Objective Troy

by Scott Shane

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  As his renown spread, Awlaki fended off preaching invitations from mosques all over the country. But one he accepted in early 2002 came from Las Cruces, New Mexico, where he had family ties: he had been born there, while his father studied at New Mexico State University, and now his younger brother Ammar was a student there. Anwar flew down for a couple of days, gave a sermon at the local mosque, and spent time with his brother. One night, Ammar recalled, the two of them had a dinner invitation from a local Yemeni immigrant family. Anwar proposed walking—to his brother’s surprise, since the house was about five miles away. The long walk gave them a chance to speak at length about 9/11, Al Qaeda, and the battle for Muslim hearts and minds. As they walked, Ammar recalled, Anwar spoke in strikingly harsh tones about Al Qaeda. Ammar, nineteen at the time and barely versed in the different political forces within the Muslim world, had noticed that some Saudi students at the mosque were “a little sympathetic” toward the 9/11 terrorists, suggesting that the United States had deserved a comeuppance. “I expected that Anwar would say, ‘Okay, they had good intentions….They chose the wrong means.’ But Anwar was totally against it.” What was especially memorable, he said, was that Anwar seemed furious at Al Qaeda, which he seemed to see as a dangerous rival for the loyalty of Muslims and which he said had “set us back twenty years in our efforts.” He even seemed to relish the prospect of strong American action against Al Qaeda. “And he said, ‘Look, now let’s see who wins. Who’s going to spread Islam?’ ”

  “I remember he opened my eyes,” Ammar recalled. Listening to his brother, he said, he came to understand divergent approaches to religion: “Okay, there’s jihadists who believe they can bomb and spread Islam, but oh, there are guys who live in the States like Anwar who are trying to spread Islam in peaceful ways, who think you don’t spread Islam by attacking. I remember he was not impressed at all by Osama bin Laden.”

  Ammar returned the visit toward the end of March 2002, flying to Washington, where Anwar picked him up in his minivan. The younger brother’s real motive, in fact, was to borrow the van and drive to New York to visit a girl he’d taken an interest in. Before he left Washington, however, he spent a few days with Anwar, hanging around the mosque and sampling some of the ethnic restaurants that Anwar liked. Neither Anwar nor Ammar knew it, but an FBI surveillance team followed them on their rounds: driving by the White House and Pentagon, shopping at Borders, dining at a kebab place and at Legal Seafood. At first, in the FBI reports, Ammar was just “UMEM,” or unknown Middle Eastern male; then the FBI watchers figured out that he was the cleric’s younger brother.

  As Ammar, the admiring younger brother, remembered it, he was eager to see Anwar return to Yemen and follow in his father’s footsteps in helping out a country that needed him. So not long after he arrived in Washington, Ammar asked Anwar lightheartedly just how long he intended to stay in the United States. “And he goes, like, ‘Forever,’ ” said Ammar, whose American English is even more colloquial than his brother’s was. “I asked him how long he might stay, because I thought Anwar was a charismatic guy, one of a kind. If he came to Yemen, he’d do something, he’d be something special in Yemen. At the time that’s what I thought. I looked up to Dad and what he’d done in Yemen. I wanted Anwar to be the same. But he said, ‘No, I’m going to spend the rest of my life in America.’ ” With his preaching success, his CDs, and his emergence as a national voice since 9/11, he apparently had set aside the plan to take an education post at Sanaa University. Between his thriving career at the mosque and beyond, his location near the center of American political power, and his pleasant lifestyle, he had no intention of leaving, Ammar said. “He had started on his PhD. We’d go out and have amazing seafood in Washington restaurants. We’d go to Chinese restaurants. He was showing me around. He was totally planning to stay.”

  It was a notable exchange. According to the FBI surveillance logs, Ammar arrived in Virginia on March 23—the day after Awlaki’s fierce March 22 “war against Muslims” sermon in response to the federal raids on Islamic institutions. It has been a common assumption that after that outburst of anger and frustration Awlaki was fed up and ready to leave the country, disillusioned by the wave of hostility to Muslims. But Ammar’s account suggests otherwise—that even after the sermon, Anwar fully intended to stay in the United States.

