Jihad Joe

by J. M. Berger

  In 1993 bin Laden dispatched Mohamed to Somalia, where a civil war was raging. The United States had deployed to Somalia for Operation Restore Hope, an effort to impose some kind of stability on the country and support United Nations relief efforts. Bin Laden was enraged at what he saw as a broader plan to establish American hegemony in Africa, starting with Somalia and then (he imagined) expanding to Islamic Sudan.15

  Al Qaeda provided training to Somali tribes who were fighting UN and U.S. forces, and Mohamed took part in this effort. More significantly, he was in the country during the U.S. intervention. In October 1993 Somali forces trained by al Qaeda— most likely including Mohamed—shot down a U.S. helicopter in the notorious “Black Hawk Down” incident that left eighteen Americans dead.

  Bin Laden wasn’t done punishing the United States for having the temerity to try to save lives in Somalia. He asked Mohamed to start casing targets for another African attack. The former U.S. soldier dutifully surveilled a dozen locations in Nairobi, Kenya, taking pictures, drawing maps, and writing up reports on the security of each installation. He took his reports back to Khartoum. Bin Laden zeroed in on the photos Mohamed had taken of the U.S. embassy, pointing out where a truck bomb could be most effectively deployed. A second team selected the U.S. embassy in Dar Es Salaam, Tanzania, for a simultaneous attack. After the targets were chosen, Mohamed took teams back to Kenya to conduct advanced surveillance. They took their time—it would be nearly five years from surveillance to attack.16

  As part of its covert war on the United States, al Qaeda wanted to obtain weapons of mass destruction. Bin Laden especially coveted a nuclear bomb. Another trusted American was dispatched to handle this effort: Mohamed Loay Bayazid, the American citizen jihadist from Kansas City who had been present at al Qaeda’s founding. It should be noted that Bayazid, who declined to be interviewed for this book, has denied all of what follows.17

  In late 1993 or early 1994, Jamal Al Fadl, one of Al Qaeda’s earliest members who had been recruited by the Al Kifah Center in Brooklyn (see chapter 3), got a call from the head of al Qaeda’s financial committee. Someone in Khartoum had uranium to sell, and the asking price was $1.5 million. Al Fadl was sent to check it out and set up a meeting.

  Bayazid was brought in to oversee the proposed transaction. Al Fadl and Bayazid went to meet the seller, switching cars along the way to foil any possible surveillance. At the meeting place, the seller brought out a cylinder two or three feet tall, engraved with technical details about the supposed contents. Bayazid carefully checked the information against the requirements to build a working nuclear bomb. It was a match. After the meeting, Bayazid arranged for a machine to be shipped from Kenya to test the material itself.

  Al Fadl said that he was praised for his work and sent on his way. He never heard whether the material checked out or whether the purchase had been completed. Bayazid subsequently returned to the United States, where he became involved with the Benevolence International Foundation in Chicago, a charity that provided money and logistical assistance to al Qaeda.18

  Al Qaeda needed cash badly. Osama bin Laden had been hemorrhaging money since he arrived in Sudan. Some of it was simply lost due to bad business decisions. More was lost to corruption, which included his own employees stealing from him. And running a global war—even an improvised war—involves substantial costs.19

  In early 1995 Bin Laden dispatched his second-in-command, Ayman Al Zawahiri, to the United States on a fund-raising trip. Ali Mohamed was responsible for making the trip safe. Zawahiri traveled under an assumed name—Abd-al-Mu’izz—and, using forged documents obtained by Mohamed, toured several mosques in northern California. By one account, he raised as much as $500,000, although most people put the figure considerably lower: $3,000 or less.20

  Despite his close relationship with both bin Laden and Zawahiri, not everyone in al Qaeda trusted Mohamed. Mohamed Atef, al Qaeda’s military commander at the time, told another al Qaeda member, L’Houssaine Kherchtou, not to disclose his travel plans to Mohamed. El Hage explained to Kherchtou that Atef feared Mohamed was working for the U.S. government.21

