by J. M. Berger
Where Anderson saw cause for alarm, retired colonel Norvell Deatkine saw opportunity. A civilian instructor in Middle East studies at the school, Deatkine helped train Special Forces members in “Civil Affairs,” a nebulous department purportedly focused on community relations overseas that often served as a cover for psychological operations and intelligence works.
Deatkine drafted Mohamed as a Middle East specialist. At one point, he convened a panel discussion that was videotaped as an educational aid. Mohamed was the star of the show, fielding questions from a motley handful of army wonks whose expressions ranged from pained to dazed to disinterested. Of the five panelists, Mohamed cut the most formidable picture of a soldier by far.35
Animated and basking in the spotlight, Mohamed was remarkably candid during the ninety-minute talk, providing a window into the viewpoint of the hardened jihadists who would soon target America. If only anyone had been paying attention.
Many American jihadists of the period were motivated by a mix of understandable emotions and rationalizations, including the impulse to defend Muslims in peril and a craving for adventure in a venue that had been blessed by both Muslim religious authority and American patriotism.
Mohamed cared nothing for America. His loyalty lay with a radical version of Islam reflecting the sophisticated and ambitious thinking of his mentor, Zawahiri, and a core ideology that would soon become part and parcel of the newly formed al Qaeda.
Mohamed’s views came from established jihadist ideology—specifically the writings of Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood ideologue Sayyid Qutb, which had deeply influenced Azzam, Zawahiri, and bin Laden. These views included the separation of the world into a war between Islam and non-Islam, and the overwhelming imperative to create Islamic states ruled by shariah law. Sitting in the heart of one of the most important military installations in the United States, Mohamed told the panel,
I cannot consider Islam a religion without political domination. So what we have, what we call Dar Al Harb, which is the world of war, and Dar Al Islam—the world of Islam. And Dar Al Harb, the world of war, it comprises all the territory [that] doesn’t have Islamic law. [ … ] So as a Muslim, I have an obligation to change Dar Al Harb to Dar Al Islam.
When asked about the rise of Islamic fundamentalism in the Middle East, Mohamed replied that there was no such thing as a Muslim fundamentalist— “just ordinary Muslims.” All Muslims were, by definition, fundamentalists, he explained.
If you look at the religion, the religion, we do not have moderate, we do not have extremist, we do not have people between. You have one line. You accept the one line or not. [ … ] I accept everything, and this is my way. In the religion I can’t compromise. [ … ] I will accept the whole part of the religion, or I will not accept the whole part of the religion. So the fundamentalist, it mean that the people they try to establish an Islamic state based on the Islamic shariah for every aspect in the life.
Ominously, Mohamed predicted that the mujahideen would not stay inside Afghanistan. They would spread around the world, take the war to Russia on its own soil, and transform strategic parts of the Middle East into Islamic states where Christians and Jews would be tolerated but “without power.”
[In Egypt], the religious people, they are calling and they [are] trying to change the system now. And most is the young people. Most is a new generation. They left the country. They are fighting, especially in Afghanistan. So the experiment will repeat again a hundred percent, maybe in Egypt and Algeria.
All of this was happening in plain sight. The underground aspect of Mohamed’s activities was even more damaging. It’s not clear whether Mohamed actually saw combat during his trip to Afghanistan, but we do know now what he didn’t tell his commanding officer then—Mohamed had been providing professionalized, American-style military training to the mujahideen during his trip at camps affiliated with Abdullah Azzam that would soon become the property of al Qaeda.36
It was the start of an illustrious terrorist career, which would span at least three continents and encompass some of al Qaeda’s most deadly terrorist attacks— the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, the East African Embassy bombings, and perhaps even September 11.
Several Americans were present at the camps during the time that Mohamed was there. Among them were Abdullah Rashid, the African American from Brooklyn who nearly lost his leg during combat, and Fawaz Damra, the imam at Brooklyn’s Al Farook mosque.
