by J. M. Berger
One man furiously scratched out a few sparse pages of notes to memorialize the meeting. He was known in the room as Abu Rida Al Suri, but his real name was Mohammed Loay Bayazid, and he was an American citizen from Kansas City.
From its very first day, the newly christened group, al Qaeda, would include American citizens at its highest levels.
Bayazid had arrived at this momentous day through Abdullah Azzam. He was born in Syria, and his family moved to the United States while he was in his teens.2 Bayazid was not particularly religious, but he encountered a handout written by Azzam that described miraculous happenings in Afghanistan and decided he had to see for himself.3
Azzam was prone to sweeping and poetic descriptions of the lightly armed and vastly outnumbered mujahideen who were prevailing over elite Russian soldiers thanks only to their faith in God.4 There were stories about the shahid, or martyrs killed in the line of action, whose bodies were said to give off a sweet perfume.5
In 1985 Bayazid decided to fly to Afghanistan and ask questions later. After making contact with Azzam’s organization through a phone number printed on the handout, he found himself thrust into a world unimaginably different from his fairly typical American life back in Kansas City. The enormous culture shock dislocated him from his old life.6
Bayazid fought alongside Azzam and later Osama bin Laden during the jihad against the Soviets. Earning bin Laden’s trust over time, by 1987 he had been put in charge of managing the Saudi’s finances and other war assets. Records maintained by al Qaeda give a glimpse into Bayazid’s routine duties—bin Laden fired off memo after memo to the American mujahid, requesting inventories of weapons and instructing him to distribute money and arms to other bin Laden allies.
In the spring of 1987, bin Laden wrote to Bayazid, summoning him from Karachi to take part in a battle against the Soviets. “[I hope] that you move toward us immediately in anticipation of the attack on the Russians as the time has come,” bin Laden wrote. Bayazid was told to research whether bin Laden needed a visa to travel to Yemen, then visit one of bin Laden’s sick friends, and then come to the front lines with money and men.7
Bayazid went to meet bin Laden for a strike against an Afghan government installation in Khost, just over the border from Pakistan. When he got there, he found bin Laden ill and the Arabs in disarray. The battle went badly, and the Arab fighters were humiliated in front of their Afghan counterparts. Bin Laden learned from his mistakes, though, and the group did better next time, engaging in more and more ambitious attacks.8
By 1988 bin Laden and Azzam were deep into planning the next phase of the jihad. The war against the Soviets was clearly coming to an end, and the mujahideen were emerging victorious. Yet the Afghan factions were poised to start a bloody civil war over who would run the country when the Soviets left. Azzam wanted the Arab volunteers to stay out of that conflict.
These deliberations set the stage for the August 1988 meeting, recorded by Bayazid.9 The idea was to start a new organization from scratch, or “below zero,” as the American wrote it, but the nature of the organization was a point of contention. Bin Laden was moving into waters that Azzam saw as extreme, and tension between the two had been building.
“Disagreement is present,” Bayazid noted laconically. Bin Laden had several bullet points he wanted to achieve, which included inserting himself into the struggle for Afghanistan in opposition to local warlord Ahmad Shah Massoud, a veteran of the Soviet jihad whom Azzam supported.10
Bin Laden also argued that the jihad organization owed a debt to its Egyptian faction, led by Ayman Al Zawahiri of the Egyptian Islamic Jihad, whose ultimate goal was to overthrow the Mubarek regime back home and install an Islamic state. Again Azzam pushed back. One year earlier the Palestinian scholar had helped create Hamas.11 Why would the organization tackle Egypt when the Palestinians were suffering under Israeli occupation?
Finally, bin Laden wanted to run the jihad with an open door recruiting policy in order to increase the numbers available for the newly minted al Qaeda. At the time of the meeting, bin Laden had identified a little more than three hundred candidates for specialized training with the new group. Azzam favored a more discriminating approach that would rely on trusted, proven brothers.12
Some days later the conversation resumed. This time the meeting included a core of eight or nine bin Laden loyalists, and Azzam was not invited. The first day was consumed with complaints about Azzam and his organization. On the second day, the conversation turned pragmatic. The men discussed which training camps would be controlled by al Qaeda and how to direct fighters from one to the other, along with the requirements for new members, which included “obedience,” references, and “good manners.”
