about his nationality or said portentously, "I am a citizen of nowhere."

The FBI took over the case. The man's real name turned out to be Ahmed Ressam. He was 32, and Algerian by birth. Given his arrival two weeks before the new millennium, the FBI assumed the worst - the four circuit boards in his trunk implied four bombs, which could mean four World Trade Center-style terrorist attacks in time for the new century. They had little to go on, and very little time - 17 days until January 1, 2000.

At FBI headquarters on Pennsylvania Avenue, counterterrorism chief Dale Watson was first told there was a guy, as yet unnamed, who had 100 pounds of white powder in his car that police out in some little town near Seattle thought might be explosives. Later that day, the FBI lab told Watson the white powder was an ingredient commonly used to make explosives, and the two jars of a golden syrupy substance were so dangerously volatile they needed a ranch all to themselves. Watson immediately turned to Rolince, one of his two top section chiefs, to organize a team and swing into action.

Mike Rolince's face has a seemingly permanent blush, his hair is almost silver, American flags often appear on his ties, and his office is stout Americana, down to the Norman Rockwell print of the good cop at the soda fountain. Raised in Upstate New York, Rolince may be better versed on Syracuse University's Orangemen than Arab politics, but he's earned a reputation as a tough and tenacious investigator. "Mike's a good example of a lot of other people around here who used to work the East Germans and the Bloc people on the espionage side, foreign counterintelligence," says Watson. "When that collapsed, basically, you know, good people gravitated to the next hot thing - counterterrorism."

In the 48 hours after Ressam's arrest, thousands of agents across the country in every field office either volunteered or were taken off their regularly assigned duties and tasked to Borderbom. Eighteen counterterrorism task forces were mobilized. The Strategic Information Operations Center at headquarters became the command post.....

[Al-khiyal]

"You're never criticized for putting your resources on the ground," Watson says. "I think you'll be criticized if you show up with two when you should have shown up with 20, be it a bank robbery, kidnapping or extortion. And that's generally the mind-set we initially operated under."

All they had was a silent man and a carload of explosives. But there was a clue in the car's back seat: a slip of paper. On it were three telephone numbers. Beside them was the name "Ghani."

Ghani Meskini and his friends grew up near honey-glinted beaches in the Algerian seaport of Arzew. His father was a police officer popular for giving miscreants a second chance. His mother raised five children in a cement house, telephone-free, where water came once a week by urn. Meskini, the middle child, distinguished himself early. He stole $10 from his father's wallet and hid it in the family Qur'an. After days passed, and no one remarked on the money's absence, he pocketed it. He was not yet 10. "I was born," he acknowledges, "a thief."

His parents' contemporaries were the revolutionaries who had won independence in 1962, ending 130 years of French colonial rule. By the late 1980s, falling oil prices brought rampant unemployment and hunger and the rise of a faith-based political party, the Front Islamique du Salut. The FIS looked to Islam and Arabic for national identity - alarming the United States, which feared a fundamentalist state similar to Iran.

During Meskini's military service in the early 1990s, the FIS made a surprisingly impressive showing in the first round of parliamentary votes. It looked as if a democratically elected Islamic party would come to power. But Algeria's military leaders declared a national emergency, imprisoned the FIS's leaders and launched a security crackdown that took thousands of lives. As some in the FIS formed an armed wing - the Groupe Islamique Arme, or GIA - and attacked government infrastructure, a predictable spiral of violence and repression ensued. Since 1992, according to the Algerian government, 100,000 have been slain in the struggle.

Meskini got a degree in architecture from the University of Science and Technology of Oran. In the army, he became a lieutenant - and a thief. He stole paychecks of superior officers. After his discharge, and three years of low-level jobs, he opted for flight. Like thousands of other young Algerians, he headed abroad. Unemployed and 27, he squirreled himself into a dank cranny of a tanker for 52 days. When he arrived in Boston Harbor on January 5, 1995, he stumbled off ship with the address of an Arzew friend, Abdelhakim Tizegha, who took Meskini in and found him a job.

At first Meskini made do with the usual grab bag of immigrant deficits: $5-an-hour wages, no English, crowded apartments, an immigration attorney charged with fraud. Eventually he turned to what he seemed to know best: small-time theft. Others soon followed him to America, including a young friend, Aziz Ouali. When Ouali figured out that Meskini was doing "credit card stuff," he upbraided him. "You're better than that," he told him.

Meskini was the life force among these emigres: chef, master of slang, open to confiding or joking or drinking, possessor of mournful eyes and self-deprecation that women seemed to love. But Meskini stuck to his sorry rationalizations. Ouali was working in gas station booths cold as freezers, a sitting target liable to be killed for register cash. In Meskini's calculation, alive and criminal was better than dead and good. Besides, Meskini's criminality was deeper than Ouali knew - Meskini had helped out in a hashish deal with an Algerian in New York and sold a gun to another Arzew stowaway for $300.

