Jihad Joe_ Americans Who Go to War in the Name of Islam - J. M. Berger [26]
One of Rahman’s disciples secretly came to the U.S. embassy in Cairo and met with State Department diplomats to spin the Islamic Group as a legitimate political organization, rather than a terrorist gang. Rahman, he explained, was innocent of the instigation charge that had been leveled against him, and the group was inclined to work with the government to make Egypt more Islamic and less secular. During the long conversation, the IG operative also assured the diplomats that the blind sheik’s organization had not attacked U.S. citizens, and he dangled the prospect of cooperation with the Americans where mutual interests could be found.29
The embassy officers were intrigued but cautious. The approach seemed like a “desperate outreach effort,” one of them wrote in a cable back to Washington. The Islamic Group operative “has revealed much more than we would have considered prudent. [ … ] We deduced that [name redacted]’s willingness to meet with embassy officers, most recently at the embassy itself, is motivated [by] a desperate hope of securing U.S. ‘support.’”
The meetings apparently took place without the knowledge of U.S. ambassador to Cairo Frank Wisner, who was aware of the Islamic Group as an Egyptian opposition movement involved with the assassination of Sadat. Wisner said he was unaware of the contacts that were being cultivated within the embassy. Any formal asylum request would have had to go to Wisner for his signature, and he said that no such request was ever filed. An embassy official directly involved in the meetings refused to be interviewed for this book.30
A little more than a year after this meeting, in July 1990, Omar Abdel Rahman moved to the United States via a circuitous route from Egypt to Pakistan to Sudan. Despite the presence of his name on a watch list, Rahman’s visa to enter the United States was signed by a CIA officer assigned to the embassy in Khartoum who was pulling duty as a consular officer. The government characterized the decision to allow the visa as a simple oversight. The CIA’s involvement, investigators said, was merely coincidental.31
Even as Rahman’s visa was working its way through the system, the blind sheikh was openly telegraphing his hostile intent toward the United States. In early 1990, Rahman gave a speech in Denmark:
If Muslim battalions were to do five or six operations to the Americans in surprise attacks like the [1983 terrorist bombings] in Lebanon, the Americans would have exited [the Persian Gulf] and gathered their armies and gone back [ … ] to their country.32
POWER STRUGGLE
As Rahman was preparing to leave Egypt, a dramatic development in Pakistan changed the course of the jihad movement with a literal explosion. In the wake of the August 1988 creation of al Qaeda, the unified jihad front created by Azzam started to crumble.
Osama bin Laden wanted to expand the movement into a wide-ranging global jihad with aspirations to reclaim Muslim lands in the Middle East from “corrupt” Muslim rulers, with Egypt near the top of the target list. Included in this global jihad would be Egypt’s most important patron, the United States.
Azzam, by most accounts, had little interest in fighting fellow Muslims, which he saw as counterproductive. His strategic vision for the long term was attuned more toward lands that had historically been Muslim, such as Spain, the Balkans, and especially Palestine, where Muslims faced a clear external enemy in Israel. His short-term strategy was to consolidate his power base in Afghanistan and help stabilize the political situation there in the wake of the Soviets’ departure. To accomplish this, he appealed to the elders of the community.33
The passion of youths might be enough to win a war, but to create an Islamic revolution in Afghanistan required serious thinkers, and Muslims fully committed to the propagation of Islam. Azzam was interested in nation building. In December 1988 Azzam wrote:
It is possible for Muslims