Mastermind

by Richard Miniter

  Khalid strongly identified with the Baluch and endured the discrimination that came from being one of them. In this way do identities harden and sharpen, becoming weapons.

  The Muslim Brotherhood

  Khalid Shaikh’s older brothers Zahid and Abed joined the student wing of the Muslim Brotherhood sometime in the mid-1970s. KSM and his nephew Ramzi soon followed.

  To boys in Khalid’s position, the Brotherhood appealingly taught that all Muslims were equal, no matter their wealth or ethnicity. He could join as an equal and delight in a culture counter to the one he experienced daily in Kuwait. Often meeting under tents in the desert or in the larger homes of more prosperous members, Khalid heard lectures and debates and even got the chance to perform in skits and plays meant to dramatize political messages.

  The Brotherhood gave Khalid two important building blocks: an integrated philosophy of life, politics, and religion, and a connection to a network of jihadis who challenged governments around the world. Suddenly the world made sense to him, and his membership gave him a kind of status.27

  Understanding the Muslim Brotherhood’s origins and philosophy gives some insights into KSM’s intellectual development, albeit indirectly. It was his first ideological education, outside of his home.

  The Muslim Brotherhood (known in Arabic as Al-Ikhwan Al-Muslimin) was founded in Egypt by Hassan al-Banna. Al-Banna, born in 1906, was schooled in Islam by a strict father, a respected Muslim scholar who ran a watch-repair shop near Alexandria, Egypt. Both father and son were devoted readers of al-Manar, a magazine edited by a Syrian named Rashid Rida28 that was obsessively concerned “with the decline of Islamic civilization relative to the West.”29

  Instead of blaming a backward clergy, as many Muslim scholars did at the time, Rida, and later al-Banna, blamed the Arab world’s impure understanding and practice of Islam. Going back to the original seventh-century version of Islam, al-Banna believed, would bring Muslims success just as it had in that earlier era.

  Al-Banna’s ideal was Islam’s “golden age” that lasted from A.D. 622 to 660, when the Prophet Mohammed and the four “rightly guided” caliphs (rulers) ran a united Muslim empire. That his utopia lasted only thirty-eight years and that two of the four “rightly guided caliphs” were assassinated did not bother al-Banna at all.30 “The subsequent fourteen centuries are considered less important, even objectionable,” writes Gilles Kepel, one of France’s most influential scholars of contemporary Islam. Kepel contrasts al-Banna’s ideal of Mecca, which vanished fourteen centuries ago, with the Western ideal of Pericles’ Athens, which disappeared more than twenty centuries ago. While many supporters of democracy cite ancient Athens as an archetype, Kepel writes, no one wants to “copy all of the features of Athenian society,” such as slavery, ostracism, or fewer rights for women. Al-Banna, by contrast, wanted to bring back seventh-century Mecca in every detail, except perhaps technology.31 Rather than learning from the past, he wanted to re-create it. Can a historical-cultural moment be reassembled and maintained, when the incentives and ideas acting on individuals, societies, and states have fundamentally changed? Al-Banna never seemed to address that question.

  Hassan al-Banna’s main political message was that Islam is a “total solution.” Al-Banna’s intellectual successor, Yusuf al-Qaradawi, summed up al-Banna’s view vividly: “Islam is a comprehensive school of thought, a creed, an ideology, and cannot be completely satisfied but by [completely] controlling society and directing all aspects of life, from how to enter the toilet to the construction of the state.”32

  Al-Banna believed that going back to the time and teachings of the Prophet Mohammed was the only way to take on the Christian West. After all, he reasoned, in the time of the Prophet, all Muslims were unified under a single law and leader, when Arab armies rode triumphantly from the shores of the Atlantic Ocean to the foothills of the Himalayas, conquering all in their path.

  Al-Banna’s first goal was to turn Egypt into an Islamic state, to be ruled by Islamic law. Over time, he believed, the rest of the Muslim world would fall. “It is the nature of Islam to dominate, not to be dominated, to impose its laws on all nations, and to extend its power to the entire planet,” he wrote.33

  While al-Banna’s ideal was ancient, his methods were modern.

