The March to War Against the United States

The Critical Juncture

In February 1989, the last Soviet troops pulled out of Afghanistan. The Islamist
leaders of the Jihad confronted the question of "where to go next," where to direct the
"Islamic Army" (as bin Laden himself then titled it) that had evolved in the decade-long war
with the Soviets. This brought to the forefront a growing split between bin Laden, who had in
the recent years become increasingly influenced by a group of militant Egyptians, and his
erstwhile mentor Abdullah Azzam. This would prove to be a decisive fork in the path to
declaration of war against the United States by the transnational terrorist force we now know
as al Qaeda.

Both factions affirmed adherence to the long-standing Islamist goal of re-establishing the
global Caliphate under pure Quranic law (which as a universal given would require eliminating
the Israeli state).1 Their division was over how to get there.

The Egyptian militants had long ago declared the "apostate" Middle Eastern regimes
to be the principal obstacle to the ultimate objective of re-establishing a pure Islamic
Caliphate, and they saw the emergent Islamic Army as a new force for their long standing
Jihad. By the time the Soviets pulled out of Afghanistan bin Laden had come to fully espouse
this position. He was already creating his own organization, distinct from what he had until
then shared with Azzam, in which many of the top positions were held by members of the
Egyptian Islamic Jihad.

Azzam did not quarrel with the principle that bringing down the apostate regimes in the
Muslim countries was essential to the ultimate objective. But he strongly opposed what he
considered a diversion offerees, funds and other resources from what he insisted was the more
immediate task - completing the establishment of an Islamic state in Afghanistan. Although the
Soviets had withdrawn their troops they had left in place a proxy regime. He also argued that
the next priority for the Islamic Army should be expunging the Israeli "occupiers" from the
sacred Muslim lands of Palestine. Whatever resistance might have been sustained by Azzam
and his remaining supporters was taken care of on 24 November 1989 when he was
assassinated, along with two sons, in a car bombing in Peshawar.

Adopting the path of Jihad against the apostate rulers of the Muslims lands would have
almost certainly led inevitably to attacks on those whom the Islamists viewed as the sources, "the

. The historical background is described in Daniel Benjamin and Steve Simon, The Age of Sacred Terror, (New
York: Random House, 2002) 95-109; Peter Bergen, Holy War, Inc., (New York-The Free Press/Simon and
Schuster, 2001), 40-62; Rohan Gunaratna, Inside al-Qaeda, (New York: Columbia University Press, 2002) 16-
26. The split between Azzam and bin Laden and the Egyptian groups is also described in testimony by Jamal
Ahmed al-Fadl, an al Qaeda member who was there at the time and turned himself over to U.S. authorities in
mid-1996. See New York District Court: Transcripts of Trial of Usama Bin Laden et al [African Embassy
Bombings]; Testimony of Jamal Ahmed al-Fadl, 6 Feb. 01, 189-95; 506). Fadl claims to have been formally
"sworn in" as a member of bin Laden's group in 1989 at a special meeting at a bin Laden camp (Camp Farouq)
in Khost, Afghanistan. Re "Islamic Army," see Gunaratna 22-24. Contrary to common wisdom, bin Laden did
not form his organization under the title of al-Qaeda. It was Azzam who conceptualized it in 1987, and his
article "Al-Qa'aidah al Sulbah," The Solid Foundation," in the Arabic Journal Al Jihad in April 1988 has been
described by some Arabists it as the "founding document" for the organization that has become known as "al
Qaeda." See Bergen 60ff. Fadl has said in his testimony that when bin Laden was initially forming his group,
the members referred to it both as al Qaeda and the Islamic Army, and only later adopted use of the single term
al Qaeda. (Fadel 6 Feb.2001, 212)
props," of the apostate leaders' power - the U.S. and other western states. The U.S. was in fact
charged with being the prop for both the "far enemy" - Israel - and "near enemies" such as the
Mubarek regime in Egypt. (And by this time bin Laden had put the Saudi regime in the same
category.) In this situation, the deployment and ultimately sustained basing of U.S. forces in Saudi
Arabia and the Gulf States in 1990 was a match in an already smoking pit, and provided a
"billboard" for bin Laden's evocations for Jihad.

Thus the evolving "bin Laden doctrine" added a new layer to the hierarchy of targets.
Before the apostate regimes could be brought down, the U.S. military forces had to be evicted
from the region. And as the focus of the Jihad became the U.S., the objectives of the Jihad
would soon expand beyond eviction from the Muslim lands to global attack against the U.S.

The Path

The Soviet invasion of Afghanistan provided a common cause for Islamists whose
militancy and motivations had diverse origins. The Afghan battlefield offered a focus for
recruitment of "troops," acquisition of weapons, and the development of a command and
logistic pipeline, including transnational financial sources and movement channels. Many of
the individuals who came from the Middle East to play key leadership roles in the "Afghan
Arab" forces had been engaged in some form of their own Jihad movements long before the
conflict erupted in Afghanistan. These included bin Laden's initial mentor and partner in
Pakistan, Abdullah Azzam, as well as the Egyptian Islamists that would later comprise most
of the inner circle.

Bin Laden linked up with Azzam in Pakistan in 1984, where they jointly
established the "Bureau of Services" (Maktab al-Khidmat - MAK,). The MAK served as
a recruiting network hub - bringing fighters to Peshawar, putting them up in guesthouses, and
then dispatching them to training camps in Afghanistan. Branches would be established
around the globe, including several in the United States.

Azzam had already been a prominent figure among Islamists long before he moved to
Pakistan, issuing public calls for Jihad to return the historic Muslim lands to the governance
of pure Islamic law. He was virulently anti-Israel; he was born in Palestine in 1941, and after
receiving a degree at a Damascus university in 1966 he had returned to fight against Israel in
the 1967 war. In 1973 he took up studies in Egypt at the al-Azhar University, the most
prominent center of Islamic studies, before becoming professor of Islamic law at Abdul Aziz
University in Jeddah. His experience in Palestine and immersion in the doctrine of ancient
Muslim teachers had committed him to Jihad. By the end of the 1970s Azzam was dropped
by Abdul Aziz University because of his rhetoric, and he migrated to Pakistan where he
became a lecturer at the Islamic University in Islamabad.

According to most accounts, when the MAK was initially formed Azzam was its
doctrinal leader while bin Laden served as his deputy and provided much of the funding. Bin
Laden essentially confined himself to shuttling between Saudi Arabia and Pakistan (with

2. Bin Laden was a student at Abdul Aziz in 1981, and thus would have known of Azzam's teachings even
before the two linked up in Pakistan. Another teacher at Al-Aziz at the time was Muhammad Qutb, brother of
Sayyid Qutb, who had been executed by Nasser in 1966, but who, as described below, continued to be the most
widely read Islamist in the Middle East and is the author of what is still considered by many militant Egyptians
to be the "manifesto" of their Islamist groups.
occasional ventures into Afghanistan to establish his Mujahidin bona fides), while Azzam,
traveled the globe on recruitment and fundraising missions, which included some 20 trips to
US. The Farouq mosque in Brooklyn was one of his regular sites for lectures on the duties of
Jihad, and as is described below, one of the first branches of the MAK was set up there.

In the mid-to-latter 1980s key leaders of the Egyptian Islamic Jihad (EIJ) were
moving to the Pakistan and Afghanistan sites in increasing numbers, and bin Laden
became increasingly influenced by them. Many who have studied the history of the
emergence of al Qaeda have pointed out that the evidence suggests that the organization was
as much a product of the Egyptians Islamists drawing in bin Laden as is was a matter of his
incorporating them into his inner circle.3

Most prominent among these was Ayman al-Zawahiri, a medical doctor, described
by some as the leader of EIJ, by others as leader of a "faction" of the EIJ.4 He had been
imprisoned for three years on weapons charges following the assassination of Egyptian
President Anwar Sadat on 6 October 1981. When released he went to Pakistan to provide
medical services to Mujahidin waging Jihad against the Soviets in Afghanistan.

Also in Pakistan at this time was Sheikh Omar Ahmad Abdel Rahman (the "Blind
Sheikh"), who was generally considered to be the spiritual guide of Egyptian Islamic Jihad
(EIJ). Many accounts claim he simultaneously served as spiritual leader for a parallel,
similar organization known as the Egyptian Islamic Group (EIG), headed by Rifai
Ahmed Taha. Sheikh Rahman had for many years issued public "Fatawas" justifying the
terrorist actions of both groups. He publicly praised the assassination of Sadat in 1981, and
was subsequently arrested and tried for his role, but ended up being acquitted. (Mubarak
apparently viewed imprisoning a/the top Muslim cleric as likely to incite more trouble that it
would solve.)

Both the EIJ and the EIG were in effect "rebellious offspring" of the Muslim
Brotherhood. The Brotherhood had emerged in the Middle East in the late 1920s in the
tumultuous post-WWI situation - the Ottoman dominion gone, much of its former territory
placed under control of League of Nation "mandates" (seen by much of the populace in the
region as an extension of European colonialism), and Palestine erupting into what would
prove to be an unending conflict. The Muslim Brothers propagated the doctrine that only
"Salafiyya" Islam - Islam purged of impurities and Western influences - could save
Muslims from the colonial powers.

By the 1950s, as the colonial powers begin pulling out, the focus of animosity turned
on indigenous leaders of the Middle Eastern states who were seen as having accepted
western law as a substitute for the Sharia, — "abandoning God's law" and submitting to
"man-made law." (These "apostate" leaders were labeled as "Jahiliyya," a term originally
used to described the "barbarians" existing before the Prophet's message began to be
propagated.) Some Islamic scholars framed the issue in terms of the need to deal first with
the "near enemy" in their own lands before moving to combat the "far enemy" in Israel.
While the "Brothers" first emerged in Palestine/ Jordan, their doctrine had its most potent

3. Many who have studied the history of the emergence of al Qaeda have pointed out that the evidence suggests
that the organization was as much a product of the Egyptians Islamists drawing in bin Laden as is was a matter
of his incorporating them into his inner circle. See, for example, Bergen, Holy War Inc., 199-204; Benjamin and
Simon, The New Age of Terror, 103; Gunaratna, Inside al Qaeda, 25.
. The "faction leader" description is by Benjamin and Simon, 103.
appeal and attracted most followers in Egypt. The Al-Azhar Islamic study center in Cairo
became the main site of its transnational gatherings.

The Brotherhood doctrine nominally did not call for violence, but rather preached a
"bottom up" approach, in which conversion of the masses was seen as the way to create
power that would eventually topple the "Jahili" leaders. Nonetheless, this declared position
did not prevent the movement from engaging in significant incidents of violence in the
ensuing decades.

By the late 1960s factions within and outside the Brotherhood were explicitly rejecting
the "bottom up" concept, declaring that experience demonstrated there was no way the
apostate leaders in the historical Muslim lands would accede to a peaceful transition to a true
Caliphate. This fueled the break off the groups that formed the Egyptian Islamic Jihad and
the Egyptian Islamic Group. While the doctrine of these groups started at the same point as
the Brotherhood - immersion in the Koran - they described it as a basis for forming a
"Revolutionary Vanguard" whose mission was "Jihad" against the existing political
leaders in the lands of the Prophet. (The most influential preacher in this development was
Sayyid Qutb, who was eventually executed by Nasser in 1966, but whose books are still the
most widely read in the militant Muslim world. His "Signpost" treatise is generally
considered to be the manifesto of the militant Egyptian movements. As noted above, his
brother was teaching at Al-Azziz University in Jeddah at the time bin Laden was a student
there.)

Bin Laden and his Egyptian colleagues saw the Islamic Army that matriculated from
the war against the Soviets as having created this "vanguard;" the main question was where to
employ it next. (Bin Laden, in fact referred to his organization as the Islamic Army, of which
al Qaeda was only a central leadership "foundation.") With the defeat of the Soviets, the
Egyptians not surprisingly wanted to take the army back to pursue their fundamental
objective of ousting the apostate leaders in the lands of Islam, starting in Egypt, but
extending through the region.

Azzam's insistence on focusing the Islamic Army's resources on finishing the job
in Afghanistan and then turning to the enemy in Palestine presumably was at least in part
because of his experience in Palestine. According to some sources he also was skeptical
about the reality of prospects - at least under the existing circumstances - for ousting the
Middle Eastern rulers through militant actions. This was the same debate among the Islamists
that scholars had in earlier years described as contesting priorities between the "near enemy"
and the "far enemy."

At the time Azzam was assassinated Bin Laden was conveniently back in Saudi
Arabia. He has since routinely praised Azzam, but many suspect that he was behind the
killing. (Or perhaps it was the Egyptians who initiated and pulled it off, while bin Laden
adopted a "don't ask, don't tell" position.)

