The factual nature of the theological discussion was probably debatable to KSM. The Koran mentions many of the Hebrew prophets (by the same or similar names) and discusses Jesus extensively. But the Koran’s account of the prophets and Jesus differs substantially from the version presented in Hebrew and Christian holy books, which agree on the Hebrew prophets. To the son of a respected teacher of the Koran, the lectures on the Bible must have seemed sectarian and wrong. But, by all accounts, KSM did not bother to debate the matter in class. He either didn’t have the English or didn’t have the interest to present his views for debate.
Twenty-nine of KSM’s fifty-three fellow Chowan science freshman students were Middle Easterners.22 Virtually all were practicing Muslims, who quickly formed a distinct subculture. Even in the Carolina heat, they would never wear shorts. A source explains: “Shorts are haram,” forbidden.
Shorts, for the strict Muslims, would make an unwelcome political and religious statement. Counterterrorism expert Daveed Gartenstein-Ross, who spent a year inside an extremist (Salafi) organization as an observant Muslim, explains that strict forms of Islam have many complicated rules about clothing, even for men. Pants must cover the knee and most of the calf, but may not cover the ankle, he explains.23 Therefore, most American shorts would be haram by a certain interpretation of Islam.
Generally, the Muslim students were self-segregated, devoting their time to study, prayer, and shared meals. Occasionally they would play soccer when other students drank, danced, and flirted, three activities the strict Muslims abhorred. “They seemed to be praying all the time,” says John Franklin Timberlake, a 1984 Chowan graduate who’s now a police officer in Murfreesboro. “Just chanting, like. We never understood a word of it. Sometimes we’d come home late on a weekend night, maybe after we’d had a few beers, and they’d still be praying.”24
Chowan required that KSM live in a dorm alongside American students. The Chowan spokesman is not even sure what dormitory he stayed in. “Supposedly Khalid stayed in Parker Hall, but I have nothing to verify that.”25 He cautions that he doesn’t know the room number, “or even if any school records show that KSM lived there at all, only hearsay.”26
Parker Hall is a 1970s-era brick tower with rusting air conditioners beneath every window. The eight-story tower is the tallest in Hertford County; when it went up, the county fire department had to buy a truck with a longer ladder.27 From the dorm windows one can see a baseball diamond backed by a fringe of scrub trees, a football practice field, and a murky pond the campus map refers to magnificently as Lake Vann. It is at the margins of the campus.
The only Chowan professor who remembers KSM is Garth Faile, who has been teaching chemistry at the college for nearly forty years. (In 2009 he was named teacher of the year.) A traditionalist who still teaches in a coat and tie, Faile was almost halfway through his career when KSM arrived in 1983.
He knew KSM as “Khalid Mohammed” and taught him General Chemistry 102-103 in a white cinder-block room on the third floor of Camp Hall.
He remembers the young KSM thanks to his meticulous notebooks, which go back to 1971, his first year at Chowan. They are small graph-paper-ruled notebooks with black-tape bindings. He pulls one from the shelf behind his desk. Consulting his notebook from 1984, Faile finds that KSM earned one of the highest gradepoint averages in freshman chemistry and a perfect score on his final laboratory exam. He was bright, not brilliant. A “B student,” Faile told me. He believes that KSM had a good science and math background in Kuwait and was skating through his class. “He was learning English more than he was learning chemistry.”28
Certainly the demanding curriculum did not allow a lot of time for class discussion of contemporary political issues. Just equations, formulas, elements, and molecules.
One thing concerns Faile. Part of the course curriculum had a section on the uses of nitrates and nitroglycerin, later a key ingredient in his bomb designs. “I didn’t teach him to make bombs,” Faile said, “but I taught him chemistry.”
As his first and only semester at Chowan was ending, KSM applied to transfer to North Carolina Agricultural and Technical State University. He knew how the system worked, and worked it adroitly. A&T’s 1984 standards for transfer students did not require an English exam. If he had applied as a freshman or an international student, he would have had to show, in the words of the 1984 college handbook, “considerable facility in the use of the English language.” 29 Once again, as when he chose Chowan College for its weak requirements, he had found a loophole.
