Objective Troy

by Scott Shane

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  Terrorist movements had often benefited from an overreaching response by the governments they targeted. Again and again through history, extremist violence had provoked an aroused government to go too far, engaging in brutal and sweeping actions, and thus inadvertently assisting the terrorists’ recruiting efforts. By the spring of 2003, the United States seemed to be unthinkingly following that historical pattern. The extraordinary wave of sympathy for America as a victim of mass murder, which had extended even into much of the Muslim world, was gone. Shocking photographs of Muslim prisoners at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, shackled in orange jumpsuits, had become one count in a growing indictment of American conduct shared by both Muslims and many non-Muslims in Europe and beyond. If the American invasion of Afghanistan had been predictable, perhaps even understandable, the invasion of Iraq in early 2003 was not.

  Al Qaeda had based its declarations of war on America in 1996 and 1998 on a claim that the United States wanted to conquer Muslim lands. That claim, initially based on the small contingent of American troops in Saudi Arabia, had seemed implausible, even lunatic, when it was first proclaimed by Osama bin Laden. But now, with American troops patrolling the streets of Kabul and Baghdad, it began to make sense. The predictions of the extremists were coming true. By the fall of 2003, when it was clear that the Bush administration’s assertions about Saddam Hussein’s nuclear and biological weapons programs had been false, the notion that the United States’ real motive must be control of the oil and lands of the Muslim Middle East gained credence. A young British Muslim might easily conclude that the United States, backed by the British and other allies, really was pursuing a global crusade against Islam.

  Untying the tangle of factors—ideological and psychological, personal and political—that produce radicalization is never easy, but in Awlaki’s case some of the threads can be made out in retrospect. His own sexual behavior, along with the scrutiny of the FBI, had helped send him fleeing from the United States, cutting short a promising public career as an American imam. He had found an encouraging audience for his most radical tendencies in Britain, and he enthusiastically played to his new audience. As an American imam, he routinely had to deal with the larger society, counseling Muslims with personal or financial troubles, speaking to non-Muslim audiences, encountering ministers and rabbis. But in the United Kingdom, his duties and circle of contacts dramatically narrowed. With no responsibility for a mosque, he was immersed in his lectures, puzzling out with other fundamentalist Salafis the lessons that early Islam could teach. To anyone who objected to his portrayal of believers and nonbelievers in constant conflict, Awlaki needed only to point to current events. Under George W. Bush, American had used bogus claims about weapons of mass destruction to send an army to the very heart of the Arab world; opened secret prisons where Al Qaeda suspects were tortured; and locked up a hodgepodge of Muslims at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, for years without trial.

  For Awlaki, the tales of the embattled early Muslims, and the least tolerant passages in the Koran and the hadith, now seemed to be not just historical artifacts but prescient guides to the present and future. The six-century-old Book of Jihad suddenly took on new relevance, and Awlaki was there to explain it.

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  Yet Awlaki’s British acolytes, who saw a confident and charismatic leader, might have been surprised to learn that to his family and friends in Yemen he still seemed a bit at sea. In 2002 and 2003, he was commuting between London and Sanaa, and in Sanaa he was staying in his father’s big house on upscale Rabat Street. His father and mother, along with Anwar’s sisters, lived on the second floor. Anwar, with his family, and his brother Omar had separate apartments on the third floor. His youngest brother, Ammar, had an apartment on the fourth floor, only half of which was finished.

  His father took some pride in Anwar’s growing reputation among English-speaking Muslims as a preacher and lecturer, but he continued to believe his son needed a doctorate and a more conventional career. “I encouraged him to complete his PhD in Britain but he couldn’t do that because of the high fees charged at British universities,” Nasser recalled. With no doctorate, the plan from 2000 for Anwar to start a new department of technical education at the University of Sanaa was off. Recognizing that the lecture circuit in Britain would not offer an adequate living in the long run, Anwar experimented with ways he might make a living in Sanaa. Using his father’s money, he invested in real estate, but he found the work didn’t suit him, and, in a repeat of his experience with a gold and mineral scheme in San Diego, he lost the money. He discussed with friends and colleagues the possibility of getting his own religious television show in the Gulf, but no offers were forthcoming. He seriously considered opening a language school; Sanaa was a magnet for Westerners who wanted to learn Arabic, and there was no shortage of ambitious young Yemenis who wanted to improve their English. But Anwar never started the business.

