http://www.spiegel.de/international/germany/0,1518,504837,00.html

SPIEGEL ONLINE - September 10, 2007, 02:42 PM

OPERATION ALBERICH
How the CIA Helped Germany Foil Terror Plot

By Simone Kaiser, Marcel Rosenbach and Holger Stark

With the help of the CIA, German investigators foiled what would likely
have been the most devastating terror attack of its kind in the country's
history. The plans of a fanatical group of Islamists trained in Pakistan
reveal just how great a risk Europe faces.

It was early June at the G-8 summit in the German seaside resort of
Heiligendamm, and climate protection and hedge funds were the key issues
on the agenda. But then there came the moment when the news of a
potential terrorist plot reached Chancellor Angela Merkel. Not a word of
it was mentioned in the summit's official communiqués. Merkel and US
President George W. Bush met alone to discuss what he called "the
Pakistan matter." America felt threatened, and the threat, US
intelligence agents told their president, was coming from Germany -- once
again, just as it had on Sept. 11, 2001.

Bush, who was well briefed about the plot, even knew the names of the
suspects. He made it clear to Merkel that he was taking the matter very
seriously. Her officials at the Chancellery were all too familiar with
what the US president was talking about. "Operation Alberich," as the
intelligence agencies called the case, had top priority.

For months the operation was discussed almost every Tuesday at a weekly
meeting conducted by Merkel's chief of staff, Thomas de Maizière. What
began with vague information soon turned into the biggest police
operation since the so-called "German Autumn" of 1977 -- a political
thriller rarely seen in postwar Germany.

Operation Alberich began last October, when the US National Security
Agency, the NSA, began intercepting suspicious emails between Germany and
Pakistan. It ended last week in the central German Sauerland region, with
the arrests of two German converts to Islam, Fritz Gelowicz, 28, the son
of a southern German doctor, and 22-year-old Daniel S., who had learned
how to handle weapons during his military service in the western German
city of Saarlouis. His neighbors in nearby Saarbrücken had noticed that
he prayed to Allah "often and very loudly." The third man arrested in the
sting was Adem Y., a 28-year-old Turkish national. The trio was caught in
the act of mixing chemical ingredients to make explosives at a vacation
house in the mountainous Sauerland region.

When they searched the house, German investigators found military
detonators from Syria that a courier had smuggled into Germany, as well
as 60 liters of hydrogen peroxide. The materials were apparently intended
for use in three car bombs that the group may have planned to detonate in
front of a US military base in Germany, a nightclub or possibly a major
airport. When troops from the GSG 9 elite commando unit stormed the house
last Tuesday, the pungent stench of chemicals was already in the air.
According to investigators, what the men were planning could have been
one of the bloodiest attacks in European postwar history -- worse than
London or Madrid. In addition to the three terror suspects, German
authorities are investigating more than 45 people.

Since the conversation with Bush during the G-8 summit, the Chancellor
knew that the diabolic plot not only threatened people's lives, but that
if US soldiers were killed in Germany, it would endanger the trans-
Atlantic relations that were so important to her. America feared a new
spectacular attack from a resurgent al-Qaida -- possibly even a second
Sept. 11. Another attack against America planned on German soil had to be
prevented.

These experiences and fears explain why Operation Alberich was conducted
from both Berlin and Washington, with a joint CIA and German task force
set up in Berlin. US Secretary of Homeland Security Michael Chertoff told
SPIEGEL last week that cooperation between the two countries was "the
closest it's ever been."

But from the US perspective the German investigation was also a trial by
fire. American authorities kept ramping up the pressure on the Germans,
with both CIA Director Michael V. Hayden and US Ambassador William R.
Timken meeting with authorities in Berlin. In early June Chertoff
traveled to German Interior Minister Wolfgang Schäuble's hometown of
Gengenbach and over dinner urged him to do everything he could to prevent
a possible attack. "We care," Schäuble assured him.

Schäuble was deadly serious. The Chancellery promptly convened its so-
called security situation meeting, a group that hadn't met at the same
level since Sept. 11, 2001, to discuss what Schäuble called the "new,
elevated threat level." Germany's interior minister decided to take a
highly unusual step. In late June August Hanning, Deputy Secretary at the
Interior Ministry, announced to the public that he feared Germany could
be in a situation "like that before the attacks of Sept. 11," and that
connections between German extremists and Pakistan suggested that the
risk of an attack in Germany was now greater than ever before. Pakistan
is now seen as the new epicenter of terror, a place where terrorist
organization al-Qaida is actively training recruits like Gelowicz.

