Jihad Joe (6 page)

Mohamed had been an Egyptian army officer during the early 1980s. As part of his military training, he had been selected to take part in a joint exercise that brought Egyptian commandos to Fort Bragg for the same unconventional warfare drills practiced by the U.S. Army's elite Green Berets.
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Around this time, Mohamed was recruited into the hard-core radical group known as Egyptian Islamic Jihad (EIJ) by its emir, Ayman Al Zawahiri.
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Linked to the assassination of Anwar Sadat in 1981, EIJ was hell-bent on overthrowing the secular Egyptian government and replacing it with an Islamic state. Zawahiri was a cell leader in EIJ at the time, and he had recruited a number of members from the military, with the idea of staging a coup. That idea failed, but
Sadat was ultimately assassinated by military officers connected to EIJ. Zawahiri and hundreds of others were indicted for conspiracy in the killing. Zawahiri was released after three years and fled Egypt for Afghanistan, where he set up an EIJ operation in exile, contributing valuable military expertise to the Arab mujahideen gathered by Azzam.
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There, Zawahiri met Osama bin Laden and forged an alliance that continues until this day. Zawahiri was deeply involved in al Qaeda operations from day one. EIJ was nominally a distinct organization under Zawahiri's leadership, but for most practical purposes, al Qaeda and Islamic Jihad were one and the same. They shared payroll, personnel, and facilities, and sworn al Qaeda members answered to Zawahiri as readily as to bin Laden himself.
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Conversant in Arabic, English, Hebrew, and French, Ali Mohamed fancied himself a spy, and a spy was exactly what Zawahiri wanted, especially one who could infiltrate the American intelligence services. Zawahiri and other Egyptian radicals blamed the United States for supporting Egypt's brutal dictatorship and sneered at what they perceived as America's corrupt and decadent morality. The Egyptians were ahead of the curve, eyeing the United States as a potential enemy even as the CIA was helping arm the mujahideen in Afghanistan.
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Infiltrating the CIA was Mohamed's first assignment from Zawahiri. Mohamed began by simply walking into the U.S. embassy in Cairo and asking to talk to the CIA case officer stationed there. Skeptical but eager for Arabic-speaking sources, the agency tried him out in Germany, assigning him to infiltrate a mosque whose head cleric was connected to Hezbollah. What the CIA didn't tell him was that the agency had already infiltrated the mosque.

Mohamed's first act as a CIA asset was to tell the target of the investigation that he was working for the CIA and had been ordered to spy on him. The agent already in place reported this back to the agency, and Mohamed's CIA career came to an abrupt halt. The CIA issued a burn notice to U.S. and allied intelligence services that Mohamed was not to be trusted. He was not told why he was released.
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Mohamed spent the next several months working as a counterterrorism adviser for Egypt Air, where he gained valuable information about airline security that would come into play years later. The ultimate target remained the United States, however, and in 1986 Mohamed hopped on a plane for New York.

How he got his visa is a mystery—the burn notice added Mohamed's name to a visa watch list. At the time, however, the United States was still trying to work out whether it could leverage Islamic extremists to fight communism more broadly than in Afghanistan, and Mohamed was not the only dangerous person to slip across the border. Whether by oversight or strategic miscalculation, the State Department let a walking time bomb enter the country.
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Wasting no time, Mohamed proposed to a woman he had met on the flight into New York, and they were married in Reno six weeks later. Now secure in his ability to stay in America for an extended period, he turned to his assignment. First, he set up a communications hub near his wife's home in California. Joining him there was Khalid Abu El Dahab, an Islamic Jihad operative whom Mohamed had personally recruited. “Be patient,” Mohamed told his protégé. “There is a bigger plan.”
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Mohamed walked into an army recruiter's office in Oakland, California, and enlisted.
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Still extremely fit at age thirty-two, he aced basic training and soon scored an assignment at Fort Bragg at the John F. Kennedy Special Warfare Center, which trains elite Special Forces soldiers in conventional and unconventional warfare, including psychological operations.

