Winter 1998. “So, Ali, now let me ask you a personal question.” I was having dinner with John O’Neill, my boss and the FBI special agent in charge of the National Security Division in the FBI’s New York office. We were at Kennedy’s, on West Fifty-seventh Street in midtown Manhattan, sitting at a table by the fireplace. It was John’s favorite spot in the restaurant, especially when the weather was cold, as it was that evening.
John and I had spent the previous few hours discussing a memo I had written on a figure then little-known outside government circles, Osama bin Laden, who had just issued a fatwa declaring war against America. It was this memo that had brought me—a rookie in the bureau—to the attention of John, one of the most senior members in the office. Someone of my standing would usually have had to go through several chains of command to reach John O’Neill.
We had just finished dessert, and John was cradling his preferred drink, Chivas Regal with seltzer. His question signaled that he was done talking terrorism and now wanted to get to know me as a person. This was something he liked to do with all new agents he took under his wing, a colleague had told me. The question appeared to be a good sign.
The thought that he was considering taking me under his wing made me smile inwardly. John was an FBI legend and was known to be one of the few senior U.S. government officials who understood the necessity of making counterterrorism a national priority. To others, the war on drugs, foreign governments spying on us, and other nonterrorism-related matters were of greater concern. For anyone who believed, as I did, that a response to acts of terrorism carried out by violent Islamist groups needed to be prioritized, working alongside John was where you wanted to be.
“Sure, boss,” I answered. “What’s your question?”
“What I want to know, Ali,” he said, leaning forward and looking at me and swirling his drink in the palm of his left hand, “is why did you join the bureau? What led you, a boy born in Beirut, from a family of intellectuals, to our ranks? You’re not a typical recruit.” Ending with a statement rather than a direct question was customary for John, and on that note he gave a quick smile, leaned back in his chair, and took a sip of his drink.
I studied John as he asked the question. He was, as usual, immaculately dressed, wearing one of his trademark double-breasted suits and expensive brogues, with a Rolex watch on his wrist. John didn’t dress like a typical government employee. He valued looking good over saving for the proverbial rainy day (government salaries don’t allow both).
I noticed the bulge near his left ankle as he leaned back and stretched out his legs. While John was too senior to be a street agent knocking on doors asking questions anymore, like any good agent he always kept his weapon by his side. In John’s case it was a 9 mm gun. He didn’t mind if people saw it, either: in truth, it could have been pushed a bit more discreetly toward his inner leg, but along with being a classy dresser John also cultivated a tough-guy persona—perhaps to show he wasn’t a typical senior manager and was still “one of the boys,” or even to intimidate people, if necessary.
While John did have an element of showmanship to him, he was one of the hardest-working and most effective senior agents in the bureau. “When you’re that good, you can be a tough guy and wear expensive suits. Apparently it works,” I once told a colleague who criticized John’s appearance and affect.
John’s question made me slightly nervous. I laughed, struggling to appear at ease. I was trying hard to make a good impression, and my answer wasn’t the typical “I-always-wanted-to-join-the-bureau-from-when-I-was-a-little-kid-because-I-want-to-protect-our-country-and-the-FBI-is-the-best” that most supervisors would have wanted to hear—and what most people in my shoes would have given.
John wasn’t a typical supervisor. His conversation with me was laced with no-nonsense blunt talk and honesty about successes and failures, and he didn’t shy away from profanities. My instinct was that John probably wouldn’t like a soppy answer anyway. But I was still with someone far higher than me, and part of me felt the temptation to play it safe.
That part of me lost the debate going on inside my mind. “You’re not going to believe me,” I said, trying to find a way in.
“Try me,” John responded.
I took a sip of my drink. “Well,” I said, “it was a bet…”
“A bet?” John repeated, raising his left eyebrow.
“Yes,” I replied with a guilty grin. “My fraternity brothers made a bet with me, and with each other, on how far I could get through the bureau’s selection process. I never expected to make it all the way, but I passed every level, even the polygraph…” I paused. “And when the offer came from the bureau it was too tempting to pass up, and here I am today.”
“You’re kidding me,” John said, and then started laughing. “Well, I see you’re honest—I like that, ha!” He shook his head, still smiling. “Cheers,” he continued, raising his glass, and we both downed the remainder of our drinks. He added, with his signature smile, “And they say gambling doesn’t pay off.”
My path to the FBI did start as a bet. I got my undergraduate degree at Mansfield University, in rural Pennsylvania, and there the vice president of student affairs, Joe Maresco—with whom I had a close relationship, as I was president of the student body—suggested, during a conversation about my prospects, that the perfect job for me might be working for the FBI.
I thought he was crazy. I didn’t think I met the profile of an agent. I was an Arab American born in Lebanon. I was also a fraternity boy, and I enjoyed all the revelry that entailed. I certainly didn’t fit in with the straitlaced white bureau types I envisioned—an image shaped by television shows. Nor had I ever considered a career in law enforcement or intelligence. It was as if Joe had suggested I join the circus or become a Formula One race car driver—it had never crossed my mind.
As I walked through the door of my fraternity house after my conversation with Joe, a few of my housemates were sitting on the couches, watching television, and I repeated, half-laughing, his career recommendation. They started laughing, too. “If you send in an application you’ll probably get it back in the mail a few weeks later marked ‘Return to Sender,’” one guy said. Another chimed in: “You won’t even pass the physical.” A third added: “They’ll probably think it’s a joke application…”
“I think he could do it,” another countered. “If he could convince everyone in the university to raise funds for a new student center, he could convince some drug dealers to come clean.” He was referring to a campaign I had led persuading everyone, from the students to the school administration, to donate to the building cause.
And the debate began, with no one, including myself, taking Joe’s advice seriously.
Still, for the next few days I reflected on what Joe had said and began to find myself intrigued: now that I thought about it, a career in the FBI could be exciting. More than that, my nature has always been to not accept that there is something I can’t do, and my fraternity brothers’ insisting that I had no chance was such a challenge. I was always the child who, given a dare, accepted it. I got that partly from my father, who loved adventures, and it was partly due to the circumstances of my childhood: the Lebanon of my youth was a war zone, and, after that, things like the dark or being locked in a closet just didn’t frighten me. One of my earliest war memories is of hugging the bottom of the stairs in my house as bombs exploded in our neighborhood. (The center of a house, where the stairs were, was said to be the safest part.) We would huddle silently, listening as windows shattered and rubble fell. Sometimes, after what seemed like an eternity of silence, screams would shatter the quiet as people discovered dead bodies and severely injured loved ones.
My father used to tell me what Lebanon was like before the civil war, when Beirut was the Paris of the Middle East, as people liked to say, and when the country was renowned for its culture, intellectuals, and natural beauty; but I never knew that country. I grew up in a land that was a country only in name. Part was occupied by regional powers, and the rest was divided among different Lebanese ethnic and religious groups who ran their areas like feudal fiefdoms. Turf wars broke out regularly, and the losers were always ordinary civilians. I remember once crouching on the floor of our house as two militias battled each other from the two ends of our street, and we didn’t know when it would end, or if we would survive. Everyone in Lebanon knew someone who was killed in the violence. I lost two classmates in a single semester in fifth grade.
To this day I vividly remember, down to minute details, Palestinian militants pulling up in jeeps outside homes in our neighborhood, swinging their machine guns toward the occupants, and ordering them to hand over their car keys. People had no choice but to obey, as there was no effective police force to appeal to for help.
A few months after my conversation with Joe, there was a career fair, and the bureau had a booth, reminding me of the bet. A few days later I decided to send in an application—more out of curiosity than anything else. I still didn’t know much about what the bureau did, beyond the conventional knowledge and what I’d “learned” from some social science classes, movies, and, of course, the television shows. But after I submitted the application, I spent some time researching the FBI.
The information was mostly new to me. I discovered that the bureau was created in 1908—given its prominence today, I had thought it would have been around longer. I also learned that only under J. Edgar Hoover had it been built into the powerful law enforcement tool it is today, which makes the bureau’s successes and reputation even more impressive. The application process includes tests of all sorts, from physical to aptitude, along with lots of interviews, often spaced out over months. As I jumped through the hoops, my friends started a pool betting on how long I’d last.
During the polygraph tests—while I was hooked up to the machine—the polygrapher asked: “Have you ever done anything that would embarrass you if your mother knew about it?”
“Yes,” I replied, which puzzled him: it was not the answer he was expecting. I jokingly explained to him that the machine probably wasn’t programmed to take in how strict the ethics of a Muslim mother can be.
After completing the long series of interviews and tests, for almost a year I didn’t hear anything from the bureau, and I began to think that my application had failed somewhere and that they had forgotten to notify me. It didn’t bother me too much, as applying to the bureau had been more a source of amusement than anything else, and I certainly hadn’t been basing my future on the FBI. I was planning on a career in academia, and as I was finishing up at Mansfield, I had applied to do a master’s degree in international studies at Villanova University. By the time I was at Villanova, I had almost completely forgotten about the bureau, and so it was a surprise to receive a letter of acceptance as I was finishing and preparing to move to England to pursue a PhD. I went back and forth in my mind as to what to do, with friends and family divided in their recommendations. Ultimately the bureau’s offer was too tempting to pass up. The idea of being an agent appealed to my sense of adventure, as did the chance to help protect America, a country I had come to love dearly. I loved it because of the welcome it had given me and my family and because, having grown up in a country pulled apart by sectarian discord, I had come to appreciate the greatness of the United States and admire the ideals that had created the nation.
I was fascinated by the protections the U.S. Constitution provides citizens. While the Constitution and the Pledge of Allegiance may perhaps seem largely symbolic to many Americans, to those of us who have lived with alternatives, they are filled with meaning. I know that the protections offered therein are very necessary.
The idea of being part of something bigger than me prevailed. I accepted the offer, and, in November 1997, after sixteen weeks of training at the FBI Academy, in Quantico, Virginia, I joined the bureau as a special agent, assigned to the New York office.
The FBI’s New York field office, located in downtown Manhattan, in many ways resembles the city in which it is housed: it’s full of colorful characters who are not afraid to voice their opinions and for whom politeness is often an unnecessary convention that gets in the way of making a point. The bluntness, the jokes, and the camaraderie of the NYO were, to me, far more appealing than the cold and formal atmosphere of many offices.
I did have an advantage over other out-of-towners in my ability to adjust, however. While New York City was entirely different from the rural Pennsylvania that had been my home in previous years (and which I loved), the lively characters did remind me in different ways of some of the interesting figures of my childhood in Beirut, and this helped me feel at home. Before new recruits are assigned to specific squads, they rotate through different sections of the office, starting with the applicants’ squad (conducting background checks), then moving on to special operations (doing surveillance), and finishing at the command center—ensuring that newcomers gain an understanding of all the work the office does. This boosts camaraderie between squads and efficiency for the bureau as a whole, with everyone coming to know the roles and capabilities of other teams. It is also meant to help the recruits see which squads appeal to them, and it gives senior management a chance to see rookies at work before deciding where to place them.
Through the rotation period we met senior agents from different divisions who gave us advice and explained what their groups did. What most interested me was counterterrorism, and the senior people in this area whom I met were Pat D’Amuro, assistant special agent in charge (ASAC) of counterterrorism, and John O’Neill, who was Pat’s superior, running the entire National Security Division.
In college I was always interested in the effects of nonstate actors on global stability. My experience in war-torn Lebanon shaped my view that groups like the Irish Republican Army, Hezbollah, the Palestine Liberation Organization, and Hamas can be more influential than the states themselves in setting political and security agendas. My graduate research focused on the cultural approach in international relations. Most of my professors were students of the realism school, which maintains that a country’s national interest is central to how it acts, but I always believed that realism in many ways is shaped by the cultural lenses of different peoples. My research developed into a hobby, and gradually led me to follow the activities of a Saudi Arabian millionaire named Osama bin Laden.
What piqued my interest was reading newspapers from the Middle East. I kept up with them in order to stay up to speed on my Arabic and because I obviously retained an interest in the region. Bin Laden’s name often appeared; there was a fascination with him among many in the Middle East, as he had given up a life of privilege to go fight with the mujahideen against the Soviet Union in Afghanistan and had then maintained the life of a fighter.
Over time I noticed bin Laden’s declarations toward the United States growing increasingly aggressive, and it became clear to me that someone with his pedigree and resources was going to be very dangerous someday. I began following him more seriously, turning him from an academic interest into part of my job: actively searching the Arab media for his name and keeping a folder of interesting articles about him.
Bin Laden was the seventeenth child (out of an estimated fifty-four) of Mohammed bin Awad bin Laden, a household name in much of the Middle East. Born to a poor family in the south of Yemen, Mohammed had moved to Saudi Arabia, working as a porter before starting his own construction business. He built a reputation as a good builder and attracted the attention of the Saudi royal family, which began using him for their projects. Commissions started with roads, then moved on to palaces, until he was given the highest honor: renovating the Grand Mosque—al-Masjid al-Haram—in Mecca.
While Mohammed had a reputation for integrity in business, in his personal life he was more lax. He married a total of twenty-two women, often “marrying” and divorcing in a single day, as Islam forbids more than four wives at a time. Osama was the product of Mohammed’s tenth marriage, to a Syrian woman named Hamida al-Attas; he was born on March 10, 1957.
True to form, Mohammed divorced Osama’s mother soon after his birth to marry someone else. Mohammed was killed on September 3, 1967, when his private plane crashed while landing in southwest Saudi Arabia. Osama was ten; his image of his father was based less on personal interaction than on the legend of his father’s building a company from scratch. The company continued to flourish after Mohammed’s death, and the young Osama grew up with a desire to emulate his father in building something great.
After a religious upbringing, a young and devout Osama bin Laden traveled to Afghanistan in 1980 to join the fight against the Soviet invaders. While bin Laden did reportedly participate in some battles, due to his Saudi contacts he developed a reputation as a financier and worked with the charismatic cleric Abdullah Azzam in operating Makhtab al-Khidmat—the innocuously named Bureau of Services, which channeled money and recruits into Afghanistan. MAK was founded by Azzam in the early 1980s in Peshawar, Pakistan, and boasted global outposts, including in the United States, where its center of activity was al-Farouq Mosque, on Altantic Avenue in the Boerum Hill section of Brooklyn.
Osama bin Laden was in many ways a product of the mixture of two extremes of 1970s Saudi Arabia: a militant version of Wahhabism and Saudi wealth. Oil had transformed the Saudi government budget from $9.2 billion (1969–1974) to $142 billion (1975–1979). Many lucrative contracts went to the Saudi Binladin Group, as the family business was called, ensuring Osama and his many siblings a steady stream of money.
The Saudi state also used its newfound wealth to spread its Wahhabi sect of Islam across the world, building mosques and madrassas (religious schools) wherever it could while at the same time allowing strict Wahhabism to dictate most domestic law. This created some problems for the luxury-loving royals, whose indulgences were often at odds with their own laws. They solved this dilemma by buying homes and yachts on the French Riviera and in other showy places and playing out their fantasies there, all the while acting like pious Muslims at home. By satisfying their desires abroad, they simply put enough distance between the exercise of these two warring impulses so that Saudi citizens and, more importantly, clerics couldn’t see them acting against their religion.