Gelowicz is precisely the type that concerns Schäuble and Chertoff: a
young, fanatical Muslim whose European passport allows him to travel
freely. "They can board a plane for America tomorrow," says Chertoff --
or they can strike at home. According to an internal document prepared
for Germany's domestic intelligence agency, the BfV, converts like Daniel
S., who an investigator describes as a young man "searching for structure
and values," play a particularly dangerous role. "Europe," Chertoff
believes, "has become just as much a part of the battlefield as the US."
For the US administration, the old continent is home to a Trojan horse,
something the Europeans haven't recognized yet. As if to confirm these
fears, last Tuesday counterterrorism units in neighboring Denmark broke
up a ring of eight young Muslims they believe were also preparing an
attack.

After the German arrests, Schäuble characterized the Islamists' motive as
a "self-destructive hatred of Western civilization." At his June meeting
in Gengenbach, Chertoff was already convinced that Americans, not
Germans, were the likely targets of the suspected attack. Chertoff's
suspicions were based on an observation report that the BfV had prepared
and sent to Washington.

Early in the evening of Dec. 31, 2006, a car containing several
passengers drove silently past the Hutier Barracks in Lamboy, a section
of the western German city of Hanau. Hanau is known as the home of a
major US military base, where thousands of US soldiers live and routinely
look forward to celebrating New Year's Eve in their home away from home.
The BfV's observation team later noted that the car drove back and forth
in front of the barracks several times. When German agents finally
stopped the car, they discovered that the passengers were Fritz Gelowicz,
Attila S. from the southern city of Ulm, Ayhan T. from Langen near
Frankfurt and Dana B., a German of Iranian descent from Frankfurt who,
when asked what he and the others were doing there, claimed that they had
just wanted to see "how the Americans celebrate New Year's Eve."

The presumed scouting expedition raised red flags with German
intelligence. On Jan. 6, police officers in the state of Hesse searched
Gelowicz's apartment in an effort to unearth the Islamists' true plans.
Gelowicz lived in an unassuming, white, six-unit apartment on the
outskirts of Ulm. White shades blocked the view through the windows of
Gelowicz's ground-floor apartment.

Over the next eight months, Böfinger Weg, a dead-end street where
strangers quickly attract attention, became the scene of the sort of
around-the-clock surveillance operation rarely seen in Germany. The
country's Federal Criminal Police Office (BKA) soon installed video
cameras to monitor Gelowicz's comings and goings. But when they searched
the apartment in early January they found nothing.

The BKA agents had better luck at the apartment of Ayhan T., where they
found a video depicting the Turkish immigrant in a building that looked
like a clubhouse, somewhere in the state of Hesse. The video shows a
group of several men sitting in a circle singing jihad songs in Turkish.
Then Ayhan T. steps in front of the camera and talks about jihad.

The tape depicted men chanting the slogans of a religious conspiracy
against the infidels, but was it also the farewell video of a potential
suicide bomber?

The BfV was convinced that it was, but the BKA wasn't so sure. Despite
their disagreement over the group's motives, the searches yielded new
information. The list of suspects kept growing, and soon both sides
started playing a cat-and-mouse game. When one of the Islamists noticed a
BfV observation team, he calmly stepped out of his car while stopped at a
red light, pulled out a knife and slit the tires of the agents' vehicle.

The US intelligence agencies, the NSA and CIA, provided the most
important information: copies of messages between German Islamists and
their contacts in Pakistan. Three people in Germany were apparently the
ones maintaining contact. The first was a man with the pseudonym "Muaz,"
who investigators suspected was Islamist Attila S., 22. The second was a
man named "Zafer," from the town of Neunkirchen, who they believed was
Zafer S., an old friend of Daniel S., one of the three men arrested last
week. According to his father, Hizir S., Zafer is currently attending a
language course in Istanbul. The third name that kept reappearing in the
emails the NSA intercepted was "Abdul Malik," a.k.a. Fritz Gelowicz, who
prosecutors believe was the ringleader of the German cell, a man Deputy
Secretary Hanning calls "cold-blooded and full of hate."

