Walking Ghost: Welcome to Terrorist University

by Nicholas Black

  Now for the bad news: The Former Soviet Union misplaced more than a dozen of them. Most likely some enterprising Russian Army officers got tired of being paid in Vodka and decided to try their hand at capitalism. I recently heard reports from a Russian officer who was assassinated in the late '90s. He claimed that the number of missing nuclear devices was over 80. Multiply 80 x a couple of kilotons a pop and the result is an astounding amount of worldwide damage. And we can't just blame the Russians, because the united States has also 'lost possession' of at least two, and possibly as many as seven, Nuclear devices. So these little death boxes are floating around out there. It's just a matter of when one will be detonated.

  Places like the Alkifah Refugee Center made the purchase of high-tech weapons and electronics a possibility. Perhaps Jonny terrorist wants to bring down a plane at LAX. He contacts his handler, who then makes contact with the center. Then the finances are made available somewhere like Libya, Tunisia, or Algeria. A numbered bank account gets a mysterious infusion of a couple hundred thousand bucks and out of the darkness comes a Stinger missile. That little device then makes its journey across the pond in the back of a fruit container, or perhaps in a shipment of raw steel or lead ingots. Next stop . . . Mexico most likely, although any of the Central American countries will do. It's fairly easy to payoff a Honduran Customs official. And besides, only about 5% of the cargo that enters a country is ever searched anyway, so it's a pretty good gamble that you could probably ship right through the docks without anyone raising a suspicious eye. Quick little trip through Mexico in a truck carrying old tires and refuse, and the u.s. border is your last little hurdle. A Jeep at the front of the line gets popped with a pound of weed and the next 40 cars and trucks go driving by while the guy in the tire truck winks at the Jeep's driver.

  A month later Jonny terrorist is reading the instructions on the side of his Stinger missile while your plane prepares for takeoff. His eighth grade education doesn't hamper him because there are idiot-proof drawings that are silk screened onto the side of the tube along with the instructions. And too bad for you that a Senator, whose known to be an outspoken supporter of Muslim cleansing, happens to be riding in first class. And the thing about all this is, it came from Nasser. It would be so simple that a child could do it. Kind of makes you feel all warm and safe, doesn't it?

  Nasser also gave me examples of how biological weapons could be smuggled in, but then he stopped half-way through the conversation and tilted his head back with a smile. When I asked him what he was thinking he told me that you didn't even need to smuggle in a biological weapon . . . they're already here. All you need are competent engineers and scientists. Put in a call and soon enough the Refugee Center will be making the connections for you. How'd you like an attack of Botulla, or Anthrax, or Cesium. Heck, you can pick up Cesium at almost every hospital in the united States. If they've got x-ray machines, you're in the money. Botulla . . . you can grow that on your own. It wouldn't take much to infect a city's water supply and within a week about half a million people would be dead, another million fighting for their lives.

  I came to the realization that if anyone really wants to get us . . . we're hit. There's just no stopping it if the perpetrators are willing to die in the effort.

  And part of the framework that makes all kinds of nasty things possible are organizations like the Alkifah center.

  Now, I have done a bit of subsequent research on the Alkifah center. The reason was that after I turned over this information to my attorney, I got news from Nasser that the accounts had been frozen, and that they had lost several million dollars of 'aid' money. This was told to me only about a week or two after I passed on the name to my attorney. But there is a history behind the Alkifah Center.

  At the height of the anti-Soviet Conflict in Afghanistan, the U. S. set up a supply area in the rather dangerous town Peshawar. At the time, the CIA was backing a large rebel group of mujahadeen. The leader of this group was none other than . . . Gulbiddin Hekmatyar. Many billions of dollars made their way from Saudi Arabia and from the U. S. and all kinds of weapons were delivered. In the middle of all of this was a Palestinian doctor named Sheikh Abdullah Azzam. He was one of the original founders of Islamic Jihad.

