Jihad Joe_ Americans Who Go to War in the Name of Islam - J. M. Berger [62]
Bin Laden told Al Fadl that he would be forgiven if he repaid the money, but Al Fadl had already spent it. So he left Sudan and went searching for refuge. At the embassy in Eritrea, he stood in the visa application line, and when he reached the window, he told the clerk, “I don’t want visa, but I have some information for your government and if your government help me, and I have information about people, they want to do something against your government.”28
Patrick Fitzgerald, a federal prosecutor who had worked on the Day of Terror case, was dispatched to debrief Al Fadl. The Sudanese jihadist had been close to the center of al Qaeda, and he started to provide U.S. investigators with a wealth of information on the terrorist network, including its American operatives.
After the meeting, Fitzgerald called Tom Corrigan, the Joint Terrorism Task Force member who had investigated the Landmarks case. It was the first time Corrigan heard the name al Qaeda.
[Fitzgerald] called me from overseas and he explained this, what this group was, it made sense. [Al Fadl] was like the Rosetta Stone telling us everything that was going on and what its relationship was to other groups and other events. [ … ] Even Jamal, he was from New York, he lived in Brooklyn for a while. He knew people that were affiliated with our case and affiliated with the Brooklyn and Queens and Jersey City area. He was a person that was overseas and filled in this incredible background but also had information that was pertinent to what we were doing over in the States.29
The FBI began to watch the Americans. In mid-1996, soon after Al Fadl started to talk, a phone tap was placed on Wadih El Hage’s house in Kenya, and his calls were recorded.30
As more and more information came out concerning bin Laden, Sudan grew increasingly inhospitable, partly due to pressure from the United States. Bin Laden had lost a considerable amount of his inheritance by this time and couldn’t give his hosts much incentive to stand behind him. In May 1996 bin Laden retreated back to Afghanistan, seething.31 A few months later, he erupted with a formal declaration of war on America, a fatwa published by an Arabic-language newspaper based in London. Bin Laden wrote,
It should not be hidden from you that the people of Islam had suffered from aggression, iniquity, and injustice imposed on them by the Zionist-Crusaders alliance and their collaborators; to the extent that the Muslims blood became the cheapest and their wealth as loot in the hands of the enemies. Their blood was spilled in Palestine and Iraq. The horrifying pictures of the massacre of Qana in Lebanon are still fresh in our memory. Massacres in Tajikstan, Burma, Kashmir, Assam, [the] Philippine[s], Fatani, Ogaden, Somalia, Eritrea, Chechnya and in Bosnia-Herzegovina took place, massacres that send shivers in the body and shake the conscience. [ … ]
Terrorizing you, while you are carrying arms on our land, is a legitimate and morally demanded duty. It is a legitimate right well known to all humans and other creatures. Your example and our example is like a snake which entered into a house of a man and got killed by him.32
The CIA secretly put together a plan to kidnap bin Laden, but it foundered amid political infighting with the FBI and the National Security Council. Nevertheless, Ihab Ali, now living in Orlando and working as a cab driver, wrote to El Hage in Kenya, warning him to “be cautious” because the “enemies” in the United States wanted to “grab” bin Laden.33
Around the time the letter was written, El Hage went to Afghanistan for a meeting with bin Laden, where the order was given: step up operations in Africa, especially in Somalia. El Hage transmitted the order to several al Qaeda members who had been working on the embassy bombings preparations. At every stage, he reported back to bin Laden, often traveling