KSM’s first summer in America revealed a different side of the quiet student: a dangerous driver with a daredevil streak. KSM treated traffic laws as “optional,” explained his friend Sammy Zitawi.30
When I asked the source about a car accident, he asked: “Which car accident?” There were many.
In the summer of 1984, KSM crashed into a car with two women inside. His subsequent actions are telling, a story that can be told in full for the first time here.
On August 8, 1984, KSM was speeding along when he recklessly collided with Deloris Christian Davis, who was driving her 1978 Pontiac, Guilford County records show. Both Davis and her younger sister, Letha Christian, were seriously injured. (Interestingly, KSM’s passenger was Abdul Karim Mahmood Abdul Karim, the brother of Ramzi Yousef, the future World Trade Center bomber. Abdul Karim had departed from Kuwait with KSM and had studied for a year at an Oklahoma college. He transferred to North Carolina A&T, partly to join KSM. He would go on to have an Al Qaeda career of his own, in Pakistan.)
KSM was convicted of “failure to reduce his speed” on August 30, 1984, according to Guilford County police records.
The women were so injured and angry that they sued KSM for damages in a civil-court proceeding. KSM ignored a May 14, 1985, summons to appear in court. KSM must have dodged the sheriff’s deputies who came to hand him the summons personally. At length, the plaintiffs were forced to serve KSM “by publication,” buying an advertisement in the local newspaper. KSM ignored that, too.
Despite his initial disregard for American law and legal procedures, KSM eventually visited attorney Stephen J. Teague, who was representing Davis and Christian. He came with a posse, including an Arab student he called his “translator,” and announced that he would be his own defense attorney. KSM clearly seemed to be enjoying the possibility of a public role. He lectured the North Carolina lawyer about Middle East politics for almost an hour.
Teague was surprised by his boldness, and even more surprised when KSM never bothered to show up at trial. The judge handed down a ruling, a default judgment, compelling KSM to pay $10,697.12 in damages, plus $1,500 in attorney’s fees. The judgment included $705 worth of damage to the car and medical bills for Deloris Christian Davis ($5,538.05) and Letha Christian ($4,450.07). Though the record is silent on their exact injuries, the amounts of the medical bills—substantial for 1985—and the fact that they pressed the matter in court for more than a year suggest that their injuries were severe.
When KSM failed to pay, his driver’s license was suspended.
He didn’t learn from the experience. At another police stop, in January 1986, KSM was found to be driving with an invalid license.
He was convicted and briefly jailed.31 (News accounts that say he was jailed for not paying his bills are untrue.)
Even jail time didn’t force a change in KSM’s driving habits. Burke County records show that KSM also received a speeding ticket on October 20, 1985. He was going sixty-nine miles per hour in a fifty-five-mile-per-hour zone. He received citation number 611669.32
He was reckless, even with the lives of others, and arrogantly refused to pay either civil or criminal fines or even to appear in court in response to a summons. Unfortunately, he learned that he could safely mock American justice. This, too, would be a lesson that would stick with him.
In the fall of 1984, he started classes at North Carolina Agricultural and Technical State University.33 The land-grant university ha
d been chartered by the North Carolina legislature in 1891 to educate “the colored race,” and retained its identity as a historically black university. Administrators are proud that the university trains the nation’s largest number of African American engineers and second-largest number of African American accountants to this day. Its alumni include the Reverend Jesse Jackson Sr.; Ronald E. McNair, an astronaut who died in the 1986 Challenger space shuttle explosion; and the “Greensboro Four,” who famously fought to desegregate a lunch counter in that city.
For KSM, Greensboro might as well have still been segregated. Again, he made little effort to live or eat alongside non-Muslim students. While college records show KSM’s address as Post Office Box 20886, it appears he lived in apartment 333-B on Montrose Drive, near West Market Street in Greensboro,34 roughly five miles off campus. The Muslim students turned one of the apartments into a makeshift mosque.35 He was seen on campus only to go to a classroom or the library.
