The Longest War

by Peter L. Bergen

  —National Intelligence Estimate of July 2007, representing

  the collective judgment of the United States’ sixteen intelligence agencies

  Najibullah Zazi, a lanky Afghan-American man in his mid-twenties, walked into the Beauty Supply Warehouse in Aurora, Colorado, a suburb of Denver, on July 25, 2009, in a visit that was captured on a store video camera. Wearing a baseball cap and pushing a shopping cart down the aisles of the store, Zazi appeared to be just another suburban guy, although not too many suburban guys buy six bottles of Clairoxide hair bleach, as Zazi did on this shopping trip. He returned to the same store a month later and purchased another dozen bottles of “Ms. K Liquid,” which is also a peroxide-based hair bleach. Aware that these were hardly the typical purchases of a heavily bearded, dark-haired young man, Zazi—who had lived in the States since the age of fourteen—kibitzed easily with the counter staff, joking that he had to buy such large quantities of hair products because he “had a lot of girl friends.”

  Zazi, a sometime coffee cart operator on Wall Street, was in fact planning to launch what could have been the deadliest terrorist attack in the United States since 9/11 using the seemingly innocuous hair bleach to assemble homemade bombs, a signature of al-Qaeda plots in recent years. During early September 2009, at the Homewood Studio Suites motel in Aurora, Zazi mixed and cooked batches of the noxious chemicals in the kitchenette of his room. On the night of September 6, as Zazi labored over the stove, he made a number of frantic calls to someone whom he asked for advice on how to perfect the bombs. Two days later Zazi was on his way to New York in a rented car. By now President Obama was receiving daily briefings about Zazi, sometimes as many as three or four a day.

  Zazi was spotted in downtown Manhattan on Wall Street on the eighth anniversary of the 9/11 attacks just a few blocks from the gaping hole where the World Trade Center had once stood. By then he was under heavy FBI surveillance and eight days later Zazi was arrested. He later admitted that “the plan was to conduct martyrdom operations on subway lines in Manhattan.”

  Zazi was the first genuine al-Qaeda recruit to be discovered living in the United States in six years. On his laptop the FBI discovered he had stored pages of handwritten notes about the manufacture and initiation of explosives and the components of various detonators and fusing systems, technical know-how he had picked up at one of al-Qaeda’s training facilities in Pakistan’s tribal regions sometime between the late summer of 2008 and January 2009, when he finally returned to the United States. The notations included references to TATP, an explosive used in Richard Reid’s shoe bomb and the London 7/7 suicide bombings.

  A constellation of serious domestic terrorism cases surfaced during the last years of the second Bush term and during Obama’s first years in office, which showed that a small minority of American Muslims were not immune to the al-Qaeda ideological virus. And quite a number of those terrorism cases were more operational than aspirational, unlike many of the domestic terror cases that had preceded them following 9/11. The jihadists in these cases were not just talking about violent acts to a government informant but had actually traveled to an al-Qaeda training camp; had fought in an overseas jihad; had purchased guns or explosives; were building bombs and casing targets; and in a couple of cases, had actually killed Americans.

  The Zazi case was a reminder of al-Qaeda’s ability to attract recruits living in America who were “clean skins” without previous criminal records or known terrorist associations and who were intimately familiar with the West. Similarly, Bryant Neal Vinas, a twenty-something Hispanic-American convert to Islam from Queens, New York, traveled to Pakistan’s tribal areas in the summer of 2008. There he attended al-Qaeda training courses on explosives and handling weapons such as rocket-propelled grenades, lessons that he put to good use when he participated in a rocket attack on an American base in Afghanistan in September 2008. Vinas was captured in Pakistan the same month and was turned over to the FBI. He told his interrogators that he had provided al-Qaeda members details about the Long Island Rail Road, which the terror group had some kind of notional plan to attack. (The fact that seven years after 9/11 a kid from Long Island managed to waltz into an al-Qaeda training camp, a feat that no American spy had done, despite the some $75 billion a year that the United States was spending on its intelligence agencies, says a great deal about how the U.S. intelligence community actually works.)

