over the FBI and CIA’s long-standing relationship with Mohamed—as well as many of the founding fathers of Al Qaeda—trump any concern about Mohamed’s danger to the public? For raising these questions in his book-length investigation into the case of Ali Mohamed, Triple Cross journalist Peter Lance was faced with a libel lawsuit by Fitzgerald. (Fitzgerald was ultimately forced to drop his claim.)
It would not be until September 10, 1998, that the government began to take measures against Mohamed—and it was only because of Mohamed’s own arrogance that the United States took the opportunity to scrutinize him. Following the arrest of el-Hage and the subsequent indictment of the key figures behind the East African embassy bombings, Mohamed scrapped his plans to join bin Laden in Afghanistan and accepted a subpoena to testify before a secret grand jury in New York.
Having outsmarted the feds for years, Mohamed probably thought he could remain one step ahead if he faced them down one more time. But Fitzgerald had had enough. Concluding that Mohamed had lied to the grand jury, he ordered his arrest. When FBI agents arrived at Mohamed’s hotel room to cuff him, they allowed him a visit to the bathroom. There, he tore pages from his notebook containing Zawahiri’s address and satellite phone number, and then flushed them down the toilet.
In federal custody, Mohamed’s name was registered as “John Doe.” A date was set for sentencing, but the hearing never took place. He gave up his right to appeal and the defense raised no objections. Mohamed was sent to a secret location that was most likely the witness protection wing of a federal prison. His file remained sealed and Fitzgerald kept him off the witness stand in the embassy bombing trial, once again averting embarrassment to the CIA, the Department of Defense and the FBI.
It is unclear if Mohamed was ever sentenced, or if he struck a secret deal with the government. The thick shroud of secrecy draped over his very existence meant that Fitzgerald denied the American public a chance to learn about their government’s colossal failures in judgment—and its sordid history of collusion with jihadist elements. As former FBI special agent Joseph F. O’Brien told Lance, if Mohamed had been allowed to testify in open court, he “would have been opened up by defense lawyers and told the whole sad tale of how he’d used the Bureau and the CIA and the DIA for years. The Bureau couldn’t risk that kind of embarrassment.”
On November 4, 1999, Mary Jo White, the US attorney who oversaw Ali Mohamed’s peculiar prosecution, was asked about his case at a press conference about his activities. All she could do was reply, “I’ve read what you read and I can’t comment.” The cover-up to protect the reputation of Ali the American’s employers in the US government had turned into a disappearing act.
A Catastrophic and Catalyzing Event
Two weeks after the embassy bombings, Clinton authorized Operation Infinite Reach. It was the most aggressive US response to a terrorist attack since the country tried and failed to assassinate Libyan president Muammar Gaddafi in 1986 for his supposed role in downing Pan Am flight 103. As with that botched missile strike, which wound up burnishing Gaddafi’s image as an anti-imperialist lion, Infinite Reach revived the beleaguered bin Laden’s global status.
From both a military and political standpoint, the American operation was a disaster. Cruise missiles fired from a navy warship in the Persian Gulf had aimed to destroy an Al Qaeda nerve gas factory in Sudan that, according to Clinton, was co-owned by bin Laden. Instead the strikes, launched on the basis of bunk intelligence, decimated a pharmaceutical plant that supplied 50 percent of the medicine to one of the poorest countries in the world. The bombing wiped out Sudan’s supply of TB vaccinations and eliminated its supply of crucial veterinary drugs that prevented the transfer of parasites from animals to small children.
Furthermore, several cruise missiles failed to explode; Al Qaeda seized them and sold them on the black market for $10 million each, allegedly to China. A separate series of cruise missile strikes hit an Al Qaeda camp in Khost—the old network of bases and tunnels that bin Laden had built for the CIA—but he and Zawahiri were hundreds of miles away thanks to a likely tip-off from the Pakistani ISI. “It was like a script [bin Laden] has written for the Americans and the Americans just went along,” Khaled Batarfi, a childhood friend of bin Laden’s, remarked to an interviewer. “He wanted to provoke the Americans into such actions against Muslim countries.”
