The long road to 9/11 begins eight and a half years earlier on February 26, 1993 when an unremarkable motorcade makes its way through the streets of New Jersey, just across the Hudson River from Manhattan. In the lead is a Ryder rental van. The driver is Ramzi Yousef, a Pakistani who had claimed refugee status in the United States. In the back of the van are 500 kilograms of high-grade liquid explosives.

This is the first attack on the World Trade Center and it is very nearly foiled because of the incompetence of the plotters. They almost run out of gas and have to stop on the way to the target. A Jersey City police patrol happens by and takes an interest in them. Ramzi Yousef decides to outwait the police by pretending to have engine trouble. His stalling works. Just before noon, the motorcade enters the basement garage of the World Trade Center and the van is parked near a pillar of the North Tower.

Yousef lights four separate 20-foot fuses. He wants to make sure there is no failure. The bombers make their escape. The fuses will take 12 minutes to carry the fire to the blasting caps. The first Muslim extremist attack in the United States occurs at 12:17 pm. The conspirators had hoped to bring down the towers, but the bomb was not that powerful. It did cause the panicked evacuation of the World Trade Center as well as six deaths and over 1000 injured.

The van was quickly traced to a circle of Islamic militants who frequented a mosque in Brooklyn. Police began making arrests. Most of the suspects had come to the United States as immigrants from all over the Muslim world. They were not previously associated with any identifiable terrorist organization. The investigation was followed closely at the White House by the man who served as head of counterterrorism in both the Clinton and Bush Administrations.

Richard Clarke wondered if some new, multi-national terrorist group could be responsible, "The FBI and the CIA couldn't, could not answer the question. And they implied that these were just people who all coincidently hated the United States and somehow, somewhere had met and decided let's blow up the World Trade Center. It seemed incredible. What we said to them at the time was, what are you telling us? This is a pickup basketball game? A bunch of people, who hate the United States, from half dozen countries coincidently bump into each other somewhere and you don't know where, and sit around smoking the hookah and saying let's blow up the World Trade Center. It didn't make any sense."

The FBI established that the mastermind of the World Trade Center bombing was Ramzi Yousef. Minutes after the attack, he had sent a message to the New York Times claiming the bombing was in retaliation for American support of Israel and oppression of the Palestinian people. Then he left New York on the evening flight to Pakistan. Investigators lost his trail for almost two years.

The next time Ramzi Yousef turned up was in the Philippine city of Manila. He had rented one of the Josefa apartments here on Quirino Avenue. He turned the apartment into a bomb factory. He was working on a new plan to attack the United States. He developed a nitroglycerine-type explosive that he would conceal in empty bottles of contact lens fluid. He designed a timing mechanism with Casio watches and a detonator powered by nine-volt batteries, which he hid in the heels of boots.

All this was to sneak explosives onto airplanes and Yousef decided to test out his plan on a Philippine Airlines flight on December 11th, 1994. He had no trouble passing his small test bomb through security at the Manila Airport. On board the flight, he slipped his bomb into a pocket under his seat, then he got off the plane at its next stop. The flight continued on to Japan. At 11:43 am, just off the coast of Okinawa, the bomb exploded. Luckily, the pilots were able to make an emergency landing. One passenger was killed. Ten were injured.

Investigators like Philippine Police Superintendent Sonny Razon were baffled, "At that time, it was a big question mark. Even the authorities in Japan had difficulty piecing it together. But we knew at the time there was a bomb sneaked into the aircraft. But who did it? Why? That was left hanging."

The answers soon emerged. Less than a month later, there was an accident at Ramzi Yousef's Manila apartment. On the night of January 6, 1995, Yousef and an accomplice were mixing chemicals when they miscalculated and started a fire. Choking smoke filled the apartment. The two men fled. Within minutes police were on their way to investigate.

Inside the Josefa apartment, police found religious garments, which would allow bombers to disguise themselves as priests. They found pipe bombs and other evidence, which revealed a plot to assassinate Pope John Paul II, who was arriving within days to visit the Philippines. But the most devastating plot was discovered on Yousef's computer. Code-named 'Bojinka', it was a complicated scheme that showed how a team of operatives could simultaneously bomb a dozen US airline flights from Asia to the United States. The attack would kill up to four thousand people in one day. Police Superintendent Sonny Razon recalls, "I was amazed. It takes a lot of planning. It takes a lot of coordination. So it would tell you that it's not Yousef alone doing it."

Ramzi Yousef managed to escape the Philippines but police were able to arrest his accomplice, Abdul Hakim Murad. In an interrogation that went on for weeks, Murad revealed an even larger plot - to attack US landmarks with aircraft. "He admitted that he is a trained pilot. He was precisely recruited for that, to undertake a mission to fly a small aircraft loaded with explosives and he even volunteered that one possible target is the CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia," said Razon.

In 1995, Ramzi Yousef's plot to attack US landmarks with aircraft was taken seriously. The CIA issued a 'National Intelligence Estimate' which said "Several targets are especially at risk: national symbols such as the White House and the Capitol, and symbols of US capitalism such as Wall Street. We assess that civilian aviation will figure prominently among possible terrorist targets in the United States." That CIA report was over six years before 9/11.