Wahhabism by itself is a peaceful version of Islam, as attested to by the millions of Muslims in Saudi Arabia and the Gulf states who are practicing Wahhabis and have nothing to do with violence or extremism. The extremism and terrorism arise when Wahhabism, a puritanical form of Islam with a distrust of modernity and an emphasis on the past, is mixed with a violent form of Salafism (a strand of Islam that focuses heavily on what pious ancestors did). An even more potent combination occurs with the introduction of the idea of takfir, wherein Muslims who don’t practice Islam the same way are labeled apostates and are considered to be deserving of death. The result is like mixing oil and fire. It was in Afghanistan, during the first jihad, when Muslims from all across the world came to fight the Soviets, that these concepts combusted. Wahhabis came from Saudi Arabia and the Gulf, Salafis primarily from Jordan, and takfiris mainly from North Africa (Algeria, Morocco, Libya, and Egypt). Takfir was popular among the North African jihadists, as they had been fighting their own (nominally Muslim) regimes and therefore had to justify their terrorism and the killing of fellow Muslims in the process.
The Saudi government encouraged and helped young men travel abroad to fight in the Afghani jihad. This served a dual purpose of ensuring that Wahhabism influenced the mujahideen and enabling the country to get rid of would-be religious troublemakers by sending them abroad. It also helped shape the future of Afghanistan by helping to facilitate the rise of the Taliban.
And so Osama and hundreds of others headed to Afghanistan, their mission endorsed by the government both financially and operationally.
While I was doing my initial rotation, in February 1998—I was on the applicants’ squad, performing background checks—I read in an Arabic newspaper, published in London, about the fatwa signed by bin Laden and other radical clerics, sanctioning the murder of American citizens anywhere in the world. The statement had been issued in the name of the World Islamic Front. It claimed that because America had declared war on God, it was the duty of every Muslim to kill Americans: “The ruling to kill the Americans and their allies—civilians and military—is an individual duty for every Muslim who can do it in any country in which it is possible to do it, in order to liberate al-Aqsa Mosque [Jerusalem] and the holy mosque [the Grand Mosque, in Mecca] from their grip, and in order for their armies to move out of all the lands of Islam, defeated and unable to threaten any Muslim.”
Unaware of any existing bureau focus on bin Laden, and seeing that his rhetoric had morphed from vague utterances to direct threats, I wrote a memo explaining who he was and recommending that the FBI focus on the threat he posed to the United States. I gave the memo to my applicants’ squad supervisor, who said that she would pass it to Kevin Cruise; she explained that Kevin was on the I-49 squad, under whose purview bin Laden fell. After receiving the memo, Kevin asked to see me. He introduced himself and explained what I-49 did—it focused on Sunni terrorist groups, including Jemaah Islamiah (JI) and Egyptian Islamic Jihad (EIJ). It covered the first World Trade Center bombing and after that had kept a focus on bin Laden, given the link between the plot and people in bin Laden’s orbit.
I showed Kevin portions of bin Laden’s August 1996 declaration of war against America, issued in response to the U.S. presence in the Arabian Peninsula: “Terrorizing you, while you are carrying arms on our land, is a legitimate, reasonable and morally demanded duty. It is also a rightful act well known to all humans and all creatures. Your example and our example are like a snake that entered into a house of a man and got killed by him. The coward is the one who lets you roam freely and safely while carrying arms in his country.” Kevin was fully aware of the background information and said that the FBI was already pursuing a criminal case against bin Laden. Daniel Coleman was the bureau’s bin Laden expert, and Kevin later introduced me to him. At the time, Dan was assigned to the CIA’s Alec Station, set up by the agency’s Counterterrorism Center (CTC) in 1996 to monitor bin Laden’s activities. (Initially the CTC was called the Counterterrorist Center.) Kevin also introduced me to the other members of the I-49 squad, and we discussed the fatwa, agreeing that it was a serious warning and that an increased focus on bin Laden was needed. Kevin told us that the other branches of government were in agreement.
In May 1998, at the surveillance phase of the new agent rotation—I was working a mob case—I was paged by the office. I called in and was patched through to Kevin.
“Ali,” he said, “bin Laden has just done an interview with ABC. He’s talking openly about attacking the United States.” Later that afternoon, I stopped in to watch it. The interview, which occurred as an offshoot of a press conference called by bin Laden, was conducted by John Miller (who later went to work for the FBI), and bin Laden was direct: “Today, however, our battle against the Americans is far greater than our battle was against the Russians. Americans have committed unprecedented stupidity. They have attacked Islam and its most significant sacrosanct symbols.… We anticipate a black future for America. Instead of remaining United States, it shall end up separated states and shall have to carry the bodies of its sons back to America.”
“What do you think?” Kevin asked. I shook my head.
“That’s it,” I told him, “that’s the third warning. First there was the 1996 declaration of jihad, then the February fatwa, and now he’s going public straight to the American people. I think it’s a warning that al-Qaeda is about to attack. We need to be prepared.”
We didn’t realize how right we were. Two months later, the U.S. embassies in Nairobi, Kenya, and Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, were bombed.
My initial rotation was up, and it was time to decide on a squad. I had become friends with a few agents in I-40, which dealt with Palestinian terrorist groups like Hamas, as well as terrorist-sponsoring countries, like Iraq under Saddam Hussein. The squad supervisor, Tom Donlon, who had been the case agent on several important cases, including the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, took me to see Pat D’Amuro.
On Pat’s desk was a box filled with packets of Advil, Tylenol, and other painkillers—“for all the headaches related to the task force,” he liked to joke. I spent a fair amount of time with him that day. He spoke about his experience in running a task force made up (at the time) of more than thirty-five federal, state, and local agencies handling virtually every terrorist group and state sponsor of terrorism around the world, and of the importance of agents remembering that they are bound by the Constitution. He said that we should never forget about the endgame—disrupting terrorist plots while keeping all options on the table, including prosecutions in a court of law.
Tom Donlon told Pat that he thought I was a suitable candidate for counterterrorism, based on my educational background in international affairs and my personal background—as someone born in Lebanon and fluent in Arabic. Pat asked if I was interested in joining the Joint Terrorism Task Force (JTTF). He explained that the JTTF was the first such effort in the nation, and that it was made up of various squads that covered virtually every terrorist group in the world, as well as the states that sponsored them. Agents, investigators, analysts, linguists, and other specialists comprised the team, drawn not only from the bureau but from other law enforcement and intelligence agencies. I gratefully accepted the invitation.
Pat then took me to meet John O’Neill, whose office was on the twenty-fifth floor of the FBI building. I stared for a few seconds out the window; John had the corner office, with huge windows and a view of lots of Manhattan: you could see the Empire State Building. We sat down on couches next to a coffee table piled with books on French art and Ireland, and we spoke about terrorism.
I was familiar with Tom Donlon’s track record from some of the people on his squad, and as a new hire it was exciting for me to work under such an experienced agent. Tom had also agreed that I would continue to help the I-49 squad, and so I did operational work for I-40—tracking suspects and questioning people—and spent the rest of my time analyzing intelligence and working with agents on I-49 matters.
I was briefed on the investigations I-40 was running, and I spent my early weeks monitoring suspicious activities carried out by what we thought might be front organizations for terrorist groups. I also worked on foreign counterintelligence matters targeting state sponsors of terrorism, but as those cases are still classified, the stories can’t be told here.
I continued to research different terrorist organizations, with a special focus on religious radical groups. Tom Donlon encouraged me to write a memo on the subject—“to spread the knowledge around,” as he told me. I was more than happy to draft it. Among the people to whom Tom passed the memo was John O’Neill, who, I later learned, in turn distributed it across the entire terrorism branch management.
“Ali, what you working on?” I heard a voice say behind me. It was late in the evening, and I thought I was the only one left in the office. The voice was John O’Neill’s. I didn’t expect him to be around this late, let alone approach me at my desk. John laughed, realizing that he had startled me.
“Well?”
“Sorry, boss, you scared me.” I worried that I had looked foolish.
“Don’t worry,” he said, as if reading my mind. “And great paper, by the way. I like that you took the initiative to write it, and the analysis was sharp. Good work.”
“Thank you, sir.”
“Next time you write something, send it directly to me as well.”
“Yes, sir, I will.”
“It’s late and you’re probably hungry. Let’s go out to dinner and chat. I also had some questions I wanted to ask you.”
The bartender at Kennedy’s, Maurice, whom many in the law enforcement community and the FBI viewed as the best bartender in New York, welcomed us with his warm Irish smile. A waitress led us to John’s usual table, and we started discussing my memo. John, I quickly saw, was the kind of leader who saw no shame in admitting when he didn’t know something, and he was appreciative when gaps in his knowledge were filled.
“What do you think makes this guy tick?” he asked, about twenty minutes into the conversation. He was referring to Osama bin Laden, whose activities we had been discussing.
“To understand that, we probably need to start with the global, regional, and local context—what surrounded him as he entered the scene,” I replied.
“Where would you start?”
“The key moment is 1979.”
“Why 1979?”
“Osama bin Laden was twenty-three in 1980, when he went to Afghanistan to join the mujahideen fighting the Soviet Union. The events of the previous year, 1979, had a big impact on the way that he and countless other young Muslims across the region saw their countries, their religion, and their role in the world—and it shaped their worldview and subsequent actions.”
“And those events were?”
“The Iranian revolution, the signing of the peace agreement between Israel and Egypt, the Iranian hostage crisis, the seizure of the Grand Mosque in Mecca, and the Soviet Union’s invasion of Afghanistan. They all happened in 1979.”
With the Iranian revolution and the overthrow of the shah, an Islamic state was established under Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini. It was the first success of a political Islamic movement in modern history, and its effect was felt across the Muslim world: Shiite communities elsewhere now had a protector as well as a similar goal to aim toward, and Sunnis—especially the more radical groups in Egypt and Saudi Arabia—dreamed of repeating the revolution within their own framework. Other Sunnis saw a Shiite theocracy as a threat to Sunni Islam’s dominance in the region and were motivated to try to counter it and strengthen their own influence.
Khomeini’s seizure of power was itself a revolution in Shiite political thought. The traditional view is that an Islamic regime can’t be established until the return of the twelfth, “missing” imam. Until then the ideas of Islam can be used to bring about a just society, but not an Islamic state. Khomeini broke with this traditional view, and he justified his actions—over the objections of dissenting clerics—by advocating the doctrine of Velayat-e faqih, or rule of jurisprudence. He argued that religious leaders can be ambassadors of the twelfth imam and therefore can establish an Islamic regime prior to his return.
Of course, modern political Islam wasn’t created by Khomeini alone. He drew many of his ideas and religious justifications from Sunni Islamic thinkers, chief among them the Egyptian author and intellectual Sayyid Qutb (1906 –1966).
Qutb was a member of the Muslim Brotherhood, an organization founded by Hassan al-Banna in 1928, when Banna was a twenty-two-year-old teacher of Arabic. The Muslim Brotherhood sought ultimately to create a state based on Sharia, or Islamic law. Its aim was to build its own social network by providing social services to the lower classes. The movement arose, in part, to challenge the rule of King Farouk, who was seen as corrupt and without sympathy for the poor. The Brotherhood was organized into small cells of five-member units, making it difficult for the king’s security services to penetrate it—if one cell was cracked, the rest of the group would remain untouched. When the government officially tried to disband the Muslim Brotherhood two decades after its founding, the organization’s membership rolls numbered more than a million.
Qutb joined the group shortly after Banna’s death and through it met Colonel Gamal Abdel Nasser and other military leaders plotting to overthrow King Farouk. They were looking for allies, and the Brotherhood, with its strong support among the lower classes, seemed ideal. Together the military officers and Brotherhood leaders carried out the successful 1952 coup.
While both groups wanted to replace the king, their ideas for what should come next differed, with Nasser planning a secular government (and championing the idea of Arab nationalism) and the Brotherhood seeking an Islamic government (and pushing political Islam). Although it was Nasser who took power after the king’s fall, he offered Qutb a position in the cabinet, as minister of education. Qutb declined, saying that the position wasn’t senior enough for him, and began publicly challenging the regime, calling for an Islamic state.
In 1954 a member of the Brotherhood, Mohammed Abdel Latif, attempted to assassinate Nasser, firing eight shots at him from twenty-five feet away. All of them missed. While panic broke out in the assembled crowd, Nasser remained calm and simply declared: “If Abdel Nasser dies… each of you is Gamal Abdel Nasser… Gamal Abdel Nasser is of you and from you and he is willing to sacrifice his life for the nation.” The crowd cheered him and the event was widely reported across the country, causing Nasser’s popularity to soar. He used the opportunity to crack down on the Brotherhood, throwing many members, including Qutb, in jail.
Qutb was reportedly severely tortured, and the experience drove him to write his most influential work, Milestones—Ma’alim fi al-Tariq—which he had friends and family smuggle out of prison and circulate. In the book, he argues that according to Islam only God has sovereignty, and that for an ordinary person such as Nasser to serve as sovereign is the equivalent of idolatry. Such a system, Qutb writes, results in jahiliyya—the state of ignorance that preceded the life of the Prophet Muhammad. To Qutb, the modern state and Islam were incompatible, and those behind the modern state were pulling Muslims in the wrong direction.
Qutb’s doctrine held that those who tortured him and his fellow prisoners, and indeed any citizens of the state (who by implication authorized the torture), could not be real Muslims—no real Muslim would inflict torture on another. Therefore, he argued, the torturers were kafirs, or nonbelievers, deserving of a sentence of apostasy, or takfir.
The background to sentencing someone as a kafir lies in the mid-seventh century, when Imam Ali, the Prophet’s son-in-law, decided, as caliph, to compromise with a political opponent rather than engage in a war. His action prompted a rebellion by the Kharijites, who assassinated Ali and declared that only they were the true Muslims—all others were apostates and must be put to death. The Kharijites called themselves al-Shurat (“the buyers”), a reference to their buying a place for themselves in the next world. Kharijites (“those who went out”) was the name given to the group by other Muslims because of their extreme views. Charges of apostasy and other measures imposed by the Kharijites had no scriptural basis: according to the Quran, only those who worship idols and who persecuted the Prophet and the early Muslims can be considered apostates. Hence the Kharijites took to manipulating Quranic passages and Islamic doctrine to justify their deeds.
Qutb also drew on radical thinkers such as the Pakistani Sayed Abul A’ala Maududi, his contemporary, and much earlier figures, such as Ibn Taymiyyah. One target of Ibn Taymiyyah’s theological wrath was the Arab Muslims’ Mongol conquerors, converts to Sunni Islam. He charged them with apostasy and declared, furthermore, that anyone who dealt with them or even so much as stood near them when they were being attacked could be killed—even if they were pious Muslims. His rationale was that if the bystanders were sinful Muslims, then it was fitting that they were killed, and if they were devout Muslims and unworthy of death, they’d simply go straight to heaven—thus no harm would be done by killing them. Either way, according to his logic, the killers were committing no sin by killing bystanders.
One doesn’t have to look far in Islamic theology to see how wrong this view is: the Quran states that anyone who kills an innocent person shall be treated “as if he had murdered all of mankind.” That refers to any human being, regardless of religion. It also states: “As for anyone who kills a Muslim deliberately, his repayment is Hell, remaining in it timelessly, forever. God is angry with him and has cursed him, and has prepared for him a terrible punishment.” To this day Ibn Taymiyya’s arguments are used by takfiri terrorists—those who accuse other Muslims of being apostates—to justify the killing of innocent people. Some who subscribe to it don’t have enough knowledge of Islam to know how wrong it is, and others knowingly misuse it to justify violence.
