Jihad Joe (18 page)

Toward the end of the 1990s, while watching events in Bosnia and Chechnya, he became obsessed with the idea that he should be taking part in jihad. He became known at local mosques as a radical. At one point, a local immigrant with more ambition than ability tried to assemble a terrorist cell of area Muslims, inspired by Osama bin Laden. Shukrijumah appears to have been unimpressed with the poser. Instead of signing up for the local scheme (which had already been infiltrated by the FBI), Shukrijumah left in search of the real deal. Investigators later concluded that he had sniffed out the informant.
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He made his way to Afghanistan and the training camps of al Qaeda, where he started as a dishwasher, worked his way up the ranks, and eventually received advanced training in weapons, battle tactics, camouflage, and surveillance. He was gifted and was soon given more responsibility. Shukrijumah traveled around the world on still-mysterious al Qaeda business, with sightings in the Middle East, Trinidad, South America, and other locations.

In 2001 Shukrijumah returned to the United States for the last time and took a cross-country trip by train. For an ordinary young American man, such a trip might have been a coming-of-age story. For Shukrijumah, it was reconnaissance.
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In 1991, Special Agent John Zent of the FBI's San Francisco field office had what is known in intelligence circles as a walk-in: an area Muslim was volunteering his services as an informant. The field office was interested in investigating a radical Palestinian mosque in nearby Santa Clara, and Zent thought the man might be useful.

He was wrong. The informant instead alerted the subjects of the investigation that the FBI was interested in them. Nevertheless, Zent kept the channel open.
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During one conversation in 1993, the would-be informant began to talk more freely. He knew a man named Osama bin Laden, who was building an army under the aegis of an organization called al Qaeda. From his home base in Sudan, bin Laden was thinking about mounting a revolution in Saudi Arabia. The informant said that he had worked for al Qaeda, training Osama bin Laden's men in intelligence tactics and “anti” hijacking techniques.
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John Zent had just joined a very exclusive club—American government employees who knew what al Qaeda was, courtesy of Ali Mohamed, Osama bin Laden's master spy, who had recently finished his assignment as a U.S. soldier serving at Fort Bragg. Mohamed had picked the San Francisco field office as the target for his latest effort to infiltrate the FBI. Mohamed's modus operandi was to play both sides of the field, offering real intelligence value in exchange for access. It was a risky play.

A handful of people in the military had heard the phrase “al Qaeda” as early as 1991.
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The CIA had picked up the name in 1993 in connection with a hotel
bombing in Aden, Yemen.
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But no one was putting the information together yet, and no one would for some years to come.

Al Qaeda, however, had already set its sights on America. Starting in 1991, Osama bin Laden had begun to preach against the United States at the camps in Afghanistan. After the invasion of Iraq, the U.S. military had established a small permanent base in Saudi Arabia. Bin Laden and his deputies started saying that the United States should get out of the Persian Gulf altogether.
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Bin Laden said the United States was “the head of the snake,” which had to be cut off. Fatwas were issued toward the end of 1992, and the wheels of war were set into motion. The first World Trade Center bombing was arguably the opening shot.

Mohamed was the advance scout. In 1989 he had trained the men who would bomb the World Trade Center. In 1991 he had helped al Qaeda relocate its base of operations from Afghanistan to Sudan. Mohamed had trained al Qaeda's operatives in Afghanistan, and he continued training them in Sudan, overseeing a specialized course for Osama bin Laden's bodyguards.
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He wasn't done yet. Mohamed and Wadih El Hage, the American Muslim from Tucson, were the senior American Al Qaeda members with an ongoing presence in the country. Together, they managed a loose network of al Qaeda members and the occasional freelance employee in the United States.

Now based in Sudan, al Qaeda was enjoying the best operating conditions it would ever know. Al Qaeda in the mid-1990s was a corporation. It owned subsidiaries, occupied an office building, and maintained a regular payroll with benefits for its employees.
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El Hage served as the company's paymaster and as Osama bin Laden's executive assistant on a day-to-day basis. Al Qaeda owned a number of semi-legitimate businesses in Sudan and elsewhere, including a honey farm, a tannery, and construction and shipping companies.

