The Looming Tower - Lawrence Wright [102]
A MONTH AFTER THE TRADE CENTER BOMBING, Zawahiri appeared on the speaker circuit in several California mosques. He came from Bern, Switzerland, where al-Jihad maintained a safe house. (Zawahiri’s uncle was a diplomat in Switzerland.) Although he entered the United States under his real name, Zawahiri was traveling under his nom de guerre, Dr. Abdul Mu’iz, posing as a representative of the Kuwaiti Red Crescent. He said he was raising money for Afghan children who had been injured by Soviet land mines from the time of jihad.
For years, the United States had been one of the main fund-raising destinations for Arab and Afghan mujahideen. Sheikh Abdullah Azzam blazed a trail through the mosques of Brooklyn, St. Louis, Kansas City, Seattle, Sacramento, Los Angeles, and San Diego—altogether there were thirty-three cities in America that opened branches of bin Laden and Azzam’s organization, the Services Bureau, in order to support the jihad. The war against the Soviet Union had also created an international network of charities, especially dense in the United States, which remained in operation after the Soviet Union broke into splinters and the Afghans turned against each other. Zawahiri hoped to tap this rich American vein for al-Jihad.
Zawahiri’s guide in the United States was a singular figure in the history of espionage, Ali Abdelsoud Mohammed. Six-foot-one, two hundred pounds, and exceptionally fit, Mohammed was a martial artist and a skilled linguist who spoke fluent English, French, and Hebrew in addition to his native Arabic. He was disciplined, clever, and gregarious, with a marked facility for making friends—the kind of man who was going to get to the top of any organization. He had been a major in the same unit of the Egyptian Army that produced Sadat’s assassin, Khaled Islambouli, and the government rightly suspected him of being an Islamic fundamentalist (he was already a member of al-Jihad). When the Egyptian Army cashiered him, Zawahiri gave him the daunting task of penetrating American intelligence.
In 1984 Mohammed boldly walked into the Cairo station of the CIA to offer his services. The officer who assessed him decided he was probably a plant by Egyptian intelligence; however, he cabled other stations and headquarters to see if there was any interest. The Frankfurt station, which hosted the Iranian office of the agency, responded, and soon Ali found himself in Hamburg as a novice intelligence man. He entered a mosque associated with Hezbollah and immediately told the Iranian cleric in charge that he was an American spy assigned to infiltrate the community. He didn’t realize that the agency had already penetrated the mosque; his declaration was immediately reported.
The CIA says that it terminated Mohammed, sent out cables labeling him highly untrustworthy, and placed him on the State Department watch list to prevent him from entering the United States. By that time, however, Mohammed was already in California on a visa-waiver program that was sponsored by the agency itself, one designed to shield valuable assets or those who have performed important services for the country. In order to stay in the United States, he would need to become a citizen, so he married a California woman, Linda Sanchez, a medical technician, whom he met on the transatlantic flight to the United States.
A year after Mohammed arrived, he returned to his military career, this time as an enlisted man in the U.S. Army. He managed to get stationed at the John F. Kennedy Special Warfare Center and School at Fort Bragg, North Carolina. Even though he was only a supply sergeant, Mohammed made a remarkable impression, gaining a special commendation from his commanding officer “for exceptional performance” and winning fitness awards in competition against some of the most highly trained soldiers in the world. His awed superiors found him “beyond reproach” and “consistently accomplished.”
Perhaps the secret to preserving his double identity was that he never disguised his