American Jihad: The Terrorists Living Among Us

by Steven Emerson

  In January 1995, just as the trial was about to begin, Ramzi Yousef was apprehended in Pakistan. Federal agents flew him back to the United States on February 7. During the six-hour flight Yousef bragged of his exploits while disclosing that the World Trade Center bombing had been a seat-of-the-pants operation. He had wanted to use hydroxide, a poison gas, but found it too expensive. The group had rented a Ryder van because buying a truck cost too much money. While feds had suspected that the bombing was timed to coincide with the anniversary of the Persian Gulf war, in fact it had occurred because “the rent was due at the end of the month”8 and Yousef was anxious to leave the country. After parking the van on Level B-2 and setting the timing device, Yousef, Salameh, and Abouhalima had become trapped behind a truck in Abouhalima’s Town Car and feared they wouldn’t get out of the garage before the bomb went off.

  Eventually they stood on the Jersey City waterfront viewing the carnage. They were disappointed. Yousef had hoped Tower One would fall sideways into Tower Two, knocking over both and killing 250,000 people. When asked his motives, Yousef told Secret Service agent Brian Parr he was retaliating against U.S. aid to Israel. “When I asked why he didn’t select Israeli targets, he said they were too difficult to attack. ‘If you cannot attack your enemy, you should attack the friend of your enemy.’”9 The purpose was to let Americans know they were “at war.”

  Commenting on the verdict, Henry J. DePippo, a former federal prosecutor who helped try the first case, said he doubted the convictions would influence future terrorists. “These are people who are trying to make a statement,” he said. “So the punishment, however severe, wouldn’t be a deterrent.”10

  *

  The biography of Ramzi Ahmed Yousef that emerged at the trials says a lot about the origins and sophistication of the new terrorists. Yousef is the son of a Pakistani mother and a Palestinian father; he grew up in a working-class Kuwait City suburb. Like many recent terrorists, he is extremely well educated. Yousef speaks Urdu, Arabic, and English, and he studied engineering at Swansea University in Wales from 1986 to 1989. He then went to Afghanistan to be trained in guerrilla fighting at the camps of Osama bin Laden. In 1991 he moved to the Philippines and joined an extreme Muslim group known as Abu Sayyaf. A former deputy commander of the group remembered him as a bitterly anti-American militant who wanted to wage a war of terrorism around the world.

  Using a false Iraqi passport, he had come to the United States with a cover story claiming that he was seeking political asylum. He was released pending a hearing. He immediately made contact with the followers of Sheikh Rahman and began seeking recruits in Jersey City. Through the mosque he met Salameh, Ayyad, and Abouhalima and began plotting. Two weeks before the bombing Yousef also called Eyad Ismoil, a Palestinian boyhood friend living in Dallas. Ismoil agreed to come to New York to join the plan. Ismoil was driving the Ryder truck when the group went through the Holland Tunnel on February 26, 1993.

  Once he had fled the country Yousef returned to the Philippines, where he became involved in another plot: to kill Pope John Paul II when he visited Manila. He also participated in a plan to blow up eleven American jetliners within 48 hours—a disaster that was only barely avoided by chance. Yousef was experimenting with explosives in his Manila apartment in December 1994 when an accident forced him to flee as smoke billowed everywhere. He left behind a computer with encrypted plans for the hijackings, which experts were able to decode. He was eventually tried and convicted on these charges as well. Although he obviously had enormous financial assistance in buying explosives and circling the globe, Yousef has adamantly refused to tell prosecutors where he got the money.

  *

  These interconnected plots from the early 1990s tell us at least two things about the new generation of jihadists. First, its aims are broad: the jihadists hate the United States. And as Yousef’s membership in a radical Philippine group suggests, they also detest secular or moderate regimes within the Islamic world.

  Second, it tells us something about the shifting and elusive nature of terrorists’ networks. There are many kinds of networks—from the highly ordered, centralized ones with intelligence at the apex, to highly decentralized ones with the intelligence spread to the periphery. The terror networks are highly decentralized. Any two points can be connected or disconnected fairly easily. Though Osama bin Laden has come to symbolize the source and puppet-master of it all, he is only one among many players. His al Qaeda network has come to serve as something of an umbrella organization, but it would be a mistake to think of it like a corporate holding company. Almost any operator can initiate an act of terror, and find support for it among old and new associates.

