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By Root 1398 0

his wife there. He knew that al-Qaeda had been having financial difficulties since bin Laden’s loss of family funds following his expulsion from Saudi Arabia; Kherchtou had been told not to renew his pilot license, which also cost five hundred dollars. He also knew, however, that al-Qaeda still had money. He had seen fellow operatives purchasing fake passports and other items needed for missions. The health of his wife and future child should be a priority, too, he believed, and he didn’t understand why they wouldn’t spare the money, especially for someone who had been so loyal and long-serving. One of al-Qaeda’s first operatives, Kherchtou felt the sting of the rejection when he recalled his service to the organization in Afghanistan, Nairobi, and elsewhere.

“If it were your wife or your daughter who needed a Cesarean, would you take her there?” Kherchtou asked Sa’eed al-Masri.

“Well . . . ,” Sa’eed al-Masri replied. He found himself caught off-guard by Kherchtou’s challenge, and he knew, in his heart, that Kherchtou was right.

Kherchtou seized on Sa’eed al-Masri’s silence to press forward: “Why don’t you borrow money for me so I can pay for the procedure, and I will pay you back later?”

Sa’eed al-Masri shook his head. “I’m sorry. I can’t do anything until bin Laden comes back.”

Bin Laden was out of the office, but Kherchtou knew that this was Sa’eed al-Masri’s decision. “I’ve been with al-Qaeda since 1991. Is this how you repay loyalty? Consider the health of my wife.” He stormed out of the office, fuming. Beyond the refusal to give him money, he also resented how Egyptians like Sa’eed al-Masri were running al-Qaeda. “I would have shot him if I had had a gun,” Kherchtou told friends when recounting the conversation. “All the money goes to Egyptians, and the rest of us they treat like second-class citizens.”

While Kherchtou remained on al-Qaeda’s payroll after that incident, continuing to run errands between Khartoum and Nairobi for bin Laden, he began to drift away from the organization. And when bin Laden announced, in 1996, that al-Qaeda was relocating to Afghanistan, Kherchtou didn’t follow him. Instead he sent his family back home to Morocco, telling al-Qaeda’s leaders that he wanted his children to get a decent education, and that there were no suitable schools in Afghanistan. He continued to work in Nairobi, but no longer saw the al-Qaeda leadership regularly and emotionally distanced himself from them.

“Ali, we’ve got a potentially important lead in understanding al-Qaeda,” Debbie Doran told me. It was a few weeks after the East African embassy bombings, and all our efforts were focused on tracking those responsible and deepening our understanding of the organization.

“What’s the lead?” I asked.

Debbie told me that her team had found a letter dated a few days before the bombing, signed by Mzungu, an alias Kherchtou used. They had also found that Kherchtou, like other al-Qaeda members, had been arrested by Kenyan authorities but then released from jail at the request of a Western intelligence agency—and that that intelligence agency had taken him out of the country.

“Was he involved in the bombing?” I asked Debbie.

“We don’t exactly know. He was in Nairobi at the time of the bombing, which makes it interesting. He interacted with the cell members.” After the Kenyans arrested him, the Western intelligence agency intervened—they had been working on using him as a source, and convinced the Kenyans to release him. The FBI nicknamed him Joe the Moroccan, a translation of one of his aliases, Yousef al-Maghrebi.

“They made a deal with Joe,” Debbie continued, “agreeing that they’d have him released so he could travel back to Khartoum. In exchange, he would meet with their intelligence operatives there and report on al-Qaeda’s activities. He agreed to the deal and returned to Khartoum, telling al-Qaeda members that he was released because he had convinced the Kenyans that he was a businessman with no connection to the terrorist plot. Once in Khartoum, he failed to make any contact with the Western intelligence