Jihad Joe_ Americans Who Go to War in the Name of Islam - J. M. Berger [57]
Padilla spent a couple of years in Egypt, supposedly honing his language skills but finding time to run errands as a cash courier for Hassoun. While there, he married a second wife, after abandoning his first but before divorcing her.
He soon left his now-pregnant second wife as well. In 2000 he made the hajj pilgrimage to Saudi Arabia, where he met a Yemeni al Qaeda recruiter and was invited to take the history-laden path first to Pakistan, from there into Afghanistan, and finally into the heart of darkness. On July 24, 2000, he filled out an application form to join al Qaeda’s Al Farooq training camp in Afghanistan, where he studied religion, surveillance, improvised explosives, and communications.67
Padilla and others were assigned to come up with a terrorist attack on U.S. soil by al Qaeda’s military commander Mohammed Atef. Padilla approached the job with zeal, discussing various improvised explosive schemes and pie-in-the-sky ideas like spraying cyanide on people at nightclubs.68
His enthusiasm often outstripped his ability. At one point, Padilla approached Mohammed with instructions on how to build a nuclear bomb, which he had found on the Internet. The webside was a parody, but Padilla had taken it seriously. Undeterred, he returned to his computer and soon came back with an idea for building a dirty bomb: a conventional bomb combined with radioactive material designed to contaminate the target area.69
Finally, in June 2001 Atef decided on a mission. Padilla and his team would rent apartments in high-rises that used natural gas for heat. They would breach the building’s gas lines and ignite the fumes to bring the buildings down. Padilla’s partner in this assignment was another American al Qaeda member—someone Padilla already knew.70
ADNAN SHUKRIJUMAH
Adnan Shukrijumah was born in Saudi Arabia in 1975 and moved to the United States with his family during the 1990s. The clan landed in Brooklyn. His father, Gulshair Shukrijumah, was a Saudi-sponsored imam who spent time at the Al Fa-rook Mosque on Atlantic Avenue, which had been attached to the Al Kifah Center.71
The elder Shukrijumah served as a translator for the blind sheikh, Omar Abdel Rahman, and was friends with Abdullah Rashid, the African American mujahid who had lost his leg in Afghanistan. Shukrijumah testified on Rashid’s behalf as a character witness.72
Padilla had blundered through his American life, cutting a broad swathe for journalists and investigators to navigate. Adnan Shukrijumah was more circumspect, leaving few clues in his wake. The family moved from New York to the suburbs of Fort Lauderdale in 1995.
Working as a used car salesman, Shukrijumah paid his way through Broward Community College, majoring in computer science and chemistry. Although he left little trace of his views, Shukrijumah’s mother said he became disgusted by American society, including the use of drugs and alcohol and what he saw as sexual promiscuity, all the while growing angry over U.S. foreign policy in the Muslim world.73
Toward the end of the 1990s, while watching events in Bosnia and Chechnya, he became obsessed with the idea that he should be taking part in jihad. He became known at local mosques as a radical. At one point, a local immigrant with more ambition than ability tried to assemble a terrorist cell of area Muslims, inspired by Osama bin Laden. Shukrijumah appears to have been unimpressed with the poser. Instead of signing up for the local scheme (which had already been infiltrated by the FBI), Shukrijumah left in search of the real deal. Investigators later concluded that he had sniffed out the