On the third day, the minutes read, “the work of al Qaeda commenced.”13
Americans were easy to find among the first recruits. Bin Laden seemed strangely enamored of Americans and people who had spent time in the United States, but the first consideration was practical. Someone with a U.S. passport could travel anywhere in the world without arousing suspicion, and bin Laden needed couriers to ferry money and information for his increasingly global operation.14
One of the first American recruits was Wadih El Hage. He must have read the memo about obedience, because on his application to join al Qaeda, he listed as his sole work qualification “carrying out orders.”15
El Hage was born into a Catholic family in Lebanon. They moved to Kuwait when he was two. He learned about Islam as a teenager and converted shortly after he moved to the United States to attend the University of Southwestern Louisiana in 1978. El Hage had spent three years involved with the jihad against the Soviet, starting in 1982, when he took a job with the Muslim World League’s office in Peshawar. He returned to America in 1985, married an American convert to Islam, and became a U.S. citizen in 1989. After getting married, El Hage took a job directly under Abdullah Azzam in Quetta, Pakistan, starting in 1987.16
In Quetta he met Osama bin Laden, and the following year he applied to join al Qaeda. According to his wife and his attorney, El Hage was never a combatant, and he suffered from a congenitally deformed arm that would have put a crimp in his military aspirations. Nevertheless, his application to join al Qaeda stated that he had been trained on “most types of weapons, mines, explosives and booby traps.”17
Another of Al Qaeda’s early members was Jamal Al Fadl, a young Sudanese man who spent time in Saudi Arabia in his youth but was forced to leave after he narrowly escaped being caught smoking pot. He moved to Brooklyn in 1986, where he worked as a grocery bagger and eventually found Allah at the radical Al Farook mosque.18
Al Fadl began to volunteer in his spare time at Abdullah Azzam’s Al Kifah Center in Brooklyn. At first, he raised money and recruited members locally. Toward the end of 1988, not long after the founding of al Qaeda, Al Kifah’s emir, Mustafa Shalabi, decided it was time for Al Fadl to join the fight. Unlike some other would-be jihadists, Al Fadl got the full ride. Shalabi gave him his ticket and some spending money.
Al Fadl’s experience—recounted in noteworthy detail during the 2001 East African Embassy bombings trial—was typical for new recruits in the early days of al Qaeda and bears a strong, noncoincidental resemblance to a cult indoctrination. When he arrived in Peshawar, Al Fadl and several other recruits were taken to a guesthouse and instructed to give up their money, their personal effects, their passports, and even their names. Al Fadl was rechristened Abu Bakr Al Sudani.
With these indoctrination techniques, al Qaeda removed the trappings of the outside world, physically severing new recruits from their previous lives. The method mentally dislocated the recruits and forced them to reorient in a totally new world. The method had been tested and refined by Azzam’s organization on hundreds, perhaps thousands, of fighters who went before Al Fadl during the war against the Soviets.
“I went to Afghanistan with a blank mind and a good heart,” Loay Bayazid told journalist Lawrence Wright many years later. “Everything
was totally strange. It was like I was born just now, like I was an infant, and I have to learn everything new. It was not so easy after that to leave and go back to your regular life.”19
At the guesthouse, Al Fadl went through two days of basic indoctrination about the concept of jihad and conditions inside Afghanistan. Then he and his fellow recruits were shipped off to an al Qaeda–controlled training camp in Afghanistan. They started with small arms—including the classic terrorist weapon of choice, the Kalashnikov rifle—and rocket-propelled grenades.
This phase of the training lasted forty-five days, then he was sent to another guesthouse inside Afghanistan for ten more days of religious training, some of which was provided by Osama bin Laden himself, who spoke about the obligatory jihad to defend Muslim lands that had been invaded. According to bin Laden, this obligation eclipsed all other obligations, such as family, business, and school, reinforcing the recruits’ emotional disconnect from the outside world with a religious dimension.