Qutb was hanged in 1966. Beforehand, the regime offered him mercy on the condition that he recant his views, but he refused, allegedly telling his sister, “My words will be stronger if they kill me.” He surely was right in that sense, as his ideas have been used by everyone from Khomeini to bin Laden. Khomeini was fond of employing Qutb’s imagery and conceptual arguments: just as Qutb, for example, compared Nasser (whom he viewed as a tyrant) to Pharaoh, Khomeini likened the shah to the biblical Pharaoh, and by his logic whoever challenged the Pharaoh took on the role of Moses. Given Khomeini’s international prominence as the leader of Iran, his use of Qutb’s ideas and arguments gave them wide circulation in the Muslim world.
In March 1979, one month after the Iranian revolution, Egypt and Israel signed the peace treaty that formally completed the Camp David Accords of the previous year. In the Middle East, the agreement was seen as a betrayal of the Palestinians and undermined the Arab world’s solidarity against Israel. As a consequence, Egypt faced isolation throughout the Muslim and Arab world and was suspended from the Arab League. Islamist radicals in Egypt were enraged: Sadat, in the years before his assassination by extremists in 1981, had tried to sell himself as a religious president, in contrast to Nasser, who battled the Islamists and imprisoned Qutb.
On November 4, 1979, Iranian students attacked the U.S. Embassy in Tehran, taking fifty-two Americans hostage in retaliation for the United States’ having allowed the shah into the country for cancer treatment. The failed U.S. rescue attempt in April resulted in the hostages being scattered around Iran; they were not released until January 1981—444 days after they had been seized. While the student leaders who overran the embassy hadn’t sought Khomeini’s approval before they acted, he supported them once it became clear that they were loyal Islamists who had pledged fealty to him. For the duration of the 444 days, the United States under Jimmy Carter seemed powerless to respond, and the forces of political Islam appeared to be on the rise.
Sixteen days after the attack on the embassy, on November 20, the destruction of a holy place shook the Islamic world when extremists seized al-Masjid al-Haram and took pilgrims hostage. The mosque surrounds the Kaaba, which is said to have been built by Abraham and is the place that Muslims turn to face when they pray five times a day. It is considered the first house of worship and the holiest site in Islam. The extremists declared that the Mahdi, the redeemer of Islam, had arrived—it was one of their leaders—and called on Muslims to obey him. Using the Grand Mosque’s loudspeaker system, which could be heard throughout Mecca, they announced that the Saudi leadership had been corrupted by the West and demanded that the monarchy be replaced, that all ties with the West be cut, and that a stricter version of Islamic law be introduced into the country.
It took two weeks for the mosque to be fully retaken, and hundreds of pilgrims and Saudi troops were killed in the process. Afterward, the Saudi monarchy made concessions to radical clerics, imposing stricter Islamic laws on the population. In a sense, the extremists won.
Khomeini and other leaders, paradoxically, blamed the United States for what had happened, and anti-American riots broke out in several countries, including Pakistan, the Philippines, Libya, and the United Arab Emirates. The U.S. Embassy in Islamabad, Pakistan, was seized by a mob and burned to the ground, and the same happened in Tripoli, Libya.
The Soviet Union’s invasion of Afghanistan was the final momentous event of 1979. The Soviets had been active in the country since the establishment of a Marxist-leaning Democratic Republic of Afghanistan in the spring of 1978. When the Marxist government could no longer contain the Afghan mujahideen, who wanted a religious state, Soviet troops entered Kabul to prop up their allies.
Muslims across the world rallied to protect the country from the Soviet “infidel” invaders. The invasion, and the creation of a new enemy for radical Muslims, served Egypt and Saudi Arabia well; both countries saw a chance to offload their domestic extremists by supporting their traveling to Afghanistan to join the jihad. Together the two countries poured billions of dollars into Afghanistan to support the mujahideen. The United States, eager to fight communism, also provided covert funding and training for the fighters.
One of the most influential figures in the Afghan jihad was Abdullah Azzam, a Palestinian cleric. A student of Qutb, Azzam had been a lecturer at King Abdul Aziz University, in Jeddah, before moving to Pakistan in 1979 to teach at the International Islamic University in Islamabad and to be closer to Afghanistan. When the Soviets invaded Afghanistan, Azzam issued a fatwa, entitled “Defense of the Muslim Lands, the First Obligation after Faith,” in which he declared that it was a fard ayn, or personal obligation, for Muslims to defend Afghanistan against “the occupiers.” Other important clerics participated in the fatwa, including Saudi Arabia’s grand mufti, Abd al-Aziz bin Baz, giving it even more weight.
Azzam’s slogan, “Jihad and rifle alone. No negotiations. No conferences and no dialogue,” gives an indication of his worldview. His speeches influenced bin Laden—who had been a student at King Abdul Aziz University when Azzam was there—to join the mujahideen. Other top terrorists, including Ramzi Yousef, were also swayed by Azzam’s arguments and appeals. Azzam had established Makhtab al-Khidmat to facilitate the movement of mujahideen to Afghanistan. He arranged guesthouses and training camps to prepare recruits for battle, opened fund-raising and recruitment branches around the world—including the one in Brooklyn—and himself recruited thousands of individuals to fight.
“Thousands of young Arabs traveled to Afghanistan,” I told John, as we finished discussing what had happened in 1979. “Many were inspired by the ideology outlined by Azzam and other similar-minded clerics. Others were disenchanted with the oppressive regimes and lack of opportunity back home and sought an adventure. Most Muslims who came just provided muscle. Bin Laden’s advantage, of course, was that he brought his own funding, which drew others to him and bought their loyalty.”
The dessert dishes had long been cleared by the waitress, but John was keen to continue chatting and getting to know me on a personal level. When that conversation finished, we looked at our watches and saw that it was past 1:00 am.
It turned out that it wasn’t uncommon for John to be in the office late at night, and it often seemed that he never slept. He was usually in the office before anyone else, and he was the last one at his desk at night. And when he did leave in the evenings, it was to entertain foreign law enforcement and intelligence officials who were visiting or to take colleagues out to discuss work.
If John didn’t have a dinner to go to, he would walk around the office to see who was there. He often stopped at my desk and invited me out. After a few weeks of finding me always there, he just started calling me at my desk; he’d tell me to meet him outside for dinner, and we would continue our discussions wherever we’d left off the last time.
John had a few favorite restaurants, and his choice was determined by what kind of food he was in the mood for and what time of night it was. For steak, he loved Cité, on West Fifty-first Street. If it was very late, we would head to 1st, on First Avenue. (He would tell me that it was “the place where all the good chefs in the city go after-hours.”) If he was looking for a more social evening, he’d choose Elaine’s.
A place John especially liked taking officials from other countries was Bruno’s, owned, “ironically,” as John liked to say, by an Albanian. “The best Italian food in the city, and the guy’s Albanian.” There was a table on the second floor that the manager would reserve for John if he knew he was coming. An exceptional Israeli piano player usually played Frank Sinatra songs, but when John had guests he would take requests from our group.
During the investigation into the 1998 East African embassy bombings, we were entertaining Tanzanian officials, and John asked the piano player for “an African song.” Without pause the pianist started playing the 1920s Solomon Linda tune “Mbube” (“The Lion Sleeps Tonight”), more or less as rendered in the Disney film The Lion King, with its chorus of “In the jungle, the mighty jungle.” When we took Saudi officials there and John requested a Middle Eastern song, the piano player opened with “Desert Rose.”
John always tried to make foreign officials feel at home, so if there was a good restaurant in New York that served food from their countries, we went. In 1999, we were working with Saad al-Khair and his fellow Jordanian intelligence officers on the Millennium Operation, the investigation that thwarted a terrorist plot to attack American and Israeli targets in Jordan on and around January 1, 2000. We took the Jordanians to a place called Cedars of Lebanon. The restaurant’s live band often played traditional Arabic songs, which our visitors loved.
John understood the importance of personal relationships. Foreign law enforcement and intelligence officers could make life either difficult or easy for us, depending upon how cooperative they were. John endeared himself to them. When a British official’s wife had cancer, John spent time researching the best hospitals in New York and helped the couple plan their trip. In turn, officials treated him and his team well when we traveled to England.
Most of our counterparts came to adore John. A phone call from him achieved much more than official cables. I saw this firsthand when I was in England taking part in Operation Challenge, the investigation that disrupted al-Qaeda and EIJ activity there. The relationship was one of honesty and friendship, not diplomatic niceties. One evening when our colleagues from Scotland Yard were visiting, John raised his glass during dinner and told them, “Unless you get your side to help more, the queen’s going to end up living in Northern Ireland.” No offense was taken—they knew John spoke from the heart, out of genuine concern for us all—and we got the help we wanted.
The bureaucracy didn’t always understand the importance of John’s dinners and entertaining and sometimes refused to give funding approval. In those cases John would just put the dinner on his own credit card. I learned to do the same, telling others, as John had told me, “We’re not in the bureau to save money, we’re here to save lives.”
As the bureau began investigating bin Laden and al-Qaeda, agents began uncovering an American contingent with ties to the group. It wasn’t only bin Laden who saw Azzam as his mentor; several Americans fell under Azzam’s spell when he toured the United States in the 1980s to raise funds for the mujahideen and recruit believers to go to Afghanistan. Among the Americans lured were Wadih el-Hage, Essam al-Ridi, and Ihab Ali.
El-Hage was born in Lebanon to a Christian family but raised in Kuwait, where his father worked. There he began hanging out with Muslim friends, who introduced him to the Quran and to the faith, and eventually he converted to Islam. His family was outraged by the conversion and shunned him. The Kuwaitis who sponsored his conversion sent him to the United States to be educated.
When the Soviets invaded Pakistan, el-Hage, inspired by Azzam’s sermons, left the United States and went to Pakistan to aid his Muslim brothers. Taking the alias Abed al-Sabour al-Lubnani (the Lebanese) and serving as an aide to Azzam, he translated military books for fighters to use and performed administrative work. While working for Azzam, he met the young Osama bin Laden, and the two formed a relationship.
In 1985 el-Hage returned to the United States, and a year later he graduated from the University of Southwestern Louisiana. He married an eighteen-year-old American Muslim named April, moved to Arizona, and, in 1989, became a naturalized U.S. citizen. El-Hage traveled regularly back to Peshawar to work for bin Laden.
Essam al-Ridi was born in Egypt in 1958 and spent his childhood in Kuwait. He studied engineering in Karachi, Pakistan, but civil unrest prevented him from finishing his degree, so he moved to Texas, where he enrolled in the now-defunct Ed Boardman Aviation School, in Fort Worth. Returning to Kuwait, he was unable to find a job, so he moved back to the United States and worked as an instructor at the flight school.
Ridi met Abdullah Azzam first in Pakistan and then again at a Muslim American Youth Association convention in the United States. Ridi had helped organize the convention, and Azzam was one of the guest speakers. They stayed in touch, discussing how Ridi could help in Pakistan, and eventually they both traveled there. Ridi spent his first night at Azzam’s house and at some point met the Afghani mujahideen leader Abdul Rasul Sayyaf.
Ridi’s time in Pakistan was marked by perpetual dissatisfaction and the desire to return to the United States, about which he spoke repeatedly to Azzam. He wasn’t sure that his services were actually required in Pakistan, so eventually he asked Sayyaf, “Will my help be needed here, or can I help from the United States?” When Sayyaf asked him to describe his skills, he replied, “I know how to fly and travel around the world.”
“There is no need for flying,” Sayyaf told him, “but we need someone to travel and ship things.”
For eighteen months Ridi procured items for the mujahideen—such as night vision goggles from the United States and range finders from England. He was traveling every fifteen to twenty days, visiting countries from Japan to Kuwait. He complained to Azzam several times, telling him that he couldn’t do it alone much longer, and Azzam always said there was no one to spare to help him.
In 1985, having adopted the alias Abu Tareq in Afghanistan, Ridi weighed his options. His Egyptian passport was about to expire, and as this was what allowed him to travel, he needed to get it renewed; but he had never stopped looking for an excuse to leave Pakistan. He resented people like bin Laden—rich outsiders who controlled decision making—but when he raised such objections, he was ignored. In the end he returned to the United States and resumed work as a flight instructor in Texas.
When he left, he told Azzam: “I’m not needed here, and I’m not in line with the ideology. It will be best if I move back home, but I’ll still provide the help you need.” Resettled in the United States, he continued to purchase items for the mujahideen, packing them in Wadih el-Hage’s luggage for el-Hage—who had partially assumed the role Ridi had abandoned—to take back to Pakistan. On occasion, Ridi semi-reluctantly traveled back to Afghanistan, as in 1989, when the mujahideen had difficulty adjusting the scope on long-range .50-caliber sniper rifles he had purchased in the United States and shipped to them. The fighters’ unfamiliarity with the weapons forced a trip whose sole purpose was for Ridi to show them, in person, how to fix the sights.
Initially Ridi’s reservations about bin Laden made him wary of working with him; he viewed himself as a purist and continued to be suspicious of the wealthy Saudi who had no military experience, only very deep pockets, and who nonetheless saw himself as a military leader. Ridi stayed true to his promise to Azzam to remain on call, however, and whenever bin Laden or other mujahideen wanted him to procure what they needed—and usually it was Wadih el-Hage who phoned with instructions—he would do so, traveling around the world for equipment, some of which is reportedly still being used by al-Qaeda.
Ihab Ali, known for his operational alias, Nawawi, was another Egyptian who moved to the United States with his family, attending high school in Orlando, Florida. Inspired by Azzam, he traveled to Afghanistan to fight the Soviets. He trained at the Airman Flight School, in Norman, Oklahoma, before traveling to Sudan to join up with bin Laden, to whom he, like Ridi, had been introduced by Azzam, in Afghanistan.
At the time, the U.S. government knew that individuals like these three men were traveling to Afghanistan, but because of American support for the mujahideen, they were not stopped, as they were committing no crime. While the men didn’t know each other well in the United States, they met abroad and built relationships with each other and with other Arab mujahideen, such as bin Laden.
The United States government played a major role in supporting the Afghan jihad against the Soviets. American involvement was in no small part driven by Democratic congressman Charlie Wilson, of Texas, who pushed for the Pentagon to send surplus cash to Afghanistan. Many American intelligence officials and political leaders believed that striking a blow to the Soviets in Afghanistan would deliver the United States a big cold war victory. CIA director William Casey believed that the fight needed to be waged in the third world. Under his guidance the CIA did everything it could to support the mujahideen, even printing translations of the Quran in the hope of encouraging people in Uzbekistan and other countries to rise up against the Soviets.
The United States used Pakistan as a conduit to the mujahideen, distributing weapons and money. Pakistan was a willing helper, as President Muhammad Zia-ul-Haq, who had seized power in a 1977 military coup, didn’t want the Soviets on his border. It was in Pakistan’s interest to have a friendly Afghanistan instead.
Ironically, while the United States was supporting one group of Islamic fighters in Afghanistan, the mid-1980s saw a rise in religiously motivated terrorist attacks against American citizens and interests. In 1983, Hezbollah suicide attacks on marine barracks in Lebanon killed more than 250 Americans. Hijackings by terrorists elsewhere in the Middle East also claimed American lives.
To address the growing threat, in 1984 Ronald Reagan signed National Security Decision Directive (NSDD) 138, “Combating Terrorism.” The director of Central Intelligence (DCI) established the Counterterrorism Center the following year. At first it focused largely on Hezbollah and secular leftist terrorist groups, rather than emphasizing Muslim Brotherhood–inspired groups. A new, interagency committee on terrorism was also formed by the National Security Council.
While these changes were being made, however, U.S. aid to the mujahideen continued to increase. The CIA also committed support to guerrilla attacks in Tajikistan and Uzbekistan and to a Pakistani intelligence initiative to recruit Muslims worldwide to fight with the mujahideen.
The biggest problem was that Washington did not have a strategy in place for what would happen after the Soviet withdrawal in 1988. Instead, Washington’s focus was on the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait and the first Gulf War, along with the fall of the Soviet Union. Al-Qaeda, meanwhile, was busy setting up a Nairobi cell to arm and train Somali warlords to fight the U.S. troops deployed to the country.
I often met with John to discuss terrorism matters, and his focus never shifted; he was married to his work and to the FBI. Pat D’Amuro used to get annoyed when John would call him every hour during investigations to ask questions and micromanage. Pat wanted him to ease up and give him a break. John’s reply didn’t vary: “You have to let it consume you; there is no break.” Years later, during the USS Cole investigation, when I was the case agent and John was out of the country, I understood how Pat felt. John called me every hour; and he told me, as he had told Pat, that I needed to let it consume me.
To John the reality was simple: “The bad guys work nonstop, so do we.” To be in John’s trusted inner circle you needed to give your all, as he did, or you were out. People who were pushed out resented John for it. I understood their anger—it’s natural to want to spend time with your family—but I saw John’s perspective, too: we were in a race against the clock.
What upset other people about John was that he liked to be the center of attention. During a dinner at Cité with Pat D’Amuro and another agent, Kenny Maxwell, who much later succeeded Pat as head of the JTTF, John repeatedly referred to New York as “my city.” Kenny—Irish, like John—had lived in New York his entire life. John, born in Atlantic City, had worked mainly in Chicago and Washington, DC.
Kenny told John, “This is my city. You’re from Chicago.” John didn’t like the insinuation, and soon the two Irish guys were yelling at each other and Pat had to calm them down. Anybody who didn’t acknowledge John’s need to be center stage or who tried to outshine him might be told off for it.
John was killed on 9/11 in the World Trade Center, and stories came out afterward about his messy personal life. He was a complicated human being, but as a boss, I never saw anything but the best from him—and I worked with him on many high-profile cases. I never saw his personal life affect his work or judgment.
In April 1988 the Soviets announced that within nine months they would withdraw from Afghanistan. The question for the mujahideen, after celebrating their victory, was what should come next. Some decided to stay in Afghanistan and use it as a base of operations for jihad elsewhere. Others returned home, seeing their religious duty as having been fulfilled and wishing to resume normal lives. Many went off in search of new conflicts—in places like Bosnia, Chechnya, the Philippines, and Algeria.
Those who decided to stay gathered in Peshawar to decide upon their next steps. They were in agreement that the network they had built to fight the Soviets shouldn’t be allowed to collapse, and that the momentum should be maintained, so they set up a new group, called The Base—al-Qaeda in Arabic—to coordinate their actions. Bin Laden was chosen as the leader of the new group, which had a defined structure, with a shura, or advisory, council, along with military, political, financial, security, religious, and media committees. His rise to prominence was in large part due to his wealth and fund-raising ability, which brought him friends, influence, and power among the mujahideen.
Among the mujahideen leaders there was disagreement over direction and priorities. MAK head Abdullah Azzam, who had been bin Laden’s mentor, wanted to focus on rebuilding Afghanistan, and then to support the Palestinians against Israel. Bin Laden, however, wanted to focus on “the head of the snake,” namely the United States—a position he was supported in, and encouraged to take, by Ayman al-Zawahiri, who had considerable influence among Egyptian Islamists. Zawahiri was one of the leaders of Egyptian Islamic Jihad, the underground group aimed at creating an Islamic state in Egypt and then using Egypt as a launching pad for jihad against the West. In 1980 he had traveled to Pakistan to join the Afghan jihad, believing that his group could obtain in Afghanistan the training they needed for success in Egypt.
Bin Laden and Zawahiri bonded and had great use for each other: Zawahiri and his group found bin Laden’s financial support and network indispensable, and bin Laden, in turn, was attracted to Zawahiri’s sense of direction and his experience. After warning bin Laden of his need for enhanced security, Zawahiri offered his own men as protection; hence the al-Qaeda leader came to be surrounded by Egyptians, who helped shape his and his organization’s focus.
Among the Egyptians was Amin Ali al-Rashidi, known as Abu Ubaidah al-Banshiri—he acquired the name al-Banshiri in Afghanistan, where he had fought in an area called the Panjshir Valley. Banshiri was a former Egyptian police officer who became al-Qaeda’s military commander. His deputy, Tayseer Abu Sitah, better known as Mohammed Atef or by his al-Qaeda alias Abu Hafs al-Masri (al-Masri meaning “the Egyptian”), had also served as a police officer. The fact that someone like Abu Sitah operated under multiple names shows the complexity of trying to unravel the identities of everyone in the group.
The head of al-Qaeda’s religious committee was Mamdouh Mahmoud Salim, who took the name Abu Hajer al-Iraqi. He was a Kurd who had fought in Saddam’s army and alongside bin Laden in Afghanistan, where the two became close friends. While Abu Hajer wasn’t a cleric—he was an engineer by training, and had memorized the Quran—bin Laden believed that he was a pious figure, and he loved to hear him recite passages from the Quran. The Islamic thinkers whom Abu Hajer liked to quote included Qutb and Ibn Tamiyyah.
The disagreement between Azzam and bin Laden ended on November 24, 1989, when an improvised explosive device (IED) that had been placed under Azzam’s car killed him and his two sons. Responsibility was never assigned, but it was suspected that Zawahiri was connected. While before Azzam’s death Zawahiri had denounced him in public, after his death he pretended that they had been the best of friends.
Bin Laden, as head of al-Qaeda, wasn’t supreme over all mujahideen; al-Qaeda was only one among many Sunni groups vying for dominance. Another leader offering a vision was Omar Abdul Rahman, the “Blind Sheikh,” so called because childhood diabetes had left him sightless. Rahman led al-Gamma’a al-Islamiyya (the Islamic Group), a rival of Zawahiri’s group. Others influential in Afghanistan were Ramzi Yousef and his uncle Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, who operated independently and had no desire to be under bin Laden’s command.
When bin Laden returned to Saudi Arabia in 1990, he was welcomed as a hero among ordinary people, but the Saudi regime was wary, having grown concerned about his actions. He was seen as a troublemaker, having worked in 1989, for instance, on a plot to overthrow the Marxist government in South Yemen.
The ultimate break between bin Laden and the royal family came when Saddam invaded Kuwait. Bin Laden told the royals that he and his army of mujahideen could defend the kingdom, but his offer was rebuffed, as the Saudis knew that bin Laden and his band of fighters would be no match for Saddam’s army. Instead they welcomed U.S. troops to fight Saddam.
Bin Laden was furious at being spurned, and at the royals for allowing “infidel” troops into Saudi Arabia. He publicly denounced the royal family. They took away his passport as a form of punishment, but in the spring of 1991, with the help of sympathizers in Saudi Arabia, he made it to Peshawar. He was later securely transported, by an Egyptian named Ali Mohamed, to Sudan.
Bin Laden’s move to Sudan was not a hasty decision or one made strictly under duress. Years before 1991, he had begun to realize that the Saudi regime was growing increasingly frustrated with him, and he had started considering other locations. When the tipping point came and the Saudis tried to silence him by confiscating his passport, he already had a new base lined up.
One option had always been to return to Afghanistan, where he had flourished in the past; another was to set up a new base in Sudan. In 1989, when the National Islamic Front (NIF) took control of Sudan in a coup, declaring a desire to turn Khartoum into the center of an international Islamic network, the NIF sent an invitation to bin Laden to move his organization to the country. It was then that he began to consider Sudan seriously.
He sent operatives, led by Abu Hajer, to meet with the new Sudanese leaders and evaluate the country’s suitability as a base of operations. Abu Hajer came back with a positive report, telling bin Laden and other al-Qaeda members that the NIF leaders were devout Muslims and that al-Qaeda would have the necessary freedom to operate effectively from the country. Abu Hajer also brought back books written by NIF religious leader Dr. Hassan al-Turabi, whom al-Qaeda members tended to mistrust because he had studied at the Sorbonne. Abu Hajer said: “Studying in Europe doesn’t make someone a bad person. Turabi is a noted scholar. He has memorized the Quran, he knows a lot about Islamic law, and in fact for forty years he served da’wa”—the act of inviting others to study Islam, sometimes with the aim of converting them.
Bin Laden made a deal with Turabi and the Sudanese authorities whereby they would give al-Qaeda the freedom to operate, and in exchange he would invest in the country and help the regime fight Christian separatists in the south. Once the deal was finalized, bin Laden sent Jamal al-Fadl (then his secretary) and others to prepare for his arrival. It was in 1991 that the preparations were completed and the move accomplished.
Every Thursday after the sunset prayer, all al-Qaeda members in Khartoum gathered at one of the farms the organization owned to hear a lecture given by bin Laden or someone else on jihad and on the organization’s mission. At the first such meeting, bin Laden told his followers that their mission in Sudan would be to build al-Qaeda, eventually turning it into an international network that would not only support others waging jihad but which would be capable of launching its own operations. From 1992 to 1995, as events such as the first Gulf War and the conflict in Somalia shaped the narrative of the terror network, operatives undertook the large-scale procurement of equipment and supplies that began to mark al-Qaeda’s institutional and operational evolution.
Essam al-Ridi was at his home in Texas when the phone rang on a fall day in 1993.
“As-Salamu Alaykum, my brother.” He recognized the voice as belonging to Wadih el-Hage. El-Hage had offered the traditional greeting: Peace be upon you.
“Wa Alaykum as-Salam, Abu Abdallah Lubnani,” Ridi replied, returning the greeting. “How are you?”
“Alhamdu lelah,” el-Hage replied: Praise be to God. “And yourself?”
“Alhamdu lelah.”
“So why are you calling, my friend? What can I do for you?”
“I’ve got a message from the sheikh.”
“I guessed as much,” Ridi replied with a hearty laugh. It was usually with some request from bin Laden that his old friend el-Hage called him these days.
“So what can I do for Abu Abdullah?” Ridi continued, referring to bin Laden by one of his aliases: the father of Abdullah. Abdullah is the name of bin Laden’s eldest son, and referring to him thus was an expression of respect, as it’s considered a great honor in the Muslim world to have a son.
“He wants you to buy an airplane for him,” el-Hage replied. He explained that bin Laden had asked that the plane be delivered to Khartoum International Airport.
“An airplane?” As a trained pilot and flight instructor, Ridi knew how to go about purchasing a plane. “What type of plane does Abu Abdullah want, and how much is he willing to spend?”
“Something that has a range of more than two thousand miles,” el-Hage replied, “for no more than three hundred fifty thousand dollars.” He explained that bin Laden wanted to transport Stinger missiles from Peshawar to Khartoum.
“You have to be careful transporting weapons, you know,” Ridi said. “You need to make sure you get permission from the countries on both ends, or you’ll find yourself in trouble.”
“Don’t worry, we’ve got permission from the authorities in Peshawar and Khartoum. But that’s why we need the two thousand miles. We can’t risk running out of fuel and being forced to land elsewhere—it will be chaos.”
Ridi found a suitable plane; the seller even agreed to give him a 9 percent commission for arranging the purchase, a fact Ridi chose not to divulge to el-Hage. In any case, his profit was never realized; inexplicably, el-Hage dropped the allowance for the plane to $250,000. “This is the price that the sheik has decided on, so see what you can do,” he told Ridi.
Ridi argued that the terms were impossible. He knew what was out there; they would never be able to get what they wanted for $250,000. At last, however, he found a decommissioned military aircraft for $210,000 that had a range of 1,500 miles. “It’s in storage in Tucson, Arizona, and hasn’t been used in a while,” he told el-Hage, “so I need to get it checked and fixed.” When el-Hage asked him how he would get it to the airport, Ridi replied, “I’ll fly it there myself.”
El-Hage said that he had one final request to convey: bin Laden wanted Ridi to work for him as a pilot. Ridi demurred, suggesting that they discuss the offer in Khartoum. He had the plane refurbished and repainted, updated its equipment, and took off from Dallas–Fort Worth. Minus-65-degree weather while flying caused the plane to malfunction, and a window cracked on the way. It took him a week to get there.
El-Hage met him at the airport and inspected the plane. He was full of praise for Ridi. “It looks good. Well done.”
“For what it cost, it’s good,” Ridi shrugged. The journey had exhausted him.
El-Hage took him to his own home and later they dined with bin Laden, to whom Ridi presented the keys to the aircraft. They agreed to meet at the airport the following morning so that bin Laden could inspect the plane. Ridi rose early to clean it—the exterior was dirty from the flight—but bin Laden failed to show at the appointed time, and Ridi spent several idle hours before getting in touch with el-Hage, who apologized and summoned him to the office for a meeting.
Ridi arrived at a residential building in the Riyadh neighborhood of Khartoum. El-Hage, manning the front desk, greeted Ridi warmly. Besides performing the duties he had inherited from Ridi, he had taken over as bin Laden’s secretary following the departure of Jamal al-Fadl, one of the first members of al-Qaeda. Fadl, who was Sudanese, had spent several weeks training el-Hage in the management of the office. Beyond el-Hage’s desk was an office that belonged to Abu Jaffar (Abu Khadija al-Iraqi), bin Laden’s business manager; the interior office was bin Laden’s. Ridi was ushered into bin Laden’s office by el-Hage.
Bin Laden was wearing a white thawb (a traditional Arab garment) and had a black beard. “I’m sorry for not coming this morning,” he said to Ridi. He spoke quietly, with a Saudi accent, his voice seeming to betray a hint of shyness. “But I’ve got a new request for you now. I’d like you to stay here in Sudan and work for me. I’ll pay you twelve hundred dollars a month.”
“Before we discuss any job offer,” Ridi replied, “there’s something that I need to say to you on a personal level. You may know that when we were both in Afghanistan, I resented the fact that you were a rich man with no military background or experience trying to be a military leader. That was one of the reasons I left Afghanistan. Now that you have the experience, it’s a different situation, so my view has changed.”
Bin Laden thanked Ridi and explained the particulars of the job. “You will fly the plane for me personally. You will also use it for crop dusting.” Bin Laden owned farms that grew crops from which vegetable oil was produced. “And you’ll fly the crops to other countries to be sold.”
“That’s three jobs,” Ridi replied. “Which one is for twelve hundred dollars?”
“That’s for all three. This, you should know, is the highest I’m paying my officers.”
“It might be the highest, but I’ve heard that there’s high inflation here in Khartoum,” Ridi replied. “I’ve also heard that schools are expensive for expatriates. So is furniture. It’s not a healthy environment. Living here is going to cost me more than twelve hundred dollars a month. Even if you’re paying this salary to your top officers, it doesn’t mean I should be paid the same. I’m doing a different job, and have different expenses.”
“That’s the highest, so consider it,” bin Laden said. “And just so you know, in case you do still have any of your concerns, this is not jihad, this is strictly business.”
Ridi later confirmed, with el-Hage, that the proposed salary was one of the highest bin Laden paid. Nonetheless, he turned it down. But he assured bin Laden that he was still prepared to “help you as usual whenever you need it.” After getting reimbursed for his expenses, Ridi flew to Peshawar, where he spent time catching up with old friends from his days in Afghanistan, and then returned to the United States.
True to his word, Ridi continued to run missions for bin Laden when asked. Sometimes it involved flying the plane; at one point, he traveled to Khartoum to take five Arabs to Nairobi. Their job was to join cells being set up in Somalia. Other times, Ridi helped purchase weapons and matériel.
