THE UNSEALING OF the plea agreement against Iyman Faris, 34, came only days after he was identified in a NEWSWEEK cover story, “Al Qaeda in America,” as one of a number of Qaeda operatives inside the country fingered by Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, the alleged mastermind of the September 11 terror attacks, who was captured in Pakistan last March.
Faris, a Kashmir native who became a naturalized American citizen only four years ago, was posing as a “hard-working independent truck driver” in America’s heartland, criss-crossing the country with his own rig making deliveries to airports and businesses “without raising a suspicion,” Ashcroft told reporters at a news conference at the Justice Department.
In fact, the attorney general said, Faris was leading a “secret double life” and had joined “Al Qaeda’s jihad against America.” The case, he said, “reminds us there are still terrorists in our midst.”
Terror Watch: America's Secret Prisoners

The plea agreement—which was actually signed by Faris on April 17 and only unsealed today—provides important new details about Faris’s admitted contact with the highest levels of Al Qaeda and the extent of his plotting inside the United States. But Justice Department officials declined to address many other key questions about the case—including how and when Faris was brought into U.S. custody and why his case had been kept under court seal in Alexandria, Va., until today. Some law-enforcement officials tell NEWSWEEK that Faris had been essentially acting as a U.S. informant about Al Qaeda and has been treated in much the same way that Mafia informants have been handled by the FBI in the past.
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Plot to bring down the Brooklyn Bridge
June 19, 2003 — Iyman Faris, a U.S. citizen from Columbus, Ohio, pleaded guilty to terrorism-related charges after a captured top leader of the al-Qaida network identified him and said he had planned attacks in the United States. NBC’s Pete Williams reports.

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According to the agreement, Faris traveled with a friend to Afghanistan in late 2000 where he wound up in an Al Qaeda training camp and met Osama bin Laden. During his sojourn, the court document states, Faris discussed procuring an “escape airplane” for Al Qaeda, arranged to ship the terror group 2,000 lightweight sleeping bags and obtained airline tickets for about a half dozen Al Qaeda operatives to fly to Yemen in late December 2001, apparently to flee American military troops who had invaded Afghanistan.
In early 2002, Faris also discussed terror plots inside the United States with a “senior operational leader” of Al Qaeda, the agreement states. (The leader is not identified in the court papers—he is referred to only as “C-2” for conspirator No. 2. But U.S. intelligence documents obtained by NEWSWEEK show C-2 is in fact master terrorist Khalid Shaikh Mohammed.) Mohammed asked Faris “what he could do for al Qaeda” and the two proceeded to talk about plans for “two simultaneous operations” in New York and Washington.
The New York plans involved cutting the suspension cable of the Brooklyn Bridge. Mohammed instructed Faris to obtain “gas cutters”—apparently some sort of acetylene torch—to cut the cables on the bridge.

The Washington plans are not specifically identified in the court papers but law-enforcement sources tell NEWSWEEK that they may have involved derailing Amtrak trains near Washington’s Union Station just a few blocks from the U.S. Capitol. The court papers do say that C-2, or Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, “assigned” Faris the job of obtaining “the necessary tools” for the train-derailment plot.
From the Magazine: Al Qaeda in America

The court papers indicate that, upon returning to the United States from Pakistan in April 2002, Faris set about his mission, researching the purchase of “gas cutters” and the dimensions of the Brooklyn Bridge on the Internet. He sent coded messages back to another Al Qaeda leader in Pakistan using code—the “gas cutters,” for example, were referred to as “gas station.” Later in the year, Faris traveled to New York and physically surveyed the bridge. But according to the court papers, he concluded that any plot to destroy the bridge by severing the cables “was very unlikely to succeed because of the bridge’s security and structure.” At that point, he sent a message back to Al Qaeda that “the weather is too hot”—code for the mission was unlikely to succeed.