The Bush administration pressed Germany to arrest Ganczarski, but the Germans said they couldn’t: he hadn’t committed a crime. The FBI protested when Ganczarski was then allowed to leave for Saudi Arabia last year. But neither the Germans nor the Saudis were able to do anything about him until a Saudi crackdown after the recent Riyadh bombings. French authorities say that Ganczarski flew to Paris after being expelled from Saudi Arabia. U.S. officials say he may have planned to travel from Saudi Arabia to orchestrate a Bali-style nightclub attack on the French island Reunion.
Investigators were watching Ganczarski, but for a long time couldn’t touch him. NEWSWEEK has learned that Canadian officials flat-out lost would-be Millennium bomber Ahmed Ressam. According to Canadian and U.S. government documents, CSIS, Canada’s spy agency, first identified Ressam’s voice on a tap in 1996. By March 1998, CSIS knew that Ressam was headed to an Afghan training camp. What it didn’t know was that Ressam had obtained a real Canadian passport using a phony name and had later re-entered Canada and gone underground. It also had no idea that his training in Afghanistan had set him on course for an attack in America. Because they thought Ressam was part of a militant network focused on Algeria, Canadian officials say it is likely that nobody in Canada told U.S. officials an international terror suspect was loose, probably in Vancouver. Ultimately, Ressam was arrested by a U.S. Customs inspector who thought Ressam looked nervous driving an explosives-laden car off a ferry from British Columbia.
