Jihad Joe_ Americans Who Go to War in the Name of Islam - J. M. Berger [87]
The surviving leaders of the American Islamic Group—including Adham Hassoun and Kifah Al Jayyousi—had also been arrested and were facing indictment in Florida. Because Padilla had first been radicalized and sent overseas by Hassoun, they were tried together. All were convicted of conspiracy to murder, maim, and kidnap people abroad and sentenced to life in prison.26
Things were going better for al Qaeda’s other Floridian. Far from being cannon fodder, Adnan Shukrijumah was rising through the ranks.
Starting in 2003 U.S. authorities began to issue a series of increasingly frantic-sounding alerts about Shukrijumah but offered few details about why he was so important. Sightings poured in from around the world: Guyana, Canada, Trinidad, and Tampa, Florida. He had even purportedly cased the Panama Canal for a possible al Qaeda attack.27
Some of the leads were solid, but most were sketchy, and the intelligence never included a clear explanation of what Shukrijumah was doing.28 Rumor had it that his nickname was “Jaffar the Pilot” and that he was training to be the next Mohammed Atta, but no conclusive evidence ever surfaced suggesting that Shukrijumah knew how to fly.29
But more credible traces of his activities eventually emerged. In 2009 the FBI broke up a small cell of U.S. citizens and immigrants led by Najibullah Zazi, a naturalized American citizen born in Afghanistan who had moved to Queens as a teenager. Zazi was, as one relative put it, “a dumb kid.” He worked a coffee stand in Manhattan before moving to Denver and driving a shuttle bus. In 2006 Zazi flew to Pakistan to find a wife. He married a nineteen-year-old cousin who stayed in Pakistan while he returned to the United States. During his time away, Zazi had become more religious. He grew a beard and started to give a cold shoulder to the non-Muslims he encountered on the job.30
In 2008 Zazi went to Afghanistan and visited an al Qaeda training camp, where he received training in weapons and improvised explosives.31 Drawing on the latter, he returned to the United States with a grocery list of bomb ingredients. He began shopping.
After the invasion of Afghanistan, al Qaeda’s training apparatus had been rendered into a permanent state of chaos. During the 1990s the training experience was thorough, long term, and rigorous. Post-9/11, the training regimen for most recruits became haphazard and much shorter, sometimes cramming months’ worth of information into just a few days. Like many of al Qaeda’s new brigade of volunteers, the “dumb kid” didn’t learn his lessons very well. When he was arrested shortly before the anniversary of September 11, he was in a panic, having just called overseas for advice on how to complete the job.32
When the FBI questioned Zazi and his accomplices, they discovered that the man who had ordered the former coffee vendor to bomb his adopted home was none other than Adnan Shukrijumah.33
In August 2010 the FBI issued yet another alarming alert with precious few details attached. The new media blitz claimed that Shukrijumah had taken over the job of his old boss, Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, and was now the head of al Qaeda’s external operations.34
The ramifications of this development were unclear, as was the source. The FBI refused to discuss Shukrijumah for this book.
Clearly, an American would theoretically be well equipped to plan attacks on the United States, but being the “new” Khalid Shaikh Mohammed was a very different thing in 2010 than being the “old” KSM.
In 2001 Mohammed had the ability to travel with relative freedom, stable facilities to work from, a significant budget to work with, and a small army of professional operatives to make his plans a reality. Shukrijumah, in contrast, had a fraction of the money, no stable geographical base, and a small brigade of enthusiastic but inept amateurs such as Zazi and his friends.
AMATEUR HOUR CONTINUES: