Objective Troy

by Scott Shane

  His sexual escapades were unremarkable, of course; the existence of the sex industry that served him was proof enough of that. But for a man in his position they were also stunningly reckless. As many a Christian minister had discovered the hard way, a public sex scandal could blow to bits a promising religious career. Awlaki was violating fundamental tenets of the conservative Islam he preached: repeatedly committing adultery; lying about his background, even as he revealed to a series of prostitutes his real name; squandering his family’s limited budget at a rate of $300 or $400 an hour. In one of his sermons, he had denounced zina, or fornication, blasting American television for spreading zina all over the world and declaring that Allah had sent AIDS as punishment. “The movies and the nudity and the destruction of this culture is now global,” he declared, in an echo of his decade-old college argument with his roommate over TV. To be exposed now before his congregation and his growing national and international audience as a hypocrite and flagrant sinner would be a devastating blow, almost certainly career-ending.

  And though Awlaki didn’t know it, as the salacious reports made their way up the chain of command at both the FBI and the Justice Department, senior officials began to consider doing exactly that. In June of 2002, the FBI’s top counterterrorism official, Pasquale D’Amuro, sent a twenty-page memorandum to James A. Baker, counsel at the Justice Department’s Office of Intelligence Policy and Review, laying out the tawdry details and seeking approval to use intelligence reports for a federal prosecution under a statute known as the Travel Act, formally titled “Interstate and Foreign Travel or Transportation in Aid of Racketeering Enterprises.” One passage in the memo: “How Anwar Awlaki’s Behavior Meets the Criminal Elements Defined Above.” The feds were not especially interested in Awlaki’s peccadilloes as such. But they continued to document his life in excruciating detail. Even if they found no evidence of terrorist ties, they might be able to use the file on his visits to prostitutes to pressure him to become an informant or, if they decided he was a dangerous influence, to discredit him with a federal criminal case.

  The underlying problem was that even after months of intensive scrutiny of his past and present, the investigators were still sufficiently worried about his possible connections to terrorism that they did not feel they could clear him. The hints of militancy, dubious connections, and suspicious coincidences in his record would disturb American authorities for years. They would be studied with concern by both the Congressional Joint Inquiry into 9/11, which completed its work in December 2002, and the 9/11 Commission, which published its report in July 2004. Despite all of the investigations, officials would continue to struggle to answer a basic question: Before 9/11, had Awlaki been a secret militant with a connection to the plotters of the worst terrorist attack in American history? Or was he more or less what he claimed to be in 2002—a conservative Muslim cleric who was critical of American actions abroad but condemned mass violence?

  To weigh the evidence, it might be useful to make the strongest case for Awlaki’s secret militancy and then examine its weaknesses. Even if no definitive answer is possible, barring the discovery of some unknown diaries or secret communications, the exercise helps place the story of Anwar al-Awlaki up to his thirty-first birthday in April 2002 in the broader context of Islam in America.

  —

  The case for the prosecution might start on January 15, 2001, with the arrival at Los Angeles International Airport of the two future hijackers, Nawaf al-Hazmi and Khalid al-Mihdhar. Hazmi spoke a little English, Mihdhar spoke none, and neither had lived in the West, so they were notably ill-equipped to navigate American life. The principal organizer of the 9/11 plot, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, recognized the problem. Though he would urge the other hijackers to keep to themselves during their time in America, he authorized Hazmi and Mihdhar to seek help from mosques and from the local Muslim community, he later told investigators.

  Within two weeks, the two Saudi citizens met a fellow Saudi, a business student with Saudi government ties named Omar al-Bayoumi, who offered to help them get settled if they moved to San Diego, where he lived. On February 4, Bayoumi helped them move into a San Diego apartment complex, cosigning the lease and paying the first month’s rent and deposit. Between that day and February 18, four calls were recorded between Bayoumi’s phone and Awlaki’s phone. Some FBI investigators believed that Bayoumi had loaned his phone to Hazmi and Mihdhar and that the calls were actually between Awlaki and the future hijackers. In the months that followed, some worshippers at Al Rribat al-Islami, Awlaki’s San Diego mosque, thought they recalled Hazmi, or both of the Saudis, in lengthy closed-door discussions with the imam in his office. The notion of a close relationship was also supported by the fact that Hazmi later turned up at Dar Al-Hijrah in Virginia after Awlaki began working there in 2001, as did a third hijacker, Hani Hanjour.

