Greg Scarpa Jr., uncovers a treasure trove of al Qaeda intel for the FBI

By Peter Lance
The 9/11 Commission Report, published in July 2004 and later nominated for a National Book Award, concluded that the original World Trade Center bombing cell was made up of a “loosely based group of Sunni Islamists.” The Report claimed that the “mastermind of 9/11” was Khalid Shaikh Mohammed who didn’t pitch the planes as missiles plot to Osama bin Laden until 1996.

But in my first HarperCollins book, 1000 YEARS FOR REVENGE, I proved that the 9/11 plot had originated with Ramzi Yousef in Manila in 1994. It was Yousef (KSM’s nephew) who first tried to knock the World Trade Center towers down with a bomb in 1993 and a year later he was in Manila planning a series of fiendish plots with “the planes operation” as a centerpiece.

Yousef’s involvement with the plot came from a treasure trove of al Qaeda intel uncovered by Gregory Scarpa Jr. who was located in a cell in Manhattan’s Metropolitan Correctional Center (MCC) in between Yousef and Abdul Hakim Murad, a pilot trained in multiple U.S. flight schools who was to be the lead pilot in the highjack-airliners/planes-as-missiles plot carried out on September 11th, 2001.

Scarpa Jr. Yousef sting 302 one of the key FBI 302’s from the Scarpa Jr. sting of Ramzi Yousef

Evidence I’d obtained from the Philippines National Police demonstrated that the Yousef-KSM Manila cell was funded directly by bin Laden via his brother-in-law, but the 9/11 Commission, with the backing of ex Asst. U.S. Attorney Dietrich Snell and other Feds, concluded that KSM wasn’t even a member of al Qaeda in 1996.

By mid-2004 I was getting closer to the truth. The 1996-97 FBI 302 memos I’d tried to share with The 9/11 Commission showed that the Bureau, and prosecutors from the Justice Department, had affirmatively covered up evidence of an active al Qaeda cell in New York City.

That same intelligence revealed the existence of a bin Laden-sponsored plot to hijack U.S. airliners, designed to pressure the U.S. to free the blind Sheikh and Yousef, who was locked up in The (MCC) in Lower Manhattan. Similar threat reporting would show up in Presidential Daily Briefings to Bill Clinton in 1998 and George W. Bush in 2001—facts that later made headlines.

As an example of the quality of Scarpa Jr.’s intel see comparison of the schematic he obtained from Yousef in May, 1996 showing the bomb maker’s plan for a Casio watch based improvised explosive device to be used in the “Bojinka” plot to blow up a dozens U.S. bound airliners — and a photograph taken by the FBI in Yousef’s Manila bomb factory in 1995 showing the identical configuration.

AL QAEDA & THE MOB

My findings revealed that the FBI had buried identical intelligence years before. Why would America’s most elite law enforcement and investigative agencies suppress such critical intel?

The motive in the suppression of this astonishing evidence by the Feds could be traced to a most surprising quarter: organized crime.

As a phone book-sized file of documentary evidence from prosecutors in the Eastern District of New York reveals, FBI investigators and federal prosecutors were desperate to avoid a scandal over an alleged corrupt relationship between R. Lindley DeVecchio, a senior supervisory special agent in the Bureau’s New York Office, (NYO) and Junior’s father, Gregory Scarpa Sr., whose two-year war of succession in the Colombo crime family had left twelve people dead, including two innocent bystanders. It initially produced 75 indictments of Colombo members + associates in the EDNY.

My fourth HarperCollins book DEAL WITH THE DEVIL amazon is devoted to the Scarpa Sr. story. The new Introduction can be accessed DEAL INTRO via Slate.com

Through a bizarre turn of events, the Yousef evidence came from the killer’s son, Greg Scarpa Jr., a wiseguy who happened to inhabit a jail cell adjacent to Yousef’s at the MCC. But rather than risk losing that series of Mafia cases in the Eastern District (built on tainted evidence from Scarpa Sr. to DeVecchio) the Feds decided to bury the intel.

One of the lead prosecutors was Patrick Fitzgerald, then the head of Organized Crime and Terrorism in New York’s Southern District. Considered the Justice Department’s leading authority on bin Laden, Fitzgerald would go on to become U.S. Attorney in Chicago, and special prosecutor in the investigation of media leaks regarding former CIA operative Valerie Plame, which ultimately cleared White House aide Karl Rove, while convicting Lewis “Scooter” Libby, top aide to Vice President Cheney of perjury and obstruction of justice.

Another top prosecutor from the SDNY who co-prosecuted Yousef for the Bojinka case was Dietrich Snell, whom this FBI 302 from the Scarpa/Yousef sting shows, was a party to Greg Jr.’s undercover operation.

THE DOJ’s MISPLACED PRIORITIES

Much of this tangled tale was laid out in great detail in my second investigative book COVER UP, published in September of 2004. It documented an ends/means decision by senior FBI and Justice Department officials to suppress the DeVecchio scandal, preserve those mob cases, and brand the Yousef-Scarpa Jr. intelligence a “hoax” and a “scam.” Until the cover up, that intelligence—chronicled in dozens of FBI 302s and notes from Yousef through Junior—was considered so important to the Feds that they gave Scarpa Jr. a camera to photograph the cache and even set up a phony Mafia front company, the “Roma Corporation,” allowing them to monitor Yousef’s outside calls.

By the fall of 1996, the Bureau’s internal affairs probe on DeVecchio was closed and Yousef was convicted along with Murad and a third conspirator. Dietrich Snell and Mike Garcia, who later became U.S. Attorney for the SDNY, had won a decisive victory and the Feds soon began to believe that they were winning the war against al Qaeda. But the burial of that evidence, which prevented other U.S. intelligence agencies from appreciating al Qaeda’s true breadth and depth, would have shocking repercussions.

As I looked back on the Justice Department’s counter-terrorism track record, I concluded that many of the dots left unconnected by the FBI and DOJ on the road to 9/11 appeared to have been the result of an intentional obscuring of the evidence.

Continuing to work sources and examine the reams of documentary evidence generated in the SDNY al Qaeda cases, I came to the conclusion that the FBI’s failure to prevent the African embassy bombings in 1998, the deadly assault on U.S.S. Cole in 2000, and the 9/11 attacks themselves, went beyond gross negligence. It seemed as if a number of FBI officials and federal prosecutors at the heart of the bin Laden hunt realized that they had been outgunned for years. So they acted affirmatively to partition the intelligence.

I believe that their motive was to sanitize the record and thus prevent the public from understanding the full depth of the FBI/DOJ missteps in the years leading up to September 11. So “walls” were intentionally built, and key intelligence was withheld from other agencies, including the CIA and DIA. In any other government enterprise, the consequences might have been more benign. but in the realm of national security that compartmentalization of intelligence proved fatal.