  When he arrived in Cairo in 1923 to be trained as a schoolteacher, he was surprised by what he described as “the wave of atheism and licentiousness.”34 With a charismatic presence and a commanding voice, al-Banna recruited fellow students to preach traditionalist Islam not only in the mosques but in the sidewalk cafés.35

  Al-Banna, after graduation, was hired as a schoolteacher in Ismailia, a hamlet in the British-run Suez Canal Zone. He continued to agitate and organize, eventually forming the Brotherhood in 1928.36 The Brotherhood leaders openly admired Hitler and Mussolini, partly for their shared antipathy to the British Empire (which ran Egypt at the time) and partly for their hostility to Jews and individual rights.37 For siding with the Axis powers of the Nazis and the Fascists during World War II, al-Banna was briefly jailed by the British.

  The Brotherhood’s appeal was similar to that of early Western labor unions—it was most powerfully felt among the self-educated strivers. Like early unions, it grew rapidly.

  In 1946, al-Banna set up the “Special Apparatus,” a secret division for terrorist attacks. The Special Apparatus bombings accelerated across Egypt as British troop numbers declined from 1946 to 1948. Movie theaters and hotel bars were favorite targets, because they were frequented by Westerners and Westernized Egyptians and because movies and alcohol were forbidden by their version of Islam.

  Government officials soon became targets. When an Egyptian judge handed down long jail terms to several Brotherhood members convicted of murdering and maiming innocents, another Special Apparatus unit killed the judge.38

  In their investigation, the Egyptian police found the Special Apparatus’s arms caches and written evidence of plots to kill other officials. The police informed the prime minister, who banned the Brotherhood. In months, the prime minister was killed.

  The police intensified their crackdown, ultimately gunning down al-Banna himself in 1949. He was left to slowly bleed to death.39 He was forty-three and almost immediately was hailed as a martyr.

  In the wake of Britain’s departure, Egypt was plunged into turmoil as communists, nationalists, and Islamists vied to seize power from the king and his prime minister.

  Then a new player emerged: a clique of army officers led by Colonel Gamal Abdel Nasser. In July 1952, they captured the palace and the country. For the first time in sixty centuries, Egypt was not ruled by a monarch.

  Incredibly, the military chose to ally itself with the Brotherhood, which was reliably anticommunist and anti-British. The Brotherhood brought the military junta a vital asset: a grassroots network. By 1948, one in every eighteen Egyptians was a member of the Brotherhood—more than one million men.40 Its vast reach included its own hospitals, schools, factories, and support programs for widows, orphans, and the poor.41 The Brotherhood had grown rapidly by recruiting future professionals (engineers, doctors, lawyers) and paraprofessionals (teachers, police, military) in universities and technical schools. As these young men graduated, they joined and ultimately dominated the professional unions. (Doctors, lawyers, and virtually every other profession in Egypt is unionized.) Many of the most educated, modernized Egyptians now wanted to upend the modern world and return to an ancient Islamic ideal.

  Naturally, the honeymoon didn’t last. The Brotherhood was disappointed when the military had no interest in imposing strict Islamic law and the military found the Brotherhood hard to work with.

  By the early 1950s, Brotherhood leaders began to complain of Colonel Nasser’s “pharaoh-like tendencies.” Those were fighting words. When a Brotherhood operative tried to kill Nasser in October 1954, the strongman retaliated. Thousands of Brotherhood members were arrested and tortured.42

  One of the arrested was Sayyid Qutb, who u
sed his prison cell to become the Brotherhood’s intellectual leader. His books, all written in Egyptian jails, advanced the ideology of al-Banna with a new twist: armed jihad was permitted, even required, against rulers who were insufficiently Muslim. (The concept of holy war against Muslim rulers was an innovation and, some Islamic scholars say, a questionable one.) Nevertheless, Qutb’s books became an underground sensation; during a 1965 crackdown in Egypt, they were found in “virtually every house the police searched.”43KSM almost certainly read Qutb’s books, especially Milestones and In the Shade of the Koran.

  Thanks to Qutb, jihad became a defining element of Islamist movements across the Arab world.

  Qutb was hanged for treason in 1966, but his ideas and books lived on. Indeed, his books continued to kill. After Nasser died, in 1970, Anwar el-Sadat took control of Egypt. Eleven years later, he was killed because of peace efforts with Israel as well as his arrests of Brotherhood members. His killers said publicly they were inspired by Qutb’s books. In time, Qutb’s writings became one of the primary intellectual sources for Al Qaeda.

  KSM would later be connected to two of the key figures in the Sadat plot. One of the plotters against Sadat was Dr. Ayman al-Zawahiri, currently Al Qaeda’s number two. KSM would meet him repeatedly in Pakistan. Also linked to the plot to kill Sadat was Sheikh Omar Abdel Rahman, later known in the American press as “the Blind Sheikh.” Abdel Rahman would come to play a critical role in KSM’s first attack on the World Trade Center.

  The antagonism between the Egyptian government and the Brotherhood, though it waxes and wanes, persists to this day.

  Meanwhile, the Brotherhood established chapters in every Arab country, as well as Europe and the United States. While the chapters operate separately, in response to local politics, their goals and philosophy remain the same. Middle East scholar Barry Rubin calls it “by far the most successful Islamist group in the world.”44

  The Brotherhood created Hamas, which today rules the Gaza Strip, and has inspired armed rebellions in Syria, Sudan, and elsewhere. It is the intellectual breeding ground of every major Islamist terror group, including Al Qaeda, even though the Brotherhood officially opposes terrorism.

  For KSM in his teenage years, the Brotherhood supplied two important and intoxicating ideas: that the Wahhabi (or Salafi) version of Islam could be combined with a utopian version of seventh-century Arabia to form a real challenge to the West’s dominance of the world, and that armed jihad was the best way to bring that utopia into being.

  The Brotherhood gave him more than ideas. It taught him how to use guns in its desert training sessions45 and provided him with a web of connections that could be tapped to finance terror attacks.

  Palestinians

  The bottom of any society is where the speed of the mixture moves the fastest. On the streets and in the classrooms of Fahaheel, Khalid met many Palestinians, who made up roughly 40 percent of the boomtown’s population in the 1960s and 1970s.46 The two groups that had the largest impact on the thinking of immigrants in Fahaheel at the time were “the Palestinian Marxists and the Islamists”47of the Muslim Brotherhood. “The Palestinians, in fact, predominated in the lower middle class and in the professional ranks of teachers and engineers. These included most of the teachers at the Kuwaiti schools attended by” KSM.48

  KSM so closely identified with the Palestinian cause that, his college friends say, he would spend hours justifying their attacks on Israeli soldiers and civilians and, sometimes, claim a Palestinian heritage.

  It is easy to see why KSM would believe he has much in common with the Palestinians he met. While the Palestinians were Arabs, they, too, were strangers in Kuwait, often living without papers and sometimes without jobs. Both peoples were Muslims whose ancestral lands are now ruled by distant, bureaucratic governments that they are powerless to displace and largely unwilling to share power with. Both peoples have lost lopsidedly when they have gone to war with what they each called the “occupying power.” Armed rebellions by the Baluch were brutally crushed by the Pakistani government in 1973, just as the Israelis rapidly defeated the Arab armies sent on behalf of the Palestinians that same year.

  Both peoples imagine a glorious past, a legacy that they say has been robbed from them. Glorious pasts are depressing places to spend time in and they defy physics by glowing brighter as they move further away in time.

  In general, both peoples adapted to the modern world very quickly as individuals and very poorly as groups. On their own, they became doctors, merchants, engineers, and scientists, building better futures for their families. But too often their organizations look backward with longing and use violence to try to turn the present into a utopian mirage of the past.

  But there the similarities end. Palestinians played a pivotal role in the development of Sunni Arab terror organizations, while the Baluch were largely foot soldiers.

  Clearly the Palestinian cause was a powerful inspiration for Khalid and his nephew Ramzi Yousef. Khalid speaks Arabic with a distinctive Palestinian accent. (A longtime friend denies this, saying Khalid’s Arabic has a Kuwaiti accent. He himself is a Palestinian from Kuwait.) Al Qaeda rarely, if ever, cited the Palestinian cause as justification for terror attacks—until KSM moved into a senior role. His nephew Ramzi shares his accent and strong identification with the Palestinian cause. He later told Raghida Dergham, of Jordan’s Al Hayat newspaper, that “my grandmother is Palestinian.”49 In reality, his grandmother was a Baluch from Iran. Yet there is no reason to doubt the sincerity of KSM’s devotion to the Palestinian cause or to believe he is simply playing to a Western audience obsessed with Israel. He advocated their cause for years before carrying out any terror attacks.

