A Kidnapping in Milan: The CIA on Trial by Steve Hendricks Page B

loaded backpack. He could. Another time, he and a friend were assigned to deposit three suitcases, each filled with sixty or so pounds of electronics and camouflage clothing, at the baggage check of Milan’s central train station. When the bags aroused no suspicion, the leader of their cell mused aloud about which days and hours the station would be most crowded and estimated that fifteen checked bags could do the work of a truckful of explosives. The cell also discussed murdering Italian politicians and talk-show hosts and flying planes into the Italian Senate or landmarks in Milan.
    Other terrorists in Milan had their hands in plots elsewhere in Europe, including a plot that was led by a German cell to bomb the Strasbourg Christmas market in 2000. The terrorists in Milan plotted a similar attack for Italy but were arrested before they could carry it out. Still other Milanese terrorists seem to have played a supporting (but unclear) role in the Madrid train bombings of 2004.
    Until the end of the 1990s, nearly all of Milan’s Islamic terrorists worshipped at the mosque on Viale Jenner, and several of them worked there. In time, the mosque’s imam, secretary, librarian, cook, barber, and janitor would all be arrested on charges of terrorism. Notwithstanding such taints, membership at the mosque multiplied, eventually to two or three thousand. At noon prayers on Friday, the holiest day of the Islamic week, supplicants spilled out of the old garage and onto the sidewalk on prayer mats in orderly rows of seven across. Shoeless, bent on hand and knee, they made a cordillera stretching the better part of a block toward Mecca—a human topography of Islam. Not all of the parishioners dreamed of heroically murdering receptionists in their office towers and five-year-olds in their kindergartens, but many sympathized with the terrorists among them, and others were indifferent. Thus Abu Imad, the head imam, could ask at one gathering without fear of giving offense, “Is it alright to kill a person who prays and fasts but who agrees with the ideas of secular, democratic, and Communist people?” One of his guests could declare, with equal inoffensiveness, “Between us and the unbelievers there is hatred. The enmity and hatred will reign between us and them forever, until they believe in Allah alone.”
    The mosque on Viale Jenner so prospered that in the late 1990s Milan’s radicals founded a second large mosque. It stood on the southern edge of Milan, on Via Quaranta, geographically distant from but architecturally and ideologically of a piece with with the mosque on Viale Jenner. Its superstructure was a disused factory, its piety bellicose. The formal name of the new mosque was the Islamic Community in Italy, but as this was similar to the formal name of Viale Jenner (the Institute for Islamic Culture), the mosques were usually identified simply as “Via Quaranta” or “Viale Jenner”—bad luck for the memories of Bernardo Quaranta, excavator of Pompeii and Herculaneum, and Edward Jenner, inventor of the smallpox vaccine. Via Quaranta, investigators would soon learn, was meant to supplement rather than supplant Viale Jenner’s terrorism.
    It was at Via Quaranta that al-Qaeda’s Abu Saleh set up shop, quickly establishing himself as one of the mosque’s leaders. Of his work, he told a disciple, “If the brothers want to hide, we hide them. If the brothers want documents, we take care of their documents. If the brothers want to move, we move them. If they need a weapon, you give them a weapon.” He seemed a good recruiter, able to inspire young men but wise enough to test and restrain them. He clearly knew the waste of money and time and the risk to security of sending to jihad either a tenderfoot who might have a change of heart or an enthusiast whose indiscipline might wreck an operation.
    “I am curious about one thing,” he said to one recruit who wanted to martyr himself immediately. “Don’t you like this good