  The fact was that, despite his increasingly outspoken criticism of the West and vocal hostility to non-Muslims, he was dispirited by the corruption and inefficiency in Yemen and really would have preferred to settle in America or the United Kingdom, family members said. He had greatly enjoyed his time in the West, his father said, “working within the Muslim community with educated people from other Muslim countries, and with young people. I think he would have preferred to go back to Britain or the United States once the situation for Muslims after September 11 became less difficult.”

  There is a surprising piece of evidence to support this conclusion: Awlaki had gotten in touch with the FBI to explore the possibility of a return to the United States. In the autumn of 2003, Awlaki called one of the FBI counterterrorism agents who had interviewed him after 9/11, Icey Jenkins, a veteran who had served in Saudi Arabia and headed the bureau’s investigation of the 1996 Khobar Towers bombing, which killed nineteen US servicemen. He left a telephone message on her voicemail, saying, “This is Anwar, you interviewed me after 9/11,” leaving his e-mail address, and asking to talk to her. She was astonished to hear from him and was working on other matters, so she passed the message to Wade Ammerman, the Awlaki specialist in the FBI’s Washington office, who followed up by e-mail and phone. Ammerman told 9/11 Commission investigators on October 16, 2003, that he believed Awlaki “may want to return to the US.” In an e-mail Awlaki sent to the FBI on October 27, 2003, he complained about reports in the media and the 9/11 Commission that he had been a “spiritual adviser” to two hijackers, which he considered a gross distortion of his passing contacts with men who had worshipped in his mosque. “I am amazed at how absurd the media could be and I hope that the US authorities know better and realize that what was mentioned about me was nothing but lies,” he wrote. But Awlaki had also read that the FBI was reportedly looking for him, and while he said he had nothing new to add to his previous interviews, he did say he was “around and available” and could meet with agents in England or Yemen. After a slow round of calls and e-mails, Awlaki and Ammerman made a plan to meet in London in March 2004. But Awlaki evidently got cold feet about a meeting or simply got busy with other things. When Ammerman tried to finalize arrangements in late 2003, Awlaki did not reply, and by January 2004 his Yahoo e-mail address was no longer working.

  The truncated exchange pointed to yet another alternate path for the Awlaki story. Had the FBI seized the initiative quickly to clarify his legal position—told him he faced no charges but should tone down his rhetoric—he might conceivably have returned to the United States. He could have resumed his old job at Dar Al-Hijrah, picked up where he had left off in his PhD program at George Washington University, and restarted his career as middleman between America and Islam. But the FBI was evidently quite satisfied to keep a suspicious but not prosecutable character at a distance, and the bureau seems to have made no effort to get back in touch after the e-mails began to bounce. Nor did the 9/11 Commission, which in late 2003 and early 2004 repeatedly sought help from the FBI in trying to set up a meeting with Awlaki, ever succ
eed in talking to him.

  Of course, even if the FBI had assured him that it did not plan to charge him, the prostitution file would have hung over his head like a sword of Damocles. Apart from that, he may have worried that circumstantial evidence—his contacts with the 9/11 hijackers and other known militants—might be used against him to build a case on the vague charge of “material support” for terrorism. It was not an idle fear. By mid-2003, after all, his sometime rival in Falls Church, Ali al-Timimi, whose appeal to young people had prompted Dar Al-Hijrah to hire Awlaki and who had since made several joint appearances with Awlaki in Britain, was expecting indictment. Timimi ultimately would be charged, convicted, and sentenced to life in prison for encouraging his young followers to fight US troops in Afghanistan, a sentence that shocked many civil libertarians.

