George W. Bush about the 9/11 plot. But each time, the red flags were ignored, allowing the plots to move ahead while international jihadism metastasized. And as journalist Peter Lance argued in his book Triple Cross, the CIA was so determined to protect its relationship with the Blind Sheikh, it “may have run interference for Ali [Mohamed] as he sought entry to the United States and a position of influence at Fort Bragg, the heart of the US military’s black operations.”
Mohamed’s career as a US intelligence agent began in 1985 when he showed up uninvited at the US embassy in Cairo to offer his services. Despite warnings from Egyptian intelligence, the CIA assigned him to Hamburg, Germany, where he was to spy on a mosque supposedly tied to Hezbollah, the Lebanese Shia-based political movement that preoccupied the agency while Sunni jihadism flourished under its watch. Mohamed immediately blew his cover, informing senior figures at the mosque that he was a CIA operative.
Having betrayed the agency, the State Department put him on a terrorist watch list. This should have been the end of his career in intelligence, but somehow Mohamed was still able to enter the United States on a State Department visa. On the flight over, he successfully courted a young American woman and married her weeks later at a drive-through wedding chapel in Reno, Nevada. At her home in California’s Silicon Valley, he proceeded to set up a jihadist sleeper cell while apparently maintaining his relationship with the CIA. “Everyone in the community knew he was working as a liaison between the CIA and the Afghan cause,” Ali Zaki, a local obstetrician, told journalist Peter Lance.
In 1986, Mohamed enlisted in the US Army at Fort Bragg’s John F. Kennedy Special Warfare Center and School. His commanding officer, Lt. Col. Robert Anderson, was convinced that the invisible hand of the intelligence community engineered Mohammed’s assignment to a special-forces unit. “If you proposed this to any army non-commissioned officer [or] commissioned officer, they’[d] tell you, it didn’t happen without support form an outside agency,” Anderson said. “Now, what outside agency? I would say that it would have to have been the CIA getting him into the United States. And then once in the United States, the Federal Bureau of Investigation.”
With his physical prowess and battlefield experience, Mohamed quickly rose to the rank of supply sergeant, gaining access to special-forces equipment and training manuals. During a joint exercise between American and Egyptian forces, however, Mohamed was sent home after Egyptian intelligence informed his army superiors that he was a potentially dangerous radical with ties to Al-Jihad. The army responded by simply reassigning him to another unit at Fort Bragg, where he served under the command of Colonel Norville “Tex” De Atkine.
As the director of the JFK School’s Middle East studies department, De Atkine fancied himself an expert on the history and culture of Arab societies. Among his most notable contributions was the foreword to The Arab Mind. Written by Raphael Patai, an Israeli American cultural anthropologist, the book presented a collection of lurid colonial stereotypes about Arabs. Patai devoted a full twenty-five pages to the supposed sexual dysfunctions of contemporary Arabs, musing about “the Arab view that masturbation is far more shameful than visiting prostitutes.” Thanks to De Atkine, the Orientalist tract became required reading for officers serving in the Middle East.
“It is essential reading,” De Atkine wrote in the book’s foreword. “At the institution where I teach military officers, The Arab Mind forms the basis of my cultural instruction.”
The colonel arranged for Mohamed to lead a series of cultural training seminars for officers on their way to the Middle East. He presented the religiously devout Egyptian as the embodiment of the Arab mind. In one such forum, Mohamed offered a vision of Islam so extreme that it could have been lifted from the pages of Patai’s book. “We have to establish an Islamic state because Islam without political domination cannot survive,” Mohamed declared before an array of stone-faced army officers. “Actually,” he continued, “if you look at the religion, we do not have moderates. You have one line. You accept the one line or not.”
De Atkine later defended his relationship with Mohamed, stating, “I don’t think he was anti-American. He was what I would call a Muslim fundamentalist, which isn’t a bomb thrower.”
At the time, Mohamed was situated in one of the most important hubs of the Afghan proxy war. Indeed, Fort Bragg was known to CIA operatives as “the Farm.” When investigative journalist John Cooley visited the onsite JFK Special Warfare Center, he found that “Green Beret officers, many of them seasoned veterans of Vietnam, took draconian secrecy oaths and then began the secret training assignments for the Afghanistan war.” From this “farm” and others across the American south, including a CIA black site in rural Virginia, according to Cooley, special-forces soldiers trained Pakistani officers and visiting Afghan mujahedin in use and detection of explosives; surveillance and counter-surveillance; how to write reports according to CIA “Company” standards; how to shoot various weapons, and the running of counter-terrorism, counter-narcotics and paramilitary operations.
In 1988, Mohamed informed his army superiors that he would take his leave in Afghanistan, where he planned to kill as many Russians as he could. Despite the diplomatic peril of allowing an active-duty US soldier to participate directly in a war that was supposed to be covert, he was given a green light. Before long, he was on his way to the Services Bureau in Peshawar, and then across the Afghan border to rendezvous with his handler, Zawahiri. On the Afghan frontier, Mohamed presided over the training of newly arrived jihadists, including a gloomy Egyptian American named El-Sayyid Nosair.
Mohamed returned to his unit at Fort Bragg proudly bearing the belt of a Russian soldier and maps of the training camps he toured. De Atkine rewarded him by assigning him to lead an officer-level seminar on the tactics of the Soviet Spetnaz. Other officers, meanwhile, were stunned that Mohamed was not harshly punished for his freelance participation in a foreign war. “I believe that there was an [FBI] agent that controlled Ali and knew Ali Mohamed’s actions,” Anderson remarked to Lance.
According to Mohamed’s army evaluation report, his duties included “translat[ing] military briefings from English to Arabic.” This gave him access to training manuals demonstrating how to load and fire shoulder-mounted M72A2 antitank rockets and M16 rifles, as well as dispatches from the Joint Chiefs of Staff to US embassies in cities across the Middle East marked “top secret for training.” Mohamed highlighted the embassies in Kenya, Tanzania and Yemen, translated the documents into Arabic and smuggled them to jihadist cadres of the Services Bureau.
The Disposal Problem
In Kabul, as the tide of battle turned against the Soviets, women who had been empowered by the communist government fretted about a future under mujahedin control. “Without the revolution, what would I be?” a college-educated Afghan Red Crescent worker named Mina Fahim declared in 1988. “I would be staying at home, and maybe only going out with the veil—like my mother did. And for marriage, I could be bought like so much property. This is why so many Afghan women are with this revolution, and why we will fight so hard to defend it.”
A reporter from the Knight Ridder news service noted at the time:
The differences in how the two sides view women are enormous. When asked why they had left Afghanistan for the refugee camps, many Afghans in Pakistan don’t talk about the bombing or land reform, or even the suppression of Islam. What they did not like, those Afghans said recently, was that the Communists in Kabul wanted to send their daughters to school.
The anti-Soviet jihad had altered Afghanistan for good. The cultural tensions that flared throughout 1970s Kabul, with Islamists battling student leftists in the streets, had been settled through conventional warfare, with the former camp winning out. The modernizing reforms of the communists, advanced against the will of the rural clan-based population, were about to be washed away in a green tide that not only restored traditional patriarchal values, but introduced new strains of Islamism cultivated in the ideological hothouses of Saudi Arabia and Pakistan. The United States was hardly an innocent bystander to this development; if anything, its role was decisive.
On February 15, 1989, the last of the Red Army’s beleaguered forces retreated from Afghanistan. On the eve of Soviet withdrawal, that country’s premier,