Perhaps the most important figure in Afghanistan around the time that Mohamed was working in the training camps was Mustafa Shalabi, a fellow member of Egyptian Islamic Jihad who had been personally recruited by Zawahiri. Now a naturalized American citizen (through fraud), Shalabi answered to Azzam, at least on paper, and ran the Al Kifah Center in Brooklyn on his behalf.37
If Mohamed and Shalabi hadn’t met before Afghanistan, they certainly knew each other afterward. Shortly after they returned to the country, Shalabi invited Mohamed to bring his training skills to the New York area. Mohamed handed out copies of the maps, the training manuals, and the documents he had stolen from Fort Bragg, which served as the foundation for the world’s most dangerous book, the Encyclopedia of Jihad, a terrorist training manual without parallel.
Mohamed began work on the Encyclopedia by translating the stolen army training manuals into Arabic, then enhancing them with his own specialized knowledge. He carefully redrew illustrations of U.S. soldiers handling heavy arms, replacing the Western figures with cartoonish mujahideen fighters. Sometimes he simply inserted a page from a U.S. army manual and added annotations in Arabic. Mohamed’s diagrams showed how to field-strip weapons, create improvised explosives, operate rocket-propelled grenades, and target Soviet tanks.38
He also added material not found in any army manual, such as instructions on how to create terrorist cells, surveillance and the selection of terrorist targets, how to create deadly poisons and other methods of assassination, and how to manipulate authorities if arrested. The book grew over the years, existing first on paper and later in electronic formats. The core text still exists today and circulates on the Internet. Copies of the book were captured in Afghanistan after the U.S. invasion in 2003.39
Mohamed took copies of both his edited manuals and the army originals to Brooklyn and Jersey City, where they were made available as part of the library at the Al Kifah Center and the As-Salaam mosque.40 He wasn’t only providing reference works, however. By early 1989 Mohamed was traveling on weekends from Fort Bragg to New Jersey to conduct hands-on training for a select group of about ten aspiring American jihadists.
The group predated Mohamed’s arrival. Its informal leader was a naturalized American citizen from Egypt named El Sayyid Nosair. After earning his degree in industrial design and engineering from Helwan University in Egypt, Nosair’s life had become tumultuous. He had dabbled with terrorism, reportedly training under the infamous Abu Nidal.
Not long afterward, in 1981, he moved to the United States, settled in Pittsburgh, and married an Irish American convert to Islam. Nosair lived a short walk from the University of Pittsburgh in a mildly seedy neighborhood with a handful of cockroach-infested bars and low-end strip clubs but relatively safe streets.41
His time in Pittsburgh was troubled. He was badly injured while working as an electrician, and he was eventually fired from his job after trying to convert his coworkers to Islam on company time. Allegations of sexual assault dogged him. Seeking a clean start, he packed up his wife and children and moved to Jersey City, where he found a job working at a power plant and began to attend the Masjid As-Salaam.
Around the same time he discovered the Al Kifah Center. Like so many others, he was drawn in by the powerful charisma of Abdullah Azzam. He began to spend more and more time at the center.
Family and health considerations prevented him from going to Afghanistan, but he began to organize an informal training program for those who might succeed where he could not.
It was Nosair’s poster that had been spotted at A
s-Salaam by Khaled Ibrahim. A small group with a rotating membership of about six to twelve local Muslims began to practice shooting at a gun club in Calverton, New Jersey. Initially they were coached by an African American Muslim from Brooklyn, an ex-marine suspected of being involved in a series of bank robberies. His name is unknown because he was never charged, and the case remains open.42
The Brooklyn fighter, Abdullah Rashid, who had by now mostly recovered from nearly losing his leg in Afghanistan, joined the group. Hoping to prevent future jihadists from suffering premature injuries like his own, he had become a zealous advocate of training.43
Two other African American Muslims took part in the training, along with recent Palestinian immigrant Mohammed Salameh and Egyptian immigrant Mahmud Abouhalima, who had come to the United States a few years earlier. Both men would later be implicated in the World Trade Center bombing.