Gelowicz, a native of Munich, caught the attention of the authorities a
few years ago when he was seen in the company of Yehia Yousif in Neu-Ulm
in southern Germany. Yousif, a trim doctor with an ice-gray goatee, was
long seen as a key figure in Germany's radical Islamist scene. An
occasional informant to German domestic intelligence, Yousif, charismatic
and authoritarian, was the ideal mentor for young Muslims. Under his
guidance, Neu-Ulm and its so-called "Multicultural House" developed into
a nationwide magnet for Islamists, especially for German converts like
Gelowicz and Daniel S. But as soon as the authorities began
investigating, the imam left Germany, the Multicultural House was closed
and the group was banned.

But convictions can't be banned, and by 2005 Fritz Gelowicz, who had
converted to Islam as an adolescent and had gone by the name "Abdullah
Gelowicz" since then, must have already been sufficiently radicalized
that it no longer mattered whether or not Yousif was still there to guide
him.

Gelowicz had previously studied industrial engineering at the Neu-Ulm
University of Applied Science. He was a good but "inconspicuous student,"
says Uli Fieder, the dean of the university. But a fellow student
disagrees, saying that he remembers Gelowicz as someone who "already had
an Islamist bent in his first semester." In those days Muslim students
would meet at a place called the "Café Istanbul" to discuss the Koran.
Another fellow student recalls: "they talked about the passages in which
it is stated that it is correct to kill Christians and infidels."
Gelowicz, says the student, defended the discussions by saying: "It's the
right thing."

A friend of Gelowicz from his adolescent days, Tolga D., was among those
in Neu-Ulm who had similarly radical thoughts and attended the discussion
groups on the so-called pure teachings of the Koran. He has been in
custody in Munich since he was arrested in Pakistan in June.

Gelowicz must have begun losing interest in his studies, even though he
was almost finished with the industrial engineering program. He passed
his last examination in corporate management in the 2003/2004 winter
semester with a mediocre grade, and then took a leave of absence for 18
months.

Gelowicz's faith in Allah and his prophets seemed to have been much more
important to him than work, a career, or finding a place in the Western
performance-based society.

The investigators believe that Gelowicz spent those 18 months abroad,
probably pursuing religious studies in Saudi Arabia. Both Adem Y. and
Attila S. were also with him in Saudi Arabia for a time.

The core of the group must have formed during this period. German
investigators and prosecutors believe that it was in Saudi Arabia that
the men must have begun to acquire their belief in violence, a belief
that eventually turned into a scheme to kill as many Westerners as
possible.

It is possible to reconstruct the stations along the way, as Gelowicz
gradually slid into the radical milieu, and yet no one has been able to
provide a truly convincing explanation as to his motives. Gelowicz's
brother also converted to Islam, and yet authorities have never
identified him as an extremist.

The father of the two converts manages a small solar technology business
in which Fritz would occasionally help out. The mother is a doctor at a
hospital. The parents separated early in his life. The Gelowicz family
and its circumstances are ordinary by German standards -- not exactly the
kind of environment that would encourage someone to go to Pakistan and
join an obscure group like the Islamic Jihad Union (IJU) to be trained in
the use of weapons to fight a holy war.

The IJU, established in 2002, is one of many similar groups that began
popping up worldwide in the wake of the attacks of Sept. 11. It is an al-
Qaida copycat group, inspired by terrorist leader Osama bin Laden's idea
of a global holy war. To wage this war, the IJU had originally set out to
kill non-believers in Uzbekistan.

But intelligence officials became alarmed after the IJU's leader, a man
named Ebu Yahya Mohammed Fatih, announced this May that his group
operates "without regard to nationalism or tribal heritage," but instead
consists of "the faithful from all over the world." They are concerned
that the IJU has now also set its sights on Europe, encouraged by men
like Fritz Gelowicz. According to a CIA dossier, Gelowicz arrived at an
IJU training camp in northern Pakistan in March 2006.

US intelligence officials believe that Gelowicz received a visit from
Adem Y., who may have helped set up his trip to Pakistan. Y., who made
ends meet in Germany by working at odd jobs, maintained strong contacts
with other IJU sympathizers in Turkey. They arranged Gelowicz's journey
through Antalya in Turkey to the Iranian city of Zahedan, where he
managed to slip unnoticed across the border into Pakistan.

The authorities have long suspected that Adem Y., who had links to a
Saudi traveling imam in Frankfurt in 2002, helped facilitate clandestine
travel in the name of jihad. Devout Muslims among his acquaintances kept
disappearing: Sedullah K. from Langen disappeared on Jan. 5, 2007,
followed by Frankfurt resident Sali S. in March, Ãœmit S. on May 10 and,
on June 5, the brothers Bekir and Hüseyin Ö., both now in prison in
Pakistan. At times it seemed that Langen was the site of a travel agency
for adventure trips into holy war. The German interior ministry's list of
radicals who traveled to the Hindukush region during this period already
includes more than a dozen names.

While at the Pakistani camp in the spring of 2006, Adem Y. and Gelowicz
probably discussed ways to secretly deliver messages from Pakistan to
Germany. They used a Yahoo mailbox, but instead of sending messages
directly, they would store them in a draft folder through which their
fellow Islamists could then access the messages. But it turned out that
the method they hit upon had long been known as an al-Qaida ploy. The
CIA, NSA and BKA had no trouble monitoring the group's communications.
Two men who went by the aliases "Sule" or "Suley" and "Jaf" kept up the
contact from the IJU side.

To analyze the messages, investigators first had to decipher a
complicated code. In some messages the Uzbeks in Pakistan asked whether
"the gift" had arrived, and in others a "trainee" and a "wedding" were
mentioned. What exactly the code words meant remained a mystery to
experts at both the BKA and the CIA.

When the Islamists wrote a message in April saying that they finally
expected "the Kurds," the US embassy issued a warning to all Americans,
saying that there was an elevated chance of an attack in Germany. But
their initial suspicion that the term "Kurds" referred to a "hit team" --
a group of foreign commandos that would execute an attack -- was wrong.
The men, who were not yet ready to launch an attack, needed until the
summer to finalize their preparations.

On July 20, a Friday, Gelowicz and Adem Y. traveled to the northern
German city of Hannover to purchase chemicals. It was to be the last in a
series of five shopping trips Gelowicz had undertaken since February.

The Islamists were searching for hydrogen peroxide, a chemical that is
readily available in concentrations of less than 50 percent. One of its
uses is as a hair bleaching solution. In one of his earlier forays,
Gelowicz attempted to purchase more highly concentrated hydrogen
peroxide, but he was unable to provide the chemicals dealer with the
required permit. After this failed attempt Gelowicz bought supplies of
the chemical at a concentration of 35 percent, which is available without
a permit, in rectangular blue canisters.

An IJU manual describes how to enrich commercially available hydrogen
peroxide to concentrations of up to 65 or 70 percent by adding starch,
which can be derived from flour. "Abdul Malik" and Adem Y. were
apparently familiar with the recipe. The authorities noticed that they
were buying flour in large quantities.

An incident that happened in May reveals the extent to which the men were
driven by their hatred for America. A surveillance team observed Adem Y.
and a few of his friends as they tried to pick fights in front of a
nightclub in the southwestern German city of Darmstadt frequented mainly
by GIs. When their efforts failed the men went through the streets
slashing the tires of US-made cars, until they were questioned by a
police patrol.

On their last shopping trip on that Friday in July, Adem Y. and Gelowicz
took the Autobahn to Hannover. Along the way, the two men discussed the
damage they could inflict with their homemade bombs. Airports, one of the
men said. Or an American barracks. Or a nightclub, the other man
responded, "a disco with American sluts."

BKA agents had bugged the car and were able to listen in on the
conversation. The drive became a key element of the case. It told
investigators that things were getting serious, and it prompted them to
take action.

On a clear night on July 30, 10 days after the bugged drive to Hannover,
a BKA commando unit was dispatched to Wittensweiler, a neighborhood in
the Black Forest spa town of Freudenstadt. Wittensweiler had been marked
in red on the investigators' maps since Gelowicz, Daniel S. and Adem Y.
had rented a garage there, on a street called Immenweg, right across from
a Protestant kindergarten in the village center.

The BKA agents had much of the town under surveillance, and a nosy forest
ranger who had noticed their black official cars on a forest trail near a
major highway demanded to see their badges. The agents then borrowed a
tractor from one of the town's few remaining farmers, hoping that it
would provide them with cover for their surveillance operation. They also
set up shop in the kindergarten across the street from the garage the
trio had rented.

The investigators already knew that the building was being used to store
12 containers of 35-percent hydrogen peroxide, a total of 730 kilograms
of the chemical the group planned to use as the basic ingredient for
their inferno.