  An American who rose to prominence in al-Qaeda several years after 9/11 was Adam Gadahn, a Californian convert to militant Islam. Gadahn, a heavily bearded man in his twenties wearing a white robe and turban, became a regular on-camera presence in al-Qaeda videos using his jihad handle of “Azzam al-Amriki” and delivering finger-wagging lectures about the perfidious United States. Typical of those appearances was a video in which Gadahn said “fighting and defeating America is our first priority.… The streets of America shall run red with blood.” In 2006 Gadahn became the first American charged with treason in more than five decades.

  Surprisingly, even almost a decade after 9/11 a number of Americans bent on jihad also managed to travel to al-Qaeda’s headquarters in the tribal regions of Pakistan. In addition to Zazi and Vinas, David Headley, an American of Pakistani descent living in Chicago—he had legally changed his name from Daood Gilani in 2006 to avoid suspicion when he traveled abroad—also had significant dealings with militants based in Pakistan’s tribal areas.

  Sometime in 2008, Headley hatched a plan to attack the Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten, which three years earlier had published cartoons of the Prophet Mohammed that were deemed to be offensive by many Muslims. In a message to a Pakistan-based Yahoo group on October 29, 2008, Headley wrote, “Call me old fashioned but I feel disposed towards violence for the offending parties.”

  The cartoons of the Prophet had become a particular obsession of al-Qaeda. In March 2008, bin Laden publicly denounced the publication of the cartoons as a “catastrophe” for which punishment would soon be meted out. Three months later, an al-Qaeda suicide attacker bombed the Danish embassy in Islamabad, killing six. For al-Qaeda and allied groups, the Danish cartoon controversy had assumed some of the same importance that Salman Rushdie’s fictional writings about the Prophet had for Khomeini’s Iran two decades earlier.

  In January 2009, Headley traveled to Copenhagen, where he reconnoitered the Jyllands-Posten newspaper on the pretext that he ran an immigration business that was looking to place some advertising in the paper. In coded correspondence with militants in Pakistan, Headley referred to his plot to take revenge for the offensive cartoons as the “Mickey Mouse project.” On one of his email accounts Headley listed a set of procedures for the project that included “Route Design,” “Counter Surveillance,” and “Security.”

  Following his trip to Denmark, Headley met with Ilyas Kashmiri in the Pakistani tribal regions to brief him on his findings. Kashmiri headed a terrorist organization, Harakat-ul-Jihad Islami, closely tied to al-Qaeda. Headley returned to Chicago in mid-June 2009 and was arrested there three months later as he was preparing to leave for Pakistan again. He told investigators that he was planning to kill the Jyllands-Posten’s cultural editor, Flemming Rose, who had first commissioned the cartoons, as well as Kurt Westergaard, who had drawn the cartoon he found most offensive: the Prophet Mohammed with a bomb concealed in his turban.

  Headley said that he also cased a synagogue near the Jyllands-Posten headquarters at the direction of a member of Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT) in Pakistan, the same group that had carried out the Mumbai attacks that killed some 170 people in 2008. The Lashkar-e-Taiba militant whom Headley was in contact with mistakenly believed that the newspaper’s cultural editor was Jewish. When he was arrested, Headley had a book titled “How to Pray Like a Jew” in his luggage and a Memory Stick containing a video of a close-up shot of the entrance to the Jyllands-Posten offices in Copenhagen.

  Headley also played a key role in LeT’s massacre in Mumbai in late November 2008, traveling to the Indian financial capital
on five extended trips in the two years before the attacks. There Headley made videotapes of the key locations attacked by the ten LeT gunmen, including the five-star Taj Mahal and Oberoi hotels and the Nariman House, a Jewish community center, which was a particular target of LeT’s gunmen and would help further explain why Headley had the book about Jewish prayer rituals in his luggage at the time of his arrest. Headley also scouted out possible locations on Mumbai’s seafront where the attackers, who originated in the Pakistani seaport of Karachi, could land their boat before they launched their attacks.

  For many years after 9/11, the United States government had largely worried about terrorists coming into the country. David Headley was an American exporting the jihad overseas. But he was far from the only one. By the summer of 2010 some three dozen American citizens or residents had been charged with traveling to an overseas training camp or war zone for jihad since 9/11: three who trained with the Taliban; ten who trained with al-Qaeda; eight who trained with the Pakistani terrorist group Lashkar-e-Taiba; three who had trained with some other unspecified jihadist outfit in Pakistan; and more than a dozen who had fought with the Somali al-Qaeda affiliate, Al Shabab. (The actual number of Americans who had traveled overseas for jihad since 9/11 was likely larger, as not everyone who did so ended up being charged or convicted of a crime.)

  In September 2009, the Somali Islamist insurgent group Al Shabab formally pledged allegiance to Osama bin Laden following a two-year period in which it had recruited Somali-Americans and other U.S. Muslims to fight in the war in Somalia. Six months earlier bin Laden had given his own imprimatur to the Somali jihad in an audiotape he released titled “Fight On, Champions of Somalia.”

  In 2006, with American encouragement and support, Ethiopia, a predominantly Christian country, invaded Somalia, an overwhelmingly Muslim nation, to overthrow the Islamist government there known as the Islamic Courts Union (ICU). While far from ideal, the ICU was the first government in two decades to have brought some measure of stability to the failed Somali state, but its rumored links to al-Qaeda–like groups had put it in the Bush administration’s crosshairs.

  Some two dozen Somali-Americans, motivated by a combination of nationalist pride and religious zeal, traveled to Somalia in 2007 and 2008 to fight the Ethiopian occupation. Most of them associated themselves with Al Shabab—“the youth” in Arabic—the insurgent group that would later proclaim itself to be an al-Qaeda affiliate. Many of Al Shabab’s recruits hailed from Minnesota, where the largest number of Somali-Americans are concentrated.

  Al Shabab managed to plant al-Qaeda–like ideas into the heads of even its American recruits. Shirwa Ahmed, an ethnic Somali, graduated from high school in Minneapolis in 2003, then worked pushing passengers in wheel-chairs at the Minneapolis airport. During this period Ahmed was radicalized; the exact mechanisms of that radicalization are still murky but in late 2007 he traveled to Somalia. A year later, on October 29, 2008, Ahmed drove a truck loaded with explosives toward a government compound in Puntland, northern Somalia, blowing himself up and killing about twenty people. The FBI matched Ahmed’s finger, recovered at the scene of the bombing, to fingerprints already on file for him. Ahmed was the first American suicide attacker anywhere. It’s possible that eighteen-year-old Omar Mohamud of Seattle was the second. On September 17, 2009, two stolen United Nations vehicles loaded with bombs blew up at Mogadishu airport, killing more than a dozen peacekeepers of the African Union. The FBI suspected that Mohamud was one of the bombers.

  Al Shabab prominently featured its American recruits in its propaganda operations, releasing two videos in 2009 starring Abu Mansoor al-Amriki (“the father of Mansoor, the American”), who was in fact Omar Hammami, a twenty-five-year-old from Alabama who was raised as a Baptist before converting to Islam while he was in high school. In the video Amriki delivered an eloquent rejoinder to President Obama’s speech in Cairo, in which the president had extended an olive branch to the Muslim world. Mansoor addressed himself to Obama in a flat American accent: “How dare you send greetings to the Muslim world while you are bombing our brothers and sisters in Afghanistan. And how dare you send greetings to Muslims while you are supporting Israel, the most vicious and evil nation of the modern era.” Another Al Shabab video from 2009 shows Amriki preparing an ambush against Ethiopian forces and featured English rap lyrics extolling jihad intercut with scenes of his ragtag band traipsing through the African bush.

  The chances of getting killed in Somalia were quite high for the couple of dozen or so Americans who volunteered to fight there; in addition to the two men who conducted suicide operations, six other Somali-Americans between eighteen and thirty years old were killed in Somalia between 2007 and 2009, as was Ruben Shumpert, an African-American convert to Islam from Seattle. Given the high death rate of the Americans fighting in Somalia, as well as the considerable attention this group received from the FBI, it was unlikely that American veterans of the Somali war posed much of a threat to the United States itself. It was, however, plausible, now that Al Shabab had declared itself to be an al-Qaeda affiliate, that U.S. citizens in the group might be recruited to engage in anti-American operations overseas.

  The fact that American citizens had engaged in suicide operations in Somalia raised the possibility that suicide operations could start taking place in the United States itself; to discount this possibility would be to ignore the lessons of the British experience. On April 30, 2003, two Britons of Pakistani descent launched a suicide attack in Tel Aviv; the first British suicide bomber, Birmingham-born Mohammed Bilal, blew himself up outside an army barracks in Indian-held Kashmir in December 2000. Despite those attacks, the British security services had concluded after 9/11 that suicide bombings would not be much of a concern in the United Kingdom itself. Then came the four suicide attackers in London on July 7, 2005, which ended that complacent attitude.

  Major Nidal Malik Hasan, a Palestinian-American medical officer and a rigidly observant Muslim who made no secret to his fellow officers of his opposition to America’s wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, went on a shooting spree at the giant Army base at Fort Hood, Texas, on November 5, 2009, killing thirteen and wounding many more. This attack seems to have been an attempted suicide operation in which Hasan planned a jihadist “death-by-cop.” In the year before his killing spree, Hasan had made Web postings about suicide operations and the theological justification for the deaths of innocents, and had sent more than a dozen emails to Anwar al-Awlaki, an American-born cleric living in Yemen who is a well-known al-Qaeda apologist. Awlaki said he first received an email from Major Hasan on December 17, 2008, and in that initial communication he “was asking for an edict regarding the [possibility] of a Muslim soldier [killing] colleagues who serve with him in the American army.”

  Hasan was a social misfit who never married, largely avoided women (except, apparently, strippers), and had few friends, while the psychiatric counseling he gave to wounded veterans when he worked at Walter Reed Army Medical Center in Washington, D.C., might have contributed to a sense of impending doom about his own deployment to Afghanistan. But while Hasan was undoubtedly something of an oddball, in what he assumed to be his final days he seems to have conceived of himself as a holy warrior intent on martyrdom.

  Early on the morning of the massacre, the deadliest ever on a U.S. military base, Hasan was filmed at a convenience store buying his regular snack, dressed in white, flowing robes. The color white is often associated with martyrdom in Islam, as the dead are wrapped in white winding sheets. In the previous days Hasan had given away many of his possessions to his neighbors in the decrepit apartment block they shared. Neighbor Lenna Brown recalled, “I asked him where are you going, and he said Afghanistan.” Asked how he felt about that, Hasan paused before answering: “I am going to do God’s work.” He gave Brown a Koran before he left for what he believed to be his last day on earth.

  As he opened fire in a room full of fellow soldiers who were filling out paperwork for their deployments to Afghan
istan and Iraq, Hasan shouted at the top of his lungs, “Allah Akbar!” God is Great! It has been the battle cry of Muslim warriors down the centuries. Hasan survived being shot by a police officer and was put in intensive care in a hospital in San Antonio, Texas. After he woke up he found himself not in Paradise but being interrogated by investigators and paralyzed from the waist down.

  For Americans fired up by jihadist ideology, American soldiers fighting two wars in Muslim countries were particularly inviting targets. A few months before Hasan’s murderous spree, Abdulhakim Mujahid Muhammad, an African-American convert to Islam, had shot up a U.S. military recruiting station in Little Rock, Arkansas, killing a soldier and wounding another. Despite the fact that the FBI had had him under surveillance following a mysterious trip that he had recently taken to Yemen, Muhammad was still able to acquire guns and attack the recruiting station in broad daylight. When Muhammad was arrested in his vehicle, police found a rifle with a laser sight, a revolver, ammunition, and the makings of Molotov cocktails. (The middle name that Muhammad had assumed after his conversion to Islam, Mujahid, or “holy warrior,” should have been a red flag, as this is far from a common name among Muslims.)

  A group of some half-dozen American citizens and residents of the small town of Willow Creek, North Carolina, led by Daniel Boyd, a charismatic convert to Islam who had fought in the jihad in Afghanistan against the Soviets, was also alleged to have had some kind of plan to attack American soldiers. Starting in 2008, Boyd purchased eight rifles and a revolver and members of his group did paramilitary training on two occasions in the summer of 2009. According to federal prosecutors, members of Boyd’s cell conceived of themselves as potential participants in overseas jihads from Israel to Pakistan. And Boyd obtained maps of Quantico Marine Base in Virginia, which he allegedly cased for a possible attack on June 12, 2009. He also possessed armor-piercing ammunition, saying it was “to attack Americans,” and said that one of his weapons would be used “for the base,” an apparent reference to the Quantico facility.