The third phase was combat. Al Fadl and his fellow recruits spent two months on the front lines, fighting in some of the lingering conflicts with the occupation government and getting involved in the factional disputes that were just starting to crystallize.
After this, the recruits were formally part of the organization. Following a brief leave in Peshawar, Al Fadl was sent to a succession of camps for additional training. He was always on the move and adjusting to new environments while being fed a constant diet of religious indoctrination and being trained in improvised explosives, booby traps, and advanced weaponry.
Al Qaeda’s young army of volunteer jihadists came from everywhere in the world, including the United States. Many American volunteers were first- or second-generation immigrants of Arab descent, but not all of them.
Daniel Boyd was one of the recruits who stood out from the crowd, a tall, white American with a baby face and a lion’s mane of blond hair, looking otherworldly in traditional Arab dress and taking the name “Saifullah.”20 Boyd arrived at the tail end of the jihad against the Soviets and managed to log some combat hours before it was over, including an attack on a Russian plane.21
“Man, it hit the ground. It was an ammunition plane,” he told a government informant in 2009. “Son, you had to see the explosion on that thing. Everybody getting down. [ … ] Now that explosion filled the horizon. [ … ] I was high, high, higher.”22
Boyd stayed on for advanced training, spending about three years in Afghanistan and Pakistan. The jihadists he spent time with were closely linked to al Qaeda. He returned home to North Carolina after a run-in with the law in Pakistan, where he had been robbing banks. Although outwardly he seemed to resume a normal life, he was quietly raising a family inculcated with his strict, militaristic reading of Islam, stocking his home with weapons and ammunition for what he saw as his inevitable return to jihad.
“One day, inshallah [God willing], Allah’s going to put me back. I saw the deen [Islamic way of life in practice],” he told some friends, years later. “I saw the deen.”23
Another dabbler in jihad was Khaled Ibrahim, an Egyptian-American living in Newark. Ibrahim was moved to join the armed struggle in Afghanistan after hearing a speech by Azzam, but he wanted to be trained before he left. Ibrahim signed up for firearms instruction after seeing a poster at the As-Salaam mosque in Jersey City. That decision brought him into contact with one of the most dangerous operatives in the history of terrorism—Ali Abdelsaoud Mohamed, the most formidable of al Qaeda’s Americans.
Mohamed had been an Egyptian army officer during the early 1980s. As part of his military training, he had been selected to take part in a joint exercise that brought Egyptian commandos to Fort Bragg for the same unconventional warfare drills practiced by the U.S. Army’s elite Green Berets.24 Around this time, Mohamed was recruited into the hard-core radical group known as Egyptian Islamic Jihad (EIJ) by its emir, Ayman Al Zawahiri.25
Linked to the assassination of Anwar Sadat in 1981, EIJ was hell-bent on overthrowing the secular Egyptian government and replacing it with an Islamic state. Zawahiri was a cell leader in EIJ at the time, and he had recruited a number of members from the military, with the idea of staging a coup. That idea failed, but Sadat was ultimately assassinated by military officers connected to EIJ. Zawahiri and hundreds of others were indicted for conspiracy in the killing. Zawahiri was released after three years and fled Egypt for Afghanistan, where he set up an EIJ operation in exile, contributing valuable military expertise to the Arab mujahideen gathered by Azzam.26
There, Zawahiri met Osama bin Laden and forged an alliance that continues until this day. Zawahiri was deeply involved in al Qaeda operations from day one. EIJ was nominally a distinct organization under Zawahiri’s leadership, but for most practical purposes, al Qaeda and Islamic Jihad were one and the same. They shared payroll, personnel, and facilities, and sworn al Qaeda members answered to Zawahiri as readily as to bin Laden himself.27
Conversant in Arabic, English, Hebrew, and French, Ali Mohamed fancied himself a spy, and a spy was exactly what Zawahiri wanted, especially one who could infiltrate the American intelligence services. Zawahiri and other Egyptian radicals blamed the United States for supporting Egypt’s brutal dictatorship and sneered at what they perceived as America’s corrupt and decadent morality. The Egyptians were ahead of the curve, eyeing the United States as a potential enemy even as the CIA was helping arm the mujahideen in Afghanistan.28
Infiltrating the CIA was Mohamed’s first assignment from Zawahiri. Mohamed began by simply walking into the U.S. embassy in Cairo and asking to talk to the CIA case officer stationed there. Skeptical but eager for Arabic-speaking sources, the agency tried him out in Germany, assigning him to infiltrate a mosque whose head cleric was connected to Hezbollah. What the CIA didn’t tell him was that the agency had already infiltrated the mosque.