  In fact, in Britain, too, despite its greater tolerance for public militancy, Awlaki began to feel the government was watching him. At some point in 2004 he was banned from returning to the country, according to British news reports. “I think the UK police, Scotland Yard, were looking for him and he had to leave the UK,” said Mohammed al-Asaadi, the Yemen Observer editor who had published his critiques of US foreign policy. “He was afraid they would take him easily and give him to the Americans—that’s why he left.”

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  When Awlaki settled permanently in Yemen, some of his friends and relatives believed the government should give him a good job. He had an excellent education, spoke fluent English, was personable, and came from a powerful tribe, they argued. Why not put him to work? Both his father and his uncle tried to help, but to no avail. Why, exactly, he had trouble getting a job is uncertain. It may be that the appeal of preaching meant that his heart was not in the search. He may have been picky, given his views of government corruption. Potential bosses may have been intimidated by Anwar’s American education or wary of his religious inclinations.

  Whatever the reasons, Awlaki was quite conscious of being left behind as his friends and former classmates from the elite Azal Modern School—among them Ahmed Ali Saleh, the son of Yemen’s president—moved up the ladder in ministries, the Yemeni military, and private companies. “I mean, to see his classmates as high-ranking officers, and he was more highly educated than others, and he’s in the streets,” said his uncle, Saleh bin Fareed al-Awlaki, whose view captured the sense of entitlement of the aristocracy in a poor country. “I am sure that if he got a chance—if he had been given a post like his colleagues, I’m sure he would have been happy.” Awlaki seems to have confided his frustrations and disappointed hopes to his uncle. “He was always talking that he spent his time to be educated, and he was sad about his future.” When he decided to move permanently to Sanaa, Bin Fareed said, Anwar had imagined, “ ‘I will come, I will get a chance to work or do my duty for my country. But I have never been given a chance.’ He was so sad that his education was ignored.” Remarkably, Anwar sometimes spoke of a return to the United States as a sort of backup plan; his relatives didn’t know the FBI backstory that probably would have dissuaded him from such a move. “He would always say, ‘Thank God I’m an American citizen and I have a second home to go back to, if things go wrong in Yemen,’ ” his uncle said.

  In retrospect, the law of unintended consequences may have been at work. American and British suspicions toward Awlaki, of which Yemeni authorities were quite aware, may have helped thwart any plan on the government’s part to steer this son of a former minister and university official into a prominent post. With other options foreclosed, Awlaki pursued his religious vocation with new energy. Since he had been essentially self-taught, with no formal Islamic education, there was plenty of room to improve his credentials.

  At Sanaa’s Iman University, whose conservative Salafi curriculum drew devout young men from many countries, he gave a series of lectures on Islam in medieval Spain, a fascination of his since age thirteen, when his family had toured Spain on the way to the Stanford computer course. The university’s founder, the prominent Yemeni cleric Abdul Majeed al-Zindani, invited him to take any courses that he wished, and he made regular visits to the hilly, rough-hewn campus in the northern part of Sanaa. He visited Saudi Arabia and spent time with a controversial cleric and erstwhile critic of the Saudi monarchy, Salman al-Awda, who had been imprisoned for five years in the 1990s. He moved to the town of Hodeidah on Yemen’s west coast, where the university had a college of shariah, or Islamic law, for three months of study. And he closeted himself for hours, preparing and recording new lecture series on CDs—a successful business, but one his father said brought him less than $20,000 a year.

  Ammar al-Awlaki, who was living at home for most of 2003 and 2004 as his older brother traveled back and forth to London, recalls that Anwar was engrossed in his religious work. He worked in a book-filled office in the family home and was “always busy,” which Ammar, as the admiring younger brother, found a little frustrating. “He was full throttle at the time—doing his sermons, translating books,” preparing English versions of classic Islamic texts so that he could record them. If Anwar accepted an invitation to the home of friends or relatives, “he would stay like fifteen or twenty minutes and he wants to leave. We’d have lunch with family members, relatives, we’d have a big feast and he’d be the first one to leave, to go back to his office or have an appointment.”

