18 December 1986

Posted on December 18, 2020December 23, 2020 by William Arkin

McNair Hall at North Carolina A&T State University

Khalid Sheikh Mohammed (KSM) graduates with an engineering degree from North Carolina A&T University, Jesse Jackson’s alma mater.

KSM had entered the United States four years earlier, first attending Chowan College in Murfreesboro to improve his English language proficiency. During his time in America, KSM mostly hung out with other Middle Eastern students. But he also attended lectures at East Coast mosques promoting the jihad against the Soviet Union in Afghanistan, which had invaded the country at the end of 1979. Those lectures are now thought to have included fundraising trips by Aymen al-Zawahiri and Abdullah Yusuf Azzam, who were free to travel in the U.S. (Azzam was Osama bin Laden’s intellectual mentor.)

With a Pakistani passport, but having grown up in Kuwait (as the son of an oil industry guest worker), KSM was already a man of the world. And after he graduated, he went from Kuwait to Peshawar, Pakistan, where he joined his brother, Zahed, who ran one of many NGOs providing aid and relief for fighters and refugees from Afghanistan.

11 November 1996

Posted on November 11, 2020December 23, 2020 by William Arkin

The FBI first interviews Jamal al-Fadl and is taken on quite a ride.

The Sudanese national Jamal Ahmad al-Fadl walked into the U.S. Embassy in Asmara, Eritrea in June 1996, claiming that he was a secretary and fixer for Osama bin Laden in Sudan. As the FBI would later tell the story to Lawrence Wright, al-Fadl embezzled $110,000 from al Qaeda; when bin Laden found out about it, and al-Fadl begged for forgiveness, bin Laden said the money would have to be returned. Fadl flees. He attempts to become an agent for Saudi Arabia and even Israel before he lands with the FBI. (Looming Tower, p. 197)

As the story goes, al-Fadl had lived in Brooklyn and was connected to the Al-Kifah Center, then the radical mosque linked to the 1993 World Trade Center attack and the “blind Sheikh” Omar Abdel Rahman.

After a long vetting process in Germany, al-Fadl began to tell the FBI of al Qaeda’s worldwide organization, activities, and finances. He is such a valuable source, he is moved to the U.S. under witness protection, and in New Jersey, “junior”—as the FBI handlers called him—spills on everything from plots known and unknown to al Qaeda’s supposed pursuit of weapons of mass destruction. That little tidbit rockets his information to the White House.

Though the WMD report would receive wide circulation—and would influence the U.S. cruise missile attack in Sudan two years later—according to Wright (who is always complimentary of the FBI), outside of a small circle of FBI specialists and prosecutors, Fadl’s reports engender little interest. (Looming Tower, p. 242)

George Tenet says in his autobiography (At the Center of the Storm, p. 102) that al-Fadl (whom he doesn’t name) “told us that UBL [bin Laden] was the head of a worldwide terrorist organization with a board of directors that would include the likes of Ayman al-Zawahiri and that he wanted to strike the United States on our soil. We learned that al Qaeda had attempted to acquire material that could be used to develop chemical, biological, radiological, or nuclear weapons capability. He had gone so far as to hire an Egyptian physicist to work on nuclear and chemical projects in Sudan.”

Oh, and al-Fadl won the New Jersey Lottery. He is still thought to be in witness protection.

20 October 2000

Posted on October 20, 2020October 20, 2020 by William Arkin

Ali Mohammed pleads guilty. Surely one of the strangest sub-plots of 9/11.