By this time bin Laden was already well down the road in forming his organization.
According to an al Qaeda defector, Jamad Ahmed al-Fadl, who claims to have formally joined
the organization in its founding stages, its inner circle was dominated by members of
Egyptian Islamic Jihad. 5 Zawahiri was his principal deputy. Abu Ubaidah al-Banshiri,

5.The description of the initial leadership and structure is given in the Fadl testimony, 6 Feb. 2001, 193-211;
221; and 13 Feb., 510-514. This includes Fadl's account of his official "swearing in" process.
former Egyptian police officer and prominent participant in the Jihad battlefield in
Afghanistan, was the first "military chief," while Muhammed Atef, (aka Abu Hafs al
Masry) another ELf member, was deputy chief of operations, and ultimately would succeed
Banshiri after his death a few years later. According to several sources with direct access, at
the same time Zawahiri held this principal deputy position in al Qaeda's Shura, he
continued to hold a leadership position in the EIJ, and the two organizations pursued a
common agenda in Egypt. (Members of al Qaeda who have since defected or been
apprehended have said many key players belonged simultaneously to both al Qaeda and a
terrorist entity in their countries of origin.)

Other members of the initial inner circle or "Shura," whom the source knew only by
their pseudonyms, included:
• An additional Egyptian - Sheikh Sayyid el Masry.
• Three Saudis (in addition to bin Laden - Abu Musab al Saudi, Abu Saad al
Sharif Abu Mohamed Saudi, and Abu Fadl al Makkee)..
• Three Iraqis - Mamudh Salim, aka Abu Hajer who managed weapons
procurement; Abu Ayoub and Abu Burhan.
• A Yemeni (Abu Farij); a Libyan (Saif al Liby); an Omani (Khalifa al
Muscat), and a Nigerian (Qaricrpt al Jizaeri).

Beneath the Shura were a series of committees, usually chaired by one or more
members of the Shura. These included
• The military committee, initially chaired by Banshiri with Atef as his deputy
(and ultimate successor).
• A finance or "business" committee, initially chaired by Abu Fadhl al
Makkee.
• A Fatawa Committee, chaired by Abu Saad al Sharif Abu Mohamed Saudi.

This composition, and the linkages and affiliations that the organization has continued
to demonstrate since then, suggest that its most descriptive title would the one - "The
International Islamic Front" - under which it issued its "Fatawa" enjoining Muslims of the
world to wage holy war against the western "crusaders."

An early bin Laden effort at toppling an "apostate" regime occurred in October 89,
when he offered bribes to Pakistan parliamentarians to support a no confidence resolution
against Pakistan Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto. She narrowly survived the vote on 1 Nov. In
a later interview, Bhutto said some parliamentarians who had been offered money told her it
came from Saudi sources. She said that when she queried the Saudi government she was told
that bin Laden had put up the money, and that this was the first she had heard of him. She
also said, however, that whatever bin Laden's role in providing the money, she was convinced
that the initiator of the scheme was the chief of Pakistani intelligence (ISI)., who had been
running the CIA support channels to the Afghan Mujahidin and who had both the motivation
and the necessary connections to set up the scheme.

It was in this same time frame that bin Laden is reported to have begun the process of
moving his main operational headquarters to Sudan and setting up operational support
facilities there.

. Bergen, Holy War, Inc., 61-62, describing his interview with Bhutto.
[Note: Another person in Pakistan at this time for whom there is no record of a role in the
debates then taking place, but who would subsequently emerge as a significant operative in
the al Qaeda organization, was Wadih el-Hage. He had in fact been there on previous stints,
e.g. living there in 1983-84 at the time the MAK was formed, when he is said to have been
associated with Azzam. He returned again in '86-'87, and again in late '89-'90.
(nydc/5feb01/32-37, 57-58)]

The Move to Sudan

Sometime in the latter half of 1989, according to al Qaeda defector Jamad Ahmed al-
Fadl, the Sudanese National Islamic Front (Defaa al Shabi) sent a small delegation to meet
with bin Laden at his camp in Khost, Afghanistan, to invite him to move his organizational
base to Sudan. The National Islamic Front, had come to power in Sudan in the summer of
1989 in collaboration with a military junta. Its leader was Hassan al-Turabi, a Sorbonne-
educated Islamist.

