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Hambali says he recruited the four members of the cell on behalf of Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, the alleged mastermind of 9/11 who was al-Qaeda's military commander until his March 1 arrest in Pakistan. Mohammed—known within al-Qaeda as Mukhtar, an Arabic title meaning headman—told Hambali that the cell's mission involved hijacking a plane. In the end, the hijacking never happened. But Hambali's recollection of these plans shows once again how closely interlinked JI and al-Qaeda had become.
In their confessions, Hambali and his two al-Qaeda lieutenants Zubair and Lilie describe in chilling detail how they spent months exploring targets in Thailand. The U.S. and British embassies in Bangkok, as well as several nightclubs in tourist hot spots such as Phuket and Pattaya, were all cased. This March, according to Zubair, the group also surveyed the facilities at Bangkok's Don Muang airport, specifically the check-in counter for flights to Israel. Zubair reported that the ticket counter was well guarded by Thai police. He also said that though he could spot the parked Israeli planes from a passing bus, they were protected by a high fence, making an attack impractical.
Another Bangkok target that was studied carefully was an Israeli-owned restaurant and travel agency near famed backpacker district Khao San Road, called United Traveler's Connection, which displays a large Star of David above a sign in English and Hebrew. According to the interrogation summaries, Hambali called off the strike only when Lilie told him there was a police station nearby. A Thai intelligence official says the three men then turned their attention to the JW Marriott hotel in downtown Bangkok, which may have been saved from attack by Hambali's capture. "They had identified it as a weak spot," says the official. "They were looking for explosives."
SHOW ME THE MONEY
"I am starting a business and I need capital," read the message sent via e-mail from a computer in Indonesia to Thailand in late May. The author of the e-mail, Malaysian Azahari bin Husin, had no doubt his message would be understood. Within weeks, Azahari, an expert in explosives and a top JI operative who is now on the lam, received $45,000 from Hambali. The money was hand-delivered through a chain of couriers stretching from Thailand, through Malaysia and into Indonesia. Along with this cash, Hambali sent a message instructing Azahari to set aside $15,000 for the families of the Bali bombers, and to use the rest to help fund his "business"—the bombing of Jakarta's JW Marriott.
In the war on terror, no challenge is greater than halting the flow of money to fund such attacks. And yet, as this anecdote from Hambali's interrogation transcript shows, Hambali still had access to large amounts of cash and the ability to move it swiftly across the region even while he was on the run. "He did it all through couriers," observes a regional intelligence official, "and it's almost impossible to stop. It's an issue we need to look at more closely."
As Hambali's confession suggests, JI's ability to cause havoc has stemmed in large part from its financial ties to al-Qaeda. Hambali says almost all JI funding for more than a year came directly from al-Qaeda military commander Mohammed. Regional intelligence officials believe that at one point in 2002 Hambali had as much as $500,000 in his jihad fund, which he used, according to Zachary Abuza, an expert on terrorism, "to support the cost of travel to and training of members in al-Qaeda camps in Afghanistan and the Philippines, and to purchase arms and explosives and subsidize JI-run madrasahs." Hambali says that al-Qaeda money helped fund the Bali bombings as well as the attack on the JW Marriott. Alarmingly, Hambali told his captors that JI militants in Indonesia and the Philippines have been sent $70,000 since June to fund terrorist strikes. Because bombing the JW Marriott wouldn't have cost much, intelligence officials believe tens of thousands of dollars are still in JI hands for future operations.
In some cases, charities have been used directly by al-Qaeda to funnel money into JI's hands. In May, a Saudi-funded charity in Cambodia was closed after a joint U.S.-Cambodian investigation detected large sums of money deposited into the charity's bank account. "We're talking about huge inflows of cash here," says a senior diplomat in Phnom Penh. "Amounts so large they set alarm bells ringing all over the place." One of the men arrested at the charity, Thai national Abdul Azi, has admitted to police that he knew Hambali and had helped him hide out in Cambodia earlier this year. A senior official at Cambodia's Interior Ministry told Time that Azi was "was in charge of accounts for Hambali [in Cambodia]. The two had a close relationship." Azi, says a Thai intelligence official, also had links to four Thai JI members arrested in Thailand in June.