aid he received. “Thank you!” he exclaimed to Bandar. “Thank you for bringing the Americans to help us get rid of the secularist, atheist Soviets.”
Bin Laden’s friendly attitude to Washington was fleeting, however. Almost as soon as the last Soviet tanks left Afghanistan, he was mapping out plans for an organization that could expand the battlefield across the globe, and ultimately to American shores. Alongside Zawahiri, the founder of Al-Jihad, bin Laden named the new network Al Qaeda—“the base”—after their old military camp in Afghanistan. Zawahiri maintained control over his old organization, which aimed to topple Egypt’s government and implement Islamist rule, while serving as one of Al Qaeda’s top tacticians. However, Zawahiri faced a powerful internal rival in Azzam, founder of the CIA- and ISI-backed Services Bureau.
A Palestinian refugee who had endured the bitterness of forced displacement, Azzam was determined to return to his homeland as a leader of a newfangled Islamist resistance against the Israeli occupiers. During 1970’s Black September, when the Jordanian monarchy brutally ejected Palestinian forces from its realm, Azzam refused to retaliate. His neutrality stemmed not only from his belief that the secular, left-oriented Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) was a rival to his Islamist camp, he warned that in battling fellow Muslims, “forbidden blood would be spilled.” Twenty years later, Azzam insisted again that killing Muslims was not only counterproductive, but sinful; he demanded that Israel, not a “near enemy” like Egypt, be the next target. He thus placed himself in direct conflict with Zawahiri over Al Qaeda’s fundamental strategy.
On November 24, 1989, a massive bomb planted on a Peshawar roadside tore Azzam to pieces. Lawrence Wright, who chronicled the rise of Al Qaeda in his book The Looming Tower, speculated that Zawahiri might have been behind the assassination, noting that he had been overheard spreading rumors that Azzam was an American agent that same day. But the killers could have come from any number of outfits—from the Israeli Mossad, which sought to liquidate another implacable foe, or from the CIA, which might have decided that Azzam had outlived his usefulness. At the time, Peshawar was a haven for operatives from virtually every intelligence agency meddling in Afghanistan. Whoever the culprits were, Azzam’s killing left Zawahiri in the driver’s seat, with bin Laden by his side.
Months after Azzam’s killing, Abdel-Rahman (the Blind Sheikh) entered the United States on a visa he had obtained at the US consulate in Sudan, despite having been on a US terrorist watch list for three years. The CIA had reviewed seven applications made by Abdel-Rahman between 1986 and 1990, during the height of the anti-Soviet jihad, when he had been a key recruiter for Azzam’s Services Bureau. CIA officers turned him down only once due to his links to international terrorism. At the same time, the FBI had been closely monitoring Azzam’s recruitment of young Muslims in the United States to fight in Afghanistan. Its investigators ultimately found a curious rationalization for closing its inquiry into the matter: “This will not be considered as mercenary recruiting, since they did not sign any documents nor did it appear that they were recruited to Afghanistan to fight.”
Five years later, a 1995 report in the Boston Globe featured a rare public acknowledgement of Abdel-Rahman’s relationship with the CIA. The article essentially revealed that the Blind Sheikh had entered the United States on the clandestine CIA Department of Operations visa waiver program, which provided privileged access to valuable assets. “In May 1993, the Egyptian government newspaper Al Gomhuria quoted Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak as saying that Rahman had worked with the CIA,” the report noted. It also quoted Mubarak complaining that the United States could have prevented the first World Trade Center bombing if it had heeded his warnings about Abdel-Rahman. Under pressure from the US State Department, the newspaper’s editor retracted the story a few days later. But in July 1993, US press reports asserted that CIA officers working under consular cover in Egypt and Sudan had reviewed seven US visa applications made by Rahman between 1986 and 1990. The CIA officers approved six of the requests.”