  The language of the sermon itself actually supports that conclusion. Awlaki framed the struggle of Muslim Americans to insist on their rights in the face of discrimination and police abuse as parallel to the earlier struggle of African Americans, with which he had become familiar. He had visited prisoners while living in San Diego, had read Malcolm X, and had spoken just days before 9/11 at the fund-raiser for Jamil al-Amin, the former H. Rap Brown, a prominent leader in the black liberation movement of the 1960s. And in the angry March 22 sermon he held up African Americans as a model for American Muslim empowerment and actually mentioned the case of al-Amin, whom he portrayed as an innocent man facing unfair murder charges. He called for unity—“This was an attack on every one of us”—and support for Muslim political organizations “by your money, by your manpower and also by your advice and ideas.” At the emotional peak of the sermon, Awlaki made the comparison with the civil rights movement explicit:

  As Muslims, if we allow this to continue, if we do not stop it, it ain’t gonna stop! It’s not gonna stop! If you don’t stand up in the struggle and make your voices heard and unite and make it clear to the authorities that you’re not going to allow your necks to be stepped over and your rights to be infringed upon, then only Allah knows where it’s gonna stop….Because there are no rights unless there is a struggle for those rights. And the history of America in that sense is very clear. African Americans in this country had to go through a struggle. Their rights were not handed to them.

  The sense of the sermon was that yes, times are tough—but that Muslims must unite and fight, not cower or flee. It fit Anwar’s explanation to his brother a few days later that he planned to stay indefinitely in the United States. But then, suddenly and dramatically, something changed.

  Just a few days after their conversation about Anwar’s future, Ammar showed up at the mosque at the time of the evening prayer, known as isha, the last of the five daily prayers. He was surprised to discover that his brother was not leading the prayer. “He was in the mosque—his car’s there,” Ammar said. “If he’s there, he’s the leader of the prayer—but he wasn’t leading the prayer.” Ammar sought out his brother and found him looking pale and more upset than he had ever seen him. “He was in such a mental state, so devastated that he couldn’t even lead the prayer….He was angry, upset, sad, maybe confused.” Ammar asked him what had happened. “And he said, ‘We’ll talk about it.’ ” Ammar was appalled and intensely curious about what could have caused such distress.

  The next day, he accompanied his brother to a library or some other public place—Ammar can picture the setting but doesn’t remember exactly where they were. Anwar found a meeting room where they could be alone and astonished him with his next request: “He told me to take the battery out of my phone, and he did the same.” Then his brother explained to Ammar what had so distressed him: a conversation that he had had the previous night, just before the evening prayer was to begin.

  “He said, ‘Something happened last night that made me reconsider my stay here in the States. I was told that the FBI has a file on me, and this file could destroy my life. I’m now rethinking my options, and one of them might be as drastic as leaving the States.’ ” Anwar said he was leaving in a few days for a long-planned visit to the United Kingdom, where he was scheduled to speak at a Quran Expo in Birmingham. He just might not come back, he said.

  Anwar did not tell his brother who had revealed the existence of the FBI file on him or what it contained. Given Anwar’s evident anguish and secretive manner, Ammar did not press him for details. He knew vaguely that some Dar Al-Hijrah members had connections to Hamas, the Pa
lestinian group that had been designated by the United States since 1997 as a terrorist organization, and he wondered whether allegations of support for Hamas might be involved. But he found the episode as bewildering as it was upsetting. A day or two after the conversation, Ammar drove to New York to visit his friend. Anwar flew to England and spoke at the Quran Expo but canceled his return trip. He would return to the United States only one more time, seven months later.

  A long-secret document reveals just how Awlaki learned on that night in March 2002 of his FBI file and what it contained. The bureau had not confronted him, nor had any of Awlaki’s friends or colleagues learned of the file’s existence and tipped him off about it. Instead, the tip came from inside Awlaki’s secret life in the hotels and motels around the nation’s capital: he had received a warning call from a manager of one of the escort services he regularly patronized, who told him that “an agent named ‘Wade’ had been there asking questions about him.” The agent, Wade Ammerman, later told four interviewers from the 9/11 Commission that he believed the escort manager’s call—monitored by the bureau under a court order approving eavesdropping—made Awlaki “nervous” and prompted him to change his plans.

  This explanation fits all the facts. Awlaki had been questioned by counterterrorism agents first in San Diego in the 1999–2000 investigation and then repeatedly after 9/11. But months had passed, and he had no reason to believe that the bureau would be able to build a terrorism case against him; in fact, investigators did not believe they had a case. Hence Awlaki’s assurance in telling Ammar only days earlier that he expected to stick with his thriving clerical career in the United States for many years to come. Now, however, with the alarming call from the escort service, Awlaki would have realized for the first time that his many visits to prostitutes had been monitored by the FBI. The nature of the questions that agents had asked the escort service manager likely would have made clear that they knew a great deal about his extraclerical activities.

  He was right: however thin the evidence tying him to militancy, the bureau’s Awlaki file was overflowing with lurid details of his paid sexual encounters. Though Awlaki didn’t know it, bureau officials were indeed studying the possibility of charging him, as the June 2002 racketeering memo would show. He was being quite realistic when he told his brother that the prostitution file could “destroy my life.” It could plausibly be used to put him in jail. It could be leaked to the media, shattering his career, his reputation, and his family life. Or perhaps even worse, from the point of view of psychological pressure, it could be used by the FBI to blackmail him into becoming an informant, an agonizing possibility for a strong-minded cleric who was urging Muslims to stand up to a bullying government. It was an intolerable threat that Awlaki did not dare confront and could not mitigate. He could only flee.

  In a tale full of twists that might have gone a different way, this was an especially provocative turn. The FBI’s blanket surveillance was intended to find his ties to terror, and what it found did not add up to anything close to a criminal terrorism case. But because the bureau stumbled onto his visits to prostitutes, and because Awlaki found out about it, he abandoned his life in the United States, with dire ultimate consequences both for American security and for Awlaki himself. In other words, his main reason for leaving the United States was not Americans’ anti-Islamic prejudice, as many have assumed, but his own anti-Islamic behavior. His aspiration to serve as a bridge between America and Islam, already challenged by the Operation Green Quest raids and the growing tension between the authorities and many Muslims, was over. He could no longer function as an American imam, living every day under the shadow of his own hypocrisy and the FBI’s knowledge of it. He would have to find something else to do with his life.

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  As he flew to London at the end of March 2002, Awlaki was heading into an environment far more tolerant of militant Islamic rhetoric than the post-9/11 United States. Both in the diverse British Muslim community and on the political left in Britain, there was substantial support for the notion that 9/11, however regrettable for its victims, represented a kind of rough justice for an arrogant America. When he left American soil, Awlaki left behind more than the constant fear of exposure for his involvement with prostitutes or prosecution for his past associations with militants and the hijackers. In the United Kingdom, he no longer faced the stark with-us-or-with-the-terrorists choice that Bush had pronounced.

  He spoke at the Quran Expo in Birmingham, as planned, but he canceled his return trip. Instead, he went to stay with his wealthy uncle, Saleh bin Fareed al-Awlaki, who happened to be at his estate in Bournemouth, the resort town on England’s south coast. Bin Fareed asked him about the fallout from 9/11, and Anwar told him he had been questioned by the FBI but never detained or charged, with no restrictions on his travel. “I asked him, ‘What are you doing here in London?’ ” Bin Fareed recalled. “And he said, ‘I want to spend a few weeks here to preach in mosques and universities.’ So he went to London and he went to the north of London and came back to see me two or three times. He was moving freely and he was not afraid of anything to be done against him.”

  At Dar Al-Hijrah, officials were shocked by Awlaki’s sudden decision to leave, but they took the move in stride, hopeful that they could persuade him to return. The mosque prepared a letter on April 20, about three weeks after his departure, to use to answer inquiries about where the imam had gone. By dressing up his sudden and highly inconvenient disappearance as a sort of planned sabbatical, mosque officials left open the possibility of Awlaki’s return. “Mr. Al-Awlaki’s Islamic knowledge and experience is phenomenal,” the letter said, “and the center wishes to continue employing him. It is in that regard that we have decided to transfer Imam Al-Awlaki to Yemen in order to take extensive Islamic law classes with scholars that are qualified to teach it.”