  Looking back at that period in his brother’s life, Ammar saw it as critical: “That was the transformation period, I think. I sensed it. I didn’t see it, but I started to sense it.” Anwar was preoccupied with a political-theological debate that was boiling across the Muslim world about the Iraq War and that could be expressed in shorthand as jihad versus fitna. Was the fight against the Americans and their allies in Iraq jihad, a legitimate battle for Islam, obligatory for believers? Or was it fitna, pointless discord in which no side was in the right?

  More broadly, this was a debate about the place of the United States in the cosmology of Islamic belief. Anwar, who a few years before had praised American freedoms and spoken of bridging the gap between the United States and a billion Muslims, spoke explicitly of how his views were changing. “I remember him saying, ‘You know, in 2001 I had a clear stance. But now I’m debating it,’ ” Ammar said. In mid-2003, he recalled, the brothers sat in Anwar’s home office and mused about the changing world. Ammar reminded his older brother of the days when he had preached about the distinctive role of Muslim Americans, who had a foot in both worlds. But with the rise of the insurgency in Iraq in 2003, “Anwar was looking at it from an Islamic point of view—is it legal? Is it Islamic? Is it jihad, or is it fitna?” Anwar’s teacher in Saudi Arabia, Salman al-Awda, had declared the insurgency fitna, but Anwar wasn’t convinced. He knew that Awda had been imprisoned by the Saudi rulers and wondered whether the scholar was hedging his position to avoid more trouble.

  The unavoidable discussion of America and Iraq strained Anwar’s relationship with his father—or rather, Anwar censored himself to reduce the strain. When the report of the Congressional Joint Inquiry into 9/11 was released in July 2003, Awlaki’s name was redacted, but there was little doubt as to the identity of the San Diego imam who “reportedly” had served as “spiritual adviser” to two hijackers. The congressional report noted the FBI’s pushback against this description of Awlaki, saying the bureau asserted that “the imam was a ‘spiritual leader’ to many in the community.” The Washington Post featured Awlaki in its advance story on the congressional report. The following year, in June of 2004, a story in U.S. News & World Report described Awlaki as a major mystery in the 9/11 story and publicly reported his prostitution arrests in San Diego for the first time. The magazine described (with some exaggeration) his “fiery anti-American rhetoric” while at US mosques and called him a “skirt-chasing mullah.”

  For Nasser al-Awlaki, with his deep fondness for America, the news reports that now linked his son to the atrocity of 9/11, however peripherally or unjustly, were excruciating. Anwar knew that his father had
always seen mixing politics with religion as playing with fire. He steered clear of theological talk when his father was present.

  Nasser, the practical man of science and progress, was critical of the American war in Iraq, but he couched his criticism in strictly political terms. “Everyone discussed it politically,” Ammar said. For Anwar, however, the Iraq War was primarily a religious issue. He was intrigued by how the war should be judged according to shariah, or Islamic law, and which clerics had issued which fatwas, or religious rulings, regarding the fighting, Ammar said. While Anwar would happily discuss such matters with Ammar, he clammed up when his father was around, acutely aware that his religious analysis would only reopen the wound inflicted by his son’s association in press reports with the attacks on America.

  In September 2004, Ammar left for further study in Canada, convinced that however tactful Anwar might be around his parents, he was deeply alienated by the Iraq War and was fundamentally shifting his views. Ammar did not see his brother at that point as “fully transformed, as the Anwar that the rest of the world knew afterwards,” he said. But, he added, “I believe, yes, 2004 is the turning point.”

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  If there is a piece of work by Awlaki that marks that turning point, it is the five-hour set of lectures that he released in 2005, “Constants on the Path of Jihad.” None of his works would prove as influential. J. M. Berger, one of the most insightful chroniclers of Awlaki, described “Constants” as “maybe the single most influential work of jihadist incitement in the English language,” one that again and again would surface as a critical influence in terrorism plots. It occupies a place midway between the earnest Islamic history of Awlaki’s early CDs and his open embrace of terrorism in later Internet messages for Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP).