by Scott Shane
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If counterterrorism officials viewed Awlaki as a critical contributor to Chesser’s transformation, it was not just because of the smitten young man’s own online testimony to his hero. It was because, as the FBI’s Philip Mudd said, they were seeing the phenomenon again and again. By the time Chesser pleaded guilty in October 2010, the collection of characters charged with plotting or carrying out violent attacks and claiming the influence of Awlaki was extraordinarily diverse.
There was Najibullah Zazi, the Afghan immigrant who was arrested in September 2009 at age twenty-four for plotting to blow up the New York subway, and who explained later that he had had little interest in Islam until he and his two codefendants listened to more than one hundred hours of lectures by Awlaki and a militant British cleric. A former fry cook and Muslim convert in his late twenties, Michael C. Finton, tried to blow up the Federal Building in Springfield, Illinois, later that month; his MySpace page featured a quotation from Awlaki about his imprisonment in Yemen. There was Roshonara Choudhry, a British university dropout—and a rare case of a woman committing this sort of crime—convicted of stabbing a member of Parliament, Stephen Timms, in East London in May 2010. She said she had listened obsessively to more than one hundred hours of Awlaki’s sermons before deciding that Timms should be punished for voting in favor of the Iraq War.
There was Paul G. Rockwood Jr., thirty-five, a Muslim convert who became an Awlaki devotee and began to make lists of Americans he believed should be murdered as enemies of Islam; he got eight years for making false statements to the FBI. There were Mohamed Mahmood Alessa and Carlos Eduardo Almonte, New Jersey men arrested at JFK in June 2010 on their way to join al-Shabab. They had played Awlaki tapes for an undercover informant. A Texas man, Barry Bujol, twenty-nine, was arrested the same month as he tried to leave the country and join Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP) in Yemen; he had exchanged e-mails with Awlaki, who sent him a copy of “44 Ways of Supporting Jihad.”
Were Awlaki’s lectures critical in turning all these fans into would-be killers? Or had they sought out Awlaki’s material because they were already committed to violent jihad? In all of the cases, it was a dance of radicalization in which Awlaki was a central figure but by no means the only influence. Such nuances went largely unexamined at the time; media reports and Justice Department press releases duly took note each time Awlaki turned up in an investigation. But whether he was cause or effect or both, Awlaki by 2010 was a celebrity unequaled in the counterterrorism universe by anyone other than Bin Laden.
And in the view of some Americans who tracked terrorism, the threat he posed had eclipsed even Bin Laden, whose Al Qaeda associates in Pakistan were being steadily knocked off by Obama’s drone strikes. As the core of the terror network shrank, AQAP—the only Al Qaeda affiliate that was operationally focused on attacking the United States—was clearly on the rise. At a Washington conference in April 2010, Representative Jane Harman, a Democrat with years of experience overseeing the intelligence and counterterrorism agencies, declared that “terrorist number one in terms of a threat against us is an imam named al-Awlaki.” At a New York Police Department briefing, an intelligence analyst called him simply “the most dangerous man in the world.”
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The two men who had done the most to elevate Awlaki to that exalted, if hyperbolic, status were Nidal Hasan, who had shot up Fort Hood in November 2009, and Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, who had flubbed the airliner attack over Detroit the following month. Despite their differences in age (Hasan was thirty-nine, Abdulmutallab just twenty-three), geography, and ethnicity, their psychological kinship was striking. Both were lost and lonely souls who, despite what on paper looked like considerable accomplishments, were desperately searching for meaning in their lives. Both were preoccupied with finding a worthy mate and struggled to balance sexual attraction with the strictures of their conservative brand of Islam. Both had heard Awlaki in person and had followed his work online as true believers. For both men, Awlaki was not a passing influence but a guide who became, over the course of several years, the center of their ideological universe, with grave consequences. He was indeed their bridge to extremism, and it is quite plausible, if unprovable, that without him they would not have made the journey.
And there was one more parallel: the American counterterrorism juggernaut got worrisome information on both men before their attacks, lost track of it, dug it out when it was too late, and made it the centerpiece of later recriminations and investigations into what had gone wrong.
Major Hasan, the army psychiatrist, had attended Friday prayers at Dar Al-Hijrah when Awlaki was preaching there; his mother’s funeral was held at the mosque in May 2001. Frustrated by his failure to find a wife, distressed by the deaths of his parents, he had become steadily more religious. Sitting alone at night in his apartment, he had discovered Awlaki’s new online life as his more radical works began to circulate on the web in 2005. He kept tracking the cleric in 2006–7, as his authenticity was reinforced by his imprisonment, which was diligently chronicled by his online supporters. Hasan was still watching in 2008, when Awlaki launched his own website and blog, offering a virtual mosque where his followers could gather, hear from him, and debate among themselves. For Hasan, Awlaki’s unforgiving new message was an implicit reprimand—What was a good Muslim like him doing in the American army? But it also offered a way out. Perhaps Sheikh Anwar would tell him that it was not too late to switch sides and join in the defense of the ummah.
Starting on December 17, 2008, Hasan began sending Awlaki messages via the “Contact the Sheikh” link on Awlaki’s website, asking his opinion on the proper Islamic view of certain kinds of violence. His first query asked about US army sergeant Hasan Karim Akbar, who in 2003 in Kuwait had thrown four grenades into the tents of his fellow soldiers and then fired his rifle at them in the ensuing chaos, killing two and injuring another fourteen troops. “Would you consider someone like Hasan Akbar or other soldiers that have committed such acts with the goal of helping Muslims/Islam (Lets just assume this for now) fighting Jihad and if they did die would you consider them shaheeds,” or martyrs? Nidal Hasan asked. Like so many others who consulted Awlaki or listened to his lectures, Hasan was trying to distinguish between violence that was halal, religiously sanctioned, and violence that was haram, forbidden. The messages capture him in the transition from loyalty to the United States, which he had vowed to defend when he joined the army after high school in 1988, to loyalty to the Muslim ummah. Akbar’s horrifying attack on his own comrades in the 101st Airborne, Hasan suggested, might seem to be an act of betrayal. But in a larger, religious framework, he wondered, would killing fellow soldiers who are themselves preparing to fight against Muslims qualify as a legitimate act of jihad?
Awlaki ignored that query and most of the rest, but he engaged briefly after Hasan told him that he was organizing a contest to award $5,000 to the author of the best essay on “Why is Anwar Al Awlaki a great activist and leader” submitted to a local online publication in the Washington area, the Muslim Link, and that he wanted Awlaki to award the prize himself. Hasan added a personal PS: “We met briefly a very long time ago when you were the Imam at Dar al Hijra. I doubt if you remember me. In any case I have since graduated medical school and finished residency training.” This remarkable piece of sycophancy stirred Awlaki to respond for the first time, but Hasan had overshot the mark: “I don’t travel so I won’t be able to physically award the prize and I am too ‘embarrassed’ for a lack of the better word to award it anyway,” Awlaki wrote back. Hasan followed up with a note explaining that plans for the contest had been thwarted by the cowardice of others. He added an offer to send money if Awlaki needed it and, in a postscript, asked for his help with his so-far-dismal search for a compatible woman: “PS: I’m looking for a wife that is willing to strive with me to please Allah,” he wrote. “I will strongly consider a recommendation coming from you.”
Awlaki replied with a friendly note, ask
ing Hasan to tell more about himself and offering to keep an eye out for a prospective wife. Hasan sent a fulsome biography and several more notes, but Awlaki did not reply again.