When a Boston bank sent police after Meskini in 1997, he fled to Montreal's Algerian neighborhoods, living in the YMCA and running into an old classmate, Mokhtar Haouari. The pair shared an interest in fraud - Haouari had just pleaded guilty to dealing in counterfeit credit cards. Meskini left Montreal after two months, and spent the next two years moving in and out of seedy apartments in Boston and New York. These were the years of his Robin Hood illusions. An Algerian stowaway had no phone; Meskini visited, and a phone arrived. Someone's bicycle was stolen; a new one materialized, thanks to Meskini. Ten crisp $20 bills appeared in Ouali's jacket after a Meskini visit. (Ouali, knowing their provenance, donated the entire jackpot to a homeless man.) At the same time, Meskini managed to send $15,000 home to his family.

As time went on, Meskini spoke to Haouari of his growing self-disgust. He said he wanted to shuck his criminal life. He wanted a mission. He told Haouari he wanted to fight with Muslim men in Chechnya or Afghanistan.

The jihad plans were always changing and often absurd. What about Afghanistan, Haouari asked in 1998? Okay, Meskini said. Haouari said he had a friend in the Pakistani Embassy in Canada who could provide him with visas, but that fell through. Later in the year, it was: What about Bosnia? No, Meskini said. The following year: What about going back to Algeria, joining the GIA? "The GIA is too messed up," Meskini says he replied. "There is a lot of killing. I don't understand exactly what is going on with this group."

In late 1999, Haouari obtained three Pakistani visas from a London friend. "I'm ready now," Meskini told him. A few days later, it turned out, there was only one visa, and then, none. Okay, said Haouari, I've got another guy who can help. He's coming to New York. No, Seattle. Why don't you meet him there?

The Seattle guy was an Islamic warrior of a sort and Haouari wanted Meskini to give this man money. Rent him a car, said Haouari, drive him around for his appointments with "the group." Give him a new cell phone. Bring him some cash.

"I ask Haouari his name," Meskini recalls. "He's quiet for a little bit. And I tell him, 'Why, you don't want to tell me his name?' He said, 'No. He's wanted.' I said, 'By who?' He said, 'By Algerian and Canadian.' " Call him Reda, said Haouari mysteriously.

Meskini says he told Haouari he had doubts about the trip. "He start getting annoyed. Mad. And he said, 'Oh, if you don't want to go, don't go.' I said, 'No, I just want to know what's going on. You're asking me to meet this guy.' He said, 'Just go over there and sit with him. He will explain to you everything.' "

Meskini's old friend Tizegha also wanted him to come to Seattle - Tizegha had lost his asylum appeal and fled Boston for the Pacific Northwest. Tizegha was broke, jobless and had been arrested for shoplifting a toenail clipper and condoms from a pharmacy. Like Reda, Tizegha insisted Meskini hand-deliver money to him, rather than use the mail.

On December 4, Reda called. Meet me on the 12th, he said, stuttering. I'll call you when I get there. Later that afternoon, Haouari was on the phone with Meskini, telling him how much Reda was impressed with Meskini. "He said you're going to have a great blessing."

Meskini flew from New York to Seattle on December 11, met with Tizegha, took him clothes shopping and bought him a lamp. At one point, Reda called to say he was on his way. To pass the time Meskini took in movies: "The Insider," "The Green Mile" and "Deuce Bigalow: Male Gigolo." But Reda never showed up and never called back. On December 16 - two days after Ressam's arrest - Meskini told Haouari he was tired of waiting around and flew back to New York.

The next day Meskini couldn't get Haouari on the phone. Then, late at night, Haouari called with what Meskini thought was overblown paranoia: Change your number, chuck the beeper and the cellular, throw out all the fake IDs, checks, credit cards. And move. Meskini asked why. Haouari's reply: Just do it. And one more thing, Meskini recalls: "Don't call me no more."

Meskini's name and three phone numbers became the operational focus of the U.S. end of Borderbom. FBI agents under Watson and Rolince's direction found every number Meskini had ever called. They found every phone number that had ever called him. The FBI tapped the phones of about a dozen people in his Brooklyn apartment building. In Boston, the FBI wiretapped an undisclosed number of residents, most of them immigrants, in the building where he had once lived. Hundreds of conversations were recorded in Spanish, Urdu, Arabic and French.

Across the country, agents made predawn "knock and talk" home visits, questioning as many Muslims as possible - especially the politically active. Salam Al-Marayati, director of the Muslim Public Affairs Council in Los Angeles, recalls that his own interrogation by federal agents went like this: Do you have any association with Osama bin Laden? Do you know of anyone planning any violent acts?