For all his supposed erudition, Abdel-Rahman displayed almost baffling naivete when he arrived in the United States. In his mind, he was the Salafi version of Iran’s Shi’ite theocrat Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini. Modeling his move to the New York area after Khomeini’s exile in Paris, Abdel-Rahman fantasized about returning to Egypt as the spiritual guide of a new, Islamist government after the old, corruption-addled dictatorship fell, just as Khomeini had done in Iran. The United States had supported Abdel-Rahman’s cause abroad for years, so why would it have a problem with him preaching jihad within its borders? He arrived to US shores with supreme confidence, but he was walking into a trap.
Abdel-Rahman’s first order of business was to take control of Brooklyn’s Al-Kifah center. The center represented a remnant of Azzam’s old CIA and Saudi-backed Services Bureau, which had directed foreign fighters into Afghanistan to bleed the Soviets. According to Osama el-Baz, former security advisor to Egypt’s Hosni Mubarak, the CIA and Saudi Arabia had kept the Services Bureau afloat for future operations against Iran, relying on Al-Kifah to launder funding. “It’s all the fault of those stupid bastards at the CIA,” el-Baz complained to journalist Andrew Cockburn. “They trained these people, kept them in after the Russians left, and now we get this.”
At Al-Kifah, millions of dollars were left over from fundraising campaigns during the height of the anti-Soviet jihad, and $100,000 was still pouring in each month. Abdel-Rahman insisted that half of the donations be committed to toppling Mubarak’s government—the ultimate goal of Zawahiri’s Al-Jihad. But Shalabi wanted to spend the funds backing the establishment of an Islamist government in Kabul.
On March 1, 1991, following a sustained campaign of incitement by the Blind Sheikh, Shalabi was found soaked in his own blood on the floor of his Brooklyn apartment, bludgeoned with a baseball bat and hacked with knife wounds. As in any gangland style murder, the killer’s methods were designed to make an example of the victim.
Despite ample evidence pointing to Abdel-Rahman’s network, and the disappearance of $100,000 in Al-Kifah donations from the apartment, the murder investigation was hastily closed with no arrests. Ali Mohamed, who had been a confidant of Shalabi and his family, was not even questioned. This allowed the Blind Sheikh to complete his takeover of Al-Kifah, which meant that bin Laden had taken over the Services Bureau network once and for all—providing his Al Qaeda network with easy access to the United States.
The ghosts of Operation Cyclone hovered over early-1990s New York City. One of them, Nosair, had been an understudy of Abdel-Rahman and trained on the Afghan battlefield by Ali Mohamed. A highly educated immigrant to the United States, Nosair had turned to fundamentalist Islam in reaction to the repression of Egypt’s dictatorship. Once he arrived in the United States, he grew depressed, popping Prozac and reeling in disgust at the socially permissive, hyper-consumerist atmosphere in which he was suddenly immersed. Trained as an engineer back in Egypt, he toiled as an air conditioner repairman, developing an inferiority complex and suffering a painful industrial accident that left him with lingering injuries. He became a constant presence at Al-Kifah, joining fellow veterans of the Afghan War for excursions to a shooting range in Long Island, where Mohamed schooled them in the use of high-powered assault rifles. Undercover FBI agents tailed them to one session and photographed them wearing Services Bureau T-shirts emblazoned with a map of Afghanistan. No action was taken, however.
Before long, though, Nosair applied his firearms and infiltration skills to target the Jewish fanatical rabbi, Meir Kahane. Kahane had made his name clamoring for the overthrow of Israel’s civil law-based government and replacing it with a fascist theocracy cleansed of all Palestinians—the State of Judea. He was the Jewish analog to Zawahiri, who aimed to do the same thing in Egypt by toppling a putatively secular government and installing a fundamentalist Islamic State that purged religious minorities.
And like Zawahiri, Kahane was a hard-line anticommunist who had been used by the US government to advance an ulterior political agenda that did lasting damage to America’s social fabric. Indeed, Kahane had enjoyed a long relationship with the FBI, dating back to his infiltration of the right-wing John Birch Society in the 1950s. During the early 1970s, Kahane and his Jewish Defense League served as tools in the FBI’s campaign of subterfuge against the Black Panthers. Agents agitated Kahane with fabricated anti-Semitic messages authored in the name of black radicals,