In February 1979, Dubs was captured at gunpoint by four Shia Muslim terrorists and held in room L121 of the Kabul Hotel.53
His captors demanded the release of three Shia clerics that they believed the Soviet-backed Afghan government was holding incommunicado. The Afghan government denied it had jailed the religious leaders and refused to negotiate, despite the pleading of U.S. embassy officials.
Instead, Soviet advisers and Afghan paramilitaries ringed the hotel. “When we left that morning for our sightseeing tour,” an American businessman said, “we had passed 10 soldiers with submachine guns and plainclothes men with drawn revolvers in the corridor.”54
From the hotel hallway, Afghan police shot their way through the wooden door. One bullet found a water pipe, but others found the captive and the kidnappers. The pipe spewed water onto the floor, sluicing away the blood.55 The four kidnappers were dead, and so was the American ambassador.
In Washington, President Carter was reported to be “very angry”56 about the Soviet Union’s failure to consult with U.S. officials before storming the kidnappers.
Only an unnamed Washington Post editorial writer noticed the “coincidence that, within hours yesterday, a respected American diplomat, Adolph Dubs, was killed in Afghanistan, and the American Embassy with 100 people was temporarily captured in Iran.”57 Even that prescient writer failed to grasp that both events were most likely engineered by Ayatollah Khomeini, writing, “The problem there lay in the difficulty that Ayatollah Khomeini is having in disciplining and disarming the thousands of Iranian revolutionaries who helped him achieve power.”58
In fact, both the kidnapping of Ambassador Dubs in Kabul and the temporary takeover of the U.S. embassy in Tehran were feints by the wily Ayatollah. He wanted to see what America would do. When all the democratic superpower did was lodge diplomatic protests and urge the roughly seven thousand Americans, largely oil contractors, to leave Iran, the Ayatollah knew America was a paper tiger. The Washington Post’s sympathy for the Ayatollah’s difficulty in governing his Islamic republic was a wry bonus.
This would prove to be a dangerous lesson to teach the Ayatollah.
On March 31, 1979, Khomeini had staged a referendum (the very electoral device he opposed for decades) and formally seized power. A second referendum, in November 1979, made Khomeini “Supreme Guide” of Iran. (The same title is used by the head of the Muslim Brotherhood.) By November 4, Khomeini had driven out the lawful parliament, and his partisans controlled many of Iran’s key government ministries.
A student group allied with Khomeini stormed the U.S. embassy in Tehran in October 1979. Unlike the embassy takeover in March 1979, this invasion was not temporary. Ultimately, fifty-two diplomats were held hostage for 444 days, while a helpless President Carter futilely tried to negotiate.
The hostage crisis helped cement Khomeini’s hold on power, even as it cost President Carter his presidency. A month into the hostage crisis, official Tehran radio reports claimed that 95.6 percent of Iranians had voted to make Khomeini dictator “for life.” The results were not surprising, because the ballot was not secret. Muslim clerics watched the balloting, noting who deposited a green “yes” ballot and who dared a red “no” ballot.59 The first radical Islamic terror state, Iran, was born.60
While KSM was the kind of Sunni who hated Shia Muslims—he and his nephew would later plot to bomb a Shia holy site—Iran’s experience still provided certain encouraging lessons for him. It showed him that the Muslim Brotherhood’s idea of an Islamic state was possible, and it suggested that the United States would not dare move against it. But what about the Arab dictators and the Soviet Union? The next few months would answer that question, too.
The Grand Mosque Takeover
While American diplomats were held at pistol point in Tehran, another set of Islamic radicals was preparing another daring takeover. On November 20, 1979, some five hundred armed men seized Al-Masjid al-Haram, the so-called Grand Mosque in Mecca, Saudi Arabia, the holiest site in Islam.
By the Islamic calendar, it was New Year’s Day of the year 1400.61 Some fifty thousand worshippers had gathered for the final day of the pilgrimage that their Muslim faith urges.62
Hundreds of them were taken hostage, and the group’s leader, Juhayman al-Oteibi, a onetime Saudi National Guard corporal turned preacher, said that the Mahdi had returned. The Mahdi is a messianic figure that Islam teaches will appear at the end of time. Al-Oteibi said that all Muslims worldwide were commanded to obey the so-called Mahdi, Mohammed Abdullah al-Qahtani, who turned out to be al-Oteibi’s brother-in-law. (The two ringleaders had met in prison, and al-Qahtani later married al-Oteibi’s sister.) Like Khomeini, the group hoped to create an Islamic dictatorship.