  Azzam created the first center in Peshawar in the early '80s and it was called Alkifah. Over the next 10 or 15 years he set up branches in different mosques in the united Kingdom, France, Germany, Norway, many different middle eastern locations, as well as the united States. It was known as Makhtab al-Khidimat(MAK), or the Services Office for the Mujahadeen.

  The center that Nasser told me about, in New York, was the flagship center in the u.S. It is located on the ground floor of the Al Farooq Mosque in Brooklyn. Other locations were opened in Tucson, Atlanta, Boston, Chicago, Pittsburgh, and several other cities. There were well over 30 different locations throughout the US.

  In the mid-1980's Azzam was introduced to a young Saudi billionaire by the name of Osama Bin Laden. His family owned a large construction company and was delivering tons of equipment and machines. When they started building roads and caves and tunnels, it was bin Laden's equipment that did the bulk of the work. Later, Azzam convinced bin Laden to become a financial supporter of his Alkifah Centers, and other support organizations.

  Azzam wanted to use funds primarily for the reconstruction of the government in Afghanistan. Bin Laden was pushing more towards a worldwide 'Jihad,' and eventually the two parted ways. The rift escalated until November 24, 1989, when a car bomb in Peshawar exploded killing Azzam and his two sons.

  I later learned, through several news articles and related books, that the FBI had the Alkifah Center in Brooklyn under surveillance, as early as 1989, after reports about a group of Arab men going to a shooting range and practicing together. One time where bigoted stereotyping might have been correct. If you were an aspiring young terrorist then the place for you was

  Alkifah.

  I must be clear on this, I did not know all of that background information while I was in Spain. But I knew that it was important. I understood what kind of a role it played in the overall Jihad effort.

  And I knew that it was a freaking cash cow. But I'm still not sure what the exact moment was when Nasser started to tell me things that were substantial.

  Soldiers don't normally learn such information because it makes them too dangerous if captured and interrogated. There's a point where your usefulness is outweighed by your knowledge of specific information. Ergo, you're better dead, where you can't talk, than alive where people can hook your ass up to a car battery and make you sing. The general rule is, keep 'em stupid.

  I know there are tough-guys out there saying, “you could do whatever you want to me and I won't talk.” Yeah, that sounds nice, but if I walk in the room with a jar of petroleum jelly and a rusted curling iron, you bet your ass you're about to talk.

  Anyway, the kinds of things he was telling me weren't need-to-know information, at least not for the recruitment of another Jihadi. But as I later learned, I was not being prepped for a normal job.

  Since my intelligence only ever went in one direction - from me to them I don't know what the government's opinion of the center was.

  But what I took from all of that was: If the bad guys needed anything . . . money wasn't it. They had plenty. And it was coming from right here in the United States. Now, one possibility was that Nasser was giving me information that had already been compromised. The technique of 'sharing without revealing. ' He might have been trying to draw me in without exposing anything of real value. It is a standard intelligence technique, and Nasser was a military trained intelligence officer long before he took up the cause of global Jihad. I believe that he wanted me to know things that could be verified. He had designs, and he wanted to make sure that I understood their capabilities . . . if only to frighten me.

  Who buys the weapons that end up killing Americans?

  Americans.

  FIFTEEN

  As Nasser and I
learned more about each other, and the motivating factors behind our lives, we began to ponder some of the edgier subjects. I remember a particular conversation that started about modern weapons and technology, and evolved into a tactical discussion about guerrilla maneuvers.

  My original stance was that sometimes technology is the deciding factor in a battle. I use the nuclear bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki as an example of how a new technology ended a major war. Nasser, quite aptly pointed out vietnam and Iraq. Well, one could argue that as far as the body count goes the u.s. had dominated both conflicts.

  But it's not just about the body count. America could never take from the vietnamese the 'will to fight.' And there doesn't seem to be any indication of the Iraqi insurgents laying down their arms any time soon.