Al-Marayati was used to such queries, but "it was considered by some to be a form of intimidation," he says. "I know a lot of those people. Your average family people. Business owners. A pharmacist. Prominent Muslim people, active in their communities, active in their mosque."

Anywhere immigrants came in contact with authorities, Algerians felt the hand of Borderbom. Stowaway Hassan El-Houari was one of many who wrote to pro bono lawyers from federal jail in Hartford, Connecticut: I told my story; wat happens to me in Algeria and why I feel hearm to go back to my home country - An FBI agent was accusing me of terroriste things and ask me about that terroriste Algerian guy who the FBI was looking for. I don't know nothing about those bad people, they are the people who killed my older brother. I hate theme - please help......

[Al-khiyal]

Counterterrorism has been a major growth sector in the federal budget. In 1995, the FBI spent $208 million on counterterrorism; the fiscal year 2001 budget authorized $550 million. Funding grew to accommodate President Clinton's expansion of the bureau's jurisdiction to investigate terrorist attacks overseas against Americans. The number of counter-terrorism agents has grown from 550 to more than 1,400. Those agents investigated suspected terrorist organizations in the United States. With a population of about 6 million Muslims here, many of them recent immigrants from violent conflict, surveillance during the Clinton years was more extensive than ever before.

The Clinton administration backed a new theory: Old terrorism was state-run. New terrorism was a transnational conspiracy of Muslim anti-American sentiment led by bin Laden. Some critics have disputed this approach, contending that rogue nations like Iraq have managed to slip intelligence operatives in and out of bomb conspiracies, leaving the FBI to chase and catch the small fish that the skilled men left behind.

With all of the interrogations and eavesdropping seeming to yield little or nothing about a bomb plot, the pressure on the FBI command post at headquarters grew. "Suffocating," is how Rolince describes the daily daybreak meetings. "The room would fill up with people, people from all agencies, all FBI field offices. There's a tremendous amount of information to catch everybody up on."

He and Watson, even FBI chief Louis Freeh, were pushing themselves on three hours of sleep. Then-Attorney General Janet Reno fretted that perhaps overworked translators were missing bomb talk. Did the FBI have the proper Arabic translators? In textbook classic Arabic, "yes" sounded like "nam." In Egypt, it sounded like "eya." In the Arabic spoken in the Algerian capital, Algiers, it sounded like "eh." In western Algeria, where Meskini and Oauli were from, it sounded like "wah."

There was another quandary: What to tell the public? Some argued that official silence was only increasing public fears - the mayor of Seattle, for example, had already canceled the city's millennial celebrations following Ressam's arrest. Some officials favored a statement saying there was no specific threat against American cities. Others believed such a statement would defeat one of the purposes of the "knock and talks" - to make would-be plotters think the FBI was watching. Watson and then-Deputy Attorney General Eric Holder ended up holding a muddled press conference that urged alertness and cautious horn-blowing on New Year's.

"This is something I've been arguing for," FBI spokesman John Collingwood said afterward. "Just to tell the American people to be cautious. If I'm on the plane and it's rocking, I'd rather hear the pilot say we're experiencing turbulence than sit there wondering."

Meskini followed Haouari's instructions poorly. He gave his beeper to a friend. He did not change his home phone or throw away his cell phone. Nor did he flee his apartment. Even two days after his return from Seattle, December 18, when Meskini saw that an Algerian named Ahmed Ressam had been arrested at the border with explosives, he ignored Haouari's advice. Reda, he believed, couldn't be Ressam.

"I didn't have anything to do with it. Why would I run?" Meskini says of his decision to return to New York. But as the week wore on, his suspicions rose. He says he must have called Haouari a hundred times; no reply.

On December 19, the Border Patrol arrested an Algerian man and another Algerian's wife at the Vermont border. Neither one had ever met or talked to Meskini. But the FBI used phone records to connect them to him and other peripheral suspects in Montreal. Both Bouabide Chemmach and Lucia Garofalo were held without bond. They would eventually be released for time served on minor immigration violations and returned to Canada. Garofalo, mother of three young children, who had lupus and a mother gravely ill with cancer, spent eight weeks in jail, Chemmach five months.

Two days after their arrests, Meskini went down the steep stairs from his one-bedroom to pick up his mail. He tossed some of it into a green dumpster on the sidewalk, including a receipt for the fee he paid for changing his return flight from Seattle. To the FBI agents watching, Meskini was "destroy[ing] his plane ticket and a bank statement that would reveal his trip to meet with Ressam in Seattle," agent Bradley S. Morrison would write in a federal court affidavit.