In other words, contrary to many later news reports, Awlaki offered no encouragement in his personal e-mail messages to Hasan for the idea of killing fellow American soldiers. But that was not the whole story. On his blog, Awlaki went on to address the very questions that were so troubling Hasan in the months before his shooting spree at Fort Hood. In July 2009, the month Major Hasan was transferred to Fort Hood, Awlaki posted a blistering attack on his website denouncing Muslim soldiers who would fight against other Muslims. His focus was on the armies of Muslim countries allied with the United States, which he called “the number one enemy of the ummah.” But his scathing denunciation would certainly have applied to a Muslim fighting in the US Army, a concern that preoccupied Hasan, who knew he might face deployment to Afghanistan. “The blame,” Awlaki wrote, “should be placed on the soldier who is willing to follow orders whether the order is to kill Muslims as in Swat,” a valley in Pakistan where security forces were fighting militants, “bomb Masjids as with the Red Masjid,” a mosque in Islamabad that was the site of a 2007 siege, “or kill women and children as they do in Somalia, just for the sake of a miser[ly] salary. This soldier is a heartless beast, bent on evil, who sells his religion for a few dollars.” Hasan had not heard back from Awlaki in the previous seven months, but he followed his writings assiduously, and this must have come as both a searing insult and a call to arms. Hasan’s idol was, in effect, calling him a “heartless beast” who was selling out Islam—and was connecting with Hasan’s own shifting feelings. Just a month earlier, when another admirer of Awlaki, Abdulhakim Mujahid Muhammad, born Carlos Bledsoe, had shot two soldiers outside the military recruiting station in Little Rock, one fatally, Hasan reportedly shocked his army colleagues by seeming to praise the attack, saying that “this is what Muslims should do, they should stand up to the aggressor.”
So by October, when Hasan was officially given the news he had dreaded—that he was being sent to Afghanistan—he had internalized the catechism of militant Islam that Awlaki had helped popularize: that the world’s population was divided into two irreconcilable groups, believers and unbelievers; that the unbelievers, led by the American military, were waging a ruthless war on Muslims; that any Muslim participating in that war on Muslims was a traitor and a sellout; and that the only appropriate response was to take the battle to the enemy. He had bought a handgun and, in a twist Awlaki might have understood, had begun to visit the strip club next to the gun shop, paying for lap dances in a private room. On November 4, he began to give away his food, clothing, and furniture to his neighbors, giving one neighbor two sport coats and a business suit still in a dry cleaning bag. “You should sell these,” he suggested. The rest, he said, should be given to the Salvation Army. On the morning of the shootings, November 5, he stopped by the home of another neighbor, Lenna Brown, who was having coffee with a friend. He gave both women brand-new copies of the Koran and suggested that they read the verses on Maryam, the Islamic rendering of the Virgin Mary story. Brown asked where he was going, and he answered Afghanistan. She asked Major Hasan how he felt about deployment, and he paused. “I am going to do God’s work,” he said.
For months he had tried to entice Awlaki into a real exchange on substantive matters, notably the obligations of a Muslim who finds himself in the American military. The imam, wary or just busy, had ignored most of his sixteen messages. But four days after Hasan had yelled “Allahu akbar!” and shot dead twelve soldiers and a Defense Department civilian, Awlaki finally weighed in with his endorsement, 420 words that began: “Nidal Hassan is a hero. He is a man of conscience who could not bear living the contradiction of being a Muslim and serving in an army that is fighting against his own people. This is a contradiction that many Muslims brush aside and just pretend that it doesn’t exist. Any decent Muslim cannot live, understanding properly his duties towards his Creator and his fellow Muslims, and yet serve as a US soldier.”
Awlaki presented the case as crystal clear: “The only way a Muslim could Islamically justify serving as a soldier in the US army is if his intention is to follow the footsteps of men like Nidal.” And, Awlaki added, every American Muslim faced the same quandary, if not in the stark terms of the military: “The heroic act of brother Nidal also shows the dilemma of the Muslim American community. Increasingly they are being cornered into taking stances that would either make them betray Islam or betray their nation….The American Muslims who condemned his actions have committed treason against the Muslim Ummah.” It was a revealing turn of phrase: the ummah took precedence over the nation, and Muslim Americans who did not betray their country were guilty of treason.
Of the 180 comments that appeared before the web-hosting company took down Awlaki’s site, the vast majority approved of Hasan’s shooting rampage and praised Awlaki for having the courage to endorse it. One writer, calling himself Abu Mubarak, connected the assault on Fort Hood with the drone attacks Obama was escalating, suggesting that the real terrorists wore American uniforms. “When a drone is sent into afghanistan, or iraq, or palestine,” Abu Mubarak wrote, “and kills 13 ‘suspected terrorists’ and injures another 30, as they were walking down the street, or drinking coffee in a cafe, where is the outcry of the Muslims and condemnations from the Americans? So if Nidal was a drone, would that have made it any more acceptable?”
