Chapter Seven
Osama bin Laden, Sheikh
Abdullah Azzam, and
the Birth of al Qaeda
EVERYONE KNOWS THE STORY of Osama bin Laden—how he went to Afghanistan to fight the Russians and ended up waging jihad against the entire Western world. But how many know of his predecessor Sheikh Abdullah Azzam, the Palestinian refugee who first preached worldwide jihad and laid the groundwork for bin Laden’s rise to power? In fact it was Azzam’s spellbinding oratory that inspired the 24-year-old Osama bin Laden to leave the comfort of his Saudi Arabian family empire in 1985 and move to Afghanistan to fight the Soviets. Moreover, Azzam’s Alkhifa network—originally a fundraiser for the Afghan mujahideen—eventually metamorphosed into bin Laden’s al Qaeda (“The Base”), which is now terrorizing the world.
Most important is how both Azzam and bin Laden were able to use Islamic organizations in the United States to build their networks. It was the records of Azzam’s Alkhifa organization that we spirited out of the Brooklyn basement when they had been moved there from the Al-Farook Mosque after the first World Trade Center bombing. It was in the United States that Azzam did much of his early fundraising. It is through Islamic networks in the U.S. that bin Laden has shopped for much of the high-tech gear that runs his worldwide network. Indeed, after Hamas, al Qaeda has achieved a greater penetration on American soil than any other single group. The Investigative Project has even been on the trail of a tantalizing possibility: Osama himself may have once applied for a U.S. visa.
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In 1993, immediately following the first World Trade Center bombing, federal prosecutors and FBI agents reexamined raw materials, documents, and data they had collected after the assassination of Rabbi Meir Kahane by El Sayeed Nosair in November 1990 and the murder (still unsolved) of the fundamentalist head of the Alkhifa office in Brooklyn, Mustapha Shalabi, in February 1991. The boxes of material seized from Nosair’s apartment following his arrest in 1990 contained the very seeds of the World Trade Center explosion, but these materials also provided at least a partial road map to understanding and reconstructing the bin Laden network. In particular, new attention was focused on the Alkhifa Refugee Center, also known as the Office of Services for the Mujahideen, that gave birth, as prosecutors laid out in their complaints and indictments, to bin Laden’s secret terrorist organization. The Alkhifa Center was established in the early 1980s in Peshawar, Pakistan, by Azzam.
Born in Palestine in 1941, Abdullah Azzam moved to Jordan, then to Saudi Arabia before migrating to Pakistan at the start of the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979. Starting with not much more than a storefront in Peshawar, Azzam ultimately succeeded in reviving the concept of jihad among the Muslim masses.
People who met Azzam were always dazzled by his spellbinding oratory, his religious scholarship, his abilities as a military strategist, and his interminable energy. The bearded, barrel-chested sheikh hated the West, specifically Christians and Jews, whom he routinely accused of carrying out diabolical conspiracies against Islam. Combined with this was nostalgia for the days of the Ottoman Empire and the Islamic caliphate, when non-Muslims were the ones who were treated as second-class citizens.
It was in the United States that Azzam was able to raise much of his money, enlist new fighters, and—most important—enjoy the political freedom to coordinate with other radical Islamic movements. From 1985 to 1989, Azzam and his top aide, Palestinian Sheikh Tamim al-Adnani, visited dozens of American cities, exhorting new recruits to pick up the sword against the enemies of Islam. They raised tens of thousands of dollars and enlisted hundreds and hundreds of fighters and believers.
The First Conference of Jihad was held at the Al-Farook Mosque on Atlantic Avenue in Brooklyn in 1988. In a speech recorded on videotape, Azzam instructed his audience of nearly two hundred to carry out jihad no matter where they were, even in America. “Every Moslem on earth should unsheathe his sword and fight to liberate Palestine,” he shouted in Arabic. “The jihad is not limited to Afghanistan…. Jihad means fighting…. You must fight in any place you can get…Whenever jihad is mentioned in the Holy Book, it means the obligation to fight. It does not mean to fight with the pen or to write books or articles in the press or to fight by holding lectures.”1
Azzam’s Office of Services started off in Peshawar, but by the end of the decade, he had succeeded in establishing scores of jihad recruiting centers around the world, in addition to a network of mosques and Islamic centers that joined the jihad orbit. Azzam had also motivated tens of thousands of Arabs from all over the world to volunteer for jihad.
By 1985, according to his own statements and accounts published by the Office of Services in its banner publication Al-Jihad, Azzam had teamed up with Saudi financier Osama bin Laden. Bin Laden would soon emerge as the largest single financial backer of the Office of Services for the Mujahideen and of the “Arab-Afghan” jihad movement. Having heard the call of Sheikh Azzam to join the jihad, bin Laden left the comfort of his family’s multi-billion dollar construction company in Saudi Arabia to participate in the jihad against the Russians. During the 1980s, however, bin Laden scrupulously stayed behind the scenes, far away from the glare of publicity.
Azzam opened branches of the Office of Services in the United States, Britain, France, Germany, Sweden, Norway, and throughout the Middle East. Dozens of centers opened throughout the United States, mostly at mosques and Islamic community centers. Major Alkhifa Centers were set up in Atlanta, Boston, Chicago, Brooklyn, Jersey City, Pittsburgh, and Tucson, while thirty other American cities were the sites of subsidiary Alkhifa offices.
The Office of Services published a monthly magazine called Al-Jihad, a full-color Arabic-language magazine that detailed the battle stories from the front lines of the mujahideen. The issues were frequently full of gory pictures of young men whose limbs had been severed as well as inspiring eulogies to the shahids (martyrs) who gave their lives for jihad. In its heyday, Al-Jihad reached 50,000 people, at least half in the United States, according to interviews with Al-Jihad leaders. Al-Jihad was distributed within the United States by the Tucson, Arizona, and Brooklyn, New York, Alkhifa centers. Articles frequently contained incendiary attacks and conspiratorial allegations against the United States, Europe, Christians, and Jews, exposing their “crimes” against Islam. From Palestine to Bosnia, Al-Jihad called for Muslims to pick up the gun and wage jihad to kill the infidels and “all enemies of Islam.”
After the Soviet Union crumbled, the duty of jihad was expanded around the globe—to any place that the enemies of Islam were deemed active. Beyond mobilizing support for the jihad in Afghanistan, internal documents show that Alkhifa members in the United States became involved in shipping bombs, timers, and explosives to Hamas in Gaza; counterfeiting tens of thousands of dollars for the purchase of weapons; reconfiguring passports to enable Muslim volunteers to visit the United States as well as to enter jihad battle fronts; and raising money and enlisting new recruits for the jihad in the Philippines, Egypt, Bosnia, Algeria, Kashmir, Palestine, and elsewhere.
Abdullah Azzam explained the new worldwide focus at gatherings of the faithful within the United States. At a conference of the Muslim Arab Youth Association (MAYA) in Oklahoma City in December 1988, Azzam inspired participants to even loftier goals: “O brothers, after our experience of Afghanistan, nothing in the world is impossible for us any more! Small power or big power, what is decisive is the willpower that springs from the religious belief.” He insisted that “It has been revealed that you should perform Jihad with your lives and your wealth.”2 Azzam also made clear that Afghanistan would be used as a training ground where Muslims from around the world could receive preparation for taking the jihad to their respective regions: “The Palestinian youth came here to Afghanistan, and also non-Palestinians, and they were trained, and their souls became prepared, and the paranoia of fear disappeared, and they became experts. Now, every one of them returns…ready to die.”3
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Azzam’s success in the United States is exemplified by the story of the Islamic Center of Tucson. This center during the late 1980s and early 1990s also served as the Tucson branch of Alkhifa and the Office of Services. One of Azzam’s key lieutenants in Pakistan, Wa’il Jalaidan, came from the Islamic Center of Tucson in the early 1980s. Wadih el Hage, bin Laden’s personal secretary in the early 1990s, was also an active member of the Islamic Center of Tucson in the mid-1980s prior to relocating to Arlington, Texas, before leaving for Sudan and Kenya to aid in bin Laden’s efforts there.
Tucson, not coincidentally, has been a fertile city for terrorists. When Ramzi Yousef and Ahmed Ajaj, plotters in the first World Trade Center bombing, arrived in the U.S. in 1992, they carried identification tags listing them as working for the Al Bunyan Islamic Information Center in Tucson.
Even the Islamic Association for Palestine (IAP) used Tucson as the base for its Information Office in the late 1980s. It was from an IAP post office box address in Tucson that the organization published and disseminated, in brochure form, the “Charter of the Islamic Resistance Movement—Hamas” in 1988. Ghassan Dahduli, an IAP leader who had registered this post office box, was a member of the Board of Directors of the Islamic Center of Tucson in the mid-1980s. (Dahduli, who also moved to Arlington, Texas, in the early-1990s, has since been deported from the United States based on visa violations although authorities had collected evidence showing ties to terrorists as well.)
For Azzam, Tucson was just a starting point in the U.S., at a time when his power was growing everywhere. By the end of the 1980s, with the Soviets no longer in Afghanistan, a Muslim alliance had joined forces to rule that country, and mujahideen were branching out to other conflicts including the one most dear to Azzam, the jihad in Palestine. Meanwhile bin Laden was playing a central role in Azzam’s network. In a speech given in Peshawar in 1989, Sheikh Azzam told his followers, “There is one person who has always stood by us. That is Osama bin Laden.”
In November 1989, Azzam, along with two of his four sons, was killed in a sophisticated car bombing in Pakistan. In the wake of Azzam’s death, a power struggle soon developed for control of Alkhifa, not in Pakistan but in the United States, where Sheikh Omar Abdel Rahman vied with Mustapha Shalabi, an Egyptian-born militant appointed by Azzam. The sheikh settled in Brooklyn and New Jersey where he had already developed an intensely loyal following among a cadre of Islamic militants.
At stake in the battle over Alkhifa was a transnational Islamic militant power base: the de facto control over hundreds of thousands of dollars and a network of thousands of jihad veterans and future jihad volunteers. Shalabi wanted to plow the money back into the Afghanistan effort, while Sheikh Abdel Rahman wanted to expend the funds on jihad in Egypt and new jihad fronts around the globe.
Shalabi, who by all accounts resented the intrusion of the sheikh, tried to stand up to him and his supporters, especially Mahmud Abouhalima, an Egyptian veteran of the Afghanistan jihad and a loyal follower of the blind sheikh. By early January 1990, Shalabi had received threats from the sheikh’s followers, but still would not agree to hand over control of the funds. Shalabi hoped to move back to Afghanistan where he could count on the protection of Mohammed Yusuf Abbas, who had taken over the Peshawar-based Office of Services and editorship of Al-Jihad. Shalabi would never make it. On February 26, 1991, Shalabi opened the door to someone he knew (according to police). His body was found five days later with a bullet hole to his head and multiple stab wounds. No one was ever charged in the killing, but federal officials believe that Shalabi was killed pursuant to a fatwa issued by Sheikh Omar Abdel Rahman.
The man who was supposed to take over the Alkhifa offices in Brooklyn as successor to Shalabi was Wadih el-Hage. Born in Lebanon in 1960, el-Hage had come to the United States in the late 1970s to attend school at the University of Southwestern Louisiana in Lafayette. In 1987, he moved to Tucson, where he became an active member of the Alkhifa office at the Islamic Center. He soon became caught up in the jihad fervor, catching the attention of senior Alkhifa officials in both Tucson and New York.
In December 1988, according to federal documents, el-Hage met other Islamic fundamentalists, including Mahmud Abouhalima and top officials of the Alkhifa Center, at a major radical Islamic conference held at the convention center in Oklahoma City. The conference was sponsored by the Muslim Arab Youth Association and the Islamic Association for Palestine. Abdullah Azzam was the keynote speaker. Videotapes of the conference and other records show that Islamic militants from around the globe converged in Oklahoma City to raise the banner of jihad not only in Afghanistan but in Palestine and elsewhere. Feverish exhortations to carry out terrorist attacks were made by Azzam and the other guest speakers, which included Hamas leader Muhammad Siyyam, militant cleric Ahmed al-Qattan, radical cleric from Lebanon Sheikh Muharram al-Aarifi, and a leader of the Muslim Brotherhood, Mustapha Mash’hur, who currently serves as the Supreme Guide of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, the highest position of leadership in the organization.
Wadih el-Hage was not just watching and listening to mujahideen. In early 1990, U.S. law enforcement officials say he became involved in a murder. The victim was a black Muslim cleric named Rashid Khalifa, who was preaching a variation of Islamic doctrine that was deemed heretical by fundamentalists. According to federal prosecutors and to information volunteered by Wadih el-Hage in interviews he gave to FBI agents, a still unidentified man was sent to Tucson to conduct surveillance on Khalifa. This person visited el-Hage at his home, where they had lunch together, and then was driven by el-Hage to Khalifa’s mosque, where the visitor recorded the movements of Khalifa. El-Hage admitted before a grand jury that he never reported this visit to the authorities.