The finding of Meskini's "ticket" in the dumpster was relayed to Rolince at FBI headquarters within an hour of its discovery. Yet while the FBI focused on Meskini, another man, as yet unknown to headquarters, was slipping away under the radar screen. The second man, Abdelmajid Dahoumane, had silently walked off the ferry while Ressam was waiting for Customs, and had spent a week undetected, in hiding. His fingerprints were found in Canada during searches of Ressam's vehicles and apartments. It wasn't until December 22 - eight days after Ressam's arrest - that FBI Seattle sent the prints to the FBI laboratory in Washington. The Royal Canadian Mounted Police issued a sealed warrant for Dahoumane's arrest in Canada. But it was too late. That same day, under the name Mark Norton, Dahoumane boarded Continental Airlines Flight 1468 out of Seattle's international airport.

Later that day, Haouari finally called Meskini. "You changed everything, didn't you?" Haouari asked.

"Yes," Meskini lied. By now he suspected that Ressam, the man arrested at the border, and Reda, the man he was supposed to meet in Seattle, were one and the same. Still, he kept the conversation casual. Chat on this, chat on that. Then he asked the question, using oblique language he prayed Haouari would get.

"Listen, was that woman your cousin?"

Quiet.

"Yes."

The conversation was wiretapped and taped, but the FBI missed its significance. The bureau remained attached to the notion that Meskini was a big player in the plot. Officials feared that he and his friends had explosives. They believed other bombings - on the East Coast - were possible. But in the intercepted conversations, no one was talking about bombs. Or plots. The FBI decided it had to arrest one of the suspected co-conspirators to get a better read on the group's supposed New Year's attack plan.

Although there was no solid evidence to make an arrest on terrorism charges, many of Meskini's friends had come to America illegally and were vulnerable to immigration charges. And so federal agents arrested Tizegha on Christmas Eve and charged him with entering the United States surreptitiously through the woods. His case was sealed. But the FBI listened intently to Meskini and Tizegha on the phone. What they heard was a babble of tears and melodrama.

"No money, no life, nothing," Tizegha moaned. "Why, God, why have You done this for me? Oh, Ghani - I will call my mother, I didn't call her for three months. When I will call her, where will I tell her I am?"

Tizegha was in a cell in a federal jail outside Seattle. Also on the line was his roommate Houari Baraka, who was cooperating with the FBI. The trio talked over inconsistencies in Tizegha's asylum record. The conversation carries no bomb or plot talk. It carries plenty of Baraka's baiting Meskini to talk radical Islam. "The year 2000 is coming," Baraka begins.

"Well, we will see," Meskini says.

"It is written in Qura'an that in every new era there will be something new coming," Baraka ventures.

"That is it," Meskini says.

"Well, the earthquakes are coming - there is already an earthquake in the west."

"Where in the west?"

"It hit in El-Asnam [a city west of Algiers]," Houari Baraka says.

"Oh, well, here it is," Meskini says.

"It started already. I swear God is not going to let them get away," Baraka says.

Meskini changes the subject. Baraka tries again, saying, "The Sharia [Islamic jurisprudence replacing secular jurisprudence] will rise from the Arab Maghreb." (Algeria is part of the Maghreb, or northwest Africa.)

Meskini brushes this aside. "We are nothing. But there is a new generation coming, a new generation that will turn the world upside down," Meskini says.

Baraka tries one more time. He tells Meskini there will be a "big war," and that "we will [expletive] them while they are smiling." But Meskini corrects him. "We came here to live normal," he says, "and they want to [expletive] us."

[Al-khiyal]

By now, the FBI was listening in to every conversation. "As of Christmas Eve night, there were hundreds - 300 in one city - on surveillance," Rolince recalls. "We brought in people from four or five other divisions, and this is something we did smart. We took people by name, who had worked in the East Africa bombings, TWA 800 - we were going 24 hours a day, seven days a week. The director was intimately involved. The deputy director was involved. The seventh floors, as we say in this town, became involved immediately and all principals of every agency are getting daily briefings and sometimes two- and three-times-a-day briefings, conference calls, face-to-face meetings and video teleconferences . . .

"If it happened in July, I'm not sure that much attention would have been paid that quickly. But keep in mind we were all focusing on Y2K, so everybody already had concerns over will anyone take advantage of this particular end of the year, Ramadan overlap and all the rest that comes with it."

Finally on Christmas Day, the translators reported a breakthrough: On an international phone call to Bouabdellah Beltisse, a grocer who lived down the street from his family in Algeria, Meskini began talking about the bomb plot - and Ressam.

"That person, you know, I was going to meet with him," Meskini tells Beltisse.

"Is it true?" Beltisse asks.

"I swear by God. That is why I was there. He called me many times on the phone, and we agreed to meet. But I was not aware that he was bringing a [expletive] like this with him."

