Jihad Joe_ Americans Who Go to War in the Name of Islam - J. M. Berger [59]
El Hage managed some of these companies. Traveling around Africa and Europe using his U.S. passport, he also helped al Qaeda members with transportation and lodging, procuring forged passports and providing other assistance. Working with Ali Mohamed, El Hage helped convert some of al Qaeda’s assets into diamonds and other precious stones. He also recruited other Americans for a transaction that was particularly important to bin Laden—the purchase of an airplane.8
Essam Al Ridi was an Egyptian national who became a U.S. citizen in 1994 after more than a decade of living in the United States. In the early 1980s, he was one of the first Americans to follow Abdullah Azzam’s call, fighting in Afghanistan and later working in Pakistan. He met bin Laden and El Hage in Peshawar.
After the war against the Soviets ended, Al Ridi was dismayed by the influx of young Muslims spoiling for a fight—any fight—and decided to leave. When he heard that Azzam had been killed, he recalled, “the Afghan chapter and jihad were closed for me.”
Al Ridi didn’t join al Qaeda but remained friendly with El Hage, who called him in 1992 with a business proposition. Bin Laden wanted to buy a large jet that could carry cargo, in order to transport Stinger missiles from his armory in Afghanistan to his new base in Sudan.9
Al Ridi, who had trained as a pilot, found a U.S. military surplus plane in Arizona for about $200,000 and agreed to fly it to Khartoum. A few years later, bin Laden asked him to move the plane, but the brakes failed on landing. Al Ridi expertly crashed it into a sand dune, avoiding any injuries, but the plane was a total loss.10
Al Ridi’s copilot on the doomed flight was Ihab Ali, another naturalized American citizen who had moved to Orlando, Florida, with his family as a teenager. Ali did not assimilate well, and during the 1980s, he heard Azzam’s siren call. Ali worked for the Muslim World League in Peshawar during Azzam’s tenure there, then joined al Qaeda soon after its founding.11
He was trained in terrorist techniques by Ali Mohamed, who kept tabs on him back in the United States, where Ihab Ali studied flying at an obscure institution called the Airman Flight School in Norman, Oklahoma. A few short years later, 9/11 hijackers Mohammed Atta and Marwan Al Shehhi would visit the Airman school seeking flight lessons. Al Qaeda operative Zacarias Moussaoui would attend the same flight school in 2001.12
Mohamed himself was constantly on the move but returned frequently to California, where his partner, Khalid Abu El Dahab, was running a communications hub on behalf of al Qaeda. Among other responsibilities, Dahab would patch calls from Egypt to Afghanistan and Sudan, in order to foil intelligence surveillance.
Dahab and Mohamed were also responsible for recruiting Americans into al Qaeda, under orders from bin Laden himself. According to Dahab, they found ten naturalized Americans from the Middle East who were willing to join. To support all of these efforts, Dahab worked as a car salesman, but it was difficult to hold down both professions at once, and he soon dropped the more mundane job.13
Ali Mohamed was prolific during these years, balancing multiple assignments and overseeing projects on three continents. In the United States, he smuggled al Qaeda operatives into the country, on one occasion even using his FBI contacts to get one of his trainees released after he was detained by Canadian customs. At bin Laden’s behest, he set up meetings and joint training sessions between al Qaeda and Hezbollah. And in Africa, he played a key role training bin Laden’s men and advancing bin Laden’s secret war on America.14
In 1993 bin Laden dispatched Mohamed to Somalia, where a civil war was raging. The United States had deployed to Somalia for Operation Restore Hope, an effort to impose some kind of stability on the country and support United Nations relief efforts. Bin Laden was enraged at what he saw as a broader plan to establish American