Initially, Mohamed worked as a supply sergeant, but with his unique background and strong language skills, he was tapped to serve as assistant director of the Middle East Seminar for the Special Operations and International Studies Department in the school. Ayman Al Zawahiri's trusted spy was now educating the U.S. Army about the Middle East.

Mohamed's tenure at Fort Bragg was a comedy of errors. He seemed to relish the role of spy but somehow remained oblivious to the fact that spies are not meant to be seen. In his spare time, he rifled through any loose papers he could find on the base, taking copies of maps and army training manuals that might be useful to Zawahiri's Islamic Jihad down to the local Kinko's to make copies.

He also copied dozens of documents marked “top secret,” which must have delighted him. Many of these were actually simulated secret documents used in a training exercise, listing fictitious fleet positions and containing little intelligence of value.
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Other material was more sensitive. Eventually Mohamed's paper sweeps raised the suspicions of his commanding officer, who took steps to secure genuinely classified information, but he didn't know the full extent of Mohamed's espionage, and no further action was taken.

Mohamed's indiscretions became even more indiscreet. At one point, while discussing Anwar Sadat with a superior officer, Lt. Col. Robert Anderson, Mohamed volunteered that Sadat “was a traitor and he had to die.” In 1988 he informed Anderson that he was planning to travel to Afghanistan to take part in the jihad during his annual leave.

Anderson was appalled, pointing out that there could be tremendous ramifications if a U.S. Army soldier was exposed while killing Russians. Mohamed shrugged it off. After a month of leave, Mohamed returned looking like he had been to war. He gave Anderson a souvenir—the belt from a Russian Special Forces soldier's uniform—and a debriefing on the action, including maps of the combat. He told another officer that he had given U.S. Army maps of the region to warlord Ahmad Massoud, the ally of Abdullah Azzam.

Anderson filed an eight-page report outlining his concerns about Mohamed's freelance adventuring. It disappeared into the black hole of army bureaucracy, and he never heard back from his superiors.
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Where Anderson saw cause for alarm, retired colonel Norvell Deatkine saw opportunity. A civilian instructor in Middle East studies at the school, Deatkine helped train Special Forces members in “Civil Affairs,” a nebulous department purportedly focused on community relations overseas that often served as a cover for psychological operations and intelligence works.

Deatkine drafted Mohamed as a Middle East specialist. At one point, he convened a panel discussion that was videotaped as an educational aid. Mohamed was the star of the show, fielding questions from a motley handful of army wonks whose expressions ranged from pained to dazed to disinterested. Of the five panelists, Mohamed cut the most formidable picture of a soldier by far.
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Animated and basking in the spotlight, Mohamed was remarkably candid during the ninety-minute talk, providing a window into the viewpoint of the hardened jihadists who would soon target America. If only anyone had been paying attention.

Many American jihadists of the period were motivated by a mix of understandable emotions and rationalizations, including the impulse to defend Muslims in peril and a craving for adventure in a venue that had been blessed by both Muslim religious authority and American patriotism.

Mohamed cared nothing for America. His loyalty lay with a radical version of
Islam reflecting the sophisticated and ambitious thinking of his mentor, Zawahiri, and a core ideology that would soon become part and parcel of the newly formed al Qaeda.

Mohamed's views came from established jihadist ideology—specifically the writings of Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood ideologue Sayyid Qutb, which had deeply influenced Azzam, Zawahiri, and bin Laden. These views included the separation of the world into a war between Islam and non-Islam, and the overwhelming imperative to create Islamic states ruled by shariah law. Sitting in the heart of one of the most important military installations in the United States, Mohamed told the panel,

I cannot consider Islam a religion without political domination. So what we have, what we call
Dar Al Harb
, which is the world of war, and
Dar Al Islam
—the world of Islam. And
Dar Al Harb
, the world of war, it comprises all the territory [that] doesn't have Islamic law. [ … ] So as a Muslim, I have an obligation to change
Dar Al Harb
to
Dar Al Islam
.

When asked about the rise of Islamic fundamentalism in the Middle East, Mohamed replied that there was no such thing as a Muslim fundamentalist— “just ordinary Muslims.” All Muslims were, by definition, fundamentalists, he explained.

