The new jackals: Ramzi Yousef, Osama
Bin Laden, and the
future of terrorism
By Reeve, S. (1999)
s.l.: Northeastern University
Retail Price US$26.90. Pages 256. Hardcover. Pub Date
11/1999. ISBN 1555534074
Reviews
The publisher, Andre Deutsch , 20 September, 1999
On 26 February 1993 a massive bomb devastated New York's World Trade
Center, creating more hospital casualties than any event in American
history since the Civil War. Ramzi Yousef, the young British-educated
terrorist who masterminded the attack, had been seeking to topple the twin
towers and cause tens of thousands of fatalities.
An intensive FBI investigation into the crime quickly developed into a
man-hunt that took top FBI agents across the globe. But even with the FBI
on his trail, Yousef continued with his campaign of terror. He bombed an
aeroplane and an Iranian shrine. He tried to kill Benazir Bhutto, the
former Pakistani Prime Minister, and planned to assassinate the Pope,
President Clinton and simultaneously destroy 11 airliners over the Pacific
Ocean using
tiny undetectable bombs. He also plotted an attack on the CIA headquarters
with a plane loaded with chemical weapons. His pursuers dubbed Yousef 'an
evil genius'.
During their huge investigation FBI agents discovered that Yousef was
funded and sent on some of his attacks by Osama bin Laden, a mysterious
Saudi millionaire. By the mid-1990s they realised bin Laden had become the
most
influential sponsor of terrorism in the world, and agents now conclude
that since the early 1990s a small group of terrorists supported by bin
Laden have dominated international terrorism. These 'Afghan Arabs' helped
defeat
the Soviets in Afghanistan before killing thousands of people in campaigns
against governments in the West, Africa, the Middle East and Asia. When
bin Laden's followers attacked American embassies in Kenya and Tanzania on
7
August 1998, killing 224 people, the US finally launched cruise missile
strikes in an attempt to destroy his secret organization.
Drawing on unpublished reports, interrogation files, interviews with
senior FBI agents who hunted Yousef, intelligence sources and government
figures including Benazir Bhutto, Simon Reeve gives a harrowing account of
Yousef's bombings, offers a revealing insight into his background, and
details the FBI's man-hunt to catch him. Reeve explains how Yousef was one
of bin Laden's first operatives and documents bin Laden's life and
emergence as the leader of a potent terrorist organisation, giving
fascinating insights into the man President Clinton has called 'the
pre-eminent organizer and financier of international terrorism in the
world today'.
Highly detailed and yet immensely readable, The New Jackals sheds new
light on two of he world's most notorious terrorists. Reeve warns that
Yousef and bin Laden are just the irst of a new breed of terrorist, men
with no
restrictions on mass killing. He also offers evidence that bin
Laden's organization may already have chemical and nuclear weapons nd
explains why the world could soon face attacks by terrorists with weapons
of mass estruction.
________________________________________________________________________
Simon Reeve is
a journalist and writer. He worked for The Sunday Times for five years
before leaving to finish co-writing The Millennium Bomb, published in
1996. He has since contributed to books on corruption,
organized crime and terrorism, and has written investigative feature
articles for publications ranging from Time magazine to Esquire. He lives
in London.
During research for The New Jackals Reeve has eaten ice cream sorbet with
Benazir Bhutto, spent hours sitting in a stairwell on a London housing
estate waiting for a former Lebanese smuggler, met American intelligence
officials in a suburban burger bar and a Chinese restaurant, and been
followed by agents from two different countries during meetings with a
renegade spy.