Fadl claims to have been present at the meeting with the Sudanese delegation, and to
have later learned that it had connections to Sudanese intelligence services. He has said that
bin Laden and his Shura members saw some clear advantages to the offer - e.g., support from
the Emir of what was in effect seen the most successful effort, outside Iran, of establishing an
Islamist state, and proximity to the Middle Eastern states which were the focus of the Jihad
against apostate regimes. Some Shura members, including bin Laden, nonetheless felt a need
to learn a bit more before making a final decision. A reconnaissance team was sent to Sudan
for this purpose and returned with a favorable report, according to what Fadl says he heard in
the guesthouse discussions. The preparations for moving the bin Laden group's operational
platform to Sudan began.8

By early 1990 Bin Laden was back in Saudi Arabia laying the groundwork for he
move. He dispatched a number of operatives to Sudan acquire properties and facilities that
would be used to set up operating bases and a logistics and administrative infrastructure.
Many of these acquisitions would be used to establish business enterprises that would serve
both as means of raising money and as cover mechanisms for bin Laden's terrorist
organization, and as channels for moving funds.

Meanwhile, he maintained at least a part of his network of guesthouses and camps in

Pakistan and Afghanistan, where volunteers continued to flow through even though the
Soviets had pulled out of Afghanistan. Initially, according to Fadl, they were coming to join
the fight against the communist regime the Soviets had left in place under Mohammad
Najibullah. This flow provided a source for spotting and siphoning recruits into bin Laden's
emerging group, and before long the incoming volunteers increasingly identified their motive
as the desire to join al Qaeda.9

7. Fadl testimony, 6 Feb.Ol, 218-19, 233; 13 Feb. 514-16) Fadl is unable to give a precise date for this meeting,
e.g. whether it was before or after Assam's assassination. [Note: In cross examination on 20 Feb.Ol, p.890, Fadl
answers "yes" to a question on whether he went to Sudan for bin Laden in 1989. But it is slightly out of timing
with his actual description in direct exam.]
8. Fadl says the reconnaissance team consisted of Abu Hamman al Saudi, Abu Hajer al Iraqi, (aka Mamdouh
Mahmud Salim), Abu Hassan al Sudani, and Abu Rida al Suri, a Syrian
9. Fadl testimony, 13 Feb.Ol, 434-35.
 Fadl claims that in this initial period he heard no talk of the United States being the
enemy, but that this began to change as bin Laden progressed in preparing the infrastructure
for his move to Sudan. Even before the move to Sudan was carried out, according to Fadl, the
focus had shifted to the United States.

One version that has achieved legend status is that a few days after Iraq invaded
Kuwait, bin Laden approached the Saudi regime offering the services of his followers for
Jihad against Saddam, and told American forces were coming to take care of the defense of
Saudi Arabia. Whatever the validity of this story, bin Laden did in fact launch a public
diatribe against the presence of U.S. forces in the land of the sacred Muslim sites after the
deployment of the first U.S. troops to Saudi Arabia on 7 August 1990. He was joined in this
line by some Islamic preachers, and the Saudi regime would soon make it clear he was
unwelcome there.1 [Need some details: Didn 't the Saudi regime impose some kind of
restrictions on him about this time?]

Fadl, who was a Sudanese national, was part of the bin Laden team sent to Sudan to
begin setting up the infrastructure. Among his tasks in the ensuing months was to take
advantage of his Sudanese nationality to purchase large farms. (Sudanese property-right laws
imposed constraints on such purchases by non-Sudanese nationals.) Operating under
instructions of al Qaeda military chairman Banshiri, he purchased in his own name a farm
north of Khartoum with $250,000 given to him by bin Laden's principal deputy Zawahiri, and
a salt farm near Port Sudan with $180,000 from finance committee chairman Abu FadhI al-
Makkee. One of the functions of these farms was to provide space for training camps for
weapons employment and explosives construction.11 (Fadl later became an assistant to Fadhl
alMakkee. )

In April 1991 bin Laden, who had been confronting significant hostility from the
Saudi government in response to his public diatribes, left Saudi Arabia for Pakistan. By this
time, many of his minions had already moved from Pakistan to Sudan, and much of the
logistic and support structure for relocating his operations platform was in place there. The
front company Wadi al Aqiq (what Fadl describes as the "mother company"), was up and
running by this time. Among its various functions were the provision of offices for bin Laden
and some of his key coordinators, and channels for moving finances for various operations.
Fadl says the process of setting up the infrastructure was facilitated by Sudanese intelligence
officers who provided letters enabling shipments to be brought into the country without
customs inspections. He quotes bin Laden as saying that the Sudanese were "opening
doors."13