Federal records show that Khalifa was killed by a member of the Al-Fuqra organization, a black Muslim fundamentalist group that has engaged in a series of murders, robberies, and other attacks in Colorado and Canada. Members of Al-Fuqra were also indicted and convicted in the World Trade Center bombing conspiracy trials. Sources familiar with the investigation say that Al-Fuqra was as early as 1988 acquiring weapons and recruiting volunteers for the jihad in Afghanistan.
From Tucson, el-Hage moved to Arlington, Texas, sometime in 1991, where he went to work for a tire store. At the same time, according to federal prosecutors, he stayed very active with Alkhifa and on the expanding jihad battlefront. El-Hage would rise to such a senior position that he was named the successor to Alkhifa director Shalabi.
For reasons still unknown, El-Hage did not ultimately take over the Alkhifa office in Brooklyn as had been expected. According to his own statements, he showed up in New York on the day Shalabi was killed; the length of his stay is unknown. Phone records of the Alkhifa office show a series of phone calls between Alkhifa and el-Hage’s residence in Arlington, Texas on March 2, 3, 5, and 6. It appears that el-Hage was calling his home from Brooklyn. Prison records show that on March 11, 1991, el-Hage visited el-Sayeed Nosair in jail. Nosair, prosecutors later determined, had been secretly plotting to carry out additional terrorist attacks and murders while meeting with various visitors in his jail cell in 1991 and 1992.
Soon thereafter, Wadih el-Hage left the United States in order to serve as Osama bin Laden’s personal secretary. In this capacity, el-Hage worked for various bin Laden companies, which included a holding company known as “Wadi al-Aqiq,” a construction business known as “Al Hijra,” an agricultural company known as “al Themar al Mubaraka,” an investment company known as “Ladin International,” another investment company known as “Taba Investments,” and a transportation company known as “Qudarat Transport Company.” These companies earned income to support what was now al Qaeda and provided cover for the procurement of explosives, weapons, and chemicals and for the travel of al Qaeda operatives.
Sometime in 1994, el-Hage moved from Khartoum to Nairobi where he set up businesses and other organizations for al Qaeda in Kenya. There, el-Hage met repeatedly with Abu Ubaidah al Banshi
ri, a former al Qaeda military commander. In 1996, however, Banshiri drowned, or was drowned. El-Hage investigated the death with Fazul Abdullah Mohammed, who later became an at-large indictee for the bombing of the U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania.
Eventually, el-Hage would make false statements in September and October 1997 to both the FBI and the grand jury that was investigating Osama bin Laden regarding his role in al Qaeda. At some date prior to this, el-Hage had returned to the United States. El-Hage would be questioned again by the FBI on August 20, 1998, following the bombing of the U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania on August 7. Again he would lie to the federal agents regarding his connections with al Qaeda. He then would commit perjury before the federal grand jury in New York on September 16, 1998. Wadih el-Hage would be initially indicted for this act of perjury; later the indictment would be expanded to include charges of conspiring to kill U.S. nationals, eight counts of perjury before the federal grand jury, and three counts of making false statements to federal law-enforcement officers while being questioned pursuant to a grand jury investigation.
Testimony provided in the trial of el-Hage and others for their role in the bombing of the U.S. embassies has provided a good deal of information into Osama bin Laden’s rise. Bin Laden returned to Saudi Arabia for a brief interval after the Afghanistan victory of the mujahideen. By this time, the Gulf War turned him against the Saudi regime, and his criticisms caused the regime to strip him of his Saudi passport. Set loose upon the world again, bin Laden found refuge in the country that was rapidly becoming the worldwide center of international terrorism—Sudan.
A desert nation directly south of Egypt, Sudan was governed by the National Islamic Front party under Dr. Hassan al-Turabi, who seized power through a military coup in 1989. Al-Turabi did two things: he imposed a fundamentalist regime almost identical to the Ayatollah Khomeini’s rule in Iran except based on Sunni principles, and he opened up Sudan to worldwide terrorists. Al-Turabi’s comrade-in-arms in the coup that established the Islamic state in Sudan, Sudanese president Omar Bashir, personally welcomed al Qaeda to the country. He gave the terror organization special permission to avoid taxes and import duties and even exempted it from local law enforcement. (Sudan was not alone in sponsoring al Qaeda. Hizzbollah was happy to contribute. Hizzbollah officials arranged special advanced weapons and explosives training for mujahideen in Lebanon. Among the items on the curriculum were instructions on how to blow up large buildings.)
American Jihad: The Terrorists Living Among Us Page 11