"Oh, you didn't know?" Beltisse replies.

Meskini goes on to describe what Haouari had told him. "He asked me if I knew how to drive, and I told him, yes, I have my driving license and everything. He told me that we were going to rent a car, and go to see a group to talk to them - [inaudible]. They spoke only English, and he didn't speak English, so he asked me if I wanted to accompany him. So I said okay. And, he was in need of some money, and I was [inaudible] - you know, so I told him that I was going to be with him. And the man brought with him - [inaudible]. I told him, at least I should know what is going on - I tell you something, I have a blind faith, I swear to God. I told him I was with him all the way, but I thought to myself . . . Let me know, man. Tell me what is going on."

In those words "I have a blind faith," Meskini comes across as a radical who would have been willing to engage in bombings. Yet a few seconds later, he comes across as someone who would not:

"I have limitations, to get involved in kids stuff, hurting kids, and get ruined, no [expletive] way," he says.

Then Beltisse asks, "The stuff, where was he going to take it?"

"According to what the other said, he was going to take it to Boston and [inaudible]," Meskini replies. "Then he would park it there. He was going to leave the keys inside, close the doors and leave it."

"And others would come and take it?"

"That is it," Meskini replies. "That is what he was going to do . . . And others would come and take it . . . Everyone would only know two people, no more than two."

Meskini had been watching endless amounts of television news about Borderbom, and most of what he told Beltisse he could have picked up from televised speculation. But there were two details that caught the attention of the agents who were listening in: leaving the keys inside the parked car, and keeping information confined to two people.

Which was enough for FBI officials. Up against a deadline, they decided it was time to strike.

Six agents bundled against the Boston cold arrived before dawn at Aziz Ouali's apartment at 6A Brooks St. "Is your name Aziz Ouali?" Yes, he told them. His underwear was thin, the air was ice. So was the next question. "Do you make bombs?"

The agents had come for Ouali because he had been wiretapped talking to Meskini and because he lived in Boston, where, Meskini had suggested in his phone call to Beltisse, the explosives had been destined to go. They questioned Ouali for hours at his kitchen table. He told them everything he knew about Meskini, Tizegha and everyone from Arzew. He admitted he was an illegal stowaway. They cuffed him and took him to jail - where he was put on suicide watch in solitary confinement, naked and blubbering, with a noose-proof plastic blanket for warmth.

Others had similar surprises. Task force agents arrested Badredine Mouai and Amin Tourasi, two old roommates of Meskini's who lived in the Boston area. Others hit an East Boston two-bedroom flat and arrested Lahouari Haoud, who had been photographed during surveillance of Ouali, and Mohammed Oukina, Haoud's roommate. They had never met Meskini; they just knew Ouali, who knew Meskini.

Agents arrested Rachid Haouari, a cousin of Mokhtar, and Najmeddine Haouichi, Haouari's roommate in an apartment two floors below Meskini's. They also detained Haouichi's houseguest, Abdelwaheb Hamdouche, a Paris school teacher and French citizen.

Hamdouche says one agent pointed a gun at his head, forced him to kneel against a wall on the sidewalk and handcuffed him. After eight hours of questioning, he was released following the French consulate's intercession. But the next day, when he arrived at the airport for his flight home, he was arrested again. Handcuffed, he was driven back to a holding cell in Manhattan, stripped and dressed in a Day-Glo jumpsuit. He tried to refuse two routinely administered injections against infectious diseases, but guards held him down.

After a week, the charges against Hamdouche - that he was a material witness to a terrorist plot - were dropped. But in his home country of Algeria, the media described him as a terrorist, and the dropping of the charges was never aired. As a result, Hamdouche is frightened to visit his family for fear of government repercussions.

In all, 10 Algerians, including Meskini and Tizegha, were interrogated, arrested on immigration charges and incarcerated over the New Year's Eve weekend.

"The [Immigration and Naturalization Service] agent goes along and says you have this problem, then he takes a step back and the FBI agent comes in," explains Abduraham Alamoudi of the American Muslim Foundation. "And always it's a way of making deals. You give up information or we'll bust you on immigration."

Held on administrative immigration charges, Oukina was released after New Year's, Ouali after 10 days, Haoud after six weeks, Tourasi and Haouichi after a year. Tizegha, who pleaded guilty to fraud, is still in custody. Many still face deportation.

The arrest of Meskini's friends and neighbors demonstrates how the definition of terrorist activity has been transformed in recent years, and how the once-thick wall between intelligence and evidence is thinning. In the past, such people might have been wiretapped or surveilled as intelligence targets, but they most likely wouldn't have been arrested unless further evidence had been uncovered. But the 1996 Anti-Terrorism Act, passed following the World Trade Center and Oklahoma City bombings, has broadened the definition of terrorist activity and made arrests much easier.