  Two men who had roomed together in New Jersey, a Jordanian named Eyad al-Rababah and a Syrian, Daoud Chehazeh, came under FBI investigation for their contacts with the hijackers at Dar Al-Hijrah. Chehazeh did not cooperate but was given political asylum anyway, a decision some members of Congress criticized as foolish. Rababah admitted helping Hazmi and Hanjour find apartments and move; some FBI agents, and the 9/11 Commission, believed he might have been given that assignment by Awlaki, though they had no proof. Rababah was later deported to Jordan, and the web of connections has never been fully understood, according to former FBI agents who worked on the case.

  Awlaki’s contacts with the hijackers seemed all the more significant because they came against a background of years of FBI suspicion of terrorist ties, including a short-lived previous criminal investigation. Alone, none of the facts about Awlaki before 9/11 came anywhere near making a criminal case. But together, they made a perplexing skein of connections.

  During his years in Colorado, for instance, Awlaki had at least some contact with a Palestinian-Kuwaiti named Ziyad Khaleel, who was vice president of the Denver Islamic Society in the early 1990s, when Awlaki was at Colorado State. Khaleel, it would later turn out, was an active Al Qaeda supporter who would later earn a modest footnote in history by purchasing a battery for Osama bin Laden’s satellite phone in 1996.

  In 1998, when he was in San Diego, Awlaki had signed on as vice president of a nonprofit organization, the Charitable Society for Social Welfare, whose ostensible purpose was to raise money for “orphans, refugees and the needy” in Yemen and to support youth clubs in American cities. The society had been sponsored by a prominent Yemeni cleric, Abdul Majeed al-Zindani, whom the United States would later place on the list of designated terrorists, and an FBI agent later testified that it was “a front organization to funnel money to terrorists.”

  Did Awlaki have any inkling that Khaleel had ties to Bin Laden, or that some of the money he helped raise in the United States might end up with extremists? It’s impossible to say. But the connections disturbed FBI counterterrorism investigators, who opened a terrorism investigation on Awlaki in San Diego in June 1999. The bureau closed the investigation in March of 2000 after finding no evidence of a crime, even though they noted that Awlaki had recently been visited by an associate of Omar Abdel Rahman, the so-called Blind Sheikh, who was serving a sentence of life in prison for plotting to blow up New York City landmarks.

  Then there were a few discoveries that had been made after September 11, 2001. A police search of the apartment in Hamburg, Germany, of Ramzi bin al-Shibh, a Yemeni member of Al Qaeda who helped plan the 9/11 attacks, turned up a piece of paper with the phone number of Dar Al-Hijrah, Awlaki’s Virginia mosque. And investigators would discover that a sort of communications hub for the scattered conspirators of 9/11 was a satellite phone in Yemen that belonged to the father-in-law of Khalid al-Mihdhar, one of the hijackers who had prayed in Awlaki’s San Diego mosque.

  In mid-2000, Mihdhar angered his bosses in Al Qaeda by leaving San Diego when he learned his first child had just been born in Yemen. That meant Mihdhar was visiting his wife, baby daugh
ter, and father-in-law in Sanaa roughly at the same time that Awlaki was visiting his family in the same city, between his jobs in San Diego and Falls Church. Hence, when an Al Qaeda team attacked the guided missile destroyer USS Cole on October 12, 2000, in the Yemeni port of Aden—a plot investigators believed Mihdhar probably knew about in advance—both the imam and the soon-to-be hijacker were in Yemen.

