• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

The men were wrong. Zak turned his back on his father’s name and views and grew up to be an antiviolence advocate.

It was Nosair who brought Ali Mohamed into the circle, introducing him to the other trainees as “Abu Omar.” The first classes were held in Jersey City at the apartment of one of the students.

“It was about navigating in areas like if you are lost in a desert area or a jungle,” Khaled Ibrahim recalled, “or you are part of a group and you want to find your way, how to use a compass, how to find your way by looking at the stars, and survival things, and how to recognize some of the weapons if you see them, like tanks, stuff like that.”46

Yet there were other lessons, which seemed less oriented toward Afghanistan. Mohamed showed them diagrams on the construction of pipe bombs, how to make and use the most effective Molotov cocktails, how to mix chemicals and build detonators for homemade bombs, and even how to build “zip guns”—crude homemade pistols that could not be traced by law enforcement.

He also taught cell structure and operational security. To keep communications away from their home, members of the group rented mailboxes near the mosque from a check-cashing company called Sphinx Trading.47 In 2001 mailboxes at this location would be used by some of the 9/11 hijackers.

The cell attracted the attention of the Joint Terrorism Task Force, a cooperative investigation unit with members from both the NYPD and the FBI. The first investigation was spurred by a bomb threat against Atlantic City casinos, but it continued as a Neutrality Act case after it became clear that the men were at least nominally training to fight in Afghanistan. The act—rarely enforced—makes it illegal for Americans to fight in foreign wars.48

During the 1980s the FBI had little interest in pursuing cases related to Afghanistan, although bits of intelligence sometimes came up during other investigations. People from the United States were going over there to fight, and Afghan and Arab mujahideen came to the United States to raise funds and train in relative safety outside the war zone. None of this was considered fair game for investigation.49

For instance, a large number of foreign mujahideen flew to Plainfield, Indiana, for an extended stay at a facility controlled by the Islamic Society of North America (ISNA) during the late 1980s. ISNA’s foreign financing was already the subject of a separate investigation, so the agent in charge sent a memo to headquarters about the mujahideen. There was no obvious case to prosecute. The president had deemed the mujahideen “freedom fighters,” and it was widely known that the United States was supporting their jihad against the Soviets.50

The case against ISNA was largely dead in the water anyway. The organization and other connected groups had sponsored hundreds of Muslim students for visas. Many of the students lacked documentation, and some brought significant amounts of money into the country. At the field-office level, a few agents investigated the origins of the money, but when someone left the jurisdiction of one field office and entered another, the case was usually lost. Washington wasn’t interested in coordinating the complicated interstate investigation, especially when the Bureau could be accused of religious profiling. Field agents who lobbied for a more aggressive approach to the visa violations were ignored at best and even reprimanded when they persisted.51

Aside from the religious complications and a general lack of institutional resolve, the cases involving American mujahideen were often muddy. For instance, noncitizen immigrants were not technically in violation of the Neutrality Act, a federal law that prevents U.S. citizens from taking part in foreign wars. And the Reagan administration had made an inconvenient habit of using private citizens for covert military missions in South America. Because the United States also supported the mujahideen, it was hard to muster enthusiasm for prosecutions.52

In the case of the Calverton training, the suspected connection to