By this time, according to various sources, bin Laden had begun dispatching
equipment, money and training materials to assist the Moro Islamic Liberation Front in the
Philippines, and also helping set up there the Abu Sayyaf Brigade, named after one of the
dominant Afghan Jihadists. (Some of the reports claim that this began at the end of 1990.)
Fadl has said he was told of this by two al Qaeda members, Osama Azmarai and Abu Talha al

lo. One of many accounts of this is in Bergen, Holy War Inc., 77.
". The descriptions of this process are given in Fadl's testimony 6 Feb. 01, 220-22; 234-239. In his testimony
he initial said this was in early 1990, but in cross examination he answered "yes" to the question of whether he
was initially sent there in 1989. Various versions are also in Bergen, Holy War Inc., 78-79; Benjamin and
Simon, Age of Sacred Terror, 110, and Gunaratna, Inside Al Qaeda, 29.
' 2 . Fadl testimony 20 Feb.Ol, 895.
' 3 . Fadl 234-39; 418-20. On p. 890, Fadl says the company actually began to be set up in late 1989. The move
to Pakistan is also described in Bergen, Holy War Inc., 79.
Sudani. The Manila police also have videotaped a confession of an ethnic Philippine named
(Roberto Angeles) who claimed to have been a founding member of the Abu Sayyaf brigade,
and who said on the taped statement that one of the people bin Laden sent to the Philippines
to assist in setting it up was the same person that the police believe to have been Ramzi
Yousef. (The name he used in the Philippines was Abdul Basil Mahmood Abdul Karim, the
same name he used on the passport with which he left the U.S after the 1993 WTC attack.
The Philippine police also had him under the name of Ramzi Yousop.)14

Fadl claims that he also learned at this time of al Qaeda support going to a Pakistani
group. He says he was personally involved in renting a guesthouse to be used by the group,
and was told of bin Laden's role in financing it by the group's emir, Sheikh Fazil ur Rahman,
(this is the same name as used by one of the four signatories to bin Laden's February 1998
Fatawa, who called himself in that document the "Emir of the Jihad Movement of
Bangladesh.")15

While bin Laden was still in Pakistan, a group of Islamic scholars back in Saudi
Arabia sent a "Letter of Demands" to the Saudi regime calling for the shedding of all
western influences and the return to pure Sharia law. This group would shortly begin calling
themselves "the Awakened Sheikhs," and bin Laden would in the ensuing years exploit their
conflict with the Saudi regime to set up the dissident exile group "Advice and Reformation
Committee" in London. This London-based organization would become a key center in
future al Qaeda recruitment.16 (In a CNN interview aired in May 1997, bin Laden touted the
support he said he felt at the time for the group from the time of its origins.)

In the summer of 1991, Bin Laden, moved to Sudan and took "on-site command"
of the infrastructure that he had been setting up there.

Meanwhile, parallel events were unfolding in New York (and elsewhere in the United
States) whose connections with the al Qaeda transnational network would only become
evident many years later.

The New York "Cell"

As noted above, one of the first "branch offices" of the Azzam/bin Laden
Peshawar-based "Bureau of Services" (MAK) was set up in Brooklyn, (on Atlantic
Avenue) in the mid-1980s under the title al-Khifa. It was tied to the neighboring Al
Farouq mosque, and would become a hub for many of the participants in the terrorist
attacks undertaken in the New York area in the early 1990s. Azzam assigned a protege,
Mustapha Shalabi, to be its initial chief. And as was also noted above, Azzam's numerous
recruiting trips to the United States in the 1980s included several lectures given at the
Brooklyn Mosque. A videotape of one of these lectures, given in 1988, is described in a 1995
[need to check specific month] issue of The New Yorker.17

14. Benjamin and Simon, Age of Sacred Terror, 112; Fadl testimony, 6 February 2001, 354; Manila Times, 26
April 2002.
15. Fadl testimony, 6 February 2001, 355-56.
16. Benjamin and Simon, 107-08. Note that Bergen, Holy War, Inc.; 88, claims the letter was sent in May 1992.
Need to check which is correct.
". Bergen, Holy War Inc., 136 gives the start-up of al-Khifa as 1987. According to Miller and Stone, The Cell,
336, the videotape was made by Steve Emerson. Need to ask him.
 10