  Khalid’s three principal influences—Baluch nationalism, Palestinian radicalism, and the Muslim Brotherhood—each have long histories of terrorist attacks under the banner of Islam. To this fuel, the world would add the fire of revolutionary events.

  The Events of 1979

  In a single thunderbolt of a year, a series of nearly unbelievable events transformed the Muslim world and, most likely, the thinking of young Khalid. He was fourteen, and the year was 1979.

  Iran

  The Shah of Iran, Mohammed Reza Pahlavi, fled his kingdom on January 17, 1979. Briefly, the Middle East’s first spontaneously formed democracy emerged in Tehran. The new government’s prime minister, Shapour Bakhtiar, quickly attracted two powerful enemies, the then-communist-oriented Mujahideen-e Khalq (known as the MEK) and the radical followers of Ayatollah Ruhollah Mousavi Khomeini. Democracy never had a chance. Within months, Khomeini would have total mastery over Iran.

  While distinct, Khomeini’s thought was similar to that of the Muslim Brotherhood, especially in its choice of enemies. Like the Brotherhood, he saw “pure” Islam as the answer and “secular” Middle Eastern leaders, including the Shah, as the enemy.

  Khomeini was opposed to the animating idea of democracy—that voters can change the law through peaceful elections—because he believed that the law is an unchangeable transmission from Allah, as represented in the Koran and the sayings of the Prophet. The law can be modified only through the interpretation of religious scholars, like Khomeini himself. And the room for interpretation is very small.

  Khomeini’s life and ideas matter because they had an enormous impact on the thinking of radical Arab Sunni groups, including the yet-to-be-created organization known as Al Qaeda. American intelligence analysts and academics have long asserted that the vehement hatred between some Sunnis and some Shia prevents the transmission of ideas and techniques from the Islamic Republic of Iran to Sunni terror groups. In practice, as we shall see, the barrier between Persian and Shia and Arab and Sunni proved to be quite permeable in the 1970s and 1980s. In his book Knights Under the Prophet’s Banner, Al Qaeda’s number two, Dr. Ayman al-Zawahiri, repeatedly cites Iranian Shia sources to establish various doctrinal points or to provide a real-world example of those points.

  In addition to believing that the Ko
ran and the Prophet’s words should govern every aspect of human affairs, no matter how personal, Khomeini advocated a dictatorship of the clerics. Scholars of Marx will see a familiar concept in Khomeini’s thought—handing absolute power to small, pure groups (a vanguard) to act on behalf of the majority, which is mired in false consciousness. While Khomeini never publicly acknowledged his intellectual debt to atheistic communism, the regime he created had striking parallels. Little dissent was tolerated. News and entertainment were aggressively censored. Individual rights, the idea that government is barred from invading certain freedoms, were dispensed with as unwanted Western imports. Tellingly, Khomeini had a scholar’s impatience with ordinary people’s quotidian concerns.

  Khomeini’s ideas were intoxicating. For the first time, a state run according to Islamic principles seemed possible, an electric idea that surged across the Muslim world. He was succeeding where the Muslim Brotherhood had so far failed. A new intellectual movement was emerging, in different forms, across the Muslim world—one that would soon threaten the communist East and the democratic West.

  Khomeini’s impact was soon felt by American diplomats in neighboring Afghanistan. In 1979, the U.S. ambassador to Afghanistan was Adolph Dubs,50 but he was generally known by his World War II–era nickname, “Spike,” because, he said, “no good American should go by the name Adolph.”51 After his tour as chargé d’affaires in the Moscow embassy, he was sent to Kabul in July 1978.52 The trim fifty-eight-year-old was an expert on Soviet affairs, and Afghanistan was the newest satellite to join the Soviet orbit. At the time, the Soviets ruled Afghanistan through their proxy, the Afghan Communist Party.