KSM stood out among Muslim students, although not among his professors. “Khalid, he was so, so smart. He came to college with virtually no English. But he entered directly in advanced classes,” Mohammed al-Bulooshi, a Kuwaiti of Baluch origin who attended college with him, told the Financial Times.36
Native English-speaking students had less exalted views of the young KSM. “The English of most of the guys was absolutely terrible. I was paired up with [Khalid Shaikh] in a senior design class. I would always get paired with one of these guys. There was much frustration. Talentwise, I questioned how they could have gotten that far,” said Quentin Clay.37
His professors have a less vivid memory of him. David Klett, a mechanical engineering professor at NC A&T, was KSM’s student adviser.38 “He just didn’t leave an impression, which means he was probably a very quiet, low-key guy,” Klett said. “He didn’t do anything that stuck out in my mind and causes me to remember him.”39
As at Chowan, a group of Muslim North Carolina A&T students emerged to keep the others in line with severe teachings. “We called them the ‘mullahs,’ ” recalled Waleed M. Qimlass, a 1985 A&T graduate. “Basically, the [foreign-born Muslim] students at Greensboro were divided into the mullahs and the non-mullahs.”40
Naturally, KSM was one of the mullahs.41 “They [the devout Muslims at A&T] wouldn’t listen to music, they wouldn’t play music,” says Zitawi. “He wouldn’t take a picture back then because they thought it was against religion.”42
These positions—against music and photography—are not required by traditional Islam, which generally bars only instrumental music and is silent on photography. Indeed, the Sufi tradition in Islam is known for its a cappella songs during its services. A source, a Salafi classmate who is now a leader of five mosques in the Greensboro area, does listen to non-instrumental Islamic praise songs. And most Muslims in the Middle East listen to Arabic-language pop music and watch television, including Al Jazeera. But Salafi Islam forbids music, television, movies, and all images of living things. (Indeed, bin Laden, who was a fan of horse racing, would put his fingers in his ears when the race’s opening horn sounded at the Khartoum racetrack.)43 KSM’s views on photography and music demonstrate a schooling in extremist doctrines.
KSM, though quiet in class and among American-born students, was a boisterous attention seeker when he was among Arab students. Every Friday and Saturday night, he and other Muslim students would share a halal dinner, a little taste of home. (Halal is to Islam what kosher is to Judaism.) “We used to go to the farmers, buy a lamb or a goat, and butcher it with a knife,” Zitawi said.44
The Friday night dinners would attract upward of twenty-five Muslim students.45 Afterward, they would pray as a group. The evening ended with comedy routines or homemade plays. “The men called it The Friday Tonight Show.”46
Again, KSM is best remembered by the Muslim students he exclusively socialized with. KSM’s lab partner Sammy Zitawi was a Palestinian who also grew up in Kuwait. “This guy was funny, he could make you laugh,” Zitawi said. “He could make fun out of everything.”47
KSM’s nickname was “Blushi,” playing on his Baluch origin and the work of then-famous comic John Belushi.48
Other Muslim classmates share Zitawi’s view. “Whenever the Muslim Student Society had a gathering, he’d keep people laughing—imitating Arab leaders, that kind of thing,” a source says.49
He remembers KSM’s ability to draw a crowd and generate a partylike atmosphere. “His apartment used to be the place where everyone liked to hang out.”50 The apartment was more than what he called “a nonstop comedy zone.” It was also a center for hard-line politics and where “everyone” went to pray.51
“Basically, what you saw was a microsociety of our home,” said Mahmood Zubaid, a Kuwaiti architectural engineer. Even the Arab Muslim students were divided by nationality. “We hung around only with Kuwaitis. The community we were in, out of the two hundred or three hundred [Arab Muslims], was actually only about twenty people.”52
The “mullahs” at North Carolina A&T were very effective at recruiting newly arrived Arab students, sometimes even meeting them at the airport. “Your first day in Greensboro, you didn’t know anybody, maybe your English is not so good, and they met you at the airport and helped you get started,” Zubaid said.53
The indoctrination didn’t necessarily please Kuwaiti parents, especially the ones who weren’t that religious at home. “We had a lot of our students coming back from the U.S. radicalized. I’m not talking about religious guys going to the U.S. and coming back as fundamentalists. I’m talking about cool guys,” he said.54 The guys who drank and went to discos would come home as bearded hard-liners.
