organization, enabling it to act clandestinely in the various Balkan conflicts as well as within the Muslim communities of several Russian republics.”
Just months before the first World Trade Center attack, another Al Qaeda operative hovering in the immediate orbit of US intelligence agencies, Ali Mohamed, was summoned by bin Laden to train his cadres at the Khost camp—the same mujahedin training base built along the Afghan-Pakistani border during the 1980s with CIA support. During that time, Mohamed also managed a trip to stake out US embassies in Kenya and Tanzania and to train a special Kenyan cell for a future bombing plot.
On his way back from one of his trips to the Middle East, Mohamed landed at Vancouver International Airport and nearly blew his cover. He was accompanied by Essam Hafez Marzouk, an Al-Jihad member who handled military logistics for Zawahiri and was traveling on a passport that was clearly forged. Both men were immediately detained by the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) and subjected to an extended interrogation session. This could have been the end of Mohamed’s career in spying, and perhaps another chance to unravel Al Qaeda’s expanding international network. But the FBI had other plans.
When it became clear that the Canadians suspected their two detainees were top-level terrorist operatives, Mohamed demanded his interrogators place a call to the FBI’s San Francisco field office. There, according to journalist Peter Lance, they reached Mohamed’s contact, Special Agent John Zent, who instructed the RCMP to let his asset go. And so they did. Once again, with the help of the US government, Ali the American maintained his cover.
By this time, Mohamed had revealed the existence of Al Qaeda and his own membership in the organization to the FBI. In a remarkably candid discussion with Zent after the World Trade Center bombing, Mohamed had previously freely detailed his training of Al Qaeda recruits and outlined the organization’s network of camps from Afghanistan to Sudan. According to a 1998 affidavit, he even named bin Laden to the FBI as Al Qaeda’s leader. Mohamed then offered more information in a subsequent chat with Pentagon counterintelligence agents. Without explanation, the FBI and Pentagon disappeared the notes of Mohamed’s interview sessions.
A month later, with the full confidence of the FBI, Mohamed led his mentor, Zawahiri, on a speaking tour of California. Posing as a field doctor from the Kuwaiti Red Crescent and traveling with a US tourist visa under an assumed name, Zawahiri surreptitiously raised hefty sums of cash for Al Qaeda, stirring crowds with heartrending stories of Afghan civilians suffering at the hands of Soviet marauders. He found his rapt audiences within mosques and Muslim charities, whose rank-and-file were almost certainly unaware Zawahiri was connected to an international terror network.
Back in Brooklyn, the Al-Kifah center was sending foreign fighters to Bosnia, where they waged jihad in support of immediate American interests and against the Russian-aligned Yugoslav army. Among those dispatched from the center to the Bosnian battlefield was Clement Rodney Hampton-El, an African American convert to Islam who had been trained in firearms by Mohamed at the Calverton, Long Island, gun range. Back in 1989, the FBI had photographed Hampton-El at the range alongside Nosair and others, clad in their Services Bureau T-shirts.
As the CIA’s “disposal problem” festered in the heart of the Big Apple, the FBI decided it was finally time to move against the Afghan war veterans who gathered around Al-Kifah. But first, it needed a plot it could indict them for. The result was a dubious dragnet that triggered a courtroom cover-up of the government’s ongoing covert operations.
The CIA on Trial
In the weeks before the 1993 bombing, the FBI dismissed a former Egyptian army officer it had been employing as an informant. Emad Salem had become close to the Blind Sheikh, but he secured a promise to never have to wear a wire, and he would not take a polygraph test to back up some of his more questionable reports. Salem had once lied under oath in a criminal court, claiming he’d been wounded while trying to protect Egyptian president Anwar Sadat from assassination in 1981. And he lied to his FBI handlers when he told them he’d been an Egyptian intelligence officer; he was, in fact, a desk officer who never fired a shot in combat. A serial fabulist with a shady background seeking income and intrigue, Salem fit the classic profile of an FBI informant.
Following the 1993 attack on the World Trade Center, Salem leaked audio to the press of conversations with his government handlers to create the impression that the FBI was aware of the bombing plot and had sat on its hands. Chastened by Salem’s leaks and embarrassed by its failures in the field, the FBI brought him back on to take down Al-Kifah’s inner circle. To guarantee Salem’s enthusiasm for the ambitious new undercover assignment, the bureau paid him a whopping $1 million.
Salem effortlessly wormed his way back into the Blind Sheikh’s inner circle, recording tapes of himself encouraging followers of the Egyptian cleric to hit targets around the city, from the Lincoln Tunnel to the UN building to the FBI headquarters. The World Trade Center was not among those targets. Some of the zealots Salem approached seemed willing to bomb anything and everything, but they never possessed the actual materials to do so. In fact, many appeared on tape as a gang of comically bumbling idiots. Among Salem’s dupes was Victor Alvarez, a twenty-nine-year-old idler who was judged by a psychiatrist as a mentally unstable cocaine addict and “borderline retarded”—an especially easy mark for an experienced hustler like Salem.
Following months of surveillance, the government arrested the Blind Sheikh and eight of his followers. They were indicted on an obscure, Civil War–era charge of conspiracy to commit sedition against the United States. The prosecution branded the legal extravaganza as the “Day of Terror” trial, suggesting that the defendants had been captured before they could cripple New York City’s vital infrastructure and slaughter hundreds of thousands. It placed a carefully selected jury in isolation and under strict guard, impressing upon them the sense that they could be next if the Blind Sheikh’s gang was not locked away for good.
Abdeen Jabara, a lawyer and founder of the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee, was a member of the legal team that defended the Blind Sheikh. He described the prosecution’s case to me as contrived and ethically dubious. “Emad Salem was as unsavory a character as you can imagine, a real slimeball,” Jabara remarked to me, referring to the informant who became the FBI’s star witness. “What he really did was help a group of Keystone Kops put together something that was indictable.”
Jabara learned that the government had initially been reluctant to indict Abdel-Rahman. He suspected the hesitation stemmed from its fear of exposing the Sheikh’s long-standing relationship with the CIA, which dated back to Afghanistan. “There was a whole issue about [Abdel-Rahman] being given a visa to come into this country and what the circumstances were around that,” Jabara said. “The issue related to how much the government was involved with the jihadist enterprise when it suited their purposes in Afghanistan and whether or not they were afraid there would be exposure of that. Because there’s no question that the jihadists were using the Americans and the Americans were using the jihadists. There’s a symbiotic relationship.”
Joining Abdel-Rahman in the dock was Nosair, whose lawyers had humiliated the government four years before. With the government back for another round, Nosair procured the services of Roger Stavis, a veteran defense attorney who had conceived a novel and potentially explosive strategy. With his client on trial for sedition, Stavis decided to focus his defense on Nosair’s role as a soldier in America’s most crucial proxy war.
During the trial, Stavis took every possible opportunity to highlight the services the defendants had provided to the CIA, referring to them constantly as “Team America.” In effect, he was putting the CIA and its covert operations on trial. “I spent days in the courtroom saying, ‘It’s all about Afghanistan. Afghanistan! Afghanistan!’” Stavis recalled to me.
Stavis compiled a remarkable body of evidence, beginning with the JFK Special Warfare Center training manuals discovered in Nosair’s apartment by police investigators after his arrest in 1990. The manuals led Stavis to the office of Colonel De Atkine. During his conversations with De Atkine, he learned about Ali Mohamed, the army cadet who had drilled with Fort Bragg’s Green Berets, led seminars on “the Arab mind” before De Atkine’s students and smuggled the special operations