Mohammed was the only al Qaeda operative known to have successfully infiltrated the U.S. military and intelligence community before 9/11. Along the way, he was an Egyptian Army officer who learned to speak English and Hebrew, attended foreign officer training at Ft. Bragg, was recruited by the CIA, joined Egyptian Islamic Jihad (EIJ) led by Ayman al-Zawahiri, was dropped by the CIA, entered the U.S. despite being on a watchlist and again was engaged by the CIA, married an American woman and moved to California, enlisted in the U.S. Army, joined special forces back at Ft. Bragg, taught Middle East and radicalism courses to the Army, took leave to go and fight in Afghanistan, returned to the Army and secretly trained radicals in New York who were later implicated for the November 1990 assassination of Rabbi Meir Kahane, wrote the al Qaeda training manual “Military Studies in the Jihad Against the Tyrants,” got an honorable discharge from the Army (after all that), joined the Army Reserve, continued work for al Qaeda from his home in Santa Clara, California, became an informant to the FBI, helped Osama bin Laden leave Afghanistan in 1991, worked to settle bin Laden in Sudan, trained al Qaeda recruits, returned to Afghanistan to provide explosives and tradecraft training, helped to set up the al Qaeda cell in Kenya that would blow up the Embassy in 1998, hosted Zawahiri on a fundraising tour of American mosques, continued to work for the FBI, provided Army intelligence with information on camps in Afghanistan, fought with fighters loyal to Farah Aideed in Somalia, scouted targets for bin Laden in Kenya and Tanzania, helped bin Laden move back to Afghanistan, was secretly arrested after the African embassy bombings, and becomes an informant (again) for the government.

In October 2000, Mohamed entered a guilty plea on five counts of conspiracy. Thereafter in custody, Ali Mohammed’s life was a bit of a mystery, supposedly never sentenced and after 9/11, again a source for the CIA and FBI.

12 October 2000

Posted on October 12, 2020October 12, 2020 by William Arkin

In Aden, a small bomb-laden boat approaches the destroyer USS Cole at midship and the two suicide bombers detonate their explosives, killing 17 sailors and injuring at least 40 others.

The destroyer, en route to the Persian Gulf, was making a prearranged fuel stop, part of a Central Command (CENTCOM) initiative to improve relations with the Yemen government. The blast ripped a hole in the side of the USS Cole approximately 40 feet in diameter. The attack occurs without warning, and the Navy vessel was never warned to expect a terrorist attack.

The subsequent FBI investigation revealed that the USS Cole bombing followed an unsuccessful attempt on January 3, 2000, to bomb another U.S. Navy ship, the USS The Sullivans. In this earlier incident, the boat sank before the explosives could be detonated. The boat and the explosives were salvaged and refitted, and the explosives were tested and reused in the USS Cole attack.

The “story” of the aftermath, favorable to a supposedly do-no-wrong FBI, is later told in Lawrence Wright’s Looming Tower, and the attack becomes an emotional debating point in the Bush-Gore presidential election. The outgoing Clinton administration is reluctant to retaliate against al Qaeda—the clear perpetrator—because an election is just a month away. But the Bush administration also does not take any military action, told by the CIA that it did not have enough “proof” of al Qaeda direction.

Yemeni authorities establish that Tawfiq bin-Atash (known as Khallad), who had been a trainer at an al Qaeda camp in Afghanistan and worked as an Osama bin Laden bodyguard, was not only one of the commanders but that he had been present at the January 2000 meeting of al Qaeda operatives in Malaysia. Khalid al-Mihdhar and Nawaf al-Hazmi, the San Diego duo who would go on to be “musclemen” on 9/11, were also present.

According to the 911 Commission Report (p. 191), back in Afghanistan, bin Laden anticipated U.S. military retaliation and ordered the evacuation of al Qaeda installations, fleeing to the desert area near Kabul, then to Khowst and Jalalabad, and eventually back to Kandahar. In Kandahar, he rotated between five to six residences, spending one night at each residence. In addition, he sent his senior advisor, Mohammed Atef, to a different part of Kandahar and his deputy, Ayman al Zawahiri, to Kabul so that all three could not be killed in one attack.

In writing his autobiography, George Tenet says that “neither our intelligence nor the FBI’s criminal investigation could conclusively prove that Usama bin Ladin and his leadership had had authority, direction, and control over the attack. This is a high threshold to cross… What’s important from our perspective at CIA is that the FBI investigation had taken primacy in getting to the bottom of the matter.” (At the Center of the Storm, p. 128).