“Why would they flip religiously? It happens there,” another Kuwaiti student told a reporter.55 “When we are there we are very vulnerable. That’s why we get into groups—to protect each other. The religious guys work on them. Why is it so easy? The key thing, I think, is the political views more than the religious.”56
Why were they becoming radicalized on American campuses? North Carolina A&T, like most other universities, did little to make foreign students feel at home with the larger student body. There was no serious effort to integrate them and no organized activity that would break up their cliques and lead to bonds with new people. As a result, a handful of students could guide, even rule over, most of the students of their nationality. Over time, many became radicalized because they were not presented with any alternatives and knew that bucking the hard-liners would leave them friendless and alone. There are numerous examples of civilian schools in America and Western Europe hosting students who became terrorists. Curiously, there seem to be no examples of students from public or private military schools who became radicalized on campus. One reason may be that military schools make a more robust effort to unify the student body, creating a shared identity between foreign students and their American classmates. We will never know how KSM and his fellow foreign students would have changed if the civilian colleges were less laissez-faire about student life.
KSM was not radicalized, but a radicalizer of others. His summer vacations in Pakistan (and perhaps Afghanistan) energized this process. KSM’s three brothers—Aref, Zahid, and Abed—had moved to Peshawar, Pakistan, to a border town that fed the Afghan resistance with arms and ideology. Indeed, most of his extended family decamped from Kuwait for the war zone while he was in college. On at least one summer vacation, KSM joined them.57
Pakistan, roiling with billions of dollars in American and Saudi aid for anti-Soviet fighters in Afghanistan, was the seething center of jihadi ideology at the time. If anything, this visit intensified KSM’s ambitions toward a terrorist career.
Sheikh Ahmed Dabbous, KSM’s high school teacher, talked to him during his pivotal college years. Los Angeles Times reporter Terry McDermott tracked Dabbous down, and Dabbous recalled a telling conversation with KSM while he was visiting Kuwait in his college years:“When he goes there [the United States] he sees most Americans don’t like Arabs and Islam,�
�� said Sheikh Ahmed Dabbous, his high school teacher: “Why?” I ask him.
“Because of Israel,” he says. “Most Americans hate Arabs because of this.”
“He’s a very normal boy before. Kind, generous, always the smiling kind. After he came back, he’s a different man. He’s very sad. He doesn’t speak. He just sits there.
“I talked to him to change his mind, to tell him this is just a few Americans. He refused to speak to me about it again. He was set. This was when he was on vacation from school. When KSM said this I told him we must meet again. He said, ‘No, my ideas are very strong. Don’t talk with me again about this matter.’”58
As a result of his foreign trips59 and his self-segregation on both of his American campuses, KSM’s English did not improve, and neither did his view of Americans. As for his idea that most Americans hate Arabs because of Israel, it seems like a pose. He simply didn’t have any relationships with American students close enough to have in-depth political conversations.
Indeed, it appears that KSM spent part of his college years plotting his first assassination on American soil, the killing of Meir Kahane in 1990.
When Meir Kahane, a rabbi who founded the Jewish Defense League and later became a member of Israel’s Knesset, came to speak on North Carolina A&T’s campus, KSM became enraged.
Kahane’s views could not have been more noxious to KSM. Kahane advocated the forcible “transfer” of more than one million Palestinians living inside Israel to Arab lands. (KSM favors exactly the opposite policy, the forcible exit of all Jews from the Holy Land.) “I say that if any Arab raises a hand against a Jew, no more hand,” Kahane said in 1986. “If any Arab raises his head against a Jew, no more head.”60
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