El Hage managed some of these companies. Traveling around Africa and Europe using his U.S. passport, he also helped al Qaeda members with transportation and lodging, procuring forged passports and providing other assistance. Working with Ali Mohamed, El Hage helped convert some of al Qaeda's assets into diamonds and other precious stones. He also recruited other Americans for a transaction that was particularly important to bin Laden—the purchase of an airplane.
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Essam Al Ridi was an Egyptian national who became a U.S. citizen in 1994 after more than a decade of living in the United States. In the early 1980s, he was one of the first Americans to follow Abdullah Azzam's call, fighting in Afghanistan and later working in Pakistan. He met bin Laden and El Hage in Peshawar.

After the war against the Soviets ended, Al Ridi was dismayed by the influx of young Muslims spoiling for a fight—any fight—and decided to leave. When he heard that Azzam had been killed, he recalled, “the Afghan chapter and jihad were closed for me.”

Al Ridi didn't join al Qaeda but remained friendly with El Hage, who called him in 1992 with a business proposition. Bin Laden wanted to buy a large jet that could carry cargo, in order to transport Stinger missiles from his armory in Afghanistan to his new base in Sudan.
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Al Ridi, who had trained as a pilot, found a U.S. military surplus plane in Arizona for about $200,000 and agreed to fly it to Khartoum. A few years later, bin Laden asked him to move the plane, but the brakes failed on landing. Al Ridi expertly crashed it into a sand dune, avoiding any injuries, but the plane was a total loss.
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Al Ridi's copilot on the doomed flight was Ihab Ali, another naturalized American citizen who had moved to Orlando, Florida, with his family as a teenager. Ali did not assimilate well, and during the 1980s, he heard Azzam's siren call. Ali worked for the Muslim World League in Peshawar during Azzam's tenure there, then joined al Qaeda soon after its founding.
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He was trained in terrorist techniques by Ali Mohamed, who kept tabs on him back in the United States, where Ihab Ali studied flying at an obscure institution called the Airman Flight School in Norman, Oklahoma. A few short years later, 9/11 hijackers Mohammed Atta and Marwan Al Shehhi would visit the Airman school seeking flight lessons. Al Qaeda operative Zacarias Moussaoui would attend the same flight school in 2001.
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Mohamed himself was constantly on the move but returned frequently to California, where his partner, Khalid Abu El Dahab, was running a communications hub on behalf of al Qaeda. Among other responsibilities, Dahab would patch calls from Egypt to Afghanistan and Sudan, in order to foil intelligence surveillance.

Dahab and Mohamed were also responsible for recruiting Americans into al Qaeda, under orders from bin Laden himself. According to Dahab, they found ten
naturalized Americans from the Middle East who were willing to join. To support all of these efforts, Dahab worked as a car salesman, but it was difficult to hold down both professions at once, and he soon dropped the more mundane job.
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Ali Mohamed was prolific during these years, balancing multiple assignments and overseeing projects on three continents. In the United States, he smuggled al Qaeda operatives into the country, on one occasion even using his FBI contacts to get one of his trainees released after he was detained by Canadian customs. At bin Laden's behest, he set up meetings and joint training sessions between al Qaeda and Hezbollah. And in Africa, he played a key role training bin Laden's men and advancing bin Laden's secret war on America.
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In 1993 bin Laden dispatched Mohamed to Somalia, where a civil war was raging. The United States had deployed to Somalia for Operation Restore Hope, an effort to impose some kind of stability on the country and support United Nations relief efforts. Bin Laden was enraged at what he saw as a broader plan to establish American hegemony in Africa, starting with Somalia and then (he imagined) expanding to Islamic Sudan.
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Al Qaeda provided training to Somali tribes who were fighting UN and U.S. forces, and Mohamed took part in this effort. More significantly, he was in the country during the U.S. intervention. In October 1993 Somali forces trained by al Qaeda— most likely including Mohamed—shot down a U.S. helicopter in the notorious “Black Hawk Down” incident that left eighteen Americans dead.