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In the weeks before Hasan’s November 5 attack, as the army psychiatrist made his preparations, Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab was making his own lethal plans. He had completed an engineering degree at University College London in 2008, residing at the expense of his father, a wealthy Nigerian banker, in a building where apartments sold for millions of pounds. But very much like Awlaki years earlier, Abdulmutallab had decided that his father’s plans and an engineering career were not the future he wanted; the all-consuming fervor with which he had embraced Islam pretty much ruled that out. After finishing his degree, he had applied for and received a two-year visa to visit the United States, trying it out with a two-week Islamic studies course in Houston. Then, after what must have been tense negotiations with his parents, he agreed to enroll in a business course in bustling Dubai, where his father hoped he might be insulated from extremist influences.
But in the world of WWW Jihad, geography was no obstacle. Abdulmutallab abandoned his business course, left Dubai, and flew to Sanaa on August 1, 2009—admitted to Yemen, where his mother’s family came from, in part because he held a valid American visa, a sort of gold stamp of approval for other countries worried about terrorism. His goal was clear: to find his way to Awlaki and volunteer for jihad. Within a few weeks he had connected in Sanaa with a member of Awlaki’s underground network, explained his goal, and given the man the number of his Yemeni cell phone. Soon he got a text from Awlaki asking him to call. In a brief conversation Awlaki—undoubtedly wary of a trap—asked the young Nigerian to write a full explanation of his desire to join the jihad. Abdulmutallab, always the diligent student, took several days over his treatise, essentially an application to join AQAP. When he sent it to Awlaki, the imam replied that he would find a way for Abdulmutallab to join the fight.
For Abdulmutallab, it must have been a thrilling moment: he had passed the test set by his hero, the new father figure who had eclipsed his own father, whom Umar Farouk now condemned for un-Islamic behavior. The young man had first seen Awlaki four years earlier on his first visit to Yemen, where he spent the 2004–5 academic year at the Sanaa Institute for the Arabic Language, one of many language schools in the Yemeni capital. The details of their encounters that summer are uncertain, but Abdulmutallab appears to have heard Awlaki lecture at Iman University on its ramshackle campus north of town, which drew Salafi students from many countries. It is also quite possible that the Nigerian joined the throngs of young men flocking to hear Awlaki preach or talk in several mosques around
the city.
Abdulmutallab’s prolific blog posts from before, during, and after that Yemen summer give a sense of a thoughtful, diligent, diffident, somewhat naive eighteen-year-old, wistfully searching for romantic and religious fulfillment and beginning to pull away from his family’s control and expectations. After a three-year immersion in London’s Islamic scene, he had embraced a rigid faith, nothing like his family’s liberal approach to religion. In May of 2005, on an Islamic online forum, he fretted that even though he had tried to sign up for a version free of advertisements he could still see ads featuring the distraction of haram, or forbidden, photographs of women. “I didn’t mind it b4 but now i see haram pictures of women with uncovered hair,” Abdulmutallab wrote. In many cultures, including many Muslim subcultures, the idea of a teenager somberly complaining that he could not avoid glimpses of women’s hair on the web might have sounded comical. But he was deadly serious.
In January, when he joined the Islamic forum at gawaher.com (the name was Arabic for “jewels”), his first post was titled “I Think I Feel Lonely.” Reaching out to the devout for comfort he could not get from his University College classmates, he explained that he felt obliged to avoid the partying that was the core of student social life. “Hence i am in a situation where i do not have a friend,” he wrote. “i have no one to speak too, no one to consult, no one to support me and i feel depressed and lonely. i do not know what to do.” Predictably, he was especially torn over his lack of a love life and the sinful thoughts and actions that seemed to rule him. “As i get lonely, the natural sexual drive awakens and i struggle to control it, sometimes leading to minor sinful activities like not lowering the gaze,” he wrote. This problem, he added, “makes me want to get married to avoid getting aroused.” But few parents wanted to see their daughters married to an eighteen-year-old, he wrote. The Prophet “advised young men to fast if they can’t get married but it has not been helping me much,” Abdulmutallab added. The humor was unintentional.