About a year and a half went by with no calls to fly the plane. Ridi took a job in Egypt with an airline but soon was summoned, once again, by el-Hage. “Brother, can you come to Sudan to fix up the plane and make it workable so it can be used for business?” When Ridi asked what had happened, el-Hage explained that the plane simply hadn’t been used for a while and was languishing at the airport. “We haven’t been able to get it to work since last time you used it.”
Ridi pointed out that flying directly from Egypt to Sudan to meet with bin Laden was likely to raise government suspicion. Bin Laden was involved in weapons smuggling through Egypt; he had been sending caravans with weapons to meet Egyptian terrorists in the desert. Intelligence operatives were closely monitoring anyone with ties to bin Laden, and Ridi didn’t want to come to their attention. “That’s fine, meet me in Nairobi,” el-Hage suggested. “That’s where I’m now based.”
“Why are you here now?” Ridi asked el-Hage in Nairobi.
“I’m working for a charity called Help Africa People.” The improbable name gave Ridi an indication of what was going on.
“A charity?”
“It’s really a cover for our efforts in Somalia and here,” el-Hage replied with a smile.
Ridi laughed. “I guessed as much.”
Their discussion turned to the plane. Ridi said that in order to get it ready to be used for business, he would need a copilot.
“Okay, Ali Nawawi will help you. He’ll meet you in Khartoum.”
Ridi flew to Khartoum, checked into the Hilton hotel near the airport, and then met Nawawi at the airport. The two men examined the plane and found that it had a flat tire, and that some of the other tires had melted from the heat. The engine was full of sand, and the batteries were dead. Parts of the plane were rusty from disuse, and the craft was filthy. They also couldn’t find the keys. A few al-Qaeda operatives had met them at the airport; they, too, didn’t know where the keys were.
Nawawi went off to hunt for the keys, and Ridi stayed to work on the plane. The keys were eventually located, and after the two men had finished making the necessary repairs and had checked the hydraulics and run a series of tests, they decided that they were ready to see how the plane handled. It took off without incident. After touching down on the runway a few times and going back up into the air without slowing down, Ridi decided that the plane was operational and that it was time to land properly. They touched down successfully, but when Ridi tried applying the brakes, nothing happened.
“We’ve lost the main hydraulic or the main brake system,” he told Nawawi. “I’m going to try the alternate brake system.” As the more experienced pilot, he was in control. The alternate brakes failed to work, and he tried the hand brakes. When this, too, failed, he shut down the engine. The plane continued to speed along the runway.
Ridi was sweating, but his voice was calm and his hands steady; his professional training had kicked in. They were still traveling fast—about sixty knots—and he found himself quickly explaining the obvious to Nawawi: that they would soon run out of runway space. He aimed the plane at a sand dune. “When we crash into the dune, take off your seat belt and get out of the plane—because it might explode,” he told Nawawi.
About five seconds later the plane veered off the runway and crashed into the dune, which brought them to an abrupt halt. The impact jerked their heads forward, but their seat belts prevented their bodies from following. Ridi unbuckled his belt and jumped out of his seat. He switched off the hydraulic system and the plane’s electric system to try to avoid an explosion, and opened the door. As he was about to jump out, he saw that Nawawi, in a state of shock, had remained in his seat, belt still buckled. He rushed to release Nawawi’s seat belt and dragged him out of the plane.
Everyone in the airport was staring at them. “I’ve got to get out of here quick,” Ridi told Nawawi, who had started to come to his senses.
“It’s not our fault. Bin Laden won’t blame you,” Nawawi said.
“That’s not what I’m worried about. Khartoum is full of Egyptian intelligence tracking bin Laden and people working with him. Everyone knows this is bin Laden’s plane. It’s the only private plane in the airport. I don’t want Egyptian intelligence associating me with him. That will cause me a lot of problems.”
They reached a security guard on the runway. “Are you okay?” the guard asked the two men.
“I’m fine, but I need you to drop me at the terminal,” Ridi told him. The guard agreed to do so, and, leaving Nawawi to fend for himself, Ridi went straight from the terminal to the Hilton, packed his bags, and returned to the airport. He booked himself on the first flight out of Khartoum—it happened to be going to Addis Ababa—and from there caught a flight to Cairo.
That was the end of what was later nicknamed, by a few of us in the bureau, “Osama Air.”
On the surface it looked as if bin Laden was in fact engaged in legitimate business in Sudan. He established companies such as Ladin International, an investment company; Wadi al-Aqiq, a holding company; al-Hijra, a construction business; al-Themar al-Mubaraka, an agricultural company; Taba Investments, an investment company; Khartoum Tannery, a leather company; and Qudarat Transport Company, a transportation company, which all seemed to perform legitimate work. The construction company, for example, built a highway from Khartoum to Port Sudan. At the same time, operatives used the businesses as a means of traveling around the world to purchase weapons, explosives, and equipment and to aid foreign fighters. The businesses were the perfect cover to avoid attracting attention from intelligence services.
Bin Laden began to create a worldwide network for helping fellow jihadist groups, establishing an Islamic Army shura to coordinate efforts. On the council were representatives from, among other groups, the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group (LIFG) and EIJ, the latter represented by Zawahiri. Bin Laden sent funds, weapons, trainers, and fighters to the Moro Islamic Liberation Front (MILF) and the Abu Sayyaf Group, both in the Philippines, and Jemaah Islamiah, which was based in Indonesia but was spread across Southeast Asia. Trainers were sent to Kashmir and Tajikistan, and a guesthouse was opened in Yemen—a central point for the entire region. Simultaneously, al-Qaeda members were sent to these groups to learn from their experiences and to pick up skills. Al-Qaeda members even went to the Bekaa Valley, in Lebanon, where they received training from the Shiite group Hezbollah. While al-Qaeda is a radical Sunni group that views Shiites as heretics, for the purpose of learning terrorist tactics they were prepared to put their religious differences aside.
In late 1992, once the basic network was set up, bin Laden and other al-Qaeda leaders plotted where they might begin striking U.S. targets. They settled on the Horn of Africa. American troops were in Somalia as part of Operation Restore Hope—an international United Nations–sanctioned humanitarian and famine relief mission in the south of the country, which the United States had begun leading in December of 1992. Abu Hafs al-Masri was sent to Somalia to evaluate precisely what the United States was doing in Somalia; in the resulting report, he termed the U.S. presence an invasion of Muslim lands but conceded that, because of the different tribal groups in the country, it would be tough for al-Qaeda to operate there. Based upon Abu Hafs al-Masri’s report, al-Qaeda’s leaders issued a fatwa demanding that the United States leave Somalia.
Al-Qaeda trainers were on the ground during the Battle of Mogadishu (also known as Black Hawk Down), on October 3–4, 1993, when two U.S. Black Hawk helicopters were shot down during an operation. After a chaotic rescue mission, 18 Americans and more than 1,000 Somali fighters were killed. The world saw the lifeless bodies of American soldiers being dragged through the streets, and President Clinton soon afterward ordered U.S. troops to withdraw from Somalia. Bin Laden celebrated the withdrawal as a major victory and often told his followers that this episode showed how America was weak, and how al-Qaeda could beat the superpower by inflicting pain.
After al-Qaeda was set up in Sudan, the leadership decided that the group needed a presence in Somalia. Nairobi was deemed the perfect entry point. Operatives, claiming to be aid workers, would fly to Nairobi and then take a small plane to the border; from there they would drive. Bin Laden sent his trusted lieutenant Khalid al-Fawwaz to lead the Nairobi cell. Fawwaz opened several businesses, the first in precious gems, and formed NGOs that purportedly helped Africans but which were actually a cover for al-Qaeda operatives who passed through on their way to Mogadishu. Once the cell was operational, bin Laden sent Fawwaz to London to run al-Qaeda operations focusing on logistics and public relations. Fawwaz worked under cover of the Advice and Reformation Committee, an NGO established on July 11, 1994, that advocated reforms in Saudi Arabia. Wadih el-Hage was sent by bin Laden to replace Fawwaz in Kenya.
El-Hage’s secretary in Nairobi was Fazul Abdullah Mohammed, one of whose aliases was Harun Fazul. Born in the Comoros Islands, Harun Fazul attended a radical Wahhabi school and then went to Afghanistan, where he got involved with al-Qaeda. (He was eventually killed, on June 10, 2011.) The Nairobi cell helped operations in Somalia and also began planning al-Qaeda’s first solo mission and announcement of their presence on the world stage: they intended to simultaneously bomb the U.S. embassies in Nairobi and Dar es Salaam.
In late 1993 or early 1994, al-Qaeda’s financial chief, Madani al-Tayyib, who was also known in al-Qaeda circles as Abu Fadhl al-Makkee, summoned Jamal al-Fadl. “We’ve heard that someone in Khartoum has got uranium, and we need you to find out if it is true. If it is, we want to buy it.” Al-Qaeda was constantly looking for weapons and chemicals to use in their operations against the United States.
“How should I find out?” Fadl asked.
“Go to Abu Dijana. He knows more about it.” Abu Dijana was a senior al-Qaeda operative from Yemen.
Fadl met with him and was told that there was a Sudanese official named Moqadem Salah Abdel al-Mobruk who knew about buying and selling uranium.
“Do you know how I can reach him?” he asked Abu Dijana.
“No, but you’re Sudanese—use your contacts to find out.”
Fadl asked around and eventually found someone who said that he knew the official. “Why do you want to meet him?” the man asked.
“I’m told he knows how we can get uranium, and if he does, we’d like to buy it.”
Within a week the man had arranged the introduction, and Fadl found himself face-to-face with Salah Abdel al-Mobruk. Fadl was soon to become involved in the kind of negotiation that characterized many of al-Qaeda’s early dealings: the banal graft, mind-numbingly tedious phone calls, and cordial middlemen—which both obscured and amplified the nature of the transactions and the magnitude of what was being accomplished.
“I do know about the uranium,” Mobruk told Fadl. “There’s a guy called Basheer who will help you.”
Mobruk arranged a meeting between Fadl and Basheer, whose reaction to the request for uranium was one of surprise and almost stupefaction, though whether his response was genuine or a pose was impossible to tell. “Are you serious? You want to buy uranium?” he asked Fadl.
“Yes, I am. I know people who are serious and want it.”
“Do they have money?”
“They do, but they first want more information about the uranium, such as the quality of it and what country it’s made in. After that they’ll talk about the price.”
Basheer quickly warmed to the task. “I will give you the information,” he said. “The price will be a million and a half dollars, and we need the money given to us outside Sudan. I’ll also need a commission, as will Salah Abdel al-Mobruk. And tell me this: how will you check the uranium?”
“I don’t know, but I have to go to my people and tell them what you told me, and I’ll get you an answer.”
Fadl met with Abu Rida al-Suri, an al-Qaeda financier. Like Jamal al-Fadl, Abu Rida was one of al-Qaeda’s original members. Born Mohammed Loay Baizid in Syria, he had spent a considerable amount of time in the United States, including several years studying engineering in Kansas City. “It sounds good,” Abu Rida told Fadl. He added, “We’ll just have to check the uranium.”
“How will you check it?”
“We have access to a machine, an electric machine, that can check it. But first we need to take a look at the cylinder containing the uranium, which will tell us about the quality of it and which country it is made in.” Abu Rida wrote down for Fadl a list of questions al-Qaeda had and the information they wanted, and told him to get the answers.
Fadl returned to the middleman and told him that he needed to meet Basheer again to discuss the uranium, on the basis of Abu Rida’s questions. The middleman provided a rendezvous point and asked Fadl to meet him there in several days’ time at ten in the morning. “You can bring Abu Rida al-Suri with you, if you want,” he added.
On the appointed day, Fadl and Abu Rida drove to the location given to Fadl by Basheer, who suddenly materialized alongside them in a jeep. “Leave your car here,” he told them. “Come with me and we’ll go to the uranium.” They got into his jeep and sped north out of Khartoum, eventually leaving the main road and pulling up outside a house. “Let’s go,” Basheer instructed them. Ushering them inside the house, he got them settled, then disappeared and returned with a big bag. Out of the bag he pulled a cylinder. It was a few feet long and had words engraved on it. Basheer handed it to Abu Rida.
Abu Rida examined the writing and spent about five minutes inspecting the whole cylinder, all the while jotting down information in a notebook. He conferred briefly with Basheer before they all left. Basheer dropped them off at their car in Khartoum.
Once they were alone, Abu Rida tore the sheet of information from his notepad and handed it to Fadl. “Take this to Abu Hajer, and whatever he says we should do is okay with me.”
Fadl did as he was told. It was a brief meeting, with little time wasted on anything other than the task at hand. Abu Hajer studied the page and said, “Tell them we’ll buy it.”
At his third meeting with Basheer, again brokered by the middleman, Fadl told Basheer, “My people want to buy the uranium.” Basheer once again asked how they planned to check the uranium, and Fadl explained, “We’re waiting for a machine to come from outside Sudan to check it.”
“How long will that take?”
“I don’t know. But Abu Rida will handle everything. He’s the financier.”
Fadl reported back to Abu Rida, telling him how to get in contact with Basheer.
It became apparent to Fadl that his part in the negotiation had come to an end. “Great job,” Abu Rida said, and gave him ten thousand dollars.
“What’s this for?” Fadl asked. He could not have been more surprised than if Abu Rida had instructed him to return to Basheer a fourth time with more questions.
“For your hard work.”
After purchasing the uranium—for the full $1.5 million asking price, plus the payment of commissions to the various fixers along the way—al-Qaeda discovered that they had been duped: it wasn’t uranium that they had purchased but red mercury, which was useless to them.
Years later, when I was in London, investigating the al-Qaeda cell there as part of Operation Challenge, we were going through files belonging to Fawwaz and other cell members in London, and I read a lab report from Austria identifying the substance as osmium.
Born in Egypt in 1935 and married to an American, Dr. Rashad Khalifa was a liberal imam in Tucson, Arizona. He had moved to the United States in the late 1950s; his son Sam Khalifa went on to play shortstop for the Pittsburgh Pirates in the early to mid-1980s. A biochemist, Khalifa imputed properties to numbers, believing that they determined events in life, and even alleged that the miracles of the Quran were revealed through mathematical equations. He allowed male and female congregants to pray together in his mosque, Masjid Tucson, and didn’t demand that they wear traditional Muslim dress, even for prayers. Khalifa also publicly opposed radical takfiri ideas that others in the local Muslim community—especially radical Egyptians—espoused, such as labeling fellow adherents of Islam who didn’t accept their views as kafirs, or nonbelievers.
A rival Tucson mosque, the Islamic Center, situated about ten miles from Masjid Tucson, served the more radical members of the local Muslim community, including Wadih el-Hage. The Islamic Center’s congregants often discussed Khalifa and their displeasure with what he was preaching. By the late 1980s, their complaints about the imam had reached other radical communities across the United States.
On a Friday in January 1990, el-Hage received a call from a man who said that he was a visitor from New York and that he was waiting at the Islamic Center to see him. They met at the mosque; el-Hage later described the man vaguely and unhelpfully as a tall Egyptian who wore glasses and had a long beard. The man told el-Hage that he was visiting Tucson to investigate Rashad Khalifa. “I’ve heard that his teachings contradict what all Muslims agree on,” the man told el-Hage. He spoke of Khalifa’s willingness to allow men and women to pray together, and of his theories about numbers in the Quran. Scientific American had called Khalifa’s well-received annotated translation of the Quran, published under the title Quran: The Final Testament, “an ingenious study,” which did nothing to address his critics’ objections. El-Hage invited the visitor back to his house for lunch.
During the meal, the visitor raged against Khalifa. He told el-Hage that he had tried to go to Masjid Tucson to pray but hadn’t been allowed in because of his long beard. Peering through a window of the mosque, he had seen men and women worshipping together and had grown even angrier. According to el-Hage, the visitor simply left after this catalogue of grievances.
Later that month, Dr. Khalifa was found murdered in the kitchen of his mosque. Wadih el-Hage later said he felt that Khalifa’s killing was justified. The murder remains unsolved.
On November 5, 1990, Meir Kahane, a right-wing American Israeli rabbi and onetime member of the Israeli parliament, was giving a speech at a Marriott hotel in New York City. When he finished, members of the audience gathered around him to congratulate him. A gun was fired, and the bullet hit Kahane in the neck, killing him. While trying to escape, El Sayyid Nosair, an Egyptian who had immigrated to the United States in 1981, was wounded in a shootout and apprehended.
A subsequent investigation found that an Egyptian named Mahmud Abouhalima had provided Nosair’s gun and additional weapons for the attack. The weapons allegedly had been bought for Abouhalima by el-Hage, whom he had met at an Islamic conference in the United States in 1989. Nosair was a member of the group of radical Islamists in New York led by the Blind Sheik, Sheikh Omar Abdul Rahman.
Abdul Rahman, having mastered the Quran in Braille, had gone on to study at Cairo’s prestigious al-Azhar University. He had been arrested by the Egyptian regime in connection with the assassination of Sadat—accused, among other acts, of having written a fatwa that prompted the murder—and reportedly he had been tortured in prison. In the end he was acquitted but expelled from Egypt. He traveled to Afghanistan, where he met up with Abdullah Azzam, under whom he had once studied.
Abdul Rahman then moved to the United States to take control of Azzam’s organization’s U.S. assets, despite being on the U.S. State Department terrorist watchlist. The visa was given to him in Sudan by a CIA official. On arriving in the United States, the Blind Sheikh began recruiting more followers, raising funds, and denouncing the United States, using many of the same arguments as Qutb, whom he greatly admired.
In early 1991 el-Hage received a phone call from Mustafa Shalabi, a young Egyptian immigrant who ran the al-Kifah Center, located in Brooklyn’s al-Farouq Mosque. Shalabi asked el-Hage to come to New York for two weeks to take care of the center while he went to Pakistan. The center was part of Makhtab al-Khidmat, and Shalabi was effective at recruiting followers and raising funds.
After the Soviet Union pulled out of Afghanistan, there was a dispute in the center about how to handle approximately $100,000 in leftover funds. Shalabi, whose loyalty was solely to Azzam, wanted to send the money to Afghanistan to help the people there rebuild. The other faction, led by the Blind Sheikh, wanted to use the funds for jihad in other countries, especially in Abdul Rahman’s Egypt. Shalabi had decided to travel to Pakistan to see Azzam and try to resolve the dispute. El-Hage would run the center in his absence.
When el-Hage arrived in Brooklyn, he went to meet Shalabi at a prearranged location, but Shalabi never showed up. He didn’t show up on the appointed day, and he didn’t show up the next day, either. A week later Shalabi’s body was found in an apartment he had shared with Mahmud Abouhalima. An investigation found that Shalabi had been murdered on March 1, 1991—the day el-Hage got to New York. While el-Hage was in New York, he also went to Rikers Island prison to visit El Sayyid Nosair.
After Shalabi was killed, the Blind Sheikh’s followers took control of the center, and it became a training ground for radicals. One the most popular trainers was Ali Mohamed, who had helped move bin Laden to Sudan. Ali Mohamed joined the United States Army in the 1980s; at the same time, he was also a member of Zawahiri’s EIJ, thus functioning as a double agent. He was in the habit of bringing U.S. Army manuals to the center to train fighters, among them El Sayyid Nosair.
On February 26, 1993, a vehicle parked in the underground garage of the World Trade Center exploded, ripping a hole through seven stories, killing six people and injuring more than a thousand. The aim had been to blow up one tower, causing it to topple into the next one—bringing them both crashing down—but the explosives weren’t powerful enough.
The FBI’s New York field office took control of the investigation. Forensic investigators on the scene identified part of the vehicle as being from a rental van that had been reported stolen in New Jersey by Mohammed Salameh, a Palestinian who was illegally in the United States. He had been calling the rental office to get his $400 deposit back.
FBI agents arrested Salameh on March 4 and soon arrested others connected to the plot, including Nidal Ayyad, the engineer who had procured the chemicals for the bomb. The investigation found that Ramzi Yousef, a Kuwaiti of Pakistani origin, had parked the van. Educated in England, he had entered the United States in 1992 with fraudulent documents but then claimed political asylum—which was granted.
Yousef had fled to Pakistan after the attack, and the evidence showed that the plot was planned either at or in the vicinity of a training camp in eastern Afghanistan, near Khost, called the Khaldan camp; Yousef and the other plotters had met there. The investigation also led the bureau to al-Farouq Mosque in Brooklyn, the al-Kifah Center, and the Blind Sheikh. Salameh, Abouhalima, Nosair, and the Blind Sheikh all became subjects of investigation following the bombing. The investigation uncovered the fact that the men were hatching a second plot—to attack New York City landmarks, including the United Nations, the FBI office, the Lincoln and Holland tunnels, and the George Washington Bridge.
FBI special agent John Anticev was the case agent for the Kahane murder, and intelligence from that operation led to the bureau’s identifying members of the World Trade Center cell. Anticev and his partner, New York Police Department (NYPD) detective Louis Napoli, had a source who had penetrated the second terrorist cell, which was preparing to attack the New York City landmarks.
Through the investigation into the World Trade Center bombing and the investigation into the thwarted landmarks plot, an operation that the FBI called Terrorstop, the name of one American citizen kept appearing: Wadih el-Hage. The FBI began to search for him, with Dan Coleman leading the investigation, and it was discovered that el-Hage was living in Nairobi, where he worked with Abu Ubaidah al-Banshiri, al-Qaeda’s military leader and second in command, and Harun Fazul, Banshiri’s secretary.
El-Hage’s Nairobi house was eventually raided, on August 21, 1997. Dan Coleman wanted to shake the tree and see what happened, as the FBI didn’t have any direct case against el-Hage. They found his address book, which included the names of Nawawi—Ridi’s copilot when they crashed bin Laden’s plane—and Ali Mohamed, the al-Qaeda double agent in the U.S. military. On el-Hage’s personal computer was also a letter from Harun Fazul, in which Harun warned that he believed the cell in Nairobi was being monitored: “There are many reasons that lead me to believe that the cell members in East Africa are in great danger, which leaves us no choice but to think and work hard to foil the plans of the enemy who is working day and night to catch one of us or gather more information about any of us.” Harun also recounted that it had been reported, in a British newspaper, that someone close to bin Laden had been cooperating with the Saudi intelligence services. He believed it to be Madani al-Tayyib, al-Qaeda’s financial chief, who had worked with Fadl to purchase the uranium. Harun said that he was trying to verify his hunch and that Tayyib’s betrayal, if verified, would be “terrible news.” He urged greater security precautions.
Tayyib was close to bin Laden, having married his niece. He had lost a leg in the Soviet jihad. Weakened and in constant pain since the amputation, he had traveled to Europe to get treatment—enlisting the help of Fawwaz, bin Laden’s man in London. In London he surrendered to the Saudis, hoping that they would help him attend to his medical needs. He told them all he knew about bin Laden’s and al-Qaeda’s finances, but the Saudis never shared this or gave the FBI access to Tayyib, claiming later that they did give the information to the CIA. The news of Tayyib’s defection from al-Qaeda became public in 1997.
Years later, in early 2002, when I was interrogating suspects at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, I received a call from Major General Michael Dunlavey, the commanding officer of Joint Task Force 170, set up by the Pentagon to coordinate interrogations. Dunlavey asked me to come see him. “I’ve got Madani al-Tayyib in our custody,” he said excitedly. “He’s a top al-Qaeda guy. He knows all about their money.”
I walked across the camp to Dunlavey’s office. “Are you sure you’ve got him?” I asked.
“Yes, I am, we’ve questioned him.”
“But I heard the Saudis have him locked up.”
“Well, it’s him. He is not cooperating yet. He”—Dunlavey gestured to an officer standing nearby—“is interrogating him.”
“Did you see Madani al-Tayyib in person?” I asked the officer.
“Yes, I did.”
“How many legs does he have?”
“What do you mean?”
“His legs. Does he have one or two legs?” I asked.
“He’s got two.”
“Two real legs.”
“Yes.”
“Then it’s not Madani al-Tayyib,” I said, “because he’s an amputee.”
Pleased that the matter had been put to rest, Dunlavey turned to the officer and said jocularly, “You see, you can’t regrow limbs.”
By the mid-1990s there was growing international pressure on Sudan over its hosting of bin Laden. Beginning in 1992, bin Laden and members of al-Qaeda’s religious rulings committee had published fatwas instructing people to attack U.S. troops based in the Saudi Arabian Peninsula. Between 1992 and 1995, al-Qaeda members, using vehicles associated with bin Laden’s businesses, transported weapons and explosives from Khartoum to the Port of Sudan for shipment to Saudi Arabia. In November 1995, a car bomb exploded in Saudi Arabia outside a training facility run jointly by the United States and the Saudis; the perpetrators were led by Khalid al-Saeed, a close associate of bin Laden’s. In June 1996, a truck bomb exploded in the Khobar Towers complex in Dhahran, Saudi Arabia, which housed U.S. servicemen. Nineteen Americans were killed and 372 wounded. The FBI investigators concluded that the attack had been carried out by Saudi Hezbollah. However, this did not stop al-Qaeda from taking credit. In his 1996 declaration of war, bin Laden boasted, in a poem invoking Qiblah, or the direction Muslims face for prayers, that he had not betrayed the Saudi king but that the king had betrayed the Grand Mosque by allowing infidels into the kingdom:
The crusader army became dust when we detonated al-Khobar
With courageous youth of Islam fearing no danger,
If they are threatened: “The tyrants will kill you,”
They reply, “My death is a victory.”
I did not betray the king, but he did betray our Qiblah,
And he permitted, in the holy country, the most filthy of humans
I have made an oath by God, the Great, to fight whoever rejected the faith.
Pressure on Sudan also came from Libya, as the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group, allied with al-Qaeda, was dedicated to overthrowing longtime dictator Colonel Muammar al-Gaddafi’s rule and setting up an Islamic state. Their opposition to Gaddafi was rooted in the concept of takfir: even though Gaddafi was a practicing Muslim, he was not allowing them to establish Sharia law and was instead establishing his own version of a socialist regime. Sudan eventually bowed to Libyan pressure and told bin Laden that all Libyan members of al-Qaeda and affiliated groups needed to leave the country. Some took positions in al-Qaeda cells elsewhere—for example, Anas al-Liby, a computer expert, traveled to London. Others left al-Qaeda, feeling that bin Laden had betrayed them by not standing up for them.
In June 1995, when Hosni Mubarak was visiting Ethiopia, an assassination attempt was carried out on the Egyptian president by the al-Qaeda affiliate EIJ. Years later, when I interrogated Ibrahim Ahmed Mahmoud al-Qosi, a Sudanese al-Qaeda member, he told me that Abu Hafs al-Masri gave him $5,000 to deliver to the would-be plotters and that, after the attack failed, the perpetrators hid in Sudan. The international community sanctioned Sudan after it refused to hand them over.
None of these incidents was capable of bringing an end to bin Laden’s tenure in Sudan: as long as he was spreading his wealth among the Sudanese leadership, the country was happy to have him. But when the Saudis decided to squeeze bin Laden financially—forcing the Saudi Binladin Group to stop sending him money—he faced real problems. Internally, he found it increasingly difficult to pay al-Qaeda members’ salaries; more importantly, his largesse in Sudan came to an end. The Sudanese decided that it was no longer worth bearing the burden of bin Laden and told him it was time to leave. On May 19, 1996, on a rented plane, he flew to Afghanistan accompanied by his trusted followers.
Two days later, on May 21, Abu Ubaidah al-Banshiri was aboard a ferry, the MV Bukoba, on Lake Victoria, traveling between two ports in Tanzania, from Bukoba to Mwanza, on his way home from visiting family members. The main purpose of the al-Qaeda military commander’s trip had been to oversee military operations in Kenya. Banshiri’s brother-in-law, Ashif Mohamed Juma, was traveling with him. The ferry’s capacity was 480 passengers, but it was carrying at least 1,200.
Abu Ubaidah and Juma had purchased tickets in a second-class cabin. Their room was about 7 by 10 feet, and it had four sets of bunk beds. They shared the cabin—Juma on one of the top bunk beds and Abu Ubaidah beneath him—with five other people. At a point in the crossing, where the water was 110 feet deep, the ferry started swaying wildly from side to side—its stabilizer wasn’t working.
Juma had been napping but was awakened by the rocking. “Abu Ubaidah,” he shouted, “something is wrong.”
“Don’t worry,” Abu Ubaidah replied. “We’re fine, go back to sleep. Allah is with us.” About five seconds later the boat tilted to one side and capsized. Screams were heard as people were thrown out of their beds. The cabin door was now located above Abu Ubaidah and Juma’s heads. Juma used some of the furniture to climb up and pull himself out. The others followed suit as water began seeping in. As Abu Ubaidah was climbing out—using the cabin door to propel himself—the door came off its hinges and he fell back into the cabin. Juma screamed his name and tried grabbing him, but a wall of water came crashing through the corridor, dragging Juma away. He tried to keep his head above water and found himself repeatedly knocking into bodies—whether the people were alive or dead he could not tell. He managed to swim out of the ship and then tried to swim toward what he thought was land.
He quickly realized that he would never reach land, and swam back toward the ferry, hoping to find something to grab onto. Other passengers were on floats, and he grabbed one, praying that Abu Ubaidah had somehow miraculously made it out alive. Two hours later a rescue ship arrived, and the survivors were taken to the port of Mwanza. Juma searched in vain for Abu Ubaidah. Back home, he passed the message to Abu Ubaidah’s al-Qaeda colleagues that he had drowned. The news reached bin Laden two days later, on May 23. He was devastated; not only was Abu Ubaidah his trusted deputy and the most effective and popular military leader al-Qaeda had, but bin Laden was counting on his guidance as he prepared to rebuild al-Qaeda in Afghanistan.
Bin Laden at first hadn’t believed that Abu Ubaidah had drowned. He suspected that he had been murdered, and he ordered Wadih el-Hage and Harun Fazul (both then in Nairobi) to investigate. Harun got to Mwanza first and began searching for Abu Ubaidah’s body, taking boats out on the lake to look for clues. Two weeks later el-Hage joined him. They stayed for two more weeks, before returning to Nairobi. From there they sent a report to bin Laden, stating their belief that Abu Ubaidah in fact had drowned. The FBI later found news television footage from the port capturing Harun frantically looking for Abu Ubaidah.
Faced with replacing Abu Ubaidah as al-Qaeda’s military commander, bin Laden appointed Abu Hafs to the position. A second vacancy—head of the East African cells—was filled by Abdullah Ahmed Abdullah, better known in al-Qaeda circles as Abu Mohammed al-Masri. In East Africa he operated under the alias Saleh.
In December 1994, Ramzi Yousef, then living in Manila, drew up plans both to assassinate Pope John Paul II when the pontiff visited the Philippines and to place bombs inside toys on U.S. airlines flying out of Bangkok. The attacks were referred to as the Bojinka plot. Yousef’s partner in the latter plan was his uncle Khalid Sheikh Mohammed. A Kuwaiti born to Pakistani parents, KSM had been yearning to get more actively involved in jihad ever since his nephew had earned notoriety for the World Trade Center bombing almost two years earlier. KSM had an identical twin brother who had allegedly been killed in Afghanistan during the first jihad.