A siege began, making the Saudis look increasingly powerless with each passing day. The Saudis were unable to take back the mosque, which was honeycombed with bombs and pious civilians begging for their lives—while the Arab world watched in absorbing horror.
A series of Saudi police and commando assaults failed, including a suicidal helicopter assault on the main courtyard of the mosque. The commandos were shot dead as they slid down ropes from helicopters.
After two weeks of fruitless assaults and hundreds killed, the Saudi king put Prince Turki al-Faisal in charge. Prince Turki phoned Count Claude Alexandre de Marenches, the French spy chief, who agreed to send a three-man French commando team. Non-Muslims are forbidden by custom and Saudi law from entering Mecca, so the team quickly converted to Islam in a Saudi Arabian airport and arrived in Mecca for reconnaissance. They pumped pressurized nonlethal gas into the underground prayer rooms that had become the rebel bunker. It didn’t work. Next, Saudi troops carved holes into the floor of the mosque and threw grenades into the subterranean lair, killing hostages and hostage takers alike. As some of the rebels fled, Saudi sharpshooters gunned them down. The “Mahdi” was found among the dead.63
After two more weeks of gun battles, the rebels surrendered.
Some sixty-three radicals were taken alive. They were secretly tried and publicly beheaded on January 9, 1980. Never before in Saudi history had so many been beheaded on a single day.64
To a young radical steeped in the ideology of the Muslim Brotherhood, the events in Tehran and Mecca seemed to confirm the rightness of those beliefs. See how America trembled? See how it took the Saudis weeks to regain control of the Grand Mosque? With just a hard shove, the old order could be brought down. Despite its conclusion, the takeover of Mecca’s Grand Mosque had actually encouraged jihadis.
But what about the Soviets?
The Soviet Invasion of Afghanistan
Soviet tanks rumbled through the snow-slicked streets of Kabul on December 25. The Soviets, frustrated by the difficulties of dealing with their puppet government in Afghanistan, had decided to rule the country directly.
In Moscow, the invasion seemed unlikely to shift the gears of history. The Soviets had sent tanks into Budapest in 1956 and into Prague in 1968, and the result had been greater Soviet control. Why should an impoverished backwater, with no strategic value to anyone but the Soviets themselves, pose a real problem?
As it happened, the war in Afghanistan would fundamentally weaken the Soviet Union and present Muslim extremists with their first opportunity for a modern jihad. The Soviets failed to anticipate that Islamist groups, which were largely unsuccessful against their own governments, would see the liberation of Muslim Afghanistan as a major opportunity to establish a Sunni Islamic state to rival the new Shia Islamic state in Iran.
Soon the Soviets were bogged down in a guerrilla war that they could not win. The Russian bear no longer seemed so fearsome. It would bleed for ten long years and ultimately have to retreat to central Asia.
The events of 1979 taught KSM that the three largest threats to establishing an Islamic state—Arab dictators, American presidents, and Soviet premiers—were toothless. He and many other jihadis were encouraged and energized.
The Afghan jihad, which began
in 1980 and accelerated throughout the decade, soon became a kind of Woodstock for indoctrinated Muslim youth. Every radical—from Morocco to Indonesia—wanted to get there to validate his credentials.
KSM was no different. By 1981, when he was sixteen, he was training at Muslim Brotherhood–run military-style camps in the Kuwaiti desert, according to the 9/11 Commission Report.65 He was training to fight, and even to die, in Afghanistan in the great anti-Soviet jihad.
While his jihad training continued, Khalid finished his formal schooling in Kuwait, graduating from the all-boys Fahaheel Secondary School in 1983.66 He wanted to follow his older brothers to Afghanistan.
But that was not to be.