Members of the group came and went over time. Authorities suspected at one point that Wadih El Hage had trained with the men but never proved it; however, El Hage did once sell a gun to Abouhalima.44 The target-practice sessions in Calverton were frequent but irregular. The men sometimes brought their children along. Nosair’s son, Zak Ebrahim, remembered one trip to the shooting range when he was only six years old:
My father seemed to be having almost as much fun as I was, if not more. Using a fully automatic weapon, he shot the legs out from under one of the larger targets. The men all shot it and had a laugh. Trying to emulate him on the next turn, I held the trigger back on a fully automatic rifle. I fired one bullet after another in quick succession. [ … ]
Besides the five or six men, there were just as many of their kids waiting to take their turn. By late morning, it began to softly drizzle and I knew our time at the range was coming to an end. On what I figured would be my last turn at shooting, I took aim at my target and let each bullet fly. The last one hit the small orange light that sat on top of the target, and to everyone’s surprise, especially mine, the entire target exploded, black smoke billowing into the sky.
My uncle turned to the rest of the men and in Arabic said ibn abu, which means, “Like father, like son.” They all seemed to get a very good laugh out of that comment. It wasn’t until a few years later that I fully understand, understood what they thought was so funny. They thought they saw in me the same destruction my father was capable of.45
The men were wrong. Zak turned his back on his father’s name and views and grew up to be an antiviolence advocate.
It was Nosair who brought Ali Mohamed into the circle, introducing him to the other trainees as “Abu Omar.” The first classes were held in Jersey City at the apartment of one of the students.
“It was about navigating in areas like if you are lost in a desert area or a jungle,” Khaled Ibrahim recalled, “or you are part of a group and you want to find your way, how to use a compass, how to find your way by looking at the stars, and survival things, and how to recognize some of the weapons if you see them, like tanks, stuff like that.”46
Yet there were other lessons, which seemed less oriented toward Afghanistan. Mohamed showed them diagrams on the construction of pipe bombs, how to make and use the most effective Molotov cocktails, how to mix chemicals and build detonators for homemade bombs, and even how to build “zip guns”—crude homemade pistols that could not be traced by law enforcement.
He also taught cell structure and operational security. To keep communications away from their home, members of the group rented mailboxes near the mosque from a check-cashing company called Sphinx Trading.47 In 2001 mailboxes at this location would be used by some of the 9/11 hijackers.
The cell attracted the attention of the Joint Terrorism Task Force, a cooperative investigation unit with members from both the NYPD and the FBI. The first investigation was spurred by a bomb threat against Atlantic City casinos, but it continued as a Neutrality Act case after it became clear that the men were at least nominally training to fight in Afghanistan. The act—rarely enforced—makes it illegal for Americans to fight in foreign wars.48
During the 1980s the FBI had little interest in pursuing cases related to Afghanistan, although bits of intelligence sometimes came up during other investigations. People from the United States were going over there to fight, and Afghan and Arab mujahideen came to the United States to raise funds and train in relative safety outside the war zone. None of this was considered fair game for investigation.49
For instance, a large number of foreign mujahideen flew to Plainfield, Indiana, for an extended stay at a facility controlled by the Islamic Society of North America (ISNA) during the late 1980s. ISNA’s foreign financing was already the subject of a separate investigation, so the agent in charge sent a memo to headquarters about the mujahideen. There was no obvious case to prosecute. The president had deemed the mujahideen “freedom fighters,” and it was widely known that the United States was supporting their jihad against the Soviets.50
The case against ISNA was largely dead in the water anyway. The organization and other connected groups had sponsored hundreds of Muslim students for visas. Many of the students lacked documentation, and some brought significant amounts of money into the country. At the field-office level, a few agents investigated the origins of the money, but when someone left the jurisdiction of one field office and entered another, the case was usually lost. Washington wasn’t interested in coordinating the complicated interstate investigation, especially when the Bureau could be accused of religious profiling. Field agents who lobbied for a more aggressive approach to the visa violations were ignored at best and even reprimanded when they persisted.51