  Nasser used the example of the fighting in Afghanistan to further illustrate his view. He explained that they were heavily out-gunned, out manned, and the technology was so far advanced of what they had that a head to head battle against the Russians would be suicide. "Suicide without a purpose is stupid."

  "We would use the things which made them powerful to kill them," he explained. He told me that they had eventually received Stinger missiles from the Americans, but at first they were very limited in their weaponry. They had plenty of small arms, and light artillery. But none of that was doing them any good because they couldn't get close enough to use their weapons. So what they decided to do was play game of cat and mouse. They would take the regular Russian soldiers and weapons out of the equation. By engaging the Russians at unpredictable times and locations they forced the use of more specialized troops. They would make the Russians chase them around the mountains, through the caves, in and around terrains that were difficult to navigate. They became formless and invisible. This frustrated to Russians to no end.

  "You have to find us to fight us," he said as his eyes narrowed. "We would hide in the snow while a couple of our men would run out in the open. When the Russians would land their Special Forces (Spetznats) in the large helicopters we would wait with the rockets (RPGs, SA-7b Grails). You see, their large Helicopters could take direct hits from the missiles if their side doors were secured. But when the troops started to exit we would raise up from the snow and fire on them with the missiles, directly inside the helicopter's troop compartment. Once the helicopter was destroyed the rest of our men would begin with the Kalashnikovs(AK-47, 7.62 assault rifle)."

  Now, this system may have been pre-Stinger tactics, because there isn't a helicopter that can withstand a direct hit from a Stinger. Perhaps the muj ahadeen were convinced by all kinds of propaganda that those Russian helicopters were indestructible, but I'm sure that after firing a couple Stingers all of their previous doubts were cast aside. But again, these were simple farmers fighting against a far superior army and all the haunting reputation and stigma that naturally followed.

  So then the Russians were scared to land their troops. They had to dumb down their strategies. And that further leveled the playing field. Piece by piece these nomadic farm people found a way to dismantle one of the largest and most advanced militaries in the world. Sure, the Afghanis had aid money and weapons support, but they weren't flying F-16s, and running Bradley fighting vehicles through the mountains. They simply refused to give up, and found a way to best a larger and more advanced mili tary using guerrilla fighting techniques. And like for the U.S. in Vietnam, the Russians never found a way to take away the Afghani people's will to fight.

  You cannot beat an enemy like that. You either kill every last one of them, or pick up your gear and go home. And I couldn't really argue with what he was saying. Vietnam, Afghanistan, Algeria, Palestine, the Chechen Republic, the list goes on. And that's just in our time. go back 2000 years: The Greeks, Persians, Mongols, British, Zulus, French, Russians, Americans, the list goes on. There is something about the "Warrior" tribal societies that drives them to find a way to win. A people whose backs are against the wall will always fight harder than those with options.

  I wondered, as we talked about the sheer number of weapons the mujahadeen had at their disposal, where did all the missiles go? I asked him how many Stingers they received from the Americans. He estimated the number at somewhere around 15,000. To me, that number seems high. He may have been told that as part of his own people's propaganda, or embellished a bit . . . but it is still daunting if even half that many Stingers made their way to Afghanistan.

  So then I wondered about how many of these man-portable shoulder fired weapons were still in Afghanistan.

  "Oh, they are all gone now. We moved them."

  "How many were left after the war in Afghanistan?" I asked.

  And he kind of looks up and does some mental math, "Ten to twelve . . . uh, thousand."

  Oh.

  He then told me what happened to the remaining missiles. They had been boxed up for dispersal allover the middle east. First stop . . . Kabul, Afghanistan. They were then moved in bundles to Egypt where they were loaded into several trucks. Then some of them headed west through Libya, while another batch headed into western Europe. The trucks that headed through Libya towards Algeria had a little trouble with a Mig-29, but most of the Stingers made it safely into Algeria. Nasser smiled to himself as he thought back. I believe it brought him great pride to constantly beat all attempts at undermining them. The other Stingers, the ones that headed into Western Europe and are still available through arms dealers in Split, in the former Yugoslavia. So . . . they're out there to be had.