Apparently, his family decided that Khalid should be the one to go to college. If every family member was committed to jihad, all would remain poor. If KSM got an engineering degree from an American college, he could support them all. It seemed like a good bet. “Khalid was very genius; in everything he is smart,” said Sheikh Ahmed Dabbous, his high school principal. “From the beginning of his studies it’s science. He wanted to go to America for this reason. He wanted to become a doctor [Ph.D.] there.”67
Far from science, his American education would accelerate him in a very different direction.
2
Campus Radical
The two-lane road to Chowan University climbs over a swamp and winds lazily past corn and cotton fields, square brick houses and double-wides, past plaques commemorating Confederate generals and the birthplace of Richard Jordan Gatling, the inventor of the first mass-produced machine gun.
The campus is in Murfreesboro, North Carolina, a rural enclave some one hundred miles southwest of Norfolk, Virginia. In 1983, the town (pop. 2,0451) had no bars and no diversions except a lone pizza shop. It closed at 9 P.M.2
Chowan’s then dean of admissions, Clayton Lewis, went to pick KSM up at Norfolk International Airport. A genial, NPR-listening liberal, he was proud to bring foreign students to campus. Lewis told me he doesn’t remember the short, thick-bearded student, and it’s very likely they didn’t talk at all. KSM’s English wasn’t good enough for conversation anyway.
Looking out the car’s passenger window, KSM saw an alien planet. Kuwait’s familiar pale, dry skies were gone; here the sky was dark blue and heavy with humidity. And the trees! In Kuwait, they mainly appeared in wealthy neighborhoods, behind high walls. Here the trees ran riot in a continuous green canopy that lined the road and sometimes leaped across it.
The window also showed a moving picture of how America’s rural middle class lived. Extra cars were parked under trees. There were birdbaths and chairs on the lawn for watching the sunset and homemade signs offering pet grooming or fresh produce. These were enterprising and open people who didn’t live out their lives behind thick walls but displayed them along the main thoroughfare. In the Arab world, windows are smaller, and little of family life happens in public view. Not so in America.
America would be good to KSM. In return, he would use his college years to make alliances he would need in future terror attacks and plot his first assassination on American soil, which will be discussed here for the first time.
America would require a myriad of minor adjustments. Everything seemed backward here. In Murfreesboro, people disappeared after sunset, while in Kuwait people appeared only after the cooler darkness fell.
Chowan College,3 as it was known then, is a three-hundred-acre mostly wooded campus a few blocks off Murfreesboro’s main street. At the heart of the campus stands an immense, white-columned pre–Civil War mansion. Spreading out like arms on both sides of the antebellum manse is a chain of charmless 1960s-era boxes, where the upperclassmen live. Thus, the campus is a meeting of the Old and New South.
Founded in April 1848 by a collection of Virginia and North Carolina Baptist families, Chowan takes its name from the language of the Algonquin Chowanoc tribe. In Algonquin, chowan means “people of the South,” and is still pronounced by graduates in the Algonquin manner: “chow-wahn.” Originally, the name referred to the southernmost Algonquin tribe, then it came to informally stand for the non-Indian people of the southern United States. By the 1980s, when KSM arrived, the name seemed to stand for the “global South,” the ambitious Third World.
Faced with declining enrollment and shrinking income, Clayton Lewis decided to aggressively recruit Arab students from across the Middle East. When he became dean of students at Chowan in 1968, he’d told the college president, “I didn’t want a student body of all Baptists.”4 He drove to Washington, D.C., to meet with officials at foreign embassies to pitch the small college. When the first foreign students arrived, they were greeted like celebrities and asked to speak at Rotary Clubs and public schools. That feeling had worn off when KSM arrived in 1984.
KSM chose Chowan, an explicitly Christian school, because, unlike many American colleges, it had comparatively weak entrance requirements.5 It didn’t even require an SAT exam.6
And it had lax English-language standards. While strong in math and science he was very weak in English. His plan seemed to be to use Chowan as a landing pad to improve his language skills before transferring to a better school offering a four-year degree in engineering.7
KSM also found Chowan attractive because of North Carolina’s politically active Muslim community, numbering as many as fourteen thousand across the state.8 It was perhaps the most active in the country at the time.
