“…on December 14 [1999], a border guard in Port Angeles, Washington, stopped an Algerian man, Ahmed Ressam, whose obvious anxiety aroused her suspicion.” Inside Ressam’s trunk were “four timers, more than a hundred pounds of urea, and fourteen pounds of sulfate–the makings of an Oklahoma City-type bomb. Ressam bolted. …The guards gave chase and caught him four blocks away trying to break into a car stopped at a traffic light. It developed that Ressam’s target was Los Angeles International Airport. …Ressam was not really an al-Qaeda operative, although he learned to build bombs in one of bin Laden’s camps in Afghanistan. He was a freelance terrorist sailing under al-Qaeda colors, the sort that would proliferate after 9/11.”
– Lawrence Wright, The Looming Tower, Pages 336-337