6 October 1981

Posted on October 6, 2020October 10, 2020 by William Arkin

Egyptian president Anwar Sadat is assassinated while viewing a military parade celebrating the eighth anniversary of the 1973 Yom Kippur war, when Egypt crossed the Suez Canal into the Sinai Peninsula.

As the two-hour parade is culminating with a flyover, a truck stops in front of the reviewing stand. Five soldiers shoot into the crowd of dignitaries and throw grenades, killing Sadat. The soldiers are often associated with the Muslim Brotherhood, an Islamic group that is a legitimate political force in Egypt. In reality, they are followers of what would become Egyptian Islamic Jihad and Gama’a al-Islamiya (the Islamic Group), the modern-day feeders of al Qaeda.

Some 300 Islamic radicals are arrested after the Sadat assassination, including Ayman al-Zawahiri, an English-speaking doctor, who would go on to become Osama bin Laden’s second and successor.

29 September 2000

Posted on September 29, 2020September 30, 2020 by William Arkin

Osama bin Laden, Ayman al-Zawahiri, and Rifa’i Ahmed Taha appear on Al Jazeera with the son of Omar Abdel Rahman, the Egyptian “the blind Sheikh,” calling for his release from American prison. The Blind Sheikh’s 1995 trial involved a group of New York-based terrorists in the so-called “Landmarks” case (or the “Days of Terror”), plans to blow up the Holland and Lincoln Tunnels and other New York landmarks. The Egyptian was found guilty and sentenced to life in prison under the rarely used Sedition Act of 1918.

The Al Jazeera video, aired numerous times starting on September 21, is believed to have been filmed sometime in the spring of 2000. It includes a direct warning by Zawahiri. “Enough of words,” he says, “it is time to take action against the iniquitous and faithless force which has spread troops through Egypt, Yemen and Saudi Arabia.”

By 2000, the al Qaeda leader and the two leaders of Egyptian Islamic Jihad (EIJ)—Zawahiri and Taha—are practically joined as one, and the leadership of al Qaeda is dominated by Egyptians. But bin Laden’s influence should not be underestimated. By all accounts, he was successful in getting Zawahiri and the EIJ to focus away from attacks on the Cairo regime and more on international (that is, American) targets. Two weeks after Al Jazeera airs this video, the Navy destroyer USS Cole is attacked in Yemen.

Zawahiri would go on to lead the last remnants of al Qaeda with the killing of bin Laden in 2011. Taha was reported killed in a US drone strike in Syria in 2016.

27 September 1996

Posted on September 27, 2020September 28, 2020 by William Arkin

At Hurghada, a Red Sea resort in Egypt, two German tourists and two Egyptian nationals are killed as part of Ayman al-Zawahiri’s campaign against tourism.

On September 30, 1992, almost four years earlier, the Egyptian Islamic Group warned tourists not to enter Qena province, the location of some of Egypt’s most famous Pharaonic temples. The following day, terrorists opened fire on a Nile boat carrying over 100 German tourists, injuring three of the Egyptian crew. Between October 1, 1992 and the Hurghada attack, there were 18 additional attacks on tourism, most claimed by Zawahiri’s Egyptian Islamic Jihad (EIJ).

Egyptian police cracked down on the Islamists and increased security around tourist sites. By the end of 1997, after a brutal terrorist attack in Luxor that killed 62 tourists, the campaign of terrorism directed at tourist sites ended. Zawahiri and the EIJ had by then begun to harmonize their attacks with al Qaeda’s global (and American) focus.

Terrorism directed at tourists was also nonexistent for seven years—until 2004, when Egyptian Red Sea villages where Israeli tourists dominated were attacked, killing 34 persons, mostly Israeli visitors. There has been a steady campaign of tourist attacks in Egypt since.