• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 661 0

beliefs. He began each morning with dawn prayers, followed by a long run while listening on his Walkman to the Quran, which he was trying to memorize. He cooked his own meals to make sure they followed Islamic dietary rules. In addition to his military duties, he was pursuing a doctorate in Islamic studies. The American army was so respectful of his views that it asked him to help teach a class on Middle East politics and culture and to make a series of videotapes explaining Islam to his fellow soldiers. According to Mohammed’s service records, he “prepared and executed over 40 country orientations for teams deploying to the Middle East.” Meantime, he was slipping maps and training manuals off base to downsize and copy at Kinko’s. He used these to write the multivolume terrorist training guide that became al-Qaeda’s playbook. On weekends he commuted to Brooklyn and Jersey City, where he trained Muslim militants in military tactics. Among them were members of al-Jihad, including el-Sayyid Nosair, a fellow Egyptian who would kill Rabbi Meir Kahane, the Jewish extremist, in 1990.

In 1988 Mohammed casually informed his superior officers that he was taking some leave time to go “kill Russians” in Afghanistan. When he came back, he showed off a couple of belt buckles he said he took from Soviet soldiers he killed in ambush. In fact, he had been training the first al-Qaeda volunteers in techniques of unconventional warfare, including kidnappings, assassinations, and hijacking planes, which he had learned from the American Special Forces.

Mohammed left active military service in 1989 and joined the U.S. Army Reserve. He and his wife settled in the Silicon Valley. He managed to hold a job as a security guard (for a defense contractor that was developing a triggering device for the Trident missile system) despite the fact that he sometimes disappeared for months, ostensibly to “buy rugs” in Pakistan and Afghanistan. Meanwhile, he continued his attempts to penetrate American intelligence. He had applied for a position as a translator at both the CIA and the FBI while in North Carolina.

Then in May 1993, an FBI agent in San Jose named John Zent approached Mohammed, inquiring about the trade in fake driver’s licenses. Still hoping to get recruited by American intelligence, Mohammed steered the conversation toward radical activities in a local mosque, and he told some eye-opening tales about fighting the Soviets in Afghanistan. Because of the military nature of these revelations, Zent contacted the Department of Defense, and a team of counterintelligence specialists from Fort Meade, Maryland, came to San Jose to talk to Mohammed. They spread out maps of Afghanistan on the floor of Zent’s office, and Mohammed indicated the mujahideen training camps. He mentioned the name of Osama bin Laden, who Mohammed said was preparing an army to knock off the Saudi regime. Mohammed also spoke about an organization, al-Qaeda, which was operating training camps in Sudan. He even admitted that he was providing the members instruction in hijacking and espionage. The interrogators apparently made nothing of these revelations. It would be three critical years before anyone else in American intelligence would hear of al-Qaeda.

Perhaps Mohammed was revealing these details because of some psychological need to elevate his importance. “He saw himself as a James Bond,” an FBI agent who later talked to him observed. But it is more likely that this highly directed operative was seeking to fulfill Zawahiri’s assignment of penetrating American intelligence. Al-Jihad and al-Qaeda were still separate entities in the spring of 1993, and Zawahiri had not yet signed on to bin Laden’s campaign against America. Apparently Zawahiri was willing to sell out bin Laden in order to get access to American intelligence that would benefit his own organization.

If the FBI and the Department of Defense’s counterintelligence team had responded to Mohammed’s overture, they would have had a very dangerous, formidably skilled double agent on their hands. Mohammed openly revealed