As they made their way through the Black Forest under cover of night, the
agents were carrying twelve blue canisters with labels identifying the
contents as 35-percent hydrogen peroxide. Like the originals the presumed
terrorists had obtained, the dummy canisters were from the same chemical
products company in Hannover, CVH Chemie-Vertrieb GmbH & Co KG. But the
canisters, which two BKA agents had picked up in late June, contained
only 3-percent hydrogen peroxide solution, too diluted for use as a bomb
ingredient, thereby eliminating the danger the material would have posed
in the hands of the three men.

Senior security officials at the Chancellery and the counterterrorism
unit discussed what would be the best time to move in. The investigators,
hoping to arrest other accomplices, wanted to wait as long as possible.

In late August a man from northern Pakistan, presumably from the IJU,
contacted Gelowicz. The Uzbeks were angry, the man said on the phone, and
he urged Gelowicz to hurry. He gave the German two weeks to act.

This allowed the BKA to pinpoint the date of the possible attack. It was
Sept. 15.

Two local police officers were responsible for the fact that the showdown
took place almost two weeks earlier than planned. Unaware of the police
sting operation, the two officers stopped Gelowicz, Adem Y. and Daniel S.
in their car last Monday evening because they were driving with their
high beams on. When the officers entered the Islamists' details into
their computer the system automatically flagged the names. "Oh," one of
the village cops exclaimed, "they're on the BKA list!"

The officer spoke loudly enough to be heard by the three suspects in the
car and by the BKA investigators, who had bugged the car and were
listening in. After that things moved quickly. They arrested Adem Y. and
Daniel S. a few hours later at the vacation house, but Gelowicz tried to
get away. He managed to run 300 meters from the house before a police
officer tackled him and there was a brief scuffle and then a single
gunshot.

Ramping up the Anti-Terror Legislation

A single shot instead of an inferno, a successful outcome that has
spurred on those who want the government to take a tougher stance in
light of the growing risk of terror in Germany. Indeed, Chancellor
Merkel, shortly before the arrests in the Sauerland region, had already
sharpened her tone on terrorism at the Christian Democrats' (CDU's) party
convention in Hanau near Frankfurt. The Social Democrats (SPD), Merkel
said, should finally agree to her party's plans to allow intelligence
agencies to search computers online. On Friday, Interior Minister
Schäuble told an emergency meeting of state interior ministers: "Now is
the time to figure out what we have learned from this case."

That may be less than it would seem at first glance, because the lessons
from the case are not nearly as clear-cut as one might expect. When it
comes to the biggest bone of contention between the two members of the
ruling Grand Coalition, the CDU and the SPD -- the online searches
Schäuble insists are necessary -- the investigations in Operation
Alberich provide little cause for political drumfire. It is indeed true
that the intensive communication between Pakistan and southern Germany
supports the "growing importance of the Internet" Schäuble repeatedly
mentions in support of his call for new intelligence tools.

But the case also shows that online searching -- though a hotly debated
political issue -- is only one aspect of many in real-life
investigations. Even in complex cases like Operation Alberich, the
authorities can be successful without access to the hard drives of
suspects like Gelowicz. Both the BfV and the police have long been able
to spy on email communications and messages stored on computers connected
to the Internet, just as they already have the power to wiretap telephone
conversations.

The case also shows that intelligence agents can live with some
restrictions, even if they get in the way of their work. For example, the
BKA agents were able to bug the vacation house where they eventually
arrested the three presumed terrorists' despite high legal hurdles --
apparently with no objections from the investigating judge.

As a weary but pleased Wolfgang Schäuble sat in his office on Friday
afternoon, the sun shone across the roofs of Berlin's Moabit
neighborhood. By that time the interior minister wanted to see light, not
shadow. At his meeting with the state interior ministers, members of the
SPD were still critical of his online searching plan. Uwe Schünemann, a
fellow member of the CDU from Lower Saxony, promptly came to Schäuble's
support, scathingly calling the Social Democrats "irresponsible."

But Schäuble was pleased that Justice Minister Brigitte Zypries -- a
Social Democrat, no less -- had come around on another important issue.
Zypries had indicated that she plans to give up her opposition to the
CDU's plan to strengthen Germany's anti-terrorism laws to make the mere
presence in a terrorist training camp a punishable offence. This sort of
legislation would have been ideal in dealing with Gelowicz, as well as
other would-be terrorists who are still training in Pakistan.

Schäuble was pleased that Chertoff had called after the arrests to thank
him. But the minister is also worried that this brief interlude of calm
could be short-lived. "We do not believe that the danger has passed," he
says. "This cell is finished, but perhaps there will soon be another one."

Translated from the German by Christopher Sultan