4

Jamal Ahmad Mohammad Al Badawi, USS Cole Mastermind

2000 can sometimes seem like a long-lost utopia of the space-time continuum, forever ensconced in that misty era before 9/11, the Iraq War, the financial crash of 2008, and President Citrus Screamer. It was perfect, right? The Willennium! Nothing went wrong in 2000 ...

AP
Dammit, Will.

Oh, right. That.

Prior to 9/11, Al Qaeda was notable for two attacks: the 1998 U.S. Embassy bombings, and the 2000 attack on the USS Cole. Their man on the ground coordinating the USS Cole attack was Jamal Ahmad Mohammad Al Badawi, a middle manager-type who rented the safe houses, gathered equipment, and surveilled the port for information on everything from shipping traffic to average refueling time to, crucially, how close small vessels were able to get to the warships. He might not have planted the bombs personally, but he handed the blueprint for the attack to the guys who did.

We know all this because he was caught. We did it! Big Willie Style, baby! He was actually sentenced to 15 years by the Yemeni government. Sadly, that sentence was reduced somewhat when a prison breakout freed him and dozens of other Al Qaeda operatives.

And that's when he disappeared? Actually, ha ha, no. A short while after escaping he handed himself in and apologized for any inconvenience that he might have caused blowing up our sailors. He even went so far as to pledge loyalty to the Yemeni president. This shameless, shallow gesture totally worked because the Yemeni justice system doesn't have any laws against Jihad, or blowing up ships, or any of the usual things laws are good for.

3

William Morales, Extremist Puerto Rican Independence Bomber

As much as we worry about the threat posed by extremist groups today, we tend to forget the bad old days of the 1970s. The Weather Underground, Black September, the JDL, the Black Liberation Army: all of those groups were bombing the country at one point. But none of them could hold a candle (fuse?) to the FALN, an extremist group fighting for Puerto Rican independence. The FALN carried out over 120 terrorist attacks in their time, killing five and injuring dozens more:

The New York Daily News

2

Felicien Kabuga, Financier Of The Rwandan Genocide

There's generally a limit to how much damage one lunatic can do. Whether it's with axes or guns or bombs, they'll eventually reach a point, often police-assisted, where they just can't murder any more.

Unless they get others to do the killing for them. And that's where Felicien Kabuga comes in. Following the assassination of Rwanda's president in 1994, the Hutu -- Rwanda's dominant ethnic group -- embarked on a rampage across the country, with the aim of wiping out the country's minority ethnic group, the Tutsi. A multimillionaire with strong ties to the Hutu government, Kabuga was the money man behind the massacre, and took part in its planning from the outset. He financed the purchase of huge quantities of machetes and other sharp farming implements, and facilitated their distribution to hardliner Hutu thugs. He also bankrolled the operation of Radio Television Libre des Mille Collines, a government-owned radio station that shied away from broadcasting drivetime classics in lieu of racist, dehumanizing propaganda that portrayed the Tutsi as "cockroaches" to be stamped out. It was also instrumental in triggering the genocide by broadcasting the coded phrase "cut down the tall trees" to knowing gangs.

1

Heinrich Mueller, Head Of The Gestapo

Heinrich Mueller was the head of the Gestapo, and responsible for, well, you name the atrocity, he probably did it with a smile on his face and a song in his heart. He hunted down resistance organizations, organized the persecution and deportation of Jews across Europe, collected extensive records on the ever-growing death toll and converted them into administrative reports for high command, and arranged murder upon murder upon murder upon murder.

That not enough for you? Ok, let's judge him by the company he keeps. Here's a picture of him -- on the right -- rubbing shoulders with Heinrich Himmler and Reinhard Heydrich, the latter of whom is referred to as "the architect of the Holocaust."

Bundesarchiv, Bild 183-R98680 / CC-BY-SA 3.0
Like a game of fuck, marry, kill starring the world's dumbest, evilest haircuts.

And while Himmler committed suicide following his capture by the Allies, and Heydrich was killed by assassins, Mueller spent the final days of the war in the Fuehrerbunker, pledging allegiance to the regime until the very end. "The end" being something the Soviets were more than willing to provide him, but in the chaos of the war's last days he vanished and was never seen again.

It's possible he was killed in the Battle Of Berlin. In the years after the war, a few Germans said they thought they saw his body after the fighting, but no one was ever sure. In 2013, a researcher claimed that he'd been killed during combat and accidentally buried in, of all possible places, a Jewish cemetery, but no 100 percent conclusive proof was ever provided for this claim either.

Still, this was not a dude you could just shrug your shoulders about. The Allies questioned everyone about his whereabouts. This was made a little more complicated by the fact that his name is the German equivalent of "John Smith." Whilst working for the Nazis, for instance, Mueller had to be referred to as "Gestapo Mueller." But the Allied investigators persisted, chasing up a bunch of bad leads, and still found nothing. His mistress denied seeing him again. The Soviets said that they didn't know where he was. Even the CIA had to refute allegations that they'd captured him; this being an era when they were known to be shipping off Nazis to work at Cape Canaveral.

With so little to go on, it was just about safe to assume he was dead when Adolf Eichmann, an escaped SS officer and colleague of Mueller's, was captured in Argentina in the 1960s. He confessed to his Israeli interrogators that he thought Mueller was alive, and although there wasn't much evidence to support it, it left a weird itch in the back of everyone's mind that has never quite gone away.

So, are you Heinrich Mueller? If you are, could you make yourself known to the nearest authority or postman? It'd really settle everyone's nerves.

Adam Wears is on Twitter and Facebook. He also has a newsletter about depressing history, if you're into that sort of thing.

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