  The mind boggles at this pile of maybes. But a final, provocative detail might be added to the indictment: Lincoln Higgie, the neighbor of Awlaki in San Diego to whom the cleric would sometimes bring fish he had caught, recalled an odd encounter. About a month before 9/11, he said, Awlaki, who had moved to Virginia eight months earlier, stopped by Higgie’s house after retrieving the last of the belongings he had left at his former house next to the mosque. The men had a friendly chat, Higgie recalled, and Higgie urged his former neighbor to stop by whenever he was in the area. According to Higgie, Awlaki offered a puzzling reply. “He said, ‘I don’t think you’ll be seeing me. I won’t be coming back to San Diego again. Later on, you’ll find out why,’ ” Higgie said. “I thought it was a little strange.”

  Stitching all these novelistic details into a unified theory of Awlaki’s secret radicalization takes a bit of imagination. First, recall that Awlaki had embraced a starkly intolerant brand of Islam, at least for a time, in his freshman year at Colorado State. Imagine that Ziyad Khaleel, who went battery shopping for Bin Laden, met Awlaki when both were in Colorado and quietly brought him into the Al Qaeda fold. Say that the future hijackers Mihdhar and Hazmi found Awlaki and his mosque not by chance but because Mihdhar’s father-in-law back in Yemen, running the satellite telephone hub for Bin Laden’s plotters, directed his son-in-law to the cleric. That would explain the closed-door meetings that some fellow worshippers remembered the men having at the mosque. Consider the possibility that Awlaki knew perfectly well that the Yemeni charity for which he was serving as American vice president was in fact raising money for terrorism. And say that Awlaki’s odd conversation with his former neighbor, Lincoln Higgie, was a bit of operational sloppiness revealing that the cleric knew in advance that the 9/11 attacks were coming.

  It is a case that has won at least a few believers in the suspicious community of hard-bitten American terrorism-watchers. It deeply worried the top investigators for both the Congressional Joint Inquiry into 9/11 and the 9/11 Commission. Philip Zelikow, the commission’s executive director, said he considers the Awlaki question “one of the three largest loose ends in our investigation of the plot.” The commission’s report noted the lingering doubts of some (though by no means all) FBI agents about Awlaki’s possible ties to the hijackers and declared, “We share that suspicion,” which Zelikow described to me as “a grave statement.” It is certainly conceivable that Awlaki was somehow in on the plot, and it is impossible to disprove. But let’s step back and examine the theory for flaws and weaknesses.

  —

  Perhaps the biggest cautionary note is that FBI investigators considered and eventually rejected the notion that Awlaki was a covert member of Al Qaeda who knew in advance about the plot. Asked for its bottom line on this question, the bureau gave me an unequivocal statement: “Extensive investigation by the FBI has not developed any evidence that Awlaki had advance knowledge of or involvement in the 9/11 attacks, nor has the FBI developed evidence that he knowingly provided support to any hijacker in furtherance of that plot.” This judgment is based in part on still-secret intelligence the bureau collected. Heavily redacted FBI documents indicate that both the first investigation in 1999–2000 and the second one, opened immediately after 9/11, involved “ELSUR,” or electronic surveillance. So apparently nothing in intercepted telephone conversations or e-mails suggested a link to the 9/11 plot. The FBI may have conducted an incompetent investigation, of course, and the bureau certainly has reason to play down the possibility that it was bamboozled by a sleeper agent for Al Qaeda. But FBI investigators with the power to eavesdrop, conduct surveillance, read classified intelligence reports on Al Qaeda, and consult with American and foreign intelligence and counterterrorism agencies—and with every incentive to make a terrorism case against Awlaki in 2002—could not do it. That counts for something.

  Some FBI investigators also raise logical objections to the notion that Awlaki was in on the plot. They argue that Osama bin Laden and Khalid Sheikh Mohammed would not have been likely to trust the fate of their entire plot to an American cleric who had lived in the United States for more than a decade, no matter who vouched for him. They point out that Awlaki’s behavior after the attacks—not trying to flee, but sitting for repeated interviews with the FBI—suggests that he had no concern about being exposed as an Al Qaeda agent. And they observe that years later, when Awlaki had openly embraced Al Qaeda’s philosophy and goals, he had every reason to enhance his own militant résumé by claiming a role in the terrorist network’s biggest success. He never did so, and—to the contrary—implied that he opposed terrorism at the time.

