http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/specials/chi-0112110186dec11.story

Terrorists evolved in U.S.
2 Egyptians set stage for attacks

By Andrew Martin and Michael J. Berens
Tribune staff reporters
Published December 11, 2001

One was the frail son of wealthy Egyptian parents, a former medical student who rejected a life of money and status.

The other was the street-savvy high-school dropout who favored James Bond movies and became so adept with the finer points of terrorism that he wrote a training manual.

Nearly 15 years ago, this unlikely duo--Khaled Abul-Dahab and Ali Mohamed--established the first U.S. outpost for what would evolve into Osama bin Laden's Al Qaeda network.

The duo operated under the flag of the Egyptian Islamic Jihad, a terrorist organization that set the stage for bin Laden's attacks on America and eventually merged with Al Qaeda.

Starting in California and moving to Brooklyn, they tapped into a network of Egyptian immigrants--cabdrivers, doctors, government employees, pilots and a gas station owner--who shared their religious zeal and were willing to join in their terrorist schemes.

Mohamed, who became a top military trainer for bin Laden, was among the first to teach U.S. recruits how to communicate in code, build bombs from garden-store materials and pose as "normal" Americans by shaving their long beards and avoiding mosques. At a terrorist camp in Afghanistan, he also taught how to target buildings for explosions.

Abul-Dahab established himself as a one-man communications hub, shuttling money and bogus passports to terrorists around the world from the tranquility of his California apartment. He even enrolled in a California flight school in an ultimately unsuccessful scheme to use a bomb-laden glider in a terrorist attack.

By the time they were arrested in 1998, Abul-Dahab and Mohamed had aided in a half-dozen terrorist attacks that left hundreds dead, including the 1995 bombing of the Egyptian Embassy in Pakistan and the 1998 explosions at U.S. Embassies in Africa.

"We didn't fully understand how extensive and dangerous the Egyptian Islamic movement had become in America until it was too late," a senior FBI agent assigned to a Midwest terrorism task force said. "We're still learning how the Egyptians, time and time again, were the brains behind bin Laden's muscle."

Abul-Dahab, now 38, was sentenced to 15 years in an Egyptian prison for his role in the Egyptian Islamic Jihad's attempts to overthrow the Egyptian government; Mohamed, now 49, pleaded guilty to participating in the 1998 embassy bombings in Africa and is awaiting sentencing in a New York jail.

Though the two have been in prison for three years, federal authorities renewed their investigations of both men in the wake of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks. The Egyptian government recently released to the FBI thousands of pages of previously sealed military court documents, including interrogation transcripts, from Abul-Dahab's trial. The Tribune obtained some of those records and had them translated from Arabic.

The new records, as well as U.S. court documents spanning a half-dozen terrorism trials, provide a glimpse into the role both men played in the birth and evolution of Islamic terrorism in America.

Unlikely duo's history

Ali Mohamed arrived in Santa Clara, Calif., in 1985 prepared to play a role he had been practicing for years.

He had enrolled in the Egyptian army after three years of high school but became disgruntled after 13 years in the service because he wasn't appreciated by his superiors, according to Egyptian court records. It was during his last years in the Egyptian army that he secretly joined the Egyptian Islamic Jihad, which aspires to overthrow the Egyptian government and turn the country into a fundamentalist Islamic state.

While in Egypt, he also contacted the Central Intelligence Agency and volunteered to be a spy but was dumped by the CIA as unreliable after a brief tryout, a senior government official told the Tribune.

Mohamed arrived in California alone but carried with him the full financial weight of the Egyptian Islamic Jihad, which was looking to expand outside Egypt because of a government crackdown on terrorist organizations, law-enforcement sources said.

He became a citizen and applied to the U.S. Army, where in 1986 he was assigned to the John F. Kennedy Special Warfare Center in Ft. Bragg, N.C.

Abul-Dahab's path to terrorism began when he left medical school under the urging of radical Islamic students. He had hoped to go directly to Afghanistan, pick up a gun and fight Soviet invaders, who had occupied the country since 1979. But Mohamed, whom he had met in 1984 in Egypt, persuaded him to join him in California instead.

During a 1998 interrogation by Egyptian authorities, Abul-Dahab recalled Mohamed's advice: Come to America but be patient. There is a bigger plan.

Once in the U.S., Abul-Dahab found he was working as a stealth fighter rather than as a gun-toting commando. He drove a used Volvo, worked as a restaurant dishwasher and later held menial jobs at a used car lot and a computer company.

