Jihad Joe_ Americans Who Go to War in the Name of Islam - J. M. Berger [68]
In early 2000 Bayoumi and an American friend had driven to the Saudi consulate in L.A. They met the pair in a restaurant, and Hazmi and Mihdhar later showed up in San Diego looking for Bayoumi. They asked for help finding a place to stay in the area. Bayoumi set them up in the San Diego apartment building where he lived. He helped them open bank accounts and paid for various expenses. Hazmi told an acquaintance that he considered Awlaki to be “a great man” and the pair’s “spiritual leader.”31
The web of associations grew thicker. Another member of Awlaki’s flock at Ribat—and a friend of Bayoumi’s—was Mohdar Abdullah, a Yemeni college student who was, like Awlaki, fluent in both English and Arabic.32
Abdullah was charismatic and well liked, although the FBI considered him a slick liar. He lived in an apartment complex around the corner from Awlaki’s mosque, in the same building as Bakarbashat. Abdullah’s computer was stuffed with anti-American sentiments, including e-mails proposing extravagant terrorist plots and references to martyrs and grenade launchers.33
In the late spring or early summer of 2000, Omar Bayoumi introduced Abdullah to Hazmi and Mihdhar. Abdullah became friends with the two hijackers, acting as both a translator and a chauffeur, driving them around the area and even to Los Angeles. He helped them get driver’s licenses—and fill out applications to flight schools.34
A third man, Jordanian immigrant Osama Awadallah, for a time shared an apartment with Bakarbashat at the complex around the corner from Ar-Ribat.35 Awadallah’s home was filled with photographs, videotapes, and news articles featuring Osama bin Laden, as well as flyers containing bin Laden’s fatwas.
Hazmi had a piece of paper with Adawallah’s phone number in the car he used to drive to the Washington Dulles International Airport on September 11. Four days after the attack, Adawallah, a student, scribbled in one of his notebooks, “One of the quietest people I have met is Nawaf. Another one, his name is Khalid.”36
Awadallah and Mohdar Abdullah both worked at the same gas station as Bakarbashat. In time, so would Hazmi. The al Qaeda man told his coworkers that he would be famous some day. Shortly before the two hijackers left San Diego for good in late 2000, Hazmi brought a third hijacker, Hani Hanjour, to meet his coworkers. Before they drove off, Hazmi told his San Diego friends that they were going to take flying lessons.37
Awlaki’s followers were not the only ones going out of their way to offer hospitality to the future September 11 killers. Awlaki himself knew both of the hijackers and Bayoumi. The 9/11 Commission speculated that he may have met them as soon as their first day in San Diego—nearly two months before the FBI closed its investigation of the imam.38 Four calls were made to Awlaki using Bayoumi’s cell phone during February 2000, the same month the hijackers arrived in the area. One FBI agent later said he was “98 percent certain” that the calls were made by the hijackers.39
Awlaki met with Hazmi several times, often behind closed doors. Like Awadallah, Awlaki found the al Qaeda operative to be soft spoken and slow to open up. Hazmi didn’t come off as particularly religious; he didn’t wear a beard and didn’t pray five times a day. Or at least that was what Awlaki told the FBI later.40
In late summer of 2000, Awlaki stepped down from his position at Ar-Ribat and embarked on travel overseas to what he would describe to reporters only as “various countries.” Awlaki told a neighbor that he was going to Yemen. Mihdhar had left San Diego for Yemen just weeks before to visit his pregnant wife. During the period that Awlaki was out of the United States, Ramzi Binalshibh, an al Qaeda facilitator supervising a different team