  Finally, the networks are interconnected in many overlapping ways, which means that a few key nodes can lead experts to many points of potential threat. Consider the connections of one man who bridges the first World Trade Center bombing, and the Kahane assassination, and the Connecticut shooting ranges, and bin Laden himself. This is the story of Ali Mohammed, Osama bin Laden’s special-operations man within the United States.

  Ali Mohammed was an officer within the United States Army’s Special Forces based at Fort Bragg, North Carolina. At the same time, he was arranging for security for meetings between such individuals as Osama bin Laden and Hizballah military chief Imad Mughniyeh in Sudan and coordinating activities with other bin Laden operatives within the United States.

  When FBI agents had raided the New Jersey home of El-Sayeed Nosair after his arrest in the shooting of Rabbi Meir Kahane, among the many items found in Nosair’s possession were sensitive military documents from Fort Bragg. The documents, some of which were classified Secret, contained the locations of U.S. Special Operations Forces exercises and units in the Middle East, military training schedules, U.S. intelligence estimates of Soviet forces in Afghanistan, a topographical map of Fort Bragg, U.S. Central Command data, and intelligence estimates of Soviet force projection in Afghanistan. Appended throughout the documents were Arabic markings and notations believed to be by Ali Mohammed. Some documents were marked “Top Secret for Training—otherwise unclassified.” Other documents were marked “sensitive.”

  Ali Mohammed was an Egyptian-born Islamic fundamentalist who had come to live in the United States in 1985. He had been in the United States earlier that decade as well, having graduated as a captain from a Special Forces Officers School at Fort Bragg in 1981 in a program for visiting military officials from foreign countries. He joined the U.S. military in 1986 and received a security clearance for level “Secret.” He was assigned as a sergeant with the U.S. Army Special Operations at Fort Bragg. He also served unofficially as an assistant instructor at the JFK Special Operations Warfare School; as such he participated in teaching a class on the Middle East and Islamic fundamentalist perceptions of the United States.

  Ali Mohammed became active in the war against the Soviets in Afghanistan and soon connected with Islamic militants in New Jersey who had been training and supporting the jihad. Mohammed was introduced to El-Sayeed Nosair by Khalid Ibrahim, an Egyptian-born Islamic fundamentalist in New Jersey. Ibrahim had become active in the Office of Services for the Mujahideen, known as Alkhifa, the group that recruited volunteers and funds for the jihad in Afghanistan. Alkhifa, headquartered in Peshawar, Pakistan, maintained scores of offices worldwide, including three dozen in the United States; its primary American offices were located in Brooklyn, Jersey City, and Tucson, Arizona. According to the U.S. government’s indictment against Osama bin Laden and others for their role in the bombing of the United States embassies in Kenya and Tanzania in August 1998, the Office of Services for Alkhifa was transformed into the terrorist organization of Osama bin Laden, known as al Qaeda, around 1989.

  According to records of the World Trade Center bombing trials, Ali Mohammed began giving training sessions in New Jersey in guerrilla warfare in 1989 to Islamic militants that included, among others, El-Sayeed Nosair, Mahmud Abouhalima, and Khalid Ibrahim. Other training sessions took
place in Connecticut, where Islamic militants trained on weekends. An FBI report, based on Connecticut State Police intelligence, summarized the activities of these training sessions, where semi-automatic weapons were used.

  According to military records, Ali Mohammed left the military in November 1989 and moved to Santa Clara, California. Law enforcement officials say he traveled to Afghanistan and Pakistan, where he befriended Osama bin Laden and other top militants in the Islamic fundamentalist movements who had sought sanctuary in Peshawar. From his base in Santa Clara, Mohammed soon emerged as a top aide to Osama bin Laden. Federal officials say that Mohammed traveled regularly to and from Pakistan and Afghanistan, having helped oversee bin Laden’s terrorist bases in Khost and other terrorist camps in Afghanistan. In 1991, Mohammed was the person in charge of bin Laden’s move from Afghanistan to Sudan. The move was considered perilous since bin Laden had made so many enemies. Mohammed helped bin Laden set up his new home and terrorist base in Khartoum, Sudan, where 2,000 “Arab Afghans”—the name given to the Arab veterans of the Afghanistan jihad—were headquartered in bin Laden terrorist camps. After 1991 Ali Mohammed continued to travel between the terrorist camps in Afghanistan, bin Laden’s base in Sudan, and the United States, and continued to train new Islamic recruits in the expanded holy war.