At that time, one of those employed in the support staff of the al-Khifa center was
Jamad Ahmed al-Fadl, the al Qaeda defector who has provided so much of what is
known of the formation of bin Laden's infrastructure up to the time he moved back to
Afghanistan. Fadl was born in Sudan in 1963, studied English in middle and secondary
school, moved to the US in 1986 on a student visa, and quickly married an American
(evidently to secure his residence. He had already married a Sudanese shortly before coming
to the U.S.) He then settled in Brooklyn, working under Shalabi at the al Khifa Bureau. He
has said in his testimony that he knew al Khifa and the Farouq Mosque were part of a larger
Bureau of Services network set up by Azzam and bin Laden in Pakistan to support the Afghan
Jihad. He has described its functions as including raising money, recruiting "jihadists," and
facilitating the acquisition of travel documents. In late 1988, according to Fadl, he departed
for Peshawar with three other "brothers ... under the direction of Shalabi," to join the Afghan
Jihad. (At which time he dumped his American wife.) 18 [Not certain this was before or after
Azzam's videotaped lecture at the Brooklyn mosque, but Fadl's description of it as "late"
suggests it was after.]

Another of Azzam's many recruitment ventures to the United States, in 1989, [before
his assassination in November] was to give a lecture in Oklahoma at a convention of the
Muslim Arab Youth League and Islamic Association for Palestine. This convention was the
occasion of an introductory meeting of Wadih el-Hage and Mahmud Abouhalima, both
of whom would later be identified as key players in the terrorist collage associated with the al-
Khifa center in Brooklyn.19

Hage especially would go on to become a key player in the al-Qaeda organization

through most of the next decade.20 Born in Lebanon in 1960 to a Catholic family, he
converted to Islam while a teenager, and then came to US in 1978 after finishing high school.
He settled in Lafayette, Louisiana under the care of a Muslim family there, attended the
University of South Louisiana, and later moved to Arlington, Texas.

Hage participated in setting up Azzam's lecture in Oklahoma in 1989, and in fact there
is substantial evidence indicating that he already had been connected with him in the
preceding years. Hage was in Pakistan from 1983 to 1985, assisting the Afghan Mujahidin
as a "relief worker"21 — serving at the same place and same time and for the same cause
for which bin Laden and Azzam were setting up their "Bureau of Services." After
returning to Arlington, Texas in 1985, Hage went back to Pakistan in 1986 and stayed
until 1987, after which he returned to the U.S. and established a business office in Tucson,
Arizona. One of the enterprises he helped to found there was the "Al-Bunyan Islamic
Information Center." Between 1987 and the end of 1989 he reportedly made several trips
to Brooklyn, in what has been described as in the service of Azzam at the al Khifa center.

18. Fadl testimony 6 February 2001, 162-65; 7 February, 424. For further details on Fadl's personal history see
"Players" appendix below.
19. Benjamin and Simon, The Age of Sacred Terror, 99-101.
20. Hage's biographical background is given in several of the books cited above, and the details of his travels are
in the court materials, starting with the opening statements by the U.S. Government on 5 February 2001, pp.20-
28; 48-52.
21. A shriveled arm from birth disability prevented him from serving as battlefield fighter.
 11

He returned to Pakistan yet again in late 1989 or early 1990, again staying for about a
year, and then returned to Arlington Texas 1990 or '91.22

[So far, we have not turned up any details ofHage's association with the formation of
the "Bureau... ," but the introductory statements of both U.S. Attorney and his own defense
attorney in the 2001 African Embassy bombing trial establish that he did have contacts with
both Azzam and bin Laden in Pakistan and subsequently in Afghanistan. The issue in
contention during his various hearings and interrogations has not been whether he was
associated with bin Laden but how close and in what function. Given what followed, as
described below, the details of how soon and to what degree this U.S. cell was set up, and
Hage is central]

During this time frame in the late-1980s Hage does not appear to have surfaced on the
terrorist threat radar screen, one of the persons he met during Azzam's Oklahoma lecture -
Mahmud Abouhalima - was on a screen, literally.