  The nature of the dispute was unclear. Dahab thought it had something to do with money, but there may be a simpler explanation. Toward the end of 1994, things were boiling over with the FBI. Mohamed’s name had come out during the investigation of the World Trade Center bombing and Siddig Ali’s thwarted Day of Terror. While Mohamed was in Kenya, working on the embassy bombings surveillance, he began to get calls from home. The FBI wanted to talk.22

  Mohamed returned to California to face the music. In December 1994 he sat down with FBI special agent Harlan Bell and Assistant U.S. Attorney Andrew McCarthy, who was preparing to prosecute Omar Abdel Rahman and his followers for the Landmarks bomb plot. McCarthy described the meeting in his 2008 book, Willful Blindness: A Memoir of the Jihad:

  [Mohamed] had been pitched to me as an engaging friendly by his handlers: FBI agents in Northern California with whom he was purportedly cooperating, though it quickly became clear who was picking whose pocket. By the time I got to that conference room, though, I already knew better. And if I’d needed any confirmation, it was right there in the steady glare of eyes that didn’t smile as he finessed his best cordial greeting, extending a hand that, when I shook it, coolly conveyed his taut, wiry strength. Ali Mohamed was a committed, highly capable, dyed-in-the wool Islamic terrorist. I couldn’t prove it yet. But I was sure it was true, and in that moment, I understood that he knew I knew.23

  The full contents of that meeting remain unknown. McCarthy declined to discuss most of it in his book, citing national security classifications. A 1998 court document revealed that Mohamed claimed he had been working in the scuba-diving business in Kenya.

  But he did talk about bin Laden, telling the men that he had helped move the Saudi from Afghanistan to Sudan in 1991 at the request of Mustafa Shalabi, the head of the Al Kifah Center in Brooklyn, not long before Shalabi was murdered. McCarthy added that Mohamed talked about El Sayyid Nosair and his belief that Islam would “triumph” (McCarthy’s word) over the world. Whatever else was said remains under the seal of government secrecy.24

  Mohamed dutifully reported the incident to al Qaeda, but it only reinforced the opinions of those who distrusted him. Over the course of the next year, al Qaeda began to freeze Mohamed out of its inner circle. His overseas travel ground to a near complete halt, and his assistance on the East African embassy bombings plot was no longer required.25

  The mistrust was not complete or universal. Significantly, al Qaeda did not change its target in North Africa, which it would have if bin Laden suspected that Mohamed had gone over to the enemy. It’s more likely that the al Qaeda leader was influenced to shut Mohamed out by those who genuinely mistrusted him, combined with the obvious fact that the former soldier was now a potential target for U.S. intelligence coverage.

  Shunned but not totally out of the loop, Mohamed returned to his efforts to ingratiate himself into U.S. intelligence at various levels, applying for a job as an FBI translator at one point and trying to get work as a security guard for private contractors doing classified work for the government. He stayed in touch by phone and mail with other American al Qaeda members, including Wadih El Hage and Ihab Ali, who were also in contact with each other. In late 1995 El Hage even visited Mohamed in California.26

  The FBI was slowly closing in on al Qaeda’s American cell. In 1996 Jamal Al Fadl walked into a U.S. embassy in Eritrea and surrendered. The United States hadn’t been looking for him, but he surrendered anyway. Al Fadl had been caught stealing more than $100,000 from al Qaeda. Osama bin Laden directly confronted him about the theft, seeming more hurt than angry, as Al Fadl remembered it:

  I don’t care about the money, [bin Laden said,] but I care about you, because you have been with us from the beginning. You worked hard in Afghanistan; you are one of the best people in al Qaeda. We want to know … we give you a salary, we give you everything. When you travel we give
you extra money. We pay your medical bills. Why you did that? What did you need the money for? Did someone outside of al Qaeda put you up to it?27

  Bin Laden told Al Fadl that he would be forgiven if he repaid the money, but Al Fadl had already spent it. So he left Sudan and went searching for refuge. At the embassy in Eritrea, he stood in the visa application line, and when he reached the window, he told the clerk, “I don’t want visa, but I have some information for your government and if your government help me, and I have information about people, they want to do something against your government.”28

  Patrick Fitzgerald, a federal prosecutor who had worked on the Day of Terror case, was dispatched to debrief Al Fadl. The Sudanese jihadist had been close to the center of al Qaeda, and he started to provide U.S. investigators with a wealth of information on the terrorist network, including its American operatives.

  After the meeting, Fitzgerald called Tom Corrigan, the Joint Terrorism Task Force member who had investigated the Landmarks case. It was the first time Corrigan heard the name al Qaeda.

  [Fitzgerald] called me from overseas and he explained this, what this group was, it made sense. [Al Fadl] was like the Rosetta Stone telling us everything that was going on and what its relationship was to other groups and other events. [ … ] Even Jamal, he was from New York, he lived in Brooklyn for a while. He knew people that were affiliated with our case and affiliated with the Brooklyn and Queens and Jersey City area. He was a person that was overseas and filled in this incredible background but also had information that was pertinent to what we were doing over in the States.29

  The FBI began to watch the Americans. In mid-1996, soon after Al Fadl started to talk, a phone tap was placed on Wadih El Hage’s house in Kenya, and his calls were recorded.30

  As more and more information came out concerning bin Laden, Sudan grew increasingly inhospitable, partly due to pressure from the United States. Bin Laden had lost a considerable amount of his inheritance by this time and couldn’t give his hosts much incentive to stand behind him. In May 1996 bin Laden retreated back to Afghanistan, seething.31 A few months later, he erupted with a formal declaration of war on America, a fatwa published by an Arabic-language newspaper based in London. Bin Laden wrote,

  It should not be hidden from you that the people of Islam had suffered from aggression, iniquity, and injustice imposed on them by the Zionist-Crusaders alliance and their collaborators; to the extent that the Muslims blood became the cheapest and their wealth as loot in the hands of the enemies. Their blood was spilled in Palestine and Iraq. The horrifying pictures of the massacre of Qana in Lebanon are still fresh in our memory. Massacres in Tajikstan, Burma, Kashmir, Assam, [the] Philippine[s], Fatani, Ogaden, Somalia, Eritrea, Chechnya and in Bosnia-Herzegovina took place, massacres that send shivers in the body and shake the conscience. [ … ]

  Terrorizing you, while you are carrying arms on our land, is a legitimate and morally demanded duty. It is a legitimate right well known to all humans and other creatures. Your example and our example is like a snake which entered into a house of a man and got killed by him.32

  The CIA secretly put together a plan to kidnap bin Laden, but it foundered amid political infighting with the FBI and the National Security Council. Nevertheless, Ihab Ali, now living in Orlando and working as a cab driver, wrote to El Hage in Kenya, warning him to “be cautious” because the “enemies” in the United States wanted to “grab” bin Laden.33

  Around the time the letter was written, El Hage went to Afghanistan for a meeting with bin Laden, where the order was given: step up operations in Africa, especially in Somalia. El Hage transmitted the order to several al Qaeda members who had been working on the embassy bombings preparations. At every stage, he reported back to bin Laden, often traveling to Afghanistan to do so in person.34

  Then the world came crashing down around him. While El Hage was in Afghanistan meeting with bin Laden in 1997, FBI agents came knocking on the door of his family’s home in Nairobi. With the cooperation of Kenyan authorities, they were there to search the house.

  El Hage’s American wife, April; her mother; and the couple’s six children watched as the FBI combed through the house, taking the Macintosh computer, papers, business cards, address books, and anything else that might provide clues. Some of the FBI agents suggested that it might not be safe to stay in Nairobi.35

  An FBI agent left his notebook at the house during the search. El Hage politely returned it after he got home a day or two later. Within a month, the family sold all their possessions and returned to the United States—just as the FBI had intended.

  The raid was meant to disrupt the al Qaeda cell in Nairobi, which is not to say that the FBI agents weren’t interested in what they found during the search: phone numbers for bin Laden, Ali Mohamed, Ihab Ali, and more. Soon after the family returned to the United States, settling in Arlington, Texas, El Hage was summoned to New York to appear before a grand jury investigating bin Laden.36

  El Hage may not have been prepared for what was awaiting him. The FBI was finally up to speed on his long history. They had questions about the murder of Rashad Khalifa, the murder of Mustafa Shalabi, that time he sold a gun to World Trade Center bomber Mahmoud Abouhalima, his relationships with Ihab Ali and Ali Mohamed … and, of course, Osama bin Laden.