  Law enforcement records show that Ali Mohammed’s extended stays outside the United States would range from weeks to half a year. But he would always return to the United States, which provided him a safe base from which to travel around the world on behalf of bin Laden. In California, Mohammed became involved in smuggling illegal aliens into the United States, including suspected terrorists. Law enforcement sources say that a favorite route for Mohammed was to smuggle illegal aliens through Vancouver, Canada.

  In a seemingly bizarre twist, while in California, Mohammed volunteered to provide information to the FBI on smuggling operations involving other aliens not connected to terrorist groups. Officials say the relationship allowed Mohammed to divert the FBI’s attention away from looking at his real role in terrorism into examining the information he gave them about other smuggling. This gave Mohammed a de facto shield, effectively insulating himself from FBI scrutiny for his ties to bin Laden. His relationship with the FBI also helped protect Mohammed from being scrutinized by other federal agencies. Mohammed had also tried to cultivate a relationship with the CIA, which did not succeed, although he had far better success in playing off the FBI against the CIA in his dealings with both agencies. Like a character from a John Le Carré thriller, Mohammed played the role of a triple agent and nearly got away with it.

  In late 1994 Ali Mohammed was called by the FBI, who wanted to speak with him about the trial in the World Trade Center conspiracy case. As Mohammed would later state to authorities, “I flew back to the United States, spoke to the FBI, but didn’t disclose everything I knew.” In other words, Mohammed was continuing to manipulate the American authorities even when he was called to testify regarding the acts of terrorists about whom he possessed information.

  Mohammed was named on the long list of potential unindicted coconspirators in the World Trade Center bombing conspiracy released by federal prosecutors. In turn, when Mohammed obtained a copy of this list, he sent it to Wadih el-Hage, bin Laden’s personal assistant, in Kenya “expecting that it would be forwarded to bin Laden in Khartoum.”

  In 1996, according to intelligence reports, Mohammed helped move bin Laden back from Sudan, which wanted to maintain an official arm’s-length relationship with Afghanistan (yet keeping its close connections secret). Mohammed continued working for bin Laden in 1997 and 1998, maintaining his role as one of bin Laden’s top lieutenants.

  In 1998, Mohammed was finally arrested on charges that he was part of al Qaeda, which had been indicted following the embassy bombings in Kenya and Tanzania in that year. On October 20, 2000, Ali Mohammed rendered a guilty plea to all charges filed against him. In his admission, Mohammed admitted his involvement with both the al Qaeda organization and the Egyptian Islamic Jihad organization. He admitted that he had been involved in conducting military and explosives training for al Qaeda in Afghanistan; that he had conducted surveillance of various American, British, French and Israeli targets in Nairobi; that he had trained bin Laden’s personal bodyguards to prevent any assassination attempts; and that he arranged security for a meeting between bin Laden and Hizballah military leader Imad Mughniyeh.

  *

  As Mohammed’s example shows, America is part of an interconnected world of terrorists. The lessons of Mohammed’s story are twofold: As noted, a small number of key individuals provide links to many parts of the sprawling network, and the motives of the terrorists are not simply religious fanaticism. Some operatives, like Mohammed, appear to do it for the sake of the intrigue; others do it for the money; some are genuine fanatics; others are unbalanced. The men who shot tourists in the Empire State Building and Hasidic students on the Brooklyn Bridge have been classified as terrorists by the government because they perpetrated violence on civilians for ideological purposes, trying to strike a blow against American society.

  In 1993, I only dimly understood these mixed motives. It was not clear to me whether American targets were a top priority of the terrorists. I knew I had to meet them face to face to understand them better. To do so, I had to travel to the fountainhead.

  Chapter Four

  The Source

  A Journey to Jihad Headquarters

  I DON’T THINK THERE’S A WAR HERE, A WAR FRONT HERE IN

  THE UNITED STATES AT THIS POINT. I THINK IF THE WHOLE

  SCENARIO CONTINUES THE WAY IT HAS, INEVITABLY THE

  UNITED STATES IS GOING TO BE REACHING A TYPE OF WAR

  FRONT. YEAH. BUT NOT RIGHT NOW.

  —Mohammad al-Asi, of the Islamic Education Center in Potomac, Maryland, in a 1994 interview with the author, from the television documentary “Jihad in America”

  WHAT ARE THE ULTIMATE GOALS OF THE TERRORISTS? What makes them tick? Why do they hate us so powerfully? The international jihad movement is loose and decentralized, but it does flow around the world from certain fertile sources. The sources themselves move—from, for example, Pakistan to Sudan to Afghanistan—yet wherever they are, they inspire and direct hundreds and thousands of followers.

  In 1994 I had the chance to meet some of the leaders who at that time were using Pakistan as a base. I was accompanied on this trip by my colleague Khalid Duran.

  Before teaching in Germany and America, Khalid spent seven years—1967–1974—teaching Islamic law in Pakistan. He knows the country well. In 1994 Khalid went along with me to meet Hudaifa Azzam, the son of Abdullah Azzam, the legendary Palestinian mullah who was the first to conceive of Islam’s international holy war. The visit was arranged through Azzam’s nephew, who lives in Chicago. Azzam had begun preaching worldwide jihad from a secure base in Pakistan. As the Afghan war with the Soviets was dying down, he asked, why stop here? The Middle East was full of corrupt secular rulers who had abandoned the true faith. The military training the volunteers from those many countries had received in the hills of Afghanistan would serve as a basis to challenge those regimes. If the U.S.S.R. could be defeated, Azzam argued, so could the U.S.

  Someone must have been disturbed by his message. In 1989, Azzam was murdered on his way to Friday mosque services, when his car exploded while winding through Islamabad’s narrow streets. Just who murdered Azzam remains a mystery to this day, but his teachings have lived on. His organization was morphed into Osama bin Laden’s al Qaeda. But Azzam provided the spiritual cornerstone. I was excited by the prospect of meeting Azzam’s eldest surviving son, Hudaifa, only twenty years old when his father was killed.

  At the time, the whole Arab world was perturbed by the return of “al-Afghan,”—guerrilla fighters from Afghanistan. They were no longer needed in the Hindu Kush Mountains. Now they were eager to put their practical experience to work in their own countries or anywhere else where they might be able
to spread the jihad and their militant view of Islam. Some went to Kashmir, the disputed territory located on the northern frontier between Pakistan and India that is under Indian control, where a guerrilla war had been launched against New Delhi’s troops in 1989. In 1993, a few hundred “Afghans” made their way to Bosnia, much to the chagrin of the Bosnian government, which wanted the conflict to be seen as a European issue rather than an Islamic one. But staying in Afghanistan was not an option. In truth, few of the Arab mujahideen had displayed outstanding military skills. Instead they became known for their cruel treatment of prisoners and for tyrannizing the people in the “liberated areas.” (These habits have proved their undoing as allied forces have liberated Afghanistan from the Taliban. The Arab Afghans have become isolated and despised by all.)

  A number of Arab governments held meetings to discuss this new threat. Algeria, Tunisia, and Egypt felt most intimidated. In the 1920s Egypt had given birth to the Muslim Brotherhood. An offshoot of the Muslim Brotherhood, Al-Jihad, had assassinated President Anwar Sadat in 1981. The civil government was sick of fundamentalists. Algeria had a socialist regime that was equally unacceptable to the zealots. Algerian authorities outlawed the Front Islamique du Salut (Islamic Salvation Front or FIS) in 1992, after it was poised to win Parliamentary elections. Tunisia’s progressive democratic government, headed by president General Zinedine ben Ali, felt similarly threatened.

  The other black-sheep nation was Pakistan. Many “Afghans” actually spent most of the war in Peshawar, the provincial capital, not far from the border, which became their unofficial headquarters. The local people had soon had enough of these immigrant “Muslim brothers” with their bossy manners—even though Arabs generally enjoy a special respect in this part of the world since they hail from the holy land of Islam and all are considered relatives of the Prophet. The Pakistani Islamist party, Jamaat e-Islami, adopted the Arab Afghans as allies at a time when they had few others. The fundamentalists had never had a very strong popular following, although their doctrine pervaded the Interservices Intelligence Directorate—the “ISI”—which is the real ruler of Pakistan. Now the Jamaat embraced their new “Arab brothers,” hoping to capitalize on their prestige.