Sleepers the German Connection

IT WAS EASY FOR TERRORISTS TO AVOID OFFICIAL SCRUTINY BEFORE LAST SEPTEMBER'S ATTACKS. IT STILL IS, AN INSIDE REPORT

I'm an Israeli Jew, an army paratrooper veteran of the 1973 Yom Kippur war and other combat. For three years in the late Seventies and early Eighties, I was a detective in Israel's equivalent of the FBI. Mani (his real name doesn't matter) is an Arab, born in Morocco in 1975, who moved to Germany with his family when he was four. He is, among many other things, a devout Muslim. His family and I have been good friends for some time, and Mani and I trust each other despite the gulf between our backgrounds. It's not complicated. When I was a cop, I helped one of Mani's relatives, an Arab Israeli who had been framed and was in serious trouble. The man and I became friends. He told Mani he could trust me--and told me I could trust Mani. I knew Mani was doing well enough in the Ruhr town of Lever-kusen to support his mother and to set up his brother in the restaurant business. Beyond "entrepreneur," however, I was not sure how to describe his occupation. When I talked to him a few weeks after September 11, he told me about his latest project. He had managed to obtain 1000 T-shirts cheap and planned to adorn them with an image of Osama bin Laden. He said he planned to export the shirts to Morocco and other Arab countries. Some of his friends in Germany were eager to wear them, Mani told me, but to do so would be dangerous, for obvious reasons.

I knew from the media that the Muslim community in Germany--past and present--was a major focus of the terror investigation. (See "Following the Leads," page 68.) I recalled that at least one of the hijackers, Mohamed Atta, had been a regular at a gym in Germany and that he liked action movies. Ditto for Mani. I confident, however, that Mani's similarities to a terrorist hijacker ended there.

But why was Germany so prominent in the unfolding terror story, I wondered. Why had the three hijackers (and perhaps accomplices, still at large) chosen Germany as a base? Would it be difficult for police and intelligence services to penetrate the terrorist underground, which, while surely a minority, lived within a sprawling, 3 million-strong Muslim community? What were Muslims in Germany thinking and doing in the wake of the events of September 11?

I decided to go to Germany to see whether Mani could help me answer these questions.

*******

I began to understand the new and dangerous realities of the place as soon as I arrived in Frankfurt. As Mani and I hurried out of the airport, German police and television crews were racing in. Parts of the airport were being sealed off, armored cars came screaming up to the curb, sharpshooters were running toward spots on the roof. Mani's car radio reported the basic facts: A Turkish student named Harun Aydin had been arrested as he was about to board a flight for Tehran. In his luggage, according to the early reports, were terror manuals (whatever those are), unspecified materials that might be involved in the manufacture of detonators, a chemical-biological warfare protective suit and, as if it were further incriminating evidence, a Koran.

Mani recognized the man's name, and he was sure many other Muslims would as well. He was the brother-in-law of Metin Kaplan, a Muslim extremist known as the Caliph of Cologne, who was in jail for incitement to murder. He was, according to the buzz in Muslim tea shops and kabob restaurants, a close ally of bin Laden.

"Let's go see where he lives," Mani said. We drove from Frankfurt to Cologne, a trip of several hours even on the autobahn. We reached a quiet residential neighborhood where everyone we saw was Muslim. A few women in traditional headdress hurried along with packages, and young men, like Mani, in fashionable Western (text continued on page 140) Sleepers(continued from page 67) leisure clothes gathered around our car. Mani rolled down the window and said in Arabic, "What's happening?"

"Is that guy a cop?" one of them asked, gesturing at me.

"Would I hang out with cops?" Mani replied. "He's my friend from New York and he wants to know what's going on." (I spend considerable time in New York, though my official residence is in Israel.) We started talking. Most of the young men were cagey and noncommittal about their notorious neighbor, but they were all fans of New York. Several said I was lucky to live there, but it was also clear that the World Trade Center attack had caused them no grief.

Already, the rumor mill had embroidered the media reports with inflammatory images. Now, it seemed, their neighbor had been in the act of hijacking the plane when police wrestled him to the ground. Like the suicide bombers in Israel, he was wearing a green-and-white jihad bandana, and his protective suit was designed to survive nuclear attack, as well as chemical and biological warfare. He was also wearing a ski mask and a Kevlar jacket and was carrying a small quantity of mercury. No one in the crowd had an explanation for why a terrorist would carry mercury.

"Life was so much easier before September 11," one of the young Muslim men said. "Then we were just dirty foreigners--and that was bad enough--but now we're murderous, dirty foreigners. And they think we're all dangerous."

Another said: "I'm a German. I was born here. I went to high school and I go to a technical school. But since September 11, Germans ask me if I am an 'Atta.' Is that fair? Is that right?"

And a third, speaking rapid Moroccan Arabic that eluded me, suddenly used a word I recognized: sleeper. He kept using it, and his friends nodded in agreement. He was saying that now the non-Muslims in Germany thought he and other young Muslims were sleepers--that is, they are agents of bin Laden who will go about their normal lives until the terrorist leader sends them into action. As a consequence, they said, they heard disparaging terms such as rag head and camel humper far more often than before the World Trade Center and Pentagon attacks.

•

We said goodbye to that group and set off to meet more of Mani's friends. It quickly became clear that however unpleasant the new realities might be, Mani and his pals had found a way to cash in on them. He showed me one of his T-shirts, now adorned with a photo of Osama bin Laden outside a cave, holding an AK-47. Mani was about to deliver a shipment to the airport.

I also met Fouad, known as Freddy Football (because of his devotion to his favorite soccer team). Freddy had spotted an Internet parody of the calypso classic Banana Boat Song, an animated number with rockets, featuring President Bush playing drums and Colin Powell threatening the Afghan terrorists: "Come, Mr. Taliban, turn over bin Laden--daylight come and we dropping the bomb." Freddy downloaded the cartoon and burned it on to, by his account, 30,000 CD-ROMs--with a twist. In his version, Bush and Powell are mocked in Arabic subtitles. The CDs were selling like kabobs, Freddy reported. No wonder, since he was marketing them through a friend who owned a chain of kabob stands.

•

Much of Mani's entrepreneurial activities are conducted at a gym near Leverkusen, where friends and colleagues hang out. It is fair to say, from what Mani has told me and what I've observed, that many of them make a living in ways that would not stand up to scrutiny by the police. Then again, few policemen in Germany speak Arabic, and strong German laws protecting civil liberties make close monitoring illegal.

The gym rats are part of a loose network of wannabe heavies. They work all over Germany as bodyguards, concert-security beef and the like. Some claim to have known Atta, from his Hamburg gym. Mani filled me in on what he had heard about Atta. He held his hand aloft and let his wrist go limp: "Atta was fighting himself because of the shame--he was gay. That was a great shame for him and his family, so he wanted to die like a man. That's Atta's whole story."

Mani's gym reminded me of a pool hall in a crime movie, the sort of place that was, all by itself, the shady side of town. It was one brightly lit room with lockers along the walls and barbells and weight benches arranged in groups. There were about 40 men there when I walked in, nearly all Muslims--Turks, Lebanese, Algerians. The rest were Germans, Russians, Poles and Yugoslavs, and all, it seemed, were friends of Mani. He told me there were just three rules for a newcomer such as myself: Don't stare at anyone, let them start a conversation and stay away from any machine where a man has left his towel.

He introduced me as a friend, and his friends went about their business normally.

And what business.

It was immediately obvious that these gym denizens were not health fanatics. I saw a Yugoslavian in an Armani suit approach a Turk who was pumping iron while chain-smoking. He placed the burning cigarette on the edge of another machine, as if it were the edge of a pool table.

"Do you have it?" the Yugoslav asked.

"Yeah," said the Turk, who rose from the machine, dragged on the cigarette, walked over to his locker and pulled out a folded towel. He opened the towel and handed the man a Glock with the magazine in place. The Yugoslav in turn peeled off several big-denomination deutsche mark bills, pocketed the gun and left the gym.

Mani slugged away at a heavy bag while I tried to be inconspicuous. I witnessed another transaction, as a Lebanese handed over two industrial-size jars of pills to a man in a sweat suit. Later Mani explained that the pills were Dutch ecstasy. The recipient was a bouncer at a popular disco.

I talked with a guy who said he had worked out with Atta. "He wore makeup," the guy said. I was sure he meant body makeup--the stuff weightlifters wear in competitions. "No, no--like a girl. Makeup on his face."

Two other men attracted my attention. They were both Turkish Cypriots. One wore soccer shorts and a Bayern Munich jersey, and the other wore camouflage trousers. I saw them speak to a German in a business suit, who also had a thick wad of bills. He gave most of it to the two men, who quickly left the gym.

The German's name was Jochen, another friend of Mani, and he was eager to show me some of his work--and what his life is like.

The first stop was Jochen's art gallery, an enormous storehouse of copies of the great masters. Jochen explained that his clientele included Germans and Muslims, and that they were equally gullible and eager to buy culture. He talked about one rich Muslim drug dealer to whom he had sold a Van Mogh. It sounded enough like Van Gogh to impress the buyer (and his friends), and it enabled Jochen to say he had done nothing illegal. From other outlets, Jochen explained, he sells different sorts of knock-offs that have come his way, such as Molex watches and Gup shirts.

Fakes sell. That was obvious. I remembered that Mani had told me another way some of his friends had planned to cash in on the suspicions that were now directed against them. Given the opportunity, Mani had explained, they would peddle false terror tips, bogus information about plots they had heard sleepers were hatching. It seemed natural.

While I was looking at a reimagining of Rembrandt's The Night Watch--a sunlit version called The Day Watch by Remnart--a German woman came in.

"I need something for my daughter's wedding," she said.

Jochen had just the right enormous oil painting. It was a portrait of an ugly woman, with the look of age about it.

"It's Mozart's mother," Jochen said.

The woman was impressed though skeptical.

"Are you sure it's Mozart's mother?" she asked.

"Absolutely," Jochen said, and he then made a show of inspecting the back of the painting.

By the time he had talked her into an expensive frame for the atrocity, he had made about $2000.

Jochen invited me to tag along when he visited a wine warehouse, where three men were sitting at a table made from a wine barrel, sniffing corks. They ignored us as we walked to the back door. Out back were the two Turkish weightlifters from Cyprus who had left the gym in a hurry. They were standing near a truck filled with bottles of Spanish wine.

"The truck broke down in the Pyrenees, and they found it," Jochen explained. The two hijackers beckoned to some German kids, gave them a few deutsche marks and had them unload the swag into the warehouse.

On and on it went, as I met more and more Runyonesque characters, Muslim and German, who conjured up an underworld open to exploitation by terrorists in all sorts of ways. For the most part, my encounters took place in tea shops, at kabob stands, on street corners and in bordellos. Until September 11, Mani told me, I could have found talkative Muslims at any of the small mosques that abound in the big cities. But they have become all but deserted because, not surprisingly, police have begun staking them out, taking pictures and asking questions.

I heard the facts--and, I'm sure, the urban legends--of the Muslim underworld. I heard about the special problems of smuggling goods or people across borders. I heard about the highway motels, which have ATM-like consoles instead of concierges. One gains entry with a credit card, and if the card is a fake, one leaves no paper trail. Story after story described how it was possible to operate under official radar.

One man told me he was trying to unload a truckload of left-footed Puma athletic shoes. He explained that so many Puma, Nike and Adidas shipments had been hijacked in eastern Europe that the companies had resorted to sending one foot at a time. If, say, his shipment of left-footed shoes had reached its proper destination, the shipper would have sent the right-footed models to join them. Someone at the gym, he said, would probably know someone who knew the whereabouts of the right-footed shoes.

There were stories about the man who had an honest job as a dental technician and who regularly stole anesthetic gas. Why? He could sell it to truck hijackers, who would give it to prostitutes who worked truck stops. The idea was that the prostitute would somehow give the driver a blast of the gas once they were alone in his cab. Then, while he was incapacitated, the hijackers could unhook his rig, hook it to one of their cabs and be on their way.

Mani and his friends travel often, driving fast on the comfortable European highways. He and I crossed and recrossed the Austrian, Italian and Dutch borders and were scrutinized on several occasions by the police. Mani and his Audi--with mag wheels and blacked-out windows--fit the police profile of a suspect. No one ever noticed the illegal Glock Mani carried with him at all times.

According to Mani and his friends, their new notoriety makes them more alluring to German women. One of them noted that Carlos the Jackal, one of the bloodiest, most notorious terrorists of the past, had just gotten married in a French prison. To Mani's friends, this news somehow suggested that women love outlaws, and now all the young Muslims in Germany had that reputation. Who knows? I did see them pick up a couple of German blondes at a rest stop and get blow jobs in the car as we drove to a nightclub. One of the guys in the car that night--a guy named Achmed who goes by Jimmy--said, "I tell you I am fucking these blonde women every day. We do not need 77 virgins in heaven when we have as many as we want here on earth. For me, this is heaven right here. Germany is paradise. I think the best way to end this conflict is for America to parachute a lot of blonde women into the desert. If they send great women with long blonde hair who fuck Muslims, I tell you there is no war, no bombing, no jihad, no worries for anyone."

•

But for all the bragging, one fact is undeniable. It is easy to operate under the radar in Germany. For historical reasons, civil liberty legislation is powerful and thorough. The word gestapo is always on the mind of German police--as in, make sure you are never accused of acting like the gestapo.

Also, Datenschutz, or "protection of data," severely limits the extent to which institutions can share information. Selling information to catalog companies, for example, is illegal, and telephone information is also carefully guarded. Legal aliens find it easy to operate illegally. One can gain residency, make all one's money off the books and skip filing a tax return--and be optimistic about getting away with it. The agencies in charge of work permits, taxation and residency are forbidden, for the most part, to cross-reference records that might indicate suspicious activity. Similarly, it's difficult for authorities to get permits for wiretaps. The taped phone conversations that led to the arrest of Lased bin Heni in Munich were provided by Italian authorities who were monitoring terrorist cells in Milan, whose members spoke to their counterparts in Germany.

Legal residency is also fairly easy to obtain. Germany maintains an open university system, and the universities are free--even to foreign students. The Technical University of Harburg, where Atta and his accomplices studied, has a web page devoted to interested foreign students. The page points out there is no tuition. In many cases--indeed, as happened with Marwan al-Shehhi--universities teach German free of charge as a first step toward a free education. In the wake of the September attacks, some university records have been examined for anomalies. The Hanover immigration office, for example, began to look systematically through the records of foreign students. The decision was criticized publicly by the state official in charge of Datenschutz. For people obsessed with operating without scrutiny, Germany is paradise.

•

Before returning to Cologne, Mani introduced me to a Turkish Muslim friend named Mehmet. They had met as youths, when both their fathers were greengrocers. Matter-of-factly, Mehmet described the various ways he provides false documentation--passports, drivers' licenses and credit cards. He also told me he has worked legally one day in his life and swore he would never do it again. Fresh vegetables were too dirty for him, he said. He preferred tampering with photos and minting phony credit cards.

•

In Cologne, Mani's gym rat--bouncer network delivered us to an Afghan woman named Leila, who has been in Germany for just a year and who lives in great danger. While Mani and his friends must take their chances with the new scrutiny the counterterrorist war is sure to bring them, Leila is a reminder of the spectral past that haunts Muslims in Europe. As more refugees pour out of Afghanistan, there will inevitably be more stories to match hers.

Leila, now 27, grew up near Kabul, where her father was an English teacher at a local school. Leila has five sisters; an older brother was killed fighting the Russians when she was a little girl. His death broke her father's spirit and her mother turned against Leila in a violent and vicious manner. Day in and day out, Leila told Mani and me, her mother whipped her with a thick carpet beater. In the beginning, Leila learned to throw her hands out at her sides, to let her billowing chador absorb most of the blow. Her mother figured out what she was doing and beat her only at night, when she was in bed wearing a much thinner nightdress.

When I asked her why her mother was so savage, Leila thought for nearly a minute before saying, "frustration."

About two years ago, she went to live with relatives near the Afghanistan-Pakistan border. Thanks to her father, she was fluent in English, and her uncle hired her out as a translator for an aid agency that worked on both sides of the border. Every payday, the uncle confiscated the small brown envelope that contained her earnings.

One of the aid workers took Leila to bed and then, she says, treated her badly. Over time, she discovered ways to keep some of her pay from her uncle, and began making plans to escape to Europe. She obtained, from another aid worker, a document with her real name that declared her a stateless refugee. From Pakistan, she made her way to India and then to London, where she spent some time in quarantine but was then delivered to France. From there, she entered Germany.

"I heard that in Germany it was easier to get asylum because the Germans were much more lenient about it," she said. And so they were. In the early Nineties, Germany was accepting nearly half a million asylum seekers each year. Even after a 1993 reform of entry policies, the number of asylum seekers entering Germany currently approaches 100,000 a year.

First, Leila worked in a fish-and-chips fast-food place, but the smells sickened her. She heard about the large Muslim community in Cologne and arranged to meet a Lebanese man called Hassan, who had been in Germany since 1982. He gave her a job in a factory he owned that made pallets. She worked there until the German tax authorities began poking around in Hassan's affairs and found that she was legally a refugee who was entitled to a government stipend but not allowed to work.

Leila was sent to a detention center, where she met a Turkish woman who urged her to call Gunter, a German pimp. Leila began working in Gunter's small brothel outside Frankfurt, where most of the girls were local and Leila was considered "exotic."

She had not danced since she was a small child, but one day she started to dance around the brothel and remembered what she had been taught. Not long afterward, Gunter sent her and some other girls to a stag party, where Leila did a striptease to faintly traditional music and choreography. The Germans loved it and Leila developed her act. She bought music in a Muslim shop, fooled around with her clothes and realized she had something that might sell in the big city.

She then said goodbye to Gunter and moved to Cologne, where she is still a prostitute but spends more and more time as "the Taliban stripper."

Since September 11, calls for the Taliban stripper have increased fivefold. She wears various veils, adorned with gold coins, and dances to tambourine-heavy Egyptian music. To be sure, disparaging remarks about Muslims are constant, and when she is told to service the groom after a striptease, the Germans usually make pins about "screwing the Arabs."

"Money is money," she said.

I asked her what the future looked like for her.

"I'm waiting to die," she said. "The first time one of my people comes to this bordello, I will be killed."

•

Hassan, the man who employed Leila in his pallet factory and who survived the investigation by the tax authorities, is the unofficial grand old man of the Muslim community in a suburb of Cologne. His story offers another view of the new battlefield.

Now 55, with a full beard and a full head of hair, Hassan is proof that many Muslims can operate within the law, even while knowing many others who don't. His father was Lebanese and married a German woman. Hassan grew up comfortably in Beirut and was a greeter and part owner of a casino operated by Syrians. He showed me photos of himself with Yasser Arafat, who, he said, never gambled or womanized. In 1982, the Israeli invasion drove Hassan to Germany, where he found a job in a pallet factory. Eventually, he established his own business.

Now, because of his reputation in the community, German police have asked him for guidance in finding the translators they need to tell them what appears in Arabic-language newspapers. The police, Hassan said, are paying the equivalent of $40 an hour for translation services, and Hassan is happy to throw work to his beleaguered brethren. But he is dubious about the efficacy of such programs in the struggle against terror: "If I am a Pashtun, or whatever, and my kinsmen say or write bad things, I will not give a correct translation. My allegiance is with my people. If they know I am the transcriber or translator, believe me, it could be dangerous to give a correct translation to the police. These translations for the police will not be useful."

Hassan has another solution: Sippen-haft, a German term from World War II that means punishing an entire clan or community if any member causes problems. "It's the only way to win," he said.

•

The fact is that everyone's future is as uncertain as the next development in the long and complicated war against terrorism. And the German Muslim community, while it adjusts to its new problems and opportunities, will continue to be the victim of inflammatory sensationalism. Not long before I left Germany, I learned that the Turkish student who had just been busted when I arrived had been released. In fact, he was never charged, even though he probably knew someone who knew bin Laden, and he had been traveling to Iran. His mysterious protective suit turned out to be a raincoat.

Mani, for his part, was moving slowly with his plan to market bin Laden T-shirts. When I left they were still at the Frankfurt airport, while he tried to cope with, or find a way around, complexities in export-import laws. He was still sure he'd get them on the streets of Algeria or Pakistan before long. Meanwhile, he had another friend for me to meet who underscored just how vulnerable the already hapless German police are when it comes to investigating terrorist cells. It's not at all certain they can distinguish an urban legend from a true story--and they may not even care. After all, they have their jobs to do, and Mani's friend just wanted to help them do it--and make a few bucks.

Specifically, the man described how he had an idea while watching a movie in which a speedboat jumps over a dock and detonates some oil tanks. The man had a police contact who was hungry for information, especially sensational information, from the Muslim community. Mani's friend called the cop and told him he had heard two men talking in a kabob shop about a "plot." Then he described the movie scene and said the men had talked about attacking a local yacht club. The German cop took notes and paid him $500, for which he signed a receipt with a fake name. That report undoubtedly became part of the "intelligence" among public officials.

•

Mani has Muslim and German friends and tries to be true to both worlds. That will be more difficult in the future. Even as he pursues shady enterprises, he is trying to strengthen his official credentials. He enrolled in an expensive security school in Hamburg, assisted by a government grant. With his graduation certificate, he can remain part of the gym rat--bouncer crowd but can also enjoy legal respectability. Indeed, the certificate will enable him to operate a bodyguard agency. It will also enable him to have a gun permit, so that he can sell the stolen Glock he now carries illegally. Mani wants to respect his roots--but he also wants a safe and stable mainstream German life. It remains to be seen how he will survive the conflicting pressures of the German battlefield of the 21st century.

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He opened the towel and handed the man a glock with the magazine in place.

Hamburg

The idea was that the prostitute would somehow give the driver a blast of the gas once they were alone in his cab.