Yousef had successfully conducted a trial run of the Bojinka plot, leaving a bomb under a passenger seat on a flight from Manila to Tokyo on December 11, 1995, that ripped apart the body of a Japanese businessman. The bomb also tore apart the cabin floor, exposing the cargo hold below, but the pilot was able to make an emergency landing on Okinawa. Yousef had successfully shown he could get a bomb on a plane—all that was needed to bring down the plane were more explosives.
With the test a success, Yousef hunkered down in Manila with KSM and began preparing to build bombs that would do far more damage. During a preparatory session, however, a fire started in Yousef’s apartment, and the police raided it and found evidence of the plot. Yousef somehow evaded arrest and went to Pakistan to continue to carry out his plan. On February 7, 1995, Pakistani intelligence officers captured him in Islamabad. Khalid Sheikh Mohammed—who had sent his nephew $600 just prior to the World Trade Center bombing, a transaction he perhaps now feared could be traced, implicating him—was in Qatar at the time. When he learned that Yousef had been arrested, he went into hiding.
Yousef was flown from Pakistan to Stewart Air National Guard Base, in Newburgh, New York, which is under the jurisdiction of the Southern District despite its distance from downtown Manhattan. At the base, he was transferred to an FBI helicopter to be flown to Manhattan. As the helicopter passed over the World Trade Center, one of Yousef’s guards nudged Yousef and pointed to the towers. “You see, it’s still standing,” he said.
“It wouldn’t be if we’d had more money,” Yousef replied.
Bin Laden had reason to resent having to leave Sudan: not only had his assets in the country been seized, but the Saudi monarchy had forced his family to cut him off, leaving him struggling financially. Still, he was returning to Afghanistan, a country that had played a significant role in his development, transforming him from a directionless Saudi millionaire into a respected mujahideen leader. A theme that bin Laden liked to promote to his followers was that their travels were like the Hijra—a reference to the year 622, when the Prophet was forced to leave Mecca and go to Medina. What at first had seemed to be a defeat for the Prophet had turned into a great advantage, as from the safety of Medina he gained followers and developed the religion, then spread it across the globe. Bin Laden often invoked comparisons between himself and the Prophet, whose work he wished to further. He was in the habit of quoting the Prophet, and he tried modeling his life on his—fasting, worshipping, even dressing accordingly—and making sure people noticed. In bin Laden’s mind, as I deduced from investigating al-Qaeda and its leadership, the appropriate prostration, when combined with rigorous, painstaking attention to public image, served to rally his spirits and those of his followers: his belief in himself grew, and the reverence with which his followers viewed him deepened. Through this combination of inner drive and public adulation he could continue the work that the Prophet had begun.
Al-Qaeda wasn’t starting from scratch in Afghanistan. In Sudan, bin Laden had built al-Qaeda into a global network, and this included setting up training camps and guesthouses across Afghanistan and Pakistan. His operatives had also formed relationships with Pakistani intelligence officials, and they had paved the way for bin Laden to be welcomed by the Taliban.
Bin Laden was curious to meet Mullah Omar, his new host and the leader of the Taliban. He didn’t know what Omar looked like; he was something of a recluse, and, as the Taliban had banned photography, no photographs had ever been taken of him, or at least none that were publicly available. He did know that Omar was blind in one eye—he had lost his sight while fighting with the mujahideen against the Soviets and their supporters.
Bin Laden was also eager to obtain a greater understanding of the Taliban itself. They had sprung seemingly out of nowhere in 1994 and had quickly imposed, on the parts of the country under their control, an interpretation of Islam based more on Pashtun tribal rituals than on religious tradition. All forms of entertainment were banned: television, sports—even, famously, kite flying. Girls’ schools were closed down, and women were not allowed out of their homes. Men without beards were arrested. The strictures amounted to a form of religious extremism unprecedented in Afghanistan, where religious tolerance had prevailed historically. The majority of the Muslim population in Afghanistan belong to the Sunni Hanafi sect, which is considered the most liberal of the four schools of law in Sunni Islam; most of the rest are Shiites.
Named after its founder, Imam Abu Hanifa, Hanafi jurisprudence is known for its use of reason in legal opinions, and for its decentralized decision making. These two traits helped make Hanafis into the most tolerant of Sunnis, and explain the historical coexistence and mutual prosperity of Sunnis and other Muslims, as well as Hindus, Sikhs, and Jews.
The shift in Afghanistan came with the Soviet jihad (1979–1989), when Saudi money came pouring into the country and, with these funds, clerics who espoused the far more unyielding Wahhabi version of Sunni Islam. Wahhabism, the dominant form of Sunni Islam in Saudi Arabia, is seen either as indistinguishable from Salafi Islam (the name means “forefather,” and practice is ideally based on unadulterated, centuries-old principles) or as a more strictly fundamentalist branch of Salafiya. As more and more Wahhabi clerics gained influence, Wahhabism began to spread among Pashtuns. Particularly vulnerable and susceptible to its precepts were the illiterate and the poor, many of whom simply followed what the clerics told them. When Wahhabism mixed with the takfiri ideology popularized by Qutb, intolerance and extremism resulted, and the jihadi Salafi movement was born.
The appeal of an alliance between the Taliban and al-Qaeda was also based on a shared connection to (or, perhaps more accurately, a manipulation of) traditional Wahhabism. The Taliban had imposed their Pashtun tribal code, Pashtunwali, on the areas they controlled, and then labeled those laws Sharia law. In reality their pre-Islamic tribal laws, while having become infused with elements of Islam over the ages, did not accurately represent Islamic Sharia. The Taliban also lacked the Islamic scholars and jurisprudence to support what they were doing. Wahhabism, with its reverence for old traditions and ancient moral conduct, was the closest form of Islam to the Taliban’s religious interpretations, and so they relied on Wahhabi scholars for religious justification.
Al-Qaeda claims to be a Wahhabi group, and it mixes traditional Wahhabism with Salafi and takfiri ideas—popular among jihadists—to create its own brand of terror. With both al-Qaeda and the Taliban claiming similar interpretations of Islam, an alliance between them in many ways was a natural theological marriage. Of course, al-Qaeda and the Taliban practice versions of radical Islam that are very different from each other. Al-Qaeda, for example, doesn’t subjugate women to the same extent as the Taliban. And both al-Qaeda’s and the Taliban’s forms of Islam are very different from traditional Wahhabism as practiced in Saudi Arabia and the Gulf states.
After the Soviet Union withdrew from Afghanistan in 1989, it took the victorious mujahideen another three years to topple the Soviet-backed dictator President Muhammad Najibullah. Various mujahideen commanders now in charge subsequently took control of different parts of the country, and most ordinary fighters returned home; others went to madrassas to study Islam. The fighters who returned home eventually saw that the mujahideen commanders were as corrupt as the regime they had replaced, and that true Islam, as they understood it from the standpoint of their Saudi-funded madrassas, was not being practiced or enforced. Groups of fighters, led by Mullah Omar, the leader of one small madrassa, began to come together with the idea of taking control of the country.
They called themselves the Taliban, from talib, meaning “student,” particularly a student of Islam. Supported by Pakistan and endorsed by the governments of Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, Taliban groups began growing in size and imposing their ultrastrict version of Islam. It was not a coincidence that the leaders of the Taliban came from the most uneducated and backward of Pashtun tribes. In Mullah Omar’s town, for example, girls had never had any schools in the first place.
As the Taliban gained control of more and more parts of the country, it began hosting radical Islamist groups from across the world, inviting them to use Afghanistan as a base. One such group was al-Qaeda. Worldwide reaction to the gradual takeover of Afghanistan by the Taliban was decidedly mixed. The United States initially supported the Taliban, which was seen as a barrier to the Shiite Iranian expansion in Afghanistan, and U.S. officials also welcomed the Taliban’s opposition to the drug trade. The fact that the Taliban was religiously intolerant—infamously destroying (together with al-Qaeda) two sixth-century Buddhas carved into a cliff in central Afghanistan—and were oppressive to women was not enough to change U.S. policy.
When the Taliban captured Kandahar in April 1996, Mullah Omar removed the rarely seen eighteenth-century Cloak of the Prophet Muhammad from the mosque in which it resides, showing it to the assembled crowd as part of an effort to demonstrate that he had been ordained by God to lead Afghanistan. His followers named him Amir al-Mu’minin, “commander of the faithful”—the emir of the country.
The Taliban took Kabul on September 26, 1996, and their first action was to capture Muhammad Najibullah, who had been driven from power and was living in a United Nations compound. They castrated the former president, dragged his body around the city tied to a jeep, shot him, and hanged him and his brother from a pole. The action brought forth a stream of recruits from madrassas, including those in Pakistan.
The largest grouping of opponents of the Taliban was the Northern Alliance, led by the charismatic mujahideen general Ahmed Shah Massoud. Called the Lion of Panjshir after the valley in which he was born (Panjshir means “valley of five lions”), Massoud, a Tajik and a devout Muslim, was one of the most successful commanders fighting the Russians, with numerous victories to his credit. He had also fought the communists in Afghanistan. The Soviets had come to see him as an unbeatable master of guerrilla warfare. However, Massoud’s weakness was that he was a poor diplomat, and the fact that he was a Tajik in a tribal society with a Pashtun majority prevented his rise to power before the Taliban came to dominate the country—and prevented would-be allies from joining the Northern Alliance. Nonetheless, many in the West eventually came to see him as the best hope in stopping the Taliban.
“Brothers, listen to me, I have something important to say.” Muhannad bin Attash stood up and raised his hands in the air to silence the young men who had been chatting among themselves. They fell silent and turned to face him. It was mid-1996, and they were gathered at an al-Qaeda–funded guesthouse on October Street in Sanaa, where young men in the neighborhood sympathetic to the radical jihad movement frequently gathered. Muhannad first reminded his audience of the heroics of the previous generation of mujahideen who had expelled the Russians from Afghanistan, and then, having sufficiently riled them up, told them that their opportunity had now come. He had, he continued, an important message from Osama bin Laden for them.
By this point the young men were listening intently. Muhannad was a persuasive speaker, and bin Laden was well known and admired for his role in the first Soviet jihad. Most of the young fighters were not newcomers to jihad, having served in Afghanistan, Chechnya, and Bosnia. Once again the enemy was the Russians, Muhannad said. And this time Russia had sent fighters into Tajikistan—to take control of that country and from there expand further into Muslim lands. The young men asked Muhannad how they could help Sheikh Osama counter the Russians. Muhannad replied that he was traveling the next day to Afghanistan to see bin Laden and would send back instructions.
Muhannad returned to Afghanistan, accompanied by another al-Qaeda member, Sa’ad al-Madani, later a bin Laden bodyguard. The two men went to see the al-Qaeda leader at the Jalalabad training camp. Muhannad had known bin Laden for most of his life. Their fathers had been friends growing up in Yemen, and Muhannad’s father had sent Muhannad to fight with bin Laden; he had soon become one of his most trusted aides.
Muhannad reported to bin Laden that he had the recruits that the al-Qaeda leader had asked him to find.
When bin Laden returned to Afghanistan from Sudan, his terrorist organization was in bad shape. Not only had the forced move from Sudan damaged morale, but funds were severely depleted, and, even more importantly, new recruits were not lining up. The death of Abu Ubaidah on Lake Victoria, too, had left a hole.
There was no shortage of young Muslims willing to engage in jihad. Many had been inspired by the Afghan jihad against the Soviets and by the theological arguments put forward by leaders like Abdullah Azzam to fight “oppressors” in Bosnia and Chechnya. They traveled to those places through the same infrastructure that supported the Afghan jihad—the recruitment channels, funding, NGOs, and travel facilitators were all still in place. The problem was that al-Qaeda’s jihad was nontraditional, and most young Muslim fighters didn’t relate to it. Their definition of the obligation of jihad centered on physically righting wrongs and expelling aggressors who were actually occupying Muslim lands or oppressing Muslims. According to this thinking, the first Afghan war was justified because the Soviet Union had invaded Muslim lands. They fought in Bosnia and Chechnya because they were told that Muslim women and children were being raped and slaughtered.
The idea of a secret war of terrorism was unfamiliar to them. (Egyptians, through Zawahiri and others, were the only ones truly familiar with this type of war and its theological justifications.) The broad goal of fighting America didn’t make sense to the young fighters. What Muslim lands was America occupying? What crimes was America perpetrating against Muslims? These were the questions young men asked al-Qaeda recruiters. Their past experience with America had been positive—the United States had been on the side of Muslims in Afghanistan, Bosnia, and Chechnya.
Bin Laden realized that to rope these young men in, he needed to create a traditional enemy for them to fight. The Tajik militants fighting the Russians at the time announced that they would welcome new fighters. Providing conventional battles and an enemy would surely bring some of the former mujahideen and veterans of the Bosnian and Chechnyan wars back to Afghanistan: the land of jihad, as bin Laden loved to call it.
After discussing details with bin Laden, Muhannad sent a fax to the guesthouse in Sanaa about two weeks following his and Sa’ad al-Madani’s return to Afghanistan, instructing the emir in Sanaa to inform those who had been present when he had spoken that the Tajik front “was open for jihad.” He provided directions for those wishing to join him at the front. Among the young men who would heed the call to arms was Abu Jandal.
Later in 1996, forty fighters showed up in Taloqan, Afghanistan, which served as the base camp for the Tajik jihad. Most of the forty were from the Arabian Peninsula (Yemen and Saudi Arabia); two were from Pakistan. The Tajik contingent called themselves Katibat al-Shimal, literally “the Northern Battalion” but known as the Northern Group (not to be confused with the Northern Alliance) because of the location of their operations: in the north of Afghanistan, near the Tajik border. Muhannad introduced the new fighters to the leader of the group, Hamza al-Ghamdi, standing unnoticed in their midst. When he came forward, a hush fell over the group: Hamza was a legend in Afghanistan from the first Soviet war. He had fought many storied battles against the Soviets; in the 1987 Battle of Jaji, in Jalalabad, he, bin Laden, and fifty mujahideen were said to have held off two hundred Soviet Spetsnaz. Hamza was muscular and strong and loved to wrestle.
He trained the new recruits hard, and they gained deep respect for his skill and commitment. Once he deemed them ready, the group moved to Badakhshan, which served as a staging area before the entry into Tajikistan. They settled outside the city of Fayzabad; Hamza knew its Afghan military commander, Khirad Mand, from the first Afghan jihad, and Mand agreed to give the Northern Group his protection. A week later they marched toward Tajikistan. It was snowing when they arrived at the border, making it impossible for them to travel any further, so they set up camp there for the night.
The next morning they were visited by Abdullah Noori, the leader of the Tajik mujahideen and of Hizb Wahdat Islami, a Tajik Islamic party. Abdullah Noori addressed the fighters. “Thank you for coming. We are honored that you are helping us. We need you to remain here for now while my Tajiks scout the area for Russians. My men are more familiar with the terrain and are less likely to be spotted and captured.”
Hamza agreed to the plan. Eight hours later Noori returned to announce that his scouts had found Russians stationed at the border and that entering Tajikistan would be prohibitively dangerous. They would have to wait until the Russians moved on. Asked how long that would take, Noori replied, “Days, or even weeks, we don’t know.” The Northern Group settled in uncertainly.