The guilty ones got the best deals. Because Mouai was involved in credit card scams and could testify against Meskini, he served 14 months, got a work permit, and the promise of a green card. (His bargain collapsed last month, however, when the feds found out he had not divulged buying a gun from Meskini.) Rachid Haouari, who pleaded guilty to identification and credit fraud, got 10 months, plus a chance for a green card, in exchange for testimony about Meskini. Such deals were not available to those like Aziz Ouali, who had no knowledge of wrongdoing to trade. He still faces deportation to Algeria, where he fears his identification as someone arrested in a terrorism sweep in America could lead to imprisonment, even death.....

[Al-khiyal]

Meskini's interrogation began on the car ride to the FBI's Manhattan offices. "Ahmed Ressam - you know him?" asked agent Rachel Katz. No, said Meskini. He knows you, she said. She told Meskini about the phone numbers on the paper. "I say to her, 'If he was my brother, he would know my number by heart,' " Meskini recalls. Sure, her expression said.

At FBI Manhattan, four agents took turns questioning Meskini for 11 hours, his left wrist shackled to a bar on the wall much of the time. He waived his right to a lawyer, signed Miranda forms and told them about Mokhtar Haouari's request to meet Reda, the credit card ring, wanting to go to Afghanistan. He made six tape-recorded calls to Haouari in Montreal at their request.

The FBI then embarked on what Rolince termed a "very massive investigation." The questions were many: "Figuring out who this guy Ressam is. What's his tie-ins with Montreal. Who is this guy Mokhtar? Who was this guy Ghani? Where did they come from? Who did they associate with? How did they get into the U.S.? You know, I mean, who was Dahoumane? Just like in Oklahoma City - it took us probably a year to a year and a half to figure out . . . who all was involved in that conspiracy. You disprove the negative - that 100 people were involved. You boil down to facts - that there were three people involved."

Mokhtar Haouari was indicted in New York on January 6, 2000, and arrested in Montreal on the 10th. The U.S. arrest warrant for Dahoumane was unsealed on the 6th. He was indicted on terrorism charges later that month.

The lab reports on the Vancouver motel room that Ressam and Dahoumane had shared showed traces of explosives. Ressam's prints were lifted from one of the circuit boards in his trunk. A scar on his thigh corresponded to explosives-burnt bluejeans. A maid at the Vancouver motel identified Dahoumane from a photo lineup. Meanwhile, a forensics search of Meskini's apartment and those of his friends came back without traces of bomb-making materials.

The feds sought to build a case against Meskini based upon his own statements in interrogation and in the wiretaps. There was no tape of their interrogation. Instead, FBI agents dictated from their handwritten notes five days later to make a typed report. There was no mention in the agents' notes that Meskini supported the terrorist GIA, but their report said he did. Nor had they made notes that he had undergone a religious awakening and held meetings with Islamic scholars in Brooklyn, but their report claimed both.

Agent Bradley Morrison in his affidavit portrayed Meskini's disposal of the airline receipt as an attempt to conceal involvement in a conspiracy, ignoring the fact that Meskini had only thrown out a receipt for the fee he paid for changing his return flight from Seattle. His plane ticket and boarding stubs were in the pocket of his black leather jacket, hanging on a doorknob in his apartment. (A listing of items recovered from the FBI's search of Meskini's apartment included the plane ticket and was part of a Justice Department court filing in Canada.)

Then there was the critical December 25 tape of the wiretapped conversation with Bouabdellah Beltisse in Algeria. According to the federal complaint, Meskini was supposed to have said on this tape that he had been trained in Afghanistan and that he had planned to raise money for a terrorist act. In fact, an examination of the tape by an independent translator shows he said neither. Meskini said he wanted to go "over there," but never said he had already been to Afghanistan.

The government also claimed, in another affidavit, that Meskini and Houari Baraka had agreed in sum and substance that Allah would shake up this world, that a new generation would punish America, and that Islam's renaissance would rise from Algeria. This, too, is a distortion of what the tapes contained. Meskini never talks about punishing America, and the other remarks are Baraka's.

The government's explanation of these faulty translations has varied. Marvin Smilon, a spokesman for the U.S. attorney's office prosecuting Meskini, said last fall that the criminal complaint quotations were not verbatim translations, even though they were described as "Meskini said" or "Meskini told" in the court filings. "These are summaries of what we believe are on the tapes," Smilon said. "We have brief summaries and snippets."

The most damning evidence remains Meskini's description of details from the bomb plot to Beltisse. His own explanation of what he calls "the bad tape" is simple: "I was BS-ing my friend."