But from his apartment, Abul-Dahab dispatched money to terrorists throughout the Middle East, some of it from American sympathizers--including two American doctors of Egyptian descent--and some of it from other terrorists, according to his statements to Egyptian investigators. In one instance, Abul-Dahab said he transferred money from Mohamed to Pakistan that was used to finance the 1995 bombing of the Egyptian Embassy in Islamabad, which killed 17 people.

Another time, Abul-Dahab transferred $3,000 to Mohamed to help him pay the legal fees of a colleague imprisoned in Canada; the money was from bin Laden, Abul-Dahab told investigators.

He also acted as a telephone operator for the Jihad network, using a three-way calling feature on his phone to connect terrorists in far-flung countries. "Out of honesty, I usually pressed a button to allow them to talk without listening to their conversation," Abul-Dahab told investigators. "I had an honest upbringing."

But not all the calls were business. Dr. Ayman al-Zawahiri, the leader of the Egyptian Islamic Jihad, called Abul-Dahab four times, twice to wish him a "happy feast." Another suspected terrorist, an Algerian, called Abul-Dahab to ask him to track down an Egyptian family so he could ask for their daughter's hand in marriage, according to his statement to Egyptian investigators.

Operated from both coasts

With Abul-Dahab in charge of the Santa Clara base, Mohamed turned his attention to the East Coast.

As a supply sergeant at Ft. Bragg, he developed a reputation as an aggressive, confident but egotistic soldier, according to his military supervisors. Because of his Middle Eastern background, Mohamed also filmed training videos about Muslim culture to be used by U.S. soldiers heading overseas, but the segments were deemed too boring and never shown, his supervisors later testified.

Even in the U.S. Army, Mohamed maintained his secret life.

Authorities believe he stole classified documents and maps by the armload. On weekend leaves, he secretly traveled to New York and New Jersey and distributed the material to a group of Egyptians who were forming their own terrorist base.

Their fledgling operation was centered at the Al-Farooq Mosque in Brooklyn, where a tiny first floor held the offices of Alkifah Refugee Services. It was created in 1987 to provide financial assistance to orphans and widows from the Soviet Union's decadelong occupation of Afghanistan.

However, the Alkifah center began recruiting and training American Muslims to fight in Afghanistan. A sister office in Pakistan--called the Services Office and funded by bin Laden--shepherded the men to the front lines.

But by the time the Soviet-Afghan war ended in 1989, the Alkifah center had evolved into a training ground for terrorists, as radical Egyptians muscled into control. Their leader was a blind Egyptian cleric named Sheik Abdel Rahman who is considered the spiritual leader of the Egyptian Islamic Jihad and is currently in jail involving a conspiracy to kill Americans by bombing New York landmarks.

Training recruits

It was about this time that Mohamed began commuting north to teach classes to the Alkifah recruits. They met in a Jersey City apartment, where Mohamed instructed the recruits on everything from making bombs to using a compass, according to federal court records.

The court records do not make clear how many recruits were taught by Mohamed, or how often he commuted to the northeast to hold classes. However, the recruits from the Alkifah center began plotting and carrying out attacks against America.

For instance, an Egyptian named El Sayyid Nosair, who worked as a boiler mechanic in New York City's criminal courts building, carried out on Nov. 5, 1990, what is now considered the first shot in the Egyptian terrorists' campaign against the U.S. Nosair was accused of firing a .357 Magnum slug into the head of a radical rabbi, Meir Kahane, who had just completed a speech at a midtown Manhattan motel.

Nosair had acted as Mohamed's host during the army sergeant's visits to the northeast, and he is identified in court records as having attended Mohamed's classes. After the shooting, police discovered binders full of military manuals and "jihad materials" in Nosair's basement, some of it stolen from the U.S. Army by Mohamed.

The documents included military training schedules and a topographical map of Ft. Bragg, the locations of military forces in the Middle East, and a military guide with drawings on how to commit assassinations and create bombs.

Nosair was later convicted of plotting attacks against New York City tunnels and landmark buildings from his jail cell, a failed scheme that included Sheik Abdel Rahman and nine others affiliated with the Alkifah center.

Several other men who received weapons and explosives training at the Alkifah center were convicted for their roles in the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center, though it was not clear if they participated in Mohamed's classes.

For Mohamed, the Alkifah center served a purpose greater than simply providing a platform to show off his military know-how. It provided an entree to bin Laden, whom Mohamed met during several trips to Alkifah's sister office in Pakistan.

Shared philosophies

Bin Laden, the son of a wealthy Saudi Arabian family, had used his inherited fortune to finance the Afghan fighters during their war with the Soviet Union. When the war ended, he began assembling his own army of former Afghan fighters--called Al Qaeda--to purge the Islamic world of influences he deemed corrupt, including U.S. military forces stationed in the Middle East.