A classmate of KSM’s (a source), met me in a Greensboro coffeehouse. A large, likable, intelligent man, he is now an imam at five mosques in the Greensboro area. The source lays out more than a dozen different Arabic-language newsletters from 1984. The Kuwait-born Palestinian fans his hand across the newsletters, saying Greensboro was a “star city” of Arab activism. Murfreesboro, Raleigh, and Greensboro formed an active triangle of Muslim Brotherhood and Salafi activity. Front groups, social activities—a complete counterculture in Arabic.9 (Later, Abdul Hakim Murad, a childhood friend of KSM’s, would take flying lessons at Coastal Aviation, in New Bern, North Carolina. He would be part of KSM’s plot to detonate eleven airliners in midair in 1994. And the 9/11 hijackers would be told about the North Carolina school as well.10 So much history seemed to follow in the groove cut by KSM’s casual decisions.)
Meanwhile, Chowan chose him largely because he said he had the ability to pay. Sitting in a favorite rocking chair, Lewis isn’t willing to say that money was the main motivation for admitting KSM and other Arab students, but, he allows, “I’m sure their money was helpful.”11
KSM kept his side of the bargain. Chowan officials showed me KSM’s college application—which has never been made public before—indicating that he paid $2,245 on August 8, 1983. The payment arrived with his application,12 Chowan records show. “Khalid’s bill was paid in full on the date of his matriculation,” Joshua E. Barker, Chowan’s director of university relations, tells me, “with no indication of who paid it.”13 That is, Chowan doesn’t know where he got the money.
KSM later told other students that his “family” had given him the money.14 This may have been true, in a way. His family had decided that he was the son it was going to invest in. But where did the family get the money? They were apparently too poor to afford a phone in Kuwait.
Most likely, the Kuwaiti branch of the Muslim Brotherhood had advanced part of the money. The organization has a large charitable division to promote the education of its members. The Brotherhood was KSM’s second family, and his brother Zahid had connections among its leaders.
Mysteriously, unlike most Middle Eastern students, KSM came to Chowan on an F-1 visa, indicating that he had a “private sponsor,” 15 unlike ordinary student visas. There is no indication of who that private sponsor might have been. Chowan’s paper records have long since been purged, and computerization didn’t begin until 1985. Curiously, the 9/11 Commission did not probe the matter.
Given that KSM paid his tuition in August 1983 and didn’t arrive until January 1984, Lewis speculat
es that he had “passport problems.” This is unlikely, since KSM received his passport more than six months before applying to Chowan. How he got the passport is an interesting question. He had no birth certificate, driver’s license, or national identity card. He received his first official document of any kind on December 6, 1982, a passport (numbered 488555) from the Pakistani embassy in Kuwait City.16 Into its blank pages was soon posted a valid visa for travel to the United States.
So KSM’s “private sponsor,” his tuition money, and his delay in Kuwait remain a mystery.
More than money and language set KSM apart. While the student body was diverse in the 1980s—almost evenly balanced between black and white Americans—KSM was different in almost every way. At five feet four inches and perhaps 135 pounds, KSM was physically smaller than most of the other male students. His long black hair and full beard were unusual in North Carolina in the 1980s.17 And strangely, he made no attempt to befriend his American-born classmates.
KSM left little impression on the then-junior college. He was on campus for a single semester, in the spring of 1984, and did not stay long enough to appear in the yearbook.18 Indeed, “there do not seem to be any photos of Khalid while he was here,” Barker tells me.19 A search of library and student archives confirms this. KSM was a ghost.
KSM may have been alienated by Chowan’s robust Christian identity. The college required all students—Muslim, Christian, and Jewish, believers or nonbelievers—to attend chapel services and take classes on the Christian Bible, every Friday at 10 A.M. Professors were charged with taking attendance and reporting missing students to the college chaplain, who could take disciplinary action.
It was KSM’s first experience hearing about Christian beliefs. KSM, a Muslim prayer leader’s son and Muslim Brotherhood member, sat with the other Muslim students and endured the experience.20
Chowan administrators caution that the Christian experience was academic and ecumenical and that the school was liberal and accommodating toward Muslims. And the college provided a room in Marks Hall for Muslims to pray in. Then-dean Clayton Lewis says he had “no complaints about chapel” requirements.21
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