In July 89, the Joint Terrorism Task Force23 in New York, acting on a tip that a
"Palestinian group" associated with the al-Khifah Center was planning bombings of Atlantic
City casinos, conducted surveillance photography of a dozen of them engaging in shooting
exercises at Calverton range on eastern Long Island. Photos were taken on four
consecutive weekends. The identities of some of the participants in these exercises remained
unknown for some time, but one of those who were relatively quickly identified was Mahmud
Abouhalima (whose street name was "Mahmud the Red" because of his hair color.) Others
identified in the photographs included El-Sayyid Nosair and Nidal Ayyad, both of whom,
like Abouhalima, were of Egyptian ethnicity; Mohammed Salameh, a Palestinian; and an
African American Muslim named Clement Hampton-El (aka "Dr. Rashid because of his job
as a hospital worker) who had already served as a combatant in the Afghanistan Jihad. In the
photographs, some participants are wearing T-shirts with Jihad slogans, some with title
"Services Office," and some with a map of Afghanistan. 24

One of the instructors [according to ms/c] was a tall African-American identified a

year and a half later as Richard Smith, who in late 1990 became a suspect in a gun running
investigation. Another instructor, not identified at the time, was Ali Mohamed, who had been
a sergeant at Fort Bragg, N.C. [Was he still in the army at that time?] The weapons being
used included AD-47s, 357 and 9mm pistols, shotguns, and other rifles, (ms/c 51, 58;
Bensim 5.) [Bensim say the group was identified as fellow-worshippers of the Farouq
Mosque, but this is not a significant distinction because the mosque was the "spiritual office"
of al-Kifa.] A Joint Terrorism Task Force (JTTF, established by the FBI and NYPD in 1980,
according to ms/c -34) assigned an NYPD group (headed by Tom Corrigan) to put the al-
Kifah/Farouq subjects under surveillance. This led to the observation, and
* This group [according to ms/c, p. 50] began to be pulled together by Nosair as early as
1987. In addition to those seen in the photos at the firing range, the group included a
person named Bilall Alkaisi, a Palestinian who had also trained in Afghanistan. The

22. See 5 February record, (p?). Bergen, Holy War, Inc., 135In his later trips to Afghanistan in 1986 and again in
1989 he took his family with him
23. A "Joint Terrorism Task Force" (JTTF) is "a combination of federal and state law enforcement formed to
identify in order to identify and investigate international and domestic terrorism and terrorists." (See e.g. US
District Court, Western District of New York, Criminal Complaint in the case of the group from Lackawanna,
NY, 13 September 2002. The first JTTF was established in New York in (1980 according to Miller and Stone,
The Cell, 34) but many others have since been set up about the United States.
24. Among many sources are Miller and Stone, 50ff, and Benjamin and Simon, The Age of Sacred Terror, 5ff.
Sources

(b/hwi) Peter Bergen, Holy War, Inc., (New York - The Free Press/Simon and Schuster,
2001)
(ms/c) John Miller and Michael Stone, The Cell (New York - Hyperon; 2002)
(rg) Rohan Gunaratna, Inside al-Qaeda, (New York: Columbia University Press, 2002)
(bensim) Daniel Benjamin and Steve Simon, The Age of Sacred Terror, (New York: Random
House, 2002)
(nydc — 01) New York District Court: Records of Trial of Usama Bin Laden et al (African
Embassy Bombings) beginning 5 Feb. 2001. Opening statements,
(fadl) Testimony of Jamal Ahmed al-Fadl, 6, 7,13 Feb. 2001, NYDC
(ridi) Testimony of Essam al Ridi, 14 February 2001, NYDC
(juma) Testimony of Ashif Mohamed Juma, 14 February 2001.

["Players" listing annexed at end of chron.]

Some classified and sealed documents relating to transportation of Odeh from Pakistan to US?
See p. 413 of nydc 2001 trials.

John Miller and Michael Stone, The Cell, (New York - Hyperon; 2002)

New York District Court: Transcripts of Trial of Usama Bin Laden et al (African Embassy Bombings);
Opening statements 5 Feb. 2001.
Testimony of Jamal Ahmed al-Fadl, Feb. 6 (346), 7 (405), 13 (534), 20 (889- 1060).
Testimony of Essam al Ridi, 14 (624) February 2001, NYDC
Testimony of Ashif Mohamed Juma, 14 (675) February 2001.