  The reality is that those missiles could be anywhere, now. Who really knows? Arms dealers don't take weekends and holidays off. And either do the 'bad guys.' Remember: One man's militant is another man's freedom fighter. So the moral side of arms dealing never comes into play. War is good for everyone, at least . . . in the eyes of the arms dealers and developers. Just ask the chairmen of Lockheed, General Dynamics, etc.

  It's been twenty years, and I haven't heard about any large cache's of Stinger missiles being found or used. So it stands to reason that they will pop up sometime in the near future.

  I was no longer unsure about the capabilities of Nasser and his compatriots. They had plenty of money, and plenty of guns. They could get their hands on missiles and other explosives. They had the personnel to devise improvised biological weapons. They could travel. They could live frugally, or extravagantly. They could fit in with our society, and we could not do so in theirs. And if they ever wanted to get us, whether it be low-tech or high-tech . . . we couldn't stop them.

  We started to become so comfortable with each other that I felt safe asking these kinds of questions. We were still discussing the Qu'ran each day. I learned about the prophets, and the Caliphate, and the tenents that were the foundation of the Muslim faith. Strangely, what I read in the Quran was not that much different from what I had read long ago when Christianity was being poured down my throat. The stories were almost identical. I didn't see 'kill the Americans' one time in the text. Religion was still not something for me, personally, but I tried to leave the door open. I wanted Nasser to believe that I was convertible to the faith. He was under the impression that I had a distaste for religion. And he was basically correct. But he believed that I would become a Muslim if I saw it for what it really was. Hey, I'd worship the Frog God if that was what the job required.

  Each day we talked about the Qu'ran, and each day Nasser saw that I was more and more interested. He was clear that he didn't want me to convert to gain his approval. Although there were several people around us in the unit that tried to do so. We would hear people yelling down from their windows, "Nasser!

  Nasser! I want to become a Muslim."

  He would give them a polite smile and a nod and we would continue walking. When we weren't facing them Nasser would tell me, "They only want to be Muslim because it is associated with violence in Media. For them it is fad. 'Jihad,' make a bomb, shoot machine gun!" Well, he did make it sound like fun.

  One day we were resting because Nasser
's feet were aching. It was one of those warm, humid days, where you're always sticky and the air is thick. He looks across the yard at the large concrete wall, occasionally glancing at the razor wire above. "You know how to fight."

  "Sure," I said. He wasn't really asking me, so much as just making the statement.

  "You know all sorts of things about fighting that I don't know," he said softly. His head turned and his eyes met mine.

  I searched the periphery and nobody was nearby. "Yeah, I know some things."

  "Things you could teach," he said. "I have seen you working with Pasquale." He had seen me training our Italian friend in Brasilian Jiu-jitsu and some Thai kickboxing. We did it for a workout mostly, but also to stay sharp. On occasion I had seen Nasser watching us - and that was not an accident, it was by design.

  "Sure. I could teach a group of guys to fight. I could bring them from the ground up. Wrestling, striking, shooting, long-rifle, small unit tactics, basic small boat handling, VBSS(Visit Board Search and Seizure). I know all sorts of things."

  "How much time would it take to train a group?" he asked rather apprehensively.

  "They already speak English?"

  "Yes, they would."

  I considered his question for a moment, did a few calculations in my head. "I'd need a place where we wouldn't be bothered for about four to six months. I'd need the equipment, guns, gear, stuff like that. Keep the groups small, no more than twenty men." I nodded to him. "But I could do it. No problem."

  He sat back, his arms on the concrete supporting him as he looked up towards the sky, lost in thought.

  He didn't say anything else about it that day. The next words he spoke were about the proper way to kill an animal for the purposes of eating. You have to sneak up on a camel, he said, or they'll start crying. I didn't know that camels could cry.