  By the time the letter was written, Awlaki had arranged for his family to leave Virginia and fly to Yemen, where they moved into his parents’ spacious house in Sanaa. He began to divide his time between Yemen, where his family always welcomed him, and London, where he was developing a reputation as a charismatic speaker, building upon his successful CDs. Nussaibah Younis described memorably in the Guardian the weekends she spent as a British Muslim teenager taking the bus to Islamic conferences. “Once you’ve been on the circuit for a while, you get a ratings system going: when old, first-generation Pakistani men get up to speak you skip out into the corridor for a cup of coffee and a gossip.” But the Americans tended to be compelling, and Awlaki was among the best, she recalled. “When I hit 17, I attended a 10-day Islamic studies course and was thrilled to discover that Awlaki was the centerpiece of the schedule,” wrote Younis, now with the Project on Middle East Democracy. “He taught us about the life of the prophet Muhammad for three hours a day and it was mesmerizing. He taught by telling stories. He spoke about the Prophet Muhammad, his wives, his companions and their lives with such passion, intimacy and humor—it was as though he knew them first hand. His stories were so good because he wasn’t afraid to see the humanity in the characters he described. He spoke about their weaknesses as well as their strengths, about jealousy, anger, love and lust.” Younis and the other students could have no idea that when he spoke of such “weaknesses” as lust he was speaking from deep personal experience.

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  In October 2002, Awlaki did something unexpected. At the urging of his father, he interrupted his budding career as a lecturer in Britain to make one last trip to the United States. Nasser al-Awlaki, who knew nothing of the prostitution file, was clinging to his dreams for his talented son. Anwar was still officially in the doctoral program at George Washington University. Perhaps he could finish his studies and still get a worthy position at Sanaa University or in the Yemeni government. Alternatively, maybe it was not too late to capitalize on his considerable fame in the United States and make a good life there after all. Awlaki, his wife, and the youngest of their three children flew via Riyadh
to JFK International Airport, arriving early on the morning of October 10. They were taken aside for secondary screening, held for three hours, and finally told they were free to fly on to Washington. Eight years later, in Inspire magazine, Awlaki recalled that customs officials seemed “quite baffled” by the situation. “I got an apology from one of them with a weird face on him. Actually I myself was shocked and asked them: Is that it? They said, yes sir, that’s it. You are free to board!” In what would be his final public encounter with his government on American soil, the future terrorist was given a comment card—just in case he wanted to complain about his treatment at the hands of immigration agents.

  Despite his lightly sarcastic tone in recalling the episode, it seems likely that Awlaki was feeling less smug at the time. He had fled the country in a hurry seven months earlier, after all, after the escort service had tipped him off about his FBI file. He knew that the FBI had plenty of evidence to embarrass or arrest him, and during the long wait at JFK he may well have wondered whether his father’s pressure to give life in America one more chance might now end in disaster.

  In fact, his return was even riskier than he could have known. In the months before his plane landed, the law enforcement bureaucracy had prepared two possible prosecutions. Both of them, however, turned out to be so convoluted that they did not ultimately pass muster with senior Justice Department prosecutors. First, there was that twenty-page FBI memo four months earlier that had proposed a racketeering case based on his crossing from Virginia into the District of Columbia to buy the services of prostitutes. Prosecutors declined to go along with the idea. Second, there was the discovery of a long-ago Awlaki lie by a determined Diplomatic Security Service officer, Ray Fournier, who was assigned to the Joint Terrorism Task Force in San Diego. Fournier discovered that on Awlaki’s application for a Social Security card back in 1990 he had falsely given his birthplace as Aden, Yemen, presumably in order to safeguard his US Agency for International Development scholarship for foreign students. The statute of limitations on a fraud charge related to the scholarship or the Social Security application had long since passed. But Fournier argued that since Awlaki had used his Social Security number to renew his American passport in 1993, a charge of passport fraud—with an unusually long ten-year statute of limitations—was still possible. On the basis of his theory, a warrant was issued for Awlaki’s arrest in June 2002.