  Then there is the testimony of family members like his brother Ammar, who got that e-mail at midnight on September 14—a private exchange, not a statement before the Washington press corps—in which his brother condemned the attacks as “horrible.” The brothers talked and met in the months afterward, and Ammar never doubted that Anwar disapproved of the mass killing.

  But what of the web of circumstantial evidence that seems to document Awlaki’s links to the militant world? It might merely reflect the small world of American Islam. Awlaki was an active, religious young man at Colorado State when Ziyad Khaleel, with the Bin Laden connection, was an imam an hour away in Denver; it would hardly require a conspiracy for them to be acquainted. Devout young men like Mihdhar and Hazmi, disoriented when they landed in America, might naturally have sought support and advice from a savvy local imam—without confessing to him their monstrous plans. The label that later came to be paired with Awlaki’s name—“spiritual adviser” to one or both future hijackers—appears in early FBI documents but seems to be based on nothing more specific than the vague recollections of worshippers who thought they had seen the men, or at least Hazmi, in the imam’s office.

  For what it’s worth, Awlaki himself, who had acknowledged knowing Hazmi in San Diego, said later that he had no idea that Hazmi had moved to the Washington area and prayed at Dar Al-Hijrah. He correctly pointed out that suggestions of his complicity in the 9/11 Commission report were mere speculation: “If you follow the paragraphs on me you’ll find the word ‘MAY’ repeated more than three times: ‘MAY have met them when they first arrived in San Diego, MAY have introduced them in Washington to such and such to help them out, this MAY be more than just a coincidence.’ ” Likewise, Mihdhar and Awlaki could easily have been in Sanaa at the same time in 2000 without meeting; both had family matters to deal with. And recall that as late as mid-2000, when he applied for the George Washington University doctoral program, Awlaki seemed to be considering abandoning his religious career altogether to become an educational bureaucrat—hardly a likely option for a dedicated Islamic extremist.

  Even Lincoln Higgie’s seemingly damning encounter in August 2001—an irresistible Hollywood moment—is by no means definitive. His memory of the exchange has varied over time. In 2003, he told a 9/11 Commission investigator that Awlaki had told him “something very big was going to happen, and that he had to be out of the country when it happened.” When I first spoke with Higgie in 2010, he did not recount Awlaki talking about “something big”—just that Awlaki had said that he might be going abroad, that he would not return to San Diego, and that the reason would be clear later. Asked about the discrepancy in 2014, Higgie said he thought that perhaps Awlaki had referred to “something” happening, but not “something big.” In our conversations in both 2010 and 2014, Higgie told a parallel story about something else that had happened shortly before 9/11: an American art dealer friend, he said, had been warned by Pakistani business contacts that they had to ship artworks to the
dealer quickly. Why? he asked his friend. “Something’s going to happen,” the friend replied. Of course, the linchpin of Awlaki’s supposed remarks—which would have been a staggering failure of discretion if he really knew about the plot—was that he had to leave the country. But he did not leave the country for many months after 9/11.

  There is no doubt that Higgie recalls a puzzling remark from Awlaki; his housemate confirmed that Higgie spoke about it at the time. But in the agitated hindsight that follows a momentous event, much looks portentous and suspicious. When Higgie read that his friendly former neighbor had contacts with the hijackers, he undoubtedly combed his memory for exchanges with Awlaki, searching for clues to what was coming, and perhaps reading too much into ambiguous words.

  When all the evidence is considered, the notion of Awlaki having a well-hidden secret life in Al Qaeda is unpersuasive. It’s possible that Awlaki had a sense that Hazmi, and perhaps Mihdhar and Hanjour as well, were involved in some kind of operation and that he was sufficiently ambivalent not to probe deeply or alert the authorities. When the attacks occurred, and he saw the mass murder of innocents, he may have been sincerely shocked and disturbed, as his public and private statements implied. “I think Awlaki had to know that something was going on,” said Bob Bukowski, an FBI agent, now retired, who investigated the ties of Rababah and Chehazeh to Awlaki and to the hijackers. “I don’t think he necessarily knew the details of the plot.” One more anecdote from the months after 9/11 lends more support for such a conclusion.