One evening Hamza summoned Salim Hamdan, a promising recruit. “We can’t stay here much longer,” he told the young man. “Our group members are having problems with the local Afghanis. They keep demanding more money, weapons, and supplies from us. We keep giving them things, and they keep asking for more. We worry that if we don’t give them what they want, they’ll try to hand us over to the Russians.”
Hamdan was considered trustworthy and honest. Hamza told him, “I need you to travel to Fayzabad and tell Khirad Mand what is going on.” The Afghan military commander who had given the new mujahideen his protection had not accompanied them.
Hamdan did as he was told, returning two days later. “Mand says we should leave this area,” he told Hamza, “and if we go to Fayzabad, he’ll give us his protection.” Hamza agreed that they had to leave. They traveled back to Taloqan and then went to Kunduz, a city in northern Afghanistan, where they stayed at a Tajik refugee camp, one of several set up for those fleeing the civil war. Their aim was to get to Jalalabad or Kabul. The main routes, however, were cut off, as the Taliban and the Northern Alliance were engaged in heavy fighting.
Hamza contacted a Northern Alliance commander he knew from the Soviet jihad; the commander helped the new fighters leave, and they eventually made it to Kabul. Hamza, Hamdan, and another operative, known as Qutaybah, stayed behind at the border to tie up loose ends. They then boarded a Northern Alliance helicopter in Taloqan and flew to the Panjshir Valley.
In Kabul, the young Northern Group fighters fell into a period of disgruntlement and began assailing Muhannad with questions about the purpose of their being in Afghanistan. They had several legitimate gripes: that they had come to fight but were instead running; that they had come to engage the Tajiks in battle but that that conflict appeared to have ended; and that they did not wish to get caught in an Afghani civil war.
“Brothers, I understand your frustration,” Muhannad told the young men, “but before you go home, I want you to meet Sheikh Osama. He has specifically asked to see ‘the brothers of the Northern Group.’ You’ve come all this way—at least hear what this great jihadist has to say.”
The al-Qaeda leader hosted them at his Jihad Wal training camp, where he and his top associates, Abu Hafs al-Masri, Saif al-Adel, and Saleh (by now using the alias Abu Mohammed al-Masri), greeted them and explained al-Qaeda’s goals. Bin Laden spoke of what was going on in Saudi Arabia: “the plundering of oil by the Americans and their imperialist plans to occupy the Arabian Peninsula and the Holy Lands.”
Of the forty fighters, twenty-three members of the group left the training camp to return home. Abu Jandal, who remained, explained to me years later: “The brothers from the Northern Group are fighters who fight the enemy face-to-face. They don’t understand bin Laden’s war and the new jihad, so they went home.”
For three days the remaining members of the group listened as bin Laden presented them with news clippings and BBC documentaries designed to convince them that the presence of U.S. troops in Saudi Arabia and the Arabian Peninsula was an “occupation.” “You therefore have a duty to expel the infidels from the peninsula, as the Prophet has ordered,” bin Laden told them. He said that if they had any additional questions, they should address Muhannad. The problem was that a degree of unease had begun to infiltrate the group, with certain members having grown suspicious of Muhannad. They had come to realize that Muhannad was much closer to bin Laden than they had previously understood. Muhannad told those who consulted him that bin Laden’s jihad was just, and that they—Arabs from the Gulf—needed to ensure that Egyptians who had surrounded bin Laden didn’t run al-Qaeda.
Jihad meant different things to different fighters. The Egyptians had what they viewed as jihad back home: assassinations and bombs to try to topple their government. Others, who had fought in Bosnia, Somalia, and Chechnya, saw the Egyptian version of “jihad” as terrorism; to them, jihad meant fighting face-to-face.
Eventually all of the remaining fighters agreed to pledge bayat, or allegiance, to bin Laden. A few offered only a conditional bayat, agreeing to join al-Qaeda and fight America with the proviso that if a jihad effort with a clearer justification existed on another front, they would be free to join that instead.
In addition to Abu Jandal, among the members of the Northern Group who joined al-Qaeda at this time were Walid bin Attash (a younger brother of Muhannad’s), whose nom de guerre was Khallad; Abdul Rahim Hussein Muhammad Abda al-Nashiri; Salim Hamdan; Mohamed Rashed Daoud al-Owhali; and Jaffar al-Hada. Not only Abu Jandal but all of the rest of this group were fighters bin Laden had privately marked as future key operatives. Their names became central to the subsequent al-Qaeda attacks on the embassies in Africa, the USS Cole bombing, and 9/11.
In mid-1996, a few weeks before bin Laden had departed for Afghanistan, Madani al-Tayyib had called Jamal al-Fadl into his office in Khartoum. Since the uranium job, Fadl had continued to handle missions for al-Qaeda. He walked into Tayyib’s office with his usual big smile. “As-Salamu Alaykum. Brother, how are you?”
“Wa Alaykum as-Salam,” Tayyib replied without a smile.
“What’s wrong?” Fadl asked.
“I want to speak to you about a serious matter. Somebody told me that you’re taking a commission on our goods that you are selling.” One of Fadl’s jobs at the time was to sell goods al-Qaeda produced to local businesses.
“That’s not true.”
“Somebody very reliable told us that you are.”
“I’m not,” Fadl replied. “Have them bring evidence. It’s a lie!”
Fadl was taken to a meeting with more al-Qaeda officials. Again Tayyib confronted him, and again Fadl denied it.
“Look, Jamal, a guy named Fazhil who you do business with—you know him, right?” Fadl nodded. “He told someone, who told us, that you take a commission.”
Confronted with more evidence, Fadl relented. “Okay,” he said, shaking his head, “I’m sorry, I did take a commission.” He had been charging local businesses a commission in exchange for selling them al-Qaeda’s goods, netting himself around $110,000.
“I must say that we cannot believe you did this. You were one of the first people to join al-Qaeda. How could you steal from us?”
Fadl’s face went red and he stared at the floor to avoid the look of condemnation in Tayyib’s eyes. “Please forgive me,” he said. “I will try my best to get the money back.”
“What should we tell bin Laden? He knows you swore bayat to him. We know that you’re basically a good person, and that you fought hard in Afghanistan. Why do you need the money?”
“The truth is that we are working hard, but the Egyptians are earning more money than the rest of us,” Fadl replied. His reply was a reflection of the constant tension in al-Qaeda between Egyptians, who dominated leadership positions and who were therefore paid more than other operatives, and members from elsewhere. Many of the Egyptians came with more experience, which is why they were higher up in the group. There was general resentment over the perceived inequity.
“That’s no excuse to steal.”
Fadl returned to Tayyib with about a quarter of the money he owed. The rest he had already spent, buying land for his sister and for himself. He had also bought a car. When he confessed to Tayyib that he could not come up with the remainder of the money, Tayyib told him that he needed to speak to bin Laden.
The al-Qaeda leader had been briefed on the matter. “I don’t care about the money,” bin Laden told him. “I care about you. You were with us from the start in Afghanistan. We give you a salary, we give you everything. When you travel we give you extra money. We pay your medical bills. So why do you need to steal?”
“For the reasons we have spoken about before, Abu Abdallah—because the Egyptians get more money than the rest of us, and they joined al-Qaeda later. It’s not fair.”
“That’s still no reason to steal,” bin Laden replied. “If you need the money you can always come to us. You can say, ‘I want a house’ or ‘I want a car’—and we’d give it to you. But you didn’t do that. You just stole the money.”
“I’m sorry, and I’ve given back what I have left, but I don’t have any more. I ask for your forgiveness and hope that you can grant it, and that you can accept my apology. I did my best, and I wish to remain a member of al-Qaeda.”
“There’s no forgiveness until you bring all of the money back,” bin Laden replied. The two men had arrived at a stalemate: Fadl continued to maintain that the salary scale was biased, and bin Laden argued that if he forgave Fadl, other members of the organization would think that it was all right to steal as long as they sought forgiveness.
Finding himself in a bind, Fadl walked into an American embassy in one of the countries in the Horn of Africa. He waited in a line for visa applications, and when he got to the front of the line, he was was greeted by a female clerk. “I don’t want a visa,” Fadl said, “but I have some information for you about people who want to do something against your government.”
The woman hesitated, unsure what to do. A brief conversation ensued, and she explained to Fadl that she would bring the issue to a colleague. She disappeared to another part of the embassy. Twenty minutes later she returned and asked Fadl to come into an inner office to resume the conversation.
“I was in Afghanistan,” Fadl began, “and I work with a group that is trying to make war against your country. They are trying very hard to do this. Maybe war inside the United States or maybe against the U.S. Army outside. They also are planning to bomb an embassy.”
The clerk asked Fadl how he had come by this information. “I worked with them for more than nine years,” Fadl said, “and now I’ve left the group. If you help me, I’ll tell you everything you need.” She asked Fadl where he was living, and he explained that he was living in a hotel and gave her the address.
“Don’t leave the hotel,” the clerk instructed him. “Stay out of sight.” She left the room to obtain cash for Fadl. “Here’s some money to keep you going,” she told him.
Fadl returned to the embassy a few days later and met with the same clerk. She had more questions and was trying, he sensed, to verify that he was a credible source. He answered all of her questions, and she asked him to return later that week, which he did, meeting more officials. Eventually Fadl met with Dan Coleman and two assistant U.S. attorneys from the Southern District of New York, Patrick Fitzgerald and Kenneth Karas.
Originally he didn’t tell them why he had left al-Qaeda, but he gave them enough information for them to determine that he could be believed. He returned to the embassy repeatedly for further questioning. About two weeks into the process, his interlocutors told him that they knew he had committed some offense in Sudan, and that if Fadl could not tell them what it was, they couldn’t trust him. Assuming that they must have somehow found out about the money he had been skimming off the top of his deals with local businesses, he sheepishly confessed, and with that he opened up: telling his questioners, in great detail, about an organization called al-Qaeda, its structure, its leaders, its members, and its operations.
Being back in Afghanistan reconnected bin Laden to the “golden chain” of money from Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, and elsewhere that had once funded the mujahideen and that now was funding the Taliban in the same way. Funding rippled out to al-Qaeda through Taliban channels, but bin Laden reactivated his own connection to the network. In this way he was able, beginning in 1996, to begin adding to his Afghani bases, buying construction equipment to help him build caves and facilities; he also continued to build his operations around the world. The cash that poured in from sympathetic Saudis, in particular, enabled him to make deeper inroads into countries such as Albania and Yemen, as well as into London.
Bin Laden’s oath of loyalty to Mullah Omar, which by 1997 had become public knowledge, gave al-Qaeda freedom of movement, allowing the group to use the Afghani national airline to transport money, weapons, and operatives, and relieving them of any worries about crossing controlled borders. Bin Laden in turn provided money to the Taliban, and among the gifts he lavished on Mullah Omar was a house for him and his family.
Bin Laden promised the Taliban that he would keep a low profile, but soon he was attracting attention, notably following his March 1997 interview with Peter Arnett on CNN. Shortly after, Mullah Omar had bin Laden moved to Kandahar, where he himself was headquartered, so that he could keep a closer watch on him.
The CNN interview was bin Laden’s first television appearance, and questions were submitted in advance. When asked about criticisms he had made of the Saudi royal family, he accused them of being “but a branch or an agent of the U.S.,” and he spoke about his jihad against America. The Saudis were furious—especially so because they were funding the Taliban—and Prince Turki bin Faisal al-Saud, director general of al-Mukhabarat al-Aamah, the Saudi Arabian intelligence agency, received a promise from Mullah Omar on behalf of the Taliban that bin Laden would be expelled.
On February 23, 1998, al-Qaeda issued its second fatwa declaring war against the United States:
The Arabian Peninsula has never—since God made it flat, created its desert, and encircled it with seas—been stormed by any forces like the crusader armies spreading in it like locusts, eating its riches and wiping out its plantations.… For over seven years the United States has been occupying the lands of Islam in the holiest of places, the Arabian Peninsula, plundering its riches, dictating to its rulers, humiliating its people, terrorizing its neighbors, and turning its bases in the Peninsula into a spearhead through which to fight the neighboring Muslim peoples.… The ruling to kill the Americans and their allies—civilians and military—is an individual duty for every Muslim who can do it in any country in which it is possible to do it, in order to liberate the al-Aqsa Mosque and the holy mosque [the Grand Mosque] from their grip, and in order for their armies to move out of all the lands of Islam, defeated and unable to threaten any Muslim. This is in accordance with the words of Almighty God: “and fight the pagans all together as they fight you all together,” and “fight them until there is no more tumult or oppression, and there prevail justice and faith in God.”
“Enough about al-Qaeda,” Jamal al-Fadl said to me one day after we had spent the morning talking about bin Laden at an FBI safe house, “let’s play soccer.” He had a big grin and the look of a little kid. Soon after he had agreed to cooperate, Fadl had been moved to the United States and put into the Witness Protection Program. He became known to the U.S. intelligence community as “Junior” and was a source of extensive information for us.
Before he arrived, we had little understanding of what exactly al-Qaeda was and how it operated. Even in 1997, the CIA’s Counterterrorism Center described bin Laden as an “extremist financier.” It was information that Fadl told us that enabled the United States to credibly indict bin Laden in 1998. He explained the organization’s structure, cover businesses, and the entire network from its inception until 1996, the day he walked into the U.S. Embassy in the Horn of Africa.
Junior, to my initial surprise, didn’t seem to be religious. Nonwork conversations focused on money, women, and soccer. Fadl was born in 1963 in Ruffa, Sudan, and had lived in the United States. He had worked at al-Farouq Mosque, helping Mustafa Shalabi raise funds for Afghanistan. On Shalabi’s recommendation he had traveled to Afghanistan to fight, picked up the alias Abu Bakr Sudani, and joined al-Qaeda—becoming only the third member of the organization, he claimed.
I met Junior only a few times; he was primarily handled by my fellow FBI agents Mike Anticev (John Anticev’s brother) and Mike Driscoll, who had the tough job of managing him: Junior’s taste for the good life made it difficult, at times, to keep him under control. At one point he tried to coach a local girls’ soccer team, and another time, while he was meant to be hiding his identity, he told a state trooper who’d pulled him over for speeding that he knew Osama bin Laden. Dan Coleman also had to weigh in as a father figure to push Junior to do the right thing.
All the trouble was worth it. The information Junior gave the FBI on al-Qaeda included details of its setup, payroll, and banking networks, even its travel warnings: don’t dress like a Muslim (wear Western clothes and shave your head); carry cologne and cigarettes. It was also Junior who outlined the story of al-Qaeda’s efforts to purchase the bogus uranium.
Eight months before September 11, 2001, Junior appeared as a key prosecution witness in federal court in Manhattan in the trial of various al-Qaeda members, including Wadih el-Hage, accused of involvement in the 1998 East African embassy bombings. He explained to the judge and jury what he had told Dan Coleman and the prosecutors years earlier—how al-Qaeda operated, what he did for them, what the front companies were, and the individuals he knew.
The U.S. government’s indictment of bin Laden, informed largely by intelligence gained from Junior, had been secured almost three years earlier: on June 10, 1998, bin Laden was charged with being the leader of a terrorist organization and with planning, and taking part in, terrorist activities. On November 4, 1998, the indictment was unsealed and updated to include the East African embassy bombings.
While the United States was thus pursuing bin Laden, he continued to be a cause of concern to Saudi Arabia. He had persisted in publicly criticizing the Saudi government, and he supported terrorist acts against the kingdom. In the spring of 1998, Prince Turki, on behalf of Saudi Arabia, had asked the Taliban to expel bin Laden. According to Turki, Mullah Omar agreed. The promise, however, wasn’t kept.