The significance of Meskini's three phone numbers on the fateful slip of paper dwindled. As it turned out, there was another slip of paper with another person's name and phone number - written in code - found on Ressam of a man whom federal investigators have traced to Pakistan. Meskini wasn't in the address book found in Ressam's Montreal apartment. When the FBI analyzed Ressam's cell phone, they found his last seven calls had been to five Vancouver rental car agencies, a Seattle doctor's office and a rural Alabama residential listing. Nothing to Meskini. Nor did credit card or bank records tie Meskini to Ressam.

As the year went on, despite the arrival of evidence suggesting Meskini stood at some distance from the conspiracy's center, pressure grew on him to talk to prosecutors, plead guilty and cut a deal. Meskini read the government's legal discovery documents, looking for the hard oak of their case, and found plywood. "You won't believe what I have. I have crap," he said after one delivery. "This is stuff that might be used in court. They want to use, be my guest."

But Meskini's dilemma was deeper than the evidence against him. The government seemed willing to consider a deal, but only if Meskini gave prosecutors information useful in developing their cases against Ressam, Haouari and Dahoumane. Meskini insisted he had spilled everything he knew in the first 11-hour interrogation. An innocent dupe was of no use to the government. As his court-appointed lawyer pointed out, if Meskini were acquitted on the terrorism counts, he would still do jail time for credit-card fraud and then face deportation to Algeria, where he would be suspected of terrorism. "I go to the home country, they send a helicopter down to my house to get me and kill me," Meskini says.

In early February, U.S. District Judge John F. Keenan in New York appointed defense lawyer Isabelle Kirshner to help with Meskini's case. Kirshner read the case file and met with Assistant U.S. Attorney David Kelley. He told her he believed that Meskini had admitted enough in his statement to make him guilty of the charge of material support for terrorism. "If he hadn't crossed the line, he's damn close," was Kelley's view, Kirshner says.

Kirshner listened to her client's fears. Meskini told her that, like Ouali, he viewed deportation to Algeria as a death sentence. "If I were facing what he's facing, I'd give up my mother," Kirshner says. "I told him if you're on Team America, the government takes care of you - a green card, witness protection, the works. Now what if he really doesn't know any more? This happens all the time. A defendant with less information, less guilt, gets less benefit from cooperation. I am not advocating a position one way or another. I think the lesson we all learn here is that this is a stinky, rotten, dirty business, that there are no good decisions and that the people making these decisions are desperate. This system goes with that desperation and runs with it."

After a sleepless night, Meskini said he was prepared to cooperate: "We have a saying - 'Sometimes you have to play with the devil.' "

"If I sit down with Kelley, tell him the truth, look him in the eye and not look down . . ." Meskini trailed off. "That's what I'm going to do." He had not told the FBI agents every last detail. But would any of those details be the ones Kelley wanted?

[Al-khiyal]

On February 21, Meskini, accompanied by Kirshner and Roland Thau, his original defense attorney, began meeting with Kelley and his team. For three days, he fielded their questions. "The same question, they asked it 10 or 12 times," he recalls. "They ask it slightly different ways. They keep saying, 'Ghani, you're not stupid. You knew Reda was in the GIA. You knew it was two weeks before the millennium. You knew he knew about Afghanistan. And you didn't know he had explosives?' "

On the third day during a break, Meskini's lawyers reiterated their pleas for him to give Kelley something new. His mind churned. He walked back toward the conference room where the prosecutors were waiting. "I'm talking to myself in my own head: 'You better come up with something new before you walk into that conference room.' "

He walked into the room, sat down, and said, "There was something I should have known was wrong. I didn't at the time. But later, after I thought about things, I started putting certain things together." It was during his conversation with Mokhtar Haouari on December 4, 1999, he said. "We were talking about lots of things. Reda. Seattle. And he said at one point, 'A fire's coming.' I didn't see it as significant, but looking back it was."

Meskini watched a smile open on Kelley's face. The air seemed to uncharge. The questioning stopped, and the conversation began.

Over the course of almost 20 sessions, Meskini also alerted investigators to the section of the December 22 tape that they had overlooked: the "was-that-woman-your-cousin" phone call. The parking lot, the keys in the car, the "everyone would only know two people" of the plot, all melted away; the feds concluded he had cadged these details from media reports or had merely been speculating.

On March 7, the government dropped the more serious terrorism charge against him and he pleaded guilty to one count of conspiracy to provide material support to terrorism, which carried a five-year maximum. His criminal acts were the following: He flew to Seattle at Haouari's suggestion to help Reda, "whose entry into the United States through Canada created a substantial risk of destruction of real or personal property within the United States." He withdrew $1,500 from an ATM, intending to give it to Reda, but never did. He planned to help Reda with renting a car, driving, translating and providing his cell phone, but never did. He also pleaded guilty to seven non-terrorism-related charges, including bank fraud.