Bin Laden wasn't done punishing the United States for having the temerity to try to save lives in Somalia. He asked Mohamed to start casing targets for another African attack. The former U.S. soldier dutifully surveilled a dozen locations in Nairobi, Kenya, taking pictures, drawing maps, and writing up reports on the security of each installation. He took his reports back to Khartoum. Bin Laden zeroed in on the photos Mohamed had taken of the U.S. embassy, pointing out where a truck bomb could be most effectively deployed. A second team selected the U.S. embassy in Dar Es Salaam, Tanzania, for a simultaneous attack. After the targets were chosen, Mohamed took teams back to Kenya to conduct advanced surveillance. They took their time—it would be nearly five years from surveillance to attack.
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As part of its covert war on the United States, al Qaeda wanted to obtain weapons of mass destruction. Bin Laden especially coveted a nuclear bomb.
Another trusted American was dispatched to handle this effort: Mohamed Loay Bayazid, the American citizen jihadist from Kansas City who had been present at al Qaeda's founding. It should be noted that Bayazid, who declined to be interviewed for this book, has denied all of what follows.
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In late 1993 or early 1994, Jamal Al Fadl, one of Al Qaeda's earliest members who had been recruited by the Al Kifah Center in Brooklyn (see
chapter 3
), got a call from the head of al Qaeda's financial committee. Someone in Khartoum had uranium to sell, and the asking price was $1.5 million. Al Fadl was sent to check it out and set up a meeting.

Bayazid was brought in to oversee the proposed transaction. Al Fadl and Bayazid went to meet the seller, switching cars along the way to foil any possible surveillance. At the meeting place, the seller brought out a cylinder two or three feet tall, engraved with technical details about the supposed contents. Bayazid carefully checked the information against the requirements to build a working nuclear bomb. It was a match. After the meeting, Bayazid arranged for a machine to be shipped from Kenya to test the material itself.

Al Fadl said that he was praised for his work and sent on his way. He never heard whether the material checked out or whether the purchase had been completed. Bayazid subsequently returned to the United States, where he became involved with the Benevolence International Foundation in Chicago, a charity that provided money and logistical assistance to al Qaeda.
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Al Qaeda needed cash badly. Osama bin Laden had been hemorrhaging money since he arrived in Sudan. Some of it was simply lost due to bad business decisions. More was lost to corruption, which included his own employees stealing from him. And running a global war—even an improvised war—involves substantial costs.
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In early 1995 Bin Laden dispatched his second-in-command, Ayman Al Zawahiri, to the United States on a fund-raising trip. Ali Mohamed was responsible for making the trip safe. Zawahiri traveled under an assumed name—Abd-al-Mu'izz—and, using forged documents obtained by Mohamed, toured several mosques in northern California. By one account, he raised as much as $500,000, although most people put the figure considerably lower: $3,000 or less.
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Despite his close relationship with both bin Laden and Zawahiri, not everyone in al Qaeda trusted Mohamed. Mohamed Atef, al Qaeda's military commander
at the time, told another al Qaeda member, L'Houssaine Kherchtou, not to disclose his travel plans to Mohamed. El Hage explained to Kherchtou that Atef feared Mohamed was working for the U.S. government.
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The nature of the dispute was unclear. Dahab thought it had something to do with money, but there may be a simpler explanation. Toward the end of 1994, things were boiling over with the FBI. Mohamed's name had come out during the investigation of the World Trade Center bombing and Siddig Ali's thwarted Day of Terror. While Mohamed was in Kenya, working on the embassy bombings surveillance, he began to get calls from home. The FBI wanted to talk.
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Mohamed returned to California to face the music. In December 1994 he sat down with FBI special agent Harlan Bell and Assistant U.S. Attorney Andrew McCarthy, who was preparing to prosecute Omar Abdel Rahman and his followers for the Landmarks bomb plot. McCarthy described the meeting in his 2008 book,
Willful Blindness: A Memoir of the Jihad
:

[Mohamed] had been pitched to me as an engaging friendly by his handlers: FBI agents in Northern California with whom he was purportedly cooperating, though it quickly became clear who was picking whose pocket. By the time I got to that conference room, though, I already knew better. And if I'd needed any confirmation, it was right there in the steady glare of eyes that didn't smile as he finessed his best cordial greeting, extending a hand that, when I shook it, coolly conveyed his taut, wiry strength. Ali Mohamed was a committed, highly capable, dyed-in-the wool Islamic terrorist. I couldn't prove it yet. But I was sure it was true, and in that moment, I understood that he knew I knew.
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