“Bin Laden’s interest was not in killing a few Americans in the embassies. He intended to have a response from Clinton—this cowboy response,” said Sa’ad Al-Fagih, a Saudi dissident who had known bin Laden since the days of the anti-Soviet jihad. Citing his contacts in Saudi intelligence, Al-Fagih alleged that no less than 11,000 people enlisted to participate in Al Qaeda–related organizations between 1998 and 2001. He explained, “It’s all because of the successful PR service from the Americans.”
The response authorized by Clinton might have been badly off the mark, but it did not produce the kind of cataclysmic effect that Al Qaeda could exploit to the fullest extent. As Al-Fagih explained, “What bin Laden wants is a full chaos in the region. And with the chaos in the region, those local regimes will collapse very easily and the culture of jihad will supersede. It’s not just a matter of a military coup or one or two operations, it’s going to be a new culture of jihad, a new thinking in the mind of the people is going to be default.”
It would not be long before bin Laden was presented with the situation he sought. Frustrated by Clinton’s insufficient belligerence, a coterie of endowed university chairs and neoconservative zealots nested in think tanks was hatching plans for military interventions that would topple governments across the Middle East. In the global war bin Laden envisioned, these foreign policy fanatics would make the perfect partners.
Benjamin Netanyahu’s 1996 election victory as Israel’s prime minister electrified a group of foreign policy zealots stationed in think tanks on America’s coasts. A graduate of MIT from suburban Philadelphia who later worked at Boston Consulting alongside Mitt Romney, Netanyahu was at least as American as he was Israeli. During the Gulf War, Netanyahu became a familiar face on American cable news, single-handedly turning CNN into what one PLO official called “a propagandist for the Israelis.” For his extended tirades branding the PLO as a front organization for Saddam Hussein, the Washington Times recommended Netanyahu for an Emmy Award, the honor bestowed on American daytime TV actors. The new prime minister was intimately connected to ideological movement that extended from Jerusalem to a network of neoconservative think tanks and policy journals in Washington, all dedicated to advancing the imperatives of Israel’s right-wing Likud Party.
At the heart of this network was Richard Perle, a neocon hard-liner who emerged during the 1970s out of the office of Democratic Senator Henry “Scoop” Jackson, a cold warrior who favored massive defense buildups. While on Jackson’s staff, Perle was overheard on an FBI wiretap furnishing classified information that he had received from a National Security Council staffer to an Israeli embassy official. When Perle entered the Reagan administration’s Department of Defense, he hired the son of a major pro-Israel donor and Likud Party activist named Douglas Feith. In 1983, Feith was fired from a job at the National Security Council and stripped of his security clearance when he became the target of an FBI investigation for forking over classified material to the Israeli embassy. Perle continued to promote his understudy, however, shielding him from scrutiny for allegations of double-dealing.
Following Netanyahu’s ascension to the prime minister’s office in 1996—a victory made possible by the assassination of Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, whose widow openly blamed Netanyahu for inciting his murder—the prime minister tapped Feith and his allies to help him devise a strategic doctrine for engaging and disrupting the region. Gathered under the auspices of the Institute for Advanced Strategy and Political Studies, an Israel-based think tank with offices in Washington, Feith joined Perle and a collection of neocon and Likudnik ideologues, from David and Meyrav Wurmser to former Mossad commander Yigal Carmon, to draft a sweeping blueprint for remaking the Middle East in Netanyahu’s vision.
They called their vision for the incoming Israeli administration, “A Clean Break: A New Strategy for Securing the Realm.” The document recycled many of the revisionist Zionist ideas introduced in Ze’ev Jabotinsky’s high colonial-era “Iron Wall” manifesto,