344

41 | onfrontation C

and Consensus

A

hdRssMe e AM, A 32-yeAR-oLd ALgeRiAn MusLiM, was at the
wheel of the last car off the ferry from Victoria, B.C. It was
5:45 p.m. on December 14, 1999. “Where are you going?” said
Diana Dean, one of the U.S. Customs inspectors at Port Angeles on the
Washington side of the Strait of Juan de Fuca. Ressam was sweaty-faced
and jittery. When she asked him more questions, he started rummag-
ing in the console. “The minute the hands disappear,” Dean says, “you
get nervous.”^1
She told him to get out of the car, a dark green Chrysler from a rental
agency. Hidden in the spare-tire well inspectors found 10 plastic bags
filled with white powder. Ressam fled into the drizzly dark, bouncing off
startled pedestrians and cars before he was finally tackled and cuffed. On
further inspection, the trunk also yielded several black plastic boxes con-
taining watches wired to circuit boards, as well as bottles and jars filled
with chemicals. The powder wasn’t drugs, as they had surmised. It was
urea fertilizer and sulfates. Ressam was an al-Qaida foot soldier, headed
to California. His goal was to bomb a busy passenger concourse at Los
Angeles International Airport at the dawn of the new millennium. But
nobody realized that for nearly a year. Seattle’s mayor canceled the New
Year’s Eve gala at Seattle Center, fearing the Space Needle was a terrorist
target.^2
The scheme—foiled by chance and Diana Dean’s inquiring mind—
prompted heightened security and an outbreak of intelligence sharing.
The FBI, CIA, Justice Department and national security operatives at
the White House were actually talking to one another and passing along
terrorist information to police departments and airport managers. The
FBI’s new attitude was particularly remarkable because at other trying
times it had shared practically nothing. The fear that the dawn of the
21 st Century would cause the mother of all computer crashes—the “Y2K”