If you look at the religion, the religion, we do not have moderate, we do not have extremist, we do not have people between. You have one line. You accept the one line or not. [ … ] I accept everything, and this is my way. In the religion I can't compromise. [ … ] I will accept the whole part of the religion, or I will not accept the whole part of the religion. So the fundamentalist, it mean that the people they try to establish an Islamic state based on the Islamic
shariah
for every aspect in the life.

Ominously, Mohamed predicted that the mujahideen would not stay inside Afghanistan. They would spread around the world, take the war to Russia on its own soil, and transform strategic parts of the Middle East into Islamic states where Christians and Jews would be tolerated but “without power.”

[In Egypt], the religious people, they are calling and they [are] trying to change the system now. And most is the young people. Most is a new generation. They left the country. They are fighting, especially in Afghanistan. So the experiment will repeat again a hundred percent, maybe in Egypt and Algeria.

All of this was happening in plain sight. The underground aspect of Mohamed's activities was even more damaging. It's not clear whether Mohamed actually saw combat during his trip to Afghanistan, but we do know now what he didn't tell his commanding officer then—Mohamed had been providing professionalized, American-style military training to the mujahideen during his trip at camps affiliated with Abdullah Azzam that would soon become the property of al Qaeda.
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It was the start of an illustrious terrorist career, which would span at least three continents and encompass some of al Qaeda's most deadly terrorist attacks— the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, the East African Embassy bombings, and perhaps even September 11.

Several Americans were present at the camps during the time that Mohamed was there. Among them were Abdullah Rashid, the African American from Brooklyn who nearly lost his leg during combat, and Fawaz Damra, the imam at Brooklyn's Al Farook mosque.

Perhaps the most important figure in Afghanistan around the time that Mohamed was working in the training camps was Mustafa Shalabi, a fellow member of Egyptian Islamic Jihad who had been personally recruited by Zawahiri. Now a naturalized American citizen (through fraud), Shalabi answered to Azzam, at least on paper, and ran the Al Kifah Center in Brooklyn on his behalf.
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If Mohamed and Shalabi hadn't met before Afghanistan, they certainly knew each other afterward. Shortly after they returned to the country, Shalabi invited Mohamed to bring his training skills to the New York area. Mohamed handed out copies of the maps, the training manuals, and the documents he had stolen from Fort Bragg, which served as the foundation for the world's most dangerous book, the
Encyclopedia of Jihad
, a terrorist training manual without parallel.

Mohamed began work on the
Encyclopedia
by translating the stolen army training manuals into Arabic, then enhancing them with his own specialized knowledge. He carefully redrew illustrations of U.S. soldiers handling heavy
arms, replacing the Western figures with cartoonish mujahideen fighters. Sometimes he simply inserted a page from a U.S. army manual and added annotations in Arabic. Mohamed's diagrams showed how to field-strip weapons, create improvised explosives, operate rocket-propelled grenades, and target Soviet tanks.
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He also added material not found in any army manual, such as instructions on how to create terrorist cells, surveillance and the selection of terrorist targets, how to create deadly poisons and other methods of assassination, and how to manipulate authorities if arrested. The book grew over the years, existing first on paper and later in electronic formats. The core text still exists today and circulates on the Internet. Copies of the book were captured in Afghanistan after the U.S. invasion in 2003.
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Mohamed took copies of both his edited manuals and the army originals to Brooklyn and Jersey City, where they were made available as part of the library at the Al Kifah Center and the As-Salaam mosque.
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He wasn't only providing reference works, however. By early 1989 Mohamed was traveling on weekends from Fort Bragg to New Jersey to conduct hands-on training for a select group of about ten aspiring American jihadists.

The group predated Mohamed's arrival. Its informal leader was a naturalized American citizen from Egypt named El Sayyid Nosair. After earning his degree in industrial design and engineering from Helwan University in Egypt, Nosair's life had become tumultuous. He had dabbled with terrorism, reportedly training under the infamous Abu Nidal.