  El Hage did his duty—he lied and evaded. But it was too late. Al Qaeda put him on the shelf, like Ali Mohamed before him.37

  It was Mohamed’s turn next. The FBI called him in for another chat. As before, Mohamed appeared disarmingly frank, although in reality he was keeping plenty of secrets in reserve. He admitted he had trained bin Laden’s bodyguards. He admitted he had been in Somalia while the United States was there, and he acknowledged that al Qaeda was responsible for the deaths of U.S. soldiers.

  Mohamed talked about his assistance in moving bin Laden from Afghanistan to Sudan back in 1991. According to an FBI report on the interrogation, “he did this because he loved bin Laden and believed in him.” He explained that a fatwa to attack the United States was unnecessary because it was “obvious” that America was the enemy of Islam. He admitted he had trained people in “war zones” and ominously added that “war zones can be anywhere.”38

  After the interview he walked out a free man. Yet again.

  In early 1998 Ihab Ali wrote a letter to Ali Mohamed. The letter indicated that although the American cell might have been pushed to the side, its operatives were still in touch with al Qaeda in Afghanistan. Ali wrote,

  At any rate please give my best regards to your friend O’Sam and his copartner and tell him—Sam—that I apologize that I couldn’t finish what he requested of me, due to some personal problems. As far as Mr. Wadeeh [Wadih El Hage], he’s presently staying in Texas. I had (illegible) him prior to traveling and he filled me in on his social/business life. He told me that after having met with and finishing a business deal with Mr. Sam and while returning home he was contacted by one of the opposition company called Food and Beverage Industry based in the U.S. He was given an extensive interview.39

  Federal prosecutors later said “O’Sam” was likely a coded reference to “Osama,” and Food and Beverage Industry meant FBI. The letter showed that all three American al Qaeda members were still in play, even if they had been placed in strategic retreat.40

  Less than two months later, “O’Sam” upped the stakes, issuing a fatwa that expanded his earlier declaration of war against the United States. Bin Laden wrote,

  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. [ … ] This is in accordance with the words of Almighty Allah, “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 Allah.”41

  In May 1998 bin Laden granted an interview to John Miller of ABC News:

  We say to the Americans as people and
to American mothers, if they cherish their lives and if they cherish their sons, they must elect an American patriotic government that caters to their interests not the interests of the Jews. If the present injustice continues with the wave of national consciousness, it will inevitably move the battle to American soil, just as Ramzi Yousef and others have done.42

  It would be the final warning. On August 7, 1998, the embassy bombings plot—so long in the making—finally came to fruition. Within four minutes of each other, two al Qaeda teams bombed the U.S. embassies in Nairobi, Kenya, and in Dar Es Salaam, Tanzania. More than two hundred people were killed in Nairobi—the operation Ali Mohamed had planned—and eleven died in Dar Es Salaam. The bomb in Kenya was a suicide bomber, and the bomb in Tanzania was meant to be—but the driver panicked and fled before it went off.43

  Bin Laden’s declaration of war had become a reality.

  Not long after the blast, Ali Mohamed’s phone rang. He told the FBI agents on the line that he had heard something years ago about a planned attack on the embassy in Nairobi, but that he had discouraged the plotters from carrying it out. He knew who the bombers were, but he had no intention of naming names.44

  The FBI also showed up on Wadih El Hage’s doorstep. He too lied, telling them he had quit working for bin Laden back in 1994 and hadn’t seen him since. El Hage said he wasn’t aware of anyone working for bin Laden in Kenya or Tanzania. At any rate, bin Laden couldn’t be behind the attacks because he was a “humanitarian,” besides which he would have done the bombing at a time of day to minimize harm to innocent bystanders.45

  Despite such humanitarian leanings, El Hage was able to explain to the FBI why bin Laden hated America so much. According to FBI agent Robert Miranda,