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According to Philips, about a dozen soldiers were recruited through the end of 1992, including several Special Forces veterans. Tahir personally escorted the vets to Bosnia in two groups of five or six people at a time. The American trainers did not go unnoticed in Bosnia, although the secret of how they got there was known to only a few.36

The Americans set up shop outside of Tuzla, the third largest city in Bosnia and home to a retired airfield used during the communist era to train fighter pilots, one of the few usable airstrips remaining in the country. Most of the trainers apparently left after instructing a small group of mujahideen, but some stayed to fight.37

In the fall of 1992, Philips and Tahir were trying to gather a third group of American military veterans to make the journey, but Tahir had to drop out. His reasons are unknown, but the next stop on his journey is not. He showed up on the doorstep of Osama bin Laden.

Tahir was believed to be a member of al Qaeda. He had gone to Afghanistan originally under the aegis of Mustafa Shalabi and trained in an al Qaeda camp. He was soon promoted to be a trainer himself, instructing recruits in weapons and close-quarters combat, according to an al Qaeda informant. Bin Laden had sent him to Bosnia on a scouting mission.38 In New York, Tahir had been responsible for targeting African American Muslims on behalf of al Qaeda, in response to bin Laden’s strong interest in recruiting U.S. citizens.39

Sometime after Tahir left the Bosnia training project, he showed up in Sudan with his children in tow, according to the informant. He believed— correctly—that he was under investigation in the United States and that he could not safely return. He was promptly escorted into a meeting with Osama bin Laden and Abu Ubaidah al Banshiri, who was al Qaeda’s military commander at the time.

Tahir was rumored to have been involved in Al Qaeda’s first official terrorist attack, a hotel bombing in Aden, Yemen, in December 1992, not long after he left the Bosnia project. Al Qaeda subsequently sent him to Somalia, the informant said, in response to an American humanitarian mission that would go disastrously wrong, thanks in part to the terrorist group’s intervention (see chapter 6). Bilal Philips, interviewed in 2010, strongly disputed the informant’s claim that Tahir was a member of al Qaeda.

From what I understand, people who, I’ve heard, had links or whatever, there’s a mindset you know, an approach to life and the role of Muslims, and jihad, and this kind of thing. And I never heard Tahir speaking that way. So, I don’t believe so. Because, see, when you’re locked into that, you know, then it’s gonna come out in your conversation.

You know, you feel close to somebody, somebody you can trust, and we were fairly close. I mean, for that limited period of time. So, I think that if this was the idea, I think they were involved in recruiting people. So I would think that he would have tried to recruit me, if that were the case. And there was nothing, nothing of that nature at all. So I think that is really a red herring.40

Intelligence sources are sometimes weak, sometimes strong. The intelligence connecting Tahir to al Qaeda was strong. In 1996 U.S. prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald went to meet the aforementioned al Qaeda informant with a book full of photographs. The informant identified Tahir from one of the photographs and provided biographical details that matched information from other sources. A source familiar with the case confirmed that the man described in the debriefing was the same man who worked on the Bosnia project with Philips.41 In 2010 I developed a possible lead on Tahir’s whereabouts, but several efforts to reach him through intermediaries were unsuccessful.

Before he left the United States, Tahir handed the Bosnia project over to a trusted friend whom he had met during his time in Afghanistan: Abdullah Rashid, the mujahid from Brooklyn who had nearly lost his leg fighting the Soviets.

PASSING THE BATON

Rashid had been watching the developments in Bosnia with great