Aside from the religious complications and a general lack of institutional resolve, the cases involving American mujahideen were often muddy. For instance, noncitizen immigrants were not technically in violation of the Neutrality Act, a federal law that prevents U.S. citizens from taking part in foreign wars. And the Reagan administration had made an inconvenient habit of using private citizens for covert military missions in South America. Because the United States also supported the mujahideen, it was hard to muster enthusiasm for prosecutions.52
In the case of the Calverton training, the suspected connection to a bombing plot, along with the fact that the trainees were Americans with roots in the local community, helped overcome some of these hurdles, at least for a short while. The FBI surveilled the Calverton group for a few consecutive weeks, photographing the participants and attempting to establish some basis for further action. In the end, the investigation was shelved. The photographs were filed away, only to emerge years later—after several of the participants had been implicated in terrorist acts.53
The FBI surveillance did not capture any images of Ali Mohamed, who was expanding his reach from the Egyptian Islamic Jihad organization and moving deeper into the center of al Qaeda.
The United States had played host to a significant number of jihadists, many of whom were now contemplating life after the Soviet Union. In order to accomplish bin Laden’s goal of taking the jihad global, al Qaeda would have to establish a formal presence on American soil. Before that could happen, blood would flow.
3
The Death Dealers
Rashad Khalifa was a rising star in the Islamic world. An Egyptian scholar raised in the Sufi tradition, he moved to the United States in 1959 to study biochemistry. Khalifa decided to stay and raise his family in Tucson while working in his field. His son was the first American of Egyptian descent to play major league baseball.1
An obsessive student of the Koran, Khalifa used computers in his day job and was inspired to apply them to analyzing the holy book. He discovered an arcane pattern within the Koran that revolved around the number 19—as seen in the number of chapters and verses, the occurrences of references to numbers within the Koran, and other, even more complicated, derivations.
Based on his writings and translation work, Khalifa became a spiritual leader in his own right. At first, his “mathematical miracle” of the Kor
an was warmly received by Muslim scholars as proof of the uniqueness and the divine creation of the Koran. But Khalifa didn’t stop there.2
Over time, his studies led him to conclude that the hadith and Sunnah— Islamic traditions about the life of the Prophet Mohammed—were not reliable sources for Islamic practice. Many of the more socially restrictive practices in Islam are supported by these traditions. Eliminating the hadith and Sunnah from the mix led Khalifa into an increasingly liberal interpretation his faith. At the Masjid Tucson, where his followers gathered, Khalifa permitted men and women to pray together, and he didn’t require women to cover their heads. Word of these practices started to spread.
Worse still, the mathematical analysis of the Koran didn’t add up perfectly. According to Khalifa’s calculations, one small section of the Koran was illegitimate—written by a human hand and not the living word of Allah. This proclamation was the final straw. The suggestion that even one word of the Koran should be changed or deleted was considered heresy by many Muslims. Khalifa’s critics charged he was setting himself up as a prophet, in contradiction of Islamic teachings that state Muhammad is history’s final prophet.3
In 1985 a group of scholars led by the Grand Mufti of Saudi Arabia, Abdullah Bin Baz, issued a fatwa declaring Khalifa an apostate, a religious crime for which he could be killed under a strict reading of Islamic law.4
One Tucson resident who looked on Khalifa with disapproval was Wadih El Hage, one of the first wave of American al Qaeda operatives (see chapter 2). El Hage agreed with the conservatives—Khalifa was not following the true teachings of Sunni Islam and “in general behaved like an infidel.”5
As word of Khalifa’s liberal views and his more esoteric heresies spread further, Islamic radicals in Brooklyn took notice. The anti-Soviet jihadists at the Al Kifah Center were now hardening into wild, undirected radicals, and their influence was growing.