Meskini took the stand against Ressam on March 29. While the jury waited, there was a fight over what he could tell them. Ressam's lawyers objected to Meskini saying anything about "a fire's coming." It was ambiguous and prejudicial, they argued. The judge agreed. The very thing Meskini had struggled to pull out of himself, the thing that had finally convinced the investigators, meant nothing in the courtroom.

Mike Rolince, wearing his customary red, white and blue tie, is at FBI headquarters, contemplating the aftermath of Borderbom. "This has been a frustrating case," he acknowledges. "I stood up 15 months ago and said and thought that we would have the answers to the big questions. I certainly thought we'd have them by now. We don't. That lucky break, that solid investigative break, that forensic match, that witness, we haven't had that. What we have here is a highly compartmentalized conspiracy and, yes, minor people left behind.

"All I can say is, whether you're dealing with an organized crime case or a terrorism case, you start with what you have, and if what you have is a piece of paper with three phone numbers, then those numbers become your initial lead. Obviously in any conspiracy your objective is to make the case against each and every conspirator. It certainly doesn't surprise us that people in the upper echelons would try to divorce themselves from the evidence.

"From what I have seen in many cases, not just Borderbom, but the Cole, the embassies [the terrorist bombings of the USS Cole in Yemen and the U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania], is that there is a pattern of schmucks left behind. There is a continuum of conspirators. So we know there are prime-time players who leave before and that there is orchestration from afar. And there is connectivity - we do hear from them again. It happens. But if you don't have sources inside these organizations, you begin on the outside edges and work your way up, because that is all you can do."

As for the small-fry illegal immigrants like Aziz Ouali swept up in Borderbom, whose lives were turned upside down by their arrests, Rolince has no apology to offer. "By no means do we infer that the people arrested on immigration charges are terrorists and that we believe that. If we believed that, we would still be actively investigating these people and we're not. But if we knock on someone's door and come across someone who is either out of [immigration] status or has an outstanding warrant - whether it be local, state or federal - we're not going to walk away from that. We owe it to whatever law enforcement agency has that warrant."

Ahmed Ressam was convicted of terrorism on April 6. He could face 130 years in prison. Mokhtar Haouari goes on trial in New York this summer on terrorism charges. The fact that neither man has talked leads investigators to believe they both are deeply committed - and knowledgeable.

On March 27, Algeria announced it had arrested Abdelmajid Dahoumane playing dominoes in a village cafe in the Kabylie highlands, according to the government-controlled press. Some reports said he was snagged at the border on his way back from Afghanistan. Dahoumane would be tried in Algeria on terrorism charges, announced the government, which rebuffed the FBI's request to question and extradite him.

For Ghani Meskini, a kind of reckoning came during his testimony against Ressam in Los Angeles, when Assistant U.S. Attorney Robin L. Baker asked him a seemingly innocuous question, "Who do you consider to be the enemies of Islam?" Meskini dropped his head. Ten seconds. Twenty seconds. Thirty seconds. All eyes were on him. The court clerk handed him a tissue. "Anybody who interfered with the Muslim law," he finally said. "Excuse me."

The Associated Press reported that Meskini was weeping over his devotion to Islam. But Meskini says he was not thinking of Islam, or even of the question Baker had put to him. It was time for him to pay the price, he says he realized, for a lifetime of deceiving and thieving. But truth-telling was new to him. The truth's complexity in that moment overwhelmed him. "I was trying to say what I could say. And trying to say the truth. And trying to say best what I remember what happened. I lost it."

Abdelghani Meskini's sentencing is slated for later in the year. There are no guarantees he will be released for time served, or that he will get a green card and entry into the witness protection program. He hopes he will.

The other man

***

Lorraine Adams is a Washington Post staff writer. Staff writer David A. Vise in Washington and Charles Trueheart in Paris and staff researcher Alice Crites contributed to this article.

To take an in-depth look at an unfolding terrorism investigation, Lorraine Adams traveled to Montreal, Vancouver, Seattle, Boston and New York. She examined court records and interviewed more than 100 people, including law enforcement officials and suspects, plus attorneys, neighbors, employers, relatives and friends of the accused. The Washington Post hired Ali Djebli, an Algerian-born, New York court-certified translator of Arabic and French, to translate and transcribe the wiretapped recorded conversations of Abdelghani Meskini, Aziz Ouali, Abdelhakim Tizegha and other suspects. Those FBI audiotapes were provided to Meskini through the discovery process, and he provided them to The Post. Meskini also gave The Post FBI laboratory reports, handwritten notes from the New York Joint Terrorism Task Force, the FBI report of his 11-hour interrogation and numerous other government records and documents.