Bin Laden shared many of the same philosophies as the Egyptian Islamic Jihad, which sought to purge the trappings of Western society from Egypt. The two groups worked closely together for years, beginning in the early '90s, and formally merged in about 1998 when they began calling for attacks against America and Israel, which they considered the leaders in a worldwide campaign to destroy Islam.

Bin Laden's No. 2 man

Al-Zawahiri, the leader of the Egyptian Islamic Jihad, is now considered bin Laden's No. 2 man. He is believed to be hiding with bin Laden in the mountains of Afghanistan, though there have been recent, unconfirmed reports that al-Zawahiri was injured or killed by U.S. bombs.

From the time he left the army in November 1989 and returned to California, Ali Mohamed maintained close ties to bin Laden and al-Zawahiri.

Along with Abul-Dahab, he served as a host for al-Zawahiri during two fundraising trips to America, the first in the early 1990s and the second in late 1994, court records show.

They escorted al-Zawahiri to at least three California mosques, where he was introduced as Abdel Muez, a doctor for the Red Crescent charity who was raising money for refugees in Afghanistan, according to court records and interviews. The real purpose of the visits, which included other unnamed mosques across the country, was to raise money for the Egyptian Islamic Jihad.

Mohamed also crisscrossed the globe and established himself as one of bin Laden's top military operatives. He helped bin Laden move from Afghanistan to Sudan, trained Al Qaeda operatives in Afghanistan in explosives and how to set up terrorist cells and bribed Algerian officials to help spring an Al Qaeda colleague from prison, court records show.

Mohamed traveled to Somalia in 1993 at a time when Al Qaeda was training Somali tribes fighting the United Nations' forces. While Mohamed admitted to training fighters in "war zones," he did not disclose his role in Somalia, according to court records.

In the fall of 1993, following the blast at the World Trade Center, San Francisco FBI agents conducted the first of two interviews with Mohamed, whose name had surfaced in connection with the Alkifah center. But agents could not prove he had committed any crime.

Mohamed, who remained under investigation for the next four years, admitted to the FBI that he had helped train fighters against the Soviets, that the Al Qaeda hoped to overthrow the government in Saudi Arabia and that he knew bin Laden. However, he denied links to any terrorist group or act.

Scouting U.S. targets

Months after his first brush with the FBI, Mohamed traveled to Sudan to talk with bin Laden. Mohamed would later describe the meeting during a court hearing following his arrest in 1998.

Mohamed said he had been scouting out dozens of possible U.S. targets.

"I took pictures, wrote diagrams and wrote a report" detailing U.S. targets for bin Laden, he said. "Bin Laden looked at the picture of the American Embassy [in Nairobi, Kenya] and pointed to where a truck could go as a suicide bomber."

Mohamed said bin Laden then ordered him to establish a cell in Kenya. There, Mohamed set up a fishing business and sold scuba diving equipment, luxury automobiles and diamonds as a cover and to generate income. More than a dozen other people in three countries rounded out the network.

Bin Laden wanted to strike two embassies simultaneously for maximum shock value, according to statements by Al Qaeda informants. The embassies in Tanzania and Nairobi were particularly vulnerable, the group deduced.

On Aug. 7, 1998, blasts delivered by bomb-laden trucks that crashed through embassy barriers ripped apart the two U.S. consulates, killing 224 people and injuring thousands.

On the day of the embassy blasts, Mohamed was back in Santa Clara, Calif. By then, he had made 58 trips from America overseas, court records show

How-to manuals

Mohamed's terrorist lessons did not stop when he went to prison in 1998.

He had left behind dozens of how-to manuals, including an 18-chapter, 180-page manual that served as the blueprint for assassinations and bombings that he had patched together from his experiences with the Egyptian jihad and from stolen U.S. training guides.

The FBI does not know if any of the Sept. 11 hijackers used the manual, called Military Studies in the Jihad Against the Tyrants. However, many of their tactics come straight from Mohamed's lessons, such as how to blend in as law-abiding citizens in a Western society.

Written in first-person in the late 1980s, the manual contains heavy doses of religion and terrorism history but clearly was written for those with scant education, providing a step-by-step tutorial on the proper way to hold a gun, make bombs from common materials and brew poisons from plants.

During the last decade, the manual has been updated by other terrorists and moved to computer disks. But the teachings of Mohamed are still echoed in most every Al Qaeda plot.

In Chapter 2, which details the characteristics of a faithful terrorist, Mohamed writes, "He has to be willing to do the work and undergo martyrdom for the purpose of achieving the goal and establishing the religion of majestic Allah on earth."

zurück