Mohamed’s first act as a CIA asset was to tell the target of the investigation that he was working for the CIA and had been ordered to spy on him. The agent already in place reported this back to the agency, and Mohamed’s CIA career came to an abrupt halt. The CIA issued a burn notice to U.S. and allied intelligence services that Mohamed was not to be trusted. He was not told why he was released.29
Mohamed spent the next several months working as a counterterrorism adviser for Egypt Air, where he gained valuable information about airline security that would come into play years later. The ultimate target remained the United States, however, and in 1986 Mohamed hopped on a plane for New York.
How he got his visa is a mystery—the burn notice added Mohamed’s name to a visa watch list. At the time, however, the United States was still trying to work out whether it could leverage Islamic extremists to fight communism more broadly than in Afghanistan, and Mohamed was not the only dangerous person to slip across the border. Whether by oversight or strategic miscalculation, the State Department let a walking time bomb enter the country.30
Wasting no time, Mohamed proposed to a woman he had met on the flight into New York, and they were married in Reno six weeks later. Now secure in his ability to stay in America for an extended period, he turned to his assignment. First, he set up a communications hub near his wife’s home in California. Joining him there was Khalid Abu El Dahab, an Islamic Jihad operative whom Mohamed had personally recruited. “Be patient,” Mohamed told his protégé. “There is a bigger plan.”31
Mohamed walked into an army recruiter’s office in Oakland, California, and enlisted.32 Still extremely fit at age thirty-two, he aced basic training and soon scored an assignment at Fort Bragg at the John F. Kennedy Special Warfare Center, which trains elite Special Forces soldiers in conventional and unconventional warfare, including psychological operations.
Initially, Mohamed worked as a supply sergeant, but with his unique background and strong language skills, he was tapped to serve as assistant director of the Middle East Seminar for the Special Operations and International Studies Department in the school. Ayman Al Zawahiri’s
trusted spy was now educating the U.S. Army about the Middle East.
Mohamed’s tenure at Fort Bragg was a comedy of errors. He seemed to relish the role of spy but somehow remained oblivious to the fact that spies are not meant to be seen. In his spare time, he rifled through any loose papers he could find on the base, taking copies of maps and army training manuals that might be useful to Zawahiri’s Islamic Jihad down to the local Kinko’s to make copies.
He also copied dozens of documents marked “top secret,” which must have delighted him. Many of these were actually simulated secret documents used in a training exercise, listing fictitious fleet positions and containing little intelligence of value.33 Other material was more sensitive. Eventually Mohamed’s paper sweeps raised the suspicions of his commanding officer, who took steps to secure genuinely classified information, but he didn’t know the full extent of Mohamed’s espionage, and no further action was taken.
Mohamed’s indiscretions became even more indiscreet. At one point, while discussing Anwar Sadat with a superior officer, Lt. Col. Robert Anderson, Mohamed volunteered that Sadat “was a traitor and he had to die.” In 1988 he informed Anderson that he was planning to travel to Afghanistan to take part in the jihad during his annual leave.
Anderson was appalled, pointing out that there could be tremendous ramifications if a U.S. Army soldier was exposed while killing Russians. Mohamed shrugged it off. After a month of leave, Mohamed returned looking like he had been to war. He gave Anderson a souvenir—the belt from a Russian Special Forces soldier’s uniform—and a debriefing on the action, including maps of the combat. He told another officer that he had given U.S. Army maps of the region to warlord Ahmad Massoud, the ally of Abdullah Azzam.
Anderson filed an eight-page report outlining his concerns about Mohamed’s freelance adventuring. It disappeared into the black hole of army bureaucracy, and he never heard back from his superiors.34
